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investigators of the government want to talk to somebody, we as journalists definitely do. i can t wait to watch, ari. thank you. all right, nicolle. see you soon. i want to welcome you to the beat. we have, as mentioned, a show we re excited about. a beat exclusive on this trump organization pro. you won t see these individuals and witnesses anyone else. we will be joined, as nicolle and i were briefly discussing, by three of the people that were closest to donald trump s business, a business he s been running a long time and now are giving him legal problems in new york. we re talking about the former lawyer michael cohen, and david axelrod s daughter-in-law jess fer weiss of berg, and we re talking the senior adviser to melania trump. that s coming up a little later in the program. we begin with the republican party s complete and total inversion of the big lie. this has become a crisis in realtime. the u.s. senate could vote as soon as this week to investi ....
empty chairs is a bit of an impact over one key issue within the giant bill, and that is unemployment insurance. democrat joe manchin holding out on alternative proposal. we have more on that coming up tonight. meanwhile, republican senators have been trying to do some other things that show how narrow their options are. minor delay tactics. they haven t found a clear message against the whole bill, and some of the numbers may show why. donald trump never passed 49% approval in his entire time in office, but biden s overall approval rating has now surged to 60%. that s 11 points higher than trump ever got in his whole presidency. and biden s approval for handling covid-19 is up to 70%, and that includes almost half of republicans, 44% of them. and then there is the most striking number of all, and this may explain why so much of what you re seeing tonight has an inevitable conclusion. it s at 76% of americans back the covid bill, including 59% of republicans. in that se ....
are now tied to far right extremists like white supremacists and recounting the warning signs that were there before the insurrection. the threat of white nationalist violence has been weaponized. the 2016 election of president donald trump gave them a tribal chieftain they can all rally behind. the fbi chooses not to prioritize the investigation and prosecution of white supremacists and far right violence. the failure to prepare for the january 6 attack on the capitol is an indictment of the counterterrorism intelligence enterprise built since 9/11. we can see future attacks that make oklahoma city bombing pale in comparison. you can see the intelligence experts there zooming in, like you might for any other pandemic era discussion, but it was of course deadly serious as they tried to implore the congress to really take this all the way, to do what past administrations sometimes haven t. for their part, republicans used their time today to divert from that to ....
the argument that then president trump was in on this the whole time. it s the kind of evidence that can as a constitutional matter cut against any defense that maybe things just got out of hand, or donald trump would oppose and regret what his fans did. lead impeachment manager jamie raskin capping a dramatic day with an appeal for facts and sense. i ve talked a lot about common sense in this trial because i think i believe that s all you need to arrive at the right answer here. let s not get caught up in a lot of outlandish lawyers theories here. exercise your common sense about what just took place in our country. exercise your common sense. at a time of incredible division, where politics and ideology, which a system under rule of law ought to be able to debate and debate peacefully, when those conversations of debates have turned into lies, we re all living through it. it was part of the recent political era, but it s clearly part of the action of the insurrect ....
the head. this wasn t just senate chambers. it was the scene of the crime not too long ago. and as those images were being replayed, i sensed a lot of my colleagues reliving the experience of january 6th. as horrific as the images were, i ve been seeing over and over again, it s equally horrific that the violence did not come as a surprise. if you ve been listening to donald trump not just that morning, but for years now. when you saw the video, and we ll play a bit more of it shortly, what did it feel like in the senate chamber to you? what was the level of interest of your colleagues during what was a quite graphic and understandably disturbing at times realtime presentation of what happened on january 6th? i mean, i guess another word that comes to mind is very sobering. the images were compelling. truth be told, ari, i was not in the senate at that time. i was sworn in a couple of weeks after. to be clear, i m just very curious, today, what was it like? exac ....