There was a nine second video posted to twitter yesterday. It was not really in the national news. More of a local story. But it was an incredibly revealing moment about how republicans are going about trying to reelect donald trump. Heres what happens. There is a reporter. His name is matt smith with wisntt out of milwaukee, wisconsin, channel 12. He camped out the elections building in madison, and this is what he got. How many signatures did you collect . That video had the feel of a local reporter being somewhere at the right place, the right time and catching someone in the act. That woman who he asked the question of really did not seem to want to be on camera. There is a good reason for that. The woman you see there, right there, giving the no comment, she is a wisconsin lawyer. Her name is lane ruhland. As recently as last week, she was representing Donald Trumps president ial campaign in court. Shes the republican elections lawyer who worked for the Republican National committee during the 2016 recount in wisconsin. Okay . But she was not at the Elections Commission building doing business for the president of the United States or for the Trump Campaign. No. She was dropping off ballot signatures in an effort to get this man on the president ial ballot in wisconsin. Kanye west. One of the most famous people in the country, who is kind of, sort of running for president. Though, he has no real platform and it is unclear if this is a real thing or not. But there was a filing deadline yesterday in wisconsin. And, so, what do you have . You had a republican election lawyer who works for Trumps Campaign who worked on the 2016 election trying to get him elected trying to get kanye west on the ballot. And it was not just her. At least five republicans are involved in trying to get west on the ballot in various state, including a Convention Delegate for donald trump and a guy under consideration to be Trumps Campaign manager in 2015. Basically, most everyone involved in kanye west kind of sort of president ial campaign, if you can call it that, theyre all just republican hacks. Im going to talk to a reporter who has been doing great deep dives on what these people are up to in just a moment. But all this makes something really clear, which is this. Republicans know that donald trump cannot win with the majority of the country. We all know that, right . That ship has sailed. Look at the polls. Trump has not had a 50 Approval Rating at any point in his entire presidency. Hes just a little above 40 right now, down near like the bottom where his score is, around 40 . He is extremely unpopular. Based on the data we have that trumps absolute ceiling in a popular vote is probably around the 46 of the vote he got last time. Like thats the top. Okay . So think about this. How do you become president when you are unpopular . How do you win the presidency . In order to win the presidency, republicans basically need to do a bunch of things. They need to stack up a bunch of things to pull out what they did last time when donald trump won despite losing the popular vote by three million votes. One thing they have to do is try to split the antitrump vote because, remember, thats a majority of the country. Has been since the day he was elected. In 2016 you had jill stein. You had gary johnson, evan mcmullen, among others. Combined they won nearly eight million votes. Now in the absence of any other notable spoiler candidates, republicans are obviously pinning their hopes on kanye west to take enough votes to squeeze donald trump through. But thats just part of the strategy. You also needed to take it hard for people to vote, to suppress the votes of democratic voters, which the Republican Party is aggressively trying to do. Then they also have to hope in the next few months, say, russia delivers or some other foreign adversary. They give them some gift they could use. I dont know. Maybe just something you can use to try to destroy joe biden. And then you also got your attorney general william barr in the department of justice and maybe they could intervene as well. Maybe when you stack all that up, all those sort of dirty tricks, thats enough to get your wildly unpopular candidate over seeing a once in a century catastrophe with 160,000 dead americans elected president. It feels like a totally different strategy for victory than we have ever seen. But part of it is not completely new, right . Back when Richard Nixons hench men, you know, the criminals who helped him who ended up going to jail, they had a name for it. They called rat copulating. Number one operate i in the country who specializes in doing that. Though, they used a more obscene version of that phrase. One of the operatives in the country who specializes in doing that is a guy with a nixon tattoo on his back who lo and behold is a friend of the president and just got his sentence commuted so hes out of jail and free to roam, roger stone. Heres what he was up to back in 2000. Roger stone comes up with the brilliant idea of getting pat buchanan to run for the reform party. Yes. I encourage him to run. But i also, yeah, i have an interest of the reform party imploding at that point. But when he had the political stage to himself, he was trumped. Donald trump announcing he will switch from the gop to the reform party. You see what happened there . Buchanan is a threat to republicans. Roger stone gets him over to the reform party and then gets donald trump to jump in as well. The Republican Party has to do this kind of thing. Its been doing it since nixon probably and before. But particularly now, it is not a majortarian party. It is not even close. And when you start strike that strategizing how to keep the presidency with the minority of voters, when you accept you represent a minority, this is what it starts to look like. Voter suppression and that cynical effort to use