♪♪ tonight on the reidout we have bagram in alaska. They say it might be as big, might be bigger, than all of saudi arabia. So my kids keep me humble. Unfortunately kamala harris doesn't have anything keeping her humble. Can someone track down the women kamala harris says are bleeding out in parking lots because roe v. Wade was overturned? does that look like a party? that seriously trying to win the election. But diminished donald trump confusing alaska and afghanistan, maga hack sarah huckabee sanders and john mctee smearing and ridiculing women. Perhaps they don't think they need votes because they have a different plan to seize power in january. And my friend and colleague, rachel maddow will be here to talk about that. And also to tell us about her highlyanticipated new documentary from russia with lev, which premieres this week. ♪♪ but we begin tonight with the american twilight zone, one of the the best episodes of the original old timey version of that show was called the monsters come to maple street. Where residents of a town turn on each other because they believe one person is an alien from space. I know who the monster is! i know who it is! blood among us. I swear i know who it is! all right, charlie, let's hear it. It's, it's what are you waiting for? well, come on, charlie, come on! who is it, charlie? tell us. It's a kid. It's tommy. He's the one. Oh, that's not true. ♪♪ it isn't so. Okay. Spoiler alert, the real aliens were manipulating the people in that small town into believing the conspiracy theory all along. Doesn't that kind of feel like kind of the manipulation happening in our politics right now? except the aliens aren't from space, they're from the republican party. Imagine a world where the wall street journal, a once agust newspaper, sends a whole reporter to a small town in ohio to check on whether a house cat is alive. Because jd vance amplified false, racist, conspiracy theories about haitian immigrants in springfield being pet eating savages everyone should fear all to create stories and make the media cover them. Well, today the journal laid bear how they fell into that very trap and how clearly james david and the trump campaign knew it was b. S. , quote, springfield city manager brian heck fielded an unusual question at city hall on the morning of september 9th, from a staff member of republican vice presidential nominee jd vance. The staffer called to ask if there is any truth to bizarre rumors about haitian immigrants and pets in springfield. He asked, point blank, are the rumors true of pets being taken and eaten? recalled heck. I told him no. There was no verifiable evidence or reports to show that this was true. I told them these claims were baseless. Of course, that didn't stop jd from doubling down on the lie or donald trump from throwing gasoline on the flames the next day at the presidential debate on september 10th. In the week that followed, the republican presidential ticket turned what started as a facebook lie building off garbage neonazi lies about haitians, into a national news story. It's a story ohio's republican governor mike dewine called garbage while defending haitian immigrants in his state and that springfield's republican mayor has repeatedly slammed as baseless. The woman whose facebook post started it all even says she regrets ever posting it and now she is concerned for the safety of haitians in springfield. But jd vance, the guy who represents ohio, including springfield in the senate, he's not concerned at all. He continues to throw his own constituents under the bus, including that woman who he straight up gas lit at an event. You say you have a responsibility to share what your constituents tell you, but don't you also have a responsibility to fact check them first? well, i think the media has a responsibility to fact check the residents of springfield, not lie about them. Back to the wall street journal report, because they did do just that. The journal notes, a vance spokesperson on tuesday provided the wall street journal with a police report in which a resident had claimed her pet might have been taken by haitian neighbors. But when a reporter went to anna kilgore's house tuesday evening, she said her cat, miss sassy, true story, went missing late august had returned a few days later, found safe and sound in her very own basement. I want you to reflect on the absurdity of the fact that actual journalists are being dispatched across the country to investigate individual missing cats. But that's where we are when you have people pointing fingers at their haitian neighbors in a town that desperately needed those haitian neighbors as workers and doing that because politicians are feeding them dangerous lies just like the aliens in that twilight zone episode about maple street. Guys, this stuff is gross. It's dangerous. It's immoral. And it's wrong. And you know who also knows it's wrong, jd vance or at least 2012 jd vance. A college professor of jd vance said he agreed to delete a blog post vance wrote in 2012 attacking gop over antiimmigrant rhetoric because he wanted to run for office. It can be found in the wayback machine, we get to experience vance's sensible 2012 blueprint for the gop. Which makes arguments like, quote, you can't nominate people, like sarah palin, who scare away swing voters. You can't activate alienate every growing bloc of the american electorate, blacks, latinos and the youth. And you can't depend solely on the shrinking block of the electorate whites. In other words, james david or james donald or whatever he calls himself on a given day. His transition is incredibly cynical and he knows that what he is doing is wrong. But that's actually the point. As adam points out in the atlantic trump and vance's statements reveal a belief that it would be better to leave dying towns in the midwest to wither away than revive them and have to share that prosperity with people who are black. That enough american voters in swing states