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00:00Good morning. It's Sunday, April 5th. Today, breaking news. The White House says the U.S.
00:06military has rescued a missing crew member of the American fighter jet that crashed in Iran on
00:11Friday. We'll have the very latest on the tense mission to find that crew member before Iran did.
00:18Then Trump's new threat that, quote, all hell will rain down on Iranians if they don't make
00:23a deal by Monday. What that could mean for the possibility of ground troops and by targeting
00:28civilian infrastructure? Is Trump committing a war crime? And exit Bondi, enter Blanche.
00:35There's a reason Trump has struggled for a decade to find an attorney general
00:39willing and able to do his deepest, darkest, dirty work.
00:43So grab your coffee and settle in. And welcome to The Weeknd.
00:56Welcome to The Weeknd. I'm Jackie Alimany, along with Eugene Daniels and Jonathan Capehart.
01:01We begin on this Easter Sunday with major breaking news. The White House says the U.S. military has
01:07rescued the missing crew member of the American fighter jet that crashed in Iran on Friday.
01:12President Trump announced the news in a lengthy post on Truth Social, saying the airman was
01:17now safe and sound. He said the rescue mission included dozens of aircraft and that the officer
01:23sustained injuries. But he will be just fine. The news caps off a tense life or death race to
01:30find the airman. The other crew member was rescued shortly after the aircraft went down in Iran early
01:35Friday. According to The New York Times, the missing airman had been hiding with little more
01:40than a pistol as defense. And after ejecting from the F-15 hide in hid in a mountain crevice.
01:48Adding to that, the mission to save the crew member employed hundreds of special forces,
01:54dozens of U.S. warplanes, helicopters and cyber space and other intelligence capabilities.
02:00And U.S. attack aircraft dropped bombs and opened fire on Iranian convoys to keep them away from the
02:07area where the airman was hiding. U.S. attack aircraft dropped bombs and opened fire on Iranian
02:14convoys to keep them away from the area where the airman was hiding. A senior administration
02:19official tells MSNOW's David Rode that the CIA also aided in the search effort, launching a deception
02:25campaign to help protect the airman before he was rescued. And joining us now is MSNOW senior national
02:32security reporter David Rode, MSNOW contributor Inzamam Rashid in Dubai, senior vice president at
02:38the Sufjan Group, Marine Corps veteran and MSNOW security and intelligence analyst Christopher O'Leary
02:44and former CIA senior intelligence service operations officer and MSNOW national security and intelligence
02:50analyst Mark Pollimeropoulos. We have a very packed show this morning. Christopher, let's start with you
02:56since you're at the table. Thank you for being here. What's your reaction to this pretty remarkable
03:03feat that the U.S. military pulled off this weekend? The U.S. military trains for this. Number one,
03:08the pilots were trained. They went through what's called SEER school, survive, evade, resist, escape,
03:12especially for this. And that school was created towards the end of Vietnam because of one special
03:20forces officer, Nicholas Rowe, had escaped hundreds of miles of North Vietnamese jungle, brought back
03:26this experience. And they created this school. And then all pilots, all special operations,
03:32personnel, intelligence personnel, all go through it. I've been through it. And I've been through it
03:37alongside pilots. And you learn how to survive when you land. You learn how to live off the land. You
03:43learn to evade capture, which is exactly what this this colonel did. And then should you be captured,
03:50resist interrogation and then ultimately escape because it's your duty to do so. This just confirms why
03:56that is so important. You also learn to use the equipment that you were given. Now he was,
04:02the pilot was injured, as reported. You're, you've had a violent encounter. You've been shot out of the
04:07air. Now you're crash landing into the ground. You know, if in best case scenario, you're doing what's
04:15called a parachute landing fall, which is really a controlled crash into the ground. And people often
04:21get hurt doing that, especially pilots who don't parachute often. But what they're trained to do,
04:28they're trained to conceal themselves, put their personal locator beacon on. The other pilot would
04:35have been debriefed as soon as they got back to wherever they were brought back to. Intelligence was
04:41gathered locating the individual on the ground and then providing overwatch with intelligence,
04:48surveillance, and reconnaissance drones and manned aircraft, and then isolating the area to make
04:53sure that nobody can get to them. And then coming up on communication windows and giving cardinal
04:58directions on where to go to number one, stay away from any foot traffic or local security forces,
05:05even local, you know, residents of the area, trying to avoid all of that. So you don't want any
05:11accidental bump ins with anybody, and then moving towards an area where we know we can safely recover
05:18the individual, and then marshalling the forces, the power rescue forces and other special operations
05:25capabilities that can go in there and execute this, this recovery, the way that you need it to happen and
05:32provide the medical care. And just so you know, power rescue, airmen go through a two year pipeline. It's one
05:39of the
05:39lesser known special operations components, but they are trained, you know, anybody who likes the show The Pit
05:46with Noel Wiley, everything they're doing on there, the PJs can do, and they can do it at night on
05:51night
05:51vision goggles. So they can put a central line and intraosseous into somebody, you know, at night on
05:57night vision goggles. They're exceptionally trained human beings, and they can fight their way in and out.
