>> thank you for joining us. do you remember when the right wing freaked out about bud light? they really freaked out about bud light. they were shooting bud light cans. they were hitting bud light cans with baseball bats.tt rghh! they were setting up towers of bud light cans to use as practice at republican day lincoln dinners. the right was very, very upset about bud light.s they were so mad. in florida, republican governorm ron desantis got so excited about it, he ordered an official florida state investigation into bud light. in congress, house republicans started their own federal congressional investigation of bud light. they have spent the better part of the past year on this. no longer would everyone in the country see bud light as the

beer that is slightly more flavorful than coors light, but not quite as flavorful as miller light. but sometimes it's on sale so you buy it even though you're ti not in love with it. and if you're drinking light wi beer, no one expects to be in e love with that stuff any way. that's how we all used to think of bud light.ht admit it. but after nearly a year of right wing culture war no holds barred demagoguery against bud light, no longer would any self-respecting right winger, would self-respecting republican buy bud light because it was ons the end cap and came with a free cuzzi. no. under the course of just over a year bud light was transformed from a normal american thing yog don't think much about into something very, very bad, k something they would shoot on sight. former president donald trump of course jumped on board. money does talk.pe anheuser-busch now understands t that. he said in a post promoting right-wing boycotts of companies that were seen to be liberal or

liberal seeping or maybe if you squinted, they might feel a little liberal, but you're not sure why. bud light over the course of this past year became a conservative target, became a trump world bogeyman, until donald trump did a society 180. out of the blue, he decided id unilaterally to call off the lu right wing jeremiah against bud light. he told all his followers to start drinking bud lying again. quote, anheuser-busch is a great american brand that deserves a second chance. now, what caused this radical nc u-turn? what caused the former president to turn on a dime like this? the word "dime" is a help in this question. because if you put that trump post back up there, the one where he says everybody should go back to drinking bud light, look at the time and date stamp on that one. can we make that part a little n bigger? you can see the stamp there we go.th all right.

so keep that in mind. 3:30 p.m. on february 6th. why is that when trump did his 180-degree u-turn on bud light?h well, hmm, look what happened that same day. lobbyist for anheuser-busch announces $10,000 a plate fundraiser for donald trump. so at 9:47 a.m., the lobbyist for anheuser-busch announces a $10,000 a plate fundraiser for trump. 9:47 a.m. that same day at 3:30 p.m., trump announces that he has changed his mind on bud light and conservatives should all drink bud light again. that fundraiser was announced on february 6th. it was actually held last week, wednesday last week. but all anheuser-busch had to do was announce they were going to do the fundraiser to get trump to do what they wanted, to get trump to call off what had been a years' long conservative culture war top line issue. would you like the head of the

republican party and the republican party's next nominee to be president of the united states to do something for you? is there something you would like him to do for you or your company? perhaps you would consider opening your checkbook and swiveling your wrist. because that's apparently what it took to end the great right wing bud light freak-out of 2023 and 2024. one fundraiser. that's how that one sort of er ended in fiasco. but now behold, here comes the same process again. last week, end of last week, something happened in washington that almost never happens anymore there was a vote in ne congress on a new piece of potential policy. it's real legislation that would actually do a thing.l it's not just a messaging bill or some kind of stunt which is most of what we see out of the republican-controlled congress these days. this was an actual policy and it's even on a somewhat controversial issue.n

nevertheless, the vote on this bill last week in congress was s 50-0. 50 to 0. this is a committee vote, the energy and commerce committee. divided between democrats and c republicans. democrats and republicans these days do not agree that the sunrises in the east or that light beer is generally less tasty than normal beer. republicans and democrats do non agree on anything. but they took a vote on this new legislation end of last week and it was 50-0. 50-0. that never happens. but this bill is moving. it's got unanimous support. it's on its way to the house floor for a final vote this week, day after tomorrow, after that 50-0 vote in committee. this would obviously be expected to pass. this is a bill that has the support of the republican t speaker of the house, mike johnson. it also, believe it or not, has the support of president joe biden, who says if indeed they pass this thing and it gets to his desk, he will sign it. now, this bill is on the issue of tiktok, social media app. and whatever you think of

