Morgan Freeman joins Ari Melber: America, Blues & Purpose

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0:42TELUS is not a bank. TELUS is not FDIC-insured. I want to begin with a programming note. Morgan Freeman joins us tonight for his debut on this program. The acclaimed Oscar winner has a new project. So get comfortable. You know him from so many great films. He will be here this hour live. So stay tuned. We consider this a true PSA to catch up with an actual American icon that's coming up this hour. Now, the nation's top story is something else. It involves Trump's setbacks in two huge areas. Damning new fallout from his war. And economic negatives for Trump from the Fed to the markets. stocks tumbling today as the market saw their worst September start since the 08 financial crisis.

1:30I'll have even more on that in a moment. While with Iran, this is an MS Now exclusive, there is new information and evidence rocking Trump's Pentagon. These missile and drone attacks are happening far more frequently than what's being disclosed to the general American public from the Pentagon. Just knowing that those interceptors that are supposed to be the defense system that's stopping those missiles and drones from actually making it to the ground, that those are at critically low levels is extremely concerning. This is new reporting on the problems that we face with this open-ended war. And now you're looking at newly released pictures.

2:14Iranian missiles damage U.S. positions in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and U.S. bases. We have these new assessments coming in from, as you see credited on your screen, photos obtained by CBS News. It details the extent of the ongoing damage. All this comes in as Trump voters have been hammering elected Republicans because they're, quote, tired of the war, as the sun puts it. And there are many different types of costs to this war. When the economic ones are totaled up, they, of course, link back to the other aspect that I mentioned that people are living through, not only the affordability crisis, but how other than, say, tech billionaires, everyone else is having to live through Trump's high prices and sagging economy.

2:55Americans paying an extra hundred billion dollars in fuel costs alone. The Journal reports, looking at families trade-offs, that's part of the rough September that I just mentioned. And that's not all. Today, the Federal Reserve, despite Trump ramming in his hand-picked chair Kevin Warsh did the exact opposite of what Trump has been clamoring for. They raised interest rates. That's a Trump loss. So even before you get into all the details, keep in mind that Trump has pushed to try to juice the economy, to try to take control of the Fed, sometimes unlawfully, and I'll get to that in a moment. And today, another loss.

3:36It's the opposite of what he wanted. Take a look. What is he doing? Why doesn't he lower these rates? We have a, you know, a deadhead Fed hair. I mean, this guy, the head of the Federal Reserve is a stiff. Now, I know it's gross incompetent because I happen to think he's grossly incompetent. Today, certainly, he should be lowering interest rates. All right? Certainly. Who would not lower them? But he's stubborn. Who would not lower them? An independent Fed. And while on the one hand, this is just how the government is normally supposed to work, on the other, because of this environment, it is an example of independent parts of our system, of our society, standing up against Trump's pressure.

4:24Indeed, if you want to make the argument, you could argue that the members of the Fed have gone forward with whatever they think is best independently to deal with this complex economy, including the problems I mentioned caused by Trump, rather than bowing like so many other media executives to say nothing of congressional Republicans. So I'm telling you tonight, this is a Trump loss. And it's not a small matter to him. He was hoping the Fed would do the opposite, if I simplify, to juice the economy for the midterms, which is why he's been working on this for over a year. And he crossed lines no other president ever has, including threatening and pursuing charges against two different members of the Fed, including Lisa Cook.

5:04Look, that case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where, relatedly, Trump also lost. Indeed, no one knew what the Fed would do until today on this issue, but that earlier loss paved the way for at least the same independent board of governors to make their decision. Former Chair Powell is remaining on the board, meaning he is not taking Trump's bullying and attacks as a reason to bow out. Trump was trying to illegally fire and pressure these people to get the opposite of what happened today. The Fed ignoring Trump. Now, as for why Trump cared so much, well, again, without getting into all the details, the markets looked at this as a short-term problem.

5:44The Dow dropping about 600 points. And if you want to kind of sum it all up, the usually right-leaning drudge report calls it F-Day. Fed Day or F-Day, take it how you want, rates hiked. And that's where we begin, a war that has economic consequences and an economy that under Trump is not responding to his sometimes illegal threats to give him a short-term sugar high. And instead, the big problems, how we deal with high prices and a lot of other stuff is still going to be up to this or the next Congress, which the voters may change. I want to bring in Jacob Weisberg, longtime Slate Editor-in-Chief, co-founder of Pushkin Industries, the author of Profiles in Cowardice, a study of collaboration in the Trump era.

