In a recent discussion on MSNBC with host Ayman Mohyeldin, Michael Steele — a former chairman of the Republican National Committee — argued for jailing Donald Trump as his incessant attacks on witnesses and other individuals connected to his various legal challenges continue.
He consistently calls such individuals out in personalized, antagonistic terms in public, and followers of his have repeatedly run with this to the point of threatening violence or actually carrying it out. Trump has repeatedly been hit with gag orders, though these have both been recently suspended amid continuing legal disputes.
“It’s enormously dangerous,” Steele told MSNBC, discussing the former president’s rhetoric. “I’m just shocked that we’ve allowed this to get this far. I’m just going to use my best analysis that I can give you at this point on this situation with Trump, and his attacks on the judges: put his ass in jail. That’s how you end it. That’s how it stops. […] There’s no other person on this planet, and certainly not in this country, who would be given the kind of grace that Donald Trump has been given.”
There were arguments in court on Monday regarding whether or how to continue with the original gag order in Trump’s January 6 case, with the three-judge panel seeming to some to be prepared to uphold the order in general terms even if they altered some specifics. Trump lawyer John Sauer kept falling back on First Amendment arguments as the judges tried to establish the nature of the standards that he was even pushing and how Trump’s status as a political candidate factored into this approach.
One of the judges brought up the ex-president’s past commentary against Mark Milley, the retired general who until semi-recently was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, contending the jarring nature of Trump’s suggestion for Milley’s execution supported the arguable clarity of the original restrictions on the ex-president’s language. Check out Steele’s comments, highlighted earlier by Raw Story, below:
