Summary
Donald Trump's niece, who is a trained clinical psychologist has said Donald Trump is, quote, "a very sick man". His sickness was on full display last night in every second of what he said and didn't say. In his new book, Reverend Al Sharpton says "Our nation stands at a cross roads, a historical turning point that's testing our moral character and endangering all we have fought to gain."
Transcript
LAWRENCE O'DONNELL, MSNBC HOST: Good evening, Rachel.
You said something about the debate tonight that has guided my coverage tonight. You said this debate needed something more than just fact checking. And so we're trying to take this to a different level in this hour. Mary Trump is going to be here and other people who will have a way of thinking about what we all went through last night that I'm sure is better than anything I have to say about it because I -- I think we all felt shell shocked.
I think I had to go on 40 minutes after it ended. You had to go on immediately which I do not envy because I had nothing to say. I had, zero, nothing to say. There were no words when that debate was over and it was a struggle for me to speak at all even within the hour of that debate ending.
RACHEL MADDOW, MSNBC HOST, "TRMS": It's -- and I think it's sort of -- I think the president's tactics here are designed to do that. I think they are designed to flummox us, to make us not understand what we just saw, to make us believe that that wasn't a useful thing that we should do ever again as a country, that we should give up on this idea that candidates would debate, this idea of the president trying to destroy the game because he knows he's going to lose it.
You know, it is more than taking your ball and going home. It is setting the arena on fire. It is designed to demoralize us and think the normal ways we decide elections aren't the way that it's going to be decided this year. And he doesn't get to decide that. But demoralizing all of us and disgusting all of us and rendering us all speechless about what it is that we're watching is a pretty good tactical step toward doing it. We just have to figure out how to resist and stick up for the way we normally do things as a country and insist we're going to do them that way this year, too.
O'DONNELL: Well, you did a good job of framing it before it started and dealing with it after it was over when I was still in speechless mode. So thank you for that.
MADDOW: You're very kind, Lawrence. Thank you, my friend.
O'DONNELL: Thank you, Rachel.
To go back to what Rachel said last night, she said that this debate demands something more than fact checking, but she said she wasn't sure what that is, and that's exactly the way I felt. I wasn't sure, and I'm not sure what that is either and that's why we will be joined tonight by people that I know for sure have much more important things to say about this debate than I do, more important observations about it.
Mary Trump, Donald Trump's niece, will join us. She has personal insights into what the president of the United States was doing last night that none of the rest of us have.
Caroline Randall Williams will join us because, as I watched the debate last night, I thought the most important things about this debate will not be said by the pundits. They will be said by the poets. But the poets take time. Caroline Randall Williams has had only 24 hours. She is a poet and author and essayist, and a brilliant, big thinker. We will get her first draft reaction to what America experienced last night.
And we'll be joined by a woman who grew up in the heartland, Oklahoma, worked in Texas where she began raising her family and now is the senior senator from Massachusetts. Elizabeth Warren will help us keep our eye on what the debate distracted us from last night and was barely mentioned in the debate, the president of the United States does not pay income taxes and Elizabeth Warren has a plan for that. Elizabeth Warren is not just complaining about how outrageous it is that Donald Trump doesn't pay income taxes. She has a real legislative solution to force Donald Trump to pay the taxes that he owes to this country.
And with only 33 days, 33 campaign days left in presidential campaign, we will discuss where the campaign stands tonight after the debate with someone who has been there and done that. David Plouffe was in the command staff of both of the successful Obama presidential campaigns, and he will give us a campaign professional's view of exactly where the candidates stand in this race tonight.
I've seen every televised presidential debate in American history. I was a little kid sitting on the floor of the living room, watching the very first televised presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Sixteen years then passed before we had our next televised presidential debate, in 1976, between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.
Televised presidential debates are not a mandatory part of presidential campaigning and might be time to reconsider the value of the ritual. It doesn't actually test presidential skills. In the rooms where president's govern, they are never told they only have two minutes to respond to what someone just said in that room. Presidents never had to make decisions alone without having expert advice available to them.