kanye west to your advantage. Joining me now is cameron joseph, the senior political reporter of the vice news. He has been doing incredible leg work uncovering the republicans involved in trying to get kanye west on the ballot. Cameron, talk me through how you started looking into this and what you found. Well, honestly, early on i wasnt taking kanye that seriously. He had this random tweet. Dont really know the strategy. I was keeping an eye on it, but not thinking he was engaging that much. Then we saw that rally in South Carolina where it was clear he wasnt exactly a focussed president ial candidate and started to worry about his Mental Health. His own wife put out an Instagram Post talking about his bipolar issues. So, yeah, i was a little skeptical. Then we started seeing folks collecting signatures to get on the ballot, which is the real challenge of running for president and either acting as a spoiler or possibly getting on the debate stage, which i think the former is probably more likely than the latter. And all of a sudden some of it started having success. And it looked pretty messy at first, but things looked like they were firming up. I was keeping an eye on a few of these states. I just had a republican source in wisconsin reach out to me yesterday and say, hey, do you want to know who the woman in this video is . I said absolutely. And it was a senior republican lawyer in the state who, you know, worked for scott walker, was a deputy in the doj in wisconsin. Pretty senior, worked on a lot of campaigns. And, so, it really got me wondering what exactly was going on here. Then i found he was actively working for the Trump Campaign in their ad to get a super pac ad off the air. So its a pretty close link. And then i started sniffing around and figuring out where else that they had to actually submit signatures to, and colorado was next on the list. I had a source there who had been asked or the email was to a source that had been asked and then i got this email that was basically laying out, hey, i am looking to try to get can kanye west on the ballot. It was from a republican strategist connected in colorado. Currently in a very tough uphill battle for reelection. And, so, its all of a sudden a lot of republicans who are not jokes working on this campaign that a lot of people kind of dismissed as a joke initially. Yeah. We just put up that email, the most random favor to ask you and im not joking. There is some more reporting about the number of Wisconsin Republicans that have been helping to get him elected. You have to pledge to been an electoral college. They are basically all republicans. It does seem that this is essentially like a somewhere between a prank by these republican hacks and an actual effort to try to get him on the ballot. I heard someone said reporting today that some source Republican Party was hoping that kanye west could get 100,000 votes, which is what gary johnson got last time around. Yeah. And, look, this is a double bang shot. And donald trump, to mix a couple metaphors, drew up straight last time. He shouldnt have won. Everything fell into place the last week of the election and then he scraped through the last states. Wisconsin is looking like the best chance that he has to win again of those three states right now. And he won by less than the margin his margin was smaller than jill stein of wisconsin last time. She had 30,000 votes. They are hoping to create the magic of those dark arts and make this an again. I dont know his motivation. I dont think anybody knows his motivation right now. It is unclear whether he is actively helping trump. It looks like hes having some Mental Health problems, which is really tragic. Hes talented and creative thinker who might have been convinced or convinced himself that this was a good idea. But it didnt look like there was much happening around him leading to actual success. It wasnt clear anyone serious was working for hip. Frankly the people who are actively involved trying to get him on the campaign right now, it is unclear to me how they got involved. I think thats the next big shoe to drop here. Who is coordinating this . And we dont know right now. We know that in colorado and in wisconsin, in arkansas, which you mentioned earlier was a major gop operative. Very involved in cpac over the years has some trump ties. We saw in ohio he filed today, too. Republican lawyers were involved with that one as well. Kanye west laid out some conservative positions. He showed some friendliness with donald trump. But this is obviously their hope that this is going to ciphon off voters. They are hoping he can ciphon off black voters because obama wasnt on the ballot and Hillary Clinton struggled with turning on younger black voters. So i dont know if this is going to work. This seems like a lot of the things were talking about that trump is trying right now with this, with the actual function of the election, it may not work. But if things get tighter, this could make a difference. Yeah. Its very well said. We dont even know if hes got enough petitions once they get challenged, right . I saw someone reporting that he had, you know, not that many over the minimum you need and often petitions get challenged. This is an age old ritual. You see it in new york all the time. Dogged fights over line by line petitions. So we will see if the signatures actually work, if hes on the ballot. It is unclear how serious it is. The intent of folks like lane rulans. By the way, youre on tv for this. I hope you are proud of what you are doing. Thanks for being with me. For more on the Trump Campaigns strategy, i want to bring in david pluff, Campaign Manager for barack obama in his 2008 run for president. If you had no scruples or morals whatsoever, if you were just a hired gun and you were hired to run a National President ial campaign for someone where you and everyone around you knew there was essentially a 45 ceiling, how do you do that . Like what are your options . Well, chris, i would start off by saying all the campaign stuff is small. So the big problem is hes been a terrible president and hes mishandled the issue that matters most to the american people, which is the pandemic and resulting economic crisis. So, yes, he won. In 16 you mentioned 46. 