Psaki: Trump can't TACO out of Iran
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We have a lot of news to get to tonight, a lot of news. But tonight, I want to start with the fact that Donald Trump announced he will sign an executive order to pay TSA workers during the ongoing shutdown. Of course, this comes six weeks after the shutdown began, which begs the question, one of the questions, I should say, as to why Trump didn't do this in the first place. I think a lot of people have waited in lines for four hours, six hours, whatever it may be, are asking that question. We're going to talk about that with New Jersey Governor Mikey Sherrill, whose state has been hit very hard by that shutdown, both in terms of people waiting at the Newark airport and in many, many different ways.
Oh, and tonight the Treasury announced that Donald Trump is literally going to put his own name on American currency, not making that up. It's literally... what has been reported, a move that is definitely very tacky, but might also be illegal. So I'm going to talk about that with former White House ethics lawyer Norm Eisen later on in this hour. But I'm actually going to start the show really with Trump's war of choice in Iran, of course, because we are now on day 27 of the conflict. And gas prices as of today have increased by a full dollar per gallon in just the last month. I'm sure you all have noticed that. Wall Street just had its worst day since the war began. Iran has categorically rejected Trump's offer to end the war.
And even Republicans are irate with the administration over the lack of answers on Iran in the briefings they've done on the Hill just this week. And amid this ongoing crisis, the president of the United States held the cabinet meeting today where Normally, you would talk about, say, the war you launched four weeks ago and the impacts of it and what every cabinet member and agency should be doing about it to bring it to an end, what the strategy is. Well, that wasn't what he was focused on. He was laser focused on, of course, another very important issue facing the American people, the quality of our pens.
See this pen right here? This pen is an interesting example. It's the same thing. So this pen is very inexpensive. But it writes well. I like it. And you know, you hand pens out, you're signing and you hand them out. Beautiful pen, ball points. But I'm handing out to kids that don't even know what they're, what is this, mommy? It's kids. They're getting a pen for $1,000. They have no idea what it is.
What executive order did Trump announce regarding TSA workers?
And it had another problem. They didn't write well. So I take it out and I sign it and there's no ink. This is what I call the guy. I said, I'd like to use your pen, but I can't have a gray thing with a big S on it. I can't do that with the press. Use your pen, but I like the pen the best, but I can't use your pen. He said, well, I can make it nicer. I said, that's nice. And I could even paint the White House on it, sir, if you like, in gold, almost real gold. And by the way, this was not staged. I just saw the pen sit there. I thought of this as an example.
Okay, I just want to note that we literally had to edit that together because he spoke about the pens for so long. It was more than four minutes. That would have taken up way too much time. But I do love the fact that he discloses there at the end that none of that was staged, as if any of us thought the extended riff on pens was part of his strategically written prepared remarks. I certainly don't think it was. And I promise you, he went on, as I said, about the pens a whole lot longer than that. And when Trump finally did move on, he showed a lot less urgency and a lot less passion about the war he started than he did about America's calligraphy crisis, I guess you could call it.
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Chapters
4 chaptersSpeakers
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