the humanitarian crisis worsens in gaza as the united states urges israel to do more to limit civilian casualties, but blocks a u.n. cease-fire resolution. former nbc news correspondent, martin fletcher, is here to discuss the latest in the israel hamas war. and courtroom clash. special counsel jack smith wins a key victory in special election case against donald trump, spelling out the evidence he plans to use against the twice impeached four times indicted on 91 counts, disgraced, former president. i am jonathan capehart. this is the saturday show. with the iowa caucus is less than six weeks away, donald trump leading in the polls, alarm bells of another trump term and its implications for american democracy are growing louder. this week at the new imes issued this morning. a second trump presidency may be more radical than the last one. noting that the forces that somewhat contained his autocratic tendencies in his first term would, quote, all be weaker. a new special issue from the atlantic titled, if trump wins, lays out the imicions and the authoritarian plans of a less restrained second trump administration. as david frum explains in the league essay they would include putting in and to all federal and state cases against him. pardoning those who tried to overturn the 2020 en. using the justice department to exact revenge on trump's adversaries and critics. ending civil service protections to make it easier to fire federal officials. deploying the military to shut down civil demonstrations and protests. trump is not exactly being secretive about his intentions to act on his most dangerous impulses. during a fox town hall on tuesday, when given the opportunity to quash concerns that he would abuse the office of the presidency should he be reelected, he did the opposite. >> under no circumstances, you are promising america tonight, he would never abuse power as retribution against anybody. >> except for day one. he's going crazy. except for day one. >> meaning? >> i want to close the border, and i want to dirrell, dirrell, drill. >> that is not retribution. i got it. >> i'm gonna be -- you know, he keeps, i love this guy, he says, you're not gonna be a dictator, are you? i say, no, no, no, other than day one. >> joining me now, david from, senior editor at the atlantic. as i mentioned, he wrote the lead essay for the magazines incredible special issue, if trump wins. he's also the author of trump apocalypse, restoring american apoxsee and barbara f walter professor of international relations at university of -- author of how civil wars start, and how to stop them. david, barbara, thank you both very much for coming to the saturday show. david, let me start with you. it is shocking enough that trump would say he'd be a dictator on day one. how shocking is it that the question even have to be asked? >> look at the world from his point of view. inauguration day 2025, he is taking the oath, what does he confront two minutes later? he is, as you said, the target of four separate criminal proceedings. 91 counts in all. two federal, two state proceedings. plus, in the state of new york, a civil proceeding that will dissolve all of his companies for its many frauds. he faces the risk of being in prison for the rest of his life. obviously this is survival. the first thing you are going to do is try to break the federal justice department. the second thing you try to do is break state justice proceedings. he has to. the problem that it presents is the use of presidential power to stop a criminal proceeding is exactly what the watergate scandal with all about. if this works we owe a huge retrospective apology to richard nixon. all trump, he is campaigning on a promise to do what richard nixon was punished for doing. >> more to your point, because i screenshotted this and highlight it. you write that the existing constitutional system has no room for the subversive legal maneuvers of a criminal in chief. if a president can pardon himself for federal crimes, as trump would likely try to do, he could write his pardon in advance and welcome these visitors to the white house. >> he is going to claim a right of self par ink about it. if the president can pardon himself for criminal offenses, that means he can shoot the first lady. maybe he'll be impeached but, do you notice that means even weirder? the vice president can pick up a pistol, walk into the oval office. shoot the president ahead and say, i'm the president now. write himself apart. and again, maybe there is an impeachment but no criminal penalty. that is so crazy, it cannot be right. that is what we are gonna be debating two years from now if this man wins the office. >> it is incredible. the scenarios that you have written up a frightening, ghoulish, and after one trump term, my ruler some is if you can imagine it could possibly happen. barbara, i want you to hear what former congresswoman, liz cheney, had to say to my colleague ari melber about trump's rhetoric on his plans for a final term. watch. >> what we as americans, voters, and citizens need to commit to do is not to become numb to that. what he says is so outrageous, it can be very easy for his allies to say to the rest of us, oh, come on. you know that that is not true. the lesson of donald trump over the last several years is we have to take him seriously and we have to take him literally. he has shown us what he is willing to do. >> barbara, for those who are not paying attention, why do we have to take what trump says literally? what >> because autocrats, first of all, they do not care about peace, they care about power. oftentimes chaos, instability, help them stay in power. it scares people. it convinces them that, maybe, they prefer security to rights and freedoms. or they want a strong person in power to keep them safe. we know the countries that backs lined into this partial democracy state are really unstable. they are unstable in terms of