Andrew Sullivan Offers Uncensored Denunciation of Donald Trump

Andrew Sullivan denounced Donald Trump in an appearance on MSNBC's Hardball today, using a term rarely heard on basic cable television.

The gay journalist and commentator called Trump a "reality television asshole," leading host Chris Matthews to apologize to his audiences. But that was hardly the harshest criticism of the Republican presidential front-runner voiced by Sullivan during the discussion, which also included reporters Susan Page of USA Today and Jeremy Peters of The New York Times.

"He is a dangerous neofascist and he is using reality television and the media in a way that is leaving the rest of us in the dust," Sullivan said of Trump. "And it's terrifying to watch."

Sullivan, who has taken both conservative and liberal stances during his career, was not particularly enthusiastic about the Democratic presidential field, calling Hillary Clinton "a useless candidate" and Bernie Sanders "a demagogue." But they are different from Trump, he said.

"They don't demonize whole sections of the population," he said. "They don't discriminate on the basis of people's religion. They don't claim they're actually going to round up 11 million human beings." Those 11 million are the undocumented immigrants in the U.S., and Trump is well known for his promises to deport them. And regarding religion, he has proposed a temporary ban on entry to the U.S. by Muslims, ostensibly to combat terrorism.

Sullivan's appearance on Hardball coincided with the publication of his New York Magazine commentary on Trump, titled "America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny." In the piece, he calls for Republicans, Democrats, and independents alike to fight Trump.

"For Trump is not just a wacky politician of the far right, or a riveting television spectacle, or a Twitter phenom and bizarre working-class hero," Sullivan writes. "He is not just another candidate to be parsed and analyzed by TV pundits in the same breath as all the others. In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order, Trump is an extinction-level event. It's long past time we started treating him as such."

Read the full commentary here and watch a clip from Hardball below, courtesy of Real Clear Politics.