witnesses. it needs to be independent, and that should lead to some form of accountability in the shooting death of an american citizen and prominent journalist. >> reporter: katy, the fbi has launched an investigation into shah reen's death. from what we can tell, that investigation doesn't appear to be making a lot of progress. they still have not spoken to a number of key witnesses in the west bank. >> raf sanchez, thank you very much. that is going to do it for me. "deadline: white house" starts right now. ♪ ♪ >> hi everyone. it's 4:00 in new york. a special two-hour program today focused on extremism and hate and the perils of platforming it. in a post dominion versus fox

world, we know news organizations take on enormous risk when they publish things they know to be false. they risk their representations. in the rare instances where actual malice can be established, they also face legal exposure. this knowledge of falsity on fox's part was established through mountains of internal communications that prove that the producers, the executives and the anchors knew that claims of massive voter fraud were false ahead of time and they broadcast them anyway. the case dominion had against fox was so strong that by the time the trial commenced, the only thing the jury was going to have to determine was whether fox met that really, really high legal bar of acting with actual malice when it knowingly published falsities about dominion. now, as we all know, instead of standing trial, fox decided to settle for close to $800 million. what we know from that discovery

process is dominion established from the top of that company to the bottom, from ruper murdock to tucker carlson, the fact-checkers and newsman jers, they all knew ahead of time pre broadcast that the content was false. what does that do? for today's purposes, it reframes our questions today about the risk involved to one's reputation in what was platformed, we'll use the word published again, on cnn last night and whether, if perhaps intoxicated by the attention, maybe even the ratings, it becomes a pattern or practice or habit for them or anyone else to platform someone who we know ahead of time will spread known and established and repeated falsities on their airwaves. to put it another way, it's not about last night. it's about what happens next. as you may have heard, trump was there. no one will cast a single vote in any primary for seven months

so there's not a pressing electoral decision to be made by anyone alive in this country. but for reasons actually articulated by the top of that company, a person named david zaslav, trump was plat formed and published by cnn. >> former president trump is going to be on cnn? >> yeah, he should be. >> given what happened -- >> it's a divided government. we need to hear both voices. that's what you see. republicans are on the air on cnn, democrats are on cnn. all voices should be heard. >> for the record, republicans are on the air here, too. all voices he said, all voices. all in that context includes a person whose track record of lying is undeniable and something any news organization would be prepared to deal with, right? despite rather valiant efforts by cnn to push back on the many, many lives, the cacophony of lies, many observers found and

observed and noted that trump completely dominated the conversation, he commanded the room, and he decided when and what would be discussed. so let's stop here, right? let's let that sink in. an anti-free press politician takes control of a press event hosted by a network and a company he hated so much when he was president that he actually sought to use his own justice department to take retaliatory measures against it. so now the company's part of the story, too. cnn recently very publicly parted ways with anchor don lemon. it came in the aftermath of a comment he made on his broadcast that was viewed by his managers as misogynistic. those very same managers are the people who aired trump's misogynistic attacks last night on e. jean carroll that could invite further defamation suits. here is part of what trump said that is almost certainly being reviewed by lawyers today. quote, i never met this woman.

i never saw this woman. he goes on to say, what kind of a woman meets somebody and brings them up and within minutes you're playing hanky panky in a dressing room, okay? i don't know if she was married then or not. john johnson, i feel sorry for you, john johnson. it's a word salad. we tried to make sense of it. we believe that's a reference to her ex-husband. he continues to call her a, quote, whack job. now, the reaction from the crowd is also worth telling you about, the laughs when he smears a woman who had just the day before prevailed in court against him. the bulwark writes this, this is a moment we knew. we knew who trump was, of course, but last night showed us who we are and what's about to happen. this is the gop front-runner. he's still the star who can do anything, and it will get worse. the platforming of a known liar and misogynist is where we start the hour. andrew weissmann is back with

us, a former justice department prosecutor, former senior member of robert mueller's team. charlie sykes, editor in large of the bbulwark. former congressman and eddie glaude. moving this forward, i should say that some of the early indicators suggest this was a very, very large audience that this trump town halogen rated. i think for the purposes of today, we've decided not to go back and play or relive any of the moments from last night. to be totally honest, ill couldn't watch it in realtime. i went for a walk, i left my house, and caught up today with some of the clips and summaries of it. donna, i wonder what you think it says that in a post dominion world where the reputational damage to fox was as much a factor, if the reporting is to believe in that settlement, as the legal exposure it faced. we have another network

simultaneously replatforming trump while fox news replatforms tucker carlson. >> it demonstrated that cnn has not learned the lesson not only from 2015 and 2016 going forward, but that they didn't learn the lesson of just a week or so ago with the decision, the settlement of the dominion cased trump would continue to pure vay the lies and obfuscations and promoting conspiracy theories and the misogyny and the hate and then the attacks, the scurrilous attacks against e. jean carroll just a day after her verdict. so this is completely

predictable. they did this i think because they wanted entertainment value and they wanted the numbers and the ratings, because it was not news and it was not journalism. it can't be what goes forward in terms of the way we cover donald trump. >> eddie, there was something so disconnected. cnn did a nice job covering the unanimous jury verdict of e jean carroll's sexual abuse finding as well as the defamation finding, also unanimous. and then, you know, 17 hours later acted like it didn't happen. again, not playing this, but trump defamed her anew, said i never met this woman, never saw this woman. this woman said i met her at the door of bergdorf goodman which i never go into other than for charity. she was about 60.

this was 20 years ago. he goes on to redefame a woman whom a jury found he's liable for sexually abusing and defaming her. >> i'm not a lawyer, but i think, nicolle, there should be some form of legal jeopardy here. maybe she'll take him to court again. what it revealed is that trump feels like he's not accountable. so you can lose a civil case and $5 million is awarded to e. jean carroll, and you can come out and do the same exact thing because you feel like you're not held accountable. cnn for me made an egregious error, dangerous error in platforming donald trump. it failed to do its job as part of the fourth estate. they believe that donald trump is the typical political candidate. he's not. so to platform him, in fact, is to participate i think in endangering our democracy and not holding him accountable to

what a civil court just held him accountable for. >> charlie, there's also something self-loathing about it, a company so brazen with its hypocrisy. it just parted ways with don lemon and then partners a day after trump's peers found him liable. a company that was almost retail eighted against by trump's doj when he was president, just throws up the door. it's like the girl who dates the jerk and thinks she's going to be different. >> this is appalling on so many different levels, including that. last night was a case in why you do not give a megaphone to an unedited, live show for somebody like donald trump who is going to use that platform to lie and to defame. we know who donald trump is. we know what he was prepared to say. that shouldn't come as a surprise. but they put him on anyway. i do think that it is legitimate

to ask whether or not there's going to be legal jeopardy as a result of all of this. i just was struck by the fact that, as i'm watching this, that cnn and others in the media have learned nothing since 2015 and 2016. they have not learned anything about how to cover donald trump. to the point about whether or not cnn should cover him, of course they should cover him. of course he's newsworthy. this was not journalism last night. when jonathan swan sits down or mehdi hasan sits down and interviews somebody, that is journalism. this was reality tv. what a surprise that he dominated the format with lie after lie after lie after lie. i think that was the depressing moment when not only is he absolutely unrepentant, bibut we saw how the voters in new hampshire reacted.

they laughed. they laughed at a woman who had been sexually assaulted by donald trump. they laughed at his jokes. so we've seen how far he has gone newspaper coarsening the culture. we're seeing the complete inability of the media to handle somebody like this who is completely unmoored from any standard of ethics, decency or truth telling. >> charlie, why do you think they did it? >> unfortunately i think they did it for many of the same reasons fox did it, for ratings. this was a way for them to rebrand themselves. they want to shift. they want to change their positioning. they are perhaps thinking this is a way to get some of the conservative viewers who might be alienated from fox right now. if those are the reasons, it is cynical, incredibly cynical. if they did it because they thought that this was sound journalism, that they were going

to treat donald trump like any other candidate, then it was a ghastly misjudgment and terribly naive. as we said over and over and over again, this is not a normal candidate. we're talking about an indicted, twice-impeached, coup-plotting sexual abuser who is known for his verbal incontinence and his ability to use forums like this and turn them into fire hoses of disinformation and they did it anyway. so it was either cynical or it was incredibly naive. >> andrew weissmann, the fox-dominion trial taught us so many important things about defamation law. one, that it is very hard to prevail. as a former republican, i thought it was just as interesting that the discovery process showed us what the culture was like inside. and my read on the final determination of what led fox to settle and to part ways with tucker carlson was the

reputational bleeding that was happening. so my questions are less about that very high legal standard for defamation and more around risk management and reputational management. the ratings are expected to be much stronger than anything cnn has done in years -- in months, maybe over a year. if they want to make this a regular thing, what is the publication of known falsities, the second, third and fourth time, expose cnn to at a risk level? >> that is a great question, and what it gets to is whether the legal system is going to be the answer for the problem that we all witnessed last night. it's worth noting, nicolle, that it's not just dominion that won a defamation claim and showed actual mall las against fox, but that is actually one of the two claims that e. jean carroll won

on with respect to donald trump. you have two victims who in civil cases took many, many years and a lot of tenacity and a lot of money in order to hold people to account, fox news and donald trump. that can't be the answer because it just takes too long. that kind of exposure is something that is -- the timeline doesn't work when you've got an election coming up. that is something that, yes, cnn does have that risk. if you're cnn's general counsel, you are thinking about that today because you just -- the issue here is not so much will e. jean carroll be able to bring a case against donald trump. of course she could. i doubt she's going to because she just prevailed. she just went through an exhaustive trial and was sort of revictimized, so the idea that she would do that again.

but the other person at the table here is cnn. this is one where they're going to start becoming dangerously close to reckless disregard and actual malice because they know what he's going to say in advance. the idea that they created this forum and they had this particular audience, this wasn't just a general audience of voters. this was a select group of sort of republicans, as if you just said i'm going to interview joe biden and we're only going to invite democrats. so cnn is exposing itself to potential legal liability, typically if it does this again and again. i don't think that can be the answer because the timeline is too long. >> andrew, let me also read something that was published. this is not an internal communication. it certainly has echoes to some of the things we read in the legal process that yielded discovery of internal communications, but this was published from cnn's "reliable

sources" newsletter last night, written by oliver darcy. he writes, quote, trump lied about the 2020 election, he took no responsibility for the january 6th insurrection and the lives inside it. he mocked e. jean carroll's allegations of sexual assault which he was found liable for on tuesday. cnn aired it all. on and on it went. it felt like 2016 all over again. it was trump's unhinged social media fooe feed brought to light on stage. collins was put in an uncomfortable position, the audience applauding trump giving unintended endorsement to his shameful antics. i am obviously a female anchor at a media company. i cannot think of any circumstance where my employers would put me in a position where i interviewed somebody who called me nasty and the audience applauded, and the head of the news room would say this the next morning. this is chris licht, the

chairman of cnn chris licht issued a robust defense of his decision to broadcast a live town hall with former president trump. a network wide call, he congratulated kaitlyn collins before acknowledging the backlash. covering trump will continue to be messy and tricky, but it's our job. i absolutely believe america was served very well by what we did last night. it is our job to cover trump. it is our job to never look away. i feel like i stare at the sun for two hours every single day. that's not what this was. this wasn't covering trump. kaitlyn trump actually does it better than just about everybody. she was, the first few minutes at least trying to push back against lies. then he called her nasty and the crowd applauded. that's what was platformed last

night. >> there are a couple things. one the format here reveals what cnn was trying to do. there was no reason it had to be a town hall and a town hall with just republicans. you could see what they were goading and what they were trying to do. to me they're a hand maiden to his mall lig nancy. the quote you have where he said we need to have republican voices. that's not what this was either. of course you should have republican voices and democratic voices and independent voices. of course that's the case. this is a democracy and people should be heard. that's part of a news organization. the way that -- you've got somebody who you know is going to lie and defame, you have to structure that if you're going to believe that is news, you have to structure it in a way that you can actually hold that person to account and bring light to the issue rather than

simply go to the ratings. it's so reminiscent of fox. it's hard to see this as cnn positioning itself as a business matter. that's where, yes, it could have potential legal ramifications, but worse than that, if you don't have responsible journalism covering this upcoming election, we are so dangerously close to losing our democracy to an autocrat, and the fourth estate has to rise above just considering its business interests. >> donna, i spoke to a former senior national security official who served under democratic and republican presidents, worked in the highest levels of national security for democrats and republicans. he said to me, i spent my career learning how to sort of bob and weave with the changing politics of a new administration, but i never had to contend with someone who at the time of active war took the enemy's

side. in this case that would be russia. trump did not take ukraine's side when asked about the war between russia and ukraine. his autocratic anti free press, retaliatory embrace of practices around companies that don't fall in line, which is actually the patient zero to what desantis is trying to do with disney in florida, has an active, on going manifestation in that his instinct is to align himself and ally himself with putin at a time of war. >> and in addition to not taking ukraine's side at a time of war, he also would not acknowledge what virtually everyone does, that vladimir putin is a war criminal. he simply can't do it. he will not ever find himself aligned with those who value democracy because he is an autocrat. i think what was startling to me

last night was that not only these things with regard to ukraine, but then when he said he'd have it resolved in 24 hours, immediately i thought, oh, my god, if this man becomes president, the way he's going to be resolving it is by giving away the store, the ukraine store to vladimir putin. he presents a really scary model for what can happen if he returns to the white house. i hope at least through this we all can see what the future holds. i'm just disturbed because cnn really did not have to do this so far out of an election where a field is not even settled. and yet we have donald trump platformed in a way that projects him way ahead of other candidates and with a message that is, quite frankly, scary to the globe. >> just because we have the

person here to prosecute here, paul manafort. giving away ukraine was very much on the table for the trump team. we're not talking about hypotheticals. jim rutenberg has done incredible reporting. these are not what-ifs. trump's views and impulses are to leave our article 5 obligations, to leave nato and to strengthen vladimir putin. >> absolutely. this goes way back in history. there's a reason that putin did not want hillary clinton. hillary clinton and john mccain were completely tied at the hip and aligned with, frankly at the tierjs republican orthodoxy which was ukraine good, russia bad, understanding that ukraine was the tip of the spear and was necessary to defend in order to not have what is happening right

now. and the deal with paul manafort was the russians explicitly reached out to him saying that they are trying to take over the eastern half of ukraine, and they were looking to have donald trump give a -- and this is a quote -- a wink so that they could go forward with that. this is longstanding on the part of paul manafort, but also with respect to what russia was up to, and seeing donald trump as an ally. and everything that we're seeing and that you just talked about bears that out, where donald trump has always taken the side of russia on every issue. >> all right. no one is going anywhere. when we come back, we'll keep this conversation going. we'll also cover another fox news defamation story, another lawsuit alleging defamation, this time for a former government official accusing that network of deliberately

spreading lies that harnld her career and threatened her safety. we'll have a chance to speak with her lawyer. later in the program, screaming, the quiet part out loud with a sitting u.s. senator about extremist white nationalists serving in our military. we'll have all those stories and more when "deadline: white house" continues after a quick break. don't go anywhere. tinues after k break. don't go anywhere. (vo) at viking, we are proud to have been named the world's number one for both rivers and oceans by travel and leisure, as well as condé nast traveler. but it is now time for us to work even harder,

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♪ liberty. liberty. liberty. liberty. ♪ (water splashing) hey, dad... hum... what's the ocean like? uh... you were made to remember some days forever. we were made to help you find the best way there. judgment is wrong in this case. president putin and his government have been engaged in war crimes. i don't believe that's disputed by most who have looked into

this. he's an enemy of the united states, our values, our interests and the security of the american people. >> -- >> of course it does. that's why i don't intend to support him for the republican nomination. >> who are you going to support? >> i haven't decided yet. it won't be him. >> -- >> where do i begin? >> so that was a republican senator, senator todd young of indiana. it always starts with one. picking up on what andrew and i have been talking about, putin is a war criminal, putin green-lit the squad that carried out the atrocities in bucha based on news accounts that have been available worldwide. he's trump's guy. that's not hyperbole. that's a known known. pull the thread that you write about today in the bulwark,

while platforming trump and helping him build and reactivate his coalition, what that leads to. charlie, you're muted. you have to unmute and start over. >> it obviously shows what we've experienced over the last four years and where we are right now. that was one of the worst moments, but there were so many actually more egregious things. donald trump last night called a black police officer a thug. he endorsed defaulting -- united states defaulting on its debt, he defamed a woman he sexually assaulted and continued his bromance with vladimir putin. this is what the republican party is facing. as we sit here, he has a 40 percentage point lead on his nearest rival. it's always interesting to hear people like senator young who say they're not going to support

him. at this point that feels like an outlier. one after another like dominos, the establishment republicans have decided they're going to cave in to donald trump. we're going to see, with all of this on display, and once again, if there's any upside to what happened last night, it removed any doubt who donald trump is, what kind of a candidate he will be and what he will talk about and how he will behave. republicans all across the country have to look at him and say, is that going to be our nominee? am i going to link my political future to him? do i want to put him back into the white house? right now a strong majority of republican primary voters are saying yes. it will be interesting to see how many other republicans like senator young are willing to say that they're not going along with him because that doesn't seem to be the trend at the moment unfortunately. >> eddie, you were always high

impact, one of the most powerful dissertations you offered on this show was to remind us that it's about us. i didn't sit and watch this, but when i read about it, the thing that gave me an actual feeling like i had been punched in the stomach were the reports in the crowd. i did a lot of reporting on trump voters. i knew it here, but hadn't felt it here in a long time. i want to ask you, the treatment of the moderator by trump was in every classical description -- we don't often apply it to politics -- abusive. he bullied her. he steamrolled her. he disregarded her role. her role was host and moderator. he dominated her, overtook the conversation, made fun of her and enjoyed having the audience on his side. he then took someone who prevailed in a sex abuse case, smeared her, mocked her, insulted her. again, the crowd laughed like they were laughing along as a

verbal sexual abuse fest. this all happenedomewhat reputable platform. what does it sayus? this is going to be the biggest number cnn has seen in many moons. >> that's such an important question. it says that we're always already on the precipice of the mob taking over. there's a sense in which everything that you just described that he did last night -- i happened to watch some of it. you saw it where he was dangling red meat, the performance of owning the libs, the kind of disregard for decency and civility, actually stoked the embers. it stoked the fires in interesting sorts of ways. cnn participated in, shall we say, allowing for that gathering that could easily at the drop of a dime turn into a mob and there would be violence it seems. i was thinking about madison,

nicolle, james madison and the role of the press. he says a popular government without popular information or the means to acquire it is but a prologue to a farce or tragedy, perhaps both. there's a direct relationship between the sovereignty of the people and a free press. the free press that allows us to gather information so we can engage in self-rule. when the press is motivated by money, greed, ratings, it compromises its position. suddenly, not only do we have a gerrymandered house, not only do we have a broken deliberative body in the senate, not only do we have a compromised court, not only do we have an imperial presidency, but the fourth estate is failing to do its job. that's a crisis beyond crisis. we're on an ice edge. >> i think that's exactly right,

donna. another thing mr. zaslav says in that interview is we're not advocacy. to take eddie's diagnosis, what brought down fox, what cost it $800 million wasn't decades of advocacy on behalf of republicans and republican causes, they were humming along. what brought them down is knowingly publishing falsities with actual malice. so the slippery slope that cnn stands on today is when it looks at these numbers when trump certainly reaches out himself or through his surrogate and says let's do it again, this is a win-win guys, what do they do next? >> i think that's the question. although we know what they've done now. there's nothing that we saw last night that cnn did not know was going to happen. we all knew it, and they knew it, too. and they decided to go forward anyway. we had already heard in the

rallies that trump has had where he continues to do the election denying and the defamation against e. jean carroll and all the lies. so it isn't as though they weren't aware of it and they decided to do it anyway. so i don't see what their rationale for not making that same choice in the future would be. but they really open themselves up for what might happen, although i think andrew is right, the law and the courts are really not an appropriate venue right now to police this in the context of the current election. it has to be dependent on a stronger fourth estate, as eddie has said, to be able to do that and to hold him to account, and not to try to do it in realtime.

i think at some point kaitlan just got exhausted the way all of us were exhausted by being run over top of. so that's not possible, figuring out the right format and the right way to cover trump i think is the challenge. >> right. fact-checking trump in a live context is like asking someone being dragged behind a car to run. you can't run fast enough to keep up with the car. andrew weissmann, some news just broke in "the new york times" about something we talked about and asked about. it's now on the record from e. jean carroll's attorney robby kaplan. she says, quote, everything is on the table in terms of e. jean's legal options. she describes comments about her client as, quote, vial. >> well, it's worth remembering e. jean carroll actually brought

two cases. there's another case pending before judge kaplan. judge kaplan actually has jurisdiction over donald trump. so those are things that are on the table. how cnn behaves going forward is on the table as it would be with respect to any news organization, whether it's fox or whether it's an individual like donald trump. so that's all fair. the one sort of optimistic note i will mention since this is quite a pessimistic, rightly so, series of questions that we're going over is, if you're jack smith, last night was a good night. there's a reason donald trump did not testify in the e. jean carroll case and would never testify. there's a reason donald trump didn't come in to be interviewed by robert mueller. he is incapable of telling a

consistent, truthful story. that's why he can say now, oh, this was unfair when he had every opportunity to testify in the e. jean carroll case. when he was pontificating last night, he said a number of things that are just very damaging to future criminal cases, whether it's his embracing january 6th and the people there, that's going to be a terrible thing for him to have to live with, if there's a january 6th indictment which i do think is going to happen. he said he took the classified documents from the white house that. is inconsistent with his own lawyer's submission less than a month ago saying they were inadvertently packed by others to mar-a-lago. there are a number of things he said that he's going to have thrown back in his face by jack smith's prosecutors.

you can be sure as we're sitting here that jack smith and his team noted everything that he was saying and has said. >> maybe that contributed to the ratings. let me just correct one thing i said. the person who called trump's comments vial is e. jean carroll herself. this is the quote, it's just stupid, it's just disgusting, vial, foul and it wounds people, ms. carroll said in an interview with "the new york times." adding she had been insulted by better people. her lawyer is the one who said everything was on the table. for having this conversation with us and for being so blunt and so honest, thank you so much, andrew weissmann, charlie sykes, donna edwards and eddie glaude. adding to fox's growing list of legal troubles, a brand spanking new lawsuit from a government disinformation researcher who says she was disgussed hundreds of times on the air which led to violent

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biden's former dhs disinformation board director who resigned from her role following death threats. nina jankowicz's lawsuit accuses fox news and fox corporation of a, quote, malicious campaign of destruction against her, quote, because hounding her was good for fox's bottom line. it goes on to say this, quote, over the course of eight months in 2022, fox talked about jankowicz more than 300 times and built a narrative calculated to lead consumers to believe that jankowicz intended to sensor american speech. >> the woman is not qualified to run anything, let alone tell us what we can and cannot say. >> jankowicz is obviously a far left radical democrat who believes her opinions are facts and your opinions are disinformation. >> she's wildly inadequate for the job. >> she obviously wants us to, i don't know, emulate a european

style model of heavy regulation of internet content deemed harmful and dangerous. >> it's unbelievable, right? now it's the subject of this new lawsuit. it claims after jankowicz resigned, quote, tucker carlson and jesse waters lied that she was fired from her post at the board when, in fact, they both knew that jankowicz resigned due to harassment arising from fox's defamation of her. joining us, one of the attorneys representing jankowicz, riley summers flanagan and david full kin flick is back. riley, take us to the defamation suit filed against fox. >> so we represent nina jankowicz in her lawsuit against fox news. basically the way this lawsuit works, it's just like anyone

else. you can't choose to come out and villainize and attack people with lies when you have the megaphone. nina jankowicz was the target of fox's complete tirade, and their decision was to go after her no-holds-barred. their view was clearly that it was good for their ratings. and despite the fact that information came out that contradicted their narrative, they never changed that narrative. the real point of this is that it caused an incredible amount of harm for nina. and at the end of the day, it's our job to make sure that fox news doesn't get a free pass when it engages in that time of disinformation. >> rylee, let me show our

viewers the human being between all of this. this is an interview my colleague chris hayes did on may 18th of last year. >> every characterization of the board that you've heard up until now has been incorrect and, frankly, it's kind of ironic that the board itself was taken over by disinformation when it was meant to fight it. it wasn't just these mischaracterizations of my work, but it was death threats against my family. over the last three weeks i've maybe had one or two days where i didn't report a violent threat, something like we're coming for you and your family, you and your family should be sent to russia to be killed, encouraging me to commit suicide. all of those have been forwarded to the department of homeland security's security services. that's not something that is american. >> there's a horrible pattern here. it reminded me of ruche by free man and san jose moss' testimony and the dominion ceo.

tell us how strong you feel your case is against fox, rylee. >> we feel that this case is incredibly strong because of certain significant actionable statements that fox news made about nina. you highlighted one of them early in this segment, the decision that tucker carlson and jesse waters made to repeatedly come out and say that she had been fired when they knew and had even referred to the fact that she had resigned earlier. not only that, they were fully aware that the reason that nina had resigned was precisely because of the extraordinary torrent of disinformation that they had reported about her and which had, in turn, elicited a violent response across platforms. she was receiving death threats.

she was being encouraged, as she mentions in that interview, to commit suicide. these particular communications, they were all arising from the disinformation that fox was trafficking in, and doing so on purpose. the question about sort of why would they take this line, i think fox news' culture has really lent itself to a -- an effort to go of individuals and particularly in the disinformation space because they see themselves as having no consequences there. i hope the dominion lawsuit really illustrates that's that's not the case. but i also think that cases like this are a dime a dozen because fox news has been out talking about people in ways that are

defamatory for far too long. >> david, there used to be a care case. now it's their bread and butter. they find sometimes an obscure person in the bureaucracy, and they seek to reputationally annihilate them. it is more the anomaly -- it always leads to threats of violence. i can't think of a single example where the targeting of someone doesn't lead to the person either having to move or being swatted or teaming up with law enforcement. the violence that tucker carlson fetishizes are believed to be among the straws that breaks the camel's back, seems to be something they're aware of as a liability. what's your sense of how they're sword of girding themselves for what may be a flurry of lawsuits like this? >> i think they think somehow this will be open season, that people will come forward with lawsuits of varying degrees of substance altd to challenge them

because dominion has offered a potential path. one of the things dominion did was make a case that part of why fox should be held accountable was that they conveyed so many times with such specificity the information put on the air was wrong. they offered a corrective as vigorously as they could several thousand times. they offered roadmap because once they were able to get over certain hurdles, they were able to get to the discovery phase of the case ahead of the actual trial, which of course didn't pay out because of this huge settlement. in the discovery phase, all this information cascaded out to dominion's lawyers and much of it in public view where we could see the exchanges you're talking about between tucker carlson and producers, tucker carlson and other primetime stars, amongst executives, expressing knowledge that what they were presenting to the public wasn't true. fox has not said anything about

this lawsuit by nina jankowicz so far. it said about another voting company, smartmatic, that its legal defense will hold. these were newsworthy allegations, that the election was fixed, made by newsworthy people, the president of the united states at the time and his allies. yet what we've seen is very damaging in terms of what credibility was still associated with fox as a news property, and in terms of the intellectual honesty and legal defensibility of what fox was doing. >> david, as someone on the beat, what do you think as we're beginning to get a picture of the audience trump built with the trump town hall last night? >> say again. you cut out for a moment. >> i wanted your quick reaction to the story we led with, the trump town hall on cnn last

night. >> i think it was an almost impossible assignment for kaitlan collins, to ask some tough questions from the very start of the town hall and persisted as the night went on in doing so. you had a live event in which she was surrounded by people who were either trump supporters or trump sympathetic. you could hear that in terms of their reaction, supporting -- giving him momentum and energy as he fed off the idea that he could sort of deflect, deny, denigrate the questions that were emanating. what we've learned and we've known this for some years, it's tough to do good interviews. i think you saw interviews like jonathan swan of axios and lesley stahl of 60 minutes, and chris wallace, all because they taped interviewed and fact-checked it before presenting to the public. >> thank you so much for spending time with us today. a quick break for us. we'll be right back. k break fors we'll be right back.

