Claire McCaskill, former Democratic U.S. Senator for Missouri, delved into authoritarian conspiracy theories during a Tuesday night appearance on MSNBC, drawing parallels between former President Donald Trump and notorious dictators such as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
McCaskill initiated her monologue by reflecting on comparisons made by her colleagues between historical dictators’ language and Trump, who recently faced criticism for referring to political opponents as “vermin.” However, she asserted that it is other aspects of the Republican leader that make him “more dangerous than” Hitler.
“The difference, though, [that] I think makes Donald Trump even more dangerous, and that is he has no philosophy he believes in. He is not trying to expand the boundaries of the United States of America. He is not trying to overcome a neighboring country like Putin is in Ukraine. He is not going for some grandiose scheme of international dominance. All he wants is to look in the mirror and see a guy who is president. All he cares about is selfish, self-promotion,” she stated.
“That’s the only philosophy he has, which makes him even more dangerous because he has actually said out loud that it would be okay to terminate the Constitution to keep him in power. He said this. He actually said those words,” she added.
After the 2022 elections, President Trump wrote on Truth Social that the prevalence of fraudulent elections necessitates “the termination of all rules … even those found in the Constitution.” Following bipartisan criticism, he clarified that his remarks were taken out of context by political adversaries.
“The Fake News is actually trying to convince the American People that I said I wanted to ‘terminate’ the Constitution. This is simply more DISINFORMATION & LIES,” Trump wrote at the time.
McCaskill’s inflammatory rhetoric aligns with a growing trend of antidemocratic language on the left, fueled by the acknowledgment that President Trump could potentially defeat President Joe Biden in the upcoming election. Other instances include an MSNBC columnist stating that the former president deserves to “die in prison,” Joe Scarborough predicting the demise of the Justice Department’s impartiality under Trump and suggesting he would “execute” political opponents, a liberal network guest proposing a new form of the Patriot Act to target conservatives, and a Democratic congresswoman initially stating that President Trump should be “shot” before retracting her remarks.