'Politically insane': Trump sets bad policy time bomb for after midterms

Thanks to you at home for joining us this hour. All right, see if you can spot the pattern here. Headline, White House officials told the DOJ to delay action on abortion ahead of the midterms. So Trump's Justice Department wants to take action to further criminalize abortion somehow, but they've been told that they need to wait on that until after the midterms, then they can go ahead. That was two and a half weeks ago. Then one and a half weeks ago, there's this one. Again, see if you can spot the pattern here. Headline, Trump says U.S. will not attack Iran before midterm elections. So Trump intends to ramp back up his super successful, totally rational, fantastically popular war with Iran, but he says he's going to wait on that until after the midterms. And then after the midterms, then he'll go ahead. Are you starting to notice the pattern? This one is from four days ago. Headline, U.S. delays rule threatening access to cheaper Canadian drugs. This is where Trump's genius tariff idea and his genius crusade against Canada collided in a new Trump administration rule that would basically radically spike prescription drug costs for millions of Americans who order their prescription drugs from Canada. Literally, individual Americans, millions of individual Americans who would be paying hundreds, if not thousands of dollars more for the prescriptions they need for their health. And it would not be because of some external constraint, some new variable, some supply chain pinch somewhere. It would be because of a new Donald Trump hates Canada rule. A new Donald Trump hates Canada and loves tariffs rule. That was due to go into effect Thursday this week. But just a few days ago, just a few days ago, four days ago, apparently, they decided, oh, maybe we shouldn't do that yet. Maybe we shouldn't do that right now. They decided they would delay it from this Thursday for 90 days. So they're going to delay the impact of that until after the midterms. Noticing a pattern here. This is from the same day, different headline from also four days ago. Quote, Pentagon plans to hold reports on Iran's school strike past midterms. So the Trump administration has a report on the American missile strike in Iran that killed more than 150 civilians, including 120 little kids, 120 elementary school kids killed by the United States on the first day of Trump's war in Iran. They have some kind of report on that, but they are going to wait to release it until after the midterms. So, pattern here is hard to miss. Here's another one. This one's from today. Headline, Trump aides are getting ready to penalize defaulting student loan borrowers. The key phrase there is getting ready to do it because they don't quite want to do it exactly just yet. From the Washington Sun today, quote, Trump administration officials are preparing to impose financial penalties on millions of Americans who are in default on their federal student loans, according to five sources, familiar with the matter. The Treasury Department is moving forward with plans to hire private debt collectors, three of the sources said, possibly as soon as November, as in next month. The sources said those plans are, quote, unlikely to be announced before the midterm elections. One source telling the Sun, quote, it would be politically insane to do this before the midterms. Ah, yes, but after the midterms, let her rip, right? Donald Trump is planning to sick private debt collectors on 10 million Americans for their student loans. But they're not going to announce that they're doing that until after the midterms. I mean, these are not things that are befalling them, right? These are all things they have done or they plan to do. They've got some plans, apparently, to use DOJ to further criminalize abortion. They love their Iran war and have no plans to, scale it back or stop it. They're going to deliberately spike everyone's prescription drug prices through the roof as some way of trying to stick it to Canada. And who cares that you're sticking it to millions of Americans who need prescription drugs along the way? They really do want to sick repo men and debt collectors on 10 million Americans who can't afford to pay their bills. Can you imagine having the federal government pay for a private debt collector to come after you for your student loan bills? That's what Trump wants to do. They are looking forward to doing all of this stuff to you. But they know it is not exactly popular. So the plan here, the pattern you are seeing emerge, is that they're just delaying all of it. They are hiding the ball. They're hoping people don't think about this stuff or maybe don't even know about this stuff when they are deciding who to vote for in these elections or whether they will vote at all. You remember Trump and the Republicans, their one big beautiful bill, right? Basically the one piece of legislation they passed. One of the things that it is designed on purpose to do, it's not a side effect, it's the intention, is they are trying to push tens of millions of Americans off their health insurance. That's a major part of the one big beautiful bill. And in most states in the country, that provision, pushing people off their health insurance, doesn't go into effect until right after the midterms. It goes into effect January 1st, approximately 20 years after the midterms. That's a big deal. That's a big deal. 20 million Americans, as of January 1st, will have these complex new hoops that they need to jump through if they want to keep their Medicaid health insurance. 20 million Americans. These new requirements are designed and expected to be onerous. They are designed and expected to force literally millions of Americans to lose their health insurance starting January 1, on purpose. And we know that the effect of this is going to be that people lose their health insurance in very large numbers. We know this in part because we've got a little bit of a pilot project going on. One state decided that they wouldn't wait until January 1st. They'd jump early. They wanted to put their policy of this type in effect even before the midterms. They wanted to put these policies in place as soon as possible and not wait till January 1st like the rest of the country. The state in question is Nebraska, right? Nebraska is one of those supposedly profoundly red states where you nevertheless keep hearing this election. This election cycle that Republicans in Nebraska might be in trouble. Right? Where Democrats seem likely to flip the seat of Republican Congressman Don Bacon. Where the Republican Governor Jim Pillen may be in political trouble. Where the Republican Senator Pete Ricketts may be in political trouble. And you know why? Well, one reason they're in trouble is because of this new Republican policy from Trump and the Republicans in Congress that Nebraska decided to go early on. That they decided to try first. They're showing us the way. What they're showing us is that Nebraska residents are now in large numbers getting kicked off their health insurance. It's happening now in Nebraska and it shows us pretty conclusively that it's going to happen to millions of Americans all over the country when it goes into effect all over the country starting January 1st. Well, how is this playing politically in Nebraska? Going back to the Washington Sun tonight. Quote, they're reporting on how this is playing out in the state of Nebraska. Quote, the decision turned the prospect of people losing access to health care from speculative to actual for more than a thousand Nebraskans so far. Health care leaders, Republican observers and others now think it's a contributor to a political climate in Nebraska that suddenly has Republican leaders on the defensive in a state that is reliably red. The Republican polling firm Brizio Ward found Medicaid cuts to be one of the most quote, resonating negatives in recent surveys of rural Republicans in Nebraska. A pollster with the firm telling the Sun, quote, one out of two Republicans either are, have been, or have a family member that is or has been on Medicaid. Quote, I mean it touches a lot of people or it has touched a lot of people so it's not like a theoretical thing. Yeah. Not a theoretical thing. Turns out when your policies are that you are going to go out of your way to make people's lives materially harder and more onerous and more dangerous and more miserable. You are going to go out of your way to immiserate and impoverish people on purpose as a policy that you voted for and put into effect knowing what it's going to do. Turns out to not have a theoretical effect on your constituents, and it does not have a theoretical effect on the political consequences for you. But Nebraska's Republican members of Congress voted with Trump and all the other congressional Republicans to do this, to get people kicked off their health insurance. That was the one big beautiful bill and it is a disaster in Nebraska where they decided to go early. Nebraska Republicans are paying for that now. Their own pollsters are telling them they are paying for that now. But it's about to be a political, disaster for them everywhere. the solution to that was to, you know, not schedule this to happen most places until after the midterms. They're pushing all of this stuff until after the midterms. And that may help some, I suppose. But I don't think it's going to help enough. At least it seems like they know, they're expecting that they're going to lose. And here's another data point that shows us that's true. This is a headline, new headline in the Wall Street Journal. Quote, the race is on. The race is on for Trump staffers to hire lawyers in case Democrats win the midterms. Quote, Trump administration officials are lawyering up. From cabinet secretaries to mid-level staffers, people who work for President Donald