--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Friday, May 2nd. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: On today's show, how Democrats are speaking to voters 100 days into Trump's presidency. A rare show of congressional unity and names to know on World Press Freedom Day. But first, to Washington, where President Trump made his first big staffing shakeup of his second term.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He removed one of his top advisors, Mike Waltz, the now former National Security Advisor, and says he plans to nominate Waltz to be U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. instead.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Remember, Waltz added a journalist to a Signal chat in March, where high-level officials, including the vice president, discussed military strikes in Yemen. Signal is not an approved, secure platform for sharing classified government information.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And Waltz took responsibility for adding Jeffrey Goldberg, the top editor of The Atlantic, who published a story revealing what happened.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But Waltz confused many, including Fox News' Laura Ingram, with his explanation of how it happened.
--:-- Shamita Basu: My job is to make sure everything's coordinated. I mean, I don't mean to be pedantic here, but how did the number get into chat?
--:-- Shamita Basu: Have you ever had somebody's contact that shows their name and then you have somebody else's number there?
--:-- Shamita Basu: Oh, I never make those mistakes. Right? You've got somebody else's number on someone else's contact.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So, of course, I didn't see this loser in the group. It looked like someone else.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Trump's decision to reassign Waltz and fire his deputy, Alex Wong, comes after he has defended both Waltz and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was also in the chat.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Trump told NBC News he would not fire people over, quote, witch hunts.
--:-- Shamita Basu: On other occasions, he's blamed the technology.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I don't think he should apologize. I think he's doing his best. It's equipment and technology that's not perfect.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And probably he won't be using it again, at least not in the very near future.
--:-- Shamita Basu: What do you think?
--:-- Shamita Basu: Republicans in the House, meanwhile, have blocked an attempt to launch a congressional probe into the matter.
--:-- Shamita Basu: An internal investigation in the executive branch is ongoing.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer told reporters he thinks Trump is focusing on the wrong person, saying they should be firing Hegseth.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's because reporters at The New York Times learned on the very same day Waltz created the Signal chat with Goldberg, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth created a second chat.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He invited his wife, brother, and lawyer, and he reportedly shared the Yemen attack plans in detail.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Hegseth has since attacked the media, blamed disgruntled former employees, and described the Times reporting as a hit piece.
--:-- Shamita Basu: To be confirmed as U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Waltz would need to go through the Senate confirmation process.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Republicans have the majority, but Democrats will likely press him hard on the Signal incident.
--:-- Shamita Basu: While Trump looks for his replacement as national security advisor, Secretary of State Marco Rubio will fill in the role temporarily.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Holding both positions means Rubio will run both the National Security Council, which coordinates foreign policy, and the State Department, which manages U.S. diplomacy.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The last person to hold both of these powerful positions together was Henry Kissinger.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Let's turn now to the other side of the aisle, the state of the Democratic Party 100 plus days into the Trump administration.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Across multiple polls, the Democratic Party as a whole has lower approval ratings than President Trump, with a recent CNN poll showing Democrats with a favorability score of just 29 percent, the lowest for the party since 1992.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Voters say they're frustrated by the lack of action they see in Congress and moments when Democrats have voted to support Trump's agenda, like when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer voted to fund the government and avoid a shutdown.
--:-- Shamita Basu: At the same time, many Democrats, from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, have been trying to speak directly to voters and galvanize the opposition.
--:-- Shamita Basu: To take stock of the Democratic Party's current strategy, I called up Perry Bacon, a columnist at The Washington Post.
--:-- Perry Bacon: I think there's a fighting versus kind of being more cautious divide still.
--:-- Perry Bacon: I'd put Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer. If you listen to them carefully, they're the Democratic leaders.
--:-- Perry Bacon: What they say is we should not go overboard. We should not oppose too much. We should let Trump sink on his own.
--:-- Perry Bacon: If you look at Schumer, he didn't want to do a government shutdown. In part, he was saying that Trump himself is going to make a lot of mistakes like he did in 2017.
--:-- Perry Bacon: Let's let him fail on his own. That's one strategy.
--:-- Perry Bacon: And then you have a lot of other Democrats who are out there saying we need to oppose him because the midterms are not next week. They're a year and a half from now.
--:-- Perry Bacon: So we need to do stuff we can to oppose him now.
