“The election is now just 25 days away, and Donald Trump is very clearly planning to run the same playbook from last time,” Chris Hayes warned at the start of his MSNBC show on Friday. “We are watching a slow motion insurrection.”
“These final weeks of the campaign, Trump and his allies are laying all the groundwork, getting ready to reject the free and fair result of this election if he does not win. That’s plain as day. We all know it right?” He continued. “Today, JD Vance said he would help his running mate in another coup attempt, after refusing to acknowledge that Trump actually lost in 2020 over and over again.”
At this, Hayes ran a clip from a disturbing New York Times interview with the GOP vice presidential candidate in which Vance again and again refused to admit Trump lost the presidential election in 2020. In the interview Vance, who it should be noted has recently spread vicious, racist lies about his own constituents, also simultaneously lied about that election and implying the 2024 election is somehow already suspect. You can read more about it here.
“It’s not a question if it’s going to happen, like, if Donald Trump JD Vance could go out and be like, ‘Oh, we conceded defeat. We called Kamala Harris. No, again Trump and his running mate have told us over and over, again they will not accept defeat,” Hayes continued. “The people who work closely with him agree.”
At that, Hayes noted the chilling example of General Mark Milley, who recently said Trump is “fascist to the core.”
“That’s who we’re dealing with. And Trump’s allies are already taking action. Republicans are attempting to seed the ground for a legal battle, filing election-related lawsuits all over the country. According to democracy docket, voting rights news platform that tracks election litigation, the Republican Party has been involved in 97 lawsuits so far this election cycle. That’s more than three times the number we saw ahead of the 2020 election, which again was in the midst of COVID,” Hayes said.
“The lawsuits are concentrated in swing states and key counties likely to determine the race. Several of the suits embraced debunked theories about voter fraud and so called stolen elections that Trump has promoted Since 2020 in the third largest county in Pennsylvania, the state that may be the tipping point in the election, the Republican party seeking to force local officials to count ballots by hand, evoking debunked conspiracy theories about corrupted voting machines,” Hayes continued, adding that similar shenanigans are happening in Nevada and Michigan.
“Now the only answer to this attempt to undo the Republic, to finish what they started on Jan. 7, is to work like hell to preserve democracy through democratic means. Democrats in the Harris campaign have to record, they have to persuade people, they have to use rhetoric and logic and reason right and emotion to win more votes in swing states, and they’ve got to fight back in the courts,” Hayes said. “[And] as we saw last time, it may come down to having enough people with integrity who are Republicans nominally in key positions at key moments.”
Hayes conceded that “none of this is ideal or even really fair, but it’s the reality of the situation. It’s weird not to call it out all the time, like we’re just having, ‘oh, so and so is running an ad. They’re doing these campaign events we’re having.’ You know, even though we all lived through Donald Trump’s first attempt a coup, the one he was never held for account for. There is something, surreal about watching it happen again, right now, in front of our faces.”
Watch the whole thing below: