This is the Oct. 29 edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday.
Is the Boss MAGA’s Maestro?
The question came to mind while talking with Jon Landau and Warren Zanes on the set of Morning Joe. We were discussing Zane’s new film “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere,” which stars Jeremy Allen White and takes the audience through the Boss’s battle with depression following his rise to superstardom in the early 1980s. Springsteen responded to that personal crisis with the cathartic album “Nebraska,” a collection of sparse songs laid down on crude recording equipment.
The lost heroes of Springsteen’s Nebraska were working-class young men scattered across the Rust Belt, trapped in the same dead-end factory jobs their fathers had.
A generation later, too many of their children are now languishing in the shadows of shuttered factories, drug epidemics, and the rising specter of artificial intelligence.
As Axios’s Jim VandeHei reported today on Morning Joe, the AI apocalypse is not coming; it’s here.
The lost souls of Springsteen’s America prove the grim reality that upward mobility for most working-class families is dead. The residents of “Nebraska” will also be the first to be crushed by cuts to Medicaid and food assistance — and the last to benefit from trillion-dollar tax cuts, billion-dollar bailouts and golden ballroom designs that would make Marie Antoinette blush.
Forty years after “Nebraska,” Springsteen’s heroes are still looking for a reason to believe.
“I don’t see a path for that.”
WILL TRUMP’S LUCK EVER RUN OUT?
Republicans want the president to come home.
Polls are breaking Democrats’ way in Virginia, New Jersey and California as the government shutdown grinds on into its 29th day. As he continues his strategically important tour of Asia, Mr. Trump finds his standing with Americans at its lowest ebb when it comes to the economy. Five leading polls show the president’s average approval rating on the economy sinking into the 30s, as voters face soaring health care costs, rising electric bills and even higher prices because of the president’s never-ending trade wars.
But the GOP is doubting whether their leader even cares.
As Morning Joe’s Jonathan Lemire co-writes in the Atlantic:
“When it comes to the government shutdown, Trump barely seems to be paying attention…. Some Republicans have begun to push back against Trump’s absentee approach. They’re signaling–both in public and private–that they want him to employ an ‘Art of the Deal’–type strategy and help end the shutdown.”
Is the Maginot Line that has long protected the White House from skeptics finally crumbling? Republicans criticized the president’s efforts to silence late-night comics and a few even oppose him blowing up people on boats off the coast of Venezuela. MTG hammers away daily against the GOP’s see-no-evil approach to soaring health care costs. And yesterday, five GOP Senators voted against Trump’s “emergency declaration” raising Brazil’s tariffs to 50% in retaliation against former president Jair Bolsonaro’s prosecution.
Trump has long drawn strength from a subservient Congress and an economy that keeps flying forward through cross-currents and headwinds. But as Ed Luce said today on “Morning Joe,” Trump’s economic fortunes are being sustained by little more than the AI gold rush.
“Napoleon considered luck the most important quality in a general, and Trump was born lucky,” the FT editor added. But the question hanging over Washington is how long until The Donald’s luck runs out.
Don’t hold your breath.
WHERE’S THE BEEF … FROM?
Broadway is buzzing over talk that Evita star Rachel Zegler will bring her remarkable rendition of “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina” from a balcony in London’s West End to the Great White Way. But West of Manhattan, American farmers are less jazzed about another Argentinian import that’s headed to the USA.
Vice President JD Vance learned that grizzled truth yesterday while being served up as the main course for this week’s Senate Republican lunch. Republican senators from the heartland blasted the Trump administration for allowing Argentina to ship four times as much beef to the United States.
“You just threw ranchers out!” one senator groused to Vance. Majority Leader John Thune warned that “this isn’t the way to do it.” And Punchbowl’s Andrew Desiderio told “Morning Joe” that as many as seven Republicans confronted the vice president directly about cattle imports and a Truth Social post in which the president seemed to insult ranchers.
Inside the Senate GOP lunch with Vice President Vance
— Andrew Desiderio (@AndrewDesiderio) October 28, 2025
Vance was bombarded with questions about the Argentinian beef issue, per multiple attendees. GOP senators told him it was an “insult” to farmers/ranchers
Vance at one point joked, “does anyone have questions NOT about beef?”
So while Broadway dreams of an “Evita” encore–perhaps with its own outdoor balcony setup–ranchers across America’s heartland will be humming a grimmer refrain. The president who bailed out Argentina’s government and undercut U.S. farmers obviously believes that nothing says “America First” like a cheap sirloin from Patagonia.
ONLY MURDERS IN THE U.K.
The “Only Murders in the Building” crew will apparently catch the early plane back to London for a much-anticipated sixth season next year.
“We’re going to London, y’all!” leading lady Selena Gomez confirmed on Instagram yesterday after rumors circulated on Monday that the star-studded cast would vacate its Upper West Side digs in the storied Arconia next season for fresh flats across the pond.
The Hulu series featuring Steve Martin as Charles-Haden Savage, Martin Short as Oliver Putnam, and Gomez as Mabel Mora, just wrapped a bold-name fifth season showcasing Oscar winners Meryl Streep, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Renée Zellweger, Christoph Waltz, and Dianne Wiest. So many other stars stopped by the Arconia that New York Magazine joked that “the show would have to cast Emma Stone, Adrien Brody, and the ghost of Katharine Hepburn to get any more prestigious.”
The exterior shots of the Arconia are filmed on the Upper West Side outside of the Belnord, a pre-war, block-long condo on the corner of 86th and Broadway. While the address used for the Arconia is 261 West 86th St., the Belnord actually sits down the road at 225 West 86th Street. Yet one of the great truths of life, according to British writer Graham Swift, is that fact and fiction are “always merging.” After all, Sherlock’s 221B Baker Street was once a fictional address, too.
EXTRA HOT TEA
Auto delinquencies have jumped 50% since 2010 and are now at their highest rate since the Great Recession.
- Southern states have the highest delinquency rates, led by Mississippi at 9.8%.
- Younger borrowers are struggling the most, with Gen Z hitting delinquency rates of 7.5%.
ON THIS DAY
“It came with a speed and ferocity that left men dazed. The bottom, simply fell out of the market. The streets were crammed with a mixed crowd—agonized little speculators, sold-out traders, inquisitive individuals and tourists seeking a closer view of the national catastrophe… Where was it going to end?”
FROM THE BOOKSHELF
“Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice”
Writer Amy Wallace came on the show to discuss a powerful new memoir by Virginia Giuffre, in which she reveals the abuse she endured inside Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal trafficking enterprise.
Wallace, who ghostwrote the book with Giuffre, said the experience did not die with Epstein in his cell.
“Those guys are walking around. If they’re alive, they’re walking around, and they have never been held to account.”
Mika added: “It is worth reading this book if you think you were bored of the news around Jeffrey Epstein, because there are many offenders out there, many who are scot-free while these girls are tortured and ruined for the rest of their lives. They will never be the same. If anybody in Congress wants to cover this up, doesn’t want to see and reveal what happened here, and take action, check out this book and then look in the mirror. Really, what’s your job?”
CATCH UP ON “MORNING JOE”
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Joe stunned by Sen. Tuberville’s comments on SNAP and ‘young men’
Hurricane Melissa slams into Cuba as a dangerous Category 3 after devastating Jamaica
SPILL IT!
Have a question for Joe, Mika or Willie? Send them over, and we will answer some of them on the show!
P.S. Did you miss yesterday’s inaugural edition of The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe? Read it here.
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Former Rep. Joe Scarborough, R-Fla., is co-host of MS NOW's "Morning Joe" alongside Mika Brzezinski — a show that Time magazine calls "revolutionary." In addition to his career in television, Joe is a two-time New York Times best-selling author. His most recent book is "The Right Path: From Ike to Reagan, How Republicans Once Mastered Politics — and Can Again."