Maddow shows Trump in polling free fall ahead of first election test of new term

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Speaker 3 Tomorrow night is election night. It's going to be an unusually interesting and unusually high stakes election night for an off-year election, right? Obviously, this is an odd-year election.

Speaker 3 It's 2025. This is not a presidential election year.
This is not a midterm year. Usually you think that elections in a year like this would be sleepy.
Not this year.

Speaker 3 This year, there's so much that is at stake, but also so much that's legitimately unpredictable in terms of how it's going to work out.

Speaker 3 Our rolling coverage will start here on MSNBC tomorrow night at 6 p.m. Eastern.
I will be here starting at 7 p.m. Eastern tomorrow night until midnight or when the cows come home, whichever's later.

Speaker 3 I don't know.

Speaker 3 And you know, every election that is happening tomorrow has its own character. Every candidate matchup is unique.

Speaker 3 Every, you know, ballot measure and proposed constitutional amendment has its own dynamics. I get it.
Every election has its own contours. But

Speaker 3 these elections tomorrow are taking place

Speaker 3 at a really important and unusual time in American history, right? These elections are taking place 10 months into a new presidential term that has been just profoundly violent and corrupt.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 tomorrow night, Americans are going to get their first chance to weigh in on that at the ballot box.

Speaker 3 And it's really unpredictable, I think, how it's going to go.

Speaker 3 In terms of how Americans are feeling right now about this presidential term and about how things are going in the country right now, well, there's lots of new data on that that I can show you right now.

Speaker 3 Let's start with the new CNN poll. New CNN poll shows that Donald Trump has never been more unpopular than he is right now.

Speaker 3 Donald Trump's disapproval rating in this new CNN poll, it's actually higher. His disapproval rating is higher higher than it was in the immediate aftermath of January 6th.

Speaker 3 After January 6th, a whopping 62% of Americans said they disapproved of Trump. Today, the number of Americans who say they disapprove of Donald Trump is not 62%.
It is 63%.

Speaker 3 63% disapprove, only 37%

Speaker 3 approve of Trump. That means right now he is 26 points underwater in terms of his approval rating with the American people.
That's astonishing.

Speaker 3 Elsewhere in this CNN poll, we learned that Americans say that Trump has hurt America's standing in the world more than helped it.

Speaker 3 They say that by a 24-point margin since he has been back in office, he has hurt America's standing in the world more than he has helped it.

Speaker 3 America, how do you feel about Trump tearing down the east wing of the White House? Well, 10% of Americans say they like that.

Speaker 3 His support on that is 10%.

Speaker 3 More than five times as many Americans say him doing that makes them feel dissatisfied or angry. He's underwater by 44 points on tearing down the east wing of the White House to build his ballroom.

Speaker 3 Washington Post, ABC News, Ipsos poll is also just out. Trump's overall approval rating in that poll, he's underwater minus 18.

Speaker 3 In this poll, right after January 6th, his disapproval rating spiked to 60%.

Speaker 3 Again, that's right after January 6th. Disapproval, 60%.

Speaker 3 Today in this poll, it's 59% disapproval, which means in this poll, he is within one point of where he was in the immediate wake of his supporters laying violent siege to the U.S.

Speaker 3 Capitol in a failed attempt to try to seize power by force.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 they asked a question here.

Speaker 3 Not just bluntly, do you approve or disapprove of Trump, but they asked it a little nuance to it in a way that is always interesting to me. Because

Speaker 3 even if you are not a supporter of President Trump, let's say,

Speaker 3 everybody knows somebody who is a really strong supporter of Trump, right?

Speaker 3 I mean, whether it's a coworker or an uncle or some other family member, maybe there's a neighbor down the street who's got all the Trump flags on his truck or whatever.

Speaker 3 I mean, everybody knows somebody. And the national media pays so much attention to people who are strong Trump supporters.

Speaker 3 But how many of them are there? Well, look at this. This again is that Washington Post ABC News Ipsos poll.
Trump's overall approval rating is minus 18. He's 18 points underwater overall.

Speaker 3 But if you look at the nuance, if you look at the people who feel strongly, the proportion of Americans who strongly approve of Trump is 20%.

Speaker 3 The proportion of Americans who strongly disapprove of Trump is 46%.

Speaker 3 People who strongly disapprove of Trump outnumber the people who strongly approve of him by by significantly more than two to one.

Speaker 3 And Americans disapprove of him on everything. America, do you approve of Donald Trump and his handling of Israel's war in Gaza? No.
Minus six. Do you approve of Trump's handling of crime? No.

