Good evening from New York, I'm Chris Hayes.

Our lead story tonight is that the candidacy of Donald Trump for President is a national

emergency.

A four alarm fire threat to democracy, and I can hear you saying yourself, Chris, isn't

that the lead story every night?

The answer is, well, yes, and when it's not, it still arguably should be.

I mean, look, we, I, all of us have been talking about this guy for seven years now.

We've been doing it because the stakes are that high.

The national emergency began when the ex-president got the Republican nomination back in 2016,

since then we have not yet emerged, and I would love, believe me, to cover someone other

than this guy.

But it is the most important story right now because you represent an existential threat

to the American project, preserving American democracy in the face of his sustained attack

on it is a necessary precondition for everything else, solving inequality to climate change.

That threat that he poses is the singular, unchanging truth about American public life every

day, for Monday to Tuesday, from Tuesday to Friday, from Friday to Sunday.

It keeps having to be said that he, the former president, is a threat to America.

But even that's part of the problem, isn't it?

Each and every new development is for criminal trials, gets priced in and expected.

On some level he lost the ability to shock long ago, and Republicans, and the echo chamber,

and even some members of the news media get bored of saying the same thing over and over.

This same unceasing truth, this same singular enduring national emergency.

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