| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Michael Schnell, congressional reporter for The Hill, will talk about President Trump's meeting Tuesday with GOP leaders in Congress. | |
| And Cliff Young, president of Polling and Societal Trends for Ipsos, discusses his organization's new survey on President Trump's policy agenda. | ||
| Then Associated Press Pentagon correspondent Tara Kopp with the latest on Pete Hegs' Defense Secretary nomination and the firing of U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Linda Fagan. | ||
| And later, Reuters White House correspondent Jeff Mason gives an overview of President Trump's latest actions and previews the day ahead. | ||
| Washington Journal is next. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| It's Wednesday, January 22nd. | ||
| Today's the third day of the Trump presidency. | ||
|
unidentified
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On Monday, President signed a slew of executive orders. | |
| And yesterday, he met with Republican congressional leaders to discuss his legislative agenda. | ||
| We'll update you on all the latest news. | ||
| But in the meantime, we're asking you this. | ||
| What would you like the highest priority to be for the Trump administration and Congress? | ||
| Give us a call by party. | ||
|
unidentified
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Democrats, 202-748-8000. | |
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| You can send a text to 202-748-8003. | ||
| Include your first name in your city-state. | ||
| And you can post to social media, facebook.com slash C-SPAN and X at C-SPANWJ. | ||
| Welcome to today's Washington Journal. | ||
| We'll start with the Wall Street Journal with this headline about that meeting. | ||
| Yesterday, Trump meets with GOP leaders to map out congressional path. | ||
| Republicans are trying to quickly pass President's tax and border agenda. | ||
| We'll have a reporter to update you on that in about 15 minutes. | ||
| Also making news is the result of the fallout from the January 6th pardons. | ||
| Here is Politico. | ||
| GOP senators criticize Trump over pardoning violent January 6 riders. | ||
| It says several Republican senators are roundly criticizing President Donald Trump's pardon of January 6 riders, particularly those convicted of violent crimes like assaulting law enforcement officers. | ||
| This is Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska who says, quote, I'm disappointed to see that and I do fear the message that is sent to these brave men and women that stood by us. | ||
| And here's a quote by Senator Tom Tillis, a Republican of North Carolina. | ||
| Quote, that segment of pardons, I'm as disappointed as I am with all the pardons that Biden did. | ||
| Well, President Trump was asked about that with reporters yesterday. | ||
| Here's what he said. | ||
|
unidentified
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The leaders of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers were free following their pardons yesterday. | |
| At the time back in 2021, you urged them to stand back and stand by. | ||
| Is there now a place for them in the political conversation? | ||
| Well, we have to say they've been given a pardon. | ||
| I thought their sentences were ridiculous and excessive. | ||
| One of the guys took down a flag that was an anti-American flag, and he was given years in jail. | ||
| I don't know the exact number, but he was given many years in jail. | ||
| I thought it was very excessive. | ||
| And at least the cases that we looked at, these were people that actually love our country, so we thought a pardon would be appropriate. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And we'll go to your calls asking about your priorities for the Trump administration and Congress. | ||
| We'll start on the independent line from Steamwood, Illinois. | ||
| Art, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| How are you? | ||
| Good. | ||
| I have an issue that I find very disturbing. | ||
| On the 20th, President Trump took an oath to protect the Constitution and hours later pardoned 1,600 people that actually attacked our Congress and tried to overturn our government. | ||
| This, to me, I believe, is an impeachable act. | ||
| And I cannot understand why nothing has been said or done about it. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And here is Dana in Indianapolis, Indiana, Democrat. | ||
| Hi, Dana. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hi. | |
| For the Trump administration. | ||
| Okay, you got to turn down the TV. | ||
| Yeah, go ahead, Dana. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, I would want them to take care of lowering the prices of food, housing, and also taking care of, I'm trying to think here, gas. | |
| I mean, that's what they should be trying to do, keep the infrastructure going so jobs can stay steady for construction workers and whatnot. | ||
| And just keep the economy, you know, is growing. | ||
| I mean, it's doing good, but if he's going to start putting tariffs everywhere, people are really going to be hurting. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And here is Rick in Grand Céline, Texas, Independent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, thank you. | |
| I believe that Social Security needs to be addressed now rather than later. | ||
| And Social Security reform should involve, to the highest degree, a removal of the cap on income. | ||
| And then they would largely solve the problem. | ||
| I know they want to raise the retirement age requirement for it, but raising the cap would do it. | ||
| And the Republicans don't want to do that. | ||
| They never bring up raising the cap on income. | ||
| So anyway, that's my point this morning. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right, Rick. | ||
| And here is Jamie in Garden City, Missouri, Republican. | ||
| Hi, Jamie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| What do I want to see from this administration? | ||
| Everything that President Trump said he was going to do. | ||
| I want secure borders. | ||
| I want to be able to go to the grocery store and afford eggs that are now $5 a dozen. | ||
| You know, I want to be able to afford my groceries. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| And yes, ma'am. | ||
| And Jamie, do you have ideas as to how you want to see those prices come down? | ||
| Do you have ideas as to policy that you want to see from Congress, from the president? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, I think that if we establish and get our petro dollar back up and we stop spending our money on all these foreign wars and everything else and start taking care of America, yeah, I think that prices will come down. | |
| A lot of this is our dollar is not worth anything. | ||
| So it takes like $5 to make $1. | ||
| And once you start giving our currency backing with the petro dollar in other areas, then our dollar is going to be worth something again. | ||
| And, you know, can I say something about the January 6th? | ||
| Sure. | ||
|
unidentified
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A lot of these people don't understand that. | |
| Some of these people, like one was a grandma. | ||
| She was getting ready to start chemo. | ||
| She thought she was allowed into the Capitol. | ||
| She didn't know she couldn't go in. | ||
| She was thrown in jail. | ||
| A lot of these people that are in there shouldn't be in there. | ||
| And Trump didn't just give everybody a pardon. | ||
| There's some people that had priors and did some things that are still under investigation, and he's not pardoning them. | ||
| So, yeah, there's some people really, and I'm a grandma, so I have sympathy for some of these elderly people that were in prison. | ||
| So, thank you. | ||
| All right. | ||
| All right, Jamie. | ||
| And let's hear from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, also responded to President Trump's actions giving those pardons to the January 6th riders. | ||
| On day one, Donald Trump signed over 150 executive orders dismantling years of progress on lowering costs for American families, on energy jobs, on lowering prescription drug prices, public health, and public safety. | ||
| With a flick of a pen, President Trump took steps to make it harder to enroll in health care and made Medicaid more restrictive. | ||
| He even made it harder for Americans to save on prescription drugs. | ||
| He made it a golden age for big pharma and big pharma executives. | ||
| He cleared the way for big oil polluters and halted leasing of offshore wind farms, making it a golden age for oil company executives. | ||
| Nothing, nothing that President Trump did on day one lowered grocery prices. | ||
| Nothing helped Americans achieve their dream of owning a home. | ||
| Nothing will help working families earn more and save more. | ||
| Who exactly is Donald Trump's golden age for? | ||
| Not for working Americans and not for your family and not for you. | ||
| President Trump's golden age is one for America's biggest drug companies who now can worry less about lowering their prices. | ||
| It's a golden age for America's richest oil executives who want nothing more than to kill clean jobs and deepen America's dependence on fossil fuels and raise the price for you at the pump. | ||
| It's a golden age for America's top 1% who want another trillion-dollar tax break, paid on, paid for on the backs of working families. | ||
| And sadly, it's a golden age for lawlessness and lawbreakers who were pardoned yesterday by President Trump. | ||
| There is no other way to describe President Trump's pardon of January 6th offenders than un-American. | ||
| It is so deeply un-American to do that, to pardon them. | ||
| And here is what's on the front page of the New York Times. | ||
| Pardoning rioters angers the police. | ||
| It says, when inmates are released from federal prison, the Justice Department places a call to their victims, notifying them that the defendant who attacked them is now free. | ||
| On Tuesday, the phones of U.S. Capitol Police and D.C. police officers were buzzing nonstop. | ||
| For Aquilino Gannell, a former Capitol Police sergeant, the automated calls began on Monday evening and continued into Tuesday morning after President Trump issued a sweeping legal reprieve to all the nearly 1,600 defendants, including those convicted of violent crimes in the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. | ||
| Between 7.03 a.m. and 9.37 a.m., Mr. Gannell received nine calls from the Justice Department about the release of inmates. | ||
| He was assaulted during the attack and retired because of the injuries he suffered. | ||
| He was outraged and distraught as he was shortly after the violence. | ||
| And here's Richard calling from Pinole, California, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning, Richard. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Basically, what I'd like to see to happen is everything opposite of what Trump is doing. | ||
| He's actually, in the things he did address, well, there's a lot of things that are going to affect the middle class. | ||
| Just the huge tax break they're going to do, you know, and the huge deficit. | ||
| That increased inflation. | ||
| The tariffs increase inflation. | ||
| But he has already harmed the American people in the executive orders he did on drug and pharma and taking rights away for aid. | ||
| And he didn't say anything about health care. | ||
| He didn't say anything or even about how he was going to bring down the prices of anything. | ||
| If I mean, the tariffs alone on China raised the prices in the agricultural department because they weren't buying soybeans. | ||
| And so his policy is totally opposite. | ||
| Any economist would say that all his policies are going to be highly inflationary. | ||
| In a lot of ways, the tariffs that raise the prices, we pay for it. | ||
| And the people up in the top are just getting richer. | ||
| People just don't, they have no clue. | ||
| I don't understand the people that vote for Trump. | ||
| I mean, I do understand are kind of delusional in denial, and they have their agenda, which is not on the side of a spiritual good. | ||
| Let me tell you that. | ||
| And so. | ||
| So, Richard, what would you, I mean, besides doing the opposite of what he's doing, what's your major issue, if you will, as to what you want to see done? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would say that I would say he needs to get his tax relief to the middle class where he can. | |
| They ought to expand. | ||
| He said nothing about health care. | ||
| We need to expand health care, not make it harder for people to get. | ||
| We should have universal health care now anyway. | ||
| The only civilized country probably in Europe that doesn't have it. | ||
| And also, we have to have some kind of form of helping people get homes and building homes. | ||
| I mean, they're going to have to rebuild Los Angeles, right? | ||
| And you don't get out of a climate accord, start drilling oil, which is going to increase the situation that causes the fire and the weathers and the five hottest years. | ||
| I mean, I can go down the list, you know, of everything. | ||
| I mean, he had like four. | ||
| We got it, Richard. | ||
| We're going to talk to Jeremy in Madison, Wisconsin, Independent. | ||
| Hi, Jeremy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, Mimi, this is me. | |
| How are you doing today? | ||
| Good. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| Hey, I got something for administration in Congress. | ||
| I got a prairie. | ||
| But before I do that, guess what I found at the library at the downtown library yesterday? | ||
| I got a book by Dick Rorty, What We Can Hope For. | ||
| Essays on Politics. | ||
| Prescient essays about the state of our politics from the philosopher who predicted that a populist demigod would become president of the United States in the 90s. | ||
| Anyway, so here, I got something for administration and for Congress. | ||
| I hope Senator Majority Leader John Soon does not impeach President Donald J. Trump. | ||
| I hope. | ||
| And, you know, when I was in middle school, you know what I used to do, Mimi? | ||
| I used to run around and say, hey, do you know what impeach means? | ||
| Do you know what impeach means? | ||
| Do you know what impeach means? | ||
| I used to do that all the time. | ||
| But I'm hoping everybody today has a great day. | ||
| And then maybe you should visit your downtown library. | ||
| All right, have a good day. | ||
| Lester in Sandy, Oregon, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| My issues is, well, a lot of these Democrats don't understand the businessman. | ||
| That's for one thing. | ||
| He's ran our country in the past very well. | ||
| And he's already got this Three gentlemen give $5 trillion for creating jobs. | ||
| And there's one in there that they can find out earlier on cancer. | ||
| And so I just don't understand why these people want not to have him there because he's running our country very well, I think. | ||
| And what's your priority then for him to get done? | ||
| What would you like to see? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Create more jobs, and we need that. | |
| PAX is do take care of our Social Security and medical. | ||
| And what I'm saying is the money that we get from taxes will help give us more Social Security because you're paying in. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So we're going to pause right here and talk to a reporter, congressional reporter from The Hill. | ||
| If you're on the line, just stay on the line with us. | ||
| We'll come back to calls right after this. | ||
| And Michael Schnell is joining us. | ||
| Hi, Michael. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Hey, Mimi, good morning. | ||
| So this meeting yesterday between President Trump and GOP congressional leaders that happened yesterday, what are you hearing happened during that meeting? | ||
| Yeah, well, we were told by Speaker Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise that there is some type of plan for how reconciliation is going to be carried out. | ||
| And look, that was significant because we know for the past few weeks there's been this debate in the Capitol. | ||
| Will Republican leaders try to pass one reconciliation bill of Trump's policies? | ||
| Will they split his agenda into two separate bills? | ||
| So that's been the main question here. | ||
| House members, particularly Mike Johnson and Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, they've been pushing for one single bill. | ||
| Senate Majority Leader John Thune has been pushing for two bills. | ||
| And publicly, President Trump has made his preference for one bill known, but he's kept the door open to both of them. | ||
| So this has been sort of the first step that folks are waiting for a firm answer on before we can move on to what exact policy is going to be in this piece of legislation or pieces of legislation. | ||
| Majority Leader Steve Scalise came back from the White House yesterday and told us that the agreement was on one bill. | ||
| John Thune seemed a little bit more uncommittal to that when talking to reporters after the meeting. | ||
| So this is still the main question of one bill or two bills, but it seems like they have the outline of a plan of how they're going to attack reconciliation. | ||
| House leaders, Republican leaders say that they want to pass a budget resolution, which unlocks the budget reconciliation process sometime in the week of February 27th. | ||
| So time, the deadline, the self-imposed deadline to get this process started and have these key decisions made is quickly approaching. | ||
| And Michael, what's the big deal between one bill or two bills? | ||
| Does it really make that big of a difference? | ||
| Well, there are questions of, A, can Republicans even get one bill over the finish line? | ||
| The budget reconciliation process is, of course, significant in the sense that it takes away the need to get Democratic support in the Senate. | ||
| It brings the threshold from passing a bill from 60 votes to just a simple majority. | ||
| But the House is sort of its own issue. | ||
| And even though the House has only needed a simple majority, Republicans are grappling with an ultra-thin majority. | ||
| At some point, once Elise DeFonic leaves the House to go serve in the administration, the breakdown is going to be 217 to 215, which means Republicans can't even afford to lose one of their members on a party line vote. | ||
| Now, when they're planning to vote on reconciliation, the margin will be a little bit larger because some special elections would have happened by then. | ||
| But still, even if it's a one or two person majority, that's extremely slim. | ||
| So the concern in the House is that they're only going to get one bite at this apple, that if they get reconciliation over the finish line, it's only going to happen once because of the slim majority. | ||
| And then the strategy here is that Mike Johnson is thinking that, well, I have some folks who don't like A aspect of reconciliation bill, B aspect, C aspect, but there are some big sweeteners in there, namely the immigration and border portion of this legislation. | ||
| So House leaders are hoping that by putting those sweeteners in one single bill, some of those conservative Republicans who are against other areas of the legislation won't vote against it because they don't want to tank that immigration and border section. | ||
| That's the argument for one bill. | ||
| Two bills, though, is in the Senate, folks are saying that they want to give President Trump an early win on the border, on immigration, and then deal with the more thornier issues down the road. | ||
| But again, there's that concern in the House of, will we really get two bites of this apple? | ||
| You mentioned immigration and border. | ||
| What are some of those things that we know that they agree on that we will likely see in the bill? | ||
| Yeah, well, we're still waiting to hear what these real specifics are. | ||
| The members have been very tight-lipped about the actual policy that will be in there. | ||
| We've seen House Republicans for a few weeks now have a lot of listening sessions with different committees and different interest groups within the House Republican Conference, different factions within the House Republican Conference to kind of get an idea of what everyone wants to see. | ||
| So we still don't know what details and what policy in particular is going to be in this reconciliation bill, but we can already see what's on the president's mind. | ||
| We saw his executive orders the eve, the night that he got inaugurated, things like ending birthright citizenship, reinstating Remain in Mexico. | ||
| So we know where his priorities lie. | ||
| It's just a question of now what policy are we going to be seeing put into this GOP bill. | ||
| President Trump also revived the idea of recess appointments for his cabinet. | ||
| Where does that stand? | ||
| Yeah, that has sort of been something that was raised during the election to become the next majority leader of the Senate. | ||
| And we saw the candidates agree to it, including somebody like Jon Thune. | ||
| You know, it's just rather not agreeing to it, but saying that they would do everything that they can to confirm Trump's cabinet nominees in a swift manner. | ||
| We then hadn't really heard much about this idea of recess appointments. | ||
| There's a lot of questions about how this would actually look practically, logistically, with the legal concerns surrounding it could be. | ||
| But it's definitely something that I'm interested to see if that's more of a discussion up on Capitol Hill this week. | ||
| I will note, though, Trump did get his first cabinet nominee, Marco Rubio, confirmed it was a unanimous vote in the Senate. | ||
| And Senate leaders are getting ready or are teeing up more votes. | ||
| We're seeing some of those nominees be dispatched out of committee and likely going to make it to the floor soon. | ||
| John Ratcliffe for CIA director, Pete Hegseth to be defense chief. | ||
| So expect to see more of these nominee votes in the coming days. | ||
| The question of recess appointments, though, we'll see if we hear more about that this week. | ||
| Going back to Pete Hegseth for defense secretary, there have been new allegations that have been leveled against him. | ||
| He denies those allegations of abusing his second wife. | ||
| What are you hearing about that? | ||
| And is that impacting his nomination at all? | ||
| Yeah, Democrats are outraged by this new development, this new affidavit that was given to lawmakers that then leaked into the press. | ||
| Democrats are concerned. | ||
| They have been concerned with Pete Hegseth's nomination this whole entire journey. | ||
| It's why his vote out of committee was on party lines. | ||
| Pete Hegseth's vote out of committee. | ||
| But I think the real question is, did this information come to the table just simply too late? | ||
| We've already seen Pete Hegseth's confirmation hearing. | ||
| We already saw his vote in committee. | ||
| One of those key holdouts, Joni Ernst, Republican from Iowa, had announced that she would support Pete Hegseth after that hearing. | ||
| I mean, there are still a few outliers, a few folks who haven't said where they lean one way or another. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Mitch McConnell, and Todd Young. | |
| So, realistically, if all four of those Republicans vote against Pete Hegseth, you know, he will not be able to be confirmed as defense secretary in the Senate because of the margins there. | ||
| But I think it's a big question of will those four ultimately vote against him. | ||
| And I think that the other folks are pretty locked in. | ||
| They have said that they're going to support him. | ||
| And they don't know that they would backtrack on that after reading this affidavit. | ||
| Look, it's, of course, a possibility, but I think at this juncture it's unlikely. | ||
| And I think a lot of folks are going to be asking, well, did we receive this information just simply too late? | ||
| You had a chance to talk to Speaker Johnson about President Trump's January 6th pardons. | ||
| What did he tell you, his reaction, and other reaction among the GOP in Congress? | ||
| Yeah, he said that he hasn't had an ability to review it yet. | ||
| He didn't have a specific reaction, sort of deflecting the question to not comment. | ||
| We will try again today, assuming that he has had a moment to review the pardons that President Trump signed on the first night of him being in office. | ||
| But the reaction from the House Republican conference is mixed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I heard spoke to a lot of folks yesterday who said this is the president's prerogative. | |
| He has the ability to issue pardons and commutations as president, and this was his decision. | ||
| I've had a lot of folks who say that the January 6th rioters were being unjustly held and unjustly prosecuted. | ||
| And then I've heard some folks say that this was the wrong decision, and that particularly the violent protesters, people who were accused of violently assaulting police officers. | ||
| And I will note, there were more than 600 January 6th protesters who were accused of violently assaulting law enforcement officers who were released as part of the sweeping pardon. | ||
| There were some folks who said that this was not the right decision, and they wish it was looked at on a case-by-case basis. | ||
| So, truly, a mixed bag when you talk about reaction from the House Republican conference. | ||
| We did hear from Senate Republicans, the usual suspects, the more moderate folks who are not the biggest fans of Trump, express their displeasure with this decision. | ||
| But overall, a mixed bag for Republican reaction to that. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, thanks for all those updates. | ||
| Michael Schnell, congressional reporter for The Hill, you can see her work at thehill.com. | ||
| Thanks so much. | ||
| Thanks, Mimi. | ||
| And we will go back to the calls now. | ||
| We're asking the question: what's your top priority for the Trump administration and for Congress? | ||
| And we'll talk to Jay now, an independent in Walnut, Mississippi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, good morning. | |
| I guess probably one thing I want to talk about a little bit is pardons. | ||
| I hear a lot about the 15 or 1600 that say Donald Trump pardoned, but you're not hearing much about Joe Biden pardoning about 40 murderers on death row. | ||
| You don't hear much about the last move he made was pardoning his family and then riding off to California. | ||
| You know, American people. | ||
| And something else I heard, I don't know facts or why I hadn't checked it up. | ||
| You might be able to look, yes. | ||
| Every who was the leader of the proud boys, he got about 20 years and he wouldn't even be in Washington at the time. | ||
| So I don't know about some things. | ||
| So, Jay, I want to bring something up. | ||
| You said that he pardoned murderers about former President Biden. | ||
| So here's what happened. | ||
| Here's the Associated Press. | ||
| It says Biden gives life in prison to 37 of 40 federal death row inmates before Trump can resume executions. | ||
| So this is federal death row. | ||
| This has nothing to do with the state, but 37 of them have been commuted to life in prison. | ||
| So they were not released. | ||
| They were not pardoned. | ||
| But they were, President Biden, former President Biden wanted to make sure that President Trump didn't resume federal executions. | ||
| Does that clear that up? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, let me ask you this. | |
| Was the leader of the Proud Boys in Washington when this took place? | ||
| Now, I think he got around 20 years. | ||
| You know, I guess they could charge anybody if they wouldn't even in Washington. | ||
| So what's the thing on that? | ||
| So here is, let me show you ABC News. | ||
| So Oath Keepers and Proud Boys leaders are out of prison after January 6th pardons. | ||
| This is ABC News. | ||
| You were asking about the Proud Boys. | ||
| That's Enrico Terrio. | ||
| They were released Tuesday from prison. | ||
| He was serving 22 years, 18 years for the Oath Keepers leader. | ||
| It sentenced Rhodes after he was convicted of seditious conspiracy the year prior for his and his group's role in the riot. | ||
| The Oath Keepers had stockpiled weapons at a DC hotel and organized the attack, according to prosecutors. | ||
| Rhodes himself did not enter the Capitol. | ||
| Okay, so this is Stuart Rhodes, did not enter the Capitol on January 6th and maintained that his group only intended to provide security and medical aid to those attending multiple protest demonstrations in the area. | ||
| Rhodes was convicted of leading members of the Oath Keepers in an attempt to use the violent capital attack to stop the peaceful transfer of power. | ||
| He says this was a bunch of nonsense. | ||
| I believe the 2020 election was unconstitutional. | ||
| It violated state election laws. | ||
| That's Rhodes. | ||
| Now, Terrio sentenced in 2023 on seditious conspiracy and given the longest sentence. | ||
| You're right, Jay, he was not at the Capitol on January 6th. | ||
| During his sentencing, prosecutors pointed to a nine-page strategic plan to, quote, storm government buildings in Washington on January 6th that was found in Terrio's possession after the riot, as well as violent rhetoric they say he routinely used in messages with other members of the group about what they would do if Congress moved forward in certifying President Joe Biden's win. | ||
| It says that former FBI Director Ray stepped down, described the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers as domestic extremist groups. | ||
| So that's about that. | ||
| And this is Jonathan, Grand Prairie, Texas, Democrat. | ||
| Hi, Jonathan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning, and thank you for taking my call. | |
| FeastPen, you folks do a wonderful job with really providing accurate information about key topics. | ||
| Just wanted to, a couple of things. | ||
| Everybody wants to have Social Security protected. | ||
| We want to have good health care coverage. | ||
| I'd like to see Congress expand the Medicaid program, Medicare. | ||
| But more importantly for me, on a personal level, I'd like to see the Congress, Senators, lawmakers look in the mirror and really focus on morality. | ||
| What you're seeing in this country is a segregation of really the moral fabric in the United States for the president, the current president, to pardon 1,500, 1,600 people with really acts of violence, most of them, or half of them at least, and they broke the law. | ||
| We always hear about backing the blue and we're a law-abiding country, but let's not forget that they convicted a felony, 34-count felon as a president of the United States. | ||
| You're absolutely right, the previous college J. Half the people don't even know what sedition is. | ||
| Half the people don't even know what a tariff is. | ||
| The problem also is a lot of people are just simply uneducated. | ||
| And, you know, to be quite frank, I didn't watch the inauguration. | ||
| It was the first time in my history as a voter not to watch that. | ||
| I just couldn't stomach it. | ||
| I am hopeful that going forward, once this man is out of office, that we don't have other leaders come in with the type of baggage he had. | ||
| And let's not forget one last thing. | ||
| When COVID hit and he lied to the American people, that it was a hoax, it was fake news, and at least 300,000 people of the 1.1 million people that died from COVID lost their lives needlessly because they believed this lie. | ||
| He incited insurrection, and he'll go down to history and infamy, as well as the other people. | ||
| They're not on the right side of history on this. | ||
| At the end of the day, I can sleep just fine knowing that I made the right decision. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call and have a great day. | ||
| This is Jim, a Republican in Winter Park, Florida. | ||
| Hi, Jim. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Mimi. | |
| I just listened to Jonathan, and I think, you know, being the Republican and him being a Democrat, we have middle ground in a lot of places. | ||
| I totally agree that they should be fixing Social Security. | ||
| But my biggest problem at this point now is the fact that we had four years of somebody running this country that was not Joe Biden. | ||
| Because I don't care what anybody says, if you watch that man, he never took a press conference. | ||
| Donald Trump sat down and was signing executive orders 20 hours into being awake, and he was still talking to everybody in the press room. | ||
| He took a straight out, anybody could ask any question, and he answered them. | ||
| Joe Biden never did. | ||
| He was hidden away by the Democratic Party because they knew he was already mentally incapable of running the government for the four years that he was president. | ||
| Now, as far as the statement about the COVID, I get sick and tired of hearing people blaming Donald Trump for the COVID. | ||
| Yes, he made stupid remarks. | ||
| That's Donald Trump. | ||
| He makes stupid remarks. | ||
| Anybody that wants to listen to him should just listen and do whatever they want to do. | ||
| You're a free person. | ||
| You can do whatever you want to do. | ||
| But everybody throws numbers out. | ||
| And I remember sitting here watching television, watching Joe Biden run his campaign from his basement, flipping out an index card and showing how many people died on Donald Trump's watch. | ||
| And it ended at about 450,000. | ||
| We are at 1,002 right now. | ||
| And Donald Trump and Mike Pence went with Operation Warp Speed and got a vaccine that Biden got in his first day of administration. | ||
| And it was held back because they didn't want Trump in the office again. | ||
| My biggest problem at this point right now is I sit here and I watch your show every morning. | ||
| You listen to the Republicans that get up and talk, Mike Johnson, John Toon. | ||
| They talk about real problems. | ||
| They talk about what they want to do to fix it, what we're going to do to fix it. | ||
| Then you watch Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer come on, and all they do is throw vitriol lies and vile statements about Republicans, about the president, about the other side of the aisle. | ||
| They never talk about real problems and how they're going to fix them. | ||
| All they want to do is blame the Republicans for everything going on. | ||
| And it even did it while they were in power in the Senate and in the House. | ||
| So I'm over people saying that the Republicans are the problem in this country. | ||
| I want everybody to just start paying attention to their lives and hope that we can turn this country around, get all the bad guys that are in this country that came across the border out of the country before we have another 9-11. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| Sid in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Sid. | |
| Hi. | ||
| My biggest priority would be this border security. | ||
| We have to secure that border. | ||
| It has been wide open. | ||
| And also, we don't even know how many terrorists and criminals have come across that border. | ||
| And the resumption of the board of wall, the deportations, I believe we should go move forward with the criminals. | ||
| There should be targeted enforcements. | ||
| That is very important because the Democratic Party really has lost its way. | ||
| And a lot of their actions now are sort of anti-American. | ||
| And the previous scholar is right. | ||
| We really have to put America first again. | ||
| So be specific, Sid, when you say some of the policies are anti-American. | ||
| Give me more specifics on that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like leaving the border open and putting up these illegal migrants into hotels. | |
| They've destroyed businesses, our communities. | ||
| They have released them with no justification. | ||
| And they're worried about this January 6 people being pardoned. | ||
| You know, I mean, our communities are unsafe. | ||
| In Chicago, Philadelphia, all of New York, people have been, U.S. citizens have had to pay the brunt of these criminal activities. | ||
| And not to forget those border towns near Texas. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Nobody's talking about that. | ||
| Even in D.C., the crime rate is out of control. | ||
| People are getting, I know people got stabbed right before the inauguration in northwest D.C. and northeast D.C. | ||
| And I read somewhere in Google that last night the Washington police officials pushed back on these pardons and they did not allow people to be released. | ||
| That is absolutely, that's not their call. | ||
| They've been pardoned and they need to be released. | ||
| That's all I got to say. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right, Sid. | ||
| Something else making news is this. | ||
| This is the Associated Press. | ||
| At the inaugural prayer service, the bishop pleads for Trump to, quote, have mercy on LGBTQ plus people and migrants. | ||
| Here's a portion of that, and then you'll see President Trump's response when he was asked about it. | ||
| Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. | ||
| Millions have put their trust in you. | ||
| And as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. | ||
| In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. | ||
| There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Some who fear for their lives. | |
| And the people. | ||
| The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals, they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. | |
| They pay taxes and are good neighbors. | ||
| They are faithful members of our mosques, synagogues, wadara, and temples. | ||
| I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. | ||
| And that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger. | |
| For we will all want strangers in this land. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. President, what did you think of the sermon? | |
| What did you think of the sermon? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What did you think? | |
| Did you like it? | ||
| Did you find it exciting? | ||
| Not too exciting, was it? | ||
| I didn't think it was a good service, though. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Thank you, Brass. | ||
| Thank you, Pras. | ||
| They can do much better. | ||
| President Trump also responded on Truth Social regarding that, and this is what he said. | ||
| The so-called bishop who spoke at the National Prayer Service on Tuesday morning was a radical left hardline Trump hater. | ||
| She brought her church into the world of politics in a very ungracious way. | ||
| She was nasty in tone and not compelling or smart. | ||
| She failed to mention the large number of illegal migrants that came into our country and killed people. | ||
| Many were deposited from jails and mental institutions. | ||
| It is a giant crime wave that is taking place in the USA. | ||
| Apart from her inappropriate statements, the service was very boring and uninspiring. | ||
| She is not very good at her job. | ||
| She and her church owe the public an apology. | ||
| And here is Kathy in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Democrat. | ||
| Kathy, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh my gosh, I didn't realize his response to that beautiful message, and his response was what you just read. | |
| I mean, I'm so saddened by everything going on, and I hope I can get through this without losing it, but I'm just really saddened by all the pardons that he did. | ||
| You know, the police officers that were there to protect the Congress people and just his dismissiveness, the way he's acted since he's, he has no grace. | ||
| He lacks any shred of human decency or caring or humility. | ||
| He's like mortally bankrupt. | ||
| He doesn't care about anybody but himself. | ||
| And that was a beautiful message. | ||
| He should be gracious right now. | ||
| He's the winner. | ||
| He won. | ||
| And for him to act that way, and it makes me really sad. | ||
| And when I wrote to Officer Fanon, because when I heard his statement about him, he had to plead and plea out. | ||
| He said, I have kids. | ||
| I have children. | ||
| And he said, that's what stopped the attack. | ||
| I wrote him a letter because that pierced my soul. | ||
| And it's just sad. | ||
| It's sad to me that people think this is okay. | ||
