She’s a voting rights activist, a prominent voice in the Democratic party and a three-time New York Times best-selling novelist; but more than anything else, Stacey Abrams is a bonafide badass. As Democratic leaders struggle to unify around a message to counter Trump’s relentless attacks on democracy, Abrams envisions a future where having a moral backbone is an asset, not a weakness. She calls out the political cowardice that’s taken hold of Trump’s MAGA Republicans and calls on Democrats to find their voice and their spine. Never forget, says Abrams, that being in the minority doesn’t make you powerless.
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Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
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Stacey Abrams: We have to reclaim the patriotism that we all say, spurs us. We have to call the cowards what they are, and we have to defeat them at their own game by showing up, despite what they try to do to stop us.
Nicolle Wallace: Hi, everyone, and welcome to The Best People podcast. This week’s guest is a badass. She turned a red state blue. She is a New York Times bestselling novelist. Her mission statement in the Georgia State House was to stop or slow stupid. And now she’s tackling autocracy in our country.
This is The Best People podcast, and this is Stacey Abrams. I’m so happy you’re here.
Stacey Abrams: Thank you for having me.
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Nicolle Wallace: I love stop stupid because I think that what we have to do now is scale that, and I think it’s so much less, it creates action as opposed to paralysis. And I think your expertise in autocracy syncs up so perfectly with that mission statement of stopping stupid, that I want to ask you to put those two hats on at the same time and take us through it.
Stacey Abrams: Absolutely. When I was in the legislature, you know, my title was minority leader. They give you leader to make you feel good. They put minority in front of it. So, you never get confused about the level of power that you hold.
Nicolle Wallace: Keep you in your place.
Stacey Abrams: Exactly. And often we see that minority status as both an excuse for not achieving, but also it becomes the borderline that tells you, you can’t move any further. What I told my colleagues, when I asked for the job was look, I’ve been minority for a very long time. I am really good at it.
And in this moment, we are in the minority in terms of recognizable political power. We do not hold the House. We do not hold the Senate. The court has at least at the highest level has abandoned its obligations. We do not hold the White House. And so, we are in a minority position in terms of recognized power, but we are not in the minority in terms of capacity. And when you decide that minority power exists, when you believe them, when they say you can be a minority leader, that’s when your mind shifts. And I think your point about the difference between activism and paralysis is you become paralyzed when you think you’ve already lost.
Nicolle Wallace: Right. Which is what they want because that’s cheap.
Stacey Abrams: Exactly.
Nicolle Wallace: That doesn’t require troops on the street. That doesn’t require any political advertising. That just requires us to believe their bullshit and their propaganda and their disinformation loop. But I think they are telegraphing their weakness with the rigging of the maps, with the voter suppression. I mean, I think that the most sort of anti-masculine moves they make are all in the category of their electoral weakness and impotence.
Stacey Abrams: Absolutely. And I think that’s the place where we have to begin, that if what we look for is matching energy, we cannot do it. We do not have the infrastructure to match energy, you know, side by side, but we have different energies. It’s what women learned a long time ago. It’s what minority populations have always learned. You cannot fight the master with the master’s tools. You have to create your own.
And so, in our case, you use what you just described. There’s an impotence to their behavior, which is why they’re trying to actually manufacture law. There is a distaste for their behavior, which is why they’re trying to cloak it.
The false notion of emergency is language that they use to justify what they want, which is they want power. And when we get past the language to what they actually intend, that’s when we can start to fight back and that’s when we can win.
Nicolle Wallace: It’s like dominance versus mandate.
Stacey Abrams: Exactly.
Nicolle Wallace: And it is undeniable that they can dominate, but it is false that they have a mandate. I mean, the most unpopular things. And I agree with the analysis that he’s doing what he said he was going to do. Right? We’ve heard that a million times. That is true, but it is also true that there is no mandate for it. You’ve got former generals who work for Republican. John Kelly was the one who warned on the behalf, sort of the military, the men and women in the military about having troops on the streets. All the calls have come from inside the House. Why do you think Republicans are so non-responsive to the alarms being sounded by Republicans?
Stacey Abrams: Because they want to be on the side of victory. And they believe that the structural power should Trump, the actual people power. When I watch Republicans bend the knee. And I think that’s too weak of phrase. We have active, not just complicity, but active engagement in the dismantling of our country by those who were elected to protect it.
So, when a member of Congress knowing better votes to dismantle and to take money away, let’s use Dan Sullivan, the Congressman from Alaska. So, when Dan Sullivan stood on the floor of the U.S. Senate and said, I know that I’m going to harm the people of Alaska by rescinding the funds that pay for the only public access to information they have. When he says that and then votes that way and then says, but we’ll fix it later. That is no longer bending the knee. That is complicity. That is active engagement.
And the reason they’re doing it is because they think this is where power is going to be.
They have forgotten why they were elected and they believe they were elected to keep the job, not to do the job. And it’s just that simple. We keep trying to construct these larger architectures of justification. You’ve got craven people who like power, who like position, who like titles, and they think they can keep those titles as long as they glam on in the click, along with the tyrants and the fascist. And when those tyrants and fascists lose favor, they are going to remake themselves in the image of what comes next, because they don’t care about people. They care about their power.
Nicolle Wallace: What’s so interesting though, is that the power in a democracy, and I understand where we’re on that knife’s edge, but the power is derived from support among the people. And to me, the greatest difference between Trump 1.0 and 2.0, is they no longer care about support from their people. In 1.0, you had Steve Bannon loudly warning about the things that would damage MAGA. And they were things like Medicaid cuts. We now have the big, not so beautiful bill that’s driving grassroots protests and rebukes into the town halls, complaining about indiscriminate cuts.
I mean, Trump wanted to hurt people that didn’t vote for him, but was persuaded by advisors like Bannon. I think the story goes not to hurt people that voted for him. He doesn’t care this time. That seems to get us into your list of 10 steps toward an autocracy. Will you take us through that?
Stacey Abrams: Absolutely. And I’m going to draw the fine point that you made, which is that Trump 1.0 was an attempt to weaponize democracy to achieve power. Trump 2.0 and the Republican agenda is to dismantle democracy. So you don’t have to exceed to the wishes of the people. In Trump 1.0, you needed to, because you still thought you had a democracy to contend with. Trump 2.0, decided why bother with democracy? Let’s just go straight autocracy.
And we know that happens and I’ll do with them really quickly. Step one, you have a free and fair election, but it’s for the last time. Step two, you exceed executive power. You use what the law says, and you go as far as possible. And in this case, you go so far as to break the law, but that leads us to step three. You weaken competing power. So, you have a Congress that is complicit. That is suborning that is actually leading you to this unfettered power. And you have a judiciary, not in the lower courts, but in the Supreme Court that says we can’t stop you. And even if we wanted to, we won’t.
Then you go to step four, you got the government. So, it breaks because democracy works when people think they get something for their contribution. We give you our trust. We give you our votes. You give us the things we need. When you break democracy, when you break government, you break the connection between the people and democracy, because democracy has to deliver for people to be willing to sacrifice. Then you install loyalists. You put people in charge who you know are not going to do the will of the people, or even the will of the Constitution. They’re going to do the will of the leaders.
That’s what we see happening. That’s why they’re going after Lisa Cook at the Federal Reserve Board. That’s why we no longer have a functional CDC because loyal is to have no absolute, no commitment to their jobs, are doing the bidding of their master. Then you attack the media. You come after folks like Nicolle Wallace and others, because you can’t allow the truth to be told.
And this goes to your point earlier about Steve Bannon 1.0 and Steve Bannon 2.0. You cared about Medicaid because you were afraid that every television station was going to lead with that story. Now that you fractured the information ecosystem, you don’t have to worry about there being a critical mass of people knowing something, because you’ve broken the infrastructure that would allow them to learn it.
Step seven, you go after vulnerable communities. That’s why the attack on DEI is so aggressive and is why I think defending DEI is actually the cornerstone of restoring our democracy. Because when you can manipulate and weaponize people against each other, when you get the people to do your bidding, you don’t have to do it yourself. So, you make transgendered children the reason for inflation, and you make immigrants the reason for everything else that’s gone wrong. When you go after black and brown people, when you go after the disabled, like the Department of Energy, they are eliminating Section 504 compliance. So that new buildings don’t have to comply with ADA.
That’s all of a piece, because when you can scapegoat the vulnerable, then you pit everyone against each other and they no longer notice what you’re doing. Step eight, you target civil society. You Sue universities, you get law firms to bend the need. Instead of doing pro bono to defend rights, they are now doing their best to eliminate those rights. You arrest protestors. You do everything you can to make certain that the nonprofit organizations that fill in those gaps between government and the public in the private sector, that those gaps can’t be filled so people fall into the chasm.
Step nine, you incentivize private violence and you occupy spaces with secret police. That is what we are watching happen with ICE. That is what’s happening with the National Guard. We are watching the weaponization of our communities and the incentivizing of private violence. Because if you can make people afraid, they will not speak.
And finally, you end democracy itself. That’s why you see Texas happening. The gerrymander in Texas to be followed by Missouri and Ohio. Those are being done because you want to break democracy at its core. Here in Georgia, 478,000 people were targeted to be purged. And across the country, we are watching law after law weaken and decimate voting.
And then you have the unlawful executive orders. They’re going to try to get rid of mail-in voting because if people can’t vote, democracy can’t work. And now you have absolute power of foreign autocrat and his authoritarian regime. And those are the 10 steps to autocracy.
Nicolle Wallace: What’s interesting is that I don’t think they would dispute any one of those items. And so, what is it in our country that made it acceptable for one of the two parties, for which, you know, half of the voting public selected to do those things out in the open?
Stacey Abrams: A lack of courage, because people who have power often want to hold it. They’re people who want to have power. And they’re people who want to be power adjacent. And what’s happened is that you have entire swaths of our community who’ve been convinced that the people taking their power aren’t the ones they should blame. It’s everyone else. And that’s why the DEI piece is so important.
When you don’t have to hold your legislator accountable and you can instead blame the woman who cleans the hotel, then you get to have a target that you can focus on and no responsibility for your invective.
But you also have watched our economy weaken time over time. And it’s not the Biden economy that’s weakened. It’s a capitalism that has said that we no longer will try for actual benefit to anyone. When we moved into the space of remarkable income inequality, where the gap widened so much, people had to fight. People fight for the thing they think they can get to. And it feels so remote that you can actually dismantle the current inequities that we have.
And so Republicans are taking advantage of it. They’re filling the void. They’re saying, it’s not the company that pays the CEO a hundred times more than you. It’s the waiter that you have to tip. That’s the person you should be mad at. Because Republicans have been able to redirect both venom but also pain onto the people who are the least able to fight back because they want to keep the power.
Nicolle Wallace: Now can we go back to Georgia?
Stacey Abrams: Sure.
Nicolle Wallace: And because it feels like Georgia is patient zero for voter suppression, which is the gateway drug two ending democracy, which is the project they’re engaged in now. And what they did in Georgia was so offensive that Major League Baseball, which almost never gets involved in politics moves the all-star game from Georgia to Colorado.
Stacey Abrams: Yes.
Nicolle Wallace: Why doesn’t that then wake everybody up? There are only Republicans attesting to the absence of voter fraud in 2020, but all the same, the train barrels down the tracks in Georgia passes the voter suppression law, you know, masquerading as voter integrity law, the momentum in sports, which is so reluctant to do anything seen as political is followed by nothing. You know, everything comes back to Georgia’s no boycott, nothing else happens. Why?
Stacey Abrams: Because the press lionized Brad Raffensperger and Brian Kemp for not committing treason. Post 2020, because you —
Nicolle Wallace: That’s so true. Wait, wait, stop.
Stacey Abrams: Yes.
Nicolle Wallace: And Bill Barr for calling Trump selection lies bullshit.
Stacey Abrams: Yes.
Nicolle Wallace: I mean, like I take the point and I’ll own some of that criticism, although I never threw them parades. But I take your point, but bill Barr is the worst example of that. So, he goes before congressional committee and doesn’t lie for Trump calls his election fraud delusions bullshit. And he like the parades for him, I think are still going on somewhere.
Stacey Abrams: Exactly. But here’s the thing. Bill Barr then is out of power. Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger are not only remain in power, but are now feted by everyone. They are celebrated. And because they are celebrated for one moment of vitiating democracy, they are then allowed to rend it apart because when the rest of us were screaming, yes, it’s good that they didn’t break the laws of Georgia, like 49 other secretaries of state and 49 other governors, no one did what they were asked to do because no one could do what they were asked to do.
I appreciate the fact that they did their jobs, but that then gave them an exemption for actually protecting the people they were called to protect. Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger were treated as heroes for democracy while they dismantled democracy in plain sight. There was no voter integrity issue, but they used it in order to limit the number of people of color who could vote. There was no problem with mail-in voting, and now it is harder for disabled people to cast a ballot. They are doing their best to use the distraction, but also again, the celebrity to justify and to hide their behaviors.
And so, what happened was the media told them it was okay because when the Major League Baseball decision was made, Brian Kemp screamed bloody murder. And he got the benefit of every single doubt because they said, well, he didn’t bow the knee to Trump. He supported Trump. He did everything for Trump except break his own rules so he could get reelected. There should be no one who says that it is justifiable to deny a single vote to an American who’s entitled to cast that ballot and be lionized for doing so because they didn’t break the law the day before.
Nicolle Wallace: And if you ask Brad Raffensperger why the law was necessary, if he himself can point to zero instances of fraud.
Stacey Abrams: Exactly.
Nicolle Wallace: He has no answer.
Stacey Abrams: Exactly.
Nicolle Wallace: We asked him that question. And what they will ultimately concede is that the political pressure cooker was too much to bear. How do you create a pressure cooker though on the other side and make it politically toxic to lie your way toward voter suppression? Or is that the moonshot? Is that the 64-million-dollar question?
Stacey Abrams: Well, one, we have to preserve democracy. I think what is happening right now, and this is why I’m so bullish about making sure people understand the 10 steps to autocracy and authoritarianism, because we’ve got to find the 10 steps to freedom and power. And one of those steps is restoring the right to vote instead of trying to fix what has been broken and decimated, why don’t we talk about what we should have? Why aren’t we a nation that has automatic voter registration in this country? Why aren’t we a nation that makes it easier for you to register on the day of an election? If you’ve been able to pay your taxes, you have to pay your taxes the day you live there, why can’t you vote the day you get there?
And so those are solutions sets that we have to start pushing for, but we can’t get there unless one, we talk about it. They didn’t just start chattering about voter suppression in 2021. They’ve been at this since 1965 since the day after the Voting Rights Act.
Nicolle Wallace: Right.
Stacey Abrams: And so, we have to do the same job, but on our side, and this goes to my point earlier about matching energy. We can’t be as cavalier as they are, but we can be as intentional as they are. We can want as badly for ourselves what they want to take away from us.
