just looking back at it is scary. i'm just thankful that i'm here and i'm thankful that nothing worse came from it . battle of the bands. let's play "hardball." good evening. i'm chris matthews in washington. it's been nearly a month since the election, but for many, it's clear there's more than a little bitterness. last night, donald trump held a thank you rally in cincinnati amid chanlts of "lock her up" from the crowd. trump reminisced how fun it was battling hillary clinton. >> i'm going to discuss our action plan to make america great again. we're going to discuss it. although we did have a lot of fun fighting hillary, didn't we?

right? >> and then there was the remarkable sight on the campus at harvard university yesterday at a forum featuring top trump and clinton aides. an event held every four years and usually a civil affair where former rivals come together to get debriefed about the election. this year, it devolved into shouting matches over the popular vote, the media, and the race itself or the issue of race, especially when it topic of trump senior adviser stephen bannon came up. >> he gets held to a standard that none of these other folks are held to. >> if providing a platform for white supremacists makes me a brilliant tactician, i'm glad to have lost. give me a minute, david. i'm more proud of hillary clinton's alt-right speech than any other moment on the campaign because she had the courage to stand up. i would rather lose than win the way you guys did. >> no, you wouldn't. no, you wouldn't.

that's very clear today, no, you wouldn't. do you think i ran a camplain where white supremacists had a platform? >> it did. kellyanne, it did. >> do you think you could have just had a decent message for the white working class voters? you think this woman who has nothing in common with anybody -- he flipped over 200 counties president obama won that donald trump just won. >> let's get into it. you guys are pathetic? that's a great line. kellyanne conway accused the clinton team of being sore losers. let's listen. >> i can tell you're angry, but wow. i mean, hash tag, he's your president, how's that. i was asked 100 times on tv. they're all here, maybe 1,000 times. will he accept the election result? will you? will you ever accept the results. will you tell your protesters he's their president too. >> i have more sound. i'm joined by casey hubt akasie susan page, and howard fien.

thank you. the tenor of this, this is usually some intellectual thing where they sit among the swells from harvard. this is raw, bitter gutter fighting. >> usually, this is polite. polite would be a word. it was not polite yesterday. the trump people were in the room because they wanted acknowledgment that they won this election. they didn't really get it beforehand. they didn't get any credit, and they, if anything, came to gloat a little bit. the clinton people were just downtrodden. nay were there to defend her honor. it was very clear they all felt very emotionally invested and devastated and were not past the election. you could see the culture clash that was on display throughout the entire campaign was on stark display in the room. even in the panels that were focused on the republican primary, where you had people who worked for republican candidates who might have sat across the table from hillary clinton and had a discussion like we have seen in past years. >> rough stuff, but i can

imagine the people who lost felt bad. they didn't like the looks. they didn't like david bossie saying they won. he's pretty nasty in politics. they said you're the winner, the leader of our country? i can imagine what jennifer palmieri felt. >> i wouldn't say they have been polite, theyave been civil. it's not like they have been friendly. this forum always takes place about three weeks after the election when feelings are still pretty high. the clinton people thought they were going to win. for them, they had three weeks and they have not yet come to terms with. >> i do that at the end of the show tonight. it was too soon for an election which happened too quickly. nobody knew it was going to happen. the trump people didn't know. nobody knew this was going to go the way it did. >> part of it is the shock of that defeat, as you say, that the clinton people haven't come to terms with. i have been going to these things since 1984. i have moderated for panels. they're for history as well as students.

to lay down the first draft of history from the sources. and i was there when the whole lee atwater controversy over the willy horton ad in the campaign of '88, that was raw, i modratded that panel, yet the situation was civil because there was a feeling in the room that, you know what. we're all in this together. this is one country. and as barack obama said somewhat naively on election night and soothingly, this was an intramural game. well, the attitude at this thing from everything i have seen and the people i talked to on both sides was unforgiving. it's like we're not even part of the same country, and it's more like after a college football game, let's say between ohio state and michigan, they hated each other before the game. they played the game, and now they hate each other afterwards. and it's lack of civility in the campaign. >> look, the clinton people believe fundamentally that trump is going to tear the country

apart. this is apocalyptic like them. >> this isn't like george hubert walker bush taking over. david bossie faulted the clinton team's approach. it get rougher. >> they made a calculated mistake if they had put out all of the e-mails, the judicial watch and vice news and citize s s united and others demanded and foia requested for the two years prior, two years prior to this campaign, they would have solved their own problem. instead, they use the clinton playbook from the '90s. they drip, drip, drip, held it in internally. >> it was working strategy i guess. >> so they said why didn't you do the same thing on the tax returns? >> this is the weird thing about the thing. i thought the trump people, or the hillary people accused the media of not being for hillary. i'm sorry, assuming hillary was going to win and being tougher

