already done it. if they want to follow through on this, yeah, i could certainly happen in reverse. it could certainly happen in reverse. what they have done is they have released the genie out of the box. >> first off, man, genies come out of bottles, not boxes. that aside, trump has been openly admitting his authoritarian vision for america, but top republicans in congress where still aiding and enabling him, including a new ethics complaint against the judge in trump's new york fraud trial. also, brian stelter joins me on his new book about fox, network of lies. if you think the worst was over when tucker was fired, think again. and three distinguished religious leaders join me tonight, each from a different faith. we're going to have a tough but necessary discussion about the israel/gaza conflict and how to begin a constructive dialogue about solutions. and a happy veterans day to all who serve. we begin tonight with the further embrace of donald trump's desire to be more like the authoritarian leaders he so publicly admires. russian president vladimir putin, hungarian prime minister viktor orban, and the recipient of his many love letters, north korean leader kim jong-un. that was on display last night when in an interview with univision, the twice impeached, four times indicted former president took a page from their strongman playbook, warning if he wins a second term, he will be justified in using the powers of the presidency to weaponize the fbi and the doj against his perceived enemies. of course, there's no evidence as trump repeatedly claims that president biden or the deep state boogiemen are behind his indictments which include 91 combined state and federal charges. as we have seen, actual evidence is just a formality. trump's remarks come just days after "the washington post" reported that trump told advisers and friends that if he won next year, he would unleash his doj to go after his perceived enemies list. which would include some of his former white house officials. trump's doj would function with the express purpose of indicting, imprisoning, and punishing anyone who opposed him. trump repeatedly also wants to invoke the insurrection act on his first day in office. to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations. this is more than just trp's usual bluster. "the washington post" also notes that to facil his ability to direct justice department actions, his associates have been drafting plans to dispense with 50 years of policy and practice intended to shield criminal prosecutions from political considerations. last night, president biden warned supporters at a chicago fund-raiser, folks, the same man who said we should terminate rules and regulations and articles of the constitution is now running to end democracy as we know it. he's not even hiding it. he added trump's actions are all about revenge and retribution. two things that motivate any wanna be dictator. and even when trump gets compared to one of the worst autocratic leaders in history, adolf hitler, he appears to see it as a compliment, at least according to a new book by washington correspondent jonathan karl. karl writes about how trump bragged to a member of congress about what angela merkel, not a fan of trump, told him,hat she was amazed by the number of people who came to see him speak. trump said she told me there was only one other political leader who ever got crowds as big as mine. the trump allied congressman knew who merkel was comparing him to, but couldn't tell if trump himself understood. a trump campaign aide denied the account. it's not the first time that that name has been brought up with trump. trump reportedly once told his white house chief of staff, yawn kelly, that hitler did a lot of good things. this was when the two were on a visit to europe in 2018 to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of the first world war. trump also reportedly questioned to kelly why his generals couldn't be as totally loyal to him as the german generals were to hitler, according to a book by peter makers and susan glasser. according to a 1990 interview with trump's then wife ivana, she divulged he kept a book of hitler speeches near his bed. quite the bedtime reading material. joining me is michael steele, former rnc chair, msnbc political analyst, and host of the michael steele podcast. and jill wine banks, former assistant watergate aprosecutor and msnbc legal analyst. there's the hitler -- what is it? i think that's the term when you invoke hitler so much it becomes absurd, but with trump, he seems to be into it, michael. >> yeah, i mean, it's the whole a authoritarian thing. i don't think he distinguishes. i think ivana, his former wife, sort of says it all. i mean, she's saying yeah, it's by his bedside. you kind of go, oh, really? all right, that's interesting. so he doesn't make these distinctions the way the rest of us do. he's not put off by that comparison. and this is not just, you know, us here at msnbc saying this. these are people who are around him, who are writing about this and telling this side of his story. so we got to take it at face value because i ain't in his bedroom so i don't know what's on his bedside. if his wife says that's what's there, guess who i'm going to believe. so there's all of these story lines that come out about him that fill in the pieces that a lot of us thought were possibly true or maybe curious about. we're realizing now this guy does have this particular complex. and there's a chance he could be back in the oval office. and we know what that means. >> exactly. and that's the point, jill. we know what it means because he's telling us. he doesn't have a filter so what he's basically saying is i'm going to arrest anyone that is in my way. i'm going to arrest people using the insurrection act for trying to protest. he's now said on his truth social that the only fraud was committed by letitia james who is prosecuting him and his company and he's been found guilty. she should be prosecuted. he's threatened the judge in that case. any of those people, jill, could be subject to arrest if he's president. and it's not a joke. he is saying he's going to do it. >> he says the quiet part out loud. he doesn't have a filter. he can't help himself. he said there are good people on both sides when the nee onazis marched in charlottesville. he's telling us who he is, and we should believe him. so this whole point of this is very frightening. we should all be worried with what is happening now with the anti-semitism rising and him taking on the role of an authoritarian leader who he praises. he's praised viktor orban. he says he would solve everything in the world in ukraine. of course he would because he would give putin everything that putin wants because he admires putin. so this is really bad for justice. his threat of an enemies list is something i'm very familiar with. during watergate, we know that president nixon had an enemies list and he used the irs to go after those people. he used things that even -- he didn't use as many things as i think donald trump is now telling us he will use. he's saying he will use the department of justice and although nixon did through his attorney general try to use the department of justice, he never succeeded at that. we know that now that bill barr has said he's toast, bill barr is going to be one of the people he will go after. we need to protect justice. we need to keep the department of justice separate from the white house. it cannot be allowed to mix in specific decisions. >> he's also said that mark milley should be put to death. i think there's a thing, michael, where people don't take donald trump seriously because he doesn't always seem fully corpas mentis but he's very clear about retribution. he has a political party that's willing to go along with t even people who used to be considered normie republicans. witness elise stefanik, harvard girl, used to see like a weirdly conservative moderate republican. but here she is now accusing judge arthur engoron of weaponized law fair against trump. she's called on the judge to recuse himself. she's now filed an ethics complaint against him. republicans are enabling this by essentially using the power of the federal government against federal judges. your thoughts, michael. >> well, elise stefanik is just flat out wrong here. i mean, she has no grounds to do this. she has no basis. she can't -- where was this judge and she, where do they cross? what is she talking about? she's not in the case. i bet she couldn't cite anything from the case right now. so this is all again performative. it's the level of performative bs to cloud the system. to grind it to a halt. to make people suspect of it. to make people distrust it. to make people think something nefarious is going on. this judge has been sitting and serving for how long? suddenly now, because elise stefanik has her nose out of joint because donald trump is getting his behind handed to him the way it should for his behavior, she's defending donald trump's behavior, right? by going after the judge. so we have to understand what's going on here and keep it in the context in front of us. that this is performative, it is largely irrelevant to the course that this trial is going to take. there are good lawyers involved here. there are good prosecutors involved here. donald trump presumably has hired the best to defend him. you know, elise, just stand down, sis. we don't need you in that room. we don't need you in that room. >> you know, he's hired the best who got paid in advance he could get. >> there's that. >> the best who aren't indicted themselves. >> they probably got the money in gold bars. >> you know that's right. jill there, is this idea of the magas who are embedded. he's embedded so many people in various places that can try to help save him, because this is all about saving himself, obviously. the judge in florida who we will not prejudge. she's seemed very pro-trump before. she's issued a ruling here. she's put off the decision on whether to delay trump's trial in the documents case that even bill barr, trump's former toady attorney general has said he's toast on, she's going to delay it. here's the rub. the trial date right now is may 20. the trial date on the other, there d.c. version of this case, is in march. where does the georgia case fit in? in a sense, is she still seeming to sort of block for trump by setting a date that kind of squeezes out the georgia prosecution? or am i being too cynical? >> you are not being too cynical. i share your cynicism. it does seem like by saying, well, i won't decide until march 1st when we have another hearing, that she's holding that block of time so that fani willis' case cannot get scheduled in that time block. and then she might put it off until april, and then of course, there's a may trial coming up that's supposed to go forward, but it's being held. so no one else can schedule anything in that time period. that does seem bad. and i think, you know, aileen cannon has shown who she is in her very first entree into this case when she issued a ruling that the 11th circuit, very conservative circuit, said you are so off and totally undid what she had done in trying to stop documents from being used by the government. so i think that we can probably say it's fair to say that she isn't an experienced judge. and that she might be thinking, well, i can help him this way. i said when this first happened that i didn't expect her to grant his original motion to put it off until after the election, but that she would do it by 1,000 cuts. a little bit here and a little bit there. >> yeah, and let's keep in mind that the oldest judge right now i believe on the supreme court is one clarence get money thomas, and she's a young right wing judge, as lawrence o'donnell said, the bribe is implied. thank you both very much. up next on "the reidout," an explosive new book exposes the dark heart of deception that drives propaganda. brian stelter joins me when "the reidout" returns. returns liberty mutual customized my car insurance and i saved hundreds. with the money i saved, i started a dog walking business. oh. 