stephanie: good evening. i'm stephanie ruhle. john: i am john heilemann. with all due respect to those who were hoping kanye west would be the one to take out donald trump, not going to happen. stephanie: not today. mr. trump: kanye west, i will never say bad about him. you know why? because he loves trump! ♪ john: do you like heilemann? stephanie: the h? stephanie: -- john: happy bowling league day, sports fans. the religious rollcall and scott walker's national anthem, but

first, donald trump's pledge of allegiance. donald met with rnc chairman reince pre-this and said he signed a pledge not to run as a third-party candidate if he loses his republican nomination bid. meanwhile, our colleagues at "bloomberg businessweek" have a story about trump's business acumen. we have both read this fabulous piece by max abelson. stephanie: one of my faves. john: he is fabulous in every way. i want to know, after digging into trump's business background, are you more or less impressed with him as a capitalist? stephanie: i was not impressed with him as a capitalist to begin with. he is this extraordinary american story. he almost makes me think of "dynasty." the opulence, the grandeur in the 80's. ivana, marla maples. but you think about why these americans love this american iconic businessman -- baloney. he is not an iconic businessman. john: he is iconic for a lot of americans. if you talk to voters, a lot of them think of trump as an icon of capitalism.

he has not built a lot of stuff. trump was once trying to be a builder. he is no longer a builder. he is now i brand her. -- a brander. and i don't think the fcc will fine me if i say bullshit artist. he is rich, but what he is not is a builder. stephanie: he is a licensing genius. that's what he has done. people like him for that, good for him. but in terms of what this guy could do as president, yikes. john: yes, and the interesting thing, he often says so-and-so has had one or two people work for him, i've created thousands of jobs. stephanie: baloney. john before you went bankrupt, he created some jobs. after the bankruptcies -- he did not go personally bankrupt, but after his troubles financially , now that he is just a licensor, i don't think there is a lot of employment. stephanie: he is not creating jobs. you know who has created his success in terms of this election? the republican party, who have done nothing.

republicans out there are saying we need someone who avoids -- with a voice who will speak his mind. that is what this guy is doing. john: you hear the bell? time to read. john: that's hard -- stephanie: that's hard for us girls! kim davis, the county clerk in kentucky who refused to issue marriage licenses for same-sex couples, was jailed -- listen to me -- indefinitely for contempt today by federal judge. republican 2016 presidential candidates have been weighing in on both sides of this issue. some call her brave for standing up for her beliefs. others say she should follow the law of the land. john, purely in terms of politics, we have had everybody come out with views on this. who has the most to gain from their response? john: there are two clear camps and they are not surprising. you've got huckabee, gentle, cruz, rand paul, all saying this is a disgrace and they are on her side. stephanie: hold on, not a disgrace for what she said. a disgrace she is in jail -- john: those people on the far right, the christian

conservative side, they think she should be allowed to defy the supreme court. they think she is right on the merits. and then you have kasich, fiorina, chris christie, saying the supreme court is the law of the land. you work for the government, you have to issue these licenses. for some of these people on the farther right, although i think they are wrong on the substance, they have something to gain politically in the sense that everybody is trying to figure out how to gain the evangelical voters. trump is taking up so much space. this is an issue where a guy like huckabee can get a lot of airtime. he will go to kentucky and stand with kim. the question i have for you -- whatever you think of her stance on this, jail time? indefinitely? for life? stephanie: there you have it. maybe this woman should lose her job. in my opinion, definitely -- you should not put your political or religious beliefs ahead of what your job is. you just shouldn't have that job. but let me tell you, being jailed indefinitely?

isn't there something better for the state of kentucky to do than throw this woman in jail? come on. john: she is in contempt of court and there has to be punishment for that. to my mind, let's fine her. stephanie: let's fine her. i would rather not have my tax dollars keeping her in jail. she can spend her own dollars to get fined, thanks. ding, ding, ding. better go. are you doing a show tune? oh, my god. john: doing my best! as scott walker tries to reboot his campaign, he is getting a big boost from his super pac. today the group unveiled a new ad that will be part of a $7 million buy in iowa next week and it highlights walker's most important political credential. >> madison, wisconsin, 2011. big government union bosses led liberal activists in protest of governor scott walker's reforms. they stormed the capital,

