Normandy, she s unbelievable. there is faulkner with her father, tracy simpson and vietnam, it brought tears to my eyes. he takes us was combat veteran in two theaters, is there anybody more decent pete hegseth as last week and others, who got to remind us, you sure are going to find it in the networks or read about it. the new york times and washington post, this is a very special place. i don t have to say this, i want to say this. twenty tomorrow on life, liberty and levin sunday when we have the governor of florida and america s wiseman, see you then. welcome to one nation, i am brian kilmeade. tonight on the show, dana white, ceo of ufc most successful sport entity in the world and pete hegseth, unwind what s gone wrong before it s too late but first, i want to start with t this, the polls in november and battleground states in many cases are closer but i don t get it when it comes to crowd sizes and enthusiasm it s not a competition. president biden, despite the political power of the white house, the oval office built in everyday can t seem to attract anyone outside his own campaign or perhaps his family. as an trump on the other hand control and enthusiastic crowd wherever he goes. south bronx or rallies, in the winter like conditions at wildwood, new jersey to events that aren t even his like this past weekend ufc event, the passion that surrounds him something to see. ufc ceo, donald trump and a former president. unbelievable. even joe rogan was moved into loyalty from his loyalists coming from the octagon and ufc. watch what the fighters were saying. pretty cool to have a moment there with donald trump after a win. president trump, you re the man. a travesty what they are doing to you. i ll be donating to you, my man. let s get it done. [cheering] a moment with donald trump. one candidate proving america more unobtainable, more than ever before. the other crime is turn time and time again, he wants to give you and everyone the opportunity to experience success he s had. dana white has witnessed growth firsthand. support for president trump unwavering because trump was there for him from the beginning believing in the little engine that could now known as one of america s premier sporting events, ultimate fighting championship. i had a chance to but talk about the relationship with president trump and steadfast support. part one of two parts we have tonight. the one thing that stands out is realty and the one thing appreciate about the former president, maybe future president he was there early, how much does that matter to your relationship? the mark realty is important to me he s been a good friend and he s a massive white man and it s not it was popular but trump was the guy who reached out to us when we couldn t get venues and had us come. we had our first two shows over there and when you think about it, trump here, she print here. he showed up the first fight stayed until the last. the guy who would reach out to me my entire career when things happen say congrats. he was guy who got in with another group who started to compete against us that i would never say anything negatively about trump because it is such good friend and sport. how has that grown? promoter, entrepreneur and builder, president of the no space, does he still call you? yes, i talked to him last night. we talk all the time. he s a good friend of mine. i really care about him as a person. his family, and incredible human being. i m close to him and his family and it will be that way until we die. her family shmuley boteach? connect there doing digit do which is brilliant so what s crazy is your and jared came, i think it was miami the last time, their first fight for four days, they couldn t stop texting me saying this is crazy. we have been to ever think you could go to come up with never been to anything as vanessa. maybe 300, i remember. what is your audience like the president so much? fan base and fighters, we are all aligned in life and everything and it s not that it s any real political side. [chanting] it s common sense, everybody wants the same thing. there s no difference in anybody in this room, if you let the media fiasco away, who want to make a good living in your ho house, want nice cars and kids, who want to take care of our kids. our kids to do well and go to college, everybody wants the same thing, it s not like we don t. it s just the media has created this divide in this country that needs to go away and hopefully soon it will. i know you hate the media you made that clear. thankfully for now i made the cut president s you to speak at the rnc and said defense said don t do it, you did and i was there and you killed it. we need somebody who believes in this country, we need somebody who s proud of this country and who will fight for this country. [cheering] are you glad? everybody told me not to but this is a guy thing gave us a sharp will always hit me up when good things happen at a guy i considered a friend, why what i say no? when he called me, this is what he said. he said if you don t want to do this, i completely understand but i would be honored if you speak at the rnc for me and i said i ll be there, brother. if yes to get? i ll be there. the former president wants to be the next president again, you stare and more fighters eyes than anybody else, where does he rank? number one. take any of the greatest writers of all time, trump was number one. the most resilient human being i ve ever met in my life. in what respect? why keep doing this? got a great life, why keep doing this? the one thing i can tell you and its effect, this guy loves this country and loves all americans regardless of what color, religion or whatever, he s not racist, his good human being and loves america and cares about this country. end of story. if he wasn t that type of guy, i ve never associate myself. prediction? how is he going to do in 2024? looking good, they are trying the kitchen sink and like i said most resilient human being government and keeps marching forward. a little bit more my exclusive interview with dana white later in the show including his latest mentor that could even be bigger than ufc on day one. i do threat china, communist party recruiting u.s. military pilots to train their own army to join intelligent bulletin boards this, china s liberation army pla skills and expertise of these individuals to make its own military air operations more capable any insight into western tactics, techniques and procedures not even hiding it. when they do the west into military submission, chinese nationalist across our southern border at alarming rates. 3500 crossed he legally and make the loan, this may increase over the last three years, less than 2000 in 2022. 2023 24000 plus in the same expected, if not more this year. what are they up to? to assess the stress and so much more is this nation s number one best-selling author, pete hegseth who wrote a book about the challenges here and what we are up against. the war on warriors in the now we will get to more of that in a second. to give the numbers 24000 on the southern border, what are they up to? they re not even hiding it. rolodex and money. not hiding at all. chinese communist party definitely no two individuals are and they ve left nothing happened. everyone has a social critic or, they know if you re coming and going and if you go for reasons unapproved, they know where your families living in these people are on assignment were allowed to be let go did come to the united states, what is the mission and purpose? when you mentioned habits, they are doing it in the open speaking about it starting private companies that look legit and recruit house to train but it s run by the chinese so they create shell companies to make them think they re making a little more cash. this is full-spectrum warfare from every direction. why would anybody in america air force pilots train pallets try to help out the chinese? are they aware you re not on board? this is not qb, we re just giving a speech to the chinese. this is the intel agency doing its job putting out notices and if you are approached by companies never heard of has bags of cash is not your time to cash in because you might be working for somebody working against us. they are trained on our stuff the french and british and they might be open so it s a problem you see from a senior member of the republican side ranking member of the armed services committee and says it s time for a major expansion of the military industrial complex and says we have to invest in the defense plan to make and massive need to make it a for-profit expand the base in which we can make tanks, planes. expand manufacturing you showed me this op-ed i had a chance to talk to staff yesterday just to get insight and it s ascending in the next five to seven years and opening a window where they are going to challenge us in the military capable to meet that. i want to throw money at it but if your auditing making sure money is in the right spot and modernizing to meet the threat of china, that something we have to do. the problem is we are broke vertically spend money it needs to be on the ability to defeat the communist chinese because they are coming for us eventually. the chinese and like 7% of the gdp, with got to get up to 5%. i think it s doable especially if it s for-profit industry, everybody wants patriots, our clients so we could sell them are stuck, there s a market for us. as our allies want to buy more in western europe and we do it through the american industrial base, great. your book is out, it paints an ugly picture where we are with our military but it s all simple. excerpt your book to emphasize for everyone at home. an example of a soldier i spoke to who said thursday is our leader time my platoon leader and skill level stuff for our jobs. training for transgender burning session. chain of command cannot question of someone in the unit want to change their gender. listing of the one in the dod changes to another gender. by the time they transition, three year enlistment is a because they are on medical and not available training, the entire time they hardly served a day in field artillery and i ended with look at china. will not pay for your transgender surgery. he did and obama didn t at the end but biden has broadened with. plus electric stuff, it s so divisive. we have the best and brightest right now, i love this institution but it s gone sideways and we need to fix it, trump is a big chance to fix it. we will keep you in the same thing sunday morning fox & friends . make sure you order the book and watch the show on fox nation. pete, great job. next ahead, you are welcome to watch agreement, one of the most important issues facing young voters in this election cycle it might surprise you. charles payne is here to unwind. ufc president dana white, keep it here. you re watching one nation. [crowd cheering] it may not seem like it, but this, is actually progress in play. a shell energy 100% renewable electricity plan lighting every soccer match at shell energy stadium. we re moving forward with the houston dash. because we re moving forward with everybody. shell. powering progress. we hear all the time publishes for voters this election, immigration. no, it s kind. no, it s abortion but what is the biggest concern for younger americans? i m just checking, we are all in house right now? i m not the only one who runs the numbers of the date and looks of the budget and is like there s no you work hard, you get what you want. no matter how many hours putting, you get nowhere. we bought our house in 2018 and we buy it today 2024, we wouldn t be able to afford it so monthly payment in 2018 was in $2894. today that would be 6000, 776. if you didn t get fixed right now in soaring interest rates, low inventory, how you buy your first home in this impossible market? is the american dream, or should we change? joining us now to offer solutions and allies of the p park, those making money, charles payne. you ve heard this before, what you say to these people. the last guy was humble bringing a little bit. i like what he did there. the young lady was interesting because working hard looking at her age it s been listed to buy a house of this age. first and foremost, do not give up on it. they ve done terrible things with respect for flooding economy and so much money sparking inflation that does not go away. also because the federal reserve has gone involved, you got this whole thing so skewed people have locked in rates reluctant to sell. he will sell a house even if you made big money on it with 2% mortgage and traded in so you don t have a lot of sellers, no incentive for builders. the neuropathy, it s really crazy, really tough. this is going to bug her mind because we have the almost unaffordable housing market in the history of america and in the world. if you want to make housing market affordable, you can do one of three things. housing prices have come down 41%. income on average would go up 69% mortgage rates on average would have to confirm 4.3% instead of over 7% like about three and a half. which it was. not too long ago. the last one is the only one that can happen in the only way interest rates will come them is the economies will go into a deep recession so my advice to people is a couple of things. we are in this new age, work from home so the beautiful thing is you have to overprice to get jobs and consider working further from the city getting a bigger house or smaller payment. the that everyone at the bottom. right now you have to make sacrifices. a couple weeks ago, you got to get these things up. you can t have an only fans account, the public health, you can t go out for avocado toast every morning, you just can t have that. nobody ever could have it all. i said that for long time to buy my house. the little things matter, it s a mindset. say the cash so when circumstances change in the table change and become into recession and housing prices plummet in mortgage rates plummet, you will be in control. it could happen soon. 1981 average person who got the first house, 29. 2013 was 31. 2023 west 35 so that s what s frustrating people. how to bring him something new market the stock market go to texas? looks like they will launch the top texas stock market with the help of rock in citadel in 2026. how real is this? very real. what s ironic, the same week, the same couple of days the news came out, they dropped congestion pricing scheme. charge everyone to drive through the city. you already paid a ton of money and of course parking is crazy so it is ironic governor say let s hold off on congestion pricing. they are chasing businesses out of america. these are major companies and if they are getting tired of new york, don t you think other people will follow? of course because these are companies trying to attract top talent out there, smartest people out there. they have choices. when you graduate from your school in the top of your class, you may not want to go through vatican city that is expensive and a crime-ridden city so they have to make adjustments like every other business and that s why businesses have fled from california and new york, huge. using the numbers and how much it costs to rent u-haul as opposed to one going to new y york. everybody wants one. i think we should keep our eye on that and see what s happening and i see you and your company s ongoing public and keep it private, they just don t want the scrutiny and others looking over their shoulders; public became a scam in my mind the last 20 years, they ve ripped american people off by a trillion dollars. this is my personal opinion. what used to happen is 25 years ago the company would go look at $30 a share and later trading at $60 a share and everyone says look at the money. you could have sucked up and now they stay private and keep raising money privately start with some family in the first round and then another round and every time the raise money natalie, they hike the value of the company it doesn t matter how much. a company could be worth five billing and hike it to 40 billion and then go public at 80 billing. the public has caught on. if you want to go public, go public at a reasonable price because no one should buy these. thanks so much, appreciate the passion and insight and so does america. coming up on the rest of the joke the rest of my interview with dana white from the u.s. these rise relationship with joe rogan, we covered all. don t miss a minute of one nation. listen to the music. i am champion new york, which president emanuel macron rolling out the red carpet at the house president biden for a steak dinner this evening earlier in the day, the two leaders discussed wars and gaza, ukraine and more. the white house working to show it takes threat russia poses to the continent seriously. leaders today coming return of the israeli hostages rescued from the gaza strip. today once again reaching gaza through newly repaired. , crews delivering about 1 million pounds of humanitarian aid today, the. was only operational about a week before i was blown apart with high winds and large waves last month. restrictions on land crossing said fighting limited the flow of supplies to the war-torn territory now back to one nation with brian kilmeade. more not on my interview with the great dana white. he started his career as a bouncer, climbed the ladder to become one of the most successful businessman in sports around the world. president of the usc, a billion-dollar company. the company is breaking records quickly and venues around the world boosting almost 100 million supporters on social media, all platforms and or young, they understand the sport and appreciate the effort and excitement each week fighters. exciting and something like it. i love jujitsu at all, sports. even if the can t walk afterwards, to put it on for you guys. these guys always put it on for the fence connect different styles fighting against each other and i love the background stories about letters and i love getting into it. the unpredictability. every night. negative passion? travel to find out about the magic behind man that runs the autopsy. he said easily this is the number one sports league in the world and in the country. what you think about ufc when you are working here people would laugh if you thought it would overtake boxing good luck you ve taken this hard work that america, i like to shine here but i want to be a force around the world. what you do without gabi and to expand this global brand? the beautiful thing upset stay one, this will eventually be the biggest in the world because no matter color country or language you speak, we are all human and fighting is in our dna. and make sense and everybody understands and when you find a guy who s the baddest dude a woman in the world and they speak like you speak and look like you, everybody rallies around them so there isn t a fighter in the world the country we can t find a fighter from like i told you, he continues to expand, we are streaming and go to places with never been about saudi arabia for the first time working on africa. we haven t been to spain yet. i opened an institute in mexico city. some of the baddest dude to other mexicans so imagine the mexicans that will come up in the next five to ten years you build a facility fighters become? one 100%. when you think about business in the history of the world that produced trillions of dollars in revenue like boxing has in the end of the day is nothing there, we built a leak and reinvest in the sport and ufc every year. millions, tens of millions the hundreds of millions of dollars we invest into the sport to reach this vision i have. you can have a sport where you allow blows to the brainstem paralyze your opponent. he tried to stop it. and here we are today it s a global sport. we break records after work and i m pretty sure will break the record this week so when we going to venues like rolling stones and massive acts in these arenas, i love that about it. they keep saying america has gone soft, there s a lot of adrenaline in your stands and the octagon and people prom promoting, are you the anomaly? probably. i agree the world has gone soft and agree that we are not in any way, shape or form. if you say you are savage, to make a killing easier. when i grew up there was old money and in the, it was harder there s a lot of disruption now. there s never been more opportunity in my lifetime than there is right here and right now. if you are one of these young kids who has heart and grit and determination and want to win, there s never been more opportunity than right now. a 19-year-old dana white had to go, you had to have side jobs or there s no safety net. for people who have a safety net, how do you keep the hunger? different than hunger i say this all the time, the problem with people as they don t know what they want to do the rest of their life. i was lucky that i always knew what i wanted to do. it wasn t this, i wanted to be in the fight business no matter what it was and i started my way in the bottom and worked my way up but these jobs like paving roads and being a bellman, these are the jobs you have to have growing up like people tell me, he worked hard. when i get to work everyday nine to nine, you know who works hard? the guys paving roads everyday digging ditches and guys who pour concrete in roofing jobs. that s hard work so you have to have those jobs to understand what real hard work really is. i just watched you and people would be happy with that turner let alone away in. when you come to fight week you have my favorites from a number one is the fight. number two are face-offs and the press conference leading up to it. when you are a fight man, those are usually the three things. wayne is the opportunity where you get to see how mentally, physically in every way shape or form how prepared are the fighters? if the guy looks away during the face-offs or doesn t look in shape, that s when you look to see who s going to win. i think your checking out the fighters, you re looking at t them. i love this game. i love everything about it. two be able to stand in the middle every saturday between the best fighters in the world getting ready for the fight the next day is one of the coolest things you see behind us, they pay to have that experience and i pulled a young kid right there and the main event, it s like what the once-in-a-lifetime type of stuff. it is the man in me is what it is. i love you so much and i do it 23 years now so i can imagine what it s like. can was on never dig up ag again. do you remember a time when they said he dies in the ring and said in modern america, there s no place, it s too brutal. contact sports are dangerous. la crosse, boxing, mma, the list goes on 30 year history, there s never been a death or serious injury. how many sports can say. and you made it, he put a time limit and put white president, that s a lot to do with the rules you put in. is it the way it started? who want to regulated sports and we spent millions in health and safety. if you take athletes into the proper medical testing. make it as safe as you can possibly make it. the one thing that sticks with me is loyalty. i think about the story the boys wanted how joe rogan went from the guy on fear factor he looked like an athlete the whole time. i did not know he worked for y you. when we first company basin new york, i had to fly and go through and figure out what would come back and what i would throw away. will credible is because this will hear so i had to go through every single tape and one tape he had his top show and joe rogan on, the fear factor guy. you are the biggest [bleep] on the planet. what you doing? you can t assault people. you can t run up to him and hit him. this open fighting stuff and broken goes into this talking about how incredible the sport is, what these guys would do to movie stars and what they would do to boxers and stuff and i saw him and it clicked and i go, this is the guy i need, who i need to be my commentator so i reached out and we hit it off and that s it and he said wait a minute, you re telling me the sport i love the most in the world but the best seat in the house and talk about it on tv, i haven t reheated the first 13 for free and the rest is history. the biggest podcast are in the world, brady greatest commentator of all time. your latest. he sent us through the roof. can you describe it and why it works for you? the most successful thing about a part of in such a short amount of time. in 15 months it s a massive social media juggernaut and financial beast. i love it. you seem to love it. everything the people are saying is exactly what they said about the ufc in early days and plenty of people don t like it. plenty of people didn t like the ufc but there are 8 billion people in the world, believe me. enough people like it to make it incredibly successful. congratulations. thanks. can t go wrong with him. very nice and sit down and get politic time. big fight at the end of the month. i ll be back on stage, history, liberty and flask to her and i ll talk patriotic, inspirational, motivational. indianapolis june 29. towards the end of july in pennsylvania, i ll be driving there and i get a chance and go to the meeting great, i ll sign your book and take some pictures if you go for the vip treatment. next, they ll never guess what undercover spy joe biden claims to have known for 40 years. we ll take the next is tom shillue joins us on news dual. we ve always loved taking care of our home, from the gardening to any repairs that come up. but last year, grandpa here broke his arm. snowboarding. snowshoeing. anyway, he was fine, but it takes longer to heal now. and we prefer to stay active. we realized some home maintenance jobs aren t worth the risk. that s when we called leaffilter to protect our gutters. leaffilter s patented filter technology keeps debris out of your gutters for good. guaranteed. they gave us a free inspection, and we got our system installed that week. our leaffilter trusted pros will clean out your gutters, repair or replace your gutters, and install leaffilter, america s #1 gutter protection system. honestly, my only regret is not calling sooner. it s true, leaffilter has saved us so much time and the peace of mind. now we can focus on what we really enjoy. join millions of satisfied homeowners. get leaffilter. call 833 leaffilter today, or visit leaffilter.com smile! you found it. the feeling of finding psoriasis can t filter out the real you. so go ahead, live unfiltered with the one and only sotyktu, a once-daily pill for moderate to severe plaque psoriasis, and the chance at clear or almost clear skin. it s like the feeling of finding you re so ready for your close-up. or finding you don t have to hide your skin just your background. once-daily sotyktu was proven better, getting more people clearer skin than the leading pill. don t take if you re allergic to sotyktu; serious reactions can occur. sotyktu can lower your ability to fight infections, including tb. serious infections, cancers including lymphoma, muscle problems, and changes in certain labs have occurred. tell your doctor if you have an infection, liver or kidney problems, high triglycerides, or had a vaccine or plan to. sotyktu is a tyk2 inhibitor. tyk2 is part of the jak family. it s not known if sotyktu has the same risks as jak inhibitors. find what plaque psoriasis has been hiding. there s only one sotyktu, so ask for it by name. so clearly you. sotyktu. [sfx] water lapping. [sfx] water splashing. [sfx] ambient / laughing. time no, great graphics feature best cocteau. joining us now to talk about tom shillue. are you ready? i m ready. let s hear the music. first appears on news dual connective know him for over 40 years. he s not a decent man, he s a dictator acting as a dictator. forty years ago he was in new zealand. vladimir putin seen as the photographer during the years and deputy mayor. is no way he knew him 40 years ago. this could be one of those great joe biden stories. he tells great stories are apocryphal site was a double agent, he was in new zealand until name : pop and we are on the beaches. hold on. i m going to get in trouble. the 20 always says, i m going to get in trouble. a story that and never happened want to go on record, i ve never trusted giraffes. do .? we have the footage? a draft picks up taller during the wild safari right and i m not surprised. if you look at the faces, we think the drop is a cute animal that kids have in the playset, the draft with the long neck. this dress, noting, picks up 2-year-old paisley and out of the moonroof in the car. can you imagine the horror? i m prepared. when i go to the zoo, i tell my kids, stay away from the draft, they are vicious, picnics. you see the veins in the next? they are bulging. huge next. our thinking no moon works on a safari but that s different next, michigan man had a court date, he has a suspended license. he called in the car to the court date and we thought that was the big story. then we find out he didn t have a suspended license but it thickens, it turns out he never had a license to suspend, his driving without a license so now we see cory harris never should have been driving when he came for his court date, he was driving. but he didn t like, it s a clintonian defense like the meaning of is, is, you can t suspended license that never existed in the first place you have another one? look at these nuns. they were part and it s nuns gone wild. they whether habits in the water. look at this. they are having a great time, it s great the nuns are getting out. there is a sense they don t have a good time and thus not true, is that what you re trying to say? to have a great time and i could hang with them because when i go to the beach, i cover-up i m an spf guy but stuff washes off of the waterpark. even the stuff that says it s waterproof, it s not so cov cover-up, i look like a nun or muslim woman. this isn t the first time we ve seen nuns having a good time. remember this documentary? you re going to go straight to hell. connect seems like a good movie. being a nun is more fun than i could ever imagine. [laughter] i ll never go to the beach with you. thanks so much. you do a better than joe biden. don t forget to take one nation on vacation with you, send us a photo of you and i ll put you on an international audience show called one nation and there is. let us but it s handsome. one nation on vacation from north carolina, she took it to the wonderful west virginia she writes, i never leave my fox news behind. thank you, brooke. thanks for going on vacation with one nation. we re talking about cashbackin. not a game! we re talking about cashbacking. we re talking about. we re not talking about practice? no. cashbacking. word. we re talking about cashbacking. cashbacking. cashbacking. cashback like a pro with chase freedom unlimited. how do you cashback? organic soil from miracle-gro has grown me the best garden i have ever had. good soil, and you get good results. look at that! the broccoli was fantastic. that broccoli! i think some of them were six, seven pounds. finally, good good news for going. they successfully launched first mission to space. commanding like 61-year-old which will more, former u.s. navy captain. before that dock, he gave an all-american speech. listen. we tell many american lives and many are waving flags of us. we know that represents unity and resilience and unified efforts with a common thread and we all know when the going gets tough as it often does, the tough get going and you have. we are honored share spaceflights with each and every one of you. some fire in the rocket and push to the heavens for the tough americans prepared to be. they go to the space station and they are there not. good to return product and we have another way to get to space. congratulations, guys. that doesn t for us. send us videos we will send you one nation legacy behind me and take us on vacation, take a picture with something you bought from us. also, one nation@box.com is our address. tune in sunday morning the great guest they lined up over the course of four hours governor doug burgum, running mates with donald trump. catch my radio show 9:00 to noon fastest growing in the country. brian will be with us, as well as doctor marty makary. meanwhile, fox news saturday night starts right now with the great jimmy failla. i will stay in studio.
and of course, he s trying to become president of america again and the other is about the business models of news, because they are under ever more pressure. and when it comes to the business model, we are also looking at al and journalism, because several news organisations have done recent deals with the big tech firms. so that is all coming up. on this week s programme, we re going to hearfrom andrew neil, who has a brand new show on times radio. he s also the chairman of the spectator group. and we rejoined by caroline waterston, the relatively new editor in chief of the daily mirror. yeah, we ve also got two guests coming out of the states one, katie notopoulos, who s the senior tech and business correspondent at business insider. but the first person we spoke to isjeffrey goldberg, who is editor in chief of the atlantic. and we started off by asking him just to sum up what the atlantic is. how is that even possible? on the rare. just in case people don t know, it s a 167 year old magazine founded in boston. 18. 1850s, before the civil war. politics, culture, literature, remains committed to those coverage areas today. but we try to explain america to itself to some degree. i think that s one of our purposes. we have a monthly magazine with a large subscriber base. we have a million subscribers, including digital subscribers. we reach a pretty wide array of people across the us and other parts of the english speaking world. and i think i m right in saying you re privately owned by emerson collective, which is an organisation set up by laurene powelljobs, widow of the apple founder steve jo bs. just explain to us how that works. yeah. laurene and emerson collective bought the atlantic seven years ago. it works, knock on wood, wonderfully well. she s a great owner. we have complete editorial independence. she s very supportive of the mission, as is the whole organisation. we re a for profit organisation, although emerson collective has a for profit and a not for profit, separate wings. we are profitable on our own, which is a good thing and fairly rare these days. i m just thinking about. i ve been thinking about the washington post a lot of the last couple of days. well, we definitely want to ask you about some of the announcements at the washington post. and we want to ask you about your route to profitability, because that was one of the reasons we were so interested to have you on the programme. before we get into the details of what you ve done at the atlantic, i just, with katie s help as well, and a guest who sjoining us, want to put what the atlantic is trying to do and what all publications in the news arena are trying to do in some context. yes, because katie notopoulos is from business insider, and ijust thought it d be useful if she just gave us a recap on the structural problems facing the industry. because, katie, you know, as has already been mentioned, much of this comes back to advertising, doesn t it? right. so one of the biggest problems isjust that| digital advertising, - which was what supported journalism for many decades or centuries, has sort- of dried up. facebook and google are very effective at being digital- advertisers, and they ve just sucked up a lot of the ad - dollars out there. so if you re a brand i like pepsi, it s easier to put your dollars somewhere else than to run an ad - in a publication. and that has really affected . the industry across the board. and you obviously. there s a lot of other| factors going on, just the rise of digital, - and therefore print is not as popular as it used to be. but i think. you know, there are some bright i spots, and there s reason to be i hopeful about the state - ofjournalism and being able to sustain media businesses. katie, thank you. jeffrey goldberg from the atlantic, let s bring you back in. you launched your online paywall in 2019. tell us about that decision and what s happened since. yeah, well, it turned out to be excellent timing, because the pandemic hit the next year and advertising bottomed out. we re holding our own on advertising. we have good people doing it. and, you know, it s not going to be the primary source of revenue for this company going into the future. we ve switched, actually, since 2019. we re now majority. you know, the bulk of our revenue comes from subscriptions, the consumer business, not advertising, but advertising is still an important part. but we launched this paywall. i mean, obviously, we re a print. we ve been a print magazine since the 1850s. we ve had long experience of being a subscription based organisation. when we entered the internet in a big way in the mid 90s, late 90s, obviously programmatic ad revenue, other forms of advertising, became huge for us. but we finally decided, the company finally decided in 2019 to launch a paywall for a digital product. and thank god we did, because a combination of pandemic news and trump news really accelerated our growth in the next couple of years. and that brought us, we just crossed a million subscribers total. half of those. roughly half of those subscribers are print and digital and half roughly half are digital only. all news organisations are diversifying the type of content that they re making. i wonder, aside from the trademark atlantic long articles which many people will know, what else you offer digital subscribers? well, we have a daily report. you know, we re not building a second newsroom, or a third newsroom in the washington post case, for tiktok videos or whatever it is that they re doing. you don t sound overly impressed, jeffrey. no, i m just feeling generally dyspeptic today. so you re just getting. just getting a general vibe. hopefully, that s nothing to do with you coming on the media show! god, no. glad to hear it. just checking. this is the only meeting i m looking forward to today. sorry, we interrupted you. no, no, no. it s ok. i d rather make jokes than talk about the business ofjournalism. i think that. so when i started as editor eight years ago, you know, all i wanted to do, and i have, you know, laurene s100% backing on this, make highest qualityjournalism, because highest quality journalism is the only thing that people will pay for. you know, if we had put all of our eggs in the programmatic ad revenue basket, we d be in bad shape, and so on. and so i think doubling down on what you do best, and doubling down on making a unique. unique stories that people will actually pay you for to read is the way to go. and so we have a much more. you know, obviously, 30 years ago, before the internet, the atlantic came out, it was a, you know, more leisurely paced thing. today, we publish every day. we publish, you know, every hour in busy times. but we re still trying to maintain that level of quality and differentiation so that we can convince readers to become subscribers. i m going to pause you there, sorry, just to bring in andrew neil, because some of this with your spectator hat on must be sounding quite familiar. jeffrey s talking about a million subscribers. how. you re a subscription model as well? we are a subscription model. the spectator has about 100,000 subscribers in the uk, 20,000 in america, because we just launched there, and about 12,000 in australia. if you get the business model right, the digital age can be a golden age forjournalism and publications like atlantic monthly and the spectator. but you need to get it right, and you need to realise that the old business models will bankrupt you. so when i took over the spectator in 2005, 65% of our revenues came from advertising. today, it s less than 10%. advertising is only our third biggest revenue stream. we ve had to seek new revenue streams. we put a very tough paywall up about 12, 14 years ago. 80% of our revenues now come from subscription. and it s a wonderful business model, because subscription revenues are predictable. i know within 5% plus or minus what s coming in this year, because i know the renewal rate, i know what the marketing will produce, and it s not subject to the economic cycle, unlike advertising, which is highly unpredictable. so you get that right and you re a golden age. the poster child of all this, of course, is the new york times, which now has nine million subscribers, more foreign correspondents than it s ever had in its history. and they got in early, didn t they? that was part of it. they got in early, as some of us did too. the times and the sunday times in this country are now highly profitable on the subscription model. and then you need to look, in addition to subscription revenue, for other streams of revenue, streams that you would never have thought of before. so, for example, of course, you still take some advertising. you take very little programmatic. because here s the problem if you re a subscription model, you re providing a premium website, and you don t want your website punctuated by endless ads for things that you have no control over. so you really need to control that. and you re talking about digital dimes in terms of programmatic, but instead, you do newsletters, you do podcasts, you have spectator tv and other ventures like that. and above all, our second biggest stream of revenue events. we do events that expand the brand and bring in a ton of money. 0k, caroline waterston, i want to bring you in because this presumably isn t sounding very familiar to you because it isn t something that you re doing at the mirror. have you ever thought about subscription? have you ever thought about a paywall? it s not on the mirror s agenda. i mean, certainly from my point of view and from the mirror s point of view, you know, i believe that our content should be available to a wide community and not just those that can afford it. you know, we are a news brand. i want to ensure that everyone has access to our content, and certainly it s not on our agenda. but what does that mean financially? you re taking a hit. do you believe. ? imean, are.? are you essentially of the belief that a paywall is this too dramatic, a paywall is a threat to democracy? is that how you see it? no, it s just not on our agenda at the moment. that s because it doesn t work. we talked. well. for red top tabloids, it doesn t work. the sun tried it and had to abandon it. you know, it s different with atlantic, spectator, times, sunday times, financial times. people are willing to pay. ..new york times. people are willing to pay for that kind ofjournalism. the problem with what we used to call the red top tabloids is that people won t pay for it digitally. of course, in the old days, they paid for it by putting their money down to buy the paper. but it seems that a lot of that kind of content, they think they can already get almost for free on the net. so they re not. it s a. of allthe. you know, all of our industry from the top to the bottom has had to withgo digital waves of change. the toughest part of the market to get right is the red top tabloid part of the market, because the subscription model doesn t work. caroline? yeah. and, look, good quality journalism is exactly what we want to do. but good quality journalism shouldn tjust be available to those that can afford to pay it. so, yes, we are an ad model. ads help fund. ..our journalism. and certainly. that s where we are at the moment. in terms of the experience of the user, the digital user of yourjournalism, do you have any concerns that the proliferation of adverts, which you need in order to fund the work you re doing, lessens the experience? look, it s something i think about every day, but, you know, ads are a part of life, and certainly from the mirror s point of view, we have to produce good quality journalism, and ads help us do that. 0k. let s bring you back in, jeffrey goldberg, because what about your experience in the us, particularly relating to donald trump, who we know back in 2016 drove huge levels of news and news related content consumption? are you seeing the same thing this time around? 2016 and 2020. i wouldn t say. well, first of all, we have a much tougher paywall, so that limits the sort of explosive numbers that you would have seen 2020, 2016, in particular. i think there s also fatigue. you know, these are. these are characters in now what would be called a long running drama, right? trump and biden as well. i think there is some fatigue with it. all that being said, yeah, there s. there s obviously an unusual election taking place. i m trying to use the most anodyne words possible. there s a consequential election taking place and people are. our kind of reader in particular is going to be very engaged in it. but, you know and i think this is a lesson from the washington post in a way you can tjust assume that political news will continually spike for you. i mean, you have to do the thing that s the right thing to do for your publication. it s mission first. and if you forget that, you re going to lose your subscribers eventually anyway. butl. we re not going to see the same crazy numbers that we saw in the past. but obviously, this is not a normal election. and trump does draw an extraordinary amount of attention. i want to ask you further about trump, but you ve alluded to the washington post a couple of times. we should say that on monday, sally buzbee, we heard, was leaving her role as the washington post s executive editor, to be replaced by robert winnett from the daily telegraph. and will lewis, who s the ceo of the washington post, said, we are losing large amounts of money. your audience. this is to staff. your audience has halved in recent years. people are not reading your stuff. i can t sugar coat it any more. so the washington post is looking to change its strategy. but coming back more broadly to donald trump, this is a question we ve asked a number of times on the media show over the years, but it doesn t make it any less pressing. you ve called the election consequential and unusual i m sure there are other words you would use, too. how do you, as the editor of a hugely consequential magazine and publication in the us, approach the challenge of covering donald trump? and i m interested to ask andrew and caroline the same question afterwards. you know, we. we had this problem in 2016, where we were trying to. you know, we were following the old rules, you know, to some degree, which is. and the old rules were the old rules of coverage, what people would call both sider ism. the old rules worked.when you had candidates who operated within certain lanes, lanes of self restraint, lanes of adherence to democratic norms, when candidates felt shame and repositioned themselves based on feedback, regarding the things that they do. you know, the most important thing for me, and, you know, we try to get it right, and a lot of other people are trying to get it right, and a lot of people are trying to catch up the most important thing is that we describe things plainly. right? not euphemise, because donald trump s behaviour is so novel i mean, it s not novel any more, but it s still novel historically and that. you know, and that we don t become. and this is what i m always encouraging our staff about. we don t normalise to this. our own, you know. oh, well, trumpjust said that, you know, the north korean dictator s head is made of cheese. oh, who cares? he always says stuff like that. no, and we have to do it every. we have to report the oddness, whenever it erupts, and that. by the way, this means. we re notjoining the resistance. we neverjoined the resistance, which means we also questionjoe biden s capacities, for instance. that s how you re approaching it at the atlantic. i wonderfor the daily mirror here in the uk, caroline, how do you.? do you approach donald trump like any other politician? or are there particular things you tell your colleagues look, we have to be careful here ? look, trump is an interesting character, but at the weekend, you ll hopefully have seen we actually had the world exclusive of stormy daniels, post everything that happened last week. and, you know, the content that comes out of trump in his everyday life and how he acts, i mean, it creates brilliant, brilliant content for our audience. that s honest. yeah. andrew, let me bring you in here now, because we have senior british executives at the wall streetjournal, the washington post, cnn and bloomberg news. what do you make of this exodus of senior british editors in the direction of the us? bbc too. mark thompson. mark thompson, former bbc. ..is at cnn and was at the new york times. of course, we always put ourselves down, but british journalism is vibrant and dynamic and hugely successful. and we know how to write and we know how to write concisely. well, not for the first time on the media show, we ve been talking about artificial intelligence, and the item that we re going to see now is all about search results that are being produced by new ai products. yeah, this is quite a fun one because google has got a new search called ai overview, a search product, and it is coming up in some cases with some pretty crazy results. and i started by asking katie notopoulos, who s the senior tech and business correspondent of business insider, tojust explain how it all works. so it s not on every single search, it s only on certain searches, typically ones that are sort of asking a specific question versus, you know, searching somebody s name or something like that. and it basically gives you a little bit of. maybe a couple sentences, a little paragraph, maybe a few bullet points that essentially answers your question. and this is probably very useful for most searches most of the time. but it was initially sort of riddled with laughable errors. i mean, one of the things that i do know that you did this really is dedication to yourjob you made a pizza with glue and ate it. just explain why you did that. slightly gimmicky. i m assuming it was for a piece. it was. piece of pizza! americanjournalists are ready. all in the line of duty. ..to undertake these big challenges. laughter. yeah, some people have to cover donald trump s trial. some people have to eat pizza with glue on it. right. basically sounds like i the same thing, really. exactly. laughter. one of the sort of silly answer that was going most viral on social media was someone had asked, how do i get the glued cheese to not slide off my pizza? and google suggested, you know, let the pizza cool for a while. and then it also said, add one eighth of a cup of glue to the sauce. so you re the only person in america who did it. ..it had sourced that little piece of information from a reddit comment that had suggested that obviously as a joke. and everyone on reddit at the time, when they were reading it, could understand in context that the person was making a joke that to keep the cheese from sliding off your pizza, you should add glue to the sauce. google sort of couldn t understand that this was satire, that it was a joke. so, not great. i mean, ijust should bring in. well, google have said about this, because they ve told the bbc, these were isolated examples, generally very uncommon queries, and they aren t representative of most people s experiences, and that the vast majority, it says, of ai overviews provide high quality information with links to dig deeper on the web. and it said it s taken action where policy violations were identified and it was using them to refine its systems. just in the last couple of minutes of the programme, let me ask a further question about al, and it comes down to when big organisations that have content, like the atlantic or the spectator or the mirror, decide whether or not to share all of that content with the big language models that are training generative ai. and jeffrey at the atlantic, jeffrey goldberg, you ve cut a deal with openai. tell us about the discussions within the atlantic, whether you were weighing up whether to do that or not. well, ijust have to be technically clear about something. the editorial team has independence from the business side of this operation, but the business side has independence from the editorial side. and this was a decision made by the corporation and by our business leadership to do this. and so.i was certainly told about it, and i was.invited to share my views on it, but, you know, i. what are your views on it? well, i have my ambivalence about it. i mean, i don t want to. i forget who was saying this before, but, you know, the internet has turns out been great for a place like the atlantic. we reach many, many more people than we used to because of the internet. i don t want to be, you know, sort of axiomatically luddite about this sort of thing and say, ai is only a threat, but i have my deep ambivalences about.ai and what it s going to do tojournalism and also, by the way, humanity and the future of our planet. all that being said, ai is coming whether or not i want it to come. and it s a little bit like, to me, complaining about the weather. the weather doesn t care that i don t like it. so i ve got to dress for the weather, and dressing for the weather in this case means trying to figure out a way to have a relationship with openai in which openai doesn t eat you for lunch. let me just ask quickly caroline and andrew very quickly, if you would. caroline, how s the daily mirror viewing the idea of sharing its content with these ai, these big ai operators? we wouldn t. we wouldn t want to. you re not planning to do that yet? no, we re not- planning to do that. and the spectator? we won t do that until we know a lot more about it. if it s another potential stream of revenue that doesn t carry risks, that s one thing. but we need to know a lot more. for me, the al s biggest opportunity is on the commercial side. i think a lot of the ai can help us run the company commercially much better. we can learn more about our readers, about usage of the app, usage of the website. all that sort of thing is fine, but forthe moment, i ll keep editorial separate. and i lljust add, the new york times is taking a very different approach to this. it s not collaborating with openai. in fact, it s suing for the theft of its content. so we re going to watch how that plays out. and i was at the enders deloitte media conference yesterday, where anna bateson, who runs the guardian, said they would do a deal with an ai company, but only on the right terms. so there you go. well. something to end on, because that is all we have time for, i m afraid. thank you so much to katie notopoulos from business insider and, of course, andrew neil from times radio, but also the spectator. and caroline waterston, editor in chief of the mirror, and jeffrey goldberg, editor in chief of the atlantic. well, thanks very much indeed to all of our guests. fascinating to hear their perspectives on all those issues. i suspect it won t be the last time we turn to ai, to business models of news, to covering donald trump, but it was very interesting to hear from all of them. i think you re right. thank you so much to everybody. that was the media show. we ll be back at the same time next week. bye. bye bye. and if you d like to hear a longer version of today s show, search bbc the media show wherever you get your bbc podcasts. hello there. it s been a pretty decent start to the weekend. there was a good deal of sunshine around across most of the country. a bit of cloud here and there, a few showers, mostly in the north. part two of the weekend doesn t look quite as good. it will start sunny, quite chilly. but we ve got a couple of weather fronts pushing down from the northwest that will increase cloud through the day, with some splashes of rain. now, we ve got this weather front approaching the northwest of the country to move through this evening. showers merging together to produce longer spells of rain for the north and west of scotland. so unsettled, breezy, showery in the north, turning cloudier for northern ireland, but clearer skies for large parts of england and wales, with lighter winds here. so it will turn chilly for most. single digits, i think, for the majority of the country. but with more cloud across northern ireland, we will fall to around 10 degrees in belfast. so sunday, then, we ve got low pressure still towards the norwegian sea there, bringing northern westerly winds into the country. we start off with quite a bit of sunshine. scotland, england and wales, cloudy skies for northern ireland, southwest scotland, in towards north west england, north wales. and that cloud, with splashes of rain, will spill south eastwards through the day. so it will turn cloudy across much of england and wales, probably the best of the sunshine across the far southwest, and the northern half of scotland doing pretty well, with sunny spells. but there will be blustery showers here and a cooler day to come, i think, because of more cloud around temperatures of about 12 to 17 degrees. as we move through sunday night, that area of rain splashes across the irish sea, into much of england and wales, becomes confined to southern and eastern areas by the end of the night. so where we have the cloud and the rain, then, a less cold night here, 10 to 12 degrees under clearer skies. further north, it will turn chilly. we start to pick up a northerly wind as we move into monday. that rain slowly clears away from the south and east. it may take a while to clear the east of england. eventually, it will do. then it s a bright day for most, sunshine and showers. most of these across the northern half of scotland, where they will be quite blustery and a chilly northerly wind at that. temperatures, 10 to 14 degrees in the north, 15 to 17 further south, giving some sunny spells. and we hold on to this chilly northerly wind through tuesday, even into wednesday as well. before low pressure starts to move in from the southwest, that ll cut off the chilly northerly and temperatures will slowly recover towards the end of the week. but it s going to be a fairly unsettled and a cool week to come, with a little bit of sunshine here and there. live from washington this is bbc news. four israeli hostages abducted last october are reunited with their families after israeli forces free them from captivity in gaza. , says 200 palestinians were killed in that raid by the idf. two hospital say they have counted scores of bodies. we will have the latest from the uk general election campaign as the conservatives pledged tax cuts and labour promises to help small business. good to have you with us. four is really hostages taken by hamas during the october seven attacks have been reunited with theirfamilies. israeli forces in gaza killed scores of palestinians in the operation to free them. special forces raided two locations in broad daylight. one soldier was killed. thomas says that more than 200 palestinians were killed in the operation. a military is spokesman said they were under 100 palestinian casualties. a top diplomat condemned the raid and in a post on xjoseph borrell wrote that reports from gaza of another massacre room calling. we condemn this in the strongest terms, the bloodbath must end immediately. joe biden s free step plan is put forward as a way to end the killing. the us president spoke out. here is a press conference. i out. here is a press conference.- out. here is a press conference. ., ., . .,
if david chase hadn t happened to be clicking around, he wouldn t see me in dr. rascals and i want to get that guy on my new tv show the sopranos. there s a lot of detail in my book and i think bill, bill was, the conversations we had, i haven t seen the film myself at ceramic just to see what happens. you haven t seen it ? that is all the time we have this weekend. we will see you tomorrow at 6:00 a.m. eastern for more morning joe. until then, enjoy the rest of your sunday. your sunday. good morning. it s sunday, june 9. i m alicia menendez. with michael steele and symone sanders townsend. we are following president biden on his final day in france and the appearance of his message of american leadership for folks abroad and at home. donald trump and his allies will payback was guilty verdict. however deranged that may sound . how congressional republicans want to use their power to punish. what could happen this week as trump pushes to be unleashed from his gag order. grab your coffee and settle in. welcome to the weekend. president biden is wrapping up his consequential visit to europe this morning in the next hour, he is expected to visit american military cemetery near paris. this caps a week of ceremonies commemorating the 80th anniversary of the allied invasion of normandy. the president used the stage to call for citizens to demand of accuracy cash against authoritarianism worldwide. we stand at an inflection point in history. the decisions we make now will determine the course of our future for decades to come. we have a lot of opportunity and a lot of responsibility. it gives me hope to know the france and the united states stand together now and always. me we continue to see democracy, may we in both languages, no we stand together. joining us is professor of history and author of strongmen , miscellany to the present, ruth ben-ghiat. presidential historian professor of history douglas brinkley. good morning. ruth, i want to start with you. i thought this week was incredibly important. a definition all week if you will. both on the global stage and here at home for president biden. he really connected a number of dots about the urgency and the washington post wrote a piece which i thought he talked will americans recognize their country in the dark and desperate portrait trump painted? or is the country s falling to pieces, he said. if he is not return to power, the countries finish. you want to be country anymore. or will americans instead choose to see a nation still striving to fulfill the higher purpose than biden described in memory of those who fought here, died here, literally save the world here, let us be worthy of their sacrifice. that, to me, was a consummating moment. i would love to get your take on how the president has framed his visit around this idea of, there is a bigger fight out there. those who come before have engaged in it and now it s up to us to engage as well on behalf of democracy. i think it s been extremely effective to frame this not only because the reason he is there is commemorating an important victory over fascism in world war ii, but it reminds us of the toll that bad leadership can have. not just on one s own country but on the world. when you have district to vengeful leaders with large armies, as you did with mussolini, hitler, and today with putin, he see the world is not safer. trump is trying to his tell us that the world may be safer because he is allied with people like putin but that s not the case and history is clear on that. i want to agree with michael that this week was in his word definition. when we were listening to president biden brought that he was expressing the urgency of this moment that we find ourselves in but with an i toward history. they were flourishes where he would say, how will we be remembered? how will this moment be remembered in 10, 20, 30 years. do you agree that this week was definitional and when scholars of history look back , how will this be remembered? on the short-term, it was a big win for joe biden. he went dess the famous spot where ronald reagan gave one of his famous speeches, and pulled up a very important speech, warning us about the need for democracy and the need to fight for freedom. reminding us that authoritarianism is on the loose yet again. really going after, going after people that are xena phobic, right-wing populist movement blooming in europe right now. i did come across as representing america as a statesman and promoting nato and protecting the ukraine and trying to create a stronger bulwark against putin s russia who is on a terror right now. to follow up on that point. i believe it was cass mood who wrote populism is a thick ideology mixed with faith and ideology. this right-wing populism on the rise in europe, populism doesn t have to be bad, but like bernie sanders is an economic populist. this idea that this dirty populism is the thing that s taking hold of places not just across europe but a sentiment like that at home. how does that dovetail with what we know to be true about our history? you see the republican party of today going back to the 1930s and embracing an isolationist plank. they are the henry ford s and charles lindbergh s of today. this is a fringe movement but isolationism over the decades has had its adherence. what is worrying about it is this friendship that trump has maintained with putin. he acts like he is putin s puppet is hillary clinton famously put it. he asked that way and with any authoritarian leader, if you chisel away at what donald trump is arguing, he sees a world of five big powers with five important authoritarian/in his case, democratic leader. we don t do business that way in the united states. trump is standing out as a loan silo because all the other presidents, ronald reagan was in the news because the spot biden chose to give his