Transcript
Rachel Maddow Presents: Déjà News
Episode 3: ‘The Meanest, Dirtiest, Low-Down Stuff’
Republicans claim the election was stolen. They use those claims to justify suppressing people’s right to vote. All of it happening amid a national reckoning on race. Rachel Maddow and Isaac-Davy Aronson tell the story of a time uncannily similar to our own — in the early 1960s. And how it’s both a parallel to our present moment and the origin of conflicts playing out today.
President Johnson: Hello?
Hubert Humphrey: Mr. President?
Johnson: How are you, Hubert?
Rachel Maddow: It’s Election Day, November 3rd. President Lyndon Johnson has called up his running mate, Hubert Humphrey.
Humphrey: Well, I’m fine, and how are you?
Johnson: Oh, I’m just kind of broken up. I’m aching all over. I’ve got a headache, and my damn bones — hip’s hurting, and I just — I’m just worn out. I just —
Maddow: The 1964 campaign had taken a toll on Lyndon Johnson. While he was making this phone call, he simultaneously was getting a massage — during the phone call.
Johnson: — and they’re rubbing me. I got a bad hip. I got a — I’ve been standing on my right leg. Your hip ever hurt you?
Humphrey: Yessiree. And I’ll tell you, you know, that I had a period in this campaign where I thought my hips and legs were going to kill me.
Maddow: President Johnson was calling that day to thank his running mate, Hubert Humphrey, for all his hard work, and also, to commiserate about their aching bones. But then he got around to what he really wanted to talk about.
Johnson: Oh, Hubert, I wish you’d see what these sons of bitches have done.
(MUSIC PLAYING)
Maddow: Oh, Hubert! What President Johnson wished his running mate could see, what he wished he could do something about, frankly, was a set of newspaper ads that were then running all across the country.
These ads were made to look like they were from an African-American group, something called the “Negro Protective League.” There was no such organization. It was actually a conservative group, a rightwing group that was running these ads, pretending that they were from a Black community organization.
And what the ads said was that Black people should not vote. It was way too dangerous for them to vote. They, in fact, would risk arrest. They’d risk jail. It was definitely safer not to even try to cast a ballot.
Johnson: Oh, Hubert, I wish you’d see what these sons of bitches have done. They bought four full-page ads in most papers. Some of them just got 12 pages, some 16. Four full pages in this state, and it’s all “integrity” and “morality” —
Humphrey: I know.
Johnson: — and —
Humphrey: They had five full pages in the Los Angeles Times on Sunday — five full pages.
Johnson: And they’ve got out a instruction from the Negro Protective League, that says that any Negro goes and votes, that the Protective League just wants to inform him, as their friend, that if he’s ever had a traffic ticket, if he’s ever been under suspicion, if he’s ever been speeding, if he’s ever had a old parking ticket, if he ever hadn’t paid his taxes on time, if he’s ever been discharged from employment, that he’ll have to report right away to the sheriff, and that these things will have to be settled before he can clear his record to vote.
Humphrey: God!
Johnson: And they put those out in all seven cities. Just the meanest, dirtiest, low-down stuff that I ever heard. Ought to go to jail for it. It’s just inhuman.
(MUSIC PLAYING)
Maddow: In this election, the 1964 election, Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey and the Democratic Party were up against something that really worried them, something the Republican party was doing that they were very upset about, something they thought people should maybe go to jail for.
Officially, the Republican Party had launched what they were calling an election integrity effort. Unofficially, it appeared to be a comprehensive, well-resourced, 50-state strategy to intimidate people into not voting, people who were likely to vote Democratic, especially Black voters and Latino voters. That plan included those big expensive, frankly, sinister newspaper ads that LBJ and Humphrey were so upset about, ads running in all those papers around the country threatening Black and Latino people that they were at risk of arrest if they tried to vote.
The plan also included a national deployment of poll watchers, the Republican Party sending out their own people to stand watch over voting locations where the Republicans said they were sure there was lots of voter fraud. Republicans stood outside polling locations with lists of democratic voters to target, to challenge over their vote.
