| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
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Including Charter Communications. | |
| Charter is proud to be recognized as one of the best internet providers. | ||
| And we're just getting started, building 100,000 miles of new infrastructure to reach those who need it most. | ||
| Charter Communications supports C-SPAN as a public service, along with these other television providers, giving you a front-row seat to democracy. | ||
| Democracy is always an unfinished creation. | ||
| Democracy is worth dying for. | ||
| Democracy belongs to us all. | ||
| We are here in the sanctuary of democracy. | ||
| Great responsibilities fall once again to the great democracies. | ||
| American democracy is bigger than any one person. | ||
| Freedom and democracy must be constantly guarded and protected. | ||
|
unidentified
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We are still at our core a democracy. | |
| This is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| We are joined now by Representative Don Bacon. | ||
| He's a Republican of Nebraska and a member of the Armed Services Committee and also the Agriculture Committee. | ||
| Congressman, welcome. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| It's always good to be here. | ||
| Let's talk about the budget. | ||
| You told Roll Call last week that the GOP budget resolution appeared to cut too deeply into Medicaid, but you voted for it anyway. | ||
| Were you given assurances about cuts to Medicaid? | ||
| I was. | ||
| So the leadership, you know, talking to the WIP, the speaker, also the two chairmen of the areas that the cuts were big, I'll just say it that way. | ||
| The unified story there was, yes, the level of cuts of the House is over here. | ||
| The Senate is over here. | ||
| We're going to end up somewhere in the middle. | ||
| Which means there will be cuts to Medicaid. | ||
| Yeah, but not cuts that will affect the quality of care. | ||
| So for example, they're going to add work requirements for able-bodied adults that don't have children. | ||
| They're going to audit all the lists. | ||
| They stop doing that. | ||
| If you don't dely on Medicaid, they'll take you off. | ||
| But they're not going to go after the quality of care. | ||
| And that's the assurance I have. | ||
| And it's the expectation for President Trump that that will not happen either. | ||
| I want to ask you about, since you're on the Armed Services Committee, you served in the U.S. Air Force for over 30 years, retired as a one-star general. | ||
| Let's start with Ukraine. | ||
| President Zelensky is set to come to D.C. tomorrow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
President Trump has said, you know, he's called him a dictator. | |
| He said that Ukraine started the war. | ||
| We know that it was Russia that started the war. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why do you think this is happening? | |
| There's a couple possibilities, but I think from my perspective, I just have to state the truth. | ||
| Ukraine is our national security interests that remain independent. | ||
| If Ukraine falls, Moldova will be next. | ||
| Maybe the Baltics, Georgia, and so forth. | ||
| An independent Ukraine that's aligned with the West is a game changer for the United States and Europe. | ||
| And so it's in our interest to ensure that Ukraine prevails. | ||
| So I just want to say that's my perspective. | ||
| We've got to be clear, Russia did the invasion. | ||
| I don't know why people have a hard time with this. | ||
| It's, you know, it's a black and white issue. | ||
| It's an absolute fact that Putin invaded. | ||
| He wants to restore his old borders from the Soviet Union time. | ||
| He has said that. | ||
| And he doesn't see Ukraine as an individual people. | ||
| He sees them as little Russians. | ||
| He wants to eliminate the language, the heritage, the culture. | ||
| So it's just clear what's going on here. | ||
| This is a war of aggression to take over Ukraine's territory. | ||
| And that's just a fact. | ||
| Now, why is President Trump saying this? | ||
| I'm not really sure. | ||
| There's a possibility he's trying to do this for negotiations. | ||
| Or maybe he, well, he's got a different worldview than maybe I have. | ||
| I have a mix of realism and idealism in how I see national security. | ||
| We've got to protect our country. | ||
| But I think we have an idealist strand as well that our country has to be an advocate for freedom, democracy, free markets, rule of law. | ||
| And I don't know that he has any of the idealism side. | ||
| I think it's more of just a straight realism and more transactional in nature. | ||
| So it could be that. | ||
| So I'm not really too sure why folks in his administration and himself don't see this clearly. | ||
| I think it's very important we have moral clarity on this. | ||
| So is it just a moral issue or is it a national security issue? | ||
| You know, this new alignment with Russia as opposed to our European allies and Ukraine. | ||
| What happens in that case? | ||
| Why not let the Europeans deal with it and we put America first? | ||
| I think NATO is important. | ||
| And a lot of the statements that they're not carrying their own weight, I think there's some truth to that. | ||
| I think President Trump has been good at pushing NATO to do more. | ||
| But we also got to realize that there are a lot of countries putting more in a defense than we are right now per share of GDP, right? | ||
| So you can't overgeneralize, say, all of NATO's not pulling their weight. | ||
| Some are doing way more than we are for the share of their economy. | ||
| And some of these countries have done a lot more for Ukraine than the United States has. | ||
| And that story hasn't got out there as well either. | ||
| Frankly, America is the leader of the free world. | ||
| We're the indispensable nation. | ||
| And without America, Russia and China, Iran are going to fill this void. | ||
| It's a more dangerous world. | ||
| So I see it from a national security perspective, but I also see it as a moral perspective. | ||
| What we stand for is right. | ||
| What Putin stands for and what G stands for, it's wrong. | ||
| It's a dictatorship, no rule of law. | ||
| And we support what is right. | ||
| If you'd like to join a conversation with Representative Don Bacon, Republican of Nebraska, you can do so. | ||
| Our lines are by party. | ||
| Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents 202748-8002. | ||
| President Trump recently fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Charles Brown, or CQ Brown. | ||
| He was about a year and a half into his tenure. | ||
| What was your reaction when you heard that news and that he was being replaced by a retired three-star? | ||
| Concerned. | ||
| Now, the president has every authority, a constitutional authority to put in who he wants. | ||
| I do think there's a level of decency that you've got to state why you fire someone. | ||
| It should be a firing for cause. | ||
| And I think the voters deserve to know why was General Brown replaced? | ||
| And that wasn't done. | ||
| In fact, there were seven generals and admirals that were fired. | ||
| No explanation given. | ||
| And I knew four of them. | ||
| It's being called a purge. | ||
| Yeah, he doesn't call it that, but you're right. | ||
| Folks have. | ||
| But I think there should be forthcoming. | ||
| Why would you fire seven generals and admirals? | ||
| I think we deserve an explanation. | ||
| And I know General Brown. | ||
| I served with him when he was a colonel, and when he's a one-star, we were colonels and one-stars together. | ||
| And when I got out, he progressed up and made four stars. | ||
| I'm not aware that he did anything wrong. | ||
| And I think it sends a bad message to our military that if you do what the previous president wanted, and it's lawful orders, and that's what our military does, we follow lawful orders, and then you get a new president. | ||
| He didn't like the orders from the previous president, then we're going to hold these generals responsible. | ||
| The military responds to the commander-in-chief. | ||
| If you get a new commander-in-chief, you pivot and you do what the new commander-in-chief wants. | ||
| And my impression is these generals and admirals are getting fired mainly for the behavior that was being demanded by the previous administration. | ||
| I don't think that's right. | ||
| Do we have the A-team in the military right now? | ||
| Well, I know a lot of the, I know like the chief of staff of the Air Force is one of the smartest guys I've ever met. | ||
| I went to school with him twice. | ||
| And so we have, I think we have great people in the military. | ||
| We have a resilient military. | ||
| I'm more worried about the level of decency. | ||
| And the voters deserve to know. | ||
| Our citizens deserve to know why this decision is being made. | ||
| I do think it's not normal to bring in a three-star that has had no major command experience, no combatant command experience, no service leader command experience. | ||
| So he didn't lead any of the services, was never a major command commander, and never commanded at a combatant command, a joint command. | ||
