expected to serve two years of a four-term term. the leader of a centrist party will become foreign minister. the two will exchange roles halfway through the term. that's it for us tonight. the news at any time. let's hand it over to chris for "cuomo prime time." >> appreciate it, anderson. chris cuomo. welcome to "prime time." i keep saying this. it there is a game afoot. it is my job to expose it and your job to realize there is a conspiracy contagion growing. there should be genuine concern. there are too many of us who have grown tired in this country of not payinpaying attention to happening. i know we all want to enjoy the summer and get back to normal, post-pandemic. i want nothing more than that as well. but i know that the pandemic is

not the disease that is placing us most at risk. and we are, -- our way of lifes at risk. we told you when trump was voted out of office, seven months ago tomorrow, that he was just a symptom. the big lie would not just disappear. divide and conquer will not just disappear, because it works too well. and sure enough, things are getting worse. today, lawmakers from two states held a meeting of conspiratorial minds to swap notes on how to make the big stolen election lie true. these are elected officials i'm talking to you about. pennsylvania retrumplicanss fle

across the country to observe a sham audit, a fraud-it, in arizona's largest county to see if they could bring the chaos back home. yep, cyber ninja's bamboo paper chase is still under way, carried out by a group with no experience, funded by an organization that is run by an abject conspiracist. and they may only grow in influence. the arizona secretary of state has found confidential manuals left un ataunattended, quality l measures disregarded. ironically, this is all in an effort to prove fraud. remember, the republican board of elections certified the results.

many republicans don't see why the legislators are pushing the fraud-it. this is what got us to january 6th. the infamy of the terrorist insurrection on that day was a symptom of an ongoing effort to disrupt. and the fringe right that has overtaken the gop only wants more. you are seeing more fringe zealots and revenge types entering races on the right. and once they get in, they are a wrecking ball. gop-controlled states are now actually changing laws to make it easier to overturn future elections. and to increase the chance that they like the election outcomes and don't have to overturn, they are reducing the likelihood that people who vote against them can vote at all.

14 states have enacted 22 new laws making it harder to vote since trump lost. the game is clear by the stone-faced suggestion that race has nothing to do with these changes. >> but i don't think any of these efforts at the state level are designed to suppress the vote based upon race. >> he had to think about it for a second, because he knows it can be about nothing else. let's just think about it. so these are fixes to outcomes that state gop officials certified as not needing to be fixed. where is the proof of the problem in any form other than an empty suggestion? nowhere.

mcconnell is playing the game. when trump was weak, what did he do? he accused trump of inciting the mob that attacked the capitol. remember that? well, he's no longer president, but as a citizen he can be held to account. that's what mcconnell said when he thought trump was done. but when the base roared back, he asked his caucus to vote against investigating january 6th as a personal favor. he is just playing this game. it is one of power and position, and he is playing with poison. and now comes the fever to our ailing body politic. trump fueling fringe conspiracists that he's going to be reinstated in august, echoed by trump's ex-lawyer sydney powell this weekend. >> it should be that he can

simply be reinstated, that a new inauguration date is set. >> it's all bs. two things. there is absolutely no provision for anything like that. and in fact, the constitutional process of certification is as layered as it is to make anything like this bs impossible. and sydney powell knows this. and that's why the second thing is to consider the source. powell argued in court that no reasonable person would believe what she says. that's how she was trying to get out of a defamation suit. she literally admits she's full of it, just playing the game. but the game works. and i'm trying to arm you with the facts of the reality so that you can talk sense to those who are open to reason. we are living in a country where people would rather see others get sick, including in their own

families, than take steps to protect themselves and those they care about just to make a political point. this is not media hype. i get your mistrust. i get the distrust. you're not always wrong. but this is a day by day reckoning of what will be an historic period of unrest in this country. i'm telling you, this is an open opportunity for things to get worse or better. washington will not fix this. this will not get better or worse because of them. this situation is going to find its level based on people like you. what you decide about what this country is about as a people. and if you needed another arrow in the quiver to convince people how asinine this is, guess who

