MNSBC’s Chris Hayes Shreds Trump’s Inaugural Address: ‘A Cult Leader Who Keeps Predicting Different Days’ for the Apocalypse
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes likened President Donald Trump to a “cult leader” who must constantly change the goalposts regarding his prognostications about the coming apocalypse after Monday’s inaugural speech.
Trump took his oath of office for the second time in eight years Monday at the Capitol and gave a speech about his goals for the next four years. During much of the speech, Trump portrayed America in many ways as a hellscape that he would have to clean up.
“America will soon be greater, stronger, and far more exceptional than ever before,” Trump said as he criticized the Biden administration. “I returned to the presidency confident and optimistic that we are at the start of a thrilling new era of national success. A tide of change is sweeping the country. Sunlight is pouring over the entire world, and America has the chance to seize this opportunity like never before.”
During MSNBC’s coverage of the speech, Hayes opined Trump spoke as though he had not previously served four years as the country’s leader. Hayes also compared Trump to a manipulative cult leader:
I remember being in that on that stage right next to President Barack Obama during that very, very cold morning. And the two inaugurations of Barack Obama and Joe Biden happened at moments of palpable, ubiquitous, and severe crisis, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the worst pandemic in 100 years. I mean, thousands of Americans dying by the day, America not knowing whether the entire economic system and foundation was going to road beneath them. Compare that to the two times Donald Trump has been inaugurated in which those crises were not there. There was not the same acute sense of crisis. And yet the theme in both of them and the obsession of Trump’s rhetoric is always a theme of national decline and national humiliation. And there’s something strange about hearing it the second time.
Of course, the first one was the American Carnage. It’s a little like a cult leader who keeps predicting different days for the end of the world because it’s kind of like, okay, the first time you did this, we’ve had all these corrupt, terrible elites and they’ve taken I’m here is your retribution. I’m going to make America great again. And then it’s like, well, you didn’t try that once. I mean, the degree to which the first term has been just completely taken away from everyone’s memory, how he kind of ran as a person who never actually held office before in this campaign. And to hear a very similar thematic speech that promises just around the corner on the other side, that’s when the next end of the world comes. That’s when the next time we are bathed in holy light, that’s the next time when everything turns around permanently for the United States. And we heard exactly that in January 2017. And he had a run at it. There is something very strange about hearing that kind of vision and prediction a second time, like like the cult leader taking a mulligan and telling you Paradise is around the corner again.
Watch above via MSNBC.
