On Wednesday, MSNBC host Joy Reid continued her ongoing, hate-filled crusade against any and all dissenting political views during The ReidOut, asserting that America’s already operating as an authoritarian country due to Donald Trump’s refusal to concede the election to Joe Biden with the “supine” Republican Party acting like Vladimir Putin’s Duma.
Reid made sure to trot out a panel of far-left sycophants who view the right as subhuman stooges “normaliz[ing] anti-democratic actions” who can only be redeemed through “repudiat[ing] the things that Donald Trump was standing for and doing.” And Reid also re-upped the 2018 lie about Brian Kemp stealing the Georgia governorship from Stacey Abrams (D). (Video forthcoming)
Reid began the show by bemoaning Trump as “an itinerant dictator, refusing to accept that the voters have spoken, erroneously declaring victory, bulldozing over our democracy and hunkering down in the White House, refusing to relinquish the reins of government or even to admit he's been fired by the American people.”
“In other words, Trump is no longer an autocrat in the making, he's already there...And behind every strongman is his supine party, the fixers, and the king-makers, and the thugs who enable him,” she added.
After saying Republicans refusing to acquiesce only bolstered the “normaliz[ation of] anti-democratic actions,” the ever-corrupt former CIA Director John Brennan griped: “[W]hat Donald Trump is engaged in is the type of behavior we've seen in many authoritarian countries around the globe where individuals try to retain power by all means necessary.”
Brennan went onto call Republicans “despicable” and Trump “an insult to spoiled juveniles,” Reid and former U.S. Ambassador Patrick Gaspard invoked everything from the Carter Center to Mobutu Sese Seko to the Russian Duma to pro-apartheid South Africans (click “expand”)
REID: You know, and I’ve been saying to my team a lot that, you know, what Donald Trump is doing Mobutuism, right? It is something we saw with the Nationalist Party in South Africa from the 1940s until they were finally toppled and Nelson Mandela became president and was released from prison in the 1990. I mean, this is what we’ve seen in these other countries and yet, we are the kind of country that maybe the Carter Center needed to oversee our election.
GASPARD: Joy, thanks for having me on. You know, I served with John Brennan and he does not get that heated about anything in public. He keeps his cool. So, it gives you a sense to the extent of the crisis we're in right now. You're absolutely right. This is the type of behavior we see from authoritarians in places and instances that we condemn. You know, the Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently put out statements of concerns about violence and clashes following the elections in Belarus and in Tanzania. Two years ago the Trump administration was making all kinds of declarations about the corruption, the fraud and the challenges in the transition of power in the DRC. So you're right that, traditionally, the United States is the broker of election integrity in places all around the world, and it's astonishing to see this being played out here in the U.S. But I have to say, Joy, there isn't a single thing that Donald Trump is doing right now that any of us could not have anticipated. Those of us who invested in planning scenarios about this expected this. The problem isn't Donald Trump. The problem is the Republican leadership in the Senate, in the House, in the states where they have authority over election outcomes. They're not doing what some extraordinary of the secretaries of states are doing, calling out the lies, calling out the danger and the danger to democracy and educating their constituents and voters about what this does to our norms in the future. Incredibly dangerous.
REID: Yeah, indeed. They're sort of acting more like a Duma than they are like an American political party. A Russian Duma, I mean.
Reid turned her attention to former MSNBC contributor-turned-New York City mayoral candidate Maya Wiley with, well, lies.
Instead of asking her a question, Reid falsely claimed Republicans only wanted “to siphon out only Republicans” and “directly govern for this sort of white, Christian minority, emerging minority, and everyone else can go to hell.”
And concerning Georgia, Reid hyped that current Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger wasn’t “behav[ing] like the governor when he was secretary of state and was fixing the election so he could win it.”
Moments later, the segment ended with Reid and Brennan ironically bemoaning how Republicans are a national security threat and would treat Joe Biden like an illegitimate president (click “expand”):
REID: So Biden will have to govern in a country where a lot of Republicans just think his election was illegitimate. So you have that. But you’re also developing this narrative that votes cast by non-white people are in and of themselves illegitimate, so what does that mean going forward.
