The Briefing With Jen Psaki 6/5/26 [9PM] — MSNBC Breaking News Today June 5, 2026

[0:00] Trump demolished the historic east wing of the White House to build his gaudy new ballroom. [0:04] He made the American people a promise. He said the whole project would not cost the American [0:10] taxpayer a dime. Now, sure, like any construction project, it was going to cost money, [0:15] and building Trump's ballroom was going to cost a lot of money, a whopping $400 million. But it was [0:21] all going to be paid for by wealthy people and big businesses, basically a generous gift out of [0:27] the kindness of their own hearts. Trump repeated that line over and over, so much so that when [0:32] his allies eventually proposed spending an additional $1 billion of taxpayer money with [0:39] a significant chunk of the ballroom security, for a significant chunk of the ballroom security, [0:43] people freaked out. Even many Republicans couldn't stomach spending $1 billion of taxpayer money [0:50] on things like a ballroom. And this, this week, they stripped that $1 billion from their big [0:55] spending bill. But what if I told you this? The Trump administration had already spent 50 times [1:02] that much in taxpayer money to build his ballroom. What if I told you Trump had already taken $50 [1:08] billion out of the U.S. Treasury and spent it? All as part of what looks very much like a pay-to-play [1:16] scheme to finance his vanity project. And I'm not making this up. A brand new report from the [1:21] government watchdog group, Public Citizen, looked into the private donors who are supposedly funding [1:26] the Trump ballroom as a gift. Guess what their investigation found? Quote, [1:31] more than half of the publicly identified donors to President Donald Trump's White House ballroom [1:36] project have won new or expanded federal contracts worth more than $50 billion during the past six [1:45] months. The report also found that most of those same companies are also facing federal enforcement [1:50] actions over alleged wrongdoing and that some have had such actions suspended by the Trump [1:55] administration since the start of Trump's second term. So just to put a fine point on this, [2:01] these rich donors and corporations gave Trump $400 million to build his ballroom. And then, [2:06] according to this report, the Trump administration gave those rich donors and corporations $50 billion [2:12] in taxpayer money in new or expanded government contracts that they were not getting before. [2:19] And to top it all off, the report says the Trump administration dropped enforcement actions [2:23] against a few of the companies as well, as if they were paying into a state-sanctioned protection [2:28] racket. Now, the White House denied a pay-to-play arrangement. But by every appearance, [2:34] this certainly looks like a duck and it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck too. [2:39] But that's how Trump sees the federal government. He thinks the federal property and taxpayer money [2:43] are all his to play with. Today, Trump administration officials were in court defending his big [2:48] ballroom project. During that hearing, a federal judge asked one of the lawyers for the Trump [2:52] administration this hypothetical about Trump's authority to unilaterally destroy government [2:59] property. He says, if the government decides very quickly to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty, [3:04] nothing can be done? The Trump administration lawyer report, quote, I think that's right. [3:10] Yes. Yes, the Trump administration argued today in court that Trump could bulldoze the Statue of [3:17] Liberty and no law could stop him. It's an audacious claim until you remember that this is the same guy [3:23] who once had his lawyers argue before the Supreme Court that as president, Trump could assassinate [3:27] his political rival and be immune from prosecution. And remember, Trump's hand-picked judges on the [3:33] Supreme Court ultimately agreed with those arguments enough to grant pretty broad presidential immunity. [3:40] So it's no particular surprise that Trump acts like he's not bound by any rules. [3:45] Take his latest construction project, the big triumphal arch that he wants to build right in [3:49] front of Arlington National Cemetery, one that would cast a huge shadow over the graves of American [3:54] service members. Trump's decision to increase the size of the arch has even alarmed the architect [3:59] who first proposed the idea, who told the New York Times that Trump's new scale is, quote, [4:04] way too big for that site. Trump is demanding that his arch be 250 feet tall, despite an existing law [4:11] that would restrict its height to just 130 feet. But today, Trump's hand-picked Federal Planning [4:17] Commission decided that that law doesn't apply to Donald Trump's arch. The chairman of that commission, [4:24] who happens to be Donald Trump's staff secretary, says he's skeptical of the long-accepted legal [4:30] arguments about the law's applicability to the arch. They're also ignoring concerns about air [4:34] traffic. As New York Times reports, aviation experts are warning that the arch's height could [4:39] actually cause problems for the already problem-plagued airspace over Washington, D.C. [4:45] Remember that just nine days into Trump's second administration, that very airspace was the [4:51] site of the deadliest air collision over U.S. territory in decades. You would think Donald [4:56] Trump would want to avoid any future problems in the airspace over the nation's capital. But Trump [5:01] is willing to overlook all of those concerns to get his arch, which more than anything else feels [5:06] like a monument to himself. He craves symbols of his own power, like he's an authoritarian leader [5:11] in some tin-pot dictatorship. And he's never been shy about those aspirations. He openly joked about [5:16] being a dictator on day one of his presidency. He's the same guy who once said his fake claims [5:23] of election fraud warranted terminating the Constitution itself. And last year, [5:27] Donald Trump basically declared himself above the law, saying he who serves his country does [5:31] not violate any law, as if he is the sole arbiter of what is and is not legal. And Trump has surrounded [5:40] himself with lackeys who are willing to support that expansive theory of power. Just this week, [5:45] Trump told his aides to officially begin the process of appointing his former personal attorney, [5:50] Todd Blanche, to permanently fill the role of attorney general. And just today, Blanche made it clear [5:56] that he intends to use that office to shield Donald Trump from accountability for his actions, [6:02] even after his term ends. Well, do I believe it's a possibility that the Democrats will go after [6:09] President Trump, his family, anybody that knows him, anybody that worked for him? I think they've proven [6:13] that to be true. And what can we do about it is we can just keep on exposing. When we learn about [6:19] the weaponization that happened for many years, we can keep on exposing it and putting roadblocks [6:26] in place so it never happens again. Putting roadblocks in place, not so that it can never happen again, [6:34] so that Donald Trump cannot be held accountable for his actions. The irony here is that Trump and his [6:38] administration are acting like Trump is invincible at a time when his popularity is at rock bottom. [6:45] A new poll out this week finds that 61% of Americans now disapprove of the job that Donald [6:51] Trump is doing as president. That's a record for Donald Trump in this particular poll. [6:56] How does a country deal with the president who seems more and more emboldened to grab onto power [7:01] as the American public continues to lose faith in his ability to lead? I have just the people to ask. [7:06] Joining me now are two people who know a lot about corruption, authoritarianism, and Donald Trump. [7:11] Ruth Ben-Ghiad is a professor of history at New York University and author of Strong Men, [7:15] Mussolini to the Present. Tim O'Brien is the senior executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion [7:19] and the author of Trump Nation, The Art of Being the Donald. Welcome to both of you. Thank you for [7:25] joining us tonight. Tim, let me start with you. This whole thing about Trump reportedly [7:29] giving benefits worth $50 billion to some of the people, the donors to the ballroom. [7:39] On one hand, it's surprising. On the other hand, it's entirely unsurprising. We know that corruption [7:43] happens in government, but this is both, this seems to be half a protection racket and half of some [7:48] kind of quid pro quo. You donate to my ballroom, you'll get a government contract. You donate to [7:52] my ballroom, your legal troubles will go away. Yeah, you're so kind calling it benefits, [7:59] Ali. You know, it's, you know, it's Greece or, you know, what Boss Tweed might have called candy. [8:05] What it is, is it's corrupting good governance and good government. And none of that, [8:11] that's not a partisan or an ideological observation. If we want good policy and if we want honest [8:17] government and if we want government by the people and for the people, then we have to make [8:23] sure that people's motivations aren't corrupted. And the great tragedy of the moment that we're in [8:30] and the danger of it is that Donald Trump is an outlaw. You know, he doesn't feel bound by the laws [8:36] and he fetishizes authoritarian strong men and wants to be one himself. The other thing that's, [8:45] you know, just become utterly clear, though it shouldn't be a surprise as you note, [8:50] is that he didn't come into the Oval Office concerned about policy or his voters. He wanted [8:56] to monetize it. He wanted to make money off it. And he's been doing that for decades. And when he was, [9:01] you know, a real estate developer and a casino operator, [9:03] his unquenchable need to put