former president obama on friday tossing out that unwritten rule that former presidents should not lash out against their predecessors but it's a different time, joe, and a very different place that we're in. good morning, everyone, it's monday, september 10th. with us we have political writer for "the new york times" nick confess sorry, professor at princeton university eddie glover, jr. the executive producer of "the circuit" on show time mark mick kinnen is with us and heidi priz blah. we will get more on president obama in just a moment, joe, but the other kind of big sports story we're covering this morning and i'm bringing it up because i found it to be fascinating. serena, can you believe it? >> it was a fascinating way to end a u.s. open and i know we were sitting there watching some of the greats of all time, chris

everett and then of course john mcenroe also, his brother patrick mcenroe talking about what happened, billie jean king wrote an op-ed for the "washington post." it was such a sad way to end a u.s. open where you have the greatest female player in the world playing against a woman that many people believe will be the next great player in the world, but she wasn't -- her accomplishments weren't even recognized because of the showers of boos that came down from above. but we will talk about it -- >> it was fascinating. >> -- coming up. it certainly was. boy, barack obama, you know, he once said i'm lebron, baby. he sure looked like lebron when he was speaking. and that was like an easy layup when he said how hard can it be to criticize neo nazis?

>> right. >> sort of puts you in the place where we are where it's just surreal that donald trump has trouble even criticizing neo nazis and white supremacists. do you know what, we have a guy who wants to be in the united states supreme court and we will get to this later, too, brett kavanaugh who would not even answer whether it was right to stop people from coming from -- from coming into the united states because of their race. i mean, that's unheard of. but, again, we will get to that a little bit later on. but these are strange, strange times and unfortunately weak and sniffling men and women will do or say just about anything, just look to capitol hill to see that, to try to get in the good graces of a man who has absolutely no understanding about what america's

constitutional norms are or who we are, what values we have as a country. >> yeah. my daughter has stopped talking to me about politics quite some time ago because it was all too much and too negative. my phone lit up, both of them, during obama's speech and snap chats and you know what, it all sort of coming in because they were finally excited again. so that certainly says something. former president obama continued his foray back into the police cal scene this weekend, once again making the case against the man now holding his old job, president trump. the former president was on the campaign trail in california on saturday working to rally voters as democrats make plays for seven competitive congressional districts there. obama's speech was notably different from the one he delivered in illinois on friday, working to turn out the vote in november rather than directly attacking the trump administration. still, the former president took a number of veiled shots at his

successor. >> we're in a challenging moment because when you look at the arc of american history there has always been a push and pull between those who want to go forward and those who want to look back, between those who want to divide and those who are seeking to bring people together, between those who promote a politics of hope and those who exploit politics of fear. i deeply believe there are no set of problems, there are no set of issues that we can't solve if we're working together and we're true to the traditions that are best in america.

it's always tempting for politicians, for their own gain and for people in power to try to see if they can divide people, scapegoat folks, turn them on each other, because when that happens you get gridlock and government doesn't work and people get cynical and they decide not to participate. >> mika, you talked about before how this is unusual for a former president to actually be campaigning against a current president, the current president's interests. you of course have donald trump who has broken every rule, you have donald trump who is still campaigning against a woman he defeated two years ago, still having crowds chant lock her up, lock her up. donald trump is making this a continuation of a campaign

against hillary clinton and a constant campaign against barack obama. so if i were a democrat and if i were somebody that wanted to win this fall, i would hope that barack obama would go all in, go there, and do what he needs to do to draw the line, not between him, but draw the line between america's political and constitutional norms. >> yes. >> and just how demented and twisted some of the statements and policies this president has promoted over the past year and a half have actually been. somebody has got to do it because the democratic party does not have a voice of oppositi opposition. barack obama is that voice right now. >> you could argue he was campaigning for decency and belief in the system, quite frankly. one of obama's comments from his speech in illinois on friday appears to have gotten under president trump's skin.

during that speech mr. obama reminded the crowd that the economic success mr. trump likes to claim credit for actually began under his watch. >> by the time i left office, household income was near its all time high and the uninsured rate had hit an all time low and wages were rising and poverty rates were falling. i mention all this just so when you hear how great the economy is doing right now, let's just remember when this recovery started. >> all right. following that comment president trump fired off a number of tweets on the economy over the weekend including one citing comments from former house oversight chairman jason chafities quoting barack obama talked a lot about hope but donald trump delivered the american dream. all the economic indicators, what's happening overseas, donald trump has proven to be far more successful than barack obama. >> wow.

>> president trump is delivering the american dream. wow, that's delivering a lot of you know what. but looking at just one of the most closely watched economic indicators, job creation, it appears president obama does have the advantage over president trump. so far this year after average of 206,000 jobs have been added per month under trump, an uptick from last year's average of 180,200. during his second term he needed 195, 226 and 250,000 jobs per month in his final three years, just adding some facts into the conversation, joe. >> mark mckinnon, that's the thing. barack obama never could go out and brag about how well the economy was doing under him. he seemed tortured to go out and tell people actually the good news about his administration. he may start doing that now, but there are a lot of americans, and it's frustrating, there are even a lot of people in news

that listen to donald trump and see the showmanship and go, well, yeah, the economy has gotten a lot better under him. no, if you just look at hard fast economic numbers, the rate of growth, the rate of -- you know, whether you look at the s&p or whatever, it's about the same under donald trump as it was under barack obama who actually inherited the worst economy since 1932. >> well, joe, i think it's interesting that, you know, first of all, we should compare apples to apples and let's wait until we have four or eight years to compare against each other, but we are throwing out the rules of the campaign. it's interesting to watch barack obama step up and you can tell he's relishing it. what's having to see is the whole fall i think is going to be like this where we're going to have a split screen with barack obama and donald trump. one is really good at campaigning about hope, the other is really good about campaigning against fear or with fear. so we're going to have a hope/fear element in this campaign and two of the best at

doing hope and doing fear. so it will be interesting to see. >> nick, though, also this isn't a nationwide contest. as you know and as our viewers know, we are going district by district. you know, barack obama is going to pick those california districts and illinois districts, he's going to pick other districts across america where republicans are holding the seats, but they were won by hillary clinton and sort of have a blue tint to them. it seems to me that barack obama is overwhelmingly popular in all of those districts. >> look, joe, his job is not to come out and be the standard bearer for the entire party. he is a targeted shot in the arm in key districts, places where democrats can flip a seat or get higher turnout and secure a seat, but it's still fascinating to watch him in action. it's like having been in a hall of mirrors are president donald

trump for the last two years and someone kind of opens the door at the end of the hallway and you see daylight. it's a turn to kind of a reality-based politics and certainly a different tone that you hear from him. he is the polar opposite of president trump in every way, but the question for me is this country rejected the politics of president obama to some extent in 2016 and turned its back on what he was offering and the huge question for me in 2018 is if that still continues or if there is some part of the electorate that wants to turn their back on president trump now. >> you know, eddie, what's so fascinating watching barack obama go there, i see a politician who i disagreed with on many policies, from the way he did his stimulus package to how he didn't move, i thought, as decisively as he needed to in syria. i could go down a long list of areas where i disagreed with him

idealogically, but i know a lot of republicans, a lot of conservatives, who saw him up there and said, man, it's nice to have like a normal guy out there again, even if i disagree with him, at least we agree on the constitution and we agree on, you know, how we treat our neighbors and we agree on just the basics of american life and the basics in civil discourse on the campaign trail. >> absolutely, joe. as you know, i disagreed with president obama from idealogically from the left, but it was nice to see and hear reasoned thinking, a kind of thoughtfulness and in some ways a commitment to the basic norms of democratic life that have in some ways defined the country at least since i've been born and politically aware. i think what's interesting, though, is that when we think about president obama stepping out, i think nick is absolutely right, it's a very deliberate

deployment, but he opens up space. donald trump has taken up so much of the oxygen in the political room that when barack obama stepped on the scene suddenly we had space to think about matters differently. i think that was good in and of itself. >> all right. the white house continues its search for the anonymous writer of last week's explosive op-ed in the "new york times." on friday president trump said he wants attorney general jeff sessions to investigate, suggesting that the op-ed amounts to treason. >> do you think jeff sessions should be investigating who the author of op-ed piece was or -- >> i think so because i think it's national security. i would say jeff should be investigating who the author of that piece was because i really believe it's national security. >> you said last night that it's treason. if this country punishes treason with the death penalty, are you

serious about that? >> we're going to look at what he had, what he gave, what he's talking about, also where he is right now. >> what is it in the op-ed that would make it treason? >> what makes you think the -- how are we secure, chuck, that the four corners of any op-ed are all that somebody that -- who doesn't have the guts and the courage to come out and put their name to that -- to that op-ed, how do we know they haven't promised other things? how do we know they are not taking other documents? >> the president of the united states wants the attorney general to investigate. what -- what law was broken here that the attorney general needs to investigate? >> it depends. there could be and there could not be. you don't know that and i don't know that. >> so he has ordered the attorney general -- >> nobody is investigating an op-ed. >> has he ordered the investigation of who wrote this op-ed? >> i won't talk about that. he has said publicly that he thinks that we should find out who this person is. >> meanwhile, members of the trump administration continue to deny any involvement in writing

the anonymous op-ed. vice president mike pence says he's confident it wasn't anyone on his staff. >> let me be very clear, i'm 100% confident that no one on the vice president's staff was involved in this anonymous editorial. >> and you asked them? >> you know, honestly, i don't have to ask them because i know them. i know their character. i know their dedication and i am absolutely confident that no one on the vice president's staff had anything to do with this. >> and u.s. ambassador to the united nations nikki haley has written her own op-ed slamming the anonymous piece in the "new york times" and she writes in part this: when there is disagreement, there is a right way and a wrong way to address it. i pick up the phone and call him or meet with him in person. as a former governor i find it absolutely chilling to imagine that a high-ranking member of my team would secretly try to

thwart my agenda. that is not the american way, it is fundamentally disloyal not just to the chief executive but to our country and to our values. heidi, there's a lot of questions as to whether or not, you know, not following the system in reaction to the president is the right way to go. i think it's a very slippery slope and extremely dangerous and i have a lot of questions about this op-ed, but the investigation into who done it, that seems also to be a slippery slope as well, calling it treason also a slippery slope. >> did not hear from any of the administration officials, mika, who hit the airwaves a good explanation of how anything that was in that op-ed could qualify as treason. it was simply a member of this administration exercising their most fundamental right under the first amendment to free speech and, by the way, it verified everything that has been reported in numerous books and in numerous articles since the

beginning of this administration. but it does highlight, i think, a broader question that it some day will be reconciled here for the media and for the american people, which is just what extent has there been any kind of official coordination between this administration and the justice department. there are outside groups that have issued a flurry of foils on everything from the at&t time warner deal to other attacks that the president has made on news organizations to try to get to the bottom of whether there has been any violation of the contacts policy that we have had frankly since nixon because of this very problem that we saw illustrated at that time. so i think this is just another example. it seemed like if you read between the lines the administration was saying there has been no formal order from this white house, but i think given that everything that we've seen going back to the days of the president launching his

campaign, calling for an investigation of his political rival, there should be a lot of skepticism about that and the american people deserve answers. >> a whole lot of skepticism. you know, this happens, mark mckinnon, all the time in government. the most dramatic case the pentagon papers. in 2005 the "washington post" published black sites and methods that the united states government was use to go try to thwart the next al qaeda attack, it happens with barack obama's administration, the cia and fbi leaking things that they did not want to hear. it happens all the time and for trump and his supporters to call this treasonness or sedition as fox news said, they just need to be quiet and stop embarrassing themselves. anybody that's ever prosecuted a sedition case knows this is not

sedition, this is not treason. this is someone exercising their first amendment rights. >> and patriotism. just another example that should cause a lot of people some disturbance that president trump is once again trying to direct the justice department for political reasons, not for any serious policy reasons, but, you know, when he gets news he doesn't like he directs his justice department to investigate to try and do things for him politically, which is really a problem. you know, when the anonymous thing came out i was struck because i remember being at the national cathedral for mccain's funeral and thinking, you know, there was just such -- that whole week the accolades were so spectacular and talking about a different time when our politics were different and maybe they could be that way again and wondering if somebody would step up in a mccain-like fashion and who it might be now. now we have a direct line between the timing of that editorial and the mccain services, which i thought was interesting. i think john mccain would have put his name on t but i do think

that that person might have been inspired by last week. >> you know, nick, you work at the "new york times," do you want to tell us this morning who it is? >> i'm sworn to secrecy but i also have no answers for you, joe. >> exactly. i will say that there are a lot of people that were expecting it to be a marquis name. willie had a pretty good source that suggested that it wasn't someone that the rest of the country knows and actually has the name, we won't say it here today, but -- but that name is slowly but surely getting around in washington, d.c. any concerns that if it's not a marquis name that everybody knows that the times may be accused of overplaying their hand? >> well, joe, i don't speak for the paper, but, yeah, i would say that i would hope and i expect and i'm sure that my

colleagues on the op-ed page would not use the phrase senior administration official if it was not an actual senior person, but that said that still leaves a fairly wide number of people. so if you adopt a strict definition of senior administration official it's still dozens or 100 people that it could be, which is why it's a good use in news stories as well that we often use to mask identities or have a source attribution. but hopefully it is a person who merits that title. >> all right. let's take a look at some of the other stories making headlines this morning. hurricane florence is tracking toward the east coast and officials in several states are warning residents to prepare for the worst. south carolina, north carolina and virginia have each declared a state of emergency to position money and resources ahead of the storm. also making news this morning, a dallas police officer has been charged with manslaughter after faye talley shooting an unarmed african-american man. the officer told investigators

she mistook 26-year-old bothan jean's apartment for her own and shot him thinking he was an intruder. the officer identified as 30-year-old amber geiger has been with the dallas police department for four years, she was arrested last night and posted bond. and finally les moonves has stepped down as ceo and chairman of cbs. it follows a number of sexual harassment allegations that stem from the 1980s to the early 2000s. and yesterday amid talks that moonves was negotiating a hefty break from cbs the allegations multipli multiplied. an additional six we will come forward with their stories of sexual misconduct, harassment and retaliation by moonves. he released a statement last night acknowledging that he was leaving his position adding that, quote, untrue allegations from decades ago are now being made against me that are not

consistent with who i am. i am deeply saddened to be leaving the company. coming up, we mentioned it at the top, a very controversial end to the u.s. open for serena williams. we're going to run through it straight ahead with mike lupica. plus two leading voices from the u.s. senate, chris coons and joe manchin join the conversation. you're watching "morning joe." we will be right back. you're turning onto the street when you barely clip a passing car. minor accident - no big deal, right? wrong. your insurance company is gonna raise

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came a day before in the women's final that saw japan's naomi osaka crowned champion following a controversial victory over serena williams. after dropping the first set to osaka, the trouble for williams began early in the second set when the umpire, the chair ump, carlos ramos, gave williams a warning for a code violation for receiving coaching, which is not allowed during grand slam matches. >> he's telling me -- we don't have any code and i know you don't know that. i understand why you may have thought that was coaching, but i'm telling you it's not. i don't cheat to win. i'd rather lose. i'm just letting you know. >> after losing a crucial game williams destroys her racquet by slamming it on to the court, a second code violation that automatically costs her a point. when serena realizes the next game would start with osaka ahead 15-0 she voices her displeasure with the ump.

>> i didn't get coaching. i didn't get coaching. you need to take -- you need to make an announcement that i didn't get coaching. i don't cheat. i didn't get coaching. how can you say that? you need to -- you need -- you owe me an apology. you owe me an apology. i have never cheated in my life. i have a daughter and i stand for what's right for her and i have never cheated. you owe me an apology. >> so this went on for quite some time and williams' coach later actually admitted to coaching from the stands, adding that all coaches do it. still fuming after osaka goes on to score a break point, williams has more words for ramos, accusing the umpire from stealing a point from her. >> serena was watching her coach give her hand signals. >> verbal abuse. >> are you kidding me?

that's like saying you are a thief because you stole a point from me, but i'm not a cheater. i told you to apologize to me. this is -- this is -- i need a referee. if i say a simple thing a thief that stole a point from me does not make -- there are men out here that do a lot worse, but because i'm a woman -- because i'm a woman you're going to take this away from me? >> the words cost williams a game penalty and osaka went on to win in straight sets becoming the first japanese player to take home a major singles title. the circumstances made for a tearful trophy ceremony in front of a pro serena crowd. >> i know that everyone was cheering for her and i'm sorry it had to end like this. it was always my dream to play serena in the u.s. open finals,

so i'm really glad that i was able to do that and i'm really grateful i was able to play with you. thank you. >> i'm here fighting for women's rights and for women's equality and for all kinds of stuff and for me to say thief and for him to take a game, it made me feel like it was a sexist remark. >> in a post match news conference williams accused umpire carlos ramos of sexism. the events drew criticism from billie jean king a pioneer in women's rights in sports who in an op-ed for the "washington post" highlights a double standard faced by williams and writes that osaka's stellar play was overshadowed by an archaic tennis rule that eventually led to an abuse of power. joining us now msnbc nbc contributor mike lupica. wow. >> mike, listen, so we've heard from billie jean king, we heard

from chris everett yesterday, we heard from none other than the racquet -- every tennis racquet's worst nightmare john mcenroe and they all seem to say a couple of the same things, one, osaka outplayed her. >> big time. >> she was easily the best player on the court that day. two, serena violated the rules. she clearly violated the rules for which she was penalized, but, three, that the chair ump completely misplayed the situation and overreacted. what do you think? >> joe, i have celebrated serena's journey and venus' journey for 20 years since they first came out on the stage. i was watching serena and writing about her at wimbledon this year. it's a great american story, but she was out of line the other day and she did break the rules. once she broke that racquet, she had to know the rules well enough to know that the next

thing she did was going to take a game away from her. mary kirilos the smartest commentator there is about tennis and she said afterwards that when you call the umpire a liar and a thief, you break your racquet in anger and accuse him of sexism afterwards and you say you're doing that for all women. she said, no thanks, she acted on her own. joe, here is the thing about serena, there has been a lot of talk about mcenroe and con northwest and i saw all of that, but serena has priors in this event. in 2009 in the semi-finals she threatened to stuff a blanket ball down the lines woman's blanket throat and ended up getting defaulted out of the match because of a point penalty. two years later in the final against sam stoezer she says to the umpire a woman are you the one that screwed me last night because if i ever see you walking down the street stay on the other side. that has to provide some context here and the greater context was

she was going to lose this match and she wouldn't let this go on the coaching. once she got that penalty for breaking the racquet, she had to know what she was staring at and she still couldn't stop talking to the guy. >> you know, it's important, mika, and athletes, male athletes, female athletes get frustrated, mcenroe of course most famously, natasi would get upset, but mcenroe said there was some, quote, fake news out there saying that he had never been penalized for his behavior. he had also a lot of the codes, a lot of the standards were changed to stop the sort of verbal abuse that john mcenroe heaped on umps because he recounted how his father said as long as you don't swear, as long as you don't use vulgarities you can get away with just go anything. that's not the case anymore. >> you know, i think serena is feeling like she's carrying a

lot of responsibility as a woman in tennis, as an african-american woman and i applaud all the ground that she is breaking. having said that, there's just a few things that you have to go through when you watch what played out because it is important and there is some incredible gender conversations that we can have out of it. bottom line, she was being coached and her coach even admits to it. complicated if you listen to john mcenroe or chris everett they will say the umpire might have overplayed his hand a little bit and failed perhaps to give her some soft warnings along the way that could have mitigated things from bubbling up, but she was being coached and she also did throw the racquet. personally, i don't think that's becoming, whether a man does it or a woman does it and apparently it's against the rules and she threw it. so it happened. and then for me, the biggest thing, especially given sort of the conversations i have with women about knowing their value and communicating it

effectively, one of the big know your value rules is don't take it personally. the entire thing that played out on the court was extremely personal, it was about serena, it was about being apologized to and it became -- it just completely blew out of control and quite frankly impacted her tennis you could argue, but even more so took away from what was really happening. the winner was amazing and she won and really what should have happened for her was taken away by serena, incapable of not taking this all personally and taking it all in. she is such a huge platform, mike lupica, that she could have waited and she could have talked about these things on the big stage, so to speak, and really had some good conversations, debates even about whether the data shows that women perhaps are treated unfairly or differently because of the rules, but instead she brought it on to the court. >> mika, as i watched it play out in realtime and heard

everybody say afterwards, well, they both lost because of what happened, she riled that crowd up and she was very gracious afterwards, but her behavior -- >> absolutely. >> -- which could have cost osaka a match that she was clearly winning and clearly wasn't going to lose. so so much of this was self-inflicted the other day. mi mika, you're absolutely right, she wouldn't drop this. she couldn't get past it and it ended up costing her what might be her last best chance to win the u.s. open. >> well, mike, the thing that serena was most insulted by, that she kept repeating over and over again is i don't cheat. he wasn't coaching me. and this -- this was the refrain, she kept going back to it over and over. i've got a daughter, i would never do this, i've never cheated in my life, i've never -- well, immediately afterward her coach said, yeah, i was coaching her.

but at the same time all the coaches, as you know, they all coach their players on the court. i'm wondering why it was, first of all, so arbitrary in this case and, secondly, don't guys like you and me always say when we're watching a game, i know i say it a good bit watching soccer, sometimes watching football to the umpire or to the r ref, hey, this isn't about you, buddy, get out of the way, let the players play, especially in the finals of a u.s. open with historic ramifications, shouldn't that chair umpire just call her over and say, hey, listen, i know everybody does it, but we are in a final, you need to let your coach know he needs to be a little smarter, okay? because the cameras are everywhere. we can see him doing it. he can't coach you. and then when she started yelling -- call her over, say, hey, listen, if you keep this up i've got no choice, i'm going to

have to cite you for verbal abuse, i don't want to do that. just get out there, play the game, we will talk about it after. >> soft warnings. >> couldn't a chair umpire that was -- had a little lighter of touch done that and not made the open about him? >> yeah, joe, i think he could have had a lighter touch, but i think that if he had even suggested it she still would have been insulted that he thought her coach was coaching her, and she kept denying it and then her coach afterwards said they did it. i agree with billy jean, i think it's a stupid rule, i think it's an antiquated rule and they ought to change it. i don't see a guy going like this in the stands is -- is some violation of tennis code or ethics, but the fact is this guy is a stickler from the rule, but this thing escalated after she broke her racquet, and she didn't break her racquet because of the coaching thing, she had let osaka back into the second set, she had just played a dreadful game and, again, that's why i keep saying most of these wounds were self-inflicted and

it's not like we haven't seen this from her at the open before in big moments. >> yeah. but, eddie glaude, did the escalation perhaps happen because she has perhaps been a victim of subtle sexism or being handled differently than perhaps men on the courts, pertaining to these sort of issues that surround the game? is that possible? >> absolutely. i don't think any tennis woman, tennis player in the country, in the world has been subject to the kind of scrutiny that serena williams has been subjected to. let's put some context with it, mike. not only in terms of the u.s. open, you know this stuff better than i do, but we know the event with the match against jennifer caprioti and the way she was treatment, in terms of the french open with vaccines and this same judge accusing vaccines of being coached and vaccines having to tell this same judge i'm 36 years old, i don't cheat. and then there's the coach, even

serena's coach saying in the interview, yes, i was coaching but so was naomi's coach coaching. so there was this moment. and of course serena plays with emotion. i think she's the greatest of all time in this sport. this is the equivalent of throwing lebron james out in game seven. if a ref did that everybody would be like what the hell are you doing in this moment? so this is one of the greatest tennis players that we have ever seen, right, literally having a hard time with naomi osaka, let's see it, not only the first japanese woman to win the u.s. open but the first haitian woman to win the u.s. open. she was having a hard time, but we've seen serena bounce back. there was a mental breakdown, i think. i think the umpire overstepped his bounds. but i also think serena is absolutely justified in standing up for herself. she should have got herself back together, i think, in order to play the game, but she was absolutely justified. and i think every young girl in

this country who saw it should look up to her in that moment and stand up for themselves and not be disciplined by how they're supposed to behave in those moments. >> eddie, i said before, no one has celebrated her journey and her accomplishments more than i do. it doesn't mean she wasn't out of line the other day. you can go broke in this world getting involved with race and gender issues, especially if you are a white guy, okay, but all i know is you just referenced it, i kept hearing that this was racial afterwards. well, wait, the young woman at the other end of the court is haitian and japanese dissent. and the fact is when you look at what happened to her, i will give you an analogy, you are a sports fan, eddie, draymond green is couple years ago in the nba finals knew if he did one more thing and got one for technical he was going to get suspended. he did one more thing, he goss suspended, it cost the warriors a championship that year against lebron james. all i'm saying is this is the greatest champion in the history

of women's tennis and she had to know where she was after she broke that racquet and she didn't and she seemed shocked that the guy took a game away from her when she called him a liar and a thief. >> that said, i think she was justified -- i think you're right as an elite athlete she had to get herself together in order to play the game, but i understand exactly her emotion, her anger and i think she's absolutely right, mike, to point out the very gendered way in which she was responded to. i think we need to be mindful of that, and moving forward as young women play sport, as they encounter the gendered way in which they're treated, how they're supposed to comport themselves, whether it's with a cat suit, whether how she's dressed, how she plays, her physical stature, she needs to defend herself and she took it upon herself at that moment,

justified or not, to do so. and i celebrate her for that. >> and these are the issues that we look at at know your value.com. mike lupica, thank you very much. still ahead, north korea celebrates its 70th anniversary with a military parade and notably leaves out the long range missiles. we will talk about what this means for diplomacy and whether north korea actually intends to denuclearize. "morning joe" will be right back.

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military parade had one noticeable thing missing this year, missiles. instead the parade's pomp and circumstance focused on striving for peace and a stronger economy to mark the country's 70th anniversary. the drastic change comes amid leader kim jong-un and president trump's ongoing negotiations for the rogue nation to disarm their nuclear arsenal. yesterday president trump tweeted praise for kim's, quote,

big and very positive statement that displayed flowers in lieu of the usually touted missiles. trump said, quote, we will both prove everyone wrong. there is nothing like good dialogue from two people that like each other. joining us now senior advisor and korea chair at csis and an nbc news and mississippi nbc korean affairs analyst victor cha. his new book is "nuclear north korea, a gate on strategies." also joining the conversation noah roth man. victor cha, let's start with exactly what we're seeing between the united states and north korea. is a trust developing or a fake relationship that could end very badly? >> mika, i think it's probably more of the latter than the former. president trump is sending all these nice tweets to the north korean leader, but the fact that they did not display the icbms

at this parade i think was more for china than the united states. the number three guy in china was at this event, this big parade celebrating the 70th anniversary and north korea, the relationship they are trying to cultivate right now is not with the united states. it's with china. because last year china cut off basically all the trade with north korea. now they are trying to rebuild that relationship. so the north korean leader is trying to do everything he can to cozy up to the chinese more than to the united states. >> so, to the extent that we're seeing a lot of these cosmetic developments being touted by the president and officials suggesting they can provide six to eight war heads. previous reports suggest they are expanding production facilities, developing more nuclear fuel.

what we've seen nuclear program that isn't near halted, maybe not even arrested, but we're seeing a lot of diplomatic overtures and you say they are aimed at china not the united states. the united states is the real target here, right? we still on the table have the prospect of preemptive strikes to disable this nuclear program. really they are talking to the president, right, and sort of pulling the wool over his eyes, correct? >> i think they certainly are in the sense that they are giving the impression that they are interested in denuclearizing, but all these reports show they are amassing more nuclear material, more nuclear fuel to make bombs. in the end they want their cake and eat it to. they want security with their nuclear weapons but they want to be able to get economic development. at this parade they said we have achieved our security. now let's focus on economic development. that does not sound like, to me, an agenda that says i'm ready to

trade my nukes for economic relations and trade with the outside world. >> real quick followup at what point do we say the united states isn't serious about a military threat and looking to contain a nuclear north korea. >> that's what i worry about. i worry the president is basically trying to pull the wool over everybody's eyes and accept a bad deal in return for peace and then walk away from the problems. it's not my problem any more. i solved it because i have a good relationship with the north korean leader. in the end that does not make us as americans more secure at all. >> heidi. >> he's taken steps towards decnuclearization, but this parade comes about two weeks after trump cancelled pompeo's trip because he said they weren't making progress. you know, i'm up on the hill. i hear from members of congress all the time that to this day we're now running a couple of months after this big summit. they have no idea what was actually agreed to between the two in that summit.

do we have a scene of whether there was even the vaguest of frame works with any kind of ability to verify, which is as you know the corner stone, the gold standard of any kind of framework or agreement going forward? >> that's what's astounding about this whole thing, heidi. this meeting that took place in singapore three months ago, we don't have any minutes of the meeting. we have nothing except the statement that came out which listed four points, three of which were the things that the north koreans wanted, in particular a peace treaty, normalization of relations. but third and most important point decnuclearization. we've not seen any progress on. it's very clear we want a declaration, we want verification, we want a timeline. the north has not moved on any one of those things to this date. >> i got one word for you, helsinki. the new book is nuclear north korea. a debate on engagement

strategies. victor, thank you very much. and mark, the new season of the service is ready to go. >> once again, no lack of material. the big challenge is friday when we figure what we have to cut. so the fall session of season three begins sunday night 8:00 on showtime. >> we look forward to it. still ahead at least one trump official is predicting a possible loss come november for texas senator ted cruz. we'll explain his reasoning. plus we'll be joined by a member of the former relations, democratic senator chris coons and his colleague senator joe manchin will be our guest as he fights to keep a seat in a state that trump won by 42% in 2016. "morning joe" is coming right back.

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of great people around you. right now there's way too much drama every day and that distracts us from the longer term stuff we should be focused on together. >> welcome back to "morning joe". that's ben sasse. it's monday, september 10th. with us we have nick confessore. associate editor of commentary magazine noah rothman. nbc news national political reporter. and msnbc political analyst and former republican strategist, steve schmidt. a lot to talk about this morning, joe. on thursday democrat kamela harris questioned brett kavanaugh on the 1889 decision on upholding a ban of chinese people entering the u.s. the court then said the chinese were impossible to assimilate with our own people and were quote, imgramigrating in number

approaching an invasion. listen to this. >> in the 1889 chinese exclusion case, the supreme court permited a ban on chinese people entering the united states. the court said chinese people are quote, impossible to assimilate with our people. end quote. and said they were immigrating in numbers quote, approaching an invasion. this case has never been explicitly overruled. you've said you would be willing to talk about older cases. so can you tell me was the united states supreme court correct in holding that chinese people could be banned from entering our country? >> senator, the 1890s -- >> 189 to be specific. >> in that era reflects discriminatory attitudes by the supreme court. of course that's the era of

plussey versus ferguson. >> that was that incorrectly decided? >> i don't want to talk about a case without studying it. >> all right. there's another part of that clip though, steve schmidt, where harris asks a guy who may be on the supreme court next whether it is permissible to ban someone from entering the united states of america based upon their race. that's it. race alone. and brett kavanaugh refused to answer whether we should be able to ban someone from this country based on their race alone. i don't think that's a tough question, steve. >> i don't think it's a tough question. i'll give you this context, joe. i ran as you know two of these supreme court nominations for justice roberts and alito.

if during those confirmations either one of, either roberts or alito had answered the question similarly, i would have believed as the person running that process that the nomination in that moment was in great peril. the inability to say that the chinese exclusion act was wrongly decided, i believe in the prep that we did with roberts and alito, i believe that both of them would likely have said that was wrongly decided. as they would have said that brown v the board of education was correctly decided. i don't understand where he is coming from on that, frankly, and on the specific question of can you exclude on the basis of race alone, again, during those two confirmations, my view would have been we have a major, major problem here, i think that the nomination is going to go down.

>> that shows you, though, and the reason i wanted to play this clip for you, i know you ran those hearings, that shows you where we are in 2018. where in trump's washington a supreme court nominee, i want everybody to just stop for a second and think about this, a man who wants to be on the united states supreme court is afraid to say that it is wrong for either congress or the president of the united states to pass a law that would ban people from coming to the united states based simply upon their race. this would have been unthinkable even three years ago, steve. >> 100% agree with that. i do think there's a broader understanding as we go into these hearings in the american public about what the role of the supreme court is. it is what is the difference between the mainstream of liberal and conservative judicial philosophies.

it's different than the debate we have politically. the supreme court, in my view, is not a supra legislature that does write and wrongs that the congress is unwilling to fix. but the inability of these questions to say that constitutionally you cannot exclude people coming into the country on the basis of race alone, i find mystifying. again, having run the confirmation process for two conservative justices, i believe that both alito and roberts, in their confirmation hearings would have answered these questions differently. >> in the pre-trump era everybody would have answered these questions differently. if they had not, there would be an absolute brush fire that would have spread and consumed the nomination. let's bring in senator chris coons. he's on the judiciary committee. senator, help me out here.

you had someone in front of the judiciary committee saying he was not comfortable, he not comfortable disagreeing with a congressional dictate or presidential dictate that would ban people from entering the united states because of what color they were. because of what race they were. help me out here. i'm just a dumb country lawyer, but that certainly seems to be abnormal and certainly against all american values that we promoted for, you know, 100, 150 years at least. >> that's right, joe. there were a number of ways in which kavanaugh's testimony before the committee was deeply troubling. this was one exchange. another was an exchange that i had with him about presidential power. judge kavanaugh in his speech to the american enterprise institute just two years ago volunteered when asked that of all the cases in american history, was there any one he would overturn.

he paused for a moment, sort of looked at the camera, there was a pregnant pause, everyone chuckled. no wait there is one. he didn't say the chinese exclusion cases, he didn't say buck v bell, three cases taught to first year law students that haven't been overturned, that are just despicable cases that expressed previous attitudes of discrimination. he volunteered that he would overturn morris v olson and i questioned him about that. why do we care? because in morris v olson the supreme court in 1988 said that the independent counsel statute was constitutional, and judge kavanaugh has written repeatedly that he thinks that the president should be able to fire a special counsel at will, who is investigating him. this is directly relevant. and the nominee, judge kavanaugh wouldn't disavow his statement that out of all the cases in

american constitutional history the one he would like to, as he said, put the nail in the coffin, is morrison v olson. it was striking he's been that forceful before coming in front of us about presidential power, and then clammed up and really would not answer that question in front of our panel. i thought senator harris did a great job of getting him right in her sights on the chinese exclusion cases. i think it was also telling that on presidential power he wouldn't say why he previously had offered it was the most important case to overturn. >> you know, nick confessore is here and he's got a question for you. he's from the "new york times". if you want to ask him who wrote the op-ed you can do that. but first another thing that happened over the weekend. get your take. the 17-year-old kid who was actually pulled off of stage and thrown back into a room with police officers and the secret

service simply because he did not applaud loudly enough or seem energetic enough for president trump. i can think of any precedent. am i missing something here? you can now be detained by the secret service for not cheering loudly enough for the president of the united states? >> joe, it's fine for the president to want the people in rallies to be his supporters. crazy town to drag a kid who is raising an eyebrow and throw him in the pen. take him out of the rally and put him outside. it's nutso to involve the secret service. senator coons, i want to ask you, you know, on one level it's right for a judge at a hearing to say, you know, i can't, you

know, offer an opinion from the bench so to speak on a case but it struck me that senator harris' question was the supreme court hearing version of how do you feel about nazis. and the answer should be pretty obvious. tell me if i'm wrong here. is it a complicated case on the exclusion act and is it the kind of thing where you don't want a guy to wing it from a hearing chair? >> correct. this is exactly the sort of case, given how long ago it was, given how clearly wrong decided it was where i was struck, judge kavanaugh didn't take that opportunity to say, you know, look, marlborough versus madison was decided and the chinese exclusion occasions were wrongly decided. the fact he wasn't willing to offer that was deeply puzzling to me. >> what does that answer mean for the future, for the trump administration? what potential policies pursued by this white house could be at stake or hinge on the answer to

that question from a future supreme court justice? >> well, it may reveal a willingness to allow presidential power, a scope and a reach that would be chilling to many of us in terms of decisions in the immigration space. as i referenced earlier in talking with joe, i think his views on whether or not a president has to respond to a subpoena or can block an investigation by firing a special counsel, whose investigation he resists or does not like is also chilling. there's a number of other areas where other members of the committee pressed him and similarly did not get a satisfying answer. so i think judge kavanaugh for all his excellent credentials is someone who has legal opinions and ideas which are well established and shared publicly recently that should give everyone watching real pause. senator chris coons, thanks

so much for being on the show. i agree with that. i was open-minded, joe, about the system of trying to get these judges through the hearing process, and when a president has won they do have the right to make these choices. but if this guy can't even answer basic questions about human decency and what our constitution is about, i do think there may be a fight ahead for sure. and president obama put it best, really, when he was speaking on friday, and really pointing out that we have lost a sense of what the difference is between right and wrong. take a listen. >> we are americans. we're supposed to stand up to bullies. not follow them. we're supposed to stand up to discrimination. and we're sure as heck supposed to stand up clearly and

uneqivocally to nazi sympathizers. how hard can that be? saying that nazis are bad. >> how hard can that be? >> it's not hard. >> saying that nazis are bad. how hard can it be? you senate the united states, we do not want laws discriminating against people based on their race. how hard can it be when you're in the primaries like donald trump, and you can't say bad things or you can't pass judgment on the kkk, or david duke. but in trump's washington, a moaning his fans and nominee, apparently, that's the new normal. >> there is certainly on the right particularly in the trump era a string of political commentary that traits racist elements on the wright a very

soft touch, afraid to alienate certain sections of the rate which are bigoted. that's a product of the trump era. i will however say i think we're giving judge kavanaugh short shrift in that exchange. he said the designates in the 1890s were discriminatory but could not opine in cases which are pending ledge allocation before the court in order not prejudice those proceedings and among those possible cases that could be brought as senator harris clearly said is the chinese excollusion act that was used to justify the constitutionality of this travel ban that are still before pending litigation. it's not on justice kavanaugh's -- it would be bad practice for him to opine that. he cite ed karamatsu.

he tried to explain and suggesting how he would decide these cases but he can't decide them in a hearing. sneef already been decided. donald trump as first two travel dance -- noah, his first -- >> one was held up. >> the third iteration of it was held up after they made sure that it was race neutral, that it was neutral on issues of religion and hit to do with national security. this is settled law. even if you look at the cases that judge kavanaugh was trying to hide behind, even those line of cases actually have holdings that show you, if you're going to exclude people from the united states of america, you can do it based on race. you can't do it based on religion. there has to be a rational connection to national security. >> yeah. of course i agree with that. i think judge kavanaugh would agree as well. he's being cautious in this

setting. >> but we don't know. >> he has a very long record. what he's trying to do is thread a needle. he's not opining on cases that's pending which is fair. it's for us what's unjustified and morally flawed. it's not on his part to say that. judge harris was attempting to make a political point. it's unfair to say that his performance there suggests that he would allow these cases when he specifically said, in discriminatory cases like ploussey versus ferguson. >> he was afraid to answer a basic question which is established law. teen cases he cited. the first two iterations of donald trump's so-called muslim ban were struck down because they were connected to people's religion, connected to people's race, connected to people's nationality, it wasn't until they moved past that rationale, it had to do with national security. i don't know exactly why he

couldn't answer that question. i'm not suggesting that he wouldn't rule in a certain way. i'm just suggesting maybe he was afraid to offend donald trump the way that donald trump is offended by the last person he scene up to capitol hill. so, let's go to steve schmidt. steve, you talked about alito, you talked about roberts, you talked about how they went through. it takes us back to a simpler time when you were a republican and, you know -- >> you were a republican. >> when you were a republican and a lot of us were republican, and what i noticed this weekend was you not only had ben sasse i think about being an independent every day which would have been unthinkable a couple of years for him to say. david french a respected voice with "the national review" said

i'm no longer a republican. i don't identify myself as a republican. i'm a conservative. i'm a christian. i can no longer depend on somebody having an r next to their name to sharing the same values that i have. i'm now going to have to go more on a case by case by case basis. that seems to be a phenomenon in american politics that is growing and should be a real concern, i think, for republicans in washington, d.c. >> well, i do think that when we look back on this trump era, it will be the predicate to a moment of profound disruption in the american political system. i could not agree more with president obama when he says that trump is a symptom of a deeper problem not the cause of it that's been building for a long time.

i don't want to cast aspersions on people who decided to remain in the republican party, decided to fight within the republican party for a decent conservative movement, for a decent republican party but in this moment of time you cannot deny the obvious, that to be a member of the republican party is to be a member of a party led by donald trump that is capitulated to trumpism meaning you're a fellow traveller with the most racist elements in this country who have become part of a coalition, have been mainstreamed, have been legitimatized by this president for the entirety of his political career going back to the birther movement. >> mika and i were having a dinner with a friend this past weekend who said that if you asked me two or three years ago to identify myself and ask me

for five words that would describe who i am, it would be christian, conservative, republican, mother, wife. she said i'm not a republican any more. i wouldn't want that name associated with me. even though she said my values are all the same today that they were two years ago that they were five years ago, and it really caused her great distress because she loved the republican party. she came of age during ronald reagan's ascension to the white house. she now no longer would call herself a republican than she would call herself as marxist. >> something is happening in the country. what we're experiencing, i'm echoing the political scientist here, we're experiencing a massive political realignment. think about what happened in the

context of the gilded age and what the new deal represented. it represented a massive shift. you think about what happened with the election of ronald reagan in 1980. it represented a massive shift. here we are in the age of trump and what it means it will disrupt traditional category, people once found themselves thinking, describing themselves as this or that are now all mixed up. part of what we need is a new political vocabulary, different political vocabulary to describe what people are actually believing. what they actually are doing. this backs particularly interesting for me because it's happening in black politics and happening, when we think about all the new people who are coming in to the political process. those folks who aren't being polled by the pollsters, who are looking at the likely voter. think about those folks that fall outside of those kwhoirs are now entering into the process. there's a massive political realign men happening in this

country. we just don't know how to describe it yet. >> heidi, there's a real tension for republicans in congress who continue to support the president and support the party because there are some policies that this presidency has come through on and yet you see people who are very, very offended by this administration, and the way this president behaves, and the norm that he's bursting through yet there are policies they can bank on. >> so, mika, i thought the really telling part about the aftermath to obama's speech was the lack of defense of republicans. a number of republicans took to twitter to criticize obama by saying hey you're violating the standard of not criticizing your predecessor, or your successor, you know, defending president trump on the economy but no one took to criticizing obama on the heart of his message, about trump's attacks on institutions,

trump's attacks on journalism, turning back standards for decades of global leadership on comments that have been very divisive racially. no one tried to defend him on that and i think just as the warning is coming from this op-ed writer i think there are many republicans who are looking forward to that post-trump era where there will be a reconciliation for the very divisive politics that have been push forward under this presidency that many republicans will want to separate themselves from. i would venture to guess many republicans would want to take ownership for that op-ed. >> still ahead on "morning joe," democrat joe manchin is running for re-election in a state that donald trump won by over 40 points. he joins us next with a first look at a new ad that he hopes will appeal to west virginia voters. you're watching "morning joe". we'll be right back.

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villafranca. the fight over health care is taking center stage, an incumbent west virginia senator joe manchin's re-election campaign. so much so that a lawsuit filed in texas aimed to block the affordable care act is the focus avenue ad by manchin that we are showing for the first time exclusively on "morning joe". >> not to me treating the cap and trade bill because it was bad for west virginia. hey i haven't changed. i might be a few years older but i'll still take on anyone who messes with west virginia. now the threat is patrick morrissey's lawsuit to take health care aware from people's pre-existing conditions. that's dead wrong and that's not going to happen. i'm joe manchin and for me it's all about west virginia. all right. looking right over the barrel of

a gun, joe manchin joining us right now. thanks for being on. good to have you. >> it's been a long time. hope you're all well. >> so donald trump won your state by 40 points. why do you think you're ahead in the polls? >> first of all, this is not new for me. 2012 when i ran for the first full term after bob byrd died in 2010, mitt romney won by states by 35 points. he beat barack obama by 35 points. i won by 25 points so west virginiians go with the person they trust. >> so, joe, help me out here. again, donald trump won your state by 40. we're hearing that people are getting more and more liberal, more and more conservative, going into their camps. never vote for a republican presidential candidate or a

democratic congressman, congresswoman or senator and yet you look what's happening in west virginia with you, you see joe donnelly is doing pretty well in indiana, a democrat, a very red state. you see phil breseden doing very well. he's got approval ratings that anybody would love to have right now. what seems to be the secret for democrats doing well in red states, or i guess you could say vice versa how would a republican do well in blue states? >> well, joe, the party really shouldn't change who we are. if you're a democrat or a republican you have an r or d by your name you're still the same person. if you try to change and i've always said that, a west virginia can shake your hand, look in your eyes and see your soul. these are hard-working people. they had to get by their own skill sets and good common sense and they want someone who is real, someone who believes in

west virginia, who understands west virginia, who knows who we are. that whole ad basically what it reflected back on is i'm the same person i've always been. just because i'm in washington, i'm in west virginia every weekend i come home. i appear as much as i possibly can and i enjoy every moment i'm home. people know i'm about west virginia. that won't change. washington won't change me. no one will change me. i want to work with the president when it's good for us. and i vote with him 60% of the town. but i vote for west virginia 100% of the time. this health care, pre-existing condition, joe, i have about 800,000 people that live in my beautiful state of west virginia. some identify with some sort of pre-existing condition. you can say you want to represent the state of west virginia if you're willing to throw 800,000 people into chaos. that's life and death matters. 400,000 west virginiians wouldn't even be able to buy

insurance because insurance companies would say you're too sick and it's not profitable and we won insure you at all. the other 400, the rates would be so high or put caps on. that's not how we should be going and looking to fix things. we have a fix for the health care bill and in west virginia, 80% of the people benefit by the affordable care act. we have a fix for that after john mccain said historically said that night, he put his thumb down and said no. the bill can be fixed here. john was saying there's no process. minority had no input. the next day, lamar alexander we had 12 republicans working together for this package, been sitting on mcconnell's desk for almost a year that would fix the people that are paying the high extreme rates.

it would bring it down 20%, 30%. that's why we say washington sucks. we need to work together and they don't let that happen. >> joe, so we had a conversation on friday, we were talking about what voters seem to care about and what voters didn't seem to care about. now, i say if you look at the polls, even though they are important issues, certainly important issues to protect democracy, to protect the ballot, but you're not going to hear people in west virginia talking about russia, vladimir putin, helsinki, robert mueller, investigations, you won't hear that in alabama or hear that in most states. what's the one issue, the one or two issues that you do hear out on the campaign trail every day that west virginiians and americans care the most about? >> well health care. i just said, 800,000 west

virginias are direct lie affected with a pre-existing condition. anywhere from high blood pressure, someone with heart expect, born with a heart defect. i have an artificial knee. that qualifies as a pre-existing condition. everybody knows somebody in the family or has someone in their family that's affected. health care is life and death matters. for first time we're getting treatment for opioid addiction which has been a horrific problem in west virginia. these are hard-working people p.m. pharmaceutical people take advantage ever them. high cost of health care. taking away your insurance, is a life and death matter. they don't care whether you're democrat or republican. if you're a west virginian you're taking away my grandmother, my mother, ahn, brother or sister or my health care because you said well you were sick before we're afraid it will come back and reoccur. if it does you're too expensive

for us and we don't want you insured. joe, to have an answer that's the biggest one. i'm so proud, we had 55 united. for the first time, joe, all of our education came together to rally around education. we have school personnel feeding our kids. we had the base as far as mr. straight orand superintendents all come together, they coalesced around saying education has to produce the 21st century work skills. they said enough is enough. they stood together and made them change. the republicans didn't listen and they chose -- 55 strong showed that education and economy go hand-in-hand. you can have one without the other. health care and education are two of the things that we hold

dear. >> democratic west virginia senator joe manchin. thank you very much for being on with us this morning. we appreciate it. >> well -- >> great talking with you. >> great to be with you. i'll tell you one thing if russia or another country wants to invade they can come to west virginia and they will have a rude wakening. they will wish they never came. >> channelling charlie daniels band. just go put your hands on a pittsburgh steelers fan and then my friend i think you'll understand. so, steve schmidt let's look at some of these races i was referencing with the senator who came to us via skype in west virginia. so joe manchin's race, this is a state that donald trump won easily. joe manchin up in internal polls on both sides pretty comfortably. you can see in indiana another

deep red state. joe donnelly doing pretty well there. claire mccaskill in missouri holding her own. same with heidi heitkamp. in tennessee phil breseden that guy is like 65-25 favorablity. he's ahead in that state. five states that democrats should be 20 points behind but man they are neck and neck and can win with all of them. >> let's start with tennessee. phil breseden a candidate well-known. former governor, former mayor of nashville running against a republican candidate. clocks in at about 13.3 on the kook scale. no surprise he's ahead in that race. in indiana, we look at donnelly. he's an indiana senator. it's a state where there's still enough proximity to the voters that you can get around that state. they know who he is. they like him.

i suspect they are going to return him to office. joe manchin in west virginia, united states senator, former governor of the state, he's known in the state. he's probably looked at more in the state as a west virginian than a democrat. plus you see the imagery of the rifle, i would say the use of it to shoot legislation is probably irresponsible for a responsible gun owner to be able to go and do. what you do see across the country as we head into the fall campaign, i think is a rising wave that's going to repudiate trumpism. i think this is a profoundly significant election. i think people in this country understand what's at stake. i think the majority opposes the tone, the meanness, the cruelty, the vileness, the corruption of it all before you get a single issue and we're seeing that in the generic ballots.

the republicans have a fundamental nut problem. you have a lot of nut ball candidates. look at the race in north carolina. he's running against commander waterford from the hand maid's tale who is out on the campaign trail talking about the necessity of women submitting to their husbands. just extraordinary. so when you look at these races and you look at it through, for example, the corruption lane, you know, you put duncan00er seat, crooked republican lane, we have the nut republican lane, we have the weirdo republican lane, and then we have your normal republicans that are just swept up in the tide who have shown cowardice and complicity. republicans on the hill and staff and lobbyists know the writing on the wall. the dye is cast for a big defeat

come november. >> nick, a week is a lifetime in politics. >> anything can happen. >> we don't know what will happen the rest of september. we don't know what will happen through october. will there be another october surprise? there may be, but at least over the past week or two you really have seen a lot of races moving in the democratic direction. >> it's true. look the biggest thing for me is that hillary clinton is not on the ballot this year and donald trump is. and what that means is that this is a referendum for a lot of voters on trump and trumpism and they are not going to have the complexity of hillary clinton as a candidate to matter for them. i don't see any democrats who are running on russia. the only democrat in the country that is making a big deal about russia impeachment is candidates like don styer. importantly they are focused on

this theme of corruption. the last time we saw this in 2006. we saw a great thing for democrats in 2006 where they basically were able to enwrap lots of different issues in lots of different races under the banner of corruption. and proved to be very successful for them in that year. >> all right. coming up hide of this year's mid-term elections there have been significant questions about facebook's role in the 2016 election. our next guest asked the question can mark zuckerberg face facebook before it breaks democracy? that is coming up next on "morning joe".

