Live with Jim Acosta | The Jim Acosta Show, March 23, 2026 with Stacey Abrams

Welcome to the Jim Acosta show. It's another day that ends in Y and the chaos unleashed by Donald Trump in the Middle East. Trump claimed today he is giving Iran more time to reopen the Strait of Hormuz before the US bombs that country's power plants. Of course, he did all of this right before the markets were to open up in the US. That sparked a rally on Wall Street

for how long is anybody's guess. Trump claimed there are talks happening with the Iranians by the way, but the Iranians say that's not the case. Let's discuss with historian Heather Cox Richardson. Heather, before we got started, you and I were having a little bit of a side chat there

about why we're even applying reason, uh, to, to what is taking place right now. I mean, your thoughts of what we've been seeing so far, because it does seem that he's just flying by the seat of his pants, uh, moment by moment. And he got freaked out that the markets were going to open up, uh, heading, you know, in, in, in a southward direction and he sort of panicked

and he came up with this idea, oh, we're just gonna give them a pause. We're gonna give them a five day grace period to sort this out when there may just be no talks happening at all.

Well, I think maybe I can tell you a little bit about what might be going on with that. And I will point out that that five day grace period covers the time in which the United States stock market will be open over the course of this week. But if you think about Trump and the way he has always been, he has always been somebody who didn't recognize really the reality of the people around him. Sort of thinking of them, I think, as the non-player characters that people like the tech bros have called other people in a

drama that surrounds only him. And so he's always always been very short-term. And people used to say, well, he's not consistent. And my take on that always used to be, well, he is consistent in that he can look at you and say one thing, and turn around and look at me and say exactly the opposite.

And the consistency there is that he says whatever makes him look the best at that moment.

Yeah.

But I think we're into something new now and that's that he's having a very hard time, I think, keeping the world around him stable. I mean, I think he is slipping a lot and he is simply saying whatever comes to mind in that moment. And so he's even more erratic than usual, which is horrifying when you think about the fact that he is the strongest or the most important person in the world. So we're dealing with something the United States had never seen before, which is the president with no guardrails. And that's really, really disturbing.

Yeah, no, I mean it sort of reminds me of Lucy in the Chocolate Factory, you know, that old episode where just Lucy just has to start eating the chocolate because it's just out of her control.

That's such a great episode, though. Don't put my friend Lucy in the same category as where we are in politics right now.

That might be kind of a sharp left turn for a Monday, but I do sort of feel like events are getting out of his control. And I mean, the US military has to plan for, I guess, any and all options. And the New York Times is reporting today,

and this reminds me of the old days of mission creep in this country. New York Times says senior military officials are weighing a possible deployment of a combat brigade from the Army's 82nd Airborne Division and some elements of the division's headquarters

to support US military operations in Iran. I mean, that's on top of the 2,500 Marines that are said to be heading towards the region. I mean, Heather, I mean, this has the potential, I mean, the one component of all of this that we don't have any control over is the Iranians.

The Iranians, I mean, they have their own cards to play too in all of this.

Right, the Iranians and Donald Trump. So there's actually a little bit more to the story than has been widely talked about today. I've actually spent the day reading about it. And that is that, remember, the United States has a State Department, which you wouldn't actually know

considering the way that we're talking about Iran. But over the course of the last several days, it appears that intermediaries from Egypt and Turkey and I think it was Pakistan, I don't know my notes in front of me now, made overtures to the Iranians, primarily one of the speakers in their parliament, to see if he would like to begin negotiations. And allegedly, the answer to that was no.

I mean, we don't know. And I don't read those languages. So I'm not in that media at all. But the idea was to have Steve Whitcoff, who is Trump's special envoy to the Middle East and, on occasion, Russia, along with Jared Kushner, who

is Trump's son-in-law, both of whom are real estate people who have financial interests in the Middle East, negotiate over somehow ending this struggle. And what's not clear here, when Trump did in fact, Saturday night he said he was going to bomb energy facilities in Iran, and the Iranians came back and said, try it, dude. And I paraphrased, by the way, try it, dude, and we're gonna go after Israel and other Gulf states,

the energy facilities there. Then this morning, shortly before the markets opened, Trump said, oh, nevermind, we're gonna have this five-day pause. And the reaction in the stock market and the price of oil was instantaneous. And then the Iranians came out and said, we haven't had any conversations.

And the markets bumped the other way. So first of all, there was potential there to make a killing on the stock and in the oil markets. But there was also here what we don't know. No, the Iranians say, well, it looks as if Trump is just trying to buy time, both for his stock market and to get troops in place. And that is supported by the idea

that you just said about the 82nd Airborne. And yet, some of the negotiators that are talking to people in Australia, for example, say, well, you know, this looks a lot like what Trump did over Gaza, saying, oh, we're going to negotiate. We have agreements in principle,

and then when it comes time to actually put the agreements in place, he gets bored and he walks away and everybody forgets about it. So that could be happening too, but then there was also a really interesting conversation

today on the tarmac at the airport.

Down in Palm Beach, yep.

Yeah, the Palm Beach International Airport, which I believe is under, in the process of becoming renamed as the Donald Trump Airport. I'm not sure where we stand on that one yet. But in that interview, Trump seemed almost buoyed,

like things were gonna be good. He kind of had a way out. And he told Caitlin Collins of CNN that the Iranians had agreed to stop nuclear enrichment, including for civilian purposes like medical purposes, which simply cannot be true.

And that the Strait of Hormuz would open immediately as soon as a deal was done. And when she asked who would be in charge of it, he said, well, maybe me, maybe me and whoever is in place in Iran at that point. And then he said, it'll be like Venezuela.

Look how well we're doing in Venezuela. And I think the larger picture here is that he is trying to put people that are favorable to him, not to the United States, but to him around the world in oil-rich countries. And that larger picture about American foreign policy is one I think we shouldn't lose sight of.

Yeah. And it does sound very much like he's just making it up as he goes along. And by the way, probably BSing us as to how much Whitcoff and Jared Kushner are involved in all of this. I mean, we have we I don't know if we have that particular piece of sound that you just mentioned. We have some this morning where he was talking about how, oh, don't worry, markets, everything's

going to be it's going to be OK. Daddy's here.

But let's listen to this. day by probably phone because it's very hard to find a country. It's very hard for them to get out, I guess. But we'll at some point very, very soon meet. We're doing a five day period. We'll see how that goes. And if it goes well, we're going to end up with settling this.

Otherwise, we just keep bombing our little hearts out.

Bombing our little hearts out. I mean, Heathercock speaking? Bombing our little hearts out. I mean, Heather, the other part of this, too, is that there is some pretty intense human suffering going on right now. And you and I both remember the 2000s very well. This idea that we can just bomb our way out of this,

it didn't work during the war on terror. It hasn't worked in a lot of places.

There is that, but I think there is this larger image, as I say, of the people in power in the United States right now, that they and strength are all that matter. That the people who are dying in bombing raids, for example, but who are also dying of starvation

in the places where there is no longer USAID, or the people who are going to be in dire straits because the fertilizer is not coming through the Strait of Hormuz any more than anything else is. And that's dramatically going to hurt the growth of crops around the world. But of course, that always ends up badly hurting Africa. In the past, the United States would have stepped in there. We're not going to be doing that under Trump. That idea that somehow the world should be run by a very few, very powerful people,

and as the rest of us around them die earlier, have less healthy lives, have less free lives, well, that's just a price that we'll have to pay. I always think of that prince or king in Shrek who says a lot of you are gonna have to die but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. And that seems to be a through line here, not only through the administration

but through some of its fellow travelers, like as I say, some of the tech bros.

Yeah, well, and I think you and I were also having this little discussion before we got started. I mean, there is the element of this that Trump is just not all there. He had another event this morning in Memphis where he could barely stay awake. We have some video of that. He can just barely keep his eyes open as others are speaking.

And I mean, this is this is this is just a couple of hours after the meeting with the reporters on the tarmac. He's in Memphis. He's got Hegseth there. He's got Pam Bondi there. He's got Stephen Miller there. He's got Kash Patel there. Barely keep his eyes open. Go ahead.

But in fairness, I mean, listen, I think the man looks like hell, I have to say. Just look at that picture. And yes, he's the president of the United States. But you should see me in a faculty meeting. In fairness, there are many things we can pick on. But when somebody falls asleep in a meeting, I got to confess, I have some pity.

I agree with that. But you would think that those naps would help and that he would be more lucid and make more sense when he comes to. But he doesn't. And, you know, uh, you know, I, I think there's a real serious problem here in that I don't, you know, I don't think there's 3d chess going on here.

I don't think that there, I think this is just buying time. And, um, you know, the, this morning he's, he's talking about putting ice agents at airports. We have some video of what's already starting to take place at some of those airports, where all hell is starting to break loose and ICE is beating people up.

I mean, you know, he's telling the Republicans do not negotiate on this reopening of the Department of Homeland Security and funding TSA, unless he gets his way on the Save America Act. Let's play a little bit of that sound and then talk about it.

And we got to do something about it all. It is part of Homeland Security. And I'm suggesting strongly to the Republican Party, don't make any deal on anything. The most important thing we can have is what's called the Save America Act. Don't make any deal on anything unless you include voter ID and you have to be a citizen to vote.

You have to show citizenship to vote. Very easy to do. It's very insulting when they say people can't do it because they don't know how to do it. Anybody that can't do it, I think it's a very insulting thing to say. The Democrats are fully to blame with the struggle of the great American public is going through at the airports.

They're going through a big struggle right now and we just put ICE in charge and they're helping TSA, the agency. Yeah, I mean, you know, he's basically putting it right there out in the open, that he's willing to hold people hostage at the airport, put them through a lot of misery at the airports in order to get what he wants. And a couple of things, Heather.

One is that, I mean, the Save America Act is a, or the SAVE Act, they go back and forth in terms of what they call it. It's basically a voter suppression bill. Yeah, go ahead.

Yeah, right. I mean, you could see the idea that everybody has to prove their citizenship if in that same bill, they provided for people to have proof of citizenship. I mean, that's the obvious answer to this,

that they're at the same time saying that you must either have a birth certificate that matches your current name, or you must have a passport in order to vote, in order to register to vote and to vote. There's a couple of versions of this by the way. One version is pass the House and now the Senate is discussing a SAVE Act and we could talk at length about what's going on there. Trump has put more and

more demands in what he wants, in what he wants to get through the Senate, including attacks on transgender Americans where you can see him going back to the idea of whipping up Americans like he did in 2024 against those people that he considers unsafe. Interestingly enough, in the picture that you just saw, what Trump and his people are sitting behind

is a series of boxes that are arrayed with, that I believe are supposed to be full of drugs and are arrayed with AR-15s and with the kind of weaponry that we don't wanna see on our streets. So he's really trying to frighten Americans

into thinking that only the Republicans will keep them safe and it's the Democrats who are causing all this trouble. In fact, if you look at the poll numbers for Trump, he's at historic lows and all of his policies are underwater, that is more Americans don't like them than do like them. numbers for Trump. He's at historic lows and all of his policies are underwater. That is,

more Americans don't like them than do like them. He has even lost a majority of his base of white men. So, you know, this looks in a lot of ways like desperation, but that remains an extraordinarily dangerous place for us to be because the guy's a loose cannon and you don't know what he's going to do next. You can see him desperately trying to cling to power and being buffeted around by the people around him who want him to stay in power because they want to complete their own agendas. Theoretically, we got three years of this left. I think it's really important for us to be

articulating what we do want out of the government and finding the people who will make that happen rather than simply reacting to him because by the time his part in this story is over, there's gonna be an awful lot of rubble and a lot of people are gonna need to be able

to pick that rubble up and put it into some kind of order or we're gonna be in really deep

trouble.

Yeah. And I mean, I think that, you know, no matter what happens with Trump, I mean, there are people behind the scenes in this government, people like Stephen Miller, who are really calling the shots on a lot of this stuff. And I mean, at this event that was happening earlier today, Pam Bondi was lavishing praise on Stephen Miller. I thought that was happening earlier today, Pam Bondi was lavishing praise on Stephen

Miller. I thought that was very disturbing. We can play a little bit of that. If we have that, we can play that.

I think the unsung hero in all of this is Stephen Miller. Stephen is the architect of making all of these plans work. Stephen, thank you. Yeah, but look at that. Wild.

Wild, but, I mean, again,. Yeah, but you know, look at that. Wild. Wild, but I mean, again, who knows, right? Where a lot of things that are happening are obscure. But look what just happened to Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski, who were extraordinarily powerful three weeks ago, right?

Now, all of a sudden, everybody's talking. Now, Pam Bondi is herself in real trouble in front of Congress and she is supposed to be appearing on April 14th under oath before the House Oversight and Reform Committee. And now she's trying to get out of appearing under oath because they're going to talk to her about the Epstein files. So what does she do?

She calls out in public and says, the person who's doing all this stuff you hate is Stephen Miller, not me. So maybe, I mean, I do think Stephen Miller is incredibly powerful. We have a number of people from inside saying that. We certainly have Noam when she got first into trouble saying, well, really, I only did anything that Stephen Miller and the president told me to.

And we know from inside that he is very powerful and yet that to me I look at that and I think boy is she making sure that that somebody else is holding

at least some of the bag here. Yeah. Maybe I'm just too cynical. No no no and how much of I mean how much of all of this is about the Epstein files do you think what we're seeing right now with Iran. You know, I suspect that this is really driving this. Trump just desperately trying to get the subject off of the Epstein files, anything but the Epstein file.

So you think Iran is driving the Epstein files, is driving the attack on Iran?

I think it is, I really do. I mean, I don't, you know, maybe maybe some of this is Russia

um

You know this I mean this has worked to russia's benefit No doubt about it. I think it's working to iran's benefit it no doubt about it But I also think that we are not talking about the epstein files and I do think that donald trump is is just Frightened of the possibility that we're going to find out exactly what took place in the Epstein files.

Julie K. Brown was reporting, I think we have this in the Miami Herald, that bags of shredded documents in New York jail after Epstein death, officer tells FBI. Now we're talking about bags of shredded documents. I mean, all of this stuff is just getting overwhelmed in the news right now. And my experience covering Donald Trump is that he is keenly aware of what is driving the news cycle

and if he doesn't like it, he wants to change the subject. That's why he freaked out about the markets this morning and said, okay, nevermind, five days, we'll have five days before we start bombing again.

You know, let's look at what we have with the Epstein files. We have the assault of children. We have sex trafficking. Now we have reports in the files that there was drug trafficking, money laundering, and we also have playing around in all this Florida

and everything that went on in Florida and what initially drove Epstein and Trump apart, which was the purchase of that estate that Epstein anyway said Trump was using to launder money for the Russians. And we have a lot of oil sloshing around too.

So, I don't know the answer to this. I am not read in on what's happening, but it seems to me there is a lot of criminal activity to go around, not only with Trump and Epstein, but also with people who move oil, people who move drugs, and people who move people. And that interests me a lot because one of the things that Robert Mueller, rest in peace, said that was really important when he was FBI director

before the whole special counsel and all that. He gave a speech in New York City in which he talked about what really organized crime looked like in the modern era. And what he said was that no longer was the real terrorist threat to America and the real organized crime

threat to America centered around ideologies or nations or religions. That in fact, what joined organized crime together and the real threat to the United States now was when you had business and government and individuals around the world working together just

for power and money. And those webs, I believe he called it an iron triangle, threatened the safety of the United States of America. And I think that in, you know, I was thinking about him when he passed this weekend, I feel like we don't know the extent to which we're looking at that. And certainly Trump wants to save his own skin, but I feel like if we had the true Epstein files,

we would know a lot more about how many people were involved. And we already know the Epstein files touched people all over the world. So is he in there to Iran because of the Epstein files? Maybe, maybe he's into Iran because of the world. So is he in there to Iran because of the Epstein files? Maybe, maybe he's into Iran because of the oil.

Maybe he's into Iran because, you know, one of the things I have to point out here is that the Monday after the last no Kings rally on a Saturday, he knocked down the East wing of the White House. A week after the Supreme Court of the United States said his tariffs were unconstitutional,

he dropped bombs on Iran. You know, there is at least some level of narcissistic injury going on here.

No question about it. I mean, I think narcissism is playing a huge role in all of this. And, you know, a couple of things come to mind. One is, you mentioned Robert Mueller. We saw what Trump posted over the weekend.

Robert Mueller just died good. I'm glad he's dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people. The thing that comes to mind, Heather, I guess that I want to ask you is, you're a historian. You've taken a look at presidents and their influences on American society over the years.

And each president, society can be reflected in that president in that era, in that period that that president was running the country. And it just seems to me that we are in a very Trumpian era. The society, the times do reflect the president and vice versa.

And I'm just wondering what the lasting damage of this is going to be. Because I worry a great deal about the potential that he has just badly and just terribly and awfully influenced so many young people in this country to basically send the message that it's OK to dance on people's

graves when they die when you're the President of the United States. I mean, when I saw that over the weekend, it was, you know, I guess I wasn't surprised that he would post that after the death of Robert Mueller. But it also makes me worry about the kind of country

that he is leaving for all of us after Donald Trump leaves the scene.

Well, first of all, my reaction that was different than yours. I looked at that and said, he's a child. You know, that's what a three-year-old says. Good, I'm glad he's dead, you know? That's not what an adult does,

which suggests to me, once again, he's in what they used to call a second childhood, right? So, people were outraged by that. And of course, he loves to have eyes on him. But in this case, it just felt to me like he was busy being a baby. In terms of what he's leaving for other people, you know, I love Eric Hoffer's work, the Longshoreman from San Francisco, who wrote a number of books in the 1950s.

And the most famous of those is called True Believers. And it's notes on the nature of mass movements. And he says, you know, everybody at the time was madly trying to figure out why we had Hitler, why we had Mussolini. And he said, who cares? The issue is not why we have those people

because those people are always in our society. The issue is why people followed them. And so when I think about Trump and what he has done to the United States, I think that he found a moment and reflected it to the American people.

And that moment was created, I think, by politicians coming really from the 1950s onward to try and push back against a multicultural, multi-gendered society. But I worry less that he's going to leave us something horrific in the sense that if you think about the 1850s, like literally you had Congress people beating each other up on the floors of Congress and you had, you know, politicians tarring and feathering

the people who were voting for the other side, and you had people shooting each other over politics, and you had this incredible sense of just being horrible to each other. And yes, those people did continue in American society, but within a generation, they got overawed by people

who were trying to make the country better. And so I think that you get these backlashes back and forth and they can't even be quick. So if you look at 1932, for example, the election of 1932, you're coming out of a period in which America has Nazis. I mean, they're not even neo-Nazis, they're Nazis.

You get the rise of the KKK and you have people literally having their pictures taken at lynching parties. And in 1932, they are so desperate for something different because of the economy, but also for other things, I think.

They back Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And by the time you are to the end of the 1930s and into the 1940s, you have people like Frank Sinatra doing videos about how don't be mean to the Jewish people in your community and the Catholic people in your community, we're all in this together.

And you've got Superman by the 1950s talking about in multicultural society. So at the end of the day, I think it comes down not to the people in charge, but to the stories that the American people tell about themselves.

And one of the things I encourage people to do is to highlight those stories that reflect the world they wanna see, and that's how you rewrite the country.

And so is it possible that that is why, I mean, do you sense that there's maybe some Trump deprogramming going on when we hear more and more, you know, figures on the right, you know, podcasting bros, guys in the manosphere, people like Joe Rogan starting to sour a little bit on Donald Trump and saying, you know, Trump betrayed MAGA by going

into Iran. I keep going back to this lady at the gas station that Jonathan Allen spoke to over at NBC News and she calls him a worthless pile of shit because of that price of gas. And, and, and says, I voted for him three times. I must be an idiot. I just wonder if there's some, you know, maybe people are ODing on this stuff and they're seeing that, that post about Robert Mueller and there,

maybe it kind of snaps them out of it a little bit. Maybe that's wishful thinking on my part, but is that possible? Is that what you're talking about when you say that there's sometimes turning points and people start moving in a different direction because they've grown out of the previous era

they were living in?

Well, I think so. And I do think that there is always a backlash to that kind of behavior. People just want something different, you know, and we could go through all kinds of periods in history when that's been the case.

I think in the case of Iran, you have to be a little bit careful because if you look at the numbers that people like G. Eliot Morris have strengthened, numbers have pulled, the MAGA base, which by the way has shrunk six points and over the course of the last year the MAGA base is still with Trump because they don't care what he does they are

Trump's to own. What you're seeing is the sliding off of those people who voted for Trump who may not have been as into politics as people like you and I are and so you know that he seemed like he was saying the right stuff he seemed like a good guy and by the way you, that's the way a narcissist works, right? You're the best thing since sliced bread until you're not. And they're moving away from him.

But I think what you're seeing in the leadership of MAGA is interesting and potentially much more worrisome. And that is, they all know Trump's not long for running MAGA any longer. I mean, he's screaming at MAGA, he's falling asleep in meetings,

he's going to war, you don't know what he's gonna do next, people don't like the tariffs, their gas has now gone up 80 cents a gallon. I mean, they know he's not gonna lead forever. So what they're trying to do is to position themselves to take over. And that's what I'm watching really closely right now

because you can see moves by people like Tucker Carlson. You can see moves, you can see people like JD Vance and other people in the administration backing off because they don't wanna be associated with Iran. The one person who's not doing that, of course, is Pete Hegseth.

So you can see this jockeying to take over MAGA and to turn it into something else. And that something else looks quite a bit like pure fascism. So the real question-

Especially in the case of J.D. Vance, potentially.

Yes, yes, and Tucker Carlson. And Tucker, that's true. Because they're trying to pick up the Nick Fuentes people. But the bigger question, you know, because they're trying to pick up the Nick Fuentes people. But the bigger question I think is what do the rest of us do? You know, what kind of coalitions do we make

to make sure that doesn't happen? And when we do that, you know, the thing that I find really interesting about it is that we have to find answers to things that most of us don't have opinions about yet. What do we do about AI? What do we do about data centers? Data centers are huge, not just

physically, but major issue. And a lot of people, it's not that they don't know how to think about it, they're not thinking about it unless it's in their backyard. So there's a lot of places where the coalitions that are going to come out of this moment are going to look really different than the current sort of alignments in the political system that is not MAGA.

And it's an interesting time because there's so much flux going on. But what there is at the heart of it, the same where there was in the 1850s, in the 1890s, in the 1930s, and so on, is ultimately a determination to define a new America.

And the thing that is frustrating for a historian, there are many things that are frustrating for a historian in this moment, but we actually know how the reactionary right version of the future goes. We have proof of how that goes and it's nothing good.

So it's a little frustrating to be sitting here going, let's not do that, that's not a good idea. And having people go, yeah, we've always been a white country and thinking, oh no, here we go again. Versus, I don't know where the future goes, but we can do a hell of a lot better than that.

Yeah, well, let's hope that where we're going next is better than where we are right now and that it's not going to get worse because it is hard to imagine it getting worse, but it certainly can get worse. And I think you're absolutely right

that there are people sort of putting their finger in the wind in this moment and trying to determine, okay, how do I trim the sails here because of the way the winds are blowing. But Heather, as always, so great to talk to you. Really appreciate your insights. And thank you for what you said about Robert Mueller, too.

That was really interesting stuff. But always great to talk to you, Heather. Great catching up.

Thank you so much.

Always a pleasure. Take care.

Appreciate it, Heather. Thanks so much. Take care of you, too. And our cups runneth over today. I just have such an amazing show to start the week on this Monday, just had Heather Cox Richardson on.

And now because there's so much important election and voting articles and pieces and topics in the news right now that we've got to bring in somebody who's really an authority on this subject. And that is Stacey Abrams,

former Georgia Secretary of State and elections and voting advocate, and also an amazing author. Stacey, great to see you as always. Thank you for coming back on.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, and you've been just writing just nonstop lately, and it's been an amazing chapter of your career to see flourish and blossom and so on. But there's so much in the news that I wanted to quiz you on and get your take on because right now it seems as though Donald Trump is kind of holding the Department of Homeland Security hostage unless he gets the Republicans in the Senate to, I guess, eliminate the filibuster and

ram through the SAVE Act, which is basically a voter suppression piece of legislation. Trump tries to boil it down and say, it's just voter ID. It's not just voter ID. But what's been your sense of things watching all of this unfold? Because he did it again today. He basically said, do not reopen the Department of Homeland Security and get TSA going on it unless I get what I want.

So I was able to listen to the tail end of your conversation with Heather and say that we have to remember, this is all of a piece. This is an authoritarian regime that wants to end democracy. They don't want to cancel elections though. They don't want to declare martial law because we might actually notice and get mad. So instead, what they want to do is erode our access to democracy so that they can still

do the mechanics, but not the meaning. And that looks like you can have an election and you can go and vote for a representative, but they've redrawn the lines so that your choices are limited to the people they want. You can go and cast your ballot, but only if you do it in the way that they say you can and at the time they prescribe and only for the people that they like.

And I wanna correct one thing you said at the top. I was not secretary of state. I fought with most of our secretaries.

Oh, I'm sorry. Yes, you're right.

No, no, no. You have very, very attentive listeners and watchers, and so I wanted to be clear.

Thank you.

I missed that. I was not governor. I was not secretary of state. I was minority leader, and I fought with both the governor and the secretary of state. That's right. The one who was the secretary of state before you.

Forgive me. know, that's why I want to point this out. Because part of the work that I've been doing, part of the reason you're having this conversation is that a lot of what we are watching play out in DC got tested in places like Georgia and Florida and Texas and Kansas and Arizona. The SAVE Act is the worst of the best of hits. So basically they've taken the worst examples of how to protect democracy and turned it into this greatest hits of voter suppression. And what the SAVE Act wants to do is to tell Americans that if you don't have the proper paperwork, you cannot participate in our

democracy. It is not a voter ID bill. Every state in this country requires that you identify who you are. No one is permitted legally to register without proof of citizenship. That's the law right now. What this does is narrow the paperwork that you can have and limit the access that you need so that fewer and fewer Americans can actually use their constitutional right to vote. That's what this is about. This has nothing to do with the terms of art they like to use.

This is all about voter suppression, and it's all about how authoritarianism takes permanent hold in our country. And you know, the part about the Save America Act that really concerns me is there's an element of it that would give the Department of Homeland Security access to state voter rolls. And I mean, one of the things that Trump has been trying to do is, I mean, just delegitimize

the idea that we run clean elections in this country, which we do, by and large. We have good elections that work just fine. And today he was trying to say that the United States is the only country in the world that has mail-in voting. He did this today.

He said, it was brought to my attention today that we're the only country that does mail-in voting. I call it mail-in cheating. My old colleague, Daniel Dale over at CNN tweeted, this is a lie that Trump has been telling for years, not a fact just brought to his attention. Dozens of countries use mail-in voting in some form, like Canada, the UK, Australia, Germany, and Switzerland.

And he just repeats these things over and over again, sort of in the way he talks about the SAVE Act in ways that are misleading.

What about the damage that's done by that? Well, they tell a lie a thousand times until it sounds like the truth, which is why I refuse to repeat their lies. We need to be very clear. America already requires voter ID. It already requires proof of citizenship. Full stop. We don't have to try to explain our way out of it. They are lying. And we need to call it a lie when they talk about it.