Nicolle Wallace: It also seems like there’s such a long set of facts about the absence of voter fraud in America.
Stacey Abrams: Yes.
Nicolle Wallace: I was involved in the 2000 George Bush campaign. And after that election, James Baker and former President Carter —
Stacey Abrams: Yes.
Nicolle Wallace: — were on a commission to look for voter fraud. And what they found is there isn’t any.
Stacey Abrams: None.
Nicolle Wallace: And what Bill Barr testified to under oath is that there wasn’t any. So, if you believe, and I think it’s amazing that like that never change. It’s a crime that doesn’t exist.
Stacey Abrams: Yes.
Nicolle Wallace: So, voter suppression and gerrymandering are all solutions responding to a manufactured problem. And it’s all rooted in political impotence, weakness, no support among the electorate and no confidence that your message will appeal to a majority of Americans. How do you make that, like the burning fire that sends not just Democrats, but independents and former Republicans who don’t want to be associated with something that relies on sort of a corrupt mission to suppress the vote, predicated on a lie and a lack of responsiveness to their needs and wants?
Stacey Abrams: We have to call it what it is, which is cowardice. These are cowards who are watching the transformation of our nation into a truly pluralistic society. In 17 years, this will be a majority minority nation, and no one racial group will have political power as an absolute good. And here’s the thing to remember, race is the strongest predictor of political leanings in this country. It is not a guarantee of any victory, but it is the strongest predictor. And if you are a political coward, if you are a moral coward, like the Republicans currently leading the charge to dismantle democracy, you can’t win the fight with your words. You can’t win the fight with your ideas. And so, you manipulate and break the system. It’s an act of cowardness that a small group of people who are afraid of the people are doing everything they can to silence the people. But the way to defeat them is to be louder than they are.
One of the ways I’ve done this work. And I so appreciate how you have used your platform to talk about everyone, because this is not about partisanship. This is about patriotism. I may want my party to win, but I can’t have that happen if we don’t have votes. And so, my job is not to make sure Democrats get to vote. It’s to make sure Americans get to vote.
We have to reclaim the patriotism that we all say, spurs us. We have to call the cowards what they are. And we have to defeat them at their own game by showing up, despite what they tried to do to stop us. That’s what we did in Georgia. They didn’t welcome us in 2018 when I ran for governor, we transformed an electorate because we got more people, 800,000 people who had not previously participated, showed up because they were told you have the right to be heard. And then they stayed around in 2020 and we had a little bit of an effect.
That can be done again, and again across this country. Because the other responsibility we have is not to think that victory is a cinematic moment. It’s taken 60 years for the current regime to dismantle what we have. We can’t wait 60 years to get it back, but we can’t expect to win everything and therefore not fight unless we’re guaranteed to win. We’ve got to fight anyway. And that, I think is the place where good people have to enter this conversation.
Nicolle Wallace: All right, we’re going to sneak in a quick break right here. We’ll have much more with political powerhouse, Stacey Abrams when we come back. Stay right here.
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Nicolle Wallace: Victory is not a cinematic moment. I feel like that’s a sweater I need to wear. Will you say more?
Stacey Abrams: Because we, in 2018, when I lost my election, I was never confused about it. I had conversations with communities and I would say we won. And that just would send people into these, you know, paroxysm of hatred. What I was telling them is look, not getting the title did not mean that we didn’t make progress. When you were trying to defend democracy, when you were trying to serve the people, progress counts as victory, because their goal is your silence. Their goal is your complicity. Their goal is your subjugation. Every day we remain free that is progress. But, if we have to wait for this large announcement, like elections, to say that this is when we win, we’re going to keep losing. I say, let’s look for the small interstitial victories we can grasp those small moments of progress we can make, because that adds up to the actual victory we’re trying to get to.
Nicolle Wallace: I think about this all the time in terms of being on the prodemocracy side, I think Republicans have a greater debt to pay to the prodemocracy side. And so, I think all the time about how to undo what I was part of doing, and people ask me all the time what’s wrong with Democrats. And I say, nothing is wrong with Democrats. They are the only party in the country that stands for the country remaining a democracy. So, if you want to go fight with Democrats about policies, that’s super legitimate, it’s necessary, but you can’t have any more fights in America if they don’t start winning all of the elections, not some of them, all of them. If they don’t flip the ratio of state Houses controlled by Democrats, if that doesn’t swing, if majorities in Congress don’t move in two years, we won’t have any more debates about tax rates. We won’t have any more debates about abortion. We won’t have any more debates about vote by mail, but I mean like our kids would probably want to debate voting on their phones. I mean, we will have no more debates. And I wonder how you approach alone in a room with a Democrat, that mindset challenge of just win and then we can fine tune all the policies.
Stacey Abrams: It’s how we get to just win. I don’t worry about converting the 77 million that cast their ballot for Trump. It’s done. And I think I can count on the 75 million that cast their ballots for Vice President Harris. I’m focused on the 90 million who did not believe their voices matter.
Nicolle Wallace: Right.