06:02Their motto is, so others may live. So it's, they're exceptional.
06:07Quite a dramatic 24 hours, David Rode.
06:10The, 24 plus hours, the CIA ran a deception campaign within Iran. You have new reporting on kind of the
06:19behind
06:19the scenes on how this was able to happen. What do you know?
06:22So a senior administration official told me that, that this plane goes down, and they don't even know, as far
06:31as I was told,
06:31they're not sure of the location of the second pilot, but the CIA launched a deception campaign
06:36to make the Iranians think that they had, the U.S. had found that second pilot, and were already moving
06:42him
06:42out of the country. In fact, that hadn't happened yet. Other details is that there was, they, that the
06:49intelligence officials made an effort to somehow confirm, they just, they talked about their capabilities,
06:55but didn't go into how, but get more detail about exactly where the second pilot was hiding. And
07:01what's extraordinary, and some of this is New York Times reporting, was that the second pilot,
07:06despite being injured, walks away from where he's landed. Obviously, people could have seen that
07:12parachute, hikes high up on a ridge. And then the senior administration official told me that
07:17was hiding in a mountain crevice. I'm not sure how large that is, or exactly the, the terrain, but
07:24it's an extraordinary thing that this pilot, who's now been saved, he's a full colonel, we learned last
07:30night, the weapons officer on the F-15, then stayed hidden. And that's, that's exactly all the training
07:36that Chris just talked about, and incredible bravery, and, and just common sense, and, and calm
07:42by that second pilot. David, let me stick with you and ask you to talk about the role the CIA
07:51played in this operation to rescue the pilot, or the missing officer, sorry. That's okay. No, and I,
08:00I had the same problem myself. This is a weapons officer. This is the, he sits in the second seat
08:05behind the pilot of an F-15 and handles the weapons and armaments and things in the plane. Mark
08:11Polymeropoulos, who's on here, can, can help us more on what the CIA is capable of. But I think
08:16they also tracked every force. The military was doing this also, but they were able to track,
08:21I would think they were monitoring communications by the Iranians to get a sense of if they knew where
08:26the pilot was, if they were getting close to him and then coordinating closely with the military
08:30to strike. There was this talk about airstrikes on any Iranian forces that moved into the area.
08:36And then another detail, this is from the New York Times, is, is about, there was actually a
08:40firefight. U.S. forces are somehow brought down onto the ground and then they, they fire on these
08:46Iranians from the ground, special forces on the ground against Iranian forces to keep them from
08:53getting there. Mark, again, could talk more. He was part, there's an amazing coordination. We saw this
08:58during the Maduro raid in Venezuela between the intelligence collected by the CIA and how they share
09:04that and how they work so closely with special forces, soldiers to carry out these kind of
09:10operations. It's just extraordinary. And so Mark, pick up the, this part of the conversation,
09:15talk more from your vantage point of the CIA's role in all of this.
