Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) said Wednesday that President Donald Trump was employing “the typical behavior of a dictator.”
In an interview with Attn:, Ellison was asked about Trump’s attempt to blame a judge who temporarily halted his immigration executive order for any attacks that could happen afterward.
“This is the typical behavior of a dictator. What they do is they try to carve into people’s rights, and they do it by saying ‘I’m here to protect you, and I only I can protect you,'” Ellison said. “And then if anything goes wrong, they exploit it to say, ‘See you should have given up your rights so that I could protect you.’”
“Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril,” Trump wrote Sunday on Twitter. “If something happens blame him and court system.”
Ellison went on in the interview Wednesday to join the chorus of Democratic voices protesting the nomination of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), saying Sessions was Trump’s Cabinet nominee who concerned him the most.
“We can’t control the outcome, but we can control the level of fight that we put into it, and we should fight him tooth and nail,” Ellison said. “He was so racist, he couldn’t even be confirmed as a federal judge back in the 1980s.”
Ellison is currently running to be chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
Watch the interview below: