Defeated president incapable of accepting the fact of his loss. With the gop paving the way for trumps lies, standing up for the truth falls on Public Servants like chris krebs. He was fired for doing his job and refusing to participate in the president s big lie that the election was hacked. There is no foreign power that is flipping votes. Theres no domestic actor flipping votes. I did it right. We did it right. This was a secure election. Krebs appeared on 60 minutes last night and inspired another round of rage viewing from donald trump, who is holed up in the white house ranting and fuming about his loss. The Washington Post in a stunning piece of reporting from the weekend, writing that his isolation at this point resembles that of a mad king. Quote, the facts were indisputable, President Trump had lost, but trump refused to see it that way. Sequestered in the white house and brooding out of public view after his election defeat, rageful and at times delegal yus in a torrent of private conversations, trump was, in the telling of one close adviser, like mad king george, muttering, i won, i won, i won. However cleareyed aides may have been to his loss of president elect biden, many of them indulged their boss and encouraged him to keep fighting. They were happy to scratch his itch, this adviser said. If he thinks he won, its like, shh, we wont tell him. And while the republican secretary of state of georgia retuesdayed to be corrupted by georgia and local Elections Officials declined to deny the will of the voters in their states and judges hearing the prif louse lawsuits brought by the trump team have laughed them out of court and scolded them on the way out the door, republican elected officials are still carrying the mad kings water. You think the president should officially concede . Well, i i understand the legal reason why he should not, because he has some appeals that are going, so, i recognize that, but beyond that, its president elect biden. We had problems all the way back at the primary. We had investigations going on. Now weve got more investigations. We need to get to the bottom of it and hold people accountable. I dont think it was rigged, but i do think there are some things that were done that shouldnt have been done and i think there was some element of voter fraud, as there is in every election, but i dont have any reason to believe that the numbers are there that would have made that difference. It was not rigged, there was no voter fraud, there are no more appeals and theres nothing to investigate. So, for all the americans desperate to turn the page on trumpism, the refusal to acknowledge joe bidens win is causing significant damage to those of us who live in reality. Including to our children. The Washington Post reports on West Virginia social studies teacher and his struggle against disinformation in his classroom. Quote, never before, cruey said, has he seen such a high level of emotion from children, such blind devotion to their frommer iffed candidate, most often donald trump. Nor has he seen anything like this level of mistrust, which he said is persisting among students weeks after the results of the election supposedly were finalized. Donald trump poisoning the publics faith in our elections is where we start today with some of our favorite reporters and friends. Michael steele, former rnc chairman and msnbc political analyst is here. Also joining us, jonathan swan, reporter for axios, and yamiche yacindor. Michael, i have talked to people that have tried to reality of the loss, people who have been in the political arena and im sure you have a lot more insight than i do, but what is the state of the effort to introduce the reality into the president s world view . Well, the way it typically happens is, trump has a conversation with these aides in which hell you know, ill give you one example, i was talking to a Senior Administration official last week and they were part of what was supposed to be a policy conversation with the president but it was actually impossible, because he was getting sidetracked, you know, every other breath, talking about the dominion Conspiracy Theory and Everything Else. So, he is still on this idea of, you know, the election was stolen and fraud, but in the next breath, hell say, well, it doesnt matter, im going to run in 2024, no one will beat me, et cetera, et cetera, so, he has actually processed reality on some level, but its sort of irrelevant, because what hes doing publicly, as you described at length in your introduction, is, he is still and there are tens of millions of people that believe him, he is still telling them that election was stolen, even his own government is making now preparations for the incoming min stray and is acting like a government and an iner circle thats known its lost. You know, jonathan, in your tremendous interview with the president , you were in this role of introducing reality, in terms of data, scientific information about the pandemic and intelligence, its been reported on about russia, to him, and i wonder if you could just offer your analysis of what you thi think what percentage of his mind do you think accepts the reality that this was a decisive defeat, free from fraud, that if you understand the way ballots are counted, there is no way that you can get away with cheating, because they are paper ballots. So, even if you think there was cheating, and chris krebs explained this on 60 minutes last night, someone who was fired for securing our election and not allowing fraud can you explain what that collision of reality, the reality is, there was no fraud, republicans are saying nothing, none of that is real. Its just a man who cannot come to grips with the fact that he lost decisively. Well, one thing that i was surprised with is there is actually a line that can be crossed in terms of the level of Conspiracy Theory. So, you know, its okay for Rudy Giuliani to say theres mass freud everywhere, et cetera, but apparently the line, you know, which that cannot be crossed is to say, actually, this is an International Conspiracy involving hugo chavez, venezuelan front companies, the cia, bribes to republicanelected officials to throw elections to communists. That was apparently a bridge too far for President Trump and they sort of pushed sydney powell off to the side. But Everything Else is in his mind acceptable. I have no way of knowing what he truly believes. I can tell you, he is privately saying no different, in terms of saying the fraud, its fraud, i won, it was stolen, i havent ive been talking to people ever since the election who were in conversations with him in his inner circle and im yet to identify a single conversation in which he said, oh, actually, i think i legitimately lost. He, to my knowledge, has never said that privately. Michael steele, this matters and i am as interested in moving on from donald trump as anybody, but when you read the story in the Washington Post and i think we all know this in our own lives, trump has convinced his voters of the most dangerous lie yet. It was dangerous when donald trump told everyone that reporters like jonathan and yamiche are the enemies of the people. It was dangerous when donald trump told people he believed Vladimir Putin over the american intelligence agencies. It was dangerous when he tweeted threats against andy mccabe and his wife and jim comey. It is always dangerous when he lines to his voters, but it is creating an unprecedented and perhaps unsustainable instability to make his supporters, to make half of this country doubt the validity of joe bidens victory. Nicolle, the way you led into this conversation was so expertly done and touched on a number of chords that resonate in the question. And i think we have to step back a moment and say that donald trump didnt have to do a lot of convincing here. Donald trump didnt have to do a lot of lying to the supporters. He picked a scab in which they already believed a lot of this. It was beneath the surface. It has been there for a long time, this this overwhelming sense of mistrust of our institutions and our executive and political leadership. Its been there. Weve seen it. It manifests itself during my watch during the rnc, it was in place during the bush years. It goes back to Newt Gingrichs uprising in the house of representatives back in 1994 and even before that. So what donald trump was able to do was to give it legitimacy, to give it voice, to give it actual voice in the body of the president , in the body of the presidency. And i think we have to understand that this is so much less the work of the mad king than the mad king actually reflecting his mad people. And by that, i mean angry, frustrated. Suffering victimhood and all of that. So, i you know, theres a lot that we want to put in Donald Trumps doorstep and deservedly so, but i think we also have to contextualize where a lot of that originated from, not with him, but what makes what hes done so bad is that he is the president and most president s, all president s, up to him, understood that this was there, but still guided the country away from that. Did not give into those feelings and tried to address them in other ways. This president said to hell with that, were all in on it. And here we are. 70plus million votes later. Michael steele, i understand the how, what i dont understand is the why. Because this isnt just, you know, an antielite world view, stick it to the mainstream media, theyre out to get us. This is a lie. It is a lie. And i dont understand why roy blunt goes along with the lie. I dont understand why Asa Hutchinson says, oh, we got to let this play out. Theres nothing to play out. Judges appointed by democratic and republican president s have thrown every lawsuit out. Kelly loeffler said that we have to let the investigation finish. There is no investigation. There was no fraud. No widespread fraud, no foreign conspiracy, there was no fraud. The recounts have turned up votes that are by and large exactly in line with the vote on election day, so i understand the how and i understand that longstanding institutional distrust. I dont understand the why. Why are republicans willing to sell their soul for a big lie . Because theyre afraid of the realities of it. Theyre afraid of the very people that they have sold this lie to. This goes back look. You have broken promises. These are folks, and ive had these conversations where theyve had, you know, you guys lied to us about overturns roe versus wade, you lied to us about, you know, unfettered spending and that you wouldnt engage in that and on all of these things now, albeit, trm drm is, you know, had a share in that lot of that, but heres the rub, for those individuals you named, those elected officials, theyre afraid of those people behind donald trump with their pitch forks. Thats why they do what they do. Thats how they perpetuate the lie, instead of coming out and speaking to the why. And heres the example of it. Georgia. So, the lie yeah. And the conceit has been, oh, you know, vote by mail is bad and they all bought into that, right . Why . Because they thought it would serve a particular narrative that would leave them unscathed. But now, they need those very voters to vote by mail and they dont believe them. And thats the problem. Yamiche, georgia is going to bring all of this into sharp relief for all of us, to see how voters have processed all of this disinformation from the president and a lot of his supporters, as well as standing up for the truth, which are also trumpbacked republicans in the state, the governor and the secretary of state, their lives are threatened. I want to show you more of the 60 minutes interview from chris krebs last night. Lets watch and well talk about it on the