MSNBC host and activist Al Sharpton said Friday on “Deadline” that President Donald Trump exposed that Republican leaders have always been “cowardly.”
Discussing Republican lawmakers not calling on Trump to concede, anchor Nicolle Wallace said, “You know, that is going to be the legacy of this time, Rev. And if you look at all of the examples of people he goes after, he has used his Justice Department, he tried to sue John Bolton for writing a book. Charlie Savage reported they tried to go after Omarosa for writing a book, and he’s attacked all three of us on Twitter, and people are still standing. I mean, what explains the cowardice of the Republican man, Rev, that they are the only people that can’t survive a mean tweet?”
Sharpton said, “Well, you can’t bring cowardice out of people that are not cowardly. And what we began to see is that a lot of Republican leaders must have been cowards all along, and all they needed was a bullying to come out and expose it, and that is what Donald Trump has done.”
He added, “What I think a lot of us are missing is that even in these last antics for the last couple of days and today where he’s meeting with Michigan state officials. He’s not declaring war against Biden. He’s declaring war against all of us. He’s undermining the very bases of having voting count. We spend all year trying to get record numbers of people to vote, to come out and vote. Those of us in the Civil Rights community telling people our pain with Georgia Floyd and vote about Breonna Taylor, and people came out in record numbers. He’s sitting in the White House and telling people those votes don’t matter. We could get state legislators to change. I really think we have got to see the existential threat this is to democracy itself. As long as we have Joe Biden against Donald Trump, it is much deeper than that. And I think that is what President Obama was addressing. That the Republican leadership ought to be ashamed of themselves to be silent when this has gone beyond the politics of November into really the very fabric of whether we’re going to stand up as a democracy in this country.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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