NBC News Analyst Compares Trump To Confederate President — Who Said Pro-Slavery South Was ‘Cheated’ Out of Win
NBC News presidential historian Michael Beschloss compared former President Donald Trump to the president of the Confederacy, who said the pro-slavery South was “cheated” out of victory.
On Sunday morning’s edition of MSNBC’s American Voices With Alicia Menendez, guest host Michael Steele asked Beschloss about the bombshell new charges against Trump compared to Watergate, but Beschloss had another historical echo in mind:
MICHAEL STEELE: How much overlap do you see between the Mar a Lago case and Watergate? Is that an appropriate historical comparison, if you will?
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Well, obstruction of justice, that’s what we’re talking about. That’s what we talked about with Nixon, abuse of power. Certainly, that’s one of the things that we talk about with with with both Trump and Nixon. But to compare Nixon to Donald Trump, to use a metaphor from the storms that are hitting Washington and elsewhere this afternoon, Nixon is a lightning bug. Donald Trump is a lightning storm that threatens to knock out our power grab. This is a level of magnitude that is way, way, way beyond Nixon.
Look at it this way. You know, you were mentioning alluding to January 6th and the insurrection that involved that famous, infamous attack on Congress. Threatened to, a coup d’etat that could have overturned our system of government and, you know, gotten rid of Joe Biden, installed Donald Trump as an unelected president who might have wanted to serve forever.
The scale of that is so far beyond Nixon that if we’re looking for a historical parallel, much more appropriate parallel would be Jefferson Davis. Jefferson Davis, of course, was never a president of the United States, but he was the president of the Illicit Confederate States of America. He tried an insurrection against our American Union for four years, failed with his military. But what did Davis say after the end of the Civil War? He was indicted. He was never sent for a long time to prison. And what did he say a few years later? He said, “I, I and the Confederacy did not lose the Civil War. We were cheated out of a victory that we won.”.
Who does that sound like to you?
MICHAEL STEELE: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s it’s, the eeriness there is is very compelling.
Watch above via MSNBC’s American Voices With Alicia Menendez.
