Morning Joe

I think Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut was banned, Native Sun by Richard Wright.

If you haven't already read my colleague Carol Lenig's book The Secret Service I highly recommend picking it up

MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell. When I was working in the Senate, I didn't realize that it's the perfect training for the job that I have now covering government, covering politics, the complexity of it all.

MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell. I have an obligation to find a way of telling this story that is fresh, that has angles that haven't been used in the course of the day to bring my experience working in the Senate, working in journalism to try to make sense of what has happened and help you make sense of what it means to you.

The Aftermath, The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America.

I think it's an all hands on deck effort to make sure that Donald Trump doesn't assume the presidency in 2024.

We all know what that's going to look like. He's told us as much.

But I also, you know, I've got to point out some of the disappointments that I've had over the past three years.

And that's where is the outrage on behalf of the current administration?

I feel like Biden can be outraged. He could express anger without coming across as unhinged like Donald Trump.

The president agreed with Xi that military exercises with South Korea were provocative and went on to describe them as a waste of money. Even worse, he seemed to agree with Xi's suggestion of a return of freeze for freeze.

I passed White House Chief of Staff John Kelly a folded note: 'He ate our lunch. Trump walked into the trap.'

Weakness is provocative.

I would tell him, 'Hey, this is the best liar in the world.' He has aspirations, he has objectives in mind that go far beyond anything in relation to us.

This is not a warning about President Trump; this is informing readers about, you know, the president's character and personality, how that interacts with, you know, the real challenges that we faced.

Cormac McCarthy passed away yesterday, the formidable and reclusive writer who wrote All the Pretty Horses, of course, The Road and so many other classics.

No Country for Old Men. But, you know, I mean, The Road, I remember being particularly moved by it. Just incredible writing.

A combination of, I mean, a singular voice, an enormous figure in American, modern American literature and a guy who who's all of his work like hangs together this dark, stark, almost apocalyptic kind of vision anchored to this really profound moral sense and like that.

That the morality in that kind of shines through and all these very dark visions in his pieces is what made him something more than just a great wordsmith, but a really important artist in American life.

You really can't have a relationship without Forgiveness. You can't have a marriage. You can't have a friendship. And you really can't even have a society. Desmond Tutu wrote a book called No Future Without Forgiveness. And he was basically saying that you have endless cycles of retaliation between various classes and groups. It goes on for centuries unless you learn to Forgive. So I'm not sure we can have a human community without Forgiveness.

people running around doing things, saying things like that, looking to the good old days when people weren't like Bill Clinton and Bill Bennett writing his book of virtues.

Maybe we got to dust it off.

And is out now with a new book entitled Courage Under Fire, Under Siege, and outnumbered 58 to 1 on January 6th.

So Mika, one of the things I talk about in the book is how people are choosing tribe over truth.

And so it doesn't matter so much what the statement is. What matters is who says it.

Trump paid me to find voter fraud. Then he lied after I found the 2020 election was not stolen.

We vote anonymously with good reason. No candidate can credibly claim that a fraudulent vote was credited to their opponent unless the person who cast that vote tells us.

There is no doubt that voter fraud can animate people, but it is one thing to provide a rallying point for supporters and quite another to drag our election infrastructure and legal system into a foundationless set of false claims.

I guess there's no there there.

Disproven My Unbiased Search for Voter Fraud for the Trump Campaign. The data that shows why he lost and how we can improve our elections.

Adam Nagourney's great, great book on The New York Times?

I lived through a little of it and certainly a lot of people I worked with are in it. And so, yeah, I keep I keep, you know, keep your name keeps popping up chapter after chapter.

I'm a big fan of Adam Nagourney.

Have you read The Time Jet, Adam Nogourney's great, great book on The New York Times?

I think Adam got pretty close. I think it is a really, really well reported, well written history of the times over this sort of roughly 20 year period.