Show: ALL IN with CHRIS HAYES Date: June 21, 2016 Guest: Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Chris Murphy, Sherrod Brown
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST (voice-over): Tonight on ALL IN --
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What do you make of this money situation between the two candidates?
ED ROLLINS, VETERAN CAMPAIGNER: Big trouble, being perfectly honest.
HAYES: Big trouble for Donald Trump.
DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESUMPTIVE PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: I understand money better than anybody.
HAYES: Even Republicans running his super PAC calling Donald Trump`s financial disclosures a disaster.
TRUMP: I`m really a good businessman. I`m so good at business, oh!
HAYES: Tonight, what the Trump FEC filings mean for November. And why his campaign is paying a company name for a fake ad agency.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I give you money, you give me ideas.
HAYES: Then --
HILLARY CLINTON (D), PRESUMPTIVE PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: Maybe he isn`t as rich as he claims.
HAYES: Senator Sherrod Brown on Hillary Clinton`s attack on Trump the businessman. Senator Chris Murphy on why today he said the vise grip of the NRA is loosening on Congress.
And the smart gun solution.
(GUNFIRE)
HAYES: Take the wristwatch away. It is more than ten inches. The grip tells me I cannot fire. I pull the trigger, I get nothing.
Our exclusive report on how innovation could fix the problems that politicians refuse to address.
STEPHEN TERET, PROFESSOR OF PUBLIC HEALTH: There will probably be some types of smart guns on the civilian market in about a year.
HAYES: When ALL IN starts right now.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
HAYES: Good evening from New York. I`m Chris Hayes.
Donald Trump talks a big game about his wealth and his self-proclaimed talent for managing money. But he`s always played it notoriously close to the vest when it comes to disclosing his actual finances. Most recently refusing to release his tax returns, something every GOP presidential candidate has done since Nixon.
But with the release of his latest filing with the Federal Election Commission, Trump was forced to lay his cards on the table and reveal a campaign historically underfunded and unprepared to wage a general election race.
At the end of May, Trump`s first month as the presumptive nominee, after winning Indiana on May 3rd, the Trump campaign had just $1.3 million of cash on hand. Now, that is a lot of money by any normal standard, but a pittance for a $1 billion presidential race. And it`s absolutely dwarfed by the Clinton campaign`s $42.5 million in cash on hand at the end of May.
Trump has less money in the bank than some of his former GOP rivals long after they dropped out of the race. Ted Cruz, who still has $6.8 million just sitting around, even Ben Carson who`s got $1.8 million, almost four months after suspending his campaign. According to opensecrets.org, Trump has less cash on hand than 122 members of the House and Senate. Think about that for a second. They`re each running in a single congressional district or state, while Trump has to compete across the entire United States of America or at least the battle grounds.
Now, despite reversing his stance on fund-raising after Clinton clinching the nomination, Trump brought in just $3.1 million in contributions during the month of May which, as "Slate" points out, is less than the "Veronica Mars" movie managed to raise on Kickstarter.
The campaign attributes these extraordinary numbers to its late fund- raising start saying, quote, "There are no concerns."
But veteran campaigner Ed Rollins who`s heading up a pro-Trump super PAC says this kind of filing report should unnerve party officials.
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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What do you make of this money situation between the two candidates?
ED ROLLINS, VETERAN CAMPAIGNER: Big trouble, being perfectly honest. I used to be chairman of the congressional committee. And if I had a house race today that basically came in with that kind of figure in June, I`d take them off a target list.
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HAYES: In a phone interview this morning on the "Today" show, Donald Trump blamed his campaign woes on the Republican Party, threatening to go it alone if they don`t provide enough support.
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TRUMP (via telephone): I`m having more difficulty, frankly, with some of the people in the party than I am the Democrats because they`re just -- they don`t want to come on, they will probably eventually come on. Honestly, if they don`t, it`s just fine. I can win it either way.
If it gets to a point, what I`ll do is just do what I did in the primaries. I spent $55 million of my own money to win the primaries, $55 million. I have a lot of cash and I may do it again in the general election. But it would be nice to have some help from the party.
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HAYES: In point of fact, Trump did not spend $55 million of his own money, according to this new FEC filing. The number is actually $45.7 million. Still a pretty huge sum.
But it comes with one very major caveat. Trump gave all that money in the form of loans. Not regular campaign contributions. Meaning technically, the campaign actually owes Donald Trump, the person, over $45 million.
So -- last month, Trump told MSNBC, quote, "I have absolutely no intention of paying myself back." Aides adding the campaign plan to formally convert Trump`s loans into a non-repayable contribution in the near future.
But here`s the thing. Almost six weeks later, that still hasn`t happened. And it means that for every donation to the Trump campaign, whether it`s from Sheldon Adelson or your uncle in Duluth, Donald Trump himself has a prior claim to that money.
That`s far from the only self-serving device revealed in Trump`s campaign filing. Campaign expenditure documents, hundreds of thousands of dollars are shown to be funneled into Trump`s own businesses, including in May alone, almost $73,000 to Trump Tower for rent and utilities, $125,000 to Trump restaurants for the same. And more than $400,000 to the Mar-a-Lago Club for facility, rental and catering.
Of the $63 million his campaign spent through May, according to "The Washington Post", more than $6 million, close to 10 percent, went to pay Trump properties or reimburse Trump and his family for expenses. All this begs the question whether Trump ever really intended to fund his own campaign or whether he even has the means to do so.
It comes on the same day Hillary Clinton gave a speech calling out Trump as basically a predatory con man.
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CLINTON: This is his one move. He makes over-the-top promises that if people stick with him, trust him, listen to him, put their faith in him, he`ll deliver for them. He`ll make them wildly successful. And then everything falls apart and people get hurt.
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HAYES: Trump responded to Clinton`s speech, I am the king of debt that has been great for me as a businessman but is bad for the country. I made a fortune off of debt, will fix U.S.
Joining me now, MSNBC political analyst, former DNC chairman Howard Dean, a Hillary Clinton supporter.
Howard, so here`s what I want to do. I want to separate out a few things. One is, I think a lot of people don`t think it`s so awesome to be raising a lot of money, politicians spend too much time doing it, and so, it`s no great shakes to say, well, I`ve got all this money because it means you`ve been spending a lot of time raising it.
But just in terms of the sheer execution of a modern campaign, at someone who ran the DNC, this is -- this is the task Donald Trump has before himself. How do you express what this report indicates?
HOWARD DEAN, MSNBC POLITICAL ANALYST: Well -- I hardly know where to start. I mean, I`m like Ed Rollins. I`d be absolutely horrified if I was running DNC and my presidential nominee kept the books like this. I mean - - I think first of all, paying your own businesses a lot of money is insane, because it`s just going to lead to major problems. Second of all, there`s no there there yet.
And this is -- we`ve seen this before. We`ve seen this in Trump University. We`ve seen this in the casinos that went broke. He takes the money and they end up with a name on their building and he doesn`t have any investment in it.
And the last thing I want to say is, I always believed that the last time around, when Mitt Romney won the nomination, that Trump dropped out because he didn`t want to reveal his net worth. Which may well be underwater, we don`t know. Until he reveals his tax returns, we`re not going to know.
HAYES: Well, it struck me today that this was someone who he says he`s worth $10 billion, he boasts about how much wealth he has. I mean, he could put everything to rest and just put up $100 million today. He could have just written a check. He very noticeably has not done that.
DEAN: And he`s not likely to do it. It`s not at all clear he has $100 million to spare. It`s not at all clear he`s worth not just $10 billion but even $10 million. We don`t know what he`s worth.
I do not think he`s going to get through this campaign and get away without releasing his tax returns. There`s one thing that you cannot do in public when you`re in public office, you cannot straight look in the public`s eye and lie through your teeth about money. It`s getting pretty close to where it looks like he`s doing that.
HAYES: What do you mean by that?
DEAN: You can`t say things that are just -- it`s one thing to exaggerate and to say outrageous things which he`s done very well with, I might add. But it`s another thing to look straight in the eye -- people straight in the eye, and say something they care about, and money is one of them, which is just not true.
And, you know, this is the con man in Trump. This is the con man. And if it comes out he`s a con man and people start to believe that, he`s done.
HAYES: Partly, what`s distinct here to me is the fact that we have the receipts. In all of the claims that have been made, in all having to do with his private life, it`s tied up in nondisclosure agreements, it`s tied up in litigation with courts not allowing, for instance, his taxes to be released that were subject to litigation. He won`t release his taxes.
It`s the only data we have about the guy, right? So, I mean, in some ways the one thing we have to go on. Show us your cards. Show us your numbers. What are your numbers? And these are the numbers.
DEAN: Right. Would you buy a building from this guy? This is apparently how he conducts his private business as well as the campaign. I mean, would you buy anything from this guy? Would you go in a business deal with a guy like this who doesn`t show his numbers, who basically says one thing one day, another thing another day? I don`t think you put your hard-earned money in this guy`s pocket and that is something the American people care about.
HAYES: Well, not just the American people but in the system in which we exist now, after essentially the death of public financing, the era of post-Citizens United, the billion-dollar presidential race, it is a fact of the matter that up until now, you need to raise money to pay staff and run ads and what donor is going to look at this and say, yes, I want in on that, I want to write my check to that.
DEAN: I agree. And I think what you`re seeing, it`s much to my fascination, is the big donors are holding off. They have decided they`re going to try to save the Republican Senate and that`s where the big money is going.
I wouldn`t donate -- if I was a conservative I wouldn`t donate 5 cents to this guy`s campaign because I think it`s going to end up right in his pocket just like the plane rental and the Mar-a-Lago rental and all this other stuff. If I were a hard-working taxpayer who was thinking of voting for Donald Trump, I wouldn`t do it, because if anybody`s a typical politician in the worst sense of that word, it`s Donald Trump.
HAYES: Well, the point you make there is key. It seems to me it would be important for him to formally convert that loan to a donation, so that there is not essentially a senior creditor claim on whatever inflow comes into the campaign. Because right now, the entirety of the next $45 million raised by the campaign are spoken for by Donald Trump personally until he legally converts that loan.
DEAN: It`s more than that though, Chris. He has not been up front about his money.
HAYES: Right.
DEAN: You know, donors don`t like that. The Republican big donors made their money by being really tough and accounting for every dime of it. I don`t think these guys are going to invest in somebody who they don`t trust and who`s not at all transparent.
HAYES: All right. Howard Dean, thank you very much.
DEAN: Thanks.
HAYES: I`m joined now by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of "The Nation," which, of course, endorsed Bernie Sanders.
And here`s what I think is also interesting about this politically. We had Benjy Sarlin on yesterday did this an amazing piece about Trump voters.
One of the most surprising things to me was how much the most popular line at the rallies and among the people I talked to was, he`s not bought, he`s self-funding.
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL, THE NATION: Unbought. He`s unmortgaged.
HAYES: This was an incredibly attractive part, particularly counterposed to Jeb Bush who was this puppet in the words of Donald Trump.
VANDEN HEUVEL: Yes, bought, puppet. Yes.
But now, he`s corrupted that, because he`s turned on a dime. And he`s now trying to raise money. But he`s also showing himself to be a big loser, which is one of his favorite lines at a rally. I mean, he can`t raise -- can`t seem to raise money. And I don`t think he`s going to contribute to his campaign because he doesn`t like to invest in losing enterprises. And --
HAYES: See, that`s the key. I mean, it`s you first is the dynamic.
VANDEN HEUVEL: You first. But I do think he`s lost the high road, which was never really a high road, that he was untainted, because, you know -- the idea that these people like Michael Bloomberg or Donald Trump or the billionaires, that`s the way to go. No, you talked about it earlier, it`s not the sexiest thing but public financing is the way to go. If we`re going to level the field and let people in the Trump rally run for office. A sheriff, a waitress. No, seriously.
I do think Howard is on to something, Governor Dean. I do think the big money -- let`s be honest, we`re not out of the era of big money.
HAYES: No.
VANDEN HEUVEL: We`re in a dollar-ocracy, not a democracy. It`s going down-ballot, big time. It`s going into Senate races. It`s going to state legislative races.
And that`s going to be tough, because we`ve talked about this. You may have a Democratic president but you certainly want a working Democratic majority. If you don`t take the Senate, the House is in a gridlock because of gerrymandering and partisan redistricting.
HAYES: Yes, you might actually see a flow of resources push down.
(CROSSTALK)
VANDEN HEUVEL: Absolutely. The Kochs have said they want return on their investment down-ballot. They`re going into Ohio, Wisconsin. And the states are pretty grim.
I think the electoral map for the presidential looks good. It`s expandable. But the states are in a lock and we need to take those back.
HAYES: The other part of this is, so there`s the billionaire model, right? There`s the self-funding which is what his whole shtick was. Now it seems that`s by the wayside.
There`s the raise a lot of money from both super PACs, big donors and small donors. There`s the way Sanders has done it so far, right?
And what`s remarkable here is he missed -- he`s missed a tremendous opportunity to do that. I mean, he could have been --
VANDEN HEUVEL: He could have been.
HAYES: I`m watching, I followed Sanders` mail guy on Twitter.
VANDEN HEUVEL: Because they had the rallies, they`re very different candidates but they had the passion, they had the rallies. Bernie Sanders has more money in the bank right now than Donald Trump, about $7 million.
HAYES: The Vermont socialist.
VANDEN HEUVEL: Trump has lost that and he`s lost it -- you talked about the self-dealing we`re seeing in the campaign, where 10 percent of the money he`s collected has gone to Mar-a-Lago and wines and airlines he owns. On some level, it looks like a scam, except this is so dangerous, this campaign, it`s not a scam.
HAYES: Right.
VANDEN HEUVEL: And I think he`s not been serious. There`s no real -- the issues are dangerous, there`s no real platform. We`ve seen the implosion this week.
Now, one thing we`re not talking about is I still think you need field organization to run an effective campaign. But hell, he`s gotten a lot of free media, some $2 billion or more according to counts.
HAYES: Right.
