Video

A conservative commentator got an immediate fact check by a CNN host on the impact of president Donald Trump's tariffs on the economy.

The president lashed out at Federal Reserve chairman Jay Powell on Thursday morning, saying his "termination cannot come fast enough," but a former White House spokesman for George W. Bush downplayed the gloomy economic forecast that drew Trump's ire.

CNN's Elie Honig casts doubt on the Trump administration's ability to successfully appeal a judge's order on deportation flights.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ruled Wednesday that “probable cause exists” to hold Trump officials in criminal contempt for violating his orders to stop deportation flights to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act, and Honig said they had little defense for an appeal.

Moments after pointing out that stock in Elon Musk's Tesla is tanking, MSNBC contributor and financial analyst Steve Rattner laid waste to the efforts of Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE.

Pointing to reporting from the New York Times that claims made by DOGE don't add up, Rattner had the MSNBC producers put up a graph with a heading reading, "Budget savings are tiny."

Nothing the differences between DOGE "promises vs realities," Rattner explained to the "Morning Joe" panel, "There's been an enormous amount of commotion. You've had a bunch of people lose their jobs. You've had confusion all over the place. What do we have to show for it? Well, back during the campaign, [Donald ] Trump claimed that he was going to cut $2 trillion from our annual budget. And, by the way, our annual budget is 7 trillion, so you're talking he would have been talking, obviously, about a massive, massive cut."

ALSO READ: 'We’ve made a mistake': Trump’s trade war sends GOP into frenzy

Using his charts, he continued, "They quickly realized that was not successful. In January, they said, we'll cut a trillion out of the budget and, by the way, the government's fiscal year is now more than half over anyway. But then on April 10th, they lowered it to $150 billion."

Laughing he added, "So $2 trillion, $1 trillion, 150 –– but even the $150 billion, the New York Times did a very thorough investigation of this. $90 and $92 billion of it is unspecified. Nobody knows where that's coming from."

"So for all the commotion, all the layoffs, all the unhappy people, there's very little to show for it. And you can see that most clearly over here because this tracks federal spending month by month since the beginning of each year, back from 2022. And as you would expect, it went up a little bit in 23, a little bit in 24, but it's actually gone up a good bit in 25. So there's still no impact whatsoever on government spending from all of, as I said, the commotion that Musk has created in Washington."

You can watch below or at the link.

Rep. Dan Meuser (R-PA) argued that a wrongly deported Maryland man should not be returned to the United States from El Salvador because he was a "potential terrorist."

During a Thursday interview on Fox Business, Meuser defended the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia despite the Supreme Court's ruling that he should be returned and the Trump administration's admission that he was mistakenly deported.

CNN's Natasha Bertrand on Thursday brought word that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had failed to greet French Minister of the Armed Forces Sébastien Lecornu after he arrived in the United States to discuss the war in Ukraine.

While talking with host John Berman, Bertrand revealed that "we are just learning that [Hegseth] failed to greet the French defense minister outside the Pentagon early this morning during an honor cordon."

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) got some pushback during an appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" for her party's response to the barrage of controversial actions being taken by the Trump administration.

During a roundtable discussion with Warren, "Morning Joe" contributor Mike Barnicle pointed out that many of the Trump administration's moves were laid out in the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 long before he won the 2024 election, and he wondered why Democrats nonetheless seem to have been caught flat footed.

Noted investment expert Steve Rattner had nothing but bad news for billionaire Elon Musk and Wall Street investors who have been hanging onto their shares of Tesla stock as the value of the shares keeps spiraling downward.

During an appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," Rattner used enlarged charts showing a bevy of downward trends and directly linked the collapse –– dubbed "Tesla tanking" –– to Musk's highly unpopular relationship with Donald Trump.

One major concern he noted, was that, at a time when EV sales are seeing a swing upward, Tesla sales are heading in the opposite direction.

