<Type: SHOW>

<Head: THE BEAT with Ari Melber for March 21, 2025, MSNBC>
<Sect: News; Domestic>
<Byline: Ari Melber>
<Guest: Michael Moore, Natasha Weistein>
<High: Trump faces backlash over economic policies as prices
rise, tariffs increase, and voters express frustration with his
unfulfilled campaign promises. Federal judges rebuke DOJ for
defying court orders and mishandling deportations, exposing
errors in identifying immigrants for removal. Elon Musk's
government overhaul sparks chaos, wrongful firings, and
inefficiency, leaving thousands of workers in limbo with
uncertain futures.>
<Spec: Trump; Backlash; Economic Policies; Prices Rise; Tariffs
Increase; Voters; Frustration; Campaign Promises; Federal Judges;
DOJ; Court Orders; Deportations; Errors; Immigrants; Removal;
Elon Musk; Government Overhaul; Chaos; Wrongful Firings;
Inefficiency; Workers; Limbo; Uncertain Futures; Policies;
Administration; Legal Issues; Public Reaction; Employment;
Political Impact; Accountability>

[18:30:00]

MELBER: -- also have these complete credibility issues with the

public. So, we're watching a public that doesn't think either
party is that great. I could show you the numbers today, I could
show you the numbers a couple years back, it's what you said. And
so, the larger grassroots question is who's going to step up and
meet that? So, I appreciate what you said there.

I want to give you more time and I want to show you something on
prices because all the way back to Flint, Michigan, we ignore the
working people at our peril in a country like this, as you've
documented. So, here's the double talk from MAGA on what people
do care about, which is jobs and prices.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MARIA BARTIROMO, FOX BUSINESS ANCHOR: Are you expecting

agricultural products to be more expensive as a result of
tariffs, Secretary?

BROOKE ROLLINS, U.S. SECRETARY OF DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE: When

they voted in November of 2024, they knew that's what they were
voting for. There may be an interim period as we're readjusting
the entire economy, but listen, real change takes disruption.

DONALD TRUMP, U.S. PRESIDENT: I will immediately bring prices

down starting on day one. I went on groceries. It's a very simple
word, groceries. Like almost, you know, who uses the word? I
started using the word, the groceries.

Starting the day I take the oath of office, I will rapidly drive
prices down.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MELBER: Prices aren't down, markets are down, and tariffs are up.
Is this a bait and switch? Go ahead.

MICHAEL MOORE, DIRECTOR AND DOCUMENTARIAN: That was the word,

groceries. OK. Yes, listen. This is the gift of Trump, if I could
put it that way, that he has already started to turn his own
people against him. They're not quite there yet, but when they
start going to the doctor and there's no Medicaid payment, and
they're going to have to pay that doctor for their children and
all of that, just put down the whole list of things that is going
to cost them more and more money.

It's going to be harder and harder to live, and they're going to

understand that he's the one that made this happen. And maybe
he's thinking, well, you know, I'm really good at lying and if
you just say it long enough price of eggs, price of eggs, price
of eggs, price of eggs that's they'll, they'll go with that.

I don't think so, I think the American people are smarter than
that. I know fellow liberals are watching this thing on mic no,
no, no, no, no, no, but yes, yes, yes, yes, and from as you
mentioned Flint, Michigan. Flint, Michigan is the birthplace of
the eight-month pregnant wife of Mahmoud Khalil. She was born and
raised in Flint, Ari. She was a top student at Flint University
of Michigan, Flint Branch. Gave the graduation speech there about
eight years ago. She's now a dentist.

She's Dr. Noor Abdallah from Flint, Michigan, American citizen.

He's a permanent legal resident with a green card. And I'm sorry
to go back to that, but I'm just saying that the people in the
state of Michigan, which Trump won, in the Flint, Michigan, in
the Grand Rapids, in the Pontiacs, all those places, he's not
going to keep this up. They're already onto him. They're already
onto Chainsaw Man.

And I read this thing the other day, the Michigan Chainsaw
Massacre, of how Michigan is already hurting by the things that
he's done. People are wise, they will come along to this, they
will realize this. The Republicans, you know, there's this,
what's his name, Andy Biggs. They're all getting just slammed at
their town halls. He's doing a town hall, he said, now, that only
Republicans can come to it. They're going to vet you and make
sure only Republicans can get in the room.

Andy Biggs, if you don't know, if you're watching this, is one of

the 147 Republicans who, after a violent mob took over the United
States Capitol on January 6th, and it took almost until late in
the evening, near midnight, for the police and the National Guard
to remove them from our Capitol. And then, all the members of
Congress and the Senators came back in, and at two or so in the
morning, now January 7th, 147 Republucans voted to overturn the
2020 election.

They voted to overthrow the vote of the people. I'll just, I'll
exactly quote the New York Times, 147 Republicans who voted to
"overturn election results." And Reuters, Republicans, 147 of
them voted to overturn the election. To me, I'm sorry, I was
raised differently.
That's the work of traitors. If you are voting, and you're voting
just hours after an attempted overthrow of the United States
Capitol, and then you show up and then you vote to say, no, we
reject what United States Capitol, and then you show up and then
you vote to say, no, we reject what the American people have said
and how they voted, treasonous act.

And there were 147 Republicans who did this, including Andy
Biggs, who only wants Republicans at his town hall. The American
people, I know a lot of people who didn't vote, they should have
voted, they'll never stay home again. This is, this what we're
watching, this dismantling of our beloved country? And you think,
are they going to get away with this? Is Musk going to get away
with this?

[18:35:40]

MELBER: Yes. Well, I'll have to fit in the break. But that's,
well that's the question, right? No, and that's, and you have all
those campaign promises and then you have the bait and switch on
the, for everything from the economy to the war plans to the
civil rights to liberty.

I mean, it's it's it's really something and it's unfolding in a

way where people have to learn and absorb it over time and then
decide like you said what they're going to do about it which is
why we wanted to to set aside some time on this Friday to reflect
with you. Michael Moore, thanks for joining us good to see you,
sir.

MOORE: Thank you. Thank you. Missed you. Thank you.

MELBER: Great, we'll talk to you soon. I appreciate it. Michael

Moore, as always, bracing thoughts there. Coming up, a fired
federal worker speaking out on the impact of this Musk agenda.

But next, we end the week with part of the story that started the
week, and boy is it important. I told you the DOJ under Trump is
losing on this deportation case. More bad news for Trump, why it
matters, and what you need to know next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[18:41:11]

MELBER: Travis is losing a lot of court cases and early steps in

the sort of the procedural process, and his DOJ lawyers are now
really taking it on the chin because of the untenable and
sometimes lying arguments they have to make. This is new today, a
judge going at DOJ lawyers for the games they're playing.

This one, about the military's effort to ban transgender troops

because of a Trump order. The judge told those DOJ lawyers, "I'm
not going to abide by government officials saying one thing to
the public and coming in here to the court and telling me
something different. Like I'm an idiot. I'm not an idiot."
The judge questioning how the Pentagon admitted that there was
indeed a transgender troop ban, as you can see here, "They're
disqualified from service without an exemption" a February post
from DOD response there.

The DOJ lawyer though says to the judge the government doesn't
operate by tweet. The judge replied no, no it does. The court is
not going to be gaslit. The Secretary of Defense called it a
transgender ban.

The idea that you can just come in here and pretend or have us
pretend that what's happening is not actually what's happening is
totally unacceptable, and that is stark language for a judge.
That reaction comes amidst this week that I've told you has had a
lot of setbacks for Trump's DOJ that has to defend the
indefensible including the beginning of the week with the
apparent defiance of a court order stopping deportation flights.