Stacey Abrams: The 90 million who felt such despair and such disgusted and such distance from our democracy that they set a pox on both of your Houses, because I’m trying to find one. That’s the community we have to focus on. And so, the only way we get to just win is that we got to give them reason to engage because we can’t win with the numbers we have. That’s the work that Democrats can be doing. And if you’re going to castigate Democrats for anything, it’s that we’ve got to show we can deliver even when we don’t have all the levers of power.
What I like to remind folks is before we had power, before we had money, we had each other. It’s how we built society. It’s how we won revolutions. It’s how we defeated fascism. It’s how we defeated Jim Crow. We didn’t have the power. What we had was each other. And we turned that into power and it sounds very heady and it can feel very remote. But to your point, these are the small things you can do to make it so.
When those families are kidnapped off of the streets by ICE, no, we cannot go and raid SICA (ph), but we can make sure we show up with food for those children who no longer know where their parents are. We can be a church that actually works to make sure they have housing and coverage and that they don’t drop out of school. We can do those things.
Nicolle Wallace: Yes.
Stacey Abrams: And Democrats have to declare that those things matter, because if we want people to vote for us, we have to deliver in the hardest moments, we can’t deliver salvation, but we can deliver solution. And we spend so much time trying to get the big things. We forget that the small things are how that we got ourselves in this place to begin with. We can’t win by pretending that the pain isn’t real, we win by offering succor. We win by offering aid. We win by talking about in a real language, but not abandoning high thought. We can do both at the same time, but we keep thinking there’s going to be this silver bullet that lets us win. We’ve got to do all of the above because they’ve done everything else.
Nicolle Wallace: I mean, you’ve got such a, let it rip, you know, vibe. Why can’t, or I won’t put it in a negative frame. How do you spread that around? I mean, I think they should. The other thing about what you said, I don’t think it sounds heady. It makes me emotional to talk about sort of being in our community being with your people and helping them, regardless of who they voted for.
I remember the most jolting image at the beginning of the pandemic was the vehicles at the food pantries. They were new Suburbans. They were fancy Audis.
Stacey Abrams: Yes.
Nicolle Wallace: They were people that never thought they’d need food from a food bank because they never thought they’d be laid off. It gets at so many things about our economy, about economic instability. And I put that out just as an indicator of how fragile people’s sense of their economic security is. Donald Trump has made it worse. Donald Trump isn’t even claiming that the price of anything will go down anymore.
Stacey Abrams: Of course.
Nicolle Wallace: He’s simply saying more is better. Paying more is better because he isn’t even telling the same lies he told less than one year ago, when he stood in front of melting meat and said, the price of the grocery will go down.
(BEGIN VT)
Donald Trump: So, when I win, I will immediately bring prices down starting on day one. We will stop inflation. We will make America affordable again. And we’re going to bring back the American dream.
(END VT)
Nicolle Wallace: How do Democrats deprive all of the credibility on economic issues from every Republican in the country?
Stacey Abrams: We start by calling things what they are. We need to stop saying tariff and we to call it taxes. He has raised taxes on everyone. The reason he is so aggressively going after Lisa Cook manufacturing evidence to remove her from office is because he needs that extra vote on the Federal Board of Reserves, because he recognizes that he is about to preside over having created the worst economy since the 1970s.
We are about to have stagflation. We are watching unemployment go up, inflation go up, an economic growth stall that is purely of his creation. And we need to give him credit every single day. Every time something costs more, every time a small business says is they can’t import. Every time someone says that we’re out of stock because you’ve got to pay 50 percent for shipping on everything. We need to call it out. And every person of goodwill with a microphone needs to say it. And if that microphone is a podcast, if a microphone is media, if the microphone is your church, you need to be calling it out. They benefit from the lag time.
That’s why step six of photography is you attack the media and you break it. Because if people don’t have the truth, they don’t know who to blame. And so, they turn on each other. But what you can do instead is tell people here’s what’s happening, share information, repeat the truth. We don’t have to lie. We can just keep telling the truth over and over again. But the larger narrative is that it doesn’t have to be this way. We are not a nation that’s running out of money. We are a nation that just robbed from our children to give the wealthiest humans in history more money. We have to tell that story too, but we also have to explain that disabled veterans lost their jobs under this administration. And when he is angry about the people laying on the streets, ask him how many of those are vets that he refuses to serve. That he had Doug Collins fire, that he allowed DOGE to strip of their benefits.
We’ve got to call these things out in real time, but we also have to put them in context. The image you just drew of those food pantries, that will be repeated by November. And we have to know in November that we did everything we could to tell people why it’s happening and how they can fix it. They can fix it by voting in every local election, because the people who are in power now got started there. Start fixing it where you are, start fixing it now.
Nicolle Wallace: My colleague, Joe Scarborough has had a really sort of nuanced and interesting as a former elected Republican, I think window into Trump deploying the issue of crime at a moment of incredible political weakness. And I want to ask you to just lay over the same sort of philosophy over how you think Democrats should talk about the military on the streets, not good, crime that makes people anxious. Something that we are better at solving than they are when people aren’t feeling it, or when Trump is still able to distort the reality there.
