Speaker 1: I want to also point out something else that was really a key bit of news from Donald Trump this morning, which is going down to North Carolina, a place where they have been trying to get disaster relief over the past few months. FEMA has been down there. And what Donald Trump said is that he wants to now get rid of that federal agency. I want to play what he said

Speaker 2: and then talk to you on the other side, Jeff. We're looking at the whole concept of FEMA. I like, frankly, the concept when North Carolina gets hit, the governor takes care of it. When Florida gets hit, the governor takes care of it, meaning the state takes care of it. To have a group of people come in from an area that don't even know where they're going in order to solve immediately a problem is something that never worked for me. I'd like to see the states take care of disasters.

Speaker 3: Jeff. Well, look, the states taking care of a disaster is that maybe one thing, but states obviously cannot afford to take care of them themselves. But Dana, what this is, the bigger picture here is just one more example of in the Trump administration, the dismantling of government agencies. I mean, this has long been a discussion by many conservatives. It was, I mean, the very pages of Project 2025 sort of dismantling and shrinking of FEMA and other agencies. So this is very much a real conversation that many would like to have. The question is, what would that actually do in a practical matter? I would be curious to know what Republican governors from years gone by, Jeb Bush, for example, would sort of a dismantling of FEMA, what would that have done for all those Florida hurricanes or Governor DeSantis? There's no question that FEMA has its critics on both sides of the aisle. Democrats here in North Carolina have been critical of FEMA in terms of the distribution of housing credits and other things. But as you can see, this is just one small slice of the rebuilding and recovering that is yet to happen here. And that, of course, takes time. We're more than three months since Hurricane Helene, the disaster that the president is going to see later on in California, still smoldering so raw here. But the idea of having this discussion of dismantling a government agency in the middle of a crisis, that's an open question that Congress, of course, would also play a role in. But he's very serious about doing it. It's part of his broader remaking the whole idea of the federal government. Dana? It sure is. Jeff, thank you so

Speaker 1: much for that terrific reporting. Here at the table are other amazing reporters, CNN's Jamie Gengel, Jackie Kucinich of the Boston Globe, and Esthead Herndon of the New York Times. Where do we start? I feel like that could be put on a pillow for the Trump years. Let's just start where Jeff left off, which is getting rid of FEMA. And as he was talking, I was remembering in May, I believe, going with the then FEMA director, Deanne Criswell, Joe Biden's FEMA director, to Oklahoma, about one of the reddest states in America. And she was greeted by the Republican governor of Oklahoma, the Republican senator, James Langford, other Republican local officials who were so grateful for her coming because of the massive tornadoes that had just hit Oklahoma. They weren't saying, why are you here? We want to do it ourselves. They were saying, thank goodness you're here. Look, if a state could handle a

Speaker 4: catastrophe, then you might not need FEMA. But that is not in the nature of a catastrophe. Another image we remember, when Barack Obama came to New Jersey and Chris Christie came out on the tarmac to hug him, to thank him for help. FEMA may not be perfect, but dealing with a catastrophe is an enormous challenge. And these states, you know, Jeff Zeleny mentioned Jeb Bush, where there are hurricanes and they deal with it. They need this kind of help. There's something else that you mentioned earlier about strings attached and things being politicized. If you're a red state, Donald Trump might be willing to give you some money, right? If you're a blue state, if you're Puerto Rico, how are you feeling about

Speaker 1: this? It's, yeah. Well, on that note, he's in a red state. I mean, it's generally purple-ish. He's there with the Democratic governor, but they voted for Donald Trump in North Carolina. I did not hear one sort of string that he said must be attached for North Carolina to get any

Speaker 5: federal aid, whether it comes through FEMA or not. This is a throwback to what we saw in the first Trump administration, where blue states were treated one way during a disaster and red states were treated another way during a disaster. There's a story that was in Politico about how, and when Trump initially refused to give funds in Orange County, when there was a fire there, I think it was 2017 or 2018, and one of his staff had to go through and say, there are a lot of Trump voters here. A lot of people voted for you in this area, and the aid was released. So this is, I think we're going to see more of this, but I agree with you. I would wonder what Ron DeSantis would say about FEMA being eliminated or any of those plain state governors who have to

Speaker 6: deal with tornadoes every year. I mean, it's stunning in the press conference, he explicitly asked what his numbers are in the state. He talked about, oh, I wanted a bigger percentage in Tennessee versus North Carolina. It's very frontally part of his decision-making when he thinks about these efforts, and I think that's an important point. Like, that disaster relief has been seen as outside of that kind of partisanship mold. So people took pride in that, and obviously Donald Trump is upending that. I was in Western North Carolina right before the election, and I remember how much Trump's misinformation on this point had taken root. You heard people all across that portion of the state, which is really Republican and rural, saying things like the Democratic governor is not coming, he's purposely leaving us out. I actually talked to one guy who was saying, oh, I thought that until I actually got my TV back, and I realized the governor had showed up, right? But it still is. That narrative had become so ingrained in that place, and that's part of Trump's power of pulpit. He puts those messages out there. The folks who believe him take root. Conservative media really blows them up, and he uses it kind of as a negotiation tactic. Like, will we see FEMA completely eliminated? I don't know, but he certainly wants you to think that so we can think about some of the changes and disruptions that he wants to bring.

Speaker 1: And yeah, I don't think that any of us should say, well, he doesn't really mean it. I mean, we're four or five days in, and a lot of the things that even people who voted for Donald Trump said, he doesn't really mean it, he meant. He meant it.

Speaker 4: No question. Remember when we talked about do you take him literally or seriously? I think what we've seen in this first week is you better believe both. I mean, there has just been a firehose of things that he said he would do, some of which his own top people said he wouldn't do, such as pardons for violent offenders. But we've seen it across the board. We've seen agencies, this flood of executive orders. He is doing what he said.

Speaker 1: And we're going to get to a lot more of that. I do want to turn back to what the president has said again in the last hour, hour and a half. Daniel Dale is with me to talk about some of the claims that he made. And Daniel, as I go to you, I just want you to know that I was, as we were coming on the air, getting a text from a former senior FEMA official just saying, what about the people, the people in North Carolina, the people in LA, but in particular, the people in North Carolina who are hearing the president come have already gotten the disinformation, misinformation in their sort of echo chambers from their neighbors who haven't applied for aid that maybe they are eligible for that could really help them because they don't have the correct facts. Help us with that. The lies impact people's lives. They really do. So

Speaker 7: again, people are entitled to criticize FEMA's response to Helene, the overall Biden administration's response. But the fact is that Trump has made numerous claims about FEMA and that federal response that are just not true. So, for example, he said in early January that FEMA is out of money, one of those lies that impacts people. It is not out of money. FEMA's disaster relief fund had $27 billion in it as of two weeks ago. He said repeatedly that FEMA had no money for North Carolina because it diverted all of the funding to illegal immigrants. That did not happen. What actually happened was that Congress gave FEMA tens of billions for disaster relief and a much smaller pot of money, a separate pot of money, about $650 million for a program to help communities around the country shelter migrants. Two separate programs Congress funded separately. There wasn't like some sort of improper diversion. The president has said over and over that North Carolina residents who lost their homes only got $750 in aid while foreign countries got billions. In fact, that $750 was merely initial emergency assistance for immediate pressing needs of food, water, baby formula. Those people are also eligible for tens of thousands in additional assistance, including, for example, up to $42,500 each for home repairs. And I think the biggest one, Dana, the president has said over and over and over that FEMA just hasn't helped North Carolina at all, has been completely absent. That is not true. You can argue they didn't help fast enough in some communities, that aid has been too slow in being distributed, but they've been there. FEMA has deployed more than 1,700 employees to North Carolina. Former Governor Roy Cooper said it was more than 8,500 federal personnel total FEMA had provided as of inauguration day. More than $316 million in cash grants to North Carolina, and in addition, more than $300 million extra to North Carolina governments for infrastructure repairs, debris cleanup. So again, yes, criticize away, but FEMA has responded in the state.