Summary
Millions of Americans face pause in jobless benefits after President Trump delays the signing of the COVID Relief Bill. The House passes a bill to increase stimulus checks to $2,000 and heads over to the Senate. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) is interviewed about the COVID Relief Bill. Marco Rubio managed to skip to the head of the COVID vaccination line and got his shots. Sen. Louie Gohmert sues Vice President Pence to change the rules of the electoral vote count.
Transcript
JOY REID, MSNBC HOST: Well, good people make good government, and good unions make for a good workplace. And Americans keep learning that over and over and over and over again. Mark Lawrenson, thank you very much. We're going to keep following up on this topic. That is tonight's REIDOUT. Thank you all for being here. "ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES" starts right now.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MEHDI HASAN, MSNBC HOST (voice over): Tonight on ALL IN. Trump leaves the golf course to sign COVID relief, but not before causing even more pain for millions for no reason.
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: And to send me a suitable bill or else the next administration will have to deliver a COVID relief package, and maybe that administration will be me.
HASAN: Tonight, the damage Donald Trump is doing every day he's still the president, the human suffering from his tantrums. And Michael Beschloss on this historically powerful leader.
Then, as Louie Gohmert sues Mike Pence to keep Trump in the White House, is there any doubt about the MAGA takeover of the Republican Party?
And as another new vaccine heads for approval, why estimates for hitting herd immunity creeping upwards?
ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES: I say between 75 and 80, 85 percent of the population. If we get that we would develop an umbrella of immunity.
HASAN: All in starts now.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HASAN (on camera): Good evening from Washington D.C. I'm Mehdi Hasan in for Chris Hayes. We still have 23 more days of Donald Trump as president, 23 more days where he will continue to do great damage to this nation. And that damage will extend well into the future.
Just today, President-Elect Joe Biden said that Trump and his political appointees at the Department of Defense and elsewhere are even now refusing to share crucial information with the incoming Biden administration.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT-ELECT OF THE UNITED STATES: Right now, we just aren't getting all the information that we need for the ongoing -- outgoing -- from the outgoing administration in key national security areas. It's nothing short in my view of irresponsibility.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HASAN: Trump spent the past four years flooding the zone with outrage of the outrage, from praising neo-Nazis to separating children from their parents, to causing tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of American deaths with his botched response to the pandemic, to name just a few of his lowest points.
But what he did this weekend is up there with the worst of the worst. In a stark illustration of his cruel indifference to the suffering of millions of Americans, the President spent the past few days golfing in Florida amid a temper tantrum driven by the refusal of some Republicans to aid his efforts to overturn the election and basically end American democracy.
The tantrum resulted in a heartless and pointless delay that earned him nothing but had disastrous consequences for millions of Americans. The President refusing to sign a COVID Relief Bill negotiated by his own administration with Congress until it was simply too little too late.
To be clear, Trump was trying to score some cheap political points by insisting on $2,000 direct payments to Americans instead of the $600 agreed in the bill. It was a number that many Democrats have long pushed for which is own administration and his own party had opposed. So, Trump refused to sign the bill as soon as it passed in Congress, and then basically just golf and tweeted the weekend away.
And there was no grand plan here. CNN reported that aids have prepared for the President to sign the bill as early as Christmas Eve. In fact, the smaller of Mar-a-Lago's two ballrooms was prepped for a 7:00 p.m. ceremony with a desk prepared and pens at the ready. But Trump then just decided not to go through with it.
Instead, the man we were told was the blue-collar billionaire, the champion of working people, waited to sign the bill until late last night. And as a result, billions of Americans are expected to lose an entire week of jobless benefits because benefits cannot be paid for a week that began before the bill was signed. And Trump outrageously, cruelly, pointlessly did not sign the bill until the start of the week on Sunday.
Now, some states are working to prevent that lapse in payments, but many Americans are expected to still lose out on money they desperately need right now. Rent doesn't wait a week. Car payments don't wait. Feeding your kids does not wait.
Trump could have signed the bill on Saturday and still gotten a few days of self-serving publicity out of delaying without hurting anyone. But he didn't. He didn't care. He was as ever indifferent to the suffering of millions of Americans while he partied and golfed at his Florida vacation home.
Marie Antoinette has nothing on this guy. On Thursday House Democrats attempted to pass by unanimous consent what Trump called for, $2,000 checks for most Americans. Republicans blocked that effort, so Democrats tried again today using a procedural move that requires two-thirds support. That effort narrowly passed. And now the bill heads to the Senate to Mitch McConnell.
For an update on where things stand now, I'm joined by Democratic Congressman Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the chair of the House Democratic Caucus. Congressman, welcome to the show. You got the two-thirds majority, you got the two k checks passed in the House, which is a good thing, but it has no real charms in the Republican-led Senate, does it? So, is this all just political theater all over again?
REP. HAKEEM JEFFRIES (D-NY): Well, that remains to be seen. And I think we're cautiously optimistic that if you take Republicans at their word -- and for the last four years, Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans have effectively behaved as wholly-owned subsidiaries of Donald Trump and the Trump administration.
That's why they passed the GOP tax scam, where 83 percent of the benefits went to the wealthiest one percent. If Donald Trump could convince them to waste $2 trillion on behalf of the wealthy, the well off, and well connected, perhaps on his way out the door, he can convince Mitch McConnell to do the right thing by the American people and pass the cash act.
HASAN: We can only hope and pray. Senator Bernie Sanders is saying today he plans to filibuster the Senate's override of Trump's veto on the defense bill to try and force Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans to hold a vote on the $2,000 direct checks in the Senate.
He wants to drag this out until New Year's Day to hurt the GOP, to put pressure on them. Is that something you support, something that more Senate Democrats should do to put pressure on McConnell, especially ahead of the Georgia runoff on January the fifth?
JEFFRIES: Well, I have great respect for senator Bernie Sanders. He's an authentic champion of working families and working-class Americans. But I leave it to the Senate to decide procedurally what is the correct approach to put the pressure on Mitch McConnell. But we want to make it clear that we passed the COVID relief bill that was really just a downpayment on what needs to happen moving forward, when we build back better and fight for the people under Joe Biden's presidency.
If we can get the cash act over the finish line, that's another meaningful step in the right direction, because everyday Americans are living hour to hour in some cases, day to day, week to week, and that $2,000 direct payment will be a lifeline to so many Americans, millions who have been struggling in the context of this deadly pandemic.
HASAN: So, I'm glad you called it a down payment. It's a recognition, of course, that we need so much more money. Trump finally signed the COVID Relief Bill last night shamefully late. But that bill itself is a shamefully small amount of money given how many Americans are suffering right now, as you mentioned.
Was it a defeat for Democrats? Nancy Pelosi opened with $3.4 trillion under Heroes Act in May, came down to $2.2 trillion in October and said she wouldn't budge from that, and then suddenly dropped to $900 billion this month with these measly checks in them.
JEFFRIES: No, it wasn't a defeat. You got to recognize that we are dealing with a president who's been missing in action, and who throughout the duration of this pandemic has often engaged in depraved indifference to human life amidst all the pain and suffering and death that the American people are experiencing. And then, Mitch McConnell had indicated all along, that they would go no higher than $500 billion.
And so, we were able to get them to just short of a trillion, again, just a down payment. But there has to be a recognition at the end of the day, that we're dealing with an obstinate Senate Republican majority led by the king of obstruction, Mitch McConnell, and a president who, on his best days is on the golf course, and on his worst days is actively working against helping working families, middle-class folks, and those who aspire to be part of the middle class.
HASAN: Indeed.
JEFFRIES: And so, it's a step in the right direction. Much more needs to be done under Joe Biden's leadership.
HASAN: It is a step in the right direction. And any fair-minded observer would agree that Mitch McConnell is to blame here and is the real block. I'm completely with you own that, Congressman. But given that Mitch McConnell was also the Senate leader in October when Nancy Pelosi said, I'm not going to budge from 2.2 trillion, and those negotiations then did kind of move, didn't go quite according to plan. Given you also lost seats in the House that many say you really shouldn't have, do you understand why your fellow New York Democrat Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others are saying it's time for a change of leadership at the top?
I mean, Speaker Pelosi has had a good run, 17 years leading your party in the House. Some people say it's time for new faces, maybe even yourself.
JEFFRIES: Well, I look forward on January 3rd, to once again placing the name of Nancy D'Alesandro Pelosi into nomination. She's been an extraordinary speaker, really a historic one, and has led us through a lot of trials and tribulations, and consistently our values and our priorities have come out on top given the circumstances that we find ourselves in.
We defeated Donald Trump, but we still are going to have to deal with Trumpism moving forward. The best way for us to do that is unify, working together in the House Democratic majority that will be sworn in this January.
HASAN: You don't think the loss of seats in the House affects anything in the House?
JEFFRIES: No. I expect that while we will certainly be leaner, we are going to be unified. And I think people on the hard left, people in the center have all said that this is going to have to bring us closer together. It's going to have to facilitate more collaboration.
At the end of the day, as Democrats, what brings us together is fighting for everyday Americans, working families, for middle-class folks, for young people, for seniors, for the poor, the sick, and the afflicted. And we can find the highest common denominator together. We're still going to have to defeat Trumpism.
And I think that we are going to be unified behind the presidency of Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris. We're looking forward to that. I've been an exile from the White House for years. I look forward to having a friendly voice for everyday Americans back at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
HASAN: We'll have to leave it there. Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, thank you so much for your time.
So, what happens to the American economy now that this relief bill has finally been signed by the president? I want to bring in former Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton and top economist Robert Reich. He's the author of the book The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It.
Robert, $908 billion is not enough to get America out of the ditch, is it, given millions unemployed, businesses going bust, long lines at food banks? We needed a relief bill in the trillions, didn't we?
ROBERT REICH, FORMER SECRETARY OF LABOR: We certainly do need a relief bill that's very, very similar to what Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats originally proposed. You left out one particular element and that is COVID. Now, that is the big, big elephant of the room, because we don't know how long it is going to go on.
We hope that by June or maybe by July, enough Americans are inoculated, vaccinated so that the economy can actually move onward. But between now and then, we've got five or six months, and you've got millions, tens of millions of Americans who don't know how they're going to make it between now and then.
So, that's where the real survival issue comes in. How do we make sure as a nation, as a society that all of these people, tens of millions of people have enough money to get through to when the economy starts up again? And we're nowhere close. And the relief bill that was passed is nowhere close.
HASAN: Yes, indeed, and even upping the checks from $600 to $2,000. We were told today would cost an extra half a trillion dollars or there about. Republicans ridiculously say we can't afford that amount of extra money. They said it in the House today. What do you say to them?
REICH: Well, first of all, I want to point out to them -- I would point out to them if I had the opportunity that it was not that long ago that they found the money for an almost $2 trillion tax cuts for the rich and for big corporations, and they never -- they never blinked. They didn't say, well, we can't afford it or we have a deficit or debt problem we've got to address. No.
When Republicans come to the question of whether a tax cut for the rich or for big corporations can be afforded, there is never a problem. When they come to a question of whether unemployment insurance for the people who are really in need in this country or any kind of other $2,000 per person --- $2,000 per person is not going to nearly make it over the next six months. You try to pay the rent, and also put food on the table and do everything else you need with $2,000. Well, you just can't do -- most people can't do it.
HASAN: Yes, no. And yet, you have these tone-deaf Republicans on the House floor today. There's been this debate elsewhere, especially online among liberals and leftists about whether the original COVID stimulus, the Cares Act, was a big enough stimulus to begin with. Some people saying, other Western countries did better, spent more. Some say no, we spent more than others did. isn't the real problem, Robert, that stimulus money in the U.S. compared to Canada or Germany doesn't go very far because we have health care costs that they don't, we don't have the kind of social safety nets that they already have in place. Isn't that the real issue?
REICH: Exactly. I mean, it's comparing apples to oranges. Almost every other advanced country in this world has safety nets that are really thick safety nets. They pay for health care; they pay for unemployment insurance to a much greater extent. They provide a paid family leave. They provide all sorts of things that we do not provide.
We are the harshest form of capitalism existing in among every advanced nation. And to compare us to what we spend or what they spend on COVID really doesn't make much sense. We have not spent very much. They have spent much more. And if you include all of their social safety nets, they are spending huge amounts. They're keeping people employed, or if they're not employed, they're at least keeping people on payrolls. They are doing a far better job in alleviating the anxiety and the underlying problems of insecurity that affect the American workforce.
HASAN: Yes. And I wonder, Robert, is there a silver lining, though, to this ongoing debate over $2,000 checks, specifically, that now we have Republican buying in the form of a Republican president for direct cash transfers from the government to ordinary Americans, something Republicans have recoiled from for years.
Now, surely, Democrats can come back under President Biden and try again. It'll be very odd for Republicans to act as if it's some sort of crazy socialist idea when it's been publicly endorsed by their own former president and party leader.
REICH: Well, it's going to determine -- a lot of this really turns on January 5th. Let's face it. If you get two senators in Georgia who are Democrats so that the Senate flips and Kamala Harris actually becomes the deciding vote in the Senate, everything is different. We're in a very different universe.
If Mitch McConnell is still the controlling force in the Senate -- you have Mitch McConnell continues to do what he's been doing since the beginning of the Obama administration -- remember, this is the man who said, my number one priority is to make Obama a one-term president -- well, he's going to obstruct everything. And anything that is done with regard to COVID getting people through this, providing survival benefits, providing a stimulus that gets the economy back on track, anything that's done is going to have to probably be done by executive order or by regulation.
HASAN: Yes. But whether Joe Biden will be willing to use those executive orders, let's wait and see. Robert Reich, thank you so much for your time and your insights tonight. We appreciate it.
REICH: Thank you, Mehdi.
HASAN: Next, the cruelty of President Trump holding the Coronavirus relief hostage as he golfed in Palm Beach. Historian Michael Beschloss puts the President's tantrum in perspective after this.
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HASAN: For decades, Herbert Hoover has been the benchmark for a historically terrible president. His own official White House biography describes how in the midst of the dark days of the depression, Hoover's view was that caring for hungry and cold Americans "must be primarily a local and voluntary responsibility," leading his opponents in Congress to unfairly paint him as a callous and cruel president.
Whether or not that was really an unfair characterization, Hoover's name became synonymous with heartlessness and indifference to the suffering of ordinary Americans. In the wake of Donald Trump's recent behavior, causing millions of struggling Americans to lose their unemployment benefits for a week for no real reason, none whatsoever, does he now top Herbert Hoover when it comes to callousness and cruelty?
And as the COVID death toll continues to rise, is he no longer just one of the worst presidents in American history, but the worst? Who better to ask than Michael Beschloss, presidential historian for NBC News and MSNBC. He joins me now. Michael, thanks so much for coming on the show. Does Donald Trump make Herbert Hoover look like Mother Teresa?
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS, MSNBC PRESIDENTIAL HISTORIAN: Yes, you know, Mehdi, it does make Herbert Hoover look like Mother Teresa, both because Hoover was personally a very compassionate person. He helped people get food in World War One, and after World War Two. But he did believe at the time of the Great Depression with millions of Americans starving and dying in some cases, he felt it was not the federal government's job to help them. That was something that FDR did feel.
And what it leads to, Mehdi, is that you do always want someone as president who has compassion and empathy. Lincoln, for instance, who at early in the Civil War, there were so many Union soldiers being killed, that they said, we need to build a new cemetery, where do you want it. And Lincoln said, build it near my summer house, because I want to see the graves being dug. I want to see the weeping widows. It's going to be very painful for me, but I want to always see the results of the terrible decisions I'm making. That's what a real leader does. That's what a real president does.
HASAN: Yes. As opposed to the current president, who when confronted with the COVID death toll, says it is what it is. Michael, many presidents have sadly caused harm to the American people or being indifferent to the suffering of ordinary Americans. But can you point to another president who's done the kind of thing Trump did this weekend delaying financial aid to unemployed Americans for no other reason than that he was having a tantrum and busy golfing. There was no ideological or policy reason for doing what he did yesterday.
BESCHLOSS: Now, Donald Trump is the kind of person that we have never ever seen before in the presidency, and I hope we never ever see it again. And what I mean by that is someone who -- you know, most of us met a when you get to the age of six, you begin to care for other people and see the world through their eyes, especially when they're suffering. You particularly want that on the President of the United States.
Dwight Eisenhower was the Supreme Commander on D-Day. The decisions he made meant the deaths of a lot of young Americans and others, and he knew it. For the rest of his life, Eisenhower was a tough guy, but whenever he spoke in public about the men, mostly men, some women on D-Day, he would cry in public and have to put a handkerchief over his face.
Lyndon Johnson, when he was president, Johnson knew what it was like for black people to be beaten up in the streets of the cities in this -- in this country, and it made him want to do something about it. When you've got a president who has no empathy, who has no compassion, you see a spectacle like what we've seen this week.
HASAN: Yes. And I wonder, when you study the biographies of these men, as you have, and of course, they've all been men, do you come across them openly talking about their legacies and wondering how history will judge them?
BESCHLOSS: Yes, they do. But they do it in terms of, you know, what can I do to make this country better so that 50 years from now people will say, this is something that this president did that was distinctive, and maybe he did it against his own selfish, political self-interest.
It's hard to think of the case where Donald Trump has ever done that. And also, Harry Truman once said, he couldn't imagine a president who does not read history. Because the only way a president, he said, can get any benefit from all the successes and failures of earlier presidents and earlier citizens is to know where they succeeded and failed in history.
He said that every reader will not be a leader, but every leader must be a reader. If Truman came back and saw a president as completely ignorant and indifferent to history as Donald Trump, I think he would have been shocked.
HASAN: Michael, aren't you being unfair to Donald Trump? He says he studied history and he's the best president since Lincoln.
BESCHLOSS: OK, well, I'm the king of Romania, Mehdi.
HASAN: I got to ask you before I let you go. I've asked this before, I would ask you again. When do we go beyond saying Donald Trump is among the worst presidents in history and say, with days to go until he leaves office, he's basically the worst?
BESCHLOSS: Well, a historian has to always account for the possibility that 50 years later a president would look better in some ways than he did to his own generation. That having been said, Donald Trump is not going to change the record. He was largely responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans who did not need to die, millions of others who suffer from COVID who did not need to suffer, an economic calamity that is afflicting people tonight in a way that is not going to be alleviated by $600 or $2,000 while the President sits in Palm Beach, and the vice president sits in Vail on a ski slope, and the Secretary of the Treasury is in Cabo San Lucas in Mexico. This is really Nero's fiddling while Rome burns.
HASAN: Indeed, America is burning in so many ways today. Michael, we'll have to leave it there. Thank you so much for your time. Always a pleasure to have you on. I always learned so much from you. Thank you.
BESCHLOSS: Thank you. Same with me, Mehdi.
HASAN: Still to come, as Marco -- I appreciate it, Michael. Still to come, as Marco Rubio gets hammered for his COVID hypocrisy, why we should all be nevertheless paying attention to the shifting numbers regarding herd immunity. That's next.
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HASAN: Marco Rubio is doing that thing again where he annoys everybody by trying to play both sides of an issue on COVID. The Republican senator played down the virus for months, including speaking maskless at a campaign event last month in Georgia for Kelly Loeffler. But he nevertheless managed to skip to the head of the vaccination line more than a week ago. How nice.
Yesterday, Rubio tweeted that Dr. Anthony Fauci lied to the American public about masks and had distorted the vaccination levels needed to achieve herd immunity. But hold on. Maybe as much as I hate to say it, does Rubio have a point? Not that Fauci has lied, but the country's top infectious disease expert has on more than one occasion shifted his statements on the Coronavirus on how to handle it.
The New York Times reported this very thing last week noting "Dr. Anthony Fauci has been slowly but deliberately moving the goalposts on when herd immunity is possible, from lower estimates of 60 to 70 percent of Americans vaccinated, to more recently 75, 80, 85 percent even. "Dr. Fauci said that weeks ago, he had hesitated to publicly raise his estimate because many Americans seemed hesitant about vaccines, which they would need to accept almost universally in order for the country to achieve herd immunity."
Now, those kinds of changes in messaging, I think, are not particularly helpful in fighting the pandemic, even though you could argue they might be necessary as we expand our knowledge about a new and vicious virus that has now killed one out of every 1,000 Americans.
Olivia Troye is a former member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. She worked with Dr. Fauci. She's also a former adviser to Vice President Mike Pence. She joins me now. Olivia, Dr. Fauci has become a living legend, a national treasure. He celebrated his 80th birthday last week on Christmas Eve. The mayor of D.C. declaring it an Anthony Fauci day.
I know you're a fan. I spot his picture on the wall over your right shoulder. But he's not perfect, is he, whether it's saying masks weren't necessary at the start of the crisis, to now shifting the goalposts on herd immunity levels?
OLIVIA TROYE, FORMER MEMBER, WHITE HOUSE CORONAVIRUS TASK FORCE: Correct. Here's the thing, Mehdi. The thing about science is it's all about gathering data and facts in a situation that's evolving, right. And what we know about this virus has continuously evolved from day one, starting in January when we didn't even have access on the ground to really test a virus and figure all that situation out early on.
And so, what you have here is, you know, it is going to continue to evolve. This information, the data, will continue to evolve along the way. And so, I think, you know, Mark Rubio's tweet, what he doesn't put into context with the fact that Dr. Fauci was talking about vaccinations. And you know, in order to reach a certain level of immunity against this virus, you're going to have to have a significant part of the population vaccinated before you can reach a certain level of herd immunity.
And so -- and you know, his -- actually, his modeling is based on the measles virus, which is known to be the most contagious virus out there. And so that's what it is based on. And early on, with the mask, you know, there was a big debate on the taskforce about how we were going to message the mask so that there wouldn't be a rush that would prevent medical workers from getting mask.
