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All In With Chris Hayes, Transcript 10/25/2016

Guests: Steve Cortes, Tony Schwartz, Michelle Goldberg, Mitch Stewart, Nick Confessore, Christina Greer, Catherine Rampell

Show: ALL IN with CHRIS HAYES Date: October 25, 2016 Guest: Steve Cortes, Tony Schwartz, Michelle Goldberg, Mitch Stewart, Nick Confessore, Christina Greer, Catherine Rampell

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST: Tonight on "ALL IN" --

HILLARY CLINTON (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Nobody should want to wake up on November 9th and wonder whether there was more you could have done.

HAYES: Two weeks out, Hillary rallies and Trump keys off.

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: We`ve had tremendous success, the bookings are through the roof.

HAYES: Tonight, the Republican nominee kicks his self-promotion tour into high gear.

What we know about the 8 million votes already cast with Obama`s 2012 battleground director.

And Senator Elizabeth Warren, live in this hour. Plus ...

TRUMP: They`re bad and very evil people.

HAYES: The Trump war on the press continues. Tonight, the national cost of a conservative media bubble, now featuring alien conspiracy theories. And about those Obamacare headlines.

TRUMP: All of my employees are having a tremendous problem with Obamacare.

HAYES: Why Donald Trump repealed and replaced his own talking points.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Because of the law.

TRUMP: I don`t use much Obamacare, I must be honest with you.

HAYES: When ALL IN starts right now.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HAYES: Good evening from New York, I`m Chris Hayes. We are now exactly 14 days from Election Day, two weeks from this very moment polls will have just closed in states around the country, results will be coming in, and depending how close things are, we may already know who will be the next President of the United States, but a lot can happen in two weeks. And so, tonight, Senator Elizabeth Warren is holding a get out the vote rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, where early voting has already been under way since last Thursday. She`s due to speak any minute now. We`ll bring you that as it happens. According to a couple new polls out today, Hillary Clinton is currently leading Donald Trump by between one and seven points in North Carolina, a state Barack Obama won in 2008, but lost in 2012.

There`s also new polling out of Arizona, another early voting state where Trump is barely clinging to a one-point lead. Among respondents who said they had already taken advantage of early voting, about 4 in 10, Clinton is ahead by 10 points. We`ve got a bunch of new data today on early voting, and we`ll talk about it in just a bit. Arizona is one of a handful of reliably republican states, including Georgia, Texas and Utah where Donald Trump is already scrambling the electoral map this year. In Utah, where the states` Mormon GOP electorate is especially unfavorable to Trump. His lead is down to 5.5 points in the polling average, prompting the campaign to dispatch his running mate Mike Pence to Salt Lake City less than two weeks before an election to do damage control, he`ll be there tomorrow. Mitt Romney himself, a Mormon, of course, won Utah by almost 48 percent in 2012.

Given Trump`s polling deficit, his reluctance for ads until very recently in his near total lack of any ground game to speak off, it came as a surprise today that according to The Washington Post, Trump has stopped holding high-dollar fund-raising events, relying almost exclusively on online donations, which, of course, tend to be much smaller. And that`s after campaign financial reports show more money spent than raised in the month of September. Report adds to growing speculation that Donald Trump is not in some very deep psychological sense, actually running to be President of the United States, so much as he`s running to build up a fan base for Donald Trump. With the advent of Trump Tower Live, the campaign`s new nightly broadcast, streamed over Facebook, rumors are once again, swirling of a potential Trump media empire to be launched after the election.

In a radio interview today, Trump flatly denied those rumors, but just listen to the way he talks about his supporters.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Is this about you running for president, or is this about you setting up Trump TV and a media empire?

TRUMP: No, I have no interest in Trump TV. I hear it all over the place. You know, I have a tremendous fan base. I know we have a tremendous base, we have the most incredible people. But I just don`t have any interest in that. I have one interest, and that`s on November 8th. And frankly, right now, some people are voting right now.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: A tremendous fan base. Today, New York Times published extensive audio recordings from interviews Trump gave his biographer, Michael D`Antonio in 2014. One of the most revealing clips, he describes how he uses the media for free self-promotion, especially for his businesses.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: When Barbara Walters called two years ago, she said, "Donald, I want to put you on as one of the top 10 most fascinating people." I could say no. And then, I could advertise a project that I`m doing, like doral or something. And spend half a million dollars on it or a million dollars, or I can do the show and spend nothing, and be on for a lot longer."

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: On the very day those tapes went public, that`s exactly where Trump was, Doral. His resort and golf club outside Miami. The event was ostensibly a campaign photo op with a group of employees, many of whom are Hispanic and support the republican nominee. For the most part, it sounded something like this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: It`s 800 acres in the middle of Miami. If you look at the ballroom, that was brand-new ballroom that didn`t exist. And it`s, you know, one of the great places on earth. We had a construction crew here of 1,600 people. We rebuilt the whole place in about 14 months. We did it under budget, although I did increase the scope of the work, because we decided to use the finest marbles.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: We should note that while Trump was hanging out at his golf course with the finest marbles, Hillary Clinton was also in Florida today, holding an event at Broward College on the second day of early voting in the state literally across the street from an early voting site, according to POLITICO`s Jennifer Epstein. This morning, Trump also took the opportunity to promote a big can`t miss campaign event taking place tomorrow in a crucial part of the country.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: I`m going -- tomorrow, we`re going to be opening up the old post office where we spent over $200 million, and built the most magnificent hotel, I think, anywhere in the country on Pennsylvania Avenue right between the White House and congress.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Trump campaign surrogate Steve Cortes joins me now. Steve, under what possible logic could it be a good idea less than two weeks in the election to go to your hotel opening in the not particularly contested District of Columbia?

STEVE CORTES, TRUMP CAMPAIGN SURROGATE: Chris, did you hear him say how great the marble is?

HAYES: Yes.

CORTES: Isn`t that a good a (INAUDIBLE)

HAYES: Yes, and I`m sure there`s wonderful things on the menu and finery in the details of The Washington Post -- the Washington Hotel.

CORTES: Right.

HAYES: But it just seems to feed into the narrative for people that think this guy is basically in it for himself.

CORTES: Sure. Of course, I`m kidding. Let me be serious here. And first of all, if anyone were to -- were to imagine -- let`s just presuppose that he`s truly into this for building Trump TV or future business ventures, this would be the most fanciful and wasteful expenditure he could ever possibly conjure. He has spent $100 million of his own money. Clearly, this is not a business investment. This is a dream for a better America, but to get to your specific question, why does he -- why is he going there? You know why he`s going there, I believe, is because he wants to show Americans once again that he has spent his lifetime building magnificent structures and employing people. The Clintons have spent their lifetime building IOUs and employing defense lawyers. And there`s a clear contrast there, and he`s going to show that to the American people.

HAYES: So, here`s my -- here`s what I think is interesting, right? So, the idea is, it`s either he`s doing this for all the right reasons, he wants to be president because if this were a business proposition, it`s a poor business proposition. But you`re excluding the third alternative, which is that it is a business proposition, it is a poor business proposition and he`s handling it terribly because he`s incompetent at doing the one thing he says he`s good at.

CORTES: Well, fine.

HAYES: That`s also a possibility.

CORTES: That is a possibly. I think he`s far too smart for that, and at 70 years of old, as a billionaire mogul, I don`t think that is obvious (INAUDIBLE)

(CROSSTALK)

HAYES: Billionaire? We`ll have to see the tax returns before I give him a break.

CORTES: That`s not on his agenda right now. Look, listen, I don`t think anyone can doubt this. Even if you have the most nefarious and malicious view of Donald Trump, you can`t doubt, I don`t think that he has poured his body and soul into this campaign. This is a man who keeps up.

HAYES: Well, but that`s -- everybody does that, who runs for president does that.

CORTES: No, no, no.

HAYES: That`s not some special thing about that.

CORTES: It is incredibly special. If you were to compare his schedule, for instance, to Hillary Clinton`s, you would see a frenetic campaigner on one side, a man who could be my father and I could never keep up.

HAYES: On his private jet all the time, yeah.

CORTES: I could never keep up his schedule versus Hillary Clinton who campaigns every few days and spends more of her time --

HAYES: She does not campaign every few days. But do you -- but do you see, realize this is like one of Trump`s sons said this is a huge step down for him to run for president. Like he`s not doing it -- let`s just be clear. Donald Trump isn`t doing anyone any favors by running to be the most powerful person on the planet, right?

CORTES: Well, listen, I disagree by saying a step down, of course. The presidency is never a step down.

(CROSSTALK)

HAYES: Good, I`m glad we agree on that.

CORTES: I think he misspoke there, Chris. Having said that, you know, I truly believe this, I do, OK? And I came to the Trump train, by the way, late. OK? I`m a convert to the Trump train, so don`t think I`ve, you know, been drinking Trump Kool-Aids since the very beginning, but I have become a true believer, and I really believe this. This man, do you think that at this stage of his life, of his fortune, of his career, that he needs any of this? You know, no, he doesn`t. He is doing this because he sees that our country is gravely ill. We are economically and national security sick --

HAYES: I understand -- I understand that that`s the theory of the case for Trump supporters and it`s what Donald Trump says, and it`s possible that that is actually the case. The other theory of the case -- and it`s not just one that people opposed to him politically believe, but also people who share the Republican Party`s beliefs or conservative, but don`t like Donald Trump, is that he`s fundamentally a narcissist who has become addicted to the attention, is sort of compulsively driven by attention, and this has given him an outlet for that attention, and crucially doesn`t actually care about the party that he is nominally representing in two weeks.

CORTES: All right. No, listen, and that`s an important point. And Chris, to your point, and I will concede this to you, there are some people whom I respect who hold those views. I would argue, though -- I would counter that by saying that generally, they are part of a Washington establishment that exists for its own self-aggrandizement. And that we are --

HAYES: And so, yes, I get that. I get that.

CORTES: -- a movement of the outsiders and the establishment can`t stand what we represent. And by the way, I`m glad they can`t because we`re not coming there tinker around the edges.

HAYES: I will respectfully -- I would respectfully say and I get that argument. There`s some truth to that. You`re talking about this sort of wired part of the conservative establishment. But the random Mormon voters in Utah that wanted nothing to do with the guy are now part of the establishment have come to the similar conclusions. Steve Cortes, thank you very much, appreciate it.

CORTES: Thank you, Chris.

HAYES: Joining me now, Michelle Goldberg, a columnist for Slate, and Tony Schwartz, Donald Trump`s ghostwriter, credited co-author on "The Art of the Deal" which congratulations, the campaign just bought a bunch of copies of that book. So, that`s money in your pocket.

TONY SCHWARTZ, DONALD TRUMP`S GHOSTWRITER: Well, no, it isn`t. I`ve given away so far $85,000.

HAYES: Oh, is that true?

SCHWARTZ: $85,000 in royalties so far this year, and I will continue to give it away to anti-immigrant -- to pro-immigration causes.

HAYES: So, in terms of that -- I mean, one of the -- I`m trying to make sense of he`s going to this hotel. He`s at Doral today. We`ve got the tape saying, you know, he`s going to his hotel tomorrow. There is a sense in which, like, it could be the case that the incentives of running for president and the incentives of getting maximum attention for yourself, sometimes align, and at a certain point, they stop aligning, and you just keep going with the incentives for maximum attention for yourself.

SCHWARTZ: I mean, that`s the only incentive he has. So, what you said, poor Steve Cortes. I mean, what a horrible, horrible job to have to defend this man. And you could see how impossible it is at this point. If that`s --

HAYES: Yeah. Although, let me just note on Steve`s behalf, and Steve believes in what he`s saying, and I don`t -- I don`t doubt for a moment that all the people that you see on television defending Donald Trump have not been drafted into it. So, everyone has entered it out of their own --

SCHWARTZ: Oh, I don`t mean -- I don`t mean he`s doing it against his will. I mean, it`s a -- it`s a crappy job. No, so I think this -- the point you were making about his need for attention. Listen, he has kept upping the ante in terms of getting attention. The New York Times piece about Michael D`Antonio`s interviews really brought that up again, this desperate feeling that if I`m not getting attention, that I barely exist. He`s like a -- he`s like -- it`s like as if he`s rowing a boat across a river and his -- the Promised Land is on the other side, but there`s a hole in the boat, and he`s bailing, bailing, bailing, and he`s bailing so much that he can`t actually row the boat. So the Promised Land is never going to be reached.

HAYES: And the way that -- it`s funny you said that, because the way that this gets understood in the campaign context when you look at, like, "Oh, he`s -- they`re not doing the blocking and tackling, they`re not doing the organizational operational things they needed to do in this election, why is he going to his hotel?" that that`s, like, called lack of discipline, but it`s obviously something even deeper than that.

MICHELLE GOLDBERG, COLUMNIST FOR SLATE: Right. I mean, lack of discipline, if you were just lazy, you would offload that to someone else, and let someone else do that work for you. I mean, it`s more of that. I think what you said his incentives are not aligned with the Republican Party. I mean, they are part of the time, but they`re not all of the time. I also wonder if at this point, I mean, given his noted inability to deal with shame, humiliation and loss, and what seem like epically deep psychic wounds that he carries around, that he just wants to go and be in a place that he feels like he created, and, you know, like --

HAYES: Right. Just go back to home.

GOLDBERG: Right. Go back to, you know -- go back to somewhere or something that he maybe can feel good about, because --

HAYES: Yeah, he did end today`s Doral event by just muttering rosebud over and over and over and over again.

SCHWARTZ: Yeah. No, I think the fascinating -- several different pieces of the Trump psyche revealed by what happened today and one of them is this decision not to hold more fundraisers. So, what`s that about? You know, more big finance fundraisers. That`s very simple. He is already in revenge mode. And he wants to get --

HAYES: Oh, exactly right.

SCHWARTZ: He wants to get the Republican Party, and if it means blowing up the Republican Party, the democracy, whatever it takes, Donald Trump is going to try to get back some semblance of self-worth.

HAYES: And to me, the biggest lesson I`ve learned up till now with two weeks to go before the election, and the thing I have to keep, sort of, taking myself back to kind of parse, is just how powerful a personality can be when it is as not worried about norms or shame as a normal person. Like that`s been the big lesson. Like, wow, you can really go pretty far and you can get away with a lot.

(CROSSTALK)

GOLDBERG: I mean, you know, when like -- at the risk of violating Goodwin`s law, right, this is the big lie, and that`s why it`s so powerful. That most people will not accept the fact that you are -- and who was it that said that eventually Donald Trump is going to go on television and insists he never ran for president?

SCHWARTZ: Yeah. Right, right.

GOLDBERG: Right. I mean his ability to be so shameless, I think that it`s impossible for most people to parse. They assume that there must be something to his grandiose self-presentation, because who could be a con man on that big of a scale?

SCHWARTZ: Well -- yeah, go ahead.

HAYES: Well -- and also, I mean -- I guess, my question to you is one of the -- the other thing you always have to remember about this guy, right, that is he`s not been a politician, right? Politics, running for electoral office is deeply humbling, and not in the fake, like, "I`m deeply humbled to be there." (INAUDIBLE) the people say when they`re actually not humble, it`s like actually humbling like you go and shake hands and beg people for their vote and things like that, and you lose races. He`s not gone through that, right? So, how he reacts these last two weeks is a totally open question.

SCHWARTZ: Well, I think it`s pretty clear how he`ll react. He will keep doing those things that make him feel like it`s somebody else`s fault that this has happened, and he`ll keep doing those things that serve his self- interests. You know, the kind of clash of civilizations that really this represents us between self-interest and a greater interest. It`s between me and we. And thank God it looks like we is going to win, because if it doesn`t win, the planet isn`t going to survive, and if Trump -- I really believe that, you know, I believe that we`re at a -- we`re at a -- you know, at a turning point here.

HAYES: And there are concentric circles of we, right? So, there`s the we of the planet, there`s also a we of the GOP, there`s a we of a whole bunch of stuff, you know, the down ballot races, which is what a lot of other people on the -- on the republican side (INAUDIBLE) Michelle Goldberg, Tony Schwartz, thank you both.

GOLDBERG: Thank you.

SCHWARTZ: Thanks.

HAYES: Up next, the early returns from early voting, President Obama`s 2012 Battleground States director on what eight million early votes tell us about where this race stands two weeks out, and why the odds that democrats take back the senate are getting better after a quick two-minute break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: As Donald Trump`s fortunes continue to slide, he`s increasingly dragging the fortunes of senate republican`s weapon. The Cook Political Report now predicting senate democrats are poised to pick up five to seven seats, which would give them the majority. Pointing out the history shows that races in the Toss Up column never split down the middle, one party tends to win the lion`s share of them. With two weeks to Election Day, there`s not enough time for republicans to recover toss-up seats in states where Hillary Clinton is currently leading, considering this, early voting is under way, and Trump won`t be any help especially since his campaign doesn`t really have a ground game to speak of. As "The Hill" reports, between Clinton`s presidential campaign, the DNC, and state party operations, campaign finance reports show democrats employ 5,138 staffers across 15 battleground states.

Trump`s campaign, the Republican National Committee and state parties employ just 1,409 staffers in 16 states. So, nearly for the one, democratic advantage in human resources, the big question now is, how well does that turn out machinery work for democrats for Election Day? Early voting data, in at least one Battleground State offers some potential insight. According to "The Washington Post," at the end of Saturday, Democratic staffers celebrated news that just over 39,000 people had voted in Clark County, compared to just over 33,000 in 2012. Now, the bulk of Nevada`s democratic voters are concentrated there. No wonder, Katy Perry held a rally for Clinton in Clark County last Saturday, literally gave a ride to some of the attendees to early voting sides afterwards. In a one- two punch, President Obama was in the same county the next day, imploring people to vote early.

If there is a single person on earth who knows this data inside and out, it`s Mitch Stewart, Battleground States Director for the 2012 Obama for America campaign, currently a Partner at 270 Strategies. All right, Mitch, I want to start with this before we get into the early voting data. I think it`s important for folks to understand when you were sitting at your perch in 2012 in that campaign, and the folks were running the operation in Clinton`s campaign, you`re not looking at the RealClearPolitics average of 538, you got internal data. What is that internal data made of and what does it say, and what does that tell you that we on the outside don`t know?

MITCH STEWART, BATTLEGROUND STATES DIRECTOR FOR OBAMA FOR AMERICA AND PARTNER AT 270 STRATEGIES: So, you have a voter file that has all kinds of different data information on these specific individuals. Their vote history, their likely candidate preference, all kinds of different things that you can look at. And what you get then from the either the county auditor or from the secretary of state are individual level returns. So, you know exactly who voted early, and many times you know how they voted early, either in person or by mail. And then you can match that information back to your existing database or your voter file.

HAYES: Right.

STEWART: And so, you`re going to look at two things, Chris --

HAYES: And you know those people -- you know enough about those people you`ve sort of profiled them whether it`s through their age, their education level, their ethnicity, to be pretty confident who they`re actually voting for based on the models you have.

STEWART: Yeah. No, exactly right. In fact, you look at two separate data points. The first is what we call a preference candidate model. And so, every single voter in that state will have a score from 100-1. 100 being out of 100 Mitch Stewarts, Barack Obama would get 100 votes. So, if I have supports score of 10, out of 100 Mitch Stewarts, 10 people would vote for Barack Obama, 90 for Mitt Romney. So, you look at that and then you also then look at your turnout score. How likely are you to vote if somebody were not to remind you? And then again, you have a score from 100-1 on every single voter in that state. And so, what you ultimately want to try do with early vote, in most states, is that you want your supporters who have, what we call, a middling turnout score. So folks that you`re not super confident will actually vote on Election Day unless you remind them. You want those folks to vote early. If somebody has a really high turnout score, you can rest assured that they`ll vote on Election Day, you know, irrespective if you remind them or not.

HAYES: So, this is the fascinating thing that for folks to understand. So, you`ve got the two scores, how likely am I to support the candidate that Mitch Stewart working for, in this case Barack Obama or it would be Hillary Clinton (INAUDIBLE) now? And how likely it`ll turn out, and what your -- the sweet spot for early voters is you want people you`re sure are going to vote for your candidate, but are in the middle of the propensity to turn out, because you can work on them in this sort of sustained fashion for this period and make sure they get their sort of in their own time and choosing.

STEWART: Yeah, that`s exactly right. And so, not only do you measure your success from a field operation, but you also measure your opponent`s success. And who are they getting to turn out early? Are they getting out this, you know, Election Day voters and they`re just doing it early, or are they also reaching into sort of this electorate people who would be less likely to participate, so are they growing their pie?

HAYES: So --

STEWART: And so you look at both. You look at both.

HAYES: So you`re -- yeah, so you`re -- you can do something like in 2012, I mean, you could have -- you could -- say in a state like Nevada, right? I mean, my understanding is your campaign basically knew who won Nevada before Election Day because --

STEWART: Well -- so, you`re going to have -- you`re going to have 80 percent of Nevadans vote early, and we had about, if you look at the models support scores, we had about a 12-point lead with 80 percent of the electorate in. So you have 20 percent in the electorate left to vote, meaning that`s the republicans would be like literally a 70-30 win on Election Day to make up for that early vote deficit. And Iowa is another example, just under 40 percent voted early and we had about a 10-point lead. And so, on Election Day, republicans had almost an insurmountable gap to fill. And so, you felt very, very comfortable with a couple of those states. Or another is just you just knew that Election Day, it`s going to be really, really close like Florida. And so, it does provide you some assurance of what`s going to happen on Election Day, but, Chris, frankly, more importantly from a campaign perspective, it allows you to allocate resources more efficiently. So, we stopped spending, you know, a ton of money in Nevada once we realized that 80 percent of the electorate voted. And so, we kind of wind down the budget there and focus on a state like Virginia, where about 90 percent of the state will vote on Election Day, because there`s very little early vote happening there. HAYES: Right. All right. Mitch Stewart, thank you so much. We`re going to check in as we noted on Elizabeth Warren who is speaking -- who`s speaking moments ago. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN (D), MASSACHUSETTS: And she gets up every day -- no, I hope you heard Donald Trump in the debate when he said that it was -- he was smart not to pay any taxes. That`s right. He is smart and all of you who pay taxes are dumb. Everyone who pays taxes, to keep our roads and bridges working, is dumb. Everyone who pays taxes to support our world class military is dumb. Everyone who pays taxes to support medical research and scientific research is dumb. Dumb, because Donald Trump doesn`t plan to pay. He just plans to use all those things you paid for. What kind of man does that? A selfish little sleaze ball, a man who will never be President of the United States, you bet. You bet.

Now, Donald Trump`s been out there, he hasn`t been hiding who he is. He`s been out there from the very beginning. He`s been out there from the very beginning. He`s been out there, and where has your senator, Richard Burr, been all this time? You know, I wanted to look this up, make sure I got this right before I came here. Richard Burr said, "Make no mistake, I am fully supportive of Donald Trump." No dancing around that one. So, Donald Trump called Latinos rapists and murderers, and Burr fully supports Trump. Trump called African-Americans thugs and Donald Trump -- and Burr, fully supports Donald Trump. Trump attacked a Gold Star family and Burr fully supports Donald Trump. Trump praised Vladimir Putin and compared himself to dictators, and Burr fully supports Donald Trump. Trump calls women fat pigs and bimbos and brags about sexually assaulting women, and Richard Burr is like a puppy on a leash sticking right there with Donald Trump. You know, if Richard Burr is just going to be Donald Trump`s lapdog, then let him go off and do that, but the people of North Carolina need a strong, independent voice to fight for the families of North Carolina, and that is Deborah Ross, you bet.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: All right. That was Elizabeth Warren speaking in North Carolina just a few moments ago in support of Deborah Ross, who`s the democratic senate candidate challenging the incumbent Richard Burr in a tightly contested race, yoking Richard Burr to Donald Trump that you saw. We`ll be right back with more, just after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: Donald Trump has spent his entire presidential campaign both obsessed with media coverage and harshly critical of the press. His rhetoric has grown ever harsher in recent weeks as his poll numbers have collapsed.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: These people are among the most dishonest people in the world, the media. They are the worst. They`re trying to fix the election for crooked Hillary. The media is entitled, condescending and even contemptuous of people who don`t share certain elitist views.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Reporters are ritualistically booed when they`re escorted into the Trump rallies where they stand in pens and then heckled while they cover them. This video from NBC`s Ali Vitali shows the view from the press area yesterday as Trump claimed the media are trying to rig the election for Hillary Clinton. Reporters describe the vitriol they face at Trump rallies as increasingly menacing and hostile. With Trump`s supporters flipping middle fingers and lashing out in tirades often laced with profanity. A Trump rally in Cleveland over the weekend, BuzzFeed reporter Rosie Gray recorded two men outside the press pen were recording picking up right after one of the men said the word lugenpresse.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That`s what you are, lugenpresse. Lugenpresse. You said it right. That`s right.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: The word that man there was so excited to learn, lugenpresse means lying press in German. And it`s the term the Nazis used to demonize and discredit the media and stir anti-Jew hatred. While Trump has traveled further into the fact-free fever swamp than previous GOP candidates, a cocoon in which any information he doesn`t like is false and any outcome that doesn`t go his way is rigged, his rhetoric is not new.

According to our next guest, it reflects a sickness that has taken over the Republican base and must be cured if the party is to be saved.

We`ll break down her diagnosis next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEAN HANNITY, FOX NEWS: They also claim that, in fact, Hillary did in fact have a romantic relationship with Vince Foster.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That, you know, that was pretty much of an open secret in our circles.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Lead story on Hannity on Fox News in primetime last night beamed out to million of viewers, an interview with a sci-fi writer and self-identified former fixer for Bill and Hillary Clinton named Jeff Rovin, who was recently featured as Hillary`s hit man in a National Enquirer cover story claiming, among other things, that Clinton is a, quote -- and I`m quoting here --a secret sex freak who paid fixers to set up elicit romps with both men and women.

Rovin is a former editor of the now defunct Weekly World News, which brought us both the story of Hillary Clinton`s alien baby adoption, and her steamy nights with another alien in the UFO love next, complete with photographic evidence.

Hannity gave Rovin a primetime platform on Fox News, despite admitting the network could not verify his claims, which had previously been amplified on the widely read conservative news aggregator The Drudge Report, and pushed by another central player in the right-wing echo chamber Rush Limbaugh who complained the mainstream media would not ignore this story if it was about Trump.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RUSH LIMBAUGH, CONSERVATIVE RADIO SHOW HOST: Would you think that The National Enquirer allegation of a guy saying that he`s procured women for Hillary would even make its way -- well, of course not, but if the story was about Trump, it would.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: This is how a pretty ridiculous story about Hillary Clinton from a, how to put this politely, less than impeccable source, makes the rounds of the right -- Limbaugh, Drudge, Hannity. This is the echo chamber championed by Drudge and who today called into the Limbaugh`s show to complain of what of all things, the mainstream media.

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TRUMP: These are vicious people. These are lying people. They`re evil people, the press, the media. They`re bad people. And nobody, nobody lies like they do.

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HAYES: Joining me now, Washington Post opinion columnist Catherine Rampell, whose latest column argues the only way to save the Republican Party is to, quote, drain the right-wing media swamp.

Give me the argument of your column.

CATHERINE RAMPELL, WASHINGTON POST: My theory is that after this election i over and Trump gets the trouncing that everybody seems to expect that he will get, the Republican Party will regroup and say, what did we do wrong? What`s our autopsy this time around? They`re going to lay it at the feet of Donald Trump and say, you know, if we`d only had a candidate with maybe the same package of policies, but like a little more empathic gloss, a little less boorish, a little less bigoted, hadn`t been caught on tape saying he was going to grope women, et cetera, we would be OK. And I think this is wrong.

The problem with the party right now is not Donald Trump, or at least not only Donald Trup, the problem is that a large share of their base believes completely bonkers bigoted things. And they have been fed this again and again over years by the right-wing media.

HAYES; What do you mean by bonkers bigoted things.

RAMPELL: Birtherism, data trutherism, widespread voter fraud...

HAYES: Explain those -- data trutherism is that like large significant parts of Fox viewers and conservatives and Republicans who think that like all the economic data is being essentially juiced and made up by the federal government.

RAMPELL: Yes, the polls are skewed. Even the Fox News polls are skewed these days according to the Republican base.

Beyond that, you know, that the weather numbers that we get are wrong. You know, that Matt Drudge had recently said that nobody should evacuate their homes when a hurricane was coming.

HAYES: Right, it was a liberal media conspiracy.

RAMPELL: Right, it was a conspiracy. The numbers were made up, the projections were made up specifically to gin up fear about global warming.

HAYES: And so the idea here -- I mean, I think, the idea is that there`s a sort of contextual environment in which Trump has flourished and the environment is the more important than Trump in some ways, because the environment is the environment that is so self- contained and untethered from connections to external reality that you can have a candidate like this flourish.

RAMPELL: Yes, basically the alt-right for years has created an alternate reality that has inevitably led to Trump.

HAYES: You mean the right.

RAMPELL: The alt-right.

HAYES: Explicitly the alt-right.

RAMPELL: The alt-right and the right.

HAYES: It`s bigger than what the -- I guess I would say that the sort of self-identified white nationalists of the alt-right, it`s larger than that.

RAMPELL: But I don`t mean to paint all conservative leaning journalists with the same brush, what I mean is those who are pedaling crazy conspiracy theories saying that Obama was not born in the United States, that sort of thing.

HAYES: I mean, that`s part of the issue, right, because there are tons of conservative journalists and writers and folks at Fox and other places. There are places that people that have integrity. That they`re opinionated with an ideological ax to grind but who doesn`t have one.

RAMPELL: The National Review...

HAYES: Right. And you can -- you know, Phil Klein, who I always talk about it a great -- he has been reporting on Obamacare, conservative, doesn`t slike Obamacare, is embedded in the facts of what Obamacare is. There`s knowledge. There`s subject matter knowledge, there`s expertise, there all these things.

That`s a very small group of these folks with a very small...

RAMPELL: And my concern is that Republican leadership has been playing along for years with these conspiracy theorizers.

HAYES: They`re controlled by them. It`s not even played along, they`re terrified of them. I mean, look what happened to Eric Cantor in his primary race with David Bratt when basically right wing radio decided to take him on.

RAMPELL: I think that`s -- so I think there are two issues going on here, why they haven`t been willing to take on the crazies essentially. One is that they desperately need the imprimatur of these places because they`re influential -- Hannity is influential, Rush Limbaugh is influential, Drudge is influential, whoever else, if they tick them off, they will potentially lose those voters.

The second is to some extent these conspiracy theories have served their interests in the short term. In the short term. So, you know, birtherism, to take one example, delegitimizing a popular mandate of the president, who happens to be the first black president, maybe that was useful to their cause in the near term. But of course in the long run it stoked a lot of racial resentment. The same kind of thing with claims of voter fraud in the near term...

HAYES: It has been extremely useful.

RAMPELL: Well, until a bunch of courts...

HAYES: Right, but as in the pretext by which they passed actual pieces of legislation that have actually made it harder for actual populations that actually vote for Democrats in large numbers to vote.

RAMPELL: Yes. And in the long run it set the stage for a presidential candidate to claim to his many voters that the election will be stolen from him.

And today, you know, a large share of Americans -- of Republicans in particular believe that that election will be stolen from them.

HAYES: I think that it`s absolutely the case and you`re seeing it in sort in its sort of death throes now as it was famously Karl Rove on election night in 2012 saying it`s not over. It`s not over.

But then they all just went back to the script. And the big question for the right I think after this about particularly conservative media is do they go back to the script or is there some sort of reckoning. Catherine Rampell, thanks for being with me. Appreciate it.

HAYES: Still ahead, the information vortex of Donald Trump`s campaign. The policy he doesn`t seem to know, but still promises to repeal and replace.

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

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HAYES: A bonus Thing One, Thing Two tonight without the commercial break in the middle: know your elected Republican and where he or she stands on their own nominee for president, because there are several distinct categories. For instance, there are those who have always backed Donald Trump like, for instance, Senator Jeff Sessions. There are a select few who have maintained never Trump like Senator Ben Sask, Governor Charlie Baker and a handful of congress members. There were those who decided this summer relatively early to oppose or unendorse Trump like Senators Mark Kirk, Lindsey Graham, and Susan Collins, next are those who stood with Trump until October, through all the offensive statements nasty statements, banning an entire religion, but finally threw in the towel after the infamous audio of Trump bragging about grabbing women by the genitals. That list of late Trump unendorsers includes Senators John McCain, Kelly Ayotte and Senate candidate Joe Heck of Nevada.

Which brings us to a really special category, the supporters who heard Trump on that bus bragging about sexual assault and defiantly proceeded to unendorse Trump, or call for him to step down only to then days or weeks later reverse their unendorsement and reendorse Trump. This crowd who supported and opposed in disgust before reendorsing him includes Senators John Thune, Deb Fischer and most recently Mike Crapo. So you have those categories.

