The tapes first aired friday night on the reidout. But first, more than 180,000 people have died of covid19 in the United States. The pandemic continues to unfurl across the nation. Impacting every corner of american life. Forcing both democratic and republican parties to host virtual and wildly different conventions and americans are spilling out into the streets to demand to demand justice for black lives in a way we have never seen before. But what has not changed is racial bias and racial injustice. So insidious that once again an unarmed black has been shot by police this time in kenosha, wisconsin. Jacob blake was shot seven times in the back and in front of his three children. As he tried to get into his vehicle. Police say they recovered a knife from his car after the shooting. His family says he is in stable condition and paralyzed from the waist down. They also said blake was handcuffed to his bed. But on friday, blakes attorney said officials removed the cuffs and vacated the warrant against him. America has been teetering on the racial Tipping Point throughout 2020. But this time, a Police Shooting set off the most impactful cultural moment in American Sports ever. With major sports teaming refusing to play scheduled games, choosing to use that platform instead to stand for black lives and disrupt the status quo. Joining me now is representative val demings of florida. Good morning. Good morning, zerlina, great to be with you. You look great in that chair. Thank you so much. Im so happy to talk to you. First about the racial reckoning that we are experiencing. You have a background in Law Enforcement and so youre a unique so your unique point of view and perspective on this issue is greatly needed at this time where we have to pull communities and also those in Law Enforcement together to reach some kind of understanding as we move forward. What would you recommend we do in this moment, not just to address the current cases of Police Violence and to get justice, but also as we go forward on a policy level . Well, zerlina, thank you so much for that question and first of all, let me just say this. I have been in this business, if you will, for a lot of years. I spent 27 years at the Orlando Police department and i had the honor as serving as the chief of police. You know, as we face this time in our nation, its really time i believe to stop talking about the police, talking about incidents that the police are involved in. And really Start Talking with the police. One thing i know for sure is that every community, black, brown and others, regardless of the economic base, the level of crime in those communities want to live and should live in safe communities. And so we really need to begin as we move from protests, we need to move to those discussions that directly involve the police. We have the International Association of police chiefs. We have the National Organization of black Law Enforcement officers. We have the National Police organizations and we need to talk and start having the discussions with Law Enforcement to look at what in the heck is going on on our streets and turn things around. As we also talk about Police Departments need to reflect the diversity in the communities in which they serve, we need to talk to our Law Enforcement leaders about, you know, their hiring standards and training standards and we need the critical discussions. I think the time is now to begin those discussions. In terms of training a lot of people are talking about reforming the Police Departments by starting with training and deescalation, but theyre trained in many of those techniques and yet we see so many of these videos where theyre clearly not using any of that training. So what do we do next . Do we try to screen those who are applying and being put into these Police Departments in a different way . How do we avoid having Police Officers on the streets clearly not listening and abiding by that training . Thats why i think its so important that we look at developing National Standards. Mandatory minimum National Standards as they pertain to training. Remember, we have about 18,000 Law Enforcement agents throughout the nation. Some are ten persons or less. Some are 36,000 persons. Many do not receive the same level of training. Many do not have the budgets to engage in things like deescalation training to any serious degree so they only meet the minimum standards mandated by the police. We are looking at developing some National Minimum standards as they pertain to Police Departments, whether theyre a tenperson agency as i said or a 36,000 person agency. I think those kind of standards particularly as they pertain to training are so very important as we move forward. Absolutely. Youre down in orlando and this week we saw a historic protest by the nba teams and the wnba and then all of the other sports, mls and Major League Baseball followed suit. Whats your reaction to really what i think is a cultural Inflection Point where sports are saying, we are going on strike until we really take this issue of Police Violence seriously. Well, you know, i was actually encouraged to see it because we have seen one lone professional quarterback protest years ago and look what happened to him. And so i guess he was right all along, huh . So i was really pleased to see members of the nba engage in this process because we really need to have everybody