President ial debate before hillary clinton, staged a surprise News Conference featuring several women who had accused clintons husband of Sexual Assault or harassment. Donald trump was down in the polls and the access Hollywood Tape had just come out 48 hours earlier, revealing trump openly admitting to his predatory behavior. It was the lowest moment of the president ial race for trump. Hillary Clintons Campaign called the stunt with her husbands accusers a quote, act of desperation. But heres the thing. Desperate people will do desperate things. Here we are exactly four years later, and consider the week that President Donald Trump has had. The president and the first lady tested positive for covid19. The president was airlifted to walter reed where he was hospitalized for three days, during which time his doctor delivered briefings on the president s condition that were either incomplete, misleading, or contradictory, sometimes all of the above. And the president was loaded up with an experimental antibody cocktail as well as an antiviral medication and steroids generally reserved for patients with severe cases of coronavirus. And the number of people connected to the white house and the Trump Campaign testing positive for covid19 grew by the day, sometimes by the hour. Were now up to 27 confirmed cases, including the president s campaign manager, the White House Press secretary, and several of her staff, trumps top speechwriter, two highranking military officials, three republican senators, and the chair of the Republican Party. This has also been one of the worst weeks that the president has had in the polls as voters have digested not just his covid diagnosis and the reckless behavior that produced it but also the president s disastrous performance in his first debate with joe biden last week. The National Polls have been wild this week. Cnn has joe biden up 16 points over trump at 57 . An nbc news wall street journal poll pegged biden at 53 , 14 points ahead of the president. Even fox news has trump trailing by 10 points in its latest poll, five points further behind joe biden than he was last month. Now, battleground state polls are mostly closer, but still very bad for the president. And this week the president learned that the october surprise that he was counting on does not appear to be coming. Trump has for months been touting the imminent release of the Durham Report, which he said would prove once and for all that russia the russia investigation was all a big hoax, and then maybe attorney general bill barr and his handpicked investigator, john durham, would start arresting and indicting Obama Administration officials. There was reportedly so much pressure on john durhams team to produce a report before the election that his top aide quit in protest. Well, this week bill barr has reportedly been telling Top Republicans that there will not be a Durham Report before the election, which might explain why the president has been publicly berating bill barr in recent days. But were going to get to that in just a minute. Also this week the president lost yet another court fight to try to keep his tax records out of the hands of a new york grand jury. But of course the New York Times already has many of those records, and the paper this week continued rolling out stories about the president s precarious financial situation as revealed by those documents. The president s son eric was deposed this week by new yorks attorney general in an investigation into possible financial crimes at the president s company. And so here we are. It is friday. The election is less than a month away. We dont know whats going to happen in that election, but by every metric we currently have, the president is losing, and he has just had a very, very bad week. And desperate people do desperate things. The president this week went on a multihour, all caps twitter spree demanding to know why his political opponents, including joe biden and barack obama, werent being arrested. Where are the arrests, he tweetshouted. He called into the fox business channel for an hour, lashing out at his attorney general and his secretary of state for not doing their part to undercut or indict his political opponents, abruptly pulling out of the next president ial debate on october 15th, and appearing to blame gold star families for giving him coronavirus at a white house event. He released a couple of rambling videos from the white house in jarringly thick, dark makeup even for him and said getting covid had been a gift from god and hed been cured and he felt great, really good, so amazing, better than he did 20 years ago. Apropos of absolutely nothing, he said on twitter hes pulling all troops out of afghanistan by christmas, which was apparently news to the United States military. He said he needed those troops home so they could be ready to fight north korea or china or russia. Also by tweet the president abruptly pulled the plug on talks over a new covid relief bill until after the election, which would have left millions of americans struggling without help for months. And then just as abruptly the president sort of tried to take it back maybe. After his own Justice Department foiled a militia plot to kidnap and possibly kill michigans governor, the president attacked her for her measures to control covid in her state. In other words, he attacked her for the very things the Militia Group said it had targeted her over. Today the president spent over two hours on Rush Limbaughs radio show, where among other things he went on a profanitylaced tirade against iran, saying to iran, quote, if you f around with us, if you do something bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done before. I know it sometimes seems