by an amazing double bill with naomi klein, whose new book is phenomenal. you have to check it. up two conversations, one ticket. at the phil morton in philly, i can't wait for that. just a small number of tickets available for the rachel maddow show in new york. you can come see us at the texas tribune festival, andrew weissmann, mary mccord onyork. you can come see us at the texas tribune festival september 23rd. and stay tuned for news on the chicago show coming soon. get tickets while they last. that is "all in" on this tuesday night. >> do i have sell cheese sandwiches out the back of my volkswagen to get tickets to this? is it like fellow the dead? >> i think we can hook you up. >> good to know. thanks to you at home for joining us this hour. as of today former president trump and all of his 18 codefendants, all of them in the fulton county conspiracy case, they have pleaded not guilty to

racketeering and other criminal charges. so unity, i guess. beyond that, though, this 19 defendants are not exactly marching in lock step. five of trump's codefendants have filed to have their cases removed to federal court, and the arguments they are trying to make to ensure that that happens, those arguments do not look good for the former president. take, for example, three of georgia's alleged fake electors. david shafer, kathy latham and sean stone. they said their cases belong in federal court because they were, quote, acting to assist the president or acting in the direction of the president. now, those arguments might help these three folks in claiming they were de facto federal employees, which weird if true, and then maybe that will help them argue they shouldn't be

tried add the state level, but wow does that argument not help their codefendant in all this, mr. donald trump. it was essentially, judge, we were fake electors acting at the direction of the president. we were federal fake electors, judge. meanwhile, trump's own chief of staff mark meadows is making the argument he was just doing what his boss wanted, and again that does not look good for mr. trump. in a hearing last week meadows was asked why he was so very ininvested in making sure the fake electors met. mr. meadows answered i knew we would get yelled at if not, as in not arranging the meeting with fake electors. yelled at by whom, mr. meadows? by the president of the united states. about a full fourth of trump's codefendants are trying an either i was just following orders strategy or the very novel i was just trying to not to get yelled at strategy, both of which directly implicate former president trump. and then trump and five of his

other codefendants are trying to abandon ship altogether. they are trying to have their cases separated from the others, each man for himself or herself sort of. now, there are a bunch of different arguments here. ray smith who's a former trump campaign attorney who's been charged in all this, he argues that the georgia case, a case alleging a vast criminal conspiracy, that from mr. smith's perspective, it involves too many defendants. the case is too byzantine. it is too complex for the jury to comprehend. mr. ray smith argues for that reason the court should split the defendants into little clumps of defendants so they can each have their, quote, bite sized cases like cupcakes and mini cupcakes. one is bite sized, the other is not. okay, but there are other things apart from these requests. there's the severance requests from defendants like trump himself and his former lawyer

john eastman. they both are arguing specifically that they want their case split-off from any of the defendants who are said to go to trial on october 23rd. they both claim that that date is way too soon, and there is no way their defense could be ready that quickly, which is of course amazing considering that two of trump's codefendants, kenneth chesebro and sydney powell are asking for that date and demanding a speedy trial. then there's sydney powell's case to sever her case from everyone else's because she believes her case is involved in no one else's. i digress. her codefendant kenneth chesebro also filed a motion to sever his case from everyone else's, and then he filed again specifically asking to have his case severed from sydney powell's case because apparently kenneth

chesebro does not want to have his legal fate tied to sydney powell's, which, i got to hand it to him, is understandable. the hearing for sydney powell and kenneth chesebro's severance motions is set tomorrow at 1:00 p.m. eastern time. as to moving the cases to federal court that could be granted or denied any day now. if all this feels chaotic to you that is because it precisely is. all the 19 defendants are here are looking out for themselves. so my question is who does this chaos benefit and who does it hurt? joining us now are anthony michael crease, a professor of law and political science at georgia state university, and joyce vance, former u.s. attorney for the northern district of alabama. joyce, let me first just start with you in terms of this idea that everybody wants to cut their case off from everybody else's or with some sort of

