Transcript: Trump Rages at Mitch McConnell in Ugly but Revealing Rants
Ornstein: It was interesting, Greg, to take it in a slightly different direction. I watched slack, odd, and appalled when Trump did his press conference after the deadly airplane helicopter crash at a national airport. And it was 30 seconds of the boilerplate that had been written for him offering condolences to those that had been lost, and then it moved into yet another sociopathic rant. Republicans in Congress watching this knew it as well.
What they know is that he has no regard for people going through difficulties, for human life, basically. That may be the definition of sociopath, and public humiliation is an important part of it. But it’s public humiliation that can also lead to violence. We know what’s happened to others who have bucked Trump in the past, Republicans in Congress who ended up resigning because they were getting death threats. We know that he pardoned the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the most vicious among those who brutalized and murdered police on January 6, who went after Mike Pence, who went after members of Congress, many of whom thought they would not live through that day. They take these death threats seriously. And he’s got a group of people now, a vigilante force that could well go out there and threaten the lives or wellbeing of any members of Congress, judges, or others and their families who take him on.
It is the mark of a dictator. So much of what we see in what Trump is doing, the playbook is right out of Viktor Orbán in Hungary, goes beyond public humiliation and that’s something, crazy as it is, they have to worry about. I know people who have gotten death threats. I know from pretty reliable sources that Bill Cassidy, the senator from Louisiana, the physician who knows full well how dangerous RFK Jr. is to his own constituents in Louisiana, has a primary challenge from the right when he’s up in 2026. We know that Elon Musk—President Musk we can call him or deputy president, or whatever you want to call him—and other billionaires have said that they will put huge sums of money into these primary challenges, but what I’ve also told is that he and his family have gotten death threats.
