Rachel Maddow is back with another history lesson about the fight against authoritarianism and fascism in the United States. The first season of her Ultra podcast, about the little-known Great Sedition Trial of 1944, was a smash hit that Steven Spielberg optioned to make into a feature film. It took listeners back to the ’40s, when a Nazi agent infiltrated Congress and colluded with more than 20 sitting members as part of a plot to overthrow the US government in the lead up to World War II. She’s remained obsessed with the tales of demagoguery and antidemocratic tactics at the heart of Ultra, using the research for season one as inspiration for her latest book, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism, and now returning to the series with a second installment.

Ultra is among the projects that the MSNBC host has been able to pursue through the megadeal she negotiated a few years ago, which allowed her to step back to hosting one day a week and turn her focus to more long-form endeavors, like various docuseries and scripted projects. Season two, the first episode of which is out today, tells another little-known story about the American ultraright, taking listeners back to the postwar 1950s, in which, as Maddow put it to me in an interview last week, “a bunch of totally crazy shit happens.” The story includes “an American fascist who ends up becoming a mole inside the war-crimes trials, working for the Nazis” and “becoming essentially the godfather of American Holocaust denial,” she explains. It also involves two senators—one perpetrating a Nazi propaganda hoax in the Senate, the other trying to stop them—who become mortal enemies. “By the end of it, one of them blackmails the other, and the guy who’s getting blackmailed kills himself, and the other one almost becomes president—and it’s not the good guy,” Maddow says.

The idea that the latter senator “launched as an American demagogic political figure feels very resonant to me, in terms of what we’re going through right now,” Maddow adds. “Demagoguery works, and has a powerful history in American right-wing electoral politics that we like to forget.”

Below, Maddow talks to Vanity Fair about the point of doing historical deep dives, what she’s learned from this work, and what she thinks is the most important factor in the 2024 election.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Vanity Fair: Can you give me a brief overview of how you discovered this story and realized that it was going to be your next big project?

Rachel Maddow: So the origin story for this is a little bit the same as the origin story for Ultra season one. I was sort of flummoxed during the rise of Trumpism and the Republican Party that it also seemed to be coincident with a real upsurge in Holocaust denial and crazy conspiracy theories that I used to associate with the very far fringe right, and not at all with electoral politics. And so when this new movement is rising in electoral politics, why is Holocaust denial now becoming a more mainstream thing? And that’s what started me down this path, trying to find, what are the earliest instances of American Holocaust denial and where did they come from?

It is helpful to me in terms of understanding where we are. And history does accumulate, it doesn’t just recur. It piles up. And so seeing what we’re standing on is really helpful. And knowing that the country has been deeply alarmed about factually unhinged, antidemocratic forms of right-wing extremism in electoral politics—it’s good to know that we can take some lessons from the people who fought it.

The first season of Ultra came out just as the Oath Keepers sedition trial began, and this one is coming out just as [Donald] Trump has been convicted. Have you thought about that timing? I’d assume you believe there’s something to learn about the threat of fascism and authoritarianism through these historical stories, but it seems like it’s a little more, not even on the nose…

Yeah. Do you think it is too on the nose?

No. I need another phrase, because ‘on the nose’ is typically taken as an insult—

Shocking parallel?

Sure. There you go. I mean, listening to you talk at the end of episode one, I think it could just as easily be the monologue you gave last night. I think some people might wonder why Rachel Maddow isn’t doing a podcast about our current moment. What would you say to that?

She is. [laughs] I mean, the reason that I’ve done these history-related projects is because this is the way my brain works. When I’m trying to figure out what’s going on now, I’m not looking for obscure moments in history that provide parallels that I can decorate my current thinking with. The point of it is, if you go back to figure out where these things came from, there are all sorts of antecedent events, characters and movements, and sort of political crucibles that brought us to where we are. All of this stuff accumulates over time.

If you go back and you look at the regular mainstream press and magazines about politics in 1952, 1953, early 1954, it is impossible to believe that you are not reading about Trump: The way they are freaking out about an antidemocratic, popular, fast growing, factually unhinged, sort of un-American movement, ascending on the American right that is going to swamp American politics. And that if the Republican party doesn’t figure out a way to police itself in terms of the extremism that is now permeating its ranks, the American Republic is going to fall. I think it’s helpful to know that these fears have existed before. It’s helpful to know it tactically, in terms of how other people fought these things and how they were beaten and why the worst fears didn’t come to pass. But it’s also helpful to know that we have a recurring problem with this in the country, and if we don’t figure out that it recurs, we’ll never figure out how to stop it from recurring.

