divided town. it is a divided town on multiple issues. politically, on the issues of guns, on the issue of race and identity. on the front page of the new york times there is caitlyne gonzales in the cemetery, jumping, playing in the cemetery because it is a place now of a lot of life. that is the mexican cemetery. you cross the street and it is the anglo cemetery. there is no one there. there is no visiting. it is just so stark. so it is a town that has complex history and at least we are having this conversation now. >> i cannot recommend more highly for people to check out you, you can watch the full -- gun's grief and texas politics. it airs tuesday, may 30th on peacock. make sure to check it out. that is all in on this wednesday night. alex wagner tonight starts right now. good pbs. that is all in on this wednesday night. alex wagner tonight starts right now. good evening, alex. >> yeah, chris, we covered a bit of it last night. uvalde, the anniversary of course today and the shock, the parallel world in which the

republicans in the legislature live doing what they were doing in the midnight hours of the closing session of that legislature which doesn't meet again until 2025. >> they're out. >> two years. two years. thanks, chris. >> you bet. and thanks to you at home for joining us this hour. so today was the big day, the day the man who was widely seen as the strongest potential competitor to president trump in the republican primary, today was the day this guy entered the race. it is the biggest day of florida governor ron desantis' political career so far, biggest day certainly since he first stepped out onto the national stage in 2018 as a candidate for florida governor. >> everyone knows my husband ron desantis is endorsed by president trump but he's also an amazing dad. he loves playing with the kids.

he reads stories. >> then mr. trump said you're fired. i love that part. >> he's teaching madison to talk. people say ron's all trump, but he is so much more. >> big league, so good. >> that ad was from way back in 2018 when desantis was positioning himself as a trump understudy, someone who knew all the lyrics, who had studied all the lines, just hadn't gotten the lead yet. and that ad very much incapsulates the essential problem desantis faces as he tries to beat trump in the primary, something donald trump himself seems to recognize. now, think back to the republican primary from 2016. you had jeb bush and you had john kasich and you had chris christie and marco rubio who like to think of themselves as moderate centrist pro-conservatives.

yet mike huckabee remember he didn't think women should use curse words. the farther right tea party adjacent ted cruz and libertarian rand paul. i'm not going to go through all the candidate because there were approximately 69 of them in that race, but the problem is they all had distinct personalities, personalities of some kind they were selling you could use to compare. but now that the republican party more or less is donald trump, not his ideas or his policies but the cult of personality trump has built-up as the maga movement, now that that is the reality of the gop, how does someone like ron desantis distinguish himself? it's not like he can run more ads of himself building walls and showing off his kids in maga onsies. well, today was desantis' big opportunity to present himself to the country as a contender. he did it at a little past 6:00 p.m. in an unprecedented way,

announcing it live on twitter with twitter's owner, one of the richest men in the world, elon musk. and here is how that gigantic headline moment for ron desantis began this evening. >> now it's quiet. >> all right, good afternoon, good evening, or good morning everyone depending on wherever in the world you're joining us from. elon is sitting next to me. we want to welcome you to this historic twitter spaces event and more broadly a first in the history of social media. >> that was the big kick off.

that was it. now, i know this is elon musk's twitter, the man who famously hyped one of his cars as having bulletproof windows just to have those windows break at the car's big launch, but this was ron desantis' presidential campaign launch. and for 21 long minutes it was mainly just this -- >> all right, sorry about that. we've got so many people here that i think we are -- we are kind of melting the servers, which is a good sign. >> let's see so -- are we on? >> yeah, think so. >> i think we're just going to use your -- >> there's 682,000 people on. >> so things keep crashing, huh? >> i think we've got just a massive number of people online so it's straining the servers

somewhat. i think we are back online here. great, well, it's certainly an incredible honor to have governor desantis make this historic announcement -- >> false start after false start after false start after false start for 21 long minutes. and as for that hype that it was so many people that it was melting the servers, it was barely more than tuned in to watch congresswoman alexandria ocasio-cortez play the video game "among us" on a random night in 2020 on the platform twitch. but you know servers are melting down, that's how popular governor desantis is. can you believe the excitement? just a brutal start to a presidential campaign, truly unprecedented.

now, lucky for mr. dant s that was not the only part of his launch today. he also released this much more traditional ad. >> in florida we proved it can be done. we chose facts over fear, education over indoctrination, law and order over rioting and disorder. we showed we can and must revitalize america. we need the courage to lead and the strength to win. i'm ron desantis, and i'm running for president to lead our great american comeback. >> there's a lot to get into there, but there is notably no mention of donald trump. there is no one in a maga onsie, and no one is quoting "apprentice" lines, and no one is building walls out of cardboard block. so those days when ron desantis played understudy to donald trump, those days seem to be over. in fact, governor desantis at this point would probably you

rather forget about that whole understudy thing. donald trump, however, would not. he would very much like you to remember that 2018 ron desantis ad and what it says about the man who is now running against trump. and so trump dropped this video minutes after the epic desantis twitter launch fail. >> trump's support was so powerful just days after the endorsement desantis took a commanding lead that propelled him to be elected governor. >> i'd like to thank our president for standing by me when it wasn't necessarily the smart thing to do. >> you're welcome, ron. unfortunately, instead of being grateful desantis is now attacking the very man who saved his career. isn't it time desantis remembers how he got to where he is? >> make america great again. build a wall. then mr. trump said, you're fired. i love that part. >> truth is there's only one

person who can make america great again. >> what a night. we have so very much to talk about. joining me now are jonathan martin, the politics bureau chief at politico, and mark liebovich. first your reaction to the 21 minutes of technical glitches the audience was treated to as part of the desantis launch. >> i thought it was a great and unifying evening for america. i think, first of all, it's very rare that you -- you see donald trump, fox news, so many democrats, i'm guessing so many people who know ron desantis and suspected that maybe he wasn't ready for prime time are

enjoying this. you did say, look, there's no trump onsie was seen anywhere. we didn't see what he was wearing, and it does seem like this was a big gift to donald trump, and it seems also he knows exactly what to do with it. so this is rough start for ron desantis. i'm not sure elon musk and his charisma is going to sort of help him get out of this, but obviously there have been better ways to begin his presidential campaign that was going to challenge the incumbent or de facto incumbent. there are definitely better ways to launch. jonathan, but there's obviously the technical glitches and the decision to do it on twitter to begin with, right? the preoccupation of this campaign with kind of the elites that are -- you know, business elites, sail convalley elites who feel somehow left out in the

cold by the woke mind virus. i just thought the choice to begin with was a bad one or questionable one and then the execution obviously had problems. your thoughts. >> yeah, look, i think big announcements are typically done with two things in mind -- getting good coverage in the press and raising a lot of money both online and also via traditional big dollar fund-raising asks. and obviously the first part is going to be a debacle, he's going to get terrible coverage. there's a third thing i'm curious about, alex. and that is desantis has kept the press at arms length in florida and up until his launch today has tried to do so similarly as he sort of eyes the national stage. is this the kind of thing that's going to make him realize i can't go around the media, i'm going to have to engage at some

level, or does the sure to be awful coverage we're going to see here in the next day just alienate him further from the mainstream press and drive him further away? i think this will be a good test in that sense of this candidate. >> yeah, there's so many tests that ron desantis has to pass, and i guess one of the things that was reported at "the new york times," mark, was the army that pro-desantis super-packs are assembling to basically get out support, get out the vote for ron desantis in early primary states. they're planning on spending $200 million to beat donald trump. and they are trying to build a political apparatus with 2,600 field organizers by the fall which is double the peak of bernie sanders' entire 2020 campaign. my question is who are the 2,600 people going to be door knocking

multiple times on the same door for ron desantis? do you sense a ground swell of grassroots enthusiasm for ron desantis, mark? >> no, i don't. and certainly tonight is not going to help, but yoodo think clearly,a hunger, there's an appetite in the republican party for some alternative to donald trump. ron desantis had this sort of positioning for the last few months that, you know, he was looked to as someone who could be that person people could rally around. now he has to do something he's extremely unproven on, which is go out in public. this decision goes to a small universe he's appealing to, which is the base, which is people who get involved in caucuses and organizing and primary states, and look, he could go really heavy at the event and could do the same in south carolina in some of the early states. at some point you have to excite some people.

