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All In with Chris Hayes, Transcript 9/29/2016

Guests: Katie Packer; Michelle Goldberg; Maria Teresa Kumar; Rick Wilson, Lawrence Mishel, Cornell Belcher, Jill Hanauer

Show: ALL IN with CHRIS HAYES Date: September 29, 2016 Guest: Katie Packer; Michelle Goldberg; Maria Teresa Kumar; Rick Wilson, Lawrence Mishel, Cornell Belcher, Jill Hanauer

CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST (voice-over): Tonight on ALL IN...

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HILLARY CLINTON, DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: He can run his campaign however he chooses.

(END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES (voice-over): With 40 days until the election, Trump hones his message on the proper weight of beauty contestants.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I saved her job. Because they wanted to fire her for putting on so much weight.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES (voice-over): Why the campaign`s counterpunch may do them more harm.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RUDY GIULIANI, FORMER MAYOR OF NEW YORK CITY: Every time a woman`d come along and say that Bill Clinton did something to her, who was the biggest attacker of that woman?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES (voice-over): Then, how voters feel about Trump`s personal tax policy.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CLINTON: If not paying taxes makes him smart, what does that make the rest of us?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES (voice-over): Plus, Trump backers cling to trade as his best debate moment.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: We have to renegotiate our trade deals. And, Lester, they`re taking our jobs.

(END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES (voice-over): But does his actual proposal on trade make any sense? And why this moment --

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Name one foreign leader that you respect and look up to. Anybody.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES (voice-over): -- should not be what surprises you most about Gary Johnson. When ALL IN starts right now.

HAYES: Good evening from New York. I`m Chris Hayes. Forty days until the election of the next president, the most powerful and consequential position on the planet. One of the two people contending for the job cannot stop himself from pursuing a personal vendetta against a woman he once humiliated for gaining weight. Not only did Donald Trump walk straight into the trap Hillary Clinton set at Monday`s debate, baiting him with the story of Alicia Machado, a former Miss Universe who says Trump called her "Miss Piggy" and other insulting names, now three days later, he`s still refusing to let the story die. Machado may be a private citizen and Trump running to be president of the United States, but that`s not restraining him from lashing out.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Do you have anything further to say on this Miss Universe thing?

TRUMP: No, not much. I mean, look, I hardly know this person. She did not do well. She had a lot of difficulties. And, you know, they wanted to fire her. I had nothing to do with this person. But they wanted to fire her. I saved her job. Because I said, that`s got to be ruinous. And I`ve done that with a number of the young ladies where I saved their job. But the staff itself -- and you know what happened? Look what I get out of it. A lot of things are coming out about her. I`m not going to say anything. I couldn`t care less.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: No good deed goes unpunished. It`s the same way Trump conducted his views of the Khan family and Judge Gonzalo Curiel: go on the attack, make it personal, concede nothing. Just imagine for a moment what that might look like with the full force of the bully pulpit and the federal government at his disposal. For now, while he`s still a candidate, Trump`s got former House speaker Newt Gingrich who addressed the controversy during a speech last night.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

NEWT GINGRICH, FORMER SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: You`re not supposed to gain 60 pounds during the year you`re Miss Universe.

(LAUGHTER)

GINGRICH: (INAUDIBLE) sexist and proves I`m not being sensitive.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: So Trump campaign surrogates are now litigating the appropriate amount of weight for a beauty pageant contestant to gain. It`s not the media, it`s not the Clintons and their allies or the Republican candidate president and his top surrogates. And for the record, not that it`s at all material, Trump appears to have exaggerated Machado`s weight gain. CBS News just posted an interview the two of them gave to Jose Diaz-Balart in 1997.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: Alicia has done an incredible job. She really has turned out to be one of the great Miss Universes --

ALICIA MACHADO, FORMER MISS UNIVERSE: Thank you.

TRUMP: -- I will say. And she had a little problem during the middle where she gained a little weight.

MACHADO: I don`t think so.

TRUMP: Yes, and she`s probably right.

MACHADO: I don`t think so.

TRUMP: OK.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Do you not think that it`s important to maintain a certain look during that year?

MACHADO: Yes, of course. But I think all women in the world have a problem with the weight.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Right.

MACHADO: And I think maybe I have some problem with this, but I`m fine now. And I think 15 pounds is nothing with 20 years old.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: New Yorker just released its new cover for next week`s issue, a doughy Donald Trump fresh off the swimsuit competition, his face a bit tear-stained after winning Miss Congeniality. Since the debate, the Trump camp has also been crying about how their candidate, facing charges of sexism, resisted bringing up Bill Clinton`s sexual history. Gingrich did it again today.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GINGRICH (voice-over): I`m sure he said to himself, a president of the United States shouldn`t attack somebody personally when their daughter is sitting in the audience. And he bit his tongue and he was a gentleman. And I thought in many ways that was the most important moment of the whole evening. He proved that he had the discipline to remain as a decent guy, even when she was disgusting.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Now Trump`s campaign is trying to deflect from the Machado story by bringing up Bill Clinton`s infidelities at every opportunity and somehow tying them to Hillary Clinton`s moral character. NBC News obtained an internal memo with talking points on the campaign`s new strategy. Quote, Mr. Trump has never treated a woman the way Hillary Clinton and her husband did when they actively worked to destroy Bill Clinton`s accusers. Hillary Clinton trying to present herself as some sort of a feminist champion is a joke. Are you blaming Hillary for those infidelities? No, however she`s been an active participant in trying to destroy the women who have come forward with a claim. In the past 36 hours since they were sent around, Trump`s top staff and surrogates have put those talking points to good use.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KELLYANNE CONWAY, TRUMP CAMPAIGN MANAGER: It`s fair game to think about how Hillary Clinton treated those women after the fact.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ERIC TRUMP, EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT: It`s amazing when you hear her talk about sexism and these various claims, which are ridiculous, aside from obviously Bill, her husband, being maybe the worst that`s ever lived.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GIULIANI: Every time a woman`d come along and say that Bill Clinton did something to her, who was the biggest attacker of that woman? And she`s a feminist?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Well, between Donald Trump and Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani, we now have these three men, all of them married three times, none appearing in a beefcake calendar anytime soon, judging the parameters of physical fitness and marital fidelity. Taking questions from reporters today, Hillary Clinton responded to the Trump campaign`s new strategy.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CLINTON: He can run his campaign however he chooses. That`s up to him. I`m going to keep talking about the stakes in this election. I`m going to keep talking about my agenda.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: I`m joined now by MSNBC contributor Katie Packer, former deputy campaign manager for Mitt Romney in 2012, founder of an anti-Trump super PAC. And, Katie, I know that you`ve sort of spent some time looking into, thinking about, testing, how particularly sort of swing voter women, Republican women, react to the kind of line of attack on Hillary Clinton based on Bill`s behavior. And what`s your sense of how that works?

KATIE PACKER, CONTRIBUTOR, MSNBC: Well, what we`ve found with the women that we looked at -- and this was obviously prior to the primaries in an effort to help the Republican ticket -- we found that while this is kind of candy for Republican primary voters and they really want to punish Hillary Clinton for her comments about the vast right-wing conspiracy. That with swing women, soft Republican women, soft Democrat women, they really reject this. And they really reject the notion that she somehow has some responsibility for her husband`s impropriety and infidelities. And they also kind of give her a free pass, even for going on the attack. You know, in focus groups we talk to these women and they say things like, well, who wouldn`t attack a woman that participated in that with their husband? And so they don`t really look at this as something that is something that she has to answer for in the context of a presidential campaign. So in addition to just being a tacky, classless thing to do, it`s just bad strategy.

HAYES: Yes. I mean, there`s that part of it, too. And there`s also the degree to which, you know, I was thinking about Benjy Sarlin, my colleague, had a good tweet storm where he said, look, Trump people are mad at me that this story keeps, you know, developing, day three, day four, and why are you and the media pursuing it? And his point, which I think is right, is if Donald Trump said, look, this woman and I had our differences years ago and I wish her the best, that`s it. Like, Newt Gingrich -- no one`s telling Newt Gingrich he has to go up and make a joke about how much weight she gained. No one`s telling anyone they have to talk about this. Donald Trump raised this the next morning, apropos of nothing on Fox & Friends because he can`t let anything go.

PACKER: Well, absolutely. And perhaps Melania Trump is an exception, but every woman in America has either thought of themselves as fat or is fat and hopes that nobody notices. And to have somebody publicly humiliate you when you`ve gained 15 pounds, you know, and you`ve just recently won the Miss Universe contest -- I mean, she`s obviously a stunning woman to have won a contest like that -- I mean, it makes most women sit back and go, well, my gosh, if that`s the standard that we all have to live up to and our daughters have to live up to, you know, how can any of us compete?

HAYES: You know, it strikes me, too, that we`re in this situation where we have the first woman major party nominee, the possible first woman president. She`s also an incredibly polarizing figure, she`s been a public figure for many years. People have very built-up opinions about who Hillary Clinton is. And I wonder how much -- you know, we know that right now the kind of battlefield of the election largely is white women, particularly white college educated women. What message do you think would work with them?

PACKER: Well, what we have found over and over again is that the message that she`s most vulnerable on is this issue of trust.

HAYES: Right.

PACKER: You know, she shot herself in the foot with, you know, the findings of her, you know, homegrown server and her refusal to disclose all these emails and perhaps even the destruction of emails. And, you know, the stuff with the Clinton Foundation presents real vulnerabilities for her, and this sense that she`s always got something to hide. The American people do have sort of a predisposition that this is somebody that`s very secretive, she`s willing to not be truthful in order to protect her secrets, and that`s the place that they should be going. That`s where her vulnerabilities lie. All of this nonsense with regard to whether or not she`s a feminist icon and whether or not, you know, she`s responsible for her husband`s infidelities, it`s just a losing strategy, frankly.

HAYES: All right. Katie Packer, thank you very much.

PACKER: Thanks, Chris.

HAYES: Joining me now, Michelle Goldberg, columnist for Slate, and Maria Teresa Kumar, president and CEO of Voto Latino and an MSNBC contributor. And, Maria, let me start with you. I mean, I guess I sometimes feel -- you know, on one level the Obama campaign, it became the case that in some ways it was very difficult to separate race from any of the politics that happened around Barack Obama, and continue to be the case for his presidency. And sometimes I feel like that`s the place we`re at in terms of gender and Hillary Clinton. It`s just you can`t come up with a version of Hillary Clinton, attacks on Hillary Clinton, the politics of Hillary Clinton that don`t in some fundamental way turn on the fact that she is trying to be the first woman president. And this moment seems like that being made explicit.

MARIA TERESA KUMAR, PRESIDENT AND CEO, VOTO LATINO: Exactly. And what she did was she basically owned it and exposed what the narrative that Trump has basically perpetrated, and that is that if you`re not attractive and you`re not pretty, he doesn`t want you to be part of his team. I mean, the LA Times just recently did a piece where he would go and visit the golf courses in Los Angeles, and if there was a waitress that wasn`t good looking, basically he`d say, fire her, right? So she is basically bringing his vulnerabilities to light and saying, look, in order for her to win, she has to bring in more Republican or Independent women that may not feel completely comfortable with her, but saying, look, look at the contrast. He failed miserably on that debate because he was trying to bring in college educated white men and Republican women by saying, hey, look, I`m not as sexist or racist as people think I am. But instead he basically said, oh, shoot, I kind of messed up, right?

HAYES: Yes. Michelle, I also just find, like, people`s desire, the right`s desire to go after Hillary Clinton in this way, like --

MICHELLE GOLDBERG, COLUMNIST, SLATE: Right.

HAYES: -- this weird psychodrama of, we`re not talking about it, but we`re talking about it, we`re so salivating at talking about it.

GOLDBERG: Well, there was a moment, remember, in the spring when he was really starting to go there --

HAYES: Yes.

GOLDBERG: -- and they were talking about it a lot, they telegraphed there was going to be a presentation on Bill Clinton`s sexual history at the Republican National Convention. And then they dropped it, I assume because one of their advisors told them exactly what Katie Packer said that she had found in her focus groups, which is that, you know, aside from hard-right partisans, women really don`t like seeing Hillary Clinton blamed for Bill Clinton`s infidelities. So they went in other directions, but he just couldn`t let it go. And my theory is that he sees this, despite all evidence, as kind of the nuclear option against Hillary Clinton --

HAYES: Right.

GOLDBERG: -- because he divides the world into women he wants to sleep with and women he doesn`t want to sleep with, and thinks that everybody else on some level does as well. And so there`s kind of no better way to undermine a woman than to prove that she is sexually undesirable, which is what bringing up -- I mean, it`s both why he`s so aggrieved about Machado, right? I mean, he calls in Fox & Friends and he`s saying, but she did gain weight.

HAYES: Right.

(LAUGHTER)

HAYES: Like, I have the better part of the substance of this argument.

GOLDBERG: And then you go back to Hillary Clinton. I think that this isn`t -- you know, the thing about her enabling is just a smoke screen.

HAYES: Right, of course, yes.

GOLDBERG: He wants to have everybody reminded of the fact that this woman was kind of cuckolded. And to him, that is the ultimate kind of delegitimization.

HAYES: Maria, what was your -- you were saying something?

KUMAR: No, well, it was just that experience of watching Fox & Friends for the first time -- I mean, they`re usually rooting him on -- and they were just dead silent, like they couldn`t believe that he was doubling down and going down this path. But at the same time, when you also take into consideration that she was 18 years old and he was 50, that discrepancy among women, in particular, just makes you feel uneasy. Because you`re just like, there`s something --

HAYES: Yes.

KUMAR: -- fundamentally that you basically want to just push off because it just seems so inappropriate.

HAYES: From the character perspective, like, to me the tweet-length version is the guy ran beauty contests.

KUMAR: Right.

HAYES: End of story.

(LAUGHTER)

KUMAR: Right.

HAYES: End of story. Like, if you were at a party and you`re like, oh, yes, my sister`s dating someone new, oh, what`s he do? He runs beauty contests. You would be like, get out.

(LAUGHTER)

HAYES: Jeez. You know, we`re not so much further down that, but --

KUMAR: That`s very funny.

HAYES: -- the other thing about it is, and again, you end up getting sucked into the trivial by the sheer trivial nature of this campaign and candidacy. But to me it`s like, remember what this will look like as president of the United States. Constant vendettas against private citizens, constant barrages of petty vendettas being pursued --

GOLDBERG: Right.

HAYES: -- over and over from the bully pulpit.

GOLDBERG: And he`s (INAUDIBLE) bully pulpit, right? Like, backed by the power of the NSA, backed by the military, backed potentially by America`s nuclear arsenal. I mean, you know, it`s no longer kind of a fun sideshow, it`s genuinely terrifying and this is genuinely what totalitarian dictators do.

HAYES: Maria?

KUMAR: Well, and that`s exactly right. I mean, when he went after the federal judge that was of Mexican descent, Mexican-American, he basically said that imagine if I`m in the Oval Office, this is not going to happen again. He basically --

HAYES: Yes.

KUMAR: -- promised to undermine our checks and balances in our institutions. And I think that`s one of the reasons why even fact checking within the media has been so difficult because he laid out an agenda saying that the media was going to be bias against him from the very beginning. And it`s finally catching up to him, but it`s been a very difficult task because he`s been very good at undermining individuals that are, you know, the faces of our democracy. And that is our judicial institutions in one case and our media that actually make sure that people are held accountable.

HAYES: And you end up in a situation, right, where you`re talking about these personality traits of this individual, which, you know, a total lack of restraint, a complete inability to admit wrong or fault or to apologize, an absolute lack of discipline. And, you know, it`s like, we`re not talking about paid sick leave.

(LAUGHTER)

HAYES: But at the same level, it`s like, those things are going to matter a tremendous amount in the person that occupies the most powerful office in the world.

GOLDBERG: Well, and it`s pointless to kind of talk about Donald Trump`s most of the substance of his policy proposals because it`s very unlikely that he himself has actually read them.

HAYES: Right.

GOLDBERG: And so, you know, it`s just -- that`s not what we`re -- it`s the same reason that USA Today comes out with this --

HAYES: Just now --

GOLDBERG: -- right --

HAYES: -- a few hours ago.

GOLDBERG: -- comes out with not an endorsement but a disendorsement, saying basically, you know, whoever you vote for, don`t vote for Donald Trump because anything else you want to accomplish or not accomplish in politics kind of presupposes a level of basic competence --

HAYES: And fitness.

GOLDBERG: -- and not recklessly destroying the country. That`s the baseline beyond which you can`t --

HAYES: Right.

GOLDBERG: -- talk about policy specifics.

HAYES: Michelle Goldberg, Maria Teresa Kumar, thank you very much.

KUMAR: Thanks, Chris.

HAYES: Still to come, there is a conventional wisdom that says Donald Trump was the winner of the first 20 minutes of the first debate. Tonight, why that conventional wisdom has some big policy holes. But first, that tax fight Trump brought upon himself, after claiming that not paying his taxes would make him smart. More on that after this break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: First of all, I never said I didn`t pay taxes. She said maybe you didn`t pay taxes --

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Right.

TRUMP: -- and I said, well --

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It`s speculation.

TRUMP: -- that would make me smart because tax is a big payment. But I think a lot of people say that`s the kind of thinking that I want running this nation.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Since Monday night, the Trump campaign has appeared to adopt a new official position, which is that not paying taxes is a clever and wise thing to do. About 30 minutes into the presidential debate, Hillary Clinton raised the specter that Trump pays nothing in federal taxes. And Trump responded unapologetically, quote, that makes me smart.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CLINTON: So you`ve got to ask yourself, why won`t he release his tax returns? And I think there`re maybe a couple of reasons. First, maybe he`s not as rich as he says he is. Or maybe he doesn`t want the American people, all of you watching tonight, to know that he`s paid nothing in federal taxes. Because the only years that anybody`s ever seen were a couple of years when he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license, and they showed he didn`t pay any federal income tax. So if he`s paid --

TRUMP: That makes me smart.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: So instead of Trump telling the American people that just like them he pays what he owes in taxes and nothing more, he insinuated it`s smart to pay no taxes at all. A comment that according to the Washington Post caused a gasp in the hotel conference room where undecided voters in North Carolina were watching the debate. Still, this seems to be a rationale the Trump campaign is suggesting voters can get behind. Here`s a Trump senior economic advisor saying as much yesterday.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CURTIS ELLIS, SENIOR ECONOMIC ADVISOR, TRUMP CAMPAIGN: If Mr. Trump did not pay any taxes one year, as Hillary Clinton -- she more than insinuated, I mean, she really basically, you know, tried to plant that as a fact when it was speculation. He was right. If he didn`t, most people think he`s a smart guy, he knows how to get around the system. Because the government`s only going to waste his tax dollars anyway, so I`d rather he spend that money making the casino nicer than giving it to these jerks.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: All right. Speaking today at a rally in Des Moines, Iowa, Hillary Clinton seemed to be trying out a question for her next debate against Trump.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CLINTON: He actually is proud of the fact that he lets everybody else pay taxes. He says that makes him smart. Well, I`ll tell you what, if not paying taxes makes him smart, what does that make the rest of us?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Joining me now, Rick Wilson, senior advisor to Evan McMullin, conservative third-party candidate for president. And, Rick, I mean, we should be clear here about what the sort of facts in evidence are, right? There`s two years in 1978 and 1979 --

RICK WILSON, SENIOR ADVISOR, MCMULLIN CAMPAIGN: Right.

HAYES: -- gambling regulators required him to release his taxes. We know he paid nothing those years. The suspicion is that there`s a lot of other years he`s paid nothing in federal taxes. It does seem to me like he basically has tacitly endorsed that underlying premise?

WILSON: Well, it does sound that way, doesn`t it, Chris? And I think you`ve got a situation now where, you know, Hillary Clinton got under his skin the other night in this debate by starting off talking about his dad loaning him money. And he started to deny and prevaricate on this thing. And when he finally said, that makes me smart, you know, I could imagine the audible gasp in Brooklyn and in the Clinton spin room going, what, how, what? Because it was obvious he played a big tell there. And it`s also obvious that his passion for hiding his tax returns and for disguising where he borrows his money from, which we know from external sources is Russian oligarchs and other sort of questionable money, and what he`s hiding in terms of his actual net worth as opposed to what he always falls back to, this financial statement, you know, which is just wish casting, from what a lot of financial folks say. You know, this is a guy who`s not as rich as he says he is, and that`s the fundamental predicate of Donald Trump. His whole credibility is, oh, I built this fabulous business empire -- that no one else believes, by the way, except Trump fans -- and so now I`ll do the same thing for America. It`s just not there. And that`s why a lot of people really have doubts that he would ever release his taxes, even if you had a gun to the guy`s head.

HAYES: Right. That`s right. I mean, the fundamental hunch, right, is that the reason he won`t release his taxes isn`t because it shows he pays nothing in taxes. Who knows what he pays. But because it`ll show that his net worth is far, far, far, far --

WILSON: Sure.

HAYES: -- far lower than he has been boasting about.

WILSON: Correct. And, you know, he even admitted it when he filed the FDC disclosure where he said, oh, my net worth is in part what I feel my net worth is. I mean, god, don`t you wish you could, like, go out and apply for a mortgage or whatever and say --

HAYES: You`re telling me, yes.

WILSON: -- I believe I`m worth a billion dollars today.

HAYES: I`m having a good day today. Hey, since I have you here --

WILSON: Sure.

HAYES: -- you move in the world of professional Republican political operatives, I think it`s fair to say. And Jason Miller, who is a professional political operative, was on Chuck Todd`s show today. And they had an exchange about polling.

WILSON: Mm-hmm.

HAYES: And it sort of perfectly embodied the bizarre alternate reality gas lighting m.o. of the Trump campaign, and I wanted you to take a look.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JASON MILLER, SENIOR COMMUNICATIONS ADVISOR, TRUMP CAMPAIGN: The polls that happened that night, the night of the debate, the snap polls, the ones that happened online, those all showed Mr. Trump winning. And he`s --

CHUCK TODD, HOST, MEET THE PRESS: Wait, wait. What scientific poll had Donald Trump winning? Where is the evidence that people who are -- I mean --

MILLER: There was Time, there was Variety, there was --

TODD: No, those are all, like, robot polling. It`s not real polling.

MILLER: Those are real -- Chuck, we have the support of the people.

TODD: They`re not -- I mean --

MILLER: And again, I understand that Hillary has got support from the insiders and from the media. Mr. Trump`s got his support from (INAUDIBLE) and from the people.

TODD: Jason, you`ve been doing this a while. You know those are bogus. All you have to do is, like, empty your history and you get to vote again. They`re not real, Jason.

MILLER: Chuck, the energy and the enthusiasm in this race is all of Mr. Trump.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: I mean, again, this is one of these things where, like, I don`t care, I don`t care, I don`t care to litigate the difference. But, like, it doesn`t matter in any grand scheme. It only matters in that the world is the way the world is, and it has not become different, like, purely through the force of will of denial by a bunch of campaign flaks.

WILSON: Look, phrenology is more accurate than online polling. Dousing is more accurate that online polling. Animal sacrifice and reading their entrails in more accurate than online polling.

HAYES: But they know that!

WILSON: And Jason knows this. He knows this. Of course he does.

HAYES: Right.

WILSON: But to be in the Trump bubble requires that you have a separate universe you live in where you, A, always use the words Mr. Trump, and B, completely deny anything based in reality or fact. You know, when they say, Mr. Trump, you`re getting -- I mean, Evan McMullin, who I work with, he`s got 3 percent among African-Americans. Now, Trump has 1, OK. These are people who live in a fantasy bubble. But they will go out and say, we`re doing great with the blacks or the African-Americans or whatever phrase they would use in their klutzy way. This is a group of people who live in a fantasy bubble where Donald Trump does no wrong. You saw some of the reporting today on how he`s, you know, requiring his surrogates to go out and say that Donald Trump won this debate --

HAYES: Yes.

WILSON: -- it was a spectacular victory.

HAYES: Yes, and you can see it all --

WILSON: This is, like Stalin-esque.

HAYES: Yes, you can see it on air all day today. It`s deeply unnerving.

WILSON: Yes, ridiculous.

HAYES: Rick Wilson, thanks for joining us.

WILSON: Thanks, Chris.

HAYES: Still ahead, Gary Johnson`s latest lapse and why that may be one of the least worrisome things about his campaign, plus an in-depth look at the millennial vote, and why the Clinton campaign is working so hard to lock it down.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: We let Japan come in and dump everything right into our markets and -- it`s not free trade. They come over here, they sell their cars, their VCRs, they knock the hell out of our companies.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: You can negotiate fair trade agreements so that instead of billions and billions of dollars going out, you can reduce your taxes by having it come back in. The reason NAFTA looks OK now is because the economy is strong. But when the economy is not strong, which unfortunately will at some point happen, NAFTA`s going to look like a disaster.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: You look at some of these companies like China, Japan, India, they`re eating our lunch.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Donald Trump has been talking about trade for decades. There was one high point in Trump`s disastrous debate performance -- at least according to pundits and observers all the way from Hugh Hewitt on the right to Michael Moore on the left -- it was when Trump jousted with Hillary Clinton on trade.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: You go to New England, you go to Ohio, Pennsylvania, you go anywhere you want, Secretary Clinton, and you will see devastation where manufacture is down 30, 40, sometimes 50 percent. NAFTA is the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere, but certainly ever signed in this country. And now you want to approve Trans-Pacific Partnership. You called it the gold standard.

CLINTON: I wrote about -- well I hope --

TRUMP: You called it the gold standard of trade deals.

CLINTON: And you know what --

TRUMP: You said it`s the finest deal you`ve ever seen.

CLINTON: No.

TRUMP: And then you heard what I said about it, and all of a sudden you were against it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: According to debate dial meters in which viewers express exactly what they like and don`t like in real time, sort of, through a dial, the only area where Trump made gains was on having the right approach to trade agreements. Part of this has to do with the fact that Hillary Clinton has some credibility issues on trade herself, specifically her previous touting of the framework for TPP as secretary of state before changing her mind on it after the full agreement was finalized. And part of it is Trump`s comparative credibility on trade, a subject duly noted, he`s consistently complained about. But there`s one big thing missing from all of the analysis of Donald Trump`s performance on trade. Is his trade policy good? Does he know what he`s talking about? Does it make any sense? Those crucial questions are what we`ll be talking about after the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: Donald Trump talks a lot about trade. Vox`s Matt Iglesias took some time to actually look at his trade policy, concluding it was, quote, told nonsense, citing an economist who characterized it as a complete mess.

And that`s not the first time Trump`s trade policy has been met with a rebuke from people that look at his policies. When Trump gave his big trade speech in Pennsylvania in late June, he cited research from a think tank, the Economic Policy Institute, EPI.

The president of EPI made a point of publishing a corrective to Trump`s trade speech, "The Trump Trade Scam" by Lawrence Mishel.

And Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute joins me now.

All right, good to have you.

So, look, you guys have been fighting this battle on trade for years, 20, 30 years in which economic -- the economics profession had the consensus the deals were good, but weren`t doing the kind of concentrated harm you said they were. You`ve been on the right side of this in certain ways. History has moved in your direction.

Now here comes Donald Trump to champion the cause of busting up trade deals. What say you?

LAWRENCE MISHEL, PRESIDENT, ECONOMIC POLICY INSTITUTE: Well, first, thanks for that acknowledgment. And good to be with you, Chris. It`s also important to note that it`s not just Donald Trump, but it`s also Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, everybody is now agreeing that these trade deals do harm to the vast majority of America`s workers, OK? And everybody`s against the TPP deal that`s been brought forward.

So I feel like our position has been validated across the board.

Now, Trump citing our work many times makes us very uncomfortable because nobody wanted to be associated with a bigot, but he is running what I do call as a trade scam. Let me explain that.

First, he brings up trade but he ends up spending most of his time talking about cutting corporate taxes and cutting regulation, that is actually the old tried and failed GOP policies.

Now, if cutting taxes and cutting regulations were great for the economy, we`d all be moving to Kansas where they radically cut taxes.

HAYES: Right.

MISHEL: We would all remember George W. Bush as the prosperity president and the Bush boom which we don`t. OK.

So what does he say about trade? Well, the fact is that Donald Trump thinks that he`s a great negotiator and he`s going to do great trade deals, but no one has ever asked him and he has never specified what exactly...

HAYES: Yes.

MISHEL: ...what exactly do you want to change.

HAYES: This is the thing that drives me nuts. We go -- he says NAFTA was terrible, the TPP -- look, there are things in these deals, you have to point to the specifics.

The other thing is, and I`m curious what you think about this, look, there are ways, the sort of, you know, the kind of -- the predisposition of economists to say, look, free trade and exchange makes everyone better off, which was a kind of guiding bias that I think drove the kind of Washington consensus and support for these.

The opposite of that is also true, like if you put up an 80 percent tariff on everything, if you started passing laws that companies just could not leave legally, there would be economic damage from that. You as a trade deal skeptic would concede, correct?

MISHEL: Yes, but the fact is that it`s worse than that really, Chris, because when Donald Trump says Ford Motor Company won`t be able to move jobs when I`m president, he has no way to do that. He has not specified what is he -- he can`t pass a law that says Ford Motor Company can`t move jobs to Mexico.

And the fact is that he`s not really able to fix our problems through somehow better trade agreements. I`m with Larry Summers on something, if we want to have an international economic agenda, I go for a treaty, then we should be getting countries together to figure out how do we tax corporate incomes.

HAYES: Yep.

MISHEL: Because there`s a trillion dollars a year shifted from workers to companies every year. Let`s work on that

HAYES: Yeah, that`s a good -- that would be a good thing to pursue. A quote, good deal on, right. I mean, if the idea is that you can negotiate good deals, you can get better binding good deals, there`s a lot of income that`s sloshing around and essentially being hid, and if you want to bring the world together and negotiate a good deal, that would be a good thing to pursue.

MISHEL: Let`s end the tax havens, you know. Let`s all stop, you know, where companies are going to go to different countries to get the lowest corporate tax rate. They can all stop that if they want.

So the other thing is, we need to look at what Donald omits. He would make it seem as if workers are suffering wage stagnation solely because of trade. Globalization is part of it and as you know, I`ve studied this for decades. But he omits many other things, and he`s against things like raising the minimum wage.

HAYES: Right.

MISHEL: He doesn`t want to strengthen unions. He wants a national right to work law. He now wants to raise interest rates, which will slow economic growth.

HAYES: Right.

MISHEL: And raise unemployment.

HAYES: Not no mention the majority of workers in America are in nontradeable sectors, right. So the majority of workers are not working in sectors where their jobs are being shipped. There`s a huge economic problem that lies outside of, say, manufacturing jobs going overseas. And I think Donald Trump has successfully used that has a sort of totem to invoke for all of the economy`s problems somewhat effectively, but if you go read what EPI is up to, you`ll see that`s not the whole story.

Lawrence Mishel, thank for your time. Appreciate it.

MISHEL: Thank you.

HAYES: Still to come the enthusiasm level among key voting demographic is in the tank. How can that affect Hillary Clinton ahead.

But first, tonight`s Thing One and Thing Two after this break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CLINTON: Donald thinks that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. I think it`s real.

TRUMP: I did not.

CLINTON: Science is real.

TRUMP: I do not say that.

CLINTON: And I think it`s important that we grip this and deal with it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Thing one tonight, he did say that. As we`ve shown many times, Donald Trump`s tweet is still up where he proclaims the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing noncompetive.

In fact, he called global warming a hoax on numerous occasions, documented.

