Title: Monday Morning Politics: No More Kings Protests; Minnesota Lawmakers Shot

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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. We'll talk about some of this weekend's dramatic developments in national politics. The "No Kings Day" marches, the Trump military parade, the assassination of a prominent state senator in Minnesota, and notably, in case you missed it, President Trump posting that he would scale back workplace immigration raids at hotels, restaurants, and farms.

New Yorker magazine staff writer Susan Glasser is with us for this as she writes a weekly Letter from Washington column in the magazine and co-hosts their Political Scene podcast. She is also the co-author of the books Kremlin Rising, about Putin's Russia, The Man Who Ran Washington, about James Baker, the former Secretary of State and Treasury Secretary, and The Divider, about Donald Trump's first term. The latest edition of the podcast, posted Saturday, is called Trump Makes a Big Show of Military Force. Susan, always good of you to come on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Susan: Thank you so much, Brian. Great to be with you.

Brian: Go right to the headline of the podcast, Trump Makes a Big Show of Military Force. It's kind of a double-meaning headline, isn't it?

Susan: Absolutely, absolutely. He is nothing if not a performative strongman. I think the question after last week is, is he starting to cross lines that turn him from performative to something closer to the real thing?

Brian: The podcast asks, you kick this around with your co-hosts, "What are the consequences of calling in the troops for protest enforcement in LA?" Do you think there have been any other than the firestorm of reaction that it produced?

Susan: Look, first of all, legally speaking, it's very much up in the air. It is an extraordinary moment to have the President of the United States overrule a state's governor and essentially to take control of California's National Guard, especially because Trump and his lawyers argue that this is not a one-off incident, but a template that he's prepared to use around the country at will.

In fact, Pete Hegseth, his defense secretary, testified on Capitol Hill, and that was the term that he used. He said that at any time, essentially, we choose to do so, we can use this method and seize control of a blue state's National Guard. That I think is the kind of red line that Trump crosses with such abandon. We often don't know which one to take seriously. From my perspective, that's one to take very seriously while we wait for the courts to weigh in on it.

Brian: The podcast touches on the latest instance of Trump administration officials detaining, in some way, an elected Democratic politician. It happened with Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and Congresswoman LaMonica McIver there. Now, US Senator Alex Padilla of California. What happened there, as you understand it?

Susan: We all saw, I'm sure, that viral video of Padilla trying to enter and shout a question at Kristi Noem, the Department of Homeland Security Secretary, on Thursday. It was just such a graphic and telling video. I've covered politics for a long time, as you have, Brian. Can you ever recall seeing a US Senator thrown to the floor and handcuffed by federal agents? He identified himself, as we saw in that video, which was remarkable because they later put out a statement lying and saying that somehow he had not done so, even though it was on the tape. It's a sign of gloves are off enforcement that the Homeland Security authorities seem to have been given the green light to pursue. It bodes ill in all respects.

Brian: About that parade, how did he manage to merge the 250th anniversary of the Army into a king-like parade for his birthday? Was June 14th the actual date of the Army's founding in 1775? Was that just a happy coincidence that he could use having been born on that date himself?

Susan: Look, to be fair, the US Army had been planning some kind of big celebration for the anniversary, I believe, even before Trump was reelected and came back to office. Now, of course, it still required the sign-off of the president and classic Trump world. When the first reports of this came out, I believe it was in the Washington City Paper back this spring, they said, "Oh, no decision's been made. We don't know. We don't know." Who knows? Was there some kind of brilliant planner for the Army who realized that it was Trump's birthday? [laughs] I don't know. I really don't know.

What I do know is that, of course, Donald Trump was eager to seize upon the symbolism and the idea that some of his supporters had that it was only haters who would dare to point out the convergence between his birthday and this multimillion-dollar parade in Washington. That was a term used by Sean Spicer. Remember him? The ignominious first press secretary of Donald Trump's first term in office. He's remained in the distant, distant Trump orbit and seemed to be wanting to curry favor. It didn't really work out in some ways as Trump had planned. The news cycle kind of overtook him, I think, a little bit, and the crowds were not the 200,000 people that the administration had hoped for and planned for.

Brian: Democrats say all those millions for Trump to celebrate himself like a king. Did he have full Republican support for this event at a time when some of them are unhappy about cuts to health care and other things in the Trump budget bill?

Susan: Yes. Clearly, there remains significant discomfort among some Republican senators, for example, up on Capitol Hill. Not just Rand Paul, who's emerged as a right wing libertarian critic of some of what Donald Trump is doing, but even some of the more traditional Republicans who had been very outspoken, by the way, in his first term against the idea of a military parade, much more muted in their criticism this time. Very few of them showed up for the parade.

They gave comments to reporters on the Hill, suggesting some of them that they weren't comfortable with it. I think that shows where Trump is such an outlier in our politics. He has a whole political party, the Republican Party, that essentially is going along with him, but it's not the instincts of many of them, that his instincts really differ from the democrats across our political spectrum.

Brian: Listeners, did any of you attend the military parade or a "No Kings Day" protest? Call and say something about your experience at either 212-433-WNYC. If you've been attending multiple protests this year, I'm also curious how you think they're changing or evolving, or any questions for Susan Glasser from The New Yorker, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text. Certainly, Susan, a central theme of the protests this year has become "No Kings" to draw attention to the various ways that they see Trump as governing like an authoritarian.

Having a big "No Kings Day" around the country on the same day as the parade, even if the parade was, as you say, originally conceived before he was president for the 250th anniversary of the army, it was obviously to draw attention as a contrast to Trump setting himself to look like a king in the bargain, "No Kings Day." How do you gauge, as a Washington reporter, when and how much public protests matter to policy or democracy?

Susan: That is such a good question. Of course, it's particularly ripe now in the Trump era. Certainly, it was smart on the part of the planners of these protests. They did a couple things, I thought, that were quite canny. First of all, they decided they know that Trump is itching for confrontation, perhaps in order to use that template of militarized force against domestic political opposition. They decided not to directly protest the parade in Washington, DC, but to have these protests basically everywhere else in the country, except for Washington, DC. That was one.

Two, I think by doing it on the same day, it certainly ensured that rather than the visual being Donald Trump, the unchallenged king or leader of the country, that it would be at a minimum reinforcing the point that this is a very divided country and that there are millions and millions of Americans who don't support Trump's authoritarian pivot in the US presidency. I think, at least, it was on the front end designed to reinforce the idea that there are millions of people who are against Donald Trump.

Given that the turnout at the parade itself was less than expected, they sort of won that news cycle, it seems to me, certainly in terms of the sheer scale and breadth of the opposition. When you add it all up, they're giving estimates in the four to five million range of Americans who participated, which is a pretty big number in a country that, by and large, we're not France. It's not like people take to the streets all the time. It's a pretty big turnout.

Brian: I mentioned in the intro Trump's post saying he would scale back workplace immigration raids targeting restaurants, hotels, and farms. It was workplace raids in LA that really set off the big protests there. Why is Trump backing off to that particular degree? Do you think the protests have anything to do with it?

Susan: No, I think that it's more likely the complaints of his own Republican business supporters and supporters in red states that have been more influential in making this pivot. There's been some good reporting that suggests, in fact, it was his agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, bringing to him the concerns of agribusinesses and the like, and people in red states that influenced what Trump decided to do in pulling back some of the very aggressive immigration raids on workplaces.

To me, that is right out of the Trump playbook. He is basically a believer himself in divided America, that there's a blue America and a red America. As you know, he's always been a politician who cares essentially only about his own base. Remember, that's how he approached even something like a deadly pandemic back in 2020. He cared essentially only about statistics and only about political blowback in the states that he thought were composed largely of his supporters.

From my perspective, people might be misled to think, "Oh, Trump is kind of dialing back this immigration crackdown." What he's doing is reinforcing that it's an immigration crackdown in blue America. He explicitly put that on his Truth Social in a long ranty posting where he basically said, "We're going to ramp it up in blue cities like Los Angeles and do even more immigration targeting." I think it's not so much a walkback as it is showing that this is kind of an oligarchic presidency where the lobbying by business interests who support his political agenda, they might have the way to get to the presidency, but the millions and millions of people who live in non-Trump-supporting America, watch out for that.

Brian: You mean you think he'd still go after people in restaurants and hotels in New York, but not in Des Moines?

Susan: You tell me if that seems like a plausible scenario or not.

Brian: I guess time will tell after that post the other day. What they're not backing off is detaining people for deportation at their scheduled court proceedings or check-ins that people seeking legal status are showing up for in good faith. That certainly was the original trigger for protests in LA. Then when the workplace raids took place, it really ignited it further. I'm guessing you don't see any sign that those detentions, too, at the scheduled court proceedings or check-ins is also turning off members of his base or maybe some.

Susan: That's a great question. It's hard to say. Trump and his White House believe very firmly that his promise of what he called during the campaign, mass deportation now, is one of the main reasons he got elected for a second time. Obviously, we're talking on the 10th anniversary of Trump's entry into our political life.

Brian: Coming down the escalator at-

Susan: Exactly.

Brian: -Trump Tower, 10 years ago today, June-

Susan: Amazing.

Brian: -16th, 2015.

Susan: That's right. What did he begin by talking about? Ranting about immigrants. It's core to his political persona. He believes it's a winning issue. He believes, and his White House believes, that he won politically in terms of the Los Angeles protests. I don't think that it's backing down as much as it is wanting to address concerns of his supporters and not to lose the business backing that has been crucial, frankly. If it weren't for so many people in the Republican establishment going along with Trump, going along with policies they might not fully support, then he wouldn't have been elected to another term.

The core MAGA base, that's not enough of America to lead to this guy being elected twice as president. That calibrating it so that he keeps the support of the Republican kind of establishment, the non-MAGA part of the Republican Party, I think that's very important to Trump, but immigration is core to who he is, and he's never really going to back away from that. I am shocked, as I'm sure you are, by many of the images that come through that show that the United States essentially is not true to its word to so many of these people.

When I look at the video of people who serve the United States as, say, translators in Afghanistan, showing up for these court dates that you were just talking about, Brian, for their regularly scheduled appointments or check-ins, they have all their documents in order and they're being tackled by ICE agents. This is a gut punch, the credibility of America's word in the world. Same thing with foreign students.

One of the great aspects of our soft power in recent decades has been this fact that the world's best and the brightest wanted to come here to study. Then telling students who are in the middle of their college career at Harvard or some other university that you may or may not even be able to come back to finish your university studies. It's an extraordinary act of breaking faith with the world, of breaking our promises.

Brian: Let me get a few "No Kings Day" attendees in here. With apologies, folks, we're running so late on everything today because of all the mayoral primary coverage that we did earlier in the show. Let me ask you to keep it to a soundbite, but let's get some voices on here. Justine in Babylon on the Island, you're on WNYC. Hi, Justine.

Justine: Hi, Brian. One of the things I just took note of is that most of the people at the "No Kings" rally in Babylon were probably 60 to 70 years old. Just something I made an observation about. The second thing was that trucks going by were in great support of our cause. Big tractor-trailer trucks or working guys, local businesses, we got a lot of support from them.

Brian: Babylon, you're in a Trump voting district, right?

Justine: Yes, yes. Then thirdly, there were two large trucks that were Trump supporters, and every time they passed by and they made a bunch of noise, we all just collectively turned around. We were not supporting them or looking at them, and I think it made a really great effect of how we feel about them, and they didn't get us rallying anymore.

Brian: Justine, thank you very much. Next, Howard in Forest Hills in Queens, you're on WNYC. Hi, Howard.

Howard: Hi. I was at a wonderful "No Kings" demonstration in Great Barrington, and there were a lot of very good signs, but there was one kind of thing that I noticed was left out. America needed a king, and we had one, thank goodness, Martin Luther King, not King Trump. I'm going to get a sign made up that says something to that effect. Thank you.

Brian: Thank you very much. Hank in Blairstown, New Jersey, you're on WNYC. Hi, Hank.

Hank: Hi. Good morning. I went to the "No Kings" event in Newton. That's the county seat of Ruby Red Sussex County, New Jersey. Now I'm a veteran, Army '64 to '67, and a civilian contractor in Vietnam 1972. I was absolutely delighted to see that there was-- Oh, I estimate between 300 and 400 people cramming into Newton Green. Mostly boomers, yes, but an awful lot of college kids as well. It was delightful. I highly recommend Martha and the Vandellas and Dancing in the Streets.

Brian: [chuckles] Hank, thank you very much. I don't know if you have any reflection on those callers, Susan, or the age or other makeup. I know at some other rallies, people noticed how white they were, people noticed how old they were in some previous "No Kings Day" rallies. What about this time, and anything else you noticed as we run out of time?

Susan: Brian, I have also observed that it's definitely a graying constituency that's been coming out to protest Donald Trump since he returned to office. That demographic isn't necessarily the most favorable for the long-term prospects of the opposition to Trump and the Republican Party. However, I would point out that that's probably a reflection of a constituency for Democrats and for the opposition that's much more likely to actually show up and vote in the 2026 midterm elections that are coming up very soon.

Brian: Yet it is younger people in general who seem to be demanding more that the Democratic elected officials show more fight, no?

Susan: That's an interesting question. I have to tell you that I haven't seen America's campuses this spring, and now they're on break, obviously, but they were not in an uproar over the return of Donald Trump. If you want to keep your democracy, you do have to, at some level, perceive yourself to be enough of a stakeholder in it to do something about it. I was pretty surprised and at times disappointed that most American college students didn't really seem to put their universities in uproar over Trump and his administration's frontal attack on American higher education.

Brian: Provocative way to end with Susan Glasser, who writes the Letter from Washington column for The New Yorker and co-hosts their Political Scene podcast. Susan, thanks a lot.

Susan: Thank you, Brian. Great to be with you.

Brian: I just want to correct something that I said in the intro. I mentioned the horrible shootings of elected officials in Minnesota. I said it was a prominent state senator who was killed. It was a prominent member of the state house in Minnesota. Also injured but surviving was a member of the state Senate.

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