Nicolle Wallace, Part 1

In this special two-part episode, Heilemann talks with his pal Nicolle Wallace, host of Deadline: White House on MSNBC, about the battle between democracy and autocracy at home and abroad. In Part One, Heilemann and Wallace focus on recent developments surrounding the House 1/6 committee: the seven-plus hour gap in Donald Trump’s White House phone logs from the day of the attack on the Capitol; Ginni Thomas’s text messages with Trump’s chief of staff advocating the overturning of the 2020 election, and the subsequent failure of her husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, to recuse himself from cases involving the insurrection; the ruling of a federal judge endorsing the theory that Trump is likely guilty of committing federal crimes related to 1/6; the pressure on the Department of Justice to indict him; and how the same struggle against authoritarianism is playing out in both Ukraine and the U.S. In Part Two, Heilemann and Wallace focus on the rot afflicting the GOP, Wallace's former party: how Republicans went from embracing her former boss, George W. Bush, to worshipping Trump; the role of Fox News and Tucker Carlson in particular in turning the right into a movement fueled by conspiracy theories and anti-democratic impulses (with Wallace averring that Trump, Carlson, and Vladimir Putin comprise a new “axis of evil"); and how the radicalization of the GOP establishment is, says Wallace, “the most underreported story in America.” Plus: Wallace reacts to the return of Sarah Palin — her bête noire as a staffer for John McCain in the 2008 presidential campaign, as famously recounted in Heilemann's book and film, Game Change — as a candidate for Congress in Alaska.

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