mathematical fungibility in all that. what is the judge going to be weighing here as he decides whether or not mr. trump, for example, could have his case severed from the rest of his 18 codefendants? >> so, when you look at severance motions under georgia law, the defendants have to convince the judge if their case isn't severed from all the other defendants or some of the other defendants, that they'll be prejudiced in a serious way, and defendants typically will argue there is evidence that is admissible against a codefendant but that is not admissible against them and that it would taint the jury's consideration, and that they would run the risk of being unfairly convicted. that's the sort of classic case. and we see the defendants here trying to make out those arguments. for instance, kenneth chesebro saying i've never been to coffee county, i don't know sidney

powell so it's not good to charge me with her. this is not a charge about coffee county. this is about a charge about a rico conspiracy. and so the issue is whether or not the defendants participated in that as opposed to whether each defendant committed every single overt act that's charged in the indictment. obviously, they didn't all participate in all of them, that's not how a conspiracy case works. >> professor, when we talk about the likelihood this is going to be a 19-defendant trial is that -- first of all, is that even in the realm of possibility? and how would that work given that kenneth chesebro has been granted his speedy trial date of october 23rd yet we're still litigating whether he's going to go separately from everybody else. there are a chance donald trump somehow has to have his trial on october 23rd? >> i don't think there was ever a real chance you were going to have all 19 defendants at the

same time. i think we all anticipated when we first saw the indictments come out that there would inevitably be some folks who would want their speedy trial requests and could potentially have a trial in the fall. there would be others who would want to have a more delayed time line and there'd be others who would cut deals in order to avoid trials at all. and so that was always a huge variable, but i don't think anybody thought all 19 was probably the most realistic outcome here. and i think that the motions we're seeing now in terms of the speedy trial motions, the severance motions bears that out. what i don't think we're going to see are 19 different trials or a number of trials in the teens. there may be a few buckets of trials, perhaps one in the fall, one in the spring, something of that nature. fani willis initially said she wanted a six-month window. and so we'll probably find out more tomorrow in particular because judge scott mcafee has

asked for a good faith time line. so we'll wait and see what happens tomorrow. >> joyce, to that end i feel like i've read different assessments about whether severing your case from trump's is a good thing or bad thing from what we will call a smaller fish in this larger racketeering case. does it hurt the former president to have some of his associates split-off from him? is it advantageous for them to not be tried with him? and what is your assessment about severance as a strategy to get a better outcome in all of this? >> so, unfortunately, the answer, alex, is it depends. it can be helpful for a smaller fish to have the bigger fish sitting alongside them and to be able to point the finger. on the other hand, when a jury hears all the evidence about the full scope of the conspiracy and the big fish is sitting there with the little fish, then the little fish can run into trouble depending on the prosecution's

strategy and the scope of the evidence. so this is a decision really that each defense lawyer will have to make on behalf of their client. >> one more on that, joyce, just because professor was suggesting -- was discussing the good faith time line that the prosecutors are being asked to come up with. when fani willis said at that press conference when she first announced the indictment that she hopes to have this go to trial in six months, i think a lot of people had to put their eyeballs back in their head. a case with 19 codefendants, a case of this sprawling nature, that seems remarkably ambitious. is it so ambitious, or is it actually plausible at this point? >> no, i think it's entirely plausible. on her end she did all of her work up front. we quo she took extra months before she sought the indictment, and she's put on full display in the last few weeks her readiness, her willingness to go to trial. so the more important question is whether the defendants could

get all the due process they're entitled to in the next six months, and that's not an unreasonable amount of time for each of the individual defendants to assess their situation and be prepared for trial. at bottom this is a case about a one overriding conspiracy. there are a lot of different moving parts, but six months is a long time, plenty of time for defendants to be ready. >> professor, i'm struck by the chaotic nature of all this, and maybe it's to be expected when you have a large, vast conspiracy case, a racketeering case in georgia with 19 codefendants, but the arguments some of the folks are making about why this should get tossed out-of-state court and moved into federal court, they seem far-fetched. the suggestion federal electors because they were working at the direction of the president were somehow federal employees. does that pass muster in terms of a defense strategy in your mind? >> no, it's completely meritless. there's a few things important here. first of all, these were not duly elected electors or duly

appointed electors, and so this would be akin to a person impersonating a police officer committing some kind of tortuous act or criminal act and claiming some kind of qualified constitutional immunity because they were impersonating a police officer. it just doesn't work that way. but in addition to that electors are empowered by state law, not federal law. so states could, for example, point their electors through the state legislature. we had a whole entire kind of debate about that. that's within the state's prerogative to do, but, you know, every state and in georgia we have used state law to appoint electors to reflect the majority will of the popular vote. and so their agents of state law, not federal law. so there's a lot of different reasons why these removal of motions don't make sense. they don't make sense for mark meadows. they don't really make sense for a number of other individuals who are trying to make these motions, but they really don't make sense for these fake electors who were never

empowered by state law or federal law in the first place. >> this sense, joyce, i get from some of these pretrial motions is a quiet desperation, perhaps borne out in a questionable legal strategy. i do wonder. we had some reporting from cnn that sidney powell continues to be reportedly investigated by the special counsel's team where she's an unnamed coconspirator in the federal indictment around january 6th and the efforts to subvert the election. she's also in the domippian and smartmatic voting machine cases. she's fighting a legal war on many fronts, and when we talk about some pressure some codefendants are under to flip, to start cooperating, i mean how much does that ratchet up the temperature that she must be feeling and the pressure that she must be under? >> yeah, it's a great question, alex. and she is certainly a defendant who has to be feeling that pressure right now. she's looking at an enormous

amount of time in georgia that she would spend in state prison there. i think it would be very surprising if jack smith wasn't serious about achieving accountability with the unnamed, unindicted coconspirators given the seriousness of the crimes that he's charged the former president with. the fact that she's still under investigation and that it's in connection with this fraudulent fund-raising and that apparently there's been now some effort on jack smith's part to link the fraudulent fund-raising using allegations of voter fraud in 2020, which were of course untrue and using that to fund these incursions into computer systems in four different states that were used to count votes is really pretty stunning. if the government is successful in putting a case against powell together on those grounds, i think she will feel an enormous amount of pressure to flip, if they're frankly still interested in having her as a cooperating witness.

>> that's the question. has she waited too long? anthony michael kreis, joyce vance, always great to speak to you both. thank you so much for your time. we have much more ahead tonight including the ways in which donald trump is spinning his legal woes into campaign gold, and what joe biden is going to do about it. but first more than 1,100 people have been charged in connection with january 6th. more than 300 have been sentenced, but today one of those people just broke a record. we're going to explain. that's next. a record we're going to explain that's next.

so today some history was made. enrique tarrio, the former leader of the proud boys, a man convicted of seditious conspiracy. enrique tarrio was sentenced to 22 years in prison. and that is a record in terms of sentencing for the january 6th insurrection. his sentence is 11 years less than the 33 years prosecutors sought but 40 years more than the sentence handed down for the leader of the oath keepers, stewart rhodes who is set to serve 18 years behind bars. before the judge made that decision today, tarrio's attorneys had asked the court for leniency since tarrio wasn't actually in d.c. during the

attack. he'd been arrested two days prior for a separate incident. prosecutors rebutted that defense saying tarrio's absence did nothing to detract from the severity of his conduct. they explained tarrio had actively recruited the foot soldiers who breached the capitol that day. the ajudge appeared to agree with them and now this general is set to enter a federal penitentiary. every member of the proud boys sentenced for sedition, every member that day has laid the blame for what happened squarely on president donald trump. which begs the question if enrique tarrio received the steepest sentence as general of the proud boys, what should we expect for mr. trump, the proud boys alleged ultimate leader here and the man who told them to stand back and standby.

he has been closely following the very intricate web of january 6th cases. kyle, it's great to have you here. i was struck by the unstinting nature of the judge's remarks in advance of this sentencing, and i'll just read this one excerpt to you. this is from judge kelly. i don't know how close the government argues to me how close we were to not completing the transfer of power. i don't know how close we came or didn't come, but i don't have to conclude how close to say what happened was -- how close to say what happened was extremely serious and a disgrace. can you tell me what it was like to hear that in person or in the -- in the court today and whether or not that was a surprise to hear the judge so sort of dismissive of the idea enrique tarrio was somehow contrite in all of this? >> right, well it wasn't totally

surprise because this is actually the culmination of five sentencings of enrique tarrio and his codefendants at least all charged with sedition and four of the five were convicted of seditious conspiracy. so we heard what the judge had to say on the attack. the peaceful transfer of power ended that day and he thinks we have to take generations to rebuild it, and so he reiterated that to tarrio, but he had had some extra words for tarrio who he viewed and the prosecutors viewed as singularly responsible more than any other person on what happened on january 6th. >> the defense was obviously trying to make the case because he wasn't there he was somehow less guilty of all of this. can you talk a little bit about enrique tarrio's posture in advance of the sentencing because he seemed to -- multiple times he issued his own mea

culpas saying i failed and failed miserably. tell me more about how you saw his sentencing change as it got closer. >> it's interesting because it's the first time we've heard him speak in these terms since january 6th. i think he sounded generally contrite. what the judge pointed out you're saying sorry to all the right people, but you didn't describe what you actually did. and throughout the trial and throughout even the post trial period he's kind of down-played his involvement. i wasn't there, i wasn't in communication with people and didn't really confront what the jury convicted him of which was trying to oppose the government by force, and the judge wanted to hear him talk more about owning up to that, what he was actually convicted of by jurors. so it was remarkable to hear that contrition in his voice, but also the judge noted enrique tarrio got where he was with his charisma and ability to convince people to do things they

wouldn't otherwise do. so i think he was expecting a good speech from tarrio and wouldn't affect the overall sentence. >> there was an enhancement for terrorism in this sentence, is that correct? >> each of the proud boys got that enhancement. and that reflects one of the crime they were convicted of, a destruction of federal property is considered terrorism and comes lmt automatically with that enhancement but also reflects the gravity of the crime. the judge said, look, this is not oklahoma city, this is not 9/11 in terms of the violence and the mayhem and the bloodshed, but it does have a different kind of character because it attacked the functioning of government. >> yeah, i mean i think there are a lot of reasons to be following what's happened to these folks who have been convict of seditious conspiracy and those who are still awaiting trial because of obviously what the implications are for american democracy and holding folks accountable but also because the person who's allegedly at the top of this period, donald trump, was actually not at the capitol with

the insurrection actually happened asked very much seen as directing movements allegedly in the cases made by numerous folks and in the reporting that we have. what -- i mean what lessons -- i think we are -- it is a mistake to think of the proud boy and oath keepers trials as separate and apart from donald trump. certainly there are different prosecutors and investigators working on them, but this is the federal government's response to january 6th and donald trump's looming case and his looming trial is very much a part of that. so as you look towards the way in which these judges have been remarkably swift and serious and severe in their sentencing, i mean has it caused you to think differently about what might await donald trump? >> well, in a sense what's facing donald trump is two sides to january 6th is what happened on the ground and sort of the ground up attack on the capitol, and then there's the top down stuff, which is donald trump and his allies organizing and trying to subvert the election, and

those two -- we don't know if they really meet in the middle, but they're two sides of the same coin in terms of the threat to democracy that day and in the weeks and months before that. so, you know, donald trump isn't charged with seditious conspiracy, but he was an ever present figure in the proud boys trial and someone they did say they probably wouldn't be there if it weren't for him. so that was certainly a running theme and it's something i think judges will think about, you know, if and when trump is ever convicted of any of the crimes he's facing now for his election efforts. >> and it's the same court, right, that trump will have his trial in. is that correct? >> different judge, same federal courthouse, yes. >> we will be watching. kyle cheney, thanks for your great reporting as always, kyle. still ahead this evening what does a man with zero felony counts do when his likely opponent in a presidential race has 91 of them? how joe biden will joe biden in

the age of donald trump. but before that what do christopher columbus and frederick douglas and florida and oklahoma have in common? a lot more than you think. that's next. common? a lot more than you think. that's next.

slavery is as old as time and has taken place in every corner of the world, even amongst people i just left. being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no?

