Acts of violence and provocation in the tinderbox that is Donald Trumps america. Joe biden today sounding all of the president ial notes that donald trump cant or wont on the raging pandemic and the unrest on american streets. Rioting is not protesting. Looting is not protesting. Setting fires is not protesting. None of this is protesting. Its lawlessness. Plain and simple. And those who do it should be prosecuted. Violence will not bring change. Does anyone believe there will be less violence in america if donald trump is reelected . We need justice in america. We need safety in america. Were facing multiple crises. Crises that under donald trump have kept multiplying. The common thread, the incumbent president who makes things worse, not better. An incumbent president who sows chaos rather than providing order. An incumbent president who fails in the basic duty of the job. Joe bidens condemnation of the violence stands in direct contrast to donald trump, who spent all day yesterday tweeting praise for his supporters, who wrote in open trucks, waving flags, but seems reminiscent of faraway wars. From the washington post, scenes of trump faithful firing plant and pellet guns during a trump cruise rally caravan through downtown portland, a liberal bastion that has been the site of weeks of street demonstrations, raises the specter that the summer of unrest reaches a new phase, in which the president s ral ees have fighting back. The portland mayor accusing trump of inciting the violence after a man was shot and killed there among his clashes between those protrump caravan and black lives matter protesters on saturday. He encouraged them to come into our community. And previously, he has actually encouraged or at least tacitly approved of violence. The tweets that hes been putting out in the last 48 hours, attacking democratic mayors, attacking those who are trying to bring resolution to the violence in their local communities. He has an opportunity to uplift us and bring us together and help us move through this difficult situation in our nations history. And instead, he chooses to play petty politics and divide us. That donald trump approves of and incites and encourages violence is beyond dispute. It was he who said that he could shoot people on fifth avenue and not lose a single vote. It was donald trump who encouraged states to, quote, liberate themselves from his own governments recommended stayathome orders. He is the one whos called for roughing up protesters at his own events, and he has said that he would pay the legal bills for anyone who got in trouble for doing so. It is that record of inciting violence and division that drove the wisconsin governor and kenosha mayor to say trump is not welcome in their city at this time, stating his presence would not be helpful to a city in the process of healing. Trump, however, doubled down on his plans to visit after their calls and will go to kenosha tomorrow to survey damage from last weeks protests and meet with Law Enforcement. As of now, there are no meetings scheduled for the president to speak with jacob blakes family. With the country on its knees, suffering from a deadly pandemic that trump failed to stop and weakened economically from trumps failures to protect it, trump sees his path to victory paved by scaring people into blaming someone other than him for the chaos he unleashed. Reality versus trumps amplification of division is where we start today with some of our favorite reporters and friends. Former u. S. Senator from missouri and current msnbc political analyst, Claire Mccaskill is here. Also joining us, democratic strategist, basil smikle and White House Reporter for the new york times, eli stokols. Eli, i want to start with you. And i wonder if you can just take anyone whos doing a little mental decluttering last week through the weekend of events, as things grew more tense on the streets of portland, donald trump torqued up his divisive distribution of tweets to his millions of supporters. And through today, after local leaders called for him to stay away, insisted that hes coming. Well, if we go back all the way to thursday, the day the president accepted the republican nomination, joe biden was out there saying, this seems to be a president who is rooting for violence. And he pointed to the comments by Kellyanne Conway during a television interview, in which he said, this stuff helps us. Thats pretty much what she said. And democrats have been seizing on it ever since. Now, trump went out that night on the White House South Lawn and gave a pretty buttoned up speech for him after, you know, capping off a fourday rnc that every night in primetime featured a lot of efforts by women, by black voices, to soften the president s edges and to paint a picture of a president that we all know is far rosier and kinder than this president actually is daytoday. And friday, the president goes up to New Hampshire and holds a rally and is right back to being his more incendiary self, talking about the protesters, basically dismissing all of them as a mop, and really going back to the fearmongering that is at the heart of his campaign pitch, that was maybe toned down a little bit during the rnc. And on sunday, after playing some golf, the president just really having an active day on twitter, and tweeting and retweeting a lot of messages aimed at stirring up fears about these protests, by continuing to pointing to the most divisive elements out there, the black lives matter, the calls to redress systemic racism. He is painting over all of that and saying, look at these protesters. They want to defund the police. Thats the campaign strategy. And its remarkable to watch. Because today at the white house, press secretary Kayleigh Mcenany was asked about the president and his responsibility for enflaming some of this violence by encouraging his own supporters to take to the streets. And she said that he hasnt seen the Trump Supporters in the back of the pickup trucks going through the streets of portland