SOPHIA CAI:
00:00:40
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, absolutely. Look, Trump, he cannot help himself but get involved. He told his cabinet that he wasn't going to get involved, but he's been calling prominent people in New York talking about this race because for him, this race is personal. This is not Cincinnati. It's not San Francisco, even. It's New York. It's the place that he grew up, the place he built his career. So, of course, this feels personal. And, Oriana, what is this about? Is it about trying to give them a job in the administration or try to find some private-sector folks in New York to induce them to, oh, just drop out, and there will be a big, lucrative thing waiting for you on the other side? I mean, we saw the New YorkTimes report was that they are thinking about offering Eric Adams a job, and here's the thing. What is the Trump administration if not the home of unwanted Democrats? We saw that with Tulsi Gabbard. We saw that with RFK Jr. and potentially now with Eric Adams.
MAJOR GARRETT:
00:01:32
Right. And to your point, Sophia, the larger sort of meta interest of the Republican Party is to see Mamdani elected and then run against the socialist slash whatever other negative terminology they want to apply. But for Trump--
SOPHIA CAI:
00:01:49
Mamdani is a repudiation of Trump. So he wants it for personal reasons. Yeah, and I think also the Trump political team feels that there's many other examples that you can take as examples of bad Democrats, right? You've got Pelosi. You've got Newsom. You've got the entire cast.
MAJOR GARRETT:
00:02:07
JB Pritzker. The entire cast of 2028 candidates. Wes Moore he's been running against, the-- There you go. --Democratic governor of Maryland. And you've seen all the memes coming out of the White House. So, for them, it's like take your pick. Now, just for the record, Adams has sort of dismissed this. Curtis Sliwa will put out a statement today, the Republican, saying he's not interested and hasn't talked to anyone. But this still churns, right? Oh, definitely. We still need to see exactly what happens. But it better happen quick. Oh yeah. I mean quickly, but also there's a couple of months till November. Anything can happen then. We have this news happening now. Who's to say that a month from now, it's announced that he's going to be an ambassador? So we have new CBS polling data that I want to show you about the economy. Anthony Salvanto and I talked about this on the program yesterday. You can see the numbers there. Economy good, 38%-- 36%. Boy, I need to fix my eye. What is it, 38%, 30-- ORIANA GONZÁLEZ: 36%.
MAJOR GARRETT:
00:03:08
36%. Thank you, Oriana. You're closer to the monitor. My God, these old aged eyes of mine. The point of that is Trump continues to say everything is roaring and the America is the hottest country on the planet. Not feeling it, according to our poll. So this is what he-- this is what he ran on, right I mean stump speech after stump speech, he talked about the economy and inflation, but now he can't blame it on anyone else. He's eight months into his term, and he sort of has to take ownership of it, but you can tell that it's top of mind for him. He uses the economy and mortgage rates to justify his reshaping of the Federal Reserve. Or attempt to reshape it, for sure. His attempt to reshape it, yep. And so this is absolutely top of mind for him, and he knows that people are going to vote on it next year. And, Oriana, we opened the show necessarily today with RFK Jr. before the Senate Finance Committee. I want to show you a poll, information from our CBS News poll. Today, RFK Jr.'s approval rating, 45%. Disapproval, 55%. That's an indicator that there are some limits to MAHA and the agenda and rhetoric around it. Oh, definitely. We saw so much-- a little bit of a mess, I want to say, happening in HHS this last week with the firing at the CDC and then having top CDC officials leaving, explicitly for saying that the organization was becoming-- the agency was becoming too political. That's a huge problem, especially, again, coming from a president that, during his first administration, helped develop the COVID vaccine, and now we're seeing a complete 180. Oriana Gonzalez, Sophia Cai, thanks so very much, and I do apologize for my aged eye at the monitor. I'm always apologizing.