| And I don't know. | ||
| I just feel like, and I actually blame the Republicans more because he wouldn't be allowed to get away with this behavior if they would have held him accountable. | ||
| But they're not going to. | ||
| He's going to get all his nominees in. | ||
| And I'm just really sad. | ||
| And I think this is really a sad day. | ||
| And that's all I wanted to say. | ||
| This is Gary in Fletcher, North Carolina, Independent Line. | ||
| Hi, Gary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| I've got to do a little rebuttal to the last caller. | ||
| The minister was trying to put him on the spot. | ||
| You know, that was her dagger that she could pull out. | ||
| You know, she made racist comments about everybody that does manual labor is an immigrant and an illegal. | ||
| You know, it's kind of sad that my mother to create education walked behind potato plows in Maine. | ||
| And I, as a kid, raked blueberries. | ||
| You know, when these immigrants had migrant cards, the blue cards, when they came into the country, they didn't ask them, where are you going to go live? | ||
| They asked them, what are you going to do for work? | ||
| And Biden took away that blue card and gave them green cards. | ||
| Now the only fruit they pick is our jobs because why would they? | ||
| Not being racist. | ||
| They feel the same heat we feel. | ||
| They feel the same cold in the field, the same sun. | ||
| They don't want that job any more than any Americans. | ||
| To say that because they have a certain quality as a race that is different than other races or some kind of acceptable behavior or negative behavior is a racial comment, a racist comment, not racist. | ||
| We all feel the same pain and everything. | ||
| But when we select workers coming across the border for years, and I live in Apple Country in North Carolina, tobacco country, these folks been since the 60s would come in, make their money, go back home, live a better lifestyle. | ||
| The system worked. | ||
| So, Gary, what did you mean? | ||
| You said they got a blue card and then Biden gave them a green card? | ||
| I know what a green card is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What's a migrant? | |
| The migrant worker card, which probably doesn't exist anymore, migratory worker card. | ||
| It was a policy for many years. | ||
| So you would like to see that come back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, yeah, as a pole. | |
| You're allowed to work for a certain period of time and then you go back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so you're here for harvest season and you're here for planting season. | |
| Because all the other time in the middle, the local area schools have to pick up all the health care benefits, all the education benefits. | ||
| They have to do housing, Section 8. | ||
| So that salad bar that we go to doesn't really, there's no more free salad bars. | ||
| Now a salad bar is like $20. | ||
| And it's really more like $100 if you want to throw in that one worker, his whole family, that has to be supplemented and things. | ||
| So there's a lot of hidden cost in there that the businessmen in the Republican Party see that, you know, it doesn't go like the bleeding heart kind of. | ||
| I'm a Catholic, and these are my fellow parishioners. | ||
| I sit with them every day. | ||
| I love them. | ||
| And I see the trap that we're setting up for them. | ||
| We're setting them up for failure. | ||
| We're bringing in impoverished people. | ||
| We're importing poverty. | ||
| And we're a high-technical nation, high-technology nation. | ||
| We're moving in that direction. | ||
| And we have people that are not only illiterate in the English language, they can't speak it. | ||
| And it's one of the ploys to kind of keep benefits going, not being able to find a job once they get here. | ||
| I could see that they were moving out of the hotels and they were rotating in and out, and it was showing some success. | ||
| But they're getting in the hotels, and they've been there for a couple of years. | ||
| So this is showing failure in a farm country where I live. | ||
| And I just want to share We got your point, Gary. | ||
| Let's go to Chris in Bothwell, Washington, Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right, thanks. | |
| I want to mention something I haven't heard of on your show this morning, Operation Stargate. | ||
| And what it is going to do is repurpose through the Bureau of Land Management some federal lands for our health care outcomes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Are you there? | |
| Yes, yes. | ||
| Keep going. | ||
| We're listening. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Marco Rubio, I want to congratulate him. | |
| I think that he's going to be in charge of selling some of the things that I can already see the lawsuits coming, and that's one of them. | ||
| I also think there's a serious now with, I guess, a clash that you can see from some, I would say, sports personalities on foreign policy seem to be more in LeBron James category, and now you have mega hats. | ||
| I think something important in the next week that will solidify the division is when people see the assistance that comes to the tragedy that happened in North Carolina, and he's going to visit Asheville, and then he'll be going over to LA afterwards. | ||
| On the bishop that we heard speak, I just think that we should pray for her. | ||
| And I also think that we'll see that Federman, through observing all of it, who I wish to continue, I wish to congratulate on his stroke recovery so far. | ||
| He doesn't seem to depend on his medical screen as we saw in the debates. | ||
| I think that he may change to the Make America Great Again agenda. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Also, I think terrorists are, you know, a word that gets people's attention. | ||
| The cartels have been designated a foreign terrorist organization. | ||
| And so combining that with the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and the prospective acquisition of Greenland, I think that we have a lot of good options to do things in a humane way and we can fix a lot of problems I've mentioned. | ||
| And Chris, the first thing you mentioned was Operation Stargate. | ||
| This is the artificial intelligence infrastructure that was just announced. | ||
| Why do you think that that's so important? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't think people understand it yet, so thanks for asking. | |
| We have to have an array of tools to fight the problems we have with healthcare. | ||
| And right now we depend on doctors and nurses who have to, you know, they have their own organic bodily functions. | ||
| They have their own necessary breaks. | ||
| They have everything in the world against these one, one-off treatment cases. | ||
| And so what the AI is going to do through the use of funding by SoftBank and technology through Oracle is going to do miracles. | ||
| And so when I say we don't know enough about it, I'm in that group, but I could know enough to fill the rest of your show if you would keep going. | ||
| I won't ask that. | ||
| No, I think. | ||
| I can't do that. | ||
| But this is what Chris was talking about. | ||
| This is from OpenAI. | ||
| The initial equity funders in Stargate are SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX. | ||
| SoftBank and OpenAR are the lead partners for that. | ||
| And this is a project that's going to be building new AI infrastructure, primarily data centers in the United States. | ||
| And this is Glenn, Madison, Illinois, Democrat. | ||
| Hi, Glenn. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| First thing I would really like to say To the Republicans. | ||
| Go ahead, Glenn. | ||
| We're listening. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| I'd give them an A plus for this, you know. | ||
| A shot of bleach in the arm will get rid of everything, you know. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Got it, Greg. | ||
| This is Mary in Akron, Ohio, Republican. | ||
| Hi, Mary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, the most important issue I feel that Trump passed was, you know, shutting the border wall down. | |
| You know, there's just a lot of things that have been going on down there at the border and down in Mexico and down in South America that most people in this country don't even have a clue. | ||
| You know, you need to investigate these things and read about it. | ||
| But I'll just give you a few facts. | ||
| The cartel makes about $13 billion a year from all these illegal aliens crossing into our country. | ||
| When Joe Biden became president, the Border Patrol was told to stand down down there in Texas. | ||
| They were bringing raft loads of people across the river. | ||
| The Border Patrol was actually helping them bring them across because if they tried to stop them, they would throw one of the children into the river and let them drown. | ||
| So they did not want to do that because they didn't want to see another child die either that way or, you know, through abortion in the United States. | ||
| That's how much the Democrats care about the children. | ||
| Let me gather my thoughts here. | ||
| Liberty County in Texas. | ||
| There's a housing development down there. | ||
| I believe it's, I'm not exactly sure. | ||
| I can't think of the name of it. | ||
| But they have sold property, 30,000 properties to illegal aliens, which they are not allowed to do, which is against the law. | ||
| And the school district has went from 4,000 to 10,000. | ||
| There was 50,000 Spanish-speaking people coming in there. | ||
| The teachers do not come back after December. | ||
| A small quaint town there called Plum Grove with about 3,000 people. | ||
| They've all left. | ||
| The mayor recorded July 4th in this housing development. | ||
| It sounded like a war zone. | ||
| Guns going off. | ||
| The illegal aliens play their music from Thursday night to Sunday, same channel, full blast. | ||
| They've sent out all the local original people that live there. | ||
| They're afraid to live there. | ||
| They've cut all the trees down. | ||
| So, Mary, in addition to your top priority being to close the border, what are your thoughts on deportations? | ||
|
unidentified
|
If you come to, okay, they have tried to make immigration a human rights issue. | |
| It's not a human rights issue in the United States. | ||
| There's been activists in the government since President Clinton passed the immigration law that have tried to turn it into a human rights issue. | ||
| We are a sovereign country. | ||
| We are not allowed to let people Who comes into this country illegally, illegally? | ||
| The first act they did was illegal. | ||
| So, if you enter this country illegally, then you need to go. | ||
| There is got out all over the world about this asylum law. | ||
| So, you would say not just violent criminals, you want all illegals to be deported. | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I say I would say to start with all violent and then go from there. | |
| There's plenty of parents in this country who end up in jail. | ||
| And the government is overwhelmed taking care of criminal immigration people when they could be dealing with Americans. | ||
| Got it, Mary. | ||
| This is Mike in Oak Harbor, Washington, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| I think first, I'd like to weigh in on the prayer breakfast or prayer meeting that they had in Washington. | ||
| The bishop was, in my opinion, totally out of line. | ||
| It didn't seem to fit into a prayer type of meeting, and it shouldn't have happened. | ||
| Beyond that, to the priorities, I think we have an issue in the United States that really has divided us. | ||
| It will continue to divide us. | ||
| It has been put to the Supreme Court, and they pundit it off to the states, and that is the abortion issue. | ||
| And I think this is an opportunity for our country through strong leadership to codify something that we, as the United States of America, could agree on as a compromise. | ||
| Otherwise, this is going to remain a continual cancer that's just going to come back and continue to divide us. | ||
| I just don't want to see our country go on like this indefinitely. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And here's David in Concord, North Carolina, Republican. | ||
| Good morning, David. | ||
|
unidentified
|
David, right now, we need North Carolina and Tennessee and all the areas that were hit by. | |
| Helene, these people have been living out in vile weather for the last five weeks now. | ||
| They were worried, so worried about the inauguration, they didn't want to have it done outside because they said people couldn't last 10 minutes. | ||
| It's snowing here. | ||
| It's far below today in the mountains with the wind. | ||
| It's been like that for weeks, and they really need to get here. | ||
| Biden had no compassion for this area. | ||
| And I know we're having a lot of natural disasters now out in LA. | ||
| I don't know what, you know, do we go in order? | ||
| But these people are living into the elements out here, and it's freezing. | ||
| And they made a big deal about that, about the inauguration. | ||
| We've got to move it inside. | ||
| They can't last 10 minutes in the weather. | ||
| David, are there people that still don't have electricity? | ||
| I mean, do they have heat? | ||
|
unidentified
|
They have electricity in limited areas still. | |
| There's 18,000 bridges still out. | ||
| The roads are not complete. | ||
| So is there temporary housing for them? | ||
| No, FEMA left them. | ||
| FEMA, they're on vouchers now, and they've been granted some stays in motels, whatever they can find until the 25th of this month, and then they're out. | ||
| It's got to be the priority of our people as a nation to not forget this. | ||
| We had a very, very bad disaster that run through Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina. | ||
| And those people, they're not being rebuilt. | ||
| But I'm just saying, in Appalachian, there's a million people there. | ||
| And death is imminent for them if they keep living this way. | ||
| All right, David. | ||
| And this is Rich in Hickory Hills, Illinois, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| You know, the last gentleman that was just speaking about, you know, we have problems. | ||
| And part of the problem is with compassion. | ||
| That, you know, these other, when we needed these workers, you know, the big business was allowed to just run the rampage, just hire up the illegal, it's cheap labor. | ||
| And now it became such a problem. | ||
| Now we want to get rid of them. | ||
| And when that bishop was talking about compassion and all this love and care that, and now she's a bad, you know, time you just sent. | ||
| Rich, your line is pretty bad. | ||
| And I'm sorry, but I'm not able to hear you. | ||
| So I'm going to move on to Ann in Washington, D.C., Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| My name is Ann, and thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Just want to say two things. | ||
| Biden did not pardon any criminals. | ||
| He did not pardon any murderers. | ||
| And two, Biden, I looked at the television programs for Trump, and I'm trying to figure out where is the mark from the bullet that grazed his ear. | ||
| His right ear is as perfect as his left ear. | ||
| So people, come on, buckle up. | ||
| You're going for a ride. | ||
| And this is real quick. | ||
| This is an article about the from the Washington Post. | ||
| Doge revamp empowers Musk as friction spur Ramaswamy's exit. | ||
| It says a deep philosophical rift between the two billionaire leaders of the Department of Government Efficiency left Musk to run the group. | ||
| And that is all the time we've got for this segment. | ||
| But up next, we'll be joined by Cliff Young. | ||
| He's president of polling at Ipsos with a brand new hot off the presses results about how Americans are viewing the new Trump administration. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
| We're joined now by Clifford Young, Polling and Societal Trends President at Ipsos. | ||
| He's also author of the book Polls, Polsters, and Public Opinion: A Guide for Decision Makers. | ||
| Cliff, welcome back to the program. | ||
| It's great to be here again. | ||
| Okay, so we've got a lot to go through, but we were just talking about the January 6th pardons earlier, and a new poll suggests that 58% oppose pardons for January 6, 2021 protesters. | ||
| Tell us about that poll. | ||
| Yeah, that's a Reuters poll. | ||
| It just came out last night. | ||
| We were in the field over the last few days. | ||
| We've asked that question in different ways, Mimi. | ||
| And it all says sort of the same thing or tells the same story. | ||
| The Americans don't like pardons in general, whether it be the January 6th protesters, whether it be some of the Biden pardons. | ||
| They don't like it. | ||
| They feel like it's breaking the rules and doing an end around with the system. | ||
| So let's talk about the question about Donald Trump's approval rating. | ||
| So the question was: do you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling his presidential transition? | ||
| And we've got the numbers here, and this also gives you an idea of previous presidents going all the way back to Eisenhower, who incidentally had the highest approval. | ||
| This is after 100 days in office. | ||
| This number that you have, it's 55%. | ||
| Tell us how you got that number. | ||
| That 55% is an average of many polls, not just Ipsos, but we took polls across the market, across polling firms. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We wanted to get an idea about pre-approval, where he stood in a relative sense. | |
| That is where Trump stood in a relative sense. | ||
| We just got his actual approval numbers last night from our Reuters poll. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We have them at 47%. | |
| So what does it suggest? | ||
| Trump goes into office his second time in a better place than his first. | ||
| That is in 2017. | ||
|
unidentified
|
In 2017, it was 41% approval. | |
| We have to remember back then that he did not win the popular vote. | ||
| So there was some dissonance there. | ||
| He didn't have the same sort of consensus that he does today. | ||
| He comes into the White House, into Washington, in a stronger place. | ||
| But historically speaking, he's below the average. | ||
| The average is around 55% or so. | ||
| That's the typical place a president starts at the beginning or in the first 100 days. | ||
| He is below that, but better than he was in 2017. | ||
| And typically, approval ratings decline. | ||
| There's a honeymoon period. | ||
| And after 100 days in office, it goes down. | ||
| So, what are we expecting for this administration? | ||
| And so, presidents don't have a forever stamp on their approval ratings. | ||
| And they typically decline fairly quickly. | ||
| We like to say between 100 days and six months in office. | ||
| That's when you get your primary agenda through. | ||
| Obviously, at six months, everyone's looking towards the midterms already. | ||
| The average decline in those six months is about five points. | ||
| And so, Trump has to take action quickly. | ||
| And we've already seen that, at least with executive orders. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But when it comes to Congress, he'll have to do that as well. | |
| And falling from 47% where he is today, if we take in consideration the average five-point decline for any president that puts him at 42, when you're around 40%, it's difficult to push your agenda forward. | ||
| So, right now, it's action, action, action, or should be at least for President Trump. | ||
| And we will take your calls for Clifford Young of Ipsos on anything related to the polls that you'd like to talk about. | ||
| Ask about the numbers: our Democrats 202-748-8000, Republicans 202, 748-8001, and Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| You can start calling in now. | ||
| The question that I want to ask you about now is about which of the following issues are most important to you personally. | ||
| And the top issue, as expected, was the economy and inflation. | ||
| But it's interesting that the second one came in as health care. | ||
| Is there a difference when you ask what's personally the most important thing to you, or what do you think is the most important issue for the country? | ||
| Yeah, you have to be careful with question wording. | ||
| It can produce different results. | ||
| And if we had asked that question slightly differently, if we had asked about the problems in the country, most probably immigration would be in second place, and health care would be in third place. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We ask it both ways because it's good practice to get an idea to triangulate a bit about where people are. | |
| How do I read the poll? | ||
| It's cost of living, cost of living, cost of living. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Donald Trump won on that issue. | |
| People are concerned about that issue today. | ||
| Your own personal health, the health of your family, and you personally, together with immigration, those are the two competing issues today in Americans' minds, setting aside cost of living. | ||
| And the poll continues: so, 47% for economy inflation, healthcare at 30, immigration at 26, and then taxes, and then crime. | ||
| Yeah, that's a typical ranking. | ||
| Once again, if we tweak the wording one way or the other, you might have a little bit different rank ordering, but those are the primary issues that Americans today are worried about. | ||
| So, we want to ask you about this question you asked about if we should pay less attention to problems overseas and concentrate here at home, or it's best for the future of the country to be active in world affairs. | ||
| So, this came out to be 60% more towards pay less attention to overseas, 38% to yes, we do need to look at the other countries and be active in world affairs. | ||
| What did you see in those numbers? | ||
| Yeah, so what we wanted to do, we asked a series of questions on this specific poll with the New York Times. | ||
| We wanted to get at the contours of public opinion, where Americans stood in relationship to Trump's agenda, to Trump's America First agenda. | ||
| And one of the critical components is we're spending too much money and too much focus abroad and not enough at home. | ||
| We wanted to see if Americans actually agree with that, and we see that a majority of Americans actually do. | ||
| That aligns well with both the rhetoric as well as the policies coming out of the White House today, as we can see. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Obviously, if we break that by party, more Republicans agree with that statement. | |
| More Republicans believe that we should be focused on the home front rather than abroad. | ||
| Democrats, less so. | ||
| There is a partisan divide, but overall, Americans want a look at home and take care of the issues at home. | ||
| Regarding immigration issues, this asks if you support each of the following. | ||
| You start with deporting immigrants who are here illegally and have criminal records. | ||
| That's at 87% would like to see those people deported. | ||
| Then it starts to decrease. | ||
| So deporting immigrants in the country illegal who arrived over the last four years, that's at 63%. | ||
| Deporting all immigrants, all immigrants who are here illegally is at 55%. | ||
| And then ending birthright citizenship for children born to immigrants who are here illegally drops to 41%. | ||
| And then ending protection for deportation for immigrants who were children when they entered the U.S. illegally is only at 34%. | ||
| What does that trend tell you? | ||
| Yeah, that American public opinion is not all black or white, not all red or blue, that Americans can see the nuance in any given issue. | ||
| That's the reason we ask that question. | ||
| On the one hand, it's perfectly reasonable to deport illegal criminals, let's say. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A vast majority of Americans agree with that. | |
| But it becomes more complicated. | ||
| Deportation and other sort of adjacent policies when it comes to children, comes to individuals born here or came here when they were small. | ||
| And once again, it just shows the complexity of the issue and the nuanced nature of American public opinion today. | ||
| And then we'll take calls after this one question, which is about what do you think Donald Trump will actually do while in office and how likely is it that he'll actually do it? | ||
| 81% says that they do believe he will increase tariffs on imports from China and Mexico. | ||
| But the interesting thing is only 46%, so less than half, believe that Donald Trump will make life more affordable for regular Americans. | ||
| Yeah, I think that shows that two things. | ||
| First, there is a partisan divide there. | ||
| If we were to show the breakout, Republicans believe he's going to resolve the issue. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Democrats believe that he won't. | |
| I mean, there's a huge divide there. | ||
| But I also think it suggests overall that Americans understand it's difficult, you know, dealing with the economy, that the president, while he or she has lots of power, doesn't control all the levers when it comes to the economy, and it's a complicated issue. | ||
| And let's go to phones now. | ||
| This is Corey in Charlotte, North Carolina, Democrat. | ||
| Hi, Corey. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, yes. | |
| I clawed in on the Republican line just to clarify. | ||
| My question is this. | ||
| Under the 14th Amendment, which was intended to give slaves the right to vote, what is our perspective on somebody flying from France that is pregnant, having a baby in our New York airport on their way to Canada? | ||
| Is that baby supposed to be an American citizen based under the 14th Amendment or not? | ||
| That's my ask. | ||
| Ted. | ||
| Well, we've never asked that question specifically, and I would guess probably Americans would not agree with that. | ||
| I'm guessing. | ||
| I'm inferring. | ||
| I don't have any data in front of me. | ||
| What we do know is a vast majority of Americans believe in birthright citizenship. | ||
| It's been something that's been part and parcel of American history since its founding, or at least since the 14th Amendment, since the mid-1800s. | ||
| And our data bears that out. | ||
| Here's Richard in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Republican. | ||
| Hi, Richard. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| I got about two things right here. | ||
| It's been reported that 35 to 40 percent of the construction workers in California or the Los Angeles area are illegal aliens. | ||
| And now, how are they going to rebuild Los Angeles if it deports all of the illegal islands? | ||
| And I think that, you know, he really stretched this criminal element of the illegals coming in. | ||
| You know, I'll bet it's, if you take a poll on that, I bet you it's only about 2%, maybe 3% are criminals. | ||
| He's really painting a bad picture of the aliens. | ||
| And then on January 6th, I think he considered that the people that were in jail for January 6th have been punished, you know, but he didn't pardon about 14 or 12 or something like that. | ||
| You know, they still have their criminal record. | ||
| So he pardoned the rest of them because they were mainly trespassing. | ||
| Okay, thank you. | ||
| And those are my two or three things. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| What do you think, Cliff? | ||
| Well, let's take it by parts. | ||
| And so first and foremost, when it comes to deporting illegal immigrants in general, you know, there is a fear among economists that it's inflationary. | ||
| You know, we've asked this question in the recent past, in the last couple of weeks. | ||
| And when you link deportation, mass deportation of illegal immigrants with the issue of economy and jobs and inflation, less than a majority of Americans agree with it. | ||
| And so it's always caveated, right? | ||
| American public opinion is nuanced. | ||
| It's sophisticated that way. | ||
| It can make allowances for those sorts of things that the caller mentioned, like Los Angeles. | ||
| Many of these illegal immigrants are important in terms of our economy. | ||
| And then ultimately, 87% of Americans are in agreement, whether it's a large amount or a small amount, 87% of Americans agree that illegal immigrants who are also criminals should be deported. | ||
| And I believe because of the difficulty, logistic difficulty of doing a mass deportation, the administration most probably will take a tack where they'll focus on symbolic specific segments like illegal immigrants who are criminals. | ||
| They both have support with public opinion, and it's easier from a policy perspective. | ||
| Morty sent us this on X. | ||
| The media is 92% negative for Trump. | ||
| How would his approval rating fare if he had even a 50% positive reporting? | ||
|
unidentified
|
People are being programmed to hate him. | |
| I think we live in, I think the viewer has a point. | ||
| We live in highly polarized times where different Americans live in different bubbles, red, blue, maybe some in purple, and they really filter their world through those bubbles, right? | ||
| Whether he would have a higher approval rating or not, that's another issue. | ||
| I think any president at this moment, because of the highly polarized times, would have problems getting above 50%. | ||
| But definitely, it is a sign of the times, this polarization and the ultimate effects of it. | ||
| John in Van Nuys, California, Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, hi there. | |
| My question is about internal polling. | ||
| We always hear, or we often hear after an election, that, well, during the last week of the campaign, internal polls told this candidate or that candidate he was going to lose. | ||
| And another thing was Chuck Schumer. | ||
| When he went to visit President Biden this year and asked him to believe he should leave the election, they said that his internal polls told him that only 5% would vote for him. | ||
| That's what he told Biden. | ||
| What I'm wondering about is why don't we, the public, ever hear about these internal polls until much after the fact, and why are they seemingly more accurate? | ||
| Well, we don't know if they're more accurate or not because they're not public and they're not transparent. | ||
| We have to take into consideration there's always a little bit of spin there. | ||
| They're not public because they're proprietary. | ||
| You know, they're done for clients, they're paying clients that want to know what's going on. | ||
| And ultimately, we don't see them therefore. | ||
| And they're used often to mark out positions, drive agendas, create spin. | ||
| Ultimately, what I would say is overall, whether it's the internal polling or the external polling, it was pretty clear that Trump was going to win. | ||
| The question was by how much. | ||
| We've got this from Kevin on X. | ||
| He says, C-SPAN, I do speak for everyone. | ||
| Pollsters don't have any credibility. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A segment is a terrible thing to waste. | |
| What do you say about credibility of pollsters? | ||
| I think that we live in a world where a large majority of Americans believe the system is broken, don't believe in the establishment, don't believe it's functioning. | ||
| We can see that with what's happening today. | ||
| Trump has that agenda. | ||
| He has Doge as an example. | ||
| I think that pollsters and polling were part of, we're seen as part of the establishment, right? | ||
| And I think we can only do what we can do. | ||
| That is, you know, we can control our craft and be as accurate as possible. | ||
| The polls were within international standards. | ||
| They did a pretty good job, right? | ||
| And I think we can come on shows like this and try to bring the voice of the people. | ||
| That's what we're trying to do. | ||
| What we're trying to show is it's not black and white, it's not red or blue. | ||
| American public opinion is nuanced, it's sophisticated. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And once again, that's what we can do. | |
| What are some of the things that you do to make sure that your polls are as accurate as possible? | ||
| Well, it's all about the method, right? | ||
| And it's based on sort of scientific approaches. | ||
| The most important is the representivity of the sample itself. | ||
| Are we getting at representative, let's say, cover of the population at hand? | ||
| And are we missing any sort of sub-segments? | ||
| In the United States today, it's been more difficult to find individuals that support Trump, at least some of the individuals on the margins. | ||
| That's created sort of turmoil a bit. | ||
| But I mean, the industry as a whole wants to get it right because if we don't get it right, we're not credible. | ||
| And this is Anthony, West Virginia, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, sir. | |
| I'm just a regular guy, and the way I see polling, polling should be done by mass communications. | ||
| You got your tax, high-tech now, controlling all that information and stuff. | ||
| But they could send algorithms out and do the polling by the people. | ||
| All right. | ||
| 75 million people voted for Kamala and 77 million voted for Trump. | ||
| Well, it just comes basic. | ||
| 77 million, that's what, 25% of the population of this country. | ||
| And the minority took over. | ||
| So people are just going to have to live with that. | ||
| And a question for you. | ||
| Who are you paid by? | ||
| All right. | ||
| How do you get your funding at Ipsos? | ||
| In a variety of ways. | ||
| And so the media or some of our media partners pay us to do polls. | ||
| We do a lot of policy work to help governments improve public policy when it comes to citizens. | ||
| We work with the private sector as well that wants to understand, on the one hand, how to navigate society because it is a difficult place today, but also how you best sort of market and sell, let's say, coffee mugs. | ||
| And so we get our funding or we work with a variety of different sorts of clients for different sorts of reasons, but most importantly of which is to bring voice to people to understand how people think and behave. | ||
| So for instance, some of these polls that we've been talking about are New York Times Ipsos polls. | ||
| That means the New York Times paid for the poll. | ||
| Yeah, it means we are partnering with the New York Times to produce that poll. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Reva in Gaithersburg, Maryland, Democrat. | ||
| Hi, Reva. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Thank you for taking my call and for this segment. | ||
| I don't know if I know how to put this as a question, but most polls I read are big picture polls. | ||
| So which is most important for you, the economy, etc. | ||
| And then there'll be something about tariffs. | ||
| And I'm interested in how things intersect. | ||
| So that would get more into policy. | ||
| And I'm going, do people who support tariffs understand, and specifically tariffs with Canada and Mexico, understand the cost of construction is going to go way up? | ||
| I don't know if it'll go 20%. | ||
| Some of the stuff will be sourced elsewhere. | ||
| But when you're talking about autos, when you're talking about electronics, when you're talking about fasteners, when you're talking about lumber, cement, you're talking about tariffs impacting the cost of those things, which will be passed on to people who build and then passed on to their customers. | ||
| And I don't know that most people can make that connection. | ||
| And part of it is, you know, polling matters and how people connect things to. | ||
| So how do pollsters deal with that? | ||
| All right, Reva. | ||
| That's a great question. | ||
| And when it comes to tariffs specifically, it's a fuzzy issue for people. | ||
| You know, the cause and effect of things. | ||
| By the way, even for economists who are professionals that look at the issue, the relationship is fuzzy. | ||
| For the American populace, it's even fuzzier. | ||
| We've unpacked that a bit. | ||
| And you have a chunk of the American population that understands more or less how things are related. | ||
| You have another chunk that doesn't. | ||
| Our experience in a general sense is that public opinion is policy agnostic. | ||
| They want results. | ||
| They don't care how it's done. | ||
| And it works until it doesn't work. | ||
| And so as long as it's working, it's fine. | ||
| If it's not producing the results, there's a backlash from public opinion. | ||
| And I think that's where we are today. | ||
| Americans are reasonably aligned with the administration's policy agenda, reasonably. | ||
| They'll be in favor with it until it doesn't work if it doesn't work. | ||
| Let's talk to Tony in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. | ||
| Hi, Tony. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| Forgive my voice. | ||
| I have a little bit of an allergy here. | ||
| But I was concerned about or considered wondering about questions that pollsters ask. | ||
| And I'll give you an example. | ||
| Leading up to the inauguration, I was generally opposed to any pardons or commutations for the violent people who were convicted of violent January 6th crimes. | ||
| But then I saw Joe Biden pardon every witness, every participant in the J6 investigation, and it brought the whole thing into question and has changed my perspective a lot. | ||
| I was wondering, do pollsters really look at the questions or the facts they provide before asking the question? | ||
| I mean, why would Biden have to pardon everybody if this was on the up and up and these people were really the terrorists that they say they are? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Have a good one. | ||
| There's a lot there. | ||
| I mean, I think there's a lot of good points. | ||
| And so the first thing is, as I said before, we live in a context where a vast majority of Americans believe the system is broken. | ||
| They're going to question everything. | ||
| Everything seems illegitimate, especially if the other side does it. | ||
| And I think that's the issue of the pardons, right? | ||
| It's not just tit for tat. | ||
| It's sort of a broad-based sort of distrust in the system. | ||
| And when it comes to questions, two points. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We try to update our questions as the facts on the ground change. | |
| And we can only be as accurate at that moment of time. | ||
| But we're very careful about how we ask the questions. | ||
| We don't want to provide too much information to people to potentially induce the question one way or another. | ||
| It's a tricky thing, but ultimately, as the facts on the ground change, we'll adjust our questions. | ||
| Regarding the system being broken, you asked about the economic system and you asked about the political system. | ||
| So if you say which of the following statements comes closest to your view, the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy. | ||
| That's 68%. | ||
| And then about the political system, it has been broken for decades, came out at 59%. | ||
| It has been broken only for the last few years. | ||
| That's 29%. | ||
| Not broken at all is only 9%. | ||
| What do you make of those numbers? | ||
| It just reinforces the point I've been making that there's a broad-based belief that the system is broken. | ||
| Both sides of the aisle. | ||
| Indeed, it's a bipartisan issue. | ||
| They agree with it, Americans across the board. | ||
| Trump's agenda is in part an agenda to fix that broken system, or at least from his point of view, the Republican point of view. | ||
| And by the way, this is a phenomenon that we're not just seeing here in the United States. | ||
| We're seeing all over the world. | ||
| So it's not just an American phenomenon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a European one. | |
| It's a Brazilian one. | ||
| It's a South African one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's an Indian one. | |
| It's an Indonesian one. | ||
| We see it everywhere. | ||
| And this is the political question broken out by party. | ||
| And you can see it is surprisingly across the board consistent between Republicans and Democrats. | ||
| By the way, it's rare for today to find that sort of alignment. | ||
| So across it. | ||
