Nicolle Wallace fumes that her ex-GOP colleagues failed to rebuke Trump's autocratic rant
The New York Times wrote Monday about Donald Trump's weekend speech at a far-right conference that outlined some of his authoritarian visions for his next presidency. Going deeper, the Times explained that Trump aims to recreate the U.S. government so that it would be an extension of the president's whims rather than independently operating to carry out the laws and the regulations of the nation.
It isn't the first time Trump has made such a proclamation, nor is it an ambition that he's hidden from the public. Toward the end of 2020, Trump began to enact such a plan, moving to craft a "personal goon squad" of loyal career staffers that goes against measures enacted centuries ago to ensure friends, family and donors weren't handed jobs.
"I mistakenly chalked a lot of it up to reflexive fealty to Trump," confessed MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace speaking to Ben Rhodes, former Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications, on Monday. "This is the path to ending democracy. As someone who has been shouting from the rooftops, I wonder what you make of this reporting?"
Rhodes called it consistent with what Trump has been saying openly for years.
"What is clear to me, is the Trump people are not only learning from his first term, where he didn't put in place his most virulent, autocratic, henchmen until the end of the administration, but they've studied the playbook in other places," he said.
"If you look at what has been done in Hungary, where Viktor Orban has been a model for the American right in a lot of ways. He eviscerated the independence of government. Everybody reported to him and served his agenda. That allowed him to exert a tremendous amount of control over every aspect of Hungarian political life. That allowed for a tremendous amount of corruption where he was enriching cronies who were financing his politics and making sure that no opposition emerged, and he was weaponizing the tools of the state to go after critics of him and his party."
Trump, he continued, is saying this in plain sight and putting it on paper. Americans believe it can't happen, he said, warning that the events of Jan. 6 suggest the opposite.
"If he has the sanction and the validation of an election, there is no reason to think he won't do these things here," said Rhodes. "And we've also seen Republicans use state legislatures as laboratories to test these things out. To give governors greater executive power or to take power from Democratic governors.
"This is something they've been working on for years. This is what the 2024 election is all about. Is this the kind of single-party autocracy that we want to risk having under Donald Trump? Or do we still believe in checks and balances in the American system of democracy?"
After rolling a clip of Trump's speech over the weekend, Wallace confessed one of the main reasons that she simply couldn't stomach being a member of the Republican Party anymore, despite dedicating her entire professional life to it.
"I stopped being a Republican for a lot of reasons. I worked in the Republican administration. You know what that is like," Wallace began. "You forge real friendships with the people, they're at your wedding, they're there when you face a tragedy. The reason I stopped being a Republican is because people I love dearly say and do nothing when that happens."
She meant that when Trump says the kinds of things that he says, GOP leaders don't stand in opposition.
"That's not someone even flirting with autocracy," she continued. "That is someone deep in the tank of delusions and propaganda. I searched high and low. I didn't find anyone. Any elected Republicans in the House or the Senate rebuke the comments. Chris Christie is running against him. Bill Barr came out and was a star witness for the House select committee. I've looked everywhere today and haven't found anyone rebuking, not just lies, but dangerous lies."
As the Times reported, these are the plans that Trump will usher in if he is reelected.
"The blood of our dead democracy will be on the hands of elected Republicans who said and did nothing," Wallace closed.
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