How one man took on Trump's improper firings and saved the jobs of thousands of people

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Subscribe to MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts. So last night here on the show, we talked about some worrying new hiring numbers, which seemed just like a bad indicator of where the economy appears to be heading very quickly now that Donald Trump has taken office again.
Those numbers from ADP, the payroll company, showed private sector employers hiring less than half the number of people they did last month, which was half the number economists had been expecting them to hire in February. That was very bad news.
Now we've got new numbers not on the number of hirings, but the number of firings. And those numbers are way worse.
Quote, layoffs across the United States soar to highest level since 2020. What was going on in 2020? Employers cut more than 170,000 jobs last month.
That is a 245% increase from the number of layoffs in January. 245% increase.
It's also the highest monthly number of layoffs since the height of the COVID pandemic in Trump's first term in July 2020. Now, that said, to be fair, there can be a seasonal component to layoffs and to employment numbers generally.
Hiring and firing numbers tend to look different in the summer months than they do in the winter months, for example. So if you're really trying to get an honest grasp on how bad this outlook is economically as Trump's policies are taking hold, consider specifically that these are February numbers that we just got.
If you really want to compare apples to apples, the last time we got February numbers this bad, it was actually February 2009 when Wall Street had collapsed and we were plunging into not just a national, but an international Great Recession. That's the last time firing numbers looked like this.
That said, these are just indicators and maybe they are wrong. Maybe these are outliers.
We expect the official government monthly jobs report tomorrow morning. It's actually not expected to be bad, in part because a lot of the firings since Trump has been president have happened so recently that they may not be reflected in government figures yet.
But we shall see, weirdly and worryingly, because the president and his commerce secretary have both started to make noises about messing with the numbers themselves, potentially changing the way the government's official economic statistics are actually compiled, presumably so they won't show bad news that looks bad for Trump. That is a whole new thing to worry about, whether they're going to try to cook the books on economic numbers like the jobs numbers coming out tomorrow.
I don't expect I don't think anybody expects them to spike the job numbers or pervert them somehow tomorrow. But we will have to wait and see what we get.
Last night, we also talked about President Trump's new gift to America's veterans. the announcement that he's going to fire 80,000 people who work at the VA serving our veterans and providing them health care.
Oh, you shouldn't have. Really? 80,000 people fired from the VA specifically? We learned about that last night.
Today, NBC News has new reporting on what else Trump is planning to do to veterans. You know, if you voted to make America great again, did you know that would mean, for example, that Donald Trump would be cutting off the funding specifically to sterilize medical instruments in VA hospitals? Quote, the terminated contracts list includes contracts for a practice crucial to preventing infection in hospitals.
Quote, the sterilization of medical devices and instruments needed during surgery. The list of contracts on the chopping block has not been made public and the VA declined to provide it, but VA employees have identified 200 of the remaining scheduled contract cancellations to NBC News.
That list includes, for example, contracts covering sterility certification for VA hospital pharmacy operations, also follow-up care for cancer patients at the VA, also accreditation for stroke centers, also the certification of VA pharmacies for making compounded medicines, which of course are commonly used, among other things, in cancer care. Another contract scheduled for cancellation supports the National Center for PTSD, which is a VA entity that is the world's leading research and educational center on post-traumatic stress disorder.
They're cutting that. NBC reports that initially, as of just a few days ago, Trump had even tried to cut x-rays and MRIs from VA health facilities.
You know, if you run MRI or x-ray machines in any hospital, any health care facility in the United States, those are things that have radiation elements to them, right? Because of that, because radiation can be dangerous, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires that a medical physicist has to come in and ensure that these machines are putting out the right amount of radiation.

