gets tonight's last word. the 11th hour with stephanie ruhle starts now. >> tonight, it is exactly 2 years since the supreme court struck down roe v wade, a decision to put abortion on the ballot in the race for the white house . then biden goes off the campaign trail through debate prep while trump focuses on bringing in more campaign cash. plus, the mar-a-lago documents case. prosecutors face off against trump's lawyers over a gag order request as the 11th hour gets underway on this monday night. good evening once again. i'm stephanie ruhle joining you from colorado at the aspen ideas festival, and we are now 134 days away from the election and today marks two years since the supreme court included donald trump's three hand- picked justices took away the constitutional right to abortion. the cause of that decision, almost 28 million american women of reproductive age now live in states with partial or total abortion bans and president biden wants to make sure every voter who knows that donald trump is the person responsible and what to do next. >> things donald trump says about your freedom. after 50 years of failure, nobody coming even close. i was able to kill roe v wade. three years ago the supreme court justices that trump hand- picked help overturn roe v wade. >> never before has the court granted and then taken away a widely recognized constitutional right. >> new laws banning abortion or taking effect. >> decades of progress shattered just because the last guy got four years in the white house. we know what will happen if he gets another four years. to republicans roe is just the beginning. they're going to try to ban the right to choose nationwide. they're coming for ivf and birth control next. on against extremism. >> and earlier today, vice president harris spoke at the university of maryland to explain the choice americans are really facing in november. >> donald trump thinks the government is in a better position to tell women what's in their best interest than women are to know for themselves. but joe biden and i trust women. and women trust all of us to fight for their most fundamental freedoms. >> donald trump has consistently claimed credit for the end of roe and for all of the state abortion bans that followed. just this past weekend he publicly thanked the judges who were responsible for those decisions. with that, let's get smarter with the help of our leadoff panel tonight. john allen is here, senior national politics reporter from abc news. josh gerstein, senior legal affairs reporter for politico and barbara mcquade, a veteran federal prosecutor and former u.s. attorney for the eastern district of michigan. her new book, attack from within, how disinformation is sabotaging america, is out now and it is a summer must-read. barb, let's look back. think back to that decision two years ago. fast forward to tonight. what has gone through your mind from then until now? >> you know one of the things that the majority said in the dobbs opinion is that finally we are going to take abortion out of these of in court and send it back to the states where it longs. and of course we see nothing of the sort because it created the chaos that people predicted it would, because of the lack of clarity, and so now we've got this patchwork of different states trying different laws, seeing what sticks, seeing what works. we've also seen 117,000 people travel to have abortions out-of- state in the past year. so i think we're in this period of chaos that is not likely to subside anytime soon. >> josh, what about you? you were the person who broke the news that the court had voted to overturn roe when the dobbs decision leaked early. what are you thinking tonight? what were you thinking then? >> well, we were thinking this was going to be significant, stephanie, but we never thought it would be as big as it turned out to be, and by that i mean the political impact really wasn't expected. and the reason for that is we've seen so many other cases come and go from the supreme court on the issue of abortion. we've seen predictions from democratic activists, addictions from abortion rights activists, predictions from political analysts that, oh, this would be the one that would really bring people to the polls, and it never seemed to happen, especially the issue of bringing women to the polls. and then in the wake of this decision, first disclosure in politico a couple months early and then the decision two years ago, we saw something we haven't seen before, which was a dramatic political upsurge as a result of this, even in states really not known for progressiveness. >> john, clearly the democrats think this issue will help them in november. it did in the midterms. how does trump's camp feel about it? >> they're obviously very concerned about it, steph. you've heard donald trump over the course of the last couple years basically scold other republicans were taking extreme positions or what he views as extreme positions on abortion, particularly those who want to have bands that don't include exceptions in cases of , incest aware the mother is in danger. you saw joe biden's clicks for democrats. number one, they can motivate their base. number two, they absolutely have to make sure that voters understand that donald trump is responsible for the supreme court justices who made this decision. voters understand that and you can see from what biden said that that's important to him. and the third thing there that's very important for them is trying to portray this as part of a larger extremism pushed by donald trump. >> but john, donald trump can't be that scared or worried about it. he's the one responsible for putting us here and he takes credit for it every chance he can get. he's chosen to make white evangelicals his core base and we know they're single issue voters, and we know what that issue is. >> i would just say that wouldn't be the first time that donald trump had taken an action, taken it proudly, and then learned that the consequences weren't exactly what he wanted. i think that he is happy to say that he put this court in place. he's happy to let people interpret from that, and at the same time, if he understands the horrible force that was unleashed by the reversal of the dobbs decision and the reversal of roe versus wade in the dobbs decision, and it is one of the political factors that has to occupy his campaign. there's not much they can do about it now except for try to make sure, appear to be a middle ground between the far right that wants to ban abortion completely and the democrats who want to keep abortion protections in place that are there now and also expand them back to at least where roe stood. >> josh, what do you think about how this is being talked about in the presidential race on both sides? >> well i think that i agree with jonathan and i think you got sort of a classic straddle going on in the trump campaign, where they're continuing to try to make their pitch to the religious conservatives, to the evangelicals, as you note, stephanie. at the same time, there very much concerned about this gender gap. you know it's a big problem. a lot of people including a lot of republicans think this is what cost trump the 2020 election and i think he has that in his mind. he knows he can't give up on one side of the ledger, at the same time, he has that lurking in the back of his mind that he doesn't want to see a replay of 2020. and then on the biden campaign side, i've been struck by the rather complete embrace of this issue by them. i was at an event over the weekend with both second gentleman dug him off and also the vice president himself were at and they were really stressing the degree at which they consider the supreme court responsible for this and the second gentleman was even talking about supreme court reform, which is interesting because that's a little bit off script for the biden administration. it's something the president himself has never endorsed but it remains very popular with liberal voters. they are definitely swinging at this particular pitch as hard as they can in the biden campaign. >> biden's campaign is now saying things like ivf and birth control could be next. what are you most concerned this court could go after next? >> i think, stephanie, and he kind of right that is built on the concept of substantive due process is at issue here. if you think about that dobbs opinion, you may remember that the majority included language like this was very narrow, we're only talking about abortion here. don't try to extend this to other things, but clarence thomas in his concurrence said oh yes it is. the basis of roe was substantive due process and if we find no textual support for that, that means there's also no textual support for other rights including contraception, gay sex, which had been upheld in a case previously based on substantive due process, interracial marriage. all of those things go to this idea that there is a fundamental right to privacy and self determination, even though those precise words are not in the constitution. and so, if dobbs can overturn roe then they can absolutely overturn all of those other rights, as well. >> josh, some americans hear these concerns about a national abortion ban or crackdown on birth control and they think these are just politicians being dramatic. this could never happen. you covered the court closely. how do you see these concerns? are they legit? >> well i mean we already see these sorts of cases coming to the court, stephanie. we already had an abortion pill case at the court this year, which was basically turned away on more fundamentally kind of procedural and standing grounds. we had another case that's still pending on the issue of access to emergency abortions in emergency rooms across the country. so as barbara said at the outset, these issues are not going away and we'll see. so far the supreme court has tried to sort of tread the centerline on this in the wake of the dobbs decision. perhaps a little bit of the backlash they received, and they may be trying to moderate themselves. but how long that sticks for and whether it sticks in every single abortion case they get i think is really an open question, because none of them is probably repudiating the decision that they rendered two years ago, even if they might be trying to attack one way or the other at this particular moment. >> josh, we are also relating another big decision for the court about abortion. this time it's a case out of idaho about emergency care. can you explain this to us? >> so yeah, this has to do with a federal law that basically governs what kind of services have to be provided to you in an emergency room. it stems from situations a couple decades ago where people with insurance would show up at private hospitals and be turned away, even though they were deathly ill, because they didn't have the correct kind of insurance, and there was a law passed at that time that basically said if your hospital takes medicare, certain medicare patients, you have to provide emergency care to anybody that comes through the door. and the situation that has developed in idaho, and it's developing in other states, is a question of what happens if the state has implemented a rather strict ban on abortion and you show up in an emergency room, and you need an emergency abortion. it does happen sometimes. people are going into sepsis. their life might be in danger but a more common situation is that they're having some kind of problem that is going to cause them to lose the pregnancy eventually end could potentially, if not treat it, result in them losing the ability to have children in the future. and so you have hospitals now that basically, and doctors, that won't provide that sort of care anymore. so you have a basic classic clash here between the federal law in the state law that in this case is trying to outlaw abortion and that's what we are looking at the justices to resolve perhaps by the end of this week. >> in idaho, a state that already has a shortage of hospitals and maternal care. barb, there is some other big legal news tonight, completely unrelated. wikileaks founder, a namely noel, julian assange, has reached a plea deal with the u.s. and he is now a free man. can you explain this to us? >> it's actually really a fascinating development. you may recall that he was charged and has been awaiting extradition out where he is in england for about five years now and even before then, he was in the ecuadorian embassy and sort of self exile for seven years so he's already been locked away for 12 years. it appears that a plea agreement has been reached where he will enter a guilty plea to conspiracy with chelsea manning to violate the espionage act by coercing, cajoling, working together with her to get classified national security information and disseminate that to the public. one really interesting fact about all of this comes stephanie, is that he's going to enter this plea, apparently, in the northern marianna islands and the prosecution has asked that the plea and the sentencing all occur on the same day. it's expected that the sentence will be time served and that it's occurring in the northern marianna islands because that is the court location nearest to his home country of australia, to which he's expected to return. >> all right. one more topic before i let any of you go. john, you know i wasn't going to let you leave without covering your latest reporting. donald trump says he knows who his vp pick will be. where do things stand? i know he loves to play it like we are watching the apprentice, the bachelor, who knows what, but this is some serious illness. any clues? >> the could name anybody stephanie. they could name you, could name joss, could name barb. >> okay, really quickly, of the three of us, who do you think has the strongest shot? >> i feel like i should leave that alone, stephanie, but i would just note that at least a couple of you are not going to attain the 35 years necessary to be vice president. but all of our reporting suggests that the leading candidates here are north dakota governor doug burgum and jd vance, the senator from ohio. marco rubio is still in the mix, we are told from a dozen sources that nbc news spoke to, who are wired into the process. again, he could make any choice. we don't know exactly when he's going to make it but it looks like it's narrowed down pretty closely to her room and vance. >> but again, you just said it could be anybody so in true trump style, could he absolutely surprise us? >> it would be like bringing somebody for the final rose ceremony who wasn't in the entire bachelor or bachelorette game. it's certainly possible. i wouldn't rule it out but i think at this point it would undercut his effort to show to people that he is stable and making decisions based on a thoughtful process, right? if he has this entire sort of game show atmosphere and at the end of it decides to throw a curveball that might lean into the biden campaign's argument that he's not very tethered, not very stable. >> just imagine it's the final rose ceremony and the bachelor and he brings in ramona from the real housewives. that's what we're doing. it's 2024. john josh, barbara, thank you so, so much and john, thanks for the vote of confidence. when we return, all eyes are on the supreme court as we await two major decisions related to trump and jinro sixth. we are going to break down the high stakes with the best guy in the business. and later, those rulings could end up colliding with -- guess what -- the first presidential debate, which is just days away. how both candidates are preparing for the very big night. the 11th hour just getting underway on a monday night in aspen. aspen. so, i didn't think i needed swiffer. until... i saw how easily it picked up my hair every time i dried it. it only takes a minute. look at that! the heavy duty cloths are extra thick for amazing trap and lock. even for his hair. wow! and for dust i love my heavy duty duster. the fluffy fibers trap dust on contact up high and all around without having to lift a thing. i'm so hooked! you'll love swiffer or your money back! you know what's brilliant? 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>> 51. >> let's start with this obstruction case. what is the most important thing we need to know? >> i think first of all, you're right, these decisions are all coming down wednesday, thursday or friday. the courts could go until next week. very unlikely. i think were going to get done -- >> why would it even take until this long? >> it shouldn't. honestly particularly the big question before the court right now in terms of just the gravity is, is a president absolutely immune from the criminal law. every responsible constitutional scholar for two centuries has thought of course not. nobody is above the law but yet the court has taken month after month, steph, to decide this case, to the point where even if they rule against trunk, as i suspect they will this week, they may have given trump what he wants, which is enough of a delay so he can't be tried before the election. >> what does that tell you that they took this long to make this decision? does that mean they've been arguing all this time? >> it means that at least the process of writing the opinion takes a while, and that's true for any supreme court case. the difference is sometimes when the court knows time is of the essence, they can move quickly. i was a junior lawyer and bush versus gore in 2000. it went to the supreme court twice for oral arguments, decided twice with written opinions all in the span of 36 days. you know here they have taken month after month and they've effectively given from what he needed. >> next question about presidential immunity. help us understand this, the stakes of this case and what you think we are going to see from