Rachel Maddow's Trump-Before-Trump Podcast Is More Relevant Than Ever
In the wake of last week’s damning Congressional testimony by Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer-fixer, it’s a smart time to search for precedent. Picture a White House mired in scandal and ever-widening investigations. The administration digs in and fights back. An executive wages war on the investigators by dismissing the whole affair as a “witch hunt!” This person also attacks the press as the enemy of the people and the “elites” of the country as traitors. Until suddenly, the case was neatly wrapped up in a felony plea deal that managed to allow the executive to duck criminal charges and claim his innocence at every opportunity for years to come.
This all happened in 1973 to vice president Spiro Agnew, but because Watergate dominated the news cycle, Agnew’s fall has been mostly forgotten by the American public. In their revealing and essential podcast Bag Man, which premiered last fall, MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow and producer Mike Yarvitz shed new light on the Agnew affair and, over the course of seven episodes, show why a story from nearly half a century ago could not be more relevant today.
“I had thought that it was much more of a Watergate-adjacent story,” Maddow tells Rolling Stone. “But every bit really was new to me, other than the fact that Agnew had been Nixon’s vice president and got in trouble and had to resign. I thought he had done something in Maryland way back in the day. But that’s not at all what happened, he was just this freaking shakedown artist and extortionist crook at every step of his public life.”
One of the surprising facts you’ll likely learn in the podcast is the scale of Agnew’s corruption and the way it continued all the way into the White House.
“When Agnew was the vice president, he was having these Baltimore businessmen, not only coming to his office on the White House grounds, but also coming to his vice-presidential residence, and delivering envelopes to him there,” Yarvitz says. “When you’re doing something that brazen, it’s hard to believe you’re not inviting trouble for yourself.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/rachel-maddow-bag-man-podcast-804209/
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It is enlightening and jawdropping.
