'The Republican Party is going through some things': Maddow marvels at GOP veering into extremism
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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. Thanks to you at home for joining us this hour. Really happy to have you here. So Super Tuesday, of course, is tomorrow. State of the Union is on Thursday. On Friday, the leading Republican presidential candidate has invited to his home the authoritarian dictator of Hungary.

for a visit. It really is going to be a big week. Did you see the movie Black Panther?

When I heard about that movie, and in fact, when I saw the trailer for that movie, I thought, this is not my kind of movie. I'm not into superhero stuff at all. I'm not into alternate worlds and magic elements and things that give you superhuman powers and flying and stuff. It's just not my thing. But I watched it anyway, and I absolutely loved it.

I watched it one weekend and then I went back the next weekend and I watched it again. Black Panther is fantastic, even if you don't like movies like that. It's the first ever superhero movie to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. Totally deserved it. I say that as a not superhero person. Just a fantastic and landmark film. Here is the serving Republican lieutenant governor of North Carolina on that movie, on Black Panther.

He says it is, quote, created by an agnostic Jew and put to film by a satanic Marxist. He calls it, quote, this trash that was only created to pull the shekels out of your Schwartzer pockets. Ladies and gentlemen, the Republican lieutenant governor of North Carolina. Tomorrow on Super Tuesday, he's actually going to be running in the North Carolina primary to try to become his party's nominee for governor of the great state of North Carolina.

Here he is calling survivors of school gun massacres, quote, media prostitutes, as in prostitutes, but prostitutes. He calls them spoiled little bastards who need to shut up. Again, this is for kids who lived through a school shooting that killed 17 of their classmates. They need to shut up. He calls public school teachers, quote, wicked people.

And not for nothing, he says this about the Holocaust. He says, quote, Hitler disarming millions of Jews and then marching them off to concentration camps is a bunch of hogwash. He is the Republican Party's leading candidate to be their party's nominee for governor of the state of North Carolina. He will be on the ballot tomorrow in that state. He's already lieutenant governor in North Carolina.

On Friday in Florida, Republicans in that state legislature passed yet another new law to restrict any teaching about racism in the United States. This happened just this past Friday, just a couple of days ago on Friday in Florida.

And in the debate over this new Florida bill, one Republican Florida state representative said that while this bill overall will restrict teaching about racism and things like slavery in Florida, he said there is one specific thing that he wanted to make sure is included in public education in Florida from here on out. He said while he supports this bill, he does want to make sure everybody's aware that slaves were paid, that slaves were, quote, paid for their work.

And so he wants to make sure that's taught in schools. And then he voted for the bill. This, of course, comes in Florida after the state's Republican governor tried to claim during his presidential campaign that there were actually a lot of underappreciated benefits of slavery for the people who were enslaved. Now in the state legislature, Republicans are saying that slaves, you know, among other things, it seems like they made a pretty good living because they were paid well.

The chair of the Florida Democratic Party put out a statement in response, clearly just mystified, saying, quote, Florida Republicans are hell bent on teaching our children that slavery wasn't bad. And it is hard to argue. I know it's insane, but it keeps happening.

Pop over to Oklahoma. In Oklahoma, Republicans control the state government there, too. And like just about everywhere, that's that's true. Oklahoma Republicans have now banned abortion in almost every circumstance. But that apparently is not enough for them. Oklahoma Republicans are now moving a new bill that would create a state registry of every woman who does still find a way to get an abortion.

I wonder what Oklahoma Republicans will want to do with a state database of women who have undergone abortions. I'm sure they want it for only the most respectful and responsible reasons. Other lawmakers are warning that the way the Oklahoma bill is written looks like it's also, in addition to creating a registry of women who have had abortions, it also seems intended to ban contraception, including forms of contraception like the IUD. That's what Oklahoma Republicans are up to.

In Alabama, you may remember the nine Republican justices on the Alabama Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling that effectively outlawed fertility treatment in that state. After Alabama's Supreme Court Republicans did that, Democrats in Congress in Washington introduced federal legislation to protect fertility treatment and protect IVF. That legislation was blocked by Republican U.S. Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith.

You know, after the Alabama Supreme Court ruling, all the Republicans came out and said how much they valued fertility treatment, how much they valued IVF. They wanted to make sure they'd protect it. But then they blocked protection for it when it came up in Congress, while Republican judges in Alabama are outlawing it in that state. Seriously, do not bother paying attention to what they say. Watch only what they do. They can say all they want about how much they want to protect fertility treatments and IVF.

when they have a chance to ban it, their actions speak a lot louder than their words. There are 219 Republicans in Congress right now in the House. There's 219. 219 number of Republicans. 125 of them are co-sponsors of legislation that would ban IVF and arguably many popular forms of contraception as well. 125 House Republicans, more than half the Republicans in the House co-sponsored that, including the Republican Speaker of the House.

125 of them. 195 of them voted against contraception. Full stop. The Right to Contraception Act was introduced by Democrats after the Republican appointees on the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. White. The right to contraception. Only eight Republicans in Congress voted for that. 195 voted against.

And let's just stick with health care just for a second. Florida again. Florida, they are now contending with a super worrying outbreak of measles. Measles, like it's the 1800s or something. One of the most transmissible pathogens on Earth. And one we don't typically have to worry about anymore in this country because for 60 freaking years, we've had a totally effective vaccine against measles.

Except in Florida, Republicans picked a very special state surgeon general who's now telling Florida parents, who am I to suggest that perhaps kids should be vaccinated against measles? Yesterday, the Florida Department of Health released a letter from Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Latipo emphasizing how contagious measles is, but did not urge parents to vaccinate their children. He does not, which is an interesting letter from a surgeon general.

Beyond who am I to say your kids should be vaccinated, the hand-picked, hand-Republican-picked Florida Surgeon General wouldn't even say that kids with measles should stay home from school while they're infectious and symptomatic with one of the most transmissible, potentially fatal pathogens known to mankind, measles in Florida. Not to be outdone, now the Republican Party's leading presidential candidate is saying on the stump that he will withhold funding, withhold all funding, not a penny,

from any school anywhere in America if kids have to be vaccinated to come to school. Kids have to be vaccinated all over the country, everywhere, against measles and mumps and polio. I mean, it's been true for decades. It's been true for generations. But just in case you've been missing, I don't know, iron lungs, the Republican Party is raring to go this election year with a new measles and polio for all the kids plan.

And, you know, what swing state busy mom and dad isn't going to want to get the whole family to lick that doorknob and vote GOP this November with that kind of platform on offer to the American people? Can we get a smallpox over here? How about some tetanus for the little ones? Whooping cough like it's going out of style. I do want to give the Missouri Republican Party a little bit of a shout out, though, a little salute, a little...

Stiff armed salute, perhaps this gentleman, not the one in the Klan robe with a sheet over his head, but the guy next to him. And you can see him also in this photo. He is not the guy with the full Klan neo-Nazi uniform on with the tie on the right. No, he's the guy next to him. You can see if you put the images next to each other, he's got the same little thing on in both images, the glasses around his neck on those like croquis style things.

Yes. So that guy, the one who with the burning cross behind him is making the Roman salute with the Klansman. And then in the other photo with the neo-Nazi uniform guy in front of the neo-Nazi flag, he is running for the Republican nomination for governor of the great state of Missouri. And I said I wanted to shout out the Missouri Republican Party here. And I do because they are now frantically trying to remove him from the ballot. So the neo-Nazi Klan guy can't be their Republican nominee for governor.

Once they announced that they were trying to get him off the ballot, he responded this weekend saying, quote, the GOP knew exactly who I am. Republicans in Missouri, including the Missouri secretary of state, are trying to get him off the ballot now fast while also trying to explain away what appear to be themselves like taking pictures with that guy. While he says you knew exactly who I was.

You want one from Georgia? In Georgia, Republicans, they are on the cusp of approving a new license plate, a new official license plate for the state of Georgia.

And this one comes with a little history. In 1944, right, this is the apex of the Allies' final push to defeat the Nazis and win World War II. When FDR was running for his fourth term in office, the Republicans ran Thomas Dewey against him in the 1944 election. There was also a third party in the mix in 1944. They ran a preacher for president in 1944 who called himself a Christian nationalist.

He ran on a platform that said that all American Jews should be forcibly sterilized and then deported from the United States. That party was called the America First Party. Around the same time, there was also an organization called America First Incorporated, America First Inc.,

The leader of that group received a patent for a club that he said was specifically designed to murder Jews in America. He patented it in men's and ladies' sizes. He called it the Kike Killer, forgive me. He ran an organization called America First, Inc.,

Both those organizations, the America First Party and America First Inc. in the 1940s, were trying to capitalize on the notoriety and the name recognition of the America First Committee, which had at one point been very popular in the United States, but it started to wobble a little bit after its chief spokesman in 1941, Charles Lindbergh, gave a big speech in Iowa saying the only reason we were going to end up fighting in World War II is because the Jews were going to make us do it. The America First Committee.

And the America First Party and America First Inc. Georgia Republicans are about to approve a new taxpayer supported official state Georgia license plate that says America first on it. The Republican Party is kind of amazing right now. No matter where you look, no matter what state you look,

Here's another. My friend David Korn at Mother Jones pointed this one out to me. I had not seen it before. This was last week at CPAC. It was a man named Stephen Moore speaking, who is a Trump advisor. One of the most evil left wing organizations in America is the AARP. Right. And I want to make sure that we are going to make a pact here today. I want to make sure that nobody joins the AARP.

What's the most evil organization in America? The retired people? The AARP. The American Association of Retired Persons, right? That's the true evil that must be destroyed. What do they call one of the most evil organizations in America? Left wing. I want to make sure nobody joins the AARP. We must make a pact. The American Association of Retired Persons is the true evil that must be destroyed. Right?

Contraception, if you're trying not to have a baby, that's over. IVF, if you're trying to have a baby, that's over too. The Holocaust denier should be the Republican nominee for governor. The sterilize the Jews and deport that movement should be memorialized on official state Georgia license plates. We

We want really, really, really small government that's nevertheless big enough to make an Oklahoma state registry of every woman who's ever had an abortion. And we'll tell you later what we're going to do with it. Slaves had it great, actually. Slavery wasn't so bad. Let Florida Republicans tell you about it. It's retirees. It's the AARP that's the real evil in America. Tetanus and measles, honestly, they're kind of cute when it's for babies.

And did I mention that on Friday, the leader of the Republican Party, the next Republican presidential nominee, is going to host at his home the authoritarian dictator of Hungary? Because dictators are kind of a thing for those guys right now, like polio is. We're back. I mean, the Republican Party is going through some things right now, right up to the top and in every state in the country.

And today we received another reminder that there's nothing magic that will fix that. There's no magic wand. There's no, you know, full stop legal remedy that is going to stop the Republican Party from being this way or that is going to stop them from ascending to take the White House again with Donald Trump at their helm.

The United States Supreme Court ruled today, as expected, that the part of the 14th Amendment that says you can't hold federal office ever again if you took part in trying to overthrow the government of the United States. The court ruled today that Donald Trump's role in the January 6th insurrection isn't enough on its own to trigger that constitutional protection. Perhaps nothing is. And so even though states can keep candidates off the ballot for lots of other constitutional reasons, like being too young or not being a citizen or whatever, we

With this one, with the trying to overthrow the government and being banned for life from federal office because of it, like the Constitution says in its plain language on this one, he's fine. That's what the Supreme Court said today, because, of course, they did. And if you're a Trump fan, if you're a Republican, if you are hoping for a return to power for Donald Trump in this Republican Party, today's Supreme Court ruling was, of course, great news.

The bad news on the other side of it is that everybody can see what the Republican Party is like right now under Donald Trump. And he doesn't just get the presidency thanks to the court trying to help him get it. He still does have to run for it. We are a nation that just recently heard that Saudi Arabia and Russia will be. We'll be. That was this weekend.

Did you just see Maduro? That is where it's unbelievable. He also slipped into admitting or thinking or positing once again that he is running against President Obama rather than President Biden. He does this all the time.

And you can hear from him making that mistake, making that same error again. You can hear from the crowd as they're listening to him that they have no idea what to make of this. They're just silent while he keeps going with it. Putin, you know, has so little respect for Obama that he's starting to throw around the nuclear word here. You heard that, nuclear. He's starting to talk nuclear weapons. The crowd is like, do we cheer for him pronouncing nuclear?

Should we just agree that he's running against Obama since he keeps saying Obama all the time? Should we clap? When the Republican frontrunner remembers that it's a man named Joe Biden who he's running against and not Barack Obama, the whole basis for that campaign against Biden, as you know, is that Biden's out of it, that Biden's old and stuff, right? Trump's 77, Biden's 81. A new AP poll out today says six in 10 voters have worries about the mental capacity of each of them.

About 57% of voters say they have that worry about Trump. About 63% say they have that worry about Biden. The margin of error in this poll is just over 4%. And so, yeah, it's kind of a tie. I think the headline here on the AP story about this today is about right. About six in 10 voters in America have worries about both of these old dudes maybe being too old and out of it. But that's who the two parties are running. So pick one, right? Pick one. That's your choice. Pick one. I mean, you have lots of grounds on which to choose.

They have also, you know, both been president, which is a rare thing you get to choose from among presidential candidates. But that lets us compare them. In the past three plus years that Joe Biden has been president, we've got

Unemployment below 4%. Best job market since, depending on your count, the 1960s. Violent crime at nearly a 50-year low. The United States has had the best economic recovery since COVID of any large country in the world. The stock market has hit record after record. More Americans have health insurance than ever before. He's standing up against Putin, who's one of the least popular figures in the world with American voters. He's fighting for reproductive rights, which is something even red state voters say they want. I'll read

Republicans are stripping those rights aggressively everywhere. He's cutting student loan debt while Republicans are trying to stop him from doing that. He has brokered and signed the biggest bipartisan infrastructure deal ever in the history of the country. Unions have never been more popular in my entire lifetime. And I'm old and he's the first president ever to join the picket line with striking autoworkers who then won their strike and then endorsed him.

His Democratic Party has outperformed the polls and outperformed history in the midterms and in all of the off-year elections since he has been president. While on the other side, his opponent has been indicted 91 times. And don't forget that his opponent was just president right before this, which we remember. And even if we don't, in the three plus years that he's been gone from the White House, we have learned some real doozies about what exactly was going on there.

The new photo is released showing boxes of documents stashed in a ballroom, even a bathroom at his Mar-a-Lago home. The indictment saying among the classified documents found in the boxes, information about U.S. nuclear programs. I overheard the president say something to the effect of, you know, I don't even care that they have weapons.

They're not here to hurt me. Take the effing mags away. Let my people in. They can march the Capitol from here. Let the people in. Take the effing mags away. A $2 billion investment that President Trump, former President Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, secured last summer from a fund led by the crown prince of Saudi Arabia has raised questions about the ethics of post-White House business dealings. And we're back with Cassidy Hutchinson. Cassidy, what was Mark Meadows burning every day?

Yeah, I wish I knew, Nicole. There were several times I would walk into Mark's office and I would see him putting papers into the fireplace. Eventually it culminated, the long break, simmering break between he and myself in June of 2020 when he wanted to deploy active duty troops on the street of Washington, D.C. and suggested actually that we shoot Americans in the streets.

He suggested that we deploy active duty troops in Washington and shoot Americans in the streets, says his defense secretary.

And the White House chief of staff was regularly burning documents in the White House fireplaces. And the son-in-law mysteriously gets a $2 billion housewarming present from a foreign government the second he walks out of the White House. And he's stashing classified documents about America's nuclear programs at home in a bathroom and then refusing to give them back. And he's explicitly asking for armed people to be let into the crowd he was going to direct to go to Congress to overthrow the government to try to keep him in power.

Those are just those are just that's just a sprinkling of the things we have learned about his time in office since he left office. Today, there's actually another one. New reporting from Rolling Stone. Look at this headline. Trump's White House was awash in speed. And I don't mean speed as in efficiency. I mean, speed as in everyone was on drugs. Who wants those guys back in the White House? Because the two major parties are going to nominate someone and you got to pick one.

Which would you prefer? You have to pick one. We're actually going to speak with the lead reporter from that Rolling Stone story in just a moment. But I will just leave you with this. There's no magic spell.

There's no solution that is going to come, say, from the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court did the favor of reminding us all of that today when they ruled that Trump will stay on the ballot all over the country. They gave us that reminder today after last week. They made sure we knew it in the first place when they somewhat inexplicably took action to delay all the Trump criminal trials except the one they couldn't stop until after the election.

There's no magic wand coming to stop this thing. There's no, you know, magic beans that you can grow here that make some beanstalk take us away from all of this. There's only one way out of this. Pick one. The Democratic Party has picked its nominee. Yes, it's an old guy who is doing practical, normal and popular things as president and who has a lot to show for it, particularly in terms of how well things are going economically since he has been at the helm.

The Republican Party is pretty obviously picking their guy as well. Also an old guy who, for example, cannot say the word Venezuela and who has no idea who is the current president of the United States. Currently riding high on his party's abortion bans and measles curious virological denialist free associating. He's trying to warm the American people up to the idea of just a little bit of dictatorship from him. And he's getting us ready to, you know, start building camps to hold millions.

because his advisors say the deportations start at noon on day one. The courts are not going to help. The law will be a sidebar to the main decision. You will make this decision. The only way this decision will be made is by you picking one, by you volunteering and donating and campaigning and deciding it matters enough to you to not only vote, but to help.

to help your candidate try to win. The Republican Party really, really is amazing right now. But the only thing that will stop them is Democrats winning instead. Period. Full stop. Thank you, United States Supreme Court, for the clarification of the campaign. If we didn't know it already, the campaign starts now. We are a nation that just recently heard that Saudi Arabia and Russia will repeat their...

MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell. When I was working in the Senate, I didn't realize that it's the perfect training for the job that I have now. Covering government, covering politics, the complexity of it all. Mastering the detail is crucial to being able to present anything that happens in Senate buildings or any of the other news centers that we have to focus on every day. The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, weeknights at 10 p.m. Eastern on MSNBC.

So here's the headline. It's kind of, can't mistake it. Trump's White House was awash in speed and Xanax. Now, earlier this year, you might remember in January, the Pentagon found in an inspector general's report that during the Trump administration, the White House doctor's office routinely provided opioids and other controlled substances to White House staff who were not sort of

eligible to get them who shouldn't have been getting that stuff. As part of that report, the Pentagon included a document that showed basically an order form for medications that were ordered by the White House Medical Unit that it was doling out. And it was stuff like fentanyl and ketamine, also morphine and Ambien and a lot of an upper called Provigil.

P-R-O-V-I-G-I-L. This is something they give to fighter pilots so they don't fall asleep when they're, you know, making war.

But now in today's reporting, Rolling Stone adds this, quote, according to interviews with four former senior administration officials and others with knowledge of the matter, the stimulant, Provigil, was routinely given to staffers who needed an energy boost after a late night or just a pick-me-up to handle another day at a uniquely stressful job. As one of the former officials tells Rolling Stone, the White House at that time was, quote, a wash in speed.

And it wasn't just speed. Quote, the anti-anxiety medication Xanax was also a popular, easy-to-get drug during the Trump years. Three sources tell us. One unnamed source telling Rolling Stone, quote, it was kind of like the Wild West. Things were pretty loose. Whatever someone needs, we are going to fill this.

Just one other detail in this report tonight from Rolling Stone that I feel like we should point out. Besides the prescription medication stuff that is outlined here, the White House Medical Unit also provides counseling services. They have mental health staffers. They have a team of therapists.

What happens in a counseling session is typically protected, as you might guess, by patient confidentiality, but apparently not in the Trump White House. Rolling Stone reporting today that therapists working in the Trump White House were, quote, pressed for information about what they were told by White House staffers immediately after therapy sessions. The implication being that whatever they told their therapist, quote,

it could be used against them at work by their bosses in the Trump White House. Joining us now is Noah Schachtman. He's a contributing writer at Rolling Stone. He's the outgoing editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone. He's one of two bylines on the story, along with Asawan Subhasingh. Noah, it's nice to see you. Thanks for being here. Great to see you. Did I get any of that wrong or the wrong way around? No, I think that's pretty much it.

You know, look, on the therapist, which is a shocking, shocking revelation. When I found, first of all, I couldn't believe I found like a Trump White House therapist. And secondly, I couldn't believe this person would talk to me. And thirdly, I couldn't believe what this person told me. Now, look, their boss told me on the record that it was just for military screening. We were just trying to make sure that they were OK with their top secret clearances. But here's the thing.

This therapist saw civilians too. So there would not be a military issue. Right. And this therapist said that, yeah, the question started out general and started out pretty basic, but...

this person felt like it went down a slippery slope into betraying confidential patient information. And when you pair the looseness with which they handled the drugs with the looseness with which they handled patient information, you get a pretty bad picture.

One of the things that you, Mr. Soussang, do in the reporting today is describe the fact that in other White Houses, people have described, particularly when it comes to long foreign trips, being doped by the White House medical office, getting either uppers or downers, depending on what people needed to be able to get through long, grueling overseas trips through multiple time zones, that that's something that's not unique here. Right.

this is described as being sort of not just quantitatively, but qualitatively different. People getting effectively for high-grade pharmaceutical versions of speed all the time, not only directly from the White House Medical Office, but also circulating it amongst themselves as staffers. Yeah, that's exactly right. And that wasn't all, right? If you do a stimulant enough, it's really hard to get to sleep. It's really hard to calm down. So then you need the Xanax. Then you need a sedative. Then you

You need this anti-anxiety medication to kind of cool down. And several staffers were then mixing Xanax and alcohol, which packs quite the wallet. Mm-hmm. You also, and you describe having been sort of inspired to do some of this reporting by seeing those handwritten ledgers from the inspector general's report. It is striking to see ketamine and fentanyl and...

morphine and some of these other, talk about pack-a-wallop kind of drugs. What are they doing with ketamine and fentanyl? Right. So we could find no evidence that ketamine and fentanyl were prescribed in the way that Provigil and Xanax were handed out. What we could find, though, is that... Although with the caveat that the record keeping around what was actually handed out was pretty lousy.

It was crazy. It was handwritten, like, in fact, the ledger you showed there, it was from 2014. They didn't have any current ones. They crossed out 2014 and put 2019. And there's lots of illegible stuff, illegible even for doctors. So, no, it's super sloppy record keeping. So we didn't find anything that said...

Trump staffers got ketamine. What they seem to do is stockpile the stuff in case of a very odd emergency, like as if Trump was maybe like in Botswana or someplace nowhere near a hospital and suddenly got shot and they suddenly wanted to do an emergency procedure on him. You're giving me a skeptical look because it seems like a remote, remote possibility. In terms of the White House medical office,

There has been continuity. We have a very we had a very controversial White House medical office chief with Ronny Jackson, who behaved strangely when it came to releasing information to the public about Trump's health. He's now a controversial Republican congressman. Is there a sense in which this is.

sort of seems specific to his time period at the helm. Is this something that has been a problem at the White House Medical Office that precedes him and has been a problem after he left? Do we know anything about this being worse or better over time? Yes, we do. So pretty much every source that we talk to

trace the problems back to Ronny Jackson and to his tenure. But the thing is, even when Ronny Jackson left, his people were still around for a while. And even when Ronny Jackson left, this kind of anytime, anywhere, Wild West attitude towards handing out prescription medications, that lasted for quite some time into the Trump administration.

Noah Schachtman, contributing writer, outgoing editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone magazine. Super creepy reporting. Thank you. Thanks for helping us understand it. All right. We've got much more ahead here tonight. Stay with us. Yikes. Sunday on MSNBC. Two documentaries. At 9, To Be Destroyed. The story of one community's fight against book banning. Followed by It's Okay. A short film about embracing differences in small-town America. Sunday at 9 p.m. Eastern on MSNBC.

Go beyond the headlines with the MSNBC app. Watch your favorite shows live. Get analysis from live blogs to in-depth essays and the latest updates on the 2024 election. Visit msnbc.com slash app to download. Forewarned is forearmed, supposedly, right?

When you try to use fraud and intimidation and violence to overturn election results, what we learned today from the United States Supreme Court is that that does not, despite the plain wording of the Constitution, preclude you from holding federal office or running for federal office again. It does, however, preclude us from being surprised if you try to do the same thing again. And that is what is sort of looming over the

Some very ugly new reporting from The New York Times. Under this headline, Trump's allies ramp up campaign targeting voter rolls. Quote, a network of right wing activists and allies of Donald J. Trump is quietly challenging thousands of voter registrations in critical presidential battleground states.

an all but unnoticed effort that could have an impact in a closer contentious election. Calling themselves election investigators, the activists have pressed local officials in Michigan, Nevada, and Georgia to drop voters from the rolls en masse. They have at times targeted Democratic areas.

And on one level, this sounds like a story we've heard a lot of times before, right? Every election under the guise of fighting non-existent voter fraud, conservatives push for purges of the voter rolls in Democratic areas. Here's what's new about these right-wing voter challenging efforts this year and what we should consider ourselves forewarned about.

This year, the purpose of them getting all these people thrown off the voter rolls is not just for Republicans to disenfranchise voters on the front end to make it harder for people to vote. That is its own reward. They like that. They want that. But they are also trying to lay the groundwork for Republican challenges on the back end to give them fodder for challenging election results they do not like.

Quoting from The Times, quote, right wing media outlets have promoted the voter roll challenges, casting public officials as corrupt and creating fodder that could be used in another round of legal challenges should Mr. Trump lose again. The chief executive of the nonpartisan States United Democracy Center tells The Times today, quote, it really is aimed at being able to cast doubt on the results after the fact.

So step one, you file all these bogus challenges to voter registrations in Democratic areas and swing states. Step two, those challenges make it harder for people in mostly Democratic areas to vote, which hopefully helps Trump win. But if he doesn't win, then proceed to step three. Oh, my goodness. Look at all these voters whose eligibility has been questioned. It must be voter fraud. Must be a stolen election.

Democrats being ready for this election season means not only getting real about the fact that this election is about picking Joe Biden or picking Donald Trump, and there isn't any other way to get through it. Democrats getting real about this election season also means getting real right now about what Trump and his allies are setting up to contest the election if and when they lose it. Stay with us.

This is from a member of the Board of Elections at DeKalb County, Georgia. Quote, despite no evidence to support their claims, we unfortunately are preparing for the onslaught of significantly more voter challenges by certain groups attempting to remove voters from the voter roll ahead of the November general election. Despite no evidence to support their claims.

Pro-Trump, stop-the-steal activists are ramping up efforts to kick people off the voter rolls in a whole bunch of swing states, not just to make it harder for people to vote, but also, according to reporting in today's New York Times, to create fodder for conservatives challenging the election results

if Trump loses the election again. That's new reporting from The New York Times, including reporter Nick Carciniti and Alexandra Brisson. Nick Carciniti joins us now here in studio. Nick, thanks very much for being here. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. So,

I feel like it's been a lot of years that I've been covering what I would call voter suppression efforts, effort to clean the voter rolls, meaning purge people off the voter rolls. It always seems to happen right before elections. It often seems to target mostly Democratic voters. It often seems to be done by conservative-leaning groups. This feels not just tactically or not just technologically different. It feels sort of tactically different, that there's kind of a new element to it this year. Is that fair to say?

