Needless economic pain from Trump not even worth it if his tariff gambit works: economist

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Rachel has the night off, but she will be back tomorrow. I promise you that.

And we're going to begin tonight with how the day began, and that is with the opening bell.

As you know, every morning, Wall Street trading officially begins

when someone rings the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange in Lower Manhattan. We've all seen the images.
It's quite important, quite symbolic. The Stock Exchange does have this long tradition of letting a different company ring the opening bell each day.
And in some ways, it is a way of celebrating some kind of milestone that the company has just hit or a company that may have been going public. And today, because the news gods do have a sense of humor, the company with the distinct honor of actually ringing the opening bell today out of all days to officially start trading was the pro-Trump conservative media outlet Newsmax.
Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy did the honors surrounded by several of President Trump's longtime associates, people you know, people like Rudy Giuliani. You see him there in the front, Trump's former labor secretary.
Remember that guy, Alex Acosta? He was there as well. A little bit further back, though.
And they all clapped and they cheered as it happens every morning. They rang tiny little bells as they officially kicked off what we now know was an especially terrible day on Wall Street.
Yeah, there's no sugarcoating it. This was the worst day on Wall Street since the early days of the COVID pandemic.
Traders and world leaders and, yes, ordinary Americans, people with jobs and 401ks reacted to the tariffs that have been imposed by President Trump just yesterday by pretty much freaking out. It was a massive sell off.
The Dow dropped nearly seventeen hundred points, its worst single session since June of 2020, nearly five years ago. The Nasdaq dropped nearly 6%, its biggest decline since, again, March of 2020.
The S&P 500 dropped about 5%. And look, I should note that the New York Stock Exchange also has a tradition of letting another company ring the closing bell to mark the end of the trading day.
And today, that honor went to a company called Fiserv. The Fiserv CEO rang that closing bell, just happens to be Donald Trump's choice to run Social Security.
So Trump's own allies, believe it or not, got to bookend this historic self-inflicted freefall of a day on Wall Street.

They are now the face of this historic day.

Their reaction to what Trump has just done went well beyond the U.S. markets.

Just take a listen to how some of our closest allies reacted over the course of the day as this news broke.

Clearly, there will be an economic impact from the decisions that the U.S. has taken, both here and globally.
But I want to be crystal clear. We are prepared.
The administration's tariffs have no basis in logic, and they go against the basis of our two nations partnership. This is not the act of a friend.
I deeply regret the United States' decision to impose 20% tariffs on imports from across the European Union. We see no justification for this.
They are all unjustified, unwarranted, and in our judgment, misguided. This is not the act of a friend.
America's most important trading partners, our allies, they clearly feel betrayed by Trump's actions and this decision. These tariffs have struck a nerve all across the globe.
And importantly, this new Trump trade war has also struck a nerve here at home, surprisingly even among Republicans. Yesterday, as Trump was announcing these new tariffs, the Senate was voting on a measure introduced by Democrat Tim Kaine to end Trump's tariffs on Canada.
For the first time in Trump's second term, four Republicans actually broke with their party to pass that bill and push back against Donald Trump. The price hikes that will happen for Maine families every time they go to the grocery store, they fill their gas tank.
They fill their heating oil tank. If these tariffs go into effect, will be so harmful.
Tariffs are a terrible mistake. They don't work.
They will lead to higher prices. They are a tax.
And they have historically been bad for our economy. And that was yesterday.
So Republicans making the case that tariffs abroad will lead to higher prices and will actually hurt Americans and the American economy here at home. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Rand Paul, former Republican leader Mitch McConnell, they actually voted with Democrats to pass that bill to end Trump's tariffs on Canada.
And the bill would still have to pass in the House. But of course, over there, Speaker Mike Johnson has already gone out of his way to make sure that Democrats cannot bring it up for a vote.
We can say, though, that the pressure is beginning to mount. Today, Democratic Congressman Gregory Meeks said that he will introduce a resolution to try and force Mike Johnson to hold a vote on that no tariffs on Canada bill.
Also today, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley joined with Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell, introducing a bill that would give Congress the power to actually stop any and all of Trump's tariffs to give Congress the final say on all tariff decisions. There is finally some momentum in Congress to try and take back some, albeit small, power from Donald Trump.
And certainly at least when it comes to these tariffs that have wrecked the markets as we saw play out today. How will Trump respond to that pressure? Will these breakaway Republicans actually stand their ground? What will happen to our economy while we wait to see how all of this plays out? We're going to talk to an economist and answer all these questions in just a moment.
But first, joining us here on set, NBC News White House correspondent Vaughn Hilliard. Vaughn, great to see you here in New York.
Take us inside the administration on a day like today. What are you hearing from your sources? What has the reaction been as the president's bombshell news of the tariffs sends markets into a free fall? We're hearing some layoffs from some companies already.
And we're seeing his administration try to spin this by saying, look, a little bit of pain, but it's going to pay off in the long run. There's an inability to explain what the ultimate end game is of this.
And that is why it is so striking to see the likes of Chuck Grassley, Rand Paul, Susan Collins, even Ted Cruz, suggesting that he could potentially get on board with this 60-day requirement that ultimately Congress would have to approve these tariffs. Because what you are looking at is an administration compared to the first one that has not articulated over the last 24 hours what

