'Not about crime': Maddow CRACKS OPEN Trump's real motives in deploying the National Guard to D.C.

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Happy to have you here.

So it was the summer of 2016.

It was June 2016,

and it was a terrible crime.

It happened in a small legal office, a legal office that specialized in real estate and in immigration matters.

At this little legal office, somebody saw smoke coming out of the stairwell at that office.

They called the fire department.

Firefighters showed up and they did what brave firefighters do.

They charged right into that burning building.

Firefighters immediately found the source of the fire.

Somebody had made a big pile of books and papers from that office and lit them all on fire.

They also found a person.

They found a man lying on the floor next to the fire in the front office.

And they dragged that man out of the building to save him, to get him medical attention.

When they got him out of the building, though, they realized quickly that this wasn't just going to be a fire call.

This was going to be a police call because the man was not just unconscious from smoke inhalation or something.

The man had been smashed in the head.

It looked like with an axe or maybe a metal bar.

And amazingly, when the firefighters got there, the man was still alive.

But as they got the EMT starting to work on him and trying to save him, it turns out he only lived for a few more minutes before he passed away.

Meanwhile, the firefighters pushed further into the burning office.

And then, in an inside room, they found yet another fire, a second fire, same MO as the fire in the front room.

It was another pile of books and papers that had been sort of hastily piled up and then set on fire.

So, it's a paper fire.

It's really smoky.

It's making it very hard to see what's going on.

But these are professional firefighters.

They get both of these fires in this legal office under control.

And as they push further into the office, in that back room in the office with the second fire, they find two more people

laying on the ground.

It's two women.

And again, awfully, these are not people who have just been incapacitated by the fire or the smoke.

These women have also been violently attacked.

One of the women is dead.

She has been beaten all over her body and she has had her throat slit with a large knife or a machete.

The second woman

has also been beaten.

Like the man in the front office, she has been smashed in the head.

But when the firefighters get to her, they find that she is still breathing.

It seems like a miracle.

They get her out of the burning building.

They get her out to the paramedics.

The paramedics work feverishly to try to save her life.

But like the man in the front room who had been hit with the axe,

she is also too badly injured to survive.

And the EMTs work to save her for more than half an hour before she also dies on the scene.

As I told you, it's just a terrible, terrible crime.

This happened at a small law office in the summer of 2016, June 2016.

It happened in Madrid, in a fashionable neighborhood in Madrid in Spain.

And it made national news in that country, as you would expect.

This was just a brutal, brutal, violent triple murder at a legal office.

And the weapons were terrible with an axe and a machete and three people killed, then the crime scene set on fire to cover the murderer's tracks is just absolutely horrific

but they got the guy investigators in spain ended up picking up his trail in part because of the lid of a water bottle that he left behind at the scene they trailed him as he fled spain he went first to germany where he had previously lived and then he fled from germany to south america he went to venezuela and when the spanish investigators trailed him to Venezuela, Spain's government asked Venezuela to extradite him, to send him back to Spain to face trial for this horrific triple murder in this law office in Madrid.

And Venezuela said they would not do that.

As a matter of policy, they do not extradite people to face trial in other countries, but they do allow people to face trial.

in their country for crimes allegedly committed elsewhere, for crimes committed outside their borders.

And so with the evidence from the law office murders and fires, with the evidence that let the Spanish prosecutors and investigators track this killer all across the globe, as he led them on a chase on two different continents,

in Venezuela, they put the guy on trial and he was convicted, convicted of this brutal triple murder.

He got 30 years in prison.

And Donald Trump just set him free.

Trump sprung him from prison and flew him to the United States.

This is

the guy in the second row,

this is him.

This is Trump flying him back to the United States.

He flew him back to the U.S.

and then he just let him go in San Antonio.

The New York Times cited a source saying that they believe after he was sprung and set loose in San Antonio, the man reportedly made his way back to Florida for some reason.

He's apparently on the streets of Orlando right now.

Convicted triple murderer, the axe and machete guy who was serving a 30-year prison sentence for that triple murder, Donald Trump set him free.

Thank you, Trump administration.

Thank you, President Donald Trump, for being so tough on crime.

The triple murderer guy, the convicted triple murderer guy, was set free to roam the streets of Orlando as part of Donald Trump's botched El Salvador prison thing.

You may recall Trump randomly declared that we had been invaded by Venezuela, remember?

And because of this insane pretext that we were at war with Venezuela because Venezuela invaded us, Trump said that justified us using the Alien Enemies Act, justified us using military force and tactics against people on U.S.

soil, which specifically in this case meant sending people to a foreign prison, effectively a concentration camp, because at this prison they afforded people no hearing, no legal process whatsoever, no way to ever get out.

Trump's attitude in this whole gambit was: you know, just call it war.

Call them alien enemies.

Call it war.

Say this is a military action.

And that means you can do anything you want.

In the humiliating collapse of that bizarre, pornographically cinematic, transparently pretextual gambit,

Trump ultimately had to get everybody out of that foreign prison that he had sent them to.

But in so doing, he couldn't just admit that he had done something transparently illegal and extra-constitutional and patently ridiculous that was never, ever going to survive scrutiny by the courts.

He had to make it somehow look like he was winning, that this wasn't just a collapse of a bizarre, transparently pretextual, botched political gambit.

This was somehow a win for Donald Trump.

This was something he meant to do all along.

And so the people who he sent, the men he sent to that foreign prison in El Salvador, they all got sent to Venezuela to be set free.

And then Venezuela sent the United States

people that it was holding in its prisons, including some random innocent Americans being held for essentially no reason by Venezuela's bizarre authoritarian government,

but also

a convicted triple murderer who used an axe and a machete to butcher his way through a Madrid law office before setting it on fire to cover his tracks.

Trump got him freed too, and then just let him go inside the United States where he roams free tonight.

You'll also remember from that whole Trump debacle the case of Kilmar Obrego

a man from Maryland.

Americans all over the country learned this man's name and protested on his behalf and pressed their elected representatives on his behalf after the Trump administration admitted that this man with no criminal record whatsoever,

they had sent him to that foreign prison totally by accident.

They also said, however, that they did not intend to bring him home, even though they sent him to that foreign prison by accident.

In order to cover up that mistake in that debacle, the Trump administration said that Mr.

Rigo Garcia, even though he'd been sent to that prison by mistake, he would never ever come home.

Then it turned out they didn't really mean that either, because then they did bring him home.

But they said they only brought him home so they could charge him with very serious crimes that they had never before thought to charge him with.

Never been charged with anything before, but all of a sudden, now, all of a sudden, that his case was part of this debacle, this collapse by Trump, completely mishandled at every step of the way.

They had to make it look like some sort of a win.

And so they had to come up with some way to make it seem like he was a criminal.

And so, all of a sudden, just in time, they turned up a cooperating witness who they'd never heard from before who said, Yeah, he was sure that Mr.

Obrego Garcia had definitely done some crimes and sure he'd testify about it.

What crimes do you want me to testify about?

They turned up this brand new, never-heard-from before, cooperating witness in prison.

He'd been in prison a lot.

In December of 2022, police in a place called the Woodlands in Texas, which is just north of Houston, police in the woodlands received reports of shots fired in a residential neighborhood in the middle of the afternoon one day.

They responded to the call.

They pulled over a pickup truck.

In the truck, they found the driver,

also a silver handgun, also several live rounds of ammunition and 11 spent rounds, so 11 bullets that had been fired.

They also found a passenger in the truck who was too drunk to speak with them.

The driver of the truck told police that his friend, the passenger, was really, really drunk and had been shooting out the window of the truck into this residential neighborhood before he passed out.

