The Rachel Maddow Show – July 21 | Audio Only — Transcript

Thanks to you at home for joining us this hour. Really happy to have you here. So, um, I do not live in Texas. Uh, I like Texas very much. Uh, but I have never spent all that much time there. I've never put down roots there. I definitely do not own a house in Texas. Relatedly, because I do not live in Texas, and I don't have a house in Texas, and I haven't visited there at all this past year. Um, I did not need to be rescued in the Texas floods this month. Uh, nor was I in Texas personally rescuing people from the Texas floods when they happened.

Also, just so you know, I do not have a long-lost daughter with whom I have recently been reunited. Uh, I do not have a daughter. I do not have a baby. I do not have a baby on the way. No kids, no kids at all. I've never had a baby myself. My partner Susan never had a baby. We've never adopted a baby or had a baby by surrogacy or by any other means by which one might reasonably end up with a baby. Um, so no house in Texas, nothing to do with the terrible Texas floods. I don't have a long-lost daughter. I don't have any kind of baby anyway, anyhow. I also have not been fired by MSNBC. Look, here I am. I still work here. You see me now on MSNBC. I have been here since 2005, I think. I'm happy as a clam here at MSNBC. Relatedly, I have not founded my own news network, nor am I planning to. Why would I do that when I work at MSNBC? Without a baby and without a house in Texas.

Uh, and I I say all this because if you have been looking at the internet machine, particularly if you have been looking at Facebook, um, you may have heard or seen stuff about me that contradicts those things that I just told you. And, you know, I've been around for a while. I've been in this business for a while. I'm used to people saying fake stuff about me to get a rise out of people or to get under my skin or for some other self-serving purpose. I'm used to it. I don't particularly care.

But I got to say it's different now. Um, now because of AI, the fake stories are more compelling to people and more believable. They're really finally targeted and calibrated to tell people things that they want to hear or specifically to tell them things that they want to click on to learn more about. The biggest change, I think, is that there are often now AI-generated pictures or even videos that are designed to make you think that you're not only reading a story that has some appeal to you, but there's visual proof of what the story says. And AI will generate any visual proof that you want. So, there I am, rescuing people supposedly in the Texas floods.

Um, and and there I am with a baby of some derivation. And uh, here I am having a security guard take the White House press secretary off of my set in a TV studio or something. None of this is real. None of this is real. This is all AI generated.

And to me, it all looks really fake. Like if if you yourself are the subject of some of this AI slop, I can tell you, these images like this look clumsy and ham-handed and weird. And if you look really closely, some of the tells are there. The the baby has too many fingers. There's a there's a random extra arm in the picture with the old lady in the floodwaters. And there's there's these other weird things that are weird and wrong if you look really closely. But we don't always all look really closely. We don't always have a reason to. You know, if you're just scrolling through stuff on the internet, you might think this stuff is real. It is way more believable to a lot of people than it used to be before AI took over all social media.

So, I mean, honestly, don't feel bad. It's no fault of your own if you saw any of this and believed any of this. Um, for your convenience, I will say if you ever do see something about me online and you want to check to see if it's true, one place you can go to see if it's true is our website where we catalog this stuff, which is is that really Rachel.com. That's the website address. Is that really Rachel.com.

We try to keep up with this stuff there so you can check to see if it's real. Again, is that really Rachel.com. In addition, I will mention the website Snopes, snopes.com. They always do a really good job debunking this kind of stuff, not just stuff about me, but everything. Um, Snopes is great. And there's almost nobody else who does it as sort of consistently, um, consistently well as they do it. Makes them pretty invaluable. You should bookmark Snopes snopes.com and you can always check that regularly against stuff that's circulating online or any rumors that you hear in the news if you want to see if it's true, to see if it's been debunked.

But you know, even even though the internet has always been a little bit of a cesspool. I I do think it I do think that something's happening right now, like this summer, with the advent of AI. There's there's just been a a tipping point.