the justices, because this one seems huge in terms of precedent-setting. >> for 20 years i've taught constitutional law at georgetown. i teach this quote from richard nixon in 1977, he gave to robert frost, which is if the president does it it's not illegal. and you always teach a. everyone understands that to be the most absurd thing our united states constitution could ever mean. after all, we fought a revolution against king george the third for exactly the opposite. now come donald trump, the first sitting president, first president in history to say i as a sitting president was absolutely immune from the law. it is crazy town. i suspect it's so crazy town even the supreme court will rejected. >> as a college professor who's been teaching this course or courses in this realm for the last 20 years, if i would've said to you five years ago, three years ago, yep, this is what the court could be doing, this could be the argument before the court, would you ever have believed it? >> i wouldn't have believed it. i would've believed the way he started the show about roe versus wade being overturned because that has been an intensive conservative project since the early 1970s but the claim that a president could be above the law, that's just so fundamentally un-american and certainly not with the republican party when i grew up stood for. it is now the cult of trump and his party and it's a ridiculous proposition. so ridiculous, justice of the mayor said in the supreme court hearing, she said to trump's lawyer, wait, if this is right you're saying that the president can go and send out seal team six to assassinate his political rival, joe biden, and the answer was yes, that's crazy. >> so let's say trump is granted this immunity. what will the u.s. look like going forward? >> it won't look like the united states. the president could do whatever he wants so a president could assassinate his rival, stay in power for a third, fourth, fifth term, do whatever he wanted so long as he wasn't impeached and impeachment requires a two thirds vote in the senate to convict someone under our constitution, and given where political parties are today, particularly the republican party, it seems like trump can do anything and not be impeached. >> what do you say to those people who say oh, you're being dramatic, our institutions will hold? trump is a big talker but nothing really will change in terms of the way our government functions, our country operates. what do you say to those things? >> two things, one, i heard that garbage before dinner sixth and look what happened on january 6. those images, not just for us as americans but across the world i was just in japan speaking to deb perlman. they were shocked by what happened in america on january 6. they thought, is america still the great country it was. so that's the first thing. the second is trump was basically really incompetent in his first term. the second term he knows exactly what to do. appoint all these loyalists who have no independent thought or conscience, you are just loyal to him and grateful for the jobs and power that he bestows on them. and imagine what the government will look like with a bunch of people like that and no one to hit the brakes. general kellys or h.r. mcmaster's are people like that. it will all be people like the frankly criminals that he associated himself with in his first term, many of them got indicted and criminally prosecuted and convicted by juries and are now in jail or perhaps pardoned by donald trump on his last days out of office the first time around. >> and a supreme court with three justices on the bench there because of him. talk to us about these other rulings we may hear from the court this week. >> i think the abortion ruling that you mentioned about the emergency access is one. the other sleeper one, and it's a huge one, it's that the conservative movement, it's this idea to overturn agency deference to rulemaking. >> explained to us what that means. >> that sounds so technical. >> because i just fell asleep and you're telling me i need to wake up on this. >> most of our rules in our government aren't set by congress. they're set by agencies. everything from greenhouse gas emissions to weather tobacco can be regulated. all sorts of things are agency action. the conservatives for years have been trying to overturn the idea that agencies can decide the scope of their own powers, can regulate tobacco, greenhouse gases. if the conservatives win this case, which according to the real argument they suggested they might, it would mean the end of massive swats of government regulation over the united states economy to protect consumers, to protect businesses, to protect our environment, to protect our health. this is a very big deal. it's hard for me to do in two minutes please have me back on later this week if this court does what many advisors think it's going to do, because it's a big, big deal. >> i've woken up. i'm paying attention. unofficially scared. i don't want you to leave until i ask you about the classified document case down in florida. notice argument over whether appointing special counsel jack smith was ever even constitutional. nine months ago i never would've predict that this would be where we are but alas, we're here. >> yeah commesso donald trump is arguing the special counsel is unconstitutional. >> did you think there was a possibility we could see this argument >> actually i was the one who went with ms. reno to the hill to talk to the house and senate majority leader, minority leaders as well as to their top lawyers back in 1999 when the regulations were drafted. no one, steph, not a single person felt there was any constitutional problem with this, whatsoever, from the most diehard republicans, the most diehard democrats. that has been consistently the law. people have tried to challenge it every so often. these challenges go nowhere. the idea -- >> they take time. >> they take time, exactly. that's what judge cannon has effectively, again, just said the supreme court with absolute immunity handed donald trump the ability to delay his day of reckoning and face a court of law. so trump will lose the special counsel's unconstitutional argument. the question is when does he miss it? >> she has been giving him a rolex daytona since day one. the gift of time since she has been appointed to this case. neil, wait to see you here in aspen. when we return, trump may like us to think he's got corporate america on his side that is far, far, far from the truth so we are going to tell you the facts on the other side of the break. break. 