'Vicious' Trump is 'only getting worse' as allies plot authoritarian takeover: Morning Joe

Donald Trump has been letting loose with "vicious" rhetoric against his political opponents as his allies craft plans to consolidate power around a second term in office, and panelists on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" said voters deserved to know the stakes in next year's election.

Democrats are again shining the spotlight on the twice-impeached former president, where they had been content to ignore him since he left office under a cloud in 2021, to highlight his authoritarian aspirations.

"Trump has long run as an outrageous candidate, right, he's been willing to say and do things that few in our lifetime have been willing to do and say on a national stage, but what strikes me this time," said New York Times reporter Michael Bender, "and which sparked this article has been, you know, most of the focus of his attacks, particularly when he started, were foreign marks. Muslim immigrants, Hispanic immigrants, and the change we have seen over the last few campaigns, particularly now, is he's saved some of the most vicious attacks for domestic opponents, and that turn inward comes at a time when he and his allies are coming up with plans to weaponize the Department of Justice, to surround himself with lawyers in a potential second term that would bless some of his most contentious actions."

"This piece tried to pull all of that together, while also showing some of the examples of, you know, this authoritarian language that he's really been leaning into really for the past year," Bender added.

Host Joe Scarborough reacted to Bender's article co-written with Michael Gold by describing Trump's plans for a second term were explicitly fascist, and analyst John Heilemann agreed that President Joe Biden and other Democrats must highlight the threat he poses to democracy as the centerpiece of the 2024 campaign.

"The important part of Mike Bender's piece, which is that the Democrats understand now that they need to breakthrough a kind of torpor among a lot of potential and past Trump [voters], people who voted against Donald Trump, voted for Democrats who assume Trump will not be the nominee," Heilemann said. "They're not focused on the election. Whatever it is, they have to make clear that Trump is here, almost certain to stay until November, and that as Bender's piece shows, his rhetoric is amazingly getting worse, more dangerous, more inciteful – I say inciteful, not insightful, as in full of insight – and all of that is getting worse, and voters need to understand as early as possible the stakes of the election, or Democrats are going to be in trouble a year from now."

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