PBS NewsHour full episode Sept. 29, 2017

On the "NewsHour" tonight: Tom Price becomes the first Trump Cabinet official to step down.
The health and human services secretary is out, after criticism he used taxpayer money
for expensive charter flights.
Then:
DONALD TRUMP, President of the United States: We have done an incredible job, considering
there is absolutely nothing to work with.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Urgent calls for help.
Millions of Puerto Ricans desperate for basics like food and water leads to rising frustration
over President Trump's response.
And it's Friday.
David Brooks and Ezra Klein talk NFL protests, what Alabama's Senate primary says about the
future of the GOP, and the realities of tax reform.
Plus: America Addicted.
We kick off our new series on the deadly opioid epidemic sweeping the nation -- tonight, a
look at how we got here.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Studies have now clearly shown that opioid medications can lead to
dependency within just a matter of days, and so this flood of prescriptions led to a surge
of addiction.
JUDY WOODRUFF: All that and more on tonight's "PBS NewsHour."
(BREAK)
JUDY WOODRUFF: We're covering two big stories this evening.
Tom Price's stint as secretary of health and human services is over, after revelations
of costly private airplane travel.
We will get to that in a few minutes.
But first: Puerto Rico is still waiting for help.
We begin with the latest from the stricken island.
Special correspondent Monica Villamizar is there.
MONICA VILLAMIZAR: For the people of Puerto Rico, lines are now a fact of life.
They wait for hours to buy supplies, to withdraw money from banks, and even to wash their clothes.
William De Lara was in line for gas this afternoon in San Juan.
WILLIAM DE LARA, Puerto Rico: We're in the heat, and we suffer every day.
The military can build a city in one day in the desert.
Why can't they do the same here?
MONICA VILLAMIZAR: But the U.S. military and Puerto Rican National Guard units are trying
to reach beyond San Juan, to towns that have gone nine days with little or no assistance.
Others are desperate to get themselves or their loved ones off the island.
Hundreds waited late yesterday in the capital to board a Royal Caribbean cruise ship to
the U.S. mainland for free.
WOMAN (through translator): I'm sending my children to Miami so they can be more comfortable
because they don't have electricity here.
Sometimes, they have water.
Sometimes, they don't.
MONICA VILLAMIZAR: The U.S. Navy is now on the ground working to get hospitals up and
running; 34 dialysis centers and 36 hospitals are currently limping along on generators.
In Washington, the acting U.S. homeland security secretary, Elaine Duke, said yesterday that
the federal response has been a good-news story.
But, today, San Juan's mayor disagreed.
CARMEN YULIN CRUZ, Mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico: I will do what I never thought I was
going to do.
I am begging, begging anyone that can hear us to save us from dying.
If anybody out there is listening to us, we are dying, we are dying, and you are killing
us with the inefficiency.
MONICA VILLAMIZAR: After traveling to Puerto Rico today, Secretary Duke had a new assessment.
ELAINE DUKE, Acting Homeland Security Secretary: The president and I will not be fully satisfied,
however, until every Puerto Rican is back home, the power is back on, clean water is
freely available, schools and hospitals are fully open, and the Puerto Rican economy is
working.
MONICA VILLAMIZAR: But frustrations on the island are also aimed at Governor Ricardo
Rossello's government.
The mayor of San German says his southwestern town of 35,000 is still without power, and
hasn't received any water trucks.
He tweeted today that: "The governor is giving the message that everything is resolved, and
it is not true."
In his own tweets today, President Trump argued his administration is fully engaged with the
crisis in Puerto Rico.
But he also raised the question of how it will all be paid for.
DONALD TRUMP, President of the United States: Ultimately, the government of Puerto Rico
will have to work with us to determine how this massive rebuilding effort, will end up
being one of the biggest ever, will be funded and organized, and what we will do with the
tremendous amount of existing debt already on the island.
MONICA VILLAMIZAR: The president is expected to visit Puerto Rico himself next Tuesday.
But residents here in San Juan and in all of Puerto Rico are bracing for a long recovery
-- Judy.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, Monica, based on what you have seen, what do people still not have?
What do they need?
MONICA VILLAMIZAR: They need a lot of supplies.
And they don't have pretty much anything.
It's hard to explain how dire the situation is.
If you stop to think anything that anyone one needs in modern life, they are lacking.
They don't have water.
They don't have food.
But there's no power supply.
So, ATMs don't work, so they can't get cash.
There is no electricity, no phone reception, and the list goes on and on.
Things here are quite bad, Judy.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Now, we have spent a lot of time talking about how hard it is getting
supplies to where they need to be.
Is that what you are still seeing on the ground today?
MONICA VILLAMIZAR: What we have seen on the ground, the distribution of aid has not been
equal at all.
So, here in San Juan, the capital, there is some aid.
However, if you travel outside the capital, there are rural areas that are very remote
that haven't been reached so far.
And this is a week after the storm, and we understand people there haven't had anything
so far.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And why aren't those supplies getting where they need to be fast enough?
MONICA VILLAMIZAR: It's really hard to understand how -- what a colossal task it is on the ground
to get things distributed to those who need it and to prioritize, because the infrastructure
of the whole country was completely decimated.
It's very hard to get things from point A to point B. And also there are so many agencies
involved, both public and private, it's proven very hard to communicate and coordinate between
all of them.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And what's been the reaction there to the appointment of this three-star
Army general to oversee the work being done there?
MONICA VILLAMIZAR: We have heard that citizens are welcoming the fact that the U.S. military
is sort of going to take more control of all the logistics on the ground.
They think that can make a real difference.
They think they have been treated as sort of second-class citizens.
They say, why are we part of the United States, and it's a week after this disaster, are we
not seeing things being reestablished?
Of course, things are much more complex.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Monica, you mentioned earlier that people are talking about a kind of new
normal there.
What did you mean by that?
MONICA VILLAMIZAR: We understand that if something is not done urgently -- and this is the Red
Cross who told us -- people are going to probably die in the rural areas, because they are surviving
out of basically water they are finding in springs or small creeks.
It's a really dire situation over there.
And we were staying, for example, in the east, where the hurricane came through.
There's a very big mountain called (INAUDIBLE) and people think it's safe there because,
before, it had sort of protected them from the hurricanes.
We saw all that natural forest has been completely decimated.
And this is what the island looks like.
There is no vegetation.
There is no lushness.
It's certainly going to take a very long time for Puerto Rico to look like it did before.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Monica Villamizar, reporting for us from Puerto Rico, thank you.
MONICA VILLAMIZAR: Thank you, Judy.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And, of course, we will continue to cover that story.
But now let's return to the resignation of Tom Price, and similar questions being raised
about other members of the Trump Cabinet.
Price stepped down after it was revealed he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on
private airplane flights for himself and his staff.
Just yesterday, he pledged to pay back about $50,000, but only for his seat.
In the past few days, other Cabinet members have come under scrutiny for air travel, including
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, Veterans Affairs Secretary David
Shulkin, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
Just before Price's departure was announced today, President Trump signaled to reporters
why he was in trouble.
DONALD TRUMP, President of the United States: It's not a question of confidence.
I was disappointed, because I didn't like it, cosmetically or otherwise.
I was disappointed.
And, you know, this is an administration that saves hundreds of millions of dollars on renegotiating
things.
So, I don't like to see somebody that perhaps there's the perception that it wasn't right.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And now our John Yang is here to help bring us up to speed.
So, John, this has come all about very quickly.
We were just saying it just was disclosed a few days ago.
What have you learned from the White House about what's behind this?
JOHN YANG: Well, despite the president saying on the lawn to reporters that he was going
to make a decision tonight, White House officials are now saying that Secretary Price submitted
his resignation earlier today.
And, by the way, in his letter, he referred to the controversy as recent events.
The president was already a little bit down on Price because of the failure to repeal
and replace the Affordable Care Act, but he was very unhappy over these reports that,
in the space of three days earlier this month, Price took five chartered flights including
a $25,000 round-trip between Washington and Philadelphia.
He, of course, had prided himself, the president, on saving taxpayers money.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And, John, what makes this even more striking is that Tom Price, before
he was in the Trump Cabinet, member of Congress from Georgia, conservative, often very critical
of government waste.
JOHN YANG: That's right.
Typical is this speech that Price made on the House floor in 2005.
He said: "Too often, money that comes to Washington never gets back home because it is eaten away
by waste, fraud and abuse."
And, of course, Price had been talking about -- as HHS secretary, had championed big cuts
in federal spending proposed by the Trump administration and had talked about bringing
efficiency to HHS..
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, John, we just listed these other -- four other Cabinet members now who
had been identified as using private charter jets to go somewhere.
Are they in trouble, too?
JOHN YANG: Well, earlier today, one of those Cabinet secretaries, Ryan Zinke of Interior,
said he had done nothing wrong.
®MD+IT¯®MD-IT¯RYAN ZINKE, U.S. Interior Secretary: The flights were only booked after
extensive due diligence by the career professionals and the department's General Law and Ethics
Division.
JOHN YANG: There are inspector generals investigations going on at EPA into Scott Pruitt, at Treasury
into Steven Mnuchin.
And the White House has put down -- laid down the law.
They say no more private chartered planes until they have a chance to review this whole
thing.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, we don't know whether other Cabinet members may have been engaged or sub-Cabinet,
for that matter, may have been engaged in the same thing?
JOHN YANG: That's exactly right.
The White House said they were not involved in these decisions before they took place.
They do sometimes get involved about military planes, which are sometimes used for the security
of the Cabinet official, or if the Cabinet official needs to have secure communications
for national security reasons.
But they had no role, they say, in these private charters.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Not a quiet week at the White House.
JOHN YANG: No.
JUDY WOODRUFF: John Yang, thank you.
And now, in the day's other news: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency warned that
Hurricane Harvey caused a potentially dangerous chemical spill from a Houston area Superfund
site.
The EPA says that it detected extremely high levels of dioxins in the San Jacinto River
after a protective cap was damaged at the site.
Dioxins are linked to cancer and birth defects, and can be spread in contaminated mud.
A 12th person has died after being taken from a sweltering nursing home in South Florida
in the wake of Hurricane Irma.
It happened on September 13, when nearly 150 patients were wheeled out of the facility
in Hollywood Hills.
The building's air conditioning had lost power.
A criminal investigation into the deaths is continuing.
New tragedy for Rohingya Muslims fleeing Myanmar.
U.N. officials report that more than 60 of them apparently drowned last night, when their
boat capsized off Bangladesh.
They were trying to join more than a half-a-million others who have already made the perilous
journey.
Today, as relatives buried the drowning victims at a refugee camp, a U.N. spokesman said the
story they told is astonishing.
JOEL MILLMAN, International Organization for Migration: The boat left Myanmar and had been
at sea for two days.
Survivors described being at sea all night, having no food, and that the captain of the
vessel, who was a Bangladeshi national, as we understand it, was trying to evade checkpoints
or sea patrols.
JUDY WOODRUFF: The Rohingya are escaping a military crackdown in mostly Buddhist Myanmar.
Russia's state-funded broadcaster R.T. insisted today that it bought advertisements on Twitter
last year simply to promote itself, not to meddle in the U.S. election.
The editor in chief of R.T. said -- quote -- "It didn't occur to us that, in a developed
democracy, regular media advertising could turn out to be a suspicious and harmful activity."
Twitter says R.T. spent $274,000 on ads for U.S. markets in 2016.
In Spain, the region of Catalonia is vowing to go ahead with Sunday's independence referendum,
despite the central government's vow to prevent it.
Thousands held a closing rally today in the Catalan capital of Barcelona, and farmers
rolled through the streets on tractors in support of independence.
Spanish national police have been ordered to seize ballots and keep polling stations
closed.
Back in this country, the Air Force Academy is now investigating racist slurs found at
the academy's prep school.
The slurs appeared Tuesday on message boards outside the dorm rooms of five black students.
Now the academy superintendent, Lieutenant General Jay Silveria, is laying down the law.
He called together all 4,000 cadets and the 240 prep school students yesterday, and he
warned them in no uncertain terms.
LT.
GEN.
JAY SILVERIA, Superintendent, Air Force Academy: If you're outraged by these words, then you're
in the right place.
If you can't treat someone with dignity and respect, then you need to get out.
If you can't treat someone from another gender, whether that's a man or a woman, with dignity
and respect, then you need to get out.
If you demean someone in any way, then you need to get out.
And if you can't treat someone from another race or a different color skin with dignity
and respect, then you need to get out.
JUDY WOODRUFF: In 2015, about 29 percent of the Air Force Academy cadets were racial minorities.
The U.S. will admit a maximum of 45,000 refugees in the coming fiscal year.
The Trump White House confirmed the number this evening.
That is the smallest cap on the number of refugees since 1980.
And on Wall Street today, the Dow Jones industrial average gained nearly 24 points, to close
at 22405.
The Nasdaq rose 42, and the S&P 500 added nine, both of those markets closing at all-time
highs.
Still to come on the "NewsHour": U.S.-Cuba relations devolve after diplomats mysteriously
get sick; David Brooks and Ezra Klein analyze the week's news; using verse to capture a
rapidly changing city; and much more.
What happened in Cuba remains a mystery.
We know 21 people who work at the U.S. Embassy in Havana have suffered a variety of illnesses,
including hearing loss, dizziness and headaches.
Today, the State Department ordered all non-emergency embassy staff to leave the island.
Hari Sreenivasan has the story.
HARI SREENIVASAN: The order, issued by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, says that the State
Department still doesn't have a definitive answer on the cause or source of the illnesses,
but described them as coming from an attack of unknown nature.
Joining me for more on this is Josh Lederman, the Associated Press reporter who broke today's
news on this, and Maria de Los Angeles Torres, a professor of Latin American and Latino studies
at the University of Illinois in Chicago.
She has written about and studied Cuba and Cuban politics extensively.
Josh, let me just start with you.
The latest on this, you know, there seems to be a difference in the word choice.
We're now calling it an attack.
Just a week ago, we were calling these incidents.
JOSH LEDERMAN, Associated Press: That's right.
And the United States hasn't exactly explained what has changed.
It was only a few days ago that they were saying, look, it's premature to say attacks
because we don't know what's causing this, so how can we say that it was a deliberate
attack?
Now we have pressed repeatedly to say, you're not just using this new term casually.
There's an actual difference of position here in saying specific attacks.
And U.S. officials say, yes, we are now confident that Americans were targeted in Havana and
this was an attempt to harm them.
HARI SREENIVASAN: And, Josh, the president did say, "They did bad some stuff to us."
I'm still trying to figure out who the "they" are in this.
Does the State Department or any other agency say that there was a calculated move by perhaps
another country?
JOSH LEDERMAN: No, I think the president was being deliberately vague.
The State Department, the White House and other U.S. agencies have not said that, because
they don't know who it is.
In fact, there's a lot of reason that the U.S. officials are skeptical that this would
be something that Cuba's government from a top-down way would have ordered.
So, as of right now, the culprit really remains a mystery.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Ms. Torres, what happens to U.S.-Cuba relations in the short-term if
60 percent of the embassy is ordered to go home?
MARIA DE LOS ANGELES TORRES, University of Illinois at Chicago: Well, I think that the
secretary of state has said that diplomatic relations are still on and that this is really
about a prudent, if you will, taking care of the diplomats.
I think that we will see in the coming days and weeks whether or not the conversations
continue.
I think the Cuban government has invited the U.S. government to help investigate this.
I think the question really is this idea of "they."
I think you really hit it on the head here, because the Cuban government is not a monolith,
and there are many competing factions within that government.
At least three intelligence agencies are organized and often do compete with each other, and
the competition has become more fierce after the death of Fidel Castro, and as we get closer
to the date of Raul Castro's resignation.
All this, I think, says we should be on the ground, and not go back on the diplomatic
relations.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Josh, you have also spoken to scientists who have studied this extensively.
Is there any indication that this is just spy vs. spy sort of stuff, or any sort of
a new technology that could do this, given how different the -- I guess the indications
are from the victims?
JOSH LEDERMAN: We know one of the these are U.S. investigators are looking at is whether
this was some type of new advanced espionage operation gone awry, some type of device that
was intended to listen to U.S. diplomats, who are very closely watched by the Cuban
government in Havana, that somehow caused unintentional harm.
However, that's just really one of the theories that they're looking at.
But, as you point out, this comes in the context of Havana, Cuba, where we had exploding seashells
and poison cigars and all kinds of history in larger-than-life science fiction espionage
between the United States and Cuba.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Ms. Torres, the way that the United States has responded so far doesn't
necessarily feel they know the Cuban government is behind this, because the two diplomats
that we expelled, it wasn't a banish and never come back in the U.S. again, an action that
the United States might likely take if they knew that the U.S. -- or the Cuban government
was behind this.
MARIA DE LOS ANGELES TORRES: Right, I think we don't know.
And I think -- therefore, I think, number one, safeguarding the health of diplomats
abroad, we do that all the time.
We tell them to come home when there are either tornadoes or hurricanes or potential attacks,
right?
When we don't, in fact, we go back and say, we should have done that.
So I think that they don't know.
I think that the calls today by a couple of the Florida senators saying that we should,
you know, expel all the Cuban diplomats is really so shortsighted, because we don't know
what's going on.
And, in fact, in any one of the likely explanations that may be going on, we should have channels
of communication open with the Cuban government.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Ms. Torres, finally, the State Department also put out a warning, a
travel advisory to anyone else that is coming, any U.S. citizens that are traveling.
What are the kind of repercussions of that?
What does that do to tourism or business that's happening?
MARIA DE LOS ANGELES TORRES: Well, I think that tourism, remember, has already been down.
This is hurricane season, as your show has been covering so well.
So I think that tourism during this time is down.
I do not think that immediately it's going to necessarily bring down the numbers any
further than they are.
So I think it's a wait and see.
I think that the United States should take the invitation of the Cuban government to
help investigate this and keep the channels open.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Josh Lederman, any of those folks that you're talking to on the ground
there, are they concerned about the deterioration of the relationship?
JOSH LEDERMAN: Certainly, we know that a lot of the U.S. diplomats who are working in Havana
don't want to come home, don't want the mission to be drawn down, because they see it as really
important.
At the same time, the fact that the U.S. is unable to provide assurances to -- either
to diplomats who are working there or even to American tourists who might come and stay
in hotels in Havana that they won't be attacked by incidents that could create brain damage
is a real serious concern, and not one that the U.S. felt like it could take lightly in
this circumstance.
HARI SREENIVASAN: All right, Josh Lederman, Maria Torres, thank you both.
MARIA DE LOS ANGELES TORRES: Thank you.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And now to the analysis of Brooks and Klein.
That is New York Times columnist David Brooks and Ezra Klein of Vox.com.
Mark Shields is off this week.
Gentlemen, it's good to have you both.
We -- our lead story tonight, David, is the resignation of the secretary of health and
human services, Tom Price.
We were going to talk about the flights several Trump Cabinet officials seem to have been
taking.
But now he's gone, the first Cabinet member to step down.
Big deal.
DAVID BROOKS: Yes, I don't think he should have to go.
JUDY WOODRUFF: You don't?
DAVID BROOKS: If Donald Trump thought he was a good secretary of defense -- of health and
human services, and he knew his policies, which he did -- he knew the policies -- and
he was generally supportive, which, as far as I could see, he was, then this scandal
doesn't merit a firing/resignation.
He made Trump look bad.
And Trump's only loyalty is to himself.
So, I get that.
He had to go.
But, personally, I think the government should have a fleet of planes to take around Cabinet
secretaries.
It would just be more efficient.
Any company of any size has this sort of thing.
And so this scandal makes Trump look bad, but it certainly doesn't merit firing, I would
say.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Didn't have to be fired?
EZRA KLEIN: No, I think he probably did have to be fired.
But I have different views on what's a decent health and services secretary than Donald
Trump.
I think there are two things here that are interesting.
One is, Donald Trump has not been running an administration of very high ethical standards.
When Tom Price was nominated, there was quite a lot of ethical smoke around him.
There were allegations of insider trading.
These were things the Senate decided not to dig into.
There were things that he misstated.
They didn't hold a secondary hearing to look into them.
Donald Trump himself has had a lot of conflict of interests and quasi-dealing things that
he's been trying to get around and certainly not address in any serious way.
Nobody knows the tax returns.
But the other thing that I actually think is a bigger scandal here -- it's not at all
why Tom Price was forced to step down -- but he's been fundamentally sabotaging Obamacare,
which is the law of the land.
They're just making it worse in an effort to weaken it.
It's going to make a lot of people's lives a lot worse, and feels to me like it should
be a bigger scandal than whatever planes he did or didn't take.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And, David, in fact, we are told the president was unhappy with Tom Price
because he didn't get Obamacare repealed.
DAVID BROOKS: Yes, I understand that, but that really wasn't Tom Price's fault.
If Donald Trump wants to fire somebody for not getting Obamacare repealed, he should
fire himself.
(LAUGHTER)
DAVID BROOKS: He was the one primarily who messed up the investigation, who had no clear
agenda, who was ignorant when he entered into the negotiations with the Congress, messed
everything up even worse.
And so, if that's the standard, then there is a lot of people to be fired.
Donald Trump has a problem with loyalty and a problem with his administration.
How many people has he gone through already?
JUDY WOODRUFF: Exactly.
DAVID BROOKS: We're only a country of 320 million people.
He's going to run through all of us.
(LAUGHTER)
DAVID BROOKS: He's going to start hiring labor from Mexico.
So there has to be -- if you're running a successful administration, then you're loyal
to people who are basically good who make a mistake.
And that seems to be essential for any organization.
And it should be essential if this were a normal administration, rather than a fiefdom,
where everybody simply tries to give Donald Trump a good headline every day.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And if he holds to this standard, Ezra, these other four Cabinet secretaries
could be in trouble.
But it's hard to believe that four more would go.
EZRA KLEIN: Is it that hard to believe?
(LAUGHTER)
JUDY WOODRUFF: I don't know.
I don't know.
EZRA KLEIN: This has been a very unusual administration so far.
I do think that there is a very unclear level of conduct in the Trump administration.
That's one reason you're seeing this among so many different secretaries.
Again, Trump himself has been bending ethics rules left and right.
But the problem is, Donald Trump is loyal to himself.
He's not loyal to them.
The rules are different for them in ways that they don't understand.
It's creating a lot -- a real lack of clarity.
This is something, though, that I think Senate Republicans deserve a fair amount of blame
for.
They should have been much harder in terms of the confirmation hearings in insisting
on a fairly high level of ethics and a fairly high level of competence in the folks they
let through.
You do that and you have those standards to protect yourself, so these things don't happen
down the road and make you look bad and imperil your agenda.
