Morning Joe - Nebraska Republican faces rowdy town hall with questions about Epstein files and fired BLS chief

Episode Date: August 5, 2025

Nebraska Republican faces rowdy town hall with questions about Epstein files and fired BLS chief

Why did you cut SNAP and healthcare research? We do not have unlimited money in the United States. $60 billion on SNAP. During COVID, that number went to $100 billion. Going from $60 billion one year to $100 billion the next year, that was not, that was the COVID pandemic. The pandemic is gone. People have gone back to work.

We are now at the 2019 levels, which I think are acceptable. Republican Congressman Mike Flood of Nebraska defending his vote on President Trump's so-called one big beautiful bill last night at a town hall. Despite that hostile crowd, Flood is in a safe red district having won his last two elections, two elections by 16 and 20 points. Good morning and welcome to morning, Joe. It is Tuesday, August 5th, and Joe, that town hall definitely was, uh, was quite loud and rowdy. There could be some questions that Republicans have to face about this bill. Yeah, it was fascinating from the clips that I saw from it last night.

Some fascinating moments there. I think a lot of takeaways that you could bring away from that. We have Annie Carney. He's going to be with us at 7 a.m. In an hour this morning, she was there, and she's going to be talking about it. there were some things that he said that I think many Americans would agree with. Like, for instance, when they said he was a fascist, he said, well, fascists actually wouldn't be standing up here holding these town hall meetings and standing for election.

There was another part where he asked the audience if they thought that 28-year-olds, who were healthy, and had nothing wrong with them, if they decided not to, to work voluntarily should they get free health care? And a lot of the crowd shouted, yes, I would guess a lot of Americans switch out. No. However, that being said, Willie, when he starts talking about we only have so much money, we don't have money for food for poor kids, but we have money to pass a $10 trillion tax cut for billionaires, millionaires, and tech giants and monopolists, that is, that's fascinating. Same thing with research. You had NIH last year was 0.77% of the entire budget, just a small portion of the entire budget. But Republicans had to

slash funding for that. Republicans had to slash medical funding, medical research, but they had $10 trillion to give to billionaires and multinational corporations. I don't know that that watches in Nebraska, in northwest Florida, or anywhere where middle class and working class people feel like they're getting pinched. Yeah, I think you nailed it. For me, that was the money line, the takeaway line. We don't have unlimited money. Well, that just opens the floodgates of arguments against the so-called big, beautiful

bill, and you laid all the reasons there. why all the cuts that have come in favor of tax cuts for corporations in favor of tax cuts for the wealthy. If we don't have unlimited money, by the way, why are we throwing a $200 million ballroom on the White House? One could ask. I mean, it just goes on and on. You can make these cases against what he said. Mika made an important point. He's won his last two elections. Congressman Flood by 16 and 20 points, a safely red district. Donald Trump has won three times in that district, all by double digits. So that's... That is not one of these Nebraska swing districts that we hear about or we think about.

This is a red district. And he went and stood in that town hall last night. And yes, there may have been some agitators there. Yes, there may have been some Democrats in the room. But those by and large are his voters, his constituents, many of whom voted for him, who are focused in very closely on the fact that rural hospitals may be going away, urban hospitals may be going away. The people who count on all of these government funds may be losing them now

because of a vote taken by Congressman Mike Flood and many others there in the House, Joe. So I think this is a snapshot of one town hall of many that we're seeing across the country during this recess. And there are many people who weren't there who are going to be facing real problems with their health care, with getting to their doctors, getting to their hospitals, getting their parents and nurses, homes, getting their children, the type of health care that they need, because there already was a rural health care crisis, has been for a decade, and this bill makes it so much worse. So again, perhaps a congressman comfortably wins his district, but at the same time, we saw what happened over the past year where you had these special elections where Florida congressmen

won their districts, but instead of winning by 25 points, maybe they won by 10, 11, 12 points. And as I'm still in shock, all these months later, that in my home county, Ascambia County, Florida, it actually went Democratic. I just, I can't, that's, that would be like the Upper West Side, you know, Upper West Side going Republican. I just, I never thought Escambia County, Florida would go Democratic. So there certainly shows even if it's not showing up in the polls about whether people are happy with where the Democratic Party is or not,

what you are seeing is a lot more intensity and you're probably going to see Democrats a lot more excited about getting out to vote than Republicans. Speaking of being excited, Willie,

I know you heard this because everybody that follows the news heard this. Grayson came home. Actually, Grayson was trapped and forced to come home. Mika's cat

Grayson. And we have the photos, Willie. I think this may be going out on AP wire later. This is Mika, actually. Mika, will you take us through these photos? Grayson, happily returned. Well, not so happily returned,

home. I've gotten more texts about my cat, Willie. So this is my cat in a lobster pot because he was gone for four days. He's not boiling, but we put a little flea and tick shampoo in there and just cleaned him up a little bit. He didn't like it, but he's home. And, you know, the house is complete. Joe, you actually, you missed an incredible night where the dogs were howling. There were five animals back together in the house. Everybody was howling or meowing. They're so happy. happy he's home. But it took a while to get him back into shape, as you can see.

