Former Republican Party chairman Michael Steele said Monday on MSNBC’s “Deadline” that President Donald Trump is a reflection of his supporters who are “angry, frustrated, suffering victimhood.”
Anchor Nicolle Wallace said, “It is always dangerous when he lies to his voters, but it is creating an unprecedented and perhaps unsustainable instability to make his supporters, to make half of this country doubt the validity of Joe Biden’s victory.”
Steele said, “I think we have to step back a moment and say that Donald Trump didn’t have to do a lot of convincing here. Donald Trump didn’t have to do a lot of lying to his supporters. He picked a scab in which they already believed a lot of this. It was beneath the surface. It has been there for a long time, this overwhelming sense of mistrust of our institutions and our executive and political leadership. It’s been there. We’ve seen it. It manifests itself during my watch during the RNC. It was in place during the Bush years. It goes back to Newt Gingrich’s uprising in the House of Representatives back in 1994 and even before that. So, what Donald Trump was able to do was to give it legitimacy, to give it voice, to give it an actual voice in the body of the president, in the body of the presidency. I think we have to understand that this is so much less the work of the mad king than the mad king actually reflecting his mad people.”
He added, “By that, I mean angry, frustrated, suffering victimhood and all of that. So, there’s a lot that we want to put on Donald Trump’s doorstep and deservedly so, but I think we also have to contextualize where a lot of that originated from, not with him, but what makes what he’s done so bad is that he is the president and most presidents, all presidents, up to him, understood that this was there, but still guided the country away from that. Did not give in to those feelings and tried to address them in other ways. This president said ‘to hell with that,’ we’re all in on it. And here we are, 70-plus million votes later.”
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