Exclusive: Rachel Maddow interviews MN Governor Tim Walz as Trump plots end of U.S. government

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Really, really happy to have you here. So there is good news and there is bad news today.
Which do you want first? Let's do the bad news first. It was only about six months ago, feels like a lifetime, but it was only about six months ago that Donald Trump announced who he was going to run with for this past election.
It was about six months ago that we got J.D. Vance announced as Trump's vice presidential running mate.
And the choice was a little hard to parse. He was a good talker, like he's articulate in interviews, but it immediately became clear that he's a bad campaigner.
He had a way of inadvertently insulting people and kind of ruining their day with his presence. Remember the poor donut shop workers in Georgia? The polling for him was terrible.
The polling said he was the most unpopular vice presidential choice in generations. His record as a public official, or even just his record kind of as an adult, was hard to explain.
For most of his adult life, he had been basically a protege, realistically more like an intern, um, for years and years and years. for one very eccentric, very right-wing, German-born tech billionaire.
That particular eccentric billionaire had basically adopted J.D. Vance, had set him up in a whole series of jobs, none of which he had very much success at.
But then the billionaire decided that the next job

he wanted to put J.D. Vance into was the United States Senate.
And so he essentially bought a Senate campaign for him. He made the largest single political donation ever made to a U.S.
Senate candidate in American history. And he effectively ran his campaign.
And that is how J.D. Vance was effectively given the only job he ever had in politics before he then immediately became vice president of the United States.
And, you know, at that point, when he was chosen to be Trump's running mate, you could basically not see him for all the red flags around him. You couldn't make him out amid all the red flags.
I mean, the billionaire who gave him all of his jobs and installed him in the U.S. Senate and who then reportedly told Trump to put him on the ticket with him as his vice presidential running mate, that billionaire himself is on the record saying he does not believe in democracy.
He does not believe that women should have the right to vote in America. He once spent a small chunk of his huge fortune trying to get people to move onto floating sea colonies made from shipping containers, because that would be a better way to live than living in countries, because countries are so terrible and so is democracy, right? So that's the political project of the guy whose other political project was putting J.D.
Vance in at the top of the U.S. government.
So red flag. Also, for someone who had never actually done anything as an elected public servant, there was also a big red flag, at least there was for me, about the way J.D.
Vance talked about why he wanted to be in politics, why he wanted to be in charge, what he wanted to do with power. Republicans, conservatives, we're still terrified of wielding power, of actually doing the job that the people sent us here to do.
We've got to get comfortable with wielding power. If you're not recognizing in this moment how crazy things have gotten and how outside the box we need to think, then I think you're ultimately not really serious about taking back the country.
And yeah, look, I agree. We are in the late Republican period.
If we're going to push back against it, we have to get pretty wild and pretty far out there and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with. Indeed.
I got to say, among some of my circle, the phrase extra constitutional has come up quite a bit. We do need to take a much more aggressive stance, a much more muscular stance.
We're going to have to, you know, become a little bit more robust in our behavior. Yeah, that's exactly right.
Yeah, we're entering into an extra constitutional way. We're going to need to act in an extra constitutional way.
We're going to need to wield power in a way that we've never wielded power before. We're going to have to, what does he say? We're going to have to get pretty wild, pretty far out there, go in directions a lot of conservatives aren't comfortable with right now.
When he says we're in a late Republican period, he's not talking about the Republican Party. He's talking about we're in a late period of us as a republic.
Like the American Constitutional Republic is ending because it's time for something new. This is how the guy talks.
