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TRANSCRIPT
Jane Coaston: It’s Wednesday, August 13th, I’m Jane Coaston and this is What a Day, the show that just learned, via his wife and conversation with Vice President J.D. Vance, that Stephen Miller, White House Chief of Staff and the person in the Trump administration most likely to scream at a waiter, puts mayonnaise on everything. Yup. Loves mayonnaise. It’s his absolute favorite condiment. I have nothing else to add. [music break] On today’s show, YouTube begins testing a new AI feature to figure out how old its users are. And President Trump announces his new pick to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics after firing the last commissioner for making him mad. But let’s start with Washington, D.C., home of great Ethiopian food, go-go music, and yes, the capital of the United States of America. Overnight, National Guard troops began showing up on the streets of the nation’s capital. Earlier Tuesday, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser met with Attorney General Pam Bondi to talk about President Donald Trump’s federalization of D. C. Police and the deployment of hundreds of National Guard troops. Bowser spoke to reporters afterwards and explained how she’s trying to make a federal incursion into D. C. work for the city.
[clip of DC Mayor Muriel Bowser] What I’m focused on is the federal surge and how to make the most of the additional officer support that we have. We have the best in the business in NPD, in Chief Pamela Smith, to lead that effort and to make sure that the men and women who are coming from federal law enforcement are being well used, and that if there’s national guard here, that they’re being well used and all in an effort to drive down crime.
Jane Coaston: Making chicken shit into chicken salad. I get it. But at his press conference announcing the takeover on Monday, Trump suggested more cities could be next.
[clip of President Donald Trump] You look at Chicago, how bad it is. You look at Los Angeles, how bad it is, and we have other cities that are very bad. New York has a problem. And then you have, of course, Baltimore and Oakland. We don’t even mention that anymore. They’re so far gone. We’re not gonna let it happen. We’re gonna lose our cities over this.
Jane Coaston: Now, if you’re wondering if Trump can federalize the local police forces of cities beyond Washington, DC, the answer is legally, no. In DC, which has limited self-governance, Trump can control the city’s police for about 30 days due to a local statute. Not so in Baltimore, New York, and the other cities Trump grouped together for reasons that are definitely not about their racial makeup. But that doesn’t make Trump’s rhetoric any less dangerous. As we saw with Los Angeles a few months ago, Trump has shown a willingness to call in the National Guard and the Marines. Whether he can legally do that is still being decided by the courts. But we have to point out that Trump’s justifications here are absurd. All of the cities he mentioned have declining crime rates, as does the United States as a whole for that matter. Yes, crime, especially gun crime is a real problem in DC and across the country. But that’s not why Trump is taking over DC’s police force and sending in the National Guard. He’s sending a message to cities, especially cities with a predominantly non-white population, especially cities with non white mayors and especially Democratic run cities and Democratic run states. Your cities are, as Trump said of Baltimore in 2019, quote, “disgusting.” And so are the millions of people who live there. Facts be damned, but that’s bullshit. And no one knows that better than Brandon Scott, Democratic mayor of Baltimore. We spoke on Tuesday afternoon. Mayor Scott, welcome to What a Day.
Brandon Scott: Thank you, thank you, hello, thank you for having me.
Jane Coaston: As the mayor of Baltimore, what are your primary concerns about President Trump’s decision to federalize the DC police force and call on the National Guard to combat crime?
Brandon Scott: Well, I think just looking at the data, right? The reality is that DC is safer today than it has been in the past 30 years, since 30 years. And then as the mayor of Baltimore, because as always, he can’t keep our name out of his mouth. I feel like he’s Chris Rock and we’re Will Smith, right? Like that’s how he just cannot keep our name out of his mouth. He said that our city was far too gone. And then, of course, I’m sitting here. Actually, I was enjoying my anniversary with my lovely wife and then my phone is going crazy because the president has called us out and said we’re too far gone. And the reality is is that we right now, as you and I are talking, have the fewest amount of homicides through this date on record ever, ever. So imagine hearing that when you’re finally tackling a issue that has been facing your city for me longer than I’ve been alive. I was born into a more violent Baltimore, right? And then what you see again, every single mayor in a city that he called out yesterday, we have one thing in common. We all have Black mayors. The second thing that we have in common is that we all have historic reductions in gun violence. And the president of United States who’s supposed to be the leader of the free world is doing the exact opposite of leading. By distracting from the things that he doesn’t want to talk about whether it be the economy, that’s on a rollercoaster. Whether it’d be terrorists whether it would be the Epstein files to just put siege a right-wing propaganda type talking points and quite frankly racist talking points about this city Just because he thinks that will work. That’s what it it just frustrates me
Jane Coaston: No, and I can totally understand that because, with all due respect, getting crime rates to historic lows is a huge achievement, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say the administration doesn’t care about those facts. They are not concerned about what the actual crime rates are. This is, to me, a stunt as evidenced by the fact that they’re trying to send in the National Guard, which I’m like, I don’t know what the National Guard’s supposed to do about youth crime. But how do Democrats more broadly combat this kind of behavior? Because we could fact check the administration’s claims all day, but we both know what he’s actually talking about. And like, you know, you don’t have to say this, I will. We both know the bullshit. So how do you start to combat that?
