This week’s Liberal Media Scream features the paranoia of the left media fearing that President Trump won’t leave office peacefully, à la Venezuela.
Picking up on how House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed Trump might not leave office if he loses by a close margin in 2020, MSNBC host Joy Reid on Sunday gave credence to how “there is a very real possibility that the president of the United States wants to have foreign interference again so that he can stay office” and “he doesn’t have any intention of committing to a peaceful transition of power.”
She quoted from an article about how Nixon considered refusing to leave office, and proposed: “So, it’s not completely unprecedented that a president at least contemplates the idea of staying in office unconstitutionally. How much of a threat do you think there is of that now with this president?”
Guest Jill Wine-Banks insisted “it’s a much bigger threat now,” citing how during the Nixon era there were “three networks and they all had the same facts. Now you have this awful thing where we have a bubble of people who believe facts that are totally made up.”
Reid, on the May 5 “AM Joy”:
“We face the scenario where there is a very real possibility that the president of the United States wants to have foreign interference again so that he can stay in office, so that he will not be indicted, that he doesn’t have any intention of committing to a peaceful transition of power, and he’s got monarchists in his party who are willing to give up their own authority, as Congress, they’re willing to give up all their authority in order to be obedient to him, the Justice Department obedient to him. He’s stacking the courts with people who we don’t know how obedient they’re going to be. How can we have any confidence that just an election is going cure these constitutional abrogations?”
She later quoted from a Sept. 19, 2018 Politico Magazine article:
“And this says, ‘According to reporter Seymour Hersh, Nixon intimates began to believe that he was contemplating some sort of a coup d’etat to maintain power. An unnamed member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told Hersh that in one meeting, Nixon called himself ‘the last hope,’ and claimed that the eastern elite was out to get him. Said the four-star officer, “his words brought me straight up out of my chair. I felt the president, without the words having been said, was trying to sound us out to see if we would support him in some extra-constitutional action. He was trying to find out whether in a crunch there was support to keep him in power.”
“So it’s not completely unprecedented that a president at least contemplates the idea of staying in office unconstitutionally. How much of a threat do you think there is of that now with this president?”
Jill Wine-Banks, who was part of the Watergate prosecution team, bought Reid’s scenario:
“I think it’s a much bigger threat now for several reasons. One is the media has multiplied in a way that didn’t exist during Watergate. In Watergate, we had basically three networks and they all had the same facts. Now you have this awful thing where we have a bubble of people who believe facts that are totally made up…”
“You could say it can’t happen here. I think a lot of people in past history have said the same thing and it did happen. And we have to be vigilant now, and we have to really get out the vote to make sure that we change administrations so that the rule of law returns, because I do think this is a significant threat.”
Media Research Center Vice President of Research Brent Baker explains our weekly pick: “This is the Left’s paranoia on full display. Democrats have spent the past two years trying to delegitimize President Trump’s presidency through specious ‘collusion’ allegations, yet now, with no real evidence, Reid tries to stoke fears with her audience that Trump won’t leave if he loses. And it takes one in a bubble, to quote Wine-Banks, to see more news sources as an ‘awful thing,’ yearning for a return to a time when three channels controlled the information flow. “
Rating: Five out of five screams.