concessions are even looking for from these litany of countries. Right.
In talking, I just got off a plane from the Midwest here where I was talking with some Republican farmers, ones that voted for Trump three times. Absolutely.
But even they said that the first go around, they were able to articulate. Right.
We want to renegotiate NAFTA. Right.
Or we're going to take the China. We want greater market access.
We want them to stop, you know, putting money towards states, Chinese subsidized companies. Right.
There is a lot of like actual tangibles. But whether it be Secretary Besant or Secretary Lutnik or the president himself, they have struggled to say and articulate to these members of Congress, but also the American people, what their goal is of this here at a time in which we're watching an American economy here question itself.
So I want to drill down on that for a moment, which is what is the end goal here with these tariffs? What is the president's stated end goal? What is perhaps happening behind the scenes? It seems to me as an outside observer, there is mixed messaging, right? On one hand, they want to negotiate with these countries. And at the same time, they're saying, hey, hey, we don't want any of these countries to make rash decisions.
We want them to be rational and not to escalate. And it's hard to watch this in real time, as we just played some of the reactions from world leaders to say they're not going to react in the same manner that we have.
So it kind of begs the question, what is the end goal for Trump with these tariffs?

Is it to force these countries to negotiate? Is it to bring manufacturing back into the U.S.? Do we have any sense of what that is? Well, the president himself said this was not going to be a negotiating tactic. Until today, he said it was a negotiating tactic.
And this is where the administration has struggled to articulate what the actual purpose is of these tariffs. at a time in which there are millions of Americans

who are looking at their retirement accounts,

questioning what crops that they're currently seeding here in these weeks ahead. Where are those export markets going to be? If you take corn, for instance, about 30 percent of corn is exported overseas, about 25 percent of pork.
And these are folks, right, they're not just out there planting, but they're out there actually going overseas and actually making these trading partners themselves, finding those export markets. And they're questioning not just this fall, but long term.
Is China going to turn to Brazil for corn instead? I think those are the questions that the administration to this day has still been unable to answer. And I think it's important to know who is actually having this conversation in the Oval Office.
We cannot move away from the point that while he was preparing to make these Rose Garden remarks yesterday, it was Laura Loomer who was there inside of the Oval Office with him. And why is that important? Because she is a preeminent conspiracy theorist who has no regard for basic facts and the truth.
And the fact that those when we look at the history books at this moment on April 2nd at the White House, the fact that such an announcement like that was made at the same time that Laura Loomer was in the Oval Office with him is striking. And I think it goes to the fact that there are serious questions from economists about exactly what the endgame here is and how the president perceives his own economic policy and its impact on people.
So you bring up a really important point as to who was with the president. We kind of know from previous years of reporting on him, he always kind of takes the impression of whoever was last in the room with him.
We outline that there are some Republicans, certainly in Congress and the Senate, who have now broken rank with him on this issue, four, growing number perhaps. But it does make you wonder, were there any attempts, do you know of any attempts by Republicans to get to the president before this announcement about the tariffs and say, hold on, slow your roll.
I know you've been talking about it. You've been promising Liberation Day.
But let's just kind of game this out and play this out over the next 24 hours. Do we know whether there was any attempts to dissuade him from the train wreck that we saw play out today? No.
And as opposed to the first administration, the likes of Dina Powell or Gary Cohn, who were there by the president's side. I think that's where it's important when you're looking at somebody like Susie Wiles, the chief of staff to the president of the United States, she was heralded as a successful campaign manager.
You know why she was successful? Why, you know, Republicans loved Susie Wiles? Because she was not a true gatekeeper to Donald Trump. She allowed everybody to have his ear.
And ultimately, Donald Trump ran his campaign. She is now the chief of staff.
And what we are watching in these first two and a half months of this administration is yet again, the full access to the president himself. And he is the one who is calling these shots.
And as he promised, he surrounded himself by people in this cabinet who knew what they were signing up for this go around. He was promising on the campaign trail, tariffs on China of up to 60%.
That is exactly what he's now implementing. And he had people like Howard Lutnick there at Madison Square Garden the week before the election on the stage celebrating those tariffs.
And I think notably, Eamon, convincing a great share of this American population, millions of Americans, including one I just got off the phone with, that this is the right path forward. And that short-term pain is the president is telling them that they are about to endure, whether it be from the farms or from the brewery or over at their local store.
The 401K or the 401K is being wiped out today. That short-term pain is going to be worth it in the end.
And there are millions of Americans that voted in that belief and now are expecting him to come through. The question is, that first administration, he had tariffs on Canada and Mexico for nine months.
He had tariffs on China for 18 months. This is not a president who has ever shown a willingness to back down or acknowledge that he was wrong.
Vaughn Hilliard, it's great to see you. I am sure it is going to be a long couple of days as this continues to unfold.
Really appreciate your reporting. And tonight joining us now, Betsy Stevenson, the former chief economist of the United States Department of Labor under President Obama.
Betsy, it's great to have you on the show with the perspective and insight of an economist. Talk to me about what you think these tariffs will actually mean for viewers at home.
We touched on this a little bit with Vaughn right now, but for ordinary Americans, explain to us how this will actually impact them, both in the short term and in the long term. Well, obviously, ordinary Americans who are relying on their savings retirees are already seeing that they're taking hits to what they have.
But I think what we're really going to see is price increases. And they will happen pretty quickly.
We might not see them tomorrow. We might not even see them next week.
But I think within the end of the month, if these tariffs stick, I don't think there are a lot of companies out there that aren't going to be able to withstand paying these tariffs without passing it on to their customers quite quickly. So I think we're going to see a spike in prices and inflation.
And we already see that in the data on inflation expectations. So people are expecting inflation to be higher.
And then what we can see, we will also see is layoffs. We're going to see an economy that where economic growth is slowing.
Will it slow all the way to the point of a recession? I don't know. I think it's more likely than not.
But what we do know for sure is we're not going to have the kind of robust growth that we've seen over the last couple of years. I think we're going to see that start to slow down.
And so what you're going to see is for ordinary people, more of your friends and family who don't have access to jobs, higher prices when you go to the grocery store, when you go to buy clothing or you go to buy ordinary items. And I think that's going to stick around for quite some time.
So let me if I if I were to say like this conversation was happening with Republicans, and certainly the administration has been making this argument, they say short term pain for long term gain. They make the argument that by creating these tariffs, we're going to see an increase in manufacturing here in the United States.
A what is the validity of that that argument? And is there any truth to increasing these tariffs will somehow compel American companies, whether it's pharmaceutical companies or automobile manufacturers, to suddenly overnight get these plants up and running, create jobs and produce goods that are going to be cheaper than what is coming in from overseas? First, we'll start with overnight. They can't do it overnight, even if they wanted to.
They're not some magic fairy that blinks their eyes and the factory opens up tomorrow. So this is a long run investment to open factories in the United States.
And you need to be thinking about not just what are the tariffs going to be today, but what are the tariffs going to be over the next 20 or 30 years?

And then you have to ask yourself, are you really going to be able to produce it cheap enough in the United States that you're better off doing that than just paying the tariffs and continuing with the factories that you've already invested in?

I don't think that a lot of companies are going to immediately come and invest in the United States.

First of all, we're going to have a slowing economy. That's not a great investment environment.
We're also going to have less stable prices with higher inflation, also not the best environment for investing. But let's put some numbers on all of this.
We have 13 million Americans who work in manufacturing, and we have 123 million Americans who work in the private sector, not for government, the private sector in non-manufacturing jobs. You know, yes, maybe we get.
Let's say that he is vindicated and we get 2 million new manufacturing jobs. So we go from having 13 million to 15 million.
What if they come at the expense of those other 123 million jobs? How many of those do we lose? And it's also worth noting that the typical pay, the average pay in those other jobs is higher than what we see in manufacturing. So it's not clear that we're going to be giving up jobs that are worse in order to get these manufacturing jobs.
So it's even in his best case scenario, where we have higher prices that persist, that we now make very expensive garments, clothing, iPhones in the United States, and many people can't afford them. So we have have smaller sales that those are the kind of jobs that the American public wants.
American public wants high paying jobs, not low paying, low skilled assembly jobs. Betsy Stevenson, former chief economist of the U.S.
Department of Labor. Thank you so much for helping us sift through all of the noise today.
Greatly appreciate it.

We're going to have much more ahead up here next.

We're going to look at, in writing, the proof of the kind of retribution those in the government seeking Trump's favor are actually willing to exact on Americans in this country and

what others are doing to fight back.

Stay with us.

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Sign up for MSNBC Daily at MSNBC dot com. So by day 73 of this administration, the Trump administration, you know, the twin themes of retribution and chaos have become the new normal.
But there are still some actions that are so petty and so vindictive that they actually managed to stand out in all of this. For example, just about a month ago, the Social Security Administration did something incredibly strange.
All of a sudden, out of the blue, the agency stopped letting new parents in the state of Maine get Social Security numbers for their kids at the hospital. They also stopped letting funeral homes file death records electronically.
Everything would now have to be done in person at a Social Security office in that state. Again, this was all done just in one state, the state of Maine.
And of course, the changes, as you know, would cost more. It would certainly take a little bit more time.
And it meant that the parents of newborn babies who are already dealing with lots of important things by bringing a new life into this world, well, they would have to now risk getting sick by going in person to crowded

social security offices and possibly spending hours in line to get their paperwork.

The question is, why did the Social Security Department make that change?

Why did it only apply to the state of Maine out of all the states?

Well, it turns out that it may have been because of this.

Is Maine here, the governor of Maine?

Thank you. Well, it turns out that it may have been because of this.
Is Maine here, the governor of Maine? Are you not going to comply with it? Well, we are the federal law. Well, you better do it.
You better do it because you're not going to get any federal funding at all if you don't. Well, back in February, Trump signed an executive order aimed at banning trans athletes from competing in school sports.
The governor of Maine, Janet Mills, who you saw in that clip, she refused to comply, saying that was an issue for Maine state legislator to decide not the president of the United States. And you know what happened? Trump was furious.
You better do it because you're not going to get any federal funding at all if you don't. And by the way, your population, even though it's somewhat liberal, although I did very well there, your population doesn't want men playing in women's sports.
So you better you better comply because otherwise you're not getting any any federal funding. Every state.
Good. I'll see you in court.
I look forward to that. That should be a real easy one.
So now Democrats on the House Oversight Committee are alleging that that clash that you just saw there, that threat by Trump and Maine's Democratic governor, Janet Mills, is the reason that Maine was singled out by Social Security. Emails obtained by the committee show that just a week after Trump's clash with Mills, the acting commissioner of Social Security, Lee Dudek, directed his staff to cancel the contracts that allowed Maine to process Social Security number and death records electronically, writing, quote, no money will go from the public trust to a petulant child.
Now, because of public outcry, the changes to Social Security in Maine only ended up lasting about two days before the agency reversed course. But amazingly, the acting commissioner of Social Security, Lee Dudek, has now been shy, has not been shy, I should say, about how the original changes were actually meant to be that retribution.
In fact, he told The New York Times, quote, I was ticked at the governor of Maine for not being real cordial to the president. Obviously, making social services worse for citizens of one state as political retribution is a huge scandal on its own, and it should be a huge scandal.
Multiple members of Congress are already calling for the acting commissioner to resign over this. But the open question here is, did he actually freelance this retribution? Did Dudek do this on his own? Or was anyone above him at the White House involved in this action against the state of Maine? Joining us now is Representative Shelley Pingree of Maine, one of the members of Congress now calling for the acting commissioner to resign.
Representative Pingree, thank you so much for being with us tonight. So quite a shocking development.
And before we get to that, I do want to start, though, with some news out of the Department of Agriculture, which announced that it was actually freezing some of the funding it provides to schools in Maine in response to alleged Title IX violations about trans athletes.

The department claimed that it was only freezing administrative funding and not touching funds

for child nutrition.

I understand your office actually has some news on that front this evening.

What can you tell us?

Well, first, thanks so much for having me. And thanks for highlighting this issue, what crazy times we're living through.
So, this retribution continues to our state. We're being singled out, but it's just like so many other things that Trump is doing.
We've learned tonight that even though the Secretary of Agriculture said that no child will go unfed, that if a child was fed today, they'll be fed tomorrow. But now they have fired all the personnel who administer these programs, school lunch, school breakfast, the snacks.
So great that the money will be there. But if we can't get it to the schools, how are they going to serve lunch? It's crazy what they're doing here.
Yeah, it certainly sounds like and they've certainly put Maine in the crosshairs all from that interaction that we we highlighted earlier on. But help us broaden the aperture here for a moment.
Other than the Social Security and the Department of Agriculture, in your opinion, how else has the Trump administration been targeting the state of Maine? Oh, sure. They've been doing a variety of things.
They started off by taking all the funds from our Maine Sea Grant program.

Now, that's a program that directly helps our fishermen who are challenged by, you know, ocean warming, sea level rise. Also helps our coastal communities.
And we were struck by some severe storms last year. And the Sea Grant program helps with that.
The whole delegation jumped on that. A few days later, they took it back.
Then they went to the University of Maine, said they were going to take away all the funds for research on, you know, simple things like the potato beetle or PFAS in our soil. A few days later, they took that back.
Then they went after the one that you heard about or you mentioned at the Social Security Administration, where they're doing an incredible amount of damage. And just the very idea that a newborn, you know, a mom with a newborn baby in a very rural state has to go to a Social Security office.
I mean, it's just unthinkable. But as you said, people pushed back and they took it back.
But this continues, you know, somewhere in the middle there. Trump said he wanted a full throated apology from our governor.
And then today we got this notice from the Secretary of Agriculture. But let's face it.
We think these are illegal and unconstitutional activities. I'm an appropriator in Congress.
We have the power of the purse. He doesn't.
So he has no right or ability to take away this funding. And then what kind of world do we live in where you get mad at a governor who has to follow the laws of our state and also a recent Supreme Court decision? So she's dealing within the parameters she's got.
And then you say, if you don't apologize or you're a petulant child, then suddenly your state is going to be denied this money, money that goes to farmers or to kids. I mean, it's really outrageous.
I'm curious as to how your Republican colleagues are responding to the state of Maine, the actual Republicans in the state of Maine. How are they responding to being targeted by the president of the United States, by the Social Security Administration, by seeing some of the funding that you just outlined, you know, being on the chopping block simply for the governor of that state to say she is going to follow the law? Well, I think some Senate, some of them, as in Senator Collins, who fought hard to get the May secret money back and who doesn't want to see our our funding targeted.
And as well, so is the chair of the Appropriations Committee has appropriately fought back. You know, there are those in the legislature who will use this for their political gain.
It was a state legislator who started the fight on transgender athletes in our school. By the way, we have two or maybe it's down to one.
So they are targeting and making young people feel, you know, very challenged and putting them in a difficult situation. But that is a matter for the main legislature to decide or this to be adjudicated in the court.
The fact is, the president is just using his power. I mean, who is the petulant child here? He did not like being talked back to by the governor.
And he doesn't like someone saying, I'll see you in court. You know, he always feels he's going to win in court.
And as we know, he's losing about 95 percent of the cases in front of the courts right now. Yeah, he is one of the most thin-skinned presidents we have seen in this country.
