Show: ALL IN with CHRIS HAYES Date: November 10, 2016 Guest: Alec MacGinnis, Max Reid, Heather McGee, Jason Johnson, McKay Coppins, Jeff Merkley
CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC ALL IN ANCHOR: Tonight on ALL IN.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I just had the opportunity to have an excellent conversation with President-elect Trump.
HAYES: The Trump era begins.
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT-ELECT OF THE UNITED STATES: Mr. President, it was a great honor being with you.
HAYES: Tonight, America gets its first view of presidential Trump, as the effects of his victory reverberate across the country.
Plus, new reporting on who will fill out the Trump administration. Get ready for Rudy, Christie, and the "Breitbart News" CEO as Chief of Staff.
Then, the James Comey effect. New evidence that the FBI intrusion into the election was a deciding factor.
As Trump takes D.C., reeling democrats search for a new champion.
ELIZABETH WARREN, CONGRESSIONAL OVERSIGHT PANEL CHAIR: We will stand up to bigotry. No compromises ever on this one.
HAYES: When ALL IN starts right now.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
HAYES: Good evening from New York. I`m Chris Hayes.
After a presidential campaign during which he suggested he would question the peaceful transfer of power if he lost, President-elect Donald Trump today participated in a one of the key rituals for that transfer of power, meeting with the outgoing president at the White House, and struck a conciliatory tone.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: This was a meeting that was going to last for maybe 10 or 15 minutes, and we were just going to get to know each other.
We had never met each other. I have great respect. The meeting lasted for almost an hour and a half. And it could have -- as far as I`m concerned, it could have gone for a lot longer.
We really -- we discussed a lot of different situations, some wonderful and some difficulties. I very much look forward to dealing with the president in the future including counsel.
He`s - he explained some of the difficulties, some of the high-flying assets and some of the - some of the really great things that have been achieved.
So, Mr. President, it was a great honor being with you, and I look forward to being with you many, many more times in the future. Thank you.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: For the record, the meeting had been scheduled for an hour, not 10 or 15 minutes as Trump said and what were - what`s note, his first ever public comments in the White House.
After the White House meeting Trump, his wife, Melania, and Vice President- elect Mike Pence went to Capitol Hill to meet with House Speaker Paul Ryan, and later, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell. Trump telling reporters, its top priorities are immigration, the border, health care, and quote, "big league jobs." Promising people will be very, very happy.
If you somehow missed the presidential campaign and didn`t know who Donald Trump was, it looked like a start of a pretty standard transfer of power of gracious words and calls of unity including from President Obama.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I want to emphasize to you, Mr. President-elect, that we now are going to want to do everything we can to help you succeed, because if we succeed, then the country succeeds.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: That comment came despite the president within the past week having described both Trump - as both a uniquely unqualified and temperamentally unfit for the presidency, a point White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest was pressed on repeatedly today.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOSH EARNEST, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: Look, the president`s views haven`t changed. He stands by what he said on the campaign trail. He had an opportunity to make his argument. He made that argument vigorously. He made that argument in states all across country, but the American people decided. The election is over.
The president didn`t get to choose his successor. The American people did, and they`ve chosen President-elect Trump. And President Obama is determined to preside over a transition that gives the incoming president the opportunity to get a running start.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: While Trump went through the normal rituals today, there were ominous signs throughout the country of a very abnormal future.
Trump refusing to let a group of journalists travel with him to cover his meeting with President Obama, bucking longstanding tradition, designed to allow the press to keep watch of the president or in this case, the president-elect.
Trump`s staff restoring a page on his can campaign website calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering United States, which had temporarily disappeared over what Trump staff now says was a technical glitch.
As anti-Trump protests raged for the second straight day, there were numerous signs the country`s most hate-filled people may feel emboldened in the wake of Trump`s victory.
The Ku Klux Klan announcing plans for a victory parade in North Carolina, same state where overnight someone spray painted the words "Black lives don`t matter and neither do your votes."
In Philadelphia, black woman`s SUV spray painted with the phrases "Trump rules" and "black bitch." In the same city, a swastika in Trump reference appearing on an abandoned store front. In Western New York, another swastika with the words "Make America white again."
In California, a Muslim student telling police she was followed by two men who made comments about Trump and Muslims before robbing her. In Pennsylvania, high school students holding a Trump sign yelling "white power."
Speaking to the AFL CIO today, Senator Elizabeth Warren vowed the democrats will fight bigotry in all its forms no matter who is in the White House.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
WARREN: We will fight back against attacks on Latinos, on African- Americans, on women, on Muslims, on immigrants, on disabled Americans, on everyone.
Whether Donald Trump sits in a glass tower or sits in the White House, we will not give an inch on this. Not now, not ever.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Joining me now from the White House, NBC News White House Correspondent Kristen Welker. Kristen, what was that scene like?
KRISTEN WELKER, NBC NEWS WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: It was striking, Chris, for all of the reasons that you just laid out because President Obama had just campaigned so vigorously against President-elect Trump.
He had said he will never be elected president and here the two were sitting in the Oval Office. But, look, I have been talking to sources here, officials here, who say the president takes this very seriously, this transition of power. This is something that they have been working on here for about a year.