commemorative speech. reagan s is part of the other presidents club. ronald reagan but want to make sure we defended ukraine. that speech reagan gave in 1984 was about liberating eastern europe, getting the berlin wall to come down and breaking up the soviet union. american democracy on offensive posture and trump s an agent of fear. he is fear mongering the way he away long dated her father conklin. joe mccarthy famously. what is different is we had those tenets before of fear mongering but they never went all the way to somebody being able to take over the party of abraham blinken and also, with the specter of january 6 has happened in this millions of americans seem to shrug off january 6 is not a big deal, to me it s frightening. it tells you how deeply rooted social media has made right- wing extremism a disease across our land right now. give then everything we know and certainly that we have learned from history and historians like douglas, how did we get here? how do people move themselves into this space? the reason i ask, i am going to play the new ad from the biden campaign which lays out some of the more infamous quotes of donald trump and military service for example. he handed me his purple heart. i always wanted to get the purple heart. this was much easier. does donald trump even understand why someone is given a purple heart? why you receive the purple heart in the first place? here we are in this moment where people are looking past the man s attack on the military. his attack on institutions. his attack on the constitution. what to use senses going on that s animating this and allowing it to continue the way it has? i am glad the biden campaign made that at. it s very moving because it speaks to dess it gets to the heart of the fact that authoritarians are nihilist. they have no ideals beyond money and power. anybody who would do something like serve their country knowing they may be injured or killed, that makes them losers and dupes which are the suckers which are the words donald trump uses about our own people who serve. he mocks people who serve such as nikki haley s husband. in keeping with authoritarians throughout history because they despise the people think, quote, govern. they only want to dominate them, exploit them. this is why i go back to character and leadership and having somebody like donald trump lead our country, we deserve better. it s an incredible moment, douglas, to be living in, and i think about president biden on the world stage yesterday we were on air and prepared to talk about his trip to europe. in the interim, there was the hostage rescue out of gaza. i want you to listen to what the president had to say. i want to echo president macron s comments welcoming the hostages return to their families in israel. we won t stop working until all hostages come home and a cease- fire is reached. that is essential to happen. so often when i see these moments in the world s stage i m reminded of the argument that president biden made when he was running for president four years ago which is, we need someone from day one is ready to hit the ground running who understands challenges at home and challenges abroad. he really foreshadowed the years that would come in terms of the marriott crises they have developed in real time. when i was watching president biden these last few days, i m reminded of his greatness. often, we dismiss something that he says he seems to be an opportunity. there is this steady evenness, even low-key on this which may not make him kinetic on the campaign trail but it makes you feel saying that he is a states person. that he understands protocol. that he understands how important the u.s./french relationship is. he can talk about lafayette with president mccrone and understand the hours story the american revolution of two today with france. he has been there. he has done that. he has seen a lot. he was visibly moved at normandy when he went to the forest of crosses and stars of david and walked across. you can feel how emotional this was. biden had been born in world war ii, 1941, probably our last president that would be a world war ii president. he reminded us of the power of nato. this has been the essential alliance since 1945, 48 with harry truman, all the way up to now and there s only been one anti-nato president and that s donald trump. nato, the atlantic alliance is seminal for keeping our military , economic policies, and democracy, and culture even alive and well. i ve been deeply disturbed the weight trump pushed aside nato might as well just blow away the european union. it s refreshing to watch biden and know he has that long institutional memory and understands what containment of soviet expansion means back in the days. especially given everything that s going on. i will ask you to stick with us because we need to talk about the rest of the far right. it s not just in america. new details about the role american intelligence played in the israeli mission that rescued four hostages. rescued . auntie, you can t put that right in the dishwasher. watch me. with cascade platinum plus i have upped my dish game. i just scrape. load. and i m done. in that dishwasher? 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help people understand the importance of not leaning into this and this does not end well for anybody. we are lucky that southern poverty law center in alabama is continuing to monitor these hate crimes. that bit of luck turns to horror when we start watching the spikes in anti- semitism, spikes and anti- mexican rhetoric, and type black, anti-lgbtq+. the right wants to destroy the fabric of a multicultural america. as we are speaking in san diego, catholic charities, i am a check let a catholic. one of my favorite people is pope francis by catholic charity workers are being attacked and disrupted by handing out food and water to children that have come over the border in southern california. we are looking at authoritarian coming our way. when have we seen this before? we haven t. black america has. black america has had lynchings. we have things like the springfield race riot of 1908 or the race riot of 1921. we have had the institutionalization of jim crow and saw what did in decimating black americans. we have seen what this can do to indigenous people where their rights are stripped away and they are seen as something other. there is a real white supremacy movement alive across the land led by donald trump. at their core, the were fearful of this browning of america and this is seen as the last big stan to reclaim america as a white predominately white country. that anti-immigrant, anti- person of color rhetoric that is coming out of this right is ghastly. it represents the ugly part of our country. trump used to praise fdr for one thing, all the great things franklin d roosevelt, but the one trump talks about, was in a gray 20 put japanese in internment camps in world war ii? he would praise eisenhower, ike did many good things, two terms, but trump praises operation with back, bringing workers, agricultural workers and shipping them out of the united states back to mexico. this is the kind of movement we are dealing with. it is frightening. we have not seen something like this coalesce since the confederate movement before the civil war. it had spirits, mccarthyism was a big deal but fellow republican dwight eisenhower along with the u.s. army were able to chop mccarthy off at the knees. there is nobody out there to stop or slow donald trump down and it s going to be up to joe biden and kamala harris to talk about optimism and the economy and talk about better days are here to come. talk about the virtues of democracy and don t result of fear mongering that trump is doing to mobilize his base and beyond. ruth, we will give you the last word, but i m thinking the fact that the european parliament elections are enfolding this week, and we talked the radical right is on the rise in the juxtaposition between was happening at home and across europe and political wrote this week that the radical right arrival in the european stage will have a lasting impact. allegiance sees allegiances formed in early adulthood tend to last lifetimes unlike in the u.s. were support for trump is concentrated among the elderly. the insurgents have captured the youth vote in europe, likely lacking and support for decades. nowhere is it more clear that in the national rally party as it relates to what s happening in france. a 28-year-old later. what say you about this rise of the radical right, this dirty populism amongst young people? it s a big problem. far right authoritarians have been very savvy about using tribalism and using emotion. symone, i want to and on an optimistic note because it s too easy wherever we are living to think there is this wave and it will submerge us and it is hopeless. we should not resist. in poland, they successfully voted out, they immobilized the biggest rally and voter turnout since 1989 and they got rid of their far right government. in hungary, there s huge protests, the gop ideal right now, and we saw in india voters dealt him a defeat. it does not have to go this way. it doesn t have to be this way. ruth ben-ghiat and douglas brinkley, thank you. we will go to tel aviv as we learn more about the fallout from an israeli military mission in gaza that rescue four hostages. stick with his. you are watching the weekend. 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reporter: even as israel is celebrating the success of yesterday s hostage rescue, they are bracing for a significant political development in a couple of hours time. 1:00 p.m. eastern we are expecting benny gantz, the centrist opposition leader who joins benjamin netanyahu s wartime government to hold a press conference and we believe he will announce that he is resigning from netanyahu s government. let s be clear, assuming that s what happens, what that does and does not mean. it does not mean the fall of netanyahu s government but it would mean that the far right inside of that government, the same far right that is deeply opposed to the cease-fire plan laid out by prime minister by president biden rather last week would be empowered. you would not have that centrist more moderate element inside of the government to counterbalance the power of the far right. that is potentially a significant move. we were expecting benny gantz to hold this press conference yesterday, but he delayed it in light of the hostage rescue. going back to the four hostages. all are in good condition according to the israeli military. they spent their first night being treated at a hospital here in the greater tel aviv area. we had a chance yesterday to catch up with some of the friends of noa argamani, the young woman who was kidnapped on october 7 from the music festival, taken on a motorcycle into gaza. the friends of hers who we have been speaking to for eight months have just seen her for the first time. take a listen. how are you feeling? amazing. very amazing. speak and she is amazing. she is strong. she s laughing and smiling. reporter: what was the first thing you said to her? a big hug and so glad you are here. reporter: the joy at noa s return is tinged with sadness. her mother is dying of brain cancer, and her final wish was to see her daughter once again. the wish was fulfilled yesterday. noa going to her mother s bedside. her boyfriend is also one of the 120 hostages still inside of gaza. the israeli military acknowledged that while it was a major success, they cannot rescue all 120 those still inside. there will have to be some sort of deal let those people are coming home. while there is celebration here in israel, there is searing grief inside of gaza. the health ministry said at least 274 people were killed by israeli forces during that raid in central gaza yesterday. one of the bloodiest days in gaza we have seen in a long time. we do not know how many of those 274 are militants or civilians, but our team on the ground was at one of those hospitals in central gaza. they say they saw dozens of women and children dead and dying, being brought into the hospital. that is the price of rescuing those hostages. we have heard from jake sullivan, the national security adviser, that while the u.s. is celebrating the release of these hostages, the united states also believes that the safest way forward for the hostages and for the civilians of gaza is not through more rescues like this but through a cease-fire deal that would bring hostages home and and end to the conflict. with those 274 deaths yesterday, that brings the death toll in gaza since october 7, to 37,084 people as of a couple of hours ago. raf sanchez, thank you very much. president biden is making his play for anti-trump republicans. as campaign senior spokesperson this year to discuss it. that is next. dad and i finally had that talk. no, not that talk. about what the future looks like. for me. i may have trouble getting around, but i want to live in my home where i m comfortable and my friends are nearby. i can do it with the help of a barber, personal shopper and exercise buddy. someone who can help me live right at home. life s good. when you have a plan. smile! you found it. the feeling of finding psoriasis can t filter out the real you. so go ahead, live unfiltered with the one and only sotyktu, a once-daily pill for moderate to severe plaque psoriasis, and the chance at clear or almost clear skin. it s like the feeling of finding you re so ready for your close-up. or finding you don t have to hide your skin just your background. once-daily sotyktu was proven better, getting more people clearer skin than the leading pill. don t take if you re allergic to sotyktu; serious reactions can occur. sotyktu can lower your ability to fight infections, including tb. serious infections, cancers including lymphoma, muscle problems, and changes in certain labs have occurred. tell your doctor if you have an infection, liver or kidney problems, high triglycerides, or had a vaccine or plan to. sotyktu is a tyk2 inhibitor. tyk2 is part of the jak family. it s not known if sotyktu has the same risks as jak inhibitors. find what plaque psoriasis has been hiding. there s only one sotyktu, so ask for it by name. so clearly you. sotyktu. frustrated by skin tags? 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( ) [thud] president biden, i think, has been serious about courting independence, even right- leaning independents and anti- trump republicans. the campaign hired a national republican engagement director who before this role was cheapest after former republican congressman adam kinzinger. this comes as outside groups are boosting outreach to these voters, republican voters against trump launched a six- figure billboard campaign and four swing states featuring republicans who refused to cast a ballot for the ex-president. joining us is senior spokesperson for the biden/harris campaign kevin munoz. it s good to see you. it s interesting and politically exciting to see the biden campaign engage the way it is starting to push up against a lot of the narratives . we were talking earlier about the biden ads that are taking trump s words and putting them out there and saying he said this. it did not make it up. you have this pivot politically on the ground where you are bringing on republicans who can help and weatherford out of the adam kinzinger for environment. how do you think the shapes of narratively for the biden campaign. what are you saying to republicans, i know many of them, waiting for that invitation to the conversation. they want to see it come correct. they want it to come in a way that s meaningful, to reaffirm the coalition, if you will, that biden needs to win. let s look at the opportunity. 4.5 million republican primary voters have voted against donald trump this year. these are voters that didn t have to vote in a primary. donald trump is clearly the front runner, but they want to show they had not gotten donald trump does not have their support and they want somebody that stands for the rule of law, stands for democracy, stands for fighting for america on the global stage. these are voters that need to hear from the campaign and we need to earn their votes. we been running these ads and targeting these voters in battleground states amber brought on austin, he has two decades of history. we got to focus on building a bunch of trust to republicans willing to speak up and talk to fellow republicans and say you can support president biden. we think we have a good message not just because we are not donald trump but because joe biden has a proven history of getting things done, working across the aisle. look at the bipartisan plan that trump killed. we will talk about those issues. let s talk about the border you have progressives angry over the present eye latest executive action on asylum specific. listen to what this representative had to say yesterday. republicans have covered up for every failure there s by pointing to some vulnerable group of people. i think they ve been setting up this trap that unfortunately president biden has been pushed into with this executive order. do you agree with that that the president has been pushed into a trap by republicans. help me understand the political calculus. what you lose in the we have energy and support from progressives. where are you gaining it back? let s take a step back. on day one of this administration, joe biden brought forth a comprehensive immigration plan republicans have failed. they used the border as a talking point and refuse to work with those. even despite that, joe biden was able to negotiate a bipartisan border plan that would ve provided long-overdue resources to help secure the border, provide more resources for immigration courts, help expedite green cards for a lot of people that need more pathways to citizenship and what happened? donald trump killed it not once but twice. we are in this position where we were forced to take executive action that helps address what we can and cannot do with very limited resources and we have to be honest about that. that does not mean the fight for comprehensive immigration reform is over. you heard biden talk about it earlier that the fight is far from over but we have to be honest. the american people demand action when it comes to a broken immigration system. overwhelming americans support the action and comprehensive immigration reform and we have to remind voters that we have to work for the. i want to as quickly as a follow-up. a lot of reporting about the possibility of the administration considering ways in which they could address challenges in immigration on the interior including parole in place of american citizens. is this something we could see as soon as this coming week? i can t get ahead of policy announcement but you heard the president earlier, the fight for comprehensive immigration reform, dressier pathways to citizenship, especially for people who have been here a long time is critical. the american people do not like chaos. they don t want chaos at the border or in their communities. we have to continue that fight and we have to remind the american people of what donald trump is running. he wants to round up latinos and immigrants across the country. max detention camps. we have to do both. and the time we have left, a lot of times when folks talk about engaging we talk about the need for the biden campaign to engage republicans because as part of his coalition. moderate republican voters and independents. we talk about the need to gin up the base as well and treat base voters, young people, women, black and latino voters, what is the message when it comes to the economy for black and latino voters, young people . when i am talking to people, one of the chief concerns as economic. housing. the rent is too high all over. gut bless you if you want to buy a house and you were not rich. which your message to folks, here which is a about the border, trump scene phobic. what about the economy? we have to tell a story to the american people about who is fighting for them and fighting to make their lives better. it s not just the economy who is taking action to address corporate greed? action to address junk fees? lowering health care costs, cutting prescription cost for the american people? this takes time and these efforts to talk about the economy, connect joe biden s popular agenda, agenda that was hard to get past but he got it done, and remind them that not only did he make washington work but donald trump will undo all of that. he will increase health care costs. he s having big oil executives right his executive orders if they max out his campaign. we ve got to do it by showing up where voters are at. they are not watching the news every day. they are watching the weekend. we have to talk to them in tiktok. we have to be on the tabloid magazines. we have to be on podcast. we ve got to go but here s the thing. kevin, you ve got to connect to understanding that rent is too high. and understanding of the efforts we are undertaking are going to try to address that. the federal government cannot lower your rent, but policies can be put in place to make people to put people in better positions. wage increases would offset rancourt increases. that s important. symone hits an important part of this conversation for the biden team that connection of what s happening to me realtime i still don t know if you understand it and they want to hear that you understand that. absolutely. and i think we have a good opportunity. there is time but not much time. kevin muniz, good to see you. he tripled down on defending jim crow. that he did interfere with reverend sharpton is coming up and we will have some of that. be sure to follow us on social media. our handle his @theweekendmsnbc s to getting better with age. here s to beating these two every thursday. help fuel today with boost high protein, complete nutrition you need. .without the stuff you don t. so, here s to now. boost. frustrated by skin tags? 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[ engine revving ] [ laughing ] the dodge hornet r/t. the totally torqued-out crossover. my frequent heartburn had me taking antacid after antacid all day long but with prilosec otc just one pill a day blocks heartburn for a full 24 hours. for one and done heartburn relief, prilosec otc. one pill a day, 24 hours, zero heartburn. we will pick back up where we left off. i think kevin is a great spokesperson for the biden campaign. i thought he was clear and calm and comfortable. where michael ended is the most important place. there are specifics specific questions voters have about specific things like housing. prices. like criminal justice reform. i think this campaign has answers, but they have to give them. i just think with us than five months until people start voting until election day less until people start voting is to give the specifics. the details are the things that will matter to the voters and make a difference. you can t give specifics on the barbershop tour. you have to get them anywhere. i think that is a big part of it. you see people and hear people and we run into them in our respective communities. they respond to us on social media. beneath the surface is this keen interest in the answer to the question, how am i going to be better tomorrow? you are asking me for another four years and i don t feel good about these four years and i m looking finely back over the last four years of the guy who is an absolute bad choice. how to help me understand and contextualize this tomorrow? my today ain t so good. when you come with a laundry list of policy objectives, that what comes up for me is that some of it is about trusted messenger and not just hearing it from campaign staff. hearing from your neighbor who says i hear you and here are the things i have done. this is a down payment on a next term. yeah. that is important because in my universe they spread those lies and those conspiracy theories amongst themselves. they are so effective at pushing it into the broader mainstream to legitimize it. that point of having faces that people know explain the story of hot tomorrow is better i think will go a long way. what he said about corporate greed is real and junk fees, those are addressing what is happening but people may not know what junk fees or corporate greed are. one of the finest political communicators at the top of this block. i want you to refill the coffee. we have another hour straight ahead with political analyst rick stengel and national security analyst coming up on the weekend. e) saving for retirement was tough enough. 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(kev) yo, yo what s up everybody? how you doing? don t mop harder, (reporter 1) kev! kev! can i get a response to the trade rumors? (kev) trade? trade means movin man.we talkin about moving? moving means contractors, inspectors, strangers judging my carpet. we talkin about staging? we talkin about a faux ficus? a faux ficus? nobody s gonna bring a faux ficus into my house. (reporter 2) you could use opendoor. sell your house directly to them, it s easy. (kev) . i guess we re movin . (reporters) kev! kev! (kev) whatchu gonna ask me about next, man? practice? will come back to the weekend. breaking this hour, president biden is closing out his trip to france by paying respect to american service members to commemorate the 80th anniversary
all russian and soviet dictators, their problem is they always think that they re the last line of defense. you are in power. you have the right to, if you decide, to destroy it so nobody else will get it. the united states doesn t even notice that the soviets are on edge. they didn t even put the soviet reaction into ronald reagan s presidential daily brief. [indistinct radio chatter] [narrator] before andropov can act, the able archer operation wraps up on schedule. [pilot] roger that. [narrator] andropov is finally persuaded that this really was just an exercise. this time. [tim] the united states didn t know to ratchet down the tension when it really mattered. that is an indicator of just the lack of understanding that the united states and the soviet union had of each other. but in a nuclear confrontation, lack of understanding can have catastrophic consequences when adversaries have nuclear weapons pointed at each other and don t understand each other. every day in every state across the country, our political system is bankrolled by an army of fund-raisers, pulling in millions of dollars a race. sometimes it looks like you might imagine knocking on doors, calling every name in the phone book, and emails so many emails. but for all those little fish throwing $100 to their local race, it s the whales those campaign fund-raisers really need powerful, rich individuals and companies. and when they donate $25,000, $100,000, a million dollars, they want a favor.or 10. it should be obvious that s corrupt, but with a wink and a nod, political deals toe the bribery line every single day. and we may never have noticed that if a certain illinois governor hadn t flung back the curtain with an unrepentant ego, a political corruption crime spree, and a set of unprecedented audio recordings that shined a bright light on the inner workings of american political power. ladies and gentlemen, meet rod blagojevich. it was early morning, cause i used to get up every morning and turn on the 6:00 news, and, you know, like, you re kinda waking up, and then you re like, well, wait, what? [helicopter whirring] oh, sh , they outside of blagojevich s house! they got cameras, they got cars, and then they march him out. and you re like, that s our governor, joe. breaking news the illinois governor, rod blagojevich, charged with plotting to sell barack obama s former senate seat. tapper: remember this guy? he sure hopes you do. governor rod blagojevich went down in a blaze of infamy for one of the largest political corruption scandals of our time. the governor was allegedly trying to sell the illinois senate seat vacated by president-elect obama. in fact, part of the governor s sales pitch was that the seat still had that new obama smell. [audience laughter] appointing someone to the senate is a rare opportunity when the will of the people is swapped wholesale for a gubernatorial power trip. blagojevich had the sole authority to place whomever he wanted straight into the halls of the u.s. senate, and he was not shy about wanting a little something in return. with the fbi recording his phone calls, for the first time since nixon, the public was able to listen in on raw backroom politics, and there s nothing quite like hearing it from the horse s mouth. reporter: the criminal complaint quotes blagojevich as saying the senate seat was a valuable thing. you just don t give it away for nothing. another quote i ve got this thing, and it s bleeping golden. [blagojevich speaking] i ve got this thing, and it s [bleep] golden. -yeah. -[audience laughter] and i m not just giving it up for [bleep] nothing. [laughter] was there a second [bleep] in there? tapper: racking up a staggering 24 criminal charges, governor blagojevich s actions essentially boiled down to four things extortion, bribery, corruption, and wire fraud. and it wasn t just about the senate seat. blagojevich was also found guilty of extorting a children s hospital. you can t write this stuff. he s an arrogant punk who thinks that, you know, he s bulletproof. well, he s not. he was convicted on 18 total charges and sentenced to 14 years, the longest sentence ever handed down to a governor. people loathed blagojevich for the way he politicked, but was what he did so blatantly criminal? cause the truth is that the line between what s illegal and what s allowable is much murkier than we d like to think, and this is where the rod blagojevich story gets interesting. let me reassert to all of you once more that i am not guilty of any criminal wrongdoing. [camera shutter clicks] was rod a corrupt politician or just a politician operating in a corrupt system that still thrives to this day? so, governor, thanks for doing this. thank you. so you ve been out of prison now for almost two years. a little over two years. and you re still very outspoken about how you feel like the case against you was unjust. there isn t really an argument about what you said. -right. -it s on tape. right. the question is whether it was illegal and whether it was morally wrong. look, if you re saying, do we have a fund-raising system in america that you can arguing is legalized bribery? i think there s truth to that. but did i do anything other than that standard that every other person in politics does, from president biden on down? i did the same as them and nothing worse. there is this real problem in american politics today where prosecutors are weaponizing themselves, criminalizing routine illegal practices in government politics, and i think it s wrong when they do it to bill clinton. it s wrong, i think, when they did it to president trump cause i have strong views on that, and i know it was wrong when they did it to me. okay, lot to unpack there. let s talk about the chicago and illinois system, because you re hardly the first governor in history, even in recent history, to to go to prison. what s the situation here that causes this to happen? well, i think it s time-honored here, and there s a long history in chicago politics, illinois politics, where pretty much everybody gets rich. ah, chicago politics. it s like going to a pay pond when you go fishing. like, if you are a prosecutor, you cannot be in illinois and not get something. illinois is steeped in a rich history of political corruption that dates back a century to the prohibition era, when bootlegging gangsters such as al capone bought off politicians and police departments, keeping them drunk on power and.also just drunk. in rod s lifetime, illinois has developed a rap sheet that any mobster would be proud of more than 1,700 convictions for corruption, including nearly 30 chicago aldermen, eight stage legislators, two u.s. congressmen, and before rod came onto the scene, three governors. in an odd way, the very people who should hate the idea of corruption are kind of proud that this is al capone s illinois. chicago is a wink and a nod town. -it s a shot and a beer town. -[clink] lot of it has to do with family relationships, because a lot of the political leadership in chicago and illinois are family-related. there s the daley family, the madigans. all of these families sort of become part of this mafia. -yeah. -a political mafia, and they re the ones who make the rules. i didn t come from that. i had to marry into it. i met a girl on the 6th of march, 1988. she was wearing a red