Hayes: Trump started a stupid, devastating war for no reason and lost

Instagram teen accounts, automatic protections for teens. Instagram teen accounts have built-in content settings and limits for who can contact teens. Plus, teens under 16 can't change these default safety settings without parental approval. So parents can help teens connect safely. Instagram teen accounts, automatic protections for who can contact teens and the content they can see. Learn more at Instagram.com slash teen accounts. Watch Disclosure Day at Home Now with exclusive bonus features. If you found out we weren't alone, if someone showed you, proved it to you? Would that frighten you? Well, now the truth belongs to seven billion people in an original event film directed by Steven Spielberg from a screenplay by David Kep starring Emily Blunt, Josh O'Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, and Coleman Domingo. Find Disclosure Day on major digital platforms now with no subscription required, also in theaters. Tonight on Olin. Hello, but I'm the boss. The boss admits to ending his war to avoid disgrace. The one president I did not want to be was the late great Herbert Hoover. and moves ahead with his radical plan for the midterms. Why are they afraid of this guy? I mean, they're so afraid of him. They'll do anything not to have Bill Pulte go in there. Tonight, the blaring midterm alarms over Trump's push for Bill Pulte. You damn right he's going to do what President Trump wants. That's the problem. Then the wild blowback for a president all but admitting defeat with Iran. A disaster that does not achieve any of the actual signal goals. It does smack of the kind of appeasement. If it doesn't work out, I'm blaming JD. You better be careful, JD. All that in Ta-Nehisi Coates on the grand opening of the Obama Library and his essay on the next black president. It all in starts right now.

Good evening from New York. I'm Chris Hayes. As the extent of Donald Trump's humiliating defeat becomes more apparent, he is turning the page on his war in Iran and shifting his attention to winning the midterm elections. And by winning the midterm elections, I don't mean by passing some popular legislation or going on a whistlestop tour of the country talking about kitchen table issues. No, no, no. I mean winning by cheating. using all of his power over the apparatus of the government, all of his leverage over the Republican Party to do everything possible, legal or illegal, to essentially rig the elections. And he is so intent on this that he defied Republicans on Capitol Hill today, and he blew up one of his own key cabinet-level nominations. Let me explain. Early this morning, Trump posted, out of nowhere, I don't think there was any warning, that he was canceling today's Senate confirmation hearing for Jay Clayton, that man you see there. That would be his nominee to be Director of National Intelligence, telling Congress that first they have to pass the Save Act. A voter suppression bill so odious, Republicans have not voted on it, fearing it could backfire and cause a massive response from voters in November. Now, of course, Trump, who's the president in the Article II branch of the Constitution, cannot himself cancel a Senate hearing. Only the Senate can do that. And Senate Republicans had scheduled Jay Clayton's hearing for today for one big reason. They desperately wanted Jay Clayton to appear before them and then confirm him and have him working by Friday. That's the deadline, because if he is not on the job by Friday, then the job would temporarily go to Trump's pick for acting, temporary, Director of National Intelligence, the man you see there. Millionaire donor Bill Pulte, who is currently Trump's top mortgage financing official. He is a man with zero military or intelligence experience who inherited his family's construction fortune and became an online MAGA influencer. Putting him at DNI would be like starting me as a U.S. goalie on the men's national team in the World Cup. But Trump doesn't care about qualifications. All he wants is for Bill Pulte to focus on one thing for a little while. It's an acting position. He's not going to be permanent because, you know, I don't think he'd want to be permanent. But he's a very smart guy, and he may find out some things about the rigged elections, et cetera, et cetera. I think he'd like to do it. I'd like to. I think he wants to do it very much. Got a lot of energy. Let's all be clear here. He's not hiding the ball. No one can pretend they don't know, right? You just heard what he said. For the next few months, give or take, you know, between, let's say, now in November. Trump wants this guy and only this guy with a lot of energy to do some dirty work for him. Because no one else, and I mean, maybe with the exception of Todd Blanche, but I don't even think Todd Blanche, no one else has done Trump's bidding this term with as much enthusiasm and moral flexibility as one Bill Pulte.

For the past year, Bill Pulte has used his position as the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which exists to basically backstop mortgage financing, increased homeownership. He's used that position to dig up dirt that he could use to refer Trump's critics for prosecution. He has gone after a senator, a member of the Federal Reserve, and a state attorney general who prosecuted Trump. charging that minor discrepancies, and I mean really minor discrepancies on their financial documents, constituted mortgage fraud. All of these have been pretextual, laughed out of courts by grand juries and judges so far. In fact, Bill Pulte's misuse of, what I can't stress enough, private mortgage documents. These are not public. They exist in some database the FHA has. His abuse of those documents appear so improper that his own agency watchdogs investigated him. And then they referred his case to the Department of Justice according to the Wall Street Journal. And in the wake of their probes, the journal reported, about a dozen members of the ethics and internal investigation unit were fired. This is the guy Donald Trump wants overseeing all 18 U.S. intelligence agencies for just a little bit of time. Five or six months, let's say, through November. He wants him there to use those powers to influence the midterms, to use those agencies' intelligence to possibly refer them for trumped up prosecutions. I mean, imagine what Bill Pulte could do with everything, oh, I don't know, the NSA collects. And not just a database of mortgage documents. Bill Pulte was not a random choice, but it was a choice that led to what I would generously characterize as a complete and total freakout on Capitol Hill, a bipartisan one. Some Republicans even joined Senate Democrats in blocking an extension of a key surveillance programming, saying they didn't want Bill Pulte to have that kind of power. Now, we should be clear here. This is not necessarily because Republicans have a moral objection to Trump spying on his critics. Sadly, I don't think a lot of them do. But I think in the main, the majority do want someone with at least a little experience to oversee the entire American intelligence apparatus. It is a real job with, as we learn on 9-11, real life or death stakes. So the Republicans convinced Trump to nominate that guy you see there, Jay Clayton. Also a guy, I should note with nearly no intelligence experience, as permanent DNI. He is the alleged grown up in the room, currently the U.S. attorney in New York. Now, here's the plan that Republicans in the Senate came up with to sort of outwit and run around Donald Trump and not have to confront him, right? The plan was fast track his nomination, Jay Clayton's nomination, get him installed with some Democratic support by Friday before Bill Pulte could even fill in for him. Donald Trump isn't that dumb. He's a lot of things, but he's not quite that dumb. So that is what Donald Trump blew up today.

He doesn't want that to happen. And so he declared the confirmation hearing of Jay Clayton canceled. And the chair of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, the guy who runs a committee, Republican Tom Cotton said at first, that's not how it works. Cotton posted this morning, Jay Clayton is a pending nominee before the Intelligence Committee. We will proceed with his hearing as scheduled unless the president directs him not to appear, withdraws his nomination. Two hours later. Cotton posted an update. It's regrettable. The president has directed Jay Clayton not to appear at his confirmation hearing today. Today's hearing is now unfortunately postponed. Right? Pretty predictable outcome. Trump's team rolls his own party again. But while sitting with the Indian prime minister at the G7 in France today, Trump somewhat oddly blamed the whole thing on the minority party in Congress. This was like a rush act. And it was a rush act by the Democrats. All of a sudden, they want to get. And why are they afraid of this guy? I mean, they're so afraid of him. They'll do anything not to have pull to go in there. He's a very capable guy, and they're worried about that. It is, kind. You've got to take a second, right, to appreciate this. Normally, presidents are incredibly angry that senators drag their feet on their nominations. Trump himself has been really annoyed when it takes too long. Now he's angry. because they moved too fast. And because they were moving too fast, they wouldn't be able to put Bill Pulte in, who's a very capable guy. Capable of what? Finding out some things about the rigged elections, et cetera? The president's own words. He's already succeeded in getting his own party to undertake an entirely unprecedented nationwide mid-decade gerrymandering of congressional maps, a gross assault on democratic representation. Get this, Republicans have, by some estimates, shifted the median house seat that's in the middle, three points to the right. Three points doesn't sound like a lot, but remember, that decides a lot of elections in this country. As of now, it appears they have netted themselves, most likely nine seats to start the game. Imagine this. Imagine every NBA finals game started with one team up nine nothing. Would change a lot of outcomes. That is not enough, though, to guarantee Donald Trump won't be impeached by Democratic House. Not enough at all because he's polling at 35%. He wants to make the Save Act to make voting harder. He wants Bill Pulte, most likely to go even further. Who knows? Spying some folks, maybe see some ballots, get some folks arrested. The thing about Trump, this never changes. He pushes and he pushes and he pushes. And he only stops when he meets enough resistance. In whatever domain or area, he hit that wall in Minnesota, he's hit it again in Iran now. He has not met enough resistance to his election-rigging aspirations yet. And the Republicans in the Senate who thought they could manage the situation with accommodation and conflict avoidance are missing the point. He doesn't want permanent appointees. He wants permanent power. Senator Cory Booker, Democrat in New Jersey, serves on the Senate Judiciary and Foreign Relations Committee, and he joins me now. Let's start on the Jay Clayton News this morning. Did that come as a surprise to you?

What do you think of that? I mean, he's saying the quiet part out loud. Let's be clear. This is a guy in his position right now is shown he's willing to violate people's privacy, violate ethics rules, and I believe violate the law all to persecute Donald Trump's perceived enemies. That's with just having mortgage documents that he could violate. Now imagine if he has the apparatus of Americans' national security departments. This could be give him insights and ability. to continue to break the law, to continue to violate privacy, and try to go after his enemies. They are gearing up for midterms, not national security. They're gearing up to try to cheat in elections like Donald Trump already showed when we had the January 6th attack, and he was inciting riots. He will do whatever he can, not to lose power. This is not about what it should be about, which is protecting the safety of Americans. This is danger. We should be flashing a forer alarm fire right now to allow this man to have this kind of power when he's already abused the power he's had over people's mortgages. This is a crisis of Donald Trump's making. And the Republicans to do nothing, they are part and party of this, what I think is an illegal assault on our laws or rules and our safety. Yeah, I mean, we've got to see if there's a plan B here, right? I mean, they did come up with it. They hashed a plan A, which was to try to like, you know. assuage the president by not directly confronting him and being like, why don't you give us a permanent one and we'll move him through quickly. But now they're going to have to come with it. I mean, Democrat, I don't think there's a single Democratic vote for Bill Pulte, to be clear. Like, I think this is a fairly unifying thing in the caucus. But I guess fundamentally, it's Republican Senate leadership that's going to have to take some next step to block him in some way. I mean, can he be blocked? Yeah, look, they can do something. They're not doing enough. Donald Trump is continuing to put unsurious people. in very serious positions for our national security, the security of our families, and our homeland. This is a disaster. They need to be doing more. I want to ask you, since I have you here about the news that we just got, the president expedited the signing of the memorandum of understanding with Iran. It was going to be for Friday. It felt a little to me like the ballroom thing, which is if you just do it, you can't undo it. You knock the ballroom down. You can't do it. You sign the thing. It can't be unsigned. There he is signing it. I think there's basically two Democratic policy party positions I've seen. The war was a bad idea, stupid and reckless to enter into and... It led to a bad agreement because of that, but that's basically the best up of bad options. And the other is it was a bad idea to begin with. It led to bad options because of it, but ultimately it's so bad he shouldn't have signed the deal. I think Donald Trump told us in February. I am going to get unconditional surrender. He just didn't tell us that it would be his unconditional surrender. Don't take my word for it. From the Wall Street Journal to conservatives are calling this Donald Trump's retreat, Donald Trump's blunder, Donald Trump's surrender. This is a horrific deal and capitulation to Iran. All the terms of this, they're solid for what Iran gets.

Billions and billions and billions of dollars, the ability to trade their oil on the open markets, and it's nebulous about everything else. Oh, we hope we can get a nuclear deal down the road. This is Donald Trump's surrender because he led us into a war in which he failed to deliver on any of the things he said he would get. Yes, I'm sorry, Donald Trump, you told us you were going to get unconditional surrender. The ridiculous reality right now is it's his unconditional surrender. And we're left holding the bill tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer money, skyrocketing costs that have cost America in the collective billions and billions of dollars. And at worst, the loss of American lies, 14 soldiers dead, hundreds more injured for this presidential shame. But quickly, I just want a yes or no on this. Still should have signed it, right? Like still better than the alternative of keeping the war going. No, look, I've been leading the fight on the Senate floor to end this war, but not to end this war by giving the adversary all the resources they need to rebuild, to rearm, to continue to persecute terrorism around the country. This is an unmitigated disaster and shows that he has amateurs negotiating as opposed to people who are serious and serious positions that can protect American interests. All right. I'm putting you down in column B. Senator Cory Booker. Thank you for your time tonight. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you so much, Chris. Coming up, much more, Donald Trump, starting a war of choice and now slinking away, why the president says he decided to just kind of give up. It's next. Instagram teen accounts, automatic protections for teens. Instagram teen accounts have built-in content settings and limits for who can contact teens. Plus, teens under 16 can't change these default safety settings without parental approval. So parents can help teens connect safely. Instagram teen accounts, automatic protections for who can contact teens and the content they can see. Learn more at Instagram.com slash teen accounts. Hey, everybody, it's Rob Lo here. If you haven't heard, I have a podcast that's called Literally with Roblo. And basically, it's conversations I've had that really make you feel like you're pulling up a chair at an intimate dinner between myself and people that I admire, like Aaron Sorkin or Tiffany Haddish, Demi Moore, Chris Pratt, Michael J. Fox. There are new episodes out every Thursday. So subscribe, please, and listen wherever you get your podcasts. Watch Disclosure Day at Home Now with exclusive bonus features. If you found out we weren't alone, if someone showed you, proved it to you? Would that frighten you?

Well, now the truth belongs to 7 billion people in an original event film directed by Steven Spielberg from a screenplay by David Kep starring Emily Blunt, Josh O'Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, and Coleman Domingo. Find Disclosure Day on major digital platforms now with no subscription required, also in theaters. They should wave the white flag of... surrender. In hockey, they say, uh, uncle, right? When are they going to, when are they going to cry uncle? After all this, today was Donald Trump, cried uncle, just like he thinks they're doing hockey for some reason. Do they cry uncle in hockey? But Trump just said it out loud. He gave his reasons today, loud and clear in front of a microphone on camera, because the war in Iran was going to create too much economic damage. The one thing I didn't want to see is I didn't want to see economic catastrophe. If you kept this going, that could have happened. But all I know is every time we talked about the possibility of peace, the stock market shut up like a rocket chip. It never went down. And every time we said something negative, like guess what, we're not going to be able to settle. You would go down very big. The one president I did not want to be was the late great Herbert Hoover. I didn't want that. And who knows what would have happened? Right, there's a whole game. Herbert Hoover was the Republican president who presided over the beginning of the Great Depression, a guy whose terrorists arguably made the economic downturn much worse, and Trump doesn't want to be Hoover. Trump signed the deal with Iran just a few hours ago at a dinner with French President Emmanuel Macron at the Palace of Versailles. If you can believe it, that's where the treaty was signed. Well, the MOU. And so it is true and accurate to say that Donald Trump started a stupid, devastating war for no reason, and then he lost it. And he should be remembered for it. Tim Miller is a writer at the Large for the Bullwork, former spokesman for the Republican National Committee, and he joins me now. Tim, the one consistent thing about Donald Trump is he will make a fool of everyone who believes in him. Always, every last one. And he will reliably provide what I would call smorgasbordes of Schaudenfreude when he does that. So, like, when he started the war, all the, like, America first, no new wars, people were like, no, my Donald, but I believed in you. And now everyone in the other side of the coalition gets to do that. Yeah. The nice thing for me is I've been doing a muckbang of Schroed Freud on both times since I've out of the coalition altogether. So that's pleasant. This, the Schadenfreude for the, I guess you'd call it the Neocon. MAGA wing of the party. It's pretty acute tonight. And if you looked over Trump's left shoulder there when he was making the comments about not willing to be Hoover, Marco Rubio's face tells the whole story. Trump kept trying to make jokes at that press conference. And Marco Rubio was stonefaced the whole time because he is the representative of and the heir apparent for, you know, the more robust neocon pro-Israel wing of the Republican Party. And Donald Trump gave that wing.

