Trump’s Greenland obsession intensifies as White House floats military action
01:01:
(Chris Hayes)
Tonight on All In.
01:04:
(Donald Trump)
He is a violent guy.
01:06:
(Donald Trump)
He gets up there and he tries to imitate my dance a little bit.
01:09:
(Chris Hayes)
The president dances after the capture of Maduro as Democrats reckon with his attack on democracy.
01:16:
(Jamie Raskin)
When you reward and normalize criminal behavior, of course, you invite more of it.
01:23:
(Chris Hayes)
Tonight, the real-world connection between Venezuela and the fifth anniversary of the January 6th attack with Congressman Jamie Raskin.
01:31:
(Chris Hayes)
Then, Senator Chris Murphy on the public rejection of Donald Trump.
01:37:
(Donald Trump)
I wish you could explain to me what the hell's going on with the mind of the public because we have the right policy.
01:46:
(Chris Hayes)
And as the White House threatens to snatch Greenland, the growing alarm over Trump's imperialism on All In starts right now.
02:00:
(Chris Hayes)
Good evening from New York.
02:01:
(Chris Hayes)
I'm Chris Hayes.
02:02:
(Chris Hayes)
Five years ago today was one of the darkest days in the long history of this country's democracy.
02:08:
(Chris Hayes)
And as everyone knew at the time, in the moment, as they watched it on live TV, and as everyone basically warned at the time and then over and over again in the years after, particularly here on this show and across this network and elsewhere, if something was not done about it, what we witnessed that day would only be the beginning of Donald Trump's unchecked grab for power.
02:30:
(Chris Hayes)
Five years later, here we are, marking the anniversary.
02:36:
(Jamie Raskin)
Long after we are all gone, future generations will speak the names of Hodges and Dunn, Ganel and Fanon, Sicknick and Pingen.
02:51:
(Jamie Raskin)
They will be remembered as the great patriots that they are.
02:55:
(Jamie Raskin)
And the people who smashed them in the face with Confederate battle flags and Trump flags, the people who tried to destroy our constitutional order, will be remembered as fascist traitors to their own country.
03:10:
(Chris Hayes)
After the Trump administration seized the president of Venezuela with the stated intention of both taking his country's oil and running its government,
03:19:
(Chris Hayes)
I think today is kind of a perfect day to observe the anniversary of January 6th, 2021, because the one through line here is that Donald Trump will do whatever he can get away with.
03:31:
(Chris Hayes)
He will not take no for an answer, and he will try to take what he wants by any means necessary.
03:37:
(Chris Hayes)
And that is true whether it's in a department store dressing room.
03:41:
(Chris Hayes)
or whether it's the majority of the American electorate telling him no, or the head of a sovereign foreign state telling him no, or our dear NATO allies, or the courts, or the U.S. Constitution.
03:51:
(Chris Hayes)
He will do whatever he can get away with.
03:53:
(Chris Hayes)
He will only be stopped when there is enough of a groundswell of pressure on the other side of him.
04:02:
(Chris Hayes)
And we saw that in action five years ago, the thing to celebrate about that dark day, right?
04:07:
(Chris Hayes)
The Capitol police officers, first and foremost, who put their bodies and lives on the line, but also leading up to it, the courts, the mainstream media, the conservative press, members of his own party and his own cabinet, the Democratic Party opposition, everyone together basically all told Donald Trump no when he tried to overturn the results of a free and fair election that he lost.
04:30:
(Chris Hayes)
And it was an overwhelming political defeat for Trump, arguably the greatest public humiliation he has ever suffered.
04:36:
(Chris Hayes)
He was a pariah.
04:38:
(Chris Hayes)
He was banned from social media across all major platforms and for a moment effectively banned from, for lack of a better phrase, polite society because there was enough public pressure against him.
04:51:
(Chris Hayes)
And it got to the point where it was a genuine question if he could successfully mount a third run for the White House.
04:55:
(Chris Hayes)
In fact, at a certain point, that seemed preposterous.
04:57:
(Chris Hayes)
Remember when everyone in right-wing circles was talking about President Ron DeSantis?
05:02:
(Chris Hayes)
So now here we are.
