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The decision really came when he called in Leon Jaworski, who was the special prosecutor.
And he asked him, he says, how long can Nixon drag this out in the courts?
And legally, he was the only person that could do it.
All this week we've been showing you encore presentations of our weekly interview program, Q &A.
And tonight we conclude the marathon with a behind -the -scenes look at Gerald Ford's presidency from the perspective of his son, Stephen Ford.
Mr. Ford details what it was like when President Nixon resigned from office in 1974, when Gerald Ford was subsequently sworn in as the 38th President of the United States, and his father's decision to pardon Richard Nixon.
Watch at 7 p .m. Eastern on C -SPAN, C -SPAN Now, our free mobile app, or online at c -span .org.
We begin by getting your view on the use of the death penalty in America.
And we're doing so on phone lines split this way.
If you support the use of the death penalty, 202 -748 -8000 is the number to call.
If you oppose the use of the death penalty, 202 -748 -8001.
If you're not sure, a phone line for you, 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 -SPAN WJ.
On Facebook, it's facebook .com slash C -SPAN.
And a very good Friday morning to you.
You can go ahead and start calling in now.
This was the headline from Monday by the Associated Press.
President Biden gives life.
In prison, the 37 of 40 federal death row inmates before Trump can resume executions.
This was the statement that President Biden put out along with that move.
Make no mistake, he said in that statement, I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims of their despicable acts, and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss.
But guided by my conscience and my experience as a public defender, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Vice President and now President, I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level in good conscience.
I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.
That was President Biden on Monday.
It was followed by a statement on Truth Social by Donald Trump.
This is what he said.
The president -elect saying, as soon as I'm inaugurated, I will direct the Justice Department to vigorously pursue the death penalty to protect American families and children from violent rapists and murderers and monsters.
We will be a nation of law and order again, promised the president -elect.
We're good to go.
I think?
Yes, sir.
I believe in the death penalty because it sends a message to people who have committed horrible crimes of killing people and stuff, even if they were high,
that you are going to be held accountable for what you do.
And if we just keep putting people on death row and commute them, then hey!
You know, three meals and a cot.
I've run into people that's been their attitude.
So the move by President Biden this week, you think it will lead to more violent crime, Mark?
I think we're already seeing it.
A lady burned on a subway, I think in New York City.
The guy that shot the CEO of the insurance company.
Mark, thanks for the call from Oklahoma this morning.
Did you want to keep going, Mark?
Did you have something else you wanted to add?
Yeah, I'll add one more thing.
When I was in school, they let them know and there was a woman that was executed in Texas.
And that perked everybody up, even the ladies.
Oh, fudge.
We crossed the line.
Lady Justice is blind.
That's Mark in Oklahoma.
We're good to go.
We're good to go.
We're good to go.
We're good to go.
Again, death...
Penaltyinfo .org is where you'll go.
We'll be showing you that website several times throughout this segment this morning.
As we hear from you, simply asking your view of the death penalty in the United States, this is Steve in Indiana.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Yeah, I'd like to call in and give my opinion on opposing the death penalty because all life is precious.
And if we're killing a person for their crimes, Aren't we becoming what they tell us not to be?
Judge, jury, and executioner?
You should never murder somebody.
And capital punishment is a form of murder, because you're purposely taking someone's life.
I just think that it needs to end.
There's something to be learned from everybody, even criminals.
If we have psychologists look at them, maybe we can find triggers that would help that, seeing it and recognizing in younger people the triggers that these people that are on death row,
things that they went through when they were younger that led them to be the criminal that they became.
Steve, what did you think of Joe Biden commuting the sentences of 37 people but leaving three people still on death row?
Well, with the Dylan Roof and the man, I forget his name, from the Boston Marathon and the other one,
I don't think that they should be executed.
I do, though, think that they should never see the light of day as far as outside of a penal system.
I think that they should be locked away for their crimes.
However, I do believe that there's something to be learned from them.
I mean, geez, Dylan Roof was, what, 19 years old when he committed that crime?
How did that young man get so lost?
Why didn't somebody in society, in his school, as a teenager, something...
Go ahead, finish up, Steve.
Serious complications life -threatening complications in a pregnancy can't even get health care in almost half the United States.
It's it's ludicrous that they won't help a woman that's dying, but they'll murder someone that's in prison at the drop of a hat.
That's Steve in Indiana, Eddie in Louisiana good morning, you're next.
Good morning.
What are your thoughts on the death penalty, Eddie?
Myself, I believe the only way to stop these murders is to start the hangmen again, like they done many years ago, like at Fort Smith, Arkansas, to hang Judge Parker.
They hung six outlaws who were murderers, and they still got the hangmen.
I think myself, they well deserve to be hung.
They should have a lamppost in some, say, five -acre place that has six lampposts.
And everyone that commits a crime like that, they should be hung to the top of that lamppost and leave them up there for the birds to eat them.
That's what I believe.
That's Eddie in Louisiana from the National Park Service website.
Fort Smith, Arkansas, National Historic Site.
Judge Isaac C. Parker, remembered in Western novels and films as the hanging judge.
Isaac Parker's real career and accomplishments in the Fort Smith area are far more fascinating and complicated, they write.
Sensational cases and executions overshadowed Parker's contributions, they say, in rehabilitating defenders, reforming the criminal justice system.
And advocating for the rights of Indian nations, Judge Isaac C. Parker in the late 19th century.
This is Chris in Wisconsin.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Thank you.
Just a quick statement.
Until you can make sure mistakes aren't made, you know, the death penalty is not a sentence that can be reversed if a mistake is made.
Yes, good morning.
That's exactly how I felt.
There were mistakes that were made.
And I think a lot of it's political.
It seems like when a governor or somebody's up for election, then they decide to put somebody on death row.
And I think we have to be very careful on the reasons and not to make mistakes, which...
They do make mistakes.
And I worry about the Boston bomber.
He seems so young to be on death row.
But then when the prisons are so full, I'm thinking, well, is that why they have the death penalty sometimes?
So I think we have to pray to the Lord that we're not making these mistakes and ruining lives that can be turned around.
Thank you.
This is what Cal Thomas of the Washington Times writes, op -ed writer, C -SPAN viewers familiar with Cal Thomas.
This is what C .S. Lewis called the humanitarian view of punishment.
Morning.
I think they ought to keep the death penalty, but only in certain things like If it's not an eyeball murder, I don't believe any.
If it's circumstantial, I don't believe in the death penalty.
But I do believe when they're sentenced to life in prison, they should serve life in prison.
And I'd like to say one other thing, and this is for C -SPAN, which I've watched ever since my cable company put it on in '79.
There's nothing in this world as terrible to me as rudeness.
And for you people to hang up on people and not let them know they are no longer talking to you is about as rude as you can get.
Thank you for your time.
Thanks for the call.
This is Jim in Lawrenceville, Virginia.
Good morning.
Good morning, America.
How y 'all doing?
Doing well, Jim.
What are your thoughts on the death penalty?
Well, I'm a man of God, but I support the laws on the book, and I believe there's not enough of a deterrent.
We've been too nice here.
They have nothing.
I think we need to bring back the hanging, firing squad, and the gas chamber.
That's not enough deterrent.
If the laws are on the book, use it.
I disagree with President Biden.
Letting those guys off the hook is too much crime.
There's a price you have to pay.
I don't believe in killing, but if the law is there, use it.
We need to bring back all this lethal injection.
No, we need hanging, firing squad, gas chamber, a deterrent.
What do you think?
That's Jim in Virginia.
We've been showing you the website, the Death Penalty Information Center.
A lot of info there about the size of the death row inmate population in the country, what it looks like, where they're located.
