i'm pacing because i didn't get my steps in today and i've i asked them to give me a handheld microphone so if it's not too annoying i'm probably going to just sort of prowl around the stage and i'm going to try something different so i've been i have a new book out it's called a colony in a nation and i'll be signing books afterwards urge you to pick it up move some product and you know you do this thing where you're on book tour i've been on book tour for a week and a half now and it is to go back to the politician analogy it is like being on the stump right so you kind of develop your stump speech talking to try something haven't been doing we're going to start with the news today well it's funny you know i've been not doing that because not nice to get a respite from the news and i think i was you know i was in philadelphia and i came out and i gave a sort of twenty five minute talk about the book and the origins of the metaphor that sort of guides the conceptual architecture of the book and at about twenty five minutes i mention the president i say it's i said donald trump you're like and i was like i may be twenty five minutes but no such luck for you tonight so today at the white house today at the white house there was a meeting in the white house about the now there's a number of things happening with the opioid epidemic just to set is context that i think are important it's hard i mean having written this book and having lived through the years of hysteria around crack for instance in the one nine hundred ninety s i am accustomed to bring to bear a certain kind of skepticism when people talk about a drug is an epidemic often there can be a kind of panic button that gets hit and often that panic button can lead to instituting policies that are counterproductive at best and brutally punitive at worst all of that said what's happening right now in this country with place called mcdowell county west virginia and the dallas county west virginia's the southern part of that state it's in coal country it's it's a very poor place it has the lowest life expectancy of any county in the united states  its population forty eight percent of them are on medicaid and it has the highest rate of drug induced deaths per one hundred thousand in the united states that rate is one hundred forty one per hundred thousand now to give you some statistical context for that rate the highest that the homicide rate ever got in new york city in one thousand nine hundred one of the peak years of new york the nation national murder capital was thirty per one hundred thousand when i was in our high school auditorium in mcdowell and i was in a room that was smaller than this but but large and i ask people to raise their hand if they had lost a loved one to opioids basically every hand went up so that's the that's the context that the public health crisis that's happening right now in this country i'll give one more bit of context which is about how this came about it's a very complicated story i'm not an expert on it but largely this came about through the prescription of painkillers but we did a story on my show before we went down to mcdowell county about a drug store in a town called kermit now kermit is a tiny town kermit's got four hundred people in it and kermit is adjacent county and over the course of two years there's one drugstore and kermit town of four hundred people over the course of two years american pharmaceutical wholesalers  distributors shipped nine million pills into a town of four hundred people into one drugstore now these distributors are actually required by law to file reports when they suspect that there is illicit  traffic and one would think that i'm not some sort of code jockey but you could write an algorithm pretty easy to tell you something was afoot they've filed over the course of seven years i think and i'm not remembering particularly is something like two or three of these forms so they knew they were doing so that's the context that brings us to today and before i even get to today one of the most interesting parts of the campaign to me were the town halls that happened particularly new hampshire at the be end of twenty fifteen the beginning twenty sixteen to remember those here you have all these politicians of they've come to new hampshire they're inside the iconic snow covered barns and they're there to talk about whatever they're there to talk about but they're doing town halls and people are standing up and question after question after questions about  genuinely changed the trajectory of the conversations and the policy discussion because of that so today the president ited states has a meeting and in this meeting there are a variety of individuals one of them is chris christie i haven't said anything yet now chris christie was very happy to be in washington today and the reason he was happy to be in washington was because a man by the name of bill baroni was his chief ally the port authority and his former deputy chief of staff were being sentenced to a combined three and a half years to prison for their own bridge gate but chris christie had other things to do he was at this meeting and chris christie has spoken powerfully to his credit about having empathy for folks who are in the grips of addiction for treating them with compassion and treatment and there are some other people there there was the director of the da the drug enforcement ministration there were two people who were who were addicts who were former addicts who had gotten clean and the president starts off by talking about the drugs that are pouring over the southern border they're pouring over the border i talked about on the campaign they're just coming over in general kelly is doing a great job down there but they're still pouring over and what pretense pires in the meeting is is darkly hilarious because it's of variety people are actual experts gently trying to tell the most powerful person the world is not really about the border so gently the drug bring the medicine in your medicine cabinets i e not medicine that came from mexico and and you could bring that into our five thousand local partners who will take that off your hands and there are two individuals there who both got  oxycontin and they're talking about their struggles and after that they go around the da a president he crosses his arms like this looks at the d a goes but would you say it's really a problem at the border i thought this was such an important moment and it crystallized for me something really profound because i've been thinking a lot about the border in the context of the election and if you go back if you were watching the election is as closely as i happen to he talked about the border all the time the border the border border and he's not the first person there was a period of time particularly around two thousand and six in two thousand and seven i was the washington bureau chief of  the nation magazine and i was covering the mccain kennedy comprehensive immigration reform ok and i would talk to folks in the immigration debate who wanted to restrict immigration they would talk border the border is overrun and you saw it again in this campaign the border the border i would think to myself watching this like he's there in mahoning county ohio and it's like what do you care about the border or erie county pennsylvania or no show wisconsin like what's it to you i mean like what are they going to flow across the border and then make their way to m honing and get a job but the border wasn't really about the border right the president's focus today on the border in the context of an opioid epidemic that largely was driven by american pharmaceutical companies prescribing and distributing ungodly amounts of opioids is not about the border and why they go back to the border what is that about what is the border obsession about the border to me is about order you're in a place that is experiencing what to you in a subjective sense and based on the statistics that we have available decline a decrease in the standard of living social unraveling disorder and the border a border wall represents the antidote right the antidote to disorder is order the antidote to unruliness to invasion is barrier for citizen protection and there's something about that that appeals to the deepest part of our shared socio political and cultural d n a as a people the first diary entry that the captain of the ship that settles jamestown makes is he says first entry as soon as we came to shore we were set upon by the savages the experience of the settlements were an experience of conquest they were an experience of ethnic cleansing but in a first person sense they were an experience of constant terror what lay out past the clearing what out in the woods and it's the same experience of the frontier an experience of conquest of ethnic cleansing but also an experience by those doing the conquering of fear what lays out past the frontier what lays out past the border will they come and take it back the experience of the slave patriarch resting his head on his pillow in his plantation in the low country in south carolina he is in control and yet every day he reads posts in the local paper that circulated to the slavers of slave rebellion cautioning him not to take to light a hand cautioning him that his only backstop if they come for him is the gun and the force of violence now in all of these cases our moral object of concern isn't with the delicate sensibilities of the slaver right of the  our moral concern is with the people who are on the wrong side of the whip and the wrong side of the gun and the wrong side of the disease but as a descriptive matter it is a through line of the american project to conquer and subdue territory not your own to bring into your sense of order a disorder land and to be animated at every moment that it may fall back into disorder that it may be taken back that you painted a lynch mobs the expression of the ultimate in white supremacist terrorism the tool by which reconstruction was destroyed years of social progress are raced for that they are protecting themselves hundred sixty eight richard nixon comes to stand at the podium in miami beach for the republican national convention to give his convention speech and the context for that speech in one thousand nine hundred sixty eight is a country that is racked with disorder are protests there are riots there have been two of the most wrenching assassinations in the nation's history between m l k an hour of k our cities are burning he says and tonight it is time for  frank discussion about the problem of order in this country this speech would sort of come to be known as the law and order speech had always sort of thought about law and order as being about the law one nation under law equal justice under law the law and all it represents in a liberal democracy but in doing the research for this book and in watching that richard nixon speech it becomes very clear that what he's really talking about is the order part of it society had grown disorderly the social order had come unravel and that order had to be reasserted in fact if you tolerated disorder if you tolerated chaos you would lead to crimin it's