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March 26, 2026; 8pm: Tonight, Governor Tim Walz on the one lie America isn't letting Trump get away with. Plus, Sen. Ed Markey on his call for oil companies to return windfall profits to consumers. And former National Security advisor Jake Sullivan on the fog of Trump with Iran.
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Tonight on all end, I thought the prices would go up more and I thought the stock market
would go down more gas prices soaring mortgage rates rising the president's broken pledge.
We will cut your energy prices in half within lock it down with and you can get very angry
at me if we don't do it.
Tonight, Governor Tim Walls on the one lie America isn't letting Trump get away with.
Plus, Senator Ed Markey on his call for oil companies to return wind fault profits
to consumers and former national security visor Jake Sullivan on the fog of Trump with
Iran.
I'm the opposite of desperate and don't care and all in starts right now.
Good even for New York, I'm Chris Hayes today is yet another day where prices are surging
people are feeling more and more squeezed and Donald Trump's polling is in the toilet.
He's even managed to hit a new low in the Fox News approval poll with nearly 60% disapproving
the job he's doing overall.
And it only gets bleaker as the polls dig into his approval on say foreign policy that
the war of choice of the run specifically.
But there he was today in a very long cabinet, meaning droning on and on and on for nearly
two hours without a care in the world.
We are begging to make a deal.
We'll see if we can make the right deal and they make the right deal and then the straight
will open up.
Just remember, remember this in a number of months from now, remember my statements.
Never an expression, a great expression, never forget, never forget.
Before the start of the Dow hit 50,000, the S&P hit 7,000.
Both of those achievements were not achievable, but this ballroom is going to be something
that's so beautiful for this city, so desperately needed by presidents.
I mean, now it's no secret the military wanted it more than anybody.
See this pen right here, this pen is an interesting example, it's the same thing.
So this pen is very inexpensive, but it writes well.
I like it.
The only president that ever took a cognitive test, it took it three times, it's actually
a very hard test for a lot of people, it wasn't hard for me.
But it's a cognitive test, it starts off with an easy question and by the time you get
to the minute it gets tougher, by the time you get to the end, very few people can answer
those questions.
They get very tough, mathematical equations and things.
For the record, my understanding is that mathematical equations are backwards from 100
by 7.
It doesn't seem to grasp that most people don't need to take cognitive tests over and
over, that maybe there's something a little strange about your doctors constantly wanting
to give you a cognitive test over and over.
But here's the thing, if you know anything about why that man is sitting in that office
today, because he won the 2024 campaign, it's that the reason that he won that campaign,
the core message, the main reason Donald Trump won was affordability.
And that is borne out in just about every bit of data we have.
The key issue swing voters cared about, people particularly that had voted for Joe Biden
in 2020, voted for Donald Trump in 2024, voters who hadn't voted in 2024 because they
were fed up, the thing they cared about was that things were just too expensive.
And Trump latched onto that message and he hammered it home in simple terms at nearly
every campaign appearance.
Starting on day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again to bring
down the prices of all goods.
We will stop the Biden-Harris war and American energy and we will drill, baby, drill.
Under my leadership, the United States will commit to the ambitious goal of slashing energy
and electricity prices by half at least half.
We intend to slash prices by half within 12 months at a maximum 18 months.
My plan will cut energy prices in half or more than that within 12 months of taking office.
That means we are going down and getting gasoline below $2 a gallon, bring down the price
of everything from electricity rates to groceries, airfares and housing costs.
Oh really, cut up by half in 12 months, 18 months the longest.
Now, here is the thing, a lot of the inflation issues really didn't have anything to do
with things that Joe Biden or Kamala Harris did.
They were a byproduct of two major things.
The pandemic and then the end of the pandemic and all that supply chain madness
and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, right?
And the other thing is things were headed in the much better direction on inflation
and affordability by election day.
The slope was going down, but it didn't matter.
Trump hammered away at that message and after he won, all he had to do, at least on that stuff,
was just kind of leave things alone.
Did he leave things alone?
No, of course he did not.
In fact, since day one, the Trump administration has acted as if they had hired
some crack team of consultants to bring in to study the problem and find all the ways
that the president of the United States could personally jack up prices for people.
Like what's in the toolkit?
