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Dec. 17, 2024 06:59-10:00 - CSPAN

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Washington Journal 12/17/2024

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	Vote on the House-approved 2025 Defense Programs and Policy Bill, authorizing $895 billion in defense spending.
	And live on C-SPAN 3 at 10 a.m., NCAA President and former Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker testifies on the growth of legal sports betting and its impact on society before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
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	Coming up on C-SPAN's Washington Journal, we'll take your calls and comments live.
	Then Benham Ben Taliblu with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies will talk about the latest on the situation in Syria and other conflicts in the Middle East.
	And the co-director of the progressive nonprofit Indivisible, Leah Greenberg, discusses how the organization, created after the first election of Donald Trump, plans to respond to a second Trump term.
	Washington Journal starts now.
	Good morning.
	It's Tuesday, December 17th, 2024.
	The House and Senate are both set to meet at 10 a.m. Eastern today, which means we're with you for the next three hours on the Washington Journal.
	We begin with Donald Trump's first post-election press conference at Mar-a-Lago yesterday.
	The president-elect touched on a wide range of issues, including his cabinet picks, vaccines, Ukraine, and tariffs.
	He took questions for well over an hour.
	This morning, we're getting your reaction on phone line split as usual by political party.
	Republicans, it's 202-748-8001.
	Democrats, 202-748-8000.
	Independents, 202-748-8002.
	You can also send us a text, that number, 202-748-8003.
	If you do, please include your name and where you're from.
	Otherwise, catch up with us on social media.
	On X, it's at C-SPANWJ on Facebook.
	It's facebook.com/slash C-SPAN.
	And a very good Tuesday morning to you.
	You can go ahead and start calling in now some headlines from this morning on yesterday's press conference.
	This is from the Washington Post: Trump in wide-ranging news conference embraces the role of president in waiting.
	This is the USA Today headline: Everyone Wants to Be My Friend, takeaways from Trump's first post-election news conference.
	And this from NPR.
	Trump used his press conference today to show that he's in charge.
	Here's the president-elect yesterday from Mar-a-Lago talking about why his administration is better prepared this time around entering the White House.
	So we're inheriting big challenges at home and all over the world.
	Again, we had no wars.
	We had no problems.
	We had no inflation.
	We had no inflation.
	We had it less than 1%.
	A perfect number.
	And then we had inflation, the likes of which I say I don't believe the country's ever seen inflation like that.
	They say 38 years.
	I don't know.
	I think it's probably ever, but we're going to take care of all of it.
	We're going to get the prices down by energy.
	The energy is going to come in.
	We have more energy than anybody else.
	We're going to use it.
	We don't have to buy energy from Venezuela when we have 50 times more than they do.
	It's just insane what we're doing.
	So we will not rest until America is richer, safer, and stronger than it has ever been before.
	And we have a big head start.
	Last time we didn't.
	And last time we didn't know the people, we didn't know a lot of things.
	But by the time we got it up and going, it was incredible.
	Again, we built the greatest economy in history for that period of time.
	And we'll do it again, I believe, substantially more so because we understand, number one, the people of Washington.
	I know them.
	I didn't know any of them virtually.
	I relied on other people for recommendations.
	Some were very good recommendations.
	We had some great people.
	Bob Lighthizer, I thought, was great.
	We had a lot of great people.
	But we had some people that I wouldn't have used in retrospect.
	And now I know them better than anybody, better than they know themselves.
	The president-elect yesterday from Mar-a-Lago, going back and forth with reporters for well over an hour.
	You can watch the entire press conference on our website at c-span.org.
	We're getting your reaction to it this morning in this first hour of the Washington Journal.
	Again, phone lines for Republicans, Democrats, and independents as usual.
	A lot of topics were brought up.
	We'll dive into those, but we especially want to hear from you, starting with Brian in Landover, Maryland, Independent.
	Good morning.
	Good morning.
	Thank you for taking my call.
	I appreciate it.
	What was your take from yesterday's press conference?
	I thought President-elect Trump did a fairly decent job.
	It seems like he's kind of moving to the left a little bit, a little bit more moderate.
	So it seems like he's going to govern, if you will, a lot less radical than what he campaigned on.
	I'm an independent for a reason.
	I don't vote the party.
	I vote for the person.
	And I did not vote for Donald Trump.
	I think he's a very intelligent crook.
	I really do.
	He riled up the right, and he convinced these people that he's going to do all of these radical things.
	And he's not.
	He really isn't.
	And they're not fooled.
	They're just convinced that he's the guy.
	And so he's a lot smarter than anyone in the Democratic Party because they fell on their face, which is why I didn't vote Democrat this year either.
	They're just terrible.
	They're absolutely terrible.
	Where were the places yesterday that you felt like he was moderating?
	I don't think with border security, I don't think he's going to do what he said.
	I think that he'll find some simple way to slither out.
	I'm a New Yorker, right?
	I've known Donald Trump all my life.
	He's a snake.
	These people who are introduced to Donald Trump eight, 10 years ago, they're just now getting to know him.
	But that's who he is.
	He'll rev you up.
	He'll promise you the world.
	And then he'll move slightly to the middle and say, well, you know, it's their fault.
	We weren't able to do it.
	But that's who he is.
	You know?
	So I thought that border security, he moved slightly to the left.
	With respect to tariffs, I don't think he's going to do the 20% or 25%.
	In fact, I know he's not.
	And so those are some of the areas that the Republicans decided to get behind Donald Trump.
	But it's not going to be what they seem.
	And they're going to be okay with it because they don't give a darn what this man does.
	They're going to vote for him.
	And the rest of the world just got to get behind him and say, you know what?
	I didn't vote for this SOB, but he's all we got.
	And we're stuck with him.
	That's Brian in Landover, Maryland.
	This is Eddie next in Atlanta.
	Democrat, good morning.
	Yeah, how you doing, America?
	My opinion, though, the meeting that he had yesterday, sitting down, talking the same old talking points, you know, ain't nothing gonna get done.
	Y'all, y'all made a mistake putting Donald Trump back in office because the only thing he wants to do is clear all the troubles that he had four years when Biden came in, just like prices.
	When Donald Trump was in office, if people didn't have $5,000 in the account, the county wasn't good under Donald Trump.
	It wasn't.
	The food was up, go up and down, just like four years with Biden.
	The lawyer come raise our rent every year when Donald Trump was in office, too.
	It ain't nothing going to change, you know.
	And then he ain't never talked about helping the poor people.
	You know, we've been, you know, since Biden leaved my whole four years, my bank account has been pretty sitting under Biden's Trump administration.
	No, it's not.
	It wasn't.
	It wasn't even, I didn't even get stimulus until Biden got in office.
	That's Eddie in Atlanta.
	Jim, Dayton, Ohio, Republican.
	Good morning.
	You're next.
	Good morning.
	Thank you for taking my call.
	I would like to say that I am a Trump supporter.
	And the things that this man has gone through in the last four years and what he's overcome makes him a pillar of persistence and doing the right thing.
	To take and sell this fencing off in Texas is just another display of the insanity of the Democrats.
	And I heard a sheriff from Texas make a comment that if a Texas sheriff was voted out of office and he had taken all of the equipment under his control and sold it off, it would be embezzlement and theft.
	There's no difference.
	These people need to be prosecuted.
	Where'd you hear that, Jim?
	I heard it on the news yesterday from a sheriff that was being, that was reporting on the Fox News channel.
	That's Jim in Dayton, Ohio.
	The first caller this morning brought up tariffs.
	That was one of a dozen or more topics that the president-elect got into yesterday with reporters.
	This is about a minute and a half from that press conference.
	We took in $600 billion and more in taxes and tariffs from China.
	No other president took in 10 cents, not 10 cents, not 10 cents.
	And no, we're going to be doing things.
	We're going to be treating people very fairly.
	But the word reciprocal is important because if somebody charges us India, we don't have to talk about own if India charges us 100%, do we charge them nothing for the same, you know, they send in a bicycle and we send them a bicycle?
	They charge us $100 and $200.
	India charges a lot.
	Brazil charges us a lot.
	If they want to charge us, that's fine, but we're going to charge them the same thing.
	I'm worried about Canada.
	The senators, some of them aren't necessarily business people.
	When I give that to them, they say, that sounds fair to me.
	Are you concerned that tariffs might hurt the stock market rise that you've seen in the economy more broadly?
	Make our country rich.
	Tariffs will make our country rich.
	Properly used.
	No, well, I didn't have any inflation, and I had massive tariffs on a lot of things.
	We put tariffs on steel.
	If I didn't put tariffs on steel, 50% and more, they would dump big steel in China and others.
	I put tariffs on, and it stopped, and we took a fortune.
	We made a fortune on it.
	Tariffs, properly used, which we will do, and being reciprocal with other nations, but it'll make our country rich.
	Our country right now loses to everybody.
	Almost nobody do we have a surplus with.
	There are a couple of countries, and they're embarrassed by it.
	The president-elect yesterday from Mar-a-Lago.
	By the way, that press conference began with an announcement from the incoming Trump administration.
	Here's the New York Times wrap-up.
	It began with an eye-catching pledge, $100 billion investment in the United States by SoftBank, a Japanese technology company.
	Standing beside SoftBank's chief executive, Masayoshi-san at his Mar-a-Lago estate, Mr. Trump announced that pledge that echoed a $50 billion commitment SoftBank made after his victory back in 2016.
	That promise was followed by investments in a host of fledgling startups, some that surged and others that ran into trouble, including the co-working company WeWork and a company called Zoom that used robots to make pizza.
	According to Mr. Trump, SoftBank's investment is intended to create 100,000 jobs.
	It's the wrap-up from the New York Times.
	This is Jerry in Sour Lake, Texas, Independent.
	Did you watch yesterday's press conference?
	Yeah, a little bit, but same old stuff.
	2,000 years ago, the people screamed and cried for Barabbas, and they got him.
	Well, we got Barabbas again, buddy.
	And the chicken is in the foxes in the chicken coop now.
	And all they want is the keys to Fort Knox, and they'll be happy.
	Goodbye.
	Susan, Houston, good morning.
	Did you watch?
	Hello.
	Go ahead, Susan.
	Did you watch the press conference yesterday?
	Yes, I did.
	I just watched it this morning.
	I was particularly impressed with the president-elect.
	I did not support him.
	I was an RFK volunteer.
	I really liked his explanation of the tariffs because I'm a contemporary of his, and I always thought that the trade policies favored other nations over America, our financial trade policies, and the trade deficit.
	And I was particularly impressed with his explanation of reciprocity.
	I think it should be approached that way more.
	I think it should be approached more that way as reciprocity rather than tariffs.
	Tariff scares people.
	We all grew up learning about it in civics that tariffs weren't good.
	And yet, tariffs or reciprocity of taxation is good for America.
	And I thought that the president-elect did a great job explaining that yesterday.
	Susan, you said you're an RFK junior supporter.
	Did you agree with his decision to leave the Democratic Party to go eventually endorse Donald Trump?
	Well, I was a lifelong Democrat.
	I'm a Jersey girl originally, and I was a lifelong Democrat, but I had to leave after Obama myself because things just got too crazy.
	And then, you know, things have got way crazy this last four years.
	So I just, I don't even recognize what's happened to the Democrats.
	Do you think RFK Jr. Going to be confirmed as HHS Secretary.
	I hope so.
	I've read half a dozen of his books.
	As the president-elect said yesterday, he's not a radical.
	People, the powers that be that are not healthy for America, our food industry and the vaccine schedule.
	I'm not opposed to vaccines.
	He's not opposed to vaccines.
	I have a grandchild with autism.
	We all want to know what is causing this.
	Nobody's looking.
	And so HHS, now they're going to start to look at what is causing these problems with children.
	So I'm a big fan of his, and he's not a radical.
	And I hope they'll be confirmed just like Tulsi.
	She's not a warmonger.
	I supported her when she ran in the primary in Texas as the Den.
	I supported her then.
	And I think that these are great choices for our country.
	R.K. Jr. on Capitol Hill this week, having those meetings with senators ahead of eventual confirmation hearings.
	That'll happen.
	Donald Trump yesterday answered questions about his cabinet picks.
	This is some of what he had to say.
	Senators who oppose your nominees, your cabinet nominees, should they be primary?
	If they are unreasonable, I'll give you a different answer, an answer that you'll be shocked to hear.
	If they're unreasonable, if they're opposing somebody for political reasons or stupid reasons, I would say has nothing to do with me.
	I would say they probably would be primarily.
	But if they're reasonable, fair, and really disagree with something or somebody, I can see that happening.
	But I do believe that if they're unreasonable, I think we have great people.
	I think we have a great group of people.
	Pam has been unbelievably received.
	You take a look, Pam Bondi.
	So many have been just unbelievably received.
	I think Pete Hegseth is making tremendous strides over the last week.
	He's going to be great.
	Look, he went to Princeton.
	He went to Harvard.
	He was a great student there.
	But he really was from the first day I met him, all he wanted to talk about was military.
	He's just a military guy.
	I think it's a natural.
	This was my idea.
	And, you know, Pete Hegseth gave up a lot because he was going big places in Fox, big, big places, a lot of money.
	And he didn't even hesitate.
	When I said, do you want to do this?
	He said, absolutely.
	I said, you know, if it doesn't work out, you'll never have the opportunity that you have right now in terms of the world of entertainment or business, whatever you want to call it.
	You'll never have that opportunity again.
	In fact, it could be just the opposite because it's nasty out there.
	He said, I don't care.
	I have to do it for my country.
	He gave up a tremendous amount.
	If this didn't work, it would be a tragedy.
	But that's what he loves.
	He loves the military.
	I never talked to him about anything else.
	He'd talk about the military.
	He'd come to see me about a soldier that was unfairly treated.
	And could I help?
	That's the only thing I virtually ever talked to him about.
	And I always remembered that I've seen him many times, and I don't think I've ever had a subject on anything other than military with him.
	That's where his love is.
	And he didn't say, well, I'd like to think about it.
	I'd like to talk to my family.
	He said, not even a contest.
	And, you know, he was going through the roof over there.
	He was doing great.
	They have the number one show that Saturday and Sunday with Will and Rachel.
	That was great chemistry.
	And if this didn't work out for him, it would be actually sort of tragic.
	The president-elect yesterday from Mar-a-Lago, plenty of reaction in the political press and on the right from RedState.com, plenty of praise for the president sparring with reporters for well over an hour.
	Here's what redstate.com writes in their wrap-up.
	Joe Biden is technically still occupying the White House for 35 more days until January 20th.
	He's supposedly in charge, but it already seems like President-elect Donald Trump has taken the reins with his actions.
	They go on to say, unlike Biden, who can't handle press conferences during this presser, what you finally saw was someone in command again.
	Red State, their wrap-up from yesterday's press conference.
	Want to hear your thoughts this morning?
	Phone lines for Republicans, Democrats, Independents, as usual.
	This is Janet, East Freedom, Pennsylvania.
	Go ahead.
	Hello.
	Good morning.
	Just to make a comment about your most recent statement, him being in command of this press conference.
	And at one point, he took it a little further to say that we have to reform the press.
	Yeah, so I think his press conferences will be much more positive in his direction in the future once he gets that situation under control, as well as everything else he's promised us to do.
	But the thing that really struck me in this press conference, and no one's commented on it, and I think it's one of the reasons the Democratic Party wasn't successful, is the environment.
	How did he say we're going to have clean coal?
	Clean coal.
	You know, he is an insult to the intelligence of America.
	But clean coal, now people are going to start saying clean coal and think it's a real thing.
	You know, how do you make clean coal?
	Janet, on the news media aspect, his comments about the news media coming in the wake of that settlement with ABC News, George Stephanopoulos, the president suing over his comments that he made, and it was a $15 million settlement, that money going to Donald Trump's future presidential foundation.
	What did you think about ABC News deciding to settle that defamation suit brought by the president?
	Country is rolling under the touch of Donald Trump.
	The press is going to submit.
	The people have already submitted their intelligence and free will in believing what he says.
	There's a difference between what Donald Trump says and what Donald Trump does.
	And to sit there for over an hour and listen to him tell me heartwarming stories about this and that was just an insult.
	That's Janet in Pennsylvania.
	This is Joseph in Mississippi, Raymond, Mississippi, Independent.
	Go ahead.
	Good morning, C-SPAN.
	The Democratic Party, House of Representatives, tried to hold Donald Trump responsible twice, impeached.
	The senators, Republicans did not hold him responsible and turned him aloof twice.
	The American people on November the 5th did not hold him responsible and re-elected him.
	There's no way that this would have a happy ending.
	God bless America.
	Blacksburg, South Carolina, Betty, Republican, good morning.
