-The protests sweeping the country
have rocked Donald Trump's presidency
and galvanized public opinion in favor of a fundamental
rethinking of how policing works in this country.
For more on this, it's time for "A Closer Look."
♪♪
As we've said before, there is probably no worse person
on the face of the earth to occupy the presidency
in this moment of national crisis than Donald Trump.
We're in the middle of a pandemic with a president
who doesn't understand or care to understand science.
We're having an intense national discussion on systemic racism,
and we elected a virulent racist and serial golfer.
He's less ready to meet the moment
than the dads on "Teen Mom."
Those guys are real duds.
He's a soulless business potato whose brain has been zapped
by decades of right-wing cable news
and the asbestos in his buildings.
"Hold on one second, I'm gonna take a bump of this wall candy."
[ Sniffs ]
Trump has always been historically unpopular.
But now, amid nationwide protests
against racist police brutality,
a deadly pandemic that he utterly failed to contain,
and massive unemployment, more Americans are coming around
to the idea that maybe, just maybe, electing a racist,
Diet Coke-stained bean bag chair wasn't the best idea.
Trump has sagged
considerably in polls over the last few weeks.
To put it in photos, he was here.
And now he's here.
Several polls have his approval rating dipping below 40,
and tied with Joe Biden in some very unlikely places.
-The new CNN national poll shows Biden with a 14-point lead
over President Trump.
Our poll also shows an overwhelming majority
of Americans support the peaceful protests
and disapprove
of the president's response to the unrest.
-The president's approval rating slipped
seven points in the last month, according to a new CNN poll.
And 63% of adults disapprove
of how he's handled race relations in the country.
65% say his response to the protest
has done more harm than good.
-The polls suggest Donald Trump would be absolutely crushed
by Joseph Biden if the election were held today.
Get this. In just the past week, polls have come out
showing Biden up by 15 points in Michigan, up 9 in Wisconsin,
up 4 in Arizona, up 2 in Ohio, tied in Iowa, tied in Texas.
-And when a Democrat is ahead in the polls against Donald Trump,
it's all over, baby!
And, who knows, Texas is historically red,
but maybe Biden has a chance there.
Sure, Skateboard Jones didn't have
the best presidential campaign,
but he did come within two and a half percentage points
of beating this were-badger.
The "Washington Post" poll also found
that much of the opposition to Trump is vehement,
as 47% of Americans say they strongly disapprove
of the way the president has responded to protests.
Wow, it's bad enough when the majority disapprove of you,
but to have nearly half say they strongly disapprove of you
must be depressing.
It's one thing if you pass a note to a classmate that says,
"Do you like me?", and they check "No."
It's another if they write in,
"I'd rather eat a burrito filled with dog turds."
The polling is so bad for Trump -- and this is true --
his campaign is running ads on TV in Washington, D.C.
just so Trump will see those ads
and feel better about himself.
"With their boss growing increasingly agitated
with the state of his re-election campaign,
and with the effort of Republican critics
to undermine it,
President Trump's team hatched a plan.
They'd run a series of hard-hitting ads
and place them on networks that they knew the president
and Congressional Republicans would watch.
And so, over the past month, the Trump campaign
has spent slightly more than $400,000
on cable news ads in the Washington, D.C. area,
buying time largely on Fox News
but with some smaller buys on CNN and MSNBC as well."
They spent nearly half a million dollars on ads in a city
they know they won't win just so the president will see them
and feel better about himself.
I mean, I guess -- I guess I get it.
Sometimes I leave the Weather Channel on for my dog
so she doesn't get nervous and chew up the sofa.
Just not sure if I'd do it
if it cost half a million dollars.
Seriously, at this point, I'd say they should just
sit him down in front of "Sesame Street,"
but even Big Bird would take one look at him and say,
"Hey, kid, maybe spelling's not for you.
You want to try and find a stick while the rest of us talk?
Yeah, go find a stick. We're going to go do vowels.
You go find a stick."
So, Trump has seen his political standing erode considerably.
And it's especially striking to contrast Trump's numbers
with the overwhelming public approval of the protests
spurred by the horrific murder of George Floyd
at the hands of police.
Majorities of Americans are finally coming around
to the reality that acts of police violence
against black people
aren't just isolated incidents from a few bad apples.
They're part of a fundamentally corrupt system
based on a history of racism and exploitation.
And that is a massive shift in public opinion,
galvanized by the nationwide protests.
And not only is public opinion changing,
but so are the responses from lawmakers.
In New York, for example, activists have sought for years
to repeal a highly-restrictive policy secrecy law
known as 50-A,
which shields police brutality records from public view.
But yesterday, thanks to the protests,
New York lawmakers repealed it.
"The law, known as 50-A, exceeds virtually all in America
in the way it blocks public requests
for more information on problematic officers.
The controversial statute technically keeps
the 'personnel records' of police officers,
firefighters, and corrections officers confidential
and not subject to inspection or review."
I feel like they just threw firefighters in there
to make it look better.
"Dave, I hear you squirted your water
next to the fire instead of onto it.
That's going in your file, Dave."
This proves once again that direct,
mass action in the streets gets results.
The demonstrations are working.
Lawmakers are responding to the pressure.
Even Republicans in Congress
are reportedly considering a police reform bill.
It's a sign of just how far the politics have shifted
that they're even talking about it at all.
Senate Republicans spend most of their time
rushing through unqualified right-wing judges,
conducting absurd investigations of Democrats,
and coming up with dumber and dumber excuses
for why they're not commenting
on the new terrible thing Trump has said.
"Oh, yeah, no, I'm sorry, I didn't see it.
My wife, uh -- forgot to pay our Twitter bill?
Is that a thing?"
So, the politics of this issue have shifted massively,
thanks to protesters and organizers
in the streets, doing the work.
People across the country have also been shocked
and appalled by the countless videos of police violence
against peaceful protesters that have circulated online.
And there's a point at which you have to ask yourself,
"Can this even be reformed?"
One bad flight and you might be, like,
"Maybe we can make air travel better."
But if every flight you take ends up in the Hudson River,
you might think "It's time to de-fund Spirit Airlines."
We've seen police officers armed like they're going to war,
showing up in riot gear, beating protesters,
shoving them to the ground, hitting them with batons,
trapping them on bridges,
lobbing flash bangs and pepper balls
and raining down tear gas
like they just turned on the fog machine
at a 12-year-old's roller rink party.
"Hey, guys, grab your skates and get on the floor!
It's Adam's bar mitzvah!"
Bam-bam-ba-bam-ba!
I think that was maybe a mistake to try to make that noise.
You know, if we were in the studio,
that would be a sound effect.
But there you go. That's how it went.
People are increasingly asking themselves,
"Why are our tax dollars paying
for these egregious abuses of power?"
Which is why you're increasingly hearing a call from activists
to dismantle police departments and de-fund the police,
a refrain that has conservatives,
and many Democrats, freaking out.
-The president tweeted just a short time ago, quote,
"Law and order, not de-fund and abolish the police.
The Radical Left Democrats have gone crazy!"
-Dangerous offspring of this movement is --
are you ready for this?
De-fund the police.
-This is a dangerous idea, and it's an insane idea.
-Funding of police is a local matter, as you know.
From the standpoint of our legislation,
we're not going to that place.
-I don't support de-funding the police.
-In the future, the left envisions the only people
who will have guns are people on their team.
And that's exactly what de-fund the police really means.
It means a woke militia policing our cities
enforcing Democratic Party orthodoxy.
-Imagine what it's all going to look like with no police at all.
De-fund the police? You have no police department.
What are you going to do to protect yourself
and your families? -I don't know, Sean.
I just assumed you'd use your sick MMA moves.
You guys know Jean-Claude Van Ham.
Usually, MMA dudes look like menacing fighting machines.
Hannity looks like an out-of-shape dad
trying to impress his stepson.
"Tyler, come on out to the garage,
I'm about to do a roundhouse kick!
Oh! My groin, Tyler.
Buh!
Ooh, pulled it off the bone.
Get me an ice pack, or just call the hospital."
Also, Tucker, you think the left wants to replace
the police with a "woke militia"?
In your warped mind, what do you even imagine
this "woke militia" would look like?
Antifa skate teens patrolling the streets
in their "Hamilton" t-shirts,
forgiving everyone's student loans
and forcing them to use their free government healthcare?
"I'm sorry, sir, I have no choice but to detain you
and bring you to the hospital to get your rash
checked out, free of charge."
And then, jump on the back of my board.
And then there's Trump, who's clearly grasping
for just anything to revive his sinking poll numbers,
and who seems to be road-testing
a bunch of different attack lines all at once,
mainly by changing one word and repeating himself.
-We won't be de-funding our police.
We won't be dismantling our police.
We won't be disbanding our police.
We won't be ending our police force.
-Ooh, someone got a thesaurus!
I guess Trump's had a lot of free time in that bunker.
"Mr. President, what are you doing down there?"
[ As Trump ] "I am...
defecating...
my dungarees."
And by the way, if you're a Democratic politician
who finds the phrase "de-fund the police"
somehow politically inconvenient,
because it wasn't focus-grouped into oblivion first
to ensure that it's as anodyne and shaved-down
as possible, too bad.
It's not the job of activists
to make you feel comfortable politically.
As Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put it,
"Poll-tested slogans and electoral feasibility
is not the activists' job.
Their job is to organize support
and transform public opinion, which they are doing.