Speaker 3 Minus 11. Do you approve of Trump's handling of immigration? No.
Minus 13. Do you approve of Trump's management of our relationship with other countries? No.
Minus 19.

Speaker 3 Do you approve of Trump's handling of the Russia-Ukraine war? No. Minus 21.
Do you approve of Trump's handling of the economy? No. Minus 25.

Speaker 3 Do you approve of Trump's management of the federal government? No. Minus 27.

Speaker 3 Do you approve of Trump's handling of tariffs, his signature issue, what he most wants to be known for in this presidential term? Do you approve of Donald Trump's handling of tariffs? No.

Speaker 3 Americans do not approve of him on tariffs. He is minus 32 on that issue.

Speaker 3 Since Trump has been back in office, has he made the United States weaker or stronger? Americans say Trump has made the United States weaker, and they say so by a 15-point margin.

Speaker 3 Should ICE agents be wearing masks out in the street? No, 16-point margin. Should Trump be sending the National Guard to states over the objections of those states' governors? No, 18-point margin.

Speaker 3 The criminal charges that Trump has demanded against James Comey and John Bolton, are those criminal charges justified or are those politically motivated bogus prosecutions?

Speaker 3 Americans say those charges are politically motivated by a 13 and 14 point margin.

Speaker 3 America, do you like the fact that Trump is tearing down the White House East Wing to build his ballroom?

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 3 In this poll, no. Americans say they do not like that by a 28-point margin.

Speaker 3 How about Trump's plan to take $230 million

Speaker 3 for himself from the U.S. Justice Department, supposedly as some kind of compensation for all he's been through? He wants the federal government to write him a check for $230 million.

Speaker 3 America, do you like that idea? Shockingly, no, by a 42-point margin. Americans say no.
They hate that idea very much. Thank you.

Speaker 3 And it's not just the CNN poll and that Washington Post poll. There's the new NBC poll, which unfolds along much the same lines.
The NBC poll has Trump's approval rating 12 points underwater.

Speaker 3 And again, they do that nuance. Well, how strong are your feelings? Americans who strongly disapprove of Trump outnumber Americans who strongly approve of him by whopping 18 points in the NBC poll.

Speaker 3 Here's my new favorite polling question, though.

Speaker 3 This is from the NBC poll. I'd like it if all national pollsters would please start asking this.
Do you consider yourself yourself to be a supporter of the no kings protest movement?

Speaker 3 That's how they ask the question. What do you think the answer is to that?

Speaker 3 What proportion of the American public says they consider themselves to be a supporter of the no kings movement in this country?

Speaker 3 What do you think the number is going to be?

Speaker 3 I mean, for context, in this same poll, in this NBC poll, they also asked people if they consider themselves to be a supporter of the MAGA, the MAGA movement, the America Great America, Make America Great Again movement, the Trump movement.

Speaker 3 The proportion of Americans who said they considers themselves to be a MAGA supporter is 30%.

Speaker 3 I should note that's fallen by six points in the past six months in this same poll, but still, that's okay.

Speaker 3 Round number, understandable number. 30% of Americans say they consider themselves to be a supporter of the MAGA movement.

Speaker 3 Compared to that, what proportion of Americans Americans say

Speaker 3 they are a supporter of the No Kings movement?

Speaker 3 43%.

Speaker 3 43% of this country

Speaker 3 says they consider themselves to be a supporter of the no kings protest movement, which means not only does the base of support for the no kings movement absolutely dwarf the base of support for MAGA in this country, but in absolute terms, it also means that support for no kings, support for the no kings movement against Trump, it's just huge.

Speaker 3 I mean, 43% of this country, that's 147 million people.

Speaker 3 I think we're going to need a bigger boat.

Speaker 3 I mean, that number is absolutely stunning to me. I got to say, I have covered the heck out of the no-kings movement as it has taken shape from the very outset of this.
presidential term for Trump.

Speaker 3 I would have thought organizers and participants in these protests would be whooping and hollering and cheering if they learned that they had 10% 10% support in this country or 15% support in this country.

Speaker 3 43%?

Speaker 3 Well, MAGA support is 30% and it's been dropping hard since Trump has been back in office.

Speaker 3 I don't know what terrible numbers like these for Trump and terrible numbers like these for his MAGA movement are going to mean for tomorrow's elections. I will tell you, CNN asked

Speaker 3 about it in sort of a roundabout way in their poll.

Speaker 3 CNN asked, if you were voting for Congress today, would you think of your vote as being more to send a message of support to Trump, or would you think of your vote as being a message of opposition to Trump?

Speaker 3 They asked that question in the new CNN poll, and the proportion of Americans who said they wanted their vote to be seen as a message of support for Trump, that proportion is 21%.

Speaker 3 The proportion of Americans who said they wanted their vote to be a message of opposition to Trump was nearly twice that. 41%.

Speaker 3 So,

Speaker 3 I mean, read into that what you may.

Speaker 3 If you're a business leader watching this right now, thinking about, hmm, I wonder if we should continue to do things to really kowtow to Trump and to be really seen to be putting our thumb on the scale in order to please Trump.

Speaker 3 I wonder if that'll be good for our bottom line. Take a little temperature of the public here, guys.

Speaker 3 You're aligning yourself with something pretty radically and deeply unpopular.

Speaker 3 And what is Trump himself doing to make himself more palatable to the American people as we head toward tomorrow's election day?

Speaker 3 Well, on the eve of tomorrow's vote, the administration cut off SNAP food benefits for 42 million of the poorest Americans, including many, many, many, many, many millions. of Republican voters.

Speaker 3 The SNAP program goes back to the Great Depression. It has never cut people off before, but the Trump administration cut people off as of Saturday.

Speaker 3 And then today, only when forced by a federal court in Rhode Island, did they begrudgingly concede that they might half-fund SNAP benefits? And who knows for how long.

Speaker 3 Meanwhile, literally at the same time he is cutting off food aid to 40 plus million Americans, Trump was bragging online about the new marble and gold toned bathroom he just built himself at the White House.

Speaker 3 at your expense

Speaker 3 he held a party at his mansion at mar-a-lago which had a roaring 20s great gatsby the great gatsby theme because yeah remind me again what happened right at the end of the roaring 20s

Speaker 3 google 1929 just see what comes up CBS News reported that the contractors who Trump brought in to destroy the White House East Wing and start building his big, weird, Putin-esque ballroom.

Speaker 3 Those contractors, those companies themselves are taking down their own websites and otherwise hiding from the public because they can't stand the blowback from the public about what they are doing for Trump.

Speaker 3 This White House East Wing teardown that has 10% support among the American people, where more than 50% of the American people say it makes them angry or dissatisfied.

Speaker 3 But Trump himself, as always, a man of the people, showing his acute sensitivity to the sentiments and instincts of the common man, he took time on Air Force One this weekend to tell reporters that he feels, quote, very badly for Prince Andrew

Speaker 3 losing his prince title because of his ties to the world's most notorious pedophile and child sex trafficker, longtime Trump friend Jeffrey Epstein.

Speaker 3 Trump was asked about Prince Andrew losing his title and he said, quote, I feel very badly. I mean, it's a terrible thing that's happened to the family.
That's been a tragic situation.

Speaker 3 Now, to be clear, Trump is not talking about the families of the kids who were molested and raped by his friend Jeffrey Epstein.

Speaker 3 He is talking about how sad he is that another one of Epstein's friends got in trouble with his own family for being part of it.

Speaker 3 Saying, quote, I feel very badly.

Speaker 3 One of the most closely watched races tomorrow will be the governor's race in New Jersey, since Trump and Republicans really have made some strides in New Jersey politics in recent years.

Speaker 3 Democratic Navy veteran and Congresswoman Mikey Sherrill is up for up in that governor's race against a Trump-endorsed Republican named Jack Chittorelli.

Speaker 3 He's a former state assemblyman who is making his third run for governor in New Jersey.

Speaker 3 Two weeks ago at a rally for his campaign, a member of Chitterelli's campaign warmed up the crowd for him by saying to the crowd, quote, somebody said, you are taking money from Jews.

Speaker 3 I said, check my bank account. Excuse me.
I said, I check my bank account every day, brother. It is not there.

Speaker 3 This is a Jack Chitterelli campaign event.

Speaker 3 This is an advisor, an official advisor, a named advisor to the Jack Chitterelli campaign warming up the crowd for Chitterelli by saying he's very proud that he doesn't take money from Jews.

Speaker 3 And Jack Chitterelli was there at that event, and he spoke right after that guy and praised the guy for being so blunt, so plain spoken.

Speaker 3 Dr. Bron Adin,

Speaker 3 just once I wish you would say what's exactly on your mind.

Speaker 3 Let's hear it one time, one more time for the doctor.

Speaker 3 Let's hear it for him. Let's hear it one more time for the doctor who just said that he's very proud he does not take money from Jews.

Speaker 3 And he wants everybody to know that while he's advising the Chitterelli campaign for governor in New Jersey. That's the Republican candidate for governor in New Jersey.

Speaker 3 We don't take money from Jews, says his campaign. In a normal world, that would be the only thing you have ever heard about, about the guy running against Democrat Mikey Sherrill in New Jersey.

Speaker 3 In a normal world, the only thing you would have heard about Jack Chitterelli, the Republican candidate for governor, is that he's the guy who did the we don't take money from Jews campaign rally.

Speaker 3 But we are well past this being a normal world, right?

Speaker 3 I mean, Trump's nominee to be ambassador to Kuwait right now running into some headwinds because he hasn't been able to come up with a great explanation for why he liked a post online that said, Jews are like monkeys.

Speaker 3 Trump's nominee to the office of special counsel just had to withdraw when Politico reported that he couldn't come up with a great explanation for why he told his colleagues that he had, quote, a little bit of a Nazi streak.

Speaker 3 I quote, I do have a Nazi streak in me.

Speaker 3 That was just days after Politico reported on the leaked group chat of dozens of young Republicans, including one state senator and a bunch of Republican congressional staffers who were all praising Hitler and joking about the Holocaust.

Speaker 3 That came right before another Republican member of Congress had a hard time explaining what on earth that swastika flag was doing in his office.

Speaker 3 Right there there over the shoulder of one of his staffers highly visible on all the zooms hmm

Speaker 3 and all that came before this weekend when on on on one of the most popular maga podcasts in the whole country a former fox news host uh had a had a friendly chat with a guy who says hitler was quote really effing cool and has said that Jews must quote be given the death penalty after we take power.

Speaker 3 Maybe they talked about something other than that in their interview this weekend. No, actually, they talked amiably about the problem of what his guest called, quote, organized Jewry in America.

Speaker 3 And what a big problem that is in America. Organized Jewry.

Speaker 3 That's what's going on in Trump world politics these days. That's what's going on in Trump Republican politics.
Things are going great.

Speaker 3 Trump himself now in this new CNN poll has hit his all-time highest disapproval numbers ever, higher than he hit even in the aftermath of January 6th.

Speaker 3 Tonight, we're going to talk about the new reporting that one of Trump's supposed loyalists, one of Trump's top apparatchiks that he brought into the federal government in Washington apparently threw Trump under the bus in closed-door testimony against Trump that has not been revealed before now.

Speaker 3 Carol Lennick is going to join us on that in just a moment. We're also going to check in this hour on what is turning out to be just a remarkable and ongoing show of force in Chicago.

Speaker 3 A show of force by Chicago, by residents and local officials in Chicago and the Chicago suburbs, that whole swath of Illinois they call Chicagoland.

Speaker 3 They are seeing a sustained and rapidly growing big community pushback against Trump's federal agents in their streets. We saw it from the outset from Chicago and Illinois Democratic public officials.

Speaker 3 We have since seen Neighborhood Watch, neighborhood rapid response efforts in Chicagoland just take off like a rocket.

Speaker 3 People blowing whistles and honking their car horns and forming human chains surrounding churches and surrounding schools and swarming into the streets to protect their neighbors against Trump's federal agents who really do appear to be untrained and just winging it.

Speaker 3 in the streets, throwing tear gas canisters from moving vehicles and pulling guns on unarmed civilians and smashing their cars into other vehicles.

Speaker 3 I'm telling you, when we get out the other side of this, the defining story of this time in American history is not going to be what our would-be strongman did in Washington, what he tried to do in Washington.

Speaker 3 It's going to be what the American people did in response all over this country.

Speaker 3 And we are seeing it in incredibly dramatic relief in places like Chicago.

Speaker 3 Chicago this weekend, people protested, among other places, at a Target parking lot where ICE agents have been staging.

Speaker 3 People protested this weekend at a Home Depot parking lot in Columbus, Ohio, where people were there protesting against ICE operations in their city in Columbus, Ohio.

Speaker 3 In Idaho this weekend, Boise, Idaho, people protested against Trump's immigration agents. You may have seen some of the news coverage this weekend.

Speaker 3 In Idaho, the feds had put out a statement denying that they had zip-tied children at the site of immigration raids in that state.

Speaker 3 When Idaho News Channel 6 sent the feds feds a picture of a 14-year-old girl who Trump's agents, in fact, had zip-tied, the feds amended their statement to say that, okay, okay, they didn't zip tie young children,

Speaker 3 young children, but apparently like a 14-year-old, that's okay.

Speaker 3 In Staunton, Illinois, which is

Speaker 3 not near Chicago, it's down near St. Louis, actually.
This is a small town, less than 5,000 people.

Speaker 3 In Staunton, Illinois this weekend, hundreds of people, again, less than 5,000 people live in this town, but hundreds of people in this town turned out this weekend all to support a local restaurant owner who'd been taken by Trump's immigration agents.

Speaker 3 In Broomfield, Colorado, this weekend, there were anti-ICE protests. In Burlington, Vermont this weekend, there were anti-ICE protests.

Speaker 3 At Hartford, Connecticut airport, Bradley Airport, there were yet more protests this weekend against Avello Airlines, which is flying deportation flights for Trump, for ICE.

Speaker 3 And so, yes, we are not even a year into this presidency. And right now, we already have 43%

Speaker 3 of the American public identifying as supporters of the No Kings movement.

Speaker 3 Far outpacing the number of Americans who identify as MAGA.

Speaker 3 We're going to find out what that means at the ballot box tomorrow. We're going to find out more about what it means for our country.

Speaker 3 Here tonight. We've got a lot to get to tonight.
Stay with us.

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Speaker 3 May 18th, 2022, about a year and a half after Donald Trump left the White House after his first term, the head of the counterintelligence unit at DOJ and two FBI agents went to Florida to go interview one of Trump's staffers.

Speaker 3 DOJ at this point was investigating whether Trump had been hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida. Trump had returned about 15 boxes of records to the National Archives.

Speaker 3 He swore that that was everything that he had taken from the White House. But that wasn't true.

Speaker 3 When the FBI agents, who went to Florida that day, sat down with Trump's assistant in Florida, she quoted, pulled out a printed copy of a picture that was worth a thousand words.

Speaker 3 It showed rows and rows of boxes, some the same brown boxes Trump used to store documents from his time at the White House, and some white boxes staff used to pack up for his departure.

Speaker 3 There were as many as 80 or 90 stacked up against an outer wall of the club's storage room. It made clear that Trump possessed far more than the 15 boxes he'd returned to the archives in January.

Speaker 3 She had transformed the fledgling investigation.

Speaker 3 That picture.

Speaker 3 And that investigation, of course, would soon lead to an FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, where investigators found, indeed, hundreds of pages of secret records.

Speaker 3 What's more, the sensitivity of the material they found was terrifyingly high, with top secret documents nearly spilling out of boxes in Trump's personal office, his residence, even a bathroom shower.

Speaker 3 Late that evening, after the search, the prosecutor running the investigation gathered his team and asked what they should do next.

Speaker 3 Quote, Julie Edelstein, the Justice Department's living library on classified documents cases, replied dryly,

Speaker 3 knowingly taking classified documents outside of a secure government facility was a crime, plain and simple.

Speaker 3 Edelstein said she knew how the department had responded to such clear evidence of a crime in dozens of cases before. But with Trump, all bets were off.

Speaker 3 Edelstein said, quote, if it was anybody else, we would would arrest him tomorrow.

Speaker 3 They, of course, did not arrest him the next day, nor any day after that. Trump would not be indicted on charges in that classified documents case for nearly a year.

Speaker 3 Charges for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election would take even longer.

Speaker 3 The story of why the Biden-era Justice Department took so long to charge Trump and why so many people inside the department seemed to be so hesitant to investigate and potentially antagonize the former president, it is all told in a remarkable behind-the-scenes, in the room where it happened reporting in this new book from Pulitzer Prize winners Carol Lennig and Aaron C.

Speaker 3 Davis. The book is called Injustice, How Politics and Fear Vanquished America's Justice Department.
It comes out tomorrow. It is an amazing, amazing piece of work.

Speaker 3 I have one other bit of new reporting from the book that is just worth knowing about, given how things have turned out.

Speaker 3 One more thing to tell you.

Speaker 3 Quote, on November 3rd, 2022, the classified documents prosecution team stress-tested a possible Trump defense that had been tossed out by one of Trump's loyal foot soldiers.

Speaker 3 They interviewed Cash Patel, a former Trump White House aide and Pentagon official before a grand jury that day.

Speaker 3 When the documents investigation first became public, Patel had claimed in media interviews that the probe was fatally flawed because he, Patel, knew.

Speaker 3 that Trump had declassified broad sets of sensitive records.

Speaker 3 After hours of testimony, prosecutors would later tell others in an update that Patel pulled back somewhat from his on-air statements, saying he only knew about Trump's efforts to declassify a specific set of documents, and he didn't know about the larger expanse of records found at Mar-a-Lago.

Speaker 3 So Cash Patel made great hay saying on TV there was no case, there's no case here because he personally knew that Trump had totally declassified everything. Cash Patel knew it firsthand.

Speaker 3 He knew all those documents were no longer classified.

Speaker 3 And when he got behind

Speaker 3 closed doors before a grand jury under oath, maybe he was not so sure about that after all. Now, of course, he's Donald Trump's FBI director.
Joining us now is Carol Lennick.

Speaker 3 In 25 years of the Washington Post, she won five Pulitzer Prizes. And I'm very happy to say she's now senior investigative reporter here at MSNBC.
Carol, congratulations to you and Erin on this book.

Speaker 4 Thank you, Rachel.

Speaker 3 We know you as

Speaker 3 a scoop machine and somebody we are very proud is our colleague here at MSNBC.

Speaker 3 But this is not just a series of newly reported anecdotes and pieces of information.

Speaker 3 It is a remarkable thesis about how Trump effectively broke the Justice Department in his first term by bullying it.

Speaker 3 The Justice Department, by the time Joe Biden became president, you essentially write, was no longer the Justice Department it was before this time. Is that fair? Totally fair.

Speaker 4 I mean we view this as a our book and we're really sad sometimes when writing it and and describing what we found. It's a tragedy in three acts.

Speaker 3 You know there is some hope at the end but essentially Trump really

Speaker 4 pressured this department, this core institution of our democracy, and caused some scarring there that changed it forever, that changed it when Biden took over and made it more hesitant, reluctant, and fearful about investigating without fear or favor the evidence of a crime that you just laid out.

Speaker 3 When there is in fact fear,

Speaker 3 the Justice Department not only may make different decisions in the end about what they do, but their pacing may change. And justice

Speaker 3 delayed is justice denied is an axiom for a reason. But in this this case, the

Speaker 3 timeline ended up affecting not only what was possible while before the Justice Department came back under Trump's control, but it also affected the political timeline around how Trump could ramp up his bullying to compound the problems that he had created by jerking around the department in his first term.

Speaker 3 I feel like that's not

Speaker 3 a crazy thing to have suspected was going to happen.

Speaker 3 Was there no political awareness in the Justice Department that their slowed timeline would affect the Justice Department's potentially, its existence from here on out, that the timeline mattered substantively?

Speaker 4 Biden's Attorney General Merrick Garland firmly believed as an institutionalist that he had to restore faith in this institution and he had to turn back the page, turn the page away from Donald Trump.

Speaker 4 And he believed that the fever dream of Donald Trump had broken in the spring of 2021. You know, Lindsey Graham was saying, I'm done with you, sir.

Speaker 3 I'm done with this ride.

Speaker 4 He actually believed that that was possible. But also, Rachel, a really important piece of this, and it's hard to

Speaker 4 understand now in retrospect.

Speaker 4 But he really felt that it was inappropriate, wholly inappropriate, to think about the political calendar.

Speaker 4 We don't know what might have been if he had had started investigating the evidence that prosecutors and agents were bringing to his team starting in December 2020 onward into the spring of 2021.

Speaker 4 We don't know what would have happened if they had begun looking at that evidence then.

Speaker 4 Evidence you called out on your show, you know, that look, it looks like these fake elector certificates are coordinated.

Speaker 4 Well, we learned there was a low-level investigator in the National Archives who was shaking those in front of the FBI and the Department of Justice in December of 2020 and January of 2021, saying, looks like there's a crime here.

Speaker 3 And the Justice Department didn't want to do it.

Speaker 4 Didn't want to do it in part because they were then overwhelmed by a violent riot January 6th and investigating at, you know, Garland's instruction from the bottom up. Let's look at the rioters.

Speaker 3 The book is called Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America's Justice Department.

Speaker 3 Carol, I will say one of the really valuable things in this book, again, because it's you, it's scoop after scoop after scoop. But I will say the valuable thing is

Speaker 3 a view toward what it will look like to put the pieces back together and rebuild a justice department that's worthy of our country and our Constitution. Carol, congratulations.
Thank you, Rachel.

Speaker 4 Thank you so much. Thank you so much.

Speaker 3 Again, the book is called Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America's Justice Department. It's out tomorrow.

Speaker 3 Carol Lennig, our beloved colleague here at MSNBC. All right, lots to come tonight.
Stay with us.

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Speaker 3 Right on the northern edge of Chicago, right on the shore of Lake Michigan, the town of Evanston, Illinois has a population of about 75,000. It's the home of Northwestern University.

Speaker 3 It's a beautiful place. I did an event there just about a year ago.
I really loved it.