They are going to hold a series of meetings with his staffers. There are going to be intelligence briefings as you know and there are also going to be some exercises in case of emergency and crisis situations. So this is something that they`ve been mapping out. They think it`s fundamental to the democracy.
I can tell you that I`ve been talking to some sources in and around Washington, who say there was a sense that the Trump team was a little overwhelmed. None of them have ever served in office before.
And so, talking to my sources, they say, look, we don`t place blame for that, but the reality is there`s a very steep learning curve when you are coming into the White House.
And so, I think that was on display. Notably, the birther issue, we are told, did not come up during that meeting. Of course, that is one of the issues that has made their relationship so contentious. And, of course, this was the first time the two have actually met in person.
So it was just striking to see them, to see their body language, and I think there was an attempt to bridge the very large gap that has existed between them, but, you know, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said there was no attempt to re-litigate these debates. The time for that is over. This was about starting to move forward.
HAYES: Let me ask you about the reporting today on the - on the president- elect`s pool. The political reporter who was part of that pool had a long tweet storm saying basically that they didn`t -- they basically shut down the pool. They didn`t tell them where he was going.
That this was a real break with the tradition, that traditionally the pool that`s in place that`s called the protective pool, so that the members of the media know what the president is doing at any time, that`s also implemented for the president-elect.
Today was the first day of what that would have been and they --it didn`t happen, is that right?
WELKER: That is the latest reporting, and I can tell you that there have been some conversations here behind the scenes. We do have a White House Correspondents Association to make sure those types of things do not happen. We`re constantly fighting with the Obama administration for more access.
So, look, this is something the White House correspondents` association would not, will not ever back down on making sure that we`re getting as much access as possible.
But you`re right, that is an indication that there may be some thorny discussions moving forward. We`ll have to see.
Again, it speaks to this issue, though, this is someone who does not have experience in Washington serving in government, and so, there are going to be potentially some of these moments where the traditions that exist here may not be the obvious choices that are made.
HAYES: All right, Kristen Welker. Thanks for your update. Appreciate it.
WELKER: Thank you.
HAYES: Joining me now, Morgan State University Professor, Jason Johnson, Politics Editor of "The Root," and Mckay Coppins, Senior Political Writer at BuzzFeed News.
I got to start, well, let me start here, Jason. I want to play this bit of President Obama talking to you Reverend Al Sharpton about this moment. Actually about the inauguration, but the possibility of this moment, take a listen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REVEREND AL SHARPTON, POLITICSNATION HOST: I mean, can you imagine how you would feel standing on the steps of the capitol having to hand over the power and watch him put his hand on that bible and become your successor? After saying, you weren`t even a U.S. citizen.
OBAMA: You know, the thing is I don`t take any of this personally because he is not somebody who`s fit to be president in any circumstances.
I would feel deeply frustrated, not because anything he said about me, but because I would fear for the future of our country.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: There`s something about that image, about the first black president sitting and shaking the hand of a man who launched his political career demanding his papers.
JASON JOHNSON, THE ROOT POLITICS EDITOR: Yes. Demanding his papers, his identity papers, his freedom papers, his college degree and the idea that President Obama will have to hand off to this person is not only disturbing, it is a heartfelt concern for many, many, many millions of Americans.
And I`ll also say this, I really believe that conversation was a lot more contentious than Donald Trump wants to admit, because I`m sure President Obama said to him, you know what, you can say whatever you want to me, but if you run this country the way you ran this campaign, it will fall apart around your ears. Pretty sure he told him.
HAYES: That is - that is interesting to be a fly on the wall there. The idea of the dog that caught the car, which is part of the idea here around the Trump folks, you`ve been around that inner circle. I mean, no one`s ready to be President of the United States, no one is ready to staff a White House, but in just an objective historical resume sense, there`s never been anyone less prepared.
MCCAY COPPINS, BUZZFEED NEWS SENIOR POLITICAL WRITER: Less qualified, less prepared, less -- who`s put less thought into it, frankly. I think that, more than anything is what I find disconcerting talking to people in his inner circle.
I mean, look, there are people in the republican establishment who got on the Trump train and those people have some basic idea. Some idea of how the federal government functions.
Those are not the people in Trump`s immediate inner circle. And the people who ran his campaign, I mean, look, I was -- we were saying off the air that I was getting e-mails and notes from people in Trump`s campaign in the final days of the race who are trying to make nice with me and, you know, repair any damaged relationships because they thought that this campaign was over.
That they thought that after November 8th, we would have to be working together again. And so, now, that they find themselves in this situation, where they are now counseling the President-elect to the United States, I mean, I don`t -- I think a lot of them probably are stunned and they`re trying to -- they`re trying to feel their way through it right now.
HAYES: Key point here, which I think Bears repeating, people talk about no one saw this coming and people were caught unaware and the elite liberal bubble, et cetera, that includes the Trump campaign.
Let`s just be very clear, they had -- they`re included in that.
COPPINS: The RNC`s own internal numbers showed him losing.
HAYES: Right. Yes. Let`s just be clear when we talk about -- I don`t -- I want to - I want to follow up on something you said, but I also don`t want to ignore the part of the split screen we showed.
We showed president - and at one level, we talked about the sort of the normal transfer of power, and in some ways, there are certain ways that that`s important. Normal, because those are -- those are part of the civic bulwark.
Those stories that we`re seeing, they`re -- now, you know, people post things on Facebook and we as a journalistic enterprise have to make sure that`s vetted and true and there`s one case in Louisiana of woman making something up, so that, you know -- but it is clear that there are outbreaks of hate crime and hate speech, being directed at people connected to the word "Trump" -
COPPINS: Right.
HAYES: Very specifically. And there are a lot of people in this country that feel like a target.
COPPINS: Yes.
JOHNSON: They feel like targets for good reason. This was happening beforehand. We had it happened down in Emory. It`s happening in college campuses around the country.
I have a colleague in Silver Spring, Maryland, who woke up the next morning to see a watermelon had been smashed and smeared on the hood of her car. That`s in Maryland. That`s right outside the D.C. Part --
HAYES: Is this colleague of yours the morning after the election?
JOHNSON: Yes. A colleague of mine the morning after the election.
So, this isn`t being made up. I`m getting text messages from my students saying should I marry my partner now, because are they going to make gay marriage illegal?
And the thing is, this is part of the peaceful transition. See, it`s not just a matter of Obama handing over the job. Donald Trump has an obligation to the country, to tell the Klan and his followers, hey, guys, play fair because we can`t run this country if you`re attacking half of the population.
COPPINS: That is such an important point. Because look, there`s this whole question of normalizing Donald Trump`s behavior on the campaign trail.
It shouldn`t be normalized. I do think that what President Obama said is true, which is the way our democracy functions is that somebody has been democratically elected, the election wasn`t rigged, it was a free and fair election. He has to be ushered into the government without any, you know, anyone stopping him, but that said, it is not on the democrats to stop this behavior, it`s not on President Obama to stop this.
Trump is the president-elect. It is on him to now try to be a unifying force in this country. It is on the Republican Party, the party that got him elected, to now make -- to -- this is their problem --
(CROSSTALK)
HAYES: To say, Donald Trump can -- Donald Trump, there`s a lot Donald Trump can do. Donald Trump could invite the con people to --
COPPINS: Yes.
HAYES: Donald Trump could make a speech in which he says to every Nazi and KKK member and bigot, I do not want your support.
COPPINS: Yes.
HAYES: I condemn what you do. This country condemns what you do. And we do not -- you are not part of our political coalition. He could give that speech. All of that is a doable thing -
(CROSSTALK)
COPPINS: And I hope he does. And this is the thing. Root for him to do those things, right?
HAYES: Let me - and one more thing about the news today about what we`ve been talking about this, what`s unprecedented. The Trump`s kids to run business via blind Trust, Trump attorney says. Which it sounds contradictive, if your kids are running it; it`s not a blind trust.
This is something that we paid some attention to on this show with reporting, completely I think unprecedented, underappreciated. People complain about the Clinton Foundation being essentially a slush fund to buy access.
The president`s children will be running a business that is not a public business.
COPPINS: Yes.
HAYES: That could take investments, loans, deals and partnerships around the world with anyone who wants to get into the graces of the American president.
COPPINS: And talk about an organization -- a way for somebody to curry favor with the president. There is a company being run by his children that can take money without ever disclosing.
JOHNSON: From banks that he regulates. You know, if this was Uday and Qusay Hussein, we will be saying this is a horrible dictatorship but this is essentially what we have happening.
You`re going to have the family of the President of the United States being an indirect pathway not only for his power but also ways for him to hide things he`s engaged in.
By the way, we`ve never seen his taxes, so we don`t know how his country - we don`t know how his company actually operates.
COPPINS: I think, this just reinforces the point there`s been a lot of self-flagellation in the media, which is absolutely -- it should happen and we have to be holding ourselves accountable, others should be holding us accountable.
But this illustrates how aggressive and adversarial in some cases the political press needs to be over the next four years. There need to be reporters -
JOHNSON: That`s right.
COPPINS: -- digging into the Trump organization, there need to be reporters holding the White House accountable and fighting every act that he tries to take to limit press access. That needs to happen.
JOHNSON: Has to happen.
HAYES: I want to thank you both. I want to just let our viewers know what they`re watching. Two, big anti-Trump protests tonight in the cities of Baltimore and Portland. We`ve got obviously -- we`ve got eyes on that.
There`s also protests in Milwaukee and Minneapolis as well. We will be bringing you footage of that throughout the night as the reaction to what happened, the seismic cataclysm that happened in this country, historic really, as everyone processes the reverberations of that throughout the country.
Those are images of Denver at this moment. People taking to streets across the country, and that is just sort of the first few days. There`s a lot more to come in every different direction. Jason Johnson, Mckay Coppins, thank you very much.
All right, still to come. Could the head of Breitbart News soon be running the White House? New reporting today on where Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie and Steve Bannon can fit in Donald Trump`s cabinet, and what that means for the country. That`s after this two-minute break.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HAYES: Today, day two in the world of President-elect Donald Trump. The focus turns to Trump actually governing. That means two things, staffing and a legislative agenda.
Staffing first, some of the names being floated are Steve Bannon for Chief of Staff, the head of the conservative Breitbart website and Trump`s campaign chairman. He may be in competition for the post with RNC chair Reince Priebus.
Bannon, of course, has declared the site he used to run with a platform for the "Alt-right." Alt-right, being a kind of politically correct term for white nationals.
