Summary
Joe Biden and Donald Trump participated in separate town halls after Trump refused to accept debate requirements. Rudy Giuliani's daughter is supporting Joe Biden for president.
Transcript
RACHEL MADDOW, MSNBC HOST: Well, that happened. Thanks for being with us tonight.
Let me remind you that what you just saw was a production of NBC News. We are MSNBC. We did not produce that event. We simulcast it here with along with CNBC, but that was a strange replacement for what was otherwise supposed to be the second presidential debate of this general election season.
Again, the reason we got here is because President Trump dropped out of the second debate. Vice President Joe Biden then scheduled a town hall on ABC News. That is ongoing.
The president then was offered this hour of time on NBC, simulcast on MSNBC and CNBC to do what amounted to a dueling town hall. We're not going to spend the whole hour tonight talking about this, but I do feel like just to be responsible, there's -- I want to give you a little bit of summation. There was in news made, especially right at the top, under sharp questioning from Savannah Guthrie.
The president told us some stuff about his own COVID experience that is new. The president, in his own words, asked about whether or not he had pneumonia, says that he was told his lungs looked a little different, perhaps infected. They've never been talked about what the president's symptoms -- what the president's illness, how it was characterized. They've never been able to, you know, describe his scans or describe what his test results were.
The president tonight saying he was told that his lungs looked a little different and were perhaps infected. Asked as a follow-up, infected with what, the president wouldn't say. The president did say that White House doctors would answer that question. The White House doctors have been unwilling to do anything of the sort under sharp questioning from the White House press corps.
Under further questioning from Savannah Guthrie, the president also continues to refuse to say with when his last negative test was before he tested positive late on the night of October 1st. Now, this is important because this tells us when the president was potentially infected, including whether or not the president potentially was infected when he stood on that debate stage with Joe Biden two nights before he tested positive.
Now, the president said tonight that he didn't feel any symptoms during the debate. He didn't feel symptoms until after the debate, but this is fascinating. He would not say whether or not he actually took a test on the day of the debate. That was a requirement of the Commission on Presidential Debates, that both candidates had to be tested.
It was unfortunately a requirement that was enforced through the honor system, assuming that either -- that both of the presidential candidates could be trusted to do that. The president says he does not recall. He insisted that he doesn't remember whether or not he was tested on the day of the debate, which is crazy given that he tested positive and was pretty significantly symptomatic two days later. It does seem like there is a very real possibility that the president was positive the day of the debate when he stood up there with no mask on, with his family with no mask on in the debate hall, and he debated Joe Biden for debate one.
The president also said again, making further news, that he does not get tested every day, nor has he been tested every day over the course of the pandemic. Also I think it is news tonight, faced with a direct question as to whether or not he supports herd immunity, this -- forgive me -- wack theory that quack doctors have been promoting contrary to all infectious disease expertise, that it's cool if everybody gets infected because somehow magically we'll protect the people who will actually get sick and we'll allow for untrammeled spread of disease in the country and somehow that will only matter to the extent that it conveys immunity and people who aren't vulnerable to it will be the only ones who get sick, and we should just lead it spread.
The president has brought on to the coronavirus task force an adviser named Scott Atlas who has promoted this idea. The Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar has also been meeting with proponents of this idea. The president was asked directly, do you support herd immunity approach, and he would not answer, which is going to sound alarms across the public health spectrum tonight.
It's one thing for White House officials to be basically flirting with that idea or talking about that concept as if it's something that they are in tune with or entertaining seriously. The president being asked about it directly and refusing to disavow the crazy herd immunity approach, which has never been used in the face of a viral pandemic anywhere in the world and which most experts say would result in millions of American deaths, that's news tonight.
In terms of other news tonight, the president did essentially cop to having more than $400 million in personal debts, which is an incredible national security risk for the country to have somebody in that much personal debt holding any form of sensitive position in the U.S. government, obviously exposes them to leverage from his -- the people to whom he owes money. The president essentially copped to that tonight and then tried to downplay it, saying that him owing more than $400 million in debt doesn't matter much. He called it a peanut because he said it's such a small proportion of his net worth.
The president has never proven that, and in fact, there's pretty good financial evidence from "The New York Times" and other sources that that $400 million that he owes might potentially be ruinous to the president and potentially to his business, which is why it's such a security concern for the country that he owes that money. Specifically, though, in terms of the president making news there, he did tell Savannah Guthrie at one point that he will let her know to whom he owes all of this money.
All right, that's the question. If it's a national security threat for the president to owe more than $400 million, well, to whom does he owe that money? Who could potentially exert leverage over him? To whom might he be trying to favor through his official actions as president as a way of trying to ease up his potential financial burdens?
He said, I will let you know who he owes that money to. That's news. I doubt he meant it, but he did say that tonight.
He also, when asked specifically whether he might owe this money to foreign sources or a foreign bank, he said, probably. So that's news in terms of the president copping to owing more than $400 million probably to a foreign source and maybe he'll tell us who it is.
I know why the president didn't want to do a second debate with Joe Biden. I don't now necessarily know why he wanted to do this. The news that I just gave you in terms of the admissions the president made there, all those things alone are not directions in which the president wants to be steering the national political discussion, you know, 2 1/2 weeks from the election.
But that's what he did. It did just feel like he got run down, run over by most of this. But not enough to stop him from telling a very long string of very potent lies, particularly on the issue of COVID, and we'll talk with some people to help us fact-check these a little bit tonight.
But I want to get out here right at the outset. A lot of the things the president said tonight about COVID were not only lies, they were dangerous lies.
In talking about himself, he said, I'm good with masks. I tell people to wear masks. That's a lie about his own behavior. The president even very recently has continued to ridicule his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, for wearing a mask and to ridicule other people for wearing masks.
He's told reporters at the White House to take off their masks. There's been multiple source reporting that he has told people inside the White House that they should take off their masks.
So the president saying he's good with masks just isn't true in terms of his own behavior. More insidiously, though, twice tonight, the president mischaracterized -- I should be more blunt, lied about a CDC study. We sort of knew this was coming tonight because he lied about this study today at a rally in advance of tonight's town hall. We think this is something he got off of Fox News prime time where one of their hosts also lied about this study and misstated its implications.
This was a CDC study of people who were COVID-positive, and it interviewed them, a small number of COVID-positive people, interviewed them about whether or not they had worn masks over the course of the pandemic. A Fox News host in recent days, the president at this rally, and the president twice tonight at this town hall perverted that entirely and said that the results of that study is that 85 percent of people who wear masks get COVID.
Absolutely not true at all, and it may be that the president doesn't understand even basic, you know, science and the organization of studies. But talking to a small group of people who have COVID and asking them whether or not they wore masks at some point during the country's experience with the pandemic is in a completely different universe of facts from the president saying 85 percent of people who wear masks get COVID.
He's essentially telling you that if you wear a mask, you are going to get COVID. It's not only fantastically wrong, it's fantastically dangerous when the science tells us that actually wearing masks is one of the main things that we can do as a country, as individual citizens, to slow the spread of the virus and to prevent from getting it, more importantly to prevent ourselves from giving it to others.
People like his embattled CDC director have been very clear about that. Dr. Fauci, of course, has been very clear about that. The CDC has been very clear about that, including since the president started mischaracterizing this study. The CDC tweeting out yesterday, quote, the interpretation that more mask wearers are getting infected compared to non-mask wearers is incorrect. It's just wildly irresponsible for the president to be telling that lie and telling it twice tonight on this town hall.
He did it at his rally, so we knew it was coming. But he did it twice tonight. It is not true that 85 percent of people who wear masks get COVID. That is absolutely bunk, and coming from the president, it's potentially deadly bunk.
The president also said tonight, we have cures. He said, you can use that word. We have cures for COVID. Not only is that wrong and tragic, but the president telling people that there's a cure for COVID is, again, dangerous. He is telling people who believe what he says about COVID, despite all the evidence that you shouldn't -- he's telling people who believe what he says about COVID that it's a curable disease.
It's not a curable disease. There is no cure. And the president is promoting that there is, and it's both wrong, again, and dangerous.
We're going to actually have some expert help a little later on this hour to tell you exactly why the president was wrong when he also said -- and he like brought out a note card or something to help him with this lie, when he said that the United States has actually done very well compared to other countries in terms of our COVID death rate.
That's, again, exactly backwards. The president started talking about excess mortality and how we've done very well compared to other countries. The Journal of the American Medical Association literally just this week, just two days ago, just did an extensive study comparing the U.S. COVID death rate and U.S. excess mortality rates with other similarly situated countries around the globe, with other relatively wealthy, relatively well-off countries, and they found exactly the opposite of what the president said tonight.
I'm reading directly from that study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Quote: Compared with other comes, the U.S. experienced high COVID-19 associated mortality and excess all cause mortality into September 2020. U.S. death rates from COVID-19 and from all causes are higher than even other countries with high COVID-19 mortality. The president trying to sell exactly the opposite of that tonight.
He's telling people, don't wear masks. It's dangerous. Oh, also I've been super pro mask. Both of those things aren't true.
He's telling people there's a cure for COVID. There isn't. And he's telling us that the United States has done better than other countries in terms of surviving COVID. All just complete horse hockey from the president.
The president lied also when he said that last year, we had the greatest economy in the history of our country before COVID hit. It's just a complete lie.
I mean, even if you just want to talk about jobs, in the first three years of the Trump administration, fewer jobs were created than in the last three years of the Obama administration. But somehow he wants to talk about last year having been the greatest economy in the history of this country. It's not even the greatest economy in the history of this decade. It's just a lie. He says it all the time, but it's still untrue.
The president said that his coronavirus Atlas -- his coronavirus adviser Scott Atlas, this gentleman who he did put on the coronavirus task force and essentially has started to take his advice in a way that seems to supplant the real public health experts, the real infectious disease experts like Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx. This guy, Scott Atlas, when confronted by Savannah Guthrie tonight by the fact that Atlas is not a public health expert, is not an epidemiological expert, is not an infectious disease expert, the president said, no, no, he's one of the great experts of the world.
He's a radiologist. He specializes in taking MRIs of people's heads. He's not an infectious disease doctor. He's not a public health doctor. He's not an expert on any of the things that he's advising the president on.
The president either doesn't know that or doesn't care and is lying about it. One of the great experts of the world. Yeah, if you are talking about MRI-ing your neck, sure. By when it comes to coronavirus, no.
On health care, the president lied and said that we're always protecting people with pre-existing conditions. This is something again that Savannah Guthrie did call him on directly. The president, his administration right now has a case before the Supreme Court in which they are asking the Supreme Court to strike down the rule under Obamacare that requires insurance companies to give you coverage even if you've got pre-existing conditions.
That's a fact. The president is lying about it, saying he's protecting people with pre-existing conditions. There is no replacement Republican health care plan that would supplant the pre-existing conditions protections under Obamacare with some other thing. There is no other Trump administration health care plan despite the fact that he described that there will be. That's a lie from the president tonight.
The president also said weirdly at the very end of the town hall that he's a great champion of DACA, of the Dreamers, literally telling somebody who was asking him about that program that he's very much in favor of it and, you know, that he's going to save it, as if somebody else put it in danger. Savannah Guthrie correctly pointing out that under the Trump administration, they've absolutely halted that program and not allowed anybody to apply for DACA protections whatsoever.
The president tonight trying to sell himself as if he's the guy who came up with that or that he's the one who has been promoting it. Just up is down, black is night -- up is down and black is white.
I will say, though, in addition to all the things the president lied about, including what I think were some very, very dangerous and potentially fatally dangerous lies about masks and COVID, the thing that is probably going to stick to the president the worst for this town hall is not just his lies and not just, I think, the news that he didn't mean to make, what exactly was a little bit infected about your lungs, sir, and why won't you tell us if you got tested on the day of the debate? It's a matter of record. Somebody can look it up.
I think the thing that's going to stick to him is the president trafficking and even worse than he has before, trafficking in some pretty dark conspiracy theories. I mean, there's some of the ones that we've heard before. He is still blaming Gold Star families. He's blaming the families of what he described as the parents of fallen heroes, the families of Gold Star -- Gold Star families, the families of American service members killed overseas, he's blaming them for infecting him.
Pressed on that by Savannah Guthrie, why do you keep bringing that up? Why do you keep describing Gold Star families as the people who posed the threat to you when it came to COVID, the president tried to demur and said, I don't know where I got it. But he does keep trying to blame military families for having infected him.
The president tonight saying that it is a conspiracy theory in the states where there are anti-COVID policies in place, where there are lockdowns or business closures or other rules to prevent the spread of COVID -- the president today saying essentially that that's a conspiracy against him, that those things aren't meant to slow the spread of COVID. They're just meant to hurt him politically. He said on November 4th, you watch, they'll end the lockdowns because he says the lockdowns are only being done for a political purpose, not anything to do with the virus.
That is not only a lie, it's an insidious conspiracy theory that has led to not only actions contrary to public health but has led to some of the crazy stuff we've seen like the militia groups that were recently rounded up by local law enforcement and the FBI for planning to kidnap and/or kill governors who have put in place measures to try to slow the spread of COVID like Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and the Democratic governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam.
That idea that these restrictions aren't about the virus at all, it's just out to get Trump and just out to get conservatives, that can be deadly stuff, and the president is playing with fire there by promoting that conspiracy theory, particularly after it was just exposed as having led to a complex militia plot involving the potential kidnapping of two sitting U.S. governors.
On QAnon, Savannah Guthrie pressing the president on why he has not denounced QAnon and why he has -- she didn't press him on this, but why he has in fact promoted QAnon adherents and re-tweeted them. This one's going to sting, I think. The president kept saying, I know nothing about QAnon. I know nothing about QAnon.
But then he decided he did want to say something about what QAnon is. He said, I know nothing about QAnon. I don't know. I don't know, I don't know. I just don't know about QAnon.
Then he said, let me tell you what I do hear about it. They are very strongly against pedophilia. I do agree with that, and I agree with it very strongly.
QAnon is about pedophilia -- you know what? I'm not even going to do this analogy. The QAnon conspiracy theory, as Savannah Guthrie put to the president, is a conspiracy theory that Democrats and celebrities are involved in a satanic cult that kills children and drinks their blood and is involved in something in the basement of a pizza parlor somewhere that deals with trafficking and some people are lizard people. I mean, it's -- it's bizarre.
The president tonight saying that they're an anti-pedophilia group, and he very strongly agrees with that is going to put gas in their tank. This is a conspiracy theory that is growing, that is radicalized, that is essentially becoming a militarized pro-Trump movement that has justified incredibly, incredibly radical and violent fantasies to the point where QAnon content is banned on most mainstream social media at this point.
The president putting gas in their tank tonight by saying that they're an anti-pedophile organization. That's not at all what they are.
The president also asked tonight why he re-tweeted a conspiracy theory that President Obama killed SEAL Team 6 and killed a fake Osama bin Laden who was a body double and the real Osama bin Laden is still out there and is innocent, right? This is the kind of stuff that QAnon promotes now, that the president himself has amplified and re-tweeted to his followers.
The president tonight justified doing that by saying, that was a re-tweet. I re-tweet a lot of stuff. I put it out there. People can decide.
That's the president of the United States.
The president continuing his conspiracy theories about voter fraud, calling it a tremendous problem inventing a fantasy about thousands of ballots with his name on it found in a trash can. That's not true.
The president continuing to push conspiracy theories about the Obama administration even after his own Justice Department's effort to try to problematize these things have fallen apart in recent days. They spied on my campaign and got caught. They tried to unseat a sitting president.
That was his answer to a question about whether or not he would -- he would accede to a peaceful transfer of power. The president raising those things as if those are equivalent -- those complaints that he has would somehow justify him not supporting a peaceful transfer of power because they spied on my campaign.
When he says they spied on my campaign, what he's talking about is the supposed scandal about Russian government assets being surveilled by the intelligence community and them -- the intelligence community accidentally picking up Trump campaign people in those intercepts because the Trump campaign was talking to so many Russian government officials.
Bill Barr assigned a U.S. attorney in the state of Texas, to look into that, to try to make it into some sort of crime, some sort of scandal that the intelligence community surveilling rightfully foreign government officials came across Trump campaign folk who's were talk -- folk who's were talking to -- folk who's were talking to them.
That investigation, that so-called unmasking, spying on my campaign scandal fell apart this week. That U.S. attorney has now quit the job. His investigation of that has been wrapped up without charges and without any findings of substantive wrongdoing. This has been confirmed. It was first reported by "The Washington Post." It's been confirmed by multiple news organizations now, including NBC News.
But the president is still promoting that conspiracy theory, again for a reason. He's promoting that disproven conspiracy theory to say that there's been something untoward about the way that he's been treated in office that would justify there not being a peaceful transfer of power to the next administration.
So I could go on. I don't know that the president will do a third debate next week against Joe Biden. I think the plan right now is that he will. He did himself no favors in his first disastrous debate. He then pulled out of the debate that was supposed to be tonight and instead gave this shambolic performance full of not only lies but dangerous lies, making news he didn't want to make, and spreading conspiracy theories of the most vile and dangerous sort.
Does that mean he goes back and does the debate next week so he can try to get away with those things with Joe Biden on the stage with him too? I don't know, but this is a -- this is a weird time. This is a weird time to be covering this re-election campaign for this president. This is the way he's going to run it.
All right. In just a moment, we're going to get some expert advice on what we just heard. A very strange night of news. Stay with us.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOE BIDEN (D), PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: If I'm elected president, the first thing -- and not a joke. You can ask, if they tell you, your dad's old friends on the Republican side, I'm going to pick up the phone and call them and say, let's get together. We've got to figure out how we're going to move forward here because there's so many things we do agree on.
And with Trump out of the way, the vindictiveness of a president going after Republicans who don't do exactly what he says gets -- gets taken away. There's going to be, a promise you, between four and eight Republican senator who's are going to be willing to move on things where there's bipartisan consensus.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MADDOW: Former Vice President Joe Biden tonight on ABC News where he was -- has been doing a town hall at the same time as President Trump did his town hall on NBC News.
I want to bring in former Obama '08 campaign manager, former White House senior adviser, David Plouffe.
Mr. Plouffe, thank you for being with us tonight. It's been a weird night to be on TV. I appreciate you being here with me.
DAVID PLOUFFE, MSNBC POLITICAL ANALYST: Of course.
MADDOW: Let me just ask you about the picture here. Debate one was the car crash that we all remember. Debate two didn't happen. Instead, we had these head-to-head but not face-to-face events tonight.
I felt watching it like this was a different kind of car crash. The president doing himself again no favors with tonight's event. But as a pro and as somebody who understands how the structure of these things is supposed to work toward the overall campaign aims, what did you think?
PLOUFFE: Well, Rachel, I don't say this facetiously. The Joe Biden campaign has enough money to consider running that as an hour advertisement next week or the week after as part of a closing argument -- the Trump town hall, because it was a disaster in every way.
I mean, you masterfully went through all the lies, all the breaking news. But let's talk about the race. Is there anybody out there who is currently undecided or who is leaning Biden but is thinking maybe I'll go back to Trump, who saw anything in that, lies about the economy, he's going to kill people because he continues to lie about mask-wearing. clearly lied about his own health situation, refusing to denounce QAnon. My guess is that's what we'll be talking about today and tomorrow.
So I still think he's going to debate next week. I assume -- by the way, now we know he tested positive for COVID perhaps before the debate. Maybe that's why he was so angry in the debate with Joe Biden.
But, no, from a purely campaign standpoint, when you are behind, you have to maximize every moment, every interview. Today was a big, you know, perch for him, and I think he probably drove voters away to the extent there are any still open to him.
It was a disaster. By the way, I thought he seemed small. I thought he seemed a little bit low energy to use a term he likes to use, almost defeated in a way.
MADDOW: Physically I'm with you on that. I'm not much of a body language expert in part because I'm such a flailing octopus on TV. But I think of him as a person who likes to be sort of to pantomime physical dominance or whatever, and he got smaller and smaller and smaller physically, kind of curled up.
He also looked sweaty, and his voice didn't sound strong. I don't think this is anything he wanted to project about himself.
But, David, you know, I was looking back at previous presidential matchups where the debates ran aground, where one candidate didn't want to them or when they made sure there were third and fourth-party candidates in there in the mix so that it couldn't be a head-to-head matchup. I feel like almost all of those previous presidential matchups where things went wrong in the debate schedule, it was because one candidate was obviously winning, and they used the leverage of themselves obviously winning to try to keep the debates out of the way so that there couldn't be some surprise at the debates that would allow the losing candidate to get any closer to them.
Given that history, it does feel weird to me that Trump is the one who is blowing up the debates because it does feel to me -- and I think it looks from the polling, like he is on track to lose his re-election effort. So shouldn't he be the one who is sort of clamoring for more of these things?
PLOUFFE: Absolutely, Rachel. I consider it to be historical political malpractice. So I have some experience here.
Obama, we bombed the first debate with Romney. You saw Reagan bombed the first debate with Mondale. George W. Bush really struggled against John Kerry.
If you struggle in that first debate, you want the second debate as quickly as possible to re-stabilize your foundation in the race. So, by the way, even if Trump would be a disaster in the debate that should have happened tonight, he's losing. He had a bad first debate.
It is the only opportunity you have with a big enough audience and the other thing is by next Thursday, we might be up to 30 million, 35 million people having voted. Votes are being taken off the table and they're not just base Trump or base Biden voters. These are people who might have been undecided, who are now with Biden and who are cashing in their ballot. They are voting.
So, it is the height of political malpractice. Now he's got one debate left. I don't think he can pull a miracle, but somehow he's got to do three things. You know, excite his base to create historical turnout.
He's got to win every remaining undecided voter, and they're very few. Unlike '16, there's very few people right now who aren't saying they're firm in their support. And then he's got to pull a bunch of people, seniors, white college-educated voters, some of the suburban voters that have flown to Biden back.
So, yes, he should have debated tonight, even if it was going to be a disaster. He needs the audience. It's almost like they're waving a white flag to some extent, and it puzzles me greatly. You raised the question will he do the debate next week? I think he has to because it is his last opportunity. But he should have -- whether it was a zoom debate, whatever the format is.