Speaker 3 But right now, that town is turning out to be a crucible for the forging of incredibly determined people. Incredibly determined and resourceful, brave, no-nonsense Americans.

Speaker 3 Take it from a local resident named Emily Miller. She's an Evanston mom who goes by Emily Thinks Aloud on social media.

Speaker 10 Chicago is traumatized right now. We have armed masked agents running around disappearing people in our communities.

Speaker 10 There's no measuring the people who don't get disappeared because you're out there with your whistle, or kids kids who feel safe because of school patrols or a tamale vendor who doesn't get kidnapped because someone went at 6 a.m.

Speaker 10 and bought all their tamales. And there's no measuring it.
You just have to have faith and know that hope is an action. And they're getting started.
They're going to get more violent.

Speaker 10 I hope they just leave and give up. But we're just getting started too.
And we're not giving up.

Speaker 3 We are just getting started too. And we are not giving up.
When we reached Ms. Miller yesterday, she had just come from a local food drive in Evanston where the line for people waiting to donate

Speaker 3 stretched for block after block after block for hours.

Speaker 3 Again, the line to donate, as the local NBC station put it, Evanston food drive overwhelms, quote, in the best possible way as SNAP recipients face uncertainty.

Speaker 3 The response to what the Trump administration is doing with federal agents in the streets and these immigration actions has been pretty remarkable all over this country.

Speaker 3 But right now, Chicago is really putting on a clinic in bravery and relentlessness in terms of the response.

Speaker 3 As Reuters reports from Chicago today, quote, in Facebook groups and on signal chats, tens of thousands of residents regularly crowdsource information on immigration agents' last known locations, neighborhoods being targeted that day, and importantly, the license plates, makes, and models of the rental cars used by agents, which can change daily.

Speaker 3 Organized by city and neighborhood and block, these rapid response teams in Chicagoland are using whistles, using cell phones, using online text chains, using their own voices to alert their neighbors when ICE is coming.

Speaker 3 You can see the determination of Chicagoland in the schools, whether it is students walking out to protest ICE arrests or parents standing guard after hearing that ICE and border patrol are nearby.

Speaker 3 You can see the determination at the gates of the local ICE prison a few weeks ago.

Speaker 3 We also showed you, you may remember this Eucharistic procession of Catholic clergy who came to offer communion to the prisoners inside.

Speaker 3 This weekend, they were back again organizing a mass outside the immigration prison and trying again to give the prisoners communion.

Speaker 3 Rather than scaring people away, what ICE and Trump's agents are doing in Chicagoland really seems to be making them stronger as the reaction in Chicago and the rapid response and neighborhood watch efforts just get stronger and more widespread.

Speaker 3 After ICE arrested five immigrants and three U.S. citizens

Speaker 3 in Evanston on Friday and Halloween, the next day in the exact same spot, hundreds of people turned out to protest what ICE had done in their community. People plainly there are not afraid.

Speaker 3 They say they are just getting started.

Speaker 3 Hold that thought. We've got more ahead.
Stay with us.

Speaker 3 Last month in Evanston, Illinois, the city council passed a resolution that banned federal immigration agents from using city property in their ongoing Operation Midway Blitz.

Speaker 3 Now, the mayor of that town, Evanston, says he is investigating ICE's attacks against citizens who confronted them on the street in his town.

Speaker 3 At a rally the next day, Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss told the crowd he wants ICE to leave his city alone.

Speaker 3 ICE agents have assaulted Evanston residents, beaten people up, grabbed them, abducted them, taking people off the street once again because of the color of their skin. It is an outrage.

Speaker 3 Our message for ICE is simple. Get the hell out of Evanston.

Speaker 3 Joining us now is Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss. Mr.
Mayor, thanks very much for joining us this evening. I appreciate your time.

Speaker 11 Thanks so much for having me.

Speaker 3 Do you think that federal law enforcement have acted unlawfully? in Evanston.

Speaker 3 I know that you've talked about the possibility that federal agents who have particularly interacted physically with local residents should perhaps be investigated in terms of whether they've broken the law in their interactions with your residents?

Speaker 11 Yeah, I mean, let's start with what they have been doing in general. They drive around town looking for people whose skin is brown, essentially trying to prosecute the crime of gardening while brown.

Speaker 11 They pick them up, they grab them, they abduct them, they're gone. And then last Friday on Halloween, in addition to that, because they

Speaker 11 that the uprising and the resistance movement is becoming a problem for them, they're now going after dissenters. And they attacked people.

Speaker 11 They were punching someone in the head whose head was on the asphalt, as you showed from a citizen-gathered video before the break. These are outrages.

