Fact Check

Did Rachel Maddow Tweet That Donald Trump Needs to be 'Taken Out?'

An image purportedly showing a threatening tweet from MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow is fake.

Published Jan. 25, 2017

Claim:
Rachel Maddow tweeted that Donald Trump needs to be "taken out" before he destroys America.

Shortly after Donald Trump's inauguration on 20 January 2017, an image purportedly showing a tweet from Rachel Maddow in which the MSNBC commentator supposedly said that the Trump needs to be "taken out" before he ruins America was circulated on social media:

rachel maddow

This image does not depict a real tweet issued by Maddow, however.

The message does not appear on Maddow's Twitter timeline, and we found no record of its having being retweeted or deleted, nor any source redirecting to the original tweet's URL.

Furthermore, the time stamp on the image does not match the format regularly employed by Twitter, which uses a dash instead of a comma and places the time before the date. Twitter's real time stamp can be seen on a genuine tweet from Rachel Maddow in which she denied sending out the above-displayed message:

maddow tweet

Dan Evon is a former writer for Snopes.