Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said Monday on MSNBC’s “Deadline” that President Donald Trump had turned the United States into a “gangster state.”

Raskin said, “There’s the $400 million bribe force, one jet from Qatar, completely brazen, totally in violation of the Constitution if you don’t come to Congress first. There’s also the fact that Donald Trump, who denounced crypto as just saturated with criminality, now has completely embraced it and created his own crypto meme coin, which is just this gaping open barn door for every anonymous foreign state dictator, king, prince, mafia ring or pardon seeker to put money directly into Donald Trump’s pockets. And so, you know, whatever kind of varnish they had from the first administration is completely off.”

He added, “Now they’re not even pretending to do anything else. I mean, their first foreign trip was back to Saudi Arabia in the Middle East, not for any, you know, peace seeking purposes or no foreign policy agenda, it was a bunch of business deals. It was a business trip. So, look, corruption is the opposite of democracy. Democracy is the system which advances the idea that every single person matters and we all rise together. The opposite of that is a corrupt, monarchical or dictatorial system, where you have a tiny group in society that uses public resources and private resources just to benefit themselves. And that’s what we’ve got now. It’s a gangster state.”

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