The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell

Admiral James Devredis is a retired United States Navy Admiral and the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO joining us now is Marcy Shore Professor of History at Yale University who's just back from Kiev she's the author of the book The Ukrainian and intimate history of revolution.

So any of us now as a retired US Navy admiral and former NATO Supreme Allied commander James Devredis he's MSNBC's chief international security and diplomacy analyst and the co author of the new book 2054 a novel and Admiral I will not ask you to comment on that business about Donald Trump being distracted away from NATO.

It's available February 20th. Doctor, thank you very much for joining us tonight. You make the point here that what you have seen, or anyway, in present Biden, is nothing unusual and nothing alarming.

like in Tennessee, where a school board pushed to keep Mouse Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize winning graphic novel about the Holocaust away from eighth graders, 12, 13 year old kids

that's just one of the stories told in jensaki's wonderful new book Say More lessons from work the white house and the world

jensaki's new book we learn what she used to do right before stepping on camera in the white house press briefing room we will ask her to demonstrate that move tonight

and her book reveals which one terrified her which one gave her a bear hug at the end of her job interview and which one got on the phone with her father jensaki joins us next

jayus now is jensaki former white house press secretary and host of inside with jensaki on ms mbc her new amazing book Say More lessons from work the white house and the world is available tomorrow

jen i was just watching you watch her at that first white house press briefing gosh it feels so long ago it feels so long ago it looked like i was watching a mother watch a daughter oh i i just remember so like it was yesterday how nervous i was that day and i talked a little bit about this in the book but just feeling like i just need to go out there and not screw up i had a little shimmy before i went out korean john pier and i now the press secretary had a little shimmy before i went out and i just remember thinking and i'd had this conversation with president biden as i also talk about in the book about how the country was so frazzled was so frayed the nerves of the country were so frayed and the best thing i could do a small sliver on that day was to try to settle some of the nerves and so it just really brings me back to that moment watching now

South Dakota seemed like the perfect place to unplug but I ended up connecting to the world around me a world where each sunset was painted where I felt adventures pulse with every step and were cold water trickling, pine swaying and grunting bison became my favorite soundtracks.

I just wish I didn't have to leave.

When I wrote a book about the Bush campaign called The Big Enchilada, I predicted that Liz would run for president. That was 2001.

Tom Ganns, author of When the Clock Broke, Conmen, Conspiracists and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s.

A lot of these guys were neo-Nazis. They all talked about Murray Rothbard as the person who kind of started them on their road of political consciousness that they had then.

So I was looking around at what Rothbard wrote, and I found a piece from 1992 called Right Wing Populism, a Strategy for the Paleo Movement.

And it was eerie what it said and how much it seemed to anticipate Trump and what had happened in the Republican Party.

He's The New York Times columnist. He has a brand new book, Chasing Hope, A Reporter's Life, which comes out on Tuesday, except I held in my hand on Monday in Los Angeles when we were in the same place.

So congratulations, Nick. I really want to ask you about this. You follow this very, very closely.

The Hamilton Scheme: An Epic Tale of Money and Power in the American Founding.

a bloodless military coup carried out by the state's armed working class, self-organized on behalf of the democracy.

the declaration would become famous for invoking equality. The word meant different things to different people.

the democracy thought it had good reason for placing itself at the center of the American Revolution.

the democracy had to be suppressed.

The most important book in constitutional law is Alexander Bickel's book, These Dangerous Pitch. And the argument of the book is that the court does its best by not doing a lot at any one time. It conserves its legitimacy.

I'll be joined by the author Kiese Layman to discuss his book Heavy, an American memoir tracking his life from boyhood in poverty-stricken Jackson, Mississippi to adulthood on prestigious college campuses as an academic. It's a coming of age story and a condemnation of systemic racism and misogyny.

I believe that Trump's presidency was an unmitigated disaster for America with continuing repercussions that inflicted grave damage on our country. With echoes all over the world, I stand by my view that he will go down as the most reviled American president in our history. But in our system, no one man or woman, even the president, is supposed to be able to destabilize our democracy. For that reason, I contended that the responsibility for the catastrophic failure of government resided with the Senate, specifically with Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans. It was the Senate's role to stop a president who was threatening our constitutional democracy. And the polarized, degraded Senate knowingly and repeatedly failed to do so, even after Trump instigated the January 6th attack on the Capitol in his indefensible effort to remain in power after losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden.

