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tonight on "the reidout" -- >> you know, if donald trump is elected again, we really don't have to worry because the institutions of our government will prevent the worst that he will attempt to do. nothing can be further from the truth because those republicans, you know, house with republicans like mike johnson, a senate with people like josh hawley and mike lee, they won't stand up to him. >> liz cheney banging that alarm bell with all her might, as her former friends and colleagues abandon democracy for the cult of trump. plus, gaza teeters on the brink of a fullblown humanitarian catastrophe as calls for a permanent cease-fire grow louder by the day. >> and texas goes full handmaid's tale, creating their own dystopian reality where women are forced to beg for the right to safeguard their own health. but we begin tonight with a threat of america's putin. today, vladimir putin announced his candidacy in the presidential election next march that he is all but certain to win. it's a move expected to keep him in power until at least 2030. putin has twice used his leverage to amend the constitution so he could stay in power. he's already the longest serving kremlin leader since soviet dictator josef stalin. it is a cautionary tale because here in america, we face a similar threat. and if you think an american putin can't happen here, you have to understand that donald trump in less than a year could overcome even a majority to become president for life. it has certainly happened before and still does in countries like russia and venezuela, where presidential governments are code for authoritarian regimes. for guys like putin and nicolas maduro to pull it off, they have to first control the bureaucracy. if they say they are going to cancel an election or call for shady constitutional changes, who's going to stop them? the bureaucracy. that is unless it is stacked with loyalists and sycophants, which is exactly what donald trump did during his presidency. when particularly at the end of his term, he raced to stack the pentagon, the department of justice, the courts, and federal agencies with people personally loyal to him. but in the end, there will still enough independent bureaucrats in place in washington and around the country, including republicans, to stop him from successfully waging a coup and staying in office after losing the 2020 election. but if he wins again, expect that to change. a 2025 trump administration would be stripped of normie bureaucrats and stacked instead with maga true believers and trump foot soldiers who would be willing to implement draconian immigration crackdowns or even against american protesters. "the new york times" reports that trump intends to revive an effort from the end of his presidency to alter civil service roles that protect career government professionals, enabling him to fire tens of thousands of federal workers and replace them with loyalists. after congress failed to enact legislation to block such a change, the biden administration is developing a regulation to essentially trump-proof the federal workforce. however, since that is merely an executive action, the next republican president, aka trump, could simply undo it the same way. and led by heritage foundation, something called project 2025 is aimed at creating a government in waiting for the next republican presidential administration. you may wonder why project 2025 is so focused on the federal workforce and its seemingly boring functions. well, it's because these workers are key to keeping a dictator from being a dictator. but if these positions are filled with maga cronies who don't follow checks and balances or the law or ethics, then trump's path is clear. he's then able to stifle dissent and criticism. he can lock up his critics and he can transform government function and maintain permanent rule. and unfortunately, he has a lot working for him. the overwhelming support of white working class americans, many of whom will support him no matter what, then there's the fecklessness of republicans who refuse to fight him even if they don't wantpower. and then there's the structure of our elections based on the electoral college where a small segment of voters in key swing states wield outsized power, and finally, trump is counting on a lack of memory about his atrocities. he's entertaining, they say, he's funny, or maybe they do remember, they don't care, they may like it. that is perhaps the most disturbing part. we have seen the rise of dictators before, and the results are often deadly, and we have seen what calamity, complacency can bring. presidential historian michael beschloss tweeted this, chilling associated press headline that ran in 1933. quote, washington not alarmed as hitler rises to power. 90 days later, in 2023, we risk the same mistake as trump raises new alarms saying he wouldn't be a dictator except on day one. i'm joined by michael beschloss, nbc news presidential historian, and matthew dowd, msnbc political contributor and analyst and chief strategist for the bush/chaina 2004 campaign. you tweeted out that piece so i'm going to go to you first. i have a couple of those old "new york times" articles from the 1930s, those front pages which had these benign articles and columns about hitler, including one about his summer estate in the bavarian hiland, treating him as a normal politician. and the american media did that for a really long time, and look what happened. your thoughts. >> that's exactly right. and you know, going back to the beginning of this country, one of the biggest things the founders worried about is one day there would be a president who would be a dictator. and they were relieved by the fact that