MSLIVE ’25: The State of U.S. Democracy with Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell

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All right, how are we doing out there?

It is time for the main event to cap off our evening.

It's prime time and we're going to talk about the state of our democracy.

Please welcome to the stage to the most trusted voices in America, MSNBC legends, the great Lawrence O'Donnell and Rachel Meadow.

I'm Lawrence.

Hi.

Hi, you guys.

Y'all are good looking.

This is exciting.

We never get to see you.

I mean, we can see you through the television, but it's hard to cycle through all of you.

Here's how serious an event this is.

Rachel Maddows wearing her best shoes.

I've never seen them before.

There is a story behind these shoes.

Oh, good.

When I first moved to New York to take my first New New York job, it was at Air America Radio.

Has anybody ever heard of it?

Not the CIA airline in, that was a different thing.

It was a weird naming idea.

Air America, check the Wikipedia page.

There's a big disambiguation thing.

It was really weird.

I worked overnights on Air America, and I had a long subway commute to my overnights.

And one time on the subway, I had my dress-up shoes with me because I had to dress up for a thing that was happening at work.

And I fell asleep on the subway.

And when I woke up, somebody had stolen my shoes.

And I told the story somewhere in an interview.

And so I was like explaining why I was wearing sneakers at a thing.

And somebody mailed me these shoes.

And I don't know who it was.

They remain my only hard shoes.

Okay.

And that was 2004.

And these have been 21 years.

Okay.

And this makes perfect sense because I know your taste in shoes.

I know the shoes you acquire for yourself.

Yes.

And that's why these were so mysterious to me.

I just

saw them backstage.

I thought, let's start with the shoes.

I didn't know Adidas made stuff like that.

How are you, Lords?

I'm okay.

I'm a little concerned about

this crowd, though, because I know they're...

allowed to ask questions.

So I just want to, a couple of things I'd like you to keep in mind.

Number one, and Rachel knows this rule,

for me, no current events questions.

By which I mean anything that happened after 11 p.m.

on Thursday.

I have no idea.

It's both lazy and for mental health.

I just have nothing to do with the news.

on the weekends.

And

the other thing is,

no

questions about Donald Trump.

Okay.

No, this is,

I have never been indicted.

I'm on

and I am

so proud of that.

I mean, that was not a certain thing, okay?

If you talk to my high school teachers, indicted was a possibility.

Like they

thought, and I've gotten a long way without being indicted, and so

anything else.

Just know, right?

I mean, that's what I'm saying.

But Lawrence, when you are out in the world, which I know is a thing that you do, unlike me, I live in a pineapple under the sea.

And

I go out in disguise in the world wearing shoes very much like Rachel's usual shoes.

But in every public presentation of self, I present as an anchorman, so you won't recognize me

in the dirty t-shirt.

When people do recognize you in the dirty t-shirt, I've seen it happen.

Do people always ask you the same questions?

Like when people say, Oh my god, you're Lawrence O'Donnell, and they say the parliamentary thing, but then do you, is there a narrow range of questions that people ask you?

It's actually never a question, and it's really quick.

It's, oh, you're Lawrence O'Donnell.

I love Rachel Maddow.

And I say,

I say, I do too.

What's your name?

I collect those names and I present them to Rachel secretly on Mondays.

I send her a little note with all the names that I picked up that weekend.

Who love Rachel Matt?

All right.

Well, I'm going to ask you a question, though, that I was asked to ask you by my mom, who, as you know, loves you.

My mom likes me.

She really loves my girlfriend Susan, and she has a real crush on Lawrence.

And this comes up a lot.

A lot, a lot.

And sometimes Lawrence comes to a thing that I do or whatever, and my mom is lost for weeks because she's in this fog of

my dad's very nice about it.

But

so, what my mom wanted me to ask you was about your current bout of what seems to her to be fearlessness.

That she thinks that

we are all fans of yours.

We have all followed you for a very long time.

I know how you talk on television.

I know how you prepare.

I know a little bit about how you think about the news.

But I think my mom is right that you are in an era of Lawrence O'Donnell, not just

incisiveness, but a fearlessness and a sort of willingness to fly solo in the way that you talk about this administration

that

I agree

is

it is inspiring to me as your colleague.

It makes me work harder and think harder about what I'm going to do, but it also makes me wonder how you're doing emotionally

in your interior life in terms of how you think about that.

So, your mother,

on the list of things she's wrong about,

that's one of them.

You know,

the short answer to that really, and Martin Sheen was here earlier today and was talking to him.

And I worked with Martin, as you might know, on the West Wing.

I was a writer when the show began.

You know, through...

and right to the end with Martin.

We talked about that a little bit here this morning with Nicole Wallace.

And so, which is to say, I've been around an awful lot of actors and performers singers people like this and what i find

is that the that people don't people who are working with microphones even even if they're hidden you know on movie sets or wherever um

they're not choosing anything

they

They don't have a choice.

This is what they sound like.

This is it.

It's who they are.

And there isn't real calculation in it.

And so there is no choice.

And if bravery is anything, it's a choice, right?

And we see people who bravely make choices.

I mean, Martin Luther King obviously bravely made choices that

he knew could mean his life.

That's chosen bravery.

You know, in my case, And come on, a man in makeup?

No.

We're not.

Let's just, when we start thinking about, you know, heroes or fearlessness, just begin by eliminating all of the men in makeup, no matter how they got there.

I don't know.

I don't know.

A lot of my heroes have been men in makeup, all different kinds of makeup.

You know,

I live in a very protected space, in a very protected studio, with the First Amendment and a very supportive company structure.

And I don't know how to do it any other way.

I don't know what what the words would be.

I write that stuff

myself.

And I usually feel, to tell you the truth, at

4 o'clock in any given day, and the show's live at 10, at 4 o'clock on any given day,

I don't know what I think about it.

And even more importantly, I don't know what I feel about it.

And for me, it's like any other writing.

It's like all the...

the

drama writing I used to do on television and other writing.

I find the heart of it by staring at it, and you do this, staring at these transcripts, staring at all this material, you just stare at it, and the writer in you at some point

finds the heart of it in there, by which I mean

the part of that story

that pulls your heart in one direction or the other.

And it has to be pulled in an important direction.

And that direction is not about outrage.

It's not about

trying to specifically teach a lesson about it so much as it is about your heart being pulled in the direction of the people who've just been harmed by whatever this is.

And they are the people who deserve whatever you can find to say about that.

In your A-block, which I think has changed.

This is not about me.

I know.

You just have to let me say my thing.

I promise I'll stop.

But so do we have do we have those?

Do we have a full screen?

Did we create that thing?

Can we put it up?

I don't know where the screen is that you guys will be able to see it.

So all right.

There's a thing that you are doing differently in your A block,

which is, first of all,

you have these

poll quotes, which are always perfect.

Like I've got like used like a little pun or like a little inspiring thing and they kind of repeat sometimes.

They're fine.

They're fine.

These are always perfect and no matter what you're saying in the moment anybody flipping past is like

78 year old criminal well

tell me more like the it's but then you stay on camera for your whole a block and this isn't something that I think you've always done this is something that's evolved in this current administration in this moment and the thing that's powerful about it is that you keep that you do very few full screens meaning that something else comes up on the camera you do very little tape you do very little like here's a chart or a headline.

It's you and that pull quote and you stay on camera for almost the whole A block.

And I feel like you're saying like, you're going to have to come through me.

Like do not mistake these sentiments as being some collective project.

You're going to have to come through me.

And

I think this is a new

I think this is a new chapter in your public presentation and I am moved by it, and I think it's freaking great.

And I haven't told you, except in the little ways we do this overlap thing, but I think you're having an amazing moment.

Did you want to pet me?

I did.

I wanted to find in.

Is that weird?

Okay.

Okay, good.

HR!

Sorry.

So this, this is what you're talking about in terms of the on-screen all-the-time thing.

That's just the accident of performance.

There's nothing chosen there.

That's just, it's not a thing I'm aware of.

Now I'm going to try to get off screen as much as I can.

You know, this is,

as you know, this is dangerous stuff to talk about.

It's what actors don't like to talk about.

They don't like to talk about what you see on the screen because a lot actors don't really completely know how it got there and they don't want to get self-conscious about it.

But let's talk about the words because I stole that from you.

Yeah, so we used to have nothing up there.

Like it just, we had this, you know, real estate of a screen and we had nothing up there.

And I'd be watching Rachel's show and she'd have these incredibly clever things over her shoulder.

