← The Beat with Ari Melber
The Beat with Ari Melber
Trump Rallies on Economy as Poll Numbers Tank
00:41:26
MS Now's Ari Melber reports on how high prices and economic pain are shaping voters' priorities. President Trump noticed and is responding at a rally in Pennsylvania tonight.
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- [00:00]
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Ari Melber
Welcome to the Beat. I'm Ari Melber. Americans are turning towards the holidays, spending money on Christmas shopping, travel. And the top story in politics is how affordability, high prices and economic pain are shaping voters priorities, including powering that Democratic sweep in last month's elections. President Trump noticed. He's responding tonight, speaking in Pennsylvania on a tour that has been touted as his sort of response to voters concerns. We have a view from Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania. Hilliard will be reporting for us there shortly. You're looking at part of that tour. Trump's planned speech is also an implicit follow up to that unusual meeting he had with the Democratic socialist and mayor elect of New York, Zoran Mamdani. There, the president seemed to recognize almost in real time that this progressive has some kind of appeal. Trump even talked up some of Mamdani's New York plans, which confounded and upset his own MAGA base. But that may have been the instinct of a president who realizes he is unpopular right now, even as he attacks the polls that show it. He's watched economic anxiety supercharged what was a slow budding but now clearly wider revolt against what has been a rocky first year of this term, to say the least. From inflation to Epstein, the president has seen his policies and plans rebuked not just on the left or the broadcast angry middle, the no kings protest, concerned about what this administration's doing to the government and the fiber of the country as we know it, but also to many people on the right who pay the same prices as everybody else. I have more on that in a moment. But remember the president who began this same year fresh off what was clearly a comeback election and pushed those shockwave reforms with his billionaire ally, Elon Musk, who strong armed concessions from businesses and law firms. If you put aside morality, ethics, and even the Constitution just for a minute. Politically in those first few months, he looked like he had some momentum. But he soon found Musk was gone. Many of those cuts failed. Some companies even stopped surrendering. Disney standing up for Jimmy Kimmel under public pressure seemed like one shifting inflection point. So tonight, Trump takes the stage on defense. High prices, flailing economic policy, and he's moving billions in taxpayer dollars to farmers to make up for his own costly tariffs, which still grind on, driving up prices for Americans across all kinds of products. And people have noticed. Look at how many people say prices are now worse than ever, worse than they remember ever in their lives. And you say, okay, Ari, 46%. I don't know. Is that just people who don't like Trump? Nope. About a third of Trump voters, 37%, say the cost of living is worse than ever. You cannot spin people out of their experience paying high prices every day. Trump saw high prices were a huge political issue last time around. He ran on them against terrorists. We all remember that. Only to find that facing his own accountability now for these high prices is harder. Funny how that works. And he's been zigzagging on what he means, says or claims about what we're all living through. In the polling I just showed you, the affordability crisis.
- [04:31]
One of my top priorities will be to quickly defeat inflation and make America affordable again. There's this fake narrative that the Democrats talk about affordability. They just say the word. It doesn't mean anything to anybod word. Affordability is a con job by the Democrats. We're also making incredible strides to make America affordable again. That's a new word that they're using, affordability. The word affordability. I inherited a mess. I inherited a total mess.
- [05:03]
A mess. And you know you can't fix a mess in the real world by just lying about it. So I want to talk about messengers for a moment. Take a look at this. Everybody walks down aisles like this. People are living these prices. People have to make trade offs as they pay those high prices, which could be above budget or put you into debt for feeding your family. And then you go into the holidays. People see the economic and political news on TV and online, wherever they get their news you know, about the inflation crisis. And yet while we're told don't shoot the messenger, Trump has been trying to do everything he can to distort coverage, often just accurate coverage of these facts and his administration's problems, what he calls the mess. Apparently, he knows there's a problem, it's a mess. He just says he inherited it. And he has done a lot more than just shoot the messenger. I just want to remind you tonight, as this all comes together and he gives this big address, he's tried to sue the messenger and he got some strong arm settlements from media companies. He tried to cancel the messenger, the failed bid to get Jimmy Kimmel fired. He tries to bully the messenger, lashing out at reporters with insults and attacks that would have seemed completely like another place, time or country in any other era, something he has normalized, including a raft of sexist, misogynistic attacks on reporters. They're journalists who happen to be women. But tonight I want to tell you, you have to add, going beyond the old talk about shooting the messenger, add the big government anti conservative MAGA playbook right now. Buy the Messenger. Let me explain what I mean. Remember, the government is barred from abusing powers like regulation or taxes to control free speech. You can imagine a tin pot wannabe autocrat trying to say, oh, well, if we have the tax audit power, let's just audit the media we don't like and let's go at them. And that's something Nixon once tried, but the First Amendment and our laws ban that. And yet, in a related type of abuse, Trump now wants one of his billionaire allies to get control of cnn. And I'm speaking about them as a group of journalists who do good work. They happen to be a competitor. Right now, it may not be a secret to you that you have this channel on and other channels are available, but I want to speak about them as our peers, journalists who need to operate in a capitalist economy that is fair and not abused by an autocrat. And that applies, of course, to other media as well. Because right now, Trump is trying to help an ally get control of CNN over other corporate bidders. This is what Republicans once criticized as picking winners and losers in the market. We don't do that in America. It has business and media leaders aghast. Some still in this Trump bully environment are afraid to say so in public. Others have indicated it. But nobody thinks this is fair. And I'm talking about this story. Trump eyeing interference in the epic battle that's shaping up for what is called here by the Economist, the future of entertainment. They're referring to that huge deal we've been reporting on where Netflix is now trying to buy Warner Brothers for many, many billions of dollars. But now a MAGA billionaire ally in the Ellison family wants to get Warner in what they call a hostile bid that would potentially also determine the ownership of cnn. And while Trump has interfered in other ways and obviously is worried about comics like Kimmel, he apparently cares a lot about CNN and news. We've, we've all seen that. I don't think you need a lot of examples to prove that. We're talking about control of major parts of the information ecosystem. Warner Brothers, of course, huge across movies and television. What they make matters. What they don't make because politicians pressure them or request it also matters. And Trump of course has also pressed tech companies to change their policies to favor him ending fact checking at Meta and other places. This hostile bid involves David Ellison, backed by his father, Larry Ellison. Larry Ellison, along with Elon Musk, is one of the richest people in the whole world. You can see all the different media that's consolidating here. Along with the billionaire Bezos, the Ellison's already got control of CBS, which led to changes at their news division in 60 minutes. Some journalists objected and resigned over it. And while I told you the First Amendment requires respect for free speech and press instead of the required independence, Trump apparently wants to be kept regularly appraised of how the DOJ could probe this Netflix deal. I'm telling you about that. According to reporting in the Journal, Pam Bondi, who runs the doj, has done basically everything Trump wants, including reversing herself on the Epstein issue, installing prosecutors so illegally that two, not one, but two, have now been fired by federal judges. An indignity we have not actually seen in the modern era of the doj. So with her in charge and Trump wanting to interfere, Trump could try to push her to misuse DOJ oversight of this merger to stop it. To put it simply, he could try to get Bondi to stop what is currently happening in the free market and the deal going to Netflix to help get it over to these MAGA allies, the Ellisons, they want to buy Warner instead of Netflix and they want some parts of the deal that Netflix isn't even currently pursuing. Which brings us back, as I mentioned, to cnn, David Ellison, quote, offered assurances to Trump officials that if he bought Warner, he'd make sweeping changes to cnn. The Journal reports Ellison recently did say he's talked to Trump, but that he won't speak for him on the CNN issues. So we haven't heard his whole side of it. But Trump apparently admits to people around him that he wants new ownership of CNN and changes to their programming. So now you see how we got here. If a politician doesn't like the messengers at cnn, he can try to get his allies to buy the messenger new ownership, as they put it in that article, and then start changing programming. So what we're seeing shape up and now really leak out in public is Kimmel round two, but with way bigger stakes. And instead of Disney being pushed by the people, by you or some people, because at first they had the indefinite suspension and then they came back. But instead of Disney ultimately being pushed by the public to back Kimmel here, if this goes down, the new buyers might be ready to give Trump what he wants, those programming changes. The First Amendment bars this kind of plot. Netflix is currently in the lead to get this deal if the Trump administration does not intervene by getting Attorney General Bondi to basically use the DOJ to try to block it. Now, the First Amendment protects the Ellisons, too. They may buy and run media how they see fit. An honest First Amendment advocate defends their speech and media or MAGA media or Fox News right along with everyone else's free speech.
