Desperate Trump needs Save Act Small WH cabal making decisions that make no sense

The things we talk about today that I never thought we'd talk about, the reflecting pool. This has been a stupid thing since we first started talking about it, except it has now resulted in people getting arrested. I did see a very funny tweet, by the way, because it's, you know, it's all gross and slimy and stuff. I saw somebody referring to it as the Strait of Hormuz, like oozing stuff. But what a mess to start with. And now they're arresting people and suggesting that they're slicing up the lining with their knives and things like that. Christina, do we have the sound of Donald Trump talking about how when they redo this? Let's play this. Let's play what Donald Trump said about this thing. The reflecting pool looks fantastic. I just got pictures of it. It's beautiful. But somebody went in with a knife and cut it. They cut it up good. And then they cut a 200, 350 foot slip in the form of lots of little slips, a real horrible stuff. Okay, so that's Donald Trump saying that the reason it's not working out is because people were cutting it up. Now listen to what he said before that. This will last for at least 50 years. You'll never have a leak. It's very strong. You couldn't, if you had a knife, I don't want to give anybody ideas. If you had a knife, you can't even cut it. So strong, so powerful, powerful rubber. It is beautiful. Sealed. How does his brain work? First of all, like he brought up the knife analogy, you could take a knife and you could do it and you won't be able to break it. And now a bunch of people with knives are getting apparently arrested for cutting up the lining of the which, by the way, feels very authoritarian, right? Like, it should be cutting up things, whatever. And I don't know what the story is behind this. But the whole thing seems a little weird. Well, it's also they're probably not cutting it up. It may actually be from the peroxide that they're pouring into the reflecting pool. By the way, we have ducks dying from the reflecting pool. I mean, which is just insane. It's a bad look, but it's also like you are cruising into the midterms. You have Republicans begging him. You have this piece of housing legislation, which somehow they passed, which now Donald Trump- Bipartisan. And Donald Trump has said he's not going to sign it. You know why he won't sign it? Because he so desperately wants that SAVE Act to stop people from voting because he knows there's no other way now to stop Republicans from losing the House. And then him facing impeachment again. So this is it. He's desperate. He needs that SAVE Act. Doesn't matter whether you passed a bipartisan housing bill that is meant to benefit all Americans. You can't get bipartisan anything done. And other than Epstein, they weren't able to get bipartisan anything done. And Donald Trump is now saying he won't sign it and yet wasting the time talking about the stupid pool. And you know, it's like it's not just the reflecting pool. It's his putting his name on the Kennedy Center. It's the East Wing, which is still completely flattened. It's the Trump triumphal arch. It's the UFC. I mean, these are all things when you have people who can't afford gas. All they want is for you to make things cheaper. They're losing, you know, SNAP benefits after the midterms. Like we're going to see huge decreases, SNAP benefits, unemployment. You know, a lot of this was a ticking time bomb for the, you know, for the cutting of benefits. And then you have a presidency that started with the richest man in the world with a chainsaw saying that he was going to cut the federal government. And then the optics are Trump sort of Marie Antoinette in his way through D.C. Yeah, it's really it's just kind of very hard to get my head around who's telling him it's a strategy. But on Sunday, JD Vance gone to Switzerland to negotiate with the Iranians. And that went south because Donald Trump posted on social media one of his expletive laden posts in which he basically threatened the Iranian delegation. If they don't behave, they may not make it back to Iran alive. It's like it's just not a really good negotiating tactic. But, you know, what David wrote at MSNOW was talking to people in the White House. Jake Traylor was talking to people in the White House who were saying they don't really know where he's getting this stuff from. Like they don't know because the decisions that are made that are kooky and don't make sense seem to be made amongst a very, very small circus circle. JD Vance, Marco Rubio, they don't tend to be involved in this stuff. I don't even know that Jared Kushner and and Whitkoff are involved in these things that they get to negotiate. They just send them out there to make it look like something's happening. But some very small cabal in the White House seems to be making decisions that nobody who's read a pamphlet on politics would think makes sense. So I talked to Maggie Haberman for my podcast about her book with Jonathan Swan, which just came out today or yesterday. And in it, she talks a lot about how difficult it is to get into Trump 2.0, how hard it is to get reporting on what's happening. And even it's funny because like those two are like probably very of the very few people who can do TikToks where you really see exactly what's happening. They even have reporting from the Situation Room, which had like quotes of what was happening, which is as recently as the Iran war. It's like I don't even know how you get a book published that fast. Yeah. And so I do think what they say is that the people surrounding Trump this time are very different than the last time. They are true believers, completely bought in people like Natalie Harp, people like Stephen Miller, who believe that Donald Trump, who actually believe the craziness like that Donald Trump would come, you know, was brought by God, that kind of stuff. I get Stephen Miller's one day we'll just do a whole thing on him, like who I can understand. I just don't I don't get the motivation sometimes. I do get the motivation of a percentage of people who believe that, OK, you know what, it's worth it if my gas prices go up and all of this. If you fix all this woke stuff that stopped me from getting into college or getting a job or whatever the case of what we used to call the alt right, right, who there were people with disparate interests who came together to say, oh, it's all the same thing. My my lack of success is all tied to affirmative action and D.I. and women and immigrants and gay people and all of that. But it's so I get it. I get there's some people who it's worth paying extra like it doesn't matter. None of this stuff matters. You're going to bring back my America that I remember. But I don't get how these smart, educated people around Donald Trump share these views or what they think success looks like. Stephen Miller should know economically. We're getting ourselves into a very bad place with this immigration thing, because we the one thing America stands out for is that we attract the best and the brightest around the world to the best universities in the world. Yeah, once you lose that, I mean, Canada is very happy. UK is very happy to take that on and say, hey, come come to our countries, come to our schools, come and we will make you come doctor. We'll give you a visa once you lose that is bad. Another point that I think you'll find germane here is that Project 2025, which you and I both talked ad nauseum about is now like 50, 60 percent implemented. Yes. Do you have thoughts on that? Promises made, promises kept. I'm not quite sure why we didn't take seriously. They wrote it down. Nine hundred and twenty two pages or something. They wrote all this. It was crazy ----. I mean, it was horrible to have read it because that's time I'm never getting back. But it it was all in there. And I just wonder whether Democrats should think of doing the same thing, write it all in a book, deny it entirely while you're running for election. He denied all of it. And then they did. They're doing all of it. And so it's it is a it's not it's not a conservative manifesto. It is crazy stuff that they're doing, but it's all written. They said they're going to do it and they're doing it. And I don't like that. I hope I don't wish this upon my worst enemy to have to read it, but it's it's all there. And, you know, a lot of the chapters were written by people who had been in the first Trump administration, people are now in a position of power, including Russ Vought, who was the main guy who's now in charge of the budget. I mean, this is like that. And the budget is the nation's conscience. I mean, people don't like to look at budgets, but that's how you determine what your priorities are, what you'll actually spend on.