Geraldo: I Wish I Had Bailed on the Trump Train a Lot Sooner Before He Threatened the ‘Utter Destruction’ of the Constitution

MELBER: “We all know what orders Hitler gave and were followed. Do you take this as a serious threat if he got a second term?”
GERALDO: “My goodness. Let me just very briefly back up to ‘Celebrity Apprentice,’ because you presented it there, very importantly. The timing is very important. Because ‘Celebrity Apprentice,’ his last season ended just before he announced for president. So, in my personal point of view, here I was, my hangout buddy was suddenly going to be in the Oval Office, the president of the United States, or running for president of the United States. That is a very, very heady mix. That is a very intoxicating kind of situation. A lot, I would submit, a lot of why people go to work in Washington and the White House and here and there is to be close to power. I don’t know, consciously, what my thought process was, except to think that it was pretty cool. In that mindset, in that mindset, particularly at Fox News, you begin to overlook the things that go — that are counter-narrative to that. Anything that smacks of, oh, maybe that’s not — you dismiss charges. Remember, he made fun of the handicapped New York Times Reporter. He was horrible toward the memory, the sacred memory of Senator John McCain, it was just service to the country and all the flag a half-staff at the White House. ‘Why the hell was that flag down,’ famously or infamously says Trump. Even though he did a lot of things when he announced he was running for president, and the Mexicans are pouring over the border and ‘They’re sending their rapists and prisoners and I assume there’s some good people,’ you know, you forgive so much. And I am so disappointed in my kind of blindness, because when push came to shove, he was revealed by his own action to be exactly the person that his critics were saying that he was.”
MELBER: “You feel bad. You feel — “
GERALDO: “ — at the cost of some friendships and all the rest.”
MELBER: “But you’re sharing, you feel contrite, to some degree, about that versus now?”
GERALDO: “Contrition, I don’t know if that’s the right word. ‘Embarrassed’ is another word.
MELBER: “You feel embarrassed?”
GERALDO: “I feel — you know, you’re putting me up against my loyalty to someone who was nice and who was good to me and a lot of — so it’s very difficult to confront and say that I was embarrassed. But in retrospect, I wish I had bailed on the Trump train a lot sooner before he threatened the Constitution of the United States with its utter destruction.”