DC National Guard Deployment Extended into 2026

0:00Listen to your favorite MS Now shows anytime as a podcast. Enjoy new episodes of Morning Joe, Deadline Whitehouse, and The Rachel Maddow Show. Every small D democratic muscle that we have is flexing. Plus The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, The Beat with Ari Melber, The Weeknight, and more. On the go, wherever you get your podcasts. For ad-free listening to all of your favorite shows, subscribe to MS Now Premium on Apple Podcasts. Welcome to The Beat. I'm Ari Melber. And tonight, let's just start with what's actually happening. Indefinite, unending troops in the streets. Military rule. If that sounds harsh, if it sounds even hyperbolic, and we all know the media sometimes can seem that way, that is the update to what Donald Trump is already doing.

0:54But what he now says quite clearly out in the open, he wants to continue to do, which is to have the troops in the streets through next year. So while you can debate whether this or that city has this or that problem that could be fixed in a week or two or a month, now he's just saying, no, he wants the troops out in the streets for a long time. I can't say indefinite. I mean, eventually this term comes to an end. He's a lame duck second-term president, but thousands of National Guard troops already patrolling Washington are receiving these formal extended orders. And here's how they're reported.

1:30Quote, open-ended. I'm going to leave this up for a second because, again, we live in a time where people debate each other and you say, well, was the news anchor, was he exaggerating? Is this against Trump? No, this is what they say they want. It is un-American in the sense that our Constitution forbids quartering soldiers and having soldiers in our lives and cities indefinitely, but it is literally what the extension now is. So Trump's National Guard DC deployment extends into next year without any basis that we would know. There's not some ongoing occupation or terrorism or riots that we would normally use the Guard for.

2:10There's not some giant unrest, ongoing basis, but the extension is, quote, open-ended until the mission is considered complete, which is up to the government. The Pentagon is ordering the Guard to also create what they're calling quick reaction forces, and this would be all over the place, in every state, where 500 soldiers and groups will get non-lethal training and crowd control, handling of detainees, use of batons, stun guns, and body shields. That, according to the Wall Street Journal's reporting, an outlet, of course, owned by Rupert Murdoch, part of the Fox News empire, also getting sued by Donald Trump right now, but that's the journal's take.

2:48So even for those skeptical about where the sourcing is coming from and whether this is all as bad as it sounds, I can tell you, according to the journal, it is as bad as it sounds. Because while training is generally a good thing, and a lot of people advocate that anyone doing policing or crowd control should be trained, remember, we're talking about the military. And there are a bunch of other more fitting layers of government that are actually already trained to do that work. It's the local police. Sometimes it's the state marshals. It's the people who report up locally to your local governor and representatives, which again is in the Constitution that policing power should first always be as close to the people as possible.

3:34There are federal crimes, and they are of course investigated by the FBI, but when you deal with most crimes, it's your local police that you're dealing with and your local courts. That's how it's always been. So it is noticeably odd, against the backdrop of the president also wanting an indefinite presence in the capital of the military, that now they want the military to be able to do more of this. How's it going? Well, we've had scenes of violence that raise the question of whether it is the presence of some of the agents themselves that are causing the danger in these local places they're patrolling.

4:07There is video surfacing of an ICE agent basically assaulting a 57-year-old woman during lawful First Amendment protected protests of what ICE was doing in Colorado, arresting another individual. And this eventually came to a head, apparently, because the woman was sort of, you might say, trolling or badgering the agent. Remember, whether you agree with how people talk to the police or the federal agents in this country, that's your right, your First Amendment right. You can criticize them. You can ask them questions. This is the exchange. So you're fake? Oh, dude. I can't take my phone. You cannot.

4:52Oh, that's the way you go, sir. That's okay. Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Get off the phone! Get off the phone! Hey! You need to get off of her! Get off the phone! Get off the phone! Get the phone! You stole her phone! Hey! And you can see it go forward like that. It is a disturbing image. And while we always caution when we do reporting that you have to look at the before and after, this is a clip. If this were a court of law, you would need to know more before or you could say whether the agent there had violated the law. It certainly doesn't look like responsible patrol and policing. And most of these federal agents aren't usually, as I reminded you, dealing with local policing.