It's just been swapped all of a sudden and very thoroughly. I mean, even Google is about 90% less useful than it used to be on a day-to-day basis with the way that they've allowed AI and references to social media that are all fueled by AI to take over their search engine results. So even Google's less useful than it used to be, but social media in particular, and Facebook is the worst of it, is pretty much totally overtaken now by AI slop. It is it is really just trash. And because the companies don't appear to want to fix it or do anything about it, it's not going to get any better. This stuff is essentially free, and it's become the dominant content in American social media.

And it's you can you can see why. It's infinite supply. It these things they don't take human effort. They are created robotically in essentially infinite quantities and for free. And what they create and post online and circulate in social media is just stuff that is designed to manipulate you, to get you to click something, which they can directly monetize, or it's designed to manipulate your feelings or manipulate your perception of what's true and what's going on in the world. And, you know, the antidote is the same as it's always been for all of us, right? Only use trusted sources of information. If somebody is citing something to MSNBC, go to msnbc.com and see if you can find it there.

If somebody is citing something to BBC News or the New York Times or some other name brand news organization, you should be able to go to the website of that name brand news organization and find it there, right? Always try to figure out where something is coming from exactly. Before you believe it and certainly before you share it. But the fact that we're going through this right now.

The fact that we are, I think, really in the midst of an AI slop information apocalypse online, where online sources of information are just becoming almost default useless. In this moment, we're also running into some funny situations because of the combination of AI-driven slop online and the extreme and bizarre news environment that is the second term of Donald Trump's presidency.

Let me tell you how these two things come together. Uh, NBC News reporter Kevin Collier has really interesting new reporting on one particular thing that's going on online. It's it's a newly reported, previously undescribed network of AI-powered bots that are on Twitter, that are on X. And these bots exist just to automatically praise Trump administration officials.

To praise them and praise everything they do. Uh, here's the lead Mr. Collier's story, quote, a previously unreported network of hundreds of accounts on X is using artificial intelligence to automatically reply to conservatives with positive messages about people in the Trump administration. Quote, it's unclear who is behind the network or which of the multiple AI chatbots that are widely accessible to the public was used to power it. The bots have posted support for conservative figures since 2024, including supporting Trump and other Republicans on the ballot in the lead-up to the 2024 election, and then afterward posting that they were excited for Trump to take office. Now, the bots in the network, quote, offer consistent praise for key Trump figures, particularly support for Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt.

So, this is one of the ways that things online are just trash now in terms of your ability to get true and bankable information online. In this case, this bot network NBC is reporting on, these bots are trained to automatically post tirelessly, mechanically, over and over again, things that Trump supporters might say in support of Trump things. Right? So you no longer have to pay a troll farm of teenagers in Macedonia or St. Petersburg, Russia, to to pretend to be right-wing Americans saying political things online. Now, instead, they just train these automated bots to do it.

They input into these bots the content that Trump supporters post online, and then they tell the bots to just mimic it. Just just spit it back out in quantity, thus maximizing what appears to be pro-Trump commentary online. But here's the problem. Artificial intelligence is not actually intelligent. It only knows what it has been trained on. It only knows what it has been fed. And so these bots that are being told to mimic Trump supporters social media comments, these bots are now getting confused about what they should say about the Jeffrey Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein scandal. I'll show you exactly what I mean. Here's one of the bots as reported by NBC. This one's name is L Harry 38143. That bot posts this, quote, Pam Bondi's attempt to escape with the Epstein client list is laughable. It's time we demand transparency and justice for all victims involved. And then less than 24 hours later, here's that exact same bot. Retweet if you agree that it's time to take a stand against the mob mentality and support Pam Bondi.

Same bot, less than 24 hours later, one very much against Pam Bondi, one very much for Pam Bondi, both on the basis of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Uh, here's another one. This bot is called, what's its name? Uh, Carrie 36622. Wow, this is getting juicy. Can't wait to see what comes out of all this. Stay tuned, folks. It's going to be a wild ride. #MegaBombshell #EpsteinFiles #TrumpScandal. And then literally one minute later, the same bot says this, quote, the coffin of perversion has been nailed shut as the case of Jeffrey Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein is finally closed. #Justice #Closure. So which is it? This is juicy. I can't wait to see what happens next or finally, closure. I'm so glad this is over. One minute apart. These bots, this is what, this is the kind of content you get from AI. These bots are trained to mimic Maga voices online. They are trained to sound like Trump supporters, based on the kind of stuff that Trump supporters say. And so when it comes to the Jeffrey Epstein story, the bots are malfunctioning. They're like sparking wires and melting down. Because these bots are trying to say what Trump supporters have always said. Epstein scandal, Epstein scandal. Why is nobody talking about the Epstein scandal? And at the same time, they're also trying to say what Trump is saying now, which is, definitely do not talk about the Epstein scandal. Everybody stop talking about it. Does not compute. They're melting down. They don't know what to do.

As NBC News put it, quote, with the Maga movement split over the administration's handling of files involving deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the accounts messaging has broken, offering contradictory statements on the issue and revealing the AI-fueled nature of the accounts. What's happening here is the equivalent of the extra arm or the seven fingers on the baby, right? It's no longer working. They're showing their guts. But it is understandable that the bots are melting down. I mean, if you're going to try to be pro-Trump on the Jeffrey Epstein issue, what are you going to say? Right? I mean, what happened to the lawyer who got Epstein his bizarrely lenient plea deal when he was first arrested on sex trafficking charges in Florida? Well, oh, Trump hired him to be his own lawyer. What happened to the US attorney who gave Jeffrey Epstein that bizarrely lenient plea deal? Oh, Trump put him in his cabinet in his first term. Well, who then prosecuted Epstein a second time when he was brought up on federal charges? Oh, that was the SDNY line prosecutor who Trump inexplicably fired last week. Hmm. Who was in charge of the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Prisons when Epstein then killed himself in federal custody? Ah, President Donald Trump, who bragged to a reporter about how much Epstein seemed to like women on the younger side, who said Epstein was a lot of fun to be with, who bragged that he was friends with Epstein for 15 years, who flew on his plane at least seven times, and who now says that everybody needs to stop talking about Jeffrey Epstein right now? Does not compute. They're melting down. They don't know what to say anymore.

And the polling of real live humans on the issue reflects the same disgust. In the new CBS News YouGov poll that's just come out, Trump is underwater overall in terms of his approval rating by 16 points. Do you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president? Disapprove by 16 points. Well, okay, but do you feel strongly about it? Huh, turns out yes. The number of Americans who say they strongly approve of Trump is 24%. The number of Americans who say they strongly disapprove of Trump is 47%. That's almost double. So if you live somewhere with a lot of Maga supporters and you're always hearing people say how much they love, love, love Trump, and they've got Trump flags up and Trump bumper stickers and blah, blah, blah, you should know that the people who feel very strongly against Trump outnumber Trump fans in this country by almost exactly a two-to-one margin. They take up a lot of space, but they are not even a quarter of the population. They are two-to-one out-numbered by people who strongly disapprove of Trump.

And it's not just him personally, he is underwater on every issue, including the one he wants to be his best issue. Do you approve of Trump's handling of immigration? No, by a 12-point margin. Do you approve of Trump's handling of Iran? No, by a 12-point margin. Do you approve of Trump's handling of the Israel-Hamas conflict? No, by a 14-point margin. Do you want the US government to put tariffs on other countries? No, by a 20-point margin. Do you approve of Trump's so-called big beautiful bill? No, by a 22-point margin. Do you think the big beautiful bill will help you or hurt you and your family? Hurt by a two-to-one margin. Well, what do you think about Trump's handling of the Epstein matter? Well, by a 50-point margin, Americans say they are dissatisfied with Trump's handling of this matter. The number of Americans who say they are somewhat or very dissatisfied by Trump's handling of the Epstein matter is 75%. The number of Americans who say they are somewhat or very satisfied is only 25%. That is a 50-point gap. Should the US Department of Justice release all the information it has regarding the Jeffrey Epstein case? Yes. Yes. Yes, by a 78-point margin. Nearly 90% of Americans say the government should do that. To which Trump says, everybody, please stop talking about this. Trump has tried to change the subject to threatening to fire the chair of the Federal Reserve, even though he's not legally allowed to do that. He has tried to change the subject by threatening comedian Rosie O'Donnell. He has tried to change the subject by threatening California US Senator Adam Schiff. He has tried to change the subject by threatening former FBI Director James Comey and by threatening former CIA Director John Brennan. He has tried to change the subject by posting a threatening video about manhandling and handcuffing former President Barack Obama, which President Trump posted online last night. But none of that is working.

And meanwhile, you know, how's he doing in terms of governance and stuff? Meanwhile, here's another near miss between another commercial passenger plane and a military aircraft, this time over Minot, North Dakota. While the former MTV reality show contestant Trump put in charge of the US Transportation Department has also, in addition to being in charge of things like the FAA and the Department of Transportation, has also additionally been given responsibility for running NASA in his spare time, where today hundreds of current and former scientific and technical NASA employees wrote a dissent letter sounding the alarm of what they call the rapid and wasteful cuts at NASA, including to the agency's key safety systems. Meanwhile, Trump's bizarre gambit of flying people to a random gigantic prison in El Salvador, apparently in exchange for social media hits from the Salvadoran dictator, that bizarre episode with the big prison in El Salvador has now ended. And all the people who Trump sent there, including the game makeup artist, Andre Hernandez Romero, they have all been taken out of that prison now and flown to Venezuela. Trump's gambit with the weird Salvadoran prison apparently is over now. Meanwhile, Trump's bizarre assertion that he needed to fly people to yet another random country, Eswatini, which used to be Swaziland, the the Trump administration said they needed to spend, I believe, millions of dollars to fly five people all the way around the world from this country to that tiny country in Africa. They said they had to fly them there in particular because these five men could never be returned to their home countries. Meanwhile, Eswatini has received these five men from the United States, and what are they going to do with them? They say they're going to send these guys back to their home countries. Because it's not actually a problem to send them back to their home countries. It's not an issue, even though the Trump administration said that could not be done, and that's why they had to spend all that time and all that effort and all that money of yours and mine to fly these men to Swaziland. They're just going back to their home countries anyway. But meanwhile, the Trump administration detoured them to a tiny nation in Africa. Okay. Meanwhile, half the National Guardsmen who Trump inexplicably sent to Los Angeles have now been sent home after completing a mission there, marked by morale so low, it yielded press reports like this one from the New York Times, quote, some troops became so disgruntled that there were several there were several reports of soldiers defecating in Humvees and showers at the Southern California base where the troops were stationed, prompting tightened bathroom security. Half of those National Guard troops have now been sent home. Now, today, the active duty Marines Trump inexplicably sent to Los Angeles are also being sent home. With a whimper. The way all these bizarre, expensive, failed Trump gambits are ending. With a whimper.

