Joe Scarborough Warns Trump is Tearing Down Institutions ‘Brick By Brick’: ‘Are We Going to Survive?’

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough warned that the Trump administration is tearing down federal institutions “brick by brick” as he questioned aloud whether Americans will “be able to rebuild” in two years.

Scarborough was reacting to new reporting by Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett on Monday spotlighting how technical reforms put in place by the administration will make race and gender demographics harder to track on the 2030 census.

The host noted that this could “impact future elections” and “obviously will impact the congressional redistricting over the next decade.” He then, however, identified the move as part of a wider trend under President Donald Trump.

“Years ago, Steve Bannon said he was a Leninist, and he and Trump were going to go in and they were going to tear down the state, take it to the ground,” he began. “You look at what Gillian said they’re doing with the census, one of the most basic should-be noncontroversial things ever, they’re trying to rig that, it seems.”

He continued: “What they’re doing with the post office, using the post office to do unconstitutional things with the midterm elections, taking it from the states’ power and giving it to the executive branch, which is not in the Constitution. It’s unconstitutional. You see what’s happened at the DOD, you see what’s happened at the Justice Department, you see what’s happened at the National Institutes of Health, all of these institutions that have been built up to protect Americans and to extend American power and safety across the globe, are being torn down brick-by-brick, piece-by-piece, by this Trump administration.”

“And the question people have is, are we going to survive? Are we going to be able to rebuild this two years from now?” Scarborough added.

MS NOW regular and New York Times columnist David French followed but argued that what citizens were witnessing was not the “tearing down the state so much as personalizing the state.”

“All elements of the state are being put in the service of the person Donald Trump, being pulled from their primary purposes, being pulled from their primary areas of competence, being remade from the inside out to serve Donald Trump,” he said. “And this is core to his authoritarian project.”

French continued: “I mean, look, we have to understand that he looks at Xi Jinping out there. He looks at Vladimir Putin out there, and he sees peers with whom he envies in some ways. He envies their autonomy; he envies their authority. And as we’ve seen with the Canadian trade wars, he envies their spheres of influence. And so he is directing everything in on himself and this is inherently corrupt. People can see that it’s inherently corrupt.”

The contributor went on to say that, when people become “dissatisfied economically” and see the “self-inflicted wounds” that are “focused in on Trump and not for their benefit”, voters will get “angry.”

“You’re beginning to see rumblings here in this country that remind me a bit of the popular revulsion, ultimately, at Viktor Orban in Hungary – authoritarianism does not sell especially when people feel insecure financially,” he said.

Watch above via MS NOW.

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