Raskin: Republican Party Now a ‘Paranoid Cult of Authoritarian Personality’

Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “The Beat” that the Republican Party under former President Donald Trump is “a paranoid cult of an authoritarian personality.”

Raskin said, “I felt, you know, a measure of closure and satisfaction about the question of individual accountability. And, you know, justice in an individual case like that, anybody who has suffered, you know, a crime or lost a loved one to a crime, that kind of justice never equals the sense of sadness and anger that you go through. This is not equal to the immensity of the crime against American democracy, the assault against our officers. It doesn’t equal up.”

“So for me, you know, the work that I want to pour myself into now is the collective accountability,” he continued. “Let’s fortify American democracy against the coups and insurrection and political violence electoral sabotage that’s coming from these people. Let’s hope that the criminal prosecution scares a lot of them off. But the truth is that Donald Trump’s party which alas is the same party that used to belong to Abraham Lincoln, used to be an anti-slavery, pro-freedom, pro-democracy party, and now it is a paranoid cult of an authoritarian personality.”

Raskin added, “That party he thrives on anti-democracy, on voter suppression, on gerrymandering and the filibuster. We need to get democracy moving again. So we need statehood for the disenfranchised populations in Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico. We need a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to vote. We need to repair The Voting Rights Act, which has been dismembered by the Supreme Court in the Shelby County v. Holder. We need to get democracy moving in the right direction, so we don’t lapse back into the authoritarian stuff.”

Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN