David Remnick: Late in November, Donald Trump's legal team filed discovery documents in the federal criminal case against him, which should be a routine legal matter, but the documents from Trump's lawyers were rife with heated political rhetoric and conspiracy theories about what had happened on January 6th.

His lawyers referred to foreign actors who sought to "undermine" public faith in the US Democratic process. They mentioned Antifa, of course, because why not? They also wanted information from the Justice Department on John Nichols or any similar persons who were encouraged or participated in any illegal activities on January 6th.

Chris Hayes: Some January 6th conspiracy theorists believe that John Nichols, who was in Wisconsin on January 6th, not in DC, appeared at the Capitol in order to trick Trump supporters into ransacking the place to make them look bad. They've got like a nickname for him, and some video they think they've identified him on the scaffold. That is the caliber of argument you could expect from the Trump legal team. False flag from John Nichols of The Nation.

David Remnick: Who is this John Nichols? He's a political reporter based in Wisconsin, the author of more than a dozen books, and he was nowhere near the Capitol on January 6th. How did you end up in this bizarre position of learning that people thought you were involved in January 6th somehow?

John Nichols: About a year and a half ago, I got an email from Caitlin Graf, who is the publicity director for The Nation, and she said, this is going to make you laugh. She sent me a post from someplace that said it was John Nichols involved in January 6th. Was he one of the people urging people to storm the Capitol?

It had a grainy picture of me from many years ago, sadly to say before I got my bifocals and when I was perhaps a bit more youthful, and next to a picture of somebody who I guess was involved in January 6th, or potentially. She sent me it, and I thought, well, that's weird.

David Remnick: Hold up. Based on one photo where you maybe resemble a guy who was at the insurrection, the internet says liberal John Nichols of The Nation was at the Capitol instigating violence? That's it?

John Nichols: I've been pretty public for a long time, and I've had people say wild and negative things about me in the past, so this isn't the thing that shocks me. Then in November, right around Thanksgiving, I got a call from a very good reporter for The Washington Post who said, you're not going to believe this, but your name came up in the filings by Trump's lawyers regarding the DC trial on his attempts to overturn the election.

I said, you got to be, really? She sent me a link to the documents. I went in, and this is sadly, David, this is where it loses its romance because it turned out I was one of 35 line items in this discovery document in which they were going after stuff from Nancy Pelosi and the FBI and the CIA and all sorts of other folks, I guess, but there I was.

David Remnick: Just for the record, what were you doing January 6th?

John Nichols: I was working really hard, and I suspect you were as well. January 6th, 2021 was a tightly constructed day for me. I got up early and took my daughter to the orthodontist. If you have a daughter who's orthodontist age, what you know is that those last appointments are really very, very happy appointments because you're about to stop paying a lot of money.

[laughter]

I took her over, and we came back and I said, well, we got to get back by a certain time, like a little round noon-ish, little afternoon, because I got to turn on C-SPAN, I'm going to sit in front of the TV like the election geek I am, and I'm going to watch what's happening in the Capitol.

Ignorantly, I had not taken the Trump rally and things like that all that seriously, but I really thought that the action was going to be inside the Capitol. I was super interested in the Republican objections, all the stuff that would play out. How Pence would handle it, and I plan to write a big piece on that.

Well, couple minutes in to watching it, I saw things begin to get chaotic. Somebody ran in Pence, got pulled out and stuff like that. It took me, I don't know, it took me a few minutes to figure out exactly what was going on, and even then, I didn't really fully understand it.

Then I started doing what again, David, the things you would do. I started calling people who were on the scene. While the Capitol chaos was still going on, I started writing a big piece on what this would mean constitutionally and that posted that afternoon.

David Remnick: You were doing your job in Madison, Wisconsin, minding your own business as it were, except for the business of The Nation, but now how does this affect your life, though? What does it tell you about Trump's case that you're dragged into this?

John Nichols: Those are two very separate questions. Number one, it affects my life in that all of my friends are teasing me now. [laughs] I have had people from all over the country call me. That's one side of it. I think that there are people, journalists who are in much more difficult positions, and who have people who target them for all sorts of reasons.

David Remnick: There have been people doxed throughout the press, and it's pretty unrelenting.

John Nichols: Yes. What it has been though, and this is what I do, I write about politics, and I write about that intersection of media and politics, and those points at which the process is strained. What this has done for me is to actually tell me that the process is much more strained and much more, I think dangerous than perhaps we even imagined.

The first part about it is you asked about Trump's case. What I'll say about Trump's case is this, it looks a lot weaker than I thought, and I thought it was pretty weak.

David Remnick: Because of your presence there as a witness.

John Nichols: Yes. It looks like they're throwing things at the wall. Just trying for dozens and dozens of possible conspiracy theories and digging pretty deep into conspiracy theories.

David Remnick: Wait, what conspiracy could John Nichols, writer for The Nation, possibly participate in, and have you heard from any Trump lawyers?

John Nichols: No, I have not.

David Remnick: Are you going to have to testify in any potential trial?

John Nichols: I'm willing to [laughs], but I have not been contacted.

David Remnick: You'll be testifying about orthodontist, I suppose, and report it.

John Nichols: Well, I don't know that much about it, David. My hope is that they would take me into the political, some of the deeper, I would hope it'd be testifying about the arcane constitutional realities of the transition of power in the United States.

To me, it's very interesting what this says about both the Trump defense, and really in many ways about our politics. That is that I think there are people who desperately want to drive the deepest possible wedges, to believe that those who disagree with them don't just disagree with them, but they're actually evil.

In this case, when it gets beyond the troll world or the fringe of the internet, and comes into a very major legal case, and a filing as regards to that case, that is a big deal.

