- 2 hours ago
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:01Good evening from New York. I'm Chris Hayes. Breaking news at this hour. We have some exclusive
00:05reporting tonight from MS Now about a top Trump official directly intervening in the effort to
00:11deceive the American people about the killing of Renee Good by ICE earlier this month. Now,
00:16we've known for a while now the Trump Department of Justice is refusing to investigate Jonathan
00:21Ross, the ICE officer who killed Good. Instead, the DOJ wanted to investigate Renee Good and her
00:27grieving widow. And it's now previously reported that a half dozen leaders of the Justice Department's
00:33Civil Rights Division resigned in protest over the decision not to investigate Ross, something that
00:38happens quite often in law enforcement shootings. Separately, several federal prosecutors who are
00:43based in Minnesota, including the number two in the office, also resigned in protest of the decision
00:49to investigate Good's widow. We've also learned that the FBI supervisor in Minneapolis, a person who
00:55sought to open investigation into the killing of Good, again, which would be essentially standard
00:59practice, stepped down in protest over what the Trump DOJ is doing. Now, thanks to MS Now reporters
01:06Karolenic and Ken Delaney, and we know that it was aides in the office of Deputy Attorney General
01:11Todd Blanche that directed federal investigators in Minnesota to shut down the investigation into the
01:18killing of Good and instead probe the victim for possible criminal liability. Three people briefed on
01:27the discussion say those aides wanted a criminal investigation into Renee Good, who was shot three
01:35times at point-blank range while trying to drive away from officers in her Honda Pilot. A federal judge
01:42rejected a warrant to investigate Good, citing the fact that the woman had died. These revelations come
01:50as thousands spent the day braving absolutely frigid sub-zero temperatures to protest to what's
01:56happening in Minneapolis and stand up for their friends, neighbors, and community. Today, more than 100
02:02clergy members were arrested at a demonstration at the Minneapolis airport. They're calling for airlines to
02:06stop working with the Trump administration to deport detainees from their computer community.
02:11It was just one element of the collective action we saw across the state today. Hundreds of local
02:16workers, a number of labor unions participating in a general strike, bringing much of the city to a
02:21standstill, something we really haven't seen in this country citywide in decades. As one participating
02:27bar owner explained to the Washington Post, quote, this is what the world's going to look like if you take
02:31our
02:31hard-working neighbors away. Post also reports that some cafes stayed open not as places of business but as
02:37free community spaces to allow demonstrators to stay warm, make signs, drink free coffee.
02:43And people who work in organizing spaces will tell you this label level of labor solidarity is hard to
02:49come by these days. It speaks to just how truly disgusted people are feeling. Regular folks,
02:55apolitical people, we have read interview after interview after interview with them,
02:59have become radicalized by the way they're seeing ICE treat their friends and neighbors.
03:06Have you ever gone out to these sort of things before? Never. Never. I've never protested in my
03:10life. My brother, my brother's here, he does it all the time. I've never. I got, dude, I, like I
03:15said,
03:15I'm far enough away but close enough and I'm sitting in my cushy house and looking and get mad and
03:20I,
03:21I, yeah, I think they're just trying to scare people and, you know, but, but, but why shoot
03:27people? My, no, you know what really pisses me off is the fact that they detain people, cuff them,
03:31and then still beat out of them. They tell you it's immigrants, only immigrants. It's anybody.
03:38I have friends that got detained and all they were doing was driving home from work.
03:42What the? It sounds like you don't fit the definition of the, uh,
03:46I'm not paid to be here like everybody says. What is that? I got to work in the goddamn morning,
03:52just like everybody else. What? Yeah, you don't fit the definition of the, uh, the, you know,
03:58anti-fascist terrorists that, uh, you know, that were labeled that I'm labeled now. Yeah, exactly.
04:04What the is that? I'm just, you're trying to stand up for community, dude.
04:08I'm trying to stand up for my community. That is, of course, what Renee Good was doing
04:12before she was killed by ICE, something the Trump administration wanted to criminally charge her
04:17for posthumously, apparently. I'm joined now by one of the MS reporters who broke the story.
04:24Carol Lennig is a senior investigative reporter, coauthor of Injustice, How Politics and Fear
04:28Vanquished America's Justice Department. Carol, this is great reporting and also illuminating,
04:32because one of these stories where we could sort of see dots, you know, from the outside,
04:37but not the connection, like we saw the resignation. So tell us about what was the directive folks
04:42received from Maine justice via Todd Blanche's aides.