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we are losing in the military so fast, our readiness in terms of recruitment. why? i can tell you why, because the democrats are attacking our military and we need to get out the white extremists, white nationalists, people that don't believe in our agenda, the joe biden agenda. they're destroying it. >> you mentioned the biden administration trying to prevent white nationalists from being in the military. do you believe they should allow white nationalists in the military? >> well, they call them that. i call them americans. >> for the record, that's a yes. hi again everybody.

it's 5:00 in new york. what is today's republican party? what does it stand for? what does it really believe in the year 2023? that's what, standing up for white nationalists, not just saying they belong in the military, but, quote, i call them americans. white nationalists, just like any other ideology. that's a republican-sitting senator defending the people who fbi director christopher wray say make up the largest bucket of america's domestic terrorism cases. in case you didn't recognize the voice, it's senator tommy tuberville. he sought to clean it up. the spokesperson said the senator is skeptical of the notion that there are white nationalists in the military, not that he believes they should be in the military. as you heard with your own ears, that's not what they said.

he made the comment in the context of the need to strengthen the military which is ironic. this is the senator who has been doing the exact opposite. since mid february, it's tommy tuberville who stalled 200 military approaches, holding hostage the quick approval of these positions because he objects to the defense department's abortion policy. following the dobbs decision, desense secretary lloyd austin put in place a policy that provides troops for family members, stipends for abortions and fertility treatments. tuberville didn't like that. he took issue with the policy saying it goes against the hyatt amendment. what does he do? he blocks the senate's quick approval of military promotions, a move that forms our national security and troops, so say former defense officials from both sides of the aisle.

last week a bipartisan group of former defense secretaries including two who served in the trump administration penned a letter that reads in part, quote, the current hold that's been in place for several weeks is preventing key leaders from assuming important senior command and staff positions around the world. some are unable to take important command positions such as leading the fifth fleet in bahrain and the seventh fleet in the pacific, which are critical to checking iranian and chinese aggression. others include the next military representative to nato, a post essential to coordinating allied efforts in support of ukraine, as well as the future director of intelligence at u.s. cyber command. leaving these and many other senior positions in doubt at a time of enormous geopolitical uncertainty sends a wrong message to our adversaries and could weaken our deterrence. today when asked by our colleague julie tsirkin to clarify his comments about white

nationalists in the military, here is what tuberville said. >> sir, if there are folks with white national lift beliefs of which there are in this country unfortunately, do you believe they should serve in the military. >> we've got to deliver that first. what -- >> do you think a white nationalist is a nazi? >> well that is one of their beliefs. >> i don't look at it like that. >> how do you look at it? >> i look at a white nationalist as a trump republican. that's what we're called all the time. >> do you agree with that assumption? >> i agree that we should not be characterizing trump supporters as white nationalists. >> it's hard to discern whether it is his stupidity or his embrace of white supremacy that is more absurd. standing up for in his own word, trump supporters who are white

nationalists is where we begin the hour. you can't make it up. joining us at the table paul reich kof, president of righteous media, host of the independent americans podcast and founder of the group iraq and afghanistan veterans of america. so glad you're back. bassal smikle is here, democratic strategist and director of the public policy program. frank figliuzzi is also here, former fbi assistant director for counterintelligence and msnbc national security analyst. we've been trying to have this conversation about white nationalism all week. i'll start with you. >> i almost have no response to senator tuberville's comments. if it wasn't so gravely serious, it would be comical. you'd see it in a skit. you can't actually understand or explain what a white nationalist is other than to say that's me, that's my party. i really think his staff is going to take him aside and say whoa, whoa, whoa, time out.

let's talk about what white nationalism is. i want to talk about his statement with regard to the efforts in the military from secretary of defense austin to ferret out as gatekeeping functions white nationalists coming in and then call them out when they're identified for their hatred and violent tendencies inside the military because it's really something that needs to keep happening. the problem with senator tuberville's statement, and even, nicolle, his office's second statement which was an attempt to pull it back are both problematic. here is why. tuberville says first, i don't call the folks in the military who are white nationalists. i call them americans. that means it's okay. the second statement, kind of a retraction that wasn't was no, no, no, what he meant to imply was he doesn't even think there are any white nationalists inside the military. either way we have a senator who

won't support the secretary's efforts to mitigate white narmism in our military. this senator probably should have stuck en to the xs and os at division one football. he was pretty good at it. clear lir this requires more brain power than he's capable of putting up. >> i agree with that completely, but i don't want to let -- i feel like we covered -- i don't want to impugn anybody else. the stupid defense is inadequate at a moment when in the words of a sitting republican senator, what is white narmism? it's trump republicans. she said no, it's not. it's a nazi sympathizer. someone show this man where google is. it's deadly serious that when you have a republican-appointed fbi director who says the greatest threat to the homeland is domestic extremism. you have a sitting republican

senator saying no, i call those trump republicans. >> tommy tuberville is one of the most radical, reckless and most ridiculous members of the entire congress. he does this consistently. right now he's saying we need more white narmists in the military, we need more white nationalists with guns trained in combat operations. it's absolutely irresponsible, totally ridiculous. he sounds like he's recruiting for the army of the confederacy, not the united states army in 2023. he's remotely out of touch with what's happening inside our military. her block is throwing a wrench. this is a very unique, isolated radical position by one guy who knows football fields and knows nothing about battlefields. >> i think the value of it is when the curtain drops and you see them for who they really are, you have to spend some time

probing and trying to understand what the consequences are. i want to play -- it's not new. this is mark milley having to defend himself for wanting to understand white supremacy and white rage. >> i want to understand white rage, and i'm white. i want to understand it. so what is it that cause thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the consultation of the united states of america? what caused that? i want to find that out. i want to maintain an open mind here. i do want to analyze it. it's important that we understand it. our soldiers come from the american people. so it is important that the leaders now and in the future do understand it. i've read mao tse-tung. i've read carl marks. i've read lennon. that doesn't make me a communist. what is wrong with having some sort of understanding of the country for which we're here to defend. >> i don't know that there's anything chairman mark milley that enraged the right more than

that statement, wanting to understand them and wanting to understand they're in our country and in the military, enraged the right. it feels like this is the book end to that, right? we are them and they are us. >> know thy enemy. the defense department has consistently that violent white extremists are one of the not the greatest risk to our national security. if senator tuberville wants to read something other than a football playbook, it should be the defense assessments that continue to underscore this threat internally that's a bigger threat that anything overseas. our recruiting numbers are down wauz women don't want to join the military because they might be from california or new york and might get stationed in a place like alabama and have no rights to health care.

