This Sunday, risk management. After the collapse of two US Banks, Washington moves in to stop a widening panic. Americans can rest assured that our banking system is safe. But did the government's actions actually make the system healthier?
Allies Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Plus close encounters. A Russian fighter jet collides with a US Drone over the Black Sea. We know that the intercept was intentional.
We know that the aggressive behavior is intentional. As tensions escalate, Vladimir Putin gets ready to welcome Chinese President Xi Jinping at what could be a pivotal moment for the war. While the GOP's top 2024 candidates no longer see supporting Ukraine as a bio national security interest. The greatest threat to Western civilization today is not Russia.
It's probably more than anything else ourselves. Is the party of Ronald Reagan now embracing isolationism? Alas, Republican Senator Mike Browns of South Dakota. And a call for protest.
Former President Donald Trump claims he will be arrested and calls on his supporters to protest as he faces the possibility of an indictment in New York City. As his legal threats grow, Trump tries to use this case about hush money and affair to distract from the more serious charges he faces in Washington and Georgia. The prosecutor in New York has done more to help Donald Trump get elected president than any single person. Joining me for insight and analysis are NBC News White House correspondent Carol Lee, former White House press secretary Jen Psaki, former Republican congressman Carlos Corbello, and New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker.
Welcome to Sunday. It's Meet the Press from NBC News in Washington, the longest running show in television history. This is Meet the Press with Chuck Todd. In a good Sunday morning, brace yourself, folks.
It is going to be a whirlwind of a week. It starts with the Russian president. He's hosting Chinese President Xi Jinping in Moscow. It's a pivotal moment in the war.
That means on Monday, China is considering whether armed Russia because Russia's in desperate need of munitions for the war. TikTok CEO, under pressure for the Biden administration which is threatening to fully ban the world's most popular rap in this country, will be testifying on the Hill this week. And already former President Donald Trump is attempting to create a circus like atmosphere, hijack the media narrative calling for protests ahead of what is an expected indictment sometime this week. It would be the first indictment of a former US President in American history.
But we're going to begin with the economy three years ago this week. We probably need a little perspective here, folks. The world began a complete shutdown. Countries began sealing their borders and social distancing became a Catchphrase this impacted our economy.
Three years later after 760 million reported Covid cases worldwide, nearly 7 million deaths from the virus. We all like to memory hold Covid but the fallout has been impossible to ignore. 47% of Americans admit it. They say their lives will never return to pre pandemic normal according to Cal.
Inflation of course has been a big fallout from this shutdown and it remains stubborn. Government day on Tuesday show the prices continue to rise. In February, the Fed trying to slow the economy gradually to curb inflation has been raising rates at one of the fastest rates in decades pulling back on so called easy money policies. Supply chain has been slowly recovering and unemployment rate is super low 3.6%.
Families dropped out of the workforce, labor for participation rate as well off pre pandemic highs and we have a labor shortage because of our strict immigration policies in this country. And now the US Economy has remained resilient despite all these challenges is facing this new test, a crisis in the banking sector. After the failures of Silicon Valley bank and Signature bank on Monday, ratings agency Moody's cut its overall outlook for our banking system from stable to negative. Markets had a volatile week down on Friday as regional bank stocks continue to slide.
The Fed is also going to be meeting this week and they're going to consider another rate hike. Washington is divided though about what right now can be done to stem this crisis. I'm going to ask Congress from the banking regulators to strengthen the rules for banks to make it less likely this kind of bank failure would happen again. And joining me now is Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.
She is a member of the Senate Banking Committee and frankly has been warning of something like this happening after the 2008 decision to roll back some of these regulations on mid size banks. Senator Warren, welcome back to the press. Thank you. Good to be here.
Let me just start with the big picture question. Last week you seem to believe we were out of the woods. Do you still feel that way? This weekend I saw some disturbing news about Credit Swiss that happened essentially ended.
We got more mid sized banks, can't find buyers. Is the contagion contained or not? Well, can we just start though? Just let's roll this back just a little bit about what went wrong.
Remember Gary Becker and the other CEOs of these multi billion dollar banks came to Washington back in 2016 said lighten the regulations on this. Donald Trump ran for president saying I will lighten the regulations on these big banks. He gets put in and he puts in bank regulators who lighten the regulations. He Then goes to Congress and says to Congress give them the authority to lighten the regulations even more.
And Congress, with help from both parties, obliged him. Then Jerome Powell just took a flamethrower to the regulations, weakened them, weakened them, weakened them, weakened dozens of the regulations. And then the CEOs of the banks did exactly what we expected. They loaded up on risk that boosted their short term profits.
They gave themselves huge bonuses and salaries and exploded their banks. So the problem we now face is twofold as you describe this. What are we going to do to make sure that the banks across the system are stable? That is these big banks, the little community banks, they're doing great.
But these banks, they're multi billion dollar banks. How are we going to make sure that they are stable and that we've got a set of rules in place going forward that will keep them safe? So I want to see an independent investigation that doesn't just get to investigate itself. I want to see us make a change in the laws, roll back the rollbacks to put tougher regulations in place.
And we finally need to step in and say these bank CEOs we've got to align them so that there are clawbacks, they're giving up on these big salaries and they don't get to go into banking again if they explode a bank. So that's how I see the overall system right now. Okay, but what about in the moment? How concerned are you about this moment, about this unraveling on us in the next couple of weeks?
Well, in the moment we've got the federal government obviously taking extraordinary action. They've done it to back up depositors. And I think it's fair to say that depositors should be able to take a pretty deep breath about the federal government indicated there's going to be a lot of for you. But we have to worry about how much risk is in these multi billion dollar banks because it's perfectly clear that these regulators were asleep at the switch.
And we get to that, I mean, because you know, there's some Republican lawmakers that are arguing, look, that the 2018 law itself didn't, didn't tell the Fed not to regulate these banks, that essentially if they wanted to be on top of them, they still could. Where do you fall on that? Is this more on the Fed or more on the law that was repealed? It's both.
And because what the law specifically said is here's regulations, you got to roll back, but mostly the door is wide open to roll back those regulations. And you know how I know that? Is exactly what the effect of the law was because Jerome Powell said so. He stood out after the law was passed, he said whoa.
That he was going to weaken a whole slave regulations. And why it in the same sentence? Because Congress just told me to. So there's, there's plenty of working together to weaken regulations.
And look, that's why now what we need to do is we need to go back and take that provision that we passed in 2018 and just roll it back out and say no, the Fed doesn't get that ability to just go to sleep when they have ultimate supervisory responsibilities over these multi billion dollar banks. Last fall you were written a letter to Fed Chair Jay Powell. You and a lot of monikers concerned about the rapid rise of interest rates. At the time you didn't mention the impact and potentially on banking investments.
And perhaps there's a reason you should have. At the time you were more concerned about his intended goal of raising the rates. Considering another rate hike is on the table. Do you think it would send a bad message to the economy that maybe our banks are unstable if he doesn't keep on this path?
Or do you think he should keep going if that is his intent and raise a quarter point? No, I do not think he should raise rates. But look, I want full disclosure here. I've been in the camp for a long time that these extraordinary rate increases that he has taken on, these extreme rate increases are something that he should not be doing.
And the reason for that is twofold. Well, twofold. The first is to remind Chair Powell he has a dual mandate. Yes, he is responsible for dealing with inflation, but he is also responsible for employment.
And what Chair Powell is trying to do, and he has said fairly explicitly, is that they are trying to in effect slow down the economy so that this is by the Fed's own estimate, 2 million people will lose their jobs. And I believe that is not what the Chair of the Federal Reserve should be doing. I want to make a second point on inflation as well, though there are other drivers of the cost increase, for example, price gouging, supply chain kinks, the war in Ukraine. Raising interest rates doesn't do anything to solve those problems.
All it does, at least by the way the Chair wants to do this is put millions of people out of work. I opposed Chair Powell for his initial nomination, but his renomination. I oppose him because of his views on regulation and what he was already doing to weaken regulation. But I think he's failing in both jobs, both as the oversight and manager of these big banks.
Which is his job and also what he's doing with inflation. If at this point I am curious, do you think it sounds like we are never going to let a bank fail? Is that a mistake? Is it okay for banks to fail?
Yeah. I always want to start in this area with the resentment that our community banks feel the regulators for years have let them fail and they really have to bear the consequences if their balance sheets are not solid. Now fortunately right now their balance sheets are very solid. They know their business and they're in a secure place.
But these multi billion dollar banks. I think the thing that just downright offends me is that Gary Becker and these other CEOs were coming to Washington telling Donald Trump, telling the Republicans, telling Congress they pose no risk. They should be treated just like those small community banks that know their communities and don't take on much risk. And look, these are guys who figured out they could make a lot of money by loading up on risk.
Look at just the piece on inflation. They made the bet that inflation would stay at historic lows forever. Now why not? Because they're not smart.
They made that bet because it cost money to hedge that bet. And that would have been into profits and that would have been into the bonuses they got. So that means this is why I have to underscore this for these big banks that could take down the banking system, that could take down a lot of small businesses and medium sized businesses. We've got to have tough regulators.
That means, I'm going to say it again, we've got to have an independent investigation. Powell needs to turn around the regulations that are in place right now. Congress needs to step up and roll back the changes that were made in 2018. And we need to hold these CEOs accountable.
That's how we have a safe and secure banking system. It's pretty clear you don't have confidence in JPYrum. Look, my views on Jay Powell are well known at this point. He has had two jobs.
One is to deal with monetary policy, one is to deal with regulation. He has failed at both. Right. Would you advise President Biden to replace him?
Look, I don't think he should be chairman of the Federal Reserve. I've said it as publicly as I know how to say. I said it to everyone. All right, a couple of quick other topics.
A TikTok band. There is some thought of trying to pass this in a way this restrict act that we essentially would target companies like TikTok that have relationships with a perceived enemy like the Chinese Communist Party where Are you on that? So, look, there are two parts to this for me. One is the question about ties to the Chinese government.
We have problems with a lot of companies with ties to the Chinese government. We should certainly take a close look at that. That's what CFIUS is about. We should be careful with that.
But the other is the question of privacy overall, about the information that's being gathered about individuals and how that information is being used. For example, here we are in the wake of Roe versus Wade being repealed. Texas putting a $10,000 bounty on people who help someone perform or get access to an abortion. What kind of information is being collected off people's telephones, and how is that information being sold to others?
This is a much bigger problem that Congress needs to look into. Calling this a TikTok problem by itself, I think really misses the elephant in the room here. And very quickly, a lot of progressives not happy with the recent moves by the Biden administration. Immigration is one of them.
The D.C. crime bill is another one. But the one that I think perhaps some people see a lot of synthesis behind is the decision to approve a massive new drilling project in the Arctic. What do you make of these moves by President Biden?
Are you supportive of them or how critical are you of them? No, you just named three in a row that I oppose. I thought they were wrong. I said so publicly.
I've written letters behind the other hand. I. Yeah, look, I want to be clear, though. Joe Biden, I don't agree on everything, but I'm really glad he's President of the United States in the middle of this banking crisis.
He's kept a steady hand. He's done the things that keep us safe, and I appreciate that. He also is someone who has really pushed hard. Look at this latest budget he's put out.
He said to the Republicans, you guys want to say that you want to bring down the national debt. I know how to do that, and that is make the wealthy and the well connected pay their fair share. He said he wants to put money into universal child care, lifting children out of poverty. And he's already delivered.
He's delivered the biggest climate package in the history of the world. And now watch a special smile for me, paid for by my 15% minimum corporate tax on billionaire corporations. So he's got a lot that he's gotten done. He's got a lot that he's doing.
We don't agree on everything, but boy, I'm glad you don't think these moves demoralize any of the supporters is more progressive supports. Look, whenever someone's not doing whatever it is any one of us wants to see them do, of course, you stay in the fight and you try to persuade them about the rightness of your position. You try to urge them to find other ways to accomplish their goals. But to protect our lands, to protect our nation, to protect our economy, we need a president to do that.
And I'm grateful to President Biden for as much as he's done. Elizabeth Warren, Democratic senator from Massachusetts, appreciate you coming on, sharing your perspective with us. You bet. Thank you for having me.
When we come back with Ron DeSantis joining Donald Trump in questioning the importance of Ukraine to the American national interest. It's worth asking, is the party of Ronald Rating now in prison isolationist? Republican Senator Mike Brown from South Dakota, welcome back. The Republican Party's rapid shift towards isolationism accelerated this week after Floyd Governor Ross DeSantis decided to align himself directly with Donald Trump on the issue of Ukraine.
And he did so by sending a statement to Foxes Tucker Carlson, who's been a huge critic of this war while the US has many vital national interest, he writes to Tucker Carlson, becoming further entangled in territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them. Desensitis statement comes after Biden reputin prepares to host Chinese President Xi Jinping and Moscow. The meeting begins tomorrow. And it's a week when a Russian fighter jet intentionally intercepted a US Rome and it forced it down into the Black Sea.
Republican hawks have hit back at the desensitis common. Senator Lindsey Graham even told the New York Times, quote, the Neville Chamberlain approach to aggression never ends well. Comparing Desantis to the infamous British prime minister who famously appeased Hitler in Iowa on Saturday. Former Vice President Mike Pence also weighed in.
The war in Ukraine is not a territorial dispute. It is a Russian invasion. Anybody that thinks Vladimir Putin is going to stop if he takes Ukraine has what we say in this part of the country. Another thing coming.
Well, joining me now is Republican Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota. He happens to sit on two committees that are pretty front and center right now. The topic we're discussing today, armed services and banking. Senator Rounds, welcome back to the press.
Hey, thank you very much. Appreciate the opportunity. Let me start actually with a quick banking related question. It's a similar question.
I Senator Warren, are we out of the woods in the next few weeks before we debate the longer term issue investigating and new regulation? Are we currently out of the woods or not? The weekend's headlines seem to indicate we may not be yeah. My personal take on it is that it may take a couple of months to work its way through the system.
I think we're going to be moving the right direction. I did agree with what the Fed did and the treasury did over the weekend to stop the bleeding, so to speak, on the immediate aftermath. But longer term, I think a lot of our regional banks and the smaller banks in particular are going to want some reassurances that they're going to be able to compete with the big ones, the big five. And so I think it's going to take a couple of months for consumers outside to recognize that all of these banks are stable.
Should we. Is it okay, let a bank fail? Let's think about this just a second. We talk about allowing a bank to fail.
If it's one thing to say it's okay to allow the owners of a bank to lose their resources, it's another thing to say that the depositors should necessarily be allowed to, to lose their deposits. That's the reason why we begin with a quarter of a million dollars in protection. Perhaps that's not enough. We started 200,000 two years ago.
We bumped into 250,000 per deposit then. The question is whether or not that's still appropriate as things rise, as we have inflation and so forth, should we bump that up? The other pieces is whether or not within the commercial marketplace, among the banks themselves, can they arrange for things such as interest rate swaps and so forth, can they use those to actually protect themselves a little bit better, kind of like buying reinsurance on those accounts? So I think among them, there are some tools out there.
The real question is whether or not all the banks are taking advantage of the tools available to them right now. All concerned though, by protecting all these deposits, we're sending a message to the real high stakes private equity folks that you know what will always back you up, even if you make a stupid bet? No, look, and that's a really good question, but you have to remember that because of dodgefront to begin with, we've identified that there are a group of banks, the very largest, that we've identified as being too big to fail. And they are significant to the entire financial services of the United States.
And therefore it is suggested very strongly that we won't let them fail. Now the question is, does that mean that they should have a competitive advantage over small and medium sized banks when it comes to trying to lure depositors in? We want to make sure that the tools are available for those smaller banks to be able to spread the risk. And so that if a depositor comes in, a lot of businesses will have more than a quarter of a million dollars in their accounts.
When they do, should they be able to be assured that there are commercial products available the banks are availing themselves to so they can actually spread that risk out. And those depositors then know that they're safe in the smaller region, regional banks, and that they don't have to move the deposits to a bank that may very well have challenges because they're so large, but that they have the backing of the federal government behind them. They're a city. And I want to make sure that we don't skewer the competition between the very largest banks and those very, very needed medium and small banks that really do the vast majority of the commercial lending in the small communities across the entire United States.
Seems pretty clear to me. You do not believe that the 2018 rollback of a medium sized bank regulation was a mistake. So do you blame regulators for not overseeing this bank better? Well, let's go back in and just make it clear that this was a liquidity problem with regard to the failure with the bank with SDB right now.
It was not a capital problem. And when we talk about the liquidity problems on it, even if you would have had the liquidity requirements that would have been there before 2155, what we did in 2018, this bank would have qualified already. There would not have been a change in terms of what happened. Even if, even if they would have failed the test, which they would not have, but even if they would have failed the tests at that time under Dodd Frank, they still would have simply purchased more of those long term Treasuries and been solid again.
So, no, it's very, very clear that the portions of 2155 that were done in 2018 did not impact this particular issue. The real question is why didn't the managers at SVB take advantage of a lot of the tools that were available to spread the risk out? Why did they use interest rate swaps for a period of time and then basically for the year previous to their failure, they quit using them? And why did they not have a chief Risk officer in place from April until December?
Why did they have a CFO that was operational during the previous year? Those are the types of things that the investigations should focus on. And then whether or not the actual auditing organizations, the California Banking Commission and the San Francisco Fed, did they do the audits appropriately? Were they providing adequate oversight?