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[cheering] don't panic. gift easy with gift mode, now on etsy. this is an impressive crowd, the haves and the have mores. some people call you the elite. i call you my base. >> times certainly do change. historically the ceo classes long backed republican presidents but that does not mean that they're in the tank for donald trump. in a piece for new york times, jeffrey sonnenfeld, who works with thousands of business leaders every year, says that despite all of trump's claims, he does not have the support of corporate america. listen to what he said earlier today on this network. >> historically this group has been 60% to 70% republican leaning. starting with trumpet went to zero. 2016, none. 2020 just two and now it's none again so that is a profound break in the historic pattern that ceos don't want to be identified with the republican candidate. that's profound and they hate his positions, his economic positions. >> for more i want to bring in former democratic senator heidi heitkamp of north dakota. she's a cnbc contributor and founder of one project. and mark mackinnon, former advisor to george w. bush and john mccain. mark, you saw that clip of george w. bush. you know better than anyone how close the ceo class has always been to the gop and now donald trump is trying to claim i'm winning over the business- class. he's actually losing the business class compared to his predecessors. >> it's a really remarkable fact that literally zero of the top 100 fortune 100 ceos have donated money to donald trump. that tells you everything you need to know. there corporate interests may have given money but that's all just hedging their bets. that's a protection racket. they're giving money for protection and just hedging their bets against donald trump as president. but none of them like him. none of them agree with him. the only fear what he might do. but when it comes to their own, look at their own personal pocketbooks and look at what they're doing. that tells you all you need to know about where they are. >> senator, the fact that donald trump is so fixated on this, he wants to convince us that the ceo community has his back. is that because he wants to push this narrative that the economy is terrible he'll and if these guys who truly know business want him to win, that means they know biden is bad for us? >> i think part of it is that is narrative in the very beginning is put a businessman in charge. make me president because i ran a business. i was successful. and for people -- >> bankruptcy. >> that's not the story he tells, right? it was time's man of the year, but he wasn't, right? so if you are looking at donald trump kind of narrative, it's that he has -- he's a businessman. i wouldn't his own peers support him? so he can't stand the fact that she doesn't have corporate america and corporate america is responding, maybe not so much to policies, but you know steph in the work you've done on wall street that the worst thing you can bring is chaos to the economy. and donald trump is the chaos president. ceos know it. they need certainty. they need predict ability and they need somebody to pick up the phone and actually answer a legitimate question, and they don't have that with donald trump is he'll the last thing they want is on predict ability. he has also been a tracking attacking president biden over the national debt, even though according to new analysis, he ran it up twice as much as president biden has. now throughout our professional careers, it is seen that republicans care the most about that and deficits. why is it that now they don't and that donald trump could potentially get away with lying about it he'll >> i think because donald trump ran as a populist. he was going to hand out the goodies to people. >> he did to corporate america. >> think about this, he started a trade war with china. how did he compensate farmers? he dumped a bunch of money into farm country. he was never afraid of spending money. in fact, i thought his campaign was over in 16 when he went on cnbc and said i'm the king of debt, i'll just write down american debt and you could see stunned silence from the panel. but he doesn't understand what debt is and he understands that if you give people something, you say i'm not going to cut social security, not going to cut medicare or medicaid, that's good for him but we all know that he can't control debt and deficit unless you start talking about [ inaudible ]. >> let's talk about the debate, which is only three days away from now. donald trump has spent months and months spreading lies about president biden's cognitive ability and then out of the blue he's now saying that biden is a worthy debater who he does not underestimate. what exactly is going on here? >> well his advisers finally got through to him and told him that the worst thing you could do in any debate -- political debates and residential debates are all about expectations. it's not judged forensically like some college debate where you score points. it's really about what you expect and how you perform against expectations. the interesting thing about this debate, as i was thinking about it tonight, is it's really less a debate than it is a competency test. i mean there's nothing about either one of these