Less than two hours before the Trump-Kim summit in Singapore, MSNBC’s Hardball host Chris Matthews and panelists Elise Jordan and Bobby Ghosh declared that President Trump is a “wannabe despot” who wants to “fulfill his fantasy” by ruling the country with an iron fist while having more affection for dictators like North Korea’s Kim Jong-un than U.S. allies.

Matthews first observed to Jordan that Trump “sits four or five feet from our ally in the north, that’s, of course, Canada and Trudeau, who causes us no trouble and then you see him huddling in these pictures of huddling with the other guy, with Putin.” Jordan replied that “[h]e can relate.”

“Donald Trump can relate to authoritarians. He, as a former businessman, he likes absolute control and we’ve seen,” she added.

Matthews followed up and asked if Trump’s a “wannabe despot,” and the anti-Trump Republican agreed and “conceded that for years now and we're going on years.”

She elaborated that her belief was due to “[a]ll of his behavior, his attacks on the free press, his attacks on alliances that are designed to strengthen our security, this is not — he has — he feels more — he calls Kim Jong-un honorable, yet Justin Trudeau of Canada” is ridiculed.

Ghosh interjected that Trump is indeed “a wanna-be despot” and while Congress should stop him from doing so (read: remove him from office), they haven’t and instead “are tolerating it, encouraging it, enabling it.”

“They’re behaving in a way people behave in a monarchy or a despotism,” Matthews stated.

The liberal pundit then proceeded by taking note of the North Korean regime’s brutal human rights record as a way to (in order to borrow a favorite phrase of the media to describe Mueller probe criticism) undermine the summit, which is actually okay.

The problem is that perhaps Matthews’s colleagues at NBC shouldn’t have been so glowing in their praise for North Korea during the Pyeongchang Olympic games (see examples here, here, and here).

To see the relevant transcript from MSNBC’s Hardball on June 11, click “expand.”