Chris Hayes Reads Letter Full of ‘Stalinist Groveling’ From GOP Lawmaker Responding to Trump Attack
Chris Hayes gave a dramatic, if not mocking reading of an open letter to Donald Trump from Wisconsin Republican senate president Chris Kapenga on Tuesday that the MSNBC host said amounted to “Stalinist groveling.”
Hayes outlined Trump’s strategy of attacking Republicans who haven’t backed election audits in their respective states. Last week the former president issued a missive declaring, “Wisconsin Republican leaders… are working hard to cover up election corruption… They are actively trying to prevent a Forensic Audit.”
Trump added that if Republican leaders in Wisconsin don’t authorize an audit, “I have little doubt that they will be primaried and quickly run out of office.”
In other words, Trump is threatening to endorse primary challenges to Republican lawmakers who won’t indulge his wholesale lunacy that the 2020 election was stolen.
“The president of the Wisconsin state senate is an incredible example of Trump-era Republicans and generally democratic decline,” said Hayes, “Not to mention absurd levels of humiliation.”
“You need to hear this,” said Hayes, referring to Kapenga’s letter. “I’m gonna read large portions of it because nothing else would do it justice”:
Let me first say that very few people have the honor of being named publicly by a United States President. I never imagined mine would be mentioned, much less in this light, from a President that I have publicly supported, and still support. I feel I need to respond even though you will likely never hear of it, as the power of your pen to mine is like Thor’s hammer to a Bobby pin…
I write this as I am about to board a plane due to a family medical emergency. In addition to my Trump socks, I will pull up my Trump/Pence mask when I board the plane, as required by federal law. I figure, if the liberals are going to force me to wear a mask, I am going to make it as painful for them as possible. I will continue to do this regardless of whether or not I ever hear from you.
Thank you for doing great things as our President.
Hayes noted elsewhere in the letter, “there is him taking issue with some of the things that were said about him.”
Despite the obsequiousness of the excerpts Hayes read, elsewhere in the letter, Kapenga is unexpectedly blunt, and twice accuses Trump of making false claims:
Nevertheless, I need to correct your false claim against me. I never received a call from you or any of your sources asking about the election audit. If you had, I would have told you that long before your press release I called the auditor in charge of the election audit that is taking place in Wisconsin and requested a forensic component to the audit…
This leads me back to your press release. It is false, and I don’t appreciate it being done before calling me and finding out the truth. This is what both of us have fought against. Being cut from similar cloth in our backgrounds, and knowing that reparation must always be of more value than the wrong done, I have two requests.
First, I ask that you issue a press release in similar fashion that corrects the information and also encourages people to support what I have requested in the audit. Second, you owe me a round of golf at the club of your choice.
Watch above via MSNBC.