05:03:
(Chris Hayes)
The question is, will we see that same level of public pressure against this administration's foreign policy?
05:12:
(Chris Hayes)
Will there be the same level of resistance after Donald Trump black-bagged the head of a sovereign state to face charges in this country?
05:19:
(Chris Hayes)
Because Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and Lindsey Graham have been very clear about their intentions.
05:28:
(Donald Trump)
The oil companies are going to go in and rebuild their system.
05:32:
(Donald Trump)
They're going to spend billions of dollars, and they're going to take the oil out of the ground, and we're taking back what they sold.
05:38:
(Donald Trump)
Remember, they stole our property.
05:41:
(Donald Trump)
It was the greatest theft in the history of America.
05:45:
(Donald Trump)
Nobody has ever stolen our property like they have.
05:48:
(Donald Trump)
They took our oil away from us.
05:51:
(Donald Trump)
They took the infrastructure away.
05:53:
(Donald Trump)
And all that infrastructure's rotted.
05:55:
(Donald Trump)
And the oil companies are going to go in and rebuild it.
06:00:
(Donald Trump)
We're not going to spend very much money at all, if anything.
06:03:
(Donald Trump)
But the oil companies are going to go that we're going to take our oil back.
06:07:
(Chris Hayes)
Just an hour ago, Trump announced that oil is ours.
06:09:
(Chris Hayes)
He said Venezuela will be turning over between 30 to 50 million barrels and that the profits will be controlled by him, solely by him.
06:20:
(Chris Hayes)
They're going to sell it at market price and Donald Trump gets a big check, puts it in his bank account, gives it to one of his weird, sad, unpleasant sons.
06:29:
(Chris Hayes)
In short, he's doing it because he can.
06:33:
(Chris Hayes)
When Mike Waltz spoke to the U.N. about the operation, he did not make up a whole rigmarole about spreading democracy or the dignity of the Venezuelan people.
06:40:
(Chris Hayes)
He didn't try to mislead them about weapons of mass destruction.
06:43:
(Chris Hayes)
He just said effectively, we want control of that oil.
06:49:
(Mike Waltz)
This is the Western Hemisphere.
06:52:
(Mike Waltz)
This is where we live.
06:53:
(Mike Waltz)
And we're not going to allow the Western Hemisphere to be used as a base of operation for our nation's adversaries and competitors and rivals of the United States.
07:04:
(Mike Waltz)
You cannot continue to have the largest energy reserves in the world under the control of adversaries of the United States, under the control of illegitimate leaders.
07:16:
(Chris Hayes)
That message was underscored by the White House on social media, quote, this is our hemisphere, ours.
07:21:
(Chris Hayes)
Do we own it?
07:22:
(Chris Hayes)
Ours alone?
07:23:
(Chris Hayes)
Anyone else live here?
07:25:
(Chris Hayes)
That's the way you have to understand everything about this era we are in and have been in.
07:30:
(Chris Hayes)
It is literal life and death stakes, both domestic and global battles over whether Trump can be restrained before he takes more, before he does more damage, before he destroys more, because he will try to take more.
07:44:
(Chris Hayes)
He feels emboldened right now.
07:45:
(Chris Hayes)
It's not an accident.
07:46:
(Chris Hayes)
Then the wake of successfully invading Venezuela and capturing its leader, Trump, along with the war hawks guiding his foreign policy, are already talking about a similar operation in neighboring Mexico, musing about doing the same in Colombia.
07:59:
(Chris Hayes)
Maybe they could kidnap and black bag that guy taking over Cuba.
08:05:
(Chris Hayes)
All of that would be illegal.
08:06:
(Chris Hayes)
It would be unwarranted, immoral and reckless.
08:10:
(Chris Hayes)
He's also talking very seriously about a potential military takeover of Greenland, which is part of Denmark, a founding member of NATO.
08:18:
(Chris Hayes)
Military action there would be unprecedented in the modern era, would completely uproot the post-war global order.
08:28:
(Soundbite)
It has been the formal position of the U.S. government since the beginning of this administration, frankly, going back into the previous Trump administration, that Greenland should be part of the United States.