Remember all the protests we've been covering against Avelo Airlines? Avelo Airlines signed a contract with the Trump administration to fly deportation flights, and then they kept trying to operate commercial passenger flights alongside those. People have been protesting every week at the airports where Avelo has tried to maintain its commercial passenger flights alongside its ICE deportation flights. Now Avelo has announced that it is pulling its operations out of a whole bunch of airports where it was trying to have commercial passenger traffic. They're pulling out of Santa Rosa and McKinleyville and Burbank in California. They're pulling out of Kalispell, Montana, and Las Vegas, Nevada, and Salem, Redmond, Eugene, and Rogue Valley, Oregon, and Pasco Tri-Cities, Washington. They're pulling out all those places. There were protests this weekend at a Walmart in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where ICE tasered and tackled a woman recently, and then the store forced out people who were seeking to videotape what ICE was doing to someone inside that store. Now people are picketing outside that Walmart. There were protests this weekend in Leavenworth, Kansas, led by former employees of the private prison company Core Civic. Core Civic had a disastrous run operating a now closed private prison in Leavenworth. Trump now wants to reopen it as an immigration prison. The city of Leavenworth is fighting it, and that fight is being led by people who worked for Core Civic at that old disastrously run Leavenworth jail. There were protests this weekend in Stark, Florida, against plans to turn the Florida National Guard site at Camp Blanding into another one of Trump's immigration prisons there. There were protests this weekend in Nashville, Tennessee, yet another big protest in the name of and in the memory of the late Congressman John Lewis. And another one in in Columbia, Pennsylvania, this weekend. And yet another one at the Kansas State Capitol. And yet another one in Canton, Ohio. And yet another one in Irvine, California. There were protests all over the Red State of Indiana this weekend at the offices of Republican Congressman Rudy Yakym and Republican Congresswoman Victoria Sparks and Republican US Senator Todd Young. In Texas, there were protests both in Houston and also in Austin at the governor's mansion there against Texas Republicans plans to redistrict congressional maps in that state to try to force five more congressional districts into being guaranteed Republican safe seats in Washington. This was Washington, D.C. today. People protesting Trump's disaster preparedness cuts, protesting with pink camp trunks, pink footlockers to represent all those girls who were killed by the floods at Camp Mystic in Texas. And this, this afternoon, this was outside the Ed Sullivan Theater where the great Stephen Colbert tapes his show for CBS in New York City. CBS, of course, just canceled his show. While Trump gloated about it. People outside Colbert's studio this afternoon saying Colbert stays. Trump must go. Don't believe everything you hear without checking it out. Don't believe everything you see without checking it out. But also, don't close your eyes to this stuff either. This is as much the story of this moment in our history as anything anybody saying in Washington. It is our moment in history too. We'll be right back.

So US attorneys are a really big deal. It's the top federal prosecutor in a state. Um, and for smaller states, there's sometimes just one US attorney for the whole state. Uh, in bigger states, there's there's often more than one. Uh, so for example, New York State has four US attorneys for four different districts in New York. But like I said, they're they're a big deal. US attorneys are nominated by the President of the United States. They are confirmed by the US Senate. They've got a lot of power. It's a very prestigious, very powerful job. It's it's an important thing. In one of the four districts in New York, in the Northern District of New York, which is Albany. Um, instead of nominating a US attorney and submitting that nomination to the Senate, President Trump instead decided that he was going to install somebody just on a temporary basis. He was going to install an interim US attorney. And this is who he picked. His name is John Sarcone. Um, among the things that have distinguished Mr. Sarcone's somewhat bizarre tenure thus far in Albany, um, was the moment when the local paper discovered that the place Sarcone had officially reported as his local home address was actually a boarded-up building where no one lives. And in response to that reporting, Mr. Sarcone ordered his office to take that newspaper off its media distribution list and no longer give them any information. Because he did not like their story about him saying that he lived in what was actually a boarded-up building.

John Sarcone's temporary appointment as US attorney, um, was scheduled to come to an end last week. If you're appointed as an interim US attorney, you can't stay forever. Um, you have to they have to have a Senate-confirmed person in the job eventually, right? There can be exceptions though. There is one way legally that an interim US attorney can extend his or her term in office and stay on a little bit longer if that needs to happen. The only way you can do it is if the federal judges in that district vote that that person should be kept in their post beyond the time when the interim appointment would usually end. Well, earlier this month, John Sarcone went on TV and said, hey, I've got great news, everybody. The judges in the Northern District of New York, they just voted on whether or not I get to keep this gig, and they voted to keep me. I get to stay. Except that was totally not true. The judges in the Northern District of New York actually had gotten together and voted, and they voted no. They voted that John Sarcone could not stay in office, which legally meant that he has to go. He can't continue to hold that job.