And so, candidates standing there alone on the debate stage, answering questions about how they will govern has always been, in a sense, a fictional television construct of how they would govern because they do not govern alone. And we get no real sense of how they will operate in the Oval Office or cabinet room or Situation Room or when privately dealing with Congress in presidential debates.
But then Donald Trump came along and four years ago, Donald Trump made the presidential debate ritual all the more absurd. And then last night, Donald Trump took it to a new low when no one realized it was possible for him to actually find a way to go lower, but he did. The president of the United States actually told armed white supremacists to standby.
Not to stand down, not to disband. He did not condemn them. He did not shame them. He told them to standby because he might need them.
He might need them to intimidate people on Election Day. He talked a lot about wanting his supporters to go into polling places on Election Day not to vote but disrupt. And it is illegal in many places for people not voting, to try to enter polling places. But Donald Trump doesn't care about that.
For once, a presidential debate actually did reveal an important truth, the truth of who Donald Trump is and the tragic truth about the way he actually does govern.
Olivia Troye has been in the room with President Trump. Olivia Troye was Mike Pence's senior staff person working on the Coronavirus Task Force in the Trump/Pence White House.
Today, Olivia Troye told Nicolle Wallace what she saw last night.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
OLIVIA TROYE, FORMER AIDE TO VP PENCE: Quite frankly, I'm grateful that President Trump showed his true colors to the entire nation and what exactly I have been talking about, about what it's like to brief him. What you saw is, literally, what it is like inside the White House every day.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
O'DONNELL: Our first guest worked inside a different White House, the Obama White House. Leading off our discussion tonight is David Plouffe, former White House senior adviser to President Obama and the campaign manager or Barack Obama's 2008's presidential campaign. He is an MSNBC political analyst.
David, where do the candidates stand tonight after that debate in this campaign?
DAVID PLOUFFE, MSNBC POLITICAL ANALYST: Lawrence, let's talk about where we were before the debate. Donald Trump is losing the election. Joe Biden is at 49 percent, 50 percent, 51 percent in battleground states.
So, for Donald Trump to win, this is a mathematical fact, he's going to have to get historic turn-out and hope Joe Biden gets poor turnout. He's going to have to win every single undecided that's still out there, and because Biden is polling at his win number, essentially, above 50, he's got to poll soft Biden supporters back.
And if anything last night, he hardened the Biden supporters that were soft. They're now hard Biden. I think any hope of getting undecided voters is probably out the door, he blew his last chance.
Now, I'm sure his base liked the tantruming and, you know, maybe that will increase enthusiasm a little bit. But this is an incumbent who is in desperately terrible political shape, and he did nothing to improve his standing.
And so the question is, is there any adjustment going into the second debate? So, you know, you remember, Lawrence, in 2012, in the Obama/Romney race, we had a terrible first debate. So, what you do when you're an incumbent running for reelection, have a bad first debate is, how do we change that? What did we do wrong? How do we get back on our front foot?
If Donald Trump brings that performance into what is a town hall debate where he's going to be asked questions by citizens in Florida. It will be doubly painful for us to watch. But I think it would be doubly painful for him politically.
O'DONNELL: I want to take a look at the polls that we should be noting here.
This is FiveThirtyEight's average of national election polls for Joe Biden and Donald Trump. It shows Joe Biden with a 7.6 point lead there, 50.5-42.9.
Let's go to exact same date four years, September 30th. Hillary Clinton was only at 3.1 percent lead over Donald Trump, and her top number was 43 percent, 43.5-40.4. Biden polling now up over 50 percent.
David, tell us about the difference between those two numbers on September 30th four years apart and what they mean?
PLOUFFE: They're 180 degrees different. And, of course, this is settled in the states. But the polling you just showed is similar in the battleground states. So, in Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Florida, Biden is anywhere from 31 percent to 52 percent. Trump is at 43 percent to 45 percent.
So, one, almost all the vote is already allocated. You have very few undecided voters. Back in '16, the poll you just showed, you had 17 percent of the electorate that was still open, OK? A huge number. So, a lot of the electorates baked in.
So, Trump, I think, is going to get strong turnout, Lawrence, you and I have talked about this. This is the thing that keeps me up at night. His people are coming.
But at the end of the day, that's not enough. He's now got to win every single undecided. And my guess is he repelled most of them tonight and he has to pull people off Joe Biden right now who are leaning his direction. And again, people are voting now. Yes, there's 33 campaign days left. We have over 10 percent in in the Wisconsin. In two weeks from now tens of millions of people are voting. And I think he lost his last opportunity last night.
So, query, why did he do it? It is because he's trying to, as Rachel Maddow said, depress us. This is a voter suppression tactic, but it's also a signal to his people that he is not going to abide by the election results. Why is that?
Two reasons. He's got an enormous ego as you know. He thinks our greatest military heroes who laid their life on the line are losers. What do you think of a president who is a first term loser? What does he think of that? A sad fact of all time.
Secondly, if the tax returns shed so much light in terms of his motivation. If he loses the presidency, his post-presidency life is going to be cold and miserable and tortured, right? He could go bankrupt. His family could be under investigation. Somebody can go to jail.
So he sees the White House as a safe house and he's going to try all he can to hold on to it. But in terms of the election right now, he is in as precarious situation as you can imagine.
O'DONNELL: The White House is his safe house. That is the line of the night.
David Plouffe, thank you very much for starting us off tonight. Really appreciate it.
PLOUFFE: Thanks, Lawrence.
O'DONNELL: We're now joined by Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.
Senator Warren, thank you very much for joining us tonight.
And I want to just get your reaction to what you and America witnessed last night in that debate.
SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN (D-MA): You know, Donald Trump really showed once again who he is. But the part about refusing to denounce white supremacy, of saying to the Proud Boys, you know, standby, to me I don't think where you were on the spectrum, how you felt about Donald Trump, that's it. No person who wants to be president of the United States and certainly no sitting president of the United States is still in the running when they do something like that.
That so rips at the fabric of who we want to be as a nation that for me, I just thought once he did that, I thought, this is done. I don't even know what the point is of going forward after that. That one went -- didn't just go too far. That went so far passed too far that you really couldn't even see where it landed.
O'DONNELL: Senator, one thing that got very short mention in the debate was the giant story that preceded the debate, which is the president of the United States does not pay income taxes. Paid zero for ten years. When he became president, he decided he would for whatever reason going through this mind pay $750 a year in federal income taxes to the United States, which he's done two years in a row now.
There has been a lot of outrage about it. What is the legislative solution to the tax code that has allowed him to file tax returns like this for decades?
WARREN: OK. So let's just start with what this is about. This is about fairness and about opportunity. So, nurses pay an average of, what, maybe $20,000 a year in taxes. Teachers $17,000 a year in taxes. Grocery store clerks, $10,000 a year in taxes.
People are paying a lot of money in taxes, and Donald Trump says he's going to pay 750 bucks. And here's the thing. A lot of people are saying, well, but it's legal. And in fact this is Donald Trump's argument.
We have to ask ourselves: why is that legal? That is only legal because billionaires, real estate developers, giant corporations are the ones who have written our tax code.
So, we got to do two things. One, we need to tighten up the tax code that we've got. There are so many loopholes. This thing makes Swiss cheese look like it's solid.
But the second thing we do is we have to think about taxes overall. It's time for a wealth tax in America. It's time to say the top one-tenth of 1 percent, those billionaires, those folks at the top, you have got to pitch in two cents of your wealth every year, three cents if you are a billionaire, and we're going to use that money to create opportunity for the next generation.
We're going to take that wealth tax and we're going to spend it on child care and pre-K and public K through 12, cancel student loan debt, put money into our historically black colleges and universities, and make two-year college, technical school, four-year college tuition free for all of our kids.
It's a way to balance the system. We can do that with taxes. It's not even that hard.
O'DONNELL: The tax code that has allowed this is one thing, but then we don't know what Donald Trump has done in these tax returns is legal. These tax returns are going to be the subject of a criminal investigation. They are now the subject of a criminal investigation by the Manhattan district attorney because a violation of federal tax will usually end up being a violation of state taxes, state income taxes that are mirrors of that.