--:-- Perry Bacon: The real divide is over kind of fight versus kind of wait till the midterms.
--:-- Perry Bacon: You wrote a column recently for The Washington Post arguing that Democrats should really be focusing on speaking to and winning over moderates.
--:-- Perry Bacon: What do you see them doing that is effective in that regard?
--:-- Perry Bacon: So what I was getting at was that inevitably when an election, you have to win people who are independents, moderates.
--:-- Perry Bacon: And what I was trying to argue is like you're seeing a lot of different things going on right now.
--:-- Perry Bacon: You have Governor Whitmer, who is focused very much on working with Trump and showing herself to be bipartisan.
--:-- Perry Bacon: You also have people like Raphael Warnock, who's in Georgia, who won a lot of moderates in his reelection, who are being pretty critical of Trump and not being particularly conciliatory with him.
--:-- Perry Bacon: So you have a bunch of different people trying a bunch of different approaches.
--:-- Perry Bacon: I think the main divide is between people who think you have to win over Republican voters by saying, I agree with Trump on some things.
--:-- Perry Bacon: And you have other people who are saying Republican voters don't love Trump either. That's why he's unpopular.
--:-- Perry Bacon: So you need to win a tiny sliver of moderates, independents, some of whom voted for Trump.
--:-- Perry Bacon: But the sort of core Trump base likes Trump and they're not going to vote for a Democrat.
--:-- Perry Bacon: So I think part of the question is like it looks like Trump's got probably 40, 43 percent of people who are permanently with him.
--:-- Perry Bacon: And that's what the approved ratings show.
--:-- Perry Bacon: But you probably have seven or eight percent of people who looks like in the polls who voted for Trump but don't like him now.
--:-- Perry Bacon: And how do you get them to vote for Democrats?
--:-- Perry Bacon: And I guess the Whitmer theory is to emphasize bipartisanship.
--:-- Perry Bacon: I think the Bernie Sanders theory is to emphasize policies that work for the working class.
--:-- Perry Bacon: And even if they're not necessarily bipartisan, I think that's the split is between.
--:-- Perry Bacon: How much do kind of swing voters vote based on how much you like Republicanism versus are they just looking for an appealing message?
--:-- Perry Bacon: And it could come from the left the center or the right on some level.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Yeah, yeah, I was going to ask you to and you kind of laying this out already but like what is the I working in 2025 strategy for Democrats.
--:-- Perry Bacon: I think the 2025 is focused on the tariffs and how many sort of normal federal employees who do normal things they fired.
--:-- Perry Bacon: I think that's something that's resonating.
--:-- Perry Bacon: Elon Musk being in cabinet meeting strikes people as being weird.
--:-- Perry Bacon: The fact that Trump keeps saying Canada should be the 51st state, which is annoying Canadians and Americans, I think.
--:-- Perry Bacon: So in some ways, I think if the midterms were today, the Democrats should just run a bunch of ads finding the seven most outlandish things Trump has done, and that would be a good campaign.
--:-- Perry Bacon: And in fact, we don't have to guess.
--:-- Perry Bacon: The new prime minister of Canada, I don't really know what his policy agenda is.
--:-- Perry Bacon: He didn't talk about it very much.
--:-- Perry Bacon: His adjunct basically is, we are Canadians, we are normal, Trump is crazy.
--:-- Perry Bacon: And his poll numbers shot up and that party won election they were going to lose.
--:-- Perry Bacon: And so in some ways, if you're the Democrats in Congress, you should be thinking, should the Democrats have a good message, a unified message?
--:-- Perry Bacon: But that message probably needs to be less about our plans raising the minimum wage or our plans to change immigration policy or our plans to build manufacturing and just more, unfortunately more negative campaigning against Trump.
--:-- Perry Bacon: We'll probably get it done right now.
--:-- Perry Bacon: I think that's where people are.
--:-- Shamita Basu: When you get to the presidential campaign, you do have to choose is the Buttigieg message better than the Sanders one, better than the AOC one, but I think we're not there yet.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There are visions being debated right now, but I think that conversation is getting shunted in certain way because every day Trump does something extreme.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And so I think in some ways the urgency about what Trump is doing is sort of, to use another word, is trumping the discussion about what the Democrats should do next.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Perry, thank you so much for your time.
