tv Alex Wagner Tonight MSNBC July 4, 2024 1:00am-2:00am PDT
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amanda, does strike me as most important here. also just doing, one thing that joe biden has been good at throughout his long political career is just like in the kitchen table meat and potatoes politics. given that, you've got to do that and if you can't do that then we are all in trouble. >> it may be a little bit more optimistic here because number one, i think it is important to remember that the largest coalition in america is the one that has been showing up again and again in midterms in general elections and that is the pro-democracy coalition. people call it the never trump coalition or the stop trump coalition but it is the pro- democracy coalition. it is important to remember we are already in at certain times were nothing is guaranteed, and we can stay together. that is the most important thing. >> array, michelle goldberg, amanda carpenter, thank you both. alex wagner tonight starts right now. good evening, alex. >> it is uncertain times, my friend. uncertain times, indeed. have a great weekend.
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or holiday, i should say. >> have a great holiday. july 4th, america! holiday. whoo, july fourth america. go america, what a time to be alive. it is 31st march 1968 when the president made an announcement that changed the course of history. >> i shall not seek and i will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president. >> president linden johnson decided not to seek re-election in late march of an election year just months before the democratic party's nominating convention. though outside observers believed at the time that president johnson exited the race largely over the quagmire in vietnam, sources in the white house later revealed it was concern about his health that drove president johnson to withdraw. at the time johnson was already facing challenges from eugene mccarthy, a liberal anti-war
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candidate and from senator robert f. kennedy. but president johnson's exit left a power vacuum, and that was filled by the entry of johnson's vice president, hubert humphrey. the democratic candidates were now hurtling towards a contested convention, but before that convention even began there was another shock to the race. on june 5th of that year, robert f. kennedy was shot at the ambassador hotel in california. the next day he was pronounced dead. two weeks before the convention began, south dakota senator george mcgovern announced that he would throw his hat into the ring as a stand in candidate for voters who supported rfk. and when the democratic delegates eventually gathered in chicago nearly 10,000 anti-war protesters swept into the windy city. they were met by more than twice as many members of the national
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guard. >> demonstrators have filled the streets in front of the conrad hilton hotel. police held them back. tensions were high, and they broke. >> those tensions then spilled into the convention hall as delegates battled over who would be the party's nominee. >> george mcgovern as president of the united states we wouldn't have to stop those -- in the streets of chicago. how hard it is to accept the truth. >> the 1968 convention went down in history as one of the most chaotic, divisive, and weird moments in democratic party
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history. people lit their delegate cards on fire. protesters threatened to put lsd in the chicago water supply. the youth international party nominated a pig -- a pig named piggasus for president and demanded the pig receive secret service protection. at the end of it all vice president humphrey won the delegate contest and became the nominee of a bitterly divided party. he went onto lose the general election to one of the most corrupt american presidents in u.s. history, richard m. nixon. and today right at this very hour the question is whether or not democrats are headed for another contested convention in chicago. now, there are things about this moment that are both eerily similar and dramatically different than what happened in 1968. first of all, robert f. kennedy's son and namesake is running for president, albeit in
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a completely different context as a fringe third party candidate who just this week faced new allegations he sexually assaulted a baby-sitter in 1998. rfk jr. responded to those allegations by saying this. >> listen, i have said this from the beginning, i am not a church boy. i am not running on that. i said in my -- i had a very, very rambunctious youth. i said in my announcement speech i have so many skeletons in my closet. >> this is not exactly the rfk of 1968. this year there is a foreign military conflict dividing the democratic party, this time in gaza. but the central issue looming over this year's convention is not the war and it is not the kennedy in the race. in fact, by all outside measurements, the democratic party is in a period of relative
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unity and cohesion and especially in its shared alarm about the threat posed by the party's opponent, donald trump. so both structurally and politically, it is a dramatic difference from the year 1968. instead this year the issue that is fracturing the party, the thing that hangs over what is a very big tent at this point isn't a policy division but a personal one. it is the issue lbj kept to himself all those years ago, the health and vitality of the incumbent president, his fitness for office and his ability to run against a dangerous candidate who threatens american democracy. as of right now, as of this evening, president biden says he will remain his party's candidates. during an all hands call with his campaign staff, biden reportedly announced, let me say this as clearly as i possibly can, as simply and straightforward as i can. i am running. no one is pushing me out. i'm not leaving. i'm in this race to the end, and