other side. This is him being asked about rudys press conference. As you watched Rudy Giulianis News Conference at the Republican National committee headquarters, what were you thinking . It was upsetting, because what i saw was a apparent attempt to undermine confidence in the election. To confuse people, to scare people. Its not me. Its not just us. Its the tens of thousands of election workers out there that had been working nonstop, 18hour days, for months, that are getting death threats. For trying to carry out one of our core Democratic Institutions . An election . And that was, again, to me, a press conference that i just i didnt make sense. What it was actively doing was undermining democracy. And thats dangerous. Yamiche, chris krebs is not some deep state actor, he went to work in the trump administration, political appointee, nonpolitical job, as lots of National Security posts are. Has there been any background filled in on why he was fired and why the president continues to be soer talted by him simply affirming that he secured our election and spared it from foreign interference . Well, President Trump has been really open about why krebs was fired, and its because he went against the lie that the president is telling that the election was stolen from him. Christopher krebs decided that he wanted to risk everything, including his career and his job in order to tell the American People, no, in fact, the integrity of this election should not be questioned. In fact, people were given a proper way to vote and a proper means to vote and this election went by and large went without a hitch in terms of the way things happened. The thing that Christopher Krebs is taking in is this idea that Rudy Giuliani is doing the thing we were preparing when we thought it was going to be russia and china and iran and all these places that were going to come into the United States and try to convince the American People not to believe in the institutions of merge. In fact what it is is the president of the United States himself doing that. So, what Christopher Krebs is trying to describe there is a Disinformation Campaign playing out before our eyes, with the white house and with the president s allies being these Center People who are doing this and so the president fired Christopher Krebs because he didnt want to go along with the lie. And it goes back to what michael was just saying. There is this feeling, when i talk to republicans, that theyre very scared of the voters that believe donald trump. They want these people to continue to be republicans, to continue to show up in future elections and as a result they dont want to cross the president , who will probably have an outside insfluns in the Republican Party long after he is he leaves office. Jonathan swan, im sure you follow the sort of few profiles in standing up to the president and in some instances, theyre just people who have already been to war with him and lived to tell. John bolton is one of them. And while he is still a die hard conservative, he has been speaking out since the election about the dangers to our democracy and he writes this. Rather than aligning with principle, which trump lacks, longstanding conservatives torqued themselves uncomfortably to support his positions. This sun natural and unwise and we must stop it. Is there any conversation happening around protecting local elected republicans whose job it is to certify the votes in their state ahead of most of that certification is early this week and the whole vote is certified at the beginning of this month. Is there any concern that by targeting these people by name in places where they dont have motorcades and secret service protection, that theyre endangering some of these officials, fellow republicans . Well, some of these state officials have talked about that openly, i mean, theyre having to get security, simply for doing their job and so yes, not only have these conversations had to happen, but steps have had to be taken to protect them physically, which is chilling. It is remarkable to me at this point so far after the election that we havent seen more i did think by this point we would have seen more elected officials congratulate joe biden, describe him as the president elect and it is remarkable, i mean, i know we keep, you know, its been one of the themes of the last three and a half years of, you know, donald trump controlling the party and dominating the party and people being afraid to cross him but it really is quite striking that that persists this deep into the lame duck, into the period where you would normally, you know, any normal universe, you would have everyone recognizing joe biden as the president elect and moving forward. It is quite stunning. Jonathan swan, i think it is the current standing that no elected republican in a leadership position in the house or senate has acknowledged joe bidens win and Donald Trumps defeat except liz cheney. Is that your reporting . And is there any indication they ever will . Will joe biden ascend to the presidency with the other party not giving him the legitimacy he deser deserves . I do think when the electors come together and when the states are all certified that you probably will see a grudging admission from leadership that the results are in and looks like joe bidens going to be the president elect, but you know, i wouldnt even necessarily bet on that. Mitch mcconnell has stayed right away from this. Hes worried about this georgia runoff, the two runoffs on january 5. Theyre in this awful predi predicame predicament, which Michael Steele described earlier, where youve got youve got to motivate the trump voters but at the same time, the president has told them that the election was stolen and its fraudulent and i dont think theres many things that are more demotivating for a voter than to know that your vote doesnt count because the