'I don't feel safe': Trump's co-author says he's fleeing the country if ex-president wins

Tony Schwartz, the co-author for former President Donald Trump's "The Art of the Deal," doesn't plan on staying in America if the former president is put back in office, he said on MSNBC's "The Beat" Wednesday.

This comes as Trump increasingly starts comparing himself and his own legal problems to those of Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who died this month in a Siberian labor camp — which Schwartz warned anchor Ari Melber is a red flag for what his plans are for the future.

"If anyone holds him accountable in any court of law in the country, he likes to say he is a dissident, and this is dangerous because other leaders have used this very card abroad to great effect and they can convince large groups of people that they are actually the embattled underdog or that the system is against them," said Melber. "Do you see this as something dangerous, where this is the way he convinces people?"

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"I think that is immensely dangerous, because he will be so much freer to pursue his personal agenda if he's re-elected, and there is no question about what that agenda is now, which is to be an authoritarian leader, to have complete control, as we learned this morning, to deport people and to create detention camps," said Schwartz. "I really believe, though I'm not a number one or number ten enemy on his list, I'm somewhere in there, and I actually have made the decision — and I've shared with my friends — that if Trump's re-elected, I'm leaving. I'm leaving the United States. Why? Because I don't feel safe. And anybody who doesn't believe that they are less safe — and that includes the right, because authoritarian leaders don't always discriminate — anybody who believes that is living a fantasy. Trump is going to do what he says he's going to do."

"You sat in the room with him, right?" said Melber. "You believe he would [target] writers, dissidents and people in political opposition and people like yourself?"

"No question he would, and somebody like you is also at risk, I would say," said Schwartz. "Anybody in the media who has talked about him in any way that he finds the slightest bit offensive, and he finds all of them at NBC offensive, is at risk. Yes. This is something that the people who love and support Donald Trump don't recognize, that they are as vulnerable as everyone else because Trump, we talked about many, many times has only one person he's interested in. Himself."

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