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Putting U.S. troops on the ground, special forces, and getting them out today are two different things, right?
That's absolutely the case.
And the question did not go there in terms of direct action on the part of U.S. forces.
My sense is certainly, I think, the impression that President Trump put out with his social media post was that anybody who is not doing their all to bring out those hostages and Turkey could be doing more and Qatar could be doing more in particular because they have communication with Hamas will be held accountable by the Trump administration.
It's the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute.
Roger Zachheim is the Washington director there.
ReaganFoundation.org is where you can go if you want to sift through this survey for yourself.
And we appreciate your time this morning on the Washington Journal.
Thanks for having me on.
Hey, focus now.
We're going to leave this, but you can watch it.
And it's X-Band viewers are familiar with Mark Caputo, former Politico, current bulwark national political reporter.
And Mark Caputo, before we get to transition, first your takeaway from President-elect Trump's Meet the Press interview yesterday.
What stood out to you?
Not a lot of surprises.
I think what stands out to me is a lot of surprise from the news media that he and the commentariat that he's planning to be serious about mass deportations and that as the callers seem surprised now that that could include families of legal immigrants.
Now, I don't think the United States has the power to deport legal immigrants, but he is saying that there is going to be a family separation policy.
And what reaction has struck you outside of the political media?
Has there been reaction from Congress that you've seen so far from this interview?
I haven't really paid attention to that, to be honest.
You know, Congress right now is sort of, it has its own fiscal deadlines it has to meet, and it's tied up, at least on the Senate side, in what to do about Trump's nominations or his nominees to be in his cabinet.
And let's go to the nominees, Pete Hegseth.
What's the latest on his nomination?
The Trump team feels relatively good about his position, especially compared to how it was just a few days ago.
In their estimation, the last few days, last two or three days of the week, Hegseth closed strong.
No new allegations of wrongdoing, allegations, which, by the way, is denied.
And they believe that the longer that the Hegseth nomination proceeds and the longer Republican senators don't say no, at least publicly, the higher the chances are that Pete Hegseth gets a favorable vote and becomes the next Secretary of Defense.
Who are the Republican senators who could still say no that you're watching?
Well, obviously, Joni Ernst is the one to really watch.
And then there's Lindsey Graham to a degree, but the possibility that, or the likelihood that Lindsey Graham winds up bucking President Trump on the Secretary of Defense nomination is pretty small.
Ernst is under incredible pressure from the grassroots, the MAGA roots, the right wing, whatever you want to call it.
That's a state, Iowa, that, but he won by 13 points or something.
So she's up for reelection this coming cycle.
The likelihood of her saying no, politically speaking, is pretty low, but I guess we'll have to wait and see.
She hasn't said no.
She also hasn't said yes.
And on Friday, she and Hegseth indicated they had a second and productive meeting.
If that sort of thaws, it's hard to see how he winds up without a majority of the Republican conference, but it's not impossible to see.
It's expected right now that Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Mirkowski of Alaska, and Senator Mitch McConnell, the former leader, are no votes.
That's what's expected at least.
That is enough if it's just three no votes against Hegseth to get confirmed.
So, again, they feel relatively good about it.
The Trump transition team does.
They believe that time is in their favor as long as they can sort of keep grinding clock.
On December 20th, the Republican senators leave town for winter break, holiday break, or whatever it's called.
And there's one thing that Republican senators hate, or senators of all stripes hate.
It's Republicans bird-dogging them outside of their offices, asking them about controversial nominations and whether they're going to confirm them.
That goes away starting December 20th, and then the sort of the new year starts.
In that span of time, again, if Hegseth is not polled, if he doesn't withdraw, and if there aren't four hell no votes in the Republican conference, then the chances, again, kind of increase and they increase closer and closer.
Just bottom line is that the Trump campaign, the Trump transition team, the Trump base believes he has a mandate.
He won the popular vote for the first time for a Republican since 2004.
He obviously won a majority of the Electoral College vote.
There are Republican majorities in the Senate and in the House, and therefore, they expect that his nominees get confirmed by the Republican Senate.
It's an understandable position.
If the Hegseth nomination falls apart for whatever reason, is Ron DeSantis the next man up?
It looks that way where we stand now, but one of the dangerous things is kind of predicting what Donald Trump is going to do.
It's what makes him a unique figure.
It is confirmed that Donald Trump did call Ron DeSantis when the peak or when the initial crush of bad headlines started to really tear away at Hegseth.
And in that conversation, Trump had mentioned to DeSantis the possibility of being Secretary of Defense.
Now, this is a discussion they actually started having in June.
And it wasn't sort of real in June.
Trump obviously had not even been elected yet.
And so in this most recent conversation, just a few days ago, Trump had dangled this possibility.
And DeSantis signaled that he was interested in it.
That doesn't mean that he's necessarily going to do it.
And it doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be offered.
There's a lot of things that have to happen in between.
But the main thing that has to happen in between is that Hegseth needs to withdraw one way or another.
And right now, Hegseth is saying he's going to fight like hell.
Donald Trump has told other people he likes the fact that Pete Hegseth fights like hell.
He's starting to publicly push him more.
So things are looking as we stand now.
It's Monday morning, right?
Things are looking okay for Hegseth in the minds of the Trump transition team.
That can obviously change just on a dime.
As we stand now, about 20 minutes left with Mark Caputo.
If you want to join the conversation, easy to do.
Phone line split as usual.
Democrats 202-748-8,000.
Republicans 202-748-8001.
Independents 202-748-8002.
You can see his work at the Bulwark, thebullwork.com.
It's Magaville, is the name of his substack.
One of the recent pieces, the two nominees for whom Donald Trump is prepared to go to war for.
That includes Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr.
Explain.
Those are the two, Gabbard and Kennedy, who were a feature of the Trump campaign.
They traveled the swing states, the two of them together.
They appeared in these joint events where they drew 1,000, 2,000 people in places like Dearborn, Michigan and Las Vegas, Nevada.
And Trump featured them as being part of his new coalition, his new political coalition, and now, implicitly in that, his new governing coalition.
They're both former Democratic candidates for president, both of them, and they've both left the Democratic Party.
And so they're sort of representing kind of the axis of the canceled, so to speak.
But more to the point, they are these anti-establishment figures whom Trump wants to burnish his record with, his legacy with.
And, you know, there's certainly a lot of controversy over both of them from the health establishment.
Kennedy would be the HHS secretary.
From the intelligence community, Tulsi Gabbard would be the director of national intelligence.
But in the Trump view, the more you have the establishment criticizing the picks, the more it indicates how valuable they are.
And so the oppositions to Heg Seth largely are on personal matters, his behavior.
Same with Matt Gates, the now withdrawn Attorney General.
To a smaller degree, Kash Patel, the FBI pick that Donald Trump wants to lead the agency.
Whereas Gabbard and Kennedy are more on policy grounds.
And that is something that the Trump team tells me that Trump intends to fight for.
But again, it's Trump.
Let's see what happens.
You mentioned Kash Patel.
What's the latest on him as the head of FBI?
Not a lot.
I think CNN just did a piece about how he grew to loathe the DC establishment.
That makes the Republican hearts at Mar-a-Lago go pitter-patter.
So I haven't heard what his whip count is yet.
While there are opponents of him, certainly on the left and the media and among critics and a few on the right, there's a feeling in Trump world that he's probably going to make it as well.
We're talking with Mark Caputo, taking your phone calls, and he's with us for about another 15 minutes.
So go ahead and get those calls in.
This is Bruce out of Lexington, Kentucky, up first, independent.
Good morning.
Hello.
Go ahead, Bruce.
Bruce, you're with us.
We've lost Bruce.
I heard him for a second there.
This is Donald out of Hawaii this morning, up early, independent.
Donald, you're on with Mark Caputo.
Hey, good morning, sir.
I would just like to ask you, I hear all these politics on TV, and you hear first black president, you hear this person.
Why isn't Telsey Gabbard with her record not being pushed like every other thing that's going on in our country?
Why is that?
Well, I can't answer for why the rest of the mainstream media is not talking about how she'd be a historic first, a woman from Hawaii, a woman of color.
But my guess is what the caller's getting at is the perception widely held, and I'm not saying it's wrong, of media bias, where a lot of the mainstream media will spend time touting that someone is a historic first because of their race or gender, and they're not doing it with Tulsi Gabbard.
I think it's a fair criticism.
I'm not saying it's accurate.
I'm not saying it's inaccurate, but that's a good question for NBC, ABC, CBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Associated Press, and the like.
Another media question for you.
This is from Aztech on X saying, Mark Caputo, are any of the nominees not qualified to fill their positions?
And why are so many in the media upset that the nominees are not members of the swamp?
It appears that most of the U.S. does not feel that the U.S. government is working well, so why not stop the insanity and have a new type of nominee?
Well, comments well made, comments taken.
An interesting thing happened over the weekend.
There was the Harvard Kennedy School, its Institute of Politics had the heads of the Trump campaign and the heads of the Biden-Harris campaign or the Harris-Biden campaigns, depending on how you look at it, talk about the election.
And there was a very interesting comment from Rob Flaherty, who was the deputy campaign manager for both Biden and Harris's presidential campaigns, who had said that for the left, for Democrats, their amplification systems are the mainstream media and Hollywood.
And kind of pivoting off of my comments from the last caller, that's a clarion call for the rest of us in the mainstream media to start analyzing how we cover Republicans and cover these issues going forward.
Because in the eyes of Democrats, the mainstream media is part of its megaphone.
And while it's our job to report the news, there is a lot of risk there if we are continuing to be perceived as favoring one side.
What's the megaphone?
What's the amplification system for the right?
In that conversation, they discussed that the right has a bigger wealth of alternative media.
Elon Musk owns Twitter.
And there's all of these podcasts which are starting to eat up major amounts of market share from the mainstream media.
This is Samuel Next out of Colorado Independent.
You're on with Mark Caputo.
Go ahead.
Yes.
Can you hear me?
Yes, sir.
Yes, sir.
Yeah, I just wanted to say that, you know, most of the picks that Trump's picking are just these rich white guys.
There's maybe a woman or two, but people are going to have buyers' remorse when it comes to Donald Trump.
You just wait and see.
Also, I'd like to know if you voted for him.
Because a lot of you men get on now whining about Trump, but then most of these men voted for him.
Mark Caputo.
I'm not whining about Trump, but I think you're accurate in saying that the voters might have buyers' remorse.
I think you see that frequently regardless of who's in office.
We elect presidents and we elect Congresses, and then the American people, at least as of late, wind up not happy with them.
If you just look at the polling, happened to Biden, happened to Trump, thing happened to Obama before him.
And then once they leave office, everyone's like, oh, wow, weren't they great?
It's kind of odd.
Regardless of who's in office, another question that comes up is: what's the role of the vice president?
What is JD Vance's role looking like?
That's a great question.
Go ahead.
Yeah, that's a story I've wanted to write for a while, but I don't have enough color.
But from what I'm being told from folks around Trump, he plays an important advisory role, and he is being used currently as what they call the Sherpa in Congress for some of these more controversial nominees.
So he's Trump's eyes and ears in the Senate.
He's making the case because JD Vance, as vice president-elect, is still an Ohio senator.
He's talking to his fellow senators trying to get these nominees across the finish line.
In one case with Matt Gates, obviously there just weren't the votes.
But with these other three more controversial ones or four controversial ones, the question is still open.
The jury's still out, so to speak, and Vance is working that hard.
In the advisory role capacity, is it just the Senate and the Sherpa, or are there issue areas in which JD Vance is advising Donald Trump?
And if so, what are they?
I don't specifically know that, but the two have a very good relationship.
Trump, however, is well known for taking advice from everyone and soliciting every possible opinion.
Bob Woodward's book, War, which was just released.
Incidentally, I wouldn't recommend reading it.
It's kind of, well, anyway, there is a great anecdote in it in which he discusses how Trump was in a meeting with Keith Kellogg, one of his generals, while president, and he solicited opinions from all of the officials in the room.
You know, there's a general and these high-ranking officials, and there was a person there who was a note-taker, just kind of a low-level staffer taking notes to memorialize it.
And Trump asked that person their opinion and wanted to solicit it.
And the person was like, no, I'm just a note-taker.
He says, doesn't matter.
You're in the room.
You heard it.
What do you think?
It's just a good example of the way in which he sort of processes information and solicits it.
Why wouldn't you recommend it?
You're a political reporter.
He's a political reporter.
It's supposed, well, it just basically read as if it was co-authored by Anthony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, the Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor.
It just seemed, it paid short shrift.
It went out of its way to kind of praise Biden's foreign policy.
I'm not saying Biden's foreign policy was bad, and it did a good job explaining why his foreign policy with Ukraine was a success.
But it spent precious little time on the failures of the withdrawal in Afghanistan.
And this is supposedly a book about war.
And it didn't really delve enough into the total lack of vision by our intelligence services.
And Jake Sullivan specifically on the Middle East and 10-7, that is October 7th.
You know, eight days before October 7th, Jake Sullivan was boasting about how there was peace and quiet in the Middle East.
And eight days later, well, that wound up not being true.
That's something that probably deserves a little more exegesis in a book about that topic, and yet it was completely absent.
So it kind of read like a pretty biased account.
Nevertheless, there's some good nuggets in there, but Woodward's written better.
No shade to him overall.
I mean, the guy's a fabulous reporter, Nixon, et cetera.
So that's just not a book I would recommend.
I didn't mean to talk about this today.
What's the best political book that you've read this year coming to the end of December?
Well, I'm reading, well, I have it on my desk.
I'm reading, I just read The Demon of Unrest by Eric Larson, which was about the lead up to the Civil War.
And I'm reading another related Civil War book called Civil Wars, and it's the history of the United States from 1850 to 1878.
And what's interesting about that period of time for me relative to our current period is Donald Trump really sort of walks out of that period of history.
The kind of more of a frontiersman and the growing nation.
He seems to be sort of more of a throwback to that time than we've seen in the sort of more recent era, albeit he is a more modern iteration of it.
I probably could do a better job explaining this had I thought I was going to come on and talk about the books I was going to read.
That's all right.
If viewers want to watch their books rather than read them, C-SPAN's book TV covered the demon of unrest a couple times, including at the National Book Festival.
Eric Larson speaking about his book.
You can watch it at booktv.org.
Back to calls for you.
I know we only have a little bit of time.
This is David in Flemington, New Jersey, Independent.
Good morning.
Thank you and your guests for making my call.
I do have a larger question about human beings and change, but if I may, I'd like to reference a comment by my wife's cousin, Gavin DeBecker, a friend of RFK Jr., and probably the most renowned security analyst in the country.
And the week ago, Sunday New York Times, he talked about how people change.
And Gavin himself, I know through the family, had an excruciating life growing up and is now probably the top security analyst in the country, a major advocate, and a security analyst for some of the most famous people.
Gavin commented about RFK Jr.'s troubled past and how he had changed and learned and become stronger.
And I think the meta question with selections like Hegset and others, who have done things that none of us would be proud of.
Can people change?
Can they become stronger through the arduousness of their life and through very bad choices?
I think that's the question I would like to know what your guest thinks.
And I thank you both again for considering my comments.
You know, that's a very thoughtful question.
My answer would be yes.
I think people can change and learn from them.
I would submit that I think I have.
I just don't know Pete Hegset's character and the degree to which he's learned from his past mistakes.
He says he has.
And ultimately, that's going to be a question to be answered by the United States Senate.
Sorry to kind of duck that, but that's the best I can do.
John, Florence, Massachusetts, Independent, good morning.
Hello, yes.
I was wondering if you can explain to me how when the Trump presidency was ending, all the legacy media speculated that Trump would pardon himself, his family, and all his cabinet members because they were criminals and how horrible that would be.
But now they're justifying it.
That's one.
Another question I have is: all the Democrats want to resist, resist, resist, resist.
And then at the end, they complain that nothing got done.
Shouldn't they be popping champagne and saying, yay, we did it.
We didn't get anything done.
We resisted everything Trump wanted to do that was good for the country.
And then another thing is, everybody says, well, you know, Biden's son shouldn't have never had that gun charge because there was no other crime committed with the gun.
Well, his brother's wife took the gun because she was scared because she was having sex with Hunter and they were both doing crack.
And she took the gun and threw it away in a trash can across the street from school.
So that was another crime that was committed with the gun.
And then the CIA came to get it.
Markuto, I've gotten Hunter Biden pardons and resistance there.
Yeah, I can't answer all of those.
I don't think the mainstream media in and of itself is celebrating Joe Biden pardoning his son, but this is a recurring theme in this discussion.
I do think the caller represents a great frustration in the way in which the media covers and amplified those voices on the left saying, oh my God, Donald Trump is so bad, he's going to pardon himself when he leaves office.
That didn't happen.
And then there isn't as much coverage of just how norm-busting it was that Joe Biden did this pardon with his son.
So that gets back to us in the mainstream media.
We might want to listen a little more to some of those voices.
I'm not saying they're always correct about everything, but there's a lot of criticism and concern out there, and it would help to have ears to hear.
Just a couple minutes left.
We've talked about several of the nominations so far.
What's the most interesting one that we haven't talked about yet?
Oh, that's a great question.
I mean, I'm a Florida person.
I've covered Marco Rubio since 2003, so almost 20 years, or more than 20 years.
Rubio is going to occupy a really unique position here in that he is the first Cuban-American, a Secretary of State, bilingual.
He was basically the de facto Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere for this hemisphere under Trump, as I said, de facto when he was still in the Senate.
And how he executes the Trump policy regarding not only Latin America, but in the Middle East with the fall of Assad, it's just going to be a fascinating thing to watch for guys like me who have just covered Rubio for a while.
And his nomination, by the way, should probably sail right through the Senate.
Is this the position that Marco Rubio wanted?
How long do you think he's thought about this post?
Yeah, well, he definitely wanted to be president in 2016.
That's why he ran, right?
But out of all of the positions in the Trump White House that Rubio would leave the Senate for, Secretary of State was up there.
I think he might have done ODNI and CIA director.
He's on the intelligence committees and that sort of cloak and dagger stuff, the intelligence world, deeply fascinates him.
And he has a very deep, thorough background and knowledge of.
Just about a minute and a half left, Mark Caputo.
What are you writing about this week at thebullwork.com if people go to Magaville?
That's a good question.
I'm sort of floating at the moment.
I think Hegseth, we might do another iteration of Hegseth, but with the situation in the Middle East, the question is, how is Trump going to handle this?
Syria poses just a very unique, complicated puzzle because of the roles of Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Iran.
And I'd like to know more about that.
By the way, the book that I'm reading now, I just want to point out, which I would recommend everyone buy, is Alan Taylor's American Civil Wars, A Continental History 1850 to 1878.
So that was the title of the book I'm reading.
Always appreciate the recommendations and would recommend you go to thebullwork.com and sign up for Mark Caputo's Substack.
Magaville is what it's called.
Thanks for the time, as always, on the Washington Journal.
Oh, it's great being here.
Thank you.
Family members of journalist Austin.
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