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- [00:05]
Joy Reid
Okay, there we go. We are live. I believe we are live. I see us. I see us. I see us. Hello, everybody. Thank y' all for your patience and indulgence. Welcome to the Joy Reid Show. I'm just gonna let you guys know, I am fresh off of Delta Airlines, fresh from an airline ground stop, sitting on the tarmac for half hour for no reason. Airline travel has become a living hell. A 45 minute Delta shuttle flight from New York to D.C. took me about four and a half hours. So, yeah. And I have no idea why it is, but, you know, it doesn't make me confident that the guy from the real world, Boston, is in charge of our transportation department and he's over in everything from airline travel to train travel. It's gotten demonstrably worse since January and it was already not great customer service. But it should not take four and a half hours to get from New York to Washington, D.C. i'm just saying. But welcome to the Toy re show. Thank you all for being patient. I love you all sitting in the chat. Thank you so much. Let me shout out a couple of people who are in the chat. Protect your Peace is a TJRS member. Robe, 33, is a reader. That means that you're an UP subscriber and a member. And we really appreciate you guys. I'm going to shout out some more folks later in the show, but thank you very much. We really appreciate everybody who's joining up and teaming up and making the show successful. But okay, I want to start with a question. Has anybody checked on Donald Trump? I mean, seriously, do we need a wellness check here? I feel like he might need a wellness check. Now, we know that Donald Trump is a seasoned citizen, a senior citizen. He's an elderly gentleman. And we know that when people get older, they can tend to get a little bit erratic. Right. You know, you start to get a little destabilized. You can be a little discombobulated. I want to just go through a few things that Donald Trump has done recently. Okay. This is his latest attack on cnn. We're going to put this up. Donald Trump attacking cnn. He's apparently very upset with CNN because Natasha Bertrand, who is a fantastic reporter by the way, we used to book Natasha Bertrand on my old weekend show AM Joy. Natasha is brilliant. She's like 12 years old. She's a kid. She's very, very young. But a brilliant reporter who's now at cnn. Donald Trump was unhappy with her reporting that Donald Trump's big, beautiful bombs that he used to drop on Iran Even though Iran had not attacked us, probably didn't really have the impact that he claimed they did. He claimed that they obliterated Iran's nuclear capability. Natasha Berdrand should be fired. Donald Trump is now saying from cnn, I watched her for three days during fake news. Let's stop right there for a moment. Why are you watching CNN when you are overseas at a summit, a NATO summit representing the United States? Donald Trump, why are you sitting down and for three straight days watching cnn? Don't you have better things to do? But he said he watched her for three straight days and said she lied about the laptop from hell story and now she lied on the nuclear site story. I said he destroyed the Patriot pilots by making them look bad when in fact they did a great job, blah, blah, blah. He's upset because the facts are not in his favor when it comes to the attack on Iran. I want to now read you guys, CNN's response. We can put that up. CNN has actually responded. And I've been concerned that these news organizations would take the knee, would not do the right thing and stand by their journalists. We saw Terry Moran fired from ABC because of a tweet that he put up that Stephen Miller didn't like know. Speaking against the regime can get you jailed in some other countries, but here it can get you fired from your media job. CNN communications put out a statement which we're going to put up now, and they said we stand 100% beside Natasha Bertrand's journalism and specifically her and her colleagues reporting of the early intelligence assessment of the US attack on Iran's nuclear facility. CNN's reporting made clear that this was an initial finding that could change with additional intelligence. We have extensively covered President Trump's own deep skepticism about it. However, we do not believe it reasonable to criticize CNN reporters for accurately reporting the existence of the assessment and active accurately characterizing its findings, which are in the public interest, unquote. The reason that Natasha Bertrand is reporting that there is great doubt about whether the bombs, the, you know, 3,000 pound bunker buster bombs that the US dropped on Iran actually destroyed their nuclear capability is because all 16 intelligence agencies which already reported that they had no evidence that Iran was trying to build a nuclear weapon at all, none of them can confirm that there was actual total destruction, total obliteration, as Donald Trump that keeps saying, of the nuclear capabilities of Iran. In fact, the reporting, and this is the next piece I want to put up, is that the assessments of what Iran was doing in turn, you know, according to intelligence professionals, people who do this for a living is that Donald Trump's assessments of what Iran was doing were based more on vibes. Vibes, not intel. Vibes. And yet, and yet you had Donald Trump not only veering off of his original promise to be a president who would not start new dumb wars and get out of old dumb wars, he went all the way from there to George W. Bush 2.0. Regime change. Suddenly calling for regime change in Iran, saying make Iran great again, miga instead of maga, prompting even some of his own supporters to get upset. Thomas Massie, the Republican congressman who he now apparently is going to primary, even Marjorie Taylor Greene. Now, I want to play you guys a video because this is why I'm asking is Trump okay? Okay. I want you to look at the very quick climb down from A to Z from Donald Trump just in the last 24 hours. This was yesterday, I believe this, this, this drop yesterday. It was all over cable news yesterday. And here he is talking about what Israel and Iran were doing in response to the US Bombing. Here it is.
- [06:50]
Donald Trump
Violated the peace agreement and the ceasefire agreement.
- [06:53]
Christina Greer
Do you believe that Iran is still committed to peace?
- [06:56]
Zoran Kwame Mamdani
Yeah. Do they violated. But Israel violated it too.
- [06:59]
Joy Reid
Are you questioning if Israel is committed?
- [07:01]
Zoran Kwame Mamdani
Israel, as soon as we made the deal, they came out and they dropped the low of bombs, the likes of which I've never seen before. The biggest load that we've seen. I'm not happy with Israel. You know, when I say, okay, now you have 12 hours, you don't go out in the first hour, just drop everything you have on them. So I'm not happy with them. I'm not happy with Iran either. But I'm really unhappy if Israel is going out this morning because the one rocket that didn't land, that was shot, perhaps by mistake, that didn't land. I'm not happy if you about that. You know what we have, we basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the they're doing. Do you understand that?
- [07:52]
Joy Reid
Okay, you heard that, right? Donald Trump. So presidential dropping an F bomb on Bibi Netanyahu's Israel and on Iran because they will not obey him. Now, first of all, Donald, you have already let Bibi Netanyahu run freely and do whatever he wants with the weapons that we're providing him and the $3 billion a year we're giving him. I'm not sure why you think you can suddenly control him. He's going to do whatever he wants. You go check him. Boo. Certainly not you, but the F bomb laced, angry Trump from yesterday has now morphed into the Bibi loving Trump of today. I promise you, in 24 hours, he has gone from dropping F bombs on Bibi, saying he and Iran don't know what the F they're doing and dropping it like fully, you know, openly cussing, which was all over the news yesterday, to this. We're going to put this on screen. This is strange to say the least. This is Donald Trump using the CNN favorite phrase, breaking news in all caps. I was shocked to hear that the state of Israel, which has just had one of its greatest moments in history and is strongly led by Bibi Netanyahu, is continuing its ridiculous witch hunt against their great wartime prime minister. Bibi and I just went through hell. He and I just went through hell together fighting a very tough and brilliant longtime enemy of Israel, Iran. And Bibi could not have been better, sharper or stronger than in his love for the incredible holy land. Anybody else would have suffered his losses, embarrassment and chaos. Bibi Netanyahu was a warrior, all caps, like perhaps no other warrior in the history of Israel. And the result was something that nobody thought was possible. A complete elimination of potentially one of the biggest and most powerful nuclear weapons anywhere in the world. They didn't have nuclear weapons. I don't know what you're talking about, buddy. And it was going to happen soon. Soon. All caps. We were fighting literally for the survival of Israel. And there is nobody in Israel's history that fought harder or more competently than Bibi Netanyahu. Despite all of this, I just learned that Bibi has been summoned to court on Monday for the continuation of this long running. He has been going through this horror show since May of 2020. Unheard of. This is the first time a sitting Israeli prime minister has ever been on trial. He keeps going on politically motivated case. He talks about unfair charges. He talks about it's going to harm Bibi Netanyahu. He uses the all caps phrase witch hunt, which he used to use for himself. For a man who's given so much, so unthinkable, undeserved, immediately, he needs to have a pardon. The pardon needs to be given to this great hero who's done so much for the state of Israel. Nowhere in here, by the way, does he talk about U.S. interests. He talks about the fact that we just were destroying Israel's enemy. He talks about the fact that Bibi's been such a patriot to Israel. And he talks about Bibi's personal legal problems and Says he should be immediately pardoned, all caps immediately. And he calls it a travesty of justice. It cannot be allowed. This looks like something that maybe Bibi's PR would have written, but not the President of the United States. I don't think I've ever seen in my entire life. And I've been around a while and have been watching politics a while. A President of the United States writing in a lengthy screed. This is a lengthy screed without paragraph breaks, by the way. Not really great grammar. Defending a foreign leader who is under indictment in his own country and not even once mention the interests of the country he's supposedly governing and leading. And writing this screed while overseas at a NATO conference. Can someone explain what's going on? Is Trump okay? Is Trump being bribed by Bibi? Like, what's happening? Why is he suddenly Bibi Netanyahu's publicist? Because there's no US interests at stake in Bibi Netanyahu being on trial or indicted for corruption in Israel. That is Bibi's problem. That's a Bibi problem. That's not an America problem. Why is Donald Trump taking up that cost? What's going on? Is he okay? Because he was just cussing at him a day before and now all of a sudden he screeched and turned on a 180. And now all of a sudden he's ranting and raving. Not about his own problems, not about the United States interests, not about Iran defying the US and the so called ceasefire, which by the way is like shooting someone in the arm and then trying to shake hands. We bombed them. And then saying, why won't they make peace? Makes no sense. All right, that's a lot. But I want to now move on. But I just wanted to get that out. Meanwhile. Meanwhile, with all of that going on in this country. Last night an earthquake happened in New York City. And not the kind of earthquake that brings down buildings. I'm talking about the kind that shifts politics and humbles political parties. Zoran Kwame Mamdani, the Improbable candidate, a 33 year old pro Palestinian Democratic Socialist, local Queens politician, a state assemblyman in Queens, an immigrant born in Uganda, and to an anti colonialism scholar named Mahmoud Mamdani. And a filmmaker who you might know named Mira Nair. And now if you do not remember who Mirror Nair is, and this was a light bulb that went off in my head today. Mira Nair is the lady who directed the movie Mississippi Masala, which Denzel Washington started. That's who his mom is. And I just, I don't know why I just got that today when my wonderful producer gave me a full dossier on him. And I did just pinged in my head today. He's a defender of immigrants. He became a citizen at seven years old after coming here from Uganda. He's done hunger strikes with taxi drivers to try to win debt relief for them. He's focused on making the city more affordable, making bus fares free. He's really pushing to make housing more, you know, affordable. All of those things, somebody that you would never think that New York City would go for. Beat the Andrew Cuomo, the literal former governor of the entire state of New York. Cuomo was endorsed by all the money people, Michael Bloomberg. He had all Michael Bloomberg's money in endorsements. He had all the high key Democrats and the Democratic establishment came all the way from Washington and from states beyond to come and endorse him. He had all of that. And yet Mamdani beat him to become the Democratic nominee to be the next mayor of the Big Apple. Big, big news. Like last night, Harry Enton, when we were on CNN with my sore Abby Phillips called it David Dinkins level earthquake news. So now Mamdani gets to face Eric Adams, who is living on Fox and running as an independent because, you know, he's a cop and I guess he wants to lock up immigrants. So that's what is his bag. And of course, maybe Andrew Cuomo, because Andrew Cuomo kind of conceded, but now he's kind of hinting he might still run. Let's play a little bit of Mamdani's speech last night.
