← Deadline: White House
Deadline: White House
"Donald Trump thinks gas prices are 'peanuts'"
00:43:01
You can’t make this up, that was in the middle of a press gaggle this week touting his golden ballroom.
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- [00:01]
A
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- [02:15]
B
You could not make that up. Calling the price of gas quote peanuts while he's standing in front of the construction site for his new Gold Ballroom. That was Donald Trump mid I don't know what you want to call it, vibing at a press gaggle this week, touting his golden ballroom behind him and calling it peanuts for the family or man or woman whose net worth has increased by more than $4 billion in two years on Trump's part. For everybody else, Donald Trump's economy is by and large crushing the American family. And that pain is showing up nearly everywhere. 83% of Americans say the economy is fair or poor. Only 16% of Americans say it's good or excellent. Despite Donald Trump's unfounded claims, things won't be like this much longer. Voters don't believe him. They don't share his optimism. 76% of voters say that economic conditions are getting worse, not better. Those numbers mark a four year low in consumer confidence. And this anxiety and frustration goes far beyond the oil prices and the high gas prices, what Donald Trump calls peanuts. Wall Street Journal puts it like this quote, inflation is back, and it is coming from Memorial Day gatherings and the summer activities beyond. Gas prices are up and cookout grocery lists are getting squeezed. Ground beef was up 14.5% in April from a year earlier, according to Labor Department data. Frankfurters rose 10.7% and tomatoes, a backyard burger staple, were 39.7% higher. For some, it's making their previous summer plans unaffordable altogether. One person telling the Wall Street Journal this, quote, nobody's like, hey, we're having a barbecue this weekend. Can you imagine? You're buying all that food and beer for people. Donald Trump continuing to profit off the presidency. Well, the American family can't afford a Memorial Day barbecue. This is where we begin the hour. The author of the Message of the Market Substack, Ron and Son is back with us. Also joining us, co host of the Weeknight, former RNC chair Michael Steele is here. Michael Steele, I start with you because I feel like this story should have been the thing, maybe not the slush fund for violent insurrectionists and the war with Iran that made Republicans jump off the Trump train. Why didn't it?
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A
You know, I think because at the end of the day, they had sort of encased themselves in the rationale of Donald Trump relative to the war. I think that a lot of Republicans know deep down, and it's, you know, it's clearly they're going to get a lot of it when they get home for the holiday. But deep down they know that this is not a staple for Americans to have gas prices this high. Going into the Labor Day weekend, we saw, and they saw how Americans, and actually the Republicans took advantage of how Americans freaked out at the price of eggs in the last year of Joe Biden's administration. And so now we're not just talking about eggs, Baby boy We're talking about, you know, beef, which is up 17, 18%. We're talking about tomatoes, as you noted. We're talking about the staples that go to a good family barbecue, let alone what it's doing to the price of extra fun like beer and other adult bever. The whole mixture for a lot of Republicans now is coming home. How they respond to it is going to be interesting when they come back. Because when they come back, Nicole, you're going to have to deal with paying for all the crap that Donald Trump has put on the table for them, starting with the ballroom, then going to this, I mean, the slushiest of slush funds, folks, if you ever want to just think about what you would say if your boss came to you and said, you know what, I'm going to take this amount out of your paycheck every week and I'm going to put it into a special account for me and my family. And when we want to go on vacation and when we want to buy crypto and we just want to sit back and have a really, really expensive cigar, you're going to pay for it out of your paycheck every two weeks. That's essentially what Donald Trump has done. And that's what Republicans are going to have to vote on when they come back after this break. So going into it, they're getting hit with high prices. Hopefully, they get a earful from voters. And when they come back, they're going to have to decide whether or not they're going to continue to spend upwards of trillions of dollars that the American people cannot afford.
- [06:54]
B
I mean, I love that analogy of taking money out of your paycheck to pay me and my sons and my companies. But there's another group getting paid and it's, you know, the bank robbers who tied up people at the Atmosphere, you know, and beat him. Except the people at the ATM were cops. I mean, it's so insane, right, that it's even news that Republicans were like, I don't think so. You can't have a slush fund to pay yourself, your sons and the criminals who beat up cops and made us run for our lives. Josh Hawley, I'm looking at you. Why do you think, do you think the politics and Trump's profound weakness made it possible? Or do you think the slush fund is just this thing more than the Comey prosecution or the Tish James prosecution? I mean, do you just think it's this thing that is, is so appalling and stupid?
- [07:46]
A
You know, that's a Good question, Nicole. I think it's one of those things that when you're looking at the scale of stuff that the American people have absorbed and where they have made excuses for Donald Trump, and if we're all honest with ourselves out there, you know, you've made a lot of excuses for Donald Trump. You know, you dipped your toe in the MAGA world a little bit and you played, you know, you know, kind of like, you know, catch me if you can with it all. But after a while, it all starts to weigh you down because it's not just the one thing, it's the cumulation. And I think when you get to this point, it is the cumulation of things that really come home to hit. And what really, again, we come back to it. I think the tipping point that began this slide to where we are for Trump is the Epstein files. That at the end of the day, regardless of how you slice it, dice it, economy, all the. There's something about that, there's something about that that sits with the American people in a spot in their stomach that they just can't deal with. And so you compound it more and more with all these other things, and you watch the poll numbers go down, and you can peg it to that moment at the beginning of his second term when this became the conversation. Not the economy, oddly enough, not a lot of the other things, not the ballroom, not a whole bunch of other stuff. But this kind of sat with people in a way that weighed them down. And I think they started thinking about their own daughters, they started thinking about their moms, they started thinking about the women in their lives and how the system was treating, how these very rich men treated them. And that stuck in their craw in a way that nothing else seems to have. And now the pylon begins. It's sitting on top of all of that. And folks have just got to the point where they've had enough. And the Democrats, I think, helped frame it with their affordability narrative as a sort of a side conversation. And those two things coming together, the way they have had brought us to where we are right now. I think.
- [09:52]
B
Yeah, I mean, Ron, it's a good jumping off point because I do think it is sort of the triple double cross, right? So the base got double crossed on the Epstein files, and the Epstein class was perceived to have been protected while the victims, many of whom went to Capitol Hill on the September in the Monday after Labor Day and said, hey, I voted for Trump in part because I thought that we would finally get justice. I mean, The Epstein betrayal didn't have a partisan divide. It had this class divide. The war, no war in the Middle east was what catapulted Donald Trump to be the Republican nominee in 2015 and 16. It's how he knocked Marco Rubio and Chris Christie and all the other traditional Republicans out of the primary. So his entire appeal to Republican primary voters for 10 years was that promise of no more wars in the Middle east and then this economic destruction that he seems to be opting into while he is lining his pockets with taxpayer dollars, literally building a $1.7 billion fund for his political cronies and people who carried out violence and building a Gold Ballroom with taxpayer dollars. I mean, it just feels like a triple whammy of stupid chaos and, and things that voters are really mad about. Yeah.
- [11:15]
A
And I think Nicole and I would, it's far be it for me to disagree with the man of steel, but I would say that the underlying all this is these is this unease around the economy. It ran through the end of the Biden administration and you could argue that the Biden economy was considerably stronger than the economy we see today, albeit with inflation coming down in the post pandemic world. And it was still too high. Ironically, the price of eggs is the one thing that's actually fallen here in the last many months because bird FL flu is over and so we have more chickens, more eggs, lower prices. But when you look at today's consumer sentiment numbers from the University of Michigan, they are at the lowest level on record going back to 1952. Inflation expectations among consumers are going up, looking out one year, three year and five years. And as a consequence, you know, this is the bedrock issue on which all this other stuff is really just, you know, one, two, three more nails in the coffin, if you will, of, of the President's support within the Republican Party. And so I think you split the politics and the economics to a certain extent. But really underlying all of this is this unease among the middle class, among lower income people who have seen their ACA subsidies taken away. Over 4 million people have fallen off the healthcare rolls. And I think this is really potent stuff and I don't think it goes away anytime soon even if the war were to end tomorrow. The tail on the supply disruptions that we see in the energy markets, in helium that's used for computer chips or fertilizer that's now used to plant much smaller crops this year among farm in the United States and around the world. It will be with us for quite some time to come.