Earlier this month, we had Robin Mayer of the Death Penalty Information Center on this program.
Well, there's lots of good reasons.
First of all, this is an enormous coalition of people who are attempting to persuade President Biden.
Organizations, racial justice organizations and civil rights organizations.
Many individuals, religious organizations and faith leaders like Pope Francis, who has been very vocally trying to persuade President Biden.
But we also have some unusual voices, like a number of corrections officials.
People who presided over executions.
We have elected members of Congress.
We have elected prosecutors, state officials, and probably most importantly, we have family members, people who've lost loved ones to violence, some to the very people who are on the federal death row now.
All of these people are calling on President Biden to commute these sentences because they see longstanding systemic problems with the federal death penalty, the way that it has been used.
Well, talk about some of those problems.
Sure.
Well, probably the most important is that it has been used in an arbitrary and racially discriminatory way.
This is an issue that has been studied repeatedly.
It's well documented.
Even DOJ officials have acknowledged these very serious concerns over the years.
So we see that predominantly the federal death penalty has been used against people of color.
And it's been used against people of color who have killed white people.
So we know that there is a very pronounced race of victim bias as well.
And we can see that in all of the statistics and all of the data that we've seen throughout the history of the death penalty.
For example, three out of four people who have been charged with a federal death sentence are people of color.
And that has been true since 1989.
So these are really powerful statistics.
We also know that the federal death penalty has many of the same problems that state death penalty systems have, which is to say we've had prosecutorial misconduct, we've had unreliable junk science, we've had terrible lawyering,
all of which we know leads to unjust results.
And people who are sometimes innocent, wrongfully convicted, but people certainly that didn't deserve death sentences as well, ending up on death row.
That interview from earlier this month.
President Biden on Monday makes that move to commute the sentences of 37 of 40 federal death row inmates.
And then this was the reaction in the wake of that move on Monday from members of Congress on Capitol Hill.
Peter Welch, the Democrat, saying federal executions don't lead to safer communities.
The president correctly paused them because it's impossible to ignore the number of people exonerated from death row.
This is the right move.
It ensures these individuals will never pose a threat to public safety.
This Senator Tom Cotton, the Republican from Arkansas.
Joe Biden is using his last days in office to spare the worst monsters in America.
These killers.
We're good to go.
I think?
And Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, the Democrat, saying, I've long advocated for the abolition of the federal death penalty and commend the president for this act of justice and mercy and for his leadership.
Taking your phone calls, want to hear your thoughts on the death penalty in America.
Nelson, San Diego, California.
Good morning.
Good morning.
How are you doing?
I just want to say, C -SPAN, you're doing a good job.
I mean, you know, everybody wants to talk forever, but you guys aren't rude.
You just...
Doing your job.
But anyways, yeah, I'm kind of divided on that.
This is one of the things where I never try to put my religious views in someone, but in the public domain, but to force other people to go along with it.
But, you know, the Bible says, whosoever sheds man's blood by man, his blood shall be shed.
And that was before the Mosaic Law.
That's a natural law thing.
But without a doubt, you know, You know...
I got punched in the back of the head by a homeless guy.
If I had turned around on the subway and killed him, I probably would have gotten death penalty, not a hero.
I'm a Marine too, but that's a different story.
Yeah, I tend to think Cal Thomas is wrong.
It's evangelicals who choose to be pro -life when they want to.
Trayvon Martin got killed.
Huckabee was on Fox News every day cheering George Zimmerman.
When a Black person gets killed even by a civilian, right -wingers, they just salivate like vampires and wolves.
One last thing.
In Missouri, the governor...
You knew the guy was innocent.
The black guy was innocent.
The prosecutor said he's innocent.
The victim's family said he's innocent.
And they still execute the black guy.
Where have all the pro -life people been?
You know?
That's all I gotta say.
It's Nelson in California, Missouri, one of those states where the death penalty still exists and is active.
This is that map from the Death Penalty Information Center.
The states in red, the 22 states in red on that map are states where the death penalty exists and is active.
The states in yellow are states that do not have a death penalty.
The states in blue, the five states on that map in blue We're good to go.
I think?
We're good to go.
Death row population is down to three at this point after the action by President Joe Biden on Monday.
This is Carlos in Ohio.
Good morning.
You're next.
Come up with this humanitarian message concerning the death penalty when he's the main sponsor of all the slaughter in the Middle East.
I can't understand that.
That's my message.
Judy, Waynesburg, Pennsylvania.
Good morning.
You're next.
Judy, you're with us.
Yes, I am.
Go ahead, ma 'am.
All right, thank you.
I am opposed to the death penalty.
I don't think it's the right of the state to kill other people.
Secondly, I don't think it's either a deterrent.
People have been killing forever and ever and ever, and we've had the death penalty forever and ever and ever.
Mike's next, out of Detroit.
Good morning.
Go ahead.
Yes, I have a little different spin on why I support the death penalty.
First of all, you have these privately owned prisons that makes a tremendous amount of money on people who have the evidence because of the new technology and - It's easier to find out if someone actually committed a crime.
And like in the Middle East, they let the families determine if someone has been convicted of murder to have them killed.
Second of all, I also think that when you're involved in mass murders, like, say for instance, when Presidents and Congress votes to go into wars that's unjustifiable,
like for instance in Iraq, where there was no weapons of mass destruction, and yet hundreds of thousands of people were killed.
Where's the responsibility for that?
Where's the responsibility for the genocides that Western culture committed in The Americas, from Canada all the way down to South America.
It's a documentary called The Extermination of the Brutes, where they said that it was about at least 200 million native indigenous people in this country,
and they committed mass murder.
They're talking about Gaza.
They committed mass murder to get this country.
So, let's start looking at when people invite people to wars, unjustifiably.
Who should be held accountable?
Should the President?
Should the Congress, voting to go to war, and it's not a good war?
Should these people be held accountable?
Last point I wanted to make in regards to the death penalty.
It is a deterrent because When people recognize that if they take a life, that their life is going to be taken,
that will make them think about committing murder.
Plus, when you have people in jail over extended periods of time, the kind of crimes that are committed in the prison system
That's Mike in Detroit.
We'll stay in Michigan.
Caspian, Michigan, this is Robert.
Good morning.
Yes, good morning.
This is Robert calling from the fascist town of Caspian, Michigan.
I think the death penalty is actually less of a deterrent ...than life in prison.
Life in prison is more dangerous to the person than the death penalty.
You put somebody to death real quick, like, and it's over.
He doesn't have to live day after day after day.
And one more thing.
I wish you would stop putting a picture of Donald Trump on the lower right -hand corner, because it's showing bias towards the Republican Party, who's already been complaining about how...
That's Robert in Michigan.
This is Kem in Jackson Heights, New York.
Good morning.
You're next.
Their souls will go to hell.
They will not be with God.
But if we cut their lives short prematurely, that is what will happen.
But their sentences have been commuted.
They're going to spend the rest of their life in prison.
And God hopes, and I hope, that they will come to an understanding Of what they did and redeem themselves, and then their souls can be with God.
But that can only happen if we allow them to have their natural lifespan.
If we cut their natural lifespan off early, their souls will not be with God.
But if we let them live in prison forever, no chance of parole, then they may redeem themselves truly in a way that God says their souls can be with me when they die.
And we should not stop people from having a chance of redemption and their souls taken away from God forever.
On President Biden's actions saying he abuses his pardon power in what he did on Monday.
And they talk about what happens sometimes if these people are allowed to remain in prison and move off death row.
This is the editorial board of The Washington Times.
Mr. Biden cites opposition to the death penalty as his underlying motive, but it's a mistake to pretend this end -of -term maneuver will save lives.
Among the midnight pardon beneficiaries is Carlos David Caro.
I don't know.
Okay.
Hello?
Go ahead, sir.
Yeah, good morning.
Listen, I oppose the death penalty because if you can't check the statistics, the amount of innocent people that sometimes they find out afterwards that they're innocent, they come out.
The penalty, if you kill somebody, you cannot bring them back.
But if you lock them up for life, you find out that they're innocent, you can release them because death is so final.
That's why I oppose it.
I'm from New York.
And I remember Donald Trump when those five young men were accused in Central Park of raping and attacking women.
They were innocent.
And Mr. Trump came out and he took out full -page ads in local papers that they must bring back the death penalty because these young men deserve death penalty.
And he was totally innocent.
So that's the reason why I oppose the death penalty because we all make mistakes.
Nothing is perfect.
That's the reason I oppose it.
That's Ronnie in Brooklyn, New York.
David, Toledo, Ohio.
Good morning.
You're next.
For example, if it turns out that Luigi Mangione has been convicted of murder and there's not the slightest doubt that he's guilty of murder,
if that happens to be the case, then I would strongly be in favor of his execution.
I don't want my tax dollars supporting people who are definitely beyond the shadow of a doubt.
Guilty of murder.
I don't want my tax dollars supporting them for life in prison.
Waste of time.
Thank you very much.
That's David in Ohio.
About 25 minutes left in this segment this morning.
Simply asking for your view of the death penalty in the wake of President Biden's actions earlier this week in the wake of that announcement that he was going to commute 37 of 40 federal death row inmates' sentences.
It was Illinois Democrat Mike Quigley who was on CNN and spoke out about his view about it.
Here's what he had to say.
I have real concerns overall with the death penalty, but I also have concerns with the executive branch overturning cases that have been decided by courts across the country.
We have to have some autonomy there.
And I understand the concerns.
Threats of a Trump administration going forward on these, but I think the baseline is I think you commute sentences or pardon people when you think justice was not done in those cases.
Uh, it sets a precedent here that goes well beyond his uh, pardoning his own son, which which again, I think was a mistake, because no one is above the law.
What I think you're getting at is an interesting point, which is almost like using commutations as a point of policy in order to stop the administration coming in next, putting in place policy that they believe, which does seem to be different from what you're looking at with Hunter Biden.
Absolutely, but it's concerned with how presidents handle pardons and how they handle commutations for their own reasons, their own personal reasons.
Back to the pardoning of his own son, I heard people say, Well, it's the love of a father.
I get that, but there's a lot of parents out there whose children are in harm's way in the justice system, and they don't have the ability to do what President Biden did.
Democrat Mike Quigley on CNN earlier this week, taking your phone calls in this first hour of the Washington Journal.
This is Bill in Boyertown, Pennsylvania.
Good morning.
You're next.
Good morning.
Yeah, I mean, I don't really know what I think about the death penalty.
I know the state.
We're good to go.
Young babies and abortion, there's no big deal about that anymore.
People, if you say anything about it, they look at you like you're crazy.
It's just, but now, thank God, Trump got the Supreme Court turned around so that we did at least throw that to the states.
But as far as Biden and his commuting the sentences of death mate, death row inmates, you know, He's shown his colors.
He's not calling the shots here.
His whole description of why he's doing it, which is, you know, it's not fair to kill people, but then you leave three people on the list.
It just doesn't hold water.
He is a doddering old man.
I think we should just, maybe we should put him out of his misery like they're putting all...
Killing all those brown people in Gaza.
Like they said, it's always the brown people or the black people that have to be killed by our government.
And Bill, I really hope you're not calling for the president to be killed.
That's not what you're saying?
Oh, I'm not calling for the president to be killed.
What I'm calling for is that look at how many people are being killed in Gaza with our bombs that he's sending there with his signature.
We don't even vote for that, but we have to...
That's Bill in Pennsylvania.
More stats on death row in the United States earlier this fall.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Yes, I'm opposed to the death penalty because I believe they suffer longer being life in prison and also because of God and, you know,
like the other thing is that I understand President Biden wants to pardon those certain prisoners and that's fine, like I said, because I'm not for the death penalty, but why is he for abortion?
You know?
So I'm not for abortion either.
And that's all I wanted to say.
Thank you.
Kill these little kids, rape them, and adults, and they get a second chance if they get away with the first time.
And they do the crimes all over again, killing other innocent people and raping and killing.
So I believe it's simple.
There's no sense keeping them people alive because they're not going to change no matter how long they stay in prison.
And that's just the way they are.
They don't care about anything.
So Sal, an earlier caller was giving the exact opposite view of what you just said.
He said as long as there's a chance for redemption, that people should have that chance of redemption, maybe people will change over the course of a life imprisonment rather than being sent to death row.
I hear you.
I just feel bad for the victims because, you see, I understand where he's coming from, the person, but I see that when they take a life or a child's life, they abduct them, they rape them, they kill them, and they don't get caught.
They do the same thing again.
And I don't care how many years they stay in prison.
I don't believe in second chance because them poor people, the victims, and them families are never going to be the same.
So that's the way I see it.
Sal, thanks for the call from New Jersey.
Some of your comments from social media and our text message line.
This is Rob in Huntington, West Virginia.
I don't support the death penalty.
One, there's no data to indicate that the death penalty deters crime.
Two, it costs more to go through the process to execute someone than it does to imprison them for life.
Three, it's murder which is wrong.
Rob's saying personally I would rather be executed than live in a high security prison for life.
This is Timothy from Facebook.
I don't trust the government to execute only the guilty.
Todd, Facebook, saying, I'm in favor of the death penalty as long as we are certain of who committed the crime.
James on Facebook, I've never been a fan of the death penalty.
It's inhumane and many of those put to death were possibly innocent.
Life in prison without parole is the solution.
And one more, Larry, saying, I've always thought that life without parole is a far worse punishment than the death sentence.
The downside is that taxpayers have to spend more money on their longer term care.
This is Keith, Madison, Wisconsin.
Good morning.
Thanks for waiting.
Good morning.
Yeah, I'm opposed to the death penalty.
I think it's an instrument of the capitalist state to terrorize their lower orders.
And as somebody else pointed out earlier, the ruling class, they can bomb and destroy and kill and murder with impunity, and they're never punished.
They're never held accountable.
And all those weapons that we shipped over to Israel to have the Gazans murdered, the Holocaust over there in Gaza, uh, no accountability by their side of the class line, but our side yep, we get a lot of a lot of accountability.
Um, if anybody's watched the series on Netflix, I Am A Killer.
Um, it'll put it kind of in perspective.
It'll make you think about your own self and the conditions that um that uh, that people are put in and and um, and how and how they turn into killers.
Um, So yeah, when I watch that show, I think, well, but for the grace of God, go I.
You know, I think, gee, if I were abused as a child, as many of those were, those people who murdered later, maybe I would have turned out to be the same way.
So yeah, you ought to have a little bit of introspection when you talk about this subject, because this capitalist system will turn you insane.
It turned a girl that shot six, actually seven people at a school here in Madison, it turned her nuts.
Her parents were, she came from a broken family, and she must have had a lot of anger in her, and then she turned it on her fellow students and teachers.
So I feel sorry for her and how she turned out, and of course the victims.
Good morning.
Yes, I'm totally for the death penalty.
I believe that if anything can be done to deter someone from committing the crimes, and they see someone getting killed, maybe that'll stop them.
People that are on death row, they have been through probably pretty much every bit of the system that they could.
I mean, if you listen to some of the details of some of these murders, there's one that I can think of on TV.
