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other television providers, giving you a front row seat to democracy. | |
| Coming up on C-SPAN's Washington Journal, we'll take your calls and comments live. | ||
| Then Washington Examiner Executive Editor James Antle discusses President Trump's legislative agenda, divisions within the GOP, and Congressional Democrats' opposition strategy. | ||
| And later public historian and author Jason Steinhauer on comparisons between President Trump and former Republican President William McKinley in office from 1897 to 1901. | ||
| Washington Journal starts now. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| It's Sunday, February 16th, 2025. | ||
| U.S. officials are heading to Saudi Arabia this week, according to multiple reports, to begin negotiations with Russia over the war in Ukraine. | ||
| And Secretary of State Marco Rubio is in Jerusalem today. | ||
| He just wrapped up meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu following Netanyahu's talks with President Trump on what it would take to end the conflict in Gaza. | ||
| This morning, we want to hear your thoughts on the Trump administration's foreign policy positions. | ||
| Do you support or oppose them? | ||
| Our number for Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| For Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| For Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| If you'd like to text us, that number is 202-748-8003. | ||
| Please be sure to include your name and where you're writing in from. | ||
| And if you'd like to reach us on social media, that's facebook.com/slash C-SPAN and on X at C-SPANWJ. | ||
| Now, the New York Times has been tallying up some of President Trump's foreign policy moves thus far, and some of them include a not exhaustive list: working with Russia on ending the war in Ukraine, working on a ceasefire deal, proposing that the U.S. rebuild Gaza and resettle Palestinian residents, attempting to freeze foreign aid and dismantle U.S. AID, and pledging to take over the Panama Canal and acquire Greenland. | ||
| Also, withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement. | ||
| Now, there's been quite a bit of foreign policy news just this weekend. | ||
| Here's a story in Reuters that the U.S. and Russia are said to meet in Saudi Arabia over the Ukraine war, saying that the U.S. and Russian officials will meet in Saudi Arabia in the coming days to start talks aimed at ending Moscow's nearly three-year war in Ukraine. | ||
| A U.S. lawmaker and a source familiar with the planning said on Saturday. | ||
| Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who met with U.S. Vice President JD Vance in Germany on Friday, said Ukraine was not invited to the talks in Saudi Arabia and Kiev would not engage with Russia before consulting with strategic partners. | ||
| Now, I mentioned about Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, being in Jerusalem. | ||
| That was a meeting, as reported here in the New York Times, as Trump pushes a plan to expel Palestinians from Gaza. | ||
| Scholars of international law say President Trump's proposal for American control of Gaza without Palestinians would be ethnic cleansing or a war crime. | ||
| Secretary of State Marco Rubio was meeting in Jerusalem on Sunday with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel as political chaos rippled across the Middle East over President Trump's insistent proposals to seize the devastated Gaza Strip and force out its Palestinian residents. | ||
| The trip is Mr. Rubio's first to the region as Secretary of State and comes as Israel and Hamas are meant to be negotiating to turn a tenuous ceasefire deal in Gaza into a permanent end to their war. | ||
| Now, back to the conflict in Ukraine, which also made news this weekend when Ukrainian President Vlodymir Zelensky spoke at that Munich security conference in Germany yesterday. | ||
| And among the things he said, he called for, as reported here in CBS News, the creation of an armed forces of Europe amid a new line by Washington. | ||
| He called for the creation of an armed forces of Europe to guard against Russia, appearing to suggest that the United States may no longer come to the continent's aid. | ||
| Zelensky, speaking on the second day of the Munich Security Conference, said Ukraine's three-year fight against an invading Russian army has proved that a foundation exists for the creation of a European army that has long been discussed among some continental leaders. | ||
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Here are some of the other remarks that the Ukrainian President made at that Munich Security Conference: Ukraine will never accept deals made behind our backs without our involvement. | |
| And the same rule should apply to all of Europe. | ||
| No decisions about Ukraine, without Ukraine, no decisions about Europe, without Europe. | ||
| Europe must have a seat at the table when decisions about Europe are being made. | ||
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Anything else is zero. | |
| If we are left out of negotiations about our own future, then we all lose. | ||
| Look at what Putin is trying to do now. | ||
| This is his game. | ||
| Putin wants one-on-one talks with America. | ||
| Just like before the war, when they met in Switzerland and looked like to carve up the world, next, Putin will try to get the U.S. president standing on Red Square on Maine, on May 9th, this year, not as a respected leader, but as a probe in his own performance. | ||
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We don't need that. | |
| We need real success. | ||
| We need real peace. | ||
| Some in Europe may not fully understand what's happening in Washington right now, but let's focus on understanding ourselves right here in Europe. | ||
| We must give strengths to Europe first. | ||
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Does America need Europe as a market? | |
| Yes, but as an ally? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| For the answer to be yes, Europe needs a single voice, not a dozen different ones. | ||
| Even those who regularly come to Mar-a-Lago need to be a part of a strong Europe. | ||
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Because President Trump does not like weak France, he respects strengths. | |
| Next, some in Europe may be frustrated with Brussels. | ||
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But let's be clear. | |
| If not Brussels, then Moscow. | ||
| It's your decision. | ||
| Once again, we're looking for your thoughts on whether you support or oppose President Trump's foreign policy positions. | ||
| We'll start with Danny in Ruffin, South Carolina, on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Danny. | ||
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unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| I think hex is. | ||
| I look like a fool. | ||
| I'm glad they didn't respect me now. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Flute is in Washington, D.C. on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Flute. | ||
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unidentified
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Hi, good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| You know, diplomacy is always the best option over war. | ||
| And I think Trump has just been in office a few weeks, but I think he is making an impression. | ||
| But I think he's spreading out in a few, too many directions. | ||
| You know, he's talking about Greenland and exploring Canada as an option for a state, as well as the Gulf of America now. | ||
| You know, he's going in a lot of directions. | ||
| But the one thing by living here in Washington, D.C., my problem is this, and it never comes up whether Democrat or Republican president is that we have a non-voting member in the Representative's House, and we have no senators. | ||
| But we have over 100,000 people that live right here in Washington, D.C., but we're not spoken for when it comes to any issues that are placed before Congress. | ||
| You know, and this is going on and on. | ||
| Everyone just sweeps it under the table. | ||
| And we have the license plates that say taxation without representation. | ||
| And that's just how I feel living here. | ||
| You know, I feel like I live in Guam or the Virgin Islands or Puerto Rico. | ||
| It's just a territory. | ||
| So you might be interested later on in our show today. | ||
| We're going to be having a conversation with someone who talks about the comparisons between President Trump and President McKinley, who acquired some of those territories that you mentioned under his administration. | ||
| Let's hear from Nur in Virginia on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Nur. | ||
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unidentified
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Yes. | |
| Hi. | ||
| I oppose President Trump's foreign policy objectives in Gaza. | ||
| Trump and the United States federal government has no jurisdiction in Gaza. | ||
| Sorry, I'm a little nervous here. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
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unidentified
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If Trump says that he will own Gaza and he will displace Gaza's Palestinians into Egypt or Jordan, he can't do that. | |
| To do so would be a war crime. | ||
| He would be a war criminal. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Next up is Brenda in Indiana, Pennsylvania on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Brenda. | ||
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Good morning, Kimberly. | |
| I oppose Donald Trump's foreign policy concerning Ukraine and Russia because his policy is surrender. | ||
| When you stop military aid to Ukraine and give Russia everything at once, that's not really negotiating. | ||
| That's surrender. | ||
| Just as he surrendered to the Taliban, when he signed the Doha Peace Treaty with the Taliban, it was actually a surrender. | ||
| The Taliban got everything that they wanted, including the release of 5,000 Taliban terrorists, the same terrorists that our military personnel fought and died trying to capture. | ||
| So in Donald Trump's Great Peace Treaty, these terrorists got released. | ||
| The United States got nothing out of Donald Trump's Doha Peace Treaty. | ||
| We got nothing. | ||
| We didn't get our military equipment back. | ||
| We didn't even get a peaceful withdrawal. | ||
| So, Donald Trump with Ukraine and Russia, sure, it's easy to solve that. | ||
| Like I said, when you cut off military aid to Ukraine, you use the stick on them, and you give Russia everything they want, you're giving Russia the carrot. | ||
| So, where's the great negotiation? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| David is in Indiana on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, David. | ||
| Go ahead, David. | ||
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unidentified
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Yes, good morning. | |
| I just have one comment to make regarding the clip you played from Zelensky. | ||
| I totally agree with Zelensky that Europe should take care of their own problems. | ||
| This has been going on for almost three years now, billions of dollars. | ||
| You know, even President Trump mentioned that Europe has donated a lot of money to the cause, but they're also giving him loans for military equipment to pay back. | ||
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So if they're really interested in preserving Ukraine, I think Europe needs to take over. | |
| We need to focus on other issues. | ||
| And, you know, at some point, there has to be a negotiated settlement. | ||
| There's got to be one, if you want to call it a surrender. | ||
| You just can't have this carnage continue, continue, and for what? | ||
| And Zelensky's attitude there, I would say shut it all down. | ||
| Go to hell with him. | ||
| Ernest is in Gregory, Texas, on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Ernest. | ||
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unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| Do you support or oppose President Trump's foreign policy positions? | ||
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unidentified
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I completely oppose it. | |
| He has given up on Ukraine, given it to Russia. | ||
| He has given up probably. | ||
| We're looking at Taiwan. | ||
| China can probably have it. | ||
| Just like he won't be told anything about trying to grab this and grab that over here. | ||
| He will have no static. | ||
| He'll just, it's a free grab for all right now. | ||
| And also, what business does he have in Gaza trying to make we can't even fix our own United States, and he wants to go fix Gaza at our expense. | ||
| But when he's out of office, he'll have all this waterfront property. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Eric is in Antioch, California, on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Eric. | ||
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unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| Thank Brian Lamb for me. | ||
| I generally support the president's policies. | ||
| As far as Europe goes and Ukraine, because of NATO, you need everybody to vote together to do something. | ||
| That's a problem there. | ||
| And I think, you know, maybe America could end up being a nuclear guarantee and yet pulling out from the land forces and then let Ukraine join the equivalent of NATO. | ||
| Also, the fact that we have the Russians visiting in Saudi Arabia, I don't think it's a coincidence. | ||
| I think we're looking to pump up Russia to start exporting as soon as possible and get the Saudis to go low to get his just drill baby drill policy. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Pete is in Union, Maine, on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Pete. | ||
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unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| I just wanted to say I can't see any coherent foreign policy position as of yet. | ||
| Just last week, AgSeth was slammed down by Vice President Vance because they had no coherent message. | ||
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So until they get something going, I just can't see any good happening here. | |
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Carl is in Inwood, West Virginia on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Carl. | ||
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Yes, this is Carl from West Virginia. | |
| I think she shut it down. | ||
| You know, Ukraine doesn't have a central government. | ||
| We're paying over 50, we're paying for 57,000 people in the central government. | ||
| The country is broke, and we will continue to pay for the government, administration, and all that. | ||
| That's where our money's going. | ||
| Most of it's going for administrative purposes. | ||
| They don't have a government. | ||
| There might be about 20 people in that government. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| And we're cutting them a paycheck, and we need to stop. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Kyle is in Clearwater, Florida, on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Kyle. | ||
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Good morning. | |
| I think this kind of leveraging the economic power of the United States by kind of bullying all our allies is going to have pretty short-term benefits at best. | ||
| And it's pretty concerning when European allies are talking about forming their own kind of treaties and deals separate from the United States. | ||
| But just wanted to say what Trump released on True Social yesterday. | ||
| He who saves his country does not violate any law. | ||
| And whatever he's trying to project with that, it's not good. | ||
| I've never seen this type of behavior before in a democratic country. | ||
| And I think the people that think they're getting benefit from this kind of tough guy mentality beyond the economic damage is just a United States that can't be trusted by anybody. | ||
| Kyle, Max Boot in the Washington Post has an opinion piece mirroring some of the points that you made, saying Trump's tariff tactics are an unpromising foreign policy anomaly. | ||
| There's no U.S. precedent for Trump's tariff use, but it does evoke China's economic bullying, going on to say, since President Trump, Donald Trump returned to office, he has repeatedly threatened other nations with steep tariff hikes unless they do what he wants. | ||
| In the case of Colombia, he dropped his tariff threat after that country's president agreed to keep receiving Colombian deportees from the United States. | ||
| In the cases of Mexico and Canada, Trump agreed to delay his 25% tariffs for at least a month after the leaders of those countries offered assurances they would do more to stop the flow of fentanyl and migrants, even though they were already doing much of what they promised to do. | ||
| And in the case of China, Trump imposed additional 10% tariffs, apparently as punishment for that country not doing more to stop fentanyl shipments to the United States. | ||
| Naturally, China retaliated with its own tariffs. | ||
| Expect many other countries to face similar threats from the self-described tariff man. | ||
| Now then, another big story on the foreign policy side of things has been the efforts by the Trump administration to dismantle USAID. | ||
| And a judge has extended a pause on Trump's dismantling of that agency through February 21st. | ||
| This is reported in CNN saying that a federal judge has extended the pause on the Trump administration's dismantling of USAID for another week after an extensive hearing on Thursday. | ||
| The case is one of the most significant early tests of President Donald Trump's power to reduce the federal workforce and shutter an agency. | ||
| Some reactions from members of Congress about the ongoing disagreement over what to do about USAID. | ||
| Representative Ryan Zinke, a Republican, posted on X, USAID spent your tax dollars on $1.999 million for sex chain surgeries in Guatemala, more than $5 million to improve the lives of LGBT individuals in Uganda, more than $11 million to measure effectiveness of the efforts to promote DEI in Nepal, and more. | ||
| It's a longer list. | ||
| On the Democratic side, Congressman Gabe Amo says Trump's illegal and foreign aid freeze is a disaster for humanitarian relief efforts, farmers, and our partners who expect America to keep our word. | ||
| This ruling, the judge's ruling on Thursday, confirms the haphazard decision needlessly put Americans in harm's way, wasted taxpayer funds, and hurt our national security. | ||
| At a House Foreign Affairs Committee meeting focusing on USAID, Ranking Member Gregory Meeks, the Democrat from New York, spoke out against the administration's actions towards the agency, and he made these comments last week. | ||
| We don't have anyone here today from the administration to explain, to appear, and to explain their actions before this committee. | ||
| It shouldn't be just private sector individuals here. | ||
| We are the oversight of the U.S. government, and we should have members from the State Department, the Secretary of State, Rubio, present. | ||
| And my Democratic colleagues and I have asked the chairman to have a committee hearing with Secretary Rubio, and I urge that to be done as soon as possible. | ||
| The American people deserve to have their elected representatives question the administration about the decision to shut down a government agency established in law by Congress. | ||
| We don't have a king. | ||
| We have a system. | ||
| If the administration believes what they have done is legal and merited, they should be before Congress. | ||
| They should be here. | ||
| They should be talking to the American people directly. | ||
| We should be summoning them here. | ||
| I also want to do away with the myth that this exercise with Doge and USAID is about addressing waste, fraud, and abuse. | ||
| Because if you really care about waste, fraud, and abuse, you don't illegally fire 21 independent inspector generals in the dark of night. | ||
| You don't fire the head of the government ethics office. | ||
| Just this week, President Trump fired USAID's independent inspector general just one day after he issued a report showing that the administration's own effort to dismantle USAID is wasting taxpayer dollars and putting our national security at risk. | ||
| That's what's happening. | ||
| Our national security is at risk. | ||
| Back to your calls and whether you support or oppose the Trump administration's foreign policy positions. | ||
| We'll go to Phil in Edison, New Jersey on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Phil. | ||
