Ex-GOP insider makes urgent call for Republicans to stop enabling Trump’s wild antics

Deep breath, friends. The 2024 election is exactly 6 months away and Donald Trump’s increasingly bizarre behavior? It was on full display Saturday, embraced by the Republican Party. NBC News reports that at the RNC spring meeting in Florida, Trump called Special Counsel Jack Smith, quote, deranged and an evil thug and compared the Biden administration to the secret police force of Nazi Germany, saying, quote, these people are running a Gestapo administration. The event started with a recording of the national anthem performed by none other than the jailed January 6th defendants. All of this behavior condoned by GOP leaders at the event, many vying to be Trump’s VP pick. Joining us now former GOP communications director Tara Setmeyer. She’s now a senior advisor at the Lincoln Project and MSNBC political analyst Richard Stengel. He served as the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. Good morning, guys. Quick question to you, Tara. I think you’ve now seen convergence, the RNC, Donald Trump around this whole idea that the January 6th insurrectionists are, you know, good people. They can use the prison choir to sing the Trump onto the stage. It is, it is sort of the the completion of the tableau that Donald Trump has established about January 6th, now that it is bought into by the moneyed interest within the RNC. It’s pretty outrageous, Michael, when we watch this, but not surprising. He’s been talking like this for quite some time. This isn’t new. This isn’t new. It’s just that now that we’re six months away from the election, we’re starting to pay more attention to the things that Donald Trump has been saying. But he’s been consistent about this. This January 6th choir singing the national anthem has been playing at his rallies for months now. And the fact that he’s embracing them as quote, patriots and that were the Republican Party seems to be just fine with that. I mean, you had JD Vance, who’s also on a an audition tour to be VP, blowing it off as if it’s not a big deal that it really wasn’t that much violence. And everyone’s obsessed with this. I mean, what an insult to the police officers and the Secret Service agents who were protecting them that day. It’s clear the Republican Party has made a calculation. They’re OK with Donald Trump rewriting history, trying to whitewash what happened that day. And they’re completely dismissing his consistent use of violent rhetoric, political violent rhetoric, in order to achieve his his goals to whip up his people and to try to convince people that what we’re seeing him do and what he’s talking about and what we saw him do before that somehow that’s OK. No, no, no. That’s the Biden administration doing that. Not, not not me. It’s projection all the time. But this is what he is running on. This is the contrast. And we, I’m glad that people are starting to pay attention because we need to believe what he says. Trump is telling us what he’s going to do every single day. Just look at everything we on the last week, from the Time magazine article at to his unhinged rant last night. He’s listing what he plans to do. And a lot of that sounds a lot, a lot like Gestapo, not what the Biden administration is trying to do, which is protect our democracy. You know, we are not making this up. I just, I’m just going to read from the NBC article of what Donald Trump said because people should know. And again, I would like to preface everything with everything he says here is not true. These people are running a Gestapo administration, Trump said, according to audio of the luncheon provided to NBC News. And it’s the only thing they have and it’s the only way they’re going to win in their opinion. Once I got indicted, I said, well, now the gloves have to come off, Trump added, saying Biden is the worst president in the history of our country. He’s grossly incompetent. He’s crooked as hell. He’s the Manchurian candidate. He accepts massive amounts of money from China, from Russia, from Ukraine and many other countries. He’s a crook. So Pritchard. Oh, and he also added that he doesn’t let his legal troubles bother him too much. If you care too much, you tend to choke. And in a way I don’t care. It’s just, you know, life is life, he said. Yes, criming is criming the the piece about being crooked as HE double hockey sticks. I find it very interesting because we know from congressional investigations and the work of the Oversight Committee, not the Republicans of the Oversight Committee, the Democrats. Jamie Raskin and many others, about just Donald Trump’s massive amounts of of of money that came to a number of his businesses while he was president from play and chief among them from places like China, from folks like in Saudi Arabia. When you hear or the that the former president United States of America who’s running to be president again is saying things like this to donors and party leaders and no one is objecting to this. What? What does it make you think about where we’re going? Well, it’s it’s not a good direction. I mean, one of the things I’ve noticed over the last six months or so is this kind of what psychologists call mirroring behavior on the part of Trump and the GOP, where they’re actually taking the language from the from progressives and liberals accusing Trump of having been a terrible president, maybe the worst president. He took all kinds of money from abroad. His daughter got dozens of patents from China while he was in the White House, and he’s incapable of actually having an argument that is rational or logical. He’s always been the person who just responds with the same insult. Remember the debate with Hillary, which she said, you know, you’re a puppet of Russia and he says no, you’re the puppet. That’s this kind of mirroring behavior that he’s only capable of. In the current trial, when the judge said, you know, you probably would like to have to go to prison. Yeah, I would like to have to go to prison. He is only capable of that 6th grade level kind of response and epithet, but the whole party now is doing that. And what we’re talking about is something that comes straight from the authoritarian playbook to besmirch the legal system, to use the symbols of the country to turn it around in the kind of the opposite way. And we’re seeing that across the entire Republican Party as well as his own campaign. And by the way, it’s not a terrible response. And this sense that it’s it takes Democrats to say, figure out how do we have, how do we have to really indict them in a way with we’re not just using epithets and insults, but we’re actually showing how corrupt they are. Cara, you know, as as my friend Michael Steele often reminds me, there is Trump and then there are all of the Republicans who are carrying his water. They were very happy to get up on stage with him to to hear themselves in sort of America’s Next top VP pick. He called Stefanik. He praised her for her role challenging former Harvard president Claudine Gay. He said you destroyed her for JD Vance. And he said, well, he, he used to be my critic, but he turned out to be incredible. He, he says, you know, Scott, he, he wasn’t a great presidential pick, but as a surrogate, he’s unbelievable. Rubio, he’s a talented guy, absolutely being considerate. I mean, he’s flirting with each of them in front of the others and they are willing to allow it to happen. And in order to stay on that stage and stay in this VP mix, they are willing to carry the worst of his authoritarian tendencies. Yeah, they’re despicable hypocrites. They these are the worst people. Because Donald Trump couldn’t become what he’s become. The malignancy of Trumpism could not have spread like this without the enablers. Plain and simple. These are Vichy Republicans. And for the historians out there, they’ll appreciate what happened to the vichy’s during World War Two. They are the worst kind because they know better. None of them. You, you. He went down the list. Marco Rubio, JD Vance, Elise Stefanik. They were critical of Donald Trump when they when they were being honest and thought that the rest of the party would follow them because they’re like, OK, they called him out for what he was. But when the party made the decision to go along with this for political expediency, they’ve now created a Frankenstein monster that they cannot turn back on. So now they have to go along in order to maintain political relevance, Relevance. That is the problem here. They are putting their party over country and over principle and at this point over free and fair elections in our democracy moving forward. They know what kind of a monster Donald Trump is. They know that he is off his rocker and that he is unhinged and that what he plans to do, he’s surrounding himself with people that could actually execute at this time, unlike the last time where there were some guardrails. They know this, but they don’t care. And it’s important that Democrats continue to call them out. I’m glad to see President Biden is starting to do that, and his campaign is beginning to do that. That is fantastic. But the Democratic Party needs to speak in one voice, constantly calling this out. Because as the American people pay attention more and more and more, they need to see what the Republican Party actually stands for. And it sure as hell isn’t for women’s rights. It isn’t for minority rights. It isn’t for free markets. It isn’t for a strong National Defense. It isn’t for America being the leader of the free world in democracies. It isn’t. It’s become an apologist party for for Putin, and one that wants to regress back to times that no one in this country wants to go back to. And that doesn’t include a lot of people that look like me and Simone or Michael. They need to start paying this, paying attention to this and making the contract. It’s crazy. And yet there’s still a campaign because it’s still competitive because, you know, I mean, heck, Michael, they’re saying Minnesota at the retreat. They’re saying Minnesota and Virginia, they believe are in play for Donald Trump this cycle. Probably Virginia due to Chris Lasavita working on that campaign now. Yeah, I’m sure a lot of things are in play for Donald Trump, just as they are for for Joe Biden. It requires that you actually run the campaign and that’s going to be part of their problem is that they don’t have the resources on the ground. They’re they’re one of their senior lawyers quit because he wasn’t, you know, bending the knee fast enough or soon enough at the RNC. And Richard, that that speaks to a lot of things that we’ve put on the table. But one aspect of this to me is the most disturbing. It occurred at this dinner as well, this event where Trump said he’d allow anyone who donated $1 million on the on the spot to come up on the stage to to be with him on the stage. So you’ve got to put up $1,000,000 to be on the stage with him. Two people took him up on the offer, including one woman who declared Donald Trump is the person that God has chosen. I don’t, I don’t, you know, know how Sunday School works for her. But that aspect of this conversation to me is always been problematic. How when you when you see this sort of convergence of politics and religion around Donald Trump, what does that say narratively about this campaign and and what we can anticipate as this thing unfolds over the next six months? Well, Michael, it’s a, it’s a form of populism as you know, kind of uniting the flag and the cross. That’s that’s something we’ve seen in the past in American history and it’s kind of diabolical. The other irony, of course, is that, you know, Trump talks about and has talked about since 2016, cleaning up the swamp. He’s the personification of the swamp. I mean, inviting people who would give $1,000,000 on the spot to come up there and pose with him shows the influence of money in politics, that he only cares about money. So this is the kind of thing that is pernicious in our American system, but it does appeal to certain people. And I think, again, the Democrats have to figure out a way to basically indict him for his incompetence and to show the stuff that that the Democratic Party is doing for the country. I mean, Biden was in North Carolina last week talking about $7 billion that’s going to get LED out of water. That affects every American in every state that’s actually governing, something Donald Trump was absolutely incapable of doing.