It was another day of faux somberness Wednesday afternoon on MSNBC as Congress impeached President Donald Trump a week after some of his own supporters terrorized the U.S. Capitol. MSNBC used this second Trump impeachment as a front in its ongoing campaign to relabel tens of millions who think and vote differently as domestic terrorists.
Since there was such an onslaught of stupidity during and after the formal vote, NewsBusters has compiled the worst moments from 4:00 p.m. Eastern to 8:00 p.m. Eastern and included a dozen far-left personalities, doing everything from worrying about police officers becoming terrorists to comparing themselves to those who fought at Normandy to insisting there won’t be unity until the country was cleansed of Republicans.
So, without any further adieu, here are some of the worst MSNBC quotes, presented in no particular order.
We Need a New Surveillance State to Spy on Americans, Just Like After 9/11
“I mean, just working in the White House after 9/11, everything, and again, these policies are so controversial, so it's not perfect parallel but every policy that was pursued was to find out what the terrorists were saying and we listened to them. That’s what metadata was. I mean, knowing what they said online is just basic intelligence. Why wasn't a memo from Norfolk like that responded to with a show of force with the occasion it came true, it turns out it did but why isn't that the practice of the FBI?”
— Deadline: White House host Nicolle Wallace, 4:18 p.m. Eastern.
Never Trumpers Are Like Those Who Fought at Lexington, Gettysburg, and Normandy?
“And the fight that's going to play out, the side that is for democracy in this country needs to be prepared to use the First Amendment as our sword and our shield to prosecute on the battlefield of ideas the supremacy, the righteousness, the goodness of American democracy. 13 generations of American patriots have made blood sacrifices from Lexington to Concord, to Gettysburg and Antiedam, to Normandy to the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The American experiment very nearly came to an end because all that it takes to end it is a collapse of faith and belief, and when you have 80 percent of a political party that says that the elections aren't legitimate anymore on the basis of BS, we're on life support as a democratic nation[.]”
— Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt, 6:52 p.m. Eastern.
Police Officers Are the REAL People We Have to Worry About Being Terrorists
“Here's the scary part, Nicolle. I'm less worried about violent extremists embedded in protests than I am about violent extremists embedded in police departments. How many stories did we hear about Capitol Hill police officers, other officers flashing badges as they came in with these groups of people to attack the Capitol? There has to be — I mean, when you talk about sharing information, okay, well, who are you sharing the information with? Can you trust everybody on your team? Can you trust everybody that you're sending out there? How do we know that the information being shared isn't being given to people who are embedded and a part of this violent revolts that have already happened, that we're going to see more of....I don't really have that much confidence that law enforcement is going to be able to stop this, unless they do a serious internal evaluation and start to expunge people who are part of this violent revolution.”
— MSNBC contributor Jason Johnson, 6:12 p.m. Eastern.
Defeating ‘Arsonist’ Republicans Is the Only Way We Can Have Peace and Unity
“This is almost as if you have an arsonist who burns down a building and then says, “wait a minute, don't charge me. Let's work to rebuild the building together.” And it’s like, no, we can only have unity and healing once there is an accountability and return to truth....[T]here's no politicization. Donald Trump is going to be out in one way or another in a week. There's no election coming up. The Democrats won by Georgia by a surprise. This is not political. This is about sending a message to preserve our democratic institutions[.]
— Former (first) Trump impeachment lawyer Daniel Goldman, 4:03 p.m. Eastern.
Schmidt RAGES: ‘There Will Be No Unity,’ No Gentleness Until GOPers Are Crushed!
“A lot of these members on the Republican side say now we need unity. There will be no unity with seditionists. The only thing we offer them is the chance for them to apologize and retire from public life. That's the only thing we can do. Only two ways to bring — to win a fight, Nicolle: to bring your opponent to defeat through submission, or they get you through exhaustion.”
— Schmidt, 6:48 p.m. Eastern.
“But the pro-democracy side cannot be the gentle side of the debate. And so when Lindsey Graham or Kevin McCarthy say, ‘oh, now we need unity, we need to lower the temperature,’ what we need in this country is accountability. The accountability for the poison of the belief and democracy, accountability for the violence done to the people of the United States, accountability for what the desecration of what Joe Biden, the President-Elect, called the citadel of democracy, accountability for the desecration of the floor of the House of Representatives and the floor of the United States Senate...[W]e have a long, difficult struggle in this country ahead with this.”
— Schmidt, 6:50 p.m. Eastern.
“At the end of the day, if there's going to be unity in this country, there must be accountability...[W]e will run a campaign that is designed to impose as much pain at the right places as possible, that that will be accomplished. And if not, then we'll attack them in the public airwaves, on TV, digitally, every day until they're up for election and the voters in those states can — can decide what to do about them....[W]e will do everything we can to make the burden so heavy that the Republicans that are left in there will drop these people because it's in their self-interest to do.”
— Schmidt, 6:54 p.m. Eastern.
Wanting to Investigate Benghazi Is Just Like....Touting QAnon Conspiracies?