Stacey Abrams: Because we’re repeating the lie and making it true. This isn’t about crime. He doesn’t care about crime. This is a criminal. So, crime is not his issue. He cares about power. He cares about scaring you. If he cared about crime, why is the National Guard picking up trash? Why aren’t they in a Republican led states? Why aren’t —
Nicolle Wallace: Where the crime rates are higher.
Stacey Abrams: I live in the South. We know crime rates are higher. So, the point isn’t, we have to stop using his language, using their language. And let’s be clear. He may be the megaphone. He is not the architect. He didn’t make this up himself. And so, we’ve got to stop giving credence to the lie. There is no emergency. This is not about solving problems. This is about taking power. He is trying to distract us and he is trying to seize power and the capital city. And if this were a story being told in any other nation, it would be that the regime head has now occupied the federal seat of power with military that he got his cronies to send.
That’s what he did. We don’t need to talk about anything else, because if he cared about the underlying issue, he’d be doing something about the underlying issue. But when we take the bait and do the analysis and ask people, of course, people don’t feel safe. That happens in societies, and that should never be diminished, but it should also not be the distraction from what’s really happening. Because what they’re at risk of is an entire authoritarian regime taking away their freedom of movement. Because do you think those guns won’t be pointed at you if he changes his mind about what he’s mad about? And you’ve given him permission to bring the guns to your neighborhood.
He is presumed to himself a unilateral power to command the National Guard, to roam the streets of America. That’s what he said. And that’s what we should be talking about. And that’s why the 10 steps are so important because they aren’t separate individual pieces. They are the pattern used by every single autocrat in history to take and seize power, especially from a democracy. And if we let them distract us, they win. When we stop taking the bait and we start laying the traps, that’s when we start to take our positions and our power back.
Nicolle Wallace: I’m sure you get asked all the time what people can do.
Stacey Abrams: Yes.
Nicolle Wallace: What is that answer?
Stacey Abrams: Okay. So, I’m working on a larger or longer answer, but I’ll tell you the short pieces. One is that we keep thinking that all power is concentrated in D.C. And you alluded to it earlier. It’s in your state legislature. Right now, state legislatures around the country are grappling with the fact that they are about to have a lot less money, but no fewer people and no fewer problems. And they are hoping no one pays attention.
Every person should be showing up at city council meetings, county commission meetings, and state legislative meetings. Because the way those budgets get built, those budgets get built by people who are telling folks what they need. So, your city council needs to know that you are concerned about what’s happening. Are they spending their resources on rounding up illegals, or they spending their resources on protecting your communities? We need to be asking those questions. And then your state legislature, when they start to slash your education budget, because they’ve dismantled the Department of Education, when they can’t afford to deploy the Medicaid payments to your local hospital. This isn’t just a rural issue. Atlanta lost a hospital in the middle of the city because Georgia wouldn’t take money for healthcare.
So, our first job is to actually let those people who hold power know that we see them. The second is that we have to show up where we are needed. And that goes back to the pantry. It wasn’t just the lines of people who were wrapping around. It’s the people who showed up to hand out food.
Nicolle Wallace: Yes. Yes.
Stacey Abrams: Those people send the signal of what we are capable of.
Nicolle Wallace: Yes.
Stacey Abrams: And with FEMA being broken, I’m from the Gulf Coast, the storms that are about to hit this country and this hurricane season are going to decimate communities. We are not going to have the infrastructure we need to fight back. We’ve got to be ready to help, but we also have to be ready to explain that while we’re giving the help, this is the one time where I told you so was appropriate. Because people need to understand that the reason volunteers are doing this work is because the government has refused to do their job.
Nicolle Wallace: My conversation with Stacey Abrams continues right after the break. Stay with us.
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Nicolle Wallace: What is your advice to people who feel like they’ve made too much headway on the first list?
Stacey Abrams: I will say that again, the 10 steps are what works, but the 10 steps aren’t permanent. If they can attack the media, we go and find our better information somewhere else. When they try to dismantle DEI, we fight back. DEI is more popular today than it was a year ago today. I’ve been working on this since 2023. And the numbers tell us that when he started to demonize communities, when he started to dismantle and fire women, people started paying attention.
We have to defend DEI. We cannot let the propaganda win. When we know that they’re coming after our elections, show up. What Iowa is doing is a roadmap for everyone. Winning by 11 points is no small thing, but every single state is having some form of election, overwhelm them with your presence. That’s what we can do. We can’t stop them from being bad. As I put in the very beginning, as you pointed out, I used to say, our job is to stop stupid, or at least slow it down.
We can be the instigators who force them to answer questions they don’t want to answer. We can talk about Epstein, not because of their distraction, but because what does it mean for a nation that is willing to protect those who would prey on our children? We need to ask the theoretical questions, but ask them and demand the truth of the answer from those who are not doing their jobs. We can do all of the above.
And the last thing I’ll say is this. William Barber did this sermon recently. And he said, Harriet Tubman didn’t have email. Susan B. Anthony couldn’t do a PhoneTree. We changed this world over and over again not because of the technology we had, but because of our will to make things better. We have to believe we are entitled to more.