is taking credit for this august conspiracy,none other than mike lindell, who is also being sued over election lies. now, look. trump will not be reinstated. he can't even get reinstated on social media, let alone get in the white house, not that way. but this is all about the surreality. it made people angry enough to storm the capitol and try to kill cops by the dozens. democrats cannot fix this. they are stuck in congress and not making as much of their majority as was hoped. and time is ticking down to what could be a monster of a midterm for them. and the right is irrationally exuberant about the big lie. more than 50% of republicans in america believe the lies they're

being fed that trump really won. could it be that a lot of people who are republicans don't identify that way right now because they don't like the stink? maybe. but we don't know that. all we know is that over 50% of one-half of our political party system believes bs. so where are we headed? let's take it to the better minds. van jones and michael smerconish. mike, do you see it the way i lay it out or am i missing something? >> i want you to think about something additionally, and it's this. there's no love lost between mitch mcconnell and donald trump, as you just made reference to. we could say the same thing relative to kevin mccarthy and donald trump, because of the comments that he made post-january-6th. in the case of mcconnell, he just bypassed an opportunity, a golden opportunity, to do harm to former president trump. he could have gotten on board or at least gotten out of the way with regard to a january 6th commission. there is no way such a

commission report could come back and be anything other than devastating for trump. but he didn't do that, chris. why didn't he do that? well, the answer that most people say is, he didn't want a report to come out on the cusp of the midterm election. i see it differently. to your point, i think mcconnell recognized all this that you're discussing has gone too far. it's gone too far with the base. and even if there were a january 6th commission that came back with a devastating report about trump, that he was watching a flat screen on the afternoon of january 6th while rome burned and refused to intercede, the base wouldn't buy it. and that's why i think mcconnell chose to bypass that opportunity. >> van, looking at it from your side of the field, you guys can't stop this, what's happening right now. is that the reality? >> well, i think that unless

there is a change of heart from joe manchin to revisit the filibuster, at least when democracy is on the line, at least when the sacred right to vote is being attacked across the country, don't make us have to climb a 60-vote wall to put laws in place to protect the vote. if joe manchin doesn't change his mind, then we are looking down the barrel of a very, very desperate situation. we keep talking about this, chris, as the big lee. th big lie. it's also an excuse for the big heist. people are smart enough to know that that election was probably more fair and square than they're acknowledging. but what happened inside the republican party, it was republicans that saved joe biden at the grassroots level. republican grassroots officials

who called it right, who said we just are not going to give this election to donald trump. it was republican judges, it was republican secretaries of state, it was republican elections officials who said, we are going to follow the law. so guess what, they're now changing the law. and they're going to change out a bunch of those officials. so next time they'll be in a position to outright steal the election. that is the danger. so it's not just a big lie. it's a big excuse to set up a big heist. and that's why you're correct that this summer can't be a sleepy summer. we need to be doing exactly what you're saying, sounding the alarm, because it's easy to say, it's just a bunch of kooky conspiracy theories, they won't let go of last year. this isn't about last year. it's about 2022 and 2024. >> mike, do you think it's even money that we get to a worse or better place, and what do you think the variables are? >> what i worry about, in line with what van just had to say, is the acceptance of future results. hard-fought elections is a big

part of our custom, culture, and history. but in the past, we've accepted the results and we've vowed to come back and fight another day. i'm really worried not so much about 2022, but about what looms for 2024, because this is all laying a predicate. by the way, if defiance of the rule of law, which has been a republican talking point since i can remember, it's laying a predicate for people not to accept the result of whatever the next presidential race might be. and i think a large part of the rati rationale, if there's any rationale to what the former president is doing, victimhood sells. it's a motivator. it's effective to say, we wuz robbed, now write your check and make sure you come out and vote in the next election. far more effective to say we were robbed than, we lost fair and square and guess what, i would like to come back and take another shot anyway. >> van, here's the problem, is

