Chris Hayes Blasts ‘Well of Evil’ That Fuels Trump’s ‘Dark Sorcery of Racial Hatred’

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes ripped President Donald Trump in a blistering monologue in the wake of the El Paso mass shooting over the weekend, offering an extended indictment of the “well of evil” that Trump’s rhetoric draws upon as part of his “dark sorcery of racial hatred.”

From the very first moments of his show, Hayes tore into the president’s language as divisive and dangerous.

“Even if there were no blood, it would still be vile,” Hayes said. “If there were no body count, no deaths to mourn, no grieving families, no young parents ripped apart by bullets while shielding their babies, even if none of that happened, it would still be an existential threat to the America we can and should be.”

He then played a clip of a recent Trump rally in Florida, where a rallygoer responded to Trump’s repeated warnings of a migrant “invasion” by yelling out “Shoot them!” which elicited a chuckle and a joke from the president.

“Even if not one drop of blood were ever shed in pursuit of it, it would still be anathema. It will still be a force to be conquered and banished,” Hayes continued. “What is the ‘it’ I’m speaking of? Well, to quote a phrase, ‘You know it and I know it.’ It’s the well of evil from which our president

draws and has drawn from the first day when he said Mexico was sending rapists to the U.S., presumably with the explicit intent to defile America’s women, the dark sorcery of racial hatred that conjures invasions and infestations out of desperate fellow human beings seeking refuge. An exultant hatred, a hatred wrapped in a joking, not-joking smile and a cowardly irony, in a pause at the podium that let the crowd hurl its bile. Hatred echoed in the refrain of death squads and war criminals and fascist mobs throughout history as they wield the club and the pistol and the machete: ‘You’re invaders. You are animals. You are a disease. You are a threat to us and you will not replace us.'”

Hayes pointed to Trump’s “very fine people on both sides” comment in the wake of a murder by a white supremacist at a 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, as well as a recent study that found a 226 percent increase in hate crimes in counties that hosted a 2016 Trump campaign.

“Donald Trump knows what he’s doing,” Hayes said. “Everyone hears the president loud and clearly when he speaks. He tells his followers they alone are the heroes of the this country’s history. They’re threatened by their fellow countrymen and women who live in cities, by the desperate mothers and babies in flip-flops that he separates in pens, by

those who call their God by a different name. Time and again, time and again, this nation must answer the question: ‘Who is it for? Who America is for?’ And the simple answer time and again must be it is for all of us. We welcome the stranger. We pursue justice. We act as equals in the collective enterprise of democracy. The president and his party stand on the wrong side of that question right now. They have long since disqualified themselves from the support of decent people by doing so.”

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.