Okay, let me move to what I started Our conversation with, in introducing you, and that was Governor DeSantis designation of the war between Russia and Ukraine as a territorial dispute. You agree with him? Look, I don't think it's a territorial dispute. While he may be taking territory, and it's technically accurate to say that there's territory being taken, this is bigger than that for us.
What our major issues are, number one, China is our near peer competitor. They are our focus right now. Russia is right behind them. But in this particular case, you have a couple of items that bring it all together in the big picture.
Number one, when we pulled out of the Afghanistan, the way that we did that sent a message about Xi Jinping and the Putin, that we were withdrawing from the net, from the international scene and that maybe they could test the waters about whether or not we would actually exercise our capabilities internationally in the future. So taking out the issue of Afghanistan and then moving into the fact that Putin now tests the waters by walking in or attempting to take over a sovereign state right next to them that we had back in 1995 agreed that they would have sovereignty over that specific part of the land. Well, Xi Jinping looks at that and says, I'm going to watch this very carefully because Xi Jinping would like Taiwan. And he's already committed that one way or another he's going to give back.
He wants to see how we respond and whether or not we can keep our allies together, whether or not NATO stays together or whether or not it strengthens NATO. So this is a bigger picture than just territory. You think the governor is misinformed? I think we have to stand strong.
I think it's misinformed or primary politics here? Well, I think primary politics may very well have something to do with it, but I think it's also a matter of looking at the big picture. And I'm not exactly sure yet because I haven't seen the entire interview if perhaps part of it was taken out of context in terms of how does that, how does that measure compared to other issues? And do you look at the border as a big issue?
Do you look at the economy as a big issue? Do you look at China as a big issue and do you try to separate those out? I just think that what's going on in Ukraine can't be separated out from the major issues surrounding the United States relationship with China. Unlike yourself, Governor DeSantis rarely allows reporters to ask follow up questions.
It was unfortunately in a statement to an infotainer. Let me ask you about former President Trump and his call for protesters to the Manhattan courthouse next week. Think that's appropriate behavior to begin with? Let me make it clear.
There's a difference between the former president and what he did on January 6 as the President of the United States and his call for support at the Capitol versus an individual person today asking people to show up to protest if he is indicted and recognizing that, I'm assuming that you're talking about the possibility of which has not yet. We have no idea happened. And second of all, we don't know what the indictments would be. So we're kind of getting into some grounds which we're making some assumptions that we don't have a whole.
I understand there you at all concerned that this only adds to distrust? You know, it's sort of almost. He's fomenting the distrust. Yeah.
Look, I don't know if he's fomenting distrust or not, but clearly we don't know whether or not this is actually going to happen. We don't know whether or not there's actually going to be an indictment. Clearly, he's following some leaks, apparently, that are coming out of DA's office that should not happen. But most certainly you don't want to have any threats towards the implementation or the attempt to implement justice.
And that's something you always have to take seriously, whether it's from an individual person or a former president of the United States. I'm just curious if you ever had second thoughts about your decision not to vote to convict after January 6 with former President Trump. It's very clear in the Constitution and the way the Founding Fathers had laid that out, that you were looking at whether or not an individual was the president of the United States or was just an individual at the time of that trial. Mr.
Trump at that time was an individual. He was not the president of the United States. Founding fathers clearly did not want indictments to start on former presidents. They didn't want that to happen.
They saw going on in England at the time. And most importantly, they don't want and they didn't feel that it was appropriate to go back in and find former impeachment. You could bar him from ever running for office again. That was the point of that exercise, actually.
The idea behind an impeachment is to take away the shield of office. That's all it does. After that, other things can occur. But.
But right now the shield of office is gone, and now it's up to the courts. All right, Mike Rex, Republican senator from South Dakota, from governor of South Dakota. So it's always Good to get your perspective on here. Thanks for coming out and sharing.
Good to see you. Thank you. When we come back, President Trump says he expects to be arrested and he's calling on his supporters to protest. Why is he doing this?
What does he think he gets out of this? Welcome back. Panelists here, NBC News White House correspondent Caroly Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for the New York Times, former Republican congressman Congress Barlow, Florida and Jen Psaki, who is here on the debut of the host of her show Inside of Jen Psaki launches today at noon after you watch the show, of course, on MSNBC and stream on Peacock. Welcome and congrats.
Thank you. So very exciting. Thanks for doing a little pregame with us, Carol. I want to start with what the former president is up to.
This was a strategic decision. This is a campaign strategy. You know, they don't keep it a secret. They know, they believe focusing on this Manhattan case will essentially trickle down.