more than they ever could have wanted for the first year and a half. And now he has pulled the rug out from under them in such a dramatic fashion. Israel is going to be so much worse off than they would have been under the status quo. The power of that faction within the party is going to be diminished. The war that they all cheer led and put their reputation behind is going to be the biggest foreign policy embarrassment since probably the last time they put their reputation behind a war in Iraq. And that's where they are tonight. And I think it's worth enjoying that sadness for that, even though it's bad for the country. Well, what's so striking to me today about the rhetoric, it's not just, again, I keep saying this, the least bad of a bunch of bad options created by Donald Trump's stupidly doing a stupid thing, right, is stopping. What's also crazy, you could do that. And then the rhetoric from him, it's like, You know, we're talking about this in rich for uranium, but who really cares? You don't really care about that. And also the Iranians, kind of nice guys, you know, it turns out kind of young and fresh. And then it's the ballistic missiles. I mean, really, who can tell them not to have ballistic missiles? The Saudis have ballistic missiles? I'm like, I'm losing my mind as every single argument Trump himself used against Obama on the deal. Every single argument that the Republicans killed the Obama people for is now like completely flipped on its head in the matter of 24 hours. Yeah, I mean, if we had an AI version where Kamala Harris was saying all the things that Donald Trump said today, talking about how it's just fine for Iran ballistic missiles, everybody's going to have missiles, right? It's kind of unfair, actually, to not let Iran have missiles. That's what Trump said today. He's concerned about fairness to his new friends, the mullahs. You know, and Kamala Harris said that, you know, there would be pandemonium at Fox, and it would just be wall-to-wall, Jesse Waters, Sean Hannity, like lighting themselves on fire, talking about the weakness. of the Democratic president, et cetera, et cetera. It's almost kind of silly to do the counterfactual, but I think it's telling because it shows just how poorly, poor that this deal is, that there are a lot of people who have like, eaten a lot of Trump's past turd burgers, who are this time, like, not doing that. And, you know, they're not saying exactly what we would be saying tonight. But if you listen to Ben Shapiro, Bill Cassidy, people on the Hill, a lot of the supporters of this war, they're deeply critical of what's happening here, maybe not on the propaganda channel, but in some other quarters of MAGA. Well, Bill Cassidy's saying, you know, the strait was open. Iran was being crushed by sanctions. 13 service members are alive. Now they're dead. Families have paid billions of the plundering decades. And I want to play just 30 seconds of the folks at commentary, which is a very, I would say, like, pro-Israel and pro-Iran war, a group of folks who I don't think of actually reckon with the fundamental thing, which is that the war didn't work. That's the problem. It's not Trump. I mean, yes, it's Trump. But like the war, here, take a listen. Trump is now. Saying Beebe is indiscriminately murdering Lebanese, but the Iranians are nice. And they only want to help their country. The people who just tried to shoot down and kill two of our pilots last week. Yeah. And of course, who tried to assassinate him. Yeah. What's going on?

What's going on? Something happened, and he decided that he went the wrong way, and he is ratcheting himself in the other direction. Yeah, something happened, which is that they lost. The leverage created by the closure of the street of her moves turned out to be the Trump card. Yeah, the war was idiotic is what happened. Donald Trump did exactly what everyone thought he had done, because it's the same thing he's done his whole career, which is screw over his partners. It's just like, it's been so crazy. It's like, have these people been awake? It's like, as BB thought he was going to be the one person, the one business partner, the Donald Trump didn't screw over. He screwed over everybody his whole life. He sent a mom to kill his last vice president. And so, you're right about this point that the war, the war was done for the start. And a lot of folks at commentary and the neocon folks would come after us at the Bullwark, like the former Republicans and say, oh, you would have been. for these sorts of wars in the past. And I'm for freedom for the Iranian people. But the premise of this war was so obviously dumb from the start and he is humiliated and surrendering right now because they didn't have a good plan and the war was never going to work anyway. Tim Miller, well put. Thank you very much. Still ahead. Senator Tammy Baldwin on Trump's plan to just lie to voters about his war. That's next.