And he's always been kind of a happy warrior. I'll show up anywhere. I like to do rallies. He clearly enjoyed the debates with Clinton.
That's what I saw tonight. I saw a diminished president. You know, he seems like maybe he's seeing the writing on the wall.
MADDOW: Former senior White House adviser, former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe -- David, thank you. It's really, really helpful to have your take on these things tonight. Appreciate you being here.
All right. I want to bring into the conversation now, former Republican strategist and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, my friend Steve Schmidt.
Steve, I wanted to talk to you tonight to get your top-line reaction to what we heard from the president but also because I was worried that he was really going to go hard down the conspiracy theory road, that he, in fact, did even worse than I thought he would. And I wanted to get your take on not only just how that's going to land in the campaign but what that means for this presidency at this point that he is -- that he's pushing these conspiracy theories about COVID, about Democrats, about Russia, about all of this stuff so hard, even down to the bitter end.
STEVE SCHMIDT, MSNBC POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, he made an extraordinary statement at the end, Rachel, when he said, well, I've done a great job. I mean, this is the biggest failure in the history of the American presidency. This is somebody who lied to the country and as a consequence, has shattered the American economy.
There are more unemployed people on this date than there ever have been on any other comparable day in October in American history. We have the education system of our kids profoundly disrupted. We have the rituals of American life that have ended because of COVID.
And now we see this president reaching for conspiracies. And no matter what happens, he will never concede to the legitimacy of election. And tragically, about 30 percent of the country will never buy into the fact that Joe Biden won the election legitimately.
And so, his peddling in conspiracy theories is part of the reason why if we had the mortality rates of Germany, we'd have 150,000 more Americans alive today. But because of Donald Trump and the lying and the nonsense that comes out of his mouth, we have one of the great disasters in the history of the country.
This QAnon cult is a danger to American society. There's a couple hundred QAnon candidates running. Because of Trump, we'll probably see 18,000 of them running in the next election cycle.
But we have some big issues to deal with all of this insanity that Donald Trump has let loose in the country.
But I will say this. What you see there, David's exactly right. He's shrinking before our eyes. The emperor has no clothes, so to speak.
He looks small. He was sweaty. He's out of control. He's unhinged. And the reason for that is he's losing. This is going down.
And there's a great hangover, as you know, Rachel, from 2016 because Donald Trump shocked the world. And by 78,000 votes and three states, he won.
But the only similarities between this election and that election, my colleague Stuart Stevens point out is the two and the zero in front of them. It's a very different race, and Donald Trump's strength and resiliency is being vastly overstated in the media, and the durability, the vastness of Biden's coalition is being serially underreported.
And the fact of the matter is, as the Biden campaign is flush with cash. The Trump campaign is out of money, out of gas. The candidate is unhinged, and this is going down.
You see new polling that has Biden up six points in Georgia from Quinnipiac. That's just out. You look at the condition of the Senate races. Lindsey Graham in 2016, when he was a very different person, said if we pick Donald Trump, we will be destroyed.
And Donald Trump has brought destruction to the Republican Party. He has brought destruction to the country, and we're going to watch it all go down in two weeks. Consequences are coming for Donald Trump.
MADDOW: Former Republican strategist, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, which has been a potent force in this election already with more to come -- Steve, thanks for joining us tonight. I appreciate you being here on a very weird night.
SCHMIDT: Weird for sure.
MADDOW: All right. We've got much more ahead.
Again, tonight, the headlines out of this -- the headlines out of this strange town hall with the president, he did play footsie with the QAnon conspiracy cult tonight, encouraging them. He said that masks basically give you COVID. That 85 percent of people who wear a mask get COVID, which is just complete horse hockey, completely untrue.
The president also said there's a cure to COVID, and he said that if there's -- in your state, if there are COVID restrictions, those are a political conspiracy theory. They don't have anything to do with the viruses. Those are just governors that are doing that to try to hurt me politically, and as of November 4th, all of those restrictions will lift.
Just the president not only trafficking in his standard lies, but using this national platform to spread truly, truly dangerous, potentially fatally dangerous disinformation, deliberate disinformation about a pandemic that's already killed 215,000 of us and counting.
More than 1,000 Americans died today, and he's still saying this stuff.
We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MADDOW: This I did not have on my "what might happen in the final two weeks of the election" bingo card. But here's the headline. Rudy Giuliani is my father. Please, everyone, vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
That is the headline right now at vanityfair.com. The byline here is Caroline Rose Giuliani, and her father really is the former mayor of New York City and the current personal lawyer to the president.
She says, quote: I have a difficult confession, something I usually save for at least the second date. My father is Rudy Giuliani. We are multi-verses apart politically and otherwise.