And so, we have yet to discover just how much ill legality there right be in the Trump tax returns.
WARREN: You know, it is in the tax returns, obviously. That's one thing to look at.
But look overall at how Donald Trump has run the last four years and the conflicts of interest. You know, Donald Trump makes our own Secret Service stay at Trump hotels. Why? So he can pocket a few bucks off it.
Donald Trump is someone who thinks, hey, he wants to cut a deal with China? How about if China gives copyright protection to his daughter so that she can start hawking her products over there.
And he brings in other people. He says he's going to do the very fast special attack on the vaccines. Who does he bring in? He brings in somebody who literally owns millions and millions and millions of dollars in drug stocks, stocks in drug companies that are trying to manufacture the vaccine and that's the guy who is going to recommend whether this company or maybe the company he owns a lot of stock in gets billions of dollars from the federal taxpayers to help develop a vaccine.
I pick those as just examples. It's all the way through that administration. He was a grifter before he came to the White House, and when he -- while he's in the White House, he's just done more grifting.
O'DONNELL: The wealth tax and the tax issues you're talking about as legislation don't need any change in filibuster rules to pass because you can do that with 51 votes in the Senate through, a budget reconciliation tax legislation specifically can do that. You need 51 Democratic votes in the Senate.
Will you have those votes in January? And what do you do if you don't?
WARREN: So I sure hope so. I hope we're going to have a lot more than 51 votes come January.
You know, now is the moment of accountability. Now is the moment when all those Republicans who said, hey, you can have an impeachment hearing and not even have a witness show up. Donald Trump can call people, white nationalists, in Charlottesville fine people and nobody has to have any accountability.
All those people who have stood with Trump for four years, who have enabled him, who have permitted him to get more and more outrageous, who have not held him accountable while 200,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus, who have not held him accountable for not helping out families that are in terrible economic trouble right now, who have not held him accountable as he stirs up more hatred and racism in this country, on November 3rd, I hope every one of those Republican senators gets held accountable, and that happens in the voting booth. Our folks have got to show up, and they got to vote.
O'DONNELL: Senator Elizabeth Warren, thank you very much for joining us tonight. Since the Trump tax story broke in "The New York Times", I have been eager to talk about what is the legislative solution to what we are reading about in those tax returns. You're the one with the plan.
Thank you very much for joining us tonight.
WARREN: Thank you.
O'DONNELL: And when we come back, we're going to turn to some people who can help us make sense of what we all went through last night, what the country went through beginning with Caroline Randall Williams, followed by Donald Trump's niece Mary Trump, with the last word tonight going to the Reverend Al Sharpton.
All of that is ahead.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
O'DONNELL: At 10:13 p.m. last night, historian Jon Meacham tweeted: The incumbent's behavior this evening is the lowest moment in the history of the presidency since Andrew Johnson Johnson's racist state papers.
We will now show you the debate moment that preceded that tweet. But this video unfortunately must come with a viewer warning. We are going to show you a racist old white man who is the most racist president of the United States who has ever spoken into a microphone. What Donald Trump says in this one minute of video and what he doesn't say has become the most important part of the debate in the first draft of history that we have been writing since immediately after the debate ended last night.
You have probably already heard what Donald Trump said when he refused to condemn white supremacy, so you can use your mute button for the next minute. But you will want to hear what Caroline Randall Williams has to say about this in a moment. So with the warning that you are about to hear a racist trying to appeal to racist voters, here is that video.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CHRIS WALLACE, DEBATE MODERATOR: Are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacists and militia groups.
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Sure.
WALLACE: And to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence at a number of these cities that we saw in Kenosha and as we have seen in Portland.
TRUMP: Sure, I'm prepared to do that.
JOE BIDEN (D), PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: Do it.
TRUMP: I would say -- I would say almost everything I see is from the left wing, not from the right wing.
WALLACE: So what are you saying?
TRUMP: I'm willing to do anything. I want to see peace.
WALLACE: Then do it, sir.
BIDEN: Do it. Say it.
TRUMP: You want to call them -- what do you want to call them? Give me a name.
WALLACE: White supremacists and right wing militia.
(CROSSTALK)
BIDEN: Proud Boys.
TRUMP: Proud Boys, stand back and standby. But I'll tell you what, I'll tell you what, somebody has got to do something about Antifa and the left, because is not a right wing problem. This is a left wing --
BIDEN: His own FBI director said --
TRUMP: This is a left wing problem.
BIDEN: Antifa is an idea, not an organization.
TRUMP: Oh, you've got to be kidding me.
BIDEN: His FBI -- his FBI director said.
WALLACE: We're done, sir.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
O'DONNELL: Joining our discussion now is Caroline Randall Williams, a writer-in-residence of Vanderbilt University.
Caroline, I thought of you as I was watching you through the debate and I was hoping you could make more sense of this than I can. There is that moment that is generally agreed upon now to be the headline moment of what we saw last night. What was your reaction to what we witnessed last night?
CAROLINE RANDALL WILLIAMS, VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY WRITER-IN-RESIDENCE: You know, I think my first reaction was to think, wow, here we're sort of re-living history. You know, as moved as I am by what Jon said and what he tweeted. Even what you said, you made a very distinct point. You said it was the most racist thing an American president has said who was able to speak into a microphone, right?
But read Thomas Jefferson's papers. I mean, my God. Racism is sort of built into the fabric of American democracy.
And so I think when I watch that I thought, why supremacists have been standing back and standing by to ensure that white supremacy was the order of the day during American elections since this country began.
You know, what breaks my heart, Lawrence, is actually to think about John Lewis who was willing to risk his life and face dogs and guns, you know, crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 to figure out how to make that not so and to watch such a radical regression just months after we have lost Congressman Lewis, that, to me, was just sort of a more personally harrowing fact of the evening.
O'DONNELL: There are a lot of people telling you they turned it off, they couldn't watch it, it was too sickening, it was too depressing. They turned away from it.
I felt an obligation. I mean, it is not just a professional obligation, but an obligation as a citizen to not turn away.
RANDALL WILLIAMS: Yeah. I think that's so important. I think that we have to witness. We have to know what we're dealing with.
You know, first of all, if you are watching this, please, if you don't know who Lee Atwater is, research him. If you have never of the Southern strategy, learn about it.
Donald Trump is what happens when you keep doing cosmetic renovations to a house that is built on unstable foundations. If we have learned anything about this presidency, we have learned that these are not systems that are certain to function. They are not infallible. They rely on like the milk of human kindness, of human decency.
The Constitution is frankly a gentleman's agreement in some ways and there are no gentlemen left to the degree that you subscribe to that value system in the first place. So I think -- you know, I watch this, and I watch the reactions and frankly, Lawrence, I'm just tired of white people being surprised. I'm tired of decent white people being surprised. I'm tired of their inability to see America for what it's always been. It's costing us our democracy.
You know, I think when Chris Wallace said I never dreamt that it would go so far off the tracks, I'm like, Chris Wallace you have been doing faithful, integrity-filled reporting for your entire career and you have been watching this for the last four years. And you are still surprised this man we've watched be a child acted like a child?
I don't -- we have to brace ourselves and be prepared to preserve democracy. I don't understand the surprises going to waylay this election and I'm sort of terrified by that.
O'DONNELL: I want to listen to something else that Olivia Troye said today. She's the insider working on Mike Pence's coronavirus task force who has quit. Let's listen to what Olivia Troye said about other people working in the Trump White House.
WILLIAMS: OK.
TROYE: I don't know how any of these people can go home and really face their families and loved ones. I also don't know how a lot of the senior political staff claim to be evangelical and Christians when I think that their actions are anything but.
I mean, how do you purposefully politicize things and weigh politics over their regard for human life and the safety of Americans, especially children?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
O'DONNELL: What's your reaction to that?