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we are going to win. but according to a report also today in "the new york times," biden is telling allies that he knows he has just days to save his candidacy. the last few days have shown new polling showing president biden losing ground with some voters following thursday's debate. perhaps in recognition of that the biden campaign is preparing a sort of mini pr blitz over the fourth of july holiday. on friday he'll sit with an interview with george step steflopdous of nbc news and next week he'll hold a nato conference in washington where he's expected to take questions from reporters. at the same time the president is now finally reefing out to party leaders. over the past 24 hours he's
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reached out to nancy pelosi and congressman jim clyburn. tonight the president held a closed door meeting at the white house with democratic governors, many of whom have been whispered about as potential running mates on a ticket with kamala harris include gavin newsom, j.d. pritzker, gretchen whitmer, and wes moore. both inside and outside the biden white house it is clear that this party is in crisis mode. yesterday texas congressman lloyd doggett became the first elected democrat to call for president biden to step down as a democratic candidate. tonight a democratic representative raul became the second member of congress to do the same, to call on biden to step down. all of which makes this feel like a very live question. is this the beginning of a
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legitimate effort to remove joe biden from the democratic ticket? or is this a fire that the party will succeed at putting out internally? in other words, will the third week of august be business as usual or will the democratic party fracture just in time for a second chicago convention? joining me now is david plouffe, former campaign manager for barack obama's 2008 campaign. also with me is marc leibovich, staff writer with the atlantic. his new piece is titled "the lie democrats are telling themselves." david and mark, thank you for joining me. david, let me start with you. how do you read these statements and this behavior? >> well, joe biden said very clearly to his campaign staff he's in the race for the duration. i think most of the democratic governors if not all signaled support, so i think that is the most likely scenario.
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i think that there's going to continue to be unrest because we're going to have public polls but more importantly private polls that people running tough senate races are showing. i want to remind everybody that we were behind in this race before the debate. joe biden was behind, you know, for inflation reasons, incumbents all over the globe are losing elections and badly. there's definitely an anti-incumbent fervor. but it was also i think primarily i think about people's sense was he up for this job? and those answers only got more challenging for him after the debate. so i think if he stays in this race, and alex, i don't think we're going to have drama in the convention. we'll have a process, could be messy, but i don't think we're looking at a repeat.
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listen, there's going to be protesters around the middle east. everyone's got a phone now that can send videos around the world, so it'll be overstated. but i think the question really is whether it's joe biden or somebody else after the supreme court ruling yesterday, the threat of donald trump is even more pronounced. it could be enterprise ending, you know, for the country. so this isn't about trying. you have to win. and i think for joe biden the candidate we have to understand -- and i think he's capable of doing this but it's very difficult at its heart. we have to make up a lot of ground. we're losing. we're losing in the battleground states. you've got to pull away from trump, you've got to grow your vote, got to be worried about turnout and pull away from rfk. i hope he does well in the
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george stephanopoulos interview. i think it remains to be seen whether trump will offer biden that opportunity. >> yeah, mark, i'm hearing a lot of hope sentences beginning with the words i hope as it concerns biden's performance and his future and what's possible with this current democratic ticket. you've been very outfront about what you think needs to happen here, and i wonder how you're reading the moment as we hear from the president and i think his defiant posture that he is not going anywhere. >> yeah, i think defiant posture is one way of saying it. i think stubborn, hubristic -- is hubristic even a word? i'm not even sure. >> it is. >> okay, hubristic is something you hear. reckless is a word you hear. i think in the last six days since the debate not only has biden been invisible since the disaster of last thursday, but morale around the party has only gotten lower obviously since some of these polls have come