04:49Chris, first, thank you so much for focusing on this issue. Uh, I think it's really important
04:54because Americans are calling me and our fellow MSNOW reporters constantly with tips and suggestions
05:02about what's happening in Minnesota. Sources are taking some great risks inside government because
05:08this is making them livid and sort of disgusted with their government. And I'm quoting them about
05:14that. I'm not a partisan. I just want to emphasize, I think it's really important to focus on Minnesota
05:19because the whole world is looking at what's going on here. And that's why I've spent a week,
05:24along with my colleague Ken, trying to nail this story of what happened with the Renee Good investigation,
05:30what happened when an FBI agent tried to open a civil rights investigation in the hours and days
05:37after she had been killed while unarmed and trying to pull away from officers who tried to detain her.
05:44So what we learned was this, that after agents in Minneapolis did what they would normally do in this
05:53kind of shooting with a federal officer of an unarmed civilian began to open up an investigation into
05:59the shooting. They wanted to get a search warrant for her car, which had been taken away from the scene
06:04because they wanted to reconstruct the ballistics for a civil rights investigation of the officer.
06:10It doesn't mean the officer did something wrong. It means that when a federal officer shoots and kills
06:15somebody, we look into it to make sure that the use of deadly force was appropriate. So that investigation
06:22went nowhere because the folks in Todd Blanche, Deputy Attorney General Blanche's office directed
06:29that the U.S. attorney, the acting U.S. attorney there shutter that investigation and that FBI agents
06:35instead redraw the search warrant with a different subject. In other words, instead of a civil rights
06:42investigation, the subject matter was going to be a Renee Good as a suspect attacking a federal officer
06:50or what's called in parlance AFO, assault on a federal officer. What's so unusual about this,
06:57Chris, and the reason I really wanted to verify and corroborate and ultimately report this, what's so
07:03shocking is that a magistrate judge shut down this warrant and said no. And it's not that shocking now
07:11that you know what it's about, but it's just not normal for a federal magistrate judge to say to a
07:17prosecutor, you haven't met this really low burden of proof that there might be a crime here. The
07:23judge turned to the prosecutors, I'm told by sources, and said, she's dead. We are not going to proceed.
07:33That is, I mean, that detail that a magistrate judge said no is, again, I think the context,
07:38the sort of baseline here is important because we've now seen these things that were unthinkable become
07:42quite common. Grand juries refusing to indict, for instance, magistrate judges dinging federal
07:50prosecutors. I mean, these are kind of 99.9% propositions. I don't think that's an exaggeration,
07:56honestly. I think in the ordinary course of things, it's probably a 999 times out of a thousand kind
08:02of thing. We're talking about like incredibly rare. We got news just a day ago that a federal magistrate
08:07judge dinged the federal prosecutors over a possible either warrant or charge of Don Lemon.
08:13So this, what you're saying is, and this is previously unreported, they wanted to run a,
08:19get a warrant to search the car in furtherance of a criminal investigation into the deceased Renee
08:26Good for having assaulted a federal officer, as opposed to in furtherance of a civil rights,
08:33an open-ended civil rights inquiry into the nature of the use of force.
08:39That's right. And you can now see if, even if there were more warrants later after this one
08:45was rejected, which we're trying to understand what happened after this, after the judge said,
08:50no way, you can see why this is so important to figure out because it was the first bomb that
08:59detonated in federal law enforcement in Minnesota about this death. It led to six prosecutors who
09:06work in Maine justice saying we're retiring and resigning earlier. We didn't want to work in the
09:12civil rights division unit that investigates police shootings if we're not allowed to investigate this
09:17one, but we're really mad about this. It led to six federal prosecutors in Minneapolis saying
09:23we're out, including the number two who had been the acting U.S. attorney and had a lengthy
09:31career as a career prosecutor and had led the investigations of fraud of NGOs in Minnesota,
09:39by the way. It also, now we know today, it led to a FBI agent who was a top supervisor
09:46resigning in the
09:47last several hours because she was disgusted and very disturbed by the handling of this shooting
09:56investigation, which she was involved in and helped oversee. So every which way that the government
10:02has handled this death and this shooting by a federal officer, including the president of the United
10:08States saying it's justified and the vice president saying it's justified, every single which way it
10:14has really harmed this city and our justice department and our sense of justice in Minneapolis.
10:22Just to reiterate, you know, I think this is obvious and people know this, but the individuals
10:25you're talking about in the Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Maine Justice,
10:29in the Minnesota field office and the FBI agent, these are all career officials. These are all people who
10:35are civil servants. They're not like appointees. They're not like people of, you know, they're not
10:40political holdovers from the Biden administration, et cetera, et cetera. I want to read the paragraph
10:44in your reporting about the FBI supervisor. Tracy Mergen, an FBI supervisor in the Minneapolis field
10:50office who oversees fraud and public corruption cases, resigned in frustration over the handling by
10:54the Justice Department leadership of the good shooting investigation and the pivot of the original
10:58search warrant subject, according to two of the sources. Mergen is said to be frustrated as well
11:02with the Trump administration's decision to treat protesters in Minnesota as possible domestic
11:06terrorists and conduct mass arrests of people peaceably protesting, according to two people
11:11familiar with her decision. Again, this is an FBI supervisor we're talking about here who is so
11:18broken up by the behavior coming from the White House direction that she's leaving her post.
