MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell began his Monday show with a brutal accusation for Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Over the weekend, Graham made the accusation that if his "friend" is charged for the crimes he is accused of committing there will be "riots." Graham didn't discourage it, nor did he condemn it.
Commentators have spent the day comparing Graham's statements to being akin to saying "it would be a shame if riots broke out." As Vanity Fair explained, he and Trump are all but calling for violence.
Graham, O'Donnell said, is what Winston Churchill would call a "Quisling." O'Donnell said that he first heard the word as a boy when it was part of a song. But it was more recently that he actually looked up where the word came from.
"The day will dawn on which the crazy attempt to settle a Prussian supremacy based on racial hatred, armoured vehicles, secret police, alien tyrants and even more despicable Quislings, will dissolve like a bad dream," Churchill said in 1941.
The word comes from a World War II Norwegian leader named Vidkun Quisling, who ultimately collaborated with the Nazis and promoted fascism in Norway akin to that of the Nazis.
It now serves as a term used for a traitor serving the enemy occupying the country.
"To understand how Lindsey Graham's rock-bottom is tonight, remember where Lindsey Graham stood when he was running against Donald Trump for president in 2016," said O'Donnell, playing a clip of Graham attacking Trump.
"And even after Lindsey Graham dropped out of the presidential campaign, before a single vote was cast in a single primary, he still attacked Donald Trump saying, if we nominate Trump we [Republicans] will get destroyed and we will deserve it. He doesn't represent my party. If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed — we will deserve it. Trump was an invader in every classic sense of the Republican Party. Lindsey Graham was right that Donald Trump did not represent what the Republican Party had publicly represented before the Trump campaign. But Donald Trump crushed every Republican in his way and there were no Republicans in his way because the last ones standing in his way, Sen. Raphael Cruz (R-TX) and Sen. Lindsey Graham, lived in fear of Donald Trump's power over their voters in their states."
Trump, he explained, had the power to take away their Senate seats and to them, the power was more important than their dignity.
"The big difference and important difference between Lindsey Graham and Norway's original Quisling is that Vidkun Quisling was a fascist long before the Nazis invaded his country," O'Donnell went on. "When Quisling was collaborating with the Nazis, he was a true believer. Would that Winston Churchill were still with us so we could prevail upon his wisdom to judge for us which is worse. Quisling the true believer or Lindsey Graham, the Quisling."
See the full commentary below: