Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) and former Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus yelled at each other over Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s qualifications to be Secretary of Health and Human Services.
"You looked at that appearance before Congress, and it just confirms what all of us around this table have known for decades," Christie said during a Sunday morning roundtable on ABC. "Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a foolish man full of foolish and vapid ideas."
"RFK Jr. doesn't belong in that job," he continued. "But after [Donald Trump] won, he wanted to show everybody, I can do whatever I want to do because this Senate will be compliant no matter what I do. And I'll put the greatest vaccine and public health denier of the last 20 years in charge of public health in America. It's a human middle finger to everybody who opposed him."
Priebus disputed Christie by calling Kennedy "a decent, humble, caring guy."
"Humble?" Christie gasped.
"Yeah!" Priebus said.
"For 20 years, for 20 years, he has been a vaccine denier," Christie noted. "And now what you're seeing around the country is people like Ron DeSantis in Florida saying, let's get rid of all vaccine mandates. This would not be happening if Donald Trump had not put the greatest public health denier of the last 20 years in charge of it."
"And so we should dismiss any person on the face of the earth that has a question about vaccine mandates?" Priebus complained.
"Let me just ask you this, because I'm very confused by you this morning," Christie asked the former RNC chair. "You think Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the best man to be leading public health?"
"No, no, no, answer the question!" the former governor shouted after Priebus tried to deflect. "You just called him a humble, qualified man! So you think he's the best person to lead public health in this country? He is a joke."
"The President of the United States has the mandate that you don't!" Priebus snapped.
Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) suggested that a shooting at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) happened because of what the agency "did during COVID."
During a Sunday interview with Marshall, CBS host Margaret Brennan advised the senator to be "very careful in this very heated environment."
"When you say you have a problem with trusting the CDC, it was just a few weeks ago a gunman walked onto the CDC campus in Atlanta and shot the place up," she noted. "Do you care to respond to that? And do you think that we need to be careful when we are discussing the CDC and public health officials right now?"
"Well, look, of course, I condemn that shooting," Marshall replied. "But the lack of confidence in the CDC goes back to what the CDC did during COVID."
"They misguided us, maybe lied to us even, about the origins of COVID and how to treat it as well," he added. "And the vaccine, they overpromise what the vaccine could do as well. So that's where the distrust is."
Brennan pointed out that President Donald Trump authorized the Warp Speed program to create a COVID-19 vaccine during his first term.
"Yeah, look, President Trump absolutely deserves a Nobel Prize," Marshall remarked. "That vaccine saved millions of lives."
"Okay, because you just said something that sounded very contradictory to that," the CBS host observed.
Donald Trump's former surgeon general sounded the alarm on Sunday about Robert F. Kennedy's role in the administration.
Former United States Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who was appointed by the president during his first term in office, appeared on MSNBC on Sunday to talk about Kennedy's recent purge at the CDC.
As for Adams, he said he was "deeply alarmed" by Kennedy's leadership, as well as what Adams sees as a "stunning collapse of leadership and credibility."
"These aren't just one offs," Adams added. "They are consistent and dangerous patterns of leadership failure under RFK."
White House border czar Tom Homan warned that people funding First Amendment protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) "would be prosecuted."
During a Sunday morning interview on Fox News, Homan told host Jason Chaffetz that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had a "historic number of prosecutions" against protesters for "impediment, assault, interference."
"So those protesters that we do see, I mean, some of it might be organic, but does strike me, it seems like a lot of them are being bused in," the Fox News host argued. "You see them at the end of these protests, actually getting back on buses."
"Are these protesters, the bulk of them, are they actually being financed from the outside?" he wondered. "And is that something that Homeland's looking at? Is the financing of how all these so-called organic protests are happening?"
"Absolutely," Homan admitted. "We know a lot of these protesters are being paid. Many have admitted to it. So, yes, there's a whole effort right now in identifying those who are funding these operations, those who fund the weapons that are being used."
"So, yeah, and they'll be held accountable too and held to the highest standards of the law," he added. "They will be prosecuted, too."
It is not illegal to fund constitutionally-protected free speech in the U.S.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) wondered why President Donald Trump had called the Jeffrey Epstein case a "hoax" even though House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) seemed to claim that the commander-in-chief had once been an FBI "informant" against the sex offender.
"Congressman Massie, let me begin with you and get your response to Speaker Johnson," ABC host George Stephanopoulos told the Republican in a Sunday interview. "He says you've been misled. He also suggested at one point this week seemed to suggest that Donald Trump, President Trump, was an informant to the FBI about Jeffrey Epstein."
"Now, I don't know if the speaker misspoke when he said that Donald Trump was an informant," Massie replied. "The lawyers for the victim said that Donald Trump had been helpful in 2009 in their case by giving them information."
"But being an informant implies some formal connection and ongoing relationship with the FBI," he continued. "I don't know what that's all about. I think the speaker needs to clarify that."
"And if it's a hoax, why was Donald Trump an informant to a hoax?"
CNN host Jake Tapper said he was "shocked" after Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo admitted he did not do any data analysis before banning vaccine mandates.
"I'm looking at this report from your department from April, showing that more people in Florida are seeking religious exemptions for vaccines," Tapper told Ladapo in a Sunday interview on CNN. "And at the same time, Florida is seeing rising cases of hepatitis A and whooping cough and chicken pox."
"This is in your own report, your own department's report," the host noted. "Before you made this decision to try to lift vaccine mandates for Florida, which include, obviously, public schools, did your department do any data analysis?"
"Did you do any data projection of how many new cases of these diseases there will be in Florida once you remove vaccine mandates?"
"Absolutely not," Ladapo insisted. "In terms of, you know, like analysis, well, ultimately, this is an issue very clearly of parents' rights. So do I need to analyze whether it's appropriate for parents to be able to decide what goes into the children's bodies? I don't need to do an analysis on that."
Tapper was taken aback: "So you're trying to lift the vaccine mandate in Florida and your department, and you did not even do a projection as to how this could impact public health."
"So you have not prepared hospitals in the Florida counties most at risk with the best treatments for any outbreaks of measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough, polio," he added. "And you have not looked into how many kids might now get these preventable diseases. That's what you're saying?"
"That's what you said," the surgeon general replied. "What I'm saying is that it's an issue of right and wrong in terms of whether parents should be able to control, have ultimate authority over what happens to their kids' bodies."
"I have to say, just I'm very, I'm kind of shocked that you have not done any sort of like projection or data analysis of what this is actually going to, going to literally mean for kids in Florida," Tapper remarked. "You talk about liberty and freedom for parents, but it seems like you're removing liberty and freedom for the parents of kids who are immunocompromised."
Donald Trump's latest move will not only backfire, but it could also help Dems win, according to a strategist on Saturday
Antjuan Seawright, the founder and CEO of Blueprint Strategy, appeared on MSNBC over the weekend to discuss a number of topics. At one point, the discussion shifted toward reports that Trump's administration was trying to interfere in the New York City mayoral election.
Seawright was asked if he thought those efforts would "backfire," to which he replied, "I don't think New Yorkers want this extreme president or his administration trying to hand-pick who the next mayor of New York is."
"And I think that not only would that backfire, that may be a uniting factor for Democrats" to win upcoming elections, the analyst added.
"Speaker should have stayed out of session a little longer," according to a conservative strategist who said Mike Johnson just "opened up a huge can of worms."
Johnson surprised political observers when he suggested that Trump was an "informant" for the FBI, providing information against Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted child sex abuser, and it led strategist Susan del Percio, who has a history of working with Republican candidates and in Rudy Giuliani's administration, to mock the congressman's claim.
"That is big news," she said, mocking the notion of Trump as an informant on Epstein. She also noted the power of the Epstein survivors now that they have all connected in the same room, and declared that Trump is not going to escape questions about the Epstein files.
"This is getting much much worse for Trump," del Percio said. "And it's not going away any time soon."
After Donald Trump's administration asked a judge to keep secret the names of individuals who had monetary transactions with disgraced financier and convicted child abuser Jeffrey Epstein, a legal expert highlighted the administration's about-face on the documents.
With the host saying the report "may have opened a can of worms," Greenberg notes that the filing at first glance appears to be like any other DOJ filing.
"Well, I think when you look at this filing, this is something that you would generally expect from DOJ to say, 'Hey, these are uncharged third parties. They have privacy interests. They object to their names being made public, so we are going to object this being disclosed. We want this to remain secret.' That's kind of standard," Greenberg said. "However, and there's a big however. The problem with that motion is, not too long ago, we got a very different motion from this Department of Justice where they asked for grand jury materials to be unsealed, and there is a precedent there. They're talking about the fact that they are committed to transparency."
She added, "You can't have it both ways."
"You cannot continue to speak about being transparent and stating that the public interest is great in these materials, and therefore materials need to be unsealed and then say, well, actually, not so much with respect to x, y, and z. It doesn't make sense," she said. "It's inconsistent. Their positions are very difficult to understand, and I expect that the judge will have some problems in terms of really understanding where is the coherent position."
World-renowned economist Paul Krugman sounded the alarm Saturday on President Donald Trump’s social media activity, calling many of the president’s online posts “horrifyingly irresponsible,” with many having led to real-world market dips.
“In the past, stagflation has been the result of external affects; war in the Middle East, things like that,” Krugman said, speaking on MSNBC with host Ali Velshi.
“Now, this is all self-generated, self-inflicted, ‘Trump-enomics’ has done this to us. I actually do, fairly often, look at Trump's Truth Social feed, and this is not a guy I would allow within three miles of making monetary policy. This is just horrifyingly irresponsible.”
Trump’s chaotic and unpredictable social media activity has had devastating real-world effects on markets.