	Yeah.
	If it wasn't for Donald Trump, the first time he came in office, everything was good.
	I'm 80 years old and what I see with my own eyes, but these people that Democrats call in, they must be getting paid or something saying stuff that they know what this country don't even look the same.
	Don't even look the same.
	And they just bid on that man the first time he come down that elevator.
	They started Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schuber, the whole Democrat.
	Some of them are good, some just like Republicans, some of them bad, like me.
	I don't care what his personal life is, not whatsoever.
	I've listened to what he had to say.
	And what he said the first time he came in, he done what he said.
	So you look at the Republican Donald Trump and look at the Democrat when Biden come in.
	He stopped everything that Donald Trump said, and it was good.
	It was good.
	I would have voted for him.
	I would have voted for him if he'd got up and done the same thing that Donald Trump.
	I'd have voted a Democrat because I've voted a Democrat before.
	That's Betty in South Carolina.
	We read you the Red State wrap-up of yesterday's press conference.
	Shane Goldmacher writes in the New York Times his impressions.
	He was both watched yesterday and was at the first press conference in 2016 that then President-elect Donald Trump held, saying that Trump is now an insider and his management of Republican relationships in the party right now, whether he wants to acknowledge it or not, is the surest sign of how much a political insider he is this time around.
	Back in his first post-2016 news conference, Trump had attacked the pharmaceutical industry, he writes, for having a lot of lobbies and a lot of lobbyists.
	On Monday, he bragged about having just had dinner with top executives at Eli Lilly and Pfizer and other industry representatives, along with his picks as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others.
	Shane Goldmacher writing about Donald Trump, the insider now in his column today.
	This is Jeff in Indianapolis, Democrat.
	Good morning.
	Good morning.
	Also, yeah, Inauguration Day, which is January the 20th, 2025, is also Martin Luther King Day.
	So I'll be doing MLK all day.
	So, you know, I tell you, you know, I saw the conference as more incoherent lies, and I blame the media.
	I blame C-SPAN and ABC and CBS.
	So you guys didn't hold this guy accountable for his lie.
	But yet, you guys came out to Kamala about every little thing when Donald Trump was talking about looking at other people's generals and whatnot.
	And you guys, you know, incoherent statements, but yet, you know, the black woman got explained.
	And 60% of the Latinos voted for this guy after he called him vermin and trash and threats of mass deportion.
	I know why you did because Latinos want that proximity to whiteness.
	And absolutely.
	All right.
	We'll go on to Russell in Massachusetts, Independent.
	Good morning.
	Good morning.
	I'm calling in response to some real important things that are going to happen in the next 15 days before the final day of December.
	Chuck Schumer has an opportunity to present to the rest of the Senate a vote on the Social Security Fairness Act.
	Can you explain to the audience what this involves and why it's so important to a lot of people in this country?
	Sure.
	Russell, it sounds like a good topic for a segment coming up here in the final days of December.
	Did you watch yesterday's press conference, though?
	That's what we're talking about this morning.
	Yeah, I watched yesterday's press conference.
	What'd you think?
	Well, I think that Trump is going to do a tremendous job in the next two years.
	It's going to be unbelievable what he's going to do.
	What are you most looking forward to, Russell, when you say he's going to do a tremendous job?
	Well, I think that the thing that drives this country to be its greatest is energy.
	And there's no question in my mind.
	Even if we allow coal production, if we don't want to burn coal in this country, there's so many other countries that are loving to buy it from us.
	India, North Korea.
	These places can't survive without the coal that we produce.
	You think we should sell coal to North Korea?
	We should sell coal to any country in the world that needs it to survive.
	It's Russell in Massachusetts.
	This is Ray in Ithaca, New York, Republican.
	Good morning.
	Good morning, Jen.
	Thank you for taking my call.
	I thought it was a very good press conference.
	I think the polling that I've seen shows that people liked so far the transition.
	I think he has a broad base of support at this point.
	And I think, you know, a lot of the calls of bitterness, let's give the new president a chance.
	I don't think that Joe Biden could have given a press conference that long anymore.
	I don't think Tamal Harris ever gave real answers.
	And that's why they didn't win.
	And I think there has to be some self-reflection in the Democrats of why this is resonating with the American people.
	I think it's resonating because people want some changes.
	And I think so far, so good.
	That's Ray in Ithaca, New York.
	It's coming up on 7:30 on the East Coast, halfway through this first segment of the Washington Journal, simply getting your response, your reaction to yesterday's more than an hour-long press conference by President-elect Donald Trump, his first press conference since six weeks ago, Election Day.
	Several viewers have already this morning brought up his comments about the media, especially in the wake of that ABC News defamation lawsuit settlement that was announced over the weekend.
	This is Donald Trump yesterday talking about the United States media.
	And you need a fair press.
	And the press says, no, I see others.
	I have a few others that I'm doing.
	As an example, I'm doing this not because I want to.
	I'm doing this because I feel I have an obligation to.
	I'm going to be bringing one against the people in Iowa, their newspaper, which had a very, very good pollster who got me right all the time.
	And then just before the election, she said I was going to lose by three or four points.
	And it became the biggest story all over the world because I was going to win Iowa by 20 points.
	The farmers love me, and I love the farmers.
	And it was interesting the way she did it.
	She brought it down two weeks before.
	She said I was going to only win by four.
	That was a big story.
	But that was good because she brought it down from like 22 points to four or whatever the number was, way up, way up.
	Easy win.
	Never even thought to go there.
	I respect them.
	I love them.
	They understand there's no reason to go there because she brought it from way up, walk away, which it was, and it turned out to be in the election too, by the way.
	It was a win by many, many points.
	And then she brought it down very smartly to four a couple of weeks before.
	And everyone said, wow, that's amazing.
	He's only up by four points.
	Then she brought it down to where it was down by three or four, whatever number she used.
	And that was the Des Moines Register.
	And it was their parent.
	And in my opinion, it was fraud and it was election interference.
	You know, she's gotten me right always.
	She's a very good pollster.
	She knows what she was doing.
	And she then quit before.
	And we'll probably be filing a major lawsuit against them today or tomorrow.
	We're filing one on 60 Minutes, you know about that, where they took Kamala's answer, which was a crazy answer, a horrible answer, and they took the whole answer out and they replaced it with something else she said later on in the interview, which wasn't a great answer, but it wasn't like the first one.
	The first was grossly incompetent.
	It was weird.
	And that was fraud and election interference by their news magazine, a big part of CBS News.
	So, as you know, we're involved in that one.
	We're involved in one which has been going on for a while and very successfully against Bob Woodward, where he didn't quote me properly from the tapes.
	And then, on top of everything else, he sold the tapes, which he wasn't allowed to do.
	He could only use them for reporting purposes, not for sale purposes.
	And he admits that.
	And I think we'll be successful on that one.
	And we have one very interestingly on Pulitzer because reporters at the New York Times, Washington Post got Pulitzer Prizes for their wonderful, accurate, and highly professional reporting on the Russia-Russia-Russia hoax.
	Well, it turned out to be a hoax, and they were exactly wrong.
	President-elect Donald Trump yesterday from Mar-a-Lago.
	This is Herbert in Camilla, Georgia, Democrat.
	Did you watch?
	What'd you think?
	Good morning.
	You know, I mean, you know, he's coming after the media.
	Everybody who feels, Trump feels as though everybody who goes against him must say something against him.
	He feels as though he is infallible.
	You know, but the thing is that I look at John, I don't see him selecting not one black person in his cabinet.
	So it shows me right there, which I already know, I'm 74 years old, that this man look at us, and look at us as second-class citizens in the United States of America.
	So I don't expect nothing of Trump.
	God done brought us through slavery and everything else in America.
	So Trump, just another, just a pill that, hey, that we look up to God the most out of control at all.
	I just look at that.
	So, I mean, I don't see the press saying nothing about that, accidental questions about that.
	Why have you not selected a black person in your cabinet?
	That's what I'm more concerned about.
	Here, Clinton, he had Jordan, black people in his cabinet.
	Jordan was his main man.
	I mean, come on, man.
	Out of all the people he did, but I don't see nobody, even your callers, not saying, why have he not selected?
	We are a pillar to America, a bill in this country.
	And you don't want to add the people who was here before all other nationalities, other nationalities.
	And here you don't recognize not one of us that are capable of handling one of your positions.
	Come on, man.
	So Herbert, the headline from the Associated Press this coming at the end of November, Scott Turner, Donald Trump's pick for HUD Secretary.
	There's a picture of Scott Turner there, a story about his nomination and one of Donald Trump's cabinet picks.
	Do you know much about Scott Turner?
	No, no, I don't know nothing about it.
	Former NFL player who ran the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council during Donald Trump's first term, 52, and the first black person that was announced by Donald Trump to be in his cabinet in his second administration.
	But this is what I want to ask you now.
	He selected Ben Carson to be overheard.
	Why have we got to be overheard?
	Why we can't have no top other position.
	So Ben Carson was in the first administration, Herbert.
	That's what I'm saying.
	That's the only position he feels black people are capable of handling.
	Because, you know, they look at the people who stand in the projects, and everywhere else, as majority are black.
	So this what he did.
	He ain't put nobody in no top.
	Why he didn't put nobody as attorney general or something else in his other cabinets.
	We the only one just control her.
	That's Herbert in Georgia.
	This is Brian from Massachusetts, Independent.
	Good morning.
	Good morning.
	My concern is that when he gave the speech, he only talked about getting even with people that have a difference of opinion with him.
	He didn't talk about lowering costs, and he's surrounding himself with billionaires.
	I mean, I'm afraid, to be honest, there's a reason Victor Orban was the keynote speaker at CPAC for the last three years.
	And America is going to turn into Hungary.
	They don't revere the Constitution.
	Donald Trump's going to take his loath of office and swear to abandon the Constitution.
	And he did it before, and he broke his oath.
	So I'm really concerned about the future of this country.
	I'm afraid it's been bought and sold.
	It's Brian in Massachusetts.
	We showed you Shane Goldmacher of the New York Times his wrap-up comparing Donald Trump's first press conference after he was elected in 2016 to this press conference yesterday, the difference in Donald Trump, the difference in how Donald Trump was seen by those around him.
	Here's another story that does that sort of comparison.
	Donald Trump entering the office in 2016 and into 2017, Inauguration Day 2017, to yesterday.
	This is Gerard Baker in the Wall Street Journal saying, almost exactly eight years ago, President-elect Trump hosted a gathering at Trump Tower for the leaders of America's biggest technology companies.
	The Titans of tech were all there.
	Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Tim Cook of Apple, Sheryl Sandberg of what was still called Facebook, Elon Musk of Tesla, the top dogs at Google.
	The atmosphere at the gathering, evidenced by Mr. Trump's language and demeanor, and by reports from participants afterwards, was cordial and constructive, but in a strangely one-sided way.
	Quote, there's no one like you in the world, Mr. Trump gushed to the assembled corporate aristocrats.
	Anything we can do to help, we're going to be there for you.
	The tone was less of that of a new commander-in-chief issuing directives to his troops than of a new company boss eager to impress a team of skeptical management consultants.
	Gerard Baker goes on to write, contrast that with his encounters with the Silicon Valley crowd in the past few weeks.
	One of them, Mr. Musk, is now a loyal lieutenant.
	Mr. Cook was seen supping solicitatiously at Mar-a-Lago on Friday.
	Mark Zuckerberg has donated $1 million to the inaugural budget.
	They have all been forming an orderly, respectful line to bend the knee, kiss the ring, and slip the big check.
	Mr. Bezos did the gushing this time, telling a New York Times conference last week, I'm very hopeful about the new presidency, just to be sure he too is padding that hope with a million-dollar check.
	Gerard Baker writes, I can't think of a more powerful illustration of the contrast between the circumstances in which Mr. Trump takes office a month from now and how he arrived eight years ago.
	A contrast that equates to an extraordinary opportunity at home and abroad that awaits the new president and the country.
	Gerard Baker in the Wall Street Journal, if you want to read his full column.
	Lawrence out of the Ocean State, Republican, good morning.
	Good morning.
	How are you?
	Doing well, sir.
	I'm just amazed that somebody who watched yesterday a man who stood up there for one hour, took a total of 33 questions when we've had a president that hasn't had a press conference in months.
	We have not heard or seen anything from Mr. Biden.
	And when we have, it's been pretty bad.
	His assurance of the polio vaccine yesterday, how he called out the middlemen of the pharmaceutical company, his ability to reason, TikTok, which he was totally against in his first term.
	What you just went over, how he talked, yes, he talked to the businessman like a businessman because that's what needs to happen in America.
	We just lived through four years of somebody that didn't even know what was going on in office.
	And I need to say one thing about Kamala Harris.
	We knew she was no good because in the primary, not one Democrat put a throat.
	She didn't even get 1%.
	So I would have thought about voting for her, but they had already told me in the primary, this woman's no good.
	So I just took the Democrats on that.
	I didn't need to do my own thinking.
	But yesterday, he put himself out on the world stage.
	The world is happy.
	The Democrats are not happy.
	That's Lawrence in Rhode Island.
	Larry in Albany, Georgia.
	Democrat, good morning.
	Yes, Trump's speech yesterday was trash.
	What Trump is talking about is the same thing he's been talking about.
	Now, Trump said he's going to make America great.
	America great is what he's talking about.
	They have got a person in the chair now that I'm a black person.
	I'm 74 years old.
	And they were talking about redlining.
	They was talking about different things about voting rights and all this kind of stuff.
	And what Trump talked about yesterday, he talked about some things that made a little sense, but he Larry, you still with us?
	Yes, I'm still with you.
	What were those things that made some sense to you?
	And it might be easier if you turn down your television and just talk to me through the phone.
	Okay.
	Some things that made sense was when he talked about when he talked about the things about trying to work with people, he really, he really, I believe he's sincere about trying to work with people.
	But the thing about it is, I want him to have some people with experience to tell him things.
	I want him to listen.
	And I think that he would do pretty good.
	I didn't vote for him.
	And the reason I didn't vote for him is because of the fact that because he is a felony and I just couldn't vote for him for that.
	That's Larry in Georgia.
	Joseph out of Florida, Independent.
	Good morning.
	Yes, thank you for taking my call.
	I'm an independent.
	I voted for Trump the first time.
	Could not even think of voting for him the second time.
	And here's the reason.
	I'm fascinated with MAGA, who believes every word this guy says.
	Someone in your show just said, well, he can stand and talk for 30 minutes, 40 minutes.
	Well, he does do that, but he lies.
	Okay, his exaggerations.
	The only thing that's factual is his retribution against people.
	This is more fascinating to me.
	Time magazine, who named him person of the year, okay, and MAGA, I wish you would fact-check this.
	He had to be fact-checked 15 times, and they are an independent media.
	Okay, 15 times.
	It's the first time Time Magazine had to fact-check a president or any person.
	It's absolutely fascinating to me that MAGA spends absolutely no time fact-checking what he says instead of spewing everything that he says as the gospel.
	John, why did you vote for him?
	I assume you met 2016, you voted for him?
	I voted for, I could not vote for Hillary Clinton.
	I've had enough of it.
	I had enough of the Clintons, and that's why I voted for him.
	And the second time, and that's the only reason I voted for him, okay, was that it was not even a pro-Trump.
	It was actually, and I have gone Democrat, Republican.
	I go, I fact-check, and I just beg people, before they say something, to fact-check, because, and particularly with this guy, he has already backtracked.
	He spent how long, three months, four months, telling everybody that he was going to change the prices.
	Prices were going to go down as soon as he hit office.
	Last week, he said, because he knows he can't do that, that it may be tough to do.
	This is what the MAGAs do not do.
	They just listen to everything he says, fact-check nothing.
	They are going to get burnt on probably 10 or 15 subject matters that this guy promised them.
	And this is what really fascinates me.
	I just wish a woman independent would run and win for the first time and have an independent and a woman.
	I would prefer a woman to get rid of this stuff.
	Drain the swamp on both sides because it's crazy.
	Thank you.
	That's Joseph in Florida, staying in Florida.
	This is Larry in Miami.
	Republican, good morning.
	Good morning.
	Good morning.
	I just want to say a couple of things.
	Trump's picks are really ridiculous.
	This Kennedy fella, the guy is obviously an addict.
	He can't walk straight, can't speak clearly, and he's making major decisions for so many people or will be making major decisions.
	Now, I don't necessarily blame Trump.
	I blame the Democrats for doing what they're doing.
	And it just gave no choice for anybody to rely upon.
	So Camilla had no choice.
	She wasn't going to win, regardless.
	She wasn't going to win.