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unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| How are you doing? | ||
| I'm just a little tired of everything Trump does. | ||
| It's like clear. | ||
| I mean, Democrats think about everything he does. | ||
| I'm wondering when is Congress going to do something about it. | ||
| And then they say, they fired all these attorney generals. | ||
| They wasn't doing their job. | ||
| All this fraud's been going on for years. | ||
| I just don't understand it. | ||
| Thank you for letting me call. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Bruce is in Kingston, New York, on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Bruce. | ||
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unidentified
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Yes, good morning. | |
| I'm very thankful that you did take my call as well. | ||
| And I want to point out that I agree with the fact that Trump doesn't actually have a foreign agenda. | ||
| What he has is the 2025 agenda, and that's both domestic and foreign. | ||
| For the most part, what he's doing to Zelensky, I think, looks more like revenge, and that has a history to it. | ||
| And we've all seen that, at least people who have TV or aren't just living over their cell phone. | ||
| There is some question about a history in the United States of being isolationists. | ||
| And I think some people just maybe listen to one speech and get an impression, just get on the phone and say, yo, we should dump NATO and, you know, we should side with this so-called rationale about so much injury. | ||
| Have they actually been following the destruction that Russia, Putin has done to the Ukraine over the years? | ||
| This has been barbaric. | ||
| And he's a war criminal, and Trump is talking about bringing him to the White House. | ||
| Again, this is not the first time he talked about that. | ||
| Putin is definitely a guy with a lot of bird feathers in his mouth. | ||
| He's a cat with a lot of things to be smiling about because Putin basically playing his game, if not actually being an unwitting or winning puppet of him. | ||
| Again, there's a lot of revenge involved here. | ||
| They call it transaction. | ||
| Trump likes to speak to his audience the way they speak to him, but he does, his actions really betray that. | ||
| The bottom line is we are betraying the Ukrainians who have all acted in good faith, not corrupt as in the past. | ||
| And the fact of the matter is that we had a treaty with them where they voluntarily surrendered their nuclear weapons that they were holding under the premise and the promise that we would defend them if they needed defense. | ||
| Next up is Melvin in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Melvin. | ||
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unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| You know, it's really pitiful. | ||
| This is the same thing that he did to Afghanistan. | ||
| He did, he went in and made his decision with the Taliban behind Afghanistan's back and never had any type of conversation with the leadership. | ||
| I don't understand why these people, they get these short memories about what is going on. | ||
| This has been going on with this man ever since. | ||
| Him and his administration went ahead and made those agreements with the Taliban to be able to take over in Afghanistan without even talking to the government. | ||
| And the people keep overlooking it like if Biden did something. | ||
| It wasn't Bid. | ||
| And then had his Secretary of State release 5,000 prisoners who were part of the situation where the military was killed. | ||
| People got to start waking up. | ||
| But y'all got to bring this stuff to his attention. | ||
| Then you have Musk, who's supposed to do it all this, supposed to be such a genius. | ||
| Man paid twice as much money for Twitter than he should have. | ||
| What are you saying about that? | ||
| Let's get some sense in here. | ||
| We're really going crazy. | ||
| People can fall in love with this idiot, Trump. | ||
| He's the worst person in the history when it comes to any type of laws when he gets sued for all the stuff he has done. | ||
| He hasn't won a lawsuit in court about anything that has come up in his businesses. | ||
| So let's get serious with this. | ||
| Next up is Rick in Howard, Ohio, on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Rick. | ||
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unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| How are you? | ||
| Good, thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| I just have a basic question. | ||
| Everyone figures their taxes. | ||
| I have a big question on the front of the 1040. | ||
| Why would we sit there and donate $3 to a presidential campaign? | ||
| And where does that money go and who does it go to? | ||
| And do you support or oppose President Trump's foreign policy positions? | ||
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unidentified
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Do what now? | |
| Do you support or oppose the President's foreign policy positions? | ||
|
unidentified
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I support him right now. | |
| Okay. | ||
| And I think that there should be something done getting our money back that we sent over there and all the people that were killed. | ||
| Over where? | ||
| It was all over in Ukraine. | ||
| Ah, Ukraine. | ||
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unidentified
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On both sides. | |
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Have a good day. | ||
| Mike is in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Mike. | ||
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unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| Excuse me. | ||
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| I oppose the foreign policy of the sitting president now. | ||
| Foreign policy, as far as I'm concerned, with Donald Trump, is nothing but deals that he continues to make. | ||
| I believe that most of his process is to keep him and his family and others in the real estate business throughout the world. | ||
| I also think that he is, he and along with the technocrats, are looking to privatize as much of the federal government that they possibly can. | ||
| And I think that the Russian and China connection with Trump is a conspiracy to work with the richest people, the technocratic people, the financial people, through foreign policy to restart what is now being called the new world order. | ||
| Very concerned about the policy in Israel to do with 2 million people to remove them and then have the audacity to call it a wonderful real estate dream when people have died, | ||
| no water, no toilet facilities, no food, and someone like Ryan Zinke, who was questioned when he was the Interior Secretary, to question the money that the AID was doing throughout the world of feeding people, making sure that people have the needs to wash themselves, to send children to school. | ||
| I believe that his foreign policy is nothing but a money grab. | ||
| He's a guy from Queens. | ||
| He's an organized crime individual, and he only knows how to think as an organized crime individual. | ||
| His foreign policy is to do nothing but to increase his wealth and those around him that go along with him. | ||
| And I really don't think that he's really in charge of anything other than taking the consultation of the people that want to control the world. | ||
| That's what I think of Mr. Trump's foreign policy. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Mike mentioned the president's statements related to Gaza. | ||
| There's a post on X from Representative Mike Quigley who said, this week I joined 145 of my colleagues in sending a letter to President Trump condemning his reckless remarks calling for the U.S. to quote unquote own Gaza. | ||
| He should focus on creating a lasting peace in the region, not permanently displacing the over 2 million Palestinians in Gaza. | ||
| It was at the White House where both President Trump and King Abdullah II of Jordan responded to a question about the President's plan for Gaza, and here's a portion of that from last week. | ||
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unidentified
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I think we have to keep in mind that there is a plan from Egypt and the Arab countries. | |
| We're being invited by Mohammed bin Salman to discuss in Riyadh. | ||
| I think the point is how do we make this work in a way that is good for everybody? | ||
| Obviously, we have to look at the best interests of the United States, of the people in the region, especially to my people of Jordan. | ||
| And we're going to have some interesting discussions today. | ||
| I think one of the things that we can do right away is take 2,000 children that are either cancer children or in a very ill state to Jordan as quickly as possible and then wait for, I think, the Egyptians to present their plan on how we can work with the President to work on Al-Qaza challenges. | ||
| So you want to tell you. | ||
| Excuse me, Wade, just please. | ||
| I didn't know that what you just said, 2,000 children with cancer or other problems. | ||
| And that's really a beautiful gesture. | ||
| That's really good, and we appreciate it. | ||
| And we'll be working on the rest with Egypt. | ||
| I think you're going to see some great progress. | ||
| I think with Jordan, you're going to see some great progress. | ||
| Three of us will have some others helping, and we're going to have some others at a very high level helping, and the whole thing will come. | ||
| It's not a complex thing to do. | ||
| And with the United States being in control of that piece of land, a fairly large piece of land, you're going to have stability in the Middle East for the first time. | ||
| And the Palestinians or the people that live now in Gaza will be living beautifully in another location. | ||
| They're going to be living safely. | ||
| They're not going to be killed, murdered, and having to leave every 10 years because I've been watching this for so many years. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's nothing but trouble. | |
| For a broader view on President Trump's foreign policy strategy, the Wall Street Journal has a commentary saying, Trump buries Wilsonian foreign policy. | ||
| The old rules of involuble state borders do not apply in a world of trade wars and terrorist regimes. | ||
| President Trump is working to undo the domestic policies of Joe Biden in foreign policy. | ||
| Mr. Trump is undoing the work of Woodrow Wilson. | ||
| The general understanding after World War I was that violations of national sovereignty and borders constituted the key threat to global peace. | ||
| Moving on, meanwhile, this European diplomats began drawing new borders throughout the globe. | ||
| In the Middle East, they established Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria. | ||
| Mirroring Wilson, they spoke of self-determination in Africa, though decolonization didn't truly begin until after World War II. | ||
| In Europe, borders were redrawn to divide empires into nation-states. | ||
| Mr. Trump is rejecting that vision. | ||
| According to him, the primary danger to global peace isn't the infringement of state sovereignty, but the actions of authoritarian terrorist regimes. | ||
| Borders drawn in the 20th century haven't provided security or self-determination. | ||
| They've led to armed conflict. | ||
| Syria has devolved into a brutal multi-ethnic dictatorship. | ||
| Jordan's majority Palestinian population is ruled by an authoritarian monarchy with Bedouin roots. | ||
| Gaza started as a territory under Egyptian control and turned into a vicious terrorist state. | ||
| The Panama Canal has become a Chinese outpost. | ||
| Those shocked by Mr. Trump's seemingly imperialist threats to take over Greenland, intervene in Panama, unilaterally rename the Gulf of Mexico, and build American hotels in Gaza are using 20th century principles to interpret 21st century policy. | ||
| Mr. Trump recognizes that the old rules don't apply in a world of trade wars and terrorist organizations. | ||
| What he proposes isn't imperialism, but a new line of Western defense against insidious forces. | ||
| Back to your calls on whether you support or oppose the Trump administration foreign policy positions. | ||
| Wally is in Los Angeles, California on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Wally. | ||
| Wally, are you there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I'm here. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| My name is Wally Lopez. | ||
| I'm a native from Puerto Rico. | ||
| I've been living in the United States for almost 35 years. | ||
| I was in the Army as a former Green Beret. | ||
| And what I've been looking watching the news, you know, I mean, and all these politics going on, we should worry about the United States first. | ||
| I mean, I don't criticize that we help another country, but we have to concentrate in our problem that we have inside the United States. | ||
| And then after we get the problem squared away in the United States, that we can help another country. | ||
| Another thing that I've been noticing is that we're helping the Western side and the Eastern side, we left them, you know, in the air. | ||
| Like we got Maduro, okay? | ||
| Maduro could be another Fidel Castro in our line. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| So even that we have a lot of immigrants, we got a lot of immigrants that they are working for so many years, way back in 1945 when the World War II they opened the frontier so they can let the Mexicans come and do the crops while the people was fighting on the World War II. | ||
| See? | ||
| And I'm 75 years old right now. | ||
| I got out of the army in 2016, I mean 2006. | ||
| But what I've been observing, you know, even that we are the biggest nation in the world with a lot of power, but we decline slow, I mean, slowly we decline. | ||
| And we come back up, you know, and be the United States that we're supposed to be. | ||
| So we have to fix our problem inside. | ||
| All this gimmick, you know, all this fighting, we should get united. | ||
| You know, Democrat and Republican, we should be united to fight because this is our country. | ||
| And when we finish our time, we go back to the normal life. | ||
| We become lawyers again. | ||
| You know, so we should be, even that we are against each other, we should be together. | ||
| So the United States become more powerful than what it is now and leave the fighting between each other. | ||
| Wally, a point that you made at the beginning of your statement about needing to pay more attention to what's happening closer to the United States. | ||
| Secretary of State Marco Rubio had a commentary in the Wall Street Journal on January 30th, making a similar point and titled, An America's First Foreign Policy. | ||
| U.S. diplomats have neglected the Western Hemisphere for too long. | ||
| When Donald Trump won his sweeping victory in November, he received a mandate to put America first. | ||
| In the realm of diplomacy, this means paying closer attention to our own neighborhood, the Western Hemisphere. | ||
| It's no accident that my first trip abroad as Secretary of State to Central America on Friday, this was back in January 30th, will keep me in this hemisphere. | ||
| This is rare among secretaries of state over the past century. | ||
| For many reasons, U.S. foreign policy has long focused on other regions while overlooking our own. | ||
| As a result, we've let problems fester, missed opportunity, and neglected partners. | ||
| That ends now. | ||
| President Trump's foreign policy agenda begins close to home. | ||
| Among his top priorities is securing our borders and reversing the disastrous invasion abetted by the last administration. | ||
| Diplomacy's role in this effort is central. | ||
| We need to work with countries of origin to halt and deter further migrant flows and to accept the return of their citizens present in the U.S. illegally. | ||
| Back to your calls on whether you support or oppose the Trump administration's foreign policy positions. | ||
| Let's go to Barbara in Elgin, Illinois on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Barbara. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I have been independent my whole life. | ||
| I have voted Democrat and Republican. | ||
| And I say I'm very disturbed by everything that is going on with our foreign policy. | ||
| Israel and Palestinians created their war. | ||
| I don't think the American people should pay for the rebuilding of Gaza. | ||
| I don't think that they should be displaced, the Palestinians. | ||
| I think Russia is still our enemy, even though Donald Trump is thinking that he is our friend. | ||
| And I think that Ukraine should be foremost in the negotiations of any kind of peace treaty. | ||
| As far as U.S. aid is concerned, maybe there was some parts of it that they should be able to take away fraud or take away spend less, but completely shut down an agency that was created by Congress is against the law. | ||
| And I hope that all of Congress, Republicans and Democrats, will stand up together against Trump when he decides that the judges aren't ruling in his favor. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Millard is in Philadelphia on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Millard. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What are you bearing this on to me for? | |
| Why are you putting this on to me? | ||
| All right. | ||
| Let's hear from Kathleen in Maryland on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Kathleen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I just wanted to call in and say that I am in support of Trump's foreign policy. | ||
| The world was a safer place during his previous administration. | ||
| And under Joe Biden, we saw so many conflicts break out that I think would have been avoided if we'd had a stronger leader at the head of our country. | ||
| And I absolutely believe in peace through strength. | ||
| And I think that it is time to consider some new ideas. | ||
| You know, as far as a two-state solution between Palestine and Israel, you know, that's not going to happen. | ||
| They've been trying that for decades. | ||
| It's not going to work. | ||
| I think taking a new approach, even though it seems unusual, I think that it's worth it to try something new. | ||
| And I support what he's doing so far. | ||
| So I just want to encourage people to keep an open mind and look at the reality. | ||
| What we've been doing isn't working. | ||
| And it's time for a change. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Michael is in Seattle, Washington on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Michael. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Let me just say that President Trump's and Desco-President Musk, both are domestic and foreign policy could be summed up by the four C's, cold, calloused, cruel, and our compassion-free zones. | ||
| Their policies, their heartless policies remind me of a quote from Shakespeare. | ||
| A head that speaks without a heart is not worth listening to. | ||
| President Trump is completely untethered, unmourned, unmoored, and unhinged from anything resembling reality, ethics, or compassion. | ||
| And he literally, by stopping the aid for USAID, there is today, as we speak, $482 million of our food rotting in warehouses that should be going to feed starving children. | ||
| Men, women, children, infants, grandmothers and grandfathers, as I'm speaking, are literally starving to death because of these disastrous, catastrophic, and dastardly actions committed by this orange felon. | ||
| And it's also hurting our farmers here at home. | ||
| It's costing jobs here at home. | ||
| It's terribly catastrophic, and we can see the effects. | ||
| Prices are soaring. | ||
| And we right now are headed for an epic disaster on every possible multiple level. | ||
| And those that are watching phone news and Fox Noise are just mindlessly receiving massive mega doses of myths and disinformation. | ||
| And finally, there's a special place in hell reserved for Trump and Musk, who are today literally taking food from the mouths of starving infants for their own petty vindictiveness and ideological extremism. | ||
| Michael mentioned food rotting while aid is being withheld. | ||
| There's a story about that in CBS News. | ||
| Almost $500 million in food at risk of spoilage after USAID paws report says, almost $500 million in food is at risk of spoilage as it sits in ports, ships, and warehouses after funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, was paused by the Trump administration, according to a February 10th report from a government watchdog. | ||
| The report from USAID's Inspector General highlighted the risks of safeguarding and distribution of $8.2 billion in unspent humanitarian aid after the Trump administration ordered almost all staff to be placed on leave and ordered a review of foreign assistance programs. | ||
| At a congressional rally outside the U.S. Capitol, Delaware Democrat Chris Coons, who serves on the Foreign Relations Committee, made a case for why he says foreign aid helps the United States. | ||
| Here's a portion from early February. | ||
|
unidentified
|
When President Trump ran, he said he would make America safe again. | |
| Nothing about this makes us safer. | ||
| There's an Ebola outbreak in Uganda. | ||
| Helping Uganda fight Ebola makes America safe. | ||
| There is a Marburg outbreak in Tanzania. | ||
| Helping Tanzanians fight Marburg makes America safe. | ||
| There is a crisis of human trafficking in Mexico. | ||
| Persuading young people not to join gangs, not to be trafficked, not to be taken advantage of, makes America safer. | ||
| Working to destroy landmines left behind by conflicts, working to rebuild economies made unstable and unsafe by conflict, makes America safe. | ||
| So all of these illegal actions of recent days will be challenged in court, will be challenged on the floor of the Congress, and will not stand. | ||
| If Doge wins and our foreign aid is completely shut down, if Elon Musk wins and our foreign assistance completely ends, who will cheer and who will win? | ||
| The cartels will win, terrorists will win, Russia will win, China will win. | ||
| This effort is not efficient. | ||
| It is not sane. | ||
| It is not respectful. | ||
| And it does not make America safe. | ||
| So let's pull together and tell the real story of foreign aid and the ways that it saves lives, advances our values, and makes our world a better place. | ||
| Back to your calls on whether you support or oppose the president's foreign policy positions. | ||
| Jimmy is in Whitefield, Maine on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| Good morning, Jimmy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I am in Whitefield, Maine. | |
| I support ending the Ukraine nonsense. | ||
| But for the rest of it, it's just bullying. | ||
| It's just Trump bullying everybody, and it's not going to work. | ||
| And the USAID thing is quite sad because we're not supposed to make any distinction between babies and bathwater. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Mark is in Virginia on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Mark. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I just want to say I support what President is doing with Doge. | |
| The amount of waste is unbelievable. | ||
| But I really just have to note that I listened for about three minutes from one of the previous callers going on an absolutely unhinged, demonizing attack toward President Trump, that he's out of his mind. | ||
| And then you play two articles and do a little quick, what, another minute of Chris Combs repeating it. | ||
| I mean, this is really, you guys are becoming just, you know, an arm of the DNC here. | ||
| This is ridiculous. | ||
| And thanks for what you're doing, but you're really not helping America. | ||
| It's just further dividing us. | ||
| Appreciate it. | ||
| Next up is Larry in Oregon on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Larry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, and thanks for receiving my call. | |
| I do support President Trump's administration on foreign policy, but more importantly, I see President Trump as not a Republican, but a populist. | ||
| And as a populist, he's trying to bring our country back together through foreign policy and through his business sense. | ||
| He's adding value to our country through business procedures. | ||
| And, you know, he did create opportunity zones, which raised the lower income people up 9% in this country. | ||
| That's a good step in the right direction of bringing people together. | ||
| Part of the problem is from the right and the left. | ||
| We got the right that those people, the middle-class people, are paying a lot of taxes. | ||
| The people on the left are receiving that tax money, and that's where the conflict is coming. | ||
| It's not necessarily Republican-Democrat. | ||
| It's an economic situation. | ||
| We have a populist president that's trying to lift the lower-income people up through opportunity zones, and that's the right direction this country needs to go in. | ||
| It'll bring us together. | ||
| Thank you for your time. | ||
| Kim is in Columbus, Ohio, on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Kim. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, you know, look, Donald Trump got in with the Republican Party, taking 3.5 million people off the polls. | |
| So to sit back and act like he's really supposed to be in office, that's quite a joke to me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But I want to say this about the foreign policy that y'all are talking about. | |
| I don't even know what foreign policy he has. | ||
| It makes no sense his foreign policy that he's just going to go take over people's land and name it after Americans. | ||
| That no, we don't own that land, and you know we don't. | ||
| And we're the only ones acting like we own it. | ||
| Nobody else is recognizing what Trump is talking about. | ||
| So all these people acting like Trump came in and he's doing it. | ||
| He's not doing nothing. | ||
| You must miss what all the other presidents are saying. | ||
| Donald Trump is one. | ||
| Bruce is in Summitville, Indiana on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Bruce. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Thanks for taking the call. | ||
| On the budget and a lot of these cuts that's being done, I think one of our biggest problems is the fact that the Democrat and Republican parties are allowed to come in and tell the congressmen and senators how to vote on stuff. | ||
| We did not elect that party. | ||
| It was not on the ballot. | ||
| You can vote for everybody in a party, but the party itself is not elected, just like they complain about people that's appointed by President Trump. | ||
| And, Bruce, how do you feel about President Trump's foreign policy positions? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mostly I like it. | |
| On the food that they say is possibly might spoil, this is something that's been going on for a long, long time. | ||
| I grew up on a farm, and this is nothing new. | ||
|
unidentified
|
People just don't know it. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Lee is in Buford, Georgia, on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Lee. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| I want to agree with the caller from Virginia that just called. | ||
| It is unfortunate that C-SPAN is very Democratic. | ||
| They have been for a long time. | ||
| And unfortunately, so is the PBS stations in the news. | ||
| And I do wish that you all would have more Republicans on so that you would get the other side of viewpoint and that people would educate themselves more when they complain about executive orders and things that President Trump has done. | ||
| If they just look at history, they will see that other presidents have done the same thing. | ||
| Like the USAID was an executive order put in place by President John Kennedy. | ||
| So they're complaining that President Trump can't take away USAID with an executive order. | ||
| That's unconstitutional, but it was implemented by an executive order. | ||
| So they really need to look into the history better before they comment. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| William is in Raleigh, North Carolina on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, William. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Hope you're doing okay, Kimberly. | ||
| This is my first time, so I'd like to say that I hope enough Americans will speak out against Trump's policy with Ukraine. | ||
| And also, his Gaza policy is only to make he and Musk extremely rich people. | ||
| And I hope that Congress can get Trump and Musk before them to answer questions about what they're doing, especially with the Treasury Department. | ||
| That's all I have to say. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Jim is in Winter Park, Florida on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Jim. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| You know, a couple of calls back, a gentleman called in and talked about the waste and stuff that's happening with the food at the ports and in warehouses and stuff. | ||
| I got a novel idea. | ||
| And the food is already paid for, obviously, because USAID bought it and it was forced to be shipping it. | ||
| Why don't we just get those foods out of the warehouses and distribute it to Americans who are needing food? | ||
| We have homeless shelters where they need food. | ||
| We have areas where people are living on the streets. | ||
| They need food. | ||
| We also have North Carolina and Los Angeles. | ||
| These people have been blown out of their houses and they need food. | ||
| And what do we do? | ||
| Now, we'll let it sit there and rot because we're the Democrats. | ||
| You people just go sit in the corner, pay your taxes, shut your mouth, because we need our kickbacks. | ||
| I'm sick of this government. | ||
| I think Doge is the best thing in the world. | ||
| I saw something I hope it's going to happen. | ||
| They talked about looking at like Nancy Pelosi, who's worth $252 million on a $200,000 paycheck per year. | ||
| And Elizabeth Warren, who's $12 million, worth $12 million on a $200,000 paycheck. | ||
| The numbers don't add up. | ||
| The money just doesn't fall over the door. | ||
| If they have a money tree in their backyard, they should sell it. | ||
| Sell some of the droplings out to people that can really use the money. | ||
| But no, we've got to cover this all up. | ||
| And Chris Coons is just an outright jerk. | ||
| And thank you for listening to me, and have a good day. | ||
| Jared is in Wilmington, Delaware on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Jared. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| I just wanted to maybe get these Republicans hands right because the question is about Trump's foreign policy. | ||
| If someone says he's doing policy through stress, It's not strong. | ||
| Letting Kuwait take 40% of Ukraine with Josh Strong and all. | ||
| Taking over Gaza, kicking people who have been, you know, really, really, really mild through these past couple of years, kicking them out of their home land, taking it. | ||
| He said he was going to keep it and invest all this money that the Republicans want to spend this, you know, they're trying to save the Doge. | ||
| He wants to reinvest that to go down Gaza to build Greenland. | ||
| Like, come on, guys. | ||
| It's come on. | ||
| Things are at the highest they have ever been. | ||
| What happened to lowering prices, lowering gas prices? | ||
| Gas is going down, groceries aren't going down. | ||
| He's doing this conquest thing in Greenland and again, in Ghana, and the Panama Canal. | ||
| Those things say it is a 51st century state. | ||
| Those things aren't free. | ||
| Those things aren't going to be cheap. | ||
| So all this money that he's cooling for finding with Doge and posting online, no foreign intelligence. | ||
| Come on, guys. | ||
| He's posting no foreign intelligence information on a public website. | ||
| Makes no sense. | ||
| This is not smart. | ||
| It's not intelligent. | ||
| It's not strong. | ||
| It's dumb. | ||
| You guys voted for that dummy that we saw as a dummy when we lost a million people during COVID. | ||
| We're just about out of time. | ||
| I'm going to get to one more caller for our segment. | ||
| Mike is in Vessemer City, North Carolina, on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Mike. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Yes, why are the Democrats so tore up about Doge? | ||
| Because you think about it, it's a Democratic slush fund. | ||
| I mean, back when this first started, it was for helping people that was displaced by massive earthquakes, hurricanes, typhoons, starvation, you know, droughts and everything like that. | ||
| You mean when USAID was first started? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| It was for that. | ||
| But after years and years of abuse and not oversee, now it's become an arm of the Democrat crazies. | ||
| You know, like, what is this? | ||
| Teaching transgender in these foreign countries. | ||
| These foreign countries don't do that. | ||
| The Democrats are using it to pass their agenda in other countries. | ||
| But these other countries don't even believe in that stuff and they don't need to. | ||
| I mean, it's just crazy. | ||
| And look how much, and it's the slush fund. | ||
| I mean, you've got like $15 million going for condoms in Mozambique and stuff. | ||
| I mean, the last thing you can go to in one of these gas station restrooms to get one for a dollar. | ||
| But it's coming back to a slush fund, probably in the Cayman Islands or somewhere for these Democrats. | ||
| And they always talk about the billionaires, you know, the billionaire Musk and all that and Zuckerberg. | ||
| But you don't never hear the Democrat callers calling in about George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, those billionaires that are funding their programs and their side of the party. | ||
| And they was all in for the Zuckerbucks during the 2020 election. | ||
| But once he came over and got reality brain-wise, now he is on the D-list like Musk and Zuckerberg. | ||
| Now, one other thing before you cut me off, the speech that JD Vance done over in Munich hit it right on the money. | ||
| And you see these people's faces from the mass immigration to trying to silence their opposition and overthrow the Romanian election. | ||
| And look at this. | ||
| The party that's winning coming in real close first in Germany. | ||
| So, Mike, I'm going to have to end it there because we're out of time for our segment. | ||
| But thank you for everyone who called in. | ||
| Coming up on Washington Journal, James Antel, who's the executive editor of Washington Examiner magazine, is going to join us to discuss President Trump's legislative agenda, divisions within the GOP, and Congressional Democrats' opposition strategy. | ||
| And later, public historian and author Jason Steinauer will discuss similarities and comparisons between President Trump and President William McKinley, who served from 1897 to 1901. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We'll be right back commemorate President's Day by shopping online at c-spanshop.org where you can save up to 25% on apparel, accessories, and drinkware. | |
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| C-SPAN, created by cable. | ||
| Tonight, on C-SPAN's Q&A, former mafia associate Luis Ferrante shares his book, Borgata, Clash of Titans, Volume 2 of his history of the American mafia from 1960 to 1985. | ||
| In the first of a two-part interview, he gives a history of the mafia in America, discusses Attorney General Robert Kennedy's war against organized crime, and the involvement that he says the mafia had in the 1960 election and 1963 assassination of President John Kennedy. | ||
| Robert F. Kennedy becomes Attorney General for his brother, and that becomes Clash of Titans. | ||
| That's the first time there's a massive concentrated attack on the mafia from someone who holds all of the almost unlimited resources of the United States government at his disposal. | ||
| And that's when the mafia finally feels threatened. | ||
| It's a life or death situation. | ||
| Louis Ferrante with his book, Borgata, Clash of Titans, tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN's Q ⁇ A. You can listen to Q&A and all of our podcasts on our free C-SPAN Now app. | ||
| All this week, watch C-SPAN's new Members of Congress series, where we speak with both Republicans and Democrats about their early lives, previous careers, families, and why they decided to run for office. | ||
| On Monday, at 9.30 p.m. Eastern, our interviews include Democratic Congresswoman Janelle Bynum, the first African-American ever elected to Congress from Oregon. | ||
| My mother graduated in 1970 from one of the last segregated high schools in the state and the country, rather, in South Carolina. | ||
| And I think about all of the opportunities that weren't afforded her, you know, coming out of segregation. | ||
| And I bring that perspective to Oregon, saying, you know, my mom was a rural kid that didn't have a lot of opportunities, but I'm going to make sure that I bring that forth for all of the kids in Oregon. | ||
| Watch new members of Congress all this week, starting at 9.30 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| We are joined now by Jim Antle, who's the executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine. | ||
| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| So what are some of the major accomplishments that you've seen in the first month of the Trump administration? | ||
| Well, they've done this sort of marathon session of executive orders. | ||
| There have been all of these executive actions. | ||
| I think they came in much better prepared than they were in 2017. | ||
| So a lot of things that they've tried to do is one, roll back various things that the Biden administration accomplished through executive orders. | ||
| That's now become a tradition as we change administrations between parties is that there are a series of things that are implemented by executive order and then the other party comes in and reverses all of those. | ||
| So that's one of the things they've done. | ||
| The diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives of the Biden administration have all been reversed. | ||
| A lot of the abortion-related executive orders of the Biden administration have been reversed and some executive orders imposing restrictions on taxpayer-funded taxpayer funding of abortion have been reinstated. | ||
| That had last been in effect in the previous Trump administration. | ||
| A lot of things are being done to freeze foreign aid, freeze various spending that they argue is within the purview of the executive branch of government and not things that are statutorily required, such as entitlements. | ||
| And Doge has obviously been, the Department of Government Efficiency has obviously been a pretty big flashpoint, a source of controversy, | ||
| but a source of enthusiasm for a lot of people who voted for President Trump and what they're trying to do to highlight waste, but also sort of cut back various agencies that they don't believe aligns with the Trump administration's agenda is a pretty big part of what they're trying to do. | ||
| One of your recent pieces for Washington Examiner headline, Lights, Camera Action, Trump and his TV savvy team, Blanket the Airways. | ||
| Can you talk a little bit about the team that you're referencing and if you see this Trump team as more media savvy than the first term and what some of the differences are? | ||
| Yeah, so I mean I think obviously President Trump comes from a television background himself. | ||
| He was a reality TV star. | ||
| Even as a real estate developer, his relationship with the BD was a big part of how he built the family brand and his personal brand. | ||
| So he's always been a pretty big TV presence and he's always valued that and the people working for him. | ||
| But if you look at a lot of the people that he's put into senior positions in this administration in this term, they are people who share that background. | ||
| They have extensive experience on television. | ||
| Many of them are fairly skilled communicators. | ||
| I think that showed in their confirmation hearings. | ||
| And, you know, it's also a source of criticism for some of these people is that many said, you know, are the people who are good at speaking on television necessarily equipped to run these massive bureaucracies, which in most cases, when you're talking about cabinet-level agencies, these are very big bureaucratic operations and require a certain level of managerial skill. | ||
| So I think there were a lot of TV people in the first administration, but I think they've really, there's a lot more now. | ||
| And I think there's a strategy of sort of flooding the zone, of flooding the airwaves, of getting the message out there, and also making it very difficult for their critics and also for the press covering them to really hone in on any specific targets because there's just so much going on. | ||
| One of the many things you mentioned, Doge, getting so much attention. | ||
| You wrote last week, President Donald Trump did a remarkable thing earlier this week. | ||
| He let Elon Musk take reporters' questions about the Department of Government Efficiency live from the Oval Office. | ||
| What's your opinion on Trump's relationship with Elon Musk and the appeal of this dynamic? | ||
| Well, it's interesting because the perception has always been that Trump doesn't like to share the spotlight with other people, that this is the Donald Trump show and he's the star and everybody else is sort of in a supporting role. | ||
| And Elon Musk isn't the only person who has sort of really been out front. | ||
| I mean, I think Vice President JD Vance and some others also have been pretty prominent. | ||
| But Musk has definitely been allowed to be a very public face of the Trump administration. | ||
| He's been given a policy portfolio that's gotten a lot of attention. | ||
| And the question has been: is there going to come a point where, you know, as Democrats focus on Musk as really even more than they are the president, as the basis of a lot of their criticism of this administration, is he the real president? | ||
| Is he the co-president, the shadow president? | ||
| Does there come a point where that creates a rift in the relationship between Trump and Musk? | ||
| We haven't seen that happen yet. | ||
| And that's been a pretty intentional strategy by some Democrats to try to drive that rift. | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| I think Democrats would like to get Trump upset with Musk, but I think because it's such a detentional strategy, I think Trump is aware of it himself. | ||
| So that has perhaps been one of the reasons why all of the disproportionate attention toward Musk hasn't really raised Trump's hackles yet. | ||
| But, you know, it's something to watch. | ||
| I mean, at the moment, there are certain things that Musk is doing that don't poll well. | ||
| Some of it does, but Musk himself, being a billionaire, richest man in the world, focused on this spending. | ||
| You know, there's a possibility with Trump having some of the best poll numbers he's had since he's entered national politics, there's a possibility that Musk is taking all of the hits right now. | ||
| Now, you mentioned that some of the things that Musk is doing don't poll well, but some of them have been challenged legally as well. | ||
| Last week, Musk and several Trump allies also attacked federal judges who have blocked some of the president's biggest initiatives, including ending birthright citizenship and federal spending cuts and some of the freezes. | ||
| And in some cases, they're questioning the independence of the judiciary. | ||
| Do you feel like federal courts are overstepping their limits in their reaction to halting Trump's initiatives? | ||
| I mean, I think whenever you have sort of lower courts doing nationwide injunctions on federal policies, you're going to get questions about whether they're overstepping their bounds, whether they're overstepping their jurisdiction. | ||
| But some of this is quite simply, you know, the constitutional design is for the various branches of government to want to protect their powers and their sort of their priorities. | ||
| And the judiciary is going to try to contest anything that the Trump administration is going to do that they feel is pushing the envelope on how far executive power is going to go. | ||
| And the Trump administration is obviously going to defend the most expansive view of executive power that they can. | ||
| And that is these sort of self-interested institutional incentives are a big part of how checks and balances work under the constitutional design. | ||
| On Friday on Washington Journal, we had on David Super, who's a constitutional law professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. | ||
| And he was discussing the legality of President Trump and Elon Musk's Doge efforts. | ||
| And we want to play a clip of him talking about protections for civil servants as well as Musk's access to sensitive personal data. | ||
| Let's listen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, the career civil servants that have managed the Treasury Department's checkbook, as it were, for decades and decades, including under the first Trump administration, are subject to extraordinarily severe security clearances. | |
| They're checked all the time, closely monitored, and heavily trained in cybersecurity. | ||
| The people that are being brought in, we know nothing about them. | ||
| All media reports suggest they're quite young, they're quite inexperienced, there's no indication that they've received training in data security, and this makes many people very much afraid. | ||
| Whatever one feels about the policies that Mr. Trump, Mr. Musk are pursuing, they don't need access to sensitive information to do that. | ||
| Knowing my bank account number will not help them resolve anything about government spending. | ||
| If there's a program that needs to be shut down, ask Congress to shut it down, but don't go into the personal information. | ||
| There is a Privacy Act that provides some protection against mishandled data that's given to the government. | ||
| I certainly wouldn't presume to offer any individual any advice about that, but in some instances there may be litigation, yes. | ||
| I'd like to get your response to that idea and whether or not you trust Elon Musk and approve of his having access to that kind of data. | ||
| Well, the government already has access to this kind of data. | ||
| So the question is, I think there are some benefits to when you're trying to audit what the government is doing, to having people who are outsiders, people who are coming from outside of the federal institutions doing that kind of work. | ||
| But of course, there are obviously risks, you know, even beyond personal data. | ||
| You know, when they're looking at the grants, when they're reviewing the grants, do they have enough background in how they're written, in how they're structured, to really know what they're looking at? | ||
| Those are the sorts of things, the questions that I think people are raising about Doge. | ||
| But I do think, you know, you have to, on some level, this was something that was promised on the campaign. | ||
| The elected officials have to hold the appointed officials accountable. | ||
| And then if the voters don't like what they're doing, they can make a different choice. | ||
| Speaking of promises on the campaign trail, President Trump campaigned with a pledge to rapidly reduce prices, but inflation rose in January. | ||
| I'm looking at the CNBC article, consumer prices up half a percent in January, higher than expected as the annual rate rose to 3%, much of that in housing and food prices, although much of the food price increase was basically just eggs. | ||
| But what now? | ||
| You know, this was a big part of the, one of the reasons that many Americans voted for Trump was concern about inflation. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I don't know how much you can hold Trump responsible for January inflation given that he wasn't president for most of it. | ||
| But ultimately, yes, he was elected in large part because inflation was so high that the cost of living during the Biden administration had gotten so high even after the inflation rate began to decline from the 41-year high. | ||
| And he's made fairly explicit promises that he's going to provide some relief. | ||
| So there's going to come a point in time where voters either feel that or they don't. | ||
| And that's one of those sorts of promises that very difficult to really message around. | ||
| Either, you know, the prices either go up or they go down. | ||
| The Trump administration believes that there are various things that they could do through the increase of energy production that will lower energy costs and therefore lower the costs of other associated goods. | ||
| So that energy is a big driver of why certain things cost so much. | ||
| The other thing that they're running on is a certain degree of spending restraint, that the major driver of inflation, I mean, inflation is largely a monetary and fiscal policy problem. | ||
| If you're not spending at inflationary rates, that that should over time also provide some level of relief. | ||
| But by virtue of making really specific promises around prices, you know, you're putting yourself at risk of not being able to keep those promises. | ||
| Well, let's get to some callers so we can hear your questions for Jim Antle. | ||
| Our number for Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| For Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| And for Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| Let's start with Marion in Grovetown, Georgia on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Marion. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| I have two things to say. | ||
| I just put in my tax returns, and it would be, you know, I'm supposed to get a refund. | ||
| And I heard Elon Musk has just gone into the IRS on Thursday. | ||
| I don't like the idea that the Trump administration has made so many of us feeling socially scared for what's going to happen to our money. | ||
| It's really concerning. | ||
| Another thing that is a huge concern to me and has been ever since I've heard about the kids that work for Elon Musk, they have, I mean, we know nothing really about them other than one of them has been fired for leaking information where he worked before. | ||
| But what's going to happen in a few years when we, since we know nothing about these kids, they're being, you know, they're being defended and we're not allowed to know anything, apparently. | ||
| What's going to happen in two years if one of these kids, one of these 19, 20 year olds, has copied this information, holding on to it, and then in a couple years sells it? | ||
| We have, I mean, we're going to be screwed. | ||
| And this is my concern. | ||
| They tried to get Elon Musk, they subpoenaed Elon Musk, and the Republicans said no. | ||
| They wouldn't let him come and answer questions. | ||
| So they didn't actually subpoena him. | ||
| There was an effort to subpoena him to appear before a committee, but that effort failed. | ||
| I want to let Jim respond to this idea of what will happen if some of the data that Elon Musk and his Doge team have access to is later leaked and the fear that people have that this information is not being taken care of securely. | ||
| Well, obviously, if that happens, there'll be political accountability for that. | ||
| You know, we've had government agencies, you know, attempts to hack government agencies in the past. | ||
| Information has been compromised in the past. | ||
| This would be something that's very closely tied to the Trump administration. | ||
| These are Trump appointees. | ||
| So it would be difficult for the administration to escape accountability for that if that were something that were going to happen. | ||
| All right, let's go to another call. | ||
| Tom is in Spring Hill, Florida on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Tom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning, sir. | |
| I just want to say one thing. | ||
| People are complaining about inflation and prices, but what they fail to realize is these bills that are put on the House and Senate are going to have to pass, like for more output of petroleum oil, fracking, the transportation that brings these goods and services. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's going to be all on these bills if they're able to pass them to lower the prices for consumer products and all that. | |
| First, you've got to lower the energy costs, the gas prices, more drilling, more fracking, which Biden refused to do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Don't worry about these tariffs because all they're going to do is use these to negotiate with other countries. | |
| We've been getting ripped off for years with these tariffs. | ||
| We have to focus on these two bills that need to be passed House and Senate. | ||
| You'll never get cooperation from the Democrats, but hopefully with Republicans should stick together and get these two bills passed. | ||
| Another thing, they want to keep on ticking on Elon Musk and all these other people working for Trump. | ||
| They fail to realize a rich man, basic economics 101, a rich man will always put people to work. | ||
| A poor man will just won't do anything for anybody. | ||
| You've got to let these men do their job, what they're assigned to do. | ||
| Too much government waste and all these handouts needs to stop it. | ||
| It needs to stop now. | ||
| Your thoughts on Tom's points? | ||
| Well, I mean, I think so. | ||
| The Trump administration has come out very quickly with a lot of executive orders, but there will come a point in time where legislation needs to be passed and legislation both to keep the government funded and running for the debt ceiling, | ||
| but also in general, if you want things that you're doing to remain in place and not be so easily reversed by the next Democratic administration, any new Democratic president can reverse much of what's being done by executive orders by issuing their own executive orders. | ||
| So there's going to have to come a time where there's some legislation that happens. | ||
| And the question will be with such a narrow majority in the House. | ||
| I think the Senate, with its somewhat larger majority, has already delivered on a number of Trump's confirmations. | ||
| So there seems to be enough unity there. | ||
| With that small margin in the House, will they have the unity that they need to actually get things done? | ||
| And that remains, I think, an open question. | ||
| Jim is in Newburgh, Indiana, on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Jim. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| I see two parties constantly in a fight in being an independent. | ||
| I think what voters should be questioning their previous congressmen and representatives. | ||
| Everything that Doge is doing was available before Donald Trump got elected. | ||
| And if you don't like Donald Trump, then you should be asking your representatives, why weren't they telling you about waste in the government, which has, to this point, admittedly, everyone seems to know about it, but no one was doing anything about it. | ||
| And so it's not necessarily that I like the process that's going on, but this is a job Congress should have been doing and for decades haven't done it. | ||
| And so now both parties own this thing, and yet no congressmen or senators have come out like the old Golden Fleece Awards. | ||
| And in educated America, it's been a party thing. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, he mentions the Golden Fleece Awards. | ||
| And Senator Tom Coburn, I think, was the last person to do something similar to those. | ||
| I mentioned earlier the fact that the... | ||
| You want to explain what that was, though? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was... | |
| It was, I think it was William Proxmire, who was a senator from Democratic Senator from Wisconsin, if I recall correctly. | ||
| But the Golden Fleece Awards were basically he would identify certain particularly extravagant or wasteful spending, maybe some pork barrel projects, maybe some kind of study that on its face seems a little bit absurd. | ||
| And he would designate one of these wasteful spending projects a year and give it this award. | ||
| And it would get a lot of press attention that he did that. | ||
| And people would then know about certain wasteful spending initiatives that were going on in the federal government. | ||
| I think a big thing, though, I mentioned earlier that the different branches of government sort of compete to hold their power and that's an important part of the constitutional system. | ||
| It checks and balances. | ||
| One of the reasons why that has failed in recent years is that the legislative branch, the Congress, has not really been very dedicated to safeguarding its powers. | ||
| It's been very content to let the executive and judicial branches usurp a lot of legislative powers. | ||
| And it seems that many members of Congress either want a lifetime membership and are not necessarily that interested in protecting the powers of the institution. | ||
| They want to run for some other higher office. | ||
| Or they even at this point aspire to internet or media celebrity. | ||
| And that's really a part in our constitutional system that's not working the way it was intended because Congress is not really safeguarding its powers in the way that I think the founders supposed. | ||
| Speaking of members of Congress, last week, Republican Senate Leader John Thune was asked about the legal actions against the Trump administration that we've been discussing and whether or not the Trump administration should comply with future legal rulings. | ||
| And here's that exchange. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Can I get your reaction to JD Vance's comment over the weekend that judges are not allowed to control the legitimate power of the executive? | |
| Do you agree with that? | ||
| And do you think the president and his administration should comply with federal court rulings? | ||
| Well, I think what you're seeing right now is the natural give and take between branches of the government. | ||
| We have three branches to our government, as you all know, and the courts have a way of mediating or refereeing, if you will, some of the disputes between the Article I and Article II branches of the government. | ||
| And I think that's what you're seeing here. | ||
| And I think this is a process that will continue to play out. | ||
| But do I believe that the courts have a very valid role and need to be listened to and heard in that process? | ||
| The answer is yes. | ||
| What is the role for Congress in this ongoing debate, do you think? | ||
| Well, one, I mean, Congress really is the branch of government that spending is entrusted to under the Constitution. | ||
| So, you know, Congress should be playing a leading role in getting spending under control, identifying whatever waste is going on in a limited time. | ||
| That's one of the fundamental questions in some of these legal challenges that the President is, according to some of these challenges, trying to stop legally authorized spending appropriated by Congress. | ||
| Well, that is one of the legal questions. | ||
| Is he doing that? | ||
| To what degree are statutes that were passed limiting the president's impoundment powers, which were fairly well accepted until 1974. | ||
| To what degree was that overstepping their constitutional bounds? | ||
| But there's also lots of stuff that one runs on autopilot and two has been created by executive order that really Congress itself should have been trying to contest and trying to maintain its control of the spending process. | ||
| And Congress has generally been willing to punt all of these questions to the executive branch and to the judicial branch. | ||
| Let's get back to your question. | ||
| Sherry is in Desert Hot Springs, California on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Sherry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Please go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was wondering if there's a simple answer to all the cutbacks that are happening. | |
| The amount of money, millions of dollars that they're saying they cut out of this, they cut out of that. | ||
| And that is supposed to be a good seeing. | ||
| That's what everybody wanted, cut back on all these things, millions of dollars. | ||
| Where does all that money go if it's now gone from these things they wanted cut? | ||
| I hope that makes sense. | ||
| So this is an interesting question. | ||
| If they do indeed make all of these cuts that they're asking about, where does that money go? | ||
| Well, there's a possibility Congress passes rescission packages and then this money is actually cut out of the federal budget. | ||
| There's also the possibility that the money, if they allow them to do some version of impoundment, there's a possibility that this money just sits out there unspent. | ||
| And so Congress would then have to try to identify, or the executive branch may try to, and then there will be likely legal challenges around that if the executive branch tries to spend the money in ways that differ from congressional appropriations because at this point, | ||
| so a big thing, a big question is how much of what Doge does will be identifying things for Congress to act on versus how much does the executive branch, based on Doge's recommendations or even Doge acting in and of itself, how much of this is really done by the executive branch. | ||
| I don't think we know the answer to that. | ||
| I think legally and constitutionally the correct course of action is for most of these decisions to be made by Congress. | ||
| But we've had executive branch. | ||
| There was the Grace Commission under the Reagan administration. | ||
| There was Al Gore's reinventing government project. | ||
| There was a commission under the Obama administration. | ||
| So it's not unheard of for there to be some kind of, whether it's a blue ribbon commission or a congressionally created task force or a presidentially appointed group of people to go in and try to find things that they don't want the government to spend money on. | ||
