MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow said the Republican Party is trying to “get rid of” democracy by embracing Donald Trump as its presumptive presidential nominee following the exit of his last remaining GOP rival, Nikki Haley.
“There’s two different things going on: the Democratic Party is marching down the middle lane of ‘Normalville’; the Republican Party is engaged in a different project … they are trying to change what the United States is,” she told Nicolle Wallace on Wednesday’s edition of her “American Autocracy” series.
In December 2023, Trump made headlines when he said he’d be a “dictator on day one” if re-elected, though he later told Fox News he was just joking.
“There was a chance for leaders like Mitch McConnell to literally have Donald Trump barred from ever holding federal office again, but they didn’t do it,” Maddow said of the second impeachment against Trump, which would have made him ineligible to run for the presidency again.
Just ahead of Super Tuesday, the Supreme Court — which has three judges appointed by Trump — ruled that states such as Colorado do not have the right to remove Trump from the ballot.
“The courts will not save us here,” Maddow added. “The only thing that will save us here is if the pro-democracy supermajority in this country decides we’re not only going to stand up for democracy in the abstract by saying nice things about it, we’re actually going to use our democracy to stop this iteration of the Republican Party from getting rid of it.”
Maddow continued, “There’s a reason nobody knows what Donald Trump’s policy is on Gaza … there’s just no governing talk happening at all in the Republican Party. It’s instead about this idea that America is a disaster, America is in decline, America is humiliated and there must be extreme measures taken to fundamentally change the course of the country or we’re all gonna die.”
She further told Wallace that the Republicans are “the reason” for her series on autocracy, saying, “It’s not the project of a governing party. It’s a project of a party that is trying to get rid of the form of government that we have and install something else.”
Watch the conversation between Wallace and Maddow in the video above.