Shelly Pingree, congresswoman from the great state of Maine. Thank you so much for joining us.
I greatly appreciate it. Thank you for your time.
Thank you so much. Up next here tonight, today was another bad day for Trump lawyers in court.
We're going to talk live with the lawyer who argued against the administration and some of its most draconian policies. We'll explain when we come right back.
at Strayer University we help students like you go from will I to why not for over 130 years we've been innovating higher education to make it more affordable accessible and attainable so you can reach your goals go from thinking can I to yes I can and keep striving Visit Strayer.edu to learn more. Strayer University is certified to operate in Virginia by Shev and as many campuses, including at 2121 15th Street North in Arlington, Virginia.
MSNBC presents Maine Justice. Each week on their podcast, veteran lawyers Andrew Weissman and Mary McCord break down the latest developments inside the Trump administration's Department of Justice.
The administration doesn't necessarily want to be questioned on any of its policy. I think what we are seeing is Project 2025 in action.
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Eastern on MSNBC. Lawyers were in court today for the Tufts University student who was grabbed off the street by immigration officers last week.
Turkish grad student Ramesa Ozturk's attorneys today asked a judge to order her returned to Massachusetts from Louisiana, where she is now being detained. Ms.
Ozturk's university is also throwing its support behind her. In fact, Tufts' president writes in a declaration to the court that the university has no reason to believe that Ms.
Ozturk did anything to warrant her detention and that her arrest is sowing fear in the campus community. In that declaration, the president says, quote, based on everything we know and have shared here, the university seeks relief so that Miss Ozturk is released without delay so that she can return to complete her studies and finish her degree at Tufts University.
And one of the things that was particularly unsettling about Rumeisa Ozturk's arrest is that she was never actually told that her student visa had been

revoked. The very first time that she had learned about it was when masked immigration officers surrounded her on the street.
Well, it turns out that revoking student visas without telling anybody appears to be the rule, not the exception for this Trump administration. After a student at Minnesota state Mankato was detained by ICE, staff at the university decided to, you know, check the status of the rest of their international students in an online federal database.
And they discovered, to their surprise, that five more students had had their visas revoked. This is happening all over the country.
It's not just in that state, Minnesota. It's in Colorado.
It's in Arizona, Ohio, North Carolina. Universities are actually discovering that their international students have had their visas revoked and no one, none of them, have been notified.
Meanwhile, in a federal court in Washington today, the Trump administration was yet again on the hot seat over its deportation of hundreds of Venezuelans to a prison in El Salvador.

Last month, you may recall Donald Trump claimed that a wartime law from the 1700s somehow gave him the power to deport and imprison them with no notice, no hearings, no due process. when a federal judge learned that planes carrying those men were in the air.

He actually ordered them to turn around and bring the men back to the United States until the judge could determine whether the Trump administration was actually acting lawfully. You know what happened? Those planes, they landed in El Salvador.
They did not turn around. And those men, one of whom the Trump administration now admits was deported in error, are now locked in a brutal prison there.
Today's court hearing was for that judge to determine whether the Trump administration willfully violated his order to turn those planes around. And it did not appear to go well for the government.
The judge said to the Trump administration lawyer, quote, there is a fair likelihood that the government acted in bad faith throughout that day. And if you really believed everything you did that day was legal and could survive a court challenge, I can't believe you ever would have operated in the way that you did.
And the judge spent much of today's hearing

trying to determine which Trump administration official,

literally by name, which official by name

knew about his order to turn the planes around.

Because the judge makes sense.

