Deadline: White HouseJune 25, 202640m

“The dismantling of the asylum system as we know it”

Showing mention at 7:01 — highlighted below

Transcript

119 segments
0:00

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Hi there, everyone. It's 4 o'clock in the East. It has been the promise of America since before our founding that we as Americans will serve as a beacon for those seeking refuge from other parts around the world. But today, Donald Trump's Supreme Court destroyed that promise, effectively slamming our doors to those who need us most. In a pair of rulings, the Supreme Court dismantled the asylum system as we know it. permitting Donald Trump functionally to end temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of refugees from Haiti and Syria. The decision has implications for refugees from at least a dozen more countries. It dealt to strike a blow to the ability of refugees to claim asylum in this country at all. Both decisions were split six three along ideological lines with all three liberal justices dissenting. The liberal justices do not hold back in articulating their outrage and their dissent. Here's Elena Kagan on the role of race. in Donald Trump's decision to end temporary protected status for certain countries. The Justice writes this, quote, the majority claims to see no evidence that race played any role in the Haiti decision, but the evidence is there plain to see in the president's statements, which the majority, and for that matter, his own lawyers, cannot even bear to repeat. So, here's some of those statements. Haitians in the United States, quote, probably have AIDS. And Haiti is a, quote, shithole country, which is, quote, filthy, dirty and disgusting. And Haitian immigration is, quote, like a death wish for our country. And Haitians, along with some others, are, quote, poisoning the blood of our country. And this, quote, why is it we only take people from shithole countries like Haiti and Somalia? Why cannot we have some people from Norway and Sweden? The majority briefly replies that those remarks are not overtly racial, but it is hard to know what that means. Haitians are black, Norwegians and Swedes, not so much. The statements fairly shout in their racial undertones and overtones alike that race entered into the president's resolve to remove Haitians from this country. The injustice of that decision is further compounded by the court's other decision today, which allows Donald Trump to prevent any new asylum claims whatsoever. Here's Justice Sotomayor on that ruling. The court today blesses the executive branch's decision to slam the door shut on all who are fleeing persecution, despite the detailed inspection and asylum system that Congress enacted in commands. Congress passed the Refugee Act in 1980 because it did not want this country to repeat the mistakes of its past. The consequences of today's decision are predictable. More people will die. More people will attempt to cross the border illegally, and some will make it while others will not. More people will turn back and be subjected to violence because of something they cannot or should not have to change about themselves, such as their race.

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Their religion, nationality, or political opinion. Donald Trump's Supreme Court, making a mockery of the words emblazoned on the Statue of Liberty, quote, give me you're tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, is where we start today. Andrea Flores is here. She's the founder of Securing America's Promise and a former DHS official and White House advisor in the Biden administration. Also joining us, senior editor and legal correspondent at Slate. Dahlia Lithwick is here. She's the host of the Amicus podcast. It has been a busy day for you. Dahlia. Let me start with the, the dissents are unbelievable, written for the moment. Sometimes we say written for history, but written for this moment. I don't know that I've read, I know I say this every time after Dobbs or after anything shocking, but I really don't know that I've read twin dissents that register this much alarm with the individuals that make up the majority. I think the tell in some ways is that after Justice Sotomayor read her dissent allowed from the bench, which justices don't always do, but she was, you know, spitting mad. The almost unprecedented thing, which is Samuel Alito had a dissent to her dissent. He. took issue from the bench, unscripted, with what she said. And it's such a breach of the court's decorum and protocol to be like, no, you. And it really shows you, I think, that she was scraping on a nerve. And I think the other through line of these two dissents is that both of these justices are not only calling out Samuel Alito in the majority for playing sort of semantic tricks in both cases with statutory language, but the real human costs, the suffering that is going to come about. And they make no bones about just calling it that. Well, I mean, Elena Kagan also says what the justices and Trump's own lawyers won't say that for Donald Trump, it's entirely racial. He doesn't want people from, quote, shithole countries, which is how he describes Haiti. Right. And you'll remember when the Muslim ban was passed and we had this same completely fatuous debate about, oh, he didn't mean all the things he said and it wasn't really a Muslim ban. And the court twisted itself into pretzels to say that the words that come out of Donald Trump's mouth have no significance. And this is the same problem on rocket fuel. And to have Samuel Alito in his majority just

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bat it away so much so that he won't even acknowledge it, which forces in some sense, Elena Kagan, to read it into the record to create a dissent where she says, here are the words that were said that are emblematic of what Donald Trump was trying to do. It really tells you, again, the degree to which the gaslighting is truly, truly the thing that is making, I think, particularly today, justices Elena Kagan and Sotomayor. absolutely incandescently angry. Because the justices who choose their words carefully chose these words, I'm going to let their words do the talking. This is more from Justice Sotomayor's dissent. Quote, what happened to the people who were turned away from the border. Those turned away from the border found themselves subject to the very persecution and crime they were fleeing. One woman who had fled Honduras after receiving death threats from gang members was beaten, cut. and knocked unconscious by an unknown man after being turned back from a port of entry. Another asylum seeker who was turned back at a port three times was later raped in the presence of her child. Those living in migrant camps were subjected to break-ins, robberies, and assaults, quote, facing serious harm at the hands of criminal organizations, including kidnapping, extortion, physical violence, and sexual assault. Some were murdered in Mexico while waiting for an opportunity to be processed by U.S. officials. One couple that grew discouraged after a month of waiting in a camp near the border decided to cross the river and ask for asylum once they reached U.S. soil, but they were caught in a swift current and drowned. Andrea, sending people to their deaths is precisely what Justice Sotomayor is providing evidence. to prove that today's decisions do. We didn't really even need more evidence. It's just a fact that our land border is one of the most dangerous land borders in the world because our asylum system has been in tatters really for the past decade. And this decision today just reaffirms that this court has no respect for the text of asylum law, which is pretty clear that You know, an asylum seeker has that procedural right once they reach the border. But this issue is going to keep coming up in our politics because whether it was under President Biden, this was an issue under President Obama. This was the policy that was being challenged. So this is back from 2016. And today, President Trump has already unilaterally suspended access to asylum at the border. So this is just adding a layer that the president didn't even factually need. So that really stood out to me. I want to read more from Elena Kagan's decision.

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The first one we talked about because she also uses her dissent to put human beings at the center of today's story, so we will follow her lead there. Consider Layla Doe, who fled Syria with her daughter in 2013 after her neighborhood was bombed. Today, Doe lives in Illinois, where she works as a behavioral technician for individuals with disabilities and cares for her elderly mother, a U.S. citizen. Without TPS, she will have to leave her mother and return to a still ravaged, violent, and dangerous country. Doe fears that as a single woman living alone, she will be robbed or even killed there. And she is afraid that her now 17-year-old daughter, who has lived in this country, almost all her life, will have no future in Syria because she speaks little Arabic. What Dahlia Lithwick do the... conservative justices have to say in response to the human toll of this uh-uh I mean, I think it's, you know, again, Samuel Alito being angry that Justice Sotomayor was upset tells you everything you need to know. In their view, this is a statutory problem with a constitutional valence, and that's what they want to address. And so we get these incredibly crabbed opinions, you know, in one case, reading a rival to mean, you know, again, cute. wordplay about what arrival means, reading determination in the other case, cute wordplay about what that means. And this kind of hypertextual approach, which is, you know, we're a bunch of Vulcans, this is our job to read the words of the statute, except I think, and this is so essential. What they end up doing is, A, ignoring the explicit intent of Congress in crafting these rules, and they end up absolutely circumscribing judicial power of review. So what they do in the end is they further kneecap Congress, they further kneecap lower courts, and they elevate themselves again into this imperial judiciary that can make words mean whatever they want to mean on the day that they are deciding a case.

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Again, because their words are far more precious and meaningful than mine, I'm going to let Elena Kagan's stand here again. This is another person who will be affected by today's decision that she writes about, Andrea. Quote, Fritz Emanuel Leslie Mayott is a Haitian national who's held TPS for 15 years. He lives in California where he works in a laboratory researching Alzheimer's. It's a job he can hold only because of his TPS work authorization. Mayotte suffers from type 1 diabetes, which is easily treated in the United States. But in Haiti, the same disease can be a death sentence given that country's collapsed health care infrastructure. And beyond those health issues, Mayotte believes his long-term residency in the United States would make him a prime target in Haiti. for kidnapping. It is remarkable, Andrea. I know that people fluent in the spaces you are, have all the evidence needed to sort of point out the weakness, the lameness of our legal and policy process. But the justices to put so much storytelling in a dissent does feel like a real... primal scream for people to wake up and see what the human toll is of today's decisions. I'm so glad you're highlighting the human toll because we just heard two stories of people in our economy whose lives would be completely upended by this decision. But what is so scary about what the court did today is that this could impact 1.3 million TPS holders. By giving President Trump the ability to terminate their status without judicial review, he has been open that he wants to terminate as many of these protections as possible. And I want to just warn people that that could also mean TPS for El Salvador. And the reason I'm pointing that out, Nicole, is because that population has been in the United States since the early 1990s. right, over three decades of lives in the United States. And it is just so stunning that this court, as Dalia said, could pretend that this is a technical issue. It's a huge blow to the economy as well because TPS holders every year. They generate $6 billion in revenue to the United States. Why? Because they have work permits to be here, work legally, they're employed. I mean, it is such an attack on legal immigration, and it is such a betrayal to anyone who thought that he was simply going to be targeting those who were undocumented or threats to our community. He is going after the healthcare industry, the restaurant industry, the construction industry, so many different industries that rely on TPS holders. It is interesting, too. I mean, maybe Samuel Alito will fly another flag if he's still mad when he gets home tonight. Dahlia, I think this was the time of year when he engaged in that behavior in the past. But the idea that they're mad, I mean.

