Peter Wehnerlongtime Republican political operative and former speechwriter for the former president George W. Bushjoined MSNBC Morning Joe Monday to discuss a recent article he wrote about Donald Trumpwhich seemed to irritate the 45th president this weekend.
Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski noted that the article appeared to “trigger Trump” as he attacked Atlantic Saturday in a Truth Social article following its publication. Brzezinski then read Wehner’s book article In Atlantic titled “Have you listened to what Trump says lately?” »
Co-host Joe Scarborough later reacted to the article by saying: “You know, Pete, it’s not a close game. What you just threw out there is not a failure. You and I grew up in similar environments. We read the same Bible. We learned from the same Bible. People might look at me and say, “Oh, Joe, he’s a backslider.” »
Scarborough went on to add:
Well, it’s not about me. It’s about reading the Bible and understanding what it says and understanding the conflict between Donald Trump and everything Jesus teaches. Everything in the Beatitudes, everything in the Sermon Mount. You have a guy that some self-proclaimed Christians follow who talks about ending the Constitution, but he uses fascist attacks, as you said, to dehumanize his enemies. He tells staffers that his vice president deserves to be lynched. He talks about executing generals.
He mocks and ridicules an 82-year-old man who was brutalized with a hammer and almost killed. And Pete, you just said it. What shocks me is not that Trump says it. It’s the people who laugh and encourage him.
And I ask the question my parents would ask me, like if I did something like that, who raised you? You were raised better than that. Who raised you? And this is the question I ask of those who applaud the attacks on 82-year-old men and the dehumanization of all political opponents.
“Yeah, that’s well said, Joe. It is also a moral inversion to see people who, for most of their lives, claimed an ethic, not only move away from that ethic, but reverse it and now enthusiastically line up behind it. a person who in embodies a kind of cruelty and dehumanization that is truly unprecedented in American history,” Wehner responded, adding:
It is the subordination of faith to politics, but not just to politics, but to a particularly malevolent and malignant form of politics. And I think we can only partly understand, through the framework of psychology, that this is a kind of mass psychosis that is occurring. You know, David Hume said that this reason is that the passions are slaves to reason. And I think that’s what’s happening.
I think passions rule. And it’s a very combustible mix of hatred, fear and activism. They must raise the threat of Joe Biden. They must be trying to turn him into some sort of progressive woke warrior or, you know, AOC. And so they have to intensify the feeling that this is an existential attack on everything they want. And I also think that it causes a kind of psychological satisfaction that many people feel. Who feel dishonored and discredited. And they see Trump as their, as he said, their revenge. And that seems to excite them.
Scarborough agreed and doubled down on his previous statements detailing some of Trump’s most outrageous rhetoric in recent times.
“Yeah, look, I think it’s eloquently said, Joe and I share your outrage,” Wehner responded, adding:
And I would say that’s doubly true for those of us who have the Christian faith, because it’s an affirmation of the Christian faith and it causes enormous harm. But this has happened historically. I mean, if you look through the 20th century, you see the German National Church with Nazism, you see the Dutch Reformed Church with apartheid. You saw what happened in Rwanda: 90% of the country is Christian. Unfortunately, there is a long history of dehumanization, of passions that consume people, including believers.
And that’s why I think there has to be such a reluctance on the part of other people to try and, in a sense, shake them up and say, do you know what you’re doing? Do you know what you are a part of, you have abandoned almost everything you claim to cherish in your life, to make inner peace with this man who is a sociopath, a sociopath without filter. And he’s not in disguise. I mean, that’s the other thing you’re getting at. He doesn’t hide who he is and what he wants to do. And that not only pushes him away, but it brings them toward him. And this is just one sickening episode in the history of American politics, but also in the history of American Christianity.
Watch the full clip above via MSNBC.
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