>> can we talk a bit about the strategy, jonathan, just in terms of how desantis' team thinks it's going to be an alternative to trump without saying anything bad about trump or actually fighting him. >> yeah, i've actually asked his folks about this question, and what i think their view in desantis world is he's got to define himself, introduce himself, get some of the bioout there, the fact he served in the navy, for example, is not that well-known. even among gop primary voters. i think they want to get the bio out there the first couple of months before they engage trump. i get the strategy, but you're not dealing with a conventional candidate in donald trump, and donald trump is going to drag you into engaging with him. and if you don't, you're going to get pounded repeatedly and not respond. so i think desantis pretty quickly is going oo have to decide now that he's a candidate do you keep that plan of just do

bio, talk about me and avoid engaging trump or hit back because lord knows donald trump is going to be swinging and swinging fiercely. >> yeah, mark, in the time those 21 minutes of technical glitches -- we were treated to that, the trump campaign literally cut an ad juxtaposing trump's campaign launch with the ron desantis campaign launch. they are going to be vicious. and the desantis people seem so intent on not saying bad about donald trump, the opposite is not true. from the jump trump is trying to position desantis as arrogant and ungrateful for all the things i put in quotes that trump has done for desantis, and you've got to wonder whether that's going to be a resident message when it comes to the republican base. >> yeah, i would agree i actually think it could be. it's something one could understand. desantis very blatantly decided to piggy bank on trump and sort

of fetishize that whole thing to get elected governor. politics you have to take it with a grain of salt but this is pretty egregious. the other piece of this that someone like glen youngkin and kemp, math is not on desantis' side. in 2016 you start dividing it up among the tim scotts and mike pence and whoever else gets in and eventually we have a repeat of that and everyone is looking to rally behind donald trump again. so, yeah, i think there's a lot of work to do. >> jonathan, the scandals, the potential looming criminal indictments have done nothing among the republican primary voters but make trump stronger. you look at the numbers from quinnipiac trump has a 31-point lead over desantis, which is bigger than it was in march, which is when the news cycle was better for trump.

>> yeah, there's no question that trump has been helped from desantis' inability to leverage the mid-terms for his benefit this calender and been helped, yes, by the indictment in manhattan. there's a rallying effect. and this, alex, gets to the heart of the challenge of trying to beat trump in a primary. if you're a republican, you cannot attack trump frontally with traditional attacks because that's going to remind republicans of the kind of criticism that they hear from democrats in the media. and so that's the challenge here. that's kind of can you go after trump in a way that weakens him in the eyes of gop primary voters but doesn't remind those voters of the last eight years of attacks on him from the left. and boy, that's going to be really challenging, but they're going to have to try and try it here soon because as you point out trump's lead is significant. and if he sits out these debates

and they can't get a glove on him in those forum, it's going to be that much harder. >> yeah, it's just a connection these voters feel to trump is so visceral, so emotional, it is deeply personal, and so will this campaign be. two great gents to start this evening off with. thanks for your time. we have lots more coming up this hour including trump's former chief of staff mark meadows. where is mark meadows, and is he a criminal target or is he a cooperating witness in the special counsel's probe of the former president? that's coming up. but first donald trump and ron desantis. is a messiah complex a prerequisite for the 2024 nominee? we're going to talk with michelle goldberg coming up next. talk with michelle goldberg coming up next helps restore gum health, and rehardens enamel.

