Jimmy Kimmel targeted by Trump AGAIN as FCC opens sudden ABC review

Tuesday, May 12th from New York City, a special live taping of MS Now's chart-topping podcast, The Best People with Nicole Wallace. Join her for an urgent conversation with legendary documentarian Ken Burns. As America approaches its 250th anniversary, they'll explore the state of our country today through the lens of our past. Ken Burns and Nicole Wallace in conversation. The American experiment at 250. Get your tickets today at 92ny.org. Tonight on All In. Well, they're back. This time about a picture of seashells on a North Carolina beach. A new indictment of Donald Trump's targeted enemies that doesn't even pass the smell test at Fox. In my view, it would very likely be viewed as protected speech. That alone would have a hard time standing up in court. Tonight, Congressman Jamie Raskin on the latest indictment of James Comey. Plus, Senator Chris Murphy on the wannabe king's ballroom amid war and rising gas prices. And big news for another Trump target. This was like deja vu for me today with all the news channels talking about this. FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez says Donald Trump's latest Disney attack is a stunt destined to fail. And she'll join me live. All In starts right now. Good evening from New York. I'm Chris Hayes. There were two kings in the White House today, according to the White House. That was the message the administration put out into the world today as Donald Trump met with King Charles III of Great Britain. You see them there just moments ago entering the White House for dinner. It is ostensibly all to mark America's 250 years of independence from royal rule. And the White House put out this photo of the two men on stage with the words, two kings and a crown emoji. They're trolling, yes, but not really. We all know Trump's kingly demands. He wants a ballroom built and his enemies persecuted. And as both of these whims dominated the headlines today, millions of Americans learned about the other breaking news, the real stuff. Today, U.S. gas prices hit their highest level since Trump launched his ridiculous counterproductive war on Iran, a single day jump of 1.6%. The average cost for a gallon of regular gasoline is now $4.18, according to the AAA, it's wholly gone up because of Donald Trump launching the war. There's nothing else happening that has made it jump that much. And it's just the most tangible example of all the ways that Trump and the Republican Party have acted affirmatively at almost every crossroads to make prices higher for people. When all anyone says in any poll or focus group across the political spectrum is, for the love of God, things are too expensive. That includes today in the New York Times, where a dozen unhappy Trump voters shared their concerns. Quote, life is becoming more and more unaffordable. Prices are high as ever. We're headed in the wrong direction. Those were Trump's voters. And all he and Republicans are doing with the power those voters gave them in Washington is finding new ways to make things more expensive. It's truly astounding. Late last week, the CEO of United Airlines said on an earnings call, the company was already jacking ticket prices as much as 20% to offset rising fuel prices from the Warren Iran, the ongoing closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Today, the CEO of the European airline Ryanair said fuel costs could break much of the commercial air industry in Europe within months. If pricing stays higher for longer this summer, we think a number of our airline competitors in Europe are going to face real financial difficulties. I think there will be failures. If it continues at $150 a barrel into kind of July, August, September, then you'll see European airlines fail. Again, gas prices are surging for one reason only. Because Iran now controls the Strait of Hormuz and the 20% of global oil and gas gets shipped through it. Before Trump's war, well, Trump and Netanyahu's war, let's give full credit here, 150 ships a day pass through that strait freely. Today, just six commercial ships pass through the Strait, according to NBC News. The Iranian news agency says one of them was a Japanese tanker that paid Iran a toll in Chinese currency. And now, to make matters even worse on this single part of the fallout from this war, right, that most people are going to experience, gas prices, Trump has decided the U.S. is going to do its own blockade to blockade Iran's blockade of the straight. That bottleneck is causing global shortages, massive disruptions in billions of lives. I mean, people could die from starvation because of fertilizer shortages. This could get really out of control. There's also an interesting other phenomena happening, which is that governments and consumers are starting to shift decidedly against combustion engines. Why should we depend on this commodity that goes up in price, pivoting to electric cars and renewable energies. They're doing that just as the Trump administration is announcing another deal to pay two energy companies nearly a billion dollars of federal money, our money, to pay them to stop building wind farms, to not bring new clean energy onto the grid and to shift to oil and gas. So here we are. Donald Trump launched a war against Iran three months ago. He can't figure out how to kind of actually end it, right? It's in this tenuous, frozen conflict ceasefire. And he can't because, frankly, he's manifestly bored by the whole thing. He's over it. He has much more important things on his mind, like a grand golden ballroom where the East Wing used to be. And Republicans are now committed to indulging him with your money. We're going to introduce legislation. that would authorize $400 million to be spent to secure, to build the presidential ballroom. I support Trump building a ballroom, yes, of course, especially after this weekend. I'm working on legislation to ensure that we are getting the ballroom funded. It's obviously a national security element to that, and it needs to be done. This has to be addressed. At a minimum, we have to have a safe place to protect the president of the United States and the cabinet officials if they want to gather, or there's a state dinner. Boy, how did two and a half centuries of American presidents ever handle a state dinner without this ballroom? And as Republicans rush to use our money, money that could go for a million different things, right? For a new wing in Versailles for the would-be king, our Justice Department is being turned into a private vengeance squad for enemies of the court. Trump's Department of Justice indicted former FBI Director James Comey again. This comes after a judge tossed the first transparently ludicrous politically motivated prosecution against him last year. Comey is now facing charges related to this now deleted Instagram photo he posted last May, last May, of shells on a beach spelling out the message 8647. The claim literally spelled out in the indictment is that this was James Comey threatening to murder the president. He was indicted today for those seashells. Even Trump's acting attorney general, his former criminal defense attorney, Todd Blanche, had a little trouble sounding confident about the case today. There's been a tremendous amount of investigation. And how do you prove intent in any case? You prove intent with witnesses, with documents, with the defendant himself to the extent it's appropriate. And that's how we'll improve intent in this case. really going to prove intent that he was posting that on Instagram for everyone to say to threaten the president with violence, the former director of the FBI. That was his intent. That's what you're going to prove. I don't think the federal case is going to survive very long, but it's what Trump wants. Just as he has always wanted ABC's late night host Jimmy Kimmel taken off the air. He tried last year. They kind of got their butts kicked, brushed back quite a bit. Now he's trying again. On Monday, the president and first lady Melania Trump put out separate Post calling for Kimmel's firing over a one-line joke he told last week. Today, like clockwork, in an obvious appeal to the boss, Trump's FCC, led by his hand-picked chairman, Brendan Carr, the guy who basically talked about doing it the easy way or the hard way the last time with Jimmy Kimmel, announced they were breaking protocol to review the broadcast licenses of ABC's top eight network affiliates in major cities from New York to LA. On a right-wing podcast today, which is the same place he got himself in trouble in the past. Carr suggested the incredibly sudden license review as part of a deeper probe into parent company Disney for its DEI policies. SEC Commissioner Anna Gomez is joining us later in the show to discuss Trump's Warren Kimmel. And we're going to be speaking with Congressman Jamie Raskin shortly on the new indictment of James Comey. But all of this mad king behavior, all of these obsessions, that's what Trump occupies himself with now. That's where he's focused. You can get this guy to talk about, like, opening straight up removes or, you know, financial policy, economic policy. He wants the ballroom. He wants the people he hates to suffer. He wants his face and signature on American passports. Not making this one up. Here's what that might look like, according to images released by the State Department today. Our nearly 80-year-old president's authoritarian obsession with remaking America in his weird and warped image is consuming him. and distracting him from, again, I can't emphasize this enough, the enormous international crisis he caused, and that still is there. And the lasting tangible damage that is doing around the world from the Middle East to the middle of your driveway. Senator Chris Murphy is a Democrat of Connecticut. He serves on the Foreign Relations Committee, and he joins me. Now, I got to say, it seems to me that the plan from the White House is to kind of just like stop talking about what's going on in Iran, sort of leave it behind, I guess indefinitely extend these ceasefires. I mean, we've got a headline today about S&P cutting global oil demand forecasts, 700,000 barrels per day that could basically prefigure some global recession. We've got people that might starve, lack of fertilizer. At the very least Americans are going to pay I guess at the pump You know in California it or In perpetuity like is that the plan They just going to like ignore this Well I mean listen I think Trump is very confident and he has evidence to back this up that he can will an issue away, that he can either declare victory and people will just be convinced we were victorious, or he can just do something else really outrageous and the whole country will shift its attention. The problem here is that there is a scoreboard, right, that you stare at every single day. It's the price of gasoline. He can move on to another issue. He can do something more outrageous. He can try to say that we've already won the war. But Americans are getting devastated by this. Remember, about one-third of American families don't have more than $400 dollars in the bank, right? One third of American families are really living legitimately paycheck to paycheck. And so a couple months of gas prices that are in some places in this country, $5 or $6 a gallon, fundamentally changes your life if you are living paycheck to paycheck. And they just aren't going to be convinced by Trump's declarations that the war is over. They aren't going to really care that he wants a ballroom built. This is a crisis that is going to get worse and worse and worse. And I just don't think his normal tactics of distraction and obfuscation are going to work here. And it's not just that, I want people to understand this. It's not just that obviously the war that he started is what raised the price of gas, right? Iran controlled the Strait of Hormuz. It's that the current means to bring it to some resolution is to increase the pressure on gas prices even more. That they don't want Iran exporting oil From the price standpoint, like any global supply is a release valve for the prices. Today, he says that Iran informed him they are in a, quote, state of collapse. I'm a little skeptical. They called him and told him that. They want us to open Hormuz straight as soon as possible as they try to figure out their leadership situation. Who knows? But to the extent that that's now the standoff, we're going to shut it all down. That does make gas prices go up, as I understand it. Yeah. Are you a little skeptical that the Iranians called Donald Trump to declare that they're in a state of regime collapse? You know, listen, he is he's managing the markets. He's trying to create, you know, some atmosphere in which, you know, at the same time the markets don't collapse while gas prices are going up. Listen, Iran believes it is winning this war right now. And they believe that they can hold out much longer than the American president can hold out. They are getting help from China. There is evidence that not an insignificant number of their own ships are getting through. The Iranian ghost fleet is still able to sell oil. So this probably goes on for a very, very long time. And the reality is that once the strait reopens, if it ever does reopen, it's not like gas prices come right back down to $3. It's not as if the global supply chains that are interrupted because of this, the plastics markets, the polyester markets, the helium markets, all of a sudden rebound. It will take months for the prices to come back down. So yeah, Iran believes that they're going to be able to win this thing because they can hold out longer than he can. You know, fundamentally, again, I just worry again, they seem ready to pivot away from this, right? Just kind of drop it. But again, the United States government is going to have some diplomats do some actual diplomacy, and there's going to have to be some deal that is struck. I mean, I guess they'll just keep extending the ceasefire. But like, this is Rubio talking about the problem with hardliners today, which again, sure, although a little bit of a problem of your own creation, but take a listen to what he had to say. And so you see a tension, and you always have in that system between the Iranians who understand, And let's be hardliners, but let's also balance that with the need to run a country and the hardliners who don't care and have this apocalyptic vision of the future. Unfortunately, the hardliners with an apocalyptic vision of the future have the ultimate power in that country. Yeah. How did that happen? Yeah, I mean, we replaced a doddering 80 year old hardliner with apparently much more provocative and effective hardliners. So we have created a government inside Iran that is right now and for the foreseeable future going to be more effective in making our life miserable. This is the entire reason that multiple administrations chose not to go to war with Iran, because every intelligence analyst told them it will empower the hardliners and they will shut down the strait and you won't be able to open it. And every president on both sides of the aisle, no matter how bad and evil and provocative Iran was, chose not to do what Trump has done because all of these results to the American economy, to the global economy, to the stability of the Middle East were totally foreseeable. Senator Chris Murphy, always a pleasure to have you. Thank you very much. Great. Coming up, Congressman Jamie Raskin on the second indictment of former FBI Director James Comey. That's next. Home to the Rachel Maddow Show, Morning Joe, the briefing with Jen Psaki and more voices you know and trust. MS Now is your source for news, opinion and the world. Learn more at MS.now. The U.S. Department of Justice has indicted former FBI Director James Comey for posting pictures of seashells online last year. The indictment reads, quote, on or about May 15th, 2025, in the Eastern District of North Carolina, the defendant, James Bryan Comey Jr., did knowingly and willfully make a threat to take the life of and to inflict bodily harm upon the president of the United States. In that, he publicly posted a photograph on the internet social media site Instagram, which depicted seashells arranged in a pattern making out 8647. Here's what Comey posted. It's a picture of seashells arranged to spell out 86-47. 