- [Interviewer] Do you think Donald Trump is fit to serve as Commander in Chief?
- No, he's not fit to serve,
37:01
I think either by character or judgment. I don't agree with his policies. I don't think he has much experience.
37:07
He doesn't know how government works. But that can all be tolerated, or survived.
37:13
But in terms of his just basic character and judgment, his basic sense of putting the country first,
37:19
at least in key moments, every politician has moments where he cuts corners and watches out for himself or herself,
37:28
but Trump is the opposite. I think it's a miracle when he actually seems not to simply put his own narrow interests first.
37:34
And the recklessness, and the demagoguery, so undercuts democratic norms and constitutional processes,
37:43
that it's dangerous to the country.
- Why do they hate his guts?
37:48
They hate his guts because he represents a threat to their status quo. It's a very weird salad,
37:54
because it doesn't fit in the box of the traditional Republican establishment, or the Democratic Party.
38:01
I mean, he is a reflection of our politically correct society. If I'm not allowed to say what I'm thinking,
38:07
and everyone's got me in a tight box, when I go into the voting booth, I'm gonna vote for him.
38:13
The more politically correct the society is, the greater the reaction formation is
38:18
of the orange man comes to town.
38:26
- Why I support Trump is pretty easy. He is the only president in the last probably 40 years
38:35
that has been for the people.
38:42
- I had an epiphany at my first Trump rally. I tell people that it was a reconnection to my life.
38:49
Because I grew up in a blue-collar situation. And I hustled my way to some dough,
38:55
went to Tufts and Harvard Law School. I worked at Goldman, built two successful hedge fund businesses,
39:00
started to become independently wealthy. And then what ends up happening is you pick up the collective biases
39:06
of the people around you. And so you don't really have a good ear to the ground. And so when I got to the first Trump rally,
39:12
I crossed the security perimeter, went in and started talking to people, and I was like, "Oh, my God,
39:19
Mr. Trump is talking to the people I grew up with." And these are people that are economically desperate. We went from a economically middle class,
39:28
and lower middle class, working class aspirational society, to a desperational society in 35 years.
39:36
And I can explain what happened through the forces of trade, and globalism, and our mistakes about repositioning manufacturing
39:43
away from the United States, all of those things that we did, some of it accidental, some of it intentional,
39:49
left a very large group of people feeling very, very desperate about their economic aspirations and their well-being.
39:56
And so that first Trump rally I was like, "Whoa, there's a lot of people out here that are in a lot of pain." And I missed it.
40:05
They have economic anxiety and they are going to vote to reject the status quo.
40:11
It's an anger-based vote. And you have to work on policy solutions to fix that.
40:17
You have to heal that. Because when you create a breach in the social fabric of the society,
40:23
you create a systemic rise of populism, and you get all of these unintended, or unexpected political outcomes.
40:29
I didn't see it myself, but Trump saw it. And so that's something you have to give him credit for.
40:35
Here is a billionaire, so you'd have to say this is a completely out of touch dude. But he saw it. I did not see it.
40:40
And I grew up with it. (gentle piano music) So, take a step back.
40:47
We racked up $18 trillion of debt. We killed a million people in the Middle East.
40:53
We wounded 70,000 servicemen and women. 7,000 servicemen and women have died,
40:58
and 22 are dying a day in the United States from suicide-related posttraumatic stress.
41:05
Our educational system K-12 is completely uneven and broken. Our infrastructure completely failed and broken.
41:12
We have no industrial policy. There's nobody in the United States as a public servant that has a 10-year plan.
41:18
They don't even have a five-year plan. So the American population is looking at the situation
41:24
and saying, "Wait a minute, this is not working for me." The stock market crashes and the very big banks are about to go out of business.
41:30
The government sends them $1 trillion to protect them. "What about me?" And so people feel that the system is rigged ,
41:38
and the system is unfair towards them. You call these people deplorable, white ethnocentrics,
41:45
white nationalists, whatever those knuckle dragging misnomers,
41:51
those adjectives of attack on these people. They tune you out.
41:57
You'd be better served going into those areas of the country and listening to them and say, "Hey, you know what?
42:02
I don't think you're a racist, or you're a white trash person; I think you're a person that really just wants your family to have a better life.
42:09
And as a public servant, I'm gonna try to come up with policies that help you do that.