the first president was going to be george washington, who gave up power. so they sort of sat on their oars. and the result is if the biggest sanction against a president who wants to be a dictator is impeachment, how has that worked out? donald trump has been impeached twice. he may be elected in 11 months. we could be living under a dictatorship. the other thing that happened, as you both know, is in the late 19th century, there was a civil service movement. presidents can come in, they might try to be dictators or the modern society of 1880 requires experts, not political hacks. so let's have a civil service that is there almost regardless of who is president. donald trump is ripping all of that away. so he can be a dictator, he can tell the doj to indict anyone he wants or go after any political enemy, someone who looked the wrong way at donald trump in the third grade, or the department of defense, you know, just invoke the insurrection act, send u.s. army soldiers into cities that he does not like. blue cities, chicago, los angeles, other places, perhaps detroit, and use it to go after his political enemies. if you have no professional bureaucracy, all that is possible, and actually i'm wrong, it's not possible. it is probable, and it is almost inevitable. >> right, and i mean, the thing is, what matthew, what michael just called the bureaucracy, the political bureaucracy of washington, they have labeled that the deep state. when they say the deep state, that's what they mean. they mean the bureaucratic regular $40,000 to $50,000 working folks who maintain government. what they understand is that what stopped donald trump from doing his worst is everything he did had to grind through the sort of slowing mechanisms of bureaucracy. so it's not efficient. politics is not efficient. that's why people are mad at biden. they have this bure ocacy, the senate, the ability to filibuster. that slows down extreme policy. trump gets back in, he gets rid of all those people, and then he says we're not having an election. i'm staying. who is going to stop him? who is going to check him? if the local bureaucrats don't do it? >> well, i'm glad michael is here because this is such -- i actually think this is a great moment because it provides clarity to the fact that our democracy is and has always been fragile in nature. it is very dependent, not just dependent on the structure of the constitution. it's dependent on good people holding office and good people serving that actually have loyalty to the constitution. and i think what donald trump, if you asked him what his biggest regret was, his biggest regret was putting certain people in certain positions that ended up not doing what he wanted. if you think about this, if there was a different secretary of defense at the time of the end of 2020, what the result would have been. if there was a different vice president, what the result would have been. if there was a different fbi director, what would the result have been? all three of which of those people, donald trump has gone out of his way in the last year to rip on them in the course of this. so it's not only the immense bureaucracy. it's keeping people in positions of power, which actually is such a great lesson for us in democrat, how important the people who occupy certain spaces are in preserving our democracy. i'll add one thing to the hitler analogy. it wasn't just the american media. the german media never took him seriously. they were like, oh, he's kind of a joke. he'll be okay. we have this system in place. there's no worried about it. then the aftermath, where he was elected, he was legitimately elected, then you had people who served in power said we're going to give him these positions because we can control him. that was basically their stance. we'll give him these things because he'll be able to be controlled by us, and that will be a good thing and we'll be able to hold power, and look what happened. >> exactly, ditto maduro in argentina. bolsonaro, same thing. they're treated as a joke, kind of funny, kind of glib. you're like, they're really not a problem. they're sort of entertaining. i want a read a line from a hington post" piece because i think the other piece of it is that the people o the ground don't fear the consequences of this kind of leadership. "the washington post" quoted a vote named arlondo, he's from wisconsin, ainy number of swing states that will decide the election. he said if it's between them, i'm going to say this, trump was hilarious. he was hilarious, said monk. biden, meanwhile, has not delivered the change he expected, leaving monk unsure. michael beschloss, this is the challenge. joe biden is slowed down by politics and bureaucracy by the slowing mechanisms in the united states senate, which means you need 60 votes to get things. people don't understand that. they just know he can't get what he wants, whereas trump says i'm going to ban all muslims, he banned all muslims. trump says i'm going to build a wall, he pretends i built a wall. trump says i'm going to rip babies away from their mothers if they come over the border, and suddenly, babies are ripped out of their mothers' hands at the border. his autocracy is efficient. a lot of people say i would rather have that and he's funny. >> that's right, and i'm hoping against hope that by 11 months from now, even mr. monk and other people who are saying things like this will understand that the choice of november 2024 is most likely going to be between democracy as flawed and faltering as it is, and dictatorship, autocracy that are going to take our rights away. look at the reaction of women and men to the cancellation of roe v. wade. that's what happens in the best of america when you take freedom away. we