Nicolle Wallace worries Trump’s ‘unavoidably obvious’ paranoia is like final days of Nixon
President Donald Trump is gripped by paranoia as more details emerge in the whistleblower scandal over the president allegedly extorting a foreign government to interfere in the 2020 presidential election, according to an MSNBC anchor.
"A single individual has accomplished what the dozens of prosecutors and investigators who worked on Robert Mueller’s 23-month-long investigation never managed to do: focus the attention of Congress and the public on allegations of gross misconduct on the part of Donald Trump in carrying out the nation’s foreign policy, including an attempt by the president to get a foreign government to provide dirt on a political rival," MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace reported. "Today we saw for the very first time the whistle-blower’s complaint, stunning in detail and devastating in substance."
Wallace noted that at "the very moment that [Director of National Intelligence Joseph] Maguire was testifying to the good faith in which the whistleblower sounded the alarm, Donald Trump made an allegation of his own, attacking the whistleblower and his or her sources at a private event morning in New York using language that is hard to consider anything but threatening," Wallace noted.
The host played the clip of Trump suggesting those who talked to the whistleblower should be executed.
Wallace interviewed Los Angeles Times reporter Eli Stokols, who obtained the audio of Trump's remarks.
"He’s basically saying that the whistle-blower is almost a spy and that the people in his own administration who spoke to this person, that they are basically almost spies themselves," Stokols explained. "Then he goes on to this riff casually talking about, you know, how in the old days spies and traitors were dealt with more harshly. And you can read into that what you will. The tone seemed casually menacing if you want to describe the way he was."
"We know that Attorney General William Barr really broke with his predecessor Jeff Sessions and even Matt Whitaker when he testified before Congress that he believed Donald Trump had been spied upon. Donald Trump sitting next to Ukrainian president Zelinsky yesterday got right back to the origins of the Russia investigation. We know that’s on his mind. This paranoia which was really a hallmark of Richard Nixon’s final days and months in office seems to be unavoidably obvious in Donald Trump," Wallace noted.
"It is," Stokols replied. "It's always in plain sight with this president."
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