all credibility. i would point out in response that that's exactly what michael cohen's book is all about, and the person he blames for his own demise and all of ours is his longtime boss, president trump. thanks for being with us tonight. "first look" is up next. joy reid and john heilemann are going to lead off our discussion with rachel's interview with michael cohen. we'll be joined later in that discussion by former federal prosecutor daniel goldman, who questioned michael cohen under oath for a couple of days when daniel goldman served as special counsel to the house intelligence committee. daniel goldman will analyze the legal aspects of what michael cohen had to say tonight and offer his assessment of michael cohen's credibility based on his own interactions with michael cohen as an under-oath witness. and later in the hour, we will be joined by former secretary of state john kerry, who is a decorated combat veteran of the vietnam war. we will get secretary kerry's

reaction to donald trump calling american soldiers killed in action losers and calling anyone who served in vietnam a loser, and that includes john kerry. i'm sure most of you have just watched rachel's hour-long interview with michael cohen, which included michael cohen's account of how the trump presidential campaign began. >> donald trump never thought he was going to win this election. he actually didn't want to win this election. this was supposed to be -- and it's how he started it -- the greatest political infomercial in the history of politics. so if you take that line and you add to it the trump tower moscow project, you'll understand that this was a branding deal. that's all that the presidential campaign started out as. this was a branding opportunity in order to expand worldwide.

there's only one problem. there's only one problem. he won. >> yeah. oops. >> and then there was the way donald trump illegally used the "national enquirer," run by david pecker, to hurt all the other candidates running for the republican presidential nomination. >> so as each -- as each candidate was moving up -- let's say marco rubio -- david pecker would reach out to me and he would give me a list of things that he was intending to do in order to squash ted cruz's or marco rubio's rise. whoever was rising in the poll, that's who became the person that we needed to knock out of the race. with marco rubio, you may remember there was photos of him in a swimming pool, that he had a drug problem, and all sorts of other -- we'll call them salacious rumors. and every time that they would

be made, they would be provided to me by david pecker. i would immediately take them into mr. trump's office. we would sit down. we would talk about it. he would approve it, and then i would contact david. next thing you know, two days later on the front cover, marco rubio has a drug problem. >> and tonight rachel got a confirmation that donald trump was lying about something that i said donald trump was lying about nine years ago when he claimed he was sending private detectives to hawaii to investigate barack obama's birth. and michael cohen explained donald trump's hateful obsession with president barack obama. >> he doesn't care what he says. he doesn't care who gets hurt so long as he wins. and when he saw that his poll numbers and his popularity and the number of times that he's gracing the front cover of a newspaper is increasing, he just

added onto it. all of a sudden he was sending people to hawaii to go check. that's a lie. he never sent anybody anywhere, right? he just said it, and everybody sort of bought into it. of course donald trump sent somebody. he's rich, right? who wouldn't send somebody if you want to prove your point? well, donald trump didn't do it because he didn't want to spend the money, and he didn't believe it. you know, his hatred for barack obama is plain and simple. he's black. he went to harvard law. he graduated the top of his class. he's, you know, incredibly articulate, and he's all the things that donald trump wants to be, right? and he just can't handle it. >> leading off our discussion tonight, joy reid, host of the reidout on msnbc at 7:00 p.m. and john heilemann, national affairs analyst for nbc news and msnbc. he's executive editor of "the recount" and co-host of showtime's "the circus."

joy, i know you were riveted to that hour of television. i just want to say, joy, go. >> i knew it was some good television, and congratulations to rachel on that interview. yeah, i was there from start to finish. look, you know, everything that michael cohen says rings true for me. you know, the book that i just recently did, i interviewed a lot of people who know donald trump and who knew him when he was running for president and before that on "the apprentice," et cetera. i interviewed tony schwartz as you have many times, lawrence. the reality is we already know all of this is true because there's so much evidence in donald trump's public life that backs up all of this. you know, the stuff about race, we've heard this from michael cohen before. we've heard it from mary trump. this idea that he hates barack obama because barack obama is what he wants to be. you know, he's smart. he's popular. he's beloved around the world. he's respected. he was a president who in donald trump's mind had it made. movies were being, you know, screened in the white house. celebrities were surrounding him. he thinks that's what he was supposed to get, and he hates

the fact that this black man got it, and he thinks that because he's black, he didn't deserve it and that he deserves it, donald trump deserves, not this guy. and there's also, you know, the stories that michael cohen has told about donald trump riding through black neighborhoods or describing what it would be like to ride through black neighborhoods and saying have you ever met any place where blacks are in charge that's not an s-hole? that's his belief. it all rings so true and here's the important thing. if people don't want to believe michael cohen, the problem with saying that you doubt him is that he was trump's bad guy, and who else would know the dirt donald trump was doing than the guy who held the shovel for all of those years? he was the guy doing the dirt for trump, paying off the, you know, porn actress with his own money and getting reimbursed. he was the guy trying to look out for donald junior while he was being berated and belittled

by his father. he's the one who would know that donald trump, he isn't pro-life. he mocks the idea of evangelical christians, but he knows he can use them. he doesn't care about them. he doesn't care about anybody. it's true. the bad guy has spoken. >> john, michael cohen offered one possible point of gratitude that donald trump would have for vladimir putin, and that's a $50 million profit donald trump made in flipping a house in florida, selling it to a russian oligarch. donald trump believes vladimir putin was really behind that sale. let's list ton that part of the interview. >> did he actually think that putin had arranged this $50 million windfall for him? >> well, i don't -- i don't know what he was thinking. i can only tell you, which i did in the book -- i can recount the conversation. he believes that all of the russian oligarchs are basically pawns of vladimir putin. he controls all of them. i guess very much to the same extent that mohammed bin salman

had the ability within which to lock up all of his relatives and other members of the royal family for money, right? trump is keen on this power and whether it's putin, mohammed bin salman, the kim jong-uns, maduros. it's the power he's so involved with and so in search of that this is exactly what he believes. he believes that putin controls all of russia and all of its wealth, and anything like the purchase of this home had to have been through or with the permission of vladimir putin. >> john heilemann, your reaction to that. >> so when you hear a story like that, lawrence, it just adds one more of the already very long list of reasons why we all now look back and wish fervently that bob mueller had been

empowered by rod rosenstein to actually look into the matters related to donald trump's financial entanglements with russia when he was doing his investigation instead of being politicked from doing that kind of work when the mueller investigation was taking place. it's the kind of thing that with subpoena power and a team of investigators, i'm sure bob mueller would have been able to get to the bottom of. but certainly it sounds to me like michael cohen having done a lot of donald trump's work in russia, having been his kind of business development czar in a lot of the squeeziest places in the world, including russia, i think michael cohen probably has pretty good instinct on that. i will say this. if you add up a couple of things here, there's not a lot of news in this book as far as i'm concerned. i agree with joy in one very particular sense. i had a lot of dealings with michael cohen in 2016 and before that when i was covering the trump campaign. i thought he was a liar back then. i know he's telling the truth about most of this stuff now

because most of this stuff i know from my own reporting to be a fact, including the notion that donald trump did not expect to win and intend to win the presidency in 2016. what does this tell you as you put the russia piece in? cohen is telling us he didn't expect to win. he's kissing up to putin throughout the campaign because he thinks there's going to be a financial payoff once he loses the presidency in 2016. if you put all that together in trump's motivation and how he sees putin and the money piece of it, explains an awful lot about the way donald trump is twa treating vladimir putin now, not just the obsession, but he's looking at what putin could mean to trump financially on the other side of his presidency, and i think that explains a lot of things that people have had a hard time understanding about donald trump's behavior in terms of foreign policy with respect to russia over the last four years. >> but, joy, isn't donald trump also looking at vladimir putin as the king maker in the united

states? he saw vladimir putin help him win the electoral college last time, and if he spends four years genuflecting to vladimir putin, then vladimir putin's going to help him win the electoral college again. >> right. i mean and i too was told by people that donald trump did not intend to win. he intended simply to market himself and grow his business around the world, absolutely. but then he won. and i think probably the scariest parts of what michael cohen said to rachel maddow in this interview was the beginning and the end part. at the end part, he says donald trump looks to someone like putin or someone like mohammed bin salman, and he sees a future for himself. now that he's win, he's like, i might as well just live like the other oligarchs that putin controls. if i'm just another one of the oligarchs and if they report up to putin and can become rich and they can have power and they can have endless money, why can't i?

donald trump looks to be junior putin now. he is an oligarch in training, a dictator in training because now that he's felt the power, now that he's begun to enjoy the unchecked power that unfortunately a weak, supine republican party, which unfortunately controls one-half of the congress has let him unleash on the country, right? they've let him act as king. and now that he's felt what it's like to be king, he doesn't want to leave. now he thinks maybe i will do 10 or 20 or 13 more -- however many i can get because, number one, it will keep me out of jail if you're thinking like him. and number two i can keep the money rolling in and maybe really benefit and get a pardon when it's over. and the beginning part of that interview was when rachel opened by asking why are you the one who's suffering here? and the reason he's suffering is there's a bigger, badder, much more wicked michael cohen in

business now, and his name is bill barr. bill barr, who we just found out tonight has had the justice department intervene in a civil lawsuit of a woman named e. jean carroll, who has accused this president of rape. now the justice department, the taxpayer-funded justice department is involved? michael cohen was out of jail, and he got snatched back and thrown back behind bars and was told by u.s. marshals, sign this thing to give away your right to free speech. give it away. give away your rights or you're going back to jail. that's terrifying because now that donald trump thinks he's the king, he's trying to act as king, and he has the power because of bill barr and the republican party to at least try to do it. >> let's listen to this piece where michael cohen is describing that donald trump is not the same person that he was before this presidential campaign and before this presidency and what's become of donald trump now. let's listen to this.

>> he's not the same person that i knew going back years ago. he was always gruff. he was always a certain way. but the power that he now has has gone to his head. he wants to be an autocrat. he wants to be the president of this country for life. he wants to be just like putin, just like kim jong-un, just like maduro. he wants to be just like mohammed bin salman. he craves this. he doesn't want to run for president, and that's why he says, what about 12 more years, 12 more years? he's not joking. understand donald trump doesn't have a sense of humor. >> john, that final line is something that professionals in comedy have pointed out to me, that donald trump doesn't have a sense of humor. there's just this emptiness and what michael cohen was describing as this craving for hanging on to power. >> yes. have you ever heard him laugh,

lawrence? it's like he doesn't have a sense of humor. not only does he not have a sense of humor in the sense that he doesn't tell a joke or say anything that's ever witty or clever, but you never see him with an easy chuckle. you never see donald trump guffaw. you never see him -- that part of him is dead, and i think it is the all-consuming narcissism. and now i think what cohen is saying here, i thought, you know, there are a lot of ways in which i think donald trump has changed since the time when michael cohen first knew him. i think michael cohen would have been fascinated to hear him what he thinks of donald trump's cognitive decline because i think that's equally obvious. but hand in hand with that cognitive decline over the last 10 to 15 years, there's also been, as hard as it is to believe, a swelling narcissism. i think that part of the clip goes to i think one of the things that joy was alluding to just now, which is trump never had power before, real power. i mean if anything, he was a man with his face pressed against the glass of the real power in

the moneyed world of new york city, in the financial world, in the world of real estate. he was an ariviste and a grasping one at that. the presidency has let him taste genuine power for the first time, and i think that speaks to the kind of ruthlessness that we now see and it does send a chill down the spine for anybody who's worried about the prospect that donald trump might not let go of office easily or at all in the face of an election result that he does not like in november. >> john heilemann and joy reid, thank you both very much for starting off our discussion tonight. really appreciate it. >> thanks, lawrence. >> thank you. and when we come back, daniel goldman will join us. he served as counsel to the house intelligence committee during the impeachment of donald trump. daniel goldman spent two days questioning michael cohen in a closed-door deposition. and michael cohen is still a witness working with prosecutors, and he explained to rachel that that's why he

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rachel asked michael cohen why he was the only one charged with a campaign finance crime of paying hush money to porn star stormy daniels to stay quiet about her sexual encounter with donald trump in what prosecutors called a criminal conspiracy against the united states of america to help elect donald

trump. >> the president's signature was on two of the checks. >> mm-hmm. >> at the very beginning, which i provided to congress as part of the open house testimony. why i'm the only one, it doesn't make sense. as i stated, i was acting at the direction of and for the benefit of mr. trump. and how i became the -- i'm not the one who had the affair. he did. i'm not the -- i am the dummy who paid $130,000 to keep it quiet. but this was my conversation with mr. trump, with allen weisselberg, and others, and i did it in order to protect him. and i guess the thank-you that i got from my loyal boss was michael cohen should, as i once said, take a bullet for him and lose everything, lose my freedom, my company, my law license, my family's happiness,

everything. >> joining us now is daniel goldman, the former majority counsel for the house impeachment inquiry and former director of investigations for the house intelligence committee. he's also a former assistant u.s. attorney for the southern district of new york. thank you very much for joining us tonight. i want to go right to that question of why was michael cohen the only one charged in that case in the southern district. why, for example, was allen weisselberg, the trump accountant who participated in that scheme to pay stormy daniels -- why wasn't he also charged? >> well, it's hard to tell. it's hard to look behind the veil. but the one biggest problem with any additional prosecutions is that michael cohen was not signed up as a cooperating witness and could not be used. so everything that you read in that book and everything that he's testified to is not helpful to the southern district of new york because for whatever reason -- and i suspect it's in large part because michael cohen did not fully admit his guilt to

the prosecutors in complete and a forthright manner about his other criminal conduct unrelated to donald trump -- that he wasn't usable as a cooperating witness. and you can't just put a book on the witness stand and say, hey, jury, read the book. you need to have the witness there who can be cross-examined. so, a, you have a problem with you can't charge a sitting president, individual-1 in this case. and, b, michael cohen is not usable as a witness. >> will the president -- if the president doesn't pardon himself before leaving office and say joe biden is sworn in on january 20th, based on what you understand the evidence to be, would donald trump, private citizen, be charged with this crime in the southern district of new york if he hasn't already pardoned himself for federal crimes? >> well, i said two years ago that if you have michael cohen as a witness, if you have david pecker as a witness, and you have the recording of michael cohen talking to donald trump about the payments, and then you

have the checks as corroboration for the repayment of michael cohen, that i would have charged that case against donald trump. but, again, the problem that you have is that michael cohen is not a usable witness. and if you don't have him as a witness to explain everything, it's very difficult to charge that case to a jury. >> what was your experience with michael cohen as a witness? you had two days that we didn't see, which was in closed-door deposition. then there was public testimony by michael cohen in the house. this was after he decided to come forward and tell what he presented as the truth about donald trump. >> right. he lied back in the summer of 2018 -- or actually '17, rather, sorry. he lied to the house tension committ -- intelligence committee. then he decided to come back in after pleading guilty to lying and he testified again. and i spent a few days with him

prior to this testimony, and then i led the deposition over the course of two days. and, look, at the end of the day, i think michael cohen is telling the truth when he's talking about donald trump. and there are a couple of things that really jump out to me. the first is his lies were in his self-interest, and what he professes to be the truth is against his self-interest. and that's always a very critical thing for anyone judging credibility. do the lies make sense? are they trying to benefit him, or are they bad for him? and when he told the truth, he admitted to crimes. so no one -- very few people, i should say, lie in order to incriminate themselves. and the second thing -- and you saw it in the interview with rachel tonight and it's sort of littered throughout the book. he doesn't overstate things. he doesn't say things that he doesn't know. and there's a strong temptation to do that. there's a strong temptation to say, oh, yeah, i heard donald

trump use the n-word. no one would be the wiser if that were not the case. or rachel asked a couple of questions. do you know were there was talk about don junior getting cut out of the will? do you know, you know, whether the sexual assault charges are true? he didn't say he knew these things. and the temptation for any witness who's trying to be persuasive is to give as much information as they can. but a real measure of credibility is when they recognize and acknowledge that there are many things that they don't know that could be damaging against the person that they're testifying against. >> i want to listen to something that michael cohen said at the beginning of the interview about what he's not permitted to discuss. let's listen to this. >> so you're right, i'm not -- i'm not permitted to discuss them other than to say that there are ongoing investigations

into all of the actions that everybody has heard about for so long, including the supreme court case that now exists in order to obtain mr. trump and the trump organization's tax returns. >> does that sound to you like he is a cooperating witness in the manhattan district attorney's investigation that is pursuing those tax returns? >> well, i know that he is. i know that he has provided information to the manhattan district attorney's office. it related to their ongoing investigation. he's provided information to other offices, and the manhattan district attorney's office does not have the same requirements that the southern district of new york does where you have to admit to all of your own criminal activities and wrongdoing. and so i strongly suspect that he is helping them and certainly given what we do know about that, it is a function of some of the tax issues that he has

raised, he raised in congress, and we now that the manhattan district attorney's office is looking into some of the business records issues. >> daniel goldman, there is no attorney with more legal authority over this subject than daniel gold man with your experience in the southern district and in the house committee council. we really appreciate you joining us tonight. >> my pleasure, lawrence. great to be with you. >> thank you. and when we come back, it has now been five days, just five days since jeffrey goldberg's reporting in "the atlantic" that quoted donald trump calling american soldiers killed in combat losers and suckers. and those comments have now been confirmed by multiple news organizations. "the washington post" reports that donald trump calls american soldiers who served in the war of his era, the vietnam war, losers. former secretary of state john kerry, a decorated combat veteran who served in vietnam, will join us next. and ask your doctor about biktarvy. biktarvy is a complete, one-pill,

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always uses superlatives about himself. donald trump is now insisting not only that he respects our military, that's not good enough for him. he is the best respecter of our military in the world according to donald trump. here's donald trump yesterday responding to reports, first by jeffrey goldberg in "the atlantic" and then "the washington post" that donald trump calls american soldiers killed in action losers. >> it's a disgrace. who would say a thing like that? only an animal would say a thing like that. there's nobody that has more respect for not only our military, but for people that gave their lives in the military. there's nobody. >> so there's donald trump trying to get people to believe that no one respects our military and war dead more than

donald trump, including everyone who has served in our military, including every american family who has lost a loved one in combat and including our next guest. john kerry, secretary of state in the obama administration, a former senator from massachusetts. secretary kerry served two tours in vietnam. he was awarded the silver star, bronze star with valor, and three purple hearts for his heroic service in combat. secretary kerry, thank you very much for joining us tonight. i want to give an open microphone to react to what we've learned about what donald trump has said about our war dead being losers and people serving in the military being losers. >> well, it's tragic. and obviously the president has been denying it quite vehemently, but what's really interesting about those denials, lawrence, is that the story

appears in "the atlantic" and at least four other major outlets, a.p., fox news, "new york times," "washington post" have all confirmed that these are the statements that the president made. and obviously it's extremely significant in my judgment that none of the generals who are cited in these stories have reputeuated the story. it is completely consistent, sadly, with an attitude that he has expressed for a long period of time. after all, he's quoted as having called his generals dopes and sissies. he has obviously attacked military people in service other a long period of time, most notably john mccain. it's there on tv to listen to. what he says he got captured, i don't like people when he got

captured. and he says i don't like losers when talk about john mccain. the credibility with the armed forces of the united states with the president is in serious jeopardy. these generals he has now attacked as saying that they just want to sell arms. which is the only way it appears this president can see anybody doing anything, that they want to make money, which is why he asked general kelly at the site of general kelly's son, quote, i don't get it. what was in it for them? he can only see transactional, that is what joe kelly apparently came to the conclusion after a certain period of time. so you juxtapose that with joe biden who's spent an enormous

time with his wife working for veterans. tyking care of veterans, respecting veterans. most importantly, joe biden is a military family. he and jill and his family are a military family. they sent their son off to war. they didn't try to exercise even the privileges they had available as vice president to get him some cushy job. and beau would have never had it any other way. so the distinction between these two men who are running for the presidency couldn't be more clear. i saw veteran after veteran ripping and tearing at the president, and that is not a good situation when you're asking young men and women to go off and put themselves in harm's way for their country. >> i want to ask you about a

quote that appeared -- a statement that the president that appeared in "the washington post" reporting that's specifically aimed at you and thousands, hundreds of thousands of others. he said it's as trump believed that people who served in the vietnam war must be losers because they hadn't gotten out of it according to a person familiar with the comments. now, most of your yale graduating class managed to get out of it. donald trump managed to get out of it. can you explain to donald trump why you volunteered? >> well, i said many times, i wrote about it and said it at the time. i said it when i came back and opposed the war, which a lot of people didn't like. people didn't like the fact that a veteran came back and spoke out against the war. but what i said was that my parents were greatest-generation parents. my dad volunteered to be in the army air corps, 1939. and my mother worked as a nurse. she happened to be in europe at

the time when the war broke out. she was taking care of refugees wounded, escaped front of the germans a day before they came in to occupy the city of paris. so i grew up with a sense of service and responsibility and believed that we all owe it to our country. of course president kennedy summoned our generation to that task. many of my closest friends at yale did volunteer, one of my closest friends, richard pershing, grandson of general pershing was killed in vietnam in 1968, and other great friends of mine were killed. so that is service. that is the greatest sacrifice. we've always called that. when you read abraham lincoln's speech at gettysburg, tiny speech that he wrote, three minutes, something, recorded for

all history because he understood what we owed the people who sacrificed. donald trump in paris when presented with the prospect of going to a rainy ceremony at the cemetery where they were going to celebrate the marines lost in world war i at belleau wood, his reaction was i don't want to get my hair wet. his reaction was that the marines who lost hair lives there were suckers. it just is such an appalling inability to understand as a president of the united states. and that's something that, you know, even the vets who came back after the war always honored the service of our fellow veterans despite the fact that bad things happened there. the vast majority of people who served in vietnam served with such honor and such distinction and gave their all in a situation where the politicians were letting them down every single day. a great tragedy for a country and one that we unfortunately

executed in another war of choice, which was iraq. but this is just -- the juxtaposition, between joe biden and donald trump could not be clearer. you look at people all over the world, they understand what's happened. donald trump we want on the howard stern show years ago and equated his chasing of women in new york as his vietnam. that's how he saw the world and i don't think it's changed very much since. >> we have to squeeze in a quick break. we'll discuss donald trump's refusal to object to vladimir putin for the poisoning of putin's strongest political opponent. we'll be right back with more with former secretary of state john kerry. (driver) i don't know what happened.

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navalny, the russian opposition leader, was poisoned, what do you think should be done to russia about that? what is your message to russia about that? and how should the international community and the united states respond? >> well, i think we have to look at it very seriously. if it's the case, and i think we will. so i don't know exactly happened. i think it's tragic, it's terrible, it shouldn't happen. we haven't had any proof yet, but i will take a look. >> mr. secretary, the president has not found a word to say about the poisoning of alexei navalny, russian dissident being treated in germany. he's not found a word to say about american troops being basically attacked by russian troops in syria, not an open fire, but vehicles going right at the american troops, injuring the american troops in the process. america has seen the video of

this, of this, you know, transgression against american troops, and not a word from the president of the united states. >> well, for whatever reason, lawrence, i think it's obvious by now, having witnessed the president's appearance in helsinki where we stood feet away from putin after having had a meeting with him, and he literally threw the entire american intelligence community over the bridge. i mean, he think threw them out saying in front of putin that he had denied that anything had happened, and he said, quote, i have no reason not to believe president putin. so in saying that, he was saying i have every reason not to believe the intelligence community of the united states. i think john mccain at the time called him one of the most infamous presidential moments that he ever witnessed, and clearly the president has never spoken out about the bounty on american troops, never raised it with president putin in any of

the phone calls to the best of any of our knowledge, never cited that he had, and has never said anything about the poisoning of navalny. so we have a president who for whatever reason is held in the spell of president putin and in those realities of all three of those scenarios, we have a president who is not protecting our troops, not protecting the interests of the united states of america, not upholding the constitution that is due to our nation. i think people need to stop and put all of this in a context of who they want to see as commander in chief of the armed forces of the united states. these young men and women are extraordinary in today's generation. they serve willingly, they're volunteers, and they deserve certainly a respect of the commander in chief if not every single american. >> the intelligence community

has found that russia is attacking our election process once again this time, trying to re-elect donald trump as president. what is at stake for vladimir putin and the russian government in our presidential election? >> well, what's at stake for vladimir putin, clearly, is whether or not there will be a president of the united states who will, in fact, be on the up and up and deal with him and hold him accountable. that doesn't mean he won't try to work with president putin: during the obama administration president obama managed to hold and vice president biden who devised the policy with the president, held putin accountable for the invasion of ukraine, for what happened in crimea, managed to put together a major reassurance program for the frontline states, $4.3 billion, sent troops to the frontline states,

adopted one country and others in nato adopted others to train and provide capacity to make it clear that this was not going to stand, and brought europe together to sanction president putin and russia. and those sanctions were raised repeatedly over the course of the next years because of actions that president putin took. but even as he did that, president obama managed to work with russia on key things and to try to work with them on the iran nuclear agreement, on global climate change and the paris agreement, on any number of other things because that's what you have to do. and president trump has clearly evidenced an absolute lack of calibration capacity. there's no ability to be able to manage the crisis and be firm and still hold president putin accountable for whatever else it is and cooperate where capable. he simply has surrendered the

presidency apparently to president putin and russian interests, and i think every american needs to be deeply concerned about that. >> former secretary of state john kerry, thank you once again for doing us the honor of joining our discussion. we really appreciate it. >> glad to be with you. thank you so much. coming up, 56 days, only 56 days until election day, and joe biden's campaign has set fund-raising records while donald trump's campaign is in financial trouble. and battleground state polls show joe biden winning the electoral college. all of that next with john heilemann.