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out but also just his visibility, but also there's no sign anything is afoot whether an interview or other debate in the near future that can turn this around anytime soon. as david said, this is a mission critical election. i mean there's a kind of imperfect analogy i've made before, which is if you were an airline pilot or air-traffic controller he would have been forced to retire 20, 25 years ago. this is a mission critical job and election. obviously i don't think the party is fundamentally as divided as it was around vietnam. that was a pervasively divided time in that convention. but, i mean the level of confidence in the person who insists on continuing to fight and be the nominee of this party is really, really low for someone who has a lot of ground to make up for to begin with. >> yeah, and i want to be clear, i don't think we're headed towards a 1968-style chicago convention, but, david, given the desires and the very big
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tent of the democratic party coming to an alternative divide is going to take some negotiating even if that's in the cards. i do want to ask, though, to mark's point about the defensiveness here. the fact the president is only in the last 12 to 24 hours reaching out to elected democrats in congress, did that surprise you? >> it did. i mean i think generally when you're in crisis whether it's in governing or campaign mode, the phone is your friend. it's an easy thing to do. and even if those conversations don't go as well as you like, people respect that you reached out. so, yeah, i think -- a i think a lot of the activity we're seeing, the interview, the calls should have happened, you know, last weekend, last friday even after the debate. so i think we're in a moment now where the president has to perform. listen, that campaign led by general o'mally dylan and quintan dpoeks is a very strong campaign. i have no question they'll do what's required, but campaigns always make a marginal
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difference for those of us who used to run them. it's the candidate really and the times that dictate the most powerful wins in politics. this will be on the president to convince voters. the voters that are swing voters, democratic voters that, okay, maybe it wasn't a bad night than not, but again these questions of fitness should he run have been witnessed the entire campaign. they've really been the headwinds he's been facing, and he just dug a deeper hole in the debate. so he should do everything he can, interviews, press conferences, go on with influencers, do town halls with voters. he's got to do all that. but the thing i remind you of is most people who voted in this election didn't even watch the debate. it's really hard to reach people, but "the new york times" poll suggests people who didn't watch the debate even have more concern because all they're seeing is the memes and video. so it's going to take something big like another debate. the conventions don't do it.
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i've read conventions. they don't really reach swing voters. they don't really reach turn out voters in the same way the debate aftermath does. generally candidates who win elections have good political appeal, they have a good story, they can connect with the voter. joe biden has done that in '21 and '21. it's like traversing a really dangerous obstacle course. i have to be honest that's where we are, and if joe biden can manage that obstacle course, i think it gets back to a really close race, but it's going to take a lot of dexterity to do that. >> i mean i hear the words athleticism and dexterity and i'm not trying to be ageist but this is candidate who has done the things he's supposed to do, traveling the world, the campaign is trying to put him out there, mark, as much as they can in a format they think would
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be good for him. they thought the debate was a good idea. it was their strategy, and it blew up in their faces. i do wonder at this point kind of where we are in the trajectory of knowing who's going to be at the top of the ticket. we have news tonight from "the new york times" that reed hastings who is the co-founder of netflix, a huge democratic donor, is saying biden needs to step aside to allow a vigorous democratic leader to beat trump and keep us safe and prosperous. what are the pressure points in your mind outside the inner sanctum of the white house, mark? is it voters, democrats in congress, is it none of them? >> well, it's polls, but it's also people like reed hastings and members of congress, senate governors actually coming out. what i was struck by really in the last two days which has been somewhat depressing as the actual debate itself is the sense of -- i guess the learned
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helplessness around both parties in some ways but in this case really the democrats are helpless to do anything except to just accept the will of one obviously greatly diminished 81-year-old incumbent who has been very, very impressive and honorable throughout his career. you know, he was very heroic in defeating donald trump in 2020. he's, you know, had a good presidency by many standards, and yet here we are, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. i keep thinking about, you know, the campaign that david plouffe led, and we were all at grant park in 2008. and even both parties there was a sense of decency and possibility. and here we have just no choice but to sort of go with what we have been given, which obviously people in both parties and people across america are very dissatisfied with. i wish people would just be honest and be vocal and speak out and not just sort of give in to the learned hopelessness, and give into the just sense of going along and the learned like
