6/3/25: China Popularity Soars, Zohran Surges In NYC, Palantir Surveillance, Biden Spox Admits Lies

Summary

Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar – Detailed Summary

Episode Title: China Popularity Soars, Zohran Surges In NYC, Palantir Surveillance, Biden Spox Admits Lies
Release Date: June 3, 2025

Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar delves into critical geopolitical and domestic issues affecting the United States. In this episode, hosts Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti discuss the shifting global dynamics between the U.S. and China, the intensifying New York City mayoral race, the Trump administration's collaboration with Palantir for mass data collection, and revelations from a Biden administration spokesperson regarding Israeli war crimes. Below is a comprehensive summary of the episode's key discussions, insights, and conclusions.

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1. Introduction and Guest Appearance

[02:08 – 05:00]
Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti welcome their guest, Marshall Kosloff, a longtime friend and host of The Realignment. Marshall shares his political evolution and insights into the current political landscape, particularly in response to the 2016 election and its aftermath.

Notable Quote:
Marshall Kosloff states, “If you just were comfortable with your perspectives and did not change by 2016, then there was probably something wrong with you.”
[02:31]

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2. Trump Administration's Tariff Regime and China Relations

[05:00 – 15:13]
The hosts discuss the Trump administration's ongoing tariff policies targeting China, despite recent court rulings limiting the President's authority. The dialogue highlights the administration's determination to continue imposing tariffs by seeking alternative legal provisions, even in the face of judicial setbacks.

Key Points:

• Court Rulings: The Court of International Trade deemed the Trump administration's tariff provisions as exceeding authority, while the appeals court allowed temporary continuation.
• Administration's Response: Officials, including Howard Letnick, maintain that tariffs will persist, adapting strategies as needed.
• Economic Impact: Discussions emphasize the inconsistency and unpredictability of the tariff implementation, causing uncertainty among businesses.

Notable Quote:
Marshall Kosloff explains, “Trump’s theory of the case was, once again, I’m coming back, I’m going to finish the job.”
[10:08]

[09:07]
Marshall adds, “They see terrorists and immigrations as their unfinished business that they did not get done. Therefore, they are gonna push as hard as they can on this issue.”

---

3. Global Perception: U.S. vs. China

[15:13 – 26:10]
The conversation shifts to global perceptions, noting a significant decline in the U.S.'s favorability and a surge in China's popularity. Polls indicate a 9-point increase in China's net favorability compared to the U.S., highlighting the adverse effects of the Trump administration's broad and unfocused tariff policies.

Key Points:

• Trade Conflicts: The U.S. has engaged in tariff battles not only with China but also with allies like Canada and the EU, damaging trust.
• China's Resilience: China has adapted by enhancing its industrial capabilities, particularly in electric vehicles and technology.
• Policy Missteps: The lack of a strategic, focused approach in U.S. trade policy has inadvertently strengthened China's global standing.

Notable Quote:
Saagar Enjeti remarks, “It would have taken multiple years of preparation to actually get our economy to the point where we could stand off against China.”

---

4. Ukraine's Drone Attack on Russian Air Bases

[28:01 – 44:49]
Krystal and Saagar analyze Ukraine's recent drone attack on Russian airbases, which has reportedly caused significant damage to Russia's air fleet. The operation underscores Ukraine's evolving military tactics and technological advancements, shifting the dynamics of the conflict.

Key Points:

• Strategic Impact: The attack demonstrates Ukraine's ability to inflict damage deep within Russian territory using civilian supply chains and advanced drone technology.
• Technological Shift: Ukraine has become adept at integrating drones into their military strategy, challenging traditional notions of warfare.
• Diplomatic Repercussions: The operation has strained U.S.-Ukraine relations, with concerns over intelligence sharing and military support consistency.

Notable Quote:
Marshall Kosloff states, “Ukraine has effectively become a drone superpower, changing the way they can approach and take this strategy.”

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5. Steve Bannon's Reaction to Ukraine's Drone Attack

[44:49 – 49:43]
Steve Bannon criticizes the White House for not preventing the attack and questions the integrity of intelligence operations. He accuses the administration of being irresponsible and dragging the U.S. into a potential third world war.

Key Points:

• Blame on Intelligence Failures: Bannon demands accountability from intelligence officials, questioning whether they had foreknowledge of the attack.
• Critique of Administration Policies: He condemns the Trump administration's foreign policy stance, attributing the attack to administrative mismanagement and lack of strategic foresight.

Notable Quote:
Steve Bannon asserts, “They're irresponsible and they're dragging us into a kinetic Third World war.”

---

6. New York City Mayoral Race: Andrew Cuomo vs. Zohran Mamdani

[50:36 – 72:00]
The hosts turn their attention to the tightly contested NYC mayoral race between former Governor Andrew Cuomo and Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani. Recent polls indicate a narrowing gap, with Mamdani gaining significant traction among younger and diverse voters.

Key Points:

• Demographic Shifts: Mamdani leads among voters under 50 and white voters, while Cuomo retains strong support among older voters and women.
• Policy Debates: Mamdani focuses on affordability, rent control, free public transit, and universal childcare, resonating with working-class and immigrant populations.
• Coalition Challenges: Although Mamdani has surged, he struggles to maintain support among Black voters and other minority groups, highlighting the Democratic Party's broader challenges in uniting diverse coalitions.

Notable Quote:
Zohran Mamdani emphasizes, “Affordable is the number one crisis. We're going to freeze the rent for more than 2 million New Yorkers who live in rent-stabilized housing.”
[56:05]

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7. The Abundance Agenda and Its Political Implications

[72:00 – 96:33]
Krystal and Saagar engage in a deep dive into the "Abundance Agenda," discussing its role within the Democratic Party and its effectiveness in addressing economic and social issues. They explore the tension between deregulation-focused abundance policies and broader economic populism narratives.

Key Points:

• Definition of Abundance: Rooted in balancing Hamiltonian (proactive, large-scale projects) and Jeffersonian (local community-focused) instincts, as emphasized by Marshall Kosloff.
• Policy Execution: Successful implementation requires a mix of policies that address immediate economic concerns (e.g., housing affordability) while fostering long-term solutions (e.g., industrial policy).
• Challenges: The lack of a coherent, unified narrative within the Democratic Party makes it difficult to effectively counter right-wing populist narratives focused on immigration and corporate power.
• Local vs. National Politics: Highlighting the success of economic populists like Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, the discussion underscores the importance of localized policy successes as models for broader political strategies.

Notable Quote:
Marshall Kosloff remarks, “A robust Abundance Agenda should balance recognizing a climate crisis with supporting local communities and democracy.”

---

8. Palantir's Collaboration with the Trump Administration for Mass Data Collection

[96:33 – 116:47]
The episode shifts focus to national security concerns, particularly the Trump administration's partnership with Palantir to create a centralized database of American citizens' information. Hosts and guest Ken Klippenstein discuss the implications for privacy, civil liberties, and the potential for a surveillance state.

Key Points:

• Palantir's Role: As an AI-driven software company, Palantir is expanding its footprint within government agencies, aiming to unify data across various departments.
• Civil Liberties Concerns: The consolidation of data from tax filings, medical records, immigration status, and more into a single database poses significant risks to individual privacy.
• National Security State Expansion: The collaboration indicates a shift towards a more pervasive surveillance infrastructure, utilizing AI to process and analyze vast amounts of personal data.
• Impact on Ordinary Citizens: The merging of data systems makes it easier for agencies like ICE and Homeland Security Investigations to monitor and profile individuals, extending surveillance beyond just undocumented immigrants.

Notable Quote:
Ken Klippenstein states, “Palantir is laying the groundwork for a surveillance state where every aspect of American citizens' lives is tracked and analyzed.”

---

9. Biden Administration Spokesperson Admits to Defending Israel's War Crimes

[116:47 – 125:48]
In a shocking revelation, former State Department spokesperson Matt Miller admits publicly that he believed Israel was committing war crimes during military operations in Gaza—a stance he could not take while officially representing the U.S. government. This admission exposes potential discrepancies between U.S. foreign policy rhetoric and individual viewpoints within the administration.

Key Points:

• Personal vs. Official Views: Miller reveals his personal conviction that “Israel has committed war crimes,” contrasting with the official stance he was required to maintain at the podium.
• Implications for U.S. Foreign Policy: The admission raises questions about the internal consistency and moral accountability of U.S. diplomatic positions regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict.
• Public Reaction: The revelation has sparked outrage and introspection among listeners regarding the integrity and transparency of government spokespeople.

Notable Quote:
Matt Miller acknowledges, “I don’t think it’s a genocide, but I think it is without a doubt true that Israel has committed war crimes.”
[116:45]

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10. Conclusion

[125:48 – End]
Krystal and Saagar wrap up the episode by reiterating the importance of addressing both domestic and international challenges through coherent policies and political strategies. They emphasize the need for the Democratic Party to unify around a clear narrative that resonates with diverse voter bases while countering rising authoritarian and populist threats.

Final Thoughts:

• Policy Coherence: Effective governance requires balancing immediate economic needs with long-term strategic planning.
• Political Strategy: Building broad coalitions through economic populism and addressing core voter concerns are essential for electoral success.
• National and Global Stability: Ensuring U.S. leadership remains focused on fostering alliances and managing conflicts without escalating towards dangerous confrontations.

Notable Quote:
Krystal Ball summarizes, “We need politics that listen to voters and deliver concrete solutions, not just ideological battles.”

---

Key Takeaways:

• The Trump administration remains steadfast in its tariff policies against China despite legal challenges, adversely affecting global perceptions of the U.S.
• Ukraine's innovative use of drone technology signifies a new era in warfare, challenging traditional military strategies.
• The NYC mayoral race exemplifies the Democratic Party's struggle to unify progressive and centrist factions amidst shifting voter demographics.
• The collaboration between Palantir and the Trump administration for mass data collection raises significant privacy and civil liberty concerns.
• Admissions from U.S. government spokespeople about defending Israel's war crimes highlight potential inconsistencies in foreign policy narratives.

This episode underscores the complex interplay between domestic policies, international relations, technological advancements, and ethical governance, urging listeners to critically analyze the evolving political landscape.

Transcript

[Tom Brokaw]

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[Lester Holt]

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[Krystal Ball]

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[Krystal Ball]

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[Tom Yamas]

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[Lester Holt]

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[Tom Brokaw]

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[Lester Holt]

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[Tom Brokaw]

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[Lester Holt]

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Breaking Points, where we have an extra special show planned because we have celebrity guest host Marshall Kosloff, longtime, longtime friend of the show and friend also of soccer, sitting in this morning. Great to see you, Marshall.

[Tom Brokaw]

Yeah, I'm excited to be here I moved out to Texas. I had a kid. I have a mustache. So everything is different, everything has changed. And I'm excited to be back on the show.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, it's gonna be a of fun. So Marshall, if you guys don't know, hosts the realignment. He also is deep in the abundance world. So I'm really excited to talk to you about some of that because I've been listening, I told you to your episodes on abundance, on the realignment, and it's actually helped me much better to understand what's going on inside the movement and what it's all about. So you can be a little bit of our guide through abundance world today, which I'm excited about. In addition, before I forget, guys announced this yesterday. We. We brought back the monthly subscription, which I'm super excited about. I think it comes at a really timely moment when, you know, economics are a little uncertain. That's actually what we're starting the show with today. And we are doing a free monthly trial right now. So if you want to try out being a premium Breaking Point subscriber, go to breakingpoints.com the promo is BP free, so you can get that monthly trial subscription. All right, so here is what is in the show today. Let's go ahead and put the show bar up so I can read it and not have to use my memory, which is a little bit suspect, to talk about the latest with regard to tariffs, some back and forth with China. We've got the continued fallout from that extraordinary Ukraine drone attack. Wanted to get Marshall's take on that in particular, and some reaction from Steve Bannon that was kind of interesting. We're going to dig into that New York City mayoral race which is tightening between Andrew Cuomo and Zoran Mamdani. A lot of really interesting dynamics there. I think that will lead us into a great discussion I'm looking forward to on abundance. What it is, what it isn't, how the left should really be thinking about it. And then we're going to thank Marshall for his time and let him go about his day. And Ken Klippenstein is gonna join to break down what's going on with Palantir. Looks like the Trump administration is trying to assemble a mass database of all of the information that they have on every single American. Yes, you should be terrified about that. I certainly am. So Ken is gonna talk about that, and he is also going to talk about Matthew Miller, former State Department spokesperson under Joe Biden, basically admitting that he was lying the entire time he was at the podium and asserting that Israel had committed no war crimes. So definitely want to take a look. So, Marshall, before we jump into the news, a lot of rising and breaking points Fans know you already. You've undergone, as all of us have, I think, somewhat of a political evolution over the years since you started being a guest on the show. So before we jump in, why don't you just sort of like, set up for everybody who you are, where you were, where you are now, and kind of your general view of politics in this moment?

[Tom Brokaw]

Yeah, totally. So I think for a lot of people, the 2016 election was really huge, as it should have been. If you sort of were a person who could see both, like Trump and Bernie, if you just were comfortable with your perspectives and thoughts and evaluations of the world before that, and that did not at all change by 2016, then I think there was probably something wrong with you. So Sager and I have known each other forever, so we started a podcast called the Realignment. And the Realignment was really rooted in responding to this 2016 moment from both the right and the left. And I think as someone who's sort of contrarian by nature, I'm from, like, the center left Portland suburbs. I was really attracted to the right, especially in the 2000 and tens after the 2012 election where everything was up for grabs, right, Like Mitt Romney loses to Obama, you have gay marriage passing at the Supreme Court. It seemed like we were moving in one direction as a country, in a more progressive direction by 2050. So the question of how would the right respond to that moment, I think was genuinely the most fascinating question of the time. Then that really got me into those spaces. I covered a lot of those topics. The Realignment's first guest was J.D. vance. Before he was. Well, I met J.D. before he was famous, but our first guest after J.D. was a little more famous was J.D. on the show. So covering that space was huge. After 2020, though, I think, obviously what kind of happened with everything from January 6th to sort of COVID I think, made pretty clear that the, I think most hopeful version of that right populist project wasn't going to end well for anyone. It wasn't going to lead to a stronger, united America. It was just leading to more division and lack of actual certainty on these questions. So I started just getting more interested in left and frankly started going back to my roots. So just in the same way that, like, 2013 was like this big era where, like, the central questions were how would the right respond to how the 2012 election really shattered their Story. The question right now is how is the center left? How is the center, how is the center right? And how does, like the further parts of the left I think you represent really well. How are they gonna respond to that moment? So I think my politics have naturally drifted towards where the big questions are.

[Lester Holt]

Interesting. Okay, excellent. Well, with that being said, let's go ahead and jump into some of what is going on with the Trump administration that I'm anxious to Marshall's thoughts on in particular. Let's go and put this up on the screen. So we have an update on how they are thinking about the tariff regime. And you will recall that there was a series of court decisions that were impactful here. So you had one court, the Court of International Trade, that came in and said, okay, you can't actually use this particular provision that you're using. You have vastly exceeded your authority. You can't do that to levy the Liberation Day tariffs. Another appeals court came in and said, well, you can do it for now while this is playing out in court. So the big question has been, how is the Trump administration going to respond? Are they basically going to take the out and be like, well, we tried and we're just going to move on now. And effectively all the indications are that they are not going to go in that direction. So that tear sheet that was up on the screen indicates that they want to have countries provide their quote, unquote, best offer on trade negotiations by Wednesday, as in tomorrow, as officials seek to accelerate talks with multiple partners ahead of a self imposed deadline in just five weeks, according to a draft letter to negotiating partners seen by Reuters. So effectively they're saying that on that Liberation Day, which the tariffs went into effect on April 9, they're giving them a deadline till July 8. And then if there isn't some sort of deal into place, Trump is going to levy whatever tariffs he decides to levy. A bunch of administration officials, including Howard Letnick, have been asked about the court ruling and if it makes a difference in terms of how they go about this. And effectively they're all saying, no, we're going to do what we want regardless of what the courts say, and we'll figure out some other provision to use if it isn't ipa, which was the original provision. Let's go ahead and take a listen to that.

[Tom Brokaw]

Congress gives the president under this IA.

[Lester Holt]

Authority, the ability to take on other.

[Tom Brokaw]

Countries who are creating a national emergency.

[Lester Holt]

And the $1.2 trillion trade deficit and.

[Tom Brokaw]

All the underlying implications of that is a national emergency.

[Lester Holt]

It's gutting our manufacturing base.

[Tom Brokaw]

The President takes that opportun on and.

[Lester Holt]

Congress lets him do it specifically, does not vote to take it away, calls.

[Tom Brokaw]

A vote and says he can keep it.

[Lester Holt]

So what's going to happen is we're.

[Tom Brokaw]

Going to take that up to higher courts. The President's going to win like he always does. But rest assured, tariffs are not going away. He has so many other authorities that.

[Lester Holt]

Even in the weird and unusual circumstance where this was taken away, we just bring on another or another or another.

[Tom Brokaw]

Congress has given this authority to the.

[Lester Holt]

President and he's going to use it. And Marshall, my suspicion is that I and others who were thinking that maybe the IPA court ruling would be like an excuse for the Trump administration to back off of this were probably mistaken and they probably are going to just figure out some other way to accomplish this. Because ultimately, I'm curious, I want to know your thoughts on what really is going on here. I think Trump loves the terrorists because it consolidates a lot of power in his hands and I don't think that he is going to let go of that easily.

[Tom Brokaw]

I think it's not just the fact that he loves the power and using the executive branch over Congress. I think it's that if there are, I'd say There are probably two things we could reasonably say Trump 120% believes, yeah, it's tariffs and immigration. We should also understand that because Trump had a first term and an interruption between his first and second term, I think he's coming into this administration and they've made very clear that this is their priority. They see terrorists and immigrations as their unfinished business that they did not get done. Therefore, they are gonna push as hard as they can on this issue. That's just the number one thing here. If you don't understand that Trump just truly believes in this more than almost anything else, you're going to sort of miss the fact that they're going to keep pushing forward.

[Lester Holt]

And to be honest with you, I actually think he believes in terrorists more than he. I think immigration is more a means to an end for him because even at times there, you know, like he told the all in guys, the thing about we're going to staple a green card to every student who graduates would practice. His administrations are obviously very hard line anti immigrant and I think he's basically outsourced that portfolio to Stephen Miller, who is a psycho and a white nationalist and is going full force with the anti immigrant program that he wants to. But it seems like the part of the agenda that Trump has really taken the most interest in and actually asserted himself in is the tariffs. And so what is your view, Marshall, of the tariff program, of the possibilities for it? Do you see any upside here? What is your kind of broad view of what's going on and what the impact could be economically?

[Tom Brokaw]

Yeah. No. So right before the election, when Sagar and I were talking about this, on the realignment, we really focused on the fact that if we want to understand the story of the moderate American presidency, it's that when you come into your second term, or even in your first term of Biden, presidents are going to just have like a theory of the case. And in 2005, after George W. Bush won, his big theory of the case was, I won, I have my mandate, I won the popular vote. This time I'm going to do a Social Security force, even though the voter base wasn't actually there in this case. And you see this leading up to the 2024 election, Trump's theory of the case was, once again, I'm coming back, I'm going to finish the job. And this has been something I've talked about since the 1980s when we were talking about Japan and other East Asian countries. I am going to pass tariffs. I'm going to re industrialize America by taking that specific route. That has always been his sort of approach. And the big problem with these mandate theories and these big, this is my big agenda project that I come in is if that mandate or that idea isn't actually sync with what the American people are failing, you're going to run into a huge issue. The huge issue they run into is that if there's one lesson, and we'll talk about this during the Zoran segment, if there's one lesson that we should take from the 2024 election, it's that pretty much the main thing Americans care about is how unaffordable everything is right now at every single level. And it's easy for people in the Trump administration just to say, like, oh, you know, these cheap goods and do you need $30? You should just have $2. If we look at, like, what's happened in America over the past 50 years, like education, health care, housing, in those sectors, everything has gotten way, way, way, way more expensive. The one thing we've actually kind of kept relatively cheap at the cost of manufacturing, at the cost of, like, in many ways, like our domestic politics and domestic economy have just been these consumer goods, right? So coming out of the COVID supply shock, coming out of Biden ignoring this issue, and he needed to pay attention to it. Having your theory of the case be I'm going to launch a massive trade war within the first three months without doing the long term planning, without getting the industrial policy together, without going to companies and businesses, even some of the small businesses. I'm sure you saw a lot of those small business owners who voted for Trump saying, wait a second, I wasn't ready for this. I needed time to prepare for this. And what's really frustrating and crazy about the whole program here is that even if you buy Trump's case for tariffs, this is just not the way you would actually do this. This starts and stops 90 days now we're extending 90 days. Actually no, we're going to get this other deal, tariffs and reindustrialization and bringing manufacturing jobs back to this country is a medium term project. Starting a new factory, rejigging your supply chains. That is so complicated and such a heavy lift for small, medium and large businesses that you have to have a consistent policy so they can make investment decisions based off of it. If you and I were going to launch a factory in Ohio, we would not launch a factory based on this current dynamic because we could have an entire situation where if you premised your re industrialization plans on what was happening in February, March and April, April, you could be totally screwed right now because wow, are those tariffs going to be there? Is it going to make sense? Is he going to get a big deal? And the last part here too is that in many ways the big problem is trade policies. They're doing so many different things at once. So on the one hand, the tariffs could serve as a new form of revenue that could lead to a income tax decrease. But if we're actually decreasing the income tax and we're actually making money from this, then it's not going to re industrialize the country. So it doesn't really make sense. And you really needed a different version of this administration that actually took those three months to say we're doing these five things, they make sense for this reason and we're going to stay strong on it.

[Lester Holt]

And here's the other thing. And guys, let's skip ahead to a five. If your goal is re industrializing the country, you're already failing. So this USM manufacturing imports index fell to 39.9, lowest level since 2009. Kobe C. Letter says we're seeing 2008 like contraction in manufacturing imports as tariffs take effect. The overall measure of manufact manufacturing has been falling month after month after month. And the reality is Marshall like the Biden industrial policy, plus protectionism in certain key sectors was actually working. Like for the first time in modern history. We came out of a recession, the COVID recession, creating more manufacturing jobs than we went in in recent modern history. Typically what happens is there's a recession, manufacturing drops, and it never comes back. Right. For a variety of reasons. And this was the first time that they had bucked that trend. And when you're talking about EVs, when you're talking about battery production, when you're talking about green energy, when you're talking about semiconductors, the policy was actually working because you paired the protectionism with industrial policy. And that's the piece that's completely missing here is any sort of a strategic direction. And at the same time, the parts of that Biden policy, which I'm first to say was like inadequate and worse should be done. And it wasn't transformational for people in their daily lives and wasn't sold well, all of those things. But the parts that were actually working are also being attacked and dismantled by a Trump administration which just hates Joe Biden, hates green energy. Anything that smacks of liberalism, like EVs, EV batteries, any sort of green energy, they just want to destroy. And so they've taken a chainsaw to those pieces and, you know, are actually destroying the part of our industrial policy that was actually working.

[Tom Brokaw]

Yeah. And the thing is of Bidenomics, we should like think about it on two different levels. So level one was like the political project, Biden's gonna bring all the jobs back. We're gonna re industrialize America from sort of a center left perspective, that political project totally failed. It didn't deliver. It didn't deliver fast enough. Like I have a lot of like MAGA in laws and like, if you tell them about like the actual policies that Joe Biden pursued, they were like, they are literally skept and do not believe it was happening because you just didn't see this. There was lots of really great reporting on how despite the fact that they put a lot of these jobs in red states and in purple and swing states, it just wasn't actually felt on the ground. So at a political level, it did not work. At a policy level, I think what's been so frustrating about covering this tariff topic is if you actually talk to most people left, right and center, what they will say is, wow, we actually came to kind of a consensus after the first Trump administration and the Biden administration. The Biden administration could have jettisoned all of Trump's tariffs when they came in in 2021. They didn't though. They kept them because they a bought into the idea that we couldn't just treat China entering the world market as this like chill thing that was gonna work out for everybody and magically keep everyone's jobs together. They kept that part, but then they once again added the government spending and industrial policy side. So we found a mix that to your point, needed to be implemented better. So in a better version of the Trump administration, to the point I was saying earlier, you would have said, okay, here's what didn't work with the b, here's what didn't work with our approach in the first term. Let's combine this into a mix that actually builds us into something productive. And the key thing here, there was consensus in the business community, in the labor, with labor and with policymakers on the left and right around that mix, jettisoning in it just because it's Bidenomics or because it's Biden tied is like a huge disaster. The NBC Nightly News legacy isn't handed.

[Lester Holt]

Down or NBC News.

[Tom Brokaw]

I'm Tom Brokaw.

[Lester Holt]

We hope to see you back here.

[Tom Brokaw]

I'm Lester Holt. It's carried forward, forward. Tom Yamas is there for us.

[Tom Yamas]

Firefighters are still working around the clock.

[Tom Brokaw]

As the world changes, we look for what endures.

[Tom Yamas]

We are coming on the air with breaking news.

[Tom Brokaw]

Right now, we look for a constant and from one era to the next, Trust is the anchor For NBC Nightly News, I'm Tom Yamas. A new chapter begins NBC Nightly News with Tom Yamas evenings on NBC.

[Krystal Ball]

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[Lester Holt]

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[Lester Holt]

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[Lester Holt]

Let's talk about the China relationship a little bit more. Can put a 3 up on the screen so we have indication here. Trump and Xi may talk very soon. We'll see. In addition, this was the big news that came out yesterday. I can put a 3B up on the screen. Trump has extended the China tariff so pushing it off into the future allow more time for negotiation. Pushing it off till August 31 and then this is pretty remarkable in terms of global impact on view of the US Since Trump has come back into office. Net favorability. This is again global average net favorability. This is a poll conducted by morning Consult the U.S. when Trump comes into office, the view of the U.S. falls off a fricking cliff. And at the same time the view of China has been significantly on the rise. So now you have a positive almost 9 point margin in favor of China and the US is underwater at minus 1.5, which is no surprise. Marshall when he again with the incoherence of the trade policy it would be one thing if you're like we're going to specifically focus on China, we're going to create a bloc of our allies to have some policy solidarity and to try to isolate China. But instead they went to war with the entire world, including Canada and the EU and countries that only have places that only have penguins and the whole thing. And so of course much of the world is like screw you, what are you doing? So in that respect too it has been Thoroughly counterproductive and has really strengthened China's hand going into these trade negotiations.

[Tom Brokaw]

Yeah. And if you, I think the perfect. So like, two examples here. So number one, like, why were we placing tariffs on Madagascar? It actually does not make sense other than the explanation we gave earlier that like, Trump just specifically does not like trade in the conventional sense. So it's not just that, like, hey, we have these industries that really matter. Oh, hey, like we have this whole part of the country that really relies on these jobs. So we have to like balance the trade offs of like, like cheap goods versus people actually having jobs here. No, Trump just broadly is hostile to trade, which explains why we are doing a trade fight with Mexico, which explains why we're doing a trade fight with Canada. And if you talk to the Canadians specifically, you know, the Mexico side of this thing has always been much more complicated because, you know, going back to like NAFTA in the 1990s and then Michaela Dorris, like, a lot of jobs, like went south. So I think people had within their mental framework the idea that, okay, the U.S. and Mexico are going to kind of have a hostile trade relationship. And I think a dynamic where that is a fight doesn't lead to that fall off of support for the US in terms of these global polls, what the Canada experience just revealed is just a real lack of trust. If you talk to Canadians about this, if you talk to people across the kind of world, they would say, wait, if we're just coming after us on this, why would we assume they're trying to find the right deal for this? Why is this about us getting a good deal with them? Us getting something from us being Canadians? The Canadians, they get something from us, we get something from them. It's all just domestic politics.

[Lester Holt]

Well, and not to mention, so in Trump's first administration, he renegotiated NAFTA with Canada and Mexico. So if you don't like the deal that was struck, you're the one who struck that deal, buddy. So again, to your point about trust, why should they expect that some new deal that they would enter into this time around would be upheld under this Trump administration, under the next administration, whether it's Democratic or Republican, like, the word of these people is just absolutely no good. Not to mention the just completely chaotic and schizophrenic nature of how the tariffs are on, off, and they're up and they're down and he's chickening out and then he's all in on a day to day basis. I am curious, what do you make of the taco discourse? Because I'm actually a little bit skeptical to your point about how Trump is. One thing that he is ideologically committed to is tariffs. And not to mention, if you had told people going into the Trump administration that we would be at the level of tariffs that we're at right now, and this is at a time before we get to July 8th and he once again does another Liberation Day announcement or whatever that's gonna be, people would be deeply concerned about what that would mean for the economy, because it was an extraordinary increase. Even just the levels we're at now are an extraordinary change and increase over where we were previously. So I'm a little bit. I understand where it comes from, because he has backed off the most maximalist positions of like 145% tariffs on China, which just completely ended trade between China and the US which was completely insane. But on the other hand, I think it would be foolish to understate where we are and what he could potentially still do in the future.

[Tom Brokaw]

Yeah, and I think that that's why the court cases really matter here, too, because once again, if we're gonna understand what are the consistent parts of Trump's politics, and over the past 50 years, he's a negotiator. Now, if I am sitting in China, if I'm sitting in the UK or the EU right now, I'm much less certain that Trump is operating with a full deck of cards here when it comes to the United States. Why is there an. And this is the danger of just sort of doing this Hail Mary, we're gonna reconfigure the way we conceive of trade policy, and the trade policy with the administration gonna do versus actually Congress. Because if you get knocked down at the core courts, even though those are being paused by the appeals court right now, why would China negotiate? The other thing that really is important here, too, and I want to go back to the comment about how China's perception is going up, is that the real problem that we're facing here is that we sort of root our approach to China in sort of two different periods. So a lot of people root their approach to China. In 2000, we let them into the WTO. They're a low cost, cheap manufacturer, they take a bunch of our jobs, and that all basically happens there. In exchange, we get cheap consumer goods. That's one version of China. The second version of China is the China that Trump faced down during the late 2010s. We now, in the year 2025, are facing a new China where they now have BYD who are producing the best, the cheapest electric vehicles in the world. And they are penetrating and the most advanced, they are penetrating European and global markets. So if I'm sitting in, let's say Germany or I'm sitting in an East Asian country and we see China delivering not just, oh, competing for jobs of us, but actually delivering like industrial first world technological advancement that the United States cannot match right now. But also weirdly enough, the Trump administration says they are just totally uninterested in China. Looks really great right now. Like that's just like the key real context here. You can't just treat China like it's the 2000s or the 2018 China or.

[Lester Holt]

Even like the night. I mean, I feel like sometimes Trump has this like 1990s view of China almost that is completely out of touch with where they are today. They made an explicit government led plan to move up the value chain and they've done it. It's not the days anymore of just like China stealing other companies IP and using it to create knockoff cheap versions of it. They have their own very high tech advanced research capabilities in some areas. To your point about BYD and EVs, they are outpacing the U.S. i think they're on par in terms of AI development at the very least. And so this is a different China. Not to mention the trading dynamics have changed as well. The us, if you consider ASEAN as a bloc, the US is no longer China's largest trading partner. They trade more with asean. You have an entire rest of the world. So it was easier for China to acquire more customers than it is for the US to recreate all of the supply lines and all of the manufacturing capability that has been outsourced to China and other countries too, by the way, over the years. It always seemed to me wild at the beginning of this that there was so much confidence from the Trump administration that it would be China that would have to come to them and China that would be in the more difficult political position in terms of these trade dynamics because that too there isn't public consensus around what Trump is doing. Whereas in China, because we're the instigators here who started this war, there does appear to be a sort of rally around the flag effect and a willingness to withstand whatever it is that the government policy in order to fight back against what the US is doing to them.

[Tom Brokaw]

Yeah, and there's been some really great reporting from the New York Times that I checked in on. So it's not as if this is just all like a total win for China, like, the Chinese really depend on being able to export goods to the United States. So it's not as if a trade war wouldn't be a disaster for their own economy. But what the Chinese have explicitly done since the last round of these wars back in the 2018 period is they've made their economy more resilient, they've prepped for this, they've set the national narrative. You are not going to see Chinese, aside from the politics of it, you are not gonna see Chinese small business owners knocking on Xi's door saying, wait, this is a disaster for us. This doesn't work. So they have set the table to fight a actual trade war. And what we have just literally not done. And I don't care if you're on the right and you, like, object, even if you are on the right and think we need to take a totally different approach to trade. It would have taken multiple years of preparation to actually get our economy to the point where we could stand off against China. To your point, to the degree to which Trump wants to trade off on. I want to also go to Letnik's comments about national security, and that's why we need to really do this. I hope no one takes away the idea that you and I are dismissing the idea that there aren't national security concerns here. My favorite topic on this is like, we are incredibly dependent on China for pharmaceuticals. It's a huge problem. It's a huge risk. This isn't just like a China Taiwan thing. This was like a Covid thing. Like, there are so many critical, critical things that we are over dependent on China on. And in an era where we have to be ready for supply chains to break at any time, once again, separate from your views of war and peace, we need to be more resilient in that category. The national security emergency supports the argument that, wow, we should really, really concentrate on these five specific areas. So once again, we really, really, really should have focused on semiconductors, which is what the Biden administration was doing. Wow. Even if our pharmaceutical goods are cheaper because of the fact that we get them from China, we can't be overly dependent on any one country and all the chaos that's happening right now. So if they'd come in and said, hey, here are these five to 10 areas, we're going to hyper focus on them and maybe if it turns out that that makes pharmaceutical drugs more expensive because we're reshoring, we'll have of subsidy or pursue some sort of industrial policy for pharmaceutical goods that would have been met not only with more policy consensus in this country. You wouldn't see the courts fighting. You wouldn't see the, you wouldn't see even Republicans in Congress fighting. You wouldn't see angry town halls where Republican congressmen and women cannot even articulate the case for this policy. That would have been the right approach here. NBC Nightly News legacy isn't handed down or NBC News.

[Lester Holt]

I'm Tom Brokaw. We hope to see you back here.

[Tom Yamas]

I'm Leslie.

[Tom Brokaw]

It's carried forward. Tom Yamatz is there for us.

[Tom Yamas]

Firefighters are still working around the clock.

[Tom Brokaw]

As the world changes, we look for what endures.

[Tom Yamas]

We are coming on the air with breaking news right now.

[Tom Brokaw]

We look for a constant and from one era to the next, trust is the anchor for NBC Nightly News, I'm Tom Yamas. A new chapter begins NBC Nightly News with Tom Yamas.

[Krystal Ball]

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[Lester Holt]

That'S a good transition into the next block, actually, because you know what I Learned yesterday, Marshall? 90% of the drone industry is also in China. And obviously we covered yesterday. But we'll just put back up the images on the screen and refresh everybody's memory. Ukraine was able to commit an extraordinary drone attack on far flung Russian air bases. And it's not confirmed how many, many Russian warplanes they were able to take out. The Ukrainians are saying over 40. Of course, the Russians are saying a lot less. There hasn't been independent confirmation, but obviously a significant amount of damage was done. And Marshall, it was quite an extraordinary operation. Zelensky Sundays this was 18 months in the making. They used, it appears, civilian supply chains trucking in these drones on large trucks, leaving, parking them in key positions. The drones were like hidden in the top of these crates. And then at the appropriate time, the crates were remote control opened and these little drones that look like toys were able to go out and do tremendous damage to the Russian air fleet. So we've got some interesting ban in comments. But before we get to that, since we didn't have you here yesterday, just tell us sort of your overall view of the significance of this operation.

[Tom Brokaw]

Yeah, it really shows a key way that the war in Ukraine has changed in a way that was totally different from the Biden administration. So one of the big debates within the Biden administration, the Biden administration, as of all areas, sort of found itself in this like, middle where basically no one was happy.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Tom Brokaw]

So there are always people sort of to the more populist side who thought that the Biden administration was escalating things in Ukraine and were way too sort of in favor of Zelensky's approach. The Hawk Hawks were pissed because the US Wasn't authorizing strikes into Russia. We would say, hey, if we're going to give you missiles, we're going to give you ammunition. Ammunitions. You cannot use them to strike Russia's potential nuclear assets. Because to build on your point, these weren't just warplanes. These were Russia's strategic bombers, nuclear bombers.

[Lester Holt]

Some of which they're not really able to produce anymore.

[Tom Brokaw]

Apparently they're quite literally not able to produce. They've obviously been upgraded. But the TU95 is a cold War relic just in the same way that our B52s, the airframe, first started in the 1950s. Same thing is true of these planes. These are propeller driven bombers that can launch missiles. They've been launching missiles into Ukraine, but they also can be used to drop and launch nuclear weapons. So the fact is now that Ukraine has this capability of utilizing the droids the way they use them, this isn't something the US can control anymore. So it doesn't matter if we're not sending them missiles to launch these types of strikes. They have built their own drone industry. They've effectively become, in many ways, and this is kind of an overstatement, but it gets to the point they've become a drone superpower. This has really changed the way they could approach and take this strategy. Another really interesting thing that I learned too, and this is why we were speaking earlier about how we're entering in a really new era. We need to think differently. It should be noted, all of these planes were out in the open. These were things that people could see. That stems from the fact that ever since the Cold War, it has been in a basic rule that there's a degree of transparency with nuclear forces. From a pure deterrence and awareness and safety perspective. It's unclear that after this attack, any country with nuclear weapons can afford to let their strategic bombers out in the open, even if it means that previous nuclear limitations treaties required they'd be out in the open. So we could monitor. That was a very good thing. That's the type of thing that you need to have in a Cold War situation that's not sustainable anymore if you can get civilian drones in, or if you could convert civilian drones into military use and then launch these attacks within the country.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, no, I mean, that's absolutely right. And you saw it also the ability to use these relatively small, relatively low tech and easily accessible drones to inflict significant damage. I mean, it really does level the playing field of war fighting in a way that should be very troubling to these U.S. you know, we see it certainly here in the Ukraine. In Ukraine, where increasingly it is a drone war where you have drones fighting against other drones. You also saw it to a certain degree on October 7th where Hamas, the first thing that they were able to do was to take out the very high tech fence, multimillion dollar fence that Israel had built along the Gaza border, including, you know, automated machine guns and surveillance. So they're able to take those out and that's how they're able to effectively their attacks on October 7th. So this was a complicated operation that Ukraine was able to pull off the US claims. They had no idea this was coming. I don't know whether that's true or not. There would be some interest both from the Ukrainians and the US if they did collaborate to deny that there was any sort of coordination or collaboration. So I'm not sure if that's true or not, but this was a complicated operation to pull off. At the same time, the tech is very easily available and very local cost. And so obviously, the reason for Zelenskyy to do this at this particular point in time is because there are peace talks ongoing. The general consensus is that Russia is in a much stronger position than Ukraine is because they have much more manpower and they have much more industrial might than the Ukrainians do. And so this is an effort to say, look, this is not, you know, the playing field is more level than you think, and we can inflict damage on you deep into your territory that you know. And it doesn't require the assistance the United States of America to be able to pull this off.

[Tom Brokaw]

Yeah, I know. And the way to understand the Russian position right now is there's some good reporting. The Russians are moving miles a day. They're sort of advancing into Donetsk. And the thing is, if you're looking at the Ukrainian position right now, what the Ukrainians are basically trying to do is just make clear that they are in this for the long term, especially in a world where they can no longer guarantee the United States is going to have their back in the same way that the Biden administration did. I think, obviously the Zelensky JD Vance blow up at the White House was a disaster on like, 50 different levels. But what I think it really accomplished in a way that the Biden administration. I've read all the reporting. I still don't understand why this never happened. I think what the Oval Office blow up forced the Ukrainians to finally reckon with is the idea that they cannot take for granted that the United States will supply them with intelligence, supply them with weapons, always have their back no matter what, always be pushing for them to sort of get some sort of settlement in the exact way that's most maximally Ukrainian. What happened this past weekend is what happens when Ukraine realizes it has to be much more independent and be able to actually back itself up without just begging the United States for more.

[Lester Holt]

So let's go ahead and take a listen to Steve Bannon's reaction to this operation from the Ukrainians.

[Tom Brokaw]

The White House has to condemn this immediately and pull all support and tell Lindsey Graham, come home. Are we going to put you under arrest when you come home? You're stirring it up. Lindsey Graham's over there saying, hey, forget Trump. I got the House and the Senate. We're going to. We're going to Pass them. You're going to see something a couple of days. Remember.

[Tom Yamas]

Remember that.

[Tom Brokaw]

He's stirring it up over there. He's telling me they got backing. If they did not give us a heads up on this all, full stop, no minerals deal, walk away from all of it. They're irresponsible and they're dragging us into a kinetic Third World war. As we said, us, we're getting dragged in now. Or the deep state is driving us in there. Either of these are not good. Tulsi Gabbard's got to let us know. Did anyone in intel at all have anything to do with this? Did anybody have a heads up? Did anybody? Anybody? And if not, who the hell's running the Ukraine desk? Who's running the Russia desk? Same thing with Ratcliffe. This is why Cash and Bongino and Pam Bondi, you got to clear out the deep state. This is a ticking time bomb. And you see what they're going to get us into. Because now we're now inexorably, we're being drawn into this. If we didn't know about it, the president, to me, has got to condemn it and got to say, we're not gonna give any more support because these people cannot be trusted. You're supposed to be in Turkey today talking peace, not 3,000 miles into Russia blowing up their strategic bombers.

[Lester Holt]

So what do you make of Bannon's position here and kind of the position he occupies in the party overall? Because he does this thing where he'll be critical of certain things going on in the Trump administration. It's never Trump's fault, though, Right? He's very critical of Elon Musk, but it's not Trump's fault. He's very critical of the direction that they're going in Ukraine. But, you know, it's the deep state. It never has anything to do with actually, the administration.

[Tom Brokaw]

Yeah, I think the principal thing that. I just appreciate you noting how, in many ways, Steve Bannon is a politician and he has to, like, navigate that. So here's the prime flaw here. So Trump and Trump now claimed that his comment that he was going to end the war in Ukraine on day one was sarcastic. I think that was not true at the time. I think that really did reflect his sort of perspective that Biden had bungled this, among all other things, that Biden bungled and therefore, or you could have gotten a deal, like, once Trump was actually there. If the US Just walks away from Ukraine and not just, like, walks away in terms of, like, giving every single Munition they ask for or like saying we're gonna back some sort of NATO or like EU membership just actually walks away and leaves the table. Russia isn't going to settle. Like, I think it's very clear that Trump wants a settlement. I think in certain ways the Ukrainians and the Russians want an eventual settlement. Clearly, neither side at this point is getting their end goal.

[Lester Holt]

Right.

[Tom Brokaw]

Like it should be noted that like put we should define his end goal is Putin launched this war claiming that Ukraine was a delegitimized, illegitimate Nazi state. Denazification de ba' athification, like this really what should be under this really should be understood as Russia's Iraq war here in all the disastrous ways that that metaphor really matters here. Ukraine's going to exist. Ukraine is a nation. Now this war has forced Ukraine into a nation. So Putin is not going to get that full maximalist extent. The Ukrainians are also not going to get because Trump has been very clear in a way the Biden people were not clear. The US Is going to back Ukraine until they take back every single inch of their territory. So everyone is going to have to get some form of settlement at some point. However, the issue though is if the US Walks away and the US Makes clear they're not going to back Ukraine at least or even participate in the process, why would Putin stop from that perspective? And that's another reason why we should understand Ukraine's need to launch an attack like this. Ukraine has to launch an attack like this to make clear that they are still in this, that this is serious. And even if the Russians to are going going to tank miles of territory in eastern Ukraine, if they're going to slowly but surely march forward, even though things are sort of still kind of stalemated, Russia isn't going to get its eventual total aim. Therefore, you have to get to some form of settlement.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, well, and I think this attack underscores why you need some sort of a settlement because, I mean, it is a dangerous escalation. And you know, we do have to be wary of the fact that Russia is a nuclear armed superpower and, you know, will Putin will be sensitive to, you know, this attack, which is incredibly embarrassing and humiliating that they were able to penetrate so deeply into Russian territory. So I think it underscores the need for a settlement. I mean, to be honest with you, I'm somewhat sympathetic to the Trump administration here because I do think it is such a mess and so difficult to untangle at this point. You were talking a little bit about the Biden Administration policy. In a lot of ways, it really was the worst of all worlds because obviously they short circuited and undercut the original peace talks. So there wasn't pressure early on on for some sort of a settlement. I think that was a grave error underscoring the fact that, listen, there's no guarantees, obviously, that there would have been an ability to have a resolution at that point. But I've also become more sympathetic to the sort of more hawkish faction that says, listen, you're just letting them bleed out slowly rather than. And over time, the Biden administration kept going, okay, well, you can have these particular weapons, all right, you can have the long range, all right, you can strike inside of Russia. So it's like, well, if you were going to do that anyway, you may as well have actually given them the tools to be more successful earlier on, push for a peace and be able to get some sort of a settlement that wouldn't be a complete and total disaster for the Ukrainians. So I do think the people who say that the Biden administration policy was kind of the worst of all worlds are absolutely correct. And at this point, it is a disastrous, brutal, bloody, horrifying mess that lands in the lap of the Trump administration. And I don't think that there is an easy resolution. There's certainly not a resolution that is going to make literally any side happy at this point.

[Tom Brokaw]

And look, and because the stakes. And this is. You've really highlighted this because the stakes are nuclear. You cannot have a situation where the US Just walks away. This isn't just another sort of Eurasian conflict. This isn't Azerbaijan versus Armenia. The stakes here are nuclear. The stakes here. And I think if there's. Obviously, you're not gonna have our disagreements about the Cold War and the different ways that it went, but I think a key thing that was achieved during the Cold War War is that we limited nuclear proliferation.

[Lester Holt]

The world still exists.

[Tom Brokaw]

The world still exists.

[Lester Holt]

That you can say the world still exists.

[Tom Brokaw]

And because the stakes are nuclear, in this case, a. A Russia that just thinks it has total impunity to do whatever it wants without consequences. A world where you could see that type of escalation. I think part of the reason why, and this is where I'll give, like, a mild defense of the Biden administration, the reason why they are hemming and hawing, and we're never really finding support from either sort of like the skeptics or the hawks, was that Jake Sullivan was terrified of nuclear conflict. So the. Well, maybe this. Maybe that's. To your Point they're saying, okay, no F16s, OK, F16s, no missiles, okay, missiles was because they, I think took very, very seriously the idea that Russia could potentially nuclear escalate. Russia didn't. Russia was bluffing. The actual thresholds for what Russia would say, for what Russia claimed would lead to escalation, escalation were passed years ago. So the Biden administration slowly, slowly, slowly dripped in. And I think we're probably over cautious if we look at the pure what the best possible world that could have came here. But they sought to really manage that. But once again, they came to an uncomfortable unpopular position because they're just trying to manage a nuclear conflict. And that is the primary thing. And once again, Steve Bannon's position, I'd be more sympathetic to that if once again, this was Azerbaijan versus Azerbaijan Romania. The consequences of this war going the wrong direction are maybe Poland gets a nuke, maybe other countries become convinced like, oh wow, we're all in it on our own. We can't be guaranteed that the US or the EU or other powers will have our backs. We need to get a nuke. Maybe South Korea needs to get a nuke. I think just tamping that down is why we have an exit. And here's the key thing too, and this is what the hawks did not do. Us helping to bring this conflict to an end does not mean Ukraine gets an unlimited limited sort of amount of munitions or weapons. It doesn't. And this is what the Biden administration also did not do. They should have made much clearer because they knew this internally, that the American people did not support a US Ukraine policy that equaled they take back Crimea and every single part of eastern Ukraine. That was never the actual in the administration consensus. What the American people want is a situation where this war comes to an end and Trump participating and negotiating and driving this process, him serving as the third party force that's pressing these two sides who know in their heart of hearts they need to settle in some ways but are incentivized not to do it. Once again, more New York Times reporting that I'll shout out a breaking points stay screwed to the mainstream media. Mainstream media has its actual functions have pointed out that part of what's driving Russia's unwillingness to take the negotiations seriously, they sent junior diplomats, not serious senior level diplomats, is they're like, actually we've got a summer offensive. It's kind of moving. Let's take it as much territory as we can before things slow down in the winter. So that's really the situation that we're playing with now.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, that's exactly right. And the last we can put up on the screen here is before. Guys. So there were negotiations yesterday. They were among low level delegations as Marshall was just gesturing towards. Ukraine and Russia remain far apart on ceasefire terms at these Istanbul talks. Apparently they're nowhere really in the ballpark of any sort of agreement. There was a prisoner swap that was agreed to, but that's really all that came out of that. So, you know, you have the Ukrainians that were able to pull off this dramatic, risky, but quite damaging and effective attack within Russia. You have the Russians who've been able to claim quite a bit of territory actually just in the recent path. And neither side really looking to, really looking to bring it to a closer, you know, take the losses that would be entailed in bringing this to some sort of a settlement in the near term.

[Tom Brokaw]

NBC Nightly News legacy isn't handed down or NBC News. I'm Tom Brokaw.

[Lester Holt]

Hope to see you back.

[Tom Brokaw]

I'm Lester Holt. It's carried forward. Tom Yamatz is there for us.

[Tom Yamas]

Firefighters are still working around the clock.

[Tom Brokaw]

As the world changes, we look for what endures.

[Tom Yamas]

We are coming on the air with breaking news. Right now.

[Tom Brokaw]

We look for a constant and from one era to the next, trust is the anchor. For NBC Nightly News, I'm Tom Yamas. A new chapter begins. NBC Nightly News with Tom Yamas. Evenings on NBC.

[Krystal Ball]

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[Lester Holt]

All right, let's turn to the New York City mayoral race, which has become much more interesting, I think, than people expected. We can put C3 up on the screen. There's a bunch of contenders here, but the two that are really in contention are former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Democratic super socialist Zoran Mandani. So this looks very complicated. This is a recent Emerson poll that came out. They do ranked choice voting in New York City. That's why you have all of these different rounds. But the one that really matters is if you look all the way to the 10th round, you've got Cuomo coming in at 54. So he's still winning, but his edge has significantly declined. And nipping at his heels at this point is Zorhan Mandani at 46%. So we definitely have ourselves a race here. You know, Mamdani obviously not enjoying the vast name recognition that Cuomo has and the establishment backing, et cetera, really been an upstart. Marshall There are some indications that even he and his campaign were not expecting him to have this much traction in this race. And so we've got a couple clips of Zoron that we can play here in a minute, but just wanted to get your reaction off the top of some of the dynamics that you see unfolding here.

[Tom Brokaw]

Yeah, so several things here, I think. What so and we'll get into this. Zoran what I love about this race is it's sort of like a microcosm of all of the challenges facing the Democratic Party as we like look forward. So you have an aging sort of like unattractive establishment centrist candidate who doesn't really stand for anything. Like I genuinely do not know if you said to me, Marshall, like what is Andrew Cuomo running on beyond just like post metoo redemption? I could actually like not articulate that for you and I don't think most people can. Versus Zoran clearly believes in things and I think is being really responsive. He's really great on social media. He's also bringing the suit back. This is where I will speak for Sager. I think he looks so great in his suit and I think that hopefully he can move us past, past the very condescending era of politicians dressing down to sort of act like they're like fake and not sort of with it. So maybe there's a fashion trend we could do a breaking point spin off on those cultural things. But I think Zoran, but that's the. But here's the problem for Zoran though. He's still underperforming with like over 40 black voters. Like that's the central. So if the central challenge for centrism is its like central casting problem, the challenge for democratic socialism and so on is just the fact that like with like black and like Hispanic like working class voters, just a real amount of skepticism about the project.

[Lester Holt]

So I want to talk more about that. Let's go ahead and put C4 up on the screen just to underscore what Marshall is saying here about what the various coalitions are. Cuomo's strongest support comes from Black voters at 74%, older voters over 50 at 66% and this one kills me. Women really guys, 58% to 42%. Mamdani leads among voters under 50 with 61% holds an edge among white voters, voters 57 to 43 and college educated voters 58 to 42. So it's the exact opposite of the coalition that he would claims to speak to and that his agenda is really crafted to attempt to appeal to. Before we talk a little bit more about that because I do want to dig in on that piece. He was on MSNBC recently and I thought was asked a good series of questions about his platform and especially about the critique of like yeah, you know, you're really too far left to appeal to be able to govern effectively. There's a concern within the establishment quarters of the Democratic Party that what's gone wrong with the party is that it's gone too far left. Obviously I have my disagreements with that, but it's an important question to ask. Let's go ahead and take a listen to how Zorin responded.

[Tom Yamas]

What New Yorkers deserve is a plan that actually speaks to the crisis in their lives. And affordability is the number one crisis. So we're going to freeze the rent for more than 2 million New Yorkers who live in rent stabilized housing. We're going to make the slowest buses in the nation fast and free and we're going to deliver universal childcare to each and every New Yorker whether their child is six weeks or five years of age, because today childcare is the number two reason people are leaving our city. And it makes Sense. It costs $25,000 a year to raise a kid here, which is more money than it would cost to send that same kid to CUNY 18 years later.

[Tom Brokaw]

What do you say, though, to Democrats who look at what we saw in.

[Sagar Enjeti]

November with Vice President Harris losing and.

[Tom Yamas]

A lot of the post game analysis, if you will, was the party had moved too far to the left, that.

[Sagar Enjeti]

It was actually time to come back.

[Tom Brokaw]

To the center a little bit, to.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Connect to a lot of those working.

[Tom Yamas]

Class blue collar voters who have broken.

[Tom Brokaw]

For Trump in recent cycles. That seems to be what Governor Cuomo is saying. What do you say to people who say, well, I like the guy, but.

[Tom Yamas]

He'S not right for this moment. He's too lefty. Well, you know, I think we as politicians need to lecture less and listen more. And when we saw New York have the greatest swing towards Trump in the entire 11 and a half points, we saw that it took place in the hearts of immigrant New York. And so I went there, to Fordham Road in the Bronx, Hillside Avenue in Queens. I asked those voters, why did they vote for him? And they told me they remembered having more money in their pocket four years ago. I asked them what it would take to bring them back to the Democratic Party. They said a relentless focus on an economic agenda. And when I told them my plan to freeze the rent, make buses fast and free, deliver universal childcare, they said that they would vote for me. And I think ultimately that's what we need is a recognition that for too long our party has moved away from working class voters. It's time we actually bring them back.

[Lester Holt]

So I personally think that's a great answer because he reframes it as not just like a where are you on the left? Right. Ideological access. But hey, we need to deliver for people. And cost of living is this, you know, crushing burden, especially in a city like New York. And so here are the really super concrete ways that I'm going to try to make life a little bit easier for working class voters. What did you think of how he responded?

[Tom Brokaw]

Yeah, I know, it's really funny because if you. And this is why I'm just really down on Cuomo as a candidate. If you think of like, what the best version of like the centrist, pragmatic, technocratic pitch is, it's just like, look, forget the lofty stuff. People aren't trying to have a big ideological debate about socialism or liberalism or Whatever. They just, like, are trying to put food on the table and they care about things. So Zoran is given just like a perfect, like, hey, life's expensive. Rent control, Life's expensive. We're going to focus on, like, housing and those other issues in childcare. I just had a kid myself. And even in the Texas suburbs, it is incredibly expensive. I cannot imagine how expensive it is in New York right now. So it's just wild to me that Cuomo and his team, I think it's because they were asleep at the wheel, allowed themselves for Cuomo to take, like, the general, like, rhetorical attack of what centrist, moderate candidates and just like, bring it that way. Like, I think at their worst, sort of DSA candidates come off like they. And this is the diploma divide that's at the center of our politics. Too many DSA candidates come off like they're sort of like campus organizers or they're sort of in academia and they're having this big debate about worker power versus or I don't think that means anything to most people. Zoran was just like this, this and that. Cuomo hasn't responded to it. And I, you know, since my politics are more to the center here, like, I have, like, qualms and concerns about, like, rent control and those different issues. But it's just, like, really frustrating that like, like, if and if you actually kind of. This is kind of what we want politics to look like. We actually want politics not to just be like a. You're a socialist. Well, you're a me too monster. Like, that's, like, very destructive and unhelpful. I love how Zoran has brought policies to the table. And I wish we had a politics where Cuomo could say, hey, rent control, I get why you're doing it. Here's why it doesn't work. Here is my actual plan. The lack of that on Cuomo, stat, is a huge problem. Even the other big issue. I want to respond to the comment about, about. Didn't voters perceive Kamala Harris as being too left? And, you know, this is a lefty yourself. One of the big issues facing the American left right now is that when voters say the left broadly, they conflate like, a bunch of different things.

[Lester Holt]

Yes.

[Tom Brokaw]

So the left doesn't just mean rent control, minimum wage increases, universal healthcare, things that poll really, really popularly. It also means certain positions on crime and immigration, certain positions especially with working class voters. There are a lot of working class voters who want the minimum wage to be higher, but also are skeptical of democratic approaches to Crime, especially in a post 2021 era. There are a bunch of people, these voters who he's going to speak with, who are gonna say we support economic populism, but actually really worried about migration and the ways that it's overstrained the city and its resources. So I think the thing that Zoran is really getting at here, and this is why he's not talking about the cultural issues as much, is he's focusing on that part of the left. Another thing, and this is just so fascinating and this is the type of thing which centrists and my sort of can't lead to really reckoned with, were assessing Kamala Harris's campaign, obviously in the wake of original sin, but it was revealed that her most popular ads had to deal with building more housing and cracking down on landlords. Those messages actually broke through. So I think the problem with sort of like the left camp that Zoran is there to engage with, they're a little unfocused on the building more housing part. This is where my politics are kind of BNB rent control control is effective for people who have housing right now, but what are the people who don't have housing? It's not a full spectrum approach. Housing policy actually requires that we do a bunch of things at once. But once again, Zoran is speaking to an environment where people say they don't like the left, but Kamala Harris most popular policies are a weird mix of centrist yimbyism, but left oriented. Landlord punching.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, no, I mean my politics, politics are the center of the policy conversation and the center of the political narrative that should be pushed by the left and by Democrats more broadly focuses on economic populism where you have a competing like Trump has his narrative about immigrants are ruining the country, trans people are ruining the country, cultural elites, college educated women, they're destroying your life, ruining the country, destroying your communities, et cetera. And, and Democrats basically don't have a consistent coherent story of what has gone wrong in the country. What has gone wrong that led to your life being difficult? What has gone wrong that led to the rise of Trump? That led to the re rise of Trump? They have not really had a coherent storyline about that. And we'll get into this more in the abundance discussion. But the story that resonates with the majority, vast majority of Democrats and vast majority of independents and majority overall of the American people is the reason life has gotten difficult is because you have a bunch of greedy billionaires who have rigged the system and are effectively incompatible with democracy. And I Think that's just with the rise of Elon Musk and what we've seen in this administration, they've sort of made the case that the acceleration of oligarchy truly does represent both a Democratic threat and an economic threat to people overall. So that's why this conversation about, well, should we throw the trans people overboard or should we throw the immigrants overboard, I think sort of misses the point, because the reason those issues were made so salient and so effectively by Trump is because they fit into his narrative of what had gone wrong in the country. The reason why Democrats were unable to stand up to those narratives is because they didn't have the. Their own story and theory of the case of what had gone wrong that made any kind of sense to people. So that's sort of my view of why that conversation really misses the mark. I mean, if you think about. This is what always drives me crazy. If you think about polling the comments that Trump has made and the things that he has done, including things like, you want to talk about crime and safety and policing, whatever. He pardoned all the violent January Sixers who beat up a bunch of. Of cops. It pulls at like, 5% support. Even one of the January Sixers was like, I don't even want this pardon. I broke the law. I shouldn't be forgiven for it. So, you know, that's where I get frustrated with some of the conversation around, like, let's just pull out what the right positions are, and let's just locate ourselves on the ideological spectrum. Number one, it ignores the fact that people's minds can be changed, as they obviously, you know, have been on a variety of issues over time. It also ignores the fact that. That Trump won while holding some, like, insanely unpopular positions. Why? Because he had a compelling, wrong, evil, cruel, in my opinion, storyline. But that rang as true to people and sort of hung together as a narrative.

[Tom Brokaw]

Yeah. And I said earlier I didn't really understand the rationale for Cuomo's candidacy, but, like, in your comments, you kind of revealed it. Like, Cuomo's candidacy was really premised on this November, December, January vibe shift, where, like, oh, wow, like, Democrats overreached in so many different ways. We overreact. Overreached on me, too, in the sense that young men are incredibly skeptical of Democrats. We overreached on immigration. We overreached on LGBTQ rights. It, I think, makes sense to look at a bunch of policy issues. That one, I think the Democrats do definitely overreach in those categories. But if you really understand what's being said there, it's incredibly defensive. Right. It's basically this theory of the way we come back into power is by recognizing where we overreach and basically either explaining or not explaining why our position is different. I think that's needed in a bunch of cases, especially where those positions like lost trust. I think Biden's immigration policy really damaged the party's long term trust with these same working class black and Hispanic voters who Zorin is really speaking to. So that has to be acknowledged. But what centrist did not do, and I say this as a person who's more than decently centrist coded, is they didn't actually focus on what does the offense look like. So, okay, we need to get a more moderated or not even moderate in the sense of like we're just moving the chessboard pieces of around. But like, I love Zoran's quote, listen to voters, let's listen to what voters are actually saying on socio cultural issues and have an agenda that's responsive to them step one. But step two is also what else are they also saying that requires us to have something to say. So Cuomo was ready to basically just say, hey, like, I'm the resurgent center left, everything's gonna be normal in 2019. Again, that wasn't enough when people were facing an affordability and housing crisis.

[Lester Holt]

Well, and not only that, it's very convenient for a Cuomo who is an establishment politician who is very closely aligned with business interests and interests of the wealthy in New York City. And that comes out in his rhetoric, et cetera. It's very convenient for him to say, well, the parts of the agenda that don't threaten wealthy interests, those are the parts that we can dispatch with and that's gonna enable me to keep together my wealthy donor base and make sure that there's nothing that infringes the on the things that they want to do. And I think we saw a lot of that coming out of Trump's reelect where there was an immediate effort to basically do the things that are easy in terms from a sort of like wealthy donor perspective and not analyze any of the failings on the economic populist front and in the areas that would be more challenging and uncomfortable for some of those alliances with mainstream Democratic policies, politicians. I do want to go back to though, because I'm curious your view of the demographics that we put up earlier. There was all kinds of conversation during Bernie 2016 and again in Bernie 2020 about the nature and demographics of his coalition. And I think parts of that were always really unfair because it was very much stereotyped as like, it's just a bunch of white bros. Well, now that the white bros have shifted to the right, the Democrats would very much like to get those white bros back. But it was also never truly representative of what his coalition was. Bernie did have a largely working class coalition. His greatest weakness was with older black voters. And I think we can talk about why that is. It's now increasingly apparent that that's not a Bernie Sanders weakness. That is a left weakness in general, as evidenced by, you know, Zorin and as evidenced by any number of other, you know, sort of left progressive, DSA type candidates. But he had a. It was a diverse working class base, including Latinos in particular, and certainly among young people. And that generational divide is important as well because the stereotype was always like, oh, black people just don't like Bernie Sanders. If you looked at young black people, that was not the case. You know, he had a very diverse coalition among young people. So why do you think it is that the left consistently strikes? Struggles with older black voters in particular seem to be the greatest sort of challenge point for people who have a DSA style ideology.

[Tom Brokaw]

So yeah, so I think a. We should understand that there's a policy pitch and there's a political pitch and a lot of what when I talk to sort of like, you know, when we used to do breaking points live show, like when we actually would talk to people who were attracted to these sort of ideas, they were really attracted to like the anti Democratic Party, anti status quo party of the Bernie pitch. It wasn't. I would talk to people like, they'd say, yeah, I like universal health care. Yeah, I want Medicare for all. Yeah, I want the minimum wage increases, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They would say those things, but like what was really animating them was just a deep distrust and not just distrust, but deep dislike of center establishment politics. These are people who came of age after 9, 11, after the 2008 financial crisis, after 2017, 2016, after Covid. There is very little to no reason why people should trust. If you grew up in that environment, the center. If you're looking at older black voters who are rooted in the civil rights era, who are rooted in a different era of the American political system. That appeal of like, don't you just hate these old bums who just like screw everything up? That just is not going to resound as well. So what I think is particularly attractive with the way that Zoran's approaching This is. He's making this much less of a establishment versus anti establishment pitch, though. Like, it's obviously there and more just. I'm going to go down the line and find the positions that you actually agree with and you are actually thinking about. So this is also another broader. And there's a warning here too, but I'll offer at the end of this. But there's also a broader lesson here for the left, which is that, like, you know, my takeaway is I'm actually thinking that, like, city issues and municipalities are probably a better fit for left politics right in this immediate moment. So, like, you know, if you think about it this way, like, what is the central challenge that, like, central like to say to lefties who say they want to take over the political system? They say, like, okay, cool, then flip a red state or flip a purple state or win a congressional district the same way that we are doing right now. It's a tall order and it is. And I think it's a real serious challenge that left politics needs to really answer. And the thing is though, if we're actually looking at these actual cities, if we look at the combination of policies and political dynamics that are better suited to the local rather than the national wise dynamics, not having Sean is not having to debate LGBTQ people. He's not debating immigration policy. He's talking about specific city issues. The warning though, for the progressive left, though, is Chicago and Brandon Johnson, because the. And this is. We'll get into this during the Abundance agenda conversation. I think a problem the left has yet to reconcile is that it's one thing to run successful campaigns and put together narratives that I think are clearly like, winning the long term narrative war and actually govern. So he could say, we're going to make buses fast and free. He said that during the clip. Okay, can you actually do that? And okay, we're going to impose rent control, but if you don't actually make more housing available for more people, that's only going to help people who kind of have theirs. What are you actually going to do when these actual challenges come in? Okay, cool. You're going to do paid sick leave. That's really great. How like. And I know this is usually a centrist dunk, but it really matters in, like, city and states where the budget is actually constrained and where voters also do not want tax increases. How are you actually gonna pay for this program and make it actually work? Brandon Johnson's one of the least. He's the mayor of Chicago. He's one of the least popular politicians in America because he campaigned on these sets of issues, but he did not have the talent, the coalition, the ability to actually get it done. So that is the warning for the left here.

[Lester Holt]

I think that's fair. But I also would say that the left always has to answer for any politician on the left who doesn't deliver, but like the center never has to answer for Gavin Newsom or Kathy Hochul, who's pretty profoundly unpopular. And I would also say that the most popular Democratic governor in the country is Andy Beshear in Kentucky, who may not be dsa, but he is an economic populist. I mean, I used to live in Kentucky. I know him a little bit, and I've followed his career and his pitch very closely. And I still talk to people in Kentucky about what it is about him that's really resonating there. And it's not because he did a hard right turn on any particular issue. He stood up for a transfer, really closed churches during COVID He went all in on protecting people from the disease. But there are two things that people mentioned to me. Number one is just that he is hyper accessible. During COVID he was doing, doing weekly, certainly and maybe daily briefings where he would just go out and talk to people in this way that felt very approachable and like you actually had a direct line to him. And number two, his pitch has been on health care, education and good union jobs. And he's brought a lot of good union jobs. Some of that came from the Biden administration into the state of Kentucky. And so he really has sort of diluted, delivered on this economic populist message. So I would put him up as proof that that general direction, when executed effectively, is highly successful, both in terms of the policy and in terms of the politics. You know, if you also look at congressional districts across the country, a lot of the candidates that have overperformed, they may not be exactly Bernie Sanders, but they have really featured a challenge of corporate power in their messaging and have used that to consistently outperform the top of the ticket. So I do think that there is plenty to suggest electorally that there's a lot there. But to your point, obviously it has to be competently executed. And at the city level, especially when you're talking about any sort of executive position, it has to be competently executed. Because at the end of the day, it's like, did the trash get picked up or did it not get picked up? Did the snow get removed or did it not get removed? One thing I want, and this will Help us transition more into the abundance conversation. Is that one thing that's interesting to me about Zoran, and this actually isn't unusual on the left. Oftentimes the left does focus on issues like zoning reform and some of the things that are considered to be abundance policy. He has not only leaned into those more DSA policies like the rent freeze and the free busts and those sorts of things, he also has made an explicit focus of zoning regulations, of streamlining bureaucracy for small businesses. He's talked about some of these things that are like single staircase reform and some of the things that are laycore in the abundance movement and the zoning reform movement more broadly. Let's go ahead and take a listen to this ad that he cut about small business in particular.

