Morning Joe - Trump approval rating continues to sink ahead of midterms

Episode Date: October 9, 2026

October 9, 2026: 8am — Trump approval rating continues to sink ahead of midterms 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.

New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani is calling for ICE officers to leave the city after an agent shot a Dominican man inside an SUV with a young child inside the vehicle. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch identified the victim as 28-year-old Oscar Belgaal. He was in the Marble Hill neighborhood on the border of Upper Manhattan and the Bronx. Tish said Belgael was pulling into a parking space when a federal officer in plain clothes approached with a gun drawn, followed by another federal officer who was also not in uniform. Belgall started to pull the car forward, and then at least one of the officers fired seven rounds hitting the man below his left ear. Here's what Mayor Mamdani had to say about the shooting last night.

Ice agents surrounded the man's vehicle before opening fire. They wore construction vests and masks that concealed their faces. There was no reasonable way to identify them as ice agents. School had just gotten out. The street was crowded with families and children. When ice agents opened fire, a five-year-old child, a five-year-old child, was in the backseat of the car. Thank God that child. is physically unharmed.

We know that ice is rotten to its core. Today's shooting is only further devastating confirmation of what we have long known, which is that ICE operates with impunity, that they sow chaos and terror across our country, that they have killed far more of our neighbors than they could ever have claimed to save. Now, the police commissioner also detailed Belgall's criminal record, saying he'd been arrested on a robbery, charge in 2023. He later pleaded guilty to grand larceny and was sentenced to probation.

Belgall has also been arrested on a drug sale charge in a case that hasn't yet been resolved. And of course, that's what they'll talk about. But think about this. A lot of anger in the streets of Manhattan last night. Just put yourself in the scene here. You're in a residential neighborhood. Thursday afternoon. It's around 4 o'clock. You've gone to pick up your children from school. They just let school out of Marble Hill. Sidewalks were filled with parents and school children. And you heard Mayor of Mom Donnie talk about ice shooting with impunity,

sowing chaos and terror? Well, as school is let out in New York, that's the time an ice agent unleashed a hail of gunfire. into a car that had a five-year-old baby sitting in the back seat. The man in the car was hit in the neck. He survived. The boy, only by the grace of God, was not hurt. Now, DHS will only talk about the man's prior arrest.

Okay, great. We know about the man's prior arrest. They immediately dive into that. Yeah, but what they find? Okay. Check. But they don't talk about how every other law enforcement agency in America would have gone in and gotten that man peacefully out of the car. They don't want to talk about that.

No, no. They don't want to talk about why an amped up federal agent sprayed bullets in the direction of a car on a crowded street in a residential area at school pickup time. You know, police departments across America, we've talked about this nonstop. Everybody knows this to be the case. We've had commissioners come on time and time again telling us, law enforcement agencies like the NYPD have spent years learning a hard lesson that they live by. Don't shoot at moving cars. Don't you park cars because it rarely stops the danger.

It just puts more people in danger. It just puts more people in the line of fire. Almost every department limits it and most ban it outright. And the reason is simple. Bullets don't know what children are sitting in the backseat of those cars. This isn't about whether immigration law should be enforced. You know where I stand. That debate, though, will go on.

This is about whether enforcing them gives anyone a license to keep gambling with the lives of five. year old children with Americans, with immigrants, twice in Minneapolis, killing Americans, killing immigrants in Maine, killing immigrants in Houston, and now shooting into a car in New York City. You know what? They may not know it, but ICE got lucky this time. But luck is not a policy. And luck, Willie, is not what, what, what, those children.

that are let out of school at 4 p.m. in the afternoon and walking home with their parents, that luck is not what they should be able to depend on. This whole idea about immigration, we're going to make the streets safe from gangs. Really? Really, why is it that these communities, if they were supposedly supposed to protect, they're actually scared of these ICE agents who act like thugs, who aren't trained, who carry around guns, and shoot wildly and depart or move, slowly moving cars.

It is beyond outrageous. Yeah, I mean, you just laid it out really well, Joe. Imagine you're sitting in a car, whoever you are, and people walk up with masks on and construction vests holding long guns. You might drive away. You might try to get away from those people to protect yourself and the five-year-old child in your backseat, right? Maybe you would if these people didn't identify themselves.