around this time that something remarkable happens in american history which has never happened before or since which is the largest uptick in crime in the nation's history right now this crime wave is is very real it's not some social construction it's not the paranoid feverish imagination of people who are the shared inheritors of our cultural heritage who are maybe disposed to be fearful homicides general violent crimes go up about four hundred percent it is it this time that a new kind of politics develops that draws on old kind of politics it's at this time that law and order politics make themselves felt from every race from dogcatcher up to present united states and that fear that white fear that white fear one of the most powerful forces in politics of course that if you cultivate your enriching political uranium for a nuclear weapon it is brought to bear and the arguments are so seductive this lawlessness this crime you fear in a city that after the civil rights movement is starting to integrate rapidly we can protect you from it we could punish the evil doers and the thugs and the criminals who threaten to overrun it's at the same moment that much of the civil rights struggle for desegregation particularly comes to northern cities where often they are beat back the infamous boston busing riots for instance fights over affordable housing and in every thrust and parry of every municipal dispute between a homeowner's association or a school district or city council district about where this housing is going to be placed and who's going to be in this school district borders are being dr and i had just started i lived in the bronx and i just started going down to manhattan every day to go to a public magnet school that took kids from all five boroughs and  school was on one of these borders on one side in the neighborhood that i went to school in ninety fourth street madison was the upper east side which is affluent and white on the other side of the border was east harlem which is poor and black and brown and at this time which was new york city in the crack years and at its peak violent we got jacked all the time it was just a sort of routine i remember going to a dance one night i was walking with these girls who i was trying to impress and this kid came up and he's like run your bus pass and i was like what he's like i said give me your fucking wallet and i want to be like actually that's not what you said he said run your bus pass but i reached into my wallet i knocked it down on the ground and i was maybe going to try to take it back in the whistle and this group of kids came up and they looked at me and i just gave my bus pass and they went off and i felt angry and i felt humiliated and i felt emasculated and that was just one time nothing ever bad happened to me i didn't really get roughed up in any way i never faced any lethal threats or anything but it was a condition of walking through the city to have that in the back your head i was talking to some friends when i when i was going through the final draft of this book and i was rereading the portions of the book that were about this time my life and thinking i was being a little overly dramatic and i was in a park with these friends of mine who i'm still friends with today who also went to school and there's actually someone in this audience who was there with me not not there but at the school and i was like did i am i imagining that know dude like we would have when we were twelve like the cool thing at the time and this will hit like a certain age group exactly right only ninety's kids will  understand like we all had sports with a cool back yes nice yeah yeah i remember that you know i mean do you guys do the thing here on the west coast where you can collected those little the little strings that's as a go one do they went to high school with me is clapping like i don't know you're talking about but not only did you wear jan's part like you were against low on your back like super low so it wasn't comfortable because that was cool and so when you walked it just like hit your but like this but the thing about wearing your jet your gen sport that low is that you couldn't really run with it so what would happen is like you'd be walking around and you kind of like looking around gazing what's going on the city and like who's over there and who's over there and who's over there and maybe like out of the corner of your eye you would send some threat and then you'd like grab the straps and go you know that that fear was there the whole time and it wasn't just me obviously the city felt it and when rudy giuliani ran for mayor in this context what he was promising new yorkers in particular white new yorkers was order he was saying to my white liberal mom like i'm your kid i'm going to keep them the ones at my jack your son's hat i'm going to keep them where they need to be i'm going to restore order back to this city was the same argument that richard nixon it made one hundred sixty eight it's the same argument the president has made about the border and it was an argument that drew on this article in one thousand nine hundred two by these two individuals killing and wilson called broken windows and broken windows is about is about the ways that disorder lead to crime the theory of broken windows is that if you're in a neighborhood that has broken windows one broken window or two broken windows soon you'll have three broken windows and four broken windows and before you know it chaos will and that approach to policing was adopted by william bratton who at the time was the head of the police