South Park Rebrands As “South America” To Mock Trump

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0:34So I talked to my doctor about self-injecting with the Vivgard Hytrulo Pre-Filled Syringe, which contains F-Gartigamide Alpha and Hyaluronidase QVFC. It's injected under your skin subcutaneously. It means I can inject in my space on my time. It's my treatment, my way. Visit VivgardMyWay.com. That's V-Y-V-G-A-R-T MyWay.com. And talk to your doctor about Vivgard Hytrulo. Brought to you by Argenics. Welcome to The Beat. We are watching new warning signs hitting the economy, and yet Donald Trump has his eye off the ball again. Damning photos that you see here. They've caught Trump inside Marine One.

1:14Pretty dramatic shot there, because you can see what's obscured by the darkness, but what we can see through the windows. And he's focused not on the war or high prices, but this odd poster, which appears to present a Kennedy Center mock-up, and the ominous words Kennedy Center demolished. Now, I'm going to tell you tonight why this is actually a split-screen moment for the president, something where we are literally seeing in real time that he is more focused on his vows to close or even, quote, destroy this public landmark, which is not his property, rather than working on the people's business or the very dangerous and pricey war that continues.

1:54And the reason for this hometown squabble, as you may have heard, is that he has failed and proven powerless under law to slap his name on it ever so ghostly. We are, in a very real sense, witnessing a president who failed to bomb Tehran into submission, but now wants to destroy U.S. government buildings in Washington. Make it make sense. and these are, to be clear, government powers that he probably doesn't have. I can tell you the news tonight as a judge is pressing on how Trump aides shut down the Kennedy Center in the first place. This fencing you can see, doors closed, the courts are dealing with what we might call the substance of the imagery.

2:38This is an isolation of that shot I showed you before where it says demolished, the news photographer showing us what is very much in front of the president's face, what he is spending his actual time on. These very photos, I can tell you, have now been filed as evidence in court. The judge formalizing at least that Trump cannot do this overnight on a whim, mandating a month waiting period to allow for judicial review of any said effort to demolish the Kennedy Center, which again leads you to wonder, why is this what the government's focused on in the first place. From the best we can measure it, Donald Trump's priorities are at odds with the nation.

3:21Red and blue, left, right, and center, however you slice it. And that is proving so indefensible, even in red areas, that we're now seeing Republicans flee Trump under pressure from voters far faster than we've seen earlier in the second term. Take Florida, which is a red state where Trump, of course, now calls home. There's a current Republican lawmaker formally breaking with Trump wanting everyone to know about it, trying to save her seat in what might be bracing for a blue wave. And so to show you this moment, which comes amid these other contrasts, we're actually tonight on the news here just going to play what is this brand new Republican ad in full.

4:00Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far. In July, 50 % of the 50 ,000 people that were detained had no criminal record. Be careful what your advisors are telling you about immigration policy. The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today. You can be for immigration when Lincoln was for slavery and Reagan was for communism. I'm not talking about giving them amnesty. I'm talking about giving them a dignified life in this promised land. I am Maria Elvira Salazar, and I approve this message. That's what it looks like when you want everyone to know that on key issues, you are breaking with the president and your party, paying quite literally to get the message out.

4:40That's, of course, just one person in one race. But the wider shift is clear. Take another inflection point breaking today. Republican Karl Rove, you might remember, there he is in the background, as the architect of Bush's campaigns from Texas to the White House. They used to call him Bush's brain if you follow politics that far back. I can tell you that Rove embodies a kind of hardball, practical, conservative politics. Go to the right and win. But he's revealed today he will vote for a Democrat in at least one Texas election. He says it's the first time he's ever done that since the 90s. Rove remains visible to MAGA as a regular voice on Fox News.

5:17You can bet the president's hearing about this. And he is, in his own way, doing what so many CEOs and other elites and Republicans have avoided. Faced with hate and extremism inside their ranks, rather than cowering or putting it to the side or hoping they don't have to be the one to deal with it. Rove is stepping up in his way. He says that a Texas Republican candidate, Beau French, who is running for what sounds like an obscure Texas thing, the Railroad Commission, but it does matter for railroad and energy policy. Rove says this individual is the kind of bigot that the party should stop now, early.

5:56Rove warning against the just-asking-questions Jew-haters, misogynists who worship hyper-masculinity, conspiracy nuts seeking cliques for profit and religious bigots. His word, I'm quoting, the GOP's stables, he says, need a cleaning. That running in Wall Street Journal, which is, of course, Rupert Murdoch's sister outlet in the empire to Fox News. Democrats also truly competitive in that same state of Texas. That's what the Texas Tribune reports. You can see the other headlines. The U.S. Senate seat there is competitive. So if Bush and Roe's beloved Texas is close, well, what's going on in the rest of the map?