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mentality that seems to have driven certainly the republican party to this point but i also think the democratic party to this particular point. >> one more for you, david. do you read anything into the fact that donald trump has been completely silent on the prospect of biden stepping down? does that suggest to you that -- that republicans would like this to go one way rather than the other? >> well, my sense is they like this matchup, so that's always a tell. you should pay attention to what your opponents think. i don't think the trump campaign has probably gotten all the mileage they could out of this. i'm not going to provide a lot of advice on here tonight, alex. but it does speak to the other thing, which is this is imminently beatable camp in donald trump. this is not a political goliath. he was not a votegetter in '16 or in '20. he is beatable. we're not talking about a situation where we're behind and we somehow have to find a way to
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slay a political dragon. his campaign's not particularly impressive. he's obviously deeply unimpressive. i think there's still a coalition of 50% plus majors who don't want a return. so that's the other thing here. you know, this is a must-win race because of the damage that could be done to the country, but it's also a winnable race. and, you know, right now it looks like it's going to be joe biden. if it's not joe biden whoever our nominee is, you know, easy for me to say, but i think the bar has got to be you've got to win the race. and the truth is is it is a winnable race. so i think donald trump and his campaign very much liked this matchup and i think that's why they've been so quiet. >> david plouffe, mark leibovich, this is a conversation to be continued. thank you for making time tonight on a july 3rd. we have much more to get to tonight including what the supreme court's presidential immunity ruling means for all of donald trump's pending criminal cases. but first as president biden
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that harris will step in to take president biden's spot if biden were to end his campaign. to that end, new reuters ipsos polling shows in an hypothetical matchup against trump harris outperforms four other potential democratic candidates losing to trump by just one percentage point. that is perhaps at least why one democrat is on the record saying kamala harris should be the democratic nominee for president in 2024. joining me now is that democrat, tim ryan, former congressman from ohio. tim, it is good to see you this evening. let's just get right to your argument. why kamala harris? >> well, we need a generational change. i mean there's no question about that. you know, i think you look at what they call the double haters. they don't want biden. they don't want trump. i think it's really important we give them an alternative so there's a generational change. look at the practical situation,
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look where we're bleeding out. we're soft with the minority communities, and we're bleeding out young people, and i think kamala could come in instantaneously, juice our base, pull in young people. i've been getting calls from ohio that want working class people they want biden to step down, and they're telling me they'd be excited for a kamala harris run. she checks a lot of boxes and i think there's so much at stake for women. for her to be able to prosecute that issue for us in a debate against donald trump, i think, you know, you add all that together and i think we're back in the game where we could make a good run at this thing. >> do you think it's a decidely different moment than it was in 2020 when she did throw hear hat in the ring for the presidential nomination and was out before iowa? >> oh, 1,000%. you're better at your job 3 1/2 years later. most americans who do something
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for 3 1/2 years especially at a very high level, you get better, you grow, you become seasoned. she already has a lot of raw talent and ability and charisma, and presidential campaigns are pretty tough so that's a heck of a standard. but i think it culminated for me in my mind, alex, to really start thinking about this was how she handled herself on debate night. absolute star. i mean i followed her -- i was so enamored i followed her across all the cable stations as she was doing her interviews, and she was masterful, and i think that's the culmination of 3 1/2 years. so to me it's like what are we waiting for? we have a very good candidate here. let's help her grow into the campaign, and i think it would be a great move for biden to kind of setup somebody like kamala harris as the crowning jewel of what is a really significant and well-done presidency. >> just in the last 72 hours or the last five days there have been a lot of names mentioned,
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and what's been so odd about this is only in the last 12 to 24 has kamala harris' name really popped up as a potentially leading contender if with the giant caveat that biden has not dropped out and only if she he does drop out would she go to the top of the ticket. i wonder what that signals. "the wall street journal" takes the opposite opinion from yours. they're saying biden is trying to scare democrats that harris is the only alternative if he drops out. the reason we're seeing this flurry of prognostication is because the biden campaign is floating that as a disincentive. do you think that's tortured logic? i mean, what's your response to that idea? >> i don't know, honestly. i'm not understanding a lot of what's coming out of the white house in the last 72 hours. i don't agree with it. i think the way they've handled this has been tremendously
