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From New York, this is Democracy Now.
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The outbreak is a reminder of the
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persistent threat to human health of disease
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outbreaks and the importance of cooperation and solidarity to continually strengthen global health security.
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The World Health Organization's declared a global health emergency due to the rapid spread of Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. We'll speak to Dr. Craig Spencer, who survived Ebola in 2014. Then a government sponsored prayer rally is held on the National Mall in the latest move by the Trump administration to push Christian nationalism. Hard to believe that it would take
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two centuries for the Lord to raise
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up a great man, to bring that
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ballroom finally to stand where it needs to stand.
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It's extraordinary.
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We only had to wait 200 years.
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We'll speak to Bishop William Barber and journalist Sarah Posner, author of How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind. Then President Trump is reportedly set to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS in exchange for the creation of a taxpayer funded $1.7 billion fund to compensate January 6 insurrectionists and other Trump allies investigated by the Biden administration. We'll speak to Democratic Congressmember Jamie Raskin. He's just introduced legislation to target corruption and Trump's efforts to profit from the presidency. All that coming up. Welcome to Democracy now, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. President Trump's escalated his threats against Iran Sunday, posting on Truth Social quote, for Iran, the clock is ticking and they better get moving fast or there won't be anything left of them, unquote. Ceasefire negotiations remain deadlocked over Iran's demands for war reparations, an end to the US Blockade and a halt of fighting in Lebanon. On Sunday, a drone strike sparked a fire at an electrical generator on the Perimeter of the UAE's Baraka Nuclear Power plant, the first and only nuclear power station on the Arabian Peninsula. No group claimed responsibility, but the UAE has faced repeated Iranian drone and missile attacks since the war began in February. Meanwhile, the New York Times reports Israel built two covert military outposts in Iraq's western desert in advance of its war against Iran, with preparations for at least one site dating back to late 2024. According to the Wall Street Journal, Baghdad had notified Washington in late March over suspected covert military activity, calling it a violation of Iraqi sovereignty. Israel killed at least six people in southern Lebanon, including three paramedics, Friday, just hours after the U.S. state Department announced Israel and Lebanon had agreed to extend their ceasefire by 45 days following two days of negotiations in Washington Israel then continued strikes into the weekend, killing at least five more people while injuring over a dozen in a series of air attacks on southern and eastern Lebanon Sunday. More than 670 people have been killed by Israeli strikes in Lebanon since the ceasefire took effect in mid April and the number killed since early March is rapidly approaching 3,000. More than 1 million people, 1 in 5 Lebanese have been forced to flee their homes. Israel's assassinated Izzaldine Al Haddad, the head of Hamas's military wing, in a strike on a residential building in Gaza City on Friday. Alhad was killed alongside his wife and their 19 year old daughter. Hamas condemned what it called Israel's quote, treacherous and cowardly assassination, unquote. On Sunday, Israel attacks killed at least eight Palestinians across the Gaza Strip. Three victims were community kitchen workers. According to Al Jazeera, Israeli attacks have killed at least 871 Palestinians in Gaza since the so called ceasefire took effect last year. This is Walla Baroud, whose brother was killed in an Israeli strike.
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Every citizen in the Gaza Strip is at risk of being directly hit by the Israeli occupation at any moment. The occupation makes no distinction between charitable workers, journalists, security personnel, civil defense workers, security forces, emergency responders or doctors. The Israeli occupation has targeted every segment of the Palestinian people. The Israeli war continues. It has not stopped to this day and the bloodshed continues and the number of martyrs increase daily.
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Israel's cabinets approved plans to build a military compound at the former site of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees in occupied East Jerusalem. Israel bulldozed UNRWA's headquarters in January after ceasing the site last year in an act condemned by the United nations and governments around the world. Meanwhile, Israeli authorities have forced dozens of Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem's Albustan district to make way for a biblical theme park called the King's Garden. The Guardian reports some Palestinians were forced to demolish their own family homes where multiple generations previously lived. Israeli forces have begun intercepting ships with a Gaza bound humanitarian aid flotilla off the coast of Cyprus. The Global Samud flotilla says Israeli military vessels intercepted the fleet in international waters, actions it condemned as illegal acts of piracy. Organizers of the flotilla said Israeli forces had intercepted 17 boats and that contact had been lost. With nearly two dozen vessels in the eastern Mediterranean, the flotilla have been attempting to breach Israel's maritime blockade of Gaza to deliver humanitarian aid to Palestinians. This is an activist on board one of the aid ships. We are being intercepted in broad daylight. The occupation forces have no shame whatsoever. They're doing it in front of the whole world because they know that everything they did in the past has been met with full impunity. This means that this is the moment to mobilize as much as we can to go into the streets and show that the people of the world are against their criminal acts. This is how far they're willing to go to continue their genocide of the Palestinian people. More than 50 ships with the global sum of flotilla set sail from the Turkish port city of Marmaris last week, Israeli media reported. Israel's navy will transfer the arrested activists to the Israeli port of Ashdod. The World Health Organization has declared a global health emergency due to the rapid spread of Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. Sunday's announcement came a day after the Africa Union's public health agency said it confirmed Ebola infections in the DRC's northeastern province of Ituri, where 65 deaths and hundreds of illnesses have been reported. Cases have since been confirmed in Uganda's capital, Kampala, where residents fear a repeat of deadly outbreaks in 2022 and last year. I'd like the government to one quickly spread awareness about Ebola and how it is spread, to break down disinformation even for the layest of people to understand, but also start to institute measures to avoid the spread of Ebola in Kampala and Uganda as a whole so that there is a feeling of safeness, of security against this disease of Ebola. Louisiana's Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, two term incumbent, lost his primary after President Trump backed his challenger, Congressmember Julia Letlow. Cassidy is the first GOP senator in nearly a decade to lose renomination. President Trump had vowed revenge against Senator Cassidy after he voted to impeach Trump following the January 6th insurrection. In his concession speech Saturday, Senator Cassidy made an apparent reference to Trump saying, quote, our country is not about one
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individual and when you participate in democracy,
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sometimes it doesn't turn out the way you want it to. But you don't pout, you don't whine, you don't claim the election was stolen. You don't find a reason why.
