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CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip

Socialist Candidate Zohran Mamdani In Exclusive Interview; Mayor Eric Adams (I-New York City, NY) Staying In Race To Beat Two Spoiled Brats; President Trump Meddling In The NYC Mayoral Race; Dismal Jobs Report On August And Unemployment; CNN Original Series Have I Got News For You On Florida Banning Vaccine Mandates. Aired 10- 11p ET

Aired September 05, 2025 - 22:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[22:00:00]

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ABBY PHILLIP, CNN HOST (voice over): Tonight, an exclusive interview with New York's socialist candidate, Zohran Mamdani, his response to Eric Adams staying and his challenge to the president and what he thinks of being called a Communist.

Plus, liberation frustration, Donald Trump's economy is no longer bulletproof as his tariff red lines are juicing unemployment lines.

And --

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool?

PHILLIP: A billion is so 2010. Elon Musk now closer to becoming the world's first trillion. But for Americans, is that cool or cruel?

Live at the table, Joe Borelli, Maya Rupert, Lance Trover, Joshua Doss, and DeMaurice Smith.

Americans with different perspectives aren't talking to each other, but here, they do.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PHILLIP (on camera): Good evening. I'm Abby Philip.

We'll get to our debate panel in just a moment and we have a lot to debate, but, first, a special guest is going to join us at the table, the socialist Democratic nominee in New York's mayoral race, Zohran Mamdani, is here, and the race is on the top of the mind of Donald Trump. So much so that the White House approached one of his rivals, Eric Adams, this week about leaving the race and joining the administration to clear the field for Andrew Cuomo to run one-on-one against Mamdani.

Adams, at least tonight, says that he's staying in.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) MAYOR ERIC ADAMS (I-NEW YORK CITY, NY): Andrew Cuomo is a snake and a liar. I am in this race and I'm the only one that can beat Mamdani.

This polo shirt that I'm wearing that says, Eric Adams, mayor of the city of New York, I'm going to wear that for another four years.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PHILLIP: Zohran Mamdani, thank you very much for being here.

So, Eric Adams is staying in the race. He announced that he is not going to take some other position. He was reportedly being offered by Trump. Why do you think he's staying?

ZOHRAN MAMDANI (D), NEW YORK CITY MAYORAL CANDIDATE: You know, I cannot speak to Eric Adams' motivations or his interests. I can just tell you that it's been a lot of noise these last few weeks. And we've seen that this is the specialty of Donald Trump and his puppets, a lot of noise, few results. And all of it distracts from the fact that one in four New Yorkers are living in poverty in this city, and so often their concerns, their welfare has been secondary to the interests of these so-called leaders in trying to figure out their own futures.

PHILLIP: Do you think Trump's involvement in this race at this point is helping you?

MAMDANI: I think it's showcasing what's at stake, which is the fact that we have a vision to actually help New Yorkers afford their city. And Donald Trump has a vision to try and rip apart the very fabric of the city. He has passed legislation that will throw millions of New Yorkers off of their healthcare, ran a campaign on cheaper grocery and has now cutting SNAP for hungry New Yorkers across the five boroughs.

PHILLIP: What about when -- you know, Donald Trump has threatened to bring troops into New York. He's done it in Washington. He wants to do it in Baltimore, Chicago. If you are elected mayor, I mean, do you think that that's the first thing he's going to do? Because he's made it clear he's invested in what happens here. He's a long time New York resident. He does not want to see you elected. If you are, do you expect that he'll get involved?

MAMDANI: We will prepare for every eventuality. And I agree with what Commissioner Tisch of the NYPD said, which is that we do not need the National Guard here. The NYPD can create that public safety for New Yorkers. And we've seen an example of how to fight back against this federal overreach in California, where you had the governor, the mayor, the attorney general work together to file a lawsuit that a judge recently found that the federal government was illegally deploying the National Guard there. That's the kind of partnership we need to see in New York, and yet that's exactly the opposite of what we saw when Andrew Cuomo was leading the state.

PHILLIP: So, lawsuits would be your first step?

MAMDANI: I think lawsuits. I also think the fact that we look at our own law department, which has been on the forefront of some of the most critical cases in the country, and yet it's staffed at pre- pandemic levels, not even at the level that it used to be before COVID. That needs to be brought up with 200 additional lawyers.

PHILLIP: So, in Baltimore, in the state of Maryland, just today, the mayor there and the governor, they're surging resources into the city to address crime, to address public safety. They're saying it's not anything to do with Donald Trump, but what are you going to do about public safety in New York? I mean, is there a responsibility that you would have to actually make the city safer for New Yorkers to address those concerns that are very real?

[22:05:03]

MAMDANI: Absolutely. That is one of my primary responsibilities. And it's interesting that you actually mentioned Baltimore because you can see in Baltimore that they've managed to bring down the number of homicides and shootings through an understanding of the very different tools you have to implement to actually confront the scourge of gun violence. Here in New York City, I would work alongside the NYPD to create that public safety and also invest in existing infrastructure we have here that is not at the full scale. It could be infrastructure that has been shown to reduce shootings by up to 40 percent, and it goes by the name of the crisis management system.

PHILLIP: The part of the question is, and maybe this is what they're trying to address in Baltimore, to get ahead of Trump and the argument that's both political and practical that he's making that Democrats aren't doing enough and he has to be the one to step in. Do you have a responsibility to do it first, to put cops on the street first, maybe to ask for the National Guard on the subways, as Kathy Hochul has done in the past?

MAMDANI: We have a responsibility to address the struggles that New Yorkers are living through. And one thing I'll say about Donald Trump is he often diagnoses actual despair that people are living through. But the issue is that he then exploits it. He ran an entire campaign about cost of living, saying that he would be the change to actually reduce it. He's exacerbated that.

But to your point, we have left an opening, especially as it pertains to New Yorker's ability to afford their own city for these kinds of politics of exploitation. We have to deliver.

PHILLIP: So, on that very front, you know, you've said you wanted to debate Donald Trump. A lot of people ask the question, are you and Donald Trump more similar than maybe you might want to let on, and specifically on this issue of socialism? Even Trump's own allies, his fellow Republicans, like Rand Paul, have suggested that some of his policies are socialists in nature. He took a stake in Intel in an exchange for U.S. government funding. People have called that socialist. Do you think that that's a good idea?

MAMDANI: I think that Donald Trump and I have one thing in common, which is that we talk about the need for cheaper groceries. The difference between the two of us is that I'm actually going to deliver on that. And that's what I think is so frustrating is that he spoke to the needs that New Yorkers had, that Americans had. They truly believed that his promise of a cheaper and a more affordable life was possible. But he's shown no interest in that. You look at his economic policies, they have exacerbated that crisis.

PHILLIP: But do you -- I mean, first of all, do you think that there are some things that Trump has done that are more socialist than capitalist?

MAMDANI: I don't think there is much that Donald Trump does that can be understood through the idea of ideology. I think he does whatever it is he decides to do each and every day with his own mind as the central piece of this.

PHILLIP: Can you walk me through just on some of those proposals, because this comes up all the time on this show, right, whenever we talk about this race. People are like, well, he wants to privatize grocery stores or whatever. He wants to have these government-run grocery stores. I know you've talked about it in the past, but explain how this really would work and why is the government a better solution for a lack of grocery stores, food deserts, than just working with the private sector to have them do what they know how to do, which is run grocery stores? What's your answer to that?

MAMDANI: There are more than a thousand grocery stores in New York City. I'm proposing creating five additional ones, one in each borough of New York City that the city would run, and that would guarantee cheaper groceries, not free food, but cheaper groceries. And part of that is because food is a necessity for New Yorkers. It's a necessity for everyone. And yet it's something that people are being priced out of. And we can see the promise and the possibility of a public option. And we've seen in studies that have been done about the applicability of this in an urban setting, like Chicago, that this is something we can actually deliver right here in York City.

PHILLIP: But there was another example in Kansas City where they had a government-run grocery store, and it's been there for years, but it's on the verge of closing because it doesn't work. They've been riddled with crime. They've dealt with just a lack of inventory. There are other examples where it just hasn't worked because, frankly, the government is not that good at being in the business of being in grocery stores. So, what do you say to that example?

MAMDANI: You know, I say to that example as well as the examples of our own failures, city government right here in New York City, that we have to prove not only the efficacy, but the excellence of this idea. Because for every one example that you can point to, there's another of another municipality today considering opening a city-run grocery store. But to me, the most important thing is the outcome.

This is something I believe will work. We will bring the best and the brightest to deliver it, and it will be five stores at the cost of $60 million, which is less than half the city is already spending on subsidizing corporate supermarkets.

PHILLIP: A lot of people in New York are freaking out about you as you know, right? MAMDANI: Where specifically?

PHILLIP: In Manhattan in particular. But a couple of things, on the rent stabilization, on the impact of your proposals on housing in this city, there's a lot of concern that it'll cause people to leave, that it'll cause, you know, dilapidated housing, that it'll cause landlords to go out of business.

[22:10:07]

But my question to you is, how interested are you in working with or talking to the private sector on some of these issues? Are you flexible in some of your views for what the solution might be to housing costs or what the solution might be to a lack of inventory? Or are you -- or do you think that there -- they can't be part of the solution?

MAMDANI: I think that every New Yorker can be part of the solution. And I am not only interested but committed to having conversations with New Yorkers across the political spectrum. And I think for too long, leadership has been defined as someone who surrounds themselves with people who are quickest to say yes to each and every idea. You have to actually encourage and create space for disagreement because that's what gets you the outcome of results.

And when we talk about freezing the rent for the more than 2 million New Yorkers who live in rent stabilized housing, that happened three times before under the previous mayoral administration, New York City is still standing.

PHILLIP: A bigger picture question, you know, your Democratic colleague, or, well, maybe I shouldn't say that you're a Democratic socialist, but Tom Suozzi, he's a representative from here in New York. He often talks about you and Trump in the same sentence. But the suggestion there is that you know how to diagnose a problem, which you have on housing, on food, on childcare, but the solution that you're offering is all too simple. It's overpromising and in ways that you cannot deliver. Is there a risk that you might over promise New Yorkers on things that you can't execute on?

MAMDANI: You know, I would call him a colleague because we are part of the same party, the Democratic Party. And as Ed Koch said, a former Democratic mayor of New York City, that if you agree with me on 9 out of 12 issues, vote for me. 12 out of 12, see a psychiatrist. We have to have room for disagreement within a party. Otherwise, we just become a monotone that doesn't accept the innate tension of people coming together.

And this vision that we have for New York City, it's one that speaks to the scale of this crisis much in the same way that when the former administration of New York City looked at childcare, they talked about developing universal pre-K. Many people thought that was unrealistic. Now, it is a fact of life here in New York City. That is going to be the same, not only for freezing the rent, not only for making buses fast and free, but for universal childcare from six weeks to five years of age. PHILLIP: You've had a conversation with former President Obama. That's been reported. But there are a lot of other Democrats who have kept you at arm's length. They've at least withheld their endorsement. First of all, were you surprised to see that outreach from Obama? But not just from him, my understanding is that a lot of people, alums of his world, have been in touch with your campaign. Are you surprised by that? What does it tell you about what they think you're doing?

MAMDANI: I really appreciated that outreach and especially that conversation with the president. It was one where he emphasized the importance of hope in our politics and the importance of delivering on that. And it's a model for what politics could be, because now for so many New Yorkers and Americans, we think the only language of politics is one of darkness and cruelty, and that just doesn't speak to the possibility that it could hold if we actually want to serve the people that we're claiming to.

PHILLIP: Will he endorse you?

MAMDANI: I can't speak for the president, but what I can tell you is my interest, frankly, is not as much on the question of endorsements because we won the Democratic primary with the support, not of those endorsements, but of the close to 600,000 New Yorkers. My focus is on the 8.5 million people who call the city home.

PHILLIP: Jefferies, Schumer, should they get on board? I mean, we're down to the wire here in this campaign. Should they state where they are in this campaign? Should they endorse you?

MAMDANI: I've appreciated the conversations that I've had with them. And what I've appreciated is that at the heart of them is the focus on partnership and a focus on affordability. And too often that's been missing in what leadership passes for here in New York City.

PHILLIP: A lot of polls saying different things, but I think the gist of it is that, you know, in the race, as it stands now, you've probably got about a third of the electorate in the city. First of all, if it were a two-man race between you and Cuomo, do you think for sure that you can win that race?

MAMDANI: Absolutely. And I would tell you that I spent many months, including somewhere I was here on this show with you where I was running for mayor in the Democratic primary, and we were told time and again, it was inevitable that Andrew Cuomo was going to win the race. I was at 1 percent early in the spring of this same year, and then we won the race by 13 points with the most votes in primary history. So, we are very confident about defeating Andrew Cuomo, just like we did in June.

And what is outrageous to us is not the question of the implications of these machinations on the race, it's what they show the blatant disregard that so many of these politicians have for the welfare of working class New Yorkers, one in five of whom can't even afford $2.90 to ride the bus.

[22:15:00] PHILLIP: You know, with a third of the electorate right now, which is where you are, if you were to win in that place, would you see that as a mandate to do all the things that you've run on, or, you know, because that means that there's a whole lot of New Yorkers who probably didn't vote for you for all kinds of different reasons? Maybe they have a lot of concerns about your age, lack of experience, your policies. Are you still going to govern as if you have a mandate?

MAMDANI: If you win an election, you have to govern to fulfill the promises you ran on. Otherwise, what is the point of our politics? And I think often of Tim Walz, who's spoken about the point of political capital is to use it to actually deliver on those same commitments. That's what I would do. And I'm confident of bringing even more New Yorkers into the political process, like we did in June, where we saw the largest number of young people coming out to vote that we've seen in recent history in this city.

PHILLIP: You know, on another note, you know, your Democratic socialism has been just the center of everything that people talk about, but in this country, there's a big debate about the wealthy, the uber wealthy, the gap between the rich and the poor. Just this week, Tesla offered a pay package to Elon Musk that would potentially make him a trillionaire. Do you think trillionaires should exist?

MAMDANI: I think the better question is whether working people should exist, because what we're seeing right now is amidst this incredible wealth, we have people who are keeping the city running that have to now live outside of the city, outside of the state. There are New Yorkers who are living in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and Connecticut because they just can't afford to live here.

Amidst all of that, we have talk of trillionaires. I mean, it, it tells you where our political priorities are. And that's what is so frustrating is that when we talk about the cuts to SNAP benefits here in New York City, the throwing of millions off of their health insurance, it's not just incidents that has taken place in Washington, D.C., it is a function of the largest wealth transfer we've ever seen in our history of our country's politics.

PHILLIP: Yes. I mean, I definitely take that -- the point that this inequality has only increased in recent years, but we also live in a world, especially this city, where it is powered by businesses, by corporations that come here, that hire people, job numbers that came out just today indicating there's a slowdown across the country in hiring. Is now really the time to raise taxes on those corporations but also to exacerbate the tensions between the rich and the poor, or do we need each other to make this economy work?

MAMDANI: We need each and every person in this city for the future that we all deserve. And what I would say is it's not politics or policy commitments that are exacerbating tensions. It's the fact of inequality. That's the tension that working class New Yorkers are living with, where they can't afford their rent, they can't afford their childcare.

PHILLIP: You don't have any concerns about the broader economic environment and the impact of higher taxes on anybody, rich or poor, in this particular economy?

MAMDANI: Let's talk about the revenue proposals. I've talked about increasing the state's top corporate tax rate to match that of New Jersey, increasing personal income taxes on the top 1 percent of New Yorkers. That's New Yorkers who make a million dollars or more, they'd pay $20,000 extra in their personal income taxes. This would actually even benefit those same sets of New Yorkers and those corporations. Because when I speak to business leaders, they tell me they're having a struggle of attracting talent that can afford to live in the city because of the cost that we're seeing across the board.

These are not proposals for the sake of raising revenue. Their proposal is to fund affordability across these five boroughs, and that's critical, because otherwise we'll see an exodus that has already been taking place of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who just cannot afford this city anymore.

PHILLIP: The United States, you have benefited from this country, this is what your critics say, but you don't support the system, the economic system that perhaps you benefited from. Is that right?

MAMDANI: I love this country and I'm also a New Yorker who has loved this city. And one of the things that I love most about the city are its parks, and its parks, and the Parks Department, was founded by a socialist mayor of New York City, Fiorello La Guardia. These are all parts of the same story. And the idea to simplify it as if a critique of capitalism is to be un-American, it speaks to a lack of understanding of the breadth of our history.

PHILLIP: Which makes me wonder, I mean, should there be more socialism, in your view, across America? Should America be more of a socialist country?

MAMDANI: I think you go back to what Dr. King said decades ago. Call it democracy or call it Democratic socialism. There should be a better distribution of wealth for all of God's children in this country. And that's what I believe we need from coast-to-coast is dignity for each and every person such that they can actually live a life that is more than just struggle.

PHILLIP: All right. Well, thank you very much, Zohran Mamdani.

[22:20:00]

Thank you.

MAMDANI: Thank you. It's a real pleasure.

PHILLIP: Next, our round table is going to discuss and debate what we just heard.

Plus, a huge warning sign tonight as the economy, the nation flirts with a job crisis, and it's who is losing the job that is raising eyebrows tonight. We'll talk about that.

We'll, right back. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

PHILLIP: More now on our interview with New York City Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani. I have my panel with me, and joining us in our fifth seat at the table is the sage of New York City, Errol Louis. He's a political anchor for Spectrum News and a journalist of New York Politics.

[22:25:00]

So, Errol look, he seems really confident. That was my takeaway sitting down with him. He seems like somebody who's really eager to take the fight all the way up to the Oval Office, and Trump gave him an opportunity to do it.

ERROL LOUIS, POLITICAL ANCHOR, SPECTRUM NEWS: That's exactly right. And this is somebody who only a few months ago, six months ago really was polling it 1 percent and came from absolutely nowhere to beating, you know, one of the titans of New York politics.

PHILLIP: He was sitting right there in the seat that you're sitting in when he was at 1 percent.

LOUIS: He was, and he beat somebody in the form of Andrew Cuomo who had won between himself and his father, whose campaigns Andrew Cuomo had run seven statewide elections.

So, politics is changing. There's a big demographic change. It's not just the young people. It's also a lot of South Asian voters who all turned out in all kind of corners of the city that weren't really being watched closely. There were 760,000 Muslims in New York City now, which is at least 50,000 or so more than I ever would've guessed.