| Here is Dennis in Melbourne, Florida, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Kyle, good morning. | |
| My comment relates to the information that people have prior to responding to a poll. | ||
| And I'd like to tie it to the lady who called in the first block referencing the bishop that spoke at the breakfast yesterday in that she was so concerned about the Immigrants or migrants being scared about being deported, et cetera. | ||
| And she mentioned the children. | ||
| But what she doesn't know is that during the Trump first administration, they were doing DNA testing to make sure that the children being presented matched with the adults that claimed to be a relative. | ||
| And that then was disbanded during the Biden administration so that there was open season on trafficking children. | ||
| And the cages that they blame Trump for in his first administration were actually installed by the previous administration to Trump. | ||
| And I am so upset with people misquoting and therefore driving opinion in the wrong direction, such as going all the way back to Charlottesville and there are fine people on both sides, was reported over and over and over again without the qualifying statements that immediately followed Trump's statement that there were good people on side. | ||
| Then he qualified it with who he was not referring to, and yet that was seldom ever reported. | ||
| So it totally misshaped and misshaped their opinion, and that would have been reflected in the poll, regardless of the information that the pollster might provide prior to getting a response. | ||
| It is just disheartening to see such misconceptions. | ||
| Got it, Dennis. | ||
| Cliff Young. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, this is a very interesting point. | ||
| I mean, we know that, you know, the more information people have, the more likely it is, or potentially speaking, for public opinion to change. | ||
| And maybe this nuance on DNA would change it, people's opinions, Americans' opinions on children and family separation. | ||
| But also, people might base their opinion not on information like that. | ||
| They might believe that children of illegal immigrants or illegal immigrant children should just be given a shot in the United States. | ||
| And so it's difficult to parse out exactly if a piece of information is going to move public opinion or not. | ||
| Obviously, the administration is going to want to make a solid case. | ||
| That might be a piece of information they use. | ||
| But ultimately, how people come to their predisposition towards a given issue is complicated. | ||
| Michael in Las Vegas, Nevada. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Democrat. | |
| Good morning, young lady. | ||
| Good morning, Clifford. | ||
| The Trump administration comes in talking about unity, and then on the other end, they're doing away with DEI, which benefits white females the most, but we know they don't like women. | ||
| You might have already stated this, but I would like to know the percentage of Americans that disagree with Trump pardoning these 1,500 violent criminals, which he was, which he and his millions were barking and grunting the whole summer about crime being high and violent crime in general, | ||
| according to FBI statistics is lower. | ||
| And he goes ahead and lists 1,500 cop killers and going into our capital to defecate and wiping it on the wall. | ||
| All right, Michael. | ||
| Yeah, the pardons are not a good thing. | ||
| Americans believe that you're breaking the rules, you're gaining the system, whether it be the January 6th pardons, whether it be Biden's pardons. | ||
| It goes once again to a very discriminable America that doesn't believe that the political class has credibility. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It just actually reinforces that point. | |
| Let's talk to Roy in Ackworth, Georgia, Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Roy. | |
| Hey, how are you doing? | ||
| My question is this. | ||
| When you take a poll, you need accurate information. | ||
| And so our opinion has been formed by misinformation for the last four years. | ||
| Laura Logan did a documentary, and it was about the Ray Epps episode. | ||
| I know C-SPAN said it was misinformation. | ||
| But if you look at the video, you see Ray Epps pulling down barriers, encouraging people to go into the Capitol. | ||
| You see police officers urging people to go into the Capitol. | ||
| Peaceful people. | ||
| And then you see on the top of the building, you see police officers shooting rubber bullets into a crowd of peaceful demonstrators, throwing grenades into a crowd of peaceful demonstrators. | ||
| And the whole reason they were there is because Pence had led people to believe that he was going to challenge the election, like in Pennsylvania, I think Arizona, where they had changed the voting rules. | ||
| They changed the rules for the election. | ||
| And so that's why the people were there. | ||
| And what Trump said, encourage your representatives to do the right thing. | ||
| That's why they were there. | ||
| And then a riot was incited by the Capitol Police and other authority. | ||
| All right, Roy got your point. | ||
| We live in different worlds. | ||
| We live in a blue world, a red world, and really it filters the way we assess things. | ||
| You know, Democrats see it in a negative light, January 6th. | ||
| Republicans see it as some sort of incredible reaction to what happened. | ||
| Probably the truth is somewhere in the middle, but ultimately, as Americans, we see it in a very different way. | ||
| Here's William in Suitland, Maryland, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning, William. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| Go right ahead, William. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I was kind of concerned. | |
| I heard the gentleman speak about the public being influenced by the media. | ||
| And that is how we are forming a negative opinion of President-elect Trump. | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| This guy has said and done things that was totally against the norm. | ||
| These people, we saw what happened at the Capitol. | ||
| Everybody in America could see what happened. | ||
| You know, you could call it blue, red, purple, green. | ||
| These people went there with the intent on disrupting the peaceful transfer of power. | ||
| That was one. | ||
| That's what we saw. | ||
| They were judged. | ||
| They were tried and convicted in a jury by a jury of their peers. | ||
| And this guy spoke about retribution. | ||
| The whole four years he complained about the election being stolen, this and the third. | ||
| And the first thing he did was release convicted criminals back into society. | ||
| He's a convicted criminal who hadn't been sentenced because of his wealth. | ||
| So we all can see what's going on, my friend. | ||
| And the media has nothing to do with influencing most of our opinions. | ||
| I say our Americans, because white and black, green or blue, no matter what, wrong is wrong and right is right. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right, William. | ||
| And we've got a post on X from Ajika who says, your polling appears to be structured around Trump narratives. | ||
| Did you do any polling about the federal government saving union pensions? | ||
| How about polling on reducing the Part D out-of-pocket max? | ||
| That's a great question. | ||
| And right now we're focused on the Trump agenda. | ||
| This kind of like crop of polls is doing that. | ||
| But we'll come back around and we'll look at the broader agenda as things unfold. | ||
| Here's Kim, an independent in Otumwa, Iowa. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was just listening to some callers. | |
| Everything is a thing a thing. | ||
| You can call a thing a thing. | ||
| The people that stormed the capital was an insurrection, period. | ||
| But we have to stop with this divisiveness, with this not calling a thing a thing. | ||
| I was Googling, and I found out $17 trillion just for racism. | ||
| Why don't we deal with economic problems here? | ||
| We are decided in this country to be $17 trillion in debt all because of racism. | ||
| What is wrong with people? | ||
| Wake up. | ||
| They're always talking about they want eggs to be lowered. | ||
| Donald Trump said he wasn't going to lower eggs. | ||
| He also said gas prices got to come down. | ||
| They're going to buy the biggest truck and everything. | ||
| He's advocating for that, gas customers. | ||
| Then they complain that the gas is too high. | ||
| What is wrong with the hypocrisy of these people? | ||
| I am so tired of that. | ||
| The media is doing the devil's work by regurgitating the lies, the lies of not only Donald Trump for 50 years between the Republicans and Democrats. | ||
| They're human. | ||
| My name is not Republican. | ||
| My name is not Democrat. | ||
| But I can see the hypocrisy and shame on this people in this world. | ||
| The majority of white women benefited off of DAI. | ||
| That's all in the information. | ||
| They have to stop pretending. | ||
| Now I'm hearing that they're crying that China is doing better than us. | ||
| That they're serving their people. | ||
| What's wrong with us serving ours? | ||
| All right, Kim. | ||
| We've got a question on X from MLB. | ||
| The best polls I've ever seen are never done anymore. | ||
| I remember when they used to just stop people walking down the street, a specific question, and let them answer on the spot. | ||
| Did you ever do that, Cliff? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We do still, right? | |
| You actually saw people on the street. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We don't do it with great frequency. | |
| Usually they're more qualitative in nature, right? | ||
| We don't do a whole bunch, but we want to get a feel for what's going on on the street, right? | ||
| Today, we're either doing them by phone or online because they're more cost-effective. | ||
| Not just IPS, but in general, the market. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, but we go out there still and talk to people. | |
| Maybe not in bulk like we used to, but it has to be done to get that more qualitative feel. | ||
| I want to ask you about something else you asked about, which was transgender issues. | ||
| And this is transgender female athletes, should they be allowed? | ||
| They identify as female, the male at birth. | ||
| Do you think they should be allowed to compete in women's sports? | ||
| 79% said they should not be allowed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that's interesting. | |
| So we asked this obviously because it was part and parcel of the campaign and also in the transition, there was a lot of talk about transgender issues. | ||
| Not on this poll, but if you look at polls in general, there's majority support for people who want to identify the way they want to identify, right? | ||
| Americans were very sort of accepting that way. | ||
| But when it comes specifically to competition in sports, biological male competing against a biological female, the vast majority of Americans, Republican, Democrat, Independents, don't think that should happen. | ||
| They don't think it's fair. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This goes back to the broken system. | |
| A lot of the sort of ethos of the broken system is feeling that things aren't fair. | ||
| And this is a very symbolic issue that reinforces that sense that things aren't fair. | ||
| The other question you asked was about medications for transgender care. | ||
| So this is: should doctors be able to prescribe puberty-blocking drugs or hormone therapy to minors between the ages of 10 and 18? | ||
| 71% said no one under the age of 18 should have access to those medications. | ||
| Yeah, those are the dual points of the transgender issue today. | ||
| Basically, competition in sports, chemicals, alteration. | ||
| Vast majority of Americans, doesn't matter your political persuasion, you know, don't think both of those should happen. | ||
| Again, those same Americans agree in transgender identity, that this is America and people should be who they want to be, but they're against those two specific issues. | ||
| Vitaly in Brooklyn, New York, Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Give me one second, sorry. | ||
| Can you hear me? | ||
| Yes, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, sorry about that. | |
| I have just a quick question about the polls about recidivism and were the polls about that. | ||
| Folks in New York City are tired of crime. | ||
| Were those numbers? | ||
| Recidivism. | ||
| Yeah, so we don't have, and in these polls, we don't have questions on that specifically. | ||
| We obviously do polls on fear of crime. | ||
| Crime is obviously a top four issue. | ||
| It's a critical issue in urban areas. | ||
| We're very much in a law and order moment where Americans at the national level and at the local level believe in stronger laws to deal with it. | ||
| And ultimately, it is one of the key issues in America today. | ||
| Let's go to the Democratic line, Wilson, North Carolina. | ||
| William, you're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| We all know that polls ain't always right. | ||
| But when did it become illegal to get a poll along? | ||
| And are you afraid that if you put out a poll that's not favorable to Donald Trump, you might get sued? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| This, I think, he's referring to Ann Selzer of the poll in Iowa. | ||
| Yeah, so that was an outlawer poll that was published, and that happens. | ||
| And, you know, it's not typical that a pollster is sued, right? | ||
| Ultimately, we need to be fearless. | ||
| We bring voice to people. | ||
| I really believe strongly, and at Ipsus, we believe that we're guardians of public opinion, and we at Ipsus will keep on doing what we're doing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And there are always a risk when we do that. | |
| Randy in Kentucky, Republican line. | ||
| Hi, Randy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| On this polling, this polling is so bad. | ||
| I don't understand why you don't get it better. | ||
| You ask people general questions that they don't have any personal, they feel like they don't have any personal actions or cost in. | ||
| If you ask the people that you talk to, would you want to pay out of your pocket? | ||
| Will you give me $1,000 out of your pocket to pay for other people? | ||
| Will you allow others to come into your house and take part of your children's house and their bicycles and whatever it may be? | ||
| Will you allow someone to just, your neighbor, to say and vote and say that that's okay? | ||
| Do you want them to come in or that will be illegal? | ||
| You have to ask different questions. | ||
| You have to present this stuff. | ||
| And the media is the one that needs to reclassify these things into personal situations. | ||
| And every person out there is media. | ||
| Every person is a reporter. | ||
| So when you talk to someone or say these things like this to people, put it in personal light. | ||
| Would you want to have to do this yourself? | ||
| Give me your money and I'll go get one of these, bring them in, and do whatever I have to do with them. | ||
| You pay for it. | ||
| All right, Randy. | ||
| Let's get a response. | ||
| Go ahead, Cliff. | ||
| It's sort of a question, right? | ||
| We ask this question sometimes when it comes to policy. | ||
| If you had $100 and you had to distribute that $100, how would you distribute it across these different policies? | ||
| And so, like, basically, put your money where your mouth is, right? | ||
| We're generally listening. | ||
| I have to disagree with the caller. | ||
| You know, polls and surveys are very predictive of the future. | ||
| Sometimes we get things wrong. | ||
| We mostly get things right. | ||
| Polls are stable. | ||
| That is, public opinion is stable over time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We did well in this electoral cycle. | |
| Not great, but well within the international standards. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And we can only work on our craft and get better. | |
| And obviously, at Ipsos and the market in general, we're doing that as we speak. | ||
| All right, Clifford Young, polling and societal trends president at Ipsos. | ||
| You can find this poll and others at ipsos.com. | ||
| Thanks so much for being on the program. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| More of your calls after the break in Open Forum. | ||
| You can start calling in now any public policy or politics issue you'd like to talk about. | ||
| The numbers are on your screen. | ||
| It's 202748-8000 for Democrats, 202748-8001 for Republicans, and 202748-8002 for Independents. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
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| Democracy. | ||
| It isn't just an idea. | ||
| It's a process. | ||
| A process shaped by leaders elected to the highest offices and entrusted to a select few with guarding its basic principles. | ||
| It's where debates unfold, decisions are made, and the nation's course is charted. | ||
| Democracy in real time. | ||
| This is your government at work. | ||
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| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| We're back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is Washington Journal with Washington Journal. | |
| We are in open forum. | ||
| So we're taking your calls and a few things for your schedule later this morning at 10 a.m. | ||
| So right after this program over on C-SPAN 2, House Republican leaders, including Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Majority Whip Tom Emmer, will talk to reporters about their legislative agenda and the incoming Trump administration. | ||
| That's live from RNC headquarters at 10 a.m. Eastern. | ||
| Again, that's C-SPAN 2. | ||
| Then on C-SPAN 3 at the same time at 10 a.m., we'll have Office of Management and Budget nominee Russell Vought will answer questions before the Senate Budget Committee. | ||
| He served in the first Trump administration in the White House Budget Department. | ||
| And you can watch that hearing live at 10 a.m. Eastern. | ||
| And we'll go to the phones now. | ||
| Actually, we will go to President Trump from yesterday. | ||
| Here's a portion. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Are you planning to travel to the Middle East soon? | |
| We're thinking about going to the Middle East, not yet. | ||
| We have a thing called the hostages are coming back going on right now, and they are coming back. | ||
| Some of them have been very, you know, very damaged. | ||
| You look at the young lady with her hand practically blown off. | ||
| You know how that happened, right? | ||
| Did you know how that happened? | ||
| When you find out, you're not going to be too happy because it was terrible. | ||
| But the hostages are starting to come back. | ||
| Oh, if I weren't here, they wouldn't be back ever. | ||
| They would have never come back. | ||
| They would have all died. | ||
| If this were done a year earlier, if Biden would have done this deal a year and a half, two years ago, or frankly, it should have never happened. | ||
| October 7th should have never happened. | ||
| Nobody should be dead. | ||
| But through weakness, they allowed it to happen, and then it was a disaster from them. | ||
| But you go back just six months ago, many of these young people were living. | ||
| You know, young people don't die like that. | ||
| They're just dying. | ||
| And young people aren't dying at 22 and 23 years old. | ||
| They don't die. | ||
| But now they're dying. | ||
| And you wonder why they're dying. | ||
| They're being killed. | ||
| And they have been killed. | ||
| But they say six months ago, you would have had 11 more living hostages. | ||
| Think of that. | ||
| Six months ago, but Biden couldn't get it done. | ||
| And it was only the imposition that I put on it as a deadline that got it done. | ||
| But it's a very sad situation. | ||
| It should have never happened. | ||
| I'll tell you, two things should have never happened. | ||
| Three things. | ||
| Inflation should have never happened. | ||
| It would have never happened except for what they did to energy and their crazy spending. | ||