This is how he was auditioning to be chosen as Trump's vice president. Almost the thing that you need to do, step one in the process, is to totally replace, like rip out like a tumor, the current American leadership class, and then reinstall some sense of American, you know, political religion.
Rip it out like a tumor. Rip it out like a tumor.
Whatever it is we've had in this country, rip it out like a tumor. So this is very bad news, right? When J.D.
Vance would do podcast interviews and talk about how the government should, conservatives should see the government and government should seize the endowments of private universities. With conservatives in control, they should find ways to hurt even private companies that don't support the leader.
He said we should rip out the current class of Americans like they're a tumor. When he talked about all these things in these very radical right podcasts, he'd get his interlocutors very excited, these guys who he was talking to.
And very frequently, they'd want to know more. They'd try to get him to talk about where it was that he got all these great ideas.
How do we, aside from elections, how do we rip out this leadership class? So these institutions are corrupted and rotted to the core. This elite ideology is everywhere and in all the things.
What other options do we have besides voting them out, which we're seeing is ineffectual? Yeah. So, again, this is like a tough question, but this is maybe the question that confronts us right now, right? So there's this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who's written about some of these things.
There's this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who's written about some of these things. Donald Trump had to get rid of his first-term vice president because his first-term vice president wouldn't help with his effort to overthrow the government and stay in power despite losing an election.
And so Trump sicked a violent, angry mob on Capitol Hill, and that angry mob then proceeded to try to hunt down Trump's vice president, screaming that they wanted to kill him, hang Mike Pence. So that didn't go great.
He needed a new guy. For the new guy, he picked this rando who had only been in the Senate about five minutes, who nobody in the country had really heard of, who had no political skills to speak of, who was deeply unpopular from the first moment he was named.
But he was really, really, really, really linked in to an eccentric, very far right tech billionaire political faction. And the political guru of that political faction, the guy who inspires all of their political goals, is this one guy.
You know, there's this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who's written about some of these things. Knowing chuckle from the podcast interviewer.
Oh, yeah, Curtis Yarvin. This guy, Curtis Yarvin, that's who J.D.
Vance cites as the guy who's been doing the big thinking about this stuff you tell me if that explains what we are living through right now today in the news because here is curtis yarvin why has no one ever suggested let's just get rid of this thing you have a government in washington you're either for it it. What is a government? A government is just a corporation which owns the country.
Nothing more, nothing less. It so happens that our sovereign corporation is very poorly managed.
And there's a very simple way to replace that, which is what we do at all power corporations that have failed. We simply delete them.
We haven't been able to do that with our government for too many years. So it's gotten a little bit stale.
The other thing about getting rid of your government is you can't just say, well, the limits of the government are the limits of the formal government. You have to say, well, what is this system actually? And it includes a lot of things that are called NGOs, things that are called universities, things that are funded by the state.
It's a very, very large system, and it all needs to be destroyed. NGOs, universities, things that are funded by the state, it's a large system, and it all needs to be destroyed.
Because we need to, in his words, delete the government, delete the whole system, including nonprofits, including universities, including everything the government funds. We need to destroy all of it.
And why would you do that? What would you want to replace it with? You need a CEO. And a national CEO is what's called a dictator.
It's the same thing. There's no difference between a CEO and a dictator.
If Americans want to change their government, they're going to have to get over their dictator phobia.

