MSNBC host Joy Reid said Thursday on “The Readout” that President-elect Donald Trump's Cabinet picks were made because the Trump administration “arrested me for sexual assault and tried to force me to have children.” “We are here,” she said, sending a message to women.
A partial transcription follows:
Reid: Since we're talking about RFK Jr., let me ask you this question. I'm a little confused. I mean, I knew Donald Trump was going to go wild. He has no restrictions. He can do it – he can get all his friends involved. But we're talking about RFK Jr. and the possibility of another pandemic causing people to stop getting the measles vaccine. You're talking about Matt Gates. There is a girl who is 17 years old. She fears that all her records and all the witnesses against her in her human trafficking case will fall into the hands of Matt Gaetz, who could become the most powerful official in law enforcement. If the President of the United States is sentenced as a sexual abuser. If you're a sexual assault survivor, you think, oh my god, this country is out to get me. They are trying to capture me and force me to bear a child through sexual assault. So the message to women was insane, right? And the people he nominates include TV hosts. Do you think the people you talked to who voted for him expected this?
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: No, no.
Reed: Or true mass deportation?
Ocasio-Cortez: Really — really?
Reid: Yeah.
Ocasio-Cortez: No. In fact, it's heartbreaking. That's really heartbreaking. And while people may want to have some sort of vindictive attitude about this, it's really heartbreaking.
People need to understand that there are millions of people in this country. And I was one of them. There, they work two or three shifts a day to make ends meet. I don't read the newspaper every morning while drinking coffee.
Reid: Yeah.
Ocasio-Cortez: Not really. And that doesn't mean people are uneducated or uninformed or anything like that.
Reid: Not all at once.
Ocasio-Cortez: This is real life.
Reid: Yeah.
Ocasio-Cortez: This is reality. You're working two or three shifts with a baby on your hip, trying to keep things going, and there's so much information out there. And actually, what I felt at this moment, whether it was 2020 or 2020, is that something is different from what I've seen since 2016, almost the next day. I mean people came up to me and said, “He's not actually going.'' That's what you do, right? And this is important, people, people may well say, he said he was going to do this. It was right in the middle of the election campaign.
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