"Just 60 days until the midterms"

0:00Join MS now live in Texas for our biggest event yet with Rachel Maddo Chen soggy Michael Steele and more MS now live together in Texas September 26th get tickets today at ms.now slash together. Hi there everyone happy Friday. It's 4 o'clock in New York with just 60 days, 60 days. To go until the midterm states are now standing up to Donald Trump's unconstitutional attempts to seize control of our elections. Despite the president's push to crack down a mail-in voting, the first midterm ballots are now in the mail. Today North Carolina started sending out ballots ahead of November's elections there. As the New York Times reports, quote, state election officials said they would send their first batch of absentee ballots just after midnight Friday to the more than 46,000 voters who have requested them. Then next Wednesday,

1:00Alabama will start mailing out their absentee ballots. And by mid September, all states must send out ballots to the US troops and other overseas voters. Even as Americans start casting their ballots, Trump refuses to give up on his effort to disenfranchise voters and suppress the vote. Just yesterday, the Justice Department filed another emergency appeal with the Supreme Court. The Trump administration wants the justices to lift a temporary order that is right now blocking the postal service from implementing Donald Trump's desired executive order to curb mail and ballots. Well, Trump spreads his unfounded delusions and disinformation about the threats of voting by mail. It is worth pointing out at this point that it is Donald Trump's preferred method of casting a ballot just last month. Donald Trump voted by mail again in the state of Florida. Meanwhile, MS now has new reporting on the Department of Homeland Security's

2:00efforts to amplify Trump's debunked election lies. As we have covered here during these hours, all week, DHS is rapidly expanding its push to hunt down examples of noncitizens who appear on the voter rolls. So far, they're only finding a handful of possible cases to investigate, quote, across the nine states, reportedly targeted in the surge. Some said they had yet to hear from Homeland Security about any possible voter fraud investigations. Others were subpoenaed this week for voting history on what amounted to a small number of individuals compared to the state's voting populations. Though more subpoenas could come, they haven't come close to the tens of thousands of potential noncitizens. The Trump administration claims to have identified on voter rolls, an unnamed DHS spokesperson telling MS now they won't comment on active investigations, but they did say this quote, they're actively rooting out and investigating election fraud wherever it can be found.

3:01End quote Trump's attack on our elections is where we begin again today with a revenue sharpening. He's the host of MS now's politics nation, the founder of the National Action Network also with me on set MS now legal analyst, Andrew Weissman is here and in bassin joins us. He's the co-founder and executive director at Protect Democracy. He served as associate White House counsel to President Barack Obama in. I start with you. This is one of those stories that we cover as unlikely because it's both unconstitutional and illegal. But because the Supreme Court has done so much of Trump's bidding, we do sort of have this white knuckle approach or at least I do in the same way we did with birthright citizenship, which was equally unconstitutional and unlawful. What are you watching and girting for? Well, and the first thing is the tell on all of this.

4:02As you said, Nicole, when we started, we're 60 days out from the midterm elections and you know what Donald Trump is not talking about? Why voters should vote for him and his party? What he is talking about is how he wants to stop people from being able to vote. And there is kind of the bottom line summary of what's going on, which is this is an act of desperation and weakness, although obviously as you note, it's a dangerous one. But the reason that they're going to the Supreme Court and I would note that they went to the Supreme Court as you said just the other day before the case that they're asking the Supreme Court to weigh in on had even been resolved at the district court level, let alone the circuit court level. That's another act of desperation. They know they're losing these cases in the lower courts. They have a terrible track record and while the Supreme Court has, as you note, given Trump way too much ground to cover and run in and all of his attacks on our democracy, they haven't quite given him the control over the elections that he wants. Nor has his party in the United States Senate. So I think he's going to lose these cases in court

