way stefanik did today on meet the press, it creates a bigger unreality for this republican party, and it s worse, and it creates a schism between what is real and what happened, what actually happened, the reason those people are sitting in jail and what trump says is real. when you have somebody like elise stefanik that does that, and she knows they are not hostages, and she knows if you break the law like these people did, and many did it on camera or live streamed it, then you go to jail. this is how these things work. they are not political prisoners and they are not hostages. john, i mean, a new poll shows a quarter of americans, nearly one-third of republicans believe the fbi probably or definitely organized january 6th. here s mike pence denouncing that conspiracy theory, and obviously that s false, but here s mike pence denouncing it.
let s talk about it on the other side. i have seen the director of the fbi repeatedly assure the american people that the fbi were not the instigators of the riot that occurred on january 6th, and frankly i am very grateful for the efforts of the fbi to bring nearly 1,000 people to justice that ransacked our capitol and did violence against police officers that day, but, you are right, we have been assured again and again that it was not the case. i have heard the many repeated assurances of the fbi they were not involved, and i take them at their word. john, a lot of what trump does out on the campaign trail, you know, it s almost like the courtroom has become the campaign trail and the campaign trail has become the courtroom for donald trump. he goes out there and he talks about the fbi and so on, but i just wonder, you know, from your standpoint, does the cold hard reality of his actions, does he
same, and trump really benefits from this mainstream conventional political framing. yeah, i mean, john, i mean, what what are your thoughts on this? i mean, i know that we typically go to you for your thoughts on what s happening in the legal realm. you heard what the president said on friday describing donald trump as a danger to democracy, and the country is bitterly divided. you know, obviously that s a message primarily for the president s base, for independents, and it s not going to penetrate trump s base. you dealt with richard nixon, and richard nixon was a danger to democracy in his own right. where does trump stack against nixon in that regard? jim, i have written several books about authoritarian
a story and they will live with it as long as they can until some day they wake up and realize it s bad. what do you think, sc? we should not even give this a second s word of our breath. it s so absurd and looney, and as john says, it s demonstrative provably false. a lot of these people plead guilty, admitted what they did. we should not even give it the credibility that we are in this segment, talking about whether it may or may not be true. it is not true, and it s a conspiracy theory meant to cloak the reality of what happened. it s not debatable for us. we do not have to push it. i don t know. i have done everything but have a sandwich board over my chest, you know. i mean, you know, you are not getting anything from us in terms of giving this any
ballots nationwide. that is according to a report just breaking in the washington post. we ll have more on that in a moment. but that is where we start with the host of the podcast, jason johnson and professor of politics and journalism at morgan state university, the jason johnson is here. plus, host of the podcast fast politics and special correspondent for vanity fair molly john fast, former top state department official during the obama administration rick stangle and editor at large for the bulwark, charlie sykes. your colleagues at the bulwark wrote that piece, i would call it chilling. talk about why we re closer to constitutional failure today than we were, let s say, three years ago. well, because donald trump has been radicalized and radicalized the republican party. he has managed to revise the history of what happened on january 6th and any lingering hope that the republican party would serve as a guardrail or a check on his ambitions, i think