Return to Transcripts main page
CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip
Judge Rules Trump's National Police Force Is Illegal; Trump On Hellhole Chicago: We're Going In; Billionaire Says, Trump Is Turning The U.S. Into 1930s Autocracy; Trump Says He Is Disappointed In Putin; Americans Debate On Retirement Age. Aired 10-11p ET
Aired September 02, 2025 - 22:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[22:00:00]
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ABBY PHILLIP, CNN HOST (voice over): Tonight, a judge says Donald Trump trying to command a national police force is illegal. So, what happens when he crashes Chicago?
DONALD TRUMP, U.S. PRESIDENT: We're going in. Chicago is a hellhole right now.
PHILLIP: Plus, a billionaire warns the United States is becoming a 1930s autocracy, but everyone's afraid to call it out.
Also, should retirement be removed? A provocative debate on the golden years as more believe the American dream is dying.
And America's adversaries pitch a new world order as Russia ignores another of Trump's deadlines.
TRUMP: I'm very disappointed in President Putin.
PHILLIP: Live at the table, Van Jones, Scott Jennings, Anna Kasparian and Ben Shapiro.
Americans with different perspectives aren't talking to each other, but here, they do.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP (on camera): Good evening. I'm Abby Philip in New York.
Let's get right to what America's talking about. Will Donald Trump's power play power down? A judge in California is siding with Gavin Newsom ruling that the president broke the law when he sent the National Guard troops to L.A. The judge's blunt message warned that Trump is running the risk of, quote, creating a national police force with the president as its chief.
But that isn't stopping Trump from threatening to put more troops in America's streets.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) TRUMP: Chicago is a hellhole right now.
But we're going in. I didn't say when. We're going in.
If the governor of Illinois would call up -- call me up, I would love to do it. Now, we're going to do it anyway. We have the right to do it because I have an obligation to protect this country.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: An hour later, Illinois's Governor J.B. Pritzker fired back.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GOV. J.B. PRITZKER (D-IL): I can't live in a fantasy land where I pretend Trump is not tearing this country apart for personal greed and power.
He has no idea what he's talking about. There is no emergency that warrants deployment of troops. He is insulting the people of Chicago by calling our home a hellhole. And anyone who takes his word at face value is insulting Chicagoans too.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: Ben Shapiro is at the table. He's the author of a new book, Lions and Scavengers. Also with us in our fifth seat at the table is CNN Senior Legal Analyst Elie Honig.
Elie, I will of course start with you on this very important legal matter. Look, the judge's ruling is pretty straightforward. This violates the Posse Comitatus Act, which basically prohibits military from operating in domestic policing operations. I thought it was super interesting reading this ruling, all the little shenanigans that were going on behind the scenes, because the Defense Department kind of knew that this would be a problem. And they were trying to get around it in all these various ways, but the judge says, no, it doesn't fly.
ELIE HONIG, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: Right. So, this is the same judge I should say, who ruled against Trump on the initial deployment of the National Guard to California and then got reversed by the court of appeals. Now, what the judges said is, okay, National Guard's there, but they've crossed that wall. They've crossed that what we call Posse Comitatus, meaning civilian law enforcement has to be separate from the military. And he goes through in detail what these National Guard troops have done. And he says some of that crosses the line.
Essentially, though, the criticism of this opinion and watch for this on appeal is that here you have a judge who's trying to essentially micromanage the movement of what these National Guard troops do, which is sort of an impossible task for the judiciary to do. The other thing is, if you really read this opinion, the judge doesn't even allow National Guard troops to provide perimeters when there's a search warrant, to provide security for arrests and stuff. So, basically he wants somebody to just be -- PHILLIP: Well, I guess, Elie, just to kind of press on that, in this ruling, they show a training that the Defense Department provided to its own troops, which outlined those very things and said, they told their own troops that they were not allowed to do those things, but that the White House told them that there was a constitutional exemption in this particular situation.
HONIG: I didn't quite understand what that Constitution looks like.
PHILLIP: Right. And that's what the judge's saying, that that's the White House apparently claimed that there was a constitutional exemption that allowed them to do these things.
HONIG: And you're right, it's one of the most effective pieces of argument made on behalf of California.
[22:05:02]
They take the training materials of the National Guard, which lists a dozen or so things that you as a National Guardsman cannot do. And the judge concludes that some of those were breached.
PHILLIP: So, for Trump, he's threatening the National Guard to Chicago and other cities. This is clearly going to complicate that because now he has to come up with a rationale that fits at least what this judge is saying and doesn't run into some of those same issues.
SCOTT JENNINGS, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Well, he's threatening Chicago with two things, one, a surge of federal resources, so ICE, CPB, other federal agents, so that's bucket number one. Bucket number two would be the National Guard. I still think regardless of what happens in the courts on the National Guard, they're going to be surging other federal resources into Chicago specifically to deal with the illegal immigration problem.
So, I don't know how the court case is going to play out. Obviously, the Ninth Circuit has overruled this district court judge before, but, you know, I talked to the president today. He had a press conference in the Oval, and I'm just telling you, he is intent on doing anything and everything he can to get into the city of Chicago.
PHILLIP: Let me play what he said today. He talked about the people that he's hearing, black people who are begging for help in Chicago.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: I saw it today on one of your networks, not a friendly network, except really the opposite, I would say, very unfriendly network. And they interviewed about 12 people on this morning. Most of them were African American, who were black, and they were saying, please, please, please let the president send it. These were people from Chicago. Please, we need help. We need help. We can't walk outside. We're petrified.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: Van?
VAN JONES, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Look, I didn't talk to those people in Chicago. I talked to other people in Chicago who see it quite differently.
Look, I think Democrats have to be very clear before we say anything else, that there are too many funerals in Chicago. There are too many funerals in Oakland. There are too many funerals in Detroit. There are too many funerals in Philadelphia. And nobody cares more about what's happening in our communities than those of us who live there and who have family there.
If you ask the people on the front lines what they want, what they want is not federal troops, not National Guard troops, because National Guard troops don't know how to solve crimes, don't know how to create jobs. There is an opportunity here. There was a Trump administration, I remember it, that did something called opportunity zones. He had a businessman who came up with business solutions to try to actually serve the right kind of support. There's a neighborhood called Pullman in Chicago where crime has come down 40 percent, 43 percent. Why? Because they use tax credits and local charity and local leadership to bring in jobs, and it collapsed the crime rate.
So, if you want to fix what's happening in Chicago, talk to the people who are going to those funerals and ask what they want, very few of them are so limited in their imagination, they say they want troops. Nothing stops a bullet like a job, and that's what's needed there.
PHILLIP: There's also the risk here of unintended consequences if a president not named Trump is in the Oval Office. And this was voiced by our colleague here, Jonah Goldberg, who's with The Dispatch. Let me just play what he said.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JONAH GOLDBERG, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: I would just caution a lot of conservatives who celebrate all of this, and I'm all for crime reduction, but the conservatives who are celebrating this, you listen to the mayor of Chicago talk about the gun crisis in America, well, what is the stop given the precedence that Donald Trump is setting? What is the stop a Democratic, a Governor Pritzker, a Governor Newsom to say, you know, we have a gun crisis in America just as legitimate on the facts arguments as a crime crisis and say, we're going to send the National Guard into states to go get their guns. There have to be standards here.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: What is to stop that, Ben?
BEN SHAPIRO, AUTHOR, LIONS AND SCAVENGERS, THE TRUE STORY OF AMERICA: I mean, I think that, to be fair the exertion of more power by the executive branch has been an ongoing process for the course of the last 20 years, minimum. And you saw the Obama administration declare national emergencies, something like 12 national emergencies or under President Obama, something like nine under Joe Biden. They've had President Trump declare a wide variety of national emergencies. This isn't a unilateral problem. I think it is a bilateral problem.
With that said, I think that we should separate a few strands here. One is the legal that, Elie, was talking about. One of the other things here though is I think what Van was referring to, which is President Trump does have a habit of wrong footing his political opponents in a unique way on this sort of stuff. There were 574 murders in Chicago last year.
And you can make the argument, I think, a plausible argument that National Guard troops should not be on the ground enforcing crime, both legally and just as a matter of general policy. But if the position you end up taking is that there is no serious crime emergency in Chicago on a rhetorical level, not on a legal level, on a rhetorical level, or you make the case that actually crime in Chicago just isn't that big of a deal, which seems to be the mistake that many Democratic politicians are making right now, Trump is going to win that battle all day long.
PHILLIP: I mean, I hear you, but I also think there is the rhetorical level, which we could focus on. But, I mean, I also want to focus on the reality, like the actual things that are happening.
[22:10:05]
And even to that point, I mean, voters are not -- I think we treat voters as stupider than they are. You ask them in polls and they say, we think crime is a problem. We don't like the way Trump is handling it in the way that he is sending the National Guard. They want Trump to do more about crime. They don't necessarily want him to send troops to cities. So, voters can handle these topics. They're not like --
ANA KASPARIAN, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER AND HOST, THE YOUNG TURKS: I totally agree. I think voters see what's happening for what it really is. I see this presidency, for the most part, as like a kayfabe presidency. It's a wrestling term. Everything is theater, right? Because I question the whole premise that Trump is using to send, you know, National Guard troops on the ground, and, of course, he's doing it in blue cities.
I think crime is a problem in some of these blue cities. I'm not going to minimize it at all. Thank you for acknowledging that, Van, because I think too many Democrats want to pretend like it's not a problem because they don't want to be held accountable for it. But it is a local issue. And if the federal government is serious about tackling crime, well, there are things you can do on a federal level that actually helps these communities, right?
So, one thing that you could do is rather than just talk about the need for mental health care, for instance, which is like, what are the root causes of all these mass shootings that keep happening, don't just talk the talk, walk the walk. Pressure Congress to pass legislation that allocates necessary funding so people get the help that they need, right?
We're not going to be able to roll back the fact that we are swimming in guns in this country, but we can deal with some of the other causes that lead to some of the shootings that we have. Opportunity zones is another good idea.
Trump isn't serious about solving crime here. This is all about theater. This is all about shock and awe. That's what he specializes in.
PHILLIP: And that's why the National Guard in D.C., they've got them on beautification duty now. Guardsmen have reportedly cleaned more than 2.3 miles of roadway, collected more than 500 bags of trash and disposed of three truckloads of plant waste. I think that is all great stuff. But the National Guard at the tune of a million dollars a day, because these folks have to be paid, are doing what the Park Service could have done if they had just been given their adequate funding.
