Joe Scarborough of MSNBC slammed Donald Trump’s latest “fascist” remarks, saying the former president’s rhetoric had become so dangerous that even Republican senators were speaking out against it.
Trump flatly claimed that he had wanted former Vice President Mike Pence to reverse his election loss on that day, and the presenter of “Morning Joe” said there was no doubt that Trump was an authoritarian if he returned to the White House.
“You have seen the rise of authoritarianism, and it is certainly what we all understand Donald Trump has been wanting to do for quite some time,” Scarborough said. “If you can’t win an election, steal an election, overturn an election — that’s what he was saying, talking about Mike Pence. Yeah, he actually said some things — we haven’t been playing his rallies of late, but he actually said some things that were so inflammatory that you had Republicans coming out and actually criticizing him and saying, ‘Hey, no, no, let’s take a step back, we didn’t want to overturn the election, we were just talking about having some of the votes recounted.'”
“But, again, Donald Trump is now speaking in shorthand, now saying what he really means,” Scarborough added. “He wanted a free and fair election overturned. Why? Because he didn’t win, and, again, his words have consequences. This new sort of almost fascist — I don’t know, do you say almost fascist after Jan. 6 or do you say fascist? His fascist instinct to use violence to overturn government institutions, we’re actually seeing it at Trump events where you have people asking, when do we start using guns? You are seeing it at forums. This past weekend, I believe it was, you had a Michigan Senate candidate telling people to bring guns to polling places. If they didn’t win, they needed to be locked and loaded. Basically saying, if we can’t win at the ballot box, we are going to win by killing people.”
Trump’s latest admissions come on the heels of CNN reporting that Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani and other Trump campaign officials oversaw efforts to assemble alternate slates of pro-Trump electors in the hopes that Pence would choose to count their votes instead of the legitimate Electoral College members on January 6.
In the days leading up to the election, Pence issued a statement publicly stating that he did not believe he had the authority to pick and choose from elector slates.
When electors met in state capitals throughout the country on December 14, Trump aide Stephen Miller gave a sneak peek at the plan.
‘As we speak, today, an alternate slate of electors in the contested states is going to vote and we’re going to send those results up to Congress,’ Miller said on Fox & Friends that morning.
‘This will ensure that all of our legal remedies remain open,’ Miller continued. ‘That means if we win these cases in the courts, we can direct that these alternate electors be certified.’
The 14 people involved in the conspiracy to transmit fake electoral vote certifications to the National Archives were subpoenaed by the select committee on January 6th.
People sought to declare Trump the winner in seven battleground states that were won by now-President Joe Biden, according to the committee.
“The Select Committee is seeking information about attempts in multiple states to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including the planning and coordination of efforts to send false slates of electors to the National Archives,’ said the committee’s chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson. ‘We believe the individuals we have subpoenaed today have information about how these so-called alternate electors met and who was behind that scheme.’
The availability of these supposed alternate-elector votes was cited as a rationale to delay or obstruct certification of the election during the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021, according to Thompson.
George Conway, the anti-Trump lawyer husband of former White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, mocked Trump’s legal expertise on Twitter.
“’The Twelfth Amendment and the Electoral Count Act of 1887 already make it entirely clear that the Vice President merely opens the envelopes,” Conway said.
‘But sometimes we want to make laws even clearer so that even semiliterate psychopaths have a chance of understanding them,’ Conway added.