at the table. One of the things i frequently say, well, zerlina, many times when we talk about the police and the community we talk about them as two separate entities. But the community is the police and the police are the community. Were one and that includes our professional sports teams. Those in the medical professions, those in education. We need everybody at this table to solve one of americas most critical, but most familiar problems. We know that racism has been the ghost in the room for 400 years. We know that it finds its way into all systems and we need everybodys help and support to deal with it. Thank you, congresswoman val demings. Joining me now is john meacham author of his truth is marching on. Brittney cooper, author of eloquent rage. Thank you for being here this morning. My pleasure. Thank you. So john, to you first and just ask about as a historian what your gut reaction was to this week seeing the president after four days of pomp and circumstance, you know, violating the hatch act all over the place, staging his acceptance speech at the white house. What is the significance of that historically . Its i hope its our bottom. I hope we dont go any farther below that. Its a remarkable moment of blending the emblems and sanctity of governance with the business his necessary business of partisan politics. And that those two things have been kept porously separate, but separate, for centuries. And basically, President Trump predictably alas has confused his own personality. He has taken his own narcism and forced it to the center of the life of the nation and when you stand on the south lawn of the white house which is sacred ground in american life, and you make a partisan speech, you turn it you turn it into the republican event. Youre mixing things that in a democracy that is tenuous, were a very complicated and provisional experiment as you were just talking about in another context with congresswoman demings. We have to be eternally vigilant about making sure that the whole is more important than the individual. That is the nation is more important than the temporary occupant of the white house. And what you saw this week was President Trump once again weaponizing his own narcism. Weaponizing his own narz acism. Violating the hatch act its not violating the norms but violating federal statute. Or encouraging staffers to do so in the president s case. When you have on the one hand the president whos caging people hes claiming are violating laws, even though theyre seeking asylum, whos encouraging brutal treatment of black people by Police Officers, even if theyre not committing crimes. Whats your reaction to the fact that you have the president violating the law and then brutally treating black and brown people who he deems lawbreakers . Look, President Trump is a lawless person. We knew he was lawless before he had got into office. We had indicators that he had sexually assaulted women. People around him have gone to jail because they committed crimes on his behalf. He understands this job as basically a money grab to support the Trump Organization and his own individual pockets. Part of the challenge we have as a nation is that a significant swath of Americans Still support donald trump. They support his vision of america. And that is rooted in racism. It is rooted in a desire for power at the expense of everyone who is black and brown. So what we have in this problem is a spiritual kind of tyranny of the worst impulses as dr. Meacham said. Its a spiritual problem, its a problem of our own sort of moral crumbling happening in our faces. Its a question for us about whether we will continue to stand by and watch this happen or whether we will fight back. But the thing that irritates me about republicans is they scream and yell at black protesters about how we must respect the rule of law when the entire governance of the last four years has been all about a cruel mocking of the notion of a rule of law. I think thats such an important point. I want to pivot a bit towards what i think as black americans were experiencing in the year 2020 which is grief and pain and loss. Not just because of the covid19 pandemic, not just because like every other year the police are shooting and killing black people in the street, but also because we just lost Chadwick Boseman who played so many memorable characters including black panther. I wanted to ask you for your reflection on the pain and grief that the black americans are in and as the pillars of the democracy are seemingly crumbling. Yeah. Chadwick boseman was our shining star and, you know, he was a superhero. Not just in the movies, but in his life. In his fight against cancer. The ability to have a black superhero character at the movies in 2018 gave black folks so much joy. It was black panther really brought together our relationship to the African Diaspora to our roots and the places we were rich from and brought here and it staged an important cultural conversation and did it with a beautiful representation of black life. He was an amazing actor. He was a fellow alum of howard university. Im super proud of that. We are deeply, deeply grieving today because these representations they dont ju just theyre not just movies for us. When theres a cultural project that denies the black community all the way, and when our lives are unworthy of protection or care to see ourselves