threatened his safety, even tried to recall him, but scott walker never backs down. john: on the other side of the political aisle, there is joe biden, the vice president, who is fueling political chatter about his political aspirations by marching in a labor day parade with afl-cio president richard trumka. this is a traditional thing, republicans bash unions, democrats cozy up to unions. who has more to gain politically or financially from those different ways of approaching the union issue? stephanie: the whole thing is tiring because why americans are so frustrated is they want political leaders to stand up for what they believe in, not -- hillary clinton-style, what makes people like me more? how about being a candidate who just stands up for what you believe in? john: these people are doing what their ideology tells them to do. the unions have been a great bogey for republicans for a long time. they spend a lot of money, they support democrats, in this video, the scott walker ad, they look like isis storming some middle eastern city.

but the republicans, the ir position of bashing them is more politically and financially advantageous in this sense -- a lot of rich people, you know some of them -- stephanie: without a doubt. john: hate unions of any kind and they will write a big check to a guy like scott walker famous for crushing unions. stephanie: carl icahn did not go to atlantic city and rescue casinos specifically because unions stood in his way. he says that if these employees are willing to step out of their union contracts, i will hire them. because they wouldn't, he says go fish. john: it is almost ecumenical. you get these rich guys -- stephanie: almost what? john: you get democratic rich people -- even the democratic rich people hate the unions. stephanie: it stands in their way. if you are a super rich person, you don't want anything road-blocking you. john: she is awesome. with themy interview potential presidential candidate who says he will resign as soon as he reaches the white house.

we will be right back with that after these messages. ♪

john: there is only one person eying the oval office who would make campaign finance reform his only issue on the trail. that is lawrence lessig, the harvard law professor and political activist who announced earlier this month that he is exploring a bid for the democratic nomination. he says he will jump in if he can raise $1 million by labor day, and he's getting close. i sat down with lessig recently and asked him why he is doing what he is doing. we know from, polling, if we had a referendum on this issue, there is no doubt we would win. john: this issue being? mr. lessig: the corruption of the political system, because of big money, all sorts of ways we defile the basic commitments of representative democracy. which is equal citizens. we don't have equal citizens anymore. we are not a representative democracy. that idea is an idea where if confronted, the american with --

american people and say, hell no, we want to change that back. if we had a referendum on that, we would win. but we don't have referendum power at the federal level. we have it in some states but not the federal level. why don't we pass a referendum president, somebody who says i am the referendum? if i am elected, i would do everything i could to pass that law and once it is passed, i would step down and my vice president would become president. it is kind of two for the price of one president candidate. john: that makes your running mate rather important. how early would you announce that selection? mr. lessig: i have people i would love as a running mate, but the decision has to be made at the time of the contention based on who could make it certain this ticket could win. people who have been articulating the values of the democratic party in a really clear and consistent way have been inspiring the base of the democratic party. bernie has clearly done that. elizabeth warren has clearly done that. these are the kinds of people who could rally the party enough to actually win and with a mandate enough to do since you have told me since the beginning

of the time i have known you is impossible, to take on the power of washington, the corrupted power, and reform it. john: how do you explain your love affair with barack obama when he was doing the very thing you find so corrupting and immoral? mr. lessig: i don't see anything wrong with living by the rules of the game to get to office and change the rules of the game. i don't believe in unilateral disarmament, but i believe in barack obama. i was excited about barack obama because he went all across the country talking about the corrupting influence of money inside the system. the lobbyists were the problem with the system. if we don't change the way washington works, none of the reforms will matter. he was right about that. the problem is, when he got to washington, i imagine there was a conversation with rahm emanuel where he says i want to take on this corrupt system and rahm says "that is not going to happen. i've talked to heilemann, he says it can't happen. this is not going to happen. let's get onto to the other issues." so he gave up the moral mandate i think he had that would have been extraordinarily powerful to try to bring about this change.

that was a big mistake. john: if a candidate like barack obama ran while collecting a vast amount of money and promising to change the system and doing nothing to change the system -- if that candidate, who you invested so much hope in, turned out to be untrustworthy on this issue, why is any candidate ever going to be trustworthy on this issue, including you? mr. lessig: well, because, barack obama and any other candidate can get elected and then after having a number of important successes, define his administration in terms of his successes. i think obama, in terms of turning the administration to the best it could possibly be, has been a brilliant president from that standpoint. but, i will only succeed if i succeed. there is nothing else to measure me against except whether i got this legislation passed in a speedy time so that this is a referendum presidency. there is no wiggle room for me. it is not like i can say i pardoned a bunch of people or went to afghanistan as a president. it's this or nothing. john: let me ask you a totally practical question.