on her than trump. this is kind of odd. >> totally mixed up. i also think in the past the media, i know, having been at a lot of these, is kind of a passive observer. we weren't the story in the past. but i gather here both at these events and the dinner the night before, the media coverage and where the media stood on this became one of the central issues of this whole debrief, which is fascinating. >> and there were no defenders of the dia. democrats thought that the pss had been unfairly harsh on hillary clinton and too soft on donald trump. and the trump people felt that the media never took trump seriously, didn't give him a fair shake. treated him in a dismissive way. and you know, the clinton people haven't come to terms with her loss. the trump people did not play the traditional role of gracious winners. neither of them had gotten off their campaign stances, even though the election is over. >> is this because these people, well, we covered it for twoory three years. they have lived it in the bunker

for two years. the people in brooklyn, robby mook, that's all their life is. then they see a new life emerging which isn't the one they're in. there's a world where trump wins. they say suicide people comes from people, not from horror stories in their life, but from something completely different than they expected to happen and they can't take it. it's like they can't take the reality of today. >> when i started covering hillary clinton's campaign six months ago, i went to brooklyn and talked to her top staff. one thing i heard over and over again, we feel an enormous weight to not screw this up. if we screw up this campaign, donald trump will be the president of the united states. their view of that was, as you said, very different from if it was jeb bush or marco rubio. and the reality is, they're still sorting through, remember, this was a campaign manager's forum about what was going on in the campaign. do they have to blame themselves? >> you're right. a good freudian thinking, but in the end, the person you blame is this one.

the trump and clinton aides also bat 8ed over the significance of trump's popular vote loss. that's an argument everybody is having right now. >> i would say hillary did win the popular vote, so we're talking about a majority of the country. purely factual. >> why does that matter? >> listen, you guys won. that's clear. you want the electoral college. let's also be honest. don't act as if you have some popular mandate for your message. >> this is just fighting words. as you said, hasn't changed, ohio state against michigan. haven't changed. >> but from clinton's point of view, the clinton camp's point of view, what's going to end up happening is that the pre-election night polling, which predicted that hillary would win by two or three points -- >> is true. >> is true. she didn't win in the right places. from the trump side, look, they were branded as illegitimate, that they didened deserve to be in the race. that trump was something completely outside of politics.

to continue the football analogy, they're spiking it in the end zone repeatedly because after having been told they didn't know what they were doing, they didn't deserve to be in politics, that they were unqualified and disructive in a way we have never seen in american politics before, they won. what was kellyanne conway's answer to every criticism? we won. >> i love your analysis. so interesting, and a separate panel at harvard, corey lewandowski, he's back, had a message -- by the way, the guy that never got paid, he was there, too. they had a comment, we shouldn't have taken everything the candidate said so literally. this is a new kind of journalism. don't listen to the words. think through what he really meant. >> this is the problem with the media. you guys took everything donald trump said so literally. and the problem with that is the american people didn't. and they understood it. they understood that sometimes

when you have a conversation with people, whether it's around the dinner table or at the bar or it's wherever it is, you're going to say something and maybe you don't have all the facts to back it up, but that's how american people live. >> this is a new challenge to journalism. if he says something like jesus in the bible, what he really meant was, he didn't mean this, he meant that. how do we report that? >> it's hard to report. we need to take things literally because when people are president, their words matter. i actually think the analysis which i first saw in an article in the atlantic, voters took trump seriously but not literally. reporter took trump literally but not seriously. i think that's about right. >> how do you do it? >> you have to understand that voters were less consumed when he said things that were demonstrably untrue. >> let me try that out. when he said obama wasn't really an american citizen, he snuck in from another country. how are we supposed to translate

that to what he meant? >> we're supposed to say that's not true, but we're also supposed to understand how it's resonating with some voters. you have to do both. >> what is the message he's saying we should report on? tell me. >> the message we should report on is there continues to be an effort by people who are so opposed to president obama they're willing to peddle a discredited theory. >> the problem is that it ais allows trump to have it both ways. he's the guy on the bar stool, i'm going to get off jesus and compare him to the guy on the bar stool. declaiming that guy is going to be president. don't pay any attention to that guy. pay attention to the guy with the action plan. when trump says he has an action plan to make america great again that he just said in cincinnati, does he mean it? >> does he mean it when he says mexicans are rapists? he didn't mean rapists? what is the interpretation. we're at the u.n., we're going to translate it. >> people are going to go to

trump as an instrument to bash the establishment, no matter what he said. >> kasie, you were there every day. >> in that panel that corey lewandowski made these comments in, one of the republicans who lost to trump said, look, americans, they didn't care what your policy was to fix anything or do anything. they wanted to burn the house down and then figure out what to do with the ashes afterward. >> thank you, kasie hunt, susan page, and howard fineman. >> coming up, trump's victory rally in cincinnati was a sign of things to come for the next four years. he spent the night blasting the media. that's ahead, and this is "hardball," the place for politics. (vo) when i brought jake home,

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>> welcome back to "hardball." that was donald trump last night attacking the media at his thank you rally in ohio. really a no thank you rally to the media. while it's been neary a month since he won, he's continued to rail against the mainstream media, now mocking them, us, i guess, for wrongly predicting the outcome of the election. as plit row reports, trump's number one message is i told you so. here's a look at what he had to say last night. >> how about -- i mean, how dishonest. how about when a major anchor who hosted a debate started crying when she realized that we won. how about it. tears. oh, tell me this isn't true.

