Hillary: ‘Maybe This Would Be Our Last Election,’ in the 1930s People Did Not Take Hitler as Seriously as They Should

SCARBOROUGH: “Madam Secretary, you know, yesterday, we interviewed Andrew Ross Sorkin, who talked to one of the Founders of well of Silicon Valley revolution in the — in the late 80s, early 90s, who said, as much as we’re talking about AI, we’re not talking about it enough. I feel the same about Donald Trump. We, fortunately, we talk about him so much in the media that, that that it’s just, it’s just hard to do it. It just really gets nauseating after a while. At the same time, a fear that for some Americans, they’re not focusing enough on a president who said he would be a dictator on day one, that he would terminate the Constitution, that he would execute the chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff’s, that he would immediately jail reporters who he didn’t like, that he would immediately find guilty of treason news organizations that didn’t talk the way he wanted them to talk or run the way they wanted him to run. We can go down the list. He said he was going to fire U.S. attorneys that wouldn’t immediately jail his political opponents. We can go on and on. And I find myself thinking back and people will say I’m being too dramatic, I don’t think I am. I’m thinking back to Richard Cohen column there was written probably in 2007, 2008, where he talked about this scene around a lake in Germany, in 1937, and how peaceful, how beautiful it was, and everybody was going about their business. 1937 kids were playing. And — and then he — he said nobody saw it coming. Nobody saw it. A year later, the world had changed. Jews were being rounded up, slaughtered, executed. So we find ourselves in this sort of a dilemma, we seem to talk about him so much and yet, I don’t know that people are really getting their arms around just what a threat, a democracy, American democracy, the American experiment is facing right now. Help us out with that, if you will.”
Clinton: “You know, Joe, I — I think you make a really important point. I mean, it’s one thing to cover the circus, and the circus is covered. I mean, people can’t stop covering the circus, every utterance, every insult every outrageous action or comment, it gets covered. The context is often missing. What does that really mean? And I think it’s imperative, especially for members of the press who understand, as you were just pointing out, the world has been here before, people did not take the kind of threats that we saw in the 1930s as seriously as they should, including American journalists. You know, people were taking at face value that oh, this can be controlled. He may have said some outrageous things, but you know, it’ll — it’ll — the institutions will hold. A determined demagogue, unfortunately supported by members of his political party, other enablers, people who care more about a future tax cut than the sanctity of the Constitution are falling in line behind him. They are trying to excuse some of the most outrageous things that you just recited. And I don’t think the press has done enough to basically say, OK, the circus is here. You can watch the circus. But let’s tell you what that means. Let’s talk to people who have a real understanding of how dictatorships evolve. Let’s look at the people that he admires, and what they’ve already done. You know, back in 2016, we didn’t have interviews with him. We didn’t have a track record of four years in office. You know, there was a lot of speculation. And, you know, I understood that people wouldn’t take what I said, necessarily as gospel about what I thought could happen, I get that. But now we know. We — we’ve seen him, and we’ve heard him. And so we need to do —“
BRZEZINSKI: “Right.”
Clinton: “— a better job of making it absolutely clear that someone who says these things, you know, maybe he wouldn’t jail all of his political opponents. One is one too many. Maybe he wouldn’t try to force out of business, the members of the press who didn’t agree with him. One is one too many. We’d go down the line. And maybe this would be our last election. Because someone who will not accept the validity of an election is someone who doesn’t believe in elections. He believes in his own power, his own right to power and his demand that he be installed regardless of whether he gets the votes or not.”