leadership. leadership tends to change very rapidly. they are in unstable in terms of policy. there is lots of flip-flopping in what the government wants. it is bad for business. they tend to be politically violent following assassinations, the violent demonstrations, increased -- here in the united states we would say a increase in militia. militias are legal in most cases about the united states. these are very unstable periods. it usually helps the want to be dictator. >> david, what other threats does a trump win pose to the rule of law in this country? >> imagine this scenario, trump has begun pardoning himself. begun pardoning january 6th felons. has begun asserting all of these rights. that is going to be the beginning of movements of protest. shows like this, people like you and me, we have been telling people, register to vote. don't take politics to the streets. but politics will move to the streets. trump says he wants to use the army. you've heard him mention the insurrection act. but not a lot of people remember is the insurrection act was passed during the first george washington and lee shun at a time when united states that no police forces, no fbi, nothing. since the first north washington in mr. action we have passed dozens of statutes and downs of the rules for beating the military to be used for police work inside of the united states. trump is going to issue order that every general is gonna have to parse and say, is this the kind of a legal order that sends me to prison or will i have to obey? we will see a dissolution of the civil military structure. generals obeying these orders and using troops in the other ways that are forbidden from law. other generals resigning are refusing to a bid orders. when we talk about chaos, it is unclear if the military obeys the president or not because the president, every day, is asking you to do something that is illegal, that is chaos. >> barbara, i asked that question because a lot of what trump is doing is instilling fear. his whole campaign is based in fear. how do we combat a fear based campaign strategy? >> information is really key. but we are also at a period in time where information, true information, is really hard to come by. it used to be that the networks could get on the air. they had a common, cohesive, message. they could could provide that to the american public. that no longer exist today. it makes everything much more difficult. the media plays a really big role in countering this. don't give a want to be autocrat like trump a lot of airtime. don't broadcast his message. don't treat him like every other candidate. the story that is told, the counter narratives that are told, the time that is given over to his lives versus the truth really, really, matters. i think that in the lead out to the 2024 election, how the media responds, how they inform the american public, how -- the message that they send about the importance of democracy and the importance of countering it, voting, telling the truth, that all really matters. >> before we go to break, barbara, let me give you one more question here. the gop is still downplaying trump's violent rhetoric and actions. is that because they like his threats? or, is it because they are afraid to denounce them? either way, is fear and authoritarian tool? >> they don't like those threats. i think most of the gop would prefer if someone else got the nomination. but they understand, increasingly, that trump is going to be their nominee. he is going to be their candidate. they have to make a choice between backing a republican candidate or switching sides and backing biden. we have seen through adam kinzinger, liz cheney, your career is, essentially, over. they do not like this. they would prefer to have, almost, any other candidate run the gop. but they did not have a choice because almost half of the american public is still solidly behind trump. >> don't go anywhere. we will continue this important conversation with david frum and barbara walter after the break. and ipad and apple watch se - all on us. only on verizon. 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>> this does become where is trump's deranged fantasy. we are not gonna have this. we are gonna be in chaos. we will have a cabinet because there will not be a senate majority that will confirm the people. what we will have is immediate chaos. trump is going to immediately going to try to shut down the justice department. he's going to try to immediately claim he is immune to prosecution in the state of georgia. things are immediately gonna be an uproar. the senate and the house will immediately be paralyzed. i don't think the thing to worry about most is we will have dr. evils cabinet government. the thing to be most worried about is we're gonna have chaos from day one! with the army receiving illegal orders from the president on day two. >> barbara, i heard you reacting when i said the most idly canteen. your reaction, you see the names of people when you see the second trump administration cabinet. >> i think what it does is they want loyalist but they also want loyalists who are are not top notch talent. people who are really dependent on that person for same, power. you don't get the very best people who tend to hook their wagon on to someone like trump. he himself, trump does not want anybody who is going to compete with him for power, for attention. he is perfectly fine picking people who are happy to go along with his orders because that is the only place they will have access to power. people like this exist in every society. we don't tend to see them in normal times because no one will hire them. they tend to emerge from their holes, so to speak, when you have somebody like trump. they served his purposes very well. >> david, control room, can we put that graphic back up of the potential vice presidential folks there. senator j.d. vance, sarah huckabee sanders, kari lake who ran and lost