candidates that we are going to learn that we didn't know already. it's not like they're going to put toward a policy position that they're either suggesting or that they supported in the past that's going to move the dial in any way but people are not tuning in to find out what biden's policies or trump's policies -- they're tuning in to see who is capable of doing the job still because everybody has questions about their competency including the candidates themselves, about each other, so the question is who is really up to the job. that's the main question that will be on the stage. >> senator, what do you think we're in for thursday night? >> i think we're in for a very aggressive joe biden. i think he's going to come out, he wouldn't be doing the debate is early if he didn't figure he needed to do it. so i think you're going to see him come out. he's going to be very aggressive, attacking the former president on abortion. he's going to talk about his failed economic record, the mess he had to clean up, and donald trump is going to ramble around and not really make a coherent statement. so low expectations for the president. if the president performs, if biden performs it will be a huge win for biden. democrats will breathe a sigh of relief that we live to fight another day and i think that it will change, actually will move poll numbers. this is a huge debate. >> you think it's a good idea for president biden. >> absolutely, i think it's a great idea because in part you know we've now bypassed the presidential commission on debates. so we can talk about it. there's another norm that's gone by the wayside. but it allowed the president to set the rules. and let me tell you, the rules benefit joe biden. >> what do you think, mark? >> i think by far it was the smartest strategic decision of the entire campaign. listen, they had three options. one was do not debate at all. that's a nonstarter. they would lose the election if they didn't debate the other was to do what you would normally do, which is to just put it off, let trump dominic the debate and say anytime, anywhere, any place up until september. then you finally go and say okay, we'll do it and it's all on trumps terms. by taking the initiative and throwing down, first of all they showed confidence, which is the most important thing that biden's got to do. his greatest problem is perception of week so by doing that he looks more confident. he takes control of the agenda. he takes control of the rules of the debate and he just looks strong and confident by doing it so i think it's a really smart thing to do. now it's also very high risk but i think it's a risk that was well worth taking and as heidi said, i think there's enormous upside to this listen, it's a high wire act and there is no net. >> quickly, yes or no, i'm out of time. do you think donald trump is showing up thursday night? >> yes. >> mark? >> yeah, i think he's got to because otherwise it shows weakness and that's the one thing that donald trump can't do. by the way, the worst thing it would do is it would create a perception of him as a loser, being afraid of joe biden. he can't come out like that. >> mark, you would fail in a debate because the rules were you were only allowed to give one word. is he ready for this debate? mark mackinnon, good to see you. heidi is tonight winter. when we return, the world is full of division, especially in politics. but there's a new initiative to fix the way we interact with people we disagree with. it is so important. i need you to stay up. i need you to watch this. i need you to care about it. ricky schreiber joins us next. the 11th hour live from aspen, colorado. colorado. a once-daily pill for moderate to severe plaque psoriasis, and the chance at clear or almost clear skin. it's like the feeling of finding you're so ready for your close-up. or finding you don't have to hide your skin just your background. once-daily sotyktu was proven better, getting more people clearer skin than the leading pill. don't take if you're allergic to sotyktu; serious reactions can occur. sotyktu can lower your ability to fight infections, including tb. serious infections, cancers including lymphoma, muscle problems, and changes in certain labs have occurred. tell your doctor if you have an infection, liver or kidney problems, high triglycerides, or had a vaccine or plan to. sotyktu is a tyk2 inhibitor. tyk2 is part of the jak family. it's not known if sotyktu has the same risks as jak inhibitors. find what plaque psoriasis has been hiding. there's only one sotyktu, so ask for it by name. so clearly you. sotyktu. so, what are you thinking? 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[music playing] speaker: it all starts here, by uniting the world in passion, commitment, and care. we turn the impossible into possible. celebrate every triumph. the last day of chemo, one child's life being saved. at st. jude children's research hospital, because of you the impossible becomes possible for kids everywhere. st. jude. possible starts with you. become a monthly donor today. please listen to this. sometimes it feels like a country is more divided than ever, but a recent poll found that americans will have a lot that we agree about. when asked what is important to american identity, the top answers for both republicans and democrats were economic opportunity and a democratically elected government. so why is it that we cannot seem to disagree about policy without feeling like we are at one another's throats? my next guest is a very special american who thinks that is because we are treating one another with contempt when we disagree, rather than dignity. want to bring in special olympics chairperson tim shriver. he is here with me. he founded unite and cocreated a new venture, the dignity index, which has tweets, cable new segments, debates and speeches on a scale of one to eight. i'm so glad you're here. >> we are not scoring this segment, the. >> we are if we are going to get in a fight. that's just talk about this because when people often hero my gosh, you're doing something on dignity they think it's pollyanna-ish, they think it's silly and times are so serious we need to focus on the anger in this country. wire we divided? you think a lot of that is nonsense. >> i think it's a missed opportunity to see the real story. i think the real story is we are in almost what i call spiritual crisis in this country with epidemic levels of loneliness and depression, with families split apart. 