SHAPIRO: And the crime rates are plummeting in Washington, D.C. The mayor of D.C. is thanking the president.
PHILLIP: But just to be clear, but the National Guard is not doing any of that. The National Guard is not doing any of that. The people doing that are other law enforcement agencies, like ICE and Border Patrol and ATF and others.
JENNINGS: I'll tell you one thing they're doing. I walked around Washington, D.C., all weekend long with my family and my entire family there, and we did run into the National Guard. And I'm just going to tell you, having these guys walking around, keeping an eye on things, they were greeting the public. I saw a lot of people walking up to them, thanking them for keeping an eye on Washington, D.C. I think there's something to be said for just having more eyes and ears on the streets. People are less likely to commit crimes in front of four or five National Guards and --
KASPARIAN: Their visibility is a deterrent. But what happens once you pull them back, right? That doesn't really solve the problem.
JENNINGS: Well, that's a good question. And today, Mayor Bowser actually signed an executive order inviting an ongoing federal presence in Washington, D.C., and didn't put an end date on it. I mean, just as Van said, she has acknowledged that this has worked. Crime has gone down, people are being arrested, illegal guns are coming off the streets, and there is apparently some cooperation between a Democrat and a Republican administration, which you're not getting a scintilla of out of Illinois, which I think is a political mistake.
JONES: I do see it differently. There is a way. Look, Biden made a mistake on immigration when red state governors started shipping immigrants to blue cities and there was no response. There was a big moment there to bring everybody together, get those blue city mayors, bring those red state governors into the room and talk to solve the problem.
Presidents can convene. They can bring problem solvers together. The problem we have right now is that's not happening. He's talking about people in Chicago. He's not talking to the people in Chicago. That's a big mistake on his part. PHILLIP: Elie, can I have a last word for you on the legal matter of what he can do in Chicago? Because Trump seems to sometimes acknowledge he can't as easily just send them in. So, if he tries, what does that look like?
HONIG: He's right about that. It's going to be much tougher sledding anywhere other than D.C. and California.
So, first of all, what can he do and can he not do? He can surge federal resources. He can take DEA, ATF, FBI and put them in whatever city he wants, ideally working cooperatively with the locals. He cannot, however, take over local urban police forces the way he took over the Metro P.D. in D.C. because that's a special case, special law.
But the middle ground is going to be National Guard. The reason he was able to deploy the National Guard in D.C. is, again, it's unique, he runs the National Guard in D.C. California, the basis was the ongoing protests, which have basically reduced down to near nothing, and there's not protests, anti-ICE protests happening in Illinois or Maryland or New York.
And so he's going to need a different legal hook when he goes into court.
[22:15:02]
I think it's going to be hard legally for the president to say, well, crime rates are high, it's dangerous. Even if that's true, I don't know that's going to satisfy the emergency statute that got him into California in the first place.
PHILLIP: All right. Elie Honig, always great to have you. Thank you for joining us.
Next for us, a billionaire hedge fund giant says that Trump is turning the US into a 1930s autocracy. Is he right about that? Another special guest is going to be with us to join the debate.
Plus, it's the scene that the president wanted in America, a military parade show of force. But tonight, it's being held by the world's strong men as a slap in the face to the United States.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[22:20:00]
PHILLIP: Tonight, a billionaire hedge fund boss is warning Donald Trump is pushing the U.S. into autocracy. Ray Dalio told the Financial Times, quote, I think what's happening now politically and socially is analogous to what happened around the world in the 1930 to '40 period. He pointed to a few reasons, like state intervention in the economy and gaps in wealth. Dalio also added that many investors are afraid to call out Trump for fear of retaliation.
Joining us in our fifth seat is CNN Global Economic Analyst Rana Foroohar. And, Rana, I wonder if you are hearing the same thing, the sense that suddenly the state is deeply involved in all aspects of the economic world and that people are afraid to say anything about it.
RANA FOROOHAR, CNN GLOBAL ECONOMIC ANALYST: Oh, 100 percent. And, I mean, you can even take that analogy back a little further and say, you know, you had 1929, you could say that's similar to 2008. You get a big financial crisis. You get a growing wealth gap. We already had a wealth gap after the 2008 crisis. It grew more. You know, you got populism really taking off on both sides of the aisle. And then you get an autocratic figure like Trump who essentially takes people's fears and makes hay with them. This is exactly what happened in the 30s and 40s.
And one thing that I am very, very concerned about, as someone that covers business, you look back at history, business was silent in the 30s and 40s. Business was -- didn't speak out in Europe, often didn't speak out in the U.S. against fascism, against the breaking of the rule of law, and they came to regret it. And I see a lot of parallels today. I do not see enough business leaders speaking out. And I know that Donald Trump likes to pick off individuals, but you could see a lot more action with trade groups who were very concerned about politicization of the Fed, tariffs, et cetera, banning together, really speaking --
PHILLIP: But they're going along to get along essentially is what it seems like.
KASPARIAN: Isn't the wealth inequality continuing to grow? In fact, isn't it accelerated under Donald Trump? So, the business community loves Trump. I mean, they get all sorts of cookies from Trump, huge windfalls from his, you know, tax bill and the continuation of his 2017 tax cuts.
You know, what I thought was interesting about Ray Dalio's argument was that he mentioned that the federal government now has a stake in Intel in order to manufacture semiconductor chips here in the United States, which I think is a really important thing to do. And also isn't it better for taxpayers to get something back from their investment as opposed to just giving a corporation a massive amount of taxpayer money?
FOROOHAR: I think you're making a really good point about the Intel stake. First of all, it's not unusual for governments and not socialist governments, per se. Israel takes stake in companies. Denmark takes stakes in companies. That's not unusual. It does worry me, frankly, that this administration is taking a stake in private business because I don't think this administration is good at running things. I mean, it's very, very complicated to do industrial policy. I was a fan of what Biden did, but even with an administration in which everybody was sort of swimming in the same lane, it's very difficult to get it right.
PHILLIP: So, Ben, I mean, when Trump is picking winners and losers in all sorts of aspects of the economy, I don't -- I'm struggling to understand how that aligns with a conservative view of economic policy. SHAPIRO: Well, I mean, first of all, I don't think that him taking a stake in Intel does align with a conservative view of economic policy, but he's done many things. He's lowered taxes, he's deregulated, he's been cutting inside various executive functions of the federal government. All of that does. So, what you have is a bunch of sort of mixed waters.
What I do find interesting about the Ray Dalio analogy is if we're going to talk about, you know, sort of authoritarian centralization of the economy and you want to do it in the United States, we could talk about the FDR administration, which is one of the great centralizing attempt in the history of the United States. You literally had the FDR administration forcing businesses to put an eagle in the window of their business in order to do this. But I find the left loving this sort of stuff. Joe Biden wanted to be FDR. All we hear about is the wonders of FDR.
And when Barack Obama was calling people on the carpet in 2009, bankers, he called them on the carpet and he said, the pitchforks and torches are right out there. I'm the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks and torches. And all the people in this room were very upset with Trump were celebrating that sort of stuff. So, when the shoe's on the other foot, authoritarianism from the left is okay, when Trump takes a stake --
PHILLIP: But, Ben, this is why Americans were so actually kind of upset about what happened after the financial crisis. Because despite what you just described, Obama allegedly said, nobody paid a price for that, right? Nobody actually paid a price for that. Meanwhile Trump is not just the things that we talked about, not just Intel, not just the Golden Share and U.S. Steel, but on the Fed, here's what he's saying about what he wants the Fed to do once he gets control of it.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: Once we have a majority, housing is going to swing and it's going to be great.
[22:25:00]
People are paying too high in interest rate.
We have to get the rates down a little bit.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: Scott, I ask again, how does it align with conservative values to have one man with his hand in industrial policy, his hand in monetary policy, his hand in fiscal policy, and all the aspects of the economy? How does that jive with conservative ideology?
JENNINGS: Well, sometimes he does things that aren't traditionally conservative. I actually asked him today if he thinks about that when you make decisions. I asked him, do you think about being a conservative or do you think about another label? And he said, well, sometimes I just think about being common sense. And many said, of course, being conservative is almost always being common sense.
So, I think he tries to think about what he thinks is in the best interest of the United States more than what he thinks is in the best interest of a particular political ideology, which, let's be honest, he didn't really subscribe to prior to running for president as a Republican in 2016. He wasn't a longstanding conservative ideologue, and I don't think he's ever really been an ideologue.
On the Intel piece, I know you don't like it that he took a stake, and I know you've raised issues. They do not have a governing stake. They have no board seat. They're not going to be doing anything to run Intel. You said you're worried about the running things poorly. They're not running Intel. He took a stake in it because he thought it was in our national security interest and he thought it was a good deal for the American people and that we will actually get something out of it. But there's no governance stake for the government.
FOROOHAR: Look, here's the thing. You could take Intel, you could take shipbuilding, you can take any of the things that the Trump administration has talked about, trying to bring back, to rejuvenate. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand's doing. I mean, I am very pro-rejuvenating manufacturing this country. I think that we do need to have more resilience, but I don't look at this administration and say they're doing this with any kind of coherent strategy.
Also, I want to make a point about FDR. When FDR was trying to raise money for the public works that he was going to do, he actually had Norman Rockwell go out and paint the Four Freedoms. And he had -- you know, he took those pictures around. It was about patriotism. It was about trying to get people excited about what could happen in this country. This president is trying to raise money by putting tariffs on our adversaries and allies alike in ways that don't make any sense. There is nothing -- the two administrations have nothing in common.
SHAPIRO: And FDR spent most of his administration ripping on what he called the malefactors of great wealth. So, trying to provide --
FOROOHAR: You know, we're still living off of a lot of the public works administration. I wish we were building by highways.
PHILLIP: But I take --
SHAPIRO: Why are you against what Trump is doing? Because he's doing a much lesser version of what FDR did.
FOROOHAR: No. Trump has -- again, the left hand doesn't know what the right hand's doing. Let me give you an example.
SHAPIRO: He's an incompetent guy?
FOROOHAR: Shipbuilding --
SHAPIRO: If you're competent, it would be better?
FOROOHAR: Well, you're just -- this is rhetoric, but shipbuilding is a great example. You know, the Trump administration got rid of Biden's domestic shipbuilding office at the same time that they're saying, let's have Koreans ship build you know within missile range of China. I mean, there's no coherent strategy to how this administration thinks about resilience.
JONES: Well, you -- wait, hold a second.
FOROOHAR: Yes.
JONES: You don't like Trump and you do. But I think Dalio was making a bigger point. And I think we're missing -- we always want to get into the Trump of everything. It's a very big deal for someone like Ray Dalio to point out, regardless of the Trump of it all, that there's something happening in this country where we're getting farther apart from each other. This wealth gap is very dangerous. The income gap is very dangerous. And I think both parties need to look at it seriously and try to figure out how to get to the table.
We got very lucky in the last century. We had major economic challenges, but somehow we produced a Churchill, we produced a Thatcher, we produced a Gandhi, we produced a Mandela. We produced an FDR. I'm looking at world leadership now and I'm watching the temperature rise, and I don't see anybody who has those kinds of skills to get people back to the table.
I think Ray Dalio is not going after Trump. I think he's going after this deeper problem happening in our country, and neither party's really dealing with it.
KASPARIAN: I think you're right about that. Look, I'll say this about Trump. You are -- I think you're correct in that he's kind of all over the place. I think the Intel stake is one of the better things that he's done. And you're correct, it's a non-voting stake, so I'm happy about that, to be quite frank with you.
I'm just sick of American taxpayers shelling out the cash, subsidizing major corporations, subsidizing the research and development for pharmaceutical companies, and then getting price gouged on the cost of pharmaceutical drugs. It's about time that American taxpayers get something in return for their tax dollars. And so in that area, I'm in favor of it.
SHAPIRO: I mean, what we're going to get in return is an endless subsidy to income. Intel starts to go down the drain --
KASPARIAN: It's not a subsidy, it's an investment in Intel. We now own 10 percent.
SHAPIRO: And then when they come up short on their cash, what do you think the government is going to do? They're going to pour more money in.
PHILLIP: And I think, just to be clear, what --
SHAPIRO: I'm the only person here defending Trump is not authoritarian and I'm the only person here who apparently disagrees with Intel. PHILLIP: Well, look, I mean, I think that's an important point to make that, that you're -- look, you disagree that he's authoritarian, but you do agree that the hand in Intel and maybe some of the other things, maybe the tariffs is --
[22:30:01]
SHAPIRO: Yes, I'm not in favor of it.
PHILLIP: -- are problematic.
I mean, on the Intel piece, I mean, this goes back to what I was saying about picking winners and losers, because you're right. There is a financial stake now in the United States making sure that Intel wins. And that's not the market. That's the government.
And I think that's the problem with him doing what he's doing. He may think this is in the best interest of the United States, but I think there are a lot of Americans who say, I don't want any one man making all these decisions when it comes to my pocketbook as American citizens.
(CROSSTALK)
ANA KASPARIAN, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER AND HOST OF "THE YOUNG TURKS": But is it the free market when we're subsidizing companies?
RANA FOROOHAR, CNN GLOBAL ECONOMIC ANALYST: I think Scott actually made a pretty good point about Trump not having an ideology. I actually wouldn't give him credit for an ideology. I think he's extremely self-interested. And that's why you see this sort of, you know, one policy here, one policy there, no coherence. He's acting from a place of, what is the short-term gain that I gave?
The Fed is a perfect example of this. This is about trying to push short-term rates down because it'll make life easier for the government at this moment. But guess what? d'Alio, all the rest of the investors out there, I cover them all-day-long, they're looking at long-term rates and saying, we are going to have hyperinflation, we are going have a massive deficit.
(CROSSTALK)
PHILLIP: It's a dead bomb. Yeah, let me just let Scott get a last word here and we will continue.
SCOTT JENNINGS, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL COMMENTATOR. Regarding his ideology, you know, look, he ran as a Republican. He often does things that I regard as conservative, normal Republican stuff.
But in some ways, he has sort of functions as our first independent modern president because he does tend to do things sometimes that a traditional conservative would say this is not what Ronald Reagan taught me that we should be doing. And he doesn't care one bit. He's more than willing to color outside those lines if he thinks it's in the best interest of the American people. (CROSSTALK)
FOROOHAR: His self-interest I mean, he's the perfect for the selfish, idealistic --
(CROSSTALK)
JENNINGS: Well, why is it against -- I don't know -- I don't know why you're lobbying an attack on him. He took a stake in Intel because the government -- the government decided to invest in the chips industry. He got this stake in Intel because he thought it was presented to him and it was a good idea at the time. He has no personal interest.
FOROOHAR: Let's be clear. The Biden administration previously made a strategic decision to bring back the chip industry in 18 months. Trump came in and then, well, it was bipartisan, but they executed it. Trump came in.
And you know, you're right. He didn't throw that baby out with the bathwater. But it's not just about taking a stake in Intel. You have to train people. You have to connect the dots between the Department of Education and labor and local governments.
(CROSSTALK)
FOROOHAR: You know, I mean, right. And that's part of the problem.
(CROSSTALK)
JENNINGS: Which is perfectly fine with me.
PHILLIP: All right.
(CROSSTALK)
FOROOHAR: That's not how you actually make things. I grew up in factories. My dad ran them. You know, that's not how you make things.
PHILLIP: We do have a lot more ahead that actually dovetails with this conversation. The question is, is the American dream out of reach? Working hard and retiring at 65 years old may be a thing of the past, but should there even be a retirement age? Stay with us.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[22:37:32]
PHILLIP: Tonight, a provocative take from Ben. No one in the United States should be retiring at 65 years old. It's a debate that's underscored with new polling showing that Americans are struggling. Seventy percent of the country believes that the American dream is dead, which is a 15-year high. And only 25 percent say that they have a good chance of improving their standard of living. That is the lowest number on record since they started the surveys in 1987.
Which brings us back to the age-old debate. When should you retire? Ben, you're going to be kicking at 69 years old doing this thing?
SHAPIRO: Well, I mean, life expectancy, if you make it to 65 and you're a dude, is now 83. So, the real question that I was asking is, when should the government pay you to retire? Which is a sort of different question than when should you retire. When you should retire is sort of a personal question, and also depends on your definition of retirements.
I don't think that, you know, if your goal is to be 65 and sitting on a beach for the rest of your life doing nothing, the social science tends to say that's not very good for you. You actually should be involved in your community and get involved and still have a side job and all the rest of that. But if we really believe that we can't raise the retirement age and we're never going to change that, we will go bankrupt.
And all the talk about cutting at the margins, whatever DOGE is doing, that's not going to touch the real driver of the systemic debt in the United States. Women are living to 85 if you make it to 65, men are living to 83 if you make it to 65. That's 20 years on the public dime.
PHILLIP: But hold on, when you're talking about the government paying, you're talking about Social Security --
SHAPIRO: Yes
PHILLIP: -- which is people's money?
SHAPIRO: Well, it is -- it is not the money you paid in.
(CROSSTALK)
KASPARIAN: It's a system they pay in --
(CROSSTALK)
PHILLIP: Yeah, it's the system that pay into --
(CROSSTALK)
KASPARIAN: --that never paychecks up.
SHAPIRO: Yes, but believe me --
(CROSSTALK)
PHILLIP: I know. I pay the Social Security. I don't know about --
(CROSSTALK)
SHAPIRO: But I promise you, the amount -- the amount that people are taking out is not the amount that is going in, which is why we are going bankrupt.
PHILLIP: Okay, but it's not the government just handing out a blank check. SHAPIRO: No, it's the government borrowing money to pay --
(CROSSTALK)
SHAPIRO: Well, you pay in X dollars and then you get multiple times X dollars when you retire. That is how the system works. It is not a lockbox, is what Al Gore was arguing about in 2000.
PHILLIP: The other part of this though is at 65, right? I mean, yeah, you might be in great health, but many people are working hard jobs. They're on --
(CROSSTALK)
UNKNOWN: It depends on what job.
SHAPIRO: Working back breaking labor and the leg is falling off that you should be.
(CROSSTALK)
PHILLIP: I mean --
(CROSSTALK)
KASPARIAN: And by the way, just totally reject what you just said about how we're going bankrupt due to social security. Really, you don't think like the trillions of dollars we've spent on wars in the Middle East might have something to do with that?
SHAPIRO: It is not even --
(CROSSTALK)
SHAPIRO: -- a percentage what we spend on Social Security.
KASPARIAN: Our national debt shot up significantly after 9-11, after we started invading countries in the Middle East.
[22:40:02]
(CROSSTALK)
KASPARIAN: Now, we're 30 -- we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars on Israel, on Ukraine. I mean, honestly these foreign conflicts have a lot more to do with our national debt as opposed to us paying --
(CROSSTALK)
JENNINGS: You thin, you think Israel is a bigger portion of our budget than Social Security --
(CROSSTALK)
KASPARIAN: I think we spend way too much money on military aid for foreign countries.
(CROSSTALK)
JENINGS: You think Israel is more than Social Security?
(CROSSTALK)
KAPARIAN: you think that Social Security is more of an issue compared to how much money we just shell out for conflicts abroad?
(CROSSTALK)
JENNINGS: As a matter of expenditure and math, yes.
FOROOHAR: Both entitlements and defense are a big issue. I actually think Ben has a point here. I think that the nature of aging has changed. think retirement is evolving. I mean, you know, my husband is 71 years old. He's still writing books. I'm 55. I hope to work for another 15 years at least. But I do think it depends on the kind of job you do.
And it starts to get into the devil's in the details here, because if I'm working with my hands and I'm 65, you know, that's a problem. Maybe technology can help, et cetera. But there's got to be some understanding of what people are doing. There's got to be probably some means testing, which gets to this point about the growing wealth divide because there really are two Americas here.
KASPARIAN: Absolutely.
PHILLIP: Yeah. And especially on this issue because for those of us sitting at this table where we're sitting around yapping our mouths and getting a paycheck, most Americans are not doing that.
Arthur Brooks, who some of you might know, had an interesting piece in the Atlantic years ago and he wrote this, "The data are shockingly clear that for most people in most fields, professional decline starts earlier than almost anyone thinks.
If your profession requires mental processing speed, or significant analytical capabilities, the kind of profession most college graduates occupy, noticeable decline is probably going to set in earlier than you imagine." For some fields --
VAN JONES, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Don't take it personally, Scott.