42:15
David Axelrod said to me, "Remember, Anthony, people will vote for somebody they won't like. They gave Richard Nixon a landslide; Nobody liked him.
42:21
They gave him a landslide. What they don't like doing is they don't like voting for people that dislike them."
42:27
See the difference? So you're standing at a podium calling people deplorable, they're like, "Okay, give my vote to the orange man..
42:33
Let's see how he does." (crowd cheering)
42:38
- I think Trump speaks to people in a really very good way. He is appealing to people who are hurt, angry,
42:46
they feel bypassed, ignored, and not taken seriously.
42:52
The problem is that he doesn't speak to the humanity of the people who don't agree with him.
43:00
- They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists. We're building that wall and it's going up very big.
43:07
(crowd cheering)
- If you have any racism in you, Trump's gonna let you bring it out.
43:13
I get to be a jerk again. I get to be in 1956 America again.
- He's not a racist. This guy treats everybody like shit.
43:22
He's not a racist, okay? It doesn't matter if you're black, white, lesbian, transgender, he treats everybody the same.
43:29
He went to Elton John's wedding. He's an asshole, but that's different from being a racist.
43:35
He's obviously an asshole.
- It's so sad that so many people have let their worst side
43:41
come out through Trump.
- Get the fuck out of here! Our country, motherfucker!
43:47
Our country! Go fucking cook my burrito, bitch! Trump!
43:53
I love Trump! Fuck you!
- Are you racist?
- I am the least racist person that you have ever met.
44:01
Look at my African American over here. Look at him. Are you the greatest? You know what I'm talking about?
44:08
I have a great relationship with the blacks. I've always had a great relationship with the blacks. I love the old days.
44:14
You know what they used to do to guys like that when they're in a place like this? They'd be carried out on a stretcher, folks.
44:20
- I resisted for quite some time the notion that he is racist.
44:27
It's more a function of his narcissism than anything else. It's not really racism.
44:32
That was sort of the way I viewed Trump, that he doesn't like them because they oppose him,
44:39
and that's really what it's about. It's all function of his narcissism. And when he says things that were supportive
44:45
of some of those bad people at Charlottesville, that's again a function of his narcissism,
44:50
because the people who were attacking those people were attacking him.
- You had a group on one side that was bad,
44:57
and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent. But you also had people that were very fine people,
45:06
on both sides. You had people in that group, excuse me, excuse me, I saw the same pictures as you did.
45:13
- [Crowd] Russia is our friend. The south will rise again.
- You had people in that group
45:19
that were there to protest the taking down of the statue Robert E. Lee.
45:25
To them, a very, very important statue.
- [Crowd] You will not replace us.
45:30
- My mother came from the Philippines. She came to the United States in the late 1950s,
45:37
so I'm half Filipino. And the other half is some mixture of Irish-Scottish. I'm a classic American mutt.
45:45
I think of myself as an American, and I just assume people aren't racist. And I tend to forget that, well, some people are.
45:55
And that's the lesson with Trump is I just gave him the benefit of the doubt.
- These are people that if they don't like it here
46:04
they can leave.
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
Jul. 14, 2019
... Why don't they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came...
[George Conway] But what he said about those members of Congress,
46:10
it brought back that memory of the one time I really remember, wow, there really are people like that here.
46:17
I was with my mother when I was a teenager in a parking lot in Massachusetts when somebody said to her,
46:27
"Go back to your country." Sorry. And I found that to be,
46:34
and it really came home to me then. This man is a racist. He is evil.
46:40
- The Democrat Party is now being led by four left wing extremists
46:46
who reject everything that we hold dear.
- [Crowd] Send her back!
46:51
Send her back! Send her back! Send her back! Send her back!
46:58
- He's a racist beyond any question.
- [Crowd] USA!
47:03
USA! - The first time I saw Trump at a rally
47:08
telling the crowd that he loved them, but he also hated everybody else,
47:13
when I saw him leading them in a loyalty oath using emotions in that way,
47:18
I realized that this was not politics as usual.
47:29
- Raise you right hand, everybody. Do you swear that you're going to vote for Donald Trump tomorrow?
47:36
Raise that hand. I love you, I love you.
- He had talked about being president for many, many years
47:44
with his advisor of the time, Steve Bannon, who is a White Nationalist, an unabashed racist.
47:50
Steve Bannon considers himself a student of history, and he likes to think that he knows the cycles of history
47:58
in terms of resentment and racism. And in this case, he was correct.
