MS NOW host Chris Hayes discussed President Donald Trump’s recent political setbacks. Hayes believes that as President Trump experiences more setbacks, he will become more authoritarian:

CHRIS HAYES, MS NOW HOST: Look, Donald Trump is having the worst political spell of his second term, and my God, is it showing. I mean, you can make the case with the exception of the immediate aftermath of January 6, which is his, I think, political new year. This has been the first few weeks, the worst few weeks he’s ever had. And it’s been a really incredible term when you consider what people were saying 10 short months ago when Trump was first sworn into office, right? Remember, his administration was desperate to project strength as if they had won a massive political mandate instead of a narrow one and a half point victory. But the projection of strength becomes actual strength if everyone decides to play along. And we saw big tech and big law and media companies and elite universities all preemptively surrender to Trump. But then something started to change. People started saying no. The initial waves of mass opposition in this administration and its overreach started with everyday Americans, people protesting the deportations of their friends and neighbors at ICE facilities, the over seven million Americans who showed up to no King’s protests from coast to coast, growing each time they were called, or the jurors who, starting very early on, refused to rubber stamp the trumped up cases that this Department of Justice brought against the people who stood up to them. And once some people started saying no, it created a kind of permission structure for, to give one example, Disney to refuse to pull Jimmy Kimmel off the air forever because Donald Trump doesn’t like his commentary. Slowly but surely, the no’s have gotten louder and louder, and now it has become a chorus of resistance against his president. Remember, back in the spring, the Democratic leadership in the Senate, particularly under Chuck Schumer, who I interviewed at the time, rubber stamped Trump’s proposal to keep the government open, basically said this is my budget, take it or leave it, and they took it. In September, they refused to go along with a unilaterally Republican only crafted spending bill, and we had the longest shutdown fight in the country’s history. Now, ultimately, some of them relented. They caved, eight of them. They lost the fight over insurance subsidies for millions of Americans. But the politics of the shutdown just definitively shifted things firmly onto the opposition’s terrain. Democrats were able to frame the narrative on their own terms. They successfully made health care an issue that is front of mind for voters. The polling shows the messaging is resonating with voters. The Obamacare issue has been left unresolved. I think a crazy thing for Republicans to do because premiums are, in fact, shooting up. That wasn’t made up, and it’s going to haunt the entire Republican Party, particularly Republican House members in swing seats heading into the midterms who have to explain what’s going on to their voters. In fact, there are reports that some Republicans are already privately panicking over those upcoming elections. We got one new poll that shows Democrats with a gargantuan 14-point lead in the generic ballot. Now, that’s an outlier in the polling, and if that ends up being an outlier in the final result, even so, it is very clear when you put all the polling together, the Democrats right now are the ones with political momentum. That’s evidenced by the off-cycle elections earlier this month, the first real test we had of all of this when Democrats flipped the governor’s mansion and the state legislature in Virginia, opening up a supermajority there. They became the first party in decades to hold New Jersey’s gubernatorial mansion for three straight terms to say nothing of the fact that 34-year-old Democratic socialists beat both a Republican and a Trump-endorsed independent candidate to become the mayor-elect of the biggest city in the country. In fact, Republicans are so concerned about the midterms, Donald Trump ordered red states to rig their congressional maps, believing that extremely rare mid-cycle redistricting would be his salvation, right? The way to make sure that Republicans face no consequences with actual voters next year. But even in that case, Trump cannot get it over the finish line. Despite bullying and browbeating state legislatures with visits to the White House, personal entreaties by Vice President J.D. Vance, state legislatures under complete Republican control like Indiana and Kansas, to name two, have refused to go along with this scheme, at least so far. They have told Trump no, they will not do his bidding. Even Texas, which of course did go along with the plan, had its new district struck down by a federal judge this week. Meanwhile, in deep blue California, voters overwhelmingly approved a referendum to draw new maps of their own in order to level the playing field, which means, somewhat comically, at the end of the day, if the Texas map stays struck down, it’s entirely possible Democrats end up being the ones benefiting from the whole fight. And then look at what happened in Congress this week, if you’re not convinced. Republicans got rolled. They completely caved across both chambers. I mean, only one single Republican voted against the bill to release the Epstein files. That is despite, let’s not forget, an enormous months-long pressure campaign from Donald Trump and the White House to block and kill this bill. Trump lost so completely, so thoroughly, he had no choice but to himself sign a bill he hated and opposed behind closed doors. Now, of course, the concern is what exactly Trump might do to distract the country from his losses. The last time Epstein was in the news, he sent federal troops in to occupy Washington, D.C. A federal judge today said that was unlawful. He’s threatened to do the same here in New York. There’s a worry that as his losses pile up, he will only try harder to become an authoritarian. That is one of the reasons that Democratic members of Congress, both former military and intelligence officials, put out this video this week reminding troops and other officers they do not have to follow illegal orders from the president. In fact, it’s crucial they don’t. And Donald Trump has been completely melting down over that very video today. He has called for the participants in the video you’re seeing on your screen right now, members of Congress, to be tried for treason. He has amplified calls for them to be executed. He has received bipartisan condemnation for his comments. All this is happening at a time when his approval rating has cratered. And it is very clear to everyone, not just people watching, but the people doing politics in Washington, that he is not operating from a position of strength right now.

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