The second day of a brutal attack by President Donald Trump on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) reveals that his worries about a prison sentence are a “trigger” for him, MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace said Friday.
Trump’s “days-long tailspin” and his “two-part smear” of Pelosi expose Trump’s “soft underbelly,” Wallace said in her introduction to “Deadline: White House.” She added: “Apparently, talk of being sent to prison is his real trigger.”
Trump attacked Pelosi for the second straight day Friday, tweeting on his way back to the U.S. from Europe that she is “disgusting” and a “disgrace” after Pelosi reportedly told Democrats that she would rather see Trump in prison than impeached.
On Thursday, Trump ranted about Pelosi in an interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham as the two sat in front of the graves of World War II heroes on the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings. He called her a “nasty, vindictive, horrible person.”
“In the category of ‘you couldn’t make it up if you tried,’” Wallace played a tape of Sean Hannity saying on Fox News that “wanting a political opponent locked up” happens in “banana republics.” Wallace followed with a tape of Trump calling for his presidential rival Hillary Clinton to be locked up.
The Rev. Al Sharpton, a guest on Wallace’s program, characterized Pelosi’s prison comment as using Trump’s own “model” to hit back at him. “It’s like if you’re a fighter and a guy uses your punch because he knows how effective that can be,” Sharpton said.
“The last thing [Trump] needs is for people to start picking up in the street, ‘Hey, he should be in jail, not impeached,’ because he knows how he worked that kind of craziness in 2016,” Sharpton said.
Panelist Frank Figliuzzi, a former FBI official, noted that there’s suddenly a “new ‘I’ word, and it’s ‘imprisonment,’ not ‘impeachment.’”
Check out the entire program here (Sharpton’s comments begin at 13:50):