Full Episode: Washington Week with The Atlantic full episode, 1/30/26

Jeffrey Goldberg: For the second 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.

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 with that. And even stranger, you'll never guess who showed up at the Fulton County Georgia Election Center with the FBI. Okay. I'll tell you. Tulsi Gabbard, the director of National Intelligence. Gabbard and the FBI are on the hunt for proof that the 2020 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. Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent at The New York Times and Toluse Olorunnipa 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 thought maybe somebody would know. 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 that

Zolan Kanno-Youngs, White House Correspondent, The New York Times: In the middle of the night on social media from the president.

Jeffrey Goldberg: 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.

Susan Glasser, Staff Writer, The New Yorker: You know, it's a Rudy Giuliani deal, I'm afraid.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Does that hark back all the way to Giuliani? Well, to vote 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?

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: A brief change in tone, right. The president over the weekend was getting calls from his political allies after his top administration officials 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 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 Truth Social once again attacking the victim of this shooting, using terms like insurrectionist as well. This is after the second video of Alex Pretti from 11 days prior from the shooting came out. 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 double down.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: 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.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. This is what -- just watch this for one second. This is what Homan had to say when he was reintroduced as the new leader of this effort.

Tom Homan, White House Border Czar: The president, one of the words he said to me that came up here is that he didn't want to 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.

Jeffrey Goldberg: 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 Homan, who is one of the authors of the family separation policy, is now being positioned as the calm leader of this effort. Steve, do you expect anything different or do you agree with Zolan that we're just going to, what's the word that we were using before, we went on air, toggle, toggling back and forth, toggle back and forth.

Stephen Hayes, Editor, The Dispatch: Yes, I suspect this is mostly toggling. You know, we've seen, these kinds of tactical retreats from Donald Trump before, from the White House before, where Greenland, he'll go as far as he can. 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 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 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 can change, they can at least get him to slow down for a minute if they can't change course.

Susan Glasser: Yes. 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 Kristi Noem, 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 this 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 premier of his wife's documentary, are you de-escalating? No, no, no, I'm not doing that. There are 3,000 agents right now, federal agents, in Minneapolis. That represents something like 8 percent of the entire force all deployed to this one city in Minnesota. It's remarkable.

Jeffrey Goldberg: And, Toluse, you know Minneapolis quite well, covering the George Floyd's story for years. 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?

Toluse Olorunnipa, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: Well, one of the reasons Minneapolis has stood up to this in what they call an invasion of their city is because 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 --

Jeffrey Goldberg: Is it a very, very left city? Is it one of the most left-leaning cities in America?

Toluse Olorunnipa: 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 going into the streets, in major capitals in the U.S. 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 protests as well.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. What happened in that church with Don Lemon? Can we figure that out?

Toluse Olorunnipa: 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 were 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 3,000 people going into a city taking kids away from preschools, separating families, this is something that's really disrupted their community, and so they want to do something different.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

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

Jeffrey Goldberg: 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, playing a role as a journalist.

Steve, 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?

Stephen Hayes: 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 journalists. He's done it. Whether he is, you know, sued big media organizations, whether he's called out journalists specifically, whether they've raised the prospect of going after a journalist for what they called hate speech. He made that specific argument about Jonathan Karl from ABC News.

I mean, this is what the president does. He did in his first term. He called journalists the enemy of 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 Don Lemon. Two federal judges said, there's not enough evidence, we're not going to do this. Apparently some of the prosecutors who were to have been involved, didn't want to be involved, and they went and got done limited anyway on basically manufactured charges.

Jeffrey Goldberg: 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 and named several other people, including Georgia Fort, who's also a journalist, in connection with a coordinated attack on Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The second tweet was from the White House account, which is a photo of Don Lemon being arrested, and it says, when life gives you lemons, and was -- so making a kind of a snarky joke about the arrest. But Pam Bondi, that's really something. I mean, that seems highly unusual, Susan?

Susan Glasser: I would say there's no other example that probably any of us can think of 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. One 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 are inured to these events. And 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.

Stephen Hayes: And this is what Pam Bondi was doing, I think, also.

Susan Glasser: Yes.