Now, Donald Trump isn`t the only one buying into this particular conspiracy theory, a very high-stakes one I would add. It`s taken hold in the Republican Party as a whole. And we`ve seen creeping conspiracism on all sorts of issues from the most important down to the most picayune.

So, it wasn`t that surprising that after Monday`s presidential debate the conspiracy theories started rolling in.

Right after the debate, Trump speculated his microphone was defective, and wondered if it could have been tampered with on purpose. Yesterday, Newt Gingrich claimed he heard rumors that Hillary Clinton received the questions ahead of time.

Alex Jones, Info Wars consulted a poker champion to suggest Clinton was using hand signals to communicate with moderator Lester Holt.

Today on the trail, Trump came right out and said the debate was just overall a rigged deal.

There`s one new conspiracy theory that may top them all, just rolled out by the candidate. And the source, alone, sounds, itself, like a conspiracy theory. And that`s thing two in just 60 seconds.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: After Donald Trump`s disastrous debate performance, the conspiracy theories started creeping in and then came this at Trump`s rally last night.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: The new post-debate poll that just came out, the Google poll, has us leading Hillary Clinton by two points nationwide. And that`s despite the fact that Google`s search engine was suppressing the bad news about Hillary Clinton. How about that? How about that?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Well, that would be something. Google suppressing bad news about one of the candidates? Conspiracy theory that first started back in June when this video went viral accusing Google of suppressing negative searches about Clinton.

It was quickly debunked as utter nonsense. Google even posted a full explanation of their search algorithm. It seemed to put the story to rest.

Until this month when a website highlighted the original video along with a new study claiming to have found the same results. That website is called Sputnik News, that`s right, Sputnik News, part of the Russian government controlled news agency.

So, last night Trump was peddling a debunked conspiracy theory being pushed by a Russian website. Before you think this was some ad lib, or off-hand comment by the candidate, take a look again. That line was part of Donald Trump`s prepared remarks. A debunked, but scripted conspiracy theory.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: So, Libertarian Gary Johnson doing pretty well for a third-party candidate in a presidential election. Polls show Johnson with about 7 percent support nationally with much of it coming from young voters. A recent Quinnipiac University poll, 29 percent of voters under 35 said they were backing Johnson, just 2 percent less than supported Hillary Clinton.

And last night on MSNBC Johnson committed his second high-profile gaffe this month. The first was when he was asked about what he would do with a crisis in the besieged city of Aleppo in Syria and replied, quote, "what is Aleppo?"

Last night Chris Matthews asked Johnson who was participating in a town hall with his running mate Bill Weld to name his favorite foreign leader.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MATTHEWS: You got to do this. Anywhere. Any continent. Canada, Mexico, Europe over there, Asia, South America, Africa. Name a foreign leader that you respect.

GARY JOHNSON, LIBERTARIAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I guess I`m having an Aleppo moment in the former president of Mexico...

MATTHEWS: But I`m giving you the whole world.

JOHNSON: I know, I know, I know.

MATTHEWS: Anybody in the world you like. Anybody. Pick any leader.

JOHNSON: The former president of Mexico.

MATTHEWS: Which one?

JOHNSON: I`m having a brain...

MATTHEWS: Well, name anybody.

BILL WELD, VICE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Fox...

JOHNSON: Fox...

MATTHEWS: Who`s your favorite foreign leader, get him off the hook. Name a foreign leader.

JOHNSON: Fox. He was terrific.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Other than those gaffes, Johnson, the former Republican governor of New Mexico, is probably best known for his enthusiastic support of legalized marijuana. Johnson has openly discussed his penchant for pot though he says he no longer partakes.

Here he is in june.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: 29 years since you had a drink of alcohol.

JOHNSON: 29 years.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: How long since you used marijuana?

JOHNSON: It`s been about seven weeks now.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Seven weeks, that`s not that long.

JOHNSON: No, it`s not. But it`s something that I made a decision, and I`m not casting judgment on those that do.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Johnson`s stance aligns with young voters. More than two-thirds of whom support marijuana legalization, according to polling. But Johnson holds a whole host of positions that would have far more impact, one might imagine, for lives of a lot of millennial voters.

Johnson opposes Hillary Clinton`s push to make college free for most Americans, wants to repeal Obamacare, which among other things allows young people to stay on their parents` health insurance until age 26. He`s been a strong proponent of the private prison system, which is part of what incentivizes incarceration, supports the unfettered flow of money into politics like as Citizens United allowed, largely opposes regulations to combat climate change and wants to lower taxes on the rich while slashing federal spending by a gargantuan amount.

There`s a lot more where that came from. When we come back, we`re going to take an in-depth look at the millennial voters who could decide the election, just 47 percent of voters 18 to 34 say they will definitely vote this year, a far smaller percentage than other age groups.

The high stakes fight for millenials up next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: Clinton campaign deployed a pair of high profile surrogates yesterday. Who they hope will boost Hillary Clinton with young voters. Bernie Sanders, Michelle Obama both urged young voters not to cast what would almost certainly be a protest vote or just not vote at all.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MICHELLE OBAMA, FIRST LADY: Here`s the truth, either Hillary Clinton or her opponent will be elected president this year. And if you vote for someone other than Hillary or if you don`t vote at all, then you are helping to elect Hillary`s opponent. And the stakes are far too high to take that chance.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Exit polls showed President Obama won 67 percent of voters under 30 in 2008 and 60 percent in 2012. In a four-way poll this month, Hillary was winning just 48 percent of these voters.

