CNN anchor Chris Wallace said on this week’s edition of “The Axe Files” that Donald Trump’s “weird” rally last weekend in Ohio shows the former president is “going in a darker and more extreme direction.”
The discussion begins at the 12:55 timestamp.
Partial transcript as follows:
DAVID AXELROD: What worries me is that the more he’s held accountable for acts of corruption, the more he is insists on the, that the system is corrupt. And that becomes more and more central to what he is saying. And he’s been heading in this direction for a long time. But how do you assess him right now? What do you think is going through his mind?
WALLACE: You know, I think. Let me make it clear to social media, I’m not comparing Trump to Putin, but there are some similarities here, which, as a person gets under more and more pressure, there are a variety of ways of reacting.
You know, the old saying, when you’re in a hole, stop digging. Putin isn’t doing that. And, you know, one could argue that Trump–not comparing them to Putin. But in a kind of tactical or strategic sense, is not doing that. You know, you had that weird thing over the weekend where he started talking about the country in very dystopian terms, and they started playing this music and people were putting up one finger and it seemed, not that I’m in any kind of an expert on this, kind of heading in the QAnon direction.
And what one wonders is, and he is under tremendous pressure, you know, in terms of the January 6th investigations, in terms of the documents and in terms of what he conceivably or may have done down in Atlanta with the DA there, now you’ve got Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, on whether he committed fraud by inflating the value fraudulently of his businesses. You know, he seems to be going in a darker and more extreme direction in terms of American politics. And, you know, that would be interesting, but not particularly important, except for the fact that there are millions of people who seem to be willing to follow him in those directions.
AXELROD: Yes.
WALLACE: And that gets very alarming, because now we’re talking about the future of American democracy.
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