	They should have allowed Hillary to come back in and run that campaign or leave President Biden there.
	Trump is making some very bad choices for key cabinet positions, and we're in trouble.
	So that's it.
	That's Larry in Miami, Florida.
	mentioned RFK Jr., potential head of the health and human services and potential decisions he might make.
	Donald Trump yesterday was asked about his stance on vaccines and some of the comments that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or those around him have made about vaccines.
	This was Donald Trump from yesterday.
	Do you believe there's a connection between vaccines and autism?
	Do you believe there's a way to?
	Well, I don't look.
	Right now, you have some very brilliant people looking at it.
	I had dinner the other night with the head of Pfizer, the head of Eli Lilly, and RFK, as you know, and Oz.
	And we had, and other people within the administration that are involved, the medical.
	And we're looking to find out.
	You know, if you look at autism, so 30 years ago, we had, I've heard numbers of like one in 200,000, one in 100,000.
	And now I'm hearing numbers of one in 100.
	So something's wrong.
	There's something wrong.
	And we're going to find out about it.
	We're not going to have to be able to do it.
	Can I follow up on Robert Kennedy?
	He's on the Hill today.
	He's meeting with senators.
	What do you say to people who are worried that his views on vaccines will translate into policies that will make their kids less safe?
	No, I think he's going to be much less radical than you would think.
	I think he's got a very open mind, or I wouldn't have put him there.
	He's going to be very much less radical.
	But there are problems.
	I mean, we don't do as well as a lot of other nations, and those nations use nothing.
	And we're going to find out what those problems are.
	And another thing that came up, the dinner was fascinating because I had Bobby and I had, again, the head of Pfizer.
	You know who that is.
	He's a highly respected man who has run an incredible company, likewise with Lilly, the top two people.
	And we had the head of the industry also.
	So all companies were represented.
	And I said, let's have it out now a little bit.
	And you know what came out of that meeting is that we're paying far too much because we're paying much more than other countries.
	And we have laws that make it impossible to reduce.
	And we have a thing called the middleman.
	You know the middleman, right?
	The horrible middleman that makes more money, frankly, than the drug companies, and they don't do anything except they're a middleman.
	We're going to knock out the middleman.
	I'm going to be very unpopular after that stage.
	I don't know who these middlemen are, but they are rich as hell.
	And faster rich.
	And we're going to knock out the middleman.
	We're going to get drug costs down at levels that nobody has ever seen before.
	And that really, I tell you, we spent more time talking about that with Bobby and with the executives and Oz, all of them.
	We spent more time talking about that than anything else.
	Thanks for President Trump.
	What about the polio vaccine?
	Well, I'm a big believer in it, and I think everything should be looked at, but I'm a big believer in the polio vaccine.
	It's the salt vaccine.
	Do you think schools should mandate vaccines?
	Do you think schools should mandate vaccines?
	I don't like mandates.
	I'm not a big mandate person.
	So, you know, I was against mandates.
	Mostly Democrat governors did the mandates, and they did a very poor thing.
	In retrospect, they made a big mistake having to do with the education of children.
	They lost like a year or two years of their lives.
	The mandate was a bad thing.
	I was against the mandate.
	President-elect Donald Trump yesterday at Mar-a-Lago.
	By the way, if you want to watch this whole press conference in its entirety, you can do so on our website at c-span.org.
	Taking your phone calls, about another 10 minutes here in this first segment, getting your reaction to the variety of topics that came up during that press conference yesterday.
	Timbo in Mountain Home in the Natural State.
	Democrat, good morning.
	Big John.
	Good to see you, buddy.
	I'll make it quick.
	The godfather of the billionaires and lies has his billionaire cronies sitting around the roundtable in Mar-a-Lago thinking about all the ways they're going to screw the American people.
	You're going to get exactly what you deserve, America.
	I hope you like it.
	Harvey, Louisiana, this is James Independent.
	Good morning.
	Good morning.
	I just got some things I want to get off my chest real quick.
	Let's look at Syria.
	When this man was first elected, within months, he bombed Syria.
	Now he's elected, re-elected, and he's saying that's not our problem.
	That doesn't work well with me.
	He went to Notre Dame, the reopening of Notre Dame, and came back at a press conference and said he was great to represent our country.
	Doesn't he realize that he's not in office yet?
	He's the president re-elect.
	That's disrespecting the person we sent there, which was Mrs. Biden.
	Joe Biden was our representative there, not him.
	Just because other leaders went there to kiss his ring doesn't mean he was our official representative.
	The other day, I noticed a minor thing.
	He did a military salute at a game.
	The only person that doesn't wear a uniform that does military salutes is the president.
	Again, he's not the president.
	If you're the president, you should respect the office for which you were elected.
	He does not show respect for our institutions unless he's in them, and then he's the only one that can take care of them.
	This man is not all there.
	This is the same guy that says they're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs, they're making hamster sandwiches.
	He's telling you who he is.
	I say believe him.
	James, on the Syria issue that you bring up, stick around.
	In about 10 minutes, we're going to dive more deeply into Syria and what it means for the wider Middle East.
	A segment on that coming up at the top of the hour at 8 a.m.
	A few more minutes, a few more phone calls from you, though, on the press conference.
	Yesterday, this is Don in the Wolverine State.
	Republican, good morning.
	Good morning.
	What'd you think?
	This is from Michigan, Don.
	I'm retired, 69 years old.
	My biggest concern has been inflation.
	It's horrible.
	I worked all my life.
	The past four years have knocked down my savings.
	The dollar is buying 40% less now than what it did four years ago.
	This country is suffering.
	People are suffering because of this.
	We need to stop this horrible inflation.
	Young couples can't afford homes at $500,000 for purchasing a home.
	Your food prices are gone through the roof.
	These are the things that are hurting the American people.
	And these things have to be dealt with.
	All the other stuff, yes, very important.
	But take care of your people in your own country so we can actually live a normal life that we had five years ago.
	And that's all I have to say.
	Thank you.
	Kiddo is in New York, Independent.
	Good morning.
	You're next.
	Hey, good morning.
	My name is Kipu.
	So initially, my interest in the election of President Trump in 2016, 2020, and 24 is real estate matters because I have worked for the Board of Elections and also my departed husband.
	We attended the New York Real Estate Institute.
	And we learned that most of the real estate transactions here on Stanton Island are illegal.
	And it's the number one reason we're being, what I will say, murdered by eviction in Richmond County.
	So real estate fraud is the biggest and is a double indemnity for me because of my black indigenous heritage.
	So Kitty, bring me to this topic we've been talking about yesterday.
	So the topic is, you know, again, I was saying that I will pardon President-elect for not renting to black people back in the day going forward if he can govern over those real real estate matches for real Americans first.
	And that's something you think he'll do?
	I hope so.
	What's Kiddo from New York?
	This is McKenzie in Staunton, Virginia.
	Independent, good morning.
	Good morning.
	Good morning.
	I just wanted to talk about how President Trump is finally bringing talking about the right points.
	You know, attacking these banks companies, you know, bringing that dollar back into the state, bringing money back to the American citizens, work hard.
	You know, I mean, look at President Biden.
	All he's done is fork over billions and billions of dollars over the Ukraine.
	We have construction problems.
	We have health care problems in this country.
	It's time for President Trump.
	And I think he's got it right this time.
	He's going to go in there and fix things.
	That's just my opinion.
	Thanks so much.
	It's McKenzie.
	You mentioned Ukraine, Donald Trump addressing foreign policy, Ukraine, and the conflicts in the Middle East.
	This is about a minute and a half from yesterday.
	There's a light shining over the world.
	We're trying to help very strongly in getting the hostages back, as you know, with Israel and the Middle East.
	We're working very much on that.
	We're trying to get the war stopped, that horrible, horrible war that's going on in Ukraine, with Russia, Ukraine.
	We're going to, we've got a little progress.
	It's a tough one.
	It's a nasty one.
	It's nasty.
	People are being killed at levels that nobody's ever seen.
	You know, it's very level fields.
	And the only thing that stops a bullet is a body, a human body.
	And the number of soldiers that are being killed on both sides is astronomical.
	I've never seen anything like that.
	And rapidly, I get reports every week.
	And it's not even, you know, it's like just going down.
	Nobody's seen anything like it.
	It's a very flat surface, a very flat land.
	That's why it's great farming land.
	It's the breadbasket for the world, actually.
	But it's very flat, and there's nothing to stop a bullet but a body.
	There's no protection, no nothing.
	And what's happening there is far worse than people are reporting for both sides.
	So we're going to do our best.
	We've been doing our best.
	We'll see what happens.
	But since the election, I've been working every day to put the world at ease a little bit to get rid of the wars.
	We had no wars when I left office, and now the whole world is blowing up.
	President-elect Trump from yesterday, time for just one or two more phone calls here.
	This is George in Massachusetts, Republican.
	Go ahead.
	Hi, how are you doing?
	Yeah, I liked it.
	I try to look at the positive one.
	After the elections, obviously, the people have spoke.
	So things like Ukraine, the pharmaceuticals, and what I do like is the terrorists.
	Most people are saying like they're going to be bad for the economy.
	But if you know anything about Trump, he's going to be bottom line.
	He's using them to basically negotiate before he even gets in there.
	So I'm looking forward to seeing the economy turn around a little bit at a time, and it should be well in about a year.
	So George, part of this press conference yesterday was sort of setting a negotiating position or putting people on notice?
	Yes, definitely.
	Any other issues besides tariffs that you would point to to him doing that yesterday?
	Well, yeah, Ukraine and the pharmaceuticals basically saying he's like behind the scenes, he's negotiating about how they can come to the end of the war and also pharmaceuticals with the people from the major companies and his nominees for their positions to deal with that issues.
	And I think he'll bring a lot of the different procedures or medications or whatever.
	I think they're going to come down in this country.
	We're the biggest, we're the most industrialized country with what, 33 out of 32 countries that doesn't even have national health care.
	So I think that the leaders of those companies will realize like if you don't bring the money down somewhat, you're going to lose it all one of these days soon.
	So I mean, meaning that the people will go to national health care at some point.
	You have a great day, and thank you so much for your service to the American people.
	That's George in Massachusetts, our last caller in this first segment of the Washington Journal.
	Stick around, plenty more to talk about this morning, including up next, a focus on the Middle East and Syria in particular.
	We'll be joined by Ben and Ben Tableau of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
	And later, Leah Greenberg joins us from the progressive grassroots group Indivisible to talk about her plans and her organization in the coming years.
	We'll be right back.
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	Washington Journal continues.
	A conversation now on Syria and the future of the Middle East.
	Benem Ben-Taliblou is back with us.
	He's a senior fellow specializing in the Middle East at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
	Let's start with what factors will determine what comes next in Syria after the fall of Assad, and what role could the United States play here in the coming weeks and months?
	Well, it's a pleasure to be back with you, and happy holidays to you and the viewers.
	Listen, there's nothing short of historic than what's going on in Syria right now.
	For over half a century, the Assad family has ruled that country from Damascus.
	And really, since 2011, 13 plus years now, there's been various evolutions of the revolution which started peacefully, became armed.
	Assad really opened the gates to make sure that there was no secular, democratic, liberal, peaceful opposition, that it would be armed Islamists, jihadists, and that led into the Syrian civil war, the whole host of foreign interventions that we're seeing, and the fall of Assad historically.
	After less than two weeks since HTS Ayatahr Sham, a designated U.S. terrorist organization, as well as some other Turkish-backed rebels from the north of Syria, really moved speedily south.
	I would still say that we are in merely the next phase of the Syrian civil war.
	There is still fighting between various militia, proxy, and terror groups in that country today.
	There is still no central authority today, despite attempts there for a transitional government and a transition council to be created.
	So there are really long-standing fights over who will govern, how will they govern, and what will the relationship between the government and the governed be in that country, between Arabs, between Kurds, between Turks, between ethnic minorities and religious minorities.
	So explain who those various groups are and who's backing them, whether it's the United States or other regional allies, and how that plays out.
	Sure.
	So up until very recently, the Assad regime, Assad himself, an Alawite, a minority sect of Islam, more heterodox than Orthodox, you could say, was backed by two large state patrons, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Russian Federation.
	And in Syria, Russia had historically what really the Russian Empire had wanted for many years, which is a warm water port.
	They had that at Tartus, and then later on they had an airbase as well at Hamim.
	Basically, this was Russia's foothold into the Middle East, and it had been a partner of the Assad regime and the Assad family for really half a century, both under the Soviet Union as well as under the Russian Federation.
	Both Iran and Russia surged to bail out Assad, Iran really starting indirectly in 2012, directly in 2013, and Russia more directly in 2015.
	Now, there's been a whole host of other groups like the SDF, the Syrian Democratic Forces, who are largely but not exclusively Kurdish, backed by the United States.
	When the U.S. was looking for a partner in Syria to pick, it wasn't prioritizing who would pick to fight Assad.
	It was prioritizing who would they pick to fight this other armed terrorist group that we all know called ISIS.
	And the SDF and the Kurds have led the U.S.-backed fight against ISIS in the region, but they're not the only group.
	There was formerly like the Free Syrian Army.
	That was defected Assad regime officers that had been disbanded.
	Some of that moved into the SNA, the Syrian National Army.
	Those were Turkish-backed, largely Arab and Syrian rebels that the Turkish government had really used, as you could say, as a proxy or an auxiliary.
	These Turkish-backed forces have been used not just in Syria, but in other places where President Erdogan of Turkey has a foreign policy interest as well.
	Unless we forget, of course, there's ISIS.
	Unless we forget, of course, there's what's left of the Iran-backed militia infrastructure, which up until recently had been concentrated in the east and been moving to be co-located in the west with the Assad regime and Lebanese Hezbollah.
	And last but certainly not least, and I'm sure there's more, but I wanted to cram in as much of the alphabet soup as we could into the present.
	And before we get to HTS, Hayat Tabir Hasham, and Mr. Jolani, who all eyes are on this individual who led the charge against Damascus, is the U.S. force presence, which is about 900-ish in southeast Syria, located at the garrison at Tant, where they have a large deconfliction zone.
	If you remember, the Trump administration actually sought in the past to pull out these troops.
	In the end, that did not happen.
	And all eyes will be on the incoming Trump administration as the Syrian civil war continues into this more political phase.
	What role will the U.S. play, and will the U.S. begin by trying to leverage the threat of withdrawal as other actors are looking to double down, particularly Turkey, which is a NATO country?
	Remind folks what the U.S. forces doing there right now and what have they been doing amid this drive onto Damascus and Assad fleeing.
	Well, amid the drive on Damascus, they've essentially been sitting there.
	Since Damascus fell, however, the U.S. has had airstrikes against ISIS positions in central and eastern Syria, much like the Israelis have had targeted airstrikes against what's left of Assad's chemical weapons and military infrastructure.
	So in the face of a collapse of central authority, the pro-status quo, the pro-Western countries are taking their shots right now to make sure that whatever emerges in Syria can at least be slightly controlled or the worst of the worst can be contained.
	But you mentioned under what authority the U.S. force presence was there.
	The U.S. was there to fight ISIS, so this was part of the counter-ISIS campaign.
	And the U.S. had played a pretty powerful role there, both thwarting some of the ISIS advances from Iraq into Syria as really supporting the counter-ISIS campaign on the ground and on the air from that base in eastern Syria.
	We're going to go into more of this with Benim Ben Talablou of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies this morning.
	I want to give you a chance to call in and ask your questions, though.
	A lot's happened in Syria and it has a lot of impact in the region.
	Wanted to take this time to allow you to call in and ask the questions that you've been wondering.
	Phone lines to do so split as usual this morning.
	Republicans 202-748-8001.
	Democrats 202-748-8000.
	Independents 202-748-8002.
	A minute ago, you mentioned Mr. Jolani explain who he is.
	What do we need to know about the head of HTS?
	And here, forgive me, I'll be tiffing my hand as to how I see this individual.
	He remains subject to a U.S. bounty.
	He has a U.S. bounty on his head.
	He's currently the head of HTS Hayat Tahir Rasham, a designated terrorist organization.
	He's led manifestations of formerly al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist groups in Syria, beginning with Jeep at al-Nusra.
	Then that really collapsed in 2016.
	There was a 2017 rebrand.
	And then beyond that 2017 rebrand, you have the group, which is really more of a coalition or constellation of some Salafi jihadist organizations who were actually effective fighters against the Assad regime, as well as pushing back and really hiding from Russian forces during the peak period of Russian airstrikes in Syria.
	So Jolani really cut his teeth on this issue.
	He's had close ties with al-Qaeda in the past.
	Really, since 2016, there's been this footse of disavowing.