My entire political life is grounded in the belief that poverty is immoral, it is economically inefficient and it is a solvable problem. We all have those things. When we believe that we are entitled to better, that we are entitled to more, when we’re willing to work at it, nine times out of 10 we win. And it’s that 10th time we got to go get our friends so we can win even more.
Nicolle Wallace: Well, it’s the piece that you keep. It’s the intention. I want to ask you this question out of genuine inability to find anything in the volumes of public statements now that we have after whatever 10 years of Trump. Why is he so particularly angered by strong, smart Black women? Like what? Like you drive him fucking crazy. Excuse my language.
Stacey Abrams: It’s okay.
Nicolle Wallace: Michelle Obama like, breathes and he’s out of his mind. He feels like a special betrayal from Oprah. Like what is it about strong, smart, funny. I mean every Black woman that even if it’s not directed at him that is powerful seems to truly terrify him.
Stacey Abrams: So, I wrote this book “Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for Fair America.” My book was number 11 on the books that got pulled out of the U.S. Naval Academy Library. They eventually put it back, but they pulled my book out, but left “Mein Kampf” by Adolf Hitler.
Nicolle Wallace: Oh, my God. I guess that’s everything, right?
Stacey Abrams: So, that’s one backdrop, but here’s the thing. Black women statistically are the most likely to be at the bottom of almost every list if you are looking at social pathologies, the things that cause harm. Black women are often the canaries in the coal mine. We are, our maternal mortality rates are higher, our poverty rates. So, all of the things that attend either racism or sexism meet with Black women. And societally, particularly at the time that he was growing up, Black women were considered the dregs. It is infuriating to a narcissistic coward that someone he believes to be morally, intellectually, and socially beneath him can call him out on his behavior and more importantly, can defeat him in the world of ideas and in the places of power he considers his domain.
That is why every single insult that he lobs at Black women, invariably, either speaks to intellect or are physicality. You know, they called me stupid Stacey. He called, I think he’s called every Black woman he’s ever met low I.Q. Personally, what I know there’s a Southern phrase, a hit dog will holler. You often point out and critique that, which you believe to be your weakness. I will leave it there.
Nicolle Wallace: What can white women, white people do to be in solidarity with people who are under the most vicious attacks from Trump?
Stacey Abrams: We should remember that DEI means everyone. Diversity means all people. There are very few people who aren’t benefited by DEI. If you have a job and you are part of a labor union, your DEI, if you take advantage of The Family and Medical Leave Act, that’s a DEI law. If you, I don’t know, were a white man educated in the Appalachian Mountains in the last 35, 40 years, even if you’ve become the vice president of the United States, you benefited from DEI because the Department of Education was a DEI creation.
All of those things can be defended and not just defended, but lauded. We have to stop apologizing for being morally correct. When did moral correctness become an epithet? I’m the daughter of not one, but two pastors. I was trained to believe that morality was a good thing and that we should celebrate smart. We should celebrate achievement. More than anything my faith tells me we should celebrate taking care of each other, where everyone can enter, especially white people who want to do better. Celebrate those who are being trampled. But more importantly, talk about how you two have been lifted up.
The reason Amazing Grace is this extraordinary song, it’s the story of a former slave ship captain who became an abolitionist and said, I repent for what I did. And it is grace that made it possible. And now it is my job to do better by others. That should be our calling. And while we start with communities that seem to think they’re immune. If we do it there, we do it for everyone. And no one should be exempt from having to do this work.
Nicolle Wallace: What part of all this experience ignited your creative fire, such that three brilliant, bestselling novels spilled out of you?
Stacey Abrams: So, I’ve been writing since I was very young. I joke that, you know, when you’re a kid, if you tell a story out loud, they call you a fibber. If you write it down, they call you an author. So, yes.
Nicolle Wallace: A writer. Yes.
Stacey Abrams: Yes.
Nicolle Wallace: Same.
Stacey Abrams: Exactly. I love writing. So, my first eight novels were romance novels. And then, you know, my last three have been legal fiction. And in between I write non-fiction and I write children’s books too. And the reason I write is because we better absorb information through storytelling and through entertainment. And for me, it is how can I help people own their power and let them believe that they can have it because they enjoyed learning about it.
So, I could, yes. I could write a very long tome about artificial intelligence and articles about it. And five people would read it. I put it in a book and kill some people. And now a few more thousand will pick it up and, you know, “Coded Justice,” my most recent novel is about the intersection of A.I., DEI and veterans’ healthcare. Three issues I think are incredibly important. And if I were to talk to anyone about it, they would listen for about 14 seconds. But if you mix them together and you have an intrepid, you know, legal heroine, who’s trying to figure it out. And you’ve got cunning A.I. technology that may or may not be a murderer. It changes the way we think about things, but the end result is the same. People feel smarter. And when people feel smarter, they feel more empowered to do the things they want to do.
Nicolle Wallace: I think it’s so incredible that you took on A.I. I’m not A.I. adverse. I’m just A.I. incompetent and I’m A.I. curious.
