The Rachel Maddow Show
Trump in search of waste need look no further than his own staff
Wed, 9 Apr 2025
Rachel Maddow looks at the bizarre, frivolous demands of members of Donald Trump's staff even as vital public services are being cut in the name of waste.
Chapter 1: Who is Kash Patel and why is he significant in Trump's FBI staff?
He made himself cash branded merchandise where the S in cash is a dollar sign. Get it? He sold cash branded wine. He sold a magic elixir that he said would reverse your vaccination status. By some sad turn of events, you'd had the COVID vaccine. He could reverse it for you. He sold something called Coin, but with a G. Coin? C-O-I-G-N.
He called it a credit card for conservatives, because you know, conservatives can't use regular credit cards. He did podcasts for a conspiracy theorist media company controlled by the Chinese Falun Gong religious movement. He also famously sold a whole line of children's books about the glory of King Donald, which means exactly what you think it does.
And so naturally, Donald Trump looked at that list of qualifications and decided that that guy, that man, is the right choice to be director of the FBI. And at that job, Kash Patel quickly distinguished himself. Very quickly. Very, very quickly. Upon reporting for the job, Mr. Patel made clear his immediate priorities.
Quoting from the Wall Street Journal, quote, Patel told officials he planned to spend a lot of time in Las Vegas, where he was living last year. He ordered new decor for his Washington office at the FBI headquarters and asked for his personal trainer to be cleared to enter the headquarters building for his workouts.
That same Wall Street Journal story about Kash Patel's first days on the job at the FBI also included the fact that Mr. Patel, quote, broke a promise he made to agents that he would appoint a deputy director of the FBI from among their ranks.
So here's this like podcaster tent revival guy with the merchandise branded with his name and the bottles of snake oil that he'll sell you and the children's books about Donald Trump being a king. That is who Donald Trump puts in charge of the FBI. When he gets there, he tells the agents of the FBI essentially, hey, listen, don't worry. I know I'm an outsider, but I respect what you do enough.
that we're going to pick one of you guys, an experienced FBI agent, to be my deputy in running this place. Sure, maybe I'm just a podcaster, but we'll put somebody in here as my number two who you'll really trust. And then does he do that? No, he does not. He hires instead, as the deputy director of the FBI, another podcaster.
Um, this burly man whose whole kind of brand as a podcaster is that he's kind of burly. His whole shtick is man in tight t-shirt talks about fighting a lot and makes a lot of melodrama about the importance of physical toughness and being willing to die heroically for the cause. And of course, the cause is the greatness and infallibility of Donald Trump. Wow. Does he love that guy?
But he means it only in the manliest way possible. Look at these arms. It's like his whole shtick. So, so Kash Patel, podcaster, names this other podcaster guy to be deputy director of the FBI instead of actually hiring anyone with FBI experience. But now that deputy director, he too has started on the job. And how is that going so far?
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Chapter 2: What controversial actions did Kash Patel take as FBI Director?
Headline, FBI creates multi-agent bodyguard team to protect Dan Bongino. The former pro-Trump podcaster is the first deputy director to have a security detail. Full-time protection could require up to 20 agents, former officials said.
Quote, in a break from past practice, in which the Bureau's number two officials have not had security details, the FBI has now issued a call for agents to serve as bodyguards for Deputy Director Dan Pancino. The FBI canvas sought agents willing to relocate for 30 days of temporary duty to protect... Dan Bogino 24 hours a day. Full-time protection could require as many as 20 agents.
The previous deputy director was assigned a single agent part-time to accompany him to certain events. He had a full detail only when he traveled overseas. In contrast, though, now... Two former FBI officials familiar with the matter said Dan Bongino's current bodyguards have followed him inside secure FBI facilities, including headquarters in Washington.
They said directors typically walk around FBI headquarters without their security details. But not this deputy director, not this podcaster. He wants the full 24 hours, 20 man team surrounding him at all times, including while he's walking around inside the FBI building. Because what spiders creaking sounds. Is there any chance you just hate to be alone?
I mean, we are in this everything must go moment, right? In this administration, we can no longer fund libraries or museums. We must stop our work on multi-drug resistant tuberculosis and drug resistant gonorrhea. We are closing the Head Start offices. We are firing the meteorologists who produce weather forecasts. We are firing the people who answer the phones at the Social Security office.
