Just past midnight Thursday after one of the more surreal days in U.S. history, NBC News presidential historian Michael Beschloss all but donned a tinfoil hat on MSNBC to offer some utterly unhinged conspiracy theories, all cheered by 11th Hour host Lyin’ Brian Williams.
Over the course of 11 and a half minutes, Beschloss suggested U.S. Capitol Police wanted and ensured violence took place inside the Capitol building, ruled he’s too scared to sleep at night, predicted President Trump will declare martial law, and use nuclear weapons before leaving office.
Williams brought Beschloss in with a giant proverbial kiss: “[W]e are overjoyed to be able to talk to the historian and author Michael Beschloss, who has been — it's hard to put this. His Twitter feed is a work of art of social and historian activism these days. Michael, I've been thinking about you a lot, because of what we're witnessing today.”
After giving his initial thoughts on what happened, Beschloss suggesting the President and his Cabinet planned exactly how the attack would be carried out: “How much was Donald Trump involved in the planning for this terrorist attack today? Was this a conspiracy? Why were his cabinet members so quiet? Why hasn't anyone resigned? We have no idea. Those questions are hanging in midair.”
For his part, Williams invoked the Capitol Police conspiracy theory before letting Beschloss take the reins and pontificate about how, while 9/11 wasn’t an inside job, this attack of terror at the Capitol probably was (click “expand”):
WILLIAMS: Michael, given your familiarity with Washington and the Capitol Police, I was alarmed by the ease with which an angry mob and believe me, social media's full of video components today and tonight, a barrier gets moved here, somebody looks the other way here, this was a takeover that happened in minutes of the center of our elected government.
BESCHLOSS: Well, you know, Brian, I think I've mentioned to you, the first time I took my two sons who are now in their 20s but they were very young, to Ground Zero about two years after 9/11, I took them to the place and showed them what had happened and there was a group of people yelling, “9/11 was an inside job.” Well, 9/11, as we both know, was not an inside job, but here we have these videos of Capitol Police unaccountably letting these protestors, so-called, through the police lines, run into the capitol with guns, with other weapons, with Confederate flags. It's going to be a long time before we find out what has happened here and the problem is that Donald Trump may be in office for another two weeks and at least I'll speak for myself, I'm going to have a hard time sleeping at night.
Beschloss went onto make an astute point about the presidency having far more power than the Founders intended (i.e. to the detriment of the legislative branch), but the rush of sobriety quickly went away once Williams asked him to predict what President Trump could do with his last two weeks in office.
Beschloss was more than happy to oblige, spinning conspiracy theories ranging from martial law to wars to nuclear weapons (click “expand”):
A President — and Donald Trump has boasted about this power in a way we never heard a president of the United States. He would tell crowds, you wouldn’t believe what powers I have under the Constitution. They're so large, I can't even talk about it, he said. One of those powers is martial law and maybe, I'm guessing here, maybe one of the reasons that he — that he wanted to have what happened today was that there would be so much chaos that he could then say, I'm declaring martial law and take on more emergency power. A president can start unnecessary wars. He can start a pretext that will provoke another country to do something to us or, you know, as in the case of Lyndon Johnson in the Gulf of Tonkin incident, can claim there was an attack that never occurred. That can happen.
And the most worrisome power the president has is the power over nuclear weapons. And all I can say is that not a lot is known about the command authority over nuclear weapons, but in August of 1974, when Richard Nixon was emotionally breaking down, he was using combinations of drugs that we don't know about yet, he was drinking, he was emotionally in very bad shape and his secretary of defense, James Schlessinger, required that any movement of nuclear weapons ordered by the president of the United States by cosigned by the secretary of defense to make certain that Nixon didn't try something to stay in office that had to do with nuclear weapons. The problem is, at the Pentagon today, is active secretary of defense who’s basically an empty suit, does not deserve to be in that job, we don't know much about him. Trump loyalists have been put in the Pentagon for the last month and a half for reasons unknown, and so, we're presented with a situation where, for the next two weeks, we hope that Trump will not want to do something terrible and cannot do something terrible, but there are not many grownups around.
And in his final Q&A, Williams gushed that Beschloss has “been on something of a personal journey as, let's face it, a classically trained author and presidential historian,” to one of progressive activism that Williams dressed up as rejecting “faux fairness” and “whataboutism” in favor of partisanship and disgust for people who thought differently than he did.
“Well, we elected, we Americans, elected a President of the United States who never should have been there in the first place. In my view, we have been in danger and our children have been in danger for four years, every single day and night,” he fretted.
Spinning one last conspiracy theory, Beschloss wondered if Donald Trump would be removed from office so Mike Pence could then offer him a pardon and save him from any future legal troubles.
Of course, Williams didn’t bat an eye at any of these deranged claims, instead urging him to “please continue to come on this broadcast regularly, always great to talk to you,” with Beschloss complimenting Brian “for all you've done, particularly today, people's nerves are very on edge, as they should be.”
To see the relevant MSNBC transcript from January 7, click “expand.”
MSNBC’s The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
January 7, 2021
12:17 a.m. EasternBRIAN WILLIAMS: And in the interim, we are overjoyed to be able to talk to the historian and author Michael Beschloss, who has been — it's hard to put this. His Twitter feed is a work of art of social and historian activism these days. Michael, I've been thinking about you a lot, because of what we're witnessing today. There's an obvious call back to what happened at the capitol building in the War of 1812, but can you believe we witnessed an event today that has us reaching back to the War of 1812?
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: No, and thank you, my friend, for your kind word. Did you or I ever think that we would be living through a day like this or a night like this? Here we've got, just as you were saying earlier, a terrorist event, just as there was in the middle of the 1812 War, or near the end of the 1812 War, August of 1814, when the British burned the White House and the capitol, or, the attack on Ft. Sumter, 1861, or 9/11, which we all remember, but the difference between those things and what we saw today is this, a terrorist attack on the Congress and the Capitol, was initiated by the President of the United States. We have never seen that before, I hope we will never see it again. You saw that speech this morning. Donald Trump spoke to that angry mob that he had summoned to Washington and told them, march up Pennsylvania Avenue, maybe I'll even march with you, he said, up to the capitol, take back our country, stop the counting of the ballots, the stealing of this election and the result was this attack that resulted in four deaths today, the vandalization of the United States Capitol, some of our most sacred rooms. And then while it was still going on, this person who calls himself a President goes into the Rose Garden that he and his wife eviscerated last summer and talks into a camera and puts on Twitter a video in which he says to the mob that's there rampaging through the Capitol, we love you, we think you're special. That's not something that any other President of the United States would ever have done in American history. Presidents that you and I remember, if there's a riot, if there's some kind of a national emergency, they try to restore order as quickly as possible and the questions remain tonight. How much was Donald Trump involved in the planning for this terrorist attack today? Was this a conspiracy? Why were his cabinet members so quiet? Why hasn't anyone resigned? We have no idea. Those questions are hanging in midair.
WILLIAMS: Michael, given your familiarity with Washington and the Capitol Police, I was alarmed by the ease with which an angry mob and believe me, social media's full of video components today and tonight, a barrier gets moved here, somebody looks the other way here, this was a takeover that happened in minutes of the center of our elected government.
BESCHLOSS: Well, you know, Brian, I think I've mentioned to you, the first time I took my two sons who are now in their 20s but they were very young, to Ground Zero about two years after 9/11, I took them to the place and showed them what had happened and there was a group of people yelling, “9/11 was an inside job.” Well, 9/11, as we both know, was not an inside job, but here we have these videos of Capitol Police unaccountably letting these protestors, so-called, through the police lines, run into the capitol with guns, with other weapons, with Confederate flags. It's going to be a long time before we find out what has happened here and the problem is that Donald Trump may be in office for another two weeks and at least I'll speak for myself, I'm going to have a hard time sleeping at night.
WILLIAMS: Michael, we've had differences in this country that have led us to war, civil war. We have had differences severe enough to kill citizen upon citizen. The people today who stormed the U.S. Capitol, who sat in the dais of the Senate, who sat in the desk and offices of the Speaker of the House, who defaced parts of the inside of the U.S. Capitol, are our fellow citizens. They have hopes and dreams and families and mortgage payments and car payments. What do we do about the — the cleft through society that will be left after this presidency and when the last bits of glass are swept up inside the Capitol?