Trump campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, and former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski also being considered for the spot according to New York Times.
Congressman Jed Hensarling is being considered for Treasury Secretary. He`s currently Chairman of the House Planning and Services Committee.
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, an ever present Trump surrogate during the campaign seems to be open to becoming Attorney General.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CHRIS CUOMO, CNN HOST: Do you have it in you to be Attorney General? Do you feel that you have the energy, do you feel -
RUDY GIULIANI, FORMER NEW YORK CITY MAYOR: Oh, my god, yes.
CUOMO: -- The desire.
GIULIANI: I certainly have the energy and there`s probably nobody that knows the Justice Department better than me.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: The head of Trump`s transition team, Governor Chris Christie would be a possibility for Attorney General, although of course there is Bridgegate still hanging over his head.
And, Newt Gingrich is being considered for Secretary of State as is Senate Foreign Relations Chair Bob Corker according to Politico.
As for legislative agenda, we can expect action on a host of items, taxes, defense spending, infrastructure spending, immigration and attempt to repeal the affordable care act and Dodd-Frank financial reform, some of that possibly hinging on the filibuster power of senate democrats.
Today, Trump met with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker Paul Ryan. And you can best those two men have a lot they want to do and they are thinking now we got someone we can do it with.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PAUL RYAN, HOUSE SPEAKER AND REPRESENTATIVE OF WISCONSIN: Let me just say how excited we are about these opportunities for the country.
We had a fantastic, productive meeting about getting to work, rolling up our sleeves and going to work for the American people.
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT-ELECT OF THE UNITED STATES: Whether it`s health care or immigration, so many different things, we`ll be working on them very rapidly. And I think we`ll be putting things up pretty quickly.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Joining me now, Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon.
Senator, I want to start with the images we`re seeing out of the city that I believe you`re in, Portland, where there are big street protests tonight.
There are street protests all over the country. There were last night. This is just the second day of the new world in which we find ourselves. What`s your reaction to what you`re seeing?
SEN. JEFF MERKLEY, (D) OREGON: Oh, these protests are folks sending a message to the president-elect that his attacks on Hispanics and blacks and veterans and virtually everyone at different aspects of society are totally unacceptable and that, quite frankly, as he assumes the mantle of leadership, he needs to assume a maturity that he has not demonstrated in the campaign and he needs to demonstrate that his campaign of divisiveness and denigration is done and he`s ready to put together policies that will, in fact be focused on making America work for working America.
HAYES: So, here`s my question. We all know how Mitch McConnell and John Boehner decided to play their role in the early days of Barack Obama`s presidency.
And they played that role amidst the worst financial crisis in 70 years in which they made a strategic political decision to offer no help to the president, not to say let`s find common grounds of things we can do together because that would validate that president.
There`s a case we made that was a very effective political strategy even if it was terrible for the country. You now find yourself in the senate democratic caucus which is the last bulwark of Democratic Party power at the federal level.
What is your strategy?
MERKLEY: Yes. I completely reject the strategy that Mitch McConnell has had of essentially inflicting pain on America in an effort to dismantle the credibility of an American president.
That strategy doesn`t belong in anyone in elected office. It`s unpatriotic. It`s destructive. It damages people. And we`ve seen it implemented over the last eight years and certainly not the way that I and my colleagues will approach it.
We`re going to find the areas that we can work together and certainly coming out of the gate, perhaps that`s all work on an infrastructure package to put America to work. It`s something both nominees -- not both nominees, but both candidates for president advocated for.
But we`re going to stand up and when the president comes in, president Trump comes in and says we`re going to do a tax package that will give away the American treasury to the billionaires, we`re going to say absolutely not.
HAYES: Senator, I have to say this, I want to -- I want to channel what I`ve seen from other folks. Not necessarily making the argument, myself. But let`s say the first two things are the following.
An infrastructure package that would genuinely include fiscal stimulus for the country and some construction jobs, and would be good for the country in some macroeconomic sense, and Democrats come to the table and they help them pass that, and they have, therefore, increase the political capital of Donald Trump who then makes his second item on the agenda on massive deportation force to try to go and get rid of the 11 million undocumented immigrants.
Don`t you contribute to his ability to do the latter if you help him do the former?
MERKLEY: I don`t think so. I think that there would be a massive reaction that it`s way beyond the realm of the acceptable.
You would see the American people responding in the streets as they are now. You would see us standing up and working to block such a bill and I think we have many partners on the republican side of the aisle that would say that that was absolutely unacceptable.
HAYES: I want to ask about the interesting battle now taking shape for the future of the Democratic Party. Howard Dean has thrown his hat into the ring to be DNC chair, Bernie Sanders said he wants to see Keith Ellison, your colleague on the other side of the aisle and also one of the very few members of the United States Congress who endorsed Bernie Sanders, you and he together.
Do you have a favored in that?
MERKLEY: Well, certainly, I think that we need to have a major shakeup at the DNC. What occurred in the -- during this last election was unacceptable. You need to have a DNC that treats all candidates equally.
But I think we have to infuse the energy of those who campaigned so hard in the election, the grassroots. It can`t be business as usual. That`s for sure. We`ve seen American electorate say business for usual is not going to work.
There is -- there is so much that was wrong with the Trump candidacy, but part of the folks who responded to his call were folks who have seen the genuine failure of the economy to lift up working people.
HAYES: Yes.
MERKLEY: And that`s certainly the one thing I agree with for the last four decades, this economy, virtually all the new income has gone to the top 10 percent, and we need to find those areas where we can actually make a change in that. And that includes enhancing manufacturing jobs in this country, it includes the ability to go to community college for free, it includes the ability to have debt-free higher education, it includes career technical education in our high schools.
There`s a host of areas we can really help working America, and by the way, it also includes taking on the pharmaceutical companies on the extravagant prices that they`re charging for the drugs. Americans need to stay healthy.
HAYES: All right. Senator Jeff Merkley, appreciate your time, thank you.
MERKLEY: There`s one other issue if I could slip it in.
HAYES: Sure.
MERKLEY: We really have to pay attention to the Supreme Court seat. The seat that is sitting empty is being stolen. It`s being stolen from the Obama administration and the construct of our constitution, and it`s being delivered to an administration that has no right to fill it, and we have to understand that this is about the Koch brothers` cartel working with the republican majority to say that they want to basically pack the court --
HAYES: Right. So, what are you going to do about it?
MERKLEY: It`s so important for our media, pay attention to this. We need to have America be informed on it, that`s why I want to raise it on - in your program, and to say that there`s no legitimacy to Supreme Court justice in a seat that`s been stolen from one administration and handed to another.
HAYES: So what - but - OK. So, no legitimacy, I understand your point, they left the seat open.
MERKLEY: Need to do everything we possibly can to block it. We need to use our power. You know, I`ve --
HAYES: So your belief - you belied is that Donald Trump`s Supreme Court nominee after the unprecedented obstruction of the Republican Party for 300 days under a sitting U.S. president, that the president-elect nominating to that court will be on arrival DOA and illegitimate?
MERKLEY: Well, it will be illegitimate but it won`t be DOA unless the American people understand this is the theft of the court and what it is, is a theft being delivering it to the Koch brothers, and the Koch brothers are not interested in we, the people. It`s turning our constitution on its head.
This is government by and for the most powerful. It`s locking in citizens united which is completely against the mother principle that Jefferson laid out for an equal voice for citizens. And this is going to corrupt our political system in a way never envisioned or intended by our constitution for a generation to come. And so, we need to be talking about it and we need to do everything we can to stop it.
HAYES: Would you take the position that Senator Richard Burr did before the election that you would keep that seat open as long as democrats could even if it took the entire duration of a term and keep a 4-4 court?
MERKLEY: Well, first I would call upon the -- not the administration, but the Majority Leader Merrick Garland, gets a legitimate shot at a vote here in the lame duck, and then the Trump administration, if they want to see a partnership and cooperation, needs to put Merrick -- if he puts forward a nominee, it should be Merrick Garland.
HAYES: Wow.
MERKLEY: Not packing the court from the far right.
HAYES: I`d be very interesting to see how this all plays out. Senator Jeff Merkley, I appreciate it. Thank you.
MERKLEY: Thank you.
HAYES: Still ahead, how Donald Trump`s narrow victory and supposed blue- wall states came with the help of former Obama voters and new evidence that James Comey`s FBI letter could very well be the reason there is a President-elect Donald Trump.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I like Donald Trump and I just -- it was just time for me to have a change in my life.
HAYES: Did you vote for Barack Obama?
UNIDENITIFIED FEMALE: Yep. I sure did.
HAYES: Twice?
UNIDENITIFIED FEMALE: Twice. Absolutely.
UNIDENITIFIED MALE: I voted for Obama twice. And I didn`t vote for him because he was a black man, I voted for him because he had a message of hope and change. I was a Democrat until this year.
HAYES: OK.
UNIDENITIFIED MALE: I switched parties so that I could vote for Trump initially in the primaries.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: The simplest way to understand Donald Trump`s victory Tuesday is that a chunk of the electorate that had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 decided to vote for Donald Trump this year. Many of them, white people without college degrees. Of the 700 counties nationwide that voted for Obama twice, only two-thirds of them stuck with the Democrats and Hillary Clinton, according to The Washington Post, about a third flipped to Trump this year.
By contrast of the 2,200 country counties that never voted for Obama, Clinton only managed to flip six. This is what that looks like across the country, those dark orange areas of the two-time Obama counties that went for Trump this year. Note the clusters in the northeast and the upper Midwest.
But you don`t need to zoom out quite so far to understand what happened on Tuesday. You just need to focus on three specific states that sealed Trump`s electoral college victory -- Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, which remains too close to call, Though trump holds the lead.
Those three states had previously been part of the so-called blue wall, a solid bloc of states that voted for the Democrat in every presidential election since 1992 when they powered Bill Clinton to victory. John Kerry won them in 2004, and if Hillary Clinton had held onto them Tuesday, she would be the president-elect today.
Trump only barely managed to edge her out, adding up his margins in those three key states, the cumulative total comes out to just around 107,000 votes. That is about the capacity of the University of Michigan football stadium.
In Ohio, another Rust Belt state that flipped from Obama to Trump, one woman told Pro Publica, she`s disappointed in the president after having voted for him.
"I don`t like the Obama persona, his public appearance and demeanor" Tracy St. Marting said. "I wanted people like me to be cared about. People don`t realize there`s nothing without a blue collar worker."