Now, then we need to talk about why they're lying. They're lying because it has worked to increase the percentage of Americans who participate in elections. If you look at the 2020 election, that was the most accessible election in American history because it expanded the number of people who could participate because our original system

was built for agrarians in the 18th century. We finally have a system built for Americans in the 21st century, and they don't like it because people they don't like are voting. Young people, people of color, poor people, rural communities that are watching their lives be dismantled by this administration and this regime, they're afraid that those folks are going to show up because they're not popular. And that

lack of popularity is emboldened when you can control the means of voting. That's what the SAVE Act is all about.

And there was also a Supreme Court case being argued, I believe just today. They apparently were divided along partisan lines, according to the New York Times, focusing on a Mississippi law that allows mail-in ballots to come in after election day, as long as they're postmarked by election day. And of course the Republican Party and the Trump administration are arguing against this,

but this has been going on for some time too, that people, they get their ballots in by election day, they get counted afterwards. They usually don't have a great deal of an impact on the final results in that particular state. It might, I guess, on occasion,

but what did you make of that case?

So to understand what's at stake, most Americans, unless you work for the postal service, you'd have no control over the mail. All you can do is turn it in. You have no control, no say after, about what happens after you submit the mail. And so because the mechanism for delivery

is out of the direct control of the voter, most states have a common practice which says, we count it when you turn it in. It's kind of like when you turned in your homework. The teacher counted it when you turned it in, even if they didn't read it for a couple of days, you got counted

for doing your part in the system. So what we have done as a nation, because we have people who travel, we have students who don't live at home, we have all kinds of mechanisms that have said, because our society is different than it was in 1787, we are going to let you cast your ballot in a different way, but we're still going to put strings on it, and you have to get it postmarked. Well, because people can't control the post office,

what the laws typically say is, as long as it's postmarked, we will count it. But we're not going to give you all the time in the world. We're going to give you all the time in the world. We're gonna set a date certain so that if you get it in the day of, or even the day before, we're gonna give you the benefit of the doubt.

What they are trying to say now is that you cannot have it counted unless you turn it in well before and you can ensure it arrives on time. And there are two problems with that. In the state of Georgia,

we had hurricanes hit during election seasons, both times I was running. You can't control whether or not the mail is going to move when the mailbox that you used is now gone or that you can't move mail traffic. So we don't know what emergencies will intercede that have nothing to do with a voter

turning in their information. The other issue is that we have underfunded election administration, which means the election workers who have to send out the ballots don't always get their information in a timely fashion. Part of what people would argue,

oh, we'll just do it ahead of time. You can't do it until you get it. And if you can't get it because they haven't sent it, why should a voter be penalized for a system they cannot control? And so we have a reasonable accommodation

and that's postmark. That postmark has worked for banks, it's worked for the military, it has worked for businesses. Why shouldn't it work for voting?

Yeah, and I mean, you know, what's incredible is that they, you know, all of these efforts have folks like you, you know, you're an expert in this and, and so many folks, uh, on, on the front lines of fighting for voter access, we're just all sort of spinning our wheels on this stuff when, you know, we should be making it easier for people

to vote in this country, not harder. And we, we just aren't. And I guess this is part of the reason why Donald Trump, every time he starts talking on this subject, he says things like he wants to nationalize elections, or, you know, they're pining for ICE to show up or National Guard members to show up at voting places in the fall. I mean, just today he's starting to send ICE agents into airports and it just makes me worry,

you know, what's the next leap? It seems to me the next leap is to have ICE agents into airports and it just makes me worry, you know, what's the next leap? It seems to me the next leap is to have ICE or National Guard members at polling places. I don't think that's a stretch.

I don't think it's a stretch at all. We forget that in the 1980s in New Jersey, Republicans had a tendency of having off-duty or sometimes on-duty police officers in polling places that were frequented by Black voters. It was so egregious that one year the courts found that it was so chilling of the effect on voting that the Republican Party was disallowed for 30 years from having that kind of presence at polling places. And in fact, it didn't get lifted until 2017 under the previous Trump administration.

But here's the thing, voting is a right. It is a fundamental foundational way that democracy works. And we've got to remember that we have an administration that is suborned by Congress that doesn't necessarily believe democracy is good. They certainly don't like the people

who get to participate in that democracy. And so their mission is to deconstruct and destroy the mechanisms. And so having ICE show up, we can't just think about as ICE being there because ICE no longer is constrained

by only being able to do immigration work because under the Supreme Court, the same one deciding on postmarks, the same one that gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act and is likely to gut Section 2 with the Calais decision, this is the same court that said that you can pull people out

of line if you think that they are not legally in the United States based on race, location, accent, or ethnicity. So we've got the possibility of ICE agents being sent to majority Black and Brown districts and standing in line and interceding and disrupting elections not based on anything legitimate, just the fact that because the Supreme Court said they could, you now have a masked armed paramilitary standing in

line at an American polling place. If this happened in any other nation, it would be headline news and we'd be sending the Carter center. And yet that's what, that's the prospect in the United States.

And I mean, and the other thing that, and I've been talking about this nonstop on my show is just the, the image of Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence at the Fulton County election headquarters. is just the image of Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence at the Fulton County Election Headquarters. I think that took a lot of people's breath away. Just recently, the Department of Homeland Security

has been asking for, if I'm not mistaken, could be the Department of Justice, FBI, asking for ballots, election information from Arizona. I guess Tulsi, there was some other headline coming out of Puerto Rico where a similar effort was conducted there.

