"No Kings" Organizers Estimate 7 Million Protestors Against Trump

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0:49This is Enterprise AI from Ireland. AI at its best by keeping out the worst. Scaled for the enterprise. From Ireland. Welcome to The Beat. I am Melissa Murray in for Ari Melber. And we begin tonight with the massive No Kings protests that took place all over the country and the world this weekend. Organizers say that nearly 7 million marchers turned out in big cities and small towns to protest Donald Trump and his policies. And notably, the protests were peaceful. The NYPD said over 100 ,000 people gathered in New York City alone without a single arrest. In San Francisco, Americans used their own bodies to spell out the message of the day.

1:38No kings. And while Trump did his best to downplay and undermine the event, protesters were prepared to speak for themselves. I think it's a joke. We live by the Constitution. I guess it was made for by Soros and other radical left lunatics. No one paid me to be here. My rage is free and well-deserved. The demonstrations were very small. There's over 2 ,000 of these things going on, right, across the country? I think it's going to be bigger than 5 million. The people were whacked out. Those are not representative of the people of our country. I was willing to die and lost a leg in a foreign country fighting for their rights.

2:22There's no way I'm bending the only knee I have left for a king here in America. By the way, I'm not a king. Trump's claim that he doesn't see himself as a king may be contradicted by his actions. Over the weekend, he reposted two different AI-generated videos that depicted him as a king. Now, of course, the president's authoritarian ambitions go beyond AI social media. His immigration crackdown is at the heart of the protests against him, and it continues to alarm experts. ProPublica reports, quote, current and former national security officials describe the legions of mass immigration officers operating in near total anonymity on the orders of the president as an unfettered and unaccountable national police force.

3:15Trump is also claiming that he has, quote, unquestioned power under the Insurrection Act to deploy troops anywhere he wants. And his next target appears to be San Francisco, California. I should note that as a matter of law, that claim of unprecedented power is false. But just hours ago, two Trump-appointed judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the president can deploy the National Guard to the streets of Portland. This overturns a lower court's restraining order. All of this, despite the fact that most of Trump's claims of unfettered power have actually been rebuffed by other courts, and his monarchical ambitions are being rejected by millions of Americans in the streets.

4:02Joining me now to discuss all of this and kick it off tonight is David Litt, former speechwriter for President Obama, and Molly Zhang Fast, special correspondent for Vanity Fair and contributing opinion writer with The New York Times. David, can we talk about this Ninth Circuit ruling? This one's unusual because usually the courts have pushed back, at least the lower courts have pushed back, and certainly on the claims of power to deploy troops to American cities for ICE enforcement, or in some cases, what looks like more federalized domestic law enforcement. What's your take on what this means, given what we saw this weekend.

4:36Well, Melissa, first of all, thank you for having me on. And I'm also aware you know a lot more about the law than I do, but I'm going to offer a broader view, which is the Ninth Circuit used to be historically liberal. And part of what we are seeing and part of what Democrats were warning about in the last Trump term was this takeover of the courts. Trump and his allies boasted about flipping the courts. This is what happened when you have these flipped partisan packed courts. So this is actually an opinion where two of the judges, the two in the majority, were actually Trump appointees. And there is one judge, a longtime Ninth Circuit Judge, Susan Graber, who has dissented from this ruling.

5:10Right. And I think, you know, I don't mean to say that every Trump judge will always support Trump. We have seen a lot of Trump appointed judges reject the president's, as you put it, monarchical ambitions. But at the same time, I think that one of the things that Democrats, all of us worried about Trump's king-like agenda need to be keeping our eye on is also not just what's happening now, but the continued attempt to pack the courts over the next couple of years. It's one of the reasons the Senate is going to be so important in the midterms. We have to put a stop to some of these nominations.

5:40So this Ninth Circuit ruling, Molly, is actually very interesting because it focuses on the president's claim that he needs to be able to protect an ICE facility in Portland, Oregon. We saw the protests over the weekend. We saw protests earlier in Portland. A lot of frogs. Doesn't seem to be a lot of violence. What do you make of this idea that the National Guard is needed because the protests are out of control and are basically endangering public safety. So this is one of the problems that Trump has had this whole time, and he's had it with the No Kings protest, right? Like, you saw them nervous before it happened.

6:16You saw the Treasury Secretary, Scott Besant, being like, no checks, no kings. Like, if you, you know, they were like, Democrats want to keep the government closed for the No Kings rally. I don't even know what that would have to do with anything. But there was like a lot of anxiety about it. And I think the fact that it ended up being 7 million people and maybe even a little more, there's some estimations that it might be more. And that they were peaceful and that they were not radical and that they were people talking about just the Constitution. Like you can't get more, you know, that's what we're all here for.

