We have a lot to talk about tonight.

It's been another semi-hallucinatory week in America.

Just yesterday, the former CNN anchor Don Lemon was arrested for covering a protest inside a church in Minneapolis.

We'll talk about the First Amendment implications of that, and even stranger, you'll never guess who showed up at the Fulton County, Georgia Election Center, where the FBI.

OK, I'll tell you, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence.

Gabbard and the FBI are on the hunt for proof that the 202 0 election was stolen from Trump.

Soon after Gabbard showed up, and by the way, could you imagine any previous administration in which the Director of National Intelligence, or the director of the CIA involved him or herself in domestic law enforcement related to elections.

Donald Trump reposted a claim on his social media platform that Italian military satellites had been used to hack into US voting machines to help Joe Biden.

Completely normal stuff With me to talk about these issues and everything else, Susan Glasser is a staff writer at The New Yorker.

Stephen Hayes is the editor of the Dispatch.

Zelon Kao Youngs is a White House correspondent at The New York Times, and Tolu Olounipa is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the co-author of His Name Is George Floyd.

One man's life and the struggle for racial justice.

Thank you all for being here.

First, everybody take a guess.

How many military satellites does Italy own?

I don't know the answer.

I just just thought maybe somebody.

I, I, I'm still trying to unravel the Italian military satellite component of this, but I feel I can say that in early 2026, I feel it's not the last time we're going to hear about the Italian military satellites that stole the 2020 election.

Sorry, I just had to get in the middle of the night on social media from the president, from the, yes, no, we'll hear about it not just in the middle of the night.

We're going to hear about it in daylight hours too, I think, you know, it's a Rudy Giuliani deal, I'm afraid.

Is that does that does that hark back all the way to Julian?

We'll devote a special show to Italian satellite technology.

Let's go to Minneapolis first.

So Bovino is out.

Homan is in.

Is this a change in tone or a policy change, a brief change in tone, right?

Um the president over the weekend was getting calls from his political allies.

After his top administration officials, uh, put out statements blaming the victim of this shooting, using terms like domestic terrorism, assassin, and he was getting calls from his allies who were saying this this operation does not look good for you.

These images, this is not good for you politically.

That's what moved him to pull back and at least briefly say that he was interested in de-escalation, right?

That was the middle of the week.

Then in the middle of the night last night around 1:26 a.m.

he posts on TrueSocial once again attacked attacking the victim of the shooting, using terms like insurrectionists as well.

This is after the 2nd video of Alex Prey from 11 days prior from the shooting came out.

Um, that's the tone, and that's consistent with President Trump, often issuing contradicting messages at times, pulling back slightly only to realize or think that he was right along and doubled down, right?

when it comes to policy though, we don't have much evidence yet that there's a difference on the ground here besides Tom Homan saying that he's in talks with local officials.

This is what just watch this for one second.

This is what Holman had to say when he was reintroduced as the new leader of this effort.

The president one of the words he said to me, I came up here, he's like you don't wanna see anybody die I don't want to see anybody die Even the people we're looking for.

I don't want to see anybody die So I have to admit I tripped on the even the people we're looking for because in another age, obviously that would count as a somewhat provocative statement because of course the operation is meant to detain, arrest, and deport illegal immigrants with people with criminal records and so on, but put that aside for a second, Tom Holman, who is one of the authors of the family separation Policy is now being positioned as the calm leader uh of this effort.

Steve, do you expect, uh, anything different or do you agree with Zoan that we're just gonna what's the word that we were using before, before we went on air toggle toggling back and forth, toggle back and forth.

Yes, I suspect this is, this is mostly toggling.

Um, you know, we've seen this, these kinds of tactical retreats from Donald Trump before, from the White House before, Greenland, he'll go as far as he can.

Yeah, we saw one last week.

He'll go as far as he can.

He makes the maximalist argument, he makes the maximalist argument in public.

He does this in his private, you know, deals, art of the deal, and then he pulls back and the idea is that he's going to pull back and head in a different direction, but he rarely does.

So I think it's likely that we'll see more of what we've seen before.

I do think the interesting thing is when you, when you think about what we saw over the course of this past week, you have an amoral president who says he's constrained only by his morality.

But there is another constraint, and it is when his allies or Republicans in general raise concerns either privately, directly with the White House, or in this case, several times from several people in public And for Republicans who have mostly remained silent and gone along with the president on whatever it is that he wants, this should be a demonstration that they cannot change.

They can at least get him to slow down for a minute if they can't change course.

Yeah, I mean, I feel like that's the dream that we've all been chasing for the last decade, and in fact, it strikes me that Trump actually has taken the measure of the Republicans on the Hill and found that there are so few of them who are willing to engage in that.

In fact, when a couple of senators called for him to fire Christi No, the Homeland Security Secretary.

He laughed in their faces and called them losers, and you'll notice we've ended the week with her still in her job with Stephen Miller, the real architect of this policy, not only still in his job, but arguably the most important adviser to the president, not just on immigration policy right now.

Not only have they not retracted their statements.

You can go find all of those posts from Stephen Miller still calling a dead person essentially, you know, smearing a dead person, calling him an insurrectionist.

Donald Trump, saying that, and in fact he was actually asked at the, I believe, at the premiere of his wife's documentary RU de-escalating?

No, no, no, I'm not doing that.

There are 3000 agents right now, federal agents in Minneapolis.

That represents something like 8% of the entire force, all deployed to this one city in Minnesota.

It's remarkable.

And Tolu, you know, Minneapolis quite well, covering the George Floyd story for years.

Um, that's much larger, that number is much larger than the entire Minneapolis Police Department.

I want you to talk for a minute about why Minneapolis?

Why is it always Minneapolis?

Well, one of the reasons Minneapolis has stood up to this in what they call an invasion of their city.

It's because they had they've had practice in 2020.

They had to come out to the streets in part because they saw the police killing someone on camera, and they flooded the streets and they started to protest, and those protests, is it a very, very left city?

Is it, is it one of the most left-leaning cities in America?

Not necessarily, but it is a very, a city that has a long tradition of activism, and that tradition was supercharged by what happened in 2020.

They saw what they were doing on the streets go global, go around the country, and people were going into the streets in major capitals in the US and then go international and people following their lead across the world as well.

And so they took that and they took some of the victories of that protest, including the conviction of the police officer who killed George Floyd, and they realized that they could win some victories by doing this kind of direct action.

And so that same network has continued to activate now that there are multiple videos of people being killed by the state in these immigration programs.