ALSO READ: 'We’ve made a mistake': Trump’s trade war sends GOP into frenzy

Pointing to his graphs, he began, "See here that Tesla in its early years had huge sales increases, as you would expect, very popular. One of the few makers of really good electric vehicles (EV) in the country. But beginning in 2025. its sales kind of stagnated, a combination of really two reasons. One, some competition, more competition from other people trying to get in the business, including domestic manufacturers and also the fact that people are getting their models Y and S, two of their most popular models, are getting a little bit long in the tooth, so to speak."

President Donald Trump issued a broadside against Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell in an ongoing dispute over interest rates, and CNN's Rahel Solomon analyzed what that might mean to the U.S. economy.

The president called for rate cuts Thursday morning on Truth Social, saying "Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough," but the Fed chairman said the central bank won't intervene to bail out the stock market that's been battered by Trump's tariffs.

Donald Trump is finding out the hard way that he can't bully everything in path into submission as the economy continues to reel due to his tariff policies that have Wall Street investors running for the hills.

That is the opinion of former Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) from her perch as a contributor on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," where she claimed on Thursday the president is bumping up against a major roadblock when it comes to getting his way.

With the entire panel bursting into laughter when it was suggested that Trump trade advisor Peter Navarro is the only person who believes the tariff war announced on "Liberation Day" is bound to be successful, McCaskill chimed in to note Trump has met a new kind of resistance he can't overcome.

ALSO READ: 'Dictatorship, not a town hall': Families 'distraught' as MTG disruptors tased and jailed

Pointing to Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell balking at rate cuts on Wednesday saying more "clarity" about the economy under Trump is needed, McCaskill quipped, "The thing about his speech yesterday that struck me is that he's waiting for clarity. Well, that's like saying I'm going to see the real Easter bunny on Sunday, because this administration is specializing in chaos, right, in lack of clarity."

Reacting to a Truth Social Post that went up just moments before with Trump hinting, "Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough!" McCaskill pointed out, "He can bully a lot of people, he can try to bully news outlets, he can try to bully universities, he's obviously successfully bullied some of the largest, most successful law firms in the country –– brought them to their knees like little baby cowards they are, but he can't bully investors."

She continued, "He can't say to the rest of the world, 'You can trust us now,' when they can see with their own eyes, they can't. So he's really ––Trump is –– he will be captured by the stock market in terms of his political popularity. People like to say, 'Well, only rich people have stocks.' There is a huge number of people whose 401k's, especially people near retirement, that are dwindling in front of their very eyes and they are in a state of panic about this."

"So politically, Donald Trump has a problem because he can't control investors that are turning their back on the United States bonds," she concluded.

You can watch below or at the link.

MSNBC "Morning Joe" co-host Mika Brzezinski went off on a brutal rant on Thursday morning aimed at the conservative media for smearing critics of Donald Trump's harsh immigration policies.

Using the abduction and shipping of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to an El Salvador maximum security prison without due process which has led to criticism as a springboard, the MSNBC host pointed out that criticism of Trump's policies have come from both liberals and conservatives –– including hosts on Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial board.

A legal expert ripped apart the Trump administration's case against Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who the government has admitted was removed illegally from the U.S. and sent to a notorious El Salvador prison.

Attorney general Pam Bondi insisted that Garcia, a Salvadoran national who was protected from deportation by an immigration judge in 2019, was "not coming back" to the U.S. despite court orders to facilitate his return and claimed the Maryland resident was a gang member, but legal expert Roger Parloff disputed her allegations on "CNN This Morning."

The legal maneuvering and outright defiance that President Donald Trump’s administration has displayed surrounding the deportation flights to El Salvador that a federal judge ordered to turn around and return to the United States prompted MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow to issue a dire warning.

Maddow on Wednesday read directly from U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s 46-page opinion in which he found probable cause to hold Trump’s administration in contempt of court over officials’ rush to deport hundreds of people despite the judge’s order.

A MAGA lawmaker told Democrats and "the left" to "look in the mirror" after Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) and his family escaped a firebombing attack that scorched the governor's mansion.

Shapiro’s official residence was attacked in an arson incident early Sunday. Cody Balmer, 38, scaled a fence at the Harrisburg mansion, broke windows with a hammer, and threw homemade Molotov cocktails fashioned from beer bottles and gasoline into two rooms, igniting flames.