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and on the eighth day god looked down on his planned paradise and said i need a protector, so god made a fighter. god said i need somebody willing to get up before dawn, kiss his family good-bye, travel thousands of miles for no other reason than to serve the people to save their jobs, their livelihoods, their liberty, their happiness. so god made a fighter. >> in november ron desantis argued he was sent by god to fight as governor for another term. the creation apparently goes earth, sun, animals, people, and then ron desantis the freedom fighter. his campaign released that ad on november 4th and four days later florida re-elected its fighter by a landslide. desantis won nearly 60% of the vote. it was a political tko. it's hard to say if desantis won

because of his promotion as a messianic fighter kicking out asylum seekers, restricting history lessons, subjecting teachers to potential felonies, fighting with disney and losing thousands of jobs or because of those actual policies themselves. but desantis' fight list is long, and today he entered the republican presidential primary ring to spar with several declared republican contenders including donald trump, another self-described savior with a pred likz for unusually cool policies. now, desantis has continued to stack up policy victories as recently as last week. he's defunded diversity, equity and inclusion laws and today he signed a bill that allows him to run for president without resigning as guv nsh, very convenient. and also, by the way, that bill also restricts mail-in voting,

limits third party voter registration and bolsters maintenance that often leads to voter purges just wrapped up together. trump meanwhile has become even more radical than he was office. in a recent town hall trump called the january 6th attack on the capitol a beautiful day, he plans to pardon rioters if he becomes president and failed to rule out separating families at the border again. at this point if you're running in the republican primary for 2024, that is the kind of résuée to be a viable contender. joining us now is michelle goldberg, opinion columnist for "the new york times," and author of "the kingdom coming, the rise of christian nationalism." michelle, just humble servants of the people. the messiah complex bundled with the just vicious, very destructive policy. like there's no building vision here, and i'm really struck at how much desantis is obviously mimicking trump and whether you think that's just a naked play

to be trump-lite or whether you think he thinks these policies in florida are going with work for him on the national stage. >> i think he thinks these policies are going to work for him on the national stage. and to be fair these policyerize the reason until his personality sabotaged him he was seen as the only trump alternative. i mean, the thing is he clearly has this messiah complex but he doesn't really know how to express it i guess except in an ad someone else makes. he doesn't come across as a figure of swaggering confidence the way donald trump does. he's basically running a sort of ted cruz campaign. he'll give you a bunch of -- he'll give you policy agreements on everything the religious

right wants whereas donald trump is running himself as an object of worship. >> and trump believes in himself. he has gotten high on his own supply, to put it in common parlance. and you get the sense ron desantis is sort of terrified of having to speak from anything beyond the script. i mean even today he's like -- you could almost hear him shuffling the papers talking about the woke mind virus. >> it was so weird when they finally got him on that disastrous twitter spaces the first thing he does was read what sounds like a campaign speech that just sounds so terrible coming out of this tinny, twitter audio. it was so prepared, even in the ultimate safe space he barely seems he can speak off-the-cuff. and when he does speak off-the-cuff i can't imagine what any quasi-normal person listening to this they're

talking about coin and there's a half hour talking about twitter, all these niche issues, they're not explaining it. steve bannon will say destroy the administrative state. ron desantis is saying, you know, we've got to do away with chevron deference. like this doesn't mean anything to those people. >> yeah, he's very tangled up in this -- the language of a very specific and small group. >> he's so far down the right-wing rabbit hole he can't talk people. >> i think that extends to what he's doing in the state. it is unfathomable to me the person that signed the six-week abortion ban into the law, overseeing the dismantling of the public school system in a lot of ways, book bans, the naacp said don't go to florida, people of color, it's not safe for you there. these are devastating data points for someone who is sort

of offering himself as the general election candidates for republicans who care. >> i guess, but i think they're devastating data points in a general election. whether they're devastating data points in a republican primary, i think this is the stuff the republican party wants. i mean none of that is giving -- >> i totally agree with you, but if you are peeling to this small subsection of republican voters who are like donald trump is too flawed to be our candidate, we need someone who's going to win, ron desantis is carrying around like 27 pounds of baggage in the form of these policies. i think he negates his own argument in a lot of ways by virtue of his own record. >> that's the dilemma the republican party is in, if you can beat him by running to the right, that automatically puts you in a worse general election position even if you don't have, you know, donald trump's personal depravity. >> i have to play this video for you, which is not a campaign video. this is video -- it is a viral video featuring what is happening i think within the