Now, this was not a secret effort. Far from it, Republicans were very proud to announce that they were doing this. They said they needed to do it to restore integrity to the election system because they said voter fraud had taken over the country. Republicans said this whole effort was necessary because the previous presidential election — the one that put Democrats in the White House — they said that election had been rigged. It was stolen.
(CROWD CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)
Kari Lake: — our elections were stolen from us.
Paul Gosar: There was fraud in this election.
Matt Gaetz: — an election that was stolen —
Mike Lindell: There were nine different kinds of fraud.
Protesters: (CHANTING) Stop the Steal! Stop the Steal! Stop the Steal!
Maddow: Today it’s stop the steal, this contention from the right that the last election, the 2020 election, must have been rigged. That has led to forensic audits and lawsuits by the dozen, which have been thrown out, if not laughed, out of the courtroom. Also, their literally inexplicable plot involving voting-machines, something-something Venezuela, something Rudy Giuliani something-something.
This strategy in today’s Republican Party, it can feel confounding. It can feel like a sort of new frontier in messing with democracy and basing it all on quite crazy, factually-untrue allegations about supposed voter fraud.
But if we have done this before, almost this exact thing before, would knowing that help us understand not just what’s happening now, but also where this might all be heading?
(MUSIC PLAYING)
Maddow: I’m Rachel Maddow, and I am joined, as always, by Isaac-Davy Aronson. Hi, Isaac.
Isaac-Davy Aronson: Hi, Rachel.
Maddow: Isaac’s here this week with another story that is uncannily familiar, something terrible, frankly, that seems like a new kind of terrible, but it has an antecedent. It has a predecessor in history.
Aronson: Claims of a stolen election, using those claims to justify suppressing people’s right to vote, mounting a big systematic voter suppression operation, all happening in the midst of a national reckoning on race.
Maddow: If we, as a country, have done this before, then it stands to reason that we should have done a better job seeing it coming this time around. It also stands to reason that there might be something to learn from the Americans who have defended against this same play before.
So let’s do it. This is “Rachel Maddow Presents: Déjà News.”
(MUSIC PLAYING)
Johnson: My fellow Americans, I accept your nomination. (CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
Maddow: Lyndon B. Johnson had not become president in the usual way. LBJ ascended to the top job when President John F. Kennedy was killed just three years after the two of them won an election that took all night to call.
Reporter: At 7:19 a.m. Eastern Time, Senator Kennedy was elected President of the United States. The NBC victory desk has just given California to Kennedy and that gives him the election.
Maddow: The 1960 election, in which Senator Kennedy eked out a win over Republican Vice President Richard Nixon, an election that handed the White House to a Democrat for the first time in eight years — that is where Isaac picks up the story. And I’ll be back with you on the other side.
Aronson: In the weeks after the 1960 presidential election in which Democratic Senator John F. Kennedy very narrowly defeated Republican Vice President Richard Nixon, Cook County, Illinois, the city of Chicago, was the scene of a kind of circus that might seem familiar to us from 2020 — lawsuits, recounts, and Republican voters convinced of some kind of a cover-up.
Nixon Recount Committee Counsel, George Dapples: The canvass, as certified by them shortly after the election, contains manifest errors and irregularities, and I am asking them to perform the act of correcting their canvass to eliminate these particular errors and irregularities.
Unknown: I watched the recount very closely. And from what I saw, I know that a court of law would throw out hundreds and hundreds of ballots that were counted.
Aronson: Republicans challenged the results in Cook County. They challenged the results in 11 states all together. There were investigations, and lawsuits, and recounts.
In one state, the recount actually did change which candidate won the state, but it wasn’t what the Republicans were after. The recount in Hawaii actually flipped that state from Nixon to Kennedy. Despite all those disappointments, Republicans were enraged that they had lost, and they convinced themselves that they’d been robbed.
But the idea that Democrats had stolen the 1960 election and they were going to steal the next one, too, that was also inseparable from the context in which it took root. John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were pro-civil rights. They were intent on ensuring voting rights for Black Americans. And lots of Black Americans turned out to vote for them.
John F. Kennedy: It ought to be possible for American citizens of any color to register and to vote in a free election without interference or fear of reprisal.
Aronson: Obviously, white lawmakers from the Jim Crow South were unified in opposition to this idea. But joining them was a Republican senator not from the Deep South, but from the West — Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater.
Senator Barry Goldwater: Now I can’t see in a situation like this why people believe that changing a law will change the nature of man. If men in the south, or anyplace else, are determined that other men are not going to vote, I suggest that any law we write can be gotten around.
Aronson: In other words, sorry, Black Americans, if white Americans are determined to deprive you of your right to vote, there’s just nothing the U.S. government can do about it. Tough luck.
That was Barry Goldwater’s response to civil rights legislation in the early ‘60s. By 1964, President Kennedy had been assassinated. LBJ was president and running for his own first full term, and he was running on a civil rights platform.
Johnson made it his number-one legislative priority to pass the Civil Rights Act that JFK had been pushing for before he was killed.
Johnson: Every American has the right to be treated as a person. He should be able to find a job. (APPLAUSE) He should be able to educate his children. He should be able to vote in elections. (APPLAUSE) And he should be judged on his merits as a person. (APPLAUSE)
Aronson: It was in that context that Republicans decided Senator Barry Goldwater, fierce opponent of that Civil Rights Act, was who they wanted as their presidential nominee to run against LBJ.
(MUSIC PLAYING)
ARONSON: Here’s historian Rick Perlstein.
Rick Perlstein: When the most live political question in June of 1964 was whether this Civil Rights Act would be passed, as it was, and signed into law on July 2nd, they chose two weeks later to nominate a candidate in Barry Goldwater who had voted against the Civil Rights Act. They had a choice to make: were we going to maintain our reputation as the party of Lincoln or are we going to basically be the party that inherits the segregationist policies of the South. And they very consciously make a choice. They choose segregation.
Aronson: Republicans figured that the path to a Goldwater victory would be boosting turnout among white voters who opposed civil rights and getting less turnout among Black and other minority voters who tended to vote Democratic. But this wasn’t a plan just for the Jim Crow South. They needed to deploy the plan nationwide. So how were Republicans going to make sure that only the right people voted?
Well, among the many assets that Senator Barry Goldwater brought to his campaign was something very valuable from Republican Party politics in his home state of Arizona: one of the country’s most sophisticated Republican so-called “ballot security” operations, a system of aggressive poll-watching and voter challenges undertaken, ostensibly, to prevent voter fraud.
This Republican strategy for reducing minority voting was already established in Arizona. It’s how the Republican Party had been tailoring the electorate to their own advantage for years in that state. Now Republicans were going to take it national. They called it “Operation Eagle Eye.”
CBS News Anchor: Supporters of Senator Goldwater mounted their Operation Eagle Eye today to watch the polls, and Democrats in many cities were keeping an eagle eye on the operation, suspecting it might be used to intimidate Democratic voters.
Aronson: As you can tell from this 1964 CBS Evening News report, Operation Eagle Eye was not a secret. It was a headline in national network news. And Republicans were loud and proud about it.
Reporter: The metropolitan director of the Goldwater Committee says all voters, both Republican and Democratic, benefit by Operation Eagle Eye. But Democrats say it is merely a form of voter intimidation and should be called “Operation Evil Eye.”
Aronson: Here again is historian Rick Perlstein.
Perlstein: They would send out ordinary citizens to challenge voters at the polls. Sometimes they would wear intimidating uniforms, sometimes they would carry cameras. The Democratic National Committee obtained a memo that instructed workers to stall lines in Democratic precincts, you know, to make them go slow.
In another document, a state ballot security office in Louisiana explained quote, “All sheriffs in the state of Louisiana except one are sympathetic with Senator Goldwater’s election. We will take full advantage of this situation.” So basically, it’s just this organized, polite thuggery.
(MUSIC PLAYING)
Aronson: Republicans claimed that polling places, especially in big, heavily Democratic cities with large minority populations, were just awash in unregistered, unqualified, fake voters. And so, they needed to deploy Republican poll watchers to catch them.
In just one example in 1964, Republicans hired 40 private detectives to poll watch in Baltimore. A local Republican Party chairman said well-dressed people would not be challenged, only quote, “the kind of guys you can buy for a buck or a bottle of booze,” or quote, “people who look like they don’t belong in the community or are not the kind of people who would register and vote.”
The real insidious genius of Operation Eagle Eye was not just direct intimidation and confrontation; it was that poll watchers wouldn’t need to challenge too many voters if their presence made people too nervous to show up at the polls in the first place.
Perlstein: The idea that someone is watching you is the point. It’s a feature, not a bug.
The Republican National Committee in the early ‘60s would hand out these brochures, explaining how to be a poll watcher. Be sure to have a camera. Be sure to use it conspicuously. You don’t even have to have film on the camera, really, you just have to scare people away. That’s the point. It’s an intimidation tactic.
Aronson: The Democrats were really worried about the intimidating effects of Operation Eagle Eye. So, they got creative in coming up with ways to counteract it.
Gregory Peck: I’m Gregory Peck, and the following is a prerecorded paid political announcement. But it is a —
Aronson: Just a couple of days before Election Day 1964, the Democrats bought several minutes of primetime national network TV just to warn people about Operation Eagle Eye. It was headlined by silver screen superstar Gregory Peck.
Peck: Ladies and gentlemen, here is Senator Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic candidate for the Office of Vice President of the United States.
Humphrey: The presidential election campaign is very nearly over. Before long, you and millions of your fellow Americans will be going to the polls to cast your ballot for the candidates of your choice. And in doing so, you will be demonstrating your faith in our democracy and America. But in these last few hours, however, I must warn you that there are some misguided persons who are trying to deny you this choice.
You may have heard of something called Operation Eagle Eye. Well, a better name for it would be Operation Evil Eye, because it is a Goldwater Republican program directed towards preventing you and many of your neighbors from taking part in this election. One of its objectives is to create delays at the polling places. Another objective is just to cause plenty of confusion. A third objective is to frighten you and others by frivolously challenging your right to vote or capriciously suggesting that you may have violated some law.
So wherever you live, I hope you will not be one of its victims. Don’t let Operation Eagle Eye take away the right to cast your ballot.
Aronson: “Don’t let Operation Eagle Eye take away the right to cast your ballot.”
(MUSIC PLAYING)
The intimidation campaign did include that national Republican poll watcher effort. It also included conservative groups nationwide running a parallel disinformation campaign that didn’t require any in-person muscle at all. It was what President Johnson was railing about in the Election Day phone call with his running mate. Rightwing groups impersonating Black community groups or immigrant support organizations, warning those communities that they’d be in trouble if they tried to vote, that they might even be arrested.
Johnson: Oh, Hubert, I wish you’d see what these sons of bitches have done.
Aronson: The disinformation campaign before Election Day was not subtle in its aims — targeting Black voters, Latino voters. And on Election Day 1964, Operation Eagle Eye produced all the chaos and all the false allegations you might expect. Republican poll watchers were challenging voters so aggressively and frequently, particularly Black voters, that elections officials ended up calling on police to intervene in some places.
In at least one city, a judge issued an injunction against the Goldwater campaign for “illegal mass challenging without cause.” And back in Cook County, Illinois, Rick Perlstein writes that, quote, “voting for Lyndon Johnson in certain precincts was about as easy as cracking Fort Knox.”
Despite the best efforts of Operation Eagle Eye, Republican Barry Goldwater did not win the 1964 election. In fact, it was famously one of the most lopsided elections in American history. Goldwater won just six states.
Announcing the results on NBC News, Edwin Newman dryly noted why Goldwater might have won those six states in particular.
Edwin Newman: To sum up, the Republican presidential candidate carried six states, one, his home state, the other five states where Negroes are of varying degrees deprived of the vote —
Aronson: Barry Goldwater won his home state of Arizona, and five deep south states where, frankly, they didn’t really need Operation Eagle Eye because so many African-Americans living under Jim Crow were already blocked from voting. Operation Eagle Eye failed to deliver a Republican victory in 1964.
But 1964 wasn’t the end of it.
Perlstein: You have to realize that Operation Eagle Eye was in operation until 1970. And in 1968, Richard Nixon hired J. Edgar Hoover’s, like, number two guy at the FBI to be in charge of it.
