Rachel Maddow: If Elected, Trump Might Make Himself President for Life to Stay Out of Prison (Video)

In an article published Monday on MSNBC’s ratings bonanza thanks to the criminal prosecutions of President Trump, Vanity Fair led with Rachel Maddow’s sobering take on Trump turning himself in last week to face charges in Fulton County, Georgia:

“The MSNBC panel was awaiting former president Donald Trump’s Fulton County Jail mug shot, when Rachel Maddow asked her audience to register the gravity of the moment. “I’m saying we should slow down here just for a second, because this is serious stuff for the nation, for who we are as a country,” she said last week, as MSNBC aired the photo—the first of any current or former United States president. “This is not something to take lightly. Our constitutional republic depends on the very basic concept of rule by law, not rule by man,” Maddow continued.”

Monday night Rachel Maddow was pushing crazy, fear-mongering Trump porn to her audience of several million viewers, warning that should Trump win next year’s presidential election he might try to remain in office for life by canceling elections in order to stay out of prison.

Maddow keyed off a New York Times article by Alan Feuer (later updated with Glenn Thrush) that reported Trump was looking to pardon himself or have his attorney general dismiss the federal cases against him should he win the election (excerpt):

“Trump has made no secret in private conversations with his aides of his desire to solve his jumble of legal problems by winning the election. If either of the two federal trials he is confronting is delayed until after the race and Mr. Trump prevails, he could seek to pardon himself after taking office or have his attorney general simply dismiss the matters altogether.”

Maddow: “And, and I know that learning that Trump has been saying that privately to his staffers is not shocking news, per se, right? We’ve known that was probably what he was planning, probably what he was thinking. But (sigh) per the New York Times it does seem sort of significant that that’s what he’s now telling people–that’s what he’s telling people he’s gonna do. He will solve his jumble of legal problems by winning the election. And, you know, whatever you think about that, that’s how he’s thinking about that. And what does that say about the election for all of the rest of us? Right, it means in his own mind, and those of his campaign and his supporters, presumably, these are the stakes. And again, whatever you think about that as a legal strategy for Trump, that is how he is thinking about the election. And that is how he is going to be talking to his supporters and his aides and his campaign about the stakes of the election.

“The election means one of two things, if this is the way he’s gonna approach it: Either he loses the election and he goes to prison, or he wins the election, he doesn’t go to prison. And, uh, is that for life, that he gets to be president? Will we keep having more elections, or no? If every election is a new opportunity for him to go to prison, do you think he allows us to have new elections? I mean if those are the stakes, if winning the election is his plan to stay out of prison, what happens in that election if and when he does not win it? Does that kind of an election end with a graceful concession to a fair and square reelected President Biden? (Sigh) I mean, if Trump and his supporters see the stakes as losing and going to prison or winning and being president -— and probably president for life — how should we expect that he and the Republican Party and Republican officials in swing states are going to handle the conduct of that election that Trump may very well lose?

“And because we are prone to forget, we have to say out loud, (sigh) that we would be remiss, we would be willfully naïve, to ask that question as if our politics exists in a vacuum somewhere outside the rest of our news, as if the politics pages are totally different than the crime pages. As if we are not in a moment where far right politics is coinciding with far right violence, with regular shows of force from paramilitary extreme right groups and with acts of violence by people who are explicitly and admittedly motivated by far right eliminationist political ideas. We are prone to forget, but we do not have to forget. So what, what should we know, what can we know, about what happens in far right politics when it appears to be in nexus with far, far right violence that right now is just pinging off the charts?”

Transcribed by TGP.

Trump fear porn is ratings gold for MSNBC, but poison for America’s body politic.

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