Brandon Scott: Well, I think, no, I will say, when something’s bullshit, I’ll be sure to say that it is. But I think that what what the Democratic Party have to do is really have to stop being afraid to talk about this issue, right? That we know the president and his folks are going to talk being tough on crime. But the reality is, as someone who grew up young, poor, and Black in Baltimore in the ’80s, in the ’90s, and the early 2000s when there was the height of the tough on crime era and zero [?] policing, how did that work the first time? The city didn’t get safer then. We’ve seen the city get extremely safer by us being smart on crime. And that’s what my brother and sister mayors are doing around the country, right? By leading as mayors and creating comprehensive violence prevention plans through a public health landscape. Also making sure that we are focusing our police department on things like here in Baltimore, our group violence reduction strategy, where we focus on the small amount of people who are likely to be the victim or perpetrator of gun violence. And we go to them first and say, hey, they actually in Baltimore, they get a letter from me, change your life. We can help you get a job, education, whatever you need. But if you don’t do this, we’re going to remove you from the neighborhood by force and people have taken us up on that. Some of them work for the city. Some haven’t and we’ve removed them and we’ve been focusing that way. But the number one thing that Democrats have to do is actually push up and lift up the people who are the best seated to talk about the issue. Quite frankly, and listen, I love, my congressman gave me my voice, but when people are calling and asking him about things around gun violence and what we should do and this and that, he’s going to push them to me because he knows I am the person on the ground that has to see the issue, the Democratic Party has to lift up it’s local leaders. They have to put the people that are the closest to the people, that can relate to the people, that can communicate to the people and have a proven record of dealing with these issues that most directly impact the people. That’s what they have to do.
Jane Coaston: I know DC officials are in a tough spot because of the city’s–
Brandon Scott: Yes.
Jane Coaston: –unique relationship–
Brandon Scott: They are.
Jane Coaston: –with the federal government and like, you know, I was saying yesterday, Mayor Muriel Bowser has one of the hardest jobs in America, but she definitely sounded pretty resigned on Tuesday, saying she was now focused on, quote, “how to make the most of the additional officer support we have.” So what have you made of the response to this from DC officials?
Brandon Scott: Well, I think that a lot of folks are trying to pontificate and think about what Mayor Bowser is doing or just criticize her, right? But I would pause everybody to understand that, listen, no other mayor in the country understands what it’s like to be in that role like she does, right, because when you think about that unique relationship, the federal government can basically do whatever it wants to DC, right. So she’s in a position where she has to balance out what would happen if they totally came in and took over versus what she’s able to try to accomplish by her being there. And I think the mayor is trying to do that and be very calculated in that, but it’s not like other cities. They don’t need to ask. He can just do there, right? Now, he didn’t do it on January 6th when he should have, but now he wants to do it.
Jane Coaston: So you mentioned that Trump ruined your wedding anniversary by calling out Baltimore among a bunch of other cities. And he was hinting that he might send the National Guard to do something like that. To what extent is Baltimore preparing for that possibility?
Brandon Scott: Well, we always have to be prepared. With this administration, the only thing you know you can expect is that it’ll be unexpected chaos. So we have to be prepared to see or take whatever measures we have to take, whether that’s legal or otherwise, always, obviously, in that case, communicating as we do every day anyway with our fabulous governor, Governor Moore, and his team on that. But also I want your viewers and listeners to hear this very clearly. We’re also not going to be distracted by the latest Jedi mind trick. We’re going to stay focused on reducing violence. We’re gonna stay focused on providing day-to-day services. We’re to stay focused on our 15-year plan to eliminate vacant housing in Baltimore. We’re not gonna be distracted from that work while also just being prepared to do that because we have to understand that the president and some folks are gonna continuously try to make violence and murder, right, into this simplified thing. It is one of the most complicated things that the human race faces. And do not allow them to try to simplify and play to your emotions over your the power that your brain has to understand that this issue is deep and it has to be solved in many different ways. There is no silver bullet. There is no uh one serum that you can take to rid our communities of gun violence. And there are many things that have to be done, including some that could be done by the president right now that, quite frankly, they’re just not going to do.