| And Ukraine would have never happened. | ||
| Never. | ||
| By the way, Russia never would have gone into Ukraine. | ||
| I had a very strong understanding with Putin that would have never, ever happened. | ||
| He disrespected Biden. | ||
| Very simple. | ||
| He disrespects people. | ||
| He's smart. | ||
| He understands. | ||
| He disrespected Biden. | ||
| And also, the Middle East would have never happened because Iran was broke. | ||
| They had no money. | ||
| They had no money for Hamas. | ||
| They had no money for Hezbollah. | ||
| It would have never happened. | ||
| October 7th would have never happened. | ||
| But it did happen. | ||
| So this is the cards I've been given. | ||
| And we're getting the hostages back. | ||
| That would have never happened under Biden. | ||
| They would have never come back. | ||
| They were just dying very, not that slowly. | ||
| They were dying or being killed. | ||
| But that was what was happening. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that was President Trump from yesterday. | |
| We are taking your calls now, and we'll go to Ted in Rochester, New York, Democrat. | ||
| Hi, Ted. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I was calling about the previous segment. | ||
| I wanted to know how they figure out who they poll because I'm 63 years old and never been polled. | ||
| So he had mentioned that they do most of their polling either by phone or online. | ||
| Do you still have a landline? | ||
| Yes, I do. | ||
| And you answer it when people call? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Yep. | ||
| I don't know what to tell you, Ted. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I'd like to say Donald Trump's an idiot, and everybody else who voted for him is. | |
| John, in Hager City, Wisconsin, Independent Line, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I'd like to know why tariffs is going to help stop fentanyl because the average person just wants a living and not to pay more for expensive products. | |
| There's so much money to be made from fentanyl. | ||
| How's tariffs going to stop fentanyl from coming into the U.S.? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Well, I think, John, part of the issue is the precursor chemicals coming from China, that there would be pressure put on China, at least the thinking goes, as a result of the tariffs to stop those precursor chemicals going to Mexico that would then be converted into fentanyl. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, but it's never stopped drugs from coming into the U.S. All this tariff is just going to make products more expensive for us, the average citizen. | |
| It ain't going to stop all these drugs coming in. | ||
| I mean, they never stopped it. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And here's Barbara in, is it Winning Vermont, Republican? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's Whiting Vermont. | |
| Whiting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| I was just wondering, I never heard on your show anything about the World Economic Forum. | ||
| And I just want people to know that it's a global movement. | ||
| And it's not just in the United States. | ||
| It's throughout definitely the Western world where it's open borders, no fossil fuels, pushing the green energy. | ||
| Freedom of speech is being denied in other countries. | ||
| And I know Joe Biden tried to do that here. | ||
| And they're having, it's in Davos, Switzerland. | ||
| And so all the elites, all the rich people, all the leaders of other countries attend. | ||
| And it's actually happening this Thursday. | ||
| And Donald Trump went twice in 2008 and 2014. | ||
| And he spoke to them and said, our country is not going along with that agenda. | ||
| We are a sovereign nation. | ||
| So this Thursday, he's going to not go. | ||
| He's going to do it by video, whatever. | ||
| And he's going to tell them that we're sovereign and we're not going for the open borders, you know, free speech denial and all. | ||
| And it's a very important topic because it's a global movement. | ||
| And all the things we talk about here. | ||
| So when you say global movement, you mean a global organization? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, it's called the World Economic Forum. | |
| Correct. | ||
| So I want to make sure that people know where they can go to find more information. | ||
| It's weaforum.org. | ||
| You can find out about the organization, and you can find out about the meeting that Barbara's talking about. | ||
| This is the World Economic Forum annual meeting. | ||
| It is going on right now in Davos. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, and I wonder, I don't know if there's going to be a taping of Donald Trump speaking. | |
| I'm sure there was. | ||
| I've seen them before. | ||
| Maybe you could put that on, you know, after it happens. | ||
| Definitely, if we have access to that, then we can do that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| If they'll give us access. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, my last point is just that he's trying to protect the United States to remain sovereign. | |
| Okay, and that's it. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| All right, Barbara. | ||
| This is Steve in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Mimi. | |
| I'm going to repeat what I have said the last five times I've called in. | ||
| I taught science for 31 years, and my second class was on perception. | ||
| And the fact, and what I would do is I would hold up a picture in front of the class and ask kids what they see. | ||
| And they would say, well, it's a human skull. | ||
| And I said, okay. | ||
| So then I would hand the picture to some other kids sitting in the front and they'd say, that's not what it is at all. | ||
| It's a woman looking at her reflection in a big mirror. | ||
| And the tablecloth and the jars of makeup and everything make it look like a skull. | ||
| But when you look at it closely, it is absolutely not a skull. | ||
| And the issue in this country right now is that people's perception is flawed and they're unwilling to look at closely what's going on. | ||
| And if people would do that, for instance, the man called in from North Carolina about the massive damage in the mountains. | ||
| And let me say this, and then I will hang up. | ||
| I have, and I'm not bragging, believe me, I'm not bragging. | ||
| I have sent $650 to help people in the mountains of North Carolina, in the mountains of East Tennessee. | ||
| Now, these are all red counties, and every one of those people would tell you that I'm a left-wing commie out that destroyed the country. | ||
| And that is absolutely their perception. | ||
| So the fact is, I sent $650 to help these people because they're human beings. | ||
| They're citizens of the United States. | ||
| And I don't care what their politics are. | ||
| And this painting everything in politics is insane. | ||
| You know, I went through Hurricane Hugo in 89. | ||
| I lost 100 trees. | ||
| And what we did, we spent the day cutting each other's driveways out, getting people, getting the roads cleared where people could do stuff. | ||
| It didn't have anything to do with politics. | ||
| So again, perception. | ||
| What you perceive may be wrong. | ||
| That's the number one rule of science. | ||
| Have you ever seen an x-ray? | ||
| People will tell you yes. | ||
| But the fact is they've seen a photograph that was made by an x-ray. | ||
| They didn't see the x-rays. | ||
| So I'm going to stop now. | ||
| Got it, Steve. | ||
| And do hold on the line with us if you're on the line. | ||
| We will get back to Open Forum. | ||
| But we're going to be speaking now to Tara Kopp. | ||
| She's a Pentagon correspondent for the Associated Press. | ||
| Tara, welcome to the program. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| So in talking about changes at the Pentagon and the Defense Department, I want to start with the firing of the Coast Guard Commandant, Linda Fagan, first woman to lead a major military branch in the service, I should say, in the United States. | ||
| Tell us what happened. | ||
| Why was she fired? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Admiral Fagan was appointed in 2022 and, like you said, was the first woman to lead one of the major branches. | |
| And, you know, we have been expecting, because of all the campaign rhetoric, that some of the heads of the services might be fired. | ||
| The Coast Guard hadn't immediately come to mind. | ||
| But in announcing the firing, they said that she had focused too much on DEI initiatives and had not really shaped the Coast Guard to deal with any sort of migration crisis, not acquired the cutters fast enough. | ||
| That's putting an awful lot of responsibility on the head of an organization when honestly the acquisition of cutters is a complicated process that involves how quickly did Congress get funding? | ||
| How quickly could the defense manufacturers get the cutters in place? | ||
| But this might have been viewed more as symbolic. | ||
| Interestingly enough, the Coast Guard almost immediately on the 21st put out a press release announcing how quickly they were going to respond to some of the president's executive orders on border security and that they're going to surge cutters and personnel and aircraft not only to the borders which they call now the Gulf of America, but also around Alaska, Puerto Rico, the Marianas. | ||
| So you've seen just this rapid shift for the services to show that they can be responsive to the new commander-in-chief. | ||
| And there's still concern among the other service branches that some of their leaders may also be still in jeopardy. | ||
| So we'll talk about that, but I just want to go back to what does the Coast Guard actually do for the border? | ||
| And, you know, you mentioned cutters. | ||
| What role do they play in border security, specifically the southern border? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| So the Coast Guard has had a really important role in drug interdiction. | ||
| There's a lot of videos online of the Coast Guard basically intercepting small boats that are carrying drugs and trying to get them to the U.S. | ||
| And there's some fairly heroic looking video out there where they actually jump on some high-speed craft. | ||
| So they've got that. | ||
| They don't have, they're not like customs and border protection at the border itself. | ||
| They're trying to get people who have hitched a ride on these small boats and are trying to get into the U.S. through the water. | ||
| Commander often to Florida. | ||
| Commander, Commandant Fagan had been very vocal about reducing sexual assault in the Coast Guard. | ||
| What do we know about her activities there, and did that influence the decision to fire her? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That was one of the reasons in this lengthy press release, again, that she was fired. | |
| The Coast Guard has been dealing with a sexual assault problem for years. | ||
| All of the services have. | ||
| A couple of news organizations, including ours, looked in depth at sexual assault allegations and how they were handled within the Coast Guard in the last several years. | ||
| And it was also the subject of multiple congressional hearings in the last several years. | ||
| And this was just one of the many reasons that were listed that she was removed. | ||
| And the heads of the other services, as far as Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, what are you hearing about the possibility of them also being fired? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So everybody's just keeping really low profile right now. | |
| There's been no media engagements. | ||
| We don't suspect there will be any media engagements right now among the uniformed chiefs. | ||
| So that's the chief naval officer, Admiral Fanketti. | ||
| That's General Alvin, who's the Chief of Staff of the Air Force. | ||
| You know, General George, the Chief of Staff of the Army. | ||
| All of the services right now are trying to show how they will be responsive and meet with the new team. | ||
| We had yesterday the halls filled with some of the acting secretaries who have been put in place and really saw some quick interactions on border. | ||
| I think in the next few hours, we're going to see the services kind of move forward on enacting President Trump's border security initiative, the last executive order he issued on the 20th, and just kind of put more detail in that as to how many forces and what kind of assets are going to be surged to the southwest border in response to his executive order. | ||
| There have been new allegations against Defense Secretary Pick Pete Hegseth regarding abuse of his second wife. | ||
| He denies those. | ||
| Have you been able to confirm those allegations? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We spoke with both. | |
| So I assisted with the story last night that was first reported by NBC News. | ||
| And we spoke with the attorney for Samantha Hagseth and then for Danielle Hagseth. | ||
| And they gave us the same statements they had provided to NBC News. | ||
| What's really disturbing about this, I don't know if you had a chance or if C-SPAN had a chance to see the affidavit. | ||
| It's one of the most disturbing documents that I've read in a really long time. | ||
| If you have a spouse that, you know, according to the allegations, needs a code word or a safe word to be able to communicate safely to a family member to help her get out of the house. | ||
| I don't know how that can just be, I realize that the incoming Secretary of Defense, if confirmed, has denied these allegations. | ||
| But that seems like a very far-fetched thing to just make up. | ||
| A lot of the other allegations in this affidavit kind of align with some of the reporting we've seen over the last weeks and months of incidences of problematic drinking and some of the things that the incoming Secretary of Defense, if confirmed, was alleged to say. | ||
| You know, we were just talking about sexual assault in the military. | ||
| And one of the most disturbing things to me in the affidavit was an allegation that under the influence of alcohol, he was saying that no means yes. | ||
| And that's the exact opposite of what the Defense Department has been trying to instill in its ranks, you know, that sexual assault is not permitted in any way, shape, or form, and trying to get this, you know, culture of intimidation out of the ranks. | ||
| Tara, do we know why these allegations are coming so late in the confirmation process? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We do. | |
| So, Senate Democrats have been pretty vocal in their level of dissatisfaction in the access to the FBI background check and just how deep the FBI background check for Pete Hegseth went. | ||
| And after the confirmation hearing, there was a request put out by the Ranking Member Reed for additional information. | ||
| I think several of the members kind of alluded to in Hagseth's confirmation hearing that they knew there was more information out there and that they were pursuing it. | ||
| And this affidavit was in response to a request for additional information from Senator Reed. | ||
| We talked about the confirmation for Pete Hegseth. | ||
| Currently, who is the acting Secretary of Defense and what do we know about him? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| The acting Secretary of Defense is a man named Robert Salesis. | ||
| He has been a career DOD employee ever since just after the September 11th attacks. | ||
| He's a Marine, retired Marine who served in the Gulf War and earned a Bronze Star. | ||
| And once he became a defense civilian, he has really spent his time all over the Pentagon managing large portfolios, large numbers of people. | ||
| So he's, you know, a highly qualified individual, the kind of resume that you would expect to see for someone stepping into the role as basically a manager for now. | ||
| He did come from Washington Headquarters Services for his latest role. | ||
| That is basically the umbrella organization of all of the support facilities around the Washington, D.C. area that helps the Pentagon operate, whether that includes the Office of General Counsel, whether it includes literally the facilities folks, like thousands of people who work to get all of the office space up and running, all the communications directorates, even the Freedom of Information Office is under Washington Headquarters Service. | ||
| So he's overseen a lot of people for years at this point. | ||
| But depending on when the confirmation vote happens for Hag Seth, which it could happen as early as Friday, but most likely over the weekend, he won't be in the troll very long. | ||
| And the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General C.Q. Brown, has said that he's going to be staying or he plans to stay in his post. | ||
| And he attended the inauguration on Monday. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What are you hearing about his future? | |
| I was asking about this yesterday, and defense officials in the building that I spoke to said that his interactions with President Trump at the inauguration were generally positive and left everyone feeling a little more confident that maybe General Brown will continue in the role. | ||
| As we have seen in the previous Trump term, everybody serves at the pleasure of the president, and he had some hot and cold relationships with all of his military officials and his civilian leaders. | ||
| So nobody's job in this building is secure when it boils down to it. | ||
| All right, Tara Copp, Pentagon correspondent for the Associated Press. | ||
| Thanks so much for joining us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you for having me. | |
| Go back to the calls now to during open forum. | ||
| And this is Janet in Perry, Florida, Independent Line. | ||
| Hi, Janet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I'm wondering about the preemptive pardons. | |
| So when I Googled it, Nixon was the only one who ever got one previously. | ||
| And in December of 2020, when they thought that Trump was going to do the preemptive pardons, they said, oh, you can't do it. | ||
| You can't do it. | ||
| It was not legal. | ||
| And then the Supreme Court said that accepting that the recipient has to accept a preemptive pardon. | ||
| And then that would equal a guilt. | ||
| So what is the truth on that? | ||
| All right. | ||
| And this is Kenneth in North Las Vegas, Nevada, a Democrat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Hi. | ||
| Go right ahead. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, thank you, and good morning, ma'am. | |
| And I thank you guys for what you're, you know, giving us intel about. | ||
| My thing is that I'm a single, single parent. | ||
| And I'm 69 years old. | ||
| And I'm concerned about the executive order that requires all executive departments and agencies, ma'am, to deliver emergency price relief, you know, that's going to be consistent with the applicable law of the American people and the increase of property and things of that magnitude. | ||
| Because I have three children, ma'am, and I have custody of one and the other two in foster care. | ||
| I do work. | ||
| I am retired. | ||
| And I just, when I went to work yesterday, ma'am, the gas had increased out here to literally like probably almost 60 or 70 cents. | ||
| And the price of eggs is extremely high. | ||
| And I just want to know how expeditiously that this Mr. Trump, President Trump and the cabinet is going to try to, I know he's coming out here to Vegas, comes out here a lot of yes business connotations and things out here. | ||
| And I just want to know, you know, what's going to be accommodatable and things that are valuable for people who have been around for a while. | ||
| And I just wanted to say to the caller that called him an idiot, that's totally out of line. | ||
| You pray for people in authority and move on. | ||
| Those kind of things are just, you know, it's just unexplainable. | ||
| It shouldn't happen. | ||
| So I'm concerned about delivering emergency price relief, you know, for the American families and, you know, defeating the cost of living crisis. | ||
| You know, I mean, there's a lot of things that have been, you know, alluded to and executive orders have been implemented. | ||