The passenger in the truck was a man who had previous arrests and convictions and jail time for lots of different offenses, including cocaine possession and public drunkenness and driving while intoxicated with a handgun in the car and other crimes.

He was a man who was not in this country legally.

He had in fact been deported five times.

But he kept coming back, even as he kept going back to prison in this country again and again for new criminal offenses, including drunkenly shooting up that Texas neighborhood from the passenger seat of a moving pickup truck.

And, you know, President Trump and the Trump administration, honestly, honestly, they just make up a lot of bad stuff about immigrants to try to make you think that there's something inherently criminal and terrible about being an immigrant.

And that, of course, is not true categorically.

But in this case, here's a guy who is kind of what they're talking about, right?

He's got a really long rap sheet of sort of increasingly serious and dangerous felonies, including multiple increasingly dangerous gun crimes.

Donald Trump, just this summer, set him free.

This guy pled guilty to deadly conduct in the Texas incident.

He was convicted on federal charges even after that and was already in federal prison serving that latest sentence and set for deportation upon his release.

But Donald Trump reached into the federal prison system and sprung this guy, let him out.

He's now in a halfway house, set to be fully released in January, whereupon Trump is reportedly set to give him a work permit as well.

Because

tough on crime.

And also, Trump needed a story to tell about that Abriego Garcia guy that everybody was protesting about.

But tough on crime.

And then there's the convicted child sex trafficker.

Sorry, I should be more specific.

The convicted child sex traffickers, plural.

President Donald Trump was, of course, friends with convicted pedophile and child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein for at least 15 years.

The federal prosecutor who gave Epstein his bizarrely lenient plea deal in Florida, which set him free to continue what he was doing to children, Trump named that federal prosecutor to his cabinet in his first term.

That was Alex Acosta, who Trump made the United States Secretary of Labor.

After the bizarrely lenient plea deal that Epstein inexplicably got from Alex Acosta, Epstein was later charged federally for additional sex crimes against children, including some that allegedly took place in Florida.

The federal prosecutor who brought those charges,

the Trump administration just inexplicably fired her without explanation.

Meanwhile, the Florida Attorney General, the Florida State Attorney General who brought no state charges against Epstein in Florida, even when those alleged Florida sex crimes against children turned up in Epstein's federal indictment, Trump named that Florida official, Pam Bondi, to be the Attorney General of the United States in his second term.

I should mention, though, that she was his second choice.

After his first choice for Attorney General washed out, when he himself came under investigation for child sex trafficking, after an ethics investigation concluded that Trump's Attorney General first choice, Matt Gates, had paid for sex and had sex with an underage girl, which is statutory rape.

Mr.

Gates was not criminally charged, but he did get withdrawn as Trump's first choice for attorney general in favor of Pam Bondi instead, who didn't charge Jeffrey Epstein in Florida.

And now under Pam Bondi's leadership at the U.S.

Department of Justice, Jeffrey Epstein's co-conspirator, Ghelene Maxwell, who participated in the sexual abuse of children with Jeffrey Epstein, who was herself sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for her own crimes against children with Epstein, Pam Bondi's Justice Department has now moved Ghelene Maxwell to a minimum security federal facility, even though sex offenders like her are not allowed at facilities like that.

This is a place for nonviolent offenses and white-collar crimes.

And not only is she not allowed to be at a place like that because of the nature of her crimes,

because

of her being convicted of sex crimes against children,

But NBC News reports that the prison itself had to increase its own security staffing and security protocols simply to be able to accept her as a transferred prisoner.

Which means they are expending huge federal resources for her, extra taxpayer dollars for extra security, just to make sure that Ghelane Maxwell is in an extra comfortable facility, giving her special privileges that no other prisoner in the Federal Bureau of Prisons appears to be getting for any reason.

But she is a child sex trafficker linked to President Donald Trump.

And so

that's what tough on crime looks like here.

Under Pam Bondi's leadership, the Department of Justice has also earned headlines like this one from just a few days ago.

Quote, video shows Department of Justice official urging January 6th rioters to, quote, kill cops.

Now, to be clear, this man wasn't a Department of Justice official.

when he urged January 6th rioters to kill cops.

He was just a January 6th rioter when he he was urging his fellow January 6th rioters to kill cops.

After prosecutors reviewed the video of him imploring his federal rioters to kill police officers that day, they arrested him and put him on trial for his alleged role in the violence that day.

The trial went all the way through closing statements, but never made it to the verdict stage.

Because during that trial, Donald Trump was sworn in as president for his second term, whereupon he ordered a mass pardon of all the January 6th rioters, including those who assaulted police officers.

And so the kill all-the-cops guy was sprung and set free.

And only then did Pam Bondi hire him to become an official at the U.S.

Department of Justice.

Because tough on crime.

In Washington, D.C., homicides are down 32%.

Robberies are down 39%.

Armed carjackings are down 53%.

assaults with a dangerous weapon are down 27%.

In Washington, D.C., the rates of burglaries and assaults with a dangerous weapon are at their lowest point in 30 years.

Nevertheless, because he's so tough on crime, President Trump today deployed hundreds of National Guardsmen and women into Washington, D.C.

send the U.S.

military to become the police force in Washington, D.C.

The lead in the Washington Post tonight, quote, President Donald Trump announced announced today that he is placing the D.C.

police under direct federal control and will deploy the National Guard to the streets of Washington, an extraordinary flex of federal power that stripped city leadership of its ability to make law enforcement decisions and could expose residents of the nation's capital to unpredictable encounters with a domestically deployed military force.

A domestically deployed military force.

Because

tough on crime.

You think it's really about crime?

You think it's really about being tough on crime?

Do you want to maybe track down the axe and machete triple murderer Trump just released to the streets of Orlando to go ask him if he thinks it's about being tough on crime?

Or you maybe want to pop in to ask Ghelane

at that Bureau of Prisons crown jewel facility that kind of looks like a community college?

You want to go ask her?

Think it's because he's so tough on crime?

That said, I mean, let's be generous here.

Maybe it's not really just a generic tough on crime thing.

Maybe it's specifically because it's D.C., which is the seat of the U.S.

federal government.

So even for a city enjoying a 30-year low in violent crime, maybe that's still just an intolerable amount of crime, specifically because it's D.C.

and D.C.

is where the federal government is.

And maybe he's just really sensitive about protecting the federal government.

Maybe he's really sensitive and really focused when it comes to protecting the seat of the federal government from any kind of crime.

January 6th, no, forget about that.

He's just sensitive about it now.

Maybe that's it.

Well, let's see.

Today's Monday.

On

Friday,

this happened.

A sustained violent attack on the headquarters of the federal government Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

See all those little pock marks, those little holes?

Those are bullet holes in the CDC.

The gunman reportedly tried to get into the CDC headquarters in Atlanta.

Security guards turned him away.

He then drove to a nearby business, a nearby pharmacy, and took up a shooting position there.

The Associated Press reports today that the man fired more than 180 shots.

into the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control.

More than 180 shots fired.

He was found with five guns, including four long guns, and bullets that he fired at the CDC broke at least 150 windows.

The bullets pierced blast-resistant windows in multiple buildings and spat glass shards into multiple offices.

One police officer was killed.

The gunman died as well.

It's not clear if he shot himself or was shot by law enforcement.

It is a miracle, obviously, that CDC personnel other than the police officer protecting them were not killed.

The head of the agency that includes the CDC, Donald Trump's health secretary, Robert F.

Kennedy, posted this online after the shooting.

Then he posted this one as well.

This is what he was posting the day after the shooting at the CDC, when a gunman fired more than 180 bullets into the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control.

This was the reaction of the man in charge of of that agency.

This was his response.

It wasn't until later and after he'd finished posting his phishing pictures that he got around to expressing condolences for the shooting or whatever.

