MSNBC’s Ali Velshi Blasts Trump’s Ongoing Pattern of ‘Publicly Endorsing or Advocating Lawless Behavior’

MSNBC’s Ali Velshi went on an extended rant on The Rachel Maddow Show, calling out President Donald Trump’s consistent pattern of “publicly endorsing or advocating lawless behavior.”

Cueing off of Trump’s recent comments to ABC News, where he both welcomed and excused illegal campaign assistance from foreign governments, Velshi strung together a number of other moments from this White House where the president told others to effectively set aside ethical considerations or outright ignore the law.

“Sometimes the president says something out loud that endorses or encourages behavior that is so wildly unethnical or even blatantly illegal, someone else from the government has to step in and remind people that, no, actually, you cannot do that thing even though the president just told you so,” Velshi explained.

“Now we are in the latest iteration of this pattern, this brand-new pattern that we are all having to come to grips with as Americans, of the president publicly endorsing or advocating lawless behavior. After the president earlier this week said he would absolutely accept campaign help from a foreign government in the next election and of course he would not report that to the FBI, what are you, crazy?”

Velshi warned that this kind of boundary testing endangers democracy, and that it threatens to put government officials in the unenviable position of either following the country’s chief executive or following the country’s laws.

“We are currently discovering our ability to address that situation, but it is not a brand-new experience for us. We have some experience with presidents who direct people around them to break the law,” Velshi said. “But a president who publicly, even gleefully, tells Americans to break the law: ‘You break the law and you break the law, let’s all break the law together?’ I don’t think this is something we’ve dealt with before. Every government official who is not the president has to decide every day how to navigate this new terrain.”

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.