“Congressman, obviously the House has long been the battlefield for very different views, but I wonder what it's like....[Boehner] sought to appease the Tea Party caucus in letting them have their way with the attacks of Benghazi, politicizing them beyond recognition and I wonder if you think that toothpaste can be put back in the tube or if the House has now become a forum for QAnon and conspiracy theorists and whack jobs?”
— Wallace to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, 5:26 p.m. Eastern.
MSNBCer: You’re Either on ‘Team Democracy’ With Dems or GOP’s ‘Team Sedition’
“I think it's so important to get everybody on the record, are you on team democracy or are you on team sedition? And that — and then the Senate trial will be another opportunity for that and I think that, in a time when it's very important to choose sides, that side, that's a binary choice right there, I think we need to know who is on which side so we can understand the nature of the fight and who needs to be defeated with whatever party they're in. This is not a party thing. This is a much deeper thing.”
— Showtime’s The Circus co-host John Heilemann, 6:24 p.m. Eastern.
“And the prospect that we might be headed in that direction should be sobering to everyone. And the only way we're going avert it is through a big, big project to try to win this battle for team democracy and beating down everything that's coalesced to give root to the fact that we now have a team sedition in our American political system.”
— Heilemann, 6:45 p.m. Eastern.
2020 Was Clean, But 2016 Wasn’t Because the Russians Stole It for Trump
“Donald J. Trump, who dragged this country through four long years of horror, from caged children, Nazi coddling, open white nationalism, and open corruption, who profited off the presidency that he gained with foreign help and then humiliated himself and us before the ex-KGB agent who helped put him in the White House, and who fired the FBI director who caught him, who sat back and did absolutely nothing while more than 370,000 Americans died in a global pandemic, that guy has been impeached for the second time in a year.”
— The ReidOut host Joy Reid, 7:02 p.m. Eastern.
America’s ‘Story’ Is Changed Forever, Scarred by Seditious Trump
“The charge itself today changes the entire American story. In 2021, the entire American story has now changed because we had to confront a President who was charged with inciting an insurrection against the United States....[T]hese are heavy words about our fellow countrymen, but — but let's be very honest. It is a violent political movement that found safe harbor in the Republican Party. That does not mean that the party writ large is violent. It does not mean that our leaders of that party condone it. We've heard them condemn the violence. But at least for this period, a violent political movement has found safe harbor in a Republican Party led by Donald Trump.”
— MSNBC contributor and former Republican David Jolly, 6:14 p.m. Eastern.
Hopefully, Conservative Media Are Sued to Death by Dominion to Save America
“You need to have the propagandists and so the Big Lie has been spread by Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin and Laura Ingraham and Fox News and OAN and Newsmax. But — but the last component they needed to lift this autocratic movement off the ground, to do the violence that they did, it needed the lift of the cynical elites....147 members of the House stood up after the insurrection, after the violence to throw out the results of the election. This was a new Jim Crow[.]”
— Schmidt, 6:47 p.m. Eastern.
“The Dominion Voting System lawsuit is the most important civil litigation maybe never the history of the country because it has the potential to bankrupt Fox News, bankrupt Newsmax, bankrupt OAN. And it certainly will keep those companies from getting the financing they need to expand, but it's going to put the truth on trial. And in the end, we will have to defeat these autocrats on the battlefield of ideas.”
— Schmidt, 6:50 p.m. Eastern.
Wallace: Screw Unity! Republicans Spent Four Years Dividing America! It’s Our Turn!
“I guess the point isn’t that you have to vote one way on the impeachment. I think every member should vote your conscience, but don't tell me that your concern is for unity. Because there is not a single member of the Republican Party who cared at all about unity when Donald Trump waved his misogyny flag or waved his racism flag, or waved his reporters are the enemy of the people flag. He sought to divide people on an hourly basis on his Twitter feed, so the excuse for — for not doing something, cannot be, most not be, from any Republican that unity is now today their priority. They’ve made clear they don't care and that disunity has been their strategy.”
— Wallace, 4:30 p.m. Eastern.
Wallace: “Congressman, what do you make of the Republican defense that now, after four years of standing with Donald Trump after Access Hollywood and after people coming from bleep hole nations and after attacks on the squad and after chanting send them back, now — now — they want unity.”
Congressman Sean Maloney (D-NY): “Yeah, it rings hollow, of course. I think that it's — it’s offensive to those of us who watched what happened to the Capitol Police, who watched someone bludgeoned to death for doing their job, for protecting our lives. It rings a little hollow now to talk about unity, to talk about further dividing the country. You know, I was talking to a friend who said that if you want to heal a wound, you first have to clean the wound, you have to cleanse the infection that threatens to do even more harm. That's the right way to heal, is to clean this wound through reconciliation.”
— Conversation at 5:04 p.m. Eastern.
Impeachment, Capitol Violence Are Proof That....America Hasn’t Been Great?