it becomes an experience of heightened importance. So black panther was not just a movie. All of the roles were not just movies but they affirmed the depths of our humanity. Part of what it feels like in 2020 is that we are losing the people that help us fight again because they show the best of us. And, you know, black people need a break. We need a break. We deserve a break. We fight for this democracy more than most people fight for it every day. We believe in the american project. So much more than the citizens that we see on the right and frankly i think many black americans are overwhelmed and devastated today. And, you know, i hope that i hope that our country learns as doc rivers said to love us with half of the love we have it and i hope we can fight for a world that black life is not cut short because of the many Health Challenges that beset us. I send my love to his family and all of us in black america who mourn today. Thank you so much, brittney cooper. I think so many of us out there relate to everything you just said in terms of the pain that we feel as american citizens. And i also want to thank jon meacham for joining us this morning. Thank you. Coming up, the dangerous consequences of reckless president ial rhetoric. Thats next. Et. Secret stops sweat 3x more than ordinary antiperspirants. With secret, youre unstoppable. 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The president s actions and his language are in fact racist. Things like there are good people on both sides or send them back where they came from. Those words gave permission to White Supremacists to think that what they were doing was permissible. And i do think that the president s divisive language is indirectly tied to the attacks we have seen in the last two years. Elizabeth newman is a former Homeland Security official under trump who this week endorsed joe biden connecting trumps rhetoric directly to acts of white supremacist violence. The same week a 17yearold vigilante and trump support took to the streets of kenosha, wisconsin, with a military style rifle amid black lives matter protests and shot three people, killing two of them. His attorney said he was acting in selfdefense. To be clear, there are no overt links between the shooter and white supremacist groups or militias and the two victims both appear to be white. But this isnt the first time a mass shooters actions seem to line up with the president s rhetoric. Like the shooter in el paso who echoed trumps language about an invasion of migrants or the shooter in christchurch, new zealand, who praised trump as a symbol of white identity before killing 49 people at two mosques. Joining me now is Elizabeth Newman, former Homeland Security assistant in the Trump Administration. And malcolm nance, author of the plot to betray america. Thank you both for being here today. Elizabeth, i want to go to you first because you said something that i think is really interesting to unpack. About the president s rhetoric and how it is tied or connected in any way to violence that we are actually seeing in the real world. From your experience in the department of Homeland Security, do you see a link between what the president is saying and what vigilantes and white what it supremacists are doing in real life . Absolutely. His rhetoric is giving permission for ideas and groups that had previously been hiding under a rock somewhere to come out and be in full force and that what that does is it creates opportunities for the small, small percentage of the population that would possibly consider carrying out an act of violence, the more you make his rhetoric mainstream the more likely you can recruit those individuals that would then carry out that act of violence. So its almost youre expanding the pool of potential, Vulnerable People and then adding fuel to the fire, creating more fear, creating these usually are scared people. They have been scared about something. Wrongly scared, you know . People coming into our country who are desperate and in need and seeking asylum, these are not people to be fearful of, but the president has told them to be fearful of and he gives example after example and that creates in certain individuals the need to go and protect. Thats that vigilanteism and unfortunately hes his rhetoric is adding fuel to the fire and we have more and more examples of people trying to take the matter into their own hands with devastating consequences. Absolutely. Malcolm, in your book, the plot to destroy democracy rise of w nationalism and white supremacist violence to authoritarianism and what russia is actually doing across europe and here in the United States. How do you see the significance of their actions and their influence on the rise of White Nationalism in the United States in the trump era . Well, its a fascinating subject, but, you know, people always say that were talking russia russia russia. Thats because behind a lot of what were seeing, there is the you know, the shadowy hand of russia, but not in the direct way that some of the pundits may want to think that were going overboard with. Al russia over the last since the end of the soviet union, has been turned into an authoritarian state with a dictator like ruler who understood the strategic goals of the soviet union and dismantling american democracy and also using their money to coop these democracies. They didnt start in the <