Maddow: 'We were supposed to get better at not having our chains yanked' by Trump
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Dear Toyota, I need a word with you about your crown family. Suddenly, I love traffic. Rush hour is my happy place. In the comfort of my crown, I feel on top of the world. This is strange though, right? The captivating Toyota crown family. Toyota, let's go places. Really happy to have you here. One quick note before we get started tonight. Right now it is Monday night, which is when you are used to seeing me here on the TV machine. Your eyes are not deceiving you. Here it is.

But this week, I will also be here on Friday. We're doing a special edition of The Rachel Maddow Show at the end of this week on Friday at 8 p.m. Eastern. And then at 9 p.m. Eastern on Friday, right after the Rachel Maddow Show, we're going to be showing my new movie, my new documentary, which is called From Russia with Lev. It is about the first Trump impeachment and what was both

So terrible and equally so stupid about that entire scandal. So in case you want to pop it in your calendar or set the DVR right now, again, I am here tonight as normal. But then you will get a second Rachel Maddow show this week at 8 p.m. Eastern on Friday. And then right after that special Rachel Maddow show at 9 p.m. Eastern on Friday, you can see my new movie From Russia with Lev. But we start tonight with a little bit of a break.

In this fraught and unnerving place that we are in American news and politics, and frankly, in American life right now, the last time there were multiple assassination plots against a president or presidential candidate in such quick succession, it was nearly 50 years ago. It was 49 years ago this month, in fact, in September 1975.

President Gerald Ford was in a park in Sacramento, California, when a fanatical follower of Charles Manson pulled out a .45 and pointed it at him.

Then not even three weeks later, also in California, but in another city in San Francisco, another woman actually did fire two shots at President Ford in close proximity at a hotel in San Francisco. Both of the shots that she fired from her 38th special went wide after a gay U.S. Marine combat veteran saw what she was trying to do, saw her pull out the gun, and he knocked her arm while she fired. And that is why she missed.

So President Ford was not hurt in either of those attempts, but they came in very quick succession. And in September 1975, the country was very deeply unnerved by having two different crazy people pull a gun on the President of the United States twice in the space of a month. We have not seen anything like this since then. But now, with the arrest of the suspected gunman who pointed a rifle toward Donald Trump while he was golfing in Florida yesterday,

We have had the second instance in the space of nine weeks of former president and presidential candidate Donald Trump being threatened by a potential assassin. Now, Trump, of course, is fine. The man with the gun at Trump's golf course apparently never actually fired his gun before the Secret Service spotted him and they shot at him. The man is in custody. He's already facing federal gun charges with presumably more to follow.

But this is just obviously absolutely terrible news. It is terrible news for everybody in the country. It is terrible news for where we are at as a country. It's terrible news in terms of what the Secret Service is contending with. It's also the worst of all possible wild cards in a political season that's already quite wild and not in a good way. I mean, just think about the past month.

It was one month ago, almost exactly, when Trump disparaged Americans who have received the nation's highest military honor, the Medal of Honor, saying most recipients of that award were killed or injured in the process of earning that award. And so other medals, like the one he gave to his biggest campaign donor, those are better medals and those are better awards. Just an astonishing thing for anybody in American public life.

to say, even anybody in private life to say, let alone somebody who is a former president and wants to be president again. Just an astonishingly offensive and ignorant remark against Americans who are literally the most decorated military heroes in our nation.

Only 10 days later, his campaign staff physically shoved an employee at Arlington National Cemetery when she tried to stop Trump and his team from filming political campaign videos at Arlington, which you are not allowed to do for all the obvious reasons, not just because it's the rules, but because it's obviously the only decent thing to do.

In short order, after those two things, one of the headline primetime speakers from Trump's nominating convention did a two hour gushing interview with a prominent Holocaust denier. And Trump's running mate nevertheless decided to go ahead with his own appearances with that RNC speaker. I mean, that each of those things is sort of astonishing for any presidential candidate, for any political figure.

campaigner of any kind, honestly, for anybody in American public life. Any one of those things would be such an astonishing scandal to drag with you into whatever else you wanted to do next in your life. But those three things in quick succession are what Trump brought with him into the first and potentially his only debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. And that debate was a disaster for him. It was a debacle.

ABC/Ipsos polling shows Vice President Kamala Harris winning that debate against Trump by an astonishing 22-point margin. On the crucial issue of the economy alone, just on the economy, post-debate polling shows Kamala Harris pulling ahead of and away from Trump in terms of who the country trusts the most on the economy. That's just one of the metrics that has gone completely south for Trump following that disastrous debate.

National polling of the presidential race also started consistently showing Vice President Harris beating former President Trump. And since that terrible debate performance, his campaign and his campaign appearances have been just shambolic. He said after the debate that ABC, the host of the debate, should have its broadcast license revoked.

He regularly threatens this now against any media outlet that airs anything that he does not like. He said that after the debate, his opponent must have had magic earrings on at the debate that somehow fed her the right answers in that debate. He told a campaign rally that California, the state of California, has a giant faucet—that was his phrase—a faucet with

with a handle that he said is the size of a building. It's such a big faucet with such a big handle that it takes a whole day to turn the faucet on or off. And he said that faucet, which he has invented, that is how California dumps all of Canada's water into the sea. And when he's president, that faucet won't turn the water into the sea anymore. What are you talking about?

He invited a musical artist named Nicky Jam to join him on stage at another rally. He said, you know Nicky, she's hot. Nicky Jam then joined former President Trump on stage and surprised him very much by being a man. Trump brought out an outspoken bigot and 9-11 conspiracy theorist to the 9-11 commemoration in Lower Manhattan.

She made a series of viciously, almost astonishingly racist statements about how terrible it would be to have Kamala Harris in the White House, where she already is, because Harris is of Indian descent on her mother's side. Trump's running mate, J.D. Vance, was asked to comment, particularly because his wife is also of Indian descent. He smiled and swallowed it and said, quote, I don't think that's insulting for what it's worth.

These comments were wildly and profoundly and baldly insulting to anyone of Indian descent. And whether or not J.D. Vance cares about that, there are very large Indian American constituencies in important swing states like, say, Georgia and North Carolina. They are likely to care. And PR also just revealed days ago that Trump's New Jersey Golf Club twice this summer hosted this man.

The one with the Hitler haircut and Hitler mustache. He was convicted five times over for his behavior during the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. His trial invoked previous statements of his like, quote, Hitler should have finished the job and, quote, babies born with any deformities or disabilities should be shot in the forehead.

This man posted a lengthy video online in 2020 about what he called the, quote, Jewish invasion of New Jersey. He compared Jewish people to a, quote, plague of locusts. And then Trump hosted him twice at his New Jersey golf club at Bedminster this summer. The second appearance of the Hitler mustache guy at Trump's club was followed the very next day by Trump hosting at that same club an anti-antisemitism event.

The day after the Hitler mustache guy. The day after the Jewish invasion of New Jersey guy. This comes, inconveniently, just as blatantly anti-Semitic TV ads targeting Kamala Harris's husband for being Jewish have started running in Michigan thanks to a Republican-linked political action committee. Now getting national attention there. I mean, as I said, this is a wild political season, and I don't mean wild in a good way.

But Trump has, over the last few days, effectively stopped coverage of almost all of those things that I just described. And he has done so by making such fantastically outrageous and racist and dangerous false claims about Haitian immigrants

that just about everybody, understandably, feels compelled to stop what they're doing and prioritize coverage and condemnation of this truly awful, consequential bad thing instead of whatever else they might have wanted to report or discuss about how the campaign is going and what the American people ought to understand about the stakes in this election. And that, of course, serves Trump very well.

Right. Anybody who thinks the Springfield, Ohio lies about Haitian migrants is going poorly for Trump should consider the context in which he has not just brought this up, but he and his running mate have repeatedly insisted that this is what we ought to be talking about. This isn't bad for them, not as they see it. And if you're taking like a midterm exam or a final exam, you have no clue what any of the answers are. And you're definitely going to fail that test. Why not get up and pull the fire alarm?

I mean, yeah, you might get in some kind of trouble for pulling the fire alarm, but you failing is no longer going to be the story. It's made-to-order outrage. And the press was supposed to learn something about dealing with this in 2016, 2015. What we were supposed to learn is that part of dealing with the tactic of made-to-order outrage

is that it's his orders, right? It keeps the discussion on things he's framing, rather than on what the election might otherwise be about. So yes, his made-to-order moral outrages have to be called out as false and as nonsense, because they are dangerous, right? They not only invite, they demand some sort of terrible response from the people who fall for this stuff. And so we should trace the origin of this garbage. In this case, his lies about Haitian immigrants,

In this case, these specific lies about these specific immigrants go to a literal Nazi group that has been pushing this particular lie in Springfield, Ohio, and then parading in Springfield, Ohio with swastika flags. Right. So we should trace this to its origins. That's where the Trump campaign got this.

We should also care for and protect the people who are being harmed by this garbage, obviously. They are having to post Ohio State Troopers at Springfield, Ohio's elementary schools now because of what Trump and Vance have done in lying about this community. But also recognize what they're doing is a tactic and recognize why they're doing it. They are doing it to change the subject.

to pull the proverbial fire alarm, to get us all talking about him and this issue that he's chosen because he likes these nouns and verbs, right? He likes this framing. He wants us to be talking about this trash, even if it's being debunked. He wants this to be the main subject of discussion in the country instead of, I don't know, Kamala Harris beating the pants off of him in that debate and him humiliating himself by showing himself unable to

to talk about anything other than ego-driven concerns related to himself.

They would love for us to be talking about anything other than Harris just wiping the floor with him in the debate. They would love for us to be talking about anything other than her being endorsed by an unprecedented slate of senior military leaders who have served under presidents of both parties. They would love for us to be talking about anything other than a sort of shocking roster of A-list business leaders who have just endorsed Kamala Harris.

They would love for us to be talking about anything other than, you know, now most recently a group of former Ronald Reagan staffers who have endorsed Kamala Harris. This is a tactic. We were supposed to get better at not having our chains yanked. After living through this experience since 2015, we are almost 10 years into this now.

The made-to-order outrage from Trump and his cohort are designed to get us talking about that outrage rather than any other issue that might more reasonably frame the real stakes of an election or the real threat of Trump's presidency. Hillary Clinton has a new book out. It was finished just before President Biden made his decision not to run for re-election and to instead endorse Vice President Harris to run.

And when Joe Biden made that decision, Hillary Clinton's book was already at the printers.

She nevertheless decided to sort of get back to the writing desk and fire off a new epilogue to the book about this sea change and American political fortunes. And in that epilogue, she says this quote on July 21st, 2024, when Joe Biden announced that he was dropping out of the presidential race and endorsing Kamala Harris, the dream of seeing a woman in the Oval Office was suddenly back within reach.

Clinton says, quote, it wouldn't be me, but it could be Kamala. History beckoned, but a whole lot of bigotry, fear and disinformation, not to mention the Electoral College, stood in the way. Could we do it? Could we finally shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling and prove that in America there is no limit to what is possible?

That Sunday afternoon, when Bill and I heard the news that Biden was withdrawing and endorsing Kamala, we drafted a joint statement saluting him, saluting Biden, and also endorsing her, endorsing Kamala. She is talented, experienced, and ready to be president, so it was an easy decision. After our statement went public, Kamala called us. She was remarkably calm for someone who had just been thrown into the deep end of a bottomless pool.

She told us she wanted to earn the nomination. She said, quote, I'm going to need your help. Bill and I told her, quote, we'll do whatever you need. Bill and I were both ready to do everything we could to help get her elected. Clinton says, quote, I don't want to sugarcoat what we're up against, especially at a moment when all of us need to be ready to fight back, not just for Kamala, but for our better selves and an optimistic, generous vision of our future.

She says, quote, but as I reminded myself that Sunday as the news about Kamala sank in, and as I tell every young woman I meet, we cannot give in to fear. It is a trap to believe that progress is impossible. Some people have asked how I feel about the prospect of another woman poised to achieve the breakthrough that I didn't. If I'm being honest, she says, in the years after 2016, I also wondered how I would feel if another woman ever took the torch that I had carried so far beyond

and ran on with it. Would some little voice deep down inside whisper, that should have been me? Clinton says, quote, now I know the answer. After I got off the phone with the vice president, I looked at Bill with a huge smile and said, this is exciting. I felt promise. I felt possibility. It was exhilarating. Hillary Clinton joins me live here next.

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I want my grandchildren and their grandchildren to know

I was here at this moment, that we were here, and that we were with Kamala Harris every step of the way. This is our time, America. This is when we stand up. This is when we break through. The future is here. It's in our grasp. Let's go with it!

Let's go win it. That was former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a speech that brought the House down at the Democratic Convention last month, voicing, of course, her support for the Democratic nominee for President Kamala Harris.

Joining us now is Secretary Clinton, former Democratic presidential nominee, Secretary of State, U.S. Senator, First Lady. Her new book is called Something Lost, Something Gained, Reflections on Life, Love and Liberty. It comes out tomorrow. I got halfway through my preview copy of the book and immediately ordered it for my mom and dad. Secretary Clinton, thank you so much for being here tonight. It's a real pleasure. Rachel, it is always good to be with you. Thank you.

I wanted to ask you, as somebody who has a little bit of experience in these things, you write extensively in the book about not just not the experience of running against Trump, but how you have felt since and what you think about where we are as a country in what is now sort of the end of this decade of Trump's influence on our politics.

You sounded a very, very hopeful note at the Democratic convention. Do you feel like Democrats and Americans in general are getting any better at sort of resisting his tricks or understanding what you see as the threat of of his ascending to power again?

I think many Americans are, Rachel, and I'm particularly impressed by the many, many Republicans, people who served in other Republican administrations and especially people who served in Trump's administration.

term as well, who are just sounding the alarm. They're making their voices heard as loudly as they can above the din, above all the distraction and diversion that goes on in our political discourse right now. So I do think many, many more people are

being given the opportunity to reject what Trump offers, what he represents. Not as many. The race is still too close. The Electoral College is still the big hurdle that has to be overcome. But I am very hopeful and even optimistic that Americans who do not want to see Trump

a continuation of this politics of hate and division will reject Trump. And maybe some Republicans who know that they can't vote for Trump will end up voting for the Harris-Waltz ticket as well. I am struck by the fact that as his campaign

into very, very offensive territory. The association with Holocaust deniers and the outrages at Arlington National Cemetery of all places, the insults to recipients of the Medal of Honor, the recent incitement

incredibly racist and dangerous lies about specific groups of immigrants, Haitians in this case, and Venezuelans in the case of Colorado. I am struck by the fact that as much as we thought we might have been inoculated against sort of outrage tactics like that, where everything else gets thrown by the wayside and everybody starts responding to his outrage du jour, it's a way of sort of yanking everybody's chain.

I sort of feel like we haven't learned. And he's still being taught, especially by the media, that the more offensive he is, the more he can dominate the media space entirely. And I feel like you've been a good diagnoser of that, not only from when you were up against him, but from what others have done. So do you have an antidote for that or a way that people can talk themselves out of taking that bait?

I think that's really a critical question, and I think there's a couple of things going on here. You mentioned the press, and sadly, the press is still...

not able to cover Trump the way that they should. They careen from one outrage to the next. What was outrageous three days ago is no longer on the front pages, even though it threatens the physical safety of so many people, particularly, as you point out, immigrants that he and Vance have decided to demonize.

And I don't understand why it's so difficult for the press to have a consistent narrative about how dangerous Trump is. You know, the late great journalist, Harry Evans, you know, one time said that, you know, journalists should, you know, really try to achieve objectivity. And by that, he said, I mean, they should cover the object. Well, the object in this case is Donald Trump.

his demagoguery, his danger to our country and the world and stick with it. You know, they were merciless about what they saw as President Biden's, you know, problems in the debate and calling for him to withdraw, I believe,

Donald Trump has disqualified himself over and over and over again to be a presidential candidate, let alone a president. The second thing, though, is that

Part of what Trump is counting on is for people to get desensitized. I mean, oh, my gosh, did you hear what he said yesterday? Did you hear who he attacked? Did you hear the viciousness? And it just like with a shrug. OK, fine. We're moving on. Well,

Americans need to understand that they have to take Trump both seriously and literally. He has said what he wants to do. He and his allies with Project 2025, his desire to be a dictator at least on day one, all of that is in the public record.

And I believe that more Americans have to be, you know, willing to endure what frankly is discomforting and to some extent kind of painful to take him at his word and to be outraged by what he represents. And then finally, the hopeful side of this is.

is that I do think more and more Americans are rejecting the kind of chaos that he represents. We can't go back. That's what the Harris campaign says all the time. We're not going back. We're not going back to what he failed to do to protect American lives during COVID. We're not going back to the, you know,

romance with dictators that puts innocent lives at risk and America's security in danger. We can't go back and give this very dangerous man another chance to do harm to our country and the world.

Speaking of dictators, the Justice Department and the State Department have taken another of a number of actions in the past several weeks, striking actions to both call out and indict and take action against the Kremlin for their attempts at interfering in this in yet another presidential election cycle.

on Trump's behalf. The State Department has put out a $10 million reward for information leading to, for information about people who are trying to, about entities that are trying to illegally interfere in our election. We've seen these dramatic indictments from the Justice Department, including for paying millions of dollars, the Kremlin paying millions of dollars to pro-Trump influencers.

We've seen the Justice Department seize web domains where the Kremlin had set up news sites, what looked like news sites, looked like versions of American news sites, but were secretly operated by the Russian intelligence services or by the Russian government. You feel like the U.S. government is sort of starting to figure out how to do this and taking this seriously enough, or do you still think there's a far distance to go?

I think there's a far distance to go. I applaud the actions taken by the Justice Department and the State Department. I think that they're very important. But

Truly, we are just at the beginning of uncovering everything that Russia, but not just Russia, other countries have done and are doing to influence our election. If you focus on Russia, and I commend you, Rachel, for your new movie, because we are

only at the beginning of understanding the whole iceberg here. What the Russians started doing in 2015 and 2016, what they continued doing, they've gotten more sophisticated. They aren't even pretending anymore. You know, their international news operations

Operation Russia Today, RT, is an arm of the Russian government, an arm of its intelligence operation. It's basically an extension of their spying efforts. They are using Americans, both those who are witting and willing and those who are unwitting and are just so surprised they're getting, you know, four hundred thousand dollars a week or one hundred thousand dollars a podcast to parrot Kremlin propaganda.

And we know from what even Republicans have said, the chairs of the Intelligence Committee and the Foreign Affairs Committee and other Republicans who are currently in office have said that Republicans go to the floor of the Congress and they parrot Russian talking points. So I think it's important to indict the Russians, just as Mueller indicted a lot of Russians who were engaged in attacks

direct election interference and boosting Trump back in 2016. But I also think there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda and whether they should be civilly or even in some cases criminally charged.

is something that would be a better deterrence because the Russians are unlikely, except in a very few cases, to ever stand trial in the United States. You know, they're not going to be going to a country where they can be extradited or even returning to the United States unless they are very foolish. So I think we need to uncover all

all of the connections and make it very clear that you can vote however you want, but we are not going to let adversaries, whether it is Russia, China, Iran, or anybody else, basically try to influence Americans as to how we should vote in picking our leaders.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, former presidential candidate, Secretary of State, U.S. Senator, First Lady. The new book is called Something Lost, Something Gained, Reflections on Life, Love and Liberty. Madam Secretary, I want to thank you in particular for the long sort of sidebar

on Charles Lindbergh and his echoes in today's politics. I know you didn't do that specially for me, but it went straight to my heart. So thank you. Congratulations. I am so glad you noticed that, Rachel. Thank you very much. I injected it straight into my veins. All right. Thank you very much, Secretary.

I have to tell you, our next guest appears on page 27 of Secretary Clinton's new book, where she cites his explanation of fascism. Quote, fascism, as Yale history professor Timothy Snyder put it, quote, is might over right, conspiracy over reality, fiction over fact, pain over law, blood over love, doom over hope.

The great Tim Snyder himself is going to join us right here after this break. Stay with us.

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We're not just making technology solutions and national security and health. We're making smart smarter. Leidos. Dear Toyota, I need a word with you about your crown family. I started driving one and suddenly...

I love traffic. No, really. Rush hour is my happy place. Intentional wrong turns feel so right. I could sit in the comfort of my crown forever, basking in its elegance, feeling on top of the world. But you see how this is strange for me, right? Who gets excited about traffic? This is on you, Toyota. And send. The captivating Toyota Crown family. Toyota, let's go places. We are witnessing a full-on attack on hard-fought cars.

hard-won fundamental rights and freedoms, like the freedom to vote, the freedom to be safe from gun violence, the freedom to breathe clean air and drink clean water, and the freedom to love who you love openly and with pride. So generations of Americans before us led the fight for freedom, and now the baton is in our hands.

The baton is now in our hands. Vice President Kamala Harris has made freedom the centerpiece of her presidential campaign. She's offered an expansive vision of what that word means and her formulation. Freedom is not just freedom from oppression, freedom from unfair or unreasonable constraint or coercion.

Although it is that too, Harris consistently invokes the need to protect, for example, women's freedom from government interference with their choices about their own bodies. But the way the Harris campaign has put it, freedom is also freedom to women.

Not freedom from, but freedom to do things, obtain things, make your own decisions. Freedom that can be made possible only by institutions and infrastructure and government that allows Americans to lead their lives as they choose. Not just freedom from, but freedom to. In 2017, just weeks after former Donald Trump took, former Donald Trump, former President Donald Trump took office,

The historian Timothy Snyder published a small book that had a massive impact here in the United States in particular, but also around the world. It's a book called On Tyranny, 20 Lessons from the 20th Century. And it's a legitimate phenomenon. It's become a kind of practical Bible for how to recognize and resist authoritarianism and to protect a democratic system that's being threatened by rising authoritarianism.

Well, now, just weeks before this year's election, Professor Tim Snyder has a new book that's called "On Freedom." Here's a sample. He says, quote, "I worry that we speak of freedom without considering what it is. Americans often have in mind the absence of something, occupation, oppression, or even government. An individual is free, we think, when the government is out of the way. Negative freedom is our common sense. To be sure, it's tempting to think of liberty as us against the world.

which the notion of negative freedom allows us to do. If the barriers are the only problem, then all must be right with us. That makes us feel good. We think that we would be free if not for a world outside that does us wrong. But is the removal of something in the world really enough to liberate us? Is it not as important, perhaps even more important, to add things?

Freedom, too, positive freedom involves thinking about who we want to become. What do we value? How do we realize our values in the world? If we don't think of freedom as positive, we won't even get freedom in the negative sense since we will be unable to tell what is in fact a barrier, how barriers can be taken in hand and become tools, and how tools extend our freedom.

Freedom from is a conceptual trap. It's also a political trap in that it involves self-deception. It contains no program for its own realization. It offers opportunities to tyrants. Both the philosophy and a politics of freedom have to begin with freedom to. Freedom is positive. It is about holding virtues in mind and having some power to realize them.

from On Freedom, Timothy Snyder's new book. Joining us now, I'm very pleased to say, is Timothy Snyder, Yale University history professor, the author of several books, including On Tyranny and Bloodlands and The Road to Unfreedom, and now On Freedom, which comes out tomorrow. Tim, it's really good to see you. Thank you for being here. I'm really happy to see you too. And I'm kind of wishing now that you had read the audio book. I am available, I think, to do that in case you need any little revisions done.

Well, I mean, you and I have talked about how meaningful on tyranny was to me personally, my understanding about tyranny and authoritarianism and resistance and what we can learn from the 20th century experience with it.

Eight years after that, why a book about the concept of freedom? Yeah, the two have a lot to do with each other because in On Tyranny, I was trying to give people advice about how to preserve what we have. But even at the time, even when I was going around the world with that thing in my backpack talking about it, folks were asking the question, well, what exactly is that good thing that you're defending? What is the opposite of tyranny? And I think the answer has to be a big answer.

Not just that we keep the wrong people from ruling us, but that we decide what kind of system we should have. And the answer I'm trying to give in this book is that the kind of system we should have is one based on freedom. That freedom is the legitimation of government. That we can have the right kind of government if we think of freedom in the right way. And you talk about freedom in terms of mobility, too.

unpredictability, freedom in terms of solidarity. In some ways, it maps a little bit to our Bill of Rights, I think, as a sort of American chauvinist in that, thinking about how our freedoms are manifest most meaningfully when we can associate with those who we please, when we do have the freedom literally to move or to change our circumstances. We have the decision, when we are allowed to make the decisions, however difficult

unpredictable or irrational they may seem to others in terms of what makes the most sense to us. It seems like you've defined them in such a way that, in particular, takes account of what authoritarians want to do in contrast to that, but also in terms of what technology is taking away from us in terms of sort of making us all think the same way.

Yeah, I mean, the book in a way is about how it's beautiful to be human. It's about the thing we can be that nothing else in the universe can be. We can be free because each of us has a different idea of what's good. We all have different values. The one thing we have in common is that when we're free, we can realize those values. And so on the one hand,

We have to work together to create the conditions of freedom so that we can live lives from infancy onward where we can realize those values. And then on the other hand, we can take joy in the fact that we are so different, that we have different ideas of what's beautiful and what's right and what's true, but that together we've created the world where we can realize those things. I want a happy idea of freedom. I think freedom is an idea that should make people happy.

