Chris Hayes: Republicans Who Tolerated Trump’s ‘Wannabe Dictator Behavior’ Need to Reckon With Bringing Us to This ‘Moral Abyss’

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes opened his show Friday night with a direct message to Republicans who have “twisted themselves into knots” to not condemn President Donald Trump more forcefully up to this point.

Hayes said he’s not talking about “hardcore Trump fans” or Republicans who already openly despise Trump, but about “institutional Republicans” and others who don’t like Trump but have avoided criticizing him more directly because “the base really loves him.”

“I think I have a sense of the bargain you have made with yourself. How you have justified what you’ve done the last few years. And I genuinely get it. Life is complicated. There’s no such thing as purity, we all make compromises in this world. You have told yourself that if Trump is going to be president, ‘isn’t it better that I work in my small sphere to make this thing as good as it can be?'” Hayes said.

But while he acknowledged some of the individual calculations are understandable, Hayes added that “what it has all added up to” is the U.S. now “standing over a moral abyss.”

“Unless there is some wholesale soul-searching and apology and repudiation, I don’t know how we go forward in American politics. We’ve now got a huge part of the Republican party that is now essentially anti-democracy, a seditious faction,” he continued. “It’s not just Donald Trump, but the people who knew better and tolerated his wannabe dictator behavior that brought us to this point.”

Hayes concluded that they could still “rally to issue the collective repudiation that the man obviously deserves” very soon, and said, “You have been given one last chance to do the right thing. Please do it.”

You can watch above, via MSNBC.