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unhelpful to, you know, just voters like me, former members of congress and current members of congress. so i don't know exactly what the machinations going on inside the white house are. i just hope they will take a very, very close look, maybe even have the president watch the debate again, really see what's happening. i mean i'm here in ohio. like the average people are still talking about what happened on the debate night thursday. we're not going to shift that narrative, alex. it's just we've got to come to reality. one of the things people don't like about democrats, we're not decisive, we don't act with conviction enough, they don't see us as strong. this is an opportunity to shift all those narratives the republicans have pinned on us as a party, and i think the opportunity now is do the right thing. let's quit dilly-dallying around here. we've got a race to win. you saw the chevron decision, the immunity decision. the supreme court flipped the
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constitution and turned it upside down. do we want a court to have a clarence thomas in every federal court across the country, every u.s. prosecutor and every district across the country is going to be from the federalist society? do we recognize what would happen to our country if we do that? and we're sitting here thinking the biggest threat i saw the other night at the debate was that trump was re-creating covid, re-creating the economy, re-creating climate, re-creating his tax cut without any pushback at all. he's shape shifting people's minds because we're not pushing pack. we can't do that for the next four months. we'll get destroyed. and so i hope members of congress step up. i hope this letter that people are talking about, i hope they send it and really let the white house know what's at stake here for their own personal careers but the potential, you know, for our own democracy here that we're also concerned about. >> former congressman tim ryan with an impassioned argument for the vice president going to the
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top of the democratic ticket, thanks for making time tonight. really appreciate it. >> thanks. thanks, alex. still to come this evening, has the supreme court handed donald trump a get out of jail free card for more than one jail? the fallout from the court's decision on presidential immunity reverberates through all of his criminal cases. we're going to get some legal expertise from christy greenberg. that's next. expertise from christy greenberg. that's next.
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on monday the supreme court dropped a proverbial bomb on all of donald trump's criminal cases by ruling along ideological lines that presidents are fully immune from criminal prosecution from any official acts during their presidency. by doing that, the high court has not just potentially blown a hole in special counsel jack myth's january 6th case but in all of trump's criminal cases. in the federal january 6th case the indictment must now go back to a u.s. district court where judge tontonia chutkan must decide which allegations are official acts and which are unofficial acts. regardless how it shakes outs the january 6th case has no
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chance of going to trial before election day. a similar process will probably play out in trump's other election interference case, the one brought by district attorney fani willis down in georgia. trump and his lawyervise asserted presidential immunity in that case as well, meaning the judge overseeing that case, judge scott mcafee will have to parse through that indictment to determine what may now be off-limits. judge mcafee won't even be able to start that process until an appeals court decides whether or not to grant trump's motion to throw d.a. willis off of the case. so don't expect any significant movement down in georgia anytime soon. now, in trump's new york hush money case where trump has already been convicted on 34 felony counts, yesterday we got the news that the sentencing has been postponed from next week to september in order to give trump's legal team sufficient time to argue that the case should be tossed out entirely because of the supreme court's immunity decision. and down in florida in trump's
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classified documents case even though that case is primarily about actions in trump's post presidency, actions that in no way can be construed as official acts, trump is still trying to argue that because he was still president when his boxes were first moved from washington, d.c. to mar-a-lago, he should be immune in that case as well. there is a lot to unpack here. luckily, legal expert kristi greenberg joins me next to do just that. greenberg joins me next to do just that.
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donald trump has already been found guilty in a court of law. he faces up to four years in prison for falsifying business records as part of a criminal hush money scheme to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. now, for those crimes trump was originally scheduled to be sentenced next week. that was until the supreme court granted trump immunity from virtually anything that could be considered an official act. as a result, next week's sentencing has been postponed to september 18th so the judge in this case, judge juan merchan, has time to consider an argument trump's defense lawyers have used in multiple criminal cases, that his guilty verdict should be thrown out entirely. joining me now to discuss the likelihood of that actually happening is kristi greenberg, a former federal prosecutor. i am intrigued by this.