activated part of the republican primary electorate as it pertains to the sort of anti-woke agenda governor desantis has embraced and how virulent that point is. let's take a look at this video. >> let me show you over here. this is clothing. dinosaurs are cool, right? there's a big rainbow on the dinosaur. we're not going to stop there. we've got a cloud hula-hooping with a rainbow. what's this? trucks are cool. why are we picking up a rainbow, guys? why is this boy's clothing today. i'm not done. baby shark, bye-bye, masculinity they're destroying masculinity. >> that's who ron desantis is going for, right, the dad in there with his made by god gender division t-shirt railing

against trucks that have rainbow shirts on them. >> right and the masculinity of baby shark. >> yes. >> i think that is a powerful constituency within the republican party, but i think it is so out of touch with the vast concerns of the american people. as i've tried to admit i tried to listen to all of ron desantis' rollout. maybe i missed some of the things he's generally vulnerable on like inflation. i don't think i've heard him talk about inflation. he's talking about dei bureaucracy. >> he literally said that seriously the woke mind virus. >> right. so there is this kind of, you know, group of very online people, the kind of person who not just is extremely angry that they're selling a rainbow baby shark t-shirt at target but is going to go make a live stream about it. right, i mean that's a faction

that exists in the republican party, but it is i think so far divorced from the concerns of ordinarily people. >> you know who knows about what sells? target. if there's -- if there's a group of people that know about what the public wants, it's the people who develop the merch at target. >> although target is taking this stuff off the shelves in response to threats from -- >> and that is separate thing around pride month. there's an activated group of target consumers who are using violence to get this stuff off the shelves. this is a video from earlier, and i would argue to ron desantis and anyone else doing casual polling about what works and what doesn't in the broader public, target knows that there are a lot of people who don't mind buying these shirts. >> people also like disney. >> exactly. largest employer in the state, also widely popular with basically all children despite what parents may want their children to look at.

michelle goldberg, thank you for your time this evening. we have more ahead including the very curious timing between donald trump attorney's request to meet with attorney general merrick garland and new reporting suggesting special counsel jack smith is wrapping up his mar-a-lago probe. that is all coming up. stay with us. up. stay with us

throughout the course of the ten hearings held by the january 6th committee, it became clear that there were two key witnesses whose testimony could reveal more about trump's plan to overturn the election than any others. vice president mike pence and his chief of staff mark meadows. both men refused to testify before the january 6th committee, but after a subpoena and quite a bit of litigation, mike pence did testify last month before the grand jury in the special counsel's january 6th investigation. special counsel himself reportedly sat in and listened to the former vice president's testimony. but what about mark meadows? meadows was with trump in the oval office during the attack. he was involved in the fake electors plot. he was in communication with state lawmakers about efforts to overturn the election. he even reportedly burned documents in a white house fireplace. we know that mr. meadows complied with the justice department's subpoena last year for documents and turned over

the same text messages that he provided to the january 6th committee, but he was subpoenaed again for his testimony earlier this year. and a federal judge later ordered that mr. meadows comply with that subpoena. whether or not he has actually testified is anyone's guess, but the lack of information here has led to speculation about whether meadows is a criminal target of this probe or whether he may be cooperating. one thing we do know is that trump's save america leadership pack gave a non-profit run by mark meadows, it gave it $11 million in 2021 which is a tidy little sum, and that same trump pack paid nearly $900,000 to maguire woods, which is the law firm representing mark meadows as of late last year. to be clear we don't know if that $900,000 payment was for mark meadows legal bills or for somethingential entirely, but today we got this, which is new

clue from cnn. a source close to trump's legal team said trump's lawyers have had no contact with mark meadows and his team and are in the dark on what meadows is doing in the investigation, fueling speculation about whether meadows is cooperating with the special counsel's probe or if meadows himself is a target of the larger investigation. in the dark, that cannot be where trump's legal team wants to be on all this especially because the former president appears to be kind of antsy over reports that special counsel jack smith is wrapping up his probe of trump's mishandling of classified documents down at mar-a-lago. and on that front, last night we learned his lawyers have requested a meeting with attorney general merrick garland to discuss that very probe. we're going to dive into that request coming up next. e into t request coming up next baby, only on game nights. you know you are retired right? am i? ya! save 50% on the sleep number limited edition smart bed. plus, special financing and free home delivery