They keep bringing up where the guy killed the eight -year -old and the nine -year -old.
Then four years later, he killed the woman in the National Guard or the services.
He took and stabbed that woman's eyes out.
I mean, come on.
The stuff these people do are so horrible, you can't even talk about it.
Stabbed a woman 30 -some times after killing those two little kids four years before.
I mean, there's no saving that.
That's it.
That's all I got to say.
I'm sorry.
Doreen, Camden, Ohio.
Good morning.
For you today, I'll keep it short, okay?
I support it because with all the technology we have nowadays with DNA and everything, and of course you've got the cameras with the young man that shot the CEO in the back.
It's like, if it's a 100%, there is no doubt these people need to be executed.
And that's just my thought on it because there are choices in life.
We all have them.
And he chose, these people make choices to kill, rape, whatever they do.
So, have a great day.
Well, hi.
Yeah, I think someone else texted what I had to say pretty much, but I don't support it.
Mainly because the government can be wrong.
I don't understand why conservatives don't get this because they're denialists.
They're the ones who don't believe government can do anything right.
Everyone's corrupt, right?
Every level of government.
So now they're willing to let the government, that corrupt government, decide who's going to get executed or not.
So I just don't support it.
Thank you.
Bye.
Barbara, Chester, New Hampshire.
Good morning.
You're next.
Good morning.
I think there's gray areas.
DNA and everything that they have now in cameras, you can lean towards it.
Ifsies, I don't think they should.
I think people that feel that they should have the death penalty, but it's okay for them to have an abortion with a little baby that's eight months old that might live.
I think everybody should be in tune that there's gray areas on both sides.
Thank you.
We mentioned some 1 ,600 executions in the United States in the modern death penalty era since 1973.
The Death Penalty Information Center notes that the death penalty does carry the inherent risk of executing an innocent person since 1973.
At least 200 people who had been wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in the United States
This is Russell in Lake City, Florida.
Good morning.
All right, that's Russell.
This is Christine in Holland, Michigan.
Good morning.
You're next.
Good morning, John.
I wanted to call a while back when you had this same question, but because I'm a follower of the Lord Jesus,
and it says in the New Testament that even if you kidnap a person, you should have the death penalty.
It's not just murder.
Christine, you want to see the expanded use of the death penalty is what you're saying?
Not have life in prison, because that only takes another person's life and that is the ones that have to watch them all the time and it's just too expensive and we're all under the death penalty and we need to answer to God and try to live a life that will show other people the way and so that they won't hate,
and We just need to show love to people.
And sometimes I think that would be the loving thing to do.
That's Christine in Michigan.
Death sentence prisoners in the United States typically spend more than a decade on death row prior to either exoneration or execution.
Some prisoners have been on death row for well over 20 years.
Again, more stats from the Death Penalty Information Center.
This is Chris, Palm Harbor, Florida.
Good morning.
Hi, there's really two sides to this issue.
Like, on the one hand, you have, like, the Manson family that were convicted of those brutal murders, and they were sentenced to death, and then California got rid of the death penalty, so it's commuted to life in prison.
And then Obama released Squeaky Fron in 2009.
So after, you know, butchering, you know, the Tate -Labianco murders, She is, actually, or she was released from prison.
So there is a possibility that you could have somebody that gets the death penalty, but then does get released after their sentence is commuted to life in prison.
The other side of the coin is when you look back at the Lindbergh baby and the person that was convicted and sentenced to death and put to death from that, there's all kinds of questions about whether...
You know, the person that they convicted actually did the crime, or if they were just looking for someone to hang because it was such a spectacular case at the time.
So it really can go both ways.
I can't believe that Obama would pardon one of the Manson family that just murdered Sharon Tate and Abigail Folgers.
But on the other side, you have a bloodthirsty...
That's Chris in Palm Harbor, Florida.
A squeaky from released from prison.
The story back in 2009.
We're good to go.
Good morning.
As a historically black college student in Atlanta, Georgia, who primarily works around criminal justice reform, it is a two -parted situation.
I know in the case of Marcellus Williams, There was a lot of conversation amongst the black community, as well as the surrounding community, in regards to why this black man was being still killed, even though it was proven that he did not murder the victim and it was just a slap in the face within our community, because we saw first -handedly that there was not any type of criminal justice reform or even any motive to
try to, more so, exonerate this black man, though he spent most of his time in this jail and then ultimately being killed and as a person, as a student, as one who's um going into the legal force, I think that it is important to be able to analyze how people are being killed and being held in jail and prison and things like that,
and There really isn't any information that's going towards to have them released, or even there's not even enough evidence that's now being produced to exonerate them.
They're ultimately being killed.
So I think like my views are kind of it's skewed because some people they don't feel any remorse for the things that they have done and it's like what do you do in those cases?
But again in the criminal justice reform you're looking at how can we better this system?
How can we That's Ivory in Illinois.
And just going back to the squeaky from story, just because I didn't remember pardon, it was parole.
Was what happened when it came to Squeaky Fromm.
Convicted and got a life term becoming the first person sentenced under special federal law covering assaults on U .S. presidents after her attempt on Gerald Ford.
She was sentenced to 15 years in prison, which was tacked on to a life term for threats against the president.
Fromm was granted parole in July of 2008 for good conduct.
And was released in 2009.
So that's Squeaky Fromm.
This is Macy in Fairfax, California.
Good morning.
Good morning.
So you can hear me.
Oh, thanks for trying again.
Can you hear me?
Yes, ma 'am.
Oh, okay.
I was like, oh, no.
I just also, I want to compliment you, sir, on the job that you do.
Like others, I'm...
Anyway, in terms of death penalty, I would like to mention a man's name named Leonard Peltier.
Peltier, who was, you know, on the reservation when the FBI came, and he's been in prison for 50 years, and the native people say he didn't do it.
I don't know, but...
So I wanted Joe Biden, everybody's supposed to call him because...
I mean, 50 years on the line, or whatever they call it, Johnny Cash, I guess, is sufficient, and I don't think he did it.
I kind of believe the Native people on that.
So the story from NPR, just for folks who don't know what you're talking about there, Macy, it's indigenous activist Leonard Peltier, I believe is how you say it.
I spent most of his life in prison since his conviction in 1975 for the killing of two FBI agents in South Dakota.
He was denied parole earlier this year.
The U .S. Parole Commission said in a statement announcing the decision that he won't be eligible for another parole hearing until 2026, serving life in prison for the killing of those agents during a standoff of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, convicted in 1977.
He is 79 years old now.
Right.
And what was the FBI doing there?
Do you know that part, John?
If I may call you John?
I can go into more of the story if you want, but I'm not an expert on what happened on the reservation that day, Macy.
But I know of this push to get him out of prison.
Right, yeah.
I mean, 50 years and like you all were saying about Squeaky Fromm, I mean, letting her out.
And I just want to say, a couple callers, I really liked what they said, but what I remember is Mike, I just want to compliment a couple people who were talking about actually the Indigenous people.
I think it was Mike who was saying that hundreds of thousands of people were killed here.
I mean, it sounds so trite to just rehearse it, but it's a fact.
They gave them blankets laced with smallpox on purpose.
They broke their tools so that they couldn't live.
It's just disgusting and stuff like that.
Stuff like that sounds lame.
Anyway, but thank you so much again for your good job because I like the way you go back and forth a little bit with the customers.
Customers is fine too, sure.
Macy in California.
More on Mr. Pelletier.
On June 26, 1975, agents came to the Pine Ridge Reservation to serve arrest warrants amid battles over Native treaty rights and self -determination.
After being injured in a shootout, agents Jack Kohler and Ronald Williams were shot in the head at close range and a standoff ensued.