(....)
REID: Well, and — but — but Mr. Brennan, you know, the challenge that will be hung directly on the Republican Party will be that Joe Biden is now going to have to govern a country and try to get a virus under control that doesn't care what party you are, that is relentless and vengeful and murderous, and he's going to have to do that where you've got people on the right, you know, going after the governor of Michigan, threatening to kidnap her and put her on trial, trying to impeach her for having mask mandates. We've got Republican governors who say freedom equals you don't have to wear a mask. I don't care what anybody says, what the science says. He's going to be facing a country where a substantial minority don't believe COVID is even real and it's a national security issue and a security issue for governors. What are — what should he do?
BRENNAN: Well, I think he's going to have to try to restore the trust and faith in the administration, both domestically as well as internationally....As Donald Trump has fueled this polarization, he has sown great distrust within the American electorate, within the American population. And therefore, Joe Biden, I think, is going to have to work really hard to highlight the fact that Donald Trump was an aberration, he was abnormal president. But, really, it's going to be up to the members of the Republican Party to, quite frankly, repudiate the things that Donald Trump was standing for and doing. Until we have that broader repudiation, I think as people have said, you know, he is symptomatic of a broader problem and challenge we have in this country, but what he has done over the last four years, I think, has accelerated and has intensified some of these very, very disturbing trends.
Fortunately for the NewsBusters team, we often come across nonsense so predictable that the blogs write themselves, and, without a doubt, this was no exception.
MSNBC’s implication that over 73 million people hate America and her Founding Documents, the rule of law, and instead support turning the country into a African-style dictatorship was supported by advertisers such as Chevrolet, Farmers Insurance, and Qunol. Follow the links to the MRC’s Conservatives Fight Back page.
To see the relevant MSNBC transcript from November 18, click “expand.”
MSNBC’s The ReidOut
November 18, 2020
7:00 p.m. EasternJOY REID: President-Elect Joe Biden has now received more than 79 million votes. That's 10 million more than the previous record set by President Barack Obama in 2008 and yet, Donald Trump continues to behave like an itinerant dictator, refusing to accept that the voters have spoken, erroneously declaring victory, bulldozing over our democracy and hunkering down in the White House, refusing to relinquish the reins of government or even to admit he's been fired by the American people. In other words, Trump is no longer an autocrat in the making, he's already there because declaring victory, in an election one has lost, an election that has zero evidence of fraud, that is what autocrats do. Trump's focus is on his power and his ego, and perhaps on that orange jumpsuit that may be waiting once he leaves office. His focus is nowhere near his duty to protect the American people from a raging pandemic which has now taken more than 251,000 lives and behind every strongman is his supine party, the fixers, and the king-makers, and the thugs who enable him. Trumpian mascots like Mitch McConnell, William Barr, and Lindsey Graham, seen here fist bumping Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris on the Senate floor, despite his claims of voter fraud in the election and his suspicion of votes cast in blue cities where the black people live. It's why you're seeing secretaries of state in Georgia and Arizona receiving death threats for overseeing elections that did not serve Trump, and now electors are getting sued for doing their sworn duty. The Trump campaign filed a lawsuit challenging Nevada's election results, including targeting a presidential elector who happens to be a homeless veteran. This is what we typically see in banana republics, in mafia states, but here we are, seeing it unfurl in a country that used to pride itself as a beacon of democracy, where now a U.S. President can casually fire an official who pointed out the truth about the absence of election fraud. Or he can stack every corner of government with lackeys who will do his bidding, from the Supreme Court to the Defense Department, to the General Services Administration where the one official who can hand over the keys to the transitioning President-Elect is refusing to do so with sources telling CNN that she is basing her decision on what she sees as the precedent set by the 2000 election, where there was not a clear winner for more than a month. Each day that the Republican Party does not condemn this behavior is another day the party normalizes anti-democratic actions, actions that will get further baked into our government and our institutions and our belief systems and if these schemes don't succeed for Trump, they will one day for someone else, a person Adam Serwer of The Atlantic describes as “the next racist demagogue who comes along, who may not be as clownish or as incompetent.” [INTRODUCES PANEL] Mr. Brennan, I want to go to you on this. Karen Attiah wrote a brilliant piece that I hope everyone got a chance to read in this morning’s Washington Post, and she wrote “how western media would cover the U.S. election if it happened in another country.” I'm just going to read a little bit of it. “The United States, the former British colony, already rocked this year by ethnic conflict and mass protest by extrajudicial killings by police, may finally have a new leader after weeks of political turmoil following a disputed presidential election. Trump, however, is refusing to leave power and there are fears the fractured nation may be pushed over the edge, destabilizing the Western Hemisphere.” That's how it would sound if we were covering an election in a foreign country, but now we are that country. What do you make of this dissent?
