Rachel Maddow Has Some Advice for Those Who Capitulate

Transcript

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There's nobody who we should all be waiting for to respond to what we see as wrong right now.

There's nothing about your job title that will call you to service in this moment. Wherever you are, however you're feeling, if you know something's wrong, you should stand up any way you can.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Best People podcast.
My guest this week is one of my favorite humans, one of my dearest friends and colleagues here.

She's the best anywhere at connecting the dots between things that are happening and making sense out of them, helping us understand a little bit more about the world in which we live.

I am lucky enough to call her my friend. I am lucky enough to have been at Dick Cheney's funeral and looked over and seen her up there much closer than I was.

This is the best people, and this is Rachel Maddow. Thank you so much for being here again.

Oh, my friend. Thank you for having me.
You're so nice to me. I don't know what I did to deserve it, but I'm just, I absorb it like a spot, like a dry sponge.
Don't make me cry.

Don't make me cry first. That's a terrible place to start because what you've done here is so special.
I mean, Bernard is so good.

And I hate relative comparisons, but I think it hits me the hardest out of everything you've sort of created because of how gutted I am by what we're covering in our current moment.

And I just wonder what it was like to cover the Trump story the way you do and be making this.

And we hadn't seen it, right? So we didn't know what you were steeped in. We didn't know the interviews you were doing.
What has it been like to make this while covering Trump?

You know, when you say you don't like the relative comparisons and everything, I'm exactly the same way. You know, there's nothing like World War II except World War II.

There's nothing like, you know, Nazi Germany, but Nazi Germany. There's no, you can't draw direct parallels, but we can also learn about types, archetypes, and prototypes in some cases

and in the case of what trump has orchestrated against immigrants in this country and the way that he has stood up a sort of faceless

unaccountable federal force to round people up explicitly on the basis of race i mean they're defending you know stopping people, Kavanaugh stops, right?

Stopping people on the street purely on the basis of their race.

We really do have experience with this before as a country.

And the core of it for me, the most important thing about this story is that once we did what we did to Japanese Americans in this country, and once the Japanese Americans who are the heroes of this story uncovered, sort of blew up the cover-up and got all the court cases overturned and had a totally comprehensive commission that investigated exactly what happened and laid it all bare.

What we did as a country was apologize for it, explain it, say we would never, ever, ever do it again, and pay reparations.

And that

is the moral foundation that we should be building on. And instead, in the Trump administration, they are taking a jackhammer to that cornerstone.

And we should appreciate what it took to get that cornerstone in place.

And we should recognize how, I think, holistically, morally repugnant their attack is on that part of our moral foundation as Americans.

Like the worst stuff that we ever took part in, they are trying to replicate. I have like a physical reaction as you're talking to the things that we did, because

I think the last 12 months have made me appreciate that even more than when I worked in the government, that everything that we do is done in all of our names. Right.

So everything that ICE is doing, it's every American's right.

Some might find it a civic duty to know what is being done in their name, in our names as Americans. And

what's so amazing is I've covered institutions as people-less institutions.

You know, why won't the rule of law or the Justice Department or the Mueller team, you know, stop him, Trump, from doing things that are illegal or a national security threat?

And what history teaches us us is that they're just people, right? They're people who

have chosen to serve inside these institutions, but they're only as good or bad. They're only as sort of moral and protective or dangerous and menacing as the humans in them.

And I wonder if telling this story makes you cover men like Stephen Miller differently. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And it and it comes down on both sides of the moral ledger, too.

I mean, the people who are the good guys in the story, story, the people who fought Japanese American incarceration, nobody tapped them and said, it's your job to stand up and be righteous here.

You know what I mean? Like in the Justice Department, you hear a lot in burn order from a lawyer named Edward Ennis.

Well, he wasn't like the lawyer in charge of defending civil liberties at the Justice Department. He was in charge of the alien enemies control unit.

I mean, he was, if you look at him in the org chart, he's on the opposite side of this.

But when the Army wanted to come in and get the Justice Department out of it and take over and start locking up American citizens on the basis of their race, he was like, well,

okay. If not, if nobody else is going to do it, it's going to be me.
I'm going to be the one who tries to stop this.

Similarly, James Rowe, who's the number three Justice Department official, like it was not in his remit to be working on this, but he just had an instinctual moral revulsion.

for this and then tried to stop it every way that he could. Within their cohort, though, there was a a guy named Tom Clark who would go on to be not only attorney general, but a Supreme Court justice.

Tom Clark was also assigned to work on this in much the same way those other guys were. But Tom Clark's instincts were to go along.
And, oh, whatever the Army needs, okay.

And then, oh, he goes out to California and he's hearing all these California politicians be really racist about Japanese Americans.

And he just factors that into the way that he thinks that we're going to handle this policy. And he's like, he's a go-along to get along guy.

Nothing about the job titles of any of these guys put them in the moral place where they landed. It was their conscience, their heart, their faith, and their instincts that did it.

And it just makes you realize that on the right side of the ledger, it's right man in the right place at the right time, but on the wrong side of the ledger, it holds true as well.

