The Democratic Party is strategizing over how to respond to Trump. Perry Bacon Jr. with the Washington Post walks us through how that’s going. Mike Waltz is out as national-security adviser. ABC has the story. Generative AI is making nonconsensual deepfake porn incredibly easy to make and much more difficult to prevent and prosecute. Reporters Olivia Carville and Margi Murphy speak to In Conversation about the scale of the problem. Plus, a judge struck down Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act, a Haitian woman died in ICE custody, and the names of imprisoned journalists to know for World Press Freedom Day. Today’s episode was hosted by Shumita Basu.
Chapter 1: What recent staffing changes did President Trump make?
Good morning. It's Friday, May 2nd. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today. On today's show, how Democrats are speaking to voters 100 days into Trump's presidency. A rare show of congressional unity and names to know on World Press Freedom Day. But first, to Washington, where President Trump made his first big staffing shakeup of his second term.
He removed one of his top advisers, Mike Waltz, the now former national security adviser, and says he plans to nominate Waltz to be U.S. ambassador to the U.N. instead. Remember, Waltz added a journalist to a signal chat in March where high-level officials, including the vice president, discussed military strikes in Yemen.
Signal is not an approved, secure platform for sharing classified government information. And Waltz took responsibility for adding Jeffrey Goldberg, the top editor of The Atlantic, who published a story revealing what happened. But Waltz confused many, including Fox News' Laura Engram, with his explanation of how it happened.
Chapter 2: Why was Mike Waltz removed as National Security Adviser?
My job is to make sure everything's coordinated. I mean, I don't mean to be pedantic here, but how did the number? Have you ever had somebody's contact that shows their name and then you have somebody else's number there? Oh, I never make those mistakes. Right? You've got somebody else's number on someone else's contact. So, of course, I didn't see this loser in the group.
Chapter 3: What controversies surrounded the Signal chat incident?
It looked like someone else.
Trump's decision to reassign Waltz and fire his deputy, Alex Wong, comes after he has defended both Waltz and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was also in the chat. Trump told NBC News he would not fire people over, quote, witch hunts. On other occasions, he's blamed the technology.
I don't think he should apologize. I think he's doing his best. It's equipment and technology that's not perfect, and probably he won't be using it again, at least not in the very near future. What do you think?
Republicans in the House, meanwhile, have blocked an attempt to launch a congressional probe into the matter. An internal investigation in the executive branch is ongoing. Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer told reporters he thinks Trump is focusing on the wrong person, saying they should be firing Hegseth.
That's because reporters at The New York Times learned on the very same day Waltz created the signal chat with Goldberg, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth created a second chat. He invited his wife, brother and lawyer, and he reportedly shared the Yemen attack plans in detail. Hegseth has since attacked the media, blamed disgruntled former employees and described The Times reporting as a hit piece.
To be confirmed as U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Waltz would need to go through the Senate confirmation process. Republicans have the majority, but Democrats will likely press him hard on the Signal incident. While Trump looks for his replacement as national security advisor, Secretary of State Marco Rubio will fill in the role temporarily.
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Chapter 4: How are Republicans and Democrats reacting to the Signal chat investigation?
Holding both positions means Rubio will run both the National Security Council, which coordinates foreign policy, and the State Department, which manages U.S. diplomacy. The last person to hold both of these powerful positions together was Henry Kissinger. Let's turn now to the other side of the aisle, the state of the Democratic Party, 100 plus days into the Trump administration.
Across multiple polls, the Democratic Party as a whole has lower approval ratings than President Trump, with a recent CNN poll showing Democrats with a favorability score of just 29 percent, the lowest for the party since 1992.
Voters say they're frustrated by the lack of action they see in Congress and moments when Democrats have voted to support Trump's agenda, like when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer voted to fund the government and avoid a shutdown. At the same time, many Democrats, from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Illinois Governor J.B.
Pritzker, have been trying to speak directly to voters and galvanize the opposition. To take stock of the Democratic Party's current strategy, I called up Perry Bacon, a columnist at The Washington Post.
I think there's a fighting versus kind of being more cautious divide still. I'd put Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer. If you listen to them carefully, they're the Democratic leaders. What they say is we should not go overboard. We should not oppose too much. We should let Trump sink on his own. Like if you look at Schumer, he didn't want to do a government shutdown.
In part, he was saying that Trump himself is going to make a lot of mistakes like he did in 2017. Let's let him fail on his own. That's one strategy. And then you have a lot of other Democrats who are out there saying we need to oppose him because the midterms are not next week. They're a year and a half from now. So we need to do stuff we can to oppose him now.
The real divide is over kind of fight versus kind of wait till the midterms.
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Chapter 5: Who is temporarily filling the National Security Adviser role?
You wrote a column recently for The Washington Post arguing that Democrats should really be focusing on speaking to and winning over moderates. What do you see them doing that is effective in that regard?
Chapter 6: What is the current approval rating of the Democratic Party?
