MSNBC host Joy Reid compared President Donald Trump to Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and a number of other totalitarians after his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention on Thursday.
“All I have to say is as I’m watching this, I’m thinking Fidel Castro, Julius Caesar, Mobutu Sese Seko,” said Reid, who famously gushed over many of the lackluster performances during last week’s Democratic convention.
“That was not an American president giving an acceptance speech. That was a monarch,” she continued. “It was—it was very much like what Castro used to do, an hour and 10 minutes, that clocked in.”
Trump’s acceptance speech is what the U.S. would look like if he overturned democracy and declared himself a dictator, Reid continued.
“He made the White House into the Trump palace,” she said.
“If democracy in America ever falls and we become a complete autocracy with a decrepit leader and his corrupt family moving their trunks into the White House and never leaving, if we become—if we become the old [Democratic Republic of Congo], you know, or we become what Brazil is now, if we just fall as a democracy, tonight is what it will look like,” she went on to claim.
Reid’s comment about Castro is particularly interesting considering several members of the Democratic Party have openly praised Castro’s communist policies.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., came under fire during the presidential primary for past comments he had made in support of Castro’s literacy program, and he refused to disavow his past praise even after being confronted.
Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., who was reportedly on Joe Biden’s vice presidential short-list, praised Castro in 2016 after Castro’s death, saying that “the passing of the Comandante en Jefe is a great loss to the people of Cuba.”
Reid has never publicly criticized Sanders or Bass for their comments, but she had no problem likening Trump to a “decrepit, corrupt monarch.”
“This was a crime,” she said of Trump’s acceptance speech.
“Every Cabinet member that was sitting there was violating the Hatch Act,” she falsely claimed, in reference to a federal law that prevents some officials from engaging in political activities under specific circumstances.
Those provisions did not apply to the convention speech. Nonetheless, Reid continued in her rant: “Ivanka Trump was violating the Hatch Act. This was repugnant to see a campaign sign festooned on our property, on the White House, with a big iron gate outside so that the people can’t even come in. This was repugnant. This would be the end of America. If this is what we’re going to be, this won’t be a democracy. That’s a monarchy. It was repugnant.”