tiktok, or whether you think of tiktok at all, there have been bipartisan concerns that have been expressed for a long time that this very popular social media app could pose a national security threat in the united states because of links between the company that owns tiktok and the chinese government. i say there are widespread concerns about this. these have been manifest already in policy at lots of different levels. already, if you are a federal government employee or contractor, if for work you have a phone or another device that belongs to the federal government, the federal government says you are not allowed to install tiktok on ay that device. in more than 30 states, there are similar bans on installing tiktok on any device that ba belongs to the state government. this bill that is racing through congress right now would effectively force tiktok off the market in the united states. it wouldn't be just the military or government employees be

forbidden from using it, it would basically mean it wasn't downloadable in the united states anymore. this bill racing through mo congress would require app stores to remove tiktok. so you can't download the app anymore. the only contingency would be if the company was sold to a firm that didn't have links to the chinese government, that didn't have links to beijing. barring the company that runs tiktok being sold, tiktok would effectively be off the market. now as i said, this is a real el policy. it's a matter of, you know, both concern and also some controversy certainly. but politically, this is one of the few things on which democrats and republicans broadly, not 100%, but broadly, pretty much agree. as i said, it was a 50-0 vote in the energy and commerce committee last week.nd

all republicans and democrats who voted yes. nobody voted no. as i said, president biden says he supports the bill, and if it gets to his desk, he'll sign it. lots and lots democrats support it.s lots and lots of republicans support it. this has been a pretty bipartisan thing. and that includes donald trump. when trump was president in the summer of 2020, he tried to ban tiktok unilaterally himself. he tried to force the company to be sold. he issued an executive order banning any american citizen from having any transaction witm the economy that owns tiktok, which effectively would have banned the use of tiktok by anyone in the united states. he tried that. he did that in the summer of ha 2020. that executive order was eventually struck down by the ve courts, which is why tiktok is not banned right now. but trump was very clear on this. he made a huge issue out of tiktok being evil and bad and hu dangerous and had to be stoppedg he was going to stop it.

that was his stand. until, until something happened. do we have that -- do we have that cash register sound? did you guys find it? cha-ching! f oh, something he's just made a total u-turn. i wonder why. after personally trying to ban tiktok, after railing against it and playing mr. tough guy r mr against tiktok for years now, trying to shut down this app in the united states, trump has just come out and said actually, we shouldn't get rid of tiktok that would be terrible. tiktok's actually got a lot going for it. he said so online thursday, and now today he said it in an interview on cnbc. >> there are a lot of people on tiktok that love it. there are a lot of young kids on tiktok who l go crazy without it. there are a lot of users, you know, a lot of good. >> it's a lot of good, really. all of the sudden, why the change?

quote, some have noted that trump recently hosted jeff yass at his mar-a-lago club in florida.ar yass is a billionaire investor in bytedance, the parent company of tiktok, and trump is seeking his support in the presidential race. so follow the bouncing coin, if you will.th step one, take very aggressive, very public position against foreign company. step two, notice nearby man who has $33 billion 15% stake in that company. step three, need money desperately. step four, announce new stance very much in favor of the same foreign company you used to oppose while blinking one's an eyelashes at the man you just noticed. step five -- cha-ching, cash in. if you would like the head of ha the republican party and the republican party's next nominee

to be president of the united states to do something for you or your company, open checkbook, swivel wrist. anything is possible. and if you don't believe me, take it from trump's own folks. this is the headline in "newsweek" right now, quote, steve bannon suggests donald trump has been bought. steve bannon, former adviser to donald trump suggested on on saturday that former president was paid off a shift in his stance on tiktok. a when even steve bannon is like woo, this guy appears to be for sale, steve bannon right now has been sentenced to prison for a massive -- steve bannon has been sentenced to prison and is out of prison while his appeal is pending. steve bannon has been put up on charges that had to be pardonedh by trump for an alleged massive fraud scheme. steve bannon is going to be charged for that mass allege -- alleged massive fraud scheme inh

new york state court. and steve bannon is like woo, seems a little transactional, i don't know. this guy appears to be for sale. if steve bannon is saying you appear to be a little fraudy, a little for sale, a little transactional, that means you have ceased to be subtle about it. and this is the part of the commercial where the very w unsubtle pitchman starts talking what a big sale this is indeed. this is the part of the s commercial where the guy starts saying things like "everything must go." because the need for money here is real.ne on friday, donald trump had to put up cash and collateral for l $91 million bond in the new york case in which he was found liable for repeatedly defaming e. jean carroll by making what the court concluded were false claims that he had not sexually assaulted her. $91 million bond. that was friday. two weeks from today, he will have to put up cash and fr collateral for a bond that is closer to half a billion

dollars. in the case where his real estate business was found to have engaged in years and years of fraud. and we've been looking at that. i think the frame on that has been that this is a difficult and dangerous time for donald trump right now. but because of the position that he is in, that makes this a difficult and dangerous thing for us as a country right now da because he's got to put up bonds for over $500 million worth of court judgments right now within the next two weeks. he's put up already up $100 million. still another 400 plus million to go very soon. he does not appear to have the p cash and assets and collateral to pay for those bonds, to put up what he needs to put up for those bonds without considerable strain, if he can even cobble anything together to bolster those bonds in total. so he desperately needs money, i mean, right now. that bond, that half billion

bond, that's two weeks from today. and he needs that money so urgently, right now, while he is openly changing his publicly in held, long held supposedly heartfelt policy positions in which that appear to be li straight-up responsiveness to -- cha-ching. financial incentives. on the bond he paid already and the huge one he's got to put up for within the next two weeks, there is no public transparency into who might be cosigning with him or otherwise underwriting these bonds.wi somebody helping him put up the cash and collateral for these bonds? if so, what are they getting in exchange for their generosity to him? i mean we know the name of the bonding company that put up then $91 million bond for the e. jean carroll case. but we don't know if it was trump alone or trump and some helpers who put up the cash andn

collateral necessary to obtain that bond from that company. we have asked mr. trump this evening if he will tell us if there were cosigners or anyone otherwise assisting him in obtaining that bond. we have not yet heard back from him.ye we will let you know if we do. but in national security terms, this is a profoundly dangerous thing, regardless of what it means for him personally and politically, it's a dangerous thing for us as a country. i mean, think about if you needed to get a security clearance for work, right.ge you wanted to get a security clearance. but when you applied for that clearance, the fbi did their background check on you and they became aware that you were in this much need of this much money this urgently. if you were applying for a u security clearance right now an the fbi found that two weeks from today you need to put up cash and collateral to secure y almost a half billion of a bond to pay your court judgment, do you think you would get a security clearance? there is no chance you would

ever be approved for even the pr lowest level security clearances because the risk is just too obvious, that you would be tempted to sell american secrets for this money that you so desperately need. whether or not you were known to be a particularly transactional kind of person, there is no way that wouldn't be seen as massive national security risk. last week, politico was first to report that trump is about to start receiving classified intelligence briefings again. presidential candidates, major b party nominees always get thesec at least they have historically. but no one's ever received a classified briefing as a presidential candidate while he or she was awaiting trial in federal court on multiple felony charges of violating the espionage act by deliberately io mishandling classified materialc and, no, no one's ever received those kind of briefings while they, quick, need to come up with a half billion worth of cash and collateral to put up

bonds to pay their court judgments. there is a lot going on in republican politics right now that is nothing we've ever seen before. it's underplaying it a bit. but i mean even not just when it comes to him, when it comes to people in the trump world of republican politics. trump adviser peter navarro has just today been told to report to federal prison next tuesday. a pro-trump republican lawyer in michigan who tried to overturn the election results in that ho state, she's just had a bench warrant sworn out for her arrese in michigan after she refused tu comply with court orders to appear in court to be fingerprinted and to have a dnae sample taken. there is a warrant now out for her arrest. in the swing state of wisconsin, pro-trump republicans are going try to recall the republican speaker of the state assembly to punish him for not overturning the wisconsin election results

to falsely claim that trump won when in fact he lost. that trump effort to get revenge on that particular legislator it wisconsin, that effort has already led to a trump pac and multiple wisconsin republican officials being referred for criminal prosecution. but they're nevertheless going u ahead to trying to remove and recall him in an election year when wisconsin is one of the most important swing states in s the country. as recently as this weekend, trump rallies are still starting with a version of the national anthem sung by people who are in prison for their role in the january 6th attack on congress to try to overthrow the election in washington. the big voiced guy comes over the loudspeaker at the beginning of trump's rally and says "please rise for the horribly and unfairly treated january 6th hostages."ly and then they play the sound from the prison.y just tonight he said online he . would order the release of january 6th defendants as one of his first acts in office. there is a lot that is going on in republican politics right

now, which is not the way things usually go in politics there is a lot of overlap between like i crime and politics, prison and politics. but as politico.com reports tonight on the, quote, bloodbath at the rnc with trump's people finally taking over as of this weekend and now as of today they are firing dozens of people who work at the republican national committee with confirmation there is no longer even an wi effort to stop the republican national committee from paying trump's personal legal expenses out of the republican party coffers. r we are in a place where the entire republican party apparatus is merging with trump's personal legal defense apparatus. and the way he has been behaving when it comes to being transactional at his time of to most desperate financial need puts us -- no matter how you think of trump, whether you nru support him or not. >> no matter whether you care

about politics or not, it puts us the american people in a radically fragile place when it comes to what exactly is for sale in our country and from our government. i mean, bud light and tiktok seemed to have figured out very early on where exactly you insert the coins to receive your prize. cha-ching! but if anything is for sale, right, if everything is for sale, what makes you think it's going to stop with thin beer and chinese social media apps? everything must go. everything's for sale. anybody who can pay can get what they want. and you wonder why guys like this always want to undermine the rule of law, right. shipstation saves us so much time

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so i have to warn you the social media profile i'm about to show you is a little racy, i guess is the word. i don't know.

consider yourself forewarned. it's not pornographic or anything, but that's kind of the idea that it's going for. apologies in advance. you will see in a second why i need to show you this. anyways, may i introduce you to magababe. magababe -- yeah, it's embarrassing. i'm sorry. magababe claims to be, and i quote, good christian girl from the south looking for a good christian man. her online bio continues, quote, god, america, mommy and daddy, trump. kind of a lot to unpack there. but we'll move on. magababe's social media presence is exactly what you would expect from a description like that. lots and lots of pro-trump material, lots of anti-biden stuff, anti-immigrant, anti-trance stuff. starting in late february, our friend magababe wandered into new territory that same account started posting highly edited

videos of high profile, pro-democracy advocates in the united states. magababe claimed to have herself uncovered a secret plot to overthrow the government of hungary. not exactly what you'd expect from her in terms of her hobbies, right? it's hard enough to draw stuff on your chest in toothpaste. who has time to get through all the foreign government plots to overthrow the hungarian -- yeah. as we have now learned in new reporting from "the new york times," this new interest in hungarian geopolitics from magababe is a result of a months' long dirty tricks operation that was aimed at smearing critics of hungary's authoritarian leader viktor orban. and as you may have guessed magababe is not a genuine account. shocking, i know. as far as cyber security experts

can figure out, it's not a good christian girl from the south. it's just a way for operatives running this pro-orban campaign against orban's critics to inject their disinformation material into the internet bloodstream for their own purposes. within hours of the magababe account posting these crude videos, a pro-viktor orban news site in hungary picked it up and ran with it. they cited them as evidence of a liberal conspiracy to overthrow the hungarian government. the orban government jumped on it too, expressing grave concern these magababe videos pointed to possible crimes that needed to be investigated and they'd get right on it. the way this stuff works is that it gets laundered, right? it doesn't have to be believable at any step of the process. it doesn't have to be real. it just has to be something that they can say is out there, right. and then authoritarian leaders

like orban and his leaders, they grab on to this attack, and they use it to go after or maybe even potentially criminalize their opponents. here's another one. in the days after russian opposition leader alexei navalny was killed in an arctic prison in russia, a russian website that was made to look like a news outlet posted what it claimed was a leaked audio recording of two high-level u.s. state department officials discussing who should replace navalny as leader of the russian opposition. the implication, of course, was that there is no real russian opposition to vladimir putin, that anybody in russia who is opposed to putin must be part of an american front, must be part of what is in fact a u.s. government creation, like navalny wasn't a real resistance lead. >> he wasn't a real opposition figure, he was just a tool of the american government, and they'd pick a new one to replace him now. this supposedly leaked audio was