Trump are calling law firms in search of legal advice as they brace for an avalanche of investigations next year if Democrats take one or both houses of Congress in the midterms. Lawyers say the inquiries signal unease that Democrats will investigate everything from alleged pay-to-play pardons to the Kennedy Center renovation to Donald Trump Jr.'s wedding. Administration officials personally face legal, reputational, and financial risks if they are roped into these inquiries. Conflict of interest rules mean the same law firm is unlikely to be able to represent several staffers simultaneously. So senior officials are scrambling to lock in their preferred counsel before someone else does. A partner at one of the law firms of choice for these folks describes for the journal, quote, an influx in corporate clients as well. Corporations looking for advice on how to prepare for potential investigations. Companies that donated to Trump's projects or that did business with the government or that did business with the Trump family could be swept up in the probes. Yeah. Because if it is a real investigation of, say, bribery, the briber and the bribee should both expect to be explaining themselves to investigators before too long. So yeah, all the companies who have been bribing their way into happiness, into a happy relationship with the Trump second term, you're going to have to explain yourselves. So those guys are lawyering up too. It's a sign that they know they're losing. And I got to say, at the White House, it's not even like they seem to be trying to turn it around. I mean, maybe Trump only cares about what happens to him and doesn't care about what happens to his party or anything else around him. But I mean, what's Trump doing to try to stem the losses for his party in November? What's Trump doing right now? Well, he's finally just fully going for it with Vladimir Putin. I mean, reportedly arranging stakes in Russian oil, and gas companies for his family's business connections, then unilaterally announcing that he's dropping sanctions on Russian oil and gas. He's trying to drop all sanctions on Russia. He's also telling Ukraine to stop bombing Russian oil facilities. Yeah. Hey, don't bomb my bribe. I'm just in the middle of arranging stakes in Russian oil and gas companies for my family's business associates. You got to stop bombing Russian oil and gas companies. And also we got to get them on sanctions. So they can be very profitable again, since we're now going to have a stake in them. You might've also heard that Ukraine has been bombing Russian data centers. Well, how did the Kremlin respond to that with this coin operated president? Well, the Kremlin now reportedly wants Trump to buy into some Russian data centers. So presumably he would tell Ukraine to stop bombing that bribe too. Trump's throttling Ukraine's military satellite, Internet. Internet access, apparently. Trump administration is apparently cutting Ukraine off from U.S. intelligence about incoming Russian attacks. The Washington Post reports tonight that Trump and Hegseth are blocking even other countries from sending Ukraine Patriot missile interceptors. I mean, this is what Trump is doing for Putin right now. Systematically dismantling Ukraine's defenses while funding Russia and effectively telling Putin to go for it. We're going to talk with Democratic Senator Mark Warner tonight about what feels like a full fledged leap right now. Trump just fully embracing Putin, having America switch sides in the world. We'll talk with Senator Warner about that. But I got to say, there is also the political mystery of why Trump would be doing this right now, right before the midterm elections that he and his party are set to lose. I mean, why now? What's the urgency right now? I mean, Trump is unpopular in this. This country right now, really unpopular, historically unpopular as a president. But just about the only really famous person who is less popular than Donald Trump in this country is Vladimir Putin. The American public is not in love with Vladimir Putin the way that Donald Trump is. So among all the other things, this radical leap means Trump hopping into Putin's pants right before the midterms makes no political sense at all. It's hard to imagine him doing anything less popular. I mean, not unless Putin has offered Trump some slam dunk guaranteed way to bollocks up the midterms so Trump can't lose. And this is Trump's way of paying for that help. Who knows? Otherwise, politically, it's inexplicable. We're going to talk with Senator Mark Warner of Virginia about that tonight. I should mention this. This sort of thing is not happening only at No King's Day events. You might have seen this footage. It's kind of inspiring footage. This is last Thursday, Thursday last week. This is Greensboro, North Carolina. The Republican-controlled Guilford County Board of Elections in North Carolina decided they were going to close the early voting sites used by college students in their county. They made it so the closest voting site to North Carolina and North Carolina's election would be in North Carolina. A&T, which is a historically black college, is now 45 minutes away from that school. It's 30 minutes away from UNC Greensboro. But on Thursday, on the first day of early voting last week, students at both of those colleges and Bennett College as well decided they would just get together and march all that way. It's a 45 minute walk now. Well, we will march 45 minutes. They marched all that way across town together to cast their vote en masse. The point of the No King's events on Saturday, rather than hold big rallies or protests like on previous No King's Days, the point of this No King's Day was not big events, but as many events as possible. They wanted people to hold as many small, hyper-local events as possible because it's time to vote and people vote locally. And so these were all supposed to be very local events about getting out the early vote. There were more than 3,000 No King's Vote early events on Saturday. In Colorado, here's Colorado Springs and Grand Junction, Colorado and Buena Vista. In Connecticut, here's Middletown, Connecticut. In Delaware, here's Bethany Beach. In Florida, here's Coral Springs and here's a little town called West Palm Beach. Here's beautiful Atlanta, Georgia, one of the greatest cities in the whole world. In Hawaii, here's Honolulu. In Idaho, here's Boise. Hey, Boise, I'll see you on my book tour November 14th. Can't wait to get up to Boise. In Illinois, here's Chicago and here's Evanston. In Indiana, look at Fort Wayne, Indiana, turning people out. In Iowa, we're in the I-States. Here's Davenport in the upper left-hand corner there. In Kansas, here's Wichita. In Kentucky, here's Paducah and all the way across the state, here's St. Matthews, Kentucky, just outside Louisville. In beautiful Louisiana, here's Baton Rouge on the upper left-hand side of your screen there. Here's Covington, Louisiana in the upper right. Lower left there, that's Portland, Maine. Lower right, that's Baltimore City. Hey, Charm City. Baltimore, Maryland. Massachusetts had a gazillion No Kings events this weekend. There on the left, that's little Provincetown, Massachusetts at the very, very, very tip of Cape Cod. On the right-hand side, that's Boston, getting into the spirit of things. In Michigan, here's Grand Rapids. Also in Michigan, here's Lansing. Also, it turns out a ton of people turned out in Kalamazoo, Michigan. In Minnesota, here's Minneapolis. Mighty, mighty Minneapolis. In Mississippi, that's Hattiesburg, Mississippi on the right-hand side of your screen. In Missouri, here's Kansas City. Big turnout in Kansas City. In Montana, hello, Missoula. Here's Lincoln, Nebraska. Here's Omaha, Nebraska, too. The aforementioned Omaha, Nebraska. Here's Las Vegas, Nevada, and Nashua, New Hampshire, and Newton, New Jersey, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. The name of the state is New Mexico. Here's Buffalo, New York, in Western New York, and here's New York, York City. Tons of people turned out in New York City. Here's historic New Bern, New Bern, N-E-W-B-E-R-N, North Carolina. That's in coastal North Carolina. Here's Bismarck, North Dakota. Here's Cleveland, Ohio. Let's go to Oklahoma. Here's Oklahoma City. And here's my beloved Tulsa, Oklahoma. Here's beautiful Portland, Oregon, and also Bend, Oregon. Here's Pennsylvania. Here's Philly. Here's Greensburg, PA from out near Pittsburgh. Here's Providence, Rhode Island. Here's South Carolina. That's Anderson, South Carolina, and also Greenville, South Carolina. Here's Rapid City, South Dakota. Columbia, Tennessee. This was Columbia, Tennessee this weekend. Look at this. This is Missouri City, Texas on the left-hand side of your screen there. Houston in the middle. Dallas on the right-hand side. This was sunrise on No King's Day in Tarrant County, Texas. In the town of Euless. Look at that sunrise shot. No Kings. Power to the people. Vote early. This was little South Hero, Vermont. This was Richmond, Virginia on the right side of your screen. That's Front Royal, Virginia up at Shenandoah National Park. Up in Washington, this was Seattle, Washington. And this was Union Gap, Washington, which is out by Yakima. That's on the right side of your screen. This was Washington, D.C. Big turnout in Washington, D.C., among other things. They had themselves a pretty good brass band. This was Charleston, West Virginia. This was another one of my favorite places on earth. On the right side of your screen there, that's Madison, Wisconsin. On to the last state that starts with W-Y, Cheyenne, Wyoming, in front of the Wyoming State Capitol. Again, that's just a taste. That's just a core sample from the more than 3,000 No Kings Vote Early events this weekend. We're going to be talking with one of the national founders of Indivisible. We're going to be talking with her tonight about how things went this weekend. Among other things, we're going to talk with her about how it came to be that Meta, Mark Zuckerberg's company, for some reason, decided to take down the No Kings Instagram account in the middle of this weekend's 3,000-plus early voting events and demonstrations. Meta apologized, said it was just a mistake, a big misunderstanding, but we'll get into that with one of the founders of Indivisible shortly. Early voting, as I said, was the theme of No Kings this weekend. Early voting starts today in a whole bunch of states. Early voting starts today in Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, South Carolina, Texas. All those states have their first day of early voting today. We're starting to get early voting numbers from other states that have just started their early vote, and the numbers are pretty stunning so far. I mean, you don't want to extrapolate too much from these early numbers, but it does show enthusiasm and people's willing to get out there. For example, the first day of early voting in Georgia was up 40 percent over the first day of voting in the last midterms, a 40 percent jump from the last midterms. Early vote numbers in North Carolina jumped 38 percent over the last midterms. Early vote numbers in Maine also jumped 38 percent over the last midterms. Early vote numbers in Iowa jumped 61 percent, 61 percent since the last midterms, which is a bananas gigantic increase in Iowa. Go, Iowa. I don't know exactly what's going to happen in the midterms, but I think Republicans are expecting to lose. I think the administration knows they're about to get shellacked, and I think the president and the administration are sort of racing into these midterms, you know, with very unusual ideas about how to appeal to potential voters. I mean, beyond hopping into Putin's pants, Trump immediately in advance of the midterms is mounting a huge new attack on an absolutely beloved public golf course in Washington, D.C., the most popular golf course in the city. A beloved course that nobody has anything against, but he is desperately and urgently trying to bulldoze it and shut it down and has cut down hundreds of trees right immediately before the midterms. Great. Yeah, everybody loves that. Trump immediately before the midterms sent federal agents into the home of a Democratic congresswoman reportedly so he can try to strip her of her U.S. citizenship. Oh, yeah, that's very popular. Trump has got federal agents out in the streets in Minneapolis mode again, throwing a U.S. citizen off his bike in Long Beach, California, and breaking his arm and putting him in the hospital. The man is a U.S. citizen. In Texas, Harris County, Texas, federal agents just ran down a guy with their car. Local law enforcement reportedly considering criminal charges against a federal agent for running this guy over in Harris County. Elsewhere in Texas, in Laredo, another man, a seventh person is now dead in ICE custody. A seventh person dead in ICE custody in Texas alone. I don't know what is going to happen exactly. I don't know what is going to happen exactly in the midterms, but I know that the Republicans think they are going to lose. And I know that at the White House, they seem to have given up entirely on even trying not to. And I do know that as the polling continues to shift against Republicans all over the country, even in places as red as Nebraska, we can see it in the data that people are fired up to get their votes in early. And I also know that smart candidates in tough districts are sort of leaning into all of that. Leaning into that zeitgeist, leading into that voter enthusiasm, and leading into that defiant spark from voters who are effectively giving Donald Trump a one-finger salute every opportunity they can in every state in the country right now. And to that end, I'm just going to show you this one last thing before we speak to Mark Warner. This is something you will not have seen anywhere else. This is a new campaign ad from an aggressive young Democratic incumbent. It's from Congressman Pat Ryan in New York, who's up for re-election. And I just want you to see this ad. I just want you to see what I mean here about a candidate who sort of knows what time it is, who knows what it means to capture the moment and where the voters are right now. My message is simple. We are having a moment in this country heading into these midterms. I think smart Democratic candidates and even independent candidates are figuring that out everywhere. But there's lots more to see, lots more to get to tonight. We'll be right back. In the first few months of last year, so the early months of the second Trump term, new Donald Trump appointees at the Homeland Security Department reportedly made a very unusual request. According to new reporting today from ProPublica, these Trump officials told CISA, a cybersecurity agency within Homeland Security, they told CISA that people at