Jane Coaston: What? Like what?
Brandon Scott: Well, for example, the president can come out today and say, hey, you know what? No one needs to be able to go into a store and buy a AR-15, which in the military, you would get like four months of training on to use. We’re going to prohibit that in the United States of America. The president can join myself and mayors around the country who are trying to fight against glock and these glocks because these switches are killing our residents, American citizens, police officers, grandmothers, children all across this country. But they’re not going to do that. He, here in Baltimore, we fought and won and ended Parliament 80, the nation’s largest ghost gun manufacturer’s business, not just here in Baltimore, but across the state of Maryland. They could outright say that ghost guns are illegal and eliminate them across the country, but they’re not going to do that, right? These are the things that they could do and that we would be very, very, very willing to say the president is actually doing something right this time, but he’s not.
Jane Coaston: So to your point about Jedi mind tricks, and I know I’ve kind of seen this argument happening, democratic strategist David Axelrod told Politico that this all is a trap for Democrats because he said Trump’s big trick is to quote, “bait Democrats to argue that crime and homelessness are not problems when many living in those communities–“
Brandon Scott: Right.
Jane Coaston: “–and beyond believe they are.”.
Brandon Scott: Right.
Jane Coaston: So how do you, and you’ve just been talking about what you’ve been doing, what Baltimore has been doing. But how do you call this out without making it sound like you’re dismissing concerns about crime?
Brandon Scott: Yeah you don’t.
Jane Coaston: Because like it’s a hard, it’s a hard thing to weigh.
Brandon Scott: No, it’s actually not that hard. And it’s the way that we’ve always been saying. I start my weekly press conferences off every week by saying where we are with violence in the city. And every single time I say, this is not even last year or when we had the largest drop in homicides that the city has ever seen, right? Ever seen from one year to the next. I stood up there and said, this not a celebration. There’s nothing to celebrate. This is us acknowledging this historic progress that we’ve made, but also understanding how much further we have to go. And that’s the difference. The president and the propaganda team that they have for the right-wing media, including those who bought up a bunch of local TV stations around the country, they’re going to do what they do. Right. But the reality is, is that those very same right- wing TV stations, when I first came to office and when I first said that we were going to reduce gun violence and homicide’s about 15% from one year to the next, ask me every day when it’s gonna happen. And now that it’s happening, they don’t ask me anymore. They’re always gonna move the football, and Democrats have to stop falling for the trap. It’s never gonna be good enough. If you solve if you reduce homicides, they’re gonna move to to auto thefts. If auto thefts go down, they’re going to move to carjacking, if carjackings go down, they’re gonna to move to package theft. Because the reality is, it’s not about whether it’s happening or being reduced, it’s whether you’re doing it their way. And their way does not work, their way is racist, and their ways is not in the best interest of American people.
Jane Coaston: Finally, you mentioned how you don’t think the cities Trump mentioned in his press conference Monday are, that’s a coincidence, because, and neither do I, but do you think that these federal occupations of cities, you know, we’re seeing this in DC, we’ve seen it in Los Angeles, are part of some bigger plan the administration has, and if so, what do you think the end goal is here?
Brandon Scott: Listen, we have to understand that Black people, and particularly Black people in America, are have been the most attacked humans that this planet has ever seen. We’re not surprised when racists come for us. We’re surprised when they don’t, right? In fact, I tell my team all the time, if we don’t receive an email, tweet, direct message, voicemail with some racist person calling me the N-word in a week, I feel like I haven’t done my job. But what we have do is be prepared to fight. And push back and let people know what they’re exactly what they are doing. Because to me, it looks like they’re leading us down the path of authoritarianism where they can just do and push and say, this is why you get rid of public media, right? So that everything that people hear is in the vein that you want them to hear it. And it’s a very dangerous time and we would heed to look at history and what has happened in other countries not that long ago when these kinds of things were happening.
Jane Coaston: Mayor Scott, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me.
Brandon Scott: Thank you.
Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Baltimore Democratic mayor Brandon Scott. We’ll get to more of the news in a moment, but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Apple podcasts, watch us on YouTube and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. [music break]
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Jane Coaston: Here’s what else we’re following today.
[sung] Headlines.
[clip of Pete Hegseth] In Los Angeles, alongside our federal law, we took a lot of criticism for 4,000 troops, 700 Marines. You know what we didn’t get? There was no summer of love in 2020. There was in 2025, there was a summer of law enforcement.