There are a lot of people, there are a lot of folks getting into politics. It's the first time he managed to find them, register them, excite them, motivate them, mobilize them, 50,000 people knocking on doors, and that the results are what you've seen.

PHILLIP: Yes. I mean, and, look, I asked him a lot of the questions that I assume that people, if you're not voting for Mamdani you would want to know the answer to, and one of the things about a good politician is that he could make anything sound imminently reasonable. And I think that's the key. That's why he's been as popular as he is.

JOSHUA DOSS, POLLSTER AND POLITICAL RESEARCHER: Yes. I mean, I think it's also really hard to scare people around socialism, about him being a socialist, when ground beef is as expensive as it is, right? I think that the moment matters right now.

He's very talented, obviously, but we're in a moment where people are thinking differently about the relationship with the economy, the relationship with this city, and I think he's capitalizing on that moment really well.

PHILLIP: And their relationship with government, Joe. I mean, some of that is hardly because of Trump. Trump has told America, hey, it's fine for government to be involved in everything. I don't think that helps him as he's going up against Mamdani.

JOE BORELLI, FORMER REPUBLICAN LEADER, NEW YORK CITY COUNCIL: Well, I think there are similarities that you can draw between Mamdani and Trump, and I think Errol really articulated that, that both were able to find slices of the American public that had felt underappreciated, unrecognized, unheard and mobilized those to get across their message.

What you saw in that interview, make no mistake, was one of the most effective political communicators that we have in his generation. He's a little younger than me. I'll give him that. The problem is, it's an onion. Because as you were asking him questions, and I'll note one thing that you asked him, you asked him about policing and you mentioned Baltimore. And he said, Baltimore's great what they're doing, they're increasing police. So, I looked up what Baltimore's doing, and they have a -- and it's called an entertainment district unit, which is, by any other account, just a way to do community broken window policing in the heart of Baltimore. That's something that he opposes.

And I think that's the problem with Mamdani, is that as you peel the onion back, whether it's these community land acts that he wants to do on housing, whether it's decriminalizing prostitution, or all the things that you talked about with the grocery stores, when you peel back the onion, you realize that a lot of the policies are unworkable, untried. And when they've been tried, as you pointed out, they haven't worked.

That's why he's trying to make this about Donald Trump. It's the right political strategy, I have to admit. When you have those vulnerabilities, when you're in a poll position where all you have to do is not mess up and you probably win. So, it's going to be interesting to see how the next couple of weeks play out.

MAYA RUPERT, POLITICAL STRATEGIST: I think this is one of the challenges I hear a lot when we talk about socialist ideas or really when we talk about progressive ideas. Very often what we will hear is, well, it's not going to work. And we're asking for something that sort of seems infallible on paper, but we're putting it up to it next to a system that doesn't work. Because if the system worked, people could afford groceries, wages would be rising along with people's rents rising, right? People in New York would be able to live in their city.

And so I think we have been tricked into thinking that the status quo doesn't have to prove itself. That's the system as it is. And anything bold enough to change it has to come in and sort of show us on its face that it's going to work tomorrow.

What we see is a system that is broken and what he's offering is a system that can work. And if people work for it, will work.

LANCE TROVER, REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST: But great interview, by the way. And you hit on something in the interview that I wanted to talk about. There's a reason though Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and some of these other folks have not endorsed him, and that is to your point about the layers of the onion because they know when you peel that back that he does, in fact, really want to defund the police. He wants to decarcerate, he wants to close jails. He supports -- I mean, you go through the list.

His ties to a group, like Students for Justice in Palestine, which is funded by American Muslims for Palestine, are very deep. American Muslims for Palestine has Hamas connections.

[22:30:01]

He started an SJP chapter at his college. I think if you're a Jewish American living here in New York City, I would be very, very concerned about that. And I think he's going to be the poster child for Hamas here in America if he gets elected New York City mayor.

DOSS: Can I just say something about that though? So I work at a research firm called HIT Strategies and we get a lot of Zoran folks and focus groups. And it's interesting the things that they like about him, the things that motivate them to vote or to want to vote for him are actually really similar to the same things that make people like Donald Trump, which is they feel like there's a big complicated unorthodox system that is not working and it might take big complicated unorthodox policies that actually might break things before they fix them, right?

And so we could sit here and we can pontificate about how the policies won't work and this will work and that won't work. But people are really at their wits end with being told what will and won't work and are ready to do something.

PHILLIP: I'm curious, Errol. I mean, in the city he brought up, Mamdani brought up universal precase (ph) an example of something that people thought couldn't happen, shouldn't happen, it was too expensive, whatever - -

LOUIS: That's right.

PHILLIP: -- and now is real. I mean, is he right about that?

LOUIS: He's absolutely right about that.

PHILLIP: -- that there are -- but that there are other things, you know, fast and free bus service, the expanding rent freezes, that can be done.

LOUIS: Urban innovation, it always sounds impossible until it succeeds, right? So the "New York Times" actually editorialized against the prior mayor, Bill de Blasio, saying like, oh, this idea of universal pre-kindergarten, it's an interesting idea, but it can't possibly work, and therefore you shouldn't vote for him.

And then he wins anyway, and then he implements it. And it is one of the biggest and most popular policies in New York because it can save you 12, if you have two kids, $25,000 per year every year. And it makes the difference between people staying in the city and leaving the city. It is unquestionably a success.

BORELLI: But, Errol --

LOUIS: -- and he's talking about --

BORELLI: -- that's an example that worked, right?

LOUIS: Right.

BORELLI: He went on the rent control issue. We call it rent stabilization. This is a policy that has failed by and large in New York. There are thousands of units, 80,000 units that are un -- you can't actually afford to renovate and put a human in these buildings because of the rent stabilization laws. It's a broken system. I know you agree with me.

LOUIS: But you know that there was a freeze on it because he's proposing a freeze. He's not opposing, you know, extending it and making it --

BORELLI: But a freeze and still allowing the property tax to rise, the (inaudible) to rise.

LOUIS: They froze it for three years. It didn't -- it didn't crush the city. It didn't break the city. It didn't help the problem. You're right about that. But even, like I say, with the grocery stores. A lot of your viewers know that every liquor store in New Hampshire is owned by the government. It's been government run for years. And there's been this whole thing up in the Boston area about like, let's go make a liquor run.

You go over the border and you go get your liquor in New Hampshire because it's cheaper and its government run. And then you go back to Boston and have a party. These things are not --

PHILLIP: But I mean, Errol --

LOUIS: -- these are not system changing.

PHILLIP: -- aside from grocery stores, for all of New York's boroughs --

LOUIS: It's a demonstration project.

PHILLIP: -- is going, I mean --

LOUIS: Is negligible, which is doing very --

PHILLIP: Are we gonna see the -- are the lines gonna be from, you know, the Brooklyn Bridge all the way up to Harlem? Like, what are we talking about?

BORELLI: We call them bread lines, yes.

LOUIS: -- Philadelphia. Nobody's crossing all the way across Brooklyn to go to one store.

PHILLIP: I think there's some practical questions here, which is why, you know, I wanted to get a better sense of like the nuts and bolts of this, because I think people do want to know. They want to know practically, what does this really look like? And does it even make sense for the government to do that for five stores or should they just hand $10,000 to five grocery store, you know, managers and have them open grocery stores and use economies of scale to make it less expensive?

RUPERT: But there's no incentive for them to do that if they're still private.

PHILLIP: Create an incentive. You can create an incentive.

RUPERT: But I think this -- I think what we -- if we want to think about the practicalities of it, let's play that out. We have five grocery stores in across boroughs with lower prices. Now in some areas maybe, at certain times lines are going to be long. We see that now. There are certain times. You don't go to certain grocery stores because of the lines. But what it's going to do is force all the other areas -- all the grocery stores in that area to lower their prices as well.

So it's not going to be everybody's trying to stop at one grocery store indefinitely, right. That's the goal. It's going to create a different economy for each of those places because we will have one grocery store that doesn't have an incentive to just charge people as much as you possibly can.

LOUIS: We're across the street from Whole Foods, which has long, long lines.

RUPERT: And you know the times --

(CROSSTALK)

PHILLIP: And look, I remember the days when there was like two Trader Joe's in all of Manhattan and the line was literally down the block. But look, it's an interesting debate. And at the very least, he's touched that off here in New York City so, we'll see what happens, what New York voters decide.

[22:35:02]

Errol Louis, thank you very much for joining us. Coming up next, another month of stagnant job growth has alarm bells ringing. What does that mean for Trump's economy? We'll debate.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

PHILLIP: Alarm bells, red flags, warning signs, whatever you want to call it, the signals are clear.

[22:40:00]

Things are getting ugly for President Trump's economy. New data shows that the nation added just 22,000 jobs last month. The unemployment rate is now the highest it's been in nearly four years. And on top of that, revised numbers show that the labor market actually lost jobs in June. Now, things are particularly bad for a few key groups, even though Trump promised to have their backs.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: I love the black population of this country. I've done so much for the black population of this country, including employment.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PHILLIP: The unemployment rate for black workers has ballooned to its highest level since 2021.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: I love Hispanics and they are. They're hard workers and boy are they entrepreneurial and they're great people.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PHILLIP: Hispanics are actually struggling too with their highest unemployment level in about a year.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: Vote Trump and your incomes will soar, your savings will grow, young people will be able to afford a home.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PHILLIP: How is that possible when young Americans are also having problems just trying to get a job?

