MSNBC host Joy Reid said Thursday on “The ReidOut” that President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet picks send a message to women that his administration was “out to get me and force me to have children by sexual assault.”
Partial transcript as follows:
REID: Let me ask you this question because we’ve been talking about RFK Jr. My mind is a bit blown. I mean, I — we knew Donald Trump would go — would go wild. There’s no constraints on him. He can just — he can put all his friends in. But we’re talking about RFK Jr., and the possibility of people pulling back on measles vaccines, on another pandemic happening. You’re talking about Matt Gaetz. There’s a 17-year-old girl out there terrified that all of her records, all of the witnesses against him in this case where she was trafficked could be in the hands of Matt Gaetz and he could be the most powerful law enforcement official in a country, in a case where the President of the United States is an adjudicated sexual abuser. If you’re a sexual assault survivor, you’re thinking, oh, my God, this country is out to get me. They’re out to get me and force me to have children by sexual assault. So the message to women has been insane, okay? And the people he’s nominating are TV hosts, et cetera. Do you think the people who voted for him that you’ve talked to were expecting this?
REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: No. No.
REID: Or true mass deportation.
OCASIO-CORTEZ: Genuinely — genuinely?
REID: Yeah.
OCASIO-CORTEZ: No. And it’s heartbreaking, actually. It is — it is heartbreaking. And people may want to take, like, a kind of vengeful stance about this, but it is genuinely heartbreaking.
People need to understand that there are people, millions of people in this country, and I was one of them, where you are working two, three shifts a day to try to make ends meet. You’re not reading the newspaper every morning with a cup of coffee.
REID: Yeah.
OCASIO-CORTEZ: You’re not. And it’s not to say that people are uneducated or uninformed or anything like that.
REID: Not at a time.
OCASIO-CORTEZ: Like this is real life.
REID: Yeah.
OCASIO-CORTEZ: This is real life. You got a baby on your hip and you got two, three shifts you’re working that way, and you’re trying to make things work, and you have such an overwhelm of information. And I actually think something that’s different about this moment than I saw, whether it was 2020 or 20 — after 2016, is that almost, like, right the day after, people immediately said, were coming to me and saying, he’s not actually going to do that, right? And it’s important to say, people — people may often say, he said he was going to do this. It was right here on the campaign trail.
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