5:06and regardless what we all need to know as voters is when someone attacks our right to vote, our response is to go out and exercise it to exercise it early to vote earlier for voting by male or to vote in person, but to not let this intimidate us. It also feels like there's this thing in that that that polls can't pick up and anyone that works on campaigns, if you're winning in the polls, you know not to trust them completely. If you're losing the polls, you may be overweight. This thing that doesn't show up in the polls, you say maybe we're only losing by less or maybe we're actually winning, but there is a piece that's unprecedented, and so there isn't a model for the actual right to vote being taken away. And when we covered the turnout model in Hungary when Victor Orbán has kicked out, it wasn't predicted that that would be the outcome. I wonder how much just in terms of your understanding of authoritarian attempts and populations efforts to reach back for the steering wheel. I wonder how much you feel is out

6:11there that we're not going to pick up or know about until election night. Yeah, I mean, look, I do think that every time Donald Trump does something to attack people's right to vote, to attack our democracy, our Constitution norms, it does have a political consequence and a backlash against him. We've seen that repeatedly. We've seen attacks on the right to vote in Georgia in recent years, particularly on communities of color and black voters in Georgia that resulted in a surge in voting from those communities because people don't like having their rights taken away. And I think there's a lot of irony in what Donald Trump is doing here. You know, the polling does suggest that the voters who are more energized to vote are those who oppose Trump's policies. And the ones who are less energized, the ones who are sort of more low-prepensity voters that tend to come out when Donald Trump is on the ballot are those who the Republicans frankly need if they hope to salvage what is looking like a bloodbath in the midterms. And the irony here is if you make it harder for people to vote, if you make it harder for people to vote by mail and

7:11otherwise, the people who are going to actually crawl over broken glass to vote are the ones who are more energized and the ones who might give up are the ones Trump most needs. So I think the thing we might discover on election night is that all of Trump's machinations actually came back to kind of vitamin. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the history of disenfranchising voters and suppressing the vote. And then this gray area where they like to flex the most, just making it more difficult, getting rid of drop boxes, getting rid of the right to hand out water in line. I mean, this is a story as old as time in certain parts of our country. I wonder what you make of the preparations to not just resist that but overcome it with turnout. I believe there will be huge turnouts. I think that the fact that Donald Trump's election strategy is to stop people from voting. Like that's it. That's the whole thing. Just stop. I'm not even going to try to win.

8:13Correct. And in fact, my big candidate in Texas, I'm going to talk about how he can't even dress well. I'm not trying to sell these guys. I'm smart strategy is to stop people from voting, which makes people vote. My second point is they have he's not given his people or the American public in general, a motivation to vote. They were voting last time, although I may have disagreed with them because they felt that Biden and Harris had not delivered. They felt they were being excluded. They felt a certain kind of way that he sold them about the 2020 election on and on and on too much diversity. He's not even giving them a reason to vote. In fact, he doesn't have one because their gas is going up. The inflation is choking them. And you have his people that have voted for him saying openly, I don't think I'm getting what I want. And he's in a war that no one sees how we're getting out of it. And he's going to have a midweek

9:16convention that even Republicans openly saying, I'm busy. I can't come. So I really think for someone who has fought him for years, I'm really saying he's not even on his game because he usually by now would have a theme and a rallying cry. And now you're left with him just saying we're going to stop and shrink the voters on the other side by having the Supreme Court give us some rulings. And we'll send JD Vance out there to act like he really knows what he's talking about. Margueralized spent some time to sort of take us through the legal architecture with their trying to do. And it's still a little fuzzy to me. But essentially, Trump is saying that the way I vote by mail is for me, but not for you. It doesn't want that to be an option. He's also going out looking for fraud that his own administration has said doesn't exist. I mean, since he has been back in the White House, he sent the Christie Nome led Department of Homeland Security out to look for the very

10:19same thing the times this week reported they're looking for again. So it is all predicated on the falsehood that there is this rampant fraud that's going on, which remember, this is now the Trump administration. So they can, if they have the proof, they can go forward and present in it. It's your notice. Exactly. They're not getting prosecutions, but not bringing those cases. And when they're in court, the judges are saying essentially, where's the beef? There's the where is the proof of this and the DIAJ lawyers are having to backtrack. I view the legal machinations as kind of a win win for the Trump administration, because on the one hand is united with Ian. There is always the chance that this Supreme Court is going to do something crazy, and they have done that. And so it is a white knuckle moment where you're thinking, well, you know, I'm looking at the exact text of the constitution, which says, of course,

11:20the president shouldn't have a role in these elections, because if he does, gee, I wonder who he thinks this should win. Right, but this is the immunity Supreme Court. So we don't assume anything in the constitution mold. Exactly. So that you're, so, A, he could be thinking, so there's some percentage that I will get five or more. And you know, maybe it will only be three or four. But so there's some chance I might say that is crazy in and of itself. Crazy. There are decisions where I'm like, birthright citizenship should have been 90, and it was five to four on the constitutional issue, five to four. The reason they're going back on that issue is because they're having to flip one. But the reason I say win win is there's some percentage that the Supreme Court will do something that we're all like, that's crazy. And if they lose, I am sure that we are going to hear DOJ. And when the midterms come saying there is fraud in the election, we are taking steps. And one of the ways that we tried to do this was we tried to do protect mail-in voting from

12:26fraud that was prevented by the courts. And now we are taking this a step further because we need to vindicate it. So they could see ballots. They could do all sorts of pernicious things and say, we need to do it because of look at all these particularly blue states or blue cities and red states that we're going to be targeting. And they get to say, we try to prevent this, but couldn't do it beforehand. So I just am sure that's going to be their strategy. I mean, it's such a pernicious lie Maria Barteromo reportedly has been fired in part because she shared information from her network about how they were instructed to not touch the lies of election fraud. I mean, these are lies that are sort of like how bad are they? They're so bad. Fox told their anchors not to cover them. What is your sense of how much the the lie has sort of seeped into the point where there'll be any legal victories for them? I mean, Mark and I keep saying they're over 23 in the courts. Or is

13:26your concern more on like the political violence in KSI? I think that I think that Mark is right that when it's actually litigated that they lose. But I have sort of two words for you, Fulton County. Yeah. There was a search that was approved by a judge even though it wouldn't be now seen the warrant. I have a lot of questions about why it was. And this is an administration that basically doesn't ask for permission beforehand. And if they just go out and seize things or take them pursuing to grand jury subpoenas, it puts the honest then on the sort of defenders of democracy to try and say wait a second, we need those ballots. So I think the answer is I am I think it pays to be incredibly cynical about what they are doing. And we have a DOJ that went forward with Fulton County in the

14:27face of the fact that we all know that there is no material fraud in the election. Right. Right. I mean, and this is where sort of the day-to-day work of covering the destruction of the intelligence community, my interview Julia Curly this week for my podcast. And she is, I asked her how she would assess the United States of America if she were writing a PDB for for an ally for an ally government. And she said she would assess it as moving solidly toward an authoritarian consolidation of power. And one of the ways they've done that is by seizing control with political appointees atop the intelligence community. I mean, where do you put your concerns about the scenario Andrew is laying out? Well, as you know, because you and I have talked about this over the years, I think Donald Trump is deploying every tool in the authoritarian toolkit that we have seen deployed across the world. And he's showing that he is quite effective at breaking everything but his own bank account. He's not not nearly as effective as fixing thing,

15:28a fixing things, but he's he's pretty good at breaking them. But the one thing that he has fundamentally failed to do is he's failed to finish his consolidation of power before becoming unpopular. And I have never been to AutoCrat School, but I imagine one of the things they teach you in AutoCrat School is you want to consolidate the power before you do unpopular things. And that way you're impervious to the political backlash. The problem for Donald Trump is he's now tipping just about 30% maybe a little above, maybe soon a little bit below in approval. And when you're at that level and you go and ask people around the country, even people on your own side team and party to go stick their necks out for you, there'd be a lot less likely to do so. And so I agree that Andrew is right to be fearful of all of those moves. But Donald Trump was more powerful and had a sort of a better political star in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election. When he tried to get a lot of people to go and find votes for him and failed, he's going to be a lot

16:28weaker as a political actor when he tries to do it this time. And I think most of his party is going to be looking past him if his party does really badly in this midterm election right at the moment he's asking for help. And I think they're going to be looking at 2028 saying let me get away from this guy as fast as I can. Yeah, like when the AutoC is written on the death of the political movement of MAGA, it will be that it fell apart and fell short of the authoritarian, you know, master plan or whatever project 2025 was because voters rejected Donald Trump so completely. He as a personality got in the way of what 2020 project 2025 was trying to sell as a political manifesto on ideology. He got in the way of his own movement and his his own care about it at the end of the day. His narcissism has has become the real obstruction for those who were really committed to what I think are some very archaic undemocratic principles.

17:28But they believe in that he doesn't. He believes in Donald Trump and that that's why he's saying I'll spend all of the money we've raised on talking about what I've done rather than selling the candidates. That's why he's having as many conventions who's ever heard of having a convention in your keynoting both nights. I mean, he's going to be the keynote both now. I'm starving. I'm doing the talking. I mean, his narcissism is going to be as a kill his heel and I don't know if they teach that in autocrat schools. I think they teach that in narcissism class 1.1. Yeah, I think there's a new Trump you. All right, no one's going anywhere. There's a lot more news to get to today, including a huge reversal. Best word I can think of to describe Donald Trump's on again, off again, now on again. Ally and friend Michael Cohen Trump now claiming his one-time fixer is taking back his testimony against Donald Trump in a court of law. Plus Trump's new acting army secretary is someone virtually unknown inside the Pentagon in a moment when steadiness and

18:32expertise matter most. Deadline White House is back with all those stories and much more in just a minute. Don't go anywhere. Ever since I was young, I've watched people working hard chasing opportunity, making sacrifices, doing everything they can to build a better life. And now we're shining a light on what matters most. Our economy, our national identity, our democracy, our future. The stakes have never been higher. It's all on the line. I'm the line with Alicia Menendez, weekdays at 12 p.m. Eastern on MS now. Hey, when that reads, Donald Trump's overnight posts or the summaries of them in the daily beasts or other places is well aware that Donald Trump lives about 100% of the time in the past. I spritly thinking or ruminating a new ways to erase his felony criminal conviction in New York,

19:39chief among those thoughts. This afternoon, Trump posted this quote, I am pleased to report that Michael Cohen, the prosecution's star witness and in actuality, the only witness in the New York State Attorney General in Manhattan, D.A. Which hunt cases? I'll capitalize for some reason. Brought against me has just fully all caps recanted. This testimony. Without a proof or corroboration to backup that claim, Trump also posted that Cohen was quote pressured and quote coerced to say things that were not true. Back in May of 2024, a New York jury convicted Donald Trump on 34 felony counts, falsifying business records to conceal payments to adult film star stormy Daniels, the Reverend, Andrew and Ian are with us. Andrew, I spend your thought. Let me just play a little bit of Michael Cohen, the case he made in appearances. I will hop to having him

20:41on this show many times here's one of those appearances. The Floyd defense is the destroyer Michael Cohen defense. That's the mistake that they were making. He believed that by destroying me, that that would exonerate him from his crimes. And the answer is that's a flawed defense. You don't win your case by trying to damage a non-party subpoenaed witness. You do it based upon your own evidence, right? Of your innocence. Well, that wasn't what he that's not what Donald's about. So I think one of the things it's worth remembering, this would not be the first witness to recant if it if it happens. He's not by a long shot the only witness in either the civil case brought by letitian james or the criminal case brought by a grand jury at the state court.

21:41In many ways, he was icing. I remember writing about that, like the issue about whether you called him or not, because there was so much other proof. But he is not the first cooperating witness who would recant. And it's worth people remembering that Michael Cohen faced real potential liability when Donald Trump was reelected in 2.0 because Michael Cohen admitted under earth and said that he Michael Cohen had lied to a federal judge when he pled guilty to something, because he said I was innocent of that. And that was under earth. So that perjury case for lying to a federal judge, which, you know, a department of justice would have every interest in vindicating that as a matter of a process matter, whether whatever the sentence might be is a separate issue. And so that was a bit of a sort of, you know, legal gun to the head for Michael Cohen

22:42that Donald Trump held because if you've seen him bring cases that were almost not existent, if not existent against James Come against Patricia James. And here you have a case that is on paper, the person saying under earth, I am guilty of this. And when that was not brought, you thought, okay, what is going on? You know, this still has to play out and we'll see where it goes. But to me, that would be the reason for this to be essentially a false recantation. You know, one of the things that was always, I think, opaque or puzzling was why the Mueller team hadn't relied on him, I guess, or some of the testimony. I guess this is maybe one of the ways that he wasn't super reliable. So the answer to that is sort of, it's a little bit, sort of yes and no, the reason that the sort of the case that was sent off to New York first to

23:45the feds in New York and then to the state. But they never bring. The feds did not bring it was, that wasn't with, if you remember the Mueller team, that wasn't within our remit. Right, from Rustine. We were given specific instructions that we had to look for sort of interference in the campaign by Russia or anyone in the Trump campaign. That was, and with other small bells and whistles, but not this piece. And so with that, this was not the only thing where we carved it off and sent various pieces of the investigation in some to New York, some went to the DCU's attorney's office. So that had nothing to do with an assessment of, oh, Michael Cohen should be believed on this or not believed on it. It should be said that there are cooperating witnesses always have a lot of baggage. I mean, I used to do bob cases where you put people on the stand to it. And Samu Gervano's case, the underboss of the Gambino family, he admitted that he participated in 19 murders. He admitted lying to a grand jury. I mean,

24:48all sorts of crimes. And there the issue is you're not telling a jury. This is a paragon. You're explaining to them why you should believe this person. And that is, that is, you know, the hard part of being a prosecutor is making those decisions and making sure that you have enough corroborative evidence that you can go to a jury and say that. But ultimately a jury has to say, you know what, this is a bad person. But you know what, who else are you going to get in the mob other than, you know, if you want to know the inside, a mobster on the inside is going to always have baggage. And so, you know, Michael Cohen was in the, was an insider. And what I, having witnessed the state case, it was remarkable to me. I did not realize just how much corroboration they had for what he was saying. I'm going to be fascinated if Michael Cohen does sort of officially try to recant in a sworn statement how he explains all of that corroborative evidence.

25:50Yeah. Yeah. And about some, what do you say? I mean, look, in some ways, Michael Cohen is kind of a paradigmatic tragic figure of the age. You know, I don't want to, I don't want to exonerate his own moral culpability here, but you can only imagine just how Benarail and the Axel Trump has gotten him for all the reasons that Andrew notes. And I think it is a cautionary tale in this era of getting entangled with people like Donald Trump is very, very hard to get out of it. I mean, I often think about the fact that we, we look back on the World War II generation as the greatest generation. And I think sadly, we'll come to look back on this current moment as one of America's weakest generations, when so many important people in American life, all the way up to our leaders, just didn't have what it took in this moment to do the right thing. And I think one of the best books of this era was written by someone that you often have on the show Tim Miller. His book, Why We Did It, is a phenomenal look at human psychology. And the fact that so many people in this era, Michael Cohen included