i don't see the problem. >> okay, so if you are not already familiar with prager you kids, it is conservative propaganda styled as educational material created for children by the unacretted right advocacy group prageru. prageru kids entered the state as the state became the first in the nation to enter the videos like that one with the animated christopher columbus talking about slavery as supplemental educational material for grades k-12. and now it is heading to more classrooms. as of today there's a second state now working with prageru to bring this content into public schools. oklahoma's department of education has announced an ongoing partnership with prageru kids. in statement the department said prageru will help ensure high quality material rich in american history and values will

be available to our teachers and students. state superintendent ryan walters spoke with the ceo of prageru, marissa strite, in an interview published today on the prageru website. >> i cannot be more excited to get this content in our classrooms and understanding of american history without any indoctrination but actually what happened so our kids can know the principles this country was founded on. >> if you recall the name ryan walters it is because he is a state superintendent who earlier this summer had to walk back his comments that appeared to suggest that race was not a factor in the 1921 tulsa massacre. but it's not just mr. walters and it's not just the states of oklahoma and florida. prageru has been pedaling this propaganda to education departments across the country, and conservative leaders have been receptive. officials in texas and new hampshire recently considered using the material in their classrooms, though, those

particular attempts have been tabled so far. and there have already been documented uses of prageru material in california and idaho and ohio. so state tuned on this one. we have a lot more ahead. joe biden due about trump and his 91 felony charges and his millions in mug shot merchandise. the author of a new biden account of the white house is going to join me next. stay with us. white house is going to join me next. stay with us

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donald trump has wasted no time in turning his georgia mug shot into a multi-million dollar fund-raising strategy. his re-election campaign had slapped it on coffee mugs and t-shirts and posters and coolers because there is nothing like reaching for a cold six pack and coming face-to-face with the former president's booking shot, at least when i'm on the beach. aside from the merch madness, the campaign is now e-mailing supporters and asking them to donate $35 to help save america from joe biden. in return for that support a limited edition mug shot poster signed by the former president. but supporters can also just go to the campaign website and buy what appears to be the same signed poster for $7 less. now, the difference in price there may be because of the postage required to send e-mails. wait a second. in any case, trump's campaign says it has raised $9 million since that mug shot was taken, and it is celebrating trump's status as the top choice in the

2024 republican field among nearly 60% of gop primary voters. despite the fact he is facing 91 felony charges across four different jurisdictions. so how does his opponent, joe biden, the current president and candidate, manage trump and his mug shot coolers and his laundry list of indictments? and most urgently how does joe biden, the president, govern in a post-trump world and maybe even a pre-trump one, too? i have just the right person to ask. joining me now is franklin foer, writer of the new book out today "the last politician" inside the joe biden's white house and struggle for the american future which is an illuminating and compelling account of the first two years of the biden presidency. frank, it is great to see you. congratulations on publishing day. thank you for joining me on set, my friend. >> thank you. >> first, i kind of wonder what

you gleaned. as we're going to talk a lot about biden the president, but just as a political animal his appetite for going into this race again for the umpteenth time with potentially even more on the line and just how -- how ferocious that appetite is and how much is borne out of a sense of duty. >> well, i think he beat donald trump in 2020. and if trump wasn't running this election, if trump had -- was incarcerated or if trump had decided he was going to hang it up, then i'm sure by biden's calculus going into this next election would be probably a little bit different. but because he vies this as an existential thing and because he's got this track record and because i think in his own mind he's arrived at this conclusion that he is the safest bet in a race -- >> does he think he's the safest bet? >> i'm pretty sure he does. >> because it's a sort of does -- yooi mean not self-agren

downsizing, but a self-flagellating i'm the safest guy so i'm going to take up the mantel. >> yeah, i think people who do the job he does inevitably come to view themselves as being indispensable on some level. and i think it's really interesting to consider what would be the counter factual. if biden in the middle of his term decided he wasn't going to run you'd have this free-for-all in the kmic party. who knows what way that would go. who knows what issues that would dredge up for the democrats. who knows how they would run against the current president. and any president makes a calculation about running for re-election when they make that announcement and how that -- the implications it has for the domestic agenda as it unfolds. and the real interesting thing for joe biden and what i chronicle in my book is that he's had i think a pretty successful first term.