And it was always A-block stuff.

And actually throughout the show.

Right.

And I saw those and I realized two things.

One, we have the real estate to communicate something.

We're not using it.

And can we just steal the thing Rachel's doing?

And they said, yes, we can steal the thing Rachel's doing.

But graphically, it's going to be really boring.

like that.

You know, just simple white letters because our studioism is cool or something.

Perfect.

And so it was all stolen from you.

And then,

you know,

and so a lot of the credit for those things go to Nick Ramsey, who's actually with us right now.

He's the executive produce of the show.

He's a great writer and has written great stuff for the show.

And other writers, everybody on the show will from time to time suggest them.

The way they occur to me is if I'm watching a hearing at 11.30 a.m.

or something like that,

I might hear one of those phrases.

And I will grab the phone and I will text it in and I will say magic words which is what we call that magic words yeah I call them magic words I just you know I didn't know what else to call them I say we need some like magic words up there and it's held on and I and I will text it you know to Melissa Ryerson or to Nick and 90% of the time, that's not what ends up there.

But it's one of the things that's occurred to me.

And then frequently, I get to the end of that sermon that I've written

and I'll get up to leave the room because I'm done, or we've got to do the other one.

And I'm ready to run down to the studio, and someone says, What are the magic words?

And only then do we realize we don't have them.

And so then I will frequently, I go, give me the script, give me everything they said, and I study them.

And I find, oh, this thing, what Trump said right here, those three words, you know, I find it and

surgically implanted after the fact.

Very good.

Very good.

And it still works, but we stole it from you.

Yeah, well, you know, sometimes

the stealer is better at it than the stealer.

And

the other big thing that it helps is actually what happens, you know, in terms of YouTube traffic and all of that.

Because what we came to understand is, you know, Trump backs down again is the only thing you see

when you find it online.

Am I going to click on that?

Right.

And so those words,

we started to realize have a capacity to get someone to pay attention.

Whereas with my A-block,

I do a million, there's a million things.

There's a million headlines and

full screens or b-roll or tape, pieces of tape or pieces of transcript or whatever.

But that means through the magic of the YouTube algorithm, whatever a little snapshot is might be me being like,

you know,

it won't be Lawrence in the magic words.

And that's why he does better.

I think hers are better.

I do.

I really do.

They're very clever.

I love this film.

I'm jealous in terms.

But

there's such a panic

in writing these shows.

And I know you go through it, but one of the most common things that I will say, I mean, minimum half the time,

we do it in a conference room where actually I dictate, because I never learned the software about the script software at MSNBC.

I never learned it.

And so I just dictate the whole thing.

Very common first line when I sit down at that table is

I don't have anything tonight, so uh so i hope the guests are ready to talk a long time because i don't have anything tonight and then you know the this panic session will be finished and i will notice somewhere in the middle of it that i'm talking very loudly and energetically because something has now possessed me in the middle of it yeah and it's like and they'll go uh yeah that's 22 minutes you know and it was supposed as an oh oh i i we i thought i had nothing we live for that possession moment when you realize oh here comes the a block

yeah it's kind of an alien sort of thing yeah

Well, we all learned, I have to say, you know, we learned how to do this from Rachel because,

you know, what this TV used to be was mostly just panel roundtable stuff.

I flippantly, don't tell anyone, I used to call it drunks at the bar stuff, which is to say, and I was one of them, I don't drink, but I was one of the guys on those shows where you just sit around and go, you know.

And then Rachel came on and started writing this show, like really writing a show.

And it got this tremendous rating.

And this was before I had a show.

And I was watching that and I realized that she has this big rating.

And it made perfect sense to me because what happens to you at nine o'clock is you, and most of you start warming up because we watch your behavior in the ratings.

At like 8:47 p.m., you know, you really start surging at MSNBC.

But at 9 p.m.,

and by the way, this is exactly what was happening on NBC on Wednesdays at 9 p.m.

when the West Wing was in its first season, is that people were tuning in because after the first time they experienced it, they wanted to be in that author's grip again.

And what Rachel was doing in hour-long, you know, news talk TV was putting you in the author's grip.

And I saw that.

I went, oh, it makes perfect sense.

And here's the bad part of it that I realized when they asked me to do a show and I understood how the ratings worked and I understood that paychecks are kind of based on ratings.

It meant really hard work.

Like you have to work really hard.

Rachel, Aaron Sorkin, equally hard workers, you know, in delivering something, you know, in an hour of television that only they can do.

And that was the model for me going in, was Rachel preceding me.

And I knew that the only way to do this is to really find a way to, first of all, have something to say,

use your author's position to have something to say, and then make it work so that you can feel that grip and you want to be in that grip.

I used to call, you called it the drunks at the bar.

I used to call it the Punch and Judy Show.

Because

that's how I started when I first got got my first ever cable news hits.

They do not exist on the internet.

Don't go looking for them.

But it was like me and G.

Gordon Liddy.

Yes, yes.

Or me and Pat Buchanan.

Or me and conservative du jour.

And it would be a host who'd be like, okay, go.

Yeah.

Like, you guys go fight about a thing.

And you'd get a lot of plaudits for winning this supposed thing.

But it didn't advance.

It was just, it was, it was a punch and judy show.

It was just kinetic activity.

And then whoever was tactically more skilled at beating up on the other person, that person would win, but it wouldn't matter.

You'd both get invited back as long as there was enough yelling.

And having been either Punch or Judy for years before I ever got a show, I just decided when I got a show that I would never book more than one person at a time.

Unless they had to be there with a lawyer or something like that, which happens occasionally.

But I figured, you know, if you're telling somebody that the value of this person, my guest, is the way they're going to fight with this other guest, you're intrinsically devaluing either of them.

And if either of those people deserves to be listened to on national television, they should have the dignity and space afforded to them to actually speak and without being interrupted.

And so

not every show should be like that,

but

I do think that at MSNBC, one of the things that I really value about us culturally is that we don't have people on staff who come on all the time because they make everybody else mad.

And so therefore

there's going to be blood on the floor and every, you know, once an hour.

We don't do that.

Lots of other networks do.

Every other network does.

And we don't.

We put people on the air because we think you should hear them.

And

we treat them with the respect that they deserve.

And I think that you model that at 10.

Yeah,

we don't pay people to lie.

It's as simple as that.

And you don't get indicted back if you do.

You know, I used to do,

if you go back into the 90s and TV, I used to do the McLaughlin Group, which was actually the original model of this kind of debate chat show.

And I was doing it with Republicans, you know, Pat Buchanan and Tony Blankly in the 1990s.

And we were disagreeing, you know, Eleanor Cliff sitting beside me and she's liberal disagreeing with Pat Buchanan.

But, you know, backstage, we were completely friendly in every way because

no one was lying.

You know, I mean, Tony Blankley wouldn't sit there and lie to me, you know, about what Newt Gingrich did.

And Buchanan, you know, he wouldn't lie about what Reagan did.

He'd actually chuckle about it.

You know,

and so there was people weren't doing that.

And it was spirited.

It was fun to do.

But unfortunately, it was a model that everyone could see.

Hey, that's easy programming.

Let's just do that with expansion teams.

And you know what happens with the expansion teams?

The game just gets worse and worse.

And you get to a point, it's certainly during the first Trump years where you had to stare at some of this and realize, hey, wait a minute.

They're paying people to lie on TV.

And it's one thing to bring in a guest from Trump World who who you're not paying, but you bring in the guest and the Trump World guest lies

and deal with it.

By the way, it's why I stopped doing it.

I stopped inviting Trump World guests in during the first Trump presidential campaign.

The last one I had was just sitting there lying for Trump.

And I just thought,

I don't get, I don't know how to counter it because it's this mad flow of crazy stuff.

And so why are we doing that?

Why do that?

If you have the opportunity now to do a live TV interview with Trump himself, would you do it?

Oh, sure.

With Trump himself, sure, I would.

And it's really easy.

It's really easy.

Do you want me to play Trump?

Play Trump.

Guess who doesn't know how to act.

I don't know.

Okay.

Now,

bear with me because the first two words I'm going to say are going to be the most difficult words to say.

Mr.

President.

I can't do it Trump.

I can't do impressions.

Yes.

What is a tariff?

And we'll go from there.

And what I'm prepared to do and what I suggest you do, if any of you get to interview Trump,

don't worry about covering some range of subjects, which is what they all kind of do.

They all want to get a sound bite about the Middle East and a sound bite about the economy.