(LAUGHTER)
UNKNOWN: Why are you guys looking at each other?
(LAUGHTER)
JONES: I've noticed. I've noticed.
JENNINGS: Van -- he's been around longer than I am.
(LAUGHTER)
PHILLIP: Listen, Scott, Van, I hate to break it to you.
JONES: Yes.
PHILLIP: Surgeons, pilots, okay?
(LAUGHTER)
PHILLIP: Mandatory retirement ages, okay, because after 56 --
(CROSSTALK)
UNKNOWN: Yeah, exactly.
PHILLIP: -- you cannot be an air traffic controller because there is a limit --
JONES: Yeah.
PHILLIP: -- on human capacity, right? So, why are we then saying to people, well, even though we know that there are limits to this, oh, you must work until you are 83 years old.
JONES: Well, I don't have a dog in this fight. I do think that backs give out faster than brains do. So, people who have back-breaking jobs, probably get out even faster than those of us who have brain jobs. But there's another factor here, which is comparatively, technology is probably going to hurt more than it helps, at least soon. Because however smart you think you are, you're not as smart as artificial intelligence.
PHILLIP: Right.
JONES: And so, I think that one of the reasons why all this food fight going on between progressives and conservatives is dangerous. This is a moment where you're going to have a bigger gap because blue collar jobs are going to be done by robots and white collar jobs are going be done by A.Is.
And guess what? You can't blame billionaires, and you can't blame immigrants, and you can't blame straight white dudes, and you can't blame, you know, you're going to have to have a real answer and right now, neither of the party does.
PHILLIP: So, a "Wall Street Journal" poll, most Americans not confident they can buy a home.
JONES: Right.
PHILLIP: Most are, 46 percent are not confident they can pay for an unexpected medical expense. Fifty two percent -- not confident that they have enough retirement savings. That's without the Social Security piece of it probably.
JENNINGS: I mean, you would think that if you lived through the last few years of inflation, you probably have it in your mind that things are only going to get more expensive and you start to project 30 and 40 years down the road, and you -- you need to be well founded in thinking I'm not going to have enough money.
It's an American dream question. I think for a lot of people, there's two things about the American dream, at least there is for me, there's making enough money to provide for your family and to retire. But then there's also the question of am I adding value to my community? Am I adding value to my country? Am I adding value -- am I providing value wherever I've chosen to live and raise my family?
And I think in our society right now, there's a lurch toward preaching easy money, you know, what are we telling people? You can get rich quick and crypto or sports gaming. Will put in your pocket and don't worry it's easy, it's easy. It's just signing up. And I think -- I think when you start to take the value, but that you could provide as a human being to your community and taking that out of it and preaching sort of these easy routes, I don't know, I think it sucks some of the soul out of the conversation about the American dream.
(CROSSTALK)
JENNINGS: The American dream is about value as a human being.
PHILLIP: And by that token, the idea that you should be working for a paycheck up until you die, I think is unfounded because I think that there's something --
(CROSSTALK)
PHILLIP: Well, no, I'm just saying like there is -- there is a lot of value that people need to give back to their communities. We should probably -- we actually should be paying them --
(CROSSTALK)
KASPARIAN: I would love to do so many things that are not --
(CROSSTALK)
PHILLIP: -- to work in their communities, to volunteer at the library, to work with younger kids.
(CROSSTALK)
KASPARIAN: There are things I want to do that are not going -- like if I were to quit my career and pursue the things I want to do.
[22:45:01]
Like for instance, I want to -- I want to volunteer in nursing homes, you know, like that's not going to make me enough money to pay my bills. So, I envision retirement being, all right, I'm done with my media career. I want to do these things that I've wanted to contribute to my community for the longest time. You know, I think there's this thought that people who want to retire
early or retire at 65 are just like bums who don't want to work. But people have interests that don't necessarily make money, you know?
(CROSSTALK)
PHILLIP: -- including their grandchildren, including their parents, including --
(CROSSTALK)
SHAPIRO: Well, the name for meaning is very real. And by the way, you see that in the polling, in that same "Wall Street Journal" poll, what you see is that Americans were pretty optimistic still about their economic circumstances and the directionality all the way up until about 2020. And really in 2020, it takes a nosedive. And that's with the government spraying money at people to stay home.
The question there was not, I have enough money? Because the government was literally paying people for a full year to stay home and providing student loan subsidies, and providing tax breaks and doing everything that it could to ensure that you had enough money in your pocket, which led of course that giant bubble in inflation. So, really, a lot of this feeling I think is driven by a feeling of helplessness that is itself being driven by uncertainty.
(CROSSTALK)
PHILLIP: We got to go. I mean, it doesn't help that-- I have to say, it doesn't help there was a global pandemic that was killing many, many people. So, I think that contributed to people's feelings, like, you know, something is wrong in the world. Rana Foroohar, always great to have you. Thank you very much for being here.
Next for us though, all the world's strong men are attending a military parade in China as we speak. And President Trump is telling Scott, he's disappointed now in Vladimir Putin. We'll discuss.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[22:51:13]
PHILLIP: Happening right now, a show of force by the world's autocrats. China's Xi Jinping is flexing his massive military might with a parade in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. And on the guest list tonight is Russian President Vladimir Putin, North Korea's Kim Jong- un. And their message is a challenge to the U.S.-led world order.
