How do you read that? Do you think some of these people are— in a sort of opportunistic phase and exaggerating the extent to which they've turned away from Trump? Or do you think it represents something very real happening on the ground?

Well, I think it is very real, but I think, you know, from Trump's perspective, he did what he does.

He wanted power.

And he is a consummate liar, and he was willing to lie to get it.

And he said whatever needed to be said in whatever room he was in.

He sold people a bill of goods, and he never had any intention of following through on that in the end, and that is what we're seeing now.

So people are disappointed, disaffected, because he basically was going to do what he intended to do anyway.

The Assignment with Antonia Hilton, weekends at 1 p.m. Eastern on MSNOW.

What exactly does this president get from this fight with the media? Because one thing that he is known for and praised for among a lot of his base members has been that he can, you know, fight with the press, that he gets to spar and he believes to show his force and authority.

No, I do believe that this is just part of the character of the man.

He really does hate the fact that people are not praising him.

But the problem is that he confuses... decent good coverage of bad ideas and bad policies as being unfair to him.

But if you look at the policies, I looked at part of the Media Research Center that he often quotes 92% of my coverage is bad.

Well, that's not exactly what that shows.

But I looked at what they looked at.

Given what we talked about in Texas, for example, does this make sense to you, his plan?

Do I say it funny? No, it's just

that's exactly how I want people to say it.

Blow the Stack.

Blow the Stack.

All right.

Trump is trying.

He's trying, but he had a playbook, and it worked.

Yes,

Mm-hmm.

It is easy to say that, uh, that DEI is the reason that you don't get the job and the less qualified Black person did.

It is easy to say that, uh, there's a trans person in every bathroom and in every sport, and the, the, the schools are determining the genders of your children, and they're castrating the babies.

It is easy to say all of that, but it is very hard to say that the economy is roaring when you have to deal with your dining room table and your, uh, pocketbook and deal with your, your gas tank.

Those things are touching people in a real way.

It is not about the other.

It is about me.

Mm-hmm.

I mean, like, what is the Republican message if you're a voter who's trying to figure out, like, what is this about?

The problem here is that you simply cannot lie about the things that people touch and feel every day.

You can't lie about how much it takes to fill a tank.

You can't lie about a dozen eggs or how much it costs to feed a family of four because people are dealing with that every day.

They have to touch that every day.

And so what they have chosen to do, what Donald Trump has chosen to do, is to lie about a promise.

And I think, you know, it is really, really important for us to say over and over and over, not going to happen.

And it also is the underpinning when you talk about race and ethnicity, the underpinning to so many of the civil rights arguments that the Supreme Court itself has tried to topple, but that are an underpinning to the way that Americans access their ballot.

What is the president of the United States? Do you even take him at his word that he doesn't know?

Well, it's President Trump, so he lies all the time.

You don't know if he knows, not know, whatever.

But it is clear that President Trump and Pete Hexeth have taken a hatchet to the defense infrastructure of this country.

They have destroyed something that was really precious.

The military had become a model meritocracy.

No meritocracy is perfect, but the military had become better than most.

Charles, the Republican state representative, Matt Sheehan, who chairs the state House Elections Committee, said, quote, We're clearly not trying to suppress the vote until you wake up on Election Day and you've been going to the same polling place for 20 years and all of a sudden it's gone.

Is this effective, the Democrats coming out and calling out the president and showing up as voters show up to say we want more?

I think this is part of the arsenal that you have to do to fight back against a multi-pronged attack on the election.

This is—people are not terrified enough.

People are—too many voters are sitting back like people who wait out storms.

You know, somebody says, you have to evacuate.

And it's, oh, maybe it won't be so bad.

You know, I'm going to play my—take my chance with it.

Right? And

So what are your thoughts, Charles, on all of this?

Hi, Reverend Sharpton.

Thanks for having me on.

Two things are colliding here.

One is the decades long Roberts Court case.

judicial philosophy that says that they want a race blind society, but that is just coded.

What they want to do is to erase anti-racial remedies which on the other hand, kind of buttresses racial oppression.

Regardless of what happens in November and beyond, Charles, has the damage already been done?

Charles, what's your reaction to that? Because obviously these are political appointees serving at the pleasure of the President, but their ultim- ultimate audience and who they serve are the American people, and she's made a call that she feels it was not enough to meet the, her burden of proof and decided to dismiss, and he wants her to revisit this.

Yeah.

I think that that answer that Ben just gave was absurd, because there's an actual human being here who is being charged with something.

And if the evidence does not support that that person did what the President says that he did, he cannot be charged.

You know, we are flaunting the, a whole idea of a presumption of innocence in the country.

We're pr- we're flaunting the whole idea that this person may not have done it.

And Jean, Zanine Pirro has basically come to the conclusion that he did not do what the President said that he did.

You haven't seen what the president saw, Charles

Once they got there, they didn't always find what they expected.

Moving away from the South to the North was supposed to, and did, offer for a while more civic engagement, more political opportunity, better wages, access to different, better kinds of employment.

But they also met challenges.

a population of white people who started to behave exactly like the white people they had left.

When Dr.

King moved to Chicago, he was doing so to fight for fair housing.

And as he said in his own words, You know, when they threw everything they could find at him and knocked him to the ground when they hit him in the head, he had never seen anything as vicious as that.

And then what? And then what do we do once we get out from under that weight? That is freedom to me

Lives were lost, damage inflicted in the millions upon millions, and they're playing politics at the White House.

Right, and it's not something that we've seen done before.

We've...

FEMA was created in 1979.

As far back as 1950 we've had some sort of de- disaster relief legislation in place to deal with these things.

No president has operated in this way.

Uh, and it is, as you say, purely political, but the, it, it is in line with how this president operates.

So Charles, um, you know, Bill Polti is so thoroughly unqualified, Democrats say, that there was sort of some relief, uh, that, that Jay Clayton was taking over, even though, let's remember, in his confirmation hearings, Jay Clayton refused to say when questioned by Senator Ossoff who won the 2020 election.

Let's go there.

Yeah, you're absolutely right.

And so when people, particularly the originalists, make some sort of argument that the founders were almost infallible, that they were brilliant.

I think some of the things that I've read, some of the writing is really some strong writing from the founders.

I won't take anything away from how smart they might have been.

But they also, they were not fortune tellers.

They could not have imagined fortune.

48% to 46% with the margin of error, within a margin of error.

Is that a risk they're running by diminishing it?

Well, you can make an argument on both sides of that coin, but...

Black voters have to be recognized for their love and loyalty to the Democratic Party.

They're voting, nine out of 10 black people are voting for Democrats.

When they make the argument that we need to chase the people who are running away from us rather than embrace the people who are trying to hug us, it sends a message to black voters that you are a captured constituency.

We don't have to worry about you loving us.

We just have to worry about you turning out.

People never run on it.

This is leadership for the whole, rooted in the wisdom and generosity from the pain of oppression.

mayor jackson's first black mayor here and he just pressures people to be inclusive you can't work with the city unless you have a certain number of people on your payroll who are black and it's not it's not like half either it's just like a small number but it changes what equality and inclusion looks like on a civic level i mean he just pressured everyone to do this and it worked and They got used to black power without chafing at it.

I mean, since Maynard Jackson, every single mayor of the city of Atlanta has been a black person.

I haven't even mentioned strip clubs in this whole race since I've been here.

The person who they put that on, she denied it.

I had a little show at the time I had her on.

She's like, that's not true.

But it was so late.

There's also-

No one, no one can allow that, the, the plane to be attacked and to go down because they're, uh, you just, you're not just risking your life, you're risking the life of other people who may not even know that this plane is not equipped in the way that the other one was equipped.

The, uh, the Air Force One is a military plane outfitted to carry people.

This plane is a passenger plane outfitted to try to pretend to be a military plane, and it just can't do it.

It does, it's not q- not equipped in the same way, and so that is a problem, and he's made that mistake.

But the bigger point here is that Donald Trump is, across the board, trying to dismantle the watchdogs in society.

That is the media.

Yeah.

Why doesn't he just say, you're not welcome here?

It's consistent with what he has done before.