As recently as Monday, Trump’s statement on social media that there was “virtually no inflation” led to a sharp drop in Australian markets down to a two-week low. His announcement via social media that he had fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics also tanked American markets, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropping by 1.2% that day, and the Nasdaq, declining by 2.2%.
Krugman, a winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, said that not only were Trump’s social media posts negatively impacting the economy, but that nearly all of the alarming economic signals could be traced directly back to Trump’s policy agenda.
“We're experiencing, at least, a mild case of stagflation; we don't know how mild it will stay, but for the moment, yeah, we're getting an inflationary impact from the tariffs, and also deportations,” Krugman said.
“People are really focused on tariffs and trade, but let's not forget that we're intimidating, scaring [and] arresting the people who pick a lot of our vegetables, the people who do a lot of our construction work, who do meat packing. All of this adds to this is not a good economy.”
Krugman anticipated that the Federal Reserve would, “for sure,” cut interest rates at its upcoming meeting this month, much to Trump’s wishes, but that slashing rates would not “fix the underlying problem,” and furthermore, would not “deliver the kind of wonderful economy that Trump claims we have.”
As part of a discussion about rumors of Donald Trump’s decline that flooded social media on Labor Day weekend, lawyer and podcaster Dean Obeidallah suggested there should be very real worries about the president's health after speaking with members of his family.
Appearing on MSNBC with host Ali Velshi, the commentator explained the most recent information about Trump’s health has come from Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX), whose medical license has expired and whose judgment has long been questioned.
“The reason that Ronny Jackson wrote the letter and not Trump's doctor? Because Trump's doctor didn't want to put his medical license on the line to lie to the public there,” he told the host. “So you have Ronny Jackson, who's not Trump's doctor, saying these things, that he's fine.”
“Look, Donald Trump is getting worse by the day,” he continued. “We see there's moments he's lucid and there's moments he's not. And as time goes on, the moments of incompetence and confusion will eclipse the moments of lucidity –– that's part of aging.”
“You know, I talked to Mary Trump and her brother as well, who both talked about in that family they have a history of dementia,” he elaborated. “Donald Trump's dad had it, his older sister had it and there's doctors I've spoken to like from Duty to Warn who talked about even Trump's gait has changed, which, while they haven't examined him, is consistent with a form of dementia. So this needs to be examined more.”
“We can't get to the point where Stephen Miller is handing Trump's documents and going, ‘If you sign this, we'll give you a cheeseburger and a Diet Coke,’ and he goes, ‘Okay, I'll sign whatever you want.’ We're the United States of America. We need to know who the president is and that they're functioning properly.”
One arena in which President Donald Trump's administration has been consistently stymied is the federal judiciary. And an attorney currently leading a prominent lawsuit against the White House is now giving new details on why his efforts have borne fruit.
During a Friday interview on MSNBC's "The Weeknight," Norm Eisen — who was U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic during former President Barack Obama's administration — expanded on his simple strategy of filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests compelling the Trump administration to release documents pertaining to convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Eisen previously shed light on his successes in the judiciary with The Atlantic in an article entitled "The Anti-Trump Strategy That's Actually Working." The article reported on "a legal resistance led by a patchwork coalition of lawyers, public-interest groups, Democratic state attorneys general, and unions has frustrated Trump’s ambitions."
"Hundreds of attorneys and plaintiffs have stood up to [Trump], feeding a steady assembly line of setbacks and judicial reprimands for a president who has systematically sought to break down limits on his own power," the report read. "Of the 384 cases filed through August 28 against the Trump administration, 130 have led to orders blocking at least part of the president’s efforts, and 148 cases await a ruling, according to a review by Just Security. Dozens of those rulings are the final word, with no appeal by the government, and others have been stayed on appeal, including by the Supreme Court."
"The tenacity and the ability to sort of go at these things really is coming into focus," MSNBC host Michael Steele said of Eisen's efforts. "... The Trump-Epstein story is the story of the Trump administration's corruption benefiting his rich and powerful cronies at the expense of vulnerable people. You explained it that way. That's the nub of this, and it's now coming home to roost, if you will."
"This is one — as I explained to The Atlantic — that has really broken through. And it's not just because it's salacious," Eisen responded. "What I think the American people are getting is a theme of the Trump administration too close to the rich and powerful, and as a result, who gets hurt? The most vulnerable people in our society."
The Atlantic reported that while FOIA requests are "normally a weak tool for unlocking investigative records gathered for criminal investigations," Eisen saw an opening based on an argument Attorney General Pam Bondi's Department of Justice made in a legal filing. He believed that because the DOJ claimed that extraordinary public interest in the Epstein controversy necessitated the release of grand jury transcripts, Eisen used that same rationale to force the administration's hand through the FOIA process.
"We've done 11 FOIAs. We're in court litigating. We're keeping the pressure on ... how did [Epstein accomplice] Ghislaine Maxwell get moved from a prison where she deserved for her involvement in these terrible crimes against young women, to a country club prison? We're going to get that information out there."