that you have never seen january 6th as an extension of political rhetoric, even demagoguery. yeah, trump pushed it in a way we haven't seen at the presidential level in modern history. but i don't think this is just about who wins the talk and who gets their people to the polls. i see the big lie as a metaphor for people's distrust, disaffection, and dissatisfaction. and it is very real. we talk about it in the minority community all the time. it's just as real in white america and in some ways, being fuel for a sense of being aggrieved, being a victim, as mike says, that has people ready to attack a capitol. i see more of that coming, not less. >> well, i mean, if you put those two things together, you have a double legitimacy crisis. in other words, you could have a situation where the left won't accept the results of the next election because we look at all this hanky-panky going on with

voter suppression, et cetera, et cetera. also the right might not accept it because of all the conspiracy theories. you've never had that. you have a legitimacy crisis when one side won't accept the outcome. when you have a situation where literally neither i side -- you now have real termites eating into the foundation of civil society, eating into the foundation of a functioning democratic republic, in ways i haven't seen before. and i think it's really concerning. i do believe that joe manchin has the fate of the republican in his hands. and he says i don't want to blow up the system. the system is being blown up. the arsonists are already here. we need a firefighter who is going to do what's needed to put the fire out, at least when it comes to all of these bills that are being rolled out, especially the one in texas, that are just going to make it almost impossible for the left to participate well and accept the outcome.

>> it will be a functional distinction if the federal were to get involved and suppress these state measures but it would also be fuel for exactly this revenge mentality, that all these states were suppressed by the crazy left. i hear you. but how it plays out could be a little different than how it is anticipated. van, i appreciate you, van jones. michael smerconish, as always, thank you. so to the presidency before trump. you don't get trump without barack obama. why? because it was fundamental in terms of fueling white anxiety and white fright and making a fringe mentality now able to be magnified, which is what trump did. so what does barack obama have to say? there's a new interview about his time in office, the times he bit his tongue about the tea party, and where he sees biden taking things. ezra klein got the one on one and he is here, next.

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the big lie is just a rationale for the big lack of contentment among many in white america. and they have tapped into something that is very real. now, how they've decided to expose it and exploit it has been very fake and fraught with a lot of toxicity. but remember, it's not just the right fringe. you have 56% of all republicans who believe that this was a fraud, this election. now, again, maybe. maybe that is because a lot of people don't identify as republican anymore because they don't want to own trump and his trumpery. but if you compare that reality to former president barack obama discussing why he didn't do more to shoot down lies when he was in office, you get something interesting.

listen. >> with the emergence of the tea party, we could see that happening with sarah palin. she was a prototype for the politics that led to the tea party that in turn ultimately led to donald trump and that we're still seeing today. there were times where calling it out would have given me great satisfaction personally. but it wouldn't have necessarily won the political day in terms of me getting a bill passed. a lot of times one of the ways i would measure it would be, is it more important for me to tell a basic historical truth, let's say, about racism in america right now, or is it more important for me to get a bill passed that provides a lot of people with health care that didn't have it before? >> the former president was speaking to our next guest. a big thinker for "the new york times," host of "the ezra klein

show," good to see you, my friend. congratulations. >> thank you. >> what do you see of the former president's perspective? yeah, he got health care done. but it was a bill that did a lot and didn't do a lot. it was imperfect and they would never work on it again because of how it was passed so it would always be vulnerable and there would never be universal health care and there's a whole list of things, job plan, infrastructure, universal background checks, climate change, not even the judges that obama was able to get done. should he have attacked what has now blossomed into the political state of play we're living with? >> i think you have to cut that into a couple of different pieces. the central problem in governing for barack obama and now for joe biden is the filibuster. under obama, democrats had for a minute 60 seats in the senate, for a longer period 59, now biden has 50. in both cases they've been tremendously stopped by the

filibuster. and, you know, they did quite a bit in the first couple of years in 2009, 2010. i think the administration was more transformational than you give it credit for, not as far as i would like it to go, but a remarkable achievement. but at some point the democratic party has to decide whether or not it is more important for it to govern or for it to preserve these old obstructions that maybe worked at a time when the parties were diverse in terms of their ideological composition and don't work now. as you see with senator joe manchin, senator kristyrsten si, there's still disagreement about that. what obama is saying is that there are things he wanted to be able to say when he was president but he thought they would not work politically. so not that he could have attacked racism in this country more directly and then passed a bigger health care bill but that if he attacked racism in this country, he would not have passed any health care bill. >> but why?

