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CNN This Morning

Trump Eyes Chicago for Next Federal Troop Surge; Lessons Learned from the Costliest Hurricane in American History. Aired 6- 6:30a ET

Aired August 25, 2025 - 06:00   ET

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

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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And you will be much more than that.

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M.J. LEE, CNN ANCHOR: The animated musical blends K-pop stardom with demon-fighting fantasy, a genre-bending mix that has captivated fans worldwide.

It's already Netflix's most watched animated original, spending weeks at the top of the platform, and this weekend marked its first theatrical release: a sing-along that packed theaters, pulling in an estimated $18 million in just two days.

Its success isn't just on screen. The soundtrack is climbing the charts, as well.

I'm M.J. Lee in Washington, and CNN THIS MORNING starts right now.

AUDIE CORNISH, CNN ANCHOR: National Guard troops now carry weapons on the streets of D.C. Get ready, Chicago. You might be next. CNN THIS MORNING starts right now.

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MAYOR BRANDON JOHNSON (D), CHICAGO: The city of Chicago does not need a military occupation.

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CORNISH: But do local officials have the power to stop it?

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We expect it. I mean, really, we expect it.

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CORNISH: Vocal Trump critics on guard, wondering who's next after the FBI's John Bolton raid.

And thousands evacuated, hundreds of acres burned with wildfires expanding in the West. No relief in sight.

And another mission scrubbed. What's going on with the SpaceX Starship megarocket?

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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We want help! We want help!

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We want help! We want help!

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We want help! We want help!

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CORNISH: Twenty years since the Hurricane Katrina disaster, have we forgotten the lessons learned?

It's 6 a.m. here on the East Coast. Here is a live look at Chicago.

And good morning, everyone. It's Monday, August 25. I want to thank you for waking up with us. I'm Audie Cornish. And here's where we begin, in the Windy City.

Two officials tell CNN the Trump administration has been planning for weeks to send National Guard troops to Chicago, and the president is now pushing it publicly.

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DONALD TRUMP, U.S. PRESIDENT: They want something to happen. So, I think Chicago will be our next, and then we'll help with New York.

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CORNISH: Unlike D.C., which is not a state and subject to federal government oversight, it's not clear how this would work in a state with a governor deeply uninterested in the Trump administration's plan.

J.B. Pritzker responded on X over the weekend: "Things people are begging for: cheaper groceries; no Medicaid and SNAP cuts; release of the Epstein files. Things people are not begging for: an authoritarian power grab of major cities."

Now, in the meantime, Defense Secretary Hegseth says the National Guard military deployed to D.C.'s streets can and should carry their service weapons.

Joining me now in the group chat: Isaac Dovere, CNN senior reporter; Michael Warren, senior editor at "The Dispatch"; and Lulu Garcia- Navarro, CNN contributor and "New York Times" journalist. Welcome, you guys. Thanks for -- thanks for coming back.

OK, so we've had people wondering who's next, which raises legal questions for me about, like, what's the authority on which you get to do this? How long does it last? What's the metrics for which it ends? Michael, what are your questions?

MICHAEL WARREN, SENIOR EDITOR, "THE DISPATCH": I kind of want to know exactly what's going to happen. If this is a deployment that is essentially there to defend federal buildings in Chicago, then it's less than maybe what critics fear and what the most --

CORNISH: You don't know if it's that. You're saying it could -- that could be the pretext.

WARREN: We don't know. I'm saying that could be the pretext of -- I think, if you look at the way things have unfurled here in D.C., all this is kind of a pretext for more intense and aggressive immigration enforcement.

That's where you've seen a lot of these.

CORNISH: We're going to talk about that in the program.

WARREN: Exactly. So, I expect that is probably what we're going to see a lot of. I just think we should maybe reserve a little judgment until we know exactly what is coming.

But I think we can look at L.A. and D.C. as precedents. And I'm a little -- more than a little concerned that this is a sort of performative stuff that Trump loves, but that really does infringe on a lot of sovereignty, local sovereignty in a place like Illinois, Chicago.

CORNISH: You also have Chicago's mayor, who's frankly unpopular, just like deeply unpopular. "The Chicago Sun-Times" reports his job approval rating stands at just 26 percent.

I don't know how this, like, affects things given the governor, but Lulu, what's your thinking?

LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: I mean, I think it affects things.

Trump is very good at sensing weakness and pouncing on weakness. So, people's real grievances about how their city is governed, the things that happen in their city, which is part of like a democracy, right? He is so good at capitalizing on that and really exploiting that to -- to overstep the bounds.

And I think that's what we're seeing here.

You know, if we think back to L.A., right? Everyone was like, you know, American troops on -- on American soil in American cities; you know, the precedent that this is going to set.