And so, that was also part of the messaging. But absolutely, messaging is key. And I get your point of conflicting messaging is hurtful. But honestly, Marco Rubio's tweet that he put out is actually even more hurtful because he's continuing to contribute to the divisive on this pandemic.
HASAN: Yes. And we'll come back to Rubio in a moment. Just sticking with Fauci, I get what you say about the science changes, new data comes in. It's a new virus. I totally understand that. But he said in the interview with The Times that the reason he didn't raise the herd immunity level before was because Americans weren't ready to hear it. But now he thinks they are based on the polling, based on how many people are willing to get vaccinated.
Is that a wise thing to do from a public health messaging perspective? Doesn't it allow people like Rubio to accuse him of trying to manipulate public opinion? Why don't just be honest with Americans from the very beginning?
TROYE: Well, I can see how people will take the message, and that provides an opportunity for counter narratives, you know, to come into play. But the thing is, I think what Dr. Fauci's point was he really was trying to encourage people to get vaccinated. And we -- you know, we understand that this issue has been somewhat a divisive thing in our country where you have people who are scared to take the vaccine, who are scared of whether it's effective, whether it's legitimate.
I mean, look, I'm going to be very honest. My mom is 76 years old. She has told me that she has concerns about taking the vaccine. And I want more than anything for her to be immune against this virus. And so, this division on the vaccine and whether to take it is real. And I understand that. Obviously, it hits home with me.
So, I think -- you know, I think in terms of the vaccination, we do need to encourage and show that the vaccine is safe. There is a legitimate process that when it was underway, and I personally, you know, we have Operation Warp Speed who worked hard, and some of the statements coming out of the White House from the President and others have politicized it to a certain extent.
HASAN: Yes. I mean, you mentioned your mother is in her 70s. I have to say, what do you make of Marco Rubio a healthy 49-year-old who goes around without a mask on at rallies, getting a vaccine before 99 percent of Americans? How does that sit with you?
TROYE: Not very well, because, you know, I remember the Marco Rubio of last March where he was telling people to take the pandemic seriously. I remember the Rubio of the summer where he had concerns about opening schools and then suddenly, he didn't have concerns about opening schools, you know. So, I don't know.
When it comes to Marco Rubio being a, you know, recovering Republican like myself, I've watched Rubio along the way always shift which would -- whichever the wind is blowing, right. So, it's really more literally about politics than actually what's doing what's right for the American people, his constituents, and the people in the state who are actually really suffering in this pandemic.
HASAN: Yes. I mean, he is a -- he is definitely a wind shifter, but to get vaccinated and then be divisive on the issue of vaccinations is even a new low even for Marco Rubio. Olivia Troye, thank you so much for joining me on the show. We'll have to leave it there.
Still ahead, why is Congressman Louie Gohmert suing Vice President Pence in the latest bid to steal the election for Trump? I'll explain what in the world he's up to after this.
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HASAN: With just nine days to go until the final procedural hurdle in the 2020 election, the formal counting of electoral votes by Congress on January the sixth, the Trump dead-enders in the Republican Party of pulling what we can only hope will be one of their last stunt to try to overturn the outcome.
Today, Congressman Louie Gohmert of Texas filed a lawsuit along with several of Donald Trump's electors from Arizona to try to get rid of the rules that govern next week's vote counting. By law, Congress meets on January the sixth to open seal certificates from each state and read the results aloud with the President of the Senate, Vice President Mike Pence, preceding.
Gohmert's lawsuit claims that Pence should be able to ignore the results that give Joe Biden a majority of the Electoral College votes and count votes for Donald Trump instead. It's very unlikely that this longshot suit will go anywhere. But apparently, it's what the boss wants. And Louie Gohmert is still taking marching orders from Trump tweets.
"If a Democratic presidential candidate had an election rigged and stolen with proof of such act to the level never seen before, the Democratic senators would consider it an act of war and fight to the death. Mitch and the Republicans do nothing. Just want to let it pass. No fight."
Well, that kind of thing has happened before in the year 2000. Democrat Al Gore famously lost an extremely close election by way of a margin of 537 votes in Florida. And the legal battle that ended with the Supreme Court essentially handing the election to George W. Bush despite accusations of dirty tricks and voter disenfranchisement.
Al Gore was of course still the vice president on January the sixth 2001 when Congress formally counted the electoral votes, and surely painfully, he had to preside over the counting as President of the Senate. There were protests from some Democrats back then upset about the nature of their party's laws. But Al Gore, of course, play by the rules.
