Rachel Maddow and Jen Psaki, who now share the 9 p.m. hour on MSNBC.Credit : MSNBC

Rachel Maddow had long been settled into life as only a weekly prime-time host on MSNBC, after scaling back her nightly cadence in 2022 to create time for other projects.

“I had definitely stepped back and considered that to be permanent,” she tells PEOPLE, noting that returning to host The Rachel Maddow Show five nights a week was “not on my bingo card in terms of things that I was considering.”

Then Donald Trump won a second White House term, and MSNBC called: What if you came back full-time just for the first 100 days of his presidency?

“I felt like it was a really good faith, big-hearted ask, like, ‘This would be good for our audience, this would be good for the network. I know it’s a big ask. Would you consider it?’ ” Maddow, 52, recalls thinking. “I was just sort of moved by feeling needed a little bit in that way.”

“For this hundred days, it felt like the time to make an extraordinary effort for an extraordinary time.”

— Rachel Maddow

With Maddow on board to return to a nightly schedule for a fixed term of three months, MSNBC entered planning mode to identify a successor who could keep up with the news cycle after her 100 days were up.

The network quickly lined up former White House press secretary and rising TV star Jen Psaki to become the new face of 9 o’clock from Tuesday through Friday, beginning on May 6.

Maddow tells PEOPLE that she’s “so happy for the MSNBC audience” that they will begin seeing more variety on screen, explaining that The Briefing with Jen Psaki will balance the 9 p.m. slate by bringing a notably different perspective to viewers who’ve perhaps grown stubbornly loyal to the Maddow format.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki holds a daily briefing in 2021.SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty

Psaki, 46, didn’t fall into her new role overnight. The popular MSNBC host, with decades of experience in political comms, has been sitting behind the desk of Inside with Jen Psaki for more than two years, which until now aired every Sunday at noon and every Monday night in the hour leading up to The Rachel Maddow Show.

The longtime political analyst admits that she’s been taking notes of Maddow’s broadcasting style for quite some time, hoping to pick up on pieces of the secret formula that’s allowed her colleague to resonate so deeply with audiences across multiple platforms.

“There’s no Rachel Maddow anchor school,” Psaki tells PEOPLE. “She tells the stories that no one else is telling, and finds a way to inform people and put interesting and helpful and useful information back into the universe every night.”

Psaki, who served as President Joe Biden’s press secretary and President Barack Obama’s communications director, explains that an hour of prime-time equates to 42 minutes of air to fill: “It sounds like a lot, but it’s not a lot.”

While many journalists are inclined to recap current events from start to finish, Psaki notes that Maddow’s show offers something different, instead finding a way to — for example — “connect giraffes in Botswana to cigarettes to the legal system and the news of the day.”

“It seems easy when she does it, but it’s a Herculean effort to pull that off every day,” Psaki admires. “For somebody who has had a connection for 17 years with her audience, she has never rested on her laurels. She works her ass off so tremendously.”

Rachel Maddow hosts her eponymous prime-time show from MSNBC’s New York City studios.Christopher Dilts / MSNBC

Though Psaki looked to Maddow for lessons in broadcasting after leaving the White House, including guidance on reading from a teleprompter, part of coming into her own at MSNBC required her to draw a distinction between admiring Maddow and feeling the need to mirror her.

“When you start in a job like this, you feel like you have to be an anchor. And it’s like… what does that mean exactly?” Psaki says. “I had to get out of my own head, and it took me a minute.”

Psaki says the process involved accepting that she could be different from the network’s other talent. Especially, she teases, when it comes to their less savory attributes — like Maddow’s divisive affinity for turkey jerky.

“When you’re trying to learn from Rachel Maddow, you’re like, ‘She likes turkey jerky so I’m going to try turkey jerky,’ ” Psaki laughs, adding that she just couldn’t bring herself around to enjoying it. (“I’ve converted zero people,” Maddow chimes in with a sigh.)

Psaki ultimately settled on a more helpful takeaway from brushing shoulders with Maddow on the job.