I've spent a lifetime forging an identity in the arts, separate from my last name. So, publicly declaring myself as Giuliani feels counterintuitive. But I've come to realize, she says, that none of us can afford to be silent right now. The stakes are too high.
Quote: we are not helpless. I may not be able to change my father's mind, but together, we can vote this toxic administration out of office. Trump and his enablers have used his presidency to stoke the injustices that already permeated our society, taking them to dramatically new Bond-villain heights.
If the unrelenting deluge of devastating news makes you think I'm crazy for having hope, please remember that making us feel powerless is a tactic that politicians use to make us think our voices and our votes don't matter. But they do. It's taken persistence and nerve to find my voice in politics, and I'm using it now to ask you to stand with me in the fight to end Donald Trump's reign of terror.
If being the daughter of a polarizing mayor who became the president's personal bulldog has taught me anything, it is that corruption starts with yes-men and yes-women, the cronies who create an echo chamber of lies and subservience to maintain their proximity to power. We've seen this ad nauseam with Trump and his cadre of high-level sycophants, the ones that weren't convicted anyway.
Those words today from Caroline Rose Giuliani, daughter of Rudy Giuliani, the president's lawyer.
It is not an easy thing to break publicly with a family member regardless of your relationship with that person, especially when you're not a public figure yourself. We're going to speak live with Caroline Giuliani in just a moment for her first TV interview since publishing this.
But this plea from Ms. Giuliani to not vote for the president, to not vote for her father's client and friend, it comes not just in the heat of the final weeks of an election with voting already under way. It also comes as Ms. Giuliani's father is right in the middle of a last-ditch attempt at an October surprise that NBC News is reporting tonight is now being investigated by federal investigators as a potential foreign intelligence operation.
Ms. Giuliani's father, Rudy Giuliani, and president Trump are with this October surprise trying to upend the election at the last minute. They've levied this crazy set of new allegations against Joe Biden, but they really do appear to be the product of a Russian intelligence operation directed at our election.
These new allegations are based on supposedly damning emails that were supposedly recovered from a gas company in Ukraine, a gas company that was hacked months ago by the same Russian intelligence unit that was one of the groups that hacked the Democratic Party in 2016.
Quoting from "The New York Times" today, quote, last month U.S. intelligence analysts contacted several people with knowledge of the Burisma hack for further information after they'd picked up chatter that stolen Burisma emails would be leaked in the form of an October surprise. Among their chief concerns was that the Burisma material would be leaked alongside forged materials in an attempt to hurt Mr. Biden's candidacy, which is something that Russian hackers did when they dumped real emails alongside forgeries ahead of the elections in France in 2017. It would also be just a slight twist on Russia's 2016 playbook when they siphoned leaked Democratic Party emails through fake personas on Twitter and through WikiLeaks.
Now, tonight, "The Washington Post" is out with this new reporting that the intelligence community actually warned the White House that Giuliani was the target of a Russian influence operation. "The Post" reporting that the president shrugged it off and didn't seem to care about the warnings.
One -- one way the intelligence community in this country knew that this -- that U.S. intelligence was monitoring suspected Russian assets in Ukraine, who should pop up talking to them but Rudy Giuliani. Quote: Former officials said Giuliani was not a target of U.S. surveillance while in Ukraine, but he was dealing with suspected Russian assets who were.
So this is where we are: 19 days to the election. At least 15 million Americans have already voted. The president's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has been picked up by the U.S. intelligence community in intercepts because he has been talking to Russian intelligence about a Russian intelligence operation to dump fake documents into the U.S. bloodstream right before the election to try to re-elect Donald Trump.
And at this moment, Rudy Giuliani's daughter has chosen to publicly plead with the American people to please vote against her father's client, to please vote to elect Joe Biden.
Caroline Rose Giuliani joins us live here, next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MADDOW: Quote: If you are planning to abstain, if you're planning to cast a symbolic vote or abstain from voting altogether, please reconsider. It's more important than ever to avoid complacency. This election is far from over. If 2020 has taught us anything, it's that anything can happen.
We are hanging by a single slipping finger on a cliff's edge and the fall will be fatal. If we remove ourselves from the fight, our country will be in freefall. Alternative alternatively, we can hang on, election a compassionate and decent president and claw our way back onto the ledge. If I after decades of despair over politics can engage in our democracy to meet this critical moment, I know you can, too.