VANDEN HEUVEL: That could kick into play. A lot of money in this media election complex we live in goes to media.
HAYES: We`re going to talk -- we have Senator Sherrod Brown in just a bit. And the fact of the matter is there`s two ways to look at the polling right now. I mean, one level, it`s the guy is behind, he`s behind in key battleground states, he doesn`t have money.
The other is, given that this has been, fair to say objectively, the worst first month of a general election campaign, he`s still got 40 percent. He`s still winning white men in America.
VANDEN HEUVEL: So there`s a chance to regroup. But if this is a measure of the campaign -- but I do think Howard Dean is also right. This is a guy according to the documents released in the district court case, Judge Curiel, who basically Trump University recruiters were told by Trump, go recruit, target parents with hungry kids.
HAYES: Pick-off marks, easy marks, that`s right.
All right. Katrina Vanden Heuvel, always a pleasure.
VANDEN HEUVEL: Thank you, thank you.
HAYES: Still to come, Hillary Clinton has a new moniker for Donald Trump, the king of debt. Senator Sherrod Brown is here to talk about Clinton`s latest attack.
But first, the new bipartisan gun safety proposal Senator Chris Murphy is calling a watershed moment. I`ll ask the senator himself what makes this the different when he joins me right after this two-minute break. Don`t go anywhere.
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SEN. CORY BOOKER (D), NEW JERSEY: If we do nothing, more people in our country will likely die. So, for all those folks who say time and time again, we`re at war with terror -- what we have been doing by not closing this loophole is to aid and abet those people who seek to get weapons to kill us.
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HAYES: After four gun control measures failed in the Senate yesterday, just more than a week after the Orlando shooting, there was a glimmer of hope today when a bipartisan measure seen as a compromise was unveiled. New legislation put together by Republican Senator Susan Collins from Maine would allow the attorney general of the United States to ban people on two specific lists, the no-fly list and the so-called selectee list from buying a gun.
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SEN. SUSAN COLLINS (R), MAINE: All of us are united in our desire to getting something significant done on this vital issue. Many of us had a meeting with the Senate majority leader, Senator McConnell, today. He did say that he would give us a vote on this important amendment.
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HAYES: As we wait to see what happens with this legislation, it is worth in these moments taking a step back from this latest horrific mass shooting, the AR-15-style assault weapon used to carry it out, and consider the problem of American gun violence in its totality.
Regardless of what legislation may have impacted this single incident, here are the basic facts about American guns: every year, approximately 30,000 Americans die from guns, two-thirds of them suicides. Gun deaths are now poised to surpass auto fatalities in the U.S. as a cause of death, largely due to decline of auto fatalities, while gun deaths do not decline.
America has an estimated 357 million guns, according to "Washington Post" investigation, based on data from the Congressional Research Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. That is more guns than there are people.
Let me say that again. America has more guns in circulation than human beings. U.S. has more guns per capita than any other nation in the world, with Yemen, the war-torn nation of Yemen, coming in a distant second. And by far, America has the most gun-related homicides among the world`s most developed nations.
The U.S. gun-related homicide rate is 25 times higher compared with a group of 22 other OECD countries. Guns in America are not protecting us, they are killing us. The permissiveness of our gun laws to the ubiquity of gun ownership to the normalcy of people dying in the hands of bullets, there is nothing like it anywhere in the developed democratized world. That is the basic reality our legislators have to deal with.
And joining me, Chris Murphy, who`s a Democrat from Connecticut, last week led a 15-hour filibuster, forced the Senate to take up the issue of guns.
And, Senator, the reason I wanted to introduce that into evidence is because my concern watching this debate play out is that legislation in response to horrifying crises like what we`ve seen in Orlando will not yield good policy. And particularly as we talk about strengthening the legal power of these legally ambiguous lists, what is your response to people who are concerned, as I am, that that is what we are seeing develop?
SEN. CHRIS MURPHY (D), CONNECTICUT: Well, you are right, that it is totally insufficient. But that`s why, during that 15-hour filibuster, we were demanding for two votes to move forward. One, closing the terrorist loophole. But two, to make sure that everyone goes through a background check before they buy a weapon.
We know that in states that have universal background checks, there are significantly lower gun deaths. And so, our filibuster was not just about this issue of protecting the country from terrorists, it was also about the unfortunate everyday carnage that happens in places like Chicago and Hartford and Los Angeles.
And you were also right to point out all of that data. It also is important to note that when you control for all other factors, there`s really only one explanation. The United States doesn`t have any greater incidence of mental illness. We don`t have any greater level of hate or discrimination. We`re not inherently in our DNA a more violent nation.
What`s different about America is the loosest gun laws in the world, a nation that is awash in guns. So, you`re right, this has to be about more than just this issue of stopping terrorists from getting guns. But what we need to do now is break the back of the NRA, which has frozen us out from meaningful reforms.
What you are seeing today in real time as this compromise proposal rolls out is the power of the NRA slowly winnowing. That is significant to the larger fight.
HAYES: What is your -- I said on Twitter yesterday that I think it`s wrong to attribute the NRA`s power to the donations they give that show up in FEC records to politicians. I got a lot of push-back for that. My sense of their power is they are organized, they are mobilized, there are voters who care about this who they can turn on.
What is your theory of their power?
MURPHY: So I think what has happened over time, and I can`t give you an explanation as to how we got here, is that the NRA stamp of approval is a proxy for something more than your position on guns. It is a way to communicate that you are a true conservative.
HAYES: Yes.
MURPHY: And that is in large part because there is nothing more anti- government today than the NRA, who essentially is arguing the people should arm themselves in case of the government coming down with black helicopters to steal their guns away.
And so, if you want to show how anti-government you really are, how much you hate President Obama, then the NRA stamp of approval`s pretty important to you.
So, we`ve got to find a way for Republicans frankly to get a conservative stamp of approval in a way other than seeking to be in lockstep with the NRA. That`s a big project but I think that`s the problem.
HAYES: This is very key I think for folks to understand. I occasionally will watch the NRA`s broadcasts that they put out. They even have their own sort of network.
The key here is that it is an identity expression of a certain political world view, a certain place that you fit in your political tribes, that is related to guns but not just about guns. I mean, there`s a lot of gun owners who are not down for that but they are managing to kind of organize those folks.
MURPHY: That`s exactly right. And I think we`ve got to do a much better job of working with gun owners to make them understand what the NRA is really advocating for here. I think there is a fundamental disconnect between the NRA`s membership and what the NRA is talking about, which is why, you know, new groups like the one that just started last week, Veterans for Commonsense Gun Reform, is important.
So, a lot of this is an education campaign with gun owners about what the NRA really is advocating for here that`s missing.
HAYES: Are you going to break the filibuster on this. You`re going to get to 60 votes, you think?
MURPHY: I mean, listen, call me skeptical that ultimately there are going to be 15 Republicans who are going to break with the NRA. They came out after the Collins proposal was rolled out and said that they oppose it. My worry here is this makes a handful of Republicans look much more reasonable but Mitch McConnell is going to make sure that this proposal never gets to the finish line.
That being said, you know, Susan Collins has always been with us, but three of the four people who stood at that press conference today voted against the background checks bill two years ago. So, this is a watershed moment. There is a -- something happening here where more Republicans are willing to break with the NRA. And I think that that does speak to our ability to move this issue in months and years to come.
HAYES: All right. Senator Chris Murphy, thanks for joining us. Appreciate it.
MURPHY: Thanks, Chris.
HAYES: The massacre in Orlando has refocused the attention on gun violence. But the horrific reality is the 49 people killed at Pulse nightclub account for just 0.001 percent of people killed by guns on average each year in these United States.
And for the few months, we here at ALL IN have been working on a comprehensive look at the technological advances that are making guns safer -- the fight to overcome the social and political obstacles and get them actually into the hands of the public. And tonight, we are bringing you that special report.
Coming up, our ALL IN exclusive report, "Smart Guns: How Technology Can Save Lives." That`s later in the show. Stick around. You don`t want to miss it.
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HAYES: A day after Trump`s campaign released a dismal and perplexing report on its finances, leading some to question if the campaign is just some sort of elaborate long con, Hillary Clinton gave a speech in Columbus, Ohio, warning of the danger Donald Trump could pose to the America economy. Clinton took on Trump`s economic policies, a difficult cask with a candidate whose policy positions are vague and prone to shifting day by day.
While Trump has no voting record or record of public service Clinton can attack, what he does have is a business record. And Clinton once again wove together Trump`s own words and deeds in his bid for the presidency.
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CLINTON: I think Donald Trump has said he`s qualified to be president because of his business record. A few days ago he said, and I quote, "I`m going to do for the country what I did for my business."
He bankrupted his companies, not once, not twice, but four times. Hundreds of people lost their jobs. Shareholders were wiped out. Contractors, many of them small businesses, took heavy losses.
Those promises you`re hearing from him at his campaign rallies? They are the same promises he made to his customers at Trump University.
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HAYES: Yet probably part of the reason why Clinton gave this speech is that even with Trump`s overall poll numbers sinking, he`s still seen as better able to handle the economy, at least in one new poll. While Clinton leads Trump by five points in the latest head-to-head national poll, presidential preference, she trails him by eight points on who would better handle the economy.
I`m going to ask Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio why that is, right after this break.
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CLINTON: He calls himself the king of debt, and his tax plan sure lives up to that name. And how would he pay for all this debt? Well, he`s said, and I quote, I would borrow knowing if the economy crashed, you could make a deal.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Hillary Clinton warning of the danger she thinks Donald Trump poses to the economy. Trump responded in a tweet, "I am the king of debt, that`s been great for me as a businessman but bad for the country. I made a fortune off of debt. Will fix U.S."
Joining me now, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio who`s endorsed Hillary Clinton for president, also a Cleveland native. And congrats on your Cavs, an amazing win for you and the city.
Here`s my question to you, senator.
SEN. SHERROD BROWN, (D) OHIO: Wait, wait, wait, wait, 52 years we waited for an NBA, NLF, or Major League Baseball championship. You`ve got to spend at least 20 seconds on this one, Chris.
HAYES: Congratulations.
BROWN: So, can`t we just kind of revel in LeBron and the Cavaliers` victory, down 3-1, coming back, winning three in a row, including two on the road? Doesn`t that count for something?
HAYES: It was amazing and a lot of us were pulling for you. I love the city of Cleveland, The folks of Ohio. Love LeBron Jeams.
BROWN: Clevelanders care about underdogs, partly because we are, partly because we have empathy, and we`re -- we have faith in our god, and faith in humanity, and that makes us support the underdog. So, enough said, move on to someone who is not an underdog, Donald Trump.
HAYES: Well, you`ve got another big event coming up in Cleveland this summer.
BROWN: Yes.
HAYES: It will be the convention that nominates Donald Trump.
And here`s the Quinnipiac poll today. Ohio, Clinton 40 percent, Trump 40 percent. This is who would be better at creating jobs in the cross tabs of this poll, Trump 52 percent, Clinton 39 percent.
Explain that result to me, senator?
BROWN: Well, I think it`s just this bravado of Donald Trump and the incredible media attention he`s gotten. I mean, there was a recent survey done in New England -- I forget, but a national survey of -- that Hillary has gotten mostly negative press from the national media, while Donald Trump`s got huge, huge amounts of, I can use that adjective many times, of positive press. And that will even out. And clearly people -- they`ve bought into the Donald Trump I`m a successful business guy.
But when Donald Trump said in 2006, I sort of hope for a housing crash, quote-unquote, I sort of hope for a housing crash. He -- that would make mill more money, people start understanding that and contrasting that with Secretary Clinton`s vision and Secretary Clinton`s leadership and Secretary Clinton`s proposals on what to do to fix this economy and to grow the economy. I think those numbers will change dramatically.
People that understand business, whether they`re in business themselves or just pay attention, know that Donald Trump has been by and large a disaster in his own business dealings. And we don`t want him to bring that to our national arena.
HAYES: Part of what I see here I think is the idea of a message to those folks that have not necessarily seen wage growth say during the Obama economy, during the Obama recovery, which has been in many ways compared to other countries, much, much better than all kinds of our peers in Europe particularly. There`s lots of positive news you can point to. There are also a lot of folks -- and I`m sure you meet them, they`re your voters, they`re your constituents in Ohio, who have not seen wage growth. What is the core economic message of the Democratic Party to those folks?
BROWN: Well, first of all, you start with seven years ago when Barack Obama became president, we were losing 800,000 jobs a month. And that number continued, more or less, for a number of months. We`ve had economic growth for close to 75 months in a row now, which is a historic high, I believe. But the growth hasn`t -- it hasn`t been distributed well enough and it`s not great enough, and far too many people haven`t seen it in their paychecks.
When Donald Trump proposed even John McCain`s chief economic adviser said would cause job loss and declining wages, the opposite of what was we need. What Secretary Clinton`s proposed will do much better than that.
But I understand Donald Trump`s blustery kind of arguments fall on pretty receptive ears because people are frustrated. Working families in Ohio have been hurt badly. It started really with the Bush years. We haven`t been able to correct it enough yet. We`re moving in the right direction. Secretary Clinton will do that, Donald Trump will not.
Whether it`s his own business dealings, or what he`s proposed, it`s -- with Trump it`s more tax cuts for the richest people in the country, more trickle-down economics, not the investment we need. Secretary Clinton, right from day one, wants to do real investment in public works and infrastructure, building highways and bridges, building airports, do doing what we need to do that way which lifts the economy up undoubtedly.
HAYES: All right. Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, congrats again and thanks for your time tonight.
BROWN: Thanks.
HAYES: Coming up, our exclusive special report on the future of smart gun technology in America. That`s ahead.
But first, the most peculiar detail to come out of Donald Trump`s FEC filing that has to do with a house in New Hampshire and Mad Men, yes, that Mad Men. I will tell you that story right after this break.
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HAYES: Among the many, many interesting nuggets to be found at Donald Trump`s latest campaign filings was a payment that happened to catch the eye of fans of the show Mad Men. The expenditures made on April 7 went to an entity named Draper Sterling.
The campaign made four payments totaling $35,000 for web advertising. Now, a payment that size to a company no one has ever heard of, which is a pretty clear reference to the advertising gurus Don Draper and Roger Sterling from the show Mad Men, was enough to pique the interest of Think Progresses Jeb Legum who first pointed out the payment.
It turns out this Draper Sterling was incorporated as an LLC just this past March in New Hampshire. The address, 18 Crosby Lane in Londonderry, about 15 minutes, it just so happens, from the home of ousted Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, quite a distance from the mid-town digs of the fictional advertising firms that Donald Draper and Roger Sterling worked at.
The New York mogul, Donald Trump, didn`t go to a Madison Avenue firm for his web advertising needs. No, he went here to this tree-lined street in suburban New Hampshire, home to Draper Sterling. More on the murky story behind Trump`s web advertising firm coming up in 60 seconds.
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HAYES: So, here`s what we know about Draper Sterling, the company that Donald Trump`s campaign paid $35,000 to in April for web advertising. We know that according to New Hampshire public records, it`s registered to a man named John Adkins. It`s located at his home in suburban New Hampshire. We also know there`s another man using Adkins` New Hampshire address, a former Navy SEAL, Paul Holtzer. And both John Atkins and Paul Holtzer, are also involved in a medical nonprofit startup. And they were paid $3,000 by the Trump campaign for field consulting on the same day, according to that filing.
Now, Paul Holtzer we were unable to reach told Fortune that part of the agreement with any client is that you sign a nondisclosure agreement so I won`t discuss any specific work done for any specific client, stressing that there`s nothing untoward about the Draper Sterling work for the Trump campaign.
But at this point, it remains all very unclear. And people within Trump world seem to agree.
Senior adviser Barry Bennett telling All In in a statement when asked what services Draper Sterling provided for the campaign, quote, "no idea."
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HAYES: With the National Rifle Association once again flexing its muscle on Capitol Hill, we`re getting a bitter reminder of just how significant the political obstacles are to passing laws to combat gun violence. But legislation is not the only tool available to attack the public health crisis that sees over 33,000 people each year in this country die on the wrong side of a gun. We have spent the past few months here at All In doing research, conducting interviews, about how innovation in the gun industry itself offers one potential way to succeed in reducing gun deaths, perhaps dramatically.
Efforts to pass legislation have so often failed. After the break, an exclusive All In report, Smart Guns: How Technology Can Save Lives. That`s next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK) HAYES: Tonight, we are proud to bring you the culmination of months of extensive interviews and reporting. Our exclusive look at the the life- saving potential of smart gun technology and the human cost of our failure to make guns safer.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: She was 12 years old. She was in seventh grade. She was bubbly, vivacious, smart, had friends. She had a great future in front of her, and she also had some depression issues.
HAYES: Seven years ago, Steve Meade`s (ph) daughter Alicia (ph) went to a relative`s home, and got her hands on a gun.
UNIDENITIFIED MALE: It was being kept locked in a bedroom underneath a pillow, and it was loaded. Alicia (ph) knew how to pick that lock and get into that room. After school one day, apparently a bad day at school, she entered that room and she placed the barrel of the .38-caliber revolver against her right temple. She gently squeezed the trigger and a bullet penetrated her skull, exited her left temple, and she died immediately.
HAYES: Alicia (ph) is not the only one -- far from it. In 2014 alone, more than 300 kids under 16 either committed suicide using a gun or died when one was fired by accident.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: For years, it was like being punched in the gut every day. It ripped me apart. It ripped a lot of people apart, frankly. And it`s something that happens surprisingly often in this country.
HAYES: About 33,000 people die each year from firearms in the U.S. In many states, guns kill more people than car accidents. Laws designed to reduce gun deaths have been blocked over and over again.
BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The United States of America is the one advanced nation on Earth in which we do not have sufficient commonsense gun safety laws, even in the face of repeated mass killings.
HAYES: In the era of Obama, the cultural and political obstacles to reducing gun deaths remain as significant as ever.
WAYNE LAPIERRE, PRESIDENT, NRA: The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
HAYES: There are now about twice as many guns per capita in the United States as there were in 1968, more than 300 million guns in all. By some estimates, more guns than people.
UNIDENIFIED FEMALE: Billy (ph), tell us about these features.
HAYES: Just this year, a kind of home shopping network for firearms, Gun TV, debuted on cable across the country.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: OK, first off, girl power, because you and I loved this firearm.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: IOh, yeah, for sure.
HAYES: But gun safety activists have not given up. Instead, many are shifting their focus from politics to technology with the goal of making the gun itself safer. It`s the same strategy employed to fight other very different public health menaces.