Wallace: “I'm so struck by something Eddie Glaude, you said to me after the El Paso massacre. You said this is who we are and I've been wanting to ask you for a whole long week now if that was your thought when you watched the insurrection last Wednesday.”
MSNBC contributor and Princeton professor Eddie Glaude: “Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. It's — it’s a result of failure, Nicolle, to deal with our demons, to really grapple with the horror of — of — of white supremacy that in some ways tried to choke the life out of our democracy....[W]hat I heard today on — on the floor of the House just, it didn't break my heart, it just reaffirmed the fact that we have a long way to go, as — as a democracy.”
— Conversation at 5:35 p.m. Eastern.
Rhetoric Opposing Impeachment Was Akin to Hitler’s Big Lie
“I'm thinking about what Biden said, Nicolle, about the congresspersons who supported the Big Lie, as Eugene and others have called it. What did we hear today on the floor? We heard radical left, the far-left, we heard false equivalencies between the seditious acts and protests by Black Lives Matter and the like. We heard all of the bells and whistles. We heard all of the fog horns on the floor of the House.”
— Glaude, 5:49 p.m. Eastern.
NBC Historian: Biden Has the Chance to Heal Like Ford, Lincoln, Washington Did
“I would look at other presidents in history who did a great job of unifying the country after Trump. George Washington in 1789 is the first president after the revolution. Abraham Lincoln as he tried to do in 1865, saying the Civil War is almost over and I'm going to approach it, he said, with malice towards none. And then going into modern times, people like Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, one of the loveliest underrated moments in American history, I think, was the Carter inauguration of 1977. Carter had barely beat Gerald Ford. He gets up. The first line in his inaugural address is for myself and our nation, I would like to thank my predecessor for all he's done to heal our land. These two opponents.”
— NBC News Presidential Historian Michael Beschloss, 6:59 p.m. Eastern.
GOP, Trump Are Doing Nothing on COVID....But We Must Impeach, Try Trump Now
Glaude: “And in the backdrop of this, the background of this are Americans dying. How many have died of COVID today? How many died yesterday, right? And so in many ways, this great American experiment stands on a knife's edge and we have idiots who hold the reins. We need to hold accountable — we need to hold these people accountable. We need to uproot white supremacy finally and be honest with ourselves and really, really, really, really understand the peril that our democracy is in on this day, in this moment as so many of our fellows are grieving because they've lost loved ones.”
Wallace: “It's always hard to go after Eddie, even when you're the host. Let me try to answer one of those questions. More than 4,400 Americans died yesterday from the raging pandemic, one that Donald Trump has refused to pursue aggressively as something he's responsible for getting under control.”
— Conversation at 5:49 p.m. Eastern.
Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D-WA): “I'm sorry to say these Republicans have not only given me COVID by not wearing their masks but they have also given it to my husband now, who now tested positive. So this is the world we live in. But I'll get through this, I know I will. And I appreciate everyone's good wishes.”Reid: “That is just one of the many sickening developments. We know that Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley put out a press release with regard to her husband. And it is — it is monstrous, I'll just put it that way, that members of the United States Congress and United States Senate would sicken other members and not think twice about it. It's disgusting. But let's go on to this other —“
Jayapal: “And Joy, there’s 3,200 Americans everyday — 3,200 Americans every day are dyeing of covid. Just —“
Reid: “Yes.”
Jayapal: “— the tragedy across the country and these Republicans are not showing exactly what we need to do to prevent the spread of this virus.”
Reid: “Well, absolutely. I think those are two ways which in a sense members of the Senate and the House might have been attacked by their own members, right? You have now, in addition to the fact we now believe that — that some Republicans were sickening other members and other members of the Senate, you have this Ali Alexander character saying he had assistance from House members.”
— Conversation at 7:36 p.m. Eastern.
Trump Is an American Cancer, But the Lincoln Project Could ‘Be the Chemo’
“No, I mean, look, this is a kind of gross way to put it, but I had hoped that Trump was, you know, a pimple on the body politic. It turns out he is a cancer. But our next guest seeks to be the chemo. Steve Schmidt’s here, political strategist and co-founder of the Lincoln Project.”
— Wallace, 6:45 p.m. Eastern.
Wilson: If You’re Being Censored, It’s ‘Because You Suck,’ You ‘Whiny B***’
“This whiny bitch victimhood from Matt Gaetz and Ken Buck and Jim Jordan and Majorie Taylor Q-Q-QAnon Greene and all of these other people, it is the most pathetic example of special pleading I've ever seen. They act as if they’ve been oppressed somehow, that the world is against them somehow. Well, guess what? Twitter and Facebook aren't banning you because you're a conservative. They're banning you because you suck. They're banning you because you say evil shit. They’re banning you because you support a revolution against the government of this country. This is a — the most remarkable thing about this to me is all of these tough guys swagger monkeys who act like they’re the big, you know, alpha males, they’re whining and bitching and moaning about Kathy Griffin holding up a mannequin head or Nancy Pelosi tearing up a piece of paper? Come on, guys. Toughen up.
— Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson, 7:53 p.m. Eastern.
