the new vicious attacks coming just hours after one of the orders was passed. trump is laying the groundwork for an even more extreme second term if he wins in 2024. how republicans are trying to circumvent democratic institutions to get the results they want. i am ayman mohyeldin, let's get started. donald trump attacks his perceived political enemies almost nonstop. cal enemies it has become to routine and breaking just a short time ago he attacked the judge overseeing his civil fraud trial, new york attorney general of the tisha james and the law clerk on the case, smearing her by name and a deranged social media post. there was reasonable cause for alarm when a new york appeals court caused the gag order that had barred trump and his lawyers from speaking publicly about court staff in the case. just hours after the ruling, trump began attacking judge arthur engoron's law clerk again calling her a, quote, trump hater. he also said that letitia james is a partisan attack dog and operative. these are part of a much broader escalation of these attacks on perceived political enemies. it follows his fraud to target groups he characterized as berman in america, a threat president biden slammed. this prompted the washington post to describe this language as echoing dictators hitler and mussolini. a trump campaign spokesperson called that a ridiculous assertion from snowflakes whose entire existence will be crushed when president trump returns to the white house. also this week trump reposted a social media comment suggesting that letitia james and judge engoron should be put under citizen's arrest. this all happened, as i said, just in the last week. it's important to note here as we have seen way too often that there is an established pattern of action taken by trump's followers when he targets his perceived enemies. in the two days after he posted if you go after me i'm coming after you in august, a man from alabama and a woman in texas sent disturbing and violent threats to the fulton county district attorney and her office. donald trump knows his supporters listen to him. he does not stop. on monday, a federal appeals court will hear oral arguments on the gag order that was placed on trump in the federal election interference case. that gag order also has been paused while the appeal is being considered. special counsel jack smith's team argued that his attacks in the case were part of a pattern stretching back years in which people publicly targeted by the defendant are as a relt of the targeting subject to harassment, threats, and intimidation. they argue that he is implicitly but unmistakably encouraging his supporters to act against the people he targets. he will not stop on his own so the courts have an obligation's. this mountain of evidence before them should actually make him stop. joining me are christina greer and david henderson. it's great to have you with us. michael, i will start with you. it is not surprising that trump has gone after judge engoron or his law clerk. i think anyone in this country would not have bet against him doing it yet again. talk to us about this danger. given how we can see trump supporters reacted to this before. >> it's enormously dangerous. i am shocked that we have allowed this to get this far. i will use my best analysis that i can give you at this point for this situation with trump and his attacks on the judges. put his in jail. that's how it stops. people will be mad and upset, but there is no other person on this planet, certainly not in this country who would be given the kind of grace that donald trump has been given to run his mouth the way he has, attacking the clerks, attacking the judges, attacking the prosecutors personally, threatening them. we have seen the evidence when he does that how his base response. the system is getting pulverized from within by trump and is being pressed to the umpteenth corner it can go in trying to appease him and allow him to be free while he is still behaving this way. if he wants to continue in this vein, then use the system the way the system would be used against all of us on this show right now because you know dam well that if any of us said half of what donald trump has said we would not be on air tonight. we would be in a jail cell. >> people have been in a jail cell for a lot less, i would argue. i was saying, people have been in jail for a lot less in terms of violating gag orders and such. david, speak to the point that michael raised their that he should be put in jail because of all of the violations. yet somehow there are two parts of this. there is the constant attempt as a legal strategy to challenge everything that comes out of the court and delay, delay, delay. we are seeing this will take time to play out. at the same time, the real-life danger that is being posed to these officers of the court. >> i will repeat something at 20 before. at the end of the day he is calling their bluff because he knows they won't do it. that's why he keeps engaging in this behavior. it's an understatement to say that if anyone threatened a judge or a member of the church's staff, they are leaving the court in handcuffs. i've seen people get locked up for far less than this. this is what it becomes when you don't do that. legal decisions when you are actually in a trial rest between law and common sense. sometimes it feels like they never meet. this is the legal equivalent of chernobyl. you have somebody on the ground making decisions that are being second-guessed by people that are not directly exposed to the problem. as a result you will have an explosion in the aftermath will be just as bad, if not worse than the explosion itself. you have judges instituting gag orders. they are not only thinking about the first amendment, they are also saying i am in the courtroom. i see the looks. i see the exchanges at the bench. i see the way people are behaving in the hallway and i am telling you this situation is going to explode. then you have appellate courts stopping the gag orders because they say, from an academic point of view maybe you should have a right to say some of these things. that brings us back to this first situation where you are doing things like endorsing citizens arrest that is not just complaining about your circumstances. you are inciting people to take action that will lead to violence when there is an established pattern of having seen it happen before. we have a responsibility to not let this get further out of hand. at this point we are as much of the problem as he is. >> we are a society that has become complacent to this. that is the dangerous part because nobody has stopped him before despite the documented history of his supporters taking action when he speaks. we have seen it time and time again and yet nothing changes. >> ayman, we have to remember. donald trump is not new to the courtroom. he has been in and out of courts for decades now. he has been lying, cheating, stealing, encrypting across new york and now it has gone national. we need to expand the point. it's not just about speaking out of turn against the prosecutorial judges and clerks, it also the attorney general. the racist and sexist comments and the call to action is a call to arms. we have seen donald trump insight his supporters. he wants this. he wants to be televised. he wants to be sure that in the court of public opinion he is seen as the hero and the victim simultaneously. as we have said, the horse has left the barn. it is so far away from us at this point because donald trump is now controlling the narrative. he knows that he probably won't be put in jail for contempt of court so he just keeps pushing the envelope. he has done it with policy and conduct and norms when he was in the office. now that he is no longer in office, he is doing the same thing and courts all across the country. i don't know how to put this genie back in the bottle, but i don't know how we retract what donald trump has pushed us into. all that he has excavated. all of the negative vitriolic, racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-immigrants, anti-muslim sentiment from the last fears. in some ways we have become numb or immune to it. we cannot if we expect this democratic republic to succeed in any way, shape, or form. >> to the point of not just the threats to the officers of the court, but jack smith's team on making the argument for re- imposing the gag order, there is a call that this actually amounts to witness intimidation. it's not just a gag order for the safety of the people. it is actually an assault on the judicial process on the country. a witness in his trial will feel intimidated by what donald trump is saying and that could impact whether or not the wheels of justice actually spin as they are supposed to down the road. >> absolutely. what you are seeing is a trifecta of moves all simultaneously. one, the first order is the attack on the judge and the clerks. the second is the attack on the prosecutors and those that are bringing him to court. those that are bringing the charges against him. third, everyone else. everyone else involves a pool of people who would be called and brought into a courtroom to serve as jurors and also the witnesses that may be participating. more to the jurors, more to finding that one person who in all the cases would say he's innocent. that would throw the whole thing out. donald trump has been from the very beginning, i love this idea of his trying to be both the hero as well as the victim. that is what he is trying to do . he is trying to use the system against itself. by the time you get into that jury room, you will have that one person who is so -bent on freeing donald trump like freeing willie, right? you wind up with these mistrials and again he will be the one that will be saying, i told you so. it is i told you so based on all the crap he is doing right now. if the system does not clampdown on it, the backend of this looks incredibly ugly. >> i cannot let you invoke free willie. that whale does not deserve to be compared to donald trump in any of these situations. >> a whale is a whale. >> i have to ask david, from another point we heard earlier this week judge engoron rejecting the attempt by trump's team to seek a mistrial. that had me wondering a little bit because the judge, i should say that they were arguing that the judge and his clerk are biased against team trump. is that part of the strategy here? not if i can assault this judge verbally and get under his skin and provoke them to do or say something irrational, i can then use that in my appeal to say, look how he is talking to me. look how he is insulting me. the cow he is voting against me that this trial is not being dismissed. >> ayman, i'm inclined to say yes but i won't say i think he's that intentional at the way he goes about this. the reason i say this is, i was a special crimes prosecutor. i don't with a lot of people that committed acts of domestic violence, sexual assault, i have seen how people will bully and intimidate and behave. they are not always necessarily thinking about what they are doing, but with that in mind goading the judge in the circumstances were not only is the judge taking actions that are intended to keep people safe. you are dealing with someone that is going down the hallway, talking about you and the people that work with you. you are taking steps to keep people safe and then you are getting second-guessed by a higher court. who may in fact overturn the gag order. everybody has a point at which they could break. i could see that being a part of what somebody could have in the back of their minds. if the judge snaps and says something maybe that will give us leeway for an additional problem that could come up the works. >> that is the fear that he can point to it and say the judge is biased against me. i'm also not sure that donald trump is that smart. may be maniacal, but not that smart. david henderson, great to see you. michael and christina, please stick around. we have new reporting about how donald trump and his allies are preparing for an even more radical and dangerous second term. nd term. 