Last month struggling MNSBC decided that Joy Reid and Stephanie Ruhle would be offered pay cuts which they could either accept or reject and leave the network. That followed an even bigger decision reached in November. MSNBC's top earner, Rachel Maddow, would have $5 million cut from her salary.

Maddow — who rakes in $30 million a year for hosting “The Rachel Maddow Show” just one day a week on Mondays — renegotiated for a $25 million salary for the next five years, the Ankler reported on Thursday.

“This is a difficult time and they needed to keep her,” one executive told the news site. “No one else can do what she does. You can’t build a brand like it overnight.”

The story at the time was that Maddow would cointinue to work on Monday nights but would appear more often as a "secret weapon" when there was breaking news.

But here we are just two months later and it seems MSNBC has decided it can't afford for Maddow to remain so secret. In a transparent effort to regain some of its lost viewers they will be bring Maddow back full time for a few months.

The MSNBC prime time star is expanding her on-air presence for the first 100 days of President-elect Donald Trump’s administration, the network announced Monday, injecting what may be a much-needed ratings boost into the progressive outlet’s lineup.

Maddow’s show, MSNBC’s highest rated program, has only aired once a week since 2022 when she stepped away to focus on other projects, including films, books and podcasts. Her temporary return to the anchor desk weeknights at 9 p.m. ET will see Alex Wagner, who currently anchors the timeslot Tuesday through Friday, deployed on special assignment to cover the impact of the president-elect’s policies.

They are hoping to jumpstart resistance 2.0 and, who knows, it could actually work but I don't think it will ever be what it was last time around. What's missing this time is the Hillary planted and funded conspiracy theory about Trump being a Russian operative that really helped focus and solidify the left during most of Trump's first term. The promise that any day now he was going to be brought low when the proof of collusion finally arrived. 

That was a very lucrative lie for MSNBC and other major news outlets. What are they going to replace it with. Accusing all of Trump's nominees of crimes real and imaginary will only go so far. But if anyone is up to the job of creating a new conspiracy theory about Trump it's probably Maddow. She was, after all, one of the main people pushing the Steele Dossier during Trump's first term. Erik Wemple's piece on her dossier boosterism is worth a 2nd look now that MSNBC is brining her back for more of the same. Here's a bit of his timeline:

On May 3, 2017, Maddow cited a CNN report that “parts of this dossier passed muster even in federal court when the dossier was used in part to justify a secret FISA court warrant for U.S. surveillance on a Trump campaign adviser.” Thanks to Horowitz, we now know that officials misused the dossier in this process, failing to disclose to the FISA court dossier-debunking information. Never place blind faith in the FBI!

“The Republican claim today was that the dossier has been increasingly discredited. That’s not true in terms of the public record about the dossier. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. As time goes on, more and more pieces do get independently corroborated,” Maddow said....

On Oct. 5, 2017, Maddow said that Steele had “a lot” of the dossier “dead to rights.”

On Dec. 8, 2017, Maddow aired a special report on the dossier. “Above all else, we know this about the now famous dossier: Christopher Steele had this story before the rest of America did. And he got it from Russian sources,” said the host, who used the term “deep cover sources” to describe Steele’s network. According to the Horowitz report, the “Primary Sub-source” for the dossier told the FBI that the information he/she passed along amounted to “word of mouth and hearsay.”

As soon as it was undermined by the Mueller report, she dropped it like a hot potato. Here's how Wemple summed up the pattern on her show.

When small bits of news arose in favor of the dossier, the franchise MSNBC host pumped air into them. At least some of her many fans surely came away from her broadcasts thinking the dossier was a serious piece of investigative research, not the flimflam, quick-twitch game of telephone outlined in the Horowitz report. She seemed to be rooting for the document.

And when large bits of news arose against the dossier, Maddow found other topics more compelling.

She was there for the bunkings, absent for the debunkings — a pattern of misleading and dishonest asymmetry.

Again, this is what MSNBC is hoping she can do to bring back viewers. No doubt she'll do her best but without the over-arching narrative of the Steele dossier, she won't have nearly as much to work with.