At the Army, General DeWitt is kind of a Trump-like figure. He's the guy in charge, but he's kind of past it and doesn't

repeats back as if it's his own opinion, the last thing anybody said to him, which is a very Trump thing.

And they bring in a Stephen Miller type character, this guy Carl Ben Dutson, who has really fixed, terrible racial ideas. And he sees this opportunity and essentially takes over this part of the U.S.

government, designs this policy, puts himself in charge of it and implements it.

And there's nothing about his job title that should have indicated that he'd be the man who did it, but he just took the, he took the opportunity and ran with it.

And that to me is humbling for all of us because it means that

there's nobody who we should all be waiting for to respond to what we see as wrong right now. There's nothing about your job title that will call you to service in this moment.

Wherever you are, however you're feeling, if you know something's wrong, you should stand up any way you can.

It reminds me of some of the stories we've covered from this Justice Department where Danielle Sassoon is the senior lawyer at SDNY, leaves after DOJ leadership wants her to drop the case and the corruption case of Eric Adams.

We've now got a million Danielle Sassoons, right?

What's amazing, though, is how much power the bad guys amass and how many bad things he gets otherwise neutral or perhaps less corrupt people to go along with. Oh, yeah.
I mean,

especially when you have figured out a way to kind of activate the government,

to activate official action on the basis of fear,

on the basis of some perceived threat,

your runway is almost limitless in terms of how many people will line up to get involved and

take action on the basis of that fear or against that threat. And in the case of Japanese Americans, I mean, we're at war with Japan and Japan has attacked us and decimated the Pacific Fleet.

And the Pearl Harbor attack was a legitimate surprise. And more than 2,000 Americans were killed.
It was just astonishing, world-changing impact.

And no Japanese Americans were involved in any form of treachery around that. There were no Japanese Americans who worked as spies.
There were no Japanese Americans who worked as saboteurs.

But yet they became the focus in terms of what the threat was.

Meanwhile, you've got all these

homegrown white American fascists. who are working as spies and agents for Japan.
I mean, there were a lot of fascists in the United States at that point, and they very much admired Hitler, right?

And fascist and Mussolini and fascist Italy. But I mean, under the emperor, Japan wasn't the same type of fascist state.
It was essentially a militarist state. Right.
But it was close enough.

I mean, they definitely had a racial superiority. I mean, some of them, and you make this clear, some of them were just there for the money.
Oh, yeah.

And the American fascists at the time who were agents for Japan, including some who were convicted as agents of Japan, were very explicit about it.

You know, they said, listen, they're a racial-based empire. And that's the way that we think the world should be organized.
And, you know, we stand with them.

And they're more, they and Hitler are showing us the way into how the future should be.

And so while you've got... Americans who are, and American organized fascist groups that are signing up with the Axis and who want to overthrow the U.S.

government to ally us with Hitler and Italy and Japan in World War II, those people, the same people who designed mass incarceration of Japanese Americans, because Japanese American babies were such a national threat to America, those are the exact same human beings who said, let us not lock up American fascists and people who are part of these pro-access organizations, because they, after all, have the protections of citizenship and they must be adjudicated individually.

I think because I'm doing 10 hours a week on Trump, I'm incapable of not finding the parallels. And I found them in Donald Trump's pardon.

You know, the treatment of the Silver Shirts, who are these, you know, I mean, the folks we interned were American citizens, but they're, to me, they were like the domestic fascists.

They're going to be dealt with in civil criminal proceedings and not treated as harshly as the innocent American citizen Japanese Americans.

And I wonder if you can just, I mean, what, what's so compelling about the series is that it races along, like the central tension seems to be that the good guys, I mean, you have Kenneth.

Ringle, right? The son telling the story of his father, the intelligence officer who, who, who really susses this out.

And they have the smoking gun gun evidence that they are not aiding Japan, much to Japan's chagrin. Yeah, the Japanese government admits it.
We can't get any of these people to work with us.

And they've got it. They've got the documentation of that.

So just talk about how the conspiracy theories and the lies, who were for the first two episodes sort of barreling down the train tracks in a race against time and for sort of the preservation of our country's moral compass, the good guys and the facts actually lose to the bad guys and the conspiracy theorists.

Will you just tell that story, how that happens? Yeah, I mean, it's essentially a bureaucratic fight that the bad guys win because they're better at moving the levers of power.

When they did the initial investigation of what happened at Pearl Harbor, like the initial instinctual reaction before they investigated it more thoroughly years later, Frank Knox, the secretary of the Navy, came out and said, oh, there was tons of fifth column activity in Hawaii.

There was not at all. He's covering for the Navy at that point, having been caught with their pants down at Pearl Harbor.
And so he says there was fifth column activity.

There were traitors among the Hawaiian population. And he's thinking specifically about and indicating specifically that it's Japanese Americans.

What happened before Pearl Harbor is that Japan had a really, really skilled, really excellent spy at the consulate. He was a Japanese naval officer working at the consulate as an attaché undercover.

And he did really intrepid work alone to scout essentially Pearl Harbor and to provide Japan with really detailed information that they used to mount their attack. He basically had one

other Confederate in Hawaii who was working undercover to help Japan prepare that attack. And it was a German Nazi family.

And actually a descendant of that family just this month published a book about her parents or her family's experience having been German Nazi spies, an entire family, the dad, the mom, the son and the daughter.

That's crazy. The daughter dated U.S.
Navy sailors. And they, and with the mom, they ran a beauty shop where they'd get gossip from the officers' wives.
They used to dress up the son in U.S.

like little sailor suit and bring him down to the fleet and have him take pictures with all the sailors who thought he was so cute.

So they could photograph all the ships in the background and they were sending it off to Japan. I mean, there was some incredible.
work that Japan did to prepare for that in Hawaii.

But again, no Japanese Americans involved whatsoever. And so when you have been defeated, I mean, when we were outsmarted, the Pearl Harbor attack was absolutely devastating.

You come up with ways to excuse yourself and to blame others. And they just decided to make up these incredible tall tales about how Japanese Americans were the real problem.
You know, it's funny.

In Hawaii, after Pearl Harbor, they declared martial law, which meant the Constitution is effectively not in place. In Hawaii, they could do anything they want.

And Hawaii had the most concentration of people of Japanese descent anywhere in the United States. And they just had the attack.
They didn't do mass internment in Hawaii. Why?

Because there wasn't a political reason to do it.

There was a political reason to do it in California, where politicians, most prominently, Earl Warren, who had become the liberal Supreme Court Chief Justice, Earl Warren, who was then California Attorney General, took the kind of nativist, racist, reactionary stuff that was happening in the weeks after Pearl Harbor and decided to turn it to his own political advantage.

The reason it resonated so well and politically to such political advantage in California was in part because there was all these farmer groups that were really jealous that the Japanese Americans in California were really good farmers and really productive.

And they wanted their land. They wanted them out of California agriculture.
And they had been organized trying to get Japanese Americans out before the war even happened.

And they freely admitted once Pearl Harbor had happened that this was their opportunity to do something that they had otherwise wanted to do. They wanted just a racial cleansing of California.

And politicians, people in the press and politicians like Earl Warren just ran with it. And the people who wanted this kind of policy in the U.S.

Army, Carl Ben Detson and John DeWitt, they just outmaneuvered their rivals to get it done, even though all of the conspiracy theories, all of them, were not only false, they were known officially to be false at the time.

I think that there's a sense that this part of our history largely about an intelligence failure, but this piece of it is about an intelligence success and a human and military failure.

And if you look at the story that we talked about, that you covered, that I've covered this week, where for the first time in either of Trump's terms, Democrats and Republicans are asking questions and have reason to believe that war crimes may have been committed in the Caribbean.

The person in charge of our military, Pete Hegseth, seems as morally bankrupt as any of the folks that were enabling these things to happen.

And I wonder if you've spent more time sort of pulling that thread on how particularly dangerous it is for the military and the things done in the name of the American military when people, and they're the exceptions, not the rule, but when people like Pete Hegseth end up in charge of the mighty U.S.

military. Yeah.
I mean, obviously the risk here is most directly the crimes that are are being committed, the people who are being killed.

The secondary risk is to our country and specifically to the members of the military who are being told to commit war crimes, who are being told to do illegal things because the civilian leadership of the military is telling them, do it or else.

And if I tell you to do it, that means it's legal. I mean, the part of the Hegseph war crime boat strike stuff that really haunts me is the reporting.

And again, we haven't seen the document, but the reporting that there's some classified legal finding that they have ginned up, which says this is legal.

To have a lawyer somewhere in the process paper that so that members of the military effectively can be pushed into doing it on the advice of counsel.

That makes things all the more worse.

for members of the military who, especially ones who know this is wrong, but may not have any idea how they can disobey this order or contest this order or hold to their oath to the U.S.

Constitution while also

meeting their responsibilities as members of the armed services. I mean, it's just, it's impossible for them.
And we should protect them from being put in morally impossible situations like this.

I mean, I do think that when Hegseth posted that cartoon image, like making light of the whole thing.

I think part of the reason they swagger on stuff like this, part of the reason that Trump's corruption around financial stuff in particular is so out in the open, part of the reason that they talk so tough about defying court orders and all of this stuff is that they're trying to kind of break the country ethically.

So not just so they won't get pushback, but just so those rules won't exist anymore.

And I think with the military, the swagger around this stuff is them trying to break the internal ethics of the military that makes it an honorable and professional military so that the military can be used in unconstrained ways in the ways that Trump wants to.

And one of the ways we know he wants to use the military is on domestic soil against the American people. So you got to, you got to, you got to break the institution if you want to use them that way.

And I think they're trying to break it.

We'll take a quick break right here. When we're back, much more with my friend and colleague, Rachel Meadow.
Stay with us.

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I mean, the part in the third episode where the series started to feel like like symbols clanging in my head as we're covering these military stories in real time is this part where they know it is unconstitutional because of the right in the Constitution for birthright citizenship to round up Americans of Japanese descent, and yet the entire bureaucracy bends toward this thing that they know is illegal.

I mean, you're talking about the fact that there is, and Senator Blimethal said this on my show, that he's seen the classified Office of Legal Counsel memo. He thinks everyone should see it.

I mean, there is what you said exists. There is some kakamami

legal justification. But I wonder what it is, too, because in the manual for rules of war is the example of shipwrecked humans.

And the fact that that fact of the reporting isn't in dispute, that there were two survivors from the first missile strike on the fishing vessel just has this like symbols clanging resonance to all of the people in the story you tell who know that it was unconstitutional to do what they were asked to do and they did it anyway.

Yeah. I mean, in the Japanese incarceration policy, the Justice Department failed in this administrative fight, right? They knew it was wrong and they were trying to stop it.

Even though the Justice Department was, I mean, participated in, you know, Alien Enemies Act roundups right after Pearl Harbor that were, you know, unconscionable in many ways.

But when it came to this idea of race-based, indefinite mass incarceration, including of U.S. citizens, the Justice Department just said no.

And when they wanted a legal opinion to go ahead, when they wanted to kind of paper the executive order, they couldn't get anybody in the U.S.

Justice Department to sign the legal memo saying it was okay. And so they went to other government lawyers outside the Justice Department to cook up a legal justification for it.

And then they, with that in hand,

they went ahead with this policy that they absolutely knew was contrary to the Constitution. And

the one thing that I found in my research on this, and I don't know that anybody's actually written about this, but the one thing that I have found is I went and sort of tracked down, okay, well, who are the lawyers?

Who are the other government lawyers who did this? And why did they do this? And they're all like, it's there, it's Oscar Cox and Benjamin Cohen and Joseph Rau.

And like, I've read all the books about all of them and figured out what happened with all of their careers.

But for all of, they were all really well-regarded lawyers and New Dealers and seen as very much part of like the FDR, liberal, brain trust, and everything.

But they all spent the rest of their careers denying what they had done with that memo. It's like Rod Rosenstein and child separation.
Yes. Yes, exactly.
They can't live it down. Yeah.

They end up, there's all of this confusion in the literature about whether

they were asked for that memo or whether they volunteered it because nobody wants to admit who asked for it.

There's all this like, oh, you know, we thought we were offering a compromise position because what the army wanted to do was so terrible. And we now know what the army did was so terrible.

This was an enabling memo that said on the basis of the fact, I mean, part of the justification in this memo was white people, to the occidental eye was their phrase, you can't tell one Japanese person from another.

And so there's obviously no way to tell whether any of them are good citizens. I mean, that was the level of legal reasoning.
And they spent the rest of their lives.

trying to explain and in their in their autobiographies and in every every way they were ever treated by anybody who ever wrote about them until the until the end of time trying to undo what they had done because they knew it was so morally wrong.

And that's the fate that awaits people who are part of this stuff now, I think. Well, that's what I was going to ask you.

I mean, I think that the election night we sat next to each other, what, a month ago now,

was

the whole country doing what large vibrant pockets of the country had been doing since after election day, November 2024, which was saying not, not, no, thank you, not for me.

I feel like that was the beginning of the process you just described, right? Like, oh, who me, I didn't capitulate.

And I wonder if you think it's going to get harder for, say, Harvard to capitulate to the Trump administration or Paramount to hire the creatives they want because of their capitulation.

I wonder if you think that project you described, which is to spend the rest of your life trying to launder your legacy from what you were a part of, has begun. It's a really good question.

And there's, I think we get tests of it every day. You know, I was thinking about it.
with CBS and canceling Stephen Colbert, right? Like that happened before

Jimmy Kimmel, right? Before the the pressure on Kimmel, but it was absolutely transparent what CBS and Paramount were doing with getting rid of Stephen Colbert. Oh, it's it's a financial decision.

Right. Cause having the highest rated late night show in America for years is somehow financially unsustainable now,

what it wasn't before, right? Like at the same time that you've got Trump-connected oligarchs taking over this company and putting a right-wing blogger in charge of CBS News.

And I was thinking about it when I was at Colbert's show this week. Which was so delightful.
I texted you. I loved it so much.

And that you could, you don't get to showcase your bartending skills very often. I was so pleased for you.
It's been a long time since the country could see that.

It's been a long time since I've made a drink on TV. Do you put ice in there or do you not put ice? We'll put a little bit of ice in there once we've made sure that we have exactly the same amount.

Oh, wow. Because I'm a liberal and so I want everything to be equal.

Yes. There you go.
Exactly. No disguise.

Exactly. There you go.
I please they're changing the name of this cocktail to the Mamdani.

Exactly. A little lemon oil there.
There you go. There you go.
A little twist. Nice job with the twists.
Well, thanks, man. Yeah.
I was a bartender. Seriously.
Cheers. Cheers.
God bless you.

To MS Now.

So good. I know.
The problem was it was delicious. And then I was like, I realized I know on television I should stop drinking.
But it was really good. It looked delicious.

And I was like, is she selling that drink? Or are we,

what are we doing here? This is, it was like so sensory for me. I loved it.
Yeah. I'll make it a drink.
Maybe it was the drink.

Yeah. Maybe it was a drink.
Yeah. I think I need a drink from now on.
I was thinking about while I was there, like, you know, they announced the canceling of Colbert. Everybody knows what it's about.

Right. They're trying to sort of live down their shame, I think, already in terms of the way they are capitulating.

I think the CBS news takeover has been a huge embarrassment to everybody involved in it. And, you know, they should reverse the decision about Colbert.
Like he's still on the air now.

He's still got a few months horizon left before they're planning on taking him off the air. They should change that.
You know what?

Donald Trump is negative 24 in terms of his approval rating in the latest Gallup poll.

And since then, he's started talking about Somali people as garbage and has been exposed for carrying out in an ongoing way war crimes that are so obvious.

in a non-war that we're in in the Caribbean that our UK intelligence partners have pulled out of the Five Eyes arrangement arrangement with us because we are so blatantly breaking the law, they're afraid their intelligence officers or their members of the military who are participating in anything with us will end up going to jail.

Like, that's what's happened, CBS. That's what's happened, Paramount, since you decided that you would try to please Donald Trump by taking Stephen Colbert off the air.
Like, maybe don't do that.

Like, maybe you can now see

where in history you're going to end up. And now's your chance to try to alter that and try to get right.
And I think that a lot of institutions are in that same boat.

I was just going to say, like, if you say like, and now do Jimmy Kimmel, so they make an equally cowardly decision to take him off the air. Yeah.
They have an outcry.

I guess before the election night results, we had the American people weigh in on Kimmel being taken off the air and they reversed it.

And I don't think anyone else canceled their Hulu or ESPN or Disney after they put him back. I mean, there are rewards.
Yes. Right.
If you, if you can say to the country, I hear you. Yeah.

I mean, when, you know, Nexstar and Sinclair jumped up and said, oh, yes, Brendan Carr, what else would you like us to do? And they participated in that. And then Kimmel was taken off the air.

You get the national outcry. And you're exactly right.
When he's put back in, it's not like they get some, there's some backlash on the right. Like, oh, no, we really thought he was fired.

Like, they know how wrong that is. Like, even within the MAGA movement, they know that it's wrong for the president to be like, this person is allowed to be on television and this person is not.

And anybody who jokes about me should be beheaded or whatever, you know, whatever it is. Like the instincts are there.
We're still Americans. Like we get how stupid and wrong this is.

But these corporations kind of need to be disciplined. Like they need to be, not they need to have discipline, but they need to be disciplined by public opinion and people expressing it.

And I do think that there's a reason that Harvard hasn't capitulated. I think that the universities and the law firms.
should reverse those decisions. Honestly, like Paul Weiss, what are you doing?

Like, totally. I'm sure you've been able to piece it together and like decide that your moral reputation doesn't matter.
But you know what would help your moral reputation?

Acknowledging that you did the wrong thing

and undoing it and saying, you know what, this deal that we worked out like with Boris,

right? Boris

for a tweet? For a tweet, right? To do all these things, like maybe this was actually taking a chunk out of our soul and we want that back and we're not going to do it anymore.

And we're going to, you know, reinstate the pro bono work that we used to do.

And here's us, you know, joining in the immigrant justice groups to stand up for what's right because we're an American firm more than we are a presidential plaything.

Like Paul Weiss needs to do that. CBS needs to unfire Colbert.
The universities that did these deals with Trump need to tear them up and take them to court. It's not too late.

Trump is not going to end up being the dictator of this country.

And when he's trying, he's running through all of these institutions and all of these people in our country who made a stupid decision to try to be on his side as he takes over because you thought he was going to win.

He's not going to win. And so now's your time to actually undo your bad decision decision and get right with the Constitution and with the American people and ultimately with history.

And maybe you can salvage your reputation and your descendants won't spend the next several generations denying that you were one of them.

It is the most conviction with which I've heard you speak about how the authoritarian campaign that is underway that i mean it was really dramatic it was news in and of itself when you talked about how the government is already acting in authoritarian ways and practices These are authoritarian tools.

I mean, it's not that the whole country is authoritarian because there's, you know, we still make our way on the air, not going when.

But do you feel like we have enough evidence that the public eventually will make sure that this arc doesn't just bend back toward democracy, but that it's like a broken pipe that we get yanked out of this?

Or do you still worry that it's going to be more two steps forward, three steps back? Oh, I think we've definitely got a sawtooth future coming up in terms of progress versus regression.

But I think that there was a cost to them going so fast. I think it was kind of a shock and awe

effect from them just sort of instantly going straight to like year 10 of Victor Orban, right? Like yes.

Talking to Russians who experienced what happened over the first 18 years of Putin being in power, like Trump tried to year 18. Yeah.
Yes. Like tried to rush right through those things.

And I think that was seen as very scary, but there was a cost to that for them as well, which is that they absolutely did not bring people along with them and people did not sort of have time to morally accommodate what they were doing.

And Trump is a kind of a spent force. I mean, he's literally falling asleep on camera in cabinet meetings.
He appears to have like weird wounds and health problems that can't be explained.

He's already the oldest man to ever be elected to the office. And the people around him are not quality people.
Like Christy Noam is not a leader of national caliber. I'm sorry.

I mean, no disrespect at a human level, but she's just, she doesn't know what she's talking about. And it's clear every time she opens her mouth about it.

And I mean, I don't know what's going on with Marco Rubio, but like first his eyes died. And now like the rest of him.
Yeah. And now he's lost his posture.

There are like no images of him standing up straight. He's young.
He's younger than me. I mean, for Trump to have fallen asleep while Marco Rubio was

talking. Yes.
Talking about him sitting right next to him. About his peace prize.

I mean, the insanity about what we see broadcast from the White House is: this is the most produced, this is the most hostile climate to actual journalism that's happened.

And this is what we still see, right? Like a guy passes out in the weight loss drug announcement.

The only reason we know that is because the few people Trump let in the Oval Office caught it on camera.

I mean, the only reason we see him sleeping in the cabinet meeting that they had this week is because the

broadcasting it. This is what the Trump people have let out.

I mean, it just makes me wonder, again, having worked on the McCain Palin campaign, having worked in the Bush White House, what are we not seeing?

Like, where does your head go when you wonder what we don't know? Yeah.

I mean, if Trump isn't getting into the Oval Office until he gets there like at 11 or noon or whatever, like, what's happening in the mornings? And what's the White House doctor doing?

And what's going on with the hands? And like, and the ankles. Yeah.
I mean, from head to toe, there are signs of something.

Yeah. And again, at a human level, that's okay.
You know, I'm 52, I'm falling apart.

But when you're lying about it and also putting yourself on TV for hours every day, because you think that's the only thing that matters in terms of your ubiquitous presence being a thing that leads the nation, you know, you want to be a totalitarian leader who's there everywhere.

You can't both be hiding your physical. decline and also physically be present all the time.
I mean, until they invent a hologram of him, I think we're in

we're not going to watch it happen. I do think, though, that when they get to the point where they don't need the public on their side, right, Trump wants to not have to answer to the public.

He doesn't believe in a lot of if he loses an election, he thinks that election is by definition a non-constraint, right? He doesn't believe in anything he doesn't win.

He doesn't want to be answering to the courts, answering to Congress, answering to the American people. He just wants to do whatever he wants.

He wants to do it the way that he's dealing with the East Wing, right? Like that's the way that he, that's the way that he wants to rule.

But you can't start acting that way until you have consolidated enough power that you can act that way.

And right now, the American public absolutely has a vote in terms of what's happening in our country.

And you saw from the last election night and you see from his approval ratings right now, what a serious constraint that is on him. The American people are not.

down with this and he is at a low ebb in terms of his capacity and he hasn't built up any other capacity around him in terms of other people.

And so if you are an institution or a business leader or somebody who's deciding whether or not you're going to accommodate and try to please Trump or whether you're going to do what you know is right.

This is not the time to side with the failure.

My conversation with my dear friend and colleague, Rachel Maddow, continues right after the break. We'll be back in one minute.

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How big of a deal do you think the sort of botched handling of releasing the Epstein files plays in his political demise?

What do you think about that? I

only ever covered the story, like as a law enforcement story. It was during Trump's first term.
I didn't really know a lot about Trump as a pre-political figure.

So I actually didn't know that he even knew him. And I kind of covered it as a child sex trafficking story.
I started listening to sort of the Manosphere figures last fall. Those podcasts are long.

Like Joe Rogan's on for three hours. And what I learned about Epstein and this conspiracy theory on Epstein is it's not adjacent to Trump's tariff policy.
It's adjacent to the pyramid conspiracies.

Like the genre isn't MAGA. The genre was conspiracies.
And so what I've come to understand. Like aliens and

like a little, like one step down. I mean, I don't know.
I don't listen to enough of Joe Rogan.

I don't, I don't know where he stands on aliens, but like the Epstein conspiracy is about like all the powerful people covered this thing up for powerful people.

And whether Trump knows it or not, the power of MAGA was what Bannon opened up for him.

Working class Americans, men and women, largely white, in this last election, more diverse than in 16 or 20, felt like he was on their side.

I feel like the betrayal of the Epstein transparency makes abundantly clear he is not on their side.

And so I know from working in politics that when people don't trust you anymore, there's before and after, and you either realize it or you don't.

And so I think for Trump, there's before and after Epstein. And no matter what he says about affordability, one, it's what you said on Colbert.

You can fact check it at the grocery store every damn day if you're shopping for your family, like or at Walmart or at Target or like wherever you shop on Amazon. It was buying Christmas decorations.

And I can see what I paid one year ago.

You purchased this last on that date and the price is like everyone knows to your point, everyone knows how much they paid for stuff, especially most people buy the same stuff.

I buy the same clothes every two years. Like we buy the same things as humans.
And so people know when those things are going up and not down.

But I think the Epstein story makes them so mad because it was this thing they cared about and they thought he cared too.

And the fact that he had no intention of turning it over, I think was a big blow at his credibility with a base that went along with the lie about 2020. And so I think he just didn't see this coming.

And if you take.

you know, at face value what they say they like about Trump, like what's he offering you right now? Like exactly.

Did you like that he was going to be the guy who got us out of wars and had us not involved in pointless overseas wars? Well, then, why do we have 10,000 troops in the Caribbean? Exactly.

And he's declaring war on Venezuela. Did you like that you thought that even though he's a rich guy, he's the kind of rich guy who's going to make everybody rich? You want to be rich like him.

He understands working people and poor people. And so he's going to help us all become wealthy the way that he is.

Well, you know, look at his numbers in terms of what he's done economically before the U.S. government stopped publishing all economic numbers, which is a thing we just don't talk about anymore.

Like you can only blame this on the shutdown for so long. Remember the firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics? Which you predicted that months before they did it.
Yeah. Yeah.

About the, about how they would get rid of statistics. Yes.
They'd take the powers of Congress and they'd stop producing government statistics. And they've done both of those things.

But yeah, I mean, is it that we're going to get out of the wars? Is it that he's going to help you economically? Is it that he's going to be the righteous white hat who exposes the Epstein thing?

No, quite the opposite on that. Like, did you like that he's such a virile, tough guy?

Well, what do you make of the makeup all over his hands and his lizard eyes and the band-aids and the like and the ankles and the lying about he doesn't know where the MRI was?

Is it like, what, what are we down to? We're down to, he says

mean and transgressive racist things about immigrants. And he's got masked secret police pulling women out of daycares and kids on a bus stops.
Like, is that it? Is that the pure appeal?

Are we down to just that? Because there definitely is a stripe of America who likes that, but it's not necessarily a stripe that you can count on to win an election.

I mean, it's the stormfront quarter. You know what I mean? Like it's nothing that has any sort of

growth potential in the United States. And so I don't know what he's offering right now to people who want to love him.
I don't see what's left. Such a good point.

And even if you're in any of those subgroups, even those subgroups are cross-pressured. Because if you are pleased by the immigration brutality, you likely also wanted the transparency on Epstein.

I mean, those are a lot of the same voters. And if you are pleased by, well, I don't, I don't know anyone pleased by the tariff policy.
That is a universe of nobody.

Actually, even on the immigration thing, like if you like the way that he's talking about immigrants and what he's doing with the sort of secret police and attacking immigrants and stuff, what do you make of the pardon for the president of Honduras who trafficked 400 tons of cocaine into the United States?

Like, what do you make of that? Like, make that make sense. Make some politics out of that.
If what you like is what ICE is doing or CPP is doing.

I mean, he's running to the end of all the things that he was offering. Yeah.
Maybe what's left is that you really like the decorations in the Oval Office. I don't know.

You were a gold gal and you finally feel seen by his decorating choices.

I want to come back to one story that I listened and I was walking down the street and I just was walking down with tears coming down my face because it made me think so hard about how I can better cover, it makes you cry thinking about it, immigration.

It's so hard to tell the stories of the numbers because people aren't numbers, right? And when you quantify them, that's their game, right? They gave them all numbers.

And when you get to that part in the third episode, I'm just like choking on the tears of these American citizens being given numbers and moved to internment camps.

Every one of them that you highlight thinks they're going to be shot any day. Yeah.
So that in and of itself is a form of torture, making a prisoner think they could be shot at any time.

That is a technical, internationally accepted form of torture that people think they could be lined up and shot. So these people were tortured, but you tell the story of 10-year-old Norm.
Yeah.

And I just thought, my God, like, just tell the story of 10-year-old Norm. So Norm grows up in San Jose

and he's born in the United States, raised in the United States, has never lived anywhere else.

And he's 10 years old when his family gets the order to turn up at the San Jose train station because the army is going to load them onto trains and take them away and put them in camps.

And he's excited because he's never been on a long train ride before. And he asks his parents if he can wear his uniform, by which he means his Cub Scout uniform.
And they say yes.

The family has been forced to sell everything they own. They had to give away their dog.
They had to, they just bought a car. They had to sell their car, you know, pennies on the dollar.

They're only allowed to take what they can carry. And they say, you know, Norm, what do you want to carry?

And he says, well, I'm going to wear my Cub Scout uniform and I want to bring my baseball stuff.

I want to bring my baseball bat and my glove and my baseball, you know, because we're going, we're going to camp. And they take his bat away because they say it's a lethal weapon.

So now he's got the ball and the glove and the Cub Scout uniform, but not the bat.

And they take them on the train from San Jose to Southern California, to Los Angeles, and they lock his family up to live for months in a horse stall at the Santa Anita racetrack.

And he's there for months before they send him to one of these permanent camps. And he ends up going to Wyoming.
He's in a camp called Heart Mountain, quite near Cody, Wyoming.

And one of the things, this isn't in the podcast, but one of the things that happens once he's at Cody, and he's there for years, is that he and the other Japanese boys in the prison camp reconstitute their Cub Scout chapter.