Good morning.
I'm quite unsure, you know, because if you believe in biblical things, you know, nobody is above God and He's the only person that can take a life.
But, you know, I find it really concerning in our country, at least, that we're all sitting here calling in and giving our opinion on who we think should be killed and who we shouldn't.
That's um, that's a big old moral problem for me.
But when we're dealing with any problem, I think you need to go to the core, and when we're dealing with, you know, people that kill other people, the system has been set up to where some people have more difficult life and they end up living a life that violence is not as
We need to really start at the foundation.
We need to fix it where we can actually help people.
That's Christina in Iowa.
We will continue the discussion again.
We're good to go.
by veteran political journalist Ken Walsh to discuss his book, The Architects of Toxic Politics in America.
We'll be right back.
American History TV, Saturdays on C -SPAN 2, exploring the people and events that tell the American story.
This weekend at 3 .15 p .m. Eastern, author Stephen Puglio with his book, The Great Abolitionist, discusses the career and life of abolitionist and politician Charles Sumner.
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American History TV looks back at famous inaugural speeches.
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I had never been in trouble before.
I had served my country.
And I was hoping that I would get a little more grace and maybe get the judge to have some latitude to go.
And he probably could have gave me even more time than he did.
But I remember hearing my mother, when he said 10 years, you know, she couldn't believe it.
And that yelp of pain, it always stays with me.
And it's always motivating.
And it always lets me know how fragile our freedom is and how perilous it is.
And if you make one wrong move sometimes, it could be literally the end of your life as you know it.
Next week, C -SPAN digs into its archives to present President -elect Donald Trump's nominees in their own words, discussing policy,
politics, and their relationship with the President -elect.
Washington Journal continues.
And the Washington Journal Holiday Authors Week continues this morning.
It is eight days of conversations with America's top writers from across the political spectrum.
It's a variety of public policy, political topics.
And this morning, we feature political journalist Ken Walsh, his book, The Architects of Toxic Politics in America.
And Mr. Walsh, you argue in that book that we've gone through these cycles of toxic politics in America before, that these cycles sort of come and go.
So how do they go?
How have we broken out of past cycles of toxic politics?
Right, well I think people probably today tend to think that this is so unusual and it is in some ways largely because President -elect Trump has been a real advocate of this kind of negative politics,
frankly, and also it's amplified by social media.
Those are two big differences than what we've had before.
But you could trace this way back to the beginning of the country.
George Washington, of course, was elected unanimously by the Electoral College.
But the first election after that, and the second one in 1796 and 1800, John Adams versus Thomas Jefferson both times, were two of the most toxic elections we've ever had, right from the beginning.
Some of the things they said and their supporters said about the different candidates would curl our hair these days because they were so negative and so personal.
But this shows it happened right from the beginning.
In that same time frame, we had the first character assassin in American politics, which was a man named J .T. Callender.
Who, uh, when he was, uh, he endorsed Jefferson, and then Jefferson was elected and did not give him a job he wanted as postmaster of Richmond, Virginia, so he turned against Jefferson,
and he's the one who broke the story about Jefferson having an affair with Sally Hemings, one of the enslaved people at Monticello, his plantation.
Um, Jefferson denied it, was considered very salacious at the time, character assassination attempt, as I say.
But Jefferson was still re -elected and became a popular president.
The interesting thing is, as often happens with these spreading of rumors, DNA evidence has since shown that Jefferson did have an affair with Sally Hemings.
So, even though for many years this was considered sort of an excessive negative charge, it turned out that he was right.
But we have had waves of this in our history.
The worst example of our toxic politics, where we could not resolve our differences, we could not find common ground, was the Civil War, which was a terrible calamity for the United States.
Ended slavery, of course, saved the Union, but at an enormous cost to the country in lives and respect for each other and so on.
So what happens is, after having researched this quite extensively, Well, the country goes through a period where people are afraid, unsettled, resentful, full of grievance.
The toxic politics comes back and that's where we are now.
You write on page 206 in your book that this politics of resentment and anger and grievance often runs its course until the warring sides, or at least one of them, Well,
I think a lot of Americans hope that will happen.
I just saw a poll, just my due diligence before coming in to do your show, that 65 % of Americans are now saying That they're so distressed by politics and so exhausted by it,
just what you just were reading there, that they've tuned out the news.
They've tuned out political news.
Doesn't make me happy as someone who's made his career on reporting political news, but that's part of what happens.
People get exhausted by the negativity and the toxic nature of things, and they just don't pay attention to it anymore, and then it has less effect.
But we still have a very deeply divided country, a very polarized country, and people who do not believe good things about the other side.
And I don't think that's going to change.
I'm sad to say that, but I think we're in for this toxic environment for a long time.
You write in this book, and this book came out earlier this year, of course, before the election, that you think the semi -quincentennial could be a moment to...
Yes.
Well, that will be the 250th anniversary of our founding as a country.
And that's two years from now.
So there are signs that some of this is happening, particularly on the level of governors.
A lot of governors, they have to get along with people more than the national politicians do in many cases.
So there's something of a movement among some governors.
There's something of a movement in the media as well.
That maybe we have played this toxic game too long ourselves and maybe we should pull back from that and try to take another approach.
So there are signs of it, but I was just exploring what could possibly be a triggering event for making us sort of respect each other more as Americans and respect our institutions.
And maybe that kind of an event, a historic event, and it's going to be celebrated all over the country, would cause sort of a renaissance of finding common ground and reduce the toxic nature of things.
That's what I hope for.
Yeah.
That's one of the open questions.
I wrote that carefully.
I am not a partisan journalist.
I'm not a partisan person.
I've covered seven presidents and I don't think I could have done it for that long if I was too partisan.
But the other thing I wanted to say before I go back to Trump is that The Democrats have done the same thing over time.
They have been very toxic in their politics.
And I talk about this in the book.
So it's not just Republicans who do it.
Although I do think that Donald Trump has exceeded the gun beyond the...
We've had guardrails, as we say in covering politics, to too much toxic politics.
But he has built a base of support.
Now, in the recent election, the country was basically divided in half.
Trump, according to the most recent numbers I've seen, did not get 50%.
He got just below 50%.
But the country was very split.
So his toxic politics, his constant pillorying his opponents, finding negative ways to portray many, many issues, and his belittling people and so on,
Which is more or less the definition of toxic politics, using bullying and personal attacks and negativity to advance yourself.
This has worked for him politically.
A lot of his supporters like what he's doing.
I mean, one way I've heard it described that I think is very insightful is that people who voted for Donald Trump were hiring him not as a role model, not as a...
As a character paragon, but almost like an attorney or CEO who will get the job done for them, and the other stuff, the character issue and that sort of thing, is much less important.
So he's sort of an advocate, and advocates will take extreme positions, they'll push and push, and that's what he's doing.
So the idea of looking for a renaissance, he's going to have to suffer some setbacks in his approach for that to happen.
It could happen, but I don't see it happening now.
You write in your book, presidents have the loudest megaphone in American life and are vastly influential.
They set the tone for public discourse and, unfortunately, many have played a key role in intensifying the toxic environment.
Also instrumental in shaping today's toxic culture are a range of influencers who have become combatants in the culture wars.
Who are some of those influencers, those combatants?
Well, that's an interesting story of itself.
In the book I describe this as sort of a rogues gallery of influencers who over the years have pushed us more and more toward the toxic environment we're in.
Today we have people like Rush Limbaugh, the late Rush Limbaugh was in this category, the famous radio commentator.
Now you have people like Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity.
People with ties to Fox News in many cases, and they had made their reputation on being the conservative network through their commentators.
