Speaker 1: All right. This is not a rehearsal. It is not Trump just talking or running his mouth to rile up his base.
Donald Trump is overtly laying out plans for the most authoritarian presidency in American history. It's not an exaggeration. Now, we are not saying he's Hitler, Mussolini or Kim Jong un.
We're comparing him to other presidents. And what Trump has already said he wants would make him the most authoritarian American president by far. I'll remind you that on Meet the Press over the weekend, we spoke about this yesterday, Donald Trump said that the members of the January 6th committee should go to jail for daring to investigate him.
This is what Trump said to Kristen Welker during this Gong Show interview on Sunday. Speaker 3: And Cheney was behind it and so was Bennie Thompson and everybody on that committee. We're going to pay for what they did.
Yeah, honestly, they should go to jail. So you think Liz Cheney should go to jail for what? Everyone on the committee?
I think everybody and anybody that voted in favor, the new director, FBI director and your attorney general to send them to jail. Not at all. I think that they'll have to look at that.
But I'm not going to I'm going to focus on drill, baby, drill. Speaker 1: So here's where the usual MAGA defense kicks in. Trump says lots of things he doesn't mean or there is no real way for him to imprison this these people.
And that's where they are very wrong. Sure, Trump likes to talk big. It's true.
There's no legal mechanism for Trump to snap his fingers and throw Liz Cheney into prison. But let's not pretend that he won't weaponize every single level of power to get as close as possible to doing it. What can Trump actually do?
Well, he's already doing some of it. He's already signaling how he would make it happen. When Trump appoints a loyalist like Pam Bondi as attorney general, he is ensuring that the Department of Justice is not about enforcing the law.
It's about enforcing Trump's will. And Trump's will is revenge. He doesn't have to go and say arrest Liz Cheney.
He creates the conditions. He hires the right people and he lets them figure out how to twist the law into a weapon of political revenge. When he nominates Kashyap Patel to be the FBI director.
Patel's shown he said he's not just willing, he's eager to go out there and be Trump's personal fixer. He was trying to discredit the Russia investigation, his involvement in the classified documents, case pushing election fraud from 2020. You don't need to go and say do this.
If you make Patel the director of the FBI. He can launch endless investigations, subpoenas, legal harassment against Trump's enemies. Doesn't matter if the charges don't stick, doesn't matter if she's never even charged.
The process itself becomes the punishment, and it gets very expensive when you're forced to hire lawyers to defend you. That's how Trump operates. It's not blatant orders.
It's you put loyalists in key positions to kind of bend the system until it breaks. It's very Putin like in that way. And you really only need to look at Trump's first term.
He leaned on DOJ if. Officials to declare the 2020 election fraudulent. He fired FBI Director James Comey when the Russia investigation was getting too close.
He pardoned loyalists who committed federal crimes, rewarding their criminality and the fact that they didn't become they didn't spill the beans on Trump. So imagine the first term, but on steroids with an unrestrained Trump who doesn't have another election to run. Let's also not overlook Trump's audience.
Trump's words about imprisoning committee members are not just hollow threats. They are marching orders for the most diehard followers. The January 6th insurrection did not happen in a vacuum.
It was the culmination of years of Trump's rhetoric taking root with people ready to act on his words. And when he gave the word, they did it. So even if Trump doesn't directly say to Kashyap Patel, the FBI must go after Liz Cheney, he's setting the tone that's going to make it happen.
And he's setting a tone that makes it dangerous to oppose him. Now, this isn't about whether you like Liz Cheney. I mostly disagree with her politically.
This isn't about whether you like Bennie Johns, Bennie Thompson. This is about what happens when the presidency becomes a tool to silence your political opponents. Hard to think of something more anti-American than that.
And Trump is laying the groundwork for something we have never seen in the United States. Timothy Snyder talked to us about it when I interviewed him several weeks back. This is going to be a government run by fear and loyalty tests and vengeance.
And Trump's making it clear. So let's stop the pretending that, you know, Trump is excuse me, Trump is Trump. Trump is telling us exactly what he plans to do, and he doesn't need a real mechanism to imprison Liz Cheney to make life a living hell for his political enemies.
He has the power of the presidency. He's shown us time after time he will abuse it. So the real question is, will we stop him before it's too late?
As I laid out yesterday, this is going to require a blue state governors and others who care about law and order to actually get on the ball will be even more specific about that in a in a forthcoming show. But we can't let him show up with his list of enemies in hand with Cashapp Patel and Pam Bondi ready to do the whole thing.
