Trump vows to stop communist 'threat' but fails to denounce white nationalists marching in DC

[0:01] We are grappling with big questions about our nation's identity on the line right now. [0:05] I want to bring in Laura Barone-Lopez, who's covering the White House. [0:08] Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, history professor at Rice University and co-author [0:12] of The Nixon Tapes. [0:14] And Miles Taylor is former chief of staff at the DHS during President Trump's first [0:18] term. [0:18] And he's a founder and executive director of Defiance.org. [0:22] A pleasure to have all of you as we dig into what was a busy weekend and one with big [0:27] ramifications. [0:27] Laura, I just want to get to the meat of what the president was talking about, but [0:31] it really struck me that there was a video that circulated over the weekend of Trump basically [0:35] watching Fox News watch him. [0:37] It felt a bit on the nose to me, if not a bit odd, emblematic in many ways of how Freedom [0:42] 250 might have wanted this celebration to go, partly America, but mostly Trump. [0:47] Yeah, it's a perfect encapsulation of what this weekend was and what these 250th celebrations [0:55] have been about because, again, alone in and of itself, the fact that Freedom 250, a Trump-backed [1:01] organization, was running the entire celebrations, the state fair on the mall, versus that bipartisan, [1:08] nonpartisan group that was established by Congress, that had been established for years [1:13] now, getting ready to prepare for this, shows how much this became about President Trump and [1:20] about his movement and about his supporters. And the president made very clear, he called [1:23] it repeatedly a Trump rally, and that these were going to be the biggest Trump rallies and [1:30] the most monumental of his presidency, be it the Mount Rushmore or the one here on the mall [1:34] over the weekend. [1:35] So, and he very much made the speech. It was kind of like his greatest hits. He did talk [1:40] about the country being a great nation, but he also, again, attacked his enemies, talked [1:46] about communism, which, as you laid out, these Democrats are not communists. But it reminds [1:52] me a lot of also 2018 midterms, heading into then, when the president made the midterms about [1:58] two things. He made it very anti-immigrant, warning of caravans that never appeared alongside [2:03] the border, but also attacking Democrats as socialists. And now this is his 2026 version of [2:11] that. [2:12] Yeah, it's all just a continuation. Everything is a shade of something else. And I agree, [2:16] out of the hundreds of Trump rallies that I've been to over the course of my career, [2:19] the one that he gave on the mall just the other night felt very much like that. Miles, [2:25] I want to come back to what I played of Doug Burgum talking about the white nationalists, [2:30] where there was an opportunity, multiple of them, by Dan Abash to give a stronger rebuke [2:35] that he missed and that, frankly, the president himself didn't carry in his own remarks that came [2:40] hours after that march through our nation's capital. You know, it feels like a carryover as we think [2:46] about these threads that Laura and I were talking about from the first Trump administration when it [2:50] was a march in Charlottesville. I wonder if you saw the parallels to Miles and what you made of this. [2:55] Well, Ali, I'm glad you asked. I felt compelled to write about this this morning on defiance.org [3:04] because it was so eerily similar to what we saw in Charlottesville. And almost 10 years later, [3:11] it's the completion of that arc. Remember, in Charlottesville, Donald Trump said after his [3:16] own attorney general said there was a terrorist attack, that there were very fine people on both [3:21] sides. I can't think of another time, Ali, that an American president has said of a terrorist [3:26] attack, that there were very fine people on both sides. And look at where that has gotten us. [3:32] On America's 250th birthday, it is acceptable for white supremacist extremists to effectively lead [3:40] their own parades into the United States Capitol. But these are not isolated incidents, Ali. This is [3:48] U.S. policy to treat these people like patriots instead of to treat them like violent extremists. [3:56] In the first term, I led terrorism prevention for Donald Trump in the administration. And I could [4:02] not get the White House to talk about domestic terrorism in the president's national security [4:09] strategy. Why? Because the president saw people like this as his supporters, not as violent extremists [4:17] that the United States should be wary of. And that showed up in U.S. government policy. The president [4:22] did not want to fund those issues. He did not want to talk about those issues. And then you saw him say [4:27] things like to the Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. So it should have been no surprise that at the [4:34] culmination of his first term, there was a domestic terrorist attack on the United States Capitol by these [4:40] types of elements. And to complete the inversion, with Donald Trump coming back into office, those folks [4:45] weren't treated as terrorists. They were pardoned. They've been offered a multi-billion dollar slush fund. [4:52] And now, of course, Donald Trump is refusing to condemn people of a similar ideology marching [4:57] through the Capitol in masks. I do also wonder, Laura, though, the fact that in the instance of [5:03] Charlottesville, when that happened, there was mass outcry in bipartisan fashion, the need for the president [5:09] to be morally clear about what happened. He obviously wasn't. But that didn't mean that there [5:15] wasn't backlash against it. What does it say? And I get that the Hill is out. Lawmakers are not as [5:19] easily available. But this does feel like a moment where it could be easy to say, this is not what our [5:24] country stands for. It is an easy moment to say that. I asked the White House explicitly, does the [5:30] president condemn this group, this white supremacist group, and what they stand for? And they haven't [5:35] responded to that. And you see Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, twisting himself, trying not [5:41] to answer. I think that Republicans have, most Republicans have made clear that they are following [5:46] the president and his movement on this, which is that they have, you know, yes, they said no to the [5:52] anti, some of them said no to the anti-weaponization fund for January Sixers. But by and large, the party [5:57] has gone along with Trump as he has revised history on January 6th, has implicitly, if not explicitly, [6:05] condoned the actions on January 6th. And they ignore questions, including Janine Pirro recently [6:12] pressed about the millions in damages done to the Capitol and why people who committed those damages [6:18] were let go or pardoned versus people being charged currently for the reflecting pool damage that the [6:25] administration is alleging. So when you talk to domestic violent extremists and trackers who have [6:32] studied these groups, be it the Proud Boys, be it Patriot Front, who believes, by the way, that America [6:36] should be a white ethno state, they say that when the president and Republicans refuse to condemn this, [6:43] it sends signals to those groups that what they're doing is okay, and that they can continue to do it. [6:48] And marching in broad daylight through our nation's capital at that. You know, Douglas, [6:53] I want to play some of what the president did speak to during those July 4th remarks. Listen to that. [6:58] America will never be a communist country. Won't happen. Communism is a loser, and it always will be. [7:12] The communist system is the opposite of the American system, and the communist system has never worked. [7:19] Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world, only to have that menace rear its [7:26] ugly head right back here in America. We're not going to let it happen. We'd like to stop a threat like [7:36] that immediately and before it begins. It's like a cancer. You got to cut it out. You got to cut it [7:42] out fast. And we were talking, Douglas, about the ways that the president chose the word socialist when [7:49] really it's he chose the words communist when really we're talking about the rise of socialism [7:54] within the Democratic Party. I mean, what do you make of that word choice? And I wonder if it's a [7:59] reflection of polls showing a certain amount of energy behind socialism right now, but Republicans [8:06] trying to brand Democrats in more radical terms. I wonder what you see here. [8:10] Well, what I see is Donald Trump's deciding to use communism as his campaign rally for the Republicans [8:18] as we head into the midterms after the summer. I mean, it's a straight from Joe McCarthy, former [8:25] senator of Wisconsin who was a race baiter and created a red scare in the 1950s by just doing a [8:33] broad brush sweep. You're a communist if you have any kind of progressive value. Obviously, [8:39] Bernie Sanders is a Democratic socialist, for example. But Trump will try to paint the AOC and [8:48] Bernie Sanders, Mondami as communist in America. And he's going to run on that because it's a broad [8:55] way to just label any progressive that's, you know, rising in one of these states primaries or [9:03] elections. Yeah. Miles, on Sunday morning, Elon Musk responded to a tweet from former L.A. [9:10] mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt, who said it's OK to love America. Musk wrote back to him, [9:15] not merely OK, anyone who doesn't love America is a traitor and beneath contempt. Those who don't [9:20] love America, those who are disloyal should be exiled immediately. And frankly, Trump actually said [9:25] something similar at his Mount Rushmore speech. He said, you have to love what we've built. You must [9:29] love our country. And I wonder if you think that's something we're going to hear more of as we head [9:34] into the midterms. And they're using words about patriots and traitors that are just so deeply [9:39] evocative at a point in our country's history where simple disagreement with this administration [9:44] labels you as something where you're you might just have a difference of opinion and you might just [9:48] be striving for the better ideals of this nation. Ali, when I've been thinking about this a lot [9:56] over the past week for obvious reasons, when this country was founded, dissent was considered one [10:03] of the single most patriotic things you can do. In fact, the country was built to offer the opportunity [10:10] for people to dissent without fear of retribution by the government. We are seeing right now in this [10:19] moment, mark my words, the criminalization of dissent in the United States of America. Criminalization is [10:26] not an exaggeration. I sit here as one of the guests on your show being investigated by the federal [10:32] government for treason because I criticized the man that I used to work for. That is antithetical [10:40] to its core of what the founding fathers envisioned this country to be. And I'm just a little tiny data [10:47] point on that map now because the president of the United States has gone after news networks, [10:52] including this one. He's gone after broadcasters. He's gone after specific journalists. He's gone [10:57] after organizations. He's gone after small businesses. He's gone after members of Congress [11:01] who he's tried to jail for critiquing him, who he's tried to jail for restating the law. [11:09] That is how severe it is. But it's bigger than Donald Trump. And I'm glad you pointed to Elon Musk's tweet [11:16] because this is the scary thing about the second term compared to the first term is it has infected [11:22] other people. This view, this inversion that dissent is patriotism into dissent is treason has now been [11:30] picked up by the president's most popular, most wealthy, biggest microphone supporters and pushed [11:39] down throughout his movement. That's why we're not talking about a person that I once called a [11:43] want to be despot being the only issue. He has created a movement that supports his effort [11:50] to bring despotic powers into the Oval Office. That's how serious this is.