For this week’s Fault Lines column, Jon Allsop is filling in for Jay Caspian Kang.

In the winter of 2022, Rachel Maddow announced that she was taking a break from her nightly show on MSNBC. An expectation that she would step away permanently created “a near-existential crisis” for the network, Dylan Byers, a reporter for Puck, wrote, with industry insiders chattering about “the lack of an obvious successor.” Byers asked whether Jen Psaki—who was still President Biden’s press secretary but reportedly close to leaving the White House for a TV gig, and on the radar of several networks—offered a potential solution. “After all,” Byers noted, her role under Biden required her “to explain complicated matters of politics and policy and debunk falsehoods—which is not dissimilar from the job Maddow has created for herself at 9 P.M., where she typically punctures G.O.P. talking points and spends entire segments circuitously arriving at a point.” Psaki’s time in the White House briefing room had also made her a darling of a certain type of #Resistance liberal—for restoring a “West Wing”-ish sense of civility after the caustic Trump years, but also for her supposedly deft clapbacks to reporters’ vacuous or hostile questions. Those came to be known online as #PsakiBombs.

Psaki did, indeed, end up at MSNBC, but not as Maddow’s immediate successor in the coveted 9 P.M. slot, which went to Alex Wagner, a former daytime host. Maddow stuck around, but hosted only one night a week. She returned to full-time duties, however, for the first hundred days of the second Trump Administration, which she covered with alarm, while also emphasizing the growing grassroots opposition to it. And, now that that period is over, Wagner is out, and Psaki is finally inheriting the time slot. (Maddow will continue her weekly appearances; Wagner will stay at MSNBC as a senior political analyst.) Psaki’s ascent, as Byers, of Puck, put it recently, suggests that she is now, along with Maddow, the “marquee star of the MSNBC enterprise.” In a trailer for her new show, she struck a Maddovian note of anti-Trump defiance. “You can’t cower to bullies; that’s how they win,” she said. “We are not powerless. We have our voices. And I will continue using mine.”

Yet Psaki and Maddow are in many ways different. As I’ve written before, Maddow’s signal contribution to the cable format, which can often be superficial, has been her often lengthy and, yes, circuitous monologues situating current events in historical context, a technique that can bring a welcome cooling perspective in crazy times, however overheated Maddow might then get about the news of the day. (You don’t have to like her politics to appreciate her approach—Steve Bannon has described himself as an admirer.) Psaki, during a media tour to promote her new show, has stressed that Maddow is inimitable and suggested, instead, that her own chief value will be as an experienced insider who can decrypt Washington for viewers. “I like history, too,” she told Byers, but “what I feel like my love is, and what I have experience in and hopefully I can bring insight to, is, like, what it’s like to be in the arena.” Maddow told People that this would make Psaki’s show better than hers. Psaki “both knows people and knows how to talk to people,” Maddow said, before describing herself as “a weird little hermit.”

It seems doubtful, however, that Psaki will become as much an avatar of the resistance to Trump 2.0 as Maddow was of the #Resistance to Trump 1.0, or that she will score as well in that most crucial of cable currencies: ratings. As other commentators have suggested, the #PsakiBomb phenomenon was always strange, belying how bland and low-key most of her public performances as press secretary actually were. (And it now feels like a relic: a search for the hashtag on X and Bluesky this week, the morning after the first episode of her show aired, returned no new results.) Maddow—once dubbed a “bellowing soothsayer” by Vanity Fair, and, reportedly, “ratings Viagra” by network executives—has built an enormously loyal audience over the years. Those tipped to step into her shoes—Wagner, Mehdi Hasan—haven’t managed to match her.

In many ways, though, this is an unfair expectation. In part, Maddow has been so successful because she is and always has been a singular talent. But we are also, of course, living through the fracturing of our information ecosystem. The question now, perhaps, isn’t whether Psaki or anyone else is the next Maddow, but whether the 9 P.M. Eastern hour on MSNBC still matters at all, as either a source of news or a lightning rod for liberal energy.

It’s a common article of faith that cable news is dying, ditto that the mediasphere has splintered since the heyday of Walter Cronkite (or even of CNN), with younger people, in particular, now getting their news—or, more worryingly, not—from a dizzying array of apps, social platforms, and podcasts, and a combination of opaque algorithms and personal choice insuring that no two news consumers see exactly the same things. Trump, we have been told endlessly, has expertly gamed this new world, by weaponizing the decline of traditional news sources to sow division and distrust and, more recently, appearing on podcasts—both political and ostensibly not—that value vibes and authenticity over facts. As the manosphere goes, apparently, so goes the nation.

Since Trump returned to office, prominent Democrats have sought to catch up to his perceived advantage online, sometimes even giving the appearance that they’ve used the internet before. In March, as Trump addressed a joint session of Congress, Democratic lawmakers invited liberal influencers to help amplify their response, though some of the resulting content was mocked as staged or, worse, cringe; around the same time, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, launched a podcast featuring bizarre, friendly banter with hard-right brawlers like Bannon and Charlie Kirk. (Jay Caspian Kang panned the endeavour as “embarrassing” in this column). Other governors have been less embarrassing, on sports shows, for instance, and last month, Pete Buttigieg, the former Transportation Secretary, dipped at least one toe into the manosphere, chatting for nearly three hours on the comedy podcast “Flagrant” and coming across as relatively relatable. Last week, MeidasTouch—a liberal content machine that posts hyperactively across various platforms and has been described as appealing “to those for whom Rachel Maddow is too subtle”—hosted four governors for a virtual town hall, including J. B. Pritzker, of Illinois, who is currently being touted as a key leader of the resistance.

