Doors slam on weak Trump as pushback hardens at every level

Welcome back to Listen to Your Heart.

I'm Jerry.

And I'm Jerry's Heart.

Today's topic: Repatha Evalokimap.

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What if you had the smartest Wi-Fi?

If you did, it'd be Xfiniti and it'd come with their best state-of-the-art equipment.

It would boost speeds to the devices that needed the most, whether you were streaming, gaming, or gaming while pretending to work.

It would even power your mobile connection so you could bring faster, secure Wi-Fi speeds with you where you use it most.

If you had the smartest Wi-Fi, everything would work together seamlessly to keep you connected.

Xfinity, imagine that.

Restrictions apply.

I know this is not the time you are used to seeing me here, which makes me all the more grateful that you are here.

The reason I'm here is because one hour from now at 9 p.m.

Eastern, it's the premiere of my new documentary.

My production company, Surprise Inside, the great folks at Left Right Films, our partners at MSNBC Films, a great director named Matt Kay, everybody came together to produce our new documentary, which I'm very proud of.

It's airing here tonight for the first time ever.

I am really proud of it.

I am nervous and excited to finally have it out in the world tonight.

But I have to tell you something.

When we first got the release date for the movie, when we first learned that tonight was going to be the release date, I wrote this statement.

at that time about what the film is about and why now seems like an important time to make a movie like this and for people to see a movie like this.

So at the time when we got our release date, I said this.

I said, quote, at a time when confrontations with the government and grassroots protests are back at the center of American political life, the civil rights movement is more than just a moral cornerstone for our country.

It's a living, breathing, practical manual for how to fight for what's right and win that fight and maybe even save your own soul in the process.

Andrew Young's story is not gauzy or romantic.

It's the gritty truth of what it takes to build and sustain a winning movement.

It's about how hard it is to be a hero and how beautiful too.

So that is the statement that I wrote when we first got a release date for the movie that we are showing here tonight.

I swear, what I did not know at the time, what we did not know at the time, was that we would be releasing this film literally the night before.

What may end up being the largest single day of protest ever in American history.

It's like we programmed it, but we did not.

The No kings protests back in June were one of the largest days of protests ever in this country.

For the protests, tomorrow, under that same headline of no kings, for tomorrow's protests, organizers say nearly twice as many people have registered or RSVP'd to say they're going to show up compared to the number of people who did so in June.

Nearly twice as many.

Considering that June saw between five and six million people turn out,

that means tomorrow really could be a mammoth, mammoth day.

So it has ended up being very, very fitting

this timing.

Tonight we carbo load on Andrew Young's story.

of strategy and discipline and the personal experience of being part of a big nonviolent protest movement that went up against tremendous odds in this country and won his story of his time at Martin Luther King's right hand in the civil rights movement and his career and what he went through as a builder and architect and a behind the scenes, dirty work, grunt work guy in that movement.

You get that tonight.

And then tomorrow, you and everybody you know makes a handmade sign or puts on an inflatable unicorn suit or grabs the grandparents or grabs the grandkids or grabs all the roommates or the friends from work or the neighbors.

And tomorrow, everybody heads out to protest.

Again, the timing is a little bit uncanny, I will admit, but the film tonight starts right here at 9 at the top of the hour.

And then tomorrow, all day long, tomorrow, live here on MSNBC, we will have comprehensive coverage of the nationwide no kings protests.

And this moment of what's expected to be very large-scale protests against

President Trump tomorrow.

I think

in terms of thinking about the point of those protests and the effectiveness of those protests and how these protests fit into this moment in American history, I think it is worth being very real about the fact

that these likely massive protests tomorrow are coming at a time of pronounced weakness for him and his administration.

And I think the mainstream media doesn't always talk about this.

I think one of Trump's great geniuses, sort of one of the things he's actually actually truly great at, is getting the media to cover things he wants them to cover.

Even if he can't always cover, he can't always get the kinds of coverage that he wants, he can almost always get the topics covered that he wants.

And so because of that, I think some of the ways in which he is at a profound moment of weakness in his presidency have just kind of slipped by and not made the headlines.

But I think if you're being real and you take a wide aperture look at what's going on with him right now, that's the pretty obvious bottom line.

I mean, here's just one one piece of that.

So today's Friday, usually every Thursday, we get the jobs numbers, right?

We get the jobless claims data.

That usually happens every Thursday.

On the first Friday of every month, we're supposed to get the data on the number of new jobs created in unemployment.

We're not getting that now, apparently because of the government shutdown.

The first Friday after the shutdown started, they reportedly had that jobs report ready to go and they could have released it, but they didn't for some reason.

That's not exactly a sign of strength.

Private sector job indicators around the same time, payroll data and stuff, indicated that the jobs numbers right at the start of the shutdown might actually be horrific numbers.

And so who knows, maybe that influenced Trump's decision about not allowing that data to be released, even though they had it right at the start of the shutdown.

We'll never know, right?

Before the shutdown, Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics when the jobs number started looking really bad.

Well, now Trump has quietly withdrawn the nomination of the guy he picked to replace the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

He's withdrawn that nomination and nobody new has been named for that job.

Trump has also quietly just withdrawn his nomination for the person he wanted to put in charge of veterans benefits at the VA.

That nomination has been pulled as well.

Trump has also quietly just withdrawn his nominee for a senior oversight position at HUD.

That nomination has been pulled as well.

Trump has quietly just withdrawn his nomination for the person he wanted to be ambassador to Serbia.

That's gone now too.

Trump has quietly just withdrawn his nomination to lead the CFTC, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

That nominee then posted online about Trump donors telling him to, quote, rectify, meaning spike, a CFTC case against them, against the Trump donors.

He says he refused to do that, and he says that's why his nomination was polled.

Trump's deputy White House chief of staff just quit and left.

The chief of staff to Attorney General Pam Bondi just quit and left.

They just removed the 25-year-old Fox News producer.

They put in charge of the commission that's supposed to run the America's 250th birthday celebration.

How come all these people are being pulled?

How come all these nominations, controversial for one reason or another, are all just being yanked?

Can't stand the bad press.

Can no longer take it political capital wise to have unpopular or problematic nominees pushed through the news cycle?

Don't feel strong enough to bear that brunt anymore the way you used to?

Today, this was a large protest on the lawn at the main campus campus quad at the University of Virginia.

This is the protest there today with students and faculty and staff telling the UVA administration that they should refuse to sign this Deal with the Devil compact with the Trump administration to supposedly get special preferences in federal funding if you agree to Trump's ideological strictures on your academic freedom.

This was the protest today at UVA, telling the UVA administration, don't you dare, do not sell us out, don't you sign that thing.

This was today, and then this, tonight, was the statement, in fact, released by UVA's president saying, okay, okay, we're not doing it.

We have told the Trump administration, no.

Remember when it was just Harvard standing up and all the other universities were too intimidated to say no, to say no?

Well, now even the ones that caved before or that signed deals before with Trump, places like Brown University, even those schools have now learned that maybe signing deals with Trump is not a good idea.

Trying to appease him, you know, trying to stay on his good side is folly.

It just shows weakness.

It invites him to come back and bully you some more.

And so in quick succession, we have seen MIT and Brown and Penn and USC and now UVA as well.

They've all told the Trump White House, no.

We're not doing it.

We're not signing on to your little compact to restrict our academic freedom and our ideological freedom of movement in order to try to keep you happy.

No, we are not doing it.

We have learned our lesson.

Forget it.

The Pentagon Press Corps, all the real reporters at the Pentagon, even the ones from Fox News, this week all walked out in unison, telling Trump, no, we're not going to do it either.

We are not going to agree to just write down what you tell us instead of doing actual journalism.

No, we are not doing it.

They walked out in unison en masse.

They told him no.

In Chicago, we're seeing spontaneous protests in every city, neighborhood, and in every suburb against Trump's apparently untrained, totally out-of-the-depth paramilitary dress-up immigration agents, who, among other things, are now regularly tear gassing Chicago police officers.

A federal judge has now ordered Trump's federal agents from the bench, quote, you can't deploy tear gas.

You can't use flashbang grenades.

You can't drive a car through a crowd.

You can't shoot them in the head with pepper balls.

The judge has ordered that Trump's federal agents in Chicago must not only change their ridiculous tactics, they must now wear body cameras and they must have them turned on.

A different federal judge had ruled that the National Guard cannot be deployed to Illinois.

That ruling has now been upheld by a unanimous three-judge panel of a federal appeals court.

In Washington, D.C., where Trump installed yet another Fox News host to be U.S.

attorney in that city,

they tried once, they tried twice, they tried three times to convince a grand jury to bring a felony criminal indictment against one D.C.

resident who was part of a protest there.

All three times, the grand jury refused to move ahead with those felony charges.

Janine Pirot's office then instead finally charged this young woman with a misdemeanor for which they put her on trial.

That was yesterday.

The jury laughed them out of of the courtroom and acquitted her yesterday afternoon after about a nanosecond of deliberation.

As Trump continues to personally order up criminal indictments against people he doesn't like, James Comey, Tish James, now John Bolton, tonight two more veteran prosecutors have reportedly been fired after refusing to bring what they believe to be a baseless prosecution against New York Attorney General Tish James.

Yesterday in that district, in the Eastern District of of Virginia, a judge who is Trump appointed

took a moment, a dramatic moment from the bench at the conclusion of a big national security case, took a moment from the bench to praise James Comey's son-in-law.

who recently resigned as a prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia when that office charged his father-in-law, James Comey.

The judge praised the prosecutor from the bench, saying, quote, how saddened he was that I will, quote, not have the privilege of him appearing in my courtroom again.

He said he was disheartened to know that the Department of Justice and our nation will be deprived of his obvious talents and integrity going forward.

He said, quote, lawyers who stand up for the rule of law provide an essential contribution to the cause of freedom.

The judge said, quote, what makes our country great

is that we are a free country and our great nation serves as a beacon for freedom around the world, but freedom and the rule of law necessarily go hand in hand.

You cannot have one without the other.

Again, a Trump-appointed judge making very pointed comments from the bench at the conclusion of a national security case in EDVA.

That comes in the wake of another Trump-appointed federal judge issuing just a rip-snorting opinion, not only blocking Trump from sending troops to Portland, but really eviscerating him in very sharp language for even having the temerity to try it.

New AP polling has Donald Trump 24 points underwater in his job approval rating.

People disapprove of Donald Trump as president more than they approve of him by a 24-point margin.

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives announced today that they will take a fifth straight week week of previously unplanned vacation next week.

Now, to be clear, there is nothing about the government shutdown that requires Congress to be out of session.

They're supposed to be in session, but for a fifth straight week, they are calling in sick, canceling class,

refusing to convene the House, and Perhaps not incidentally, refusing to swear in the new member of Congress from Arizona, Adelita Grijalva, who won a special election last month, but they won't allow her to be sworn in.

And they won't say why, but Democrats will say why they think it is.

And it's because she would be the 218th and therefore the deciding vote to force a release of the Epstein files in which President Trump himself reportedly plays a fairly starring role.

Trump's attorney general has reportedly told him his name appears in the Epstein files multiple times.

Trump, perhaps unsurprisingly, is refusing to release those files.

But once Adelita Grijalva is sworn in, they may no longer legally be able to refuse the release of those files any longer.

And so we are now heading into a fifth straight week of Republicans refusing to convene the House of Representatives, a fifth straight week of unplanned vacation,

apparently just to try to protect Trump from whatever is in those Epstein files.

about him.

On day 17 of the government shutdown, government workers and military families are lining up at food pantries all over the country.

Trump is apparently excited to have another crack at firing the people involved and keeping our nuclear weapons safe.

They're citing the shutdown to go through with an 80% furlough of the National Nuclear Security Administration as of Monday morning.

Remember, they accidentally fired all the national nuclear security people right at the beginning of Trump's term in office, and then they said, oops, we didn't mean to do that, and they brought them all back.

Well, now they are furloughing all of them.

These are the people who keep our nuclear weapons safe from, you know, theft

or going off when they shouldn't.

Yeah, who needs them?

Democrats say their price for relenting on the shutdown is that Republicans need to reverse their changes to health insurance.

Their policy changes that are going to spike people's health insurance costs in very short order,

by almost unbelievable amounts.

And I will show you what I mean.

States are now starting to release the actual numbers on what the Republicans' policy changes have done to health insurance costs with this legislation that they've passed this year.

This is what the Democrats have been making a stink about.

You've heard like Democrats are concerned in the shutdown fight about health care costs and health insurance and you think like, oh, Democrats are always concerned about health costs.

That's nice.

I care about health costs.

I'm glad they're standing up for it.

No, it's this specific thing.

You want to know what the Democrats are making a stink about with the shutdown?

You want to know what the Democratic side is of the fight over the shutdown?

Look at these numbers from the New York Times tonight.

Look at this.

This is for the tens of millions of Americans who get their health insurance through the online marketplaces.

Look.

Based on the newly newly posted information, meaning the pricing information that's now being posted in multiple states, a family of four making $130,000 in Maine, so you combine the family's income, everybody's salaries, you got to do $130,000, that family would face an increase in their annual health insurance premiums next year of $16,100.

That's how much their health insurance premiums would go up.

But maybe that's, you know, that sounds like it's a fairly well-off family.

And you think, oh, well, maybe that doesn't apply to me.

I'm not quite in that kind of a bracket.

Well, imagine you're in a couple, you're each 60 years old, and you put both your salaries together combined, you make $85,000 a year.

So maybe one of you is making $40,000 a year, maybe one of you is making $45,000 a year.

Combined, your couple's income is $85,000 a year.

In Maryland, your insurance premium is going to to go up by $13,700.

In Minnesota, your insurance is going to go up by $15,500.

In Nevada, it's going to go up by $18,100.

In Kentucky, the increase for you guys as a couple will be that you are expected to pay an additional $23,700

per year.

That is the amount.

of increase we are looking at in people's health insurance premiums.

Can your family afford just randomly an additional charge of $24,000

for exactly what you're getting right now for $24,000 less than that?

I mean, these are insane numbers.

But this is what Republicans, in their policy changes on healthcare, what they have done to health insurance costs.

And this specifically is what Democrats have been screaming bloody murder about.

This is what Democrats have been drawing the line about in this shutdown, telling Republicans that this is the thing they need to fix.

Think they're going to fix it?

Think they will?

President Trump doesn't appear real focused on it.

Tonight he has pardoned convicted Republican cotton man,

former Republican Congressman George Santos, and sprung him out of prison.

So clearly that's a president operating from a position of strength,

right?

This is what he wants to be known for?

I mean, his only moves right now are big destruction moves.

We're in day 17 of a government shutdown.

He's refusing to release the jobs data or the inflation data about what he's doing to the country's economy, while all the private sector data that we have to look to to try to understand those things is terrible.

His paramilitary and would-be military assault on his own people in cities across the country is being pushed back, not only on every street corner where he's trying it, but in every courtroom where he's trying to get away with it, including in front of judges he himself appointed.

He is pulling out all the last stops he can to try desperately to avoid the Epstein disaster he is still mired in.

He is quietly, quietly pulling his nominees and hoping no one notices and asks why.

The health care policy on which the Democrats are totally unified and taking their stand against him is about to be a full-blown economic disaster for literally tens of millions of American families, the majority of them in Republican-run states.

He is 24 points underwater in his job approval.

24 points.

And his big idea to change the subject is to free America's comedic poster child for compulsive lying and stealing.

I mean, for a supposed strong man, this is all pretty weak, right?

And on top of all of that,

and perhaps because of all of that, tomorrow there may be the largest protests ever in this country,

in all 50 states, all against him.

Couldn't happen at a better time.

Happy No Kings Day, America.

By the way, you're already winning.

Lots to get to tonight.

Let's go.

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To be clear, maybe we should have seen this coming when he named a Fox and Friends weekend co-host to be in charge of the Pentagon, one who promised he would stop drinking if he got the job.

Oh, good.

Well, now we are nine months into Pete Hegseth's tenure as Defense Secretary, and it is going as well as you might have expected with that kind of leadership at the helm of the most powerful military in the whole world.

The military, by definition, of course, is not a political body where there is supposed to be massive turnover every time there's a new administration.

But since Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth took over at the Pentagon, the military's upper leadership has just been destroyed.

We have seen fired or pushed out everybody from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the Commandant of the U.S.

Coast Guard to the head of the Navy SEALs to the top legal officers in the Army and in the Navy and in the Air Force.

They've all been sent packing.

And in the midst of that, at the highest levels of our armed forces, we have seen,

frankly, bizarre behavior toward the military from both the President and the Defense Secretary.

Last month, of course, Secretary Hegseth summoned every top general and admiral in the U.S.

military to all come in person to hear a speech by him.

Generals and admirals from every conflict zone all over the world were all ordered to leave their posts all at the same time so they could all travel to be there in person at this gathering,

where Pete Hegseth gave them a speech and President Trump did as well.

In President Trump's speech, he told them that he wanted them to bring the force of the U.S.

military to bear against Americans in U.S.

cities.

He said he needed these generals and admirals to bring the U.S.

military to American cities because he needed them on the ground to help fight what he called, quote, the enemy within.

It has been a lot for the U.S.

military under this administration.

And now we are starting to see one sign of things pretty seriously breaking down.

Since early last month, the U.S.

military has attacked at least six boats in the Caribbean.

The Trump administration has said, without putting forward any evidence to support it, that these boats were blown up because they were all carrying drugs.

Now, to be clear, the United States stops boats suspected of drug smuggling all the time.

They stop vessels like that.

They search them.

they arrest people, they investigate, they prosecute.

But now, under the Trump administration, they're just blowing these things up, blowing up boats and killing all the people on board.

No questions asked, no investigation, and potentially no legal grounding to do it.

For the lawyers within the U.S.

military, these attacks have reportedly raised really serious concerns.

According to recent reporting from CNN, quote, multiple current and former JAGs, meaning military lawyers, say that the strikes do not appear lawful.

Lawyers specializing in international law within the Pentagon's Office of General Counsel have raised concerns about the legality of the strikes.

CNN goes on to report that the top expert in international law in that Pentagon General Counsel's office is set to leave his role soon and move to a position instead in Europe.

Former officials familiar with the matter said this official has been, quote, left out of discussions surrounding the legality of the Caribbean strikes.

Well, it's against this backdrop that today we learn that the U.S.

military's most recent strike on yet another boat in the Caribbean had a different outcome than the earlier ones.

This time, our military didn't kill everybody on board.

Somebody survived.

and then our military picked them up.

Reuters first to report that, quote, the U.S.

military is holding two survivors aboard a Navy ship after rescuing them from a suspected drug vessel in the Caribbean Caribbean, hit by a U.S.

strike that killed two others.

This disclosure raises the possibility that the survivors from Thursday's strike are the first prisoners of war in a conflict declared by President Trump against a narco-terrorist threat he says is emanating from Venezuela.

The first prisoners of war?

War?

That legally questionable strike took place yesterday.

Also yesterday, we learned that the top U.S.

military commander overseeing this campaign in the Caribbean is abruptly stepping down without explanation, well before his time in that position was due to elapse.

The Washington Post is among those reporting that Navy Admiral Alvin Hulsey, the head of U.S.

7 Command, will retire unexpectedly this year.

The Post reports, quote, two people familiar with the matter said Secretary Hegseth had grown disenchanted with Holsey and wanted him to step aside.

The scrutiny began about a month ago, around the time that the Trump administration began ordering deadly strikes on alleged drug boats off the coast of Venezuela.

Joining us now is Dan Lamothe.

He's military affairs reporter for the Washington Post.

Mr.

Lamothe, I know this has been a really difficult and stressful time for everybody who reports on the U.S.

military, especially somebody as experienced as yourself.

I appreciate you taking time to be with us tonight.

For having me.

How big of a surprise is it to have the head of Southern Command stepping down?

it definitely caught me by surprise uh two things that i think uh are both notable uh in terms of this being unexpected one he's only had this job about a year uh he took this job last november these are typically roles that take about three years and there's kind of a typical uh cadence to them it's kind of a three-year cycle uh he would either then retire or get another four four-star position uh so to have it happen now is definitely off-cycle, unusual, notable.

And then I think the second thing,

he's only been in this four-star position a year and he hadn't had a previous spot.

So at the moment, there's at least a discussion of whether or not he'll even be able to retire as a four-star general.

He would probably take a waiver in order to do so.

So that's not something you would anticipate he would do for his own career, for his own retirement pay, all of those things.

And what does your reporting suggest?

What do you understand about what may have led to

this, again, surprise decision?

Obviously, there's been a lot of reporting and a lot of, I think, even just lay observers wondering what could possibly be the legal basis for these killings, for blowing up these boats and killing everybody on board.

Even before we ended up in this thorny position of now having two survivors on a U.S.

Navy ship and all the questions about what's going to happen to them,

I think a lot of people are wondering whether the concerns about those actions might have been correlated in some way with this decision.

I don't have clarity on what particular discussions may have occurred or what Admiral Holsey's thinking was here,

but it's caught a lot of people by surprise in the military community.

It's not something they anticipated.

I think there was an open discussion of whether or not Admiral Holsey was comfortable with the direction that this conflict off the coast of Venezuela is going.

And

there's no clarity on what lies ahead with that, whether or not that stays at sea, how long this could go, in what ways it could expand.

We saw B-52 flights in the region in the last 24 hours, kind of another way to show a force of sorts.

All of those things I think are notable at this particular time.

With the B-52s, with the helicopters, with the president threatening that what he's been doing at sea off the coast of Venezuela, he's now willing to do on land, implying some sort of potential ground invasion or ground action in Venezuela, with reporting about the president and the president confirming that he's authorized the CIA to take some sorts of covert action inside Venezuela.

I mean, all of these signs at a normal time would suggest that we are, if not already at war with Venezuela, that we are going to war with Venezuela, especially when you look at the amount of military hardware and the number of U.S.

personnel who are in that region right now.

Where do you think this is going?

I wish I had a good read.

You know, and that's one of the problems with the Pentagon Press Corps being out of the building, frankly, is the lack of

context, the lack of ability to kind of drill in and say, okay, what's on the table, what's not.

You can also allay fears that way.

If they're looking to make the case that

the more strident options are not on the table and this is meant to be targeted and at least the discussion would be a little more narrow.

But we're not having that discussion either right now.

Dan Lamothe, military affairs reporter for the Washington Post, Dan, I know that what we all watched sort of in awe with you and your colleagues walking out of the Pentagon this week because of that conflict over the military's new rules about reporting, we all watched it in awe and saw it as a really politically important moment.

But I know for you, it's just difficult.

It reflects a lot of sacrifice.

I know this is not a fun time, not an inspiring time.

I know this is just difficult.

And I really appreciate what you do and I appreciate you being here.

Thanks for having me.

All right, we got much more news ahead tonight.

Stay with us.

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If you're not lucky enough to know this already, the Yiddish word for grandmother is bubby.

Having a grandmother, either a blood relation grandmother or somebody who just plays that role in your life, having a bubby, it's one of life's great gifts.

It's one of life's necessities, I might say.

But you know what else is great?

Having a grandmother to show you how to be a patriot, to help this country stand up for democracy and to do so with incredible resilience and persistence.

And we're lucky to have that in this country right now.

The great Tim Snyder circulated this today, a a protest sign for No Kings Tomorrow.

It says, Bubbies for Freedom.

And you can see the happy cartoon stickers of grandmothers and grandkids.

That's kind of a theme, as you can see here again, grandmothers defending democracy.

It's been funny to watch Republicans say that people who are expected to turn out to protest tomorrow are people who hate America, right?

It's going to be radicals and terrorists and violent people, which if you've seen anything about the character of the protests at the previous No Kings events or any of the Indivisible events or any of the big protest days, it's kind of hilarious.

Simultaneously, though, Republicans also repeatedly dismissed the protests against Trump and the Trump administration as being largely populated by older people.

And they say it like it's a bad thing.

I mean, there have been.

There's been, it's a very multi-generational thing.

There's all sorts of people who've protested against Trump.

Once you've got five and six million people protesting on a single day, you're going to have every kind of person represented in that huge number.

But there have been a lot of older people protesting against Trump.

Republicans have tried to make that seem like a bad thing.

I think they have that backwards.

I mean, older people at these protests are not only leading the way, they're not only sort of in the older and wiser category.

Also, Older people vote more than any other category.

Older people tend to be more conservative than any other category of voters.

So when you see tons of old people out at these anti-Trump protests, that ought to be a wake-up call for Republicans, not a reason to sneer.

You might remember back in April, we showed you a group of friends in New Jersey whose average age, average age is 90.

You know, when you're 90 years old, you have time to make your own sign.

When you're a grandparent or a great-grandparent and a retired school teacher and a patriot, it's really hard to convince anyone you're a radical terrorist.

You've also been around the block and you know the importance of protest.

You know how to not take the bait.

This week, the veteran climate organizer Bill McKibben was asked by the news outlet, Notice, if he was worried about people from his grassroots organization showing up to these protests and being labeled domestic terrorists.

Bill McKibben told them, quote, our average age is in the mid-70s.

I think our gray-haired presence alone will help make it clear what nonsense this is.

Older Americans were proudly overrepresented at the first No Kings Day, and we aim to make that happen again.

Joining us now is Bill McKibben.

He's an environmental writer.

He's also the founder of Third Act for Americans age 60 and older who are out there working for change.

Mr.

McKibben, thanks very much for being here.

I know it's a big night.

Rachel, what a pleasure to be with you.

Tell me about this

What I described as kind of a sneer, this sort of criticism that has been levied by Republicans, by defenders of President Trump, but even sometimes by people on on the other side of the aisle, people who might consider themselves to be on the left or in the center, saying that older people participating in these protests in such large numbers is somehow a bad thing, is somehow some sort of strategic weakness.

I've never seen it that way myself, but I feel like you hear that critique a lot.

Yeah, I think just the opposite.

I think one reason that older people have been turning out in such large numbers and they have been heavily overrepresented in these demonstrations is because

everybody can tell with a heart can tell that the Trump regime is bad news.

But if you have 15 presidents in your experience, you know that it's not just bad news.

You know that it's utterly different from every president that we've ever lived through before, good or bad, that this is a complete rupture with the America that we knew.

And I think that may strike old people harder.

We've certainly noticed noticed at Third Act that there's a huge willingness of people to be out in the street over and over again.

And not just at these demonstrations.

You'll remember a couple of weeks ago, Stephen Miller was boasting about how well things were going with the federal occupation of D.C.

He said, the one problem we're having is that all these elderly hippies are out there yelling at us.

Time for them to go take a nap.

Well, we're not taking a nap.

We're rising up.

Tell me about the sort of intergenerational dynamics that you're seeing, too, because particularly on days like the huge No Kings protests back in June, I think we're going to see numbers along those lines are even larger tomorrow, particularly on days when there's tons of people protesting.

Obviously,

numbers that big, you're going to have everybody protesting.

You're going to have everybody from zero to 99 out there.

What are the kinds of

intergenerational dynamics that you're seeing between older people and young people?

What does it add to the environment of those protests to have older people in such a big, rich part of the mix?