5:33So maybe they're making more mistakes, violating policy, hurting people. And maybe this work should go back to the normal process of local policing. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker asking the DHS, as Nicole Wallace recently reported, to pause operations at least during the Halloween celebration. I've sent a letter to Christy Noem and to the Department of Homeland Security leadership asking them to pause all of their federal agent operations for the entirety of the Halloween weekend. I'm asking for basic human decency. Show us this is about something other than you just causing mayhem. The governor there alleging that they are trying to cause mayhem.

6:21Now, a lot of these agents have a job. They work for the federal government, and they're being sent these places. And some of them may just be trying to do the job and get by. It is a fact that when you look at these situations, for every terrible video, there may be a hundred other agents honestly just trying to get through the day. But the policies are suspect to begin with. The Constitution does not view federal power as something that is the first resort for policing the public, nor the military, which is supposed to protect us from foreign enemies and protect the borders and protect us in war.

6:57Constitution does not view the military as the place for a president to bend the people to his will. I'm joined by Reverend Al Sharpton, who's the host of Politics Nation on MSNBC. He's the founder of the National Action Network. He's, of course, a longtime civil rights activist. And around New York, he's known Donald Trump or all the different versions of Donald Trump. What do you see in this bending of military powers? I think that Donald Trump is having his ultimate dream of having the trappings of a ruler slash dictator, because there's really no evidence that there's a functional reason, for example, for Washington, D.C., for the military and the guards to stay there till next year.

7:40There's not been any roundup of a lot of people there that should not have been there illegally. There have been incidents, as we saw in Colorado. There was another one in Chicago. So you have to say they're not doing this to stem a tide of crime or of illegal people there. So what are you doing? You're feeding his self-image that I am king. That's why I wanted the military parade that nobody came to. That's why in the middle of a government shutdown and people losing snap, I'm going to spend $300 million on a ballroom because I am king. And that's what we're looking at. And the sickness of it is that the citizens are paying for themselves being the victims of this kind of delusional power.

8:29Yeah, these are your tax dollars. I wonder about the almost the whether you call it existential, that's a. a nice word, or absurdly hypocritical premise of all this for Trump. Because they say it's an emergency. They say it's a rebellion. They say it's unrest. But if it were any of those things, why don't we see that? Why isn't there evidence of that? And in the case of D.C. as emphasized, it can't just be an emergency forever, unending into next year. If you go to D.C. and you and I are there all the time, we got reports from there. They got a lot of soldiers around, But it's a pretty quiet, peaceful streets.

9:07And when you look at the fact, take D.C., for example, when I've been in and out of there, they're mostly in Georgetown and in other areas that there's not not only high crime, there's not a lot of, quote, illegal people there. So what emergency? When did the emergency start? Where does it end? And how do you gauge the emergency? Oh, but we're really not there for an emergency. It's all kinds of window dressing. And again, it's to play to his ego that he's a military ruler and that he is in charge. And it's also to try and assuage the public that they're doing something. And I think that we really need to be more vocal about this.

9:51And taxpayers, particularly now when we're seeing shutdowns and snap money, I mean, we're seeing real problems. Well, that goes to the protest, which is something you've done your whole life. Rachel's talked about the power of it. I've heard you say, do you want to be a thermometer or a thermostat? Right. Because you can change the temperature. And the Supreme Court and these courts, they have rules. But everyone's noticed that sometimes they look around, they're trying to get a sense of where the country is. And the court right now is blocking Chicago. And they're not, the Trump administration is not violating that.

10:22They're following that. And these troops have an obligation to follow that. But the Washington Post reports Supreme Court asked for more briefs on the Chicago deployment. The justices won't rule at least till mid-November, which leaves Trump's troop deployment blocked until they rule, because that's what the lower courts have done. Where does that fit in, that the protests, no kings, people saying this is not OK, this is not American, as the courts look around and figure out what's the breaking point? And in fairness, I want to say you don't just slap the president's hand the first day of a deployment.

10:52I don't care what party. If the president on day one does something with the military throughout our history, you usually leave it. But on day 30 and day 60, the courts eventually are going to have to adjudicate. No, I think that the marches, the protests, whether it was no kings, whether it's been other union protests, whether it's what we did on the Wall Street protests, that is necessary. If you look at American history, just the last half century, civil rights movement, we got the Civil Rights Act of 64, Civil Rights, Voting Rights Act of 65 by marching in Birmingham, by marching in Selma, Alabama.

11:30We didn't get it in a cloakroom in the Capitol. The same thing with women's movements, women's liberation movement in the streets is what changed the laws. Same thing we've seen in terms of war and poverty. So I think that it is the eruption of these movements of different races, different ages that will make the courts and everybody has to say, wait a minute, we've got to look at this more fairly. And as you quoted, which I always use, thermometers are thermostats. Thermometers are politicians. They see what the temperature is. Thermostats change the temperature. We turn the heat up. And the more we turn the heat up, the more they'll sweat in Washington.

12:11Well put. and that's why I wanted your view on the dynamics here. Thank you to Rev. Al, as always. Politics Nation, 5 p.m. weekends, Eastern. You can check that out. By the end of the hour, we have a National Guard member who is protesting exactly what Trump is demanding they do, policing neighbors. That'd be an interesting perspective, we think. Also, Republicans rebuking Donald Trump, at least on trade. The Nobel winner, Paul Krugman, is here tonight with his wisdom and candor. I'm looking forward to that. But after this 90-second break, I'm going to give you my takedown and breakdown of the profiteering, the crypto, the BS.

12:49That's next.

13:09How long has it been in line? I love human beings. To spend time connecting with them is the biggest blessing that I could ask for. From the field to the studio, Jacob is finding the heart of the story. Connect with Jacob Soboroff. Weekends at 10 a.m. Eastern on MS Now. Let's turn to the profiteering. Donald Trump is doing many things differently in the second term. And while he's made many pledges to disassociate from business during office, saying he would be hands-off and a lot of other vows. It is far worse now in the first year of the second term than his first term. There's a backroom deal between the Trump family and a crypto figure that has been pardoned, the founder of the crypto giant Binance, the Journal, reporting that around the time of the election, associates there who had been convicted of money laundering began discussions with Trump allies saying they wanted to, quote, find a solution to Binance's legal troubles in the U.S.

14:02and offering a deal with the Trump family business. That is sorted. It sounds like pay to play. It sounds like a conflict of interest. Whether legally it meets the definition of quid pro quo bribery would have to be investigated. There are no signs that the DOJ is doing that. Indeed, in a traditional era or a time where a different party controlled Congress, you might hear a lot more demands to have a special counsel appointed to independently investigate whether the president or people around him are compromised. Again, we don't know the answers, but we can see the problems. The following Trump's win, the Binance folks reportedly helped build the Trump family's crypto, which they're currently using not to make thousands or hundreds of thousands, not to make millions, but allegedly billions.

14:49There's a lot of secrecy around exactly how much. They're striking business deals that, according to some estimates, are over a billion dollars in total. And then you have, of course, that pardon. And this comes at a time where a lot of Republicans are still criticizing Biden's pardons because of how he signed them. Apparently, they don't have concerns about this one, at least not publicly. Reuters reporting that the Trump family's crypto profits are also approaching a billion. You see right here, that's, again, not even the year done. 800 million coming from Trump crypto ventures, including these so-called tokens.

15:26Now, some of this, to be clear and fair, relates to Trump's family. We don't know whether all of the family money would go back to him. That's why it might be a conflict of interest. You remember there was talk about whether Hunter Biden should be on a board? Well, this dwarfs that by many, many, many scales of millions and hundreds of millions. Now, I want to show you from just recently, the Biden era, where the top Republican on the Oversight Committee went on and on about whether the Hunter Biden business operations compromised President Biden. The president's son and his brother have definitely committed the Foreign Agents Registration Act violation.

16:09That's a felony. Any American who has a fraction of the violations of the law that Hunter Biden has would have already been indicted. You're politically connected to elected officials at the highest level, then you're going to get by. Now, those were the criticisms. As for how the system was working, well, Hunter Biden was not actually convicted of anything related to corruption. And he was thoroughly investigated. He was ultimately investigated and indicted on those charges around gun paperwork and some other personal problems he'd had. But remember, that's because the DOJ under that administration had independent probes.

16:54Your name, or being the same party as the administration, did not excuse you from investigation and oversight. Now listen to the same congressman while Trump does this stuff with his family that is obviously worse. I showed you the journal reporting. And there's no suggestion that the DOJ or anyone is doing oversight to protect you, the taxpayer, from this kind of corruption. But suddenly he says it's OK. And wait till you hear the reason. The difference between the way the Trump family is operating in the Biden family is they're admitting they're doing this. The president campaigned as a business guy.

17:33So as long as you disclose your income and disclose the sources, I think that's acceptable. Fact check, false. It's not acceptable to the law. Disclosing, for example, corrupt activities or bribes or profiteering is not legally acceptable. Now, he may say that politically, he just doesn't want to apply the same standards to his side as the other side. And remember, we've seen that type of double talk from both parties for sure. In the Biden era, the process worked, but the president did ultimately use his power to pardon his son, you may recall. It was near the end of the tenure, and that itself was a controversial and debatable thing.

18:19Big picture, that DOJ and that administration still followed ethics rules and allowed and stood by the independent process to play out, which is important whether you think someone should end up in jail or not because it protects the taxpayer, you have investigations, and whether someone's pardoned or not, you can break up these other criminal problems if they exist. Here we have the opposite. Basically, open season announcement from the person who's supposed to claim the Republican there that he's against corruption, that's what he was against last term, now saying, disclose it and it's fine, whatever it is, and a DOJ that is closed for business when it comes to protecting you, the taxpayer, from the politicians' potential corruption.

19:04Now, we have a lot coming up. A National Guard member who is speaking out against President Trump and the Chicago deployment orders. That guest joins me later. He, on the shutdown issues, and Mitch McConnell and other top Republicans getting into it. And of all the issues you might disagree with Trump right now on, for them, it's trade. Why does that matter as we see more cracks in this lame duck president's first term? Well, Paul Krugman, the Nobel winning economist, is next.

19:41Is Donald Trump's trade war working? Well, he returned to the U.S. following this summit with the Chinese presidency, claiming wins. The Times reports China was actually practicing, quote, the art of letting Trump claim a win while walking away stronger. They get the benefits, according to the Times, while the U.S. gets the spin. Withholding soybean purchases and rare-earth exports, China actually extracted relief from the U.S. tariffs without conceding much in return. Are the deal or something else? Trump retreated on the strongest tariffs. Politico reports on the fact that this seemed to be more about headlines than results for Americans.

20:18Quote, as ever, Politico reports, Trump's rhetoric is strong, but the detail is somewhat lacking. Some criticism. it appears to most reasonable observers that Donald Trump was punked on the world stage by the Chinese Communist Party. The notion that Donald Trump has created all of this trouble for the American people, which he has, the Trump tariffs are raising costs on everyday Americans by thousands of dollars per year. So we showed you the evidence in The Times reporting, and we showed you the top Democrats' criticism. you might say, okay, well, wait a minute. What about the like-minded Republicans?

21:00Well, it's rare to criticize Trump in this GOP, but there are high-level defections in the Senate, including actually doing something about it. Republicans voting to block Trump's tariffs, saying basically they don't make sense and trying to restore congressional authority over some parts of trade. House Republicans are expected to join what is a rare effort to actually use their power to stop Trump on something. Interesting that it's something revolving around immediate economics, which can be harder to spin than some of the other debates we've had lately. Paul Krugman, the Nobel economist I mentioned, writes, we lost the trade war because the tariff policies inflicted three types of damage.

21:39Higher prices for American producers and consumers, that's you if you're watching this inside the U.S., economic uncertainty, he writes, and, quote, the global loss of American credibility. All that against a shutdown that continues when the Republicans control both political branches. Health care costs will go up under Trump policies, many now working without their federal paychecks and food benefits running out. I'm only down to one pack of chicken. I don't even know what I'm going to do for the next months. One word to describe how you're feeling right now. Stressful. That's what it feels like, is that we're being punished for needing the assistance or needing the help.

22:17I just hope and pray that they don't shut it down because a lot of people and a lot of mothers that are really dependent on the SNAP benefits. My son won't have his milk and we won't have food. I'll go without eating or anything as long as my kids eat. This is about real people. It's not just numbers or policy debates in D.C. Paul Krugman has been writing clearly about this. The expert here is our guest when we come back.

22:49Do you think that we will have a crash or not? The answer is we will have a crash. I just can't tell you when and I can't tell you how deep. But I can assure you, unfortunately, I wish I wasn't saying this, we will have a crash. We will have a crash and we may lose a trade war that's already lost, according to some. Paul Krugman is the Nobel winning economist, longtime author of textbooks, New York Times columns, and now the Paul Krugman sub stack where he has confronted this second term Trump administration with clarity and candor. The latest piece, how we lost the trade war. Welcome back, Professor.

23:33You're better at the complex economics. I, as you know, can read. So I noticed that it says loss, not losing. Let's start there. Why is this, in your view, factually already lost? Okay. Think of this as a contest of wills, a contest of leverage. The United States versus China. Who backed down, really? And the answer is America backed down, or Trump backed down, because it turned out that, yeah, the Trump tariffs were a problem for China, But China cutting off our access to rare earths was a bigger deal. And also the Chinese kind of have an idea of what they want. And it's kind of, you know, under Biden, lots of criticism.

24:24But we were pretty serious about confronting China, trying to deny them the most advanced technology. Trump is apparently going to let them buy advanced chips. And in return, they say they're going to buy some soybeans. So we have traded our reputation, our leverage in the world, and possibly the future of the technological race for a hill of beans. Hill of beans. Did China have better cards or is Trump bad at playing this card game? Well, China did have better cards. The fact of the matter, which Trump should have understood, you know, somebody should have understood, which is that, look, losing the U.S., some access to the U.S.

25:07market is hard, but the Chinese can turn to other sources. conjuring up a strategic industry like rare earths from a standing start is not something you can do right away. So we entered this in a weak position. But also there was just no clarity. And Trump didn't never had a clear a clear goal in these tariffs. And one of the big strengths of the United States has always been that we have allies, that we were the leader of the free world in a very real sense. But we have now alienated, I guess technical term is pissed off, everybody who should be on our side here. I mean, as all of this was going on, Trump is slapping tariffs on Canada because the Canadian province of Ontario ran a TV ad that made him feel bad.

26:00I mean, we've really lost our credibility on the world stage completely over this. Yeah, it sounds like you're saying he was very emotional, which is no way to lead, we're told. I want to show you what the Trump officials are saying. And Professor, as you know, we follow the evidence here and we fact check and we have a lot of people on. So in this second term, which which has been rocky for the reasons you mentioned, among others, I've had several Trump officials on. This is Peter Navarro, who is a White House trade official. And he said on this program that there is revenue from the tariffs that they've been doing.

26:33I want to play this for you and have you walk us through the actual economic data and facts. Take a look. The beautiful things that we've learned about tariffs is they actually raise substantial revenues. And we're turning what looked like to be a fiscal cliff and a deficit that was going to go out of control into something. We're going to be able to pay down to the two and three and four billion trillion dollars. So you feel like this is working for the U.S. even though you didn't get all the deals that you vowed? I mean, we don't have 90 deals. Wait a minute. I think we've done beautifully. Professor?