Part-time MS NOW host Rachel Maddow remarkably showed up to work on a weekend, appearing on the network from a mysterious remote location on Saturday morning to criticize President Donald Trump’s military operation that captured Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro.
“Not only will [Trump] care about people saying this is illegal, he’ll see that as an asset,” Maddow said in an appearance on colleague Ali Velshi’s weekend morning show, suggesting that the president is a “would-be strongman” who ordered the operation to provoke a war and give himself “expanded powers” against domestic political opponents.
Maddow’s appearance on MS NOW—and certainly on the weekends—is a relative rarity. She is believed to be the second-highest paid employee at Versant, the new spin-off company made up of Comcast’s discarded cable networks, after CEO Mark Lazarus, but she usually only works on Mondays.
Until November, she earned $30 million a year for hosting The Rachel Maddow Show only one night per week, a paycheck that drew industry-wide mockery of NBCUniversal news boss Cesar Conde. Nevertheless, Maddow reportedly agreed to a salary cutback that month, negotiating a $25 million-per-year paycheck for the next three years.
While still raking in the $30 million this February, Maddow made headlines for accusing her bosses of racism after the network fired host Joy Reid, who faced extensive criticism for racially charged diatribes. Maddow’s salary was “roughly 10 times what the network was paying Reid, a proud black woman, to work significantly more hours,” the Washington Free Beacon noted at the time.
If Maddow’s support for stars of color didn’t help Reid, her stalwart support of unions was unable to save dozens more of her lesser coworkers. In February, MSNBC, as it was then called, also laid off about 100 members of the Writers Guild.
More pain could lie ahead for MS NOW employees not named Maddow or Scarborough. While Lazarus publicly describes Versant as “a blueprint for versatility, growth, and innovation,” media observers, such as the scribes at Puck, have repeatedly predicted that the company will be sold to private equity and chopped up for parts.
In her extraordinarily rare Saturday appearance, Maddow was criticizing Trump’s decision to send in the elite Army Delta Force to capture Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, early Saturday morning, a move that retired rear admiral Mark Montgomery called “the first step toward ending Venezuela’s autocratic regime.” Both Maduro and Flores now face a litany of charges, including narco-terrorism, weapons possession, and conspiracy to attack the United States.
During the segment, Maddow mockingly referred to Trump’s Pentagon chief, Pete Hegseth, as a former host of Fox & Friends Weekend, speculating that he is unable to handle the complexities of overseeing a military occupation. When Hegseth was at Fox News, he hosted on Saturdays and Sundays, working twice as much as Maddow, and he worked the weekends.
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