Fake Trump electoral certificates reveal fine line 'between fascism and farce’: MSNBC analyst

Former president Donald Trump's coup attempt may have been "amateur" and "farcical" – but that doesn't mean it wasn't also both real and dangerous, according to MSNBC analyst Michelle Goldberg.

"That's always been the trick of Trump and people around him, is to do it in plain sight, because if the conspiracy is in plain sight, then it looks like less of a conspiracy," Goldberg said Wednesday night, reacting to a clip of former Trump aide Boris Epshteyn admitting on the network last week to his role in a fake electoral certificate plot.

"Something else that you see over and over again with the people around Trump is that the line between fascism and farce is often hard to parse," Goldberg added. "So, just because it seems ridiculous that you can just go to the coffee shop and make a certificate and send it in to the National Archives, just because it's laughable, doesn't mean that there wasn't also a real plot."

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"And I think that when you have an authoritarian government, you can put forward the laughable, the farcical, with a straight face, and kind of demand that people accept the absurd," Goldberg said. "And that's what you see from Trump and the people around him over and over again. I think the shoddiness of it, the armatureness of it, can in some ways obscure the seriousness of it."

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