Trump Hits Crisis Point as War Expands and Economy Slows

0:00Hello, I'm Ozempic. And I'm other GLP-1s, kind of like him. Are you shaking a maraca? No, I'm shaking the pill version of Ozempic, which no one should ever do except in ads like this. A nice disclaimer. Hey, thanks. Ask your doctor about which FDA-approved uses of the Ozempic pen or pill may be right for you. Call 1-833-OZEMPIC or visit Ozempic.com to view the medication guide and learn more about Ozempic semaglutide tablets, 9mg, and Ozempic semaglutide injection, 2mg. There's a pill version of Osimpec. Need a lesson in savings? Who doesn't? That's where Burlington comes in for back-to-school style.

0:37Because those school lists get long, but your receipts shouldn't. Find backpacks and sneakers to sweatshirts and jeans. Burlington has them all from the brands your kids keep begging for. Why choose just a few looks? With our prices, just get them all. Burlington. Deals? Brands? Wow. Welcome to The Beat. I'm Ari Melber. And we are tracking several stories, Donald Trump, basically admitting that he could have an embarrassing defeat in the Congress that his party controls. And this isn't one of those stories where I have to tell you one side says this and the other says that. The concession of weakness coming out of the Trump White House is confirmed by Donald Trump, who publicized late today something that he doesn't want, that he wishes was going differently, and that weeks ago they were bluffing and saying would never happen, which is Donald Trump says he might just pull the attorney general nomination of Todd Blanche.

1:37And that's because there is a revolt, not just criticism, not just, oh, what could happen, but an actual revolt that might prevent Blanche from getting confirmed this term. Andrew Weissman is here on that. And while we start with a different story, I can tell you that that kind of weakness, Donald Trump's low polling, a Republican party that's less afraid of him, candidates that want to run away from him, is the context of basically everything in Trump's Washington right now. And that relates to a reason he's unpopular that's different than just the AG, a crisis point with the low polling numbers and an unpopular war that Trump has clearly failed to stem, which has the cascading effect of more economic uncertainty and gas prices that are already high.

2:19We are now about half a year into the war that Trump said would take weeks. And the conflict has basically elements of expansion. We're seeing reports that Trump is exasperated that this thing has spun completely out of control. Remember, he sold that partial ceasefire as some kind of off-ramp. Well, we are not through the worst of it. Reporting you see here, the president erupted at top officials during a recent meeting. That's a U.S. official and a person familiar with the discussion telling NBC. The war is also dissipated across other countries. Now, that doesn't mean we have what we would call a regional war yet because we don't have some hot conflict on the ground.

2:56But for the first time, Saudi Arabia has joined in with strikes against Iranian backed militias. Egypt was hit by Iranian drones for the first time. So that's not good, even if it's not a full regional war. everyone in the region and the U.S. agrees on one thing, which is that hopefully it won't get worse and turn into a hot conflict. At home, we have the latest polls with 66 percent disapproving of Trump's handling of the war. When you look for people who approve, you have to go well beyond Trump voters or Republicans. You get a much smaller share of just 28 percent, a kind of hardcore group that thinks this is going well and they are in the clear minority.

3:35The backlash has been clear on the right. That includes media conservatives and the Trump voters that we hear from. Like, oh, it's just totally normal that we invaded Iran, just do this thing that we know is going to wreck our country, which it now is. Clock is ticking for President Trump to get out of this war before voters head to the polls. I went from disappointment now to anger. It would be nice if we didn't have so many wars or whatever's going on in the government that's hiking up our gas prices. Well, it upset me that he told everybody he was going to end it quick. And now it started all over again.

4:12So I'm not happy with that. I think you need to maybe change your strategy. I don't think we're close in that regard of finishing the job. The word is out. We're often told that we live in this environment, especially with the Internet and phones, where you can find your own version of events, your own stories. And I'll tell you, as someone who deals on a daily basis with news and information, there are topics where that happens. where people kind of just go into their corner and believe the stuff they saw. They'll tell you, well, I read this on Facebook. As if Facebook itself is a source of facts or news, Facebook is a bulletin board and you can find all kinds of things people pin up there.

