Rachel Maddow on Monday mocked Donald Trump over the former president's calls for protests over his indictments that have fallen flat.
The MSNBC host suggested that Trump’s calls for protest were intended to have the effect of making the public uneasy about prosecuting a former president now facing four indictments.
“The guy himself, the defendant himself, has said repeatedly what he wants his followers to do about it, and he hasn't just been calling on them to give him money to pay his lawyer fees, right?" said Maddow. "He's been calling on them to bodily show up. He has been calling them to get out in the streets for him. Again, like they did for him on Jan. 6, when he told them to march down Pennsylvania Avenue and physically go to the building where Congress was doing its work."
“They turned out in the streets for him then, he has said he wants that again," she continued. "He’s said it explicitly. He said publicly that if he were to be indicted, ‘I hope we are going to have in this country, the biggest protests we have ever had.’”
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Maddow noted that Trump said earlier this year in an interview about his impending indictment in Manhattan: "I think if it happened, I think you'd have problems in this country, the likes of which perhaps we've never seen before. I don't think the people of the United States would stand for it. I think that has big problems, big problems. I just don't think they stand for it."
“But it turns out, the dog did not bark,” Maddow said, noting that the response to Trump’s indictments mirrored a Sherlock Holmes episode.
“Turns out life goes on,” Maddow explained. “The rule of law applied to the high-ranking former officials and powerful political figures and the rule of law goes on and politics goes on.”
“Turns out the former leader does not snap his fingers and command a nationwide crippling uprising in his or her name," she said of the 2020 loser. "I mean, even in our country ... where he overtly, publicly tried to make it happen. It failed. He failed. He wanted that, he promised it, he was counting on it, and therefore a lot of a country was counting on that being a consequence of this part of the process.”
Maddow said that although the rejection of Trump’s calls for mass protests reflects well on the state of American democracy, “the bad news is that instead, we're getting something else.”
“Not mass violence. Again, like we saw on Jan. 6, not even mass protest. But instead, what we are getting is individual acts of violence and threats of violence by radicalized people and groups that support them,” Maddow said.
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