0 mask. so a little bit longer. hanging in there means those who don't really want to get vaccinated, are more likely not to get vaccinated. an overwhelming majority. people looking out for each other. and i think because they see it is working. >> well we will see, your >> thanks, chris. that is "all in" for tonight. "the rachel maddow show" starts now with ali velshi. good evening, ali. >> chris, we have not crossed paths in the last year and a half, so we caught up a little bit. >> nothing like a little makeup room chitchat. that's been missing from all of our lives for a long time. >> great to see you, chris. rachel's got the night off. thanks to you for joining us. we're coming up on nine months since the january 6 attack on the united states capitol. i think for all of us, amid the deluge of video and photographic documentation of the attack that emerged in the days and weeks afterwards, there are certain moments, certain images from that day that are burned into our minds. moments like this one. a man in a very distinctive stars and stripes jacket with "trump" emblazoned in big letters on the back steps toward the capitol police who are guarding a doorway and unloads a fire extinguisher at them at close range. and when the fire extinguisher runs out, he chucks it at them, at the police officers who are under siege. he chucks it as hard as he can. one of the astounding things about this video and that guy in it is that for more than two months after the insurrection, that guy was not arrested. the fbi had his face on a wanted poster but had not even identified him, even despite that jacket that you couldn't miss. it was online sleuths working from home, sifting through hours and hours of footage of the insurrection, who actually figured out who this guy was. when reporters ryan riley and jeslyn cook called him up, he appeared blissfully unaware that the fbi was looking for him and he confirmed it was him, robert scott palmer of clearwater, florida, in the eye-catching jacket. he told reporters that the biden administration was trying to, quote, vilify the patriots, end quote, who were in the riot. but the reporters noticed he seemed to grow increasingly anxious as the call continued. he said, quote, i didn't do anything wrong, unquote, but he hung up when "the huffington post" asked him about the fire extinguisher. because it is one thing to talk in general terms about being an innocent patriot being vilified. it's another thing to answer specific questions about how you unloaded a fire extinguisher at a bunch of besieged police officers and then threw it at them. 12 days after that piece appeared in "the huffington post," robert scott palmer was arrested and charged with assaulting those police officers. today he pled guilty in court to a felony. the specific charge is assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers using a dangerous weapon, inflicting bodily injury. and he admitted in court not only to using the fire extinguisher, but also to throwing a wooden plank at the officers. the judge ordered mr. palmer incarcerated until his sentencing when he faces up to 20 years in prison. make a note of that. that will become important in just a few minutes. many of the more than 600 people arrested for their involvement in the capitol attack are ohm charged with or are being allowed to plead to misdemeanor offenses, and they're getting off with little to no prison time. for months now federal judges in washington have been expressing frustration at what they see as too much leniency in the treatment of many of the insurrectionists. the federal judge who presided over robert palmer's guilty plea today in a separate case this morning, well, she did something no judge has done before in a jan 6th case. she handed down a harsher sentence than what government prosecutors were asking for. this particular capitol rioter pled guilty to one count of, quote, parading, demonstrating, or picketing in the capitol. that's a misdemeanor crime. it carries six months in prison. that parading charge is actually one that several capitol rioters have pled to. the prosecution had recommended that this guy get three months home confinement plus probation. but the judge rejected that recommendation and ordered the defendant to spent 45 days in prison. the judge saying from the bench, quote, there have to be consequences for participating in attempted violent overthrow of the government beyond sitting at home. she continued, the country is watching to see what the consequences are for something that has not ever happened in the history of this country before, for actions and crimes that threaten to undermine the rule of law and our democracy. and our democracy. that's the important part. and you can understand where the judge's frustration is coming from. if january 6 was a violent insurrection against the government, an attempt to block the peaceful transition of power in our democracy, the consequences for that cannot just be a few hundred people being charged with holding an illegal parade because it's not what each individual person did on their own. it's what everybody involved did collectively. that's the insurrection. and we do have a body that's tackling this bigger picture. the house select committee investigating the january 6th attack is reportedly moving ahead with its work, even if we haven't heard all that much from them publicly in recent weeks. politico reports that the committee has held its first closed door transcribed interviews with willing witnesses. and new ones are scheduled for this week. this thursday, by the way, is the deadline for former trump administration officials including chief of staff mark meadows and one-time chief strategist steve bannon to report to subpoenas the committee issued last month. the committee subpoenaed documents from them and ordered them to sit for depositions next week. the chairman of the committee, bennie thompson, says if they don't meet the deadlines, the committee will probably issue criminal referrals for those former trump officials. even as many of the people who physically breached the capitol on january 6th have been tracked down and arrested and made to apologize in open court and pay some kind of price. the people who created the conditions for that attack, the people who teed up the event and stoked the crowds and who turned the january 6th certification of the election into something that they thought had to be stopped, those people are not only walking around free. they are still pushing the narrative that produced the insurrection. take this lawyer, john eastman. he's revving up