And they meet as Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts in the camp. And they eventually arrange for a local Boy Scout troop from Cody

to come into Hart Mountain to do a jubilee with the boys at Hart Mountain. And Norman is very high spirited.
He's kind of a rascal. He's kind of an imp, like he's a trickster.

And there's some boys who are being mean to him and he plays a trick on them. He arranges for their tent to be flooded in a rainstorm.

He like digs a moat so that all the water channels down into their tent to mess with them.

And he makes common cause in doing that with the other kid from Cody, white kid from the Boy Scout troop in Cody, who comes in, who has exactly the same attitude that he is.

And they are like fast fast friends and they're messing with all the other kids and they make friends. And

that's Norman Manetta, who goes on to be the mayor of San Jose, congressman from California and ultimately secretary of transportation in the George W. Bush cabinet.
He was the Democrat who George W.

Bush put in the cabinet. And the kid from Cody, who he made friends with, went on to be Republican Senator Alan Simpson.

And the two of them, lifelong friends, forged in that prison camp, ended up spearheading the commission that investigated internment and ultimately got the apology and reparations for Japanese Americans having been locked up on the basis of their race.

It's such an extraordinary,

extraordinary thing that it happened, but that it's someone that we all know with our own eyes, right? Like we've seen him. They're public figures.

And so it makes it impossible to deny that we did this because we did this to people that are public figures that we saw and there were witnesses. And I worry that we're not close enough.

I mean, people like Jacob Soboroff is, but I worry that we're not staring close enough at the human beings being brutalized, being torn out of preschools, being treated brutally, physically brutally.

I wonder your thoughts, you know, in sort of doing the storytelling on how we do a better job telling the story of the people being targeted by this government.

One of the things we need to do is

focus on where they're taking people, I think. There should not be black boxes

where you can put people outside of the reach of the U.S. Constitution.

If you have two feet on American soil, regardless of where you were born or where your parents were born or whether you've committed a crime or any other thing about you, you are protected by the U.S.

Constitution. And we should not be holding people in facilities that are designed to prevent them from having contact with lawyers.

And, you know, Paul Weiss and the other law firms out there who did these deals with the Trump administration, when you come to your moral senses and decide that you want to be able to look yourself in the mirror and you want to be able to not lie about your career to your descendants, which you're going to have to if you want to do it and save face moving forward.

One of the things that you could do is that the big law firms in this country could start flooding the zone in terms of legal representation for people who are being held in these black sites.

The chrome detention facility in Miami, the so-called alligator alcatraz facility in the Everglades, the facilities in places like Vermont and Washington State and Massachusetts, the facilities where they are holding people.

I mean, the Louisiana facilities themselves. There ought to be 300 white shoe farm lawyers who are flooding those facilities, which are on U.S.

soil, which are essentially being held as lawless zones for people to be held indefinitely to try to treat them so poorly and to give them so little hope of any legal protection that they agree under duress to self-deport, to take themselves out of this country because they can't bear the way they're being treated here.

That's a thing that we should do and that we could do and that we'll be morally shamed for and embarrassed for for the rest of our days if we don't get that done soon.

I mean, we're talking about thousands and thousands and thousands of people already and their lives and their parents and their grandparents and their kids and their grandkids and the generational impact of this stuff on those people is something that we can materially affect right now.

You may not be able to stop Stephen Miller's position in the White House.

You may not be able to stop Trump's rhetoric and intentions toward immigrants, but you can mitigate the impact of what he's doing and thereby expose it and thereby defend people who are at the sharp end of the stick.

And we ought to be doing a hell of a lot more than that.

And people with resources and good salaries and good reputations in these freaking law firms that have rolled over, they ought to be leading it. Every last one of them.

I mean, the child separation policy was so appalling, even to Donald Trump, when he saw it reflected back on the television screens that he reversed it.

It's happening at such a faster pace, at such a larger volume, the families and little kids being terrorized and traumatized. Yeah.

I want to say, too, before we wrap up here, that your role in keeping all of us pointed toward right and toward our role here. And it was...
I don't know if arduous is the right word.

It's a privilege. These are not hard jobs.

These are easy jobs compared to the things that the people we get to cover live through and endure.

But just to keep us focused on our role and humble in doing it and to feel that it is in and of itself a service, just to bear witness, you deserve the credit for keeping all of us focused.

And I want to give it to you here and thank you. And that you did this also is so awesome and so amazing.
I love you so as a friend and I love you so as a colleague.

I can't tell you how much I value you as a colleague and as a friend, Nicole. I just, I don't think I could do any of this without you.
And you're leading us more than anybody else is right now.

So don't cut yourself any, don't cut yourself short here. Well, thank you, my friend.
Thank you, my friend. This is so special and this is so important.
There will be four out when this drops.

Yeah, there's six episodes in total of Burn Order. And I have to finish writing six.
Go. We'll let you go.
We'll let you go. We love you.
By the call, thank you. Okay, thank you.

Thank you so much for listening to the best people.

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