Donald Trump wants to put his war with Iran in the rearview mirror, and he hopes that come the midterm elections, all will be forgiven by voters. Everything will be great, as he said, an event with farmers in the swing state of Wisconsin just a couple weeks ago. The midterms are coming up, and I hope you people are really spiritized because we're at a point. We're going to come out of Iran very quickly. We're going to come out and your fertilizer prices are going to go way down, just like they were four months ago. Your fertilizer is down, your energy is down, your oil, your gas is all coming way down. Senator Tammy Baldwin is a Democrat of Wisconsin. She's a senator. She joins me now. Senator, the theory of the case, I think, from the president here, there's been a lot of pain across the country, obviously gas, fertilizer, particularly farmers as a New York Times piece, that a full reopening of the strait will eventually cause fertilizer prices to fall, but they will remain above their pre-war levels for years to come, said an agricultural economist. The theory of the case from Trump is, we'll get out of this, all will be forgiven, everything goes back to normal. Do you think that's true? Well, very clearly not. I traveled the state and visited many Wisconsin farms to hear about the impact of his illegal war in Iran on our farmers. I visited soybean farmers, corn farmers, dairy farmers, livestock farmers, and just during planting season. we saw the price of fertilizer goes through the roof. 70% of our farmers could not afford enough fertilizer for their crops this year. Diesel fuel hit a record high last month. And in Wisconsin, when people were preparing their fields, I met one soybean farmer who spent $80,000 more this year. on diesel than he did last year. That's a 60% increase. We're talking about impacts that have already been felt. Price is going down tomorrow, next month, even into next year. Our farmer's going to remember that. And then he adds salt to the wound as he did earlier today in his rambling press conference when he said he loves inflation and that affordability is a hoax as he's heading off to dinner at the Palace of Versailles. You know, Wisconsinites are shouldering the burden of this war of choice, and they are not going to forget the extra hundreds of dollars each family is spending just to fill up their gas tank.

The Department of Justice has set its sights on the state of Wisconsin, along with many other states, in what seems like a fairly transparent attempt to use the power of the department to mess with elections. This is some reporting from just the last few days, Wisconsin Public Radio. The Trump administration is appealing failed attempt to get unredacted voter registration data. Trump's administration is continuing its effort to force the Wisconsin Elections Commission to turn over unredacted Wisconsin voter data, data after being rebuked by a federal judge. The Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division is appealing the judge's decision, dismissing the case suggesting many absentee ballots could be sent to fraudulent registrants in November unless it audits the roles. You also have FBI folks interviewing election workers in your state. What do you think is going on here? Well, it seems that President Trump is just doing everything he can. He's still litigating the 2020 election outcome in Wisconsin. A lot of these FBI interviews of election officials and police officers and others have been about the 2020 election results, not the upcoming midterms. But between his threats, and these aren't veiled threats, these are outright threats to send armed... ICE agents or others to particular cities in the midterms to prevent fraudulent voting, as he puts it, or his insistence in Washington, D.C., that any bill that lands on his desk next must contain his voter suppression bill, the SAVE Act, or his directives to the U.S. Postal Service about whether they will deliver absentee ballots. either two voters or back to election precincts without match with some national voter database. This is frightening stuff. We need to be very vigilant about it. But it's very clear that he knows that his situation with Iran of crisis has been a total and utter failure. He's trying to lie his way through that. And then if that doesn't work, he's going to try to win the midterms with other means. And we're seeing it play out in real time. Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, thanks for your time tonight. Thank you for having me. Still to come, bestselling author, Tanahasi Coates, on Barack Obama's legacy and what's in store for the next black president after this. Hey, everybody, it's Rob Lo here. If you haven't heard, I have a podcast. That's called Literally with Roblo. And basically, it's conversations I've had that really make you feel like you're pulling up a chair at an intimate dinner between myself and people that I admire, like Aaron Sorkin or Tiffany Haddish, Demi Moore, Chris Pratt, Michael J. Fox. There are new episodes out every Thursday. So subscribe, please, and listen, wherever you get your podcasts.