and firing paintballs and ore ammunitions at the black lives matter protesters. Trump himself retweeted video of just that on sunday. She was asked, what does he make of the 17yearold in kenosha. The apparent trump supporter, kyle rittenhouse, whose social media was littered with protrump posts, video of himself at a january trump rally. This is the person accused of shooting and killing two people who were protesting jacob blakes shooting in kenosha. And the press secretary just sa said, we dont have any comment on that. Theres a real selectivity here in picking out the elements of this, that the white house, the campaign believe benefit the president politically and ignoring pretty much everything else. And that is what former Vice President joe biden was trying thil to highlight, some of these inconsistencies. Thats what he was trying to highlight when he spoke today in pittsburgh. Let me show you more of that speech that eli is talking about. Vice President Joe Biden today in pittsburgh. You know me. You know my heart. You know my story. My familys story. Ask yourself, do i look like a radical socialist with a soft spot more rioters . Really . I want a safe america. Safe from covid and looting. Safe from racially motivated violence. Safe from bad cops. Let me be crystal clear. Safe from four more years of donald trump. Now, just a little over 60 days, we have a decision to make. Will we rid ourselves of this toxin . Or will we make it a permanent part of our nations character . Thats some strong stuff from joe biden, Claire Mccaskill. Yeah, i think what happened, we have entered the phase of the campaign where theres a lot of hand wringing by supporters. And theres a lot of pressure. And in this instance, i think that pressure was felt by the campaign. And i think joe biden realized he had to get out there and he had to go on offense. I mean and by the way, hes going to have to do this every day. They cant just give one speech totally agree with you, yeah. Because donald trump is going to be on his Little Machine with his thumbs, retweeting white nationalists, retweeting falsehoods every single day, incessantly. So theyre going to have to do it. Theyre going to have to say over and over again that joe biden is no for rioters or people who set fires or burn buildings or break windows. But heres the thing, nicole, that i think is really interesting about this. The visuals here matter. America knows that trump is ginning up this chaos. They know that. They can tell it, they can smell it. That he wants this conflict. And the suburban women that are supposedly at play here and that trump is trying to say, you should be afraid, you know what they see . They see all of his supporters with ar15s. They see a 17yearold going into a volatile situation with a long gun and killing people. You know, and i was reminded over the weekend by about one of my favorite johnny cash songs. Dont take your gun to town. Trump is saying to these people, take your gun to town. Lets see if we can have a rumble. And, you know, the american suburban women, they see that. And they dont like everybody having an ar15. Thats part of the problem in america right now. Claire, let me follow up with you. Having worked on republican campaigns, the three things you try not to talk about in the last 70 days, even if youre a republican, abortion, gun rights, and these polarizing issues. You almost want the swing voters to forget about sort of that dark underbelly of the rightwing coalition, especially after tragedies like newtown and like parkland. Those are the things that really cross pressure independent women. And when we talk about independent women, i spent two months out interviewing independent women for the today show in 2016. And today theyre registered as democrats, sometimes theyre registered as republicans. But they follow events. And i think youre right, though, about joe biden. He needs to get on the air, on camera, every single day to counter the disinformation coming from donald trump about all of this. And i think hes landed on the right message, that this is Donald Trumps america and Kellyanne Conway gave away the farm when she told us that he does this because it benefits him politically. But what do you make of the fact that polls suggest that that convention of his, so far, didnt move anybody in terms of their favorable ratings of donald trump . I think the first poll that came out was abc, and donald trump has a 31 approval rating, down 4 points since the middle of august. Yeah, heres the thing. They tried to soften him, but he doesnt want to you know, they did try to soften his edges. But you know, he doesnt want his edges to be softened. He wants them to be razor sharp. He wants to be the bad guy, the tough guy, he wants to be that guy. He doesnt want to be the soft guy. So his true self is whats going to come out in the next 60 days. And that convention is already in the Rearview Mirror and people took it for what it was. It was a staged effort trying to make him into something he is not. Now, very quickly after it was over, he has shown what he is. He will somebody who wont condemn somebody who has been charged with murder and he will not do anything but encourage his supporters to strap up with their ar15s and go out there and do what youve got to do to defend america, which means, lets go have somebody else shot. And the guns is a huge part of this. And women in america are sick of all of these guns and not having any gun regulations whatsoever. Basel, let me read you something that Greg Sergeant writes in todays washington post, which is a pretty inciteful analysis. What trump really represents is the promise of law and order without the rule of law. He stands for this in combination, as part of the same package, often quite deliberately so, but law and order without the rule of law is the wielding of power and violence, both state violence and private vigilante violence, unshackled from laws and rulesbound processes. When i read that, i remember that donald trump