Watch Turkish coup survivor Zeynep Tufekci explain why we need to call what Trump is doing a coup
Tufekci: “The fact that it’s ridiculous does not make it unserious or not dangerous”
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From the December 7, 2020, edition of MSNBC's All In with Chris Hayes
ZEYNEP TUFEKCI (GUEST): And more importantly, and I think this is the part where the smoke kind of needs to clear, is that the Republican leadership has not come out and said, "You have to stop this right now."
And that's really important, because this is not a child whose tantrum we're watching. This the man who is the President of the United States, with whom we trust with the nuclear codes, who has executive power, and he is blatantly trying to -- yes, very clumsily, very buffoonish, it's clownish, it's not going to work, the lawsuits are incoherent -- but it's still an attempt to overturn a legitimate election --
CHRIS HAYES (HOST): Yeah.
TUFEKCI: Not through legal means but through extra legal means. And I -- you know, I'm an academic. I can argue forever is this an oligarch, which is technically a little more correct.
There's words like constitutional coup, there's democratic backsliding, which this country seen over the past few decades.
So, I can get even more and more precise and detailed about the technical term. But if you just kind of step back and look at it --
HAYES: Right.
TUFEKCI: It doesn't really matter what the exact term is unless we're contesting our grades here. You know, if I'm marking a paper, yes. But the reason people say coup is that it captures the spirit of what's being attempted.
HAYES: That's right.
TUFEKCI: And the fact that it's ridiculous does not make it unserious or not dangerous especially because the Republican lack of concern, fury, anything about it when there's already so much minority rule entrenched in this country is something really worrisome.