Baldwin: ‘Overthrow the government of the United States under Donald Trump’
ACTOR Alec Baldwin urged voters to use their collective voice during the upcoming midterm election and “overthrow” President Donald Trump.
A day after Baldwin portrayed Trump in a “Saturday Night Live” skit about the president’s recent meeting with rapper Kanye West, he addressed voters at a political fundraiser for the New Hampshire Democratic Party, according to the Associated Press.
“The way we implement change in America is through elections,” Baldwin said Sunday night, according to the news agency. “We change governments here at home in an orderly and formal way. And in that orderly and formal way and lawful way, we need to overthrow the government of the United States under Donald Trump.”
Baldwin went on to say that some of the Republicans in power are setting up the country for failure.
“There is a small cadre of people currently in power who are hellbent on continuing a malicious immigration policy that has set this country up for charges of human rights violations by the global community,” he told the attendees. “This cadre has looted money from the federal treasury and deposited it directly into the bank accounts of their most ardent political supporters so that they and several generations of their descendants will have the resources to maintain the GOP in political power for as long as possible.” Baldwin then said that Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh showed how Republicans see women.
Harsh criticism
“They view and treat women as human beings that are not entitled to the same constitutional protections that men are,” the actor said. “They themselves are sons, husbands, fathers - and yet, when the time arrived in the thick of the # MeToo movement to set politics aside and establish that women’s rights were more important than political expediency, they failed. And it was ugly.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post.
Baldwin’s comments were met with harsh criticism from a commentator on the other side of the aisle.
NRATV contributor Dan Bongino said Monday on “Fox & Friends” that he was embarrassed for Baldwin.
“How is there a lawful way to overthrow the government?” he said. “Baldwin is a deranged lunatic, and he’s not even that bright. Thankfully, there isn’t a lawful way to overthrow the government; there’s an impeachment process.”
Bongino referenced a speech that former Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards gave in 2004 in which he said he had seen up close “what having two Americas can do to our country.”
“I say that because, sadly, there are two Americas developing right now,” Bongino said, saying that there’s academia, the media and “the swamp rats” - “and then there’s the rest of us.”
“And,” Bongino added, “Donald Trump has really tapped into that, and people see him as a warrior.”
After speaking Sunday night, Baldwin told reporters that he still struggles to wrap his mind around the fact that Trump is president, according to the New Hampshire Union Leader.
“For me, every day I wake up, I still am horrified,” he said, according to the newspaper. “I feel like I’m in some dream where Trump is the president. In New York, Donald Trump is not a punchline. He’s not a joke. He is nothing. He went on a TV show for many years and convinced middle America that he was this crack businessman.”