And Willie, that's when when Mika asks if she can trim my hair, this is one reason why I say, you know what, I'll just go to John the barber down the street. I actually did take your much, there's a much better job at that. Did you use me? You didn't sound terribly upset. You didn't sound terribly upset when Mika said, you missed it last night. The dogs were howling, the cats were meowing, all night. You didn't seem like you were that bummed to have missed that night. No, no, Jack, Jack and I were watching the Red Sox last night and compared to the barking and the howling and the yiping and everything else. Yeah, we were, we, we, we enjoyed that. We enjoyed that much more. But yeah, but, but, but Grayson, Grayson came home. And so we have the final picture of

Grayson looking pretty. I hope we can, well, also took all the signs down because of course, We had put up about 200 signs to try and find Grayson, and he's beautiful now, and he's home. So thank you, everybody, especially Josh and Beth, the form and function. You know who's not home, Joe? Well, hold on a second, though. I've got to just say, I just want to clarify, can we, TJ, can we go back to the picture of Grayson when Grayson's being shaved? Mika did a reveal there. Could we show that?

She's using the same clippers on Grayson that. I use when I cut my hair. So, we both have about the same amount of hair that falls on the floor at the same time. It's not a problem. Not a problem. But, you know, Grayson is home, Mika, and that's great news. But as you said,

there are a group of legislators who are not home. Who are they? Wow, what a newsy segue. The Texas House has issued arrest warrants for Democratic. who have left the state to block congressional redistricting as the Texas Tribune reports the war on supply only within state lines, making them largely symbolic. As most of the legislators who are in Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts, Texas House Speaker, Dustin Burroughs yesterday criticized the missing members. They've left the state, abandoned their posts, and turned their backs on the constituents they swore to represent.

They've shirked their responsibilities under the direction and pressure of out-of-state politicians and activists who don't know the first thing about what's right for Texas. To be absolutely clear, leaving the state does not stop this house from doing it to work. It only delays it. And every day this chamber is unable to act, the cost grows. Oh, my goodness. It's almost like Lincoln talking to Congress at the beginning of the Civil War. The stakes are so high. Oh, wait.

No, they're not, Willie. To do what's right for the people of Texas, to take the vote away from anybody in Texas who's basically a Democrat by gerrymandering the districts, like, so out of whack that even if Democrats managed to get a 50-50 vote total in state legislative races, Republicans would win overwhelmingly. That guy and the rest of the Texas legislature and Greg Abbott want to really. the system. They want to make sure that Republicans are overrepresented on election day. They want to rig the process, and so they're acting so indignant about it. The short-sightedness of it is this. If Texas achieves what they want to achieve, then California will go back. And then they will

draw up even more rigged lines that will help Democrats. And New York State will do it. And who Who knows? Maybe then Florida decides. I mean, it really is. It's an idiotic thing to do. They used to do it every 10 years. And now I don't know if the president told them to do this or somebody else told them to do it. But it's just stupid. And worse than that, it's just not right. I mean, gerrymandering is just, it is so anti-democratic. And yet both sides have been doing it for a long time. And it's time for us to stop it. This is not going to accomplish anything. And as you say, governors of blue states have promised this will set off an arms race. Governor Newsom said, okay, Texas, if you want to do that, you leave us no choice. We'll do the same. And there won't be any red Congress congressional districts in the state of California. New York could do the same on down the line.

Just to remind our viewers, these maps, if they are redrawn, are usually redrawn at the end of a decade when the new census report comes out based on data, not in the middle of the decade. going right now. And it is Texas Governor Abbott, who ordered lawmakers to redraw the congressional map during that special legislative session after pressure from President Trump and his political team. The current map was drawn by the Republican-dominated legislature just in 2021. Republicans have controlled 25 of the 38 seats after the last two elections. Last week, the House proposed new congressional lines dividing up existing districts in Austin, Houston, and Dallas with the goal of adding five more Republican seats. Join us now from Chicago, chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, Kendall Scudder.