48:03
- [Narrator] This is Italy in 1922. These marching men are charter members
48:09
of a new Italian political party, the fascists, founded and led by a flamboyant ex-editor,
48:15
ex-army corporal, ex-socialist, Benito Mussolini. His movement numbers a million members
48:21
including uniformed Black Shirts and Mussolini successfully forces his leadership on the Italian king and people.
48:29
Despite the fact that 80% of Italians still support the constitutional monarchy, his threats of violence and revolution
48:36
win him the office of Premier. On his first anniversary,
48:41
with the aid of gunfire, kidnapping and castor oil, he is absolute dictator.
48:48
- At the time Mussolini came on the political scene in 1919, Italy was a limited democracy.
48:55
People had the vote, women could vote, and Mussolini came in as a revolutionary,
49:02
as a rabble-rouser to completely shake things up. One of the most crucial moments of authoritarian capture
49:07
is when traditional elites invite the authoritarian-in-the-making into power.
49:14
Fascism was a very violent movement. The political establishment,
49:21
these traditional conservatives, were so frightened of the continuation of the violence
49:27
that they actually invited him to become Prime Minister. He was invited into the office
49:32
and they thought that he could be contained, and he would kind of do their dirty work, and then they could control him
49:39
and tragically, that was not to be. He attacked the press.
49:44
He attacked democracy as something that wasn't necessary. He joked about having term limits removed.
49:53
His arch enemy, Giacomo Matteotti, the leader of the Socialist Party, was seen being taken away by fascist thugs.
50:00
Eventually, his body was found but it was a huge outrage and a special investigation was launched
50:066
with the prosecutor and in the course of this, Mussolini's career looked like it was over
50:12
and he was being asked to resign. And to end this, he declared a dictatorship in January 1925.
50:19
He changed the special prosecutors. The assassins were given light prison sentences,
50:24
and eventually pardoned, because dictators love to pardon criminals. And the Italian society was never the same again.
50:35
(chanting in foreign language)
50:41
There are times in history when figures appear who are able to coalesce existing hatreds and anxieties
50:48
that exist in a culture and form from them a movement through rallies,
50:54
through propaganda, through promises to them.
- We will be ending the AIDS epidemic
51:00
and curing childhood cancer.
- [Ruth] Only they know the truth, only they can fix the problems.
51:06
- We are finally putting America first.
- My name is Cheryl Koos,
51:12
and I'm a historian of interwar Europe, and fascism and authoritarianism.
51:20
Hitler gained his followers by promising them a better life, a better Germany but he also had a scapegoat.
51:27
- Jews as diseased and foreign objects. One of the most dangerous things about authoritarian leaders
51:34
is that they're particular personal quirks, their obsessions, their preoccupations
51:40
often become state policy.
- And I think one of the manifestations of that that we've seen in policy is the Zero Tolerance Policy.
51:47
- Immigration is the fault in all of the problems that we're having.
51:53
You look at what's happening in Europe, you look at what's happening in other places, we can't allow that to happen to the United States,
51:59
not on my watch.
- The separating of children from parents. Think about the kind of mind that thinks,
52:05
"I know how we're gonna restrict immigration. Let's take their children away." (cackles) I mean, it's a cruel, almost cartoonishly evil
52:12
kind of thing to do.
- Who's number one with Hispanics? Trump.
52:18
- It's a violation of human rights to take children away from their parents.
52:23
And to be so uncaring about the permanent effect on these children -- and it is gonna be permanent --
52:30
is cruel and sadistic behavior. It's completely different from saying
52:35
we need to have strong borders, or we need to limit immigration, or something like that. Those things, if they are worth doing,
52:42
can be done without destroying children's lives.
52:48
- One institution, in my opinion, that hasn't stood up for themselves at all are Congress and the Republican Party.
52:54
- It's quite extraordinary that the Republic Party, they're slotting right into the behavior in Italy in the 1920s,
53:04
and Germany in the early 1930s, and so on.
- [Donald] I wanna know who's the person
53:10
who gave the whistleblower, who's the person who gave the whistleblower the information?
53:15
Because that's close to a spy. You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart?
53:21
The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now.
53:28
- He does not believe in democracy. The way he rules in the White House shows that.
53:34
It reminded me of something I read by Ivana Trump when he was married to her. And in their divorce proceedings,
53:41
she had written that he liked reading Hitler's speeches. And Hitler's speeches would always build you up
53:48
to this crescendo of shouting, and repeating things three times.
53:54
Because if you repeat something three times, it breaks through to the audience, and it becomes a fact in their mind.
54:00
- And I want you all to know that we are fighting the fake news, it's fake, phony, fake.
54:06
(crowd cheering)
54:12
A few days ago I called the fake news the enemy of the people, and they are, they are the enemy of the people.
54:21
- The big lie technique that came from Nazis, so now we're faced with the same problem.
54:27
People say over and over and over again something which has never been true, it's a lie, basically, or it may be a prejudice
54:35
but when you repeat it, unless it's challenged quickly and effectively, it becomes the norm, it becomes accepted wisdom
54:43
even though it's completely wrong.
- Repeat everything three times, and the third time it becomes the truth.
54:49
He is capitalizing on that.
- The Authoritarian Playbook is a way that these kinds of men capture democracy.
54:58
After they get power, they proceed to tame the judiciary, they attack the press,
55:05
and the ultimate aim is to get people to believe that reality is what they say it is.
55:11
- The fake news, right? The fake news. (crowd cheering)
55:16
- They are not about the greater good and calling people to their better angels;
55:21
they're about fostering a sense of victimization and fear,
55:27
and how the nation could be purer, and how the nation would be better
55:35
without X, Y and Z elements.
- Hail Trump! Hail our people!
55:40
Hail victory!
- [Interviewer] So, is it appropriate to compare Trump to Hitler?
55:46
- I compare Trump to Hitler all the time. And that makes people angry. And I'm not gonna stop doing it.
55:52
And I'll tell you why I'm not gonna stop doing it. Because my father was a great historian,
55:58
and student of Jewish history. And he used to say to me all the time, "John, the meaning of history is in the Holocaust.
56:04
We cannot be silent." It's not that he's as bad as Hitler, or that he's the equivalent of Hitler,
56:11
but he has the same diagnosis as Hitler. He's in the same category. That it's a psychological type,
56:18
that can be more or less extreme, but they share these common characteristics. They're cut from the same cloth.
56:31
Those of us who've been raised in this current era, we don't realize how spoiled we've been.
56:36
We've been raised from the World War II boom of prosperity to today, one of the greatest periods
56:41
of peace and prosperity in human history, and we've also taken it for granted
56:47
that our democracy was solid, that liberal democracy is now becoming the touchstone for the planet.
56:53
That's what we believed three years ago. But Plato predicted thousands of years ago
57:00
that democracies always end in autocracy,
57:06
and we're so naive that we don't understand that every democracy is always vulnerable
57:12
to being taken over and turned into an autocracy.
- We are in the third era
57:18
of the rise of charismatic threatening strongmen in history. The first was during the Fascist period
57:24
in the '20s and '30s. After World War II, you had anticolonial strongmen
57:29
like Mobutu and Qaddafi. And today, we have a new crop of leaders
57:35
who are threatening liberal democracy, or have already partly destroyed it.
- Trump has helped autocrats all around the world just,
57:42
I mean, almost immediately out of the box. Erdogan in Turkey.
- [Translator] Turkey has the right
57:48
to eliminate all possible threats towards sovereignty, with or without it's allies.
- [Malcom] el-Sisi in Egypt.
57:55
- [Translator] Whenever there is a minority trying to impose their extremist ideology, we have to intervene regardless of their numbers.
58:02
(speaks in foreign language)
- [Malcolm] Even in Libya, they're backing the strongman al-Haftar.
58:07
- His most important aim is take over the capital, of course, because the one who takes over the capital is the one in power.
58:14
- [Malcolm] You have presidents like Bolsonaro in Brazil. (speaks in foreign language)
- [Translator] These red outcasts
58:19
will be banished from our homeland, it will be a cleansing never seen in Brazilian history.
58:25
- [Malcolm] You have strongmen in the Philippines like Duterte.
- Hitler massacred three million Jews.
58:33
Now, there is three million drug addicts,
58:38
I'd be happy to slaughter them.
- [Malcolm] Vladimir Putin. (speaks in foreign language)
58:53
(crowd cheering)
- Russia is actually fueling right wing extremist governments in Europe;
59:00
they're funding them. AFD in Germany, Alternative for Deutschland.
59:05
(crowd chanting in foreign language)
59:11
They're the second largest political party in Germany fueled mainly by hatred of liberalism and immigration.
59:20
These people are all fellow travelers now, and as fellow travelers,
59:26
they all believe in the same thing, and they believe that democracy is a failed experiment,
59:32
and that the polar axis of the world should shift. We are in a battle for our political and ideological lives,
59:41
what was America is now under siege around the world. This is a dangerous, dangerous time for the world.
59:49
Are we moving to a time where the 1930s have been forgotten, and people are viewing it a template not a warning?
59:59
- The only way we can perpetuate a democracy is by people sharing those values,
1:00:05
and thinking that that is something to be upheld.
- I mean, Trump is a symptom of a lot of things,
1:00:11
including a rise of a kind of ethnonationalism and authoritarianism; but he is a symptom who's become a very important cause.
1:00:19
The United States is standing against ethnonationalist sentiments and authoritarian regimes
1:00:25
around the world. I think that puts a certain amount of check on them. With the American president on their side,
1:00:32
it's an exponential shot in the arm for them, and an exponential weakening of liberal democracy
1:00:39
around the world.
- I actually go back to, believe it or not, chimpanzees.
1:00:51
When Jane Goodall was observing chimpanzees, one of the things she showed us was how loving they were,
1:00:58
and how human they were. And she bonded with them, and formed these relationships with them.
1:01:03
And then the males would compete for dominance. They'd pound their chest, and they'd throw dirt up in the air,
1:01:10
and they'd throw heavy rocks into the river to show who is more powerful. But no one ever really got hurt.
1:01:15
It was all called "display behavior," just to show who was the toughest. And that person would become the alpha.
1:01:21
What happened, though, after many years, is that that troop that she observed became so big that they split into two troops.
1:01:28
So everything she taught us about chimpanzees is really what we would call "within group behavior."
1:01:35
It says nothing about "between group behavior." Once the troops had split apart,
1:01:42
a very aggressive, charismatic, alpha male from one of the groups would start beating his chest,
1:01:48
and hooting, and slapping the other males, and getting them excited, and then they would start marching
1:01:53
toward the other group's territory, and the other males would follow him. (percussive music)
1:01:59
And they would wait at the edge of the territory for another male, maybe even someone they were friends with
1:02:05
when the troop was one troop. And then they will barrel down the hill, and beat that male to death.
1:02:10
(chimpanzees shrieking) And they'll do that systematically,
until they're able to take over the other group's females and their land. Now, think about this from an evolutionary point of view.
1:02:16
1:02:24
Who's genes got to move on? The troop with the malignant, narcissistic leaders,
1:02:31
that said, "Let's go kill all the other chimpanzees." (chimpanzees shrieking)
1:02:37
So this is very deep in our genetic programming. And this is why demagogues like Trump
1:02:43
are able to be successful because before Trump we had fractures in our society,
1:02:49
but we had this overarching identity as Americans. Donald Trump fractures it and says, "No, we're actually two troops,
1:02:55
and our troop is being attacked by that troop. And if we don't go over there
1:03:01
and beat the crap out of them, they're gonna destroy us." And that is like a siren song
1:03:08
to the deep genetic programming in the base of our animal brains that, yes, if somebody convinces us
1:03:15
that that other troop is trying to kill us, and I don't care how bad my leader is, but he's the one who's leading us to the edge of the troop.
1:03:21
So only one of us is gonna survive. Who cares if he's a liar? We wanna survive.
1:03:27
And the only way we survive is by attacking those other people. That primitive programming is actually not atypical.
1:03:34
They're not anomalous. They're not unusual. Humankind has been at war in every place at every time, right?
1:03:40
And they've been horrible in war, to burning down villages, raping women, torturing people, killing people.
1:03:47
That's actually normal for the human animal, unfortunately. It's the psychology of power.
1:03:53
(crowd cheering) We all tend to fall behind the powerful leader out of self-preservation, and out of group perseveration.
1:04:01
It's the natural instinct.
1:04:10
- [Interviewer] What are you most fearful of about this president being in control?
- Nuclear war.
1:04:16
I mean, that's the long-term, that's the biggest risk, is that he gets in a confrontation with
1:04:23
North Korea, with China, where his ego's on the line.
1:04:29
- Several months ago, a foreign policy expert on an international level
1:04:37
went to advise Donald Trump. And three times he asked about the use of nuclear weapons.