Joining me now, Cornell Belcher, former pollster for the Democratic National Committee, and Jill Hanauer, president and CEO of the Progressive group Project New America, which has been working with Belcher to conduct polls and focus groups to better understand this cohort of voters.

Great to have you here.

I guess let`s start with this gap that`s opened up. So there`s two things happening, it seems to me.

One is you`re seeing polling showing they`re less inclined to definitely vote this year than they were in 2012, Millennials, there`s a bigger drop-off. And also there`s more diffusion going into this sort of third party candidates.

JILL HANAUER, PROJECT NEW AMERICA: That`s right.

But I would say two things. First of all, we`re seeing her catch up in a two-away race. And she`s getting close to President Obama`s 2012...

HAYES: That`s interesting.

So, when you force the choice to two-way, she`s getting there. But the problem is it won`t be first choice. I mean, those names are going to be on the ballot.

HANAUER: Well, and Jill Stein, a number of the states she won`t be, only will Gary Johnson. But at the end of the day, two things, a, you cannot capture millennials, black, brown, Asian, Pacific, white millennials methodologically the way we used to be able to catch voters and trends. We`ve got. And Cornell`s one of the kings of methodology that actually works with millennials.

But the other thing that`s really important is this enthusiasm gap isn`t because of Hillary Clinton, it`s because millennials want problems solved. It`s about solutions, stupid. The first Clinton ran on the economy, stupid. Now it`s solutions are going to fix things. How are you going to fix things when everybody, the elite is talking about a horse race, who won or lost the debate. That`s not what they want to hear.

HAYES: But Cornell, it seems to me that Hillary Clinton is very -- she`s got a pragmatic solutions-oriented pitch and that seems to be the one really persistent gap in the Democratic primary was that she got walloped by Bernie Sanders whose approach, I think it was fair to say, was more ideological.

CORNELL BELCHER, DEMOCRATIC POLLSTER: Well, let me go back to something the first lady was hitting on in talking about the third party candidates. When you get inside the data and you look and you talk about sort of the enthusiasm level. You know he was even further down on the likelihood to vote list, those millennials are are actually saying they are going to vote for a third party candidate. I mean, they`re six, seven points off.

And when you ask them, OK, who are your peers or are your friends likely to vote for? I mean, it even drops even further down below.

So, I think to a certain extent, you know, the Johnsons and the third party candidates, they are kind of straw men for protest votes.

Look, Johnson is not...

HAYES: I want to make sure I understand you, because that`s an interesting point. So, you`re saying from a methodological perspective that the poll that`s capturing a relatively large number of millennials saying they`re going to vote for Johnson is fictitious votes. There is a certain group, people who aren`t actually going to vote who are sort of invoking this as a kind of principled expression, but behaviorally we don`t think a lot of them are actually going to vote.

HANAUER: Or they`re going to come home.

BELCHER: I think that`s right.

When you get inside the data and you look at sort of how farther back they are on the likelihood to vote, and then you ask them, not yourself but your friends or your peers, which sort of takes some of the bias out of it, you know, it`s even further down.

So -- and again, they`re not that familiar with Johnson. I mean, Johnson is someone who is talking about opening up more coal plants, right? He`s not someone who is in line, necessarily with these millennial voters. I think to a certain extent, they are Hillary`s votes to get, and she desperately needs to bring them home.

And where this enthusiasm gap really hits home is in the battleground states. In Colorado, for example, 15 percent of the electorate in 2004 were under 30, 20 percent of that electorate was under 30 in 2012, 14 percent of it in 2014.

So he has a really -- so, she has a really harder road ahead of her if they in fact do sit home, which I think a lot of those third party candidate voters right now, they`re not turning out for Johnson.

HANAUER: So let me jump in about Colorado because I`m lucky that`s where I live and where my company is based even though we do research around the country. There`s a reason Colorado is still not really a battleground state, it`s because we`re happy in Colorado because it was the economy, stupid. And it was solution based. And it`s not just because people are high all the time.

And it`s because of that we are going to see Millennials...

HAYES: So, you`re confident that Hillary Clinton will win that state?

HANAUER: I am very comfortable that it`s hers to lose just like the senate race is already ours to win. And it`s because of what`s happening in realtime and politicians are going to where voters want them to be.

HAYES: Well, part of what -- that`s an interesting idea, too, because part of what the map has sort of laid out and Josh Barro has made this point, Cornell, a bunch of times about states that are that doing well -- Colorado, Virginia is doing relatively well, Texas actually is doing relatively well in the aggregate where you see very thin Trump margins where he`s underperforming. But actually this kind of -- states that are ascendent or feel like things are going pretty well are stronger for Hillary Clinton, overperforming for her.

BELCHER: Thank you, Barack Obama, right?

But back to this sort of point that we`re making overall is, look, Hillary Clinton is more in line with where these younger voters are. I mean, they do sort of pull back from labels. They do sort of pull back -- I`ve said it before. We got a lot of young voters who are Obama voters, they weren`t necessarily Democratic voters, but when you look at them on criminal justice issues, when you look at them on minimum wage, when you look at them on college affordability, she`s the candidate who has best case to make to them.

HAYES: Yeah, and we should also be clear, of course, that Millennials are not the ones that are supporting Donald Trump in terms of age cohorts. In fact, they reject him overwhelmingly.

Cornell Belcher, Jill Hanauer, thanks to you both. Appreciate it.

That is All In for this evening. The Rachel Maddow Show starts right now.

END

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