	And much like everything else in Washington, where you stand in life depends on where you sit.
	There are many people who take this disavowing very seriously.
	Starting from 2016, some of those people actually end up saying, well, look, how come the U.S. has had targeted airstrikes on a whole host of al-Qaeda officials, not just in Syria, but in Iraq, but really around the world, but has never touched this individual despite having a bounty.
	Does that mean there is some laissez-passe or some covert relationship there?
	Sometimes that line of thinking can get into conspiracy if taken to its fullest conclusion.
	But nonetheless, it does raise questions.
	How come this person was allowed to kind of remain on the battlefield while having a bounty on his head?
	And also, conversely, what role should the U.S. play going forward?
	Because all the talk now about Mr. Jalani is how he views minorities, ethnic and religious, in that country, how he views the relationship with Israel, and how he views the relationship with the outside world.
	So this individual has tried very hard to disconnect himself from any terrorist organization publicly.
	I, for one, think that's more of a shell game or a political rebrand.
	You've seen Islamist leaders do this in the past, particularly the country where my parents, my ancestry hails from, the Ayatollah Khomeini in Paris was saying drastically different things before he entered government and came into Iran and then really took that country really in my view with respect back to the Stone Age.
	So Islamist leaders do have this capacity to kind of fib to gain a political advantage and then once they have a political advantage to cement an entirely different and often terrifying reality.
	And we hope for the sake of all Syrians, not just minorities in that country, that that is not the case.
	So while we are happy in so many ways that the brutal Assad regime is gone and really the pictures coming out of the Syrian prisons is something to celebrate, the kind of groups that are coming to the helm today, the kind of individuals, still pose a significant cause for concern, at least in my view.
	Let me come back to Bashar al-Assad.
	We heard from him via a social media message yesterday for the first time since leaving Syria saying that he held out until the end before going to Russia.
	You had mentioned that his main allies were Russia and Iran.
	Why did he go to Russia and not Iran when he decided to flee the country?
	Well, Iran is also not having the best day or really the best year.
	There's a plethora of articles right now that the viewers can look up calling Iran's 2024, Iran's and his horriblis, Iran's horrible year.
	There's been a whole host of regional political military setbacks against the Islamic and the Israeli military successes brought to you by the multiple battlefields that constitute the post-October 7th Middle East.
	So in the shortest of terms, and perhaps the most basic terms, Assad wanted to go somewhere where he would survive, given the fact that the Israelis were able to kill Ismail Hania, the former Hamas chief, in Tehran at a safe house, Assad may have had some doubts as to if the Iranians could protect him.
	There is some analysis that the Iranians and Assad have had a cooling off, even though Iran believes that possessing Syria really is critical to its land bridge strategy, its attempts to resupply Hezbollah, its chief proxy in Lebanon, its attempts to fight this four decade-long shadow war, proxy war, what have you, against Israel in the Middle East.
	Despite all of that, there is some reporting about some tensions.
	I think those tensions are overblown, but tensions exist in any political relationship, whether you're the patron or the proxy.
	And then, of course, one other reason why he may have gone to Russia is that he had already sent some of his family members to Russia.
	And then lastly, there is a deeper kind of security tie with the Russian state.
	Even though it was the Iranians who bailed him out first, the Russians were able to do it more effectively.
	So he might have thought in terms of capacity, in terms of where my family is, and in terms of longevity, this would have been a better spot for me.
	Want to get to some of these callers first?
	Explain to viewers your organization, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, what its mission is, how it's funded, how long you've been there.
	Sure.
	So I've been with FDD now for about 12 years.
	Just became the senior director for the Iran program there, but still cover the breadth and depth of Iran political security-related Middle East issues.
	FDD is a 501c3 nonprofit nonpartisan think tank.
	It's basically a research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
	Actually, today in the Washington Post, we were mislabeled as conservative.
	This tends to happen a lot, unfortunately.
	But we don't take any views domestic on health care, tax, immigration.
	We have zero domestic policy views.
	We advocate for a strong U.S. presence abroad.
	You could say it's an internationalist in terms of its disposition when engaging with foreign policy issues abroad.
	It was founded shortly before or after 9-11.
	It was late 2001 or early 2002 when the organization was founded.
	So a little over two plus decades now.
	And its president and founder is Clifford May.
	FDD.org is where viewers can go if they want to check out the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
	Let me get you some calls.
	And just right before, actually, I forgot you mentioned funding.
	We take no foreign government funding or direction.
	So only U.S. citizens, taxpayers.
	And it's a tax-deductible donation, by the way.
	And FDD.org, again, is where you can go to find out information about that as well.
	Shemedin in Woodbridge, Virginia, Democrat, good morning.
	You are up first in the segment.
	Thank you for taking my call.
	I have a question for your guests.
	What is the reason behind all the wars in the Middle East, especially 99.5% of the wars around the world done by America, British, French, and German Italians, all combined with so-called civilized countries, are focused only on Muslim countries, specifically in the Middle East because of natural resources or because of land and position allocation?
	I'd like to understand.
	I'm from Ethiopia.
	Originally, Italians, they killed almost 30,000 people any day and gas them out.
	Italians during Mossaronia.
	My family died from that.
	I would like to know why civilized countries, such as civilized ones, focus in the Middle East and the Muslim countries.
	Thank you very much.
	Thank you, Kohler.
	Good question.
	Yeah, good question.
	In fact, Ethiopia does have a very long and proud history of not being subject to colonization.
	But I believe the scope of the question was wars in the Middle East or wars in Muslim countries.
	Well, there's wars raging all around the world, not in Muslim countries, CC right now, Russia, Ukraine.
	It's not the first iteration of that war.
	Something tells me even if we do get a peace agreement or a stalemate, it won't be the last iteration of that war, given Russian President Putin's appetite.
	But there's lots of reasons for the myriad conflicts in the Middle East.
	I don't believe there's an overarching reason, Western colonialism, aggression, imperialism, what have you.
	I think that has some explanatory power, but exceptionally limited explanatory power, particularly when you get into the conflicts of the present day.
	I mean, you have right now the various battlefields of the post-October 7 Middle East.
	You've had right now, really, since the U.S. wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran be able to exploit the kind of failed state structures around it.
	And in particular, in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, you've had with the Syrian civil war, for example, everybody from not just the U.S., but the Russians, the Israelis, the Iranians, able to take shots at the sides that they want to take shots at.
	So, in a collapse of central authority, these things are not uncommon when there's a civil war for other foreign actors to get involved.
	Even in the U.S. here, where there was a civil war not about 200 years ago, you've even had different British and French iterations of support for the North and South.
	So, civil wars across the board bring in foreign interest and often to some degree foreign intervention.
	Question from Michael Thornton on Twitter, on X these days, I should say, asking about what Israel is doing in Syria.
	Should Israel be attacking Syria, annexing parts of that country right now?
	Yes, so there is a debate right now as to how far Israel should be able to secure its interests while there is still this new government being formed.
	I, for one, think that if the Israelis are going to continue going after Assad regime military assets, particularly the number one priority needs to be and should be the chemical weapons infrastructure, not just the precursors, targeting them in a safe fashion, not just the delivery mechanism, the missile infrastructure, the long-range strike capabilities, but also the research centers and laboratories that produce these things.
	And then also, I would add onto that target list the facilities that produce Capagon.
	Captagon is basically the Middle Eastern version of ecstasy.
	It's been proliferating throughout the Middle East, not really covered much.
	There is some legislation trying to push back on its illicit funding and trafficking throughout the Congress, in the Congress recently.
	Trafficking in the United States or in the region.
	For the U.S. to be able to counter the trafficking in a much more aggressive sense, because the Assad regime actually helped to get revenues from this drug.
	The Iran-Bakshiya militias were able to engage in the trafficking and the smuggling across a whole host of jurisdictions that are U.S. partners from Jordan to Saudi Arabia.
	There's a real threat that this party drug could have already may have landed into Central Europe.
	So I would also go after the facilities that produce Captagon as well to make sure that the new government in Syria, whomever it may be, A, does not have chemical weapons, but B, does not have this robust narco-trafficking infrastructure.
	Back to the phones, James in Lancaster, Virginia, Republican.
	Good morning.
	Good morning.
	Merry Christmas.
	My question is, why do we, and I'm kind of like piggybacking on the other caller, on the Muslim countries, why do America try to impose our constitution, our way of life on a people that their culture is differently, their leadership is different.
	It's kind of like we're trying to change a giraffe into a force.
	If you look at it historically, I mean, it is what it is.
	We need to respect what they are and let their people decide their leadership.
	Look at Turkey.
	That leadership's been there how many years?
	He's been there.
	Rule Turkey.
	He's a hard leader.
	I could not stand Hussein that ran Iraq.
	But look at Iraq now.
	We overthrew him.
	Look at the country.
	It's dismal.
	We created the Iran problem with the Shah.
	I mean, we go into these Muslim countries.
	We got rid of Gaddafi.
	Look at that country.
	We got rid of Syria's leadership.
	Look at that country.
	James, I think we got your point.
	Thank you for your question, Carler.
	The degree to which the U.S. government engages in social engineering or forced democracy promotion, I agree with this sentiment.
	That's something the U.S. simply should not be in the business of because we don't have the great track record.
	The question is, A, how do we secure our interests in these countries and our partners' interests in these countries when we're not in that business and when there is chaos?
	So would you support the U.S. going after a terrorist organization like ISIS when it's fundamentally easier to do so across a whole host of jurisdictions?
	I think that from a counterterrorism perspective, you should be going after terrorists anywhere they are because you're supposed to be targeting them before they can target you and organize.
	That's one.
	And two is, let me get to some of the countries that caller mentioned, ranging from Turkey to Iran, but also Iraq.
	Turkey, for example, right now is contested democratically.
	The U.S. doesn't have a policy of democratic promotion because Turkey itself is a democracy, albeit a more limited one with the AKP and President Erdogan at the helm.
	But Turkey is very interesting because society is really split.
	You have half of the country that really likes the guy, President Erdogan, and half of the country that really despises the guy.
	So keep your eyes on what's happening on the ground.
	That's not a U.S.-led issue.
	That's an organic debate within Turkey about how they want to live and how they want to be governed, about the role of religion in public life, and to in what order the Eastern or Western order Turkey aligns itself.
	Iran is a fundamentally different question.
	I don't think we have enough time for it today.
	But in terms of social engineering, this is where I would say the U.S. is behind the curve.
	The U.S. isn't trying to force democracy down the throats of the Iranians.
	In fact, someone like me who is an Iranian American would say we need to do a heck of a lot more to actually stand with the Iranian people who actually do have our views, values, and interests.
	And we've fallen up short there, particularly even when there is an adversary that is doing something that is both morally reprehensible and strategically unsound that we could afford to check better, and that's the government of the Islamic Republic.
	And on Iraq, yes, I couldn't agree with you more.
	You're not supposed to force democracy with the barrel of a gun, and you're not supposed to be launching wars on faulty premises.
	We spent the first hour this morning on the Washington Journal talking about President-elect Donald Trump's press conference in Mar-a-Lago.
	One of the questions he got was on U.S. troops in Syria and the future of U.S. troops there.
	Let me just play that for a minute and a half and get your thoughts.
	Sure.
	Well, you know, we had 5,000 troops along the border, and I asked a couple of generals, so we have an army of 250,000 at Syria, and you had an army of 400,000.
	They have many more people than that.
	Turkey is a major force, by the way.
	And Erdogan is somebody I got along with great, but he has a major military force.
	And his has not been worn out with war.
	It hasn't been worn out with all of the other things.
	I mean, he's built a very strong, powerful army.
	And so we have 5,000 soldiers in between a 5 million-person army and a 250,000-person army.
	And I asked a general, what do you think of that situation?
	He said, they'll be just wiped out immediately.
	And I moved him out.
	And I took a lot of heat.
	And you know what happened?
	Nothing.
	Nothing.
	I saved a lot of lives.
	Now we have 900.
	They put some back.
	But 900, if you're talking about two, now that one of the sides has been essentially wiped out, but nobody knows who the other side is.
	But I do.
	You know who it is?
	Turkey.
	Okay?
	Turkey's the one behind it.
	He's a very smart guy.
	They've wanted it for thousands of years.
	And he got it.
	And those people that went in are controlled by Turkey.
	And that's okay.
	It's another way to fight.
	But no, I don't think that I want to have our soldiers killed.
	But I don't think that will happen now anyway because the one side's been decimated.
	Benem Ben Taliblou, your thoughts on those statements from the president-elect?
	Well, there's those statements, and there's also what he said, I think, about a weekend ago, where he mentioned that this is not our fight.
	Stay out of it.
	That was his original true social post about Syria.
	And I actually think there's great synergy there.
	And there is a colonel that I actually strongly agree with, meaning the fight over how Damascus at this point in time, after a 13-year bloody civil war with tons of foreign intervention, is to be governed, isn't necessarily the U.S. fight and isn't legally and politically the role of the U.S. forces at that TANF garrison today.
	But the degree to which we're bringing in Turkey now, because the President mentioned President Erdogan's designs, Turkey's larger designs on Syria, the larger Turkey-Syria problem, which has been a problem really from when the Assad regime was in power, the father of Hafiz al-Assad, everything from land to water rights, the Euphrates River Dam issue, there's tons of issues there.
	There is room for a constructive Turkish role in Syria.
	The problem is the Turkish role in Syria has not necessarily been constructive.
	When we're talking about ethnic minorities in Syria right now, one thing that got Turkey to be more overtly interventionist in Syria, using those Syrian proxies, is of course the U.S. support for the SDF, which was largely Kurdish-backed, and the territorial gains made by the SDF.
	Really, let me put this as simply as it can, freaked out Turkey, particularly given the orientation and alliance of some of these Kurdish forces with other designated terrorist organizations like the PKK, which has had terrorist attacks inside of Syria.
	So there is this issue that we have to square.
	And yes, there will have to be high-level Turkey-U.S. diplomacy over Syria, but simply turning it over to the Turks, who've already proven that which they want to do, which is to really engage in some kind of a controlled slaughter of the Kurds in Syria, also isn't wise, also isn't conducive to regional peace, and also doesn't help NATO when you have the second biggest army of NATO engaging in this kind of activity.
	So we need to keep that alliance more cohesive.
	We need to make sure that President Erdogan knows that there's certain boundaries, and we have to make sure that President Erdogan can't transactionally use his leverage in Syria to flip us on other issues as well, to say, I'll turn off the fire in Syria if you are better on me on this issue, on the F-35 production, on Ukraine stuff, on whatever the issue du jour is.
	Staying on the Kurds for a second, this is by Thomas Kaplan and Bernard Henri Levy in today's Wall Street Journal.
	Assad's fall is a chance to back the Kurds, saying they're among the few allies who share American values and know how to win in the region.
	What is the U.S. relationship with the Kurds right now?
	Well, the U.S. does have a deep relationship with a lot of the Kurdish groups, particularly even the ones that were leading the fight against ISIS in Syria, particularly in eastern Syria.
	I perhaps wouldn't take support for the Kurds to the farrest logical conclusion that the two authors have, because I think the U.S. being in the business of drawing further lines in the sand isn't necessarily the best issue, isn't necessarily the best solution to the problems of the Middle East, because the problems of the Middle East today are brought to you by, well, the lack of respect for the rule of law, which are manifested in people don't respect the lines as they are.
	So if you're in the business of trying to solve the problems or manage the problems, more lines that aren't respected create actually more triggers for conflict, more triggers for intervention.
	That doesn't mean the U.S. doesn't necessarily have to stand by, or that doesn't mean the U.S. shouldn't be standing by the partners that it has had, like the Kurds.
	But it's also to understand that Syria is actually a pretty volatile place, and they're able to, at the same time, retain relations with a whole host of folks that are somewhat more problematic.
	And also, you don't want to be in the business of creating new countries in the region, which will create a potential impetus or a trigger for Turkey, Iran, or other countries to get more overtly involved, particularly if your goal is to back away from the region slowly or to make sure at least there's a modicum of stability.
	More phone calls.
	Tony in Flowertown, Pennsylvania, Independent.
	You're on with Benim Ben Taliblou.
	Great.
	So a very interesting conversation.
	I've been following it closely in the news.
	So interesting how different groups are labeled different things.
	For example, the use of the term rebels instead of ISIS, terrorists.
	So I think it matters what we call things.
	I'm interested in the extent to which these proxy wars with Russia have continued.
	I would bring us maybe back to sort of Vietnam, the Gulf of Tonkin.
	You know, Americans are never told the truth about war.
	I think it was Dwight D. Eisenhower that said, you know, beware of the growing influence of the military-industrial complex.
	I would also add to that, beware of the influence of think tanks and their clever names.
	And I'm just thinking of this think tank, this defense of democracies.
	I would just add that you guys are not doing a very good job.
	Democracy is not doing well.
	It certainly isn't doing well in the Middle East, where we're sort of engineering these overthrow of governments.
	It seems like we create more terrorists.
	We're going after terrorism when we create more terrorism.
	Thinking about even WMDs in Iraq and that disaster.
	And just again, time and again, the American people are told things that are just simply not true.
	The reporting on Israel and what Israel is doing and how they're actually seizing territory in Syria now.
	And that's not on our news at all.
	So what we cover, we really mislead.
	We do a disservice.
	This program, when they have think tanks on, also do a disservice in terms of often generating good information.
	That being said, this guest seems to be very intelligent, articulate.
	I'll be interested to see his thoughts on what I'm talking about, which is this continued pattern of proxy wars, the military-industrial complex, and then failed policy after failed policy.
	Got your points, Tony.
	Ben and Ben Talibloo.
	Well, I'll politely sidestep some of the intonations about think tanks and the double D in our name defending democracies.
	I'd be curious to know the caller's views on standing with the sole democracy in the Middle East right now, Israel, which has really proven not necessarily that there is a military solution to all the region's conflicts, but that in fact there is a military option and the forceful exercising of that option can actually have gains that are certainly not just good for the Israelis, but actually gains that are actually good for America and I would say for the world order.
	Going after the Islamic Republic of Iran's terrorist apparatus in the region, handicapping the acts of resistance, defending against the largest ballistic missile arsenal in the Middle East, I would say is a pretty good thing.
	So depending on where you stand in life, we'll find out where you sit.
	But to the heart of your question about proxy wars, not just in the Middle East, but writ large, you know, this has been an interesting pattern, an interesting pattern that we even saw for the Cold War.
	Remember, the Cold War was cold between the U.S. and the USSR because it was hot everywhere else.
	So there's no doubt that the U.S. then and the Soviet Union then had their partners, had their allies essentially fight it out and they were able to arm, train, and equip their partners.
	The question is now, as we move into what many have called, some historians like Niall Ferguson, I believe, have called Cold War 2.0.
	Some authors like David Sanger have called it simply the new Cold War.
	You have people in Congress on the left and the right calling a new axis of evil or new axis of aggressors or new axis of authoritarians emerging, where there's the North Koreans, the Russians, the Iranians, and the Chinese really all coming together.
	The question for U.S. foreign policy will be not one of proxy wars, but what will we do to stop the gains made by these actors?
	So standing with Ukraine, in my view, is not a proxy war.
	The degree to which Ukrainians are willing to fight still for their own territorial integrity against a country that has diametrically opposed views, values, and interests, like the Russian Federation to the United States of America, allows us an opportunity to actually do well by strategy and do well by our morals.
	But the degree to which we impose it on other countries that are unwilling to take on this task, yes, that's where I would agree with the caller.
	But I wouldn't call some of these conflicts around the regions around the world proxy wars today, even though I totally do understand the similarity that may exist between how things went down with the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
	You mentioned David Sanger.
	His book is New Cold War.
	Yes.
	We covered it on C-SPAN's Book TV back in the spring when it came out.
	Can you define a term, axis of resistance?
	Sure.
	Axis of resistance is a term translated into English from Persian, mehfaramuhavamat, that you began to see in the Persian press between 2011 to 2013.
	It really calcified then.
	The Iranians tried to make sense of the Arab spring around them because they had crushed the 2009 green movement in Iran.
	They had seen a whole host of Arab streets protesting against the Arab state.
	The main difference was that the Arab street that Iran had tried to make inroads with did not necessarily get to take over the pro-Western states that used to rule over them.
	And amid this kind of menagerie of chaos that you saw from 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, the Iranians tried to rebrand the Arab Spring as the Islamic Awakening, to make sure that their forces or their friends in each of these countries, be it Egypt or anywhere else, would be ascendant.
	So they wanted the Islamists in each of these contests to be ascendant when the U.S.-backed autocrat in each of these countries would fall.
	Through that came Iran's material support for a whole host of militias turned into terrorist organizations in many of the failed states of the Middle East already.
	So the axis of resistance is an umbrella term that saw the militarization of Iran's foreign and security policy in these failed states at the height of the Arab Spring or what the regime called the Islamic Awakening.
	The Axis has components that are created from well in the past, like Hezbollah in Lebanon in the 1980s or the Badr Corps in Iraq, or that are co-opted, like Hamas in Gaza or the Houthis in Yemen.
	Either way, whether created or co-opted, the goal of political and material support by Iran to this axis is control, to control the cycle of violence, to control the situation on the ground, and to be able to use foreign territory to fight against the U.S. indirectly, to fight against the Israelis indirectly, because this was one of the lessons of the Iran-Iraq war, to not have conflict on your territory directly.
	Has it worked?
	It has worked up until now, meaning the ability of Iran's current supreme leader, who is an 86-year-old man, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
	He's the longest-running contemporary autocrat in the Middle East today, who is still alive and still in power.
	His legacy is actually not the nuclear quest, in my view.
	His legacy is helping create political support for this axis, helping build this axis, helping keep the Islamic Republic on this anti-American, anti-Israeli trajectory at A, the height of American unipolarity after the Cold War, B, when America was on literally the regime's left and right border with the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and being able through,
	with his chief terrorist and former Qudsforce head Qasem Soleimani, architect and manage the chaos and the violence in the region towards not just not the people or the national interest, but towards the regime's hyper-ideological end.
	So in that sense, the regime was able to use chaos to enable for itself a limited war option through proxies, through the axis of resistance, while denying for everybody else against it a limited war option.
	And that, you could say, was their success strategy from the post-9-11 Middle East up until the post-October 7 Middle East.
	And through Israel's targeted killings of Haniya, as well as Salah-Ruri, as well as Yahya Sinwar, as well as a whole host of leaders of the Iran-backed Axis, coupled with the setbacks against Hezbollah militarily, coupled with the powerful strikes by the U.S. and the Israelis and even the Brits against the Houthis in Yemen, coupled with the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, and you've had Iran's axis take a severe beating.
	And the ramifications for this regime getting a severe beating on the conventional front for its axis is exactly what you see in the Iranian press today, which is the more the conventional deterrent goes down, the more the talk of the nuclear deterrent goes up.
	And that is something the Trump administration is going to have to deal with when it comes into office.
	How is this regime, the world's foremost state sponsor of terrorism, going to be acting when max pressure comes back into effect and when it continues to threaten on an almost daily basis that it will go nuclear?
	Soleimani's gone.
	Does this outlast the Ayatollah?
	Well, one hopes that it doesn't outlast the Ayatollah, because the Ayatollah, again, is an 86-year-old man who's taken hostage a nation of 88 million.
	You know, one of the interesting things of watching the shadow war between Iran and Israel move out of the shadows is what the Iranian population has been saying, and even the ability to spin some of this stuff into jokes.
	You know, one joke that emerged in October between Iran's October 1st ballistic missile barrage against Israel and Israel's, I think, October 25th or 26th military response was a joke that I heard kind of being spread across Iran and later made its way into social media was what's the difference between Israelis and Iranians when there's a war?
	And the joke or the answer comes back, well, when there is a conflict or an attack on Israel, Israelis run to the bunker.
	When there's a conflict or an attack on Iranian territory, Iranians run to the rooftops to first make sure the office of the supreme leader is hit.
	So it's a fundamentally different risk tolerance.
	You know, Iran today, and I think we may have spoken about this before, in the post-October 7th Middle East, in terms of society, is a fundamentally different place than where the state is.
	The state continues to chant and has its elites and its supporters chant death to America, death to Israel.
	The population today is in a fundamentally different place.
	You've had the Arab world with the Arab Spring go through this Islamist challenge.
	We're talking about now not Democrats running Damascus, but different shades of jihadists and terrorists and militias and rebels and whatever Namdegir you want to give many of these folks.
	That's fundamentally not going to be the case if you have a collapse of central authority in Iran because you've had the population already go through the Islamist nightmare with the revolution in 1979.
	Back to the phones.
	Charles, Newton, North Carolina, Independent.
	Good morning.
	Thanks for waiting.
	Good morning.
	Thank you for taking my call.
	And I wanted to thank Mr. Talbler for coming on.
	I mean, so much information about the Middle East is so valuable.
	We really hear voices talking about it.
	But I wanted to ask Mr. Tahliba a question about who is going to coordinate the varied influences you listed in Syria to bring people to a central table for discussion about what's going on and who is going to emerge as, I don't know, a central government of Syria, perhaps.
	And also a second question.
	Do you feel that the spirit of the Syrian people that I see so brilliantly on the television will seep through to Iran and the Iranian people?
	Thank you very much.
	Thank you, Carlos.
	An excellent question.
	Thank you for the kind note about the commentary.
	You know, who will coordinate the efforts or who will ensure certain winners and losers, that stuff will continue to be determined by the facts on the ground.
	And unfortunately, the facts on the ground are still determined by, as in all conflict situations, the guys with the guns.
	HTS, as well as these whole hosts of other organizations and groups and terrorist groups and militias and what have you, have not disarmed.
	And it's always interesting when some of the shooting stops and the talking starts, but the guys with guns continue to retain their guns.
	So one wonders how much the threat of violence is going to dangle over the Syrian transition efforts, which we're consistently seeing underway, as well as, of course, this foreign influence factor.
	Turkey certainly has a view.
	Perhaps some of the GCC countries that have also historically in the past funded these Salafi organizations, Salafi jihadist organizations in Syria, they may have a view as well.
	I think President Trump has articulated that this is not our fight.
	How will that line of thinking hold up when he is back in the Oval Office, back at the Resolute Desk, back in the Commander-in-Chief's position when you have to look at the counter-ISIS fight, the counter-WMD fight?
	And really, the question will be, what lens do you wish to see the Middle East through?
	Is the lens that you want to see the Middle East through the counter-Iran fight, in which case it's zero-sum?
	What's bad for the Islamic Republic is good for the United States?
	Or is it going to be through the prism of how can we stand with various minority communities, be it in Iraq or Syria, that have been oppressed, particularly since the rise of ISIS?
	What will be the ordering principle?
	That remains right now an open question.
	And then who else could coordinate?
	Well, I'm quite worried about Mr. Jolani.
	That's his, by the way, his Namdager.
	His real name is Abu Ahmad Ashara.
	That's made its way into the press now.
	I'm quite worried about some of his statements being taken not seriously but literally when they need to be taken seriously but not literally.
	You know, there are some.
	So there are some lines about him saying Syria is weak right now and then therefore we should not go after Israel.
	Or there's quite a bit of hedging as to his commentary.
	And there is a little bit of FTSE on the other.
	There was a caller who asked about think tanks.
	I'd also respectfully like to flag this about the media.
	We've seen paraphrases from Mr. Jolani, Mr. Shara, turn into directly attributed quotes by some media organizations.
	That stuff, I think, is very problematic.
	And I think we can't let anybody speak for this individual other than himself.
	So those who speak the primary languages of the region need to be keeping an eye on the prize.
	This is the time for open source intelligence analysts, open source Middle East watchers to be helping and working hand in glove with reporters to stick to the facts and to keep your eyes on the prize here because a mistranslated quote could lead to a drastically different conclusion because what we're dealing with right now are the very malleable intentions of again the guys with guns in Damascus.
	What is the prize?
	It depends again where you stand.
	Is the prize stability?
	In which case that seems to be what most of the GCC countries want, the Gulf Cooperation Council countries want.
	That's why even there were efforts by the UAE and the Saudis to try to bring Assad back into the fold at the tail end of the Syrian civil war.
	Is the prize handicapping Iran's threat architecture and terrorist architecture in the region?
	In which case the Israelis have done a great job already?
	Conversely, if you're the Islamic Republic, how do you rebuild it?
	That's your prize.
	How do you create this deterrent architecture?
	So the answer really is where do you stand?
	And again, where do you sit?
	But I have to tell you, watching this Syrian crisis unfold and having friends who are Syrian, the prize ultimately has to be a government in Damascus that represents the views, values, and interests of the Syrian people.
	And it's, again, so unfortunate that those people who came onto the streets bravely back in 2011 were so sidelined.
	And again, have not even been a part of this conversation because this conversation, just like all civil wars, continues to be dominated with the guys with guns.
	One more call for you, Pat in New York Independent.
	Thanks for waiting.
	Good morning.
	Thank you for having me.
	Like you said, according to Murphy's law, you know, where one stands on an issue depends directly on where one sits.
	It's hard to justify our position.
	It's hard to say is our statecraft policies questionable in this part of the world.
	I mean, we talk about the Turks' involvement and their intent and interests and all the other players.
	But I remember years ago when a young woman was running for president, trying to be one of the candidates here.
	She was from Hawaii.
	I forget her name.
	She talked about What happened with Clinton when she was in the State Department and the Arab Spring and the involvement with the Saudis who financed some of ISIS to topple Syria because they wanted it to be part of that domino effect?
	There's a lot of questions.
	But as far as where you sit, if you and your family were in Gaza right now, I would want to study you to see how long it would take you to redefine evil.
	I mean, what's going on there, the allowing of the bombing in Syria by the Israeli military, which is with our blessing, I'm sure, if not our direction, is questionable.
	All our involvement is questionable.
	But you know what?
	The genocide that's happening there is just not justifiable.
	It's unjustifiable.
	So we have 150 nations voting against us right now, the ICC, criminal court, and everything else.
	So you have to re-examine your position, your stand on what you're doing.
	Even though you want to fight Iran or you want to play this chess game against these forces, the way you're doing it is not going to prevail.
	We're in our little country here in our arena.
	We justify what we do, but the rest of the globe has a different opinion on what's happening right now.
	And you need to open your eyes and see it.
	And there's so much more I can say, but I think you get the picture of what I'm trying to talk about here.
	We'll take your point.
	Let me give Benam Ben Taliblu the final two minutes here.
	Sure.
	Pat, thank you for your call, sir.
	No, trust me, my eyes are open and I'm seeing it.
	I've seen the horrors of October 7, seen what happens when the Islamic Republic of Iran has basically unchecked capability to cause havoc across the region.
	The question will be, have you seen the horrors of the Syrian civil war?
	Have you seen what Assad has been doing in his prisons?
	None of this is to justify or to engage in whataboutism.
	There is a whole host, a whole host, a cycle of violence in the Middle East right now.
	But to take the word genocide and apply that to what is happening in Gaza, I think that is respectfully quite far off the mark.
	Instead, I do think that the U.S. does need to retain a productive, strong relationship with the Israelis, but also where you can speak truth to power, engage in tough talk where you need to.
	But that doesn't need to mean lining up 150 different nations against your best partner and ally in that region, particularly one that was targeted by the back end of this acts of resistance of this terrorist organization after October 7.
	But again, you agreed with me on the framing.
	Where you stand in life depends on where you sit.
	In the short term, how can the U.S. best live up to its own views, values, and interests, do well by the American people who clearly want to do less, not more, in this region?
	I would say three framings, three lenses are important to have.
	One, the counterterrorism lens.
	Don't forget about that fight because what happens in the Middle East does not stay in the Middle East.
	Often the first test case is what happens to our friend and partner, Israel.
	Number two, the counter-WMD fight.
	What happened by going after the chemical weapons program of Assad is, I think, a net positive, not just for the Syrian people, not just for the Israelis, but for the Americas and for Global Order.
	You don't want loose WMD across the Middle East.
	And number three, that WMD fight gets us to the world's foremost state sponsor of terrorism, pursuing the world's most dangerous weapons.
	The imperative of having an ordering principle to deal with the Middle East, and that is to tackle the one main state threat that continues to drag us in into various iterations of conflict after conflict, and that is the Islamic Republic of Iran.
	So have a policy with which to deal with that.
	I, for one, am cautiously optimistic about the return of maximum pressure, the Trump administration's economic policy against the Islamic Republic.
	There are certain areas where it needs to be significantly improved and calibrated.
	And we'll certainly need a domestic angle as well to stand with the Iranian people.
	So maximum pressure against the regime, maximum support for the people.
	Hopefully from there on out, we can create a better Middle East.
	And I'm sure we'll talk to you down the road if and when that starts happening.
	Benham Ben Taliblu is with the Foundation for Defense of Democracy's FDD.org if you want to check out the work of him and his colleagues.
	And we always appreciate your time.
	Thank you.
	Coming up in about 25 minutes this morning, Leah Greenberg will join us to talk about her group, Indivisible, discuss that group's efforts in the year ahead.
	Coming up next, though, more of your phone calls in open forum.
	You can go ahead and start calling in now on phone lines for Republicans, Democrats, and Independents.
	And while you're dialing in, we take you to the National World War II Memorial here in Washington, D.C. Yesterday, veterans and representatives from each of the Allied nations gathered to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge.
	Germany launching that surprise attack on Allied forces 80 years ago yesterday.
	More than 1 million Allied service members took part in that campaign.
	More than 22,000 Allied soldiers and civilians died.
	The ceremony honored two World War II veterans who took part in that battle.
	Here's a portion from yesterday.
	It is now my great honor to introduce our World War II veterans.
	Colonel Frank Cohn was born in Breslau, Germany in 1925.
	Colonel Cohn escaped with his parents to the United States at the age of 13.
	Drafted into the United States Army, he bravely served in the Battle of the Bulge, the Rhineland, and Central Europe campaigns, ultimately meeting Russians at the Elba River.
	Following these historic contributions, he became Sergeant of the Guard for the Nazi prisoners, later tried in the Second Nuremberg trial.
	Colonel Cohn's distinguished military career spanned 35 years, including tours in Korea and Vietnam, culminating in his role as Chief of Staff of the Military District of Washington.
	Let us honor Colonel Frank Cohn.
	Mr. Harry Miller, at just 16 years old, Harry Miller fought in the Battle of the Bulge as a member of the United States Army 740th Tank Battalion attached to the 82nd Airborne Division.
	His distinguished military career continued with service in Korea at General Douglas MacArthur's headquarters and in Vietnam with the United States Air Force, retiring in 1966 as a senior master sergeant in the Air Force.
	Today, Harry remains dedicated to honoring the legacy of his fellow veterans, volunteering here at the memorial to share inspiring stories of courage and service with visitors of all ages.
	Let us honor Harry Miller.
	Washington Journal continues.
	Some time now for you to lead the conversation.
	It's our open forum.
	Any public policy, any political issue that you want to talk about, now is your time to do so.
	Call in on phone lines for Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, as usual, as you're calling in, letting you know what's on the C-SPAN networks today, including a hearing on legal sports betting.
	Since 2018, 38 states in Washington, D.C. have begun to offer legal sports gambling today before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
	NCAA President of former Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker will testify on the growth of legal sports betting, its impact on society.
	That is 10 a.m. on C-SPAN 3, also c-span.org and the free C-SPANNOW video app.
	This afternoon, 2:30 p.m. Eastern, a hearing on antitrust enforcement and reform legal scholars and antitrust experts are before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee today about those issues.
	Live coverage, again, begins 2:30 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN3, C-SPAN.org, and the free C-SPAN Now app.
	And with that, time for your phone calls.
	It's open forum.
	Shirley is up first in South Carolina.
	Democrat, Shirley, what's on your mind?
	Okay, John.
	Good morning.
	This is the first time I was able to get anywhere while you were there, but I just want to have a few things to say.
	I'm a 90-year-old woman, and I live half of my life in New York.
	I was there when Donald Trump's father and his, I call him his gang, brought Donald there.
	I just can't stand the idea of Donald Trump being in that White House because I know a lot about his history.
	I kept up with him when I was in New York.
	I did not vote for him.
	I would never vote for him.
	And I don't understand how all these other people could vote for this.
	He's a crook.
	I just don't have anything to say nice about him, but he is not my president.
	And I thank you for letting me speak.
	That's Shirley and South Carolina.
	This is Kim in Michigan, Benton Harbor, Michigan, Republican.
	Good morning.
	What's on your mind, Kim?
	It's open forum.
	Then we will go to Maria in Atlanta, fine for Democrats.
	Go ahead.
	John McCarlow, C-SPAN family.
	Can you hear me?
	Yes, ma'am.
	What's on your mind?
	John, what's on my mind is I used to love to get up and watch y'all faithfully for 20-something and 30 years.
	Me and my sister wonder what's all like people say, well, you can't play the race car.
	What's going on with you guys?
	You have a new staff?
	You don't show how they know African Americans anymore.
	You have two, three weeks and nothing but contagious, Caucasians, Caucasus.
	And I'm quite sure any subject that you talk about are African Americans.
	I mean, it seems like somebody new has taken over.
	Maria, keep watching.
	I'm sure you've missed some of our guests, and I'm sure you'll see more down the road.
	But I hope you keep watching.
	It's the same Washington Journal.
	We try to be here as a place of a forum for you to call in and have these conversations every day about what's going on on Capitol Hill and around the country.
	What's going on today on Capitol Hill?
	We continue to watch that funding deadline that's coming up on Friday, December the 20th.
	The government funding deadline, if a continuing resolution to fund the government passed Friday does not pass, we will be in a government shutdown.
	Congress working this week to avoid that possibility.
	Yesterday, it was on the Senate floor that Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell spoke.
	It was his first remark since falling and spraining his wrist last week in the Capitol at a meeting with fellow senators.
	He urged yesterday lawmakers move quickly on Friday's funding deadline.
	This is some of what he had to say.
	Extending government funding by Friday is our top priority.
	Shutting the government down is a one-way ticket to needless disruption of important functions.
	It's never been a winning proposition, and this time it's no different.
	Delivering urgent disaster relief is a non-negotiable as communities across the country continue to pick up the pieces from a devastating storm season.
	They're watching closely for the Senate to deliver on the promise of a much-needed helping hand.
	Mitch McConnell, yesterday the Senate is back in session at 10 a.m. Eastern.
	Today, the House also comes in at 10 a.m. Eastern.
	That's where you'll be going after this program if you stick with us on C-SPAN.
	But it's open forum right now.
	This is Connie in Friendsville, Tennessee, line for Democrats.
	Good morning.
	So I'd like to make a comment on Pete Hegseth.
	I hope I'm saying that right.
	That he said that he would stop drinking if he were appointed to the position that Donald Trump wants to have him approved for.
	When you have an addiction, you just can't say that and you just can't stop.
	And to me, he is, say, the equivalent of Hunter Biden walking through the House of Representatives.
	And Hunter Biden had a drug addiction, had to go through recovery.
	And then, you know, he got through his recovery and he's in recovery.
	Yet the first time they find what they say is some kind of a white powder in the White House, oh, it's Hunter Biden, and it's his drug.
	It's cocaine.
	So Pete Hegset, the Republicans are they know that any of them that have had any kind of drinking or drug problem, and many of them have, that is life, but they're hypocrites.
	And so Pete Hegset, my father was killed in World War II in the Marines.
	He is not deserving to serve our military men and women.
	Thank you.
	That's Connie in Tennessee.
	This is John in Hampton, Virginia.
	It's open forum.
	Go ahead.
	Good morning, John.
	I just want to take my hat off to the man that fought in the Battle of the Bulge.
	40 years ago this month, I was able to visit that exact location.
	I was stationed in northern Germany at 2nd Army Division Ford in Garstad.
	I was with Delta Company 17th Engineers and we supported 341 Infantry Division.
	We had a field exercise and a tour of the Battle of the Bulge and the Ardennes Forest region along Belgium and southern Netherlands and Luxembourg.
	But it was a sight to see and there is a museum there that we had a chance to go in and look.
	But it gives a chilling effect when you go stand in that place and know that a lot of Americans died there.
	However, my dad served in World War II.
	He was in northern Africa and in Italy and Sicily.
	He was out of Camp Polk, Louisiana at the time, Fort Polk, and he was with the engineer unit.
	Then there was the 425th Engineer Battalion out of Camp Claiborne, I should say, is what it was called back then.
	But I just take my hat off to the men and women that served during that time.
	80 years ago, John, what's the legacy today of the Battle of the Bulge?
	We talk about the anniversaries of December 7th and June 6th.
	What's the legacy here on the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of the Bulge?
	I would say the legacy is that the U.S. military will fight wherever we're told to go by our country.
	However, there's a lot of things that need fixing.
	I understand that the current incoming president wants to go back and get rid of the homosexual and gay and transgender soldiers.
	But I was also an Army recruiter, and it is very hard to recruit back then and recruit now.
	So I don't care if a person to my left or right is gay.
	I want them to point a weapon downrange and be able to fire and hit a target.
	That's John out of Hampton, Virginia, this morning.
	Dale is an independent in Texas.
	Good morning.
	You're next.
	Yeah, good morning.
	I just want to bring up a couple things.
	One, recently is heard that Biden gave Iran more oil revenue that was being held up.
	I don't understand that.
	The second thing is selling this border law stuff that the government's already paid for, pennies on the dollar.
	That makes a lot of sense in Biden's thinking.
	And it just behooves me how he seems to want to end his legacy on being such a petty, childish actions that he seems to be taking against this country.
	If somebody could explain that justification, I'd appreciate it.
	Thank you.
	Dale in Texas, staying on the independent line.
	Tina in Pennsylvania.
	Good morning.
	You're next.
	Good morning.
	I want to wish my fellow Americans a very happy, merry Christmas.
	I hope everybody is well, but I would like to make a suggestion.
	I wish the Democrats, specifically the Democrats and the couple rhinos that we have left, would allow Trump to do Trump.
	He picked these people for a reason.
	Everybody's coming down on Pete Hedsett.
	He saw battle.
	You know, he's a good soldier.
	He's a patriot.
	I'm tired of the DEI.
	Let's get, let's put this one in because it'll be a first.
	Let's put this one in because of the color of a skin.
	That has nothing to do with the capabilities of doing the job.
	Let Trump pick his cabinet, confirm them.
	If they screw up, he'll fire them.
	We all know he can be as pompous as he can be.
	He will get rid of them.
	We need to sit back and give this man a chance that he did not get in his first term.
	The very first day they were going after him.
	I don't want to see that again.
	For four years, my family has suffered.
	My husband is dying because he was forced into something that everybody in America had to get.
	And I'm done.
	I'm done with it.
	Let President Trump do his job.
	The Democrats need to sit down.
	They might learn something on governing.
	Because I'm going to tell you, we were a heck of a lot better off eight years ago than we are now.
	That's Tina in Pennsylvania on Donald Trump's nominees.
	This was yesterday on Capitol Hill, Republican Senator Rick Scott of Florida after meeting with Donald Trump's HHS nominee, RFK Jr.
	So I just had a great meeting with Barbara Kennedy.
	I really appreciate his message.
	As you know, I used to be in the hospital business.
	I think it's great to have an HH secretary that is going to focus on the health of America, which is the most important thing we ought to do.
	I think for all of us, what we're thinking about is how do we stay healthy every day?
	And finally, we're going to have an HH secretary that wakes up every day and says, how do we keep everybody healthy in this country?
	He's going to have a lot of opportunity to do that.
	I'm completely supportive of what he wants to accomplish, and I wish him the best of luck.
	What did he say about vaccines specifically, sir?
	And especially his claim that it's linked to autism.
	So what he wants with vaccines is, which is what I believe in, is transparency.
	I think we need to know exactly with all vaccines, what has been the research, and do they work?
	And what's your risk?
	Like what you should know, even if you're going to go get a vaccine yourself at your age, even say, okay, so what's my risk of having a problem with that disease or whatever.
	And so that's what the government ought to be doing to you.
	What about polio vaccines specifically?
	We didn't talk about that.
	Talk about the hypercoast corn syrup.
	So what we talked about was we talked about what he wants to accomplish.
	And I asked him, we talked about how do we make sure Medicaid is a program where people have the ability to, we keep people healthy.
	And how do we make sure Medicare is a program we keep people healthy?
	That's really what we talked about.
	I joined Mike Fine Spirits.
	Did you talk about abortion at all?
	Abortion access?
	No.
	All right.
	Thank you, guys.
	Senator Rick Scott of Florida, yesterday with reporters on Capitol Hill.
	Back to your phone calls.
	It is open forum.
	Any public policy, any political issue that you want to talk about, now's the time to call in.
	This is Elizabeth Waiting in California.
	Democrat, good morning.
	Good morning, C-SPAN.
	I just wanted to call and remember my uncle Henry this morning.
	He was at Pearl Harbor when it was bombed in Hickam Field, and he saw the planes coming in.
	He said he was so close he could have thrown a rock at the plane if he had one.
	And he later helped pull guys out of the bay.
	And then he was also, he also went to the European theater and was captured at the Battle of the Bulge and spent time in a prisoner of war camp there.
	But anyway, we are a Democratic family.
	And I wanted to comment about Trump and the young lady that called earlier saying that, let Trump be Trump.
	Well, I do remember what he was like on his first day in office.
	On his first day in office, Trump claimed that he had more people at his inauguration than Obama had.
	And he spent a few weeks trying to prove this silly, ridiculous idea that he had more people at his inauguration.
	He was gaslighting the American people from day one.
	And now someone called in earlier on one of your programs and said there was a photo of Trump.
	He was saluting, standing and saluting.
	And he said that he was representing America at Notre Dame.
	And in his press conference yesterday, he kept saying, well, we're negotiating for the hostages and this and that.
	He thinks he's president already.
	That's the kind of person he is.
	He's delusional.
	And the other things that Americans need to remember about Trump, he did try to overturn the election on January 6th.
	We cannot forget that image either.
	And finally, the image that I can remember that the press suppressed was him performing a sex act on a microphone.
	That's the kind of man Trump is.
	And I don't think the American people can forget it.
	And what I can see now with Trump is he's trying to take credit for a lot of the things that Obama has done.
	Trump is not president yet.
	I mean, sorry, that Biden has done.
	Biden is trying to point out all of the good things he did with regard to the CHIPS Act and the infrastructure building.
	And Trump is going to run in and try to take credit for that.
	And I hope Americans don't let that happen.
	Thank you.
	Elizabeth, before you go, can I ask the name of your uncle, somebody who survived Pearl Harbor and was captured at the Battle of the Bulge and was in a German city?
	His name is Henry.
	His name is Henry, and he's very modest.
	And one interesting thing that happened in his life, he passed away in 2011.
	But when we went into the Iraq war, you know, there was a lot of footage about bombing Iraq.
	And my uncle had, he started, he lived alone, and he had lunch with my father almost every other day.
	And my dad went over to get him, and he was still sleeping, and he was disoriented.
	And he came out with one shoe on, and we couldn't figure out what was happening.
	So we ended up taking him to the VA.
	And they do a fabulous job with veterans.
	I hope Trump does not dismantle that.
	Anyway, after being surveyed and spending some time, the doctor, his doctor told me, said they thought he had PTSD from his experiences in World War II.
	And that's what it appeared to be because there was nothing physically wrong with him.
	But there was so much news coverage of bombings when we first went into Iraq.
	Elizabeth, thanks.
	Thanks for telling us about Henry.
	This is Robert in Ohio, Republican.
	Robert, just less than five minutes in open form.
	Go ahead.
	Hello.
	Go ahead, Robert.
	Oh, I'm not prepared.
	Okay, then we will go to Helen in Wisconsin, Independent.
	Good morning.
	Good morning, John.
	I'm just calling to advocate that President Trump does dismantle the Department of Education.
	Absolutely.
	I've heard callers on your air who work for the Department of Education say the same thing, and it's true.
	The Department of Education is running the most predatory, unconstitutional loan scam in U.S. history.
	You know, these student loans have been stripped of bankruptcy rights, which is called for in the Constitution.
	They have the power to declare war and raise an army, actually.
	They've been stripped of statutes of limitations.
	They've become a license to steal, and the Department of Education and the colleges are the two entities most culpable for this.
	I would say to Donald Trump, when he comes in office, the first thing he has to do is return bankruptcy rights to these loans, and I would say put the colleges on the hook to reimburse the federal government at least partially for discharges.
	And I don't mean the smaller colleges.
	I mean, the trust fund colleges, the hedge fund colleges like Harvard and Yale, these people that have hundreds of billions of dollars in their endowments.
	That's Alan in Wisconsin.
	This is Nebraska.
	Karen, Democrat, good morning.
	Karen, you with us?
	Then it is Mary Lou in Connecticut, Independent.
	Mary Lou, good morning.
	Good morning.
	You know, I'm calling.
	I tried to call yesterday about the UFOs and the drones, I guess they're drones or whatever they are flying over the East Coast.
	And I believe it's China that is doing it.
	And I believe this is one of the things that President Biden got, let China take over the surveillance of this country for money.
	For what Biden, what we heard Hunter Biden say, you better give me the money because my father is sitting right here.
	And they've gotten at least $10 million, that family, from China.
	Yesterday, it was John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesperson, who came out and gave a new statement about the drone saying that we have assessed after an investigation that the sightings to date include a combination of lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones, and law enforcement drones, as well as manned fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters, and even stars that were mistakenly reported as drones.
	We have not identified anything anomalous or any national security or public safety risk over the civilian airspace in New Jersey or other states in the Northeast.
