I sipped from the Hope Hicks/Beverly Crusher glass, and we watched Maddow’s show over veggie enchiladas. I brought a bottle of rosé, and she poured it into glasses decorated with charms that featured Russia-investigation figures on one side and characters from “Star Trek: The Next Generation” on the other. Recently, I went to dinner at the home of Rebecca Kee, a preschool principal in San Francisco who turned to Maddow in her depression and confusion over the 2016 election. (The network has monetized this lightly condescending label with a set of MSNBC Mom tote bags and latte mugs.) Molly Jong-Fast, a former novelist who once described her pre-Trump self as “completely selfish and disinterested in politics” and who is now a liberal Twitter influencer and columnist for the Never Trump site The Bulwark, told me that Maddow “made wonkiness cool.” Maddow’s typical fan has been branded ( by Kat Stoeffel in The New York Times) as the “MSNBC Mom,” a woman who feels that the election has radicalized her even if she has not moved to the left politically, her liberal sympathies and news consumption have swelled into a suddenly central part of her identity. If her show started out as a smart, quirky, kind-of-meandering news program focusing on Republican misdeeds in the Obama years, it has become, since the 2016 election, the gathering place for a congregation of liberals hungering for an antidote to President Trump’s nihilism and disregard for civic norms. But over the past three, her figure has ascended, in the liberal imagination, from beloved cable-news host to a kind of oracle for the age of Trump. Maddow has hosted “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC at 9 p.m. She is the host of “The Rachel Maddow Show,” and her fans want something more from her than a star encounter. “In New York, there are people who are much more famous than me.” But Maddow is not just famous. Then she turned and said, as if I were a friend and not yet another stranger pumping her for information: “That was dangerous! Did you see my twist with Ed?” The gathering swarm of fans - “that sort of thing doesn’t happen all the time,” she said. “Be careful with her!” Emily said to Ed, and then, as she saw Maddow breaking away and toward the car, she urgently called out: “So - so what do you think? Elizabeth Warren?”įinally sealed in the back seat, Maddow propped up the ankle. She made a perfunctory gesture toward the silent bald man next to her. “What’s your name?” Maddow asked brightly, as if she had hobbled out expressly for the purposes of saying hello. She spread her crutches out to accommodate the stranger’s embrace.
As Maddow finally neared the curb, a woman with silver hair and chunky glasses materialized at her side and said with blasé familiarity: “I don’t know what happened to you, but I just want to say I love you. Farther down the block, a woman screamed something incomprehensible in her direction. When he saw Maddow see him, he smiled and waved slowly, as if he were a proud relative capturing a milestone. Maddow smiled for the camera as a man in long shorts planted himself 20 feet away, holding his own phone up horizontally to film the scene. “Rachel,” she said, extending her phone to secure a selfie for a friend in Oregon who watches her show every single night and was going to bug out when she saw this.
In Manhattan, this had the effect of a kind of ritualistic drumbeat, alerting every liberal within earshot to her presence.Ī woman with a graying ponytail suddenly wriggled into Maddow’s path. Maddow had torn three ligaments in her left ankle - fishing accident - and one of those ligaments ripped off a piece of her bone, so now she was lumbering toward the sidewalk, her foot strapped into a boot, her lanky body bent over crutches that creaked and boomed with every hit to the sidewalk. that was idling at the curb, waiting to spirit her to 30 Rockefeller Plaza, but there was a hitch. She only had to get from the glass door of her doctor’s office to the tinted-windowed S.U.V.
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