We are firing tens of thousands of people who work with veterans at the VA. We are shutting the U.S. Department of Education because everything must go. It's all waste. It's all waste. It all has to go because we, the taxpayers, must pay for Kash Patel's new drapes in his office.
his nice new decor that he demanded on day one, and also the cost of him, what was that phrase, of him spending, what was the quote? Quote, a lot of time in Las Vegas, where he won't even be enjoying the new drapes.
Also, we have to pay for his deputy director, Dan Bongino, the podcaster with the arms, we'll be paying for him to be surrounded at all times by a full-time phalanx of a 20-man team of bodyguards who stay with him 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so like... While he sleeps, they can sit and watch him.
And while he's inside the FBI headquarters building at work inside, they will be there surrounding him in case like he has to get up and go potty or something. There is a team that can take him. But it's not only Trump's guys at the FBI. the cabinet secretary who wants his cookies freshly baked.
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Chapter 3: Why does Deputy Director Dan Bongino have an unprecedented security detail?
The Atlantic has three sources on the Interior Department staff member being told to remake the cookies for the secretary. What'd they do with the old cookies? What was wrong with them? Is there anything you could do to cookies that would be that bad?
Now, there are sources from the Department of Interior that are defending Secretary Burgum here, noting explicitly in their pushback to The Atlantic that staff members are not required to make this cookie dough themselves. It is store-bought cookie dough that they only need to bake. So ease up, people.
Quote, Burgum has also used the political appointees in his department for another purpose in recent days, stacking firewood in his office's fireplace. Burgum also reportedly demands, quote, that any labels get removed from water bottles before they are delivered to him. Or else. I mean, the man obviously cannot remove the labels from his own water bottles.
That must be done by other government employees, people on the payroll paid by the taxpayers, because, I mean, think about it. Honestly, if the secretary himself was occupied removing his own water bottle labels, he might not get to the cookies in time. And then who would send them back demanding that they were not warm enough and they must be rebaked?
The secretary is in charge of some really specific stuff. Tell me more about your Department of Government Efficiency. I mean, at the National Park Service, they're firing the rangers and the maintenance crews and scientists by the thousands.
But Park Service helicopters, including the staff that fly them and maintain them, they're being diverted to pop Secretary warm cookies around town when he's in a rush. You know, honestly, it's so much nicer than sitting in traffic. Quote, the aviation unit of the U.S. Park Police, a division of the Department of the Interior, does not routinely handle VIP transport, according to a U.S.
Park Police fact sheet. The blue and white helicopters launched to provide additional aerial surveillance during presidential and other dignitary movements and are used for medevac search and rescue, high-risk prisoner transport, and to support law enforcement operations. And also to make sure he is there in time for the cookies to still be warm or they are going back. Do it again!
Doug Burgum used to be the governor of North Dakota. In his very red state, there were protests all over this weekend. Nearly 1,000 people showed up in Fargo, North Dakota. That's not far from where Doug Burgum is from. But tons of people also turned out in Bismarck, North Dakota, and Devil's Lake, North Dakota, and in Grand Forks. Minot, North Dakota, actually had a really, really big turnout.
And look at this. This was from little Jamestown, North Dakota. When I first saw this, I was like, oh, look, there's like five people down by the Dairy Queen. But no, that's just who was early. The footage keeps going. And then you realize, oh, look, the whole town's coming. The whole town's coming down, marching down to join them. Those other people were just staking out the spot.
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Chapter 4: What unusual demands has Interior Secretary Doug Burgum made of his staff?
On the other side of the number line, in terms of the number of people turning up, but maybe just as impressive, were these folks who scrambled and turned out on less than an hour's notice yesterday when they found out that Trump Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was coming to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City to do a freaking anti-fluoride event.
You see people turned out on no notice. This was not planned in advance. They just heard he was coming and they scrambled. Got polio? Me neither. Thanks, science. Vaccines save lives. Make America scientific again. This was, again, not pre-planned. They just scrambled when they heard he was coming to make sure that somebody was there to show up and to say no. This was today at the U.S.
Senate office building in Washington, D.C., fired federal workers going from office to office, telling U.S. senators of both parties about their jobs and their work and what the American people are losing thanks to Trump's mass indiscriminate firings of federal workers. This was Detroit today. People turning out in the cold in Detroit. Vaccinate yourself against dictatorship. Kill the cuts.
