Today about the role the president s racist language may be playing in the uptick of violence, particularly as we learn more about the shooting in el paso. Its language that targets elected officials of color, immigrants, Asylum Seekers and athletes, language amplified damy on the president s twitter feed, featured prominently at his maga rallies and sometimes preceded by similar attacks by fox news and other right wing media. Phil rucker from the Washington Post puts the finest point on question surrounding the president s role writing this, after yet another mass slaying the question surrounding the president is no longer whether he will respond as a president once did but whether his words contributed to the carnage. From the moment trump rode down his goldplated escalator four years ago to start his renegade run for the white house, us against them language about immigrants has been a consistent and defining feature of his campaign. Now for his presidency. Absent from his repertoire has been a forceful repudiation of the White Nationalism taking rise on his watch. And as watching the cia fight the russian attack on our democracy, while trump often seemed to row in the opposite direction, questions now about whether the fbi will white White Supremacy while the president encourages hatred. Congresswoman escobar, whose district includes el paso, spoke out about the president s role this morning. Words have consequences. And the president has made my community and my people the enemy. He has told the country that we are people to be feared, people to be hated. He has done that at his rallies. He has done that through his twitter. I heard earlier someone mentioned he may be coming here. I hope he has the selfawareness to understand that we are in pain and we are mourning and we are doing our very best in our typical, beautiful, grateful el paso way to continue to be resilient. The president made remarks this morning 50 hours after the first shots rang out in el paso at a walmart. But nothing he said today erased his lengthy and ongoing screed against americans of color and immigrants. Theyre bringing drugs and crime, theyre rapists. You know what they are, they are thugs. Build that wall, youre right. I think theres blame on both sides. I think theres blame on both sides. You know what, were not letting these people invade our country. If you look at the border and look at the hundreds of thousands of people that are invading or at least trying to invade our country. It is an invasion, you know that . I say invasion. Isnt that terrible . I dont care what the fake media says, thats an invasion of our country. But how do you stop these people . You cant. Thats only in the panhandle you can get away with that statement. According to two sources, members of the crowd yelled shoot them. The president s response, only in the opinion handle. That is whe panhandle. Thats where we start with eddie glaude from american studies at princeton university, politics etd iter for the daily beast, sam stein is back, raul reyes should we confess that i practiced and still got it wrong . Columnist for usa today, whos from el paso, was there this weekend and joins us. Former republican congressman now an independent, david jolly, former assistant director for counterintelligence at the fbi, Frank Figliuzzi is here, and with us today the piece we quoted, White House Bureau chief for the Washington Post, phil rucker. Phil rucker, i will out myself. I emailed you last night and said i thought your reporting was some of the best and distressing of trumps presidency and i want to read what you wrote. This gets to the heart of the matter. The overlap of the killers manifesto in Donald Trumps language. Portions of the 2,300 word essay titled the Inconvenient Truth closely mirror rps rhetoric as well as the language of the White Nationalist moment, including the warning of the spanish invasion of texas. The author is so aligned with the president he decided to include in his manifesto by clarifying his views predate trumps 2016 and arguing that and blaming him would amount to fake news. So the killer so aligned with trump that hes more trump than trump . Its chilling, nicolle. Reading that manifesto, you see so many parallels to the kind of message trump delivered from the oval office, from the president ial podium at his rallies, from his twitter which are president ial statements and what we saw today at the white house from the president when he gave that scripted speech at 10 00 a. M. Was almost a repudiation of what we heard previously from trump. There are two trumps on display, the president ial scripted trump and the id that bashes immigrants and talks about them as sub human and talks about this invasion. So the president s going to have to grapple with his rhetoric and his words and the extent to which that language has congress contributed to the tensions and divisions in this country. And perhaps the very carnage we saw in texas. The words that i can hardly believe as they come out of Philip Ruckers mouth, Frank Figliuzzi, but you predicted this. You so much as predicted that the tinderbox that phil and peter baker of the New York Times have written about, this countrys sort of state of play when it comes to questions of race. So amped up by the president s rhetoric, colliding with this rise in White Supremacy and domestic terrorism. Talk about what you predicted, what you feared, and what has come to pass. Well, i have never felt so badly about being right before. I wish i were wrong. But i had to put pen to paper because it was instinctive. This isnt rocket science. If you have been in the intelligence community, you have an instinct to identify a threat, push it out and get the intel and prediction out. What i saw happening was the theme of the president attacking the socalled squad, the elected Congress Members of color, telling them to go back where they came from and the attack on Elijah Cummings and the city of baltimore where no human, quote, would want to live. I saw that resonating among the white hate groups, the White Supremacist Movement and i saw them being encouraged and boldened by it. That kind of was a trigger that i saw developing that i needed to talk about. What i see is uncanny parallels between the radicalization you see in islamic, violent extremism, radicalization to commit jihad, go to jihad, and then what we are seeing in the White Supremacy movement, so how do you stop it . Were talking about health care and Mental Health and guns. Yes, we talk about that but one way to stop is it is for the driving radicalizer on the other side, that guy has to come out and say i announce thirenounce reject it, i denounce it. I dont need it anymore. Stop it. Its not american. And we didnt hear that. The president to use a baseball phrase today was swang aa swing miss. He didnt say i renounced. He said the nation must condemn racism. Guess what . We condemn it already. But how about you . You are the radicalizer in chief. We didnt hear that today. Were going to spend more time on this later in the show bit, fra but, frankly, let me stay with you on this. The parallel was haunting. I was in the white house on 9 11. I know everything we did and the policies and choices and decisions will be debated until the end of time. But after 9 11 and the attack on the homeland the questions are not whether or not they will be attacked again but where and when . We can debate which ones were right and which ones were wrong but the condition duct from the u. S. Government was from the top to the bottom to make policies for the attack. What youre saying is the person at the top of the federal government didnt even say i condemn the terrorist conduct. I am saying he didnt go far enough. He tried, he swung, he didnt make contact with the ball. As a result of that those who are unstable amongst our society, who dont make the subtle distinction between a license to hate and then a license to murder, they dont see that distinction. I hear people say well, the president didnt directly call for violence. Hes not responsible for el paso. The subtle distinction between a call to act and call to hate is lost on people who are of the extremist ideology, seeking to belong to somebody bigger than themselves and they found it. And the only way to stop that and disrupt the radicalization process is call it out and stop them. He didnt do it. So i fear theyre going to interpret his press Conference Today and that subtle but important difference between i reject and we must reject, theyre going to say that was the lip service that he had to pay to us. His script writer made him say that. He doesnt really mean it. And thats not disrupting the radicalization. Frank, i was reminded about the power of speech by a former Senior Intelligence official who said, remember the length we want to after 9 11 to find the perpetrators, the purveyors of terrorist speech . We did things that will forever alienate people from the bush presidency like looking for phone records, wiretapping. We were so hungry for the speech. Now the speech is on a twitter feed. Its on radio station. Its on the internet. What do you do when the speech is everywhere . You dont even have to look for it. Well, first we need a whole new government approach, as you said, like we had after 9 11. We literally change the laws. We created an entire Government Agency called the department of Homeland Security. We created an executive called the director of national intelligence. We all pulled together and changed our government to combat the threat. Now what are we hearing . We are hearing from the fbi that the new threat by far, the number of cases p. The numb, th arrests is all about white terrorism and white hate. Yet all we are hearing is its some kind of Mental Health problem. We are not seeing the allout government response necessary to get this job done. Thats the threat. Raul, lets talk about the targets. The targets were moms and dads communities of color buying pencils and backpacks and notebooks for their kids in backtoschool shopping. As you mentioned, i was there in el paso for a family reunion. Before any of these details came out, one thing i heard was this shooter want from el paso and that was true. El paso is a very, friendly and very safe place. In fact, i knew it was targeted because this mall is a place everyone in el paso has been there a million times. And with regard to the president s remarks, sad to say i dont really see at this point anything he can do in words and actions throughout his presidency, hes basically declared open season on latinos because we are one of his favorite targets. And its not just the language he used. He mentioned calling mexicans drug dealers and rapists when he came down the escalator. That was day one. Then it escalated into attacks on the journalists and attacks in the socalled mexican judge. Then ramped up to the invasion, warning people of a caravan and words like infestation. What do you do with an infestation . The natural conclusion is attempt extermination. To me theres very little distinction between inciting this violence and the fact its now happening. Sad to say, its probably inevitable. He knows what hes doing. This resonates with a portion of his base and he has succeeded unfortunately of turning the entire conversation about latinos in the United States to hinge on illegal immigration, undocumented people and the purported threat latinos pose to this country. We rarely hear latinos in education, views on health care and climate change, and thats in large part to him. In that sense very tragically he has succeeded. What do you do when certainly the last republican president fought for, sought and not ideal but 44 of latino voters, so politically power signed the last republican administration. President obama used to try to pass comprehensive reform with latino leaders. And now you have a president talking about exterminating latino. To me its not even a question what this president