--:-- Perry Bacon: Thank you. I appreciate it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It can seem in this highly partisan moment that our lawmakers in Congress can't agree on anything.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But there was a rare moment of unity earlier this week when Congress passed the Take It Down Act, a law designed to stop the online spread of non-consensual sexual imagery known commonly as revenge porn, including deepfakes.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The bill was championed by First Lady Melania Trump, and it passed in a remarkable show of bipartisan support.
--:-- Shamita Basu: 409 votes in favor, just two opposed.
--:-- Shamita Basu: President Trump is expected to sign it into law.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Take It Down Act makes the sharing and posting of these types of images a federal crime and carries punishments including fines and possible prison time.
--:-- Shamita Basu: For victims targeted by deepfake porn creators online, it's being hailed as a big step in the right direction.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So there has been a lot of positive feedback about the law being passed, and that includes that finally we get real concrete relief for victims who for a long time have had nowhere to turn.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That this is a meaningful step forward to closing a very dangerous legal gap.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's Olivia Carville, an investigative reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I spoke with her and her colleague, Margie Murphy, a cybersecurity reporter, on this week's Apple News In Conversation.
--:-- Olivia Carville: Despite strong support for the bill, some think it doesn't go far enough.
--:-- Olivia Carville: So while the act targets the offenders who might be pumping the photos into these apps and it also goes after the websites like Facebook Instagram Snapchat where this content can be shared
--:-- Olivia Carville: What the act doesn't do is go after those who are actually creating the tools to enable deepfake porn to be made.
--:-- Olivia Carville: Carville and Murphy have a new podcast series called Levittown, where they tell the story of how one small town was upended by a deepfake scandal.
--:-- Olivia Carville: During their reporting, they saw in real time just how the advancement of these tools has allowed entire communities to be targeted by creators of deepfakes, and they met remarkable victims who fought back.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If you're listening in the Apple News app, we'll queue up that conversation to play for you next.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Before we let you go, a few other stories we're following.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A federal judge ruled Thursday that President Trump cannot use the Alien Enemies Act to carry out mass deportations.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The 18th century wartime provision allows presidents to quickly deport people from countries that are carrying out an armed, organized invasion of the United States.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Trump used the act to justify sending hundreds of Venezuelan men to a high-security prison in El Salvador, two of which judges have since ruled were wrongly deported.
--:-- Shamita Basu: His administration claims the men belonged to gangs, including the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua.
--:-- Shamita Basu: However, a CBS investigation found 75% had no criminal records.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The judge said the gang's activities in the U.S. do not meet the definition of the Alien Enemies Act, so it cannot be used to detain or remove people from the country.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This decision is the latest rebuke to Trump's aggressive deportations, which have involved little or no due process.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Staying with immigration, a 44-year-old Haitian woman died in a Florida detention center last week, and lawmakers are demanding answers from ICE about how this happened.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Here's Representative Sheila Sherphilis McCormick, a Florida Democrat, speaking from the House floor.
--:-- Sheila Sherphilis McCormick: Marie had been complaining about chest pain for hours.
--:-- Sheila Sherphilis McCormick: They gave her some pills and told her to go lie down.
--:-- Sheila Sherphilis McCormick: Unfortunately, Marie never woke up.
--:-- Sheila Sherphilis McCormick: Her loved ones deserve answers.
--:-- Sheila Sherphilis McCormick: They deserve accountability, like so many immigrant families who have their loved ones missing and who are hurt.
--:-- Shamita Basu: ICE says her cause of death is under investigation, and the agency has denied failing to provide emergency care.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And finally, tomorrow is World Press Freedom Day.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Global media outlets have come together to publish a list of the 10 most urgent cases of journalists who've been imprisoned by governments across the world.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Time magazine has the full list, which includes Jimmy Lai, a journalist being held in solitary confinement in a maximum security prison in Hong Kong.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He's been there since December of 2020, when the Chinese government cracked down on pro-democracy advocacy and journalism.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find that story and all the stories we cover today in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And if you're already listening in the News app right now, stick around.
--:-- Shamita Basu: My full interview about deepfake AI pornography with Olivia Carville and Margie Murphy from Bloomberg is coming up next.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If you're listening in the podcast app, just search for Apple News in Conversation to find it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And we'll be back with the news on Monday.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Thank you.