1:04:45
Three times he asked, at one point, "If we have them, why can't we use them?"
1:04:54
[Donald Trump] North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,
1:05:00
they will be met with fire and fury the likes of which this world has never seen before.
1:05:08
- A president of the United States, even if he's being a showman, saying that we will bring fire and fury to your country,
1:05:16
that is an implicit nuclear threat. Donald Trump does not have the temperament
1:05:21
to be around these systems.
- Welcome to the White House. This ceremony and the treaty we are signing today
1:05:28
are both excellent examples of the rewards of patience.
- [Narrator] It was 1987, and President Reagan,
1:05:34
and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, celebrated the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty
1:05:41
as calming Cold War tensions. The INF scrapped thousands of ground launched
1:05:48
nuclear and conventional missiles with ranges of from 300 to 3,400 miles.
1:05:58
- [Reporter] Moscow and Washington have repeatedly accused each other of violating the treaty,
1:06:04
a deal that helps protect the security of the U.S. and its allies in Europe and the Far East.
1:06:10
Russia has condemned President Trump's intention to withdraw from the pact. The Deputy Foreign Minister is saying
1:06:16
it would be a very dangerous step.
- [Man] Sierra, Victor, Two.
1:06:24
- [Malcom] The President of the United States is a nuclear monarchy. He is a king.
1:06:30
There are no safeguards other than his whim, that determines when he launches an atomic bomb and where.
1:06:38
The briefcase that he has, the football, is a communications device, and all it does is authenticates him
1:06:45
to the nuclear arsenal's chain of command.
- [Commander] Unlock code enter, Juliet, Papa, Papa.
1:06:52
- [Malcolm] And it executes his order once he has authenticated himself.
1:06:57
- [Commander] Mark. T-minus 50.
- Not one bomb's going, multiple bombs are going.
1:07:06
So when you choose that option, that missile will blow that country up in 35 minutes.
1:07:12
And there is no turning it off. Once they boost into space, they're gone.
1:07:19
- The president has the authority to order a nuclear attack,
1:07:24
including a first strike. And it is extremely unlikely that the military command
1:07:30
would not take his orders.
- The president can decide that France is a national security threat,
1:07:36
and he can order an ICBM strike.
- [Man] That's not the correct procedure.
- Screw the procedure.
1:07:42
I want somebody on the goddamn phone before I kill 20 million people.
- Sir, we have a launch order.
- [Timer] Four, three, two
1:07:48
- Put your hand on the keys, sir.
- [Timer] One, launch.
1:07:56
- So what do you say to people who say that Trump is a bluffer, a strategic thinker, and he won't do this?
1:08:04
Are you willing to bet your children's life on it? Are you willing to bet the lives of every person in this nation on it?
1:08:11
And if you're willing to say that about any person who will pathologically lie to you,
1:08:18
to your face, documentable, quantifiably lie to you, your wife, your children, on a daily basis,
1:08:27
then you don't really understand what the stakes are. (missile blasting)
1:08:44
We cannot allow that kind of gamesmanship to continue. This man controls those weapons.
1:08:55
- I don't think you can understand Trump, or much else of what's going on in the world today,
1:09:02
without factoring in the effects of death anxiety.
1:09:07
Are we doing what we're doing for the reasons that we claim,
1:09:12
or could there be something that lurks beneath the surface of consciousness?
1:09:20
In "The Denial of Death", Becker argues that it is our awareness
1:09:25
that we will inevitably die, and our inability to accept the reality
1:09:31
of the human condition with grace and courage, that underlies almost all human activity.
1:09:41
What Freud pointed out is that we're animals, and we don't like that.
1:09:46
We're breathing pieces of defecating meat that aren't any more significant or enduring than lizards or potatoes.
1:09:53
So, if you think about it, I'm gonna die, I could walk outside and get smoked by a comet.
1:09:59
You wouldn't be able to stand up in the morning. You would literally be overwhelmed by paralyzing existential terror.
1:10:08
What we do to bury that anxiety is to embrace belief systems that life has meaning, and we have value.
1:10:16
In a single word, culture. So the prevailing belief in the U.S. in the last century
1:10:25
is that America is the home of the free and the brave.