TRUMP: America will be a manufacturing nation once again.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PHILLIP: That vow to bring back factories has now turned into four straight months of job losses for U.S. manufacturers. Joining us now in the fifth seat at the table is DeMaurice Smith. He's the former executive director of the NFL Players Association and he's author of the book "Turf Wars: The Fight for the Soul of America's Game." The Fed is often the boogeyman to blame for everything going on in Trump's economy. He said, Jerome Too Late Powell should have lowered rates long ago. As usual, he is too late.

But of course, a year ago, the economy was growing at a much stronger pace in terms of job creation. And Jerome Powell wasn't lowering rates than either. So, I mean, this is just a blame game for Trump.

DEMAURICE SMITH, FORMER EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, NFL PLAYERS ASSOCIATION: I think it's a blank game in its utterly performative. I mean, the job numbers weren't the numbers he wanted a few months ago and what happens he fired someone. They're still bad. You're gonna run out of people to fire at some point. I think what the American people on both sides of the aisle should want is something that is a little bit less performative and something that is going to create jobs a meaningful job for Americans.

And you look at these numbers for June and the adjusted numbers, that adjusted number of job loss was the lowest it's been since June of 2020. And we were in COVID in June of 2020. I mean, 120,000 people had died around the same time that we have lost these many jobs. So I think it's time that we move beyond sort of these things that look great on television or firing somebody if you don't like the numbers.

People have put forth really good plans for creating jobs in America. And middle America, people on the coast, these are people who want to work and they can't find work. And we should be looking to a president who can fix that.

PHILLIP: As DeMaurice said, mean, Lance, Trump is saying -- Trump's aides, I should say, are saying that it's the Biden devotees at the Bureau of Labor Statistics that are to blame for these numbers. He already fired the head of the BLS. And now he's blaming the poor guys sitting there in front of their computer with calculators. What about accountability?

TROVER: Yeah, these numbers are disappointing. I'm not going to sit here and argue that with you. But look, we're still at a pretty historically low unemployment rate in this country.

PHILLIP: Yeah.

TROVER: We have a lot of capital investment that has been -- since he became president, we have had many, many corporations and companies bringing money back into this country to reshore --

PHILLIP: -- to bring money back.

TROVER: I mean, you heard Mark Zuckerberg last night at the White House?

PHILLIP: That was not -- that's a bad example because you know Mark Zuckerberg, that is not the number. Just to be clear.

TROVER: Take your pick.

PHILLIP: He made that (inaudible).

TROVER: They have announced -- look, again, we are at a historically low unemployment rate still. We have a lot of capital coming into this country. We had a tax bill that is giving businesses certainty going forward into the next year or two. So yeah, I do think it is time for the Fed to lower rates. We know that. It's not just the president who's been calling for lowering rates. CEOs of corporations have been calling for it for over a year as well.

PHILLIP: I mean, it's probably going to happen regardless, but I mean now it's going to happen in part because the Fed is looking at the job market and saying this is a weakening job market and the economy needs some stimulus.

RUPERT: And I think right now too, what we need is to see a leader who is going to take ownership and say here's what we're doing. I think Donald Trump when he's running for office is really good at throwing out which communities he loves and he loves these people and you're all going to be able to buy a home. But he's the president now and when you're looking at numbers, you're looking at jobs disappearing. You're looking at people even the jobs that are being added their part-time jobs so people are unemployed but they're also under employed.

[22:45:05]

People don't want to hear, okay, well, now it's this person's fault. Now it's holdover from Biden. At some point, the president needs to recognize that he's president and start saying, okay this is what this means, this is what we're doing, this is what we're correcting not pointing to one more person.

PHILLIP: The manufacturing jobs numbers they lost about 12,000 jobs. It's almost 80,000 jobs since the beginning of the year. That should be a red flag, right, for Donald Trump. I mean, if this whole -- the whole purpose of these punishing tariffs is to bring back manufacturing. Why are we shedding jobs in that sector?

BORELLI: Look, we're shedding jobs right now. The numbers indicate that. But this is a long-term play. Johnson & Johnson, 2 billion in North Carolina. GE, I think another 3 billion in over five states creating 1,000 jobs. The implementation of these policies will take long. And I'm old enough to remember sitting around tables like this in 2017 when the Tax Cuts and Job Act was first proposed, you heard the same people saying the same thing about Trump and the economy and he was going to destroy. Everything's going to be in the gutter.

And you know what happened a year later in 2018, 2.7 million jobs created in one year by President Trump. That's what, 300,000 a month. The lowest unemployment rate in 49 years, real wage growth at 4.9 percent. And by the way, this job number that just came out is one indicator of the economy. Q2 GDP growth, 3.3. Better than it was under President Obama. Better than it was at various times under other presidents. So I think this is one indicator.

