Cost of Trump Projects Hit Voters as Midterms Loom

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0:58Still waiting in line? Welcome to The Beat. I'm Ari Melber. We have a big show tonight with all the things going on. You can hear the music that tells you one thing. It is another election night in America. And here on MSNOW, we will always update you on these races, big, small or in between. There are primaries today in Georgia, Alabama, Oklahoma, Washington, D.C., our capital, as well as in California. Republican fears are growing that Donald Trump is not only out of step with voters, that the second term has lost basic contact with what people's priorities are, but that it actually keeps getting worse, including the costly war in Iran and what could be a costly peace that he has been pursuing.

1:41So that's the background for new reports that Trump has been told about other costs that are piling up, including his chosen vanity projects in Washington. The president opting to continue to spend your money, that's what it is, however populous that sounds, on all sorts of things that you haven't authorized and that when we check and poll, people don't want. Whether that was the expensive foreign war in Iran, which the president has now backed off of, some people calling it a loss, losing a war. But whatever you call it, we know that it costs a lot to wage and there are reports that will cost you even more if the president spends a lot to get us out of it.

2:18Now, that's big, big spending. There's other spending that can feel symbolic, but still tells you about this White House set of priorities. Trump's ballroom, which, of course, they sold like so many Trump projects on a price tag that was not real. They claimed that you wouldn't pay. In other words, if it was only going to be private donors, aside from perhaps corruption issues, maybe that doesn't affect you. And so you're not supposed to care that much, except it's not true. We have new reports tonight that completely undercut the president's claims and show that it's already costing you, the taxpayer,$300 million and counting.

2:53The Post got the internal cost estimates. This is the journalism we've mentioned so much these days that matters. This is not opinion. This is not criticism. This is just dogged reporters, journalists at the Post doing their job, getting the receipts and finding out this. The total cost ballooning to over half a billion dollars. $307 million of that, as mentioned, is about the ballpark for taxpayers, and you might pay for more. I want to remind you exactly how Donald Trump sold this, not unlike his campaign and other past business ventures. The pitch is far from today's reality. You've been so generous in your contributions, very substantial money, fully financed, it's fully taken care of now.

3:37And, in fact, we'll have money left over. Fact check, false. It was not fully financed by private donations. They do not have money left over, not on track to anyway, based on what we're seeing. The Post reports that this was basically known so that people around Trump, if not the president himself, should have known that the work was already projected to rely heavily on taxpayer dollars from the moment it was announced. And then you have something that is a swamp metaphor turned into an actual swamp. You're looking at it. Donald Trump obsessed with these type of things, these visual, symbolic things where he wants to change the reflecting pool or add his name to stuff or put up arches that then in the future people would, in his mind, say, oh, that's the arch Trump built.

4:20Well, he wanted to change this reflecting pool to Lincoln Memorial. And so, again, when you talk about priorities, this goes all the way to the top. The president and his aides spending time, money and energy on this project, which is now over budget and not working. The green you see is from an algae infestation. It's turned it noticeably green. I will say, to be clear, as anyone who's been around Washington knows, or if you've reported on these issues, other administrations have dealt with this. It was a known recurring issue. And other presidents and their administrations have looked into it, not usually with as much presidential attention as Trump.

4:56But here we are again. So you have the actual algae swampy problem in a reflecting pool that Trump was spending a lot to try to fix. Trump ordered American flag blue for the reflecting pool, puts one headline in the Times, it's green again. So what are they doing? Well, I don't want to give you any COVID flashbacks, but yes, they're reaching for the bleach. Federal workers seen pouring all this bleach into the pool, which is obviously a short-term or cosmetic effect at the coloration, money and energy, while other people spent, while other people, of course, are worried about gas prices and inflation.

5:34J.D. Vance was on The View today. He said he loves the inflation. What he said, Anna, what he said is that he loves the fact that the inflation is going to come down when this war is over. That's what he said. That wasn't a duress. Wait, are you his interpreter or are you his vice president? Come on. You could see they kept the tone light, maybe trying to have a sort of a pleasant exchange with someone when there are plenty of, of course, Trump Vance critics on that panel. But the points remain. He said what he said. You're going to say he didn't say what he said. We're deep into this. We are approaching the halfway mark of the second term and then the lame duck period and having people come out and just claim Trump didn't say what he said.

6:17And up is down and a war didn't happen or the war wasn't expensive or he doesn't love the inflation. This stuff is wearing thin on today, as I remind you, another voting day. Now, the wider context is not something as sort of potentially ephemeral as the color of the water in that reflecting pool. It is the war we've been waging. Trump is facing questions about how he got out of this and whether basically Iran, having paid a certain price on the ground, ultimately did what Iran has done in other conflicts with other nations and past U.S. administrations, took the beating and waited it out. We had generals and experts on this program and others, I'm sure you've heard, and we've seen it written in print as well, who said you cannot basically wage an air war to victory.

7:02That it doesn't happen, hasn't happened. You can't bomb your way to victory. And no one, not even the Hawks and the Trump cabinet, wanted to do a ground war. So we ended up back sort of where we started, but actually worse off because we're paying for it. And the questions are growing. Take the Drudge website, which is kind of clickbaity, but leans right. Their front page has these headlines, make Iran great again, war for nothing. Here's how it's playing on Fox. I can't square some of the things that are coming out of the administration from reliable sources. That makes no sense whatsoever. It's not defensible.

7:38Victories are usually visible, clear, understandable, and it's just premature. This is precarious. What do you think about us getting suckered back into a long, stalemated negotiation? Here, the Iranians are in charge. The killers and thugs are still in charge. It is true there was no regime change. There certainly was an unconditional surrender. Military capacity was not destroyed, although it was initially degraded. But the United States Air Force can do that. We can, when we choose, degrade most other military's abilities. That's a tactic. It's not a strategy. And obviously, the nuclear pile, nuclear stockpile, I should say, is far from destroyed.

8:25That's one of the many issues. So many people from the right to the center to the left, from the hawks to the doves, from the State Department veterans to the military veterans, and basically anyone who is not sort of on the payroll or political threat matrix of Donald Trump's Republican Party have pointed some of this out. If you've watched our coverage, you may remember when the opening days of the war started, we had all the views on. We heard from people who said there is a way it could work if you achieve certain objectives. But that didn't happen. And so now, if you just follow the facts, this is not a U.S.

8:56victory. Anyone can see that. And it's costly, which voters don't like. Axios reports that U.S. intel agencies also doubt Iran's willingness to make future nuclear concessions the U.S. is seeking under Trump in any final deal. Now, you don't need to be a foreign policy expert to say, duh. That's always been the issue. It's why Obama and his team sometimes took public criticism for what they said was the most responsible course. Contain, sanction, offer money when you can if you get what you want, but treat this as long-term containment because you can't trust these guys. And again, you don't want a ground war.

9:35New York Times reports high gas prices will be lingering long after any deal is signed. Trump was rushing towards this. Some critics say he gave up too much. But either way, whether this on a primary day like today is seen at the pump before November in a meaningful way to help the Republicans also remains an open political question. I want to bring in Michelle Goldberg, New York Times columnist, MSNOW analyst, and Jelani Cobb, dean of the Columbia Journalism School and reporter, writer for The New Yorker magazine. Welcome to both of you. Michelle, Well, I go out of my way to mention that if you put aside international law and congressional participation, there were people who said up front, well, if certain things happened, you might get results out of an Iran campaign.

10:25That was a view that existed. For example, had there been regime change, there are people who said, well, you go in and do something that no other administration has done. And if you got a better regime to deal with, maybe it's worth it. I mentioned that to say that on the evidence, none of the possible good things have happened and several bad things have happened. And so I'm curious, both on the substance and the politics of a midterm voting day like tonight with the primaries, what you see happened here. Well, I mean, substantively, I don't think I'm not sure how much of an argument it is for the war that says if everything kind of follows this magical thinking, then we might end up with something better than the status quo.

11:09I mean, what we've ended up with was predictable and predicted, although I'm not sure that even the war's harshest critics imagined the kind of scale of the debacle for American power and prestige. I would also say that the problem with this deal is not the deal itself, right? I mean, the war had to end. And I think that we should be glad that it's at least seems to be coming to an end, if not, or at least a pause. the problem is that the war was misbegotten and there was an American defeat. And so, you know, the sort of humiliation of this outcome has been baked in for some time. It was just a matter of when the administration was going to at least tacitly admit it.

11:55And you see, they still don't want to admit it, which is why you don't see them releasing the text of this memorandum of understanding. Right. And Jelani, on that point, I mentioned that, you know, other administrations have dealt with this. You have a bad challenge and you end up with the best accommodation you can make. A lot of foreign policies like that, because there's a lot of bad regimes out there. It's not the United States job or really possible to fix, even if we could, a hundred other countries. And so when Obama made those Iran deals, I want to show you one thing and I'll let you in.

12:30Obama made the Iran deals, got criticized, held the line. Jon Stewart makes the point that Trump played himself and ended up in a similar place with more problems. Take a look. That horrible, stupid deal where President Obama paid$150 billion for nothing. What kind of an idiot would try and dangle billions of dollars in exchange for a deal with Iran. U.S. officials did mention that in addition to sanctions relief and the unfreezing of Iranian funds, there could be something like a$300 billion fund to help rebuild Iran. Only the great Donald Trump could fight a costly war to get the United States to remove the sanctions put on Iran by Donald Trump.

13:19In the words of the great Winston Churchill, you played yourself. Jelani.

13:53It began in 1953 with the U.S. involvement in pushing out the prime minister, Mossadegh, and vastly expanding the Shah's authority, which in itself leads to the 1979 revolt and revolution. And in turn, is predictive of why there's so much animosity toward the U.S. when that revolution takes place. and, you know, we go through all this and then we think that the potential solution to the problem is more of the thing that created the problem in the first place, which is a kind of cyclical thinking, you know, the definition of insanity, doing the same thing, expecting a different result. That's the first part of this.

14:39The additional part of it is that they have hoped that their core constituencies are not going to pay attention to what's actually in the deal or what they actually wind up costing. It'll just be bluster. People will believe what Donald Trump says. He'll say that it's great. If he says it's great, then his acolytes will suspect that it must really truly be. And it'll just be left to people on shows like this and people at egghead universities to actually point out what's really going on. But that doesn't seem to be the case. And you see people who are on the right who are now outlining. People can count, and they know that$150 billion is smaller than$300 billion, and also that the reflecting pool is green.

15:27So I think that all of these things add up. And finally, the last thing I'll say about this is that it is entirely, it is heavy-handedly appropriate for the water to turn green during this administration. And we're talking about what we truly value. then that is a heavy-handed metaphor. The water should actually totally be green. Cash rules everything around me. I hear you. And Michelle, that actually brings us to new comments. Dollar, dollar bills. Dollar, dollar bills, y 'all. Respect. Michelle, Obama, new comments on the money issue and the corruption. Take a look. We've got a set of institutions that have fallen victim to the siren song of everything's about money and everything's about attention and everything's about fame and everything's about getting over.

16:29Michelle? I mean, I think that's a little bit indirect for, you know, I mean, yeah, certainly we've had a set of institutions that have collapsed. We have had an epidemic of cowardice and capitulation and complicity. But really, we just have this kind of mass looting that you are, you know, typically see in this sort of countries that Donald Trump typically, actually, I can't say that on this show, but that Donald Trump has referred to as asshole countries. I mean, he's now, you know, sort of putting that playbook into account. I mean, that's what makes a country dysfunctional. It's not that it has people of a certain skin color.

17:14It's that it has these completely corrupted institutions in which access to power and access to wealth are one in the same. We saw this just over the weekend with this kind of both ridiculous and obscene UFC fight that was ostensibly to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States, in addition to celebrating Donald Trump's 80th birthday. And you saw, you know, this kind of on the White House lawn, this octagon wrapped in crypto ads with, you know, interspersed with ads for Trump coins attended by Trump donors, put on a pay-per-view network of a Trump crony that has taken over CBS News and made it more Trump friendly and in turn has had a merger, and in turn, the parent company has had a giant merger approved.

18:04I mean, there is the part of the problem with the scale of the corruption is that, you know, it's one of those things that, as I've said, I think on your show before, it really defies human cognition in the same way that we can't quite conceive, you know, kind of what a light year is or the scale of the universe. It sort of defies all of us to get our head around the full scope of this graft. I think that's a very apt point. And Jelani, I've had to do that twice. My apologies. I got a 90 second break, but both of you come back. Michelle, I think you really nailed the point that we have to actually accurately understand the scale of the problem to face it.

18:46But it's so bad. It's so corrupt. It's so absurd and at times baroque that that's harder to do. You guys come back. I'm going to show J.D. Vance getting pushed a little by Megyn Kelly as she talks about Iran dividing the whole GOP base in 90 seconds. There's only one Ozempic. Hello, I'm Ozempic. Because this ad is 30 seconds, I can't get into everything I'm FDA approved to do. so I'm just going to play my jingle again. But first, ask your doctor about which FDA-approved uses of me, the Ozempic pen, may be right for you. Call 1-833-OZEMPIC or visit Ozempic.com to view the medication guide and learn more about Ozempic semaglutide injection, 2 milligrams.

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20:04Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? introducing Odoo, the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. From CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part, Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So, why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. We're back with Michelle and Jelani. One of the political issues for the president with Iran is even if this quiets down for some Americans, for Republicans, especially online, it's already become, as Megyn Kelly likens it, to a civil war.

20:50She actually pressed the point with J.D. Vance himself. This is new. Take a look. Let's talk about what happened to the GOP base as a result of all this, because it's divided. I know you've experienced it yourself. I've experienced it, too. It's been sort of a sad, tumultuous, stressful time, but it's been kind of civil worry over on the conservative teams since this whole thing got launched. And the non-interventionalist right feels very betrayed, very betrayed. Mr. Vice President, what do you say to those people? Well, what I'd say to them is, is one, I think you can walk through all the ways in which this has led to a good place for the United States of America.

21:29He went on like that. So, Jelani, we show it more for the question than the answer. Sometimes that's the case in news. But sort of even Megyn Kelly, to his face, treating it as true, obvious premise that this has split the base, not debatable. That as well as the other point you wanted to make, Jelani? Well, I think that there are a couple of things. One, just going to the point that you the question you just raised. Yes, it split the base, but it also is important that you read the fine print, because from the outset, You know, Trump has always kind of talked out of both sides of his mouth on these things.

22:09You know, he said that there have been stupid wars, that the U.S. has been involved in these things, and we need to make the kind of classic isolationist arguments. But then there was also a lot of saber-rattling and a lot of bombing people, you know, back to whatever era he said he's going to do it and so on. He always had both of those elements in his rhetoric. And both of those things have coexisted uneasily in the GOP base. This is just a case of the inevitable coming to pass and not the first time, you know, we could make that point, you know, either. So there's that. The other part of it is, going back to Michelle's earlier point, is that it's not simply the scale of the graft.

22:52It is the naked nature of it and the kind of ham-fisted nature of it. Because in the U.S., we have basically a tolerance for sophisticated graft. If it involves multiple accounting firms and offshore banking accounts, if it involves anything that comes out of Citizens United, things that we would call graft and corruption in other countries. We have just simply created a bureaucratized way of making it legal in the United States. The thing that we don't like is the brown paper bag full of money kind of graft and corruption. We think of that as declassé and risqué. Those are the things that people in those asshole countries that Michelle was just talking about, they do that kind of graft and corruption there.

23:38But the amazing innovation of Trumpism is that he has brought that old boss tweed style of graft and corruption back into the 21st century. These things that are obvious, transparent conflicts of interest, things that no advocate for democracy would countenance on their worst day. And for us, that is just Tuesday. It's just a regular kind of thing. It's so we're so inundated with it. It has become normal. But it would normally under normal circumstances be shocking. right and both of you are drawing those lines and then when you go to the outrage or does it get bad enough that you get actual social change and we've seen that pendulum throughout our history you know one of the big parts of that is people's standard of living i mean there's a lot of political science history on that and so as people get angrier and these things are in your face or if we have a correction as as uh musk is the first trillionaire and all the the sort of decadent end Sometimes it feels sometimes that we're living through.

24:42Then you say, oh, are they going to come to the gates? And who are they going to come for? Big questions here, Jelani and Michelle. Thanks to both of you across two blocks. We appreciate it. Jelani was quoting Wu-Tang. I'll tell you, by the end of the hour, we have another New York artist, Fat Joe, returning to the beat to discuss his beloved Knicks. He might be the celebrity on that so-called celebrity row who has been doing it the longest. He's a day one, both with the Knicks and, quite frankly, here on MS Now. And we are thrilled to get him back tonight. That's by the end of the hour. Meanwhile, Trump's FBI facing more allegations.

25:14Speaking of corruption, Andrew Weissman breaks it down next.

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26:16Order today at 1-800-Flowers.com slash SXM. That's 1-800-Flowers.com slash SXM. Monday, AI agents took over my work. And I absolutely love it. Chasing deadlines, writing status reports, updating stakeholders. Agents handle the daily grind now. They live inside Monday.com. So they see the full picture. My work, my team, the whole company. And I don't have to worry about the data. It's safe, which means I'm free to focus on the big stuff, knowing everything runs smoothly in the background. It's completely shifted the way we work. Create your own AI agent in minutes on Monday.com. Trump DOJ has a new indictment.

26:55This is out of Minnesota, where the feds announced 15 people charged for what they say is conspiring to interfere with ICE officers who were enforcing in those very controversial operations in Minneapolis earlier this year. The Trump administration, since that time, at a policy level, of course, has removed more than one official and really backed off. But this is Trump's DOJ claiming that this was a kind of Antifa plot. That is a group that is seen as sort of anti-fascist or potentially progressive. And whether they are actually organized, and there's evidence to support it here, is what's going to be tested.

27:30but it accuses these individuals of preventing by force intimidation and threats DHS officers from their duties. Now, question, as I mentioned, is not whether that could be a crime. It could. But do they have the evidence? The U.S. attorney, this is the person in DOJ working under the Trump administration, didn't exactly have a lot of specifics. What kind of injuries did officers sustain as part of these campaigns? Can you elaborate on that? I can't elaborate on that today. What evidence do you have if these assaults and attacks took place? Oh, we have video evidence, we have eyewitness testimony, and all of that evidence will roll out in the normal course of a prosecution.