Trump Asked to "Stay Away" from MAGA Campaigns

0:00We told them he cannot come. Stay away. That's what senior Republicans just said about their own president. Republicans across the country are telling Donald Trump we don't want you in our districts to stay far away from their districts this fall, a stunning turning point just two months before the midterms. And it comes as Trump is making a shocking admission about why he's building monuments to himself. We have a mistrial in the lens, a clansic case, and so much more. As always, if you can, subscribe to support this work. It was a busy week. And I just want to thank each and every one of you, my sincere gratitude to all of you. This isn't always easy. The news isn't always fun. Rarely it is these days, but we are making a difference. We're fighting for the release of the Epstein files and the survivors. We educate many, especially young people, and we're staying in the McConnell beat when no one else will. So thank you. Thank you to those who fund this work. Thank you to those who share this work. Like, comment, get the word out.

1:00Let's talk about the big story of the day, though. The remarkable story arguably. Because Republicans are telling Donald Trump to stay away in what's being described as a major turning point for his party. Privately right now, lawmakers and battleground states have relayed to Donald Trump's political team that they don't want him campaigning in their districts. And top Republican pollsters are advising vulnerable candidates to even stop talking about Trump on the campaign trail. Quote, we've told them he cannot come when senior Republican involved in a competitive House race, said adding that Trump's team wouldn't send him without their approval and that they wouldn't campaign alongside him, even if he showed up anyway. On one hand, while Republicans are desperate, they desperately need Donald Trump's massive $400 million more chest. On the other hand, they're terrified that it's sacking approval ratings and unpopularity in the war on Iran will drag down the candidates left and right, especially those in tight races. Trump himself wants to be heavily involved. He told battleground Republicans at a Rose Garden dinner this week that he'll

2:05campaign hard in the final 30 days, but they told him, no, some Republicans are even removing the, quote, America first fighter off their records off their websites and instead are saying Kentucky first, for example, from a Kentucky politician. And it's not just the candidates who are keeping their distance. Melania Trump is too. She's skipping Trump's midterm convention in Dallas next week, a White House official confirmed to the independent joining at least 45 Republican lawmakers who've all told political they won't attend either. And it comes as Donald Trump made a genuinely stunning admission about himself. He said that the reason why he's building all these monuments, why he's renaming things after himself, well, it's because, quote, no one else will do it. That's what he told New York magazine, a stunning moment of, in a way, self-reflection, acknowledging that should, should he essentially leave office, he will leave office, but when he leaves

3:09office, no one's going to come in and build monuments for him. You're not going to have the Donald J. Trump Memorial, like you do Abraham Lincoln or the Washington Monument or the Jefferson Memorial, because this president has left a mark and it's not a particularly good one. And it comes as even Tetris is rebuking the presidency. Donald Trump used your taxpayer dollars to launch arcade.gov, a video game system on the White House website where kids can pretend to build the border wall. And the way they do it is by playing Tetris and Tetris is saying, hold on, that is copyright and infringement threatening the president of the United States seemingly with potential legal action. If you continue to use Tetris on official government websites, you don't see this every day. But you also don't see this every day. Trump threatening the Federal Reserve that if it doesn't reduce interest rates that we will cut off trade, countries across the world, launch trade wars

4:13across the world. That's what he's saying here. Lower the rate, we're all stopped trading with countries with which we have a deficit. And when we talk about the war in Iran to him, it's small potatoes. I'm going to talk about first part of the question. Mr. President, the Vice President said yesterday that he would not describe the conflict with the Iran as a war. But the U.S. resumed strikes for the first time in recent weeks. Can you explain to the American people if this is not a war? What exactly is it? Well, I tell you what, a lot of people don't call it a war. I call it a military conflict because it's small potatoes for us. It's not a big thing. We did Venezuela. And we did this. And Venezuela, we lost nobody. And this we lost 18 people. And in Vietnam, we lost 100,000 people and another conflict. You lost tens of thousands of people. I would say that it's intermittent. You know, it's just small potatoes for us. That's what the President of the United States is saying today in the Oval Office, referring to the war, where 18 Americans have lost

5:14their lives. It's real. And it's happening right now in this moment. And it comes as today, Lindsey Clancy trial was declared a mistrial. Prosecutors are deciding right now whether to retry Lindsey Clancy for the murder of her three kids. She faces three first to be murdered, charges still. Now that there's a mistrial, they've been declared and so much more. Tonight, I wanted to bring you an interesting conversation. It may not get the most views, but I found it very interesting and I want you to hear about it too. I sat down with a woman by the name Laura Porter. Laura Porter is the leader of the United States campaign to end the death penalty. And a lot of people have been talking about the death penalty recent years and have expressed support or opposition for it. And we've seen a major trend interestingly away from the death penalty. It's something I've researched for a long time personally. I've spent, I don't know, nearly a decade

6:18researching capital punishment in the United States of America and across the globe. So let me nerd out for a second. But I want you to listen to the conversation I had with Laura and let me know what you think. And as always, if you can, support this work. Subscribe today, like, comment, share. We're going to have some big updates coming soon and stay tuned for more excited to be joined today by Laura Porter, who is the US lead for the US campaign to end the death penalty. Laura, I'm really excited to talk to you about this issue because it's an issue that honestly I have thought about for over a decade now and done a ton of research into, but most of Americans don't really talk about the death penalty on a day today. So if you can, give us a kind of, what is the landscape looking like right now in the United States as it relates to capital punishment? It's very interesting what's going on right now. I think the public in general in the United States are moving away from the death penalty. We have seen, Gallup is one of the only cultures that pulls the population year after year at the same time every year asking the same questions.

7:20And the last poll, which was last November, was we were at a 40 year low in support of the death penalty. And what I think was most interesting, maybe well, then to your audience is that people under 50, a majority of the people under 50 do not support the death penalty. At the same time, there's a real disconnect between that move away from the death penalty and historically low new death sentences. And an effort by the current Trump administration to kind of reach into the states and try to get execution moving at unprecedented recent unprecedented pace. And also to expand the use of the death penalty by passing legislation that increases the use. One piece of legislation that I found or one trend line that I kind of interesting in Florida, and I want to get your opinion on it, is the movement away from unanimity when it comes to imposing capital punishment in certain cases. Now in Florida, you don't you no longer need a unanimous jury to come back with a death sentence. It arguably hasn't been challenged in front of

8:24the Supreme Court yet. I'm sure it's something that's going to get up to the Supreme Court. Where do you envision that going? Do you envision states moving towards something more like Florida, where even it's now you can get capital punishment for non homicide related offenses as well? I don't anticipate that so far. We have no indication that there it does seem to be an accepted premise that a unanimous jury is necessary for a death sentence. It wasn't always that case, but we've moved away from that. Florida is the only state that's really moved backwards. And where they are right now, only requiring a jurors has been unprecedented and is in my mind, you know, very, very alarming because the point of a jury in a death sentence is to have to do that deliberation, have to think through those hard things and communicate with each other. And if you don't need unanimity, then you don't need to have those hard conversations. If you want to get your thoughts on this constant talking point from folks saying, well, the people getting the death penalty are the worst of the worst in American society. These are

9:27serial killers, your murderers. I mean, they commit horrific crimes. Why shouldn't they be sentenced to death? What do you say? I think that the strongest argument to me about why the death penalty, we should not have the death penalty is that it's run by human beings and that human beings are fallible. And so that every stage of the process of the death penalty, there can be flaws and imperfect application unfair and bias application mistakes being made. And so that it doesn't work out that way. It doesn't work out that that that a serial killer versus another type of crime is the one who's getting the death sentence. That's not how it works out. There are many cases where there's numerous victims that don't get sentenced. There's many cases where there's a kind of robbery gone bad that does get a death sentence. Oh, crime is horrible. And the loss of life is horrible. But I don't press the government to decide and distinguish which of those cases that are eligible for the death

10:31penalty because we are flawed and we've made mistakes. Earlier this year, there was a case involving a man by the name of Tony Carruthers, a death row inmate in Tennessee, where there was a failed execution of Carruthers. Could you talk a little bit about the case for folks who don't know what happened? Yes. Proceeding the attempted execution on Tony Carruthers, there was a swell of movement of people trying to stop the execution at Tony Carruthers because of legitimate questions and incents. There was serious, serious questions about the informant testimony in his case, and particularly around that there was DNA and fingerprint evidence that had not been tested. And he had insisted on his innocence for decades and for years. And so there was just a request to get this information tested to get this evidence tested. Those please were rejected and they went forward with the

11:32execution. And then everything went wrong like the execution. The person that was in charge, the doctor that was in charge of overseeing the execution when they were trying to insert IV lines. They were unsuccessful and the usual attempts of accessing the vein so they had to try to do a central line and that ended up being a debacle. The doctor who was overseeing it had not performed a central line in more than a decade and had made that very clear and earlier litigation stage of documenting the will, how they were going to see with executions and they failed to execute Mr. Carruthers and it was it was excruciating. What's the status of the case right now? He got a year reprieve, a temporary year reprieve. And so right now he cannot be scheduled for execution for a year.

12:34And not where it is right now. I want to also ask you about the federal government's expansion of the use of the death penalty. Obviously, President Biden, pardon, pardon, gave clemency to all death row inmates and removed their sentences from death to life in prison, excluding, I believe, one or two inmates on death row. There has been a push by those in the administration to either to expand the use of the death penalty but also expand the methods by which the death penalty can be used. Where do you see that going? Do you see this administration ramping up executions between now and I don't know, they end of Trump's term? There's not that many people as you name. And so you have to have been done. Each case cannot be scheduled for execution unless it's done with all of its appellate process. So I don't know in terms of whether the time will run out before the Trump administration is over or whether there will be a case that is eligible for execution

13:40during the time that he's president. But they are looking to expand the method of executions that the federal government can use and not just these land action looking to expand the firing squad. Has the Supreme Court held that the firing squad is constitutional? So far they have not held it is unconstitutional. I think that there are going to be arguments that will go forward but there are states that have used the fire squad most recently, South Carolina. Most recently, South Carolina. Okay. And I think moving forward, I guess if you had to predict where this the trend line will go with capital punishment in American 10 years, 15 years time, what would you say? Well, I'm a cock-eyed optimist and I have to be in my line of work, but I do think that Americans are looking for a more effective response to violence and one that actually evidence-based responses that prevent violence going forward and help those who are harmed.

14:42And the death penalty does not know that. And I think that what we're seeing is so few new descendences that is also the public speaking and saying that we're not interested in the death penalty and fewer prosecutors are seeking descendences. And so on the front end, it's dwindling away. And so I think I'm hopeful that over time, the policy will be let go. This will not be seen as an effective response to violence and that will look for other ways to hold accountability, help those harmed and prevent violence going forward. Laura Porter, thanks so much for the time. Thank you.