MSNBC host Joy Reid is warning of what she describes as American representative democracy “in decline,” citing recent efforts by former President Trump to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election and the passage of state-level legislation, led by Republicans, on voting rights.
“And the challenge, as I understand it, is that Americans have a kind of conceit that American democracy is permanent when it’s really young,” Reid said as part of a wide-ranging question and answer session published in the Washington Post Magazine this week. “And countries much, much older than ours have had their democracies collapse. And so there’s a certain presumption among Americans that we can’t lose ours.”
“But we’re in the process of losing it. I mean, we’ve officially been declared a declining democracy by this think tank who focuses on democracies. We are already in decline.”
Reid, who has relentlessly attacked Republicans and conservatives during her time on MSNBC’s airwaves, noted Trump’s “attempt to dispute a lawful election and overturn it,” as evidence of an increasing danger facing the democratic process in the United States.
“We had an attempt to do everything from put forward false slates of electors to try to get the vice president of the United States to overturn the will of 160 million voters. This idea that a political party would not accept defeat — you know, we’ve come closer and closer and closer to the idea that the two political parties do not accept the legitimacy of the other,” she said. “We have one political party that’s decided that it cannot, and must not, be defeated. That it doesn’t have to accept defeat. And that is the end of democracy.”
Trump has in recent weeks criticized former Vice President Mike Pence for overseeing the congressional certification of President Biden’s Electoral College win on Jan. 6, 2021.
Pence in a speech late last week broke with Trump and said he had “no right to overturn the election.”
“There are those in our party who believe that as the presiding officer over the joint session of Congress, I possessed unilateral authority to reject Electoral College votes. And I heard this week that President Trump said I had the right to ‘overturn the election,’ ” Pence said. “President Trump is wrong.”
Reid regularly sparks outrage from conservatives with social media posts and segments on her evening talk program on cable.
In November, she angered critics with a comparison between Kyle Rittenhouse’s emotional testimony during his murder trial and an outburst from Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his Senate confirmation hearings in 2018, which she described as “male white tears.”