Morning Joe - Biden is living rent-free in Trump’s mind: Joe reacts to president's misleading address

Episode Date: December 18, 2025

Biden is living rent-free in Trump’s mind: Joe reacts to president's misleading address To listen to this show and other MS podcasts without ads, sign up for MS NOW Premium on Apple Podcasts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is what the Biden administration allowed to happen. Do you remember when Joe Biden, under the Biden administration, compared to the Biden last year, under Biden, 30 to 100 percent under Biden? The worst thing that the Biden administration did. When you were always on my mind. Come on, sing it, Willie. Come on, sing it, Willie. Come on. sing it. Oh, I love Willie.

Oh, yeah. Joe Biden, very much. Living rent-free in Donald Trump's mind. Good morning. And welcome to morning, Joe, and it is a good morning anytime you can start with Willie. Willie Nelson. And Willie, and Willie Geist. Willie. The sweet sound of Willie. That's a good start to the show, that song, isn't it? Oh, that is so good. That is so good. It's so good. It's awesome. You know, so the New York Times, even before this speech last night, had written an article about how absolutely obsessed Donald Trump is with Joe Biden. And they wrote that they actually counted during the first 50 days, Donald Trump said Joe Biden's name, and

average of 6.32 times per day. Think about that every day. Sounds like obsession. Per day. Yeah. It is. And then when he had that cabinet meeting last week where people said he was having a very hard time staying awake, he, he, when he was there and conscious, the time said that

he blurted out Joe Biden's name eight times. in 20 minutes. And here we are, this is over 300 days into Donald Trump's second administration. And it's just, it is a constant obsession. And now he's putting up third grade plaques in the people's, you know, White House, might as well write it in crayons.

I mean, but yeah, there's a crazy obsession with Joe Biden. lives rent-free and his head. No question about it. And the American people disagree with him about this, by the way. They believe this economy is Donald Trump's. As we look at that headline, the presidential walk of fame, what Joe's talking about is now, in addition to those photographs of former presidents, they've added plaques written

clearly by Donald Trump himself, maybe lifted from true social posts with all the grammar and spelling that comes with that, memorialized in bronze, attacking the president whose portrait sits above that in that case of Joe Biden's. But my larger point was he may be obsessed with Joe Biden. The country has not. The country has moved on from Joe Biden and said, this economy stinks. I can't afford my life. And it's not Joe Biden's fault anymore. Well, and we're going to get, we're going to talk about the speech. By the way, I just have to say that presidential so-called walk of fame, which will be torn down the literally the first minute of the next

administration, that presidential, quote, walk of fame, I don't get the Saudi gold things that he's putting all over the place. Does he have a Saudi interior design? It is the least American-looking stuff I've ever seen. It's straight out of a Saudi kingdom or something, a palace or something like that, which is great if it's a Saudi palace. It's not a Saudi palace. It is an American White House. But it's one of the strange things about the speech last. night. Yeah, look at one, no, well, that's weird, all that gold, but you look above it and there's these, yeah, those things above it. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think we saw a lot of those things when we went into Sodom Hussein's palaces and like, you know, during the war. Like,

did we lift those from Sodom's palaces? Look at that. That's not the American White House. That Saddam Hussein's like summer house. Like in, yeah. Baghdad. Look at the other. Maybe they share an interior designer. By the way, though, I will say it tracks with his previous design choices. Anyone who's ever been to his buildings, his apartments, or his beach clubs, there is a certain

gold gaudiness to everything inside those. So I guess that's his design choice. But I've just never seen the Sodom Hussein swore. world above pictures. That's a fascinating, fascinating choice. But anyway, so when you're given speeches and somebody had said this on our show, I think earlier this week, he's great when he's running against somebody. And he can make these crazy claims and people, people are, oh, yeah, that's really awful, isn't it? Yeah, I don't watch TV and, you know, usually I'll watch YouTube or Twitter, you know, look to be on Twitter for five minutes. But what he said, boy, that, that must be

bad but now when you say in some places in america you go and gas is a dollar 50 a gallon or whatever he said people drive out of their the front door in their their trucks and they turn that and they say three dollars three dollars and twenty cents like it's like you don't need like politifact to fact check most of this stuff he's saying he's still on this whole greatest economy ever kick and gas prices of, no, gas is around $3 a gallon everywhere you go. Inflation's not down. He can say inflation's down. Inflation's exactly where it was when he took office. It's around 3%. It's exactly, let me say again, about where it was when Donald Trump took office. So if you don't want to lie, you can say, we've stabilized inflation.

