"A blow to democracy"

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You killed and lynched black folks on poplar trees. Shelby County, Tennessee, had the most lynchings of anywhere in this state where you're taking this district. And we are still here. You've had three strikes laws, mass incarceration, denied us of who we are, and we are still here. And today, you will take the only majority black district from us. But I want you to know, and I want my nephew's sons and the future to know, no matter what you do. No matter how much you try and break us and make us bend and make us quit, we will still be here. We will still be here. That, that message, that delivery of that message. that articulation of resilience and resistance on a day in which democracy took a very serious hit. This is where we start the hour with Democratic Congressman Maxwell Frost of Florida and joining me at the table, host of Politics Nation, president of the National Action Network, the Reverend L Sharpton. Our Rev. Let me start with you. I think that we are seeing the end of the second reconstruction. The rawness and insensitivity that is being done shows that these people are deliberately saying that as we call on the world to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the very principles that we claim the country has started. Everybody in the country was not the same status. Blacks were slaves 250 years ago. Women couldn't vote. But we're not even going to pretend during this anniversary that this is about democracy. We are going to, as it was put up by Gavin Newsom, we're going to do with no votes. change what we want. And if the people in Virginia vote, we'll just flip it over in the Supreme Court. So we are approaching this 250th anniversary and more like King George than we are like those that signed the Declaration of Independence because they're saying that might is right. We're going to rule no matter what. And we're going to use race as one of the ways that we're going to whip everybody in line. I might remind people the black majority district in Tennessee is represented by white. Blacks vote for whites. Blacks vote for blacks. So it's not like just black representation. The congressman in Tennessee, the black district is white. In fact, I'm having them on the show this weekend and Justin, who's running against them. So, I mean, the whole idea of us bringing the country together, they're ripping the shreds and they're doing it gleefully and they're doing it openly. The question is, will we be able to come with the same force that our forefathers did? What does that even look like right now? I think you've got to organize and mobilize. There are groups I've been on the phone all day.

with National Action Network and NAACP here and others, we need to be doing everything from the streets to doing local, decentralized organizing. You must remember, Nicole, Man Luther King, Fannie Lou Hamer, all of them that brought us to Voting Rights Act, they didn't have the techniques that we have. They didn't have social media. The King never knew what a cell phone was. Never had email. Is that better, though, that people were together and they were in the streets? It was better if we're not using more ways to communicate. I think our challenge is that if they didn't have the options we have to organize, then that means that we are falling down on the job, not that the job is insurmountable. They were getting lynch, Goodman Cheney, Swirner, Viola, Pluisa. All of them were killed. for trying to get the right to vote. We're talking about we may miss a day or two of relaxation at home. There is no excuse, blacks, whites, and everybody else not to be on the front lines trying to save democracy. Not just for blacks. They're going to do it all across the board. They're only going to start with us. Congressman, you're one of your party's best communicators. And I wonder what your... Thoughts are today and what your message is to the country? My heart is heavy for the country because we see that this is going on all across the south. And it's important for people to realize that this isn't happening in a vacuum. This isn't a plan that just came up because Donald Trump said to go redistrict. This is the product of a 60 plus year plan to bring this country into Jim Crow 2.0. An era where they've traded in the hoods. for suits and ties, an era where they are trying to use our democracy against us to take away, not just our right to vote, but our right to protest, our right to privacy, our right to health care, a right to be able to actually have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in this country. And they see the South as a threat. And that is the reason why some of the worst voter suppression tactics we see are in the South. Over 40% of these nations black residents live here. Most of this nation's civil rights and mass people-centered movements started in the South. So we see that they put us right in the middle of the bullseye because they know that we will rise up and we will fight back. I want to associate myself with the dog barking along with us. I'm sorry about that. Don't be sorry. Don't ever apologize for the canines in your lives. I want to ask you, this has been such, we were talking before we came in the air, this has been a bleak week of news in terms of the anti-democratic forces. sort of logging some legal victories and now taking those and ramming through gerrymandered maps. What is your message in terms of sort of dusting, dusting ourselves off and continuing the fight for democracy?

Well, the first thing I'll say is what our opposition wants us to do is throw our hands in the air and say there's nothing more left. There's nothing we can do. We shouldn't take part in this system. If we walk away from the fight, our adversaries and our opposition, they are more than happy to step into our political power for us. So we can't run away. That is what they want. We have to continue to fight. And now we understand that we have to do it in very creative ways. And I love what the Reverend had brought up. It's all about grassroots organizing. in making sure that we're going out into the communities and empowering people. And we have to understand, and I think this is important, because what I'm about to say might be misconstrued. We have to understand that we asked people to go to the ballot box to protect democracy, and the Supreme Court said, we're throwing it out. We have to understand that as a result of that, a lot of people are going to feel like it doesn't matter anymore. Us as organizers, us as leaders understanding that isn't so that way we give up, but so we understand in the way that we message that we have to validate the root of our people's concern. Yes, this is a broken system. Yes, I understand that you might not feel great about our democracy right now because they're trying to break it. It will bend, but we will be the ones to ensure that it doesn't break. And I think that acknowledgement going forward, is important. We can't gaslight people who have seen what have been going on, especially in the South, over the last hundred years. But we have to say that we are not unique in this moment. Like the Reverend brought up, our ancestors have been here before, those before us with less at their disposal, and they did a lot with less, and we can do the same thing. And what I do believe there's going to be a moment where we're looking back on this era. and that we're thankful that we kept marching and that we kept moving forward. But it's gonna take all of us, and it's gonna take elected officials, and I have to say this. Elected officials need to stop just trying to knock doors and organize three months before election day. Year round, don't be raising money and keeping it in an account for some race that might come. Spend it year round on the doors, community events, building power so we win not just the next election but the next 10. That's what the right wing has done in the South. They don't make short-term plans. They make long-term plans. And I think it's important that we do the same. And if we do that, I believe we can win. Congressman, when you look at the president's plunging popularity and you look at the sort of foregone conclusions that a lot of political pollsters draw that Democrats will regain the House, it's almost too obvious, right? There, why? What is the sort of silver lining in that? You know, if you look to... to Viktor Orban's defeat. It was an extraordinary amount of turnout because the corruption was so obvious and the economic conditions were so bad that it broke down some traditional partisanship. Like, what are you seeing and feeling and hearing on the ground that gives you hope if you have any?

People are upset. People have a righteous anger, especially black folks in the South right now. And I think what's happening is their blatant disregard of democracy and their obvious march to Jim Crow 2.0 is actually going to encourage and anger a lot of black voters that are going to go out and vote. And I think what you're going to see is places that and races that a lot of people in the national... atmosphere maybe have thrown to the wayside, I think you'll see that we have an opportunity to win in a lot of these states. They want to take away black districts and civil rights in Alabama. Watch that energized voters to the point where Doug Jay Jones is the next governor. You want to do the same thing in all across the south and Georgia. Watch us not just reelected Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff, but watch us elected Democratic governor. Look at the state of Florida as well. You want to completely disregard the voting rights of black folks, but also Puerto Ricans in central Florida, where they've cut up that community in about four congressional districts. Watch us elect a Democratic senator and a Democratic governor, and then work to using the levers of power to make sure everybody has democracy, because that's the difference between both of our sides. They use their power to just help their people, but we care about their children too. And I believe that what they're doing is really going to have a huge backlash on them because when people are angry, you see a lot of people, especially in the South, they pray with their feet. They're going to go out and vote and then they're going to go out and protest. And that people-centered movement is how we went and get the power back. Congressman Maxwell Frost, thank you for starting us off today. The rev sticks around for the hour when he and I come back. One of the attorneys on the forefront of this battle to protect minority voting rights on where the fight goes from today. Also ahead, the Trump Justice Department is expanding its effort to try and steal or at least relitigate the 2020 election, which Donald Trump lost fair and square to Joe Biden. There's brand new reporting about what the FBI is up to in Wisconsin. The state Joe Biden won by more than 20,000 votes. And later in the hour, many Americans are following the story closely of the cruise ship stuck at sea after three passengers died from a rare strain of the Henta virus. That story is scary enough, but it's also a reminder of how badly we've all been endangered by Donald Trump's deep cuts to public health spending and how those cuts have left health officials scrambling in the middle of another infectious disease outbreak. Deadlin White House continues after a quick break. Don't go anywhere today.

Democracy is an action, one that says I will share my power with those I disagree with because it is the only way to guarantee our common future. As we backslide into authoritarianism in the United States where one party and one race hold dominion, that is unworthy of the volunteer state. Whether by consequence or by intention, it is wrong. It is unworthy of a nation that revolted when power was held by the few rigged maps that decide elections before a single vote is cast and politicians who rig elections so it's impossible for them to lose. That is not democracy. That is cowardice. That is, of course, Stacey Abrams, a former gubernatorial candidate in Georgia. I want to bring into our coverage, Jene Nelson. She's the president and director of counsel of the legal defense fund. She argued to protect the rights of minority voters before the United States Supreme Court in Louisiana versus Kalea. The rev is still here. Janae, just pick up on this idea of where the fight goes from here. Well, the fight goes to the streets. It really does. It will continue in the courtroom. It will continue in state legislative houses. It will continue even in Congress because we are not giving up on that body. We will not cease our demands that Congress be held accountable to the people and enact the legislation that will protect from these types of antics. But it really is a moment. for the American people to take stock of whether we want to have a democracy. This is a republic if we can keep it. And we don't keep it by sitting on the sidelines. We don't keep it by lamenting bad decision after bad decision. We keep it only if we exercise every constitutional right, every civil right at our disposal. And that includes the right to protest. That includes the right of peaceful dissent. That includes the right to show up at hearings to make sure our elected officials understand that we need business when we say we want to pick them and not have them pick us. It means that we need to consider reforming various aspects of our court system at the state level and even at the Supreme Court level. It means that we've got a lot of work to do. And Americans need to get to it before we don't have a democracy within which to do that work safely and peacefully at all. Janay, I know that you, of all, people, knew exactly how Republicans would respond to the Supreme Court decision. But there always is almost like an over-reading of their mandate, right? Republicans, and I once worked for them. You know, they're given an inch or they prevail in court, and then the political power grab is almost political gluttony. Is there anything about how they've acted in the last 72 hours that surprises you?

This isn't the end of a fight. It's the start of one. Lioness, the critically acclaimed original series from Taylor Sheridan, returns August 2nd only on Paramount Plus. In the new season, hidden networks, foreign operatives, and personal betrayals collide while Joe walks the line between duty and family. Don't Miss Lioness. Starring Zoe Saldana, Michael Kelly, with Morgan Freeman and Nicole Kidman, streaming August 2nd only on Paramount Plus. The colonel's cooked up a new $10 bucket of the day just for you. Monday, 24 nuggets for $10. Tuesday, eight-piece fried chicken for $10. Wednesday, 10 wings for $10. Thursday, eight tenders for $10. Friday, 24 nuggets for... Oh, you guessed it, didn't you? $10. The $10 bucket of the day deal. Every weekday, only at KFC, it's finger-licking good. Prices and participation vary while supplies last. Not available on third-party ordering platforms, tax extra. Saturday, September 26th, join MS now live in Texas for our biggest event yet with Rachel Maddo, Jen Saki, Michael Steele, and more for a day of powerful conversations and timely insights in a crucial state for the midterms. democracies heal and advance themselves by engaging everybody where they are. Plus exclusive community experiences. MS now live together in Texas. September 26th. Get tickets today at MS.com slash together. It doesn't surprise me. It doesn't surprise me. They've been given a green light by the Supreme Court. The wind is at their back in terms of the permission that they believe they have. to override the will of the people by drawing maps that will entrench their power. And when I say this, I'm not speaking in partisan terms. I'm speaking simply on the fact that the Supreme Court has made it able for any party to act with aggression against the voters, to act with impunity, to draw lines that will manipulate different... types of voters and especially voters who identify as a racial group to exploit that unity, to exploit communities of interests, and to effectively corrupt the political process by making it a sham only. And that happens with both parties at various times. Right now, we see Republicans doing it with... As I said, with impunity, and what we stand for, what the legal defenseman stands for and what everyone who wants to live in a fair and competitive democracy wants to stand for is the opportunity to cast a ballot that will be counted and has equal weight with every other person's ballot in this country. The right to vote is a precious one that we all hold equally. And what's happening in front of our eyes completely disembowels the constitutional mandate to vote without discrimination and also the right to vote that preserves every other right that we have. Rev, we've sort of adopted this shorthand right for the things that the Republicans do. Shocking, not surprising. This assault on voting rights is.