Aronson: In 1968, the Republican candidate for president was once again Richard Nixon. Nixon was still smarting from his defeat in 1960. He was obsessed with the idea that his true victory that year had been stolen.
On his campaign plane in 1968, Nixon told a reporter that he was confident in his chances of winning this time around because, quote, “We have Operation Eagle Eye watching this time.”
Perlstein: And in 1968, they won. The Republican Party won another very close election, just as they had lost one in 1960, so it comes full circle.
Richard Nixon: Having lost a close one eight years ago and having won a close one this year I can say this, winning is a lot more fun.
(LAUGHTER, CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
(MUSIC PLAYING)
Maddow: So the same election that brings us the presidency of Richard Nixon in 1968 also brings us a Republican Party crediting this Operation Eagle Eye for their ability to compete and win. And it turns out that’s not just an unsettling precursor to where we are now, it’s also how we got the pieces in place for those who want to play this same game today.
And that’s ahead when Déjà News continues.
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Raphael Warnock: We’ve seen voter suppression bills since the election in November and January all across this country, 360-voter suppression bills in forty-seven states. What these bills all share is that they are predicated on the “Big Lie,” that the outcome of our last elections were the result of fraud.
The truth is politicians in their craven lust for power are willing to sacrifice our democracy by using the Big Lie as a pretext for their true aim — some people don’t want some people to vote.
(MUSIC PLAYING)
Maddow: U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock, speaking a few months after the 2020 election, talking about voter-suppression bills enacted in lots of Republican-led states as a response to the 2020 election. The bills included new voter ID laws, changes to absentee voting, changes to early voting, even bills to just bluntly make voting more uncomfortable. Georgia Republicans pursued restrictions against anyone bringing food or water to any person waiting in a long line to vote.
The Republicans pushing those bills said the new laws were necessary to restore voters’ trust in the election system, to restore their confidence. Trust and confidence that, of course, had only been undermined by Republicans’ insistence that the election had been stolen.
Restricting access to the ballot box in the name of restoring trust and confidence in the elections, it’s almost verbatim the recruiting pitch for poll watchers during Operation Eagle Eye in 1964: quote, “Its fundamental purpose is to restore public confidence in this country’s voting processes.” That was from the Operation Eagle Eye recruiting pitch. And the name of that Operation Eagle Eye recruiter was Ronald Reagan.
Because here is another thing about Operation Eagle Eye. The people who created and ran it, eventually, they went on to run the whole country. Here’s Isaac with that part of the story.
Aronson: We don’t know whether Operation Eagle Eye ensured Nixon’s victory the way he said it would. But he did go on to appoint the very conservative Arizona lawyer who more or less created it to the U.S. Supreme Court. A later president, former Operation Eagle Eye recruiter Ronald Reagan, would elevate that same Arizona lawyer to the role of chief justice.
The lawyer’s name was William Rehnquist, and his role in creating the modern Republican Party’s systematic voter intimidation program was not a secret. It was the subject of a whole panel of witnesses at his confirmation hearing.
Joe Biden: Describe for me what you recall having seen upon arriving at the polling place. What is your recollection?
James Brosnahan: First thing we saw was a long line of voters.
Aronson: This was then-senator Joe Biden, at one of William Rehnquist’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, questioning a witness who had been a young assistant U.S. attorney in Phoenix in the early ‘60s. His name was Jim Brosnahan.
Brosnahan: On that day, the United States attorney’s office in Phoenix received numerous complaints from persons attempting to vote in precincts in south Phoenix. In south Phoenix, at that time, the population was predominantly Hispanic and Black. There were charges of harassment. It was a serious situation. Based on interviews with voters, polling officials, and my fellow assistant U.S. attorneys, it was my opinion in 1962 that the challenging effort was designed to reduce the number of Black and Hispanic voters by confrontation and intimidation.
I received a complaint on election day and went with an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to a polling place in south Phoenix. At that polling place, I saw William Rehnquist, who was known to me as an attorney practicing in the city of Phoenix. He was serving on that day as a challenger of voters. That is to say, the conduct and the complaints had to do with his conduct.
Aronson: Jim Brosnahan’s testimony is backed up by other witnesses, who say they also saw William Rehnquist challenging or harassing or intimidating minority voters in Arizona in the early ‘60s. Some witnesses testified that they had seen Rehnquist himself conduct so-called literacy tests for Black and Latino voters, demanding that they demonstrate they could read specific sections of the Constitution or they wouldn’t be allowed to vote.
William Rehnquist denied that he had done anything like that.
William Rehnquist: If they say I did something that I have said I didn’t do, I would have to say yes, they are wrong.
Aronson: The kind of stuff that went on in Operation Eagle Eye, the kind of stuff William Rehnquist denied taking part in, the intimidation of voters, the targeted voter harassment, Congress tried to stop that, in part, with new legislation LBJ signed into law in 1965, the Voting Rights Act.
While he was on the Supreme Court, William Rehnquist was a reliable opponent of voting rights in all kinds of cases. When he died, Rehnquist was replaced by his clerk and protégé, John Roberts, who remains Chief Justice to this day.
And when it came to that crucial 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was enacted in part to address the kinds of abuses that Rehnquist himself had allegedly taken part in, it was Rehnquist’s successor John Roberts who found a way to gut that legislation.
Roberts’ record on voting rights is complex and still a work in progress, but the decision he authored in 2013 was the biggest step backwards in voting rights since Jim Crow.
(MUSIC PLAYING)
Here’s Sherrilyn Ifill, former president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
Sherrilyn Ifill: Prior to that decision, every one of these changes, voter ID laws, changes to absentee voting, voter purges, all of these tactics would have had to have been submitted first to a federal authority before they were enacted and pre-cleared. And the federal authority would review the proposed voting change to determine its effect on Black voters or Latino voters or Asian-American voters or Native American voters, depending on the jurisdiction and the history.
It’s the Supreme Court, essentially saying, we want to take all hands off the wheel. And we’ve got now the car careening through our country in precisely the way that the framers of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 suspected would happen without pre-clearance.
If you look in the Senate report to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, what the senators say about pre-clearance is that this pre-clearance regime, where you get permission before you enact the voting provision, was created to prevent discriminatory practices that were currently in existence. But also, the Senate Committee said, to address ingenious practices that might be undertaken in the future. They well-understood that those engaged in voter suppression were likely to continue to try and do so.
Aronson: And sure enough, new ingenious practices to restrict voting rights have proliferated in many Republican-run states. Sometimes it’s new state laws. Sometimes it’s rightwing activists going and sitting next to ballot drop boxes with guns.
NBC News reporter Gabe Gutierrez: Amid complaints of armed mass groups wearing tactical gear and recording voters, the sheriff in Maricopa County, Arizona, has now stepped up security near ballot drop boxes. He also says —
Aronson: When voters in 2022 tried to use the Voting Rights Act to get those armed vigilantes away from the ballot boxes, the first judge to hear their case, a Donald Trump appointee, rejected their plea.
So that’s one way to understand the present-day hysteria over voter fraud. For decades, Republicans were simply legally blocked from doing many of the things they wanted to do until the long project of undoing the 1965 Voting Rights Act finally started to pay off.
(MUSIC PLAYING)
The other way to understand what’s happening now goes back to the same constant refrain that motivated Republicans in the 1960s. It’s motivating them again today.
Lake: Our elections were stolen from us.
Gosar: There was fraud in this election.
Gaetz: — an election that was stolen —
Lindell: There were nine different kinds of fraud.
Protesters: Stop the steal! Stop the steal! Stop the steal!
Aronson: The election was stolen. There was rampant fraud. Here’s Sherrilyn Ifill again.
Ifill: The claim of voter fraud and of ballot security has become, and been for quite some time, the lens through which Republicans and the Republican Party was able to put pressure on the full enfranchisement of Black people. It was used to cover aggressive poll watchers. It was used to cover voter purges, that is, removing voters from the list because of the claim that dead people are voting. It was used to, and has been used to, impose strict voter ID laws. It’s been used to impose strict requirements on absentee voting. All of this comes out of this claim of voter fraud.