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President Trump endorsed Congressmember Julia Letlow, who finished first in Saturday's primary with 45% of the vote. Louisiana State Treasurer John Fleming came in second with 28%. Both of them advanced to a runoff in June. President Trump took to Truth Social to celebrate Senator Cassidy's defeat and went after Kentucky's Republican Congressman Thomas Massie, who co authored the bill compelling the Justice Department to release the Epstein files Trump wrote, quote, tom Massie of Kentucky, the worst and most unreliable Republican congressmember in the history of our country is an even bigger insult to our nation than Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who suffered an unprecedented loss tonight by not even being allowed to run in the Republican primary. This is the first time such a thing has ever happened to a sitting US Senator. President Trump gloated New financial disclosure forms released by the U.S. office of Government Ethics show President Trump made between 220 million and $750 million in trades in the first three months of this year, including purchases and sales of securities and companies such as Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia, Apple and Goldman Sachs. According to News of the United States, Trump bought between half a million and a million dollars worth of Nvidia stock a week before the Commerce Department officially approved the sale of some Nvidia chips to China. The Trump Organization claims the investments are managed exclusively by third party financial institutions, that neither Trump, his family nor the Trump Organization plays any role in investment decisions. In Washington, D.C. thousands of people gathered on the National Mall Sunday for a taxpayer funded Christian Evangelical service backed by President Trump. The eight hour lineup feature featured song, prayer and speeches by government officials, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, who shared the stage with religious leaders Franklin Graham, Cardinal Timothy Dolan and others. President Trump appeared in a prerecorded video that was apparently recorded weeks ago at a separate White House event titled America Reads the Bible. Others appearing by video included Vice President J.D. vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The Freedom From Religion foundation blasted the event as an unprecedented and shocking mix of church and state, adding, quote, our Constitution is godless by design. The government has no authority to organize religious revivals, much less use them to promote a Christian nationalist agenda, they said. The Supreme Court on Friday turned down an effort by Virginia Democrats to implement a new congressional map, which would have allowed Democrats to gain up to four additional seats in the House. The decision, with no dissents, leaves in place a ruling by the Virginia Supreme Court striking down the map. The push to redraw congressional maps began last year when President Trump pressured Republican led states to come up with new district maps ahead of the midterms. In Alabama, thousands of people joined a rally at the state Capitol in Montgomery on Saturday demanding an end to racist gerrymandering by Republican state legislatures in southern states targeting black voters. The National Day of Action came in response Supreme Court's April ruling, which gutted Voting Rights act protections for majority black districts. Saturday's protests began in Selma with a march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named after the former Confederate officer and Ku Klux Klan leader, which was the site of the historic 1965 Voting Rights March that became known as Bloody Sunday. This is Laquita Smith, an organizer who traveled from New Orleans to join Saturday's march. Selma has a special place in my heart. I'm a Southern girl, and I believe that suppression of voting rights is what's happening across the south and the United States. It requires all hands on deck. We'll be joined by Bishop William Barber later in the broadcast. And five unions representing more than 3,500 workers for the Long Island Railroad have staged their first strike in more than 30 years, bringing all train service to a halt on North America's largest commuter railroad. The strike follows three years of failed contract negotiations. Union leaders say wages haven't kept up with the cost of living and that workers haven't received raises since 2022. More than a quarter of a million daily riders rely on the service to commute between New York City and Long Island. And those are some of the headlines. This is democracy now, democracynow.org, the war and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. The World Health Organization declared a global health emergency Saturday due to the rapid spread of Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. The announcement came a day after the African Union's public health agency said it confirmed Ebola infections in the DRC's northeastern province of Ituri, where 87 deaths and hundreds of cases of illness have been reported. Reported cases have also been confirmed in Kampala, Uganda's capital. At least four healthcare workers are among the dead. In a statement, the WHO said the outbreak is potentially much larger than what is currently being detected and reported. This is WHO Director of Health Emergency Alert and Response Operations, Abdurrahman Mahmoud.