I like things my way, my coffee, my schedule, and my treatment. So I talked to my doctor about self-injecting with the Vivgard-Hitrilo-pre-filled syringe, which contains F-Gar-Tigamodalpha and High Loranidase QVC. It's injected under your skin subcutaneously. It means I can inject in my space on my time. It's my treatment, My Way. Visit Vivgardmyway.com. That's V-Y-V-G-A-R-T-My-Way.com. And talk to your doctor about Vivgard Hytrullo, brought to you by Argenics. If you're a parent and want to help set up your child for success, then I-A-X-L is right for your family. As an effective and affordable online learning program, I-A-E-A-Sel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies using interactive practice problems for kids from pre-K to 12th grade. Listeners can get an exclusive 20% off Iexel membership when they sign up today at Iexel.com slash 20. Visit Iexel.com slash 20 to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price. We have some very exciting special coverage in the days here on MS Now because tomorrow we are at the grand opening of the long-awaited Obama Presidential Center. Tomorrow at 11 a.m. Eastern, we'll have live special coverage from Chicago for that historic event. Then Friday at 9 p.m. Michelle Norris will host a special behind-the-scenes look into the center featuring exclusive interviews with former president Barack Obama, first lady Michelle Obama, and members of their inner circle. Take a look. We had an entire letter correspondence office just responding to the public's letters. And that office would select 10 representative letters for me to read each day. They'd put in my folder at the top of my briefing book, and I'd usually save those for after I was finished with reading all the stuff I had to read. And I initiated that as a way of staying in touch with people, especially early on when we were going through so many difficult decisions. And so there's a display that has a sampling of those letters, but the exhibition team made this wonderful short video, this vignette of... of a few of those letters. People are really raw in their emotions in some of these letters, partly because they don't expect the president's actually going to read it. It's almost like a meditation for them, a way of getting stuff off their chest. If there's one exhibit that... People should take the time right after the Oval Office, which everybody will go to just so they can take a picture of the apples and everything else that might be in there. Sit in your chair. Sit in the chair. Just come around on the side and there'll be those letters and there will be a...

a video that's looping. And take the time to watch that. Because I think that, as much as anything captures, what I always hoped the spirit of my presidency was. It all starts tomorrow right here at 11 a.m. Tanahasi Coates is a best-selling author and recipient in the National Book Award. His collection of essays, We Were Eight Years in Power, an American tragedy is a fantastic, complex reflection on the Obama presidency with a callback to Reconstruction, which is where that quote comes from. And in Vanity Fair this week, he looks ahead to the next black president, which wrestles with the Harris campaign and what might come next, and he joins me now. It's great to have you back. You know, first I just want to... Get your feeling on, I feel so complex and almost a little overwhelmed going back into Obama world and Obama as the president because it feels like it was beamed from another dimension. Everything seems so far away. right now, and I'm just curious how you, what comes up for you as you watch this play out as we prepare to have this big sort of reemergence of the Obama's as public figures, this presidential center? Um, God, I really didn't want to say this. What comes up is the conversation I had with him when I was working on the piece that's in, in that book. called my president was black, and he said Trump couldn't win. And I think what I am always reminded of is he had qualities that made him the first black president. I don't know that somebody who thought that Trump could win. They thought that actually, you know, these things about the country weren't actually dead, that they were alive. I don't know if that would have been the first black president. But I also think that there was a very, very tragic inability to see certain aspects of this country that are very clearly still with us. One of the things that you wrestle with, and my president was black, that essay that's in there, that then now carries through to the essay that you haven't been any fair, is a kind of the complexity and inherent tension of a black man or woman. coming through this country's history and coming from the long tradition of persecution and oppression that that has meant and the liberation movements that have brought us to this point, being essentially the commander of the American Empire, the person that orders the drones and orders the army and orders the bombs and acts in a way across the world in ways that are oddly reminiscent in some ways of domestic oppression. And you think that's basically unresolved, but has to be forthrightly addressed, I think, is what I get from your latest as I see. How do you think about what has to happen in this next presidential campaign with respect to how America acts in the world? Chris, you know, I thank you for asking me our question because the fact that the matter was when I was finishing up.