| Normally, to bring in a chairman of the Joint Chiefs, they have one of those three experiences. | ||
| So on paper, I would say he's not as prepared. | ||
| Now, I don't know him. | ||
| Maybe he'll exceed expectations. | ||
| Let's take some calls. | ||
| We'll start with David in Swainsboro, Georgia, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, C-SPAN. | |
| How are you doing, Don? | ||
| Very good, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, sir. | |
| I appreciate all you've done. | ||
| But let me point to two things, and these are the highest portions of our tax money go to. | ||
| One of them is the health care marketplace, which is an invention of Mitch McConnell. | ||
| And it's based in Lexington, Kentucky. | ||
| I mean, you know, how much more barrel can you roll in there? | ||
| But it cost us $1.4 trillion in losses, about $4.5 trillion of taxes that we're taking in off of people's paychecks. | ||
| And it can almost all be pointed to the health care marketplace. | ||
| And if you want to know, all these robocalls we get, it's government-funded. | ||
| If you look at the way I am, it's a health care marketplace. | ||
| Well, that's $1.4 trillion. | ||
| And these are procedures which are just done for no good reason. | ||
| My ex-wife, who's 76 years old, I watched it go on with her for about eight years. | ||
| I said, I've had enough. | ||
| And now, the other is, and bless the military, for those folks, they do their job, but they get punished for doing their job. | ||
| And now that's a lot of money that we're putting from our payroll taxes into it, who the wealthiest folks who depend on that military to protect the infrastructure around the world so they can run their multinational companies, but they're not putting in their fair share. | ||
| You talk about people in NATO not paying their fair share. | ||
| Well, let's get the wealthiest people in this country to pay their fair share, not the 9.6% that they're paying right now. | ||
| All right, David. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you so much. | |
| Yes, Mimi, thank y'all. | ||
| Y'all be good and keep it up, Don. | ||
| Thank you, David. | ||
| Well, there's a lot to be said in all those comments. | ||
| First of all, I want to point out two-thirds of NATO is paying more than what we were asking them. | ||
| So there is a third that should be doing more, but two-thirds are ours. | ||
| I just want to put that on the table for clarity. | ||
| I do think he raises a good point. | ||
| We do not want to cut the quality of health care and Medicaid. | ||
| The president said that. | ||
| And I talked to the leadership in our team and the two chairmen, and I got those assurances. | ||
| But I think what David's saying, there are ways that we can look at all the spending and see how can we reduce the spending without touching the quality of care. | ||
| And I think there is money going around in places that we should study it. | ||
| And so there's some opportunities to reform Medicaid, but we've got to protect it. | ||
| In my district, 50% of all the Medicaid recipients are children. | ||
| Another 25% are disabled adults. | ||
| But the area that concerns us is the able-bodied adults. | ||
| And of course, if they're under the safety net, we should protect them, right? | ||
| But we want to encourage them to get work, to get training, and try to get them back in the workplace and get them off Medicaid. | ||
| Here is an independent line, Auburn, New York. | ||
| David, you're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, good morning. | |
| I just wanted to follow up on the discussion about how many four-star generals we have and how many we had in World War II. | ||
| And the numbers are kind of astonishing. | ||
| There were seven four-stars generals in World War II at the max. | ||
| And there were maybe four or five million men under arms. | ||
| Now we've got 44 four-star generals, and there's a million and a half in all the branches together. | ||
| It looks like it's lopsided. | ||
| And what I always keep thinking is that every time they try to refocus, which we're trying to focus this military now as a warfighting machine, really, which is what it was intended from the very beginning, they just keep adding on to it rather than, you know, you keep the old stuff in place. | ||
| Like the guys you're trying, they just got fired, I guess was the word. | ||
| So you need to refocus this thing. | ||
| And somebody else, another color mentioned something earlier about the efficiency of government employees. | ||
| Well, I'll just say I worked 35 years as a government employee in the Department of Corrections, and I could say that that is not the epitome of efficiency. | ||