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And I remember sitting on a few of these panels and, you know, people on the right going, this is not that. This is -- you know, this isn't really him pushing the bounds. And now we see that it absolutely is. This is part of a wider sort of

idea that he has that he is going to be going city to city and putting American troops on U.S. soil and potentially putting them in conflict with U.S. citizens.

CORNISH: And some of the differences there with L.A., you had this riotous response to ICE arrests going to federal buildings to protect. What are you hearing from states about this?

EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE, CNN SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: I think.

There's a huge amount of concern. Governors have been talking to each other, Democratic governors, about what they would be doing about National Guard deployments for months. This is not a surprise to them that this was a possibility.

But I was talking to Gavin Newsom about a week ago, and what he said to me was, if you remember at the event where he announced -- the officially announced this ballot initiative for the redistricting.

There were immigration officers who were out -- put outside that event and going up to people and asking for their status, and they arrested at least one person.

And Newsom said to me that he assumes that, when it comes time for the ballot initiative to be up for vote in November, that there will be federal agents, troops, whatever it may be, who are deployed to polling sites to try to suppress the vote.

Now, that's Newsom assuming that, or at least saying that he's assuming it, but we don't know what's going on here and how far this is going to go. And we do see already that.

Just look at what's going on in D.C. There are people who are not identifying themselves, who are wearing masks, who are, without any clear probable cause, arresting people, if you call it an arrest, and putting them in the back of their own cars. And we don't know what happens to these people.

CORNISH: Yes.

DOVERE: That's where we are in August.

CORNISH: Yes.

DOVERE: That's where we are at the end of --

CORNISH: And before ICE, in particular, ramps up its hiring.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: I just have one more thought, which is, you know, as we've been watching this, it is both terrifying and incompetent, though, in D.C.

Because, you know, I was just by the White House on Sunday, and they were talking about sweeping up homeless encampments, et cetera, et cetera. There's a huge homeless encampment, literally a block away from the

White House.

There are enforcement operations. "The New York Times" reported, going to the -- going to the courthouse and just seeing the kinds of menial things that people are being picked up for so they can juice up the numbers.

The numbers of arrests actually aren't even commensurate to what they were a couple of months ago. And so, you know.

CORNISH: I'm glad you guys are bringing this up. We're going to bring in an expert who's been following those numbers, because for the exact reason you're talking about, what are we looking at in terms of enforcement?

So, you guys, stay with me. Coming up on CNN THIS MORNING, reunited with his family, but not for long. Today, a mistakenly deported man could be sent to a third country.

Plus, the launch of a SpaceX Starship rocket scrubbed again. What's going on?

And two very different scenes in D.C. this morning. Kids heading back to school and Guard troops carrying weapons.

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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I feel both, like, really excited -- it's the beginning of the school year -- and really scared. I'm really worried about the amount of police and military and FBI.

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CORNISH: It's almost 15 minutes past the hour, and here is your morning roundup.

A pair of Israeli strikes have hit a hospital in Southern Gaza. Health officials there report more than a dozen people have been killed, including several journalists.

The Israeli military is also unleashing strikes on Gaza City ahead of its planned takeover of the enclave's largest city.

Israel's defense minister is vowing to push forward with the offensive, despite international criticism and concern for civilians.

Another failed SpaceX mission. A 10th Starship test flight was planned for last night, but it was called off due to a, quote, "issue with ground systems."

Starship hasn't made it through a clean test since November of last year. It's not clear when they'll try again.

Elon Musk says this spacecraft will carry humans to Mars.

And actor Jerry Adler has died at the age of 96. He was best known for his role on "The Sopranos." He also starred in "The Good Wife" and was on Broadway.

But before all that, Adler spent decades behind the scenes. It wasn't until his 60s that he pivoted to acting.

And after the break on CNN THIS MORNING, brazen arrests all caught on camera. Our ICE agents crossing the line.

Plus, natural disaster or man-made fiasco. We look back at what we have and have not learned, 20 years after Hurricane Katrina.

And so, good morning, New Orleans.

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CHAD MYERS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: From New Orleans, many reports are coming in stating total structural failure in the New Orleans metro area.

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CORNISH: Does that give you flashbacks? Because it does for me. The water, the waiting. And then there was the silence.

It's been 20 years since Hurricane Katrina tore through the Gulf Coast. It left more than 1,200 people dead from Alabama to Louisiana.

But New Orleans took the hardest hit. When the levees broke, 80 percent of the city was underwater. And inside the Superdome, 20,000 people waited for help. And the government response was disjointed and confused.

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LT. GEN. RUSSEL HONORE (RET.), U.S. ARMY: Hey! Weapons down! Weapons down.