department for the new york city subway system which was kind of it famously in a sense a site of disorder and just repair or do people remember the images of the new york city subway system from that time the city was an icon of disorder particularly my youth like in the bronx there are all these abandoned buildings in the bronx and at some point mayor koch decided like the way they're going to deal with that was get put like window dickau in the windows that had like a flower box and like the nation blinds but they they didn't like very up the  so it looked like this like completely soviet project where every single window had the same colorful image of potemkin happiness nixon in that speech he he has a line in the speech where he sort of trying for some kind of going to miti and he says in some point you know a black citizens want the same as white citizens you know they they don't want to be just the subjects of state aid they don't want to be a colony in a nation and that term really just stuck with me that phrase a colony a nation because when i was just reporting in ferguson and when i was reporting the west side of baltimore and when i reported in new york and in chicago there are so many people that i talked to who were experiencing the police as an occupying force there are people who are experiencing the police a form of humiliation in the face of the police that is a form of humiliation that does a crucial and fundamental violence to our shared democratic principles who are in the front yard of their own house drinking red from red solo cups you guys know what those are right ok good you'd be and they're drinking red solo cups in the background in the background you can see the blurry lights of a police cruiser and behind that police cruiser it's at night or in front of the police cruiser you can see a phalanx of cops in a v formation and they're hard to make out but the folks who are in the smart phone sort of shaky frame start to get agitated and someone starts narrating into the phone they're coming toward us they're marching and they're coming towards us and as you hold up the phone you can see that there's this wedge formation of cops slowly down the street and the police bullhorn is telling these people who are in the front yard to get off the front yard and go in the house and folks in this front yard start getting agitated  and the person who owns the house is like this is our yard this is my house this is my property and a bunch of people start saying hands up don't shoot which was the rallying cry in the wake of mike brown's death  this is two nights after michael brown was shot and killed police keep calm and bullhorn tells him to go back in the house crowd gets a little more agitated and then fired into the yard the camera frango shaky the person holding it hits the ground bedlam ensues people are screaming the person as you are it is is furious his friends have to restrain him as he's yelling this is my house this is our property they finally calm down and the person who had been narrating looks in the phone and says why do you think we say fuck the police this shit the politics of order have brought us a nation that is divided into two regimes of criminal justice those regimes interlock like a lattice work in inner city neighborhoods and in long stretches through counties those two regimes represent different spheres of citizenship in the nation the police sort of function like your laptop's operating system it's working in the background you do what you do the ideal amount of interactions you want to have at the police's zero right we agree on that right i mean you want to be the victim of crime you don't want anyone you love or know to be a victim of crime you don't to be suspected of a crime you want to know when you love or know to be suspected of a crime you want to have basically nothing to do the police ever in the colony law enforcement functions like a computer virus it disrupts it intrudes constantly the disruption itself is normal the disruption itself has to be planned out and in the colony the experiences of citizenship is an experience of humiliation that we would associate with an the point of this book is for us collectively and when i say us i mean to be specific here white people ok white people this political system was not built by some special interests and it was not negotiated in a backroom deal it's not like the bankruptcy bill or small bits of deregulation the coal industry is able to convince the president to sign this was a democratic project it was a democratic project that was formed through the call and response of white fear over a period of twenty to thirty years that has produced a nation in which one out of every four prisoners in the world is an american think about that i mean you can go right now to an arraignment court in this city or any city in america and you can just watch the conveyor belt roll through it's like lucy with the chocolates and that system lies in fundamental conflict with the things that we say we believe as a democratic people and so the project of this book i'm going to take questions in just a second you guys with me still g the project of this book is if we made this democratically we can on make it democratically right and the project this book is to tell all of you that are sitting here tonight and everyone that's read the book that we own it as citizens what's so  idea that powers it all is that we can build some wall and be ok where we are i mean i'm seduced by it i live in new york city now crime is down i own a home i got two kids i don't want to be bothered i don't want