Sort of what the steel LCA did to the Mueller investigation, they hope Manhattan Dal and Bragg does to the special counsel in Georgia. Is this the strategy? Yeah, that's exactly right. And we've seen this playbook before.
It's trying to pre buy, set the tone, create the narrative. The president, the former president stepping out, saying that he's going to be arrested on Tuesday, which his spokespeople then had to say. No one's told them that. The president, former president cleaning this from news reports.
And this is something I'm talking about Republicans over the weekend where they feel like this helps Trump get some attention, gets him fundraising. It puts him out there in a way that he where he's the victim. He gets support and he gets his supporters right about this, but hurts the party which wants to talk about inflation and Joe Biden and crime and issues like that. And so once again, you're seeing Republicans having to answer this question of whether they feel like the president is being wrongfully targeted.
We're seeing him try. Also hijacked the press here a little bit, hijacked the media narrative. He did it so well in 15. This is an interesting first test here.
It is. But you know, let's just step back for a second. Like traditionally, politicians want to capture the media cycle by some remarkably good, successful thing, not the fact that they may be arrested. This has always been the case.
I know. Right. But you know, yes, it's a tactical, you know, am I getting ahead of the curve? Am I going to appeal to my political base or anything?
Let's not forget that this might be the first time in American history that the foreign presence has been indicted. Now, it's not for the big crime that a lot of his critics would like to have in charge of, which of course is January 6th. And the effort to overturn an election, it seems small by comparison to that, but it may only be the first of many. I think we're going to the next two months is going to be really momentous potentially for our rule of the game when it comes to presidents and foreign presence.
What is accountability? How do we look like the justice system? Do we look like this partisan? How do we play it out?
It's going to be a really important test of our system. Carlos was an interesting back signal that they put out because it works. Kevin McCarthy put his own statement a couple hours later and he said this. Here we go again now.
Racist abuse of power by radical VA who lets violent criminals law because he pursues political vengeance against President Trump. And then he promises to have essentially an investigation of the investigators to see if there are politically motivated prosecutions. He's getting the party leadership to support him. I mean, McGrown's doing it, but you do see the House Republicans doing it.
That's right, Chuck. This is a Trump trap. Right? Republicans need to check the box, appease Donald Trump and then put some of their more vulnerable members in peril.
This is good for the Trump base. And a lot of House Republicans for the primaries, of course, depend on that Trump base. But this is bad for those majority makers, Right? And there's only five, really.
I mean, it's a five seat majority. So these members, I'm taking people from south Florida suburbs, Long island, all over the country, I mean, they don't like this. This is a distraction, as you said, for the party, it's very harmful long term. But for Kevin McCarthy, someone who's had a little bit of unstable situation in the House a few ago, to his credit, I mean, the House has been relatively quiet for some time.
But this is one of the ways that he guarantees that stability by appeasing Trump. Jen, you know, it's interesting. Albert Bragg, there's some people gonna claim that he was bullied into this and then I can just see this inevitably, right? He was gonna get blamed if he didn't do it.
And there are gonna be others that are gonna blame him for ruining the other prosecutions. Right? Like, no matter what, he seems to be in a no 1 situation. That's right.
And Trump knows that, as everybody on this panel has been saying. And so his statement yesterday and the surprising Thing to me was not about I may be arrested on Tuesday. Even though we now know that he doesn't know any more than maybe we do. It's that he was sending a bad signal to his party.
Go after the D.A. i'm going. Let's create some manufactured outrage because we want to delegitimize him before he does anything at all. And a lot of people followed suit.
Kevin McCarthy, Marjorie Taylor Greene, even Vice President Pence followed suit. And that's his whole goal. They're doing what I want them to do. And ironically to me, the biggest element of Republican presidential race had not.
And apparently it had to do with Governor DeSantis aligning himself with the sort of isolationist winning his party. The Wall Street Journal editorial board, Paul Joe and company called it his first big mistake. Mr. DeSantis has sounded more hawkish not Russia in the past.
And the press will play those up as contradictions. Walsh Journal pray forgetting that it is press. This could become less a policy issue than a matter of character. What does Ron DeSantis believe anyway?
It's a big moment. It is a big moment, Chuck. If you look at it, it's the first time that Ron DeSantis has had to weigh in publicly on a national issue that's not related to his home state. And so it was a bit of a test.