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Well, we know very well that the country has experience, but the region where
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it is happening is highly volatile with
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the humanitarian situation going on and the population moving around from South Sudan to Uganda and other parts. So our response is to stand with the regional government, with the regional government and the country neighbor in terms of solidarity to show again that they can control this outbreak.
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Ebola causes severe hemorrhagic fever and is often fatal. There's no approved vaccine for the species of Ebola responsible for the current outbreak. This all comes as the World Health Organization is coordinating the international response to the outbreak of the Andes strain of the hantavirus, which began on a Dutch cruise ship. The MV Hyundais has docked in Rotterdam, where the ship's crew will self isolate. There are three confirmed deaths and at least 11 confirmed cases where dozens more are being monitored. As of Sunday morning, there were no known cases of hantavirus in the United States. For more, we go to Providence, Rhode island, where we're joined by public health professor and emergency medicine physician Dr. Craig Spencer, also himself an Ebola survivor. In 2014, Dr. Spencer tested positive after returning to the US from Guinea, where he was helping Ebola patients with Doctors Without Borders. He was treated at Bellevue Hospital here in New York City for 19 days and made a full recovery. Dr. Spencer's recent piece for STAT is headlined the Hantavirus is a Wake Up Call. Will the Trump administration Answer it? Thanks so much for joining us from Brown University. Dr. Spencer, if you can start off by talking about Ebola and the significance of the announcement by the World Health Organization,
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for sure. Well, I've been saying that we learned too much too quickly to be anything but remarkably concerned. As you noted in the intro, this was first declared on Friday and already by Saturday, the World Health Organization had declared this a public health emergency of international concern. Never has something been done so quickly. And that's because the number of cases that were reported when this was first declared would make it already the fourth largest Ebola outbreak in history. This has likely been circulating for much longer than is being reported, maybe one, two, three months, Months. And I wouldn't be surprised if the actual case numbers are dramatically higher than what we've seen so far. I think in the coming days and weeks, we're going to learn a lot more what cases actually look like, where they're at. But as has been pointed out, this is an incredibly difficult region to work in. I've worked in eastern Congo a bunch of times. I've responded to Ebola. This is going to be a really difficult outbreak to manage and respond to even under ideal circumstances. And eastern Congo, particularly given the violence and conflict, is anything but ideal.
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Can you describe what happened to you and your particular concern about public health professionals dealing with this and what you think needs to be done?
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Ebola is a disease of compassion in that the folks that are most likely to be infected are people that take care, provide close care for people who are sick, for patients who have diarrhea and for vomiting. Think about family members. Think about mothers taking care of their children as well as healthcare workers taking care of patients. If you have the right protections, gloves and masks and everything that you need to stay safe, the likelihood of transmission is actually quite low. But most folks taking care of family members as well as Most healthcare professionals in this part of Congo don't have access to the same things we may have access to here, including gloves, good personal protective equipment, and sometimes even running water. That makes the risk really, really high, particularly for health care professionals in a place where there's already not enough of those health care workers and where over the last year we've seen dramatic cuts in the supplies and support going to many of these clinics and health facilities in eastern Congo.
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I wanted to turn to Nicholas Enrich, a former civil servant who worked at usaid, the Agency for International Development, through four administrations, serving as Director of Policy Programs and Planning in the Bureau of Global Health until January of last year. On March 2, 2025, he was placed on administrative leave for exposing the Trump administration's illegitimate and dangerous dismantling of the agency. He's written a book called into the Whistleblower's Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded usaid. This is Nicholas Enrich speaking to Democracy Now.
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In April, there was an outbreak of Ebola happening in Uganda at the time that USAID was being dismantled. And while I knew we couldn't start a robust outbreak response that we usually have because of everything that was being dismantled, there were a few key activities that I really felt that we needed to do. And they would not even let us screen passengers at airports that were traveling on international flight flights onwards to the United States to make sure that they had Ebola, that they did not have symptoms of Ebola. So that was a real risk to US national security. And it was just sort of laughed off and ignored by the political appointees and doge.
