Rachel Maddow outlined the ways in which Donald Trump extremists seemingly used intimidation tactics to harass participants in the former president’s hush money trial and conviction, which the MSNBC host argued is their attempt to make the U.S. legal system “unworkable” in order to benefit their party’s plans to establish Trump as their 2024 presidential nominee.
“Michael Cohen has, since the verdict, had his whole family doxed,” Maddow said on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.” “Last summer, Trump supporters circulated the purported names and photographs and home addresses of the grand jury members of the grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia … It is terrorizing to the people involved in these cases. And it is systemic. They do it to all of them, with all of the cases. It’s designed to make the legal system unworkable when it comes to Trump.”
Maddow’s Monday report came after a recent rise in MAGA supporters calling for armed riots and violence after Trump was found guilty on all 34 charges in his hush money case, making him the first U.S. president to be convicted of a crime. In response to Trump’s conviction, his followers took to social media encouraging violent retribution against jurors, Justice Juan Merchan and even urged for an all-out civil war.
On top of Trump supporters posting the phone numbers of Michael Cohen’s family members to a doxing website, Maddow broke down how republicans are adding to the issue by pushing a narrative that Trump’s potential incarceration is an “abuse of power.”
“We are at a moment when the Republican Party says the legal system doesn’t work, the criminals are the heroes. Everybody involved in making the legal system work should fear for their lives. Trump says the country will rain down fire if he faces any more legal consequences,” Maddow said. “The Republican Party is wrong about that, and Trump is wrong about that. Our system is strong. And so, we should feel very confident in standing up to protect it. Our system is strong, and so are we.”
Judge Merchan set Trump’s sentencing for July 11, a pre-Election Day move that has the GOP up in arms.
“The burden of what’s going on in the Trump movement is terroristic. It’s not mass violence,” Maddow said. “The burden of what is being threatened against our fellow Americans is falling disproportionately on a very small number of people. It’s falling on individual people they are singling out to try to pick them off in order to intimidate the whole country. There isn’t a civil war. There isn’t a riot… They are using targeted harassment and threats towards specific people to try to cow all of us, to make us all scared of anything that holds Trump to account and punches him for committing crimes.”
Watch Maddow’s full MSNBC report in the video above.
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