This major attack on a federal government facility, again, 180 shots fired into the CDC.

This major attack on a federal government facility has so far garnered no response whatsoever from President Donald Trump,

let alone an armed response into Atlanta, where the CDC headquarters is.

But he did send in the National Guard to Washington, D.C.

today because

tough on crime,

you think?

Maybe it's not about crime.

Maybe it's not about defending the federal government from threats.

right?

Maybe it's not about that.

Maybe it's not about crime.

Maybe it's not about any other thing he might voice.

Maybe it's what you can see with your own two eyes.

Maybe it's that he really enjoys using U.S.

military force against American civilians on American soil and wants any excuse to do it anywhere he can.

Watch what they do, not what they say.

Because, I mean, given what else he's done on the issue of crime, Does it make sense that him sending in the troops for a military takeover of Washington, D.C.

is about crime?

I mean, that's what he said.

But what do you think based on what he's done?

Because meanwhile, while he's talking about crime, he has sent in the National Guard and active duty U.S.

Marines to Los Angeles as well, right, supposedly to save that city from protests against him.

That deployment was so inexplicable and so palpably disconnected from its purported justifications that the LA Times reported on a spike in calls to the GI rights hotline, with military personnel telling that hotline they didn't want to be deployed to point guns at citizens.

Military personnel telling that hotline they, quote, didn't want to be on the side of being armed occupiers in their own country.

The New York Times reported the troops recoiling from Trump's use of them in Los Angeles.

In more pungent terms, quote, at least one company commander and one battalion commander who objected to the mission were reassigned to work unrelated to the mobilization.

Some troops became so disgruntled that there were several reports of soldiers defecating in Humvees and in the showers at the Southern California base where the troops are stationed,

prompting tightened bathroom security.

Tightened bathroom security.

Despite that military triumph in Los Angeles,

We've now got Trump using military bases now all over the country to hold massive new immigrant prison camps, which he is planning on military bases at Fort Bliss in Texas and Camp Atterbury in Indiana and Joint Base Maguire-Dix Lakehurst in New Jersey.

Trump has also expanded huge swathes of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona into what he's calling, quote, military zones, in which he's legally expanded the boundaries of local military bases into huge hundreds of miles-long territories, where he's now given U.S.

active duty troops the instruction and authority to stop and search and arrest Americans on domestic U.S.

soil.

Watch what they do, not what they say.

He wants U.S.

military force deployed on U.S.

soil facing inward.

as a show of force to the American people about what he and the government can do to you.

People in DC are already protesting against it.

This was just today.

Just as people in Los Angeles protested against it when Trump tried it there as well.

This weekend, people protested in Los Angeles against ongoing immigration raids and arrests there.

Those protests have not stopped in Los Angeles, with or without the National Guard and the Marines there to try to scare everyone into not protesting.

People protested in Columbus, Ohio this weekend as well.

Hands along high street, they called it.

Protest in Columbus, Ohio, where protesters line the streets for eight solid miles

protesting against what Trump is doing.

This woman in Florida is 104 years old.

She has been protesting every week, every Thursday with her neighbors and friends.

Her sign in this picture

says here, girls just want to have fun ding for scientific research.

She's 104.

She'll be 105 years old this week.

And she is protesting against the Trump administration one out of her every seven days.

What are you doing with your life, you spring chicken?

When Donald Trump sent troops to Los Angeles this summer on the absurd pretext that some kind of war was on, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and other LA officials didn't just protest against it and try to stop it.

They also warned the country

that, yeah, he's doing this to us first, but it's going to be you next.

They were clear-eyed about that.

They were right.

And we clearly are now in the part of the attempted authoritarian takeover where our authoritarian leader just starts trying to turn our own military to face us, the people of this country.

And the questions that are equally important in response to that right now are, number one, what will the troops do about that?

And number two, what what will we do?

Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles joins us live here next.

Stay with us.

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It makes me feel like our city is actually a test case, a test case for what happens when the federal government moves in and takes the authority away from the state or away from local government.

That was Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass speaking on the day the Pentagon confirmed back in June that it would deploy active duty U.S.

Marines into the streets of Los Angeles, supposedly to quell protests against Donald Trump and his immigration raids.

In all, 700 active duty Marines and roughly 4,000 National Guardsmen and women deployed to Los Angeles over the past couple of months over the objections of both the city of LA and the state of California.

As of today, there are still some National Guard troops in Los Angeles, about 250 of them.

California continues to fight this policy by Trump in federal court.

Today was the first day of a three-day federal bench trial in San Francisco, where a judge will soon decide whether the Trump administration actually has broken the law with these deployments, whether Trump violated the 10th Amendment and the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars troops from participating in civilian law enforcement.

From the very start of this gambit of sending troops into Los Angeles, Mayor Bass

very, very clearly and very soberly warned that whatever you thought about what was happening in LA, nobody should be under any illusions that this is just an LA thing.

that it's only a matter of time before Trump was going to expand these tactics and apply them to other American cities.

Today, that prediction was proven true, with the president now weaponizing the military to exercise control over our nation's capital.

And in the process of announcing it today in a rambling press conference, he also found time to threaten the city of Chicago, the city of Oakland, the city of Baltimore, the city of New York, and yes, again, even the city of Los Angeles.

Joining us now is the mayor of the great city of Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass.

Mayor Bass, I really appreciate you taking the time.

Thank you for being here tonight.

Absolutely.

Thank you, Rachel.

Given what you have experienced in Los Angeles this summer, do you have any words of wisdom for your colleagues and peers in Washington, D.C.?

Yes, absolutely.

I mean, I think that the outcry that you already saw building in Washington, D.C.

is important.

It is just so critical that we stand together as a nation and say that we are not going to allow our military to be misused like this.

But I almost feel like now the experiment started in LA and now he's dosing Washington, D.C.

Well, let's see, we'll try it for crime.

Let's see, we'll do this here.

Sending 100 FBI agents to do what?

To patrol Washington, D.C.

As you reported, we still have National Guard members here.

At its height, there were 4,000.

I would say about 100 maybe were actually used protecting two federal buildings.

The rest of them were playing video games, bored to death, taken away from their families, their jobs, and their education.

It's a complete misuse of the young men and women who sign up to serve our country.

It's described

today in Washington in the way that

it was described when it first happened in Los Angeles.

It's being described, I think, across the board as a flex, as the president making a show of force, essentially against you, against local officials and state officials who are powerless.

He revels in how powerless you are to stop him from what he's doing.

But it seems to me it's also a flex against the public in your city and now the public in Washington, D.C.,

that there will be no locally accountable force

that is the end-all-be-all of local law enforcement.

There will be an additional federal force that answers only to him

and

nothing anybody can do or say about it can can stop it.

Is that a fair interpretation that this is essentially an intimidation tactic against not only local and state officials but also the public?

Well, absolutely is, but flex dosing, I mean to me, they're trying to see how much are we going to tolerate.

Will the American put up with the American public put up with this?

Will they put up with that?

It's interesting which mayors in which cities

he's chosen to focus on.

In Los Angeles, where you have crime down, a 60-year low in terms of homicides, homelessness is down.

He points to homelessness and he points to crime in Washington, D.C.

I don't know what's going on there, but I imagine that they are not suffering in the despair that he described in his press conference that in any way would warrant the use of federal officials in this manner.

When you say he's testing how much we'll tolerate, and you talked also about the protests being important, what do you think people can do that would matter?

Can the people, can local officials

establish any sort of limiting factor?

What do you think is the most valuable pushback against things like this for people who object to it?

Well, I can tell you when they were doing the random snatching or kidnappings of people off of our streets, when people gathered, they backed away on many occasions.

