Prosecutors should consider arresting former President Donald Trump for allegedly trying to initiate an “administrative coup, if not a bloody coup” and “acting like an Adolf Hitler,” said CNN’s Jim Acosta on Wednesday night’s episode of “Cuomo Prime Time.”
“I think, arguably, Donald Trump committed crimes on the way to January 6th,” Acosta told host Chris Cuomo. “Is anything going to be done about it? Why have we not had this conversation in this country?”
“I think it’s a critical question, Chris, whether or not the former president of the United States belongs in the slammer for what he did between the election and January 6th,” Acosta said.
The former White House correspondent provided his analysis after Cuomo read an excerpt from the new book I Alone Can Fix It by The Washington Post’s Carol D. Leonnig and Philip Rucker. The excerpt did not allege the president had engaged in any criminal behavior. The book’s revelations consist entirely of the reported fears, suspicions, and concerns of Trump administration officials and others inside the Beltway.
Cuomo later admitted, “Nothing ever happened to confirm these suspicions. And that’s I think one of the suggestions that this book is going to have to deal with.”
Yet Acosta said, “Donald Trump was behaving like an Adolf Hitler, who was potentially looking to overthrow the government.”
“The question becomes Chris, what do we do about this information?” Acosta asked.
Acosta’s fellow panelist, Michael Smerconish, tamped down the allegations, saying there is “much we still don’t know about the events of January 6.”
But Acosta, who has long viewed President Trump as his personal bête noire, said the poison pen book “aligns with a lot of what we were reporting around the time of the election and then the” D.C. riot.
“I talked to a source close to Trump, around the time of the [D.C. riot], who said that Trump had lost his mind, that he had lost it, and he was essentially trying everything by hook, or by crook, to overturn the election results at that time,” Acosta continued. “I will tell you, I’ve talked to two former senior White House officials, who have told me that Trump is quote, ‘insane.’ They have both used that word, ‘insane.’”
Attempting to force President Trump from office by citing concerns over his mental health became so common that the American Psychiatric Association issued a statement in 2018 saying that it’s “unethical” to diagnose someone as mentally ill without examining him or her personally. “We at the APA call for an end to psychiatrists providing professional opinions in the media about public figures whom they have not examined, whether it be on cable news appearances, books, or in social media. Armchair psychiatry or the use of psychiatry as a political tool is the misuse of psychiatry and is unacceptable and unethical,” it said.
Cuomo attempted to hype President Trump’s alleged indifference to constitutional norms by quoting an alleged conversation Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi had with General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:
Pelosi told the [g]eneral, she was deeply concerned that a “crazy,” “dangerous” and “maniac” Trump might use nuclear weapons during his final days.
“Ma’am, I guarantee you these processes are very good,” Milley reassured her. “There’s not going to be an accidental firing of nuclear weapons.”
Cuomo later asked CNN correspondent Phil Mudd, “Isn’t the real question, ‘Did they have any reason to feel this way?’” Mudd responded that if these thoughts occurred to “someone like General Milley,” they “can’t simply be paranoia.”
The time between when former President Trump lost the election and President Biden’s inauguration was “worse than we knew,” says @ChrisCuomo on troubling new revelations in the book “I Alone Can Fix It.” https://t.co/KxKLzI5VCF pic.twitter.com/TBejmzQvqv
— Cuomo Prime Time (@CuomoPrimeTime) July 15, 2021
General Milley is best known for his viral defense of Critical Race Theory, saying the Marxist-tied ideology sheds necessary light on “white rage.” At President Biden’s inauguration, General Milley told Michelle Obama, “No one has a bigger smile today than I do. You can’t see it under my mask, but I do.”
Meanwhile, the book’s authors, Leonnig and Rucker, have faced questions about the veracity of their previous book, A Very Stable Genius, which relied heavily on anonymous sources. Rucker deflected criticism last January, telling CNN’s Don Lemon that Trump’s criticism of the media “fits a pattern” of “authoritarian impulses.”
“We’re not at war with the administration,” Leonnig added.
That summer, Rucker wrote that Trump’s speech at Mount Rushmore was part of “President Trump’s unyielding push to preserve Confederate symbols and the legacy of white domination,” since “amplifying racism and stoking culture wars have been mainstays of Trump’s public identity for decades.”