| But the role of Congress in actually making those decisions is really part of the constitutional design. | ||
| Nicole is in Basking Ridge, New Jersey on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Nicole. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Just two points. | ||
| Very quickly, there's a lot of ire about the young people that are working for Elon Musk who are going through and auditing the government, including places like the Treasury and the Department of Education. | ||
| I just want to point out that on January 9th, it was reported that our school had a data breach, which affected the student information and staff information for 50 million people. | ||
| And we don't necessarily know where that information went, whose possession that information is in. | ||
| So there are a number of breaches that happen. | ||
| And even on December 29th, we learned that China hacked Janet Yellen's computers in the U.S. Treasury. | ||
| There doesn't seem to be a big outcry about that. | ||
| So that to me is ironic. | ||
| I appreciate that we have the Washington Examiner on and the editor. | ||
| I'm hoping that there's more investigative journalism that follows these leaks and takes a different stance. | ||
| I think many people in the country are really kind of frustrated with the strongly worded letters for the people that are committing crimes in Congress. | ||
| And we want to see people really, something potentially a little bit more just than just being censured or called out for their behaviors, the crimes that they're committing. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Any thoughts? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, as I said earlier, I think, you know, we've seen data breaches in government before, and there often isn't any real accountability for it. | ||
| You know, it's not necessarily tied to any specific administration. | ||
| I think that if the people Elon Musk is hiring to do Doge work mishandle any data, I think the connection to political actors and who you can hold responsible is pretty clear in a way that, you know, say if some random agency compromises some data, maybe we haven't had accountability for that in the past. | ||
| Gus is in Shreveport, Louisiana on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Gus. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| I think we blame, I'm an 82-year-old vet, and I think we spent too much time trying to blame each other, and it ends up nobody's fault, it sounds like. | ||
| But first of all, I think yesteryear we sent in order to fight the unions, everything got sent overseas for that cheap labor, and now they're just coming back to slap us. | ||
| But yet it ain't nobody's fault. | ||
| And thank you for letting me vet my piece. | ||
| I don't know if you have any follow-up points to what Gus said, or should we go? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the things that President Trump was elected to do is to try to reshore some American jobs. | ||
| And that's part of what he's intending to do with the tariffs. | ||
| It's part of what he's intending to do with some of his negotiations with foreign governments. | ||
| I think there is a general view that portions of the American industrial base were shifted overseas. | ||
| And while there might have been some price benefits to that, there are obviously some costs associated with that as well. | ||
| We have a question from J.D. Redding, who asks on X, given that Project 2025 was crafted by many former Trump officials and think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, how do you reconcile its more radical proposals? | ||
| Do these measures not risk centralizing power contrary to conservative ideals of checks and balances? | ||
| Well, it depends on what specifically you're talking about. | ||
| So Heritage Foundation has always given a sort of agenda and waiting for any Republican who gets elected president. | ||
| And Project 2025 was their version of this for a potential and now actual Trump administration. | ||
| And I think given that you have a lot of people who are serving in the administration who are involved in that, it's certainly valid to look at those proposals as possible things that the Trump administration will do. | ||
| Already in some cases, they are things that the Trump administration has done. | ||
| But I do think they're going to pick from them a la carte rather than this is just a list of stuff and now we have it and we're going to do it. | ||
| I think there are certain things from that set of proposals that are going to get implemented and certain things that won't be. | ||
| Another question from X. Congressman Al Green has brought up a desire to impeach. | ||
| Is the President doing anything that could be deemed impeachable? | ||
| Well, I mean, technically anything that you could get a majority of the House to vote for an article of impeachment on is impeachable, right? | ||
| The Constitution says that high crimes and misdemeanors are impeachable offenses, but then does not go on to define what constitute high crimes and misdemeanors. | ||
| We have, until relatively recently in U.S. history, thought that impeachment was for particularly extreme cases, and we don't do it very often. | ||
| Since House Republicans impeached Bill Clinton in the late 90s, impeachment has become a much more common thing, at least in the House level, but we've never had an actual successful impeachment in terms of getting a conviction in the Senate. | ||
| So right now, I would say there is no article of impeachment against President Trump that could, well, even get through the House Judiciary Committee, most likely, but certainly couldn't get a majority in the House, and there'd be no hope of convicting him in the Senate. | ||
| Richard is in Augusta, Maine, on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Richard. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| I'm glad you took my call. | ||
| And I'm glad that you showed that guy that was on there Friday, because I tried to get through there. | ||
| And he was talking about how Trump, you know, all this stuff should be going through Congress and stuff like that. | ||
| Well, when Biden was in office, all the people were on the Mexico side of the border. | ||
| And when he took office, he opened the border and let all these people come across the border and flying them and busting them all over. | ||
| And we spent billions of dollars on these people. | ||
| Congress didn't approve that. | ||
| He did all kinds of stuff without Congress's approval. | ||
| And one of the things that guy also said was he said, well, we got Inspector General whose job it is to do that. | ||
| And Trump fired them. | ||
| Of course he fired them. | ||
| For four years, they hadn't been doing their job. | ||
| I mean, you know, you've got to expect if you're not doing your job, you're going to get fired. | ||
| So, and Elon Musk is doing what these people should have been doing all along. | ||
| And now they're criticizing Musk. | ||
| It's like, we've got to cut waste, no matter what. | ||
| We definitely got to cut waste. | ||
| We shouldn't be giving billions of dollars to people who aren't even U.S. citizens. | ||
| I'm a veteran and I'm on Social Security. | ||
| I don't get free health care. | ||
| I don't get free housing. | ||
| I don't get any of that stuff that these people who can illegally cross the border are getting. | ||
| So Richard, I want to give Jim a chance to respond to your points. | ||
| Well, I should have mentioned immigration earlier because that's one of the biggest things that the Trump administration has done to try to be different from the Biden administration is that they've various Biden initiatives, some of which were reversing previous Trump initiatives. | ||
| But in terms of getting rid of catch and release, in terms of various enforcement priorities for removing people from the country who are in the country illegally, the Remain in Mexico policy for people applying for asylum and trying to get in the United States. | ||
| These are fairly substantial changes that were done through executive orders and are probably some of the biggest changes that Trump has implemented since taking office. | ||
| A question we received via text. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Will all of these cuts help to offset the well, she refers to President Trump as a turnup, The permanent tax cuts that are due to expire at the end of the year. | ||
| So this is Chass, an independent, an independent from Jacksonville, Florida. | ||
| This is referencing the expiration of several provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. | ||
| And Republicans have obviously expressed a desire to make some of these tax cuts permanent. | ||
| Yes, so there will be congressional action to try to extend the Trump tax cuts. | ||
| I think that there is no likelihood that they will all be allowed to expire, but there are certain provisions that are pretty hotly contested, including a reform that was in the initial act, the initial tax cuts on the salt deductions that a lot of blue state Republicans in particular would like to undo. | ||
| You know, Doge, when you're talking about the $1, $2 trillion that Musk has talked about, that would get you in the zone of that, but the likelihood is no, nothing of the size of those tax cuts would come from this effort. | ||
| Just for the information of the audience, the estimated cost of the tax cuts extending, if they were extended in their current form, would be about $4 trillion. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And, you know, like I say, I don't think you're going to get anywhere near $1 to $2 trillion from savings from Doge, and Congress would have to approve anything of that scale anyway. | ||
| But in addition to the $4 trillion, there's also talk of adding various provisions. | ||
| So if you get rid of the cap on the salt deductions, that costs you some revenue. | ||
| If you do no taxes on tips, that will cost you some revenue. | ||
| If you do no taxes on Social Security benefits, that will cost you some revenue. | ||
| And so some of these things, some of the higher tax rates, there may be some revenue you get back from how people respond to the economic incentives, but there is less of a supply-side effect to some of these other provisions that are being discussed. | ||
| Cy is in Plain View, New York, on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Cy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'd like to say that the reason we're losing sight of the reasons for these for Doge, if we do not cut, eventually the dollar will become worthless. | ||
| And everyone, a lot of people will lose their jobs. | ||
| And whatever money you have, you can chop off a few zeros. | ||
| The interest on the debt is astronomical. | ||
| If we keep going like this, there won't be a country. | ||
| We'll have a major depression. | ||
| So yes, no one likes to see people lose their jobs. | ||
| But sometimes when you have a cancer, some of the good cells unfortunately have to be extracted as well. | ||
| Also, I'd like to say that Nancy Pelosi in her district in San Francisco, they built some kind of walking path for $20 million. | ||
| So let's not lose sight of the big picture about why this is necessary. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Well, I mean, in the big picture, the problem is that we have more spending really at the demand, in many cases, of the voters than we have any political appetite to pay for through taxes. | ||
| And we have entitlement programs that we're unwilling to reform but don't long-term have any concrete way of paying for. | ||
| And Doge and various efforts at rooting out government waste can be helpful, but ultimately those basic fiscal realities are going to have to be addressed to really change the country's financial situation. | ||
| Well, that's all the time that we have for your calls on this segment, but thank you so much. | ||
| Jim Antle, the executive editor of Washington Examiner Magazine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for having me. | |
| Now, coming up later in our program, we'll hear from public historian and author Jason Steinauer, who will be here to discuss similarities and comparisons between President Trump and President William McKinley, who served from 1897 to 1901. | ||
| But up next, more of your calls and comments in Open Forum. | ||
| Our numbers for Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| For Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| While you're dialing in, we want you to know that there are more than 60 new members of Congress in the U.S. House of Representatives, and we'll meet many of them next week on C-SPAN. | ||
| Starting at 9.30 p.m. Eastern, we'll hear them talk about their lives, their past careers, and why they ran for Congress. | ||
| Here's some of what they had to say. | ||
| We have a history of public service in West Virginia. | ||
| My grandfather serving as the only three-term governor of the state of West Virginia, and my aunt currently serving in the United States Senate right now. | ||
| And then my cousin, who was in the House of Delegates. | ||
| So certainly we have a long family history of service in the state of West Virginia. | ||
| I'm certainly proud to be able to carry on that tradition. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And we're talking about Archmoor, the former governor, and Shelley Moore Capitos, the current senator from West Virginia. | |
| What did you learn from all those family members about public service? | ||
| Well, you know, when my grandfather was governor, I was quite young in his last term. | ||
| So a lot of it was for the learning process for me was that you could order anything you wanted in the governor's mansion to eat. | ||
| Other than that, not too much in terms of his actual service, but I did learn a lot from him in terms of his life and just talking about that. | ||
| He had served in World War II. | ||
| He was in combat. | ||
| He was wounded and Siegfried Line in Germany and what that did in terms of changing his life and his service to this nation and put him on that path. | ||
| He was not on that path before then and really felt like he had a calling towards it. | ||
| And obviously I talked to my Aunt Shelly all the time, Senator Capito, and she's been a real good sounding board for me in terms of how to get things done in this type of legislative body. | ||
| I served in the House previously and was also in the House of Delegates in West Virginia. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I started a nonprofit in 2012. | |
| It's called DIY Girls for Do-It-Yourself. | ||
| It's an after-school program, summer camp for young girls in my district starting at fifth grade where they're able to do a lot of hands-on tech and STEM projects. | ||
| The goal is to get them interested in careers in STEM and it has worked. | ||
|
unidentified
|
In the years it's existed we have hundreds of girls that are in college right now studying STEM. | |
| So in 2016 we lost my little brother Luke to a fentanyl overdose, fentanyl that's here and shouldn't have been. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And so we lost my little brother. | |
| He was 20 years old and it was tragic. | ||
| And I tell people it's like losing an arm and having to go through life without something that should be there that's not. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So it drove me to do this and to run for Congress. | |
| That's why I'm here. | ||
| Well I'm a longtime trial attorney. | ||
| I've been practicing law in Texas for 33 years representing people in their times of need and when they've had a problem usually against a corporation or insurance company or something along those lines. | ||
| And then I'm married. | ||
| My wife's a gastrologist. | ||
| And so we have a split household on Republican, not Republican and Democrat, but lawyer and doctor, which I think in some contexts is more contentious. | ||
| I have two sons, Nicholas and Benjamin, and they're 22 and 24 and working their way up through life and just really excited to be here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You are the first openly LGBTQ member representing Texas ever. | |
| What does that mean to you? | ||
| What do you think it means to others? | ||
| Well, it's a huge honor and it's something and a responsibility. | ||
| You know, there are, Texas has a significant LGBTQ population and it's demonstrative that, you know, you can win in hard states and we must win in hard states for our equality to ultimately be achieved. | ||
| And also, just to put yourself out there, don't shut yourself down because you think you can't win. | ||
| You know, I did that to myself. | ||
| I never thought I could win in Texas as an LGBTQ person. | ||
| But here I am. | ||
| I flipped a state House seat in 2018. | ||
| I'm the first Democrat to hold it in 40 years. | ||
| Now I'm a member of Congress and I just think it's awesome. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I grew up in an era in which the Vietnam War during high school and the Watergate scandal during my college years really transfixed attention in my generation on what was happening in government and politics. | |
| I didn't envision that I'd ever be here in Washington. | ||
| I thought that my service would be at a more localized level. | ||
| But, you know, one road led to another over an extended period of time. | ||
| But we would talk about politics at the dinner table because of Vietnam and what was happening in those days. | ||
| Very tumultuous year of 1968. | ||
| It's a long time ago. | ||
| I was a tweener in those days. | ||
| And then, of course, during college, the debate about what was happening at Watergate was overwhelming. | ||
| And so it sparked an interest in politics that might be a little unique for that generation. | ||
| Tonight, on C-SPAN's Q ⁇ A, former mafia associate Louis Ferrante shares his book, Borgata, Clash of Titans, Volume 2 of his history of the American Mafia from 1960 to 1985. | ||
| In the first of a two-part interview, he gives a history of the mafia in America, discusses Attorney General Robert Kennedy's war against organized crime, and the involvement that he says the mafia had in the 1960 election and 1963 assassination of President John Kennedy. | ||
| Robert F. Kennedy becomes Attorney General for his brother, and that becomes Clash of Titans. | ||
| That's the first time there's a massive concentrated attack on the mafia from someone who holds all of the almost unlimited resources of the United States government at his disposal. | ||
| And that's when the mafia finally feels threatened. | ||
| It's a life or death situation. | ||
| Louis Ferrante with his book, Borgata, Clash of Titans, tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN's Q ⁇ A. You can listen to Q&A and all of our podcasts on our free C-SPAN Now app. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| We're in an open forum ready to hear your comments about the news of this week or public policy in general. | ||
| In the foreign policy dimension, there's continuing fallout from the comments of Vice President JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference last week. | ||
| Here's a headline in the Washington Post. | ||
| German leader rebukes Vance. | ||
| Boosting far right draws Scholz's ire. | ||
| German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Saturday blasted Vice President JD Vance for his support of the far right in a country that gave rise to Adolf Hitler, accusing the American vice president of interfering in domestic affairs less than 10 days before national elections. | ||
| Vance's denunciation of efforts by the German establishment to keep the far right out of power sparked a wave of condemnation from senior officials and pundits, some of whom saw a U.S. administration actively promoting political extremism in the West. | ||
| And let's look at some of those comments that Vice President JD Vance made while attending the Munich Security Conference. | ||
| This is a portion from Friday. | ||
| Today, almost one in five people living in this country moved here from abroad. | ||
| That is, of course, an all-time high. | ||
| It's a similar number, by the way, in the United States, also an all-time high. | ||
| The number of immigrants who entered the EU from non-EU countries doubled between 2021 and 2022 alone, and of course it's gotten much higher since. | ||
| And we know the situation, it didn't materialize in a vacuum. | ||
| It's the result of a series of conscious decisions made by politicians all over the continent and others across the world over the span of a decade. | ||
| We saw the horrors wrought by these decisions yesterday in this very city. | ||
| And of course, I can't bring it up again without thinking about the terrible victims who had a beautiful winter day in Munich ruined. | ||