There is a lot that they didn't do at the front end that is going to come back to bite
them in these coming months.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, speaking of Senate Republicans, they have got other headaches right now.
The leader of the Senate Republicans, David, Mitch McConnell, was backing a particular
candidate, Luther Strange, in the Alabama Republican Senate runoff, the same candidate
President Trump was backing.
But folks like Steve Bannon were backing Roy Moore.
We have talked about Roy Moore here, very, very conservative Republican from Alabama.
How much of a rebuke is this to the Republican majority in the Congress and the president?
DAVID BROOKS: Pretty strong.
And they're rebuking themselves.
The thing I think we learned this week is that Roy Moore and Steve Bannon, what we will
call the nationalists, they have a story to tell.
They have a story about the country and why it's going astray.
They have a story about what is wrong with Washington and the swamp and why it needs
to be drained.
The regular Republicans, the Mitch McConnell Republicans, have no story.
And they thought they could hold off the nationalists with money, and with logistics and with party
organization.
And I think one of the things we have learned is they can't do that, that if you want to
hold off Steve Bannon, you actually have to have an argument, you have to have a story
about why his kind of Republican is the wrong kind.
And they don't have that.
And if they don't have it in Alabama, they are probably not going to have it in Tennessee,
and they may not have it in Wyoming, and they may not have it in Arizona and all the other
states where Republicans are up for grabs, at least in the Senate, in 2018.
EZRA KLEIN: There is one place I would push on that a little bit, which is that I think
David's right, except that what's strange about it is, this is a story that the establishment
Republicans have also been telling.
The hard thing that they have been doing in the past couple of years, a thing that I think
has given them a lot of trouble, giving them to some degree Donald Trump, is, they have
bought into, have helped along, have at the very least indulged a story about what a swamp
Washington is, about how the establishment needs to be torn down, about how government
has become completely dysfunctional, about what Barack Obama was or wasn't doing, about
how corrupt he was, about birth certificates.
And then the voters believe them.
They believed that they were going to repeal and replace Obamacare.
They believed a lot of what the Republicans were saying.
And then, when you get to election time, they try to run these more establishment candidates,
and it's at odds with their own story.
And then folks like Bannon come in and hijack it and become more authentic than the party
itself.
That's worked for Trump, worked for Bannon.
But it's not good long-term for the Republican Party.
And, at some point, they have to tell a story that they can actually fulfill.
JUDY WOODRUFF: But, in the short-term, this is a headache.
DAVID BROOKS: Yes, and I do think Republicans -- right now, the establishment Republicans
are frozen in fear and they're just trying not to be the next target.
But I think, if I were them, I would say, how do we get out in front of this thing?
Maybe Mitch McConnell is not the face of establishment Republican Party.
Maybe we do have to have a new leader, somebody who can actually speak to the country.
And maybe we do have to have a story to tell.
And maybe Mitch McConnell's job shouldn't be secure, because the hatred toward Mitch
McConnell, while I think 50 percent unearned, is vituperative and not going anywhere.
And so if every Republican has to really run as Mitch McConnell's partner, that's going
to be a problem for a lot of Republicans in the primaries.
EZRA KLEIN: True.
JUDY WOODRUFF: If he stays, and they have to figure out a way to work around that, they
have got a complication in so many of these races coming up.
EZRA KLEIN: I think that's right.
It's been true for a couple of years.
One of the things that's going to be a real big question here for Mitch McConnell, the
things that can really imperil you as a Senate leader is if you put your Senate majority
at risk.
So, we just saw a poll come out -- I believe it was today -- that said Roy Moore's only
leading the Democrat in Alabama, who is a strong candidate actually, 50-44.
That is not the margin you would expect to see for a Republican in Alabama.
Now, it's early.
Special elections have unusual dynamics.
I would still certainly put Moore as a favorite.
But if you begin to see an upset in Alabama or Tennessee, then maybe Democrats take something
in Arizona, particularly if Flake loses his primary to another -- to Kelli Ward, to another
sort of nationalist more Tea Party-like challenger.
The thing that will really put McConnell's job in danger in if, in what should be a very
good year for Republicans -- the Senate map looks very good for them -- they lose more
than expected or, even worse, lose the Senate.
And it seems more possible than it did, say, two months ago.
JUDY WOODRUFF: I want to turn to the NFL story.
The president's really gone to war with the National Football League, David.
I'm just learning from our producer that the White House has announced that the White House
chief of staff is going to have to approve, going forward, all charter travel on the part
of senior Cabinet official -- I guess any Cabinet official or Cabinet at any level.
But what about -- David, what about this story that has -- confrontation that's just blown
up before our eyes over the last week-and-a-half, between the president openly criticizing professional
football players and the league standing up for them?
DAVID BROOKS: Yes, well, I don't approve of what Colin Kaepernick did.
I don't think you kneel before the national anthem.
I think, if you are going to protest, you protest in a way that doesn't undermine our
common nationality.
And so I didn't think -- he did what he did.
But Donald Trump reacted in his typical way, which was to find a wound in the American
body politic, in this case, a wound about race, and then to stick a red-hot poker in
it and to rip it open.
And to me, that is what is most troubling about what we're seeing over the last year,
maybe two years, is that the fabric of society is being destroyed by someone who's really
good at finding out where we're weakest, and exploiting those differences in order to launch
really a cultural agenda.
And so the fragmentation we saw last Sunday, and we will probably see again, is something
that he is exacerbating.
And somehow we have to find a way to reverse that cycle.
JUDY WOODRUFF: It doesn't get a more serious indictment than that.
EZRA KLEIN: No.
And I think that part of it -- and I think that's right.
I think that Donald Trump -- Donald Trump didn't need to wade into this fight.
There was plenty going on that he could have focused on, Puerto Rico, tax reform, his own
administration and how it's running.
He looks for these points of cultural conflict.
The one thing that he is doing still that is responsive to his base, right, in a moment
when they're bringing a tax reform bill that doesn't look good for that base, in a moment
when the health care effort was incredibly unpopular among his own voters, as well as
everyone else, he looks for these points of cultural conflict, because that at least is
one place where he's able to deliver.
He's able to deliver on leading one side of a tribal war.
And it's not a good thing for the country.
And it's not a good thing for any of the folks involved.
It's probably not even long-term a very good thing for Donald Trump, but it is the one
place where he can stand on firm ground and be assured of keeping his side coalesced.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, cultural conflict is right.
We can quickly show our audience this news "NewsHour"/Marist poll that shows -- people
were asked about their views on athletes kneeling or locking arms.
Overall, very divided between respectful, disrespectful.
Among Democrats, 82 percent say it's OK, Republicans, 88 percent disrespectful.
David, you're -- the president's going right at a sore place in the American psyche.
DAVID BROOKS: Yes, I wrote a column this week trying to argue that he's sort of the Abbie
Hoffman of our era.
Abbie Hoffman was a prankster in the 1960s who just was great at political theater, great
at pulling at the weaknesses in that -- the establishment of that era.
And his only job was to destroy, so something could replace.
And that's more or less what Donald Trump was hired to do.
He doesn't have to build anything.
He just has to pick apart at the cultural fabric and destroy the consensus of that we
had.
And that's sort of what he's been running on and what he's been doing, with some effectiveness,
culturally for two years.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Which begins to raise the question, how do Democrats and other Republicans counter
this?
EZRA KLEIN: I'm not sure there's a way to counter it.
The thing that Donald Trump does control -- doesn't control votes in the Senate, not control them
in the House, does not even really control the legislative agenda.
He controls his Twitter feed, and, to some degree, he controls the media.
There is a question here, why are we even talking about this, right?
What happened here?
Was there a policy put in place towards the NFL?
Did he do something?
He said some stuff at a rally.
He sent out some tweets.
His ability to pull the media to whatever zone of conflict he wants us in, that is Donald
Trump's one real great power.
He doesn't use it judicially.
He doesn't use it wisely.
He doesn't always use it always in ways that benefit himself.
I'm not sure that pulling apart our cultural consensus is even good for him, again, in
the long run.
But there isn't a lot that other actors in politics can do, so long as Trump's ability
to move the media is as complete as it currently is.
JUDY WOODRUFF: It's hard to see how others compete with that, isn't it?
DAVID BROOKS: Well, we have to find -- if we solved the underlying problems of the country,
a large number of people who are financially disenfranchised, then that will make the culture
wars a lot less fierce.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, we are -- but you're right, Ezra.
There is a lot that we're talking about, and Donald Trump is behind it.
We didn't get to tax reform.
We got -- I think we may have a few weeks to talk about that.
EZRA KLEIN: That's the Trump administration in a nutshell right there.
(LAUGHTER)
JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, that's for sure.
Ezra Klein, thank you for joining us.
David Brooks, have a great weekend.
DAVID BROOKS: Thank you.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Thank you.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Stay with us.
Coming up on the "NewsHour": a modern-day experience that hearkens back to the time
of slavery; and we launch our new series on America's opioid crisis.
But first to a story of poetry and place, and a new way to look at the life of an ever-evolving
city.
Jeffrey Brown reports from Seattle.
JEFFREY BROWN: How do you map a city in all its complicated glory?
For Seattle, a bird's-eye map in 1889 showed its early expansion.
Foot traffic downtown was highlighted in the 1920s, pedestrian fatalities in the 1940s.
There's this minimalist map of the city's quirky and infamous intersections, and now,
a different way of seeing the city, the Poetic Grid.
The idea of the Poetic Grid is to capture a sense of place in a city going through rapid
change, and to use the words of the people who live here.
CLAUDIA CASTRO LUNA, Creator, Seattle's Poetic Grid: I have a background in urban planning,
and, you know, it was a happy convergence, I think, of my interests in poetry and place.
JEFFREY BROWN: Claudia Castro Luna dreamed up the online digital map in 2015, when she
became Seattle's first civic poet.
It's a two-year position administered by the city's Office of Arts and Culture.
She ran a series of workshops at Seattle's public libraries, and asked people to write
about the place they live.
CLAUDIA CASTRO LUNA: We all have stories to tell about the place we live in.
And we all have memories attached to the place we live in.
And so, you know, it was like opening up a faucet.
And people have stories to tell.
And that's one of the marvelous things.
At the end, I told them, you will write.
You will see you will have a poem.
And, indeed, they had one.
And it's such a pleasure.
It's a pleasurable thing.
JEFFREY BROWN: The poems for the grid span the city.
Some are about home, memories of growing up in the affluent Blue Ridge neighborhood.
Others are about homelessness, the cold concrete of a Seattle underpass.
There are poems left in their native tongues, Spanish, Arabic.
The writers run from well-established poets to first-timers.
And they reflect the diversity of the changing city, where cranes dot the skyline.
Seattle is adding more people per year than during the post-gold rush boom years.
CLAUDIA CASTRO LUNA: Some of the poems express very well what it feels like to not recognize
the place you grew up in, because the buildings that you had so much attachment and were meaningful
to you are no longer there, and the sense of this location, of turning a corner and
the building that was there is no longer there.
JEFFREY BROWN: Changed that fast?
CLAUDIA CASTRO LUNA: Oh, yes, it has.
JEFFREY BROWN: Hing Hay Park in Seattle's International District has seen its share
of change.
KOON WOON, Seattle: I first moved in here when I couldn't afford rent anywhere else
in the city.
And my uncle said well, there's a room here for $60 a month.
And I came here to look at it.
And there's this tiny little table.
I said, I can put my typewriter on top of that.
So, I took the room.