But the history of this includes Democrats and Republicans and others too.
If you look at the commentariat or the influencers on the outside, very famous people that people don't remember today.
Father Charles Coughlin was a Catholic priest.
From Canada, who moved to Michigan, established a small parish, and he became, he realized he was a great speaker, and he gave him a radio show.
It became enormously popular around the country, and he became a toxic politician.
He actually became a fascist, because his argument was that we're fighting the wrong people in World War II, we should be fighting godless communism.
Not the Germans and the Japanese.
Huey Long was the governor and senator from Louisiana.
Part of the time, he was so obsessed with being a strong man, he was the governor and the senator at the same time.
He was able to pull that off in Louisiana.
And he was so popular that Franklin Roosevelt felt that he could be a real threat to his re -election.
Of course, Huey Long was killed.
He was assassinated before he could run against Franklin Roosevelt in the 30s.
And that's the other thing I wanted to mention real quick, and I'm sure the callers will bring this up as well.
That's one of the real problems with toxic politics.
Does it lead to violence?
We had that with the Civil War, as I mentioned before.
Probably the worst domestic cataclysm we've had, where we couldn't resolve our differences.
And so the question is, today we have such a toxic environment.
Is it leading to violence?
The cases of people who are attacked in politics.
Donald Trump...
We're good to go.
And we have so many shootings in the country now, it's hard to sort a lot of this out.
That's one thing I think a lot of Americans are concerned by.
How far does this go?
And having written this book, that's one concern I have.
Have we extended toxic politics to each other so much that we've come to distrust and hate each other as Americans?
That would be a very dangerous thing for us.
And I think in some ways we're on the cusp of that.
The Architects of Toxic Politics in America is the book, the subtitle, Venom and Vitriol.
Ken Walsh is our guest in this hour of the Washington Journal, taking your phone calls in our Washington Journal Holiday Authors Week.
It's 202 -748 -8000 for Democrats to call in, Republicans 202 -748 -8001, Independents 202 -748 - 8 ,002 phone lines already lit up for you, Mr. Walsh.
This is Ray, an independent in Colorado.
You're up first in this segment.
Good morning.
Thanks for taking my call.
And I happen to be affiliated with the Libertarian Party.
You mentioned the major figures within toxic politics.
I was wondering if any names come to mind.
When it comes to reasoned opposition as opposed to toxic opposition, and I'm also wondering how much the kind of medium, radio, TV, internet, you know,
how much of it really has played a role?
I think of the late Marshall McLuhan that his famous quote, the medium is the message.
That's a very good question.
By the way, I covered politics in Colorado for a long time, so I'm glad you mentioned that.
I always look back on that as a very positive time in my own career.
I worked for the Denver Post and the Associated Press in Colorado.
So, in any case, as I remember, and very vividly, Colorado actually has a history of quite positive politics.
People there, when I covered politics in Colorado, were very proud of that.
The sense was that we don't stoop to conquer, we don't...
Excuse me.
I don't...
I can't really point to many people who avoid it completely because when push comes to shove, people will go into toxic politics.
They think that's what it takes to win an election.
So you see people, including Joe Biden, by the way, who tried to come into office as a guy who would be a healer and who would not be a toxic politician,
but he got into it too because he felt that he was being roughed up.
Excuse me, too much by his enemies.
The other point I'd make is that the toxic politics is amplified greatly by social media in particular.
You can find on social media anything you want to find to support your views.
In academia, we call it confirmation bias, where people will look for information that only supports what they think, not anything to challenge it.
And won't even pay attention to people on the other side.
And this is spreading through the country where people are getting to the point in polling you see people saying I don't want to be in a neighborhood with people who disagree with me on politics.
There's a lot of talk during the holidays about how people dealt with their families.
Where you had people around the dinner table for Thanksgiving or the Christmas holidays.
Or whatever.
And how do you deal with people who disagree with you?
And some people felt, well, I don't invite those people anymore.
But the mainstream media, we don't get off the hook on this, in my mind.
We accelerate this, too.
I think we're too drawn to covering conflict and clashes, and that's how politicians have learned they can get attention.
But it's really social media, I think, that's doing more damage than the mainstream media.
It's growing in importance among young people and as I say there's no filter there so you get whatever you see on social media is not filtered by an editor or reporter so you have no idea what's true and some of it now with artificial intelligence and with what we used to call photoshopping the images are made up and created and they look very real so I just have to caution people to be careful In assessing what you see on social media,
because it looks real, but many times it's not.
But it goes to that idea of confirmation bias.
Social media today, the caller talked about the media being the message.
Remind viewers what the Daisy Girl ad was.
Yes, well, this also relates to the idea of Democrats have been guilty of this toxic politics themselves as well.
The Daisy Girl ad was the most famous...
We're good to go.
Uh, work best when there's a subtext, when people think there's something going on here that I don't like, and the people who make the ads can latch on to that.
There was concern that Goldwater was too, uh, warlike, was too bellicose.
He was going to get us into a war with the old Soviet Union.
So Johnson came up with an ad which showed a little girl in a field, and if you've seen it, you probably always will remember it.
Uh, it's a one -minute ad.
Um, it showed a little girl in a field picking daisies.
That's where the name Daisy comes from.
She pulls petals off, like "He loves me, he loves me not" kind of thing, and she counts.
And she gets the numbers wrong.
She's basically a toddler.
Ten, six, four, five, and then you hear a narrator take the countdown, and it becomes a nuclear blast.
And she looks up, and you see the nuclear mushroom cloud in her eyes, as if she's looking at the blast, and this is the last sight she's going to have.
So, a nuclear war is illustrated in this very vivid ad.
And at the end, you hear Lyndon Johnson say, "Today it's important that we get along.
We must learn to love each other or we will surely die." Goldwater is not mentioned in the ad at all.
And then the narrator says, "Be sure to vote on..." It gives the date of the vote, November 6th, I think it was.
The stakes are too high for you to stay home.
That ad ran once.
It was so powerful, all the networks picked it up as a news story, the newspapers did.
It only had to run once.
And it made the point, and it really just put the end to Goldwater's campaign.
And he just knew how devastating it was.
But that's the most...
Yeah, thanks for taking the call.
Yesterday you guys had an author from the Newsweek, I guess his name was Alter, and the entire hour was condemning Donald Trump, how terrible a person he is.
And now you have this author today, and he goes directly to Chapter 5, how toxic Donald Trump, the most toxic or...
The Vice President.
So you go there, and then you go on to say Rush Limbaugh and the media, how terrible he was, and Tucker Carlson, Fox News, and you know, a lot of people voted this year,
and more than 50 % of the country voted for Donald Trump.
They don't care about what you say anymore, because after the Russian collusion hoax...
The fake story about the Russian, I mean, Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation, and the lies about Biden's cognitive abilities,
and issues with Hillary Clinton banging and crashing up her email, you know, on her phones, and having something in her basement that shouldn't have been there.
You know, they're seeing it.
They can see it with their own eyes.
And you know what?
We listen to you, and we listen to your condemnation of the Republicans, and you don't say a darn thing about President Biden and the comments he made about, you know, fascism, Hitler,
and the people that support Donald Trump are no, you know, they're dangerous.
They're a danger to our country.
And then Hillary Clinton calling people that support Donald Trump a basket of deplorables.
Can you say something bad about Joe Biden and something good about Donald Trump?
Is it possible?
Show me you're not biased, okay?
Well, first of all, maybe you weren't listening, but I did talk about how Biden had descended into toxic politics in his presidency.
And part of it is the criticism of Trump supporters.
Yeah, and I think that's part of the problem he had.
I've been very critical of Biden in a number of ways.