WILLIAMS: Again, I think the notion of American exceptionalism is literally getting people killed every direction. I mean I think even when you think about, you know, from -- the present industrial complex to children at the borders to the present, you know, school shootings, you know, the American government has been ripping babies away from mothers since the founding fathers sat down in Philadelphia. You know, from plantations on Tennessee and Mississippi and Georgia to like reservations like across the country.
So this idea that, you know, Christian decency is going to be the savior of America or preserve some sort of central American values doesn't bear out under any kind of scrutiny when you think about the good Christians who set up these systems in the first place.
I think we just have to get a little bit real about that so we can actually ask the ideas of America to be made manifest for the first time ever instead of being startled that upon, you know, further examination they're not actually functioning yet.
O'DONNELL: Caroline Randall Williams, I can't thank you enough for sharing your wisdom with us once again. Really appreciate it.
WILLIAMS: Thank you for having me.
O'DONNELL: Thank you.
Donald Trump's niece, who is a trained clinical psychologist has said Donald Trump is, quote, "a very sick man". His sickness was on full display last night in every second of what he said and didn't say. Mary Trump will join us next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
O'DONNELL: Here's some of the Twitter reaction that I saw during last night's debate.
Everything he just said is a lie. Everything.
He is a fraud.
What a disgrace.
What a traitor.
All of those tweets were from the same person who was live tweeting the debate and who happens to be Donald Trump's niece.
Joining us now in her first interview since last night's debate is Mary Trump. She is the author of "Too Much and Never Enough: How my family created the world's most dangerous man".
Mary Trump, thank you very much for joining us tonight. I thought of you many times last night because it was a difficult kind of psychological study for us all to observe of a madman out of control. What were you seeing when you were watching your uncle last night?
MARY TRUMP, DONALD TRUMP'S NIECE: The first thing I saw was desperation. We know that top of his mind was "The New York Times" reporting, and he knew that he had to go into this debate and make it impossible for there to be any serious conversations about that or about policy because pretty much across the board his administration has been a failure.
O'DONNELL: I want to show one exchange where Donald Trump reacted to the word "smart", use of the word "smart" in a very, very particular way really snapped about it. Let's watch this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOE BIDEN (D), PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: He's on record as saying it. He panicked or he just looked at the stock market, one of the two because, guess what, a lot of people died and a lot more are going to die unless he gets a lot smarter, a lot --
(CROSSTALK)
CHRIS WALLACE, FOX NEWS HOST: Mr. President.
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Did you use the word "smart"? So you said you went to Delaware State but you forgot the name of your college. You didn't go to Delaware State. You graduated either the lowest or almost the lowest in your class. Don't ever use the word "smart" with me. Don't ever use that word.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
O'DONNELL: Mary Trump, what was it about that word for Donald Trump?
M. TRUMP: Well, he knows it doesn't apply to him and he's very insecure about it. That was just classic projection because, you know, it also didn't make any sense, you know.
Joe Biden was talking about a tactic that wasn't the right way to approach something. He wasn't talking about anybody's IQ. So I think it was just another example of Donald's insecurity coming to the surface.
O'DONNELL: Now, in the very same debate, Joe Biden called Donald Trump a racist and he didn't react to that word at all. It was in the middle of Donald Trump was talking about trying to change education in this country and prevent, quote, "teaching people to hate our country". Joe Biden says nobody is doing that and Joe Biden says he's just -- he's racist.
And Donald Trump doesn't interrupt him and doesn't try to stop him from calling him a racist at all. That word doesn't seem to bother him.
M. TRUMP: Oh, not at all. You're right. That was a great observation.
No, he's happy to take that label as we saw with his horrific comments or failure to comment, I should say, on condemning white supremacy. He knows -- first of all, he is a white supremacist, so he's not going to go condemn himself.
And secondly, he knows that that is something about him that plays with his base, and his base is all he's got left.
O'DONNELL: There was a moment in the debate where Joe Biden started to talk about his son Beau Biden.
In fact, we will squeeze in a commercial here because I want to show the video, let you react after the fact because it was one of the most horrific moments in the debate, just from a human perspective.