And then as you said, and we've said a million, times before. The NYPD or the smallest small town police force in America does not shoot into cars to make arrests. If you can't apprehend somebody with all those agents, even if the guy pulls away, you call ahead to another car, they pull the guy over, you get the tag number, and you make the arrest. The same thing we said in Minneapolis, the same thing we've said in Maine, in Texas, and all over the place. This is just not how it goes. It's not how it works. You don't shoot into a car. Any car, certainly not one with a five-year-old child in the back at four o'clock in the afternoon in Upper Manhattan at school pickup time. The details of this are horrific. The man was here

illegally. He had been convicted of grand larceny. All those things are true. But that's one set of facts right there. But if you cannot as an agency arrest a person without firing seven shots into a vehicle, then there is something rotten to the core. And the New York Police Department obviously has distanced itself from this and said, we had nothing to do with this. Obviously, this is not how we apprehend criminals. They are left to do the investigation. And the scene and the eyewitness accounts were hearing from, you know,

the child being left in the back seat of the car while the man got out, holding his neck, calling for help as people called 911, people trying to get to the five-year-old who was crying in the back seat of the car and the ice agents keeping people away. Just another horrific scene in America that is completely avoidable by a group of agents who have quotas now. They have to meet certain numbers. We're hearing they're going to have 5,000 more of these agents in the street by the end of the year. This is not de-escalating. This actually is ramping up at this point. Along with Mika, Willie and me, we have the co-host of our 8 a.m. hour staff writer at the Atlantic Jonathan O'Meer Managing Editor at the

Bullwark Sam Stein and CEO and co-founder of Axis, Jim Vanda. You know, Jim, our first story, we were going to be talking about Donald Trump's just shockingly low approval ratings, but we don't really have to explain why, do we? I mean, we got a month to go to the midterms, a month to go to the midterms, and you look what Donald Trump's doing every single day, every day. And it seems like he's working overtime to agitate, to irritate, to piss off the very voters he and Republicans need to win in November. And here you have, again, a Pew poll. Pretty good standard here. Go back to the last, please. Because this number is, I've seen this once before in my life. Can you go back to the last screen, please? 30% approval rating. I saw that in the final days of

of George W. Bush's presidency, Jim, and the only other time I saw it was following Donald Trump trying to whip up an insurrection where a bunch of cops got the beat out of them. Four died, and his approval rating dropped to 30 percent then. It's back at 30 percent now,

right before the election. And every day, every day, it seems like he and Stephen Miller and everybody in that administration are working overtime to bring their numbers down and destroy the Republican majority. Yeah, as you were mentioning, for people who you can dismiss a poll here or there, 30% is almost impossible to achieve just because you have locked in hardcore partisan.

So it just shows that even Republicans, not a bunch of them, but certainly non-self-identified mega- Republicans, are turning against him. You've seen this in state after state. Part of it's linked to what you were talking about at the top of the show. I think the American people have now been very clear what they want, right? on immigration, you want to lock down the borders, but they also want to treat people humanely. So when you see images in city after city of people getting roughed up, in some cases, getting killed, when people know that we rushed the training of a lot of people and then said, hey, let's go be hardcore against anybody who looks a certain way or might be suspected of being here illegally, people respond negatively, and you're seeing this.

You saw it last night in the debates. We had huge debates in three big states, and the common theme was basically Democrats taking Trump up on his offer. He wanted to make the election about him. They said, good, let's make it about you. We don't like your war. We don't like your tariffs. We don't like the economy. We don't like ice.

We don't like your acolytes who were running against, who happen to be losing in states that you should be winning. We don't talk enough about that. The fact that you're having to be competitive in Iowa and Kansas that you're going to lose potentially badly in Georgia shows you that. that 30% is now starting to be contagious. It's trickling into states that just should not be competitive for Republicans. Republicans privately, you know, you have the same conversations I do. They just had it because they're just begging Trump to stop doing things that seem to make it. Somebody needs the spine in the party.

All right. So, John, they're Republicans are so. Spinless. They're so upset. Jim brings up a great point. You talk to the republic. I mean, at this point, a lot of reporters aren't you said, we're not even talking to Democrats anymore. Because we're going to get the quotes from Republicans.

They're the ones who are really angry at Donald Trump right now. And we'll be right back with more Morning Joe. Coming up, our next guest is on for his exclusive interviews with some of the top musical stars across the world. I caught up with YouTube creator, musician and producer Rick Beato, possibly the most powerful voice in music right now, who took me inside his Atlanta studio, that conversation straight ahead. Last month, we welcomed around YouTube creator,

musician, music producer, Rick Biodo to Morning Joe. Now, Beato interviews legendary artists and acts on his YouTube channel. He currently has more than 5.8 million subscribers. And prior to that online startup, he spent decades working as a university music lecturer, multi-interested and audio engineer, and a record producer. But where he finds himself now is being one of the most important persuasive voices in music. I had a chance to visit a studio in Atlanta to see what the buzz was all about. I stumbled across you on YouTube maybe three, four, five, six months ago. I had seen you.

