The 2nd time in as many weeks, Donald Trump has backed away from an unpopular policy.

Last week it was Greenland.

This week, the ICE operation in Minneapolis where federal agents killed yet another protester, but it is also true that once he gets an idea in his head, tariffs, for example.

The idea doesn't go away.

So will he come back to the notion of invading the sovereign territory of Denmark, and will he escalate tensions once again in Minneapolis.

We'll discuss this and more next.

This is Washington Week with the Atlantic.

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Thank you Once again from the David M. Rubenstein studio at WETA in Washington, editor in chief of The Atlantic and Moderator, Jeffrey Goldberg.

Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

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.

What happened in that church with Don Lemon?

Can we figure that out Well, that is one version of direct action that the very Minneapolis activist community decided to go into a church and criticize a person who was involved in that church, who was a member of the ICE operation and Don Lemon and a couple of other people are going in there filming and broadcasting what was happening, and yes, you could say that going into a church might be seen as, you know, a little bit over the top or maybe uncouth for some people, but they wanted to show that they were going to go to do things that were different because of the way that this operation with 3000 people going into a city, taking kids away from preschools separating families This is something that's really disrupted their community and so they wanted to do something different.

Obviously, Don Lemon ended up getting arrested for the act of journalism, and that is something that we're watching.

It does strike me that invading a church during a service is not necessarily a good way to reach the middle of the country.

It also strikes me that Don Lemon was there recording as a journalist playing a role as a journalist, Steve, is this a, is this a sign of things to come, especially when it's come just a couple of weeks after a Washington Post reporter's house was raided, and her devices seized.

Yes, I mean, I think certainly the president, I mean he's made no mistake or no secret about the fact that he wants to intimidate journals.

He's done it whether he's, you know, sued um big media organizations, whether he's called out journalists specifically whether they've raised the prospect of going after journalists for what they called hate speech.

He made that specific argument about Jonathan Carl from ABC News.

I mean, this is what the president does.

He did in his first term.

He called journalists the enemy of the American people.

and he promised throughout his campaign that he would get retribution.

I think that's what we're seeing.

I don't think he's he's sort of guileless about it.

It's not really like he's dressing it up much.

He said he wanted to get done lemon.

Two federal judges said there's not enough evidence, we're not going to do this.

Apparently some of the prosecutors who were were to have been involved, didn't want to be involved, and they went and got Donald Lemon anyway on basically manufactured charges.

I want to make note of two extraordinary statements, extraordinary by any other by the standards of any other previous administration.

The first was a post from Pam Bondi, the Attorney General who wrote at my direction, and I think those are the three words that I focused on at my direction early this morning, Federal agents arrested Don Lemon in the name of several other people, including Georgia Ford, who's also a journalist in connection with the coordinated attack on City's Church in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

The second, uh, the second tweet was from the White House account, which is a photo of Don Lemon, uh, been arrested, and it's when life gives you lemons.

And was there, so making a kind of a snarky joke about the arrest, but the Pam Bondi, that's, that's really something.

I mean, that, that, that seems highly unusual, Susan.

I would say there's no other example than probably any of us can think of as something like this.

The Attorney General of the United States obviously does not normally concern herself or himself with a matter like this, and it's really remarkable because although it's true that Donald Trump has gone after the press.

He's accused us of being enemies of the people.

He has, you know, tried to restrict White House access.

He has filed lawsuits against the New York Times, CBS ABC, other large news organizations.

This is the first time he's ordered the arrest of a journalist.

So I do think a line has been crossed here, and I looked at the complaint when it was unsealed today.

And one thing really leapt out at me right there on page 11, 1 of the things that they're accusing Don Lemon of doing is peppering the pastor with questions.

That is called doing journalism.

They have explicitly criminalized the act of journalism in their legal filing here, and you know, I think it's the kind of thing that we're inured to these events, and then this goes back to our Minnesota conversation.

Donald Trump has a playbook.

He's in, you know, political hot water.

What does he do?

He distracts He gives disinformation, he delays, he denies, but distraction, and this is what Pamboti was doing, I think, also, yes, she was trying to ingratiate herself with Donald Trump by including that at my direction phrase, you know, it's going to cause problems, and in this case I don't think is going anywhere anyway.

It's hard to imagine that a judge is going to that I mean there was already questions about the magistrate obviously didn't want to go forward earlier, but no, that's an issue, you know, I asked you totally as a former White House bureau chief.

Zolan, you just spent 4 hours with the president.

