Trump's Taxes: Maddow Wasted Thirty Minutes of Our Time With Conspiracy Theories

By Joe Cunningham | 9:45 PM on March 14, 2017

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A couple dozen more viewers than normal (including me) tuned in to Rachel Maddow’s show tonight after she teased social media with this tweet.

BREAKING: We've got Trump tax returns. Tonight, 9pm ET. MSNBC.

(Seriously).

— Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) March 14, 2017

She opened her show, then, with a 20-minute rambling monologue on the possibilities of what Donald Trump’s taxes could reveal. She tried to tie him to a certain Russian oligarch, attacked his credibility over the tax return issue, and went through a litany of theories.

Then, she went to commercial.

She then came back and talked for about five more minutes on the fact that the returns were real and they weren’t obtained illegally.

In the 28 or so minutes before she actually talked with the tax expert who got the returns mailed to him anonymously, both The Daily Beast and the Wall Street Journal both read and analyzed what the returns said, because they went to the site that posted the returns.

So, let’s go over that again:

Rachel Maddow teases her show, saying they have Trump’s tax returns.
Her show starts, she monologues conspiracy theories.
Commercial break.
3-5 more minutes of not talking about the returns.
Two websites scoop her in the meantime.

It should be clear to pretty much everyone what just happened: Rachel Maddow trolled us all into watching the first 30 minutes of her show so she could show a ratings spike. That’s where we are right now.

Why do you think Stephen Colbert took a largely apolitical late night show and has made it all about attacking Donald Trump night in and night out? Why do you think the media is pushing this U.S. attorney non-scandal so much? Why are they harping so much on everything about Trump being scandalous?

They are trolling for ratings for their shows. They are trolling for traffic for their sites. They can show increased numbers and get more advertisers. They can get more subscriptions. But, this near-artificial inflation of readers and viewers is going to come tumbling down at some point.

Yes, Donald Trump is the president and practically everything he does is news. But, not everything he does is a scandal, which is how the media has been treating him. It’s insane under normal circumstances to try to make it out as such. But, he’s DONALD TRUMP and we must TREAT HIM AS THE ENEMY.

This is ridiculous.