Fox News analyst Brit Hume downplayed the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy ― and at the same time warned Republicans about what nominating the former president would really mean for the party.
“It seems to me it’s all a little overwrought,” he told Bret Baier on Monday over concerns Trump plans to become a dictator if he wins. “We had four years of Donald Trump, and he blustered and bragged and threatened and so forth, and yet he didn’t bring us to the brink of dictatorship.”
Hume said Trump’s attempts to cling to power after the 2020 election failed, and he dismissed the January 6 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump’s supporters.
“What was labeled an insurrection lasted three or four hours, and it was no match for the constitutional restraints which exist and would exist in a Trump second term,” he said.
Then he gave Republican voters a warning of what a Trump campaign might really mean: Yet another defeat at the ballot box.
“He’s more likely to drive the Republican Party into defeat at the hands of Joe Biden than he is to drive the country toward dictatorship,” he said.
See his full conversation with Baier below.
Numerous analysts aren’t as sanguine as Hume.
On Sunday evening, for example, MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan warned against treating next year’s election like politics as usual.
“It’s dangerous, denialist madness,” he said. “And I’m sorry, but it ends in only one place: the end of American democracy.”
Presidential historian Michael Beschloss said last month that Trump’s agenda for a second administration is on par with “authoritarians” and “fascists.”
And in October, John Bolton, who was one of Trump’s national security advisers, also sounded the alarm.
“If he were elected to a second term, this time he might [do] damage that would be irreparable. This is a very dangerous period we’re about to enter into here,” he said on CNN.