| Our thoughts and prayers are with them and will remain with them. | ||
| But why did this happen in the first place? | ||
| It's a terrible story, but it's one we've heard way too many times in Europe and unfortunately too many times in the United States as well. | ||
| An asylum seeker, often a young man in his mid-20s, already known to police, rams a car into a crowd and shatters a community. | ||
| How many times must we suffer these appalling setbacks before we change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction? | ||
| No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants. | ||
| But you know what they did vote for? | ||
| In England, they voted for Brexit, and agree or disagree, they voted for it. | ||
| And more and more all over Europe, they're voting for political leaders who promised to put an end to out-of-control migration. | ||
| Now, I happen to agree with a lot of these concerns, but you don't have to agree with me. | ||
| I just think that people care about their homes. | ||
| They care about their dreams. | ||
| They care about their safety and their capacity to provide for themselves and their children. | ||
| And they're smart. | ||
| I think this is one of the most important things I've learned in my brief time in politics. | ||
| Contrary to what you might hear a couple mountains over in Davos, the citizens of all of our nations don't generally think of themselves as educated animals or as interchangeable cogs of a global economy. | ||
| And it's hardly surprising that they don't want to be shuffled about or relentlessly ignored by their leaders. | ||
| More from that Washington Post article about the response to that speech that Vice President Vance gave at the Munich Security Conference. | ||
| He used the conference to criticize the country's Germany's political firewall, the post-World War II agreement by mainstream parties to block the far right from being part of any government. | ||
| Vance punctuated this point by later meeting with Alice Wheedell, the co-leader of the Anti-Migrant Alternative for Germany Party, or AFD, which is polling in second place. | ||
| The AFD denies being a far-right party, but is classified by German intelligence as a suspected extremist group. | ||
| One of the party's most plemic figures has been convicted and fined for using a banned Nazi slogan. | ||
| Let's get to your calls in open forum. | ||
| We'll start with Michelle in Los Angeles on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Michelle. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Wow, that was quite a clip. | ||
| I saw Vance speaking to the European Union, and I was a little bit, he was so bellicose with them. | ||
| They are our allies. | ||
| He was lecturing them about free speech, and here we have while the White House is barring AP News from the Oval Office because they have not agreed to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. | ||
| But that's not what I actually called about. | ||
| On foreign policy and Trump, he says he favors peace, yet the first thing he did was get USAID, which is a peacekeeping organ. | ||
| It's a form of soft diplomacy. | ||
| And instead, he talks of increasing the defense spending and annexing Panama, Greenland, Canada, and Mexico, which is the exact opposite of peace. | ||
| So one of the problems I have with Trump's foreign policy initiatives is that he says one thing, peace, and then his actions point to maybe escalation of imperialism. | ||
| So the only thing I can get is that most of his policies seem to be callously transactional. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| John is in New York on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Thanks for taking my call, Kim. | ||
| It would seem that the countries of the world now have a new mindset, and that is this total unrestricted mass migration just coming in, migration of totally unvetted people. | ||
| I think most of the industrialized countries in the West, they're not necessarily against migration, but common sense would dictate that they want it vetted in a way that they can certainly know who's coming in and have these people be productive citizens. | ||
| It was disturbing one time. | ||
| I go back and forth between Fox News and CNN. | ||
| And Jonathan Turley sounded an alarm. | ||
| He said in Europe, it looks like what they're doing is waging an all-out war on free speech, that they're broadly interpreting people's discontent with hate crimes and punishing people. | ||
| And that seems to be the trend going on. | ||
| And possibly maybe somebody would know who gave Joe Biden the okay, the order to let these people in totally unvetted and to obstruct any type of actions that people like Governor Abbott would take to control this onslaught. | ||
| I'd just like to know that. | ||
| Who gave Biden the order? | ||
| Because I think it's common sense. | ||
| He didn't do it on his own. | ||
| And Kim, one more thing, a little bit unrelated, but I think relevant. | ||
| I recently watched TV on this Democratic hysteria over the Doge actions. | ||
| And I was never so shocked in my life. | ||
| Now, I'm 77 years old, and it's sure as hell not approved. | ||
| And I would watch these Democrats get up, women especially, and drop the F-bomb in their little speeches and then giggle. | ||
| And I just thought that would be, you know, something totally unprofessional. | ||
| And I don't know, maybe it's the norm today. | ||
| But if some of your viewers have comments to make on that, I'd appreciate it. | ||
| So thank you for your time and have a good day. | ||
| Bye-bye. | ||
| Next up is Steve in Clifton, New Jersey on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Steve. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, thank you for taking my call. | |
| I don't know. | ||
| I listened to the advanced clip. | ||
| I didn't see anything controversial there. | ||
| But I mean, I think that's the problem, I think, with media and things. | ||
| We can't speak about things rationally. | ||
| I mean, you look, everyone's talking USAID. | ||
| I am sure 99% of the people that are against this whole cutting in the USAID never heard of USAID until two weeks ago. | ||
| So, you know, I think I look back when Clinton did something very similar to this called RIGO, Reinventing Government Initiatives. | ||
| And he ended up cutting over 100,000 people from the federal workforce, 360,000 in eight years. | ||
| And for the first time, the United States had a budget surplus. | ||
| And back then, and this is not long ago, everyone was applauding that effort, both whether it was Republican or Democrat and the media. | ||
| I mean, I just don't understand. | ||
| We're in a country with trillions of dollars in debt, and we're going to argue over every single dime cut from the budget. | ||
| It's destructive to our nation. | ||
| I just don't get why. | ||
| And why doesn't anyone mention that Clinton did this, what was it, about 30 years ago? | ||
| If you give me just a moment, I actually was able to look up an article about just that in the Washington Examiner. | ||
| We just had our guest on from the Washington Examiner. | ||
| Doge's government work recalls Clinton administration's RIGO initiative. | ||
| Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency are busy eliminating waste within the U.S. government, though it's not the first time a presidential administration has sought to make the government more efficient. | ||
| Doge's work has drawn comparisons to the Clinton administration's Reinventing Government Initiative, or RIGO, which was launched on March 3rd, 1993, just a few weeks after Bill Clinton was inaugurated as the nation's 42nd president. | ||
| Six months after launching this initiative, Clinton and then Vice President Al Gore showcased a report on the administration's national performance review, which detailed how the government could save $108 billion over the course of five years. | ||
| This is what you're talking about, Steve? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about. | |
| Why hasn't anyone mentioned that? | ||
| Why hasn't anyone mentioned that? | ||
| When we're talking about this, oh my God, this is draconian. | ||
| Well, first of all, with a trillion-dollar deficit in the country that continues to grow, we have to be somewhat draconian. | ||
| How else do we cut the budget? | ||
| We need to, and it's not just, oh, let's tax the rich. | ||
| That's not even going to make a dent in the budget. | ||
| So, I mean, I just, you know, it would be nice if everyone was on the same side. | ||
| And I think part of the issue is the way media has to report things now is there's good guys and bad guys and good guys and bad guys, and everyone follows suit without anyone thinking rationally about the reality of the country. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Next up is another Steve. | ||
| This one in New York on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Steve. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for having me. | |
| What this guy, Steve, mentioned at the end, I forgot to put it at the start, was they cut and they raise taxes. | ||
| I mean, Republicans will not raise taxes one penny. | ||
| That's why Bill Clinton balanced the budget. | ||
| Taxes on the rich. | ||
| And they won't even touch that. | ||
| So we had a surplus, and then George Bush, a Republican, came in and started two wars and gave a tax cut, a Republican initiative. | ||
| It started back then, and you had a pandemic and all that, and things happened. | ||
| But they just won't raise a nickel of taxes. | ||
| We're not saving money because this money is going back out the door, as you mentioned earlier, on a $4.5 trillion tax cut. | ||
| Three-quarters of it will go to people making over $100 million a year. | ||
| But they forget to mention this. | ||
| If you've got to cut, and absolutely cut, don't do it with a hatchet. | ||
| I mean, 80% of these jobs are not in D.C. | ||
| This is going to have an effect all throughout our states. | ||
| There'll be lower purchasing, all this. | ||
| I mean, it's going to have a snowball effect. | ||
| And we just let this guy, Elon, Elon Musk's cars blow up every day. | ||
| His spaceships don't always work right. | ||
| He has conflicts of interest. | ||
| There are other companies that make satellites and stuff that he can withhold contracts from, and they're just as good as his. | ||
| He's hiring these 18 and 19-year-old kids that don't know, and they don't know old programming languages like COBOL and Fortran. | ||
| And they're making a lot of mistakes. | ||
| They're not the cream of the crop. | ||
| You know, I've worked in tech, and these guys, a lot of times, they'll never admit a mistake. | ||
| They'll never admit that they don't know something. | ||
| And you're seeing it now. | ||
| And it's going to have a big effect. | ||
| And I would imagine a lot of it's going to get held up in courts. | ||
| It's going to have effect on people's jobs that don't even understand it yet. | ||
| They're cutting from the VA, from the NIH, from the CDC. | ||
| I mean, cancer research. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| If you want to cut, do it with a scapegoat. | ||
| You do it with a scapel. | ||
| You don't do it with a damn hatchet. | ||
| Lynn is in Columbia, Maryland, on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Lynn. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Your earlier caller referenced the more than 1 million unvetted migrants that were ushered across the border in the opening months of the Biden administration. | |
| That was actually the second thing they did in terms of executive order. | ||
| The first thing they did was renew the Declaration of National Emergency originally issued by President Trump, declaring a deadly global pandemic. | ||
| So let me put this together for you people out there that aren't getting it. | ||
| The Biden administration came into power officially January 20th of 2021. | ||
| The first thing they did was renew the Declaration of National Emergency for a deadly global pandemic. | ||
| The second thing they did was open up the border. | ||
| And then between January and May, we had more than 1 million unvetted, untested, unvaccinated, whatever immigrants cross over in the border. | ||
| I was paying attention. | ||
| And at that point, I knew that the whole pandemic scare was fake, was phony. | ||
| It was obvious. | ||
| They knew there was no threat of a deadly global pandemic. | ||
| But most Americans can't put those two ideas together in their head. | ||
| And I really waited to see what Anthony Fauci would say when he faced that Senate committee. | ||
| And they asked him, Dr. Fauci, what do you think about our maintenance of the border and the millions of immigrants that have come in in the midst of this deadly global pandemic? | ||
| And Fauci said, I couldn't believe he said this. | ||
| He said, Senator, I have no opinion on the impact of migration on the pandemic. | ||
| I just think all Americans need to go out and get vaccinated. | ||
| I also should say, those of us in the truther community out here know that this alleged opposition to Elon Musk is fake, phony, and controlled. | ||
| It's controlled opposition because it's refusing to go after Musk for those areas of fakery and phoniness on which he is most vulnerable. | ||
| And that is his use of CGI in many of the presentations of his space launches. | ||
| That ridiculous space car in space, or a sports car in space, where he allegedly had some guy behind the wheel of a sports car floating out in space. | ||
| That was CGI that was completely fake. | ||
| But you alleged, alleged enemies of Musk, you won't go after him for that because you're a coward, you're a good person. | ||
| I'm going to stop you there, Lynn. | ||
| Let's go on with Beth in Shalamar, Florida on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Beth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, my goodness. | |
| I don't even know where to start. | ||
| I was calling in about fraud, waste, and abuse. | ||
| I'm one of the few people. | ||
| In fact, I think I may be the only person that's ever called into your show in the last eight years that has ever spent a dime of taxpayer money for the government. | ||
| I'm a former contract negotiator, and I wanted to talk about fraud, waste, and abuse and Doge. | ||
| Number one, Doge is not a government organization, and they are definitely not being efficient. | ||
| And I'll leave that at that. | ||
| Except I will add, the new Treasury Secretary, Mr. Bissant, was on Laura Ingram on Fox News the other night and said that Elon Musk was going in and looking at algorithms. | ||
| Unless he's doing an audit of the system itself, the computer system, he's not doing an audit for the government, and he's definitely not doing a financial audit. | ||
| My husband was a financial auditor for the government for 33 years. | ||
| And I was a contract negotiator and spent the tax dollar. | ||
| Fraud, waste, and abuse. | ||
| Fraud. | ||
| One contract I had, I was working with a large business, sole source, large business. | ||
| I'm sure if I could remember which one of the big names like Boeing or McDonnell Douglas or whatever, I could tell you which one it was. | ||
| But this is almost 40 years ago, and I don't remember the company. | ||
| But I was buying a sole source item from them. | ||
| And in the midst of that, I got a reply from a small business that said that they could make the same item. | ||
| Well, get to the point of the story. | ||
| What had happened is the small business had somehow gotten a copy of the specs and blueprints for this item from the large business. | ||
| Basically, they were stealing their proprietary rights and their intellectual property. | ||
| And we found out that it was stolen from the large business because there was a notation that was written in cursive writing on it. | ||
| And so that I had to stop my contract by my contract. | ||
| This whole thing had to go through the courts because the large business sued the small business for theft. | ||
| And there was a big investigation in the government. | ||
| So Beth, I do want to get to a couple more folks before we have to end open forum. | ||
| Let's hear from Janice in Midlothian, Virginia on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Janet. | ||
| Janice. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| I wanted to ask your last guest about security clearances. | ||
| When I applied for a job, an IT job with a government contractor, it took almost four months for me to get my security clearance. | ||
| I didn't even have half the access to the personal data that Elon Musk and his other younger kids may have. | ||
| I just, I'm not understanding what kind of security clearance does Elon Musk and these people from Doge have to have access to such sensitive information. | ||
| I'm not getting it. | ||
| I mean, a previous caller just talked about vetted migrants. | ||
| What kind of vetting does Elon Musk have to have access to us? | ||
| And I would say this, if President Obama would have put Louis Farrakhan or Jeremiah Wright in charge of any government agency, all heck would have broke loose. | ||
| So, I mean, people really need to start thinking about what's going on out here because this is not a joke right now. | ||
| This is very serious. | ||
| And these people have access to our sensitive data they should not have access to at all. | ||
| Okay, Gary is in Meridian, Connecticut on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Gary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fellowing in regard to the apparent current direction of our policy toward the war in Ukraine, I want to point out that when the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukraine as an independent state was the third greatest nuclear weapons power in the world. | |
| In 1994, they signed a treaty guaranteed by the United States, Great Britain, and Russia to give up their nuclear weapons if their territorial and sovereignty were protected. | ||
| That was a treaty which we guaranteed. | ||
| Now, we're not doing that. | ||
| And that's terribly upsetting. | ||
| You know, and I want to add that it's really ironic that the sellout of Ukraine has begun in Munich. | ||
| Munich is where the sellout of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis took place. | ||
| And it's a very upsetting situation because as we all know, those of us who have studied history, that the Munich sellout and the collapse of Czechoslovakia was a major factor leading to World War II. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Bye-bye. | ||
| That's all the time we have for open forum. | ||
| Coming up, public historian and author Jason Steinhauer will be here to discuss similarities and comparisons between President Trump and President William McKinley, who was in office from 1897 to 1901. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Tonight on C-SPAN's Q&A, former mafia associate Luis Ferrante shares his book, Borgata, Clash of Titans, volume two of his history of the American mafia from 1960 to 1985. | |
| In the first of a two-part interview, he gives a history of the mafia in America, discusses Attorney General Robert Kennedy's war against organized crime, and the involvement that he says the mafia had in the 1960 election and 1963 assassination of President John Kennedy. | ||
| Robert F. Kennedy becomes Attorney General for his brother, and that becomes Clash of Titans. | ||
| That's the first time there's a massive concentrated attack on the mafia from someone who holds all of the almost unlimited resources of the United States government at his disposal. | ||
| And that's when the mafia finally feels threatened. | ||
| It's a life or death situation. | ||
| Louis Ferrante with his book, Borgata, Clash of Titans, tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN's Q ⁇ A. You can listen to Q&A and all of our podcasts on our free C-SPAN Now app. | ||
| All this week, watch C-SPAN's new Members of Congress series, where we speak with both Republicans and Democrats about their early lives, previous careers, families, and why they decided to run for office. | ||
| On Monday at 9.30 p.m. Eastern, our interviews include Democratic Congresswoman Janelle Bynum, the first African-American ever elected to Congress from Oregon. | ||
| My mother graduated in 1970 from one of the last segregated high schools in the state and the country rather in South Carolina. | ||
| And I think about all of the opportunities that weren't afforded her, you know, coming out of segregation. | ||
| And I bring that perspective to Oregon, saying, you know, my mom was a rural kid that didn't have a lot of opportunities, but I'm going to make sure that I bring that forth for all of the kids in Oregon. | ||
| Watch new members of Congress all this week, starting at 9.30 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| We're joined now by Jason Steinhauer, who is an author and public historian here to talk a little bit about some historical comparisons to our modern moment. | ||
| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for having me. | |
| Good to see you again. | ||
| Likewise. | ||
| You describe yourself as a public historian. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's a great question. | |
| I'll try to be brief. | ||
| So the world of professional history in the United States and increasingly around the world is subdivided into two major categories, major camps, academic history and public history. | ||
| There's a lot of overlap between the two, but very roughly speaking, academic history, professional historians teaching inside universities, writing scholarly articles. | ||
| Public historians typically work in places like museums, libraries, national parks, may not ever write an academic book, but may do a series of museum exhibits or may do curricula for K through 12. | ||
| So it's very much about taking historical scholarship and interfacing with public audiences. | ||
| And that's what I've done throughout my career. | ||
| I began my career in museums. | ||
| I worked at the Library of Congress for a little while. | ||
| I was the founding director of a center that was all about bringing history to bear on contemporary issues. | ||
| And so I love to think about history and apply it to questions of public policy and also think about how the public interfaces understands history and try to find innovative new ways to bring history to public audiences. | ||
| And one of the ways you do that is through your substack. | ||
| And you have a commentary here, Make McKinley Great Again, How Trump is Bringing the 19th Century Into the 21st. | ||
| Tell us a bit about President William McKinley. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| So I'll tell you very briefly how I kind of got turned onto this subject. | ||
| So President Trump's obviously issued an array of executive orders. | ||
| And one of the first executive orders that he signed in the early days of his presidency, I believe on the first day of his presidency, was to revert Mount Denali back to Mount McKinley. | ||
| And inside the executive order, there were a series of sentences, full paragraphs praising President McKinley. | ||
| And I thought that was kind of curious. | ||
| You know, there's lots of different Republican presidents that could be cited, Reagan, Eisenhower. | ||
| Why cite McKinley? | ||
| And then as Trump's presidency unfolded, he started to talk about tariffs. | ||
| He began to talk about annexing territory. | ||
| And I thought to myself, this has a very sort of McKinley-esque ring to it. | ||
| This sort of feels very 19th century, tariffs, American empire. | ||
| So that kind of got me thinking about the similarities between the two, as well as maybe some of the influences that the president is currently drawing upon for some of his policies. | ||
| So that led me to re-look at McKinley. | ||
| Now, as to your question, McKinley was the 25th President of the United States. | ||
| He was from Ohio. | ||
| He was a Republican. | ||
| He served in the U.S. Civil War. | ||
| He eventually went on to serve in Congress and as a governor before running for president. | ||
| He served as president from 1896 to 1900. | ||
| He ran for reelection. | ||
| He won re-election and began his first term and then unfortunately was assassinated in 1901. | ||
| So he was a very influential figure in his time, ran for president twice, won twice. | ||
| His second term was obviously cut short. | ||
| He's a name and a personality that was very well known for his time, but since then has kind of faded a bit in terms of the American memory and American imagination. | ||
| Let's listen to President Trump talking about former President McKinley in his inauguration address, specifically citing his policies on tariffs and the Panama Canal. | ||
| America will reclaim its rightful place as the greatest, most powerful, most respected nation on earth, inspiring the awe and admiration of the entire world. | ||
| A short time from now, we are going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, and we will restore the name of a great president, William McKinley, to Mount McKinley where it should be and where it belongs. | ||
| President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent. | ||
| He was a natural businessman and gave Teddy Roosevelt the money for many of the great things he did, including the Panama Canal, which has foolishly been given to the country of Panama after the United States. | ||
| The United States, I mean, think of this, spent more money than ever spent on a project before and lost 38,000 lives in the building of the Panama Canal. | ||
| We have been treated very badly from this foolish gift that should have never been made. | ||
| And Panama's promise to us has been broken. | ||
| The purpose of our deal and the spirit of our treaty has been totally violated. | ||
| American ships are being severely overcharged and not treated fairly in any way, shape, or form. | ||
| And that includes the United States Navy. | ||
| And above all, China is operating the Panama Canal. | ||
| And we didn't give it to China. | ||
| We gave it to Panama and we're taking it back. | ||
| So in your piece, you highlight some of the accomplishments of the McKinley administration. | ||
| Let's kind of tick through the list. | ||
| And some of those will sound familiar for the modern era. | ||
| Instituted tariffs, issued an executive order that dismissed civil servants, annexed Hawaii, acquired Puerto Rico and Guam, went to war with Spain over Cuba, expanded American power in the Pacific, specifically the Philippines, bolstered the American military, particularly the Navy, advocated for business and industry, and professed a sympathy for American workers. | ||
| Where do you see the strongest comparisons between Trump and McKinley? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, it's a great question. | |
| So first of all, these were things that happened during the McKinley administration. | ||
| I think there could be some debate about whether they are accomplishments or not. | ||
| But putting that aside, I would say clearly the president and his advisors, people within his circle, have given great attention to the McKinley administration. | ||
| And I think there's a couple reasons why. | ||
| And the clip that was just played kind of touches on it a bit. | ||
| During the period before McKinley ascended to the presidency, the late 19th century, the United States was booming in terms of its economic activity. | ||
| And we think about it as the Gilded Age, right, with tremendous wealth among robber barons like the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers. | ||
| But American industry was really surging and it was a golden age in some ways because there was a surplus and there was tremendous revenue coming in. | ||
| And so I think, you know, Trump has talked about this in other public appearances. | ||
| He kind of seems to be harkening back to that era and thinking about, okay, how can we use tariffs, for example, as a way to bring in additional revenue and also to support American businesses and make sure that we have another sort of golden age of prosperity, as McKinley might have described it. | ||
| So I think in terms of worldview, there's a lot of similarities there and trying to establish the dominance of economic, of American economy and American corporations and hoping then that that will trickle down to the American worker. | ||
| And that was sort of a philosophy that McKinley ascribed to as well. | ||
| You know, he was very much a pro-business, pro-corporate president. | ||
| He actually had a version of an Elon Musk who helped him assume public office, a man named Mark Hanna, who was an industrialist and a wealthy businessman. | ||
| And McKinley sort of believed that the better that American corporations did, then the better that all of America would do. | ||
| And he kind of envisioned expanding the possibilities for American trade, not just in the Western Hemisphere, but beyond into the Pacific and Philippines and China and other places. | ||
| So I think in terms of worldview, there are some similarities there between McKinley and Trump. | ||
| And also Trump seems to be inspired, perhaps, or maybe even just borrowing from a McKinley-esque playbook about how to expand American reach, American trade dominance, and an American empire at various parts of the world. | ||
| To your point earlier about whether these policies and these things that happened were accomplishments or not, the University of Georgia history professor Stephen Mim says the McKinley tariff of 1890 reflected a seductive political logic. | ||
| If defensive tariffs had helped Republicans win the presidency, then even more tariffs would only enhance their power. | ||
| As the bill took shape under McKinley's direction, he and other legislators began adding new taxes on a dizzying array of imports, cotton collars to tinware to rope to steel plate and much, much more. | ||
| The reaction to the legislation was overwhelmingly negative, with most voters correctly perceiving it as a handout to the nation's wealthiest manufacturers. | ||
| Newspapers dug into the tariff schedules, spelling out how much more working class families would have to pay for a wide range of goods. | ||
| Democrats warned farmers that they would soon be reduced to drinking from gourds on account of the high price of tin cups. | ||
| That's quite the summary. | ||
| What do you think are the lessons, perhaps, from the McKinley administration for the Trump administration if they are going to follow that playbook? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I would say this. | |
| There's a lot of debates about tariffs and their efficacy and who ends up paying for the tariff, whether it ultimately gets passed on to the American consumer, and then that leads to higher prices. | ||
| And there's some evidence to support that. | ||
| I think, well, one of the broader lessons, I think, from all of this is that economics and understanding the dynamics of marketplaces are exceedingly complicated. | ||
| And there are lots of different factors that go into it. | ||
| And oftentimes presidents get far more blame than they deserve and take far more credit than they deserve for the success or failures of economies under their administrations. | ||
| And in the case of McKinley, he wrote a piece in a North American Review in 1890, strongly arguing for tariffs, believing that in order for the government to raise the necessary revenue that it needed, it was better to levy a tax on imports than it was to do so via internal revenue. | ||
| And he argued passionately for that in the early 1890s. | ||
| In 1893, there was actually a very severe economic recession, and tariffs were blamed in part for that recession. | ||
| So that helped the Democrats. | ||
| But then McKinley kind of doubled down and said, well, actually, the Democrats didn't really do tariffs correctly. | ||
| If you elect me, then I'll do them correctly. | ||
| I'll protect American industry. | ||
| And he obviously ends up winning in 1896, in part because of that, in part because of other issues. | ||
| And by the end of the century, by the end of the 1890s, the American economy has recovered and is doing quite well. | ||
| And so, of course, McKinley then takes credit for it and says, ah, it was my tariffs all along that were part of the formula for success, right? | ||
| And of course, the answers are far more complex and nuanced than that. | ||
| There are lots of different factors that go into it. | ||
| And in today's administration, I think they're looking, and I'm not by any means an insider, but in terms of just what I can see from the outside, it seems like they're looking at a variety of different things. | ||
| They want to bring down government spending. | ||
| They want to increase the amount of oil and gas in the fuel supply. | ||
| They think that will help bring down costs. | ||
| They hope that will help to bring down inflationary pressure by doing so. | ||
| They're looking, obviously, at trade deals. | ||
| They're looking at tariffs. | ||
| And the combination of all those things, they hope, will also deregulation and lowering taxes. | ||
| They think the combination of that will ultimately help the American business and American consumer. | ||
| So even if there is a slight uptick in price from the tariffs, these other savings will help to offset that. | ||
| The jury's out on whether that will actually happen. | ||
| There's also some parallels to sort of the imperialist ambitions. | ||
| President Trump has obviously talked about Canada as a 51st state or potentially buying Greenland or as he mentioned in that clip, reclaiming the Panama Canal. | ||
| And then McKinley had quite the sort of expansionist view as well. | ||
| What are some of the highlights there in terms of what you, as in what you highlighted in your piece in terms of the comparisons there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so perhaps the biggest legacy of the McKinley administration is how it redrew the map of the United States. | |
| And for example, you mentioned it in the opening, the annexation of Hawaii. | ||
| Hawaii had a queen and it had an indigenous population. | ||
| And during the McKinley administration, the United States annexed Hawaii and claimed it as an American territory. | ||
| Viewers might be familiar with the Spanish-American War, 1898. | ||
| Spain had obviously been a dominant empire. | ||
| By the time the 1890s come around, Spain's empire is waning. | ||
| It's under pressure from insurgencies in Cuba and Puerto Rico and in the Philippines. | ||
| In 1898, the United States enters the war on behalf of Cuban revolutionaries to try to expel Spain from the Western Hemisphere. | ||
| And as a result of that war, the United States takes Cuba as a protectorate, incorporates Puerto Rico, incorporates Guam, and also annexes the Philippines. | ||
| And so by the turn of the 20th century, you have an American map that far extends beyond the continental United States. | ||
| The distance from New York to Manila is, I think, 10,000 miles or something like that. | ||
| So McKinley drastically redraws the sphere of American influence in the American empire and expands the map in really profound ways. | ||
| And these are legacies that we are still grappling with, because Puerto Rico, still part of the United States, yet does not have representation in Congress the way that a state would. | ||
| The presence of Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, that is a result of the 1898 war with Spain and the arrangements that were made after that war for an American presence on that land. | ||
| So McKinley would talk about this in terms of spreading American geopolitical and economic influence, making sure that there was an expansive array of opportunities for American businesses to expand their markets. | ||
| Again, the Philippines and the Pacific being a primary destination for that and Hawaii being a strategic gateway to the Pacific. | ||
| And I think when we hear President Trump talking about expanding American influence geopolitically in our hemisphere and expanding opportunities for American businesses, there are valences of that discourse in that. | ||
| And so, again, he seems to be drawing some inspiration, at least, from that imperialist moment in our American history. | ||
| Got quite a few questions for you from callers. | ||
| Let's start with Brian in East Sandwich, Massachusetts, on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Brian. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for letting me talk. | ||
| So listen, I understand that McKinley, and please correct if any of my understandings are wrong. | ||
| McKinley was one of the few, or maybe many, enlisted men who rose to an officer rank, and he experienced battle during the Civil War in places like Antietam. | ||
| And he was, I believe he was a Methodist. | ||
| And I was wondering whether that religious persuasion enabled him to stop a war with Spain over Cuba. | ||
| But there was an erroneous report that a mine had blown up the USS Maine in Havana Harbor, and he was forced to declare war or approve of war with Spain. | ||
| So I just wanted to get your opinion on his probably nonviolent understanding of war because he had experienced war. | ||
| And so thanks. | ||
| It's an interesting show. | ||
| Thank you very much for letting you answer to that question. | ||
| He did serve in the U.S. Civil War and he also was a devout Methodist. | ||
| Now, as it comes to the Spanish-American War, one of the things that's important to remember about history is that historians oftentimes argue with each other. | ||
| And we argue with each other because we look at sources, we try to understand how these personalities behaved in their time. | ||
| And sometimes, based on the evidence, we come to different interpretations about what may have happened because none of us was there. | ||
| So in the case of the Spanish-American War, there have been debates and arguments among historians over the generations about how eager McKinley was to enter that war and how reluctant he may have been to commit U.S. forces to that cause and also how much he was influenced by the newspapers at the time. | ||
| To the point that you mentioned, McKinley sort of does a half-measure at one point where he sends the USS Maine towards Cuba as a show of force, but not with the intention of actually engaging in battle. | ||
| And the Maine explodes in the harbor. | ||
| And so the cry of remember the Alamo changes to remember the Maine. | ||
| And there are lots of calls in the American public to intervene in the war between Spain and Cuban revolutionaries on behalf of the revolutionaries to avenge the explosion of the USS Maine. | ||
| The evidence suggests that the Maine was actually not exploded by Spanish forces. | ||
| It may have exploded as a result of something internal to the ship. | ||
| But either way, it became an impetus for entering that conflict. | ||
| And there were debates in American society at that time about whether entering that conflict was the right thing to do. | ||
| And McKinley himself debated that. | ||
| The evidence suggests, and in fact, he wrote about this, that he would stay up late at night pacing in the White House or thinking it over at his desk and sometimes even praying to God to give him the guidance about what to do vis-à-vis the Cuba question and the Spanish Empire. | ||
| Ultimately, the explosion of the USS Maine is what provokes the United States to enter the war, and the war only ends up lasting for another three or four months after that before the Spanish are defeated. | ||
| There's a question received from Steve in Alexandria via text. | ||
| Anti-immigration sentiment was rampant in the U.S. public during the McKinley administration, primarily against Irish Catholic and Eastern Europeans. | ||
| What similarities are there today with the Trump administration and what immigration policies ultimately implement? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, it's a great question because I think it's important for us to remember that in the 1890s, there were some pretty nefarious ideologies that were present in not just American society but around the world. | |
| There was obviously anti-black racism in the year 1896 that McKinley is elected. | ||
| It's also the infamous Plessy versus Ferguson decision, which codifies basically racial segregation in the United States. | ||
| There is a lot of xenophobia and nativism. | ||
| There were a tremendous amount of immigrants coming to the United States in the 1890s and early 20th century. | ||
| Many were from Italy, actually. | ||
| That was a period of peak Italian immigration to the United States. | ||
| There were also Jews from Eastern Europe. | ||
| There were Croatians and Syrians and earlier Chinese Americans, later Japanese Americans. | ||
| And there was tremendous xenophobia and nativism within American society and fear about what those immigrants would mean for American society. | ||
| And if you look back at the language that was used, you will see in the writing people use terms like quote-unquote invasion of immigrants. | ||
| People worried about whether this quote-unquote invasion of immigrants would change American culture and how it would affect American civilization and would America be able to survive this influx of immigrants. | ||
| And it ultimately leads to heavy restrictions on immigration, not just the Chinese Exclusion Act, but also eventually quotas that were implemented in the 1920s. | ||
| With hindsight, we know that actually immigration did not destroy the American Republic. | ||
| In fact, it enriched the American Republic. | ||
| And folks like Italian Americans, for example, who in the 1890s people questioned whether they could ever integrate into American society, today, Italian Americans are part of the fabric of American life. | ||