47 seemingly a reference to Donald Trump's second term. He captioned it, quote, Cool shell formation on my beach walk. Comey later removed the post, writing, quote, I didn't realize some folks associated those numbers with violence. Think for yourself. When a Bouncer 86 is a drug customer, do they kill them? Or do they just get them out of the bar? In a sign of just how ludicrous the case is, here is how Fox News analyst Jonathan Churley reacted to the news. Well, I have to say, I must be in a parallel universe to be talking about the shell artwork of James Comey. I think that just showing the picture is going to be a weak case in terms of a threat. In my view, it would very likely be viewed as protected speech if it was the basis of a criminal indictment. Congressman Jamie Raskin is a Democrat of Maryland. He serves as a ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, and he joins me. Now, Congressman, at some level, it's a little ludicrous to get too into the weeds of the indictment here because the context is so obviously pretextual. That said, there really is a very long trail of cases and jurisprudence about, you know, what separates a genuine threat that's criminally actionable from protected speech. My read of that history is that this isn't even like remotely close to the boundary. But what's your read? Well, is there anybody who observed that it was a threat in the several days or weeks or months that followed? Or is this just coming up now? It would be very odd for somebody to threaten the life of the president and for nobody to notice for a half a year or something like that. So I think that that undercuts the whole argument. I also was under the impression that he didn't create that little seashell formation. Someone else did, and he just reported it. So on that theory, he was publicizing to the world that somebody out there was anonymously threatening the life of the president. But again, nobody saw it in those terms. Look, Chris, I think every reasonable person left in America understands that this is not an act of law enforcement and justice. This is an act of political vendetta. And the Department of Justice has been turned into an instrument of political revenge towards Donald Trump's perceived foes. And that's the only way of understanding it. The first time that he was indicted, having to do with, I guess, obstruction, I guess, or I think it was obstruction that he was charged with and perjury, possibly. He put out a video basically to finally saying, hey, I believe in the judiciary. I believe in our system. Let's bring it on. I'm happy to take this to court. Basically have the same thing to say today. Take a listen. Well, they're back. This time about a picture of seashells on a North Carolina beach a year ago. And this won't be the end of it. But nothing has changed with me. I'm still innocent. I'm still not afraid. And I still believe in the independent federal judiciary. So let's go. He seems confident, and that confidence strikes me as relatively well-earned, given what's happened once before. I mean, the charges here are just surreal and absurd. But, of course, from the perspective of the person who's obviously calling the shots and proudly calling the shots under the unitary executive theory of the Justice Department in America, Um, you know, it's not important whether or not, uh, the grand jury, uh, either, you know, indicts or doesn't indict or whether the court throws it out or doesn't throw it out or the person's convicted or not. What matters is that he can occupy, uh, Mr. Comey's time and lots of resources. It'll probably cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend himself, um, against, you know, this Sally sells seashells down by the seashore charge. And, you know, as long as he's occupying other people's time and space, that's all he cares about. It's not like he's got some program for America he's working on, like he's focused in the same way on trying to get health care to everybody or lower the price of groceries or lower the price of gasoline or end the war that he just unleashed on the world in Iran. He focused on Mr Comey and what happened at the beach nine months ago In fact my understanding is just looking at what going on in the House of Representatives where you serve where there is a Republican majority very thin one They can't even get their act together to like pass a number of bills they think are important and want to pass. Things like the farm bill. You know, there's a Pfizer rep they want to do. Like they pulled everything off the schedule just