1:10:30
Anybody who works hard enough can be just as successful
1:10:35
as Oprah, or Bill Gates, or Warren Buffet. And that we will always be the world's foremost economic,
1:10:45
as well as military, power. And so one of the first knees
1:10:51
in our psychological groin was 9/11, when both our military and economic power
1:10:59
had been challenged. Then we get clobbered with the recession,
1:11:05
combined with globalization, combined with demographic reality that by the middle of the century
1:11:12
white people will be in the minority. And so for many Americans,
1:11:17
their world view have been completely upended.
1:11:22
So fast forward to 2015. Donald Trump declares that he's running for President.
1:11:30
He comes down the escalator. He's like, "Mexicans are rapists, I'm going to keep you safe.
1:11:37
And I said to myself, "That guy is gonna win."
- The American dream is dead.
1:11:47
- [Audience Member] Bring it back.
- But if I get elected president,
1:11:53
I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger
1:12:00
than ever before. And we will make America great again.
1:12:05
Thank you, thank you very much. (crowd cheering)
- When the psychological shit hits the fan, if you'll pardon the expression,
1:12:11
and when people are economically and psychologically insecure,
1:12:17
when somebody comes along and confidently proclaims in very simple terms
1:12:25
that they will keep them safe, they will make them prosper,
1:12:31
they will bring back the good old days, that's the psychological hook.
1:12:37
If you look at it from a detached perspective, we're really at a crossroads.
1:12:43
The impending environmental apocalypse, juxtaposed with simmering ethnic tensions,
1:12:50
juxtaposed with rampant economic inequality, and here we have Trump magnifying all of those difficulties.
1:13:02
What Trump also did masterfully was to take nonexistent problems
1:13:08
and render them potentially traumatic by grotesquely overemphasizing the danger.
1:13:15
- Look at the deal he's making with Iran.
- Once you get on board psychologically,
1:13:20
once you commit to a demagogueish ideologue,
1:13:25
that puts up a fact-proof screen between you and the world.
1:13:31
Once you are fully on board, there's no rational argument that will alter your opinion.
1:13:42
There is always a tendency for charismatic leaders to bring out the tribal nature of humans.
1:13:49
It is very easy to lapse into an us-versus-them mentality.
1:13:57
Rationality will lose every time.
- Where is the red line?I
1:14:03
Where do you say, "Okay, hey, No mas; I'm not supporting this guy anymore?" Where is the line? So, it's obviously been crossed by many people,
1:14:10
but for me, the line would be when you look at our documents, and you look at our constitution,
1:14:15
North Korea, Russia, Venezuela has the exact same language.
1:14:21
Go look at their constitution. They have the same flowery language related to human rights,
1:14:26
and all of that stuff. But what make us unique is the checks and balances,
1:14:32
and the power diffusion in the construction of the government. So if Trump starts to trample on that,
1:14:40
then I'm gonna turn on him; I have to. You can't disrupt a 243-year experiment
1:14:47
for one dude's personality.
1:14:52
- It has now been a week since the Centers for Disease Control confirmed the first community transmission of coronavirus
1:14:58
in the United States.
- We all have personalities. Some people are more dependent;
1:15:04
some people are more aggressive. It becomes pathological when you see the whole world through a screen
1:15:10
that makes everything fit your need.
1:15:15
- Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus.
1:15:22
- [Lance] It's not just being manipulative, it's a fundamental inability to not be that way.
1:15:29
[Donald Trump] This big, vast land of ours, this great country of ours, we have 240 cases.
1:15:35
Most of those people are gonna be fine.
- Donald Trump doesn't care about experts.
- [Journalist] Can you also weigh in
1:15:40
on this issue of hydroxychloroquine? What do you think about this, and what is the medical evidence?
- How many times have I answered that question?
1:15:46
Maybe 15.
- [Journalist] Doctor.
15 times.
- He only cares about people who will tell him what he already wants to hear.
1:15:53
He makes himself ignorant about almost everything, because he only wants to hear what he wants to hear.
1:15:58
[Donald Trump] We have it so well under control. I mean, view this the same as the flu. When somebody sneezes, I mean, I try and bail out as much as possible.
1:16:06
And I haven't touched my face in weeks, in weeks.
- [Journalist] Mr. President, the...
- I miss it.
1:16:11
- And one of the most devastating things he's been doing is to emotionally train Americans not to care about others,
1:16:19
to extinguish compassion, and to extinguish kindness in themselves. He terms it being tough.
