For Trump's opponents, a model for finding their fight to stop him

The Rachel Maddow Show

Rachel Maddow, MS NOW

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4.5 • 34K Ratings

🗓️ 19 January 2026

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

While Donald Trump has made clear how he intends to wield his power and retain his power, the most pressing question for Americans is how his opponents intend to stop him. Jon Ralston, founder and CEO of the Nevada Independent, and author of the newly published "The Game Changer: How Harry Reid remade the rules and showed Democrats how to fight," talks with Rachel Maddow about how the Democrats' best political tactician and savviest fighter in living memory would have handled stopping Trump and retaking power before it's too late.

Transcript

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0:00.0	So I think if you had to boil it down to something really, really simple, perhaps over-simple, but simple.
0:07.0	What we have learned in the past year is that there is no ambiguity at all, no suspense, about what kind of designs President Donald Trump has on this country.
0:19.0	What he wants, who he is, what his intentions are, how he's going to try to do it even.
0:24.6	There's really no mystery at all. So the time for warnings and red flags, you know, watch out, this might be coming.
0:33.6	That time is over. It's here now. We are living it. It is the challenge of our generation.
0:41.9	Because of that, I really think that the most important thing to try to understand now, the most
0:48.6	important thing to report on, the most important news story in the country, the true black box open question, the
0:55.5	what's going to happen here, edge of your seat drama in our lives right now, is not at all
1:01.5	about Trump, about whom there is no mystery, there is no ambiguity, it's not about Trump
1:07.0	at all, it's about Trump's opponents. How strong will they be? How strong can they be
1:16.0	in trying to stop him from doing what he wants to do? And from the start of this second term for
1:24.9	Trump, some of the most shocking and interesting
1:28.1	questions there have just been about the most basic part of it, namely, who is the opposition
1:35.6	to Trump? Who is a Trump opponent?
1:39.1	As he tries to overthrow the U.S. system of government, Who is standing against him and who is not?
1:46.6	And, you know, of course, we saw that the tech billionaires all immediately get into bed with him.
1:51.7	We saw the non-tech billionaires get into bed with him, too. We saw powerful, supposedly
1:56.9	confident, supposedly patriotic people and entities just cave instantly to him without a fight.
2:03.6	You know, big powerful law firms, universities, business, so-called leaders.
2:13.6	The real opponents of Trump, the people who really are standing in opposition to what Trump
2:19.5	is trying to do, I think one of the things they have to figure out now is if they can get
2:24.6	those kinds of people back on their side, if they can get those people who caved, the people
	...

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