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Wait till they see how the country views immigration. When Trump was elected, immigration was 44 points less popular than it is now. I think the last New York Times poll I saw was around the beginning of this year. And 80% of all Americans think immigration is a good thing. When Trump made clear that he wasn't targeting the worst or the worst, people who committed any crimes other than being in the country without status, those numbers took their most dramatic leap in a generation or two. And here is a... TPS recipients, someone who was going through the immigration process legally, who had legal status before today, speaking to some of the points Andrea made outside the Supreme Court. For many of us, this ruling is not just about policy. It is about our homes, our families, our future. The uncertainty if we may even live or die. TPS holders have built lives in this country. We are nurses caring for patients, workers supporting our economy, parents, raising American children. We are home. And we belong here. I am heartbroken that the Supreme Court did not do the right thing today to secure our safety. As I said, I mean, 24 months ago, that woman's flight was more divisive question. Now people who are in this country seeking asylum or with temporary status have a lot more support from the public after seeing the Trump administration's excesses in Minneapolis and beyond. What do you make of how thin-skinned politically justices like Samuel Alito have been over the past three years in terms of the climate in which they've... issued these, what I imagine, will be very polarizing opinions. I think if you look at this in the aggregate and you hold it up against the recent Calais decision about racial gerrymandering, if you hold it up against, you know, the affirmative action decision from a few years back, right? The whole aggregation of decisions that the court has made, that... permanently. Undue statutory and constitutional protections for people of color. I think it's fairly clear that this isn't, you know, the Supreme Court lifting up MAGA values. This is MAGA values in perfect alignment with that of some of the majority of the Supreme Court. And I think this is a kind of, as you suggest, dog catches the car moment where Americans have now spent months watching ice raids on court.

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houses and in schools, terrorizing small businesses, arresting citizens under the guise of going after the worst of the worst. And now everybody kind of knows somebody who's been swept up in the dragnet. And all this fearmongering proves to be. No, it could be your neighbor. It could be your friend. It could be the nurse who takes care of your mom. And I think it's really, really unfortunate at this point that the court is blinkered. to that and still very much of the agenda that when we say we're going to stop the immigration problem that never existed to the extent that Trump posited that it existed. That's happening on its own steam undeterred by opinion polls. It's just amazing. It's just amazing. And I wish I had the capacity to stop being shocked and horrified because you're exactly right. It is a perfect alignment. Andrea, thank you for starting us off. To be continued, well, there's some incredible reporting. We'll stay on top of the story for our part. Dahlia sticks around a little bit longer when we come back. Major pushback against Donald Trump coming. Of course, not from the Supreme Court, but from another federal judge, calling Trump's push to crack down on mail-in boating, quote, unconstitutional. Plus, Trump promised that his D.C. Renno wouldn't cost the American public one dime is what he said. Quote, one dime. Okay, but he didn't say anything about $1 billion, did he? New analysis has found that all those... Vanity projects are ballooning into costs, and he's planning to pass them on to you. We'll bring that reporting ahead. And later, even his own supporters are sick of him while Trump ranted on and on at his state fair. Crowds were seen heading for the exits. One journalist who was there at Trump's speech last night, tell us what really happened. We'll talk to him about all that and much more. When Deadline White House continues after a quick break, don't go anywhere today.

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You can't mail absentee ballots. You're going to make a decision that people cannot vote by mail. That's unacceptable. Joining our coverage is Mother Jay Jones National Voting Rights Correspondent Ari Berman. Dahlia Lithwick is still with us. Ari, I don't want to make too much of the victories and the wins because I think Donald Trump has proven that whack-a-mole is always his legislative strategy. If a door shuts, he, you know, sticks his head up some other underground place and tries again. But on the legal front, this does seem like a significant victory. Hey, Nicole. Well, it absolutely is a significant victory and also great to be with Dahlia as well. But if you look at the details of this, the Trump administration has now tried a number of different times to try to essentially end mail voting. And every time they've done so, it's been blocked in court. His first executive order on voting was blocked in court. Of course, the Save America Act, which he remains obsessed with, has no chance of passing the Senate. And now his new executive order, which is really a backdoor form of trying to end mail voting, was blocked as well. And there was really two key points from the ruling. One, the states run their elections with oversight from Congress. The federal government has no role to play in telling states how to run their elections. And that, two, the job of the the post office is to deliver the mail, not create rules for mail-in ballots, let alone a blatantly illegal extortionary scheme that would essentially say, give us your voter rolls or you don't get a mail ballot, which was just an absolutely crazy proposal that luckily now the courts, at least for now, have blocked. Dahlia, I want to read a little bit more from the decision. So this is from Judge Talwani's ruling, quote, it is clear that the federal agencies charged with compiling confirmed citizen lists lack the ability to create complete inaccurate lists of the U.S. citizens residing in every state. While the EO provides that the confirmed citizen lists shall be derived from certain federal records, those records do not necessarily track name changes, such as when a woman changes her name at marriage. or residence changes when citizens move from state to state. It is specific, it is decisive, it is conclusive, it doesn't seem particularly ideological. Is the Trump legal strategy to have this make its way to the Supreme Court where they find something that no other judge does? I mean, first of all, there is a male voting case pending at the court that will come down next week. So I think to your larger point, this is a multi-pronged attack, right? This is one play of many plays. And I think that, you know, Ari's right. You bat one away. The next one comes up. And so is the hope that this gets to the court. Maybe the clock is ticking on this, you know, this entire.

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policy, the administration has taken the sort of irreconcilable positions that, like, no harm, no fell, we haven't done anything yet. We're just chattering amongst ourselves. Nobody's been compelled to do anything. And at the same time, like TikTok, we've got to get this done. So I think that in some sense, they're trapped under their own shot clock. But I think to your point, it's very, very clear that, and we even heard it in the testimony. testimony from the Postmaster General. The play here isn't so much this particular act of vote suppression or the SAVE Act or, you know, the attempt to suppress ballots that come in a couple days late, which is the case at the court. The play here is to completely destabilize confidence in voting so that you can set up the claim that elections are stolen all the time and to sort of... absolutely make clear that all of these things that we are doing are to make you safe from these stolen elections. So please accept that all of the programs that we're putting in place are just benign programs to keep, you know, illegal voters from voting. So I think we have to be very clear about what the big play is, which is to chill voting, to scare voters from going to their polling places and to create uncertainty. And in that sense, whether this wins or loses. I think the message has to continue to be. You can't constrict the post office into doing this. You can't stop counting mail-in ballots. Can't take away the prerogatives of the state to decide how voting is conducted and your vote counts. Yeah, I have to like hit pause though and just say, how are we at the place where the post office is now like a MAGA actor? I'm going to ask both you that question on the other side. Like I feel like I miss like the middle chapters of this book where the post office like became part of this effort. I'm going to ask both you that question on the other side of a break. Don't go anywhere.

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You are being used as part of a much bigger story that this president is trying to play out where he does not believe elections that he loses are valid elections. Please push back on being a pawn in this authoritarian playbook. The Postal Service is one of the most important institutions in our country. Don't taint it with the obsession of this one man. Please push back. Ari, the American Postal Workers Union has also weighed in. They write this, quote, the executive order is an unconstitutional attack on the millions of Americans who vote by mail and another front and an ongoing assault on voting rights in the United States. The union rejects the premise that the United States Postal Service had to comply with the EO. The Postal Service was created by Congress in 1971 to be independent of the White House. The executive order also ignores the fundamental purpose of the Postal Service and postal workers. which is to provide universal service to all. How do we get here, where the post office is now marching as compliantly to the MAGA bagpipes as Mike Johnson? Well, you remember Nicole that Trump tried to do this in 2020 when people started using mail voting in larger numbers because of COVID. He tried to defund the post office and radically changed leadership so that people wouldn't get mail ballots. And that became a huge story. There was tremendous pushback against it and ultimately that plan failed. But now he's trying again and there's going to have to be a big public outcry again because this story has gone kind of under the radar because so many other things. are happening. But it's really right out of the Trump playbook because what he does is he tries to weaponize any kind of agency that he doesn't like. to try to serve its own ends and try to change it from something that benefits all Americans to something that only benefits the MAGA base. And so I believe there's going to be a big fight about this. The court order against it is just one part of that fight. There has to be a lot of outcry. There's already been a lot of pushback from election officials. And basically, the message just has to be, the post office just has to continue to deliver the mail like it's always done. That's all we're asking. We're not asking for any kind of special treatment. We're just saying if someone requests a mail ballot, Please get it to them. It's really as simple as that. I mean, Dahlia, I may be dating myself, but I mean... buckets of votes from overseas that contain military ballots used to be like this red line that people didn't want to cross. I mean, the right to vote if you're serving your country and you're overseas or, you know, the idea that this is now sort of chum in the water and this Maga-Aligned Supreme Court is either likely to be sympathetic or at least contemplate this does feel like.

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We're kind of at the bottom of Alice in Wonderlands looking less, looking back up. I mean, I think this is all reverse engineered, right? If you look at the Save Act, if you look at general moves in voter suppression, it's always reverse engineered to try to disenfranchise voters that the administration believes will be voting for Democrats, right? And so right or wrong, they've convinced themselves that people who vote by mail skew against him. Let's be clear, Donald Trump votes by mail. But I think that there is this very, very surgical effort to try to disenfranchise the kinds of people who vote by mail. And again, to destabilize confidence in voting by mail on the theory that, you know, maybe we can get some of them to not show up. But I think, you know, the other thing that's probably worth saying is we could have the same conversation about did any of us think the Justice Department works for Donald Trump today? any of us think until this year that big law firms work for Donald Trump or that, you know, major networks work for Donald Trump. I think this is, in some sense, his superpower is taking neutral entities and kind of bending them beyond recognition until, in his view, they're the people who do what he needs them to do. I mean, Ari, the piece of this seems like it could have a parallel to the gerrymander, what's turned into a bit of a political debacle for Republicans, is that lots of Republicans vote by mail also. I mean, you cast into complete suspicion over on Earth to the validity of anything you send in the mail, and you could actually deprive yourself with a lot of votes that could, at least in the midterms, go to Republicans. Well, you know this very well, Nicole. That's why the smart Republicans hate when Trump talks about this, because he is alienating his own voters in places like Florida, in places like Arizona, states like Utah, Alaska that have virtually all male elections. And so it's bad politics for Republicans. And one of the reasons that the Republican Party did better in 2024 is that despite what Trump was saying about rigged elections, they actually used male voting in higher numbers. They used early voting in higher numbers. They took advantage of all this stuff. And if they go backwards, it's going to disenfranchise their voters, particularly at a time when... Trump's voters are less motivated to vote. So you put an obstacle in front of Democratic voters, they're going to overcome that obstacle in this midterm election because they're so motivated to cast a ballot. You put an obstacle in front of Republican voters, they may just say, we're not going to vote at all because we're already not that happy about what's happening. So it's bad politics. Trump's obsessed with it because he can't get over his 2020 defeat. And it's...

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True that Democrats use male voting more than Republicans. So yes, you would hurt more Democratic voters, but it's undeniably true. You'd also hurt a lot of Republicans as collateral damage as well. It's so interesting. I hadn't heard anyone lay over the enthusiasm gap. I mean, it's, I think, two to threefold on the Democratic side. And it's not a good long-term strategy. But to your point about voters who will likely overcome obstacles, they're not on the Republican side right now. Ari Berman and Dahlia Lithwick, thank you so much for this conversation. I feel smarter already. When we come back, Trump claiming his D.C. rally last night was, quote, packed to the brim. I'm not sure that's accurate. Reporters were there and they reported and saw things with their own eyes that we'll share with you next.