1:16:26
- He is giving people a license to hate, to provide a source of anger to go after each other.
1:16:34
How are we all tolerating this? Loyalty is not blind obedience
1:16:39
unless you're supporting a demagogue, okay? And so you don't wanna ever be like that in your life.
- Relax, we're doing great.
1:16:47
- [Reporter] The DOW is now down nearly 900 points.
- [New Anchor] Economists have been ramping up their projections.
1:16:52
- [Reporter] The virus spreading explosively like quote, a bomb.
- To be president, you have to exercise good judgment
1:17:00
on behalf of the American people for their interests.
[Donald Trump] They have to go back to work. Our country has to go back.
1:17:06
Our country is based on that. I think it's gonna happen pretty quickly.
1:17:12
- It's got nothing to do with the safety of the people; it's about him. It's not about the country.
1:17:19
- He spent a lot of time on Twitter today boasting about the excellent television ratings
1:17:25
his news conferences have received lately.
- We have Monday Night Football-type ratings
1:17:30
and that these are like "Bachelor" finale.
- He is not fit because he is unable to think.
1:17:37
He can only react and attack.
- What do you say to Americans who are watching you right now who are scared?
1:17:44
- I say that you're a terrible reporter. That's really bad reporting.
- He is unfit to be president because he cannot think.
1:17:53
- [Reporter] The U.S. is surpassing Italy as the country with the most fatalities.
- [News Anchor] He says he wants to reopen the country
1:17:59
with a big bang.
- Pursuing truth is to the mind like food is to the body.
1:18:07
Without pursuing truth, your psyche starves. And Trump's psyche has been starving for a long time.
1:18:15
- [Journalist] Say, sir, what metrics you will use to make that decision?
- The metrics right here. If we can hold that down between 100,000 and 200,000,
1:18:25
we all together have done a very good job. I am very proud to be your president. Thank you very much.
1:18:30
Thank you, everybody, thank you.
- He's detached from reality.
1:18:37
I mean, this is just demented. (gentle guitar music)
1:18:48
- The founding fathers always knew that a king-like tyrant would try to rule as a personal dictator,
1:18:55
and use the powers of the presidency to enhance or enrich himself. But they never foresaw the Senate, the Judiciary
1:19:03
might completely abdicate their responsibilities and go along with that.
1:19:09
- The natural tendency of history in many ways is towards greater liberalism and altruism,
1:19:15
but human nature has these competing forces. And so what we're seeing now
1:19:20
is this amazing regression from where we were. We are literally going backwards. I think,
1:19:28
we all have to do everything that we can do, because our society is at risk, and we could lose it all.
1:19:38
We could lose this grand experiment in democracy. I think we're more than halfway there.
1:19:44
I think people don't realize how far this has actually progressed.
1:19:50
- When you're in a period of rising authoritarianism, it's easy to get exhausted,
1:19:57
because the news comes at you like bullets from a machine gun, all of it bad.
1:20:04
One of the best weapons against authoritarianism is protest in the street.
1:20:09
And protests are key, because not only does the leader see that he's unpopular, but even more important,
1:20:15
his allies see that the public is actually against them.
1:20:22
- Think of what you tell your kids. You tell them to be honest.
1:20:27
You tell them to tell the truth. You tell them, 'don't think of yourself, don't brag.
1:20:34
Don't trash other people to make yourself feel good.'
1:20:40
How can you support Donald Trump? How can you support somebody who essentially violates all of the things
1:20:47
that we want them to follow? It makes no sense. It's corrosive for them. It's corrosive for you.
1:20:55
And it's corrosive for the country.
- This is a phenomenal, phenomenal country.
1:21:02
It's one of the most unique historical experiments in the 5,500 years of recorded history.
1:21:10
We have to figure out a way to help people, and bring them into the new world of globalization.
1:21:18
They have to feel like they're part of the aspirational success of America
1:21:23
that our parents felt.
- I believe, at our best, that we have the capacity
1:21:30
to radically reconceptualize who we are. And the extent to which that we can accept
1:21:38
our commonality as human beings, I think, therein lies the key,
1:21:44
because then there's no one left to hate. And that's not gonna stop us from hating,
1:21:50
but as Ernest Becker put it, maybe we can hate stuff that we should, like poverty and injustice.
1:21:56
And maybe we can then use righteous indignation to everybody's best interest.
1:22:02
(gentle music)
