Donald Trump’s increasingly vengeful attack on his perceived enemies has reached a point where some of his most avid supporters are becoming hesitant that he is going too far.
That was a message Axios founder Mike Allen passed along on Monday morning during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
With the entire panel alarmed by Trump's positioning of troops in Washington, D.C., and threatening other major cities in blue states with the same, combined with the raid on former Trump official John Bolton’s home and office, the segment started off with co-host Mika Brzezinski reading from a Wall Street Journal editorial.
According to the editors, “It’s hard to see the raid as anything other than vindictive. Mr. Bolton fell out of Mr. Trump’s favor in the first term and then wrote a book about his experience in the White House while Mr. Trump was still President. Mr. Trump tried and failed to block publication.”
They then went a step further and concluded, “The real offender here is a President who seems to think he can use the powers of his office to run vendettas. We said this was one of the risks of a second Trump term, and it’s turning out to be worse than we imagined.”
That set up Allen from Axios to tell the panel, “I talked to people in MAGA world, and these are not like Paul Ryan Republicans. these are Donald Trump Republicans who said that raid which unfolded live on your air on Friday, made them uncomfortable, that this seemed like even for President Trump, this seemed like new territory.”
“Now, important to note that we don't yet know the reason for that search,” he cautioned. “We have not seen the documents that were behind it. Axios’ Marc Caputo has reporting that part of what they are looking for here had to do with the sharing of classified information and so there may be more to this than we know. There's reporting out there that it goes beyond the book. So we just don't know. But I can tell you that even MAGA Republicans are uncomfortable about it.”
“Second, the command economy, the involvement of the American government in business, such a change, and it's the deal-making mindset of the president,” he added. “And we've seen this time and again, we saw this in the U.S. getting a cut of Nvidia chips that are sold in China. We see the golden share that the US has that gives control as part of a steel deal and then we see here 10 percent of Intel, such a change. We talk again and again about how the Republican party has changed and we talk about Russia. We talk about trade, this is –– talk about the deficit, this is a huge one.”
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