MSNBC host Joy Reid said Wednesday on her show “The ReidOut” that she believed the voters who support former President Donald Trump have “racial anxiety ” over demographic change, so they want “revenge.”
Reid said, “It’s a vengeance tour this time around. We talk about Trump all the time. We also need to talk about his voters. And I know, I know it’s not popular in the media world to not venerate the great American voter. But as Tom Nichols writes in The Atlantic, these particular voters want revenge as well on their fellow citizens. Nichols writes, ‘The Republican base actively embraces Trump’s grievances. It emulates his pettiness. It supports his childlike inability to accept responsibility. These voters are not sighing in resignation and voting for the lesser of two or three or four evils. They are getting what they want. Because they, too, are set on revenge.'”
She continued, “I want to talk about the media’s role in all of this because we were talking during our morning call, our therapy call, as we call it, about, you know, the question of whether the media has always kind of pulled back when it came to number one criticizing the American voter and looking at them a little more with a little more circumspection but even candidates like Trump. And I go to the 1930s, when The New York Times was doing style pieces on Adolf Hitler, and saying, oh, he is going to moderate himself when he gets into office, and actual power is in his hands. I feel like that is happening again because people don’t want to come at the voters. But these voters are actively saying yes, we want a dictatorship. Yes, we want him to be a dictator. Yes, we like autocracy. And it’s just not being examined.”
Reid added, “People didn’t want to accept it’s not economic anxiety. It’s racial anxiety. It’s demographic panic. The reason we needed Rachel Maddow to exist in the world for most people to know how many Americans were fascist and were pro-Hitler in the 30s. People wanted to believe that all of America wanted to overthrow Hitler and was disdainful of fascism, when there was a giant chunk of America that was for fascism and wanted to replicate a Hitler in Washington, D.C.
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