isnt for the law at all. Hes an unindicted coconspirator in the Southern District of new york. Hes been pardoning Campaign Aides and allies. Hes undermined the rule of law inside the military by reaching deep inside their sacred process and pardoning people accused of war crimes. I mean, hes not for law. And he is creating disorder. And its really an effort to bam boozel his supporters. Hes the opposite of law and order. I googled some of the ways that that phrase has been used in the past. And its never been used by such a by someone so associated with lawlessness. And part of what his base liked about him was that the rules didnt apply to him. I dont know that theyre i mean, they bought that hed built a wall, because i guess they thought hed built casinos and didnt know that many of them went bankrupt. But i dont think that theyre going to buy hes done anything in the categories of law and order, basel. I dont think theyre going to buy that, but the other side of the equation in my opinion is intimidation. He may have been bamboozeled his supporters, but hes also in favor of anticipation and thats why some of the attacks on mailin voting are so problematic for so many of us, because it does amount to voter intimidation. Let me say this. And its important they need to raise this. Over the weekend, we lost chadwick bozeman, the actor from black panther movie and today we learn that we lost georjohn thompson from georgetown, two amazing africanamerican leaders in their own right who used their vehicles to rewrite a narrative about black life in this country, other than what we have been seeing in the media. And to me, what donald trump is doing and has done is continuing to chip away at this very reductive view of black and brown people in this country. And lets make no mistake about it. He needs america to buy into that view, because that is, was you alluded to earlier, the only way that he gets reelected, were people to be afraid of this socalled this dystopian future that he painted in that convention. And then on top of that, suggesting that hes the only one who can solve it. So whats important about what senator mccaskill has said is that what joe biden and quite frankly, Kamala Harris need to do is continue to fill that gap in sort of our thinking about whats happening in america right now. Because if there is no voice in there giving sort of the ability for americans to see the world through their eyes, through joe bidens eyes and Kamala Harris eyes, all theyre left with is donald trump. And that is not only scary for the suburban voters that Claire Mccaskill is talking about, but its also very dangerous to the lives and livelihoods of people that look like me. And so there is a lot of b bamboozeling, but also intimidation and real fear youll have these Trump Supporters on the streets intimidating many of us in many more ways than just a protest in a city somewhere. Lit impact many aspects of our lives and thats the slippery slope that donald trump wants to be on, but we have to do what we can to keep it from going down that path. Let me just press you a little bit. I mean, thats the path he wants to be on. And the poll numbers i put up suggest theyre not working. And i am i was in the white house on 9 11. I lived that history. Im a student of other president s in this countrys hour of crisis. I could also recite president obamas and Vice President bidens remarks about newtown. I remember in college, watching bill clinton in oklahoma city. And all of those men were driven by this sort of singular function of the job, which is to hold the country in their arms and hug it and try to make it stop hurting. Additionally, at each of those three moments in their presidencies, they were the most popular of their prosecuteses. Uniting the country in her hour of pain also polls tremendously well and dividing the country in her hour of crisis polls terribly. And the country is undeniably in an hour of extreme crisis. We lose a thousand people a day to covid still, every single day, and thats on the low end of the spectrum. We have more than 6 Million People in this country infected by covid. We are the worst in the world at controlling the spread of covid. And the Economic Impact of those failures of Donald Trumps, not to prevent it from coming here, but to contain it, to fight it, to be a wartime president that he infafantasized about one daym the podium, that failure has cost him. So my only pushback to what you said, basel, its not clear that even if we wants to be there, that its going to help him in the end. What im reacting to and responding out of is just fear and perhaps an overabundance of caution. Because i just feel like anything can happen right now. And i know a lot of voters are not sitting on their haunches and thinking that democrats have it in the bag. I think its important to believe and to act in a way that says that he could still win this thing. That this race can still get tight, if we dont if were not careful, if were not vigilant. Thats the fear that i think we should all be walking away with. Because i know everything youve said is absolutely true, absolutely true. But i also remember that this that his election was won largely on a cultural war also. Not just facts, not just history, not just good data, but also cultural issues that we are going to consistently have to battle along with all of the factual information that you laid out. Basel, sadly, i think youre more right than i am, but im glad we can continue to have this conversation. Claire and basel, thank you so much for starting us off and making me think. When we come back, new reporting on the extent that the Justice Department went to block an investigation into Donald Trumps decadeslong personal and financial ties to russia. And despite what we know is happening today with regard to russia and interference in our election, trumps director of National Intelligence is ending inperson briefings to congress. Well ask a member of the Intelligence Committee about how dangerous that