Morning Joe - 'This looks like Russia': Joe shocked by ICE's tactics in Minnesota

Episode Date: January 14, 2026

'This looks like Russia': Joe shocked by ICE's tactics in Minnesota To listen to this show and other MS podcasts without ads, sign up for MS NOW Premium on Apple Podcasts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm not resisting. Hey, I'm not resisting. I'm not resisting. I'm not resisting. This is how you spend your life. Hey, can somebody grab my phone? Being a cheap, Jay. You can stop out?

I got your phone. That's what you want? I got it. Who do you need us to contact? Hey, my girlfriend's right behind you. Give us a phone number. My girlfriend's right behind me. Why don't you guys get him in to Victor 3?

I'm going to Victor 3. That's what I said. Victory 3. You know, make a pass-down once you get them up. Get me the America. You can't see it in the States. All right, we're back. You know, Mika, this is not the America that most of us recognize.

You can see it in the polls. This is not Stephen Miller's America is not the America that most small government conservatives recognize. It's certainly not the America that even Joe Rogan recognizes. He talked about it yesterday. I can also

see the point of view of the people to say, yeah, but you don't want militarized people in the streets just roaming around, snatching people up, many of which turn out to actually be U.S. citizens that just don't have their papers on them? Are we really going to be the Gestapo? Where's your papers? Is that what we've come to?

So it's more complicated than I think people want to admit. ICE are villains. And now people are looking at them like murderous, military people that are on the streets of our city and they're masked up, which is also a problem, right? Because if you get arrested by a cop, you're allowed to ask the cop, what is your name and badge number? And you could film that cop. If you get arrested by an ICE agent, you have no such right. They're wearing a mask.

They don't have to tell you shit. Yeah, and Willie, he talked about Americans being snatched up off the streets because they don't have their papers. And he asks the question, are we the Gestapo? Talks about no rights by these people coming in wearing masks saying you have no rights. They're not police officers. Police officers, you see the police officers. You can talk to the police officers. You can say, officer, but how can I help you?

what's going on. And there's none of that here. This is something new and alarming. And as Joe Rogan says, they're just snatching up Americans, Americans. They're snatching up Americans off the street and asking for papers. And he asks, again, are we really the Gestapo?

This is such a Christy Noem and Stephen Miller have taken a show for, away from what Donald Trump talked about, which is, oh, we're going to get the worst of the worst. We're going to get the baddest of the bad. No, they're not getting the worst of the worst illegal immigrants. They're now doing this to an American citizen. And there's another clip where Joe Rogan talks about an American citizen, a Minnesota mom, getting shot in the face when it looked like she was turning her car wheel and trying to get out of the way.

Joe Rogan's been consistent about this. He supported Donald Trump. He said he supported sealing the border, closing the border, at least having a secure border, and getting out the worst of the worst. That was the promise among illegal immigrants. Murderers is rapists. We still hear that from the president. Every day, he says, what we're doing is we're getting out the worst to the worst.

That's just not true. As a matter of fact, it's just not true. These are not the worst to the worst. And as you say, now we're having U.S. citizens pinned to the ground and arrested and thrown into vans. It happened inside a target yesterday where an employee, a U.S. citizen, was arrested for protesting the presence of ice

inside the target, arrested and dragged out. A U.S. citizen who cried, I am a U.S. citizen as the person was being dragged into a van. Rev, we were just talking about this a moment ago, but you have now men in military fatigues look like they're dressed for war, ready for war.

And as you've been talking to people on the ground in Minneapolis, emboldened by what happened, by Renee Good being shot in the face a couple of times, because they know that reflexively and immediately this administration led by President Trump will have their back, apparently no matter what they do. No, that is what is the most alarming things that I've heard from people on the ground. We've had consistent relationships with some of the local activists in Minneapolis since George Floyd happened there almost six years ago. And they're saying they've never seen anything like this. We've said in the past, oh, you're discriminated against blacks and people of color,

and that certainly continues. But these are just anybody, whites, anybody, and they're under siege and they're unapologetic, and they're not listening to any appeal. And it is the closest graphic example I've seen of a police state going on in Minneapolis than I've seen in my lifetime. Yeah, I've just, I have not, I've not seen this. In my lifetime, I don't think anybody's seen it in their lifetime. And, you know, I think somebody in the White House, several people in the White House, Christine Nome, think they're acting tough. They're going to show people who are no, well, they're just showing people how stupid they are, how fuggish they are. The poll numbers are collapsing. The poll numbers just keep collapsing. And as they collapse, Mika, the more they collapse,

the more brutish, the more terrible, the more unpopular the behavior comes where you have Joe Rogan on radio yesterday talking about these Gestapo-like tactics. Joe Rogan's saying that and talking about, again, the masks. It's just people get dragged out of their cars, thrown onto the streets. And these ice officers really, they don't believe that Americans have rights the way they're behaving. 40% of Americans approve of ice tactics. That's the highest number I've seen.

57% disapprove. And the disapproval numbers just keep going up. Things seem to really ramp up on the ground in Minnesota yesterday. And we're going to show you more of what we're seeing. out of that state in just a moment. Plus, we'll go through President Trump's speech yesterday in Detroit that was filled with false claims about the state of the economy, also in an interview he did. The president, meanwhile, again suggesting U.S. intervention in Iran amid massive protests there, will show you what he said about

sending troops to the Middle East. And on Capitol Hill, the Republican-led House Oversight Committee says it will hold, look into, hold the Clinton's in contempt of Congress after they refused to testify about Jeffrey Epstein, a move that can't apply to President Trump, according to Chairman James Comer. A remarkable letter from Bill and Hillary Clinton, which we'll get into later in the show. With us, this hour co-host of our 9 a.m. hour, staff writer at the Atlantic, Jonathan Lemire, an opinion columnist for the New York Times, David French, is with this. So more now on the situation out of Minnesota. The Justice Department says there is.

no basis for a civil rights investigation into the deadly ICE shooting of Renee Nicole Good. The feds argue the officer who shot her acted in self-defense. This comes as frustration grows in Minneapolis, where ICE and Border Patrol agents are using aggressive tactics to arrest people. MS now reporter Britt Miller talked to the local political leader who says he fears for his life. In a network exclusive, we're hearing about the terrifying moments when Minneapolis City Council President Elliot Payne says he was assaulted by an ICE agent. Payne says it happened Monday night after he went to check on a U.S. citizen being harassed by federal agents. I introduced myself as council president. I asked the name and badge number of the officer. They refused to provide that information, and they were pointing tasers at us indiscriminately.

and then another agent came up from behind me and shoved me aside. Seconds later, another person is pushed. This is just one of the countless videos showing how the streets of Minneapolis have descended into chaos after an ICE agent killed 37-year-old Renee Good, shooting her in the head. It feels like a military occupation. It feels like we're under assault by our federal government. At a gas station, agents walk up to a parked car asking the driver for status. get status, got Honduran here.

When suddenly the masked men smash his car window and drag him to the ground. There's a lot of direct assault, and particularly how they're roughing up U.S. citizens who are just legal observers. They will tackle them. One of my constituents have their hand broken as they were apprehended. And then they will just dump people off without medical care after essentially torture. them. And this is the most un-American thing I can imagine. ICE agents started showing up in Minneapolis late last year for Operation Metro Surge,

with reports of more than 2,000 arrests so far. But according to a new Quinepiac poll, 57% of registered voters disapprove of the way ICE is enforcing immigration laws. 40% approve. Podcaster Joe Rogan joining the conversation with criticism. And then I can also see the point of view of the people to say, yeah, but you don't want militarized people in the streets just roaming around, snatching people up, many of which turn out to actually be U.S. citizens that just don't have their papers on them? Are we really going to be the Gestapo? Where's your papers? Is that what we've come to? But the Trump administration has argued community members are the aggressors disrupting immigration operations. I have not seen residents of Minneapolis being violent with law enforcement agents. I've only seen law enforcement agents. being violent with the residents of Minneapolis.

They are the aggressors. They are the instigators and they are the escalators. Pain says in the face of anger and fear, the community is practicing de-escalation and exercising their right to demonstrate. And with President Trump promising a day of reckoning and retribution in Minnesota, there's concern about what's next.

Are you worried that what happened to Renee Good could happen again, that another federal agent could kill somebody? Yeah, I'm worried that They'll kill me because I'm out there and I'm witnessing and I'm documenting and it seems that they are retaliating against us for asserting our rights. And as clashes continue, activists have announced a day of action on January 23rd, asking people not to shop, not to go to work or even go to school, but to march peacefully

through Minneapolis instead. Meanwhile, we've reached out to DHS about those videos you just saw. We have yet to hear back. Back to you. Thank you so much, Brayette. So David, French, you have the Justice Department covering up the killing of Renee Good, no investigation. Despite the fact, you have an ICE agent shooting point blank range from the side of the car straight into her window. It looked like it was pointed directly at her head.

I don't know in what universe that wouldn't cause. law enforcement officers to investigate that shooting. But here, the Justice Department, the White House, desperate to cover that investigation up and kill it. And then finally, I'm just curious as a constitutional lawyer, I mean, I see these people being dragged in the street. I see masked people coming up demanding people. demanding papers. I see a guy sitting in a gas station parking lot and ice officers breaking the

window and then dragging him out and putting their knee on his back. I just, again, this, we went to law school. We practiced law. This, this looks like Russia. It really does. This looks like something that you would expect in Russia, that protesters, this is happening to protesters, not suspected murderers are rapists. This is what America looks like in 2025 for protesters. We always looked at what happened to the Soviet Union and looked at what happened in Putin's Russia

and saw this happening to protesters there being taken off the streets, thinking, my God, how could that ever? happen in society. And I'd always ask, how could those Russian police officers do that? Well, we've got people lined up for this job to put masks on, to go in, to break people's windows, drag them out of their cars, beat up American citizens, shove them to the ground, and then cuff them. Help me understand, David, how we got here so fast. Yeah, I think it's plain that we got here so fast because Donald Trump and Stephen Miller came into office deciding that they were going to move very fast and in a very brutal way. You know, and you mentioned the Constitution, Joe. I think it is

starting to sink in at all levels of the federal judiciary that a couple of things. One, that the Trump administration is not being honest with them. There was a more than 200-page legal opinion coming out of Trump's deployment of the National Guard to Chicago and talking about the ICE tactics in Chicago that demonstrated all of the ways in which the administration had lied to judges, lied to the court about its actions. It's sinking in that they're not being honest with them. And it's also sinking to the courts the way in which the Trump administration is systematically violating the Constitution. I think it is very telling that in the Trump v. Illinois opinion from the Supreme Court very recently that upheld an order blocking deployment of the National Guard, that Justice Kavanaugh very clearly said, you can't stop people on the basis of race alone. Yet this seems to be happening across the United States. And Joe, you put up those poll numbers. And I think what's particularly notable about those numbers, it was, I believe, 57 to 40 with 57% against tactics.

We need to remember, this is a core area of Trump. This was Trump and Trump's best issues when he was elected. He was elected in part to engineer an immigration crackdown. This was part of the reason why Americans voted for him, a big part of the reason, and he has squandered that goodwill in a core area for him. And this is the record that Republicans are going to be running on this year in the midterms. It's a question that was initially strongly Republican, now tilting against them because people are looking at this and having the same reaction. You and I have. This isn't what we want America like. This is not what America is supposed to look like.

And Willie, those numbers actually are misleading in that you're seeing a lot of Republicans pop up, blindly supporting Donald Trump, prop up those numbers even to 40 percent. On every one of these polls show, independence, the people who will decide who controls Congress for the next several years are markedly against this sort of behavior. I mean, you even have some polls showing over 40% of people want ICE now to be abolished. But you look at that independent vote, the people are going to make a difference in the next election. Those numbers have cratered.

It's also new polls have come out about whether the officer, was justified in the killing. And there you see, would you support abolishing ICE? 46% would support that. And again, as we said yesterday, ICE's approval numbers have gone down 30 percentage points since Christy Noem took over the agency back in February. But Willie, polls came out yesterday about whether the officer was justified in killing Renee Good. of course, shooting twice at point-blank range into the side of her car.

Quinapeak, 28%, only 28% support. UGov, only 35 think he was justified. Data for progress, 36%. So these Republicans who live in a bubble, these MAGA supporters who live in a bubble and think that America is with them, no, America's not with them. America is horrified by what's been going on. Yeah, with every video, every morning that we show here and we watch in horror often of a mass man dressed in military fatigues in the streets of an American city, breaking a window and dragging someone out or dragging U.S. citizens out of a target.