today because no one there seems to be able to just focus again on this, some of the stuff ostensibly that is what their agenda would be about? Yeah, look, I mean, basically they're piling distraction on distraction. So they wanted to distract from the Epstein files by going to war in Iran. Then that's turned into a complete debacle and catastrophe. So they want to distract from the war by indicting Comey. And who knows what tomorrow's distraction will be. And that's the kind of governance that we've got. He is acting like a mad king. And they brought a real king to Washington. I, of course, didn't go because I'm an anti-monarchist. And when I say no kings, I mean it. But, you know, that king at least seems to have a certain kind of decency and civility and reason about him. And we've got a guy who's president who's acting like a mad king, drunk on power and unable to focus on anything related to the public interest in the common good. The dynamic here at the Department of Justice is interesting to me. You know, there was this filing they had in the ballroom case that's like clearly it's it feels like it's dictated by Trump, you know, where they're saying like the National Trust for Historic Preservation is a beautiful name. But even their name is fake because when they add the words in the United States, it makes it sound like a government agency, which is not. This is very bad for a country. They stop many projects that are worthy. This is not did not deter them because they suffer from Trump derangement syndrome, commonly referred to as TDS, as noted by Democratic Senator John Fetterman. I mean, it's got precisely the train of thought. And the reason I entered this evidence is it seems to me this is what's happened in the Department of Justice, as I can understand it from the reporting. They got rid of Pam Bondi. There's a power vacuum there. And now people competing to run the department are even more supplicant to Trump. And he is even more than he was under Bondi, sort of personally dictating what the department does. And he was already doing that to a large degree under Bondi. Is that your read of this? Totally. Well, look, in the first administration, I think he would impose those manic free associations on his legal teams. And at the beginning, there were real lawyers who tried to translate that into something that would be recognizably legal vernacular. Then as time went on, then the, you know, Rudy Giuliani's took over and it got more and more mad, but it still sounded like the kind of thing that wouldn't necessarily get you kicked out of court and sanctioned. Although towards the end, a lot of them started being sanctioned. Right now, the Department of Justice is just taking dictation from Donald Trump. In other words, his manic reveries and diatribes become their briefs. It's the most extraordinary thing. It's like he's practicing law without a license. Yes, the world's most powerful pro se litigant. Donald Trump is at it again. Congressman Jamie Raskin, thank you very much. Still ahead. Stop me. You've heard this before. The president's latest push to cancel Jimmy Kilgore. Again, next. Home to the Rachel Maddow show. Morning, Joe. The briefing with Jen Psaki and more voices you know and trust. MS Now is your source for news, opinion, and the world. Learn more at MS.now. Donald Trump is trying to get late night comedian Jimmy Kimmel taken off the air again. Today, Trump's FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, took the unprecedented step of threatening Disney's broadcast licenses by bringing them under an early review. The Trump administration claims This is part of its investigation into diversity, equity, inclusion at Disney. But it's widely understood as retaliation for this joke that Jimmy Kimmel made last Thursday, two days before the White House Correspondents' Dinner. Of course, our First Lady Melania is here. Look at Melania, so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow. Yesterday, the First Lady put out a statement demanding Kimmel be fired. Here's how Kimmel responded on his show last night. Obviously was a joke about their age difference and the look of joy we see on her face every time they're together. It was a very light roast joke about the fact that he's almost 80 and she's younger than I am. It was not by any stretch of the definition a call to assassination. And they know that I've been very vocal for many years speaking out against gun violence in particular. But I understand that the first lady had a stressful experience over the weekend and probably every weekend is pretty stressful in that house. And also, I agree that hateful and violent rhetoric is something we should reject. I do. And I think a great place to start to dial that back would be to have a conversation with your husband about it, because. And by the way, I also should point out, Donald Trump isn't allowed to say whatever he wants to say, as are you and as am I, as are all of us, because under the First Amendment, we have, as Americans, a right to free speech. Anna Gomez serves as a commissioner of the FCC. She was appointed by Joe Biden in 2023. She's spoken out about and against today's decision, and she joins me now. Commissioner, it's good to have you on the