That judge wants those names

so that he knows exactly who to hold in contempt

if he determines that they did in fact defy his order to turn those planes around back to the United States. Joining me now is Lee Galernt, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants Rights Project.
He was the lawyer on the other side in that courtroom today arguing against the Trump administration. Mr.
Galernt, it's great to see you again. Thank you so much for joining us.
Help us understand what happened in today's hearing. What was the judge trying to get from the Trump administration and why was it so important? And did he ultimately get it? Yeah, so I think he was frustrated and he's been frustrated now for several weeks about the government's actions.
So there's two sort of parallel things going on in this case.

One is, and the administration used this wartime authority during peacetime and remove people, potentially for the rest of their lives, to this brutal Salvadoran prison without any due process whatsoever. We say no so far.
The courts have said no. We'll see that case is pending in the Supreme Court.
Now we'll see what the Supreme Court says. But at the same time, the judge is also trying to figure out, was his order violated? We had an emergency Saturday night hearing.
The administration started moving people under this authority before they even published the law. He said, turn the planes around till we can figure things out.
Or if they land in El Salvador, bring the people back. The administration did not bring the people back.
And in a highly publicized video, you saw those men being turned over to El Salvador in prison. So the judge is very, very concerned that the administration just sort of blatantly violated his order not to turn the planes around.
And what he said is, if you thought my order was wrong, appeal it. You did appeal it, but don't just ignore a federal court's order.
He's trying to get to the bottom of what happened, who did it, who ordered them not to turn the planes around, and was it done deliberately? What is the argument that the government is presenting as to why they have not produced the name of these officials? Do you do you expect that the government will ultimately reveal the names of who gave that flight the green light to take off from U.S. soil? Or if the order came out after the plane had taken off, not to turn back around and just ignore that order? I mean, do you expect the judge to haul Trump administration officials in to testify? Yeah, I mean, you're asking the exact right question.
I don't know how the administration is going to play it. So far, they've not only failed to turn over the information, but they've invoked something called the state secrets privilege, which is invoked so rarely and only in the most serious matters, you know, matters with CIA kind of investigations and that kind of thing.
So I don't know what they're going to do. I think the judge is not going to let them off the hook.
He is going to want to know who's responsible, what happened. And he today said there may need to be hearings.
And he also said, you know, maybe you want to try and avoid contempt by bringing these individuals back. So we'll see how he plays it.
But the one thing he's been clear about is this is not about him. This is about a federal court's authority.
And I think he is very, very concerned that the administration is just thumbing their nose at the judiciary and saying, well, there was this honor, but so be it. Yeah.
And of course, as others have noted, if that is the case, this would put us on the precipice of a constitutional crisis where the administration is ignoring a court order. But talk to me about the what the administration has now done.
They have admitted that one person on those flights was deported and in prison in El Salvador in error. They are now saying he has no recourse to contest his situation or return to the United States.
That has to be mind blowing for anyone who is watching this to think, how is that even possible? Somebody who is wrongfully sent out of this country has no legal recourse. Yeah, absolutely.
And I wish we could say it was only one person, but we know one person definitively now. But we have started to put in evidence showing that many people were likely mistakenly sent that they were not gang members.
They're using things like tattoos as what they think is definitive proof, but they're not giving anybody a hearing to contest that. Experts have said tattoos are not a reliable indicator to this gang.
I think when it's all said and done, we are going to find out that many, many, many people are sitting in a Salvadoran prison, potentially for the rest of their lives, and we're never gang members. And the fact that they didn't get any due process means we may just have sent people there when they were going to hear from again.
And so I think this one person that we know now is definitively a mistake. I think that's just the tip of the iceberg.
I don't know what the administration is going to do, but this judge is going to get to the bottom of it one way or the other. And we not only have to deal with the people who've already been sent, but we really need to stop it going forward because the administration is saying we don't need to give them process and we will start removing person after person after person.
And I don't think El Salvador will stop taking them. Yeah, so much is at stake.
And let's certainly hope the judge does get to the bottom of it for the sake of those wrongfully sent there, as well as for our democracy. Lee Galer, it's great to see you as always, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants Rights Project.
Thanks. Up next, what Kamala Harris said tonight

about what's happened since Donald Trump became president.