He has refused to condemn the people who marched in Charlottesville.

He has refused to condemn the Proud Boys.

He not only refused to condemn the people who rioted at the Capitol, but he pardoned them or commuted their sentences.

But you cannot say that he's masking, he's hiding behind the mask of defending the First Amendment because he has, in fact, repeatedly condemned protests of people he does not like.

He repeatedly condemned BLM, Black Lives Matter.

Charles.

Charles?

But it's not just rhetoric.

It's actually policies.

We have a president who likes conspicuous cruelty.

We saw it in how ICE was operating on the streets.

It is why he wants to bring back Alcatraz.

It is why, uh, he wants to bring back, uh, uh, firing squads.

I mean, is there a conversation to have that's like, "This, this joke, you're, you have a right to say it, but it's in poor taste"?

Charles Blow?

Um, one of the things that's really interesting to me is how far the needle has moved on what we can absorb, and that, I guess, also is on purpose.

Uh, the coarsening is happening all the time, and, uh, the, the, the window of what is acceptable or, or not, uh, uh, completely damaging and, and, and disempowering keeps moving.

Uh, when in 2018, when, um, Roseanne Barr, who is an actual comedian, compared Valerie Jarrett to an ape, within hours ABC had released a, a, a, a message about that, a statement about that, and canceled her show, which was incredibly popular at the time, a big decision for them to make.

But again, we were...

At that time, we had a, uh, a, a Black president-- I mean, no, sorry, not a Black president.

We had, uh, uh...

Yeah.

But Jay, what are your thoughts before we hear from Charles?

Well, I'm currently in New Orleans, so the city of New Orleans is with Don.

I know a lot of people here have already posted about it, and I'm doing shows here, uh, just coincidentally, I guess, in, in a very serendipitous kind of way.

This is connected to stand-up comedy.

Nick Shirley was a YouTuber posing as a journalist.

Now we have real journalists getting arrested.

You have all these comedians, Andrew Schulz, Tim Dillon, Joe Rogan, Theo Von, who pose as journalists, and now we have actual journalists, who should be protected by the First Amendment, being arrested for covering a protest.

Charles, your thoughts?

Why have we found ourselves in this kind of golden age of corruption here?

Well, I mean, the...

Mostly it's because Donald Trump has set the bar so high or low, depending on how you want to describe it, that nothing really registers anymore.

But it also underscores that what these people were complaining about, uh, was not something that they opposed on principle, but rather something that they were jealous of.

They, they were never, uh, really on principle against indoctrination, they just wanted to do it themselves and more.

They were never really against, uh, weaponizing the Justice Department, they just wanted to do it themselves and more.

They were never against grift, they just wanted to do it themselves and more.

Mm.

Mm-hmm.

And, uh, be in space with other Black people to lift the whole? I remember when I was, um, about to go to college and I had, um, a full scholarship from LSU.

Called me down to Grambling.

I was only 20 minutes away, but he called me, and he said, "Come into the office." White man.

And he says...

I had also, had a, um, a scholarship from Louisiana Tech.

He says, "LSU doesn't need you.

Mm-hmm.

How do you feel?

No, I think...

Listen, uh, I don't think that anyone fully has been able to capture the emotional, the psychic industry...

Injury that Black people suffered during this election.

It was...

When America said they'd rather burn it all down than to share it, that they would rather risk it all on him than accept her.

It hurt us in a way that I don't think we fully have been able to grapple with, and I don't think that us collectively have even been able to grapple with and express.

Except for just one foot in front of the other and just to keep moving.

That backlash, Charles says, is all too familiar.

There are periods every 50 years or so where there's a surge in Black progress and then a massive backlash against that progress, and it happens over and over and over again.

There's a surge of Black progress during Reconstruction and then the massive backlash of Jim Crow.

There is the surge of Black progress, or the p- promise of it, during the Great Migration, and then there's the massive backlash which manifests itself in Red Summer and then in the construction of segregation throughout the country.

If you look at Brown v.

Board of Education, right after that, the White Citizens' Council is born in response to it.

[gentle music] You keep going with the civil rights movement.

Hmm.