There's a difference between the president and his people, though the president will also loves the media.

He can't live without the press.

The some of the other people around them, maybe Pam Bondi, certainly Stephen Miller, seemed to be not liking the press at all, but am I, am I onto something there or is that just, am I just imagining that, that, that he has a kind of, he understands the symbiosis.

It makes me think of that the time where the Pentagon first issued restrictions against Defense Department reporters before they price them all out, and right, and then the president was asked about it and he almost seemed surprised about and had a comment of, well, wait, no, no, we, we want this coverage.

Of course they did go with those restrictions, right?

But you do have a sort of two pronged thing where the president loves being in front of TV cameras.

He loves being on the radio and, you know, you have that sort of relationship with the press, but at the same time this is not an administration that embraces dissent all that well, right?

You have seen them mobilize the federal government to go after political opponents to oust administration officials that are not loyal to the present as well, and the press, when you have when the job is at times to be confrontational and also to hold the power to account.

That doesn't align with the previous actions that you've seen from this administration in the past year.

You worried about this going forward to the terms and beyond.

It is highly concerning, and we'll have to watch and see where this case actually goes, but the fact that they're willing to take this step is in part a president that finds himself against the ropes, especially in Minneapolis.

He sees these protesters standing up to him making his poll numbers go down and things going out of control and he wants to exert some level of control and so doing something that's unorthodox, arresting a journalist lets him and his administration feel like they're in some level of control on an issue where they've lost a lot of the control and so that is one way they're trying to crush dissent, trying to show that they can have the power in this power struggle between the residents of Minneapolis and the administration, and they're flailing a little bit and doing things that other presidents haven't done, so I'm a little concerned that's something they'll continue to do.

Let me ask you a related question, semi-related Minneapolis question.

We're hearing a lot of abolish ICE now, and it's coming into the more closer to the center of the Democratic Party politics.

You were obviously covering George Floyd 5 years ago with defund the police and abolished the police, all that sort of thing turned out to be not such a great strategy for the Democratic Party.

Are you are you sensing any kind of qualms in the mainstream Democratic Party that we can't let this go too far, that actually most Americans want immigration enforcement.

Yes, the specter of the George Floyd protests and the folks that were trying to push the party to the left and calling for defund the police because they felt all this momentum from those protests, and we saw the backlash.

We saw how that did not work out electorally and so that is sort of over and above what we're seeing with these protests, specifically when it comes to the policy implications of them.

I don't see very many Democrats saying that abolish ICSE is where they want to go, but they do want to rein in this, this agency, and they do realize that that public support for Donald Trump's immigration policies has gone through the floor because of these operations in Minneapolis, and so they do want some some changes and some uh some reforms to the operation, even if they're not calling and yet the base is highly activated and it wants to double down right now.

That's the problem Trump.

Yes, but also the train has left the station on abolished ice, right?

Remember there was a bill passed last year that made ice on the highest funded federal law enforcement agencies, more funding than some militaries in the world, right?

So this conversation around restraining ICE at that point.

That conversation is almost that that's passed at that point.

In terms of the politics of immigration here.

I don't know if what's happening in Minneapolis is even in the world of a conversation of the politics of immigration.

You've had two American citizens been shot, right?

Uh, what's factoring into the change in poll numbers here is I don't know if Americans are viewing what's happening in Minneapolis in the same way as the president talking about the border, right?

or talking about mass deportations.

I think this is a really important point because it's true that Trump's policies are now very unpopular, but if you actually look at his approval numbers, there's new polls out this week, for example, Fox News poll, and it's true that Donald Trump is wildly unpopular, but guess what?

He is actually exactly as wildly unpopular today as he was in December before the killing of Renee Goode and before the killing of Alex Pretty, and you know, I think that's also true, by the way, largely on the immigration front.

And you know, I feel like we've, we've been through so many iterations of Donald Trump has done something so unacceptable, and this is it, and it's an inflection point.

How many times have you heard that this week and while it's, it's shocking to the conscience and I also think it's very affirming to many people who don't like what the president's doing to see how brave the people in Minnesota are, that the truth is that Donald Trump has this confidence that he can weather this storm with his damage control playbook because this is the guy who was re-elected after January 6th, and on Janu ary 7th, by the way, 2021, Donald Trump, he said what he had to say.

He went out there, he said that, you know, these rioters had profaned our great capital that they should be prosecuted, the same people that he would go on to pardon, and I just, I think it's really, it's cautionary so that was a day of love people's views of Donald Trump are people's views.

