to compete with the future. kevin's now part of this next generation of young people who feel they can thrive. ♪ ♪ tonight on "the reidout" -- >> nobody has any idea where these people are coming from. we know they come from prisons, they come from mental institutions and insane asylums. we know they're terrorists. it's poisoning the blood of our country. it's so bad, and people are coming in with disease. >> harsh treatment of immigrants, jailing his perceived enemies. donald trump is not hiding his iron fisted authoritarian plans. believe him. >> meanwhile, the biden coalition that stopped him the last time is showing signs of fracturing. also tonight, call it the clarence thomas policy. the u.s. supreme court announces a new code of conduct, but the loopple holes are big enough to drive a truck through. plus, new reporting tonight on what lawyer jenna ellis shared with prosecutors in trump's georgia election interference case. now that she's cooperating. including that she was told, quote, the boss is not going to leave. and we begin tonight with a reminder. donald trump has told you who he is over and over again. so you should believe him. because as frightening as the prospect of a second trump term is, you don't have to wonder. he is telling us exactly what he plans to do. and that includes a reference to the nazi playbook, as he did on veterans day. with trump embracing the language of hate, using the words vermin twice to describe his perceived political enemies. first, in a social media post on his fake twitter, and later repeated verbatim in a speech in new hampshire. >> in honor of our great veterans on veterans day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections. the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. >> in using the word vermin to refer to the left, which is apparently more of a threat than russia or north korea, trump was using the same word historically weaponized by authoritarian dictators to dehumanize their historians and scholars were quick to point out two dictators specifically. adolf hitler and benito mussolini. trump's words could just be rhetoric since he has proven time and time again he doesn't know about history and doesn't seem to know whether the current president is barack obama or joe biden. one might also note, adolf hitler was imprisoned for staging a coup a decade before becoming the german chancellor, and it was in prison where he wrote the first volume of mein kampf. you can understand why historians are treating trump's worlds like the five-alarm fire it is. the trump campaign put out a fully unhinged, unapologetic statement basically proving they're right. steven chung said, quote, those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from trump derindgement syndrome and their sad miserable existence will be crushed when president trump returns to the white house. meanwhile in another post on his fake twitter today, trump warned special counsel jack smith and other justice department officials will wind up in a mental institution if he were re-elected. the idea that people might wind up in mental institutions might sound like a bit if we didn't already know in a second term trump is planning to go after anyone who opposes him. trump plans to gut the department of justice and fill it with sycophants who will go after his political enemies and he's reportedly drafting plans to invoke the insurrection act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the u.s. military against civil demonstrations. much of what donald trump wants in a second term is no secret at all. the project 2025 collection of policy proposals to give him all sorts of dictatorial powers has been in the works for years now. with the help of the heritage foundation. axios reports on efforts to prescreen the ideologies of thousands of potential trump foot soldiers as part of that unprecedented operation, to expand his power at every level of government. noting that hundreds of people are spending tens of millions of dollars to install a prevetted pro-trump army of up to 54,000 loyalists across government to rip off the restraints imposed on the previous 46 presidents. social media histories are already being plumbed and if trump were to win, thousands of trump first loyalists would be ready for legal, judicial, defense, regulatory, and domestic policy jobs. his inner circle plans to purge anyone viewed as hostile. adding that the people leading these efforts aren't figures like rudy giuliani. they're not ridiculous figures like rudy giuliani. they're smart, experienced people, many with very unconventional and elastic views of presidential power and traditional rule of law. one of the chief architects of project 2025 is a former trump adviser, stephen miller, the white nationalist dracula behind draconian and cruel trump policies like the muslim ban and separating immigrant children from their families and putting them in cages. as even more discusting, racist plans for a second trump term. "the new york times" dug into the plans. they include preparing to round up undocumented people already in the united states on a vast scale, and detain them in sprawling camps while they way to be expelled. adding that trump plans to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year. to expedite the deportation process, they're preparing an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings. in a statement, top advisers for the trump campaign acknowledged reporting on the plans calling them merely speculative and theoretical. and if you are inclined for one second not to take all of this seriously, just remember that this is exactly what donald trump did with the federal judiciary in 2016. with the help of his crony leonard leo and his gang over at the federalist society. with a ready made list of people he would nominate to the supreme court, and to other courts, months before a single vote was cast. and the biggest alarm is that the face of this clearly articulated monstrosity, trump, is not just facing joe biden but an increasingly fractured coalition of non-trump options. as many as five people, maybe six, could be on next november's ballot. so just remember, when people tell you who they are, believe them. joining me now is ruth ben-ghiat, professor of history and a scholar of authoritarianism at new york university and david plouffe, former obama campaign adviser. thank you. ruth, i want to start with you, because the project 2025 stuff is frightening to me. as somebody who has followed politics since i was in high school and has done it as a journalist for nearly 20 years i have never heard anything like it. it sounds like a road map to a hitlerian or putin or orbon style government. how worried are you about the implementation potentially of such plans? >> i'm very worried, and i want to say that all of this goes together, the talking about people like vermin, goes together with the plans for instant, you know, action to purge civil servants, plans reported elsewhere by "the new york times" to find the lawyers who will be unethical because, you know, if you're trying to have an autocracy, you need corrupt and lawilous people to be part of the government, otherwise you don't get anything done. you also need to convince people to see violence differently, and donald trump has been doing that since 2015, trying to get americans to see violence as patriotic and necessary. and then you need to dehumanize your targets. through language that we saw, like they're vermin, which mussolini and hitler used because you want people to get over any last aversion to cooperating with violence or committing violence themselves against state enemies. >> you know, david plouffe, we know that stephen miller, who ironically is the grandson of holocaust survivors, is fixated on remaking the racial composition of this country. by deportation, mass deportation and returning to a 1920s era immigration policy that essentially will only let in white europeans. we know that donald trump still talks to tucker carlson despite tucker carlson having said he despises him and they share a view that non-white immigrants have made the country dirty, have made the country unseemly, and that they need to return power essentially to white men, and they're very open about it. they don't hide it. and yet, what you're seeing is this ideology being transmuted outside of just white conservative republicans into other ethnicities, into other ethnic groups are seeing this as this is a possibility. donald trump isn't losing support. he's gaining it with this open call to turn the united states essentially into a giant white ethno state. how is that possible, and what is the counter to it? >> well, joy, i guess i would start where you start, which is, you know, the danger of giving him -- would be one of the biggest mistakes in the history of the planet in global history. because i do think he won't be as successful probably as he would like, but he's going to organize his government and an outside game here to try to be much more effective to accomplish vetting, which is to turn america into an autocracy where he rules and then don jr. rules and then ivanka rules. and basically, white men, you know, have all the power in this country, maybe with the exception of ivanka. what i would say is most of the people that are going to decide this election, people right now in polls who might say, you know, all things equal, i would vote for trump. people who are still undecided, progressives and young people who haven't decided who to vote for or whether to vote, they don't know this is what he's doing to do. we have to understand that's what the campaign is for. the campaign is to feed this because the percentage of americans that would support -- by the way, it's scary how high it is, maybe 30%, maybe 35%, but it's not 50%. you need to feed this to them each and every day so you raise the stakes of the election and the important point you raised is you have to make sure voters understand there is only one way to save the country. and it is to vote for joe biden. and any vote to these third parties is vote for trump. because trump, i don't know, you know, i worry about these latest polls because he is at 49%, 50%, 51%, higher than he's ever been, but i think it will look different in the spring, but he's not going to fall below like 45%. if there's too many third party votes, he's going to win. that's what the campaign is for. is to make sure that all this stuff that we're spending all the time seeing, which again is deeply, deeply unpopular, so this is not a guy who has decided, you know what, i lost in '20, my party was awful in '18. we got our butt kicked in '22, a bad election week. i need to change. he's doubling down on basically, you know, destruction of this country. and we have to explain that and explain why that's important. >> i want to come back to that in a second, and the challenges in doing that. ruth, i want to come back to you. the thing is, i think people have a misremembering of the 1930s. the assumption was america rose up en masse to oppose hitler, to oppose that kind of autocracy. that's not true. i lot of americans had no empathy for the jewish people being purse kited there and wanted nothing to do with the war, and many sided with him, including very prominent people like henry ford. we had a contingent in this country that was actively pursuing potentially overthrowing our government, rachel maddow has taught us with her books and with her podcast, that wanted to overthrow our government and give us a 1930s style autocracy like hitler's in the 30s. we have a part of our country that's always been that way. then i look at