And Republicans of them privately say that he failed. Wall Street Journal says that probably would say that he failed the test. Trump light essentially doesn't work and that he could have taken a position that would have set him apart and he chose not to. And I put up these numbers here.
Wall Street Journal editorial page may be part of the Republican establishment, but it's not where Republican voters are on aid to UK Republicans are not divided on this. It's two to one that are done that want to limit the amount of new funding and weapons to Ukraine here. What's going on your party, Carlos? Well, Chuck, but I think their point about credibility is valid.
Ron DeSantis has been a hawk his entire career. He would come on the House floor, he would come in with letters advocating for a muscular foreign policy, having the US Lead in places like the Middle East, Latin America. So now you know, this sharp turn to the left, to the right u turn, whatever you want to call it is strange and it isn't believable. And by the way, if you want to beat Donald Trump in a Republican primary, you're not going to do it by being a cheap imitation of Donald Trump.
Ron DeSantis has a record of Rama Say a Ford is doing well, you know, by many metrics, yet he's choosing to follow Donald Trump. And that just doesn't seem like it's going to work long term. Do you think did you expect that Israel actually he might be able to frame or heat the Ukraine issue is all his. Is he comfortable with that?
He might be. I know that it's just about Ukraine. I think it's about are you up to the task of the job? Can you meet the commander in chief test?
Biden has decades of experience. China is watching what Trump and DeSantis say. Putin is watching because guess what, it doesn't stop in Ukraine. And that's something even Republicans have said about DeSantis and Trump's comments.
It's about larger values. The Russians must be very happy. The top two Republican candidates are now taking the position that what they're doing is okay. It's fascinating.
Right now everybody else is on the other side there. I'll be curious to see how long everybody else stays there next. Since the midterms election deniers have actually won campaigns for state party chair positions in Colorado, Kansas and Michigan, we're going to show you how the GOP underperformed when they put known election deniers on the top of their ticket. Welcome back to download time.
As the Republican Party gears up for 2024, they can't seem to leave behind the 2020 presidential election with many Republicans still refusing to accept their acknowledge that Biden actually won over Trump. In fact, just last week, the Colorado Republican Party decided to select an election denier to be its chair following the state parties in Michigan and Kansas that both did the same last month. This is after the 2022 election result and new data from some research at Stanford University shows that the political pickle Republican Party has put itself in when it nominates these election deniers. It cursed them at the ballot box.
These elections in Niagara Republicans. According to these Stanford researchers, they do get a 2 percentage point bump in Congress. But what happens is even if they get the nomination, it costs them on average 2.3%. They did this study across the board.
Obviously it'll go up and down. Let's look at these grouped four candidates. All of these folks from Carrie Lake to Tim Michaels Dixon to Astriano, Pennsylvania. They all benefit from being elected in Irish.
They won their primary because of it thanks to Adam and Trump endorsement. And look look at 2.3% might have been the difference she was an electionary like might actually be governed in Arizona today. The Wisconsin rates would have been A coin flip Obviously this is on average so I don't know if it would have closed the mark there either Michigan or Pensacola but this would have changed the landscape there. And what does 2.3 percentage points mean?
This is this is what the overall DSS will look at this in the 2020 presidential election. These are the states that were decided by less than 3 percentage points. So the Republican Party has to ask itself election denialism is this the road to 270 electoral college? According to this fact, it is not.
Before we go to break, I meet the Press minute this week. There are questions right now about whether the GOP is still party Reagan who's been discussing on the show well back in 1991 with his boss facing a primary challenge from an America Firster on the right defense agree dictionary warned against isolationism in the GOP and it happened to be 10 days before Kel Korbach's resignation which of course formally brought an end to the country known as the Soviet Union. Secretary, you're a politician. As a politician can you admit that with Pat Buchanan running a serious challenge against President Bush in the New Hampshire primary on a platform of America first, you are seriously constrained on how much taxpayer money you can pour into the former Soviet Union.
I don't think that's the problem at all, Bob. I think this dichotomy between foreign policy and domestic policy or the future of what happens inside the Soviet Union somehow is unrelated to and separate from what happens here. Homes is hogwash. It's not true.
And American people so this kid didn't understand that we have spent trillions of dollars building first class defenses and winning the Cold War because of what was going on inside the Soviet Union. What goes on inside the Soviet Union has a direct impact here at all. I think you have to be naive to assume the American people don't understand it. One of the first sovereign countries have to break up the Soviet Union Ukraine.
When we come back, how Republicans with the help of a Texas Democrat sabotage Jimmy Carter's re election. The secret finally revealed after four decades. Welcome back. As we indicated, I want to do a little update on TikTok.
TikTok CEO Carol who gives some important news here is going to testify this week try to save his company from an American fan. It's pretty clear the politics he is China's actions in Moscow has only made his job I think impossible. What you expect? Well it's not going to be a friendly crowd obviously but one of the things so currently TikTok says it has 100 million people in the US who are active, regular users.
What I'm told is that the CEO is, when he testifies on Thursday before the House committee, that he's going to say that number is now jumped to 150 million users. So that's relevant because as Washington sort of figures out what to do with TikTok, they had this review and national security review going on for three years. Congress is trying to figure out what they want to do with it. It's just becoming more and more entrenched in Americans daily lives.
And so one of the things you're going to see TikTok do is pull out a lot of stops this week. They're bringing these creat leaders to Washington, and these are people who are small business owners, entertainers, things like that. And they're gonna make an economic argument. So they're basically going to say here, look, if you ban TikTok, it's going to hurt us financially because we rely on TikTok to basically build our businesses and things like that.
And so even though there is YouTube and there are alternatives, it's gonna be tough. TikTok has a big reason, so they're trying that. And then just look at these numbers. Shock.
It's very young. It's like 31 is average age. And so that, politically speaking, could hurt Democrats if there was a ban because younger voters are more likely to support Democrats. It's very fraud circle impacting.
Yeah, potentially. I mean, it is so hard to reach young voters. This is always a challenge for every Democratic candidate, no matter how hip they are. And so TikTok is a platform where it doesn't require Joe Biden or Kamala Harris to do TikTok dances.
They can go on there and do policy, have conversations with creators and reach that audience they're trying to reach and been playing around with this at the White House. They use. They meet with TikTok, they both use TikTok and criticize it as an influence operation. Think about this.
Democrats, including Joe Biden, do that with Facebook. They do that with Twitter. You can't take yourself off the field of these things. So they're doing that while criticizing.
Yes. Peter Baker, you had an incredible scoop for. It would have been huge news in 1980, I'm sure Jimmy Garner, who may be watching now and absorbing this right now, obviously he's been in hospice care and a suspicion that the hostages were held out from being released for politics. You've got confirmation from a former Democrat.
Yeah, for years, of course, a carpool suspected something happened There to keep the hostage in around until after evidence that investigations that went, books written and so forth, nobody ever actually kind of proved it. But we now have testimony from an on the record source. Ben Barnes, a former Texas lieutenant governor, very widely respected Democrat in his state, powerful figure in his time, tells us that he took a trip in the summer of 1980 with John Connolly. John Connolly been the Texas governor and Republican presidential candidate, Secretary of Treasury for Nixon.
And during this trip around the Middle East, John Connally told all the Middle east leaders, get a message to Iran, tell him to hold the hostage until after the election. Reagan will be better than Carter. We've never had on the record source like Ben Barnes telling us a story like this before. And most intriguingly, he says that when they get back from the strip, they meet with Bill Casey.
Bill Casey, who's the campaign chairman around right now. We don't rage anything about it. We don't know anything from Casey has passed Connolly's past. Obviously, we cannot really verify the story 100%, but Ben Barnes has a lot of credibility and it's hard to imagine why we make this up at this point.
It's astonishing. We wonder, Carlos, very quickly, why Americans believe conspiracy theorists. Well, there are. There are some conspiracies turned out to be just not as many as people's.
Before we go up, a quick opportunity for you to see one of the terrific films we screen at this year's film festival, the Recall refrain, to explore the aftermath of the 2016 sentencing of that Stanford swimmer named Brock Turner. The Recall, a California judge, Aaron Persky. The role of the legal system in seeking justice for sexual assault victims. It was a terrific documentary.
You get to watch it tonight for free on one of our platforms, nmc, Universal, msnbc. And it'll be streaming on Peacock as well. Enjoy it. That's all for today.
Thanks for watching. We'll be back next week. Because it's Sunday, it's Meet the Press. Hey, it's Kate Snow, NBC News anchor and host of the Drink.
This month, Demi Lovato is my guest. The global superstar tells me that she is the happiest she's ever been right now. But getting there, it wasn't simple. Demi opens up about starting in Hollywood young and why she now thinks she may have started too soon.
She talks about recovery, her new marriage, and the deeply personal reason behind her new cookbook. The Drink is always about the journey to the top. And this was an honest conversation about what that takes. Hope you'll listen and follow the Drink wherever you get your podcasts.