Just stay with the one thing that he doesn't know and you know he's going to lie about because the first words out of his mouth about what is a tariff will be a lie.

And then eventually, you know, you get to who actually pays the tariff and he'll lie some more, you know, and you just stay with that.

You know, that's the way I do it.

Yeah, that's the way I do it.

But

I've never seen anybody

do a particularly good job of interviewing Trump.

There's been, you know, maybe one of two over the years at most.

And I don't sit around thinking, no, I could do better than that.

I don't sit around thinking like, oh, I wonder what Trump has to say about X.

No.

Like, I don't have any curiosity about his thoughts.

No.

No.

Well, of course you don't because it's impossible to be curious about his thoughts.

And I don't mean this as like wordplay, but he doesn't have any.

So, so, so, and that's.

I think he thinks about you.

Oh, he has hatreds.

He has passions.

Hatred counts as the thought.

But, you know, that's what's interesting about asking a question of someone like, you know, Barack Obama, because you know he's a thoughtful person.

You don't know you're going to get his thoughts.

He's going to, he might need to mask a lot for various purposes or whatever, but you know, in here is a thoughtful person, and this could end up being interesting, you know, if we're lucky.

But with Trump, it's utterly ridiculous, you know, to think that there's anything he could say that couldn't be just putting an extra little flourish on one of his hatreds.

I just, I'm just thinking about taking that same approach to an interview with Barack Obama.

Can you imagine sitting down with President Obama and being like, define this name?

Do you know who your Secretary of Labor is?

Like, what is the country to our north?

Like, asking any of those questions to Donald Trump, actually, there's a little suspense.

Like

open question as to whether or not he knows the answer, but you wouldn't have to approach any other president that way.

Yeah, but I am ready for that interview.

I got that question ready.

Ready to go.

We have questions from people.

Oh, we have, yeah, we do have questions.

I have not seen yours and you have not seen mine.

So you have kindly given us questions to ask each other, which is very helpful because I really, after the shoes, I have no questions because

I know everything about her.

I would like to know who sent me the shoes.

Yeah.

But it was 2004.

I don't know.

It was weird.

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Today's forecast, high chance of brain fog that lasts all day and a pileup of excessive daytime sleepiness causing a massive slowdown.

That's how every day feels with idiopathic hypersomnia.

Waking up groggy, walking through brain fog.

But there is an option specifically for this condition.

It's all at testyourtiredness.com.

Looks like things are clearing up already.

Discover more about a treatment option for idiopathic hypersomnia at testyourtiredness.com.

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So this is to Rachel.

It's from Bonnie Barron in Brooklyn.

Given the preparation that obviously goes into scripting a one-hour live show, can you take us through the drama?

She has the drama in quotation marks.

Okay.

Really is a drama.

The drama that must occur when you learn of major breaking news that occurs close to showtime.

How do you quickly revise your prepared show?

Not well.

It is not what I'm great at.

I mean, the way that I prepare for the show, broadly speaking, is just I read all the time.

And there's definitely reporting and fact-checking and legal and standard stuff that we have to do, but almost everything that I'm doing is reading or talking to my own staff who's also been reading.

And hopefully we haven't all been reading the same things.

So it's an iterative process.

So there's a lot of trying to understand a lot more news than the thing I'm going to talk about.

So hopefully, even if I've prepared 22

interesting minutes on something that's going to be in the A block, if there's breaking news on a totally different subject, I will have at least read something about that subject.

I will not be completely blindsided by it.

So I try to be a generalist enough so that I'm kind of ready for anything.

But a lot of, I mean,

it is no fun to work on the Rachel Maddow show.

And anybody who's been a longtime producer on my show, I think, will tell you that we prepare a lot of stuff that dies,

that ends up on the cutting room floor and never sees the light of day.

Sometimes we've started now cutting some of those things the same night after the show.

We'll cut stuff and put it on YouTube and just see what happens.

And that's good, but a lot of stuff seems to happen, particularly in the Trump years.

I think because he's a late night, goes to bed late and he wakes up late kind of guy.

So like sometimes he gets ideas in the 9 p.m.

hour.

And weird stuff happens.

Like when you have a normal presidency, like stuff keeps business hours, right?

Unless it's in a different time zone.

But with Trump, like, oh, it's two in the morning.

