Maddow: The world needs Russian dissidents against growing threat of Putin aggression
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freaking deal. MSNBC Live Democracy 2024, Saturday, September 7th in Brooklyn, New York. Visit MSNBC.com slash Democracy 2024 to buy your tickets today. Chicago, the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago has a lot of amazing stuff. Science museums are almost always great. Science museums are the best.

But at the Museum of Science and Industry, right on the shore of Lake Michigan in Chicago, they have some truly crazy stuff. I kid you not, at that museum in Chicago, they've got a replica coal mine, a full-size fake coal mine that you ride a cage elevator down into, you get on a train down there, and you ride around in the fake mine. It's bizarre, right in the middle of downtown Chicago.

They've also, at that museum, they've got the actual Apollo 8 spacecraft. Not a replica of it, they've got the real Apollo 8 module. They've got the thing. They've also got this terrifying mirror maze that I can't even look at pictures of without getting my stomach all twisted up. It's just, ah, my worst nightmare. It's the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, and they have many cool things that you can see and touch and get inside and ride around in.

But undoubtedly, the craziest thing they have got there is this, which is a real life German U-boat. It's the only one on display anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. This is a German submarine that the U.S. captured during World War II.

German U-boats during World War II were absolutely devastating. They sunk thousands of Allied ships, including lots and lots of American ships. By 1943, the Allies had hunter-killer task forces assigned to go find U-boats anywhere in the world and sink them because they were so dangerous, because they were doing so much damage, not just to Allied military vessels, but even just to merchant ships everywhere.

By 1943, they had hunter-killer task forces looking for U-boats everywhere. By 1944, one particular U.S. Navy hunter-killer task force was able to do an almost impossible thing. They hunted down a German U-boat. It was called U-505. They hunted it down and found it about 150 miles off the coast of West Africa. But they didn't sink it. They captured it.

They crippled this thing with depth charges while it was undersea. They then fired on it when it surfaced. They then boarded the sub. American sailors boarded the sub on the high seas. They stopped the Germans from scuttling the sub, from deliberately sinking it. They rescued the German crew that had bailed out into the sea and surrendered. They took them prisoner.

And then they took the sub. They towed the German U-boat away. It was the first time the U.S. had captured an enemy ship on the high seas since the War of 1812. And it turns out it was a gold mine. Way better to capture it than to just sink it. Not only did the Allies now have a U-boat that they could study, so they could learn its capabilities, learn how it operated, learn its vulnerabilities, they also got

all the stuff that was on board that German U-boat, including code books. They got code books, they got all these classified German military documents, they got German communication equipment, state-of-the-art German communication equipment. They even got a German Enigma cipher machine with all the most up-to-date coding and decoding stuff on it, all the up-to-date cipher rotors. So it was a total goldmine what they got on that U-boat.

As I mentioned, the crew, the German crew, was taken prisoner. They were held at a POW camp in Louisiana. The sub itself was towed away. They towed it thousands of miles so it could ultimately be studied by U.S. military intelligence. They painted it, though, for the tow, for that tow across thousands of miles of ocean, they painted it to look like it wasn't a German U-boat. They painted it to look like an Allied sub.

while they were taking it off to be studied. And they painted it that way, they camouflaged it that way, because it had to be a huge secret that the Allies had captured the sub. They didn't want the Germans to know that the Allies now had its huge intelligence trove, not just the ship itself, but the code books and the Enigma machine and all the rest of it.

For obvious reasons, right? If Germany knew that the U.S. had all the current code books and a current up-to-date Enigma machine, they would have changed their codes. So the U.S. didn't want Germany to know that they had that U-boat. It was not until after Germany surrendered in 1945 that the U.S. revealed that we had captured this sub. And then, remarkably, through a remarkable series of events, only about a decade after the end of the war,

That U-boat, U-505, ended up in Chicago, of all places, where you today can buy a ticket and go see it. That U-boat is all restored, you can go inside it, they built a huge purpose-built exhibit hall for it, which is an amazing thing. And war, of course, is most often about finding an enemy's ships or tanks or planes or submarines so that you can destroy them, take them off the battlefield.

But sometimes one of the most valuable things you can do is not just destroy as many as possible, but see if you can take one, see if you can capture it. So you can study it, you can learn what makes it tick, how it operates, what its systems are, what its vulnerabilities are, so you can better target similar hardware that your enemy has been using against you in the fight. And sometimes, like in the case of this German U-boat that you can see on display at that Chicago museum,

The value is partially having the sub itself so they can study the sub itself, but equally it was having what they found inside it when they captured the sub. Capturing something is often much better than killing it, strategically speaking. In May 1960, in the Cold War, the Soviet Union shot down an American high-altitude spy plane. It was a plane called the U-2.

The U.S. had secretly been flying very high-altitude spying missions over the Soviet Union for about four years by that point, but we were denying that we were doing it.

On May 1st, 1960, though, when the Soviets hit our U-2 with a surface-to-air missile, they not only were able to capture the pilot, a CIA pilot named Francis Gary Powers, they were also able to take custody to seize all the pieces of his plane that came down when the missile hit it.

And that gave the Soviet Union intelligence about America's technological capabilities with these U-2 planes that were able to take pictures of what was going on on the ground from 70,000 feet up in the air. It also gave them a great propaganda victory because it gave them something to put on display. The Soviet Union put pieces of Francis Gary Powers' shot-down U-2 CIA spy plane on display in Moscow.

to show the Russian people that the Soviet government had been right about the U.S. spying on them, that the U.S. had been spying and the U.S. had been lying about it, and here were the parts of this plane to prove it. So capturing the enemy's stuff in wartime, or even in Cold War time,

You get the thing itself. You potentially get good intelligence from whatever was on board or inside the thing. You also potentially get the propaganda or political benefit from what you're having the thing can prove to the public. Mostly in wartime, we try to shoot each other's stuff to smithereens, but there is kind of a golden ticket if you can seize the other side's stuff, even if you can seize pieces of the other side's stuff. And so it was last summer, August 2023.

A Russian pilot at the controls of a twin-engine MI-8 Russian military helicopter took off from an airfield, from Kursk Airfield in western Russia, not far from the Ukrainian border. And he was supposed to be flying inside Russia. He was supposed to be flying replacement parts for Russian fighter jets from one Russian airfield to another. But instead, he took his cargo of Russian fighter jet spare parts and he flew straight for the Ukrainian border.

He flew in radio silence. He flew at extremely low altitude. He was reportedly shot, shot in the leg by Russian forces as he flew his helicopter across the border into Ukraine. But this apparently was a long-planned mission this Russian pilot had planned for months.

to defect to the Ukrainian side. His family had reportedly already been extracted from Russia before he made that flight over the Ukrainian border. He landed that Russian helicopter in eastern Ukraine. He landed at a Ukrainian airbase about 80 miles from the border with Russia. In so doing, he delivered both himself, a Russian pilot, and this Russian military chopper,

to Ukraine and to Ukrainian intelligence, where they made fast work of making the most of it. This was David Axis reporting on it at the time for Forbes. He said the headline there, the MI-8 is one of Russia's best assault helicopters. A defector just flew one to Ukraine. Quote, Russia just unwillingly donated to Ukraine an up-armored MI-8 transport helicopter.

Now, Russia first tried to say that the pilot must have gotten lost. They called it a navigational error. But then within a couple of weeks, that was very profoundly disproven when, oh, hi, there he is at a press conference in Kiev in Ukraine explaining at a press conference alongside mission alongside Ukrainian military intelligence officials that

that he had defected, that he had reached out to the Ukrainian intelligence service months earlier because of his own distress as a Russian about his country invading Ukraine and starting this war. So when he defected, they got him, including the value of him speaking about why he defected, they got his up-armored assault helicopter,

And they got it reportedly with a bunch of spare fighter jet parts that had been loaded onto it. Fighter jets, fighter jet parts that actually fit the kinds of fighter jets that Ukraine uses. So those were helpful. But having this Russian military pilot, right, and all he knows and just the fact of him to show the world. Yeah, the helicopter is one thing, but he was a big part of what they gained there, too. Today, multiple news agencies are reporting that that pilot has been found dead, shot to death,

mysteriously, in a parking garage in a town in coastal Spain. Now, NBC News has not verified these reports, so I am bringing you news that at this point we can only attribute to other news agencies. Again, we cannot verify these reports ourselves. But if these reports turn out to be true, as The Guardian newspaper in London puts it today, quote, "The finger of blame is likely to point to the Kremlin." And that's because the Kremlin does stuff like this all the time.

In 2006, Russian intelligence agents used radioactive polonium to assassinate a Russian dissident named Alexander Litvinenko. They put the polonium in a pot of tea when they met with him in a restaurant in London.

In 2018, Russian military intelligence agents used a proprietary Russian military nerve agent to try to assassinate another Russian defector in Salisbury, England. They didn't quite kill him, but they did kill a British innocent bystander who mistakenly handled the poison.

In 2019, another Russian intelligence officer murdered a Chechen Russian dissident in broad daylight in a park in downtown Berlin, right nearby the German chancellor's office. He rode up to him on a bicycle in the park, shot him dead. In February 2020, Russia even tried it in the United States, a Russian effort to assassinate a former high-ranking Russian intelligence official in Miami.

after he became an informant for the U.S. government. That assassination plot on U.S. soil was only foiled by the arrest of the guy who was sent to surveil the target before he could convey his location back to his FSB handler. And now, the Russian pilot who flew that helicopter, that Russian helicopter, over the Russian border into Ukraine and landed, saying that he was troubled by his country, by Russia having invaded Ukraine, and he and his helicopter

were now being put in Ukrainian hands. And they kill these guys in Germany and at least two assassination attempts in the UK. They seem to have tried it in the United States. Maybe they have now done it again in Spain. Who cares? They'll do it anywhere. If you're a dissident in Russia, if you defect from Russia, if you turn against Putin in Russia, it doesn't matter if you are no longer in Russia. He will send assassination teams anywhere in the world and hunt you down.

So there's a clear message here, obviously, right? Don't be a Russian dissident anywhere in the world. At least that's the very clear message from Vladimir Putin. The message from the rest of the world, of course, is do. Do please be a Russian dissident because the world needs you to.

Because Vladimir Putin, now in his 25th year in power, is not someone for whom his ambitions or the damage he's willing to impose are things that are confined by Russia's borders. He operates anywhere in the world, doing whatever he wants. It's like he can't try any harder to make clear that this is a whole world problem now. Let me show you part of a report that Richard Engel aired tonight on NBC Nightly News. Watch this.

The Ukrainians broadcast warnings, telling Russian troops to stop shelling at the risk of a nuclear disaster. The warnings went unheeded. Russian troops occupied the plant and the territory around it. Ukrainian forces held on to the far bank of the Dnieper River, leaving the nuclear power station right on the front line.

Two years on, the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has inspectors at the plant, is sounding the alarm. You're responsible for nuclear security all around the world. Yes. Is this the most dangerous nuclear facility on the planet right now? It's the most dangerous situation that we have. It's my job not to, you know, panic, but at the same time, I have to tell the truth of what is happening.

Nuclear experts point to three main dangers. First, a military strike on the plant, either accidental or deliberate. Second, a power cut. The plant's six uranium reactors require electricity for cooling. But Ukrainian officials say three of the four power lines are damaged, and the fourth is faulty. There have already been eight blackouts as recently as December. When you have a blackout...

the cooling function of the reactors is lost and you could have a meltdown. And finally, it's understaffed. Ukrainians say the Russians have been abusing employees.

11,000 people worked at the plant before. Only 4,000 work there now. Irina Kokolt is responsible for radiation detection for the Ukrainian government. Her office predicts how, if there was a meltdown, a cloud of radioactive particles would spread across much of Ukraine and neighboring countries. This is Istanbul, right here, the city of Istanbul. Yes, this is Istanbul.

Contaminated the entire city of Istanbul on the Black Sea. It's a catastrophe, a total catastrophe. She says the fallout would last up to 100 years. A nuclear disaster here would be felt around the world and leave large parts of Ukraine and beyond uninhabitable. That's NBC's Richard Engel reporting tonight on NBC Nightly News.

And if you remember, we heard a lot about the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, at the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Now, two years into Russia's invasion of Ukraine, with Russian troops there, 7,000 of the 11,000 people it takes to safely run that reactor are gone. They're having regular blackouts. They're allegedly torturing some of the remaining people who are there trying to keep the thing from melting down, Fukushima-style.

I mean, that is part of what Putin is bringing to bear on the rest of the world right now. You may also have seen the news just a few days ago, which started off as a sort of cryptic warning from the Intelligence Committee in the House and its Republican chairman about some kind of grave new national security threat from Russia that the American government needed to be addressing and talking to Congress about.

It started off with that cryptic letter from the House Intelligence Committee chairman. It was soon reported all over the place that the point of concern was Russia developing a new nuclear capability that they would deploy in space, a nuclear weapon. They have thousands of nuclear weapons just like we do, except this one would be put into orbit around the Earth.

So it could strategically be detonated to wipe out satellites orbiting the planet, which would have the effect down here on Earth of wiping out not only communications technology, but like navigation and military capabilities like missile defense.

The New York Times summed it up like this, quote, global communication systems would fail, making everything from emergency services to cell phones to the regulation of generators and pumps go awry. Quote, debris from the explosion would scatter throughout low Earth orbit and make navigation difficult, if not impossible, for everything from Starlink satellites used for Internet communications to spy satellites.

So, here's the game plan, right? We'll assassinate our enemies anywhere on Earth, including in Western Europe and even the United States, by any means we choose, including by the use of military-grade nerve agents that we will dump willy-nilly in civilian areas, thus killing bystanders.

We will bring a war inside the gates of one of the world's largest active nuclear plants, threatening a continent-wide, century-long radiation disaster. And no one and nothing is allowed to protect that site. We'll do what we want with it.

And we'll put nuclear weapons in orbit around the Earth for the first time in human history so we have the power to knock out just like, not just like your GPS and your cell phones, but your emergency systems and your power grids and your water systems and everything else. Oh, and we'll invade Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 and Ukraine again in 2022. We'll get Europe back into the game of large land wars for the first time since World War II.

At the Munich Security Conference this weekend in Germany, NATO Secretary General shared new NATO intelligence. He repeatedly shared new NATO intelligence that they believe what Putin intends to do next is try an attack on one of the smaller NATO countries on its border.

Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Baltic states, they are all NATO members. New NATO intelligence says that Putin's next designs are on one of them. If he indeed attacks one of them, which NATO now says they think he is planning on, that would bring Russia into war with all 31 countries that are part of the NATO alliance, which includes a little country called the United States of America.

There is not another entity like this on Earth. There is not another country on Earth that is doing anything like this. There is not another leader on Earth that is doing anything like this. And so what do we do about it? What do we, the United States, do about it? What does the world do about it? This is what the Russian embassy in London looks like in normal times on a normal day. This is what it looked like this weekend.

On the right side of your screen, that's what it looked like this weekend after Putin killed Russia's charismatic, creative opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, at the age of 47 at a Siberian prison camp. At the Russian embassy in London, they projected this image of Navalny onto the side of the building. You see it takes up basically the whole side of the Russian embassy.

Russian embassies all over the world this weekend in Eastern Europe, in Western Europe, as far away as India, at the Russian consulate in New York, at the Russian embassy in D.C. People left flowers and signs in Alexei Navalny's name. Inside Russia, anybody leaving flowers or leaving signs or even just showing up in public to pay their respects is

For most of the weekend, they got beaten up and hauled off by police. Hundreds of people arrested this weekend, literally for laying flowers in public or for holding a sign with Navalny's name on it.

In Munich at that international Munich security conference, right after Vice President Kamala Harris spoke about the need for the world to help Ukraine defend itself against this now two-year-long Russian invasion, Alexei Navalny's widow, excuse me, Alexei Navalny's widow, Yulia Navalny, appeared without announcement after Vice President Harris spoke. She appeared to everyone's surprise, making unannounced remarks.

asking the world to stand up, to stand together, to fight against the Putin regime in Russia. Then this weekend, she posted this sort of stunning straight to camera video in Russian saying that she is not afraid that she will carry on her husband's work. She said that will start by naming and showing the faces soon of the people who carried out the murder of her husband at that prison camp.

She said people do not need to be afraid, they need to do everything they can to fight against Putin's regime. And of course, we have to wonder if she is now marking herself for death as well, by stepping forward into that kind of a role now that her husband has been killed for it. The whole world needs for there to be Russian dissidents, because

The world needs for Russia to change. The whole world needs for there to be Russian dissidents and needs for them to not only survive, but ultimately to win because of the incredible threat, an increasing threat, an increasingly aggressive and unconstrained threat that Putin poses to the rest of the world as long as he remains in charge of Russia. But how do we get that?

I mean, here in the United States, we have the leader of the Republican Party trying to return to the White House, saying, quote, I would encourage them, meaning I would encourage Russia, to do whatever the hell they want to our allies. That was just before Russia killed Navalny. He has made one comment about Navalny's death, not until today, saying online today that it was a, quote, sudden death and not lamenting it at all.

He'll be running for the White House this fall against the incumbent administration, which is trying to continue the life-or-death support that we have been providing the country Russia has invaded, which is trying to maintain a global coalition to pressure Russia and to pressure Putin, which is trying to act in the interests of Russia's brave and, until now, basically invariably doomed dissidents.

as Putin kills them one by one without consequences at home and anywhere in the world. What else can they do? What else can we do as a country? Literally, what else can we do? A very small but surprising silver lining may have just emerged on this. And that's next. Stay with us.

A new election matchup with new energy surrounding the race. There is an electricity on the ground. Join your favorite MSNBC hosts at our premiere live audience event to break down all that's at stake in this historic election. The election of 2024 was always going to be a big...

freaking deal. MSNBC Live Democracy 2024, Saturday, September 7th in Brooklyn, New York. Visit msnbc.com slash democracy 2024 to buy your tickets today. I want you to know that the White House gave us information today. They're going to remain in close contact with leaders of Congress on the issue, and it will be dealt with. There's steady hands at the wheel.

The United States can't rely on other nations to handle matters like this. We must do it ourselves, and we will. The bottom line is that we all came away with a very strong impression that the administration is taking this very seriously and that the administration has a plan in place. We look forward to supporting them as they go to implement it. But in the interim, I've got great faith in what the administration is currently doing to address this matter, and I appreciate the support and the working relationship on a bipartisan basis I have with my ranking members.

You are not hallucinating. That was two senior Republicans, including the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, praising the Biden administration, saying how much they trust them and value them to deal with what was first reported last week as an emerging national security threat of Russia trying to put satellite killer nuclear weapons in orbit around the Earth, up in space.

For this unbelievably partisan and dysfunctional Republican Congress to have senior leaders praising the Biden administration on a national security issue related to Russia is perhaps the tiniest of teeny, teeny, teeny, tiny silver linings of hope that maybe the U.S. government as a whole might be able to get it together to stand up to Putin on at least some things in the wake of not only two years of war in Ukraine, but now the murder of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

I'll take it. Joining us now is Pulitzer Prize winning author, staff writer for The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum. She just returned from the UNIC Security Conference, where leaders from all over the world were gathered when news broke about Mr. Navalny's death. Ms. Applebaum, it's great to see you. Thanks for making time to be here tonight. Thank you. First, let me just ask you, I know you were at Munich when news about Navalny's death was announced. What went through your mind? How did everyone react? It must have been an amazing and awful thing.

AMY GOODMAN: I shared the feeling that I've heard a lot of Russians say in the last day or two, which is,

you know, you feel like the future has been stolen. You know, Navalny represented the idea of a different Russia, you know, that Russia could be a different kind of place. You know, different kinds of people could rule it. It could operate by different rules. It wouldn't be a threat to the world. It wouldn't be the backer of Iran and of North Korea. It wouldn't be invading Ukraine. And what Putin is trying to do by killing people like Navalny is destroy that hope, to give people the feeling that there is nothing we can do

Putin is inevitable and autocracy remains. And it's really, really important that his wife has now stood up to say, "I will do that. I will try to be the person who gives you that hope, who makes you believe that something can be different, because if no one believes it can be different, then it never will be."

How do Russians see Yulia Navalny? And, I mean, as an American who has followed Mr. Navalny's career, who was gutted by the news of his killing, I feel like I've been aware of them as

force together. And I've been aware of the way that they were able and willing, remarkably, to put their family and their relationship in the public eye, despite the threats to him. How do Russians view her? The first thing I felt when I saw her give that direct-to-camera, those video remarks this weekend, I felt like she was marking herself as a target just after her husband was killed for doing exactly this.

So, she's made a point, actually, of not speaking much in public. You know, she decided that her role was to support him and be the person who gave him the strength to do what he did. You know, obviously, she's now made this decision to shift. It's extremely painful and difficult for her. I did see her

privately at Munich, and she's like an ice statue. She's frozen and horrified. But she understands that what he did that was so important was that he modeled civic courage by deciding to go back to Russia. He was famously poisoned in Russia. He left the country. He was cured. He made the decision to go back. He went back with her. And he went back to show Russians that there is such a thing as bravery in a society that's trying to kill off bravery. And I think

she understands that and is now trying to be that person as well. What can the U.S. government do that we are not already doing to support bravery like that and to help them in their cause?

Well, first of all, we can win the war. The war in Ukraine is a war of a democratic state against Russia. It's also the war of the democratic world against Russia. We've created this spectacular coalition of 50 countries. Europeans are giving more money to rush to Ukraine to aid the war than we are.

Yet we are strangely divided about it. We've allowed a very small minority of Republicans, inspired by the former president, to block that aid. And that's giving Putin this inspiration, this feeling that he can go farther. It may even be why he killed Navalny, you know, just to show that he can. Look, I don't care what any of you do. I'm going to keep going. We can enforce our sanctions. We've sanctioned Russia.

We've put out dozens of export controls, all kinds of things, but we do very little to enforce it. If we were serious about winning this war,

You know, we would have thousands of people working on sanctions, thousands of people, not a few guys at the Treasury Department, you know, a few policemen here and there. We would be taking this seriously. You know, there are two ways this war can end. Sorry, excuse me, one way this war can end. The war ends when Russia leaves Ukraine. But that's not just a—that means that the point is not merely to help Ukraine. The point is to

defeat Russia. And we have many different spheres in which we can defeat Russia, political, military, economic. And I just don't feel that we've taken it really seriously yet. Staff writer for The Atlantic, Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Applebaum, thanks very much for making the time. Difficult subject. I feel lucky to be able to talk with you about it. Thank you. All right. We've got much more ahead here tonight. Stay with us.

MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell. I have an obligation to find a way of telling this story that is fresh, that has angles that haven't been used in the course of the day, to bring my experience working in the Senate, working in journalism, to try to make sense of what has happened and help you make sense of what it means to you. The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, weeknights at 10 p.m. Eastern on MSNBC.

Today's news requires more facts, more context, and more analysis. The world's never been harder to understand. That's why it's never been more important to try. MSNBC. Understand more. For years now, for more than a decade, Democrats in the state of Wisconsin have been trying to level the playing field in Wisconsin politics.

Even when Wisconsin Democrats have won statewide in recent years, turfing out the Republican governor, Scott Walker, for example, in 2018. Even when Wisconsin Democrats have gotten way more votes for state assembly, say, in 2018, when they got 54% of the vote of state assembly votes.

Even when they've been outvoting Republicans that clearly, Democrats have been getting way less when it comes to seats in the state legislature. In that 2018 race, Democrats won the total vote for state assembly by a margin of more than 200,000 votes, but Republicans still got more seats. Democrats won 54% of the votes for state assembly, but that 54% of the vote only earned them 36% of the seats.

Ever since Wisconsin Republicans got control of their state government in 2010, they have redrawn the political maps, the state legislature and the congressional maps, so that Republicans effectively can't be voted out of power. So they can win more seats from Wisconsin despite getting fewer votes from Wisconsin.

I mean, in Wisconsin, it's the Democrats who have won 14 out of 17 of the last statewide elections. But Republicans consistently win more seats, even though they've got fewer votes. The state consistently votes overall for Democrats most recently in the 2022 election. But Republicans nevertheless got nearly two-thirds of seats in the state assembly and a full two-thirds of the seats in the state senate. For the past 13 years in Wisconsin,

The bottom line is that Democrats can basically win as many votes as they want, but those votes will not put them into power in the state. And for years, Wisconsin Democrats have been trying to fix that, have been trying to level the playing field again so that what people vote for is what they get in terms of state government.

