Morning Joe - Morning Joe 8/18/23

Episode Date: August 18, 2023

Barr says federal cases 'legitimate', predicts conviction by next summer

I resigned on December 14th because I thought that at that point the state votes were certified and that was the end of the legal process. Right. And I also didn't like the way he was spouting the big lie. I thought that was irresponsible. But he took it much further than even I expected or anyone expected. And during this time, he was being told by lawyers in the White House that if he kept on doing this, he would spend the rest of his life tangling with the criminal justice process. And that's exactly what's happened. He shouldn't be surprised and no one else should be surprised.

He shouldn't be surprised. Nobody else should be surprised. Anybody that has followed this story at all, unless they're reading about it on, I don't know, websites run by Chinese cults, would know that. That everybody around Donald Trump warned him at the time, if you do this, if you keep moving forward, you are going to be fighting the law for the rest of your life. That was former Attorney General Bill Barr knowing something about that, making it clear that Donald Trump is nobody to blame but himself for his many legal troubles because he was warned all along that all of this could happen. Good morning. Welcome morning, Joe. I want to jump right in here. Of course, it's Friday, August the 18th. We've got the host of way too early

White House bureau chief at Politico, Jonathan Lemire, former White House press secretary under President Biden, now an MSNBC host, Jen Psaki, and former White House press secretary under President Obama, Robert Gibbs. Mika has the morning off. She's at an undisclosed location somewhere in the south of France. Not so, but people always believe it. Jonathan Lemire, this is, you look at all of the January 6th testimony from the hearings. Every Trump lawyer,

every Trump lawyer that Donald Trump hired said you can't do this. Now, Mr. President, you can't, if you do this, this is going to be problematic. All the way through, he was warned. All the way through, he knew that he was making moves that were illegal. And instead of listening to trained lawyers, he decided that he would listen to political operatives in South Florida who were actually plotting and scheming this before the election was over. So instead of

listening to his attorney general, who didn't give him the answer he wanted, he'd listen to Roger Stone. And then I think most famously, and it's all going to come out in the January 6th trials, he kept pushing his lawyers. What can we do? What can we do? And they all said, Mr. President, you're going to have to leave office on January the 20th. There's nothing else you can do. We're sorry.

It's over. Donald Trump, as you know, because you wrote the book about this. That's when he starts plotting the January 6th riots. He goes back to his private residence and he tweets, come on January the 6th. It will be wild. And so it began. And there's a guy on the inside who said we warned him every step of the way. He just wouldn't listen. Yeah. President Trump at the time chose not to listen to his attorney general, Bill Barr, or his White House counsel. He chose to listen to the Kraken, Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani and then their like. And as each of their options failed in the days after the election. They methodically moved to the next.

There was the date when the states were certified in mid-December. Electoral colleges were counted. They thought that could be a day they would be able to throw up roadblocks. That didn't work. They talked about voting machines investigations. They talked about even at one moment briefly considering martial law. All of this fell apart and they finally settled on this scheme for fake electors, which is what the John Eastman memo and the key role that Vice President Pence was going to have to play on January 6th. Trump summoned the crowds with that tweet, which was a real talking point in the conservative media, that people would come there that day. And of course, as we know, Mike Pence, with an assist from Dan Quayle, chose not to carry out Trump's wishes. But this is going to play into his defense here,

because he's making the argument, Trump and his attorneys, that he truthfully believed he had won and that he was simply doing everything he could to find what he believed was the fair outcome. But that is, of course, contrary to what we know, which is what he was told repeatedly by the authorities in not just his White House, but in the states that he hadn't won. That's not going to be an argument to defend Joe, that that defense is going to work. And even if, as Bill Barr points out, even if Trump did believe it, that still doesn't give him the right to act illegally to carry out that outcome. Yeah. I mean, it's stupid. I mean, I can walk up, like walk past an airport and go, hey, that private jet there, that Gulfstream, that's mine.

That's my private. And then what? Does that mean that because I think it's mine, which it's not, I'm in the Kia van, because I think it's mine, I can then steal it or start plotting to steal it? No. And this is what Barr says, not about the Kia van. This is what Barr says, though, about Donald Trump trying to steal elections. So it was a calculated and deceitful plan to remain in office by nullifying and negating certified legal votes.

The fact that he didn't drop things could lead some to believe in his people who defend him say that he genuinely did feel that he was robbed. And this was the good fight and the proper fight. Well, even if he did, and I am dubious about that, but even if he believed that, that doesn't mean you can use illegal means to rectify it. If you think the bank is unfairly keeping your money, there are many things you can do to get it back. You can't go and rob the bank. No, exactly. And I like a calculated and deceitful plan to rob people of their votes. You know, Jen, I we need to talk about Donald Trump here, but we also need to sort of open up the aperture a bit and understand that this is anti-democratic,

trying to rob people of their votes, as Bill Barr said. But this has now become the accepted norm in Donald Trump's Republican Party. You look at Tennessee. You don't like what two black legislators are saying. Doesn't matter that the people elected them. You kick them out. Right. Right. It's the same thing in Florida. You don't like how prosecutors are acting, even though they're doing exactly what voters were promised when they ran for office.

Ron DeSantis just kicks them out of office. He's really he makes an anti-democratic move. So we don't care what the voters said. You even look at Ohio recently. They had a rule, a rule for referendums. It was 50 percent. An abortion issue comes up. They want to turn it into 60 percent. You know, the thing you go back and you look all the way back to Bill Clinton. I think Democrats, let's see, Democrats won the popular vote in 92, 96, 2000, 2008, 2016, 2020, 2000. You know, this whole one man, one vote thing, one woman, one vote thing. Yeah. That never works for Republicans.

And it's almost like they figured it out because whether it's January the 6th or Tennessee or Ohio or Florida, they're doing everything they can now to stay in power by pushing voters aside. And as Barr said, by robbing voters of their vote. Right. I mean, look, Joe, I think one of the fundamental problems, if you take a step back from all the developments of the legal trials and tribulations of Donald Trump, is that the Republican Party has moved in a direction that's out of touch with the American electorate. And you gave a number of examples there. But if any party, a political party, is trying to make it harder and more difficult to vote, which is something we've seen the Republican Party do in a number of states across the country over the last couple of

years, it's because they don't want more people to go out there and voice their view and voice who they want to support. That means fundamentally you're scared of more people being out there voting because they're going to vote for your opponent. And the Ohio example you gave is such a good one. And unfortunately, there's a number of other cases in states across the country where there have been efforts to make it harder for people in red states and purple states and lavender, whatever states, color states they are, to express their support for abortion rights and the ability of women to make choices about their own health care. Because there's a fear that women will do exactly that, that men will do exactly that,

because those positions are popular in the country. So even as we're working through navigating, litigating, explaining every detail of Trump's legal issues, the challenge here is that the positions that the core candidates and leaders of the Republican Party have on issues people care about, whether it's access to voting, choices about your own health care, all of these crazy wackadoo cultural debates about gay marriage. First of all, gay marriage is the law of the land. It's out of touch with the public.

And that is a core problem for the party. Well, it's a massive party. And you have these extreme positions on abortion. And I always use Wisconsin as an example because there's a state that's probably, I think, along with Georgia, the greatest toss up state. It's the it's the it's the state that everybody's battling over. And so they have an abortion law from 1849, that's a total ban. And they think they have a shot of winning the most important Supreme Court election there in probably decades. No, they're wildly out of touch.

So then they say, OK, well, let's stop people from voting or let's change the rules. That's short sighted. I mean, that that that is not the long play. And they're going to keep losing the combination of supporting Donald Trump with his four felonies and and supporting the most restrictive abortion laws possible. I mean, and now being seen as people that even are trying to restrict, you know, morning after pill. It's it's all again, all going to add up very badly for him. And I've got to say, after the Manhattan prosecution, Robert Gibbs, after the Manhattan

indictment, I had a lot of lawyers, Democrats and Republicans saying, I don't get it. Even after January the 6th, a couple of weeks ago, they're saying, I think he can. I think it's, you know, OK, but it's going to be harder for Jack Smith to prove that. Now, after Georgia, I've got to say some of the smartest lawyers I know, people I've worked with, some of the most well-known lawyers in the country who tried a ton of cases. They're saying basically what Barr, Bill Barr is now saying now, which is this guy's going to jail. Take a look at Barr. I think the federal cases are legitimate. At the end of the day, at the core of this thing, he engaged in the case of the documents and outrageous behavior where anyone would be prosecuted.

I don't know of any attorney general who could walk away from it. He's not being prosecuted for having the documents. He's being prosecuted for obstruction the documents. He's being prosecuted for obstruction to egregious instances are alleged. So I think that's a very simple case and that should be tried. If the judge is anywhere competent, that could be concluded before the summer. And the other case after the election, he, in my opinion, he did cross the line. It wasn't just rough and tumble politics. He crossed the line. And he actually says Trump could be convicted by this time next

summer. He doesn't think Trump's going to go to jail. It doesn't really explain why a guy convicted for stealing nuclear secrets wouldn't go to jail. We can talk about that later. But just look ahead for us, if you will. You've got this Georgia case, a sprawling Georgia case. You've got January 6th, which I think actually is going to move pretty quickly. And the documents case, all of that happening between now and most likely Donald Trump's convention, except the Georgia cases, because it's so sprawling. We'll go. But you've got at least two federal cases and very real possibility of Donald Trump being convicted in the January 6

case and the documents case, even before the convention. So he'll be a convicted felon. Please, Robert, walk us through that. What in the hell does that look like? Well, I think what it looks like, and you see that calendar up on the screen, is you've got somebody who may well be the leading candidate for the Republican nomination who's going to spend the better part of January through maybe mid-June inside of a courtroom and not outside on the campaign trail. I can only imagine that the most valuable job in the Trump campaign may well be the scheduler who has to figure out how he's in a courtroom in the daytime

and how would they get him to Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, or Nevada in the evening to campaign. I think it's going to be an extraordinary thing to watch. You see the prosecutors, Jack Smith, who wants to start in January in one of the cases, the late spring documents case, which, as the attorney general said, seems to be a pretty open and shut case. You now have Georgia who wants to go in March, even as Trump now wants to push these into 2026. So it's going to be an amazingly complicated time period. I think we're clearly in unprecedented waters. We've never had a president that has been indicted. We're now into four indictments. We now have two indictments just

in August. So to say this is uncharted waters is really a dramatic understatement. But I think there's no doubt that you're going to have the leading candidate for the Republican nomination, presumably spending more money on lawyers than his campaign over the course of the next six months. Yeah, I mean, in predicting conviction by next summer, Bill Barr, his attorney general, who was really is Roy Cohn, until it was so obvious he was going to try to steal the election. Jonathan O'Meara, we've been saying over the past several days that that that Donald Trump has had a game plan since the mid-70s. And that game plan, and I think Maggie Haberman said this before, it's to survive five minutes, the next five minutes, the next 10 minutes.

And his fights have been against the New York Post. His fights have been against the Daily News, have been against the New York Times, been against tabloid culture. He's fought Rosie O'Donnell. He's fought all of these people where he would just throw out outrageous claims. People would be shocked. Same thing with the apprentice.

He would he would get good ratings. And it didn't matter that he was lying all along. He just he survived that. We've been talking about certainly since Georgia, how we've now moved from a sort of, you know, Trump world where you can just shoot BS all the time. You can have the fire hose of falsehoods and get away with it because it's good press for him. He's always one step ahead of the tabloids. That's ended. And I think we got a great indication of that yesterday when you and I were talking about the fact that Donald Trump was going to have this massive press conference, we were told, to show how Georgia was rigged against him. I said to John Sell yesterday, this is great news if you want Donald Trump to go to jail, because all he's going to do is continue admitting things that the prosecutors are going to love to listen to.

And sure enough, what happens? He cancels, doesn't he? He does, because right now, Donald Trump, it's a firehook of falsehoods, but anything he says is admissible in court. And as we were discussing yesterday, just hours after Trump was named as a co-defendant in that sprawling Fulton County, Georgia election interference, he promised to release a, quote, large, complex, detailed, but irrefutable report on the presidential election fraud which took place in Georgia. Trump promised to release the report at a major news conference this coming Monday, the 21st, at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club. And he claimed it would cause all charges against him to be dropped and it would be a complete exoneration. Well, that sounds dramatic, Jonathan.

I say, and one wonders why he waited two and a half years to release this information that would have exonerated him and given him the state of Georgia. But it was coming Monday. Well, Joe. Yeah, it's not. Yesterday, Trump took to his truth social page to say that we won't be seeing that report. It won't be released to the public. But instead, his lawyers would prefer to use it in legal filings. Therefore, the news conference was no longer necessary. ABC News reported yesterday that Trump's lawyers actively urged him to call off the event. Other advisers did, too, arguing that continued claims of election fraud could hurt his case. NBC News has not confirmed that report, Jen Psaki. But this is something, first of all,

there's a theory here that Donald Trump, as we know, has trouble retaining good counsel, partially because he doesn't pay them. And some of them end up testifying against him. His lawyers had signaled to him, hey, we're going to quit if you do this, because you're going to make our lives a lot harder. And his advisors were doing the same, saying, look, you can say, if you go out there and say the wrong thing, it's just going to put you in more and more legal jeopardy. Which presumably they've been telling him for months now, right? Because he's gone out there and said things that could be used in court. And we may see Jack Smith and others used in court as the trials begin, as he's done rallies over the last few months. But, yes, as you touched on there, we don't entirely know.

But a lot of the smart theorizing, in my view here, is, one, he's gone through more lawyers than anyone can imagine. He has not been clearly paying. There's been a range of reports on this. People who have been his legal counsel, people who have been politically advising him, even he owes a lot of people a lot of money. And there was a really interesting component. Lisa Rubin wrote about this, actually, in one of the recent federal court hearings that John Laura was participating in, where he asked for in the discovery phase for discovery for all these documents to be provided to lawyers who are

not paid by the campaign so volunteer lawyers essentially because either he can't pay them or he won't pay them so yes it seems like he's having a bit of trouble holding on to counsel here this does seem to be one of the first times that we know of where he has potentially listened to legal counsel on what is inadvisable for him by canceling this rally, which probably wasn't easy because he never likes to look weak. But that does seem to be the most likely theory at this point. Yeah, it makes sense. It really does. Irrefutable. They're going to drop the. Oh, wait. No, I'm not going to hold that press conference. Robert, I'm'm gonna veer off

the road for a second here but i promise i'll get back onto the main path in a second you know i always read about like winston churchill how we just drink all the time that there was always alcohol in his body and everything i'm not much of a drinker i can't do it and the few times i've tried i you know i just can't do it and i i'd always i've said to me before i, you know, I just can't do it. And I always I've said to me before, I say, you know, life's hard enough. I don't know how people do this, like getting up, going to like, I can't do it. It's hard enough as it is. Well, this reminds me of Donald Trump's campaign people, and I want to compare them to you as a campaign person running for the presidency, handling all the incoming is hard enough as it is. I know I know, you know, you guys in 2007, 2008, you had a ton of challenges coming at you and you were blessed with a remarkable political candidate, but it's hard enough as it is.

Can you imagine trying to do this with a candidate that has four indictments against him and who keeps speaking out against his own interest every day? I can't imagine it. No, I can't imagine it either. I mean, it is hard enough, as you said, on even the best days to get everybody rowing in the same direction, to have to manage the candidate in a totally separate way, to have to probably have lawyers in almost every discussion that you're having, particularly around planning.

But look, this has been going on around Donald Trump. He loves, it appears, just the sheer chaos of all of this. I once asked Sean Spicer right before he went into the White House, do you have any idea that those tweets are coming? Does he share those tweets before he hits send? Do you see any of it? And he said, no, I wake up, open my phone and read them just like you do. And, you know, that's just a tweet. Imagine now you're talking about something that puts him in potential legal jeopardy. I do wonder is if you watch this, is this a realization by Donald Trump that he is in much more significant trouble than he's ever let on to the fact. And look, Joe, if I had accused you of half of the stuff that Donald Trump had done,

you'd be rushing to a courthouse tomorrow to try to clear your name. Not waiting until 2026. And that's the point, isn't it, Robert? That if you or I were accused of something we didn't do, and we had a presidential election ahead of time, I'd be telling my lawyers, get me to court as quickly as possible. I'm going to bury these people in court. Then I'm going to bury them on the campaign trail. He's doing the exact opposite. He actually he's been accused of stealing nuclear secrets. He's been accused of stealing plans to to to war plans on invading Iran.

He's been accused of trying to steal American democracy. And he's saying, oh, let's just let that hover out there. Let's not find out whether I was guilty or not until a year or two after the election. I mean, that's not how an innocent person acts. It's a great point. And by the way, on your point about talking to Sean Spicer, I remember I was driving around one early Saturday morning. I think it was March of 2017, going to get coffee on a Saturday morning. And Trump's tweet comes across. It says your former

boss, Barack Obama, had tapped his phones at Trump Tower. I immediately called Reince Priebus and I asked indelicately, Reince, what the blank is going on? And he was like, what do you mean? What do you mean? I said, you need to read Twitter. He looks at Twitter. He's like, oh, I'll call you back. So now they never knew about the most outrageous stuff. And remember, it used to be worse on the weekends because Jared wasn't around supposedly to calm him down. I mean, again, Robert, I don't see how he gets from here to there as far as running a political campaign, because even as his biggest offenders on Fox News have said legally of the, let's say, 90 indictments, if he's convicted on one of them, like he could go 89 and one. But that one conviction, that's a life sentence. How do you run effectively for president with life in jail staring staring at you?

Well, one certainly hypothesis is you run because you feel like that's the only way you can get out of those 90 counts, that somehow you can go 90 and 0 if you get elected president and ask your new attorney general to get rid of some of these cases. If you buy time and get the Justice Department to write memos that you can't be tried while you're in office. I mean, there's certainly been, and supporters of the former president have said as much, that he's running essentially to stay out of jail. And you wonder if that there's a dual track focus on keeping him out of jail and keeping him probably out of a courtroom as long as they can to get him back, in their case, to the White House to get rid of some of these cases.

And what a political nightmare for Republican candidates in the House and the Senate, the RNC that wants to get money from fundraisers, to have Donald Trump siphoning off hundreds of millions of dollars from Republican contributors and not sending it out to advertise, but instead having it all go to lawyers because of his four felonies. And by the way, you heard here in 2019, us saying if Donald Trump lost, he would run for reelection again, and he would do it for the reason Robert just said four years later, which is to avoid prison.

Still ahead on Morning Joe, President Biden's gonna send a clear message to China and North Korea today when he hosts the leaders of Japan and South Korea at a key summit aimed at boosting military cooperation between America and our Asian allies. We're going to get a live report from Beijing and White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby is going to be with us live from the summit at Camp David. Also ahead, we're going to be joined

by the legal counsel for Hunter Biden to discuss the, quote, lies and fantasies about the Biden family. It's constantly being pushed by Republicans in Congress. Plus, 2024 presidential candidate Chris Christie will be our guest. We'll try to get him to speak his mind and get a couple of things off of his chest. You're watching Morning Joe. We'll be right back. President Biden will host his first Camp David summit of his presidency today. By the way, I can't listen to that song without thinking about the end of Royal Tenenbaums. What a credible, credible movie. But let's get back to news. The summit day is going to bring together the leaders of both South Korea and Japan to announce new steps forward in defense of cooperation.

This, as Joe Biden might say, is a big blanking deal. The meeting reportedly will not end with a NATO-style defensive pact, but all three nations are expected to publicly affirm for the first time that their security is linked. Let's bring in NBC News foreign correspondent Janice Mackey-Frayer live from Beijing. So, Janice, I'm going to speak just as an American. I've watched presidents in our country talk about, you know, their pivot to Asia for about 20, 25 years now. It seems to be happening. And I will just say again, for myself, not speaking for you or anybody else, I think it's a good thing that we're building a security apparatus there and bringing all of these nations together.

I want you to talk about what a dramatic step forward that is. But also, if you could let us know the level of concern that this is raising with China, because while I'm while I'm glad the president's doing this, I also know we have to have good relations with China. How complicated do these actions make that? Well, it's not insignificant that President Biden is using Camp David to have this meeting to host the leaders of South Korea and Japan. This is the first trilateral of its kind. These are two countries with an uneasy history, but they also share these very looming security challenges with North Korea and China. So in that sense, President Biden is trying to

draw in his Asian allies and create unity among them. The administration says that it's looking for security arrangements as well as cooperation on the economy and technology. They're going to talk about things like sharing North Korea missile data, as well as setting up a crisis hotline for the leaders, because the security of these three countries are interlinked and not just rhetorically, but in actual military operations. And the threats are very real. The Ukraine war has leaders in this part of the world looking at their security. There is the assertive behavior of China and the Taiwan Strait. North Korea has just tested a solid fuel ICBM, something they haven't done before.

And there are growing signs of military cooperation between Russia and North Korea. China is looking at this meeting about to happen, of course, critically. They've been using state media to characterize it as a mini-NATO-style alliance. So there is bound to be some further reaction. There's also one other challenge that's facing these three leaders in this important summit. It's their own domestic political environments. Prime Minister Kishida and President Yun both face some opposition at home for their own reconciliation efforts.

They have to deal with the fact that China is their largest trading partner, so they could see some blowback in terms of soft sanctions. And they have security advisors warning them that there is no guarantee that this level of cooperation with the U.S. is going to sustain itself after the 2024 election. So it's why we see President Biden really trying to lock in these allies. We can expect a major security agreement as well as these agreements on economic issues, in particular semiconductors and supply chains. And we keep reading, Janice, about a stagnating Chinese economy. I'm wondering how important is it for Chinese leaders to move forward and reconnect with Western allies?

Do you see that again as a sort of a two-step process where they're obviously going to be pushing back on some of the military cooperation around them, but also trying to get their trading alliances a little bit stronger post-COVID? Well, you see China moving in a lot of different directions right now, trying to, of course, shore up their strategic alliances with Russia, with North Korea, with Iran and other players. They're trying to shore up economic ties and trade deals with different countries in Europe and also trying to to walk the tightrope on relations with the U.S. The economy is in really sad shape here. All of the economic data that has been released is pointing to slower growth, even deflation. That's the economic data that they're choosing to reveal. There have been a number of indicators that have been quietly dropped over several months. And earlier this week, they announced they're going to suspend issuing youth unemployment

data. It had already reached a record high of 21.3 percent. So not reporting it anymore seems to indicate they don't expect it to go down anytime soon. And there are a lot of other factors at play, too. Even in the youth unemployment numbers, a lot of young people are underemployed by Chinese metrics. If you work one hour a week, you're considered employed. So there is the sense that that youth unemployment number could be closer to 50 percent. So you combine that with weaker consumer spending. There's a bit of a chill in foreign investment with the new security laws and counter espionage laws that they've had come into play here raids on some firms so it's a very tricky landscape that

china is trying to navigate right now in trying to kickstart its economic growth with property developers filing for bankruptcy protection in the U.S. and, of course, very strained relations between the two countries. All right. NBC's Janice McEfrayer, as always. Thank you so much. Live in Beijing, we greatly appreciate it. And coming up next hour, we're going to be talking to White House national security spokesman John Kirby about today's summit. Jonathan O'Meara, it really is striking, is it not? And I don't think we pay enough attention to this. It is striking how we've been hearing.

And I must say, we at Morning Joe have been skeptical for some time, but we've been hearing for the past decade that China had this roaring economy that was going to overtake us, that was going to crush us. I'm older. It's the same thing I heard about Japan, 1987, 88, 89, 90. And my response then was, whatever, let them have 30 Rock and Pebble Beach. We'll be fine. And sure enough, they then went into this lost decade. I will say just for Americans, we don't want China economically to go into a lost decade because whether Republicans and Democrats like it or not, our economies are so connected

that a lost decade in China economically would have a negative impact on our economy. But you listen to Janice there, and the news is all bad economically for China. I mean, the fact that youth unemployment is at 21.3%, or at least it was until they stopped reporting the data, and that includes people working, if they only work one hour a week,

this sounds like a country that is in real economic, in dire straits. Yeah, all of the economic indicators are bad right now out of China, across the board. It is still obviously trying to find its footing after the COVID outbreak, the pandemic swept through the nation. And the growth has really has really slowed. And to your point about the Biden administration pivoting to Asia, obviously, the war in Ukraine still remains front of mind, but they have been able to do that. And senior officials that I've talked to this past week say what's going to happen later today? Right now, perhaps a somewhat overlooked storyline, but it's going to be remembered as one of this president's crowning foreign policy achievements, the way he has helped bring these two nations, Japan, Korea, rivals for a long time together here. And he certainly had,

as one aide put it to me, some help from Kim Jong-un and Xi Jinping along the way, because those threats there have really forced an urgency here among these three nations to come up with this security agreement. It also helps bolster American influence in the Pacific, and they've made progress with some islands off the Philippines in recent weeks as well. So there's a lot of momentum there for the U.S. They do believe the Chinese economy is slowing. The one note of concern, Joe, I'll just, as I send it back to you here, is that there is a slight concern that Xi Jinping, who is seeing everything go poorly, that he'll look to bolster his standing, his grip on power

by resorting to Chinese nationalism. Does that mean then a play on Taiwan at some point that makes this alliance with Japan and Korea that much more important? Yeah, it really does. And you are right, Joe Biden. I'm not sure how it's going to play out in next year's election. Don't know how it's going to play out in approval ratings between now and then. But historians are going to look at what he helped do with the NATO alliance, expanding it to Sweden. And again, with a lot of help from our rivals, in this case, Vladimir Putin, but expanding it to Sweden and Finland, getting 800 new miles of border with Russia and the NATO pact. That's extraordinary.