and now it's going to get even better. It was at 9%. When we got in, it was a 3 p. We've stabilized inflation, and this next year, we're going to do more than just stabilize it for you. We're going to bring it down, but he just can't say it. There's, you know, he's saying,

oh, I'm going to cut pharmaceutical prices by 100%. Oh, really? You're going to people. Oh, so, okay, good. So I'm going to get free medication, because if you cut the cost of something by 100%, it's now free. If you cut it by 200%,

you're giving me double my money of what I would normally pay instead of buying insulin for my son, they're going to pay me. And then when you say, some cases, I'm cutting it 500, 600 times, well, that's a

multi-pliare effect. Who needs to, like, go on calcium anymore? You don't have to bet on football games. You just buy your family like pharmaceuticals and Donald Trump says you're going to get 600% savings

which means if something costs you $100, not only do you not pay for it, they're going to give you $600. That's pretty good. It's not true but we had a lot of that last night in a dress where I had Republicans asking

me, why is he shouting at us? So quite a speech last night I don't know how that's going to the square with how people actually feel about the economy. But strange days, as John Lennon would say, most peculiar, darling. It was, why is he yelling at us or why is he making this speech at all in primetime in networks across the country? It had the feel of a rally or a campaign speech. There was not a pressing need for him to address the American people. Let's get in to

some of the speech last night. It took place in the diplomatic room and then we'll talk through some of the claims he made afterward. Eleven months ago, I inherited a mess, and I'm fixing it. When I took office, inflation was the worst in 48 years, and some would say in the history of our country, which caused prices to be higher than ever before making life unaffordable for millions and millions of Americans. Our border was open, and because of this, our country was being invaded by an army of 25 million people, many who came from prisons and jails, mental institutions, and insane

asylums. Already, I've secured a record-breaking $18 trillion of investment into the United States, which means jobs, wage increases, growth, factory openings, and far greater national security. Much of this success has been accomplished by tariffs. my favorite word, tariffs. I'm doing what no politician of either party has ever done standing up to the special interest to dramatically

reduce the price of prescription drugs. I negotiated directly with the drug companies and foreign nations, which would take advantage of our country for many decades to slash prices on drugs and pharmaceuticals by as much as 400, 500, and even 600 percent. Gasoline is now under $2.50 a gallon in much of the country. In some states, it, by the way, just hit $1.99 a gallon. And within the next 12 months, we will have opened

1,600 new electrical generating plants, a record, and it's a record that won't be beaten by practically, I would say, by anybody. A check on some of the claims from the president. First, not inherit the worst inflation in 48 years or ever. The most recent inflation data from September shows, as Joe said, the rate of inflation at 3% that is exactly where it was when Donald Trump took office. Meanwhile, since that so-called Liberation Day announcement of massive tariffs in April, the inflation rate actually has climbed from 2.3% to its current level. Presidents claim that 25 million migrants entered the country over President Biden is not true. U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded under 11 million total encounters during

the Biden administration, including millions of expulsions. The president also bragged that he's brought down drug prices by as much as 600 percent, as we just said, that is mathematically impossible. It would mean people are getting paid then to take their prescriptions. Meanwhile, the president has presented no evidence that he's secured $18 trillion worth of investment for the United States. As the Associated Press points out, The White House's own website offers a number of $9.6 trillion, and that figure appears to include some investment commitments made during Joe Biden's presidency. And as we said, no state in the country has gas at $199 a gallon.

As of yesterday, the national average was $291, according to AAA. Let's bring into the conversation, the co-host of our 9 o'clock hour, staff writer at the Atlantic, Jonathan Lemire, CEO and co-founder of Axios Jim Bandahy, MS now's senior Capitol Hill reporter and host of way too early Allie Vitale and presidential historian and Pulitzer Prize winning author John Meacham. Good morning to you all. So John Lemire, let me start with you. We can put aside the performance side of this, that it looked like he had to rush to a dinner reservation the way he was presenting last night. But the substance of it, the purpose of it, why did the White House make this speech last night? Yeah, the president lost his battle with a teleprompter

yesterday, and not his finest delivery, to be sure. And I heard similarly as Joe did. People were just wondering, why is he going so fast? Why is he shouting at us? And I think part it felt to me almost as if he's trying to desperately convince the American people, hey, things are going great, maybe even trying to convince himself of that, because things have not been going well. This is, as we've talked about on the show, an administration that came back to power after having four years to plan. Its first six, seven, even eight months executed its agenda. Now, there plenty of people didn't like that agenda, but it got done what it wanted to get done. And it is completely careened off the rails in the last month or two.

So this was an attempt to reset, to recap, almost like a state of the union in a sense, where he would just, there were really no new proposals here outside of a payment to active service members, a bonus for the military, which he announced late in the speech. This was more trying to say, well, this is what we've done right now. But yet so much of it, it was very backwards looking, not just, during his term, but also, indeed, blaming President Biden, blaming things that he inherited, rather than taking any responsibility. And a few people I heard from last night just sort of said,

well, this isn't going to help with what is the defining problem for this White House right now, the sense of the president's out of touch, that he doesn't understand what Americans are going through. And when he bragging about the greatest economy of all time, you know, people across the country who did tune in last night are going to say, well, I'm sorry, that's just not what I'm feeling. Unless you're at the very, very top 1% or so, you're just not going to feel that same way, Joe. But this is an attempt to try to change the narrative, and I don't know that it got anywhere.