Stephen Hayes: She was trying to ingratiate herself with Donald Trump, by including that at my direction phrase. You know, it's going to cause problem. I mean, this case, I don't think, is going anywhere anyway.

Jeffrey Goldberg: It's hard to imagine that a judge is going to -- I mean, there was already questions, the magistrate obviously didn't want to go forward earlier, but, no, that's interesting.

You know, I asked you, Toluse, you as a former White House bureau chief, Zolan, you just spent four hours with the president. There's a difference between the president and his people, though. The president also loves the media. He can't live without the press. Some of the other people around him, maybe Pam Bondi, certainly Stephen Miller, seemed to be not liking the press at all. But am I on to something there or is that just -- am I just imagining that he has a kind of -- he understands the symbiosis?

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: It makes me think of that that time where the Pentagon first issued restrictions against Defense Department reporters.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Before they kicked them all out?

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: Right. And then the president was asked about it, and he almost seemed surprised about and had a comment of, well, wait, no, we want this coverage. Of course, they did go with those restrictions, right?

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: But you do have a sort of two-pronged thing where the president loves being in front of T.V. 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 president 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.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Are you worried about this going forward to midterms and then beyond?

Toluse Olorunnipa: 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. And so I'm a little concerned that's something that he'll continue to do.

Jeffrey Goldberg: 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 five years ago with defund the police and abolish the police, all that sort of thing, it turned out to be not such a great strategy for the Democratic Party. 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?

Toluse Olorunnipa: 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 ICE is where they want to go, but they do want to rein in this agency.

And they do realize that the 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 changes and some reforms to the operation, even if they're not calling --

Jeffrey Goldberg: The base is highly activated and wants to double down right now. That's a problem with Trump.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: Yes. But also the train has left the station on abolish ICE, right? Remember, there was a bill passed last year that made ICE the highest funded federal law enforcement agency, more funding than some militaries in the world, right? So, this conversation around restraining ICE at that point, that conversation is almost -- 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? What's factoring into the changing 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.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes.

Susan Glasser: So, 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 Good and before the killing of Alex Pretti.

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 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 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 reelected after January 6th.

And on January 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 a precautionary --

Jeffrey Goldberg: And then it's just pretty quick -- that was the day of love.

Susan Glasser: People's views of Donald Trump are people's views of -- he's at the low end of where he is, but he's still where he has been.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Let me ask you a question. Not to make everything about polls and electoral politics, because 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?

Susan Glasser: I mean, look certainly if it were to happen, people will believe that to be the case regardless. And I think 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 new scandal distracts from an old scandal.

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

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Steve, Tulsi Gabbard, what's going on there in Georgia?

Stephen Hayes: You want me to answer that definitively as if I know, because I can't. Nobody knows.

Jeffrey Goldberg: No. I want you to just play Steve Hayes on television.

Stephen Hayes: Okay. I'll do my best.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes. In some, a troubling situation.

Stephen Hayes: Yes. No, actually, I think it's -- in some ways it's related to the Pam Bondi 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 2020 election having been stolen.

So, she's down there at a time when they're seizing ballots, when they're raising questions yet again about Fulton County. 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 long disgraced conspiracy theorist, who Trump's own people tried to fight to keep her out of the Oval Office in 2020, is back appearing in a picture with his weaponization are. So, stuff's about to get crazier than it is.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Do you agree it's going to get crazier?

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: Based off of this pace and trend, I mean, it certainly seems that way.

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

Jeffrey Goldberg: 2026 midterm.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: Yes. Yes, that's right. So --

Jeffrey Goldberg: The concerns are --

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: 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?

Jeffrey Goldberg: 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.

Stephen Hayes: One quick point. When Donald Trump was asked about this, what she was doing, what's going on in Fulton County, presumably, this was all backward-looking, re-litigating 2020. And he answered with a forward look, she's keeping our elections safe.

Susan Glasser: They're after the voter rolls.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Susan, let me ask you -- it would be our last question, 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 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 herself domestically, I think that's unprecedented. I know we're not supposed to 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. Is that fair?

Jeffrey Goldberg: 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 going to -- we're not done talking about it.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Well, we'll talk next week about the Fed and Epstein and Venezuela. Remember Venezuela? 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. Goodnight from Washington.