MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and John Heilemann sounded the alarm on Donald Trump's "fascist" predictions of street violence if he's indicted in one of the many criminal cases against him.
The twice-impeached former president appeared Thursday on conservative broadcaster Hugh Hewitt's talk radio program, where he warned there would be "problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen" if he faced prosecution, and the "Morning Joe" host said that was clearly a violent threat.
"I'm worried about violence in the street from Republicans," Scarborough said. "I never thought that [Sen.] Lindsey [Graham] thought so little of his own party, and if you actually enforced the law against somebody that there would be riots. We've seen it before, and you could go back to Donald Trump in 2016 talking about beating up people in protests, that he would pay for people if they beat up protesters. He loved it when people would be taken out in stretchers, like to punch somebody in the face, told cops before they put criminals or people they arrested into the back of police cars to bang their heads on the paddy wagon, showing how old he is, and you keep going on and on. The presidential debate, he's talking about, of course, Proud Boys stand by, and then the Lindsey riots, the threat of riots, if you hold me accountable to the law, there will be riots, and now this."
"I'm still trying to figure out why people are using the term, what did [President Joe] Biden say, semi-fascist, because this isn't semi-fascism," Scarborough said. "This is fascism -- I mean, by any definition."
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Heilemann agreed, saying that Trump had been using the threat of violence as a political tool since he first ran for president.
"It's a form of terrorism and a form of hostage-taking and, you know, the whole history you just laid out is right," Heilemann said. "As is often the case, the people quickest to invoke the specter of violence, call forth actual violence, talk so freely about violence, to play the tough guy, that was the 2016 Trump. Every one of those rallies, and God knows how many I went to in 2016, I like it in the old days, somebody said that, they end up on a stretcher. He would like to see the level of rage in his audience. You could see him feed off that rage and stoke it again and again and again, and we're at the logical, you know, Jan. 6 was the logical terminus of that, and we're past that, right."
Trump sent an intermediary to attorney general Merrick Garland after the Mar-a-Lago search warning that he needed to cool the temperature, which has been widely seen as a threat to curtail the investigation.
"Many people who are followers of Trump, that's the threat," Heilemann said. "You really think he's going to go there in that way, and now we see what we're seeing from Lindsey Graham and Donald Trump -- couldn't be more clear, the hostage-taking that was going on yesterday."
"Basically the framing going on there was, 'Nice country you have there, it would be a shame if something happened to it,'" he added.
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