Paramount-Warner Merger Sends Industry Shockwaves

0:00Matt Belloni:On any journey using Uber, it helps to know you're getting into the right car. Pin verification adds an extra step to make sure your ride is your ride. Before the trip begins, your app gives you a unique pin. Just tell it to your driver, and they'll enter it in their app before the ride can start. Hey, what's your pin? Mm-hmm. 2538. That way, you know you're in the right car taking the right trip, and your driver knows you're the right passenger. Make sure your ride is your ride with pin verification from Uber. One more way Uber is putting safety at every turn. Learn more on the Uber app. For a small business owner, every day is full of surprises.

0:33Some great, some not so great.

0:36Matt Belloni:Like when a client cancels their order at the last minute. But here's a surprise you will like. Progressive provides small business owners with 30 customizable coverage options to help keep their business going strong. So go ahead, surprise yourself. Get a quote in as little as 8 minutes at ProgressiveCommercial.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates and third-party insurers. Coverage is not available in all states or for all vehicles and coverage selections. Welcome to The Beat, everyone. I'm Ari Melber. We begin where we were. If you happened to be watching the news last night, it was at this hour, 24 hours ago, where Donald Trump made another series of statements to contradict his own timeline.

1:14And so the New York Times and other serious outlets in the news section, not some big opinion attack, have just reported the fact that on this matter of life and death for Americans and everyone in the Mideast region, the president has been sending confusing, clashing, and sometimes downright contradictory messages about what we're doing in Iran and how long we'll be there, sometimes within one day, more typically every couple days. It is, if you will, the opposite of a doctrine and more of a what's he going to say today. He is also being pressed by his own White House team at the highest levels as people inside the Trump administration who report to Donald Trump and may want to carry out his goals as best they can are seeking an offering.

2:01We have that reporting for you right now. We also can tell you there are new strikes rattling to run as of tonight, eight confirmed U.S. deaths, roughly 140 Americans injured, according to the Pentagon. The AP estimates the Iranian death toll at over 1000 around 1200, which is a number that does keep changing, obviously, as this goes on. Some of Trump's advisors privately urging him to look for an exit plan, the journal reports amid the spiking oil prices and concerns over a lengthy conflict, sparking a backlash. That backlash in the polling has already begun. And so the journal reports are encouraging him to at least, quote, articulate a plan to extract the U.S.

2:39from the war and make the case the military had largely achieved its objectives. Trump officials, we want you to know, deny this report, although clearly the journal had multiple sources. This is a matter of war. They don't just push this out lightly. There may be people inside the White House who desperately want Donald Trump to hear about this, whether that's through the journal or the television coverage of it, which is a dynamic we've seen in the past, because they're putting this out there one way or the other, according to the journals, multiple sources. There's scrutiny on the contradictions.

3:13Is this war almost over, or is it actually just beginning? Have we basically completed it, something that Donald Trump said as recently as yesterday, or are the most intense strikes only beginning now, today, something that the Pentagon chief said? And what does it mean to claim we may have basically already won?

3:34Matt Belloni:We've already won in many ways, but we haven't won enough. I think you'll see it's It's going to be a short-term excursion. It's going to be ended soon. What I want your viewers to understand is this is only just the beginning. It's not for me to posit whether it's the beginning, the middle, or the end. Are you thinking this week it will be over? No, but soon. You're talking about days? I think so. Today will be, yet again, our most intense day of strikes inside Iran. Mr. President, you've said the war is, quote, very complete, but your defense secretary says this is just the beginning. So which is it, and how long should Americans be— Well, I think you could say it both.

4:09You could say both, but then you would be contradicting yourself. And you would be giving misleading information to the American public if you said it is both basically over and going on for a long time to say nothing of the brave men and women around the world who represent the United States, some of whom are obviously in harm's way and trying to plan this out. Now, no one is suggesting that every step of the war will be publicly telegraphed, But whether you're asking people for a short-ended operational commitment or a long-term potential boost on the ground war is a big difference. And I'll remind you, as we've reported, this is the only time we've had a conflict of this level where the president hasn't given a formal address to the nation.

4:49It was only around day 10 when he went to do a press conference. And that seemed to be a response to stock and oil price jitters rather than telling the public what we're doing, why we're doing it, and roughly what kind of long-term operation it is. Then you go to the scale of this thing, and I want to show you this because it really is astounding. This war has now involved 20 countries at a military level. That would be shooting, shielding, or supplying, according to Axios. There's also the widening energy shock that punishes nations, of course, beyond the 20 on the front lines. Another way to state this conflagration is that the war now has more great powers and more overlapping conflicts than any crisis since the Cold War.

5:33quoting the same article. So how is that all being absorbed in this country that is one of 20? This war was unpopular from the start, which is rare. Most Americans already oppose it. About 41 % support it. And if you put it up against other wars, you can see it's an unusually rough start. Most interventions begin with some initial boost. It's a kind of patriotic tendency to rally around the flag, as political scientists put it. And if the war remains broadly supported and popular, like the top numbers you see on the left, wars that are seen as almost obvious and existential necessities, responding to 9-11 or World War II, a high watermark, well, they stay popular.

6:12The numbers go down over time. The Iraq War, of course, was split and ultimately ended widely opposed, but Iran being the least popular from the jump, as unleashed by this president, Donald Trump, is historically bad. Oil prices fluctuating. Gas prices are up. Americans paying 20 % more already at the pump than just last month.

6:40If it stays like this, it's going to be pretty bad. It's going to stop people from traveling.

6:44Matt Belloni:We're from Tampa. We came down to Miami for a funeral, and it's like, I just looked at the price. I was like, wow. Right now, I'm already at$65 and still pumping. I'm just getting killed right now. I mean, gas prices are so high, and, you know, They were high before this war. We got to drive. We got to work. I'm working now, you know, for rideshare. And I don't know what that's going to look like next week, because if gas is$4 a gallon, I'm done. That's the immediate reaction from real people around the country. Whether or not they're following foreign policy closely, they are learning about it at the pump in real time.

7:18The war's cost is clear. The Pentagon says what they've done already is over$5 billion in the first few days. I want to bring back an expert that we've called upon before, Middle East diplomat, longtime ambassador and peace negotiator, Dennis Ross. He worked in the Clinton and Obama administration. You can see him there in the Oval Office with President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton. He also worked on these high-level Middle East negotiations, which are relevant again today. Here he was with then PLO leader Yasser Arafat, you see on the right, and the gentleman on the left, then a key leader, back in power in Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu.

7:55That was 1997. His book is Statecraft 2.0. Welcome, Ambassador. How do you view the conflicting, sometimes contradictory statements from the Trump administration about how long we're going to be doing this war?

8:10Matt Belloni:You know, one could accept more easily the flexibility when it comes to not being clear specifically on the time, if there was greater clarity on the nature of the objective. You know, it's one thing to understand if you say, look, we are determined to make sure that Iran loses the ability to ever have a nuclear weapon. We want to set back their capacity to build ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones. We want to set it back, you know, for at least five years or more. We have an expectation that this is not a regime that can last that long. We say, well, we're saying to the Iranian people, we're creating an environment for you.

8:56Matt Belloni:But the truth is, whether we're creating that environment or not, this is a regime that can't address any of the grievances that have motivated people to come out of the streets, motivated Iranians in all 31 provinces, something we hadn't seen before, to basically say enough already. Now, they killed, depending upon who's counting, anywhere between 7 ,000 and 30 ,000 people in two days. So this is a regime that will do whatever it takes to stay in power, but they can't keep doing that because the people who pull the triggers also don't have water, also don't have electricity, also don't have a currency that has any value, also have no prospect that anything can improve.

9:36Matt Belloni:That was before this war. So if the administration were clear in terms of saying our aim is to ensure, and we have four tiers of targets that are designed to ensure the end of the day, Iran is going to be in a vastly less capable position of threatening any of its neighbors. If that were the case, then I think there would be a greater readiness to cut the administration slack in terms of how specific they need to be with regard to when it ends. You said it earlier, Ari, you really don't want to telescope or communicate to the other side. We're going to end this in two days. That's the last thing you want to do.

10:21Matt Belloni:But on the other hand, what you do want to communicate to the other side is, here's what we're going to do. We are going to hit all these targets. You're already seeing how many we're hitting. And we're going to continue until we reach a standard that tells us you can't threaten anybody. Think about this. For sure, there's an objective criteria that says this is what it takes. Here's how many targets there are. These are the machine tools that are used to build components of missiles, engines, guidance systems. We're going to take that out. We know where they are. We know there's all sorts of underground bunkers.