08:40:
(Soundbite)
The president has been very clear about that.
08:42:
(Soundbite)
That is the formal position of the U.S. government.
08:44:
(Soundbite)
Right.
08:44:
(Soundbite)
But can you say that military action against Greenland is off the table?
08:47:
(Soundbite)
What do you mean military action against Greenland?
08:51:
(Soundbite)
Greenland has a population of 30,000 people, Jake.
08:55:
(Soundbite)
The real question is, by what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland?
08:59:
(Soundbite)
What is the basis of their territorial claim?
09:01:
(Soundbite)
What is their basis of having Greenland as a colony of Denmark?
09:05:
(Soundbite)
The United States is the power of NATO.
09:08:
(Soundbite)
Nobody's going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.
09:14:
(Chris Hayes)
Again, it can be crazy making that we're in this position.
09:16:
(Chris Hayes)
You've got to take a step back.
09:17:
(Chris Hayes)
Like, it is my position that Stephen Miller's house is mine.
09:21:
(Chris Hayes)
That's my position.
09:22:
(Chris Hayes)
By what claim does Stephen Miller have his house?
09:24:
(Chris Hayes)
His bank account is mine.
09:26:
(Chris Hayes)
And who's going to fight me over it?
09:27:
(Chris Hayes)
Who's going to fight me if I come up to your business and I smash the windows in and punch you in the face and take it?
09:32:
(Chris Hayes)
Who's going to stop me?
09:35:
(Chris Hayes)
Today, White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt confirmed to CNBC that Trump is considering military action in Greenland.
09:42:
(Chris Hayes)
For his part, Secretary of State Rubio says Trump wants to buy it, which again is a sort of familiar kind of way of approaching this, right?
09:50:
(Chris Hayes)
We'd like to buy your business.
09:53:
(Chris Hayes)
We'll take it if we have to.
09:54:
(Chris Hayes)
Can we find a price?
09:57:
(Chris Hayes)
It is exactly what it looks like.
09:58:
(Chris Hayes)
They don't try to really mask it.
10:01:
(Chris Hayes)
The whole world sees it.
10:02:
(Chris Hayes)
Our European allies are already sounding the alarm.
10:05:
(Chris Hayes)
And again, they'll do it if they can get away with it.
10:09:
(Chris Hayes)
They'll do a lot more, a lot more.
10:12:
(Chris Hayes)
And the question is, and the question is every day from here until this awful national nightmare ends, is can enough pressure be put on the other side of the door to keep the predator out of the room he's trying to break into right now?
10:30:
(Chris Hayes)
Can the wide array of nonviolent tactics available to people and states, institutions and corporations nationally and internationally stop Trump from continuing a rampage of wanton destruction, from creating a new imperialist American empire with himself as a dictator?
10:45:
(Chris Hayes)
He wants to do that.
10:46:
(Chris Hayes)
He could not be clearer about it.
10:49:
(Chris Hayes)
It's been the goal of his political project since at least this day, five years ago, January 6th, 2021.
10:57:
(Chris Hayes)
It's all the same story.
11:01:
(Chris Hayes)
Congressman Jamie Raskin is a Democrat of Maryland.
11:03:
(Chris Hayes)
He's a ranking member of the Judiciary Committee.
11:05:
(Chris Hayes)
He was the lead prosecutor in the second impeachment trial of President Trump.
11:08:
(Chris Hayes)
And he joins me now.
11:10:
(Chris Hayes)
Congressman, what are you thinking about on this day today?
11:15:
(Jamie Raskin)
A lot of the same stuff you were just talking about, Chris, you know, we're dealing with a guy who mobilizes violence to his political ends completely outside of the law.
11:28:
(Jamie Raskin)
And we saw that on January 6th, five years ago, and we're seeing it in Venezuela and Venezuela.
11:35:
(Jamie Raskin)
They're promising to be doing it other places.
11:38:
(Jamie Raskin)
I do think that you give them too much credit almost when you use the language of imperialism or people have been talking about climate change.
11:47:
(Jamie Raskin)
Obviously, there's no I mean, not climate change of regime change.
11:51:
(Jamie Raskin)
There's obviously no regime change.