Save science. Cut Doge, not funding. And, you know, we see the direct line between pushback and the result. Sometimes a dotted line. Sometimes you got to, you know, you got to follow it out in time. But if you look, you see it working in ways large and small every day, everywhere.
Tonight, we got a federal judge in Washington, D.C., ordering President Trump to stop his punishment of the Associated Press. This is from the ruling tonight. Quote, the AP seeks restored eligibility for admission to the press pool and limited access press events, untainted by an impermissible viewpoint based exclusion.
That is what the court orders today for the government to put the AP on an equal playing field as similarly situated outlets, despite the AP's use of disfavored terminology. The court declares that the AP's exclusion has been contrary to the First Amendment and it enjoins the government from continuing down that unlawful path.
For these reasons, it is ordered that defendants shall immediately rescind the denial of AP's access to the Oval Office, Air Force One, and other limited spaces based on AP's viewpoint when such spaces are made open to other members of the White House press pool.
It is ordered that defendants shall immediately rescind their viewpoint-based denial of the AP's access to events open to all credentialed White House journalists. That ruling tonight in federal court in Washington, D.C. Also today, the Trump administration put back up the website for the Underground Railroad and Harriet Tubman.
The Washington Post reported on Sunday that that website had been taken down by Trump and replaced with a bizarre Orwellian Trump-think version of that history, which didn't mention slavery or African-Americans or the fact that it specifically was African-Americans who were enslaved. Headline in the Washington Post after that coverage Sunday. Here's the headline today.
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Chapter 5: What recent protests have taken place against Trump administration cuts?
Staffing levels at the Social Security Administration were already at 50-year lows, and the departure of so many workers who answered phones and worked field office counters has led to longer lines and phone waits.
Teresa Boswell, whose vote for Mr. Trump in November helped flip Arizona, but who found herself fuming outside the Social Security office in Glendale last week, unable to sign up for $1,200 in monthly benefits after she retired from her job processing legal papers, told the Times, quote, I didn't know he was going to pull this. She told the Times, quote, This is a joke. It's not a joke.
It's the destruction of one of the core moral and practical functions of the United States government that affects elderly and disabled people who are among the least able to raise a relevant ruckus when things go wrong that hurt them grievously. And the Trump administration's approach to handling this crisis is to just hope that people don't hear about it.
From The New York Times, quote, the White House has grown worried enough about the political fallout from the long lines and wait times that White House officials are pressuring Social Security administrators to reduce the information that they put online, which could draw attention to problems. Yeah, we wouldn't want to draw any attention to these problems.
Tonight, we are going to speak with the Attorney General of the state of Arizona. She's a Democrat. Her name is Chris Mays. And at least for the state of Arizona, her office has created a website. It's an easy-to-use, one-page website. I spent some time on it today. This is it. This is the whole page. This is what it looks like. It's very simple.
And the reason they put up this webpage is for people in Arizona... if they're having trouble with social security because of what Trump is doing to it, they can use this website to report it to her office, to report it to their own state attorney general's office. So number one, the attorney general's office can document what the problems are. Number two, they can hopefully offer some help.
And number three, you know what maybe is the most important thing here? They can, by doing this, implicitly tell older and disabled people and their families that they do not have to be alone in contending with this. Because who else is telling them that? We need and we are now getting a lot of pushback to what is going wrong in this country in the midst of this authoritarian takeover.
We need and we are getting a lot of pushback. We also need help from good government. And Arizona's state government is trying to help here on this specific issue. I want to find out a lot more about it. Arizona's Attorney General Chris Mays joins us next.
By our count, Arizona's Democratic State Attorney General Chris Mays has filed or joined—I think the number is—a whole honking bunch of multistate lawsuits against the Trump administration. Arizona has led or joined a lawsuit against Trump's attempt to To end the part of the Constitution that says anyone born here is an American. A lawsuit against his federal funding freeze.
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Chapter 6: How are federal workers responding to administration layoffs and cuts?
Cuts to Arizona libraries and museums. There's probably more. In Arizona, they have been busy suing the bejesus out of Donald Trump for what he has been doing in this second disastrous term as president.