11:00Matt Belloni:We know there's stockpiles of weapons that are buried underground. We know where the tunnels are. We're going to go through all that. Now, that's one set of targets that is related to an objective. That objective is weakening the regime so it can't be a threat. There's another objective related to weakening the regime, and that is go after the control mechanisms of the regime. So you hit the headquarters of the besieged. You hit the headquarters of the Revolutionary Guard. You hit every command post. You hit their depots, their weapon stocks. But that's a different objective. That's an objective that is designed to say, we're going to weaken the regime to the point where it can't suppress its population, or at least where there's more likely to be defections.

11:45Right, which I'll jump in and say is the fundamental difference between, are you doing regime change because that's where you want it to land? Or are you defanging this very despised power that's gotten away with a lot? I mean, you could take U.S. and Israel out of the equation and you'd have a bunch of other detractors in the region for how Iran operates and what it gets away with. But that seems to be a big difference that you're saying they haven't had strategic clarity on. Others are worried in the Congress from the briefings they're getting that this could expand to Trump putting boots on the ground, even though he would face even more blowback.

12:19Take a look. I emerge from this briefing as dissatisfied and angry, frankly, as I have from any past briefing in my 15 years in the Senate.

12:36Matt Belloni:We seem to be on a path toward deploying American troops on the ground in Iran to accomplish any of the potential objectives here. Is that a possible risk or is that the opposition party trying to find ways to wake people up because they oppose this but overstating what the risk is right now? Well, I think here's where you come back to the confusion of objectives. If the objective is not to defang the regime, or at least to defang the regime, but you're focused more on not the threats to the outside as much as you're focused on the threats to the inside, the suppression of the public. I don't know how you do regime change only from the air.

13:21Matt Belloni:Now, to be fair, maybe the administration is testing the proposition that there is a way to weaken the Revolutionary Guard and to weaken the besiege enough so they really can't suppress the public. If that objective was one in which we were making real progress, I would expect to see some signs of defections at this point. We're not seeing those defections. The surest way of having the regime collapse would be if you begin to see whole units defect. The idea of protecting, let's say that the public rise up. I noticed that Prime Minister Netanyahu didn't appeal today to the Iranian public to rise up because we're, as he said, we are weakening those who have savaged you.

14:07Matt Belloni:Now, if that's the case and people do rise up, Do we not have a moral obligation? If we're calling them to rise up and they rise up, we have no responsibility? Well, obviously, I'll let you finish. Obviously, you're speaking in the grand external sense of on Earth or whatever one's worldview, what are the values that the United States still holds? But Donald Trump has ruled out any moral obligation because this is purely great power, realist politics for him. I mean, he does not claim in any way to have any, it sounds like a criticism, but it's just he has no standard for foreign policy other than if you're a big enough power like Putin or China, he'll deal with you and everybody else.

14:52He might kidnap you.

14:54Matt Belloni:Well, he did say at one point help is on the way when the public was rising up. So, again, I ask the question, what happens if the Iranians rise up and the Revolutionary Guard has not been defanged or hasn't been defanged to the point where they're breaking ranks, they're defections? They still have arms. Whether it was 7 ,000 or 30 ,000, what we saw was there was no hesitancy to kill people. Now, the question is, are they changing? Is something happening? Are there signs of weakening? They give us a reason to think that we could be closer to the point where there will be defections. As I said, if they're there, I'm not seeing them at this point.

15:39Matt Belloni:That's why, again, I divide the objective into are we is the objective to make sure that Iran cannot be a threat to its neighbors. That's different from making sure that Iran is not capable of brutalizing its public the way it has before. Right. And to your point, if Donald Trump is putting people in harm's way above and beyond the danger of the actual bombings, then what does America own and owe for that? Which, again, is why these are complicated matters when we go in there. And he didn't involve the Congress or the public. So we're doing it on the back foot or the back end. And Ambassador Ross, as always, we appreciate you.

16:16I want to thank you tonight and tell folks what's coming up because years later, authorities are now finally searching a new Epstein property, believe it or not. But this is how the pressure works. We have that story coming up, including the pressure on Donald Trump as his name comes up more and more in the files. Also, I have told you we have a big problem with independent media and billionaires in this country. Donald Trump got the merger he wanted. CNN is now changing hands if the merger's approved, and we have a special insider on that. It's an important story about what you hear and whether you're going to hear the truth in the years ahead.

16:52So stay with us tonight, right now, a 90-second break, and we come back with Paul Ryko.

17:00Matt Belloni:On any journey using Uber, it helps to know you're getting into the right car. Pin verification adds an extra step to make sure your ride is your ride. Before the trip begins, your app gives you a unique pin. Just tell it to your driver, and they'll enter it in their app before the ride can start. Hey, what's your pin? Mm-hmm. 2538. That way, you know you're in the right car taking the right trip, and your driver knows you're the right passenger. Make sure your ride is your ride with pin verification from Uber. One more way Uber is putting safety at every turn. Learn more on the Uber app. Stay up to date on the biggest issues of the day with the MSNOW Daily Newsletter.

17:35Analysis by experts you trust. Video highlights from your favorite shows. Plus updates on our latest podcasts and election coverage. Sign up at MS.now.

17:51We're back with Paul Rykoff, the founder and CEO of Independent Veterans of America, a national security expert, host of the Independent Americans podcast. We've been looking at this in the region. I want to look back in America where you have a real pushback. Take a listen to Joe Rogan.

18:08Matt Belloni:But it just seems so insane based on what he ran on. I mean, this is why a lot of people feel betrayed, right? He ran on no more wars and these stupid, senseless wars. And then we have one that we can't even really clearly define why we did it. Well, but he said he's against endless wars. Well, they're all endless. Listen, man, they're all endless. How are you feeling about the President Trump? That's an open-ended question. Yeah, that's revealing. The bottom is dropping out on his support, even in his base. This is a really unique, I think, defining moment for how the country is viewing him, his administration, foreign conflict.

18:49Matt Belloni:Over 70 percent of the country is against this war. That's the highest percentage of people against any war since World War II. I mean, there's no precedent for how unpopular this war is. And I think it's really important to understand it comes in the back of the unpopularity of ICE. So you've got these two overwhelmingly bipartisanly unpopular elements that I think is actually an opportunity. In every crisis, there's an opportunity. This might be the one moment that defines the unification of America because they're united not just against Trump, but against ICE and against Iran. You've got the left wing, the right wing, Joe Rogan, everybody in between is against this war.

19:23Matt Belloni:The big problem is Donald Trump doesn't care. He doesn't care about public opinion. He continues to go forward, all gas, no brakes, and nothing's slowing him down. And what I want to hear from every senator today is not just alarm and concern and anger. What is their plan to slow him down? Are they going to defund the Department of Defense? Are they going to impeach him? Are they going to come up with other ways to slow him down? Because so far, nothing is slowing him down, including popularity of wars, to include if he goes into Cuba. We should expect him to go into Cuba in some way militarily, like he did in Ecuador last week.

19:52Matt Belloni:and most Americans didn't even notice. Yeah, and as you say, I mean, there was a legislative push on the War Powers Act, which Republicans basically interfered with. So some of them are making noise, but they don't actually want to call him out and use the powers that are there. Steve Bannon may not be a preeminent foreign policy expert, but he has military background. He has been in the White House, whatever you think of him. And here's where he comes down in some of this.

20:21Matt Belloni:you just can't sit there and go shine us on about imminent threat oh yeah it was not an imminent threat no it doesn't work like that the people in the messaging department over there got to get serious about this you're going to start losing people if there's not consistency just to kind of shine on imminent threat no no no no no no incorrect sir incorrect mr pete exit there was not an imminent threat. And now we're in it. Now we're in it. Yeah, we are deep in it. We're deeper than we've ever been before. It's a regional conflict and the bodies are already coming home. And that's what all Americans will not tolerate is caskets coming home wrapped in American flags with likely more to come.

21:03Matt Belloni:And some in this White House and some in the Republican Party who seem to have no problem with it. There's a whole new generation of chicken hawks, people who are willing to send other people's kids to die. And Trump's base, most of this country, has some connection to our military, and they don't want to see American men and women come to die. The question is, what is Trump going to do here? And usually he does something. And it looks like the circular firing squad is focusing on Hexeth. He continues to fumble. He continues to be unpopular. He says egregiously negative things. I don't think he represents us very well to the world.