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(announcer) change your life at golo.com. that's golo.com. if the thought of donald trump returning to the white house issen terrifying enough, this week, trump poured out more nightmare fuel when asked aut his potential picks for vice president. >> would you consider tucker, though, based on -- >> i lik tucker a lot. i guess i would. i think i say i would because he's got great common sense. >> that would be former fox host tucker carlson, whose common sense from his days bloviating at fox sounded like this. >> our leaders demand that you shut up and accept this. we have a moral obligation to admit the world's poor, they tell us, even if it makes our own country poorer. white supremacy, that's the problem. it's a hoax, it's a conspiracy theory used to divide the country and keep a held on power. the left becomes unhinged when you point out americans are being replaced. what is this really about? why do i hate putin so much? has putin every called me a racist? has he threatened to get my fired for disagreeing with him? >> it might be awkward since we learned this year in the final weeks of trump's presidency, tucker was texting about how he hated him passionately. we know that insight into tucker's feelings from texts discovered in discovery in dominion's lawsuit against fox. they settled to the tune of $787.5 million. carlson was canned by fox less than a week later without much explanation from tucker or fox. a new book by brian stelter digs into the circumstances of tucker's firing and including the network's role in radicalizing its viewers. promoting the big lie, january 6th, and new insights of trump's efforts to overthrough the 2020 election. he writes, with or without carlson, fox is the black widow at the center of the web of lies that perverts american politics. and brian stelter joins me now. good to see you. let me start with tucker. i'm going to roll back to him. a few of the texts and you get into the texts and here's the book, texts about this is now how white men fight about trump supporters beating an antifa kid. referring to sidney powell as the c-word, saying sidney powell is lying, f'ing b word. was his firing mainly because of his grossness toward other people, or was it, i don't know, going to hungary without authorization and other things you reveal? >> i'm a long time viewer, first time guest. great to be on with you. i think you named three or four of the many reasons. there's a list of 20 or 10 reasons he was canned. i devote many chapters of the book because it's a mystery, and tucker is promoting conspiracy theories for why he was fired, blaming dominion. this was a bad breakup, like a relationship that goes sour when one side has 20 reasons to dump the other side. the other side doesn't see it coming. this was building for a long time. rupert murdoch decided it wasn't worth it anymore. as one source said to me, his arrogance destroyed him. one producer said we were burning too bright. we knew it wasn't going to last. >> talk about the insight about how they think about why they wanted to put people like sidney powell on, why they wanted to put on the january 6th stuff and the outrageous lies they got sued for. >> i think it was a self preservation instinct. wanting to believe the lies, wanting to give false hope to millions of viewers. it was driven largely by profits and ratings. you know, there's examples you see in these dominion filings which i had to write this book because there were so many details in the papers that it demanded someone write the book. examples of these producers and these hosts obsessed over the minute by minute ratings. what they notice is when we talk about voting irregularities, the ratings tick up. i was at cnn nearly a decade. i didn't study the minute by minute ratings to figure out, that is next level engineering to keep the audience addicted. and ultimately, that is what drove so many of these falsehoods. >> you talk about the black widow at the heart of our democracy. lachlan murdoch versus rupert murdoch, is there any difference, any directional change, or does it get worse? >> rupert is much more of a newspaper man. he believes he's a journalist at heart, and he detested donald trump. as a family friend said, he can't believe we're going to end up with trump as the nominee again. then again, he doesn't seem to be doing much to stop it. lachlan murdoch cares a lot less about politics. i'm told he personally is not a fan, he holds his nose like a lot of republican party establishment types but he's not doing anything to stop the trump train. he cares a lot about campaign ad spending at histations than he cares about polling and things like that. you're not going to see them do anything really to stop this coronation of trump, even though, by the way, trump complains about fox all the time. he says fox is out to get him, but that couldn't be further from the truth. >> yeah, let me play a bit of a montage of the way fox sounds now post tucker. >> what does that leave you with? it leaves you with you need to make war to bring peace. you have a side that cannot change because then that means an admission their beliefs have been corrupt all the time. so in a way, you have to force them to surrender. >> or we could make love not war. >> i tried that once. >> or we have an election. >> i had to go to a doctor. >> elections don't work. we know that. we know they don't work. >> i want to say something about arab americans and the muslim world. we have created the middle east. we made them rich. we got that oil out of the ground. our military protects all of these oil shipments. flying around the world, making them rich. we fund their military. we respect their kings. we kill their terrorists. okay. but we have had it. we have had it with them. >> so that's first greg gutfeld and then jesse waters. what did you learn in doing the research for this book? is it a bottom up thing? is this the audience craves this and so fox serves it, or are they engineering this kind of sort of necrophilic attitude toward american culture and divisiveness. are their engineering it or taking in what their audience wants? >> in the roger ailes era, it was top down. now, it's bottom up. it's driven by the audience. the audience is in charge, which is a scary prospect sometimes, even though i love our viewers. i agree with your banter a moment ago. jesse waters has taken over as the prime time extremist. they think they're respecting the audience. that's the quote that comes up time and time again. they think they're respecting the audience by giving the audience what they want. that's actually disrespectful, and it's hurt the gop. i would argue that fox is sometimes hurting the republican party that it thinks it's helping. that's an interesting dynamic in 2024. >> t