his name on anything, whether everything that he [9:08] owned or touched, whether it was a skyscraper in New York or a casino in Atlantic City, [9:12] t-shirts, mattresses, underwear, bottled water, steaks, magazines, on and on and on and on. [9:19] At the time, you know, he was considered in the New York business community as a cartoon character, [9:25] but he's now ascended to the Oval Office in the White House. And what he's doing now is not [9:31] cartoonish. It's damaging and it's dangerous. And the kind of takeover, institutional takeover that [9:40] he's orchestrating is, you know, as Ruth well knows, as anyone who is serious about history or [9:47] chronicling the rise of authoritarians and fascists and strong men is, you know, trampling the voter [9:56] and taking over institutions. And I don't think U.S. institutions are fully compromised yet, [10:03] but we are very far down a road where I think we could begin to say that. And it's, you know, [10:08] it's going to be on institutions to stand up to what's unfolding right now. And until that happens, [10:14] Donald Trump is going to still use the powers of the White House to line his pockets [10:17] and reward his friends. [10:18] So, Ruth, there's a level of irony here that Trump is engaging in these self-aggrandizing [10:23] projects. It's not entirely clear what he hopes to get out of the reflecting pool being painted or [10:30] the arts or the ballroom. But this is at a time when his popularity is rock bottom. That would seem [10:36] strange to some people, but it's actually strange at all that this is happening, that those two things [10:39] are happening at the same time. [10:42] Yeah, they're in relation. The more they become unpopular because they have these idiosyncratic [10:49] and nonsensical policies, the more they feel insecure and yet they get megalomaniac because [10:56] they've surrounded themselves with sycophants and loyalists. And so they want to see their name [11:02] and their mark on everything. And I would also add that authoritarians have a very proprietary [11:08] mentality about governance. And that's how classified documents had ended up at Mar-a-Lago, [11:15] Trump's private residence. And so in this case, everything is theirs. And so taxpayer money for [11:21] the greedy authoritarian is a pot of money that they should control, that they should use for [11:28] their personal fixations, obsessions, their vanity projects. And that's also why, and it becomes a way [11:36] of engaging in corruption and in tying people to them so that it says, if you support me and give [11:44] me money for my vanity project, I will make you rich and I won't come after you. And so this is why [11:50] authoritarians from Mussolini onward who built stadiums and Erdogan is the Istanbul Canal and Hitler [11:58] with the Audubon, they love big projects. They love infrastructure because it's both building their [12:04] personality cult, but it's also a mechanism for corruption. [12:09] So there, Tim, there are a bunch of things. There are these big projects and then there are [12:13] things that regular people might say, what does it matter? The $250 bill. I mean, we've never put a [12:18] living person on a $250 bill. There also isn't a $250 bill, but they're going to make that. [12:25] There's his pictures on coins. There's his picture on admission tickets to the national park. [12:30] There's these banners. He has this habit, by the way, of making it clear that he, none of this was [12:36] his idea. People came up to him and said, sir, your picture should be on the $250 bill. Sir, [12:41] your banner should be on the Justice Department. But it is interesting because as you travel the world, [12:45] you go to these authoritarian countries and you see the pictures of the leaders in people's houses [12:50] and in their offices and in every bank and in every business. There's this blurring of the line [12:55] between the president as an elected servant of the people and the president as inseparable from [13:00] the state. Well, and by personifying himself as the state, it allows him to start to say he has [13:10] supreme authority over institutions, over the laws and over the hearts and minds of voters. [13:15] You know, remember, he's been playing as well on the idea, you know, that he's the chosen one [13:22] and that there's a religious blessing and legitimacy behind all these demonstrations of ego and [13:31] self-aggrandizement. And the other thing I think that he's doing is by mixing all of these small [13:38] and absurd grifts, you know, like the $250 bill and what he calls the reflective pond, [13:48] with larger grifts and outright corruption, like what he and his sons have done around crypto, [13:57] for example, is, you know, it's easier for people to start to lose a sense of scale [14:03] and they can become numb by the frequency of all of this. And we found this also when Trump lies, [14:09] on a regular basis. You know, it's hard to keep up with it because it's this fire hose of things. [14:16] And he knows it distracts people. And it becomes normalized and people forget that it is just a raw [14:25] and grotesque conflict of interest for the president of the United States to be trading stocks in [14:30] companies that he regulates and who benefit from the policies he helps enact and anything else that he [14:36] touches. [14:36] RUTH, this whole idea of small and absurd things, there was a lot of that in the first Trump [14:41] administration, right? There were a lot of people who said, why do we care about his hotel rooms, [14:45] you know, his hotel that foreign leaders are staying at? How much money could that actually amount to? [14:49] And now we're into a world where there are jets and billion-dollar contracts and deals for, [14:54] as you say, his family and his kids and his friends. The normalization is something that [15:00] has happened in history, right? The idea that you start with things that people say, [15:03] it's got really nothing to do with me. I don't really care. One day he'll be out of office and [15:07] it won't matter. At what point do we recognize that the normalization has set in? [15:13] Well, we're past that. The fact that the Republican Party, which is, of course, [15:20] he completely owns and is domesticated, it's a fully authoritarian party. It's very rare that they [15:29] stand up and rebuke him for anything. But I want to point out that the logic of these things, [15:35] we need to understand the logic. So even this absurd $250 bill with his face on it, [15:41] what this does is create a series of loyalty tests. Because it's illegal, [15:47] you would need somebody in Congress to go to the trouble of proposing a law to make it legal. [15:55] Which someone has. [15:57] Yes, exactly. So check that. Then the Department of Treasury, [16:01] the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who is abasing himself every day to genuflect to Trump, [16:09] has to say, oh, well, we've already, there's nothing wrong with this. There's nothing untoward [16:16] about this. And they already replaced the Treasury Secretary's signature with Donald Trump's signature [16:24] for printing new money. So even these small things that perhaps will never come to be [16:29] are how the machine operates and how the machine keeps itself, the machine of loyalty tests [16:36] and making government officials democratic ways and serving the leader and not serving the people. [16:45] Because the secret of authoritarianism is that you, the people, serve the leader. He doesn't serve you. [16:52] And so your tax dollars are helping him because he's not interested in public welfare. [16:57] And so it's like a pot of money for him. So the whole thing is reversed in a very perverse way, [17:04] actually. [17:04] This is a remarkable piece of context that every piece of getting one of these things done [17:10] is another piece, another opportunity for someone to prove their fealty or their loyalty. [17:16] And Tim, that has happened two times this week, by the way. Todd Blanche, [17:19] no surprise. Donald Trump wants him to be the permanent attorney general of these United States. [17:24] And Bill Pulte qualified for pretty much nothing is is going to be the head, the director of national [17:31] intelligence for the United States, a country at war with remarkable adversaries and remarkable [17:36] intelligence capabilities. And we've got a Trump election witch hunter who's going to be in charge of [17:42] it. Well, and I think as absurd as these appointments are, you know, Todd Blanche has been carrying Trump's [17:49] water for quite some time and is willing to make the most non-legal and an irrational series of arguments to [17:59] counter the idea that what they're doing is undermining the law when that's exactly what they're doing. [18:04] And in Bill Pulte, obviously, you have some with no intelligence experience. So why are they there? [18:10] And I would add to that mix of a third person that we have to watch very carefully, who is hasn't been in front of the [18:15] cameras lately, but is Stephen Miller. And those three men all are there because they have fealty to [18:22] Trump. And they are not there only because they have fealty to Trump. I think Donald Trump, I think [18:28] we really have to watch what happens now in the midterms with all three of them. Stephen Miller [18:33] essentially has in the shape of ICE a small private army at his disposal. Todd Blanche has the FBI and law [18:42] enforcement. And now Bill Pulte has part of the intelligence apparatus and oversees will oversee the [18:49] flow of classified information among intelligence agencies. All of those things, I think, going into [18:54] the midterms are going to be weaponized against voters and against democracy. And so Trump does have [19:02] a very survivalistic and streetwise goal with all of these appointments, even if they are unfit to hold [19:10] the offices they all occupy. Hang on to both of you guys. Stick around for me. When we come back to [19:15] another part of the authoritarian playbook, controlling the media, we have news on the [19:18] upheaval at 60 Minutes, what Americans can do to push back and a big piece of news out of California's [19:23] primaries, which I'll give you as soon as we come back. Stay with us. Following a tumultuous few weeks [19:36] at CBS News flagship program, 60 Minutes, that included the firing of the veteran journalist Scott [19:41] Pelley and other longtime staffers by the company's new leadership. The three remaining 60 Minutes [19:46] correspondents have said they've decided to stay with the show. Leslie Stahl, Bill Whitaker and John [19:51] Wertheim sent a joint message to colleagues explaining their decisions, saying in part, [19:56] we feared that our ruined of the existing power structure. That is simply categorically not the [20:01] case. Here's why we're staying, they said. We don't want to see 60 Minutes die. But the future of the [20:08] long running 60 Minutes program and its home, CBS News, remains uncertain. CBS's parent company, [20:13] Paramount Global, is in the process of acquiring CNN's parent company, which means a potential [20:18] merger of those two newsrooms looms. And Trump aligned figures could be calling the shots in [20:23] both. According to the Financial Times, behind the scenes, Paramount CEO David Ellison, the son of [20:29] Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, who U.S. President Donald Trump has called a friend, has been closely [20:34] involved in important decisions. Now, I should note that the description of the elder Ellison really [20:39] undersells his closeness to President Trump. Ellison not only bankrolled his son's purchase [20:45] of Paramount, he's also given millions of dollars to Republican aligned causes. At the same time, [20:51] he has billions of dollars worth of business in need of government's approval. The elder Ellison [20:56] even had the Trump administration broker a deal for him as the U.S. successfully pushed TikTok to sell [21:02] its American operations to a group co-owned by Ellison's company, Oracle. With Fox, CBS, local TV news [21:09] stations, groups like Sinclair and Nexstar, major social media platforms, and potentially soon CNN [21:15] financially connected, if not fully under the control of pro-Trump allies and billionaires, [21:20] the possibility of the American media landscape resembling what we see in autocratic countries [21:25] grows with every passing day. Ruth Ben-Ghiad and Tim O'Brien are back with me now. Ruth, let me ask you, [21:31] it strikes me that Scott Pelley was fired from 60 Minutes basically for doing his job. Sharon Alfonsi, [21:37] who was also pushed out of 60 Minutes, posted a statement on Instagram saying that, quote, [21:41] he was fired for asking questions, which is the job, and that journalists who ask questions are being [21:47] systematically replaced by people who won't. And that's not a side effect of what's happening at 60 [21:51] Minutes. It's the goal, end quote. I think she says something very profound there. It's not a side [21:57] effect. It is the goal. Yes, because, you know, autocracies need a standardized talking points. [22:04] That's very important for propaganda. But they also need journalists to act in a non-threatening [22:11] way for the power structure. And asking questions is a sign of independent thinking, of critical [22:17] thinking, and of curiosity. And those are all things that autocracies can't abide. Also, [22:24] asking questions and being critical are harmful to the leader's personality cult. How can you question [22:32] his policies, that kind of thing? And the last thing I'd say is the more respected the show, [22:40] the more it attracts people across the political spectrum, the more it's going to become a target, [22:44] because they need those minds. They already have Fox News viewers, but they need other people, [22:50] especially when Trump is no longer popular and people are waking up to the absurdity of his policies. [22:56] So they have to go after these respected news vehicles, because that's how media capture operates. [23:04] Tim, you and I have both been through many newsrooms over the years. 60 Minutes is not a TV show. It's [23:09] an American institution. What do you make of the remaining 60 Minutes correspondents deciding to stay [23:15] with the show, giving the idea that they don't want the show to die? [23:19] Well, I honor them for doing that. I worry deeply that they just had their fingers in the day, [23:26] because the Ellisons are running the show there, literally and figuratively. And we've gone, [23:32] you know, the American media ecosystem has gone through the devastation of local and national news [23:36] reporting that so many other forms of reporting rest upon. And then the boom in social media, [23:43] which essentially is built on magnetizing divisions among people or distractions among people. [23:49] And there's this third leg now