perhaps the most shocking to the system and the least surprising. What is the appropriate political response? The political response must be legislation. as well as what Janae is doing in the courts and as well as those of us that can organize in the streets, not just one time, but to continue to penetrate because it raises the level of awareness and it raises the level of where people understand this is about them. This is not just a courtroom battle. or legislative battle. Dr. Amaluth King used to say you have two kinds of leaders. You have thermometers and you have thermostats. Thermometers give you the temperature. Thermostats change the temperature. We need to be out there changing the temperature. And we never had the majority of Americans on our side. from civil war days going forward. So sitting around taking polls right now, we have to change the polls. We have to change the mentality that this is not all right. This is not the kind of country we have. And I think people will respond, but you have to give them something to respond to. And there must be complementary strategies, legal as well as legislative, as well as in the streets, of disciplined in the streets, all at the same time. You know, Janae, the Trump administration has ushered in so many ugly elements and they've normalized and greenlit and taken out of dark corners of our politics, so many ugly sentiments. I wonder how you knit together the entire pro-democracy coalition around this effort, which is so central to being a functioning democracy as a salve to that, as a counter to that. You know, it should be easy. We should be able to coalesce around the common denominator of holding on to our democracy, right? We don't have to agree on every social issue, every economic issue, every political issue. But we do know that the only forum in which we can safely debate and disagree and come to some consensus on any of those issues. is in a multiracial democracy, a high functioning multiracial democracy. That's what we've been working towards for the past 60 years with the help and benefit of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, which is the birth certificate of our democracy. And it is the one thing that we should, as Americans, who are proud of this country and proud of all that it has overcome. all of the trials and triumphs, we should be able to come together.

on saving our democracy. We are in the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, where we rejected despotism and authoritarianism. And that's exactly what we are descending into if we allow this type of corruption of our electoral lines and allow the pressure from the White House and the executive to dictate that. That's where we're headed backwards. And what's amazing, Janice, it used to be, you know, you could defend that, but you couldn't prove it. Donald Trump himself proves it for us. When he sends out a picture of himself with a king saying two kings, I mean, it used to be sort of the stuff of political arguments. They're now just sitting in that very unpopular, very un-American. place. Janae, thank you for your work. Thank you for joining us. I hope this conversation is to be continued. The rev sticks around when we come back. We have seen it in Georgia. We've seen it in Arizona. Now we are seeing it in Wisconsin where the Trump Justice Department has reportedly sent the FBI into Wisconsin as it tries to, it looks like it's trying to steal back the 2020 election in which Joe Biden prevailed. We have new reporting on that story next.

