Trump decisively defeated Vice President Kamala Harris in the November election despite facing four criminal cases during the campaign. Stein, on “Morning Joe,” credited Trump’s resilience and strategic approach to his legal troubles as key to his success.

“In terms of what we’re talking about, we were also thinking a year ago this would be the courtroom campaign. How would he wage his run for the office from the courthouse? Ended up being that he leveraged it, frankly,” Stein said. “I think the real lesson from all this is that, you know, say what you will about Donald Trump, but he has one attribute that distinguishes him from anyone else in politics, which is an insatiable perseverance. He will just grind through stuff that, more often than not, other politicians will succumb to. And he can figure it out, he will just claw his way back in and he will fight it. And then he’ll turn it into his advantage. And he did martyr himself by the trials.”

“He did get the rest of the Republican Party to rally around him. And I think if you talk to people in his universe, look, there was a time when the primary itself was uncertain, right? [Republican Florida Gov.] Ron DeSantis looked ascendant, it was unclear if he could win but it certainly seemed possible,” he continued. “And then what happened was the indictment came down, and everyone, including DeSantis, rushed to Trump’s side. I think that ultimately Trump managed to use that and leverage that to the nomination. That changed the course of history.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis acknowledged in December 2023 that Trump’s indictments had negatively affected his presidential campaign.

“I would say, if I would have one thing changed, I wish Trump hadn’t been indicted on any of this stuff. I mean, honestly, I think from [Democratic Manhattan District Attorney] Alvin Bragg on, I’ve criticized the cases, I think someone like Bragg would not have brought that case if it was anyone other than Donald Trump, and so someone like that is distorting justice, which is bad,” DeSantis said. “But I also think it distorted the primary, and I think those have been the main issues that have happened.”

He added the charges “sucked out a lot of oxygen” from the primary.

The Trump campaign announced in May that it raised $34.8 million just after a Manhattan jury convicted him on all 34 counts of falsifying business records brought by Bragg.

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An unidentified shooter killed two people at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wis. before committing suicide. Dr. Kavita Patel told MSNBC host Chris Jansing that guns are a “public health crisis” before she attacked Kennedy’s nomination to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Patel served in the Obama White House as the director of policy for the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement.

“First responders know this better than anybody. They are not just the first to the scene, but I’ve been in the emergency room when we have had these shootings and we’re waiting for people, and we don’t get them,” Patel said. “Because… there are no people that can be saved, and then when you look at the aftermath of the violence, Chris, as we’ve seen, an escalation in the ability to print guns, the ease in which you can gain ammunition, the uneven pattern of laws, depending on the state you’re in and what the laws are, and, let’s just be honest, the culture of violence. I see it with my 10-year-old son, the video games his friends play. They normalize so much of this violence.”

“And I want to go back to American health policy. This is awful, but it’s a reminder that I need to keep at the screening that I do with patients on whether they have guns in the household, how they keep the guns safe, whether they have children in the household, what they do when other children visit their household,” Patel said. “I have had parents even say, ‘Should I ask other parents about guns in the household?’ I said you should. It should be a checklist, not even to think about it, but that’s part of what we’re talking about.”

President-elect Donald Trump announced Kennedy as his nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services in November. Kennedy in the past has questioned whether vaccines cause autism, a view popularized by a discredited study retracted by the Lancet in 2010.

“These are not just policies that we have to enact at our local level. They need to be implemented at the federal level,” Patel said. “And as we’re talking about a secretary of HHS potentially, we’re talking about people who are going to be in leadership position. They don’t even support science when we talk about vaccines. How are we going to depend on them to support the science around gun violence, as it’s literally unfolding in front of our eyes, and it’s tragic.”

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Musk joked on X Friday about potentially purchasing the site, with the Department of Government Efficiency co-chair asking “How much does it cost?” in response to Trump Jr. posting that he had “the funniest idea ever” referring to reports that Comcast is spinning off MSNBC and other cable channels. Stelter fretted that Musk could shift the left-leaning 24-hour news network to a less-critical tone towards President-elect Donald Trump.

“The incoming President Trump is joined at the hip by the owner of the old platform Twitter, now known as X, and every tweet Musk posts is now scrutinized very carefully for clues about what he might do or not do, you know?” Stelter told “CNN Newsroom” host Kayle Tausche. “So I think this solves — this ends the argument about how important these social media platforms are. Over the weekend, for example, Musk is joking, I think, about maybe trying to buy MSNBC. It seems he’s just trying to troll. Comcast is not making MSNBC up for sale right now. Maybe something will change in a few years. But those tweets, those posts from Musk, those memes that he’s posting, it just speaks to his power and his center of power throughout this incoming administration.”

Musk completed the purchase of Twitter in October 2022 and reinstated Trump’s account the following month.

“He used some of the same phrasing that he used a few years ago, when he ended up actually buying Twitter, when he said, ‘How much is it?’ just fairly casually,” Tausche responded. “I mean, it would seem that yes, there is a fair amount of trolling going on right now, but at the same time, Comcast is cleaving off a part of the business that could potentially be an affordable acquisition. Do you think that there’s… any possibility that it’s more than a joke?”

“Well, some inside MSNBC are taking Musk’s comments seriously. Whether he’s trolling or not, there is a serious undercurrent to this, and it is the following: In some countries, where we’ve seen democratic backsliding, where some oppositional media outlets have been captured by the government, a process known as media capture, this is exactly what happens,” Stelter claimed. “An ally of the leader, like Musk, comes in and buys a media outlet that is viewed as oppositional, and then he turns the content and makes it more friendly to the person in power. That has happened before in other countries. That’s part of the concern when — even if Elon Musk is just joking, that’s part of the concern here when it comes to MSNBC.”

MSNBC ratings fell by over fifty percent following former President Donald Trump’s defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, according to the New York Times. MSNBC hosts and guests routinely hyped the claims that Trump’s 2016 campaign colluded with the Russian government to defeat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and repeatedly had Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California, who often made claims about alleged collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia, on the air.

“But at the moment, this spin off that Comcast is doing will take at least a year to complete,” Stelter said. “There’s no immediate sale or any of that, I‘m told, that is planned. But the idea that Musk talks about it, he likes to say, ‘The most ironic outcome is the most likely.’ And in this case, it would be pretty ironic if he controlled MSNBC.”

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Jong-Fast wrote in a Vanity Fair column Monday that expressing outrage over Trump’s remarks about women and “wokeness” only satisfies his supporters and is less dangerous than what he may do during his administration. The “Morning Joe” guest argued the media focused too heavily on Trump’s rhetoric throughout his first administration, and stated they should instead focus on Trump’s alleged threat to democracy and American institutions.

“We are in it for 4 years, this is gonna be a marathon, not a sprint. We need to protect norms and institutions and not focus on the aesthetic problem of Trumpism,” Jong-Fast said. “The first time there was a lot of ‘he used vulgar language,’ you know, offended by things and more focus on the norms and institutions. So, the war on woke is vague. You saw reporting that had these people, Trump voters, saying Trump had defeated woke. So that’s vague. But the structural things that Trump might do to try and fight woke could end up undermining democracy. So I feel like, more focused on democracy, democratic values, norms and institutions, the structures that keep America, America, and less focused on the aesthetic problems of Trumpism.”

Jong-Fast wrote in her piece that Trump’s tweets during his first administration distracted from the “actually terrifying things” the then-president did. She argued that his possible “outrageous” remarks that will be made in the upcoming 4 years should not get the same reactions.

“Will I be outraged? Obviously, Trump will do outrageous things. But in entering likely one of the most perilous moments for our democracy, we must focus on the assault on essential norms and institutions, because without them, we are lost,” she wrote.

The media, including “Morning Joe,” spent the entirety of the 2024 election season warning that Trump is a “threat to democracy” and will govern as a dictator, even likening him to former Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. Scarborough accused Trump of being the single biggest “threat to democracy since the Civil War” and compared him to Hitler during a Sept. 23 segment, while one of their guests Claire McCaskill claimed he is “more dangerous than Hitler” during a November 2023 segment on the program.

Co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski met with Trump in Mar-a-Lago on Friday to discuss their concerns regarding policy issues, including abortion and illegal immigration.

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Former President Donald Trump won reelection, with Fox News predicting he had secured the necessary 270 electoral votes to secure the presidency early Wednesday morning. Maddow said that Trump would be “supporting Russia” in its war with Ukraine.

“Intelligence sharing between America and our traditional allies is likely going to end. The whole five eyes thing is likely going to end,” Maddow claimed. “If you’ve got America switching sides in the Ukraine-Russia war to instead support Russia or to become neutral, which means in this case would be to support Russia.”

“If you’ve got ongoing secret communications even out of government between the Republican nominee and the person who funded his campaign and led his ground game, right?” Maddow continued. “Both of whom are communicating with the Russian government without reporting that information to the U.S. government, and on top of that, you’ve got reporting from the New York Times that they’re considering once there is a second Trump administration, if it happens, to stop performing background checks before giving people security clearance, meaning giving classified information to anyone.”

MSNBC hosts and guests routinely hyped the claims that Trump’s 2016 campaign colluded with the Russian government to defeat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and repeatedly had Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California, who often made claims about alleged collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia, on the air. The Steele Dossier, which was used to further allegations of collusion, was later discredited.

“That’s supposedly at the instigation of a Trump campaign official who was born in Moscow, who was unable to get a security clearance in the first Trump term, who has had multiple arrests and is reportedly on top of a short list to be White House counsel and he is the one who proposed to get rid of all background checks for security clearances, which means handing out classified information on the corner,” Maddow said.

“You are not going to have American allies who have been relying on us as the pinnacle intelligence agency in the world since World War II,” Maddow continued. “You are not going to have continued sharing of information with a new administration that has an open line with Vladimir Putin and that is going to essentially be willing to handle classified information the way the man who was indicted for handling it the way he did it at Mar-a-Lago at the top, and with handling security clearances the way they’ve been reportedly described.”

Special counsel Jack Smith unsealed a superseding indictment on July 27, 2023, that included charges against Carlos De Oliveira, a maintenance worker at Mar-a-Lago, the Florida estate owned by Trump after the special counsel initially secured a 37-count indictment against Trump and aide Walter Nauta the previous June.

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MSNBC… not so much.

The Democrats’ propaganda machine in cable news has exactly one story about Biden’s remarks on their website a day after they dropped, and they didn’t even drop that story until after the Wednesday morning traffic rush. This is a far cry from their massive coverage of both Donald Trump saying America was becoming a “garbage can” last week and comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s joke about Puerto Rico at the Madison Square Garden event last weekend.

MSNBC has mentioned one, the other, or both in 43 articles over the last seven days.

Do you want to know who is truly #garbage?@MSNBC

Over the past seven days they've mentioned @realDonaldTrump's and @TonyHinchcliffe's comments about "garbage" in 43 articles.

43.

They've mentioned Joe Biden's comments exactly none.

Zero.

That's "journalism" in 2024.

— JD Rucker (@JDRucker) October 30, 2024

Here’s a chronological search on msnbc.com for “garbage”:

As I noted in a clip for today’s episode of The JD Rucker Show, they hate me, they hate you, they hate Donald Trump, and they hate the United States of America.

Vice President Kamala Harris is only leading Trump by 14% among Hispanic voters, according to a national NBC News/Telemundo/CNBC poll conducted from Sept. 16-23. Although both Las Vegas residents on “Ana Cabrera Reports” praised Trump’s economic record in their Saturday interviews, one expressed skepticism about Harris, while the other said she believes the vice president has not been effective during her term.

WATCH:

“I love what Donald Trump did for us as an economy while he was in the presidency. And I don’t know what she has to offer because she’s new. So that’s kind of like taking a chance on her, you know? So that’s what I mean,” Griselda Martinez told Noriega. “But I do like how she is doing a lot of things for small businesses.”

Noriega said Martinez told him “she’s about 60/40 leaning toward Trump, but still very much open to being persuaded and open to hearing more from the Harris campaign.”

“The four years he was in office we were doing good, absolutely good … Kamala, she’s already in office and ain’t [got] shit done,” Veronica Sosa told Noriega. “And … there was more work too. We were able to afford things.”

Noriega said Sosa is definitely voting for Trump, but her husband told him he is planning on casting a ballot for Harris.

Harris is currently leading the former president by 1.3% in Nevada, according to the RealClearPolling average.

