Ahead of the midterms, Donald Trump has doubled down on his calls to “nationalize” elections. On Tuesday, the president told reporters he believed the federal government should “get involved” if states “can’t count the votes legally and honestly.”
During his remarks, Trump claimed without evidence that three cities — Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta — had “horrible corruption in elections.”
On Thursday’s “The Weeknight,” co-host Alicia Menendez said it was “interesting” that Trump chose those specific locations to highlight, noting that each is Democratic-controlled and boasts a large Black population.
“I think part of what we’re being forced to reckon with in this moment is that there have always been efforts to prevent people of color, marginalized people, from heading to the polls,” Menendez said. “We still have never seen anything quite like this.”
MS NOW political analyst and Princeton University professor Eddie S. Glaude Jr. told Menendez that Trump’s comments were part of an effort to delegitimize the process of elections in the U.S. “We’re soaked in lies, he said. “We’re drowning in disinformation.”
“He’s undermining trust such that he can then intervene in the ways that we know he’s going to intervene,” he explained, adding that Trump was “setting the stage for purging voter rolls, undermining the ability of people of color to vote.”
Glaude stressed that Trump’s efforts need to be recognized as “a five-alarm fire” and Americans “need to understand what is really at stake here.”
During the conversation, Menendez’s co-host Michael Steele said Republicans should be pressured to stand up to Trump and defend the independence of elections.
However, Glaude said he did not believe that was possible, telling Steele that “in a reasonable world, that seems like that would work.”
According to the professor, today’s Republicans “behave in a way that they don’t care about the hypocrisy. They don’t care about the contradiction. They’re either fearful, or they’re just simply committed to holding on to power by any means necessary.”
“I’m sitting here, not as an expert about elections. I’m sitting here trying to think about the moral rot that has put us in this place where the President of the United States can lie repeatedly to us, can say that he’s going to basically try to take over our elections — and Republicans will sit back and nod and bend the knee and do whatever we want to do,” he continued.
With an election quickly approaching, Glaude said Democrats couldn’t just wait for Republicans to come to their senses.
“We are kind of barreling our way to the midterms, trying to figure out what we’re going to do in the face of what we already see and what we see every single day,” he said. “So I’m not so sure revealing the hypocrisy will actually get us out from under all of this BS that we’re drowning in.”
You can watch Glaude’s full comments in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW. She was previously a segment producer for “AYMAN” and “The Mehdi Hasan Show.”