for senate in arizona. congressman byron donalds of florida. marjorie taylor greene. tucker carlson. potential vice presidential contenders. >> go on. >> i can't! >> well, these are people who have been put forward as many people in trump circle. as you know trump does not have any kind of orderly process. one of the things you'll be thinking about if you are normal person running for president, what if something happened to me? who can do this job? none of these people would passed that test. he is preparing for a kind of -- and this goes to barbara's work, a kind of cold civil war. there is no attempt to expand his coalition. no attempt to reach out. in donald trump's case it seems perverse but these are the things that normal people try to do. they try to be president, even for the people who didn't vote for him. trump has always been clear, i want my 46%. the other 53 or 54, i'm going to deal with them by shaving them off. one of the most important things in this election is you are going to see republican donors backing boutique candidates. trying to shave off a quarter of a point, a half a point. if you cannot get trump above 47, and you can't, you can slice off just enough of biden to grind him down 48. hope that the electoral college does the rest. >> right, that is the key. it is the electoral college they are all hoping for. barbara, one of the other things that i think people have in mind or remember from 2020 is, there is the electoral college. let's say the electoral college, it comes in even. or, there is an issue. this is then thrown to the house of representatives where a speaker, mike johnston, mike johnson the congressman from louisiana is the speaker. barbara, can you talk about the impact of not just the election of trump to a second term, but a speaker, mike johnson, who would be in place between election day and inauguration day, whether or not republicans hold on to the majority in the house. >> we now have extremists in power. trump would be in the white house, if he is able to come back into power. whit congress and the republican leadership, they are political radicals. they do not want to pursue policies that a majority of americans want. they are pursuing the policies of an extreme wing of the republican party. that period of time between the election and the inauguration would be a highly uncertain. time americans would feel insecure. this is again, part of that authoritarian playbook. this benefits people like trump. he can use this insecurity to go around the country and start talking about how, yet again, the democrats are trying to steal the election from him. yet again, the system is failing. yet again america is being beholden to the far left, as he would say. this is right for somebody like trump to grab power and assert himself into the white house. many americans, i think, will feel relief. most people do not like uncertainty. they would rather have somebody like trump who is going to tell them things they want to hear, rather than have a period of time when they don't know what the outcome will be. >> we are out of time. i want to close out by reading you to you, david. juraj, for a democracy to continue, however, the democratic system itself must be the supreme commitment of all major participants. we are getting very close to seeing whether that commitment will hold true. david frum, barbara f walter. thank you both very much for coming to the saturday show. coming up, an appeals court oppose the gag order on don't trump in a 2020 election interference case but has narrowed the parameters. what that means for the case and special counsel jack smith. glenn kirschner joins us after the break to explain. for one and done heartburn relief, prilosec otc. one pill a day, 24 hours, zero heartburn. 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(avo) this holiday turn any samsung phone, in any condition, into a galaxy s23+ on us. and now add netflix and max to your plan for just $10 a month. only on verizon. he hits his mark —center stage—and is crushed by a baby grand piano. you're replacing me? customize and save with liberty bibberty. he doesn't even have a mustache. only pay for what you need. ♪ liberty. liberty. liberty. liberty. ♪ another dramatic twist in the many legal travails of donald trump. and federal appeal court largely of how they get gunner imposed upon the former president election defense case. however, the court did provide leeway to criticize special counsel jack smith, as well as the doj, and the biden administration. earlier this week we got a glimpse of how the special counsel is planning to make his case against trump in the upcoming january six trial slated to begin in march. according to a court filing, smith plans to highlight trump's historical record of false claims of election fraud dating all the way back to 2012. while jack smith is laying the groundwork to tell the full story of what transpired on january 6th, how speaker mike johnson is doing everything in his power to protect the violent capitol rioters. speaker is set to release thousands of hours of unseen footage of the attack. he says the footage will feature blurred faces of the rioters in order to protect them from potential, quote, retaliation from the doj. joining me now, glenn kershner, former federal prosecutor msnbc legal analyst and host of the justice matters podcast. glenn, thank you very much for coming back to the show. first, the narrowing of trump's gag order in the election interference case, do you think the court struck the right balance here? >> i think the court struck a balance that is very likely to survive any appeal to the supreme court that might result. we don't know, well, we do know donald trump is likely to appeal. we do not know if the supreme court will accept the case for review. i don't think that they should. i think this is hard land law when it comes to putting some reasonable restrictions in place. thos