So tonight we're going to spend a lot of time talking about Donald Trump's increasingly authoritarian rhetoric and his increasingly authoritarian plans for a second term.

Congressman Adam Schiff is standing by for a conversation

about all of it. And as the former president urges his supporters to watch voters in Detroit, Atlanta,

and Philadelphia, civil rights attorney Cheryl and Eiffel is going to join me as well. Plus, comedian

Jordan Klepper has a way of cutting through the noise when it comes to the right-wing echo chamber,

and I'm very excited to chat with him later on in the show. But we do want to start tonight by talking about a world

leader who has a history of projecting onto his opponents what he himself is actually doing.

On February 27th of 2014, a group of Russian men wearing green uniforms and no identifying military insignia

took over the capital of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula and even raised a Russian flag above the building.

In the days that followed, these little green men, as they were called, took over Ukrainian

military bases and important facilities.

But despite what was clearly a Russian-led campaign with Russian military to illegally annex a part of a neighboring country, the Kremlin denied all involvement.

When President Putin was asked about the role of Russian soldiers, he completely flipped the argument around.

And he flipped it around and claimed, quote,

those were local self-defense units. When the reporter pushed him on the fact that the uniforms looked a whole lot like those worn by the Russian army, he even claimed that, quote, you can go to a

store and buy that kind of uniform. Easy to find. His argument was basically that it wasn't the Russians

who were attacking Ukraine, but instead it was the West who was attacking the Russian people.

And this was all simply a matter of self-defense. Now, I was at the State Department at the time,

standing at the podium every day. And while we aggressively called out the invasion, landing me, by the way, on the list of favorite Kremlin targets, we were often on our back heels.

Because the Russians had no shame.

They took no shame in lying and blurring the lines to create such confusion that it was hard to tell what was fact and what was fiction.

We've seen Putin continue to use this tactic

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