Still mysterious. Elizabeth Warren?”Finally sealed in the back seat, Maddow propped up the ankle. Maddow’s is the rare television news show that requires an active listener. But over the past three, her figure has ascended, in the liberal imagination, from beloved cable-news host to a kind of oracle for the age of Trump. If some change happened to the characters’ lives during the episode, it was usually undone by the end. Maddow is right to question the summarizing of a 300ish-page report into four measly pages, to insist on transparency, to challenge the motives of the Trump-friendly AG—and she’s not alone in doing so. When the show is over, she wipes off her makeup, removes her contacts and changes into her civilian clothing.When I picked her up from rehab, she wore glasses, a denim shirt and jeans, and a vintage belt buckle engraved with the words “Texas Nuclear,” signaling one of her obsessions: This month, she publishes her second book, “This is the hardest part of my day,” Maddow said as she approached the nickel-bronze revolving doors of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, before lifting her crutches and hopping easily through the obstacle. “It was about Donald Trump’s campaign plane or something. Free UK P&P over £15; online orders only. Instead, she carries her viewers along on a wave of verbiage, delivering baroque soliloquies about the Russian state, Trump-administration corruption and American political history. What happened to Rachel Maddow? Later in the program, Maddow brought on Representative Elaine Luria, a moderate Democrat from Virginia who had just co-signed a Washington Post op-ed calling for an impeachment inquiry, and asked her why she was coming out for impeachment now. If her show started out as a smart, quirky, kind-of-meandering news program focusing on Republican misdeeds in the Obama years, it has become, since the 2016 election, the gathering place for a congregation of liberals hungering for an antidote to President Trump’s nihilism and disregard for civic norms.Maddow does not administer beat-downs or deliver epic rants. What Maddow provides is the exciting rush of chasing a set of facts until a sane vision of the world finally comes into focus.Recently, I went to dinner at the home of Rebecca Kee, a preschool principal in San Francisco who turned to Maddow in her depression and confusion over the 2016 election. But eventually, after weighing their options, Ukraine rose into the A-block slot, and Maddow drifted toward her office. Then she segued into her signature move: a 25-minute soliloquy on the convoluted schemes swirling around the Trump-Ukraine incident, burrowing into a dense network of connections among Paul Manafort, Senator Mitch McConnell, Rudy Giuliani, the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, the Ukrainian natural-gas billionaire Dmitry V. Firtash and the former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. I’m not trying to get people to call their member of Congress,” she said. I remember how crazy it was,’ ” she said. Nicolle Wallace, who served as George W. Bush’s communications director and now hosts her own show on MSNBC, Since Trump’s inauguration, an anxiety has arisen among the media commentariat over Maddow’s role. At the tail end of the Bush years, after frequently guest-hosting for Olbermann, Maddow got a show of her own, in the time slot right after his, on which she pioneered a more jocular, cerebral approach to opinionating. Maddow asked him if the testimony of Rick Gates, Trump’s former deputy campaign manager, caused as much of a stir in the courtroom as it had inside her when she read the reports. Media observers often position MSNBC as a rival of Fox News, but Maddow’s success has not sapped Fox of its power. It is a uniform she selected for work and steps into every day, so that she never has to make an aesthetic choice that can be picked apart by the commentariat and elevated above what she has to say.