6:41Tonight we can tell you it's expanding, as the politicos say. And if you look at the generic lead, I put this up very simple. Democrats leading by nine points as a generic red to blue question. Now, there may be candidates who are not a generic red and do better, outperform this nine-point gap. I want you to understand that. We're not one of the shows or networks that's going to oversell polls. You got to go out and see what happens. But there's a nine-point gap, and I will tell you, last time you saw that kind of gap was 2018 in a blue wave. And if you're counting, that kind of edge can net about 40 seats in the House.

7:19That's what Democrats did when they had a nine-point edge back then in Trump's first midterm. Now, Trump wanted the spotlight in this fall homestretch. He's got it, which has Republicans' concern. Dragging down the party, keeping the focus on his own misunderstanding of what matters in the country, his fixations on the Kennedy Center and not the damage we see both obviously in lives and treasure in this ongoing war that he started that's on the right and focusing on his vanity projects while Americans face high prices and a gas tax of his making and a wider market skepticism which is blinking red in so many ways I'm going to leave this up for a moment to let you take it in these are the president's priorities this is what he cares about himself his name what he views perhaps rightly as the very very narrow legacy of slapping his name and visage on anything he can get his hands on even though it is not his money not his property it is your taxpayer dollars but as if that wasn't an affront enough he is doing it amid a gas crunch and a war and an economic crisis and an affordability problem that so many Americans face every day.

8:43With that said, I want to bring in our experts, Mala Jong-Fast from the New York Times, and Bill de Blasio, former New York City mayor, one-time presidential candidate, who's also faced Trump. I mentioned the split screen because rarely do you see it so vividly. Right. Look, three immediate thoughts came to mind. One, this was the week in human history where the issue of AI and its dangers exploded. What's Donald Trump thinking about on that helicopter? The Kennedy Center. Two, the American people have never believed in the war in Iran. It is destructive in every way. It's hurting people in their homes, in the gas pump.

9:19It's visceral. What's he thinking about? The Kennedy Center. Three, on a more political level, you know, I grew up in Massachusetts. Let me tell you something. The Kennedy legacy is still extremely powerful. to many Catholics in this country, particularly older Catholics, a lot of whom are part of that vote base that did swing to Trump and can swing right back. He is insulting literally their number one political hero, the first Catholic president of the United States. I think this is being underestimated. He is spitting in the face of the guy who made it possible for Catholics to feel full connection and ownership in this society.

9:57That's not going to be soon forgotten by a lot of Americans. So I just, that video, you played, the ad you played, I was thinking about that because that's Florida's 27th district. That's a district that Donald Trump won by 14 and a half points. OK, it is a 73 percent Latino district. So what you can see here is that this member of Congress is very smart and has been able to keep that seat is clearly seeing internal polling that is horrifying to her. And we are 47 days from the midterms. Like we are in the home stretch. Yeah. And you have diesel prices breaking records. And diesel is everything, right?

10:37It's planes and tractors and heating oil. And so I think this is a really big problem for Donald Trump. The economy is noticed everywhere. You cannot spin it away. Here's what some of the MAGA pundits and others are saying.

10:54All right. 849 for diesel in California, let me tell you something. It's$6.59 in Georgia. I don't care if it's Georgia or California. It's way too high. The biggest political swing and miss in my lifetime has been not keeping the$2 gas that we had in December and January. The war in Iran has got to stop. When it comes to gasoline, a reflection of the Iran war, and groceries, which have continued to go up, the problem is worse. This is Trump's fault. This should not be this high. It needs to end. Ridiculous. You know, it's striking to me because you would think a president who believes keeping the Congress in his party is essential to his program, to his efforts, would be speaking to this issue and acting.

11:49What happened? The House just went out of session instead. The president made no real effort to convince Mike Johnson and the House members to do something about gas prices or do something about inflation. They were more concerned about protecting Pete Hegseth from an impeachment vote. So when you look at this, it's really become even more of a cabal than I think we realize. It's more about the personalities and their own images and their own survival instead of their party or their program. I think at this point, Trump is literally sacrificing the final two years of his administration because he can't present a vision of change anymore.

12:27Yeah, and Molly, Vice President Vance has sort of said, one more time, come on, just one more time, take a look.