agree it would be better to be broke than integrated. In exchange for these fearful votes, a second trump administration would proceed to shower tax cuts on the wealthy, raise them on everyone else, slash regulations on big business and further undermine unions while towns like springfield would be left to tumble further into decline. The aforementioned adam joins me and eugene robinson, washington post columnist and msnbc columnist. Adam, brilliant column. I hope everyone reads it. What you point out is obviously true but it is even worse when jd vance is the one doing it. He wrote a whole book, hill billy elegy, about that part of the world, about the poor, white community. And struggling small town communities. Which he now seems to be very happy to sink into economic despair just so he can do what he literally said republicans should not do, demonize immigrants and people of color. Yeah. I think both donald trump and jd vance are dishonorable bullies using their positions of considerable power to terrorize a small community that does not have the ability or the numbers to fight back in the same way. And i think it's very clear that they're not interested in making life in small town midwest in america better, interested in exploiting whatever problems those places have in order to get them angry at people who are ultimately not responsible for those problems and could actually help them recover from those problems. That's really a disgrace and a shame. Yeah, because eugene, there's a world in which if you're running for president and you are supposedly running on solutions to the problems of small town america, you could say you would like to do things like, provide more federal assistance to schools that would provide multilingual education so you can integrate people coming from other countries and have them fit more into society. You could bolster unions and small businesses and do things like harris saying $50,000 to start a small business. That seems like things you can do. But what they're trying to do vance knows this because we know because he wrote it, that all they're doing is trying to feed these white citizens fear and white citizen's writ large fear of black people to get their votes when they don't want to do anything for them. Absolutely. That's absolutely true. So, you're talking about solutions, and you're talking about donald trump, you're talk about those the same sentence, that doesn't go together. It's all bombast. It's all bullying. And it's all for the outside audience, for the maga world. It's not really for the people in springfield. I just got back from springfield. And i really couldn't find anybody who believed the stuff about eating dogs and cats. Even people who had issues with the wave of haitian immigration. And what i found was a town of 58,000 people that had seen in the basically last four years influx of maybe 10,000, total of maybe 15,000, immigrants from haiti who made the place richer. Who made springfield wealthier, who are model citizens. Who aren't committing crimes. Who aren't doing anything. They, you know, people said they might need some driving lessons because they drive the way they used to drive in port a prince as opposed to springfield. But and so this is all been, you know, what trump is doing is using the friction that is in an influx of immigration like this and just driving a wedge and making everything worse in order to try to better his political prospects. Yeah. Adam, they might not believe in inside of springfield, but there's polling that shows that people do believe it. That people disproportionately, at least republicans, disproportionately believe these things to be true and it's actually shaping the way they think about it. That they think about politics. It's actually causing them to dislike and hate immigrants. It's having the desired effect is what i'm saying. I think the key factor here is really that they were told that these stories are false. They were told they were not true by the people who are in a position to know whether these stories are true and they are repeating them any way because they are politically useful to them to foment hatred against this small community. And that is an extraordinary abuse of power and it says that people like this are unfit for office and should be nowhere near the awesome power of the federal government. Indeed. The fact is people trust donald trump more than they trust the press and he is deliberately, consciously lying to them in the hopes that these people will develop negative feelings towards people who have done nothing wrong because of the lies that they are being told. And that is outrageous. Indeed. Go ahead, eugene. No. I was going to say, here is a sentence i never say, perhaps even worse than donald trump dot dot dot, is jd vance. Okay. Jd vance, who represents springfield in the u. S. Senate, who called to check on these ridiculous rumors and was told they were false, was told there was nothing there. It is just inconceivable that he could be so cynical and craven to treat his own constituents this way, to know what it's doing, not just to black haitians and africanamericans, but to white people in springfield and to everybody in springfield. Everybody is suffering through the bomb threats and the closures of schools and hospitals. It's a mess. And that the senate that represents the city would do something like that is just unbelievable. I've never seen anything like this. And i've been on this earth for a while. I'll play the shorter one. This is three for my wonderful director. This is jd vance not only lying and using doing what he his goal is to create an attack, pivot and attack against kamala harris. Here he is doing that and then apparently not being able to even know the name of the country haiti and say what that is. Go ahead. And what happened in springsfield, i think, is an example of what kamala harris's open border what she wants to do to every small town and big city in this