How do you feel like the threat is different now? As we’re going into this election, people are saying we’re potentially facing a sea change; it’s unprecedented, historic. And I’m wondering if you feel like we are up against something different than we were then.

Yeah, I mean, history never repeats itself. It’s just there are recurring themes and problems and American democracy has recurring crises. This doesn’t directly answer your question as to whether this is worse, but I think one of the things that is helpfully illuminated by seeing these patterns at work in other times is that it is very exciting to a surprisingly large minority swath of the American polity to have really, really lurid transgressive lies told about people who you already don’t like. So when we’ve got the QAnon stuff and the really lurid conspiracy theories and lies that the Trumpy right is telling about Democrats and telling about the left as they imagine it right now, that sort of thing is something that we not only can recognize in other countries in the terrible things that it has led up to—that has happened here too.

This Senate scandal that I’m covering in Ultra season two was built on sadistic, pornographic, violent lurid lies about Jewish Americans, and it was the idea that the Nazis were the innocent victims and these terrible American Jews had done these unbelievably demonic things, and it’s quite literally unbelievable in its tone. But that has this polarizing effect where most people living on Earth, most normal people, will look at that and say, That seems like it can’t be true. What’s going on? These people have gone crazy. But the people who believe it are so excited by the transgressive thrill of how bad those lies are that it can drive them to very radical things. So that dynamic happened in the late ’40s and early ’50s in the United States around really talented demagogic, right-wing politicians, with help from the unrepentant Nazis in post-war Germany, which is bizarre and amazing, and that story should be known.

I think a version of that—minus the Nazis—is happening right now in terms of why the right has become, under Trump, subject to lies and conspiracies that just seem bizarre to people who are not in their thrall; but for the people who are in their thrall, they’re incredibly energizing. I didn’t understand that until I saw it at work in another place. I thought that that was totally new. I thought that was something going on with Trump and it was something totally foreign. Maybe we’d seen it in some authoritarian country in the 20th century that we should study. No, no, no, no, no. That happened here too. And I had never known that it happened here before, and it helps me understand how it works.

So zooming out to this election, Republicans have spent the past four years undermining Americans’ faith in elections. Now we have the GOP out there after Trump’s conviction assailing the rule of law. And I’m wondering what you think the result of these attacks are? And what do you think will happen if Trump loses, given this undermining of the legal system?

I mean, I don’t know what the result is going to be, and I don’t know what’s going to happen in the election. I’m a famously terrible predictor of election results. I was the only American not named Romney who was convinced we would have President Romney in 2012. I’m always wrong.

I do think by looking at the historical stuff that I’ve been doing with these other projects, I am trying to take not instruction but sort of framing guidance from the big picture on American history about how we handled problems like this in the past. And honestly, I think the issue for the election is not going to be what do the most fervent, rabid Trump-supporting people do? That’s pretty predictable. I think that’s sort of a given variable that we can just put in the equation. The important thing for what happens in the election is not what happens among the extremists. The important thing for what happens in the election is what happens among the broad swath of normal Americans. Are they put off by the extremism that is being offered by the right? By the ‘tear it all down, we want you to be afraid, we’re going to get retribution on our enemies, the American legal system is corrupt and must be destroyed?’ If the broad swath of normal America is put off by that, which I don’t think is impossible, I think this election result will be a tough one for the Trumpy. That said, if the broad swath of the American public either isn’t paying attention to that or is in some ways seduced by it—which seems difficult to believe, but it’s happened in other countries—then it’s going to be hard.

Is that your biggest fear in this election? That they are seduced by it?

I don’t know. I mean, again, I do feel like we’re in a really volatile time right now. One of the things I talked about just on the show last night is over the last couple of months, seeing the Florida trial with that Trump-appointed judge kind of just dissolve into her calendar and her just making it go away; seeing the Supreme Court step up the way they have against the federal January 6th prosecution; seeing the way that Republicans in Georgia have cut the legs out from under Fani Willis and her prosecution in Georgia. I think the thing we thought we learned over the last few months is like, okay, between now and the election, all the legal stuff is now done.