program. Obviously, the FCC is a bipartisan, structurally bipartisan entity with a majority appointed by the sitting president, the chair, Brendan Carr, obviously appointed by Trump. Can you just start with what technically happened today? Because my understanding is in the past there's been what we might call jawboning. There might be threats. We're going to block this. But there was actually like a regulatory action taken today. What was it? Yes. Hi, it's good to be with you. Well, what we saw today was the White House called for the silencing of a vocal critic and the FCC answered that call. What the FCC did today was it issued an order to renew, to start the renewal process for Disney-owned local broadcast stations. And that renewal process is years in advance of when that was supposed to happen. But this is all just as an excuse in order to retaliate against voices that this administration opposes. The last time this happened, in some respects, I would say one of the mistakes Brendan Carr made from my reading on it, other than the substance, was to explicitly say what he was doing. And I'll play you what he said the last time they tried to cancel Kimmel about the role that he was going to play. Take a listen. This is the chair of the FCC. frankly, when you see stuff like this, I mean, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or, you know, there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead. Basically saying, look, get rid of Kimmel, or we're going to come after you regulatorily. Today, this is all cloaked in some DEI investigation. Do you credit that at all, or is this obviously pretextual? Oh, this is an outrageous assault on the freedom of speech by this FCC in order to retaliate against Disney and against the critics of this administration. It is unprecedented. It is unlawful and it is bound to fail. So Disney should push back because Disney has the First Amendment on its side and it will win against this FCC action. What do you mean by that? We say it's bound to fail. Like there's regulatory steps. There's there's court. What is a recourse here for a corporation that's obviously been targeted for protected speech? Yes, there is a process that this renewal process that the FCC goes through, and the FCC is clearly trying to target Disney to actually harm it. And it will go through this process. It's a years-long process that involves various levels of review, including a final vote by the commission, if in fact the commission decides not to renew these local broadcaster licenses. Then it goes to court because Disney would presumably appeal such an action. And it's important to note that through all of this time, ABC will still be able to operate its licenses. So this threat is really just about the process and about putting Disney through the pain of having to defend its licenses and its local licenses. And I just want to point out to you, there really is a rich irony here that this is an action taken to retaliate against a bit about an event that is about honoring freedom of speech, but is instead being used as an excuse to curtail that very freedom. And it's absolutely antithetical to what our First Amendment is all about. The FCC, like other boards, right, the Federal Elections Commission and a bunch of other ones, you know, they have these kind of structures where they're bipartisan, but there's a majority. I mean, what is your relationship with Brendan Carr like? I mean, when you see this, can you call him up and be like, this is ridiculous? Is this wrong? Why are you doing this? Well, I don't talk about my conversations with my colleagues. But yes, we are a board, a bipartisan board. There's only three of us right now. There's two vacancies. And we work on matters together. We often actually agree. There's a lot that the FCC does that doesn't involve curtailing the freedom of speech, but instead involves valid goals like protecting national security or making sure that we have a spectrum needed for new and innovative services. And so we work together to make sure that we can advance the public interest in general pursuant to what Congress tells us to do. What Congress explicitly told us not to do is to censor broadcasters. How important is it to you for the free speech in this country and the liberties that all of us as Americans I think are proud of or aspire to that this not be allowed to work in this case It is so important for our democracy that we not allow this administration to weaponize the FCC or any of its other agencies under its control to curtail our freedoms. And freedom of speech is so important. Freedom of the press, of course, the fourth estate, is so important to hold power to account. And so it's really important that the broadcasters push back against this, because as we have learned, capitulation does not lead to protection for that particular broadcaster. We've seen already how this administration has tried to retaliate against broadcasters and how it continues to come back to demand more. So we are at an inflection point right now. Broadcasters can make a decision. They can push to protect the freedom of speech or they can surrender it. So I am happy to see that Disney has said that it will, in fact, fight this and it should fight