‘DIFFICULT TO DIGEST’

Chris Hayes Goes Off on Congress for Trying to Brush Aside MAGA Mob

The MSNBC host groused that “there is something frankly kind of appalling about the tone of normalcy that has resumed in the nation’s capital” hours after an attempted coup.

MSNBC host Chris Hayes on Wednesday night excoriated over Congress, and especially its Republican members, who seemingly tried to move past the deadly pro-Trump riot at the U.S. Capitol, calling the attempt to whitewash the violence “appalling” and “hard to digest.”

Hours after thousands of pro-Trump protesters stormed the Capitol in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s victory, Congress reconvened to listen to debates over congressional objections to the Electoral College votes and eventually certify the count.

As the members of the House and Senate delivered speeches on the floor Wednesday night, MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow contrasted the chaos from that afternoon’s coup attempt to the congenial scene occurring before them.

“Chris, I am struck by the fact that as we are watching particularly that lower right-hand quadrant of the House floor, that is a scene where just a few hours ago, more than a dozen members of Congress were sheltering on the floor, under the desks and under the chairs in there while gunfire erupted through the door of the House chamber,” Maddow noted.

“A woman was shot and ultimately died from her wounds not far from there,” she continued. “Members of Congress wearing gas masks. Members comforting each other while they’re hiding for their lives. Now we’re proceeding with these objections to the vote.”

Hayes, meanwhile, didn't hold back in response.

“You put your finger on what I’m finding difficulty with at the moment,” he told Maddow. “At one level I understand and I think it’s admirable and correct and appropriate to proceed with business as usual to show that they are uncowed by the armed insurrectionists.”

Stating that “reasserting normalcy is all well and appropriate,” the progessive MSNBC star added that “there is something frankly kind of appalling about the tone of normalcy that has resumed in the nation’s capital.”

Calling the MAGA siege on the Capitol as the “most severe threat to democratic sovereignty in the nation since the Civil War,” Hayes fumed that this is being treated as “some kind of unpleasant episode” in an attempt to move on and ignore what happened.

Congressional Republicans, Hayes said, attempted to brush aside “the pressing emergency that faces the nation right now, which is that the President of the United States is clearly a danger and threat to the republic and needs to be lawfully removed from office as fast as is legally practicable.”

The MSNBC host wrapped up his furious monologue by torching the sanctimonious floor speech by Republican Sen. Ben Sasse, in which the Nebraska lawmaker waxed poetic about the need for neighborly values.

“To watch Ben Sasse speechify about shoveling your neighbor’s snow, which is a good, nice thing to do, while the president’s retains control of the nuclear codes, having urged his battalions of fascist thugs to storm the Capitol is just very, very difficult to digest, I have to say,” Hayes fumed.

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Justin BaragonaSenior Media Reporter

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