Or now, as the New York Times reports, targeting refugees who are here legally, who've been screened through all the security protocols, and that is not an easy process to get to America that way. They are also being arrested by ICE now for the crime of being Somali in Minneapolis. Every time we see these videos, those numbers that you talked about go down in support of ICE. And John Lemire, not long ago, Abolish ICE was an extreme left-wing position. And now you see 46% of Americans supporting that because if the mission for ICE was, as President Trump promised, to go and get rapists and murderers out of this country, hard to find anybody. who would object to that. But that clearly now is not the mission.

As Joe Rogan and many other Trump supporters themselves have said, this is not what we voted for. These scenes we're watching this morning. Yet at least for now, the White House doesn't care. Those scenes are difficult to watch. That woman being pulled from her car, the glass shattered and that guy sitting in the gas station. And then we hear the agents,

the ICE agent, the Border Patrol agent, saying, oh, we've got a Honduran here. What is this? Like, this is not the America that many of us thought we would. were living in. But it is Donald Trump's America. It is Stephen Miller's America. And there was a moment last week. President Trump sat for a two-hour interview with the New York Times. And it was in the aftermath of this moment. And the reporters there actually wanted to ask him about the shooting.

His aide brought over the video on a laptop. He initially defended it saying, oh, look, she struck him with the car. But as subsequent viewing show, well, actually, she didn't, he kind of backed off. He's like, well, I'm not really sure what happened here. You know, but that moment of sort of humanity because he did say like, well, I feel terrible about what happened. Gone quickly. By that night, by the next day, he has doubled, he has tripled down. They have used this shooting in Minneapolis as an excuse to surge far more officers there. We've heard local officials say it's like an occupying force there in the Twin Cities. We have seen them suggesting that other cities might be next with enforced ICE agents, including potentially New York.

And yet people I talk to in the White House say, there's no plan here. They see the, some of them see the polls. The political operation has expressed some private concerns, Mika. But right now, there's been no plan to deviate course right now. Miller and Nome are empowered. The president has given his blessing. Well, they're going to take it right to the ground then.

They're taking it right to the ground because those poll numbers are going to keep collapsing. And the support, especially among independents, going to keep collapsing, not only for ICE, but also for Donald Trump. And for the administration, this is a losing course. It's un-American. It's a losing course. And you're going to be boiled down to that 31, 32, 33 percent that, oh, I don't know, defended Cali after Milai that defended the soldiers at Abu Ghraib.

There's always the 33 percent. And then what follows? A massive landslide against the point. president who is supporting this. So or against the president's party. So I am hoping that this president understands that Stephen Miller and Christyneum have him on a losing course. I am hoping he looks at the poll numbers. And I'm hoping Republicans look at the poll numbers and see that since Christy Gnome took over ICE approval for ICE has gone down 30 percentage points. I just have a favorable approval rating. Now a 30% swing. And on top of that, you now have 46% of Americans saying

they want to abolish us. This gets worse by the day. It doesn't get better. It doesn't get better. This has to stop. All right. We're going to pause and continue the conversation in a moment. Still ahead of morning, Joe. We'll get to President Trump's speech in Michigan, where he made a number of false claims about the economy and repeated them in other settings as well. Steve Ratner is standing by with charts, fact-checking those remarks, including what Trump said about the key issue of housing. And as we go to break, a quick look at the travelers' forecast this morning from Ackyweather's Bernie Raynow. Bernie, how's it looking? Mika, colder air on the move on our Wednesday.

It's going to produce some showers in Buffalo, Pittsburgh, that changes to rain late in the day. Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, nothing more than a spotty shower to today. that colder are also pushing in across southeast. Take a look at Dallas, 60 degrees. Your ac weather forecast and there will be showers in Charlotte, Atlanta, maybe a thunderstorm in Miami. Travel delays, I think we're going to have a few in Atlanta along the eastern seaboard in Miami.

We should be okay. To help make the best decisions and be more into know, download the ACU weather out today. It is 41 past the hour. Welcome back to Morning Joe, a live look at Capitol Hill, as the sun has yet to come up over Washington. So President Trump seemed to give the middle finger to someone who was heckling him while he was touring a Ford factory

in Dearborn Michigan yesterday. That according to the New York Times. Yeah. TMZ released this video of the interaction as the New York Times described it. President Trump raised his middle finger at a heckler who accused him of being a, quote, pedophile protector. It was a fleeting interaction

that happened while the president was out of sight of a small group of reporters that travels by his side as part of the press pool. The Times added, Trump mouthed a two-word response. It was difficult to make out what he said in the clip, published by TMZ, though it sure looked like something beginning with a letter F, and it wasn't Ford. A spokesperson for the United Auto Workers said the employee has been suspended, but did not identify the individual. who it was. The White House Communications Director defended the president's response, calling the heckler a lunatic, and that Trump gave an appropriate and unambiguous response. I think he was referring to the Epstein files, the heckler.

The heckler, yeah, was. He called him, he called him something regarding the Epstein files. Well, I mean, that's the thing. I mean, coming out of this, the real takeaway is that, First of all, all the preaching about free speech. You get a guy fired there. You could look after Charlie Kirk's death and J.D. Vance running around, telling people to go around, trying to get people fired. You can't have free speech on the streets of Minneapolis or you get the hell beaten out of you. You can just go down the list and this idea of free speech. It's just absolutely absolutely ridiculous. Not there. So as for his speech in Detroit, the president defended his handling of the economy amid growing pressure on affordability issues.

Grocery prices are starting to go rapidly down. Rent is down. Airfares are down. Hotel rates are down. Cell phone prices are down. And we're just getting started. It's an election about high prices that was caused by the Democrats and that I brought down a lot. And remember, when I bring, when you see energy coming down like I brought it down and gasoline coming down, that brings everything else down. When we would have drug prices stay the same, everybody thought it was great. They're going to be coming down thousands of percent. We're standing up to special interests and slashing prescription drug prices by 300, 400, 500, and even 600 percent and more. Our spirit is restored.

Inflation is stopped. Wages are up. Prices are down. Our economy is booming like, I think you'll see soon like never before. Oh, maybe soon. but certainly not now. There's so much wrong in what the president just said there that we just have to sort through it

because these are the sort of things that in the past he's sad and people just sort of take whole cloth, even people in the media. But, you know, the president said that prices were going down and said food prices were going down quickly. Well, the fact is that December, the last month that was reported, food prices actually shot up at a faster rate than any time in three years. Food prices did not shoot up as much as they did last month since 2022. President also said that inflation's gone.

Inflation's not gone. inflation's at about 2.7 percent. For 2025, inflation was around 2.7 percent. And food prices were stubbornly high. So if you're out there and you're hearing somebody telling you, food prices are going down, that's just not the case. You also heard that, and the president loves to say that inflation was higher ever under Joe Biden. and how horrible this situation was when he took control of the White House.

Actually, inflation wasn't higher ever than ever before under Joe Biden in history. World War I, inflation was up at 19%. In the 70s, the great inflation, the 1970s, it was around 13 to 14%. In the 1980s, when Reagan was president, where was inflation? inflation? Was it about 13, 14 percent? When Joe Biden left office, in 2024, his last year in office, now, I don't know if you can actually handle the facts if you're in a warped bubble, ideological bubble. Here are the facts. When Joe Biden left office in 2024, his last year in office, inflation was at 2.9%. Can you absorb that? 2.9%. Donald Trump's first year in office,

inflation at 2.7%. Basically the same thing. The only thing that concerns me really right now is the fact home heating prices keep going up. Groceries keep going up. Housing costs keep going up. And Willie, when health care, my God, healthcare is unaffordable for middle class and even upper middle class Americans. It's a disaster, this affordability crisis, you know, to say that's a hoax when the very things that keep people alive are skyrocketing to where they're unaffordable, Willie, no a lot. No, no, it's just a lie. The problem is, again, let's just go where most people feel the

pinch the most, and that is with the groceries. They shot up in December, skyrocketed. Worse since 2022. That is something that really worries me because of the pinch that working class and middle class voters are already feeling right now. That speech in Detroit, yesterday was Exhibit A in the struggle that Donald Trump personally is having, but also this administration is having with this issue, which is the data are the data. You just laid it out. And when he says, gas is below $2, no, the national average of gas is $2.80, and it's even more where he was yesterday in the state of Michigan. He's trying to will fake numbers into being the truth, but it's not going to work. So he's there to announce a affordability agenda while

