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Inside Politics

Eight Injured In Flamethrower Attack At Colorado Pro-Israel March; Trump Condemns CO Attack, Blames Biden "Open Border"; Senate GOP Returns To Washington With Trump Mega-Bill Looming; GOP Senators Throw Cold Water On House-Passed Budget Bill; Federal Agencies & States Prepare For An "Above-Normal" Season; Internal Agency Review: FEMA "Not Ready" As Hurricane Season Hits. Aired 12:30-1p ET

Aired June 02, 2025 - 12:30   ET

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

[12:30:00]

DANA BASH, CNN ANCHOR: -- want to avenge my people. Can you connect dots there and can you explain, not just from your perch as a lawmaker, but also given the background that you have in your studies and your schooling?

REP. GREG LANDSMAN (D), OHIO: Yes, so there's three phrases here that people should get to know better and this is part of stopping antisemitism is understanding it. The American Jewish Committee, the AJC, this is what they do. You can go to their website and download content, share it with everybody. This is part of how we stop this.

One of them is the use of Zionism and I believe he said and Zionists -- Zionism is simply this idea of Jewish self-determination where Jews, because of the history, but also just because we're human beings have the right to self-determination, that we believe in having a place for us and that is true for everybody. Everyone should have a place for themselves.

And so, there isn't anything wrong with that, I don't believe. And to say you can't have that is antisemitism -- semitic. Also to say we're going to end, I'm going to end Zionists, that is a threat to kill Jews.

The second has to do with the global Intifada. The Intifada, there were two included, included -- wasn't limited to, but included a suicide bombings and killing of Jews. So you don't want to globalize that.

And then the third has to do with free Palestine. If you believe that Israel is there and should not be there, the idea of free Palestine means not peace for Palestinians, which this group was supporting, which I support, and I'm working hard for, free Palestine means getting rid of all of the Jews, either by kicking them out or by killing them, that means that there is no more Israel.

BASH: Just a few minutes ago, President Trump responded for the first time on his social media platform. He focused on the fact that this suspect is apparently in the U.S. illegally. He said, "Yesterday's horrific attack on Boulder, Colorado will not be tolerated in the United States of America. He came in through Biden's ridiculous open border policy."

And then he went on to write, "This is yet another example of why we must keep our borders secure, deport illegal, anti-American radicals." He went on and on and then did say his heart goes out to the victims of the terrible tragedy.

This is obviously a very important point in -- of this story to a lot of Republicans and a lot of people, regardless of their party affiliation, that as they learned that this man was in America illegally.

LANDSMAN: Yes. What I want more than anything else is to solve this problem and to keep people safe. And, you know, I don't want the further escalation of this. What we want is a de-escalation. And so there's three things, you know, again.

One is, you know, more investments in security across the board, not just for Jewish communities, but for everyone that is being targeted in this moment. You know, my daughter was going to a Jewish event yesterday and my wife couldn't find it and then she said, oh, there are the cops. That's how we find our events now. And so security is a big piece.

The second is, we got to pass the antisemitism bill, which will help with education and training, but people shouldn't wait. They should go to the AJC and other organizations that can help them ensure that people are on the right side of this line. Because if you cross the line, it does lead to terrible things, including what we saw yesterday.

And the third is leadership and this is where I wish the administration would pursue a more thoughtful strategic path, which would be to de-politicize this, get a top Republican, a top Democrat, work on this together with the AJCs of the world and take this on, every aspect of it, and get the politics out of it.

BASH: That would be amazing. I think you're describing utopia, but I'll take it.

Congressman, thank you so much. I really appreciate you coming on and expressing --

LANDSMAN: Thank you.

BASH: -- what you did. Really appreciate it.

Up next, President Trump's so-called Big, Beautiful Bill faces its next big challenge, the Senate. What changes will Republicans there demand? We have a great team of reporters here to help you understand.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:39:15] BASH: The countdown is on for Senate Majority Leader John Thune. If he's going to meet President Trump's deadline, he's got a month to muscle the president's massive agenda bill through a very narrow Senate majority. The math, it may not math.