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i will say i have long wondered what the impact of the supreme court decision might be potentially on the new york hush money case, and i wonder what parts of it, what parts of that conviction are potentially imperilled in your eyes. >> i don't think the conviction is imperilled. that's the good news. look, the charged conduct itself, directing your personal lawyer to make hush money payments to a porn star and then reimbursing him and covering it up, none of that is official conduct. so it doesn't matter they signed the checks from michael cohen to the white house. they were from his personal account to his personal attorney, unofficial conduct. the real question then becomes whether any evidence of donald trump's official acts was used to prove those unofficial acts because the supreme court says now you can't use any of that. i spent a good amount of time reviewing the evidence trump's lawyers have cited saying it was improperly used at trial, and i
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looked at the trial record. and essentially i found even if you take the pieces of evidence that trump's attorneys say shouldn't have been admit, even if you take that out, it was largely cumulative of other evidence that was already in that trial record that was proving trump's guilt. the bottom line is the evidence of trump's guilt is overwhelming even without that evidence that trump's team is citing, and so i don't think any of that evidence they're concerned about is make-or-break evidence that would have led a jury to acquit. so i think this verdict will still be upheld. i think it will still be an impact to at least one case where i think people can breathe a sigh of relief at least for now. >> yeah, and it sounds like some of the evidence they're trying to get out of this, some of those oval office conversations presumably between pecker, trump, and cohen. you sound pretty bullish on the integrity of the conviction standing up. it also sounds like they tackled the immunity thing a couple -- a while ago. they've already gone down this
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lane, and they've effectively waived their right for immunity already, have they not? >> so they definitely waived their right to challenge the charged conduct, that's for sure. the judge already ruled on that and said this is untimely, you had the opportunity to raise this a while ago. same thing with the evidence, but again now we have the supreme court opinion saying you can't use any evidence of official acts to prove the unofficial acts. that's new law. that was not the law the d.a. office cited, not the law the judge seemingly relied on letting that in, so that's new in having to deal with that. as you said testimony -- conversations just because they happened in the oval office, that doesn't make them official. i think something like a conversation with hope hicks who was then the white house communications director when they're having a conversation, for example, about how the stormy daniels testimony, how that story would play in 2018 arguably could be official conduct, that conversation under this opinion.
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but, again, there are many other conversations from pecker's testimony and from michael cohen's testimony both before and after the election about the fact that donald trump didn't want these women's stories to come out to negatively effect the campaign, and his communications even when he was president with private parties, that's not plausible to be official conduct. so, again, i think we're on solid footing with a lot of this evidence. >> i do have to ask as we talk about what the impact of the court's decision on immunity is and these other federal cases, what do you think happens in the january 6th case? because the ball is in judge chutkan it was court, right? and she can have these evidentiary hearings. and i wonder if you think we should be expecting mini trials. is the public going to get some sort of smaller bite sized version of the trial in one of these hearings, or is that overestimating the sort of information we're actually going to get made public?