where the remaining, you know, media bodies are being picked off [23:56] by people who are loyalists to Donald Trump. And whether that's the Murdochs or the Ellisons, [24:03] and the Ellisons now are also on the cusp, as you noted earlier, getting control of CNN. And there is [24:09] nothing that has come out of Barry Weiss's leadership that indicates that she is concerned about holding the [24:17] Trump administration accountable, and that she believes in ideologically free news gathering. [24:24] Commentary can be around that, as it should. I'm a proponent of commentary, obviously. But the core [24:29] act of gathering information and disseminating it to the American people is the spine of everything. [24:36] And the test in this will be, will we see critical pieces out of 60 Minutes and CBS News and then CNN [24:43] about the quagmire in Iran, about grifting in the Trump administration, about what's going on with [24:50] crypto, about Trump's disregard and sabotaging of American legal institutions, and on and on and on. [24:59] There are ample targets here that I think she is going to shy away from, because she was brought [25:05] to this particular party by Trump supporters. And they are digging themselves deeper and deeper into [25:13] the American media ecosystem. Thanks to both of you tonight. I appreciate it. Ruth Ben-Ghiet and Tim [25:19] O'Brien. We appreciate that. Hey, I want to show you about some big news that's coming out of the [25:23] California election. We've got a lot more vote in, and there's been a major development. The former [25:27] attorney general of California, Javier Becerra, will now advance to the primary, to the election [25:32] in November. He has taken the lead with 68 percent of the vote in. We've had a number of votes come [25:37] in from a number of countries. He's now taken the lead over Steve Hilton. We are not advancing Steve [25:42] Hilton because the lead between Hilton and Tom Steyer is actually narrowing a little bit. Let me show you [25:47] where most of these votes came in from. Sacramento County, we now have 63 percent of the vote in. Again, [25:53] you can see a substantial lead that Becerra has got over Steve Hilton. It's a Democratic county, [25:59] generally speaking, so you'd expect the Democrat to win, but Becerra is winning by yet more. [26:05] In Contra Costa County, 82 percent of the vote is in. Again, the lead has increased 31.9 percent [26:12] for Becerra, but Hilton is now in third place there. Tom Steyer also overperforming, coming in with 25 [26:18] percent of the vote there. Let's go one county south of that, 72 percent of the vote in from [26:23] Alameda County. Once again, Becerra in the lead, 31.6 percent. Tom Steyer in second place with 30.6 [26:30] percent. Steve Hilton in third place with 15 percent. Let's go to Los Angeles County. We had [26:35] a lot of vote come in in L.A. County. 71 percent of the vote is in there. Becerra in the lead with 30 [26:41] percent. Once again, Tom Steyer not in third place, but in second place now with 24 percent. Steve [26:46] Hilton, not too far behind with 21.7 percent. I also want to show you while we're in Los Angeles, [26:52] let's take a look at that mayoral race. Seventy one percent of the vote is in. We already decided [26:57] on Tuesday night that Karen Bass will, the incumbent mayor, will advance to the election with 35 percent. [27:03] But look what's happening here. Spencer Pratt is still in second place with 28.2 percent of the vote, [27:09] but the gap between Pratt and Nitya Raman, who's a progressive Democrat, is narrowing. Now, [27:15] whether she has enough space with 29 percent of the vote to come in to be in second place, [27:20] we are yet to see. But it is narrowing. This, of course, is tricky for Karen Bass, [27:24] who's in the political fight for her life, because she'd probably rather run against Spencer Pratt in [27:29] the general election because Nitya Raman's Democratic supporters, while some progressives [27:34] may not support Karen Bass, most of these votes would go to Karen Bass and probably see her [27:39] reelected as mayor. So this is a tricky race that we're continuing to watch. But in the governor's race [27:44] in the state statewide, we have 68 percent of the vote in. Javier Becerra, the former attorney general [27:50] who sued the Trump administration 122 times in his first administration, is now going to advance to [27:57] the election. We will watch to see what happens here between Steve Hilton and Tom Steyer. Tom Steyer is [28:02] overperforming at this point against Steve Hilton, but he's still running in third place. We're going to [28:07] take a quick break. Let's play a game. It's called how badly can the Trump administration [28:14] screw this one up? Today's category is screw worms. Now, if this is your first time hearing about [28:21] screw worms, don't feel badly. There hasn't been much of a reason to know anything about [28:25] screw worms. That's because screw worms were completely eradicated