Donald Trump is having a rough campaign closing talking of
violence against journalists this weekend, pantomiming a sex act on
his microphone, and continuing the free fall since the Madison
Square Garden rally put him on defense over all kinds
of attacks and hateful jokes.
Now, voters have been living through the impact of Trump's
first term for some time.
People live through the COVID failures, the ensuing economic collapse,
his failed coup, and these abortion bans around the nation.
But there are many accounts that suggest Trump is not
only basically tied with Harris, but that he could end
this election with more support than before.
His ceiling has been typically stuck around 46 or 46.8%
in the past races.
You can see there both times he drew fewer votes
than the Democrat running, but famously took the Electoral College
with 46.1% in 2016.
And Americans disapproved of Trump as president for his entire
time in office.
There were historic lows.
He averaged about 41%.
And I want to tell you, when he left in
January 21, he was at a rock bottom 34% record
lows.
These are not numbers suggesting the public approved of him
or wanted him at the time, let alone again.
Yet as Steve Kornacki has reported, and we saw these
charts, the same nation that rejected him and saw him
out the door at that 34% approval, now in surveys
remembers that very same time more fondly.
People now say in the United States that they give
Trump's first term 48% approval.
That's in the past tense, but it's far higher than
the actual approval he had at the time.
Now, memory is flexible.
It's subjective.
People thought less of Trump's first term during it, according
to them.
I'm telling you, their approval ratings, not the media's, not
not my view.
But it's also been very choppy since then.
People feel worse off than they did four years ago.
The wrong track numbers in America are high.
And when times are tough, it's common to look back
for some better time.
A type of political nostalgia, which is actually the exact
messaging the conservatives have long been primed for.
Ronald Reagan coined the MAGA slogan.
You see it right there, Make America great again.
Donald Trump later plagiarized it and added his more blunt
appeals to the old days from gender to race.
So right now, our special report here heading into the
election is what are people forgetting about Trump in office
now, he could tick up to 48% and still lose.
Or he could win the Electoral College.
But any chance Trump has it winning Tuesday's votes rests
on a pretty good number of people forgetting what I
just mentioned, that they did not actually approve of his
time in office during that time, which is usually the
best indicator, not your faraway memories later.
It's while they were living through it, in contrast to
what may be these inflated sort of nostalgic numbers.
Now.
Now, those are the facts about the numbers.
They're not partisan.
Just as many warnings against Donald Trump from the beginning,
warnings that he was unfit, untrustworthy, divisive, and wholly opposed
to the actual public service for the nation.
And sacrifice came not as a partisan attack, but from
Republicans and from conservatives back when they were speaking freely
before Trump's unexpected 2016 Electoral College victory.
They were based on Trump's record over the years in
business and public life.
They weren't based on some liberal agenda or Biden Harris
campaign.
That was many years in the future.
It is a fact.
If you put aside all of the partisan harping and
skepticism about where we hear things, it is simply a
public fact that we lived through that those Republicans made
those warnings because we've never seen any figure in either
party in the modern era draw such widespread condemnation.
He's a race baiting, xenophobic religious bigot.
This man is a pathological liar.
The most vulgar person ever aspire to the presidency and
I don't think he has a clue about anything.
The man cut cannot tell the truth, but he combines
it with being a narcissist.
He's a chaos candidate and he'd be a chaos president.
He's a populist authoritarian narcissist.
Coming from a guy who is such a coward.
He has authoritarian rulings and and interests and notions.
I'm a never Trump guy.
I never liked him.
Those are all Republicans.
OK.
His own running mate, the last voice you heard there
opposed him so much.
He didn't just say I'm a not Trump or an
anti Trump.
He said he was never Trump and then collapsed.
The meaning of the word never.
And there are many more condemnations from progressives and liberals,
from other types of critics, from government veterans, from nonpartisan
experts.
But maybe all these adjectives only go so far.
There is also the facts of how Trump ran the
government, how he used the power when he had it.
Here are some of the documented examples.
Trump failed to lead a competent COVID response.
He rejected the medical leadership.
He lied about the virus danger.
And then he told people to drink bleach, right?
And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it
out in a minute, one minute.
And is there a way we can do something like
that by injection inside or or almost a cleaning?
Trump failed to also enact his own legislative agenda, the
top items he had been pitching from infrastructure to healthcare.
He failed to build the wall he promised, which was
the centerpiece of that first campaign.
He then launched a chaotic travel ban with which courts
limited.
He used immigration powers to separate children from their own
parents, something almost no parent and no free thinking person
says is a positive.
He bent American policy towards Wall Street bankers after campaigning
as a populist from tax welfare to gutting consumer protections.
He failed to appoint or maintain qualified officials.
With so many people quitting or getting fired, he had
the record of the worst turnover in modern American history.
More on that in a moment.
He was repeatedly caught abusing power for his own benefit,
routing foreign and domestic government funds to himself and his
companies, demanding prosecutions of his opponents, shaking down Ukraine to
go after the Biden's.
He staffed the courts in order to end Roe, paving
the road for those Trump abortion bans.
He used his bully pulpit to clearly coddle and equivocate
on white supremacy at Charlottesville.
He encouraged violent militias like the Proud Boys.
He routinely divided and denigrated his fellow citizens.
People know and remember that Trump ran the most criminal
operation since Nixon, who of course was run out of
the White House.
During one term in office, Trump has seen 20 some
aides indicted, a dozen convicted, several incarcerated, and many more
now awaiting trial, including his own most serious trial for
federal felony offenses for the failed coup, which makes Trump
the 1st president to ever thwart a peaceful transfer of
power with an insurrection.
And he lied hundreds of his own supporters into their
conduct that day and later convictions and prison, even as
he now very openly admits the lies because he lost
the election.
I lost by one 110th of a point.
What it is.
They say it was 22,000 votes.
Yes, he did lose narrowly.
And he got a lot of people in trouble telling
them to commit crimes, claiming he didn't lose.
He knows he was the loser, just like he knows
vowing to pardon those traitors convicted of sedition is disloyal.
Literally the definition disloyal United States.
He doesn't care.
Those are public facts.
And that's just a small selection, which is why such
a broad bipartisan group, unusual in American politics, we hear
so much about our polarized politics.
Why don't we hear more about this bipartisan coalition of
people who oppose Trump returning to power?
These people with different ideologies and policy views combine with
one clear consensus.
They say.
They're telling you that knowing all this, picking Donald Trump
to be president again now would be like picking an
anti vaxxer as your doctor, which is actually what Trump
says he'll basically do in government.
Embracing anti vax RFK junior who says he'll oversee doctors
and health agencies in the Trump administration, helping Trump decide
whether to ban vaccines that save lives.
Hiring Trump would be like taking the closing pitch in
your campaign to Latino and undecided voters and then opening
up that night's closing argument address with a comics racist
material.
There's literally a floating island of garbage.
Yeah, I think it's called Puerto Rico.
Picking Trump would be like hiring your own nepo baby
in law to tackle the Middle East with no diplomatic
experience and then give that same nepotistic higher complex assignment
to deal with pandemic supplies without any experience.
Hiring Trump again would be like hiring a renegade for
your top national security post only to watch them get
indicted.
Or hiring the Exxon chief to run all US diplomacy
so you could further fuse a capitalist oil agenda as
America's foreign policy and then tell everyone you're draining the
swamp.
Hiring Trump again would be like hiring an Energy Department
chief who backed abolishing the Energy Department.
Or hiring an attorney general who undermines the rule of
law by blatantly politicizing cases.
Or trying to replace that attorney general with another acting
AG so corrupt he ended up indicted.
Hiring Trump again would be like picking a chief financial
officer who does financial fraud, which Trump did, that's why
his CFO went to jail.
Or like vowing to drain the swamp and then hiring
4 different agency chiefs who then corruptly enriched themselves.
Enriched themselves in a rush to grift and take taxpayer
dollars.
Which is why each of these Trump appointees were actually
forced to resign over their blatant and busted ethic scandals.
Hiring Trump again would be like hiring for your top
campaign lawyer, a person who then is disbarred for election
crimes and indicted in several states.
The call for Joe Biden isn't, is it?
What was it called by all the Oh my goodness,
all the networks.
Wow, all the networks.
Let's have trial by combat.
It'd be like having your original campaign chairman hired to
run a campaign so you are ahead of the government
and enforcing the laws, and then that person's actually guilty
of their own felonies going to prison.
