There's this very funny thing the other day Donald Trump was at I think there's a prayer breakfast

There's some religious meeting with the map of the map of his

County votes to the super red map and he didn't he didn't refer to anything

My colleague Aaron was able it was like just there for emotional support

Yes, exactly, but there's this very weird way in which Republicans are able to like sit there and look at this map that looks all red

Despite the fact that it's fewer people and comfort themselves with that

Hello and welcome to Wise is happening with me your host Chris Hayes

Last year we had an episode with a really dear friend of mine and a colleague and some of that I've known since he was

22 and I was 27 Ezra a client he might be familiar

You he's got a fantastic podcast. He was the founder of the website Vox

He was at the Washington Post before that and I think the title of that episode a year ago is like I think we called it how bad is it?

Which was just the two of us spending an hour wrestling with all of the ways in which these kind of deep structural defects in American

Democracy are manifesting themselves in the era of Trump in ways that feel like they're putting this stress on the structure

Where you can kind of see like if you imagine like beams that are that have weight on them

You can start to see like a cartoon like the little cracks showing up in the beam right before the thing splits and cracks and

The conversation was a lot about polarization about the sort of asymmetries between the two political coalitions that enabled Donald Trump to be president and

I mean our assessment at the time. I think was like it's pretty bad

So now if you're listening to this on the day this podcast comes out or even the week that it comes out

We're in the midst of an impeachment trial in the United States Senate of the president for just the third time in American history

I think the evidence is pretty clear that the president

Corruptly of uses power to attempt to use official acts for private gain sort of definition of corruption the official acts of

Aid to Ukraine for the private gain of them announcing investigation is political rival in order to sort of like dirty him up in advance of a

...