Whenever American politics start to get real crazy, Jimmy Fallon likes to invite MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on his show to explain what exactly is going on. And things could not be any crazier right about now.
Starting on the Republican side, Maddow posited that someone could still try to get in as a third-party candidate in order to combat Donald Trump’s growing inevitability. “We might find out in the coming days if the Republicans keep freaking out so hard about Donald Trump that they drive themselves into some crazy plan like that.”
“It seems like it’s irretrievably cleaving the Republican Party,” Maddow said of Trump’s candidacy. On one side, you have “all the people in Washington” and on the other side you have “all the voters.”
Calling the whole situation “a little nutty,” Maddow predicted that “establishment” Republicans are going to try to take the nomination away from Trump at the party convention this summer. And, she added, they don’t need to pick someone who has already been running. “They could pick Mitt Romney, they could pick you,” Maddow told Fallon.
“Why would anyone want this job?” Fallon wanted to know.
Maddow also found the idea that Marco Rubio has become the Republican establishment’s de facto choice laughable. On Super Tuesday, “he didn’t just lose to Donald Trump, he came in third all over the country,” she said. “He can’t win anything to save his life, and they’ve decided that he’s the winner.”
The MSNBC host was a bit more open-minded when the conversation pivoted to the Democratic side, highlighting the fact that Bernie Sanders is “still alive” and Hillary Clinton has not yet locked up the nomination.
“The big advantage that he’s got is that he’s crowd surfing a sea of money,” Maddow said of Sanders. "He has so much money you wouldn't recognize a socialist in the crowd. He raised more money the day before yesterday than Marco Rubio raised all of January.”
“He has more money than anyone else in the race, Democrat or Republican, and nobody knows how that works when it’s the socialist,” she added, saying she has no reason to believe he will drop out of the race any time soon.
So, basically, while most pundits are saying Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have this thing in the bag, Rachel Maddow is here to tell you, not so fast. But that might just be because she’s having too much fun and doesn’t want it to end.