Or it'd be like hiring as your longest serving political
consiglieri and advisor someone ultimately convicted of federal felonies to
hide your own history of conduct with them.
It'd be like taking your longest longest serving lawyer that
you hire but them actually being a criminal imprisoned for
election felonies on your behalf.
Or picking a new lawyer for another one of your
trials who ends up being indicted.
As you see Boris Epstein there was in the corner
and would need his own lawyer.
It'd be like trying to hire ADOJ special prosecutor who
again was supposed to enforce the law, who ends up
convicted of election crimes for your benefit.
They used the machines to trash large batches of votes
that should have been awarded to President Trump.
That there are enough facts that support this plea of
guilty I do.
Hiring Trump again would be like picking an election fraud
czar who's indicted for election fraud, which they also did,
or hiring a campaign lawyer who's then convicted of campaign
crimes and regrets ever working for you.
I would have declined to represent Donald Trump.
I look back on this whole experience with deep remorse,
as the argument goes from, again, the very bipartisan coalition
I showed you.
Putting Trump back in the White House now would be
like hiring White House aides who would go to prison
before cooperating with the federal government.
They literally took an oath to serve.
Or like hiring aids who admit their plans were to
overthrow the election results in a coup.
They put me in handcuffs, They bring me here.
They put me in leg irons.
They stick me in a self.
It's a lot.
The argument, the warning from these individuals, is that hiring
Trump again would be like rehiring the people who grifted
after promising to drain the swamp.
And even after going through this litany of mistakes in
crimes tonight on election eve, when you see more of
the Trump crime spree in one visual, it is galling
and telling.
Here put together are many of the stories I just
alluded to, whether these people are fit to be hired,
these lawyers now disbarred, indicted, convicted, not for other random
activities, but all for what they did over time for
Donald Trump and convicted in fair processes in federal and
state courts, in states red and blue, in independent probes
and separate investigations with different prosecutors who don't coordinate in
different states.
And this crime spree that you see on your screen
is just the 2020 campaign.
Four years was a long time ago.
People may have put it out of their memories, but
if you broaden out to both of Trump's prior campaigns
and his business, you see a man convicted of fraud,
a top three organizations rife with crime and convicts, a
web of criminals around this one man on top.
The common element is obvious.
Criminal enterprises as adjudicated by many separate juries of their
peers from the campaign to the business, It's a lot
to even track, as we just did there for you
swiftly, let alone fully absorb.
And so I'll tell you this, if you are watching
this or you share this with someone who's watching it,
who hasn't yet made-up their mind or is leaning Trump
for certain reasons, it would be understandable that people with
lives and obligations could forget all that.
It's not your job to track all that.
It's the job of, you know, law enforcement, news media,
government, auditors.
It'd be easy to forget how it went and felt
and went during that time and how all those failures
and all those convicts by definition were interfering with the
honest administration of the people's business.
That may be part of why they didn't get some
of their stuff done that I mentioned earlier.
This report you're watching cited 19, just 19 of the
worst offenders as determined by those independent probes and public
reporting and sometimes juries of their peers.
There are many, many other Trump veterans.
We did not include these people.
At Trump's behest and repeated encouragement and defense.
He, in fact, later pardoned some of them.
These people violated their oaths to you, to the Constitution,
to the United States government, and to the money, the
taxpayer dollars of yours that they were dealing with.
They violated the law to a criminal degree.
It is quite literally the opposite of hiring the best
and the brightest.
I know the best people.
I know the best managers.
I know the best deal makers.
I know people that will make us so strong.
I know guys that are so good.
We need to get the best and the finest, and
if we don't, we'll be in trouble for a long
period of time.
I know the best people.
Hiring Trump as president, again would be like hiring those
people.
They are literally his people.
And he is not saying he learned from those mistakes
or wants to turn a page or try something different.
Again, I'm just giving you the facts.
He has been campaigning all year on doubling down on
these people, embracing them and saying he would go after
anyone who gave them any accountability.
And here's the thing.
Elections are always a hiring decision.
You've seen his decisions.
You've seen who he hires and what he does.
And if some people had forgotten it, this is the
time to make sure you're remembering it accurately.
So now you get to make your decision.