Two days after attorneys for Donald Trump advanced the astonishing claim U.S. presidents have legal immunity even if they murder political opponents, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes warned viewers that “we are already living with a version of it.”
He didn’t mean that the current president — that’s Joe Biden — has done anything like that. He referred instead to the way Trump has consistently encouraged violence among his supporters without once suffering consequences.
What sparked Hayes’ commentary were two related events that happened earlier Thursday.
First, early Thursday morning, Arthur Engoron, the judge presiding over Trump’s New York fraud trial, received a bomb threat at his home in Long Island. Later that morning, while presiding over the final day of the trial, Trump insisted on making a final statement, which was in direct defiance of Judge Engoron’s orders. He attacked Engoron himself and flung baseless accusations against him. Trump also made comments that resembled veiled threats of violence.
For some reason, Engoron allowed Trump to speak uninterrupted for nearly 6 minutes instead of citing him for contempt of court, as would have happened for almost any other defendant. Hayes sees these two events as connected.
“We don’t know all the particulars,” Haye said, “we don’t know who did it. But it appears to be the latest example of mob style intimidation by pro-Trump MAGA loyalists that has become disturbingly common. Just a part of day to day life in the Trump era.”
Hayes identified what he called “a pattern of dangerous and potentially violent intimidation of people who have attempted to hold Donald Trump to account under the rule of law,” noting numerous prior examples.
Hayes ran down many examples of Trump celebrating violence against his enemies at campaign speeches prior to the Jan. 6 attack, among many others. And then he noted how many public officials that Trump has locked horns with have received death threats or have seen actual attempts on their lives in the form of the harassment practice known as “swatting.”
“People hear this message loud and clear, no matter how much he tries to cover it in the cadence of comedy,” Hayes said, citing examples like the man who mailed pipe bombs to various Democrats before the 2018 election and the man who in 2022 attempted to murder Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul.
“And what did Trump do?” Hayes said, “What does he still do today? He jokes about that attack continuously as part of his routine, sending the message to everyone who listens to him that it was funny, and it was good that the man nearly killed Paul Pelosi with a hammer in his home. That that is a funny thing.
“And he’s out there doing it right now,” Hayes continued, drawing attention to remarks Trump made on Tuesday, when he threatened that there would be “bedlam” if he’s held accountable in his fraud trial.
“It’s the same thing he did when he told his supporters before Jan. 6, ‘Be there, will be wild,’ when he told them Mike Pence didn’t have ‘the guts to do what needs to be done,’” Hayes said.
“We all understand what’s happening here, right? All of us. You think it’s a coincidence? A coincidence that this week after he said there will be bedlam, there was a bomb threat directed to the judge in his New York trial? I don’t know, maybe. But I do know that when you look at the worst case, most intolerable incursion of essentially fascistic violence by the MAGA faction, combined with Trump’s legal arguments in court, you have to consider that we are already living with a version of it in America,” Hayes concluded.
Watch the clip via MSNBC above now.