Speaking of kings and autocrats, Donald Trump's obsession with relitigating an election he lost six years ago has sent the FBI to Wisconsin. That's according to brand new reporting from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. They report this, quote, an FBI agent interviewed a high-ranking state election official in recent days about the 2020 presidential election that is according to sources with knowledge of the conversation. That agent sat down with Wisconsin Elections Commission Deputy Administrator Robert Mike Kehoe earlier this week and discussed with Mike Kehoe how elections are carried out in Wisconsin and various election theories. Mike Kehoe debunked false claims and clarified how elections work, according to the sources. MS now has not independently confirmed the journal Sentinel reporting. But Wisconsin appears to be the latest state targeted by Donald Trump and his weaponized Justice Department because Donald Trump cannot accept that defeat. Earlier this year, FBI agents raided an election office in Fulton County, Georgia and issued a grand jury subpoena for voter information in Maricopa County, Arizona. All of this is predicated on the big lie, a lie so audacious that Donald Trump's own Former Attorney General Bill Barr described those lies as, quote, bullshit. Because of that, voter information of hundreds of thousands of voters in the Milwaukee area and how those voters voted could now become public. From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's reporting again, quote, if federal authorities expanded their probe to include the pursuit of voting data in Milwaukee, poll books and about 176,000 absentee ballots with an attached ID number could be turned over. I want to bring into our coverage, former assistant special agent in charge of the FBI and national security and intelligence analyst for us. Michael Feinberg, the Rev is still here. Michael, I feel like every story we have called you in on this week has been more audacious and outrageous and undemocratic as the next. And this one fits the bill. What is in the head of an FBI agent interviewing a Milwaukee or Wisconsin election official? There's two possibilities. The one that I hope is the case is that there is an FBI agent somewhere going through the motions, doing things he or she was ordered to do, that he or she has no intention of following up on because the agent knows that there is no merit or predication to this whatsoever. The other possibility, which would worry me and should worry everybody, is that there are people in the FBI possibly who believe in these electoral conspiracies. And I hasten to point out, it's not just the epistemological error that should concern us. What should concern us is that this is an administration filled with people. who in 2020 and 2021 actually tried to engineer a coup to overturn a democratic election. A federal grand jury found such.

a state grand jury in Georgia found such. These aren't hypothetical allegations. These are things that juries of our peers, of the defendant's peers, after hearing evidence from the Department of Justice or local prosecutors, came to a reasoned decision about. And of the people who tried to engineer that coup, giving it either rhetorical or actual support, Many were hauled before grand juries, as I mentioned. And I can think of at least a couple who now occupy leadership positions at the FBI. That should be concerning to us all. I mean, if you take a step back, what is your analysis of the whole of government buy-in to something that we quoted Bill Barr called BS that Lindsey Graham described this way? If you told Trump Martians came and stole votes, he'd be inclined to believe it. So the whole point was he saw a vehicle that could maybe get a better outcome, prove all the things he believed. And I thought that vehicle would be dead for the country. He sincerely believes it. This isn't a depot in... in Georgia in Fulton County, Georgia. The questioner says he sincerely believes it, but you told him that it wasn't stolen from him, correct? Lindsey Graham, quote, I have told him more times than we can count that he fell short. Questioner, Bill Barr told him, correct? Lindsey Graham, yeah, and Bill Barr, you know, we're just having a chat here, apparently. I don't know where my privileges are, but I don't care anymore. Let's just talk. Bill Barr sort of saved the country. So, do the... FBI agents know that Lindsey Graham is making fools out of them, that Lindsey Graham, when he was delivering a deposition, a sworn deposition, told the same truth Bill Barr did, that all these lies about fraud in 2020 were bullshit. Well, I have a couple responses to that. The first is, I doubt that Lindsey Graham can make a fool of anyone because he is incapable of being intellectually or rhetorically consistent about any of his positions on anything longer than a weak timeline. But... You know, if he really felt that, it would be nice if he showed the courage of his convictions today and continued to call out these egregious actions. You know, as numerous guests on your show and others, both on MS Now and other networks, have noted, the past week has not exactly been a banner one for representative democracy. We have... what I can only call the return of Jim Crow era electoral norms ushered in with the blessing of the Supreme Court of the United States. And although some of the justices may have tried to dress it up as a matter of politically neutral originalism,