he's gotten a lot done, but his legacy at the end of the day turns on the question of how he performs in the 2024 election. >> yeah, absolutely. i mean and i got to think as biden seems so unwavering in his fundamental leaf of the goodness and decency of the american people, that seems like it's part of his dna at this point -- >> it's been a journey for him and an interesting part of the story. when he comes into his office his inauguration happens in january 6th and the scene of that moment -- it's crazy to consider how he inherited this nation at that moment in time, and part of his agenda was trying to cool the nation down. and we were dominated by politics, and he intentionally i think started to recede a little bit and to allow the nation to breathe again. >> and it feels like that wasn't just a sort of posture he adopted but that almost felt like a directive to his -- his cabinet members. i mean the fact, for example, that merrick garland didn't try

and prosecute -- you know, there was not at least from the reporting we have a robust attempt inside the upper etch lawns of the department of justice to hold accountable the generals of the january 6th insurrection until congress really put some pressure on the doj seems to me an extension of biden just really wanting to let that chapter fade into the rear view and not have to relitigate it. and yet here it is on his doorstep has he makes another run for the presidency. >> he wouldn't refer to trump by name. he was the former guy and he whose name shall not be invoked. that was his strategy for a while. and it's also important to remember that happens while he's trying to get the nation to take the vaccine. >> yes. >> and so it's impossible to disentangle that from the pandemic response. and his big challenge was persuading the unpersuadable. and then by the end of his first year he -- his view evolves from one where he's talking about the

better angels to one where he's making this big push on voting rights. and he compares the opponents of voting rights to bull conor, in effect comparing joe manchin, mitch mcconnell, all these people who were his friends and colleagues to bull conor. and he takes this much more aggressive bleak view of the american condition at that moment. >> but would you -- and i know you can't jump inside the mind of joe biden. i remember that speech where he really starts calling out maga republicans, but he's still doing this thing where he's trying to excise the poison from the broader body politic where he's suggesting trumpism is a virus but it's not overtaken the host. and it seems like he still believes that there is a fundamental decency in america and a fundamental decency even inside the republican party. is that fairly accurate? and if it is -- >> i think it would be hard to be president of the united states and not believe in the

fundamental decency of the -- >> well, the republican party. >> there he's been care -- to give him credit he held out hope he could pass bipartisan things by working with this group of ten or so senators who were ambivalent about trump who clearly behind the scenes wanted to be rid of trump but were reluctant to challenge him in public. so biden starts talking about the ultra-maga republicans. that was his phrase ultra-maga when he was looking at the report and he emphasized that distinction. indeed after coining that term and framing things in that way, he got the chips bill passed. he got gun legislation passed. >> a lot of staff passed. i mean we have a lot to talk about so we're going to take a quick break, but i do want to ask you about how joe biden who still believes in the decency of the american public and the decency of republicans who are not ultra-maga, that he's running neck and neck in a poll

46-46 with donald trump. so stay tuned. we have much more to discuss including way a former top aide to president biden once had to admonish president biden he was president and not actually prime minister. those details are next. stay with us. nister those details are next stay with us ercial, i think i'm late on my payment. it's okay, the general gives you a break. yeah, we let you pick your own due date. good to know, because this next scene might take a while. for a great low rate, go with the general.

here's a quote from franklin foer's new book about the last politician. if there was a lesson president biden extracted from the first year of his presidency was that

he'd spent too much time trapped in senatorial minutia. of course he loved it. ron klain once felt aul compelled to chide him you're not prime minister. biden felt his deep involvement was time consuming and worse counter productive. by taking the lead in negotiations, the president elevated the stakes. he pressurized the conversations when they actually needed space to breathe. and there was no way that he was risking deep involvement in another round of negotiation that could go sour and make him look like a chump. franklin foer is still with me tonight. frank, looking like a chump is something no politician ever wants to be, but i was surprised at how pointed and how focused biden was as someone who seems so selfless. of course he's a political animal and knows impressions matter. >> it's his presidency, his legacy and what's at stake

there. in the middle of his negotiations of the build back better package where he was so close to getting joe manchin over the line and scanning the social safety net in a profound generational transformational sort of way, you know, it flopped in this spectacular fashion when manchin wept on fox news sunday and pulled the plug. and so i actually think that moment is a relatively selfless moment because biden was so deep in the weeds of those negotiations. he'd bring the senators into the oval office. they'd be with him for two or three hours at a time as he tried to charm them, wheedle them, you know, bring them aboard and it was a really difficult thing. no majority leader would be able to pull that off on their own, and he took the lead and became the face of those negotiation. so i think pulling back, it's one of the things that surprised me about biden is that there's these moments i always thought of him -- when it came to the subject i didn't have the highest regard for him. i had a very conventional