BESCHLOSS: Well, you know, the real problem is that in our system, presidents, in my view, have too much power. The Founders basically said, we know that this country is going to be divided geographically, people will have different ideas and interests, come from different places, national origins, but they put much too much emphasis on letting the president clean it all up. Let the president unify the country. That works most of the time, because, you know, we've had presidents of different abilities, but virtually all of them have understood that the main job of the president is to bind this country together. For the last four years, we have had the spectacle — freakish spectacle for a president who, for all sorts of different reasons, has tried to pit group against group from the moment of that horrible inaugural address in which he talked about American carnage. So, in the system, it's not going to be a quick fix, but the best thing we can do is to bring in a president who wants to heal, wants to unify and has the ability to bring people together and sure enough, our system has produced that. I think, in Joe Biden.
WILLIAMS: What — what’s the gamut of your fears for what could happen in the realm of the possible in the next 14 days?
BESCHLOSS: Presidents, as you know, have much too much ability to wreak all sorts of havoc. Martial law. A President — and Donald Trump has boasted about this power in a way we never heard a president of the United States. He would tell crowds, you wouldn’t believe what powers I have under the Constitution. They're so large, I can't even talk about it, he said. One of those powers is martial law and maybe, I'm guessing here, maybe one of the reasons that he — that he wanted to have what happened today was that there would be so much chaos that he could then say, I'm declaring martial law and take on more emergency power. A president can start unnecessary wars. He can start a pretext that will provoke another country to do something to us or, you know, as in the case of Lyndon Johnson in the Gulf of Tonkin incident, can claim there was an attack that never occurred. That can happen. And the most worrisome power the president has is the power over nuclear weapons. And all I can say is that not a lot is known about the command authority over nuclear weapons, but in August of 1974, when Richard Nixon was emotionally breaking down, he was using combinations of drugs that we don't know about yet, he was drinking, he was emotionally in very bad shape and his secretary of defense, James Schlessinger, required that any movement of nuclear weapons ordered by the president of the United States by cosigned by the secretary of defense to make certain that Nixon didn't try something to stay in office that had to do with nuclear weapons. The problem is, at the Pentagon today, is active secretary of defense who’s basically an empty suit, does not deserve to be in that job, we don't know much about him. Trump loyalists have been put in the Pentagon for the last month and a half for reasons unknown, and so, we're presented with a situation where, for the next two weeks, we hope that Trump will not want to do something terrible and cannot do something terrible, but there are not many grownups around.
WILLIAMS: Michael, final question before I'm going to bring in an FBI expert to talk about security angle of what we talked about today, and that's this. You've been on something of a personal journey as, let's face it, a classically trained author and presidential historian. You have changed your mode of communicating with your followers on social media. You have changed the voice you use. We just showed the front page of tomorrow's New York Times. There's been a lot of pressure within the news media to get us all to speak English and get out of the kind of faux fairness, whataboutism that is often news media speak. That headline, however many points high that is, “Trump incites mob,” is the plain English that you and I would never have seen over the past several decades, on the front page of the gray lady of journalism, but look at what this era has forced in our kind of public parlance.
BESCHLOSS: That's exactly right. Well, we elected, we Americans, elected a President of the United States who never should have been there in the first place. In my view, we have been in danger and our children have been in danger for four years, every single day and night and I wish I could say that what's happened today was a big surprise, I don't think it was to many people. It doesn't make it any less horrifying. But the problem is, you’ve got a President Donald Trump who knows that the moment he's out of office, whether he gets a federal pardon for himself, if that's declared legal, I'm not sure it is, or from a Vice President Pence who serves for a couple of hours as President and agrees to pardon him, I'm not sure he'll do it after their estrangement today, or under other circumstances, Donald Trump knows that the second he leaves office, even on the state level, he's going to be besieged with lawsuits, possible indictments, legal trouble of all kinds that could number in the hundreds, they will be expensive and exhausting. So, you've got this bizarre spectacle of this guy trying to cling onto a second term to which he was never elected and doing it by the kind of things we saw today. I hope we don't see anything more like this.
WILLIAMS: Incredible picture to end on, a member of the mob sitting in the dais in front of the U.S. Senate chamber. What a day, what a time. 14 days remain in this presidency before it, like all the others before it, is history. Michael Beschloss, please continue to come on this broadcast regularly, always great to talk to you. Thank you, my friend, for making time.
BESCHLOSS: Thank you, my friend and thank you for all you've done, particularly today, people's nerves are very on edge, as they should be.
WILLIAMS: Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Michael.