- [14:41]
Zoran Kwame Mamdani
Thank you. My friends.
- [14:53]
Andrew Cuomo
Tonight we made history. In the words of Nelson Mandela, it always seems impossible until it is done, my friends.
- [15:15]
Zoran Kwame Mamdani
We have done it.
- [15:20]
Andrew Cuomo
Okay, I will be your Democratic nominee for the mayor of New York City.
- [15:30]
Joy Reid
So that was that last night. I mean, this was an earthquake. I think that he was ahead in the poll. So this was not totally unexpected, but he walloped Andrew Cuomo. Let's listen to Andrew Cuomo's concession speaker speech.
- [15:45]
Zoran Kwame Mamdani
And having a vibrant campaign through November.
- [15:50]
Andrew Cuomo
I am qualified. I have an independent line that's done. And I am right now assessing that landscape and looking at the information, talking to people, talking to the stakeholders in my campaign about what, what that general election is going to look like. I can tell you there are a lot of people who have a lot of concerns.
- [16:15]
Joy Reid
And that was not the concession speech. That was actually him basically going back on the idea that he was conceding at All Andrew Cuomo still viable, apparently, in the race? Maybe. Let's bring in my pal, political scientist, podcaster, professor extraordinaire, and official New Yorker, Christina Greer. Hey, Chrissy.
- [16:32]
Christina Greer
Hi there. How's it going?
- [16:34]
Joy Reid
You know what? It's going pretty well for Mr. Mamdani, who literally shook the world last night. Give us your assessment. Harry Enton last night said that. He said this was nothing. This ground earth shaking has happened in New York City since David Dinkins became the nominee of the Democratic Party. Would you agree with that?
- [16:54]
Christina Greer
I would agree. I mean, I think, you know, many people thought that Zora Momdani would do pretty well. I don't think that they thought he would deliver the walloping that he did last night. Now, keep in mind, we still don't have all the numbers and they'll come in on July 1. But I was always of two minds, Joy. I said this night is either going to go by really quickly and we'll know something or it'll drag on for weeks and weeks. And the former applied. I think a lot of people, though, thought that it might go really quickly for Andrew Cuomo. But he didn't run a campaign, Joy. He ran a coronation. He didn't talk to the voters. He didn't touch the voters. There was no ground game. He didn't participate in any of the forums of which there were several. He only participated in two debates, two editorial board meetings, and that was it. He essentially, I say, ran a less is more tour where he had lots of endorsements by electeds, many black electeds in New York City and out of New York City. But that's only because people loved his dad. They assumed he would win. A lot of people are afraid to be on the wrong side of Andrew Cuomo. And so it was a fait accompli. So they thought they didn't realize. For the past several months, doranahamdani has been building a real groundswell. He's literally the only campaign you would see around the city with any sort of presence. And so had, you know, Andrew Cuomo and his donors been paying attention to the five boroughs and the activity that was happening there, they may have known that they had a bigger problem than their data security suggested.
- [18:20]
Joy Reid
And your. Your audio is low, so I'm. I don't know if you on your side can turn your. Turn your mic up just a little bit, Christina, so we can make sure that we can hear you. You know, it. The thing about it is this does remind me in some ways of sort of a Bernie Sanders you know, Hillary Clinton situation, where you have the progressive candidate, the sort of Bernie in the race that is really exciting. Young voters, new voters, people who are not frequent voters, and they come out in just huge numbers. And then older black voters go with the more establishment candidate. You saw James Clyburn come out and endorse Andrew Cuomo. He's the establishment candidate. You know, he's the Hillary V. Obama in the race. Right. And so the question then becomes, how do you then consolidate the Democratic Party again when they have such disparate interests? I mean, Andrew Cuomo put his legal problems aside, if you were capable of doing that. And I'm not sure that I'm capable of doing that, but he's put those aside. He is the ultimate establishment candidate. He isn't going to change anything about the way Democratic Party politics operates in the state of. In the city of New York. He just won't. He's a traditional Democratic politician. And if you don't want that, you're. You know what I mean? Like, you're going to go for Mamdani. But then the question is if you then are afraid of Mamdani. And I've talked to some people who are like, well, you know, know, he might ruin the city. You know, there were some Republicans around Abbey Philip with me last night who were like, he'll turn it into the 80s crack den that it was in the 80s in Times Square will fall apart. He's going to. He's going to raise taxes. You know, how do you bring those two halves together again in November and not have Eric Adams just walk in and win?