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great in my book! who are you? no power? no problem. introducing storm-ready wifi. now you can stay reliably connected through power outages with unlimited cellular data and up to 4 hours of battery back-up to keep you online. only from xfinity. home of the xfinity 10g network. axios is out with a new report pulling back the curtain on plans for the next administration if trump should win. they want to prescreen ideologies of thousands of potential foot soldiers. they want to rip off the restraints and help trump carry out his radical second term agenda. it is an agenda that has come more into focus over the last few weeks thanks in part to several bombshell reports from the new york times. there is just something of what we could expect. the disgraced ex-president wants to use the justice department to carry out revenge missions using the power of the federal government to take vengeance on political adversaries. he also plans to carry out an extreme immigration crackdown including sprawling camps to hold undocumented detainees. to accomplish these goals they are looking to purge career civil servants from the government and replace them with trump loyalists. they also want to install more aggressive i ideologically aligned gatekeepers for the government that will carry out his plans with no questions asked. a second trump presidency truly runs the risk of ending to -- american democracy as we know it. that is not hyperbolic. let's bring michael steele and christina greer back. we also have an expert on authoritarianism joining us. ruth, let me start with this axios report. this trump ally machine that is beginning to spin has the most power over the formation of a potential future government of any group in u.s. history. put this report into perspective for us. is this from the ex-president and his allies? is it as an unprecedented as it seems on the surface given that our country has not had a president that has lost them and come back to win reelection. >> you know, trump is an autocrat. what he is doing here is straight out of the history of authoritarianism. it is not just the content of what he wants to do, the mass deportations and detentions when you get into it he says he wants to expand psychiatric institutions to put people in there. that is what authoritarians have always done. you mentioned jack smith. that is exactly what authoritarians do. the communist's in the ussr would routinely put dissidents and psychiatric institutions. it's not just that, it's the method. autocrats need a compliant bureaucracy to implement their oppression quickly. they need corrupt people that will not have pangs of conscience. that is what happened the first time. he has learned from that with too many civil servants that had ethics and too many lawyers. this time he is not making that mistake. it is like seeing a chapter of my book come to life. i wrote about this that you must have lawless and corrupt people in government in order to have an autocracy. >> you bring up an interesting point. tell me there is a false perception in our society that we have such strong democratic institutions and such strong guardrails that democracy has arrived for 250+ years that it can't simply be undone in the span of four years by one man and his cohorts. the truth is, our institutions are vulnerable. they can be co-opted by a handful of people. in my wrong in that assessment or do you think these institutions are resilient enough? >> no place is immune and perfect in terms of that. we got january 6 because he already did a number corrupting the gop and the other people that contributed to the coup that almost had success. he came far closer than people know. we are already along the way and he intends to pick up and accelerate everything that he was doing. by 2026 we would be looking on the road to looking like hungry -- hungary and away we are not prepared for. >> donations have been surging to groups linked to project 2025 wrapping up for the next republican administration pick does this worry you? the sheer amount of energy and power these conservative groups are putting behind this effort to fill the white house with an army of yes-men who fundamentally are undemocratic? >> yes it does. emphatically it does. it does for a number of reasons. the first thing, people need to listen to ruth. they need to read her book and listen to what she is telling us and what those in this space who are looking at this democracy from the inside out are trying to warn us about. it is real. these folks learned a lot from january 6. they are not going to make the same mistakes again. i'm sorry. the revolution will not be televised nor will it appear on facebook. they have learned. they will not tweet about it or text about it. they are going to create the institutions and the infrastructure awa