that assumes he would have lost his own members by addressing what is a signature issue for their platform anyway. >> i don't think it was a signature issue back then. ben nelson from nebraska was concerned about structural racism in america? i don't buy that. more broadly, something he says in his book, and we talked about it more at length in my interview with him, is that every time he talked about race, his poll numbers plummeted, something i found incredibly revealing in the book. he says, you remember the incident where the policeman arrested harvard professor of african-american studies on his own porch? obama said the police acted stupidly. his advisers told him that no event drops his support among white voters as much as that single moment where he says the police acted stupidly there. and he never gets some of that support back. >> help us. let's wait for you to unfreeze. let's see if we can get ezra

back. okay, ezra's coming back. and then he's gone again. all right. so let's do this. can you hear me, ezra? >> i can hear you just fine. >> good. don't do that, i'm too old for that. look at my face, it's already flushed. it's just hypertension. >> the conversation is too hot. >> you and i have known each other for a long time, i have a lot of respect for you on this. i don't agree that democrats would have left obama over him talking more about race. but that's neither here nor there, that's in the past. it's more about the state of play. and the point you just made, what does it mean that nothing hurt obama with white voters as much as his saying something that seemed obvious in that incident about policing? because the skip gates thing was not a close call. it was obviously bad policing. what does it mean to you? >> it means that this country is on the one level, has a lot of

racism in it. on the other hand, is incredibly defensive about that fact. when you still have not just, by the way, not just a white majority in the electorate, but then you have built on top of that political structures and rules and systems, particularly in the senate, in the distribution of the senate, the equal proportion of the states, and the filibuster, that give white voters even more power, then it becomes a very, very dangerous line to walk, that obama had to walk very, very carefully. now a lot of politics have changed in part because of him and i think democrats can be a lot more frontal on that. >> white fright, ezra. >> it's minefield, even now. >> white fright is the minefield we're talking about and that is being exploited so well on the right. during obama's eight years in office, his party lost more house, senate, and state legislative and governor seats than under any other president. now, up until house and senate, i don't want to be unfair to former president obama because the right -- you and i both know this but for people at home, they organized and put money

into state races in a way that democrats had never contemplated and it paid off, and now they're doing all this redistricting, or gerrymandering as we used to call it. in sum total, do you believe they lost all those seats under obama because of his governance or because of his countenance? >> i think there's a bit of both in there. some of it was the economy. what you have in 2010 is a recession that keeps building even after obama got into office. that's part of it there. then there is countenance, you don't think you can get away from that, there's a huge realignment under obama where white voters move away from the democratic party and into the republican party, we know that happened. another thing that happened, actually pretty important, ticket splitting goes way, way down over the next couple of years. so, you know, when obama runs in 2008, you have a 0.71 correlation between a presidential vote and whether or not the same party candidate

gets a senate vote. now it's 0.96, it's basically perfect with the exception of joe manchin. you're no longer allowed to be a different kind of democrat or different kind of republican. because of how concentrated the democratic party is in urban areas, that ends up hurting the democratic party quite a bit over the years too. >> ezra, let's do this. this is like the introduction of a ten-chapter talk that we need to have on the state of play. you and i have been doing this for a while. i don't think either of us have ever seen the country culturely or politically culturally where it is right now. and i really believe that this is going to be a very impress period. i need to have you keep coming on to talk about the perspective of where is progress on this, what are we seeing, what are the dynamics. you understand it in a way that i don't, that would benefit the audience well, and i will ask you to come back, okay? >> i appreciate that. >> ezra klein, congratulations on getting the interview.

