At the start of his MSNBC show on Thursday, Chris Hayes got blunt with viewers, telling them straight up that “it’s very obvious what Donald Trump is doing” with the public statements he’s been making about his myriad criminal indictments.
Trump, Hayes said, “is obviously fomenting violence against the judges and prosecutors.”
Hayes kicked the commentary off by referring to the disturbing news this week that a Trump supporter posted the purported names and addresses of members of the Georgia grand jury that indicted Trump and 18 of his accomplices on Monday.
He linked that to a few other disturbing incidents involving Trump supporters, including the woman in Texas who threatened to kill Judge Tanya Chutkan if Trump isn’t reelected.
“We can all see what’s happening here. I mean, threats happen in public life and they they’re not contained to one part of the ideological spectrum, I want to be clear about that. But what’s happening here is part of a larger story, a long history of menace and violence as a form of political power, wielded by Donald Trump and the MAGA right,” Hayes said.
“These are not just isolated incidents. This is coming from the top down. Donald Trump knows exactly what he’s doing when he goes on social media, and he shares a picture of Judge Chutkan with a post calling her ‘an activist judge,’ accusing her of running election interference,” Hayes continued, noting that on Thursday the Trump campaign released a video attacking Special Counsel Jack Smith for subpoenaing access to his Twitter account.
“It’s very obvious what Donald Trump is doing right? That he’s trying to cultivate a sense of menace, the possibility of reprisal, retribution, violence from those diehard supporters,” Hayes argued. “When he calls the prosecutor charging him ‘deranged,’ accuses him of committing an ‘atrocity.’ I mean, at the very least, and this is me bending over backwards to be charitable, let’s say that Trump certainly appears to be unbothered when his supporters make good on the implicit requests in his inflammatory language.”
Hayes connected to the assault on Nancy Pelosi’s husband last year, noting how he was “excused and defended, lied about by nearly everyone on the political right, from Elon Musk to Donald Trump himself.” And of course he noted the Jan. 6 attack.
“This is who Donald Trump has always been, his obvious personal cowardice aside. He’s a guy who thinks political violence is an acceptable means to an end, a desirable one in some cases,” Hayes said.
“Let’s call it what it is. He is obviously fomenting violence against the judges and prosecutors. If something terrible happens, what are we going to conclude? Every warning sign is blinking bright red and of course yes, most Trump supporters, the vast majority are not violent, they’re not gonna do something violent. And even among those who make threats… most probably are not serious. Again, the vast majority,” Hayes said.
“But this is kind of a numbers game here. It’s a big country. So some small percentage of them are. we know that to be true. Again, this is not an abstraction, the longer Trump keeps inciting and agitating, it’s a roll of the dice each time and the greater the odds, iteratively, are that that small group of people, who couldn’t do something, will do something,” Hayes continued. “It only has to be a few.”
Comparing Trump to a “mafia boss,” Hayes clarified, “I am not a lawyer. I do not claim to know what counts as actionable speech in a legal sense. Furthermore, the First Amendment in the United States is broad for a reason and as a journalist, I like it that way. But that aside, morally, morally, we all know what’s happening. And we all know who’s culpable for what’s already happened. And what’s maybe to come. Mark my words.”
Watch the clip above.