can hope that that is what's going to happen. but i shudder to think that after all the decades that our american soldiers fought fascism in italy, naziism in germany, soviet dictatorship for 46 years, we're going to throw all this away so gingerly. i can't bring myself to believe that's going to happen. >> right, and i think people should remember, when you're speaking of abortion, one of the first things these guys do and threaten to do is take away the rights of women. because controlling women is always part of the plan. banning abortion is always part of it. it's a signal. and you know, to go back, matthew, to the minutia part. i say this all the time to my poor beleaguered teen. how do elections happen? they don't happen because there's some giant machine that turns on and elections happen. they happen because individual people at the bureaucratic level in the states begin the process. it's an honor system. they just believe there's supposed to be an election so they begin the process. what if they don't? these are the 19 states where 25 election deniers hold state-wide positions with election oversight power. in other words, if they believe that donald trump cannot be returned to office by an election, and they just say, you know what, we ain't doing it. trump is in. we like him. we don't want him to be replaced. he stays. who is going to stop that? nobody. who is going to stop it? >> that's been the most nefarious, one of the most nefarious parts of this, the attack on our election infrastructure. the secretaries of state in michigan and in wisconsin and in illinois that have been physically, physically and violently threatened in the course of this. not only them, but local people who volunteer to serve at the polls. and so you put those states up where you have election deniers in office. then you overlap that where states where all these massive amounts of threats that occurred where it's difficult to recruit people to actually man the polls. and this is a recipe, as michael has alluded to or said, this is a recipe for not only an infrastructure in washington, d.c. but a threatened infrastructure in the country that actually holds the elections, done by little old men and women around the country who, do they want to be visited by maga people at their home and threatened by the point of a gun in the course of this? which is what has happened. you saw what happened in georgia in the course of this, people jug trying to do their service and fulfill a civic duty. those people are now under threat, and now they have to ask themselves, i love america, i believe in america. do i want to put myself and my family at risk just to hold an election? >> yeah, there used to be a senator from the state of mississippi who used to say the best way to keep a black person -- he didn't say black person, from voting them is to visit them innight before with a gun. michael, let's talk about the other things. there are fundamental anti-democratic aspects to the structure of our elections that also work against democracy and work for trump. he only has to really carry a majority, 50 plus 1 in ten states, basically. because of the electoral college, it's gone down from 26 states that used to really be swing states and matter to like ten. you know, neither party will probably contest florida this time. it's now seen as deep red like alabama. you're talking about maybe ten states that decide who wins. the rest of the country is just stuck with the result. >> that's exactly right, and a system, i love what matt said, i agree with everything he said. go on to take a look, we have citizens united, we have corporate and private money pouring into the system in a way that you can't imagine. that is not progressive money. for the most part. those are people who would be perfectly content to acustom themselves to a donald trump dictatorship if it comes to that, they're already showing they are. and the other thing, joy and matt, you know, take a look at, we have thought in the past when americans were confronted with the loss of our liberties, you know, that would be a deal breaker. it doesn't seem to be yet. we're on the verge of a situation, look right now. donald trump, i'll ask both of you. why is donald trump in public saying i will be a dictator from day one and presumably afterwards? i will use the defense department in a way that hasn't been done before. i'm going to talk about terminating the constitution. i would expect, matt has this history as a campaign genius, of knowing that usually you would expect a candidate who intends to do those things not telling you until election day. this is the beginning of the intimidation we're talking about. i think he's making these threats to get people to be quiet and to knuckle under even 11 months before his possible election. please, everyone who is watching, all of our friends, beware. >> last word to you, matthew. please answer, where are the republicans in all this? >> i was going to add, one of the reasons he's doing it is because a majority of republicans accept it. so if a majority of the republican party found this unacceptable, he wouldn't be doing it. but he understands the republican party as a whole has moved in the authoritarian way. i'll add one more thing on the electoral college. in 1976 when jimmy carter was elected, 85% of the voters in the country lived in a swing state. 85% of voters lived in a swing state. today, 11% live in a swing state. that's the problem. >> mississippi used to be a swing state. michael beschloss, matthew dowd, thank you. up next on "the reidout," antony blinken calls on israel to do more to protect civilians but stopped short of calling for a permanent cease-fire. 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