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this was the letter sent late last night from trump's lawyers to attorney general merrick garland. you'll notice down at the bottom they have cc'd members of congress, apparently all of them. the rest of the letter reads we request a meeting at the earliest convenience. despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary the letter asserts trump is being treated unfairly by special counsel jack smith's office because of something, something, something hunter biden. that letter dropped shortly

after "the wall street journal" reported the special counsel is wrapping up the investigation into the documents found at mar-a-lago. special counsel regulations are explicitly clear on the process here. jack smith is running this investigation, not garland. we reached out to the special counsel's office today and asked whether trump's lawyers had also requested a meeting with mr. smith before sending that letter. the special counsel spokesperson declined to comment. joining us now is a former federal prosecutor who also served as law clerk for merrick garland, and also joining us is mary mccord, former acting assistant attorney general at the doj. there are no two better people to speak with on this. let me first ask you about what you think is happening in this letter? first of all, do you have any reason to suspect there is an official purpose here? there's cleary a political

purpose. if there is some official purpose to this, what might it be? >> so i don't think there's an official purpose to this, alex. i don't think it's really a serious letter because as you pointed out, the attorney general is not the right person to meet with the would-be target, you know, would-be defendant donald trump. so it is common for sort of high profile targets to ask for a meeting with the attorney general. when i was at the department of justice there was a person in the deputy attorney general's office who was responsible for writing back -- >> vsvp a high priority. >> the attorney general is not going to meet with you. and it is common especially in white collar cases for prosecutors to let a target know they are a target when an indictment is imminent. the u.s. attorney's manual says that prosecutors are encouraged to send a target letter so that the person can come in and try to convince them not to bring

the indictment or to choose to testify in the grj, but all of that in this case is supposed to happen with jack smith and not with merrick garland, and obviously trump's lawyers know that. so if there was a meeting for them to have to try to make their last minute case don't indict me, it would be with jack smith and his people. i actually think that happened. we heard no comment from the special counsel and he's always very tight-lipped, but i think that meeting might have happened and trump didn't like the way it went. >> ah, interesting. >> so he's like i'm going to try to -- >> go to his boss. >> but likely i'm going to try to make some political hay out of this if i'm not getting anywhere with the legal process. >> mary, what do you think of that that maybe there has been communication between trump's attorneys and jack smith himself? >> i think that is likely. i think that, you know, one of his attorneys was at the

department for a very long time. he knows the process, and he would know that that was the place to go first. i will note, though, despite the independence under the special counsel regulations of jack smith, jack smith under those regulations is still obligated to send what are called urgent reports. he is treated just like a u.s. attorney and required to advise the attorney general of any significant developments in sensitive litigation or a sensitive investigation. and clearly the investigation of a former president is a sensitive investigation. so significant developments would include things like a charging decision. so it's not as though he will go to the grand jury, he'll seek an indictment, he'll return, it'll go to court, and then he'll say, hey, merrick garland i did this thing you've probably already heard about. if he were to think special

counsel jack smith's recommendations were so unwarranted and inappropriate, garland could overrule them. if he were to, he'd have to give notice to congress he was going to do that. you made it clear he was going to give jack smith leeway to operate independently just like he gave durham leeway to operate independently. but he will be aware of this, and this may be one reason why trump's lawyers are essentially appealing if that is the case to merrick garland. >> interesting. so there's -- there may be more happening behind the scenes than there -- well, there always is when it comes to the special counsel, but i do want to focus on the cc at the bottom of the letter, representatives of congress, i guess they'll be receiving their copies of this letter in the forthcoming days. this is -- this to me seems like the real trump strategy here, which is if you can't get the law to fall on your side, get your friends in congress to do everything they can to gum up the works. and certainly trump allies in congress whether it's jim