That means he's had his ice cream and he's like, he's got his truth social on and he's doing a thing.

He's got an idea.

And so stuff happens late into the evening nothing happens early in the morning but stuff does happen late into the evening and so you just have to be nimble and it just means a lot of the stuff that we produce goes out the window and we have to make live you know in the moment news decisions about what's big enough to break our plans and make us cover something else I've got another one for you this is from you get to do two in a row huh Okay, two.

Is it your internet?

No, no, no, no, fairness.

That's fine.

Is it your turn?

No, you go.

You're going to like this.

I mean,

I like the name of the school.

And I like Alexa Rodriguez's name.

She's from New Jersey to Rachel.

I'm in seventh grade.

Hey.

That's all I had to see.

As soon as I saw that.

Hi, Alexa.

As soon as I saw that, I knew we were going with Alexa.

I'm in seventh grade at Buzz Aldrin Middle School.

Yeah, baby.

Woo!

I'm in the Model UN and Model Congress After School Club.

The topic came up about LGBTQ rights in debate one day and I was wondering how kids my age could advocate for the LGBTQ community.

Wow.

Wow.

Very, very cool question.

First of all Alexa thank you for being here.

Thank you for doing the stuff that you're doing and we're counting on you.

As a country,

you and your friends.

I mean, listen, I think that for a long time before I was ever in media, before I ever had my first job in local radio, which led to my next job in national radio, which led to my weird punch and judy show things with Pat Buchanan, which led to the TV show, before I did all of that, I was an activist.

And I was in a group called Act Up, which was an AIDS activist group.

And what I learned in Act Up and in some of the other activism that I did is that it doesn't help you to learn somebody else's story or somebody else's talking points.

That if you are advocating for the humanity of yourself or your fellow Americans or your fellow Buzz Aldrin middle school kids,

you have to speak from the heart about that.

And when people are being discriminatory or cruel, I believe that that means that they are not seeing the target of their discrimination or cruelty as a full human being.

And so the best way I know to become an advocate is to make sure that you are treating people the way they want to be treated.

You are recognizing people as fully human.

You are helping people to speak for themselves in their own terms.

You don't have to memorize anything.

There's no perfect argument.

But recognizing the full humanity of anybody, everybody that is in your

sphere,

not letting anybody talk about anybody like they're an animal or like they're less than human or less than you

is the most important lesson I ever learned in activism and it's the one that I'm still trying to live by today.

And,

you know,

Lawrence and I, for example, are harsh critics of the current administration and the current president and that's not a surprise here, but I am trying to always make sure that I see the Americans who are on the other side of all of these issues from us, the Americans who I think are making the worst decisions right now, are also Americans and human beings.

And I believe that they are fully human, that they are not evil, that they can be changed.

And it is my job to not defeat them, but change them.

And

there's

political competition and

competition in terms of saving our democracy, in terms of who's going to come out on top.

And I'm as fierce a competitor as anybody.

But my idea is not to win the battle, it's to win the war.

And I don't want to save democracy by having the pro-Democrats destroy the anti-Democrats.

I want to save democracy by turning everybody's heart toward saving democracy.

So

I don't know if that's uncle, Alexa, but

there you go.

All right, keeping with the education theme to Lawrence.

This is from Carol in Dover, New Hampshire.

What grade is she in?

She's a fourth grade teacher.

Okay.

Carol Finn, a fourth grade teacher in Dover, New Hampshire.

What can educators do to promote a sense of civic responsibility in our young people and help them understand their role as future stewards of our democracy?

Oh, I love that.

You know, I started off, among other things, as a public school teacher in Boston, and I...

am just in awe of the people who can actually do it like this, a fourth grade teacher.

It is the most challenging job certainly that I ever had.

I wasn't good at it.

I was in awe of the people who were good at it.

She knows so much more about that, the question that she's asking than I do.

And teachers do this every day.

Teachers every day are doing what she wants them to do.

My teachers did that in my third high school.

Your choice?

Well, I had some disciplinary issues in the first high school where I was, in their view, most likely to be indicted.

Like

if I had made it into, if I'd stayed and made it into their yearbook in the final year, I definitely would have won most likely to be indicted at this point.

Instead, they kicked me out, which was a reasonable choice.

But I, yeah.

Do you support their decision to kick you out?

