Rachel Maddow

He talked about people being on the edge of death.

He went into graphic detail on a number of different people's injuries of various kind.

And in those moments, he slowed down, ad-libbed a lot, and tried to give seemingly as much sort of gory detail as he could, talking about very bloody scenes.

There was tremendous anxiety as they saw neighbors and friends being taken.

I never believed that America would be doing this.

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Thanks to you at home for joining us this hour.

Really happy to have you here.

So who's going to be the designated survivor?

It is the most morbid thing, but it's a real thing.

They do it every year.

Every State of the Union, they pick somebody, some lucky stiff from the administration, from the cabinet, to be a designated survivor, to not go to the State of the Union address.

It feels like it's left over from the mutually assured destruction days of the Cold War or something.

But the logic of it really is apocalyptic.

The logic of it is that if some catastrophe...

physically happens at that event at the State of the Union while all of Congress and the President and the Vice President and the Joint Chiefs and the Supreme Court and everybody are all in that same physical place.

If something, God forbid, terrible happened there during that event, the designated survivor, by virtue of the fact that that person didn't attend the event, that designated survivor would be the one

would be the person who would reconstitute the government of the United States and keep the government going after the president and the vice president and the whole rest of the cabinet and the whole Congress were all swallowed up in a hell mouth or something.