think of it. we won in a landslide. that was a landslide. and we didn't have the press. the press was brutal. remember, you cannot get to 270 -- the dishonest press. that person is doing the map. and that person was saying for months that there's no way that donald trump can break the blue wall, right? we didn't break it. we shattered that sucker. >> in effect, trump is continuing the rhetoric of the campaign. however, it appears his attacks are a prebuttle against the media to lower expectations for his incoming administration's press, the kind of press it's going to get. i'm joined by david korn and aldar deans, former chair of the republican party. it seems to me it's called riding the ref. whatever your hear from "the new

york times," which he fairly despises, would like to see go out of business, whatever you're reading, don't believe it. they crap all over me and that's all it is. >> a few conclusions. healing the country is not yet a top priority in the incoming administration. and two, this is it. i mean, he wants to make sure he can talk to the populist crowd in their language. this rally stuff is his addiction. i think you'll see more of it, even during his term in office. you're going to see constantly the rallies feeding the needs he may have. look, the optimistic me says as long as they can govern right with the right people in place, i'll live with the aggravation, but it won't heal the country. the country needs more than that. >> david. >> he has no interest in healing the country, unfortunately. he came to prominence pushing a racist conspiracy theory. he ran a campaign of hate and fear, misogyny, bigotry, and he's going to govern or rule as

president in the same way. he, according to every fact checker, lied so much more than any other politician, he broke the record of all politicians for telling lies. so he doesn't want the media to pay attention to him. he wants to keep dismissing it, which is a play out -- >> let's talk about the logic. is he trying to destroyhe fact checking. he would like to see no print newspapers. i think that's fair. there's not a single page whose editorial page endorsed him. >> sheldon adelson. >> you're making a skroek. he doesn't like print reporters. >> you will find out he believed he got his message out in the digital media world. he believes you and the traditional mainstream media are a nuse nls and he doesn't need you. if he discredited you, he has another outlet. at the point in time -- >> the live coverage at the

rallies helped him out a lot. >> the live rallies that were unfiltered and unevaluated in the first couple months. things people were shouting at jeff zucker about, he doesn't want to be called on the fact he doesn't care about that. >> he said he won in a landslide. what does he mean? >> no, he lost the popular vote. if you look at the list of -- >> they cheered him. because i think it's like -- i'm not a mead ucritic. at fox, they say we're fair and balanced. that's not what they mean. they mean we balance out the liberal media. we know what they mean. i get the feeling it's not a dog whistle. it's like you know what they're really saying. trump talks in this language, it's not that he really did. it's like screw you. i didn't win in a landslide, but i'm going to say it. do they think they won in a landslide? >> i they think some of them do. >> you could say i won 30 states and more.

>> here's your case study, chris. the other day, he said millions of people voted illegally in the race. now, that's not true. >> yeah. >> his campaign cited studies that didn't say that. on cnn yesterday, had this wonderful video. i hate to tout a competitor, in which one of the reporters talked to trump voters and they said, of course, he's right. >> if there were 3 million illegal, i assume, hispanic voters who voted in california, right? that's where the big plurality was for hillary, how come they didn't vote for loretta sanchez? why didn't she roll it up? she lost. there weren't 3 million illegal people voting out there. there just weren't. >> this gets back to your question. he said it. his people believe him. despite any evidence. they even say, we heard it reported on cnn when it wasn't. >> thank you. >> when we return, let me finish with what happened between the trump and clinton campaigns at harvard. you're watching "hardball," the place for politics. diabetes can be a daily struggle,

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let me finish tonight with the event last night at harvard. the john f. kennedy institute of politics which hosted the forum last night featuring the trump and hillary clinton campaign managers is usually a more convivial affair. last night was anything but, and there's a reason for it. the reason is the campaign didn't turn out the way it was supposed to. nobody had reason to believe trump was going to win, not even the top trump people believed he was going to break through the firewall and grab pennsylvania, michigan, then wisconsin. so the losers haven't had a chance to digest what happened. it takes time to realize the world you imagined thou two years of campaigning in is not the world you live in. feelings are craw, for women who felt he got away with words that should never get spoken, forhan for immigrants, for mexicans. i could live with a little

bitterness after all that. i'm glad to live in a country when confronted with this, do more than say ouch and forget about it. that's "hardball" for now. thanks for being with us. coming up next, "your business" with j.j. ramberg. it's time to shake things up. with the capital one venture card, you get double miles on everything you buy, not just airline purchases. seriously, think of all the things you buy. great...is this why you asked me to coffee? well yeah... but also to catch-up. what's in your wallet? but when we brought our daughter home, that was it. now i have nicoderm cq. the nicoderm cq patch with unique extended release technology helps prevent your urge to smoke all day. it's the best thing that ever happened to me. every great why needs a great how.

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