Nicolle Wallace: Trump ‘Greenlit a War’ Around Race In This Country

It is one thing for people on the right to holler about a civil war over race in America. But when the folks at MSNBC start aping that language, you know something has flown off the rails.

Yet that is exactly what happened Friday afternoon on Deadline: White House. During what at some point sounded like a revolutionary council meeting right before they all head off to the armory to gear up, Nicole Wallace and her guests made it clear that they have given up the last shards of hope that anyone in the Republican Party is going to ever push back on the racial panic coming from the nation’s conservatives. And that includes the one currently occupying the White House.

Former RNC chairman Michael Steele was particularly blunt in saying that, based on his silence about the arrest of Christopher Hasson, he doesn’t think Trump would be bothered to condemn a racist attack against minorities if one occurred:

STEELE: “You have communities of color, you have communities across this country that are concerned about whether or not this president is interested in protecting their interests.”

WALLACE: “You think if Dylann Roof committed that crime now now, is that what you’re saying? No ‘Amazing Grace?'”

STEELE: “Yeah. Yeah. Show me otherwise. Prove it to me otherwise.”

Wallace then played a clip of conservative lawyer Joe diGenova telling Laura Ingraham that the country is already in a civil war. Which would be par for the course for the far right, except that Ingraham occupies a primetime slot at Fox News five nights a week. diGenova is a frequent guest on Fox, and was almost hired by Trump to be his personal lawyer during the Russia investigation.

In other words, this kind of language is getting laundered right into the main propaganda organ of the right, which the president is known to watch obsessively for several hours a day.

This all led up to Wallace’s big statement:

“But I think the conversation on race, it’s not even a conversation anymore, it’s what Joe diGenova said it was, it’s a war. He permitted, he greenlit a war in this country around race. If you think about the saying the most dangerous thing he’s done, that might be it.”

Obviously we’re a long way from this being anything other than blather on the cable news channels. And perhaps it is dangerous for MSNBC hosts to take a conspiracy theorist like diGenova seriously. But it is a sign of how far we’ve fallen under Trump that a conversation like this even happens at all by ostensibly serious-minded people.

Watch the entire segment at the top of the post.