11:26That's right. That's right. I think there's such an interesting connection or analogy, I guess, between
11:37how now people who had the job, a public service job to uphold the constitution, to equally administer the
11:46law, to carefully and faithfully be honest with the court about when they have evidence that there's an
11:52actual crime. Those people are saying, hey, the rule of law is being monkeyed around with in a way
11:58that I can't stomach anymore. And on the other side, you see Minnesotans, and I hope no one takes any
12:05offense about the regionalism I'm about to describe, but, you know, Minnesotans with their, by gosh,
12:11by golly, this just isn't right. There's a parallel element going on there where they're saying,
12:17wait a minute, this isn't okay that ICE agents are detaining five-year-old children and stopping
12:25off-duty police officers because they're brown and blocking them in with their cars and threatening
12:32them until they identify themselves as a police officer. This is not, you know, somebody's
12:37monkeying around with the foundation of what makes America special. No, I think this is such an important
12:43point as we look at these images today and we're going to talk a little bit about that this shared
12:47sense that there's something very wrong here and some lines being crossed is not just the people in
12:52the streets today. It's not just random observers or, you know, residents of Minnesota or people looking,
12:58but people in the deepest parts of the federal government tasked with meeting out justice,
13:03lifetime law enforcement officials who are having exactly the same reaction as confirmed by your
13:07excellent and careful reporting today. Carol, I think it's such a gift to have you. Thank you so much.
13:13Thank you, Chris. Thanks for focusing on this.
13:16You bet. All right. Coming up as ICE agents snatch young children and toddlers,
13:20the outrage flooding Minneapolis streets. That's next.
13:26This administration has clearly, clearly been caught off guard by the strength and the persistence
13:31and the effectiveness of the protests against Trump's agents occupying essentially the state of
13:36Minnesota. Today's general strike against ICE was no exception. I mean, hundreds of businesses closed,
13:41thousands marching in the streets peacefully in absolutely like truly brutal subzero temperatures.
13:48I love this sign. I saw it as a protester. It says, for those who believe in paid agitators,
13:52you could not pay me to be out in this weather, but for our neighbors will freeze for free.
13:58I think by now, even Donald Trump, and it's pretty clear actually, understands this crisis is a
14:04political problem for him, for the White House. Because day after day after day, we are inundated
14:11with videos and headlines that are both dystopian and unfathomably cruel. Like, for instance, the story
14:17of the five-year-old child who was detained by federal agents in Columbia Heights, Minnesota,
14:22earlier this week, Liam Ramos was used as bait by the agents who marched him to his own front door
14:30and instructed him to knock to lure out any family members inside. The boy and his father were then
14:37sent to a Texas detention facility where, as far as we know, they still are. Three other students from
14:42the same school district have been apprehended in recent weeks, including a 10-year-old girl who's
14:46detained with her mother on the way to class. And to be clear, this isn't just happening in
14:50Minneapolis. In Portland, Oregon, for example, federal agents detained an entire family,
14:55including a seven-year-old girl, while she was seeking emergency medical care at a hospital.
15:01The administration insists, although increasingly gamely, this is all in pursuit of public safety.
15:06They are targeting, quote, the worst of the worst. But I don't know anyone who feels safe for
15:09knowing that Trump's agents are rounding up toddlers and elementary school students.
15:14Lidia Polgreens is an opinion columnist in the New York Times. Her latest piece is titled,
15:17In Minneapolis, I Glimpsed a Civil War. And she joins me now. It's good to have you here. You
15:22just filed this great column on Minnesota, a place that you have roots, where your sort of home is
15:26from, and where you were reporting watching the growth of this sort of civil infrastructure come
15:33together. And as you see it on the street today, what can you tell us about what you saw there?
15:36So it's interesting because I hear a lot of people describing these as protests. And I think that
15:41that's actually not quite right, because what I saw was actually an incredibly organized resistance
15:49response to a complete catastrophe, something that is unfolding in residential neighborhoods that are
15:56filled with little bungalows. You know, these raids are happening not on giant commercial thoroughfares.
16:03They're happening block by block. And the organizing that has happened that has sprung up
16:08is really a block by block response. You know, I, um, one morning while I was in Minneapolis,
16:14rolled up on a street corner in South Minneapolis, just a couple blocks away from his school.