- [20:00]
Christina Greer
Well, and that is a very real possibility. And I keep telling people we have a long road to November 4th. Hopefully my sound is a little bit better. I'm not sure. Here's the thing, Joy. New Yorkers, we're many shades of blue. We are a very diverse city. We are not a progressive city. We have a lot of purple in this city. And so, Mamdani, keep in mind, the people who show up in June are not the people who show up in November either. The same people. And we have an abysmally low turnout, not just for primaries, but in general. It's pretty quite embarrassing. There are four groups that I always tell people you have to pay attention to, sort of see where they have gone traditionally. And that's the business community, collective freakout, the real estate community, collective freakout, labor unions, who haven't said much just yet, and Hasidic Jewish community. And they've been traditionally with Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams, those have been sort of the four big pillars that anyone who wants to be successful in the New York City mayoral election has to sort of tackle the vast majority of those, if not all four. The difference this time, Joy, though, is that there's so, especially post Covid, there's so many New Yorkers who are feeling pinched, even if they're not the working class New Yorkers you saw. He did very well with sort of upper middle class white voters, Upper west side Park Slope, he did well with that community. And they're not necessarily struggling, but people who are renters, people who are worried about their jobs, people who are worried about international politics and how it'll affect them not just financially, but morally as well. And so he tapped into a lot of different coalitions. And when I say his ground game was like an Obama 2008, he recognized he had to pull in new people, many people who were disaffected. And so I was of two minds where I thought one of two things would happen. One, when the federal government is in such chaotic disarray, some voters just want status quo and stability. Let's not move and start getting something new. The second option is when the federal government is in chaotic disarray. Some people are saying, well then now's the time to have bold choices and fortune favors the bold and let's just go for something because clearly the status quo isn't working for us. And we saw, at least in primary voters, that's what happened. But we are going to have to see, you know, and some of the critiques coming out today for people who don't really know New York City politics, they just know politics. And New York is a very nuanced place. No, he didn't do well among black voters, but black voters are the most strategic voters. They went with who they thought would win and who they know, which is Andrew Cuomo, his name was Daddy Mario Cuomo, who was a thrice term governor of New York State. And so there was this assumption that Andrew Cuomo would easily get across the finish line. And that's also how black people have voted. We don't necessarily vote for sort of people who have all these pie in the sky ideas because we know the capacity of the white voter as well. So that's not to say that Zoram Hamdani isn't going to try and chip away and talk to black voters moving forward, but in a very limited amount of time when you have a primary that actually wasn't his concern to try and convert Cuomo voters. It was to try and get young people who were so apoplectic about what's been happening in politics to get them off of the sidelines. They're already registered. They have voted in the past to get them to turn out in a primary.
- [23:16]
Joy Reid
Well, we're going to see what happens in the general because. And we're going to have to have to have you come back, Christina, because there's going to be a lot of drama because you know, Eric Adams is going to try to play the black card and try to keep some of his black vote as well, even though he's running as a right wing Republican on fox. I'm really not sure what that's about. And a cop that wants to use Rikers island to lock up migrants, you know, so I think there's going to be a lot of stuff about the immigration stuff, I think. But I think the cost of living, it's such a key issue in New York and it's so expensive to live there. It's gonna be interesting to see a Christina Greer, my friend, thank you very much. I appreciate you taking the time. Thank you. All right, let's. Thank you very much. Let's move on to the happenings in Washington, D.C. now, I'm sure that you guys are paying attention to this. Last last week when the Leonard Leo Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Tennessee law that bans gender affirming care for trans kids in their state, many liberals and progressives wondered, well, how low can they go and what will they do next to be cruel to regular people in this country? Well, now we know. On Monday, the Leonard Leo six freed the Trump administration. The regime, as we call it, to deport migrants to countries that they did not come from, have never been to have never set foot in and have known nothing about. They lifted a court order that had required that immigrants at least get a chance to challenge their deportations. So the regime is now free to send migrants again without hearings to as far away as Honduras, Libya, South Sudan, a nation on the brink of a violent civil war, by the way, countries that they're presumably paying to take these people and throw them into their prisons the way the regime is currently paying El Salvador by its autocratic leader Naib Bukele, who calls himself the world's coolest dictator. In a scathing 19 page dissent that was joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and Justice Elena Kagan, Justice Sonia Sotomayor just literally ruined and laid waste to the right wing majority saying that she could not in good conscience join quote, so gross an abuse of the court's discretion and writing that the court majority's action exposes thousands to the risk of torture and death and gives the Trump administration a win despite earlier violating the lower court's order. I'm going to put up a piece of her dissent. It says the following, quote, the the government has made clear in word and deed that it feels itself unconstrained by law, free to deport anyone anywhere without notice or an opportunity to be heard. She closed her dissent this way. The due process clause represents the principle that ours is a government of laws, not of men, and that we submit ourselves to rulers only if under rules. By rewarding lawlessness, the court once again undermines that fundamental principle. Apparently, the court finds the idea that thousands will suffer violence in far flung locales more palatable than the remote possibility that a district court exceeded its remedial powers when it ordered the government to provide notice and process to which the plaintiffs are constitutionally and statutorily entitled. That use of discretion is as incomprehensible as it is inexcusable. Respectfully but regretfully, I dissent. And I want to note for you now that the right wing majority, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, they didn't even bother to justify their decision in writing. Joining me now is Leah Littman, author of the recent New York Times bestseller Lawless, how the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories and Bad Vibes. They're going to put a picture of that up on your screen so you can know what that looks like so you can pick it up for yourself. We're also joined by the great Ellie Maal, author of the also New York Times bestselling book Bad Law, 10 popular laws that Are Ruining America. We're just teaming with bestsellers on this show. We got a lot of bestsellers. So we're going to put up their pictures of pictures so you can see them. Thank you both for being here. I want to also know that Ellie is the guy who I asked him to do it and he did it. Put a portion of, I believe a soda Mayor Descent to the ether be for the people. There's, there's Lawless. Hey, all, thanks for being here. I want to start, Leah, I want to go back to you first because the last time you were on it was the day that the Supreme Court did that ruling on trans care for trans kids and you had some thoughts about the Amy Coney Barrett angle of it. So I want to let you share that.
- [27:30]
Donald Trump
Yes. So what we were talking about is after the Chief Justice's majority opinion upheld the ban on gender affirming care for trans youth, reasoning that it didn't actually discriminate on the basis of sex or discriminate on the basis of gender identity. You know, two ridiculous conclusions. Justice Barrett wrote separately to say, well, but even if it did discriminate against trans youth, I would be okay with that, and I would still treat that law as presumptively unconstitutional. It was completely gratuitous and unnecessary. The Chief justice had already upheld the law on more narrow reasoning. And yet she still felt, still felt compelled to say, oh, and by the way, I think discrimination against the trans community would be perfectly fine, basically inviting states to do more of it.
- [28:14]
Joy Reid
Yeah, well, I mean, she's a handmade in her religious belief system. Shocker. And all of the people who have been writing hot takes in the mainstream media saying that, oh, my God, she's suitoring, she's becoming this moderate. Yeah. Wait to see what she does before you start suiting her up with a superwoman suit. Ellie Mastal, let's talk about this new ruling. The idea that you would take somebody who's from Cuba and send them to South Sudan, a country that may soon be enmeshed in a civil war, and so they can be locked in a wartime prison. It seems barbaric even for maga, but here we are. Your thoughts?
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Andrew Cuomo
Yeah, it's very bad right now. The, the, the thing that I want people to understand is that the way the Trump administration is doing this and what the Supreme Court is allowing them to do is to find a loophole in a treaty, an international human rights treaty called the Convention Against Torture. And just in case there are any young people, any young lawyers out there listening, if your boss asks you to find a loophole in a treaty called the Convention Against Torture, you're working for the bad guys. That's a good time to quit. Right? Because we should not be finding loopholes in the anti torture convention. But in any event, the loophole is if the government wants to send you away, wants to send you out of this country, and a judge determines that it cannot send you back to your home country because it is too dangerous in your home country. Right. Because you literally have proven to the judge that you will be tortured or killed or, or in some way brutalize, if you're sent back to your home country, then the government is allowed to suggest other countries to send you to. Right. But according to the convention, those countries have to be countries that aren't going to torture and brutalize and kill you. Right. The loophole is that if you've gone through the entire process, apparently according to the Supreme Court, if you've gone through the entire process and the judge says, okay, you can't send them to this country or that country. If the government later then says, okay, we're going to send you to a country that wasn't even on our initial list, that's okay. So you completely circumvent the convention against torture by sending somebody to a country that wasn't on the country that you initially said you were going to send them to. And that country can do torture. And that is what Trump is doing. He is sending people to places like South Sudan after not giving them a hearing on whether or not South Sudan is safe for them. And the Supreme Court said, yeah, that's cool. Yeah, that's fine. Let's get around the convention against torture.
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Joy Reid
It's so, it's so sick. But to come back to you for a moment, Leah, because one of the subheads of your book is conspiracy theories, right? And, and it seems to me that this all stems from the Trump Stephen Miller conspiracy theory, which he actually tried to use on New York. He said the reason that Mamdani won the election is because of the conspiracy by Democrats to import unlimited migrants to America. As if New York has not always been an immigrant rich city, suddenly they've conspired to bring in the brown baddies to put the other brown Muslim baddie in office. But there is a fundamental conspiracy theory at the heart of the immigration policy of this administration. And, and it is called White Replacement theory. It's something that Tucker Carlson used to pitch before he switched against Ted Cruz and became rational. And it's this idea that Democrats somehow led by George Soros, who apparently rules them, is attempting to import brown black Muslim, any non white immigrants that they can scoop up around the world in order to drown America in non Republican voters so that Republicans can't win elections because all the batty brown people vote Democratic because they think they're going to get free welfare. And that is the theory. And it is a, it is a fascist theory in the sense that it is strictly racial. You know, they talk about the other side playing the race card and this is the race card. This is absolute identity politics. They're saying we the country's becoming less white. And that is a conspiracy. Can you talk a little bit about why it is that the supposed learned lawyers of the Supreme Court seem to believe this theory too, because they seem to be acting on it in their rulings.
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Andrew Cuomo
Well, I would say that I think.
- [32:43]
Joy Reid
We lost Leah, so please go for it. Ellie.
- [32:45]
Andrew Cuomo
Yeah, well, I, I would say that there are a couple of reasons. First of all, Samuel Alito's brain has curdled. I mean, like, Samuel Alito is, is no longer irrationally human. I believe he is the kind of person that truly is sitting around every day with, watching Fox News just like everybody else. And so he 100% buys in to the white replacement theory. I would argue that Kavanaugh does too. I mean, like, you know, he's drinking his beers, he's watching Fox like it makes sense to him. So, like, there are a couple of Republican justices who are on that side. On the other side, you have the Republican justices, and Leah can speak to this more clearly than I can, but you have these Republican justices who basically act like anytime the president says national security, that gives him a free pass to do whatever he wants. Like, literally all he has to do is click his ears three times and say national security. And then the Constitution is moot. The Constitution can be thrown out of the window. That's generally how Roberts likes to play it. As long as it's a Republican president saying national security, Roberts will apparently let the president do anything. And that is the other way we get into white replacement theory. So if the president says, if the white supremacist premise, the white supremacist president says, oh, we've got replacement theory going on. John Roberts is like, well, I have this Constitution, but what can you do? The president said, so, yeah.
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Joy Reid
Leah, your thoughts on that?
- [34:12]
Donald Trump
Yeah, so I think we should understand what the Supreme Court and the Republican justices are doing is basically a project of anti animus laundering, where they are willing to launder the animus of the Trump administration into the language of the law and tell the Trump administration basically just lie better and we'll let you get away with it. This is the lesson the Trump administration learned from the first travel ban. After all, you know, the president immediately fired off a Muslim ban that was obviously written with animus. And then after lower courts invalidated it, they do a slightly revised version that they say, oh, we're going through some magic intergovernmental process that just somehow produced another Muslim ban and the Supreme Court let them partially implement it, and then they let them finally implement the third and final version of the Muslim ban, basically saying, well, the government kind of tried hard enough and went through enough motions in order to again cleanse this still animist laden Muslim ban of its origins in anti Muslim animus. And so I think that is the lesson that the Republican justices have taught the Trump administration. And so the Trump administration now thinks we can get away with this. I'd also note that the Supreme Court's recognition of the federal government's power over immigration is itself rooted in. In replacement theory. The Supreme Court cases, known as the Chinese exclusion cases from the late 1800s, which are the first Supreme Court cases to recognize the federal government's power to deport people and remove them and exclude them, literally justified saying Congress had the power to do so based on the idea that it was up to the political branches to decide whether, quote, foreigners of a different race presented a threat to the country. So the very origins of the immigration power were rooted by the Supreme Court in a kind of replacement theory.
