weight, my weight, my phone rang during the show. >> that is 70 me. but it won't happen tonight. >> you know, lawrence, it has been a long week. >> it has, and that neil is going to join us tonight to talk about the supreme court decisions, and i need this. because i like neil gorsuch's. i don't know the difference between nitrous oxide and whatever the other thing is. which chris hayes and you both explain beautifully and i have already forgotten. but ■çhe is going to take me through it again. >> he is the guy to have. it is a big day at the high court, i will be watching. >> thanks, alex. >> have a great show. >> thank you. okay, 24 hours later, if you're ready for some calm analysis about what we all saw last night this is the place to be for the next hour. the very first thing you need to know about what we all saw last night is that most voters didn't see it. it was the lowest rated presidential debate in a very long time. it had the smallest audience of any first presidential debate, first in a series. in the 21st century. and only about one third of the people who voted in the last presidential election actually watched the debate. only 51 million viewers out of■ç 155 million voters who voted last time. so two thirds of the voters didn't see a second of what happened last night. and that is an important number to have in mind when you consider the impact of residential debates, because everyone who thinks that that thing last night with some kind of big problem for joe biden believes, without evidence, that the debate changed the minds of undecided voters, even though undecided voters are the most likely kind of people to not watch debates, like last night. in 1980, when we had about half of the voting population we have now, half the voting population we have now. the presidential debate got 80 ç million viewers. almost every voter watched that debate. in 1980, 85 million votes were cast in the presidential election and 80 million people watched that debate. that is a big difference. faithful audiences of this program will know that i have, and every presidential campaign season, insisted repeatably that these so-called debates, that were invented by and for television, do not test anything that is actually part of the daily job of the presidency. no one ever runs into the oval office and says mr. president, you have two minutes to explain your position on some subject. presidents discuss one subject at time■ç in the oval office. they do it in detail for as long as they want or a short as they want. they read roofing papers if their name is not trump about that subject before each of those discussions. most presidencies never have an emergency, a run in the room emergency. there is never a moment when someone rushes in giving the president an immediate emergency problem that the president has to solve. that did happen to one of those candidates on the stage last night. and when he faced that emergency his choice was to do absolutely nothing for 187 minutes. he froze for 187 minutes on january 6th while his supporters were attacking the capital and trying to overturn the "j(residential election through violence. last night in donald trump's first debate appearance since january 6th, the debate moderators did not ask him what the january 6th committee very much wanted to ask him, what were you doing for those 107 minutes? instead of that hugely important question, the very first question written by a committee, as these questions always are in these kinds of debates, the very first question to donald trump was you want to impose a 10% tariff on all goods coming into the u.s. how will you ensure that that doesn't drive prices even higher? trump, it's not going to drive them higher< that's it. that was the answer. a tariff, by definition, is an increase in price. that is the very point of tariffs, to increase the consumer price of imported goods. everything from clothes to cars. in trump's case, a 10% increase on the price of every single thing imported into the united states. so a new $4000 tax you would pay on a $40,000 car. that $40,000 car becomes a $44,000 car because of donald trump's terrace. this debate, that wasn't a real debate, pretended the tariffs are not tariffs . the better question would been what is a terrorist? ■ç because he proved last night he does not know, and he proved that his true believers do not know what a tariff is. donald trump said that his terrorists are going to force china, quote, to pay us a lot of money. that is the very first of donald trump's long list of lies, over 50 of them in that so-called debate. american tariffs can only be paid by american consumers of those goods. a 10% tariff on 10 chinese goods will not cause anyone in china one penny. it will not cost the government of china a penny. no business in china will be cost a penny by a trumpet tariff . this is the kind of lie that no presidential debater would ever have attempted to tell prior to donald trump, and it was the least of his ■çlies. >> i didn't have sex with a porn start. >> you now live in a country where most of the public commentators with access to microphones declared the liar the winner of the debate, and