Kendall, thanks for being with us this morning. So where do things stand from your point of view among Democrats? Are you going to go back to Texas? If so, how soon? Where does this go from here? Texas Democrats have no interest in participating in this sham. Texas Democrats don't work for Donald Trump. We work for the people of Texas.

I believe our delegation will stay put, and we will make sure that Republicans aren't able to avoid accountability in the 26th election by stealing congressional districts in Texas. So, Kendall, how long do you plan to hold out? And I understand, absolutely, who you believe you work for and who all lawmakers should be working for. At the same time, They've made some moves that are rather threatening. Would you see it that way? You know, the biggest difference right now between a Democrat and a Republican is that a Republican will trample on your constitutional rights in order to preserve their own political power, while a Democrat is willing to risk their elected political offices to protect your constitutional

rights. We will stay in Chicago as long as we have to because the people of Texas deserve to have representation. And beyond that, every person in this country has been looking for a Democratic Party that will fight. And we have that in Texas. We've been calloused by years of getting pushed around and kicked in the teeth, and we're not going to take it anymore. So we're going to do whatever it takes to make sure we're preserving democracy and grateful for the opportunity to do it. I want to add and make sure that I point out, our Texas legislators are making a great personal sacrifice to do this. They have families who had their first day of school yesterday that they missed. They have jobs. They have mortgages. They're being fined $500 a day. But

they're doing it because they know it's the right thing to do. Yeah, you know, it's so fascinating, Kennelly. I mean, let's compare of what the Republican House did under Mike Johnson and what you guys are doing. Both left town. But Mike Johnson had that. House race out of town so they didn't have to talk about the Epstein files. Democrats in Texas went out of town to stop, to stop gerrymandering and to stop a process that would actually deprive people of the idea, one man, one vote, one person, one vote, one woman, one vote. That's what's at stake here in Texas. It's what would be at stake in California, if they followed this up by doing it on the other side. This is just wrong. But again,

you guys left this state for a good and noble reason. Republicans raced out of town because they didn't want to talk about Epstein files. Talk about the difference. I think it's shocking to me that they're so hypocritical on this topic. What we're telling you right now and hopefully shining a spotlight on is how what we need in this country is federal nonpartisan redistricting committees. We as Democrats are tired of being the only adults in the room where we're putting these nonpartisan redistricting committees in places like California to our own disadvantage and acting like that is going to somehow solve this problem. I think that these Democratic governors in these blue states need to start carving their states up and bring these Republicans

to heal so that they end up going to D.C. and begging us to sign on to nonpartisan redistricting committees for the country. Because that's what we want, that's what we think would help and save this republic. But they're not going to do that. They're going to spend their time playing political games and doing everything that they can to try to pull distractions. So you aren't looking at the fact that right now our economy is in tough shape. Cost of living is through the roof. They're openly talking about privatizing Social Security. And as you just mentioned, Joe, they're doing everything they can to make sure you don't see that they're hiding the Epstein files because Donald Trump is clearly in them.

Uh, Kendall, let me ask you something that, that you and Texas legislators know a lot about, something that, you know, uh, people in my family know a lot about. Um, um, and that is, and, and we've talked about it for years. So I'm not being political. I'm not responding to, uh, the horrific bill that, that, that passed in Washington a couple of weeks ago, which by the way, we had congressman out in Nebraska. where we don't have unlimited money, despite the fact that they just jacked up the debt $4 trillion and $20 trillion over the next decade. But we'll just put that to the side. But I've been talking with a family member mine about the crisis in rural health care for about a decade now. Can you talk about in real terms about the parents that are going to have to drive 20, 30, 40, 50, 100 more miles to receive care about kids in the state of Texas that don't live in big

cities, that don't live in Dallas or Houston. What's going to happen to their health care when 30 to 40 percent of all children in Texas and across America get their primary health care from Medicaid? What are these cuts going to do to rural health care across America? Well, this billionaire bootlick and bill is going to shut down more than 300 rural hospitals across the country. I'm from rural East Texas. I come from a family that would have to drive 45 minutes to an hour to get to a hospital. Most counties in the state of Texas don't even have a hospital that could birth a baby. And so what are you supposed to do if you live somewhere in South Texas where you're two, three hours away from a hospital and you have

have an emergency. Those hospitals are having a hard enough time staying open as it is, let alone with the government working against them. And why would the government work against them? Because they aren't profitable. Well, guess what? The government's job is not to turn a profit. The government's job is to provide services to the people that live here. And they're failing to do that. And they're taking all the money that would provide services to working class people like us, and they're handing it to the people at the top because their greed knows absolutely no bounds. Chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, Kendall Scudder, thank you.