so obviously fake, it would fool exactly no one. a state department official told the daily beast, which broke the story, quote, in case the thick russian accents pretending to be u.s. officials were not clear, yes, we can confirm this audio is fake. but still, it doesn't have to appear to be all that real. you launder it, right? you say it's been cited here. you describe it here, you move into it another fake news site here. i mean, the russians successfully got this idea into circulation for a time. if you searched the names of the people in this story, the u.s. government officials who were named as the supposed source of this leaked audio in the story, the hoax audio came up as relative humidities number two and number three on google. and if you clicked through to the quote, unquote news story, you would be taken to this site, the miami chronicle, which at first glance might appear to be an actual florida news site. at one point it featured the tag

line "florida news since 1937." but this chronicle has existed for less than a month and it's created by russians. so is this very similar looking one. not the famous new york daily news, but instead the new york news daily. also, here is another one, the chicago chronicle. that sounds like it could be a real paper. it's not. or this one, the d.c. weekly. all of these different sites have the same mix of ai-generated stories on right wing hot button issues like crime and immigration, plus a whole slew of stories advancing the kremlin line on the war in ukraine. not long ago, the d.c. weekly site posted an entirely made up story about ukraine's president volodymyr zelenskyy spending tens of millions of dollars on a pair of yachts. yachts for himself. the story was total bullpucky, but it's perfectly designed to spread on social media as if it were from some real news site, which it is not.

at least one republican member of congress and one republican senator then cited the fake yachts as a reason to oppose approving any more funding for ukraine. republican senator j.d. vance, republican congresswoman marjorie taylor greene. and while that's hilarious about them, in all seriousness, ukraine funding is still being blocked by republicans in congress. these very obvious russian fake news sites are proliferating right now. and again, they are not sophisticated. you spend just a few seconds on one of these sites, and you quickly realize this is not, say, a newspaper that has been bringing you news since 1937. but these efforts do not have to be sophisticated to spread disinformation effectively.

you just launder it. you just spread it around. you say you've silent somewhere else. you get the government to comment on it. if you can just get it into the bloodstream. if you can lend a sort of aura of credibility to post flying by on any social media feed, mission accomplished. joining us now is darren linvill. he is co-director at clemson university's media forensics hub that uncovered the russian roots of the d.c. weekly site. thank you for being here. i really appreciate you being here tonight. >> thanks for having me. it's great to be here. >> did i explain any of that wrong or get it the wrong way around? >> no, you did a remarkably good job. this is a campaign we've been tracking for several months now that combines really old russian tactics dating back to the age of the kgb with new technology. in frankly, frightening ways that may have implications for 2024. >> given that there are old tactics at work here, and

certainly, there is an old strategy at work here, what is it about new technology that makes this more difficult to combat? >> yeah, absolutely. in 2016, 2020 all we had to worry about was, you know, fake social media accounts. but now we have to worry about fake systems, fake organizations, fake media outlets. ai technology, large language models, they make disinformation cheaper to do at a scale that is a little intimidating. >> in terms of trying to build up resilience against this sort of stuff, i feel like a lot of the discussion over the last eight years since the russian social media intervention to try to help trump get elected in 2016, i feel like the discourse around that has centered around the idea that people need to get smarter about discerning the original authorship and the quality of the material that they're seeing online. people need to become more

discerning consumers of online information. the thing that i find particularly troubling in your work is that what you're describing is information that is not sophisticated, that is not well done, that is not, you know, evolving to become unrecognizable as fake or as foreign disinformation. this is pretty crude stuff. but it's spreading very far and wide and quickly. >> yeah. well, the russians -- the thing that they are good at is engaging with very specific communities in the u.s. and abroad on both the left and the right and telling those communities what they want to hear. and, you know, lots of research over decades tells us that when people are being told what they want to hear, they're going to believe it. then what the russians do is make -- pull people along to believe even more extreme

versions of those things that they wanted to believe already. and that's exactly what they're doing with this campaign. this campaign has targeted especially narratives around western support for ukraine and unfortunately, there is a lot of communities who want to be critical of ukraine right now. >> darren linvill, co-director at clemson's media forensics hub. this is really, really important work, and it means a lot that you're getting it out in a way that people can understand it. it makes people smarter about what they're looking at, and it gets us all to get our antenna up on this issue. thanks for doing it, and thanks for doing it in a public-facing way like this. >> thanks, rachel. i hope that's true. >> me too. more news ahead here. stay with us. stay with us sium to support my muscle and bone health. qunol's extra strength, high absorption magnesium helps me get the full benefits of magnesium. qunol, the brand i trust.