| And I'm just concerned as an American. | ||
| My daddy was a Buffalo soldier. | ||
| He's buried out here in Boulder. | ||
| He fought for this country, just went to sleep in 2009 and didn't wake up. | ||
| He never got his purple heart. | ||
| He never got any of the medals associated with that. | ||
| He was over in Japan where he captured three soldiers, being a minority. | ||
| I mean, it's just a lot of, you know, things that I'm concerned with here in this country. | ||
| You know, and that's, I just need to know what's what's what any intel, any incident undertones that you may can give the American people about that. | ||
| All right, Kenneth. | ||
| And a previous caller asked about how preemptive pardons work. | ||
| This is the Christian Science Monitor that says this, while technically within the bounds of presidential pardon power, no president has issued so many late pardons to individuals yet to be convicted of or even investigated for committing crimes. | ||
| Supporters of the preemptive action counter that an incoming president never threatened legal action against his political enemies the way newly inaugurated President Donald Trump has. | ||
| In his inaugural speech on Monday, President Trump reiterated his view that his four criminal indictments and convictions on one set of the charges resulted from persecution by the department, the departing president, rather than his own actions. | ||
| And the president is quoted as saying, the scales of justice will be rebalanced. | ||
| The vicious, violent, and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our government will end. | ||
| This is Lou in Tampa, Florida, Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Lou. | |
| Hi, good morning, Mimi. | ||
| Good morning, America. | ||
| How's everybody doing? | ||
| Good. | ||
| Did you get snow in Tampa, Lou? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, ma'am, but it's cold. | ||
| It's cold. | ||
| And I had some past health issues, and I'm freezing. | ||
| I've turned up my thermostat to like 74. | ||
| But it's chilly. | ||
| But we'll make it. | ||
| They had a lot of snow up north, I think. | ||
| All right. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Go ahead with your comment, Lou. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Well, I'll tell you what, I think a lot of people are very happy after the election, and we have to give Trump and the team a chance. | ||
| And I know the price of gone through the roof. | ||
| I paid $6.29 for a dozen eggs yesterday. | ||
| You know, it was crazy. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| And then what about like eggs going to bakery props and then it's all downhill? | ||
| You know, price is going to go up again? | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| So, anyway, I think you guys did a phenomenal job during the inauguration. | ||
| And I'm very happy that Marco Rubio became Secretary of State. | ||
| I met him several times. | ||
| And he's a good man. | ||
| He loves America and he's going to do real good. | ||
| And one thing I have to say more: Bob Woodward, a couple years ago, wrote in his book, and he said, oh, he said to his wife, how should I end this book, right? | ||
| And he said that Trump should be disqualified to be president. | ||
| And I think Bob Woodward needs to come on to C-SPAN and say, look, I apologize. | ||
| I was wrong because look at what the mess we just came out of. | ||
| It's horrible. | ||
| Disrespected around the world. | ||
| You know, Trump's got the right path. | ||
| So thank you so much. | ||
| All right, Lou. | ||
| And Lou mentioned the price of eggs. | ||
| Here's Axios. | ||
| It says egg shortages and higher prices spike as bird flu grows. | ||
| So there is an escalating bird flu crisis ravaging the nation's supply of eggs, leading to increased prices and presenting an immediate challenge for the Trump administration. | ||
| So some retailers are limiting how many eggs consumers can purchase, while others are having a hard time keeping shelves stocked. | ||
| It says a dozen large eggs in the Southeast and South Central will be north of $7, while Midwest eggs are $6.95. | ||
| That's just to give you an idea of the egg issue. | ||
| He also mentioned Marco Rubio. | ||
| So here is a portion of his remarks just after he was inaugurated as Secretary of State. | ||
| I am new to this department. | ||
| Today is my first day on the job, literally, but I am not a stranger to it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've interacted with many of you, both in my travels abroad and in our daily functions. | |
| My job now is different. | ||
| And our job in some ways will be different. | ||
| In our republic, the voters decide the course of our nation, both domestically and abroad. | ||
| And they have elected Donald J. Trump as our president when it comes to foreign policy on a very clear mission. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that mission is to ensure that our foreign policy is centered on one thing, and that is the advancement of our national interest, which they have clearly defined through his campaign as anything that makes us stronger or safer or more prosperous. | |
| And that will be our mission. | ||
| That will be our job across the world is to ensure that we have a foreign policy that advances the national interest of the United States. | ||
| I expect every nation on earth to advance their national interests. | ||
| And in those instances, and I hope there will be many, in which our national interest and theirs align, we look forward to working with them. | ||
| This is in many ways, and again, it was referenced by President Trump yesterday in his speech that he designs that his overriding goal for global policy is the promotion of peace, the avoidance of conflict. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And no agency will be more critical in that regard than this one. | |
| In fact, it's its founding principle and purpose. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that's what we endeavor to do, to promote peace around the world because that's in our national interest. | |
| Without peace, it is hard to be a strong nation, a prosperous nation, and one that is better off. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But there will also be challenges. | |
| We recognize that there will be those times, unfortunately, as humans interact with one another because of our nature. | ||
| But there will be conflict. | ||
| We will seek to prevent them and avoid them, but never at the expense of our national security, never at the expense of our national interest, and never at the expense of our core values as a nation and as a people. | ||
| And here is Steve in Ormond Beach, Florida, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| Morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| I have a few things to mention. | ||
| The fellow that said we need to pray for each other, that was a very good quote. | ||
| The fellow that was asking about the drugs crossing the border, well, I saw this morning Tom Holman said, I guess the past few days, or I don't know whether it was today, they've apprehended like 750 people compared to many, many thousands every day. | ||
| And the drugs thing is slowing down too. | ||
| As far as the lady that was asking the question about the pardoning, well, what I've read on the pardoning is they have to be convicted in order to pardon. | ||
| That's everything I've been reading. | ||
| You can't pardon somebody that hasn't been convicted. | ||
| So that's going to be a problem there. | ||
| Okay, I want to bring up, I'm an independent, okay? | ||
| And I've been very independent. | ||
| I mean, when Hillary and Trump were running, I didn't like either of them. | ||
| I put my own name in. | ||
| When Barack ran, I voted for Barack twice. | ||
| I'm a veteran. | ||
| When I was in the hospital and I had a heart attack, I had a $250,000 bill, and I had a lot of problems going on, and collection agencies coming after me, and doctors and things. | ||
| The VA I called up, I was fighting them, and they said, after months, they called me up. | ||
| They said, it's a good thing Trump's president. | ||
| He's helping you out here. | ||
| You know, they're going to pay this bill. | ||
| They're going to pay that bill. | ||
| And then they said, you can go to your own doctor now. | ||
| Okay, what I want to say is I did vote for Trump twice. | ||
| And Trump is not perfect. | ||
| He's a human being like we're all human beings. | ||
| And we all change all the time. | ||
| You know, we go this way, we go that way. | ||
| You know, we decide on things. | ||
| Trump's been tested since 2015. | ||
| They've been going after him, the left, continuously. | ||
| He's been tested so much. | ||
| And when I watch the news, to this day, they are still biased. | ||
| You know, I used to watch MSNBC and I used to watch CNN. | ||
| I put them on the child block thing now. | ||
| You know, I used to enjoy watching a little bit of it. | ||
| I don't like Morning Joe, but some things he said were good, you know. | ||
| It's just ridiculous to bias. | ||
| You know, this is another thing I want to bring up. | ||
| J-Sixers, okay? | ||
| Yes, maybe it was not an insurrection, in my opinion, but yes, maybe some of them did do wrong. | ||
| They were interviewing a person on Cuomo, this lady. | ||
| She has eight children. | ||
| It's a young woman. | ||
| And she has a big beam and she's breaking a window, you know. | ||
| That was wrong of her. | ||
| But when I compare it, you know, they never bring up George Floyd and the summer of love. | ||
| They never compare. | ||
| They should have the, they should have the, you know, they call it an insurrection. | ||
| I don't believe it's an insurrection. | ||
| And then they should have the summer of love. | ||
| Who got hurt more? | ||
| People were killed, cost-killed. | ||
| They burned down government buildings, police stations, and other government buildings during, and nobody was, nobody was nothing. | ||
| Nobody got in trouble. | ||
| But yet, the J-Sixers, I am so happy. | ||
| I've been praying for those people. | ||
| And that's my biggest thing. | ||
| The J-Sixers are now innocent, and things are going to turn around now. | ||
| There's a higher power. | ||
| A matter of fact, there's a scripture in the Bible, Matthew 7, 3 through 5, I think it is. | ||
| And it talks about, you know, judging, and there's a plank in your own eye, you know. | ||
| And, you know, recently I've been blind in one eye, so I'm thinking, yeah, I say too many wrong things a lot of times. | ||
| There's a plank in my eye, too. | ||
| I judge too much. | ||
| But anyway. | ||
| All right, Steve. | ||
| This is Patty in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning, Patty. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Mimi. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I'm really sorry that it turns out that I was able to get through on a day that you were on again because I love you and my ire is not with you. | ||
| But I am just extraordinarily, extraordinarily upset. | ||
| I think that the whole thing with pardoning the J-Sixers and listening to people talk about it, it's just insane because what it is, I've talked to you about Project 2025 and the fascism. | ||
| And this is it in action. | ||
| Project 2025 in action was firing the head of the Coast Guard and the fascist technique of what they call new speak. | ||
| They were able to somehow completely flip January 6th upside down. | ||
| People see some of them as patriots, patriots. | ||
| I was watching last night. | ||
| I turned it off pretty quick. | ||
| The proud boys marching and celebrating the streets as Enrique Terrio was released. | ||
| Stuart Rose, the head of the Oath Keepers, these people were convicted of seditious conspiracy. | ||
| Folks, that means there was an insurrection attempted. | ||
| And to have the Republicans so spineless and so cowardly adopt the language of this pig and convince people that what happened was okay. | ||
| And now there are an awful lot of people that are in danger because they have been let loose. | ||
| Who do you think is in danger, Patty? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh my gosh. | |
| Well, I know I personally was harassed, one of the convicted J-Sixers. | ||
| And there's an activist in Philly that I know that one of them that had been convicted had stalked her, had been arrested. | ||
| Officer Fanon's family, all of the officers who have spoken out, they and their families are in danger. | ||
| They were talking yesterday. | ||
| They've been talking nonstop for four years about this, how they themselves don't feel endangered because they feel they have the skills to protect themselves. | ||
| But their families, Officer Fanon's mom has had human feces thrown on her, 76-year-old woman by these freaks. | ||
| All right, Patty. | ||
| And now. | ||
| Let's talk to Ava in Columbia, Mississippi, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| It's cold down here, COTIS. | ||
| I don't know if we've ever had any cold as much as 12 degrees in Mississippi. | ||
| We've got three or four inches of snow. | ||
| But I think it's nice for Mrs. Trump to be back as First Lady. | ||
| We got grace, poise, a lady that knows how to dress appropriately for any given occasion, who will be a helpmate to her husband and will not try to be a co-president. | ||
| I'm glad Jill Biden's gone. | ||
| She was so silly. | ||
| And I want to talk about this man that Joe Biden pardoned that murdered Ashley Babbitt. | ||
| Ashley Babbitt was the only person murdered on that day. | ||
| He should be tried for hate crime. | ||
| And those other policemen that testified late, they're dangerous for them to have a gun if they're so emotional they have to get up there and cry and carry on like that. | ||
| And I don't believe you can legally pardon somebody that has not yet been charged. | ||
| I think that's like going out and buying a car and driving it off before you sign the papers to it. | ||
| I want to close with one of Nancy Pelosi's statements. | ||
| She made the stupidest statement I've ever heard a politician make. | ||
| She said, I don't hate anybody because I'm Catholic. | ||
| I don't question her religion. | ||
| I don't question her faith, but I certainly question her honesty. | ||
| I pray that God will bless America and God will bless the Trumps and bless us all. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right, Eva, and we will pause here to talk to a White House correspondent from Reuters, Jeff Mason. | ||
| If you're on the line, please do hold on. | ||
| We'll come back to you and take your calls. | ||
| Jeff, welcome to the program. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Good to be with you. | ||
| So it's day three of the Trump presidency. | ||
| What's on his schedule today? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, that's a very legitimate question. | |
| And the answer is we don't know because they haven't given us a schedule for the day. | ||
| The Trump White House team, particularly the press team, is still getting set up here. | ||
| And this is typical for new administrations. | ||
| You don't always have access to email. | ||
| You don't always have access to schedules. | ||
| So we know that he is doing an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News at some point today that will air later tonight on that channel. | ||
| And otherwise, TBD. | ||
| You had a chance along with the rest of the press score yesterday to talk to President Trump about his January 6th pardons. | ||
| What did he say about that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I was actually in the Oval Office on Monday night when he did those pardons, signing the executive order then. | |
| And then yesterday he spoke to reporters again at the White House in the Roosevelt room. | ||
| And basically his message both times when we asked him about it was that he felt number one that they were unfairly prosecuted and number two that those who perhaps did do something that deserved any kind of punishment had already served their time. | ||
| And he was asked specifically yesterday about people or one person in particular who had attacked a police officer. | ||
| And the president sort of dismissed that. | ||
| He said, we'll look at it, but he's not looking at it anymore. | ||
| He's already issued the pardons and the clemencies. | ||
| And the president did host House and Senate Republican leaders at the White House yesterday. | ||
| What was his message to them? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, a couple different things. | |
| We didn't get to go in for that meeting and didn't receive a comprehensive readout, but I saw some reporting that he was talking to them about the tax deal and budget deal that he's been working on since before he came into office. | ||
| And also there were some reports that he spoke to them about recess appointments. | ||
| He didn't really expand on that when he was asked about it later. | ||
| So we'll see to what extent that ends up becoming an issue. | ||
| He certainly has some cabinet members right now who are going through, or potential cabinet members, future cabinet members who are going through their hearings on Capitol Hill. | ||
| Well, speaking of which, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has some new allegations that have been leveled against him that he denies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Has the White House reacted to that? | |
| Do they think that his confirmation is still on track? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I haven't seen a fresh reaction from Trump's folks from the White House about Pete Hegseth, but I think it's important to note that he has been, he being the president, has been a strong supporter of Hegseth throughout this whole process. | |
| There was certainly a time at the beginning when some of these initial allegations were coming out when the president could have decided, ah, this isn't who I want or this isn't worth the bad headlines to go through. | ||
| But that's not the decision he's made so far, and he's been very supportive. | ||
| And the president also talked about reviving this idea of recess appointments. | ||
| What has he said about that? | ||
| And what do we know about that being a possibility? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I referenced that earlier. | |
| It sounds like that may have come up in his meeting with lawmakers. | ||
| Don't really know a whole lot more. | ||
| You're right that he has referenced it or mentioned it before, and I think that that is a sign, perhaps, that he's not sure he's going to get all of the cabinet members through that he wants to get through. | ||
| But honestly, so far, he's getting everything that he wants. | ||
| Of course, Marco Rubio was confirmed as the Secretary of State earlier this week, and the confirmation hearings for even controversial picks such as Hegseth so far are getting the Republican support that they need. | ||
| But if that changes, and with regard to Hegseth, if these latest allegations perhaps lead to any shifts in momentum for him, then perhaps that's a strategy, the idea of a recess appointment that the president will pursue. | ||
| But for right now, it's just kind of floating out there as a possibility and hasn't come to the point of being a reality because so far his cabinet picks are going through the process. | ||
| And the new White House press secretary is Caroline Levitt, youngest ever at 27 years old. | ||
| What are you expecting from her and her team? | ||
| Any changes to the White House press briefing approach? | ||
| And have you worked with her in the past? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have worked with her in the past. | |
| Caroline worked in the Trump White House in the first term towards the end in 2020, I believe is when she came. | ||
| So I have, and I may be wrong about that exact date, but yes, I worked with her. | ||
| And, you know, I think we're just eager to see her brief. | ||
| And I know that she plans to brief. | ||
| What kind of changes she may have in mind or what her style of briefing will be is something we'll have to wait and see once she gets behind the podium. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Jeff Mason, White House correspondent for Reuters. | ||
| You can find his work at Reuters.com. | ||
