that not far from here in the central jail of washington, d.c, a growing crowd is gathering and that crowd is waiting in anticipation, hoping that they will see the release of some j6 defendants who are being held. so we are waiting to see exactly what happens when the president arrives in emancipation hall. but this is this is a city where tonight there will be a lot of parties. >> there will be inaugural parties. there were parties last night where people are gathering, but in fact, it is a country where also a lot of americans look at what they see happening. and like joe biden, they take a pause. >> i'm chris jansing at the capitol. >> let me set it back to nbc studios and nicolle wallace, msnbc. chris jansing, thank you so much. really a harrowing picture that you paint. >> thank you so much for your

reporting all day long for us. hi there everybody. it's now 4:00 in new york. >> i guess we'll start here. buckle up. the country and the world are now experiencing what this is like. the first hours of the second trump presidency happening right now. donald trump is at the u.s. capitol. soon he will head to that rally inside capital one arena. it's happening in place of the inaugural parade because of bitterly cold temperatures. donald trump is expected to take the stage there later in this hour. the rally taking place after this morning's events, a swearing in and a speech in which donald trump promised a golden age and depicted the america only as it exists on earth, to an endless series of cataclysmic events and catastrophes, weaponized government falsehoods like claiming the panama canal is operated by china. the panama canal is not operated by china, and declaring drill, baby, drill! all of it is about as far

as it gets the normal self-imposed restraints on pardoning partizanship that you would find in any other inaugural address. >> donald trump also laid out a raft of day one promises and actions, things that are expected to be put into motion today. >> executive orders, some of them amounting to stunts things like renaming the gulf of mexico to the gulf of america. it's unclear to us if the president has the authority to do so. others likely to trigger long and protracted legal fights. donald trump is expected to sign an order ending birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants. it will apply to children born to undocumented parents going forward. it will not apply retroactively, but it is likely to trigger what the new york times calls, quote, one of the greatest challenges in the 14th amendment's 157 year history. the 14th amendment of the constitution has ensured that

anyone born in this country is an american citizen. it has been a fact of life for the lifetime of anyone living in the united states right now and now, as part of his day one, trump is in effect issuing a challenge to the 14th amendment of the united states constitution. that executive order on birthright citizenship is part of a group of others. other orders targeting the border, including declaring a national emergency. >> now, that would allow trump to deploy u.s. troops and force asylum seekers to remain in mexico as their cases are reviewed. >> one of the very first things the new administration did was to shut down a government app. that app allowed migrants to schedule their appointments to cross the border at a port of entry. it's been used by almost a million immigrants coming fights over the border, taking shape in the earliest hours of the trump presidency. it's where we start today with some of our favorite reporters and friends with me at the table, co-host of msnbc's the weekend. alicia

menendez is here. also joining us, host of the bulwark podcast. msnbc political analyst tim miller is here. also joining us, democratic strategist and professor at columbia university, msnbc political analyst michael is here. and former democratic senator. msnbc political analyst claire mccaskill is here. but we're going to start with my friend and colleague, nbc news white house correspondent vaughn hillyard. he's outside capital one arena. vaughn, let's start with the policies that are already in motion. take me through what exceeds his now vast authorities as the president of the united states. and that's his desire to end birthright citizenship. >> nicole, over the course of the last two years, i know well, so many of us were covering the 2024 presidential election and campaign. >> you were on the front lines of helping cover what was happening on the side of the

trump operation, and that were two particular organizations that were crafting. in the case of one of those organizations, they told me more than 250 draft executive orders that would be prepared for a president trump to sign on day one. and there is project 2025 with the heritage foundation. >> other organizations that wrote a 900 plus page playbook for every department and agency of the federal government about how to more efficiently operate and how to execute the policies that they feel like they failed to during the first trump administration because they were ill prepared, ill equipped. >> that day is today. donald trump is now the president of the united states. and you said it. he is going to be making his way here to the capital one arena in a mere minutes to begin signing a series of executive orders. publicly, we are told that he is anticipated to sign more than 50 today, potentially up to 100, but more will be coming in the days ahead as they work on the final drafts of those. and in the case of the president elect inside of the

capitol, just one example. he said that he will seek to invoke the alien enemies act. what is that? it's usually a wartime resolution. it was last invoked by franklin delano roosevelt as a means of apprehending italians, japanese and german descendants in the aftermath of the pearl harbor attack. it allows the president of united states to unilaterally detain, apprehend, and put into detention, and then ultimately deport any non-citizen above the age of 14 years old. if he declares that the country of where that individual is from, in this case mexico, is engaging in an attack on the homeland, the united states, exactly what does he intend ultimately to do? >> just how vast. well, he told us the mass deportation program, he said, would target criminals to begin. >> but it's a question of just how far reaching do those in ice and the department of homeland security and tom homan ultimately seek to use the executive order? the

presidential powers are going to be put to the test by this president, united states. >> he's also said that he's going to challenge the empowerment act, which obligates the executive branch to appropriate congressionally approved funds. >> they have suggested that they are going to all but take that to the courts as a means of cutting off funding for particularly environmental programs, for example, that were approved under the biden administration. there are major executive orders that are going to challenge the bounds of presidential power, and that's all going to be coming to a head not only in the hours ahead, but in these weeks ahead. >> nicole vaughn hillyard let me let me just drill down a little bit on what you're reporting. i mean, he he described what's happening at the border as an invasion. >> and that's despite the fact that border crossings, i think, are at a near low for the last two presidencies, his his first one and the biden years, he talked about deploying the military to the border, if not the militarization specifically, but to use the alien enemies

act. those are wartime powers. >> does he is he seeking a formal declaration of war from congress? >> that is a question not only about the southern border, but also is a statement in which he explicitly said today, from inside the capitol that we, as in the united states, will take back the panama canal. >> of course, that is the obligation of the congress to approve wartime actions, but it's not clear from this now, president, united states, how he will seek to use the department of defense. and frankly, we saw pete hegseth during his confirmation proceedings just this last week, be very indirec. in not explicit, when asked by democratic senators whether he would take orders from the president of the united states to use the military to, for example, attack greenland or the panama canal, panama, or use the use military forces on domestic

soil. and so i think there's a lot of outstanding questions. >> and ultimately, this is why the conversation about the extent to which donald trump has pledged to put loyalists in these positions is so crucial because he is now in real time signing executive orders. >> that would all but essentially, in his mind, provide him the powers to begin to put that all in motion and challenge the constitutional bounds that we have really not seen challenged in. in some cases, 70 years, 100 years, 200 years. >> ron hilliard, you are part of a, i think, a small group who understands pence world as well as trump world because they were once one world. >> the history that was made today also includes pence being there. i think he's the only former vice president who attended the inauguration of the president. he once served to see a different man sworn in as vice president. >> any sense of why he was there or what his experience was today and why mrs. pence wasn't.

>> yeah. >> we it is not clear why the former second lady, karen pence, was not there today, but at jimmy carter's funeral service, just a little over a week ago, when donald trump and melania trump walked into the cathedral, she did not stand and shake either of their hands. mike pence, of course, is not the vice president. he was an unyielding defender of donald trump, and i went on three different international trips with him around this country. it was hard to find somebody who is more committed to donald trump than mike pence was. but ultimately, on january 6th, four years ago, when he refused to reject the electoral college votes, he was effectively dismissed from donald trump's orbit. and yet he made the decision to be here today. he congratulated donald trump when he won this election, but he has also been on the front lines of criticizing him. for example, when donald trump announced that he wanted to be tiktok to allow to continue to exist, even if the chinese parent company continued to have ownership of

it. and mike pence is former vp. just days before this inauguration was suggesting that it was capitulating to a chinese national security threats. and so in mike pence, what is his political future look like? it's not clear, especially within his republican party. yet at the same time, by coming here today, he respected the norms of the transfer of power and his former boss. and clearly somebody who continues to be involved in conservative politics going forward. >> alicia, what is on our screen is what would have been had this been held outside, probably one of donald trump's favorite aspects of the inauguration. let's listen in for a second. it's a military review. ceremonial piece. >> oh. thank you. >> it's going to be able to play it on the track. >> so that's the delegation

there making their way in. as you watch this go on. this is steeped in tradition donald trump's day one actions not so much. >> they are not i mean, let's talk first about these border executive actions. >> what they're actually doing is cutting legal pathways to come into this country. >> this month, you had more people who were crossing legally rather than between ports of entry. that is because a lot of the actions that the biden administration has taken, whether it's the cbp app that you and i have spoken about before, which actually allows you to apply from abroad, you did you see the video of a woman who had a 1 p.m. appointment and 20 minutes before this appointment that she has been waiting for, for our viewers would happen at noon. >> the website was deactivated. >> deactivated. so a person who has waited months to do things the right way. what we say all the time do things the right way. >> get in line. she got in line. >> she did things the right way. 20 minutes before she was finally supposed to have her appointment. >> all of a sudden, app crashes the appointment. >> i guess my question is, if

you wanted to create images of an incoming invasion, is that the kind of thing you would do? crash the website? >> it's not an anomaly. >> that which is that? >> that's the image at the border. >> they're the images that are going to come from the inside of this country, when all of a sudden they are doing these raids at workplaces. we know what that looks like. we've seen it before. we saw it in 2019, in mississippi, when all of a sudden you had kids at school who weren't getting picked up by their parents. >> that is going to absolutely crush americans. when you have the foreign enemies act, which you heard from juan. it is unclear how this applies. in practice. >> you can't declare war on a non-state actor. >> so as he said, the most likely thing is that the president now tries to declare it on mexico. what i want people to understand is that we're not just talking about undocumented people. >> we are talking about the possibility that green card holders, that people are here on legal visas, are all going to get swept up in this. during japanese internment, half of the people who were interned were u.s. citizens. >> so we have seen this play out before, and it will not be

limited to people who are here without papers. >> tim. >> i mean, we're changing names and stuff. i think we're changing the gulf to america. i think we should change the statue of liberty, too, while we're at it today, the statue of america, you know, and just get rid of trump. yeah, statue of trump. get rid of the little plaque. i don't know, this whole thing. you were talking about how this is the part that donald trump likes, the pomp and the circumstance and the military. i just i've had to watch all this stuff today. and i got to say, i don't really love that. everybody's just participating in this farce because it is a farce. like trump knows that it's a tv show. say what you want about trump. he knows it's a tv show. he went and gave one speech when he was supposed to play the role of important president, and then he goes to a luncheon an hour later and he's like, the guys wouldn't let me talk about the stuff that i really wanted to talk about, which is revenge against crying, adam kinzinger and blah, blah, blah. we're going to take mark milley's photo off the wall, like trump knows that it's a show. and so i don't really know why everybody is playing along with his tv show. that's kind of

where i do find myself pretty aligned with karen pence today. >> they have told themselves they have told themselves the lie that if they are proximate to him, they are somehow going to be the final guardrail. >> and what we had to learn the first time was that did not prove to be true. there was no one who actually kept him honest and to his word. yeah. >> what should we do instead? >> i mean, i'm game. i'm with you. >> i mean, karen didn't show up today, and i think that we can just call it what it is. you know, again, he doesn't put his hand on the bible. whatever. maybe that's an accident. maybe that's symbolism. but like the notion that he is, you know, going to uphold the constitution and that we're going to have this ceremony today where joe biden and jill biden do the traditional thing and they have tea in the white house, and they stand together and take pictures. then they go to the capitol together. then he forgets to put his hand on the bible, and then he says he's going to uphold the constitution. it's like we know he's not going to uphold the constitution. he didn't already. he was in there once. and when he lost, he said to a mob of people at the police that are guarding this very capitol where

all this stuff is happening. so, look, we can't stop any of this. i'm not, i just, i think quiet protest. i think acting, acting sternly and severely and speaking clearly about the truth of what we expect from donald trump rather than saying, well, you know, rather than giving, you know, friendly niceties. at the presidential lunch, i just i think that we're doing a lot of things that help him advance his own political project. i don't really, and by we, i mean, i think that his political opponents are doing a lot of things that help advance his political project today. and i don't i don't really know why. >> i mean, his political opponents include the democrats, the democrats are considering his cabinet picks. they are in the minority. something i've asked you about, claire, is why not use the tools that tommy tuberville used to hold up thousands of appointments to the pentagon and the military to hold up a single one of trump's cabinet picks? >> well, they are pick one. >> well, they're they're making them run the calendar on texas. so instead of texas being able

to be voted on right away, he's going to have to wait. >> all that time, what tommy tuberville did was a little different. >> he took a huge number at once. so for schumer to work through each one of those, giving each one of those three days was practically impossible. unless you want to shut the entire senate down for four months, trump will want hundreds of people confirmed to his government. >> why not say, and i'm not saying which which nominee? >> the democrats should pick the one that gives them the most concern for the future of the country. i think they'll run the clock on all the ones that are controversial. i don't think any of them will get through by a calendar that is set on unanimous consent. i think they'll have to run all the procedural hoops, which takes 3 to 4 days for each one. >> that is controversial. >> but here's here's my response to tim. i completely get what you're saying. frankly, i thought today was going to be like a dental appointment with no novocaine. >> and frankly, i need whiskey. but the point is that we got to quit paying attention to what he says and pay attention to what he does. and one of the things

that democrats have to do is point out to the country, this is a guy who laid out today the % of local control in for the tea parties and all the people that showed up to his rallies. think government is the enemy and it's too big. so what's he doing? in his inaugural speech, he said, you know, we're going to have the federal government take over your curriculum, your local schools. we're going to have the federal government take over your local police department. we're going to come in with federal troops and enforce local law in your community. this is unbelievably big government at work. and that's not what the people who voted for him, even the hardcore 27% of the country, that's all in donald trump. they're not envisioning a big government takeover. so the democrats have to show he's not going to bring down your prescription drug costs. he's not going to lower your taxes. he's going to play around with

your the benefits you've earned. he's got to cut the va. and by the way, in the process, he's doing a big government takeover of things that you should be able to control locally or even in your own home. and if the democrats have some discipline about that, i think they'll have some success in the next midterms cycle. >> you know, we talked before about the politics of pain, that trump has this ability to promote. and i and i hear you clear. normally i would and i would i actually do agree with you i do agree with you. i just feel that at this point in time, there are a lot of folks who who are saying let let the pain occur, as opposed to me standing up or democrats standing up and saying, he's going to do x, he's going to do y. we did that already. been there, done that. and to elisa's point, you know, what concerns me is that back in 19 1920s, 1930s, there was mass deportation of mexicans in this

country. they weren't many of them weren't even stopped to ask about their status. they were deported on site. so when i think about the people that are yelling and screaming and supporting donald trump in the ways that he talks about immigration, they're doing that because my fear is they're going to start looking at people on site, not discriminating as to whether or not this person is legal or not, but on site. start removing people from their homes, start taking people off the street. and when that disruption really starts to hit home to families we won't need to have, we won't need to speak to it because people are going to start feeling it. and, you know, a reporter asked me the other day, you know, if there is a democratic malaise. and i said, there's no malaise, there's introspection. and i said, there are a lot of people that were invited to the barbecue, but now we have a family meeting, and that family meeting has to intentionally exclude others, because folks right now are trying to figure

out how do we move forward. if that coalition that we thought we had didn't come through for us, and that is a real concern for a party, but also for community and constituency going forward. i'm not saying i have all the answers, but i'm saying there's real anger out there right now and there's a malaise. >> there were people in the streets eight years ago. this time there were tens of thousands of people in the streets protesting this and saying no. and you can say, oh, that didn't work or whatever, because he's back. but there's still some value in organizing. get out there and saying what is true and what is not true. and i just and look, i agree, i think there are a lot of things the democrats can do and talk about, about the policies and the failures, and they're going to be a lot of failures in the coming administration. but we just went through a period where we're where the democrats and anti pro-democracy, whatever, the pro-democracy coalition, whatever you want to call me, was calling him an authoritarian threat and saying this is going to be an authoritarian threat. and then he comes in today and does 200 executive orders. and i just i just that doesn't match

with me to say this is an authoritarian threat coming in on the one hand, and on the other hand, i'm going to have tea with him and pardon my brother and say, happy, happy joy, joy. pictures like, i'm sorry that just there is a disconnect there. and i think that the american people see it. >> well, i, i hear what you say. i'm going to push back on you. push back. i hear what you're saying about police. i don't i really don't think there's a malaise. i think what's happened is that there are a lot more people in this country than a lot of folks figure that side with donald trump. and rather than do the sort of massive protest that we've seen because, you know, folksa protest sign. this is the 30th anniversary of the million man march. we can throw up a protest that that we can do what we have to now figure out how to do is how to navigate this environment right here, right now. me as a black man in this society, how do i how do i engage? how do i walk the street? how do i support my family? how does my family engage where i'm a child

of immigrants too? so how is this going to actually impact home? and i think that's what people are, are starting to say, you know what? i've done the i've done the demonstrative, i now need to do the personal i need to, i need to, i need to be home and i need to take care of community and for at least a period of time, i think that's what we're going to see. >> i want to. just tell our viewers about a couple of other things. i mean, it's obvious what's happening on your screen. is it well, is it andrea mitchell is going to join us and tell us exactly what's happening. this is a military display honoring the commander in chief. but the commander in chief had done today was to remove a ten day old portrait of former chairman of the joint chiefs, general mark milley. and there were a couple of hours today where it wasn't clear who the acting secretary of defense is the nominee to lead the department of defense is a real

barrier breaker in his own right. pete hegseth is accused of massive financial mismanagement of the veterans organizations he once ran. he is accused of rape. he personally settled with the accuser, not clear how much of that substance has been really explored by the republicans on the committee that's considering his nomination. andrea mitchell you're in the hall. talk about, again, the stunning contrast between this display that trump seems to be enjoying and his actual ideas for the military. >> nicole. yes, i do hear you. there was some confusion there. look, the portrait was removed at 12:46 p.m. from the wall of the pentagon, which from which it had just been placed. because those portraits get completed a few months or years after someone's service. it had just been hung. on january 12th, it was removed at 12:46 p.m. just

after the swearing in. and it is remarkable. we don't know on whose orders. we don't know whether the president, the newly elected president, is aware of it. and here we are, ironically, at the honors for the troops. as we listen to the national anthem, we should just say this is usually the reviewing of the troops. but because it was moved indoors, it is honors for the six services. nicole. >> alicia, this is something that donald trump saw on display when he was in france for bastille day and really admired. there was some incredible reporting. i don't remember if it was in a book or if it was in newspaper reporting about how much he enjoyed the military displays of power in north korea. this is undoubtedly part of the day that he likes a lot. but again, to sort of tim's point, it is farcical and that

the disdain and disrespect he has shown for the military through the course of his first presidency includes undermining their own sort of justice system. it includes asking mark milley to do things unprecedented in the history of which you ask your military leaders to do. and it culminated in general john kelly taking the extraordinary step of doing a recorded interview warning the country of donald trump's authoritarian and fascistic instincts. >> i think the key word you just laid out is power, his obsession with power, and how he plans to leverage that power. i've been reading a lot about the national emergencies act. i think it's one of those things we all thought was going to be relegated to ap history class. it is now something we are very much living through. for years, attorneys and activists have said this is way too broad and we need to rein this in through legislation. and yet here we are with someone who plans to utilize it in all of its available forms. the brennan center did some analysis of it. 123 statutory authorities that become available to the

president when he declares a national emergency. so we've talked a lot about it in the context of immigration, but i want to broaden that out. it gives the president the power to take over domestic communications, to seize americans bank accounts, to deploy u.s. troops to any foreign country. and part of the problem is that the check, the balance that was supposed to be on this was congress. but you need a veto proof majority in order to really act as that check. and so the question becomes, both with the us military and with all of the other powers that are granted to him as president, how he intends to use them, claire, the systems were not set up for this. >> right? the system isn't set up for the democratic party, who is in the minority to be the only party that cares about the qualifications of the nominee to head the pentagon? it's just not set up for that. and i, i, i share a lot of tim's analysis, but i thought it was an unfair framing to say the democrats

failed to sink any of the nominations. the nominees have the votes if it's a party line affair, but it has never been that before. that's clear now, how did the democrats adapt to that new reality? >> i think it's going to be really hard on confirmations, because over the time from when i got elected to the time i left, there was an erosion of the requirement of 60 votes for first it was cabinet people, and then it was district court judges. and then before you know it, we were in a place where a bare majority was all that was needed. now, part of that happened because the polarization was beginning to take hold, and people were too afraid to vote in a bipartisan way. but never has the secretary of defense been a strictly partizan vote. and i predict this one will be never has. you know, the head of the fbi been a strictly partizan vote. if patel makes it, i predict this one will be never before has dni been a strictly partizan vote.

so what trump is doing is he's politicizing the very parts of our government that have not been political before, and he's proud of that. so this idea, i mean, my favorite text i got today was from a sitting senator that said unifying my bleep. i won't use the word that he used when he texted me, but this is not a guy who is ever interested in unifying anything, and he is now going to politicize. and anybody who's spent more than ten minutes at the pentagon would tell you that this is no lefty organization. i can assure you the people who are drawn to the military are not leftists. the people who are drawn to the military are people who want discipline and order, who are patriots, who are proud. sometimes they're doing it because they have no other opportunities in terms of their career, and they see it as a path to higher education. but the idea that now and this is the thing that scares me the most about his speech, when he talked about the loyalty of government, this loyalty test

thing he's doing, people need to give this some thought. how do they determine who's loyal? and now when you look at the military, are you going to start seeing, oh, is that trump or military or is that a leftist military, or is that a trumper fbi or a leftist fbi? i mean, now we're identifying every judge by who appointed them. we didn't used to do that. so it is really, really dangerous what he's doing, particularly to the military. and i want to see how this loyalty test, it's a little bit like deporting somebody on what they look like. how are they going to be civil? and don't even get me started on the contractors. that's where they should go. that's where the swamp is. it's not employees, civil service employees. there are millions of contractors in the federal government. clean those out. hey, ellen, take a look at the contractors and you can find you won't find a trillion, but you'll find some real money, especially at homeland security, the pentagon and frankly, every other branch of government where contractors have been hired and with really

little or no accountability. >> what do you think has happened to our politics more broadly? if you widen out where it used to be a liability for any democratic elected official or republican elected official to be seen as on the take on the grift, and now you've got you've got trump enriching and selling everything. and the people closest to him at this event were not members of the military, not members of congress, not members of his cabinet, not even all the family or grandkids. it was the billionaires. >> well, when i found out that pam bondi had $3 million of truth social stock, what the woman who's nominated to be attorney general. and you don't think trump knows that? that she put $3 million in his stock? of course he does. and this whole meme coin thing, it did anything ever stink more ever in the history of our government than the two of them two days before they're they're coming into the white house. they put out a meme coin, and every foreign government in the world, i mean, we spent all that time worrying

about who was staying at the trump hotel. i mean, this is that's peons. we're talking about billions of dollars and the middle east, those those guys that want him to help them control the price of oil. >> believe me, spiro agnew resigned, overtaken 10-k, exactly ten grand. he took ten grand. he resigned the vice presidency. >> these guys make 20, 30 billion overnight and nobody know. >> well, it's just, you know, one of the things that i've been trying to wrestle with is the is the, you know, you've heard of prosperity gospel. there's prosperity politics. there's a good chunk of this country that actually aspires to the kind of wealth and power that donald trump sort of exudes, right? even if they don't specifically like him as a person or his policies. there's something about that that's attractive. but to your question, there's another part of this country that feels that democrat or republican, they're all like that. so they come out, they withdraw from the process. so the big challenge, therefore, is

to is to try to i don't say reeducate, but try to find a way to talk to voters to say this is not the way it's supposed to be. we're not supposed to be enriching ourselves in these positions. but there's so many voters that think we do that anyway. and i don't know if that change. and i'll say this, i think it does change generationally, but we're in a point right now where i think enough time has passed, where there is a whole generation of voters that feels that my generation or older, we're the elites, we're part of the institution, and we need to go with everybody else. the difference between democrats and republicans is that the republicans went through the same thing, but donald trump kind of took that over. we don't have the parallel on the on the democratic side. >> i mean, let me just sort of test the theory. i mean, robin hood, right, is this mythical figure from taking from the rich to give to the poor the person who won the popular vote in the electoral college was surrounded by the richest people in the

country, in the world. and he's viewed as the most powerful person, not just in our politics, but but in the world. >> four of the five richest people in the world were in the right behind him, and they own the biggest communications platforms in the world. i mean, it is totally unprecedented. it feels un-american. it feels like kind of one of those other countries where you have the plutocrats and the oligarchs and the favored businessmen that is next to, you know, the autocrat. but the notion that these people, elon, having been the biggest supporter of him, and then also one of, if not the largest government contractor, then a bunch of other guys who have jumped on, jumped on board after once they've seen that grift train, you know, kind of leaving the station. i do think that that presents a political opportunity for democrats, for sure. i do think that it is a kind of naked corruption that is a story in itself, and that will probably be the thing that we're talking about for most of the next four years. it's kind of a new because besides elon, since the rest of them came on so late, it's something that has

developed in the transition, really. it wasn't even a big issue in the campaign. like vice president didn't talk about, you know, the big tech oligarchs that much. so i think that's something that's emerging. but just one more example of this, of the naked corruption. you were mentioning the spying, and we're mentioning the dni. i mean, tulsi gabbard today, the nominee for dni is sitting next to the ceo of tiktok, a chinese spyware app like this. >> so they were sitting together? >> yes. no. at the at the inauguration in the crowd, like the tiktok guy didn't get the spot of honor that elon and jeff bezos got. he was he was sat in the crowd with the dni nominee. i mean, that is just that is mind boggling. like the idea that somebody who is in charge of protecting our national intelligence would be next to the person whose app was banned because a supermajority of congress, including many republicans, were concerned that they were spying on us. >> and the supreme court ruled nine zero. right, that that that had to be shut down. >> and the incoming secretary of

state for trump and the incoming national security advisor for trump agree with the ban on tiktok for national security reasons. you're watching the president donald trump, travel from the capital to the capital one arena, where he's expected to sign more executive orders. we'll have much more on that. everyone sticks around. also, when we come back, 1% billionaire oligarch club was seated front and center today for donald trump's inauguration, the mega richest in the country, aligning themselves atop the political world now as well a warning of their growing influence and power and ballooning wealth from senator chris murphy, who joins us just ahead. and the test our democracy now! faces all those stories and more when deadline white house continues after a quick break. don't go anywhere. >> hi, i'm caleb and this is my story. i was born with osteogenesis imperfecta or

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what? well, the holiday offer. all the big wireless companies stopped doing theirs in january, so i wanted to make sure that we don't stop loving our customers just because december is over. this future. me micromanaging me. me. just. just cut to the offer. well, it's your commercial now. i am insufferable. this is how you're using time travel, you irresponsible son of a. >> it's unsettling, as americans to watch it happen in real time, something timothy snyder introduces on page one of his work on tyranny. that is, the obeying in advance. publicly, titans of the tech industry did their fair share of that today, perhaps seeking to ingratiate themselves in the early hours of a more autocratic era in american history. mark zuckerberg, tim cook, jeff bezos were there at saint john's church earlier, the ceos for google and tiktok will be around for all of the trump inauguration events happening

today. and they were at the swearing in people who have everything to gain in a democracy that has everything to lose. joining us now is democratic senator chris murphy of connecticut. you've been sounding the alarms since the earliest hours on election day. your thoughts about how much of what you've been warning about is coming to pass today? >> you're watching the unraveling of our democracy. it's not about to happen. it is happening right now. elon musk got into this speech a commitment to go to mars. right. there is a dispute inside the scientific community, inside the nasa as to whether we should be going to mars or to the moon. it makes elon musk an even richer man i the choice is to go to mars. he got that. mark zuckerberg went down to mar a lago and got instructions to stop fact checking on facebook. when asked, donald trump said, yeah, i'm sure he made that change because he was afraid of what i might do to facebook when i was president. but this is the

unraveling of our democracy, because what is happening before our eyes, literally on that stage today is that the billionaires who control huge parts of this economy are trading favors with donald trump behind closed doors, often where none of us can see it. and what is even worse about the moment today is that the first official policy that trump is going to pursue here in congress is a massive tax break for those billionaires and those corporations, paid for by devastating cuts to regular people medicare, medicaid, the affordable care act, education programs. this is a government for, by and of the billionaires. it's an old fashioned corruption. and you saw it on display inside the united states capitol today. >> it was an argument and a warning made by folks like yourself by former vice president kamala harris, former

president joe biden. and i wonder where you think the disconnect is with the voters that they chose this. >> i mean, i think it's always easier to believe that the worst isn't going to happen. and the history with trump is that, of course, he says lots of things that he doesn't end up doing. but what you saw today was surgical. it was precise. not every ceo of a major american company was up on that stage. who was up there in front of the cabinet? the ceos of the major information companies in this country, the people who control through their algorithms and their editorial policy, the information that the vast majority of americans consume, how democracy dies is a fairly simple story. first, you intimidate your your opposition into staying home. and that's what he's doing by endorsing political violence today and threatening to lock up the

people who investigated him over the past ten years. but then you control the media. you cut deals with all the people who own the information channels, and you tell them to just chill out on criticism, pump up my own narrative, and in exchange, i'll make you a little bit richer. that's exactly what's happening today. that's exactly what's happening. and democracy doesn't die in a heartbeat. it doesn't die overnight. it dies because gradually the truth doesn't appear on your information channels. it dies gradually as folks just decide to stay home instead of risk showing up on somebody's enemies list. the moment is really dire, and we've got to tell that story to people. >> what's the remedy? >> the remedy is to go out there and build a political opposition that stops this corruption. i mean, everybody said that the affordable care act was going to be repealed in 2017. it wasn't because we went out and built a political constituency to stop it on the left. you know, we've got to build our own media

ecosystem. we've got to make sure that if places like facebook and twitter aren't venues where people can hear us, that we've got alternative forums where the truth can get out. so we've got work to do to organize the public. we've got logistical work to do to make sure that there are fair minded platforms that hear all messages. but that's the work we've got to do. we've got to do it beginning today with urgency. >> where is the urgency behind the scenes that maybe strategically we can't see? but in stopping some of the trump nominees that are the most controversial, i sat here and covered day after day, week after week, month after month. tommy tuberville's damage to not just active duty military and their families, but to the combat readiness of the united states. that was the position of the pentagon. how do you slow down nominees that democrats and even some republicans have called wildly unqualified?

>> well, we can't stop all these nominees. we can only probably stop a few. and so we've got to be really targeted. listen, i would put at the top of the list kash patel. right. if the fbi becomes a political arm of the white house, which is what kash patel will make it if kash patel takes his enemies list, which include members of the biden administration, members of congress, individual fbi agents and operationalizes it, it will have the impact of suppressing political dissent and political speech in this nation such that we may never recover. i think there may be three or 4 or 5 republicans who are considering voting against kash patel, but only if they get phone calls from their constituents telling them, you know what? let this person go. but don't don't let the fbi be fundamentally corrupted by an extremist like kash patel. but those phone calls won't happen if we aren't all speaking with one voice. and i will just say, i'm worried

that we are. we are not necessarily translating right now the urgency of stopping some of these nominees, especially the ones that are going to transition the justice system into a political witch hunt operation for president trump. >> yeah. i mean, i share your concerns that there is a real sense it is challenging to cover the resistance or the opposition to trump right now. could you say anything about what's happening behind the scenes to organize democrats around messages and messengers? >> sure. listen, we are meeting every day later today to begin to build out that campaign that's going to stop, hopefully not just a couple of these nominees, but stop that billionaire tax cut again, we have faith because we stopped the repeal of the affordable care act, that we can organize the country by traveling the country against the billionaire tax break. but listen, there are some people in my party that think you sort of reserve power to use at a later time, that you

wait until the moment is the most urgent. i actually don't believe that's how politics works. i worry that if we sort of remain quiet right now and wait until the right moment in february or march to scream at the top of our lungs, people won't take us seriously because they see many people see that the corruption is beginning right now. so i just think you've got to be at top volume level every single day. and i think if you are your credibility about the message that you're sending, the oligarchy is forming. our democracy is falling, the corruption is beginning. it just has a lot more weight if you're consistent about it. >> yeah. and there are examples under all three of those buckets that were on full display today and over the weekend. i said this to you before, thank you for being outspoken and for taking some time to talk to us. we'll continue to turn to you, senator murphy. thank you. thanks, nicole. we're going to take a short break. as donald trump has made his way into the arena in washington, where he

plans to sign his first executive orders. stay with us. >> breaking news. >> a fast moving disaster in california. >> breaking news. israel and hamas will enter a ceasefire in the nation's capital. >> philadelphia and el paso. the palisades from msnbc world headquarters. >> msnbc premium gives you early access and ad free listening to rachel maddow. chart topping series, msnbc original podcasts, exclusive bonus content, and all exclusive bonus content, and all of your favorite msnbc when you're a small-business owner, your to-do list can be...a lot. ♪♪ super helpful. ♪♪ [ cheering ] what are invoices? progressive makes it easy to see if you can save money with a commercial auto quote online

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thank the doctors and health care workers. and then there was this. if you'd like to celebrate, cecile, today we invite you to put on some new orleans jazz. gather with friends and family over a good meal. and remember something she said a lot over the last year. quote. it's not hard to imagine future generations one day asking when there was so much at stake for our country, what did you do? the only acceptable answer is everything we could. >> yeah, she was an amazing woman. her mother would have been so proud. you did this to me every time you get. her mother, of course, was governor ann richards, who really was the first woman who figured out a sense of humor was important for a woman running for office, especially a sense of humor that allowed you to laugh at yourself. and cecile embodied her spirit. you never saw her without a smile on her face, and she faced some really courageous battles, not just this last one with the most aggressive form of brain cancer there is, but also

the battle she fought on behalf of women all over the country. and, you know, i'd like to really anybody out there who has cared deeply about the issue of women's health and reproductive freedom, if you've got some friends that have tuned out because it's just too painful to watch and take office again and watch us be in this situation again, reach out to them today and read that statement from cecile richards family. because if everybody tunes out right now, then things are going to get even worse. and i'm not pleading with people to watch our network. i'm not pleading with people for any certain action, but i have so many friends who have expressed to me sympathy that i have to watch what's going on today, that i have to talk about what's going on today, that have just decided enough and we can't have that attitude. and cecile richards family, i think, embodied that with her. her quote, which is we say we did everything we could,

everything we could. >> one of the most moving tributes. >> i love it so much. >> cecile was from brittany packnett cunningham, who you often see on our network, and she talks about the fact that as a black woman in america who does this work, she's sort of given up on the idea of allies, but that she has embraced the idea of coconspirators and that cecile richards was a coconspirator, and that part of that conspiring was understanding the art of listening, understanding how to change and evolve with humility, and how to cede ground to the next generation. right. that handing of the baton that will be part of cecile's legacy, the fact that, yes, we may no longer have cecile here in body, but we very much have her in spirit because she brought up a generation of women behind her to do this work. >> i got to know her when i was still a republican, an active republican in good standing. i barely remember, and she helped me find my voice on the issue of abortion rights because i was never a fan of the anti-abortion

policies that my boss has pushed, and she either knew it or heard it or detected it, and she draw me out, drew me out, and as you said, turned me into an ally. and, and i hope an advocate for everything she believed in. but it's i don't know if it's more painful or just more powerful that women are literally dying under the policies that she spent her life fighting. >> yeah, her daughter lily, is a friend of mine. so just sending my love to lily, you know? look, here's the we're just talking in the earlier segment about the actual ramifications and real life consequences of what's going to happen in this next administration. you know, we haven't talked about reproductive rights at all during this first hour, because there's just so much other stuff. right. and that that was such a key part of the campaign. and i think that there will be a there will be a sense for people that like, because kamala harris lost this election to like, oh, that's not that's not a fight worth fighting on or whatever. and that's i don't think that is

the right message. you know, if you just looked at this last election, a lot of voters who believed in reproductive rights at some level, you know, and we're concerned about the economy, both of those things, they went for trump over. >> harris voted for the abortion access measures in their state, where they were available. >> and a lot of these states, some of these voters felt insulated from it because they have a democratic governor and democratic legislature, etc. that's they're going to be not insulated from it in this next administration, which is sad. and i think that continuing to talk and focus on that would be a nice way to remember her legacy. >> sending all of our love to her family. tim and basil, thank you for starting us off. clare and alicia are still stuck with us. they will stick around. we'll sneak in another break. donald trump, who is now the first convicted felon ever to be elected to the highest office in the land, says he plans to pardon those involved in the capitol insurrection. how groups and individuals affected by that potentially are preparing much potentially are preparing much more ahead. don't go anywhere.

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granger.com or stop by granger for the ones who get it done. >> hi everyone. it's all happening. it's 5:00 here in new york and in washington dc. we just witnessed the first inauguration of a convicted felon to become the president of the united states of america. donald trump was sworn into office in front of a crowd inside the capitol rotunda, flanked by family, past presidents, members of congress, and a whole bunch of tech industry billionaires who were very, very close to him. he will soon deliver remarks for the third time today at the capital one arena in dc. he'll give those remarks right before he signs a barrage of executive orders, many of which are targeted at immigration and people in this country illegally. he is expected to

declare a national emergency at the southern border and to seek to end birthright citizenship, something that is in the constitution. earlier, trump declared another top priority of his pardoning the rioters who violently sought to overthrow the u.s. capitol on january 6th, 2021. after his defeat, trump saying this, quote, you're going to see a lot of action on the j&j six hostages. abc news is reporting, according to sources familiar, that he is planning on, quote, commuting the prison sentences of hundreds of his supporters who have been convicted of violent attacks against law enforcement and plans to extend full pardons to his supporters who were not charged with engaging in violence that day. a convicted felon as president, a forgiving of those who attempted a violent coup against the government. what we're seeing is an ushering in of an entirely new era for america's views of the rule of law, something that will be noted the world over,

underscoring all of it, the scene of members of the far right militia group, the proud boys, who donald trump famously and publicly told to, quote, stand back and stand by in 2020, and who were among the january 6th insurrectionists marching in downtown washington, d.c, as the inauguration was underway? that is where we start the hour with some of our favorite experts and friends chief political columnist, host of the impolitic podcast for msnbc, national affairs analyst john heilemann is here with me at the table, former top official at the department of justice. msnbc legal analyst andrew weissman is here. plus, new york times editorial board member and msnbc political analyst mara gay is here. my colleague alicia menendez and claire mccaskill are still with us. john heilemann, since you are joining us from out there and not in here, we miss you, my friend. let me start with you. on the whole day, the whole spectacle.

>> well, nicole, one of the main reasons i miss you is because if i were there, we could be drinking. >> and that's the kind of. you don't know that i'm not. >> that's my that's that's my main. that's my main reaction to this day, which is that this is a day that calls for a lot of alcohol. i've been i've been struggling to, to kind of deal with this split screen of what i actually think is kind of like the one of the most fundamental tensions in that we're going to see play out in the course of the next four years, which is the tension between the donald trump who had in that room in the rotunda. the capitol rotunda had with him 800 of his closest friends, at least of the people who he most wants to curry favor with, particularly these tech billionaires. and that's kind of the oligarch side, donald trump currying favor with rich people,

almost certainly going to spend a lot of the next four years trying to enrich himself further from being in office and then essentially going to the after party after playing some kind of like his version of yacht rock in the in the actual inaugural speech, going to the after party and playing speed metal, which is what he really wants to play, which is the kind of the have the have the ceo of x in one room. but then go talk to the hoi polloi of x in the other room. and that tension between which we've seen play out most dramatically, i think, or most visibly or most audibly between steve bannon and elon musk over the course of the last month is the central tension of the trump administration, which is what does donald trump have to do for his base? and what does donald trump have to do for his other base, the base that got him elected, that voted for him, the maga movement and what he thinks he has to do for them, what he has to say, what he what he's going to feel compelled to execute on and on the other side, the rich people who he

sees as being the people he actually probably wants to hang out with most of the time, and certainly the people who are going to put money in his pocket. and that's what matters to him more than anything else. >> so, john heilemann, i have the perfect analysis. not from not my analysis. it's from tim snyder, who described this clash between elon musk and steve bannon this way, quote, the clash between those who want oligarchy to get to fascism and those who want fascism to get to oligarchy. i guess my, my, my question is, don't we end up in the same place either way, we very well. >> we very well might. nicole i the only question is whether is what the various members of those classes make of donald trump's attempt to do the balancing act. they may be they may be. they're both they're both roads to ruin. right. yeah. and they're and they're both deeply they're both deeply dangerous for the cause of the american republic. but the tensions between and within a coalition like this are the things that can bring it

crashing to the ground. if they're not massaged and managed in the proper way. and one thing that we know about donald trump is he's not you know, he's he's obviously accomplished way more in american politics than you or i or i imagine anybody at the table with you or remote with you today would have ever dreamed in their worst nightmare back in 2015. but, you know, he's not he's not subtle, you know, and he's not, he's not he's not someone who who typically pulls off balancing acts all that well. he tends to he tends to do better when he's in piledriver mode than in, in, in tightrope walking mode. and i do think there's a tightrope to be walked here because the interests and objectives and concerns of those two parts of his coalition are really, really adverse to each other. and i think it's not going to be easy for him to, to handle it. none of it makes today any easier to stomach without a lot of tequila. and i, you know, because i'm not with you. i

managed to stay sober all day, which i'm sure was a mistake, but i'm going to i'm going to remedy that starting at six. >> yeah. that's that's that's when i hereby grant you permission to remedy your soberness. we need you, though, for another 53 minutes, just as you are. the rule of law was on the ballot. i think we spent really the better part of the last eight years talking about it on this program, including the investigation. you were very much a part of. central to and i don't know that the whole part of the electorate that voted for trump said they didn't care, but they didn't care enough not to return him. and so here's what they're going to get. they're going to get people who assaulted cops, commuted if they were engaged in violence. and i believe that the fbi and doj have said there is no one nonviolent who was sentenced, but he will commute, so he will commute the sentences of anyone

who was violent and full pardons for those who weren't. >> so this is, i think, the biggest sort of shock to the system in terms of, you know, my world that i inhabited at the department of justice and as a and also as a defense lawyer, i really don't understand how the people who are going to be at the department of justice are going to handle the next four years. and on the one hand, you have the next 24 hours that but, i mean, they're going to have to live the same way. this is just today has been a shock to the system. they're going to have to be dealing with this over and over again. and you have the president talking about the pardons that he is going to give of crimes that are really go to the as we've talked about, as goes to the heart of what it means to be a democracy as well as just violent acts. and they're not entitled in any way, shape or form to a pardon or clemency or any sort of commutation. the entire dc

bench, the district court, has been inundated with these cases, and republican and democratic judges appointed by every single president you can think of, including donald trump, have talked about how awful these crimes are and have taken it seriously. so you've seen sort of an apolitical response to what happened. and so you have donald trump running on this sort of like, you know, our sort of traditional view of law doesn't matter. and you have president biden just in the last 24 hours, taking the extraordinary step of, in many ways, saying, i want to relieve certain people from what could be the abuse of the legal system, because normally you'd say, you know, you didn't do anything wrong. you obviously liz cheney didn't do anything wrong. adam kinzinger didn't do anything wrong. mark milley didn't do anything wrong. anything remotely that we can think about. so why do they need a pardon? and they need the pardon precisely because you have a president, as you said,

who is a convicted felon who has. and that's just that's just starting with the criminal stuff. there's all sorts of other things found by the courts. he's threatened criminal prosecution over and over again. he has, in fact, we know from trump 1.0 actually taken those steps with respect to, for instance, hillary clinton. just to take one example of wanting to do that, john durham is another example of appointing someone to go after people. just spectacular failure. and so you have biden doing this, something so unusual, which is saying, you know what? i understand that our system does not have a way to deal with this kind of abuse that we are going to see, and there's enough evidence that he's going to do it, that i'm going to take him at his word because of that history, that these people shouldn't have to suffer for public service. so it's a remarkable turnaround in terms of where the country is. there's no question that from an international perspective, you know, this we really are no

longer this sort of shining beacon on a hill. >> you've done some sort of legal scrub of the policies that trump has already made public. his announcements, especially the executive orders that are mostly targeted at the border. what is your analysis of what he's announced so far in terms of constitution bending law and norm busting? >> so it's going to remain to be seen. you know, you need to see the exact wording. i mean, i've read sort of what they have put out in terms of what they're going to do. it's both going to be important to see exactly how it's worded and then exactly what happens. there's no question that the one that seems just so palpably difficult to square with law is saying we're going to get rid of birthright citizenship. meaning if you're born in this country, you're entitled to be a citizen. that is in the constitution of the united states. so that means that congress can't change it.

and certainly the president, through an executive order, can't change it. those are lesser to the constitution to state the obvious. so i don't know how they're going to get around it. i assume they have done polling that says it's worth the battle to on that one. or maybe they're going to try and slice it up in some way to make it. the category is going to be one where it helps them with polling, but it's hard to see how you have somebody who, just as we all saw today, swear on a bible to uphold the rule of law and the constitution, and in the next breath is saying, i'm going to get rid of birthright citizenship. and whether it's sort of in general or for some specific group, it's in the constitution that he just swore to uphold. so that sort of number one, what happens at the border and how the military is used is it's a complicated issue, but it's one where if the military is going to not arrest

people, but to sort of facilitate law enforcement, then that could be entirely legal. if it's going to arrest people. you have the military being used domestically. that is a whole other ballgame. we will. and that's point two quickly. point three is there are a whole bunch of lawsuits that have already been filed in dc. people are ready for this relating to the so-called d.o.j, the which is a sort of made up name. it's a made up agency that these lawsuits say are not complying with the transparency rules, which are in place because we're all entitled to know what our government is doing. and so you can't be using whatsapp and signal, and you can't have meetings without having records of it that people can access. so there now, i think three if not four lawsuits about all of that, but that's the stephen miller of it all flood the zone, right? >> that's part one. part two is operate in secrecy. don't let people, even inside your own government know what it is that

you're up to. and that applies to doge. it also applies to all of the immigration action. >> i mean, these are the four, the four things that were announced in his speech, which we've talked about a little bit, declaring a national emergency at the southern border, deploying troops to the southern border to repel a, quote, invasion, categorizing or classifying cartels as foreign terrorists, and unleashing all the tools we have to deal with foreign terrorists, and declaring the alien enemies act. these may be very well be the sum and substance of these executive orders. >> so one of the things about the shock and awe is that some of it is in policy, and some of it isn't simply in the chilling effect. right? so something like birthright citizenship, as you said, will face a number of legal challenges. we've seen some more recent reporting about the fact that they may limit the scope of it to be about recent arrivals and their children. that still means that i know plenty of people who are u.s. citizens who have children adopted from foreign countries, who are updating their passports, who are getting attorneys on the phone and

making sure that they understand their rights, the anxiety it creates is real, even if a policy like that never goes into effect. i think one of the things that we ought to be very careful about is the fact that donald trump wants to collapse what is happening at the us-mexico border, new arrivals and asylum process with what is happening in the interior of the country. right. there does seem to be a lot of political agreement about what is happening at the us-mexico border. there is much less agreement about what we're supposed to do with the 11 million undocumented people who are members of our community. and i think one of the things that needs to be teased apart is when he is going after each group and the way he is going after each group, and the civil liberties that are likely to be violated by a lot of the policies that he's laying out. >> i just want to pull back for a moment and talk a little bit about what we saw today in the performance of it, because there's a lot to unpack there. i think, you know, i was jotting some notes earlier and then

again, just listening to all of you and trying to take in how tragic this moment is. essentially, what we saw today was the peaceful transfer of power to someone who doesn't believe in democracy or the rule of law. we saw the promise of a return to greatness for america, from a president who has weakened our bonds of affection and actually weakened the country in a plethora of ways. we saw his rhetorical embrace of martin luther king jr this on mlk junior day of all days, by someone whose movement is almost wholly dedicated to the destruction of everything that martin luther king jr stood for and his legacy. and all of this unfolded as we listened to the battle hymn of the republic, which actually is a song written by an abolitionist. that was a battle cry for union soldiers in the civil war. and i, i wanted

to bring that together, just to take a moment to recognize that i think donald trump has kind of today shown us the challenge to americans and american society who wants a very different and democratic vision, which is what what does the opposition look like and sound like and do in a country where donald trump and his movement are determined to culturally appropriate the very thing they are trying to destroy? and i think kind of that challenge has been put to the rest of american society today. this is day one of what does the rest of america do with that? and i think we've got to be a lot less reactive and a lot more strategic in thinking about how to build coalitions. and i don't have any answers beyond that, but i just want to talk about how disturbing that was. and i also think we saw some

important reflections. you know, michelle obama's decision not to go was a sense of, hey, something is not normal here. when you looked out at the sea of faces and you saw almost all only white americans, that wasn't quite normal either. so right around the edges you can tell that something was not quite right. and that's where we need to begin. >> the new york times reported this as it was going on, quote, as trump disparages migrants as criminals and outlines his plans, there are actually not millions and millions of criminal aliens, as he claims. but a largely white crowd is applauding inside the rotunda. i it's a beautiful list. i want to get a copy of that. i know you scratched it down, but i want a screenshot of that. but i would add to it the peaceful transfer of power was power was handed over to him in a transition he doesn't believe in. right? didn't believe in the peaceful transfer of power. that's right. >> so i think a lot of us have

drawn a lot of comfort as institutionalists over the years in these really important traditions, and they are important. i'm happy it was peaceful. that is something to celebrate. but what do you do when that has resulted in the election and transfer of power to someone who wants to burn the thing to the ground? >> well, and i think the other question for democrats and the pro-democracy coalition to answer is, what do you do with the despair that your coalition of available voters feel by what they view as your weakness? because i think the truth that no one has voiced in an hour and 19 minutes, i think tim tried to and blinked. is that what is perceived from a distance? and again, i'm not in the trenches. i'm not organizing. is that all of the honoring of institutions to a man who loathed them and sought to destroy them? mike pence is the first ever american vice president to be at the inauguration of someone who's who sent his supporters to endanger his life and the life of his family. he was there. what does all that reverence for

institutions mean? at an hour in a ceremony where they're handing them to someone who loathes them? well, does it mean respect or does it mean weakness? >> yeah, i think that's the right question. i think the other thing that that is very clear, just from talking to some of the americans in my life who are not involved in politics or journalism, is the millions of americans who did not vote for donald trump. expect the people who they did vote for, especially those who are still in office, to fight. and i mean that obviously democratically, peacefully and for them not not to pick, to fight, to be in opposition party. this is not a time for go along, get along. and i think the less they see democrats and others willing to do that, the more despair they themselves are in. >> there's the scene i quoted all the time where cuba gooding says to tom cruise how it feels we're fighting. we're just

starting to communicate. i feel like it took us an hour to starting. we're just getting started. on that note, no one is going to go anywhere. we'll have much more of this conversation with these friends on this inauguration day. as we await donald trump's first round of executive orders. we'll also have a live report from our dear friend jacob soboroff, who is where else? at the southern border for us today. deadline. white house continues after a quick break. don't go anywhere, friends. >> i am tony hawk and like many of you, i take a statin to reduce cholesterol. but statins can also deplete coq10 levels. that's what my doctor recommended. qanon coq10 qanon has the number one cardiologist has the number one cardiologist recommended form your record label is taking off. but so is your sound engineer. you need to hire. i need indeed. indeed you do. our advanced matching helps find talented candidates, so you can connect with them fast. visit indeed.com/hire

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carter has died at the age of 100. >> donald trump is now officially a convicted felon. >> justin trudeau announcing he intends to step down in el paso. philadelphia in the nation's capital. >> the palisades from msnbc world headquarters. >> donald trump's planned executive orders today will be among his first actions on his first day as president, and also

his clearest stance that we'll be able to see on his policy direction. with ten of them expected to address immigration and the border, some of them reversing or dropping biden administration orders. another invoking what trump calls a national emergency at the border. and in order to end birthright u.s. citizenship, a right explicitly protected by the 14th amendment and an attempt likely to be blocked by the courts. let's bring in my friend and colleague, nbc news national political correspondent jacob soboroff, in otay mesa, otay mesa, california, overlooking the border. if i botched that, jacob, please first correct it for me. and second, i am so cognizant all the time of the people impacted by a second trump term. right? it has nothing to do with any of us. it's real people who come to this country looking for a better life, who are tossed around in our politics and by trump's design, dehumanized real impacts to a lot of them almost

instantly. when in the 12 noon hour, the website that lets people trying to make appointments with the government for their immigration or migration or asylum status was taken offline. >> yeah, you're so right, nicole. this is about the people, not about the politics of this moment. and i was listening to you and alicia talk a couple minutes ago about how, you know, effectively the conversation we had around the border itself. what i'm standing over in otay mesa right now has been moved, actually, to the interior, to this largest mass deportation effort in american history and what president trump wants to do there. but i do want to talk about the border, because exactly, exactly four years ago, i was speaking to you from this exact point during the inauguration of president biden. and what he had promised then was a fair, safe, humane, orderly immigration system, a radical departure from the cruelty, the intentional cruelty, and the reporting bears that out of the previous trump

administration. one of the ways, actually, there was plenty of criticisms by immigration advocates and attorneys that represent migrants who cross borders just like this, one of the biden administration. but one of the main things that i do think a lot of the folks that were looking for a more humane system did support was this cbp, one system that allowed people to make appointments to come to the border, including the san ysidro port of entry, one of the largest land border crossings on the entire planet earth. it's just a stone's throw away in that direction by just making an appointment on an app, and that app has effectively been canceled. and there's 270 or so thousand people as of right now who had appointments, who now have nowhere to go, no recourse to come into the united states other than to try to get into this country illegally. that was the legal way. that was the right way of doing things. and now that is gone. let's talk about the interior. family separation started here in otay mesa. miss l, the namesake of the lawsuit that stopped the policy, won the order to reunify

all of those 5500 families deliberately split apart from one another. she was separated at otay mesa at the port of entry in that direction from where i'm standing, were it not for a federal judge here in the southern district of california, who said that this was one of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country, and stopped that policy. maybe 25 or 30,000 people would have been subjected to that policy, called torture by physicians for human rights, government sanctioned child abuse by the american academy of pediatrics. so now the conversation based on these executive orders, as promised by president trump, moves to the interior of the country, to the millions of undocumented folks, 20 million by at least one count that live with an undocumented person in their household that could be subjected to an entirely different type of family separation. and that includes, by the way, as i mentioned to rachel earlier, hundreds and hundreds of people that i just was with over the course of the last couple days, volunteering undocumented folks to help in the relief and recovery of the wildfire effort in the los angeles area. mass

deportation is not just the most violent criminals. it's people that live in our communities and in our schools and in our workplaces and in our neighbors. and that process is now underway with this series of ten or so executive orders announced by the trump administration earlier today. >> jacob, let me ask you this. so 270,000 people left without access to the website. andrew weissmann just handed me a note saying that the aclu has just sued about the cancellation of that app. what will the consequence be? where will those people go? will they gather at the border? ostensibly? >> in all likelihood, what analysts and people who understand this, this part of the world, the border, the thousands of mile long border between the pacific ocean and the gulf of mexico on the other side, i guess the gulf of america. now, if you go by what president trump has said, the this entire border, his goal is to seal it. but what happens

when you take away legal pathways as people go on more dangerous or deadly journeys? prevention through deterrence was a strategy that was pioneered by the clinton administration. in this very area, thousands of people used to cross on a daily basis in this area, just south of arnie's point, west of arnie's point, where i'm standing right now. and when they put in other ways of monitoring the border, it stopped down there. people crossed the ports of entry, the shift, the flow shift of human beings. when those legal pathways are taken away, people will start to enter through in between ports of entry yet again in those dangerous and deadly areas. and border officials know well that when you take away legal pathways, when you take away a means of entering the country for people in a in an orderly way, they'll do it in the, in the illegal way, because people are coming from the most desperate and dangerous circumstances on planet earth. the result of taking away legal pathways will be more people dying and more people getting injured attempting to come into the united states through ports of entry rather than at them.

and it's as simple as that. >> jacob, i guess what i'm trying to understand is, does he want to create? he's talked about caravans. he's talked about chaos at the border. does he want to create the chaos to muster the political will for the national emergency and other controversial policies he'd like to enact? >> i can't say what's in his head, but what i can tell you is by closing legal pathways, what you will do is force people who are desperate to get into the country, to come in between these ports of entry. and right now, the numbers are as low as they've been during the biden administration and as low as they were at the end of the trump administration. and that is because, by the way, of restrictive immigration policies put into place by the biden administration that are some of the most conservative proposed by a democratic administration in a generation. and so when you when you take away official ways for people to come into the country, these people making these policies know that migrants are going to try to find any way they can to get into the country. those numbers, if that happens, will in all likelihood go back up to your point and give the politicians

something to talk about, saying that there's an increase in migration in between ports of entry, and now we have to do x, y, or z in order to mitigate that. >> you and alicia both talked about what is going to happen in the interior of our country. the wall street journal was first to report over the weekend of planned raids. we do a little bit from the times reporting on this. the incoming trump administration has planned for post-inauguration immigration raids in chicago next week. the plan is called operation safeguard. what do you know about these plans and preparations to protect people who might be swept up in them? >> what the reporting tells us and what history tells us about about immigration enforcement in the interior, is that when it's announced in advance, it creates a chilling effect, a terrorizing effect on on not just the people that these raids and operations target, but other people in the community in which those folks might live or be targeted, even if they have nothing to do with these raids. they're collateral

damage, so to speak, in sort of the immigration enforcement parlance. and what does it mean for those people to be subjected to sort of that type of, of fear? it means they don't go to school. it means they don't go to work. it means they don't go to places of worship. it means they don't go into the community. it means they don't spend money in stores and in shops and in restaurants. it it creates a chilling effect throughout these communities. and in some measure, that's always been the goal of deterrence, to scare people both away from coming to the country, from the interior, but also to scare people who might be undocumented but who have not otherwise committed a crime to leave the country on their own, or to shrink away out of society. and so we don't know exactly what's going to happen in chicago. we don't know exactly what will happen in los angeles or philadelphia or denver or any of the other cities, new york, that there have been conversations reported about these types of actions happening. but what we do know is the impact that they have on people's psyches, both documented and undocumented. by

the way, it shakes people to their core, even people who are not the violent criminals that are intended to be the targets, at least the spoken intended targets that this administration says they're going to go after. >> initially, jacob soboroff, from the fires to the border. for us, we're really grateful to get to talk to you today. thank you for being there for us, my friend. >> thank you. nicole. >> we'll bring alicia and the whole panel in on this. i have to sneak in a quick break before we do so. live image of the white house. we'll be right white house. we'll be right back. i need to get me a new phone. you need to trade-in that busted up phone and get you a brand new iphone 16 pro at t-mobi's on them. families save 20% every month. what a deal! new and existing customers, trade in your busted old phone, and we'll give you a new iphone 16 pro with apple intelligence on us. ♪♪ (tony hawk) i still love to surf, snowboard, with apple intelligence on us. and of course, skate, so i take qunol magnesium to support my muscle and bone health. qunol's high-absorption magnesium glycinate helps me get the full benefits of magnesium. qunol. the brand i trust.

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get started at framebridge comm or visit a store today. >> we're back with john helm and andrew weissmann, mark alicia menendez and claire mccaskill. it took me an extra five minutes to get all your last names, and i don't know why i did that. john heilemann, bring us back to reality here. i mean, trump sought to put alligators and moats around the border, and he wanted to paint his border wall black and have spikes on it. i mean, really sadistic stuff. new york times reported that he wanted to issue pardons for people that carried out things like shooting people, trying to cross it. today, he has taken down an app that made the system at the southern border orderly, and border crossings are at, i think, a five year low. just suss out all these data points for me today. >> all right. well, you know how. okay for you i want to put

a fine point on something that jacob soboroff said, which is it's not simply that people will come in between ports of entry, it's that you are empowering the cartels and the gangs and doing the exact opposite of what it is that the trump administration purports to be doing. and it brings me back to something very smart that claire said earlier, which is you want to talk about the bureaucracy, that's fine. there's a way to go after the bureaucracy, focus on what actually matters, focus on some of these contractors. you want to solve the problem of immigration. we can solve the problem of immigration. it is the way you are talking about doing it that is actually exacerbating the problem rather than making it better. i think that's part of the challenge. isn't that the point? >> i guess what i was trying to get at with jacob is, isn't it the point, isn't it? >> trump's objective to create is i think the objective in this case is about seeming just tough on the border and, and, and acting as though he is just doing all of the things and also making it difficult for the opposition and the resistance to choose which of these things they are focusing right to draw them into a myriad legal fights, to draw them into myriad

challenges in a way that, you know, simply depletes resources, makes things more complicated? i'm not necessarily sure it is. i don't think he understands the dynamics of what creates a border crisis. i don't think he understands the power that the president of mexico currently has to create a border crisis for him, right? if they reinstate remain in mexico, she gets to decide who stays and who goes back. so i think so much of this comes down to he may not understand it. i think stephen miller, i think tom homan do understand some of the nuance of this, but i'm not sure that's exactly it. >> john heilemann, can you hear us? >> i can, i think the nuance at the policy level is super important. >> i think the public i mean, i'll read you the public support for what trump is talking about doing. 87% of americans responding in a poll support deporting people in the country illegally who committed crimes. 63% of americans polled support

deporting immigrants who are here illegally and arrived over the last four years, 55% of all americans support deporting all immigrants who are here illegally. that is a massive number of human beings. 41% of americans support ending birthright citizenship. nuances. never been in the least popular thing that trump has talked about is ending daca. but on the spectrum, there's a lot of support for some of what trump wants to do. and that support is what may give him some political opportunity to invoke things that are very alarming in his hands. the extra powers of the government. your thoughts as we await perhaps the last hour before these executive orders are revealed and signed into law? >> well, i don't want to. nicole, the thing you just said that you almost was like a little throwaway there is worth dwelling on for a moment, which

is that i believe you said that according to this polling, that there's less support for birthright citizenship, there's less support for. there's more support for ending birthright citizenship than there is for ending daca. right? i think that's what you're saying. the least popular thing is, is ending daca, which is kind of, on its face, sort of crazy, right? i mean, it speaks to it speaks to the a program that is that is way less foundational to the country. daca is a is a popular is a relatively popular program compared to birthright citizenship, which is much more fundamental to the country to what america is. i think it speaks to the fact that i'm not sure that a whole lot of americans, this has not been an issue that's really been litigated properly in any political context, in a campaign anywhere. i don't think people necessarily understand what birthright citizenship is. and of course, this gets us into the question of like, is the poll

the polls been done properly? have the questions been asked appropriately? have they been explained enough, well enough to people? and the reason i dwell on it is that i think all of these questions in the polling have a quality of abstraction to them. that makes the polling on it very tenuous, and i do think that it creates a political look donald trump has if he has a mandate for nothing else, he has a mandate to do some of these things, to try some of these things that he campaigned on and that have become in many of these cases, especially those top ones that you mentioned, there have become majority issues in america. right? we might not like that. we might not think it's humane. we might not think it's fair. i don't, but i also but i also think that he can stand up and say, there's nothing i said more clearly than what i wanted to do with about about illegal immigration in the country. and, and i won the election. and i think that the thing about the abstraction that i'm trying to get to here is

that i don't think most people in america have any idea what it's going to look like if you started to actually try to execute, to execute on not just removing illegal immigrants who are criminals, but starting to remove all illegal immigrants in the country, what the economic impact of that would be, what the social impact of that would be, what the human impact of that would be, what it would mean for law enforcement across the country. if you had to mobilize the kind of force to, in any kind of reasonable time frame, remove the kinds of numbers that trump has talked about. the number of illegal immigrants in the country is, is, is a vast number of many, many millions of people that would take many, many years and would draw down a massive amount of, of, of the of federal, state, local law enforcement or would have to enlist the military, which would be a whole other horror show. and i do think that when people start to see what it looks like to pull it then, and i think that's where the rubber is going to meet the road of the politics of

this, because i think a lot of people are not going to have the stomach for what this is going to mean if they actually see it enacted. >> it's amazing because it i mean, you're right, we have not litigated this, but we did all live. i remember i was sitting in the propublica tape first broke the cries of children and child separation. i mean, we know what his instincts are. we know what he promised to do. and at every trump rally, it started with the immigration tapes. he rolled tapes and promised to do all these things. but you're absolutely right. we either we don't remember that chapter in our own very recent history or we haven't contemplated something worse. >> well, and i just meant more specifically on the question of ending birthright citizenship, i don't think i think that's an issue that for a lot of democrats, what they've done is said, well, that's unconstitutional, and they haven't made the case for why we should beyond the recourse to, of course, it's unconstitutional is a good starting point for this argument. but to try to explain to people why birthright

citizenship is essential to what america has always been is not a thing that we've had a thorough airing of. i don't think we've seen that argument really played out anywhere. and i think that people, when they hear it, they just think automatic citizenship. why? i think that it's not an issue. it's an issue that will, that would, would, would benefit from a more thorough defense if it's going to be on actually on the table. and trump's actually going to try to end birthright citizenship and courts are actually going to accept it. i think having it on the table and having a real argument about what the value of birthright citizenship is in this country and how much of the country's of what, like i said, what america is a nation of immigrants has been built on that cornerstone. that's an argument that that needs to be fully, fully engaged before we can pull it in a way that that will be meaningful, to understand what americans really think about it. >> well, i think we'll learn more about what they really think about. the constitution has to be in the constitution, the perfect person to talk to about all of this will be joining us. we have to sneak in

a break. but on the other side, we will bring in congressman jamie raskin. he worked to hold donald trump accountable during his first term as president and now as a member of the january 6th select committee. he has been preemptively pardoned by the outgoing president, joe biden. we'll have that conversation next. >> it's important to remember that for all the statistics and square mileage and square footage and number of people displaced, they're all individual people with their homes, with their lives driving around, there's almost nothing left standing. >> occasionally you'll see a house that's okay or a street that's okay, but that's occasional. >> i continue to see, and i want to shout out one more time, the first responders who are responding in this mutual aid effort from all over southern effort from all over southern california. it really has you founded your kayak company because you love the ocean. not spreadsheets... you need to hire. i need indeed. indeed you do. our matching platform lets you spend less time searching and more time connecting with candidates. visit indeed.com/hire

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pardons today by outgoing president joe biden. congressman, thank you for being here. >> you bet. i'm delighted to be with you, nicole. >> did you accept your pardon? and would you advise your staff to accept theirs? >> well, you know, i'm not even sure that's part of the process. i'm trying to connect up with a lawyer to figure out whether you accept or reject a pardon, because one interpretation i found from some cases is that a pardon is like an executive order or a legislative enactment. it's just public law. and so you don't have the choice whether or not to accept it or reject it. i know there is some contrary authority, so i'm going to try to figure that out and figure out, you know, what to do. you know, i have felt, as i've said for many weeks about this, now that we are safe with the speech and debate clause, which protects us against both federal and state criminal prosecution as well as civil lawsuits. this gives us, obviously, an added

fortification against any efforts by trump and his administration to do what they've been talking about with liz cheney and with bennie thompson, which is, you know, they've been concocting this whole theory about how liz cheney somehow suborned perjury or interfered with the right to counsel, which is complete nonsense and has been refuted and debunked by the democrats on the house administration committee. but they've obviously been trying to torture out some reason to try to prosecute people. and president biden basically put it put it to bed. >> the issue was initiated by donald trump. it was written about by kash patel, and it was popularized by his allies and many of his nominees in their confirmation hearings. and it is interesting that it is sort of put on par or lumped into the same conversation about pardons that are expected for convicted people who have been convicted of the crimes of violence against law enforcement

officials. your thoughts about the pardons that donald trump himself teased out at the united states capitol earlier today? >> well, you know, thank you for making that elementary moral point. those of us who served on the january 6th select committee and the police officers who got a pardon, doctor fauci, have committed no offense and are have not been prosecuted for anything and have not done anything wrong. and that's versus talking about hundreds and hundreds of people who've already gone through the criminal justice process. the vast majority of them have admitted to committing crimes. others have gone all the way through the process and been convicted by a jury of their peers beyond a reasonable doubt for having committed crimes and crimes. and some of those are nonviolent offenses, and some of them are violent offenses, and appears to be a split within the trump administration as to whether they should be pardoning

just the nonviolent insurrectionists or the violent ones as well. that is, the ones who attacked police officers with trump flags and confederate battle flags and american flags and baseball bats and other weapons. so i think that remains to be seen at this point. >> congressman, if pardoned or or in the eyes of the trump administration, sort of if the crimes are erased, what do you do about the threats of retribution or violence on the part of people who, again, are in prison because they were violent and the role that judges may have played or jurors may have played, or other witnesses like the police officers. >> yeah. and that's the critical point here. people have generally been pardoned, either because they're innocent. and that's the case with these, you know, preemptive or presumptive pardons or because there was some grave miscarriage of justice. neither of those

conditions operate with respect to the insurrectionists or because they've done time and they are repentant and they are reformed and they're rehabilitated. the question is whether donald trump is actually going to vouch for any violent insurrectionists. he's pardoning that these people, in fact, are reformed and rehabilitated, that they are not going to go out and become some kind of, you know, violent political shock troops for the maga movement. there are a lot of judges and a lot of prosecutors and a lot of other people in public life, as well as the public generally, who would have every reason to be afraid that these people might just be unleashed on the public if they're not vouching for their reform and rehabilitation. >> congressman, your voice was among the clearest and warning of the threats to our democracy that donald trump represented. if reelected, mara gaye had an almost poetic articulation of

what was handed back over to him, you know, peaceful transfer of power that he violated for the first time four years ago. the legacy and the quotes of martin luther king, who donald trump opposes in almost everything he fought for. what do you make of this day and how democrats and the pro-democracy coalition comes back from it? >> well, there are obviously some eerie dimensions to this day, and some of the political rhetoric has just been deranged. but look, we are in the middle of the fight of our lives. i mean, this is a long term fight to rescue democratic freedom and the rights of the people. and we've got to continue to make common cause across the partizan political spectrum. adam kinzinger and liz cheney, mitt romney, people like that have been very important players here, and we need other republicans to come forward to say they will stand up for democracy and the rule of law,

as well as more independents and more democrats and everybody across the board. when you look at the history of attacks on constitutional democracy around the world, it's only been multi-partisan coalitions of people standing up for the rule of law that have been able to defeat authoritarian and fascist threats. now, i will say that within the maga coalition, there are different elements there. we can see in some of the recent statements of steve bannon that his part of the party, which is kind of the nativist maga original elements, is very concerned about the ascendancy of the oligarch techno feudalists. and he says that the people in maga are not going to be reduced to being techno serfs in the new feudalist government

that these people want to set up. so already we can see that their coalition is beginning to come apart in different ways, and we have to look for any opportunity to make common cause with people who will stand up for the constitution and the rule of law. >> i only have a minute left, but i want to know if you and your colleagues from the january 6th select committee would go over to the senate side and advise them on how to conduct congressional hearings, confirmation hearings in this case that break through to the american public about the dangers of some of trump's picks to run cabinet agencies. >> well, the watchword has got to be teamwork and solidarity. you've got to get together behind the scenes and figure out exactly what the messages are and how and then how best to communicate them and convey them to the public. these can't be, you know, solo performances by anybody. and i think if you decide that you're going to work together, you're going to huddle

up, you're going to plan it out. you can be very successful using all of the new media available to us in breaking through that sound barrier, and that kind of solidarity and teamwork will be essential going forward as the republicans begin to fly apart in different ways. we've got to hang tough and stand together. >> congressman jamie raskin, some words of wisdom i'm going to make sure those circulate far and wide. thank you for spending some time with us today. and if you figure out all the legal twists and turns of the pardon process, please come back and explain it to us. if you're at the forefront of that, we'll we'll wait till you have full clarity. thank you for talking to us today, john heilemann. thank you for joining us from your remote location, andrew weissman, mark, alicia menendez and claire mccaskill. special thanks to lisa and claire, who did a whole two hours with me today. that's our new norm. and thanks to all of you who showed up today and are here and show up every day. we're so grateful to all of you for tuning in during these truly remarkable times. we keep going now. ari melber picks up our