It looks like Donald Trump was caught watching Rachel Maddow last night

It’s no secret that Donald Trump has spent an extraordinarily large portion of his illegitimate presidency lying in bed and watching cable news coverage of himself. Trump usually watches Fox News in the hope of hearing himself praised, and he frequently tweets about it in real time. Trump also sometimes watches CNN, and then tweets nasty things about the people on CNN who criticize him. But there has never been any hint that Trump goes anywhere near MSNBC – until now.

Last night Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal appeared on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show and confirmed that Donald Trump Jr lied under oath to Congress. The clear implication was that Junior is going to be indicted for perjury, and that’s a problem for him, because no one beats the rap against solid perjury charges. This was a big revelation in its own right. But then Donald Trump stepped in and made it a much bigger deal.

Just a couple minutes after Richard Blumenthal made this news on Rachel Maddow’s show, Trump promptly launched into a vicious Twitter attack against Blumenthal. There’s no question that Trump was responding to what Blumenthal had just said about Trump Jr, and so the most likely explanation is that Trump was in fact watching Rachel last night. Why does this matter?

There would only be one reason for Donald Trump to break from his usual cable news habit, and begin watching the MSNBC host who has done the most intelligent job of interpreting Trump’s crimes and scandals. Trump knows he’s in real trouble, he’s so concerned about it, he’s now resorting to peeking at Rachel Maddow to try to find out just how bad it is for him.