Well, I think one of the things that's very new right now is just how coordinated this is, both on like a very large macro level and then at the state level. So we've seen these loose networks of people who are stop the steal, who are either election deniers or people who are just very conservative on issues of voting, all kind of coming together and uniting under some leaders. Cleta Mitchell, you know, the lawyer who helped Trump try and

overturned some of the results in the 2020 election has been a leader. Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, who believes that machines are corrupted, he's another leader. And what they've done is they've kind of established this loose connection where they meet on Zoom, they meet on calls in states like Michigan and Georgia and Arizona, and they're talking and trading tactics and they're building software. They're actually building new software now.

In Georgia, there's two new pieces of software they're about to roll out for this election specifically. So it's designed to target voters who they want to get kicked off the rolls. Yeah. One will be looking exactly at the national change of address form and trying to identify voters that have changed. And another is this database that is basically like a couple million voter files. And then they try and match that to other databases, kind of like what Eric used to do until they got rid of Eric.

And those are being developed by a conservative-leaning organization just to facilitate, help facilitate voter challenges. So it's a much more sophisticated effort. And they're also getting much more savvy in some of these tactics. Like in Michigan, for example, they discovered a law on state books from 1954 that said that if you...

elector challenges another elector, singular, then there's a process that begins and they attest to it with a signed affidavit that that voter must be removed from the rolls if they're not, if they don't respond within 30 days. That's very different than the federal statute and the NVRA, which is two federal election cycles.

So they found a loophole that lets them move more aggressively. Exactly. And so they started sending these notes directly to municipal clerks saying that you have to follow this law. And we found, you know, these voters, sometimes it was dozens, sometimes it was just four, saying, don't.

We checked. We're attesting to this. And due to this law on state books, you have to follow the law. And some clerks were like, OK. And in Genoa, about 100 were removed. In Waterford, there was about 1,000 removed. Now, the secretary of state stepped in once we actually noticed this. My colleague, Ali Berzon, on the story was the one who found this in the first place. And so, yeah.

Just the fact that they were able to find this state law. The clerk didn't know about it until you called and asked for comment. The Secretary of State. Secretary of State. Yeah. But let me stop you there just for a second. Do the clerks and the local officials who are being targeted by these efforts, obviously it's voters who are being targeted, but they're being targeted through local officials. Do the local officials like kind of have the wherewithal to deal with this? Do they know what they're up against? Are they being kind of pushed into this? They're being told they're breaking the law and they must do what these activists want them to do.

Well, I think some are very much afraid of breaking the law. And, you know, they're under a microscope like they've never been before. Yeah. There's poll watchers everywhere who are, you know, trying to either catch a mistake, catch anything that they can to seize on either challenge or kind of change the election. So I think so many election officials are...

are overtaxed, they're underpaid. You know, election offices across the country don't have enough money to simply carry out elections. And there's been numerous laws recently preventing them from getting other sources of money. And then Congress isn't passing the bill or part of the budget in Congress to give elections more money.

they have a lot on their plate. And if they see an email that's like, you gotta follow the law, some just think, I have to follow the law, it's in front of me. Others are more familiar with this. If you look at Georgia, in the 2021 Senate runoff elections, there were 360,000 voter challenges. That's a massive amount of challenges. They hadn't seen that forever. So they're a little bit more familiar with the statutes and they're ready to assess these, how valid they are. They do have a process that they have to follow,

Georgia passed a law in 2021 that kind of expanded what you can do to challenge a voter. But they're a little bit more prepared. Yeah, it's I mean, they're good if they're getting blowtorch attention from one side, that's going to have an effect in terms of how they react. And they're going to need support, among other things, to to know the right thing to do and to be able to stand up against pressure. Nick Korsanid from The New York Times, who, along with Alexandra Berzin, did this crucial reporting. Thank you so much for helping us understand. We'll be right back. Stay with us.

Tomorrow is Super Tuesday. 16 states and one territory will be holding primary contests for the Republican Democratic presidential nominations. MSNBC will have live coverage of all of that tomorrow starting at 6 p.m. Eastern. I'll be joined by all my colleagues here for special coverage as the polls close. It's right here on MSNBC. I'll be here starting 6 p.m. Eastern. I will see you then. All right. That does it for us tonight.

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