if you qualify for the democratic debates and find yourself on stage with martin o'malley and jim webb and certainly bernie sanders and hillary clinton, your tactic will be what? you will turn every single question into a question about this, or will you debate policy towards iran, debate about health care? will you become a sufficient expert on that wide array of policy areas that you will take on those issues and develop a full-blown platform? mr. lessig: you know i am an expert on all those issues. john: ok, fair enough. mr. lessig: no, absolutely, i have to take on those issues. john: you will be a full spectrum democratic candidate. mr. lessig: absolutely. the point is, it is incredibly important to tie every one of those issues to this in quality -- equality point. some of them are just outside the scope. i've got to be able to acknowledge it and talk about it on the merits and recognize that people are electing people on the basis of what they expect is going to happen in the context of an emergency and that is totally appropriate, exactly the right kind of question.

but if i were the referendum president, i would be a trustee for two different interests. one, i would be a trustee for the people to say we are going to get this bill passed and as soon as we get it passed, i will step down. second, i would be a trustee for the vice president, because that person will become president and then has some job to make sure the administration reflects his or her judgment about the way things ought to be. but i am, in the end, the president. i'm the person who needs to make the judgments and the calls. that's what i would have to do on the debate stage. john: my very last question for you. i believe many people who are your friends and your foes will describe this endeavor with one word, quixotic. do you reject that label or embrace it? mr. lessig: i don't think this will be quixotic. even if it were quixotic, if there were a one out of one million chance, if you believe this is the most

important moral issue of the time, and the only price i pay is people make fun of me and maybe personal bankruptcy, but ok, the only price i pay is that, in order to have a chance of moving the needle on the most important moral issue of the day, absolutely. i'm happy to embrace whatever chance it takes. i actually think that people are so frustrated that this is not quixotic, that people will rally in a way they rallied in another context. but if they don't, and it turns out to be just moving the needle and getting this issue in the center of the debate, that is enough for me. john: our thanks to lawrence lessig. when we come back, a new film about the black panthers, the party, the movement. my conversation with the director after this. ♪

>> second amendment guarantees the right to bear arms on public property. >> we are going to carry our

guns and follow police. we are going to maintain a legal distance ready to throw down if necessary. >> anyone who would approve this kind of demonstration must be out of their minds. john: that is a clip from "the black panthers: vanguard of the revolution," which premiered yesterday here in gotham city. i sat down with the director, stanley nelson, and asked him what led him to chronicle the rise and fall of the black panther party. stanley: i was 15 or 16 when the panthers came into being. i saw this thing arise, the soul -- this whole different way of looking, different way of being, and i was fascinated about it. as i got into film making, i thought it was incredible story that hadn't been told, with great, larger-than-life characters, a story that wasn't known. there was great footage and music. it seemed like a perfect topic to make a film on. john: right. when you think about that moment in the mid-to-late-1960s, the transformation of the civil rights movement, the splintering of it, you now have the black power movement, stokely

carmichael, that stuff kind of giving rise to a more radicalized view. talk about what was going on in oakland when the black panthers started, how the movement started. it's of particular relevance to the discussions we are having today in america. stanley: sure. the panthers started in 1966 in oakland, california. the oakland police were notoriously brutal to the african-american community. the panthers were a group of guys who were in college and said we have to do something about this. they formed a group and they called themselves the black panthers. what they did was they decided they would police the police. because in california at that time, you could carry a loaded weapon as long as you carried it in the open. they would follow the police, when the police would jump out to do a traffic stop or to confront somebody on the street. the panthers would jump behind, stay 10, 20 feet away, and make sure there was no violence that occurred in the stop.

john: there was a period from 1966 to 1970, 1971, when the group was probably at its peak, it was in 60 or 70 cities around the country, where many people of authority in america consider ed them a great threat. j. edgar hoover said they were the greatest threat to internal security in america. what was it that was so threatening, given the inspiration of the group, which was to monitor police and make sure police brutality didn't take place? what happened in those four years that caused so much of white law enforcement and the white power structure to freak out about the black panthers? stanley: the panthers were in some ways a victim of their own success. the image that first came to the public was these black men with guns that they had in oakland. but that really didn't last long. very quickly after that, they changed the law in california and said ok, you can't carry a gun. john: perhaps there was some relationship between those two things. stanley: a little.