Systematically doing just about everything you could do as president
to personally make things more expensive.
Number one, unilaterally by fiat attempting to impose hundreds of billions of dollars
in arbitrary tariffs on thousands of imported goods from dozens and dozens of countries.
Number two, unilaterally out of nowhere, starting a war of choice with Iran
that has caused what could prove to be the worst oil shock in history.
Number three, to capital off, bullying the Federal Reserve, the folks who are in charge
of trying to keep a hand on inflation.
Bullying them so severely, you even threaten prosecution through the Justice Department
all to try to get them to lower rates prematurely,
which if successful would likely uncork more inflation.
So here we are.
Did that promise ring true?
The price of food is up nearly 20%.
Gas is almost $4 a gallon.
Higher in some states, it's five and six out of west.
$7 get diesel, all because the war the president has started has led Iran
to shut down the shape of her moose and 20% of global oil supply.
The cost of fertilizers also up because of the war hitting farmers
who are already dealing with the loss of major markets,
thanks to Trump's insane tear of policy, petrochemicals, things you haven't even heard of,
packing, paper bag, plastic bags, all going up, mortgage rates just jumped again.
The average rate on a 30-year mortgage is just over 6%.
That is the fourth increase just since the war began.
Car payments are up, making it harder for people to buy or keep cars.
While all this happens, Trump's Treasury Secretary is out today claiming, quote,
under President Trump's leadership, we're on a path towards unprecedented economic growth
and lasting dollar dominance.
And Trump is now signing $100 bills to prove it,
literally putting his name on money, it's what you learned today,
it's going to put his signature on money, but again, he can do two hour cabinet meetings,
Scott Besson can say what he wants, people are not buying it.
It really, it's like the one lie he can't get away with, go figure.
A recent Reuters poll found that over 60% of Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling the,
look at that, look at that number, 62 disapprove, 29 approve.
That number you see right there, that is worse than even Joe Biden's lowest mark in that poll.
And keep in mind, inflation was like 9% under Joe Biden.
That number you see there, Donald Trump riffing about the ballroom and the pens and
going to Graceland, could I take Elvis in a fight?
That is a large part of why Republicans are losing special election after special election.
As we brought you the news on Tuesday, a Democrat, a first time candidate
won a special election flipping Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago state-hosted district blue,
literally happening his backyard. You can imagine what is bubbling up across the country.
It's not just like the poll numbers as a subtraction. Real people are tired
of seeing their neighbors scooped up by ICE agents, angry that their neighbors are being
silenced and killed by federal agents of the past of Donald Trump. People like Renee Good now
and now those same ICE agents are showing up your airports getting paid to watch the TSA agents work
without paychecks. It's not surprising that resistance is growing everywhere you look.
From the ballot box to the courts, the administration just lost in court today in their stand-off
with Anthropic, the AI company, to Americans in the streets. This has been building and building
up over the past year. Because fundamentally, Donald Trump thinks he's a king, wants to be a
king, and fundamentally in America, there are no kings. That's kind of the whole point.
And so back in June, about five million Americans took the streets to no king's protests.
And he did it again back in October, and even more people took the streets as many as
seven million accordion estimates. And now there is another one this Saturday. The third no kings day
protest, where millions of people are expected to turn out across the country to say, loudly,
what more and more of the country is feeling. This is not a lonely sentiment anymore if it ever was.
No war, no kings, no more cruelty and threats for our neighbors because Donald Trump does not run
this country, fundamentally we do. Joining me now is Governor Tim Walls, Democrat Minnesota. The
no king's flagship rally is scheduled in his state in Minneapolis, St. Paul and Saturday.
Governor, it's good to see you. What made you want to attend the rally this weekend?
Well, good to see you, Chris. I think it's just to be with my neighbors. I'm grateful to the folks
you saw, organic leadership on the streets that showed that peaceful protest and resistance,
standing up for human rights, constitutional rights, is proved to be a very popular thing.