JOHN BRENNAN: Well, obviously what Donald Trump is engaged in is the type of behavior we've seen in many authoritarian countries around the globe where individuals try to retain power by all means necessary and Donald Trump, I think, has demonstrated time and time again that he's not going to adhere to not only the norms and standards that are expected in the office of the presidency, but also the requirements that really have the United States national security hanging in the balance. The fact that he's acting as a spoiled juvenile, and I — that's an insult to spoiled juveniles, quite frankly, that he is not facilitating the transfer of power of the executive branch to Joe Biden and his incoming administration, I think is outrageous because whether we're dealing with COVID or whether we're dealing with international issues, that transition, which has been honored by every president, certainly in — during my career and has allowed the incoming administration to be able to get up to speed quickly on these very, very challenging issues, this is something that must happen. And the fact that the members of the Republican Party are still allowing Donald Trump to continue with this tantrum, I think, is despicable.
REID: Yeah, and, you know, Patrick, you and I share both family connections to the Congo and connections via family to South Africa where, of course, you were ambassador. You know, and I’ve been saying to my team a lot that, you know, what Donald Trump is doing Mobutuism, right? It is something we saw with the Nationalist Party in South Africa from the 1940s until they were finally toppled and Nelson Mandela became president and was released from prison in the 1990. I mean, this is what we’ve seen in these other countries and yet, we are the kind of country that maybe the Carter Center needed to oversee our election.
PATRICK GASPARD: Joy, thanks for having me on. You know, I served with John Brennan and he does not get that heated about anything in public. He keeps his cool. So, it gives you a sense to the extent of the crisis we're in right now. You're absolutely right. This is the type of behavior we see from authoritarians in places and instances that we condemn. You know, the Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently put out statements of concerns about violence and clashes following the elections in Belarus and in Tanzania. Two years ago the Trump administration was making all kinds of declarations about the corruption, the fraud and the challenges in the transition of power in the DRC. So you're right that, traditionally, the United States is the broker of election integrity in places all around the world, and it's astonishing to see this being played out here in the U.S. But I have to say, Joy, there isn't a single thing that Donald Trump is doing right now that any of us could not have anticipated. Those of us who invested in planning scenarios about this expected this. The problem isn't Donald Trump. The problem is the Republican leadership in the Senate, in the House, in the states where they have authority over election outcomes. They're not doing what some extraordinary of the secretaries of states are doing, calling out the lies, calling out the danger and the danger to democracy and educating their constituents and voters about what this does to our norms in the future. Incredibly dangerous.
REID: Yeah, indeed. They're sort of acting more like a Duma than they are like an American political party. A Russian Duma, I mean. Maya, we're going to have to talk at some point about your run for mayor. But you're running for an executive position in which, you know, you run and you try to win your base, but then you actually have to govern those who voted for you and those who didn't. And Republicans seem to be trying to siphon out only Republicans and say we're going to directly govern for this sort of white, Christian minority, emerging minority, and everyone else can go to hell. And even other Republicans are being targeted by these sort of campaigns against any dissent from Trumpism. ProPublica reports that Trump campaign officials began pressuring Georgia's Republican secretary of state even before the election. A little bit of that. Raffensperger — Mr. Raffensperger of Georgia, got an offer — “declined an offer in January to serve as honorary co-chair of the Trump campaign in Georgia....He later rejected GOP requests to support Trump publicly....The attacks on his job performance are ‘clear retaliation,’ Raffensperger said.” They wanted this man who is supposed to be the guy counting the votes to basically behave like the governor when he was secretary of state and was fixing the election so he could win it, they're like this guy needs to do it not for himself, but for Trump.