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So, Dr. Craig Spencer, if you can talk about this, do you think these cuts have exacerbated this crisis? And about the significance of it being in cities and conflict areas is
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absolutely. Look, Nicholas is fully correct. If you recall, it was just over a year ago that Elon Musk gleefully declared that they were throwing USAID into the wood chipper. And you may recall that Elon Musk also sheepishly said at his first Cabinet meeting that he mistakenly canceled Ebola prevention, but turned it back on. For many folks, the story ended there. But what actually happened was there was an Ebola outbreak and Doge and Elon Musk. Musk cut all the support that we normally would have been giving to respond to that Ebola outbreak. The result was that exactly usaid, who in the past would have been supporting things like airport screening in Uganda, was not providing that logistical or financial support. USAID and other partners would have been providing support to make sure Testing was adequate to make sure a vaccine rollout could have taken place, but we didn't have USAID on the ground. Similarly, CDC has long had relationships in this part of the continent, in Congo and in Uganda, and a lot of those relationships have broken down and withered over the past year because we just haven't been paying. Similarly, the US has pulled out of the World Health Organization over the last year, which means that in normal circumstances our CDC folks are not able to even talk to World Health Organization people. Something that is absolutely unbelievable and an incredible mistake for something that we should be able to do and be prepared for at all points. And the result is what we've seen over the past couple of weeks with Hantavirus. We've seen with a dramatic increase in number of measles cases in the US in Nahu, Ebola in Dr. Congo and across the border in Kampala. This is not all just a coincidence. This is a consequence of us cutting back our support not only here at home, but also over.
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If you could talk about your piece and stat, the hantavirus is a wake up call. Will the Trump administration answer it?
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Yeah. So a year ago I wrote a piece for the Atlantic saying that we were going to regret this. We were going to regret the cuts to cdc, we were going to regret the abdication of leadership on the global stage. Pulling out of the WHO and dismantling usaid. And I think that right now we're seeing the end result of all of that and we're starting to see the worst case scenario. You know, in normal times we would have had people on the ground, organizations on the ground that the US helps support. There are a lot of NGOs that have worked in eastern Congo for a long time that do things like provide infection prevention and control training, that make sure clinics, clinics have personal protective equipment. We're seeing what happens when those things unfortunately aren't in place. Similarly, we saw over the past couple of weeks with the hantavirus response, the US Was not at the forefront. It was not helping lead response, but found itself pretty flat footed. I was saying that normally we would be two steps ahead, but we found ourselves two weeks behind. Similar here with the Ebola outbreak. Outbreak. The CDC reported yesterday on a press call that it learned about the outbreak the same time the rest of the world did. Which is horrible given the fact that we used to have very close collaborative and trusted relationships in the Dr. Congo and in Uganda. But again, over the past year, a lot of that work, a lot of that trust and a lot of that collaboration has broken down.
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Dr. Craig Spencer, I want to thank you for being with us. U.S. public Health professor and emergency medicine physician at Brown University. Ebola survivor in self in 2014, Dr. Spencer tested positive after returning from guinea, where he was helping Ebola patients with Doctors Without Borders. He was treated at Bellevue Hospital for 19 days and made a full recovery. Well link to your piece the hantavirus is a wake up call. Will the Trump administration answer it? Coming up, a government sponsored prayer rally is held on the National Mall. And the latest move by the Trump administration to push Christian nationalism. We'll speak to Bishop William Barber and journalist Sarah Posner. I think of you by Amadou and Mariam performing in our Democracy now studio. This is DemocracyNow. Democracynow.org I'm Amy Goodman in Washington, D.C. thousands of people gathered on the National Mall Sunday for a taxpayer funded Christian evangelical service backed by President Trump. From the eight hour lineup featured song, prayer and speeches, including video messages By Vice President J.D. vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Trump reading the Bible a video of him. This is House Speaker Mike Johnson addressing the gathering.
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Almighty God, we ask that you hear these solemn petitions just as we in
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the beginning dedicated this land to your most holy name.
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Today here, lord, in this 250th year
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of American independence, we hereby rededicate the United States of America as one nation under God. Other speakers at the prayer service include a number of religious leaders and the conservative radio host Eric Metaxas.
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It's hard to believe that it would take two centuries for the Lord to
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raise up a great man, to bring
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that ballroom finally to stand where it needs to stand.
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It's extraordinary.
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We only had to wait 200 years.
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The freedom from Religion foundation blasted the government sponsored prayer rally as an unprecedented and shocking mix of church and state, adding, quote, our Constitution is godless by design. The government has no authority to organize religious revivals, much less use them to promote a Christian nationalist agenda, unquote, quote. We're joined now by two guests, Sarah Posner, author of How White Christian Nationalists Power the Trump Presidency and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind. She's host of the podcast Reign of Error. And we're joined by Bishop William Barber, president and senior lecturer of Repairers of the Breach, founding director of the Yale center for Public Theology and Public Policy. He took part in a counter event on Sunday called Redirect250. Sarah Posner, let's begin with you. Talk about the significance of this gathering.
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Well, this is another example, another Prominent example of the administration's Christian nationalist agenda. His Christian nationalist followers contend falsely that America was founded as a Christian nation, that God intended America to be founded as a Christian nation, and that the Christian nation has. Has fallen away from that divinely intended founding, and that it's their job, both spiritually and politically, to restore the Christian nation. What does that mean to them? The political, social, legal progress of the 20th and 21st century are the things that they think have caused America to decline and fall into sin. So this is really a battle for the soul of America. Are we going to be a pluralist, secular nation governed by secular laws that protect equal rights for all, or are we going to be a Christian nationalist country where the religion of Mike Johnson and Paula White is imposed on the rest of us?