the crowds here at the president's stop the steal rally just before those crowds stormed the capitol. eastman was not well known at the time, but we've recently learned that he was the author of a memo for president trump that detailed exactly how trump could use the january 6th election certification process to overturn joe biden's win and remain in power. and trump and his allies were following eastman's instruction manual right up until januaryth when vice president mike pence refused to carry out his part of the plot. so trump and eastman riled up the crowd which went and stormed the capitol instead. "the new york times" this weekend did a deep dive on john eastman, telling the story of how donald trump discovered him in 2019, seeing him on fox news, of course. and how eastman became trump's source for all kinds of hair-raising legal theories that would allow trump to do things he wasn't actually allowed to do, right up to and including the instruction manual for the coup that trump almost pulled off. john eastman's memo is one of the most terrifying pieces of evidence that has yet to come to light from those last several weeks of the trump administration. it shows just how much planning went into trying to keep trump in power after he lost and how close they came to succeeding. but not only is john eastman so far successfully wandered off back into semi-obscurity after the whole coup thing didn't work out, he's still working at it. when "the times" reached him for their article this weekend, john eastman was still pushing the narrative that the election was stolen from trump. he told "the times" quote, there are lots of allegations outs there that didn't get their day in court and lots of people that believed them and wish they got their day in court and i am working very diligently with several teams, statistical teams, election specialist teams, all sorts of teams, to try and identify the various claims and determine whether they have merit or there is reasonable explanation for them. all sorts of teams. he's working with all the teams. and on one level, who cares if this kooky lawyer wants to work on election conspiracies in his basement with all of his teams? well, we should care because this stuff is the engine that's powering all the various republican projects to undermine americans' faith in our elections like the sham election audits being pushed by to create the incorrect impression that there was something wrong with the 2020 election and with our election systems as a whole. it's powering the republican takeover of elections boards and clerks' offices in state after state, and all the pro-trump candidates for secretary of state across the country with the goal of controlling the machinery of elections for 2022 and 2024. and it's powering trump's own 2024 candidacy. "the washington post" reports that trump is already running in all but name. he's not officially declaring his candidacy yet because he would have to rejigger his whole fund-raising apparatus to comply with presidential campaign finance laws, and right now most of trump's fund-raising just goes straight to trump. why mess with a grift that's working? but trump's former press secretary said today that if trump does run and win in 2024, his presidency, quote, will be all about revenge. well, that's comforting to all of us. it isn't something we know how to deal with in our country. we never had one of our two political parties become an explicitly anti-democratic party enthralled to a twice-impeached demagogue. we don't really even know how to measure how much danger our democracy is in because we've never seen it tested like this, certainly not in living memory. so one of the weird things about our current political moment is that some of the people who are turning out to be the most insightful about what we are going through now are those who are studied the decline of democracy in other countries. the rise of authoritarians in other countries. if we look around and have trouble understanding exactly what's happening in our country because we've never faced anything quite like it, well, other countries have. you may remember that during donald trump's first impeachment, one of the most compelling witnesses to testify was this woman, fiona hill. she was the top russia analyst on trump's national security council and part what was so compelling about her testimony were her explicit warnings. she repeatedly warned that what the president and his allies and some of the very members of congress who were sitting on that impeachment committee were doing was dangerous. they were pushing wild conspiracy theories about american elections and about trump's political enemies that were in many cases manufactured by foreign intelligence agencies with the goal of destabilizing the united states. she warned that pumping that poison into america's political bloodstream was a danger to democracy. fiona hill knows something about dangers to democracy. she is, after all, an expert on russia. well, now fiona hill has written a book. it is called "there is nothing for you here: finding opportunity in the 21st century." i want to read you what she writes about the january 6th insurrection. quote, the failure of trump's slow motion, in plain sight attempt at a self-coup was not preordained. ultimately it was thwarted only by individuals at the key institutions that typically would be involved in executing such a plot. first and foremost, high-ranking members of the military resisted trump's efforts to personalize their power. if they had gone along with it, the outcome of trump's self-coup could have been completely different. other government institutions also held firm. for instance, throughout his tenure, with the help of republican lawmakers, trump filled more than 200 federal court vacancies with what he kept calling his judges. trump judges all the way to the supreme court, however, respected their oath of office. they rejected the president's appeals to overturn the legitimate election results. state and local government election administrators also refused to be swayed. throughout history, coup plotters have seized control of the main communication channels. trump did not physically take radio and tv by storm, but he continuously discredited the mainstream media who were critical of his behavior. he directly messaged 88 million people who followed his twitter account to propagate false, self-serving narratives and blatant lies. after the events on january 6th, twitter and facebook belatedly acknowledged what trump had done and cut off his accounts. in the aftermath of trump's