after that, the panthers changed in a lot of ways. but that was the image that was in people's minds. even worse, that was the image that was in j. edgar hoover's mind, the director of the fbi, who really just went ballistic and kind of went all out to do anything he could to destroy the panthers. john: you talk about the great characters in this movie. let's talk quickly about some of these characters, who were incredibly glamorous in some ways. huey newton, bobby seale, fred hampton, eldridge cleaver. talk about those characters and how they were received by the pop-culture consciousness in america at the time. stanley: huey newton and bobby seale were the founders of the party. they were in college. huey newton was a real intellectual, just a brilliant guy. he was beyond handsome, he was beautiful, incredibly charismatic, incredibly good-looking. but he went to jail early on in a shootout that happened with

an oakland police officer and he was in jail. nobody saw huey. there arose this huge "free huey" movement. everybody knew "free huey" although though people didn't know who huey was. bobby seale had been an entertainer, somebody you liked and loved and was a great spokesperson. eldridge cleaver joins the party and eldridge cleaver had just gotten out of jail. but eldridge cleaver had written this book, "soul on ice," while in prison, and the book was on the top 10 of the "new york times" best sellers. all of a sudden, you have this guy who is this literary star who says, i will join this group. that also kind of helped to increase the mystique of the black panthers. john: you talk about how the group changed and they started doing other things. like a lot of groups on the left , they started caring about community health and education and other things in inner city areas.

but again, the image of them was very powerful, right? for a lot of people, one of the most famous things in social-literary journalism is when tom wolfe wrote about radical chic, and the leonard bernstein fundraiser for the black panthers in new york city in 1970 or so. what was it about the panthers that was so seductive, in your view, to certain segments of the american white left? stanley: i think the panthers were seductive to everybody. they were great at using the media. they had this look we had never seen before. the traditional civil rights movement was martin luther king, ralph abernathy. very church-based. suit and tie, buttoned up, but here black men and women with afros and berets and sunglasses, and looking cool. the other thing hard to grasp is that nobody had ever seen a

black man with his finger pointed in a white man's face. "look, you've got to do this!" we had never seen that in the history of the country. you could be killed for that. but that is who the panthers were. it was a whole different, aggressive attitude that people hadn't seen. i think was seductive for a lot of different groups. john: one of the most striking things of this summer to me has been the incredible success, kind of unexpected success, of the movie "straight outta compton." what is the through line for you between this movie and where we are right now in terms of the very same issues that the black panthers were confronting in the late 1960's and the african-american communities are facing now with the police? stanley: the black panthers started 50 years ago, almost exactly 50 years ago this year, and they started as a result of police brutality, as a way to confront this police brutality that was going on in the african-american community. we are 50 years later and we are still in the same place.

i think that part of the reason why we are in the same place is because those -- that has never been healed. we are still in the same place. it was never rectified. here we are in the exact same place and we have groups again saying that this is something we have to do for ourselves. we can't wait. black lives -- we are losing black lives. and how do we correct that ourselves? i think that is important. john: when we come back, deflategate. ♪

john: a federal judge sided with new england patriots quarterback tom brady today. stephanie, tom brady -- lying, cheating scumbag, or american hero? stephanie: or a hot piece of ass. who has lost here, seriously?

roger goodell. was it worth it to go to the mat over this? john: that just smoked everything. everything. great time for a iny floor wax, no? not if you just put the finishing touches on your latest masterpiece. timing's important. comcast business knows that. that's why you can schedule an installation at a time that works for you. even late at night, or on the weekend, if that's what you need. because you have enough to worry about.

i did not see that coming. don't deal with disruptions. get better internet installed on your schedule. comcast business. built for business. discuss the ceo search. who do investors want to see in charge? i'm emily chang and this is "bloomberg west." coming up, jack ma plans a $2 billion loan against alibaba's stock. plus, the nsa and pentagon go to court, but is it safe? and a messaging system gaining traction with corporate giants like cisco and unicorns like spotify. i will be joined by the ceo of lula -- all of that ahead on "bloomberg west."