There are a community in Maine, I know well, that has lost food assistance and maternal care in an entire community to that point. Thank you very much for being on the show this morning. Another top story we're covering this morning is really Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to hold a security cabinet meeting today, where he will direct Israel's military on how to proceed with the war effort in Gaza. The news comes as discussions surrounding a ceasefire and hostage release deal appear to be breaking down once again. Middle East envoy Steve Whitkoff told hostage families in Tel Aviv on Saturday that President Trump is pushing for a comprehensive

deal to bring the remaining hostages home and that there will be no more piecemeal deals. Officials from the Prime Minister's office said last night that Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, will push to occupy the whole of the Gaza Strip, including areas where hostages may be held. Joining us live from London, NBC News, foreign correspondent Raf Sanchez. Raf, what more do we expect from Netanyahu today? So, Mika, this is a big moment. Israeli forces have been operating inside the Gaza Strip for nearly two years now.

They have laid waste to much of Gaza. But there are places where Israeli troops have not gone in on the grounds. That's specifically in central Gaza in areas like Darabala. And part of the reason for that is that they believe that many of the remaining Israeli hostages are being held in that area and that to go in on. on the ground would put the lives of those hostages in danger. We have seen in the past, Hamas executing hostages as Israeli troops draw near. But officials in Prime Minister Netanyahu's office are now saying that the prime minister

has decided to fully occupy the Gaza Strip, to send troops in to every corner of that territory. And he will be, according to these officials, seeking approval from Israel's security cabinet to move ahead with that. Now, that is likely going to be pushing on an open door. Far-right ministers in Netanyahu's government have been urging him to fully occupy Gaza for months and months now. The question is whether Israel's military leadership believes this is feasible or not. We have seen the Israeli generals very reluctant to do things that would put the hostages in danger. There are also questions about the told that this would take on the Israeli economy, the Israeli society would require an

enormous amount of manpower for Israel to occupy Gaza in full. You have been seeing reservists who have been spending some 200 days in uniform, away from their families, away from their businesses. It is possible, Mika, that this is a negotiating tactic. As you mentioned, these ceasefire negotiations appear at minimum stalled, at worst, completely broken down. And it may be that Netanyahu is trying to pile pressure on Hamas by threatening to go for this full occupation of the strip. Hamas, for its part, is applying pressure of its own. We have seen two videos of emaciated Israeli hostages released in the last week, one by Islamic Jihad, one by Hamas itself. These are hostages who have been held for 669 days now. And the goal clearly, from the perspective of Hamas,

is to put pressure on the Israeli government to try to make a deal. Now, inside of Gaza, the humanitarian situation remains dire. Israel has eased some of its restrictions on aid, but the Gaza Health Ministry says just around 100 trucks made it into Gaza yesterday. You can see those trucks there just being looted by these desperate crowds of people. the U.N. says some 600 trucks are needed every day if they are going to meet the needs of the population inside Gaza. Willie? So, Raf, the IDF says it already controls more than 75% of Gaza.

And now, as you say, Prime Minister Netanyahu suggesting they're going to push through and control the rest of Gaza, a full occupation. You've already got more than 2 million people, many of them very, very hungry right now, pushed into the southern part. of Gaza. What does this mean, this declaration by Prime Minister Netanyahu, for those two million people if Israel, in fact, does occupy the entire territory? And then secondly, ultimately, what is the objective here for Netanyahu by occupying all of Gaza? You know, Willie, that is the question that people have been asking since immediately after October 7th. What is the Israeli government's long-term strategy here? From the beginning, it has been unwilling to allow the Palestinian authority,

the internationally recognized Palestinian government that governs some of the occupied West Bank to take charge in Gaza. So the question is, if you're not going to have the Palestinian authority in charge there, you're not going to have Hamas in charge there, who is going to be in charge? And one of the concerns among many, many Israelis,

is that the answer is it will end up being the Israeli military, that they will be in full occupation of the strip. They will end up being responsible for health care, for food distribution, for running of schools, for hundreds of thousands of children there. That is not something that most Israelis want. Polls show that more than 70% of the Israeli public is open to a deal that would lead to the return of the hostages in exchange for Israel ending the war and fully withdrawing from Gaza.

But that just does not seem to be the direction that Netanyahu is prepared. prepared to take at this point. Mika. All right, NBC's Ralph Sanchez, thank you very much for your reporting on this this morning. We'll be watching that. It is time now to take a look at some of the other stories, making headlines this morning. The former president of Brazil has been placed under House arrest. Jair Bolsonaro is accused of plotting a military takeover of the country back in 2022. President Trump has sought to intervene on Bolsonaro's behalf slamming Brazil's judiciary and imposing steep tariffs on trade. The U.S. State Department issued a statement yesterday reading in part, quote, let Bolsonaro speak

with an exclamation point. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is pushing forward on plans to build a nuclear reactor on the moon. Duffy, who also serves as interim NASA administrator, has accelerated American efforts to win what NASA calls the second space. race. The White House has proposed big spending on that, even as it slashes spending elsewhere. Duffy says a nuclear reactor on the moon would help support a future lunar economy and travel to Mars. You know, I think we could worry about maybe, oh, I don't know, making it safe to fly in and out of

Reagan, National, first. I think we could actually... Saving women's lives in the hospital? Work on focusing, if you're in the transportation secretary, on actually making it possible to actually travel in America without, like, 10, 11, 12 hours of being backed up. Like, this system is broken. is not breaking. It is broken. They use floppy disks for their technology. I mean, let's worry about the nuclear reactors on the moon after we take care of moving Americans

from Atlanta to Detroit or Charlotte to Chicago or anywhere. But right now, travel in the summer is such a disaster, and it has been since COVID. It has been since COVID. But we're five years past now. And, you know, this is something that we can blame on leadership in the Biden administration and leadership now in the Trump administration. And again, talking, I don't want to hear Sean off to Duffy talking about nuclear reactors on the moon. I want him to figure out how to get more pilots in the in cockpits how to get more air traffic controllers up in the towers and how to move people across the united states how to pay them better in a way where where they can where they can get to their families get to their work get to their homes without having to be delayed seven

eight 10 12 hours it's a nightmare out there right now and that should be his only focus i got one more for you. These headlines are something this morning. This is from the New York Times. A zoo in Denmark wants to feed your pets to its predators. What? Danish zoo officials are asking the public to donate guinea pigs, rabbits, chickens, and even small horses.

The zoo says the animals would be gently euthanized before being fed to its European links. as well as it's lions and tigers. Wow, Willie. Grayson got home just in time. Stop. There are a couple ways you can go when your beloved Pat passes on to the Great Beyond. You can maybe bury him or her in the backyard

and put a little headstone for the kids to visit. Or you can ship it to Denmark to be fed to the lions. I don't know. It's kind of up to you. That picture you just showed. thousand or the other. I will just say a totally different topic, but that picture I've used as a caption for so many things,

including me trying to call my daughter. Like, I'd love to do a caption contest on that. Look at Grayson's face. And no, he's not being fed. Links is. So still ahead on morning, Joe. Attorney, stop. Attorney General Pam Bonnie wants to open a grand jury investigation

into former President Barack Obama's handling of the 2016 Russian election interference probe. We'll dig into that as the Trump administration doubles down on its treason allegations. Plus, we'll go through

a New York Times report on how President Trump is demanding countries pay cash in exchange for lower tariffs. And a reminder, the Morning Joe podcast available each weekday

featuring our full conversations and analysis you can listen. Wherever you get your podcasts, you're watching Morning Joe. We'll be right back. Attorney General Pam Bondi has directed Justice Department prosecutors to launch a grand jury investigation into whether officials in the Obama administration committed federal crimes when they assessed Russia's actions during the 2016 election.

That's according to a senior Trump administration official. The move comes after National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard claimed last month, top Obama administration officials carried out a, quote, treasonous conspiracy against Donald Trump. She did not offer evidence of that. Gabbard said she is sending criminal referrals to the Justice Department. Join us now, co-host of our fourth hour contributing writer at the Atlantic, Jonathan Lemire, and NBC News Senior Executive Editor for National Security, David Rode. Guys, good morning.

David, I'll start with you about this move from the attorney, general, what crimes are alleged here? And what about the statute of limitations if you can come up with one? We don't know what the crimes are that are alleged here. We don't know who is being targeted and we don't know where this grand jury will sit. And all of that's, you know, very concerning. Normally in the, you know, prosecution process in this country, no one is indicted, no investigation is announced or anyone is indicted before a grand jury has hurt evidence and a fellow citizen decides this other citizens should be charged with a crime. Here we have an approach where there's sort of a, you know, the Director of National Intelligence makes a sweeping allegation,

