Rachel Maddow slammed President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in Washington, D.C. this week, calling it the next chapter of his “attempted authoritarian takeover” of America.
“Let’s be generous here. Maybe it’s not really just a generic tough-on-crime thing. Maybe it’s specifically because it’s D.C., which is the seat of the U.S. federal government,” Maddow began on Monday night’s episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show,” after citing statistics that show Washington, D.C.’s crime rates have decreased in recent years. “Maybe [Trump’s] just really sensitive about protecting the federal government.”
“January 6?” Maddow rhetorically asked. “No, forget about that! He’s just sensitive about it now. Maybe that’s it.” Ultimately, the MSNBC anchor explained why she believes Trump’s latest National Guard deployment has nothing to do with him being “tough on crime.”
“Maybe it’s not about crime,” Maddow argued. “Maybe it’s what you can see with your own two eyes. Maybe it’s that he really enjoys using U.S. military force against American civilians on American soil and wants any excuse to do it anywhere he can. Watch what they do, not what they say.”
You can watch the full “Rachel Maddow Show” segment in the video below.
To support her stance, Maddow noted that Trump has not yet commented on the Friday shooting at the CDC Headquarters in Atlanta, which saw an armed gunman open fire on the federal building. The “Rachel Maddow Show” host also cited Trump’s similar deployment of the National Guard in Los Angeles earlier this year in response to the city’s anti-ICE protests.
“While he’s talking about crime, he has sent in the National Guard and active duty U.S. marines to Los Angeles as well, right? Supposedly to save that city from protests against him,” Maddow observed, calling the move “inexplicable” and “palpably disconnected from its purported justifications.”
“When Donald Trump sent troops to Los Angeles this summer on the absurd pretext that some kind of war was on, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and other L.A. officials didn’t just protest against it and try to stop it. They also warned the country that, ‘Yeah, he’s doing this to us first, but it’s going to be you next,’” Maddow continued. “They were clear-eyed about that. They were right.”
“We clearly are now in the part of the attempted authoritarian takeover where our authoritarian leader just starts trying to turn our own military to face us, the people of this country,” the MSNBC anchor concluded. “The questions that are equally important in response to that right now are, number one: What will the troops do about that? And number two: What will we do?”
