'Loaded guns': Ex-Trump official says former boss 'raises the specter of violence'
Former President Donald Trump is still trying to boost violence and hatred in America for political gain, even in the wake of January 6 and his multiple indictments for trying to overturn the election based on lies, argued former Trump administration Homeland Security official Miles Taylor on MSNBC's "Deadline: White House" on Thursday.
This comes after a lengthy interview in which Tucker Carlson asked Trump whether America is heading for "civil war" — and he declined to confirm or deny it.
"I always like to sort of pull back the curtain and explain why I'm covering this, why this matters," said anchor Nicolle Wallace. "When Trump talks about political violence, he names names. He names targets. He was warned by two jurisdictions, that the judge in D.C. and, I think, Willis or the judge there has warned him against his tactics, his intimidation, witness tampering and his M.O., if you will. We saw in this interview with Tucker ... where he raises the specter of violence. He doesn't tamp it down. He doesn't say he doesn't want it. We already know his people are all too willing to act on that."
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"This is not normal," said Taylor, a longtime critic of Trump even when he was inside the administration. "It's not loaded gun rhetoric. It's actual loaded guns that we need to be worried about. What's dangerous with this whole situation isn't that we have an ex-president who is being booked on criminal charges. It's that people in the Republican Party don't see him as the madman that he is. They see him as a martyr now. They are trying to rally around him as a martyr. His colleagues in the GOP don't condemn him. They are sticking with him. His supporters are standing behind him. His most hardcore loyalists are basically telling reporters that they would die for him. And his opponents that should be trying to replace him in the party are trying to be him."
All of this is exemplified, said Taylor, by "Vivek Ramaswamy last night [at the GOP debate] essentially try[ing] to posture himself as the next Trump, as the savvier successor to Trumpism, as the guy who would go further than Donald Trump."
"All of these things are the opposite of what you would want to see from a law enforcement perspective about tamping down the rhetoric and avoiding violence," Taylor continued. "Instead, all of these things lend themselves to a more volatile and combustible situation. We are about to find out in the next couple of weeks what law enforcement in this country actually thinks about it. Usually in September, we have the heads of the intelligence agencies and the FBI come up and testify before Congress. I predict they will come up and say that the political violence factors and trajectory in this country is worse than it was before and they are worried about 2024. I think you will hear from from the FBI, as well as the Department of Homeland Security, probably around the beginning of September."
Watch the video below or at the link right here.
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