State of Play: “Meanwhile”

It drives me crazy when I find myself overusing a word in scripts. For the past few weeks, that word has been “meanwhile.” It’s a lazy prefab transition and not particularly additive: the audience already knows that the different things we’re talking about are happening at the same time. But recently I’ve found myself almost powerless to stop using it. I think that’s because, with all of the awful and mind-bending storylines right now, the simultaneity is in a way the most salient point.

Blood in the streets and troops in Greenland. The Fed under siege and the expired ACA subsidies. An oil deal in Venezuela and a carrier group moving toward the Middle East. The Grok nudes and the childhood vaccine schedules. It seems designed to break our comprehension. We can’t let it. Our job here at the show is to try to impose some sort of order, informing ourselves—and you—topic by topic, one thing at a time, until we get through it all. Meanwhile, meanwhile, meanwhile.

What We’re Watching

For tomorrow’s show we’re going to be talking to Sen. Ruben Gallego, who met with Greenland and Denmark’s foreign ministers yesterday, and who I’m sure will have lots of blunt takes about everything else going on. Even without the interview, though, we have more to discuss than we can possibly get through in 90 minutes. The putative rundown below is very much subject to change.

Thanks to the indefatigable Saul Rubin and Greg Walters for helping me wrangle all this across two time zones.

Pain in Minneapolis

The news this morning is that Donald Trump is threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act and send actual troops into Minneapolis, after tense, scary protests last night over yet another shooting by a federal agent there.

• Torquing up the cycle of angry demonstrations and federal deployments is, of course, the point. As Mayor Jacob Frey said on the show last week, “the Trump administration is looking for some excuse to cause additional chaos and deploy even more military force in our city.”

• The footage from last night—flashbangs, teargas, people screaming—lands in a sea of other horrifying clips of masked men terrorizing the community over the last several days. Is any of this breaking through to the American public? Is it changing minds? We suddenly have a bunch of polling data to help answer that question. We’ll get into the latest from Quinnipiac, Economist/YouGov, CNN, and more. Lucky for us, Dan confirmed in our Wednesday afternoon staff meeting that he’s raring to get into the data.

• We’ll also look specifically at two questions facing Democrats right now: whether to embrace “Abolish ICE,” and whether to make specific demands about reforms at DHS before approving new government funding at the end of the month.

Iran and Greenland

Where this ends up in the show, and whether it’s one topic or two, depends on what unfolds over the next few hours.

• On Iran, as of Wednesday afternoon, it looked like Trump was backing down from his Tuesday promise to the protesters that “help is on the way” and that the “killers and abusers” will “pay a big price.” At an Oval Office event, he told reporters that “the killing has stopped and the executions won’t take place,” before appearing to offer excuses for the regime: “they said people were shooting at them with guns and they were shooting back, and you know, it’s one of those things.” But then this morning we got a report that a carrier group is heading to the region. Hard to know what to root for here.

• On Greenland, we’ll get more from Senator Gallego, but a meeting at the White House between JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and the foreign ministers of Denmark and Greenland didn’t seem to go particularly well. In their press conference afterward, the ministers reiterated that an American takeover would be “totally unacceptable,” the same word that Trump used on Wednesday to describe any other outcome. That said, the leaders agreed to convene a “high-level working group” to look for a way forward.
  

• We may also cover the failure of the Venezuela war powers vote in the Senate, where Senators Josh Hawley and Todd Young changed their stances on the thinnest of assurances from Rubio—that if Trump decided to send ground troops into Venezuela, “he would seek congressional authorization in advance (circumstances permitting)”—allowing Vance to cast the tie-breaking vote.

Prosecutions

I’m going to confess something dark, which is that sometimes when we’re looking at what to cover, news suddenly breaks that pairs well with an existing story, suggesting a tidy section that makes organizing the show easier. I say “dark” because it’s usually bad news, and that’s the case here.

• On Wednesday morning, Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson had her home searched and her computers seized—apparently she herself isn’t the target, but still—which fits naturally with the investigations into Sen. Elissa Slotkin, Rep. Jason Crow, and the other members of Congress who made that video about disobeying legal orders. Of course, there’s also the criminal investigation of Jerome Powell, which Federal Prosecutor Extraordinaire Jeanine Pirro walked back ever so slightly on Tuesday, clarifying that her office had been trying to ask about cost overruns and Powell’s Senate testimony for a while, but no one called them back, “necessitating the use of legal process—which is not a threat,” before threatening him again.
  

• Trump, meanwhile (there it is again!) continues to undermine the charade that this is an impartial inquiry, attacking Powell in personal terms every chance he gets. Delivering one of his famed affordability speeches in Detroit on Tuesday, he said of the economy, “if I had the help of the Fed it would be easier. But that jerk will be gone soon.”
  

• We’ll probably use the Powell remarks in the Detroit speech as an excuse to mention Trump yelling “fuck you” to now-suspended autoworker TJ Sabula, Sabula’s incredible statement to the Post defending his actions, and the fact that two GoFundMe campaigns set up for him have now raised more than $800,000 combined. Not globally significant, but the kind of good news we needed today.

Open Tabs

My browser windows are always littered with articles I keep meaning to finish, or, in some cases, start. Here are this week’s top three:...