given the fact that donald trump is not going to do a town hall on fox news, i don t know who is going to be watching nikki and ron in that debate. i hope some people are. because i think they will get a real sense of the fact that the two of them are living in an alternate universe. they will will debate each other as if the contest is between the two of them. and my guess is that neither one of them will spend five minutes bringing up donald trump because they are both playing for 2028 or a vice presidential nomination from donald trump. i are talking to voters, the sense they have of haley, of desantis and for that matter chris christie. reporter: you know, chris christie is playing a game of offense here in this primary. he s made it very clear the approach he s taken and when you see where he is in the state of iowa, he s polling at 1%. so, new hampshire, you know, that 10% will maybe take him somewhere as, you know, at one point he ll be able to reflect on his career and kn
donald trump not only has shown no remorse, he s saying, right, i m going to do it again and the republican party is saying we re okay with this. i agreed with everything that has been said on the panel. could i make one cautionary note here? watch for this flex, that donald trump, you know, is a very effective populist demagogue and understands that he can use the language of democracy to undermine democracy. and one of the things i ve been talking to a lot of voters in my home state of wisconsin, a swing state, and a lot of people say, we re not for authoritarianism, we re for democracy, we believe the lie about the election, and if in fact donald trump is kicked off these ballots because he s an insurrectionist, we think that that is antidemocratic. i disagree with all of that. but i have to say that one of the things that donald trump has done has been to co-opt the language of his opponents, to
fair election results. we also haven t seen a president be the ring leader as tim hait yes s investigative committee laid out. we have never seen the president be a ring leader for all this marry netting of individuals, trying different ways, different legal strategies to toss free and fair election results into chaos, into question, into suspicion, to try to, first, threaten his own department of justice if they didn t say there was fraud where there was none, next, to get states to block the election results and also call those into question. and finally, the hail mary pass, to pressure and bully a vice president into refusing to certify those elections in the pro forma january 6th certification. let s talk about the supreme court. court watchers are loathed to make predictions about how this
tried to violently take over the country, i m sick and tired of people saying, well, we have guardrails, we don t have guardrails. if we had guardrails this would be done already. our guardrails are made of spaghettios and silly string. the fact that he could be on the ballot in so many places and he gets to go to a supreme court, where a third of that court are people that trump put in, and then you have other people who we know are absolutely compromised by the same donors that give to donald trump, this is a joke. and i mention this example before, the fact that you had an insurrection by bolsonaro in brazil, he had an insurrection on january 8th of 2023 and by july of 2023, the brazilian supreme court was, like, yeah, this guy can t run again for ten years. we had three years of this. we re coming up on a three-year anniversary of a terrorist attack and we re fumbling around with individual states what font trump can use when he runs for office again after he declares he wants to b
so, it is not clear that his legal team feels like he s going to get the warmest reception, even by this conservative court on the merits of whether he s an insurrectionist, but rather they re trying to provide other off ramps, which i think as a in one sense is a smart strategy given the facts, i do think, though, at another it does portray weakness. it is not for a guy who portrays strength, this is a brief of someone who is clearly on his heels, who is portraying weakness in the legal posture he is in, vis-a-vis the question of whether or not he engaged in insurrection. so, jordan, i want your broad read of this, i want you to weigh in on this question that marc elias put before us, to front load with procedural off ramps, seeming to leave trump s team actually a stronger argument than this question of whether or not he is in fact an insurrectionist. right. so i think it makes complete sense that he doesn t focus as