disorder back on the subway right there some part of us there's some part of me that thinks if real equality were to come i'd have to pay some price that it is zero sum that if we did let the disorder creep back in then i'd be paying that mental tax i used to pay when i was twelve years old walking around my jan support i don't want to pay that there's another part of me it's a part of me that i cling to particularly in these times that thinks that a world and a nation in which we flourish together is possible that the system we've created offers us the promise of safety and security but it brings us repression and it hurts us as a people as a collective entity lights on an unbelievably massive bonfire of the talents and dreams of aspirations of millions of our fellow citizens every goddamn day and the country we would be if we tore down those walls if we relinquished that call for order if we focused instead on things like safety  a different thing safety treatment trauma care empathy education we would all be better off so i'm going to leave you with this and then i'll take questions you look like the kind of audience that will get this reference or go ahead with it has no cognitive behavioral therapy ok i thought so cognitive behavioral therapy the idea is that you have these sort of subconscious mental routines and habits these kind of neural circuitry that gets fired and you don't realize it as a distinct and present entity it just sort of runs there in the background and it can be bringing you all kinds of distress anxiety depression and the idea is that not that i've ever been through this the ideas i've heard read in books you know the idea is that you you recognize those routines for what they are and you sort of you want them out and you examine them here right i think we need to do that with the way we think about order and punishment that's the point of this book is to get you to take those parts of the brain stem that start getting fired the most the deepest parts where the cheeks get flush and to pull that out and examine it and think for yourself what are my commitments what do we really want and what kind of country do we want to be thank you seems like a lot of the issues that you're describing and other people have described are become more of a problem because of vast amount of misinformation in a lot of metaphorical or literal ads for dissent from ation i mean look you know i lived through like i said i lived through the crack years in new york city and it wasn't fox news it was like the local news like about crack babies for instance about how addictive crack was more than cocaine which proved to be completely imperiously bankrupt in terms of our present day yeah there's a tremendous amount of just information right also well but there's all that old george to stands a line right it's not a lie if you believe it well it's true sort of a deep philosophical question actually it's one i wrestle with all the time so there's a lot of disinformation there's a lot of lies we live in a mall or balkanized environment for acquiring information then arguably ever and so my response to your question are basically two things  person who tries to communicate information and for all of you in the audience who consume it you know for me the way that i've approached my job in the last sixty days particularly is double down on all the principles i believe and for the folks in this room who are consumers i would say there's two things i think about one is be attentive to the information you consume the source of it but this is the most important thing if you believe that only some other kind of person is able to be suckered you will be sucker we've all got the same brain architecture we are all subject to tribalism and confirmation bias i mean lord knows things come across my feed every day that i think that's too good to check and i don't put it on the air right so if you think something's too good to check if something comes into your informational space that just makes that brainstem confirmation bias please just light up like a volcano be skeptical of it x question thank you for your book it was really thought provoking lead me in a lot of different directions but one thing that struck me was your idea that you wrote kind of towards the end of leveling one in the criminal justice system and i'm wondering do you see a way forward where us as american society can focus ourselves on leveling up and not just in criminal justice but  things like i see it all the time in unions people say why did the union members get good benefits and i don't yet have what i have so there's a great book called harsh justice by a guy named james whitman who you know who writes about the sort of comparative legal development of criminal justice in the u s first continental systems in germany and france and he says basically the way to understand what happened in germany france which have much more humane prison systems is basically there were two tiers of justice there was a sort of common or an aristocratic tour of justice and what they did is they just sort of leveled everyone up to a wrister craddock right the social project was that everyone would enjoy due process and humane treatment in the u s we never had this sort of formal two tiered aristocratic commoner of course we had a formal two tiered system by race but we just level down right and you see that urge all the time still i write about in the book when brock turner who is a stanford student swimming star convicted of rape a sexual assault that happened in a brutal fashion he was interrupted by two foreign exchange