Well, if you live in America and you're paying the prices you're having to pay for, you know, groceries and for electricity and for, you know, new homes or the houses that you're renting or for new or. used cars, you know, it's back to what we've been saying. Are you going to believe Donald Trump or you're lying eyes? And people are going to believe their eyes. They're going to believe their wallets. They're going to believe their bank accounts. They're going to believe, you know, the struggles that are continuing. And why did he do this? Maybe he's just seeing all the polls that are coming out that are showing approval for him economically at record lows. You have yesterday the NPR Marist poll showing that only 36% of Americans support his handling of the economy, only 24% of independence. The president, 57% disapproved 68% of independence.

People are going to decide who wins the next election. And if only this were an outlier for the president, we're seeing this more and more. Gallup has his overall rating at 36% and the latest Gallup poll has approval on the economy down in the lower 30s. Jim Van de High, but I don't really understand, though, me being the simplest of country lawyers, is that why the president exaggerated in ways that you didn't need Daniel Dell to fact jacket for you. you just needed to drive out of your house and you pick up truck, go to the gas station down the road to see the gas is not at $1.99, it's that $2.99 or $3. And all of these other claims, you're not, you know, you're not going to go to Walgreens and after you get your prescription, they aren't going to say, hey, hold on a second.

I owe you six times the amount of what this would have cost you. It's just clearly false. And even on something that he could have talked about and said, hey, I did a great job on this. Illegal immigrants coming into America under Joe Biden. He said 25 million. That's just clearly false. It's 11 million. Even by his own government's records, it's 11 million.

That's bad enough. Like, that's a horrific situation. And he could brag. we shut down the southern border. I mean, he didn't have to say, yeah, it was starting to go that way because of some things that Joe Biden finally implemented after three years,

three and a half years. Could have said, but he didn't. One exaggeration after another exaggeration, after another exaggeration, which, as I said, works if you're running against the other guy who's in office, does not work when you were the one in office.

Yeah, I mean, the president lives in his own bubble and he lives in his head And in one of the things that LaMere was just saying about, hey, unless you're part of the 1%, look at who he spends most of his time with, right? If you look at his cabinet, a lot of rich people. If you look at all the tech executives that he spends a lot of time with, they're in the upper 1%. They are actually crushing it. There are aspects of this economy that are phenomenal compared to other countries.

That is just true. If you're holding stocks, it's a great time. If you are invested in AI companies, you're killing it. It's all those people that aren't. Most people aren't in the market. Most people aren't part of AI companies. Most people aren't part of the 1%. And you've said it time and time again.

There's one truism of politics that never changes. Never ask the American people to not believe their own eyes. And that's where the big disconnect was. Because you're right, Joe, he does have a good story to tell even for the people outside of the 1%. He has had accomplishments in the Middle East. He has shut down the border. on the south. He has gotten a lot of companies to cough up a lot of investment into communities. That is all true. And if he said that, people are, yeah, that's fair. You could take,

you could critique parts of it. And so, and the thing is, and we did a lot of reporting on it this week, this is what he believes. Like, he truly, truly, it's not spin. He believes the economy is set to explode in Q1. He thinks the tax cuts will kick in. He thinks it'll keep pressuring for lower interest rates. Some of these refund checks will go. out, tariff dollars will flow in, and he believes that will drive down prices, and you're going to have phenomenal growth next year. A lot of that doesn't make a ton of sense in terms of how I understand supply chains, economies, and how long it takes for that to actually work itself into pricing for the American people. But that is what he believes. And even in

this speech, he actually did something really nice. If you're going to give away government money, let's give it to the people who serve in the military. The fact that everybody's getting a check who's in the military that no one thought was coming, like that would have been the headline of this speech if he didn't do all those other things. So he's not even credit for the accomplishment that he had inside of the speech. And that's, it's just Trump. Yeah, and the question is, where is that the billions of dollars going to come for that? I guess a president now can just, maybe the Fed has a printing press at the White House.

I'd love to know where that money's coming from. I'm sure we'll find it out, find out today. But yeah, things are bad right now, Willie, but they may get better. You know, we have a historian on today, and if the historian would bring up figures like FDR or Winston Churchill instead of James K. Polk, then maybe he would tell you this. But since he didn't, I will tell you this. During the darkest days of World War II, Winston Churchill, Willie, never said, things are going great. Right. We're winning this war. What he said is things are bad. Tough days are ahead. And they're going to get worse before they get better. But they will get better. We will fight the Nazis if they do invade our homeland. And they may. They may invade our homeland. And if they do, we will fight them. Then, of course, he talks about on the beaches and the streets and everywhere else. That is, that's actually all very legitimate. And so the president could have said, we've shut down the border. We're bringing in some

money with tariffs. We're going to be bringing in more money from tariffs if the Supreme Court rules my way. He could have talked about some of the other things that he's done. He could have been talked about peace, the peace planned in the Middle East. But instead, it's these wild exaggerations it, as Jim says, he believes because he keeps repeating them every day in the Oval Office, and nobody's there to say, well, no, Mr. President, it's not that much money. It's actually lower. No, Mr. President, you can't go out and say it's, you know, we inherited the highest inflation ever. That's not true.