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efforts. >> that was facebook co sheryl sandberg testifying before the senate intelligence committee last week. joining us now, staff writer at the new yorker, evan osnos. he profiles mark zuckerberg in the new issue of the magazine in which he spoke to zuckerberg about facebook's problems and about facebook's underlying views on technology and society and in it evan writes that he quote found zuckerberg strange not always could -- coherently to grasp problems for which he was one prepared. some of the subtlest aspects of human affairs including the meaning of truth, the limits of free speech and origins of violence. zuckerberg is now at the center of a full fledge debate about the moral character of silicone valley and the conscience of its leaders. zuckerberg and sandberg have attributed their mistakes to

excessive optimism, a blindness to the darker applications of their service, but that explanation ignores their fixation on growth and unwillingness to heed warnings. the question is not whether zuckerberg has the power to fix facebook, but whether he has the will. and, evan, i would go on to say that seems to be the core problem with facebook and a lot of these social media entities, where information is thrown around with absolutely no sense of right and wrong and putting them through some sort of strainer. it seems to me that zuckerberg had a great idea technically, but don't companies run on much more? >> well, exactly as you say. we're discovering in some ways the skill set, the vision, the ambition that got facebook to where it is today is not the same set of attributes that they may need in order to fix the problems that they are face. they are now about two years into this public reckoning and

it started with the election of 2016, the discovery there was russian propaganda that reached 126 million facebook users. then it continued into this spring with disclosure of the cambridge analytical scandal. the question a lot of us are asking, the beginning of this project, the reason why i wanted to talk to mark zuckerberg about this is to say does this person who stands at the center of this company, to an extraordinary degree of control, does he have the awareness, does know what the problems are? can he describe them? does he deeply understand the depth of frustration and criticism and can he apply that same ingenuity to building this company to fixing these problems. >> nick confessore, since you studied this so much yourself let me ask you a quick question and have you and evan discuss since you know so much more about it than the rest of us

here. mark zuckerberg may act like a babe in the woods. i don't understand. i was taking that role of caveman lawyer. i don't understand these complicated issues of emotion that, hey you're talking about, really, come on, the bottom line is for them to clean up facebook would cause them millions and millions of dollars. cleaning up facebook is not consistent with their projections of economic growth inside the company, are they? >> well, joe, no. it's impossible to run facebook as a newspaper with editors overseeing things, human people, and still be as profitable a company as it is today. and the issue that i find for facebook is facebook not really knowing who or what it really is. and you often see this. i want to ask evan, i'm speaking

to facebook officials, i often ask them do you believe in your motto that your business is about connecting people. i'm curious what you think. if you think that mark zuckerberg knows what business he's really in today and what it is, if so. >> you know, i concluded in this process that that term, connecting people, which we hear over and over from facebook and from mark zuckerberg is in effect a code for something simple, user growth. from the very beginning of this company, it stood for one thing and one thing above all which was building itself. that worked from. from a business perspective in the beginning they need the network effect. they need more and more people on this platform for to it gain value. but at a certain point it passed this almost invisible threshold where that fixation on growth, this what one former employee described to me as a religion of growth has become now really a threat to the future of the

company because if it does not figure out how to have a richer set of values, a deeper set of values about protecting democracy, about reducing the toxic side effects of social media, then they run the then they return -- run the risk of undermining this thing they built. mark zuckerberg is not even 39 years old. people have stopped believing he is so overwhelmed by his original idealistic impulse that he's unable to see the down sides. the reality is he's been a successful shark in this business for 14 years, ruthlessly competitive and successful. now it's a question of whether he can direct that same level of personal ambition to solving the problems before they overrun the company. >> i get the sense that the greatest fear these companies have is not a privacy regulation or a content regulation.

it's anti-trust. how is facebook preparing and anticipating this and what steps is the company taking tos assue the republicans? >> they are actively working on trying to lobby against the idea of a big push against big tech. i asked mark zuckerberg what do you think are the chances they are going to move against you, and he made it clear that he thinks they will not. he think that is the args thas t he think that is the args tha t over facebook's dominance are overblown. i think that really it's not going to come down to the details of their competitive landscape so much as whether washington decides that the

nature of big tech as it exists today is fundamentally unworkable. that is a threshold i'm not sure they've reached yet. my rough con sevcensusevconcens operating in a political never never land for the first 14 years of this company and that period is coming to an end. >> i've seen on the one hand senator hatch has pushed some questions at google on anti-trust. i think he's serious, but if i see president trump talking about it, what i see actually is the president and his people applying a set of pressure points to these companies to try to actually walk back from some of the reforms they are undertaking on content and moderation and quality, because it's believed that these steps are worse for deserves. -- conservatives. >> we've just been conducting

one big postmortem on what happened in 2016 and what these tech companies are doing about it. did you get any sense that facebook understands what's being done now in 2018 and potentially in 2020 in terms of concrete examples of what they're seeing, what kind of activity and what they're doing about it such that we don't get to 2018 and 2020 and once again we're looking backwards at doing another postmortem? >> i think they recognize their core credibility rests on how the 2018 midterms go. if they are found to have allowed russian or other countries to interfere in this election on their platform by spreading disinformation, you know, that for them is an existential risk. they've tried to be very public about taking down a couple of big operation informations, as they call them, one from russia, one from iran. there's two ways to look at it. either that means they're

getting better at taking them down or it demonstrates the scale of the problem. one of the people who's involved in their election integrity efforts said to me there are a lot of copy cats out there now, patterning themselves after the internet research agency, the russian outfit. this problem is getting bigger. the more that facebook scales, the harder and larger these problems become. for them, 2018 is make or break. they have to show that they can get these things under control. >> thank you so much. we're going to be looking for your piece in the new issue of "the new yorker." the big bells were broken up in the '70s and '80s. should we see the same thing happening with the facebooks of the tech world? >> i think so. until we figure out the role of these social media platforms and begin to take them seriously, we will find ourselves in deeper

and deeper trouble. >> i have a point of view on this that, to me, the question around facebook is it the worst thing ever invented or just the worst in the last 50 years. as we look at facebook, is facebook an american company that operates globally, or is it a global company that is headquartered in the united states? because an american company acts in a certain manner when the country and democracy are under attack from a hostile foreign power and their platform is the vehicle and the mechanism by which the attack is made. and i don't know if they ought to be broken up, but we ought to be having a very, very serious discussion about how big we want these companies to be, how powerful we want them to be as we look ahead over the next 1 5 10-15 years. and the application of the anti-trust laws, we may be very

well in another similar space with silicon valley and these companies. >> we had a very similar conversation about the nature of patriotism in silicon valley in the wake of an attack on san bernardino in which authorities approached apple and said we need to unlock this phone and apple said no, our authority is not with you, it is with our shareholders, our customers and our global marketplace. that is a big problem facing not just facebook, not just apple, but corporate culture in general in the united states and particularly in silicon valley. still ahead, new reporting says donald trump still can't understand why roy moore lost his senate race. >> are you kidding me? >> perhaps because moore was a credibly accused child molester? plus, former president obama may have just coined a new political bumper sticker for the ages. to paraphrase, nazis are bad.

how much more does congress need to see? donald trump has now been implicated in two felony crimes, and he's all but confessed to them on fox news. no one is above the law, so we have to make sure this president doesn't use pardons to cover up crimes. if you agree that a president should not be allowed to pardon himself or his associates, join us at needtoimpeach.com.

the washington establishment doesn't have the courage to act, but the american people can. doesn't have the courage to act, ythen you turn 40 ande everything goes. tell me about it. you know, it's made me think, i'm closer to my retirement days than i am my college days. hm. i'm thinking... will i have enough? should i change something? well, you're asking the right questions. i just want to know, am i gonna be okay? i know people who specialize in "am i going to be okay." i like that. you may need glasses though. yeah. schedule a complimentary goal planning session today with td ameritrade. we are americans. we're supposed to stand up to bullies. not follow them. we're supposed to stand up to discrimination. and we're sure as heck supposed

to stand up clearly and unequivocally to nazi sympathizers. [ applause ] >> how hard can that be, saying that nazis are bad? >> good morning, everyone. it's monday, september 10th. with us, we have political writer for the "new york times" nick confisori. professor at princeton, eddie glau jr. former advisor to president bush, mark mckinnon is with us this morning. and heidi prisbilla. >> barack obama looked like lebron when he was speaking. that was like an easy layup when he said, how cahard can it be t

criticize neo nazis? to put you in the place where we are where it's just surreal that donald trump has trouble even criticizing neo nazis and white supremacists. you know what? we have a guy who wants to be on the united states supreme court, brett kavanaugh who would not even answer whether it was right to stop people from coming into the united states because of their race. i mean, that's unheard of. these are strange, strange times. and unfortunately, weak and sniveling men and women will do or say just about anything -- just look at capitol hill to see that -- to try to get in the good graces of a man who has absolutely no understanding about what america's constitutional norms are or who

we are, what values we have as a country. >> yeah. my daughter stopped talking to me about politics quite some time ago, because it was too much and too negative. my phone lit up, both of them, during obama's speech and snapchats and you know what, all sort of coming in because they were finally excited again. former president obama continued his foray back into the moyle scene this weekend, once again making the case against the man now holding his old job, president trump. the former president was on the campaign trail in california on saturday, working to rally voters as democrats make plays for seven competitive congressional districts there. obama's speech was notably different from the one he delivered in illinois on friday, working to turn out the vote in november rather than directly attacking the trump administration. still, the former president took a number of veiled shots at his

successor. >> we're in a challenging moment, because when you look at the arc of american history, there has always been a push and pull between those who want to go forward and those who want to look back, between those who want to divide and those who are seeking to bring people together, between those who promote politics of hope and those who exploit politics of fear. i deeply believe that there are no set of problems, there are no set of issues that we can't solve if we're working together and we're true to the traditions that are best in america.

it's always tempting for politicians, for their own gain and for people in power to try to see if they can divide people, scapegoat folks, turn them on each other. because when that happens, you get gridlock and government doesn't work and people get cynical and decide not to participate. >> mika, you talked at before how this is unusual for a former president to actually be campaigning against a current president's interests. well, you of course have donald trump who's broken every rule. you have donald trump, who is still campaigning against a woman he defeated two years ago, still having crowds chant "lock her up." donald trump is making this a continuation of a campaign against hillary clinton and a

constant campaign against barack obama. if i were a democrat and if i were somebody that wanted to win this fall, i would hope that barack obama would go all in, go there and do what he needs to do to draw the line, not between him, but draw the line between america's constitutional and political norms and just how twisted and demented some of the statements and policies this president has promoted over the last year and a half have actually been. somebody's got to do it, because the democratic party does not have a voice of opposition. barack obama is that voice. >> he was companying for decency and belief in the system. one of his comments appears to have gotten under president

trump's skin. during that speech mr. obama reminded the crowd that the economic success mr. trump likes to claim credit for actually began under his watch. >> by the time i left office, household income was near its all-time high and the uninsured rate had hit an all-time low and wages were rising and poverty rates were falling. i mention all this just so when you hear how great the economy's doing right now, let's just remember when this recovery started. >> following that comment, president trump fired off a number of tweets on the economy over the weekend, including one citing comments from jason chaffetz saying, barack obama talked a lot about hope, but donald trump delivered the american dream. all the economic indicators, donald trump has proven to be far more successful than barack

obama. president trump is dlelivering the american dream. wow. that's delivering a lot of you know what. looking at job creation, it appears president obama does have the advantage over president trump. so far this year an average of 206,000 jobs have been added per month under trump, an uptick from last year's average of 182,000. during president obama's second term, he added an average of 195, 226 and 250,000 jobs per month in his final three years, just adding some facts into the conversation, joe. >> that's the thing. barack obama never could go out and brag about how well the economy was doing under him. he seemed tortured to go out and tell people actually the good news about his administration. he may start doing that now, but there are a lot of americans and it's frustrating, there are even a lot of people in news that

listen to donald trump and see the showmanship and go, well, yeah, the economy has gotten a lot better under him. no. if you just look at hard, fast economic numbers, the rate of growth, the rate of whether you look at the s&p or whatever, it's about the same under donald trump as it was under barack obama, who actually inherited the worst economy since 1932. >> well, joe, i think it's interesting. first of all, let's compare apples to apples and wait until we have four or eight years to compare against each other. we are throwing out the rules of the campaign. it's interesting to see barack obama step up. you can tell he's relishing it. i think the whole fall is going to be like this where we're going to have a split screen with barack obama and donald trump. one is campaigning about hope and one is campaigning with fear. we're going to have a hope/fear