But then there`s Republican Pennsylvania Pat Toomey. As millions of people decide who should hold the most powerful job who will be in charge of the nuclear codes. Pat Toomey has his own answer. And that`s Thing Two tonight.

See, for the entire general election, Senator Pat Toomey has simply refused to say whether or not he will support the GOP nominee. He won`t endorse nor will he rule out voting for Donald Trump. He won`t give a simple direct answer to the single most pressing question in all of politics, one that every single American has to answer for themselves all of which made for an interesting debate last night.

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UNIDENITIFIED MALE: I know you have been waiting for this debate, in fact, I know you`ve been waiting for this moment to say whether or not you will vote for the nominee of your party. So is it yea or nay?

SEN. PAT TOOMEY, (R) PENNSYLVANIA: So, Jim, unlike Katie McGinty, I a not a hyper partisan reflexive ideologue who thinks he has to give blind obedience to his party`s nominee.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So I guess that means you haven`t been waiting for this debate?

TOOMEY: I have refused to endorse Donald Trump. Katie McGinty says that`s supporting Donald Trump. That doesn`t make any sense.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Look, I`m not going to badger you to say something that you`re not going to say, but don`t you think your constituents, the people of Pennsylvania, deserve to know if you`re going to support the nominee of your party?

TOOMEY: I don`t think my constituents care that much how one person is going to vote. They`re going to make their own decision.

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UNIDENITIFIED MALE: Iraq`s elite counterterrorism troops trained by the U.S. are at the tip of the spear in the fight against ISIS. We join their commander, Major General Maan al-Saudi (ph), of a tour of their front line positions. The enemy has had two years to dig in for this battle, but General Saudi (ph) has an advantage: American air power.

ISIS is losing ground, fast.

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HAYES: American troops are on the ground in Iraq right now coordinating air strikes and aiding Iraqi forces as they move to retake Iraq`s second largest city from ISIS fighters. The battle for Mosul has already claimed the life of one U.S. service member, 34-year-old Chief Petty Officer Jason Feinan (ph) was attached to a Navy SEAL team advising Iraqi counterterrorism troops. According to the U.S. commander in Iraq, he was in a vehicle and telling other members of his team he had spotted a roadside bomb when he was killed.

Chief Petty Officer Jason Feinen (ph) leaves behind a wife and a 7-year-old son.

The stakes of this battle with both American and Iraqi troops in harm`s way are clear and progress has been steady in first week of the operation. Iraq`s prime minister says the offensive isgoing faster than planned.

U.S. command says Iraqi forces are making solid progress, but according to the Republican presidential nominee, quote, the attack on Mosul is turning out to be a total disaster. We gave them months of notice. The U.S. is looking so dumb. Vote Trump and win again.

That tweet prompting this response from Secretary Clinton.

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CLINTON: I was so appalled when Donald Trump tweeted that the new effort under way to push the terrorists out of the key city of Mosul is already, and I quote him, a total disaster, and that our country is again a, quote, looking dumb. Really? He`s declaring defeat before the battle has even started? He`s proving once again he is unqualified to be commander-in-chief of our military.

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HAYES: We are right now as a nation in the midst of choosing someone to command the most powerful, most deadly military on Earth. And it is not just Mosul or the fight against ISIS that will be in the new president`s portfolio. Right now the U.S. is, get this, conducting air strikes or missile strikes with special ops, troops the on the ground in at least six different countries. Right now Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. That is what the next president will inherit in our era of constant war. That`s what`s front of mind for military members and their families and it should be front of mind for every voter.

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HAYES: There`s one thing that Trumpers and never-Trumpers have in common is their opposition to Obamacare, a shared interest even Senate Republicans can get behind. Back in May, according to The Hill The Trump and a group of GOP senators met and agreed that Obamacare will re-emerge as an explosive political issue before the November elections. And that could be a millstone around Hillary Clinton`s neck.

So with the recent news that Obamacare premiums in the exchanges, in the individual plans, are going up by more than 20 percent on average next year Trump stood before his Doral golf course in Miami this morning flanked by about 200 of his employees and tried to make the point that Obamacare is a disaster for them.

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TRUMP: I can say all of my employees are having a tremendous problem with Obamacare. You folks, this is another group, is that a correct statement? I mean, you look at what they`re going through, what they`re going through with their health care is horrible because of Obamacare.

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HAYES: Except the vast majority of those employees are not on Obamacare because their health care is provided by their employer Donald Trumps resort.

And when the resorts general manager said as much, it seemed to catch a local camera operator by surprise.

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DAVID FEDER, GENERAL MANAGER: I`d say 99 percent of our employees are insured through the hotel, through our insurance and maybe there`s a few that are insured through Obamacare. But very, very few.

I would say -- and I haven`t gone through the records, but over 95 percent, without a doubt.

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HAYES: A short time later on Fox News, Trump was asked how his employees are hurt by ObamaCare.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A moment ago at your event in Florida we were watching it live here in New York, you said that it`s costing jobs within your business itself. Specifically how?

TRUMP: Well, I don`t use much Obamacare, I must be honest with you, because it`s so bad for the people and they can`t afford it. And like, for instance, I`m at Trump National Doral in Miami and we don`t even use Obamacare. We don`t want it.

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HAYES: Joining me now, Christina Greer, associate professor of political reporter at Fordham University and Nick Confessore, political reporter for The New York Times and MSNBC contributor. The perfect moment to me for two reasons. One, it displays Donald Trump`s general level of sort of policy expertise. And number two, most Americans still now in 2016 don`t know what Obamacare is, couldn`t tell you what it is, or who it affects. It`s become this kind of culture war issue, or like symbolic thing, like can you put a creche in the public square.