Just look at the actions that state legislatures took immediately after that decision to functionally disenfranchise mass amounts of voters based on race. Like, We should be up in arms. People's hair should be on fire. FBI agents are not. Nobody should be looking at anything that is being done by this administration with respect to elections with anything less than an extremely critical eye. The hours later than it seems on this matter, and people need to start waking up to that fact. Rev, what is the best strategy for people waking up at this late hour? I think that you have to do the combination of having nonviolent drama in the streets as well as dealing with our political leaders, showing some backbone and standing up. And it's not that Donald Trump and his cohorts didn't tell us it was going to get here. I mean, Project 2025, they said they were going to do this. When Donald Trump was first elected president in 16, He put a picture of President Andrew Johnson in the Oval Office. Andrew Johnson put, as nominated on the Supreme Court at that time, Judge Roger Taney. Taney presided over a court that did the Dred Scott decision, that blacks had no rights, anyone was bound to respect. We are now back at a Dred Scott decision. Johnson's portrait is hanging in the Oval Office. What do we need to see? It's not that Trump is not showing us flashing signs of where we are. The question is where we rise up and respond like those in generations past and turn us around and say, we're not going to have that kind of country. Michael Feinberg, thank you for joining us again. Rev, thank you for being here for so much of the hour. We're grateful to both of you. Be sure to catch more of the Rev this weekend. Saturday at 5 p.m. Eastern for Politics Nation is always must-see. When we come back, the Hanta virus outbreak aboard a cruise ship has left health officials scrambling. And if that's not scary enough for everyone and anyone, it's even worse after Donald Trump slash funding for public health. We'll bring you that reporting next.

Have you ever wanted to share your opinions with MS Now about our TV programs, podcasts, live events, and more? Now's your chance to have your voice heard. Join the MSNow Insights community at MS.com slash insights. What are the most experienced public health experts for, if not to protect us and all of humanity from rare viruses spread by rodent droppings? You may have heard from the news or from family or friends about an outbreak on a cruise ship of a rare respiratory virus called haunta virus. Since the outbreak began nearly one month ago, three passengers have died and five others are confirmed to have contracted that virus. In the U.S., health officials in five states are monitoring passengers who have returned home. None of them have shown any signs of infection. But as the New York Times reports, what is alarming public health experts the most is Donald Trump's administration. quote, sluggish response and lack of communication that suggests the United States is ill-prepared. for a larger health crisis such as another pandemic, end quote. Because of deep staffing cuts the Trump administration has made to the CDC and other health agencies, the government has far fewer people to respond to outbreaks from trainees and contractors who can be deployed to do boots on the ground epidemiology to senior leaders who can coordinate responses across the U.S. government and elsewhere. And because President Trump withdrew the country from the World Health Organization, the United States does not receive regular information from member states about emerging health threats. What could go wrong? I want to bring in Dr. Craig Spencer. He's a professor of public health at Brown University and an emergency medicine physician. Thank you so much for being here with us. Thanks for having me. It feels like there are two big parts of this story for the purposes of our conversation. One is the outbreak and how scary that is. And two, is the window it gives us into our lack of preparedness. I'll let you tackle those in whichever order you prefer. Sure. Well, let me first start by saying that I know a lot of people are concerned and I've been hearing a lot about Hunter virus, but your risk is remarkably low. The risk is highest for the people that are still on that cruise shipping. We need to think about them and making sure we can get them off safely to where they need to be. The risk is higher to medical professionals, including those that may be taking care of some of those folks. And thankfully, across the U.S., we have a dedicated network of excellent biocontainment units that can do that and can do that well and safely. And so that is important. I want people to continue to be aware, but I don't want people to be too concerned about this. There's a lot more things you should be worried about. Now, when it comes to the overall risk of not necessarily hunt a virus and whether you should be scared of that.