students and he got six months and the judge talked about his bright future and people lost their mind and they lost her mind completely understandably but that impulse to punish that's one thing we've got to interrogate and the reason i say that is because if america would like to come down to curse aeration rates incarceration rates that are like other o e c d countries we're not going to stop at nonviolent drug offenders it would mean letting out people who have committed assault who committed rape who committed manslaughter it's always this point in the talk when the room gets i serious right we want to be the case that the nonviolent drug offender is the problem with mass incarceration no it is going to require a a complete sort of social re conception of what we do when people are in prison when and how people can be reintegrated rehabilitated and deeply in a spiritual sense redeemed and everyone's got that empathy inside them for someone maybe they happen to know some of the toughest harsh on crime republicans wrote letters to the judge when denny saying this guy whatever he did molest boys as a high school wrestling coach i know him as a good person right capacity for forgiveness for someone that is close to us that's go have to be extended much more broadly to be as concise as i can but my question requires a little bit of context so there's a part in the book where you talk about how we will you go through this training exercise where you experience what it's like to be a police officer relatively low trained in the sorts of situations that you're in and you compare that to being a social worker and how police officers are frequently sent into the same sorts of situations that social workers are i'm a social worker but due to my particular job i have approximately the same level of training in conflict resolution and deescalation that police officers do so i'm going into the same kinds of environments as police officers and the main difference that i see between their job and mine is that i don't have a gun and b i'm actually per our code of conduct i'm not allowed to physically defend myself so my question is twofold because also social workers and i don't know how many people know this but social workers have experienced a higher rate of workplace violence than any other employment demographic  so my question is if i'm not afraid to go into those environments why should the police be and secondly how much research if any in the book did you do into the rates of violence that police experience versus the rate of violence that they perpetrate great great question  i was sure you were leading up to so shouldn't i be armed right so i was good that's what i'm going to say right so there are police forces around the world that don't have guns there are police forces around the world that fire their weapons i think i said in the book like the danish police fire the weapon twelve times last year collectively across the entire nation on the second question we just don't have very good data right so one of the obstacles for all this is national data is incredibly hard to come by for instance if you ask the simple question like how many times in american police discharge their weapon last year nobody can answer that question literally that the answer that question does not exist as a statistical artifact so all of this data is really developing in fact it's been a variety of kind of volunteer projects and journalistic projects that even compile databases of fatal shootings right the first point is such a profound one i don't have a good answer i don't have a good i know that i think that the presence of guns in america really changes policing and shapes policing in certain ways but it is also true is an empirical matter that policing is not even in the top ten jobs in terms of danger logging for instance is much more dangerous than policing in terms of workplace fatalities and i think i think in my ideal world the thing that i've sort of dreamed about  sort of like you know the wire hamsterdam experiment kind of way is oh a world in which like at least in one neighborhood we just said we're literally just going to have like two social workers an addiction specialist for every cop and we're going to train them and they're going to be in the neighborhood and like let's see what happens what if every call that came in because as i say in the book like when i'm doing this police training and you're a beat cop you show up and an ex girlfriend is parked in the car of her ex boyfriend who is now with a new girlfriend and they're beefing your twenty six go like resolve that right it's sort of a miracle they ever work so i do think like i do i really do think i think there is a real space to really increase the number of people without guns who intervening in these situations i just finished reading national identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed but the meaning of identity is now based on hatred and hatred for those who are not the same now about a few weeks back i read three pieces in the new york times magazine which are you probably saw two about jobs in the future the jobs that are most available now which seem to be mostly in service industry the jobs that have been or soon will be completely automated and the probable need in the future  guaranteed national income to offset this that both of these things are found interesting so my question is what chances do you see for the colony if the nation continues to see itself as in danger of being dispossessed and for that matter what let me just put myself down as a skeptic on automation