26:51probably, made decisions based on what was going to keep them in the good graces of the people around them and their small little tribe and clung, which is a very human instinct. And it caused so many in this moment to go down the wrong road. But I think perhaps the positive spin on it is it's also the power that we have. It means that people will behave in a way that they think their friends, their neighbors, the members of their community are expecting them and looking to them to behave. And we should lean into that. If we want to come out the other side of this crisis and strengthen our democracy, we have it in our power to create the kind of expectations of our neighbors that say, we expect more of you. We expect you to exercise the role of citizen to vote, to stand up for democracy. Because if we do that, I think we actually utilize that human psychology in a positive way to our advantage. And maybe that's the good we can take out of this saga. Last word. I would say, I knew Michael Corm for years. Anytime you would deal with Donald Trump, he was almost in the room. And usually Donald Trump and I would not agree in the room. But it was some issue here in New York or

27:53something. And when he was facing going to jail, he called me and asked me to have prayer with him. We met for breakfast. It was in New York time. And he asked me to stay in touch with his son. And I really wasn't surprised when I heard that he was doing this recanting because I sensed he was more trying to get back with daddy. He had a real love for Donald Trump. I mean, as awkward as that may sound, I think that he would rather risk anything to get back in that fold for whatever reason. And I think that it is absolutely correct to say the corroborating evidence and the fact that Tis James would not bring a case like that if there wasn't more to it than that. But I think you have to look at all of the things that my colleagues have raised, but you must also add the factor. There's some personal I want to be part of the group again that is in Michael Corm.

28:54I think he is genuinely feeling that that's what he wants to be. It's amazing. I mean, it'll take years for sort of the human stories to come out, but we certainly platformed him a whole lot here and we'll be watching this closely. Rep, thank you so much for being here. Andrew, thank you for being at the table. Ian Basson, thank you for being here on this Friday before a holiday weekend. I'm grateful to all of you. Still ahead for us, Trump's new seat warmer leading the US Army for now is someone who is virtually unknown that the Pentagon, but perhaps most importantly not to beat Hexa, stay with us. That's next.

29:55Donald Trump has named a new acting Army secretary after the sudden resignation of Army Secretary Dan Driscoll earlier this week. He's chosen Adam Telle, an official who oversees the Army Corps of Engineers by passing the Army under Secretary who would typically fill this role. Washington Post is reporting while Telle is a relative unknown at the Pentagon. He is well known on Capitol Hill. However, after serving for decades as a Republican congressional staffer, and White House liaison, Telle is viewed and the Pentagon is having a good relationship with Pete Hexa and takes the position following months of tension between the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hexa and Driscoll. This now leaves the Army without a Senate confirmed leader as new intelligence reports assess that Iran has grown more confident in its abilities to attack targets

30:57in the Middle East and prolong Donald Trump's war of choice in Iran. Let's bring into our coverage MSN Military Analyst and retired Army Lieutenant General Mark Hurtling. He's the author of, if I don't return, a father's wartime journal. Tom Nichols is also with us. He's a staff writer at the Atlantic and professor emeritus at the Naval War College. General Hurtling, we started this conversation yesterday. What's amazing is that they still in the six, maybe beginning the seventh month of this, can't manage to say the same thing. I want to show you something that JD Vance said and then Trump defending Vance. The phrase and into the war, I want to push back on that just a little bit because major combat operations are currently not ongoing and they haven't been ongoing in a very long time. I wouldn't call it a war. Right now there is no active shooting. I tell you what, a lot of people don't call it a war. I call it a military conflict because it's it's small potatoes for us. It's not a big thing. I heard what he said and it was interesting because

32:02I think that there's a lot of truth that we're not fighting right now. I can understand what he's saying. It's a military conflict but it's it's very intimate and I could see somebody not calling it away. Again, this is not the conversation happening in the country. This is not the conversation happening around the tables where men and women of the military have been deployed for much longer and Trump's words quote not long enough when it came to the USS Abraham Lincoln. These are not the conversations happening for the families that the Wall Street Journal yesterday reported would be deployed through 2027. What is your sense, General, why this is the debate the debate Trump and Bans are having publicly when the men and women of the military are are living a life that is consistent with the military that is at war? If it's a debate in a coal, it's a pretty dumb one. First of all, the vice president who is a marine veteran, although he was a public affairs

33:04specialist within the Marine Corps, so I'm not sure he may or may not know what combat is. But for him to say something like that and then the president to back it up by changing the definition to a military conflict, I'm not sure what a military conflict has in terms of a difference with a war. There are times in combat when you're not fighting, which is what the president said. You're sleeping or eating or perhaps resting in the rear area. But you tell any of the individuals, the 50,000 individuals that are in the Middle East, the brigade of paratroopers that are somewhere in the Middle East, or you tell their mothers or fathers or their wives or husbands that they're not in a war. And I think they would all disagree with you. There's a chance for people getting her, as there has been already, although the president said, you know, only 18 killed, that's not that's small potatoes, which is also infuriating. But all of the comments that are trying to obfuscate

34:07the fact that we're in a conflict that continues on with no end in sight and no political objective. Perhaps the only reason this isn't a war is because it doesn't have a political objective, and yet we're still sending the military to fight it. But, um, Tom Nichols, the Trump administrator or Trump and Bayon's talk about it as though they're the only people or the only side that will determine whether it's a war or not. Here's how the Times reports Iran's state of being today, quote, a more confident Iran emerges after six months of war with the U.S. Quote, the report, some current and former officials said, suggest that any agreement to fully end the war will be hard to reach. There are a few signs that Iran is ready to make any sort of deal with the U.S. content exacerbate President Trump's political problems ahead of the U.S. midterm elections, according to some officials, your thoughts. Well, you have two states on flying their flags with identifying each other's enemies,

35:13fighting with each other. Now, you know, maybe I'm just an old retired war college professor, but I'm pretty sure that's war. You know, and there are military excursions that are not war when example, fighting anti-terrorist operations or, you know, escorting ships or doing things like that. When you're fighting another state and you are pummeling their military forces and they're striking back and you are seeking, as the president said, to gain their unconditional surrender, I think most, you know, you don't have to be an intellectual or a scholar. Most people know that's war. And the fact that they're trying to downplay this tells you that they know that they've been losing it. And I know it upsets people to hear them. It doesn't make me happy to say it. But the reality is Iran is achieving its strategic objectives in the United States. It's not

36:13achieving any of its strategic objectives. That's called losing. And it doesn't surprise me at all that the administration doesn't know what to call this, wants to keep down, soft peddling it and downplaying it as, you know, an excursion, a conflict, a bit of unpleasantness, whatever they've decided to call it now, because this is really a disaster of the first order. And I want to just coming behind one other point, Mark was making. It's not just infuriating to hear, you know, the 18 dead and 100s wounded is small potatoes. This is a country that's the size of a chunk, a big chunk of Western Europe with more than 90 million people in it. This is one of the biggest expeditions the United States has undertaken in the Middle East. This place is like two and a half times the size of a rock. And somehow to say, well, this is just small potatoes for us. Mm-hmm. That is, once again, the president just wish-casting and trying to make it all go away,

37:14because he and Hegseth have screwed this thing up from the very beginning. And their lies or their disinformation or their obfuscating, whatever words you want to use, is in isolation. I mean, our allies who are still under withering bread and facing strikes are having to call a war or war. Our adversaries are taking note to exactly what you just pointed out. We are not winning. Iran is not losing. I want to share some of the other reporting from today with both of you on those fronts. No one goes anywhere. We'll be back in one minute. Stay with us. So, I'm hurtling and Tom are still with us. Let me read this reporting that I referenced before the break to you, General Hartling from Politico. Arab diplomats fear Iran is widening the war and there's no way out. Quote Iran's renewed attacks against Arab countries are raising the stakes for regional powers with some saying they are losing hope that there's any way out of the war

