MSNBC's Chris Hayes slams Republican Party as ‘threat to the republic’

MSNBC host Chris Hayes tarred the GOP as a threat to the American republic itself in a hostile monologue against Republicans Thursday night.

"The Republican Party as a whole, as an institution in American political life, is a continuing threat to the republic, even if some of its members did the right thing when called to against great odds and great pressure," Hayes claimed on the June 22 broadcast.

He praised some Republicans who affirmed the results of the 2020 presidential election: "…a few people, more than a handful, a few people faced with the great moral test, who acted with integrity, and ultimately, that’s what saved or democracy."

The MSNBC host juxtaposed the Republicans who stood against former President Donald Trump contesting the election with the larger American conservative movement: "The distance between the genuine individual integrity that [Arizona House Speaker] Rusty Bowers showed and the nature of this broader force that no one, not even Donald Trump, really, truly controls. Because in the end, the whole is greater and worse than the sum of its parts. And the whole really is, right now, a mortal threat to our democracy."

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Hayes has a history of hyperbolic rhetoric that has put the accuracy of his reporting in question. He infamously appeared to mischaracterize a viral video of an NYPD arrest as a "kidnapping" to his millions of Twitter followers in 2020. NBC News correspondent Tom Winter corrected him in a public statement on Twitter:

"It could also be undercover detectives from a warrant squad making an arrest with probable cause for someone wanted for 5 specific crimes wearing visible weapons and vests in a car immediately surrounded by uniformed police officers with NYPD written on the back."

Hayes has also condemned right-leaning rhetoric about free speech amid Elon Musk's battle for Twitter as somehow being cover for use of authoritarian agendas, claiming: "This active desire to own a press, to control freedom of the press, from some on the right, to control who gets to speak and how under the guise of free speech."