that agency needed to secretly acquire a voting machine and then learn how to hack into it. This was not for the purpose of making a public announcement or public service announcement, right, about, you know, here's some vulnerabilities and here's how to patch them. No, CISA was supposed to secretly obtain a voting machine and then figure out how to hack it. And then they were supposed to do it. They were supposed to report that information, report those findings only to the White House. Quote, the request made the CISA employees fear they were being asked to take part in political interference. Yeah. I mean, why would the White House need to know secretly how to hack into voting machines, how the federal government could hack into voting machines? Did they want to do that? Did they want to use this gambit? For something else, one former administration official telling ProPublica, quote, my thought was they could keep it in their back pocket to invalidate any election results they don't like. So folks at CISA were apparently worried that, you know, being told to start hacking voting machines secretly was a bad enough directive on its face, but they reportedly additionally worried that what they were being asked to do was to kind of demonstrate the supposed truth. To help the administration, to help the White House create a pretext for contesting election results, right? For seizing voting machines, for contesting the certification of results, saying, look, we have this evidence about how these machines can be hacked. One of the only reasons this secret voting machine hack never happened was that Elon Musk and Doge had already fired all these CISA agents who were even capable of pulling off such a thing. So it didn't happen, but it's now today being reported that they asked for it. For the first time. MSNOW has not independently confirmed this ProPublica reporting, but we have been keeping our eyes on other potential ways they may try to manufacture a pretext. for contesting the election results. Consider the Trump administration's creation of what essentially amounts to a fake national voting roll, or at least a fake voting roll for some states. Last week, as you know, Trump's Justice Department sued the state of California, saying California was sending ballots to 20,000 people the Trump administration says are not citizens. Well, how has the Trump administration determined that California has 20,000 non-citizens on its rolls? We don't get to know that, but they say they have their own federal voter roll somehow. A few months ago, when they said there were 16,000 illegal voters on the rolls in Nevada, the actual number turned out to be zero. But now they're threatening California elections officials with criminal prosecution if they process ballots from these people the federal government tells them, they suspect are non-citizens. They're essentially telling them, they're telling them, they're telling them, they're telling them, they're telling local elections officials, if you use your real voter rolls instead of our fake one, you're going to go to jail. I mean, the point here is certainly to try to prevent people from voting, try to block people from voting. But even more so, the point appears to be to create a pretext for contesting the results, for contesting the certification once the voting has happened, right? Oh, these results can't be trusted. They didn't use our fake Trump national voter roll that we invented. You're not allowed to see. That's the only voter roll that we trust. So you shouldn't trust these results. So we're watching these creations of pretext to contest the election. But there's a sort of third branch of this pretext creation that they're doing. And it's one that's being focused in on by somebody who's really in an important position both to know and potentially to do something about it. He's the top Democratic senator on the Intelligence Committee. And Senator Mark Warner now says that he's worried that that fake bogus claims, of foreign interference in the election, will be used by the Trump administration as a pretext to question the election results next month, to contest certification of the vote, potentially to seize voting machines or ballots. We're going to talk with Senator Mark Warner live about that next. It's from The New York Times. Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, says he has grown increasingly worried that President Trump may claim foreign interference in the election as a reason to seize voting machines. Senator Warner says he has reached out to business leaders, former military leaders, and veteran federal law enforcement officials to ask them to stand up to Mr. Trump if he contests the results. Quote, good people of both parties and independents are going to have to say no, we're not going to allow this to take place. Senator Warner says he has reached out to business leaders, former military leaders and veteran federal law enforcement officials to ask them to stand up to Mr. Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, says he has reached out to Mr. the effectiveness of the no-kings events this weekend? Well, look, we said from the beginning what we wanted to do was drive a historic wave of early voting. We've driven historic crowds, and now it's time to take that protest power and turn it into voter power. And I am so excited to share that we have gotten some preliminary numbers back from the weekend. Early voting is, in fact, up everywhere. It's up around 32 percent, and the state's tracking it. In places with a no-kings event, in zip codes with a no-kings event over this weekend, it is up 51 percent. So we are incredibly proud of everyone who came out and did the hard work to help get out the vote this weekend. Wow. Let me ask if—I feel like one of the things that has been underappreciated, both about Indivisible but also about no-kings, is the kind of practical organizing you've done around these things, so that it's not just a show up and that's your event and then you wait till the next one to show up again. You guys have done a lot of work to make sure that people are— trained, that they're offered resources, that this is part of an ongoing organizing effort that is made manifest in political action. What kind of organizing of that type happened around these no-kings events, and should we expect to see over the next couple of weeks? Well, these no-kings events had two goals. The first was to drive that historic early vote turnout. The second was to organize people and help folks get into election protection formation. We understand that we have got a— we have got a lot of people who would be authoritarian, who is threatening our election. We are seeing attacks on the right to vote, left and right, and we want to make sure that people are organized, that they are connected, that they are hooked in and volunteering in their own communities, in whatever way makes the most sense, whether that is poll monitoring or poll working, whether that is preparing to mobilize if there are attacks on the vote. We're getting people organized in advance. We've actually got an upcoming organizing call specifically on this topic, on election defense and our next steps on Wednesday night. So if you're interested, please do join us at no-kings.org to sign up. Wednesday night, election defense organizing call. Last question for you, Leah. Over the weekend, Meta, which runs—which owns Instagram, they suspended the main Instagram account for the no-kings protests. The company, as I understand it, has since apologized. They're blaming an uptick in activity that they mistook for some sort of nefarious bot traffic. No-kings organizers, as far as I understand it, say that explanation doesn't add up, and certainly the company was way too slow. They're not going to do anything about it. They're to fix the problem even after they admitted that they'd taken down the account in error. The No Kings Coalition sent a letter this evening to Meta that says, in part, public comments from representatives of Meta don't sufficiently explain these actions or the significant delay in remedying the so-called technical glitch. This raises serious questions about why these actions were taken and the implications during the election season. Can you help me understand what you think happened here and if you have ongoing worries about what happened? Well, look, I don't know what happened here. I'm not an expert on algorithms or content moderation. But what I know is that we were conducting a historic action driving early vote and civic participation and that the official Instagram account for No Kings went down at the height of activity in the middle of the day and we remained without access to that account for another four hours. And what I also know is that Mark Zuckerberg flew to Mar-a-Lago immediately after Donald Trump's election to bend the knee, moved millions of dollars to his inauguration and to his ballroom and has consistently moved to, you know, in a number of ways that should lead none of us to give Meta the benefit of the doubt in this moment. We have got to get answers here. We've got to demand that they be transparent, both about this specific incident and also more broadly, has the White House had any communications with them regarding No Kings or regarding other pro-democracy protests? What are their content moderation policies? Will they share their information? This is not a situation in which anyone is getting the benefit of the doubt. We need a full and transparent explanation and we need it to be public. Leah Greenberg, co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible. Leah, thank you. I appreciate it. All right. We'll be right back. Stay with us. That does it for me tonight. You can catch the show Tuesday through Friday at 9 p.m. Eastern on MSNOW. And don't forget to follow the show on Blue Sky, Instagram and TikTok.