12:38There's a lot of good that's been done, but there's a lot of work left to do. Don't give power to the people who cause the problems that we're fixing. Give us another chance or give us another couple of years to continue to work on the amazing things that we've been doing for the past two years. That's just some of it. I want to, again, go back to what he said. There's a lot of good that's been done, but there's work left to do. The work, as we showed in our opening tonight, is the work that Donald Trump is doing. I mean, the work he's doing right now, people seem to be aware of. He's fighting over the Kennedy Center.

13:14He's fighting over the ballroom. He's going out there, making it about himself, Trumpapalooza convention. if this, and I leave this up for a second, Molly, is the work left to do. I'm not sure that people think they should get another day of it. Yeah, I would also add Donald Trump ran on making things cheaper, right? He said, I'm going to make things cheaper. Remember, he had this thing, the weave, where he talked about bacon and how he's going to make bacon cheaper, right? What did he do? He put on tariffs that made no sense, that were inflationary. He went to war with Iran, which made gas and diesel more expensive.

13:48You know, the way to undo some of this inflation would be to undo the tariffs, which he's totally uninterested in doing, and if anything, has declared more trade war with Canada, or to bring peace to Iran, which he has tried and is not succeeding at, maybe perhaps because he's using his son-in-law and his real estate friend to negotiate. Amen. And he has now empowered Iran in ways that Iran, I don't think, ever dreamed of. They never attempted to control the Strait of Hormuz the way they do now. He literally put that power into their hands with a failed military strategy, doesn't have a way out.

14:29And now, if you're talking about national security, the whole world can see the United States is running low on munitions. I mean, this is just astounding how many negative impacts before you even get to gas prices and the impact on Americans every day and the lives lost. Yeah. And people and people know the crisis level. Then you look at how does the economy work in people's minds? I want to show something that's really damning that has Republicans sort of freaking out. Our panel stays. We're back in just 90 seconds.

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16:35I think that the Trump administration should certainly have recognition, because frankly, if we don't do that, it's going to close. It'll end up being ripped down. Donald Trump going back to his hobby horse and threatening to do something. he may not have the power to do, rip up, rip out, or destroy the Kennedy Center. We've been covering that, Molly and former Mayor de Blasio both here. Molly, he's now under judicial orders to have to wait a month for review to even do that. And while people are understandably concerned about what you can stop, this is not a one-second thing to destroy the Kennedy Center.

17:13So all the federal employees come down there with a judicial warrant or order saying stop, They're going to stop. It's, again, kind of defenestrating him on the public stage. I did want to show, as promised before the break, what people think. Whether you like it or not, Donald Trump has benefited from the public perception in years past. And he was a big businessman with a big boardroom. And in 24, he had an edge over both Biden and later Harris on who would handle the economy better. That's flipped. If you ask voters about this bad economy, 63 percent blame Trump, Molly, which statistically includes as a Fox News poll, by the way, a hell of a lot of people that once voted for him.

17:56And in fact, a fourth of Republicans in that poll blamed Trump, which is this split in MAGA that we've been talking about forever. Right. Which is this idea that it started with the Epstein files and it went to the war in Iran. And now you have people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who used to be one of Donald Trump's main people making videos about how expensive diesel is. I mean, Donald Trump has really gone at the MAGA base and sort of made it smaller and smaller. Yeah. And people know, I mean, look, for hardcore New York politics fans out there, mayor, mayors complain they get blamed for the weather and how you handle a snowstorm, which you don't always have 100 percent control.

18:37Sometimes mayors get blamed for running late. And people say they had more control over that. Groundhogs. In all fairness, Donald Trump and no president has 100 percent control over the economy. But he has done more intervention, more failed attempts to deal with. And we have more on this later tonight. The Fed, the bond market. And we have a war tax going. And it seems, unlike, say, New York weather, Mr. Mayor, that the public has accurately perceived that he has done more to make their economy worse. What do you think about that shift, given that he used to actually be above ground on this? Yeah, look, continuing your theme, Ed Koch said specifically, if a sparrow dies in Central Park, it's the mayor's fault.

19:21Right. Ed Koch is such an interesting example. Trump watched Ed Koch. Ed Koch was ubiquitous. He was everywhere on every issue. Trump is ubiquitous. And this is part of his fundamental problem. He is claiming to have an impact everywhere. And especially that opening of the administration with all the executive orders, all powerful. Well, people are smart. They say, oh, if you're all powerful and our lives are getting worse, well, then you're the author of that. To make matters worse, the obsession with tariffs, not just I like tariffs, but Liberation Day, something the vast majority of Americans had no idea what he was talking about.

19:57And he's never framed it properly. And then a self-chosen war, which no Republican or Democratic president was dumb enough to try previously, that now has come home. You know, you're talking about literally the fastest increase in gasoline prices in American history, much more than back during the Jimmy Carter days or any other period. In a month, we saw prices double in many places. So it's impossible to suggest. He tries to say Joe Biden did it or Vance says the guys before us. Doesn't work anymore. They broke it. They own it now. Yeah. In the magic of television, I want to close on a more personal note.

20:31Why don't you both state your heights? I'm 6 '4". No. What's your real height? I'm 5 '7 and three quarters. Mr. Mayor? Today, my 6 '5 actually seems just pale in comparison to Molly's great news. We keep it very accurate. We like everyone to be presented. We didn't want to have that mismatch. We're not going to ask you to stand up. But anyone who's been around, we remember in the New York, not in New York debates, the presidential debates, when you go walking out there, I think you were the tallest candidate. Is that right? It is true. But I want to say this is my kind of fake news. This is OK.

21:06There we go. I'm all right with harmless. And full disclosure, I mentioned it. There we go. My thanks to both of you. We have a lot coming up, including how South Park is owning Donald Trump, even on a network bought by a MAGA ally. But next, I mentioned Wall Street is calling the Trump Treasury's bluff. Word is bond. And I'll explain next.

21:35Look, here's the bottom line. Donald Trump had a rough summer, but he's now having a full panic fall. The economy is sputtering from daily life, which we've been covering, the prices, to alerts on the wider outlook that you get from multiple parts of the market. The worst is yet to come on gas. The stock market dipped. Consumers are crushed. The data shows part of the problems are caused by Trump. Take the war. If you're wondering how much it's cost you, it's about$1 ,700 per household. And counting. The number on your screen is bad for Trump and the Republicans. Now, Trump has lost his efforts to end the war sooner.

22:17He's clearly losing the fight against inflation. But at the macro level, and I promised I was going to get into this tonight, despite months of plotting, Trump also losing his bid to control the independent Federal Reserve. He even tried, remember, to investigate two of its members in order to control a corrupt policy. Well, they stood up, they fought back, and they won. They're both still on the job, which was newly relevant this week because they and their colleagues, their peers, as the Fed, rejected Trump's calls to basically juice policy. He was hoping for a Band-Aid going into the midterms, but even with other new Trump appointees added to the Fed, independence won out.

22:58The Fed moved unanimously to raise rates this week. Its members believe that for America, the best long-term plan for the economy is this approach, and it may be, but it is not the short-term kind of sugar high that Trump wanted for his political reasons going into the midterms. Now, then there is the wider skepticism of the U.S. government under Trump. Now, his erratic leadership and pricey tax cuts don't help. Some of the long-term issues here, of course, run in the decades. But right now, the global markets have been hammering U.S. government borrowing. The U.S. has faced these headwinds because of trillions in debt that piles up over time.

23:40But it also clearly got worse under Trump. In his administration, this may sound familiar, separate from the Fed stuff I mentioned, also now has been trying to offer a Band-Aid on this one as well. They wanted to see if they could basically temper bond market skepticism by throwing some U.S. money at the problem. Trump's Treasury Secretary started talking tough about taming the markets because they were going to buy back some bonds. And then the amount they actually bought back was so small, such a tiny portion that the market basically rejected this gimmick. That's the new economic development this week.

24:20Trump's Treasury Secretary rebuked by the actual market, as the Times put it. Indeed, the move led to precisely the opposite of what Trump and his Treasury are trying to achieve. That's how the nonpartisan outlet Axios put it. So that's another Trump loss. and you could say, okay, try to watch political news. I'm getting a little bit of the economy. Where does it all fit? Here's the important part. Even if you're not super interested in the markets or bonds, even if when you hear bond, you don't think of markets. Maybe you think of the hip hop credo word is bond. I promise you can still follow this story because it is about one, Trump losing bids to spin reality, something he does from politics to economics.

25:11But also, stay with me, it's about how Trump failed to meet the standard of word is bond, which means keeping your word so people believe you. Trump's Treasury Chief Besant failed at that. Business and conservative outlets noted his word basically is not his bond, and his bluff failed. I don't love what he's doing with bonds right now. The best dare to the market. I'm the house now. You can bet against me if you want. Markets kind of called his bluff. He was trying to get interest rates down. Instead, they went up. The reality is, look,$6 billion in a$31 trillion treasury market is like throwing pebbles in a river.