JOHN CONFESSORE, NEW YORK TIMES: You know, and if you called it Trumpcare, it would probably poll better or call it like Powellcare, and it would probably poll at 60 percent, right. It`s the association with President Obama that drove down a lot of the approvals. Obviously, for some people the premiums are going up, it is going to be a hardship, but it`s much more than the exchanges, right. It`s the guarantees on coverage and parent`s plans.

HAYES: You`re saying the bill itself, the law itself. So, the law does a ton of things. You can stay on until you`re 26. There`s a whole bunch of -- half the laws about sort of getting -- pushing the cost down and innovation in Medicare and Medicaid delivery and health systems and integrated care and there`s no lifetime maximums, yadda, yadda, yadda. But then there are the exchanges, which are somehow the focus of it, but a tiny percentage of voters are in them.

CHRISTINA GREER, FORDHAM UNIVRESITY: But if we`re dealing with a candidate who had any grasp of public policy or the idea of how to talk to voters 13 days before an election, we might see someone who could frame...

HAYES: Could make that argument.

GREER: Very clearly.

This is a horrible day for sort of Obamacare and ergo Hillary Clinton. So, Trump can`t help but make everything either, a, about himself, or he doesn`t much knew, know Obamacare. Again, the assault on the English language with this man is deplorable. However, he didn`t seize the opportunity to break it down to the public. Everyone is there asking him questions about it. He could have walked them through it very briefly.

HAYES: But the point here to me is just that it remains -- like, so we were talking about there`s 3 percent of the roughly of the insured get their insurance through the exchanges, right, 80 percent of them are subsidized, more or less, right. So, we`re talking about like less than 1 percent of people that are going to get the full hit of this subsidy increase.

Now, there`s another 7 million people who are not on the exchanges but are buying plans, right, individual plans or small plans, so they`re also going to see those premium hikes.

But the point is that this is the a small percentage of voters. And it remains the case, Nick, that this law is as controversial as the day it passed despite the fact it`s actually a thing out there in the world which I have to say continues to astound me, because I don`t think that was the expectation.

CONFESSORE: You know, I think President Obama was not great about selling it in the early years, that was one problem. And they tried to rectify that. I do think that the reason the focus is on the exchanges is that the exchanges are the broken part. And the interests that want to kill Obamacare would not want to focus on the parts that are very, very popular, such as you can`t be denied coverage for a prior condition and if the conditions were such that you could focus on the popular parts, it would probably be a different conversation. But for some reason, it`s kind of weird that none of the Democrats or the GOP has managed to really steer that conversation in the presidential election.

HAYES: But here`s what I want to ask you as a political scientist, it`s like I sort of feel in the long run that the sort of lines of politics and policy should converge, right? So, if there`s something that there`s a lot of scare tactics about this thing and it`s going to destroy America and turn us into this socialist monster and the thing happens and it`s not that, but maybe has some broken parts, that like opinion would converge on it.

But instead it`s like someone -- a health reporter I follow today called it like Roe v. Wade, like there`s no convergence in the sense it`s just as polarizing. People have their fixed views about these things despite the fact that it`s an operating thing that you can empirically assess.

GREER: Right, I think that goes back to Nick`s point which was when Obama did something that FDR couldn`t do, he did something that LBJ couldn`t do, he did something that William Jefferson Clinton couldn`t do and he passed Obamacare and he put his name on it and he took the negative and made it a positive.

HAYES: Right. He didn`t put his name on it.

GREER: Why not?

(CROSSTALK)

GREER: Exactly. But he never framed it. We saw it with the stimulus package and then we saw it with the Affordable Care Act. I mean, there is still so much confusion and misinformation from the very beginning we`re still sort of seeing how this has played out eight years after the fact.

CONFESSORE: There`s some fascinating social science that shows that people`s perceptions of what it is and what it constitutes and who it helps are crazy skewed. People perceive the stimulus bill and Obamacare to be aimed at black people to this degree that it`s not actually true. And I think that accounts for a part of the hatred and resistance to it.

HAYES: Right. There`s a sense of who benefits from it.

GREER: And he`s done very few racially targeted policies. You know, he is under the -- for better or worse, but you know all -- what is it, all tides lift all boats? And so, yes, there are going to be certain segments of the population that are disproportionately affected good or bad, but this is not a racially targeted policy by any stretch of the imagination.

HAYES: But that doesn`t mean the perception of it doesn`t...

GREER: And perception becomes reality.

HAYES: And so then what you have on the flip side right, is that Democrats I think thought this would be a real boon to them, right. I mean, Bill Clinton even said this, like pass it, it`s going to be good. People are going to like it. It`s going to be a political boon. That has not been the case.

It also is not the electoral Kryptonite that Republicans believe. Republicans keep thinking Obamacare is so terrible, right American, you want to reject this and that hasn`t played out either.

GREER: But look at your demographics. I mean, you know, it`s not getting Republicans rich. I mean, there are certain Republicans who are destitute and they realize a small segment realize that this is actually what`s been keeping them afloat.

I mean, so many people are one injury away from, you know...

CONFESSORE: But also like the people on the exchanges, the people benefiting the most are not high frequency voters.

(CROSSTALK)

CONFESSORE: Their benefit is muted, I think.

HAYES: Christina Greer and Nick Confessore, thanks for joining us tonight.

And that is ALL IN for this evening. Make sure to stick around, because it`s veep night on MSNBC. Both vice presidential candidates will be here.

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THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED. END