Out MSNBC correspondent Rachel Maddow said the story of Donald Trump’ first 100 days in office is of “his failure and the American public saying no to him.”

“There has never been a president who has botched the first 100 days of his presidency more than Donald Trump has,” Maddow told colleague Katie Phang while appearing as a guest on the final episode of Phang’s show for the network. “You don’t have to take that as a subjective view. It’s the view shown in scientific polling of the American public. The public is deeply, deeply, deeply against what Trump is doing.”

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“Tell me more about your Department of Government Efficiency.”

A recent poll from ABC News/The Washington Post/Ipsos found that Trump has the lowest 100-day approval rating of any president in 80 years, eclipsing his own first-term record of having the worst rating in 100 days.

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“He’s been very radical in his first hundred days,” Maddow went on, “and I think we knew that would be true, but I don’t think we knew he would turn the American public, including a large portion of his own base, against him so quickly, that the public would be willing again and again and again to go protest and say no and rise up against him, that he would fare so uniformly disastrously in court. He’s just been clobbered in the courts in dozens and dozens and dozens of cases already. He’s really flailed.”

Phang asked Maddow if we still underestimated Trump’s effectiveness, since he has still managed to bring chaos and destruction to the federal government.

Maddow said she does not believe Trump has been any more efficient in his second term than he was in his first. “I do think we’re in the middle of an attempted authoritarian overthrow of American democracy,” she clarified. “I think everybody who predicted that was right, but I don’t think he’s any better at it.”

She gave examples of the administration’s “litany of mistakes” it has had to walk back on, like accidentally firing and scrambling to rehire people in charge of crucial initiatives, like bird flu prevention and nuclear weapons management.

“All of this stuff that they have done and then undone, it does reflect the radicalism and their ability and willingness to just destroy,” Maddow explained, “but they haven’t done a lot of it on purpose. They’ve done a lot of it despite themselves.”

But Maddow emphasized that in this case, Trump’s incompetence is not a blessing that will protect the nation from harm. “They’re failure has created wreckage in the U.S. government… They’re [just] not that good at doing what they’re actually trying to do.”

Maddow also said political pundits mostly predicted there would not be a strong resistance to Trump from the American people this time around, but that has proven not to be true at all.

“It’s just different this time,” Maddow explained, saying that instead of one big rally after his inagauguration like there was in 2017, there’s “literally every single day dozens of protests all over the country including in small towns and in red states.”

And it’s paying off, she added, explaining that many GOP representatives are telling constituents they will resist Trump on certain issues because their angry constituents are giving them no other choice.

“That momentum is going to be the story of the second 100 days and beyond,” Maddow said, “Their incompetence, their inability to defend what they’re doing and the American people in a louder and louder and more intense way, just telling them, ‘Nope you’re not doing it.'”

The segment ended with an emotional exchange between Phang and Maddow regarding Phang’s last day on air.

In February, Maddow dedicated a five-minute segment of her show to slamming her own network for canceling the shows of non-white anchors, including Phang, Joy Reid, and Alex Wagner.

It’s “unnerving to see that on a network where we’ve got two — count them, two — non-white hosts in primetime, both of our non-white hosts in primetime are losing their shows, as is Katie Phang on the weekend,” Maddow said.

“That feels worse than bad,” she said, “no matter who replaces them. That feels indefensible, and I do not defend it.”

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