JEFFREY BROWN: Koon Woon was born in China, but moved to Seattle in 1960.
In the 1980s, he lived just a block from here, sometimes homeless, struggling with mental
illness.
His poem, "The High Walls I Cannot Scale," is now part of the grid.
KOON WOON: "Desolate in my Chinatown morning, among the scraps and people sleeping in urine
doorways, I ache from the politics of the heart.
Pigeons flock together in Hing Hay Park, no children to greet them.
I walk for my sanity, since, alone in my room before dawn, the mind constructs improbable
things."
JEFFREY BROWN: Why are you writing about these things?
KOON WOON: Well, I first started writing poetry as a way to deal with my mental illness.
I could articulate my feelings and try to clarify to myself what my thoughts were.
I would try to separate delusions from reality.
JEFFREY BROWN: There go the pigeons you write about, huh?
KOON WOON: Yes, that's the flock of pigeons, yes.
LILY BAUMGART, Seattle Youth Poet Laureate: I always enjoy coming back.
JEFFREY BROWN: For 17-year-old Lily Baumgart, animals figured into her writing as well.
LILY BAUMGART: The squirrels here are very aggressive.
They expect to be fed by people.
And so we'd write stories about why they'd come up to people, how humans' interactions
with animals change their behaviors.
JEFFREY BROWN: We met in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood at Volunteer Park, where
Baumgart took field trips in elementary school and conjured up images of what lived in the
reservoir, inspiring her poem.
LILY BAUMGART: "Volunteer Park, they say there's a giant squid in the reservoir, that if you
could climb the fence, you could stick your hand into the bright water and feel his slimy
body swimming by yours.
When it rained we would hide in trees and feel their cold bark underneath our toes.
We'd laugh so loud that the sky would be scared of us and our umbrella laughter."
JEFFREY BROWN: So now you're here, much older, right?
LILY BAUMGART: Yes.
JEFFREY BROWN: You think the squid is still out there?
LILY BAUMGART: I like to think he's still there.
(LAUGHTER)
LILY BAUMGART: I think it would be a lot more fun if we had a squid there.
But I don't think he is.
JEFFREY BROWN: Baumgart is now Seattle's youth poet laureate and one of the youngest contributors
to the new grid.
LILY BAUMGART: I get to write about myself and my own experiences, without it seeming
like me, me, me.
I can kind of hide it behind using different metaphors or even characters, for lack of
a better word.
I feel like poetry has a sense of intimacy that other writing just can't give you, which
I enjoy.
JEFFREY BROWN: Poetry brought something else to Claudia Castro Luna, a way to work through
traumatic childhood memories of war in El Salvador that forced her family to leave their
home when she was 14.
CLAUDIA CASTRO LUNA: It was a tremendous loss of place, of culture, of family, of language.
And I think it's taken me my entire life.
Actually, I think a lot of, all of my writing has to do with understanding that -- what
it meant to lose that place.
And this is why I'm interested in other people's lives and what they have to say about the
place they occupy.
"A corner to love.
Maps of this city number in the thousands, each unique and folded neatly inside each
citizen's heart.
We live in the city, and the city lives in us."
JEFFREY BROWN: Castro Luna's term as civic poet has ended, but she plans to add more
tales of the city to the evolving online map.
For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Jeffrey Brown in Seattle, Washington.
JUDY WOODRUFF: You can watch the poets read their full poems on our Web site, PBS.org/NewsHour.
Sometimes overlooked in this week's debate over whether athletes should take a knee during
the playing of the national anthem before games is the original focus of Colin Kaepernick's
protest, the deaths of unarmed black men in confrontations with law enforcement.
Riley Temple is a lawyer and author.
And, tonight, he shares his Humble Opinion on how those confrontations with police are
a direct legacy of slavery and the racism that fueled it.
RILEY TEMPLE, Author: Whenever I go to the Smithsonian's African American History Museum,
I make my pilgrimage to Joseph Trammell's tin wallet.
It's a handmade, thin case that holds his freedom papers.
Joseph Trammell, a black man, was born a slave in Virginia in 1831.
When he was 21, he was freed, and surely believed that he had some measure of liberty so long
as he had his tin wallet with him.
When he was stopped, he invariably had to effect a servile posture to the whites, who
demanded to know who, why, how come, and what for.
The very sight of him, no slave tag, no white supervision in sight, was terrifying, an errant
and aimlessly roaming Negro going about his ordinary days.
His family undoubtedly reminded him, be nonthreatening, say yes, ma'am, no, sir, effect servility,
cower even.
Just don't get killed.
I was having an ordinary day not long ago, when, in my upscale and overwhelmingly white
Washington, D.C., neighborhood where I have lived for the past 25 years, my dog Wilson
and I walked past an apartment building just across the street from my own.
As Wilson paused, a blustery white man appeared and bellowed at me to not let my dog stop
there.
Then he demanded to know if I lived in his neighborhood.
I asked why it was a pertinent question.
He became furious, threatened to call the police.
Three cops in two cruisers appeared within a couple of minutes, flashing lights and all.
They told me they were answering a trespassing complaint.
I pulled out my I.D.
I didn't have to, but I knew I had to show my papers to de-escalate the situation.
I wasn't a trespasser in this rich white neighborhood.
I lived there.
I got out of my brush with the police unscathed, but not before telling a belligerent cop to
go to hell.
And, in so doing, I broke a rule, the rule by which the Joseph Trammells of slavery days
lived, and by which all black people today are told to obey, in order to survive confrontations
with law enforcement: Be nice.
Be servile.
Say, no, sir, yes, ma'am.
By all means, do nothing that smacks of dignity or claim of right, else you will be killed.
My story was minor.
But so too is failing to signal a lane change or selling illegal cigarettes, and those acts
turned deadly for Sandra Bland and Eric Garner.