like we say this a lot, but even for this president , this is erratic, manic behavior, and its uncomfortable to say it, but we honestly do not know if any of the president s behavior has anything to do with the medications that hes been on. From everything we know, President Trump may be the only person on earth to get the particular cocktail of medications that hes been given. One of those medications is a powerful steroid that is known to produce hyperactivity and mania. But then again, maybe this is just donald trump. Hes behaving like this because we are less than a month from the election and he feels like hes losing, and this is what we should expect. Thats where we are. The best Case Scenario here is that our president s baseline behavior is simply indistinguishable from that of a person jacked up on heavy steroids. But its also clear that the president s personal Health Crisis is inseparable from the countrys public Health Crisis and that both are creating a political crisis for this white house. As of tonight, a week after the president announced his positive test result, the white house still will not answer the basic simple question of when the president s last negative test was before he tested positive for coronavirus. My intrepid colleague, hallie jackson, spent a full five minutes today trying to get a White House Deputy press secretary to say when the president s last negative test was and if he was tested before the debate like he was supposed to be, and the White House Deputy press secretary simply would not answer. If they are willing to go through the kind of verbal gymnastics that this guy kept up for five straight minutes, chances are the answers not good. And the answer matters. Minnesota Public Health officials report that there are now nine coronavirus cases linked to the president s rally there on september 18th, including two hospitalizations and one person is in the icu. Well, the president was back in minnesota for a rally in duluth on september 30th, barely 24 hours before he announced his own positive test. So how long was the president infectious . Was he getting tested . How many people at how many trump events in the days leading up to his positive test should be concerned, especially if the white house isnt do a bangup job of Contact Tracing . Just last hour the president appeared on fox news for an interview with one of their onair doctors, who himself has played down covid19 in the past. Trump claimed hes been off all medications for eight hours, and, again, just keeps on saying how good he feels. The white house says the president will host a public event on the south lawn of the white house tomorrow, speaking to supporters from the balcony. Then hell hold a Campaign Rally in sanford, florida, on monday even though we dont know exactly where in the course of his illness he is. The second president ial debate, which had been scheduled for next week, was canceled today by the commission on president ial debates because after trump pulled out, joe biden made other plans. And, again, here we are. Its been one of the craziest, most unnerving weeks of this presidency, and that is saying something. We thought wed seen every crisis, but this is new. This is the president feeling cornered and losing with less than a month to the election. What happens next week and the week after that . After the kind of week we thought it could be helpful to check in with yale historian and professor tim snyder. Mr. Snyders joined this program a few times before because he literally wrote the book on how to recognize whether the authoritarian inclinations of this president are shifting toward shifting the country really toward authoritarianism. That book also tells us what we can do about it and what we can learn from other countries that have gone through something similar. The book is called on tyranny twenty lessons from the twentieth. Heres lesson number ten. Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights. So my question is what kind of spectacle might we expect when a leader like donald trump feels desperate . And i know who to ask. Joining me now, tim snyder, professor of history at Yale University and author of a new book our malady lessons in liberty from a hospital diary. Thank you for being with us tonight. I have to be honest with you. We really tumbled this around all day, the team on rachels show, to say is this alarmist . Should we be talking about a slide to authoritarianism . Do all these lies add up to something . What does a desperate donald trump do because a desperate donald trump is different from a desperate ali velshi or tim snyder. Hes got things at his disposal that we dont have. What do you make of this . I think he also has problems that you and i dont have. Hes in a different situation than he was in 2016. In 2016, he could win or he could lose. Now in 2020, you dont see the kind of lightheartedness that you saw in his campaign in 2016. Everything is dead serious, so serious that as you say, it looks desperate. And there are reasons for that. One is that he doesnt have money. Hes about half a billion dollars in debt, and once hes no longer president , people are going to come to collect. And the second is hes under investigation for crimes. He and his company are under investigation for crimes. So long as hes president , he can hold that off. So from his point of view, this is a struggle for life and death. Hes not just desperate, as you say, because hes down in the polls or because he thinks hes going to lose. Hes desperate because hes in that typical authoritarian situation which is unfamiliar to americans but very familiar to people around the world, which is that if the leader loses, hes afraid of jail, and hes afraid of the