In a new video, former MSNBC correspondent Medhi Hasan lays out a rapid-fire parade of horribles on Trump's first-100-days checklist if he is elected once again to the Presidency: declaring martial law, purging civil servants, stacking the government with sociopathic loyalists, persecuting oppenents and the free press, re-instituting the racist Muslim ban, unleashing jackbooted thugs to terrorize immigrants, stripping trans people of health care, and jailing his political enemies.
These aren't just feverish hypotheticals – Hasan is quoting Donald Trump's own sycophants and letting that bloviating bully's own words indict him. Example: Kash Patel, chief of staff to the acting United States secretary of defense during the Trump presidency, who recorded on video saying, "We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government, but in the media. Yes, we're going to come after the people in the Media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We're gonna come after you."
MAGA cultists will cry "fake news" until they're orange in the face. But we've seen this movie before, and it doesn't end well for democratic norms and human rights when a vengeful strongman gets his hands on the reins of power.
Hasan concludes the video with an ominous warning:
Now, I know what the critics will say, "Medhi, these things can't possibly get that bad. This alarmist hyperbole." But those critics said the same thing at the start of Trump's first term in 2017, a term that ended in almost half a million Covid deaths, many of them preventable, a 6-3 conservative Supreme Court that would go on to gut abortion rights and affirmative action, and of course an armed insurrection at the Capitol.
And that was with all the adults in the room and the guardrails and checks and balances. There'll be none of those next time round, just a wannabe dictator surrounded by authoritarian sycophants on an anti -democratic mission of vengeance, cruelty and persecution.