And Tulsi Gabbard was asked about this, I think at a hearing last week, and she just said, well, I was there observing and you know, this was made very clear at the time when the story first broke that it was Donald Trump who was, who was deploying the FBI to do this, that this was coming from him. Um, what have you, is there anything that he'd done to stop this? I mean, it just seems to me that, you know,

I think about it as almost like a Watergate type burglary happening in plain sight. It's just, they're just doing it right in front of our eyes.

Well, first we have to know what's happening and that's why shows like yours are so important. And two, we have to recognize that while Trump may be the person manufacturing these fever dreams, he's got support. Tulsi Gabbard is someone who got confirmed by the US Senate, which means the Senate said it was okay for her to behave, which means the Senate can say don't do this. So we can't

ascribe all the power to Trump. He might be the salesperson, but there's a whole infrastructure benefiting from this. There are US senators who do not want to lose elections. And so it would be great for them if they're in a tight election to not have to worry about who else shows up. They're Congress members, but they're also mayors and city council members and county commissioners and governors and state legislators and state secretaries of state who will benefit from this.

So we can't just put all of our attention on Trump. We've got to focus on anyone who is currently holding power on our behalf. And that's any elected official. Ask them, because every single elected official is affected by what's happening.

There is not a person who gets elected to office who will not be affected by the changes being made to voting rights in this country. Therefore they need to be protecting your rights and if they're not ask them why not and if they are ask them how they're doing it.

Yeah, and why do you suppose is the motive behind sending Tulsi Gabbard or sending the FBI into these election offices? Are they trying to find some sort of aha, see we told you there was this one little thing that, or is it just to delegitimize?

What do you suppose it is?

It's three things. One, it's to get access to information they're not legally permitted to have. The Constitution gives the states the authority to oversee elections, and they are not permitted to have this information, which is why they've been sued by more than 20 states, because the federal government demanded voting rolls, and they're not allowed to have them. And the reason they're not allowed to have them is that they could then preemptively try to

disqualify voters they don't like. How would you do that? Well, you'd look at names that you don't think sound like American names, or you'd go after enemies, political enemies. We know that they've already had someone use ICE to try to deport. They had someone in this administration try to use ICE to deport someone because they upset them. So they will mechanize and weaponize information. They also want to use it as a way to track more and more Americans. And they should not be able to use our right to vote as a pretext for surveillance.

And so they want to preemptively disqualify. They want to continue to stir up to your point. They want us to doubt the system. And what makes you doubt the system? Well, hearing the FBI is investigating, hearing that the DNI is investigating, hearing that they seized these voter rolls. They can't go back and do a thing about the 2020 election, but they can make us doubt the 26th election because all of this is practice for the 28th election. And that's what they're really gearing up for. And so we have to use 26 the way they are. They're using it to practice delegitimizing elections

and seizing control of democracy. We've got to use it to practice our democratic muscles, to show not big D democratism party, but small D democracy as in patriotism. Our responsibility in this moment is to make certain that even if we can kill the SAVE Act now,

which I think we can, let's make sure people have the paperwork they need. Let's use the interregnum to support vote riders and support organizations that are getting people the paperwork they need. Let's elect state and local officials

who are going to shore up their systems to protect our democracy. We can't be in pure reactive mode. Now is the time for us to go on offense. They've told us what they want. They want to dismantle democracy. Our job is to protect democracy and shore it up wherever we can, however we can. And that's the work I'm doing

with the 10 Steps Campaign. So I encourage people to go to 10stepscampaign.org to learn

about how you can help. Terrific. Yes. Let's definitely do that. And also Stacey, your sub stack is always terrific. Folks need to check out Stacey on her sub stack. And then also your book, Our Time Is Now. We should show the cover of that. A great book. Tell us about the book.

You've written so many books. Why should we focus on this one? I mean, I know we should focus on all of them, but.

Thank you. No, our time is now the badge of honor I like to lift up is that it was one of the books banned by the US Naval Academy. The book is, our time is now power, purpose and the fight for a fair America.

If you wanna understand voter suppression, if you wanna understand how we build the census so it actually tells us the truth in 2030. If you want to know how we ended up with an authoritarian in office and what it looks like when it starts, our time is now is a blueprint for anyone who wants to understand how we got here, but more importantly how we get out of it. I don't believe in just diagnosing the problem. Our time is now is a blueprint for how we save

and fix our democracy. And that's going to be a key subject heading into No King's 3, which is happening this weekend. And I think, despite their best efforts here in Washington, I think people are keenly aware of this issue. They understand that somebody somewhere in Trump world is trying to make it where folks cannot get to the polls and cast their ballots and exercise

their American constitutional right to participate in this process. And, and Stacy, I think it's because of folks like you that they're just not going to, they're not going to succeed. And because you know, the cops are on the case. Uh, the good guys are on the case, but, uh, thank you so much for coming back on. Stacy really appreciate it.

Sorry.

I elected you to something that you had not been elected to. No, no, no, look. Elected you to a place. I just got off a plane from the West Coast yesterday. I think I'm having some jet lag and some Mondays happening here, but thanks as always.

I appreciate you.

