Rachel Maddow Warns Trump 2.0 Mass Deportations ‘Playing With Fire’
“They’re looking forward to the fights they’ll provoke,” the veteran MSNBC pundit said on Friday.
Star MSNBC political pundit Rachel Maddow issued a scathing rebuke ahead of President-elect Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration, warning that his second term would test “what our values are” as a nation.
Speaking with her network colleague Alex Wagner on Friday night, Maddow said Trump’s ‘Day One’ promises of mass deportations, ending birthright citizenship, and pardoning his Capitol rioters illustrated how his administration would continue to test the foundations of American values.
“I think they want to do things in a performatively brutal way because they’re hoping to shock and awe people in this country, and to pick fights,” she said. “I think they’re looking forward to the fights that they’ll provoke, and you know, that’s playing with fire in terms of our civil fabric.”
Maddow added, “It’s also playing with fire in terms of people potentially getting hurt. But I think that’s what they’ve wanted for a very long time. I think that’s Stephen Miller’s vision of the sort of accelerationist race conflict that he’s been looking for since he was a teenager, and they’re going to try and start it, and Americans are going to have to decide [...] what our values are in this context.”
The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s administration is planning a series of shock-and-awe raids to deport undocumented migrants across the country–beginning in Chicago, a sanctuary city, as early as next Tuesday.
Tom Homan, who’s tipped to serve as “border tsar” in Trump’s forthcoming cabinet, told Fox News on Friday the new government was eager to “take the handcuffs off ICE and let them go arrest criminal aliens.”
Reflecting on Homan’s recent comments, Maddow said, “I think that we are going to see resistance to those things, I think we are going to see communities react to households and businesses being raided and families torn apart.”
She added, “I don’t know how well organized or visceral it’s going to be, but that could potentially be a big deal. And I think that we should be ready again, sort of ready for anything in terms of what that turns into.”
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