Well now, in addition to all of that, Arizona's Attorney General Chris Mays has just launched a new effort to combat what Trump is doing to gut and essentially disable the Social Security Administration. Attorney General Mays is now urging Arizona residents to report to her office
any problems they are having accessing their Social Security benefits amid the Trump administration's efforts to gut that agency and what it provides. Her office has launched a new website where Arizonans can go to report any problems they are experiencing with Social Security.
The website allows Arizonans to register whether they've had any problem receiving their Social Security check on time or if they were unable to reach the Social Security administration online or on the phone or in person at an office. It's a very simple website. But it gives people a place to report what they're going through. In announcing this new web portal, Attorney General Mays said this.
She said, quote, I'm highly concerned that Elon Musk and the Trump administration will take a wrecking ball to the Social Security administration. We need any Arizonan who experiences any disruption to their hard-earned Social Security to report the issue immediately to my office.
I refuse to let an authoritarian administration override the rule of law and destroy critical services that millions of Arizonans rely on. Joining us now is Arizona Attorney General Chris Mays. Attorney General Mays, I really appreciate you making time to be here this evening. Thank you. Hi, Rachel. Thank you. Thanks for having me.
The reason I think this moves me, in addition to interest me, is that I feel like the people who are having such a hard time and have such anxiety and are so dependent on Social Security right now, as they are taking a wrecking ball to it, I felt like very few people have been able to offer them
anything in the way of concrete help or even somebody to listen to them in terms of what they're going through. What do you think your office is going to be able to do constructively with the information that you're able to collect from this website?
So, yeah, I mean, what we're hoping to do is, first of all, gather information and gather evidence about what is actually going on out there. And this is incredibly important for a state like Arizona, where 1.5 million Arizonans rely on Social Security. One out of every five Arizona residents rely on Social Security. And so this is incredibly important to gather this information.
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Chapter 7: What legal actions have been taken against Trump’s treatment of the press?
But look, at the end of the day, if this is really happening and it's really starting to look like it is happening, we may very well be gathering evidence for a lawsuit against the administration on this. I mean, there is nothing, I think, more important in American life and for Americans than their Social Security checks. And this is money that Americans earned. It's their money.
And if it's being stolen from them or deprived from them, even for a few days, for many people, that can be catastrophic. It can mean that they're going to go without food. They could go without prescriptions, without medication. It could be a life or death situation. So in my mind, it was just incredibly important for us to give people a way to tell us whether this is happening.
Yeah, exactly. And it's, I mean, just from a moral perspective looking in on this, it feels like the first concrete addressing of people who otherwise may not have any other means of communicating with people what they're up against when it could be a very dire situation. Arizona Attorney General Chris Mays, thank you for doing this. Thank you for helping us understand it.
We'd love to check back in with you as you get more data, you hear from more Arizonans, and you get a clearer picture. Absolutely. Thank you, Rachel. Thank you. I would also encourage other states. I know they're doing this in Arizona.
I don't know if they're doing this in any other states, but I don't know at this point why every state isn't doing something like this, because elderly and disabled people need somewhere to go. If we can't do it at the federal level, we should be doing it state by state. All right. More news ahead here tonight. Stay with us.
Before she was Donald Trump's Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem was the governor of South Dakota. And her time as South Dakota governor was a lot. There's so much to say. The flooding, the COVID, the daughter's real estate license, that poor dog, the poor goat. I mean, honestly, I could go on. I could go on.
But one thing that you may or may not remember about her time as governor of South Dakota was the teeth thing. While she was serving as governor, Kristi Noem, sitting governor, posted on all her social media accounts a long, apparently professionally produced infomercial about her fantastic experience with a dentist in Texas.
Nearly five minutes of the governor speaking straight to camera about this particular dentist and how great this dentist was, interspersed with many, many, many extreme close-ups of her Kristi Noem mouth. I mean, this is a weird thing for a governor to do, right?
Governor Noem never disclosed if she was paid for this infomercial, or perhaps if maybe she got the dental work for free or at a discount in exchange for doing the infomercial. She never disclosed if anyone paid for her travel to Texas. But now we know. Now we know that someone did pay for that trip. It was South Dakota taxpayers.
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Chapter 8: How has public outcry affected Trump administration policies on historic sites and environmental protection?
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
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