Moreover, the vice president led Trump by just 17% among likely Hispanic voters in an ABC News poll released Sept. 15. ABC News Political Director Rick Klein said Sunday that Harris is performing poorly among Hispanic voters compared to past Democratic candidates.

CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten on Monday also noted Trump is performing strongly with “working class voters,” including “voters of color” who are “non-college graduates.”

“You go back four years ago, look at that, Joe Biden won that group by 45 points. Look at where Kamala Harris’ support is today. She’s still leading amongst that group, but that lead is down 17 points to just 28 points,” he said. “And I will note that the margin among voters of color who actually graduate college has only been changed by five points … compared to four years ago. The reason Donald Trump is doing so well amongst voters of color is because he has really gone in and grabbed a lot of voters that he didn’t previously have among those who didn’t graduate college.”

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Trump has picked up substantial support among Hispanic voters in polling due to issues like immigration and the economy before President Joe Biden announced he would not seek reelection on July 21, with Harris regaining some support from Hispanic voters since replacing Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket. Hinojosa said many Hispanics cited Trump’s track record in business to justify their support for the former president, even as she tried to dismiss it.

“What I said to you when we asked the question was, Latinos want to be white. They want to be with the cool kids,” Hinojosa told MSNBC host Jonathan Capehart. “They want to be — I’m asking Latinos all the time and they just say, ‘Well, isn’t Donald Trump es tan buen negociante? He is such a good businessman.’ It’s like, no, he’s not. He had bankruptcies.”

WATCH:

“But they don’t want to be identified with all of those other immigrants that Donald Trump speaks so badly of, including me as a Mexican immigrant, so they’re like, ‘Let’s be with him,’” Hinojosa continued. “But those numbers, they could cost Kamala Harris the election. Everything that I’ve been saying that Latinos could push her over the top, these are the numbers that could also take her down.”

Harris trails Trump 48% to his 51% in a Fox News poll of likely voters in Arizona released Thursday, partially fueled by Trump’s relative strength with Hispanic voters. Trump trails Harris by 2% in the RealClearPolling average of polls from September 3 to 20, with the vice president’s lead remaining at 2% when Green Party candidate Dr. Jill Stein, independent candidate Cornel West and Libertarian candidate Chase Oliver are included in surveys.

Trump has picked up substantial support among Hispanic voters in polling due to issues like immigration and the economy before President Joe Biden announced he would not seek reelection on July 21, with Harris regaining some support from Hispanic voters since replacing Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.

Hinojosa also referenced how Trump and his running mate. Republican Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, amplified unconfirmed reports of pets being stolen and eaten by Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, via social media and during the Sept. 10 presidential debate. Springfield residents told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the city struggled to handle the influx of approximately 20,000 migrants, alleging that there has been an increase in traffic accidents and housing prices.

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Frankly, it was an embarrassment for American corporate media and gives the lie to the idea that the Harris campaign is all about defending “democracy.”

The interview was exactly what one would expect if you’d followed the Harris campaign at all. It was a series of mostly softball questions, delivered in the friendliest of confines on left-wing MSNBC, conducted by an admiring and sycophantic host, Stephanie Ruhle.

That setup was practically telegraphed ahead of time.

Five days before the interview, Ruhle went on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher” and claimed that Harris didn’t have to answer any substantive questions from the media.

“Kamala Harris isn’t running for perfect,” Ruhle heatedly told the New York Times’ Bret Stephens, another guest on the program. “She’s running against [former President Donald Trump]. We have two choices. And so there are some things you might not know her answer to. And in 2024, unlike 2016, for a lot of the American people, we know exactly what Trump will do, who he is, and the kind of threat he is to democracy.”

Ruhle said it was utopian—“nirvana”—to think we the people might get substantive answers from Harris on how she’d govern if elected president.

Really, what a crazy idea that some of us may have that we should live in a free society, where leaders are expected to account for themselves, and the people are the boss.

Basically, Harris isn’t Trump, so anything at all is good enough, right?

How interesting it is that after those comments, the Harris campaign almost immediately announced that they would allow Queen Kamala to come down from on high and grant Ruhle a humble request for an audience.