Let's just squeeze in the commercial break right here.
We'll be back with Mary Trump.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
O'DONNELL: Here is that video of Joe Biden talking about his son Beau Biden last night. And notice that Donald Trump does not deny that he calls people who serve in the military "losers" and "suckers".
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BIDEN: And speaking of my son -- the way you talk about the military, the way you talk about them being losers and being -- and just being suckers. My son was in Iraq. He spent a year there. He got the Bronze Star. He got the Conspicuous Service Medal. He was not a loser. He was a patriot and the people left behind there were heroes. And I resent --
TRUMP: Really? Are you talking about Hunter? Are you talking about Hunter.
BIDEN: I'm talking of my son Beau Biden? You're talking about --
TRUMP: I don't know. I don't know Beau. I know Hunter.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
O'DONNELL: Mary Trump, Donald Trump's niece is back with us.
What was your reaction to that exchange?
M. TRUMP: Besides pure rage? It was horrifying. It was certainly not the most dangerous moment in the debate, but I think it explains why other moments are as dangerous as they are. This shows us who he is.
First of all, I found Vice President Biden's restraint absolutely incomprehensible. But that's who -- that's who Donald is. He is cruel. He is contemptuous. And when Vice President Biden was able to steer the conversation back to something that mattered, his son's recovery, and to say how proud he was of his son, I first thought personally I wish he had been my father's dad. But unfortunately Donald Trump's was my father's brother, so it was a pretty devastating moment.
O'DONNELL: When Donald Trump hears Joe Biden say he's describing his son's service in Iraq, and he says the people left behind were heroes and Donald Trump says "really" -- question mark. That's what he's saying really, too.
I mean it happens fast and maybe people have to watch this video more than once to see what he's actually responding to. He does not ever deny that he calls people in the military suckers and losers. And then when he's told that the people who killed in action are greatly honorable sacrifice, he says "really" as if that's a joke, as if it's not a sacrifice.
M. TRUMP: Because he doesn't understand real sacrifice. He doesn't understand or care about any of the things that people value about this country. And it -- the idea that he is anywhere near the levers of power is so depressing that I think it just underscored how vitally important this election is because that performance last night across the board disqualified him.
That moment for me personally was as disqualifying as anything could be because if character mattered, he shouldn't have been allowed to speak another word on that stage.
O'DONNELL: I want to look at something that Senator Harris said on this program Monday night because I think it's a preview of the vice presidential debate and possibly future presidential debates where she's talking about the questions she has after reading "The New York Times" coverage on Donald Trump's tax returns showing he pays zero income taxes most of the time.
Let's listen to this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SENATOR KAMALA HARRIS (D-CA), VICE PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: Who does he owe the money to? Tell us. Who do you owe the money to? And do you owe debt to any foreign nation? Do you owe -- you know, do you owe debt -- do you owe money? Let's just be clear what debt means. You owe somebody money.
Do you owe anybody money who is impacted by any decision you make as president of the United States? We need to know that.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
O'DONNELL: Mary Trump, many questions comes out of those tax returns, but in presidential terms, that might be the most important one.
M. TRUMP: Yes. Senator Harris is exactly right. I understand why how little Donald pays in taxes is resonating so much with the American people, as it should. But in terms of the importance of what that article uncovered, that brilliant article by the brilliant Susan Craig (ph) and Russ Butner (ph) is that we have every reason to believe that Donald Trump who is currently in the Oval Office is a national security threat to the country he's ostensibly leading. So we need answers. And the fact that that was not a major topic at the debate last night was very disheartening, I have to say.
O'DONNELL: Mary Trump, the book is "Too Much and Never Enough: How my family created the world's most dangerous man". Thank you very, very much for joining us once again tonight. Your perspective on what we witnessed last night was something I knew we had to hear tonight. Really glad you could join us.
M. TRUMP: Thank you so much, Lawrence.
O'DONNELL: Thank you.
O'DONNELL: Up next, the Reverend Al Sharpton gets tonight's LAST WORD.