| Thanks for standing out in the cold for us there, Jeff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
My pleasure. | |
| And we'll go back to your calls now to Athens, Georgia. | ||
| On the independent line, is it Tavares? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's Tavares, Mimi. | |
| Haven't spoken to you in about a year and a half. | ||
| But before I get into it, Mimi, how much do I love C-SPAN? | ||
| I love C-SPAN immensely, Mimi. | ||
| And I want to chime in on Ms. Barbara from Vermont and her comments about the World Economic Forum. | ||
| But before that, let's run through some quick things if I could, Mimi. | ||
| First of all, Mimi, congratulations to President Donald J. Trump. | ||
| I did a lot of work here in the Georgia area trying to get people's minds changed about their perception of Mr. Trump. | ||
| Mr. Trump is doing the will of the American people. | ||
| Number two, please, people, pay attention to the bills and the laws that these career politicians are passing and spending money on in your name. | ||
| The career politicians have sold us out, Mimi, and they've got to atone for that. | ||
| Number three, I want to thank Mr. Brian Lamb for the wonderful service he's done. | ||
| I want to offer you guys, the listeners and viewers, go to c-span.org, hit look for the donation tab, and donate to C-SPAN. | ||
| We want to keep C-SPAN fluid and financially solid so they don't have to go to the commercial marketing strands. | ||
| Now, Mimi, you and I had a moment about a year and a half ago. | ||
| You were reading an article, you slowly looked up from the article, pulled your glasses off, and leaned into the camera. | ||
| And, Mimi, I almost had a heart attack. | ||
| Do you hear me, Mimi? | ||
| Listen, thank you guys, and I look forward to talking to you guys next time. | ||
| Bye-bye. | ||
| And Tavares, sometimes I lean because my back hurts from sitting in this chair. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I really don't mean anything by it. | |
| But Amin is in Temple, Texas, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| First of all, I like to say that I, when I graduated from high school here in Austin, Texas, my father told me, I asked him, what should I do now that I'm out of high school? | ||
| And I did pretty good in high school. | ||
| He said, there's two choices you can do. | ||
| One choice is you can get out and try to find something that you're real good at, and you can use that to build your life with, or you can go into the service. | ||
| Now, my father went into the service when he was 15 years old. | ||
| And he went in then because they wasn't really checking birth certificates and things like that, because a lot of black people didn't have that. | ||
| And my father stayed in the service for 30 years, and we had a comfortable life, and we had a good life. | ||
| And I appreciated that. | ||
| So I joined the service. | ||
| And I went to Vietnam. | ||
| I had been soldier of the month everywhere I was. | ||
| I read up like my father told me to do. | ||
| And then Vietnam. | ||
| And when I got to Vietnam, it was nothing like I ever expected. | ||
| It's like the weather is here now in Fort Greeley, where I flew from the States to Vietnam. | ||
| And when I got to Vietnam, it was 95 and pouring down rain, and I thought I was back in Texas. | ||
| But the thing about the president and the government now is everybody that was there, the soldiers were kind and they did everything for each other. | ||
| And believe it or not, there wasn't any prejudice. | ||
| Everybody was brothers because we were fighting. | ||
| And then when I came back to the States, the first thing was a lot of the soldiers had got hooked on drugs and stuff because it wasn't a beer war like World War II and World War I. What was there was drugs. | ||
| And if you, you were two, three kinds of troops. | ||
| There was the pray boys, the ones that pray all the time. | ||
| There were the drunks, the drinkers of beer and alcohol. | ||
| And then there was, like me, somebody who was trying to do as good as he could so it'd be easier when I got out. | ||
| All right, Amit. | ||
| Thanks for sharing that with us. | ||
| John in Ohio, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, very good morning to you, and thanks for taking the call. | |
| I'm calling about the last-minute pardons that Joe Biden put out. | ||
| Family and some politicians, and I don't know, it was last half hour or something like that. | ||
| And I guess they're relieved from any criminal liability. | ||
| But I'm wondering about civil liability and the possibility. | ||
| I don't know what the process would be, but exile to them people would be on my mind. | ||
| And I don't know if there is such a process. | ||
| And I know the House Oversight Committee still has maybe plans to call some of those people in under oath and might be more people involved. | ||
| And I thanks for taking my call. | ||
| Mike. | ||
| Bill in Cleveland, Ohio, Republican. | ||
| Hi, Bill. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| I'd just like to say, you know, how refreshing it was how he signed these orders, you know, while talking to the press, you know, transparency there. | ||
| Everybody knows what he's doing. | ||
| You know, when Biden did this, I had no idea he was going to open the border. | ||
| They didn't tell anybody anything. | ||
| I mean, President Trump in the last three days has done more and spoke more than Biden did in years. | ||
| It's amazing, you know, and I think it's great. | ||
| And as far as the pardons go, you know, that's another thing. | ||
| It's ridiculous what he did, you know, in the last 15 minutes or whatever to, you know, pre-pardon people for something they haven't even been convicted of. | ||
| You know, as far as the January 6thers, I mean, people look at it this way, too. | ||
| It wasn't an insurrection. | ||
| Nothing got overthrown. | ||
| But the way I look at it, I mean, how much better would we be off if something did happen to where, you know, Biden did it didn't even happen these last four years. | ||
| There'd be a lot of more people alive, you know, and just not the big mess we're in right now. | ||
| You know, and plus, you know, like the other caller said, the Black Lives Matter riots were way worse. | ||
| And Camilla Harris was bailing them out. | ||
| And it's just crazy to me. | ||
| So that's all I have to say. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| All right, Bill. | ||
| And we saw this in the New York Times. | ||
| Trump pardons creator of Silk Road Drug Marketplace, Ross Ulbricht, was serving a life sentence for creating a site in a shady corner of the internet to sell heroin, cocaine, and other illicit substances. | ||
| It says that Mr. Trump fulfilled a promise that he made repeatedly on the campaign trail as he courted political contributions from the crypto industry, which spent more than $100 million to influence the outcome of the election. | ||
| Bitcoin pioneer, Mr. Ulbricht, age 40, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in 2015 after he was convicted on charges that included distributing narcotics on the internet. | ||
| And this is Beverly calling from Huron, Ohio. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| I'm very upset about his pardons of the January 6th people. | ||
| They destroyed the Capitol. | ||
| They did millions of dollars of damage. | ||
| And he pardoned them. | ||
| And they wounded and almost killed the policemen. | ||
| And then besides that, then he's going after, he calls them illegal aliens if they steal something. | ||
| And he says that they came from prisons and insane asylums. | ||
| That is absolutely false. | ||
| That is not true. | ||
| And he pardoned all the January 6th people, and then he's going after these migrants, hard workers, immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers. | ||
| If they steal a watch or something, it does not make any sense. | ||
| And he does not make any sense. | ||
| And I have a question. | ||
| Have any more hostages been released? | ||
| And Biden and Blinken worked hard on that. | ||
| They worked hard on it. | ||
| Blinken did everything to get the hostages released. | ||
| And so did Biden. | ||
| And now Trump is taking all the credit. | ||
| And as far as I know, only three have been released. | ||
| Have there been any more? | ||
| Not that we've seen, Beverly. | ||
| So right now it's only the three, but hopefully more will be released soon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How soon? | |
| Keith and Denver, Colorado Democrat. | ||
| Good morning, Keith. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm trying to wrap my head around who the hardcore MAGA base is. | |
| And they share one characteristic which I hear every morning on C-SAN. | ||
| I see it in every interview on news, which I've turned away from. | ||
| And that is a lack of critical thinking skills. | ||
| They do tend to have lower degrees of education than their opponents. | ||
| And they're very sensitive about that. | ||
| They know that they're less educated. | ||
| And the rest of us with educations post-high school are all indoctrinated. | ||
| They will agree to a person on that, that they're smarter than us. | ||
| With less education, we're just indoctrinated. | ||
| What it is, is a lack of critical thinking skills. | ||
| And it's so apparent. | ||
| You know, I just turned 65, so I've been around for a minute. | ||
| I know you have older callers. | ||
| Probably an average age of about 69, I'd say, similar to Fox. | ||
| One thing asked them, they're like, I used to be a Democrat. | ||
| Well, what happened to the Southern segregationists, Dixie Crat voters? | ||
| What happened to them? | ||
| They migrated to the right. | ||
| They became Republicans in realignment. | ||
| What happened to the John Birchers? | ||
| They didn't die or disappear. | ||
| They migrated to MAGA. | ||
| What happened to the moral majority of the 1980s? | ||
| Same thing. | ||
| They migrated to MAGA. | ||
| So to me, they're just not that smart. | ||
| And Democrats, stop wasting your time trying to convince them of anything. | ||
| They've always been here, just under a different brand and a different name. | ||
| Segregationists, Birchers, Morrimajorityers, Eagle Forum people, Philippe. | ||
| And that's all I have to say. | ||
| And a couple of things for your schedule for after this program, right at 10 o'clock over on C-SPAN 2, we're going to have House Republican leaders, including Speaker Mike Johnson, Majority Leader Scalise, and Majority Whip Emmer. | ||
| They'll talk to reporters about their legislative agenda and the incoming Trump administration. | ||
| We will have that live from RNC headquarters right at 10 a.m. Eastern. | ||
| So in about 10 minutes over on C-SPAN 2. | ||
| Also at 10 a.m., but on C-SPAN 3, Office of Management and Budget nominee Russell Vought will answer questions before the Senate Budget Committee. | ||
| He served in the first Trump administration in the White House Budget Department. | ||
| And that hearing will be live at 10 a.m. at C-SPAN 3. | ||
| Both of those on C-SPAN now are video app and online at c-span.org. | ||
| And we are in open forum until the end of the program when we'll take you over to the House of Representatives. | ||
| This is William, a Republican in Winfield, West Virginia. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, thank you for allowing me to talk. | |
| In 2016, Trump made a statement that said that he could go to Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and we'd be immune. | ||
| It looks like the Article III folks, the Supreme Court, decided he was right. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I think he said he wouldn't lose any voters. | ||
| That he could shoot somebody and not lose any voters. | ||
| Not necessarily. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's what he said in 2016. | |
| Not didn't lose any voters, would be immune to prosecution. | ||
| And in fact, that's what happened after January 6th, 2020. | ||
| You know what, William? | ||
| Let me look up that quote. | ||
| Yeah, because I remember it differently. | ||
| Sorry, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Many that were injured. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| And Jeff in Portage, Michigan, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, first of all, thank you, C-SPAN. | |
| I love watching you because you don't have the talking head from any media. | ||
| And I really enjoy that because like the caller two callers ago, he said it perfectly. | ||
| We don't have the sheepskin and all the degrees, but I'm independent, but I'm leaning America first, which happens to be MAGA. | ||
| I stay independent. | ||
| But anyway, Trump had my vote this year and in 2016. | ||
| Enough of me. | ||
| Okay, so that caller from two years ago, he's pretty much said everything I wanted to say. | ||
| But I do love watching you. | ||
| I watch just about everything I can or watch it later. | ||
| Appreciate that, Jeff. | ||
| And just to be clear, this is what Donald Trump said. | ||
| This is NPR.org is reporting, that in 2016, he said, quote, I could shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters. | ||
| So you can go back and check that as well. | ||
| Samuel in South Pasadena, California, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Mimi. | |
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| I was just thinking I was happy that Trump won the election because, well, the man speaks very well. | ||
| He seems to have it together. | ||
| And he always talks to the press, you know, and they'll ask him questions and he'll answer. | ||
| I mean, Joe Biden wouldn't do that. | ||
| And they always call him the Biden crime family. | ||
| I was thinking, well, I don't think Joe Biden's doing this and stealing it. | ||
| But man, he pardoned all these people, his family and people, and all this other stuff he did and everything. | ||
| And God, I mean, he's so guilty behind it. | ||
| And I think Trump's going to do a great job for this country. | ||
| And I want to say that the family of the Biden family and then the people that come over the border, the illegals come over that are pregnant, the women, and they want to become an American. | ||
| Let them have their babies in Mexico. | ||
| And then file for American citizenship in America. | ||
| But don't just come in and have the kid and think you're welcome to this country because, you know, we have a lot of departing to do here, getting all these gangs and everything out of this country. | ||
| And then the people that were killed and everything. | ||
| And it seems like Biden, the Biden administration, they never even cared about what happened. | ||
| And thank you, C-SPEN. | ||
| And I watch you people all the time. | ||
| And, Samuel, were you affected by the fires? | ||
| Was South Pasadena? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no. | |
| No, I live in South Pasadena. | ||
| I live five miles south of there. | ||
| Oh, we had a lot of ash and everything all over our house. | ||
| I got a beautiful house in a swimming pool here, and it was filled with ash and everything. | ||
| And a lot of my friends up there lost their homes up there. | ||
| But most of the people up there, they just want to sell their property. | ||
| They don't want to rebuild because it's going to take a good 10 years to get all that toxic waste out of there and shipped up north to Bakersfield. | ||
| And then Pacific Palisades, my brother lived there. | ||
| His house burned there. | ||
| And it was a terrible mess. | ||
| I don't know if you've been out here, but I haven't been out of my house because I don't want to breathe none of that crap up there. | ||
| But I'm telling you right now, that's a beautiful place up there at Palisades. | ||
| And I hope Trump, when he comes here to visit here, he gets news and the mayor, Karen Bass. | ||
| You know, Karen Bass should have never been mayor. | ||
| It should have been Rick Caruso, the mayor, because he was a billionaire. | ||
| He knew how to get things done. | ||
| Thank you so much for having me. | ||
| Thank you, Samuel. | ||
| This is the Independent Line in Binghamton, New York. | ||
| John, you're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I just wanted to call in because I've been hearing a lot about the topic of the insurrection coming up, and it always goes to the whataboutism of Black Lives Matter. | ||
| Well, the big difference, there's a huge difference in that. | ||
| Like in the Capitol, you have the state-of-the-art, most advanced camera in the world. | ||
| Facial recognition, if you're there, camera catches you, they know who you are. | ||
| That's the difference. | ||
| Now, with Black Lives Matter, that's wrong. | ||
| Bad. | ||
| But what do you got? | ||
| You got a gas station camera, like moving, circling back and forth, catching a person in a hoodie. | ||
| Wake up, people. | ||
| You know, I'm getting tired of this whataboutism crap. | ||
| It has nothing to do with it's okay to go to the Capitol and commit a crime because look what happened with Black Lives Matter. | ||
| Wake up, man. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Use your smart brain. | ||
| Are you that stupid that you don't get that? | ||
| Miles is a Democrat in San Angelo, Texas. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Hey, it's not really fair to put me on the Democratic line because you caught me last time, Mimi, I was doing sarcasm. | ||
| So let me try, okay? | ||
| Listen, since we're planning a trip to the Gulf of America, my egg prices have dropped, and the gas is free. | ||
| Listen, man, hold on. | ||
| That was my sarcasm. | ||
| Trump lied. | ||
| People died on January 6th. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That's why people were there. | ||
| That's why people died. | ||
| Also, the 147 Republican insurrectionist voters are going to forget. | ||
| Did y'all forget that Trump sent Putin COVID testing machines at the start of COVID? | ||
| There's just a whirlwind of things now that he's elected. | ||
| Anybody see the Hitler salute last night by Elon Musk? | ||
| Did you notice that Donald Trump didn't put his hand on the Bible during the inauguration? | ||
| He doesn't even, he doesn't give that a second thought. | ||
| He has no belief in any of that. | ||
| And now, second day, 500 bill to AI in Texas. | ||
| Hey, thanks, man. | ||
| Anyways, fascism is here. | ||
| We voted for it. | ||
| I hope next time we might try liberalism, in essence, not having massive deportation as top-notch, top-of-mind job to do. | ||
| But thank God, my eggs are below $4. | ||
| All right, Miles. | ||
| Let's talk to Donald in Independent and Raleigh, North Carolina. | ||
| Yes, good morning. | ||
| I just want to make a couple of points here. | ||
| Tavares, who said he last spoke with you about a year and a half ago, that was a lie. | ||
| He spoke to you on September 7th of 2024. | ||
| Yeah, I have his recording. | ||
| Can you look that up? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I keep records. | |
| I keep records. | ||
| I listen to C-SPAN every day, and I keep records. | ||
| You keep records of all the callers and the dates? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Generally, yes. | |
| Why, Donald? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I want to see how things are trending. | |
| That's it. | ||
| But I just want to say another point I want to make is about them killing DEI. | ||
| I mean, if they want to do that, that's fine. | ||
| But a lot of people who think that seem to think that DEI means you're going to hire people who are unqualified. | ||
| I think it just means that you're going to look to diversify your employment workforce. | ||
| I want to give you an example of what happened to me as a black guy attending college in the 1980s. | ||
| I was in a course called Small Business Management. | ||
| I majored in business administration. | ||
| And in that course, we had 15 cases where you had to diagnose a small business, you know, diagnose its problems and provide your solutions to how they could improve their business. | ||
| Then that you could also justify why your solutions would work. | ||
| And in that course, we had 15 cases. | ||
| And I had my first two cases I responded to in-class tests. | ||
| I got a C and a C minus. | ||
| But I had a very good friend who was a white guy. |