Morning Joe Panel Warns Trump’s ‘Normalization’ of Jan 6 Will Lead to Assassinations and Random Political Violence

Frequent Morning Joe contributor Richard Haass warned on Monday’s show that the “scariest thing” to emerge from the news that former President Donald Trump spoke at a fundraiser for Jan 6 defendants is the net effect of normalizing such an attack on the Capitol.

MSNBC’s Vaughn Hillyard and Ryan Reilly reported on Thursday:

Former President Trump spoke on Thursday at a fundraiser on behalf of people charged in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol — even as he faces scrutiny from national and state prosecutors for his own actions surrounding the attempt to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 election win.

“I’m going to make a contribution,” Trump told the gathering hosted at his own private golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. The group, Patriot Freedom Project, included at least one actual defendant along with multiple family members of those charged in the attack.

A video posted online of Trump’s remarks:

“The bottom just keeps getting lower,” said Jonathan Lemire after the story had been introduced by Mika Brzezinksi. “Why not? I mean, he’s called January six, the beautiful day. He has promised to pardon most of the January six rioters. He has now suggested he’ll make a contribution to Legal Defense Fund,” Lemire continued. “And of course, let’s not forget; he has appeared with a January Six choir convict because that’s Donald Trump right now.”

“The idea of somehow normalizing or regularizing January 6? That, to me, is the single scariest thing,” Haass chimed in. “Because that’s what is that? That is the use of violence for political purposes by non-state actors. That happens to be the textbook definition of terrorism.”

Haass then drew upon his experience as a U.S. envoy to Northern Ireland, which saw a raft of random political acts of violence called “The Troubles,” which Haass explained and connected to what we are seeing in the US:

Look, I spent three years as the U.S. envoy to Northern Ireland. Before that, you had three decades of the troubles. What were the troubles? Sporadic, decentralized political violence by all these groups, militias, whatever you want to call them, provisional IRA loyalist groups and so forth. What scares me, Jonathan, is if January six ever gets normalized in this country, we could have the American version of the Troubles where we could have assassinations. We get up political rallies disrupted by people going into them, beating up people on on the other side. What January six should teach us is it can happen here. We are not somehow so exceptional, so different. Plus, we’re a country awash in guns. It’s also very easy to go into any hardware store and buy the ingredients of explosives. So we shouldn’t fool ourselves. The fact that the Republican Party and others are not prepared to de-legitimize this, every religious leader, every religious leader on Friday, Saturday, Sunday ought to be denouncing this sort of thing. There can be no space in American democracy for this sort of thing, or there won’t be American democracy.

Watch above via MSNBC.