Now, at that point, what the Justice Department's supposed to do is nominate somebody new for the post or appoint another interim prosecutor to hold the position for a little while until they can figure out who they want the Senate to confirm. But instead, they decided to do something crazy. The Trump administration decided instead to just keep John Sarcone on the job. And they decided to do that by naming him to be his own assistant. So he's they've given him a new job where he's now the first assistant US attorney. And um, since there's been a vacancy left by John Sarcone having to leave his interim US attorney, now the first assistant has to step up and be the new acting US attorney, and who wouldn't you know, the first assistant is also John Sarcone. So now he is the acting US attorney for the Northern District of New York, as well as serving as his own assistant, as well as I guess being the former interim US attorney.

He and the White House are now claiming that he can now serve out this this term as the top federal prosecutor in the Northern District of New York indefinitely, with nobody voting on it, and nobody confirming him. He just gets to stay because he is his own assistant.

They seem to think they have found this loophole where where maybe they where maybe they never have to nominate anybody for Senate confirmation for jobs like this anymore. I mean, we don't know if they're going to try this one neat trick to bypass judges and the Senate for other US attorney posts as well. But I can tell you that the interim US attorney for New Jersey is the former parking garage lawyer and former Trump personal attorney, Alina Habba.

In her time as interim New Jersey US attorney, she has filed charges against the mayor of New Jersey's largest city. She has indicted a sitting Democratic Congresswoman. She has announced an investigation that the Democratic governor and the Democratic attorney general of the state, all while posing for immigration enforcement cosplay glamour shots on the regular. Her appointment as interim US attorney runs out tomorrow. A panel of federal judges in New Jersey was slated to meet today on her request to stay on.

If they reject her, will they try to keep Alina Habba in the job indefinitely as well? Who fixes this if this is the way Trump is trying to break it? Joining us now is Joyce Vance, former US attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. Joyce, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. Good to be with you. This isn't the sort of thing that um, regular news consumers and regular citizens usually have to know anything about. This is usually kind of in the weeds in terms of how the justice system works. Let me just ask you if I explained any of it the wrong way around or if I confused any of those details.

You did a great job. It's horribly in the weeds. I was technically an acting US attorney for the first four months I was off in office, but I think even I had forgotten that until all of this came up.

Hmm.

With this interim US attorney, um, one neat trick that they have pulled off in the Northern District of New York, saying that by naming this man to be his own assistant, now he no longer needs permission from the judges in the district to stay on. Now he doesn't need Senate confirmation. He can just indefinitely hold this position. Um, I have to ask if that's something that you know of any other administration ever trying, or if it's something that's ever otherwise been tested.

No, absolutely not. And and I think, you know, it's it's easy to make light of this, but the reality is this is the top law enforcement officer in the Northern District of New York, and he's come into office by making a mockery of of these foundational laws in our democracy.

The separation of power that's meant to keep power from being concentrated too deeply in the hands of any one branch in government, so that the Senate has to confirm the president's pick for these high-ranking jobs. It's no way to become the top chief law enforcement officer in a district by doing this.

The federal judges in the Northern District, is it is it in their part of their remit to sort of police this? I mean, the way that the rules are supposed to work, they're supposed to have a say as to whether or not an interim US attorney can have his term extended, um, on the basis presumably of their view of that interim US attorney, but also the circumstances that warrant the request for an extension.

The judges are given judgment in terms of whether or not this is a good idea. What can they do if anything now that this is being flouted pretty obviously?

I think it's unlikely that we would see federal judges go to war with the President of the United States over one of these appointments. It absolutely is their prerogative. The question is how would they enforce it in a situation where you've got a president who's committed to doing it the wrong way. So he could, for instance, fire the court appointee, put in his own person for another 120 days. These laws are really vague and fluid, Rachel, and there are reads of these laws that would say that would be an okay thing for the president to do. So I think we'll just consider uh, we'll continue to see this kind of tomfoolery as opposed to taking this seriously like it should be.

Former US attorney Joyce Vance, thank you so much for your time. We're going to continue to watch this closely. I think if they think they've gotten away with it once, they'll keep trying it in other places. So we'll see. Thanks, Joyce.

Thanks.

All right.

All right.

That's going to do it for me tonight. Good to have you here.