‘Very Hard for Me to Look at This Spectacle’: Joy Reid Mourns How America’s Institutions of Democracy Were ‘Completely Exposed’ By Trump’s Win

Joy Reid argued that the reelection of President Donald Trump — following his role in the capitol attack of January 6th — completely exposed the failures of democratic institutions.

Reid joined a panel of MSNBC’s top anchors and hosts for special coverage of the Trump inauguration Monday morning, on the same day the nation observes the life and legacy of its most significant civil rights hero, Martin Luther King, Jr. As such, Reid appeared to relish the comparison and contrast of Trump and MLK in a manner that didn’t just portray Trump as less than, but also in a manner that damned American institutions, particularly regarding Democracy.

Reid’s commentary followed Chris Hayes’s comparison of Trump’s second term to that of Grover Cleveland, who was besieged by controversy and crisis shortly after returning to the White House as Trump. I’m “rooting” for the country Hayes qualified, “really rooting against crisis and disaster and really hoping that this country’s resilience in all of its glory, which is all the different parts of what makes America America, it’s not just one person who occupies a single office.”

“Except that the promise of the incoming administration is to wipe away the civic memory of Washington, to get rid of and to fire all of the people who normally transition as civil servants from one administration to the next,” Reid opined. “The promises on the table are 200 some odd executive actions, an attempt to get rid of birthright citizenship, an attempt to do mass deportation which we thought was being threatened on the state of Illinois and the city of Chicago, apparently, which said, yet you can’t come here and do that. And maybe they backed down.”

“We’re talking about an attempt to portray this peaceful transition of power with people who were convicted in the insurrection, attempt, attending with the person who fulminated, who fomented the coup, being sworn in as president, essentially a delay in the completion of the insurrection, the idea that the institutions will hold,” she continued.

“We just had a ‘content of their character’ election,” she said, referencing one of the more famous lines from MLK. “And the person didn’t get elected due to the content of their character, to use the phrase — the only thing that some folks on the right remember about Doctor King. And so we have now, I believe that this idea of the institutions — which the Bidens clearly believe in — have been completely exposed by this election.”

After briefly praising Marco Rubio, Reid lashed into Trump’s cabinet appointees, saying, ” You go down the list of the people. It’s no longer a content of their character or great meritocracy. Now, it is people Trump likes to see on television. It’s people he thinks will praise him. It’s people who will give him what he wants and allow him to do to the American people, to immigrants whom Jesus loved. ”

“This is supposed to be the great Christian president who is promising to attack immigrants and trans people who are already vulnerable,” she concluded. “These are some of the executive orders. The cruelty is the point of this coming administration.”

“So it is very hard for me to look at this spectacle of the takeover of the United States by a base mentality of greed and corruption and say the institutions will save us because they’ve not done well for us so far.”

Watch above via MSNBC.