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so president biden had a good state of the union last week. very well received. but of all the quotes and clips you might have heard from the state of the union, i think this one was probably underplayed. i partly blame myself in terms of it being underplayed that night because i was helping anchor our coverage immediately after the address. there were so many things that n the speech that we kept going back to talk about. this one kind of got lost in the shuffle. when i woke up the next morning, i thought you know what? that moment from the speech, this one right here, that should have been all over the place after that speech that was a good moment. watch. >> many of my friends on the other side of the aisle want to put social security on the

chopping block. if anyone here tries to cut social security or medicare or raise the retirement age, i will stop you. >> "i will stop you." "if anyone here tries to cut social security or medicare or raise the retirement age" -- he then goes off script. "i will stop you." in going off script that way, he made a forceful point even more forceful about protecting social security and medicare against republican plans to cut them. and this is a central point that president biden and the democrats would love to run on, right. the republicans want to cut social security and medicare. we the democrats, i, president biden will stop you when you try to do it. they would love to run on this. today former president donald trump did an interview with cnbc in which he was asked, quote, have you changed your outlook on how to handle entitlements,

social security, medicare, medicaid, mr. president? to which mr. trump responded, quote, there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting. the biden campaign was quick to pounce on those comments. president biden tweeted a video of that exchange with the caption, quote, not on my watch. trump campaign then went into damage control mode claiming those comments were not really about cutting the entitlements. it was just about cutting waste and stuff. but as far as the two candidates for president are concerned, joe biden is delivering this clear message that we're not going to cut social security and medicare, while trump has thrown the door open to questions about it today and while republicans continue to insist that we must cut those programs. and those questions are swirling in part because people who would likely staff a second trump administration, they're all being very open about the fact that they really want to cut social security and medicare.

just this past month at cpac, one former trump adviser, one of the weirdest things i've ever heard at cpac said one of the most evil organizations in america is the aarp, as in the american association of retired people. one of the most evil organizations in america. yes, the american association of retired persons. everybody knows them obviously satanic. social security and medicare are broadly popular in this country. proposals to cut these programs are equally unpopular. and americans of all ages like the idea of protecting our retirees and taking care of them, not blaming them for all the nation's ills and calling them evil. aside from abortion, this is one of the most potent political issues for democrats running against republicans this year. but republicans cannot seem to stop themselves from salivating over the possibility of making these unpopular cuts. on the one hand, this is an

important strategic issue for democrats versus republicans in this election year. on the other hand, it also sort of feels like a refreshing outbreak of normal politics in a year when everything else feels quite dystopian and like we're reading some bad novel about some other country that lost their democracy. this feels like normal politics. normal politics that very much plays in the democrats' favor. joining us now is nbc presidential historian michael beschloss. thanks for joining us. great to see you here tonight. >> oh, thank you, rachel. great to be here as always. >> i do feel even though cutting social security and medicare is a terrible idea. >> it is. >> and i think it's terrible politics for anybody to propose them, i do feel like there is this little bit of sunshine around this issue for me too because it does feel like a normal -- it feels like an outbreak of normal politics when everything else has been so radical and insane. >> it does. i mean, here we are seeing the republican party being pro-russian, saying that we should take money away from ukraine. donald trump's positions in so

many ways have nothing to do with most of the republican party for the last century. i feel exactly the same way. if you had to look at one theme that runs through almost every presidential election back to maybe 1936, it is the democrats agree that the measure of a society is how well it takes care of its old, its sick and its poor. and the republicans have always talked about cutting all these government programs beginning with social security. that's what barry goldwater said. it should be made voluntary. george w. bush said let's privatize it. ronald reagan in his first debate with jimmy carter 1980, jimmy carter said if we elect you, if our people elect you, governor reagan, you're going to try to cut medicare. and reagan said oh, there you go again saying not in a million years. and as it turns out, reagan, once he became president, tried to cut medicare by $20 billion.