dress, and she happened to be the daughter of an old-fashioned chicago political war boss. and she s my wife patti. we fell in love. patti blagojevich is a loyal wife, she is a tough customer, and she s the daughter of dick mell. she s complicated. that budding relationship between those two is how rod goes from this nobody politically, finding a way to kind of imbed himself into one of these big political families in chicago. they have so much power. i don t think it was, you know, some great surprise that, like, you know, when it comes time to meet the parents, that dick mell was the father-in-law and the the powerful city council chieftain. we re gonna try to work together to put this great city back together so that we re all part of it and we all feel free. dick mell was a guy who always had the voice in the backrooms. he was a power broker in that kind of chicago classic sense. before politics, it was a nice relationship, but for the most part, respectful. and then because i was in the family, and i was actually pretty good at helping her dad, local politics, knocking on doors and trying to get him votes, there was an opportunity to run for office. in rod blagojevich, mell could see a guy that eventually, if he does it right, i could sort of pass the mantle toward. rod was an immediate hit with illinois voters, who sent him first to the state house in 1992 and then to the u.s. congress in 1996. dick mell says, i can see you being governor. and i gotta be honest, i m sure if i m looking at it from dick mell s position, he s saying, man, if i can elect this guy governor, i can run the whole state. reporter: the campaign for illinois governor has gotten pretty lively. you ve got chicago congressman rod blagojevich. what s that name again? -bala-jo-vich. -reporter: bala-jo-vich, huh? -bala-jo-vich. -you sure? positive. tapper: during rod s 2002 governor s campaign, dick mell s membership in the old school chicago elite was a definite bonus, but it was rod s working class bonafides and people skills that did all the rest. coming from the family he did, he had a real working class chip on his shoulder, and his two heroes were elvis and richard nixon, both because they were guys who came from the wrong side of their tracks and fought their way up and were kind of disdained by the elites. in fact, if those two gritty 20th century icons fought their way into a single person, you might actually end up with rod blagojevich, for better and for worse. the rod blagojevich that i first met was youthful. he was energetic. he had this kind of mane of black hair that was super thick, and you could tell it was filled with hair product. the hair so iconic in its own right, that it became a comedy staple on every late night show. -the hair. -the hair. really, it looks like you re wearing a toupée that s also wearing a toupée. [audience laughter] he had a huge infatuation with elvis presley. his charisma was disarming. [cheers and applause] [amplified voice] thank you. thank you very much. [cheers, whistles, and applause] but the elvis of illinois was itching to lose his colonel parker, because despite the many benefits of dick mell s patronage, rod was still in his shadow. you know, he really became known as dick mell s son-in-law first. and i know he hated that. he didn t know how to both be his own man and not let dick mell foreshadow him. the only way for rod to survive outside of his father-in-law s machine was to create his own cash flow. so his first step was to hire two of chicago s most bare-knuckled political fund-raisers, chris kelly and tony rezko. chris kelly and tony rezko could generate big bucks. they were fund-raisers. they were donors. you know, let s just call em what they were. they were influence peddlers. they wound up being able to shake the bushes here and help rod raise money. they promised access and favors if blagojevich won, and they got results. where dick mell s good old boys would fetch $2,000 at a time, kelly and rezko would shake loose 50 grand. all that money plus rod s appeal to voters who had felt ignored by the entrenched chicago political dynasties well, it proved to be an unstoppable combination. he ran on some things that were uniquely important to black people. healthcare for kids is a good idea. when he said, free rides for seniors on public transportation, that resonated with black people specifically. blagojevich became governor in 2003. -congratulations, governor. -thank you. may god bless you. [cheers and applause] how do you view your your time as governor apart from the scandals? how do i say this in a way where i don t sound like a guy without any humility? but i truly believe i was a great governor. i can t think of any governor in my life that did anything for anybody i knew that can walk around and say, you know what? thank you, governor. my daughter had healthcare through you. free public transportation for seniors and the disabled? i did that cause they raised the sales tax, which hurts working people and poor people and seniors. with the legislature raising taxes that hit lower-income illinoisans hardest, and rod striking back with policies to offset that, it s no surprise that his populist agenda made him a lot of enemies amongst the big political families. to the people and the masses, he was on our team, and to the aristocracy and to the political elites, he was this guy that was taking their resources and giving em to the peasants, and so he became robin hood. i knew the reality that i m gonna have resistance from the old guard, the old ward bosses, the madigans, daley to some extent, my father-in-law, and so the goal was raise money now and raise a lot of it so that you can afford to make enemies, and you can afford to lose support. right, but some of these people that you were that you were relying on like chris kelly were were corrupt. -right? -turned out that chris had problems in his own personal business, and he was found guilty of those things. had nothing to do with me. but, like, a lot of the people in the world of fund-raising are not necessarily. -they are not. -.upstanding individuals. -no, they re not. -yeah. -no, they re not. what s the saying? ignorance is not a defense ? tony rezco and chris kelly they started compiling this list of different entities that were state contractors, and they hit all those people up for money, probably with rod s assistance. hey, you got a contract? you wanna keep it? or you want to get more? you gotta pony up. a lot of people in play have scalpel-like tendencies when they fund-raise, and rod was probably more of a meat cleaver. [beeping] -[telephone rings] -kelly and rezco were using government levers to squeeze anyone they could for a campaign contribution kickbacks like a cushy job or a fat contract, a little light extortion such as holding up teachers funds. they had deep pockets to fill and a financial machine to do it. you can t trade official actions as a governor in exchange for campaign contributions or jobs. i mean, there is one simple word for that. it s called graft. graft is simply the use of political power and authority in exchange for personal gain. to state the obvious, appointing unqualified people to state positions because you wanna use the government as a vending machine for your political campaign that s completely illegal. the m.o. was to make money from every state petitioner possible, and small-town hospital ceo pam davis looked like just another easy mark. but in this case, the whole shakedown process is recorded by the hospital executive who was getting shaken down. [laughs] woman: he needs to reset your wire. [laughs] oh, god, another wire. sorry for, uh. -i don t care. -just in here. uh, the governor really wasn t on my radar, um, at all until i experienced an extortion attempt through one of his, um, colleagues. pam s hospital system wanted to build a new facility in plainfield, illinois. seems pretty straightforward, but there were red flags right away when she went to get government approval for the project. davis: in my case, the governor had appointed individuals to this board who had either contributed money to his campaign, so they bought their way on, or individuals that were controlled by the governor and other individuals and would approve only those projects where a kickback was going to be given. turns out the board was willing to approve the hospital. all she had to do was use builders and lenders who were in their pocket and pad the contract so the board could take. let s call it a transaction fee for their trouble. it became clear to me that this was a major extortion attempt, and i was furious. so i called the fbi. the feds set her up with a wire so they could listen in on her meetings with board members and get the dirt straight from the source. she d be meeting with these players, and they would be basically laying out the whole scheme to her. davis: the contract would be padded, um, by roughly $10 million so that that money would go then to the various players. at one point, i decided, i wonder if this goes up to the governor, because the governor appoints these individuals to the various boards. the feds were wondering the same thing, and over the course of their investigation, their suspicions proved to be spot on. out of the public eye, rod s fund-raising goons, chris kelly and tony rezko, felt safe to strong-arm money from donors across illinois. but unbeknownst to them, the fbi was following their every move as part of a far-reaching corruption investigation into the blagojevich administration. as the money rolled in, their role in rod s administration only grew, which had his father-in-law, dick mell, feeling as though he d been served divorce papers. as dick mell famously said, he got replaced by a trophy wife or trophy wives. those were the people who were getting the love that he should have gotten and wasn t getting. we all know that you got here because of dick mell. rod says, i got my own team, and so don t talk to dick mell. not only does he not do what you wanna do, but he said, don t talk to my boss. i m the boss now. well, dick mell ain t feeling that, and dick mell is not the type to be like, so, may i talk to you privately? mell wears his heart on his sleeve, his anger on his sleeve. .leave me out! he can love you today, and if he starts hating you tomorrow, he can, you know, pull the switch just like that. and mell becomes more and more resentful of being cast aside, and so that fueled this tension in that family to the point where it eventually exploded. [explosion] that explosion came in 2005, and though it may not have aired on reality tv, it was still inextricably linked to garbage. rod blagojevich closed down this landfill which dick mell was a part owner of. rod said that this was for environmental issues. tapper: what did he want you to do? leave it alone, and i had learned that it was operating in violation of the environmental laws. i had knowledge of that. uh, ultimately, i decided i had a duty, that i had to shut it down, and then he made some accusations that really unleashed the furies. dick mell called a press conference and basically accused rod blagojevich of selling board and commission seats within state government. reporter: mell has had a falling out with his son-in-law, the governor. this is a family at war. so your father-in-law, dick mell, accused chris kelly of selling political favors for campaign contributions of $25,000 to $50,000 at a time. tell me about where were you when you heard that he was leveling this accusation. i remember vividly. it was early january of 2005, and this was the consequence of me shutting down his landfill. the very next day, he called a press conference, and he was clever enough to accuse chris kelly, not directly me, but that s me. i don t think he envisioned that it would turn into something that would ultimately land me in prison, but i know he did this to hurt me politically and cause me problems with the fbi. tapper: mel s allegations backed rod into a corner, giving the fbi room to prosecute his inner circle, until in 2008, the feds secured a secret wiretap on the governor himself. feeling the squeeze, rod started looking for some kind of escape route, and then a golden opportunity landed right in his lap. at this defining moment, change has come to america. [cheers and applause] now that senator barack obama is president-elect barack obama, someone will have to take over his senate seat. this is the governor s decision. uh, it is not my decision. the criteria that i would have for my successor would be the same criteria that i d have if i were a voter. senator obama becomes president obama. he resigns his senate seat. according to the law here in illinois, you as the governor get to name his replacement. now you re excited about this, and you say on tape, i d like to get the [bleep] out of here, and you re talking about options for yourself. does that mean, i d like to get the [bleep] out of here, you were sick of being governor? that s absolutely the things i was saying, of course, and i was looking at all kinds of options. so he attempted to trade obama s seat for a golden parachute. he begins to be heavily courted by all sorts of people who would love to be that u.s. senator. they saw something really valuable here a very valuable bargaining chip that could elevate his power in some way or or benefit them monetarily. when i said i wanted to get the eff out of here, it s because the fbi people and my persecutors were all over me, and it s the sort of thing, when that stuff s swirling around you, you know that stuff s swirling around you. -right. -and it s there. it s everywhere, and it and it was just very clear to me that they were determined to get me no matter what. i guess one question i have is knowing that they were looking at you, why did you talk about this stuff that way? look, i had 2,896 days in prison to ask myself a thousand questions, including that. but you know what? what s the alternative? i have all my staff and lawyers. we all go to saunas and get naked and talk to each other so nobody s got wires on em? -no, or -what s the alternative? or you just don t say anything, or you just say, like, this seat is very important, and we wanna make sure the best person gets it. and separately, i am thinking that i d like to not be governor of illinois anymore. well said. i don t make a habit of telling politicians how to avoid jail time, but here s the thing. being more cautious could have gotten rod everything he wanted and kept him out of prison, but caution is not really in rod s dna. [blagojevich speaking] [line disconnects] jackson: you know they taping you, so you can t say that out loud, right? breaking news the illinois governor charged with plotting to sell barack obama s former senate seat. reporter: illinois rod blagojevich was arrested tuesday morning by federal authorities and charged with corruption. dude. dude! dude. you know they trying to get you, dawg. but why? why? reporter: the day after being arrested on corruption charges, illinois governor rod blagojevich walked out of his house and headed back to work. -[camera shutter clicks] -tapper: all in all, rod blagojevich was facing 24 charges connected to four specific events the attempted sale of obama s senate seat, withholding legislation that would benefit a children s hospital and racetrack in an attempt to get political contributions, and the attempted extortion of a highway contractor. [amplified voice, chanting] 2, 3, 4, blago must go! i personally think he should at least step aside if not resign. my husband is an honest man, and i know that he s innocent. jackson: he thought that he had the moral high ground. i don t believe there s any cloud that hangs over me. -man: governor, governor -well, getting back to that, can we discuss your i think there s nothing but sunshine hanging over me. he didn t show any of the humility or anything. you just can t stick your finger in the eye of the federal government. let me reassert to all of you once more that i am not guilty of any criminal wrongdoing, that i m confident that at the end of the day, i will be, uh, properly, uh, exonerated. [reporters speaking at once] i represented rod blagojevich in two of his criminal trials. i mean, he wanted to fight his case. he believed he was innocent, and he was working to that end to try and prove his innocence. anyone who believes that this was a