38:17and that things will get worse before the November elections. The fear is that Iran is particularly motivated to increase strikes right now ahead of the U.S. midterms making a widening regional conflict more likely. This is something that is happening. It's not front and center for the American people, but this is something that's happening in the region on a new daily basis, right? Well, it gets back to what you were saying before about whether this is a war or a con-military conflict or whatever the two of them are calling it. If we're seeing that from our side, guess what? Our partners in the Middle East are seeing it too and they don't know what to make of it. You know, there's a whole lot of military equipment in various countries, U.S. military equipment, in various countries in the Middle East and they depend on us to protect them in many ways. They don't like Iran either, but they're not going to go it alone against Iran. They'd seen what happened when Iraq did that in the 1980s. They spent eight years going at each other

39:19with nothing but a lot of explosions. So, you know, when the president saying this isn't a war, it's a military conflict. You know, people in a mom and UAE and Kuwait and Jordan and about five other other countries are all saying, hey, it sure smells like, tastes like, and feels like a war when you're seeing drones or missiles come into our soil. So if you're not going to do anything about it and it doesn't seem that the president is in terms of other than striking into Iran, yeah, I would bet that the political situation in each one of those countries is a little bit dire because they expect us to do something about it and they want their oil protected. That's not happening right now. Tom, do you have any doubt that if the war pulled at 90 percent approve, as opposed to I think less than 20, which is the current standing of the war, the Trump would be calling it a war and talking about it every day. But everything they say and do is about the politics of this. You wouldn't be able to cross a street in a major city without a parade if it were that

40:24popular. This is an anomaly and I think this is something really striking. In the modern era, the United States has never embarked on a war that was unpopular to begin with and then stayed unpopular. I mean, it's remarkable. Nobody wanted this. President Pete Hegseth accepted. Nobody really supports it. And there was no rally around the flag effect for the president. I mean, every president gets a little bit of a bump, a little bit of the benefit of the doubt. But this was so obviously a war of choice. So obviously a war launched without any real pretext that it was unpopular and it's remained unpopular. We've just never seen this in recent American history. And it doesn't surprise me that the Iranians are paying attention to that and they're going to try to make it more unpopular. I mean, there's nothing for them to lose by widening this war. I think those Arab diplomats, you know, understand this situation maybe better than the White House because what have they got to lose? The president will issue some more truth.

41:27Social posts, he will vow to annihilate Iran. There will be some air strikes. There will be some naval activity and then we'll go right back to where we were before and the Iranians know it. And I think that's really not only an indication that this is a war, but it's a war in which our enemy probably understands us better than we understand them at this point. If only our founders had created a co-equal branch of government and given them the power to declare war and control the purse. I mean, that would have been a good idea, but they did. Huh, it's amazing that they're heading into the midterms, not using their own power. General Hurtling and Tom Nichols to be continued. Thank you for joining us today. We will be right back. Today was another day in court for Olympian David Hurn, but still no conclusion to the Trump administration's campaign against him. A judge today, not yet ruling on whether the DOJ's

42:31Trump-to-vandalism charges against Hurn can be tossed out without prejudice, which means they could never be brought again. A judge previously dismissed the case and US Attorney Janine Puro admitted the damaged pool liner was due to a botched installation, but she sought to dismiss the case without prejudiced leaving the door open for future litigation. You remember Donald Trump repeatedly blamed the reflecting pool damage on so-called vandals and publicly criticized Janine Puro for her decision to dismiss the case. At the top of the next hour, Trump's White House can change the decor, build monuments, play games, but it cannot wish away. But Americans are living and feeling and seeing and paying. The next hour to then White House starts after quick break. Don't go anywhere. For me, being a part of this place has always been about the people, not about the politics. From the field to the studio, Jacob is finding the heart of the story,

43:35connect with Jacob Soberov. We can set 10 a.m. Eastern on MS now.