- [12:21]
But the problem does come in if the federal government, Trump, abuses power to interfere in this free market, trying to distort what you see, what you hear, to help his own government. And that's at the cost of free speech and perhaps the truth itself. So here we are. This is one time where the free market and free speech are on the same side. While a politician tries to interfere with both to shape coverage of his record and his economic problems, what he calls his mess, rather than, you know, maybe trying to fix the actual mess instead of buying the messenger. I got Maya Wiley here. We're back in 90 seconds.
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Ari Melber
President Trump says he inherited a mess. That is one of his arguments today, and he is going to build on that in what we are just keeping an eye on making sure you know what's going on all over the country. You're looking at Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, where the President is giving this address and talking about his economic agenda. As we've been reporting, it's a bit of a rejoinder to some of the headwinds he's faced, both in polling, where even Trump voters say this is the worst set of prices and cost of living in their lives that they remember. And obviously in the Democratic sweep, which involved economic issues just last month. So now you've seen what's going on out there. As promised, I'm bringing in our special guest, Maya Wiley, as CEO, president of Leadership Conference on Civil Human Rights, and a politician at times. She ran for mayor in New York, which I mentioned because it's a big, expensive city where affordability was back on the ballot just last month. And speaking of the economy, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, Jared Bernstein, one of the warmest economic nerds we know. That says something, Jared, because some of them are a little data driven. Low bar, my friend.
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Jared Bernstein
Low bar.
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Ari Melber
Yes, you light up the scene when you're surrounded by economists. I could say that because I've known you a long time. I'll start with you because as I've been reporting, Trump says it's a mess, but it's someone else's fault. But he's not even really claiming it's not a mess anymore. The voters think the prices are a mess. And at the same time, when you talk about inequality, it is inequality powering a billionaire buying spree which could subvert the free market. Something I know you say is better off free than in some Soviet kneecap position to distort the coverage of the messy economy. Do I have that right and what do you see here?
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Jared Bernstein
You have it exactly right. But you also have something else, right? Earlier you said, I wrote this down. You can't spin people out of being stressed by affordability issues. And so this issue, it's really kryptonite to the president. It's one of the reasons he's out there tonight, because he can do a very good job of getting his followers to follow him into a phony reality in lots of different issues. But they know which way is up when it comes to prices. And so I find this to be a very challenging issue for him and so do his advisors, who are again sending him out to try to address it. The problem is that not only did he not inherit a mess, he inherited an economy that was improving. And he's made the affordability problem a lot worse, not just with tariffs, but also by allowing those healthcare premiums to expire.
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Ari Melber
Well, let's let me get to tariffs and we'll get to healthcare if you want. But I don't know your, your nightlife. Jared, have you ever been to the, you know, if you go to a good, a dive bar, sometimes they have a deal where you get the beer and then you get a shot with the beer. You ever had. You ever seen that?
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Jared Bernstein
No, but I've heard of it.
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Ari Melber
You've heard of it. This is like the Trump version is the opposite. You get a tariff you don't want that raises the cost, and then you get a bailout for the tariff that apparently the taxpayers are going to have to keep funding for as long as we have the tariffs. I mean, they didn't cancel it. And so here's none other than Brit Hume telling I talked about the information ecosystem out there, Brit Hume telling Fox viewers about this.
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No doubt the tariffs are a factor in this, Brett. There's no getting around that. And it's put the president now in a position where he's got to try to try to help the farms. They're calling it a bridge, but it's not a bridge loan. This is a subsidy. The president, who is otherwise mostly conservative on economic policies, engaging in a government program to try to bail out farmers who are hurt by his other program, that of course, being the tariffs. Jared?
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Jared Bernstein
Well, those farmers were really hurt, I mean, our soybean farmers, and they're still trying to recover from the damage that he's caused. And so it makes it very, very difficult for him to maintain this fantasy that the tariffs help everybody and that they don't raise costs when he's now consistently taking off Tariffs to try to help lower costs.
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Ari Melber
So that, I mean, if the damage is, is bad and it's from Trump policies, why not stop the policy to help the farmers?
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Jared Bernstein
Yeah, well, that would be the obvious thing to do. Yet his love of tariffs prevents him from doing so, even when it is exactly pushing in the wrong direction on the thing Americans care most about right now, that is affordability. The poll numbers you took us through show that the fact that he's where he is tonight shows that he would rather be in his golden, you know, ballroom or bathroom or whatever than where he is tonight. He and his team actually have very few solutions to this problem. Democrats have rolled up their sleeves and tried to figure out ways to help, but when it comes to actually helping with affordability, they really don't have much, especially if they're not willing to take down the tariffs.
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Ari Melber
Stay with me. I'm gonna turn to Maya and play a little bit of David Ellison, who as I mentioned is part of the Larry Ellison family. And they have a lot of money and they're not as famous to people as maybe Elon Musk, but they have Musk level money. Here's what Mr. David Ellison was saying is he's both pitching the hostile bid. This would involve CNN and whatnot and the Trump effect.
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Commercial Announcer
Do you think the President embraces the idea of you being the owner of cnn, given his criticism obviously for that.
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Ari Melber
Network in the past?
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Commercial Announcer
By the way, we've had great conversations with the President about this, but I think what, but I don't want to speak for him in any way, shape or form.
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Maya Wiley
Why speak for him when he can speak for you, which is essentially what we're talking about here, which is what is so disturbing about it. Right. And we already saw this with Brendan Carr. We've all talked about this multiple times, but Brendan Carr, as his head of the Federal Communications Commission, which is the regulatory authority that would make these decisions, and Donald Trump essentially telling CAR what he wants him to do and not do, which includes the control of information.
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I think the point here is whether it's tariffs or who gets to buy what. What Donald Trump wants most is to be in control, is to make all the decisions, is to bully people into whatever it is he wants them to do and whether it's using tariffs every time some, some country pisses him off, is actually thinking about who gets to buy what and what deal goes through. When we take it all back to just the way people are living their lives.
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You can't have a destruction of the east wing of the White House and the building of an opulent. It doesn't matter what people think about it. It's the visual of it, the opulence of it. To be cozying up with wealthy people constantly and telling them that you want them to do what you want them to do and telling people who can't literally are trying to figure out whether to pay health care premiums so they can see a doctor when they're sick or buy food. Or buy food. That's what happens when you double the cost of healthcare premiums, take away subsidies for just paying for the health insurance. So. But putting all this together is Donald Trump cares mostly about Donald Trump and figuring out how he can use the power that the Supreme Court has said he can use supremely to do what benefits him in whatever way.
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Ari Melber
Yeah. And I mentioned you being a candidate because you're in New York. It's a big media market, expensive media market. If you, and you came in second to, as, as I've mentioned, a mayor who is no more. So voters can always think about, huh, did they want the guy who got indicted and worked with Trump or would they wanted you? But, you know, buyer's remorse is a funny thing. Right. But if you had buddies who could buy up the main media in the entire place you were running, I imagine as a candidate, that could affect you a lot.
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Maya Wiley
It could affect you a lot. I think the other interesting thing here to note is people are not dumb and they do not like attacks on their ability to make decisions for themselves. And when they see and feel power being abused in that kind of way, they don't like it.
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Ari Melber
And they didn't like the idea of, oh, the government's gonna cancel your comedy show.
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Maya Wiley
When government becomes abusive, people don't like it. And that's not a political party position. That is just not who we are as Americans. And it is something that we have seen repeatedly that costs politicians. And I think Donald Trump has to take that very seriously at some point.
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Ari Melber
And Jared, I know you wanted to get on the health care. I will read the exchange from Trump in the new interview with Politico. He said the Democrats love to say affordability, but then they never talk about it. Now, if they said affordability, they are fact check talking about it. And then he's asked, will you tell Congress to extend the Obamacare subsidies, which, as you both, both of our guests here mentioned, go right to affordability. Because we're talking about something most people need to live and will the government be supporting them in the safety net here or not? And his answer was, I don't know, I'll have to see. And Jared, you wanted to get in on that topic.
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Jared Bernstein
Yeah, I mean if you are considering affordability and you talk to people about it, they're gonna say healthcare is one of their biggest constraints. Housing as well, childcare, utilities. I mean, that's the list. And healthcare is a particular challenge because it's not something you can go without, especially if you have a sick family member or a child. And now we're talking about for over 20 million people on average, doubling what they have to pay for healthcare. And as Maya said a minute ago, you might be able to do that, but you know, the rent eats first, healthcare eats second, and if you got nothing left, you've got a real problem. Now his hypocrisy on affordability is just, you know, a continuing saga here because on alternate days he realizes it's important. And of course the election calls caught the attention of him and his aides. That was very much an affordability election. But again, where you ended, your comments just now are quite important. Cuz when they actually pushed him and said, well, what are you gonna do about it? He said, I don't know. Now this is a man who's been president for five years. If you tote them all up and he still doesn't seem to know what to do on healthcare, that suggests a real serious foundational problem when it comes to dealing with affordability.
- [25:45]
Maya Wiley
Well, what he wants to do is send a check with his name on it so he can tell people that they should be thoughtful and thank him personally. Not the, the United States of America, which is another power grab effort.
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Ari Melber
Right. And the personalizing of everything, which is what we are more accustomed to in failed states or non democracies than this one. And yet against that backdrop, you have all this pushback and you have 37% of Trump voters saying whatever we thought in the past, we get it, we see it, he's not lowering prices. And that's again, brings us back to I guess where we started, why he's in Pennsylvania tonight. Jared and Maia, thanks to both of you, Democrats have a new plan to block a whole other power grab. Whether Trump will get to put his face on this coin. Unusual to say the least. New heat on Pete Hegseth. I have that story coming up. And a breakthrough in the Epstein files. We got two different cases coming out that will force grand jury materials into the public. Something that as recently as a few weeks ago, we were told couldn't happen. I'm going to Explain to you what these new cases say next.
- [26:53]
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Ari Melber
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- [27:25]
Ari Melber
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Ari Melber
We have major legal developments tonight and they look like this and I'm going to walk you right through them. These are two separate cases where two judges have ruled four major Epstein transparency and basically changed what is long standing precedent on what materials you release from criminal probes. I'm going to walk you through it here in plain English. The big development today is one of these cases, a judge granting a motion to release sensitive Epstein records specifically to unseal what are grand jury records in the Ghislaine Maxwell case. Now that mirrors another ruling and I'll tell you about that as well. But if this sounds like a huge change, it is. If you think back to every case you've ever looked into, maybe you're a true crime whitey Bulger fan. Maybe you remember the Mueller probe. Grand jury materials are protected by Rule 6, which is one of those sort of long standing rules of the federal court system. And the reason the grand jury materials are usually secret is because unlike say an open trial where the government is presenting certain evidence, this is a private process designed to decide whether you get to trial or not. And for many reasons of fairness, say they don't indict and move forward. You don't just release everything they ever talked about. It could affect people's lives or careers. That's generally the baseline. But there is a new law in town. It's called the Epstein Files Transparency Act. You probably recall it because it was passed over the objections of Donald Trump all year. Then at the end, he claimed he was for it. He was forced into signing it. Republicans bucked him. And that law now requires the release of a ton of different types of Epstein material, colloquially referred to as the Epstein files, this month by December 19th. So this new ruling responds to that law, and it comes just after another judge agreed in another case that also involves Epstein in Florida. Remember, there was that earlier Epstein case down there.
- [30:04]
So a Florida judge down there orders those Epstein grand jury records to also be released by the same logic. Now, this may sound like one of these legal weeds type things, but I want to point out a couple points on this with you. Number one, this is why the government, Congress still has these vast powers. Sometimes we watch Congress and feel like they're not doing much or they're only fighting. But because of the push that we follow, the survivors, Ro Khanna, Republican Massey, and then winning, over the objections of even the House speaker, they passed this new law, the Epstein transparency Act. And so, number one, new laws can change everything. Judges who literally last month were like, hey, you know, we can't release grand jury materials. They're always secret today are saying, if you read the law, if you read the ruling, well, there's this new law and it says release everything. And this applies to everything. Number two, we've heard a lot about whether the Trump DOJ will try to play games or hold back materials. But I want to point something out, and maybe people who think everything Trump does is wrong will have to face some cognitive dissonance. But this is coming because the Trump DOJ asked to release the materials. This is not from some critical group or survivors class action lawsuit. This is Pam Bondi's doj, only under pressure, of course, as you know. But the pressure worked. Both these rulings will release new Epstein files and Maxwell files from previously secret grand jury materials because the DOJ was pushed into asking for it. That leads me to point three, which is everyone's watching to see if they play games. Going up to December 19th on these grand jury materials. It would appear that rather than playing games, they're trying to get the files out. They invoke the new law and ask the judges to let them release it. And that's where we're headed. So that's pretty interesting because if they later play games, say, if Pam Bondi says, oh, we're going to redact everything, well, look what you have. New rulings from these judges saying, no, you got to release this stuff because of the new law. So that would be bad for anyone trying to hide too much in the future. Now, one judge did criticize Bondi's doj, saying that while they paid lip service to Maxwell and Epstein's victims, they have not.
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Treated them, the victims, with the solicitude they deserve. Now, that's a point separate from the transparency I mentioned and refers to many past problems, which I'm not going to get into all right now, about why the judge says the DOJ has basically failed victims under Trump. Now, the House Oversight Committee also has been releasing those new images and videos from Epstein's island, and they say more material will come, including important bank records. Donald Trump has found this was an issue he could not spin or outrun, and his base remains interested in whether he complies with this law, which they know he was forced to sign. And Congresswoman Mtg, who sparred with Trump over this and other issues, ultimately resigning, made some pretty interesting new remarks about the Epstein back and forth with Trump in her 60 Minutes interview.
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Commercial Announcer
We did talk about the Epstein files.
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Ari Melber
And he was extremely angry at me that I had signed the discharge petition.
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Commercial Announcer
He said that it was going to hurt people.
- [33:19]
Ari Melber
I had asked him, these women are the ones that were hurt.
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Jared Bernstein
He said to you, people will get hurt.
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Commercial Announcer
People will get hurt.
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Ari Melber
I don't know what that means.
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Maya Wiley
I don't know who they are.
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Ari Melber
MTG calling out what she basically implies was Donald Trump aggrandizing or threatening. If he really thought people would get hurt by this and he really cared, he could have vetoed that bill. He could have fought it to the end. He seemed to more go with the wins when he saw that he'd lost. Now, everything I'm telling you is about how these cases work and how so far the pressure is working on the Trump DOJ to get more Epstein transparency. What is in the grand jury materials? Nobody knows. They're secret. I have seen some folks online, maybe they're just podcasters or not formal journalists or lawyers, and they've made claims about what's in there or that there's going to be big stuff in there, but the truth is they don't know either. So you should always be a little wary of people promising you details on something they haven't read or seen. Interestingly, the judge did tamp down expectations in one of these cases, saying the grand jury materials would actually not reveal new information of any consequence. That is striking. And whether that's true for both cases or why the judge thinks that, or whether everyone will agree remains to be seen. But the deadline is Coming. We're going to fit in a break. But we also have new pushback on that Trump coin and an important fight over press freedom at the Pentagon. For all of the people and institutions, institutions that have caved, there is a big powerful institution taking Trump to court on those Pentagon rules. I'll tell you all about that next.
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Many institutions have caved to Trump. But tonight we turn to a very different story. The New York Times taking the Trump administration to court. They're leaning into a fight over these anti First Amendment rules that came from the Pentagon. It was a big deal and some have moved on, but they are actually trying to fix this. The Pentagon infamously demanded that reporters should become government stenographers or get evicted from the Pentagon. The Times objects to rules claiming that reporting info not approved by basically Trump's appointees could lead to this punishment regardless of whether the info is classified or not. Many outlets would not sign on to those rules when they rolled them out. That includes Ms. Now, full disclosure. But Trump's Pentagon meant it. This is unlike anything we've seen in the modern era. But they then evicted the reporters who wouldn't sign their order to stop doing real reporting. Critics of the Pentagon chief say this new boat strike scandal also shows how much investigative reporting matters. Remember, the Post broke that story. Any outlet signed onto those rules would have been prevented from reporting exactly that story. That has upended a lot of important things. We're learning about the Pentagon and whether Trump needs to make changes there. While investigative journalists departed, Trump aides brought in entities that are not news. Oan sending a partisan congressman to the briefing, which this weekend drew SNL's take.
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Commercial Announcer
Oh, my God. Is that Matt Gaetz?
- [36:36]
Maya Wiley
That's right. It's me, Matt Gaetz. I'm a reporter. Now.
- [36:42]
Ari Melber
Question.
- [36:42]
Maya Wiley
You're only killing people who are trafficking drugs, right? So hypothetically, if someone were trafficking something.
- [36:49]
Ari Melber
Else, they'd be okay.
- [36:53]
Commercial Announcer
We're targeting drug smugglers exclusively.
- [36:57]
Ari Melber
Giggity.
- [36:59]
We are joined by David. Excuse me, Folkenflick, media correspondent with National Public Radio. He has dealt with Trump's attacks. He's been covering the administration's battle with the press and has covered this battle extensively. Welcome, David.
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Commercial Announcer
Hey, Ari.
- [37:16]
Ari Melber
In your reporting, you write about how their September policy has a ban on journalists reporting unclassified material that's not approved by the Defense Department leadership. So basically you can be an in house propaganda magazine for the Trump Pentagon or you can leave. How do you view the Times lawsuit? Does it matter? At a time where other outlets have have had corporate Owners say we don't want to fight.
- [37:42]
Commercial Announcer
I think that may be in some ways why it matters most. You have the Times Signal News organization representing what its controlling owners had made clear they view in this era to be a pillar of independent minded journalism, pointing out that the role of the free press is to hold power to account and what could be more powerful than the executive branch of the American federal government or the military itself. And they're making some clear lines. They're arguing in their suit, yet to be tried that this is a violation of their free speech as a result of essentially targeting news organizations that ahead of publication that have committed no crimes, broken no laws on publication even of classified information.
- [38:30]
And yet trying to preclude them from being able to do that ahead of time, that it's a violation of their Fifth Amendment rights under due process clause to have a process that makes sense. This was essentially pulled out of the ether as a policy. There was no specific cited reason for it and no process through which they can appeal. You're the lawyer. Sorry, I'm not. But these are things embedded in our constitutional process from the outset from the Bill of Rights. The Times is saying for us to be able to do this, if the Pentagon wants to make policies, there has to be a reason for it. We should be able to appeal it to some other authority and we should be able to say this is why that doesn't make sense.
- [39:06]
Ari Melber
Yeah, you mentioned I'm a lawyer. You know, before I came into journalism full time, I practiced First Amendment law. And the cases that show the most aggressive overreach is often involved national security. The Pentagon Papers is a classic case. I worked, I should say full disclosure for Floyd Abrams, who won it for the New York Times. But the reason that it was a tougher case is there is some deference to the government when it says something could involve national security or even endanger troops. And it seems that the Trump Pentagon folks thought that they could use that kind of foundation to go this aggressive. And yet I'd be curious for you on the, on the reporting side to enlighten us how in the recent boat controversy, it is reporting that might redeem or help improve safety. It's precisely the sunlight and the transparency there that might improve a system that according to the most recent reporting involved the unnecessary initial death and later possible war crime execution of individuals who were not headed to the US and were not at war with the US and.
- [40:23]
Commercial Announcer
Far from it being the reporting breaking the law, it may well both Republicans and Democrats on the Hill question may be that it is reporting and revealing that the actions by the military were unlawful themselves. These, of course, things are yet to be seen. You've seen a number of moments in this first year of the second Trump administration, the return to power in which the military and Secretary Hegseth have been aggrieved by reporting that have questioned the official line, questioned the efficacy of the bombing raids on nuclear, nuclear sites in Iran, questioned, as we've seen here, the bombing on Venezuelan vessels, whether or not there was a need for that, whether or not this really is in any way something that should constitute an act of war or wartime conditions revealed. For example, thanks to the Atlantic's editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, a signal chat since found by an inspector general for the Department of Defense to have potentially, potentially put American service members lives in danger by compromising security. And we know that because Jeff Goldberg was added to the signal chat inadvertently by one of the president's national security team. So there have been a number of incidents, not simply limited to these, where independent reporting from news organizations, not relying on handouts from the press office, attached to the top brass at the Defense Department are being able to perform some form of accountability and ensuring what is done in the American in the name of American citizens and what is done with their taxpayer dollars and what is done in terms of things that could put service members lives in jeopardy or in harm's way that they comport with the official line that's actually coming out.
- [42:07]
Ari Melber
All important points. David, thanks for joining us. We're going to fit in a break. When we come back, the push to stop the Trump coin.
- [42:23]
Donald Trump wants his own coin, but the treasury is facing new pushback. Lawmakers responding to this very unusual idea that while he's still in office, he should get his face on a coin, not something the United States has ever done before. Democrats have now launched a bill change Corruption act to block the coin. The bill simply says no US Currency may feature the likeness of of a living or sitting president. Republican majority leader might not bring the bill to the floor. If the coin were minted, it would actually be the second coin in US History to feature a living president. With Trump, he's still in office. There's a wider movement, of course, that protests Donald Trump's efforts at King like autocratic power. We know the no King's protests deal in that basically widespread opposition. Some of the largest protests we've seen in decades are about stopping exactly this kind of conduct, whether it is the tacky like statues and coins or the more serious like whether or not the troops stay in the streets indefinitely. One of the bill's authors, Senator Cortez Masto, says while monarchs put their faces on coins, America has never had and never will have a king. I suppose, depending on who you ask, that is to be determined. We'll be right back.
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He's been boasting about hosting, saying, we've never had a president host the Kennedy center honors before, which.
- [44:01]
Commercial Announcer
Yeah, why do you think that is?
- [44:04]
Ari Melber
We've also never had Neil Patrick Harris order a military strike on a fishing boat before. Trump said he rejected honorees who were too woke. Then he slept through all the exception species.
- [44:16]
Jared Bernstein
Wake up. Wake up.
- [44:18]
Ari Melber
A couple jokes here and there. And since the First Amendment has naturally become a theme in the news this week, a reminder why some politicians or would be autocrats won't want to hear that jokes, political satire. And yet that is still protected in this country. You can make fun of whoever you want, Kimmel, if anything emerged stronger from the failed attempt to get the government to cancel his show. If you want to catch up with us, you can always go to Ms. Now. That's our new URL Ms. Now Ari. Easy to remember, Ari. We have new videos, including some fun stuff this week. If you log on, that does it for us. Coming at you live from AutoTrader. Here's New Car Energy. They're searching inventory. Make a budget for your pilot. It's smarter car shopping. Just find your next ride@autotrader.com powered by Auto Intelligence.