Glaude said the executive branch has acquired more power over the past decades, and that power will now be pushed ever further with Trump in the White House.
February 18, 2019

Joe Scarborough wondered how voters in the state of Kentucky will feel about Mitch McConnell funneling money away from schools to pay for "this imaginary phony wall he could have funded himself when he and Paul Ryan were in power for two years.

Eddie Glaude Jr. said he wondered what the political calculus is and thought maybe it was the fear of being primaried.

“You’ve interviewed on this show the authors of ‘How Democracies Die,’ and one of the claims of that book isn’t simply about the autocrat or the figure who emerges who comes and undermines norms,” he said. “It’s about the complicity of elites allowing for those norms and institutions to be eroded.

"So what we see here in this crisis is, the leadership of the Republican party and even the backbenchers, supporting presidential overreach."

“What we’re seeing here is the imperial presidency run amok,” he said.

“Many of us have been complaining over the years about the expansion of executive power. We wondered and we worried that if you had a person who occupied the office who had no ethical backbone, who wasn’t committed to constitutional principles, what they would do if they had access to that kind of power — and now we’re here.”

"So what we have is a president who's pursuing a policy that is basically racist, in my view, who is engaged in constitutional overreach in order to pursue that racist policy, and we have elites in Congress, particularly the Republican party, signing off on it.

“We are in deep trouble.”

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