Oh, 100%.

I thought they were slow.

I actually,

you know,

what took them so long.

But anyway, you know, look, teachers are doing this all the time.

They're doing it in ways that they're mindful of and in ways that they're not mindful of just through their modeling, you know, of how they approach thinking, how they approach the world we live in.

And we just owe

our public school teachers, especially an enormous, an enormous debt of gratitude.

None of them are paid a fraction of what they deserve.

Next question is about another part of Lawrence's life.

Your insight into the Congress is excellent, says Elena from Staten Island.

Obviously, you have a history of working in the Senate.

What do you think are the major differences for congressional staffers now rather than when you were there?

Okay, first of all, Staten Island is my favorite borough.

I mean that.

It's where I bought my last Harley-Davidson at Staten Island, Harley-Davidson.

I had to give it up when my child was born because, you know, I had to live.

um but i missed that moment uh so my job there's a someone there's someone there right who has the business cards that i used to have staff director of the senate finance committee staff director of the committee on environment and public works before that uh you know, chief of staff to a senator, that sort of thing.

Those job titles exist and the jobs don't exist, those legislative jobs especially, because they don't legislate that way anymore.

They don't govern.

You know, the committees don't govern.

The members don't govern.

The stuff that gets passed is passed through this horrible

centralized thing that's kind of run out of the speaker's office and the majority leader's office of each body.

And the members now are, you know, they're like silent jurors who just get to vote, you know, in the end and they vote the way they're told.

And the work we were doing there was just the most important work I've ever done and will ever be close to.

And it was so real and it was so powerful.

And

sometimes in real granular detail and other times in bigger shapes, you know, of things like, you know, what should the top income tax bracket be?

What should the bottom bracket be in a giant budget bill

along with Medicaid, Medicare issues that were all in the jurisdiction of the Finance Committee.

Welfare was there, Social Security, everything.

And

there was a Saturday afternoon in 1993 when the first Clinton budget was going through.

It was the biggest tax increase

at the time in history.

It was also a very large matching spending cuts.

And most of those spending cuts had to occur in our jurisdiction, which meant reductions in the increase of growth of Medicare and Medicaid.

And what that meant for members was generally just voting on a number.

But what it meant for us, the staff, was sitting in these conference rooms together for days on end, line by line through the Medicare budget, line by line through the Medicaid budget.

And

there's a project for hemophiliacs in Rochester, New York, and here's how much it costs.

And can we trim that by

X.

And, you know, I like hemophiliacs.

You know, I don't want to trim that at all.

And I like the program.

But

it came down to that kind of specificity.

And the number that I would end up choosing for the various debates there at that point would be what would happen

in that institution in Rochester.

And it was real and it was heavy.

And I mean, the gasoline tax was last increased, as I know you all remember, in 1993 by 4.3 cents.

4.3 cents.

We started off trying to get a much bigger tax on general energy issues and all that that didn't work, and we had to negotiate that.

And that was just me alone in a room

with the senator from Montana and his staff over a number of weeks, days, and in the end.

literally grinding out the tenths of a penny, the tenths of a penny.

And I secretly knew that I can put this whole budget package together if I can get at least four cents out of him.

Every other Democrat was willing to go to a dime if necessary, which was the last time we'd increased it.

But certainly

five cents would have been great.

But I'm literally trying to get every single tenth of a penny out of that because every tenth of a penny I get is something I don't.

you know, have to take away from hemophiliacs on the other side of the bill.

And so that work doesn't exist anymore at the staff level.

It's gone.

If you

watch the West Wing and you dreamed of I'd like to be in the room doing that kind of staff room, that work on stuff that really matters, it's gone.

And it's all just done by a very, very, very impersonal remote control distance at the at the Senate Majority Leader level and the House Speaker level.

And the staff is robbed of both the responsibility and the experience that they used to have.

And that was way too long an answer.

Well, the idea though that

the governing process is now a top-down thing where only the people on top get to make it.

Yeah, and so it's much cruder.

You know, it's much crude.

It's actually something

that no one doing the governing now even knows that that program in Rochester is affected.

They don't even know.

And never mind the bigger strokes that they don't know.

We got one more minute.

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What more can we do other than protest to fight this administration?

Asks George from Wilton, Connecticut.

You know what?

George, I think that is a great question for Rachel Meadow.