washington view of the guy he was a senatorial blow hard, very nigh eve in his faith and bipartisan. watching him bob and weave and navigate these episodes, i was actually kind of impressed by his ability to shelve his ego when that's what the strategy required. >> to some degree he kind of goes back and forth in terms of that strategy, right, because debt ceiling negotiations, he's on the phone with kevin mccarthy and it's nobody else. it's the president and speaker of the house trying to avert financial calamity. so sometimes clearly he believes it's warranted asked he loves it. >> that's an instance of him being really good at it. >> well, sure, yes. he likes the strategy when it works. >> what he did there was he brought mccarthy in and biden's strength as a politician that he's got -- as a guy who's very empathic. he's able to read the psychology of the person sitting across from him.

i think pretty quickly he was able to size the person up and say this is where his insecurities are, and if i can send mccarthy out to the white house driveway to look like he's owning the negotiations in public, then i'm going to own the negotiations in private. >> i do wonder if you think he still stands by -- i mean if he still has aechlathy to a man basically kowtowing to the right party who's suggesting impeachment hearings for president biden. do you think that empathy extends to this day? >> i think empathy is maybe the wrong word. >> their humanity? >> no, it's the ability to see things from their perspective. and so you're dealing with xi or putin or any number of foreign leaders, modi, who are jerks and terrible human beings in most regards. you still have to deal with those people. and so you still have to be able to figure out how their minds work. >> do you think that empathy, that ability to understand the workings of unsavory characters'

minds extends to donald trump. i do have to ask you about the question i teased going to brick break, which is when biden sees himself tied neck and neck in a poll with trump in a matchup in 2024, of course this poll is a snapshot of a moment in time and i don't want to put any weight on it. but i would assume that -- i can't imagine being joe biden who has worked so hard to be so diligent and preserve institutions and see himself in a head to head against someone with 91 felony counts and that the american public is split down the middle between the two of them. >> yeah, that's got to be a hard thing to look at. >> do you think he in some way respects trump's appeal to the base. >> no. i think at the end of the day he thinks trump is a malignant bully. i don't think there's any hedging on that. and he's been consistent and clear in public on that. >> yes. but he's also consistent and clear about trying to win back parts of the republican party

that have otherwise beenfore saken. >> yeah, and that's been -- that's been his strategy. >> as we talk about the way in which he governs in the next two years and maybe the next six if he's lucky and wins re-election, do you think that the biden white house has learned a -- any particular lesson about how to sell its message to the american public given the pretty outstanding number of legislative accomplishments they've had with the thinnest of majorities? >> this weekend he gives this every day speech, which is the first time that he frames things in a populous sort of way. one of the mysteries to me about the biden presidency is that so much of their agenda delivers on all of these things that trump has talked about, whether it is trade or going hard against monopoly or infrastructure, he hasn't framed things in a way where he paints the republican party as an elitist

phoney-baloney party. and this is the first time that he's done that, and it does connect in the end of the day to trump believing that he's above the law. the whole thing is a scam, and biden has to present himself as the one who's genuinely delivered on all this stuff that they talk about. >> well, he has a lot of talking and speaking to do. i couldn't even get to the part about the dobbs decision, but that is something the democrats want to run on. but you detail the real crisis of conscience biden has a catholic about going full boar on reproductive freedoms. >> when dobbs dropped, this gets to some of the themes we're talking about. i think it took him a while to understand the radicalism of the dobbs decision and the radicalism of the republican party's approach to abortion. we're not in the 1980s, 1990s debate here about limits on abortion. this is about eradication. and so it took the case of that

10-year-old girl to really -- >> in ohio. >> to really drive it home for biden, and i don't think he's had too many doubts about it since then. >> i should hope not. franklin foer, thank you for making the time. the last politician inside joe biden's white house and the struggle for america's future is out now. that is our show for tonight. "way too early" with jonathan lemire is coming up next. the longest prison sentence yet for someone involved in the capitol attack goes to a man who wasn't even there that day. we'll have expert legal analysis on that punishment as well as the latest developments in the fulton county election interference case. plus senate minority leader mitch mcconnell addresses concerns about his health following a pair of unsettling incidents when he froze up in front of reporters. and also ahead, covid could derail a major overseas trip for president