That is from Caroline Rose Giuliani, the daughter of the president's personal attorney writing tonight at "Vanity Fair" under this remarkable headline, Rudy Giuliani is my father, please, everyone, vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Joining us now live for "The Interview" is Caroline Rose Giuliani. She's a filmmaker. She's the daughter of President Trump's potential attorney.
Ms. Giuliani, thank you so much for being here tonight. I know you don't have to be here yet, you had a choice to be anywhere in the world. Thanks for being here.
CAROLINE ROSE GIULIANI, RUDY GIULIANI'S DAUGHTER: Thank you for having me. I'm a big fan.
MADDOW: Oh, thank you for saying so.
Let me ask if you -- if you and your dad have spoken since you made a choice to do this or if your family has given you any feedback thus far?
GIULIANI: We haven't spoken since the article was published, but, so I'm not sure how he feels. But I know that if I were him, I'd be very proud to have a daughter who's using her voice for what she believes in.
MADDOW: Tell me about the decision to do this so publicly. Obviously, you've had to grapple for whole life with what kind of public profile you want to have and the associations with your name, both in your father's own political career and now in his career associated with the president's.
How did you weigh that in terms of how much you wanted to put yourself out there versus what you felt like was the urgency of this message?
GIULIANI: Yeah, I've spent a lot of my life running away from that connection, just because I wanted to build an identity of my own. But just looking around, seeing the crisis that our country is in for the last four years, it just felt like an urgent thing to do.
And I felt like because of the experiences that I've had in politics and how discouraged I've been by them my whole life, for personal reasons, that I could speak to those people who feel really overwhelmed about this election because of the toxic climate that Trump has created.
MADDOW: One of the things that's happened, actually, since your piece was posted at "Vanity Fair" tonight is that "The Washington Post" is reporting that the White House was told last year that your father was being used by Russian intelligence. That he was the target of a Russian influence operation.
NBC News is reporting tonight that with this sort of October surprise, that he has brought to the fore about Joe Biden and Mr. Biden's son, that that is now being investigated by federal investigators as a foreign intelligence operation for which your father would be the conduit.
I imagine despite all your political differences with your father, that has to be jarring as his daughter to think about that prospect and to think that he might be wrapped up in that.
GIULIANI: Yeah, I mean, the whole experience can be difficult and challenging, but I think it's the same thing that -- not the same -- but I think a lot of people can relate to despair over politics. And that's really what I wanted to speak to.
I don't have any -- I live in L.A. I don't have any inside information on anything like that. But I just thought maybe I could be the other October surprise. You know?
MADDOW: Yeah. No, I hear you. And you're not -- and you take pains to not, you know, go out on limbs that you didn't grow, yourself, in terms of speaking from your own experience. That's part of why I was interested in your diagnosis you gave in your piece on "Vanity Fair" about the importance of sycophants of yes-men and yes-women, that being something that makes corruption possible, that it doesn't just take one bad person, it actually takes them being surrounded by people who -- who supplicate their own ethics in order to make it happen.
Can you tell us a little bit about how you arrived at that analysis about what went wrong here?
GIULIANI: Yeah, I think a lot about fame and power. It's something I've been exposed to for a long time. But it's not something that's specific to politics, either. It's something that just happens in the world. But, you know, I'm a filmmaker, so I like to observe why people become how they are and think that a lot of, like, Trump's egomania, if you look at him four years ago, to now, it's gotten exponentially worse and that's because of that echo chamber of lies.
MADDOW: Your father has made a lot of media appearances over the past year and a half, including a number where -- a number of them where people who've known him for a long time felt like, or said that they didn't recognize him, or that he had changed or maybe that there was something going on with your dad's health or with his sort of mental stability.
Did you -- did you share any of those concerns or has your father's public profile been sort of what you'd expect? I don't know him personally. I haven't known him over a long enough period of time to know whether his behavior was sort of weird for him.
Have you been concerned about his public behavior at all?
GIULIANI: I mean, I've certainly been concerned about his public behavior, not for those reasons, per se, but just because he's involved in this whole group of people doing these things. So, I think it's less about him specifically and more about this mob mentality that has been created and that he's feeding, unfortunately.
MADDOW: Caroline Giuliani, the daughter -- the daughter of president's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and the author of this searing call to action tonight in "Vanity Fair" -- Caroline, it's really nice to meet you and thanks for talking to us tonight. It's a pleasure to have you here.
GIULIANI: Thanks for having me.
MADDOW: All right. That is going to do it for us tonight. This was just one hour. Didn't it feel like a number of hours?
All right. I'll see you again tomorrow night.
Now, it's time for "THE LAST WORD WITH LAWRENCE O'DONNELL."
Good evening, Lawrence.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.END
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