he couldn't be speaking at a more important time. good to have you. now, on the pandemic front. look, there are two diseases. i've been saying this to you for over a year now, right? our politics is making us sick. and we have a pandemic that is literally making us sick. the director of the nih is now calling for an investigation into the wuhan lab leak theory. after once appearing to dismiss it. we have dr. francis collins here tonight. has the opinion on the genesis of covid changed? what is the state of play? is he worried about the politics? next. a's had a lot of firsts. 100% online car buying. car vending machines. and now, putting you in control of your financing. at carvana, get personalized terms, browse for cars that fit your budget, then customize your down payment and monthly payment. and these aren't made-up numbers. it's what you'll really pay, right down to the penny. whether you're shopping or just looking. it only takes a few seconds, and it won't affect your credit score. finally! a totally different way to finance your ride.

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rely on the experts at 1800petmeds for the same medications as the vet, but for less with fast free shipping. visit petmeds.com today. so here's our latest count when it comes to the pandemic. more than 3.5 million lives have been stolen. that includes 595,000 americans. eventually it's likely we're going to lose more americans from this than any war has ever taken from us. more than the civil war, more than anything. now, nowhere is the threat of our current political situation more evident than in the reckoning of the pandemic. how so? because it's all become about who was right. prioritizing political points. and i don't understand why the right would ever want this argument when trump absolutely

lied to you about how serious this was because he made a bad bet, that he could suppress our understanding and our response to covid-19 as a way of keeping the economy afloat and therefore his fortunes politically. when the right play was to own covid, become the wartime president that he said he was, own it like nobody else, use manufacturing like nobody else, get us to a better place faster, then he would have won again. now, it begins with a fight over where it started. why? because the right now believes if it started in a lab, then they can say maybe it was weaponized. and that means that china did this to us on purpose and they're really the bad guy and the left should have known that and never went after it. and trump said it before the left so he's not the bad guy. so let's go to the top person in search for facts. the director of the national institutes of health, dr. francis collins.

it's good to have you on "prime time," doc. >> glad to be with you, chris. and glad to talk about what really happened here as best we know it, which still leaves a lot of gaps. >> i want to get into that morass. let me take one step back. the idea of the chinese having viruses come from bats that make their way into the rest of the world and make people sick, even in america, is not new. why have we nor any kind of consortium ever done anything about that fact before now? >> well, goodness. we knew all the way back to when sars emerged almost 20 years ago that that came from a bat that got transferred ultimately through a civet cat to humans and took the lives of a few thousand people. so we knew that was a serious issue. mers came along later, same thing, except it was a camel that was the intermediate host.

we at the national institutes of health had to be concerned about that. global health isn't concerned with national boundaries. what other viruses are lurking in bats in caves in china? that seemed to be where the trouble was. >> nobody ever cracked down on them. i find that curious. is that just politics? was it being afraid of what china would do in response? why not? >> well, there was a lot of criticism of how china squelched the information about sars when that happened. go back and look at those reports. clearly they were not transparent about what was happening, and the virus got spread to other places in ways that maybe could have been prevented. so yeah, there was quite a bit of criticism. there is also a recognition that -- >> criticism wasn't enough, is all i'm saying, because what we are have now is, obviously under president trump you had the cdc cut its staff there by two-thirds. you didn't even have eyes on the

ground. that leads us to our current problem with contagion, which is where this started. is it a fair criticism to say that you were dismissive of the lab theory early on and that now you are more open to it, and if it is fair, why did you change? >> it's not entirely fair, chris. you know, when this virus first emerged, all of us at nih were deeply engaged in studying its genome, its letters and its sequence, to try to understand what its connection was with previous viruses. we could see it was a bat virus, it looked a lot like one that had been found in a cave in china seven or eight years earlier. but it had a lot of differences. then the theory began to be put forward, maybe it's human engineered, maybe it's an intention bioweapon that has been put together with the intention of killing people. that theory really didn't hold up. you could look at the letters of the rna code and say, no human would have come up with this. that was rather widely spread. the idea that it might have been