selling of some senate seat doesn t understand politics. every single day in politics, that is what happens, is this horse-trading. and if you really listen to this in context, what you heard was talking with various people, getting annoyed, talking about nonsense, and then the end. nothing really that was ever acted on. later, rod blagojevich s lawyers would argue that what rod did specifically with the senate seat was no worse than when president eisenhower appointed earl warren as chief justice of the supreme court. back in 1952, dwight eisenhower s about to win the nomination to become the republican president. earl warren, the governor of california, is withholding the delegation s votes. governor warren tells eisenhower, i ll deliver the delegation for you on one condition. i wanna be the next chief justice of the supreme court. ike, the great war hero, shakes hands, says, you got a deal. he wins. one year later, earl warren is the chief justice of the united states supreme court. rod wanted a political appointment from obama, and for that, he was prepared to trade obama s old senate seat, which is actually legal. otherwise, eisenhower would have gone to jail, and americans would not have liked ike. do you see yourself as somebody who was just trying to function in perhaps an inherently corrupt but legal system, and that theoretically almost any politician could be snagged the way you were? absolutely. of course i do, except i m giving me higher marks. because i was using that money that that and that power gave me to fight an established system that served itself on the backs of the people, and when you do that, you piss a lot of people off, and they wanna get rid of you. but do you think that you re earthier about it? like, more outspoken about it? well, i wasn t hiding any of it, but these because it s legal, and that s how you govern. abraham lincoln was able to get the 13th amendment passed at congress, which ratified the emancipation proclamation, freeing slaves. he had to make political deals with members of congress to get the votes to pass it. -that s how you get things done. -you re not comparing yourself to abraham lincoln. -by no means. -okay. -and please say that. i m not comparing myself to abraham lincoln. you re not or the emancipation proclamation. okay, right. he s a lot taller than me, and i never did anything as great as that, of course not. -but you re also not talking about the i mean, the emancipation proclamation of course i m not. governor blagojevich tried to sell the appointment to the senate seat vacated by president-elect obama. the conduct would make lincoln roll over in his grave. you re very critical of pat fitzgerald. yeah, he s an evil guy. he s a wicked guy. he s a scoundrel, and he deserves to get an ass kicking. you know? and he s a big coward. anyway, go ahead. sorry. well, i think he would take issue with everything you just said. you know, he has a reputation for being the choirboy, for being, you know, an upstanding, moral person. he sees himself as, i am trying to uphold some basic standards for our politicians. that s how he views it. governor blagojevich has been arrested in the middle of what we can only describe as a political corruption crime spree. we had a political and public narrative that we had to overcome, and when the entire potential jury pool believes that your client is guilty before they ve even heard the evidence, you re going into the trial like if it s a basketball game, you re losing 100 to nothing. or it s like if you re a governor, and you re getting impeached 114 to 1, and the lone vote in rod s favor his sister-in-law, deb mell. done from office and eager to prove he was not a crook, rod knew exactly where to plead his case. please welcome to the program governor rod blagojevich! [applause] you are a charming dude with the best set of hair i ve ever [bleep] seen. [audience laughter] so i want this to be real. got some challenges ahead, but, uh, i m gonna trust in the truth and as it says in the bible, the truth shall set you free. rod blagojevich just.kept.talking. how are you? you wanna get on tv? come on in. i think he was able to warm himself a little bit with the public. better to be seen as a klutz than a crook. sure, everyone loves a good laugh, but oversaturating the talk show circuit may have had unintended consequences, as david letterman told rod when he appeared on the late show in 2009. the more you talked and the more you repeated your innocence, the more i said to myself, oh, this guy s guilty. [laughter] so during the period from your impeachment to your trial and your sentencing, you did a lot of media appearances. what was the strategy behind that? my feeling was like, look, i didn t do any of that stuff, and what does somebody do who s being lied about? but you have a tremendous desire to get out at the highest mountain and yell out, i didn t do it. well, letterman said that the louder you yelled it, the more it made him think you were guilty. yeah. yeah, i mean, i didn t i didn t convince him, but, uh, i think i convinced donald trump. that s why i got invited on celebrity apprentice, right? i have great respect for your tenacity, for the fact that you just don t give up. but, rod.you re fired. what i saw over the course of rod s career was a guy who started off as kind of a charming rogue and a guy who really did give voice to concerns that people had to someone who became almost a parody of himself. and by the time that trial came around, he really was his own worst enemy. see you in court. he thought that the court of public opinion could save him, but he had disturbed forces that decided, it was a wrap for you, dude. don t poke the feds, fam. just don t do it. man: blago, can i get your autograph? reporter: at verdict today, in a notorious case that federal prosecutors did not want to hear, rod blagojevich was convicted today on only one count. -see you guys! -man: way to go, baby! tapper: the jury was hung on all but one of the charges against blagojevich, and without unanimous consent, the result was a mistrial on the remaining 23 charges. the jury, like a lot of people to this day, just could not agree on whether what he d done was actually illegal. in that first trial, the jury deadlocked on everything except for lying to the fbi. -right. you were convicted of lying to the fbi. -right. -do you acknowledge that you lied to the fbi? -no. no. i don t. i ll tell you about that. it was about how much of your associates that were fund-raising for you, the degree to which you knew what you were doing. yeah, it was the issue was i said, i didn t, as a practice, track fund-raising. and who got contracts? i didn t. i didn t look into who got contracts. i wasn t interested in that. i had 27,000 contributors. i wasn t tracking who gave me money, who got what. the first trial was too confusing for the jury, and they had a lot of paper documents. it was a lot of witness testimony. man: governor, are you anxious for this to begin? i feel great. absolutely. what the government did in the second trial is they pared down their their case, and they believed that everything was in the tapes and they needed to make this trial a lot simpler. [blagojevich speaking] he was swearing a lot. .and upset and not appreciative of the position that he had. and i think that was more influential in the jury s decision than than anything. it made him look bad. breaking news right now the jury has reached a decision, convicting blagojevich on 17 counts of corruption. -reporter: wire fraud. -bribery. blitzer: attempted extortion. solicitation of a bribe. blitzer: racketeering. conspiracy to commit bribery and conspiracy to commit extortion. rod blagojevich was convicted on almost all counts and sentenced to 14 years. patti and i are obviously very disappointed, uh, in the outcome. i, frankly, am am stunned. when did you realize, oh, shit, i might actually be going to prison ? -from the beginning. -really? -i knew i was a dead man. -really? -yeah. -why? cause they have so much power and resources, and i, you know, wasn t really surprised when i got 14 years. the justification for the judge was, you treated this like a golden glove boxing match, but those corrupt liars are lucky dueling is outlawed, cause i d have challenged them to a duel. rapists and murderers get so much less time? that s why this system is so wrong and so broken. let me offer you an alternate theory. sure. my alternate theory is that the entire system of justice that we have in this country depends on prosecutors and police who are incentivized to get convictions. -mm-hmm. -period. what do you think of that? well, i think you re almost right. [laughs] i never took a penny. no one says i did. i keep saying that cause that s so important to me. i don t want people to think that i was some one of these corrupt politicians that was taking cash. tapper: but remember, even though he never actually got that envelope full of money, that was because the feds closed in before the senate deal was done. the offers being considered, campaign contributions or a lucrative job in a nonprofit, the fact of accepting them that would have been simply illegal, hence, the charge of conspiracy to commit bribery, which he was definitely guilty of. rod s argument is no cash changed hands, but prior to that, there had been plenty of money changing hands. there s ample evidence these government positions, these government contracts they were effectively for sale. it does not matter if rod blagojevich actually won the argument and got the money or the donations he was seeking. it s the ask. if something goofs it up, but the burglary or robbery s interrupted, it doesn t make it less of an intended burglary or robbery, right? he had his day in court. that 14 years was what the system gave him. so you went to prison for almost eight years? 2,896 days. and let me tell ya what gets you through prison when you have to face something like that. it s love and it s faith love for my daughters and my wife. you know, when i was arrested, within days, the vegas oddsmakers had it 9 to 1 that she was leaving. so in that sense, i ve been so lucky and blessed. after he was sent to prison, patti proclaimed his innocence, and she did try and go to any leader that she could find to have him either pardoned or commuted. and when all else failed, patti blagojevich knew exactly who to appeal to next. after rod goes to prison, patti was essential in keeping their life together. more than anything else, maybe, she got in donald trump s ear. trump had a connection with blagojevich cause rod was on the apprentice, and patti blagojevich was on fox news every day. you know, we know that president trump is a kind man, and he s compassionate. he s always been kind to my family. and when you speak on fox news, you have a direct connection with donald trump. today the president sprung from prison former illinois governor rod blagojevich, who was convicted after attempting his own quid pro quo. yes, uh, we have commuted the sentence of rod. i watched his wife on television. quote, um, i watched his wife on television. -yes. -end quote. how did how did that happen? i think he just saw he he would tell me he liked the fact that i was fighting back. i remember him saying something like, uh, you know, i have friends that go through what you re going through, and they re in a corner. they can t even move, and you re out there throwing punches. i think he liked that. i m so grateful to him. sometimes things happen in life where god intervenes in the most unbelievable ways. trump, blagojevich, fox news? i m not sure how much god played a role in any of this. when rod came home from prison after eight years, his daughters had grown up. how are your relationships with them? they re good. i m i m getting to know them. our family was broken for a long time. the difficulties that i talked about with my father-in-law, those were heartbreaking, because in spite of everything, i love him, and he s been good to me in so many ways. and, uh, you know, it s been a tough road for my wife. our lives could have been so much simpler, so much better. understandably, rod looks back on the time away from his family with regret, not for what he did, of course, but that he was sent to prison in the first place. but what else would you expect from rod? i am a political prisoner. i was put in prison for practicing politics. wait a minute. you re a political prisoner? nelson mandela was a political prisoner. political prisoners have no due process. i was thrown in prison and spent nearly eight years in prison for practicing politics, for seeking campaign contributions without a quid pro quo. you do have an obligation to at least admit what you did wrong, and you refuse to do that, and you re creating a whole new alternate universe of facts, and that may be big in politics today, but it s still, frankly, just bullshit. a reporter, uh, asked you if you wanted to say sorry to the people of illinois, and you said, sorry for what? -do you still feel that way? -very much so. i ve done a lot wrong. criminal? none. you and your defenders argue that the persecution, prosecution of you is about the criminalization of politics. in other words, there is horse-trading that goes on in politics. you do me this favor. i ll do you this favor, and that s all you were doing, and that it s legal, but they made it out to be illegal. well, first of all, it s not illegal. now you can argue whether we should improve our laws. that s a valid thing. i would think there s a lot of room to improve the fund-raising laws, but that s not illegal at all, and it s a common practice. now ultimately, after i ve been in prison for four years, the appellate court reverses that big lie of the sale of the senate seat, and they said it s routine political logrolling. and look, that s partially true. the court did vacate the conviction related to obama s senate seat, but they never said he did nothing wrong. the court said there was a jury instruction issue, and they upheld the remaining 13 counts. so contrary to his claim, he has not been exonerated. and for the love of elvis, we can only hope that rod s crimes are not routine. if there is a big lie, it s that he s a victim, especially since every other charge was upheld, including the extortion of a children s hospital. gandhi, he ain t. this isn t some sort of mystery, that, gosh, i didn t know. i had no idea. it s so gray. really? i think most of us have some gut sense of when we re beginning to get in trouble. i don t believe blagojevich has ever done any reflection on right and wrong. extorting a hospital never occurred to him that that might harm the citizens that he was elected to protect. he he has no ability to look at anything but himself. that s it. that s it. what s the worst thing that can be said about you that s accurate in your view, other than you were stupid to say that stuff? sure. look, i ve been accused of being a narcissist. i might plead to a misdemeanor on that, okay? um, i think i my judgment of some people was way off. i think i should have been a lot more vigilant and see some of the warning signs. i knew they were aggressively out there raising money, and i didn t slow it down because i wanted to raise the campaign money. i could have been more vigilant on that in retrospect. close, but no cigar. whether or not rod trusted the wrong people, he set them loose on illinois because they brought him the most money. whether the rules on political fund-raising are flimsy guardrails at best,
Dissolution people that will show up, or will biden have more disillusioned people that would show up, and that scares me because i feel like for those of us doing the work, in the streets every day, defending people s freedoms, if trump wins again, what we are facing is no dissent, and with no dissent, we can t challenge any of it. but, if he wins again, there are no surprises about who donald trump is. in 2016 you could make the argument. people don t realize who he is. remember all of these people were going no, you don t realize what you re in for. america knows exactly what they re in for. you know, there seems to be a lot of delusion. we hear a lot about the trump era was great. the trump administration was great is if covid just didn t happen and some reason that those last two years just don t count against his record. i don t remember covid but i definitely remember