so not only is this familiar, it's a great idea for democrats to campaign as the party that will make sure that the lives of those who need government are protected. >> and michael, i feel like over the course of my adult life, maybe even before my adult life, my whole life on earth, i feel like there has been a conservative media discipline on this issue where everywhere from right wing talk radio to washington think tanks to academic conservatives, they are relentless in making the case that social security is terrible, medicare is terrible, medicaid is terrible. they all need to be cut. there has been just 50 years of republican and conservative messaging against us. my feeling is that that hasn't done anything to change the wisdom of this as a political issue because it hasn't persuaded the american people and american voters to go along with that, even though

conservatives have been arguing for it for more than a generation. >> absolutely. and that's how 2024 is different, because if trump is elected this fall, especially with a republican congress, for the first time in history, you could see lethal cuts to medicare and social security and other programs that people depend on. dwight eisenhower in 1952, he had this right-wing brother in washington state named edgar. and edgar kept on writing him and calling him saying ike, you've been president for three minutes. why haven't you destroyed social security yet? and eisenhower writes him this letter saying edgar, any political party in america that decides to destroy things like social security, that's the last you will ever hear of that political party. i'm not sure trump and the republicans understand that rule. >> nbc news presidential historian michael beschloss. michael, thank you for talking to me about this tonight. i knew that i wanted to look

into the history of this. and of course i had never known about that. that was fantastic. thank you, great to see you. >> thank you. we feel the same way. be well as always. >> be well. thank you. stay with us. stay with us

(psst! psst!) ahhh! with flonase, allergies don't have to be scary. spray flonase sensimist daily for non-drowsy long lasting relief in a scent free, gentle mist. flonase all good. also, try our allergy headache and nighttime pills. i'd like to show you something next that comes from kansas. this was johnson county, kansas friday night at a fundraiser for the kansas republican party.

what you see here is an effigy of president biden and attendees at the kansas republican party fundraiser are kicking the effigy of president biden, or trying to kick it without falling down. and then finally you see this woman beating it on the head and the face with a styrofoam club. which is where the video ends. again, this is kansas state republican party fundraiser. the reaction in kansas to whatever that was at the republican party fundraiser has been interesting, has been sort of revealing about republican politics and kansas republican politics in particular. one kansas republican, a former state lawmaker saying, quote, i would say we're better than that, but it doesn't appear we're better than that. one past chair of the kansas young republicans calling the incident, quote, the logical extension of a cult-like mentality. here's a republican who is trying to win back a local congressional seat saying,

quote, ridiculous, thoughtless actions like this one distract from those trying to deliver solutions. for the record, the kansas republican party called the events, quote, unfortunate. today the party's executive director gave an explanation to the kansas reflector news site, which has done great work on this incident. according to the state party executive director, the biden effigy was put up at the party fundraiser by a, quote, outside exhibiter who has rented a booth at the event. a local republican party official says the biden mask on the dummy they were all hitting and kicking was, quote, regrettable. that person also said that nobody asked for donations or gave any money in order to hit or kick or foam bat the mannequin of the president, or in some cases to knock themselves down trying. take it easy, kansas republicans. maybe try not to hurt yourself

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so i wrote this book. it's called prequel, an american fight against fascism. it has turned out to be kind of unexpectedly topical in the news. i did a book tour for "prequel" this past fall, but i keep getting asked to give more talks about it and given what's going on in the news, i have decided i am going to do a couple more events. i just wanted to tell you on may 26th, i will be at the historic and beloved township hall in providencetown, massachusetts for a special event sponsored by the provincetown bookshop. you can get information about how and where to buy tickets at msnbc.com/prequel, msnbc.com/prequel. that's it. thanks for the indulgence. that's going to do it for me now. "way too early" with jonathan lemire is up next. my predecessor failed the most basic of any duty the president owes to the american people, a duty to care. i