	That's after the federal government looked into it.
	Well, why did they let the air balloon fly from Alaska over to South Carolina before they did anything about it?
	Because what is President Biden doing now?
	He is trying to do things so Trump will have a terrible time when he gets in office.
	I'm worried that Trump is going to meet up with World War III on January 20th or sometimes 20 because Joe, I hate to call him Joe Biden, but President Biden is doing everything to undermine Donald Trump's new time in office.
	That's Mary Lou.
	James, last call here from California.
	Go ahead.
	Thanks for waiting.
	Hey, how y'all doing today?
	Nice to see everybody is very, very interested in what's going on with the political scene.
	But I feel like these older people need to understand that it's millennial rule.
	That's why JD Vance is in the White House right now.
	He's a man who went through some very, very tough times, if you will, going through the Second Gulf War, the Iraq War, Afghanistan.
	I have neighbors that went through that.
	I have friends who went through that.
	And shout out to Mr. Justin Oxenrider out in Oregon.
	He's featured on one of the films that actually details the first people into Iraq.
	And we, I mean, I was a senior when that happened.
	I was a senior in high school.
	It was the second week of high school.
	Our world stopped.
	And I think a lot of people are forgetting.
	They're focusing on too many people are focusing on right now, all the delusions that are thrown at us, all the craziness that's being thrown at us.
	But we're forgetting that 9-11 happened.
	9-11 destroyed America.
	9-11 made America hurt.
	But hurt no more.
	Donald Trump is going to handle his business for four years, but I'm going to tell you right now, 2028, James Houston the second for president.
	Believe it.
	Are you James Houston?
	Thank you.
	And I am speaking.
	It's James Houston in California.
	Last caller in this segment of the Washington Journal.
	About 45 minutes left this morning in that time.
	We'll be joined by Leah Greenberg to talk about her grassroots progressive group, Indivisible, and their plans in 2025.
	Stick around for that conversation.
	We'll be right back.
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	Washington Journal continues.
	A conversation now on progressive activism during a second Trump administration.
	Our guest is Leah Greenberg.
	She's co-executive director of the group Indivisible.
	Ms. Greenberg, what's the mission of Indivisible?
	How'd you get started?
	How long have you been around?
	Well, Indivisible got started shortly after the election of Donald Trump in 2016 when my husband and I, we were former congressional staffers, took everything that we had learned about how to operate on the Hill, how to organize locally, how to be effective in moving your elected officials, turned it into a kind of like do-it-yourself guide to organizing locally, and just put it on the internet as a Google Doc.
	And in that moment, it caught fire with thousands and thousands of people who were horrified by the election of Donald Trump, who had already started organizing locally and who picked up the guide and its name, Indivisible, and started using that as their rallying cry.
	And so we formed an organization to support this incredible grassroots movement of people who were standing up against Donald Trump, who fought to build the blue wave in 2018, who fought to save the Affordable Care Act, who fought to get him out of office the first time, and who are getting ready right now to fight back once again.
	Why do you think Donald Trump won in 2024?
	Well, I think when we're looking at Donald Trump's victory in 2024, we've got to look first and foremost at the global context, right?
	This has been a year in which incumbent governments worldwide are getting pummeled, right?
	If you look at people who presided over 2021, 2022, the post-COVID inflationary period, there's just very deep and widespread anger and frustration with how things have been going all around the world.
	And we've seen that and we knew that that was the case heading in with fairly low approval ratings for the incumbent president.
	I think we all hoped that the swap in candidates would give us a little bit of ability to outride that wave.
	Unfortunately, in spite of a really valiant effort by a lot of folks, it wasn't enough to overcome that overall level of anger and frustration.
	And I think fundamentally we let Donald Trump present himself as, or we hope Donald Trump was ultimately able to present himself as the candidate of a change, the candidate who was opposed to the status quo.
	And he was able to portray us as kind of in favor of the status quo.
	And that set up for an unfortunate result.
	In retrospect, was swapping candidates a good idea?
	I absolutely think it was a good idea.
	I think if you're looking at the approval ratings of President Biden at the time, I think if you are looking at what Harris was able to do, how she was able to harness an enormous amount of new energy, excitement, we personally have a ton of new people who came in out of sheer excitement for the ability to support her candidacy.
	I think she ran about as good as one could ask for with 100 days left, which is a feat that nobody has been asked to do before.
	Did she do everything exactly the way I would have done it?
	No, but that's not a fair task to ask of anyone.
	Fundamentally, I think probably the candidate swap helped us save three or four Senate seats and prevents a down ballot bloodbath.
	So it was absolutely a good decision on the part of the party or on the part of President Biden.
	Who's the leader of the Democratic Party come 2025?
	That's a great question.
	And I would answer, it is the people who start showing leadership.
	Right now, we are not seeing a ton of leadership across the Democratic Party.
	We are seeing some people put forward ideas, some people start to organize, but we're seeing a lot of people kind of go into Democrats in disarray mode, right?
	Where we all start questioning everything about ourselves just because we have had an election loss, right?
	And that is not a helpful place to be.
	We should always be thinking critically.
	We should always be thinking about what is our message?
	What is our brand?
	What do Democrats stand for?
	What kinds of policies actually make people's lives better in ways that they can feel and see and trust us on?
	That stuff is good and important.
	But what we're seeing right now is a lot of Democrats who are kind of inching over to collaborating and supporting some stuff that is not helpful around Donald Trump's initiative.
	And what we need to do is present a strong and coherent opposition party that's ready to fight back and that's going to articulate to the American people why Donald Trump's agenda is going to make their lives worse.
	What are some of those agenda items that you think some Democrats are inching over and starting to support?
	Well, I think what we've seen, for example, with certain Democrats flirting with the congressional or with the Doge effort, right?
	Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy's effort to, you know, theoretically cut $2 trillion from federal government, which they absolutely cannot do without digging into Social Security, into Medicare, into Medicaid.
	I think any effort that validates that as a real and good faith effort to try and address government reform, as opposed to a transparent cash grab by people who will benefit personally from gutting government services so they can hand themselves fat defense contracts and tax cuts, that's the kind of thing where we need to be really clear to people what is happening, that this is a scam.
	Two weeks after the election, your group Indivisible published a new guide.
	It was that original guide that put your group on the map back in 2016.
	This new guide for supporters, what's the message that you're sending in this new guide?
	Well, the message is really simple.
	Donald Trump is made very clear that he intends to come in and govern as a dictator, but that's his intention.
	And that is not how power works in American society.
	Power is distributed.
	It lies at the local level.
	It lies at the state level.
	It lies at the federal level.
	If we all organize locally and if we use every lever that we have got, right?
	Our counties, our cities, our mayors, our state legislatures, our governors, our elected officials at the federal level, and we all play our roles because we each have a different role to play based on where we are in the country.
	We can block some of the worst of Donald Trump's agenda, some of the harm that he intends to do to us and to our neighbors.
	We can hold off that harm.
	We can make sure that people understand exactly how dangerous and damaging and personally harmful his agenda is going to be for them.
	We can protect elections so that we're actually able to have elections in 2026.
	And then we can beat them in midterms in a way that will allow us to have a real check on them going forward and set up for 2028.
	So the guide is about what you as a regular person, wherever you are who is appalled by what is happening, can do to exercise that power.
	Organize locally, never give an inch.
	Use your own elected officials to exert the power that you have.
	How do you block that agenda without control of the House or the Senate?
	And of course, the White House?
	Well, I think we should be, I think we should be real about a couple of the underlying conditions here, right?
	So Donald Trump got elected by putting as much distance as he possibly could between himself and his actual Project 2025 agenda, right?
	He like literally disowned it in a number of different settings.
	And he was elected.
	And one of the things that we saw in focus groups was a lot of voters literally didn't believe that he was going to do some of the things that he said he was going to do.
	So his coalition is not stable.
	There's a bunch of people within that who voted for him because they are frustrated about inflation, but did not vote for anything about a Project 2025 agenda.
	So that's one is that he's not actually got as stable a coalition as people are making out.
	The second is he has a teeny tiny majority in the House of Representatives, right?
	When we were able to successfully block the Affordable Care Act for the first time, he had a majority of 43 Republicans in the House of Representatives.
	They are looking at a three-person majority right now.
	So that pits all of the members of Congress who want to get reelected in 2026 and can't do that if everything that they're doing is incredibly unpopular against the extremists in the House, the people who are like, this is our chance to slash every single government program and get rid of Social Security once and for all.
	That's going to be a real fight.
	And as long as we hold Democrats united, then they are going to have to fight that out themselves.
	And a lot of the things that they want to pass, we might be able to stop with enough pressure, enough outrage, enough summoning of all the power that we've got.
	And if we make sure that people know exactly how dangerous these things are ahead of time.
	Leah Greenberg, our guest, the numbers to call in in this last segment of the Washington Journal, 202-748-8001 for Republicans.
	Democrats, 202-748-8000.
	Independents, 202-748-8002.
	Joining us until the House comes in at 10 a.m. Eastern.
	Of course, the Senate is in as well at 10 a.m.
	You can watch that over on C-SPAN too.
	You'll go to the House if you stick here on C-SPAN.
	Leah Greenberg, as folks continue to call in, let me just bounce this off you.
	This is Congressman Richie Torres, Democrat of New York, in the days after the 2024 election.
	He writes this, Donald Trump has no greater friend than the far left, which has managed to alienate historic numbers of Latinos and blacks and Asians and Jews from the Democratic Party with absurdities like defund the police or from the river to the sea or Latinx.
	There is much more to lose than Twitch and TikTok.
	There's much more to lose, excuse me, than there is to gain politically from pandering to the far left, which is more represented of Twitter and Twitch and TikTok than of the real world.
	The working class, he said, is not buying the ivory-towered nonsense that the far left is selling.
	Look, I think this has been one of the strains of the discourse and the hot takes post-election, right?
	And we should be real that anytime you lose an election, certain people who are making one argument on Monday are going to say on Wednesday, yeah, that's why we lost.
	That's my pet issue.
	That's why we lost.
	I think it is a completely transparent exercise to kind of continue to grind the acts that you were grinding before the election to go in and say a campaign that ran a really aggressive effort to reach out to centrists, a really aggressive effort to flip Haley voters that did very intentional and very aggressive outreach on all fronts to try to broaden that coalition, to look at that and say, you know, somehow, some way,
	this is the fault of the people who are totally not making any of the decisions in the Democratic Party.
	Don't look at the people who, you know, made decisions about deploying a billion dollars.
	Don't look at the people who set up for the conditions that forced Vice President Harris into this like last minute, you know, mad dash attempt to present herself to the voters.
	Look at somebody who's totally out of power and completely not, you know, wasn't making any of the decisions involved in the campaign.
	So, you know, again, I think hot takes are going to hot take, but we should be serious when we're actually looking for answers about what is really going to transform the Democratic Party.
	Let me get you some of those callers.
	We'll start on line for Democrats out of the battleground state of Michigan.
	It's Holly.
	Good morning.
	Good morning.
	Morning, Holly.
	What's your question or comment for Leah Greenberg?
	So David Hogg was on yesterday on another newscast, and he was very frustrated with how he was, how the Democratic leadership was responding to his questions and comments about the previous election, about the Harris campaign.
	And now with the shooting that we've had, I feel like the Democratic Party really needs to embrace some of the things that you guys are talking about, but they're just not listening.
	Leah Greenberg.
	Well, I think that the Democratic Party is a lot of different people and a lot of different places, right?
	When we talk about the Democratic Party, we're talking about all of our own elected officials.
	We're talking about the DNC.
	We're talking about the president and everybody in his administration.
	I think what I would say is that we're going to be in an intra-party conversation for the coming years about who we are, what we stand for, what we want to be.
	And the single best way that we're going to make people listen is we are going to organize and we're going to show our own power.
	And then we're going to be at the table and say, this is what we are seeing work on the ground.
	And ultimately, we're going to be able to push people in that direction by virtue of that power and that organizing.
	The caller mentions David Hogg.
	Do you think David Hogg should be in DNC leadership?
	He's running for one of those vice chair spots as reported this week.
	So I represent a network of thousands of local indivisible groups.
	And when we're going to make a national endorsement of any kind, we want to talk to our indivisible groups first.
	What I would say is that I think that the Democratic, you know, the conversation over the DNC is absolutely a healthy time to be talking about the future of the Democratic Party, the ways that it can and should be doing better outreach, messaging, reaching people in non-traditional ways, all of the stuff that's being brought up by this conversation.
	This is Patricia in Minneapolis, Republican.
	Good morning.
	Thanks for waiting.
	Good morning.
	Ms. Greenberg, didn't you learn anything from the election?
	How did that lie about Trump being for the Project 2025 workout for you guys?
	How about that lie about the dictator thing you said?
	And the other lie, quit trying to scare Americans.
	Quit lying to us.
	They're not going to get rid of Social Security.
	You Democrats have been saying that for decades.
	It's the biggest lie.
	You're trying to instill fear.
	You're trying to divide Americans.
	We're sick of it.
	We're absolutely sick of it.
	You and your far left, crazy, insane ideas and lies.
	Leah Greenberg, give you a chance to respond.
	Sure.
	I think what I would say is that I could have heard somebody call into this show and say the exact same thing about abortion five years ago.
	They're not going to get rid of abortion.
	Don't be ridiculous.
	That's all lies.
	That's the kind of thing that people were saying.
	And in fact, very smart people across the establishment were telling us, like, you know, don't worry about the right to abortion.
	You don't really need to be concerned about that.
	Then they got a majority on the Supreme Court and they did what they've been planning to do for 40 years, which was get rid of the right to abortion nationally.
	And now women are dying for lack of ability to access basic reproductive care.
	So when we say they mean what they are saying, they mean what they're promising, they mean what they're promising.
	And they have been absolutely clear if you look at conservative writing and reading in theory over the last few years that they 100% intend to come for the basics of the great society, the basics of the welfare state, basics like Social Security, like Medicare, like Medicaid.
	One of our viewers on X as Tech wants to know how you're paid, how your group is funded.
	Sure.
	We're funded by donations.
	Our single largest source is small dollar donations.
	We get them through our emails, through our website, through social media.
	So if you are inspired, feel free to go to indivisible.org and sign up for our weekly email updates on what you can do to be strategic or, you know, help support our work.
	And is this your full-time job?
	This is my full-time job.
	Mark is in Wisconsin Independent.
	Good morning.
	Yes, sir.
	Oh, thank you very much.
	I just wanted to comment on the representative cited the reasons earlier you played.
	Democrat representatives said why the Democrats lost the election.
	And I think it's wise for the Democrats to invest early now in accepting why they lost.
	And if they don't, 2026 is going to be a big problem.
	And I believe that the Democrat representative you had, I can't remember his name, but that was a very accurate take on what happened.
	And to say it was a particular hot cake on Monday or Wednesday or whatever, that's kind of denial to me.
	And so that's all I really want to do.
	Mark, we were talking about, I'm trying to remember the representative from last week.
	Was it Tom Swazi of New York?
	He was talking about concerns about Democrats on the issue of immigration.
	And that's one of the reasons why Democrats lost.
	Was that what you were referring to?
	No, just about two minutes or four minutes ago, you're talking about Richie Torres' the comment.
	Gotcha.
	Leah Greenberg, you talked about Richie Torres.
	We did have Tom Swazzi on this show, and he talked a lot about Democrats not trying to understand why people voted for Donald Trump and talked a lot about the issue of immigration.
	What would your response be?
	Well, look, we've got a lot of folks who organized in Tom Swazzi's district to elect him and who worked really closely with the campaign to get him through.
	And, you know, we are an organization that collectively is really clear that when it comes to general elections, we're going to get in line behind the Democrat and make sure that we are collectively pushing to defeat, to elect pro-democracy candidates and to defeat would-be fascists or fascist enablers.
	So, you know, regardless of whether we've got ideological disagreements, we're always behind the person who ultimately we need to get into office at the end of the day here.
	What I would say overall is that, you know, I think we got to look at the terms this election was fought on.
	Donald Trump did a very effective job of being the anti-system candidate, right?
	And he appealed to people who do not trust that the existing system is working.
	And fundamentally, if what we take away from that is kind of about the ideological spectrum, right?
	Left to right, versus the like pro-system, anti-system spectrum, people who don't trust the establishment, people who don't trust the institutions, people who don't think that the status quo is working for them.
	And we talk about it in ideological terms in terms of talking about how do we actually reach people who are sufficiently frustrated with how things are going that appeals about preserving democracy, preserving institutions did not resonate with them, then I think we're missing the vote.
	Are Democrats no longer the establishment party right now?
