Piers Morgan lashes out against US President Donald Trump
The outspoken commentator has lashed out against his former “friend” he now labels a “monster”, saying: “President Trump must be removed from office.”
“President Trump must be removed from office,” English broadcaster and journalist Piers Morgan said in an outspoken commentary after violent rioters stormed the US Capitol.
The British commentator, a previous Trump supporter and former “friend” of the US President, wrote in the Daily Mail that the Mr Trump should be impeached to bar him from ever running for presidency again “through the 25th Amendment on the grounds of his obvious mental instability”.
“There can be no other appropriate response to the utterly horrific scenes we all witnessed at Capitol Hill yesterday,” he wrote.
“Surely, he cannot be allowed to stay in office for another two weeks until Joe Biden’s inauguration because who the hell knows what he will do before then?”
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The President was temporarily banned from social media platforms, but finally admitted his election loss in a new Twitter video. In the clip, he defended his decision to fight the election results and refuse to concede that Joe Biden won, but he said the fight was now over.
“He can’t be trusted not to incite violence, yet he still has power to start a nuclear war that could end civilisation,” Morgan wrote.
“This cannot continue. It’s too dangerous. Trump’s now too dangerous.
“In the past year, he has morphed into a monster that I no longer recognise as someone I considered to be a friend and thought I knew,” he wrote.
Morgan said the President’s leadership during the coronavirus pandemic and George Floyd protests was “dreadful”. He said it “laid bare his inherent narcissism, shockingly incompetent crisis management, and woeful inability to offer empathy or comfort to grieving and suffering Americans”.
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Morgan made damning comments about how the President dealt with losing the election with “pathetic antics” that have been “utterly contemptible”.
He said Mr Trump “was now acting like a mafia mob boss” after a leaked tape heard him allegedly threatening Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn the state’s election result.
Morgan urged other senior Republicans to “stand up and stop him before it was too late”.
“A load of shameful GOP charlatans led by Senator Ted Cruz stood up to support Trump’s outrageous campaign to overturn a fair and democratic result without a shred of evidence to support his insistence of widespread voter fraud,” he wrote.
Mr Morgan blamed the “anarchy and insurrection from a crazed mob” as “the direct result of Trump’s refusal to accept defeat and repeated entirely false claims that the election was ‘stolen’ from him”.
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He spoke of Ashli Babbitt, one of the four rioters who died in the “mayhem”, who was shot by a police officer after bursting through a window into the Capitol building.
“She was an ardent, blindly obsessed Trumper who genuinely believed him when he said corrupt liberals had stolen the election – and it cost her life,” he said.
Morgan dismissed anything Mr Trump achieved over his four-year presidency, including getting three conservatives onto the Supreme Court, taking on “terror leaders” and getting the economy roaring.
“None of it matters anymore,” he wrote.
He added that the President’s “diabolic reaction” to losing the election has cost the Republicans control of the Senate.
“With his catastrophic act of self-harm, Trump has now blown up Trumpism as a political force, despite winning over 70 million votes in the election,” Morgan wrote. “There can be no way back now for him or his family. The Trumps are done as any kind of serious force in US politics.
“And all because Donald’s stupendous ego couldn’t accept losing and sent him nuts, which in turn sent his supporters nuts.”
Morgan said he couldn’t believe what he was watching as the rioters – or “thugs” as he labelled them – broke through the police barricade to storm into the Capitol building, adding there should be a police investigation into how that happened and why the National Guard weren’t called in sooner.
“If the mob had been mostly black or Muslim, they would have been treated much more aggressively,” he said. “I even saw one police officer pose for a selfie with a rioter.”
He described the Capitol building as “a magical monument to the very best of America”, adding “the thugs desecrated the place”, turning it into “a nightmare monument to the very worst kind of America”.
The former newspaper editor drew on scenes of the rioters that disturbed him.
“There was a bearded rioter wearing a T-shirt saying ‘CAMP AUSCHWITZ’ above a skull and crossbones, with the phrase ‘work brings freedom’ printed below. This is a translation of ‘arbeit macht frei,’ the words that appeared above the entrance of the Auschwitz concentration camp where more than a million Jews were murdered by Nazis during the WWII Holocaust.
“That made me shudder in horror.
“As did the sight of white supremacists flashing the white power hand signal as they marched inside,” Morgan wrote.
“Seeing armed cops barricading the door to the Senate chamber was horribly surreal, as was seeing Senators hiding on the floor, and rioters later lounging in the Speaker’s chair and roaming and looting offices including that of Nancy Pelosi,” he wrote.
“We were watching an attempted coup in real time, perpetrated by violent, racist extremists in the name of Donald Trump,” he wrote.
“They were exemplified by what I finally concluded was the most hideous image of all – a rioter arrogantly brandishing a confederate flag inside the Capitol, somewhere it had never been flown before, not even during the Civil War,” he said.
“It all made me sick to the pit of my stomach.”
Morgan added: “Trump’s beyond help or advice now, even from close friends or long-time aides.
“I’ve always known he’s a very bad loser, and a highly polarising character with an inflammatory personality who revels in the rough-and-tumble of verbal combat,” Morgan wrote.
“But, I never imagined he would be capable of becoming what he’s now become – the deranged figurehead of a bunch of hard-right conspiracy-theory-fuelled fanatics intent on destroying American democracy. And yet he has.”
He labelled it “insanity” and said: “Trump himself has now lost his mind.”
Morgan added that when Trump “finally said something about the shocking scenes”, the President described the rioters as “special” people and said he “loves” them while reiterating that the “election had been stolen from him”.
“This was a deplorably incendiary response, guaranteed to pour fuel onto the raging fire, and prompted social media companies to race to suspend his accounts,” he wrote.
Morgan said he “can’t remain friends with someone who says he ‘loves’ a bunch of violent Nazi sympathisers and white supremacists who’ve just launched a deadly attack on the epicentre of US democracy itself and thinks they’re ‘special people’”.
“Such a person should not be President of the United States for a second longer,” Morgan said.
Morgan said the President called him a week before the election, sounding like his old self. The pair had had no contact all year, since Morgan told Mr Trump to “shut the f**k up” when the President suggested injecting people with bleach to tackle COVID.
“If he tried to call me today, I wouldn’t take the call,” Morgan said. “I’m done with Donald Trump.”
Meanwhile, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said in a press briefing: “Let me be clear – the violence we saw yesterday was appalling, reprehensible and antithetical to the American way.”
Democrats have formally demanded Donald Trump’s “immediate” removal from office in the wake of the recent assault on the US Capitol.
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