jordan, other subcommittees or committees tasked or appealed to stop these investigations, i mean the trump team has met with limited success in getting republicans in congress to aid them in all of this, but it's hard for me to believe actually once this letter is out that they can -- you know, now trump has effectively laid his cards on the table, which is congress help me, i think it becomes in some ways more politically difficult for congress to rescue him because the ask has been so explicit. >> i think that's right, alex, because he's making a connection that could be implicit and should be explicit. that process i described about going to the prosecutor in charge, the u.s. attorney in a normal case, a special counsel in this case and saying please don't indict me and presenting your evidence and reasons for why, you want to do that very privately. i mean you don't -- because you're hoping that you won't get

indicted and this won't be publicized. so pubalizing it is -- it's kind of strange in the normal course unless you're trying to make something of it. it's sort of like when trump told the world that the fbi executed a search warrant at mar-a-lago. i mean, again, usually when the fbi comes into your house pursuant to a court ordered search warrant, it's embarrassing and you don't want everybody to know because you're going to hope that the case doesn't go anywhere. >> right, which is the opposite of what trump did. >> he has his lawyers sort of within the structure of the law doing some things and making some motions that are familiar, but the reasons for it are totally unfamiliar. >> to me, mary, i'm not a lawyer, i'm not on team trump obviously on both counts, but do me it does seem like there's a bit of angst. you're reading the anxiety seems evident in that letter, in the general tone of the rhetoric, which is more elevated than it

has been in previous weeks, and i wonder if, you know, trump is worried about the evidence that has been amassed on the part of the special counsel and to that end the disappearance of mark meadows? do you have a theory about why such a key player in this who has kind of gone back and forth in terms of cooperation has suddenly gone completely radio silent? >> i think your two theories, you know, that you mentioned in the entry are spot on, right? he's maybe cooperating or he's maybe a target, and either way it's not in mark meadows' interest to share that with team trump. if he's cooperating he obviously doesn't want pressure put on him. he doesn't want team trump to know that. and if he's a target he may have defenses he wants to keep to himself and not share with the former president. and so he has, you know, whichever it is or maybe neither of those options, but whichever it is i don't see a real incentive for him to share with the trump team. and i think you're right in

terms of the letter there is a sense of desperation. frankly the letter reads to me like something trump himself first drafted and his lawyers tried to get it into some sort of shape marginally presentable, but i would say marginally being the key term there, because it's not a serious request for a meeting and i don't think he'll have a meeting with the attorney general. >> well, you could almost hear him say and make sure over wn in the congress gets a copy, too, and they're just like write cc representatives in congress at the bottom and we'll be done with it. there's lots to come on this front. and mary mccord, thank you so much for your time tonight. really appreciate it. we have one more story for you tonight. the world lost a queen today. coming up we're going to have teeny turner in her own words. that is next. n her own words. that is next

a lot of r&b music is singing about depression and love. and i found when i listened to the music i would become depressed, but when i listened to the rock and roll music those guys were writing fun stuff or naughty stuff and things that would make you laugh and play around with. and i thought that's what i want to sing. i don't want to sing about hurt and depression. and that drew my attention to -- that balanced out all of the laughing and the dancing in my act, because i don't want to stand there and sing the blues and get sad. >> that was the legendary tina turner at the height of her

comeback in 1986 explaining how the songs "come together" by the beatles and honky tonk woman by the rolling stones cemented her status. tina turner had a career that spanned five decades and sold 150 million records worldwide, won 12 grammys and inducted into the rock and roll hall of fame not once but twice, and she also starred in films like mad max beyond thunder dome and tommy because that's how talented she was. and today she died in her home in switzerland after a long illness. she was 83 years old and she was simply the best. that is our show for tonight. we'll see you again tomorrow. "way too early" with jonathan lemire is coming up next. voters who are participating in this primary process, may pledge to you is this -- if you nominate me, you can set your