Chris Hayes Goes Off on ‘Chilling’ Trump Election Remarks: Openly Plotting ‘Coup to Steal the Election and Hold Onto Power’

“The President of the United States threatening violence to stay in power.”

Chris Hayes opened his show Wednesday talking about the “chilling” comments President Donald Trump made not committing to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses.

Hayes — featuring a graphic on screen that straight-up said “TRUMP’S PLAN TO STEAL THE ELECTION” — told viewers, “Just to be clear, if you are talking to a person and you ask them to commit to behave peacefully and they refuse, they’re threatening violence, right? What the president is doing here is the most explicit that he has been about his plans for this election. He’s plotting, in open, in public, repeatedly, a coup to steal the election and hold onto power.”

He said that “it all sounds crazy to say” but “those are the plain facts as assembled before us… in plain view.”

Hayes granted the possibility that the polls could be wrong and Trump is “much more popular than he appears” or something could happen that gives him an outright win. One other outcome, he said, is that Biden could score a big, decisive win.

What’s more concerning, Hayes continued, is a very close election where the outcome isn’t clear right away, because that would “set in motion [Trump’s] plan to steal the election.”

He said all over the country Republicans are trying to going after the voting process in a number of ways, including “the relentless attacks, aided by William Barr’s lies, on legitimacy and integrity of mail-in voting while the country is still in the midst of a once in a century pandemic.”

Hayes also brought up what Trump has been saying about the need for a 9th Supreme Court justice — explicitly citing the election in his comments — and a new piece in The Atlantic by Barton Gellman. Hayes highlighted this section in particular:

According to sources in the Republican Party at the state and national levels, the Trump campaign is discussing contingency plans to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority. With a justification based on claims of rampant fraud, Trump would ask state legislators to set aside the popular vote and exercise their power to choose a slate of electors directly. The longer Trump succeeds in keeping the vote count in doubt, the more pressure legislators will feel to act before the safe-harbor deadline expires.

“It is, frankly, a plan for an authoritarian power grab,” Hayes said.

Before speaking with Gellman about his reporting, Hayes added to viewers that there is an off-ramp: “A historic mobilization of the country’s anti-Trump pro-democratic majority coming out to vote, delivering a resounding unquestionable defeat to the president and his agenda in order to save American self-governance.”

You can watch above, via MSNBC.