And so in Los Angeles we have a rapid response network where everybody is alerted.

If you see masked men getting out of unmarked cars, let everybody in the area know, not to interfere because

that's a crime, but to bear witness, to bear witness, to film, to document, to speak up.

And on many occasions, they would back away.

Now we did go to court.

You know, we've had two successful

policies from the court,

court decisions that basically have put a temporary restraining order in place.

And so I know that they are violating it, but we do have a court date in September and it's going to go to the Supreme Court.

We have to use every avenue possible, every tool in our toolkit.

But what's most important that we cannot do, we cannot accept this.

It has been a unifying factor in our city.

Our city has stood strong.

No part of our city says that this is okay.

Everybody is repulsed by it.

But we cannot allow our sense to be normalized.

We cannot allow this to be normalized.

We come accustomed to it and then we grow to accept military being abused in this manner.

That's why I think it's so important that this is still another phase of an experiment.

We have to make sure that this experiment fails.

Do you remember the day I came on your show and the president said that he had stopped the violence in Los Angeles and he was patting himself on the back.

The National Guard hadn't even arrived.

That's why I call it performance.

It's an act.

It is not legitimate in any way, shape, or form.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.

Madam Mayor, thank you very much for your time tonight.

You've got an invaluable perspective on this and I appreciate you being here.

Thank you.

All right.

What she just said there about how it has brought the city together, that there is not a single part of Los Angeles that is in favor of what he did and not a single part of the city that hasn't objected to what he's done.

It's a really important part of how this history will go down and will be a limiting factor in terms of how much he thinks he can do it elsewhere.

All right, we got much more news ahead here tonight.

Stay with us.

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Ondeck does not lend in North Dakota.

All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

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Over 2 million lives have been saved because of mRNA technology.

It helped us develop COVID-19 vaccines in record time.

People are going to die because we're cutting short funding for this technology.

People are going to die because we are cutting short funding for this technology.

That person is Dr.

Jerome Adams.

If he looks familiar to you at all, that's because he was Surgeon General in Donald Trump's first presidential term,

saying now that people are going to die because of a newly announced decision by Donald Trump in the second Trump presidential administration.

Dr.

Jerome Adams is not the only veteran of the first Trump term who is directly urgently making this case.

A former top biodefense official from Trump's first term tells NPR this decision, quote, endangers the national security of the United States.

Another health official from Trump's first term tells NPR the new policy is quote irresponsible, saying, quote, we're taking our country from 2025 back to 1940.

and we all know that's a recipe for disaster and failure.

The thing that has all these public health officials freaking out, this irresponsible recipe for disaster and failure, is Trump's inexplicable decision to cancel half a billion dollars in contracts related to mRNA technology.

Health Secretary Robert F.

Kennedy Jr.

announced last week he's canceling funding for the development of mRNA vaccines, including ones against respiratory illnesses like COVID and the flu.

In the COVID pandemic, we lost more than a million American lives.

We would have lost millions, multiple millions more,

had it not been for the mRNA vaccines that were developed during Trump's first term.

Now, apparently, though, Trump is calling it all off, or at least RFK Jr.

is.

Trump recently appeared perplexed by the question when he was asked by reporters about this decision to kill off mRNA vaccines.

He honestly did not seem to understand what the question meant or what his administration's new policy was.

But doctors and scientists and experts in public health of all points on the ideological spectrum are not just criticizing this decision, they are warning that Americans are going to die because of it.

Somebody who definitely does understand this stuff and who has scared the heck out of me with it is going to join us here next.

Stay with me.

Michael Oosterholm is an esteemed epidemiologist who has served in senior roles at the CDC.

He's been an advisor to both Republican and Democratic administrations.

When the AP recently asked Dr.

Osterholm about Trump health secretaries, Trump's health secretary cutting off funding for mRNA vaccines, Dr.

Osterholm was very blunt.

