Chris Hayes is, famously, not particularly fond of disgraced ex-President Donald Trump. The MSNBC host has frequently warned that Trump is, effectively, seeking to make himself a dictator. And on Tuesday’s episode of “All In,” Hayes extrapolated that line of thinking to the way the Republican Party at large is defending Trump.
The defenses, particularly those deployed after Trump’s 4th indictment this week in Georgia on charges that he and 18 accomplices took direct action to subvert and ultimately nullify the state’s 2020 vote count, are ‘cynicism all the way down,” Hayes said.
And that isn’t, Hayes continued, merely “the core contention of authoritarianism, of anti democratic right wing reaction.” It’s also “the core contention of Donald Trump himself, who hates democracy.”
In case you need to catch up, read more about the 41-count indictment handed down in Fulton County Georgia against Trump here, here and here.
In his commentary Tuesday, Hayes identified what he called “an important principle here.”
“It’s best embodied in an ofte-quoted line you might see online a lot. It actually comes from a comment on a political science blog, and goes like this, quote: ‘Conservativism consists of exactly one proposition: ‘There must be in-groups whom law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect,’” Hayes said, referring to this quote.
“It goes hand in hand with another saying, another way of saying which is often attributed to a Latin American dictator, which goes like this: ‘For my friends, everything, for my enemies, the law,’” Hayes continued, referring to a quote attributed to Óscar R. Benavides, who became president of Peru in 1913 after leading a coup d’etat.
“The core idea here which animates all the defenses for Donald Trump and his, frankly, pathetic lackeys, is that there is no such thing as democratic equality in the law,” Hayes said. “What we should want, and what there is, are people who should be in power and they can do whatever they want to the other people who should be subject to that power.’”
“Donald Trump? Well, he represents the right kind of people whom the law should never touch. The law should be in his hands and he could do with it whatever he wants,” Hayes added. “There is no value neutral sense of equal justice. none of it. It’s cynicism all the way down.”
Hayes argued that this concept is “the core contention of authoritarianism, of anti democratic right wing reaction through literally the centuries… and it’s the core content of Donald Trump himself, who hates democracy. And has always been kind of clear about that.”
“It’s the core contention that animated the sack of the Capitol. It’s the core contention that animates all of our politics as of this moment. ‘Is there really such a thing as democratic reality, as democratic equality? Are we all really equal under the eyes of the law?’ ‘Is that how it is, is that how it should be? Or is there a group of people in the country with an iron fist, even if they are the minority, because the power belongs to them in some deeper sense?’” Hayes said.
“And that latter proposition is what the Republican Party stands for right now,” he concluded.