Former President Donald Trump is explicitly directing his supporters to violence — and escalating over time.
That's the urgent warning offered by former GOP staffer Kurt Bardella on Wednesday's edition of MSNBC's "The Beat."
"We hear really alarming and horrific stuff from Donald Trump all the time, but even I am noting that this latest rhetoric is beyond the pale," said anchor and legal analyst Katie Phang. "Am I an outlier on this?"
"No, it means you have a functioning brain, Katie, and your ears and brain are connected and you're hearing all the things the rest of us normal sane people are hearing," said Bardella, a frequent critic of the former president.
"Let's be clear here — after January 6th we know that it's not just rhetoric, it's not just performative, it's not just, I guess, entertainment, what some people might want to call it," Bardella continued. "This is real. The people that follow Donald Trump, his most ardent supporters, they hear his words and take them as marching orders take them as directions, and as we saw on January 6th, they act on them."
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"So this isn't just harmless playroom Donald Trump, oh, that's what he does, it's hyperbole. This is dangerous," he added. "The fact that so many people in the Republican Party are willing to whitewash what happened January 6th tells me their plan going forward is, if they don't get their way politically, they'll instruct their following to incite violence against the rest of us."
Watch the video below or at the link right here.
Kurt Bardella says Trump supporters take violent "marching orders"www.youtube.com
