August 2, 2023

MSNBC's Chris Hayes weighed in after former President Donald Trump was indicted for the third time on Tuesday along with six unindicted co-conspirators. Hayes said what most of us are thinking. The thrice-indicted President was criming around publicly for quite a while, and it has been mentally exhausting watching him get away with crapping all over our country. We watched the Jan. 6th insurrection unfold live on television.

"Like, if this wasn't a crime, nothing is a crime," Hayes said. "We watched him do it on television. We sat at this desk a year ago at the January 6th committee. We knew what he was doing."

"If that is not a crime, then nothing is a crime," he continued. So that part of it is just like, I find really important and gratifying."

"This, yes, yes, of course, this was corrupt," Hayes said. Of course, this was fraud. Of course, it was a conspiracy to defraud the US. We all saw him engage in the conspiracy to defraud the US."

"The second thought I had, it's just about the magnitude of this moment, which I think is just worth taking a second on," he continued. "I mean, with Donald Trump, lots of things are unprecedented. The first time he was indicted, it was unprecedented. And the second time he was indicted, it was unprecedented because a federal indictment had never come down."

"This, this is in the canon of American events, January 6th and its aftermath," he said. "And the reason is that for 159 years after the cannons fired on Fort Sumter, there is an unbroken chain of peaceful transfer of power."

"And not only that, the core story of the American experiment is a fight within itself to be true to the radical promise of democracy," the MSNBC host continued. "That is why Lincoln says at the battlefield at Gettysburg that the question before the nation is whether a nation of by and for the people can long endure."

"It is a test whether the thing can last," he said. "And that's in a category of itself in American history, the Civil War and the death and misery. But this is the gravest political crime since secession. And the gravest test that Lincoln called on the battlefield at Gettysburg of whether a nation of by and for the people that we are our masters, whether that can long endure."

"So I feel profoundly gratified by reading this document because it calls the question in a way that it has not quite been called yet," he added.

And it's not just Trump, but his supporters, too, that have downplayed the Jan. 6th insurrection that we all witnessed with our own eyes. What happened was illegal. It was an unprecedented crime against the United States of America.

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