One is I think that he and his White House did not fully explain the cognitive decline that everyone saw in that debate, which he lost to Donald Trump.
And he took a couple of weeks after that, but then he did drop out.
To me, that is a huge story that the mainstream media, my own business, my own career, That we didn't focus on enough.
And I've said this many times.
The basket of deplorables went too far.
But, you know, also we have to realize one reason that the Republicans get so much attention for negative politics, as I say in the book,
is because they have had masters of it in Republican politics.
Lee Atwater...
He defined attack politics in the United States in the 80s.
He worked for Ronald Reagan.
He worked for George Bush, the father.
And this has nothing to do with Donald Trump at all.
And Lee Atwood, I knew Lee Atwood very, very well.
And his philosophy was, we don't win elections by building up our own candidates.
We win elections by tearing the other side down.
He said that many, many times.
This is long before Donald Trump.
So, there's a long history here.
The other thing is, or a couple of points.
One is that Trump, according to the latest numbers, he did not win a majority of the vote.
He won just below 50%.
He won the election, there's no doubt about that.
He won a big majority in the Electoral College.
But the Democrats, as it turns out, didn't do as bad as we thought they did initially after this campaign.
Kamala Harris lost by about two and a half million votes.
That's a lot of votes, but in percentage, she was about a point and a half behind Donald Trump.
So that's another thing to keep in mind.
The other thing I wanted to mention is, and I know the caller was very agitated about this, but one reason that the Republicans get a lot of attention We're good to go.
We're good to go.
We're good to go.
What do you mean by that?
And some of them are not really Republicans.
They're conservatives, but they don't say that they're Republicans.
So anyway, but they do it very well.
So that's the other thing to keep in mind.
The Associated Press numbers Donald Trump with 77 ,297 ,721 votes in the 2024 election.
49 .9 % of the total votes cast.
Kamala Harris, 75 ,000...
75 ,009 ,338 votes.
48 .4%.
William is in Miamisburg, Ohio.
Democrat, good morning.
Good morning.
This is your favorite old dumb, I can say 89 -year -old hillbilly now.
Mr. Walsh, I commend you for writing a book like that because we have nothing but crooks and politicians in the government.
It's just a shame that we pay taxes to support them crooks.
And that's...
From federal, state, and local.
It's just a shame.
I feel so sorry for my grandkids and nine little great -grandkids.
It'll be 11 in March.
It's just a shame.
Did you ever read the book Broke USA?
Broke USA?
I'm the number one guy in that.
And as far as Trump, every time I see his lips move, I get diarrhea.
It's just a shame.
That's William in Ohio.
This is Ted in Washington, New Jersey, Republican.
Good morning.
Yes, I just wanted to say a couple things about the negativity on balance here.
First of all, the Democrats are also very big on negativity.
I go back a couple years ago to Nancy Pelosi.
She ripped up the State of the Union speech on national TV and there was no repercussion.
It's just all the late night TV shows, PBS.
60 Minutes, ABC, they all went along.
Oh, yeah, let's attack Trump.
These people, the late night shows, are the biggest offenders.
I can't even watch them.
All they do is attack the one side.
It's not a balance.
Now, also, during the election time, we had David Muir, who I thought was a fair guy.
He's doing the interviewing at the debate, and he had a woman on there who was friendly, apparently, with some kind of...
I just hope that in your reporting or when you're talking about your book,
You're inclusive about this because the reason why people voted for Trump is because they're tired of the so -called swamp where all these united people in Washington and Hollywood and in the networks, they're all together.
They're like one group, and they're very powerful.
They don't have the money, but they have the media.
They control the media, and they control the education and the universities.
I go to the big universities of the debates, and they're all on the left side.
Well, yes.
I don't really disagree with what you're saying at all.
I mean, and in fact, in my body of work, I think if you looked at it, you can see that I have been very critical of both sides on this.
You mentioned Pelosi tearing up the speech, but basically there's a parallel universe here for both sides.
For every case like The View, there's The Five on Fox.
They make a living of denigrating the Democrats and Biden.
I don't know if the call is still there, but do you watch The Five at all?
The caller's not there, but go ahead.
Anyway, so you have the view, you have the five.
You have a parallel approach here that both of them are taking.
I have been very critical also of the Democrats of not understanding the level of resentment and grievance that the working class has in the United States.
Understand that Trump did understand that better than the Democrats did, than Kamala Harris did.
She started off her campaign talking about the politics of joy.
Well, this very important segment in our politics, the working class, was not feeling joy.
That was the wrong approach to appeal to them.
And Trump did enormously well with those people.
They used to be the core of the Democratic Party.
I come from a working class background myself.
And I saw that in my own family when I was being brought up.
But the Democrats are no longer the party of the working class.
They're going through enormous soul -searching now on how do they fix this, but it was a terrible problem.
And it's a problem that we have in the media too.
We don't really understand the working class as we might have in the past.
One reason is we don't live like working class people.
When I first started covering politics, Long ago, I felt like I was living the same life as the people I was writing for as a newspaper reporter.
When the property taxes went up, I would not like it.
When grocery prices went up, when something happened in crime or something, I was worried about my neighborhood.
But as time has gone on, I think the people in the media, in the big media centers, New York and Washington and California and...
And Chicago, for instance.
We don't live the same life as working class people, and I think we did at one time.
So this is a real disconnect, and this is something the Democrats are feeling.
The other quick point I'd make, and I think you were very well taken, talking about the celebrity endorsements.
I was always critical of the effect of celebrity endorsements.
Ever since I've covered politics, and it's been 45 years now, all those elections, The Democrats always get the endorsements from the famous stars.
And the Republicans do well with country music entertainers and some Hollywood people.
But basically, that's a Democratic constituency.
That's always the way it's been.
But it doesn't really convert votes.
I'm sure it annoys and angers people on the other side, conservatives who feel like there's too many social activists in Hollywood who are liberals.
And there are many who are liberals, but I don't think they swing elections.
I think Americans really don't pay attention to that very much.
Even Taylor Swift, who had a brief moment in the sun in this last campaign.
If you had to list the three most divisive, toxic, is the word we've been using, elections in American history, would 2024 crack the top three?
Well, I think the first two would be 1796 and 1800, the ones I started out talking about.
They were incredibly toxic elections and very personal elections.
John Adams criticized and his supporters criticized Jefferson as heading for bringing the guillotine, bringing the French Revolution to the United States, killing people,
bringing atheism.
As the governing philosophy of the country.
And on the other side, Jefferson's people said Adams was a royalist.
He wanted to bring the sort of nobility into the country, the nobility of the nobles of Europe, that sort of thing.
And he was mocked as his rotundity.
And we're talking about personal attacks, and he was criticized by the Jefferson people of being a hermaphrodite.
Now, that's not the best thing to call somebody, then or now.
But that's how negative it was.
Very, very negative campaign.
But big issues were at stake.
A lot of people were worried about the future.
Can we survive as a country?
That's the point I made initially.
When that kind of resentment and anger and fear and grievance rises, negative politics rises.
So that, I would say, is a very negative period.
Andrew Jackson had very, very negative campaigns a few years later.
That was the era of duels.
He got into duels.
He killed people in duels.
And just a quick point about this is that when he ran for president, he ran and lost and then he ran again.
His opponents raised the issue that his wife was an adulteress because she had been married before and she thought that her marriage had been The divorce had gone through but it had not.
So she was actually still legally married when she married Andrew Jackson.
And his opponents raised this as an issue against him that he had married an adulteress and she was scorned by a lot of people in Washington, including the spouses of a lot of people in Congress.
Her name was Rachel.
And she never made it to his inauguration.
She died.