David Remnick: Has it led you to look even more carefully at Trump and social media, and what have you learned about it?

John Nichols: What I think about it at this point is the decay of our communications and those communications which underpinned democracy is far more severe than I thought before this came along.

David Remnick: How do you mean?

John Nichols: Because we know that local media is dying in a lot of the country. Journalists are getting laid off. That internet news operations are not filling the void. We know that there's a gap out there. There's an information gap, and that that gap is increasingly, especially on social media, being filled by lies, propaganda, spin, and we also know that in this era, it's possible to produce those lies in much more sophisticated ways to make it look--

David Remnick: The gap is an opportunity for political operatives.

John Nichols: Yes. For not even the highest level political operatives. For folks, even on the fringe to fill a void and say, well, here's the explanation for things you can't understand. I do think this relates to a collapse of traditional media. Not that I'm a big fan of traditional media.

I've probably been one of the biggest critics over the years, but it relates to the reality that we no longer have those reliable known sources. Now, increasingly, people do rely on a Twitter feed or on something on TikTok or something like that, which I do too. I want to acknowledge I'm one of those people. I rely more and more on social media than I used to.

David Remnick: You do that because if you have a distrust of The New York Times and The Washington Post, or because--

John Nichols: No, it is because it's easy and fast. I have criticized The Washington Post and The New York Times. I have to look back in the index to see if I criticize The New Yorker, but--

David Remnick: Fair enough.

John Nichols: -undoubtedly not. I think you can have two things in your head at the same time. I think you can recognize that traditional media is flawed, and that has failed us in times of war and in all sorts of other challenging moments. I think there are many folks that will tell us that it's failing even now in Israel, Palestine, Gaza. We can have those discussions, but separate from that is the fact that it isn't there, that at the local level and even the regional level, increasingly, those reliable sources aren't there. The gap gets filled.

I think for Trump, that's been very advantageous. Trump was really, in many ways, the first politician of a new era, and that his ability to communicate directly to people and his understanding that the way to do that is to tell people that everything is urgent, that everything is breaking, and also that there are really bad players who are conspiring against you, and you better just rely on this stream of information because if you believe anything else, it's unreliable, and it's probably there to harm you.

David Remnick: John, is Trump uniquely good at this? There's a similar story when Trump shared a photo from the courtroom of his civil trial in New York, and he claimed that a man sitting way in the back of the room was the son of the judge, Arthur Engoron, somebody that Trump really hates. That was completely wrong. The man he picked out was a court reporter for the New York Post, in fact, but that didn't stop the claim from getting a lot of traction in Republican circles. Are we going to be seeing more and more of this kind of thing as the election year progresses?

John Nichols: 100%. Absolutely. In fact, that's why I'm interested in this.

David Remnick: You see $148 million judgment reached in the Giuliani defamation trial of two Black former election workers in Georgia. He falsely accused them of stealing the election on behalf of Joe Biden, and that doesn't seem to have a sobering effect on Rudy Giuliani at all. He's still out there defaming them.

ABC News’ Terry Moran: Do you regret what you did to Ruby and Shaye?

Rudy Giuliani: Of course, I don't regret it. I told the truth. They were engaged in changing votes.

ABC News’ Terry Moran: There's no proof of that.

Rudy Giuliani: Oh, you're damn right there is. Stay tuned.

David Remnick: What will it take for MAGA extremists to back down from character assassination and things like that when an entire media machinery, the kind you've been describing, remains powerful and vicious and unending?

John Nichols: As a historian of the American experience, and I've written a lot of books about American history, we have moments of fever, and then we come out of them. We calm ourselves. The period before the Civil War, the period of the First Red Scare, the period of the isolationism in the '30s into World War II, and then the Red Scare that followed it. If you look at what we saw in the '60s, assassination, after assassination, after assassination of prominent figures. You can get to a point where you think, "Wow, it's all falling apart." I think a lot of people are there now.

What happens in 2024 will give us a very, very strong signal of where this country is going. If I was to predict one thing, it would be a decisive election result in America. Is something that has the potential to break the fever. If we're committed to this small Democratic experiment, then we have to believe that the the way out is to have a decisive result one way or the other.

David Remnick: I don't mean to deflate our one moment of optimism or hope, but we heard all during Trump's first term that if they got defeated at the ballot box in '20, and then again they were in 2022, that the fever would break, and yet the MAGA Republicans just keep coming. Are they our new normal or will they eventually retreat and become something different or marginal?

John Nichols: I don't think they're our new normal. I know this is an odd thing to say, but I have a regard for his skills as a communicator. He clearly knows how to get hit with something and stand right back up and push back even harder. I think it is somewhat unique to him. I don't see many other figures. You have a whole bunch of Republican candidates who are trying to recreate it. I do think there is a chance that Trump is a unique figure, as we've had unique figures in the past who build a party around them. Trump has defined the Republican party. There's no doubt of that.

We are stuck in the United States with a two party system. I think that's problematic in many ways. I wish we had a multi-party system. If somebody dominates one of those two parties, they're going to define it. That definition is going to continue for so long as that person is in play. I do think that both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party are going to have to redefine themselves, because right now, the Democratic Party is defined by Trump, as well as the Republican Party. They're both revolving around this thing. Do I think that's the point at which a fever breaks? I think potentially, yes. I am open to that prospect because as my wife tells me, I'm a very optimistic person.

David Remnick: John Nichols of The Nation, thanks so much.

John Nichols: It's been a pleasure talking to you.

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David Remnick: John Nichols' books include Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiteers, and most recently, It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, a book he wrote with Bernie Sanders. The federal trial of Donald Trump was scheduled to begin on March 4th, but that date is now in limbo as an Appeals Court decides whether a former President is immune to prosecution for alleged crimes committed while in office.

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