element in this campaign and two of the best at doing hope and doing fear. it will be interesting to see. >> also, this isn't a nationwide contest, as you know and as our viewers know, we're going district by district. you know, barack obama's going to pick those california districts and illinois districts. he's going to pick other districts across america where republicans are holding the seats, but they were won by hillary clinton and sort of have a blue tint to them. it seems to me that barack obama's overwhelmingly popular in all of those districts. >> look, joe, his job is not to come out and be the standard bearer for the entire party. he is a targeted shot in the arm in key districts, places where democrats can flip a seat or get higher turnout and secure a seat. but it's still fascinating to watch him in action. it's like having been in a hall of mirrors with president trump

for the last two years and someone kind of opens the door at the end of the hallway and you see daylight. it's a return to a kind of a reality-based politics and certainly a different tone that you hear from him. he is the polar opposite of president trump in every way. but the question for me is, this country rejected the politics of president obama to some extent in 2016 and turned its back on what he was offing. the huge question for me in 2018 is if that still continues or if there is some party elector rle that wants to turn their back on president trump now. >> watching barack obama, you see a politician who i disagreed with on many policies from the way he did his stimulus package to how he didn't move, i thought, as decisively as he needed to in syria. i could go down a long list of areas where i disagreed with him

ideal l idealolo idealologically. at least we agree on the constitution and how we treat your neighbors and on just the basics of american life and the basics in civil discourse on the campaign trail. >> absolutely, joe. as you know, i disagreed with president obama from ideologically from the left. but it was nice to see and hear reasoned thinking, a kind of thoughtfulness and in some ways a commitment to the basic norms of democratic life that have in some ways defined the country, at least since i've been born and politically aware. i think what's interesting, though, is when we think about president obama stepping out, he

opens up space. donald trump has taken up so much of the oxygen in the political room that when barack obama stepped on the scene, suddenly we had space to think about matters differently. i think that was a good in and of itself. still ahead, mike pence is sure no one from his offense wrote that op ed for the "new york times." of course, he was also sure that mike flynn wasn't talking to the russians. so we'll break down the reaction from top administration officials, including a pointed statement from nikki haley. insurance that won't replace

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the white house continues its search for the anonymous writer of last week's explosive op ed in the "new york times." on friday, president trump asked

attorney general jeff sessions to investigate, suggesting that the op ed amounts of treason. >> do you think jeff sessions should be investigating who the author of the op ed piece was? >> i think so because i think it's national security. i would say jeff should be investigating who the author of that piece was, because i really believe it's national security. >> you said last night that it's treason. in this country we punish treason with the death penalty. are you serious about this? >> we're going to take a look at what he had, what he gave, what he's talking about. also, where he is right now. >> what is it in the op ed that would make it treason? >> what makes you think the -- how are we secure, chuck, that the four corners of any op ed are all that somebody who doesn't have the guts and the courage to come out and put their name to that op ed, how do we know they haven't promised other things? how do we know they're not taking other documents? >> the president of the united states wants the attorney

general to investigate. what law was broken here that the attorney general needs to investigate? >> it depends. there could be and there could not be. so you don't know that and i don't know that. >> so he has ordered the attorney general -- >> nobody's investigating an op ed. >> has he ordered the investigation of who wrote the op ed? >> i won't talk about that. he has said publicly that he thinks we should find out who this person is. >> meanwhile, members of the trump administration continue to deny any involvement in writing the anonymous op ed. vice president mike pence says he's confident it wasn't anyone on his staff. >> let me be very clear. i'm 100% confident that no one on the vice president's staff was involved in this anonymous editorial. >> you asked them? >> you know, honestly i don't have to ask them because i know them, i know their character, i know their dedication. and i am absolutely confident that no one on the vice president's staff had anything to do with this.

>> and u.s. ambassador to the united nations nikki haley has written her own op ed, slamming the anonymous piece in the "new york times." she writes in part, when there is disagreement, there is a right way and a wrong way to address it. i pick up the phone and call him or meet with him in person. as a former governor, i find it absolutely chilling to imagine that a high ranking member of my team would secretly try to thwart anmy agenda. that is not the american way. it is fundamentally disloyal not just to the chief executive, but to our country and to our values. there's a lot of questions as to whether or not not following the system in reaction to the president is the right way to go. i think it's a very slippery slope and extremely dangerous. i have a lot of questions about this op ed. but the investigation into who done it, that seems also to be a slippery slope as well.

calling it treason, also a slippery slope. >> did not hear from any of the administration officials who hit the air waves a good explanation of how anything in that op ed could qualify as treason. it was simply a member of this administration exercising their most fundamental right under the first amendment to free speech. and by the way, it verified everything that has been reported in numerous books and in numerous articles since the beginning of this administration. but it does highlight, i think, a broader question that it some day will be reconciled here for the media and for the american people, which is just what extent has there been any kind of official coordination between this administration and the justice department. there are outside groups that have issued a flurry on everything from the at&t/time warner deal to other attacks that the president has made on news organizations to try and get to the bottom of whether

there has been any violation of the contacts policy that we've had frankly since nixon because of this very problem we saw illustrated at that time. i think this is just another example. it seemed like if you read between the lines, the administration saying there has been no formal order from this white house. but i think given everything that we've seen going back to the days of the president launching his campaign, calling for an investigation of his political rival, there should be a lot of successful schism abke north korea is still making nukes and the trump administration is taking a harder line. we'll talk about what it means for national security next on "morning joe."

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north korea's staged military parade had one noticeable thing missing this year, missiles. instead the parade's pomp and circumstance focused on striving

for peace and a stronger economy to mark the country's 70th anniversary. the drastic change comes amid leader kim jong-un and president trump's ongoing negotiations for the rogue nation to disarm their nuclear arsenal. yesterday president trump tweeted praise for kim's, quote, big and very positive statement that displayed flowers in lieu of the usually touted missiles. trump said, quote, we will both prove everyone wrong. there is nothing like good dialogue from two people that like each other. joining us now senior advisor and korea chair at csis and an nbc news and msnbc korean affairs analyst victor cha. his new book is "nuclear north korea, a debate on strategies." also joining the conversation noah rothman. victor cha, let's start with exactly what we're seeing

between the united states and north korea. is a trust developing or a fake relationship that could end very badly? >> mika, i think it's probably more of the latter than the former. president trump is sending all these nice tweets to the north korean leader, but the fact that they did not display the icbms at this parade i think was more of a sop to china than it was for the united states. the number three guy in china was at this event, this big parade celebrating the 70th anniversary and north korea the relationship they're trying to cultivate right now is not with the united states. it's with china. last year china cut off basically all the trade with north korea and now they're trying to rebuild that relationship. so the north korean leader is trying to do everything he can to cozy up to the chinese more than to the united states. >> to the extent that we're seeing a lot of these cosmetic

developments be touted by the president as some measure of progress, yet at the same time we've seen public reports suggesting that the intelligence officials believe they could produce five to eight new neuroleer wneuro le -- nuclear war heads by the end of this year. they're developing more nuclear fuel. we've seen a nuclear program that doesn't appear to be anywhere near halted, maybe not even arrested. but we are seeing a lot of diplomatic overtures. you say they're aimed at china, not the united states. but the united states is the real target here, right? we still on the table have the prospect of preemptive strikes to disable this nuclear program. really they're talking to the president, right, and sort of pulling the wool over his eyes? >> i think they certainly are in that they're giving the

impression that they're denuclearizing. they want to have their cake and eat it too. they want to have their security with their nuclear weapons but they also want to be able to get economic development. at this parade they said, we have achoieved our security, no let's focus on economic development. that doesn't sound like an agenda that says i'm ready to trade my nukes for trade with the outside world. >> at what point do we say the united states isn't serious about a threat here and is just looking to contain north korea? >> i worry that the president is trying to pull the wool over everybody's eyes and accept a bad deal in exchange for peace and walk away from the problem. in the end that does not make us as americans more secure at all. coming up on "morning joe," the embattled vote in america,

from jerry mangerrymandering to turnout. "morning joe" is back in a moment.

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through internet essentials, comcast has connected more than six-million low-income people to low-cost, high-speed internet at home. i'm trying to do some homework here. so they're ready for anything. at a private gathering over the weekend, white house budget director mick mulvaney warned republican donors and party officials that the party was battling serious vulnerabilities in the upcoming midterms. according to the "new york times," mulvaney raised the prospect that senator ted cruz of texas could lose his bid for reelection because he's not seen as likable enough. in an audio recording obtained by the times, mulvaney conceded that president trump's personal unpopularity was a problem for the party, but he predicted it would not ultimately

deisisdeisis -- decisive factor for most voters. he said, quote, there's a very real possibility we will win a race for senate in florida and lose a race for texas for senate. another detail from that "new york times" report says the president is still bewilders about why roy moore, who is accused of molesting a child, lost his senate race to doug jones. mick mulvaney said, quote, the president asks me all the time, why did roy moore lose? mulvaney told the crowd, that's easy, he was a terrible candidate. joe, what do you think? >> there's so much to think here. first of all, you have ted cruz talking about mick mulvaney is

just another political guy in washington, d.c. as if ted cruz hasn't been a political guy in washington, d.c. most of his adult life. i mean, talk about raging hypocrisy, he is from the swamp, ted cruz and has been from the swamp for some time. he was a catch creature for george w. bush when he decided when the tea party came along, that he was going to be an outsider. it says a couple things about donald trump. first, it says he's far more insulated and isolated than any of us could have expected. donald trump is still shocked that he lost the race? it suggests that he has a steady diet of news from fox news. he doesn't read things that will upset him, doesn't see things that will upset him that much.