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REP. MAXINE WATERS (D-CA): Mr. Vice President, I rise to object to the fraudulent 25 Florida electoral votes.
AL GORE, FORMER VICE PRESIDENT, UNITED STATES: Is the objection in writing and signed by a member of the House and a senator?
WATERS: The objection is in writing and I don't care that it is not -- it is not signed by a member of the Senate.
GORE: The chair will advise that the rules do care and the signature of the senator -- the signature of a senator is required. The chair will again put that part of the question, is the objection assigned by a senator?
WATERS: Mr. Vice President, their gross violations of the Voting Rights Act from Florida and I object, and it is not signed by a senator.
GORE: The gentlewoman -- the chair thanks to gentlewoman from California on the basis previously stated. The point of order may not be received.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HASAN: Al Gore, the man who lost the election did what he believed was right for the good of the country that day, shutting down his own Democratic colleagues in the process. In a little over a week, it will be the party of Trump's turn and we'll talk about that next.
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HASAN: Rupert Murdoch's tabloid newspaper The New York Post is now telling Donald Trump to move on, to stop as they put it cheering for an undemocratic coup for both his sake and the country sake. Forgive me if I don't totally buy the Posts' belated change of heart. The paper, like the Republican Party has spent so much time egging on Donald Trump that they long ago ceded their authority and even their identity to the man. And it's far too late to turn back now.
Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz made that point explicitly clear when he tweeted yesterday, "I'm not going back to yesterday's Republican Party. This is Donald Trump's party." For more on the future of Donald Trump's party, the GOP, Tina Nguyen is a White House Reporter at Politico where she covers MAGA world. Jennifer Holden is the former chair of the New Hampshire Republican Party, who announced this month that she's leaving the party over GOP efforts to overturn the election result.
Tina, though, let me start with you. Is it Donald Trump's party as Matt Gaetz says? It sure looks like it from where -- from where I'm sitting.
TINA NGUYEN, WHITE HOUSE REPORTER, POLITICO: It's a strange situation because you can't quite tell where the party ends and where Donald Trump's supporters begin. Well, you have members who are 100 percent Republicans and pro-Donald Trump, you also have a giant section of Republicans who are saying, OK, we maybe need to move on and just deal with the Biden presidency. Let's certify the results in Congress next week and say, OK, Biden won because here are the votes. Or you can indulge in a fantasy and say that Donald Trump isn't going to leave the White House. And what we can do is somehow manipulate the rules of Congress to do so. And that's where the split lies.
HASAN: Yes. And in that split, Jennifer, you've been part of that split where you've gone beyond that split. And I wonder, did you leave the GOP because you believe not only that it's Trump's party, but that it can no longer be anything other than Trump's party. There's no rescuing of it.
JENNIFER HORN, FORMER CHAIR, NEW HAMPSHIRE REPUBLICAN PARTY: Well, that's exactly what we learned when we watched how the Republican Party leaders behaved post-election, it became clear that they were willing to engage in borderline seditious behavior trying to overturn a legitimate election, the results of a legitimate election in the United States in order to somehow protect and preserve Donald Trump.
You know, that the New York finally kind of coming to grips with reality a little bit. It might be a good thing, but it did not have any impact on a Republican lawmakers who are going to remain tightly under Donald Trump's thumb for years to come. You know, they live in fear of a Trump supportive primary --
HASAN: Someone -- Jennifer, someone is keen to speak to you there. I'll let you stop that call. Maybe someone from the Republican Party is trying to get you back. Tina, in the meantime, let me come back to you. Will a New York Post front page make any difference in MAGA world? I mean, Fox News dared to call the election for Biden, and Trump supporters just switched over to OANN and Newsmax rather than accept the Fox call.
NGUYEN: I think that might have happened with the New York Post as well. As you've been seeing in the past couple of weeks, any Republican entity, even ones that are extensively pro-Trump such as Tucker Carlson or the majority of Fox News hosts, the moment that they break from that narrative of OK, there isn't evidence saying that the election was stolen, then MAGA world starts turning on them and going, oh, well, you've been bought out by corporate media.
You can start seeing a bit of that with the New York Post op-ed where you have people looking at this op-ed and saying, OK, no, you're truly not believers. Here's all your corporate ties that we suddenly care about right now. So, there will be other newspapers that they'll flock to. There will be other MAGA friendly online internet sources that they'll immediately start sharing on their various social media feeds. But at this point, like there is really nothing that the New York Post can do to win them back other than retract any sort of story or just pretend the story never happened and then go straight back to supporting Donald Trump's request to overturn the election.