And I think Donald Trump, just like so many things, breaks it and moves on. Some of its buffoonage,
Trump's takes, Trump's university, but he sent the federal government armed agents in here,
killed our citizens, did massive damage that will take years to recover from. And I did listen
in that opening, which was fantastic, Chris. The one thing Donald Trump said, I agree with the,
I'll use his line, never forget. We will never forget what happened here and we're taking action
against it. And I think you'll see it very visibly in the No Kings rallies and grateful to folks
across the country, but an ununderstanding that I think Minneapolis and Minnesota provided the
template here for pushing back on this guy. And there's work to be done. There's work to be done
because we still need justice. Well, I've been, you know, I've been texting with people that I met
when I was there. And they've said largely the same thing. There's just a lot of broken pieces.
People that didn't leave their house for 40 days, people that lost their jobs, people whose
kids schooling was interrupted. People that didn't take medicine or skip medical procedures,
I mean, it was almost like a, it was like a COVID lockdown, right? For, for some of the people
in, in your city who all these things still happen and they have to recover, how, how are people
recovering? It's horrific. There was a story in today's paper in the Minneapolis
Star Tribune, a gentleman missed his chemotherapy. Now he's in hospice. They killed him. That is
going to kill this, gentlemen. And there are hundreds and hundreds of stories of all this disruption.
They are still waging war on us. Each of these cabinet secretaries, they're withholding
our Medicaid dollars, a state like Minnesota that has some of the lowest childhood poverty rates
they're trying to make it worse, disrupted the education of our students and, and caused generational
trauma. The good news is, is nobody here is forgetting. You saw that the Attorney General
Ellison, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Murray already are suing because we're not even getting
access to the evidence so that we can do prosecutions where prosecutions are warranted. And I think
for your viewers, that is so out of the ordinary. We've always partnered with our federal authorities
when, when needed. And I made the move yesterday using my executive authority to put a commission
together. We are capturing all of the stories. We being the ACLU, a lot of groups, especially
immigrant groups, folks at the United Nations in in Geneva, are working because what happened
in Minnesota and the absolute horrific assault on this state. If this happened in another country,
it wasn't that long ago that the United States was a voice of reason, decency, and human rights.
We would investigate those things. We're going to do that here. And we're going to capture these
stories. And so if Donald Trump, like so many things, thinks he can move on from Greenland,
Venezuela, Pirate of the War, and Iran that he started, tell his, tell the final days of this
administration and beyond. Minnesotans will ask for justice. We demand it. We have to do that.
Yeah, we showed that headline that the head of Penn County District Attorney and Keith
Elles in the age of your state, suing essentially, trying to, trying to get hands on evidence,
because as far as we know, there has been no, there's been no public real investigation of
the deaths of this two citizens residents of your state. That remains just sort of floating out
there. I want to ask you too, is someone who are these people? Where are they?
And what maybe there, you know, there are some, there's some talk about how they were,
they were briefly taken off the job, but for all we know, they're back out there.
Yeah, I don't believe that they were taken off the job. And I don't believe that it matters.
Donald Trump said like he said, you know, I don't care. He doesn't care. Everything you listed
there from prices to what was done in Minnesota to what's happening in Iran and throughout
the Middle East, he truly doesn't care. And I, you know, I'm still scratching my head, who those
29% are that still thinks he's there. But look, he's not going to go silently. And I have to tell you,
I, the ICE agents in the airports, and I've been saying it, my fellow governors have been saying it,
they just subpoenaed my secretary of state and our voter rolls again, that they are definitely
going to try and interfere with the election. That's why I think things like Saturdays, no kings,
rallies like, you know, not on our watch, you're not, not on our watch, are you going to take
democracy from us? And that's why it's really important. And I keep saying whatever your lane is
in resistance, find that lane and, and, and be out there. For some people, it is marching in the
streets. For others, it's helping at food banks, for others, it's letters to the editors,
for others, it's just talking to their relatives. I'm going through that, you know, are you,
are you ready to come off the ledge now? Because we're sure ready for you to get off the ledge.
That, that point about the, the ICE agents in airports, I mean, what's become clear in what I
think we saw, reach a kind of crescendo in Minnesota now is, is, is, is Trump viewing that particular
work, workforce as kind of his personal armed agents to deploy for, for the tasks. And to
hundred percent, what you are making about this being like, oh, we're going to put them in a place
they don't belong, the airport, because we're going to be putting them in other places we don't
belong. That does seem to be clearly what is being tested here. Yeah, no, thank you for saying
that, Chris, this is, this is about normalizing. That's what they're trying to do. And they
continue to test and they continue to push and then they back off and then they come again.
It's about feeling normalized that, that this is what we have. Look, I think many of us got used
to TSA after 9-11. That was something new in airports. Many of us were used to seeing, you know,
military style police and airports in Europe and Asia. We weren't used to it in America.
Now they're trying to do the same thing, like this is a normal thing. This is not normal. These
guys aren't doing a damn thing. They weren't qualified to be here in Minnesota. They're not qualified
to be at the airport. And they are dang sure, not qualified to be anywhere near a polling station.
But I would be absolutely shocked if he is not already making plans. I mean, Democratic states
are seeing this as salt. We have the most secure, fairest elections anywhere. And they're still coming
for it. Minnesota, Governor Tim Walls, thank you so much for your time tonight, sir.
Thanks, Chris.
Coming up, should oil executives share the wealth as they rake in what truly wild profits from
Trump's work? Senator Ed Markey says, yes, he'll join me next.
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My car here typically is only $35 a film. Now it's in the $45.50 range and it's a little
ridiculous. It used to be 60 something to film my tank now. It's 90 something to film my tank,
so it's a big difference. Right now I spent $80 and I was not empty. I had a quarter of a tank.
No one is happy about gas prices spiking except for one specific select group, oil companies.
Those same oil companies whose executive Donald Trump met behind closed doors in 2024 to ask
for a billion dollar contribution to his campaign because he said of just how much money he was
going to make them as president. And boy, that proved pretty pretty prescient. By one research firm's
estimate, those oil companies stand to make $63 billion in additional profit just this year
as long as oil prices remain as high as they've been since the start of Trump's War of Choice in
Iran. Senator Ed Markey is now calling on the CEOs the biggest oil companies to take a pay cut
and lower prices for Americans. Democratic Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts joins me now.
Senator, I saw your, I think, you know, earnest but somewhat trolling recommendation of the CEOs
to take a pay cut. But I do wonder if there's actual some sort of windfall tax that could get some
real legislative momentum in the Senate or the House on a bipartisan basis if we see what we think
is going to happen if this continues. Well, exactly. Donald Trump said in this press conference
today that he was taken, he decided to take a little detour into Iran. Well, that little detour
is coming at a big price, skyrocketing gasoline prices, skyrocketing, home heating oil prices,
skyrocketing inflation. We are seeing across our economy the impact which oil and natural gas
prices have upon every single price on the prices for trips for people on airplanes for the price
of food for everything else. Who are the big winners? The big winners are the oil companies. Their
stocks are skyrocketing. The oil company executives are going to have record profits that are
going to flow into their pockets. And from my perspective, yes, they should not be taking any
salary at this time. But a windfall profits tax is something that we should be discussing because
that's all this is plain and simple. The oil companies, the gas companies, say to Trump,
will give you a billion dollars if you kill wind and solar and all electric vehicles. In other
words, true energy independence. And in turn, here is what we wind up with. Once again tied to
the oil and natural gas prices of the Middle East all to the benefit of American oil companies
and their executives. That's the crazy thing that this is happening in 2026. We got these two
headlines. So the New York Times reporting that the Trump administration is going to pay a
French company that was going to develop offshore wind. That would have been electricity for a million
homes on the East Coast. They're going to pay them a billion dollars not to do it. Okay. Here's
a billion dollars. Go away. And they're going to, I guess, invest in some natural gas in Texas.
They're going to do that anyway. And then also this, the UPS is going to start, the US Postal Service
is going to start charging an 8% fuel surcharge for package deliveries. And again, these are two places
where it's 2026. The idea that we have to still be tied to oil prices is increasingly deranged.
And lots of the world isn't, but yet we are. And partly because the Trump administration has been
going to war against all the alternatives. Look at people are paying a dollar, a gallon more
than they were a month ago. When people will have that nozzle stuck into their gasoline tank,
it's really trump at the pump. His picture might as well be on every pump in our country because he
owns that price increase. And he really owns it because he campaigned on the promise that he
would kill the alternative. He would kill the clean energy revolution, the all electric
vehicle resolution, a revolution that does not require gasoline, does not require fossil fuels.