They're not going to hurt either the patients who are being scanned or the people who are running these machines. But Trump zeroed out funding to do that.
Zeroed out funding for the medical physicists that check the X-ray and MRI machines. if they went ahead with that, if they got rid of the medical physicists who checked those machines, that would have resulted in every VA facility in the country losing its ability to operate its x-ray and MRI machines, losing any ability to do medical radiology at all.
And since you can't run a hospital without a radiology department, that one contract decision by Trump would, by law, have shut down every single VA hospital in this country. So they announced that one, the getting rid of the medical physicists last week.
That was the plan. Now that piece of it has been at least rescinded.
But yeah, they really are still planning on cutting off funding to sterilize the instruments that they use for surgery. Because nothing's too good for our veterans, right? Or for our seniors.
If you want to get disability payments through Social Security, you may need to do a hearing to establish your level of disability. Trump just cut off the funding that pays for medical experts to testify at disability hearings.
After thousands of people were fired by Trump at the Social Security Administration, the Washington Post reports today, quote, delays in reviews of disability claims and hearings before administrative law judges are already starting.

Quote, wait times for basic phone service at Social Security.

Those wait times have grown in some cases to hours.

Hours long wait times when you're calling Social Security for help right now.

We're also seeing record wait times at the entrances to America's national parks, like this more than one mile long line outside Big Bend National Park in Texas on President's Day weekend. This happened right after Trump fired roughly a thousand employees from the National Park Service just last month.
Today, the New York Times reports that the Park Service just got in new data that actually shows some great news about last year. Last year, America's national parks had more visitors than ever before in U.S.
history, which is great for last year. But they also obtained an internal Trump administration memo from this week saying they will not be publicizing this news about record attendance at America's national parks because, well, that's an awkward thing to brag about while you're firing all the people that work there because supposedly they're not needed.
The National Parks Conservation Association telling The Times today, quote, the National Park Service just reported the highest visitation in its history as the administration conducts massive firings and threatens to close visitor centers and public safety facilities. America's national parks are really popular.
Firing the people who work at the parks is not popular. So they're trying just not to talk about those two things in the same sentence.
But none of the stuff that they're doing is popular. I mean, the Wall Street Journal now reports that Trump has an executive order that was ready to go as soon as today to shut down the U.S.
Department of Education. Shutting down the U.S.
Department of Education is wildly unpopular among the American people. The latest Reuters Ipsos poll asked specifically, should the U.S.
close down the Department of Education? 32 percent said yes, 66 percent said no. By a more than two to one margin, Americans say don't shut down the Education Department.
Do Americans feel strongly about that? Yes, they do. Americans who strongly oppose shutting down the education department outnumber Americans who strongly like the idea by a 30-point margin.
A lot of what they are doing is very unpopular right now. So much so that Aaron Blake of The Washington Post today nutted some of it up under the headline, the many unpopular things Trump is doing right now.
And the numbers, I mean, speak for themselves. Laying off large numbers of American workers, a huge majority of the country is against that.
58% of the country is against that. Dismantling USAID, which provides foreign aid, another big majority against that.
58% against in one poll, 59% in another. How about trying to take the Panama Canal somehow? No.
The American people say no to that in huge numbers. Sixty five percent opposed freezing funds for public health agencies.
Sixty seven percent opposed renaming the Gulf of Mexico for some reason. No.
Seventy percent of Americans oppose that. How about pardoning the January 6th defendants who attacked the Capitol for Trump? The American people are against that by an almost unimaginable margin.
Numbers like this don't exist in polling, but 83 percent of Americans are opposed to the fact that Trump did that. And ultimately, this matters, you know.
I mean, pulling genius economic moves that send the markets and other economic indicators into free fall, trying to pull off genius ideas like cutting off the funding specifically to sterilize medical instruments for when veterans get surgery, trying on all these other things that are so radically unpopular, it matters, right? It creates an inhospitable political and democratic environment for them to try to continue these things. It does enforce some political and public opinion discipline on them for trying this stuff.
It's what leads to the street corner protests and the state Capitol protests and the town halls that Republican members of Congress are now too scared to continue.

All of these things matter.

They all create democratic friction.

But these things don't necessarily stop them in their tracks.