09:21So, you know, this is 20 years of the global war on terrorism. All the experiences that we had,
09:26you know, started certainly after 9-11. It's the integration of the U.S. intelligence community,
09:30particularly with the Special Operations Command. And you see things, you know, work out over the
09:36last, you know, 24 hours in really fine fashion. There are, you know, there's a whole ecosystem
09:41within U.S. intelligence and the U.S. military on personnel recovery. There's various aspects of
09:47this. It's non-assisted recovery. That's where the CIA, the intelligence community would recruit
09:52networks inside of hostile countries. In case there's a down pilot, that would be agents on the ground,
09:58Iranians who would be working for us. And then there's assisted recovery. And it looks like that's,
10:02you know, it's kind of a blend of both here. And, you know, what the agency did, I'm not,
10:07of course, particularly sure right now. Those details will come out. But we do know there were
10:11MQ-9, you know, predators overhead. Perhaps they were used for the geolocation aspect of it. You know,
10:16the pilot aviator, the WIZO would have had an encrypted radio sending out burst transmission. So
10:22obviously, the intelligence community would be trying to collect on the location.
10:27This is also a location in Isfahan, essentially central Iran, where we know that there was a
10:34significant anti-regime sentiment. And so the agency could have had assets on the ground as well,
10:40who are, again, helping to spread that disinformation and, of course, helping to assist in
10:44the recovery too. But, you know, this to me is a product of, you know, 20 years of extraordinarily
10:49close cooperation in the personnel recovery mission. I'm not surprised. I'm, of course,
10:54thrilled this worked out so well. But this is that fusion that we learned from Iraq and Afghanistan.
11:00It really came out in the finest fashion. And look, at the end of the day, it's the message
11:05that everyone who is in the U.S. national security community on the front lines, you know, always kind
11:10of preaches and wants particularly to know if you're one of those people on the tip of the spear is
11:15that, you know, if you go down, if you're lost behind enemy lines, you know, the U.S.
11:18government will move heaven and earth to get you back. And I think that's what we saw last night.
11:24And Enzamam, you are on the ground in Dubai. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about the
11:28reaction in the region so far. We know that Iran obviously desperately wanted to capture and find
11:34this airman before the United States. They also were trolling the president yesterday. The
11:41parliamentary speaker posted on social media that after defeating Iran 37 times in a row,
11:46this brilliant no strategy war they started has now been downgraded from regime change to, hey,
11:52can anyone find our pilots, please? Wow. What incredible progress. Absolute geniuses. I mean,
11:59how important is it that we rescued this person and prevented Iran from gaining additional leverage
12:06here? Incredibly important, Jackie, probably one of the most important points of this conflict,
12:15because if Iran managed to capture this U.S. Air Force personnel, managed to detain them,
12:23they would effectively use him as some form of leverage in negotiations. The propaganda tools
12:30would have been immense. And I really think it would have changed the course of this conflict. So
12:37not only is the U.S. breathing a huge sigh of relief this morning, particularly the White House,
12:43but also many of the Gulf nations as well, particularly where I am here in the UAE. But it was
12:50a race over the
12:51last 48 hours or so between Iran and the U.S. to find this Air Force personnel, this airman from
12:59the F-15
13:01fighter jet. And clearly, Iran had put a lot of resources in to try and identify them, to try and
13:08identify his location and essentially capture him and detain him and keep him as a U.S. military
13:16prisoner inside of Iran. They failed to do so given the U.S.'s technology and tactics to try and find
13:25him first. Iran have clearly come out today and refuted some of the claims that have been made
13:33by President Trump, but also some of the reporting as well. They've specifically said that they are
13:42claiming two American C-130 transport aircrafts. Now, we saw one of them in the video with the two
13:49Black Hawk helicopters. They're claiming that two of those have been shot down alongside two Black
13:56Hawk helicopters. This is unconfirmed reporting, but this is what the IRGC are suggesting. It's hugely
14:03unclear right now. U.S. officials said that American forces had to destroy two of their own aircraft.
14:11That's according to reporting in the Wall Street Journal. And Iranian military today have also
14:18released some images and video of a crash site, it seems, around 28 miles south of the Iranian city,
14:27Isfahan. And the images there show components of what looks like one large propeller-driven plane
14:34and helicopter at this crash site. So there is still some uncertainty specifically around whether
14:41Iran had managed to shoot down some of these aircraft, whether this was by the U.S. But clearly,
14:47I think there'll be a sigh of relief, not only in the U.S., but here in the Gulf now
14:51that this serviceman
14:52has been found and effectively evacuated from Iranian territory.
14:58Yeah, there is a sigh of relief here in the United States and certainly for the officer's family.
15:08Inzamam Rashid, David wrote, thank you both very much for kicking off our coverage. Christopher O'Leary
15:12and Mark Palomaropoulos are staying with us much more ahead on the rescue of the missing U.S. airmen
15:18in Iran. You're watching The Weeknd on MSNOW.
15:22Back with us are MSNOW security and intelligence analyst Christopher O'Leary and MSNOW national
15:27security and intelligence analyst Mark Palomaropoulos.
15:31Christopher, I want to ask you about the potential for resource strain here. Obviously, there were
15:36a lot of people, as you all just laid out, that were involved in this extraordinary
15:40mission. And I applaud everyone who rescued this officer. At the same time, it seems like
15:47if there are additional missions, as we were just talking about, and something like this happens
15:51again, it's an extraordinary amount of resources that are used to carry something out like this.
15:58What does it mean for the rest of the U.S. military and other operations going on around the world?
16:03Well, it certainly does. It's a resource strain from other areas of operation, whether it's
16:08the Indo-Pacific or the Caribbean, which is a priority right now for this administration.
16:14But even in theater, in the CENTCOM AOR, there's a limit to the resources that we have.
16:20And so any operation like this is going to, a spin happens when we get an isolated, you know,
16:28personnel, somebody shot down or somebody who's straight away from their base. I've been in
16:32Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, where you see everything gets dropped and everything goes
16:37towards that. All the aircraft in the area support the operation and everybody on ground,
16:43especially special operations troops, start spinning up for a recovery operation. So it's
16:49an unblinking eye towards this problem. The concern is that if we move forward with additional
16:55operations, that we could have more pilots being shot down. Certainly the A-10 warthog that was
17:01struck and, you know, it's called the warthog for a bunch of reasons, but it's a bit of a pig.
17:07You can shoot a lot of holes in that aircraft. It's still going to fly, thankfully, because it was
17:13able to make it into the water and the pilot was recovered there. But that happened nearly
17:18contemporaneously with this other incident going on. But the Iranians have plenty of anti-aircraft
17:25capability, both man pads. So that is a stinger missile for a reference point, something similar
17:33to it where an individual on the ground is actually shooting a missile towards the heat signature of
17:41the aircraft. But then auto cannons, you know, things like, you know, Mark can talk about it as
17:47well. They're automatic cannons that are shooting projectiles at a rapid pace towards low flying
17:56aircraft. So helicopters, C-130s, those things are susceptible to this exact type of thing.
18:03And in putting U.S. Marines or paratroopers on ground, they will all be exposed to that kind of
18:10the aircraft as they're inserting, whether it's the Ospreys or the C-130s or C-17s or any of the
18:17helicopter platforms. All of those are susceptible to this.
18:20Mark, I have a question. I have two questions for you, actually. One, the president of the United
18:25States, the administration has said over and over again, we have decimated the Navy, the Army, the
18:31military of Iran. So one, what have we learned over the last couple of days about their capabilities
18:37that they still have? And two, on the CIA deception story, in America and around the world, we were
18:45still reporting that, and the United States government was saying that there was someone
18:49still out there. How do you run a deception campaign where you're saying this person, we
18:54already got them, they're moving, while the rest of the world is reporting that this person is actually
18:59still out there?
19:01Well, I mean, I think the idea, of course, is to give the downed aviator enough time to go through
19:07kind of the escape and evasion protocols that, you know, as Christopher noted, that they're very
19:11well trained on. And so that would be, you know, inserting kind of into Iran, specifically into that
19:17area around Isfahan, whether it's to the population, you know, perhaps, you know, feeding this type of
19:23information to the Iranian security services in some fashion. The notion that the pilot has already been
19:29rescued when, in fact, they had not been. And so, you know, this makes a lot of sense to me,
19:33just because you want to give that downed aviator as much time to escape.
19:38Kind of on the overall question, in terms of, you know, what comes next, and I think that's really
19:43important, we can all celebrate, you know, particularly on Easter, a really amazing time in which a U.S.
19:50serviceman was recovered. There's a lot that can happen in the future. And I think that, you know,
19:58from the president himself when he's talking about, you know, how we own the skies, how we decimated the
20:03Navy, all of that might be true, but it doesn't mean there's no risk to forces. And I think this
20:09incident showed that, you know, there is a lot that can happen in the future. And look, the American
20:13people, if we do put in ground forces, and I think when you take a look at the signal versus
20:18noise from the president, I think a lot of us believe he is going to do this, is that we
20:22have to
20:22brace ourselves for more incidents like this, and in particular, casualties. And, you know,
20:26Central Command and kind of what they should be doing, what they usually do is in undertaking
20:32operations in which we're putting men and women on the ground, they're going to provide the
20:35president and the national security team their assessments of how many forces we could lose.
20:40And I hope they're doing that, because this is not going to be cost-free. And we're really at an
20:45inflection point, particularly with this deadline that the president set about, you know, freeing up
20:49the Strait of Hormuz, or, you know, all hell is going to rain down on Iranian infrastructure.
20:53You know, if we see U.S. forces on the ground, we're going to go through this same type of
20:58scenario,
20:58I think, in the future. And that's going to be something that the American people have to
21:01steel themselves for. Mark Palomaropoulos and Christopher O'Leary, thank you guys for getting
21:07us started this morning on this breaking news day. Up next, how the war with Iran is exposing the new,
21:13more isolated U.S. position on the world stage. You're watching The Weeknd, only on MSNOW.
21:19While the search for the U.S. airmen was underway, President Trump renewed his threat to escalate
21:24the situation in Iran ahead of a looming deadline. He reminded the country and all of us of his
21:30ultimatum to Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or reach a deal by Monday, writing on social media,
21:35quote, time is running out before, quote, all hell will rain down on them. Republican Senator Lindsey
21:42Graham backed the president's threats, warning Iran to choose wisely as Trump's deadline approaches
21:48or face overwhelming military force. Meanwhile, Trump continues to alienate America's allies over
21:55his war, telling them to go get your own oil if they won't help secure the Strait of Hormuz,
22:01and repeatedly threatening to pull the U.S. from the NATO alliance for not joining the war. Writing
22:07The Atlantic, Robert Kagan notes, however America's war with Iran ends, it has both exposed and exacerbated
22:15the dangers of our new, fractured, multipolar reality, driving deeper wedges between the
22:20United States and former friends and allies, strengthening the hands of the expansionist
22:24great powers, Russia and China, accelerating global political and economic chaos, and leaving
22:30the United States weaker and more isolated than at any time since the 1930s.
22:35Jernigas now is the man that wrote that himself, Robert Kagan, contributing writer for the Atlantic
22:40and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He's the author of Rebellion, How Anti-Liberalism
22:45is Tearing America Apart Again. Robert, I want to start right there with this, this threat
22:51to the allies. New York Times writes that a senior European official said he thought most Europeans
22:59did not believe that Article 5, the NATO commitment to collective defense, still had teeth.
23:04The United States now seems part of the problem of world disorder, the official said, speaking
23:09anonymously given the sensitivity of the topic. Essentially, they are saying that the United
23:16States cannot be trusted, and that this is a president who started a war without asking
23:23them, did not come to them and talk to them as we would usually do, talk to our allies, get
23:28some more support. Because as all presidents know, at the end of the war, when you're kind
23:34of really in it, at the end of the beginning, you need your allies to shore up the resources,
23:39to make sure that your resources aren't too stretched, to help out in ways that you can't
23:43do it yourself. But you argue, and I think it's accurate, that President Trump has ruined
23:49these relationships, and therefore that possibility seems impossible.
23:55Yeah, we are facing a kind of isolation in the world that I don't think Americans, certainly
24:00of our people who are alive today, have had any memory of. The NATO alliance has been effectively
24:06destroyed. You know, Trump has been so critical of the alliance and made clear that he's not
24:13really committed to it. And he doesn't even have to formally pull out of NATO to destroy it,
24:17because NATO depends on American reliability to be there when there's a crisis and to come
24:24to their defense, which is part of our commitment. And it's pretty clear that that's not happening.
24:28And I think it's important to remember, because people are all focused on what the Europeans
24:32are or aren't doing in the Persian Gulf in the war that we started. But what people seem to be
24:38forgetting is that they are facing their own war, that there is a massive invasion of Ukraine
24:43in European territory, that everyone knows that once Putin has succeeded in Ukraine,
24:50he's going to move on to other states, probably Baltic states. And the United States is signaling
24:55that we won't be there for anybody. This is one of the biggest victories for Putin that he could
25:00possibly imagine. His whole career has been spent trying to destroy NATO, and now Trump has given
25:05him that gift.
25:07Bob, it is great to see you again. Eugene mentioned in the book, in the intro, your latest book is
25:12Rebellion, which is a fantastic book, people should read it. But you read, you wrote one of
25:17your previous books, I believe the title was When the Jungle Grows Back. And it seems to me like the
25:24big, the international order that the United States helped found and maintain over the last eight
25:31decades is an aberration of history. And two questions. One, do you think that the things you
25:38warned about in that book are coming to fruition now? And then I'll ask the second question after
25:43you answer that.
25:45Well, yes, I mean, I think the order is it has been shattered. I think what we would have called
25:51the American order that's existed since 1945 has now been destroyed. And, you know, the jungle in
25:58this case is coming from the White House. You know, it is being destroyed actively and deliberately by
26:04the American president. So yeah, I think, unfortunately, it has become true. And we're going to see the
26:09breakdown in every corner of the world, by the way, both in the both in the Middle East and in
26:15the
26:15Gulf, as well as in East Asia. And we've already talked about Europe. All right. So now let's talk
26:21about the president and talk about his rhetoric and the threats that he's making in that rhetoric.
26:27We've been talking about his social media posts where he has warned Iran that I think it was like
26:32all hell will rain down on them by tomorrow. If they don't come to the negotiating table or open
26:38the Strait of Hormuz, and I'm just wondering, these threats to infrastructure, to the power grid, to
26:47bridges, we've been asking around the table, particularly Eugene has been asking, and I think it's the
26:53right question, aren't these war crimes? And I'm just wondering, I mean, are these war crimes or are we
27:01being hypersensitive here?
27:02No, these are war crimes. And I would point you to a statement made by the chairman of the Joint
27:10Chiefs, General Milley, back in 2022. This was an official Pentagon statement referring to what
27:17Russia, what Putin was doing in Ukraine when he was going after the Ukrainian energy infrastructure.
27:23The Pentagon labeled that specifically a war crime. There's no question that when you go after
27:30civilian facilities, which, you know, keep civilians alive, we're talking about hospitals,
27:37we're talking about food supply, we're talking about water supply. When Trump talks about sending
27:43Iran back into the Stone Age, he's talking about bringing immense humanitarian suffering to the people
27:51of Iran, and that is a war crime.
27:54And Robert, before we are out of time, you also write a lot about how this entanglement,
28:00this war, is just as damaging to the U.S.'s partners in Asia and the Western Pacific.
28:07You noted in The Atlantic last week that Japan gets 95 percent of their oil from the Middle East,
28:13and 70 percent of that comes through the Strait of Hormuz. So let's say Trump's threat to,
28:18you know, rain all rain, have all hell rain down on them doesn't actually materialize. The Strait
28:26stays closed. What does that do to our partnerships with that area of the world?
28:33Well, there's the other great power that's being strengthened in all of this is China,
28:39and that's of great concern, obviously, to our East Asian allies. So not only are our Asian allies
28:44paying a huge price in the price of gas, they're starting to ration gas in these countries. There's
28:50a possibility of really disturbing stability in some of these countries as a result of this oil
28:56crisis. But more important, I mean, not more importantly, but just as importantly,
29:00the United States is making it very clear that as it gets bogged down in this quagmire in the Middle
29:06East, it's pulling resources, defense resources from the Western Pacific and East Asia, which are
29:12designed to protect Japan and Taiwan and other countries in the region. And so it's clear that
29:19this is a big shift. And any arrangement that is reached after the United States has walked away,
29:25as President Trump has said he plans to do, even if the Strait is closed, any arrangement to reopen
29:31the Strait is, first of all, going to give enormous influence and leverage to Iran and
29:37also to one of Iran's biggest protectors, which is China. I noticed the German foreign minister
29:43thinking about how to deal with the Strait called the now called up the Chinese to ask them if they
29:49could be helpful. And I think we're going to see that increasingly. This is the cost of the war
29:53for the United States. Robert Kagan, wonderful to see you again. Thank you very much for coming to
30:00The Weeknd. We'll continue covering today's breaking news out of Iran. And coming up,
30:06the economic impact of Trump's war with Iran driving up prices at the pump and driving Trump's
30:11approval ratings to historic lows. You're watching The Weeknd on MSNOW.
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