tommy tuberville doesn't understand the modern military. vladimir putin is somewhere watching this going thank you so much, just keep on giving it to me. it underscores how this is beyond politics. it endangers our national security and he should resign in disgrace. this is so far beyond the norms of the senate. this is not even this rart. this is one guy who should resign in shame. >> to hear him say out loud that the reason he said what he said to my colleague in the second sound we played, is because we are them, they are us. white nationalists are, quote, trump republicans, feels like a moment. feels like a-ha, that's why the insurrection was a normal tourist visit because we are them and they are them in their view. to hear them malign and smeer chairman milley, the first time i saw it, it didn't make sense to me. if you want to understand white rage, they see angry white

supremacist s as them. trump republicans is what tuberville said. where do we go from here? >> that's why i'm trying not to label it anti wokeness, it's pro white nationalism. i always think about the tuskegee airmen in moments like this. these are men that went overseas and defended their country, but came home to experience segregation and discrimination. so who are the real americans here? the men who went and defended the values of america or the people that upheld segregation and white supremacy when they came back from their tour. according to senator tuberville, it would be those segregationists. he has a skewed view of what america is. the jamaican in me would say this is pure foolishness. if you zoom out from that

asinine statement, it exists even if there are no white people in the room. if you look at everything we engage in, from the food we eat, there's white supremacy as a thread through all of it. that's why so many young people are talking about the abolitionist framework. there's no sense reforming the system when you have members of the senate in the system moving the levers of power who are going to continue to do that almost unchecked. so rather than reform it, maybe this is an opportunity, as you're sort of alluding to, this may be a moment where we say this entire system is broken beyond repair and we need to find a way to free ourselves from it if we're going to move forward. >> the other problem is we try to focus like to a laser on the symptoms and consequences of one of the two political parties in america being broken and corrupt to its core. to his credit mitch mcconnell

disagrees with the hold on the military promotions. i don't see any effort to censure him. there's no self-policing of that which is flagrantly racist in the u.s. senate. >> well, that would mean that there were leaders of the senate that have to believe that this is flagrantly racist. it's clear that they don't. they just see this as either abhorrent behavior of one member of the senator they actually agree with it in some way, shape or form but won't articulate out loud because they have better political sense. i'm the cynic. i think many more believe it and just won't speak to it out loud. that's why you go back to the point that we cannot allow them to self-police. when we talk about the supreme court, cannot allow them to self-police because it's clear that these institutions are unwilling, unable to do it, and there are more of them in there running these institutions than

perhaps wech even thought before. we have to take a different look and a different approach. >> we have to, frank figliuzzi, be able to stare at the sun of the self-identification of, quote, trump republicans as, quote, white supremacy. we have to sit in that for a minute. i think what some republicans in mixed company, if you will, bipartisan circles try to say. we're not them. the white supremacists are over here. what tuberville lets us into is when the guard is down or you don't have the sharpest tool at bat, they see themselves as one in the same. >> when you study history and violent extremist movements, you see a period of time, and i think we're in it, where the extremist leadership is casting seeds into the field to see what grows. whether he admits it or not,

whether it's part of a much larger deliberate strategy, trying to legitimize a certain form of extremism. what i mean by that is, they'll come out quickly and say we're not white supremacists, no, no, no. tuberville will say we're not white supremacists, we're white nationalists. a portion of the society goes, thank god, we're not white supremacists. they don't realize that white nationalism is not american either. it's a notion we should be living separately, maybe we carve out a part of the united states and put the whites there and stick the blacks elsewhere, move them somewhere. they should go back to, quote, unquote, wherever they came from, which was here. it's kind of the frog in the proverbial pot of warming water. white supremacists, they certainly don't think white people are superior, they just don't want any black people

around and the acceptance level goes up when that happens. >> i want to ask you about its intersection with the growing threat of domestic violent extremism. we have evidence in the public arena that many of the mass shooters in our country at the end of their acts of violence are found to share white supremacist ideologies. how do we discern the similar people people telling us who they are as a motivation to carry out violence, frank? >> nicolle, it's been 28 years since one of the largest domestic terror attacks in the united states, the bombing of the murrow federal building in oklahoma city. i recently was invited to events there in connection with the april 19th anniversary of the bombing. what struck me was how much has not changed and how much we're right back there and, in fact, how much the growth has happened

in the ideology that timothy mcveigh who was responsible for the bombing, has taken hold here. timothy mcveigh was someone who was in to white supremacy, white nationalism, antigovernment. boy, was he very much pro gun as a means of taking down the government. the bombing of that oklahoma federal building was in a symbolic way the taking down of government structure. look where we are today. former president trump has a rally where? in waco, texas? where, an antigovernment movement sprung out. guess who was there watching that siege. timothy mcveigh. it's connected to guns, to white supremacy. and now we have a u.s. senator saying, yeah, we're white nationalists. that's who we are. >> let me show you what chuck schumer had to say. he was revolted. >> revolting, utterly revolting. does senator tuberville honestly

believe our military is stronger with white nationalists in its ranks? i cannot believe this needs to be said. but white narmism has no place in our armed forces and no place in any corner of american society, period, full stop, end of story. i urge senator tuberville to think about the destructive spectacle he is creating in the senate. his actions are dangerous. his words are gravely damaging. his refusal to think about the consequences of his actions on our military personnel and families is a stain upon this chamber. >> strong statement, paul, but it comes up short of tieing white supremacy back to mcveigh, back to waco, back to trump. >> he's right. but it's also coming from chuck schumer, so often it will be seen as a part san fight. this is so much bigger than that. this is the spawn of trump. tuberville is assuming this mantle of being a radical, kind

of political suicide bomber, just going in on behalf of the cause and blowing up anything in his crusade, against abortion, the words on white nationalism. it appeals to the worst parts of this country. we can flip it back, he's also a senator elected from the state in alabama. i went to basic training in alabama at fort mcclen land. it's conservative, but not tommy tuberville. he's blocking promotions of generals from alabama. people that need to push back, veterans from alabama need to push back. chuck schumer is taking the right position. it has to come from the middle, from independents like me, from veterans and common sense ordinary people who maybe aren't political to hold tuberville accountable in his state. >> mitch mcconnell, i said he disagreed.

>> took too long. he took a long time to say it. ahead for all of us, the spread of right wing extremism all across america and the world of trump world in platforming it. new details about who will be sharing the stage with members of the disgraced, twice-impeached, once-indicted, once found liable for sexual abuse ex-president, his inner most circle at an event at his miami hotel. that's next. we'll explore what frank and paul are talking about, the direct line from oklahoma city, that bombing nearly three decades ago, today's insurrection-supporting gop. how digital media reshaped life and gave voice to the angriest most outrageous voices of society, ben smith, author of "traffic" will join us. don't go anywhere. raffic" will s don't go anywhere. and when i switched, i got to choose the phone i wanted. for free. not bragging. (cecily) you're bragging. (neighbor) oh, he's bragging. (seth) who, me? never. oh, excuse me.