100 million americans have ended a relationship in their own family over politics and culture. we see this at levels of breakdown of trust in institutions. so all that says to me that there's something else going on. it's not that we are divided on policy positions. in fact you mentioned this, stephanie, at the beginning. the divisions on policy decisions are not that big. they're nowhere near as big as we are led to believe. even on divisive issues like guns or immigration, the country actually has broad swaths of agreement. what we don't have is the capacity to treat each other with dignity when we disagree. >> so the led to believe, who's responsible for that? is it our lawmakers who know how to divide and raise money over it or is it journalism today who realizes dividing and causing anger gets clicks? >> yes and yes but it's not just politicians who use contempt to raise money and mobilize the base. it's not just journalists who use contempt to get ratings and mobilize audiences. it's also all of us, those of us who watch and give. we've become unwittingly participants in that culture of contempt. >> unwittingly, though? >> unwittingly because we think we are living up to our principles by treating other people with contempt. contempt operates in disguise. we don't see it in ourselves. we see it in others. i watch -- let's just say someone says, watching here, says if i watch fox i'll see contempt. those people are full of contempt and if you ask a fox viewer to tune in here they're going to say those msnbc, they are full of contempt. neither party -- >> you actually think a fox viewer says those msnbcers are full of contempt? they might do a lot of things. contempt is in it, but okay. >> i dare you to do -- you've got a good pulling enterprise at this network. i dare you to poll it. when i speak to republican audiences or democratic audiences, they almost universally say of course we'd rather treat people with contempt -- with dignity, but the other side won't follow. republicans think democrats will treat them with hatred and contempt and the same is true the other way around. now i'm not equalizing the policy positions. the point here is to say democrats who have strong convictions about president biden should give up their principles, should not work for the kind of immigration or reproductive rights or tax policies they believe in. our position is you should work hard for your positions, not compromise on any of them but add a position. at one principal. >> what's the goal? >> learn how to treat people you disagree with, with dignity. that's it. isolate one variable in the culture, the dignity of people you disagree with, and bring that up as you engage in differences of opinion. it sounds so simple but it's actually super complicated when you feel like the only way to advance your position is to demonize or dehumanize the other person. >> that's also because we are living in a time when we have leaders who suddenly are not prioritizing empathy, who think saying sorry or admitting that you're wrong is a sign of weakness. >> all i can say is i don't disagree with you on that i think we are all responsible. so you know i have a piece on writing. it's going to come out tomorrow. it says watch the debate but everybody thinks the action is on the screen between trump and biden. i invite people to see the action as in their own home while they're watching the debate. watch the debate with a mirror. hold it up and when you scream at that screen and you say i can't believe that blankety- blank blank trump sitter i can't believe that blankety- blank blank biden said, hold the mirror up and score yourself. just take it out. you can go on the dignity index .us and you get a little scorecard like this and you can score yourself. stephanie can score last night's segment and you can find out how many times you used high levels of contempt bordering on violence or hatred. >> violence and hatred. you punch the mirror, if you drop an f bomb you're off it. >> if you say the other side is evil and it's us or them you're a hair's breadth above violence and if you say the other side has profoundly distorted positions but i'm going to treat them with dignity no matter what, you're actually not only using dignity but you're more likely to convince them. you and i have been alive through the last eight years of presidential politics. we've watched democrats froth at the mouth. i'm saying that with respect and great affection, over president trump's words and policies. i can empathize with why they get upset but they haven't changed -- very few voters. very few voters have been changed by the contempt they were hurling. >> this is a solution plate. >> this is a solution play. get business, get schools, get kids, get politicians, journalists. change the tenor of the conversation. use more dignity. >> you have one journalist tonight. >> yeah baby. >> thank you so, so much. good to see you. we are going to be back. back. as a police administrator. i oversee approximately 20 people and my memory just has to be sharp. and i realized, my memory was just changing. i did my own research and i decided to give prevagen a try. my memory became much sharper. i remembered more! i've been taking prevagen for four years now. it's a life-changer. prevagen. at stores everywhere without a prescription. why didn't we do this last year? 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