According to out MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, America is reaching its boiling point.

Americans are not happy with the Trump administration and have been showing up in droves to protests and town halls to make their anger known – and Maddow thinks something big is happening.

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“The number of people turning out at individual events, I think, tip over into something that’s qualitatively different than what we had previously seen,” she said.

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She started with Tesla protests, explaining that the administration has tried to intimidate Americans into halting their protests outside Elon Musk’s dealerships.

“The American people this weekend showed in very large numbers that they are not going to be dissuaded from peaceful, legal, nonviolent protest for or against anything they want, because we don’t need to clear that with the government because we are Americans, and it is our right to peacefully protest if we want to,” she said, showing videos and photographs of huge protests at Tesla dealerships across the country. One video depicted a protest in Cherry Hill, New Jersey that organizers believe included between 600 and 700 people.

Maddow also spoke about the more general protests taking place in blue and red states alike against the massive cuts made to the federal government by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), run by Elon Musk.

“There’s been almost too many of them happening right now to sum them all up,” Maddow said, adding that we have seen the number of town halls “just explode,” taking place even when representatives refuse to show.

She also made clear that all of this is happening in both red and blue states and said the number of people showing up is “through the roof.”

Maddow also spoke about the growing number of “empty chair” town halls taking place in which hundreds of constituents have shown up to mock and humiliate their representatives for refusing to face them. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has advised GOP lawmakers not to host town halls anymore after videos went viral of angry constituents yelling at Republicans about where Trump and the GOP are taking the country.

In one, a GOP congressman was met with a chorus of screams and boos from constituents after telling laid-off federal workers being fired by Elon Musk is part of God’s plan for them. 

Both Johnson and Donald Trump have perpetuated the GOP’s new favorite lie that these hordes of angry constituents flooding Republican town halls are actually paid actors.

“Paid ‘troublemakers’ are attending Republican Town Hall Meetings,” Trump claimed on Truth Social earlier this month. “It is all part of the game for the Democrats, but just like our big LANDSLIDE ELECTION, it’s not going to work for them!” (Trump’s 2024 election wasn’t a landslide: He won only 49.78% of the popular vote and beat his opponent by roughly 2.2 million votes, the smallest margin of victory for any president since Richard Nixon’s 1968 election.)

Johnson echoed Trump’s claim about hired actors, telling CNN Democrats are merely trying to make “it look like that what is happening in Washington is unpopular.”

Johnson did, however, admit he didn’t actually know if what he was saying was true when the host pressed him on the fact that surely not everyone was a paid protestor.

“Many of them were,” he responded. “I don’t know.”

But Maddow said it’s become quite clear that even without their representatives, “Americans just show up.”

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