You never know what's going to happen on Lemon Live at 5 or anytime you tune in to the Don Lemon Show. So that's what makes it exciting because we don't know what's going to happen either, and neither does the president of the United States. His day has been filled — I'm going to say full of or filled with surprises.
And like he opened up his cereal box. Remember when there used to be like prizes in the Cracker Jacks? They still make Cracker Jacks, or there's still prizes in there. And also cereal used to have prizes in them. Do they still do that? I don't know. Maybe they do. I haven't had cereal in such a long time.
Okay, so thank you for joining. Like and thumbs up. Make sure you hit that because it does affect the algorithm. More people become aware of our conversation and our channel. Okay, so thank you for that. Let us know where you're streaming from. Let's get to it because Donald Trump is having a very bad, awful, terrible, shitty day. Like shitty day.
I mean, the kind of day where maybe you just turn — have you had one of those days where you turn the phone off and you're just like, I'm going to go back to bed? But maybe he should turn the phone off, put down the McDonald's, whatever it is, and the Diet Coke. Close the Truth Social for sure, I'll tell you about that. And just take his ass back to bed.
All right. And you know he's fuming. Everybody knows he's fuming. Fuming when his fingers are tapping out post after post after post. Somebody has their mic opened up, by the way. Post after post after post on how much he hates the decisions and what he calls the deep state.
The deep state. The deep state that he himself is the head of. He is the deep state. He is the swamp. And then again, wait till I show you all these unhinged posts on Lie Social that he posted. First, I need to tell you though what the Supreme Court did and that made him lose his freaking mind. They blocked his mail-in ballot plan, leaving him pissed off, as New Yorkers say.
He then calls it a big loss for Republicans. Now, wait a minute. This is a big loss for Republicans. How is that? I thought that this was about protecting elections. I didn't think it was about like what this meant for Republicans. Is it supposed to be we're protecting the integrity of American elections? They're trying to steal the election.
Anyway, he then starts attacking the justices, accusing them of being intimidated by Democrats and the radical left. Okay. Do we have that Todd Blanche soundbite that we talked about? If we have it, find it. Because someone asked the attorney general of the United States, say, 'Hey, is this really smart for the president to be —' I totally forgot about that when I was thinking about this.
Like it's crazy. He's accusing them of being intimidated by the Democrats and the radical left. The radical left and the Democrats. Democrats have no power. Democrats are in the minority. Donald Trump, these are your people. Your people, three of those justices were put on the court by you. Andy, put them up. Look at this. Trump, you put him up there.
You got basically the supermajority and you blaming — he blames the Democrats for everything. This is all Joe Biden's fault. Or maybe it's Barack Obama's fault. Or it could be Kamala Harris's fault. I don't know. Maybe it's Bill Clinton's fault. I know it's the Democrats' fault.
Is this supposed to be — is this American exceptionalism? Is this like the supremacy that people tell us about? Donald Trump's dumb ass. Imagine hiring somebody, giving them one of the most powerful jobs in America, and then screaming, 'Who hired these people?' You did, dummy. You big dummy. You did.
All right, I got to calm down here because you know what? I got to catch my breath and I'm going to let actor Brian Cox — you know Brian Cox from Succession on HBO, right? It is HBO, right? If you know, you know. Then I'll let him sum it up. Here it is.
He's nuts. He's mad. I mean, he's unpleasant. The man just made me feel like I wanted to go and have a shower. Wow. I found him really unpleasant. Just unpleasant aura. But also, but actually at root, he's an abused child. I think his father. Yeah. I think there's something. And he was more resilient than his brother who became an alcoholic. And of course his niece writes a lot about it as well, about that family.
As an actor, I have to think that it's a mitigating situation because nobody is born bad. You know, if you walk into a hospital and you go into the birth room where there's a lot of babies, try and pick out the Adolf Hitler or the Donald Trump, it would be impossible.
Thanks. I needed to catch my breath there. Have a little sip of water. His words, not mine. Thank you, Brian. We need to catch our breath. So, okay. Just to recap, he had a bad start to his day. Bad morning. Maybe the afternoon got a little bit better for Donald Trump. Maybe.
Back to Kash Patel's testimony in the Senate in just a moment. But first, we have some breaking news. A judge in Washington has blocked the Kennedy Center from inscribing President Trump's name on the building unless Congress signs off.
Andy, that was good. Thank you for that. I appreciate it. Okay. Thank you. Nope. Because then a federal judge delivers asking number two. Trump wants his name carved into the Kennedy Center so bad he could taste it. Oh my god. Of course he does. Apparently being president of the United States isn't enough anymore for him. Every building has to look like a Trump casino with all the gold.
The board wanted restored and renovated by President Donald J. Trump. They wanted the grounds renamed President Donald J. Trump Plaza. Good lord. What is next? The Donald J. Trump Lincoln Memorial? The Donald J. Trump Statue of Liberty? Maybe wake up tomorrow and Mount Rushmore has a giant gold Trump sign hanging over Washington's forehead.
I mean, when Democrats take over, they're going to get rid of all that, right? Let's hope they can rename some of the things, maybe the airport in Palm Beach and all that. But the judge essentially says, 'No, you cannot just put your name on the Kennedy Center.' And remember, Kennedy as in John F. Kennedy. He's the dead president, the assassinated president. The building is literally a memorial to. And apparently somebody had to go to federal court to explain this to Donald Trump.
And I almost forgot. I almost forgot about this one because, you know, they said they come in threes, right? On Monday, a federal judge blocked the administration's ability to limit visa stays for foreign students and journalists, effectively ending a pillar of Trump's anti-immigration efforts.
So, Donald Trump scoreboard today before we get to our guest who you're going to love. Supreme Court, nope. Judge, hell no. Mail ballot plan, no, you're blocked. Kennedy Center inscription, hell to the no. And Donald Trump is probably sitting there thinking, 'What the hell do I have to do to get my way around here? I'm the president of the United States.' I think it's really simple, Donald Trump. You have to follow the damn law. And you know what's even more satisfying? The day isn't even over yet. Michael Popok, Legal AF.
Am I lying? This is a shitty day. Talk to me, brother. Thanks for coming on.
It's a shitty day. And you ask me like, why is he going so south so quickly this week? Because his legal positions are and the factual record is worse. His DOJ will argue anything. His solicitor general, John Sauer, his former criminal defense lawyer, will argue anything in order to make their boss happy even if it has no legal merit whatsoever. And now the rubber is meeting the road, especially around voting. And of course, the Kennedy Center. You want to lead off with voting?
It's a Gurn. This is your show for the moment, sir. You have the floor.
I just could, as I was sitting here reading this and putting this together, I'm like, this has been a really bad, terrible, crazy day. Okay, so why don't we start with — you said you want to start with what the —
Well, we can. Let's start the vote. Let's back up three days to leading into the vote. He loses in Missouri in his effort to get a 7-to-1 advantage with the Missouri congressional delegation, and Kavanaugh is the one that slips him the shiv, right? So it goes to the full court, but eventually it's all about Kavanaugh, even in the mail-in ballots. We'll talk about Kavanaugh there too.
So they don't get to use a 2025 map that eliminates every seat but one for Democrats in Missouri. And they have to use a 2022 map that gives the Democrats a fighting chance to pick up at least one more, if not two more seats. That's three days before we're waiting on the mail-in ballots while the full briefing is in. So that was a data point for me when we saw that lineup with no dissent, effectively, that at least when it comes to maps and voting this close to the election, they're not going to side with Donald Trump.
Fast forward to the case coming out of Boston with Judge Talwani, and Donald Trump likes to constantly remind us she was an Obama-appointed judge, as if that matters. Her case has two components, two sets of parties. 22 Democratic states led by California, New York, Minnesota, Oregon, the rest. And then you've got the ACLU who's leading the charge there along with the League of Women Voters. They combine those two cases.
The judge enters an administrative stay. She issues a temporary restraining order. And then she goes to full preliminary injunction, finding that the executive order instructing the post office to set up a voter database, a voter portal, that the post office is going to stand up out of whole cloth, having never done this before, having no postal workers trained before to do this. They're going to now double-check against the state's citizenship roll before they deliver mail. And there's some design issues about the ballot envelope. Well, that can't be done. Even the postal workers filed a brief with the Supreme Court.
The postal workers AFL-CIO said, 'We just want to deliver the mail. We don't want to be involved with a partisan attack and we're not qualified to be running a portal that's not even done on citizenship.' So that really resonated. We wait. We wait. Days are ticking off the clock here. There is no administrative stay entered by the Supreme Court. So every day since last Wednesday has just been burning down the candle as we head to day 49 before the midterms. And that was the second sign for me.
So what does that mean? What does that mean? There's no admin — what does that mean?
So when the Supreme Court is interested and thinks it has the votes to support somebody like Donald Trump, they'll enter an administrative stay to block the trial judge's preliminary injunction to give them time to make their ultimate ruling. Twice they didn't do an administrative stay, which meant there wasn't at least five votes, which is what you got to count to five on the Supreme Court, to support Donald Trump. I thought that was a very good data point.
Jackson didn't do it because she's in charge of that neck of the woods up at the First Circuit, and then the whole court didn't do it. Now we're just burning off days — Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. All of a sudden we get the ruling. Now we know why there was a delay. The delay was not for the six on the Supreme Court, or maybe seven on the Supreme Court, to rule against Donald Trump and save mail-in balloting as we know it and the rules as we know it for at least the midterm. No, the delay was to wait for Alito and Thomas to finish their dissent.
That's all we watched because the order, Don, is one paragraph, three lines long. Now there is something very interesting in that order, which we know at least six people joined — Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, Chief Justice Roberts, and then they joined Ketanji Brown Jackson, so Kagan. So that's the block of six. It's been reported that it was a 7-2 vote because Kavanaugh, who was trying not to be beat by daddy, sided with them on the stay, like we're not going to block Judge Talwani's injunction.
But he did it for a different reason. He said, 'Oh, we're just out of time. It's just too close to the election,' suggesting that if there was more time he'd be okay with the post office running a ballot selection process and joining Alito and Thomas in the dissent. So Kavanaugh, once again, the great concurer — he's always concurring about something. It was very similar, Don, to the birthright citizenship case in this way.
Everybody reported birthright as 6-3, birthright citizenship upheld, not quite. 5-4. Five people on the court believe that the 14th Amendment says what it says. Kavanaugh agreed with them, but not that the Constitution said it. He said that a congressional statute, the Nationality Act, applied. So even he wouldn't go — we couldn't get six justices to believe that the 14th Amendment says what it says.
So Kavanaugh rears his ugly head again here, suggesting and inviting a future appeal for the 2028 election to see if they screw with mail-in ballots again.
Wow. So Kavanaugh is a problem to Donald Trump. Kavanaugh has a problem because he — and that's why Trump came out today, lashed out at his Supreme Court. 'Oh, they're not the people that I interviewed.' Look at this. This is crazy. How many times did you read these crazy unhinged posts? Something is wrong with this man, Michael. Something's wrong with him.
Have you just figured that out? The whole long line about 'I love Alito and Thomas and Kavanaugh and Gorsuch' and they're corrupt, they're setting back the country a million years, and that he's got to raise the tariffs thing again. Oh, they'll be billions of dollars in tariffs and it's just crazy.
Now, I asked — I just had Kristen Clark, the NAACP's general counsel, on today in the interview going up tomorrow, and she said out loud just a little bit of a preview. You're in the dark there, Don. There we go. She said —
You shouldn't be messing with the lights in the middle of the show, but go.
I said, what do you think's going on with Kavanaugh? She said, 'I think he's afraid of Donald Trump and he's trying to figure out a way to walk a tightrope so that he can side with the majority because he knows they're right, but that he can give Donald Trump something like, "Hey boss, we'll try it again before 2028. Is that okay?"' Like, uh, don't beat me. She really said that out loud, which I agreed. I totally agreed with.
Kavanaugh is unreliable for Trump because he doesn't side with him enough is the problem. The question now for me, Don, is are we seeing the confirmation that this is the Amy Coney Barrett court? Because I've said two years ago, watch Amy Coney Barrett.
You — I remember you said that on Legal AF. Yeah.
She's right of center, but she may be the new — fill in the blank — the new Sandra Day O'Connor, the new Kennedy, even though she's far right of Kennedy, because every time there's a major decision, Amy Coney Barrett seems to be in the majority on that.
Wow. Interesting. I want to talk to you about — we'll put that tweet or whatever it is back up. But since you mentioned how he attacked the judges, I want to play this. This is from Todd Blanche. Watch.
That last question, and then I have another question related to it. On the comments from the president specifically that these Supreme Court justices in this decision aren't the people he interviewed, does that undermine even the perception of the court's independence in your view?
The people he interviewed? Not at all. No. I mean, he wants another one. That's okay. He can have another one. No, I don't think it undermines — like, I think, look what happened after the DOGE decision. Members of Congress, the administration came out basically threatening judges for months on end. There's a full security force, okay, around every justice because of the rhetoric after the Supreme Court issued that decision.
And so the fact the president issues a Truth saying that the justices that interviewed in front of him, you know, six, seven years ago, eight years ago, are not the justices he's seeing now, that undermines the — no, I don't think in any way, shape, or form it does that. I think that's just something that the media wants to put on it. The president should be communicating to the American people about cases that are extraordinarily important to him, which this one is.
And related to this whole discussion, after all this back and forth, are you concerned at all that voters may be confused about what their options actually are now to vote by mail? And what, if anything, will the DOJ do to —
I want to talk about this. Look, I'm just saying the president, you know, he has the right — he's so whiny. I'm sorry. Every time I hear him, he just sounds like, you know, I just get tired of people just criticizing the president. He has the right to be, you know, able to —
How about, Don, the question in the same press conference when somebody asked him, 'Are you going to be investigating Oleg Deripaska buying Don Jr.'s wedding?' And —
I don't see a reason to investigate.
He says, 'Well, the president doesn't know who that is. Friends around him don't know who that is. Don Jr. says he's his best friend. What's there to investigate?' I don't know. Soft corruption through Deripaska doesn't spend a dime without Putin's approval and they money-laundered it through the International Boxing Association through Dubai to pay for the afterparty. And Bettina Trump says in her social media everything's okay, right, because it was the afterparty. No, it's not okay that Putin's controlled guy paid for part of your wedding.
It was the afterparty, Michael.
It was the one with all the Molly and all the, you know, debauchery.
You should have been at the after-after party.
He's way in the back in that photo. If you leave it up, you can find him. He's way in the back.
I know. I see like one black person. Well, this is another incentive for your audience and my overlapping audience on Legal AF to vote, because if you want to stop seeing just cross-examinations that are withering against Donald Trump's administration by the Democrats and you want to see them get the gavel and get the subpoena power and get the ability to do real full-blown investigations so you don't just read it in ProPublica, you see it in the halls of Congress, then vote blue.
Yeah. I just — woof, Lord. You should have seen my wedding. It was like the United Nations. There are a couple of flies in the milk there, but that tells you a lot about our administration. Michael, I don't really know how to characterize all of the madness that is happening.
And then I did talk — I did mention, and I don't know if you talked about it, basically one of the pillars of his immigration — right, where they said he can't do something with foreign journalists and students. And so this is the third loss for him in a matter of 24 hours. I feel you — you know, I think that — wait, hold on, hold on, hold on.
He hasn't had a win in a long time.
A couple of things before I go there. I'll tell you how I feel because I'm going to tell you that at the end. But did you know Todd Blanche before this? Had you had any interactions with him or did you —
No, I was probably one degree separated from him with people, you know, when I practiced in the New York bar. I know people that know him well.
Yeah. Because people say, 'I have no idea who this particular person is right now.'
Right. Same as Rudy Giuliani. People were like, 'Who's this guy?'
When Rudy went off the deep end and became a deep conspiracy theorist. Same thing with Todd Blanche.
But Todd Blanche is motivated by — has always been motivated by one thing. It's the brass ring to be the attorney general of the United States. And he'll do anything and say anything. He's more pliant than Pam Bondi. There are just certain prosecutions even Pam Bondi would not go after, like the Seashell prosecution of Comey or the Southern Poverty Law Center. But no, there is no prosecution that Todd Blanche doesn't see the ability to go after.
Is this court starting to get some testicular fortitude?
No. You know, it's really Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett. Somebody in your chat wrote, 'Come on, Popok. Amy Coney Barrett's all over the map.' She is, and she may not be where you want her to be on issues, but my point is when you see a majority decision, she is often in the majority whether you like the ruling or not. And she is all over the map, although I could give you the things that motivate her to vote a certain way.
No, I don't see that. I think there is a certain amount of regret by John Roberts because he is Dr. Frankenstein that created the monster, and now he's trying to figure out how to get it back into the cage. There's a little bit of that. But it's dominated by Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Roberts who believe in an imperial executive branch. It comes from their days working in their respective White Houses.
And Alito and Thomas had always believed that anyway, but they were always in the minority waiting for enough votes. The only thing that's changed over the last few years is they finally got the votes. That's why they're revisiting all of this precedent from five years ago, ten years ago, 100 years ago. It's because they have the votes.
Yeah. This is my favorite two comments so far. This is what it says: 'Don, you mean the honest?' And then this one is like when I asked that question, when it came out of my mouth, I was like — and then she goes, I don't know if she's going, 'Don, for the testicular fortitude thing.' Like, 'Don, you know better. That's a dumbass question.' But I did get the look when I —
When I woke up to the news about, you know, about —
I said so there was a shift. I felt like, okay —
I felt like honestly — I don't want to — am I going to jinx it if I say this? I felt like it was the beginning of the end. I'm like, this is where I think the tide starts to turn. That's why I asked that question whether you think it's legit.
Well, I agree with you in this way. On birthright citizenship, they voted against Donald Trump.
Tariffs, they voted against Donald Trump twice. They voted against Donald Trump on mail-in ballots in June. They said, 'No, they don't all have to be received on the same day and counted on the same day.' No, even that was so laughable that I thought Amy Coney Barrett was going to laugh in John Sauer's face.
And now they've won on Voting Rights Act, Trump, you know, they've won on destroying the administrative state and firing at will anyone that's in the executive branch. They almost got — I'm not sure where they exactly are with Lisa Cook on the Federal Reserve and its independence, but there are things that they will go out of their way — if you're talking about executive power and the power of the president alone to fire everybody, they're all for it.
If you're talking about church and state, you know, all those decisions on church and state and religion, they're all for it. Voting, they don't side with him as much. Tariffs, economics, not as much.
Okay, don't get me in trouble with Mrs. Popok, okay? Because — all right, we're getting close to the time. And I saw your beautiful grandbaby. Is that your grand or your daughter?
That's my daughter, my friend.
Oh my gosh. Why did she — she's so little? She's tiny.
