Maddow Offers Dire Warning About Trump’s Motivations For Running For President and the Future of U.S. Elections

MSNBC’s top-rated host Rachel Maddow offered her audience a dire warning on Monday night, arguing that former President Donald Trump’s motivations for seeking the presidency in 2024 mean if elected the U.S. may have no future elections.

“Trump has made no secret in private conversations with his aides of his desire to solve his jumble of legal problems by winning the election. Quote, ‘If either of the two federal trials he’s confronting is delayed until after the election and Trump prevails in that election, he could seek to pardon himself after taking office or he could have his attorney general simply dismiss the matters altogether,’” began Maddow, quoting from a recent New York Times report.

“And I know that learning that Trump has been saying that privately to his staffers, it’s not shocking news per se,” she continued.

“That’s what he’s telling people he’s going to do. He will solve his jumble of legal problems by winning the election. And, you know, whatever you think about that. That’s how he’s thinking about that. And what does that say about the election for all of the rest of us?” she asked, continuing:

It means in his own mind and those of his campaign and his supporters, presumably, these are the stakes. And again, whatever you think about that as a legal strategy for Trump, that is how he is thinking about the election and that is how he is going to be talking to his supporters and his aides and his campaign about the stakes of the election.

The election means one of two things If this is the way he’s going to approach it, either he loses the election and he goes to prison or he wins the election. He doesn’t go to prison and is that for life that he gets to be president? Will we keep having more elections or no?

If every election is a new opportunity for him to go to prison, do you think he allows us to have new elections? I mean, if those are the stakes, if winning the election is his plan to stay out of prison, what happens in that election if and when he does not win it?

Does that kind of an election end with a graceful concession to a fair and square reelected President Biden? I mean, if Trump and his supporters see the stakes as losing and going to prison or winning and being president and probably president for life, how should we expect that he and the Republican Party and Republican officials in swing states are going to handle the conduct of that election that Trump may very well lose?

“And because we are prone to forget, we have to say out loud that we would be remiss, we would be willfully naive to ask that question as if our politics exists in a vacuum, somewhere outside the rest of our news,” Maddow added.

“As if the politics pages are totally different than the crime pages. Right? As if we are not in a moment where far-right politics is coinciding with far-right violence, with regular shows of force from paramilitary extreme-right groups, and with acts of violence by people who are explicitly and admittedly motivated by far-right eliminationist political ideas,” she continued, arguing that Trump’s desire to stay out of prison coupled with real-world bad actors could lead to a potentially dangerous situation.

Watch the full clip above via MSNBC.