Amid War and Gas Crunch, Trump Pushes Vanity Projects

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0:53We begin with a president confronted sometimes to his actual face about if he has now become preoccupied with his vanity projects, these sort of late stage anti-democracy, pseudo autocratic style and self-glorification efforts. When we are quite clearly in an economic gas crisis of his making and an ongoing war, even though many hope that the ceasefire holds. Donald Trump now demanding the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool be painted a color of his choosing. Now, the point here is not which color it should be. He says blue is better than what it was. The point is whether this type of thing is anywhere near the literal top 20 or 30 things a president should be worried about, given the problems facing our country and real people.

1:42The ballroom cost is now a billion dollars. Veterans groups suing over this proposal to focus on building a massive arch. And while other presidents, to be fair, have been involved in certain what we might call symbolic building projects and efforts around Washington, D.C., and we do have this anniversary, a lot of this just feels completely off base. Americans are concerned about the war. We just saw the ceasefire tested with that missile firefight last night. Trump visiting the reflecting pool because of all the things he could do on a work day. And mind you, he's not working full days that we can measure.

2:18But on the days where he is in Washington actually presidenting, this is what he's spending his time on. It's the backdrop of war in Iran. Why focus on all these projects right now? You know why? Because I want to keep our country beautiful and safe. Beautiful also. This place was a disgusting place. Such a stupid question you asked. We're fixing up the reflecting pond to the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument. And you say, why are you fixing it up? This is not the sound of a great communicator summoning public works projects or finding a way to argue for unity or, again, perhaps mentioning the anniversary.

3:05No, this is someone who seems to have lost the plot, according to many critics. It's what they call in our business a split-screen moment. You saw we split one way to look at it, but the public doesn't need a reminder of a headline about how expensive gas is. That's what most people are struggling with every day. We reported on people going into credit card debt to pay for what are the Trump tax gas prices. He also has this idea to take that building that you've seen, if you ever watch inauguration and other events, where you go on a wider shot, broader than the White House. Just sort of to the left of the main front of the White House is the building you see here.

3:42If you've ever held meetings or done stuff in D.C., it's a known building. It's called the Eisenhower Executive Building, and it's part of the White House complex in the sense that way more people end up holding meetings and working there than in the smaller White House. So the president, having thought about this now, I guess, over the course of two terms, wants to paint it white so that it visually matches the White House more. To be clear, it was deliberately painted this color because the White House is supposed to stand out and not dilute sort of that visual cue. But again, I don't want to be doing interior decorating and external aesthetics in the news.

4:19We have bigger fish to fry, but this is what the president is fixated on, leading to headlines that are just kind of straightforward. Trump bored with the war he started. That cites reporting from some in his inner circle. The war, though, boring or not to the president, grinds on. As mentioned, the U.S. had to fire on those Iranian-flagged oil tankers, raising questions about how durable this sort of stalemate ceasefire position is, because every day that things are going down is a risk to holding it. The Post reports, confidential CIA analysis, has found Iran can outlast Trump's blockade for three to four months before they face what, to them, would be severe economic hardship.

5:03And I don't minimize what Americans are facing on gas prices, but if you look at the history of the Middle East, We have face down countries and their, of course, dictatorial leaders before who are willing to subject their people to a lot of hardship, which means the equities may not pay off for Trump's bad bet. The finding, the Post notes, raises questions about Trump's optimism on ending the war. We also have U.S. adversaries who now view America as kind of a giant. We can still bomb these countries in a way most others cannot. That's true. That's the giant part. But the Times says other superpowers like China do see us now under Trump as a giant with a limb.

5:39And their analysts believe the war has done more than deplete U.S. munitions stockpiles. That's sort of the hard power piece. They say something that goes to what, you know, these days the kids call aura. The Times reports that, according to China, Trump has managed to shatter America's aura of dominance. In the Washington Post, one conservative writing that Trump now risks snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in Iran, while another longtime conservative who also has a pretty MAGA audience these days online, Megyn Kelly, says this.