And a lot of people thought she died of a nervous breakdown because she realized how her reputation had been sullied by all this criticism.
And Jackson always held the death of his wife against his critics.
So you talk about a negative environment.
This is a man who was devoted to his wife.
He felt that his opponents had actually killed his wife by causing her health to be shattered.
And so that set the tone.
He became a negative politician.
You're right.
When Rachel Jackson once discovered her husband Andrew Jackson crying in his office, she asked him what was wrong.
"Myself I can defend, you I can defend, but now they have assailed even the memory of my mother," he replied.
Yes, well, at that point, yeah, he felt his mother was being attacked, and she was.
So, you know, we've had this history of our country, and that's part of what I was trying to show in the book, because of the reasons I've talked about.
Hey, good morning, good morning.
You know, I'm 76 years old, and I've kind of noticed in this past election, my younger kids and, you know, some of the kids in their 40s and 50s, but they never watch programs on TV.
They watch, you know, movies and stuff, but they never watch the news.
They never watch Fox and stuff like that.
But what they do, it seems like on their telephones and Facebook, We're good to go.
Yeah, well, again, very well.
Well, An insightful question.
What the caller is referring to, obviously keeping up on the news, is that Donald Trump is very good at this.
That's partly why we talk about him so much in the media.
He's a terrific showman.
He understands the media.
He understands how to get attention.
He understands how to...
Divert attention from things he doesn't want to talk about and create other things.
What's happened in the last week or so is that Trump has talked about the United States taking over Canada and taking over Greenland and taking over the Panama Canal.
Now, maybe this is just his showman instinct because he knows everybody will talk about this.
If you look at how that would happen, it's very hard to see how any of that would happen, except the Panama Canal, which I think that could happen.
The United States could take that back, because the United States did build it.
But he raised the idea of taking over Greenland in his first term, by the way.
And Denmark, as I recall, actually owns Greenland, controls Greenland.
And they said, no, you're never going to get Greenland.
Forget it.
Now he's back on that again.
Now maybe it's just he feels like it's an issue that he knows people will talk about.
Maybe he's serious about it.
There's no detail about this at all.
So we really don't know how serious he is.
Except at the Panama Canal.
He apparently has looked into this because he knew enough about it to know how many people died building the canal more than 100 years ago.
He says about 38 ,000 Americans died building the canal.
So he's looking at it as...
Just a couple things.
The implicit by, Ken, you're a nice man, and everybody likes to think they're in the middle of the road, but...
Actually, just you're saying that for every one of these shows, there's one of those, everybody knows that the media is like 90 % liberal.
So that's not true.
And the negativity of Joe Biden, when he went after Bork and used the NPR to come up with this scandal, and he was lying and trying to embarrass politicians way before Trump.
His negativity is tenfold.
So when Trump goes against, A 90 % attack, he kind of has to do that.
And we want him going to bat for us against these people with these crazy ideas that a boy isn't a boy, a boy's a girl, and all this wild and wacky stuff.
And then not to mention that, yeah, I mean, and that's where we're at.
And I appreciate your niceness and that you think that you're in the middle, but you are a liberal.
Well, I mean, I have never disclosed my political leanings, and I don't intend to.
I don't think I could have covered seven presidents and won the major awards for White House coverage over the years.
If I was biased, and I don't believe I am, I try to call them as I see them.
As I say, I come from a working -class family myself.
My father was a longshoreman in New York.
Then he became a... worked for the city of New York and my mother was a waitress and then raised her five sons.
I have four brothers.
But in any case, I do try to, as I say, call him as I see him.
And I think that, I think the caller and the other caller in particular was very riled up about the bias against Trump and so on.
And I understand that, but...
At this moment, I don't think you could look at what Trump is doing and saying as he's trying to, as he's just won the election and is about to become president, and see that he's looking for common ground.
He's not.
He feels that the polarization benefits him.
He has felt that way for a long time and has felt that that's the way he would win re -election.
Now, as I say, he almost hit 50%, but he didn't quite hit 50%.
But he won.
There's no doubt about that.
But just look at the results that we've shown here in the map a little while ago and how divided we are as a country.
It's really remarkable.
It's unfortunate that I think that the president -elect has not tried to step away from this a little bit.
Some of the polling, I think, would be interesting.
One recent poll said that 20 % of Americans now support what they call a national divorce, where the blue states, the Democratic states, would go their own way, the red states, the Republican states, would go their own way.
That sounds like a civil war to me.
That's about 60 million people feel that way.
That's a lot of people.
Only 20 % of the people.
But we have very deep divisions as a country, and I think at some point, Somebody who stands astride the whole system needs to step back from this and serve as an example for everybody else.
In the Bible, it's called turning the other cheek.
This is what we used to think in our daily lives and in our politics and in public life.
So I think civility is really in danger here, and you can see that in this idea of the national divorce.
So a different take on my first question about how these cycles of toxic politics end.
What was the previous cycle before the one that we acknowledge we're in now?
How did that end?
Well, I think after World War II, we had a huge...
I don't know.
To find these alleged communists in government, which he never could really identify them, but he made the accusations.
That became a very difficult time for a lot of people who were wrongly accused.
What Eisenhower did, and this gets back to the point I'm making now about today, is he felt that he didn't want to take McCarthy head -on, which a lot of people faulted him with since, but he felt that...
McCarthy would sort of overreach and he would automatically at some point people would turn against him and that's exactly what happened.
But he had the credibility as a president to feel like he wasn't going to embrace McCarthy.
He felt he could stand up to him and that's the kind of thing that I think we need today.
Somebody to stand up to the extremes and to speak for the common ground.
And I think Eisenhower managed to do that.
And by the end of McCarthy's hot streak, when he was at his most popular, Eisenhower made the distinction, sort of a criticism of McCarthy, done in a typical Eisenhower way, said,
it's not McCarthyism, which is the name given to making unsubstantiated charges, it's McCarthy -was -ism.
But it was interesting how Eisenhower handled that delicately, but nevertheless tried to push McCarthy off the stage in an interesting way.
But it took Joseph Welsh saying, have you no sense of decency, sir?
At long last, have you left no sense of decency?
Yes, that was the famous hearing in which McCarthy started to go too far, where he was making accusations against the young fellow.
Who had no communist connections that we know of, and he was ruining this guy's life.
And so this lawyer, Welsh, that you talk about, had a very dramatic moment where he made exactly those words, criticizing McCarthy for going too far, for ruining this young man's life for his own political gain.
And that stuck with a lot of people.
Eight minutes or so left with Kim Walsh.
Good morning.
Happy New Year.
Congratulations on your book, Mr. Walsh.
I have a question for you.
Do you think Donald would be as gracious and dignified as Vice President Harris when it comes to the fact that she conceded to him with that landslide of 1 .48 %?
Will he be as civil as she has been?
Is that what you're asking?
No, I'm saying...
Oh, I'm sorry, right.
No, I don't think so.
We already have the track record of that the last time.
And he had been saying all along in the campaign that he was talking about widespread fraud and things that were about to happen, that then when he won, that all went away.
Now, I am hearing, and you probably are too, reading the mainstream media, there is an effort by some Democrats to challenge those results, even now.
I don't know if that's going to go very far, but the Democrats are doing an enormous amount of soul -searching, and I think that if they go to challenge the results, that's probably a bad thing for the Democrats to do,
because it would look like sour grapes
How'd you get into writing about politics?
Well, I come from a family, as I say, from New York City, a working -class family who were always very interested in politics.
My parents were always...
That was the era when there were like 12 newspapers in the city, and my parents were avid readers of newspapers and political news.
And I was the oldest son, and so I was assigned to go to the newsstand.