The last essay in that book, I just, I had no real understanding. Obviously, I understood the vocabulary, you know, of empire and the vocabulary of saying America is an empire. But I had no real, and I hadn't seen it. I hadn't seen it. I hadn't traveled much out of the country. And so what I have now is, you know, a basic understanding. I mean, the staff that I think about all the time is in this book, How to Hide an Empire is that. The United States of America has 800 overseas bases on foreign land. And all the countries in the world together have like 30. Like the next closest is Russia with like seven. You know what I mean? And the fact that the matter is, you know, and I go through the history of this in the peace is everybody knows what happened with the indigenous Americans of this country. But what is less known is that we spent the 20th century and most of... the Cold War, undermining democracies, overthrowing governments, plodding against people. And a disproportionate amount of that violence, although not exclusively, was done in the Arab and Muslim world. And so when we have a conversation about Gaza, I think one of the things that we do not understand. Or when we have a conversation about Iran, one of the things we do not understand is that these people remember things that we have had the imperial privilege of forgetting. And that includes white and black, by the way. You know, we don't, we are Americans. And, you know, no matter what oppression we've suffered here, we don't get an exemption from that. I was thinking about. The essay talks a little bit, a lot about the Harris campaign, and particularly how the Harris campaign was attempting to navigate the issue of Gaza, the severe and acute sense of desperate moral outrage that so many people in the Democratic Coalition felt about what they were seeing being done to Gaza in the wake of the October 7th Hamas attacks in Israel. And kind of tried to just not do it at all. And then I was comparing that to Barack Obama's victory in 2008, where, and correct me if you think I'm wrong, I think Barack Obama being against the Iraq war was the reason he won that primary, which is to say, you couldn't avoid it. You couldn't run the primary in 2008 successfully in the Democratic coalition and not. have the right view on that conflict. And it seems to me you're saying there's some similar reckoning coming in this primary process as we head towards 2028. Yeah, yeah, and it's here. And look, I want to be fair here. You know, you get X number days a brief campaign. You are a black woman. And I am not blind to the sheer amount of weight that was being put on Kamala Harris's shoulders. And, you know, look, I had my moments where I felt like, man, you dump all of this in our lap. Like now where it felt unfair. But then you go to the convention and you see that the patron saint is Fannie Lou Hamer.

And Fannie Lou Hamer is obviously famous for, you know, attempting to integrate the Mississippi delegation. But she's less famous for the fact that as early as 1965. She was speaking out against the Vietnam War. And people were not happy about that. That Carotta Scott King, who, you know, is a hero to so many Democrats, was speaking out before her husband and had the foresight to understand and to ask of Lyndon Johnson. I do not understand how you can be so sympathetic to young black kids in Alabama. and drop bombs on kids in Vietnam. And I think we kind of forgot that, to say nothing of 2008. I think to some extent, some of us who are in the political world have forgotten the very real history of the heroes that we claim. Do you think? there's a space for sort of reimagining what this all looks like after Trump. I mean, even after this sort of debacle of this war and it's now maybe cessation or not, that like it does maybe create some intellectual, political, rhetorical space for something new, for just a new way of talking about the U.S. and the world. Look, I mean, I think there's a moral imperative too. I don't know how you remain consistent by claiming an anti-apartheid legacy here in the United States of America while enforcing it abroad. But I actually think practically you really, really have no choice. Whatever, you know, we think about this, you know, in terms of pragmatics, look, look, the party's moving somewhere else on this, you know. And I don't think, for instance, I don't think Zoroamandhi. would be mayor of New York City without the protest at Columbia. There is very real political energy, you know, around us that as far as I'm concerned, has the right and correct moral view. So I think even from a practical perspective, there's no choice. Tanazzi Coates, the piece is called the next black president in Vanity Fair. I would advise you to check it out. It's really good. Great to see you, man. Thank you. Thanks, Chris. Thank you so much. Stay tuned. In just a few minutes, Jen Saki, we'll be speaking with both Speaker Emerita, Nancy Pelosi, and Georgia Center, Jon Ossoff, who does not do a ton of national interviews. We'll be right back. That is all in on this Wednesday night. Speaking of Zohran Mamdani, join me tomorrow when I will be speaking to the New York City Mayor fresh off the Knicks Championship Parade. That does it for All In. You can catch us every weeknight at 8 o'clock on MS now. Don't forget to like us on Facebook. That's facebook.com slash all on with Chris. Real talent is defined by what people can do, not where they learn to do it. So by stopping at the education section of a resume, you might throw away the perfect hire. Skills first hiring helps you see talent others miss, like more than 70 million stars, skilled through alternative routes. Let their story unfold and gain a competitive advantage. Because hiring managers who start with skills are 60% more likely to find a successful hire. Hire skills first. Learn why at tear the paper ceiling.org. Brought to you by Opportunity at Work and the Ad Council.