Former President Donald Trump's second-term plans are ominous in a specific way that isn't discussed enough, argued MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes at a New York City live event with fellow anchor Rachel Maddow.
"There've been headlines the last few days about the sort of vision being put together around people around Donald Trump," said Hayes. "What a second term would look like and particularly staffing it and who the lawyers would be and what the lawyers would do and how the lawyers would approach their job."
"One of the things that I recognized in the last days, particularly, in the Trump administration, is that the rule of law, a grandiose and abstract term, is just as a kind of sociological fact what the sort of acculturation of a class of lawyers will or won't go for at a certain point," Hayes continued. "In reality, what it means is that when it is time to do the coup, which lawyers will be like, yes, and which will be like, no. And that's like a sociological fact, as opposed to an abstract fact about law. The law is no, you can't. But if you get people with bad enough faith and bad enough intentions and sort of morally dubious enough and smart enough—"
"Smart enough is important," agreed Maddow.
ALSO READ: How Democrats stormproof democracy from Hurricane Donald before Election Day
"They can come up with ways to make a colorable argument that yes," Hayes said. "We got lucky and so far as there were not, there were a few, but there were many more who didn't. But that idea that it comes down to that. It sort of shows up in that Fayetteville chapter, that everyone who's operating the system, the Jim Crow in the South as lawyers know what they are doing, that really haunts me."
"It's what I think about the most when I read the stories about the 2025 Project, about Trump's plans, and about what ultimately the guardrail is that keeps us using democracy under the rule of law and not a dictatorship," added Hayes.
Watch the video below or at the link right here.
Chris Hayes on Trump's second term planswww.youtube.com