What has been stopping them most directly is the courts and brave individual people

in the government who have been willing to take Trump to court over what he has been doing. Today, Trump's attempt to fire the National Labor Relations Board out of existence was shut down by a federal judge in Washington, D.C., who struck down the firing of a member of that board and wrote this in the judge's ruling, quote, the president does not have the authority to terminate members of the National Labor Relations Board at will.
His attempt to fire the plaintiff from her position on the board was a blatant violation of the law. At issue in this case is the president's insistence that he has the authority to fire whomever he wants within the executive branch, overriding any congressionally mandated law in his way.
The framers anticipating such a power grab, this is the judge's ruling, the framers anticipating such a power grab, vested in Article 3, the judiciary, not Article 2, the executive branch under the president, the power to interpret the law, including resolving conflicts about congressional checks on presidential authority. The president's interpretation of the scope of his constitutional power, or more aptly, the judge writes, his aspiration is, quote, flat wrong.
Judge Beryl Howell writes in her ruling, quote, an American president is not a king, not even an elected one.

And his power to remove federal officers and honest civil servants like the plaintiff is not absolute. A president who touts an image of himself as a king or a dictator, perhaps as his vision of effective leadership, fundamentally misapprehends the role under Article two of the U.S.
Constitution. In addition to that ruling today, telling Trump that he cannot fire the National Labor Relations Board, Trump also lost today in federal court in Rhode Island when a judge ruled that he must restart federal funding appropriated by Congress that Trump unilaterally cut off to 22 different states.
Yet another judge tonight blocked Trump from firing the head of a tiny agency that does development grants specifically in Africa. After staff members of that agency refused to allow Doge staffers to access their offices yesterday, those Doge staffers came back today with some kind of security with them.
We believe armed security. We are still trying to figure out who the muscle was that they brought with them.
We are seeking that actively right now, trying to figure that out. But by bringing some sort of armed force with them, these kids from Doge forced, physically forced their way into this agency.
That said, tonight, a judge blocked them from removing the head of that agency from his job. Of all of these fights, the biggest material victory thus far in all of these fights against what appear to be these illegal mass firings and these efforts to unilaterally close down and turn off parts of the government.

The materially most consequential one of all of them is one that was obtained because of one man whose name is Hampton Dellinger. Trump tried to fire him in the first week in February.
Mr. Dellinger fought it immediately.
He fought it long enough and hard enough that while he was able to retain his post, thanks to a judge's order, still under fire from Trump, he succeeded in enlisting the Merit Systems Protection Board to reverse thousands of baseless firings of so-called probationary employees. Among the direct results of what Hampton-Dellinger did are more than 5,000 people at USDA who yesterday were told they must be reinstated to their jobs.
Hampton-Dellinger today himself announced that he is ending his one-man fight to stay at his post at the Office of Special Counsel, which looks after whistleblower rights, which looks after the rights of government employees to not be fired for corrupt or improper reasons. He left that job today after an appeals court ruling basically made clear that he must.
But take him as a case study here, because his one-man, one-month fight to not go quietly saved the jobs of thousands of people who were improperly fired by Trump. And that fight set the bar and set the tone for what it means to refuse to go quietly and to make as much good trouble as you can every single day that you can for as long as you can.
Joining us now for his first interview since ending this fight is Hampton Dellinger. He's now the former head of the Office of Special Counsel.
Mr. Dellinger, it's really nice to meet you.
Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me.
I'm sorry that this was your last day. Yeah, I'd rather be at work.
Yeah. Well, tell me about your job.
Tell me what your job was. Well, for almost a year, I was the place that if you're a federal government whistleblower and you see wrongdoing happening on your job in the government, you could come to my office and report it.
I could initiate an investigation. And if you happen to be retaliated against for blowing the whistle, I could help protect you.
That job, for obvious reasons, when you think about checks and balances, is an independent job.