the loser, in their view, was the older man with the weaker voice, who struggles to tell the truth in a ridiculous format that he is no longer any good at. and that has nothing to do with the job of president. a format that does not test the job of president. most of the coverage of the event encourages actively the voters to look at that as superficially as possible, and focus only on what the commentators call the performance, and never ■(he policy. the word panic started showing up on banners on your television screens, and then, of course, came the unrealistic notions that there is a magical candidate who can emerge to pick up the banner, as the democratic presidential nominee. not one person who makes that suggestion has said who that magical candidate is, and how, and through what process the nomination could be delivered to that magical candidate. the new york times editorial encouraging joe biden to leave the race published tonight, at least in its, perhaps inadvertently at the end, that the new york times does not have any idea how this should happen, because the editorial says the democrats must, quote, create a process to select someone ■çmore capable to stand in his place to defeat mr. trump in november. create a process, because the process does not exist, and there is no polling data to even begin to suggest that that candidate exists. there is no polling data. the other democrats, the only other democrat to this day that has ever pulled well against donald trump, the only democrat who has pulled strongly against donald trump is joe biden. the second best polling candidate among democrats against donald trump is actually vice president, harris. the magiccl@■dream candidates are completely unknown to most people in the country. governors of states like california, michigan, pennsylvania. and not one of those governors polled anywhere close to kamala harris or joe biden against donald trump. and not one of those governors has ever raised one dollar of campaign funding that can be used in a federal presidential campaign. they don't have any to run with. and that is not a minor technical point. campaign money is not some minor technicality. i heard this talk once before on the democratic side, in 1992. at exactly this point in the calendar, in june, when bill clinton was running third at a tiny 25% of the vote against ross perot's leading 39%, and president george h.w. bush■ç's 31%. and there was panic in the halls of congress above that, where i was working at the time. there was much talk of trying to replace bill clinton as the nominee, even though he had the nomination locked up through the primaries. there was talk of somehow getting the governor of new york, who already refused to run for president that year, to take the nomination somehow away from bill clinton. or george mitchell, then majority leader of the united states senate. and i knew george mitchell and worked with george mitchell in those days, and i knew that talk about george mitchell was preposterous. and it was being pushed by other members of congress, including senators, who knew absolutely nothing about the complexity of run@ng a presidential campaign. they were all dreaming about something none of them knew how to do. and in the end, all that panic was for nothing. bill clinton won. he won with 43% of the vote. the next time we saw this kind of panic was on the republican side in 2016, when the access hollywood video came out and prominent republicans started pulling their endorsements from donald trump that very day. and talking about finding a way to replace him as their nominee. republican congressman jason chaffetz made his one and only appearance on that program that night, when the access hollywood tape broke and he said this. >> i can't, you 7jnow, my wife and i have a 15-year-old daughter. how in the world could i look my 15-year-old daughter in the eye and say honey, you know what? your dad endorses donald trump for president. i can't do that. and i won't do that. and i am withdrawing my endorsement. >> he wasn't the only one. a bunch of endorsements were withdrawn that day. no endorsements, none have been withdrawn from joe biden. none. jason chaffetz's daughter is now 23 years old and she has watched her father fully endorsed donald trump for president three times now. three times in a row, because only 19 days after jason chaffetz said that here on this program he reversed himself■ç a announced that he was voting for donald trump for president, and he did not explain to anyone how he explained that to his daughter. and we know who won that election. in fact, no party has ever abandoned a nominee. the last time we saw something close to it, a presumptive nominee drop out of the race, was in march of 1968 when president lyndon johnson announced he would not run for re-election. his vice president, hubert humphrey, who did not run in a single primary, won the nomination at the convention in chicago because back in those days most of the delegates went to the convention free to vote for anyone. that has never happened again, because of a rules change beginning in 1972 they created the current system of voters choosing the nominee