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our on going conversation about platforming dangerously -- media matters is reporting that tomorrow and saturday trump's miami hotel will host two anti-semites who have promoted pro adolf hitler propaganda and spread overwhelmingly anti-semitic views. scott mckay has claimed that jewish people orchestrated 9/11 while trump doral speaker charlie ward who also streams a show on rumble has shared posts praising hitler for warning us about judaism. scheduled to speak alongside mckay and ward are numerous members of trump's inner circle

and family including his son, eric trump and his wife laura trump, former trump economic adviser pete navarro, former national security adviser mike flynn, former senior department of defense official kash patel, former acting attorney general matt whitacre, truth social ceo devin nunes and trump ally roger stone. joining us, mary mcchord, former top official of the justice department's national security division. paul reich calf, bassal smikle and frank figliuzzi are still here. mary, what could go wrong? >> listening to that cast of characters, you have everything from the most extreme anti-semites and racists to people who are extremists and anti-semites and racists, but held positions of power in the department of justice, all coming together.

just to focus on national security for a moment, each of these things -- your prior panel talked about it when you were talking about our military, but when we have people in positions of power like a former president, normer national security adviser embracing not just white supremacy and white nationalism, but also christian nationalism -- remember, these we awakening events, they mixed a whole bunch of supposed faith in with their politics in the name of christian nationalism. when these combinations are together, this is emboldening others -- i should say these combinations that are casting others as evil and immoral, that's giving license to people to engage in vigilante justice. it is dividing us in ways that i think as an earlier guest said, putin is sitting back loving this. so are our other international

adversaries. it inspires domestic terrorism that make us weaker as a nation. it expires things like accelerationism. there was a whole spate of attacks on critical infrastructure, power stations at the end of last year and into the beginning of this year. a lot of these things are part and parcel of the motivation that we're going to destabilize the government, we're going to do that so people lose faith in government, and eventually we can -- what can emerge from all this loss of faith and people abandoning their governmental institutions is a white christian nationalist society. so this kind of event, with bringing these kind of people together, is just license for all of that. >> mary, frank brought us back to oklahoma city and back to waco and mcveigh's ties to waco.

i want to read you, timothy mcveigh's dreams are coming true, it's hard to think of an historical precedent for a society allowing itself to be terrorized in the way we have. the normalization that both right wing terrorism and periodic mass shootings by deranged loners is possible only because mcveigh's views have been plain streamed. wide embrace of a former president also possibly a future president who reflected the bomber's values, wrote the author of the book "homegrown," jeffrey toobin. here is trump fanning the flames of extremism in his own word. >> do i think there's blame, yes. i think there's blame on both sides. you had very bad people in that group, but you also had people, very fine people on both sides.

>> -- >> proud boys, stand back and stand by. >> i know nothing about qanon. >> i just told you. >> what you tell me doesn't necessarily make it fact. i hate to say that. i know nothing about it. i do know they are very much against pedophilia, they fight it very hard, but i know nothing about it. >> they believe it is a satanic cult run by the deep state. >> we didn't get to the other night, yes, i will pardon most of the insurrectionists if i'm re-elected. so this embrace of not just extreists but extremist violence, remember part of what motivates people to engage in political violence and domestic terrorism is that they believe they're losing something and people gaining something are evil and immoral.

as i think i mentioned on a previous show, there's research that shows that the largest percentage of the people who participated in the insurrection were from counties losing the white population the fastest. when you demonize the others, that those people think they're losing, too, by portraying them as evil, portraying them as child molesters and all the things trump has lied about over the years, that justifies using violence. tracing back as jeffrey toobin has done in his book to the oklahoma city bombing and timothy mcveigh and drawing that through line from that bombing and what he was trying to do there, which was to start a succession of violent attacks that would culminate in overthrowing the government and from that starting a race war he hoped would emerge with a white nationalism, christian nationalist state. this is still a minority view, but the problem is we're

becoming almost immune to it because it's happening evidence reday when people like trump and tuberville and others embrace this type of extremism, embrace violence, give license to others to do it. we're having mass shootings on a daily basis, many motivated by white supremacy. we're doing this to ourselves. it didn't just start with the oklahoma city bombing. kathleen ballou in her book picked up the history before that from post vietnam to the oklahoma city bombing, the rise of white power as a movement with the same sort of insurrectionist view, the same sort of white supremacist, christian nationalist views and ideas based on -- including not just on replacement theory, but also the turner diaries, books that told in a novel form of how to go about doing this. that is all part and parcel of what is now really being embraced by trump and by those who are close to him and other elected officials. >> i want to ask this very

specifically. i think there is a sense that the republican party has always harbored this. parts of it, that's fair. never before has the figurehead, the leader of the party said it out loud over and over again, and not just plat formed it, but posted it. what's the political response to not look away? mary said it's a minority view, it's the majority view of the republican party which is the minority party in the united states. donald trump says these things out loud. >> that's exactly right. two quick points about that. one of the things i tell people when we talk about voting and who you should vote for, don't just look at the candidate, look at the people around that candidate. those are the individuals that will help them govern. what we've seen, to mary's point, the cast of characters around donald trump, these are people who have and will help him run the country. what senator tuberville was trying to say no, no, no, a trump supporter is not that. that's not those people.

we're a different kind of person. no, because we've seen everyone that's around him. it's extraordinary important point, because you're not just voting for the individual, you're voting for everything that's around. when we look at the cast of characters and i go back to all of those rallies, what was concerning me the most wasn't just what trump would say, but who is standing behind him. >> and what the crowd was doing. >> that's right. all those individuals could be public-facing workers in my life, doctors, lawyers, nurses, teachers, all cheering him. my question then becomes, so how does what they feel and how they neil about donald trump and that ideology influencing their work day to day as they're dealing with all of us. that's the scary part of all of this. how do you extricate that from going about our everyday lives? it's incumbent upon all of us to call out this white supremacy, this flirtation, perhaps even

deeper than that, with naziism in our country because it's going to seep into so many aspects of our lives if we don't pay attention to it. >> we'll never stop paying attention here. thank you all so much for having this conversation, mary mcchord, paul reich kof, basil smikle. a new podcast, prosecuting donald trump is out right now. paul is joined by michael steele for this week's episode. when we come back, how digital media has promoted and pushed our society's loudest, most outrageous and, yes, dangerous voices. jury roomist ben smith will be our next guest about his new book "traffic." don't go anywhere. traffic. don't go anywhere.