[Tom Yamas]

There's a lot of things that make New York City special for me. It's the delis and bodegas.

[Krystal Ball]

Habibi.

[Tom Yamas]

Could I get an egg and cheese on a roll with jalapeno? One Zoran special coming up. Small businesses employ nearly half of all New Yorkers in the private sector. They keep the city running. But the last four years have been hard. We've seen the dollar slice go extinct, storefront after storefront close and had a mayor and Eric Adams who has ignored the struggles of small businesses. That's why as mayor, I'm gonna make it faster, easier and cheaper for small businesses to get started and stay open. First, we're going to cut fines and fees for small businesses by 50%. Regulations are important, but small businesses have to navigate more than 6,000 of them with far fewer resources than the big chains. That's why as mayor, I'll appoint a mom and pop czar with the clear goal of making it easier to run a small business. $1,000 isn't a lot to our city government, but it can be make or break for a small business trying to get off the ground.

[Krystal Ball]

Next, we're going to accelerate permits and applications.

[Tom Yamas]

The mom and pop star will coordinate with agencies to speed up turnaround times, cut red tape and let New Yorkers start businesses sooner because you shouldn't have to fill out 24 forms and go through seven agencies to start a barbershop. But most of all, we're putting our money where our mouth is by increasing funding for small business support programs. With 500%, we're going to invest $20 million in our business express service teams.

[Lester Holt]

So very abundance y messaging, I would say. You know, what do you think of the pairing of the rent control control, the free public transit and some of those Other policies alongside the zoning reform, the cutting red tape and the kind of like abundance suite of policy options.

[Tom Brokaw]

Yeah, no, I think you guys are gonna talk about this later. But as someone in the abundance camp who's probably done more speaking with the left than like anyone else in that broad coalition.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Tom Brokaw]

What I keep hearing is obviously there's like the angry or like Twitter discourse and they're all the negative reviews. But when I talk to people in the know who I would take seriously, they're like, look, abundance at its best has pointed out some real problems and we'd like to get to a yes, and from a progressive perspective that doesn't just treat us as these people to be left punched, but like a broader conversation. Because like, this is like, I'm really interested in like UK politics. I always like to think of American politics in the sense of like coalitions. Like, this is a coalition and if a coalition is going to be like 50 plus one and actually have a governing majority, it has to take everyone's different perspectives in mind too. So like, I really think that like the best version of the abundance agenda is going to be a set of policies that a politician like silver and kid likes take and leave. This is good. This is good. That isn't good. That isn't good. Okay, I'm governing. How do I actually make this happen? That's my best version of the project. Rather than just a version that equals. Okay, now we ought to support Richie Torres for governor. NBC Nightly News legacy isn't handed down or NBC News.

[Lester Holt]

I'm Tom Brokaw. We hope to see you back here.

[Tom Brokaw]

I'm Lester Holt. It's carried forward. Tom Yamats is there for us.

[Tom Yamas]

Firefighters are still working around the clock.

[Tom Brokaw]

As the world changes, we look for what endures.

[Tom Yamas]

We are coming on the air with breaking news right now.

[Tom Brokaw]

We look for a constant and from one era to the next, trust is the anchor for NBC Nightly News, I'm Tom Yamas. A new chapter begins. NBC Nightly News with Tom Yamas. Evenings on NBC.

[Krystal Ball]

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[Lester Holt]

When I saw the reaction to that ad from specifically Matt Iglesias, who's an abundance guy and his position is you should basically rank Zoron last Cuomo would be superior. Cuomo, who we know was a failed governor and who elderly people like to die in nursing homes during COVID Obviously there's the MeToo issues, doesn't really stand for much of anything other than preserving the status of status quo. He thinks that he would be superior to Zoron and there's just it seemed to expose that abundance is not really about getting to yes. And it is actually an attempt to compete with what is an ascendant narrative within the Democratic Party, a very popular narrative within the Democratic party about fighting corporate power and fighting oligarchy. So how should I think about those things?

[Tom Brokaw]

Yeah, so the key thing here is a abundance is rooted, right? So actually abundance is a bunch of different things, right?

[Lester Holt]

So like yeah, so maybe start that with how do you define abundance?

[Tom Brokaw]

Here's how I define abundance. So Ezra and Derek have written this incredibly successful policy book and yes, like it's an airport book, it's a quick read. But policy books like that, even short accessible ones, do not sell as many books as they have sold. They will have big platforms. They're really good writers. Like this is speaking to a set of people who have like real organic like interest and thoughts behind this. So that's one part of it. The Other part is there's a right wing people call it dark abundance that in many ways is sort of more of the VCs, like Marc Andreessen people in the Trump administration. Sort of a lot of the tech right falls into that sort of like right wing abundance kind of because they're like, look like Trump's going to build nuclear, Tom's going to deregulate everything and help us build again. Technology is the way to the American future, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That's part of the abundance movement as well too, though I would not overstate the use of the word abundance. And then there are sort of like this, I think, unhelpful sort of version of abundance that in many ways is this center that was finding itself in a defensive position after November December, where they said, okay, we have to moderate on LGBTQ issues, we have to moderate on immigration, et cetera, et cetera. But we actually do need to have something like forward facing to say. And they've adopted abundance as part of that project because though the project is like moderating and making the Democratic Party more centrist, abundance has been mixed into that. What I'm trying to do with my work from my small podcast perch is build out abundance as a broader sort of approach or set of policies and questions that any sort of like from the center to the left should really think about. And I think the way that I tell the story, and I'm not saying this as a dumb, because this has become a sort of cliche, but I'm actually asking, did you read the book Abundance?

[Lester Holt]

Yes.

[Tom Brokaw]

Okay, so you know this.

[Lester Holt]

I listened to it.

[Tom Brokaw]

But yes, the first chapter is this, like 2050 vision of the future where, like, technology and growth provided us all these different, like, great things. I actually really did not like that first chapter, especially from the perspective of articulating to the left why they should actually care about these ideas. Because I think a to your point, we live in an era where people are backlashing against oligarchy, race, people aren't excited about technology, or we're debating smartphones. That is a version of the book. Because this book was supposed to come out in 2024. I suspect if they were to start this project today, the first chapter would be a little different. So my pitch for what the first chapter should have looked like is rooted in me not being a New Yorker or a San Franciscan, which is where a lot of the Yimby House people come from. Me being a Texan, I live in Austin. I live next to the Hill Country. And I haven't looked at the books in a while, but the path to Power, Robert Caro's biography lbj, is no longer back there. But that was a really informative book for Sager and my politics. And here's my favorite chapter of the book. It talks about how in 1937, LBJ is a congressman. And during the New Deal there was something called the Rural Electrification Administration. And what it literally did was bring power to rural America. We had electricity in the country for more than 50 years, but the private sector was not delivering electricity, electricity to the hill country, to poor hardscapble farmers. And what the New Deal did, they used a combination of private actors and public actors to create these co ops that brought. And Robert Caro is telling. I really recommend people read this book. Brought people into the 20th century from the Stone Age effectively. People didn't have power, now they have power. That is a vision of broad left liberal that delivered for people and really mattered and got over the actual objections and things that wouldn't make that happen. So rooting abundance in this story of like, wow, like it used to be that we had like a majoritarian left liberal politics that could fundamentally change people's lives by delivering them things that are powered by technology, that are powered by different forms of like organizing. And when the private sector or the public sector can't get it done. That's really what I want abundance to be rooted in. And I think the first chapter of the book that would be pitched to the left would be rooted not in the future in a way that people aren't really bought into, but just in the like, why was it that 1930s liberalism could deliver? But if you asked basically anyone, they would say that like New York, California, et cetera, all these bastions of left liberalism can't really deliver. That's why I want abundance to be rooted in.

[Lester Holt]

I think the whole country can't deliver, though. I mean, I am perfectly willing and happy to admit I'm in favor of zoning reform, that there are ways that the Texas housing zoning policy is superior to the California zoning policy. But I feel like the differences between Texas and California are less important than the differences between America now and America during the New Deal as you're laying out. And so I was telling you before, I feel a little bit gaslit on abundance because sometimes it'll be pitched to me this way of. We're just talking about the New Deal. You like the New Deal, right, bro? And I'm like, yeah, I like the New Deal. And then other Times it's pitched like screw Zoran Mandani and we just need to effectively abundance is just a new pitch for neoliberalism where we get the regulators out of the way and these out of touch do gooder liberals so that the big business can do their thing and it can't be both of these things. So there is a part the goals of abundance who could disable, agree with. Right. Building more stuff, building more housing, making housing more affordable, actually being able to do the high speed rail, really building out. And this is where there's another I think tension within abundance, like really building out the capability to move into a green energy future. But to your point about there's this other part of abundance that also is very fossil fuel aligned and is, you know, exist in the Trump administration which does not actually want that green energy future. It certainly starts to feel like, okay, this is being used whatever the intentions of various people in the movement are, it's being used as a way to stop a shift in the Democratic Party that would otherwise organically happen and that you see happening towards a framing around corporate power and checking oligarchy. And so that's where the concern comes in in is that you've got this moment. You have this reckoning with the wreckage of neoliberalism that has been repudiated sort of across the board here and around the world. By the way, you have a moment where Bernie and AOC have never been more popular, not just with the original Bernie base, but with the broader Democratic Party. You have a really clear reckoning with oligarchy which has been made abundantly evident by the Trump administration and Elon and Doge and the tech right and having all of those oligarchs behind him at the inauguration in the way that so much of their policy is driven towards providing for the billionaire class. You also have this reckoning with AI coming where these people are trying to become the first trillionaires and eliminate like half of the jobs and into this marches effectively. What appears to me to be basically like a rebranding of neoliberalism to say no, this is new and different, but really try to preserve the status quo. And that's where I think evidence for this in terms of the way it's being used is by how eagerly it's being accepted by the Richie Torres's of the world, by the entire Senate Democratic Caucus and the establishment Democratic figures who are most comfortable with trying to preserve the status quo.

[Tom Brokaw]

Yeah, and I think that I'll offer you kind of a rubric here. So you should note that when I was sort of giving my pitch for abundance, I wasn't saying, and we need to get a message America back to growth. Growth is the key, key thing. Growth, growth, growth, growth, growth. You'll kind of hear that from sort of like the right wing tech billionaire crowd here. That is like the version of abundance, which is basically just like a substitute for neoliberalism, just a substitute for deregulate, rehashed 1990. And so that is a key thing that I really should write out for here. But let's go back to the Zoran conversation. What I love about abundance, and this is like the key thing. We're going to talk about this poll in a second, but there's, you know, there's a poll out there by Demand Progress that revealed that abundance messaging is far less popular when you're not door knocking for voters than a more like populist centric pitch. So I think that's fine. That is not a shocker. Like, if you are running for office right now, you should not be talking about bottlenecks. And like the fact that like our NEPA laws have made it so permitting doesn't. Like, that is not the pitch. The pitch is that like Elon Musk is like literally killing kids in Africa. He's cutting your grandmother off of Social Security. So a bunch of like 18 year old, you know, dudes can like play around and pretend they're like New Deal or something like that. That is what you are talking about right now. And to your point about Zoran, you're also talking about housing and affordability. Actual, not just, not just housing in the after. But actually I am meeting you as a voter and I'm recognizing the number one thing you're worried about right now is how truly precarious American life is right now. So that is what the actual electoral pitch is. But what abundance should be in response to voters not being jazzed about bottleneck reforms is a Twitter toolkit to help politicians actually think through how freaking complicated and difficult it is to navigate this country. So back when I was first getting into policy, if you were lucky, if you're talking about people talking to people about housing, we just say like, yeah, like rent control or, you know, like, let's just like kind of do that. Abundance expands the set of policies in a bigger direction. So it says, okay, Zoran. So like, I'm not going to convince Zoran in any way whatsoever that rent control isn't what like New Yorkers are demanding or what wouldn't be informal Delivery for his base. But what I could offer with the abundance toolkit is, but, hey, we really should also build more housing because there's a real gap in shortage of housing. And yes, there are 2 million New Yorkers who want rent control, but there's also, like, other New Yorkers who don't have apartments right now in the first place and need apartments to actually exist in the first place. So my real like. And the good news here, too, is.

[Lester Holt]

Which he embraces.

[Tom Brokaw]

Yeah. And so. So great. That is what yes and looks like. And once again, yes and should also be rooted in that Kamala Harris poll and ad thing we talked about earlier where it's like, voters love more housing. Talk about the new day. What did Harry Truman do after he comes into office? There was a housing shortage in America when all the GIs came back. We built more housing. This is something we have to be able to do in this country. So we're gonna have to come up with a broad mix of doing these different things. I think part of the issue, too, of abundance. Ezra and Derek are pundits. Like, that is their job. If you're a pundit, you know this. Like, you have to make your argument, dial it up to 120% and advance the argument. So they, in their argument, really focus this on the. The deregulatory story. The reason why I went back to the New Deal story in terms of my telling of abundance is more just that we should be focused at this point in the conversation, or let me put it this way, because people would have whatever conversations they want. We should root our abundance conversations when we're trying to engage between the center and the left in objectives and then work our way backwards rather than just sort of saying, hey, guys, guess what? Deregulation is the answer to all of your problems because you're not going to agree with that. What I want you to agree with me here, and I suspect you will, is we need to approach housing through a bunch of different vectors.