could do. It brings me no pleasure saying this. I just think with this administration, its too late. And its not even a political question. Obama, george w. Bush, h. W. , all of the president s in modern history made sincere outreach to latinos, whether or not their views happen to align with mainstream latinos. They wanted to be in the report. This president doesnt have the slightest modicum of respect, virtually no regard for our communities. Weve seen the way hes treated some of the most prominent people, latino achievers in this nation and his words strike me as utterly insincere, completely inauthentic. If you paid five minutes of attention to trump over the years, you know hes just reading words over a teleprompter totally passive voice. The fleem who have spoken, youre the third person to say those words are diskengted conn what he does and why on this program we do not air them. You were there with the attacks on the squad that week and we played obama singing amazing grace. We have that video again. Its also worth for main talking about how far from normal we are. Because i think some of the feelings are disoriented by this conversation. Actually even as i ask you the question about the lightning of extermination in my head i couldnt remember that was something he said about baltimore or something said by a surrogate or something he said about the latino community, but its on us to be specific to decline it where you have to pull down the files of insults that he used for different Minority Groups is so overwhelming at this point. I take your point. The questions have all been answered, what now . Its a very difficult question, nicolle. I mean, america is not unique in its sins as a country. Were not unique in our evils to be honest with you. I think where we may be singular is our refusal to acknowledge them. And legends and myths we tell about our inherent goodness to hide and cover and conceal so we can maintain a kind of willful ignorance that protects our innocence. The thing is when the tea party was happening, we were saying pu pundits, its just an economic populous. When people knew, people knew social scientists were already writing what was driving the tea party were anxieties about demographic shifts that the country was changing, they were seeing these racial, ambiguous babies on kyrgios commercials. The country wasnt quite feeling like a white nation anymore. People were screaming from the top of their lungs, yo, this is simply not just economic populism. This is the ugly underbelly of the country. See, the thing is is this, i will say it and i will take the hit on it, there are communities who have had to bear the brunt of white americans confronting the danger of their innocence. And it happens every generation. So somehow we have to kind of oh, my god, is this who we are . And just again, heres another generation of babies, think about it, a 2yearold had his bones broken by two parents trying to shield him from being kid. A woman who had been married to this man for as long as i have been on the planet almost, lost her husband. For what . So what we know is the country is playing politics for a long time on this hatred. We know this. Its easy for us to place it all on Donald Trumps shoulders. Its easy for us to place pittsburgh on his shoulders. Its easy for me to place charlottesville on his shoulder. Its easy for us to play el paso on his shoulders. This is us. And if were going to get past this, we cant blame it on him. Hes a manifestation of the ugliness thats in us. I have had the privilege of growing up in a tradition that didnt believe in the myths and the legends because we had to bear the brunt of them. Either were going to change, nicolle, or were going to do this again and again and babies are going to have to grow up without mothers and fathers, uncles and aunts, friends, while we try to convince white folk to finally leave behind a history that will maybe, maybe embrace a history that might set them free from being white. Fight. Fight. Lord help us. I cant follow that. First off, beautifulfully sa. But i want to sub lament that a tiny bit. Youre spot on. It is a political story that takes place in 2009, not racial or culture. It involves one of the early controversies of the Obama Administration. It says a lot to me about where we are now, which back then the department of Homeland Security under Janet Napolitano put out a study. The study said, warning, theres a rise in right wing extremism and White Nationalism. The study was relatively noncontroversial if you looked at it. There was danger. What was interesting is what happened in the aftermath, which was a huge you uproar among republicans, accusations of bias within dhs and most importantly from this conversation, the Obama Administration backed down and apologized. The reason i think this is an important data point in this story is we do not structurally have the institutions or the willpower to confront these things. If we back down in face of backlash when the data is on our side, were not going to be able to deal with this stuff. If we have a congress that has to depend on one person in the senate to bring legislation to the floor in order to get gun control legislation passed, we do not have the structures to handle these types of issues. It may not be our complete history may be dont road we can get through this but at this point we look at this and say wow, donald trump, you know, hes spurred a lot of this hatred and true, he has, hes the pied piper of this stuff. But this predates him. Its the inability to stand up for your own study at dhs that predates donald trump, the rise of the tea party not calling out what it was that predated donald trump. It was welcoming birtherism when trump was just part of it that predates donald trump. Hes absolutely right. We need hard conversations about whether our political system is up for the challenges. I think its not just about our political systems. And i agree with what both of you are saying.