A U.S. Congressman from Tennessee said over the weekend that former President Donald Trump is still a threat, even though he no longer holds office.
“If indicted, Trump said there will be problems in this country ‘the likes of which we’ve never seen,'” Representative Steve Cohen (D-TN-09) said on MSNBC. “He’s threatening another insurrection and encouraging his people to be prepared to do it. He is a present and imminent danger to our democracy.”
He linked to a video of the segment on his Twitter feed.
“I got a fundraising letter that Trump sent out just yesterday, and he said ‘the attacks on me really are an attack on you, friend. They want power, and it’s up to us to rip that power from their hands and put it back where it belongs,'” said Cohen.
He blasted Trump’s fundraising tactics, calling them “blarney” and a “rip off.”
“And the idea that he says we have to ‘rip it from their hands’ is really like I think he suggested earlier [that] if he’s arrested, if he’s indicted, that there will be problems in this country like you’ve never seen,” Cohen said. “He’s threatening another insurrection, he’s threatening civil war, and he’s encouraging these people to be prepared to do it. He is a present and imminent danger to our nation.”
Cohen says an “insurrection” was the January 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol building.
But Cohen took it a step further, agreeing with MSNBC host Katie Phang that Trump should be barred from holding public office because he participated in the “insurrection.”
Cohen introduced a bill to that effect shortly after January 6. That bill would compel Americans to abide by the Fourteenth Amendment, which says in part that anyone who has engaged in an “insurrection” cannot hold public office.
How “insurrection” would be defined remains up for debate.
“It’s unfortunate that we’re not using [the bill],” Cohen said. “The Fourteenth Amendment was after the Civil War and it punished treasonous individuals – people that didn’t support the United States, and in fact attacked the United States. And there’s not that much difference. They tried to overturn the processes of the Constitution and the free transfer of power – the fair transfer of power, the peaceful transfer of power of the presidency. This was the biggest threat to our democracy, probably since the Civil War.”
Phang offered no pushback in response.
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Pete D’Abrosca is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Pete on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