One in which Congress created the job. Yes.
50 years ago. Congress created the job and created it in such a way that the president couldn't come in and say, I don't like what this guy is doing, protecting these whistleblowers.
Get him out. I want my own guy in there.
Specifically, the design of the job, right? That's right. And for 50 years, presidents had respected that design, had respected that there would be a limited but important role for my office and that we would have a measure of protection so we wouldn't worry about losing our jobs when we stood up for other federal employees who are unlawfully losing their jobs.
When the president, February 7th, told you that you were fired, had you been expecting it? Did you already have a plan in place for what you would do in that moment? Yes and no. I had seen inspectors general really capable, hardworking IGs be ousted.
I knew that there was a general view that they didn't want independent watchdogs in the executive branch, but I also knew the history of my office and that it had been around for 50 years and courts had respected that independence for 50 years. So when I got the email saying, you're fired, thank you for your service, I didn't feel like they meant it.
I also didn't feel like it merited a response. So I went back and forth.
And, you know, I'm someone who believes in the presidency. I want to see every American president succeed.
But I also knew that my firing violated a law, a law that had been on the books. And I just couldn't walk away in the face of that.
You fought for a solid month since that since that happened. One trip.
Your case took one trip to the Supreme Court already back down to lower courts. You got an adverse appeals court ruling yesterday, which led to your decision to effectively stop your fight.
Did you feel like you had no choice in terms of stopping it, that there might be additional harm done to the things that you care about and that you were trying to protect if you stuck with it and kept fighting? Certainly, that was an aspect of it. I had a three-judge panel that was somewhat conservative, and that mirrors the Supreme Court.
So I knew that it could be an uphill fight, even though I disagree with the court's ruling, and I would disagree with the Supreme Court if they found my position unconstitutional. But the other issue, Rachel, is it was going to be months, maybe a year before I'd get a final answer.
I'd be on the sidelines the whole time. And I've seen the damage over the past month or so that can happen in days, sometimes even hours to these federal agencies when the laws aren't being followed.
And so the idea of trying to come back in a year and fix what I think might be broken forever in terms of the independence of my agency was not something that I thought I could do. You talk about not wanting to be on the sidelines for that duration of that kind of a fight, waiting for something to get up to and through the United States Supreme Court.
What does not being on the sidelines mean?

What do you plan to do now? Today's day one out of government service.

Yeah. Rest, maybe.
But I tell you, I can't let go of yesterday. I started out in the morning

and helped get six thousand unlawfully fired federal employees, their jobs back. Yeah.
And

at the end of the day, I'd lost my job. And so it was my best day at work and my worst day at work on the same day.
So I'm going to hold on to that for a little bit. Well, don't hold on to it for too long.
I mean, you do, you have seen, you have seen things, A, the skills that got you this job in the first place and that you allowed you to perform those duties for the past year, but also what you have seen about what it means to fight. It's part of the reason I wanted to talk to you tonight, because you embody an example here of what it is to stand up and put your name as the plaintiff on that suit against the government to stand up for the way the American people ought to be treated.
We very rarely ask individual human beings to say, I, the named plaintiff, am here to stand up for the way the American people ought to be treated. We very rarely ask individual human beings to say, I, the named plaintiff, I'm here to stand up for the people against the government that is mistreating them.
And it takes something. Hey, it takes resources.
You had help in filing the suit? I did. I had brilliant lawyers who assisted me.
I got a lot of support from whistleblower advocacy groups, from military veterans groups, because a lot of my job was focused on the VA, which is why, by the way, I think it makes no sense for the president to put in the secretary of the VA. I honor his military service, but he's got a big job on his own to do.
And the idea that he could be in my job investigating himself is just the essence of a conflict of interest. They dual-hatted the VA secretary and your job.
That is the plan as of a couple of weeks ago. But to your broader point, I'm just one person and I was inspired by others.
I saw the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York stand up for the rule of law and not sign off on something she didn't think was right.
Yes. I saw the inspectors general who I'd worked with hand in hand for a year being ousted.
And I knew their integrity and their talents. And I feel like the easiest thing for me to do was just to follow the law.
That's what I'd done every day in my job. And I knew my firing violated the law.
So I just held true to that. You know, I listened as I was thinking about whether to file the suit or not to shelter in the storm by Bob Dylan.
And I just think for a lawyer, the shelter in the storm in chaos and uncertainty is the law. And that's just what I've tried to hold on to.
I have been not thinking about it in that poetic a term, but I have been thinking about the peculiar and insidious evil of arbitrary action. Right.
When you got those those five thousand plus employees at USDA their jobs back. Part of the reason you got them their jobs back is because they were fired for arbitrary reasons.
Right. And we've seen that everywhere.
Right. We've seen that from, you know, you see CDC employees get fired one day, rehired the next day, fired the next day, rehired the next day.
And it's arbitrary action. They're being told it's performance.
It's clearly not. And there's something that's just dumb about that.
But there's also something I think really insidious, because when the government behaves arbitrarily like that, it's telling you there's no refuge for you in the law and there's no refuge for you in order. We will act.
There will be no law and order for you. We'll use the law against you whenever we can.
But there's no refuge for you there. There's nothing that you can turn to to ask for for fairness and that arbitrary and misspelled and, and dumb and instantly retracted and reinstated and untrackable and anonymous nature of what they're doing.
I feel like it gives it some of its authoritarian sort of cadence and feel. Well, we only have a government because of laws.
We have a president because of the Supreme Rulebook, the Constitution. So everything is created and structured by a set of rules, a set of laws.
And so that's what I think we have to hold on to. And many individuals are putting it front and center.
Many individual judges are retaining the essence, I think, of what makes us America. But the other thing about federal employees, I don't want to be lost, Rachel, is that 30 percent of them, more than 600,000, are military veterans.
They wore the uniform. They put their lives on the line for our country.
They come back to federal service. They're nurses, TSA agents, their FBI agents.
And so we're the least we can do is treat them with respect and treat them lawfully. Let me ask you one last question here about the law, and it is about something that happened today.
There was no cabinet meeting on the president's schedule today, but he nevertheless sort of announced after the fact that there had been a cabinet meeting and there started to emerge some reporting about what happened. The president reportedly, or at least says now, that what he told his agency heads, his cabinet officials today, is that Elon Musk can no longer order firings, that the agencies must do it themselves, and Elon Musk is only there to advise.
This obviously, it cuts against what Elon Musk has been doing. There was also a strange moment in the State of the Union where the president described Elon Musk as the head of Doge, and then immediately court filings were updated to reflect that because the government had sworn to federal courts that he wasn't the head of Doge.
This overall idea of firing all the probationary employees of Elon Musk's anonymous group coming in and ordering shutdowns of agencies and firings of whole categories of people. Do you think it is running into a legal cul-de-sac? Are we getting to the point where the law is going to start to trip up these efforts in a more wholesale way? I think the law should.
I think Congress should step up. You know, Congress has the power of the purse.
The president can reorganize government, but there are set of rules that govern how that reorganization should take place. And all I was asking is that the rules be followed.
And I think it's a simple truth. And I think it's one that courts will hold on to and vindicate.
And I hope Congress does their part as well. Hampton Dellinger, as of today, the former head of the Office of Special Counsel and somebody whose story is going to be told for a very long time because of what you did and because of its effects.
Don't I know you have to you have some wounds to lick and you need probably some rest, but don't go too far. The country needs you.
Thank you. Thank you.
Good luck. Thanks.
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This is a man named Justin Sun, S-U-N. He is 34 years old.
And about two years ago, in 2023, he and a bunch of celebrities got named in a big, serious cryptocurrency case that was brought by the SEC. The Securities and Exchange Commission said Justin Sun and this list of celebrities had engaged in fraud and in violations of securities law.
So that was March 2023. The SEC said that Justin Sun had engaged in this fraud specifically by manipulating trading activity around two different crypto tokens.
Now, Justin Sun's company vehemently denied the charges. A spokesperson said the SEC's civil complaint is just the latest example of actions it has taken against well-known players in the blockchain and crypto space.
We believe the complaint lacks merit. But that was a couple years ago,

March 2023, the SEC bringing that civil case against cryptocurrency entrepreneur,

young Justin Sun. And he roundly denied the claims.
But then last year, right after the election,

the charges against him are still pending.

