Eddie Glaude: We Are in a Cold Civil War, ‘Trump Is an Avatar’

Princeton professor Eddie Glaude Jr. said Friday on MSNBC’s “Chris Jansing Reports” that America was in “a cold civil war” for which former President Donald Trump is the “avatar.”

On the potential indictment of Trump, Glaude said, “It’s historic, it’s unprecedented in the history of the most stable democracy in the world, in the history of the world, we have never had an occasion where we’ve had to hold accountable by our criminal justice system a former head of state or a head of state. So we’ve always carried ourselves as, in fact, the most stable democracy the world has ever seen, and typically in these sorts of moments, it reveals the fractures, the fault lines at the heart of the politics. So this is unprecedented. It is a reflection of a crisis point. We can’t understate that even as we try to understand the rule of law, you know, try to downplay, we don’t want to fall into the trap of melodramatic, but we have to understand it for what it is. It’s an historic moment.”

Jansing asked, “Where is our democracy right now, and what does this indictment say about its strength.”

Glaude said, “We are in a cold civil war. There’s no doubt about it, and that cold civil war falls along the lines of Republican and Democrat, and that, of course, has racial and class undertones and overtones, but we’re in a cold civil war. We can’t deny that and Trump is an avatar. He represents all of these sorts of grievances, these fears, this sense of marginalization, the skepticism about government, about the other and the like. So all of this is out in the open, and this trial, and I think there will be cascading indictments, this is just a first of others to come, I believe. It bears wears the weight of those divisions.”

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