A-CHANGIN': "It IS Mussolini," Chris Matthews said!

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 12, 2025

The [lunatic claims] of King George: First thing this morning, Joe Scarborough said it.

Yesterday, he and Mika chose to watch CNBC as the markets continued to plummet. He said they saw "people saying things on CNBC they don't normally say about this president."

We suspected we knew what he meant. Twelve minutes later, producers finally played the videotape of what a maddened Steve Liesman had said at one point as he spoke with Kelly Evans:

LIESMAN (3/11/25): I’m going to say this at risk of my job. But what President Trump is doing is insane. It is absolutely insane. It is about the eighth reason we’ve had for the tariffs, and now he’s saying he’s putting 50 percent tariffs on Canada unless they agree to become the 51st state. 

That is insane. There is just no other way of describing it. And the trouble is, Kelly, is that it shows there are no bounds around President Trump. This is very different from the first administration, where there were people around him who seemed to—I don’t know what the word is—but smooth over some of the edges.

[...]

Insanity’s not a strategy. I’m sorry. I'm with you, Kelly—I look for silver linings. I 'm a sunny person. [Is there] some explanation for this other than insanity? I'm ready to accept it of you can come up with one.

You can watch the videotape by clicking to Mediaite. The full discussion was more technical than that. Also, policies kept changing by the hour, as is now the norm.

Liesman kept using the I-word, presumably, he was speaking colloquially, Liesman isn't a clinician, and "insanity" isn't a clinical term.

We'll leave this tired conundrum right here. But yes, the times really are a-changin' when people like Liesman, on CNBC, are speaking that way about the economic policies of a sitting Republican president.

We assume that Liesman still has his job today. With that, we move right along to the extremely peculiar claims that very same president made last Tuesday night.

We refer to the claims this president made concerning Social Security fraud. He was speaking to a joint session of Congress, and to the American people, such as we are at this point.

In yesterday's report, we posted the full transcript of the commander's remarks. Rather clearly, he seemed to say that Social Security checks were being sent to as many as twenty million people who are, according to databases, more than 100 years old.

Some are quite a bit older than that, the reigning regent said. According to what the president said, roughly eleven million of these people are anywhere from 120 to 150 years old. Something like another 1.5 million such people are even older than that!

That's what the president said to us, the American people. All in all, such presentations have been normalized within the American nation's journalism, such as that animal is.

In fairness, we can't entirely blame the high-end press corps for the "What us, worry" attitude which has produced this normalization. 

It's hard to find the words to describe such deeply peculiar presentations and claims by such a key figure. There's little precedent for such bizarre claims, and there's no established journalist language which tells journos how to respond.

With respect to the behavior of King George III, a major Hollywood filmmaker once used the key term "madness." Speaking on Morning Joe last Thursday morning, two days after the president spoke, Chris Matthews stepped to the fore and offered the remarks shown below about what the president said.

His statement was jumbled in several ways. We don't agree with some of what he may have seemed to imply or suggest.

Still and all, here's what he said. Like Liesman, he used fighting words:

MATTHEWS (3/6/25): He’s doing all this on television. If you noticed, he calls the TV cameras in for the cabinet meetings he’s doing. He’s redirecting his cabinet officials, redirecting Musk.

I’ve watched this guy use television like nobody’s ever done. When he went up the other night, on Tuesday night, he talked to the American people and said, “We’re paying Social Security checks to people who are 160 years old.” 

Anybody who reads an obit page knows that’s not true. Anybody knows we’re not spending money on 20 million people out there getting free checks. That kind of fraudulence is unbelievable.

But he’s telling the MAGA people out there, "They’re stealing your money. Don’t trust these people in Washington. These are bad people. They are the deep state." He did it. 

You know, he talked about the election being stolen. Nobody in America will tell you which states were stolen from him. All the MAGA people—get them in a corner and say, "Tell me which states were stolen in 2020?"

They can’t tell you. He just told them that. He just said they were stolen.

And with Zelensky on television, he said it was "great television." I’ll never forget that. It was "great television," where he beat up this guy on television. He and JD Vance, and they just did it in public.

So we all know what Donald Trump thinks of Zelensky. He's teaching us.

He’s teaching us. Don’t trust Social Security, so he can go after it. Don’t trust Ukraine, because he’s going to go after Ukraine and diminish that country and its size and its importance. All because this is what Trump thinks and that’s what it’s about.

It is Mussolini. It’s about believing the leader in what he says verbatim. And that’s what Trump does on television. And he’s using us to do it, using the medium.

To watch the tape of what Chris said, you can just click here.

In our view, a great deal of that presentation landed directly on target. In our view, other parts of that presentation are fuzzy, and are possibly wrong or misleading.

On the one hand, the times really are a-changin' when Chris becomes the voice of reason about a matter like this! Tomorrow, we'll try to offer a bit of background, taking us back to his own extremely strange behavior during an earlier era.

That said, that was the way Matthews responded to what the commander had said:

He's schooling the MAGA people, Chris said. "It is Mussolini," he said.

Tomorrow, we'll discuss what Chris meant by that last remark. On Friday, we'll look at an alternate reaction to this transparent lunacy, a viewpoint expressed by Bill Maher.

The larger question is this:

How did we ever manage to land in this peculiar place? How did such bizarre behavior by an American president ever become normalized—basically, come to be seen as basically par for the course? 

(Also, is there something we're withholding? Something that's "making us weak?")

This is insanity, Liesman kept saying. "It is Mussolini" Chris said.

Tomorrow: Follow the [claims of the] leader!