1 national. He won wisconsin with 47. 2 . He won michigan with 47. 5 . So hes not going to get 49. 5 or 50 . Third parties look like theyre not going to get the significant vote they got last time. So, yes, i think you try to suppress democratic vote. You try to juice your own turnout, which is something they are working on, and you need to find a way to get some third party vote, which is what this desperate kanye west thing. If you are joe biden or any campaign you are involved in, you know you sweat everything because every vote counts and while biden has a huge lead now, you know, it is possible that race could tighten. Thats what you are trying to do. The most important thing would be to juice trump turnout beyond what trump thinks is possible. Thats where the big numbers come from. We obviously see all the things hes doing. Weve got foreign interference. Hes engaged in state Voter Suppression from the white house harder. Were going to have organize through that. Again, we just saw an election in 16 decided on the margins. The two elections i was involved with barack obama, we prepared for elections that would be on the margin. I think it is not surprising, they will turn over every seedy rock they can. We will find out whether its Jared Kushner himself, somebody in the close trump circle has been involved in this kanye west thing. Yeah. I want to say two things that you just that i want to emphasized. One, it is my position and it has been the position of folks like yourself that i cant i can think of no election in recent lifetime that turned more on the fundamentals than i anticipate this election will. The country is in the worst state its been in my lifetime and in generations and there is just misery everywhere you look and were all mourning day by day. 1,400 people died today. 10 times as Many Americans died today as were killed in that beirut explosion, today, just a wednesday under donald trump. Thats what were dealing with. I totally agree, thats above all else. It also strikes me, though, it is coming out of a there is a sense of desperation, which is like they will do anything. And i do think there is something dangerous about that, when you mary desperation and sort of an impulse for dirty tricks to state power, which is what we have right now with donald trump. Well, chris, listen, there is an election to win. You know, if you have my point of view. Thats the most important thing. And understand it could get close. But that is the fundamental thing. Using the levers of government to suppress vote, openly trying to, you know, recruit third party candidates. You know, we see what hes doing. He may give his Convention Speech at the white house, which, you know, with everything trump has done that may seem minor. These are norms being shattered all over the place. The question is just his politics going forward. Are there no boundaries and are there no rules. The other thing you will see with this kanye west thing and every other message that trump and his campaign is sending, the foreign powers around the world want to keep him in office. A weak american president if you are in turkey, north korea, russia, china, you couldnt dream of a better scenario. You know, they are sending clear signals. Theyre not smoke signals. You will see a bunch of advertising on his behalf, a bunch of organic content. Right. Trump is sending signals all over the world that hes in desperate shape. Right. And, you know, he may be on the phone with people. I dont know. Yeah, no. Thats exactly right. If you wanted to help donald trump if you were a foreign government, there is all sorts of pathways he highlighted for you. The guy on the runway with the two lipsticks. I dont know what the persons name is. Always great to get your insight on campaigns. Thank you for your time tonight. Thanks, chris. Next, chicago joins the growing list of major School Districts starting the year with entirely Remote Learning as reopened districts are already reporting cases of the virus. Those stories right after this. One of the signature images of the Great Depression were people being thrown out of their homes and living in homeless en campments called hoovervilles. And they were named after president Herbert Hoover and encapsulated everything he did wrong leading up to and through the Great Depression, not acting strongly enough to prevent those images. It might seem like those images are from another era, but unless something is done very quickly, we are about to see something very similar right now. The federal Eviction Moratorium in the Coronavirus Relief act expired last month, along with many state moratoriums. Tomorrow 14,000 evictions can start being served in new york city alone. In houston, courts are overloaded with eviction filings. In new orleans, a grandmother who also lost her job in the pandemic and owes thousands of dollars in back rent told a reporter, i dont have any money coming in. I dont know what to do. What an eviction looks like in his district. Peoples belongings piled up in front of their home. Thats someones life you are looking at. And beyond the cruelty, this is the stupidest thing you can do Public Healthwise in the middle of the pandemic. Forcing people out of their homes to live in increasingly crowded shelters or into crowded houses with other families and friends. And it is something that senator Majority Leader Mitch Mcconnell and President Donald Trump and other Senate Republicans could end today by passing the legisla