Jane Coaston: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Fox News Monday. The summer of law enforcement sounds fun, doesn’t it? Well, it’s officially here, and somehow it continues to get worse. We just learned that the Trump administration is reportedly planning to create something called a, quote, “domestic civil disturbance quick reaction force.” That is according to internal Pentagon documents obtained by the Washington Post. The idea is that this military force, made up of 600 National Guard troops, could immediately deploy into any American city facing protest or civil unrest. Those troops would be on standby at all times, ready in as little as one hour, half stationed in Arizona to cover the West and the other half in Alabama to handle everything east of the Mississippi. The documents were compiled by the National Guard and are marked as pre-decisional, according to The Post. It’s unclear when the program would go into effect, how it would be funded, or whether or not Hegseth is even aware of it. But it sounds a lot like what you’d find if you asked ChatGPT how to create a police state. So that’s terrifying. President Trump announced his new pick to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Monday, E.J. Antoni. He just so happens to be the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank known from going from George W. Bush is cool and fun to writing Project 2025. The Monday announcement comes after the president fired former BLS commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, because the numbers in the July jobs report made the economy, but more importantly, him, look bad. He also accused McEntarfer, without evidence, of rigging the data for political reasons, which is definitely not something his new nominee would do. Earlier this month, Antoni floated the idea of scrapping the monthly U.S. Jobs report. He told Fox News Digital, quote, “until it is corrected, the BLS should suspend issuing the monthly jobs report, but keep publishing the more accurate, though less timely, quarterly data.” Oh wait, that actually does sound like someone who would rig data for political reasons. And that level of loyalty is not unexpected, given what the president said when a reporter asked about who he planned to hire.
[clip of unnamed news reporter] Right, but do you put someone in who actually has labor statistics experience? Or put in a Republican?
[clip of President Donald Trump] I put somebody in. I put somebody in who’s going to be honest, that’s all we want.
Jane Coaston: Even Kyle Pomerleau, a tax expert for the right-leaning Tax Foundation and the conservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote on Twitter, quote, “There are a lot of competent conservative economists that could do this job. E.J. is not one of them.”
[clip of unnamed CBS host 1] There is talk of a July 4th–
[clip of unnamed CBS host 2] Go ahead.
[clip of unnamed CBS host 1] –fight. America’s 250th birthday next summer.
[clip of unnamed CBS host 2] Where at, where at?
[clip of unnamed CBS host 1] At the White House.
[clip of unnamed CBS host 2] Okay.
[clip of unnamed CBS host 1] A pretty big venue. Uh. Is that going to happen, Dana? What can you tell us?
[clip of Dana White] It is definitely gonna happen.
Jane Coaston: Okay, get your left hook ready, J.D. A cage match could be headed your way. Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White shared some news Tuesday on CBS Mornings. White told the host he’s flying out to meet with President Trump at the end of the month to discuss the logistics of putting on a UFC fight at the White House. All normal things.
[clip of Dana White] It’s definitely going to happen. Well, think about this, when you were just asking me you know at the beginning how I felt about you know where we are today. July 4th, 250th birthday of the United States of America, live on CBS from the White House.
Jane Coaston: Where’s my Zhang Gang? Kayla Harrison fans, stand up! White’s comments come a day after UFC’s parent company announced a seven year agreement with Paramount to host all UFC events. YouTube will start testing a new age verification system in the US today that uses artificial intelligence to determine a viewer’s age based on the videos they’re already watching. So based on my viewership of World War II history videos, I am 95 years old. The new approach comes after political pressure on sites like YouTube to protect minors from inappropriate content, even when they lie about their age. So how will it work? The AI will run all of a user’s recently watched videos through an algorithm in a way that isn’t creepy or horrifying at all. Beep bop boop beep, if it decides they’re under 18 based on all the kid stuff they’re watching presumably, it will automatically install parental controls on their account. Sounds like a totally flawless plan, right? Except for adults who really like to watch Miss Rachel, I guess. If the new system makes a mistake, the user will have to submit a government-issued ID, credit card, or selfie to YouTube for verification. Again, what could go wrong? YouTube’s product management director said the new system is, quote, “designed to deliver safety protections while preserving teen privacy,” but that sounds like a lot of personal information to ask for just to watch some videos.” Luckily, there are already many, many videos teaching underage users how to avoid the new verification system. You can find them on YouTube. And that’s the news. [music break].
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Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, buy me a house in the Hamptons, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading, and not just about how 165 Surfside Drive in the Hampton’s is available for just the low, low cost of $2 million a month, yes, a month like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston, and it has floor-to-ceiling windows and a putting green. It’s basically free. [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producer is Emily Fohr. Our producer is Michell Eloy. Our video editor is Joseph Dutra. Our video producer is Johanna Case. We had production help today from Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Gina Pollock, and Laura Newcomb. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our senior vice president of news and politics is Adriene Hill. We had help with the headlines from the Associated Press. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music break]
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