welcome to the beat. We begin with a warning from Barack Obama as we're coming on the air.

Former president, who's actually known for his efforts to often avoid commenting constantly and

having a daily battle with Donald Trump, is now speaking about what he refers to as the current

government's autocratic tactics, the need to defend democracy, and the costs and risks that

some elite Democrats may have to be willing to bear. So this is pretty interesting, newsy.

These are photos here brand new from an appearance he just made. And we're going to play you

some of that brand new Obama sound shortly. The context, of course, is the escalating power grabs, the abuses,

the efforts by President Trump to normalize a different way of patrolling and policing and

using force in America and concurrently trying to grind down dissent. Even as dissent is hitting

some of its highest levels in decades. You have to go back to

the marches against the Iraq war to find anything like this, five million people across our

country protesting in unity on one big overwhelming issue. It wasn't just against Trump's tariffs.

It wasn't against a specific thing he said or did. It was no kings.

It was the idea that unified all these people this weekend that there cannot be kinglike powers

in this country, not in the name of immigration enforcement, not in the name of some sort of

muscular law and order union, that there has to be a line.

Against that backdrop, Trump is continuing to press forward this week,

activating another 2,000 National Guard troops to L.A.

They join the 2100 servicemen and 700 Marines who are on the ground,

and that is notable because this does not appear to be a fact-based

or security-oriented decision, because there's mostly calm in the streets. The original

incidents that this was supposed to patrol are now over a week and a half ago. The curfew has actually

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