6:28It overlaps with some of the points I just mentioned. It's new this week. You can go get Profiles in Cowardice now. And New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, an MSNOW analyst for us. Michelle, I mentioned that the setbacks on the war and the economy are related. And all of this comes after an extraordinary and sometimes illegal pressure campaign by Trump. Well, right. I mean, and I wouldn't necessarily give Kevin Warsh, the Fed chair, too much credit because he really didn't have that much of a choice. Because Donald Trump, you know, driving up inflation, driving up the debt, it seemed like if they didn't hike rates, there was going to be some kind of bond crisis that would also hit American consumers.

7:09Right. He's sort of they were in a they were in a lose lose position. There is not a way kind of without radically changing Donald Trump's foreign policy and tariff policy to ease the pressure on the ordinary Americans. If you're Donald Trump right now, the Treasury giveth and the Fed taketh away. I mean, Scott Besant is pursuing this policy of buying back bonds to try to lower interest rates. But Warsh, because the Fed has a mandate to maintain inflation at 2%, as Michelle says, doesn't have a lot of choice in the matter. Where Trump had a choice in the matter is with the policies that are driving inflation.

7:49And there are principally three of them right now. There is the war in Iraq and what it's doing to fuel prices. There is the overspending, which is creating fears long term about the debt. And there's this trade policy, which is dry, which is inflationary. And what must irk Trump to the extent that he's in touch with reality on this is it all could have been prevented. If he hadn't attacked Iran, we wouldn't be in this position. I don't think we would be having a Fed rate hike right now. Yeah, those are all policy failures. And they drive what I mentioned, which is this revolt in the public and the hard times out there.

8:22and none of them touch on the sort of angrier, flashier aspects of Trump that people are so familiar with. All these norm breaking, all of the attacks, all of the angry, negative, mean behavior, right? All the stuff that takes up so much energy. We're talking about the fact that these policies have failed the American public. If anything, the Fed's trying to help, as you said. In your book, Jacob, you write that cowardice is shameful. It wears disguises. Pragmatism, realism, caution, institutional loyalty. Beneath those justifications lie abdication and refusal to confront a fundamental threat when duty and ethics demand it.

9:00There are greater causes than just handling the markets and the interest rates that the Fed is doing. But they, and the people I mentioned, including Ms. Cook, stood up to this when we saw others fold over the last two years. Absolutely. Lisa Cook and Jay Powell are two people who exemplify the opposite of what my book's about. They were in positions of institutional responsibility. You know, Jay Powell is a lifelong Republican appointed by Republicans, served in Republican administrations. But he understood his public responsibility and his role and the need for an independent Fed. That's why he's still there after his term as chairman expired.

9:41Normally, you leave. But he's staying, I think, because the Lisa Cook case might not be done yet. You know, the Supreme Court said that they couldn't fire her for what they call cause without some sort of judicial process. It's not clear yet that they're not going to come back at her again and say, all right, we're now going to have a hearing. We're now going to show the evidence and see if we can make another case for firing her. Yeah. And Michelle, it sounds weedsy, but Powell clearly made that choice. and we saw, for example, the former FBI director just quit early, just give up because he was worried that Trump was going to make his life hard.

10:19And we've seen some leaders in law firms and universities do the same. And I wonder what we see here in terms of what actually works. And there's a shift. I mean, ABC, we've covered recently, has decided to sue Trump over censorship rather than give in, whereas at one point they were going to yank Kimmel. Right. And you see all of these. I mean, I think that it was one of the things that has most shocked me about the second Trump term, and I wrote this in my column, is that I honestly expected the armed paramilitaries on the street, right? I expected the political persecutions. I expected the terrorizing of immigrants, the camps, all the rest of it.

10:54What I truly did not expect is the capitulation of people who, by all accounts, knew better, right? I mean, I think we've gotten used to, like, where are the decent Republicans, and we've seen a couple of them, but not nearly enough. And but the capitulation by heads of universities, the capitulations by big media companies that paid him, that paid Trump these like ridiculous kind of protection money slash bribes in the guise of settling lawsuits. I think there was this sense when Trump came back that he that something had fundamentally changed in America. Right. And that he and that people were sort of scrambling for their own place on the lifeboat.

11:37And now I think even just not even two years in, you can already see that the tide has changed. The kind of vibe shift was extremely temporary. And these people have shamed themselves, you know, often for nothing, because it's not as if the people that have stood up to Trump in these same industries have, you know, kind of Many of them have been able to fight his attempts to weaponize the government against them. They've tended, yes, exactly as Michelle says, the law firms that did stand up, the universities that did stand up, have won every case in court so far. And more than that, the law firms that stood up have thrived.