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O'DONNELL: In his new book, Reverend Al Sharpton says "Our nation stands at a cross roads, a historical turning point that's testing our moral character and endangering all we have fought to gain."
Joining us now is Reverend Al Sharpton, host of MSNBC's "POLITICS NATION" and author of the new book "Rise up: confronting a country at the crossroads".
And al, it seems the country was at a crossroads on that debate stage last night. And I'll reach for preacher language and you correct me if I overstate it. It seemed like on one's side of the stage was damnation and on the other side of the stage was salvation and the country has to make the choice.
REVEREND AL SHARPTON, MSNBC HOST: That's exactly right. The country really couldn't have had a more graphic example of our being at a crossroad and having to decide which way we were going to go.
When you look at the fact that for the last five to six decades, we have seen a forward move towards civil rights for everyone, whether you are African-American or women or LGBTQ or whatever area you may live in in terms of geography, trying to assure the country live up to its motto, that it never fully lived up to but was moving in that direction.
And now you have a very quick move towards going the other way, of limiting the rights of blacks, limiting the rights of women and LGBTQ and poor people.
We are at a point where we must make a decision on whether we are going to go back and finish the journey that was started by those in the 60s and going forward or whether we are going to let this new road that connects back to the old days where you have to be white and male and rich to be considered and to have your rights and your opportunities guaranteed couldn't have been more graphically displayed than last night when we saw a president not only refuse to condemn and denounce white supremacy, but actually said to a known self-described supremist and militia group to just, you know, hold back.
And in saying that and also underscoring he would not call on his followers and supporters not to go to the streets if he is not satisfied on the night of the election. It undermines the real principle of democracy and morality at the same time that this country has tried to move for in the last 50 years.
It was alarming not surprising, stunning but at the same time it ought to stimulate us to go towards the right road. That is not the kind of America that we have fought to try and make come into being.
O'DONNELL: Al, I'm struck by how your new book "Rise Up" navigates, it has an ambition of delivering a very big and important message to the country. But it also tells personal stories and it navigates between the two.
And there is a New York story in here, of two guys, one named Sharpton and one named Trump. They know each other. They're kind of living very different but, you know, parallel lives, appearing on some of the same pages of the local newspapers in New York City.
You tell the story of Donald Trump calling you after he was elected president. You're one of the people he called. You were in college with him. And one of the things you say about your encounters with him is that you were always seeing a guy from Queens who was resentful of that world in Manhattan that he was trying to crack and was never accepted into and it seems like we see the effects of that that continue throughout his life.
SHARPTON: One that knows New York, know that there is Manhattan and the certain parts of Manhattan, the Park Avenue side, the Wall Street side that has the financial elite. And then there's the outer boroughs of residents. I came out of an outer borough Brooklyn. He came out of Queens. He comes out of a part of Queens that was very much white-dominated but they were outcasts. They were not probably power elite.
And even though Donald Trump's father had money, they were not part of the real estate elite, the people that would breakfast and eat lunch at the power spots. He resented that. He felt that he didn't have their blessing, their legitimacy. And it always gave him that chip on the shoulder, fighting as the outer borough guy.
That's the kind of rejection that he could try and communicate when he was running for president that would appeal to some in working class communities around the country. It was that kind of resentment that he showed which you just talked to his niece about when he felt that someone was saying he wasn't smart that out of rejection came on.
And it was always people with that kind of mentality need to have people beneath them. So it breeds racism and misogyny and homophobia because you can only affirm yourself and I wrote too in the book, you affirm yourself by trying to be better than others and you need to be superior to even feel that you're equal.
And this is the kind of person that we have walking around with the nuclear codes and over the military. It's a frightening time and I think that it's time that we put these people in a situation where they're not empowered to exercise their bigotry and their bias over our lives.
O'DONNELL: Al Sharpton. The new book is "Rise Up". Al Sharpton gets tonight's LAST WORD.
Thank you very much for joining us tonight, Reverend Sharpton.
SHARPTON: Thank you Lawrence.
O'DONNELL: "THE 11TH HOUR WITH BRIAN WILLIAMS" starts now.
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