11:53:
(Jamie Raskin)
taking place in Venezuela.
11:55:
(Jamie Raskin)
He doesn't care anymore about the people of Venezuela than he cares about the people of America.
12:00:
(Jamie Raskin)
And imperialism, you know, as hateful as the project was, at least had the redeeming pretense that it was going to do something for the whole country.
12:11:
(Jamie Raskin)
Donald Trump doesn't even pretend like this is going to do something for anybody other than the oil companies and him and his family.
12:20:
(Jamie Raskin)
And everybody knows that's what it's about.
12:22:
(Jamie Raskin)
So after spending his first year in office basically plundering the American economy, ruining large parts of our government, imposing these ruinous tariffs, now he's turning his attention to the rest of the world.
12:37:
(Jamie Raskin)
we should view it as an exercise in gangster state politics.
12:42:
(Jamie Raskin)
And if he's got a problem with this or that fellow gangster like Maduro, well, the mob bosses always get into fights all over the world, but there's no moral difference there.
12:52:
(Chris Hayes)
Yeah, I mean, you're right.
12:53:
(Chris Hayes)
And I think, you know, it's a fine line between imperialism and a smash and grab at a global scale.
12:59:
(Chris Hayes)
One way of understanding imperialism is that.
13:01:
(Chris Hayes)
But it's a smash and grab, what's happening, as was what they tried on January 6th with a smash and grab.
13:07:
(Chris Hayes)
Quite literally, like breaking the door, take a thing.
13:12:
(Chris Hayes)
In this case, the presidency of the United States.
13:14:
(Chris Hayes)
In the case of Venezuela, an incredible detail in all this, you talk about the oil companies is it's a smash and grab in which within the span of 72 hours, it's gone from we're taking the oil to it's probably going to take a lot of money and investment and we're going to subsidize the oil companies.
13:29:
(Chris Hayes)
We're going to pay the oil companies to take the Venezuelan oil.
13:34:
(Jamie Raskin)
And that's why I'm saying it doesn't even have the virtues of traditional imperialism, because the corporate class that would putatively benefit from it is not behind it.
13:43:
(Jamie Raskin)
He's going to have to bribe them in order to create his conglomerates with Donald Trump Jr. and other members of the family and the people who he's really determined to benefit.
13:53:
(Jamie Raskin)
And obviously there's nothing in it for the Venezuelan people.
13:56:
(Jamie Raskin)
other than the removal of Maduro, which admittedly has some benefits.
14:01:
(Jamie Raskin)
But who knows what's going to take place in that country now?
14:04:
(Jamie Raskin)
And Donald Trump would be the last person they would want to entrust their fortunes to.
14:11:
(Chris Hayes)
There was a consensus, a brief one, five years ago.
14:15:
(Chris Hayes)
Not that brief, actually.
14:15:
(Chris Hayes)
I think it was an acute, pervasive, ubiquitous, shared consensus across almost everyone, other than basically Donald Trump and the people that broke into the Capitol, that that was a shameful, dark, horrific transgression.
14:33:
(Chris Hayes)
Donald Trump has sort of undone that.
14:35:
(Chris Hayes)
And I think we can all despair of a social consensus like that ever reforming about Donald Trump.
14:41:
(Chris Hayes)
Do you think it's possible that it could ever reform, that we could ever encounter a moment when everyone understands precisely what they understood in that moment five years ago when they were watching this unfold?
14:56:
(Jamie Raskin)
Oh, it will reform very quickly as soon as he's off the stage, as soon as he's in jail or gone to his eternal reward or whatever.
15:04:
(Jamie Raskin)
The minute he's gone, all of the facts, 100% of the facts are on one side.
15:10:
(Jamie Raskin)
They haven't laid a glove on a single statement in the January 6th Select Committee report.
15:15:
(Jamie Raskin)
We've got documentary after documentary, and a lot of them are excellent, that demonstrate precisely what happened.
15:22:
(Jamie Raskin)
And you've got Jack Smith's testimony now
15:26:
(Jamie Raskin)
Also saying that there is no doubt that it could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt for every element of the indicted offenses that Donald Trump was guilty.