an accidental leak from the lab, on the other hand, always seemed sort of a dark and unfortunate idea, but not one you could rule out. and today we cannot rule that out. and we know there have been other instances, including in china, were leaks have happened by accidents. >> why are you guys calling for an investigation into it now? and just to be fair, you know, even on fox news, one of the guys who was interviewing you about this, you said, look, i reject the bio weapon part. you were told, this isn't about a bio weapon, it's just about it happening in a lab. why are you more open to that suggestion now and will you ever know the answer? >> i would not say i'm significantly more open than i was last summer when we began to remember about that as a real possibility. but there was so much swirl going on in other areas that that probably didn't come to attention. i didn't go to a microphone and announce that. do i think we'll ever know the answer? we really need an

evidence-based, expert-driven investigation that's going to require china to be willing to let investigators look into the lab records, find out what happened in late 2019 in terms of the first cases, including those people who got sick in the lab, and get to the bottom of this. without that, you know, chris, we don't know any more about this theory really than we did a year ago. so for people now to say, oh, well, it's emerging as a likely explanation, it hasn't really. it's going to require more data before anybody can say that. i still think the most likely explanation is, this was a natural transmission from a host bat, maybe something else in between, to humans. but i can't prove that either. we need to know the answer. we haven't got the evidence yet to say. >> dr. francis collins, please come again, and thank you for coming tonight. >> glad to talk to you, chris. glad to come back any time. >> appreciate it. what do you think about the olympics? do you think we should hold it or do you think the pandemic is going to create a catastrophe

there? the tokyo games are less than two months away. there are many new concerns being voiced including from our next guest. i don't think anybody understands the olympics better than broadcasting legend bob costas. let's talk to him about the olympics and the state of play in this world, in the case.

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they're pushing ahead. but thousands of its volunteers are not. according to japanese broadcaster nhk, around 10,000 volunteers have withdrawn from the games. our next guest says he's not surprised, especially amid growing calls to cancel or postpone. bob costas, everybody knows him, he's a broadcasting legend. and he is on record as saying these olympics are a mistake. he joins me now. hey, possible. a pleasure. it's been a second. good to see you. do you still feel that way? and if so, why? >> that may have been misinterpreted a little bit. i think the best course of action would be to postpone it, not cancel it, postpone it to 2022. that may have led some people to infer that that's a possibility. it's not. the ioc holds the hammer here and the ioc has repeatedly said, even with a state of emergency in tokyo itself, even with vaccinations in japan in single

digits, even though they say in the next two months they hope to get it to 70%, even with around 70% of japanese citizens saying postpone or cancel it, even with the overwhelming consensus of the international health community, the health experts, that this is risky, they are going full speed ahead. so it's going to happen, no matter what we think. >> let's put up the full screen of some of the major countries that are participating and their vaccination rates so people get some context about what people like bob and many people are worried about, which is, what happens after, okay? these are the vaccination rates. let's say they'll all be marginally higher. not incredibly higher by the time of this, because i believe, and i think, bob, you share that idea, that people are losing incentive to get vaccinated, not gaining incentive. what is your big concern about what happens after the olympics? >> well, i would think that the athletes might be atypical of the citizenry of their countries

taken all together, because they have some incentive, a large one, to be vaccinated before they arrive in tokyo. and without pretending to expertise i don't have, but just common sense and what we've learned, if you wanted to come up, forget about within sports, but anywhere in the world, with a petri dish for a surge, variants and all the rest, how about bringing large numbers of people from 200 different countries, with varying levels of health care and all the rest, varying levels of vaccination, bring them together, even though they're going to socially distance and have all kinds of protocols that are going to make this a very unusual olympics, without much of what's appealing about it, besides the competition itself, even with that in place, it seems to me like you're really rolling the dice. it could be a petri dish. >> now, barring the controversy where bob costas is about to kill it in the heptathalon