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>> so bring on the mini trials. i think there is no reason here for jack smith to really hold anything back. this is for all the marbles, right? you have most of the indictment that is at least still in play, so he's going to have to bring out his witnesses, his documents to be able to prove these are, in fact, either official acts but you rebut the presumption of immunity, or that they're unofficial acts. those hearings should happen before the election. there's no reason to delay. you'll expect there's some briefing over the summer, but come fall we should be seeing these hearings, and there's a lot still at play here. donald trump's attempts to pressure mike pence to count these -- you know, to not count the legitimate elector votes, yes there's presumptive immunity under the supreme court for those, but that can't be rebutted. and the supreme court itself said the vice president was not acting in his executive branch function when he was presiding
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over the senate and that donald trump has no authority whatsoever with respect to counting those electoral votes, so expect testimony from mike pence and others to that effect. you know, even supreme court justice barrett said as to the slates of fake electors, that's private conduct. so, again, i think we're going to hear from a lot of these state officials that donald trump was trying to pressure a lot of private actors, you know, people he was trying to get to interfere with those state processes, which the president has no authority whatsoever to tell the states how to count their electors, so i think that fake elector scheme will still be in play. we'll get a lot of evidence to that. and then there's that last bucket about everything connected and leading up to january 6th. and there i mean we're going to hear more about how these tweets came about, how the communications came about. it would be quite incredible to think that "be there, will be wild" is an official act of a
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president. i mean, the supreme court said, look, presumptively a lot of communications are going to be official acts, but there are communications that fall in the bucket of candidate trump, and i think a lot of his threats to fight back and take our country back, you know, sending the crowd to january 6th. once the evidence comes in about what was going on surrounding those contacts it's hard to see them as anything but candidate trump and not president trump. >> be there, will be wild not in the annals of presidential speech. always great to get your expertise on this. really appreciate it. still ahead tonight one of the master minds behind project 2025, the blueprint for a second trump presidency, one of the master minds just revealed what conservatives plan to do with the law-free zone created by the supreme court around the presidency. in his words they're planning for a second american revolution. i'll talk to slate's mark joseph
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the reason that they are apoplectic right now. the reason that so many anchors on msnbc, for example, are losing their minds daily is because our side is winning. and so i come full circle in this response and want to the courage you with some substance we're in the process of the second american revolution, which will remain bloodless if
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the left allows it to be. >> that was kevin roberts, the president of the heritage foundation and the architect of project 2025 promising a possibly bloodless second american revolution. this battle plan follows the supreme court's radical expansion of presidential power on monday effectively allowing the president to be a king above the law. joining me now is mark joseph stern, senior writer covering the courts and law for slate magazine. mark, what's your reaction to a potentially bloodless second american revolution courtesy of project 2025? >> you know, i have to say that he's reflecting on a triumphant supreme court term where he has been delivered a number of the major policies and victories that was intending project 2025 to accomplish if trump wins. it's almost as if they're prevailing in the battle ahead of schedule. the supreme court has fundamentally restructured our
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government in a way we're just beginning to understand. the immunity decision is just the tip of the iceberg. there's much more to it, and he has the attitude of someone who has won and if he prevails in november he'll have even more to celebrate. >> it feels the immunity ruling, it is serving the project 2025's goals on a silver platter. and the partisan nature of all of this seemingly can't be denied. but, mark, "the wall street journal" has an op-ed out today, and i know i'm laughing because it's so preposterous, not because the subject is full of levity. but they're charging the maga supreme court doesn't exist and basically focusing on the percentage of cases that were unanimous and sort of glossing over the substance of the court's decisions this term. what's your reaction to that and the story conservatives are telling themselves? >> i mean, i think that is an effort to prevent the american people from seeing behind what's going on in the supreme court and recognizing just how
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radically everything just changed. you know, from the imperial president now immune from criminal prosecution under so many circumstances to the court's seizure of power from congress and from federal agencies. you know, the court's creation of this entirely new kind of traditional authority -- it's a recipe for paralyzed government under a democratic president and for an oppressive monarchical government under a republican president who wields his power and the tools of his office -- >> you know, mark, to underscore that point politico has an article in the magazine this week saying that s.e.a.l. team 6 could actually execute someone at the president's direction based on this new immunity ruling. that is the assessment from legal scholars. why did john roberts try and sort of gaslight sonia sotomayor
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and elena kagen and justice jackson in their not alarmist reading of what the immunity decision does? >> so my colleague dahlia lithwick has a great piece arguing a lot of it is sexism. justice roberts is treating the women as they're hysterical and they can't be trusted to understand -- >> okay, mark, we're having some audio issues with your connection and i know everything you're saying is important so please come back next week so we can talk about this more in detail with even better audio. mark joseph stern, thank you for spending the night with me. "way too early" with jonathan lemire is coming up next. >> alex, mark joseph stern i
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