Presidential historian: ‘Trump tried to destroy our system’

Presidential historian Michael Beschloss said Wednesday that former President Trump attempted to “destroy our system” through his actions taken Jan. 6, 2021.

Beschloss said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that in the hours since special counsel Jack Smith delivered an indictment against Trump for attempts to overturn the election, people have questioned how the latest indictment will fit “into the larger American story.”

“I think the last 12 hours fit perfectly into the American story,” he said. “And that is this. From time to time, America faces threats from monsters who want to destroy our democracy.”

Trump was indicted Tuesday by a Washington grand jury on charges in connection with efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The 45-page indictment contends that the former president engaged in a campaign of “dishonesty, fraud and conceit” to obstruct a “bedrock function” of a democracy.

5 takeaways from Trump’s indictment for trying to overturn the 2020 election

Beschloss went on to compare Trump to supporters of the Confederacy, perpetrators of the Pearl Harbor attack and the terrorists responsible for 9/11, explaining how each event included people who wanted to “destroy” the democracy of the United States.

“What we see in this indictment, is that on Jan. 6, 2021, Donald Trump — just like those other threats to American democracy — tried to destroy our system to take away our rule of law, came very close to doing it, to take away our system of elections, to take away our tradition of peaceful transfer of power to a new elected president.”

Beschloss also warned that Trump could attempt to destroy the system again, as he remains the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination.

“Who is the Republican front-runner? Donald Trump, threatening to do it all again, but even more effectively, saying he’s going to institute a presidential dictatorship that we may assume is going to take our democracy away,” he said.

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