Thune can only lose three GOP votes, and at least that many have already said that the House-passed version of the bill crosses several red lines that they have. Several are unlikely to want to sign off on a $3.8 trillion increase to the debt or cut $700 billion from Medicaid, nearly $270 billion from food stamps.

Here's how two of those skeptical Republicans talked about it yesterday.

(BEGIN VIDEOCLIP)

SEN. RON JOHNSON (R), WISCONSIN: The $89 trillion we're going to spend over the next 20 years, the $22 trillion in additional deficit we're going to incur, that's $2.2 trillion per year deficit. And it's completely unsustainable.

SEN. RAND PAUL (R), KENTUCKY: The math doesn't really add up. I think there are four of us at this point, and I would be very surprised if the bill at least is not modified in a good direction.

(END VIDEOCLIP)

[12:40:19]

BASH: And my panel is back. Manu, you're going to have an interesting few weeks.

MANU RAJU, CNN CHIEF CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, indeed, I will. And it's going to be an interesting few weeks for the Senate Majority Leader, John Thune, as you mentioned there, because there's just so many competing interests, demands, conflicting demands, really, and that's what Mike Johnson had to deal with in the House.

It's different in the Senate, of course, because you have the Ron Johnsons of the world who are concerned about, they want deeper spending cuts, a really massive overhaul of how federal spending, entitlement spending, like Medicaid, Medicare, how that's dealt with here, and much deeper, far too much to say some of the more moderate members are willing to go.

And even some of the conservative members, like Josh Hawley, for one, who has raised concerns about going too far into cutting into Medicaid benefits. So you have that issue. Then you have other provisions that were demanded by the House Republicans, House Conservatives, to phase out green energy tax credits.

That was a big sticking point in the House. But then there are the members in the Senate who say, you can't do that. That's going to hurt their jobs back home. Those are the kind of competing interests. And then the real deficit concerns, and oh yes, the debt limit, that's going to hit by August -- BASH: Yes.

RAJU: -- and that's included in this bill. And that's why Rand Paul opposes this bill, because he does not want the debt limit to increase as part of it. All really complicated decisions that the leaders are going to have to make.

BASH: OK, so let's just take one of those, which is Medicaid, and the Medicaid cuts, which of course is the -- I'm not saying the Democrats are salivating at cutting Medicaid, but if that goes through, politically, they think that that's where they can hit the Republicans the hardest.

I had the budget director for President Trump on State of the Union yesterday, and we talked about this. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEOCLIP)

RUSSELL VOUGHT, OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET DIRECTOR: This bill will preserve and protect the programs, the social safety net, but it will make it much more common sense. Look, one out of every five or six dollars in Medicaid is improper. We have illegal immigrants on the program.

We don't have -- we have able-bodied working adults that don't have a work requirement that they would have in TANF or even SNAP. And those are something that's very important to institute. That's what this bill does. No one will lose coverage as a result of this bill.

BASH: That's not what Josh Hawley, who is not exactly a liberal Democrat, said. He said it's wrong to cut health care for the working poor, and that's what we're talking about here with Medicaid.

VOUGHT: Well, we continue to work with people in the Senate as to working through the specifics of the bill, what it does and what it doesn't do.

(END VIDEOCLIP)

AYESHA RASCOE, NPR HOST, "WEEKEND EDITION SUNDAY" AND "UP FIRST": Well, I mean, they're kind of playing with semantics here. They're basically saying no one's going to lose coverage who deserves that, right? But how can you get savings if everybody still has the same amount of coverage? Like, that doesn't make sense.

And so when the rubber meets the road, what you're going to see in the Senate is people are realizing, look, you can play around with the semantics, but there are people in my state that are going to suffer. And there are many red states that have a lot of people on Medicaid, a lot of people with food stamps, and they need that help. And those semantic gains aren't going to put food on their table or get them the health care that they need.

BASH: And then you have someone like Jamie Dimon, who was out this morning saying he doesn't love those cuts that we're talking about. But what he doesn't love more is the idea of effectively a tax increase, which if nothing gets passed, the tax cuts from Trump one would expire, and that's what would happen.