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CORNISH: That was the scene as U.S. Army General Russel Honore stepped in. He's since been credited with bringing some order to the disaster zone.

So, what have we learned in the decades since? Well, former FEMA director Michael Brown says not enough. In a new op-ed published this weekend, Brown, who later resigned as FEMA's administrator, says, quote, "State and local officials, FEMA, DHS, and even the military branches struggled and occasionally refused to overcome bureaucratic obstacles and jurisdictional disputes."

Joining me now to discuss is retired Army Lieutenant General Russel Honore. He was former commander of the joint task force over Katrina.

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And General Honore, first of all, good morning. Thank you for being with us on this day.

HONORE: Well, good morning.

CORNISH: I wanted to start with what we heard from Michael Brown there. He was trying not to assign blame. He obviously has taken so much criticism for how he handled the storm.

He claims he was cut off from the White House, that FEMA's authority was undermined, that Louisiana's governor and New Orleans' mayor failed to act quickly in handing over control.

Can you talk about what you saw on the ground in terms of federal, state, and local coordination?

HONORE: Well, when I arrived in New Orleans, arrived in Mississippi on Tuesday and met with the governor and the adjutant general and had my troops at Camp Shelby prepared to be able to respond.

Then on Tuesday evening, I was designated a joint task force commander.

And Wednesday morning, when I arrived in New Orleans, flew over the Superdome, landed in a Navy helicopter, what I saw was a bunch of people that needed to be evacuated.

Went in and saw the mayor and the FEMA representative and National Guard representative, and the mayor guidance was, General, we need to get these people out of here. We need a major evacuation, and we're waiting on buses to come. We need to get them out of here.

And we need food and water to those that are isolated. And he asked me what I brought with me. And I said, right now I'm going to bring everything you need. I'm here to see you.

And I flew in and saw the governor, and she repeated the same thing.

But this was an evacuation that should have started already, and it hadn't started. Much of the issues associated with inability to be able to communicate between Baton Rouge and New Orleans because the grid was down. The secular grid was down. The communications grid was down.

And many people were getting their information through watching CNN cameras on the street in New Orleans. So, that was a big problem. The ability to communicate, because the storm overmatched the grid and took it out.

CORNISH: Now, the Trump administration at this point has actually cut some post-Katrina reforms at FEMA. There was money that helped fix infrastructures, for example, for weak levees. Funding that helped local first responders train up for emergencies. Support for towns that want to rebuild in a more sort of storm-resistant way.

Are these things that really could make a difference? Or do you think the overall structure is just stronger today?

HONORE: Yes, the term for it is mitigation money. If they either took it, delayed it, or eliminated it altogether from budgets. There were projects in and around the North Shore and through LaPlace, for instance. An example where they were putting a small levee in to prevent future storms from flooding the areas of Saint Charles and LaPlace.

And all that went on hold with the new administration through the DOGE cuts, and that prevents future disasters. It's unfortunate that that's happening.

There was also a plan to raise some 3,000 homes. Many of those programs have been put on hold to prevent future disasters. That was a major part of FEMA investment in communities so we wouldn't have a repeat of the last floods that are happening in South Louisiana.

So, I hope that program gets back on track. But we've also lost a third of the FEMA employees. And a good part of the National Weather Service. And all -- the weather service, they are trying to hire some back, but we lost a third of FEMA with the DOGE cuts.

That is concerning, as we are in the middle of hurricane season right now.

CORNISH: Yes. During the storm at the time, there was a lot of fear, as you mentioned the cameras, about looting, about violence. In the clip we played of you earlier, you're there telling people to put their weapons down.

We're in this moment where military is policing city streets again under, you know, an emergency. Can you talk about what you learned from that time about using the military for domestic policing?

HONORE: Yes, that is not in accordance with our Constitution. Troops under state control of the governor can be authorized to detain people and to help law enforcement directly when they're working for the governor, as was the case in Katrina.

But we didn't have a crime problem in New Orleans. We had an evacuation problem. Much of that was exacerbated by camera shots of people coming out of stores with bags. That was food and water, and they were trying to stay alive and stay survived.

I didn't call that looting. I called it a survival technique that people did to stay alive, because we -- that was the biggest issue. And that misconception by the federal government and by the state government caused this to be from taking the police in New Orleans from doing search and rescue and saving people, to go into security to prevent looting. [06:25:13]

But the looting that was happening that they were seeing was survival. We went into survival mode to get food and water.

CORNISH: Well, retired Army Lieutenant General Russel Honore, thank you for remembering this time with us. We appreciate it.

HONORE: Have a good day.

CORNISH: Straight ahead on CNN THIS MORNING, prominent Trump critics on edge after a raid at former national security adviser John Bolton's home.

Plus, wildfires rage in the West. When relief could come.

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