In 2017, Wisconsin Democrats brought a legal challenge to the Republican-drawn maps all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, but that got swatted down. In 2022, following his reelection, Democratic Governor Tony Evers was able to push through revised maps, not quite un-gerrymandered, but a step in a less gerrymandered direction. The U.S. Supreme Court threw those out, too.

Finally, it was what happened last year that changed the course in Wisconsin. After dogged campaigning and organizing by the Democrats, Wisconsin voters elected a new liberal judge to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. And that effectively flipped control of the court to the liberals. And Wisconsin voters then filed a new lawsuit arguing that the Republican maps were illegal. The state Supreme Court agreed.

And they ordered new maps for Wisconsin. New, fair, ungerrymandered maps that meant the playing field would not be tilted in either party's direction.

Today, just today, 13 years after this all started, Governor Evers has signed new state maps into law, maps that will effectively end Republican gerrymandering and give equal party a fair shot at trying to control the legislature in that state. It took 13 years of perseverance by Wisconsin Democrats.

But those old, unbelievably outrageous Republican maps are finally gone, which means when Republican or Democratic voters go to the polls in Wisconsin, however they vote will now be reflected in their state government. Shocking, I know.

Now, for now, these maps apply just to the state legislature. On the congressional level, it's still the way it was. There's a fairly evenly split electorate in Wisconsin. It is a purple state. But even so, because the congressional maps are still gerrymandered under the old system, of the eight seats that Wisconsin has in Congress, six of them are held by Republicans.

Now, the Wisconsin Supreme Court hasn't yet decided whether they're going to take up a legal challenge to the congressional maps as well as the legislative maps that they just did take up the challenge for. But you can expect that to be the next battle, and you can expect Wisconsin Democrats to fight as hard for that as they have for these past 13 years.

Still, though, take a moment to recognize what a victory this is in Wisconsin. A victory not for capital-D Democrats per se, but for small-D democracy. A victory born out of perseverance and organizing and dedication. The chair of the Democratic Party in Wisconsin, Ben Wickler, is going to be on with Lawrence O'Donnell next hour to talk about what it took to win this fight and how it can be a model for the nation.

That news out of Wisconsin today is also a good reminder about the many Democratic victories in the states recently. Democrats in the Biden era really do keep winning election after election after election. You can consider Pennsylvania also was kind of a case study. Pennsylvania just held a state election, excuse me, a special election for an open house seat in the state.

In 2020, this is a district that Joe Biden won by 11 points. But in the special election last week, the Democrat in that race not only won, he beat the Republican by 35 points. In the past year, there have been six special elections in Pennsylvania. Democrats have won six out of the six. Democrats also won last week in New York. They flipped the congressional seat that once belonged to Republican Congressman George Santos.

That's an increasingly red district, everybody's been saying, but the Democrat won that race. And yeah, you can read that as a Democratic Party victory, for sure, and the Democrats deserve credit there. But look also at the Republican Party response to that victory. Steve Bannon, senior advisor to Donald Trump, very influential right-wing podcaster now, he's now saying publicly that that New York special election was rigged for the Democrats. He says, quote, "...they stole this election in New York."

So we are in this era now where we have one party competing to win elections, persevering year after year after year after year to win in a democratic system, level the playing field to compete and win. They're doing very well at it in the Biden era, working their hearts out in a small de-democratic way, but they are working against an opponent that does not really want elections to determine who gets to be in political power anymore in the United States.

What do you do about that? How do you win that democratic fight with an opponent that doesn't want democracy to be the way we solve our problems? We've got expert help on that next. Stay with us. He said, quote,

Those were the promises made by a crowdsourced campaign to build a Trump border wall with donations on GoFundMe. It started in December 2018. By August 2020, four leaders of that We Build the Wall thing had been federally indicted for...

fraud. Three of the four ended up convicted and sentenced to years in prison. The fourth is Trump aide Steve Bannon, who got a federal pardon from his former boss on his last day in office. Although I should mention, Bannon now faces state charges, basically for the same fraud, in New York state. On Friday, a New York judge ordered Trump himself to pay more than $450 million, including interest, in a civil fraud case involving his real estate businesses.

