-Our first guest tonight hosts "Deadline: White House" weekdays
from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. on MSNBC.
Please welcome back to the show Nicolle Wallace.
Nicolle, how are you?
-I'm good.
I have to say, I was on TV for most of it
and hadn't processed it until I heard your summation,
and I couldn't have said it better myself.
I mean, that is exactly where we are.
That's exactly what happened today.
-I want to thank you for the fact that you were on TV
very late last night, covering the Georgia runoffs,
and then, of course, you were kept on camera all day today,
as you mentioned.
So thank you so much for finding time for us as well.
Are you exhausted?
-No. I mean, look,
there are people who have so much more at risk.
And I'm just ruminating on what you said about
what has to happen to the people
who supported today's insurrection
in Congress and the sedition caucus
that were carrying out a fake thing.
There is no legislative vehicle for overthrowing
the results of an election that was fair,
that was verified, that was counted and recounted,
that was litigated in 60 court cases across the country
from coast to coast by judges from both political parties.
So the only thing I would add to this group of people,
starting with Donald Trump
but also the 12 Republican Senators
and more than 100 House members
and all of the supporters of Donald Trump's
who were at the Capitol today,
endangering the lives of everybody inside --
staffers, members of Congress, senators, the police officers --
we have to make sure that people
who are on the other side of democracy get voted out as well.
I mean, Donald Trump should be removed
because he is, right now at this hour,
a national security threat.
And I worked in a White House
where we dealt with national security threats
in a very different way
than they're being dealt with right now.
But that's what Donald Trump is.
He's a clear and present danger
to the country he ostensibly leads.
But even that is unclear at this hour.
It was reported that Mike Pence was the one that authorized
the National Guard coming in to aid Capitol police.
-You mentioned your time in the White House,
and you were obviously working in the White House during 9/11.
And you've mentioned today to some of your guests
that you had a flashback to that
because it must have been terrifying for those
that were in both chambers when this was going down.
-Yeah. Well, Congresswoman Linda Sanchez came on the air
and said that last night she called her husband in California
and told him where he could find her will.
So last night Congresswoman Linda Sanchez thought
it was possible that today she would die at work.
She works in the Capitol.
So it is inexplicable to me if she thought yesterday
enough concern that she told her husband where her will was,
and she has an 11-year-old son,
she got very emotional telling me this story,
why didn't the Capitol police
have a better plan than they had?
I mean, it didn't appear that the protesters, the rioters,
met any resistance at all.
And to me where this was similar to 9/11
was that both chambers were evacuated.
Members went to undisclosed locations
and they sheltered in place.
What was different was the response.
I mean, after 9/11, many of the things that this country did
in the name of making sure that terrorists never flew airplanes
into the World Trade Center or the Pentagon
or crashed in Pennsylvania will be polarizing decisions.
But everything changed.
Today the Republicans went back to the floor of the Senate
and six Senators still sought
to overturn the results of the election,
still sought to delegitimize Joe Biden's win.
So what's disturbing to me
is more the ways that it was different from 9/11,
that we didn't wake up from this sort of drunken stupor
of disinformation and lies and smears
that endanger, at this point, all of us.
-Yeah. There was a moment that I think was also very clear-eyed
where, you know, Mitt Romney took the floor
and basically said we have to tell these people the truth
because when we lie to them, they're very upset by reality.
And yet as you mentioned, people came back into the chamber
and, you know, ostensibly this is about
"Hey, we want evidence.
We can't move forward unless there's evidence."
And yet if you listen to some members of the House tonight,
if you watch right-wing cable news,
the speed at which they're saying this was actually Antifa,
now, obviously, that is a claim that cannot this soon after what
we just saw be made with any evidence.
And so that I think is the most terrifying thing,
is how quickly, as you point out, it went back to normal.
-And it suggests that we're just in the --
you know, we're in grooves now.
And I think -- you know, I thought this a lot
as we floundered and failed to contain and protect one another
from COVID, that if Donald Trump were the president
and the disinformation were in place,
you could see people refusing to abide by TSA requirements
and say, "I'm not taking off my shoes
or throwing away my Fiji water bottle.
It cost me $4."
We are not the same country that we were on September 11, 2001.
We are not represented by the same kinds of leaders.
There is -- Clearly after today there is nothing
that jolts them out of their -- and it's not partisanship.
This isn't in the name of the Republican Party.
This is in the name of a cult leader, Donald Trump.
-You know, we're often told that, you know,
senators like Josh Hawley, like Ted Cruz,
these are brilliant lawyers.
You know, Donald Trump's one thing,
but these are intelligent men.
These are serious men.
And yet when you watch what they did today,
were you surprised
or is this in line with their behavior in the Trump era?
-You know, I thought on election day that Trump was like
a popped balloon, that he was no longer the most newsworthy part
of this really terrible moment in our politics.
And I instantly started covering much more aggressively
the Republican enablers because I thought if, after the election
was lost by Donald Trump, if all the Republicans,
if Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy and all the Republicans
came out and said, "Hey, we voted for you, Donald,"
because we know he's a big baby, they had to make clear
that they were there for him, "but the country went
a different direction, better luck next time,"
that none of this would have happened.
And I believe that about today.
So with that stipulated, I actually think
the more egregious offenders to our democracy,
the people putting all of us in danger and capable of doing so
after January 20th are the Josh Hawleys of the world.
And if one more person says on our air how well-educated he is,
he may be well-educated but he's clearly not smart.
Or if he's smart he doesn't care about the country he lives in
or the fact that it's a democracy.
-I think it's really important to stress that
our nation's best universities
are filled with some real dummies.
And that has always been the way.
-And conversely our public universities
turn out some good folks. -Yes, absolutely.
It's a mistake to think what's on the diploma
speaks certainly to the character of a person.
You know, I feel as though people like myself maybe
have been framed as being overreactive or hysterical
when we point out, you know, how awful it is to say,
after Charlottesville, you know, there are good people
on both sides or to say, during a debate, you know,
Proud Boys, you know, "Stand back but stand by"
or, you know, to use the word "coup."
This always seemed like these were the cards
that Donald Trump was showing us.
And it always seemed as though -- and you hoped,
obviously, you were wrong, but it did seem like
it was heading toward something like this.
-Look, I think the lookback on all of us
will be that we weren't harsh enough.
Why did it take us -- It took us a couple years.
And I was one of the first to stop
airing Sarah Huckabee Sanders, but I wasn't fast enough.
I always called Donald Trump a liar and a racist
and a misogynist, but I didn't do it early enough.
I wish I'd done it before the election in 2016.
And so I think part of what the mob mentality on the Trump side
has done is successfully bully people.
They call it Trump derangement syndrome.
"Oh, you don't understand the other half of the country."
It's not about understanding the other half of the country.
I think that you and a lot of people that had worked in
government before watched him,
and he wasn't doing anything in the spirit of the state.
He never saw the country as attached to him
or as something he was responsible for.
He always saw it as a possession of his.
Like, you know, he talks about women as objects.
He talks about -- He talks about people
and the United States government and the United States military
and his hotels the very same way because to him
they are all objects that he possesses and controls.
And so I think that the lookback will be that we were not
hard enough on him, we were not aggressive enough as journalists
in covering him and we did not draw people's attention
to the grave threat that we now face from him right now today
in his remaining days as our country's only president.
We only have one at a time.
And last time I checked my phone unfortunately he's still it.
-We're going to be right back after this
with more from Nicolle Wallace.