So this is an issue which I think is about to turn like a nightmare politically on the
Republicans. They own this price. They own every single dollar that is now being paid, which is extra
at the pump. And they also are going to re-energize the clean energy movement, the climate change
movement, the union built a wind and solar and all electric vehicle revolution that we were in
the midst of until Trump made that payback to the oil and gas industry. They own this. And Trump
is right now in, he's in law, he's in violation of the first rule of, of holes, which is when
you in one stop digging. And instead he's talking about invading card, island, bombing all of the
electrical facilities in Iran, which is only going to throw the spike energy prices here domestically
in our nation. And if he doesn't stop, then there's going to be pitchforks of people who are heading
towards the Republican party this November at the polls. And the no kings rallies this Saturday
are going to be the beginning of that revolution. You're obviously, you know, I say center
represent Massachusetts. I have you here. There's been a little bit of movement on trying to find
some deal to basically give money to the parts of DHS that are not immigration's custom enforcement
and custom board protection. And particularly TSA, right, which has not been paid. We've seen the
airline chaos. Donald Trump has personally killed multiple deals that had bipartisan support
in the Senate. Today, he just, just I guess an hour ago said he's just going to direct the new
DHS Secretary Mark Wayne Mullin formerly your colleague in the Senate to pay TSA. Again,
is it your understanding that he can do that? And if he could do that, why did we wait till now?
What what do you make of that? Well, I think it's obvious that the Republicans over the last week,
nine times have turned down the democratic offer to pay all of the TSA agents. They say no every
time. But Trump has come to realize he's owning these lines that are appearing in Houston and all
across the country. And he now wants an exit strategy. And he's essentially saying that he is going
to adopt the policy which the Democrats had offered in the first place. But he had actually tied
it, however, to, let's be honest, to the Save Act, to suppress the votes of minorities, of women,
of transgender Americans. And he was really, honestly, it's really the Save Your Ass Act,
because the prices are so high for every good in America that the Republicans are going to pay
the price this November. So finally, however, he's realizing that this TSA airport crisis is
something that he's owning and he's now looking for an exit ramp. And let's hope that Democrats and
Republicans can come together and finally solve this, just taking the solution that Democrats have
been offering for a week. Yeah, if he's going to tell him to do it, just say yes to the deal that
Kennedy and Schumer are made and vote it through and sign it tonight. Senator Marky, see, I'm
I'm solving problems here. Good to have you. Thank you. Great to be with you. Thank you.
Still to come, Joe Biden's National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, a man who actually sat
across the table from Iranians during the negotiations over that nuclear deal on Trump's war
and where it's headed next.
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The more you listen to Donald Trump talk about his war of choice in Iran, the more frankly
desperate he sounds to cut a deal with someone, anyone to run who can get him out of it.
He keeps saying they're sending him presence and they're begging him to do a deal,
but they keep trolling him and saying he's making it all up. Today, he responded.
And they'll tell you we're not negotiating. We will not negotiate. Of course they're negotiating.
They've been obliterated. Who wouldn't negotiate? They are begging to make a deal. I mean,
I read a story today that I'm desperate to make a deal. If I was desperate, he'd be the first to
know me. Let's get that out of there. I'm the opposite of desperate. I don't care.
Does he sound like the opposite of desperate?
Yesterday, people familiar with the matter, children of the Wall Street Journal. The president
thinks the war that he launched is now distracting from his other priorities, you know,
like the ballroom and stuff. And he'd like them to find a way out of it fast.
That's even as he's moving thousands more US soldiers and Marines into positions for ground
operations and threatening to keep the bombing going. That could just be for leverage.
The problem for him is that Iran now seems to hold the most important cards,
including the straight-of-form moose and control of 20% of the world's oil flow.
Jake Sullivan served as national security adviser under President Joe Biden and he joins me now.
Jake, it's great to have you. I imagine that thinking through all this is something that happened
in the White House when you were there. And you have a particular insight into this because you
were involved in those that first round of Iran negotiations and the nuclear deal. So from where you
sit, it seems to a lot of us like they didn't have much of a plan B. They thought maybe hey,
we'll do this big strike. The whole thing will tum, you know, crumble. And now Iran holds this
key leverage and Trump is looking for an exit. How does it look to you?
Well, Chris, I think you make a really good point. They made two assumptions going into this war
that were completely faulty. The first was that dropping some bombs, taking out the supreme leader,
striking regime targets would lead to rapid regime change. And we've seen reporting in recent days
that this was being pitched by Israeli intelligence to both the Israeli Prime Minister and the American
President that regime change would come quickly. The second faulty assumption they made following the
12-day war last year was that Iran wouldn't fight back. That Iran would basically sit and take it.
That all these years that people have warned about the risks of military action against Iran,
those people making those warnings were just wrong. They were chickens and the United States could
strike basically with impunity. And that's proven to be totally wrong. Iran has struck back and
it struck back by holding at risk this vital artery of global commerce. And it's put President
Trump in a box. And so now he sits at this intersection down one path lies an effort to just get an
off ramp and end the thing. And I think he's quite tempted by that. And down the other path lies
the very real risk of escalation and the introduction of American ground forces into Iran.
Men and women who would then be putting their lives on the line for a completely unclear
objective. And right now it looks to me like the President is just trying to buy time because he's
not sure which way to go. You obviously, I mean you've sat in the situation room, your
national security adviser. We've just got reporting for the Wall Street Journal that just happened
five minutes ago. The President is considering another 10,000 troops to send to the region.
Does that look to you like that's where this is headed right now?
I think there's a distinct possibility of it. You see the movement of paratroopers from
the 82nd Airborne. You see the movement of a marine expeditionary unit. And now you have
discussions about sending additional forces. Frankly, that report of additional forces doesn't
surprise me because I'm confident that the chairman of the joint chiefs and the commander of
central commander telling the President, if you're going in on the ground in Iran, it's going to
have to be really heavy. And I'm confident they're also telling the President, we're going to take
real losses. And I think the question the American people should be asking for what?
Because right now it seems to me that it doesn't look like these guys know what they're doing
because they don't know why they're doing it. They have yet to really lay out for the American
people what the actual objective in this war is. And in the absence of that, I think you get this
kind of strategic drift. Even despite the efforts of the US military to achieve tactical objectives,
the lack of a strategy is the thing that hangs over this like a very dark cloud.
Do you think there's strategic tension between what Israel wants out of this war and was able to
convince help get the President's help and this is a long-standing objective in Netanyahu
by his own admission and indeed boasting? And what the US gets out of this war?
Absolutely. It's no secret that Prime Minister Netanyahu has had a 40-year mission to
take military action against Iran and to get the United States of America to join him in that.
And he's going to multiple presidents to President Obama, who I work for, to President Biden,
who I worked for, who said they would not go to war against Iran. They would look to try to
solve this problem diplomatically. And even President Trump in his first term said no to the idea
of going to war against Iran. It's only now that Prime Minister Netanyahu has a willing participant
in President Trump, but their objectives are quite different. Israel at the end of the day
would be perfectly happy to have Iran basically broken and in chaos. And for Israel, the
state of war is not the central issue. What is the central issue is a weakened Iran by any means
necessary. For the United States of America, we need to see the bigger picture because we have
responsibility for a global economy that has a huge impact on our economy, for the price at the
pump for our people, for not having a chaotic outcome in which you have massive refugee flows
that could have produced the same kind of destabilization we saw after the Syria crisis.
These are the things the United States of America as a global superpower has to worry about
that Israel does not, and therefore there is a significant divergence in the ultimate objectives
between the two countries. The two presidents you worked for did not go to
with Iran and left one of them negotiated that deal while you were there. I have seen some
be largy, and I want to get your response to it, that the kind of carte blanche that the Biden
administration gave the Israeli government in its pursuit of its war in Gaza. And again, it
wasn't just Gaza. It was Lebanon that was bombing that happened in Syria as well. And also a kind of
high that Israel got over the military dominance, right? That we're sort of going after our foes
left and right, and it's all working, is part of what led to this moment where they didn't think
Americans are going to stop them, that they had gotten, kind of gotten whatever they needed from
the Biden administration, and also that they had total military superiority over everyone,
let's go to Iran. What do you think of that? Well, I'm glad you asked that, Chris, because first
when it comes to Gaza, I think about this every day, what we could have done to end that war sooner,
and what we could have done to end the suffering sooner. When President Biden left office,
there was a ceasefire and hostage deal in place in Gaza, but it would have been better if we could
have brought that outcome about before the end of President Biden's term. But in the broader sweep
of things, when you look at what President Biden did with respect to Israeli military action
vis-a-vis Iran, twice Israel sought to take really significant military action against
Iran, and twice President Biden said that he thought there had to be limits on what Israel did
there because it implicated American interests, and twice Israel listened to that. That was in 2024
in both April and October. So a massive difference between the way President Biden approached Israel's
strategy with respect to military action against Iran, and what we've seen from this President,
who in fact has put American men and women at risk, has cost American lives, has put American
troops in harm's way, American civilians in harm's way. So I think we've seen just a radically
different approach from this President, and I think we should also say, at the end of the day,
for whatever Israel has done here, you cannot let Donald Trump off the hook. He is the President
of the United States. He decided to put America at war here. He decided to launch this military
operation, and he should own the consequences for that, and not try to slough them off on anyone else.