It shouldn't make people angry. It shouldn't be just about opposing things. Sure, we have to keep a bad government away, but freedom is that place where we are when we can become who we should be. It sounds like, I mean, I know that the Harris campaign did not consult with you on this, but they did choose freedom as the centerpiece, the center concept of their campaign.

Do you think that she is getting at the same kind of idea of positive freedom that you're talking about? Well, I mean, I think in some sense, you can aim for the middle by being boring, or you can aim for the middle by pulling things in from all sides. Freedom is traditional because it's, as you say, it's a constitutional idea. It's a declaration of independence.

but it's also a left-wing idea because the conditions of freedom are the things that people on the left tend to like and of course you know if you're a liberal you should like freedom that's what liberalism is all about so freedom can kind of get you from conservatives through liberals to even all the way over to the left but yeah you're absolutely right the way she's talking about freedom i think is closer to being correct because once you move away from freedom just being about

your impulses and pushing things away, and you move it towards freedom too, then you can start to talk about how government can enable us to become the people we are, right? Freedom too means that we create conditions so that children can grow up to become free people. Like that's a kind of marvelous vision. And suddenly you're not angry. Suddenly you're looking forward to a future that could be a lot better than the present. Yeah. Suddenly it makes sense to have freedom

as the centerpiece of a campaign that does describe itself as joyful. Yeah. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back with Timothy Snyder. His new book is called On Freedom. It's out tomorrow. We'll be right back. Stay with us. We're back with Yale historian Tim Snyder, whose new book is On Freedom. I know you're just back from nine or ten days in Ukraine. Yes.

at the last debate, which is probably the only debate, former President Trump refused to say whether it would be a good thing for Ukraine to win the war. I know that wasn't necessarily an unexpected thing, but is that a consequential thing for him to have said? I think it's very consequential. Ukraine

Ukraine winning is necessary to preserve our sense of the international legal order. Ukraine winning is necessary to send a message to China that these kinds of wars aren't going to work out in the future.

Winning for Trump would seem to be a natural thing, right? The guy talks about winning all the time. And I think it is revealing that he looks up to dictators like Putin as the people to whom he should submit. I think Kamala Harris was right there, and not just rhetorically. I think she's on the money. He is a strong man who wants to admire stronger men. And that's a very dangerous place for an aspiring American president to be.

You grew up in Ohio. Springfield, Ohio is currently at the center of the news because of this repellent, racist, very dangerous fiction that's being peddled by Trump and his running mate and their supporters about Haitian immigrants. I wonder, from what you know about the way violence has

the way violent and dangerous rhetoric like that works and the way it's been used by authoritarians and would-be authoritarians in the past. Does that history teach us anything about the best way to protect the people who are most in danger because of it or to stop it?

Well, this whole, I mean, first of all, Ohio needs politicians who are going to help people into this post-industrial tradition. It's a post-industrial situation. It doesn't need politicians who are going to foment this ridiculous us and them, which is what Vance is doing and Trump is doing in his wake.

they don't actually care about the border or border policy. They just care about telling people that all of their problems come from somewhere else. We're innocent, they are guilty. And what history tells us is that that's a dead end. When you say that government policy can't really do anything for you, that's Vance. But we can tell you who the enemy is, that's Trump. That only leads in one direction. That leads towards a hard right racial situation where everyone is worse off than when we started.

The new book is called On Freedom by Timothy Snyder, one of the most influential big brains of our generation. Thank you for this contribution. Thank you for being here to talk about it, Tim. Good luck. Thank you very much. Thank you. All right. We'll be right back. Stay with us. All right. That's going to do it for me for now. But you don't even have time to miss me because I'm going to be back here on Friday for a special edition of The Rachel Maddow Show, Friday, 8 p.m. Eastern.

Then right after that, 9 p.m. Eastern on Friday, we're going to premiere my new movie. First documentary for my new production company. The movie is called From Russia with Lev. It is about the absolutely absurd story of Trump's first impeachment and lots of stuff you didn't know about it. Very excited for you to see it. Again, that's Friday night. Dear Toyota, I need a word with you about your crown family. I started driving one and suddenly I love traffic. No, really.

Oh, really? Rush hour is my happy place. Intentional wrong turns feel so right. I could sit in the comfort of my crown forever, basking in its elegance, feeling on top of the world. But you see how this is strange for me, right? Who gets excited about traffic? This is on you, Toyota. And send. The captivating Toyota Crown family. Toyota. Let's go places.