from the United States [28:30] in the 1960s. But to catch you up and forgive me because this is kind of gross. The new world [28:35] screw worm isn't actually a worm at all. It's a parasitic fly that lays its eggs in the wounds [28:42] and the body openings of live animals. Those eggs then hatch into larvae that feed on the host's [28:48] animal's flesh, burrowing deep into the animal like a screw. Hence the name screw worm. Screw worms [28:56] were a huge and devastating problem for U.S. livestock in the 1960s, infesting and killing cattle across [29:01] the country and costing beef producers hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. But the U.S. [29:07] government, through some really interesting science, developed a plan to kill them off and keep them [29:12] gone for good. You see, female screw worms only mate once in their lifetime. So the USDA bred millions [29:20] of sterilized male screw worm flies, airdropped them into the wild. Female screw worm flies then mated [29:29] with the infertile male flies and the entire population quickly collapsed. Again, that was back [29:34] in 1966. And with rare exceptions, screw worms haven't been a problem in the United States ever since [29:40] until about this week because the screw worm is back. On Wednesday, the USDA confirmed the parasite's [29:48] detection in a calf in Texas. And today they confirmed a second one. Texas Governor Greg Abbott [29:55] has declared a disaster and is mobilizing state resources to contain the parasite. And while only [30:00] two cases have been identified so far, a wider outbreak is very possible and could be disastrous [30:06] to our country's already suffering cattle industry. The U.S. cattle herd is already at its lowest level [30:11] in 75 years, which has driven prices to record highs. The cost of beef has soared a whopping 75% [30:20] since 2020. And it's estimated that a screw worm outbreak would cost the industry up to $1.8 billion [30:26] in losses, skyrocketing the prices for consumers even more. Even if this somehow doesn't develop into a [30:33] major outbreak, containment efforts like cattle movement restrictions and quarantines are still [30:38] guaranteed to have an available an impact on the availability and the price of beef. And that's the [30:44] best case scenario. So you might be wondering, how do we get here? How are we being threatened with a problem [30:49] that was supposedly solved 60 years ago? Well, back in 2023, the screw worm crossed the Darien Gap in [30:57] Panama, which has long served as a containment barrier. The Trump administration, of course, blames the Biden [31:02] administration for this. The parasites started moving north and over the past year, outbreaks in Central [31:08] America and specifically in Mexico, raised serious concerns that the screw worm could keep moving [31:14] north all the way to the United States. So what did Trump do about it? Well, his Department of Government [31:20] Efficiency, run by Elon Musk, decided to cut the funding that was specifically dedicated to monitoring [31:26] and containing the screw worm in Central America. I mean, why spend money on, you know, taxpayer money on [31:34] boring old parasites when you could spend it on a 250-foot arch or some fresh paint for the [31:39] reflecting pool. Around the same time, the administration decided to reopen the border [31:43] to Mexican cattle, incidentally, reversing a Biden administration border closure. Now, to be fair, [31:48] the cattle were subject to inspection first. While they eventually changed their minds and closed the [31:54] border to Mexican cattle once again, Trump's cronies were busy on Fox News, assuring the American [31:58] public that there was nothing to worry about. Here was the Agriculture Secretary, Brooke Rollins, [32:03] last November. We've got screw room under control south of the border. Still a couple more things [32:08] before we get there, but we're getting close. And the president is hyper, hyper focused on this. So [32:14] our numbers and our formulas are showing that prices will start coming down as soon as next spring [32:19] and certainly by summer and fall of next year. The president is hyper, hyper focused on screw worms. [32:28] Here we are in the summer of 2026. The Trump administration just broke ground on a new facility [32:32] to breed more sterile male screw worm flies, but it's going to be a lot of time before it's up and [32:36] running. Meanwhile, screw worm flies have made it to Texas now and beef prices are only going up. [32:42] You see, this is government under Donald Trump. It's not about real policy. It's not about really [32:46] solving problems. It's about him getting to play his games in the White House while the rest of [32:50] America is left screwed. From ranchers in Texas to farmers in Wisconsin, people are getting fed up. [32:57] Trump met with some of those farmers today. And can you take a guess at how that went? [33:00] We'll have more on that after a quick break.