Chris Hayes Alarmed That Trump Will Try to Upend Democracy Again: ‘The Dude Tried to Foment a Coup Six Months Ago!’
Chris Hayes began Monday’s edition of All In by highlighting the lack of accountability among high-ranking officials in the administration of George W. Bush who he said had violated the law. The MSNBC host said there’s “a direct line” between that lack accountability and the present day with respect to former members of Donald Trump’s administration.
“There’s a reason that people are hesitant to prosecute members of the government,” said Hayes. “You definitely do not want to end up in a lock-her-up cycle in which each successive administration jails members of the previous one in a never-ending tit-for-tat, which is a thing that happens in many countries.”
But he added, “When [the law] is violated by the people entrusted with the power to uphold and enforce the law, there must be accountability for that. And there was essentially none in the Bush administration.”
Hayes noted that John Yoo, who wrote the infamous “torture memo” as a member of Bush’s Justice Department to justify so-called enhanced interrogation techniques, is a tenured professor at the University of California at Berkeley, who’s “just chillin’. Goes on cable news. Teaches.”
He said that “there’s a direct line between that lack of accountability, and the world that we find ourselves in, now.”
Trump and other Republicans have repeatedly said falsely that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, or at least cast doubts on the merits of the election. On the morning of the January 6 insurrection, Trump held a rally in Washington, D.C. and suggested the crowd should march to the Capitol where the election was going to be certified.
Hayes alluded to an interview with Trump by two Washington Post reporters for their book, I Alone Can Fix It in which Trump teased a possible comeback.
The host explained:
Donald Trump was impeached twice and yet, he sits at Mar-a-Lago giving interviews where he sounds like a person, entirely and completely fixated on upending American democracy, having tried and failed, once already.
Like, he’s focused. He knows what he wants to do, again. They tested out all the weak parts in the fence. They’re going to come for the fence again. Yes, he is still being investigated by the Manhattan district attorney. But the dude tried to foment a coup six months ago. I don’t know what to tell you. That’s what is waiting in the wings. That’s what is being hatched. It’s being plotted obviously in front of all our faces. Listen to what the man says!
Watch above via MSNBC.