It was a “coincidence” that didn’t go unnoticed by commentators on X.

hahahaha

Stephanie Ruhle slobbered over Kamala a few days ago, saying she doesn’t have to do interviews because democracy is at stake, and the Harris campaign immediately called her up and says, “You’re our kind of interviewer.”

Incredible. https://t.co/ziPPQEtYzo

— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) September 25, 2024

Stephanie Ruhle goes on Bill Mahar and lick spittles Kamala Harris saying it doesn't matter that she doesn't answer questions or what she believes. Peter Baker calls her "the great" for landing a pretaped interview because of it. https://t.co/LCqF3ioY1w

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) September 25, 2024

It is really bad form for MSNBC to have someone argue that Kamala Harris doesn't need to take questions at all and then have that same person conducting the interview with her. Like if they care about journalistic ethics at all, they should assign a different interviewer. https://t.co/YdPcJXOuvK

— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) September 25, 2024

As for the interview, Harris was asked a few gentle questions about her proposed policies, to which she responded with mostly shallow, bumbling non-answers.

Unsurprisingly, Harris has few ideas about how to cover the $1.7 trillion in spending she’s proposed other than to raise corporate taxes on “billionaires.” Harris additionally had no answer for how she would get this corporate tax hike through with the Republican Party controlling the Senate, if they win back control in November.

So, we just have to assume more borrowing and more inflation. Great stuff.

Here is Harris addressing increasing housing and other costs in society, but her grand idea is just to say, over and over, that our problems must be addressed “holistically.”

NEW: Vice President Kamala Harris says "holistic" three times in a 15-second period.

The VP proudly showed off the word during an interview with MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle.

"Looking holistically at the connection between that and housing and looking holistically at the… pic.twitter.com/Z9DMdR97Qj

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) September 25, 2024

Using “holistically” in this way is akin to using other meaningless corporate-speak buzzwords like “creating synergy” that are intended to sound profound, but mean nothing. I suppose it’s slightly better than saying that the plan for lowering costs is lowering costs.

NEW: Kamala Harris is asked about her plan to lower the cost of living, says she will do that by lowering the cost of necessities.

Remarkable.

Question: What will you do to lower costs?

Answer: Yeah. I first of all, thank you both for being here and yours is a, a story I hear… pic.twitter.com/UQUNCnvesO

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) September 20, 2024

There was hardly any real substance to the interview at all. Aside from a handful of policy questions, Ruhle and Harris joshed about accusations that Harris never worked at a McDonald’s in her youth as she claimed.

Harris said she made fries, not burgers. But besides laughing and taking potshots at Trump, she didn’t really get into specifics or dispel the notion that the story about her working at a fast-food chain might be made up.

There’s really nothing more to say about these tepid, jovial back-and-forths, but it is notable how similar this was to Harris’ previous CNN interview with host Dana Bash. A handful of “tough” questions received only the lightest of follow-up questions and a large portion of the interview was fluff, wasting the time of viewers.

That would be fine if Harris was generally out on the campaign trail talking to the press and conducting interview after interview like a typical presidential candidate in the age of “democracy.”

It’s wholly unacceptable when one considers that the vice president was dropped into this race in a last-second swap, in which she never even answered to Democratic primary voters. We really are supposed to just accept that the reason to vote for Harris is that she’s not Trump, just as Ruhle said.

When the MSNBC host was later asked about Harris’ vague policy answers, particularly on why the Biden administration ended up keeping many of Trump’s tariffs in place, Ruhle made the excuse that the issue is “complicated.”

It’s totally fine that Harris didn’t give clear and direct answers, because “we are not talking about clear or direct issues,” she said.

Ah, yes, as Sun Tzu doubtlessly once said, the ways of the great leader must be mysterious and opaque to those who must follow.

Since when are members of the press expected to run PR for the politicians they interview?

What we should take from this MSNBC interview is that America’s media don’t want to ask her tough questions in an election. They want to conduct and plan her coronation. They are hardly even interested in getting answers about the way she will promote left-wing policies.

Just being in power is apparently good enough.

In some sense, Harris’ gilded tower campaign is even more disturbing than the Biden basement campaign. Any pretense of illuminating the policy positions of the candidates before the people is gone.

Hard questions won’t be asked. “Joy” and “vibes” will suffice.