country, which is over the last few years, 20,000 migrants primarily from haitia dropped into springfield, ohio. Adam, jd vance went to yale law school. He knows the name of the country of haiti. But what he did there is the point of all of this which is to say to every american who lives in a small, predominantly white town f you don't vote for me and donald trump the guy whose mentals aren't fully there anymore, then they're going to flood your community with these savages. That's his message. Well, i want to say another thing there which is he's lying again. These people were not, quote unquote, dropped in springfield. They came to springfield like every other virtually every other person who lives in america descended from someone who did this, they came because they wanted to pursue job opportunities. And that's what they did. And you have to look at the catch 22 here. Republicans say they want immigrants to come here and work and contribute and then when they do that, republicans make up lies about them being pet eating savages. Yeah. It's what they do. And by the way, what donald trump and jd vance should be doing is thanking the haitianamerican prosecutor who is actually ironically enough the person that is going to be bringing to justice the person who shot at him in florida. How about that? how about them apples? adam, eugene, thank you very much. Coming up, my friend and colleague rachel maddow discusses the latest plot to undermine this year's election results and her much anticipated new documentary. There she is. Don't go anywhere. Documentary. There she is don't go anywhere. ♪♪ citi's industry leading global payments solutions help their clients move money around the world seamlessly in over 180 countries. . . 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[laughs sarcastically] but then we switched to tmobile 5g home internet. And now his attention is spent elsewhere. But i'm thinking of her the whole time. That's so much worse. Why is that thing in bed with you? this is where it gets the best signal from the cell tower! i've tried everywhere else in the house! there's always a new excuse. Well if we got xfinity you wouldn't have to mess around with the connection. Therapy's tough, huh? mmm. It's like a lot about me. [laughs] a home router should never be a home wrecker. Oo this is a good book title. With just 48 days to go until election day, you may be asking yourself, where in the world is donald j. Trump, is he campaigning in battleground states like pennsylvania or michigan or maybe arizona? nope. Right now he's holding a rally in, drum roll, please, long island, new york. Yep. A state he's almost certainly not going to win. But that is where he is spending valuable time and resources. You know, at this point, i don't know, if you didn't know any better you would think trump isn't trying to win the election. I mean, campaigning in new york, while resources for his field operation in actual swing states are dwindling, attacking black immigrants and republican governor sarah huckabee sanders did just last night at a town hall with trump. So my kids keep me humble. Unfortunately kamala harris doesn't have anything keeping her humble. Yeah, man, you don't sound humble. They're not growing the base. They're shrinking it. And they don't seem to care. What they do seem to care about is what happens after election day. Meaning, if kamala harris wins, how do they once again contest the results and create a big lie 2. 0? just take a look at georgia. The guardian has new reporting today on a behind the scenes network of county election officials coordinating on policy and messaging to both call the results of november's election into question before a single vote is cast and push rules and procedures favored by the election denial movement. Of the many nightmare election scenarios that keep me up at night, one of the most daunting is what happens if vice president harris wins but some states just refuse to certify? that could mean the election winds up in the hands of the republican majority house of representatives. Or even with the leonard leo six on the supreme court. Which means trump could lose the election and still wind up as president. Joining me now is maybe the only other person who is up at night while i'm up thinking about these nightmare scenarios. Rachel maddow, i try not to text in that moment and also the executive producer of the new msnbc documentary from russia with led we'll talk about shortly. Rachel, hello my friend. I hold in my hand a letter that i'm sure you have read, too. And this is mr. John, chairman of the georgia state election board. And to him. And it is it is scary because it is questioning whether or not new rules are going to be put in place in georgia that make it harder to certify the election. What is going on? so, couple of weeks ago there was this weird moment a rally in georgia trump from the stage shouted out by name new members of the georgia state election board. And the georgia state election board is not supposed to be like a partisan entity. It's not like a trump campaign thing. It's the technocratic board that oversees the administration of elections in georgia. So him shouting them out by name and claiming them as like maga superheroes who were pit bulls for victory was a bad sign. But it turns out that, in fact, three protrump members have been assigned to this board. They are the majority of the board. And since they have taken over this board, they have been passing all of these new rules in georgia that are designed, among other things, to let local republican election officials refuse to certify the vote, refuse to say what the vote total is in individual counties. Republicans have been trying to refuse certification since 2020 in all of the swing states, in a bunch of states that aren't swing states. More than two dozen, more than three dozen instances they just refuse to say here was the vote total in our most recent election. They're doing th