You know, I

This is a moment that calls on all of us to do all we can.

And the thing that I've been doing all this historical work for the last few years, trying to figure out what we can learn from Americans who went before us, who faced big problems in our country as well.

And the thing that I have learned so far is that there's no one answer, that

the moment calls for all of us to give what we are capable of giving.

It doesn't call on the same thing from all of us.

And so in pre-World War II anti-fascist organizing, which was the basis of a podcast that I did and my last book and stuff.

You know, it was people who were activists on their own right.

It was people in law enforcement.

It was counter-protesting.

It was a ton of journalism.

It was private research.

It was pressure on the people who are on the right side of politics and incredible pressure on the people who are on the wrong side of politics.

And I keep coming to that answer over and over again.

I've got two big projects coming up between now and the end of the year

about groups of Americans who did very hard things, who won really big battles against the government when the government was being terrible and when these Americans had everything against them and they won anyway.

And what's the lesson of how they did it?

They did everything.

They didn't just do one thing.

It's never just one thing.

There's never a silver bullet.

And that is always the answer because we are a small D democracy.

And the way that democracies heal and advance themselves is by engaging everybody where they are.

We don't all need to become the same kind of soldier.

We don't all need to do the same kind of work, but whatever work you do, you have to find a way to do it in a way that benefits your country.

And we are in one of those moments.

Protesting actually is a really big part of it.

And peaceful protest, Disciplined, nonviolent protest is

the most powerful thing that Americans Americans can do

in a

in-between elections.

And it means joining something, it means getting disciplined, meaning

not necessarily just protesting on your own, but joining a group and protesting with a group, being able to look out for each other, making sure that you know how to stay nonviolent and how to be principled always in what you're doing.

It's hard work.

It's not easy.

It's not something that only a certain kind of people should do.

But I am moved by,

for example,

what Pope Leo just asked of American Catholic bishops in terms of telling them that they need to speak up for immigrants.

I'm moved by what teachers are doing, both at the university level and at

elementary and high school level, in terms of not only just standing up for their students who are facing ICE,

but also standing up for academic freedom and standing up for one another.

I'm moved by the way people found it in themselves to articulate the importance of free speech and the lack of government censorship when it came to something as seemingly unimportant as whether or not a late-night talk show host was going to keep his job.

I mean, the number of Disney Plus subscriptions that they saw evaporating out of them.

I mean,

what part of your citizenship did you think was going to be called upon to make this strategic decision about your streaming services?

Well,

you never know what your country is going to need from you, but it's a time to look into your heart and figure out what you have to offer.

The country doesn't need just one thing, it needs the best of all of us right now.

What do you think, Lawrence?

Now you see, of course, you've seen this, you knew this already, but now you see why it's so very difficult to go on MSNBC at 10 o'clock.

You, you know, try going on stage after Sinatra.

Stop.

Nobody ever had to do that.

No.

It was just, no, it's over.

He sang, it's over.

I would like to say just one thing about MSNBC right now in this moment.

And you'll forgive me for this, I think.

But you will hear a lot of people complain about the corporate media and the mainstream media.

And sometimes we get feedback from people that it's like, I know they won't let you say this,

but I know that I can tell when I look at you that you really want to say this other thing.

I can tell you, sitting here with Lawrence, and we've worked together for so many years, and we have a lot of mutual respect, and his staff is incredible, and my staff is incredible, and they work together really well.

Nobody tells us what to say,

and

MSNBC is a very special thing in that we are a big-time media company who's on TVs universally all over the United States of America and nobody tells us what to say and nobody's giving us ideological pressure and we are not fighting with one another to get on top of the totem pole.

And it is a mutually supportive, healthy, non-toxic workplace where there are good people doing good work in good ways where we are not at each other's throats.

And for us to be like making a lot of money money and having a big audience and growing and at no risk of becoming state TV and at no risk of being taken over by right-wing bloggers that are some billionaire's friend,

it's a really special thing.

And you guys supporting us

keeps us on the air.

And

we couldn't do it without you and your loyalty is helping us do what we do and we couldn't do it without you.

So thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks, Lawrence.

I think,

did we just hear the last word?

Thanks, you guys.

Thank you.

My dear.

So good.

So good.

Thank you.

Thank you.

That was Foggy Mornings.

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