attacking the idea that affordability is a problem. He says it's a Democrat hoax that it's a fake story, but I guess I have to do this. So here's my affordability agenda. He doesn't want to take responsibility for it, but it's real. And it's true. He boasted also about his administration's proposals he believes will bring down rising home prices, among other things. Join us now with charts, former Treasury official, Morning Joe Economic analyst Steve Ratner. Steve, good morning, good to see you before we get into your first chart. Just absorbing what we heard from the president there, what do you make of what he's saying in the story he's trying to tell about this economy? I think you and Joe covered it pretty well. He's like King Canute, you know, trying to part the

waters and claim something's happening that isn't happening. And there are a lot of false claims. You know, for example, he claims that he brought $18 trillion of new investment into the United States. But his own website only says it was $9.6 trillion. And that's probably exaggerated. He talks about, as Joe mentioned, the highest growth in history, but growth last year in 2025 was lower than it was in 2024 under Biden. So he's trying to, by just simply making up these facts, somehow convinced the American people that he's on track. And then, of course, to deny the affordability crisis is just laughable. Incomes have gone up, as he said, but prices have gone up almost as fast. And what he also didn't say is income inequality action. And, he's

widened last year. The people at the bottom did worse than the people at the top for the first time in several years. They did better under Biden at the top than under the bottom. So Steve, there's the cost of groceries, the cost of gas day to day. And then in your first chart, you're looking at the cost of just having a roof over your head. How expensive housing has gotten? It was interesting because he didn't mention housing until he was about 40 minutes into the speech. And then it was simply three sentences, less than a minute of his 45 minutes. minutes on housing because I think he may recognize that this is a problem and he hasn't got really a solution. So let's go back and take a look at what the problem is for starters. So essentially, if you

go all the way back to 2000, housing has generally gone up faster than incomes. This is median household income. This is the price, the cost of buying a house. This is the cost of renting. You can see that the cost of buying a house has gone up over 280 percent. In other words, it's almost tripled while incomes have gone up by far less. And what's particularly interesting here is you can just see with your eye how much it has spiked since 2020 and how house prices have just run away from the average American. So that's the problem. And then you combine that with interest rates. Now he loves to bash Jerome Powell and claim these are these interest rates are his fault. I won't get into the weeds on this, but just take it from me. The Fed does not control mortgage rates.

It controls short-term interest rates, doesn't control mortgage rates. Those are controlled by other factors that I won't get into today. But when you combine higher interest rates with higher home prices, the cost to a family of affording a house has roughly doubled. For a typical $400,000 house, it was about $1,000 a month in payments. Between the higher costs of the house and the higher mortgage payments, it's now $2,000 a month. So this is the affordability crisis in housing that, as I said,

Trump really didn't get into it all yesterday. And part of what's driving that, Steve, as we move to your second chart, is just a shortage of housing, not a lot of inventory out there. Yeah, that, it's, you know, supply and demand like so many other parts of the economy. And so you see if you go back to 2000. We were building about a million and a half new houses a year. And then before the financial crisis, and there was a lot of cheap money around, frankly, housing starts went all the way up to about two and a quarter million per year.

And then you had the financial crisis. and they went down, down, down to 500,000. They've never come back for a variety of reasons. They've never come back, and now they're even slightly softer at about a million and a quarter houses being built. And the reasons really relate to affordability that people can't necessarily afford these houses so you don't build them.

They relate to interest rates are higher, which, again, is not Jerome Powell's fault. They relate to difficulties in permitting and zoning, which we'll talk about a little bit more. But when you put it all together, These are five reputable forecasters of all different sorts. And the estimates of how short we are on housing range from 2.8 million down here from J.P. Morgan all the way up to 4.9 million here.

Obviously, building more houses would put downward pressure on prices and make them more affordable for Americans. So let's talk about how the president, how this administration proposes to help with all this, given the data you just showed us. In the third chart, Donald Trump has thrown out. this idea of a 50-year mortgage. He's recently said that he doesn't want investment firms to buy individual homes. Is any of this going to help? Yeah, he repeated a bunch of these yesterday and also said he was going to make a major speech on housing at Davos next week. I'm not sure why you go to

Davos to talk about housing in America, but that's not my problem. But as you said, he's made a number of suggestions, proposals, whatever you want to call them. And let's take a look at them. First, there has been a bit of a trend of large investment firms buying groups of houses and then renting them out. But let's put that in perspective. Big investors own less than 1% of the houses. Most of them are owned by families, individuals. A few smaller investors, somebody might own a couple houses or a small apartment building, but big investors are not a major factor in this. And by the way, if they own this house, they're going to rent it out. The house isn't like going offline or something like that. So then he saw throughout the other day the idea of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which as you know,

of the big government mortgage companies buying $200 billion of mortgage bonds to try to bring mortgage rates down because, as I said, that is not something the Fed controls. Sounds like a lot of money, except for one little problem. There's $12 trillion of mortgage debt outstanding. $200 billion doesn't make a dent in $12 trillion. That will have no effect on house prices. And then lastly, they've thrown out the idea of a 50-year mortgage, instead of a 30-year mortgage, with the concept that it would stretch out payments, make payments per month lower, and thereby

make it more affordable. But let's look at the math on that. Typical $400,000 house, 6.5% mortgage, your payments would actually go down, if you went from a 30-year mortgage to a 50-year mortgage, your payments go down from $2,023 to $18. So about $200 is all you would save per month. That is not going to solve the housing problem either. Wow, a lot to digest there. Morning Joe economic analyst, Steve Ratner with his charts, Steve, thank you as always.

You know, John, we were talking about as comfortable and excited in some ways as President Trump is when he talks about scenes in the streets of Minnesota or blowing up drug boats off of Venezuela or seizing Greenland, he is uncomfortable talking about this issue of affordability. full display yesterday where he's trying to present an affordability agenda while attacking the idea that affordability is a real issue. It shows just how he disliked suggesting everything's not perfect in Donald Trump's presidency. He keeps trying to blame the policies of his predecessor. He's been in office for a year now. That act is tired. And this is, as I wrote this week, about this flurry of activity, this pure id that's been on display from Trump since the start of 2026,

Republicans still think, they acknowledge, like, this election, these midterms are probably going to be one or lost on the economy, on affordability, on prices. And the White House has rolled out a few small programs rev to see if they can tackle some of this, although even the Congress has suggested, like the credit card fee thing. We're not interested. But I know what doesn't help the economy is when you launch a criminal investigation into the Fed chair, which, of course, undermines some of the fundamentals of what provides stability for the whole system. Well, when we're dealing with interest rates, we're dealing with things that directly is impacted by the Fed. And for you seeming only on vindictive reasons and because you want

to control where the interest rates go, announce a criminal investigation. This again speaks to many American voters like we are in a place in this country that we see in dictatorships. Because what are we going after power for other than you want to control the interest rates and therefore or how you can spend the economy. And I think that this will backfire on them politically. Jerome Powell is certainly not a one you can portray as some left-wing lunatic or whatever else they call people. And I think that this is something that will backfire. And, Mika, because of all that, we've seen Republicans running away from this idea of prosecuting Jerome Powell publicly in ways they don't speak publicly against the president.

Many of them now saying, let's just turn and walk away from this issue. we've got other stuff to look at. Yeah, all right. You know, I mean, the problem is, of course, that it shakes up the markets. It shakes up confidence. That's why you had the Treasury Secretary saying, man, telling the president, this is a mess. This is a mess. Don't do it.

It's why you have Republicans doing the same thing on the banking committee saying, don't do this. This is the wrong way to go. You had the president a couple of days ago before the Powell investigation. was announced the New York Times reporting that he was yelling at prosecutors saying they're being too weak. These are the sort of things that are getting into the way the message of president needs to get out to win. Like, for instance, over the past couple weeks, he could have talked about what he's trying to do with pharmaceutical prices, but that gets drowned out by a woman

getting shot in the head at point blank range. He could be talking about trying to limit how the percentage that people can be charged on their credit cards as far as interest rates go. Free market conservatives don't like it, but a lot of Americans, a lot of independents would like that. The same thing with his proposal to stop big investors from swooping in and buying single family homes, right? That takes a lot of good homes off of the market. These are things, again, traditional conservatives wouldn't like, but a lot of independents would like, but that's never going to get through, Mika, when you're having images coming out of the twin cities of Minnesota that looks like they're coming out of Moscow or St. Petersburg.

The Besson approach is pretty simple. Don't make a mess.