The author of that report joins me next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HAYES: Michigan hasn`t voted for Republican for president since 1988. In every election since its 16 electoral votes have been a pretty reliable part of Democrats` path to victory. This year all that changed.
As of right now the state is too close to call, Donald Trump is holding on to a margin of just under 12,000 votes. It`s tiny margin, especially when you consider this, almost 88,000 Michigan voters cast a ballot on Tuesday, but left the presidential line blank, nearly double the number from four years ago.
Joined now by Alec MacGillis, reporter for Pro Publica, author of a great new piece out today "Revenge of the Forgotten Class."
And Alec, I liked here`s been a lot of really and very fraught conflicts and fights about the sort of genre of reporting about the, quote, white working class in the Midwest. One thing I think that`s important to distinguish between our core Trump supporters and essentially the marginal voters that were necessary to put him over the top and you talked to a lot of those folks throughout the campaign. What did you learn?
ALEC MACGINNIS, PRO PUBLICA: Well, you`re right. This is a really important group. And I think, you know, too often we get into this discussion of, oh, the white working class, how can the Democrats ever get back the white working class? They lost them so long ago.
But what we`re talking about this year is really a subset of the white working class. These are people who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and some of them even in 2012. You cannot win these states -- Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, without winning quite a few of them. And Barack Obama did win quite a few of them.
The problem is that this year, Hillary Clinton did not win a lot of these same folks. She did not -- towns like Scranton, Youngstown, Toledo, she did 15 points worse than Obama in these towns and that`s why she lost these states.
So, the question is what do you need to do to get them back? And it`s not -- it shouldn`t be that hard of a problem because, again, you had them just four years ago. It`s just that this year, somehow the message -- the message didn`t get through the way it did four years ago that the Democrats are the party that`s on your side. Four years ago, they were so good at driving that message against Mitt Romney and this year it just wasn`t getting through.
Part of that`s Donald Trump, but part of it is also the direction that the Democratic Party and the candidate who was running this year had headed these last couple years.
HAYES: Yeah, that`s a -- I mean, people forget I think a little bit. I mean, 2012, Barack Obama pounded Mitt Romney for being essentially an out of touch multimillionaire tough who made his whole earnings off outsourcing and closing down factories. And that was a populist appeal. That worked. That was a very effective political strategy about a core economic message.
GM is alive and bin Laden is dead.
The core economic message from the Clinton campaign I think this year was beneath a set of layered messages about temperament and with those voters that temperament argument and that argument of bigotry did not move them.
MACGINNIS: It did not.
So that`s a big part of it, that they chose to go with that sort of unfitness for office argument instead, which that made some sense because one can make the case that he`s unfit for office but the economic message got lost.
The other part of it is that Hillary Clinton turned out to be not actually the best vehicle for that sort of economic message.
HAYES: Right.
MACGINNIS: You know, back in 2008, she won against Obama with these people. That`s the great irony. She beat Obama with these very voters in the primaries. But now she`s come a long ways from that Hillary Clinton who had represented upstate New York in the senate, now she`s the Hillary Clinton who is off in the State Department and then what did she do when she came back from the State Department?
Instead of going around these states and visiting small towns and all that, doing a listening tour, she went and gave a speaking tour. She went and gave 80 paid speeches over those 2 years for $18 million. That`s how she prepared to run for president.
HAYES: Let me say this, two quick things. One is, you say that and then you read the quotes in your article, right. There`s people who say, well, this really was about race and white nationalism. And then you read some of the quotes in your article, like, I don`t like his demeanor. And it is hard to think that that`s not playing some role in some of this voting decision as well.
MACGINNIS: Oh, absolutely. I mean, race is all mixed up in this. I have another quote in that article about a young guy who voted for Obama and is now talking about how he feels put off by the Black Lives Matter movement.
There`s absolutely race shot through all of this. It`s all mixed together.
The other part of it that I think we really can`t overlook is regional inequality.
HAYES: Yep.
MACGINNIS: We need to talk more about these places, it`s not just these voters. It`s these places that have fallen so far behind, these bubbles of prosperity that we have: New York, D.C., San Francisco, these places that are just completely soaring away from the rest of the country. So, it`s not just that these places are struggling, they`ve been struggling for a long time. It`s that they see these other places that are doing so incredibly well and the Democrats, let`s face it, the Democrats have become more and more the party of those places that are doing very well.
So it becomes almost culturally more difficult for them to reach out to these places that are struggling.
HAYES: And finally, just one thing, because we`re talking about these thin margins. James Comey`s decision to write that letter nine days before the election then a few days, you know, seven days later say actually there`s nothing to see here, I think there`s very strong evidence that that was pretty decisive.
Here`s the late breaking -- late deciders breaking for Trump, people that broke in the last week, go 50-38. The internal polling and the data that we have -- the RNC data showed the first week of October, two battleground states within three points, by the last weekend, 13 battleground states within 3 points. I mean, what is your sense of how important that was?
MACGINNIS: It was absolutely important.
You could sense the momentum shift at that moment. So clearly. And I think it was most important, actually, with the other voters that Trump got, the suburban college educated Republicans. We thought that more of them were going to defect from Trump because they just couldn`t stomach him.
In the end, he got a majority of college educated white votes. We need to remember that. It wasn`t just the white working class, it was also the more upscale voters.
HAYES: And those numbers moved a lot after the Comey letter which, again, was a letter about a set of emails he had not read in violation of DOJ policy, which he later then had to say had nothing to see there.
Thank you, Alec MacGillis.
Still ahead, I want to make the case for not unfriending anyone that you disagree with in your news feed because it`s partially maybe responsible for our current political climate. Although, also, I`ve hear that you may need to do that. I`ll explain ahead.
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HAYES: Tonight, a bonus Thing One, Thing Two without the commercial break in between.
While the political world was focused on Washington, D.C., today, as Donald Trump held meetings with President Obama and top GOP leaders, a mother in West Chester, New York, was described herself as heartbroken following the election decided to take her daughters hiking.
Margot Gurster wrote, "I decided to take them to one of my favorite places in Chappaqua. We were the only ones there. It was so beautiful and relaxing. As we were leaving I heard a bit of rustling coming towards me, and as I stepped into the clearing there she was."
Who did she run into while hiking in Chappaqua? Why, Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton walking their dogs. They stopped to chat and take a photo.
Gerster (ph) wrote "I got to hug her and talk to her and tell her one of my proudest moments as a mother was taking Phoebe with me to vote for her."
Last night I took a hike here at 30 Rock up to the 8th floor, I did run into Secretary Clinton, but I did appear on a comedy show on perhaps the least funny day I can remember in a long time. That`s thing two.
I was on Late Night with Seth Meyers, and normally this point we would play you the funny parts, but it wasn`t all that funny. But we had a really important discussion about what I think helped explain this election.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SETH MEYERS, LATE NIGHT: You actually wrote a book called "Twilight of the Elites" which talked about a lot of this in a strange way predict a lot of this. And you just mentioned distrust and there is a core distrust of the media, of our leaders, of even military leaders.
Like, there`s -- what -- does that trust ever come back or is it lost?
HAYES: That`s in some ways the project, right? The project has to be building back up some of that very necessary trust. Now, healthy distrust is good, right? And I think a lot of people learned that with the war in Iraq or the financial crisis, right. I mean, there was a lot of really smart authoritative people saying we got these models about housing derivatives and believe us, this is going to work. They were wrong.
But when you sort of weaponize that distrust, when you spread it everywhere, you actually lose the ability to form knowledge. And I mean this in a really literal sense. Like, the things that you, Seth Meyers, know, are actually just things that you read or heard from a trusted source.
MEYERS: Uh-huh.
HAYES: You know, like, you haven`t conducted the experiments, right?
MEYERS: No. No field work.
HAYES: You have not done the field work. You know it because of trust. And when that gets severed, you end up in a situation in which the entire public discourse goes completely, completely haywire.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Coming up, how the severing of public trust was amplified as the largest social media platform in the world became a hub for false news, right after this break.
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HAYES: Did you know that back in July, the pope endorsed Donald Trump? You saw it on Facebook. Says so in this article right here from WTOE 5 News: "Pope shocks world, endorses Trump."
The only thing is, it`s not true. If you do a little bit of digging on the WTOE 5 News website, it admits WTOE 5 News is a fantasy news site.
Most articles on WTOE5News.com are satire or pure fantasy.
That disclaimer doesn`t come up when you share its content on Facebook. The website, Snopes, debunked the fake Pope Francis endorsement. That article, the debunking, was shared about 33,000 times on Facebook. The original fake pope Trump endorsement got well over 800,000 shares. That was the election in a nutshell.
As Max Reid writes in New York Magazine. Basically Facebook built the largest platform for the dissemination of incorrect information and news ever created in human history.
Over the summer, Facebook got rid of its humans editing its trending topics list, essentially ceding editorial control to an algorithm, and enabling fake stories to proliferate.
Which is big problem, since the majority of Americans, 62 percent, say they get their news from social media.
According to Pew Research, 44 percent of all adults say they get news specifically from Facebook, while just two in ten say they often get their news from print newspaper.
Not surprising, considering Gallup found public confidence in the mass media at all-time low this past September.
And while Facebook is now admitting it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation, that kind of misinformation is twinned with another Facebook problem: the great unfriending of 2016, and how it isolates people even further next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HAYES: Facebook does not attract data on unfriending rates, but in the wake of this election anecdotally, the rate seems to be pretty high.
As one Clinton supporter in Chicago put it, I unfriended my brother and sister-in-law today not because they were being particularly obnoxious, and I already knew they were Trump supporters, but because seeing their posts and likes just serves as a sad reminder to me of how little we have in common.
While unfriending those with different views maybe cathartic, doing so means that people are further isolating themselves in like-minded bubbles, perhaps that`s part of what got us here in the first place.
Joining me now, Max Reid, senior editor at New York Magazine`s Select All, and author of the piece "Donald Trump won because of Facebook." Strong claim.
And Heather McGee, president of Demos Action and my very, very, very good friend.
Let me do the latter part of it, because these two are obviously related, right, like the things that you`re seeing in your feed tend to be shared by people who you`re socializing with and there tends to be a like-mindedness there. That`s part of what`s driving it. But this idea of like, you know, there`s all this discussion now about like people are out of touch with each other in these two Americas, and I think that`s true but also misses the fact that like everyone has family and are from places. You know what I mean?
It`s like, (inaudible) corridor. It`s like, yeah, people are from -- people`s parents voted for Trump or their sister or they did, and you know. What did you think about how the conversation across the political divide and racial divide is happening on social media right now?
MCGEE: Well, I think it`s happening, frankly, too much on social media and not in real life.
HAYES: I could not agree more. It`s happening in the place that`s like most conducive to the most kind of toxic interaction.
MCGEE: Yeah, absolutely. And frankly, it also means that we`re spending a fair amount of time really thinking a lot right now about sort of what is our civic time. We`re so people. People are so overworked. They get a little bit of home time and they plug into a screen.
And if a third of that time were actually spent in any kind of real life interaction with other human beings outside of your living room, I think we would have a different kind of social justice infrastructure, civic infrastructure, it sounds like Rotary Club of me, but it`s...
HAYES: No, it`s a great point, although the other part of the problem, which is what Alex MacGinnis was talking about is that we have this geographical polarization that`s happening as well. So, like, people aren`t living around each other with different views and across these sort of divides.
Social media becomes the place that they sort of experience it. And then social media, as you`ve written, I mean, it is crazy to think about the most powerful platform for the dissemination of information in the history of the planet has no editorial standards, like you could get 10 million views on an article that says Barack Obama was born in Kenya.
MAX REID, NEW YORK MAGAZINE: Yeah, absolutely. And because of the way Facebook works, because it has these sort of difficult to navigate privacy controls and stuff that sort of spirals off and you can`t really chase misinformation and find ways to debunk it the way you might be able to do on other social media platforms on Reddit or on Twitter.
And you know, I think it speaks to this idea: social media is the bad place to have these conversations in part because they`re being had underneath articles that are lies.
HAYES: Right, exactly. It`s the common thread of the article saying that, for instance, here`s one from the -- there is a Macedonian town that just churns out fake Trump information, because it gets them U.S. ad dollars and there are 17-year-olds who want to buy electric guitars. This is how teens in the Balkans are duping Trump supporters with fake news.
And like there`s an article there that in the lead that`s like Hillary Clinton is about to be indicted.
MCGEE: Well, but Donald Trump said that from the stump.
HAYES: Right, which is why that was a viral story.
MCGEE: Right.
And I do think that there is some responsibility here. I know it`s kind of like interesting to think about it in Facebook, but it also really started in Fox News and right wing radio. And the general narratives that are picked up by someone, a Macedonian teenager who doesn`t even live here can pick up and understand what the click bait things will be.
HAYES: Yeah, he just knows what will get read.
MCGEE: Because for the past ten years Fox News has been telling us four basic stories about the world that are now kind of understood deeply, like at a gut level, by the most -- excuse me, MSNBC, it`s the most watched cable news network in the country.
HAYES: Yeah, that`s true.
MCGEE: I want to lay a little more blame on a slightly bigger plattform.
HAYES: Although Facebook, the crazy thing is that Facebook now has a much bigger audience. And the amount of traffic they`re driving and particularly driving to like -- Fox News is in one category, but like a literal fantasy news website run by Macedonian teens.
REID: Well, I mean, you have to think about it like Facebook didn`t teach anybody to lie.
MCGEE: And it didn`t teach people to be duped by...
HAYES: No, or to want to hear what they -- what feeds into their prejudices.
REID: If Fox News is like a supersoaker, Facebook is like a fire hose. So you`ve got a cable network and they`re spraying disinformation everywhere, then Facebook comes along and they dump a reservoir on top of people.
MCGEE: And I think also a good question is sort of, OK, that`s what`s been done by mostly kind of right wing independent fake news and blogs.
But why aren`t progressives doing the same thing? And progressives are. I was just in the interaction today earlier with Upworthy, and their stuff is about feeling good. I mean, which is wonderful. But it`s just not the same kind of knife fight that is going on on the right.
HAYES: Well, and that`s part of what`s interesting, too, is that the people, for instance, the Macedonian teens, they don`t care whether they`re doing Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump stuff. They`re just doing what works and what gets shared. And the fact is that`s where all the money has been, in advertising, where all the shares have been in this election, it`s totally been on the right.
And that comes from totally politically neutral entrepreneurs who just want to get clicks.
REID: And sort of scarily neutral...
HAYES: Yeah, I mean like why is that, though?
REID: I mean, Trump -- so from what I`ve heard from people who have done some reporting about this is that Trump drives engagement big league. He does it bigger than anybody else. He`s got the greatest engagement that not even Bernie Sanders, not even Elizabeth Warren, not even the populist heroes of the left can possibly generate that kind of passion. I mean, that`s what it comes down to. And I wish I knew why, but I don`t.
HAYES: Quickly, should people be unfriending their...
MCGEE: Well, so, I think part of the problem here is that this was not even just a candidate election or a policy election or a party election, people really feel -- people on the left really feel like this was a values election. And so when Donald Trump sort of embodied racism, sexism and greed, it`s not like I`m unfriending you because of something small, it`s because you`re really, really hurting my values.
HAYES: At the core.
MCGEE: Yes.
HAYES: Heather McGee, Max Reid, thank you both. Appreciate it.
That is All In for this evening. The Rachel Maddow Show starts right now. Good evening, Rachel.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED. END