	Well, I think that when you are, when your president is a Democrat, you are kind of de facto responsible for the context and the outcomes, right?
	That is the thing about running as an incumbent.
	We are about to no longer be the incumbent party.
	Donald Trump is about to become the incumbent, and he is going to switch from a challenger candidate, from a change candidate, to a guy who is responsible for everything that his administration is doing.
	And his administration will be stocked with radicals who are doing extreme and harmful and dangerous things that are directly impacting regular people's lives, security, and well-being.
	And so what I would say here is a coalition that is built on frustration with the status quo is not a stable coalition.
	That is an opportunity for us to demonstrate that we are actually on people's sides to fight for their benefits, fight for their well-being, fight for their safety, and actually reach out and peel some of those folks off of the Trump coalition, as well as re-energizing our own base, because that's the other piece of this equation that we're missing is who was not sufficiently motivated, excited, ready to show up in November on our own side.
	And who were those people in your estimation?
	Well, disproportionately, I mean, we saw that cities tended to underperform.
	I really don't want to be the person who has very informed takes before we get the voter file back and we're able to speak in real and concrete terms about exactly who did what, which demographic group did what.
	So I don't like to get too into the details there until we have the data to really speak about it.
	But what we know is that, you know, we had some real drop-offs in turnout.
	And so that's the other side of this equation is who did we lose to Donald Trump?
	Who did we lose to third-party candidates?
	And who did we lose to the couch?
	To Ohio, this is Nancy, Lynn for Democrats.
	Good morning.
	All right.
	Good morning, everybody.
	I would like to know, should the Democrats use the filibuster to fight back?
	Yes, absolutely.
	Oh, sorry.
	Is that your, you're not done?
	Are you finished, Nancy?
	All right, we'll take the question.
	Go ahead, Leah Greenberg.
	Look, I think we've been really clear that we think there are a lot of things about the existing institutional system that are pretty flawed.
	And also, while we're in the existing institutional system, we think you should use all the tools at your disposal.
	And so, absolutely, I think a really core part of our work over the coming period will be blocking some of the most harmful stuff that we can in the Senate by holding the Democratic, holding the Democratic caucus united to stop it via whatever tools are at their disposal.
	Do you think Joe Biden should have appointed additional members of the Supreme Court?
	Well, I think that court reform is absolutely a topic that we should have been trying to move with more speed and alacrity across the Democratic Party.
	I don't know if it would be realistic to say that the conditions would have been ripe in this term, the realistic, you know, Joe Biden doesn't have the ability to do that unilaterally, right?
	You need to have 50 senators vote for it.
	That means a real organizing effort across the Democratic Party to move Democratic senators and the broader set of stakeholders into alignment with the understanding that the courts are fundamentally and irreparably captured by right-wing interests.
	That's taking some time.
	Unfortunately, we were not able, that was not something that we were able to like get broadspread Democratic appreciation for and agreement with during this term.
	But I do think that as the years go by and as we see repeatedly devastating decisions as the courts are simply moving to roll back some of our greatest legislative achievements over the last few years, some of the greatest protections for Americans for clean water, for clean air, not to mention our own fundamental rights like reproductive freedom.
	I think we will see a groundswell of people who are asking, why are we treating this court as legitimate when it does not treat itself as accountable to us?
	What does court reform look like?
	Court reform could look like a lot of different things, right?
	You know, if you start with this fundamental question of why do we have a right-wing court that's been, or OSEPA Supreme Court that has been captured by extremist federalist society hacks and, you know, why, how are we going to move forward?
	You could talk about ethics reform, right?
	Because we have seen enormous ethics scandals involving members of the court who are not reporting large amounts of money, large gifts, luxury vacations, et cetera, that they are getting from donors.
	You can talk about term limits, right?
	Because we operate in a modern society and we don't have to consistently stick with the system of everyone stays on until they are no longer physically able to do so.
	You can talk about adding members to the Supreme Court or expanding the Supreme Court because you would want to recognize or create a system whereby Supreme Court positions are adds which president adds how many seats to the Supreme Court is standardized rather than kind of a matter of chance.
	All of those are things that aren't options that one might consider under the bucket of Supreme Court reform.
	But fundamentally, I think the first thing is Democrats have got to recognize that the existing court is fundamentally captured by the Republican Party.
	And then we got to talk about what we should be doing about it.
	To the granite state in East Kingston, this is Norman, Republican line.
	Good morning.
	Good morning, Ms. Greenberg.
	I've enjoyed listening to you, and I'm glad you're participating in the system by forming a group.
	However, you seem to be completely against the incoming administration.
	I would like to know, what do you think about the immigration policy of the current administration that allowed so many people into this country and put them into the states so the states have to support them?
	And those people that are American citizens don't get their what they should be getting as American citizens.
	Thank you.
	What I think is that we have got a broken legislative system that creates the kind of checkpoints that mean that Congress is not able to flexibly adapt and respond to crises in order to address real and pressing needs for Americans and immigrants alike, right?
	What I think is that if we had the kind of functioning system that was able to, you know, adjust and recognize that a significant number of people are coming in to make sure that cities had the support that they needed to handle that influx, and that it was able to craft a coherent response that both observed our obligations under international law and helped to support the people who are working collectively to support this folks arriving, then we would be in a really different situation right now.
	But fundamentally, I think that is one of many ways in which the difficulty in making government work for regular people is leading to a level of cynicism and frustration that is causing folks to look for solutions outside or opposed to the system.
	And that is part of how we ultimately ended up with Donald Trump.
	But it is a broader and systemic issue with how government not being able to deliver and flexibly address our problems is prompting a level of frustration that's driving some of the current conditions.
	Albert Kirky, this is David Democrat.
	Good morning.
	Yes, I'm a 77-year-old man.
	I've been a Democrat all my life.
	And it's kind of amusing how the Democrats are saying they're, you know, for the American public people, which they are not.
	I mean, it's evident, seriously, you know, they don't care about us and letting in millions of immigrants that has harmed, murdered, frightened people to stay in their own house or apartments, and we're taking care of them.
	And as far as concern, Biden and Democrats, they should be held responsible for every rape and murder.
	They should be prosecuted too.
	And if I may, real quick, you say that you're taking care of people or you are taking care of people.
	Let me rephrase that.
	I grew up with a mom and four siblings.
	And the government helped us.
	And they said the Democrats helped to help the poor people.
	And I thought, okay, I love the Democrats.
	You don't help people no more.
	You take care of them.
	You say we need all these immigrants to do the work that the Americans won't do.
	And that's true to a big extent.
	But why are we telling people, hey, have kids.
	And if you don't want to do the work, let us know.
	We will give you more food stamps.
	We will take care of your housing costs.
	And we will give you a welfare check.
	And that's on the back of the working American person who is black and white, Republican, Democrat.
	And honestly, the Democrats are phonies, and they are the ones that's wanting to spew the hatred.
	David, I got your point.
	Leah Greenberg, give me a chance to respond.
	I think we've got a big challenge right now in American society because I think that a set of people who are very wealthy and very powerful across corporations, across Silicon Valley, across a number of concentrated interests, are telling a story whereby we blame each other, right?
	We blame people across lines of race.
	We blame people across lines of citizenship status.
	We blame populations like trans kids.
	And we say these are the problems that are really that should drive us when actually they are distracting us so that they can loot the government so that they can undermine public education so that they can attack our health care system and so they can back up a giant truck to the federal government and take the money for themselves.
	And so fundamentally, I think we've got to figure out ways that we tell that story to the American people.
	We've got to figure out ways that we understand that when they ask us to fight each other, what they actually are doing is trying to distract us so that they can profit and so that they can exert control over this government for the good, for good.
	About 10 minutes before the House comes in today, we'll take you there live, of course, for gavel-to-gavel coverage.
	We're talking to Leah Greenberg of the group Indivisible.
	How many members are there in your group?
	How many folks do you work with around the country?
	Sure.
	We work with around 2,500 active indivisible groups around the country, and membership is local.
	It's held by the local groups.
	It can be anywhere from a dozen folks in a small town in Tennessee to thousands and thousands of folks in some of our bigger cities.
	So it's a really, it's a vibrant network.
	It's really shaped by whoever starts an indivisible group.
	And if you're listening and you're thinking, I really need to do something right now, we're actually doing a training today for people who are interested in starting a new indivisible group because we are experiencing a big influx in interest in the last couple of months or in the last month.
	Over 100 groups, new groups have already signed up.
	We're anticipating hundreds more over the coming weeks and months.
	What we're seeing is people are really frustrated.
	They're really upset.
	They're really sad about what happened, but they are also getting ready to organize.
	And so that is where we like to be.
	And that's what we're here to help them do.
	What do you train them to do?
	We train folks on the basics of organizing, right?
	How do you have a meeting?
	How do you make asks to people within your group?
	How do you help develop other leaders so that they can take on different parts of the work?
	How do you advocate to your elected officials so that they can hear you?
	And how do you do things that actually make them sit up and listen, right?
	How do you know enough about what they care about that you can actually impact them, right?
	Like they like good press.
	They don't like surprises.
	They don't like bad comments from their own constituents.
	You use their incentives to make them act the way that you want them to act.
	So those are the kinds of things that we train people on: both how to have power and how to have leverage in our existing broken system.
	And then also how to get people together and keep them hanging out together and keep them forming a community that's effective and that's able to take on the work over the long term.
	At this point, do you know what races you're going to target into 2026?
	We do not.
	You know, indivisible groups are going to be working on basically all of them because they are all over the place.
	But absolutely, we're thinking about swing states.
	We're thinking about how we're going to flip the House back.
	We're thinking about some of the key Senate targets.
	And we're thinking about the key states that are going to determine the Electoral College in 2028 because we got to win those statewide governorships, attorney general, secretaries of state races to make sure that the people who run the election in 2028 are committed to democracy and are committed to running a fair election.
	To New Jersey, this is George Ann, Independent.
	Good morning.
	Thanks for waiting.
	You're on with Leah Greenberg.
	Good morning.
	It's so refreshing to hear from someone like I know at this time many are feeling a sense of loss after the election.
	However, I was wondering, since I'm not really familiar with what you're doing, you remind me so much of the early days of Rachel.
	And I'm hoping maybe I can see you on programs such as that, such as Morning Joe, even Fox, Joe Rogan, so that your point of view, everyone can listen to.
	It's facts.
	I have listened to opponents and I can't really make sense of what they're saying for the reasons they supported the MAGA.
	You ask them a question and they die off.
	You, you have MSNBC and all of them have the same people on every single day, same experts.
	It's so nice to hear from you.
	You're offering more of a joining and everybody to listen to.
	I really appreciate.
	And the other thing I want to say, C-SPAN, so often when they call to collect money for either the Democrat or a Republican registered as an independent now, I tell them about C-SPAN that they should watch the hearings that you offer and people could learn from them and see what their representatives are doing.
	But you never hear them tell people to watch C-SPAN.
	They can make judgments for themselves, and especially at a time like this, we need to see your shows and watch hearings.
	Thank you.
	George Ann, thanks for watching.
	Leah Greenberg.
	Well, thank you for those kind words.
	And I, you know, I show up on any program that'll have me.
	So if the Fox News wants, well, I'm not sure about Fox News, but if I'm not sure they want us on sharing our thoughts, but we'll go where people are willing to hear our message.
	If invited, would you go on Fox News?
	I'm sure I don't know, but I've never been invited.
	So I think they're not really doing, they're not really interested.
	Fundamentally, though, we'll go where people will hear our message.
	Pete Buttigieg during the 2024 election got a lot of attention for going on conservative programs and engaging on conservative programs, saying that it was important for Democrats to do that, to be in those spaces, to provide a voice on conservative programs.
	What do you think of that?
	Was it a good use of his time?
	Look, I think Pete Buttigieg is great at showing up and making a really compelling argument for our values.
	I think that the kinds of people who watch Fox News are generally pretty set in their overall commitment to a worldview that is not going to be disruptible by a single really compelling monologue or argument.
	I do think that Democrats need to get a lot better at penetrating popular culture in places that reach people who are not political, right?
	Because I love everybody who is watching right now, but if you are watching C-SPAN, you are probably not in the population of voters that we are most worried about reaching for 2026 and beyond, right?
	We need to reach people who don't think that following the news is a particularly fun thing to do, who are not particularly interested in politics, who might be really frustrated with the whole idea of politics.
	We have to figure out, you know, how do we talk to people who are paying attention to content that is relevant to their lives or content that is fun and interesting, but has almost nothing to do with politics?
	And how do we both inject our ideas and our messages so that they get through there?
	Because that is a real place where we fell down in 2024.
	Is that Twitter?
	Is that TikTok?
	Is that social media?
	Well, I think it's, I mean, each of those platforms has both a political platform and a non-political entire set of content, right?
	What I would say is if I had the choice between another person who's really good at talking about politics on TikTok and I had the choice or and a mom influencer, right?
	Somebody who mostly makes content about taking care of their kids and who occasionally talks about why healthcare is so expensive, why healthcare, even what we have is under threat and why Republicans are doing this attack on us.
	I would take that second person because I think that they're reaching an audience of people who might be clicking past that first person in the algorithm or might never see them at all.
	Back to the Garden State.
	This is Edward in Keyport Independent.
	Good morning.
	Yeah.
	All right.
	Thank you.
	And so I'd like to congratulate you that you're not taking the tact of trying to outQAn on QAnon and you're sticking with facts and logic with what you're trying to do.
	I would like to think that fascism defeats itself by the idea of Like how you have to just highlight the idea, like Latinos are basically one step away from having to wear like a star David in public.
	You know what I mean?
	Minority communities are going to be like one step away from having more polluting industries in their neighborhoods and more over-policing and police brutality.
	So you just need to highlight these issues and keep up the fight.
	And there's people like there was no mandate here, you know, for these people to do what they want to do.
	And, you know, you guys got supporters.
	So keep up the fight.
	Thank you.
	Well, thank you.
	Thank you.
	And that is, those are absolutely some of the kinds of messages that we need to make sure really get out to communities over the coming years, right?
	Every time the Trump administration changes a regulation that's going to contribute to the polluting and harm done in your community, every time the Trump administration rolls back requirements on banks that will allow them to operate in ways that screw over consumers, every time they take an action that is designed to benefit the rich and the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us, we are going to need to make sure that we get that message out and we get it out to the kinds of people who might not be listening to traditional political media.
	A story from Axios, it's a very Capitol Hill story.
	It's about seatings on committees in the 119th Congress.
	This story, noting House Democrats Steering and Policy Committee voted to recommend Congressman Jerry Conley, the Democrat of Virginia, as the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee.
	According to several sources, it's a blow to Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's hopes of leading that high-profile panel.
	Is this important?
	What do you think?
	Well, I think this is in the context of having seen a number of challenges within the Democratic Party of younger members or members who are really seeing a role in kind of the public relations aspect of chairmanships, right?
	And fundamentally, what I would say is, I hope that all of us within the Democratic Party are looking at the past election, an election cycle in which we literally had to switch out our candidate because of voters' concerns over age and thinking, what do we do to push back against this tendency towards your autocracy, right?
	This tendency towards only having the faces of our party be, you know, older folks who are struggling to relate to newer and younger voters who are not able to speak their language, who are not tech or who are not able to, you know, come in and do the things that are necessary to reach audiences that we are struggling with.
	And so, you know, when I see somebody like AOC, who is an incredibly compelling communicator, who has really done the work on oversight, who has demonstrated just a deep investment in the party throughout all of her campaigning and work throughout this cycle, coming in and trying to take a role like this, I think that's a really powerful potential lever for Democrats to lean into.
	And I hope that people see the potential and the excitement that that could generate.
	You worked in Virginia politics, including for Tom Periello.
	Remind viewers who Tom Perriello is.
	Sure.
	Tom Perriello was a congressional, he was a member of Congress elected in 2008, who took a number of hard votes in favor of the president or President Obama's agenda, including passing the Affordable Care Act.
	I worked on his congressional team.
	We were unfortunately defeated in the red wave in 2010.
	Do you think he has a place in the future of the Democratic Party?
	Well, I think Tom has played a number of really crucial roles throughout the Democrat, or throughout his time, right?
	He ran for governor.
	I was part of that campaign.
	He then turned right around after not winning the primary and spent the entire next nine months making sure that Democrats would win the general election and campaigning tirelessly for Democratic candidates up and down the ballot.
	He's really invested in the nuts and bolts of party building.
	And he's also really invested in the kind of communication and approach to politics that helps people hear and see that you are taking on the system as well.
	And so I think that his messages and his framing are and his learnings about what works are absolutely a part of what should be, you know, what we should be thinking about in the future of the Democratic Party.

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