16:18And I found a, uh, 50 something year old solar energy consultant who, uh, is a parent at a nearby
16:25high
16:26school who had gotten involved because she was, um, you know, concerned about what was happening
16:31and through a parent group. And, uh, just right, right before, um, I had gotten there, she had witnessed and
16:38filmed as some, uh, I say agents pulled a, uh, uh, you know, two girls, one who was, it seemed
16:45to be a teenager
16:46and the other one who was maybe 12 years old and a little white dog, like in a pickup truck.
16:52And what seemed to
16:53have happened was that this, these, these girls were on their way to, you know, do school drop off. And
16:57so you have ice
16:58agents who were, who were there patrolling around, trying to pick up kids on their way to school,
17:03nab their parents, whatever. And so this woman that I met, Hillary Oppmann was like, this is,
17:07this is criminal. How, how can I just stand by and let this happen? And, you know, on street corner
17:13after street corner, there are people who are commuting, communicating with one another over,
17:17um, you know, you know, these, these, these encrypted, uh, chat apps. And, uh, you know,
17:23they have, they have big networks to talk about things that are happening citywide. And then
17:27small, micro, just a few blocks networks where they talk about, okay, there's an action happening
17:33here. And the, and the other thing that really struck me was just the extraordinary discipline,
17:38even in situations where there was open confrontation, there was not violence. You know,
17:43people were filming, um, you know, sometimes people would, would, would shout rude things and say,
17:48your grandmother is ashamed of you and stuff like that to the agents. And some things that we
17:52probably can't say on television, but this is disciplined work. These are people who are
17:58organized, who are working to collect groceries for people who are too afraid to leave home.
18:04They're, they're, they're organizing escorts for people who want to take their kids to school.
18:09And, um, and it's extraordinary and transformative. Yeah. You know, Zach Beauchamp is a writer I
18:14really like at Vox made this observation today. I thought was interesting where he said that,
18:17you know, a lot of the big protests in Trump one were about these sort of shows,
18:21big shows of force to kind of create sort of narrative interventions. And so much of what
18:28we're seeing here is just like the actual mechanical on the ground organizing to like,
18:34put your crowbar in the machinery of authoritarianism, like absolutely like block by block to interrupt
18:41and stop this awful thing from happening. Exactly. And I think that the, the, the,
18:46these volunteers are essentially trained to walk right up to the line of confrontation, right? I mean,
18:53they are filming their following, but they're following traffic laws, unlike ice. They're not
18:58running through red lights and doing stuff like that. Their goal is to slow down, but not actually
19:04obstruct the work. The goal is to distract rather than, uh, you know, pull them away. And it's
19:09interesting because a lot of these networks really had their roots in, uh, the protests that broke out
19:14after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. And so it was very quick to reactivate them and get them
19:20going
19:20again. Um, but unlike the 20, the summer of 2020, um, there hasn't been no property destruction.
19:27There's essentially been no violence on the part of the protesters or, or the, or the, um,
19:31the activists who are out there, but even calling them activists doesn't feel right. These are just
19:35ordinary people. There was a, there was a real estate agent, a suburban real estate agent who was
19:40detained by ice because he was filming, uh, an operation that he had come upon while dropping his
19:45kid off at school. And it's like, this guy works in Woodbury. I mean, Woodbury is like a suburb of
19:51St. Paul and this guy's not an activist. He's just someone who saw something and was like, this is
19:55messed up. I need to, I need to do something. And I think once you have that spirit going in
20:00a
20:00community and of course, you know, Minnesota is unique, Minnesota is different, but I think that,
20:05that, that it's really unstoppable. I mean, people start to see things that they just can't live with.
20:10And once they see those things, they start acting and they start organizing.
20:13Yeah. And it was interesting to me today to see, uh, in the protest, how many signs
20:17had allusions to Liam Ramos, the five-year-old. Um, just again, every day, it seems brings us some,
20:25some story and there are so many that we can count, but some story that just,
20:30it's just unconscionable, right? Like it cannot, it can't be tolerated. We, we, we showed the, um,
20:36the man who is an American citizen who was marched out of his house, uh, you know,
20:42topless in Crocs and a blanket, an incredible cold. I mean, the incredible cold with no explanation.
20:48And then they started spinning their wheels to say that they were searching for sex predators,
20:52which always what they say. And then it turned out one of the people that they were searching
20:55for was already in jail, right? Was already in jail. So, and so this person was marched out of his
21:00house, humiliated for no reason. And people are just seeing this all the time. And I, where do,
21:06what do you think happens next? I mean, that's an impossible thing to predict, but given the
21:10balance of forces, where does it go? Well, I mean, I think we're already seeing an attempt by
21:16the Trump administration to kind of like pull back a little bit rhetorically. You know, some of that
21:21was in the, you know, fatuous and mendacious remarks that JD Vance made. Can I just play you that?
21:27Because I thought it was, it was, it was notable for people that are, have one mode,
21:31which is attack and double down. Yeah. Listen to how JD Vance was sounding yesterday. Yeah.
21:37This is part of a broad effort to make us safe and the chaos that people are seeing. And I
21:42understand there is frustration of the chaos. I I'd say that we're doing everything that we
21:47can to lower the temperature. The directive that I got from the president United States
21:50is meet these guys halfway, work with them so that we can make these immigration enforcement
21:56operations successful without endangering our ICE officers. And so that we can turn down the chaos
22:01a little bit, at least I think a lot, actually. This is exactly what I'm talking about. I mean,
22:07you know, they never do that. But in these same remarks, they say things like, you know,
22:13Minnesota has the most undocumented, you know, criminal, which is crazy. I mean,
22:17the rate of undocumented people in Minnesota is half the national average, right? So they're just liars
22:22and they're just, you know, trying to escalate. And then when they escalate and go too far,
22:25they try to pull it back. But the reality is that, is that people have eyes, you know,
22:30we're so used to thinking that, you know, there is this kind of MAGA core that is just going to
22:36believe whatever it sees on Fox News. And they're there. Those people are there. But there also are
22:40a lot of other people in this country, people who perhaps reluctantly voted for Trump, you know,
22:45uncertain, who are watching this and just saying, I didn't sign up for this. This is disgusting.
22:50You know, I think about, so I think about my grandparents who were, you know, Minnesotans.
22:54They were conservative Republicans. They loved Barry Goldwater. They loved Ronald Reagan.
22:59And for them, they had this key moment during the civil rights movement where, you know,
23:05they saw little girls being, you know, menaced by dogs. They saw children, you know, with fire hoses
23:11being aimed at them. And they're like, this is not, this is not for us. You know,
23:15it doesn't mean that they became Democrats, but they were morally disgusted by what they saw.
23:21And that to me is the moment that we're at where people can see this and just say, this is
23:26not,
23:26this is not acceptable. We cannot live like that. You know, these are jackbooted thugs. We've been
23:31warned by the right about jackbooted thugs and we don't want this. Morally disgusted,
23:35I think is the right term. This is so great to have you here. Thank you for your reporting
23:39and for coming in tonight. Really, that was great. Thanks, Chris.
23:41Still ahead. Brand new polling shows most people disapprove
23:45of basically everything Trump is doing right now. These numbers are really wild. Stick around for
23:54Donald Trump is a new public enemy number one, and it's all these damn polls that keep showing
23:59how nobody likes the job he's doing. One of them is kind of the gold standard of political polls
24:03conducted by the New York Times and Siena University. It's been known and reliably has
24:08been quite an accurate poll. In the latest release, Donald Trump's approval rating among
24:13registered voters is an abysmal 40 percent. That is the lowest approval rating this poll has given
24:18Trump since he returned to the White House. By contrast, 56 percent disapprove of how Trump's
24:23handling the presidency. They disapprove by a 16 point margin. 16 points underwater is not good.
24:28Trump seems really mad about it. So mad he's threatening legal action against the pollsters online,
24:33calling, quote, fake and fraudulent polling a criminal offense. The truth is, when you really
24:38dig into this poll, that top line approval number might actually be the best news in there for Trump.
24:43G. Elliott Morris is a data journalist. He's the author of the Strength in Numbers
24:46Substack, which I enjoy a lot. He's been running through the numbers. I want to show one of his graphs,
24:53which shows where Trump is on all the key issues that he has been
24:59pursuing in this second term. If we can throw that up there. There we go. You can see that even
25:06though immigration still is the top issue that he has, he is still underwater in immigration. And as
25:12you move down to jobs in the economy, health care and inflation cost of living, he goes down to under
25:1730 points. Do we have Elliott now? We don't have him. What should we do here? Let's take a quick
25:26break and get him back in a second. We'll be right back. As Lydia Pilgrim was just saying,
25:35as Michelle Norris has said, lots of reporters have been noting it's been really striking in the
25:38last few months just how many people have gone out to protest what's happening. People who are
25:42not super into politics, people who have not protested before, just helping out their community,
25:46standing guard outside schools to watch out for ice, packing and delivering food to neighbors
25:51who are scared to leave their homes. There is a level of civic resistance to Trumpism that is
25:57building day by day at the same time that his national popularity is genuinely cratering.
26:03Michelle Goldberg is an opinion columnist in the New York Times where she's writing about how the
26:06right is furious with liberal white women. Jelani Cobb is dean of the Columbia University School of
26:10Journalism, staff writer for The New Yorker, where his latest piece is From Selma to Minneapolis.
26:14Also with me now, data analyst G. Elliott Morris, who writes the Strength in Numbers
26:19sub-stack that analyzes data and polling. They all join me now. Elliott, let me just start with you
26:24because I was showing the Times-Siena poll, and the reason it was striking to me is that poll has
26:27been
26:30it's been a very accurate poll in midterm polling in terms of elections, but also been generally
26:35like not one of the pollings showing him with his worst numbers reliably and has also not moved
26:42around a lot. So I was struck by the minus 16, 40 percent approval headline in that poll. What was
26:49your read on it? Yeah, minus 16 is not far off from the average of polls. I'm a big numbers
26:54guy,
26:55so Donald Trump can't accuse the New York Times of like rigging the woke New York Times poll,
27:00right? All polls are saying this. Donald Trump with an average disapproval rating of around 57 percent
27:06and approval rating at 39 or 40 percent among all adults. That's just the numbers, right? Like,
27:12let's think about what this means in terms of people. Another finding from the New York Times poll
27:17was that those voters that put Donald Trump in the White House, mainly with big swings among non-white
27:24and young 18 to 30-year-old voters, are the ones that have swung the most against him since the
27:30last
27:30election since the 2024 election. And it's worth thinking about that change of vote not as a
27:37signal that they're just not happy with what's going on, but as a withdrawing of their consent
27:42for him to lead them. We talk about polls as just numbers drifting around. Let's think about them as
27:48elections that happen on average or every single day. If there was an election today, Donald Trump would
27:54lose in a landslide, a 1980 landslide. His approval rating is underwater in 14 Republican states or
28:01states that he won in 2024. That is a verdict that the public is rendering as sharply negative
28:07and they don't like where the country is headed. Yeah, let's put up that graphic we just showed that
28:11the Times did a very clever little thing with these U-term graphics that shows, and if you could sort
28:16of,
28:16it's a little small on your screen there, but you start with what the numbers were in 2020,
28:20right? In the Biden-Trump election that Trump lost. Then you go to 24, you see how much better
28:25he did with particularly folks aged 18 to 29, non-midterm voters and non-white voters. And then
28:31the last part is where they are now, which is to say they have swung further away from him
28:36than when he lost in 2020, Michelle. Well, yeah. And I mean, and no wonder. I think that
28:43if you look at the kind of scenes that we're seeing in Minneapolis, I mean, I think that
28:51those kinds of scenes were things that, you know, liberal hysterics like me said that he wanted to
28:57do. Yes, I think he did. But they were not things for the most part that he was actually doing.
29:02I
29:02mean, he certainly, look, he certainly, you know, behaved thuggishly in his first term. There was child
29:06separation. There was, you know, that sort of march with the upside down Bible. There was all kinds of
29:12horrific things, but there was not this kind of blatant, you know, fascism. There wasn't Jack,
29:18there wasn't show me your papers. There wasn't Jack boots on the street. There wasn't something
29:22that, that triggers, you know, every American who's seen these kinds of scenes in movies about
29:28World War II or in dystopian fiction, you know, you kind of, you could see where it was going,
29:34but you could also, if you didn't pay that much attention, think that that was all that,
29:40that those warnings were overwrought. I think it's very difficult, although some people are
29:43still trying to pretend that those warnings are overwrought to deny that the worst case version,
29:49at least the worst case version so far of Trumpism is here. And that's what people are responding to.
29:53And you, he had a post today that you, you and I, Michelle, I thought found interesting Trump
29:57basically being like, people are paying too much attention to ice and not enough attention to this
30:02fraud situation. And what was so interesting to me is this is a person who has a real feral genius
30:07for attention. I wrote a whole book. It was a chapter about this, that they thought what this
30:13whole thing is backfired, right? The idea is you surging in Minnesota to lend attention to this
30:18fraud case in which some Somali Americans are implicated. So you can create this sort of racist
30:23caricature, right? And instead, what you get is this, like the images or people saying it's completely
30:30the opposite of the intended effect. But this is roughly around the same level of competency
30:37that Trump has displayed in all of his endeavors through all of his career.