Speaker 11 They're physical assaults on people who are literally just exercising their First Amendment rights. We can't have this.

Speaker 3 What do you

Speaker 3 think the country should understand about your residents and the type of reaction, the kind of resistance that you're describing that's taking shape in Evanston?

Speaker 3 We can see it in terms of local media coverage and

Speaker 3 local social media in terms of residents documenting what they are seeing and the way they're responding.

Speaker 3 But as Evanston's mayor, what should we understand about how the city of Evanston and the people who live there feel about and how they're acting in response to Trump's agents?

Speaker 11 Rachel, there are not words to describe how much I appreciate you asking this question because these last two months, this hell, this occupation, it's

Speaker 11 changed us. It's changed our brain chemistry.

Speaker 11 We don't leave home without a whistle anymore. When we hear a helicopter overhead, we freak out and we text everybody we know.

Speaker 11 We're always on the lookout for exits and rooms that we haven't been in before. We are constantly working together to inform people who might be at risk of what the dangers are.

Speaker 11 We are a community under occupation and people are rising up. Yes, the city is doing everything we can.

Speaker 11 We are trying to be the tip of the spear fighting back against ICE, but it's not just the government.

Speaker 11 In fact, not even necessarily mostly the government, just residents are coming together, building new organizations, new networks to track ICE, to keep people informed of their rights, to keep people safe, frankly, to slow ICE down so they can abduct fewer people in a given shift.

Speaker 11 It is horrifying and yet it's astonishingly uplifting to see the way people are fighting back.

Speaker 3 I have to ask, because of that, what you're describing and what we've been able to observe from here is a movement that is instinctual on the part of your residents.

Speaker 3 People, yes, people that were organized, you know, who may have been political activists in some way or shape or form in advance of this, but a lot of people instinctually are reacting and organizing and doing this sort of community rapid response stuff.

Speaker 3 And since more people started doing it instinctually, we are seeing more and more people do it in terms of the numbers.

Speaker 3 Given that, given the change that's happened in Evanston, I wonder if you could speak to people in other towns around this country, whether they're elected officials or just residents of places where this kind of ICE action may be coming next,

Speaker 3 how to best prepare for it. The rapid growth of the reaction in your city would seem to indicate that there's going to, that people should be prepared for

Speaker 3 movements like this really taking off.

Speaker 11 Yeah, I would say get ready.

Speaker 11 If they're not in your city yet, particularly if you're a blue community, a progressive community, get ready. And if you're an elected official, call me.

Speaker 11 We are not just ready and willing, but excited to tell you everything we've done on a governmental level, what our playbook is, and to encourage you to copy us.

Speaker 11 And if you can think of something else to do, we'll copy you back. But for activists, here's the thing.

Speaker 11 For all of the extraordinary work that's been done here in Evanston, I know that the activists who have been leading these efforts wish they were ready earlier, wish they had been in April where they are now in November.

Speaker 11 And so start to form those coalitions. start to learn best practices, be out there educating people about their rights, put together those signal chats where you can communicate securely.

Speaker 11 Just start to build it out because what typically happens is after the first abduction, the first outrage occurs, then there's an influx of people who want to help and you're kind of a little bit behind the eight-ball organizing at that point.

Speaker 3 That type of

Speaker 3 Those type of practical preparations, I think, I don't know if that's going to be seen as the Evanston Handbook, but I think it's starting to be seen as the handbook around the country as people are learning from communities that have spontaneously and instinctually reacted in the kind of constructive ways that you're describing.

Speaker 3 Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, really appreciate your time tonight. Stay in touch with us.
We'd love to stay apprised as your community

Speaker 3 continues to go through this.

Speaker 11 Thank you so much. All right.

Speaker 3 We'll be right back. Stay with us.

Speaker 3 All right, that's going to do it for me for now. But a reminder to get a good night's rest tonight because we all have a very big day and a long night ahead of us tomorrow.

Speaker 3 MSNBC is going to be following all the key races throughout tomorrow. It's election day.
Then our primetime coverage is going to start at 6 p.m. Eastern with Ari Melbourne and Jen Saki.

Speaker 3 I'll be on starting at 7 p.m. alongside all the rest of my beloved colleagues.

Speaker 3 We're going to be here as results come in from Virginia and New Jersey and New York and California, all the other consequential races all around the country. You're not going to want to miss it.

Speaker 3 So big night rest up.

Speaker 2 Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odo, the only business software you'll ever need.

Speaker 2 It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier from CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more.

Speaker 2 And the best part: Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch.
So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com.

Speaker 2 That's odoo.com.