He's at the low end of where he is, but he's still where he's been.

Let me ask you a question, not to make everything about polls and electoral politics this is bigger than that, but there's a not unreasonable chance that Donald Trump may order another strike or a series of strikes on Iran next week.

would that change the subject at least?

Would that be a motivation for him?

I mean, look, certainly if it were to happen, people will believe that to be the case regardless, and I think that's that's the problem.

I mean, we're talking on Friday, millions of files in the Epstein case were released today.

Many people immediately made the connection of this as a distraction, you know, Donald Trump is the only person for whom a news scandal distracts from an old scandal.

Trump has certainly been escalating his rhetoric and his pressure on Iran over the last couple of weeks.

He has been threatening it.

He has moved military assets back from the Western Hemisphere, from the Caribbean back all the way to the Middle East.

He has publicly issued threats to the Iranians, you know, maybe truly of me to point out that he's also talking once again about getting rid of the Iranian nuclear program that he claimed had been obliterated by his previous strike.

So you know, it's not clear to me Trump is prepared to go there or even what the rationale for it is, but I definitely would not exclude it in the next few days, Jeff, right.

Steve, Tulsi Gabbard.

what's going on there in Georgia?

You want me to answer that definitively, as if I know because I can't.

Uh, nobody knows.

No, no, I want you to just play Steve Hayes on television, OK, I'll do my best.

In some, a troubling actually I think it's in some ways it's related to the Pambani point I made earlier.

Tulsi Gabbard was on the outs.

She was somebody who was not involved in much of the discussion about Venezuela.

She's nobody really has a good sense of what she's doing all day every day as director of National Intelligence, and it has been widely reported that Donald Trump was down on her, and there's nothing you can do if you are in Trump's orbit that will get you back in his good graces sooner and faster than going and supporting his crazy arguments about the elect 2020 election having been stolen.

So I don't, she's down there at a time when they're seizing ballots when they're raising questions yet again about Fulton County.

There was, there were reports back in December that got sort of Maga world very excited about new developments there that really weren't new developments, and it's unclear if this is sort of a follow on to that because those were entirely domestic.

This was not about Italian spy satellites back then, but today, as you pointed out, he's tweeting about that.

Sidney Powell, who was, you know, the the the long disgraced conspiracy theorist who Trump's own people tried to fight to keep her out of the the Oval Office in 2020 is back, appearing in a picture with his weaponizations tar.

So, uh, stuff's about to get crazier than it is.

You agree?

It's going to get crazier, uh, based off of this pace and trend, I, I mean, it's uh it certainly seems that way.

I mean, also, this is prompting concern among election security officials for the forthcoming election as well, the 2026 midterm.

Yes, yes, that's right.

So the concerns are well, I mean, just you have a federal government that's responsible for election security and maintaining the sanctity of these elections, and then you have a president that obviously has been mobilizing his government towards the grievances of the previous election, right?

Do you think this is the beginning of a campaign to throw so much smoke, make so much smoke that you can't see the truth.

One quick point, when Donald Trump was asked about this, what she was doing, what's going on in Fulton County.

Presumably this is all backward looking, relitigating 2020 and and he answered with a forward look, she's keeping our elections safe.

They're after voter rolls.

Susan, let me ask you to be our last question.

I'm, I'm sorry to say because there's well, I guess we'll spend the weekend reading the Epstein Files and learning about Italian satellite technology, but let me stay on on on on this.

I don't want to sound alarmist, but when the head of your foreign intelligence operation.

The biggest foreign intelligence gathering operation in the world is positioning yourself domestically.

I think that's unprecedented.

I know we're not supposed to use the, use the word unprecedented because it's so overused, but this strikes me as one of the most dramatic things I've seen since Trump came back to office.

Absolutely, and I appreciate that you're focusing on it because we're in this, you know, sort of smoke grenades everywhere we turn today.

We haven't even talked about the $10 billion lawsuit Donald Trump filed against his own Treasury Department for leaking his taxes.

We haven't talked about his new Fed chair.

I mean, we're literally in the smoke bomb phase of this situation.

I think you're right, Jeff.

It's another line that has been not only gone over, but obliterated today and it's going to come back.

We're not gonna, we're not done talking about it.

Well, we'll talk next week about the Fed and Epstein and Venezuela.

Remember Venezuela?

Yes, but we're going to have to leave it there for now.

I want to thank our guests for joining me, and thank you at home for watching us.

For more on the president's Iran options, please visit theatlantic.com.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg.

Good night from Washington.

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