Stacey Abrams: Okay. I’m going to stop you on the incompetent.
Nicolle Wallace: Okay.
Stacey Abrams: Competence is not the point. It’s the curiosity. That’s the thing you should hold to. It’s the —
Nicolle Wallace: So, what do I do? Like, which one do you use? Which one do you trust?
Stacey Abrams: So, I have part of the point of the book is that A.I. is everywhere already.
Nicolle Wallace: Yes.
Stacey Abrams: If you’ve ever used Siri, you used A.I.
Nicolle Wallace: Right.
Stacey Abrams: Now, the issue is do you want.
Nicolle Wallace: I think it’s in my Amazon.
Stacey Abrams: It is.
Nicolle Wallace: Because I —
Stacey Abrams: Exactly.
Nicolle Wallace: For sure in my Amazon.
Stacey Abrams: It’s in your car. Okay. Do you use TSA PreCheck?
Nicolle Wallace: Of course.
Stacey Abrams: You use A.I.
Nicolle Wallace: Yes.
Stacey Abrams: So, we all use it. But the whole point of the book is that we don’t have to be experts on it. We have to be conversant in it.
Nicolle Wallace: Yes.
Stacey Abrams: And the way I try to tell the story is when you finish, you’ll be able to use the phrase LLM and feel like, you know what you’re talking about. When people talk about the algorithm, you’ll know what they mean. If you hear about alignment when, you know, A.I. models suddenly become Nazis like Grok did, or when you —
Nicolle Wallace: Right.
Stacey Abrams: When they hallucinate you’ll learn about all of those things, but in the comfort of murder mystery.
Nicolle Wallace: I ordered it. I ordered your book. I want to ask you one last question. I like this idea of like, I find it totally overwhelming. All the things I’m supposed to do as a woman, I’m supposed to be strength, training, like things larger than a truck and a car. You know, so I like these, like the idea of like, you know, drink a glass of water before my 11 cups of coffee.
Stacey Abrams: Exactly.
Nicolle Wallace: What are your like stackable anti-autocracy habits?
Stacey Abrams: Yes. So, the first one, in fact, I’m going to borrow that framing because I think that, no, I think that’s brilliant. So, the way I think about it, you have things that you can do as an individual, things that you can do as a community and things that we can do through institutions. And we keep waiting for the institutions to do their thing.
Institutions learn from what community demands and community learns from what people do. And so, find one thing the issue that matters to you the most and make that the one thing you do once a week. So maybe what matters to you is that you volunteer at a health clinic once a week, or if the issue for you is hunger. Which for me is a big issue because too many children in our country are hungry. Those children are not going to be able to learn because they’re hungry. So maybe you work with neighbors, even if you don’t have kids in that school. And you make sure that every Friday children have a little lunch pack to take home with them, because those are two days they will not eat if we don’t help.
So, find the one thing you can do as an individual, and then bring friends with you and community, and then show your results to the institutions so they can scale it. That’s why we have institutions to scale what individuals should do, can do, will do, but to make it possible for all of us to do together.
Nicolle Wallace: I love everything that you have to say. And I guess my last question is, how do we scale you?
Stacey Abrams: Well, I’m working hard. And the thing is, we don’t need to scale me. We just need folks like you and folks like me to let everyone else know that they’re out there. So, the last little anecdote I’ll give you. My favorite television show. One of my favorite television shows of all time is “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” So, the finale of Buffy, if you haven’t seen it in 15 years, I’m sorry. But the whole point of Buffy is that she is the slayer and she’s called, and you can only have one slayer at a time. And they dispel it a couple of times because when she dies and then comes back to life, there are other slayers. But she realizes at the end of the show that there are people with potential everywhere, and that she doesn’t have to be everywhere. She doesn’t have to be the slayer. Her job is to imbue everyone with the knowledge of their potential and to activate the potentials.
Nicolle, we are all potentials. I learned what I get to do, and I’ve had a chance to test out my powers. My mission is to activate the potential in everyone else. This is our country. This is our fight and we can win, but we have to believe that we have the right to victory and I believe we do. And so good people like you and me, we just have to keep reaching the potentials and getting them in the game.
Nicolle Wallace: Can we keep this conversation going? I think I might need it.
Stacey Abrams: Absolutely. Absolutely. Anytime.
Nicolle Wallace: Stacey Abrams, thank you so much.
Stacey Abrams: Thanks for having me.
Nicolle Wallace: Thank you so much for listening to The Best People. Be sure to subscribe to MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcast to get this and other MSNBC podcast ad free. As a subscriber, you also get early access and exclusive bonus content. All episodes of the podcast are also available on YouTube. Visit msnbc.com/thebestpeople to watch.
The Best People is produced by Vicki Vergolina and senior producer Lisa Ferri. Our audio engineer is Bob Mallory and Bryson Barnes is the head of audio production. Pat Burkey is the senior executive producer of Deadline White House. Brad Gold is the executive producer of content strategy. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of audio, and Madeleine Haeringer is the senior vice president in charge of audio, digital and long form.
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