But then we learned that there are apparently FBI agents and federal prosecutors from DC who were interviewing law enforcement in Michigan on the day Trump was convicted in New York, and so maybe there’s going to be more federal charges. There’s an open federal investigation involving the fake electors thing, and that potentially means that there’s going to be a superseding indictment or more defendants or more charges for the existing defendants. I mean, I didn’t have that on my Bingo card, so I feel like even just that piece of it—the question of Trump’s legal entanglements—is still evolving on a daily basis.

I think that the fact that Trump keeps calling for mass protest in his name at every step of the legal process—whenever things don’t go his way, or when there’s a search warrant or indictment or arraignment or conviction—he keeps calling for mass protest and not getting it. I think that is an interesting dynamic and I think that’s unpredictable in terms of the way that goes.

I also think that the violence and threatened violence against judges and witnesses and jurors is something that is going to require a law enforcement response and indeed a political response. And that is going to introduce a new dynamic here. And all of that is separate from all the normal campaigning on all the normal issues. Any one of those things is a firecracker and it’s just a question of how big the boom is going to be.

As far as covering this political moment goes, I’m wondering how you see the role of the media in getting Trump and his supporters’ point of view across, but doing so in a way that is true and accurate? What types of commentators and analysts can you have on to do that? This came up, obviously, after NBC bosses signed Ronna McDaniels as a contributor and you and other hosts spoke up against the hire [saying that the former RNC chief’s past endorsement of election-fraud claims should disqualify her from the job].

I think that it’s easy to really tie yourself up in knots if you try to perfectly calibrate it in the abstract. In realistic terms, the way it works on a day-to-day basis is that you shouldn’t put people on the air who are lying to the audience. And if there are people who are important in public life who are lying to the American people and their lies are getting traction, the news there is: A lie has been told that is being propagated to the American people and is being believed. That is the news there. You don’t just broadcast the lie because people are believing it.

And journalistic institutions—core to who we are is figuring out what’s a lie and what isn’t right. That’s why we fact check stuff. That’s why we give people the opportunity to comment. That’s why we have editors and standards and all of those things. It’s about discerning what’s factual and what’s not. And so I think if you just take that as your North Star, that’s what gives you most of the guidance that you need.

I also feel like there is an appeasement problem that arises whenever you’re confronted with this kind of demagogic politics, which is that the whole idea of the way demagogic tactics work in the media context is that you just berate the media all the time. You attack them, you berate them, you undercut them. You tell people that they’re not just wrong but evil and they have to be destroyed and all this stuff.

And there is a natural appeasing reaction that I think happens in normal civilized people, which is like, Oh, don’t say that bad thing about me. I don’t deserve that. Let me prove to you that I am fair and professional in everything that I’m doing, and I see that instinct at work and it’s noble. It’s a human instinct that is rational and fair. But you have to understand that these attacks on the media are not rational and fair political tactics. They're to try to get you to skew your coverage in a way that is positive toward the person attacking you. And I just think we should self-police in the media against doing that because it hurts all of us. It hurts media coverage, it hurts the quality of it, but it also sets up a dynamic where media outlets are turned against each other in terms of who’s the bad guy and who’s currying favor with the bully. And I think that’s the wrong way to approach it.

CNN and ABC nabbed these debates; CNN’s is in a few weeks. What do you hope to see from moderators, both as a journalist, but also as a viewer and voter?

I mean, I pray for them. I think it’s a really, really, really important job, and it’s really hard to do well because I think that both of these candidates are actually very skilled debaters, but I think they approach this in very different ways. And so some of the critique that I was talking about, in terms of the tactics that are used demagogically against the media, they’ll do that. Trump will do that in the moment against debate moderators, right—you attack the process, attack the moderator. We’ve seen this dynamic at work: You try to have a rational linear point-to-point discussion with him, and instead he puts tactics on it that are about trying to make the process, the person asking the question, and the setting the problem. And it’s very hard not to react to that both defensively and in a way that is appeasing in the same way that happens with the media critiques too.

I don’t think anybody in America is looking forward to those debates. Who thinks that’s going to be a pleasurable experience, watching it, participating in it at any level, covering it, standing outside it with a placard? Nobody’s going to have a good time. It’s important, but I think we know enough about what Trump is in that kind of environment to know that it’s going to be a challenge to make it substantive and not just a display of aggression and hostility to the American system of government.