So what I was getting at was that inevitably win an election, you have to win people who are independents, moderates. And what I was trying to argue is like you're seeing a lot of different things going on right now. You have Governor Whitmer, who is focused very much on working with Trump and showing herself to be bipartisan.
You also have people like Raphael Warnock, who's in Georgia, who won a lot of moderates in his reelection, who are being pretty critical of Trump and not being particularly conciliatory with him. So you have a bunch of different people trying a bunch of different approaches.
I think the main divide is between people who think you have to win over Republican voters by saying, I agree with Trump on some things, and you have other people who are saying – Republican voters don't love Trump either. That's why he's unpopular.
So you need to win a tiny sliver of moderates, independents, some of whom voted for Trump, but the sort of core Trump base likes Trump and they're not going to vote for a Democrat. So I think part of the question is like, It looks like Trump's got probably 40, 43 percent of people who are permanently with him. And that's what the approved ratings show.
But you probably have 7 or 8 percent of people who looks like in the polls who voted for Trump but don't like him now. And how do you get them to vote for Democrats? And I guess the Whitmer theory is to emphasize bipartisanship. I think the Bernie Sanders theory is to emphasize policies that work for the working class.
And even if they're not necessarily bipartisan, I think that's the split is important. between how much do kind of swing voters vote based on how much you like Republicanism versus are they just looking for an appealing message? And it could come from the left, the center or the right on some level.
Yeah, yeah. I was going to ask you, and you're kind of laying this out already, but like, what is the I'm working in 2025 strategy for Democrats?
I think the 2025 is focused on the tariffs and how many sort of normal federal employees who do normal things, they fired. I think that's something that's resonating. Elon Musk being in cabinet meetings strikes people as being weird. The fact that Trump keeps saying Canada should be the 51st state, which is annoying Canadians and Americans, I think.
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Chapter 7: What are the main strategic divides within the Democratic Party?
So in some ways, I think if the midterms were today, the Democrats should just run a bunch of ads finding the seven most outlandish things Trump has done, and that would be a good campaign. And in fact, we don't have to guess. The new prime minister of Canada, I don't really know what his policy agenda is. He didn't talk about it very much. His idea basically is we are Canadians. We are normal.
Trump is crazy. And his poll numbers shot up. And that party won an election they were going to lose. And so in some ways, if you're the Democrats in Congress, you should be thinking, should the Democrats have a good message, a unified message? Sure. But that message probably needs to be less about our plans for raising the minimum wage or our plans to –
change immigration policy or our plans to build manufacturing and just more, unfortunately, more negative campaigning against Trump. We'll probably get it done right now. I think that's where people are. When you get to the presidential campaign, you do have to choose, is the Buttigieg message better than the Sanders one, better than the AOC one? But I think we're not there yet.
There are visions being debated right now, but I think that conversation is getting shunted in a certain way because every day Trump does something extreme. And so I think in some ways the urgency about what Trump is doing is sort of, to use another word, is trumping the discussion about what the Democrats should do next.
Barry, thank you so much for your time.
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Chapter 8: How are Democrats trying to win over moderate and independent voters?
Thank you. I appreciate it.
It can seem in this highly partisan moment that our lawmakers in Congress can't agree on anything. But there was a rare moment of unity earlier this week when Congress passed the Take It Down Act, a law designed to stop the online spread of nonconsensual sexual imagery known commonly as revenge porn, including deepfakes.
The bill was championed by First Lady Melania Trump, and it passed in a remarkable show of bipartisan support. 409 votes in favor, just two opposed. President Trump is expected to sign it into law. The Take It Down Act makes the sharing and posting of these types of images a federal crime and carries punishments including fines and possible prison time.
For victims targeted by deepfake porn creators online, it's being hailed as a big step in the right direction.
So there has been a lot of positive feedback about the law being passed, and that includes that finally we get real concrete relief for victims who for a long time have had nowhere to turn, that this is a meaningful step forward to closing a very dangerous legal gap.
That's Olivia Carville, an investigative reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek. I spoke with her and her colleague, Margie Murphy, a cybersecurity reporter, on this week's Apple News In Conversation. They've been reporting on the effects of AI and deepfakes. Carville said despite strong support for the bill, some think it doesn't go far enough.
So while the Act targets the offenders who might be pumping the photos into these apps, and it also goes after the websites like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, where this content can be shared, what the Act doesn't do is go after those who are actually creating the tools to enable deepfake porn to be made.
Carville and Murphy have a new podcast series called Levittown, where they tell the story of how one small town was upended by a deepfake scandal. During their reporting, they saw in real time just how the advancement of these tools has allowed entire communities to be targeted by creators of deepfakes, and they met remarkable victims who fought back.
If you're listening in the Apple News app, we'll queue up that conversation to play for you next. Before we let you go, a few other stories we're following. A federal judge ruled Thursday that President Trump cannot use the Alien Enemies Act to carry out mass deportations.
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