4:49So on some topics that happens. Not this topic. As you just heard that voter say, and as I just showed you the polling reflects, people know the war isn't over. They know that Trump's much-hyped ceasefire didn't work, and they know their gas prices are up. We also have new numbers with economic growth. Now, whether you follow this day to day or more broadly, or you just know that things are expensive, U.S. economic growth is slowing, they say, unexpectedly in the second quarter, based on at least what economists had expected. So that's a shift, tariffs and the war cutting into the gains. The AP recording its lowest second term approval rating for Trump, 33%.

5:26And you see the other pollsters who track this. This is dangerous territory. This is getting towards Nixon-Watergate territory. Sarah Longwell, writing in the Bulwark, put it like this. Trump is close to the disastrous Bush line. An approval rating hovering where George W. Bush's approval was at the end of the term, like I mentioned. You get down to 34, 30 percent, you're in Bush-Iraq war or Nixon-Watergate territory. And so while we hear stories about Trump's resilience, like many other Trump things, it's repeated a lot, but it's not true. He is not politically resilient. He is not Teflon. He is not popular.

6:04And he does not have the MAGA base he used to, which is why Republicans are so nervous about the midterms. And remember, the Bush number I mentioned included not just the Iraq war, but also ultimately, by the end of his term, a financial crash. What happened then? Well, Obama won the presidency. And Democrats had a blue wave. Now, this is not the first or the last time you might hear about Democrats saying, well, if Trump and or the Republicans mess up enough, they should be home free. And so while that is the context that we begin with tonight, there is a heck of a lot of political debate over what the right message is going into these midterms at a time where, as you can see, voters not only are paying more attention, but for people worried about gas prices and which family necessity they have to sacrifice in the Trump economy.

6:53voters are paying attention because they have to. I want to bring in our politico, Reverend Al Sharpton, who, of course, is president of the National Action Network, host of MSNL's Politics Nation. And although they don't mention it in every introduction, someone who ran for president, stood on the stage with other candidates, you kind of know that side of the field, which most of us don't, how it looks when you're staring out at voters. And why don't we start with that? Because Trump's staring out at an angry set of voters now. He's staring at an angry set of voters that are angry about the exact things he promised him he wouldn't do.

7:24He said, we're not going to have war. I'm going to deal with making life easier for you in terms of the economy. And he has also stated a bunch of cultural wars that he's not really shown any advancement there. So I really think that he's in serious trouble in the sense that not only is his polling near where Bush was at the end or Nixon, but there is no clear strategy on how he digs out of this. So when you look at what Senator Cornyn did today and Senator Tillis, that's like just one of many things that's going against him, to where he's embarrassed that two Republican senators from states that he gets a good vote said, I'm not going to vote for your candidate for the attorney general because he wants, he will not sign in writing that you can get negotiations with yourself about a tax settlement that you claim the government owed you.

8:33And it's just ugly. I'm sitting at a gas station paying over$4 for gas. And the president wants an attorney general that won't sign that he can't self-deal on the record. And you wonder why the polls are going down. People are a little sometimes not paying attention, but they're not stupid. Yeah, and they say sometimes with America, we have political amnesia. There are countries that are ruled by the recent history of debate. If you go to Europe, I think it's fair to say sometimes they're talking about history in more detail than we sometimes do. And you wonder, was there amnesia about this strange end of the first term?

9:12because COVID and so many other factors contributed. Trump was run out of the first term, first electorally with people saying no more. And then Jan 6, he was as opposed as he'd ever been. But he came back in 24 on the idea that it might be different or better. And now by the time the next midterms show up, what do you make of the electorate saying, oh my gosh, they forgot. And now remember what they don't like about his governance. And I think the part that they all forget is they get in the Beltway arguments, and I think in some ways Trump has gotten into that, where they're arguing with each other in the dressing room, not realizing they're not on stage and the audience is not in the dressing room, and the audience is saying, I don't like what I'm seeing.

9:57And they're not hearing that. The weakness of, everyone talks about how he had some adults around him in the first term, which is debatable, but they certainly were better than his crew. The weakness of having sycophants around you is you don't even get a real pulse reading on where the people are. There's no one telling him this is not working on Main Street. Well, and you say Trump sounds very insidery. It's interesting because, and you've known him a long time. Che Colmendouri, who's a guest on our show, said this week that Trump has actually become a typical politician, lying, spinning, focused on these things.

10:35that he's lost touch with whatever it was at bottom of the base, that he doesn't see himself that way, but the voters do. To paraphrase Big Pun, a New York artist, you remember, he said, I'm not a player. I just play a lot. And so with Trump, it's like, I'm not a politician. That was his whole pitch, right? And his lack of experience, he flipped into a positive. Well, now he is politicking a lot. And people see that, including the D.C. corruption. He's the swampiest, most conflicted and corrupt leader. I can't say whether these all break criminal law. That would have to be investigated. But I can say he has more ongoing corruption problems than any president we've seen.

11:12And so what about that, if you will, big pun problem that Trump was trying to say, oh, I just politic a lot, but I'm not like them. And now the voters seem to think he's exactly what's wrong with the swamp. He is not only what is wrong with the swamp, he's made it swampier, if there's such a word. Because even the guys that I did not like, I'm voter A, I did not like the guys in the swamp because I felt they were self-dealing. They maybe were going on a vacation at taxpayers' expense or they had some other stuff going on. Here's a guy that is outright negotiating millions of dollars to pay himself back for a government.

11:49And here's a guy that gets a plane from a foreign country as a gift that he's going to take with him. There's just too much there for the average guy to now say he's one of us, not one of them. He's one of them with additions to being one of them. And I think that that's the problem. You can't play we the people and then you're way ahead of the people. You know, there was a saying we used to hear going over the civil rights movement. If you get too far ahead of the troops, they'll start shooting. They don't know the difference between you and the enemy. And he's way ahead of his own base. And that's why, yeah, Tillis and Cornyn didn't like his politics in their state.

12:32But they also know that the people in their state on the ground gives them enough cushion to stand up to him and not have to pay for it. Yeah. And Trump, when he was on his game, when it was first term, he was selling things that at least appealed to some people. We can debate them. But the message discipline, I mentioned the swamp, so he knew that what he's now doing is unpopular. The wall. I mean, he had clear things that weren't just about himself. Now they can't even explain the Trump economy. I want to show you right after this short break what Howard Lutnick basically got caught spinning on how bad the economy is.

13:05So we're going to look at that when we're back with Rev in 90 seconds.

13:12look for the second quarter of 2026 to be amazing as all this money comes back into the economy from this big beautiful bill uh we got the tape that was in the prior quarter prediction untrue uh you could call that you know hoping for the best it's fine you can hope for it but they haven't delivered? Where does that type of sort of fallen expectations for this Trump economy fit in? They have laid their own basis of failure because they're speaking in emphatic terms that are emphatically not coming to become true. Look for the second quarter where we're there and look at what we see. It wasn't this is what we're trying, this is a goal, this is the factors that we're looking at.

14:00It was a promise. They talk very basic to people, common language. There's no equivocation about what they're saying. So there is no equivocation that they failed at what they said. Yeah. And so people feel that. I mean, that's the reality theme that we hear. We're like, you can't just spin out of that. Right. There's no spin when you made a commitment. And in fact, not only did not in the second quarter of the economy get better for the average American, including the MAGA voter, it got worse. Right. Gas prices went up. Prices of certain food and groceries at home went up. So I not only ended up getting better, I got worse.

14:42And you emphatically told me that I'd get better. Wait, hold on for the second quarter. And now we're in the middle of it and I'm doing much worse. And finally, briefly, I wanted to show health care. You and I know this is true. And you mentioned civil rights. It's true in activism. It's true in the news. Some stories are harder to tell just because of the nature of what's happening. So this health care cut from the GOP is a slow rolling problem. We don't we don't have all the pictures, but I want to put up one headline here that patients who've lost their insurance because of these GOP cuts are now showing up in emergency rooms and clinics.

15:14They lost what was the Affordable Care Act or sometimes called Obamacare coverage. The final question, does this also matter as Republicans said, oh, it'll be fine. And people will figure it out. They're not figuring it out. This is a health care crisis. It's a huge problem for them. Many of us said when they let the the Obamacare or Affordable Care Act not be extended, this would happen. But it took a slow process. Now people are seeing I have no insurance. I can't afford what I need. Senior citizens, just regular people that was on the Affordable Care Act. And it's now with the term chickens come home to roost and people are looking at him saying, wait a minute.

15:55And you left us no cushion. There was no alternative. It wasn't like they said this is our health plan and it's better than the affordable care. They had no plan. They just wanted to stop anything that Barack Obama did. And in the process, they put millions of people where their health care was out of reach in terms of their being able to pay for it. Yeah, I appreciate your candor and all this important stuff. I'll let the viewers in on a little bit of the backstage. We asked you, can you stick around for something really special at the end of the hour? You said sure, because you're a great colleague.

16:27So what we're doing at the end of the hour is even more fun than what we just did. So Rev sticks around for that. As we look at the artists fighting back against Trump, Jimmy Kimmel winning. That's later in the show. Trump also now saying what Rev alluded to. He might pull his AG nomination. A moment of weakness. What's happening? Andrew Weissman's here. Next.

17:16We'll see you next time. That's L-A-T-T-I-C-E dot com slash no regrets. Need a lesson in savings? Who doesn't? That's where Burlington comes in for back-to-school style. Because those school lists get long, but your receipts shouldn't. Find backpacks and sneakers to sweatshirts and jeans. Burlington has them all from the brands your kids keep begging for. Why choose just a few looks? With our prices, just get them all. Burlington. Deals? Brands? Wow.

18:16of the Supreme Court has basically shut that down and allowed the administration to do what it wants. That's this week on Why Is This Happening. Search for Why Is This Happening wherever you're listening right now and follow.

18:30Here's how badly Donald Trump's week is going in Washington. Just through facts. One, Trump cares more about the attorney general position than just about anything else in government. It is the fulcrum of his efforts to break the rule of law, to punish and indict enemies and to have sort of favorable treatment of what he perceives to be his vulnerabilities, tax audits and the like. You've probably heard about that in the news. That's number one. Number two, today was a scheduled vote in a Republican-controlled Senate to confirm his attorney general nominee. And as a reminder, most of Trump's cabinet has been pretty straightforward, pretty easily confirmed by this Republican Senate.

19:09And yet, if you've been watching the news atop of this broadcast or really any news lately, you might have heard that Trump is crashing in approval. Republicans less afraid of him, don't need to work with him as much, depending on the issue. And that brings us to point number three. The plan to install, controversially his former personal criminal defense lawyer as attorney general, is derailed. That scheduled vote, off. So that right there is a loss or a setback in the plan. If they had the votes, we know how Congress works, they would have voted today. Translation, they don't have the votes, and we have more evidence on that.

19:42But this has been derailed. Donald Trump's plans not going the way he wanted, and the fear of crossing him is fading. Trump says, in response to this setback, that maybe he would just pull the whole nomination, which is a kind of ploy to leave Todd Blanchett as acting AG. Then the midterms would come. Trump is hoping they hold the Senate, and then the two senators causing the most problems, who he primaried, would be gone, and he hopes replaced by more loyal Republicans. but that itself is a gamble that requires them winning the midterms which is really up in the air especially when you look at the polling and the war cornyn responding that there are other senators that have similar concerns they just haven't been flushed out in public which is an interesting point we will discuss tonight what he's basically saying is he's the heat shield other people oppose this but they don't need to get into a party civil war if the nomination is already stalled.

20:40And that came hours after Cornyn sent the DOJ a new proposal to try to resolve this sort of fake made-up settlement deal that Trump claims would immunize him and his family from future audits. All of this tied up as well in the plan to try to give out money to Magi-allied convicts. Now, Cornyn told reporters already that the way things are going, meaning as of that moment, he was just going to vote no on the AG nominee. Every time I think we're getting close to a resolution, somebody throws a wrench into the work. So we, this morning, it looks like we're no closer than we were before. I am prepared to vote no, but I do think I owe it to my constituents and to Mr.

21:32Blanche to try to negotiate in good faith. And that's what we've been doing. The sound you hear is of a Republican actually using a little bit of their power as a co-equal branch to govern and regulate the executive branch in one that many people say has become a runaway executive branch. Now, we'll leave it to the side for now whether Cornyn could have done this, I don't know, any time in the last six years. He lost his seat anyway. But that's where we stand. Now, the Republican majority leader, Thune, is still trying to work with Trump to come up with some resolution before this long summer recess begins, which sort of would put a fork in the whole plan.

22:12Here's how Politico, a nonpartisan outlet, puts it. Thune, leaving the door open to getting Blanche confirmed next week if the senators are able to come to a deal with the DOJ. But, and this is crucial, Politico writes, Cornyn and Tillis, have yet to blink. Trump is threatening to take his ball and go home. That would be, obviously, a very public loss in a very key agency, the Department of Justice, all because these senators decided to stand up for something. So, not your normal narrative, a little bit different. I want to bring in Andrew Weissman, former FBI general counsel, former Mueller prosecutor.

22:47He has lived the intersection of the DOJ and Congress. When Congress is doing its job. It can exercise a productive type of oversight. That's why we see people, including the attorney general, testify. Lately, I think a lot of folks are skeptical or cynical about the whole thing. We'll put to the side Cornyn's newfound constitutional responsibility. We can do it in three minutes. But for now, what's happening here? And do you see this as a type of progress. Look, it is, as you said, it is a loss. Even if ultimately he is confirmed, you know, in short order or upon, you know, a new Senate, if the Senate is still controlled by Republicans, it is still a loss.

23:35But having said that, the idea that you have Senator Thune and others willing to confirm somebody where the hill that two senators have chosen to die on, where they have drawn the line, is such small potatoes. This is somebody who has subpoenaed the New York Times and his own lawyers have had to go to court and say, we made mistake after mistake and we didn't even read the leading case on point and so we're in violation of law. And then the Department of Justice issues a press statement saying that the judge is wrong. After a court appearance where they had to admit over and over again how it was a department that violated the law, you have Todd Blanche, Department of Justice, trying to indict six sitting members of Congress.

24:32You have them trying to open a criminal investigation into Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve. You have them in violation of the Epstein Transparency Act. You have a federal judge who said that Mr. Abrego Garcia was vindictively prosecuted and laying the blame clearly over and over again at the feet of Todd Blanche. And you have a federal judge who has referred Todd Blanche and what the bad faith conduct in connection with this so-called settlement slush fund to the Bar Association for the nominee to be the head of the Justice Department. and yet you have just two Republican senators saying that there is a problem.

25:16Well, paraphrase Tucker Carlson, as I am wont to do. We had a big pun earlier quoted in the show, but Tucker said about this moment in the Trump era very accurately, and we're supposed to pretend this is normal? There is nothing normal or inbounds about this kind of attorney general. And whether people like to hear it or not, The president is fully entitled to nominate a qualified attorney general who has strong conservative policy views. Absolutely. Jeff Sessions was at the time one of the most right wing voting members of the Senate. But he did, by all accounts, follow the DOJ rules, went through a confirmation process.

25:54Here you have someone who, as you're pointing out, is already on a rampage against the rule of law, against the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, probably, depending on how you view subpoena abuse. and a heck of a lot of other rights and rules. And so you kind of say, yeah, to get back to the Cornyn of it, if I can nerd out with you. Yeah. Yeah. If this flies, then what the heck? I want to play a little bit of this was Trump and Cornyn because this has become their standoff. Yep.

26:29Maybe you have said that the weaponization fund is a moot issue. Is that your position? The time. That has nothing to do with it. This is about making sure that even if you're the president of the United States, you don't get favorable terms from the government in a settlement of a lawsuit that ordinary citizens would not get. You know, it's a combination of lawyerese and Washingtonese. The way he says that, I mean, I have it written here. You don't get favorable terms in the government and settlement of a lawsuit that ordinary citizens would not get. No, you don't get to corrupt the entire Justice Department to do self-enrichment that can endanger the public good.