disastrous reign, it was tempting to breathe a sigh of relief, but that would have been premature because there was no indication that his dynasty would fade away. and american populism looked like it was here to stay unless we could find a way to mend our socioeconomic and political divisions. end quote. joining me now, fiona hill, former white house adviser on russia. she is the author of the new book "there is nothing for you here: finding opportunity in the 21st century" which comes out tomorrow. dr. hill, thank you for being here. thank you for writing this book. you've been studying russia and authoritarian regimes for decades. you're trained to recognize the signs of a nation spiraling toward authoritarianism in a way that the rest of us are not, which is why no one should take lightly when you write in this book, quote, russia is america's ghost of christmas futuren, a harbinger of things to come. for me, watching trump's disorganized but deadly serious attempt at a coup unfold, the clearest and most unmistakable parallels were with russia, unquote. so i ask you, what to your trained eye are some of those parallels? >> well, thank you, first of all, for having me on tonight. there are sadly many parallels. i think anybody who is even the most casual student of russia would see them right away. one of the most striking, in fact, is actually unfolding with an anniversary almost today, in fact. back in 1993, in october 1993, president yeltsin of russia fired on his parliament what was known as the russian white house, after a constitutional dispute with his own vice president, and also the speaker of the parliament, over excessive powers for the presidency in an amendment of the constitution. and instead of resolving this in, you know, the way that one would hope and would expect in a constitutional manner or through political debates, yeltsin actually turned the guns of the russian military onto the white house, onto the russian parliament. that was a pretty striking, rather shocking episode. and, of course, the parliament capitulated, and yeltsin went through that, which gave the presidency greater powers. in a way that is a parallel with what happened on january 6, when president trump was trying to pervert the constitution to keep himself in power. there are many similarities like this. and of course it's really jarring when you think about the united states starting to resemble anything like post-soviet russia. >> this is why the book was such a good read, because these things come to mind for you immediately. they don't come to lined for a lot of americans because we don't have those parallels. one of things that was compelling was that you wrote that in 2020, our democracy did hold the line. the military, the courts, the vice president of the united states, refused to go along with trump's attempted coup. is that to you a sign of the resilience of our democracy or a sign of the fragility of our democracy, that that's how close we came to democracy falling? >> i think it's a bit of both. but actually you did miss out there, although, you actually talked about it in your overview, what happened on capitol hill in congress. because what we saw, however, was certainly members of the republican party not live up to their oaths to the constitution or to their commitments to their constituents in the places they represent, because so many of the members of congress, with just a few small exceptions, of the congressional republicans went along with president trump's lies. if we also look back at russia and other authoritarian governments, what it takes is one political party, one particular grouping, actually deciding they're going to throw their lot in with a would-be authoritarian leader. if other institutions had gone along, we would be in a very different position from where we are now. >> you are clear in the book that the threat to democracy is very much alive, with or without donald trump. and that you actually argue that maybe trump paved the way for a more competent populist to pull, as you call it in your book, pull a putin in this country. i think some people, maybe some of rachel's own viewers here, breathed a sigh of relief when trump left the white house. what would you say to those people who think, it's okay, he's gone? >> it isn't okay, because the big lie that he perpetrated in saying that he had won the election in 2020 when every piece of evidence suggests and underscores and confirms that he did not, is being perpetuated by members of congress, by him. he's never repudiated anything that he said, he's not conceded that he lost the election. this is, again, another of those signs that we're in deep trouble because millions of people have been convinced because of the president's own credibility as being the president of the united states and clearly somebody who people voted for and obviously somebody who they looked up to, somebody has been telling them over and over again an enormous lie. we're already in the territory that has been paved many times before through history by countries like germany, nazi germany, and also the soviet union. people will say, oh, of course, here we go again, people making these kinds of comparisons. but these are valid historical comparisons. in each case people went along with what became the beginnings of massive atrocities and also the perversion of democracy. >> for an economic journalist like me, there's a lot in your book that's about economics. your upbringing in northeastern england and the changes that you have witnessed and studied. it's very clear that you understand the impulse that so many voters had to vote for donald trump. you've got a grasp on why so many people really did believe that their lives would be better with someone like him in charge. that impulse has not died with the trump presidency. what's the antidote to this? it's not even a uniquely american problem. it's in your home country of england. it's all over the world. >> yeah, well, sadly, we've just started to prove that america is not exceptional. i would have liked to have thought we could do better than this, as many of our really principal leaders have said. but we've actually shown we can go down the same path. we're not immune to flawed leadership and we're certainly not immune to eroding and undermining our best institutions. the socioeconomic aspects of this are really critical, because mainstream parties, both the republicans and the democrats, have failed to address many of the problems that the majority of americans would like to see actually fixed for them. and this gave an opening to president tru