so going into this battle with democrats in the fall, he has no view of how he's seen or how the rest of the republican party is seen. that's going to be a real problem not only for him but for the republican party, because mika, he's the guy who's supposed to be planning the counterattack against democrats this fall. >> i think that's a very kind assessment, by the way. joining us now professor of history at american university alan likchtman. joe, these are two great guests and also some really interesting questions about what is happening to the electorate. >> i want to follow up with the

professor about his last book, impeachment. you've been right about all the of the presidential elections since taft, whatever the stat is, it's pretty remarkable. but you also predicted the impeachment of donald trump. do you feel like it's still moving in that direction? >> absolutely. everything i wrote about a year and a half ago in my book "the case for impeachment" is coming to pass. i wrote about how donald trump inveterately lies, chapter on that, a chapter on flouting the law, a chapter on the war on women, on the russia connection, on his nefarious business activities. it is now all coming to a head. i believe there will be multiple grounds ultimately for impeaching donald trump on financial crimes, obstruction of justice and quite possibly conspiracy to undermine our democracy. but it may well depend on the

democrats taking over the how is this november because the republicans have shown no subpoena in standing up to this president who threatens our democracy. >> well, a lot of what happens this fall depends on the house of representatives which of course has been gerrymandered. it's not just skefb you usually only have 35 or 40 seats in normal years that are up for grabs out of 435. >> right. i wrote in my book that the great mystery of american politics is that you do not have in america a guaranteed right to vote. the great mistake of the founding fathers was not putting a right to vote in the constitution along with all the other rights. every subsequent amendment has

been phrased negatively in terms of what the states can't do. you can't deny the vote based on race or age or gender, but we still don't have a guarantee of the vote. that's why these folks can get away with egregious racial and political jerry mangerrymanderi voter suppression through voter purges and voter id. we've seen one of the most outrageous attempts at voter suppression in modern history, the trump administration trying to subpoena the voting records of millions of people in north carolina. you know, the tactics have changed. we don't out right ban people from voting anymore, but the patle pat -- battle remains the same. >> racial gerrymandering pushed by civil rights legislation and also by democrats themselves trying to guarantee that there

are black members of congress. in many ways, that's worked to republica republicans' advantage because you carve out the most likely of democratic voters. for instance, a district in florida, the jacksonville district, it goes down like a snake. what you do effectively is while guaranteeing one democratic seat, you in effect help republicans in all of the adjoining seats. isn't it time to look past some of those civil rights -- some of the gerrymandering that was down for the right reason, but now is having a detrimental effect? >> absolutely. i was an expert witness in a series of cases recently in the state of florida, which by the way, has pioneered a constitutional amendment against political gerrymandering. i was able to show as an expert witness that, in fact, you don't

need these packed african-american districts in order for african-americans to elect candidates of their choice, that in fact, you can reduce these percentages, unpack these districts and give tremendous advantages to fr african-americans and progressives because you can create coalition directs across the state. now it is republicans and conservatives as we saw in modern north carolina and in virginia who want to pack african-americans and other minorities into particular districts so that republicans can have the advantage everywhere else. i have been strongly arguing against this and my book makes the point very strongly. >> this is something,again, that was one of these laws that was passed with all the best of intentions, but now all of these years later, it end up working against all of the goals of the

original hedge legislation. >> it's one of the ironies of approaching the difficult question of racial equality. oftentimes african-americans are treated as a cause or problem in this country. because we're treated as a kind of cause, you know, for charitable kind of work or a problem, we don't really get to the heart of the matter and then we end up on this kind of racial hamster wheel. professor, let me ask you this question. so is race at the heart of this problem with the vote? >> yes. >> is it the key -- >> race is absolutely central. it seems to always come back to the great american dilemma of race. but arguments about race always transcend race. what people don't realize is in the very early republic, most of the constitutions were race

blind. it was only in the 19th sechbce that virtually every constitution except for five in american wiped out african-american voting. when the 15th amendment was being debated in 1870, there were those who said we shouldn't focus on raise. rather, we should have a universal guarantee of the vote. but the response was, this is all we can do at the time because the great sacrifice of the civil war was about race. >> it's so interesting that what we're talking about right now is yet one more reason for people on both sides to get out and vote in the next 60-70 days, because the gerrymandered lines that we have today were determined by the tea party revolution in 2010. but governors that are getting elected this year will determine

how lines are going to be drawn for the next decade. the stakes aren't just about donald trump. it's how congress and how gerrymandered districts look for the next 12 years. >> let me even frame that out once more, because i fully agree with you. this election is inevitably framed and trump and the most important election in decades for that reason. i think it's important for one further reason. one of the reasons i wrote "winners take all" is i believe the idea of making change has been stolen from the people by the very powerful. if you look what's happening in america this week, this is the tenth anniversary this week of the financial meltdown that caused the ghoelobal economy to tank and from which only the rich have really recovered. we talked about mark zuckerberg changing america while compromising our democracy. we talk about donald trump fighting for the common man

while in fact enriching himself. all of this is happening because of instead of believing it is through the vote that we make change in america, we have outsourced change to billionaires and we need to learn to take change back. this election in november needs to be more than just a repudiation of donald trump. it needs to be a repudiation of fake change. >> the back is "the embattled vote in america." that's professor alan lichtman's book. we'll be right back. water heate, she was pregnant, in-laws were coming, a little bit of water, it really- it rocked our world. i had no idea the amount of damage that water could do. we called usaa. and they greeted me as they always do. sergeant baker, how are you? they were on it. it was unbelievable. having insurance is something everyone needs, but having usaa- now that's a privilege. we're the baker's and we're usaa members for life.

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hey, welcome back to "morning joe." noah, i want to ask you, bring up something i was talking about. it seems like a lot of things have hit this weekend about republicans having second thoughts being republicans. ben sasse talked about famously leaving party. david french, very respected conservative thinker, said he no longer looks at himself as a republican or looks at the republican party as the guarantors of his values as a christian and as a conservative. i talked about my friend who said if you had asked her her entire life, over four decades, how she identified herself, one of the three or four words that come up is republican. she's left the party as well.

even steve schmidt obviously has been very hostile about donald trump. a guy who ran the elito and roberts' confirmations. do you think is something happening? has the pace quickened to such a degree that more and more republicans are thinking like david french, this may not be the party for them in the future? >> i'm not sure about more. i think the opportunity to make that decision was in 2016. the fact ben sasse is thinking about this is interesting. as he said on "meet the press," he caucuses with republicans. you have to be a republican essentially in order to caucus with them. so his is more of an instrumental consideration than a philosophical one. those who stay in the party and want to maneuver it back to a place of conscious insanity and appeal to a broader share of the

electorate than what republicans currently command need to have philosophical anchoring. it has to be about an ideological inclination. that ideology is small government conservativism. that ethos which has governed the party since approximately 1964 is what is needed in order to reorient the party away from trumpism. i'm very hopeful we can get back to a status quo. because donald trump is such a mercurial personality and has few ideological inclinations. but it can't simply be about we have to do what we think is going to sound really good to people. and sometimes that's going to annoy people. especially people who are not conservative. but you have to stand for something. >> as mika and i have said from the very beginning, one of those people it would annoy is donald trump who we've always said was a big government democrat. he's proven that. you look at the debt.

you look at the spending increases. there's nothing about him that is about small government conservativism. and, you know, and it's interesting that -- there are some republicans who say i'm going to stay and fight the good fight. for me, the break, not with the party, but with donald trump, but the break with donald trump came with the muslim ban back in december of 2015. you can add to that donald trump apologizing for neo-nazis. you can add to that pretending, feigning ignorance over the klan and david duke. polls that show 90% of republicans that still support this guy. i do wonder how you justify staying with that party. >> you know, it's a problem that i think is very deep in our culture. you see it in the republican

party. i found it in my reporting, in all of the silicon valley companies you talked about. i found it in the big banks. you have people who work in these institutions who know they are working for something that is not doing right by this country, who understand that they are part of a fleecing of america and face this moral dilemma about stay and make it 3 degrees better if you can or leave. i get people now, because of this book, started calling me and telling me the dilemma stories are proliferating. one of the things i say to people is if you're going to stay make it useful. because you are compromising yourself by staying. and so staying and just doing a little anonymous op-ed or stealing a paper off the desk, i don't think that's enough. if you're going to stay in these constitutions, use your voice. speak with power. if it doesn't work, come out and tell us. >> you know, eddie, your "time"

magazine article on don't let the loud bigots distract you really goes to my larger point. as a son of the south, this upsets a lot of people, when i've said middle class white guy growing up in the deep south, alabama, mississippi, georgia, florida, i did not hear even behind closed doors a lot of racist comments. that made me think that things actually weren't what other people said they were. and yet we have a president who is clearly either a racist, or racially insensitive or fanning the flames of racism. and he has 90% of my former party still backing him. what, for tax cuts? are you really going to trade the ideals of america for, you know, a percentage or two percentage points off your tax

bill? i don't think so. >> yes, you know, in the piece, what i try to do is say this is typical racial america melodrama. what is really the case is it's much more complicated. we can't displace our national sins on to the shoulders of donald trump. donald trump as president obama said yesterday is a reflection of who we are. just so happens that my life is bound up with yours and my son's safety is bound up with yours. and if we are really going to get through this crisis, we have to answer the question. are we going to be a racist country? are we a racist country? and if we're not, what does that look like? and that's going to have to address the assumptions of the silent majority. it's going to have to address why do we invoke the forgotten american? it's going to have to address all those folks willing to deal with donald trump because their 401ks are doing well. the tax cuts helped them. deregulations helped them. they'll say yes, he seems to be bad, but it's okay. so the piece really tries to get

us at something that i think is more fundamental than simply decrying the people shouting the "n" word or telling people to go back to mexico. >> yes you know, nick, it's so interesting that so many of the same republicans who were saying, you know what, i don't really listen to trump. he's crazy. look at how good the economy's going. these are some of the same people that were wearing, you know, sack cloth and ashes back in the late 1990s saying how dare democrats still support bill clinton because they say the economy's doing well. it's, you know, what goes around comes around. >> well, joe, this is a country where big donors give a few thousand dollars in campaign contributions to get hundreds of millions of dollars in tax cuts which they then gave a few million dollars back as charity and have their in as on libraries and museums. which i turn now to annan and his book "winners take all." what is the through line between

a president who says i alone can fix it and an elon musk on whom we rest a lot of our hopes for ambitious spaceflight and clean cars? >> one of the very awkward things is donald trump got a lot of his language from these fill lan thr philanthro capitalists. a funny story about musk, i was in a community art space in brooklyn taking a tour. this tall very wise-looking elegant older lady comes up and says what do you do, i'm a writer what are you writing, i'm writing a book. it's about rich people who says they're changing the world. and she said, well, are they? no, i don't think they are. who do you think they are? mark zuckerberg, elon musk? she had a weird look on her face and ten minutes later someone said to me, isn't it so great you met elon musk's mom? >> i love it, very nice. before we go today, another

great show, another split screen in time for you all for our viewers. remember the montana kid, the plaid shirt kid on the left there and famed astronaut buzz aldrin on right. both had some amazing re, ans while listening to donald trump speak. unlike the high schooler, it's safe to say buzz aldrin was not kicked out by secret service. there you go. that does it for us this morning. stephanie ruhle picks up the coverage. >> thanks, mika. thanks, joe. good morning, everyone. i'm stephanie ruhle with a lot to cover today. starting with fear and loathing. president trump hits back hard against bob woodward's new book. >> this idiot wouodward what wrote this book which is all fiction. >> the watergate journalist strongly defends his work. >>