No one should be happy about it. We shouldn't be rooting for job loss. But I think the long game is what President Trump is worried about. And he doesn't care what critics say around tables like this because they're always going to criticize him.

RUPERT: I don't think it's critics around tables like this that he needs to be concerned about.

DOSS: Right.

RUPERT: I think it's people.

DOSS: Yes, everyday people. We also -- I'm pretty sure we had 12 consecutive quarters of growth going into the Trump administration and then we got our first negative with him in there. Look, I was also surprised, I guess, like Trump, that firing the BLS commissioner didn't solve the problem. It seemed like maybe that would have been a good solution.

I guess the message to the kids at home is you can't fire your way out of being a bad economist. But I really think that this is a moment that Donald Trump actually has to turn the tides and take some accountability. Nobody at this table is going to take accountability.

When we get those people, when we get Trump supporters in focus groups and somebody else dissents and they say that they were afraid of his economic policy, usually the two things that will response -- responses were, tariffs will be paid by somebody else and that it was going to bring back manufacturing.

We're sitting here nine months in and the American businesses have paid $200 billion for the tariffs. And we've lost 79,000 manufacturing jobs. Accountability needs to be taken.

BORELLI: You're aware we can't just build a factory overnight.

DOSS: I'm aware. Is Donald Trump aware is the question. He had no plan to implement anything.

SMITH: I agree with everything you said except for one thing. These businesses aren't going to pay the tariffs. Americans are going to pay the tariffs.

DOSS: Right, right, right.

SMITH: American taxpayers are going to pay the tariffs.

DOSS: Yeah.

SMITH: And to me, the fundamental question is, are there a group of people in America who would rather feel better than be better?

DOSS: Yeah.

SMITH: And you know, I'm interested in what the focus groups could say because when that person responded, that was a person who responded in a way that I just want to feel better --

DOSS: Yeah.

SMITH: -- about something. The fact is, American right now aren't better.

DOSS: NO.

SMITH: They may feel better, but they are not better.

PHILLIP: They also, I mean, look, we talk about this as if Trump is still kryptonite on the economy and he's not. I mean, his approval rating is at 37 percent on the economy, which is very low for him. So, voters are actually saying already that they're not happy with how things are going. And Trump is saying, well, give me another year until 2027. By that point, it's probably going to be too late, especially from a political perspective. SMITH: For sure.

TROVER: I'm not pulling the -- look, we have a long way to go before the midterms and I -- to your point, there are investments that are being made. There are corporations that are investing here and building factories. There will be jobs coming back. Yes, is this something they need to pay attention to? Of course it is. But I think, again, to your point, I don't know what the president's worried about right now. He is playing the long game for what is for this country and I think that is --

(CROSSTALK)

TROVER: -- that is why I'm not --

DOSS: Wasn't it a day one thing? Weren't we told that grocery prices are going to be taken down on day one? And we just talked about it earlier with ground beef. It's like a --

TROVER: A politician use hyperbole, come on, man. I mean, look, we know that egg prices are down. Gas prices are down right now.

DOSS: How is that not matter --

(CROSSTALK)

BORELLI: Inflation is 2.7 percent. That number was okay when it was Obama.

PHILLIP: Thank you very much for joining us tonight. Coming up, Elon Musk could be the first trillionaire in the entire world. That's ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[22:50:00]

PHILLIP: The comedians of "Have I Got News for You" are back for an all-new season and they are jumping right into this week's stories.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ROY WOOD, JR., COMEDIAN: Here's Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo.

JOSEPH, LADAPO, SURGEON GENERAL OF FLORIDA: The Florida Department of Health, in partnership with the governor, is going to be working to end all vaccine mandates in Florida. All of them. All of them.

[22:54:58]

DAVID FOLEY, COMEDIAN: There's an argument that can be made that people, adults, should have the right to make their own decisions and they have the intelligence to make those decisions, but clearly that doesn't apply to Florida.

WOOD: What did he compare giving your kid a lifesaving measles shot to --

AMBER RUFFIN, COMEDIAN: Roy.

WOOD: What did he compare --

RUFFIN: Roy.

WOOD: -- vaccination to? To what did he compare?

RUFFIN: I don't know this news story, but if the answer is slavery, I'll kill us all. (LAUGHTER)

LADAPO: All vaccine mandates in Florida. All of them. All of them.

Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery.

RUFFIN: No. (LAUGHTER). Oh, knives. Dead. You're dead. You're dead. You're dead. I'm dead. I've got to start watching news before I come here.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PHILLIP: You can catch an all-new episode Saturday at 9:00 p.m. right here on CNN. We'll be back in a moment.