I'm like, who is this guy? And the more I dug into it, just the more remarkable this story has been. And then when we started talking, I found out you haven't been doing this for 50 years. Like, you stumbled onto this 10 years ago. How did that happen? So I was posting videos on YouTube to start. share with my mom early on, and that's pretty much all I use YouTube for. I had this viral video that I did with my son Dylan on Facebook in December of 2015. And Dylan has insanely good perfect pitch.

One of my friends wanted me to make a video to show his wife, a country artist I was producing. So I was like, Dylan, come on downstairs. I don't want to. No, just come on. It's going to take one minute. So he comes down and I do this quick ear training thing. Okay, here we go. A. C, C, C, B, A, A, one. So I made this video that's a minute 20. I put it on Facebook. Got 80 million views altogether. Oh my gosh. And then people wrote to me from all over the world, how can I, can you teach me this? Music Conservatory is everything. You've gone from, look what my son can do. to interviewing Billy Joel.

When you're playing at Madison Square Garden, how many times you played it or 150 times or something like that, sold it out? 150 lifetime. Does it ever get old? No. No, that never wore off. Playing at the garden was a blast from beginning to end.

I didn't even want it to end, but I thought, I've been here for 10 years. It's time to move over. Don't overstay your welcome or leave before they kick you out. Right. Right? And everybody in between. Yeah, tell everybody. I mean, all the people, some of the highlights from Stain. In modern music, most of it, you're in the circuiter, you know, trap really.

It just goes round and round and round. It fits nicely into the next song and the next song and the next song, but you're not getting that release, that sense that there is a way out of our crises. and we are in crisis. The world is in crisis. David Gilmore, Brian May. I've interviewed, I mean, so many people. Talk about Brian May.

It's fascinating how you connected with Brian May. So one day, this is back in 2020 or so, I get this DM on Instagram, and I was like, who's Brian Harold May? And I click on the profile. It's like, oh, it's Brian May. It's Brian May. And Brian said that he had watched my videos and would love to chat sometime.

And so I wrote him back. I said, could I interview you for my channel and do a breakdown of Bohemian Rhapsody? He said, absolutely. And I said, can you play guitar or two in the video? We did it remotely. and he was incredibly great. No, you can't list one favorite interview or one favorite artist you've dealt with. Can you give me two or three that have really stood out over the past decade?

When I interviewed David Gilmore at his studio in Brighton, England, Darkside was such a massively big record, right? And you must have had this feeling like, okay, so how do we, How do we top that? Yeah, the idea of topping something was never, never something that consciously came into my thinking. I just, every time, think, let's do the best thing we can do. That was amazing. Now, didn't you interview him in New York?

And then he said, if you want to, you can come over. To sit there with him, he had all this gear. It was better than that. I listen to Comfortably Numb with David Gilmore sitting there. Talk about the devaluation of music. Buying a record, you'd take it out of the sleeve and the inner sleeve and you'd lovingly, ritually place it on the thing and the stylus would go on and the white noise. That was a religious exercise for me.

That used to be a massive experience that connected millions and millions of people across the globe. Talk about how that's been devalued by streaming. Well, the loss of the physical medium, in that case, the LP, you have a big square that has a lot of information on it. Lyrics, who produced the record, the session players, if there were ready, who mixed the record. I think that devaluation, you pay one monthly fee and you get all music for that cost. Whereas we used to save up, Joe, right, to buy an album? Right. And you would share your music that way.

And now, what does it mean? You turn on the thing, you turn it off. You turn it on, you turn it off. Does it blow you away all the people that you grew up listening to who are now watching you? Well, the one thing that blew me away was I made a video about a Johnny Mitchell song, Amelia, a few years back. in 2021. And I got an email from her assistant a couple weeks later. And she said that Joni watched my video. No way. And she said that and Joni went on to watch other videos of mine and said the next time I'm in L.A., Johnny liked to take me to dinner. Wow. About six months later, I went to L.A. and I had dinner

with Joni. You did not. It was amazing. Oh my God. We had dinner for three hours together. And she was incredible. What songs will be heard in a hundred years? Well, I always start with, well, what songs that we listened to from 50 years ago? Right. Because they've already lasted that long. If you look at the Eagles, for example, Eagles have all these incredible hits, their greatest hits records. But really, if you go to Spotify, what songs are they streaming, Hotel California?

Right. And these people's careers that you think these songs will last forever, get distilled down to a couple songs. They're the ones that survive over the course of 50 years or so. historically what has lasted Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, things like that have lasted hundreds of years. So the thing about Bach and Beethoven and Mozart is that there weren't definitive recordings, like there are the Beatles and the Stones and Led Zeppelin and you name it, Stevie Wonder, Prince. They have the definitive versions, whereas there's millions of versions of the Bach-Goldberg variations and things that are Beethoven symphonies.

So the fact that you can reinterpret things that way actually gives life to the music beyond when the composers were long, long past when the composers were living. U.S. Ambassador to Greece and Donald Trump Jr.'s former fiance, Kimberly Guilfoyle, pushed a Trump donor to send her $100,000 to pay her American Express bill last year. Honey, please, I need you to get this done for me today. Adding a prayer hands emoji and a PDF with Bill Pinkin. and instructions from American Express. Wow, that was not subtle. Usually it's meet me in the parking lot with a suitcase full of bills, but Gilfoyle was like,

here is a PDF with instructions for how to send me a bribe. Please send the bribe today, honey. Man, if the Justice Department still existed, you'd be in so much trouble. And damn, $100,000 credit card bill. Ah, now her current government. job makes sense. We need a new ambassador who really understands Greece. Kimberly, you're deep in debt. You'd be perfect. The Daily Show there. Our second day of state, Marco Rubio, and Vice President

J.D. Vance were both asked to respond yesterday to that Wall Street Journal report that found Kimberly Guilfoyle, I asked a Trump donor to send her $100,000 to pay her amex bill last year before her confirmation as U.S. ambassador to Greece. The newspaper reviewed hundreds of messages. emails and letters. And in one text, she wrote, quote, honey, please, I need you to get this done for me today. You could just send it here. Here's how Rubio and Vance responded yesterday. So I'm not going to comment on a story that literally posted a few hours ago. I get the game. I've been in this for a long time with an hour some member of Congress will write you a letter demanding you answer questions to something. We've never seen before. I don't even know if it's true

and not true. What I find with these stories is that you never want to comment in a purely abstract way because a lot of times the details really matter and the details in the context inform the reality of the situation. So of course, I don't like anybody selling access to another government official, certainly a high-level government official, but, you know, I assume you're talking about a specific case, and I can't say with confidence that the case you're talking about is actually reflective of the way you're describing it. Now, the Trump donor, the go file press for money, man of Eric Dieter, didn't ultimately make any payment to her. He spoke to MSNAV's Peter Alexander yesterday. She ambushed me out of the blue with this $200,000 American Express offer.

And she offered me to be her ride and die forever if I did this. Kimberly Gilfoyle is a grifter. Kimberly Gilfoyle, I have no doubt, has done this to more than me. She's doing it right now in Greece. I cannot stand Kimberly Gilfoyle. Kimberly Gilfoy is a wicked evil person. She thought I was going to be a sucker and I'm not a sucker. The State Department in the White House have not responded to requests for comment. A lawyer for Gilfoyle said the ambassador disputed the

authenticity of the messages obtained by the Wall Street Journal but did not provide any specifics. Let's bring in contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, Molly Zhang Fast. Molly, I mean, it's preposterous and yet she's very real chance in the Trump administration face no consequences.

Well, we, this story reminds me of Trump 1.0. where stories started to come out that were sort of almost unbelievable, but sort of made sense. And what we're seeing here, we're seeing more and more stories like this. And that's because I think these people are reading the polls and they see that the house is very likely to flip. And so there's more headwinds for this administration and more leakers. And we've seen a bunch of leaks this week about the inner workings of the White House. you know, different people lobbying for different organizations, foreign countries. And so I do think

once those start historically in Trump administration, or at least in Trump 1.0, it's hard to get them to stop. Yeah, and certainly we could have some investigations if the Dems do indeed flip at least one house of Congress. Up next here on Morning Joe, despite its growing popularity, Meta's new AI agent is causing privacy concerns for its users. We'll tell you the information some say the tech is releasing without permission. Morning, Joe. We'll be right back with that. A live look just outside at Times Square just before 9 a.m. here on this Friday morning, and it is time for some business before the bell. Meta's new AI agent, Muse, is gaining popularity by taking on everyday tasks from canceling subscriptions to negotiating online deals. But some users are deleting the tool over

privacy concerns, including reports of unauthorized messages and personal information being shared. The controversy highlights the trade-off with AI agents. The more access they have to your digital life, the more useful and potentially risky they become. Meanwhile, there is a huge due player in the world of TV, streaming news, and media. In a massive $110 billion deal, Paramount Skydance finally completed its blockbuster takeover of Warner Brothers. discovery. That hands CEO David Ellison control of one of the world's largest entertainment companies. For more on that, CNBC's senior media and tech correspondent, Julia Borsden, who spoke with Ellison Ellison earlier this week. Julie, great to see you. Tell us more about this interview and how,

frankly, the world of media entertainment, basically anything that involves a screen, has now been reshaped. Yes, the consolidation in the media industry is now happened. We see the merging of these two major media behemoths, Paramount and Warner Brothers Discovery now into this new company, Skydance. I spoke to David Ellison, who's been working to get this deal closed for a year. And he told me that there's so much concern about how they're going to be achieving the $6 billion in cost savings that he promised. And while job cuts will be part of it, that he will not be relying entirely on job cuts. And he said he sees a lot of opportunities to do cost cutting when it comes to some logistical things, things like procurement, and also integrating the technology

stacks to help save money without focusing just on cutting jobs. It also sounds like this can be a long process of pulling these two companies together, figuring out how to integrate their streaming services. But another key thing he noted is he said one reason he's been spending so much time in Washington, D.C. over the past year is not just to get this deal closed, but also because he's pushing to get a federal tax credit for film production to help make it cheaper for people to shoot here in the U.S. There's been this challenge of so much production going overseas. He said this bill, if it gets passed, he is hopeful it will by December 11th, could save billions of dollars for the industry and then also be really beneficial for the new skydance company as well.

Julia, you are also the host of CNBC's ChangeMakers podcast, which is officially launched its second season. In season two, you focus on female leaders at the forefront of the AI revolution. Tell us what we can expect from the podcast and also the fourth annual women transforming business list. Yes, thank you so much. I'm so thrilled to launch season two of the change makers podcast. We are focusing this season on AI because not only is AI the most transformative technology that we perhaps have ever seen, but we're seeing a gender gap form around it. Women, according to various studies, are more wary of using AI in the workforce, which poses a widening gender gap in the workplace and especially around things like pay and promotion. So we are focusing on women who are using AI in their work and their lives. My first interview was with Gina Raimondo, former U.S. Commerce Secretary, who is now devoting her life to reskilling and upskilling the American workforce to help make sure that workers are not left behind through her organization, race. us. You've got to check out that interview. And my podcast that just launched this week is with

Google Deep Minds Lila Ibrahim. Lila Ibrahim. And her job is to get the world ready to embrace AI technology to help be a force for good, whether it's around education or healthcare or drug development. So with so much concern and fears about the impact of AI, this is a great look at the women who are driving positive change and using AI. to help their customers and the workforce. And next week, we're going to be launching our podcast with Kate Ryder. She runs the women's healthcare company called Maven. So we have a bunch of great podcasts coming up this year,

including with Paris Hilton, who has a whole AI initiative as well. And then for our fourth annual CNBC Changemakers list, which is coming out next year, you could submit nominations online now. And if you want more on any of this, go to CNBC.com slash changemakers to learn more. Season two of CNBC's Changemakers podcast out now. Host and CNBC, senior media and tech correspondent, Julia Borson. Julia, thank you so much for joining us this morning. And congrats and all that you have going on.

We're going to close this morning with an update with what was our top story yesterday. My exclusive reporting that there were some in the White House who were advocating, striking Iran again before the midterms and pushed the Pentagon to provide plans to do just that. Now, Trump, you know, was torn on this. You know, he had foreshadowed there could be strikes after the midterms, but seemed to be warming to the idea of striking them first, something that many Republicans think would have been a terrible idea because it would just put the war in the headlines again. We know how unpopular this war is. That I would perhaps just hurt Republicans' chances in the midterms. You know, but Trump yesterday responded to our reporting, didn't dispute it, but simply said we won't be doing it, seemingly making a decision that they will not strike Iran.

before the midterms, didn't say anything about afterwards. Molly, your quick take here. I mean, it's such a deeply unpopular war. Going forward with it would have seemed to be, in many people's eyes, a political mistake. Right. And especially when you think about, like, the problem in the heartland is this very high diesel prices, which people can see are completely tied to the war in Iran. So I think bringing it back into the headlines at this moment, especially in light of

that we're like less than a month from the midterms, would have been a real mistake. But of course, there is the possibility that Trump is bluffing and may carry through with these attacks. We do know that more U.S. military assets are heading towards the region, whether they use them at all or before or after the midterms remains to be seen. We, of course, will be following this story. This does it for us this morning. Thank you so much for watching today and all week long. We'll see you Monday at 6 a.m. for another morning, Joe.