12:25And Paul Weiss, the firm I write about that capitulated so prominently at the beginning of the second term, has not thrived. They've lost, you know, several dozen top lawyers who've gone to form a sort of old Paul Weiss values and exile firm. And, you know, it's no longer that firm is no longer special. That's no longer the kind of liberal firm that stands up for civil rights. It's just another corporate firm. And that's going to be that reputation is going to stick with them. They can't really go back to being the old Paul Weiss. But what I think maybe we're starting to see now, just early signs of it, is countervailing pressure that makes it harder to give in because the resistors to this sort of capitulation have gotten a little more organized.

13:09And it's very interesting what's happened in the universities. I thought Harvard was probably going to end up making a deal. There was so much pressure on them, you know, the$2 billion in government grants being taken away from them, the threat to ban, prevent foreign students on visas from coming. But what's happening now? It's become impossible for Harvard to make a deal because the faculty, the students, the alumni have said this isn't acceptable. And I don't think Harvard is going to make a deal right now. Trump, the Justice Department, has turned their attention to Yale because they think, Mel, maybe we can't get a deal from Harvard.

13:45Maybe we can get a deal from Yale. But I don't think it's easy for Yale to make a deal in this circumstance either because the world's a little different than it was in early 2025. Right. Their perceived power, and sometimes perceived power becomes power, particularly when people are scared, as Michelle was reminding us, has completely curdled into something else. And we're watching a backlash in an economic environment where people don't have the patience or the interest in what Trump's selling. So it's really striking. Again, Jacob's new book is Profiles in Cowardice, a study of collaboration in the Trump era.

14:19Michelle Goldberg, our thanks. In the program tonight, Morgan Freeman will be here live on the beat. You can tell we're excited because we're going to keep showing you clips from his great films. We also have a lot of other stories, including the AI clash in D.C. And Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel uniting to fight for freedom, even if some of their companies didn't. We're going to show you some of those special moments. We're back in 90 seconds.

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16:22Turn to something you don't see every night. Stephen Colbert, joining one time television rival, or at least time slot, same time slot, Jimmy Kimmel, to discuss the kind of strange journey they've been on that tells you a lot about not only American politics under Trump, but the need to have a First Amendment in this country. People still do this. Truth is still view themselves. Rarely. I've been done very many. Do you? Many fond memories of this. Do you? Do you think about it ever? Nope. I will say. I have an opportunity to not think about the news every day. And I took it. You took it, yeah.

17:03You just seem like a different person. You seem happier. You seem healthier. Like I don't drink a cup of poison every day? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Like that. Because part of the job is, the old gig as I remember it, was to be lowered like carbon rods into a radioactive pool every day. And then to be pulled out and put in front of a camera and to irradiate it back at the audience at a non-lethal rad level. Colbert obviously having fun, joking. He is a great comedian and orator, so he's exaggerating. But you see his beard? He actually shaved it on live TV. The backstory being that he made a promise to his wife.

17:41Apparently there was some disagreement in the house about the value of the beard. And he promised his wife he would shave it if he won an Emmy this year.

17:53congratulations thank you not just to you but your whole staff you guys won six emmys seven actually seven emmys you know it was fun because usually emmys you're just sitting in a row but we got to sit with john stewart and john oliver with that photographer the photographer came over and he goes oh look at all you got let's get a one shot of all you all you hosts together so we got up and got a little circle and the guy said and the guy said oh it's the endangered table and look at our faces there that's the reaction we all had to that kind of fun to get the backstory when you have that photo there though this endangered table there are too many seats because the joke is fine it's hard to do comedy in a country like this under Trump.

18:41But the truth is what you see here, a level of attack, legal and otherwise, on the free press in this country and the tech companies. Our earlier guest tonight talked about the early capitulations and so-called settlements. This is the real deal. And Trump is still going after Kimmel's parent company, ABC, threatening their broadcast licenses over the programming, the free speech, the First Amendment that he doesn't like. Donald Trump is for cancel culture. He is against the First Amendment. He is, in the modern era since Nixon, the most anti-First Amendment, pro-censorship, pro-cancel culture president we've had.

19:22And you might say, I don't know, I remember all this branding about him being against it. Just like he was against wars in Iran or for Epstein transparency. On a lot of big issues, the great reality show communicator got a lot of people saying words that are the opposite of his real plans. Now, that doesn't mean all the censorship is working. We reported from day one on how Kimmel outwitted the FCC by taking the entire Texas Democratic candidate Tallarico interview to YouTube, an interview that has now reached more people there by a magnitude of over five than Kimmel's entire live show. This is not the first time you've been demoted to YouTube when you were on Stephen Colbert's show.

20:08That's right. This same, very same thing happened. Why are they so scared of you? Well, they're worried that we're going to win this race in Texas. Yeah. They are terrified of this movement we're building in Texas, working people coming together across party and race and gender and religion and culture to take on the people at the top who have been screwing us over for far too long now. I have to say, that's just some of the censored interview that's being viewed so many times, and we've played clips here because it's newsworthy. It is still bad news when telling jokes and talking to candidates in America is something that becomes a fighting cause, an ongoing month-by-month battle to just tell jokes because freedom of speech comes in all shapes and sizes.

21:00But it is a good sign that so many people, including apparently people in Texas, are standing up against that, deciding they will watch what they want to watch and not rely on the government censors. Jason Johnson is here on this. Next.

21:24And we're back with Jason Johnson, Colbert and Kimmel uniting while the government can't take a joke. Your thoughts. I am reminded of one of the best quotes from Deep Impact, a movie that your upcoming guest Morgan Freeman was in. And he mentioned that, you know, when cities fall, we rebuild them. But when heroes fall, we remember them. We will remember Stephen Colbert. We will remember Jimmy Kimmel if he's pushed off the air. These people, I'm not being hyperbolic when I say this, these people will be known and remembered as sort of fighters in the First Amendment battles. that we had under this administration.

22:01People who could have capitulated in advance. They could have changed their jobs. They could have stepped down. They could have backed away, and they didn't. And it was an amazing night and an example of how even people with tremendous wealth and power can still put themselves in the line of sight and stand up for everyone else. Respect. And we know how this works a little bit. We're around, you know, I don't know about you, but I'm around the media, Jason. Sometimes the test is right in your lane, and you got to kind of deal with it. They had an easy dodge. They could say, you know, ha ha ha.

22:35But mostly I do a monologue. I'm supposed to have jokes. And then you've seen my guests. Most of them are not Senate candidates. Right. So they could have said, you know, I'm going to steer back to that. That's kind of what this show's always been about. And they could have. And they didn't. And I think that that bears noting. And even the Tallarico thing, they could say, well, you know, let's just leave it. It's been a whole fight. We don't do a lot of candidates, which is true. Most midterm candidates are not on any of the late night shows. And instead, I'm going to put it back up because it is a we talked about profiles and courage.

23:07Right. This is a profile in boomeranging. The effort to censor the interview we have Kimmel here has actually enhanced it only because they chose to fight by putting it on YouTube. that puts it out to the world. And oh my gosh, we are way over the normal audience. And the intrigue, I mean, I'll tell folks, they titled it, you know, the interview the FCC doesn't want you to see. Americans don't like being told what to watch or what to think, Jason, including by right-wing overlords, even in Texas. Right, and here's the thing, Ari, you know, to sort of paraphrase, you know, I got beef with the FCC, they won't let me play my hits, right?

23:47And he said, I don't care. And he took it to YouTube. And here's the thing, it's not just that Tallarico got a lot more attention. Jimmy Kimmel saw what happened to Stephen Colbert. He knew he was putting himself in the line of sight. So not only does the show improve, but the Tallarico interview actually got more views than Trump's speech at the midtermapalooza in Texas. So it is a victory on multiple levels, both politically and politically. And that's one of the things that makes it both a brave move and an indicator. People don't like being told what to watch, but they will watch what they think is important.

24:19You remember the old phone a friend? Yes I want to phone a nerd I know you well enough that we both are nerds And we can call each other as such, right? Yes, I feel it Captain America's shield We saw Colbert give Kimmel The shield We'll put that up here Can you walk us through that? I This actually makes me somewhat emotional This is such a huge deal Because throughout his career Stephen Colbert has been very supportive, not just of free speech rights, not just of labor and everything else like that. And so for Marvel to say, we're going to give you a replica shield of Captain America was significant.

24:58He's always had it in the background of his shows. For him to give it to Jimmy Kimmel is basically like when Steve Rogers gave his shield to Sam Wilson at the end of the Avengers series. And I can also say this, you know, Steve Rogers' catchphrase, Captain America's catchphrase is always, I can do this all day. He fought bullies. That's what he did. He was a small town kid who got superpowers and fought against bullies. That's basically what Colbert is saying. I'm going to let you continue this fight that I can't fight anymore against the bullies that other people can't push up against. It was it was an amazing nerd moment and an amazing political moment for me.