'Guilty as all hell': Historian says re-electing Trump would be 'like letting Benedict Arnold run George Washington's troops'

On Friday's edition of CNN's "The Lead," historian Douglas Brinkley laid out what he considers the crucial importance of preventing former President Donald Trump from ever taking office again.

This comes after a historic vote by Congress to reform the Electoral Count Act, codifying the process of certifying presidential electors — and preventing another coup scheme like Trump and his associates attempted to execute in January 2021.

"Trump is the very first former president to have a congressional committee refer them to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution, and now this official recommendation from this bipartisan committee that he be permanently banned from ever holding political office again," said anchor Jake Tapper. "How extraordinary is this?"

"It's stunning," said Brinkley. "You and I didn't grow up thinking this would be possible in the United States, a sitting president trying to throw a coup against our government. The January 6th Commission are really the stars in my mind of 2022. They stuck with it and they produced the data and the evidence they needed to. They built their case in a methodical way. They unspooled it on the public in smart way. Here we are at the holiday season and this report comes out, and to read it is to have your eyeballs pop out, because Donald Trump is guilty as all hell, there's no question about it, and in my mind you cannot have somebody be a sitting U.S. president who already tried to throw a coup over your country. That would be like letting Benedict Arnold run George Washington's troops during the American Revolution."

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"It's interesting, so often during this Trump era, I think about I'm, you know, I'm a history buff, not an esteemed historian, but I think a lot about how will history remember people and this era, and it just seems like some of these individuals that are enablers of Trump, just don't even remotely think that way in terms of how is this going to look in 10 or 20 years?" said Tapper.

"Yeah," said Brinkley. "Because they have no soul and don't have a deep love for the country. They put self-interest or political power ahead of themselves. The story of Rudy Giuliani alone will be talked about for ages. It's important to realize that Donald Trump is not really part of the presidents club. He's an outlier. In that way he will be remembered, he's going to have his fans, but it's more like Dillinger and Al Capone and Billy the Kid or something. There'll be a folk cause around him, but he's an outlaw, and somebody who in the end will be seen as an enemy of the U.S. Constitution. It might sell you some t-shirts in Gatlinburg and Tombstone, Arizona, and might keep Trump's image alive and well, but in the real game of history, which is serious, in years to come, Trump and all of his enablers are going to be seen on the dung hill of U.S. political history."

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