Rachel Maddow took a victory lap on NBC’s The Tonight Show the night after devoting her entire MSNBC program to a much-hyped look at President Donald Trump’s 2005 tax returns.
It was a nice scoop, though the document did nothing to answer any of the many questions about Trump’s possible ties to various dubious Russians that Maddow spent the first half of her program walking viewers through. Which seemed kind of like introducing a large dagger in Act 1 of your drama without plunging it into someone by the end of your play. Tends to disappoint the audience. Anyway, she took a certain amount of grief from viewers as well as industry navel lint gazers and, of course, cable news competitors.
Visiting Jimmy Fallon’s show tonight, Maddow seemed to suggest viewers had whipped themselves into their frenzy in advance of her Trump tax show, which she had promoted with the juicy tweet: “We’ve got Trump tax returns,” adding, “Seriously.”
“I think the reason people got so excited about the news… is because it’s really weird that the president hasn’t released his financial information,” Maddow told Fallon. “And there’s a reason to worry about it… because of increasing worries about his contact with foreign countries like Russia. People are really concerned to see what’s in those tax returns.”
“So when we found out we had one, it’s like speaking to a group of people dying of thirst in the desert. ‘Behold! We have found a drop!’” Maddow joked.