Americans are going to have to get over their dictator phobia. We need to delete the government,

destroy all nonprofits and schools and get rid of everything the government funds.

We need to bring it all down to zero. We need to destroy the whole system.

And the reason we need to do that is so we can have a national CEO take over and run everything

And I think that's what I'm saying. We need to bring it all down to zero.
We need to destroy the whole system. And the reason we need to do that is so we can have a national CEO take over and run everything.

And what is a national CEO?

A national CEO is a dictator.

Just run that definition one more time.

You need a CEO.

And a national CEO is what's called a dictator.

It's the same thing.

There's no difference between a CEO and a dictator. If Americans want to change their government, they're going to have to get over their dictator phobia.
Americans need to get over their dictator phobia. This is the philosopher, right, of this milieu from which we got J.D.
Vance. This is the philosophy that drives the eccentric right-wing tech billionaire class that has ascended, that is effectively the defining feature and driving force of Trump's second term.
That is where they got J.D. Vance from.
Quote, Vance is friends with Curtis Yarvin, whom he openly cites as a political influence. And this isn't like a Rosetta Stone, you know, it's not that complex.
But they really did tell us in advance what they were going to do, and now they are doing it. And I think the biggest barrier to getting Americans to understand that during the election campaign was because it was so crazy, you couldn't believe they were really going to do it, but now they're doing it.
Because in order to delete the government, to destroy the whole American government and the American system and rip it out like a tumor, so instead we can get over our dictator phobia and at last have a national CEO, we can at last have a dictator, what do we have to do to get there? What's the operational day one plan to get there? What should we see these guys try to do if, in fact, they get that power that J.D. Vance says they need to wield more ruthlessly? So I've reduced this very complicated problem to a simple four-letter acronym, which is RAGE.
And RAGE stands for retire all government employees. Very, very, very simple.
Now, the problem with this is, why have you never heard this before? Retire all government employees. It's interesting.
He doesn't say fire them. He says retire them, both because RAGE is a better acronym than FAGE.
But he also is suggesting giving them all payouts, giving government employees generous payments so they will all leave the government. So the government can be closed, can be deleted, can be collapsed, so that we can have a national CEO, so we can have a dictator instead.
It's a pretty out there idea, right? Pretty wild, pretty far out there, as J.D. Vance might say.
But here's what it looks like tonight in the flesh, because they're actually trying to do it. Tonight, a buyout program for every worker in the U.S.
federal government. Quote, if you choose to remain in your current position, we cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position or agency, but should your position be eliminated, you will be treated with dignity.
If you choose not to continue in your current role in the federal workforce, we thank you for your service to your country, and you will be provided with a dignified, fair departure from the federal government.

This program begins effective January 28th, meaning today, and is available to all federal employees until February 6th, next Thursday.

If you resign under this program, you will retain all pay and benefits regardless of your daily workload until September 30th, 2025, or earlier if you choose to accelerate your resignation. So they're doing it.
They're offering a buyout. They're threatening to, well, they are trying to induce every single employee of the government to resign, and they say they will pay them to go.
After that, though, no guarantees. Don't you want to get out now? This is weird, right? This is new.
The reason this has never been done before is because this is not something that anyone would do if they actually wanted the U.S. government to continue.
Even if they wanted to change what the U.S. government did, they would want to keep federal employees in position so that the government could do anything.
The idea of retiring all government employees, every employee of the federal government, this is an idea that comes from one weird place. It comes from the very weird eccentric right-wing tech billionaire world, where in their eyes, this is the end of the American Republic.
And thank God, because this lousy democracy thing has been holding us back. And what we really need is a CEO, a national CEO.
What is it they call it again? You need a CEO. And a national CEO is what's called a dictator.
It's the same thing. There's no difference between a CEO and a dictator.
If Americans want to change their government, they're going to have to get over the dictator phobia. What other options do we have besides voting them out, which we're seeing is ineffectual? Yeah, so again, this is like a tough question, but this is maybe the question that confronts us right now, right? So there's this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who's written about some of these things.
So we're not going to do the voting thing anymore. That has proven ineffectual.
But there's this guy that has these other ideas. So now they're doing it.
Retire all government employees. On the same day they rolled that out, Today, they also caused chaos across all 50 states of this country by just announcing that they were stopping all the things the government does, all the things the government funds.
And I mean, you could see it, the effects of this ripple out across the country. Columbus, Ohio, Columbus Dispatch, millions in funding at risk as Columbus nonprofits scramble to deal with Trump pause.
The Oregon Capitol Chronicle. Oregon officials scrambling to respond to Trump order freezing many federal funds.
In Alaska, the Anchorage Daily News. Catastrophic for a state like ours.
Alaska governments and nonprofits react to federal grant funding freeze. Florida, the Miami Herald.
Confusion in Miami over federal grant freeze. Channel 10 in Miami-Dade County, Miami-Dade officials very concerned about federal funding freeze.
Idaho grant recipients scrambling for clarity after federal freeze. Nebraska officials assessing impact of very concerning Trump funding freeze order.
Illinois shut out of Medicaid as Trump enacts temporary freeze on federal funds. Trump order put $700 million in grants on pause for Louisiana schools.
Maine housing authorities can't access funds after Trump's federal grants freeze. So the bad news is bad, right? This is them dismantling the government.
And it's not because they think there's a nice smaller government in there somewhere that they're trying to find. This is them dismantling the government.
And it's not because they think there's a nice, smaller government in there somewhere that they're trying to find. This is them dismantling and trying to get rid of the American system of government.
That's the bad news. The good news is they're not all that good at this.
And we saw that today in the inexplicable, unlawyered, clumsy language of this two-page order to stop all federal funding. That order directed, for example, that the Green New Deal funding must stop.
The Green New Deal is a years-old piece of proposed legislation that never actually passed. The inexplicability, the sort of bumper sticker style language of the stop all the funding order is why so many of the initial headlines about the impact of this today focused on the confusion, the lack of clarity, nobody really having any idea what exactly the Trump administration was shutting down.
And that was true in blue states. That was true in purple states.
That was true in red states. As members of Congress and governors and former government officials and members of the press started putting it together, started circulating lists of all the things that this Trump order was shutting down, the White House themselves appeared to be fairly bewildered by the news that this was, in fact, the stuff that they were shutting down.
Like, really, we're shutting down veterans' homeless shelters? We are. We're shutting down meat and poultry inspections? We are.
We're shutting down school breakfasts, school lunches. We're shutting down home heating assistance.
It's January 28th. We're shutting down housing assistance, including rent vouchers, which is how people pay their rent first of the month when the rent is due is Saturday.

We're shutting down food stamps. The SNAP program, millions and millions and millions of Trump voting Americans get SNAP.
Millions of Americans of all stripes. The WIC program, that's food specifically for pregnant and postpartum women and their infants.
Child care, Head Start, suicide hotlines, child abuse investigations, supporting law enforcement, rape crisis centers, Medicaid, which is health insurance for millions of Americans, including especially disabled people, old people, and oh, by the way, it covers 40% of all births in America. And this isn't stuff that they were like proposing to not reauthorize or like asking Congress to cut.
They said that money was cut off as of today. And after the Trump White House started to realize that those were all the things they had just shut down, there was a hue and cry and a huge pushback all over the country.
And what happened? The Trump White House backed down and tried to say that, oh, this wasn't what they had meant to do. That, no, no, no, Medicaid wasn't being shut off.
Where'd you hear that? Yeah, tell that to the states that all day couldn't access any Medicaid payments. Again, after a hue and cry and huge pushback, they changed their mind, or rather changed their

explanation and said, oh, no, no, no, we didn't mean that. Pell grants and federally supported student loans, those won't be included.
Well, they certainly appeared to be on the list this morning. But then after the hue and cry and the pushback, they tried to say, oh, no, no, no, they never were.
The White House apparently had no idea what was going to turn off when they flipped that switch today. Shut down the government.
By the way, what's the government? Ready, fire, aim. This White House had no idea what the impact was of what they were doing.
And so they spent all day taking more and more and more of it back as people told them what they had just done and pushed back hard. Later in the day, they put out a new directive insisting, oh, no, no, no, we didn't mean food stamps.
Snap isn't being stopped. We didn't mean that.
Oh, and neither are funds for small businesses and funds for farmers and Pell Grants

and Head Start and rental assistance, quote, and other similar programs. Anything that sounds good that people might get mad about, we didn't mean that.
We just meant government, which sucks, right? We didn't mean all the stuff that people use and like and need. the bad news is they are trying to delete the government.
They are trying to get rid of all federal employees. Just throwing a brick through the window on everything the government does.
Their aims appear to be as bad or worse than anybody predicted or imagined, even after they picked J.D. Vance.
That's the bad news. But the good news is that they're bad at what they're doing and that there is loud and outraged pushback, and it is pushing them back.
The pushback is happening all across the country, red states and blue states. We are about to see the impact of that in Washington.
Democrats in the House today called an in-person emergency all-hands-on-deck in Washington meeting tomorrow to plan a response that they say includes not just legislation and communication, but also litigation. That emergency all-hands-on-deck meeting today called by Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the House.
Today, a lawsuit brought by Democracy Forward has blocked the funding freeze already. It is blocked at least until next week.
You know the group Indivisible? They've been doing big, impressive organizing meetings all over the country this week. Look at these pictures of their numbers that are turning out at their meetings right now.
These organizing meetings, again, all over the country. Indivisible is calling on Democratic senators in response to what Trump has just done, telling them what Trump has just done here in this last couple of days is so extreme.
This is so bad. Democratic senators need to not wait to see what else he's going to do.
They actually need to take relatively extreme action in response right now. Indivisible is calling on Democratic senators to, quote, oppose all nominees until Trump reverses

the freeze, to deny unanimous consent in order to slow down Senate proceedings, to vote no on

all cloture votes, to, quote, force quorum calls at every opportunity. They say, quote, Trump is

daring anyone to stop him as he seizes power, ignoring Congress and rewriting laws by decree.

They say, quote, we need Democrats to use every procedural maneuver to grind things to a stop and use every media tool to raise alarm and allow public pressure to build. Quote, shut down the Senate.
Shut down the Senate. Refuse to allow them to steamroll and take this fight to every town hall, courtroom and news outlet.
Quote, shut it down. Indivisible tells us tonight that they've had their members calling the Senate, calling Democrats in the Senate all day, making that demand.
They told us they are finding senators and their staffers to be very receptive to this message. It is against the law for Trump to have stopped this funding that Congress allocated.
He thinks that that law doesn't count and it doesn't matter. So he did it anyway.
For that matter, it's also illegal for Trump to have fired people at the National Labor Relations Board and the EEOC today. It is illegal for Trump to have fired the inspectors general from all those agencies the way that he did.
All of those things are actually contrary to law. But in this administration, what are they trying to do? Delete the government and install a national CEO, aka dictator.
So him acting in ways that are contrary to law, they see that as a feature, not a bug, right? They want to demonstrate that he does not have to follow the law. Because after all, we are deleting the U.S.
government and replacing it with something else. That is what they are offering.
They think we're going to get over our dictator phobia and go along with it. Turns out we're not going along with it.
Not in the courts, not in the Congress, not in the Senate, not in the states, not in the press, and ultimately, I think, not in the streets. Nope.
Turns out, not having it. And it does turn out that their intentions are as bad as we could have imagined or maybe worse.
But now, what did you see today? You saw them cave and mumble and try to take it back and say they didn't mean it. We've got a free press, a free people, and an organized political opposition that represents fully half the country.
So here we go. It's on.
It's on. It's on.
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While he was out golfing, he threw the country into crisis. This is not bold.
It's not leadership. It's stupid, buffoonish, childish of exactly what they did.
Most folks were up all night last night as we dealt with this being thrown on there with no guidance. I know you have a lot of

questions. I have a lot of questions because not one damn person thought this through.
I'm hearing

within the last few minutes, oh, no, no, the Medicare thing was just a fluke. It's unrelated

to this. That is ****.
There is absolutely no way they didn't know exactly what they were doing.

Minnesota governor and Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Wall speaking this

afternoon in Minnesota in response to the Trump White House's sudden, inexplicable freeze on all federal funding.

Governor Wall's and state officials were sent scrambling overnight to try to deal with the expected impact of roughly two billion dollars in federal funding for ongoing programs being yanked instantly and with no warning.

Today, after a huge pushback across the country, the Trump administration tried to take some of it back and say they hadn't meant it. Then a freeze, the freeze overall, was put on hold by a federal judge.
Joining us now exclusively for his first interview since the presidential election is Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Governor Walz, it's really nice to see you.
Thank you for making time to be here. It's good to be back with you, Rachel.
Great first segment. Terrifying, but accurate.
You know what they're after. And it's not that we should be surprised by this.
They laid it out in Project 2025. So here we are.
Well, actually, let me ask you about that on this point. A lot of people have been today and the last few days crediting your campaign and crediting all the reporting during the campaign that identified Project 2025 as essentially what looked like a blueprint for the incoming Trump administration to dismantle the American government.
They denied it. They said they had nothing to do with it, said they'd never heard of it.
Does it seem to you like that's actually what they're doing? Oh, it is. It doesn't seem it is.
We took it seriously. And I can tell, you know, your viewers tonight, governors and attorney generals took this seriously.
And there was a lot of planning. There's a lot of good folks, smart folks, organizations.
You talked about some of them that were out there preparing for this. But there's only so much planning you can do because of the impact it makes.
And just today, I was at a Head Start program. What we have to do is we have to personalize this down to this matters to each person because Republicans always want to talk about cutting government.
That's in theoretically. They never want to be specific because we know that these programs are incredibly popular.
But I can tell folks we were we were preparing for it. They wrote it out.
If you go back and look at that now, you'll see this go step by step. And I would say, Rachel, that it was cruel.
They planned it. Yes, it was somewhat buffoonish, but I'm not quite certain that we're reading that right.
I think this is a case of that. This is a trial balloon to see how much tolerance we had and what we pull back.
I make this analogy. It's like you caught someone and they stole everything out of your house.
You caught them and you told them to put it back. And when you start looking, some of it's still gone.
What they're going to see is, oh, they didn't raise a stink about meteorologists or our folks who are monitoring PFAS in our water. So let's just go on with that.
Or people that we don't think have a voice that we want to marginalize and demonize. So, you know, they were going to get this.
And, you know, and I heard Chris on his program talking with Jamie Raskin, who is the smartest person you'll find in Congress. They're never going to bring this the legal way because no Republican will vote for this.
And the deafening silence of Republican governors. These are my colleagues.
Some of them are my friends. But shame on you.
You know what this is doing. And look, I come from a wealthy state that has the lowest childhood poverty rates and we have a strong safety net.
I guarantee you these Republican states would pay the price far more than us, and they're just silent on it. So we're going to need some courage.
This is a long fight. This is ideologically everything you laid out.
They want to destroy the federal government, this buyout of employees, because now they threaten them. It's here.
The game is here. We knew it was coming.
I don't know what people thought that we were just speaking, you know, that this wasn't going to happen. Donald Trump said, oh, I never heard of him.
And now you got vote. This guy vote that's at the heart of it.
So look, it's on. I'm glad you said that.
Governors are out there. The resistance is strong.
You felt it. Americans, lo and behold, like democracy and feeding their children.
So they're going to fight for these things. But here's what I OK.
There's a court order. Who believes Donald Trump's going to care what the courts say? Who believes he's not going to do this? We're still finding glitches in our things.
We're trying to access these systems again. They're not functioning correctly.
And the ludicrousness, the insult to the American public to tell us that for the first time it was just a coincidence that the Medicaid reimbursement site glitched at the same time they froze all these programs. We have to put an end to that.
We have to just say, no, it's not enough. And I got to tell you, I'm going to I'm sending it out to those Republican governors.
We set by side by side. Governors don't.
We have to deliver. we have to make sure that the water runs, that things are happening.
And they're getting hammered just as much as we are. What do you think? America's listening to you right now, thinking about what might have been.
Had you been vice president instead of J.D. Vance? What might have been had Kamala Harris been the president right now instead of Donald Trump? People hearing you talking about the pushback and the fight and that mattering.

What does that mean in practical terms?

The average person watching you right now who agrees that this needs a big pushback,

what should they do?

Yeah, and you know that overused term, the frog in the boiling water,

we've been in the damn pot way too long.

I think it is speaking up.

It's thinking about your neighbors.

It's writing and putting those members of Congress. Look, there is no spine amongst those folks.
But this is real. This is, you know, they're talking about defunding the police, things that they, you know, puff their chests up and say they're good with making the case.
And I would let, you know, to the voters, I'm with this, too. Everybody's fatigued.
Trust me. I get it.
That was it was pure hell and the disappointment and the frustration. And I'm, you know, soul searching, what could we have done to make the case? Because we knew this was coming.
We knew that the implications, and they're throwing so much at us that we're fatigued. You know, we, we spent three days, you know, debating, having them trying to debate that president Musk gave a Nazi salute.
Of course he did. But that is a distraction from what I think you said.
This is game on stuff right here. And I am worried with these federal employees because look, they're in a tough spot that some of these folks, especially those that are doing good work around environmental concerns, around justice for people, around criminal justice reform, all of the things that make our society better.

Those folks are are in there and they're making, you know, they put out tweets from the president's failed son who threatens people like we're coming for you. You think this is bad or whatever.
So I would tell people, stay focused. Don't take the bait on the distractions.
Surround yourself with people who understand this and recognize the things they went after today are basically a big chunk of what society does. And people like to have clean water and hospitals and safety and roads and airports, all the things they're going after.
And you summed it up.

This is there are societies that function like this, where the rich and the oligarchs do everything.

And there's some fabulously wealthy people who are basically not basically are above the law.

And the rest of us are here. And I think we have to find that voice.
We have to push back. We

Thank you. everything.
And there's some fabulously wealthy people who are basically not basically are above the law. And the rest of us are here.
And I think we have to find that voice. We have to push back.
We have to be organized. We do have to use the courts.
But I just want to caution everyone. I don't know what lent tends us to believe that Donald Trump cares what the courts say.
I think there needs to be more to that. And I think it is taking it to the individual people.
Show what each of these programs does and what it means to people's lives. Yeah.
No matter what people motivated anybody's

vote, if you didn't think you were voting to cut firefighting, if you didn't think you were voting

to cut meat inspections, if you didn't think you were voting to cut air traffic control,

well, it's all becoming very, very clear right now. Sir, please come back anytime.
It's

nice to see you. And it's really, it's an honor to have you here with us tonight.
Thank you.

Thanks, Rachel.

All right. More news ahead tonight.
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What's that we were saying about the fact that pressure works? The Trump White House has just reversed course on another really important thing tonight. Look at this headline in The New York Times.
Quote, State Department permits distribution of HIV medications to resume. For now, the Trump administration today issued a waiver for life-saving medicines and medical services, offering a reprieve for a worldwide HIV treatment program that was halted last week.
The waiver announced today by Secretary of State Marco Rubio seemed to allow for the distribution of HIV medications.

Pressure works. Attention works.
Trump administration cut off crucial drugs for people with HIV around the world, risking, among other things, that all of those people might not only die, but they might in the meantime develop drug-resistant HIV, which would then be unleashed on the world. Hey, that seems like a great plan.
But focused pushback made them change course today. And that incredible story is one thing in tonight's news among what feels like about 5 million.
There are at least a dozen different items just in the news just today that would be worthy of its own book. When you're in an environment like this, when there's too much to cover in detail, you do what you can.
You try to notice everything. You try to make note of everything.
But then you know you need to move on. How do you focus, right? We are eight years down the road from the last time we were adjusting to a news environment like this.
And maybe we're remembering some of what it was like in 2017. Maybe this is a skill we have, but have you found yourself wondering over the last couple of weeks whether we're actually worse at dealing with this dynamic right now than we were eight years ago? Our brains are worse at dealing with it because of what has been happening to us as humans and our human brains in the digital attention economy that we have been living in for the past eight

years since the last time we had to deal with this? I've been worried about that. And that is

what my friend and colleague Chris Hayes writes about in his excellent new book, which is called

The Siren's Call. He writes, quote, before you can persuade, you must capture attention.
Before you

inform, insult, seduce, or anything else, you must make sure that your voice doesn't end up in the muted background static that's 99.9% of the speech directed our way. Public discourse is now a war of all against all for attention.
And we're all feeling battle weary. This book is an attempt at finding peace.
Joining us now is my friend and colleague, Chris Hayes. He's the host of All In here on MSNBC.
And his new book is out today. It's called The Siren's Call, How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource.
Chris, thank you for being here. Thank you for writing the book.
Thank you. It's so great to join you.
And that was, those were two phenomenal blocks of television, I just got to say. And also, man, like, Tim Wall should have been doing a lot more press.
Yeah. I feel like, anyway, I guess we can't swim upstream to that.
But I'll just say that those were excellent blocks. Thank you.
That's nice of you to say. Do you, what I just said, though, does that resonate with you at all?

I am worried. Since 2017, I'm older and wearier and all of the things that happen over eight years.

But I also feel like my brain has gotten softer and more strangled because of the information environment and the attention environment that you describe in your book.

Does that resonate for you? Yeah. I mean, I think one of the things about the way that our attention functions is it gets habituated.
We have different cells within us. There's the kind of volitional self that wants to focus on things.
Like the classic example is the book you bring on vacation that you don't read because you were like scrolling social media. Right.
And which of those is the true self? And they're both the true self, right? Different conditions, different technologies bring out different parts of ourselves. And we are living right now in a technological and market atmosphere in which the value of our attention is so high when aggregated and pooled by large corporations or by political figures that it is constantly being compelled against our will.
And that habituates something in us that makes it harder to focus. And we're seeing, I mean, your point about focus here is so important about the political effects of it, because sustained focus is a kind of power.
And they're, you know, Donald Trump wants attention on the ICE raids, which is why Dr. Phil's there.
They didn't want attention on suspending HIV drugs being given out and shutting down veteran suicide prevention. But the battle isn't we don't have battles in public discourse that are debates like notice what happened today.
Was there debate? Did they rise to say, actually, we think it's not good to spend federal money on veteran suicide prevention? Well, no, here's why we think we do. We didn't debate it.
It was just a war over who was going to pay attention to what. Was it going to be paying attention to these cuts or what they were trying to direct us towards? Yes.
And in the news environment, like for what you and I do as a living, to make a living, we have to choose what we are going to talk about. That is the most powerful part of our job.
For me, it is the most intellectually stimulating and rewarding part of our job. But that is absolutely the competition in which all Americans are engaged in terms of what you look at, what you believe is true, what is worth spending time with.
And I feel like it's more scientific. We sort of feel like it's stuff that we encounter, and it's stuff that we see, and it's stuff that was scrolled by.
I feel like the thing that your book taught me is how much this is a professional science of getting us to turn our head and getting us to stop paying attention to one thing and start paying attention to another. it makes me feel like we're being experimented on by scientists who didn't get our consent.
And one of the key insights here is that because we have this biological inheritance, we have this faculty that, you know, the predator rustling in the bushes, someone drops a glass at a party like we whip our head around. That is what we're susceptible to having our attention compelled.
And the thing that we want to cultivate in ourselves, and you're really one of the best practitioners at this in terms of what you're able to do, is like sustained attention and focus. And so we still have that within us.
It's just a question of putting ourselves embedded in institutions and conditions and environments where we're cultivating that in ourselves, because that is its own kind of power right now. Yeah.
And being able to name it, recognize it, think about it, make decisions about it, rather than it all just seeing like an ambient thing you can't control, to me actually is very calming. And I found that your book did actually give me some peace on this.
This is the book. It's called The Siren's Call, How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource.
Chris Hayes' new book. It's fantastic.
You're a great writer and a great pal. Thanks, my friend.
Really appreciate it. Thank you.
All right. We'll be right back.
Caroline Kennedy is the daughter of President John F. Kennedy.
She was ambassador to Australia under Joe Biden. Now that the Biden administration is over, Caroline Kennedy is no longer in government.
And who, boy, does she have some things to say specifically about her cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump's nominee to be America's health secretary.
I just want to read you this from a letter that Caroline Kennedy today sent to senators who are going to be questioning her cousin at his nomination hearing tomorrow. Get a load of this.
Quote, I have known Bobby my whole life. We grew up together.
It's no surprise that he keeps birds of prey as pets because he himself is a predator. I watched his younger brothers and cousins follow him down the path of drug addiction.
His basement, his garage, his dorm room were the centers of the action where drugs were available, and he enjoyed showing off how he put baby chickens and mice in the blender to feed his hawks. It was often a perverse scene of despair and violence.
Bobby has gone on to misrepresent, lie, and cheat his way through life. Bobby is addicted to attention and power.
Bobby preys on the desperation of parents of sick children vaccinating his own children while building a following by hypocritically discouraging other parents from vaccinating theirs. She says the nation's health care providers, quote, deserve a stable, moral, and ethical person at the helm of this crucial agency.
They deserve better than Bobby Kennedy. And so do the rest of us.
She also just sums it up by saying he lacks any relevant government, financial management, or medical experience. Needless to say, she ends by urging senators to vote against him.
This letter from his own cousin is now in the hands of every senator who will be questioning Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
at his confirmation hearing tomorrow. Watch this space.
Before we go, I want you to do me a favor. Take out your cell phone and open up the camera app on your cell phone.
We're now going to put something up on the screen. If you point your camera at that little blob on the screen, you see that little pixelated circle where it says scan to follow that little blob, that QR code.
If you look at that with your camera on your phone and then click the link that pops up,

that is a thing that you should do. Because that link will bring you to my account on the social media app that's called Blue Sky.
And that's where I am online. You can find me here on TV

at 9 p.m. Eastern weeknights.
But the whole rest of the time, you can find me on Blue Sky,

where I am matto.msnbc.com. So just click on that, click on follow to follow my account, and I will see you there on Blue Sky.
Thank you very much for considering it. All right, I'll see you again here tomorrow, 9 p.m.
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OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota.

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