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after joe biden's record-setting $365 million fund-raising haul for the month of august, a new report details frivolous spending inside the trump re-election campaign that has erased the trump campaign's massive financial advantage. "the new york times" reports of the $1.1 billion his campaign and the party raised from the

beginning of 2019 through july, more than $800 million has already been spent. now some people inside the campaign are forecasting what was once unthinkable, a cash crunch with less than 60 days until the election. joe biden's campaign has been outspending the trump campaign in tv advertising over the last week, including in six key battleground states where starting today, voters see ads like this. >> this is our chance to put the darkness of the past four years behind us, to end the anger, the insults, the division, the violence, and start fresh in america. we can stop focusing on a president who thinks it's all about him and start focusing on what's best for us. we need to get control over the virus. donald trump failed. joe biden will get it done. >> john heilemann is back with us. and, john, i want to put up the nbc battleground map right now,

which is a conservatively arrived at approximation. they're giving joe biden 290 electoral votes as of tonight, which would be 20 more than he needs. donald trump at 163. 85 were a toss-up. but biden, even if donald trump wins every toss-up state, biden is still president. how did we get to the spot where the trump campaign is struggling for cash? >> oh, lawrence, there's going to be quite -- it's going to be books written, movies made about this. how we got there is we got a bunch of grifters, a bunch of thieves, a bunch of charlatans running a campaign in the way that they approach all of their business dealings, who took over this campaign and saw it as a slush fund rather than as a crusade, who were mercenaries, not missionaries. you know, donald trump, i think,

there's a reason why brad parscale is not running the campaign any longer. that was not -- they were losing, and they were losing in a profligate way, and it was clear that brad parscale and a lot of his friends, people on the edges of the campaign, were getting rich in the process. and donald trump is not someone -- does not take well to that under the best of circumstances, and these are not the best of circumstances. lawrence, it's one thing to blow your cash advantage, to blow one of the main advantages that an incumbent president has always over a challenger. you don't have to have primaries. you don't have to spend money gaining the nomination. he ran unopposed, and they managed to flow that. it's one thing to blow all that

money and be ahead. donald trump's not ahead as you just pointed out. he's losing -- right now, he's losing enough without, you know, on the most conservative estimate if the election were held today, he'd lose, and that's a pretty conservative estimate. there's not a battleground state where donald trump is ahead right now, and there's a lot of states that donald trump is playing defense on that he won pretty comfortably in 2016. >> and every, i guess, 7-year-old in america can remember five years ago when donald trump said he would pay for the campaigns himself. he didn't need any donations at all. here he is running out of money having spent an awful lot of that campaign money on himself and his own businesses. >> we needed to spend more money upfront because of the pandemic and the statements being made by democrats. but the press was fake, and we have to spend a lot of money. no, if we need -- if we did need -- we don't because we have much more money than we had last time going into the last two months. i think double and triple. but if we needed any more, i'd put it up personally. >> john, how much is he going to put up personally? >> oh, lawrence, let's you and i admit that we can say right here you and i agree the answer to that is the big old goose egg. the big fat donut, a big stinkin' hairy zero. you're good at picking up donald

trump's lies, lawrence. that one was not -- you don't have to be as good as lawrence o'donnell at calling the lies of donald trump to know that one was a lie. >> john heilemann gets tonight's last word. and once again, the last word is "lie." thank you, john. really appreciate it. that is tonight's last word. well, good evening once again. glad to be back with you. as we come on the air, day 1,328 of the trump administration. 56 days remain until the presidential election. and tonight the president is driving home that law and order message on the campaign trail. he held his 21st campaign rally of the year 2020 in north carolina tonight. he mocked the idea of social distancing. he said a biden victory will crush the economy, destroy the u.s. suburbs. indeed, much of the crowd was unmasked. seating was pre-pandemic