florida, where ron desantis has been able to essentially implement an experiment in doing most of this, driving immigrants out to the point where he's hurting the economy. implementing book bans, implementing a lot of really weirdly 1930s policy and getting away with it because he had a party in tallahassee that was willing to do what he wanted. if trump comes back, he'll do that too. there won't be normie republicans. how do we fight against what trump wants to do when all the republicans who will be willing to stand up to him are gone. they have left washington, left the party. >> yeah, it's very difficult because the party has become an autocratic entity, and it is relying on corruption and autocratic playbook, lying, corruption, and violence and threat as a form of government. the reason they don't care about -- the reason they don't if they take positions that are unpopular is they don't really plan in the long run to depend on the popular will, to depend on elections. the end game of an election denial is to convince americans that elections are not necessary or the best way to choose their leaders. so they plan on having a kind of electoral autocracy where you have elections but they don't mean anything. you get tommy tuberville saying, oh, we shouldn't have elections. you have michael flynn saying maybe we won't have an election. this is all kind of psychological warfare, drip, drip, drip. when you put it together with trump kind of marketing violence as something positive and all the other things going on, it's just, i think civic education, which i have been trying to do since 2016, why i wrote my book strongman, is essential because as you said, people have the kind of amnesia. they don't remember that mussolini was an enormous star. he had a syndicated column, and he reached 1,000 newspapers for seven years, mussolini, and of course, we know that hitler was very popular. so we can't -- we can't forget this. and we need to come to terms with this reign of authoritarianism in our country that is being activated now. >> you know, david, it isn't us trying to insult donald trump by associated him with the 1930s. he does that. he associates himself. he doesn't feel it's an insult to compare him to hitler. he apparently had the book by his bed of his speeches. he's not against it. he said, you know, those people vote too. when he's told you're hanging out with nazis. he doesn't care. the other piece that is analogous is the economy piece. the economy on paper is good, but like the 1930s, there is very high inflation, very high dissatisfaction. you have a lot of young voters, a lot of voters of color on the democratic side who are dissatisfied. the jobs picture does not impact them. they have a job, they can't afford things. so there's dissatisfaction, and then we bring in what's happening in gaza. a lot of anger at biden. there's a sense that there's not that much difference between republicans and democrats when it comes to issues like violence against people in palestine, in gaza. and then you have all these options. people who don't like pandemic restrictions. there's a robert f. kennedy jr. for them. if you don't like what's happening in gaza and biden's stance of 100% support for whatever israel has, you have cornel west as an option. if you somehow have this dream there can be this magical weird bipartisan utopia, you have maybe joe manchin, you have jill stein if you're a contrarian. there might be that many people on the ballot. it's worrisome to me because i don't see the cohesion on the democratic side, the biden side, that i see on the trump side. does that worry you? >> of course it does. joe biden can win this race, with a degree of difficulty, because of all the factors you enormous. and you really have very little margin for error. and trump, you know, in '16, he won the presidency winning 46.1% of the vote, including getting 46, 47 in battleground states because you had stein and gary johnson, and it was that 30 party factor. so it's a huge issue here. and i think at the end of the day, first, i would say on the economy, i think the white house understands this, but democrats have to understand, i have learned this lesson the hard way. you can never tell a voter how they should feel about the economy. they'll tell you how they feel about the economy. and while the unemployment rate is low, i think people are never satisfied with wages, nor should they be. people have their paychecks going not as far as it was, certainly pre-pandemic. and these high rates are causing factors maybe not for everybody, but enough people. and then you add the global uncertainty. so biden's going to have a really tough time around the economy because voters also kind of remember this rosy period pre-pandemic where even though trump was largely profiting from the barack obama economy, people remember it being quite strong. so you have to prosecute an economic argument here, but for all these other voters out there, the notion that we would become an autocracy, the notion we would become basically a white power country, is not supported. you have to raise the stakes. this is going to be like navigating a super treacherous obstacle course because of all the factors you talked about. >> the question is whether abortion is a strong enough deterrent and the desire for gun reform, which are powerful issues for young voters, are enough to move them in the direction to save them from what donald trump would do the the country. scary stuff, but important to put it on the table and talk about it. thank you both very much. up next on "the reidout," after a series of scandals involving right-wing justices, the supreme court is adopting a code of conduct. but it doesn't really prevent clarence and company from continuing their corrupt ways. 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