'Team Normal' who let Trump plot coup are 'stupid, disqualifying naive or incompetent': MSNBC host

On MSNBC Wednesday, anchor Chris Hayes tore into former members of the Trump White House, like former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and former Attorney General William Barr, for claiming to have resisted all efforts for the former president to overturn the election results.

It is hard for them to make that claim, noted Hayes, when Trump had been threatening to try such a scheme in the months beforehand, and they did nothing to try to prevent it.

"Donald Trump was dead-set on staying in office, against the will of the American people, by any means necessary," said Hayes. "Cipollone was among those in Trump's orbit that resisted those efforts in the final days of Trump's term in office. Now, just to state the obvious, it is a very good thing that people like Pat Cipollone, and Bill Barr, and others around Donald Trump resisted his attempted coup. But part of the story that they are telling about how the insurrection came to be, is, I think, wildly misleading. And actually, I have to say, kind of enraging. Liz Cheney clearly feels the same way."

"Now the argument seems to be that President Trump was manipulated by others outside of the administration," said Cheney in the clip. "He was persuaded to ignore his closest advisors, and that he was incapable of telling right from wrong. The strategy is to blame people, his advisers called quote, the crazies, for what Donald Trump did. This, of course, is nonsense. President Trump is a 76-year-old man, he is not an impressionable young child. Just like everyone else in our country, he is responsible for his own actions, and his own choices."

"Liz Cheney said that for a reason," said Hayes. "She recognized, I think, a common theme in the testimony for Trump insiders who had submitted to the lawful subpoenas of this committee. Many of them have clearly been attempting to salvage their own reputations, and to try to exonerate themselves from their complicity in the most severe potential attack on American democracy since the Civil War. And they have been doing that by basically blaming the entire thing on a group of so-called, as she said, crazies. as Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien put it, there is Team Normal, like Pat Cipollone and Bill Barr, and then there was Team Not Normal, made up of people like Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Mike Flynn, and the Overstock guy. We heard the same derision from Pat Cipollone yesterday, when he derides the ragtag group of coup plotters, who made their way to the White House for an unscheduled meeting in the residence in December of 2020."

"Pat, buddy, bro, my man, do you know who you worked for?" said Hayes. "Do you realize who employed you? The guy driving the bus, the big guy, Donald Trump. You worked for Donald Trump. The most serial liar to ever occupy the Oval Office. The most pathological liar I've ever covered in 20 years of journalism. And the people assembled in that room together on December 18th, were there because he, to overturn American democracy and declare himself, essentially, president for life, and keep himself in power. You are either stupid, disqualifyingly naive, or so incompetent that you should never hold another job. My god. Because Donald Trump was not shy about the fact that he would never accept an election loss, he was quite public about it. He said it before he took office back in 2016!"

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