For this week’s Liberal Media Scream, we have an extraordinary Trump Derangement Syndrome rant that doesn’t just declare President Donald Trump a “strongman,” but more evil than Japan’s attack on America and more dangerous than the Civil War.
It comes from weekend MSNBC host Ali Velshi, who on Sunday spat out a seven-minute-plus speech denouncing Trump and Republicans for the “collapse of democracy.” He claimed Trump has enacted a “police state” in cities while Republican “election security” efforts are really the “classic playbook of the strongman.”
It was classic TDS and then he doused his fire with gasoline, charging, “America’s democracy has withstood civil war, depressions, attacks by foreign enemies on its soil, but it has never faced an assault on this scale: an internal demolition carried out not by outsiders or even by well-armed rebels, but by the holder of the highest office in the land.”
Portions of Velshi from Sunday:
It’s Sunday, August the 24th. I’m Ali Velshi, and we begin this hour with a reality check, a crucial one. The collapse of democracy is a strange, almost surreal thing. It can be abstract and hard to recognize in the moment. At first, it just feels like politics. It’s messy, it’s noisy, it’s frustrating, and sometimes a bit removed from one’s day-to-day life. But then the guardrails that we’ve taken for granted begin to topple one after another…
At best, each assault may seem like an outlier until the day you wake up and realize the system itself has become unrecognizable. Well, that’s where we are right now. It’s not where we’re headed. It’s where we are. The tragedy of what’s unfolding and the danger of what’s ahead will be compounded if American citizens en masse, all of us, do not recognize this moment for what it is. Understandably, unless it touches you directly, it’s easy sometimes to miss what’s being taken away…
This is not about public safety. It’s about flexing power, teaching dissenters and political opponents a lesson, normalizing the use of troops against Americans. In the nation’s capital, hundreds of federal troops now patrol the streets alongside [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and [Drug Enforcement Administration] and FBI agents, ticketing residents for minor offenses like broken taillights. Federal troops policing petty crime on America’s main street. Think about that. Crime may be statistically down, but intimidation is way up. The police state is here, and that’s the whole point. D.C. restaurants and bars report business down by one-third. What Trump is doing is designed to bleed blue cities dry economically…
What Republicans label election security is the classic playbook of the strongman: tilt the playing field toward yourself and lock yourself into power. It doesn’t stop in Washington, D.C. Across the country, Republican controlled legislatures are dismantling the last avenues of direct democracy: Citizen ballot initiatives…
The message is clear: Even if voters pass something that Republicans don’t like, Republicans in power will just rewrite the rules. This is not democracy. That is something called competitive authoritarianism. Elections in name. One-party rule in practice.
And here lies the tragedy. Ultimate power in this country still belongs to the people. But every time we accept or tolerate one more red line being crossed, we normalize the next. Each violation larger than the last makes what came before feel almost normal.
America’s democracy has withstood civil war, depressions, attacks by foreign enemies on its soil, but it has never faced an assault on this scale. An internal demolition carried out not by outsiders or even by well-armed rebels, but by the holder of the highest office in the land.
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Brent Baker, the Steven P.J. Wood senior fellow and vice president for research and publications at the Media Research Center, explained our pick: “Ali Velshi is auditioning to win the role as the [Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA)] of the left-wing legacy media: The guy who most excites the anti-Trump world as the chief conveyor of Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
Rating: FIVE out of FIVE screams.