6:12Chai Komanduri:I have no idea whether there's a 14-point deal or not. None whatsoever. I don't trust a word President Trump says about this anymore. He's told us 31 times that the Iran war is over, only to then tweet about how we're going to bomb them into oblivion. if this is what his media friends sound like imagine what independent objective analysts military experts veterans communities see and hear when he lies this much about the war and its end and the plans and then you can just go out again to the general public where some people really thought and hoped that trump would do what he said that he talked a lot about bringing prices down that he was talking about biden gas prices and inflation and so he'd come in and do something about it.

6:55The only thing he's done is made it worse. Gas prices over$4.50. That's up$1.40 from just last year. The grinding war, the rising prices, the concerns about, again, real world problems. If you watch this program, I try to keep it very clear. I don't need to make it too fancy. Some things are very simple. Reality is the biggest problem in politics. And when you have economic realities or other big realities, we all remember the pandemic, which helped sink Trump in his first term and his failure to lead the government in a clear way to protect the American people, reality is the hardest thing to spin in politics.

7:31Very different than debating about symbolism or even sports and bathrooms and some of the tertiary issues we've seen campaigned on. I mention that because state officials say in New Jersey, residents may have been exposed and infected with this deadly hantavirus. There was an outbreak on a cruise ship from the Netherlands, and three passengers are dead there. American officials are monitoring people in six states. Now, we're not here to exaggerate anything. We all lived through a pandemic, and this could give you a kind of PTSD if you remember the cruise ship stories early then. The top international group on this, the World Health Organization, still says that they view the risk to the wider public as low.

8:17Not medium, not high, low. The Times, though, also reports that if you're looking to that group to help do international collaboration to avoid that risk getting any higher, remember, Trump was the rare president who withdrew the United States from that group. So we don't even now get updated, regularized information about these emerging health threats from them. Although we can read about it, of course, in public accounts, the administration also closed those research centers focused on preventing pandemics that study pathogens like this hantavirus. And the Trump administration's sluggish response and lack of communication suggests the U.S., if the risk got higher, would be ill-prepared for a larger health crisis.

8:57Now, you're watching the news tonight. It's Friday. Maybe you were hoping for news that doesn't give you deja vu of COVID. We are not telling you, based on the information we have tonight, that this is another COVID. And for folks who were hoping for the worst or think this could bedevil Donald Trump because he did fail by many accounts the last pandemic. That's not my point. We all hope for the best. But Donald Trump has, in policy, set the U.S. back to deal with what is even still considered a low-risk but serious thing to monitor. Here he is.

9:32Chai Komanduri:It's very much, we hope, under control. It was the ship. It should be fine. We hope. I hope not. I mean, I hope not. We'll do the best we can. Hope is not enough when you're talking about a gas crunch and a war you started. Hope is not enough to fix a tenuous ceasefire or reopen a strait that has been open until Trump started a war. As for how the government runs, you could add a hantavirus briefing to one of the many things Donald Trump could have done late this week other than attend to his vanity construction projects. I want to bring in Che Comandori, veteran of several presidential campaigns, including Obama's and New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, an analyst for us.

10:23Welcome to you both. Che, there are a lot of problems. Everyone hopes the virus is not another one that affects even more people, although there's been loss of life. But is it fair and is it an actual reality problem if Donald Trump seems this distracted from the things affecting people's lives in this country?

10:44Chai Komanduri:Yeah, it's an actual real problem. As Harry Truman said, the buck stops here. People expect their president to take responsibility of the problems and concerns that they have about their lives. And they also expect them to take responsibility for the military conflicts and wars that they have started. You know, there was a saying in Italy when Silvia Berlusconi was in charge that to all the problems in Italy, Berlusconi's answer was simply more Berlusconi. That is doubly true of Trump. For every problem, Donald Trump's answer is more Trump. The problem is that more Trump does not reassure Americans when they are trying to fight prices at the pump, when they are worried about their men and women overseas fighting in a theater of war.

11:34Chai Komanduri:when they are worried about a hantavirus outbreak and the president says, I hope it's going to be better, you know, like a passenger in the backseat of a car, as opposed to the guy actually driving it. Yeah, and you said more Trump, more Berlusconi. I thought you were getting close to a more cowbell Saturday Night Live reference, Che. Right. Yeah, I don't think, you know, well, that song that they were parodying was Fear the Reaper. I think, unfortunately for all of us, that that that the reaper seems a lot closer and a lot scarier to so many americans today than it did even a few months ago fair and michelle i defy anyone in america to find another person who could name the cowbell song off top jay is a man of all kinds of knowledge um michelle i put the same question to you i might sound like i'm you know being obvious but like this is the obvious question, isn't it?

12:30We have real problems. Ideology is one thing. Donald Trump's ideology is very unpopular. We've covered that. But we also are in a competence crisis, are we not? Absolutely. I mean, you know, and look, I obviously know epidemiologists, all the epidemiologists that I have read and followed say that the chances of a hantavirus pandemic are extreme.

13:06I'm losing Michelle. Jay, can you hear Michelle or we lost her a little bit? I can't hear Michelle either, so unfortunately. All right, so we'll try to get Michelle back, talk about the COVID era. This brings back all the early Zoom glitches we used to deal with, but we want Michelle in the conversation, So I know we're going to work on that. Let me play a little bit of how some of this is even playing on Fox. This is a Fox business.

13:29Chai Komanduri:To ignore the way that people feel right now about gasoline prices and mortgage rates, they're pissed off and they have every right to be upset. And as that quote from the CEO of Heinz yesterday, Kraft Heinz, consumers are literally running out of money. Jay?

14:23Chai Komanduri:Megyn Kelly as well earlier in addition to that clip from Fox. The way I think of it is, you know, when Patrick Mahomes throws a football, he throws a football to where the receiver is going to be as opposed to where the receiver is. Right wing media has to think about where the audience is going to be, where the future audience is, where young conservatives are, as opposed to elected officials and MAGA voters who are simply concerned about where Trump is right now. Michelle, we got you back. Tell us what you were saying. Oh, I was just going to say, and I'm not sure where I got cut off, but that although I think it's pretty clear, at least extremely unlikely, that Hantavirus is going to be a pandemic, the part that gives me PTSD is not the idea that this is happening again, but that if this does happen again, you know, if there is a pandemic sometime in the next two and a half years, we have systematically destroyed whatever infrastructure, the already insufficient infrastructure that we had.

15:25to to manage such a pandemic. And, you know, the pandemic in the first administration, in the first Trump administration, should have given us all a very clear picture of how Donald Trump handles crises that are not self-creating. Right. Donald Trump is kind of good at creating a crisis, fixing it, or at least abandoning his terrible idea, declaring victory and saying and then like kind of laughing at everybody who freaked out about it. But whenever the crisis wasn't kind of created by him in a way that he can change it just by changing his mind, we see utter flailing, you know, kind of death, despair and humiliation.

16:03We saw it with COVID. We're now seeing it with the Iran war. And we still have over two years to see kind of what new disasters unfold. Yeah. And you're reminding folks, it's popular to beat up on government for many reasons but a part of the federal government is just insurance it's experts and prep and plans for things you hope don't happen and and to your point michelle your colleagues in the in the times reported on this article hannah virus responses shows trump cuts have compromised u.s preparedness deep staffing cuts the trump administration made the CDC and other health agencies, the government has fewer people to respond to outbreaks.

16:49We're living very quickly through some some stress tests here. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, and, you know, I say for Trump himself, you know, I'm kind of torn between when when we see him spending time on his gilded ballroom or the Golden Idol that was recently installed at one of his golf courses or painting the reflecting pool. And on the one hand, he's defacing our capital. On the other, in some ways, this is the least destructive way that he could be spending his time. But what the people under him have done is so thoroughly. I mean, if you think about Doge and you think about these emails, you know, what did you do in the last week to kind of justify your existence?

17:32The people that they cut were kind of by and large the nonpartisan professionals that make government function, especially that make it function in times of in times of emergency and distress. And so that safety net that a lot of us could ignore when there wasn't a catastrophe, it's just now become, you know, exponentially more threadbare. Yeah, well put. Che, we had one of our reporters out talking to folks, and I just kind of want to share what we're hearing, actual real world view about how people are doing under this phase of the second Trump term.

18:14Chai Komanduri:Is there any way in which your life has gotten better during this second Trump administration? No. In what ways has he made your life better in the second term? I don't know how to answer that one. Can you name one way in which your life has gotten better since he was elected for the second term? No, absolutely not. Have you seen any way in which your life has gotten better during this second Trump presidency? No, not at all. In any aspect, no. Che? Yeah, I mean, one thing I would add is one person whose life has definitely gotten better in the second term is Donald Trump. You know, the New Yorker did that story in January where they said he has enriched himself to the tune of four billion.

19:04Chai Komanduri:I have seen estimates going up to six to seven billion for the entire family. When we when the story is told about all the corruption and all the money that has been made by Donald Trump, his life has gotten better. The problem is, is for the American people, there's a whole lot of buyer's remorse and a sense that their lives have not gotten better. That is an important American story that needs to be told. Very fair. Michelle, that relates to the last thing I want to ask you, which is we have a whole larger question about inequality in this country. People see how most folks are struggling. It's against a backdrop where the U.S.

19:42stock market is hitting literally record highs, including in the concentrated tech space. Um, there's a lot of reasons. One is that they basically think the war will get wrapped up. So to them, three months is like now, unless they're wrong. Um, but the tech optimism continues and under the current system and rules, it benefits a very, very tiny group, um, who have power and are saying, Hey, maybe it's going okay. So I want to remind folks, and again, here on the political channels, we're not, you know, we don't do the day trading. We don't have a ticker up every day, Michelle, but, uh, five tech stocks, um, Alphabet, NVIDIA, Amazon, Broadcom, and Apple account for more than half of the gains of what is basically the top 500 index.

20:21And that changes a period when investors had actually seen broadening returns. So translation, Michelle, it's getting more concentrated again, which could be a bubble. And it's making the very rich richer while everyone else suffers under gas prices. Where do you think that fits in to Trump's problems in the midterms? Well, and meanwhile, we see a lot of these kind of AI tech titans crowing about how their creations are going to destroy jobs in this country and put, you know, large parts of the country out of work. It's why you see this really bipartisan revolt against data centers and sort of people want to do anything that they can to slow down this Leviathan.

21:02I think in the first Trump turn, you know, you saw working class people think that Trump was basically a class traitor, that although he was this extremely gaudy billionaire, they saw him as somebody who would be, you know, kind of he promised because he came out of that world, he knew how to contain it. And what I think everybody can see now, maybe except for the most blinkered diehard MAGA fans, is that Donald Trump wanted nothing more than entree into that class. He wanted to be a kind of billionaire in good standing. And now he is. And those are the people that he that he cares about. Michelle and Che thank you very much kind of covered a lot of ground there appreciate it have a good weekend I have a 90 second break and then I'm back with Joyce Vance on how some companies are now fighting for free speech

21:59at DSW we ask the important questions like what shoes are you going to wear whether you're prepping for wedding season festival season or just planning the ultimate vacay the right shoes can make or break an RSVP. So own the moment. You've got big plans and we've got just the shoes at the perfect price, of course. Get ready to get ready with Designer Shoe Warehouse. Head to your DSW store or dsw.com today and let us surprise you.

22:27Chai Komanduri:Why have I asked my electrician I found on Angie.com to bury my pet hamster? I was so moved by how carefully he buried my electrical wires. I knew I could trust him to bury my sweet nibbles after his untimely end. This is very strange. Angie, the one you trust to find the ones you trust. Find pros for all your home projects at Angie.com. In the U.S., there's a break-in every 26 seconds. But when intruders step near, SimpliSafe Home Security steps up. Stop. This is SimpliSafe. Police are on the way. Using AI alerts, U.S.-based live agents help deter break-ins. SimpliSafe, no long-term contracts.

22:58Chai Komanduri:Save 50 % on your new system with professional monitoring at simplisafe.com slash sxm or with promo code sxm. Outdoor deterrence requires a SimpliSafe Active Guard outdoor protection plans starting at$49.99 a month. Visit simplisafe.com slash licenses for alarm license information. Tennessee 2012. Turning to the censorship and free speech wars under Trump, ABC, which under Disney had initially wavered but then stood by Jimmy Kimmel, is now going farther. Perhaps buoyed by public support, they're fighting back against the Trump FCC and saying they're violating First Amendment rights and abusing their position as regulators to punish political content they disagree with.

23:35This is from a brand new filing. This builds on, of course, what was the past Kimmel skirmish where the FCC, they say, has created this harmful ambiguity in an area where none previously existed, that there's a chilling effect on First Amendment protected speech. That's because the FCC is trying to go after the view for its anti-Trump criticism and pushing some sort of theory that there are old rules where they have to grant equal time. Now, talk shows have long been exempt from that, and very few people think this is on the level, like that it's about equal time. Most think that It's another way that while they've often failed, the Trump FCC folks have tried to dial up pressure on Kimmel, on comics, now on talk shows for using their First Amendment rights to criticize Trump.

24:17And we know that does happen on The View. When you look at the lineup of guests that have typically been on The View, I think it's an uphill climb for Disney to make the case that they're just a straight news program. If you're fake news, you're not going to qualify for the bonafide news exception. And again, the FCC walked away from this for years. That's just the view piece. There's also Trump's attacks on comedians. He's revived that online. He wants to sort of decide who's on TV, which has proven unpopular. There's that huge backlash when he tried and failed to get Jimmy Kimmel canceled. He's also, of course, celebrated that the Stephen Colbert show, once it came under the ownership of a company much friendlier to Trump's politics, canceled the show.

25:02As we've noted, they've said publicly that it was a financial decision, not bowing to government pressure. But this is the environment we're in. I want to bring in former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance. Good to have you. I noticed the contrast when Disney and ABC initially faced the Trump attack on Kimmel. There were days where they had suspended him and people thought they might fold completely. Now, having won that fight over time, do you see a bit of a different legal strategy in how they're defending the view? Yeah, absolutely here, because one of the lessons of Trump's second term in office has been that it does no good to prematurely bend the knee when your First Amendment rights are on the line.

25:47And that doesn't matter if it's a university, if it's a law firm, or even more recently, this criminal prosecution against the Southern Poverty Law Center. You know, the through line in all of those events, Ari, is this effort to suppress any sort of criticism of this administration. So I think it's interesting to see ABC pushing back here. You know, this issue just involves one station in Houston that was sort of being challenged for the view, which has had this long-term exemption, I think, since the early 2000s, which recognizes that the equal time doctrine doesn't cover straight up news, but it also doesn't cover news interview shows.

26:30And so they have brought in Paul Clement, a former solicitor general, during the Bush administration, which signifies how serious they are about joining those that have stood up, pushed back in court. This is a petition in front of the FCC for now. But they are, I think, trying to demand that their First Amendment rights be honored. Yeah, and the Kimmel standoff was so fascinating because unlike Colbert, where there was some contested reality and he did stay on air for many months to fill out the contract. So it just didn't feel quite as a core live event. With Kimmel, you had the country weighing in and you had Disney going, well, people are really mad if we just turn and cave like you said.