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B
Ron Talk a little bit about the price of gas, both as, I mean, I think we have some of our most concrete data for how this is impacting families. This is in the New York Times. Since the war with Iran broke out, the average American household has spent an extra $190.47 on gasoline. For many households, that is the equivalent of a month's electricity bill or a week's worth of groceries for a couple. The gasoline calculation is part of an analysis conducted by researchers at Brown University. Anyone spending $190 does not have a teenage boy. But the impact of the war on the price of gas and then the impact of the price of gas on how people feel about the economy. Say a little more about that.
- [13:41]
A
Well, it's a direct hit to your pocketbook, right? I mean, it's extremely tangible, as is the price of groceries. I mean, when you look at these fuel costs going up and also, we shouldn't forget about the tariff. They're still in place. They're driving up the cost of tin and aluminum, which means canned foods and other groceries are priced higher than they would otherwise be. So for consumers, they're generally being hit in the places where they feel it the most. And again, Nicole, when we talk about the K shaped economy, those who are making enough money to weather this storm don't feel it, but the middle and the lower income folks are feeling it in spades. And so that $190 and quite frankly, overall, they're paying a lot more for a lot of different things. That's a, probably even a smaller, a smaller estimate of what individuals and families are paying out of pocket in increased costs. And so this is something they see every day. It's not abstract in any way, shape or form. It's, they don't, you know, necessarily see the price of a computer go up or down, but they see the price of their grocery bills. They see that every time they go through, you know, the gasoline lines. Well, which we don't have lines like we did in the 1970s, but when they're in line at the pump, when, when they pay that bill with either a credit card and by the way, credit card delinquencies, auto loan delinquencies and student loan delinquencies are either at record highs or recession levels, depending on which one you're looking at. So again, it's that group, the most sensitive group, that's getting hit the hardest. Hence all this anxiety that we see among a broad swath of the American population.
- [15:10]
B
Michael Steele, There's, I think Cause and effect is now fair to assume. There's some new insights from Morris on the disintegration of the Trump coalition. I'll read it to you. Defection from Trump's 2024 coalition remains substantial. One in six of Trump's own 2024 voters has left the fold. Asked to pick the biggest reasons their view. The Republican party changed since 24 defectors name the economy and cost of living first, immigration second, and Trump's personal conduct third. 52% name the economy for a reason to defect from Trump that he clearly, I mean, I feel like if we've been covering him for 10 years, people like you and me know that he lies about everything. But for that to be the reason that half of his defectors claim that his promises about the economy were a lie. I mean, that he comes out and does tariffs, that he's enriching himself, that he's creating slush funds for his allies and his kids and striking deals to never be held accountable for future tax crimes should be all the evidence anyone needs. And I, and I guess as opposed to sort of pounding the table for nine years, it is starting to sink in that he doesn't care about his voters.
- [16:23]
A
Yeah, well, you know, but it's, it's interesting in an ironic way, and very much to Ron's point, it is the thread that cuts through, that is woven through everything. And it is a thread that, that tied up Joe Biden and lost him support and the conviction of the American people to, you know, believe and stay with him and ride it out, if you will. The same is true here, to Ron's point, when you feel that, and yeah, you may not see it in a computer purchase. Oh, well, I can't really get the computer because I can't get these other things. So it all kind of connects together for folks and they, and it comes to the kitchen table. That's where America makes all its decisions. That's where America feels the pain. That's when the American celebrates good times. That's where a lot of how we define ourselves as a country gets played out. And when people sit down and they say, you know, babe, we just spent $190 to fill up the car twice this week, we don't, we can't. We are either not going to be able to get what we needed for the party this weekend, so that means we're not going to have the party, or we have to look to next week and say we may have to cut back on the gas on the number of trips we have to do. But the kids need to get to sp. You see how that goes, Right. And all of a sudden, and you know what's interesting about what Michael's saying, if I may? It's when you have to make that decision. Right. It's been a long time in pure economic terms that Americans sitting around the kitchen table had to make a choice, filling their tank up completely or filling their grocery bags up completely. And when it comes down to that type of choice, that's a really painful choice that Americans have not become accustomed to making. And when you put on top of this, and my Buffalo accent just came out when I said and. But when that happens and the stock market's hitting new all time highs and the top 10% are doing considerably better, and Elon Musk's about to become a trillionaire when SpaceX goes public next next month. These are real pain points that people feel.