There were many things that we knew would happen.

Many things.

I'm not here, sir.

I told you so. to sew.
I swore I was going to say that. What she went on to say about the courage that she is seeing from the American people next, along with historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat here live.
Stay with us. I'll say this.
Fear has a way of being contagious. When one person has fear, it has a way of spreading to those around them and spreading.
And we are witnessing that, no doubt. But I say this also, my dear friends, courage is also contagious.
Courage is also contagious. That was an MSNBC exclusive clip of former Vice President Kamala Harris speaking to a group of black women at the leading women defined summit in California tonight, encouraging them to speak up against the rolling back of progress happening in the country right now.
It is something more and more Americans appear ready to do. In fact, this Saturday, more than eleven hundred rallies are set to take place across the country in what organizers are calling a hands-off nationwide protest.

It is expected to be the largest single-day demonstration since Donald Trump took office.

Joining us now to help us contextualize Donald Trump's latest extreme actions and the growing pushback to his agenda,

Professor Ruth Benguet, history professor at NYU, New York University, right here in New York City.

Miss Benguet, it's great to see you as always. Thank you so much for being here.
You're not a you are a historian, not an economist, I should note. But connect the dots for us.
I mean, what is your reaction to Trump's sweeping tariffs decision and whether or not you see it in furtherance of his authoritarian agenda? Absolutely. The chaotic way that these are being rolled out and is is very typical.
You know, it's very important to note that the pace of change and the scale of change, the things they've been doing in the months they've been in office, does not resemble the early months of most authoritarians now in office. Even somebody like Putin, Erdogan, Orban, it's much faster.
And when you move fast and you break things, that brings chaos. Dismantling the administrative state is part of Project 2025, and that brings chaos.
And the other problem with the tariffs is, you know, part of this, I believe, is part of a plan, along with rolling back health, you know, health protocols and everything else to kind of take down America as a democracy and weaken America. But even if Trump believes in his heart that these are sensible and doesn't listen to economists, that not listening to people is symptomatic of a kind of autocratic pathology, that autocrats surround themselves with sycophants, and nobody has the courage.
We talked about courage. No one has the courage to tell them that this is inane and harmful.
And in a real dictatorship, if you say, if you critique the leader,

you go to jail or you get killed. The tragedy here is that people could speak out as the stock

market is plummeting and these tariffs are ruining our alliances and trade policies all over the

world, but nobody wants to, despite there not being consequences like in other in autocracies that are more advanced. And it seems to me you're describing two things.
One, the actual result of a policy, but also the decision making process and the fact that within 74 days, the Trump presidency has moved quickly to break things in a very unilateral way, not through a legislative or collaborative process. And we're seeing it happen with the acquiescence of Republicans who have basically or essentially ceded their power to him with very few, if any, willing to actually disagree with him publicly or go against him.
Is that is that fair? Yes, that's fair. And that's a symptom of the reason he's been able to do this is that he's entirely domesticated the Republican Party.

You know, I think they were January 6th when they were targeted just like Republicans, just like Democrats, really whipped them into shape.

And they've been afraid of him ever since because January 6th told everybody that there was no stopping him and there were no limits and no bottom. And so he's able to do what he wants without pushback.
The other issue is that, and this is where we're innovating the authoritarian playbook, there's only one man on the cover of my book, Strong Men, because there's only one man in the Strongman model of rule. We have two people who are breaking things.
We have Elon Musk, who's been like an unelected co-president, and his whole MO has been to defund and dismantle and break things. And so we're facing a huge amount of loss, a huge amount of chaos that's being institutionalized.
And here we're in uncharted terrain, I think.

Yeah. And of course, it raises the question of what comes next after this state gets dismantled

the way that it is happening right now. Ruth Benghia, New York University history professor.

Ruth, thank you as always. Thank you for talking to us.
We'll be right back. That does it for us tonight.
Rachel will be back here tomorrow night. You can catch me this weekend on my show.
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