MSNBC Guest Accuses Trump’s 77 Million Voters of Wanting to ‘Destroy the Republic’ Rather Than ‘Elect a Black Woman’

GLAUDE: “I don’t know what it’s going to take for the American people, for 78 million Americans to deal with what motivated them to make the choice to elect this man again, to make the choice that will allow these people to undermine every fundamental assumption we have that you can just be disappeared. And then they can argue that, you know, a court is getting in the way of their ability to exercise, you know, foreign policy in some ways, right? I don’t — I don’t know what it’s going to take for 78 million Americans to deal with what motivated them to make this choice. And the choice that they’ve made, we have to just be honest, is to literally throw the Republic into the trash bin. And this is just one example. The tariffs is another, right? They made the choice. Now, what was behind it? We have to grapple with it because it’s the snake, it’s — it’s the beast coiled up in the heart, the bosom of the country is, as Frederick Douglass said. And the fact that they are doubling down on this shows you what kind of human beings they actually are.”

Wallace: “Say more.”

GLAUDE: “We chose a felon who is more interested in loyalty, who’s more interested in retribution, who’s more interested in grift than in democracy. And we chose a felon because we didn’t want to elect a black woman. So, to read that, to actually explicate that is to say we would rather destroy the Republic than for that to have happened. And until we grapple with it, there’s no amount of protesting I could do, there’s no amount of resistance that could come into play to actually force 78 million people to grapple with what motivated them to put themselves in this position.”

Wallace: “And I think you’re getting it how we’re going to have to go through the next four years, right? Because I haven’t on this show covered the talk of a third term because I believe it’s a shiny object. I believe the things driving Trump’s approval rating down are the man-made destruction of the economy, abandoning due process. But you’re right in that 78 million people voted for someone who wants to shred the Constitution. Why?”

GLAUDE: “That’s the key.”

Wallace: “What’s the answer?”

GLAUDE: “There is a sense in which the underbelly of the country, what Melville was writing about that, that there’s this sense, this tragic, this tragic dimension of the American project where the extension of basic democratic principles, the idea that dignity and standing should be accorded to anyone, no matter their gender, no matter where they’re from, no matter their color, that has been challenged because some people believe that by definition they ought to be superior to others and that the country should be organized in such a way to ensure that fact. And we have been willing to do monstrous things in defense of it, monstrous things. And people have been using it, in some ways, Nicolle, for their own self-interest. They might not be monsters in that sense, but they might be unabashedly greedy. They just want to make money and exploit people’s grievances and hatreds in the way. But we’ve been dealing with this from the very beginning. And, you know, people will say Eddie’s on his horse again. He’s on that horse. But we’ve been —“

Wallace: “It ties everything together.”

GLAUDE: “That’s it.”

Wallace: “And I want to give you the last word, Andrew. I mean, the greed piece is where I was, where my brain goes on, these law firms. And look, I didn’t sit in Brad Karp’s seat when he looked at his firm that I’m sure he loves and is proud of, falling apart. But if it’s all the things we thought it was, if it’s this beacon of justice, if it stood with people who in the beginning maybe were not given all the rights of sort of a ruling, if it stood for the things that it thought it stood for, could it really have fallen down over money?”