One can debate whether Psaki qualifies as a prominent Democrat in a political sense; she has spent the bulk of her career in Democratic campaigns and Administrations but, after joining MSNBC, has described herself as a journalist. Either way, her anti-Trump message is broadly the same, and will have to overcome similar challenges in breaking through a crowded media environment. High-profile former cable anchors—including Joy Reid, axed from MSNBC (to Maddow’s dismay) during the same programming reshuffle that saw Psaki elevated—have found an audience by posting independently to Substack, stripped of the bells and whistles of a fancy studio. In a similar vein, people are increasingly watching the video versions of podcasts as TV. The most influential resistance-adjacent media figure of this moment might not be anyone at MSNBC but the Times columnist and podcast host Ezra Klein. Recently, MeidasTouch briefly overtook Joe Rogan’s wildly popular podcast in terms of downloads.

It’s certainly true that the 9 P.M. Eastern slot on MSNBC is too little (and literally too late) to stand astride the modern media landscape. And yet it’s also possible to exaggerate the death of established formats. The notion that Trump won last year because he had the brilliant idea to tour apolitical podcasts, and that this was entirely new, oversimplifies the reality. Fox News remains hugely influential on the right, and is still watched by several million people in prime time; Maddow’s nightly show during the first hundred days of Trump’s current term scored ratings in the millions, too. (Indeed, hers was the only non-Fox offering among the top fifteen highest-rated cable shows between January and March.) And political élites still care about what happens on cable—not least Trump himself, who has stuffed his Administration with Fox personalities, and recently found time to attack Maddow from the Oval Office. (“Nobody watches her anyway,” he said—a telltale sign that people do.)

The line between the polished old-school structure of the TV studio and the badlands of the podcastverse is perhaps blurrier than it might initially appear. It’s impossible to imagine an MSNBC version of, for example, Buttigieg’s three-hour “Flagrant” odyssey (with its digressions on, among other things, how hot Scandinavians are). But if shows like that reflect, in part, a growing audience demand for content that takes more time to unspool than the typical cable segment, one could argue that Maddow preëmpted that trend, and did it on cable news, with her winding historical monologues and earnest self-presentation. (In recent years, Maddow has herself adapted to the fracturing of our media world, branching out into podcasts and books, in addition to her show.) And some digital offerings, like the MeidasTouch governors’ town hall with Pritzker et al., would not look so out of place on MSNBC. Psaki, for her part, has spoken recently of the importance of making content for TikTok or YouTube in between her nightly shows, rather than counting on being appointment viewing. “Everybody kind of has to do everything right now,” she told the Poynter Institute. “If there was one thing, everybody would be doing it. There isn’t one clear silver bullet. So we all gotta try lots of stuff.”

If the point of MSNBC’s 9 P.M. hour is to be the tentpole for the resistance, based on some idea of a TV-centric liberal monoculture, Psaki’s show is all but destined to fail. The notion of a singular tentpole was always a bit of an illusion anyway, even during the early days of the first Trump Administration, when Maddow was No. 1 in prime time and perhaps at the apogee of her cultural relevance, for better or worse. (I’m old enough to remember the buzz generated, around the same time, by an upstart liberal venture called “Pod Save America.”) And the further fragmentation of the media landscape doesn’t mean that prime time has suddenly turned into worthless real estate. Psaki’s show will, at least, be one fragment among all the others, and perhaps a relatively noticeable one. She may not have a hot new platform. But she is a political celebrity, which can still help you stand out from the crowd.

If the media environment is fragmented, so, too, is the Democratic resistance itself: split, as Kang wrote in this column, in February, among incompatible strategic impulses; severed from a discredited Party establishment but uncertain where to go next; fundamentally leaderless. As Biden’s former press secretary, Psaki is plausibly part of that discredited establishment, even if she left the role in 2022. (During her recent media tour, she has had to parry questions as to what, if anything, she knew about Biden’s decline, with her response—essentially, that she knew nothing—proving to be catnip for right-wing websites.) But, as Kang suggested, those who still have a platform can use it to cast off the establishment mantle—even if they really should have to wear it. A leadership vacuum is also an opportunity.

Kang ended his column by asking readers to “picture the most intense, bleeding-heart liberal you know, the type who has five signs in their front yard, rage-watches the news, and has spent the past ten years worried that Donald Trump will march us straight into fascism,” and then wondering where all that energy might go next. That person sounds, to me, like a Maddow viewer, and possibly now a Psaki one. Psaki surely won’t harness that energy for herself, at least not in any electoral sense. (She has said that she’s done with government service, unless she’s one day offered an ambassadorship in a warm climate.) But she is pitching her new show as a space where possible future Democratic leaders—prominent already or not—will be able to get a hearing, and that itself confers a certain sort of power. Recently, Byers, of Puck, asked Psaki how she’s thinking about MSNBC’s status as a Democratic Party forum, now that others exist, too. “There are still millions of people—more if you’re Rachel Maddow and Fox News—but there’s still millions of people watching cable at night,” she replied. MSNBC has “a tremendously dedicated audience of people who wanna hear what all these people who may aspire to be leaders have to say.” ♦