MSNBC’s Presidential Historian Warns: Republican Party Taking America to Civil War and Hitler Eras

NBC presidential historian Michael Beschloss warned on MSNBC that the Republican Party is taking America back to the eras of the Civil War and Adolf Hitler.

During Biden’s Thursday night speech, President Joe Biden went after the MAGA base of the GOP.

“We must be honest with each other and with ourselves,” he said during his speech outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia. “Too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal. Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”

Biden remarked that “the Republican Party today is dominated, driven and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans. And that is a threat to this country. These are hard things. But I’m an American president, not a president of red America or blue America, but of all America.”

Appearing on MSNBC’s All In With Chris Hayes following the speech, Beschloss, who met with Biden in a White House meeting with historians last month, compared America nowadays as being in “1860” and “1940.”

Here is a case, what we talked about was, just as you just mentioned, Chris, 1860. Someone who is in a historian like you, you know all this. 1860 this country was in big jeopardy. It was splitting apart. House divided. Slavery or non-slavery. And [Abraham] Lincoln cast the election of 1860 by saying the House can’t stand, half-labor, half-free, we’ve gotta choose.

1940 when Franklin Roosevelt was running for a third term, just as you just mentioned, Roosevelt didn’t say the paramount issue this year is the minimum wage, although that was pretty important, or, you know, whether Texans get an oil depletion allowance or something like this. He said look, these are all important, but what is really at stake at this moment is whether our children are going to get to live in an American democracy, especially with Hitler and the fascists looming in Europe and marching.

So I said, and the others said I’m happy to be transparent about it to President Biden in the Map Room. This is like 1860. This is like 1940. You know, you have to talk about the large issue in the room, and just as Lincoln gave the ‘House Divided’ speech, just as Roosevelt gave a speech on the State of the Union about the four freedoms, as you well know, 1941, here is the time when President Biden has chosen. And by the way, we didn’t help him write this speech. I don’t give political vies nor did any of the rest of us.

Good thing, it would be pretty sad, because we’re not afraid to do that. But the point is that he realized that this is an historic moment. What you heard, I think, comes out of that.

Watch above, via MSNBC.