Sunday on MSNBC’s Weekends, House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Adam Schiff claimed absurdly that President Trump has “no moral compass” and was contemplating a “military coup.”
After stating falsely that Trump “is creating a permanent class of citizens who believe their election was stolen when it wasn’t” (fact check: it was), Schiff responded to the recently-pardoned Gen. Michael Flynn’s interview comment that Trump “could take military capabilities, and he could place them in those states and basically rerun an election in each of those states,” saying, “I shudder every time I see Michael Flynn to think that that man was the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. What he’s just saying is perfectly normal, perfectly ordinary, done 60-some odd times in history is a military coup. That’s what he’s talking about. I’ve resisted using the word coup to describe these efforts by Trump to make these bogus lawsuits and make these bogus claims, but what Flynn’s talking about a military coup. That may have done 60 times in history, but it’s been done by dictators around the world, not in the United States.”
He added, “Could the president do it? I don’t think the people around the president are going to go along with it. It would fail. But it would be such an additional destructive blow to our democracy. The fact that they’re entertaining this is so beyond the pale. But, again, this is a man who has no moral compass. He will do the length and breadth of what people let him get away with. Sadly, he’s had all too many enablers in his own administration and the Republicans in Congress, and that’s what even breeds this kind of reckless talk.”
This is all fact-free demagoguery. To paraphrase Schiff himself, he is creating a permanent class of citizens who don’t believe the election was stolen when it was. He is demonizing Trump as a would-be dictator, when in fact, it is the Democrats who have no moral compass and will do anything to acquire and/or keep power.