Joy Reid Floats a Conspiracy Theory About Trump Rigging the 2026 Midterms and Staying in Power Forever

Reid: “Whenever Democrats say to me, ‘You know, this is the reason we have to coalesce for 2026, I always add to the end of their sentence, to the end of that sentence, ‘Yeah, assuming we actually have free and fair elections.’ I think it’s insane, honestly, to just assume we’re gonna have normal elections next year. I don’t assume that, because these Republicans — let me give you an example. 16 House Republicans, okay, wrote a letter, wrote down and sign their names and signatures saying that this big billionaire bail out bullsh*t bill is gonna hurt their — “
Ali: “That’s exactly how you should call it:”
Reid: “Yeah, it’s is gonna hurt their own constituents. They said it. They wrote it down. They said, ‘This bill is an abomination. It’s going to hurt our people.’ And then all but one of them voted for it anyway. Voted for it anyway. The only one who didn’t vote for it, it’s not even as if he was courageous enough to vote ‘no,’ he just didn’t vote at all. So what you had — you had Murkowski, Lisa Murkowski, who admitted that this bill is gonna gut the very heavily — it’s one of the top five states for the number of Medicaid recipients, is Alaska. Louisiana’s number one.West Virginia is in there as well. But Alaska is way up there. She admitted this was gonna gut her people, tried to get a fix for them, didn’t get it and still voted for it. So what you’re seeing is, Republicans — what that tells me is that they’re not actually worried about getting reelected. If they feared being re-elected, they would not vote for this bill because they know it’s going to devastate their states, mainly rural red states are gonna get devastated. New York will try to take care of its poor, Maryland, California, blue states, Vermont will try to take care of their poor. They won’t let their poor die the way that they will in red states.Louisiana, Mississippi, they’re gonna get devastated, red states. To me, the fact that Republicans are still voting for the bill tells me that they’re not actually worried about being re-elected. The way Trump is behaving, he’s not acting like somebody who worries that his party will lose power or that even if the party — even if somehow we had normal elections and Democrats took control of either house of — you know, the House or the Senate, he’s not acting like somebody who’s worried about the consequences of that. This is somebody who is behaving as an autocrat because they don’t anymore believe — he said it during the election, ‘I don’t need your votes anymore.’ And he doesn’t. I don’t think Trump intends to leave office. I’m very clear about that. I think he intends to stay in office like Putin, till he dies, like Bukele has done, blown past their term limits. Bukele should be out already. He’s still there. I think he’s gonna try to pull an Orban, pull all of these — Xi Jinping. He’s going to do that because he’s making so much money now, the grift is so good, he’s not going to leave and let all this money go. And I think the Republicans are presuming that they’re gonna put enough restrictions in place that they can’t be voted out. So I think it’s gonna take an extraordinary movement to get rid of them.”