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I heard one of the people on the Mall yesterday saying people understand the separation of church and state the wrong way. Yes, yes, we don't want the government intervening in the church, he said, but we do want the church intervening in the state. I'm wondering if you can talk about the significance of taxpayer money being used to fund this Christian revival.
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Well, for a long time in our country, this would have been considered a significant breach of church state separation to have the taxpayer fund a specifically religiously oriented event that is intended for one particular audience and also intended to project the government's favoring of one particular religious orientation. Over the past several decades, the Supreme Court, which has also, I should point out, been shaped by Donald Trump, has eroded that church state separation. And even apart from what might be legal or not legal under the current Supreme Court jurisprudence, Trump has run roughshod on almost every norm and value that we have, including spending taxpayer dollars for his own projects, including his own project of Christian nationalism in this case and
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yesterday during this nine hour prayer event on the National Mall. And is it significant that the Trump administration, they all were beamed in, whether it was President Trump reading from a Bible a few weeks ago or Vance or Rubio or Hegseth.
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Well, I think that obviously Trump couldn't even be bothered to produce a new video for this event. They just replayed the same video that they had produced for a previous Christian national event called America Reads the Bible. And he could barely read the Bible in the video, I should point out. I think viewers should go take a look at it and see how haplessly he read the Bible verse and discussed it. But the fact that he went golfing instead couldn't be bothered to show up at the event. Nor could some of the top administration Officials shows that they, they don't care enough to be immersed in with the crowd, but they care enough to have the crowd provide the support for them. And I think, you know, if you're going to host an event like that, showing up in person is a truly significant thing for a politician. But to project that, that it doesn't matter enough to you, yet you expect this worship from the crowd is very telling.
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I wanted to bring Bishop Barber into this conversation. Can you talk about what you participated in yesterday, Redirect250 as a direct counselor to the religious nationalist festival, the differences between a government imposed prayer event or supported, taxpayer supported and grassroots movement.
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Well, thank you. First of all, Amy, let me say a little bit about this whole event because yesterday, of course, many people were in Montgomery, Alabama, retracing the steps of Dr. King. We deeply supported it. I was actually at Yale, graduating students in public policy and public theology that takes on this very kind of heresy that we saw in Washington D.C. but prophets and preachers are supposed to be the conscience of the nation. We have plenty of scriptures that Donald Trump and them would never read that say that. What we're supposed to do is challenge the nation to care for the least of these, the poor, the hungry, the sick, those who are pushed aside, the least of these and the immigrants. Nothing was Christian about what we saw yesterday. And we have to challenge, even repeating that it's Christian nationalism. It's not Christian nationalism. This is idolatry. This is heresy. This is a form of religious nationalism. This is Trump worship. This is trying to make someone a messiah figure. And it's very dangerous because the scriptures say, the scripture that Trump actually read yesterday is condemning of him and what they're doing because it says that people are supposed to turn from their wicked ways. And wickedness in the scripture is when you hurt the poor, when you hurt women, when you mistreat the least of them. These. So I'm deeply offended as a person of faith for something like this to be done because what we are supposed to do is the King once said the church is supposed to be the thermometer of a thermostat of society, not the thermometer. We're not merely measuring the temperature, we're supposed to change the temperature. And everything that he has done and his group has done is counter anything that Jesus said. Notice they never mentioned Jesus yesterday. They never mentioned justice yesterday. And that is the fundamental problem with what they do. Any gathering that, that, that, that in this moment, that's not saying anything about poverty and anything about the denial of voting rights and anything about taking people's health care away and anything about unholy war and anything about the mistreatment of immigrant brothers and sisters and claims to be Christian or religious. Religious is actually fundamentally flawed and blasphemy. I'm using some strong terms this morning, Amy, because that's where we are and we have to stop calling them. They want us to call it Christian nationalism, but it is not. There's not. They did not base anything they did yesterday on Jesus. Jesus is the example of Christianity and Jesus was killed by the state because he chose to stand up to the state state and stand with the least of these. So not only is it a violation of the Constitution as a clergy, as a public theologian, this is a violation of, of the basic principles of Christianity, Jude, Christian traditions in itself. It is fundamentally wrong. And for them to say it took 200 years to raise up somebody as though he's some messiah figure that's not now been sent by God is ultimate blasphemy. It is ultimate idolatry and we must challenge it and the church must challenge it and stand flat foot. That's why today in D.C. we're preaching in front of the White House. We're having moral Monday. We're going from Saturday, tomorrow, Monday in front of the White House in D.C. standing up preachers are going to be preaching in front of the White House following one of the great Jewish prophets, Jeremiah, who said go down to the palace and tell the king stop hurting people, stop mistreating people, stop murdering people. And so from Saturday, people by faith coming together saying we will not bow down to the sin of voter suppression. We will not bow down to the injustice of taking people's God given right to today in front of the White House we're going to be a direct challenge to what happened on yesterday. We're broadcasting on 25 different sites and ministers, leading clergy will be preaching the gospel and preaching a true faith and not allowing what we saw yesterday to even be claimed Christian. We can't even call it Christian. There's nothing Christian about what they did yesterday. That is human worship and idolatry and blasphemy and heresy at the worst form.
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Zara Posner as the nine hour prayer event taxpayer funded happened on the National Mall. Rededicating the United States to God, they said. President Trump once again threatened to destroy Iran, saying on truth social for Iran the clock is ticking and they better get moving fast or there won't be anything left of them. Time is of the essence, he wrote on social media. I'm wondering if you can talk about the people piece that you wrote about what you said. Evangelicals are working overtime to spin the Iran war. Sarah?
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Well, white evangelicals are the most supportive religious group of Trump in general and in particular of his war in Iran. Evangelicals for decades have been marinating in Christian Zionist theology and ideology which holds that in their view, America has a biblical duty to defend Israel and in particular, defend Israel from aggression, both nuclear and otherwise, from Iran. So for decades, they have exaggerated Iran's access or ability to obtain a nuclear weapon and have been cheerleading Republican administration since George W. Bush to attack Iran and wipe out its nuclear capability. And so for them, the war in Iran is not an illegal war. It is not an immoral war. It's an imperative to them. And they have supported Trump from the beginning. They have pushed Trump to do this even in his first term. So they look at the war in a completely different way than most of the rest of the nation does. The they don't see it as an illegal foray that lacks congressional authorization and lacks the legal justification for a war. To them, Donald Trump is the savior of America and in fact, probably the savior of Israel, in their view. And they don't see the war as a strategic failure either, because they can't admit any strategic failure by their savior, Donald Trump, Trump. So for them, the war, looking at the war in the way that say Reverend Barber does is just not part of their thinking.
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Bishop Barber, if you can talk about President Trump taking on the pope, Pope Leo retweeting a picture of himself as Jesus Christ, though he said he thought it made it just like, like he's a doctor. And also the 22 foot gold covered statue of Trump raising his fist, known as Don Colossus, dedicated at the Trump National Doral, Miami last week. One of the pastors, Mark Burns, defended it on social media, saying, let me say this plainly, this is not a golden calf.
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D
Well, it's not. It's a golden image. It comes straight out of the book of Daniel when Nebuchadnezzar raised an image of himself and wanted people to bow. And the prophets Shadrach, Meshach, Bendigo and Daniel said, no, we will not bow down to you. Remember, Saddam Hussein did something similar. I mean, this man is committed to being a strong man. And his followers are not Christian. They're not even evangelical. I have to say. I'm an evangelical evangelical. But evangelicalism in the Bible according to Jesus, starts with good news to the poor, a healing to the brokenhearted. Recovery, sight to the blind, relief to the captive, and welcoming all those who've been unwelcome. There is so much sinfulness in this. When he put up that picture to worship. First of all, if he was a doctor, that's a bad doctor, I wouldn't go to the doctor. But trying to put himself as Jesus with. With bombers flying over the head. Not a halo, but bombers. The Pope not only challenged him, but the Pope not only challenged him, but the church challenged him. All of the archbishops since Vatican ii. Vatican II has said anyone promoting war, that is talking about the annihilation of people, it is unholy. It is outside of even any concept of just war. War itself is unholy, particularly in a nuclear age. It is dangerous, it is immoral. What we see happening right now is time and time again in scripture. We see places where worshiping of a person leads to the destruction of a society. And what he did, every church person piercer faith should name that as a form of idolatry. I wrote about it, we talked about it at our national conference on what are the moral issues of this particular political moment. And it is extraordinarily dangerous. But we see it. We saw it in the Bible. We saw it with Pharaoh, we saw with Nebuchadnezzar, We've seen it with Hitler, we've seen it with Saddam. We've seen it with so many people that attempt to. To. To mesh themselves, place themselves in some kind of religious holiness. And what is most shameful about all of this is that those who would dare call themselves evangelicals are not even activists acting like biblical evangelicals. They're acting the opposite of it. Which is why I refuse to call them evangelicals, because they want us to call that name. We are in a moment where this president is playing with dangerous things. This is why the Pope said this. He said, preaching the gospel. The Pope said, I'm just telling him the gospel and I'm going to continue to preach the gospel. And if that's what he's upset about, he'll have to remain upset because the Pope said, I'm not backing up. And thank God that the Pope said that.
- [44:23]
A
Bishop Bello, we just have 20 seconds and I was wondering if you can just talk about the settling of your federal discrimination lawsuit against AMC theaters stemming from you going with your mother to the movie the color purple in 2023 in Greenville, North Carolina.
- [44:42]
D
Well, yesterday we went back to the same theater, had the chair, had. My mother, had 80 some people with disabilities. I can't talk a lot about the say we're saying to disabled people, you don't have to hide, you don't have to run. I've been in pain for 40 years, every minute of my life. And I refuse, like other disabled people, to be pushed to the side, to be turned it away. Yesterday we went back to that same theater, went in with the chair, went in with the people and looked at Michael Jackson on the big screen. And we're saying, everybody, come on out regardless of what your different ability is. Don't be in the corners. Don't be in the shadow shadows. Let people see you and know who you are. The laws protect you and God loves you.
- [45:21]
A
Bishop William Barber, president and senior lecturer of Repairers of the Breach, and Sarah Posner, author of How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind. Coming up, Democratic Congressmember Jamie Raskin has just introduced legislation to target corruption and President Trump's efforts to protect Prophet from the Presidency. Back in 20 seconds.
- [45:47]
B
Stand behind his drunken imp. Stand behind his light of love. Hear him yowl his blooded tongue. Hear him yellow blood in war. Do you believe in his sweet sensation? Do you believe in second chance?
- [46:18]
A
Do you believe in rapture? By Thurston Moore performing years ago at Smith College. This is DemocracyNow. Democracynow.org, i'm Amy Goodman. The Justice Department's considering settling President Trump's $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. In January, the president and his son filed suit seeking restitution from the federal government alleging reputational and financial harm and public embarrassment as a result of the leaking of their tax returns by a government contractor in 2019. Now a possible settlement is on the table where the president would drop his lawsuit in exchange for an agreement by the IRS to drop audits of the Trump family and their businesses, as well as the creation of a $1.7 billion fund to compensate people Trump claims were wrongly targeted by the Biden administration. The fund would reportedly be called the President Donald J. Trump Truth and Justice Commission would be led by a Trump appointed commission. Trump allies who could potentially file claims and be compensated include the participants in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. The top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Congressmember Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who is also a constitutional law scholar, calls the proposal an illegal political slush fund. Last week, Congressmembers Raskin and Senator Adam Schiff introduced the Protecting Our Democracy act to curb the president's profiteering and corruption. For more, we go to Jamie Raskin, congressmember from Maryland. Can you, can you Respond to first, what is being proposed here, this $1.7 billion fund who would profit, and then talk about your bill.
- [48:08]
B
Sure. Well, the $1.7 billion political slosh fund in the Department of Justice may take the cake in terms of being the most thoroughly corrupt movement of the Trump administration after the billions of dollars that they had been getting, getting through the crypto schemes and the foreign governments. But. So let's go back to the beginning. The $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS is completely bogus. It's empty, it's vacuous. There's nothing to it. There was a private contractor who leaked reports of Donald Trump's tax returns that Trump had promised to make public, like every other president had done. He said, I'm going to release my tax return returns. Then he said he wouldn't. The IRS didn't do anything. But this private contractor released some of the details and he's in prison. He went to jail for it. There's no private right of action under the statute, and it's happened to lots of people. So the idea that it's $10 billion that he's going to order the Secretary of the treasury to order the IRS chief to give to him is ridiculous. There's just nothing there. So there's nothing to trade. But then they traded that mythical $10 billion they claimed to be owed for dropping real criminal investigations into all of the corruption or some of the corruption that the Trump family is engaged in, and then also for the creation of this $1.7 billion slush fund. Well, there are 1600 people that he's pardoned, and they want a $1.7 billion slush Fund, which comes from to a million dollars ahead. In terms of the proud boys, the Oath Keepers, the insurrectionists, with $100 million left over of taxpayer money to spread around in different ways. Congress never voted to appropriate that money. We control the power to spend. We never created that, and we never would. There's no way you could ever get that out of Congress. So they're using the judgment fund of the United States, which is for validation, valid court verdicts against the United States or valid court settlements, to simply confer money on their private political militia, their street fighting militia, which went to battle for them on January 6, 2021. And what do you know? Right before this election, they want to shower these people with a million dollars ahead. I mean, it's just, it's an outrage. It's a scandal. It's also unconstitutional because the 14th amendment says in section that no money shall go to pay for insurrection or rebellion. That, of course, was in the wake of the Civil War, but it's written in general terms. Basically, they're paying his insurrectionary army.
- [50:51]
A
And you were there, Congressman Jamie Raskin on January 6, right along with your daughter and your now son in law taking shelter from the insurrectionists.
- [51:04]
B
Oh, yeah. I mean, I remember it once well, and this is all part of the whitewash and the attempt to sanitize what had happened. I mean, there were Republicans like Ted Cruz who were calling it terrorism. They lived through it. They saw exactly what happened. And they were basically saying, hey, guys, we went a little bit too far with this. This is dangerous. People died, officers lost their lives. And now, you know, they're all with Donald Trump and saying it was a day of hugs and kisses and love. It sounds like Woodstock on Capitol Hill to hear them describe it.
- [51:37]
A
So describe the bills that you have introduced.
- [51:41]
B
Well, understand that opposing and dismantling the corruption of the Trump administration is going to be the work of a lifetime for a lot of people in politics. So this is a beginning. And we start with the emoluments clauses, which have been completely, you know, thrown into the gutter here. But what we're trying to do is codify the emoluments clauses to see saying the president must report any money he's getting from foreign governments, like take the $400 million jet from Qatar that's got to be reported within 72 hours. And then Congress must get together and vote whether or not to allow him to accept it or to turn it over to the US Government or to return it. Because the Constitution says that nobody in federal government, much less the president, can restore, receive a present, an emolument, which means a payment, an office or title of any kind, whatever the Constitution says, from a king, a prince, or a foreign state without the consent of Congress. And he has never come once to Congress for the hundreds of millions and billions of dollars that he's been pocketing from foreign states. Our America first president, who is the biggest globalist who's ever served in the White House.
- [52:54]
A
New financial disclosure forms released by the U.S. office of Government Ethics show President Trump made between 200 million and $750 million in trades in the first months of this year, including purchases and sales of securities in companies like Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia, Apple and Goldman Sachs. Trump bought, according to Nautas, between half a million and a million dollars worth of Nvidia stock a week before the Commerce Department officially approved the sale of some Nvidia chips to China. China. The Trump Organization claiming the investments are managed exclusively by third party financial institutions. And neither Trump, his family, nor the Trump Organization plays any role in the investment decisions. Can you talk about this in stock trading by Trump himself?
- [53:45]
B
Yeah. Look, what we know now is that corruption is the whole purpose of the Trump administration. It's not like some, some eccentric peripheral thing. It's a vast money making operation. And the COVID story is what you were talking about before with, with Bishop Barber. I mean, you know, they've tried to conscript all of these religious figures to come in to give cover to the fact that they are looting the federal government. The $1.7 billion slush fund that they want to install at the Department of Justice, $1.776 billion showing you exactly how arbitrary and random it is. They're just naming it after 1776. It's not related to anything that's actually owed to anybody. But that's political slush fund is just one of many political slush funds. They're turning the entire budget of the United States that was authorized and appropriated by Congress into a collection of slush funds. So the Board of Peace, for example, take that one. We still don't know whether it's public or private profit or not for profit. Profit registered in the United States, registered another country, we don't know. But they gave $1.5 billion from the state Department, money that was set aside for disaster relief, to this Board of Peace. And they got a billion from Qatar, a billion from the United Arab Emirates, a billion from Saudi Arabia. It's the same thing with the Venezuelan oil after that hit on Venezuela. Then they created a political slush fund operated, I believe it's out of Qatar as well. Donald Trump is controlling that. So the whole idea is to seize as much of the federal budget as possible to put directly under his control. The whole thing is corruption. And nobody should be surprised that he's engaged in thousands of day trades. We've got to ban individual stock trades by members of Congress, by the President, by the Vice President, the whole thing, because they've turned the government in states into a money making operation. You may as well put a Wall street ticker tape up around the Senate and the House of Representatives in the White House, because that's what they've turned into. It's all about insider information, exploiting insider information to make as much money as possible. Put your money either in a blind trust or in a mutual fund and leave it there. Not single stock day trading by people who, who have all kinds of political inside information very quickly.
- [56:14]
A
Cuz I know you have to go. Eric Trump being on that trip to China. If you could respond. He's now saying he's going to sue Jen Psaki and Ms. Now over a report on a China trip based on a Financial Times report that said that he while on the state visit in China, Eric Trump is linked to a company and the US President's family exploring a deal with a Chinese chipmaker that American lawmakers have warned is connected to the ruling party in China. Las Vegas based Fintech Alt five Sigma, which has financial links to the Trump family's World Liberty Financial crypto business, last month signed a memorandum of understanding with a Chinese firm to build data centers in the US Any knowledge about this?
- [57:04]
B
I don't know anything about this one other than to say that the response of President Trump and the Trump family and all of their enterprises to reports of their staggering phenomenal corruption is to attack the media and sue the media. And they lose all of these cases. It's a form of distraction and a form of harassment. But they've brought suits against, you know, New York Times, Atlantic magazine, abc, cbs, you name it. And when they've got some kind of political control over them through the Federal Communications Commission Commission, they're able to shake them down for millions of dollars. But for the media that can actually stand up to them, they win all these cases and Trump and his family lose all these cases. But it makes it seem as if, you know, it's just some kind of contested dispute between two sides when it's perfectly clear that they have corrupted the entire government. They've turned the presidency into an instrument of private profit making. Every day it's like watching the Sopranos. You turn just to see, well, what is the scam going to be today?
- [58:08]
A
Maryland Congressmember Jamie Raskin. We have to leave it there. Top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee has introduced a package of anti corruption bills aimed at putting new checks on the White House. That does it for our show. I'll be speaking at the IFC in New York City as it plays the new film about Democracy Now. Steal this story, please, on Tuesday and Wednesday. Tuesday with V, formerly known as Eve Ensler. She'll be moderating the Q and A after the six o' clock film along with the director Tia Lesson. And on Wednesday, Nermeen Shaikh, Democracy now co host, will be moderating the post film discussion at the IFC at West 4th and 6th Avenue. I'll be there again with the film's director. Steal the this story, please go to democracynow.org for details. I'm Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.