He said, quote, I don't think I've seen a more dangerous decision in public health in my 50 years in the business.

Joining us now is Michael Osterholm.

He is director for the University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research.

Dr.

Osterholm, I really appreciate your time tonight.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Why is this such a dangerous decision?

Well, the vaccine research that we desperately need to have is research that would actually make us much better prepared for the next influenza pandemic, which is going to happen, and it could be much worse than COVID.

Right now in the world, if we had a pandemic, we could only make about enough vaccine for not quite one quarter of the population of the world in the first 18 months.

The approach we use is embryated chicken eggs, which are just very slow.

It would take years to get all the people vaccinated.

In the meanwhile, mRNA technology, if we continue to research it and apply it, we could likely have enough vaccine for the world in the first eight to 10 months.

Big, big difference.

We're not talking about saving a couple of lives, a millions of lives.

We're talking about saving many millions of lives.

In addition, this vaccine has a number of other applications for other infectious diseases as well as cancer vaccines.

And literally all of that has gone down the drain with this decision.

So it's not just the speed at which you can develop vaccines in relation to emerging pathogens.

It's the volume at which you can quickly produce them.

But it's also, in addition to that, sort of the nimbleness of this technology that it can apply potentially to vaccines for all sorts of things for which we currently have no vaccine technology.

Is that fair?

Absolutely fair.

And I think the important point to note here is that with the experience we saw from COVID, we know how fast we can make these vaccines and we know we can even make them better with more research, meaning that these are good vaccines we have now for COVID, but they're not great.

They don't necessarily prevent you from getting infected.

They don't necessarily stop you from transmitting the virus, but they keep you from becoming seriously ill, being hospitalized, and dying.

With more research, we actually know that we can make these vaccines even better.

That has all been cut off.

And so, even for just the regular applications of looking at mRNA technology, it's pretty much out the window.

Dr.

Olsterholm, in his time as HHS Secretary, Robert F.

Kennedy Jr.

has made a lot of very, very, very unpopular decisions and some bizarre ones and has made some bizarre pronouncements in his time in public life and in public office.

It seems to me that the reaction to this mRNA funding thing

is of sort of a different character,

different magnitude, and you're hearing it from different quarters than you've heard object to some of the other things that he has done.

Do you see it that way?

Do you think there's any possibility that the magnitude of the negative response to this decision might force its reversal?

Well, I can only hope so, but let me just point out that this administration continues to trip over the facts so much, they must have a terribly bloody nose by now.

For example, this very decision, Mr.

Kennedy announced this last week, and he emphasized the fact that the reason we're not doing that is because mRNA vaccines are not beneficial and they're dangerous.

They have a high risk of causing problems, which, of course, neither of those statements are true.

This past weekend, the head of the NIH was on Steve Bannon's podcast and said, no, the decision to take this vaccine money away was because of the fact that the secretary decided that the public no longer had faith in mRNA technology and therefore why invest in it.

Well, in fact, the reason the public has questions about it is because of the kind of statements that he has continued to make since the very beginning of its availability and in the pandemic.

And so when you can't get your facts straight, I can't even know what to react to in terms of what decisions have to be overturned.

How would they be overturned?

So this is one of the challenges we have today.

Whatsoever relative and HHS in a given moment could be very different an hour later.

Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research.

Thank you for your work, sir, and thank you for talking to us about this tonight.

I appreciate it.

Thank you very much.

We'll be right back.

Stay with us.

All right, that's going to do it for me for now.

Riley Herps from 2311 Racing checking in.

Got a break in between team meetings?

Sounds like the perfect time for some fast-paced fun at Chumba Casino.

No waiting, just instant action to keep you going.

So next time you need to pick me up, fire it up and take a spin.

Play now at chumbacasino.com.

Let's chumba.

No purchase necessary.

VGW group void where prohibited by law.

CTNC's 21 Plus, sponsored by Chumba Casino.