this because it will win. Ana Gomez, commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission. Thank you so much for making some time for us today. Thank you. Still to come, the Republican full court press to make Trump's ballroom America's oddest issue. Next. I got to say, it's so crazy that in almost every single possible poll, every single possible poll, the American people are just screaming, please, please do whatever you can to make life cheaper. And the response from this administration is we're going to enter into protracted conflict with Iran, in which their strategic ace in the hole is to just keep oil prices high by us also shutting down the Strait of Hormuz. And now they're pilvetting fully into the president needs taxpayer money to build his big ballroom. The ballroom will be a solution for this. We need a place. We have needed a place like that. And the president keeps pointing it out. And the sooner we get the ballroom built, the more hardened it is, the better for the country. We need to have that ballroom built. This is a great, great thing for this country. And God bless the president for doing it. So the American people are like, please, please, groceries are too expensive. Gas is too expensive. I can't afford a home. And the United try, the Republican Party is the president is right. We need a ballroom for all of our fancy balls. Tim Miller is writer of the Blarge, the Bullbrook and host the Bullbrook podcast. Nikki McCann Ramirez, politics reporter Rolling Stone. Her latest piece is, no, Trump doesn't need a new ballroom to protect himself. And they join me now. First, Tim, I just, I was so struck by the optics of all this. Obviously, it was very scary and upsetting what happened. Thankfully, it was not. More people weren't hurt. No one was killed. Thank goodness. But just like at this moment when people are not happy with the right track, wrong track, they're not happy with the economy. For the entire party to be like, you must build us a ballroom and we're going to use taxpayer money. And this is the most important thing in America right now. Struck me as shockingly toned out. Yeah, $400 million. We need $400 million of your dollars to build this ballroom right now. And it's going to be very gold. Very, very gold. And here's the picture of it. It looks very gold and very fancy. How are things going for you? How do your school rooms look? How do your hospital rooms look? The ballroom's going to look amazing. Yeah, there it is. I don't know, man. I think that it's interesting. Because what this has shown is that there's been something that Trump and his, you know, the Republican Party and the mega media apparatus has been very good at for 10 years now. Which is something happens in the news cycle and Trump says squirrel and everyone goes and looks at the squirrel and talks about the squirrel and talks about how important it is. And oftentimes that is, you know, something terrible that the liberals have done. You know, sometimes it's something that Trump wants to do. But everybody sings in one echo chamber about it. And they've been much better at that than the Democrats have. It just doesn't feel like it's working on this one. Like on this one, you know, that is something that works if you're tearing down the other side, if they're doing something wrong. It maybe works if people are kind of happy with what you're doing and they're just, you know, interested in whatever the story of the day is. When people are really upset about what's happening at the pump with Epstein files, with the war in Iran, to just like get everybody singing from the same ballroom hymn book, I just don't think is doing them any good. Yeah. And I think, you know, we were just showing the pictures of the destruction. I think people, a lot of people were like aghast at the destruction, but the actual, like, whether you build it, like, no one cares really that much one way or the other. I think people are opposed to it, but generally just like in the concentric circles of things people are animated about in this country, things they care about in their lives. Like, how is this your obsession? Yeah. And I think to Tim's point, there's something really off-putting to the American public around the idea that the president deserves an in-kind taxpayer-funded reward for dealing with the unsavory aspects of his job. Security is part of what the president has to deal with. And I also think there's something really, there's a cognitive dissonance to the fact that this conversation is taking place when King Charles is there on a state visit. There are so many trappings about the American presidency that are a steer, that were designed by the founders and like the 200 years of our history as a visual contradiction to European monarchies. This idea- We don't have Versailles. Yeah. We don't have aristocrats who spend their time partying in ballrooms. The White House is not a resort. It's a place of governance. So the very idea that this has to exist is anathema to the image that most people have of this country. And yet at the same time, the other thing that's being shown there is like, of course they can put on fancy events they do all the time for a very a very long time. The other part of this, I