not like a harsh skeptic but like literally people have been saying robots will take all jobs for a hundred and eighty years and then we just find new stuff to do and sell to each other that require human beings that said the kinds of conditions in huge swaths of particularly white working class america are very real and are very real in terms of decline like materially worse off and i think of places like mcdowell county i think as that trend happens right there's sort of two ways o politics can go one is doubling down on building a wall both in the sort of literal border sense in a kind of metaphorical sense between the colony in the nation between us and then between in group an outgroup because you feel like you need to protect what you have even as it diminishes and i think that was a lot of what the last election was about but i also have a hopeful sense that there's another possibility which is that as huge swaths of what i call the book the nation sort of trend towards an experience of what life is like in the colony right i mean think about addiction right how often addiction means interfacing with the criminal justice system how often it means interfacing criminal justice system for a loved one who has addiction finding yourself in court maybe the for the first time that as those conditions in some bizarre way trend towards the conditions that are experienced in the colony there is the potential for actual solidarity and i'll conclude on this which is that i did t town halls in the last two months one was on the south side of chicago it was almost entirely african american one was in mcdowell county which is predominately white and these places are so far apart geographically and culturally and socially and politically and yet there was a lot they shared i mean in both places like i could feel the trauma in the room like it was a physical presence people have been through it and i think the only hope for any of us all of us is that somehow out of that we can build solidarity ok well thanks for coming and visiting us i you know i really appreciate it there's so many questions with the news being so crazy today i'm going to pick what i think might be the most important it's the one that bothers me the most and that is i'm really upset with how we sing to be soft pedaling all of these connections between the trump  group and the russians and i get the feeling that even if they find something very definite it's like oh it's just a slap on the wrist it's just like no no you shouldn't have done that learn your lesson and i really think it's time to start calling it what it is it's treason and everyone is so reluctant to use that word it's none dare call it treason so to go back a few  a few things one i don't use the word treason because i don't think reasons been established right although even the allegations i'll be very very like annoyingly literal here are right russia is an adversary it's not an enemy right now we don't have an active war with russia they're not holding our soldiers the way say isis or the taliban might right now the allegations are extremely serious and the amount of information continues to mount and the behavior of the parties involved is wildly at every step along the way my approach is like i'm going to take the most conservative interpretation of each new fact set right like i'm going to be small so you conservative about what we know and at every step along the way like they keep making me feel like i was a chump go ok you didn't talk to the ambassador about the sanctions on sanction day i did that seems implausible but ok well let's see  totally talk to the master about sanctions and sanctions day so i think look if there is collusion or coordination of any kind it's the biggest scandal in american history but there's two things i would say about that and we've covered this i'm a block and the night before and we've been on this story one is that it's also entirely possible the whole thing happened in the absence of explicit collusion like they hacked the d n c in very public ways the trump camp sent signals to the russian state that they would be more friendly to them then they hacked to death and released that and somewhere in there donald trump looked into a camera and said russia if you're listening hack hillary clinton's e mails so that seems like enough to communicate what needed to be communicated the final thing i'll say on russia is that from the day that donald trump came down the escalator people opposed to him and what he stands for have been in this state of sort of disbelief and they've been waiting for the moment when the day s x winks them out of existence right the the implosion is around the corner i know you said that about john mccain and he can't possibly there's like the thing there's the kill shot the silver bullet and i worry sometimes that people that are opposed to him are looking for that from russia and just like the previous ones didn't deliver it this want to leverage if you look at the president's approval ratings job  approval ratings there is one inflection point he basically is bumping around like this in the forty's which is low to be clear but then something happens that actually sends him below that right inserts going down like thirty five where he is now and gallup which is shockingly low that inflection point is the introduction of that health care bill it's not a magic bullet that will ultimately be the political and i think of donald trump it is normal politics and what i mean by normal politics is i mean citizens fighting on the terrain of who is going to make someone's life better