Our job as policymakers is to take the public's mandate,
and find and create pockets
to advance as much progress as possible.
Progress takes a team of different roles.
You don't criticize a pitcher for not being a catcher."
Exactly!
You criticize a pitcher for not pitching well.
Or, in the case of 50 Cent,
you criticize them for agreeing to throw out a first pitch
without ever having thrown, touched, seen, read,
or even heard about baseball before in their entire life.
-And his first pitch was not great.
Just a bit outside.
-We wanted to watch it again.
Just let us watch it again.
Instead of obsessively telling activists and organizers
in the street doing the work
how they can rewrite their slogans
to make you feel more safer politically,
maybe you can just listen to them
when they explain what they're calling for,
as Black Lives Matter co-founder, Patrisse Cullors,
did on this show last week.
-If anybody has time,
they should look up their city budget.
What we start to realize so much in our communities
that are divested from, that have little access
to health care, educational opportunities,
access to jobs and healthy food,
is that our city governments are using our tax dollars
to primarily pay for an economy of punishment
over an economy of care.
And that's what so many Black Lives Matter organizers
and organizers that are allies
of Black Lives Matter are asking for --
is to allow for a reallocation of investment
into some of the most marginalized
and divested-from communities.
-Yes! She's right.
For one thing, if you've ever had the time
to look up your city's budget, it's now.
You're probably still in lockdown.
What else are you going to do?
Watch "The Sopranos" in your sweatpants for the fourth time
while you bake your eighth loaf of banana bread?
"Mmm, it's still -- still too dry."
Second, an economy of punishment
is the right way to think about it.
For marginalized communities and the black community
in particular, we divest from the things
that help create a healthy, safe, equitable society,
like housing and health care, and we put that money
into surveillance and punishment instead.
Just look at the warped priorities
of New York City's budget.
"New York City spends more on policing
than it does on the Departments of Health, Homeless Services,
Housing Preservation and Development,
and Youth and Community Development combined."
Instead of spending all that money on tanks
and riot gear and pepper spray for police
so they can steal people's bikes,
or arrest essential delivery workers,
or slash people's tires, or violently break up barbecues,
maybe we can shift that money to any number of other areas
that actually help build
safe, healthy, equitable communities --
like health care, housing, mental health services,
or, hell, just pay people to stand in Times Square
and tell tourists where the M&Ms Store is
so the rest of us don't have to.
You can't reform something while continuing
to give it billions of dollars to enact violence
on marginalized communities with impunity.
Reforms are a good place to start,
but our conception of what policing is for,
and how much policing we need,
is itself something we need to fundamentally rethink,
which is why we're talking about de-funding the police.
That doesn't mean murder will suddenly become legal
and everyone will have to take ninjutsu classes
from Cobra Hair Dye over here.
It just means taking money away
from a fundamentally oppressive system,
undoing the overpolicing
and oversurveilling of black communities,
and reallocating many of the responsibilities
we currently assign to police to other safer,
more effective alternatives that don't involve someone
showing up to your door with a badge and a gun.
-It's actually about not having no police, right?
But making sure, again, that communities have the resources
so that you can have less of a footprint of police.
Right? So I'll give you an example.
Lots of people have been asking me
for the last couple of days, "Hey,
if we de-fund the police, what happens when you call 911?"
And what I say back is,
"Well, if something's on fire, what number do you call?"
You call 911.
And who shows up? It's the ambulance.
Or, sorry, it's the firetruck.
And if somebody's having a heart attack, you call 911.
And the EMT shows up.
So we already have 911
giving lots of different emergency services.
If the resources that folks needed
so they didn't need to rely on
law enforcement were there, all right?
If 911 had more options, communities would feel safer,
and you wouldn't be introducing a badge and a gun
to situations that law enforcement can never be trained
to manage in the first place and that they have been calling
to get out of the business of for years.
That's what the majority of protesters and activists
I talk to say that they want.
-Exactly.
Even a former police chief in New Orleans and Nashville said,
"90% of all the police department calls
that I've looked at in my life have nothing to do
with a major Uniform Crime."
Let's spend the money we're lavishing on police departments
on other nonviolent alternatives,
like mental health resources or substance abuse resources.
Or, if Tucker Carlson's the one calling,
we can send the woke militia to force-feed him,
I don't know, vegan sausage. Maybe he'll like it.
Maybe that'll be the end of it all.
Look, maybe we can just listen to the activists
and the organizers who are doing the work
instead of spending time nitpicking their slogans.
But if you're looking for synonyms
for de-funding the police,
President Thesaurus has, like, plenty of ideas.
-De-funding our police, dismantling our police,
disbanding our police, ending our police force.
-This has been "A Closer Look."
♪♪
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remember that we're still a city in crisis,
and City Harvest has been stepping up
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