Yeah, it's a good point. He could always say no. He's the commander. It's the US Army.
He gets to say no, and he said, yes, Jake Sullivan, great to have you come back anytime.
Thanks for having me. Still to come, the second oldest President reminds the country nobody. Nobody
has taken more cognitive tests as he has next. Donald Trump is 79 years old, and if you're
looking for signs, he is on top of his game mentally, of an economic downturn and a costly war
with no end in sight, watching him talk and talk and talk for literally our city was not particularly
encouraging. So this pen is very inexpensive, but it writes well. I like it. He said,
I'll paint it black. I said, that's nice. And I can even paint the White House on it, sir,
if you like, in gold, almost real gold, not bad. And I can even do your signature, sir,
but the bottom line is the better pens. It's a business story. So for five dollars could be zero,
but for five dollars, I get a much better pen than for a thousand dollars.
Someday they'll discover a paint that would look like gold, and the guy's going to be the richest
band in the world. I'm the only President that ever took a cognitive test. It took it three times.
Nicky McCarram-Mira is a politics reporter for Rolling Stone, Lydia Polgrain,
an opinion columnist in your New York Times, where she writes, it's not Trump, it's America,
and they joint me now. Lydia, I've been having flashbacks a lot during this last few weeks to
2020 COVID. Because it was also a situation where there were real stakes and a real emergency
with real lives on the line. And the President, A, couldn't really focus, and B, thought he could
kind of talk his way out of it. Remember when he would do the two to three-hour press conferences?
And watching that cabinet meeting, I had the same thought of like, he thinks if he talks enough
that that will overcome the things in the real world. I mean, this is the story of his whole life,
right? I mean, he's someone who is managed to get out of scrape after scrape after scrape by
just kind of talking his way through whatever messes in front of him. The problem with the crisis
that is in front of us right now is that it's ultimately a material crisis. And it does not seem like,
okay, the oil futures are trending one way. They're not quite as bad. But at the end of the day,
you either have a barrel of oil. That's right. You don't. You either have the little plastic
needles that you need in order to make polyethylene to put our carrots and bags, or you don't.
And so I think at some point, the reality is going to come crashing down that we need stuff,
actual stuff, which is actually exactly what happened with COVID. We actually needed real things,
and there was a huge supply chain. That was, I remember screaming at my television,
the virus doesn't care. It does, it's a period where he said, I don't want him to come off the ship
because I like the numbers where they are. And it's like, it's not the numbers. It's the actual
thing. And it's the exact same dynamic here. Yeah. And I'm glad you brought up COVID, because when I
saw the news today that he's putting his signature on American currency, the first thing I thought of
was the Trump series. The COVID checks. Yes. But again, like you're saying, we're in a completely
different material context right now. It isn't the government giving people money that they're
going to spend to stimulate the economy. What's going to happen is if we have an economic crash,
if food gets more expensive because we don't have fertilizer, it's going to be Trump's signature
on the extra bills that Americans are then handing over at the pump, at cashiers, because there
is another price shock that we were promised was not going to happen. You know, part of what is so
strange about watching, again, the public performance of the presidency and the administration
over the last three weeks, they took this incredibly consequential decision. And Trump seems like
immediately bored by it. He's just not that, like he wants to talk about the ballroom. And not
only that, because he seems bored by it. And because they're not, they don't, they haven't even
gone through the, they didn't before the war, try to make an argument. And they haven't even tried
to propagandize the war since it's been going. Yeah. So this today, this was JD Vance, who has been
extremely mumm on all this. JD Vance, who's very mal the individual and likes to post all the time,
who's been pretty silent. Giving his argument for why we had to have this war, which really, again,
for people with a certain cohort from the post 9-11 generation, it was like really playing the hits,
take a listen. It's options to ensure that Iran never has a nuclear weapon. You talk about
people who walk into a crowded supermarket and have a vest on and they blow up the vest and a
couple of people get killed and that's a terrible tragedy. What happens when what's on the vest?
It's not something that can kill a couple of people but can kill many, many tens of thousands of
people. Like dirty bomb suicide bomber, I was like, I haven't heard that one in, I mean, it's like
you said they're playing the hits, right? I mean, you and I are similar age and we live through
the post 9-11 time and all of the fears that came out of that. But the reality is that we just
live in a completely different world now. And this just doesn't work. I mean, it really doesn't work
not because it isn't possible that there could be terrorism in this country. No, in fact,
that's a thing I genuinely worry about with this intelligence apparatus. Absolutely. But I also
think like this is a country that has also become incredibly inert to death. I mean, we went through
COVID with a million Americans died and people are like, oh, well, let's just get back to life.
We live with school shootings. We live with assassination attempts and successful assassinations.
We are a society that's just completely suffused by violence and we just kind of accept it as normal
reality. So it's not surprising to me that these tactics don't actually break through.
That is such a profound point. I hadn't thought about it in those in those terms.
No, and that's why I really enjoyed reading Lydia's piece today about how this situation,
people are reading it the way they're reading it, not because the United States messed up,
but because the rest of the world didn't create the conditions for the United States to just
waltz and do run. And Vance's comments speak to me of someone who is grasping for another reason
to keep this war going. When he can't admit that we might have been bested, we might have
misread the situation. Yeah, I want to read from that. He said, is Trump a freak of
history or a fulfillment and aberration or a culmination? The answer surely is both. But in the
course of his presidency, Trump has revealed a much older malady. America's unshakable faith
and its ability to shape the world to its liking indifferent to what others might want and supremely
confident its plan is the right one beyond Trump. It's the disfiguring mentality we Americans face.
And this helped me formulate another thought I had, which is that the first year was all about
bringing sort of his authoritarian wannabe monarchy king domestically. And he got a lot of friction.
And there's, I think he thought there'd be less friction outside the borders. So he starts
doing the airstrikes and it's like, oh, who's going to stop me? And then he does vent as well.
I was like, look at this, I'm on a roll. And it's like, oh, I could just do whatever. There's
who's going to, and then it's like, oh, no, no, no, there's actually other stuff. There are other
people in the world. There are other people of interlives. And they're able to
to affect our lives, right? Because I think the whole Trumpian illusion is that you can just float
through the world always, you know, always unaffected by, because you're so big and so powerful,
you're too big to fail, you're too big to be affected. And that has been the kind of
American way of operating in the world basically since the end of World War II. You know, we're the
superpower. We can do whatever we like. And when things go wrong, you know, well, you know,
it's not our problem. Or it's something that we did. And we actually are as omnipotent as we
think that we are. And that omnipotence in this moment, I think, is just being shattered.
Because we're living in a world where we actually, it's very clear that we can't control outcomes.
And, you know, Trump can get up there and say, well, you know, Iran has to, you know, we don't,
we don't need the the straight of war moves. It doesn't really matter us. We don't use it.
I mean, we do use it because we are part of a giant interconnected global economy.
Everybody uses it. Yes. I mean, it's such a such a good point. And I don't think he's going to
try to talk his way out of it, but it talk is not going to be what's good. It's either he's either
going to escalate or we're going to get some deal. I prefer to laugh, or honestly, Niki McCann,
Ramirez, Lydia Polgrem, great to have you both. Stay tuned because in just a few minutes,
Governor Mikey Cheryl of the Great State of New Jersey is going to be joining Jen Socke
on the briefing. We'll be right back.
That does it for all in. You can catch us every weeknight at eight o'clock on MS now.
Don't forget to like us on Facebook. That's Facebook.com slash on with Chris.
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All In with Chris Hayes
