Ben Rhodes: Trump ‘Absolutely’ a Threat to National Security

Friday on  MSNBC’s “Deadline,” former Obama administration Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes called President Donald Trump a threat to national security.

When asked if Trump was white supremacist, Rhodes said, “Well, I certainly agree. Check the videotape. This is a man who built the program where my old boss wasn’t born in the United States. Would he possibly be saying that if Barack Obama was white? No. In his first speech, he calls Mexicans rapists and on and on. The fact the massive uptick in white supremacy violence is somehow just coincidental that they say the same things the white supremacists say on message boards, you know beggar’s belief here, Nicolle. We have to call a thing what’s they are.”

He continued, “This is a national security crisis I would say, Nicolle. The number one threat to the American people in terms of their personal security is a threat of white supremacist terrorism. That’s not just my view, that’s the view of the director of the FBI. A normal president would be running meetings on this in the White House. A normal president would be putting more resources on this challenge. A normal president would have Department of Justice and Homeland Security trying to figure out what the radicalization process that is leading to these shootings. If you look at Donald Trump, what we hear from the reporting is the Department of Homeland Security scrubbed mentions of white supremacist terrorism in favor of just focusing on Islamic terrorism because they don’t want to upset Trump. Just think about that, because they don’t want to upset the feelings of the president of the United States, his own team is avoiding bringing to him the number one threat to the American people. If we look at the juxtaposition of guns, another national security white supremacist terrorism and Russian interference in our election, these are the national security challenges confronting the United States, and the president is willfully ignoring them. I would like to see Democrats make these national security arguments, getting guns off the streets, getting the white supremacists that lead to violence and securing our elections.”

Host Nicolle Wallace, asked, “I want to ask a yes or no question, is Donald Trump a threat to our security, Ben?”

Rhodes said, “Absolutely. if you have a president who is willfully preventing his own administration from defending our democracy against election interference, from going after white supremacists who are propagating violence in this country and from getting AR-15s guns off the streets that are weapons of war, how is that not a threat to our security.”

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