MAYA WILEY: Yeah, this is not democracy. This is hypocrisy because this is also the same party that claims that it's so important for the federal government to defer to the powers of state. And we saw that hypocrisy as we saw states in some instances working so hard to ensure that voters could vote despite COVID and spreading lies and disinformation about mail-in voting, something to enable democracy in a way that would also protect public health and yet folks then came to the polls. And now we see the efforts to suggest that that, too, was fraudulent, which essentially means there's no means of voting where you can't claim fraud, even in the absence of evidence. And, you know, one thing that we have to remember here that has been so damaging to this democracy is that the attack on people's ability to vote, particularly black and Latino voters, really started in 2010. So as Patrick said, you know, Trump is a symptom of a Republican Party that has refused to pay attention to winning votes rather than making it more difficult — rather, making it more difficult for people to vote who may not vote for them and that, that is ultimately what is endangering our democracy.
REID: And Patrick, your name was called. I mean, this is — we're at a point now where half of Republicans believe that the election was rigged, right? So Biden will have to govern in a country where a lot of Republicans just think his election was illegitimate. So you have that. But you’re also developing this narrative that votes cast by non-white people are in and of themselves illegitimate, so what does that mean going forward.
GASPARD: Yeah, not a new story, Joy. You know, some of us remember not that long ago serving in a White House where people like Donald Trump and others lifted up birtherism and all kinds of other claims to try to delegitimize the presidency of Barack Obama. But let's be clear that this goes back decades. When we talk about voter suppression today in this election cycle, we need to appreciate that going back through the '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, there are clear antecedents to this moment that may not be as dramatic as what’s occurring with the attempt to [INAUDIBLE] ballots in Detroit, for instance, bu it’s an everyday occurrence in Milwaukee, in Atlanta, and so many other urban centers where clearly Republicans are concerned that the more people who participate, the less likely it is they are to succeed in their effort. So this is not a new thing. And I want to say, Joy, shame on all of us, and this is not just Republicans — shame on all of us in this democracy that we don't make voting access a regular issue in our policy work beyond election cycles. So that's not something that we can hang exclusively on the Republican Party.
REID: Well, and — but — but Mr. Brennan, you know, the challenge that will be hung directly on the Republican Party will be that Joe Biden is now going to have to govern a country and try to get a virus under control that doesn't care what party you are, that is relentless and vengeful and murderous, and he's going to have to do that where you've got people on the right, you know, going after the governor of Michigan, threatening to kidnap her and put her on trial, trying to impeach her for having mask mandates. We've got Republican governors who say freedom equals you don't have to wear a mask. I don't care what anybody says, what the science says. He's going to be facing a country where a substantial minority don't believe COVID is even real and it's a national security issue and a security issue for governors. What are — what should he do?
BRENNAN: Well, I think he's going to have to try to restore the trust and faith in the administration, both domestically as well as internationally. Donald Trump will soon be out of the White House. He will pass from the political scene, but the damage he has done to our standing, reputation in the world as far as being that beacon of democracy that really represents those democratic principles upon which our country was founded and which other countries are struggling through. The same thing here in the United States. As Donald Trump has fueled this polarization, he has sown great distrust within the American electorate, within the American population. And therefore, Joe Biden, I think, is going to have to work really hard to highlight the fact that Donald Trump was an aberration, he was abnormal president. But, really, it's going to be up to the members of the Republican Party to, quite frankly, repudiate the things that Donald Trump was standing for and doing. Until we have that broader repudiation, I think as people have said, you know, he is symptomatic of a broader problem and challenge we have in this country, but what he has done over the last four years, I think, has accelerated and has intensified some of these very, very disturbing trends.
GASPARD: And — and — and John, I just don’t think his lies —
REID: I wish we had more time.
GASPARD: — his lies can't survive the 250,000 empty chairs that are going to be at Thanksgiving tables two weeks from now.
REID: Indeed.
GASPARD: And that's something we should all focus on.
REID: Absolutely. Absolutely.