poorhouse. So thats the structural situation that hes in. Theres no reason to be hysterical about it or consider this alarmist. Thats simply the way hes looking at the world right now. Whats the other side of the equation . Whats the part that were not hearing where there are probably military leaders in this country saying, you all are talking about what happens if he doesnt have a peaceful transfer of power. Dont worry, we got this. Or people who are thinking through how they will preserve the institutions that we all rely upon, that we think of as democracy. Thats a really important question because the institutions dont protect themselves. The institutions only protect us if we protect them first. So if we sleepwalk through november thinking that everything is going to work out automatically, then were going to have big problems. Its right as you say that the military will not intervene. However, what mr. Trump has been trying to do since the summer are two things. First, hes been trying to change the department of Homeland Security into an agency which acts against what he perceives to be domestic terrorist threats. And he, himself, has defined a threat as people protesting around the right to vote. The second thing that hes done is hes been encouraging american citizens to take part in voter intimidation. So these are the things that we have to watch out for. These are the things that we need to be alert for even as we are calm. By the way, these are also the things that Law Enforcement has to Pay Attention to. In the weeks to come, Law Enforcement at every level, local, state and federal, needs to think, am i following the rules here, or am i bending or breaking the rules on behalf of someone who is desperate to stay in power . But what a strange position for Law Enforcement and military to be in, to have to think about whats my oath to, who is my oath to, who is my responsibility to . Two days ago, professor snyder, i was thinking that we were going to be talking about this encouragement of armed people or Trump Supporters to go to polls and conduct poll watching. And now im realizing that the encouragement of armed people may have something to do with this situation in michigan, in which the president had there was one answer to that, and that was to condemn it. And the president stopped short of it. In fact he stopped well short of it, criticizing the governor of michigan for the same grievances that the militia members who have been arrested have had. Thats a dynamic we have not faced in america since the ku klux klan really. Again, i mean this is part of a larger pattern that the president encouraged citizens to rebel against statehouses months ago. The president has been saying for months that its all right for to rebel against democrats at the city and state level. The president s been suggesting the whole summer and the whole fall that the real problem in this country are democratled cities and democratled states. The purpose of this is to create a background atmosphere in which voting itself is going to seem like its questionable and can be challenged. Let me tell you after that long intro about everything thats happened in the last week, you are a calming influence. Professor tim snyder. Professor of history at Yale University and the author of on tyranny twenty lessons from the twentieth century. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for your time tonight sir. We have much more ahead but i want to give you an update on a big story were following tonight. Hurricane delta. Were out of letters. Thats why were on the greek alphabet now. The storm made landfall as a category 2 hurricane in southwestern louisiana at about 7 00 p. M. Eastern time tonight, just 13 miles away from where hurricane laura hit six weeks ago. More than 200,000 people in the area are now without power. Some people who fled the last storm have still not been able to return to their homes, and its currently making its way up the southeastern United States as a weaker category 1 storm. Wind gusts in southwest louisiana have reached nearly 100 miles per hour. Some areas are reporting deadly storm surges of more than eight feet of water. The storms going to continue to head north through mississippi, then tennessee through the weekend. Hurricane delta is the tenth named storm to make landfall this year. Thats the second highest number of named storms in a single season in modern u. S. History. Hurricane season has nearly two months to go. Climate change . What Climate Change . More news ahead this busy friday night. Stay with us. Stay with us tonight, ill be eating a veggie cheeseburger on ciabatta, no tomatoes. [hard a] tonight. Ill be eating four cheese tortellini with extra tomatoes. [full emphasis on the soft a] so its come to this . [doorbell chimes] thank you. [doorbell chimes] bravo. Careful, hamill. Daddys not here to save you. Oh i am my daddy. Wait, what . What are you talking about . Look limu someone out there needs help customizing their Car Insurance with Liberty Mutual, so they only pay for what they need. False alarm. Only pay for what you need. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. The letter to cdc director Robert Redfield says in part, quote, the first thing would be to face the truth. You and i both know that. One, despite the white house spin attempts, this will go down as a colossal failure of the Public Health system of the country. The biggest challenge in a century, and we let the country down. The Public Health texts of the future will use this as a lesson on how not to handle an Infectious Disease pandemic. Two, the cause will be the incompetence and illogic of the white house program. Three, the white house has had no hesitation to blame and disgrac