Morning Joe - Morning Joe 10/3/23

Episode Date: October 3, 2023

Trump didn't want wounded veterans in military parade, John Kelly confirms

Five months off and we are back. I am so excited to be here. I am so excited. Seriously, I'm more excited than a guy seeing Beetlejuice with Lauren Boebert. I'm more excited than a Jets fan during the first three plays of the season. You've got to be kidding me. In case you've forgotten, my name is Jimmy. I've been off the air for five months.

We've been gone so long. We've been gone so long, The Bachelor is now a grandfather. It's been a long time since our last late show. We looked at the calendar today and checked my math on this. I believe we have been off the air for 154 indictments. Look at some of the late night shows which return to TV for the first time in five months. We have a lot to get to this morning, including a recap of day one in Donald Trump's civil fraud trial in New York City. Part of that is the punishment phase. We'll tell you about the moment that seemed to enrage the former president. Also had the latest on Kevin McCarthy's speakership battle

as a far right Republican forces a vote in the House to decide his fate, whether he keeps his job as speaker or whether Democrats will step in and bail him out just to keep the government running. I think Democrats will. Are people falling down? Are you okay, Willie? What's happening up in... We've got some equipment moving. Everybody's in place now. We're getting ready.

Once the show starts, we'll be ready. We'll be set. I just didn't know if Lamere was running from one set to another. You should talk, Mr. Two Minutes Late. Elise is here. We're good. Yeah, we're ready. We're ready now. Game on. All good. Late. Elise is here. We're good. Yeah. We're ready.

We're ready now. Game on. All good. Well, I'll tell you, Mika, no one can ever, ever accuse me if I'm late of running to set. No, that's true. No. Swagger. It's more of a stagger than a run. Yeah.

Stumble. Stagger. Yeah. With the Sinatra hat on, smoking a cigarette, drink, put it down. Okay, we'll go over there. Yes, he knows I'm here. So it's very nice. Always nice.

The late night guys. It's great that they. That was fun. Great that they came back. And I mean, Jimmy Fallon really excited. More as excited as the guy who went to see beetlejuice was lauren bober that's saying something that's what what's nice is you got five months of pent-up jokes so they've been sitting at home writing these things oh we missed this one we missed this one so they kind

of emptied the chamber of the summer jokes yesterday and a lot going on in politics as stephen colbert mentioned several indictments since they were last on TV. Yeah. Now, you know, I heard something interesting yesterday. I was I was watching as, you know, I do, Willie, on the way down to the orphanage, I was looking at Instagram reels. And I think that's what the kids do. Stuff like that. Of course, they've already got my algorithms down. It's Nick Saban yelling at the press. It's Will Ferrell clips. But it's also some SNL clips. And they were asking Dana Carvey, who the best, just speaking of comedians,

who the best person was for Weekend Update. And, of course, there have best person was for Weekend Update? And, of course, there have been incredible people for Weekend Update. I don't know if you've seen this clip, but, you know, started with Chevy Chase. But, my gosh, Norm MacDonald, go down the list. And he actually said, he said, Dennis Miller. He goes, I understand all the politics of this. He said, I was on a ride with Dennis Dennis and he's sitting in the back seat and he's got a notepad and we're like driving like a couple of miles. And he's just sitting there writing.

You know, we're like, what are you doing? Because I'm just writing jokes. And he did the read on the jokes. And he said they all they all could have gone on any any show anywhere at any time. But again, a fabulously, fabulously talented actor who, of course, we don't hear that much from anymore. Oh, so funny. So and so great in that chair. You mentioned Norm MacDonald, too. He his head writer on Weekend Update. Jim Downey was on Conan's podcast this week. And it's where if you love comedy, love SNL, it's worth a listen because he goes through and sort of step by step walks through how you write those jokes and why Norm was so funny and good.

But it is if you go down the list, you know, you've got Seth Meyers, Tina and Amy. I mean, that has been a cradle of greatness for a very long time. And Dennis Miller truly was one of the funniest guys in the world. Still is. All right. Well, now we're going to get to things that are unfunny. And that is our top story this morning. One of many.

The longest serving White House chief of staff for Donald Trump, offering his harshest criticism yet of his former boss, John Kelly, sent in a statement to CNN, which he backs up many of the stories recounted recently of Trump lashing out against U.S. service members and veterans. Kelly confirms Trump didn't want wounded veterans in a military parade planned for Independence Day because it, quote, doesn't look good for me, meaning Donald Trump saying that. Kelly also says Trump, quote, rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America's defense are losers and wouldn't visit their graves in France. Kelly then appears to comment on Trump's most recent attack on General Mark Milley, in which the former president suggests he be punished by death.

Kelly describes Trump as a, quote, person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason in expectation that someone will take action. In expectation that someone will take that action. For him. Yeah. Like January 6th. Yeah. That someone will kill, as the general said, he says it in expectation that someone will kill Milley for him. So the statement ends with Kelly saying Trump is a quote person

that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our constitution and the rule of law. There is nothing more that can be said. God help us. Kelly served as chief of staff from 2017 to 2019. He has criticized Trump before, but this statement marks the first time these comments have been confirmed by Kelly, who was present at the time they were made. Of course, the chief of staff is right in there and sees everything all day, every day, and gets a real firm sense of a situation,

which is why that expectation line is chilling and something we believe to be true and makes the support for Trump out there all the more concerning. Well, it's obvious. I mean, it's obvious what Donald Trump wants people to do when he talks about they said they should be killed, they should be executed, they should be this, they should be that. I don't think it's obvious to everyone. It is. It's obvious that that's what Donald Trump wants to do. And I'm glad the general said it. But you look at these just horrific statements, Willie.

There was questions before when they first were in the Atlantic, I believe, in early 2020, maybe 2019, who they were about. Was it John Kelly? A lot of people thought it was. But who said it's really not as important as what was said by Donald Trump. And it goes all the way back to John McCain, obviously calling John McCain a loser for being a POW who sacrificed for his band of brothers who refused to leave Vietnam, even though he could have because his father was connected. And just think about that. Donald Trump use his uses his connections to have a doctor lie about bone spurs.

John McCain uses his connections to stay in Hanoi, being beaten and tortured so badly that he can't even raise his arms above his shoulders for the rest of his life because he refuses to go home before everybody else that came in with him in that prison cell in Vietnam. And it goes on to, of course, he's at Normandy, one of the most sacred places, and he's not wanting to visit. It's raining. He doesn't want to get out. He doesn't want to visit the markers, the tombs of soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines who died because, well, they died. So he considers them losers. And at one point he turns to General Kelly, who lost his son, and say, why would anybody do this? Why would anybody sacrifice their life for this country? What's in it for them, he wondered. Yeah. What's what's in it for them? I mean, again, this is just one more example, one more example of these people who

once claimed to be the most righteous, who claimed to be the most patriotic, who claimed to be the most supportive of the military, lining up behind a man who is the antithesis of everything that they grew up believing was right. But now they are behind him in this personality cult. Yeah. And that McCain moment that you reference is such an important one. That was back in July of 2015. Important because it gave us a sign of what was coming, which is to say he did something unthinkable, especially within the Republican Party, trashing John McCain, specifically his heroism in war and his support went up. And in that moment, we talked about it here and we talked about it privately.

We said, hmm, something different is happening here. And to your point, these are the men and women that we hold most sacred in this country. And as you say, Republicans always have defended the military. And we present this to Trump supporters. How can you defend this? They'll say, well, it was the media. He probably didn't say that. I don't know.

Now we have General Kelly, Jonathan Lemire, on the record in that statement to CNN saying, yeah, everything you read in those Atlantic pieces, two of them. That's true. I was there. Those things happened. He did trash war heroes. He trashed the military dead. He didn't understand why they would sacrifice what was in it for them. A fundamental misunderstanding of the military, a fundamental misunderstanding of patriotism.

And yet you can expect that internally in a Republican primary, at least among his supporters, this will have no impact on the way they view Donald Trump. Now, Kelly has been known to cooperate on background with journalists for some time, but it is noteworthy that he decided this is a moment to put his name to it. We know that he had some success as chief of staff, keeping Trump in line for a matter of months, and then that quickly went away. It was indeed the battle. There's a foundational battle from the Marine Corps, Belleau Wood in France,

that basically as many Marines think that's sort of where they they began their origin story. And Donald Trump was dismissive and refused to go to the funeral that day because it was raining. He didn't want to get his hair messed up. And that, Kelly has told people, was sort of the last straw for him when he realized what sort of person Donald Trump really was. Will this make any difference? I highly doubt it. Others who worked for Donald Trump, the national security establishment, who have spoken out against him, General Mattis, General McMaster, John Bolton, the list goes on and on. They have all forcefully condemned Trump's leadership, his patriotism, and his being his character. We know what Rex Tillerson thought