STEPHEN TERET, PROFESSOR OF PUBLIC HEALTH: When we want people to avoid malaria, or we want people in the future to avoid the Zika virus, we don`t just say to people, can`t you be careful and stay away from mosquitos? We try to modify the vector, do something about the mosquito.
HAYES: Professor Steve Teret has worked on guns as a public health issue since 1979. Before that, he worked to reduce motor vehicle fatalities which have fallen dramatically over time, even as the rate of gun death has held comparatively steady.
TERET: In the early stages of my career, I worked on getting air bags in cars. I thought that was tough when I was doing it because the motor vehicle manufacturers were tough to deal with. That was nothing compared with guns.
HAYES: Two years ago, I met a man named Andy Raymond, a Maryland firearms dealer who wanted to sell a new gun that could only be fired by its owner, a so-called smart gun.
To shoot the gun the owner had to be wearing a personalized watch. If the gun lost contact with the watch, it would no longer fire.
All right, I can fire. Now take the wristwatch away. It is more than ten inches. The grip tells me I cannot fire. I pull the trigger, I get nothing.
But Andy Raymond (ph) never sold a single smart gun, reversing course amidst an outpouring of vitriol from gun rights activists.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I received numerous death threats today. I really (EXPLETIVE DELETED) appreciate that, that (EXPLETIVE DELETED)classy, that`s a great thing for gun rights when you threaten to shoot somebody.
HAYES: Those threats were fueled by a controversial New Jersey law mandating that once smart guns became commercially available, gun dealers in the state must eventually only sell smart guns. The law was designed to help spur the development of smart guns by guaranteeing a market, but it allowed the NRA and its allies to stoke paranoid fears.
SCOTT BACH, ASSOCIATION OF NEW JERSEY RIFLE AND PISTOL CLUBS: It was obviously an attempt to use technology as an excuse and cover for what was essentially and is a ban on every conventional handgun ever made.
HAYES: Claims like that prompted New Jersey senate majority leader Loretta Weinberg to come on this show and offer to roll back the law if the NRA and its allies would stand down.
LORETTA WEINBERG, NEW JERSEY SENATE MAJORITY LEADER: If, in fact, they would get out of the way, I would move to repeal this law in the state of New Jersey.
HAYES: We never heard from the NRA, but New Jersey lawmakers acted anyway, passing a bill to get rid of the mandate.
There was just one problem, Governor Chris Christie refused to sign the bill, effectively claiming he didn`t have time to review it. Proponents expect to send the bill back to Christie`s desk by September.
President Obama isn`t waiting. He has embarked on a new push for smart gun acceptance with an eye on getting them in the hands of law enforcement.
OBAMA: If we can set it up so you can`t unlock your phone unless you got the right fingerprint, why can`t we do the same thing for our guns?
HAYES: The major U.S. gun manufacturers have so far declined to develop a smart gun. In part, out of fear. Both Colt and Smith and Wesson faced boycotts when they moved to embrace the technology more than 15 years ago, but the major manufacturers aren`t the only game in town. Entrepreneurs are developing smart guns that can`t be fired without a special ring, and guns that can only be unlocked with an authorized user`s fingerprint.
TERET: I would say that there will probably be some types of smart guns on the civilian market in about a year.
HAYES: Then there`s German firearms designer Ernst Mauch, a legendary figure in the gun industry. Mauch designed the gun reportedly used to kill Osama bin Laden, as well as the smart gun I tried two years ago. He is now working toward a new smart gun for use by law enforcement.
ERNST MAUCH, FIREARMS DESIGNER: If somebody wants to buy it, a safer gun, why not? Why should it not be offered to the market?
HAYES: And that market is potentially huge. A survey this year found that nearly 60 percent of Americans would consider buying a smart gun if they were buying a new gun.
TERET: If you said to a breakfast cereal manufacturer, I could do something that would allow you to capture 59 percent of the market -- they would be dancing in the corporate hallways.
HAYES: The cultural and institutional roadblocks to the arrival of smart guns are not going away, but neither of the technological advances that increasingly make traditional guns seem as outdated and as needlessly unsafe as a car without an air bag.
MAUCH: The problem I see these days is only the communication and telling them what potential it is, how far the technology is, and I see no reason why these people should be against a technology who will save thousands of lives, thousands of lives of children.
HAYES: Steve Meade (ph) knows all too well just how much is at stake.
You think your daughter would be alive today if that technology...
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I`m absolutely convinced she would. We were in the process of getting her counseling and help, and all we needed was time.
Thousands of children every year are killed needlessly because of accidents, my daughter was one of them seven years ago. My heart was broken when that happened. And I want others to know about it. I want this to be avoided whenever possible in the future.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
HAYES: That is All In for this evening. The Rachel Maddow Show starts right now.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED. END