“I could never try to do what she does, but what I’ve drawn from her and learned from her is continue to check yourself and test yourself and try to push to be better,” she says, concluding that an important piece of Maddow’s secret formula is how she “evolves to meet the moment we’re living in.”

Jen Psaki (second from left) speaks on a panel of MSNBC hosts, including Rachel Maddow (fourth from left), during Trump’s joint address to Congress in March.MSNBC

While thinking about how she wants her new 9 p.m. hour to differ from the show she’s been hosting since 2023, Psaki says she reflected on that idea of evolution.

In the wake of the 2024 election, voters expressed a strong distrust in legacy media, which many perceived as an insider’s club for elite Democrats. The title of her broadcast, Inside with Jen Psaki, suddenly felt misguided.

“One of the first things I said is, ‘Can I change the name of the show?’ ” she remembers. “Because sending this message to people — even with a title, which sounds like a small thing — that it’s ‘insiders’ and ‘insiders have all the answers’ felt so out of touch with the moment and what we learned from last year.”

Deciding on a new name, The Briefing, allowed her to refocus on what makes her unique. Whereas Maddow specializes in covering the present day through a historical lens, Psaki’s 20 years of government experience allow her to explain the intricacies of Washington and how it operates behind closed doors.

“To me it means diving back into my roots,” she says. “We called it The Briefing because it’s trying to provide people an understanding of what the heck just happened, what it means for them and who’s fighting for them.”

Psaki plans to make room for longer-form conversations with figures at all levels of government during her “briefings.” And of course, she says, the show will still offer context on the Trump White House as it radically reshapes the function of the Oval Office.

“Every night that you have this honor — and also responsibility — to speak to the audience, you want them to come away and feel like they’ve learned something or they have a different perspective.”

— Jen Psaki

Jen Psaki hosts ‘Inside with Jen Psaki’ on March 17, 2025.MSNBC

Though Maddow could easily feel protective over the 9 p.m. hour that’s inextricably linked with her name, she tells PEOPLE that MSNBC will be all the better with Psaki at the helm four days a week.

“The thing she has which I do not have, which is going to make 9 o’clock better with Jen Psaki than it is with Rachel Maddow, is that she both knows people and knows how to talk to people,” Maddow says.

“I really am a weird little hermit who works great with my staff, but I don’t know anybody in Washington. I don’t know anybody in the news, and it’s on purpose — I am not great at interacting with people,” she claims. “I’m not a great interviewer and I’m not great at cultivating sources. It’s not my thing. I’m a reader, not a talker.”

Maddow insists that, in addition to managing the level of reading and synthesizing required of hosting an hour-long show, Psaki is in a distinctive position to tap into her exhaustive Rolodex and elicit premier sourcing or secure difficult interviews.

“I don’t know anybody else who really can do that the way that she does,” Maddow says, adding that off camera, Psaki has also remained immune to the television curse that turns decent people into “monsters.”

“She’s not been susceptible to that wizardry. She’s a good person,” Maddow adds.

Jen Psaki covers the 2022 midterm elections for MSNBC.MSNBC

Asked what Maddow will do with all her extra time as she retreats back to a once-per-week hosting schedule, she clarifies that she won’t be any less busy.

“When I made the transition the last time, I had this big list of all this stuff I want to do, and it was finally clean the basement and learn how to detail [my wife] Susan’s car … finally learn to double haul, which is a hard way of fish-casting that I can’t do,” she says. “I didn’t do any of that.”

“All I did was make podcasts and write books and make documentaries and set up this new company, Surprise Inside, through which I’m doing books and movies and TV shows and podcasts,” she continues. “I didn’t get any time off at all. I instead just started working on a different schedule that didn’t need me to produce a TV show every day.”

With Trump’s 100th day in office now in the rearview, Maddow plans to return to that arrangement. She’s interviewing show runners for a new TV show, financing a documentary, outlining another book, and has already finished the first draft of a new podcast that she teases will be “way more timely than I hoped.”

Still, she promises, “I’ll be there every Monday night on MSNBC and whenever the bat phone rings, whenever they need me to come in and do special coverage, I’ll do it.”

“I’m not going anywhere. They’re going to have to drag me out of here. You’re going to see the fingernail lines down the floorboards.”