Chris Hayes Explains the GOP’s ‘Sesame Street’ Problem After Trump’s PBS Cuts: ‘Those Things Are Popular’ | Video

The Republican Party has a “‘Sesame Street’ problem,” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes said Friday night — and it’s due to the GOP’s quiet support for Donald Trump’s “flagrantly unconstitutional” dismantling of PBS and NPR as well as the elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities from the federal budget.

Republicans have had this problem for “a long time,” Hayes said. “There are so many things Republicans want to destroy, defund, slash, and cut in the government that they can’t because those things are popular” — like “Sesame Street.”

“That is the context for what we have seen in the first hundred days. It is the reason that somewhat counterintuitively or paradoxically, Republican members of Congress who should want to protect their constitutional power of the purse, that’s the biggest thing they have, have instead been so eager to let Donald Trump and Elon Musk slash and burn entire agencies and programs because it saves them from having to do the unpopular stuff directly,” Hayes continued.

In other words, “It protects them from their own voters. Put another way. It protects them from democracy.”

Trump’s greatest success so far has been to “essentially rewrite the Constitution such that the president unilaterally gets to control spending can elimatine or defund the entire independent entities that were established by Congress itself and signed a law by previous presidents from USAID to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.”

Courts have “slowed or stymied” those attempts, “but what they’re trying to do is overcome politis in a way that makes them not accountable to us.” The GOP is comfortable with this course of action “because it allows them to slash spending, which they finally want to do on a lot of these programs, without being the ones who have to take the political risky vote to say, end Alzheimer’s research as we know it, which is a thing they’re doing right now.”

Such cuts are “flagrantly unconstitutional,” Hayes also said.

“What I think is the MAGA movement the Republican Party kind of wants to dissolve politics,” he concluded, “So it’s no longer an obstacle. So you’re no longer accountable to people. And the only way to stop that, in addition to the courts, is for members of Congress who are going to have to vote for someone’s agenda to really feel some pressure from their constituents that they would much rather ignore.”

Watch the clip from “All In With Chris Hayes” in the video above.

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