Equally extraordinary, like you said, bringing South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Australia all together in this sort of Pacific NATO, whether they want to call it a Pacific NATO or not. That's exactly what it is. That's, again, what presidents have been promising for 20 years. Joe Biden has done it. Historians will mark that down and remember it. It is significant. Coming up on Morning Joe, we're going to take a look at Donald Trump standing among evangelical Christians, how he's divided some congregations, but also how he's also kept a lot of evangelicals on his side, despite everything he's done and what it means for 2024. Morning Joe, we'll be right back. making mistakes. Scripture teaches us the Lord is close to the brokenhearted. If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them. I cherish women and I will be great

on women's health issues. When you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Whatever you want. Grab them by the... My favorite book is the Bible. My second favorite book is The Art of the Deal, but it is not even close. Actually, I was only kidding. You can get the baby out of here. Two Corinthians, right? Two Corinthians, 317. That's the whole ball game.

You can do anything. Grab them by the. You could do anything. That's what you said, correct? Well, historically, that's true with stars. Not always, but largely true. Unfortunately or fortunately. I just don't know what to say. I guess I will go to two Corinthians to find out.

Donald Trump's words and actions not exactly lining up with the church's teachings. Let's bring right now Russell Moore. He's the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its public theology project in these crazy times. Russ is also the author of the new book, Losing Our Religion, An Alter Call for Evangelical America. And I just I just have to go to one of those clips that still eight years later fascinates me that members of our tribe. I'll just say evangelicals generally, we both grew up in the Southern Baptist Church, but that they would sell their political souls. And I'll just say their political souls. I'll be nice this morning to a guy who says, I don't need to be forgiven by God. I don't need to ask God for forgiveness. Anybody that has been

in Sunday school for five minutes or whose parents had them go to training union growing up after Sunday night church or Wednesday supper and then youth, I mean, you name it. You're there for five minutes. You know, we're all sinners and we're all saved by grace. And if you ask, you will receive. And if you don't think you need that grace, just keep walking because that's the first requirement. It's so elemental, Russell. And yet you and I still have people coming up to us thinking we're heretics because we're not following this guy. Well, that's the that's the sadness of the entire thing. I think there are a lot of people who would say with the asking for forgiveness, well, we don't necessarily need a Christian president.

And of course, that's true. But those same people would say we need somebody with character. And then, of course, we've seen everything that we have seen over the past eight or nine years. And my big fear is that we're at the point right now where it's not even a point of controversy for most people. Most people who would ordinarily argue about this have either made peace with it or have just stopped talking to people who would disagree with them. And that's one of the reasons why I really don't think 2024 is going to be a repeat of what we saw in 2016 and 2020. It's just numbness. And I think that says something really bad about American life and about church life, too.

You know, it's interesting. We we we you and I again, and I always stumble around when I'm talking about this because it's such a shock to see people that I grew up with and that I literally was a church with four nights a week. Just wonder, you know, I had I had one of them come up to me when my mom when I was at my mom's funeral at First Baptist Church in Pensacola. And my mom's casket was three feet behind me. She came up lecturing me about Donald Trump and saying, how could you as a Christian? I'm praying. And I just cut her off. I said, won't say her name.

I said, I want you to know I'm going to pray for you tonight when I go home because you were lost and you need Jesus more than you've ever needed Jesus before in your life. And then I turned around and shook other people's hands. But that's like that's the cultish level it's gotten to again. For people we grew up with. But I want you to give some good news to you and Beth Moore. Not related. You had an event about your book a week or two ago and you said so many people came came up to you, evangelicals came up and go, thank goodness you all are here. I thought I was alone. Yeah. I mean, the number one comment that I get is I thought I was crazy. And I see a lot of that,

especially with evangelical women. There are a lot of evangelical women who are deeply concerned about some of the things that have been passed over and waved away over the past several years. And that we keep seeing repeatedly and ongoingly. And it's not just about the Trump phenomenons, but other things as well. But related things. Uses of power in horrific ways within the church and outside the church. But there are a lot of people who feel homeless. They feel as though they don't fit into a neat category when it comes to their political party or their church tradition. I actually think that's a good thing.