I think the Republicans, to some extent, wanted to make up for their catastrophic failure in failing to stop Donald Trump.

I'd like people to think about it at some point. Fundamental change in the Senate is probably years off. But I thought if you elected 15 senators nationally, these national senators would have a different sense of their responsibilities. They would upgrade the Senate overall. And I think they would encourage the other 100 senators to think about their commitments to the national interest, as opposed to simply being representatives of their state or party members.

The Senate's deteriorated quite a bit because the senators have become fundamentally partisan operatives. Many of the Republican senators, particularly, became partisan operatives as opposed to people who were looking at the national interest.

So this was an area where the families that sued Alex Jones in Connecticut and those who sued him in Texas, which, by the way, included Neil Haslund and Scarlett Lewis, who are Jesse Lewis's parents. They were among the Texas plaintiffs. They divided on what should be the disposition of his business, his Infowars empire.

The Connecticut families wanted it to be closed and go into liquidation, which was essentially be a whole new bankruptcy case in which the business would be sold off for its parts and that money would go to satisfy the debts to the families.

The Texas plaintiffs argued that by dismissing the bankruptcy case, they could more quickly pursue Jones for the same money.

And the judge ultimately ruled that the case would be dismissed because it had been in bankruptcy court for two years. They could not achieve a settlement agreement. No one could get together and come up with anything that was palatable to both all the families and Jones.

And so basically, that is the purpose for bankruptcy case. So if they couldn't reach a settlement, there had to be something decided. Would they convert it to a Chapter 7 and liquidate or would the judge dismiss and he decided to dismiss it?

I'm not a psychiatrist and I'm not diagnosing Trump with anything. I am, however, a man who has lived on this earth for more than 60 years. And I know someone who has serious emotional problems when I see them played out in front of me over and over. The 45th president is a disturbed person. He cannot be trusted with any position of responsibility and especially not with a nuclear arsenal of more than 1500 weapons. One wrong move could lead to global incineration.

I think the lead, you know, the real headline for that day is former commander in chief goes on mystifying rants about dying from sharks and electrocution.

This is really the problem with covering Trump in excerpts rather than just turning on the camera, showing people and letting him rip.

Even with that whole shark digression, a lot of the printed excerpts from it, including mine, because, you know, you just run out of space, only had little bits from it.

And I think, you know, you need to put it out there in a full paragraph and say, look, just read this and tell me if this is a person who ought to have control of nuclear weapons. This is a person probably shouldn't have control, you know, of car keys. And we just don't do that.

author Sasha Eisenberg on his latest book, The Lie Detectives, in search of a playbook for winning elections in the disinformation age.

The disinformation narratives that are going to be a problem for us electorally with a small share of persuadable voters are the ones that respond to some existing concerns or anxieties that voters have about a particular issue or about Biden.

And we need to not chase the particular story or deepfake that's moving today. We need to have a messaging attempt that addresses the underlying anxieties that that voter has.

Joining us now for more is Simon Rosenberg, longtime Democratic strategist and the author of Hopium Chronicles on Substack.

You know, Peggy Noonan wrote a book when character was king and they're up there voluntarily dressed like some sort of aging boy band reunion and talking about the president, a guy that wants to be president United States who had accused of having sex with a porn star 10 days or so after his son, youngest son was born, who paid her off.

Luke Russert's writing, beautiful writing, and his wisdom and the way he opened his heart and mind to the world in backpack travel all over the planet left me in awe.

Luke Russert's book, the perfect Father's Day Gift, took me to far off places in this world that I will never see.

When I was deep in the throes of writing the first draft of "Look for Me There", full of self-doubt but also stubborn determination, before I ever dreamed of a publishing deal or becoming a bestselling author, a woman who is now my fiance asked a simple question.

I don't care if this thing ends up in the bargain book box at a gas station and sells 10 copies.

If some kid who lost their dad finds it and it helps them feel a little less lost, well, that's the best reward I could ever have.

This woman was very disloyal and now I go out of my way to make her life miserable