Thank you. Great to see you, Stacey. Thanks so much, Stacey Abrams. Always a pleasure when she can come on the program because, I mean, I sort of, we didn't really, I don't understand how these two amazing ladies came together on this show today, but it just happened. And that is why it's so darn important for folks out there

to do what you can to support independent media, independent journalism. As you might recall, last Friday, I was out on the West Coast testifying about the perils, the dangers of media conglomeration, media consolidation in this country,

big companies gobbling up other media companies and forming these giant propaganda networks that are just not good for our democracy. And that is so very important that we focus on this issue of not just the right to vote, but the right to inform ourselves,

to stay abreast of everything that's important that's happening right now. And that's why I feel very grateful that both Heather Cox Richardson and Stacey Abrams came on the program today. And I do wanna go back to a little bit of something

that Heather and I were talking about earlier, and that is the state of our political culture, where we are as a country right now, the way we're talking to one another, the way we're interacting with one another. And I know that it might seem a little bit of a quaint or Pollyannish or naive thing to think about. But when Donald Trump is putting out a truth social post over the weekend and saying he's glad that Robert Mueller died

Uh, you know this this happened on saturday, you know, I I've done all my stuff On friday and and I really haven't had a chance to respond to this um, and I do think um, it goes back to what heather and I were talking about earlier on the program that You know, what what kind of country are we? leaving to our kids

When you have the president United States Basically saying he's glad that somebody's dead and and and make no mistake You know one of the things I brought up as soon as I saw this With anybody who had listened to me is that he had just done this about Rob Reiner About Hollywood legend Rob Reiner, about Hollywood legend, Rob Reiner. He had also basically danced on the man's grave.

And the, and I worry about the toxic effect that this is happening on our culture. I mean, to me, when you read this, when you read this true social post, Robert Mueller just died.

Good.

I'm glad he's dead. That, that to me is Trump derangement syndrome.

That to me is a deranged thing to say a deranged thing to think.

And, you know, maybe we have dark thoughts that occur to us from time to time, but we don't put them in words like this. I mean, this, this is sick, deranged stuff. And, and this is not a one-off as we all know, this is not a one-off. He talked about Rob Reiner in this fashion, but look at the way Donald Trump was talking about Joe Kent. This morning.

Remember Joe Kent is the, uh, counterterrorism official who quit last week and said that there was no imminent threat posed by Iran. And, um, and he resigned. He resigned from that position. Trump was asked about this on the tarmac in Palm Beach this morning and here's how he responded to Joe Ken.

Mr. President, do you know what a Joe Ken was leaking?

Look I'm not a fan of the guy. If you look at and you never covered this. If you look at his truths or whatever he went on, if it's X or truth. If you look at his truths or his statements, he was all for everything all of a sudden. He wasn't He was a man that I met At Dover he came in his wife was killed. He remarried

fairly quickly His wife was killed and I felt badly for her. He ran for Congress, he lost. He ran for Congress again and he lost. I said, you know, he's a guy, nice guy, seemed like a very nice guy.

I mean, the thing that disturbs me when I listen to this, what Trump just said there at kind of at the beginning of that video, as he knocks Joe Kent over how quickly he remarried after his previous wife passed away. I just want to just in case folks were not aware of this and maybe this is not the most important thing in the world but People Magazine says that Joe Kent's wife died in 2019. He remarried in 2023. Um, and you know, they, they had children and I, I don't want to get all tangled up in somebody's personal life, but since when is Donald Trump an authority

or some sort of moral leader when it comes to getting married and how many times you get married and who you're married to. I mean, he's the last person who should be weighing in on that subject. But my point is that that is also a deranged comment. And for all the talk of Trump derangement syndrome in Washington, Trump throws that term around people in the white house,

people in the Republican party throw that term around and accuse people of having Trump derangement syndrome. If you do not, if you do not think that it is evil for Donald Trump to tap dance on the grave of Robert Mueller and by the way, I mean, when Donald Trump dies, you know, there might be a similar reaction.

I just, I'll just point that out, but you know, that is deranged and for Donald Trump to talk about a critic of his and when he remarried after his wife passed away, that is deranged. And this is what I'm talking about. This is what I'm worried about. This is, this is the world that I'm worried about that Donald Trump is

leaving to all of us when he leaves the scene and people are responding this way or that way to his passing, to his death, that's what I worry about. That's what I'm concerned about. And the less of that that we have in this society, the less of those kinds of hot takes from people who have some sort of influence on our society. I Mean the better off we're gonna be we just you know, that is not

That's not who we should become that's that is not the kind of world we should be leaving to our kids and our grandkids and future generations Not at all, but it makes me worry about I mean this is the guy who is in the driver's seat right now. This is the guy who's in the driver's seat when it comes to Iran, when it comes to our economy, when it comes to gas prices, when it comes to just about everything else. Somebody who tap dances on the grave of Robert Mueller, somebody who talks about

a person remarrying after their wife passed away.

I just wonder, you know, when Lindsey Graham, when some of the people on the right who cheerlead Donald Trump nightly on Fox, when they hold Donald Trump as this great man, this great human being, this person that we should all look up to? Are they not looking at the truth social posts?

Are they not listening when he says what he says about Joe Kent? Come on. Come on, Lindsey Graham. Come on, Sean Hannity. This is your guy. This is your guy. The guy talking about Robert Mueller,

the guy talking about Joe Kenton that fashion, this is your guy? Come on, give me a break. My thanks to Heather Cox Richardson for joining us. My thanks to Stacey Abrams as well. Some really important discussions

on where we are as a country right now and also the state of our democracy. It's going to take all of us folks to rally to this cause to protect this democracy so it stands there for future generations. And really appreciate all the wonderful comments that were made about my testimony last week out in California, you know, I read so many of them it made so It may it really meant so much to me to see that outpouring of support and all that was a little nervous going to a Congressional hearing and testifying like that just I wasn't sure how that was gonna turn out

But there was so much there was so much of a positive reaction to it that I knew I had made the right decision So really want to thank everybody for that as well. But in the meantime, thanks for tuning in on this Monday. Still reporting from Washington, I'm Jim Acosta. Still reporting from Washington, I'm Jim Acosta. I'll see you next time.