“Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski addressed a statement put out by former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) addressing President-elect Donald Trump’s victory during a Wednesday segment with writer and international affairs analyst Tom Nichols.
“Tom, you argue in your latest piece for ‘The Atlantic’ that democracy is not over,” Brzezinski began before getting to Cheney’s somewhat unhinged remarks. “I’m going to get to that in just a moment. I first want to read Liz Cheney’s statement on the results of this election.
“And she says, she tweeted this out, ‘Our nation’s democratic system functioned last night and we have a new president-elect. All Americans are bound, whether we like the outcome or not, to accept the results of our elections. We now have a special responsibility as citizens of the greatest nation on Earth to do everything we can to support and defend our Constitution, preserve the rule of law, and ensure that our institutions hold over these coming four years. Citizens across this country, our courts, members of the press, and those serving in our federal, state, and local governments must now be the guardrails of democracy,’” the co-host said before asking Nichols about “the possibility that that can happen.”
“Well, strangely enough, I think I’m glad that Trump won an outright majority because I don’t think the country could have taken one more election where the Electoral College produced this kind of freak outcome of the loser of the popular vote becoming the president,” he said, despite the fact that the country’s founders created the electoral college because they didn’t believe a direct democracy was viable long-term.
“This is clarity now. You know, Donny made the point about not walking up to people and, you know, getting in their face. But I think it’s — on this we can say this is a clear choice. This is what you, the American people — 51 percent of the American people, wanted.” he continued. “This isn’t an accident. It’s not the Russians. It’s not some fluke. This is a choice, and the American people have made a choice. He is the legitimately elected president of the United States.
And I think Cheney — what Cheney said was absolutely right. And I — what she said at the end of her statement, I echoed in what I put out this morning, saying now, if you really care about democracy, you care about what happens in courts, in state houses, in the federal civil service, in the military, you know, these institutions are all still there, and they all require protecting,” he continued.
“But I — I think one of the things that I’m really concerned about is that — and I’ve been — and I actually had been having a bad feeling about this election for a while,” Nichols said before he seemed to disparage the tens of millions of Americans who voted for Trump.
“I — it was cemented when I was in Pennsylvania about a week ago, and I had a long conversation with a Trump voter, where I came to realize that there was almost nothing, this postmortem that we’ve all been going through about what Biden could have done, or Harris could have done, or Walz, or Shapiro, I’m not sure anything could have been done, because I think there’s been something changed out there in America that’s really concerning,” he said, without elaborating.
