On Wednesday, during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) complained that President Donald Trump was moving the United States toward an “autocracy.”
Co-host Jonathan Lemire said, “The president yesterday gave a speech to some of the most senior military leaders in the US Armed Forces. It was not the traditionally, those speeches are sort of apolitical. This one very much wasn’t largely akin to a Trump rally speech, but we wanted to highlight one line in particular to get your response, in which he says that he told the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, that the military should use American cities as training grounds. What is your response to that, sir?”
Schumer said, “This is so against the American way for 200 and however many years we’ve had this great republic. The military protects us from foreign enemies and our local police departments, sheriffs and some federal agencies like the FBI, which they’re decimating now for political purposes.”
He added, “This is backfiring. When they tried to do this in California and they thought it was going to be such a winner, the Californians across the board erupted and said, we don’t want this, you’re creating it worse. In Oregon, which he just said he wanted to go into, the governor said, we don’t need you. If you want to help augment the kind of dollars we need for police and for sheriffs, do it. So this is totally against the American grain. And it’s one example of many that they’re moving to an autocracy away from a democracy. In dictatorships, the federal military goes into the cities to do bad things. In this case, we should resist it in every step of the way and the American people are. Nobody likes this except a few hardcore people.”
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