“Deep breath,” Rachel Maddow told her MSNBC audience Tuesday night. “This was a big day.”

“Things are at a boil, things are going fast now,” she continued. “This is a time when everyone needs to pay attention.”

MSNBC’s most prominent primetime anchor launched into a deep-dive analysis of the strange relationship between President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in light of the stunning press conference between the two.

“There is no explicable scenario for any of those things, unless you are willing to believe the worst,” Maddow said, gesturing towards a graphic looming behind her that blared: “WORST CASE SCENARIO.”

“We haven’t ever had to reckon with the possibility that someone had ascended to the presidency of the United States to serve the interests of another country rather than our own,” she said. “What’s the corrective to that? How do you remedy that? These are no longer hypothetical questions.”

“No serving US president has ever before taken sides with a foreign government against our own,” Maddow continued. “Let alone a foreign government that has just attacked our country.”

“If the president did that today because he has some reason to serve that other country rather than our own, then a lot that has previously been inexplicable is now explicable. That’s the worst case scenario,” she said. “And, deep breath, it means that we are going to have to come to terms with this as a country. And we’re going to have to come to terms with what we need to do next as a country to fix this. And in order to do that, the blinders have to come off. We have to be real.”

Maddow went on to explain how developments in the unfolding legal case against Paul Manafort will help.

Watch the deep-dive above, via MSNBC.

[image via screengrab]

—

Follow Aidan McLaughlin (@aidnmclaughlin) on Twitter

Have a tip we should know? [email protected]