[Lester Holt]

Yes.

[Tom Brokaw]

Rent control is not going to solve everything. That's your concession. I'm going to concede that if we magically. Also a. We're not going to magically just relax. Zoning across the country because it's incredibly unpopular, ironically enough, even with moderate centrist voters. I live in the Texas suburbs. I promise you these. And this is also why the centrist abundance project is going to run into a weird place. I promise you, my centrist Texas voters definitely would. They're down for the moderate on social and cultural issues part. They are not down for a mass Embiid deregulatory program that fundamentally transforms the suburbs. So we're both going to have to to make some sort of concession here and build an approach together. And that starts with recognizing, wow, we need to get more housing for people and make housing more affordable. That's a bunch of different approaches.

[Lester Holt]

I agree with all of that. When you read the book, that is not actually the message of the book. And I think one of the things that has been useful to me in listening to the realignment is helping to understand like, okay, the book is not the entirety of. There are different factions here and the book is not the entirety of. But when we were talking about narratives before, the narrative of the book is that there were these liberal do gooders who put a bunch of regulations in place, well intentioned, that have out served their usefulness and need to go. And a lot of this becomes very squishy because there are difficult moral choices involved in pushing to the side any of these regulations or any of the individuals, interest groups involved in what Ezra Klein calls everything bagel liberalism. So he never wants to actually say like, and that's why we shouldn't use prevailing wage standards, right? Or that's why we shouldn't require childcare as part of building these projects, or that's why we shouldn't do environmental review, or that's why we shouldn't have these air protections to make sure that when we do build public housing that poor people aren't like suffering from asthma and other conditions that would be avoidable. That's also all kind of pushed to the side so that it feels like there are no difficult moral choices that have to be made there when there actually are. So that's number one. Number two is what I would say is like on some of the concrete examples about zoning regulation and about building out green energy. I don't disagree. What I disagree with is making that story the central story to politics. Because it's not that it's not part of the picture, but I don't think it is the central story to politics whatsoever. And just to give one example, when they did this massive study to look at, okay, when zoning reform has been implemented, what has been the impact on the housing supply? And it's not that it had no impact, but it increased housing supply by like 0.8%. So to have it as part of the agenda and to understand these issues in terms of governance and being able to better deliver. Yes, absolutely. If you're trying to supplant an oligarch, anti Oligarch agenda with a YIMBY agenda and a deregulatory agenda. Yes, those two things are actually at odds with each other. And I think they fail. I think they fail on both. The. I think abundance as like this narrow we need to deregulate project fails both on the policy level to deliver the things that we would want to deliver deliver. And on a political level in terms of winning elections at a time when the stakes are really existential. Like if you zoom out for a minute here we are. And I don't know if we agree on all of the contours of this, but I think we're witnessing the rise of a sort of like would be fascism and techno authoritarianism. You have these powerful billionaires who have vast control over our government, who are doing things like just cutting the funding of USAID so that millions of people around the world may die as a result of those cuts restricting the social safety net, who are deregulating AI so that there's just this massive rush into an AI arms race that could have completely devastating consequences for the human race, but in the more immediate term is certainly going to cause significant labor and war worker displacement. And this agenda is being pursued at a rapid and terrifying pace. And so to fight back against that with zoning reform and getting the regulations out of the way, to me it feels so wildly inadequate to the moment and what we actually need to deliver as a counter political project to what is rapidly coalescing in this country right now.

[Tom Brokaw]

Yeah, so two things. So number one, I want to focus on like the liberal do good or deregulation story because I think it's like really important. So what's been unfortunate from an abundance perspective is like Derek and Ezra, because the size of their audience has just blotted out the sun. There was another book about abundance that also came out a month before. It's called why Nothing Works by Mark Dahlman. It's a very, very good. Frankly, it's actually a much better book. It's 100 pages longer. People, if you want a really long learn about these books, you should read these books and why Nothing Works. And what Mark does an amazing job is he tells this abundant story through the lens of debates about America and the left and liberalism through the 20th century. So here's the way he tells the story. In the 1930s, you saw, he explains us that liberalism and by the way, I know people, you know, this people get so nitpicky with the terms I'm basically describing, like left of, like center left thought in America extends All the way out during the 1930s. The way he explains this is liberalism has two instincts. One is the Hamiltonian instinct. After Alexander Hamilton. It's big, it's making moves, it's trying to force change. It's aggressive. So the New Deal was a Hamiltonian project. We were going to once again electrify the Hill Country. We're gonna build the tva, we are going to build the Hoover Dam. We're gonna do all these big, big, big things and bring America into the 20th century while also, like, right, regulating capitalism, all these different aspects. So that created a lot of really great stuff. It also though, and this is why I think this needs to be more rooted in the story of abundance. It created a lot of bad things. What is Rachel Carson's Silent Spring about? What were all those 19s? What is Ralph Nader as, like, unsafe at any spring? All these sort of like left movements that came out of the 1960s looked at a lot of the benefits of what we got from that Hamiltonian New Deal era, where we also had had business and government working very, very. And labor working very, very comfortably, little too entangled together. There was a real industrial complex there. We got a lot of benefit, but we also got crazy costs. We have Robert Moses, like destroying whole neighborhoods of people in New York City. We had the pollution, we had all these different issues. So that activated a Jeffersonian instinct, once again named after Thomas Jefferson. Once again, this is me just citing Mark here. But the Jeffersonian instinct is like, nah, what about the, the people? What about the local community? Did anyone ask like a small community of black people in New York City whether they agree with Robert Moses's grand Hamiltonian vision of what the 20th century city looked like? So coming into the 60s and 70s, as we focused more on the costs of everything liberalism accomplished, we got movements that said, hey, let's focus on the benefit, on the downsides of that. And that's really important. And I would really push back on your idea that the best version of abundance says if we're just going to jettison, we're going to jettison those regulations because they are just slowing us down and they're a whole problem. No democracy, all of our politics needs to be rooted in a belief in democracy and once again, a balancing of the Hamiltonian vision and the Jeffersonian vision. So the way that he kind of explains this is what's going to work out during this era is how do we balance the recognition? And I think this is what the Green New Deal is the definition of a Hamiltonian Project the Green New Deal recognized recognizes that in a climate crisis, America has to move, it has to move fast. It has to be big in its ambitions. We're not going to get this done via a bunch of tax credits to a bunch of corporations to get this done. That's Hamiltonian. The Jeffersonian side though is, hey, a Hamiltonian project that is premised on us bulldozing the entire country, not listening to communities who may have pollution, not listening to local communities who have their own actual. It's also not to going to work. So what I'm trying to do with my work, and this is why I'm really grateful to have a platform to talk about this here, is how do we actually balance the Hamiltonian instinct with the Jeffersonian instinct? And I think if Ezra and Derek spoke from the perspective more of like balancing those dynamics and that's where we're trying to really get to how do you recognize a climate crisis? How do we recognize the fact that we really need to do get. How do we recognize the fact that we need to re show our semiconductors in this country with the fact that we have local communities, communities and democracy? So that's what I'm trying to basically get to. And the last thing in the second part of your response is, look, I think an abundance. And this is why I said that Ezra and Derek are doing the pundit thing where they dial everything up to 120% to sell their argument. Everyone does this, right? This isn't left, right or center thing. I think there's been a serious overstatement of effect of abundance agenda policies and I don't want to. And that's why my pitch for what we do moving forward, I'm doing this on my own end. Other people are thinking about this. This too. And the good news too, when I talk about this on the podcast, I get input from actual politicians and actual staffers of what they're looking for is what we're talking about this year too. That's actually the funny thing. Most people are not actually looking to do a big centrist versus progressive fight. Most people recognize what time it is and how we need to build something together. So my point is let's focus on. I would love to sit down with Zorin right here and say, look, let's just start the fact that housing is a crisis and we need more of it and it needs to be more affordable and then we work our way backwards to how we actually get there. If abundance people are not willing to do that, then a they're not going to gain political power in the first place, given your point. But B, it's not going to work.

[Lester Holt]

So unfortunately, at the very end of that segment with Marshall, I collapsed into a coughing fit which took me a while to recover from. But I just wanted to make sure to say thank you so much to Marshall. Really enjoyed seeing him, enjoyed engaging with. I thought it was really great to have his insights on what is going on in the world and abundance. All right, let's go ahead and move on to what is going on with Palantir. The Trump administration, according to the New York Times, is launching this elaborate project to hoover up all of our data to consolidate it in one database. And they are working with Palantir in order to accomplish these goals. So let's talk to Ken Klippenstein about what's going on here.

[Tom Brokaw]

NBC Nightly News legacy isn't handed down or NBC News. I'm Tom Brokaw.

[Lester Holt]

We hope to see you back here.

[Tom Brokaw]

I'm Lester Holt. It's carried forward. Tom Yamatz is there for us.

[Tom Yamas]

Firefighters are still working around the clock.

[Tom Brokaw]

As the world changes, we look for what endures.

[Tom Yamas]

We are coming on the air with breaking news.

[Tom Brokaw]

Right now we look for a constant and from one era to the next, trust is the anchor. For NBC Nightly News, I'm Tom Yoff. A new chapter begins NBC Nightly News with Tom Yamas evenings on NBC.

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[Lester Holt]

Joining us this morning is Ken Klippenstein, who is a fantastic journalist over at Substack and has been following, I guess you'd broadly call the deep state, the national security state for a long time. Great to see you, Ken.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Hey, good you see to be back.

[Lester Holt]

So I have grave concern and interest over these reports that Palantir is going to be working with the Trump administration to compile this mass database of information about American citizens. We can put this up on the screen from the New York Times. They say Trump taps Palantir to compile data on Americans. The Trump administration has expanded Palantir's work with the government, spreading the company's technology which could easily merge data on American Americans throughout agencies. So help us understand the contours of this story and what Palantir even is and what it means for ordinary people.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, so Palantir is this sort of AI fueled software tech company that is a contractor for all sorts of national security agencies across government. I believe they had a meeting with the IDF last year in relation to the war in God, Gaza. So basically because of the advancements in AI that we've seen over the last several years, it has become an integral part of basically every major military at this point for things like targeting, kind of the rote stuff that it would have taken a lot of human manpower to do. Now they're no longer limited by that. And I think the concern on the part of ordinary people, even if you're not someone that lives in Gaza or in Ukraine where it's being used or wherever else, is that something that has preserved our civil liberties for a long time, has been just the pragmatic fact that as much information as agencies collect, it was never feasible for them to be able to go through it all. AI now is making it possible to do that, to triage these huge amounts of data that are being siphoned up not just by social media analysis, but network analysis, ways that they try to map out connections between people. All of that now is able to be done in near real time without that delimiting factor of how many people you can actually have to go through it.

[Lester Holt]

So more Perfect Union. Put together a good video explaining what Palantir is, what it does, and how the federal government may be planning to use it. Let's go ahead and take a listen to a portion of that.

[Tom Brokaw]

There's a reason Palantir just replaced Ford.

[Tom Yamas]

Motors in the S&P 100 in the months after Trump was elected.

[Tom Brokaw]

The Trump administration is an ideal customer.

[Tom Yamas]

For what Palantir is selling first.

[Tom Brokaw]

There are many former Palantir employees sprinkled across the Trump administration from inside DOGE to foreign policy advisors to high level technology appointees.

[Tom Yamas]

And Palantir co founder Peter Thiel, heavily.

[Tom Brokaw]

Invested in the company, is also heavily.

[Tom Yamas]

Invested in President Trump in and Vice President Vance.

[Tom Brokaw]

He was a major campaign donor to both. Then. The stated goal of DOGE is to streamline and combine government data, which is exactly what Palantir does. The ways that the government is defrauded is that the computer systems don't talk to each other.

[Tom Yamas]

And obviously Karp is loving it.

[Tom Brokaw]

Disruption at the end of the day.

[Lester Holt]

Exposes things that aren't working.

[Tom Brokaw]

There'll be ups and downs.

[Lester Holt]

There's a revolution.

[Tom Brokaw]

Some people can get their heads cut off. Like, you know, it's like we're expecting.

[Lester Holt]

To see really unexpected things and to win.

[Tom Brokaw]

And what is winning, according to palantir? This is CTO Sham Senkar in 2021.

[Tom Yamas]

Turning to government. We continue to advance our mission of becoming the US Government's central operating system as we extend our footprint across defense, healthcare and civilian agencies. The government's operating system, they want everything to funnel through palantir.

[Lester Holt]

So the US government central operating system, we can put E4 actually up on the screen here. Jason Basler tweeted about some of the data the government already collects on everybody that would now be centralized and unified. He's talking about tax filing, student debt, Social Security, bank accounts, medical claims, immigration status. And he says no previous database system has ever centralized this much personal info across various federal agencies. So help us understand the extent of this in the ways in which this could be deployed. I think we already have some inklings of this from the war on terror and the way that dissent in various administrations has been curbed and people profiled who may be at odds with administration priorities.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, so the national security state is so pervasive in the United States that if you look at a case like ice, which you mentioned a moment ago, being a report on a large, I think it was a $30 million contract that they were awarded. People think of ICE as the deportation squad, which that's obviously part of their job. But they have another lesser known division that is kind of like the Homeland Security Department's own equivalent of the FBI. It's called Homeland Security Investigations. If you go and look through some of the stuff that's been released under FOIA about them, they're involved in monitoring protests, protesters related to the Gaza war. Stuff that you wouldn't think of as what you think of as ISIS remit, you know, being going after people that they're going to deport. That's what its other function called enforcement and removal operations does. But that's not all they do. So these guys have a very broad mission set. It's not just immigration, it's also, quote, national security threats, which can encompass a lot. They've got thousands of special agents. It's kind of the biggest law enforcement agency you've never heard of, of Homeland Security Investigations. So not only is that all true of ice, ICE is not actually a member of the intelligence community. So at the very least we hear more about it because it's less secretive than some of the other agencies. My concern is the contracts that company like Palantir is being awarded on the classified side, on the side that is the national security agencies, you know, the part of FBI, CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, we're not going to hear about any of that. And my sense from talking to people is that there is a massive deployment going on at that level as well as the lower law enforcement agencies that are not a member of that system of the intelligence community, like ice. So what we're talking about now is just the tip of the iceberg and what you're actually able to see. All this is an important thing to talk about.

[Lester Holt]

I see what you did there.

[Sagar Enjeti]

All this is an important thing to talk about because when Trump talks about cutting these agencies, and in some cases he is trying to cut, he proposed a 5% cut to FBI, for instance, and cutting certain things in the Department of Defense, the military. He's cutting legacy systems. So we're talking Lockheed Martin. It's going to affect the old school companies. But what's happening at the same time is more money is being thrown at these newer entrants who are focused on AI and technology. So it's sort of misleading to say he wants to cut these deep state agencies. It's more like he wants to move the money from these legacy platforms, which I think there's a good argument for, but towards these AI fueled ones that raise all these civil Liberties concerns that we're talking about now.

[Lester Holt]

Right. And you wrote an article called Homeland Security's Pre Crime Push, where you're talking about some of these elements. I mean, one of the things that I've been really thinking through in this era where, you know, the Trump administration is trying to effectuate this policy of mass deportation, there's a conception that you can sort of limit those tactics just to the immigrant or undocumented immigrant population. That's not possible. I mean, we already see this in ways that American citizens are getting swept up by ice. You see this in the way that American citizens who may be married to an immigrant are having their liberties infringed upon. But more broadly, in order to figure out who is citizen and who is noncitizen, you got to take a look at and surveil every. It necessitates a vast massive police state. Again, the priorities of which are quite evident in the Republican Trump budget, which massively expands. It also expands the Pentagon budget, massively expands detention facilities. Those things don't just stay aimed at the non citizen population. It necessarily has to take a look at everyone in order to figure out out who are the goodies in their view and who are the baddies.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, a critical point here is that what AI allows you to do is map out networks, connections between people. That's very explicitly what they're trying to do. And that's going to pull people into the dragnet far beyond the only individuals you're talking about. So when you send ICE out to conduct things like what's called pattern of life analysis, see where someone walks to and goes back from, before they deport someone, they try to get a sense of their pattern of life. Where do they go about their day, where can we try to intercept them? And as you're mapping that out, you're going to sweep up all sorts of other things. So in the case of Mahmoud Khalil, they are going to be surveilling the demonstrations of which he's participating in. It's impossible to separate those two things. And that's what we have seen again and again, there are FOIA records to show this, that ICE is looking at the demonstrations more generally and not just people they suspect of immigration, immigration violations. So, yeah, that has to be front and center to everything we think about because again, now they can process this stuff at scale in a way they never could before.

[Lester Holt]

And so that is really the sort of, I guess, tipping point that we're at right now is just the technological development has advanced to the point that they are able to accomplish this grand scheme of having a mass database of all of information and tracking us in these significant. You know, there's been a lot of conversation about Elon and Doge. There's actually a little clip of him in the More Perfect Union piece. And in some ways, Doge is this total and complete failure didn't save any money, made the government less efficient. But in other ways, I have a lot of questions about what was going on there and what sort of data was being collected, what sort of data was being consolidated. And, you know, Elon, obviously very close to Thiel and to Alex Carbon over at Palantir. What do you make of how the Doge project sort of is connected to this move towards massive data collection?

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, I informed that as well. I mean, Musk has his own company, X AI, which the most common part of that that we think of is Grok on Twitter. But the idea behind that is that all of these companies are trying to take the information that they already have had. And, you know, there's a lot of speculation that that's why Elon Musk bought X in the first place, was to be able to access that data and then have some sort of input to.

[Tom Brokaw]

To.

[Sagar Enjeti]

To use to train AI on. And so there is just this blitz around, just to give you just one random example. Since the budget came out, I was looking through it. The Department of Homeland Security has an AI core, just like the Peace Corps or any other, you know, subgroup that an agency might have, that has an entire team, team of people going on to these different agencies, figuring out, just like we saw with doge, but happening at the agency level, which we might not hear about. How do we take these breakthroughs, these advancements that are happening, and apply that to case management, to information processing? And like you said before, sharing across agencies, even though ICE is not in the intelligence community, they have a formal mechanism by which they can share information, information with them. So something that ICE might sweep up, maybe it'll get passed along to FBI, maybe it'll get passed along to military police or whatever it may be. So there really needs to be a debate about this brave new era we're entering in, because protecting civil liberties is going to look completely different than it.

[Tom Brokaw]

Did.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Prior to machine learning and some of these large language models.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, I think that is all. Well said. I wanted to talk to you also, Ken, about another area issue. We got some extraordinary, I guess, comments from former State Department spokesperson Matt Miller, who became, you know, quite infamous from being up at the podium and defending things that should be indefensible in the context of our support of Israel, as Israel is committing what I and many scholars see as a genocide in Gaza. Now he comes out and says, yeah, obviously Israel is committing war crimes. You know, that's, that's completely apparent. I just couldn't say it at the time because I was representing the government. Let's take a listen to what he has to say now.

[Tom Brokaw]

Do you think what's going on in Gaza now is a genocide?

[Tom Yamas]

I don't, I don't think it's a genocide, but I think the, I think it is without a doubt true that Israel has committed war crimes.

[Tom Brokaw]

You wouldn't have said that at the podium.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah, look, because when you're at the podium, you're not expressing your personal opinion. You're expressing the conclusions of the United States government. The United States government has had not concluded they've committed war crimes. Still have not concluded, included that. But your personal view is they have. Well, so.

[Tom Brokaw]

And they were.

[Tom Yamas]

While you were there. But here's here. Yes, but here, let me, let me qualify that. There are two ways to think about the commission of war crimes. One is if the state has pursued a policy to deliberately committing war crimes or is acting reckless in a way that aids and abets war crimes. And that, I think, is an open question. I think what is hard is almost certainly not an open question, is that there have been individual incidents that have been, that have been war crimes where members of the Israeli military have committed war crimes. So ultimately, in almost every major conflict, including conflicts prosecuted by democracies, you will see individual members of the military, of militaries commit war crimes. And the way you judge a democracy is whether they hold those people accountable. But Israel hasn't. That's my point is we have not yet seen them hold sufficient numbers of the military accountable. And I think it's an open question whether they're going to. I'm really struck that you think now that Israel did commit war crimes. And yet at the time, and I get why. But at the time you, you were at the podium and, and you couldn't say that. I mean, personally, that must be very difficult. So the State Department itself had concluded. Not in these, they didn't phrase it in these terms, but I think I did at the, the podium a few times, had concluded that it was likely that Israel had, had committed war crimes. But I, I do think it's almost certain.

[Lester Holt]

Your thoughts on that, Ken?

[Sagar Enjeti]

I mean, on the one hand, it's of course outrageous that he's willing to work for an administration that he clearly didn't agree with. But on the other hand, I'll tell you, and I talked to a lot of people for, from State, including diplomats. What he's speak, what he's saying is pretty much in line with what a lot of these guys would say privately when I talk to them. I mean, it's the agency for diplomacy. It shouldn't surprise us that they see these things and have these attitudes. But what does surprise me is how it shows you how out of step President Biden was with his own administration that so many people, including this spokes, this paid flack, are coming out and saying this stuff. Like Biden had really strongly held views about Israel that were not consistent with much of the rest of his administration.

[Lester Holt]

I mean, I think most people would feel like even if you are a paid spokesperson, that doesn't just give you license to lie. And I mean, that is the moral position that he's effectively articulating. So there's that. It's also astonishing to me the continued levels of spin at this point in time. I mean, you've got fricking Piers Morgan out, being like, what can I say? Y' all were right. It's a genocide. I mean, the number of Israeli officials, all you have to listen to is their own statements. He's trying to parse. Well, there might have been individual war crimes, but I don't know if it was government policy. It's like, really? Did you not see them announce a policy of mass starvation and blockade of the entire Gaza Strip? Like, have you not watched as we've had month after month after month of total annihilation and people being massacred as they go and try to get food aid? Have you not listened to what Bibi Netanyahu is saying about how we're just gonna use this aid as a pretext to basically engage in ethnic cleansing? It's wild to me at this point that you could still engage in that level of self delusion to pretend that maybe this was just rogue actors within the IDF and, oh, they have been punished appropriately, but they were just doing their own thing rather than a very clear, consistent, concerted government policy at a time when, like I said, even figures like Piers Morgan have figured out that this is the case.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, not just Pierce, but various officials from powerful European governments, like France, for instance. I mean, this is change.

[Lester Holt]

I don't even Germany.

[Sagar Enjeti]

These are very powerful, wealthy European states. Safe these things. Something is happening over the last several weeks. I looked at that and I Couldn't figure out what was driving it. But there's absolutely a shift that we haven't seen at any point since October 7th.

[Lester Holt]

So just for people's recollection, let's go ahead and take a listen to some of the ways, some of the things that he was saying when he was at the podium.

[Tom Yamas]

I think it is without a doubt true that Israel has committed war crimes. You wouldn't have said that at the podium.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah.

[Tom Yamas]

Look at bureaus that look at facts, apply them to international law and make assessments. Assessments. Those assessments are ongoing and we have not yet at this time concluded that Israel has violated international humanitarian law. But we have ongoing assessments across a number of different fronts.

[Tom Brokaw]

So all these organizations are just wrong.

[Sagar Enjeti]

They just see the law different.

[Tom Yamas]

I'm telling you that we have ongoing assessments and we have not yet reached that conclusion, failed to implement all the things that, that we recommend in that letter. Now, that said, we are not at the end of the 30 day period and we are, we are in cover. It's not the end, it's not the end of the semester. You don't give out, you don't hand out grades in the middle.

[Lester Holt]

In the middle gives you the right.

[Tom Yamas]

To lecture other countries on their moral. So if you have a policy question for me, I'm happy to take it. If you want to give a speech, places in Washington where you can give a speech. Yeah, but people are sick of the in here. I mean, it is a genocide.

[Tom Brokaw]

You are abetting.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Blowing up an entire.

[Tom Brokaw]

Village in southern Lebanon. What do you make of that?

[Tom Yamas]

So I've seen the footage. I cannot speak to what their intent was or what they were trying to accomplish. Sometimes everyone likes to make this seem like a black and white issue that is completely simple where there's somebody that's blocking humanitarian assistance when it actually, it can be much more complex. Targeted attacks on civilians could not be justified. But Israel does have the right to go after terrorists. I mean, that is just a fact under international humanitarian law that every country has the right to defend itself.

[Lester Holt]

So, Ken, I'd like you to talk a little bit about the moral calculation that goes on here because I think in some instances people could be sympathetic to the idea that, like, look, you're a spokesperson for this other politician. It's impractical to think your views are going to line up 100% of the time. You aren't speaking for yourself. You're speaking on behalf of this agency, you're speaking, speaking on behalf of the president, whatever. So there are going to be times when you represent something that is not truly your own personal view, it seems very different when you're talking about something like war crimes and crimes against humanity. And I do think the willingness of someone like a Matt Miller to stand up there and say things he knows is not true, to remain in that job. Even as it's not just Israel committing war crimes, it's US funding providing diplomatic cover for lying on their behalf, shipping weapons in order for to them them to perpetrate those war crimes. That is, to me, a morally unconscionable decision to make. So talk a little bit about that moral landscape and the rationale that does go through the minds of people like Matthew Miller who end up adopting this pathetic line of defense. Oh, I was just following orders.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Sagar Enjeti]

The capacity for rationalization has to be strong if you're, if you're going to be a spokesperson for an organization like that. He clearly has that. I was amazed at how breezily he was able to put it off. I mean, if I did an interview like that, I'd be kind of embarrassed to kind of like, here's what I'm doing to try to, you know, make up for what I said before.

[Lester Holt]

Right. He has war crimes. Yeah. But, you know, it speaks to the.

[Sagar Enjeti]

It speaks to the culture because he must be surrounded by people that also are making these, you know, more, you know, very morally compromising decisions. And they're all so used to it that it doesn't even merit thinking. Looking a little embarrassed or trying to explain what you're doing to make up for your position before. That's the most disturbing feature of it, is how when they're breezy about it, that means that they're used to it and they're surrounded by other people that are used to it.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, that's such a great point, Ken. Tell people where they can follow you and support your work.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I'm on substack. You can find [e-mail].

[Lester Holt]

All right, Ken, great to see. Good to see you, my friend.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Good to see you again.

[Lester Holt]

All right, guys, that does it for me here today. Ryan and Emily will be in tomorrow. Reminder, reminder, reminder. We are doing a one month free trial of Breaking Points. If you go to breakingpoints.com and you put in that promo code BP free. You too can be a premium subscriber. Participate in our live AMAs. Get the full Friday show. Get every show full and uncut early in your inbox. Thank you so much to all of you guys who are out there who have supported the show. And thank you made this work possible and thanks for watching today. I'll see you soon.

[Tom Yamas]

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