6:54So I think that was problematic for them. And you even saw they were they couldn't figure out how to message it. And this White House very good at messaging. And all of a sudden you saw Trump saying they're radicals. And then you saw someone else saying they're all old and someone else said they were all white. I mean, OK, like, you know, that none of those are disqualifying. And so I do think this is really, I think this has rattled them. And then you put that with those polls that show him underwater on everything. And look, you know, even if you want to rule as a king, you still got to get a buyout, buy-in from the people.

7:29Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about how rattled they might have been this weekend. I know I was rattled by some of those AI videos that the president posted. I don't think I'd ever seen anything quite like that. I hope never to see anything quite like that again. But what do you make that the president first started out saying like this was just an anti-American demonstration, which, as Molly says, was belied by the fact that they literally transported the Constitution down the streets in some cases. And these are grandmas and veterans and everyone coming out. Why then the pivot to this AI generated video of the president in a cockpit with a crown on doing all kinds of things?

8:05Well, first of all, if you're hoping to never see videos like this again, I think your hopes are going to be not not achieved. I'm sorry to say they seem to be all in on this AI flop. You're dashing inputs everywhere. OK. But I think part of the reason, right, they're never going to say, oops, we were wrong. That's just not how the Trump administration operates. You will see them flail. And I think this is AI flailing. And part of that is, as you're saying, this was not just peaceful. It was patriotic. I was at a No Kings protest in Red Bank, New Jersey. So one of the it was not huge. It was in a big city.

8:33It was like a celebration of a liberal bastion of New Jersey. I mean, and the other piece of that is, you know, I think about this is a president who describe January 6th as a day of love and tried to say that No Kings was a day of hate. And I thought it was funny because after the January 6th protest, they stormed the Capitol. And after the No Kings protest I went to, we all got Italian eyes, right? It was like, this is just if we were terrorists, we were not very terrifying. And I think that meant that the Trump administration, which would have loved some violence or something to point to, they were left with nothing.

9:04So they typed something into ChatGPT and tried to do their best. Yeah. Not sure they succeeded in doing their best. Maybe not the best people, maybe not the best AI. But Molly, I want to play you a little bit more from many of the people who turned out this weekend. Let's take a look. Everything this regime has been up to is anti-American. We've got another election just a year from now, which is the midterms. And we could actually change the House and Senate with the midterms. Congress makes the laws, not the president. All right. Let's think about that point. Congress makes the laws, not the president.

9:46Where is Congress right now? Do you think Congress will be bestirred after all of this to get back in the driver's seat and maybe exercise some of its prerogatives that it is thus far ceded to this president? Congress is on vacation, right? Mike Johnson sent them home again. If you look at their calendar, it is stunning. And he's keeping them out for any number of reasons. He does not want to swear in the newest member of Congress, 151st signature on the discharge petition for the Jeffrey Epstein files, which again, you know, he's making that such a thing, which ultimately this administration is never going to release the files.

10:23But OK, I do think we're seeing a lot of there's like I think they have to do popular stuff, even if they want to be autocrats. They still need some buy in from the from the voters and they're not getting that. And remember, like Trump is not on the ticket again. Whatever they say, he's constitutionally not able to run again. I mean, he may try and they may do something. But at this point, the people who are on the ticket in 2026 are on vacation. So like those guys, you know, even though they're trying to like re-gerrymander so that he doesn't lose, you know, if you re-gerrymander enough, you dummy-mander.

11:08And if there's enough of a Democratic wave, then a lot of these Republicans who think they have safe seats may not. Right. So, David, let's talk about something Molly just said, this prospect that the president is term limited. The 22nd Amendment says he is term limited at two terms, but he has been floating on some of this AI generated social media this weekend that maybe he'll stick around until the year 90 ,000 beggars believe. But what do you think? Is he merely floating this? Is he just being hyperbolic or is this a way of testing the waters? I think Trump is always testing the waters. The limiting factor in the Trump administration is what can we get away with?

11:46Right. And so often there's this kind of ironic way of starting out. Right. It's just a joke. You know, it's tongue in cheek. We're all in on it. That's how, you know, not respecting the results of the 2020 election started in some ways. Trump's resent. Oh, well, if I win. And is he joking? Is he not joking? Well, we found out he wasn't joking, but maybe he found that out, too. Right. You just kind of keep pushing and pushing and pushing. I do think one of the things that struck me is even among people who I know and also, you know, when you've seen polling on it, people who support Trump, many of them are like a third term.

12:17No, that's not how America works. Right. You don't have to be like a deep lover of American civics to be like, no, two terms. You just have to read. Right. It's very basic. And people are used to that. So that idea, it might be fine. And again, another piece of AI content. I do think that if he ever tried it, especially if, as Molly said, he's this underwater, I don't think that he's going to find it as easy as he might think. He's also the oldest person to ever be elected president. I'm just saying. I know we've heard that before. I know we're not allowed to talk about his age because that's only for Biden, but he is actually quite old.

12:53All right. Molly Jung-Fast with the deep truth. Thank you, David. Thank you, Molly. Coming up, a top Democratic lawmaker on what critics are calling the GOP's Epstein shutdown. Plus, new video from former special counsel Jack Smith airing for the first time right here on The Beat. But first, James Comey's opening salvo against Trump's bid to target his political opponents. All of this right after the quickest 90-second break.

13:29Donald Trump and his former FBI director James Comey are facing off in court. Today, Comey's legal team filed a motion to dismiss the criminal case brought against him by the Trump DOJ. Comey's team alleges that the case should be dropped because it is, quote, vindictive and selective prosecution, based on Trump's, quote, personal animus toward Comey. Comey's team also filed another motion today, arguing that the appointment of Trump's former lawyer, Lindsey Halligan, as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia is invalid. They write, quote, the defective appointment of Halligan was made in defiance of the law and for the sole purpose of securing an indictment grounded in retaliatory animus days before the relevant statute of limitations expired.

14:19And they emphasize that the indictment is, quote, quote, fatally flawed. All of this comes amidst criminal prosecutions against multiple Trump critics that have emerged in recent weeks. Now, a former DOJ lawyer, Arez Ruvaini, is speaking out for the first time about what he says are abuses of power by the Trump Justice Department. He says he was fired after he refused to lie and signed a brief that called Kilmar Abrego-Garcia, the man the Trump administration mistakenly disported to El Salvador, a terrorist. That is not factually correct. It is not legally correct. That is a lie. And I cannot sign my name to that brief.

15:02They did everything they did to him in violation of his due process rights. What's to stop them if they decide they don't like you anymore? are. Joining me now is Maya Wiley, the president and CEO for the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and a former civil prosecutor with the Southern District of New York. All right, Maya, what is the likelihood that this case against Jim Comey is going to be dismissed based either on selective prosecution or the defective appointment of Lindsey Halligan? You know, that's impossible to say because, as you know, Melissa, the judge has so much discretion there.

15:39But I have to say, if there's ever been a strong case for vindictive prosecution, this is the case. It is the case not only because Donald Trump made so many statements about wanting to be vindictive, about using the language that is vindictiveness, and wanting and demanding publicly and on social media a prosecution, including against James Comey, and not only James Comey, including Attorney General Tish James. But the fact that he actually fired a sitting U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia in order to get it because they said they didn't have sufficient evidence. And installed an insurance lawyer.

16:20And installed an insurance lawyer and then rushed to get this indictment where she had to go and do it herself. You know, you and I both know that that is highly unusual. It's not usually the person sitting at the bigs in the big chair. Right. Who's the one going to the grand jury? It's the career prosecutors. She had to do it herself. It is unorthodox, though not necessarily unprecedented. Sometimes there have been lone U.S. attorneys who signed these things. I think what makes it a little more compromising, if you will, is that the U.S. attorneys, the rank-and-file prosecutors, had written a very extensive memo explaining that they didn't think that there was probable cause to charge them.

17:00It's the totality of the circumstance. You're right. It's not that one thing, but it's all of them put together. And then when you read the indictment, I mean, it is so it looks like a rushed indictment. It has very little clarity about what is actual false. I mean, it says what the false statement was. It doesn't say why it's false. Well, it's not the first indictment. So we've seen there's been an indictment against New York Attorney General Letitia James. There has since been an indictment of John Bolton. And one of the motions in this case said that the charge against Comey should be dismissed because, quote, a last minute retaliatory charge after a torrent of personal invective by a president who expressly sought charges regardless of the facts.

17:41If that is a successful argument for Jim Comey, is it also going to have spillover effects in the cases against Letitia James and John Bolt? Well, look, I think each case is going to stand or fall on their own merits, including, because I don't necessarily want to say the John Bolton indictment is the same. No, it's very different. They're very different cases. I would say there is more similarity between Comey and Attorney General James in the sense that they're very thin. They're on these things that you don't typically and wouldn't typically see indictments on. They're hard to win. There are a lot of facts in each.

18:17They're different cases, but there's a lot of facts that are a matter of public record in each case that make you scratch your head and think, what's the actual evidence here that's going to get to a conviction at trial? And so I say that because, and they have, of course, the same dictiveness, but there is differences between the three. So, and judges, judges, judges, as we know, there's a lot of discretion on the part of judges, and a lot of them like to go to trial and have a jury decide. Well, speaking of judges, someone who had a lot to say about judges was Arez Ruvani, who had a lot to say also about his colleagues at the Department of Justice or his former colleagues.

18:57What do you think that interview with 60 Minutes where he essentially spilled all of the tea, what does that say about the state of the DOJ right now? It says what we've all been seeing in real time and suspecting. And what he said is, yes, don't let them gaslight you. It is exactly what you thought. This is not an administration. A Department of Justice administers justice. That means it's neutral. It looks, it gathers the facts. It investigates them. and makes neutral decisions about the cases. Doesn't mean we always agree with them, but certainly they're not motivated by anything other than the evidence.

19:35In these cases, and what we were seeing with Brego Garcia and others was, and you could see it in the lineup of the facts. It's like, and a judge said, wait, wait, wait, no. And those planes, bring those planes back. And what they say is not only did they know, not only were they told in advance, you might ignore the judge, ignore the court if they tell you to do something. Then you have the good Ryan Goodman also demonstrating. He's like, we actually did the check and there were 35 cases where we found the same type of behavior. And we saw so many seasoned career attorneys from the Department of Justice quit their jobs, leave jobs that we knew were a big part of their career and who they are.

20:19And that really spoke volumes. Right, that was a study that Maya referenced by my colleague at NYU, Ryan Goodman, about the Department of Justice. Maya, thank you so much for shedding light on some of this. Later, we have exclusive new recordings of Jack Smith speaking out about Trump, airing for the first time on this show. Also, I will talk to the lawyer who just argued at the Supreme Court about the conservative effort to empower Trump and to roll back voting rights. And there is new heat on GOP Speaker Mike Johnson over the Epstein files and more. When are you going to swear in representative-elect Adelita Grahama?

21:01As soon as we get back to legislative session when Chuck Schirmer allows us to turn the lights back on. Why haven't you done it already?

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21:54These are fast-paced, quickly-moving situations. What exactly is happening on the ground is often shrouded in mystery. But we turn to trusted sources, satellite imagery, and expertise built up over years in order to ferret out the facts that wouldn't otherwise come to light. I'm here to ask you to seek out a news source that does firsthand fact-based reporting. If it's your local paper, great. If it's the Times, thank you. Because where you go for your information matters.

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23:09Critics are calling it the Epstein shutdown. It's been 20 days since the shutdown took effect, officially making it the third longest in U.S. history. Because Speaker Mike Johnson has refused to come back into session, to bring the House back into session, something important hasn't yet happened, and that is the swearing in of the newest elected member of the Democratic caucus. The Democratic congresswoman from Arizona, Adelida Grijalva, would be the final vote needed to compel the Department of Justice to release the Epstein files. And today, Johnson was pressed about the delay. When are you going to swear in representative-elect Adelita Grahama?

23:55As soon as we get back to legislative session when Chuck Schumer allows us to turn the lights back on. Why haven't you done it already? Because this is the way the institution works. I will administer the oath on the first day. You could swear in tomorrow, right? No, not tomorrow. No, we couldn't. We wouldn't. There was an exception for two Floridians earlier in this Congress. But the reason was they were duly elected. They had a date set. They flew in all their friends and family. and the House went out of session. So if she flies in friends and family, then you don't have a date set. We don't have a date set.

24:23Meanwhile, the shutdown is affecting everything from nuclear facilities to courts to airports and air travel. Joining me now to discuss all of this is Congressman Brendan Boyle, Democrat of Pennsylvania and the ranking member of the Budget Committee. Welcome. Great to be with you in person. Oh, likewise. I'm glad to have you here. I have so many questions. Let's start with Adelita Grijalva, who was elected overwhelmingly by the people of her district to replace her father, Raul Grijalva. She's not been sworn into office. She can't operate her office without being sworn in because she doesn't have access to funds.

24:59She can't pay staff. She can't even access the building. And she's forced to wait on line with tourists to enter the Capitol. This strikes me as anti-democratic and maybe even a species of election interference since it's preventing the people of Arizona from being represented in Congress. Why aren't we talking about it in this way? I'm glad you brought it up because, you know, this is not just about Jeffrey Epstein and who has an interest in making sure those files don't come out. And it's not even so much about Democrat, Republican, although that's part of it. What about the three quarters of a million people who live in her district in Arizona who now are going, continuing to go unrepresented in the people's house?