- [18:39]
B
Yeah. And real WTF moments like what are these billionaires doing while I'm having to choose between, you know, $10 of gas and dinner at the drive thru? Because frankly, most people are working so much, are not all around the table every night they're racing to work and drop off and pickup and extra side hustles and they see all these.
- [18:58]
A
Nicole, can I real quick just put a tag on both your points? So go. Let's relate it back to what you said when you talked about before, the fact that people who are have student loans, people who have credit card debt and people who have card notes, et cetera, what are they doing? They decide, I'm not going to pay that this month. I'll put it off till next month. And that's how you get on the downslide to getting behind because the next month that payment is now doubled, but the price of gas has two. And then what do you do? Well, hopefully your credit rating gets dinged, too.
- [19:35]
B
Yelling at your Republican lawmaker to make it stop. Ron and Sana Michael Steele, maybe we'll make this a thing. Thank you both so much for this conversation. When we come back, Congressman Jamie Raskin has a plan to stop what might be Donald Trump's single most in your face act of corruption. His nearly $1.8 billion slush fund that we've been covering all afternoon that puts taxpayer dollars into the pockets of his criminal allies. Congressman Raskin will be here. Also ahead, Stephen Colbert signs off from THE Late show after CBS pulled the plug on a late night host who consistently got under Donald Trump's skin despite his high, high ratings. How comedy and culture have emerged as some of the most powerful drivers of the anti Trump sentiment in America. We'll have that conversation later this hour. And then Whitehouse continues after a quick break. Don't go anywhere.
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- [21:43]
A
So we are seeing $4.09 a gallon at this station. It's ridiculous.
- [21:49]
B
It's too high. It's too high.
- [21:52]
A
I mean it's, you got a balance between eating or you know, you need gas, you know, you gotta go to work. Just seems like every day used to be like every year, but every day there's some type of additional costs creeping, you know, creeping up. And now they're talking about this weaponization fund. Why would we give them some kind of fund to help them along when other Americans are starving and other Americans are going through the cost of living the way they are?
- [22:28]
B
Just a small snippet of what we've been talking about, how the American people are experiencing it as frustration and anger as they struggle while Donald Trump takes their tax dollars and tries to give them to people who helped him stop an election for being certified or overthrow the government. As our next guest, Congressman Jamie Raskin, put it in a brand new op ed in the New York Times quote, these days it takes a spectacular burst of corruption to get the attention of our scandal weary nation. But President Trump and his administration have managed once again to transfix Americans by establishing a $1.776 billion anti weaponization fund in the Department of Justice that will undoubtedly be used to line the pockets of Mr. Trump's partisans and foot soldiers with your tax dol dollars. It is quite simply a scam. Only Congress has the power to appropriate federal dollars. But Mr. Trump and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche seemed to think they can conjure this giant slush fund into being without congressional approval. This week, I introduced legislation to put a stop to this. It would bar the federal government from paying out monetary settlements to sitting presidents. It would also prohibit settlement payments for claims involving investigations or prosecutions related to January 6 or foreign interference. In the 2016 presidential election, members of Congress must act to reassert the exclusive power that the Constitution vests in the legislative branch, or else we will have gone a step further toward making Mr. Trump a king. I want to bring in Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland. He is the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee. Congressman, thank you for being here.
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A
You bet. It's a delight to be with you, Nicole.
- [24:16]
B
Do you have any Republicans who have privately said, I'm in, wink, wink?
- [24:23]
A
Well, amazingly, there are over a dozen Republicans who have spoken out about this. And I'm starting to think that the bottom is falling out for Donald Trump in terms of his ability to micromanage and control everybody in the Republican caucus. I don't think this can stand. I think the public clamor against it and rapidly growing opposition within Congress means that we're going to be able to stop it. And it violates essential constitutional principles. Almost everything about this slush fund violates the Constitution and the rule of law.
- [25:03]
B
I mean, I feel like it's in that PBS how a bill becomes a law thing, that they have the little dollars and they're over the white capital sign. This is sort of the most basic thing you learn about the separation of powers, how we get here, where it takes you writing a letter, a handful of Republicans speaking out, first a little timidly, but then finding some safety in numbers to say, this is the line, this is the line, and now we're drawing it.
- [25:29]
A
Well, it's brazen. I mean, Trump is like a mischievous, misbehaving child, and if you let him get away with something, he presses out the next step. So the Republicans would not join us in stopping Trump's unilateral, unauthorized, undeclared, illegal, unconstitutional war in Iran. Congress has the exclusive power to declare war, not the President. And so he's been warping, redirecting, impounding federal funds that we've allocated for particular purposes to other purposes. And so he figures, oh yeah, well, it's a big piggy bank for me. The whole federal budget is becoming a collection of slush funds. Under Donald Trump. You've got the Board of Peace. Slush funding took $1.5 billion away from the State Department for DIS and he put it into the Board of Peace. We don't even know, is that a private entity, a public entity, profit, not for profit. We don't know where it is, what it's doing. The Venezuelan oil funds are going to an account in Qatar that he controls. And the only thing that all these different entities have in common is that they are lawless. And ultimately, like the Board of Peace, Donald Trump is the chairman for life. So if you look at the, you look at the slush fund in the Department of Justice, they want to create this so called anti weaponization fund. First of all, it implies that the President can just go ahead and appropriate money. You can't take $1.776 billion out of the federal treasury without Congress appropriating, as you're saying, every second grader knows that Congress appropriates the money. Nor can you say we're going to take hundreds or thousands of cases and controversies away from the courts and the President is going to decide them. So right there he's trampling the Article 1 Powers of Congress to legislate and appropriate, and then the Article 3 powers of the courts to decide cases and controversies. But even beyond that, nothing like this has ever happened in American history. Because the domestic emoluments clause says in Article 2 that the President is limited to his official salary in office and may not take any other funds from the federal government. And now suddenly he's engaged in this self dealing settlement operation where he's going to get nearly $1.8 billion to give away to anybody he wants, including his political foot soldiers and proud of boys and Oath Keepers and people in his family and himself. So it's hard to imagine anything more totally unconstitutional than what we're seeing unfold right here. And by the way, this is like an issue spotter in a law exam because every day I start seeing new things in there that I hadn't even seen before. If he's going to be transferring this money to himself, and even if you're willing to accept the utter fiction that it's a settlement for A valid claim, which obviously it isn't. But say you indulge that proposition. He owes taxes on that. Anybody who's taken tax law understands that a settlement is income to you, unless it's for a physical injury, which clearly it's not in his case. And the people he's giving money to inflicted physical injuries on the officers. They didn't receive physical injuries. But in any event, for him, he's got to pay taxes on that. So what's a quarter of $1.776 billion is hundreds of millions of dollars? CEOs. But then, then he presents himself a codicil, an amendment that nobody else has ever seen before, which simply just says that he can never be prosecuted by the IRS or the Department of Justice or any other federal agency or department for tax fraud or anything else or any other matter. So it's incredible that he holds himself completely above the law. But the good news, Nicole, is there seems to be a profound political and cultural backlash happening to this. And when Todd Blanch went to talk to the Republicans, they just gave him hell.