I think we've been too closely tied to those identities, and it's kept us from seeing the fact that Christianity really is about being different, about walking in step with the kingdom of God, not with any set of party or denominational bosses. And if that's the beginning of something new, then I welcome it. Robert Gibbs. Yeah, let me ask you one question. You talk a little bit here about politics. Who do you see on the Republican side or on the Democratic side that evangelicals are interested in politics? Who, if not in Donald Trump, who in 2024 and beyond do you see as having an entree into these voters?

Well, I hear almost no evangelical Christians talking about the primary election yet at all. There'll be talk about people on various sides of the Donald Trump indictments, but I don't hear much talk at all about support for various candidates. I just don't think most of them have have tuned into that yet. Now, that would be different, of course, in Iowa, because they're being courted right now. But I don't think that's the case in the rest of the country. Well, that's what I wanted to actually ask you right there was the idea of Iowa, because we know that former Vice President Pence in particular is trying to win over this group of evangelicals. And I think he stands as a fascinating case study. He is someone who is a man of deep faith, who makes it center to his

political identity. But yet by so many diehard Republicans, including evangelicals, is deemed as a traitor because he betrayed Donald Trump instead of, you know, because these Republicans wanted him to abandon his duty to the Constitution. Yeah, and that's what was so disturbing to me about watching a film from the Iowa State Fair, people screaming at Vice President Pence, you're not a Christian. I mean, people can have all kinds of views about Mike Pence, but the idea that he's not a Christian is ridiculous. And you ask why? And it's because he stood up for the Constitution and wouldn't undo our entire democracy. Well, if that's the definition of what it means to be a Christian, we're in a very dark place. And so I think I think Mike Pence has a lot of work to do, of course, in a Republican

primary the way that it is right now. But I'm glad that he stood by his principles on January the 6th and that he's starting to talk about that quite a bit right now. Russell, let's talk about young Christians. You know, in 94, when I ran, I noticed when I would go to Christian schools, I would go to churches, younger Christians would be like their parents talking about cultural issues, cultural issues that a lot of people are talking about today. By 2000, I noticed when they would come into my office in Washington to get jobs, a lot of them were like wearing Birkenstocks. They were talking about hunger, AIDS in Africa. The emphasis was, and it was such a marked change

in six years. It's what I call Matthew 25 Christians. What we know of is Matthew 25 Christians, you know, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, helping the poor, bringing hope to the hopeless. And that was the focus. And there was a real and a real energy. I remember at Katrina, Hurricane Katrina, going to Mississippi and Louisiana and not seeing the government over there. There were a lot of young evangelicals that were on the front lines immediately. I wonder, is all of this causing a crisis in faith for younger Christians, all of this fighting, this Trumpism, because we're hearing

about the emptying out of churches. What's the impact of this on those Christians? Well, even the word evangelical, in almost every case, someone who will push back and say, I don't like the word evangelical, let's not use it. That's almost always somebody who is the most committed kind of evangelical, but they see it as being captured by political sorts of connotations that they don't support. And often the people who will say, yeah, I'm an evangelical, are people who haven't been to church since the first Bush administration, but who identify with the politics. Well, that's not an even trade. And I think right now we have a lot of people who are hurt, who are disillusioned. And my response to that is to say, let's not pretend that we don't

have a crisis. Let's address the crisis, but let's not yield to cynicism. Let's instead create and form something new. And I see a lot of signs of life there, but it's going to be a really important next four or five years to see whether or not we get there. And I think that's true, frankly, not just with young evangelicals. I'm starting to see that also with a lot of older evangelicals who are saying there has to be a better way than this. Yeah. You know, the problem is that even the term evangelical has become a cultural marker more than anything else. Nothing to do with faith. It's now a cultural marker, like Christian nationalism. The new book is titled Losing Our Religion, an Alter Call for Evangelical America.

It is out now. Russell Moore, thank you very much. Greatly appreciate you being here for Faith on Fridays. And Robert Gibbs, thank you as well. I'd love to say War Eagle. I just don't have it in me yet. So good luck. You can do it.

I don't think I can. But anyway, we need to get you back sometime soon once the season starts.