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twice-impeached, indicted ex-president. gasoline can create useful energy, but it can also simply burn, and by 2023 it seemed clear that the power of this new social energy had been to destroy any institution from the media to the political establishment that it touched. those of us who work in media, politics and technology were largely concerned now with figuring out how to hold these failing institutions together or how to build new ones resistant to the forces we helped unleash. joining us is ben smith, author of the new book "traffic," the co-founder of semafor. joining me is donny deutsch. >>. >> /* i scooped you on ben. >> what i love about this, it's not defensive. it really is here is what's going on, here is my role in it

and what do we do next. i wonder if you can be introspective of how you came to write a book like this. >> i came up in the digital media world in new york and was the editor tore of buzzfeed from 2012 to 2020. i came out of there, i kind of had this feeling of, wait, what just happened. i was at "new york times" writing the media column and took the opportunity to go back and report out the early, kind of birth of the new media that we kind of all lived with and the social platforms that we all kind of lived through over the last ten years. >> so you write this, along these lines, this book has been for me a humbling exercise in what i missed, even as i was there. i certainly hadn't realized until i began reporting on this book the extent to which right wing populism always seemed to be sitting just down the white ikea table from this progressive internet team, looking over its

shoulders, learning et cetera lessons. if facebook's staff thought barack obama was a culmination of what -- it turns out he was a weigh station on the road to donald trump. >> it's almost hard to get your head back to these moments. it was a default assumption this new media was populated by and read by young people basically, by default, kind of meta obama voters. when obama was elected in 2008, there was a sense of this is what digital media can bring you, a new liberal president. obama visits facebook. he doesn't have to say it's a democratic forest. it obviously is, like visiting a college campus in that moment. the reality when i went back was that people who were really instrumental to c populism from andrew breitbart who was a

co-founder of "huffington post," the co-founder of fortune, steve bannon who made a real study of much fing ton post. they in some ways took lessons of how the internet worked and in some ways had the stomach that a lot of us didn't, journalists didn't, to follow it to its logical extreme, to follow the traffic in the direction of saying things that weren't true to inflame people, and as facebook in particular figured out, that the way to keep you on that platform a little longer, to go from four minutes to five minutes a day or whatever, was to produce maximally engaging content which really synced up with the kind of either dishonest or really transgressive obnoxious speech that right wing populism -- core to this right wing populism, sort of poke the establishment in the eye, caused fights. facebook in particular had metrics that said, wow, this really keeps people commenting. they're all screaming at each

other in the comments. and this kind of divisiveness produced engagement that the people who followed it to the logical extreme were steve bannon and the trump campaign. >> the book is a must read i want to say for everybody at home. if you want to understand how we got here and the problem in terms of the triangle of technology, politics and media. let me ask the scariest question, because i think, if you were going to write a book ten years from now and now you put ai into this, it starts to take a volcano and turn into an atom bomb. >> i'm sure something terrible and scary will come out of ai and journalism. i'm not quite sure where we are -- >> i'll tell you right now. it takes joe biden and puts something in miss mouth he didn't say. you're just creating fake shun. instead of just writing about

fiction, you're taking technology to video-ize, i don't know if that's a word, a way to take this emotional incubator that you talked about to another level. >> right. i guess maybe i'm repeating my optimistic errors of the past. i think people are basically smart enough when it comes to joe biden, they realize there's such a thing as photo shop, that there are deep fakes. you'll see it come up in city council races where there's no one to rebut it, or in people's personal lives where you see disgusting smears and stuff kick around. i think the level of attention that touches national politics means that kind of deep fake ai is a little less likely to i would think really fool a lot of people. although, of course, the thing with fake news, it doesn't necessarily fool people. i'm not sure when people were

publishing stories that hillary clinton was replaced by a body double, that it wasn't necessarily people believed them that it was a kind of new political conversation that was intended to provoke and fulfill your wishes and almost entertain you. >> if you take hillary clinton in a pizza basement and a pedophilia ring, ai can produce the pedophilia. >> ben, you really think people are immune to disinformation at the national level? what were the people doing at the capitol on january 6th? >> i guess my -- having kind of watched all this play out and been part of it, i wound up thinking that people like us were a little too concerned with the idea that all this stuff was information, that if only we could fact-check people out of it, if only we could argue them out of it, that donald trump wouldn't be so popular. i think looking back a lot of

this was really emotion, it was really politics. in some ways lying so you would call them a liar to pick the fight. i think that's really core to that kind of trumpy populism. i'm not sure it's informational claims that people are making, that people could be talked out of some of this stuff they would change their politics. i guess maybe that's why -- i'm sure there will be unbelievably provocative and obnoxious ai stuff that's part of this campaign that fuels it and deep fakes. but i guess i see it more as provocation than information. >> to your point about emotions, matt dowd shares that assessment. we have much more to get to with both of you. we have to sneak in a quick break. we'll be right back. a quick break. we'll be right back. how? how do you choose?

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ben and donny are still with us. i want to ask you about last night, and about this point that ben is making that it isn't the variable, it isn't the "x" factor. there was some analysis from trump world that the interrupting and the steam rolling over the host was that point, that's how he won. >> he also won because of the audience that was in there. there's a lot of back and forth at cnn, doing the right thing, the wrong thing. but if the audience is going to be booing and cheering accordingly, the deck is kind of stacked. i think to ben's earlier point, at the end of the day, it's going to still come down to the viewer. what does the viewer want to ingest and not ingest?

and because we have bespoke media today, and obviously what ben's book is so much about, it's really, really tough. doesn't matter. if all of a sudden he says something be the cheers, the visceral cheers are there, it kind of outmines the information, the actual facts in there. what we've seen with voters, particularly trump voters, is you can present them with the alternative facts. i don't care. this is what i believe. >> i think what we know now that we didn't know in 2016 is they know they're alternative facts and want them any way. >> the word truth and what is truth, particularly in politics, there's a new definition to it. it's individualized truth. >> which isn't truth as all! >> we need to find a new word, because the -- >> it's called delusion. we're living in this delusional world. >> we're not all living in delusion. >> what scared me watching last night, and i'm drifting off a little bit -- i said all along that trump can't win again, and

that was a reminder. i know we want to lens it one way, but when you put him on cnn and he's getting cheers and they're booing the moderator, it's happening again. >> it's how he wins. ben, i want to draw you out in the frame work you write about, facebook, and the drug of engagement. what is your advice to journalists covering trump now and platforming him? >> i think cnn you saw that argument so clearly i don't buy the notion he's going to go away if you don't platform him. but what you do see the difficulty with, which is cnn was not able to position ilts as a neutral platform. trump made them the enemy and the foil and turned this into, he going into the lion's den and fighting the lion and cnn is the lion. it's hard for journalists to find a way around that, to not become especially like a prop in this professional wrestling

match. i think my own point of view is always that you should be trying to report the stories, you know, stay -- in some sense as a reporter, stay on the initiative and find things that are not what he tweeted that morning, but something somebody doesn't want to you write about, that is about what your audience is interested in, what people are interested in, not what donald trump woke up that morning deciding what everyone should talk about. it's challenging. he has been thrown off social media for about a year, a couple. that did not wind up vastly diminishing his support. he did not go away when facebook and twitter tozed him awesome i think there was a deep well of support for him in the united states and that's a not like an artifact of the media, which is what i think the media would like to think, because we like to imagine we're all powerful. >> the book is really great. it's reflective and important. pause and read it before we dive into another season of, as donny said, doing this all over again.

"traffic" is out now. thank you for this conversation. another break for us. we'll be right back. her break fs we'll be right back.

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thank you so much for letting us into your homes during these extraordinary times. we are grateful. "the beat" with ari melber starts right now. hi, ari. >> thanks so much. welcome to "the beat." boy, do we have a show for you tonight. we talk about those santos tapes which broke exclusively here last night. we have more of them, tapes of the newly indicted republican george santos. when we get on a story like this

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