- [29:40]
B
Yeah. I mean, I also thought back to your line of testimony in the January 6th select committee. I mean, a lot of people, Andrew Weissman and Paul Rykoff, have suggested that what people who would carry out violence in the future might hear is that if you do so in the name of Donald Trump's political ambitions, you will get pardoned and paid. What are your thoughts about that analysis?
- [30:06]
A
It's unconstitutional. In addition to everything else, Nicole, if you go to the 14th Amendment, Section 4, and I understand there are whole parts of the Constitution that are coming alive for the first time in the century because of Donald Trump. Okay. But go to Section 4 of the 14th Amendment, and it says that neither the United States nor any state shall assume or pay a debt or obligation for the purpose of paying for insurrection or rebellion against the United States. So it's unconstitutional, and it's just constitutionally blasphemous and outrageous that we would be taking money from every citizen in the United States, paying taxes to give to people who attacked our police officers and tried to overthrow an American presidential election. It just makes no sense. It's utterly incoherent.
- [30:58]
B
I feel like it would be a great public service, especially to the Republicans, to sort of do that, that constitutional issue overlay on this issue. Maybe we'll bother you to get that done as a. As a public service. Like, if you're a Republican and you're looking for all the ways to be on the side of the Constitution here are. I think you just named 11. So here are like 11 things you can hang your hat on so that you know if you need an excuse. Congressman Jamie Ruskin, thank you for joining us on the holiday Friday. We are grateful.
- [31:28]
A
My pleasure.
- [31:29]
B
Thank you. When we come back, Stephen Colbert's final episode, the MAGA now MAGA friendly network that pulled the plug on Colbert and the President who proves over and over and over again that he cannot handle being the butt of any jokes.
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B
Stephen Colbert hosted his final episode last night in the most Stephen Colbert way possible with truth and courage and humility and humanity. And of course, of course, next level comedy brilliance. Completely in sync with his massive audience. And as expected, a late night juvenile thin skin post from Donald J. Trump proving that he too couldn't look away and was watching this finale. Last year, CBS and Paramount pulled the franchise. It was a staple of late night television for 33 years. For the last year, a frequent target of the Trump administration. Final episode was packed final week really with star power and supporter Colbert, including from Paul McCartney, who Colbert introduced as his perfect last guest 62 years after the Beatles made their American debut on the very same stage.
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All the rock and roll, the blues and the whole thing, even going back to the Fred Astaire, it was all from America. So that's what we thought America was just the land of the free, the greatest democracy. Yes, that was what it was. Yep, yep. That was. Yeah, yeah. Still is, hopefully. Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. Yeah,
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B
hopefully. Emil Colbert never mentioned Donald Trump by name. He took this final jab at the network that canceled him.
- [35:41]
A
Meanwhile, the owner of the music of A Charlie Brown Christmas and other Peanuts television specials has filed four lawsuits yesterday against those illegally using the famous song Linus and Lucy. Anyone illegally using that music is going to have to pay through the nose. Louis. Oh, no. I hope this doesn't cost CBS any money.
- [36:04]
B
I want to bring in New York Times media correspondent Michael Grimbaum. Also joining us, executive editor of deadline.com, dominic Patton. Dominic, I want to start with you. I mean, we've talked, I feel like for 16 months about this thing that's really hard to measure and that is brand damage. In terms of brand damage and devastation, could CBS and Paramount have been more dilapidated from a brand image than this messy breakup with Stephen Colbert?
- [36:34]
A
Oh, I don't think so, Nicole. I think in a lot of ways there were two fatal flaws here for them. One, they pink slipped him, which was a fatal flaw. Because regardless of any story about money or whatever, and I will mention this because I think it's important, it wasn't Actually the Ellison regime that fired him. It was the previous Sherry Redstone one as they were about to be sold to the Ellison. So sweetening the pot. But I think part of that was they, you know, look, look, Trump complained about him and he was gone days later. So you can't say there's not a cause and effect because this is the thing. You can't tell people what they're seeing isn't real. The other thing though too is I think in this is there was a lack of grace about the way it was handled. There should have been a big network send off, a big thanks, you did great, we love you, et cetera, et cetera. Happy trails. But this was all done like can you please leave? Like you're the annoying cousin who we can't get rid of of. And so to that they opened themselves up to this and I think very much so. You know what you saw here, there wasn't a lot of mention about cbs. There wasn't a lot of mention about Donald Trump, though petulantly he talked about thank goodness he's finally gone about Gobert and said rest in peace to all the other late night hosts. Which is just kind of dumb and creepy. But like that's Trump's brand. Right. So what do you do? But I think that insofar as that when, you know, Stephen Colbert comes out the better for this. Right, Right. You know, he won an Emmy because of this. Now next year, not this year, look, clearly Jimmy Kimmel's going to win the Emmy because he got pulled off the air due to the Trump administration hijinks. But I think in that so far as the dynamic is in their favor and let's be honest, I don't know. Besides, you know, I mean, honestly, how many corporate executives can you name out of the top, out of the top of your head? But we all know Jack Paul, we all know Johnny Carson, we all know Dick Cavity. And I was like these, we all know Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas. These live on. And that's where this is going to go. Even more so in a multi platform world where Stephen Colbert can show up on Broadway, on YouTube, on Netflix and a million other places besides writing a Lord of the Rings script.
- [38:32]
B
Michael Grimwald, let me show you some of the moments from this week. Let me show you Bruce Springsteen.
- [38:40]
A
Thank you, Stephen. I'm here in support tonight for Stephen because you're the first guy in America who lost his show because we got a president who can't take a joke. And, and because, because Larry and David Ellison feel they need to kiss his to get what they want. So these are. Anyway, Stephen, He's a small minded people. They got no idea what the freedoms of this beautiful country are supposed to be be about. This is for you,
- [39:21]
B
Michael. He went on to perform the Streets of Minneapolis, a beautiful and haunting ballad for the Americans who lost their lives there and the protesters who came out in protection of one another. Your boss, your publisher echoed Bruce Springsteen's message in a commencement address this week. I won't use the word echo, had a similar message. I don't know which one came first. Let me read that to you. This is from A.G. sulzberger. He said, quote, under this new ownership, CBS has already altered programming, personnel and policies in ways that align more closely with the administration's preferences. Rights are just ink on paper unless they're exercised. Standing up for press freedom in court and losing is still a much healthier outcome than standing down and letting the administration simply rewrite the rules. Our country has some of the strongest legal protections in the world for free expression and due process. They mean nothing if the press is too timid to defend them. Interestingly, a lot of the MAGA sort of movers and shakers that were most vocal ahead of the 24 election were most vocal about one issue and it was free speech. They are now under hard tortoise shells as Donald Trump and his administration trample that.
- [40:40]
A
Well, that's right. We've seen that pattern throughout this term where Trump has sued news outlets, including my own the New York Times filing defamation suits. His FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, we all know, has threatened other television personalities, including Jimmy Kimmel, who was suspended off the air for three days by ABC and Disney after a threat was lobbed his way from car. It's interesting, Dominic, you were talking about Grace. You know, Stephen Colbert over the last 10 months or so when we knew his show was going to be canceled, never really spoke that ill a word about his bosses, at least in such unvarnished language as Bruce Springsteen used in that clip. He was graceful about it. Of course he poked fun at cbs. Of course he poked fun at Paramount. That's something that David Letterman used to
- [41:29]
B
do on the Late show back when
- [41:30]
A
he was the host. But as you mentioned, he didn't mention Trump on the air last night. And there could have been a couple different reasons for that. But I think that allowing his guests to voice this, this anger, this fury that I think a lot of people
- [41:45]
B
on the left, a lot of people
- [41:46]
A
fans of Colbert feel that free speech and comedy and satire of which there is an incredible tradition in this country and in our politics, has been suppressed in this new era, and not just because of active litigation and threats from the administrations, but also out of self censorship. We've seen networks like ABC and CBS go out of their way to settle cases brought by the President that many legal experts said were frivolous and would never have made it past review in the courts. But in this race to placate him, it feels like some of these mass media operations have almost given him more permission to be even more aggressive and even more assertive. And I think that what my publisher, A.G. sulzberger, was talking about last night was that the freedoms of the press that we have in this country are only valuable if news outlets exercise them and fight for them, and that it's better to challenge them and go to court than simply to lay down. And I think that's a lesson that everybody in journalism and entertainment, frankly, in this country would be worthwhile to remember.
- [42:55]
B
Neil DeGrasse Tyson entered the chat. What he had to say was mind blowingly brilliant. I'll show it to all of you on the other side of a break. Don't go anywhere.
- [43:10]
A
Two contradictory realities cannot coexist without rupturing the space time continuum. Like what? Well, for instance, if a show is number one on late night and it also gets canceled. They canceled Gutfeld. No, no, no. Oh, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. So your cancellation has created a rift in the comedy variety talk continuum. And if it grows, all of late night television could be destroyed. This is unbelievable. Yeah, it kind of is unbelievable.
- [43:48]
B
Rebecca, Michael and Dominic. Dominic, I hear you have numbers.
- [43:51]
A
Oh, yes. Look, I'm a loudmouth. Sorry to admit it, but I will. I'm a loudmouth, but I also believe in math and I know a certain loudmouth in the White House who also believes in math or ratings and he's not going to like this, but Stephen Colbert's finale last night got 6.74 million viewers in early numbers. That is the best regular scheduled Colbert show ever. Better even than the 6.55 million he got back in September 2015 when he debuted. Now, there is a slight caveat to that. There was a post super bowl show a few years ago that got about 20 million, but that was a weekend show. So it lives in the alternative universe, as the great scientists would say say. So I'm just saying the people have spoken.
- [44:32]
B
Michael Grimbaum, you get the last word.
- [44:35]
A
Well, it goes to show that late night TV, there have been a lot of elegies for it over the years. But comedy and satire, there's still a pretty major audience for it. A lot of people tuned in last night to see how Colbert would give his send off after so many years on the air.
- [44:50]
B
Michael Grimbog,
- [44:54]
A
no, no, no. 6.7. It's impressive. We'll see what Trump tweets about it,
- [44:58]
B
we'll see what Trump tweets about it, and we'll see what he does next. I mean, it's obviously a good omen for him as he goes, you know, as you all said, to do whatever he wants to do next. Michael Grimbung, Dominic Patton, thank you so much for being here today. When we come back, what former President Barack Obama did so well that today's Democrats might want to keep in mind. Poll after poll shows that Americans agree on at least two things. The country is way too divided and people are doubtful that the country will actually come together anytime soon. What if we had, I don't know, someone who laid out a mostly positive and constructive vision for the future in the White House? My guest on the latest episode of the Best People podcast used to work for a guy who knew exactly how to do that. Pod Save the World's Ben Rhodes told me this about what he learned from President Obama's communication style.
- [45:54]
A
The point I always make about Obama's communication that I learned from him, it wasn't the other way around, is that he didn't show up and say this is a racist country and we need to own up to our racist past or list any of the other flaws with America. He would say, this country is so great that we've been able to change and now we need to change again. And here's how we can do that. In other words, he invited people to be a part of remaking America for the better, not in a way that whitewashed our sins at all. I mean, he would name structural racism, he would name structural inequity, he would name corruption. But again, he invited people into. I mean, this is what the word progressive should mean. Progress us.
- [46:44]
B
The entire Conversation with Ben will be available tonight for premium subscribers. You just scan the QR code on your screen right now to get early access to that episode and special bonus content. The episode will be available broadly on Monday, but also this Monday. You can tune in for a Memorial Day TV special of my conversation with documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. You can watch that Monday night at 8pm Eastern. One more break for us. We'll be right back. Thank you so much for letting us into your homes for another week of shows. We are so grateful. I hope you have a great weekend.
- [47:18]
A
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