HASAN: Here's my question to you, Tina. If it is Donald Trump's party, if it's the Trump GOP, does that mean the 2024 candidate will be a Trump, if not Donald himself, then Don Jr. or even Ivanka?
NGUYEN: That's a difficult question to answer right now. Obviously, if the presidential candidate is Trump, then the president is 100 percent -- then the Republican Party is going to have to fall behind him because there's really no one else that can establish themselves against him. If he doesn't run, however, it's going to be difficult for anyone to take on the party of Trump without Trump himself, saying, I give my blessing. Who knows if that's going to happen.
But you can see all these other Republicans who have stepped in and tried in their own Senate races or House races and say, I am superduper pro-Trump, I support all these Trumpian policies, I'm even going to emulate Trump. But if Trump decides that he doesn't like them at one moment, then Trump's base immediately just turns against them.
You saw that with Kelly Loeffler. You kind of see that with the Georgia Senate race right now where these two candidates are trying so hard to hue to Trumpian policies, say the right Trumpian things, and there's still a giant set of MAGA supporters who think that they were the beneficiaries of a "stolen election and some scheme in Georgia to steal votes from Trump." So, at this point, it's all -- it's all Trump's game. Can you give these voters up? Who knows?
HASAN: Yes. And here's what I don't get. When you have this kind of Trumpy Republican Party with a Trumpy base which, you know, says I'm going to -- you know, we're going to switch TV channels if we don't like the news we see, we're going to switch papers if we don't like the front pages we see. When you have a party like that, which is basically a kind of cult of personality, and then you have Joe Biden saying, as he said last week, once Trump is gone, I'm going to be able to work with the Republican Party. And I just feel like isn't that a fantasy?
NGUYEN: It really depends on how prevalent Trump will be in politics and whether he has a group of people left in Congress whose priority is him above, you know, their own supporters or their own leadership. That's a question that I haven't been able to personally answer because the entire base of MAGA is all primarily one, internet-based, and two, not particularly concentrated in one area or one constituency. Like geographical, that could be represented by a House or -- like a House representative or a Senate member. That is -- like honestly, I can't particularly tell if they'll -- if they'll keep going on this way.
HASAN: Yes. It's going to be one of those -- one of those wait -- one of those wait and see games, although I'm very skeptical myself. Jennifer is back, I believe. I believe we can speak to he. We might not be able to see it, but I do want to bring it back in discussion before we run out of time.
Jennifer, you quit the party. Steve Schmidt and others have quit the party. What's your advice to Republicans like Mitt Romney and others who are staying in and fighting? Should they quit too?
HORN: You know, it's completely up to them whether or not they want to become independent or stay with a party, but it's just imperative that they continue to speak up. You know, you mentioned Joe Biden talking about wanting to work with Republicans when he becomes president.
I believe Joe Biden's commitment is real and true. But as long as people like Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy are declaring, you know, war on the Democratic Party or on the Democratic president, you know, declaring that this is about blocking and obfuscating at every turn, it's going to be very difficult to get cooperation from any of the Republicans.
And frankly, as long as the Republican Party continues to see themselves as Matt Gaetz said yesterday as the party of Trump, I don't see a world where they're going to be able to work on behalf of the American people in compromise with President Biden or any of the other Democrats.
HASAN: Jennifer, we've got 20 seconds left. Quick last question. You quit the Republican Party, you became an independent. Do you have plans to join Joe Biden's Democratic Party.
HORN: I don't have plans to join the Democratic Party. I'm going to be an independent. I still hold a lot of my conservative values. And most importantly, I am pro-democracy, which the Republican Party is not at this time.
HAYES: I think that's a good position for all of us to hold, pro-democracy the bet. I mean, it's crazy to have to say that, but we do in 2020. Tina Nguyen and Jennifer Horn, we'll have to leave it there. Thank you both so much for your insights.
That is ALL IN for this evening. You can always catch me on my new show streaming on Peacock every weeknight at 7:00 p.m. Eastern. "THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW" starts now with my good friend Ali Velshi in for Rachel. Good evening, Ali.
ALI VELSHI, MSNBC ANCHOR: I got a smile on my face when you said that part about how we just all need to be pro-democracy. It should be obvious, but it's actually not. And I think the important thing to point out is whether you're Republican or an Independent or libertarian or a liberal or progressive, it doesn't matter.
There's a choice to be made right now. You either on the side of democracy or you're not. Fantastic that we have to say it.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.END
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