| I did work two years for Uncle Sam in a military uniform way back in the 60s, and that was efficient. | ||
| I mean, that was it. | ||
| You did it. | ||
| They gave you time to get it ready and be ready to go, and it got done. | ||
| All right, so David, going back to your first question, you want to know why the military keeps increasing in size as far as the numbers go and the budget? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, the number of administrative, I can only, there's 10,000 lawyers, they say, in the Department of the DOD. | |
| Okay, let's. | ||
| Let's get a response. | ||
| There's a lot of truth to what David just said about World War II versus today. | ||
| But we've got to remember, World War II, I can't remember the exact number. | ||
| We actually had like seven five-stars. | ||
| We don't have any five-stars today. | ||
| So I think the number he was using was the four-stars. | ||
| And we had a lot more four-stars in Europe and fighting the wars in the Pacific as well. | ||
| But the fact is, I think we should assess, do we have too many four-stars or too many generals in the military today? | ||
| And one of the reasons we have so many is we had the Goldwater-Nichols bill in the 1980s, and it put up theater commands for Africa, Europe, Asia. | ||
| So we have all these theater commands, and we put four-star generals in charge of, or admirals, and each of them. | ||
| And in some cases, they have very little forces, like, you know, the four-star for Africa, right? | ||
| But they could get a lot of forces. | ||
| Some kind of, say, a fight between Egypt or somebody. | ||
| And also, this four-star hits a lot of forces. | ||
| And we may want to reevaluate because a lot of these generals don't have a lot of forces under their command. | ||
| But it was written in law by Goldwater Nichols in the 80s. | ||
| Here is Alex in Brooklyn, New York, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning, Alex. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Representative, I just wanted to go back to what you started with, which was the necessity to help Ukraine to need to push back on Putin. | ||
| Your president basically has aligned with Russia, made a deal with Russia behind Ukraine's back, Europe's back. | ||
| The new chancellor of Germany wants to literally protect Europe and basically push itself out of NATO because it sees the United States as a danger. | ||
| Just yesterday, Trump posted this video, AI video, of Trump's Gaza. | ||
| He's extorting Selinsky for a deal for the minerals in Ukraine. | ||
| And you mean to tell me that you're saying that you believe this, and yet none of you in Congress, none of you in the Senate are really pushing for there to be a real position for the United States to be the leader of the world. | ||
| This country is no longer the leader of the world. | ||
| Everywhere that the United States is pulling out of through USAID, China is coming in. | ||
| China, I'm Colombian. | ||
| China is all over South and Central America now because the United States under the leadership of the Republican Party has turned the world against us. | ||
| And the way that Bush had two literal lying wars that you people were not accountable for, that raised the debt trillions of dollars, I hope that people hold your party accountable for all of the disaster that's going to come because what your party is doing right now is destroying the federal government, weaponizing every agency, and made a mockery of the cabinet and the presidency. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Well, Alex had a lot of feedback there. | ||
| First of all, we do hold people accountable through elections, and that's what happened in November. | ||
| People were so disgruntled at Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, we got President Trump. | ||
| And so there is accountability. | ||
| And, you know, President Biden was polling the lowest of any president going back to 1952. | ||
| And that's how we got here today. | ||
| But for the caller to say that, I'm not saying anything vocal here. | ||
| I've been one of the more vocal people about Ukraine. | ||
| I've been very vocal about the need for NATO. | ||
| Is there anything you can do, though, through the committee, through your position in Congress, getting the other like-minded Republican congressmen with you? | ||
| I mean, is there anything you can do besides, you know, we appreciate you coming on T-SPAN and talking about it? | ||
| Well, he is the commander-in-chief. | ||
| So there is only so much we can do, but we do have the power of the purse. | ||
| And so there's, you know, a talk from the Secretary of Defense that they want to cut 40% in areas of the defense budget. | ||
| It's not going to happen. | ||
| You know, we have the power of the purse. | ||
| So we have the ability to have some control through the budget and through policy and law. | ||
| Of course, the president can always veto it. | ||
| You've got to have two-thirds. | ||
| So there's checks and balances there, but there's no doubt that the president has a large say here. | ||
| He's the commander-in-chief, and he got elected. | ||
| Here is Johanna in Stony Point, New York, Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| How are you? | ||
| Good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm going with a question. | |
| I'm just wondering, as he was just speaking about checks and balances, how come the Republican congressmen and senators nowadays have no backbone to stand up against the things this president is doing and saying? | ||
| You all just fall in line to whatever he says, talking about not cutting Medicaid, Medicare. | ||
| Now you're talking, well, we're not going to cut the quality of care. | ||
| You're still going to cut the people. | ||
| He's talking about President Putin is not a dictator, and there's not a peep from the Republican side. | ||
| What happened to the backbone of the Republican Party? | ||
| You can't stand up to this president. | ||
| You think you have no say anymore? | ||
| He's not supreme leader. | ||
| And I think that the Republicans need to realize that and stand up and finally do something. | ||
| Johanna must have been listening to me earlier. | ||
| I've been very public. | ||
| I've been talking about Ukraine for since the invasion. | ||
| I've been talking about Ukraine since President Trump got elected. | ||
| I was very vocal last week with the president's comments. | ||
| I was very discouraged about his vote and our vote in the United Nations. | ||
| So I've been very public, and I'm not the only one. | ||
| There's 10 or 20 on Ukraine for sure. | ||
| And there's probably more behind the scenes that feel that way. | ||
| You know, the Ukraine issue divides the Republican Party. | ||
| And we have two strands in the Republican Party. | ||
| You have an isolationist strand, and you have, I would say, the old Reagan viewpoint out there. | ||
| And I represent that point, that America is an indispensable nation for freedom. | ||
| Would you be willing to vote against President Trump's agenda? | ||
| It depends what it is, but yes. | ||
| I mean, and I have. | ||
| He campaigned against me two years ago because I voted for the infrastructure bill, for example. | ||
| So my job is to do what's right for our country. | ||
| This is how my priorities are. | ||
| I'm a Christian first. | ||
| I'm an American second. | ||
| And then way down here somewhere, I'm a party guy. | ||
| And it's about doing what's right for our country. | ||
| Now, Medicaid needs to be looked at. | ||
| We're going to have to reform it. | ||
| But we've got to protect the quality of care. | ||
| Just to say we shouldn't touch it, that doesn't make sense. | ||
| It's a huge program here. | ||
| And it hasn't been audited for the role, for what people are on. | ||
| If we go through it, we'll likely find people who shouldn't be on there. | ||
| And so we should give it a scrub. | ||
| Here's Joe, an independent in Bitterford, Maine. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, my God. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| Thanks for taking that call. | ||
| Don, you probably don't remember me, Donnie, but we spoke before October 7th. | ||
| And on that program, you were peddling your lies. | ||
| But my question is this. | ||
| President Trump has lied repeatedly about the amount of money that U.S. has given Ukraine. | ||
| Given Ukraine. | ||
| How much have we given? | ||
| Please give me a number. | ||
| Is it $360,000 like Donnie Deli said yesterday in his big cabinet meeting? | ||
| Is it? | ||
| No, I think it's $180 billion. | ||
| That's what we've done. | ||
| And a lot of it's been weapons. | ||
| And we give them weapons and we get to replace them here with newer weapons. | ||
| So this has actually been good for our military. | ||
| We've been able to set off older weapons and replace them with newer weapons. | ||
| And I'd also point out the nations of the European Union, if you consolidate them, have put in more money than we have. | ||
| So I haven't lied at all. | ||
| I've been pretty honest about this. | ||
| And I continue to do so. | ||
