Rachel Maddow joined “The Briefing with Jen Psaki” on Wednesday to discuss how Donald Trump is ratcheting up his anti-immigrant rhetoric and to share what lessons she believes Americans can take from one of the darkest moments in U.S. history: the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II — the topic of her new podcast, “Rachel Maddow Presents: Burn Order.”
During her opening monologue, Jen Psaki discussed some of Trump’s more recent attacks, including his repeated demonization of the Somali American community. She called out the president and Republicans for spreading “lies” about those who come to the U.S., including the false claim that immigrants commit more crimes than native-born Americans.
Trump’s renewed attacks come amid his administration’s immigration crackdown, which has garnered pushback nationwide. Across the country, residents are protesting the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers who are targeting their neighbors and friends in their cities.
Maddow noted that this resistance stands in contrast to how most Americans reacted to internment eight decades ago.
“One of the things that didn’t happen in 1942, when Japanese Americans were being thrown out of their homes, rounded up, put on buses, put on trains and taken to detention centers and then taken to prison camps — which [President Franklin D. Roosevelt] called concentration camps — one of the things that didn’t happen was mass street protests, other Americans turning out and saying, ‘Stop, we’re not going to stand for this,’” she said.
Maddow said her podcast is focused on “the story of the regret of a country that didn’t stop it when we could have.”
Although there wasn’t one mass movement across the country to counter the U.S. government’s actions, Maddow told Psaki the podcast does share the stories of the “truly unique people” who stood up.
“It took a special kind of person — and that means, for me, at least looking back on it, a special kind of role model for what it means to not go along — to actually recognize when something’s wrong, stand up and object, even if you don’t think you can stop it,” she said. “It matters.”
Maddow said another point of comparison between that dark chapter of American history and the current day is that courts are taking the “government’s word” when its officials may not “deserve to be trusted.”
“One of the most corrosive things the Trump administration is doing, particularly around the way it’s treating immigrants, is lying to the courts about what they’re doing, and that puts both the courts and the government and the victims of these policies in absolutely untenable positions that will be vindicated by history and that will ruin a lot of lives on both sides of these fights,” she said.
The MS NOW host said that same problem also plagues the media coverage of the Trump administration. She said the media can sometimes focus on the receipt of information instead of an analysis of what that information means. “The way we make sense of it has to instead be ‘Well, why is he doing it? What is this for?’” she said.
According to Maddow, one likely reason for Trump’s hostile treatment of immigrants is that they make a convenient “scapegoat for everything that’s wrong in the country,” letting him avoid being held accountable for his own failures — and consolidate power.
“You’re trying to turn people in this country against each other so that they blame each other,” she continued. “They see some group of people in this country as inhuman. That then justifies inhumane treatment toward them, which justifies radical government powers that the Constitution says we’re not supposed to have.”
Maddow noted, “It’s augmenting their own powers at the expense of a scapegoat — and it’s the authoritarian playbook down back to the very beginning of time.”
“We need to change our analysis to recognize what they’re using it for and not just point out that they’re saying it,” she advised.
You can watch the full conversation between Maddow and Psaki in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.