By questioning my right to be, I was suddenly slammed onto that continuum of history, a
black man, perceived to be an interloper, a trespasser, an imminent threat, just like
freed slave Joseph Trammell in 1852 Virginia.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Every day brings another story about the depth of this country's opioid crisis:
overdoses up, emergency services overwhelmed, another family burying a loved one.
On Monday, we're starting an extensive series here on the "NewsHour," broadcast and online.
It's called America Addicted, and it will look at how opioids are affecting communities
throughout the country, from its toll on one city in West Virginia, to the rise of powerful
new synthetic drugs like fentanyl in New England, and how new programs out West are trying to
combat addiction.
First, we wanted to take a quick look at exactly how this crisis began.
William Brangham has that.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: It's hard to grasp the full scope and scale of the opioid crisis we're
in the midst of.
The numbers are staggering.
Almost half-a-million Americans have died in the last 15 years from an overdose, and
the majority of those involve opioids.
On average, 91 Americans are still dying every single day.
In that same period, the rate of addiction to opioids has shot up by almost 500 percent.
And the availability of addiction treatment hasn't kept up at all.
So, how did we get here?
Most experts say this crisis began in the 1990s, when some doctors and medical associations
argued that, for generations, their profession had ignored the problem of chronic pain, which
had caused unnecessary suffering for millions of patients.
They started pushing the idea that pain be seen as the fifth vital sign, something to
be checked as often as blood pressure, and treated accordingly.
At roughly the same time, the pharmaceutical industry, which was eager to boost sales of
its new class of painkillers, like OxyContin, told doctors that these new drugs could be
used without fear of their patients becoming addicted.
The industry even put out testimonial videos, like this one from Purdue Pharma in 2000.
MAN: We doctors were wrong in thinking that opioids can't be used long-term.
They can be, and they should be.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: The industry and even some doctors also cited this one-paragraph letter
posted in "The New England Journal of Medicine" back in 1980.
Its authors had looked at the use of opioid painkillers at one burn unit in Massachusetts
and wrote -- quote -- "The development of addiction is rare in medical patients with
no history of addiction."
While the authors and "The New England Journal" have both said that this letter was misinterpreted,
it was cited hundreds of times as an endorsement for the widespread use of opioids for pain.
And, in fact, starting in the late '90s and early 2000s, the rate of opioid prescriptions
began to snowball.
By 2015, according to the CDC, enough pills were being prescribed for every American to
be medicated around the clock for three straight weeks.
But studies have now clearly shown that opioid medications can lead to dependency within
just a matter of days, and so this flood of prescriptions led to a surge of addiction.
And it also drove a steady rise in overdose fatalities.
With these numbers growing, the medical community, local governments and law enforcement began
to take action.
New prescribing guidelines were issued.
Databases were created to track prescriptions.
MAN: This was a pill mill operation.
Those are the allegations tonight.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: And law enforcement cracked down on the so-called pill mills, the doctors
and pharmacies that had been recklessly flooding certain communities with opioids.
In 2010, prescriptions of opioids peaked, and have fallen ever since.
Problem solved, right?
Not so fast.
In 2015, there were still three times as many opioid prescriptions being written as there
were in 1999, and many people have turned to cheaper opioid substitutes, like heroin.
Seizing on this booming market, drug dealers sought to boost potency, and their own profits,
by lacing their heroin and other drugs with powerful synthetic opioids like fentanyl.
Those additives have only accelerated the rise in overdose deaths, which last year killed
more than 64,000 Americans.
By almost any measure, this is the biggest drug epidemic in American history, dwarfing
the number of lives lost to crack cocaine or methamphetamines.
It's a crisis that took decades to create, and experts say will take a great deal of
time, patience and work to undo.
For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm William Brangham.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Our series America Addicted will continue all next week here on the "NewsHour."
Meantime, Robert Costa is preparing for "Washington Week," which airs later tonight.
Robert, what's on tap?
ROBERT COSTA: Tonight, we will have more on Tom Price's exit as health and human services
secretary and the investigation into other officials who have been using taxpayer money
to fly in private jets, plus the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico -- later on "Washington
Week" -- Judy.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And we will be watching.
And tomorrow, on "PBS NewsHour Weekend," meet the American citizen who is leading a rebel
fight to change South Sudan's government.
NARRATOR: In the hills of Northeastern Uganda, a forest path leads the way to war-torn Sudan.
We are traveling with South Sudanese rebel commander Martin Abucha.
What separates Abucha from other combatants in this war is, he's a dual South Sudanese
and American citizen, with family in the United States.
MARTIN ABUCHA, Rebel Commander: I would like to enjoy eating hamburgers.
I would like to enjoy going to Burger King or McDonald's with my daughters and things
like that.
NARRATOR: Abucha's life as rebel is a far cry from his comfortable life in the United
States.
Despite the hardship, Abucha is determined to fight to overthrow a government that stands
accused of widespread human rights abuses and ethnic cleansing.
MARTIN ABUCHA: You know, to us, we are not rebels.
We're people fighting for their rights.
JUDY WOODRUFF: That's tomorrow on "PBS NewsHour Weekend."
And that's the "NewsHour" for tonight.
I'm Judy Woodruff.
Thank you, and have a great weekend.
PBS NewsHour full episode, September 29, 2017 PBS NewsHour Weekend full episode Sept. 24, 2017 Brooks and Klein on Tom Price’s plane scandal, Trump taking aim at the NFL Desperation in Puerto Rico fuels frustration with federal response PBS NewsHour full episode Sept. 12, 2017 PBS NewsHour Sept. 28, 2017 PBS NewsHour full episode Sept. 11, 2017 PBS NewsHour full episode Sept. 6, 2017 PBS NewsHour full episode Sept. 19, 2017 PBS NewsHour full episode Sept. 20, 2017

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