Aronson: So yes, the Republican claims about the 2020 election somehow being stolen, that’s a live and volatile issue driving our politics today in all sorts of unpredictable ways. But, in some ways, it’s the same old allegations, which then get used for the same old effect.
Trump’s many lawsuits contesting his 2020 loss sought to invalidate votes in heavily Black cities, claiming voter fraud. Trump briefly got Michigan Republican officials to refuse to certify the vote in that state, because they said the numbers from Detroit couldn’t be trusted. Trump has gone after two Black election workers in Atlanta, falsely accusing them of stuffing ballot boxes. His lawyer Rudy Giuliani called the two women “hustlers” who acted like “drug dealers.”
According to Sherrilyn Ifill, what’s so destabilizing now is the combination of that time-tested electoral tactic with Trump’s larger project — leading a modern-day backlash to the decades-old achievements of the civil rights movement.
Ifill: I do believe that the power of the 1960s was compelling America to confront racism and the contradictions of racism with its image of itself, to create a culture in which espousing racist beliefs was no longer socially acceptable. I think those things were very important. They were helpful, certainly for our lives, to be able to move through the world. I think that was a huge success.
I think that what we are seeing now is the response to how successfully we had penetrated every aspect of American life with at least the tacit understanding that the expectation was that you would be on the side of equality and justice or at least pretend. And this is where Trump becomes an accelerant, right, because what Trump did was he tapped into something that I think many of us didn’t realize many white people were experiencing, which was they just wanted to be free of all of this. They wanted to be free of the requirements of decency, free of the requirements of embracing a belief in equality, free of having to speak in a way that shows respect for others, that all of this, it turns out, felt unbearable for a segment of the white population.
And Trump came and said, then don’t do it. You don’t have to do it. You’re great. In fact, you’re better.
(MUSIC PLAYING)
Maddow: Sherrilyn Ifill. Trump as an accelerant to a fire that has been smoldering for 60 years. They wanted to be free of the requirements of decency. Wow.
Aronson: Yeah, I’m not going to lie, the hardest thing about putting together this episode was figuring out what sections of my conversation with Sherrilyn Ifill to play, because it was all so good.
Maddow: Yeah, there should just be a podcast of us saying, what else, Sherrilyn Ifill? Sherrilyn Ifill, is there more? Could you expound on that more, please, Sherrilyn Ifill?
Aronson: I will both host and listen to that podcast.
Maddow: Exactly. Well, we’ll host it in the sense that we’ll just show up and bring a microphone and then shut our traps.
I mean, the basic idea that she’s explaining here, I think, is hard to escape once you hear it, right, once you understand it. If you think that a multiracial democracy is a problem for you, if it isn’t giving you enough of what you want, it’s proscribing what you do want in some way that you find uncomfortable, well, in 21st century America, you maybe don’t outright crusade against democracy. People don’t necessarily want to hear that.
But instead, you just cast doubt on democracy. You claim that our democracy is screwed up. It’s all rigged. And then you propose to fix it, to unrig it by making our democracy not so multiracial anymore, right? Shoving out of the electorate the swathes of it that challenge your hold on power, that block you from doing what you want to do.
I mean, obviously, it’s very dark, but it’s kind of a win-win strategy, right? In the short run, you get more power in our democracy now, if you exclude people from participating in it who disagree with you. But in so doing, if you shake everybody’s faith in democracy, well, then in the long run, that makes it a weaker edifice for you to press against, for you to ultimately get rid of.
So yeah, I guess looked at that way, it makes sense that the same tactics just keep coming back and back and back. They don’t even get revised. They don’t even get updated for the times. They just do the exact same thing over and over and over again.
Aronson: And, you know, speaking of things coming back and back and back, you know how we played that tape earlier of Jim Brosnahan, the Assistant U.S. Attorney in Phoenix in the early ‘60s who later testified about William Rehnquist’s voter intimidation? This was him.
Brosnahan: At that polling place, I saw William Rehnquist, who was known to me as an attorney practicing in the city of Phoenix. He was serving on that day as a challenger of voters. That is to say, the conduct and the complaints had to do with his conduct.
Aronson: So I was watching that hearing and thinking, what must it be like to give that testimony, watch it have no effect on the confirmation of Rehnquist, and then see all the language and tactics of Operation Eagle Eye deployed bigger and bolder than ever today. So we called up Jim Brosnahan and asked him.