No, Mr. President, you can't say that we brought inflation down because we haven't. It's exactly where it was when we got in. but you can say we're headed in the right direction. But, of course, that just doesn't happen. So it opens him up. Again, it's not good for him. It's certainly not good for Republican members of Congress who find themselves in a desperate situation right now

where two-thirds of Americans aren't happy with where the economy's going. It doesn't help them to have to go to town hall meetings if they still do those and to defend a president who's telling everybody happy days are here again instead of saying things were bad we've stabilized it they're going to be better yeah i mean members are skipping town after today's session and they'll be home through the holidays and you can bet they'll be hearing from their voters as you say i mean the polls the american people are very clear they tell us in poll after poll after poll and interview after interview after interview that they are not feeling what donald trump is describing in this

country just full stop that things are too expensive that inflation is bad add that groceries are to cost too much when you go through the scanner at the grocery store. And John Meacham, I think to Joe's point, what's probably different, among many other things between Donald Trump and Winston Churchill and maybe every other president we've had is the complete inability to show any vulnerability or the perception of weakness, which is to say, if he went out and said, I know things aren't great right now, I hear you, I feel you, but we're working on it. Things are getting better,

and here's everything that we're working on, and here's what's going to happen next year. But that initial concession that things aren't going well is something he appears to be incapable of admitting. He is. You know, there's a, Churchill gave a great speech in January of 42. He was facing a vote of confidence in the House of Commons.

We now think of Churchill only in this Hollywood way, but he had domestic political problems because people were impatient. They wanted victory. And he said, you know, the British people can face any misfortune with fortitude and buoyancy, as long as they're convinced that those who are in charge of their affairs are not, A, deceiving them, that is that he's not lying to the country,

or B, are not themselves dwelling in a fool's paradise. They want to be sure that the leader isn't telling themselves a fairy tale. So, you know, I'll let everybody work out what we think the applications of that would be. And FDR said, Washington's birthday in 42, the news is going to get worse and worse before it gets better and better, and the American people deserve to have it straight from the shoulder. And if you think about it, and I'm violating a rule here by talking about how history has worked for millennia before not the pre-Trump period. but presidents who get in trouble are, in fact, the presidents who think they can put one past us. It's an interest, it's an elemental way of thinking about it.

But whether it's President Johnson in Vietnam or presidents in previous eras who wanted to say the economy was better than they were hearing. And I think part of this is what you're seeing in those numbers you're talking about. There's never going to be, I think, and Joe was talking about this at the beginning, you know, the interesting conflation of this speech and the world according to President Trump that's now on the walls of the colonnade, where, you know, where John and Robert Kennedy walked and thought about how to save the world from Armageddon is now a walk of fame, authored by President. President Trump. And it's this, it's a solipsism and a, an egotism that even by presidential standards, which is a pretty big standard, I do think is fueling a phenomenon that may, may actually be something that endures in this era. Most of the rules we talk about have been repealed. But here's, here's one, and I submit it to Congressman Scarborough to tell if he thinks this is right.

Every day that goes by, President Trump's interests diverge a little bit more from those of any Republican who's going to be on a future ballot. And that's simply a function of the clock. Yeah. And the one thing President Trump

can't repeal is time itself. And I just wonder, you know, I think Willie just said, you know, when people go home, when the, hear more, and most important, when they begin to see in their internal polling that among their constituents, President Trump's numbers are going down a bit, will that finally begin to stoke a little bit of convenient courage? And I don't care, look, all we want is some courage here.

If it's convenient, that's fine. Right. And so there's a lot going on here. I don't want to be overly sentimental about last night and then the walk of fame. And you can imagine what I think about it and what you think about it. You know, we all grew up in a world where an Oval office address was one thing. You know, we don't want to just be yelling at kids to get off our lawn. But it's, there is an accretion here. You know, people will forgive the showmanship if they feel they're being receiving substantive results. But if they're not receiving substantive results, maybe the showmanship begins to not wear quite as well. Yeah, and we are seeing right now, Willie, and we've seen it over the past month or so.