| So we do see some similarities in the discourse today in the way we describe immigration that mirrors some of the language that existed in the 1890s. | ||
| And with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that actually there are lots of ways that immigration to the United States enriches our culture and makes us a stronger and more diverse nation. | ||
| And that's one of the benefits of studying history. | ||
| And some of those same narratives at the time, I imagine, contributed to the public support for some of those expansionist policies of taking over Hawaii and Guam and Puerto Rico, et cetera. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, what's really interesting about that is that actually some of those very same ideologies were some of the most staunch anti-imperialists. | |
| So basically, there was a big debate about whether the United States should actually annex these territories on the heels of the 1898 war with Spain. | ||
| And the anti-imperialists, many of them worried about how the integration of Puerto Ricans and Hawaiians and Cubans and Filipinos into American society might work, if it would work at all. | ||
| And so some of the anti-imperialist language actually is wrapped up in discussions around race and immigration, the thinking that basically America and the United States is better off not integrating these quote-unquote alien races, as they were described at the time, into American society because that will help us preserve American society. | ||
| And by bringing these into the fold, they risk destabilization of society. | ||
| So McKinley, and he talked about this again, both publicly and in his private writings, in his vision of empire, part of the responsibility was to quote civilize and Christianize these peoples and find a way for them to be able to either govern themselves or integrate into American society. | ||
| But there's actually some very famous court cases around this. | ||
| They were called the insular cases, and they were argued before the Supreme Court. | ||
| And it got at the question of whether these territories that were newly acquired could ever really fully integrate into the United States as states or whether they had to remain as territories and then what rights those people would have if they lived in a territory versus a state. | ||
| And again, we're still grappling with some of these legacies today when we look at places like Samoa and Guam and Puerto Rico. | ||
| CJ is in Buffalo, New York on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, CJ. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning, Mr. Steinhauer. | |
| Can you sort of give the whatever, you know, the Zeitgeist culture of the turn of the century? | ||
| And like, you know, like whoever killed McKinley, I think his name was like Leon Zolgos or something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, was there a purpose behind that, or was he just like a crazy anarchist? | |
| Or is it some kind of like, you know, semi-political motivation? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because, you know, I grew up in that area, but I've never really heard a whole lot of details. | |
| So it's interesting. | ||
| McKinley ranks on C-SPAN's presidential, we do a presidential history, historian survey, and they get historians to rank the popularity of the presidents. | ||
| McKinley was ranked 14th in 2021. | ||
| And I wonder how popular was he at the time? | ||
| And then to the caller's question about the assassination. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so McKinley was very popular. | |
| He wins the 1896 election against William Jennings Bryan very comfortably, and he wins re-election also against William Jennings Bryan, also very comfortably. | ||
| He was a well-known figure. | ||
| You know, he had, again, served in the Civil War, served in Congress, had been governor of Ohio. | ||
| He ran a very strategic presidential campaign. | ||
| I actually made a video about this on YouTube years ago with the Smithsonian talking about how he was very shrewd about public relations. | ||
| He was very good about working with the press and actually converted a train car on his train into a dark room so he could constantly feed the press with photographs. | ||
| So a very shrewd politician. | ||
| And again, won comfortably in both elections that he ran. | ||
| The caller alluded to this. | ||
| So in 1901, McKinley goes to Buffalo, New York, to deliver a speech. | ||
| And while he's greeting various people in the crowd, there is a man there who pulls out a gun and shoots him in the chest. | ||
| And initially, it looks like McKinley might survive, but eventually, eight days later, he succumbs to his wounds and passes away. | ||
| And that allows Teddy Roosevelt, who was the vice president at the time, to become president. | ||
| In terms of the reasons for the assassination, so the assassin whose name I'm surely going to mispronounce, so I apologize, I believe it's Leon Cholzhkov, but I defer to my Polish and Polish-American friends to correct me on that. | ||
| He describes himself as an anarchist. | ||
| He describes himself as someone who has sympathy with the American worker, and he felt that McKinley did not do enough for the American worker. | ||
| Again, McKinley was very pro-corporate, very pro-business. | ||
| He wanted to make sure that American businesses succeeded, and he believed that that would then trickle down to the American worker. | ||
| I think he said at one point that their pails would be full. | ||
| But of course, the reality of the turn of the century was a little bit different from that because, as mentioned, you had Robert Barrons and people like the Vanderbilts and the Carnegies who amassed tremendous wealth, including Mark Hanna, the gentleman who helped McKinley get elected. | ||
| But then, if you remember from your American history courses, you know, inside cities in particular like New York City, you had tenements where immigrant families would be living multiple families to a unit or with multiple people in a family to a room. | ||
| There was tremendous poverty, and there were tremendous fights over workers' rights, over the length of the work week, about wages. | ||
| There were numerous strikes that happened across the country. | ||
| All this eventually feeds into the progressive era, which people are probably familiar with, where there were calls for reforms to make sure that workers had more protections, that conditions were better for workers, that there were more fair wages, and that prosperity was shared more equally. | ||
| So, McKinley's assassin certainly was privy to that rhetoric and understood that in a moment for tremendous American wealth and prosperity for some, there was inequality in how that wealth was distributed. | ||
| And what's interesting about him is that he expressed no remorse for his actions. | ||
| He was executed for assassinating the president. | ||
| And even up until his execution, he defended his actions and really expressed no pity or remorse for them. | ||
| And so the zeitgeist at the time, like all historical eras, was very complex. | ||
| And it differed depending on who you asked and depending on what your place was in society. | ||
| Bo is in Sylvester, Georgia, on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Good morning, Bo. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| I'm glad I got to call in. | ||
| I've been teaching my class on the new imperialism of the late 19th century and early 20th century. | ||
| And I want to bring up China, and I know your historian will know about this as well. | ||
| You could probably flash a map up showing the Western powers' spheres of influence in China during McKinley's term, and you can elaborate on this too. | ||
| You had the Boxer Rebellion, then you had the Boxer Protocol, but you also had John Hayes open door notes. | ||
| The thing about this is, I think this was part of China's century of humiliation that we tend to forgot in American history. | ||
| And I think this is one of the legacies of why we have issues with China today, that they remember when the Western powers dominated their kingdom. | ||
| So I'd like my historian on there to comment on that. | ||
| Yeah, no, it's a great point to bring up the Boxer Rebellion. | ||
| So one of the things that I think is important to remember is that even in the midst of this sort of period of American empire where the United States is in geopolitical competition with great powers like Spain or Great Britain for dominance of economic markets and geopolitical influence, the United States is still collaborating with foreign powers. | ||
| And one of those collaborations happens, as was mentioned by the caller, in China to suppress the boxer rebellion. | ||
| The United States actually does send troops along with other European nations as part of this effort to suppress the rebellion. | ||
| And, you know, it's part of this broader period where not just the United States, but also powers in Europe are looking to Asia and thinking about the opportunities that are there, both for empirical and colonial expansion as well as the expansion of markets and trade. | ||
| And obviously, you know, the British have a presence in India, the Spanish had a presence in the Philippines. | ||
| There's a lot of imperial legacies in the Pacific. | ||
| And yes, absolutely, those are still coming into play today when we look at our geopolitics. | ||
| And various nation states and actors in Asia, whether it be China or any number of different countries, still remember and still talk about in their public sphere American imperialism and presence in the Pacific, | ||
| European imperialism and presence in the Pacific, and that absolutely informs the way geopolitics happens today and some of the ways, some of the tensions that exist in that region today. | ||
| So I think it's an excellent point by the caller. | ||
| I attempted to find a map for you, but I wasn't able to find a good one very quickly. | ||
| Apologies for that. | ||
| Let's go to Jim in Dubuque, Iowa, on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Jim. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| This is a peculiar time. | ||
| The Western powers, England, and the United States are facing an irreversible doom loop of debt. | ||
| And the geopolitics generally historically have directed them to enter into some kind of a war where the population is directed to blame some foreign power rather than our own politicians and bankers. | ||
| And the thoughts of expansionism and things like this in the face of 85% of the world organizing against us, having proved ourselves unworthy stewards of financial assets by seizing other nations' savings puts us in a peculiar position. | ||
| I think we need to learn how to cooperate finally against or with at least two other major powers in the world and try to structure a new non-hegemonic system. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Did you have any follow-up points to what Jim was saying? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I totally agree about global cooperation. | |
| And I think that's something that I think a lot about today, in particular, when we think about some of the international structures that the United States worked so hard to build after the Second World War and how we can continue to perpetuate those structures and those organizations in order to ensure that freedom and democracy and human rights triumph. | ||
| And I think that the only way we can do that is through global cooperation. | ||
| So I think that, yes, we have ambitions for the United States in terms of our expansion and our economy and prosperity, but we cannot lose sight of the fact that we will need to cooperate with our global partners and allies to ensure that democracy and human rights also prevail around the world. | ||
| And that's something that I hope we as Americans, regardless of our Republican, Democrat, or Independent, can agree on. | ||
| Robert is in Indianapolis, Indiana, on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Robert. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, and thank you for taking my call. | |
| Mr. Stannhauser, my question is, you were sharing that the Trump administration are highly infatuated with the McKinley era. | ||
| And I'm assuming that's what they mean. | ||
| That's what they mean when they say make America great again. | ||
| And it's trying to bring us back to the McKinley era, 1895, 1901, I think I heard you say. | ||
| So my question is, in the spirit of, I think this is why African Americans are such nervous about the Trump administration. | ||
| So my question is, in the spirit of Black History Month, how did the African American people fare in the McKinley era and how does that coincide with us here in America in 2025? | ||
| And I'll take my answer off the air. | ||
| Yeah, it's a great question. | ||
| Let me break it up into two parts. | ||
| So first and foremost, I think in the United States, sovereignty rests with the people. | ||
| And we elect a president every four years. | ||
| That president works for us. | ||
| And then every four years after that, we get to decide whether he or she will stay in that office or whether we'll elect a new president. | ||
| So I think the reason that history is important and this particular conversation is important is because if the president works for us, it's incumbent upon us to understand from the president what influences are shaping his worldview. | ||
| And some of those influences are historical in nature. | ||
| Some of them are more contemporary in nature. | ||
| And my argument for the piece that I wrote and for this conversation today is that McKinley's administration is one of those influences. | ||
| I don't want to suggest that it's the only influence. | ||
| I think that there's a lot of other influences that the current administration is pulling from. | ||
| They clearly are pulling from Reagan and take inspiration from him. | ||
| They're also clearly pulling from Milton Friedman and other sort of libertarian economists. | ||
| So I think it's a mix, but part of our responsibility as citizens and as voters is to understand all the various pieces so that we can decide whether the person that we've elected is acting in our best interest or not. | ||
| So I think that's really one of the benefits of this conversation and sort of what I try to do with my historical scholarship more broadly. | ||
| Part of that also is understanding, and this is a great point by the caller, that in particular eras of history, certain policies have positive effects, certain policies have negative effects, and different aspects of the population get affected very differently by those policies. | ||
| In order to understand holistically American history, we have to look at the entire picture, not just part of the picture. | ||
| And so as mentioned earlier, you know, McKinley, when he runs for re-election in 1900, he proclaims that he has ushered in an era of prosperity for all. | ||
| When we look below the surface, though, we realize that actually not everybody was prospering during the 1890s. | ||
| As mentioned, 1896, there is the, today what we would consider to be a very unfortunate Supreme Court decision of Plessy versus Ferguson, which basically enables racial segregation under separate but equal and ushers in a period of really virulent Jim Crow laws that will persist up through the civil rights era. | ||
| And also, there were lynchings in the 1890s across the American South. | ||
| There's a museum now in the United States that documents this. | ||
| Viewers might be familiar with a banner that used to hang outside of the offices of the NAACP in New York City that said, a man was lynched today, right? | ||
| And, you know, McKinley does not do much to speak out against these injustices. | ||
| He doesn't do much to condemn the Plessy versus Ferguson decision. | ||
| Doesn't do much to condemn lynchings and other Jim Crow segregation that was happening in the American South. | ||
| So, again, understanding that history, knowing that that is part of our American story, we then have an obligation to move that forward and say that we cannot let that happen again. | ||
| And so, we have to learn from that history and make sure that whatever influences our leaders are taking from various aspects of the American past, they don't include those ugly episodes of the American past that I just alluded to. | ||
| This complicated history of McKinley ties into what we kind of started at the beginning of the conversation talking about President Trump's efforts to rename Denali, the mountain in Alaska, back to Mount McKinley. | ||
| And I should point out that Alaska State Legislature has formally opposed Trump's renaming of Denali as Mount McKinley. | ||
| This is reporting from Alaska Public Media saying the Alaska Senate unanimously joined the state House Friday in urging, this was back on February 7th, in urging President Trump to reverse his decision to rename North America's tallest peak as Mount McKinley. | ||
| Trump issued the order renaming Denali after President William McKinley on his first day back in office, saying he was a natural businessman who made our country very rich through tariffs. | ||
| That decision created an uproar in the state. | ||
| In addition to what the Alaska state legislature has done, Alaska's Senator Lisa Murkowski has introduced a bill to keep Denali as the name of North America's tallest peak. | ||
| And she said in a statement, you can't improve upon the name that Alaska's Koyukan Athabascans bestowed on North America's tallest peak, Denali, the Great One. | ||
| For years I have advocated in Congress to restore the rightful name for this majestic mountain, to respect Alaska's first people who have lived on these lands for thousands of years. | ||
| This is an issue that should not be relitigated. | ||
| This was back in 2024 when she made those statements. | ||
| And I wonder when it comes to the naming of things in terms of what someone's legacy actually is through your research on McKinley, what do you think is the way to think about him as a president? | ||
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unidentified
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Well, I think all historians would agree that we should view our history with complexity, with nuance, and with an understanding that the policies that our elected officials and our presidents enact sometimes have positive consequences, | |
| sometimes have negative consequences, and it's incumbent upon us to try to analyze that objectively, to look at a wide array of sources. | ||
| So not just what the executive office says or the White House says, but also to look at social history, to look at cultural history, to look at the voices of immigrants, to look at the voices of disenfranchised populations, and weave all those together into some narrative, both for other scholars and for the broader public, that can somehow make sense of very complex and complicated moments that we ourselves did not live through. | ||
| And that is a very challenging task, but that's what makes history both difficult and rewarding as a field to engage in. | ||
| It's also a very time-consuming past, excuse me, time-consuming effort. | ||
| You have to look at a wide array of sources to try to understand a very complex moment in a very complex person, such as McKinley or the 1890s. | ||
| And to do that work requires time and it also requires funding. | ||
| So one of my pleas to anyone who watches this program or anyone anywhere out there who feels that history plays an important role in American society is to make sure that you tell your elected officials to continue to fund and support history education, whether it be at the K through 12 level, whether it be at the university level, or whether it be beyond as a lifelong learner. | ||
| To have archives, to have libraries, to have institutions that preserve these documents so that we can then, as scholars and citizens, go back to them and look at them and learn from them. | ||
| That is a fundamental aspect of democracy and it's also a fundamental aspect of doing good policy and being an educated and informed citizen and voter. | ||
| So we have to ensure that there is still an opportunity for people to engage in that work, both as a professional as well as an amateur. | ||
| And I think one of the great things about C-SPAN is that it creates the platforms for us to have these types of historically informed conversations. | ||
| Well, we're going to end it there. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Jason Steinhauer is an author and public historian. | ||
| Thank you very much for your time. | ||
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unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| And thank you to everyone who called into Washington Journal today to share your questions and comments. | ||
| We are going to be back with another edition of the show tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. Eastern. | ||
| Have a great day. |