- [36:01]
Andrew Cuomo
Yeah. I would just add really quickly, in my book, I talk about how the Immigration Nationalization act, our kind of fundamental immigration law, was passed based on the science of a Nazi eugenicist, like an American guy that we then exported to Nazi Germany to teach them how to do eugenics, like we were doing it here in the States. So, like, our entire immigration system is really based on racism like that. That is its beating heart. And so it's not all that surprising that the justices are going for it.
- [36:35]
Joy Reid
We're having some gremlins that have knocked Leah Lippman off. And I want to stay with you for a minute, Ellie, while we try to restore her connection. Because my understanding of the Alien Exclusion act, the acts that were passed in the early 20th century, which Stephen Miller absolutely loves and wants to restore, even though he would probably not have made it into the country based on them, because his family actually were Jewish refugees from Europe. But he apparently wouldn't maybe even let his own family in at this point, and especially if they tanned, wouldn't be able to get in at all, was based on the idea that the 1890 census had a certain percentage of white people and non white people people. And the goal of immigration was thought to be to preserve that same mix, that we could never allow the country to become less white than it was in 1890.
- [37:14]
Andrew Cuomo
Is that true, Ellie, that my read of history is like yours? It is. The white folks got to a number where they felt like they could still maintain control over this country via their whiteness. And they've been trying basically to keep the quota, the. The ratio of whites to non whites in this country the same ever since, since about the 1890s. And we've seen it's not just the 1890 census that we call the 1920 census the law census, because that was the census that early showed the massive influx of immigrants to the country, the massive redistribution of people from rural areas to the cities. And that is the only census, the 1920 census, where we just didn't. We just didn't reapportion. We just threw it away. We just literally acted like it didn't exist. And when we came back with 1930, the switch that we did was that we changed how many people were allowed to be in Congress. Right. Most of your listeners know we have 435 Congress people, but a lot of people don't know. It wasn't always that 435. In fact, every census, every time we added population, we would add Congress people. Right. So to keep the level of representation basically standard, no matter how many people we had. But after the 1920 census showed the power of the cities growing, we cut it off and we instead limited the number of congress people to 435. That's where we've been since 1929. Without increasing representation. Which one of the reasons why America right now is the least representative democracy in. Among major Democratic powers, right? Like our ratio of congresspeople to citizens is the highest in the developed world because of the racism inherent in. In things like in the things that we're talking about.
- [39:02]
Joy Reid
I mean, it's even why we have two Dakotas. Like, I mean, they literally, like, we'll just apportion it out so that there'll be two Dakota Senate. You know, there'll be four senators from the. The one thing that was the Dakota. They made it two of them. They're like, we'll just get two. There's a. Why is there a Wyoming? There are less people in Wyoming than there are in Washington, D.C. why do they get a whole state? You know, it doesn't make sense because gives him two more senators. It gives him more power. Leah, let me ask you this, because I, and I. I've talked to Ellie about this before, and I'm going to bring you into Asian. I do believe that John Roberts is a monarchist. I believe that the majority of these, Leonard Leo, six are monarchists. I believe that they actually fundamentally disagree with George Washington that America should have a king. I think they think that we should. They just want the king to be a Republican. Is she. Is she not there? Have I lost Leanne? Sorry. Oh, we've lost Lee again. I don't know what's going on. Leah's got a gremlin. We are going to figure out why the regime is targeting Leah Littman and not letting her be on the Joy Reid show. I apologize to Leah, maybe if we can bring her back another time, but we're just not going to be able to make it work. So I'm going to stay with you, Ellie, on this. I mean, I do. It seems to me that their fundamental goal is to create an American monarch. They just want that monarch to be a Republican. They're consistent. If you go back to Bush v. Gore, where they were essentially saying, we set aside even the counting of votes and we will just keep on, you know, nickeling and diming this thing until we get to a George W. Bush presidency. We'll do it however we have to do it. And then you get to Donald Trump and they do the same thing. They say, well, we know Article 3 exists in the, you know, in the 14th Amendment, and we know it says you can't be an insurrectionist, but, you know, a 12 year old can't get on the ballot. If a State says you're 12, you can't run for president, they can knock that person off. But if a state says you're an insurrectionist, you can't be on the ballot, they're like, yeah, no, not if it's Donald Trump. And it does feel like the whole goal. And I feel like Sonia Sotomayor was kind of screaming that in her Trump v. United States dissent, where she was saying, y' all are trying to make this man a king. Am I hysterical for thinking that?
- [40:56]
Andrew Cuomo
Look, four of the Supreme Court justices actively worked on the Bush v. Gore campaign for George W. Bush. This is not an accident. They didn't just end up in this here. They were chosen because of these tendencies. Leia's back. I'm just gonna let her. She was. Leah, they're asking you about the monarchy. The monarchy ism of John Roberts.
- [41:18]
Donald Trump
Sorry, my Internet is broken. And I'm pretty sure it's Sam Alito. It's a whole.
- [41:24]
Joy Reid
It's 100. Sam Alito. Sam, you've got better things to do. Go listen to like old Rush Limbaugh episodes, you know, you wanna.
- [41:32]
Donald Trump
Does he have better things to do, though?
- [41:33]
Joy Reid
Yes, we think. Fly an ugly flag in front of your house. Sam, do something else. Go get your wife in order. Go on, please, Leah, go.
- [41:43]
Donald Trump
His wife does that.
- [41:45]
Andrew Cuomo
Yeah.
- [41:47]
Donald Trump
To be referring to the monarchical view of the court. You know, I think a lot of.
- [41:53]
Joy Reid
What we're going to stop you right there because you're Internet. No, it's not working. It's not working. Okay. Guys, we're gonna have to probably re. We're gonna have to rebook Leah Lippman. We love Leah so much. She's one of our favorite favorites. But your Internet, my friend, is not going to allow you to be great. It will not let you be great. But I want to congratulate you on your New York Times bestselling book. Let's put up a picture again, if we could. It's called Lawless, and it is. It's already a New York Times bestseller for very good reason, because it's trying to explain the madness that we're seeing today. We're going to bring Leah back another time, but her Internet is not going to work. So it is down to you, Ellie Mystal, to explain why these men are trying or and one woman are trying to turn us into a monarchy again.
- [42:39]
Andrew Cuomo
Right. So like I said, they all work for, most of them work for Bush v. Gore. But it's also a question of where they find it easier to execute power as a Republican. Right. They love the court because the court is not elected and the court can do horribly unpopular things that conservatives want without having to answer to the people. Right. The president, while an elected official is able to wield power again without direct connections to the people, more often than not. Right. You've got, you've got a long term, you've got serious military powers, as I said, you can always say national security and get a lot done that way. We see Trump using executive orders a lot of time. That's a much easier way for Republicans to wield power than Congress than through the strictures of the people. And we see this working in real time. Right? Yeah, because we see how difficult it's been for, for the Trump Republicans to pass his big, beautiful death panel bill, even though he controls his party, controls both houses of Congress. Right. So even with Congress, even with the Senate, even with the, and even with the Democrats being so kind of feckless they can't filibuster effectively most of the Republican ideas, they still can't pass the bill. Right. And that's because their ideas, Trump's ideas, are extremely unpopular. But the court understands that most of their ideas are extremely unpopular. And so they prefer to have power in the courts. And when the power can't only be done by the courts, they prefer to have the power in the presidency because those are the most inculcated from the will of the people. So it's how they win. Democrats, by contrast, understand that their ideas are popular. If they could only kind of get Them get out of their own way. Their ideas are winning ideas.
- [44:33]
Joy Reid
Let's talk a little bit about war powers, because I've heard a lot of people tried to say that Donald Trump and I don't know, I feel like the whole we should impeach Trump because he bombed Iran. It's so exhausting for people to still be talking about impeachment. Impeachment is ineffective without the ability to convict. And the United States has impeached multiple presidents but has never convicted a single one. Andrew Johnson didn't get convicted. He was acquitted. I think by one vote. They attempted to impeach Bill Clinton. That didn't work. He was not convicted. Richard Nixon never even got impeached. He resigned before they could impeach him. And Trump was impeached twice, not convicted. The whole impeachment thing is, you know, I was very much for Trump being impeached both times. But unless you can have Republican senators, to be honest, who have the courage to convict and we just don't, they don't exist. They are simpering saps who are just going to take the knee to Trump. They will back down from the one thing they could do to write themselves better in the, in the annals of history. They won't do it. So I don't want to talk about impeachment, but there is a question right now about war powers and whether or not presidents, and not just Trump should be legally able to bomb other countries without Congress giving them authorization. Is there anything in the law that speaks to this? Because presidents, they all do it.
- [45:51]
Andrew Cuomo
Yeah, there is. Right. Technically, it is Congress that is allowed to do declare war, not the President, because we don't live in a monarchy. Right, but that's on paper, in practice, and this has happened throughout multiple administrations with multiple presidents from both parties and multiple Congresses controlled by both parties. Congress has ceded its power. And this is like, I think a, a, a big, think, 3,000 foot point, 30,000 foot point, about like why we're in this point that we are as a country. Over the past 30 or 40 years, Congress has repeatedly ceded power seeded specifically the war powers to the President because whenever the president starts saying let's go to war, their poll numbers go up. Congress, people are afraid of opposing a president on the war path for reasons that I can't fully understand. We are a violent country. And so being tough and strong on war plays well, polls well with the people. And so Congress has repeatedly ceded its right, its ability to constrain a president who wants to start a war. So now when you start to try to claw back the power that Congress already gave away. It's just. It's really hard to do. Right. So much of this starts with Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon in Vietnam. Right. And the idea that Vietnam was not a declared war. And so that was a way for Congress by not declaring it a war. Congress, well, what can we do? It's not a declared war. The President can take military actions without declaring war. Okay. They kind of made that up for. For the Vietnam special. Right. But it allowed Congress to escape accountability for our disaster in Vietnam and put it all on the presidents. Right. Put it all on lbj, Put it all on. On Nixon and. And Vietnam killed lbj. Right. Like, just absolutely destroyed him. Right. And so that's why when we go now, fast forward to Desert Storm, whatever thing we're doing. You know, fast forward to all of our wars for oil. Fast forward to Afghanistan. Fast forward to Iraq and Yellow Cake and Colin Powell lying to everybody. All of it then redounds back to the President, and Congress gets to pretend like it has nothing to do with it. Well, now Congress basically has nothing to do with it because they gave the powers away. You're asking, could Congress claw it back? Yes, absolutely. A strong, idealistic Congress could tell the president, no, you cannot do this. That is a legal thing that is in our system of government. But I see nothing from Congress that suggests they have the will or the desire to. To claw that party back. I honestly believe that Congress is, at this point, they're just there for the parking spaces. They like being told their congressmen they're not there to actually wield the power of the American Congress.
- [48:51]
Joy Reid
Well, and I have to say, and you know, and I will agree with you, that the Congress no longer essentially exists. We essentially have a Duma in the United States. There are some dissenting members. You have a few people who speak out. But, you know, the Congress, to me in the US is really not that much different than the Knesset in Israel, which kind of just rubber stamps whatever their prime minister wants to do. The Duma in Russia, which just rubber stamps it. You know, there's a. There's sort of the appearance that we have a representative government, but you don't. Unless you have, like, a tip o' Neill, that is. That is so full of hubris that he believes himself to be, you know, the leader of the free world or a Nancy Pelosi who is just so strong that she is going to insist on the power of the speakership. Those are the kind of speakers who actually stand up to presidents. We don't have that anymore. And I would. The only thing I would differ with what you said, Ellie, is I don't even think it was Vietnam. If you think about it, the last declared war we had was World War II. And after that, we have gone to quote, unquote, war, or at least made war on Korea, which has resulted in North Korea looking at Japan getting nuked and being like, oh, we need nukes now. They have nukes too, and they're still in a software war with South Korea. We have done actions, not just in Iraq, twice, once to take our oil, you know, because make sure that we had access to the oil we think is ours in Kuwait. But you go Back to the 1950s, Eisenhower, the same president who said the military industrial complex will destroy us all when he left office earlier in his career, allowed the CIA to wage, to essentially make war on Iran, on Chile, on the Democratic Republic of Congo, killing Patrice Lumumba, their democratically elected leader, getting.
- [50:33]
Andrew Cuomo
Mostly jailed in South America, right?
- [50:36]
Joy Reid
All throughout South America, we were destabilizing and overthrowing governments at will. And the idea of the arrogance of the United States to literally do acts of war. You know, we were bombing Cambodia. We didn't have a war against Cambodia, we were bombing them, right? I mean, you think about Libya, okay, maybe people didn't like Muammar Gaddafi, but wow, we went and put a drone up and killed them. You know what I mean? Like, do we get to do that? Do we get to decide who gets to live and die in other countries? You don't like their politics, you don't like something about them, or maybe they've done something in the past. The other day, Ellie, I have to, I have to bring you into this. Last night on cnn, I was on with my friend Abby, Phillip, and someone said that, that Donald, that our bombing of Iran, one of the gentlemen that was on the set with me said that this was about the Iran hostage crisis and the various act of terror by Hezbollah, an Iran proxy in the like 80s. I've never heard of delayed action warfare. So essentially they take our hostages in the 70s and we bomb them in 2025. Does that even make sense? Is there a War Powers act for that, for delayed response retaliation?
- [51:39]
Andrew Cuomo
No, they're making it up as they go along. They're making it up again because they understand Trump's poll numbers were tanking. He can't pass his bill, his actions are unpopular. He's deploying troops on the streets of Los Angeles. So let's have a war let's have some bombing. That always tends to get people to rally around the flag. Joy, I've argued, and I don't say this lightly, but our country needs to be sanctioned. We are the bad guys on the world stage. We are a menace to not only free people everywhere, but the. We are a menace to peaceful people everywhere at this point. And I'm not even going to say that we've only been a menace for the past three or four months, right? Like when, when does the international community decide that enough is enough? I know we're rich. I know we've got a lot of money. I know that people want to buy things from our country because we're rich or want to sell things to our country because we're rich. But at some point, the international community has to stand up to us because we are a bad guy on the world stage, right? And so we should be sanctioned. We should be sanctioned and rebuked for these illegal, unnecessary bombings in Iran in a conflict that does not, that does not involve us, right? Like we have to be stopped through the same kind of means that we have that our country and others have used to rebuke a North Korea or a China or name a rogue state. We are the rogue state and other countries need to start treating us like that.
- [53:23]
Joy Reid
Ellie Mustall, always such a shy and retiring figure who never tells us what he thinks or feels. We have to drag it out of him every single time. Ellie, my style, my friend. Thank you very much. Much appreciated. Enjoy the rest of your night. Thank you. Cheers. And I want to thank Leah Lippman once again. And we are so sorry about not being able to get your connection to work. Leah, we owe you a repeat. We'll bring you back on because we love hearing what you have to say. Your book is brilliant. Her book is called Lawless. Ellie's book is called Bad Law. Both of these are New York Times best selling books. You should read them both if you want to try to understand the madness that's going on in our Supreme Court. We are going to sort of, sort of bring it to a close. We're going to start to bring this plane down to a landing. But I have an important announcement that I have to make. This is very important, this little show, the Joy Reid Show. In the course of just two short weeks in existence, it was born on June 9th in the year of our Lord 2025. Today, as of June 25th, it's a couple weeks later, we have already reached 2 million streams on this channel. That is huge. And we are so thankful. We want to thank everybody that has liked, shared, subscribed. Keep doing that. I'm going to shout out a couple of people. Michael Sneed, welcome to Team TJRS. Pamela Watson, welcome to Team TJRS. Tammy, welcome to Team TJRS. Gail Map, Jackie Nome. Yolanda McBride. Pamela Williams Gates. Angela Porter. I think it's Melo. Kitty97. Veronica B. Walton. Beverly. I love a Beverly. That's a great name. Protect your peace. We talked about you earlier. Thank you all, everyone who has subscribed and like, keep doing that. Share, share, share. And hit that like button. And hit that subscribe button. It's free to subscribe, but if you want to become a Team TJRS member, it's just a wee bit of coins and you're going to get some fun freebies. We are going to do a exclusive chat with our Team TJRS members. We are scheduling that as we speak. We're going to try to do them at the top of the month. So be ready. And if you're not yet a Team TJRS member, you can join and then you can be part of that chat. It's going to be an ask me anything. You're going to get to ask me questions and I will be the interviewee and you can ask questions of me and find out some things that you want to know. All right, y' all, thank you so much. Thank you all for coming in and staying, sticking around. I know we started a little late today, but blame it on the guy from the real world who does not know how to run the transportation department. This is why television hosts are great. I'm a television host. But you don't put television hosts in charge of government agencies. You want real professionals in charge of those things so that they actually function. Because right now our government don't work good. It don't work good because it's being run by cartoon characters, TV hosts and Dr. Oz. This is not good. And also the guy from the Apprentice who's literally tweeting at CNN and freaking out about a single reporter demanding she be fired because he wants North Korea style coverage on the regular airwaves and not just on Fox. Woo Saw. Thank you all very much for joining. We appreciate you. And we'll see you on the next the Joy Reach out Bye bye day.