ELI STOKOLS, WHITE HOUSE & FOREIGN AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT, POLITICO: And we know the president will listen to Jamie Dimon when he speaks. That was part of the reason why he walked back the reciprocal tariffs a month or so ago. She heard Jamie Dimon on TV. He's concerned about -- he's going to hear concerns from all corners here.

And I think what's interesting is, you know, yes, Russ Vought was on your show yesterday, but generally the administration is kind of stepping back and saying, take your time. They're making -- the president's making calls, but they are not laying down a lot of air cover for members. They are not putting a lot of pressure on people to pass the exact House version of the bill the way it is.

They're going to wait and see what happens. They're going to try to get the votes they need. And then at the end, the president's probably going to come in and try to close this deal.

But as far as like all the things you laid out and what Donald Trump actually cares about the most and is not going to, it's not like that. He just wants the bill.

BASH: It's just the tax cut.

STOKOLS: Yes.

KASIE HUNT, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Yes. And one of the things that I think is so interesting about this from a big picture perspective, Dana, is that you can see how the parties are realigning around these issues in real time as this fight has been playing out.

BASH: So true.

HUNT: I mean, if Manu and I had been in the hallways with you 10 years ago and you had told me that Josh Hawley, who obviously wasn't on the scene at the time, but like the most -- were the most Conservative members, was saying we can't cut Medicaid, right? And meanwhile, Peter Orszag was going to write in the New York Times that it's time to worry about the debt and the deficit. He was, of course, Obama's budget director.

I'd have -- you know, I don't know, my head would have exploded. All of ours would have, right? And so you're seeing these new pressures that are coming out of a party that is shifted in the Republican case to be a more working-class party really playing out in public here. And it's making building the coalition inside the party to pass the bill different than it's been certainly in my career.

[12:45:00]

RAJU: And at the end of the day, the decisions -- their leadership in the White House is trying to create a situation -- take it or leave it. This is it. This is the agenda. You kill this, we got nothing. And then the tax cuts are going to expire at the end of the year.

And they hope that pressure campaign will force these members to ultimately compromise and have to vote yes. And, you know, the calculation may be correct at the end of the day.

BASH: Yes. And I'll just add one other thing. You talk about Conservatives on Medicaid. What Manu said about a lot of these Conservative senators worried about protecting clean energy in their states.

STOKOLS: Yes.

BASH: I mean, that's definitely part of the realignment.

HUNT (?): Indeed.

BASH: It is about jobs, but never mind. It is about realignment.

Thanks, guys.

Don't go anywhere. DOGE cuts hit a new test, hurricane season. Are hollowed-out federal agencies ready for what's coming?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:50:15]

BASH: The arrival of June ushers in one of the most dangerous weather seasons of the year, Atlantic hurricane season. One big question in the DOGE era will massive budget cuts at key agencies hurt their ability to prepare and respond to major weather emergencies? At the National Weather Service alone, there will be 560 fewer employees forecasting and tracking those storms.

CNN's Gabe Cohen is here in the studio and CNN's Derek Van Dam is in CNN's Weather Center. Derek, let me start with you. What kind of risk are we facing this season?

DEREK VAN DAM, CNN METEOROLOGIST: Yes, Dana, all the science is really pointing towards an above average Atlantic hurricane season. Similarly to where we were at the beginning of hurricane season in 2024, we are starting off with record warmth across the main development region and much of the Gulf of Mexico.

We're talking about the ocean temperatures, which are running about 2 to 4 degrees above normal. I want to point out this area near shore here along the Florida Peninsula, that shading of orange, that's up to 4 degrees Fahrenheit above average, where it should be this time of year.

And if we learned anything from last year, an above average season is all really reliant on these above average temperatures. So how many named storms are we predicting, at least according to NOAA and the National Hurricane Center? 13 to 19 named storms. The average is 14.

So we're talking about storms that are 58 mile per hour or greater winds, 6 to 10 of which will become hurricanes, 3 to 5 of which will become potentially major hurricanes. That's what they're predicting.

And it's all about this data, all the climatological aspects they're considering all favor this above normal season. You can see with that shading of yellow on our pie chart here, National Hurricane Center betting doubling down here on another active Atlantic hurricane season. Dana?

BASH: And the question of staffing shortages because of the very deep cuts done by DOGE, one of the things that they're trying to do now to address those is relocate about 150 staffers to, quote, "critical open positions". And we can see on your map what they see as those open positions geographically. Is there any way to really, though, predict which areas of this country are the most threatened?

VAN DAM: Yes. So that's a big balancing act, right, Dana? We have to take all these considerations into play here when we make these projections. What we do know is where storms typically form during the month of June. Gulf of Mexico, the nearshore waters of the southeast Atlantic right here.

But let's go forward into July and we start to see the warmth building in the Atlantic Ocean as well as the Caribbean. These are the locations that will start to see the development spin up. And then we really ramp things up going to hyperdrive for August and September peak of the season. Look how that starts to form the potential there for hurricane formation.

Remember, Dana, it's not just the coastal landfall of a hurricane, as we learned with Helene last year. The rainfall doesn't stop there. It moves well inland, bringing the threats along with it. Dana?

BASH: Yes, sure did. Thank you so much, Derek. Appreciate that.

VAN DAM: You got it.

BASH: And there is another very much related agency phasing cuts, one tasked with federal response after storms, and that is FEMA. Gabe, you have been following FEMA, and really the question that everybody wants to know is, are they ready, particularly given the cuts?

GABE COHEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, and it really depends who you ask. The Trump administration has said repeatedly in recent weeks that FEMA is ready. But I have talked to well over a dozen FEMA officials who for weeks now have been sounding alarms, saying that the agency is not prepared for hurricane season, and that likely Americans who are hit by these catastrophic disasters could see delayed and even stifled responses from that agency.

Look, they typically prepare for this moment for months, but that hasn't really happened this year. A lot of trainings have been paused. A lot of the collaborations with state partners just have not happened. And then there are these staffing concerns.

About 10 percent of FEMA's workforce has already left, with close to 30 percent expected to be out the door by the end of the year. And a lot of those people are senior leaders, some of the most experienced people who really wrote the playbook on disaster response in recent years. And as that brain drain is happening, what we're seeing is that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whose department oversees FEMA, has been installing some of their own people. Homeland Security officials with very limited experience handling natural disasters, into FEMA's front office, where my sources are telling me, they're going to be effectively running the agency.

They have already rescinded FEMA's strategic plan for this year. And so, a lot of FEMA's workforce is left saying, well, what is our mission going to be this year? What is our workforce going to look like? And what disasters are going to rise to the level where this administration says what this warrants federal assistance?

[12:55:09]

BASH: Yes, I mean, experience matters in most industries and in most jobs, but FEMA is like in a category of its own.

I want our viewers to listen to what President Trump has said regarding FEMA.

(BEGIN VIDEOCLIP)

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I'll also be signing an executive order to begin the process of fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA or maybe getting rid of FEMA. I think, frankly, FEMA is not good.

When there's a natural disaster, a hurricane, a tornado or whatever it may be, you're very capable people. It's called you fix it.

(END VIDEOCLIP)

BASH: And there he was talking to governors. Weigh in on what you're hearing. I just -- I actually had the experience of going with the former FEMA director to Oklahoma after a tornado last year. And the governor there, who is about as Conservative as they come, was so happy to have the help of the federal government. And I think that's true across parties, across the geographical spectrum.

COHEN: Yes. And I think FEMA is really in this awkward transition period right now. That's what the Trump appointed administrator who just took off over has said. The reality is they still want to eliminate FEMA or at least how it exists today.

And they want states to handle disasters. They want them to pay for it, maybe federal assistance on the back end for catastrophic disasters. But the reality is, if they were to implement those changes today, the vast majority of states, maybe except California, Texas, Florida, they just don't have the emergency management infrastructure to handle it.

They don't have the budgets for it. They don't have the manpower for it. And so what we may see this administration do is say, you know what, for 2025, we want FEMA to act more like it did in 2024 than in 2026. The problem is they have been dimming the light switch there to throw it back up. Might not be so easy.

BASH: Gabe, thank you so much. Really great having you on. Appreciate it.

COHEN: Thank you.

BASH: Thank you for joining Inside Politics. CNN News Central starts after the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)