Rachel Maddow claims 'Trump has already turned US into a dictatorship'
'Whether you're looking at small–scale local stories or the biggest picture stories about what's happening, the story is the same,' she began. 'We're in a place we did not want to be, but now we're here.' Maddow continued by telling viewers that 'life in the United States is profoundly changing, is profoundly different than it was even six months ago.'
'We do now live in a country that has an authoritarian leader in charge,' she declared. 'We have a consolidating dictatorship in our country. 'It sounds melodramatic to say it,' she admitted, before encouraging viewers to think in 'cinematic terms' of what a dictatorship looks like.
'It's secret police... a massive anonymous unbadged, literally masked, totally unaccountable, internal police force, that apparently has infinite funding but no identifiable leadership.' She continued to claim that the 'secret police' act in ways designed to 'instill maximum fear and use maximum force.'
Maddow went on to explain how, under an authoritarian regime, 'you have a scapegoated minority group,' which in this case is migrants. Maddow suggested that 'all these extraordinary shows of force will be framed as necessary to stop this terrible internal enemy,' and that everything will be framed as 'immigration enforcement.'
'For immigration enforcement, not only is all force justified, but maximum force is preferred,' the host went on. She also claimed that the administration is turning immigration enforcement into 'national entertainment to threaten to feed immigrants to alligators in South Florida,' referring to the so-called Alligator Alcatraz detention center.
The MSNBC host, who reportedly makes $25 million a year , saw her viewership plummet after Trump won the election in November as MSNBC's ratings tanked across the board. Maddow, MSNBC's highest paid anchor, has lost a staggering 43 percent of her audience since Election Day.
As of July, her viewership was averaging 2.02 million viewers, down from last year's weekly average of 2.4 million, according to the New York Post . In June, Maddow claimed that someone must have convinced the president that 'attacking immigrants would work for him politically.'
The remarks claim came in light of Trump's decision to send the military to Los Angeles amid widespread protests against immigration enforcement in the city. The host said Trump made the decision because he was 'panicking' over the growing number of protests against his mass deportation policy, which was a cornerstone of his campaign.
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