of him as well. We can't say it on family-friendly television, however. But none of that has led to a drop in support of all. Though we should all take in, at least, this idea that these are the people who worked with Donald Trump day after day in the most sensitive, important moments of his presidency. They're the ones who knew him best. And much like we saw at the January 6th trials, much like we're starting to see now these criminal proceedings, those who spent the most time with Trump are saying he is unfit to hold that office again. You know, and John Kelly always seemed to have somewhat of a pain public posture when he would be out in public, with the exception of John Kelly himself had a pretty bad episode when it was the slain husband of the

widow. It was David Johnson and Najer. And the fight started when Trump was this was just, in my mind, the absolute worst episode when he was picking on the widow whose husband had died, you know, a week earlier. That was that to me was just so this is what Trump thinks of our military. He cares so little for the loved ones of those who have fallen in battle that he literally will belittle them in the aftermath of that loss. And so this is nothing new. We know the level of respect that Trump has for basically anyone but himself. And we see it. We see the contempt in which he holds those who choose to volunteer for service for their country. And so this tells us nothing new. It just reminds us of the man's fundamental character. I do think, Willie, that if this continues, taken together,

I do think General Kelly, who served this country proudly and ably for so long, who lost a son, sacrificed his son for this country. General Kelly, General Mattis, who, again, another war hero, another man that Trump was just so thrilled to have come before him, General McMaster. I do think if these generals do come out and do speak out and do speak out publicly on camera and do have it make a concerted effort between now and next year to talk about just how unfit Donald Trump is to run for office and to be president of the United States again, be commander in chief again. I do think Trump's generals, so to speak, the people we were talking about back in January of 2017, Trump's generals all coming out, condemning him for all the horrific things

he said about our men and women in uniform in this country. I do actually believe that is one thing that could have an impact with the cult, with people that are cheering and laughing about Nancy Pelosi's spouse getting his head bashed in. No, no. But with voters that are going to actually decide this election in the suburbs of Atlanta, in the suburbs of Philly, in the suburbs of Detroit and the suburbs of Philly, the suburbs of Detroit and in suburbs of Milwaukee. And we may well hear more now from General Milley. He was somewhat restrained as the chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, but he may be able to come out and say more except for that 60 Minutes interview last week as well. And Joe, for people like us who revere the people who've served this

country and who try to lift up injured members of the military and help them. The comments most recently in Jeffrey Goldberg's Atlantic piece were particularly abhorrent, where he told General Milley that after a man, a warrior who has lost his leg to an IED attack in Afghanistan, who'd suffered heart attacks and strokes because of it, who'd been through hell, saying, God bless America, that Donald Trump pulled Milley aside and said, nobody wants to see that. Speaking of injured warriors of veterans, don't let that happen again. How do you defend that? How does that sit with you? You're willing to excuse a lot of things about Donald Trump. We get that over the last eight years or so, But that, attacking a wounded warrior,

how do you defend that? Well, and Willie, you see this firsthand in all the work that you do. These men and women are the best of who we are, the best who've gone over to protect and defend this country, who, like Bob Dole, left a part of themselves in battle. Like Bob Dole, Donald Trump would call Bob Dole a loser. They come back with with with injuries. And yet they stay together. They keep fighting a new fight, a new cause. And you see that every day. These are these are our heroes.

They are. And it stays with them for the rest of their life. And it's a reminder that Donald Trump is all about the superficial. How does it look? He's creating a play. He's putting on a TV show. And if it doesn't look just the way he wants it to, well, then the people who are ruining it for him in his eyes are disposable, including hero military veterans. All right. Speaking of how it looks, Donald Trump was in court yesterday

for day one of a massive fraud trial against him. He's back in court today in one minute, just exactly 60 seconds. We're going to talk about the moment yesterday that enraged him and what is next. We'll be right back. welcome back at 18 past the hour donald trump is expected to be back in court this morning for day two of his civil fraud trial in new york city yesterday the punishment phase began after judge arthur and goran last week found trump two oldest sons, and his company liable. For fraud. The former president sat with his arms crossed as his defense team and prosecutors. Do you think he's getting bored yet being in so many courts?

No. Like this one he does. So this one actually has hit him where it hurts. Because it's about his money, right? There's a monitor being put in charge of his companies. They're going to figure out whether or not they need to be dissolved. Everything that this guy is made of, I would say he built, but he actually probably inherited the equivalent of a billion dollars from his dad. He inherited about in terms of today's dollars, about 400 million.

Lost most of it. OK, well, prosecutors from the New York attorney general's office gave their opening statements. Sitting just a few feet away from him was the attorney general herself, Letitia James, who leered at Trump while cameras were briefly allowed inside the courtroom. This was quite a scene. I don't think everybody expected those cameras to be in there. An attorney for Trump complained that the former president did want a jury to hear the case, but the judge noted that his team had never asked for a jury

trial. After opening statements, prosecutors played taped depositions from Trump, his sons, his former attorney, Michael Cohen, and his company's former chief financial officer, Alan Weisselberg. Then they called their first witness, a former accountant who spent several years handling the former president's tax returns. According to our team inside the courtroom, Trump seemed to take issue with some of what was being said during the testimony and became extremely animated with his lawyers. His face is said to have become beet red while he pointed and finger waved at his lawyers. For the most part, though,

Trump appeared subdued during the trial. Outside the courtroom, though, he was anything but. Here is some of what he said to reporters during a lunch break. When you have a radical left attorney general like Letitia James, who's a disgrace to our country, who got elected on the fact that she's going to take down President Trump, we're going to take him down.

This is called election interference and worse than that, really much worse than that. And you don't get much worse than election interference. I got a call last week, sir, we lost part of the case. I said the trial didn't even start. You know, the trial starts, I guess, today. He ruled that we lost a big part of the case because he's a Democrat club politician. He's a Democrat operative and he's a disgrace.

That's that's a really, really, I think I wasn't in that part of my law school class on judge trials where the professor told you, if it's a judge trial and the judge is determining your future, that is best for you to insult him and call him a loser and attack him. Again, it makes no sense. As we were watching for 15 seconds yesterday, as Donald Trump was saying that this guy could be arrested, should be arrested. Of course, there's there's the threat. There's the intimidation. If I get elected president, I'm going to arrest you is what Donald Trump's saying there. But, you know, any other defendant in America in this position, Willie, that's already been

found guilty of fraud. The evidence is very clear against him. You know, he's over exaggerating and everybody in New York had known for decades that this is what you do. You would actually have somebody get on the stand and apologize, say, made mistakes. I did this. I did that. I am so sorry, your honor. I'm going I'm going to straighten this up. We're going to put systems in place to take care of it and throw ourselves on the mercy of the court to let you know we're not going to do this again. We're going to make sure that anything that we file

with tax authorities in New York State and with banks is going to be correct. And I know we fell far short of the mark, but then you would have a judge saying, all right, this is a problem. We'll put your company on probation or however, however they do it. But instead, you have Donald Trump who's been caught. This is the bank robber that has been caught. Or this is the congressman who's been caught in an scam with money in his pockets, like jammed into his pockets, looking like the Michelin man because he has so much money jammed into his coat pockets, you know, yelling and screaming about unfairly being prosecuted.

He's already been busted. Like he's already been caught lying. He's already been caught saying that he had a 30,000 square foot residence when it was like 10,000 square feet. Claiming that he had the most expensive property in all of New York City. What a scene. Well, that was a lie as well. God. And what's he doing?

He's doing the exact opposite of what he should be doing. He's continuing to drive his car off the cliff and leave his lawyers in a no win position. And then after it's over, you know, he'll probably call for the execution of the judge like he called for the execution of General Milley. It's a it is it is a zero sum game and it's a game he loses every time. And as you say, the facts and evidence are stacked against him. So now all he has is to play that outside game where he goes outside the courtroom, attacks the judge, attacks the prosecutors in this case. And by the way, you can expect to see that same speech. Just queue it up every time he comes out of one of these other courtrooms,

attack the judge, attack the process that there's a witch hunt against him. Some pretty extraordinary pictures on the covers of the newspapers here in New York this morning. Looks like an ad for The Apprentice or something, that face. Wall Street Journal, a very similar photograph, too, of the tantrum outside the courtroom as two police officers stand by. Let's bring in Bloomberg legal and politics reporter Eric Larson. He was in the court overflow room yesterday covering Trump's fraud trial and professor of law at Columbia, John C. Coffey Jr. He's an expert on securities law and white collar crime and author of the book Corporate Crime and Punishment, The Crisis of Under Enforcement. Good morning to you both, Eric. I'll

start with you. So you're in the overflow room getting a sense of how things are playing out in the courtroom. How does this look right now for Donald Trump? Well, I think the fact that he showed up, actually, it's a position of strength for him, which is kind of interesting. I don't think anyone was actually expecting him to show up until just kind of the last minute. And now we kind of see why he was able to do a lot of that grandstanding, give that big speech outside of the courtroom. And every time there was a break in the trial, he was viciously attacking the judge and the attorney general. So this is, you know, helps him in part of his campaign, to be honest.

As you said, he's already been found liable for fraud. So the case is kind of in the state's favor pretty strongly. And the judge clearly has accepted a lot of what the state has to say. So what kind of defense are you hearing from his legal team other than Letitia James is biased and the judge is a Democrat? Is there anything on the evidence where they're defending themselves? Yes, they're focusing a lot on whether or not any banks were actually harmed by this alleged conduct. You know, they're looking at these inflated financial statements, wildly inflated, according to the judge, from 2011 to 2021 and saying that these were submitted to various banks, Deutsche Bank, others, and to

insurers to get better terms on loans and policies for years, and that he reaped $250 million in illegal financial benefits as a result. But he says that these banks were not harmed at all. He paid back all these loans. They actually made $100 million in interest off of him. Both sides are calling bank employees as witnesses because they both think that they'll be able to back up what they say. And at the end of the day, even though it has been found liable for fraud before the trial, there are other significant claims, including falsified business records, things like that, which the judge theoretically could still rule in his favor on. So, Professor, let's set aside Trump's hysterics outside the courtroom and talk about the merits of the case being tried within it.

What have you heard so far from both the state attorney general as well as Trump's defense team? And how strong do you think these claims are? We know he's been found liable, but for how much? Well, I mean, he's appointed the judge has appointed receivers who still have to be named, who are supposed to liquidate all these companies that are within Trump's organizations. The one thing I think you are missing is that petulant and silly as Trump seems, he's probably being rational from his own perspective because he wants to exploit this trial as an opportunity to show again that he is the victim of political persecution.

That's been his main theme. And it's actually raised his popularity in the Republican primaries. So he's figured out that I'm going to go to this trial. He almost never has gone to civil trials. But he's doing it because this is a way to raise his theme that there's a persecution going on and you should raise an arm and support me because we're being attacked by the evil government. So, Eric, explain, if you could, what exactly has been decided and what still has to be decided in this case and how long the punishment phase of what has been decided could take? Well, the judge has said that this trial is going to go until December 22nd. So we can expect a lot of evidence on whether or not these six remaining claims Trump is liable for, whether or not he

conspired to falsify these business records, whether or not they were used in specific transactions in a way that harms these banks. And then insurance fraud is another claim in there as well. But then there will have to be more arguments on whether or not the full $250 million has to be disgorged and whether or not Trump and his two sons, who are also defendants, would be banned from being directors or officers of any New York-based company. And as the professor just said, you know, there's this whole other aspect that has to be decided outside the trial on this fraud claim that's already been against Trump. We really don't know how far that's going to go, what the full outcome will be. Even Trump's lawyers don't know, and the judge hasn't really clarified what it means that all of these companies are going to

have to be dissolved once this receiver is put in place. But right now, there are five more claims that the judge has to decide on liability for. And then based on those, he'll go into the penalty phase. So, Professor, I spent the day listening to commentators who can't seem to get over their fealty to Donald Trump. And one of the arguments they made was that, oh, my gosh, if this attorney, this is so political, if this attorney general can do this to Trump's business, he can do it to your business, too. I'm curious if you could put into context these fraud allegations that he's accused of and some he's been found liable for. How do they compare to other white-collar crimes in their severity and their size?

We have to understand that the attorney general is operating under a unique statute that authorizes her and no one else, not private plaintiffs, to dismantle, to liquidate a company that is engaged in persistent fraud. She does not have to prove that anyone has been damaged. She only has to prove this company has persistently defrauded people, in this case, by inflating its assets. And because you're a persistent fraud, we're going to throw you out of New York State. That was the intent of the legislature, but this is a statute that applies only when the attorney general brings the case. I'm curious, from what you have seen, do you believe the Trump organization has been, is it likely that they have been engaged in, quote, persistent fraud?

Well, I think the inflation of assets has been shown. He granted summary judgment, and there was lots of evidence. We've heard the stories about calling an 11,000-foot apartment a 30,000-foot apartment so that you could get a higher valuation on it. They are treating rent-controlled buildings as if they were the same as non-rent-controlled buildings. That's the way to inflate assets. The evidence there was pretty strong because he granted summary judgment. And he's an experienced judge. You don't grant summary judgment unless you believe there is no fact in this case that really has to be further resolved.

It is all clear. All that's really left now is the penalty. Yeah. And that sounds certainly, make it through the years like persistent fraud. Professor at law at Columbia, John C. Coffey, Jr. and Bloomberg's Eric Larson. Thank you both very much for your reporting and analysis this morning. And coming up on Morning Joe, Congress managed to avoid a government shutdown with a short term funding bill. But Washington's budget woes are far from over. Lots of drama on Capitol Hill. Steve Ratner is here with charts to break down all the numbers. He's from the Southwestern.

Yes, he is. That's just it. We built it. Wake the kids up. On Morning Joe. So pretty. Hey, Willie. Oh, boy. Come on. You know last summer, Willie, when our kids asked us if we could go to the Grand Canyon? I think you should not answer this.

And what did we say? We said, no, we have some work to do with electrons. Right? We had to do some. We had some. We had to work with electrons. It's happened again, Mika. What's going it's happened again mika what's going on what do you what's going on it's getting embarrassing our work has been stolen by a couple of french dudes the nuclear the nobel prize yeah and they awarded them a nobel prize for the

electron work willie a 50 over 50 lister won the Nobel Prize. That you and I have been working on for years now. Like, when is this going to, how long? How long must we sing this song, Willie? It's theft. It's just flat out scientific theft. We started just rubbing the two rods together in ninth grade general science class. We pioneered that work with electrons.

And now somebody else has get to wear the medal, the Nobel medal. Is it a medal or a trophy? The medal. Yeah. Well, guess what? We wouldn't know. We wouldn't know, would we? Because people keep stealing our medal, trophy, whatever it is away. So I quoted you, too, which reminds me because this is sort of our Faulknerian stream of consciousness uh segment here we're about to go to the southwest wall with ratner have you heard and have you seen any pictures really of what youtube is doing in vegas that orbital thing it's like breathtaking it's mind-blowing even even looking at it uh on on on screens but uh people that go there say you can't capture it, that it's like a one of a

kind experience. Yeah, the Sphere in Vegas, new building, the outside and the inside are just a giant LED screen. And you two started this residency out there that's going to run, I think, through December. And the pictures coming out of the weekend when they open for people who were there on Instagram and other places are truly breathtaking. It's like nothing you've ever seen before, where you're sort of surrounded by the experience on the video wall while, by the way, you too is playing right down there in front of you. I think we have to take a break from the lab show, just one, just for a moment, and maybe go see that show. Well, obviously we can, we might as well throw away all of our work on electrons because.

Okay. If you're going to continue with this Nobel Prize joke, I'm going to say something of value. So, Katalin Kariko was on our first 50 over 50 list. Yeah, yeah. And she won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to her and Drew Weissman for their discoveries that enable mRNA vaccines against COVID-19. Yeah, she had Penn You're saving the world. 50 over 50. Penn wouldn't give her tenure. She was working.

She was researching this, and Penn didn't give her tenure. She didn't bring in enough funding to fund her research, and they put her off the tenure track. I think she might get it now. Now, today, she has the prize. I think she might. We're going to have more on this. Thank you so much, Elise. I think maybe, maybe they found a pathway forward at Penn for her.

Okay, so listen, a lot of people, when they looked at Willie and my electron work, they said, you should really call this project the eighth wonder of the world. Now I'm hearing people say that you too, like this orbital thing, eighth wonder of the world. Now I'm hearing people say that you too, like this orbital thing, eighth wonder of the world. But I will tell you the original eighth wonder of the world, the Southwest wall at 30 rock. Willie and I came up with this concept. What year did we come up with this concept? Willie just after the war 47, I think it was 47. I think it was a couple of kids, a couple of crazy kids coming back. We were we were so swept up into the excitement of V.E. Day.

Everybody and nobody would kiss me, but everybody in there that we said, look, look up there. We should do that inside of that building over there. And that's it was born. And Steve Ratner, of course, has been with us for over a 50th of a century. And Steve Ratner, so glad to have you here. The kids have now, we've given them time to wake up. Before we let you get to the charts, I want to ask you about this deal. It's a short-term deal on Capitol Hill

to keep the government opening, the continuing resolution. They kicked the can down the road. Talk about how much work there still is ahead. Oh, well, I'm going to show you some numbers that will show you how much work there is ahead. They accomplished nothing. They simply, as you say, kicked the can down the road. And so they're going to have 45 days in which to do two things. One, figure out whether they want Kevin McCarthy to still be the speaker anymore or not. There is this motion to vacate that Matt gets filed, and that is going to consume an enormous amount of time and effort. And they've got to resolve

unbelievable differences, which, again, I'm going to show you in just a second, between the two sides about how much we should be spending. Why don't we start with how much the House and the Senate plans clash and how difficult it is to actually synthesize those two plans. So you remember that back in the spring when we almost defaulted on our debt, there was an agreement between the White House and the Republicans as to what spending would look like for this coming year. And when we talk about spending, we're talking about non-defense discretionary, meaning we don't talk about Social Security, Medicare, a lot of parts of the budget. I'm going to show you that in a second. We talk about things like the Transportation Department or Housing Department and so forth.

So out of that pool of money, the deal between the President and the Republicans back in the spring was to make a $2 billion reduction. We would spend $2 billion less in the fiscal year that just started over this past weekend than we spent in the previous fiscal year. The Senate Republicans and Democrats are bipartisan. They agreed on actually increasing spending by $4 billion. They put some money back for a few things that they thought were important. McCarthy came up with a bill that he hoped would pass the House that involves $60 billion of spending.

The hard right, the MAGA group, whatever you want to call them, killed that bill. He came back with a continuing resolution that would involve cutting $196 billion of spending. They rejected that bill, too. And that is where we are now. But let me put those numbers in perspective for you. As a share of our economy, obviously the original two deals that we talked about, very small effect on our, not on the economy, but on our spending. The McCarthy bill would have cut spending in this category by 9%. The House continuing resolution would have cut spending in this category by a full 30

percent. And I'll show you in a bit what some of those implications are. So, Steve, let's move over to your second chart about where the money's coming from. The proposed bill here was $60 billion of proposed cuts, massive reductions in non-discretionary funding. The mandatory funding is obviously the biggest part of the budget. So what are they going after? Because they can't touch that. Right. Because they can't touch that. And let me just show you how small a part it is. So you have here, this is our non-defense discretionary, only 14 percent of the budget. Defense, which you theoretically can cut, but nobody wants to, 12 percent of the budget. But all the rest of this stuff, Social Security, Medicare, other kinds of aid to people who are suffering,

and then a bunch of other stuff, and then interest on the debt, of course, we can't cut. And they're fighting over this tiny little sliver of Ukraine aid, which is more symbolic than substantive, obviously. So you're cutting out of this little piece of the budget. And so the consequences of that are something like Title I education, 77 percent cut. Women, infants, children as a form of kind of like food stamps, 70 percent cut. Affordable housing, 66 percent cut and so on and so forth.

The Labor Relations Board, 33 percent cut. Water quality, 55 percent cut. So the math is almost impossible. How do you reconcile? And this is the smaller of the two. This is the $60 billion one. Imagine if you tried to do the $196 billion one, which they haven't even laid out the specifics of. So this would really gut, and this is what they're trying to do, of course, this would gut so many functions of the government that so many Americans depend on. Yeah, we're talking about things like grants for low income schools, water quality, et cetera. So let's look at that third chart. Steve, how does the debt and deficit play into this?

As we've said many times, the last administration under Donald Trump in just four years added nearly eight trillion dollars to the debt. What does it look like now and how does it affect this conversation? So, look, we do have a deficit and a debt problem. That much of this is legitimate and fair. Our deficit this past fiscal year was $2 trillion in the federal government. It's going to be $2 trillion again this year. And you can see here the deficit, which is this whole space in here. And so what happened?

Basically, we kept our revenue share of the size of the economy roughly flat. We did cut a bunch of taxes. You can see the George W. Bush tax cuts. You can see the Trump tax cuts. So we held down our revenues. But meanwhile, our spending was exploding. And so we end up with $2 trillion deficits. And that, of course, turns spending was exploding. And so we end up with $2 trillion deficits. And that, of course, turns into debt.

We have $33 trillion of debt at the moment in this country. And let's just show where that came from. All the way from 1776 until Bush took office in 2001, we accumulated, and that includes fighting wars, World War II, $5.7 trillion of debt. And then you can see every president since then has added a huge amount of debt. Trump, as you just said, Willie, $7.8 trillion of debt in one term, far less than, for example, Barack Obama across the two terms as a proportion. And Biden so far, $4.6 trillion.

So you can see these are just unsustainable amounts of debt that we're adding. But you can't really do it by cutting all that other stuff. It's just too much. It's too much deficit relative to what you have available in those discretionary programs. And Steve, that's always been the problem. It's always been the problem. And it's something that we dealt with going all the way back to 1995 when we were talking about balancing the budget. People say, oh, we will take from foreign aid. We'll take from food stamps. We'll take from this way. No, no, no. It's it's Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense spending. And now more a hell of a lot more than what we had to worry about in the 90s when we were trying to balance the budget, interest on the debt and

the massive tax cuts to the richest Americans that Trump gave us a couple of years ago. And so, you know, we've had for 20 years now presidents trying to do everything all at once. Not only have they said we'll take all guns, we'll take all butter. We'll also continue to cut taxes for the richest of Americans, which, of course, is sadly inverted our tax system in such a way that you look at billionaires. You look you look at the richest Americans, they have much better tax treatment than working class Americans or small business owners or entrepreneurs who are just starting up, who are paying, you know, a lot of workers in states like New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Illinois, California, they're paying 50, 51, 52, 53, 54% of every dollar that they make to taxes,

whereas you got people on Wall Street paying 15, 16, 17%, these billionaires. It's insanity. And so talk about how we're not going to balance the budget with these yahoos saying, oh, cut food stamps, cut foreign aid. That's just a small, small proportion of our budget. Yeah, look, we have a two trillion dollar deficit and all that other stuff over there only adds up to less than 200 billion dollars. And it would go completely, completely and utterly

gut the federal government in terms of what it does. So, yes, we're not going to even get close to balancing the budget. You know, Joe, look, you said it right. The conundrum is we've got all the stuff that nobody feels we can cut and we can debate. Maybe we should be doing something in here. But right now, these are untouchable. Even Donald Trump says they're untouchable. So you've got this little sliver you're dealing with. And spending has been going up by a rapid rate. Taxes, as you point out, we've been cutting and cutting. Tax cut, tax cut.

And so tax revenues have not been going up as a share of the economy. And you've got to do something. You've either got to deal with taxes. And I agree with you about where the money should come from. There are a lot of rich people not paying their fair share. Or you've got to deal with making some changes in here. But otherwise, you're never going to get this deficit down to anything that looks like a balanced budget, let alone something that actually is a balanced budget. You know, I know it sounds radical, but a fifth grader could look at this and say,

well, it seems to me that you've got to make it so your revenue line matches your spending line. That's what we have to do. So do you want to jack taxes up that much? I think that would be bad for the economy. Do you want to cut spending that much? No, I think that would that would cause a lot of pain in a lot of ways. We've got to figure out a way to have those two numbers come together. And that's going to take leadership. And yeah, it's going to mean cutting taxes, are raising taxes for some of the richest Americans who who've had a pretty incredible run over the past 20 years and have to raise their taxes. So they pay the same share, the same percentage that their clerical staff pay, that that that small business owners pay. It's just not fair. And then, yeah, we've got to figure out

where we're going to save money. Those numbers have to come together. And as we've been saying time and again, I said it during the Trump years, we can't push this off any longer. And Steve, I know you and I were saying this during the Obama years, too. I mean, you're part of an organization. We've been saying this for a long time. It's just why am I going on right now? I'm going on right now because the problem just keeps getting more difficult to fix. And if we don't fix it very soon, it's going to become unfixable for

the next generation. We have a twenty seven trillion dollar economy every year in GDP. That's extraordinary. First in the world. And yet we're carrying around thirty two, thirty three trillion dollars in debt. That doesn't add up for long, does it, Steve? No. And by the way, our debt to GDP ratio, our debt in relation to the size of our economy is higher than almost every other country. You know, France, Germany, you pick the UK. We have more debt. But yeah, Joe, you're right. I mean, we've got to do something here. And what's interesting is that nobody cares anymore. Nobody cares. Two trillion dollars used to be a lot of money.

But yet we just we just went from one fiscal year of two trillion deficit to the next one of two trillion deficit. And you don't hear anybody saying anything about it. Nobody cares. Nobody cares anymore. The only time the Republicans cares when there's a Democrat in the White House. It's the only time. And again, we do it. We've been talking about this nonstop. Republicans, when Trump was in office, they went along for the ride. They spent, spent, spent. I said this during the Obama administration. The only time Republicans care is when there's a Democrat in the White House. And sure enough, Republican gets in the White House for four years and they spend more money.

No, they do worse. They spend more money than any party in the history of this country. We appreciate this conversation a great deal. Great to see you, Steve. Thank you.