State Of Play: Family Separation

Yesterday evening, Jon posted an Instagram link in one of our news-monitoring Slack channels, and before I knew it I was watching the heart-shredding plea from Savannah Guthrie and her siblings for the safe return of their 84-year-old mother, Nancy. I cried. This is somewhat personal: we know and love Savannah from working with her as NBC’s White House correspondent in the mid-2000s, but you don’t have to know her to be absolutely sickened over this.

We don’t have any idea yet what the kidnapper’s motives were, but it’s hard not to think about the abduction in the broader context of the moment we’re in: all the families being ripped apart for nothing, and the normalization of violence in our streets. I’m relieved that the administration is going all-in on the investigation. I hope they find Nancy Guthrie safe and sound. I also hope they can find in this story a moral about parents and children, and what holds our society together.

What We’re Watching

As of our meeting last night, it was a coin flip whether we would start the show with immigration or authoritarianism, but after the release of the full transcript of Trump’s Super Bowl interview with Tom Llamas, we’re going with the latter. Dan is slated to talk to Maine Governor Janet Mills about her Senate run, which will be fascinating given all the drama around Graham Platner. Standard disclaimer that busy politicians often cancel (as some of you may have noticed the other week when I teased an Ilhan Omar interview). Here’s what I’m proposing for news blocks.

Creeping Dictatorship

It seemed like last week’s FBI raid on Fulton County, GA’s elections office was just the beginning of something bad. Trump’s comments to Llamas make it obvious.

• Llamas pressed Trump on his new idea to “nationalize” elections. “There are some areas in our country that are extremely corrupt,” Trump said. “They have very corrupt elections. Take a look at Detroit. Take a look at Philadelphia. Take a look at Atlanta. There are some areas that are unbelievably corrupt.” He went on: “If they can’t do it honestly and it can’t be done properly and timely, then something else has to happen.”

• When asked why Tulsi Gabbard was present at the raid, Trump said: “If China or any of these countries are involved, that would bring her into it … There should be nothing wrong with the fact that they went in, got ballots from a while ago, and they’re gonna look at them. And now they’re gonna find out the true winner of that state.” Gosh, anyone have any bets?

• Georgia has moved in court to get the ballots back, but that seems beside the point now.

• Not for nothing, Steve Bannon said on Wednesday, “We‘re gonna have ICE surround the polls,” adding: “We’ll never again allow an election to be stolen.” Very scary.

Immigration

As usual, there is more to cover here than we’ll have time to get to. We’ll do our best.

• Trump told Llamas “Maybe we can use a little bit of a softer touch but you still have to be tough.” We’ll get into what that’s looking like on the ground, as 700 DHS officers begin leaving the state, leaving about 2,000 behind.

• Another new clip we have to react to: JD Vance’s response to an interviewer from the Daily Mail about whether he’d consider apologizing to the family of Alex Pretti. Vance’s answer: “For what?”

• I’d like to get into the story of Julie Le, the DHS lawyer assigned to Minnesota who went viral this week after reports surfaced that she told a judge “the system sucks. This job sucks,” as he pushed her on why ICE ignores so many court orders. “Fixing a system, a broken system, I don’t have a magic button to do it. I don’t have the power or the voice to do it,” she went on, according to a court transcript seen by Politico. Le has now reportedly been assigned back to headquarters.

• In Washington, debate over DHS reforms is heating up now that temporary funding is in place. Democrats released their official list of demands last night, including banning masking and racial profiling and, sensibly, ending the use of military gear and uniforms. Republicans are not happy about it, and many Dems are pissed at the leadership for agreeing even to the temporary funding. This could get interesting.

Media Pain

The Washington Post laid off a third of its employees on Wednesday morning, as you may have seen, in order to stanch losses that, while significant on paper, are essentially meaningless to a man of Jeff Bezos’s incalculable wealth.

• We’ll talk about what it means to live in a world without the Post and the missteps and bad calls that led us to this dark place.

• There’s also the discussion around Trump publicly scolding CNN’s Kaitlan Collins for not smiling as she dared to ask him questions he didn’t care to answer. This seemed to me to have the potential to break out the political media bubble; we’ll see what Jon and Dan think. We also have Vance going out of his way to tell Megyn Kelly how “perceptive” Trump was in that moment. “Why does it always have to be so antagonistic?” asked the guy who picks fights on Twitter all day and rushed to the White House briefing room to call Renee Good a terrorist.

• I think this would also be the right place to talk about the Guthrie story, and whatever the latest is.

Open Tabs

Here are three of the stories that I know I need to finish over the next couple of days:...