Chris Hayes: Trump’s Racist Rhetoric Would Be ‘Existential Threat’ Even if There Wasn’t a ‘Body Count’

Following the El Paso shooting in which a white nationalist murdered 22 people on Saturday, MSNBC host Chris Hayes opened his program Monday evening by tearing into President Trump’s racist and xenophobic rhetoric, claiming the president is drawing from “dark sorcery of racial hatred” that is threatening the country.

“Even if there were no blood, it would still be vile,” the All In host declared. “If there were no body count, no deaths to mourn, no grieving families, no young parents ripped apart by bullets while shielding their babies, even if none of that happened, it would still be an existential threat to the America we can and should be.”

After pointing out “MAGA Bomber” Cesar Sayoc was sentenced Monday to 20 years in prison, Hayes went on to show earlier clips of Trump calling asylum-seeking migrants an “invasion” and laughing while a rallygoer called for immigrants to be shot.

“The rallies would still be ghastly and chilling enterprises where crowds are incited and encouraged to give into their worst impulses,” the liberal MSNBC host said. “Where they desecrate our national character by yelling ‘Shoot Them!’ while cheered on by the head of state.”

Adding that even if no blood had been shed “in pursuit of it,” Hayes pointed out just what the “it” was that he was speaking of.

“Well, to quote a phrase, ‘You know it and I know it,’” he stated. “It’s the well of evil from which our president draws and has drawn from the first day when he said Mexico was sending rapists to the U.S., presumably with the explicit intent to defile America’s women—the dark sorcery of racial hatred that conjures invasions and infestations out of desperate fellow human beings seeking refuge.”

Further highlighting the president’s “both sides” reaction to the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Hayes connected Trump’s nods to racism to a rising “body count” and “list of names waiting now to be carved into headstones.”

Noting that political violence is a “distinctly destabilizing threat to the fabric of a peaceful democratic society,” Hayes observed that there’ve been recent “leftist bouts of terror,” specifically the congressional baseball shooting. The progressive stalwart, however, said it required “willful obtuseness” to ignore the recent pattern of right-wing violence.

Asserting the El Paso murderer’s manifesto contained talking points that would sound “more or less unremarkable out of the mouths of the president’s closest advisers or the president himself,” Hayes concluded his emotional monologue by saying Trump “knows what he’s doing.”

“We welcome the stranger,” he said. “We pursue justice. We act as equals in the collective enterprise of democracy. The president and his party stand on the wrong side of that question right now. They have long since disqualified themselves from the support of decent people by doing so.”