← The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell
The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell
Trump destroys White House East Wing for ballroom
00:38:33
Tonight on The Last Word: Congress faces a November 1 deadline to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies. And Donald Trump is criticized for his relationships with autocrats. Plus, Lawrence shares some of his conversation with Rachel Maddow from the recent MSNBC Live ’25 event. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and Amb. Michael McFaul join Lawrence O’Donnell.
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- [00:00]
Angie Hicks
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Maurices Spokesperson
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- [00:31]
Lawrence O'Donnell
Trump keeps making it easier and easier for future historians 100 years from now to evaluate who he really was as a person and a president. At 8:46am when the North Tower of the World Trade center was struck by an airliner, we had reason to believe at first that it was an accident. No aircraft ever should have been even close to the World Trade center. But it could have been a plane out of control on the way to LaGuardia. But 17 minutes later, at 9:03am when the south tower was hit by an airliner, everyone knew this was not an accident. And 34 minutes later, when a third airliner hit the Pentagon, the world knew this was a coordinated attack unlike anything the world had ever seen. And no one knew what would be hit next. No one would have any reason at that time to believe it was over. The Vice President of the United States was lifted out of his chair in his office in the West Wing of the White House and rushed through the corridors where he disappeared into the White House bunker and spent the entire day down there, worried that the next plane was coming for him. In the White House, the President of the United States spent the rest of the day in the air in Air Force One, which was adjudged to be the safest place the President could be, with the country under attack and Washington awaiting the next plane to hit the Capitol or the White House. Or who knew? At 10:03am, United flight number 93 hit the ground in Pennsylvania, killing everyone on board. After passengers bravely rebelled against Osama bin Laden's hijackers. The plane had already been detected off course by air traffic control and been presumed to be headed for Washington, targeting the Capitol or the White house. Once Flight 93 went down, it was over. But no one knew that, least of all Dick Cheney, hiding in the White House bunker that was located under the east wing of the White House in a targeted attack on the White House, attempting to kill the President The East Wing would be the least likely target, which is why the bunker was located there. A plane attacked the White House. Attacking the White House during the day would, of course, choose to aim for the West Wing, where the President was likely to be in the Oval Office in the middle of the night. That same plane would aim for the residents in the center of the White House. First lady Laura Bush was at the capitol when the 911 attack began and was rushed back to the East Wing of the White House where her office was located, and then immediately rushed down to the bunker below her office. Here's Laura Bush in that bunker, not knowing if the next plane was coming for her. Dick Cheney on one side and his wife Lynn Cheney on the other side. Well, all three of them worried about so much the safety of the country, the safety of their families, and just how strong that bunker really was. The bunker wasn't tested that day, and nothing destructive hit the White House until 24 years later, when Donald Trump attacked the East Wing of the White House with funding provided by the now most disgraced clean class of billionaires and business executives in American history. Before demolishing the East Wing of the White House last week, Donald Trump, of course, lied. He began by lying about every previous president. Donald Trump said For more than 150 years, every president has dreamt about having a ballroom at the White House to accommodate people for grand parties, state visits, et cetera. That is is a lie. Only one desperately needy president craved having bigger crowds worship him than could fit in the massive East Room of the White House. When Donald Trump began running For President in 2016, he lied to voters, saying that he would never ask for or accept campaign contributions because he wanted to remain incorruptible, and he was so rich that he could pay for his presidential campaign himself. He then immediately started soliciting campaign contributions and has never stopped. Every day of his life since then, Donald Trump has been soliciting campaign contributions. Another lie Donald Trump told in his first campaign for president was that the White House shouldn't have big, fancy events like state dinners. And thanks to Michael Daly's brilliant reporting in the Daily Beast, we know that Donald Trump said in 2016 we shouldn't have dinners at all. He told a campaign rally. We we should be eating a hamburger on a conference table. He added, forget the steak dinners that cost, by the way, a fortune. Cost a fortune. The lie the White House is currently telling is that the new Trump ballroom will cost $300 million. And the reason we know it's a lie is because Lying is what the Trump White House does every day. And secondly, Donald Trump is trying to pick a budget number that won't sound so offensive and the lowest number that even he could come up with, someone willing to lie about anything. The only budget number he could come up with at this point for the temple that he wants to build so that at least 1,000 people can worship him indoors at the White House is at least $300 million. We will have no idea until sometime after the Trump presidency how much it really cost, because the project is funded by the so called Trust for the National Mall. The word trust in that title is supposed to have two meanings. One is trust as in trust fund, a fund for preservation of important national structures in Washington, and trust as in we can trust that the Trust for the National Mall won't allow anything horrible to happen to our national treasures in Washington, which very much include the entirety of the White House. But now the so called Trust for the National Mall is in effect controlled by Donald Trump, which means it cannot be trusted with anything. Every previous change made to the White House since the addition of the west and east wings in 1902 has been reversible or adaptable to another purpose. The swimming pool installed by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt as the therapy center that he needed because of his paralyzed legs was also used by President Kennedy before the White House Press Brief Room was built on top of that space. No structural changes in the White House were necessary for those adjustments. Donald Trump's vulgar paving over of the White House Rose Garden can be easily reversed by the next president. Donald Trump's sleazy use of gold trinkets on the shelves and walls of the Oval Office will probably disappear with him because he'll want to take the gold with him. But his destruction of the historic East Wing of the White House is a unique presidential crime against our history and our culture, made by someone who publicly at least, seems to believe that the only American history and culture worth worshiping is on the losing side of the Civil War. Donald Trump expresses outrage at the taking down of any statue to any Confederate general who committed treason and did everything that general could every day to kill as many American soldiers as he possibly could so as to defend the practice of slavery, the crime of slavery in the Confederate States. That war was waged to preserve slavery, and that is something Donald Trump wants us to honor. While he refuses to honor even the White House itself, he defaces it with a Bulgarian's lust for gold and a madman's lust for destruction. He couldn't do it alone. He didn't attempt to obtain the money for the project the way the Constitution intended, which is by passing a law in Congress giving him the money and the authority to do it. Donald Trump turned directly instead to rich business people, all of whom do not think they are rich enough. Mark Zuckerberg doesn't think he's rich enough. Jeff Bezos doesn't think he's rich enough. Tim Cook doesn't think Apple doesn't is a successful enough company. Apparently he doesn't think he's personally rich enough. And Comcast, the current, but not for long owner of the company I now work for, doesn't think it's a big enough business. Comcast is committed to nothing but Comcast. That has been true of major American corporations for long before all of us were born. John Kenneth Galbraith, then the most famous economist in the world, exposed the incentives of corporations and corporate executives in his groundbreaking work the New industrial state in 1967. And if you read Galbraith in college, you have known for your entire adulthood to expect nothing that isn't purely self serving from American corporations. All of the major corporations that own television news organizations never wanted to. The television news operations that they own are minor irritants within the giant media systems that those corporations own. The only reason abc, CBS and NBC ever did news in the first place was as a justification for getting to use the American airwaves to broadcast their TV signals for free. No one took TV news seriously when it started. It was a minor entry in an information flow controlled by newspapers at the time. And so the owners of CBS News in 60 Minutes paid off Donald Trump in a phony lawsuit brought by Donald Trump for two reasons. Number one, they have never cared about the news and number two, they want to be richer. The same thing with ABC News when they paid off Donald Trump in a frivolous lawsuit brought by Donald Trump against ABC News, the giant Disney corporation inside of which lives the minor irritant called ABC News, bent to Donald Trump's will and handed him $16 million in a phony settlement of a phony lawsuit because Disney doesn't care about the news, never has and never will. They might all be doing this because they fear Donald Trump's interference with the next merger they want to engage in. But it wasn't always that way. It used to be that Republican administrations allowed just about any corporate merger to go through as part of their so called pro business spirit. Turns out that was all a lie. They don't believe in any professional elected Republicans in Washington don't believe in anything because they have now become the most interfering administration in the history of corporate America. With corporate America, it was Democratic administrations in the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission that challenged some of these mergers in the past. And you know what happened when Democratic administrations challenged those mergers? Usually the courts let those mergers go through. That's what high priced corporate lawyers are for. Warner Brothers, which is now the target of a merger, has been there before. When AT&T took over Time Warner, the Obama administration objected to the merger. AT&T went to court and won in a lawsuit that lasted exactly 204 days. These greedy, cowardly corporate executives and billionaires of today don't want to wait 204 days to get richer. Not when the payoffs of the mergers could come immediately just by paying off Donald Trump. And so none of them are willing to do it the old fashioned way and just go to court and beat Donald Trump and his clowns at the Justice Department in court, use their corporate lawyers to do what they know how to do. CNN is already owned by a right wing Trump supporter and has compromised itself accordingly. The firing started right away in that new regime. That's why Jim Acosta is no longer there and others are no longer there. And everyone who remains has become much more careful in anything they might even think of saying about Donald Trump. And now CNN eagerly pays a Trump supporter to lie on CNN every day and night for Donald Trump. CNN did this during the first Trump presidential campaign and presidency. CNN regularly paid Trump supporters to lie about Trump on cnn. But the CNN regime then realized that was a mistake and they stopped doing it. They stopped paying for lies. But then CNN got a new head. The head of CNN for the last three years, hired by the Trump supporting owner and operator of CNN, is an Englishman who thinks paying Scott Jennings to lie about Donald Trump is money very well spent. Scott Jennings, who used to be an aide to Senator Mitch McConnell, was not always a rabid, lying Trump supporter. When he first started appearing on television, he was capable of criticizing some of the more extreme Trump positions. But Scott Jennings figured out where the money is and how he could get his own podcast and decided to become the J.D. vance of CNN. And here is the single goofiest thing ever said by anyone in charge of CNN in that network's history. The Lost in America Englishman who heads CNN said, quote, scott's like d'. Artagnan. He's got his sword out and he's got about four Democrats against him, but he spiked them all off. That's much more like it. I think he's a worthy opponent, as it were, for the Democrats in the room. And it makes not just good television, but also for, in some ways, a slightly deeper testing of the ideas all the way around the table, good television. Here's how bad that television is that they make over there. The show that Scott Jennings frequents the most is on opposite this program. And that show, on a good night, gets half, half of the audience of this show. This program usually has an audience triple the size of the terrible, terrible television that Scott Jennings is delivering on the absurdly degraded version of cnn, presided over by the man who thinks lying for Donald Trump on TV is an honorable pursuit and should be paid for by cnn. Scott's like d', Artagnan, he says, as horrific as it is, as corrupt as it is, Donald Trump's destruction of the east wing of the White House is not the worst thing he's done. It is the worst thing he has done to property in Washington, D.C. or anywhere else. But the worst thing he's done in his life is the harm he has done to the most vulnerable people in the world, some of whom I saw last week in Africa and Malawi and Ethiopia. There are people who are starving in Africa tonight, children, babies, because Donald Trump and Elon Musk decided to take their food away. Those kids that you just saw are doing okay. Those kids are in a school in Malawi. They got desks last week. Their lives improved a bit last week. They were not dependent on the food programs that America was funding in Malawi. Not the kids you saw there, but many others were. Bill Gates famously called what Donald Trump and Elon Musk decided to do the world's richest man killing the world's poorest children. They took their medicine away. They took their food away. They took the food away from starving children and people in the middle of a famine in Sudan. Donald Trump did that. That is the worst thing Donald Trump has done. But it is also invisible to most of us. And sometimes the story that we can see, the destruction that we can see, the vulgarity, the cruelty, the corruption, the cowardly corporate greed and laziness that we can see tells the story of Donald Trump that historians will be telling for hundreds of years. And right now in Washington, nothing tells the story of Donald Trump more vividly than Donald Trump's corrupt and savage destruction of a home that voters never should have trusted him with. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse will join us next. Joining us now is Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. Senator, thank you very much for joining US tonight. As the week began last week, I was out of the country. But I know at first it wasn't easy to even see imagery of what was going on at the White House. That's how much Donald Trump was trying to hide it. Apparently, that plan didn't work, hiding what was happening there.
- [18:47]
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
No, it sure didn't. And I think the reason that they wanted to hide it is not because it was the worst thing Trump was doing, but because it was so symbolic of his arrogance. We've always said that presidents are the occupants of the White House. Nobody ever said that presidents own the White House and get to destroy it on their whim. And then, of course, the notion that this is going to be a big rebuild and all of the big plutocrats, CEOs and Wheeler dealers are going to come with their big fat checks. And that's how this new president's structure, this home for the American presidency, is going to be rebuilt. I mean, it's got everything but the damn skyboxes.
- [19:39]
Lawrence O'Donnell
Yeah. And Senator, about the corporate greed and cowardice here. It's not that long ago that when American corporate giants wanted to merge, if there was a Democratic administration, they might very well run into some resistance. And they knew exactly what to do. It's why they have the highest priced corporate lawyers in the world. They would just go to court and they would fight and often win and win within a matter of months through.
- [20:12]
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
The law because they had a winning case and could convince a judge. Now, the routine is to go show up at the Trump White House with a big check and have the instructions go out to the antitrust division of the Department of Justice. He's a good guy, he's a friend. Let's make that case go away. And if you look at the list of people who are paying for this new spectacular palace that they're building, the guilty party palace, it's people who are in litigation with the government. It's people who have merger approvals pending. It's the crypto boys who are having the Trump administration basically set up the guidelines for their whole industry. And then, of course, the usual, you know, fossil fuel polluters and inauguration tech billionaires. They even went back to big tobacco, for Pete's sake. It's really quite the roster.
- [21:11]
Lawrence O'Donnell
Yeah, the, the, the idea that you have to do this in order to conduct your business. It reminds me a bit about the law firms that all the ones that capitulated to Trump at the very beginning when he threatened them. If these corporations had all just said no, we've Got our corporate lawyers. We're ready to go. We will fight Trump's obviously fraudulent attempts to block our mergers, and we'll go ahead and do it. That was open to them all along. Correct.
- [21:42]
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
And ditto the big corporate leaders of the big American corporations. They could easily have said, nope. There's some boundaries here that we're going to honor because we respect that our country, the one that lets our company succeed so well, is a country that runs on rule of law. And instead, it's now a question of coming in and seeing how obsequious you can be to Trump and to his cronies and minions and that, you know, I grew up in the Foreign Service, and that was always the biggest distinction between us and most of the countries where diplomats serve. We operate under rule of law. Doesn't matter how big, rich and powerful you are, you still have to play by the rules. And in these other countries, it's all who can get closer to El Jefe and get favors.
- [22:37]
Lawrence O'Donnell
So one thing that we now have evidence of Donald Trump fearing is Ronald Reagan. He does seem to fear what could be Ronald Reagan's possible continued grip on the. On the. On the views of some Republicans, although I don't see any Republicans following very many Reagan principles these days. I want to run this ad that Canadian TV rank that angered Donald Trump so much because every word of it was true and Ronald Reagan was saying it. And this is what provoked Donald Trump to suddenly reopen a trade war with Canada. Let's listen to this. When someone says, let's impose tariffs on foreign imports, it looks like they're doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs. And sometimes for a short while, it works, but only for a short time. But over the long run, such trade barriers hurt every American worker and consumer. Senator, that was Ronald Reagan's view. And when Canada started airing Ronald Reagan's view, that's when Donald Trump said, you know, we're going back into a trade war. Because you quoted Ronald Reagan. That was their crime against Donald Trump.
- [23:58]
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
Yeah. As I recall, that was by a Canadian province. So that would be like a state running an ad that President Trump didn't like and him punishing the entire country because he didn't like the ad. And then, of course, the spillover of trade wars with Canada is trade damage to America, and particularly to the border states where they've seen enormous drop off in tourism, they've seen enormous drop off in business. Many businesses are unable to get the raw materials for their manufacturing across the border any longer. So you're seeing a great number of Americans hit very, very hard in their real lives because of this extraordinarily petulant response by the President of the United States to an advertisement which if this were America, everybody would have a First Amendment right to run that ad.
- [25:01]
Lawrence O'Donnell
So, Senator, I'm not hearing any criticism among elected Republicans in Washington about what Donald Trump has done and his destruction of the White House. But one one mentioned that maybe it was bad timing because there's a government shutdown. And oh, by the way, people's health care premiums are going to skyrocket because of Donald Trump and the Republicans.
- [25:23]
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
Yeah, well, when they're willfully cutting off food benefits for poor kids, when they're willfully exposing millions of Americans to multi hundred dollar monthly premium increases for their health care, while they've got Medicare cuts of half a trillion dollars looming and Medicaid cuts of a trillion dollars looming behind that, it's not necessarily a great look to be building a gilded new ballroom for the White House to be buying the Secretary of Homeland Security Hundreds of millions, 175 million, I think it is, in new luxury jets to be taking this enormously expensive free new Air Force One from the cutteries and having to spend fortunes to try to make it safe and bug free and all of that. So you're seeing these, what would be in an ordinary administration, preposterous luxuries, indulgences that are all being done in plain view as regular American families, the ones that Trump promised to protect and lower the costs of are taking it on the chin from Canadian tariffs, from health care costs, from home insurance rates, all of it.
- [26:45]
Lawrence O'Donnell
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, thank you very much for joining us tonight.
- [26:49]
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
Thank you.
- [26:50]
Lawrence O'Donnell
Coming up, the author of the new book Autocrats vs Democrats, Michael McFaul, will join us next.
- [27:01]
Angie Hicks
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- [27:31]
Lawrence O'Donnell
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- [28:33]
Lawrence O'Donnell
Donald Trump is using his trip to Asia as he uses most trips to warm up to foreign autocrats while refueling in the Middle East. Donald Trump invited the Emir of Qatar, who gave Donald TRUMP A $400 million used private jet that he didn't want anymore in May so that Donald Trump can convert it to his own use. Well, the emir is one of the great rulers of the world, not just the Middle East. He's loved, he's beloved and respected by his country. I don't know what's more important, being beloved or respected.
- [29:14]
Michael McFaul
Both.
- [29:15]
Lawrence O'Donnell
You have a preference because you have both. You're one of the few. It's hard to think of a stupider question than that, that you could possibly ask anyone in that position. Our next guest, former Ambassador Michael McFaul, wrote in his new book Autocrats vs. Democrats. He wrote it in part because he is, quote, worried that an oversimplified explanation of our new era of great power competition would lead to bad US foreign policies decisions. Joining us now is Michael McFaul, who served as US ambassador to Russia for President Obama. He's an MSNBC international affairs analyst. His new book, Autocrats vs. China, Russia, America and the New Global Disorder is out tomorrow. Ambassador McFaul, well, two things. Let's go right off of what we just saw on that airplane. Idiotically childish discussion. Which is better, being loved or respected with a dictator who has no legitimate claim to power? That kind of small minded childish conduct on the world stage means what in our international relationship?
- [30:27]
Michael McFaul
Well, first, Lawrence, welcome back. Everybody's saying that on my feeds, my social media feeds. And second, it's great to be in person. I'm usually staring at a computer when I talk to you, so it's great to be here. Two reactions. One, you know, I see the world divided between autocrats and Democrats and I think this struggle is Going to be a long one, like it was during the Cold War. It's not like there are differences. I talk about the differences. That's not how Donald Trump sees the world. He thinks about strong leaders and weak leaders, and then he thinks about people that praise him and people that don't. And if you praise him, it doesn't matter if you're autocrat or a Democrat, although most of the people that praise him are autocrats. But if you don't, then you're a badyou're a bad leader somehow.
- [31:08]
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
Right.
- [31:08]
Michael McFaul
You just talked about the Canadians. Right. Well, you offended me with that commercial. I'm gonna punish you. And I just don't think that's in America's national interest to carve up the world between those that say nice things about our president and those that don't.
- [31:24]
Lawrence O'Donnell
What we are seeing in the descript destruction of the West Wing, East Wing seems to be one of those moments where Trump is saying, look what I can do. I have powers you did not know I had. Right. Which seems like something that autocrats want you to feel, that he has powers you don't know he has, and you don't know what he's going to use next.
- [31:48]
Michael McFaul
Absolutely right. And I've studied autocrats for most of my adult life as a Stanford professor, and they create facts on the ground, and then they dare other people to reverse them. And what's so tragic, both symbolically, but also in terms of our rule of law, is you tear it down. It's really hard to reconstruct it, especially if you put a ballroom there that nobody wants. And that's what he's doing. I don't actually know the laws of that. You explained it rather well tonight. I didn't know that he should get money from the Congress. That seems very rational to me. It sounds like the Constitution, but he did it a different way. And then he dares everybody to stop him. Sometimes he is being stopped. Let's take credit for that. And sometimes independent media is pushing back on it. So I'm cautiously optimistic that our democratic institutions are stronger than him. But as I write about in the book, this is the strongest test of our democratic institutions of my lifetime, for sure. And maybe got to go all the way back to the Civil War to remember a time as dire as this.
- [32:47]
Lawrence O'Donnell
What does it mean to people like Putin when they see Donald Trump engaging in some ways in the kind of behavior that they have engaged in?
- [32:56]
Michael McFaul
Well, two things. It's an ideological thing that they like together. And as we both know, we've talked about it for a decade. Trump and Putin a little bit scratchy lately, but they've had a long standing relationship where ideologically they're more in line than I am with President Trump, even though we're both Americans. This kind of illiberal nationalism, populism, anti immigrant thing, that's what they share. And by the way, in other countries, too, Putin's been successful courting other people. But the second thing that he sees is a guy that is polarizing and dividing our society. And what is a bigger gift to Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin that we are fighting amongst ourselves and not focusing on the threats from the outside world that China and Russia, I think, pose to American security and prosperity.
- [33:43]
Lawrence O'Donnell
And that was apparently Putin's ambition. In their first interference in the 2016 election, Russia succeeded beyond its wildest dream. They seem, according to the investigation, Drew have gone into it just trying to get the American voter to go crazy against each other, not necessarily expecting that they could pull off or help Donald Trump pull off a win.
- [34:06]
Michael McFaul
That's exactly right. They've been using multiple instruments to get into societies, including ours. But it's also Hungary, Italy, France, the U.K. it's a transnational strategy that Putin has to divide these countries. And that's what's different today compared to the Cold War. The Cold War was between states, right? You remember red states, blue states. We all know whose side we're on. What's different about this era is the fight between autocrats and Democrats is oftentimes within states, including our own country, the United States of America.
- [34:37]
Lawrence O'Donnell
Former Ambassador Michael McFaul, thank you very, very much for joining us tonight. We need this new book. It is called Autocrats versus Democrats. China, Russia, America and the New Global Disorder. No one knows more about that than Michael McFaul. The book is out tomorrow. Thanks very much for joining us.
- [34:53]
Michael McFaul
Thanks for having me.
- [34:53]
Lawrence O'Donnell
And coming up, we will show you some of my conversation with Rachel Maddow at this year's MSNBC Live event, some of which you will be seeing Friday night at this hour right here on msnbc. That's.
- [35:11]
Angie Hicks
Hi, I'm Angie Hicks, co founder of angie. When you use Angie for your home projects, you know all your jobs will be done well, from roof repair to emergency plumbing and more done well. So the next time you have a home project, leave it to the pros. Get started@angie.com hey, Riley Herbst here with.
- [35:27]
Lawrence O'Donnell
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Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
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Lawrence O'Donnell
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Lawrence O'Donnell
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- [35:53]
Maurices Spokesperson
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- [36:11]
Lawrence O'Donnell
At MSNBC's live event a couple of weeks ago in a giant theater, two wonderful things happened for me. One, I was reunited on stage with the brilliant Martin Sheen, who I wrote scripts for in the NBC series the West Wing some years ago where he played the president. And I got to talk to Rachel Maddow for more than just the few minutes that we get to chat on this program. In fact, Rachel, I chatted for over 45 minutes. We're going to show you some of that conversation and you'll be seeing more of it Friday night at this hour.
- [36:46]
Rachel Maddow
What more can we do other than protest to fight this administration? Asks George from Wilton, Connecticut.
- [36:51]
Lawrence O'Donnell
You know what, George? I think that is a great question for Rachel Madison.
- [37:05]
Rachel Maddow
You know, this is a moment that calls on all of us to do all we can. And the thing that I've been doing all this historical work for the last few years, trying to figure out what we can learn from Americans who went before us, who faced big problems in our country as well. And the thing that I have learned so far is that there's no one answer that the moment calls for all of us to give what we are capable of giving. It doesn't call on the same thing from all of us. And so in Pre World War II, anti fascist organizing, which was the basis of a podcast that I did in my last book and stuff, you know, it was people who were activists on their own right. It was people in law enforcement. It was counter protesting. It was a ton of journalism. It was private research. It was pressure on the people who are on the right side of politics and incredible pressure on the people who are on the wrong side of politics. And I keep coming to that answer over and over again. I've got two big projects coming out between now and the end of the year about groups of Americans who did very hard things, who won really big battles against the government when the government was being terrible and when these Americans had everything against them and they won anyway. And what's the lesson of how they did it? They did everything. They didn't just do one thing. It's never just one thing. There's never a silver bullet. And that is always the answer because we are a small d democracy. And the way that democracies heal and advance themselves is by engaging everybody where they are. We don't all need to become the same kind of soldier. We don't all need to do the same kind of work. But whatever work you do, you have to find a way to do it in a way that benefits your country. And we are in one of those moments. Protesting actually is a really big part of it. And peaceful protest, disciplined, non violent protest, is the most powerful thing that Americans can do in between elections. And it means joining something, it means getting disciplined, meaning not necessarily protesting on your own, but joining a group and protesting with a group, being able to look out for each other, making sure that you know how to stay nonviolent and how to be principled always in what you're doing. It's hard work. It's not easy. It's not something that only a certain kind of people should do. But I am moved by, for example, what Pope Leo just asked of American Catholic bishops in terms of telling them that they need to speak up for immigrants. I'm moved by what teachers are doing both at the university level and at elementary and high school level in terms of not only just standing up for their students who are facing ice, but also standing up for academic freedom and standing up for one another. I'm moved by the way people found it in them themselves to articulate the importance of free speech and the lack of government censorship when it came to something as seemingly unimportant as whether or not a late night talk show host was going to keep his job. I mean, the number of Disney subscriptions that they saw evaporating out of them. I mean, what part of your citizenship did you think was going to be called upon to make this strategic decision about your streaming services? Well, you never know what your country is going to need from you. But it's a time to look into your heart and figure out what you have to offer. The country doesn't need just one thing. It needs the best of all of us right now. What do you think?
- [41:01]
Lawrence O'Donnell
Now you see, of course, you've seen this. You knew this already. But now you see why it's so very difficult to go on MSNBC at 10 o'. Clock. You can see more of my conversation with Rachel on Friday night at 9pm in a special version of that event featuring many other MSNBC hosts and special guests. That is tonight's last word.
- [41:30]
Angie Hicks
Hi, I'm Angie Hicks, co founder of angie. One thing I've learned is that you buy a house, but you make it a home. And for decades, Angie's helped millions of homeowners hire skilled pros for the projects that matter, get all your jobs done well at angie. Combination.