because of a dirty test, a covid test, but barring that, what about the argument that we need it, that the world is in a frightened place, it needs to see people coming together, and the risk is small enough to manage it in some kind of bubble? >> well, when the nba played in a bubble, the nhl, baseball, with no fans last year, those were containable bubbles. whatever the risk was. the olympics are the most far-flung event in all of sports. indoor venues, outdoor venues. it's actually beyond the core of the host city in many cases. the marathon and all the rest. i know that they're going to try. but the risk seems to me to be larger than when we talk about the american sports, the team sports that we generally follow. >> obviously the united states is going to go there and be all in, but it's also in a better position than any of the other countries. let me ask you something while i have you, brother.

you are an observer of politics and culture. can you believe the situation that we're in right now in this country? have you ever seen anything like it? >> no. i have not. and i think that we ought to make it clear that this is not a matter of liberal/conservative, democrat/republican. if the republican party in any discernible way even exists anymore. when you have a sizable percentage of the country that is absolutely fact-averse and believes wild, crazy things, and is a cult of personality, this has nothing to do with principle. it has nothing to do with conservative ideas. this country needs a strong republican party so that moderate republicans have a place to go, a place they recognize. but also, no matter who is in office, even if you voted for him, joe biden needs a thoughtful opposition, just as if a republican was in office, that person needs a thoughtful opposition. plus there are excesses on the left, excesses of pc and wokeness and all the rest, and

you need some sort of thoughtful response to that instead of the nonsense that we're getting in maga world. >> bob costas, i've been a student of yours for many years, it goes well beyond sports. i appreciate your perspective. and be well. we'll be right back. >> thanks very much, chris. that help unleash your energy. loaded with b vitamins... ...and other key essential nutrients... ...it's a tasty way to conquer your day. try centrum multi gummies. now with a new look.

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this is kind of a bolo but something you should keep an eye on. benjamin netanyahu. bibi may be on his last leg as israel's prime minister. his political foes reached a coalition agreement to form a new government. a coalition is made up of eight different parties across the political spectrum. the came together minutes before a midnight deadline, all united by their desire to oust netanyahu, israel's longest-serving prime minister. he's been in power the last 12 years. the shakeup is poised to have a big impact on us and our relations with israel and president biden's middle east agenda. under the agreement netanyahu's former lieutenant, that tally bennett, a more right-wing politician, will take over as prime minister for two years

before handing off the reins of power to another coalition leader. what does that mean for us? a little bit of it is unknown, a lot of it. in the short-term, policy experts believe biden is unlike to face much challenge over the iran nuclear deal or calls to reset relations with palestinians as cease-fire holds. still this isn't over and it's not clear. netanyahu remains prime minister until somebody else is sworn, in, and might not happen for another week and a half. netanyahu has time to convince people to defect from the bloc. the stakes higher for him and his ongoing trial on corruption charges. don't forget the threat from the right fringe and the trumpers to make that situation a weapon here as well.

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you know, there are different theories about how this dynamic is supposed to work. there are many who believe that we have to be very careful what we discuss with the audience, to not rile tensions, to not give

people misgivings or fears or doubts. that's why we always warn you before explicit videos, we don't show you the dead when we're at war the way i believe we should. i believe that you can take it. and i believe that you are too suspicious because you know too much has been hidden from you. that's why i tell you about the dangers of this moment. because they're real. and i know that the reality is going to be a function of what you believe and what you want to be true. so thank you for watching. "don lemon" tonight with its big star d-lemon right now. okay, so let's see, who's darker? what happened? did you, "a," they put the wrong makeup in your room poweder? >> i have no powder. >> "b," you fell asleep in the tanning bed. >> i've never been in a tanning bed in my life. >> "c," you went fishing today? >> i did not fish today, as usual,