But whether we should be concerned about what Hanta virus reveals about our preparedness, our general preparedness in the U.S., and I think that is the bigger concern. Nicole, I was on your show a year ago, and I said in the aftermath of Elon Musk cutting Ebola funding that we are sure to regret this. And since then, we have dismantled the USAID and our bio surveillance systems around the world. We have cut. A lot of our CDC disease detectives, we fired them, rehired them, rehired them, rehired them. NIH has cut grants to centers that were doing work on exactly this hunter virus. Money that we had sent out for things like PEPFAR in the past had supported labs exactly like the one that helped identify this hunter virus in South Africa. And in that year, since we last chatted, we have cut a lot of the capacity that should normally be in place for us to respond not only to hunt a virus, but to any other virus that's circulating could potentially have an impact here in the U.S. I mean, one of the things that we talked about, and it's on us that our attention was diverted, but gutting USAID has led to the death and the suffering of the planet's most vulnerable. And it endangers us here at home. And I wonder if you think we failed to sort of finish the thought or finish the sentence at the time that USAID was gutted. Yeah, look, I wrote a couple months ago about how I think that there is still an incredible role for empathy, particularly in global health, and how Americans know that we are great because we are good. And for a long time, we were good on the global stage and did a lot of work to battle mentally outbreaks to make sure that countries were able to manage HIV, not just because those things could eventually come here, but because that was the right thing to do. And we've lost that thread among the upheaval of the past year. But in the same time, we've forgotten how important it is to make sure those things are in place, not just for people abroad, but for us here at home as well. And the one thing that I keep coming back to is that none of us question the importance of funding our local fire departments. We all know we need them, even if there hasn't been a big fire in our community in a really long time. And we know that getting rid of the hoses and taking away the training for our firefighters and not letting them have access to the water that they need or the trucks that they need would be a really dumb thing to do. And I feel like we're doing something similar with our kind of global health and public health infrastructure. We're not seeing it as a set sustained investment that we need, that when things like this happen, we're ready. We would never do that with firefighters because we know we want them to be prepared for the next fire, whether that's today, next year, or maybe even never. I would love to ask you to come back. And whenever I do this on live TV, people say yes, so I don't mean to put you on the spot. But this idea that Americans like to see themselves as good. It's another thing I think that we skip by too quickly. It's really sort of in people's guts. And I think the events of the last 12 months have made clear that we've landed on the other side of that with a lot of these cuts. Dr. Craig Spencer, thank you for being here for us today on this story. Great to see you. We're going to take one more break. We'll be right back.

I'm incredibly fortunate to get to be here every day, but I'm equally fortunate to get to call a lot of really, really, really smart people, my colleagues and coworkers here at this network. My other half, my wingman on our big election nights, Chris Hayes, is my guest on the newest episode of The Best People podcast. Here's a little preview of the conversation. I think personally, he's just bored with the job. He's obviously bored. I mean, you're talking about the kids. He did this very strange thing with a bunch of kids, physical fitness, and he's there. And like he always is, he's, you know, his eyes look down and people say he's falling asleep. He's not falling asleep. Sometimes he is, but sometimes he isn't. He's just bored out of his gourd. Mm-hmm. very evidently could not be more bored by the job. And so I think all those things are true. And then I think the final thing that's true is it remains the case that Trump and the kind of party that he has captured is committed to. rule by any means necessary. And we'll use every possible stratagem, legal, illegal, constitutional, extra constitutional, normal politics and abnormal politics to try to retain power. The conversation is wide-ranging and nuanced as Chris himself will be available for premium subscribers tonight. Scan the QR code on your screen right now to get early access to this episode and special bonus episodes as well. The episode will be available to everyone starting Monday morning. One more break, we'll be right back.

Thank you so much for letting us into your homes for another week of shows. We are so grateful. For me, being a part of this place has always been about the people, not about the politics. From the field to the studio, Jacob is finding the heart of the story. Connect with Jacob Soberoff. Weekends at 10 a.m. Eastern on MS. Now.