It’s hard to imagine supporters of President Trump being ’dissed worse than Hillary Rodham Clinton’s slap as “deplorables,” but a former New York Times critic has gone way beyond that, comparing them to cultists such as those who adored Charles Manson and even Adolf Hitler.
For our weekly Liberal Media Scream feature, we present Frank Rich, who was featured on MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell’s show to elaborate on his New York Magazine feature, “What Will Happen to the Trump Toadies? Look to Nixon’s defenders, and the Vichy collaborators, for clues.”
On the Thursday episode, Rich said, “Whatever crimes are found out now or in the course of the Trump presidency is nothing compared to what’s been buried that none of us know about.”
He also described Trump supporters as part of a “cult,” warning “the cult leader, whether it be the Reverend [Sun Myung] Moon, who was a Nixon supporter, or Jim Jones or whomever, Charlie Manson, they’re never going to be reformed.”
Rich on Thursday’s Last Word with O’Donnell on MSNBC:
“What I tried to do in this piece is make the point whoever goes to jail or doesn’t go to jail, whatever crimes are found out now or in the course of the Trump presidency, is nothing compared to what’s been buried that none of us know about, not even a very zealous investigative press has found yet. And people are going to be turning over rocks for decades. And you look back at history, General Motors and Ford both had executives who were essentially Hitler appeasers, and in the case of General Motors, were involved in the armaments that were used against American troops in manufacturing them in Germany during the war. It took 40 years to find all that out, but it all came out.
“And people who support these kind of regimes, whether it be appeasement then or America first in the ‘30s or Trump, which is, you know, let’s face it, a criminal presidency however you want to slice it, there’s going to be a reckoning. And one other thing I wanted to mention is, you can only take the Nixon analogy so far because, yes, Nixon abused his office. He also tried to throw a presidential campaign. But it would never occur to him to collaborate and aid the Soviet Union, America’s own enemy. It would never occur to him, to my knowledge, to break up immigrant families at the border and turn away refugees from horrors in other countries. It would never occur to him to, quite the contrary, to fight climate change science and to downgrade a regulation of environmental poisons. And so these are really serious crimes and whether they produce jail sentences or not for the people who did them, they’ll be implicated and so will their children and their grandchildren. There’s going to be a stain.
“Here, it is a cult because they absolutely — people who, in some cases, did have reputations that they’ve now destroyed, good reputations, have made fools of themselves for their dear leader. And the thing about cults is they always do come to an end. And the cult leader, whether it be the Reverend Moon, who was a Nixon supporter, or Jim Jones or whomever, Charlie Manson, they’re never going to be reformed. And that’s certainly true of Trump. They will never see the problems with their ways. But the people who swirl around them and were taken in, they’re going to pay a price, a human price, and a reputational price forever.”
Brent Baker, Media Research Center vice president of research, explains our weekly pick: “The very definition of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), getting all the paranoia into one article and TV segment, though transferring his disdain from President Trump directly to those working for Trump. Supporters are like those who worked on behalf of the Nazis, the legally enacted policies staff helped implement are ‘serious crimes’ and those in Trump’s orbit are in a cult similar to the one led by Charles Manson. Liberals were upset by the ‘Lock Her Up’ chants against Hillary Clinton, but isn’t that just what Rich is doing here in criminalizing policy disagreements?”
Rating: Five out of five SCREAMS.