Another judge grilled in the DOJ for the defiance of that order
saying, "I will get to the bottom of whether they violated my
order, who ordered this and what the consequences will be." And
today's hearing had another revelation but there were also
apparent mistakes in the deportations. Now, remember a judge
blocks a government action, it must stop, period, sometimes it
could be stopped and later allowed and the action itself might,
under review, work.

So, this is above and beyond the apparent defiance, the

incompetence that has been revealed, which is also why the
government generally has requirements to prove what they're doing
is correct. People have due process to explain who they are,
something I was just discussing with another guest moments ago.
And so, here you have the plaintiff's lawyer saying that several
people were sent back on the planes.

Today, Trump was pressed on these reports about the idea that
there were mistaken deportations.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There are families from some of the people

that were on those flights to El Salvador that claim that they're
not criminals, they're not members of Tren de Aragua, of MS-13.
What can you tell them and what guarantees can you give them that
everyone in those planes were actual criminals, terrorists, as
you said?

TRUMP: Well, I was told that they went through a very strong
vetting process, but we will continue that process. Absolutely.
We don't want to make that kind of a mistake.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MELBER: Again, you have the president sort of overwhelmed by so

much negative information that sometimes he's not in denial mode.
He says, well, we don't want to make that kind of mistake, but
there are indications that immigrants were deported based on
flimsy reasons like misidentifying their tattoos. Some of those
tattoos, it turns out, according to the Guardian, were references
to their children's names or soccer teams.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Upon entry into the United States he was

detained because of his tattoos some of which you can see in
those photos but these are not the tattoos of somebody who is
involved with gangs.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Franco Caravaggio is a 26-year-old barber

who was living with his wife in Dallas. His attorney Martin
Rosenau showed us DHS documents confirming Caravaggio has no
criminal history. In the DHS deportation document, agents
highlight Caravaggio's tattoos but don't explicitly say they are
connected to gang activity.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MELBER: The Trump administration began the week busted by flight

records and other evidence for apparently defying at least one
order on this deportation. They end the week in a matter of a few
days with enterprise and public reporting finding out what the
government is supposed to determine in advance of any such
action. The actual identities of the people that you are seizing
using government power to control and in some cases remove from
the country.

[18:45:30]

If you don't know who they are, you certainly cannot safely
determine who should be here. The next deportation case hearing
is Monday with this administration on defense. We're going to fit
in a break and when we come back, that special guest I told you
about, someone on the front lines of Elon Musk's cuts.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[18:50:24]

MELBER: Elon Musk has claimed above all that he wants efficiency
for the government. So, it is not without some obvious
contradiction that apart from all the other scandals he's facing
right now, these firings already have proven extremely
inefficient.

Consider that the government under Musk's push overplayed its

hand and fired over 20,000 individuals that it didn't have legal
standing to fire, and so now they are inefficiently rehiring them
which raises a question of whether they should have ever been
fired.

Some employees meanwhile returning to offices that are crowded

that are in chaos that have broken or missing equipment. It is
not a picture of efficiency. To continue to do this reporting and
hear from people who are actually experiencing all this, we are
now joined tonight by a new guest, Natasha Weinstein, a USAID
worker fired by Musk who's six months pregnant and is dealing
with uncertainty about her own health insurance, her own
situation amidst past public service and federal judges have been
pushing back on this including a new ruling that said the USAID
firings, specifically, were likely to violate the Constitution.
Welcome.

NATASHA WEINSTEIN, FORMER USAID WORKER: Hi, thank you so much for
having me.

MELBER: Absolutely, tell me about your experience and whether as

mentioned this has seemed to be an efficient process.

WEINSTEIN: Definitely not efficient. There's been so little

communication. I was locked out of my e-mail, but still getting
paid for weeks. Couldn't actually do my job while being told to
do my job. Getting e-mails, you know, 2:00 in the morning on a
Sunday telling me not to show up for work or to show up for work.
I mean, I'm a professional.

