a one-off, nothing happened. it was about a weak candidate versus a strong candidate. so everything the republicans are pretending about this is a standard procedure. but inside the party, there is full-scale panic about what this means to holding on to republican control of congress next year. i want to get to your book now, it s called playing with fire. you make in this book the case that the 1968 election set the stage for modern u.s. politics. lawrence, where do you see the common threads between what happened then and what we re witnessing, president trump s rise to office? when you go back before 1968, if someone told you i m a democrat, you didn t know if that person was a conservative or a liberal. if someone said i m a republican, you didn t know if that was a conservative or a liberal, because there were liberal republicans, there were conservative democrats. 1968 was the end of liberalism, the death of liberalism in the republican party, and it was the
conservative democrats. people did cross party lines. that seems like a long time ago now. it wasn t necessarily that long ago in years but it seemed like an awful long time ago. we are where we are. it s a much more partisan, polarized time. i think the senate ultimately is going to reflect that. so mark halperin, is this what every trump nominee is going to look like? are we going to see this happen three or four times over the next four years. once they change the rule, they are not going to change it back will i think the temptation for the president, for conservatives around him is going to be to nominate someone more conservative than judge gorsuch and to assume they can hold all the republicans. this is an incremental change in some ways. harold, this is kind of the last step. once he changes supreme court nominees, the senate is more like the house. it s just about a majority rule. you begin to see a parity develop between the two places.
party, and every time he hit the pinata candy came out. and we live in a country that s split 50-50. and whenever you do that with a country the size of ours you re going to have a lot of disparate groups. you re going to have a lot of groups that have nothing in common. he has evangelicals that voted for him. he has libertarian-leaning republicans that voted for him. he has toldly secular republicans, conservative democrats, whatever. the one thing that they all have in common is they hate the media. so when he goes out there and does what he did today this was not a press conference. this was a public flogging or performance. and the people that watched that press conference that voted for him were cheering at their tvs. they loved it. it was therapeutic. it was cathartic. they couldn t get enough. are you saying it was chum in the water for the faithful? it was ridiculous. and by the way, some of the groups that john just talked about are some of the most hypocritical pe
which we said on this program, which i know a lot of people at these newspapers watch, in june of 2015, almost verbatim we said the more you mocked him, the stronger you make him. when he came down the escalator, we said this could happen. and the entire room laughed. michael moore predicted that donald trump was going to win. michael moore did one of the most extraordinary things. this shows how there s new political order. michael moore is somebody that we ve been at each other s throats for a decade. but michael moore got it better than anybody else this entire campaign and he did something extraordinary. he did something that we all need to do as americans that live more and more in our clusters. we live around people who think like us, who vote like us, who worship like us or don t worship at all, but michael moore
people that you believe in lose. i ve got to tell you, i never had the media focus on my people when the people that i supported, sometimes democrats, conservative democrats, lost. there s an outpouring of grief. if donald trump had lost, do you think the press would have been so concerned about his supporters and their disappointment? the country is divided. she won the popular vote. a lot of people are upset about this. the coverage cannot just be and dialogue cannot just be about how upset those people are. i feel so bad for them. people that are hugging each other and crying. heartbreaking. and for her who as we said before, she thought at 9:00 p.m. she was going to be president. she thought for weeks she was going to be president. the whole world did because the media didn t do their job for the past month. let s just say it. you want michael moore? liberal filmmaker michael moore responded to donald trump s election yesterday with a morning after to do list