Justin Sun ended up in the news again because he got involved in a really big way with another crypto thing, specifically Trump's crypto thing. Bloomberg reported last week that since the election in November, Justin Sun has invested $75 million into the Trump coin,

into the Donald Trump cryptocurrency.

Bloomberg calculated that means he put about $56 million right into the Trump family coffers.

Bloomberg made that calculation as part of reporting that the

SEC had halted its investigation into Justin Sun on those other matters. Quote, from the court filing, the parties submit that it is in each of their interests to stay this matter while they consider a potential resolution.
Which is great news for Justin Sun, I'm sure. And I should say I'm by no means a crypto expert.

I'm not going to give you a lecture on blockchain or meme coins or any of that. I just, A, I don't

know and B, I don't care. But I do think it's worth looking at this crypto thing a little bit

only because it is a deeply, deeply old fashioned, simple scam at this point, which points right to

the White House. News from the White House tonight really gives us no choice.
You have to look at it. Helpfully, the broad strokes of crypto trading are not complicated.
It's like when there was the beanie baby craze in the late 90s. People started buying these stuffed animals, right? Beanie babies, kind of inherently not worth much, but people were speculating on them, right? It was a Beanie Baby trading bubble.
Other than maybe some emotional value, if you had one as a child, Beanie Babies didn't have much inherent value, but it was worth buying up a bunch of them because there was speculation on the premise that as collectibles, maybe one day your Beanie Baby's collection could be worth a lot of money. Cryptocurrencies operate on the same idea.
They have no inherent value at all. The only value they have is if you have some reason to believe that somebody else might want to buy them from you in the future.
That's it. And what that means in very practical terms is that convincing other people that your crypto is popular and in demand, convincing people that your crypto thing is going to have value in the future, it's going to be collectible as beanie babies.
That is key to actually making money. One of the things the SEC alleged a couple of years ago in 2023 was that Justin Sun had orchestrated a scheme to pay celebrities to tout his cryptocurrencies without disclosing that he had paid them to do so.
So in other words, he was creating the impression of hype and organic enthusiasm around his product when that hype didn't naturally exist. That was the allegation, which again, Justin Sun has denied.
And now the SEC has halted the case right after he gave more than $50 million to the Trump family. The idea of hype in cryptocurrency is that people should buy in soon, right? Get in on the ground floor while it's cheap because it's about to go way up in value because there's so much interest in it.

You get it on the ground floor now, you'll make a bundle. It's the whole hype.
It's the whole scam. And when I mentioned that the news tonight leaves us not too much, not much choice.
But but to talk about the stuff right now, this is what I mean. The White House just posted this video tonight of Donald Trump signing an executive order establishing a digital Fort Knox, as someone says to the president off camera.
Trump apparently signing this executive order, creating what they're describing as a federal government cryptocurrency reserve. Now, imagine the Beanie Babies again for a second.
Imagine Trump had just announced that the U.S. government was going to buy up tons of Beanie Babies.
We were going to establish a federal government reserve of billions of Beanie Babies. What do you think would happen to the value of Beanie Babies? Right? Oh, it turns out there's a huge guaranteed buyer for these things.
They're buying billions of them. I should mention that when Trump first brought up this idea, this cryptocurrency national reserve thing on Sunday, he name-checked five specific cryptocurrencies that would be going into this government reserve.
And Trump's own cryptocurrency company, his own project, bought $20 million of those currencies, of two of those currencies this week. Ahead of what we now know will be a White House summit on crypto tomorrow.