30:42So here's the other thing about this. The, when we look at what he, he appeared to be in the
30:48first
30:49term, there were all of these people who were doing their level best, exerting every iota of strength
30:56they had to rein in his worst impulses. He has no one to do that now. Uh, and in fact,
31:02the opposite, the people are enabling. So arguably we're getting what he always was,
31:08but it's Trump unchained. Uh, and then the final version of this is that, uh, you know,
31:13perhaps they don't really believe that they're going to run for a third term. Maybe that they're not
31:18that far detached from reality because he's behaving like a second term president. Yes. There's no
31:24reason to, you know, pedal to the metal, no reason to ever hit the brakes. You can do whatever you
31:29want. The consequences be damned. And in fact, Elliot, when we look at these, the polling,
31:34right? I mean, it's like at some level, they don't seem to care much. I mean, they care. He's pissed
31:40off about it and he wants to sue the New York times and it's getting under their skin, but either
31:44they
31:44have some plan for some presidential dictatorship that doesn't depend on the will of people or he can't
31:48run again, right? It's one of the two, right? It's not like that. So, but Republicans are going to have
31:52to, and just to put up the chart that I was showing before by issue area, one of the things
31:57I found
31:57interesting as we talk about this moral disgust, people are feeling watching what's happening in
32:00Minnesota in the average, he's still better on immigration than almost anything else, which is,
32:06I think notable, right? In the times poll today, Elliot, his, his negative disapproval on immigration
32:13was, was tied with his overall disapproval and tied with his disapproval on the economy, which suggests
32:18it, we may see that all that sort of converge towards the same point.
32:24Yeah. Look, his approval on average is eight right now, a minus eight on immigration, but things are
32:31moving fast. The data might not be catching up to public opinion here. Uh, if you think of like
32:39presidents as moving, moving policy to the left or to the right of what the median voter wants,
32:44then you're going to get a predictable on average over a bunch of elections movement to the right.
32:49After you see something like Donald Trump is, is doing in general, but the policy that we're
32:54getting is not an average move to the right for an administration. Uh, the, the ice policy in
33:00particular, the most extreme, you know, like border enforcement, let's call it for the Republicans
33:05or just deportations policy. If you're a liberal like me policy that we've seen in, in four generations,
33:11you should expect a much larger than average movement from a policy shift like that. I would
33:16expect the polls to trend toward that minus 17. And that is not a position in which you can hold
33:21a
33:22competitive national election for that party. So let's see what happens to the policy, or maybe
33:26they're just going to lose the next two elections. That's possibility too.
33:29You know, I was saying this to Lydia before she was here, um, to use a somewhat tortured football
33:35metaphor for a second, as we head into the championship weekend, you know, sometimes teams will come
33:39out and they have what's called like a scripted opening drive where like that they have plotted
33:43what they're going to do in the first drive and they look incredible. And then the next few drives,
33:47they don't look as good because they had sort of all of the coaches had sat down. They'd scouted
33:52out the defense. They'd figured out like, if we run these plays in this sequence, we're going to
33:55march down the field and it works. And then, then you're in some new place. And it feels to me
33:59a
34:00little bit like that is the Trump administration because it did, they felt a lot more competent.
34:05I got to say the first six months. Sure. Yeah. They really did. They felt more competent.
34:09It felt to me like this moral disgust that we're seeing in people now was weirdly absent.
34:14It felt to me like these absolute violations of our most sacrosanct core civic commitments
34:21were not getting the correct response, but now it does. I don't think they were getting a response,
34:28just not a response among elites, right? Yeah. Right. That's partly too. From the beginning,
34:31I think, yes, there was some activist burnout. There was, there was, you know, the resistance
34:35was discouraged, but you saw, I think from the beginning, a lot of, a lot of local organizing,
34:41a lot of protests, a, um, you know, a decision as you and Lydia were talking about that
34:48because there was sort of nobody coming to save any of us, the focus could no longer be on,
34:53let's have a big protest and demand that our leaders act because our leaders have failed us.
34:57It was instead, let's figure out what we can do to protect the things closest to us. And that's a
35:04harder thing to cover, right? It's a hard, it's just like, doesn't create spectacle. So it's happening.
35:09And, but you just there, because it didn't have the same sort of elite repercussions,
35:14it was happening somewhat below the radar. What's happened recently is that it has, you know,
35:19partly through Trump's own doing, it has burst into public attention. And I think shown the utter
35:28fecklessness of, you know, so many elite leaders who've capitulated, who've said, I guess this is
35:33where the country is now. And so we're going to, you know, maybe they were sort of always a little
35:38bit
35:40reactionary and, but they also put their finger to the wind and you see, you know, the sort of
35:45the utter fecklessness of, you know, look at the kind of the difference between a, um, you know,
35:52a Minnesota mom in this kind of bitterly cold, negative 20 degrees, fending off tear gas so that
35:59she can patrol around the school and kind of compare that to say some of the people who were
36:04just at Davos. Exactly. The CEOs. Also, also, I mean, um, I've spent my entire career in academia,
36:10so it pains me to say this, look at the emotional resonance of the kind of targets they were picking.
36:16I mean, universities, people are not going to stand out. How dare you lay a finger on Harvard,
36:22which was also why it was kind of smart. Law firms, you know, it's like,
36:27when you go after the lawyers, that's where I lose it. That wasn't going to happen.
36:31That's a good point. Well, I mean, the other part of this too, to what you were saying, Michelle,
36:37about the sort of grassroots leading, you know, we have this example of juries, which I found so
36:41fascinating has been the through line, right? Cause like juries are randomly selected, right?
36:45So you're not even talking about, you know, Lydia was just saying this, this thing about these are,
36:48these are not activists. They're just people, right? A jury is the, the ultimate example of that
36:52because they're just, they're drawn by lottery. In Chicago yesterday, DHS accused a man of putting
36:59a $10,000 bounty in a murder for hire scheme for, uh, uh, Bovino that had a CP. Now that's
37:04an incredibly serious thing. And if someone actually did that, like that's an important thing
37:08to prosecute and also accountable for, they came back with an acquittal of this jury in three hours.
37:14And the Chicago sometimes is running the score on the, I guess, 15 people so far who have been
37:21charged in operation midway blitz, which is the one before Minneapolis 11 had their charges dropped.
37:27Three grand juries have given them no bills and one jury acquittal, right? So like, if you're
37:32looking at the grassroots and this, I think is the other reason, Elliot, that, you know,
37:35you can make too much of polling, but again, as we're sort of trying to figure out where
37:40everyone's at, there's like the anecdotal reporting and there's the numbers, the polling data does seem
37:45to be telling a consistent story. And also to me, an important one for precisely this reason.
37:55Elliot.
37:57Look, Chris, there's, there's something that we think about when, when we're doing these polls and
38:02that's the balance of all Americans that feel a certain way towards the president and how independent
38:10voters feel toward what's going on in the country. I like to look at those independent voters because
38:14maybe they're reacting more to the conditions than, than the Republicans are who are primed to think
38:20one way and the Democrats who are primed to think one way. Like independence today are 70-30 against
38:24what the administration is doing on ICE policy in general, but they think ICE has gone too far
38:29in a 70-30 answer. And, and they think that the country is worse off now than it was a
38:35year ago
38:36by a 70-30 margin. If you're trying to think of like what people want from their government,
38:43I really like to hone in on those independent numbers. And 70-30 is one of the worst,
38:47one of those worst margins that I've seen for an incumbent president in a very long time.
38:52You know, again, one of the things we've seen with Trump is this floor, which is very helpful,
38:58right? Because it's like, if you can't crack beneath that floor, then it just sort of,
39:01you get to that floor and then you just operate, right? I mean, Biden was at 40% for a
39:05lot of his
39:05presidency too. And I was telling, talking to Nicole Wallace, uh, last night when we were on set
39:10and she was talking about like, I work for president who's at like 25. And she was like,
39:14you can't land Air Force One anywhere 25% approved. You know what I mean? Like in that period where
39:19like the bottom truly felt out of, fell out of bush, he had to beam into the RNC. Actually,
39:25that happened in the Twin Cities. So like, again, to me, the floor is this real question,
39:31right? Is there something structural that means you can't break through and they all get kind of
39:36acclimated to operating at that structural floor, Michelle? Or do you really start to see things
39:44break if things get worse than that? So I don't know. I mean, there are certain, look,
39:51there are polls that show, you know, 40% is kind of one of the better numbers for Trump,
39:56right? There are other polls that show 36, 35. And so, you know, it's, it's, we see the direction
40:02it's going in, right? The question is how far does it go? And I think that a lot of that
40:07has to do
40:08with, um, you know, it has to do with the economy. It has to do with the success of Donald
40:14Trump's
40:14various plans for regime change. It has to do, I mean, we have a huge storm barreling down on this
40:20country after Donald Trump has eviscerated FEMA. And so basically destroyed FEMA for no reason.
40:26Right. And I think, you know, anyone who remembers the George W. Bush administration remembers
40:30that it was, you know, the failure of FEMA that sort of was a, a tipping point in people realizing
40:36the incompetence of this administration. So, you know, they, they've sort of, there's,
40:40they've been playing, you know, Jenga with big parts of the federal government. Um, we don't know,
40:46I think exactly when that tower falls, but when it does, I think will tell us, um, a lot.
40:51This, this point is so important too, as a historian, which you're trained at events have the,
40:56have the say in the end. They ultimately do. There's one wild card here
41:00though, which is that no one was afraid of George Bush's supporters. Right. Uh, and so
41:07people have behaved in all sorts of unconscionable ways out of fear. And that's one element that I
41:13don't know that that shows up in a poll, but that's an element that will determine how people react to
41:18him. That is really an important, excellent point. Elliot Morris, Michelle Goldberg, Jelani Cobb.
41:22Great to be with you all. Thank you very much. We'll be right back.
Comments