We've seen some Republicans start to break. We've seen it, of course, in the House with MTG and Massey and others. We saw it yesterday, and I know you're going to talk about that in a minute with Republicans bolting on health care. We've now had Republicans bolt on the Epstein files and on health care. Many would argue two of the issues that have been most front and center for this White House over the past six months. But even on the Senate side, you've had senators that have said, no, we're just, we're not going to get rid of blue slips for you. We're not going give you the prosecutors that you want and throw out a tradition where Democrats don't have a say if it's a democratic state. And we're not going to get rid of the filibuster, even though the

president came down to try to push the senators around to do that. You are seeing far more of a pushback, but so much of that has to do with the fact that its approval rating in many polls now are in the 30s, his economic approval rating, lower than it's ever been. And again, the very things that Republicans attacked Joe Biden for were now seeing in Donald Trump, including, again, some questions about his energy to do the job. And, you know, where somebody wrote an article where, you know, they're now bragging that he's in the Oval Office at 7 o'clock at night, sort of very Biden-esque, you know, but also on the economy, a president, again, that seems detached from the realities of working Americans. And for Donald Trump, it's terrible

because, well, working Americans are people that helped get him elected. But even in these latest polls, you have his numbers going below 50 percent in. some polls with non-college Americans with a lot of working Americans that were the base of his support. Yeah, fascinating poll we're going to talk more about, but just as

you say, rural voters, black Latino voters, especially on the economy fleeing Donald Trump at the moment because of the reality of their lives. And I think you're right that some Republicans, not all, but some Republicans are starting to feel a little bit more comfortable picking their spots to public

criticize Donald Trump. And boy, if they lose the midterms and he officially becomes a lame duck president, I think you'll see them run for the exits. Presidential historian John Meacham, John, always great to talk to you. Thank you, sir. Still ahead on morning, Joe, the latest from Capitol Hill as House lawmakers pass a Republican-led health care bill without re-upping Affordable Care Act subsidies that will expire in two weeks. We'll get the latest reporting from Allie Vitale. Plus, Steve Ratner standing by with his charts after new economic data released this week painted a potentially worrisome picture of the U.S. jobs market.

And as we had to break a quick look at the traveler's forecast this morning from Accuweathers, Bernie Rayno. Bernie, how's it looking out there? Willie, we have wet weather on your Thursday across the southeast, your ACUweather exclusive forecast showing rain thunderstorms, Jackson, New Orleans, toward Tampa, a couple of thunderstorms, Atlanta, Charlotte, a wet afternoon with some rain. In the Northeast, though, another pretty nice day. Temperatures above the historical average with clouds and sunshine.

Watch Chicago, though, it's going to be windy and wet there with some travel delays. And we're also forecasting delays in Atlanta, but you're fine in the Northeast. To help you make the best decisions and be more in the know, make sure to download the Acuether app today. Live shot of the United States Capitol with one week to go. by the way, House lawmakers have passed a Republican-led health care bill that does not include an extension for those Obamacare subsidies. The legislation has little chance now of passing in the Senate and does not address the expiring tax credits that could lead to skyrocketing health care costs for millions of Americans. The exclusion of the tax credits sparked a revolt among some House Republicans.

Four Republican lawmakers sided with Democrats to sign a discharge petition that would force a vote to extend the Obamacare subsidies, but that vote will not happen until January at the earliest after they've expired. House Speaker Mike Johnson was asked whether it really has a handle on this situation. I have not lost control of the House. I have not lost control of the House. Because it's the third time. Look, we have the smallest majority in U.S. history, okay? These are not normal times. There are proceeds and procedures in the House that,

are less frequently used when there are larger majorities. Allie, not a terribly convincing case that he has not lost control. What is going on here with the Obamacare subsidies? As we said a minute ago, these members are leaving town here pretty soon. Nothing's going to get done. What's going on in the Republican caucus there? So I think that's the interesting piece of it is what's happening among Republicans, but the important piece of it for viewers who were hoping that Congress might stave off

this health care cliff, it's not going to have. happen. What it means is that maybe in January, after those subsidies have expired, we could see something that helps on the affordability front. But that's not assured, especially as we see the Speaker here, many of these Republicans, the four of them who signed onto this Democrat-led discharge petition, had been trying behind the scenes to either broker their own legislation deals or just plead with the Speaker to put some kind of a vote on Affordable Care Act subsidies on the floor. Eventually, many of them told me they felt backed into a corner and they signed on the Democratic Discharge Petition. What this means is that this issue is going to surface again

in January right before the looming government shutdown that could happen at the end of January. Unclear if that's going to be the case. But we know that health care was the centerpiece for why the last shutdown happened. Now we'll have something to look forward to on whether the House can do this vote on ACA subsidies. And then, of course, we know the Senate already did a version of this vote, Willie. And so it's an open question of if the pressure and the dynamics will have change to any significant extent that bipartisan talks can use ACA subsidies as a bridge for maybe one or two years until they can get on to a health savings account plan. There's a lot of different iterations of this that members have talked with me about, but there is no clear plan

forward. And for Americans who are just trying to plan their budget, it makes it really hard. Well, you know, in LA, unless things change pretty dramatically between now and the new year when they come back, you're not going to get more Republican support for, my Johnson's position. I mean, it's fascinating. We had Michael Lawlor on yesterday. Did not sound like he would be siding with the Democrats on anything. He made the wise political choice because he's in a swing district, a district that Joe Biden won. And he changed positions, changed track. I mean, we remember him going after the King Jeffries during the shutdown when the shutdown was to do exactly what they did yesterday. But these numbers are just absolutely plummeting for

Republicans. They're plummeting. I'm sure internal polling not only in Mike's district, but in every other district is plummeting for the president, plummeting on health care. So this seems to be, again, a good decision politically to make. But I don't see that dynamic getting any better for the president. And as far as Mike Johnson goes really quickly, he's exactly right. When you've got like a majority of three or four, that is just a nightmare. We were there in 98 when Gingrich had a majority of three or four. And he didn't even last to like the opening gavel of the next session. We got rid of him. So Mike Johnson's right there, but there's something that we can't ignore. The two biggest issues over the past six months have been what? The Epstein files, whether they should

be or not. They have been front of mind for so many members in the House and the Senate and the press and for members of the MAGA base. That's number one. Number two, health care. There was a government shutdown for it. It is the issue right now that's driving Democratic numbers up and Republican numbers down. On those two issues, on the top two issues, in sort of the political atmosphere on the hill, he lost the House on both of those issues. I think that's exactly right. So then you put those two issues of Epstein and health care, and I'll just really pull out health care next to the speech that the president gave last night. And he does best when he has a natural foil. It's why during campaigns he's always so energized.

He's driving towards one message, going against one person, making things pretty black and white for whatever voter is casually tuning in. Okay, I know who he's for and who he's against. It's harder when you're president for a number of reasons. But what really stood out to me in the speech the president gave last night is that he's, looking for a new foil. It's Biden, but no one really buys that. Biden has majorly pulled back from public life. And now it's hard to argue for the American public that an economy that Trump has lorded over for a year belongs to anyone other than him. You saw him trying to cast potentially the drug companies, potentially foreign nations, Democrats, Congress. It's hard to sell

to an American public that says, but wait a minute, don't Republicans have control over both houses of Congress as well as the White House? It's why the shutdown in polling didn't fall in their favor. And so as the president is looking for a foil, he's trying to turn the page ahead of a midterm election year where Republicans are very much aware. The political dynamics already weren't favoring them, but then you look at a day like yesterday where some of their most vulnerable members are saying, you have to do something on this central issue or at least be caught trying. And I think when you hold those two things next to each other ahead of a deadline where the Epstein files tomorrow are due by the Department of Justice

to be made transparent and made public. All of it just amounts to the year ending in a mess for the White House and Republicans going into a huge midterm year. And some 22 million Americans of all political stripes and all geographic locations counting on these subsidies that now appear will disappear. MS now, senior Capitol Hill reporter, host of way too early Allie Vitale. Allie, thank you. Let's bring in former Treasury official.

Morning Joe economic analyst, Steve Ratner. Steve, good morning. We've got your charts in just a moment, but first you were watching the speech last night along with us, and you had a couple of more fact checks. Yeah, look, I think you guys did a great job on the fact checking, things like his inability to do percentages, no matter how many times we point out to him, you can't have 500 percent declines, but whatever. But yeah, a couple other things. First, on the deficit, he said that Congress had looted trillions from the Treasury, presumably under the Biden administration. If you look at his one big beautiful bill, it would explode the deficit, take it from maybe a trillion dollars to two or even three trillion dollars. So he's going to be looting the Treasury to a far

greater extent than any of them did. He said that we were dead when the economy was dead. When he came into power, the fact is the economy will grow more slowly this year that it did in the last year of the Biden administration by a substantial amount. So I don't know how you quite reconcile that. He said wages are up. They are up for people. people at the top. They're actually down in real terms for people at the bottom. And that's also a contrast to the Biden administration when they were up for everybody. And then on jobs, it was interesting. All he said on jobs was that 100% of jobs were created in the private sector last year because the news on jobs is really pretty bad. So we can move to the charts if you want,

and I'll show you what came out this week on unemployment and on job creation. So on unemployment, the jobs ticked up to four, unemployment rate ticked up to 4.6%. And that's up from 3.4% in April of 23 under the Biden administration. So you've had jobs, unemployment up here, the highest it's been since 2017. If you look at a couple of the subcategories of unemployment, one thing I noticed in these numbers is black unemployment. Black unemployment is historically higher than white unemployment, But it has been spiking up this year to 8.3%. Again, the highest it's been in almost a decade. And this is an interesting phenomenon. And then youth unemployment, we've talked about this before, but the news just keeps getting worse. 10.6% of people 16 to 24 who are looking for jobs are

unemployed. Again, the highest in many, many years. So there's nothing really good happening here. And why is that? Because we're not creating that many jobs. We created 64,000 jobs. last month, well below the amount you need to keep a growing labor force employed. But even more interestingly, Chairman Jay Powell of the Fed said a week ago that he thinks the jobs numbers in recent months have been overstated by as many as 60,000, not through any kind of malfeasance, but simply quirks of the statistical methods. He's got his own set of economists who look at this thing. If that's true, then the average number of jobs created over that period of time is actually negative. We actually would have lost almost 50,000 jobs a month during this period of

time. And you compare that to the pre-COVID average when we were adding 170,000 jobs per year. And so there's really nothing good happening on job creation and therefore on unemployment. As we look where the jobs have been created, Steve, to your second chart, looking at the health care sector leading the way by a pretty big margin. Yeah, this is also interesting because Trump is trying to bring back the manufacturing industry, the sort of core businesses that he thinks contribute to economic growth. But the picture so far anyway is quite different. Health care really has been far and away our biggest source of job creation. We do need more health care, and therefore we need more people. But these are not manufacturing jobs or jobs that are

creating things that people can buy. Social assistance is basically social workers, people that help those in need with whatever their requirements are. An important function of the government, certainly and of private social agencies, but again, not necessarily at the core of the economy. Leisure and hospitality are actually not the best paying jobs in the world. Local government interestingly has increased its number of employees, and perhaps that's partly because when you look down here at where we've lost jobs, the biggest source of lost jobs is the federal government. It's everything that Trump has been doing, Doge, and so forth. And at the state level, there's also been a small loss of jobs. And manufacturing, which as I've said, and as everybody

knows, is at the core of the Trump economic program, lost 73,000 jobs this year, as did the energy industry, another industry that is at the core of Trump's agenda, lost 17,000 jobs. So not just the total job numbers aren't great, but when you look inside of it, the categorization. The category, in which we're creating jobs are perhaps not the ones that Trumpet himself says are important to him. A little bit of hope in your third chart, Steve. Yes, there's current pain, long-term unemployment. That number is not good. But where are you seeing green shoots that might make people a little more optimistic about job prospects? Yeah. As you said, Willie, another thing we should point out is that the long-term unemployment, people who have been unemployed for 26 weeks or more,

is up to 24 percent. Again, the highest that's been in many, many years. And so, There is a lot of despair out there, and a lot of people talk about artificial intelligence and whether that's going to destroy jobs and whether this unemployment situation will continue indefinitely. It is a tough job market, as I showed you, for young people. But I do want to end on an optimistic note. It may not happen in the very near term, but I think when we're out there, we're going to find that there are jobs being created. I know of no technological innovation history that has not ultimately created more jobs than it costs. So here's some of the of the categories that various consultants think will produce jobs in the coming years. And I've put

them by income level because you've got people in the 90,000 above, we are going to still need a lot of, there's still a lot of good health care jobs out there. Registered nursing is a big growth area, obviously data scientists and so forth. And then in the middle income categories, we are going to need electricians. We are going to need truck drivers. But we're also going to have jobs in the new green energy industries that are still being developed, notwithstanding Trump. And then at the bottom end, of course, you're going to continue to need restaurant workers and home health aides and so on. So there are jobs coming in the future, but we are definitely in a period of difficult adjustment at the moment. All right, morning Joe economic analyst, Steve Ratner. Thank you so much. As always,

we greatly appreciate it. Jim Van der Haie. One of the things also that, again, And the disconnect between what the president is saying and what so many Americans are feeling does have to do with unemployment and the possibility of AI taking jobs away from people. And I will say a lot of us talk to parents of kids getting out of college who feel it, who feel it right now. They're not getting jobs, even regardless of what schools they've gone to. So you look at unemployment for younger Americans over 10%. That's the sort of thing you can't explain away by attacking Joe Biden. And again, call me a Luddite, but I think a lot of that like you, I think a lot of that comes from AI.

And the fact, as you've said, you've talked to so many CEOs who say, they're just not going to hire people for, you know, younger people for quite some time. They're going to see how the whole AI revolution shakes out. But you wrote, I think, an extraordinarily important piece yesterday on AI and the way your company is addressing it, the way you're facing it, and how you're going to have it impact Axis, as well as the way you cover the news. Tell us about it. Yeah, I mean, I think the most interesting thing happening right now is you have three once-in-a-hundred-year plates shifting in our culture. One is just the way that politics is practiced and the ideology of both parties. You have AI, which could be as big as fire or as the internet, depending what you think of

AI. And then you have how our reality is being formed, which might be just as important as those other two. The way that people are getting and ingesting information and it's shaping and reshaping their reality sits at the heart of what's changing at politics and why people feel anxious and why people feel like they can't trust what they see. And so I think it's really important to continue like we do on this show to come back to these big themes, these things that are going to outlast the moment. And I think AI sits at the center of it. Listen, the people building AI are

not wrong that long term these technologies do tend to create more wealth and more jobs. What they leave out is that there's often short-term pain because you're making this huge transition within the economy. And that's the bet that Trump has made. He's all in on AI. And there is a logic to it because if you look at the amount of investment going into energy, into these data centers, if you went to Phoenix, or if you went to Des Moines, or if you go to Pittsburgh, you see a whole lot of investment, a whole lot of new jobs that little by little are being created, but they're disconnected from where people are being trained. And so you're not able to fill some of these jobs or people don't want to move to take those jobs, and that takes a long time to really reorder the

economy. And I think that's the vice that the president is in. That might be true long term, but short term, you care if your kid can get a job next year. What you were talking about on health insurance, I can't stress this enough. People's premiums are going up 18% on average next year. That's a hell of a hit for people. I just got done doing our insurance at Axios. our insurance premium for our company that we have to pay went up 50%, 5.0. Now, we're lucky that we can absorb the vast, vast majority of that, and it was because we have a couple of people who are unusually ill, so our cost went up.

But most companies don't just eat all of that. They have to pass or do pass some of that onto the consumer. Listen, Obamacare might or might not be the most efficient way to deliver health insurance. But it's not debatable that there are 22. million people who are going to take a massive hit in the amount that they pay for insurance. That's why those Republicans are freaking out about it, because when you go home, they talk about it. And for people who are skeptical of polls, and I am skeptical of an individual poll, go back and look at polling over the last month or two. Every poll, big or small, Republican or

Democrat, I don't care who the organization is that's polling. Almost all of them say the exact same thing. And when those polls say something that when you use your own two eyes, you look around, you see the exact same thing unfolding in reality, you can kind of take it to the bank that that's where the American people are. And I think that's where the American people are. They're worried about the economy. They're worried about AI. The companies know it. AI companies are freaking out. They're looking at polling that shows AI extremely unpopular for all the reasons that you talked about. And so Trump's got a hard hand to play here. And he's made a hell of a bet. If at the and the Q1, he's not right.

That's going to be a tough one. Well, I mean, the problem is, again, we've had this health care crisis coming for quite some time. Republicans don't like Obamacare. They don't like the Affordable Care Act. And yet, they've been promising for 15 years to give us something else. They haven't given us something else. So Donald Trump can call it the Unaffordable Care Act if he wants to,

but he owns it because Jonathan O'Meer, he's been promising us for two, you know, in two weeks. My health care reform plan's coming. That's how we spent the first term for the most part. Republicans have done nothing. And yes, health care costs are exploding under the Affordable Care Act, but they're also exploding, more importantly, in private sectors, as we just heard from Jim, a 50% hike on health care insurance that he is getting for his Axis employees.

There's one other really big problem, too, and it goes back to AI. I know you've got the next question for Jim, but, you know, I grew up at a. interesting time. You know, he was born in the 60s, early 70s. We moved from the south to upstate New York. And that was just the beginning of the time where upstate New York was starting to lose jobs, starting to lose its industrial base. Eastman Kodak, you go down the list, all of these companies that started their decline. And we were seeing things fall apart in real time. That was happening. The post-industrial rot that happened across the West. That was happening in the 70s.

That was happening in the 80s. Bill Clinton was still talking about it in New Hampshire in the early 1990s, where you drive still. You still drive through New England, and what do you see? Abandoned factories with broken windows. And that's because it takes time. We are still readjusting to that post-industrial age. And yes, Americans are doing well, have been doing well. We're now going into a new transition, and it's not coming five years from now.

It's not coming one year from now. It is here now. And people getting out of college, people going from one job to another, they are feeling it. And regardless of who the president of the United States would have been, we would have been going through this right now because this is one of the most disruptive economic changes that this country will have faced since we went from an agrarian age to the industrial age. president needs to face that and warn Americans that tough times are ahead. And that's the one thing this president cannot and will not do. He can never acknowledge that when he's in charge, things are not perfect. And pulling all these threads together, you're right, health care costs about to skyrocket. The Republicans have not had their own plan since John McCain gave a thumbs down in the spring of 2017. It's everything since then has been vague notions and there has been no concepts that actually could be.

deliver health care for Americans. AI, of course, a huge, huge sweeping story. You're right. It's not the future anymore. It's the present. But yet, this administration so far does not have a coherent plan for how it matters to Americans right now who can't find their jobs. And you pull all this together. It could paint, you know, President Trump keeps predicting that there will be an economic boom next year. We'll see. If not, the Republicans are the ones who will pay the price at the midterms next year. And actually, Alex, or AI version of Alex tells me we're out of time. So therefore, we can't go back to Jim Van der Heim, Willie. But this is where, this is real political peril for an administration,

administration that needs to at least recognize, tell Americans, hey, we get it, you're nervous. We're trying to sort out solutions, and they simply won't do it. They're blustering ahead. There's a, Carl Rove has written a piece in the Wall Street Journal op-ed page this morning. We can read more from it later, but one line from it is telling voters, not to believe their lying checkbooks is politically insane, says Carl Rove. Co-founder, CEO of Axios, Jim Van de Hy, Jim, thanks as always. Jim's new piece is available to read online now.