If the whole idea here is that you hype something by making it appear that there is a market,

that there's demand, that there's lots and lots of buyers for specific crypto,

and people who get in on the ground floor and own it, boy, that value is going to go up.

Well, it would seem that President Trump and his family and the White House specifically are now playing that game. Clearly, there is a lot more to ask and a lot more to know, but hold that thought.
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Today we're signing, and this is very historic and executive order, establishing a strategic Bitcoin reserve and digital asset stockpile. This is a promise that you made throughout the campaign, and today we're keeping that promise.
The reserve will be capitalized in Bitcoin that the federal government already owns, so it won't cost taxpayers a dime. This is like a digital Fort Knox for digital gold.
And premature sales of Bitcoin over the past years cost American taxpayers over $17 billion in lost value because we didn't have a long-term strategy. Right.
Now we do. And this is something you believe in? 100%, yeah.
Okay. And the whole community believes in it.
Very good. And he made the promise, right? How much do you think he knows about what he's doing? President Donald Trump tonight in the Oval Office signing an executive order establishing a strategic Bitcoin reserve and digital asset stockpile, a digital Fort Knox for digital gold.
My questions extend beyond whether or not the president understands what he's doing. My questions extend to who is going to make money off this and who is going to lose money off this and what does it mean to have the U.S.
government working in this field in this way. Joining us now is New York Times reporter who has been covering whatever it was Trump did tonight since it was just something the crypto industry hoped he would do on his first day in office.
David Yaffe Bellamy is a reporter for The New York Times. David, thank you very much for being here.
Thanks for having me. This strikes me because the president is personally invested in in in cryptocurrency and because we've never before had the federal government involved in holding cryptocurrency and because he has surrounded himself with people who are fighting all government regulation on cryptocurrency.
This strikes me as the stickiest hot lava pit of scandal I have ever seen any animal try to escape from. That said, I do not understand cryptocurrency very well.
Are my instincts unfounded here? How do you see this? I like to think of this as the sort of purest form of a classic Trumpian conflict of interest that we've seen play out many times since 2016. It's just like the Trump Hotel back in the first term.
It's another way that people who want to get access to the president, who want to influence the president, can spend money to do that in a kind of informal way that has very little oversight. Well, you can do that by buying the Trump coins in which he and his family, from which he and his family financially benefit.
You can literally just buy as much of that as you want. There's no disclosure requirements in terms of saying who you are or being a foreigner or anything like that.
And the money just goes to Trump. So it's an open funnel to bribe the president if you are so inclined.
What new dynamic is introduced into either that process or the broader process of enriching the president or unenriching the American people by having the government hold a reserve of cryptocurrencies? Well, it means that, you know, Trump could take steps to boost the kind of crypto economy sort of aimed at making this kind of stockpile a success. It sort of creates an incentive for him to strip regulations away from an industry that has a long track record of scams, fraud, manipulation in all sorts of ways.
And so, you know, those conflict of interests, you know, combined with, you know, the pressures that he feels from sort of industry figures who want these sorts of changes, you know, results in the leash coming off a highly volatile world. In terms of the volatility of this world, I mean, you've reported on the SEC as you put it