throughtk" and it is worth noting in 1968, which you can read all about in my book about that presidential campaign, called playing with fire, hubert humphrey lost that election to republican richard nixon by less than 1% of the vote in the humphrey campaign, quite reasonably, blamed their loss on not being able to raise enough money in so short a time and not having enough time to build a presidential campaign around a candidate who was forced to enter the race so late and not run in a single primary. we won't get our first major clues about the effect of last night's debate, which was not seen by most voters, until polls began to emerge sometime next week. focus groups■ç last night indicated no real shifts among voters. there is an overnight poll indicating no shifts among voters. one of the striking things about focus group responses is that they knew donald trump was lying most of the time, even without donald trump being formally fact checked at the event. with the debate behind them, both candidates got back on the campaign trail today. >> we win here, we win the election. and this is how we are going to do it. we are going to stand up for the women of america. we are going to restore roe v wade as the law of the land. we are going to stand up for the right to vote. and we are going ■çto stand up for medicare and social security. we are going to fight for child care, paid leave, and eldercare. and we are going to keep lowering the cost of prescription drugs, not just for seniors, but for every single american. we are going to keep protecting the affordable care act. which is why more than 40 million americans have health insurance today. we are going to protect our children and get the weapons of war off our streets. we are going to provide clean drinking water, affordable high- speed internet, quality education for every child in america. we are going to secure our ■ç border and protect legal immigration. and, unlike the other guy, we are going to stand up to dictators like newton -- putin, because america vows that no one ever. and we are going to keep dealing with the climate crisis. >> global warming is fine. >> how about the fact that out of his 44 top advisers, including the vice president, aren't supporting him this time around? the people that know him best. 40 of them is that i will not support the man i work for this time around. it tells you a lot about the person who ■çknows him. he lied about how great he was on crime. i had to remind him that he oversaw a record increase in murder rates in 2020. on my watch violent crime has had a 50 year low. there is more to do. then i pointed out that the only convicted criminal on stage last night was donald trump. when i thought about his 34 felony convictions, his sexual assault on a woman in a public place as being fine, $400 million for business fraud. i thought to myself donald trump is not just a convicted felon. donald trump is a one-man crime wave. >> biden's department of justice has wrongly prosecuted hundreds of americans for peacefully protesting on january 6th. ■ç >> and then his biggest lie. he lied about how he had nothing to do with the insurrection on january 6th. we all saw with our own eyes. we watched it on television. we thought thousands of insurrectionist attacked the capital. we saw police being attacked. the capital being ransacked. a mob hunting for speaker pelosi. gallows literally set up for mike pence. and then he told them as he sat in the dining room, the private dining room one door off my oval office, he sat there for three hours watching the tv. he did not a single thing to stop it. nothing at all. i know we have more to do to get prices down. we have to take"çon corporate greed. they are making twice the profit they were before the pandemic. we've got to make housing more affordable. provide childcare. make the tax code fair. 16 nobel winners of the economic nobel prize have looked at my economic plan this week and issued a report, and trump's plan. here is what they concluded. they said that my plan would continue to grow the economy and bring down inflation. 16 nobel laureates. and trump's's plan would send the nation into recession and inflation soaring through the roof. >> all they know is electric. they want electric army tanks. they want electric planes. what happens if the sun isn't shining while you are up in the air? well, i told you there would"çb problems, sir. no, they want electric everything. >> folks, >> folks, i don't walk as easy as i used to. i don't speak as smoothly as i used to. i don't debate as well as i used to. but i know what i do now. i know how to tell the truth. i know right from wrong. and i know how to do this job. i know how to get things done. and i know, like millions of americans know, when you get knocked down you get back up.ç >> coming up after this break we will be joined by stuart stevens, who ran the last sane republican presidential campaign. and john howland will be reporting us, his reporting always digs deep into president campaigns. and selena maxwell will be with us. she actually talk to voters today. that is next. ♪) plateau de fromage! 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