We've noticed all along that there's an enormous pleasure for younger people in seeing that older people, boomers, silent generation, are not abandoning them, leaving the mess behind for them to clean up, but are showing up and trying to do something about it.

When we first launched Third Act, we were doing a big climate protest in Boston, and it was led led by high school students, but they asked us to come along.

And so, at the front of the march, because they're spryer, there were four or five hundred high school kids.

They know the trouble we're facing.

But at the back, there were a bunch of us from this nascent third act with a big banner that just said, fossils against fossil fuels.

And all the kids who saw it started laughing, but they started laughing in part out of a sense of relief.

A lot of that climate anxiety you hear about is just this sense that they've been abandoned.

I'm going to be in Lexington, Massachusetts tomorrow on the battle green.

When I was a high school kid myself, I grew up in Lexington and I spent my summers giving tours of the battle green, telling the story of what was in essence the first no-kings protest.

And so it feels really good for me to be coming full circle there tomorrow.

And I know that there'll be lots and lots of high school kids there.

The circle turns.

And I think that's the great hope.

Remember, if you're in your 60s or 70s or 80s now, your first act was precisely in that period of social, cultural, political transformation when women became a full part of public life, the apex of the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the first Earth Day.

It's very much in our generation's muscle memory, if you will.

I love the idea that there are different tiers, different stratas of spryness, and we can organize our marching order, a literal marching order along those lines.

Bill McKibben, environmental writer, the founder of Third Act, thank you for joining us tonight.

Look forward to talking to you about how things go tomorrow, Bill.

Thank you.

Indeed.

Enjoy No Kings Day.

Take care.

Indeed.

We'll be right back.

Kingsport, Tennessee is in the northernmost part of Tennessee.

It's really close to Kentucky and also Virginia.

It's a really Republican corner of Tennessee.

In the 2024 presidential presidential election, Trump won the county surrounding Kingsport by 55 points.

He didn't win with 55 points.

He won by a 55-point margin.

Which is why nobody expected this from the people of Kingsport, Tennessee.

This was the last No Kings Day back in June.

About 2,000 people lined the streets of Kingsport, Tennessee for almost a mile through the center of town.

2,000 people protesting the Trump administration.

That represented about 10% of the total population there.

10% of the town.

In a county, Trump won by more than 50 points.

We show a lot of protests on this show, big ones and small ones, from major cities to really small towns.

Anecdotally, I will tell you, having looked at so much of this footage, I think the consistent, sustained movement we have seen against Trump this year really has looked and felt different,

not only from Trump's first term, but also really from any other presidency ever.

And now there's new data to back that up.

New research from the Kennedy School at Harvard, a new paper titled, The Resistance Reaches Into Trump Country.

Quote, the share of counties hosting at least one anti-Trump protest has risen markedly during Trump's second term, surpassing the historic spikes observed during his first term.

Compared to what we saw in the first Trump term, the average anti-Trump protest has grown by more than 60%.

And compared to his first term, there are more protests in what we traditionally think of as pro-Trump areas of the country more than ever before, places like good old Kingsport, Tennessee.

In the months that they studied this year, these researchers found that, quote, the median protest county in the U.S., the median protest county in the U.S., cast more votes for Trump than Harris in the last election.

The resistance reaches into Trump country.

The reason these political scientists are documenting this stuff is because they found over time and in multiple countries that if you want your resistance movement to work, if you want it to wield power and cause change, your

resistance movement needs to be big, it needs to be sustained, it needs to be nonviolent, and it needs to take root in new places where there are new people who will join you, people who maybe weren't with you in the past.

And according to this new study from Harvard, the protest movement against the second Trump presidency really checks all of those boxes.

The protests are bigger than they were in Trump's first term.

They are more persistent and sustained.

They are more widespread.

They are in more pro-Trump areas of the country than ever before.

And of course, they are nonviolent.

Millions of people are expected to turn out tomorrow from Alaska to Maine to deep red Kingsport, Tennessee, once again.

More ahead tonight.

Stay with us.

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