I'm more than happy to respect different decisions made by

different administrations, but it's not screaming competence to
me, so it makes it a little bit harder to respect the situation.

MELBER: And what kind of work was was interrupted or handicapped

through this process?

WEINSTEIN: Yes. So, I was a budget officer at the Bureau for

Humanitarian Assistance, so we technically had a waiver telling
us that we could, you know, we should still be making payments
and, you know, getting humanitarian aid, but at the time that I
was there, that was just not happening.

We, at one point, got told to come back to work, like from home,
on our e-mails, but never got access to any of the actual systems
to do our jobs. So, like, I would like to be paid for actually
doing my work, but they were essentially paying me to sit there
and you know, just reload trying to see if I can actually do my
job every day.

So, yes, just really pointless and then I was told through the
grapevine that I was on admin leave and no longer working But
didn't actually receive an e-mail about it then finally received
an email where I was BCC'd with thousands of other people and
told to put my own name on my resignation and send it in, which I
declined to do.

And then, I actually just got my actual termination about a week

and a half that was backdated later. So, I think I was officially
terminated on March 6th, but didn't get a contract telling me I
was terminated until earlier this week when we were supposed to
be reinstated.

MELBER: And one of the themes here has been getting the best or
the right people in government under the premise that some of the
people shouldn't be in government. What do you think this
approach does for recruitment? I mean, you're actually doing this
work and you're around colleagues who do this work and if this is
how it works, how do you recruit great people for future federal
service?

WEISTEIN: You can't. I mean, humanitarian work is a passion. It's

not the highest paying job that a lot of us can get. So, we do it
because we love it, but they've decimated the industry. There's
no trust for the U.S. system to actually pay their bills now. So
who wants to work with us? And when you're recruiting people, I
mean, experience goes a long way. And so, you've just pushed all
these people out.

I would have loved to work for FEMA or some of the other

departments because I really enjoy what I do, but there's no
chance that I or a lot of my colleagues are ever going to apply
for these jobs again because now we just don't trust that there's
any certainty that if you do a good job, you're actually going to
keep your job.

And you know, it already takes a really long time to get hired in
these processes. So, why are you going to get started when things
are just constantly changing? You're going to end up with just a
bunch of 19-year-olds out of college, which might be decent at
their jobs, but with no experience in the field or any of these
government systems.

MELBER: What do you want to say tonight, you're here on live TV,
to Elon Musk about how his project is going? I mean, he thinks,
claims to think, it has these goals and there's interference.
You're actually in it. So, what do you want to say to him?

[18:55:14]

WEISTEIN: Yes. I mean, if it's just in a work side of things, I

would say you're going about this the wrong way. Like, listen to
your staff, learn what they do before you go in. Like you're --
it's like going out and wiping out a hospital and then saying
like, oh, we need some doctors now. Like, no, do it the other
way.

Speak to the doctors, speak to the people who are in this

industry. And I would have told you what was less efficient. I
would have said this could work more smoothly. This doesn't work
the way it should. Like, you know, we weren't a bunch of
criminals working in there. We were a bunch of passionate people
that were held by bureaucracy and just doing our best every day.

So, if they had actually come into the interview, a lot of us

would have been honest and told them how we could fix it and make
the government more efficient. But that's not what happened. They
just wanted to wipe everything out so that they can control it.
So, I mean, that's what I would say in an official capacity.

What I would actually say to him and Trump is, you know, I'm
really, really sorry your parents didn't love you enough for you
to have any empathy. And I just hope that, you know, you can let
this anger go. Go home, hug one of your 18 or 19 children,
whichever one is your favorite, and it's not too late for you to
become a person of substance.
MELBER: We got the professional and the personal psychological as
we're ending the week and you're helping us explore why do hurt
people hurt people, so to speak? I appreciate all of your
answers. Natasha Weinstein, thank you.

WEISTEIN: All right, thank you.

MELBER: We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

END