MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Brian Williams were left visibly confused Tuesday evening after anchor Chris Matthews incorporated the history of the Nazi’s surrender into his analysis of tonight’s New Hampshire primary.
“You know, New Hampshire has had this happen, going back – oh – going back to ’52, when it became the hot place to pick presidents; to go outside the system, outside the career politicians,” the longtime cable news anchor said during a live broadcast from the Granite State.
His remarks about Nazis came after Maddow had noted that billionaire businessman Donald Trump leads in the all the polls in New Hampshire.
“They started with Dwight Eisenhower, who had done something with his life: He received the Nazi surrender in World War II,” Matthews said of New Hampshire voters, “and that became a pattern up here.”
There were three solid seconds of dead air as Maddow and Williams took a moment to digest their colleague’s remarks.
“Ah, I see the Donald Trump reference,” Williams said. “Uh, and that is if the GOP, if the GOP makes a choice outside the business of politics, and, remember Chris, you had a World War II general, we love our generals, by the way, I think either 11 or 12 of our presidents have been generals in past … but [Eisenhower had an] entirely different résumé than the one that they are considering making the victory of the New Hampshire primary tonight.”
“Yes, but they made a transition in 1980 when they picked [Ronald] Reagan,” Matthews responded, “who, like Donald Trump, had made his public name through eight to nine years of prime time television.”
“So, in a way,” Matthew added, “three men in a row were not career politicians. Certainly, Eisenhower, Reagan and now Trump, all went into politics in their middle-ages or later.”
When Reagan won the Republican Party nomination in 1980, he had already served as California’s governor from 1967 to 1975, successfully tackling welfare reform and turning the Golden State’s $194 million budget deficit into a $554 million surplus.