15:38:
(Jamie Raskin)
So, you know, some people have said, can you really blame him for all of the violence?
15:42:
(Jamie Raskin)
None of the violence would have happened without Donald Trump.
15:45:
(Jamie Raskin)
He was the one who got the groups to change the permit dates on the rallies from January 20th.
15:51:
(Jamie Raskin)
They were going to rally as a counter inaugural thing to January 6th.
15:55:
(Jamie Raskin)
He was the one who said, we're going to march the White House.
15:58:
(Jamie Raskin)
He was the one who said, be there, you know, we'll be wild.
16:01:
(Jamie Raskin)
He was the one who said to Mike Pence, you know, you've got to return the Electoral College votes from the swing states and, you know, history will record you as a patriot or as a pussy.
16:13:
(Jamie Raskin)
I mean, he was the mastermind and the ringleader of the entire conspiracy.
16:19:
(Chris Hayes)
The website posted today, you know, a sort of predictably deranged statement.
16:24:
(Chris Hayes)
counter story of, uh, January six.
16:27:
(Chris Hayes)
I mean, it was all the, you know, precisely the kind of nonsense that you would see pulled from like a sort of unwell person in the bowels of the internet.
16:35:
(Chris Hayes)
Um, this is, I want to read you one part about the pardons, uh,
16:39:
(Chris Hayes)
With his triumphant return to the White House, he wasted no time righting one of the darkest wrongs in modern history, issued sweeping pardons and commutations for the vast majority of January 6th defendants.
16:49:
(Chris Hayes)
By the way, I think it was all of them.
16:50:
(Chris Hayes)
Patriotic citizens who've been viciously overcharged, denied due process, and held as political hostages by a vengeful regime.
16:57:
(Chris Hayes)
You are confident, more confident than I am, that the judgment of history will be what your committee and what your impeachment proceeding produced rather than that nonsense, yes?
17:10:
(Jamie Raskin)
Well, yes, dozens of the people that he's pardoned have already gone out and committed other crimes.
17:16:
(Jamie Raskin)
I mean, dozens and dozens of crimes have been committed since January 6th by the perpetrators.
17:22:
(Jamie Raskin)
We're talking about child sex abuse, child pornography, trafficking, rape.
17:27:
(Jamie Raskin)
you know, domestic invasion, you name it.
17:29:
(Jamie Raskin)
And he's going to have to pay the political price for that.
17:33:
(Jamie Raskin)
And anybody who defends him is.
17:35:
(Jamie Raskin)
But there is no counter story to what actually happened.
17:38:
(Jamie Raskin)
This was the most documented, videotaped and photographed mass criminal event in the history of the world.
17:46:
(Jamie Raskin)
And so we have a near perfect record of what exactly happened.
17:51:
(Jamie Raskin)
And all they've got is colliding conspiracy theories.
17:54:
(Jamie Raskin)
On the one hand, they say, well, this day was a great day of revolutionary resistance to the deep state, like 1776.
18:01:
(Jamie Raskin)
Then in the same breath, they say, and it was all set up by Antifa.
18:06:
(Jamie Raskin)
Those were all Antifa fighters.
18:08:
(Jamie Raskin)
Well, then he pardons 1600 Antifa fighters.
18:11:
(Jamie Raskin)
I mean, none of it makes any sense.
18:12:
(Jamie Raskin)
It's utterly incoherent.
18:15:
(Chris Hayes)
Congressman Jamie Raskin, I thought of you today because I think it was today Trump was musing.
18:20:
(Chris Hayes)
It's always occurred to me that one of the reasons he's so obsessed with midterms isn't because he cares about Republicans controlling the House or wants to pass legislation.
18:27:
(Chris Hayes)
He's very terrified of a third impeachment.
18:29:
(Chris Hayes)
He verbalized that today, that that's the reason he's invested in midterms.
18:33:
(Chris Hayes)
And I think there's something to that that hangs over him, partly because of the work that you did after January 5th.
18:39:
(Chris Hayes)
Congressman Jamie Raskin, thank you very much.
18:42:
(Jamie Raskin)
Hey, they say three, the third time's the charm.