But don't worry if that sounds like a lot of money. A new GoFundMe campaign has raised half a million dollars already to help the former president toward that end. More than $27 million in Trump campaign fundraising went to his legal fees just in the last half of last year alone. Now that Trump's working to put his own people in charge of the National Republican Party, some senior Republicans are saying they're worried he'll end up tapping Republican Party coffers as well.

The prospect keeping many people up at night, though, is the idea that it will be a foreign government, some sort of foreign entity, perhaps even a hostile one, that could decide they'll just cover it all. How would that fit with Trump's announced plans for a second term and for his strongman style of promised governance? Our next guest studies the relationship between corruption and foreign influence being openly bought, between those perils and the idea of authoritarian governance—

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history at NYU. She's the author of an essential book on authoritarianism called Strongman, Mussolini, From Mussolini to the Present. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, it's really a pleasure to have you here. Thanks very much for joining us. It's a pleasure.

The prospect of massive foreign support for a president who's in serious financial trouble feels like a very singular thing that we've never faced before in the United States. But the way you write about money and corruption and its relation to authoritarianism in your book makes me think that this is not something necessarily that should be seen in isolation to Trump here, but maybe should be seen as more a larger part of the authoritarian project.

Yes, exactly. Trump is what we call a personalist ruler, meaning he personalizes politics and holding public office or running for office in this case. The goal of it is and the party and government agencies, they're supposed to solve the leader's personal, legal and financial problems. So holding office is a mechanism of self-enrichment and so is running a campaign in this case.

And Trump, in that sense, is very similar to other authoritarians at its most extreme. Like in Putin's Russia, you have kleptocracy.

But what we have here is a party mechanism, as Lara Trump is saying, that every penny has to go of the RNC and donors to, you know, electing Trump and solving his financial problems. And sadly and disgracefully, the RNC was already doing this. It's incredible, Rachel, that a whole year after the election, the 2020 election, the RNC was paying Trump's personal legal bills.

And so this is an example of the personalization of power where there's no division or recognition of the difference between public and private. And so when Trump says openly that he received millions from the Chinese to his businesses while he was president for, quote, services, and he says this openly, he's telling you that he embraces that conception of power.

Does it have to work only on his supporters so that they will give him their own money? Or does it also have to work in such a way that, as you say, even foreign money, even obviously corrupting foreign influence funneled as money to the leader personally, has to be made into a political virtue as well? Yes, yes. It has to be both. And the key here is the Republican Party.

that is a linchpin of this. It is a willing accomplice to Trump's financial corruption. And it was okay with him hiring his family, Jared Kushner in power, and is not doing anything to stand up for

the division between personal and political indeed is embracing this kind of authoritarian leader cult where Trump can do whatever he says and says that Putin can do whatever he says as well. So it can be hard for Americans to understand because it's a completely proprietary vision of power that everything is for your taking.

Everything is yours. There's a kind of megalomania. And that's how you can end up with highly classified government documents in the bathroom of your private residence. Or think it's OK to say that the Chinese gave my businesses millions of dollars for, quote, services. Most people who are Democrats would not say such things. But for Trump, it's a boast.

And this is why he admires Xi Jinping and Putin, because they get away with things like that. It's been very open, the corruption. And corruption is institutionalized. And that's what he would like America to be like if he comes back to the White House. Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history at New York University, the author of Strongman, Mussolini to the Present. Ruth, thanks very much for talking with us tonight. I really appreciate you being here.

- Sure, it's a pleasure. - Of course, the root and branch of all American anti-corruption protections has always been about transparency. It's been the idea that you show it, therefore you create shame and political backlash toward those who would try to get away with something like this, and that effectively polices itself. When transparency doesn't work because there's no shame and there's in fact pride in doing it, we do need a new toolbox.

All right. That's going to do it for us tonight. I'm going to see you again this weekend, Saturday night, 630 p.m. Eastern. I'll be part of our special coverage of the South Carolina Republican primary again, 630 Eastern Saturday night. I will see you then. MSNBC Live Democracy 2024, Saturday, September 7th in Brooklyn, New York. Join your favorite MSNBC hosts at our premier live audience event. Visit MSNBC.com slash Democracy 2024 to buy your tickets today.