backing away from the push during President Biden's administration to regulate cryptocurrency in some of the same ways that stocks and bonds are regulated, essentially to treat them as a speculative instrument that can be used by wise investors, but can also be used by wise scam artists to separate dupes from their money. How far along did President Biden get down that road and how much of that is being reversed by Trump? The Biden administration got pretty far down that road.
Gary Gensler, who was the chair of the SEC under Biden, filed lawsuits against many of the biggest crypto companies in the country, essentially advancing exactly the argument that you just outlined, that there's nothing that new about crypto. It's just like a stock.
It's like any old security, and it should be subject to these same strict regulations that are designed to protect consumers and make sure they're not manipulated and defrauded. Those cases were pending in court.
We were looking at potentially a years-long legal battle that could have reached the Supreme Court over some of those claims. And in the space of a few weeks, the Trump administration has more or less fully reversed that.
The biggest of those lawsuits have been dropped. Investigations into other crypto companies have been halted.
And now many of those leading figures who are being sued by the SEC are going to show up at the White House tomorrow for a meeting with Trump. For people who are listening to this interview right now and they're thinking, I got feelings about this crypto thing, but I've never quite felt like I understood it.
Now that this is something that the government is treating in a very different way than they ever had before, what would you say to people who feel like they don't understand it, but they're worried that this is dangerous? It used to be the case that crypto was walled off from the real economy, the economy that most of us were invested in. In 2022, the crypto world crashed.
People called it crypto's great recession. But most people didn't notice because they didn't have money invested in it.
And the people who lost out were the ones who kind of knew they were getting into something risky. But that's starting to change.
You know, this reserve is a step in that direction. Slowly, crypto is kind of seeping into the traditional economy.
It's becoming more available to people through their brokerage accounts. And it's setting up a scenario in which next time this highly volatile industry crashes, ordinary people could feel the effects in a much more profound way.
which is why it might make sense as it spreads out for it to become more regulated and more safe.

So there's less opportunity for people to get scammed.

Instead, it's just getting bigger with less. way, which is why it might make sense as it spreads out for it to become more regulated and more safe.

So there's less opportunity for people to get scammed.

Instead, it's just getting bigger with less rules.

David Yaffe Bellany from The New York Times.

Thank you for helping me understand.

I really appreciate it.

Thanks.

All right.

We'll be right back.

Stay with us.

Well, hey, it turns out tonight, Elon Musk blew something up and disrupted the lives of thousands of Americans. For the second time in less than two months, a rocket launched by Elon Musk's company SpaceX exploded and rained potentially dangerous debris down over a wide area of Earth, causing real chaos for planes and airline passengers.
This was the most recent test of SpaceX's Starship rocket. Musk says he wants to use Starship to one day take people to Mars.
This one lifted off around 6.30 p.m. Eastern from the southern tip of Texas.
In a statement, SpaceX said that, quote, during Starship's ascent burn, the vehicle experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly. Rapid unscheduled disassembly is kind of Elon Musk's specialty these days, especially in a way that really messes with other people through no fault of their own.
As debris rained down tonight from Elon Musk's failed rocket, multiple airports in Florida, including Miami and Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach and Orlando, were all brought to a complete halt, ground stop at all of those airports. Even departures as far north as the Philadelphia airport were significantly delayed.
As I mentioned, this is the second time this has happened in recent weeks. SpaceX's last test of the Starship rocket suffered a similar fate in mid-January.
When that happened, the FAA grounded Starship and has since been overseeing SpaceX's investigation of what went wrong, even though that investigation is still underway. Last week, the FAA nevertheless cleared SpaceX to launch another one, even though the investigation into why the last one blew up wasn't complete.
Why'd they clear it? I don't know. But of course, in between those two flights, Donald Trump was sworn in as president.
He installed Elon Musk, his top campaign donor, as kind of his co-president. Musk's Doge austerity operation fired hundreds of people at the FAA.
And the FAA reportedly decided to suddenly start using Starlink satellite terminals made by Musk's company. Speaking of Elon Musk lighting up the night sky, I should also mention that this electronic billboard just went up in Times Square today in Manhattan.
Fire Elon Musk. He fired 6,000 veterans.
He wants to cut Medicare. Who is running the White House? Fire Elon Musk.
That billboard courtesy of the pro-democracy organization Common Cause and its Fire Musk campaign.

I mean, it is worth wondering at least

how much more rapid unscheduled disassembly

our country is going to be able to take.

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

I'll see you again tomorrow.

As President Donald Trump returns to the White House, what will the first 100 days of the presidency bring? All right, that's going to change the American system of government.

Sign up for Trump's first 100 days at msnbc.com slash trump100.