mean, here's the Reuters polling today, Tim. The other part of this is approvals at 34 percent, disapprovals at 64 percent. Like, this has been in line with all the polls. His handling on cost of living specifically is the lowest handling he has. It's 2269. And I also thought it was funny to watch members of Congress come out loaded for bear to be like, that's it. Last straw. Guess what we're going to do now? we're going to introduce legislation to authorize this and appropriate the funds. And I was like, yeah, that's the way it works. If this is so much, this is so important to you, you should have done that from the beginning and had the fight. And if you win, you win. That's what democracy is. Yeah. And they don't really have, in addition to being focused on the ballroom, like you're saying, they also don't have any message really for the American people right now on how they're going to get costs down. And what are the other bills that they're talking about on the Hill? It's the SAVE Act. We've thrown in some transports on top of that. There's some discussion of some new rules around boxing and MMA. It's not like there's a big bill coming this year, regardless of whatever you think of the merits of it, that has some Republican priorities around providing relief, whether that be tax relief or assistance for working people or a gas tax rebate, whatever. They don't have any of that. They're not offering any of it. And part of the reason why his numbers are so low is, you know, obviously Democrats, people that are engaged are going to be opposed to him. But there are a lot of people that just that supported Trump, that are not the MAGA red hat folks that just were, you know, that weren't really tuning in that closely. They're getting some of the news. And like one day, all of a sudden, they go to the gas station and it costs a dollar more. And they're like, why? And they're like, well, because we're going to war with Iran. I voted for him because they didn't want war with Iran. Like this all happened in a flash and they're not providing that type of voter any message that could possibly resonate with them. It's so striking how true that is. And, you know, they keep doing like someone convinces him to go out and do some, you know, rally where he talks about, you know, no taxes on tips. Right. They got like they got like a few days of that out of him. But it's also just the case of like the guy just manifestly doesn't care at all. Like he doesn't want to lose the House because he doesn't want to be impeached. He doesn't care about the prospects of Republican Party. He doesn't care about any of that stuff. What he cares about is putting his face on things. He can't like this passport thing that just came out today with his face plastered on it. The ballroom, like his name on the like this is what he cares about. He's 80s, almost 80 years old. He's thinking about the fact that he is not going to live forever. And like, what is his legacy going to be? And he wants he wants a kingly legacy when he's gone. No, absolutely. And right before we came on air, the New York Times released one of those roundtable interviews they do with 12 Trump voters. I'm just going to read you some of the words that they use to describe how they're feeling. Disappointed and sad, worried, concerned, worried, anxious, frustrated, annoyed, disengaged, apathetic, and a sense of betrayal. And so voters feel exactly that, this idea that the president does not care about them. And at the same time, the notion—no, yeah. Every day is this split screen, basically. But the notion that the president is then putting his face on $100 bills, on passports, on buildings, that's just going to turn into a visual reminder that that is going to be in their wallets when they travel, that this man does not care about what happens to them. There he is at the state dinner, which, again, they can trick the place out to look quite nice when they need to. A very weird 250th anniversary commemoration of our Declaration of Independence, where we decided that monarchy was not the way to go. And along comes someone as president of States, who I think really thinks it was the way to go. Tim Miller and Nikki McCann Ramirez, great to have you both. Thank you. King Charles III speaking at the White House State Dinner Order today. He addressed a joint session of Congress where he pointedly defended NATO, the importance of Europe and the US and other allies defending Ukraine from the Russian invasion and war, and also cited the Magna Carta and the centuries-old Anglo-Saxon tradition of restraints on the power of the executive even before the American Revolution. That does it for All In. You can catch us every weeknight at 8 o'clock on MSNOW. Don't forget to like us on Facebook. That's facebook.com slash allinwithchris. Tuesday, May 12th from New York City, a special live taping of MSNOW's chart-topping podcast, The Best People with Nicole Wallace. Join her for an urgent conversation with legendary documentarian Ken Burns. As America approaches its 250th anniversary, they'll explore the state of our country today through the lens of our past. Ken Burns and Nicole Wallace in conversation. The American experiment at 250. Get your tickets today at 92ny.org.