The three of them increasingly interested in working together rather than cozy up to Donald Trump. Now, remember, last month, we saw Trump standing next to Putin as he tried to broker a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, giving the President of both countries just days to hash things out.
But that deadline has come and gone and there have been no results and Trump is not happy about it. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: I'm very disappointed in him. He and I always had a great relationship. I'm very disappointed. Thousands of people are dying. I'm very disappointed in President Putin. I can say that. And we'll be doing something to help people live.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: That was, in fact, Scott Jennings, whose face you saw there before the President was speaking. But Scott, who could have thought, who could have guessed that Vladimir Putin was not serious about peace with Ukraine and that this summit was not going to produce the results that you and Trump thought it would?
JENNINGS: Well, I mean, think he thought he should try. I mean, the alternative was not to try, so he tried. And now Putin is doing what, you know, many people thought was possible, which is not be serious, not follow through on the commitments they thought he made in Alaska and in some follow-up phone calls when they had the Europeans at the White House. So look, I tend to be somebody who thinks it's worth trying to create peace deals.
(CROSSTALK)
PHILLIP: I mean, I think it was entirely predictable. I mean, I think this is the problem. Everybody knew that this was what Putin was going to do. They said so from the get-go. The only people saying that Trump was a genius and that this was going to be all totally different were folks like you two and Donald Trump, perhaps.
SHAPIRO: Well, I mean, to be fair, I'm not sure that even President Trump said things were going be totally different. He said that he was giving the opportunity for things to be totally different. But let's be real about this.
Six months ago, everybody would have celebrated on the left and in the center and on my part of the right if President Trump had said we're going to maintain arms shipments to Ukraine and we might consider further sanctions on Russia, and actually we're not going to force Ukraine into a bad settlement, okay?
So, Trump hasn't done any of the things that everybody thought he was going to do in January of 2025. And now, we're ripping him for, for what, not being hawkish enough. It's kind of funny how they have the goalposts move every time Trump moves. Trump is heterodox, but he is responsive to reality.
PHILLIP: I don't think goalposts have moved except that Trump has moved them. He said that he was going to end the war in 24 hours. That was obviously not going to happen. He also said that he didn't want to fund Ukraine. And now he's found a backdoor way to doing that by allowing the Europeans to do it. So, I don't know that --
(CROSSTALK) SHAPIRO: Trump's Russian tool narrative was untrue.
(CROSSTALK)
PHILLIP: The only person changing the goalpost is Donald Trump.
SHAPIRO: No, but Trump was a Russian tool. He was going to come in. He was going to sell out the Ukrainians. He was going to make Volodymyr Zelenskyy give away everything, the entire store.
(CROSSTALK)
KASPARIAN: Well, was kind of headed in that direction, but he pulled back to his credit. But I'm going to say this. I think that it's a good thing when you have a President who wants to approach something diplomatically at first, and if that doesn't work, then you look at other options. I think that he's actually doing something kind of smart, it's very subtle, but he's kind of moving the U.S. responsibility of helping Ukraine to the Europeans. And that's good.
(CROSSTALK)
JENNINGS: And you know what? The Ukrainians right now are talking about a post-war future where they have this multi-billion dollar defense built up - build-up that will be funded by the Europeans. I think that the E.U. commissioner said Ukraine should become a steel porcupine that's undigestible by --
JONES: Right
JONES: -- anyone. But that -- but again, what you said is true. It's not going to be fully the U.S. responsibility.
[22:55:01]
KASPARIAN: Exactly.
JENNINGS: What Trump has somehow --
(CROSSTALK)
PHILLIP: I just have --
(CROSSTALK)
JENNINGS: -- done is built a larger and better funded coalition to help support them.
(CROSSTALK)
PHILLIP: Well, hold on, hold on. Let's just be honest. Van, I promise I'll let you. But let's just be honest about what's happening here, is that everybody told Donald Trump what was going to happen and he had to find out himself, which is fine. He did find out and to his credit did change course. But not because it was not foreseeable by other people who know a lot about it. (CROSSTALK)
JONES: Look, I'm happy to dunk on Trump for falling on his face if that's kind of what we want to do. But I think we're going to look back on today historically as a very big deal because that image of Xi Jinping with Putin, with Modi from India, with the leader of Iran, with the leader of North Korea, that should send a chill down the spine of every American. That is a new world order.
KASPARIAN: Multi-polar world.
JONES: They call it multi-polar. I call it the West is now in a box. Don't forget, everybody doesn't like Henry Kissinger, but he did figure out a way to get us on the right side of the triangle. So, it was United States and China together and Russia by itself.
Now, we're on the bad end of the triangle. It's everybody against us. That is not good for America. That is not good for Democrats, for Republicans. And I think we've got -- that image is a feather in Putin's cap. It is a dagger pointed at the heart of the West.
PHILLIP: All right. Got to leave it there. Everyone, thank you very much for joining us. Coming up, thousands of Jeffrey Epstein files have just been released. Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett reacts. That's ahead.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[23:00:24]
(MIC OFF)
PHILLIP: -- P.M. right here on CNN. Thank you very much for watching "NewsNight". "Laura Coates Live" starts right now.