potentially that the former President of the United States was involved in a treasonous plot. And then you have the Attorney General announcing that she is launching a criminal investigation of this plot. But again, we don't know the charges. We don't know where they're going to investigate or who it's going to be. But the one thing we do know, Jonathan Lemire, is this is extraordinarily stupid. It's extraordinarily stupid on so many cases. account. If you look at the timeline, the timeline doesn't add up. It's like when Donald Trump is saying that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton created the Epstein files. No, no, no, no, no. That all happened during Donald Trump's first term. You look at the timeline here about what happened

and when it happened. Barack Obama had nothing to do with this by anybody's accounts and especially by the Senate Republican Intelligence Committee run by Marco Rubio, who afterwards said that it was Donald Trump's 2016 campaign that created a, quote, grave counterintelligence threat to the United States of America. That was Marco Rubio, the current Secretary of State, that was every Republican on the Senate Intel Committee after pouring through all of the documents. That's what they found. And when poor John D. Durham was made to sacrifice his professional career to go around the world investigating the investigators. He found nothing and ended up making a fool of himself. I mean, we even found

out that the two documents that supposedly, you know, fed into the Clinton conspiracy that she was the one pushing this actually was Russian disinformation. So, again, they know in the Justice Department that this is all BS. What's going on here? Well, first of all, Joe, I think this is a desperate attempt to distract. This is playing politics. This is reviving old conspiracy. Yes, reviving old conspiracy theories.

To talk about this, and the timing here is illuminating. This, of course, comes back to the headlines shortly after the Jeffrey Epstein matter explodes and consumes the White House and continues to do so. So they're pushing this. They're playing the hits, if you will, knowing that it will be eaten up on certain conservative of cable channels and in the MAGA podcast sphere. But you're right. This is something that it's also showcases the evolution of the Republican Party.

That, you know, after certain, Republicans, of course, were delighted that Donald Trump won in 2016, but they still expressed, as you say, grave concerns with Russia interference. They were still supportive largely of the president's agenda, but they were fiercely critical of what he did in Helsinki when he sided with Russia over his own U.S. intelligence agencies. but now, with only a handful of exceptions, they sit idly by. So David Rode, let's take a little deeper in this. As Joe said, some of the documents that are being presented as, hey, this is evidence of this conspiracy.

Well, actually, it turns out, if you read the fine print, there's conclusions that some of them probably were drummed up in Moscow or the suburbs thereof. We also should note that President Obama now has immunity, thanks to the Supreme Court, so he wouldn't really be able to be prosecuted here anyway. What avenues, like, if they're really going to go. through with this. And it seems like they're going to try, at least for a while, to make things ugly and messy and to distract. What avenues do they have? They can hold this grand jury investigation for weeks or months and not really release any details about it. Just hold it over people's head

and have it act as a distraction. And it was interesting because I called various people who followed this closely, some who've been on, some who were actually investigated by John Durham, the special counsel. And they were like, don't overreact. This is a political stunt. And it is a distraction. But I just want to say, they said, there's another side of this. And that's that this is serious. They could pursue, they could indict people. Ambassador David Pressman, the former U.S. Ambassador to Hungary, wrote this very powerful op-in in the New York Times recently saying, you know, these are authoritarian tactics.

And simply ignoring that is very dangerous, that it's very important. People in Hungary were like, oh, you know, Orban is just, this is a distraction. It'll pass business leaders, universities, you know, people making, you know, just deciding to go quiet for a while. And it worked. It gave Orban more power. So I just want to say there are other people who said this is incredibly dangerous. This is authoritarianism.

These are sort of secret prosecutions. We don't know who is being targeted, but they're sort of throwing out these names, Obama's names, Comey's name, Clapper's name. And so this is completely unorthodox, I would say, unprecedented for the modern American Justice Department since Nixon. And it's very disturbing at the very least. NBC's David Rode. Thank you very much for coming up.

on the show this morning. And coming up on Morning Joe, Republican strategist Carl Rove says President Trump is making the same mistake that former President Biden made. We'll tell you what it is. And we'll dig into new reporting on how President Trump is using higher tariffs as leverage to get countries to hand over large amounts of cash. Morning Joe, we'll be right back. Hey, welcome back to morning, Joe, look at the White House and the city that is the home of the nationals. Let's see how they're doing. Let's not. So, you know, Willie, I was looking at the standings this morning.

And, of course, I start in the America. League East, and then I go down and I'm looking at the run differential. And I notice the top three teams in the American League East have a run differential of like 80, plus 80, which is pretty good. And then I keep scrolling down, and I get to the National League Central. And two teams there, the Chicago Cubs and the Milwaukee Brewers on another planet. They're like in the 120s. And the best two records in baseball come out of the National League Central. Now, if this This is no surprise that, you know, the Cubs are doing this. But the Milwaukee Brewers, man, the best team in baseball right now.

Where did they – where did this team come from? Well, these days as a Yankee fan, I like to scroll past the ALE standings and get right down to the NL Central. It's a happier place for me to live right now. Much happier. Congratulations to the Red Hot Red Sox winning their six game in a row again last night. We're all playing in the shadow of the Mighty Blue Jays. We know that. We're just hoping to get a wildcard birth.

you're right joe the cubs have been great all year the brewers though have been unbelievably unbelievable in the last couple of months they've got the best record in baseball they won again last night as you said they're run differential i think is like plus 121 or something crazy like that really really good team that doesn't get a lot of attention people focused on the cubs this year and rightly so because they are good but all of a sudden the brewers have put their foot on the gas right now the best team in baseball jonathan lamere yeah look in this this show we justly received criticism for spending too much time talking about teams in the central time zone. So we're doing it again today, once again, dwelling on Milwaukee and Chicago and the like.

But no, the Brewers are fantastic. They've got great pitching. They've got a rookie phenom coming up. And they've got a team that puts the ball in play. That's one of the things that's really impressive about them is the strikeout rates are really low. They force teams to make the plays. And we have seen both of our teams, we should note, have struggled doing just that at different stretches of the season. They've got a solid bullpen.

They got some reinforces the deadline. Yeah, Brewer's best team in baseball right now ahead of the Cubs, Joe, and we have the Detroit Tigers in the America League Central, right of the ship after a little bit of a skit. Boy, they had quite a skid for a while there, but doing much better. I think I may have to change my prediction. I had said the Yankees were going to beat the Dodgers in five games, and if they didn't, it would be a failure of a season. And now I'm changing that to the brewers. The Yankees will beat the brewers in five games. You heard it here first.

Anything short of that, I think you just have to, geez, a total abject failure. But we'll get back to that tomorrow. Today, we're talking about the mighty brew crew. In some other news, President Trump's renewed tariff threats have turned into a play for cold, hard cash. That's how the New York Times is describing it, saying that Trump is trying to, quote, leverage U.S. economic power to cajole other nations to make multi-billion dollar investments in order to maintain access to America's market. Last week, Trump lowered the threat of a 25 percent tariff on South Korea to 15 percent

after the Asian nation agreed to make $350 billion in investments in the U.S. And purchase $100 billion of liquefied natural gas. Japan and the European Union have also said they would make major investments in the United States. Let's bring in the reporter behind that piece. Alan Rappaport, who covers economic policy for the New York Times, also with us, business reporter for Axis, Nathan Bomi. Thanks, guys, for being with us. Now, let me begin with you.

And your article caught my attention yesterday afternoon because I had just seen a previous article about how the United States was making $30 billion in tariff receipts, and that might be a hard habit to give up. It seems right now that the markets are absorbing the tariffs and the Trump administration seems to be getting some pretty good deals out of the leverage that Donald Trump's holding over other countries. Talk about your reporting. That's right. I mean, what we're pretty much seeing is it's kind of the art of the shakedown here with President Trump taking a page out of his art of the deal book. He's pretty much set things up.

So it's kind of in his view, a win-win, whether or not he takes in the tariff revenue or he tries to use that as. leverage to get these huge multi-billion dollar, multi-hundred billion dollar investments from other countries. So what we're kind of seeing is he's, you know, taking this approach where he'll put out these astronomical proposed tariff rates and then give other countries the opportunity to sort of buy them down by basically handing over, as I say in the story, it's cold, hard cash. And so he's using that leverage. He's getting these other countries to sort of almost bit against each other in some ways, seeing what kinds of deals they can come up with. And then he's touting these huge sums of investment money to the American people to say he's winning the trade wars.

Well, and it seems at the beginning the big risk was, of course, the markets would rebel. They would collapse. Of course, there was a massive correction, but it's come back up. Markets are high. It looks like they've absorbed the shock of the tariffs, for now at least. And right now, it seems to be upside as far as investment. in the United States. Talk about that, especially what South Korea has agreed to. Right. Well, it's a little bit too sweet to say whether or not the economy is fully absorbing the tariffs yet because they're just starting to get rolled out. But I think in terms of the markets, yeah. In terms of the market reaction, I think there's a sense of relief because the

tariffs are not as high as they were initially proposed to be. So it seems like, you know, now we're getting maybe 15% tariffs or 10% tariffs in some cases, as opposed to 25% that was threatened. I think markets see that as that there's some sensibility here. In terms of South Korea, I think, and some of these other deals as well, it seems like maybe these investment deals could be a little bit too good to be true. They're very, the details are quite murky. Nothing's really written down yet on paper. And sort of after they've been announced by the Trump administration, we're seeing the South Korean saying, well, hold on a second. We're not actually committing to exactly what's being said here by the U.S. in terms of Japan, you know, some of the

$500 billion that have been proposed are actually going to be loans or loan guarantees. But it gives the Trump administration and President Trump the opportunity to say, look, I'm bringing in trillions of dollars, either in investment or tariff revenues. So everybody should be happy. So Nathan, you all at Axios have some new reporting on optimism among U.S. automakers that Donald Trump's policies, these tariffs ultimately might actually be good for their bottom lines, despite blaming the tariffs for billions in losses right now in the short term. Can you explain why a car manufacturer would be?

be happy in the long run about some of these tariffs? Well, I think the automakers are still biting their nails over the tariffs, but they're also sort of starting to get excited about this idea that the U.S. government is going to take its foot off the gas when it comes to environmental regulation. The automakers, of course, for many years, have been upset about the extent to which the U.S. government imposes carbon emissions regulations and it requires them to buy these carbon emission credits. And so if that's going away, then the automakers can start to sell the big hulking vehicles, the SUVs, and the pickup trucks that have, you know, fueled their profits for so long.

And we should not skip past some real environmental concerns here by these potential rollbacks. But we heard a lot of, in the weeks before these tariffs went into place, Steve Ratner and others would talk to us about how these car parts would cross the borders repeatedly in order to get assembled and how these tariffs are really going to, you know, it's significantly potentially increase the cost of these cars for consumers. Where are we seeing there, as you know, the tariffs are still coming into place, particularly with Canada. Talk to us about where we're seeing the prices of these vehicles go. Well, Kelly Blue Book is reporting that the average price of a new vehicle in America is approaching $48,000, but it's really not up significantly

year over year. So so far, the automakers are kind of choosing to absorb some of those tariffs. But I think the impact has yet to be felt because a lot of the vehicles that are being sold right now were produced before the tariffs took effect. So I think you're likely to see several thousand dollars on average per vehicle of an increase in the coming months, and it could be a lot more for luxury models. Alan, what we talk about tariffs, it's not like Donald Trump is a blank slate. You talk a good bit about what happened in his first term. Looking back over his first term of tariffs, what he did, what he followed through on,

what he didn't follow through on. What can you project forward on how we can expect these tariff wars to go? Well, a big question is going to be going forward about how these tariffs are enforced, how these trade deals are enforced. We saw in the first term he struck a big deal with China over trade. There were big promises made over purchases of agricultural products from the U.S. that China was going to make. And these didn't end up happening.

Part of that was because of the pandemic, but also just part of it was because the enforcement mechanisms didn't end up working, they were toothless. And so we'll actually end up having to see whether or not these investment deals end up going forward as well, because they're actually quite hard to enforce in some ways these commitments can't actually even be followed through on, like the ones that the European Union have made. And finally, Ellen, can you give us just sort of a report card right now for those who are following the tariff news? But it always seems to, you know, you get 20 different sources saying 20 different things about where things are going.

What is the current state of negotiations with China? Does the White House expect to deal on China anytime soon? And same with the EU, since those are, you know, the United States, China, and the EU are the three economic powerhouses in the globe. Where do the negotiations with China and the EU stand right now? I think with China, you know, Secretary Besson and Ambassador Greer had talks with them last week. And it's kind of a situation where they're trying to keep extending this trade truth. you know, over periods of 90 days where basically tariff rates don't spike up again. There's a lot of sort of back-and-forth conversation about that.

Still discussions about trying to open up the Chinese market to make it more favorable to U.S. companies. But I think it's going to be a lot of a situation there in terms of just talking, talking, talking, and hoping that the trade war doesn't kind of revive itself. EU is going to be a lot of discussions about sort of putting to paper some of the things that they agreed, at least provisionally, particularly in terms of this investment deal. And another big one to watch is India, especially, you know, as we get closer to this August 7th deadline, where more tariffs could snap into place. President Trump has been very angry with India in terms of his purchases of Russian oil and threatening even higher tariffs on them if they don't curb that. So that's another one to watch just how tariffs are being sort of used as the new sanctions going forward.

All right. Economic Policy Reporter for the New York Times, Alan Rappaport, and business reporter for Axis, Nathan Bowie. Thank you both very much for coming on the show this morning.