(MUSIC PLAYING)
Brosnahan: My name is Jim Brosnahan. I’m an attorney in San Francisco. I am now senior of counsel in the firm of Morrison & Foerster.
Maddow: Wait, Jim Brosnahan is still going? He’s still working as a lawyer?
Aronson: He is. He’s in his seventh decade of practicing law.
Maddow: Wow. Right on, that’s amazing.
Aronson: And let me tell you, he is still fired up about what he saw William Rehnquist get up to in Phoenix.
Brosnahan: I was deeply committed to the idea that you don’t pull with anybody’s vote. Anybody that tries to take away a vote is committing, in my view, a serious democratic sin. If anybody tried to take away my vote, I would let them know about it.
Aronson: Now, Jim Brosnahan is the kind of guy who doesn’t like to let his personal feelings get wrapped up with his legal analysis. I mean, he insists to this day he had nothing personal against William Rehnquist. He just thought the country was entitled to know all the facts. But when he surveys the landscape of voter suppression in the years since he tried to stop it in Arizona in the ‘60s, he is not happy.
Brosnahan: It did go nationwide, has not really changed. On the contrary, it’s increased. And if I dare have an opinion with you, if you don’t mind, I don’t like it. I really don’t like it.
Aronson: I also asked Jim Brosnahan what it means to him that it’s the exact same tactics, the exact same language being deployed today as was deployed in Arizona and by Operation Eagle Eye in the early ‘60s. And his response, I think, we can all empathize with.
Brosnahan: At my age — oh no, not again.
Maddow: Wow, that’s amazing. Jim Brosnahan.
Wow. Isaac, well done.
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Maddow: Ok that’s going to do it for this week’s episode of Déjà News.
Isaac, what have you got for us for next time?
Aronson: We’ve got a president with authoritarian tendencies who packs his country’s Supreme Court with rightwing allies. And that court proceeds to end the right to abortion. What can we learn from the other country that went through this just a couple years before ours did?
Maddow: Hmm, all right. Well, that’s next time on “Rachel Maddow Presents: Déjà News.”
Déjà News is a production of MSNBC and NBC News.
Aronson: It’s executive produced and written by me and Rachel.
Maddow: Our associate producer is Janmaris Perez.
Aronson: Our audio producer is Tim Einenkel.
Maddow: Additional mixing by Bob Mallory.
Aronson: Our technical director is Bryson Barnes.
Maddow: Our senior executive producers are Cory Gnazzo and Laura Conaway.
Aronson: Our web producer is Will Femia.
Maddow: Our booking producer is Valerie Champagne.
Aronson: Archival tape wrangling by Holly Klopchin and Johanna Cerutti.
Maddow: And that amazing recording of the phone call between Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey —
Johnson: Oh, Hubert, I wish you’d see what these sons of bitches have done.
Maddow: — that comes from the Presidential Recordings Program at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. They have an online archive that will blow your mind. Highly recommended.
Aronson: Thanks also to historian Rick Perlstein. All his books are fantastic, but the one most germane to this episode is “Before the Storm, Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus.”
Maddow: Our thanks also to Sherrilyn Ifill, national treasure, former President and Director Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, now, the inaugural Vernon Jordan Endowed Chair in Civil Rights at Howard University. Congratulations.
Aronson: And thanks to Jim Brosnahan, whose forthcoming book about his more than six-decade law career, including his testimony against William Rehnquist, is called “Justice at Trial.”
Maddow: And finally, thanks to Rachel Maddow’s show viewer Randolph Bachrach, who dropped us a line a while back to make a great pitch for Operation Eagle Eye. Thanks, Randolph.
Aronson: You can drop us a line, too, at dejanews@msnbc.com and find us at our website, msnbc.com/dejanews.
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Brosnahan: You know, I’ll just say this. In the practice of law, I did learn one thing. When there’s a bully in the courtroom, you go right at them, and you describe it the way it is. And if, that, people don’t like it — I speak on behalf of all trial lawyers — we don’t care. We really don’t care. Because it’s true.
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