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Donald Trump tried to pull and only I can fix it out of his hat to save himself from humiliation after multiple, multiple musical artists pulled out of performing in his great American state fair. And he did that by inserting himself as the headliner for the kickoff event last night. It didn't seem to go very well. The celebrations are off to a very rocky start with video from the bulwark. showing what appears to be a steady stream of people leaving the event in the middle of Trump's speech. You can hear him talking. Listen. We are delivering the largest reduction in drug price history with price differences. I guess they felt like they'd heard that riff before. Not a great look, though, for a guy who worries so much about... crowd size. The bulwarks, Jared Polis, also shared this snap online of an attendee lying down on the grass, writing that Trump's speech was literally putting people to sleep. Let's bring in the aforementioned rapid response senior editor at the bulwark, Jared Polis. So how was it? The speech was definitely a short one by Trump standards. I've watched hundreds of Trump speeches since I've started working for the bulwark. And his speech last night came in just a little under 30 minutes. And a lot of the crowd there, I would say, were definitely not your typical sycophantic, super, super Trump crazy supporter. There were definitely some of those there towards the front. But a lot of the people hanging out towards the back that I talked to, this had been their first Trump rally. And there were some people towards the front that I had talked to that actually it was his 116th Trump rally. And so those people, I imagine, stayed. But a lot of people got their picture of Trump and headed for the Bill Gates. Trump is obsessed with late night. So I will show you how late night covered this. This is Jimmy Fallon. Well, tonight, President Trump headlined a rally to celebrate America's 250th after all the musical artists dropped out of his concert. It's the first event where BYOB means bring your own band. And you all right. Tonight included a military flyover, Lee Greenwood singing, God Bless the USA, and a speech by Trump. Even Trump's biggest fans are like, is this a repeat? I feel like I've seen this for him.

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Remarkable because Jimmy Fallon of all of the men and women in late night and on that stage, folks funded Trump the least. But this is where it hurts the most, if you're Donald Trump, a repeat, a rehash, not so a list. What was it that they couldn't, last block we're talking about how all powerful Trump is, that he's literally got media organizations, law firms, and all the federal government working for him. But he couldn't rub sticks together and get anyone better than. himself? So a lot of the people that I talked to at the rally, they were there not because of Trump, but because they wanted to be there to see the festivities. There were definitely some Trump supporters there. But I think a lot of the people backed out because Trump really has made this entire America 250 celebration about him. And a lot of people that were there. Definitely were looking for something to celebrate America and were happy to see the president speak, but I think they were more so there for the flyovers and the Marine Corps band that was playing before. So I think the attendance would have probably lasted a little bit longer into the night had the original acts stayed on board. I want to show you Trump trying to do some crowd building for his next event featuring himself. This is Trump, seeming to beg the crowd to come to his Fourth of July speech. Then on July 4th, we will have the greatest show of all on the National Mall. Your favorite president will be speaking. So please show up. Because if we have two empty seats, you know what's going to happen? The fake news is going to say he didn't fill out the arena. I mean, he doth protested so much. The idea that we're the problem. He seems to be the problem when it comes to empty seats, clearly showing the vulnerability that this exposes, the lack of attendance, the lack of enthusiasm, and people walking out looking for non-political, I guess, most generous description acts. Yeah, I think this celebration would have been a lot better. Trump not made himself the center of it. But unfortunately with Donald Trump, he's incapable of doing that. I mean, he wants to be at the center of every bit of this America 250 celebration. And last night, I think you saw how the crowd feels about that. As soon as he came on, the crowd started to thin out. And I think come the 4th of July, because the fireworks are at the end, you might not see that as much. But last night, there was nothing to look forward to after Trump. So they got their pictures and they head for the Bill Gates. So sad. So sad. I guess this he would say hashtag sad. Jared, thank you for being there for your reporting on this. We appreciate you. After the break, another judge calling, I think the legal term, is BS on Donald Trump and Todd Blanche. We'll tell you about it next.

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The Justice Department has a growing credibility crisis in the courts. A federal judge made clear today that she is not taking DOJ at its word when it comes to killing Donald Trump's slush fund. The Department of Justice refused to put in writing as ordered by this judge that the slush fund is officially dead. saying that what acting attorney general Todd Blanche has said publicly is good enough. That claim left the judge wholly unsatisfied, and she ordered DOJ again today to officially put in writing an end to the fund, writing this, quote, that the defendants have refused to accord a genuine degree of trustworthiness to their representations about the fund not going forward. is particularly concerning because of the president's consistent support for the fund and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche's acknowledgement that the fund remains, quote, important. We'll stay on top of this story. See who blinks first. See if the Justice Department complies with the judge. After a break, the New York Times revealed the enormous cost to taxpayers of Donald Trump's atrocious home redecorating efforts, both at the White House and all over Washington, D.C. We'll bring that to you next.

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