'Unbelievably depressing': Morning Joe panelist disgusted by Trump's messianic pretensions

MSNBC's Mike Barnicle was left speechless by a "Morning Joe" panel discussion of Donald Trump's supporters seeing him as a messianic figure.

The Lincoln Project released a new ad warning of the phenomenon, which Trump himself has encouraged, and the panelists agreed the former president was attempting to gather dictatorial powers for himself as he seeks a second term in the White House.

"I think people truly don't understand what absolute power for Donald Trump will mean," Donny Deutsch told host Joe Scarborough. "Joe – and this is not a stretch – you could end up in jail. That's what dictators do, they take their political opponents and put them in jail. We will no longer have a vote."

Scarborough said that scenario wasn't far-fetched at all.

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"He tried it once – he called me a murderer and was saying I should be thrown in jail for murder," Scarborough said. "He's already tried it when he was president last time, so these people that are sitting around going, 'Oh, you guys are catastrophizing' – when he says he's going to throw his political opponents into jail, you can trust him. People are not going to be U.S. attorneys unless they promise to go after Democrats, members of the media, judges, with phony charges, to throw them in jail. That's what Trump is going to do. It's that simple."

Deutsch agreed, saying the former president would remove the obstacles he faced in his first term to obtaining absolute power.

"He will own the Justice Department, he will own the military, he will own the [Federal Communications Commission]," Deutsch said. "When people say it's a stretch to put him next to Adolf Hitler or next to Mussolini, says who? As an absolute leader in power, everyone who is thinking twice, if you want to vote more than one more time, you need to vote for Joe Biden, because your vote will not matter anymore. You will give that up. We will to longer be a free society. We take that for granted. The darkness is that dark."

Evangelical voters justified their support for Trump in 2016 by saying he didn't have to be a saint, but now many of them – with the former president's encouragement – say he was anointed by God to save the country, and Barnicle said he'd heard enough.

"Wow," Barnicle said, blinking his eyes in astonishment. "The past seven minutes, it might be me personally here at the table, is unbelievably depressing – unbelievably depressing. I mean, first of all to Donny's point and to Joe's point, what Donald Trump has done successfully is taken an industry that used to be filled with sometimes promise, sometimes horror, but always aimed at the future, politics in America, and he's drawn a darkness over that business that has enveloped it now for nearly a decade. The darkness has fallen over America to a certain extent, people are now negative about everything."

"Ted Cruz is the poster boy for why people hate politics, a sleaze ball, a spineless sleaze ball who will say or do anything, and Trump himself is out there pretending he's a messiah, being portrayed as a messiah," Barnicle added. "Somewhere out there this morning there's a mother and a father individually or still together, whose child, son or daughter, just got early admission to Boston College or Vanderbilt or some state school, and they're thinking, how can we pay the down payment for tuition? That's politics, that's what it ought to be about – the future."

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