| Here's Tracy and Clinton, Maryland, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning, Tracy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I agree with the last Republican caller. | ||
| I don't understand how you clearly state that Russia started the war with Ukraine, but yet the president is saying the complete opposite of that. | ||
| So we're supposed to believe everything that this man is telling us. | ||
| I don't understand why you all don't call out the lies. | ||
| I don't understand why you would believe that there will be no harm done to Medicaid and to the people that rely on that. | ||
| Why do you trust him so much when he can't even clearly state the fact and the truth? | ||
| You all never go toe-to-toe with him on anything that he says. | ||
| I mean, he even dates back to the whole alternate truth. | ||
| It's either a lie or true. | ||
| So please explain to me how you all follow this man word for word, and you all don't hold him accountable for anything that he says. | ||
| He's clearly lying to the American public, and you all are okay with that. | ||
| I don't understand it. | ||
| Well, Tracy, evidently, you haven't been listening to me again. | ||
| I've been very clear. | ||
| Russia did invade Ukraine, and I pushed back on it. | ||
| So maybe it should talk to another Republican because I think I've been honest and very clear. | ||
| Regarding Elon Musk and Doge, you told Axios this, quote, before making cuts rashly, the administration should be studying and staffing to see what the consequences are. | ||
| Measure twice before cutting. | ||
| They have had to backtrack multiple times. | ||
| Does Congress have a role in stopping what you're calling rash cuts? | ||
| Two types of spending here. | ||
| One, if we've earmarked it and it's been signed into law, the president has to spend it, right? | ||
| So if we write into law, you know, spend so much money for Project X and it's been signed into law by the President, you know, constitutionally has to do it. | ||
| There's been other money that we put into a pot and say we give it to USAID and they get to determine where that money goes. | ||
| Well, the president does have the right to move that money around. | ||
| So I just want to put that on the table. | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| Does it do two things? | ||
| The first thing it's doing is highlighting where all this money is going. | ||
| How's it being spent? | ||
| I welcome that. | ||
| We should have a full audit, very accurate audit, and let the voters see what's going on. | ||
| And I would say many voters would be concerned about what USAID was spending money on. | ||
| The second part is now they're going to make cuts. | ||
| And what I've found is that they're making them too quickly, and they're not measuring the consequences of some of these cuts, and it's hurting. | ||
| And so they've had to go back and rehire people they fired or realize, okay, this money was going to fight AIDS in Africa. | ||
| That's a good program, PEPFAR. | ||
| So they put that back on. | ||
| The problem is they fired the administrators that were doing it. | ||
| So we still got a problem there. | ||
| And Ebola prevention. | ||
| Ebola prevention. | ||
| I mentioned yesterday. | ||
| Nuclear, folks with our nuclear weapons have had to rehire them. | ||
| FAA, we need people manning our air traffic control towers. | ||
| I could just go on and on. | ||
| So my point is, let's do a full audit by all means, put a spotlight on our spending. | ||
| But when it comes to cutting, let's make sure we do the analysis and know what we're cutting so that we don't hurt our country. | ||
| I saw a lack of caution in these cuts. | ||
| And we've had to, numerous times, they'll rehire people back in because what's wrong. | ||
| I don't think that's smart. | ||
| And they sometimes can't find those people that they laid off. | ||
| That's a fact. | ||
| Here's Duane, a Republican in Winfield, West Virginia. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, Representative. | |
| I don't agree with your idea about firing all these generals. | ||
| If you'll look, General Milley went behind President Trump's back, consulted his equal in the Chinese Army, told him that he would let him know if Trump was going to do an attack on China. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Now, do you think that a man like that should be the Joint Chief of Staff? | |
| And also for General Charlie Brown, Charlie Brown is a poster boy for DEI. | ||
| And something else, you say you're a Christian. | ||
| Do you believe that God knows all, sees all, and hears all? | ||
| Okay, last question. | ||
| Yes, I do believe I believe in an Almighty God of our Bible, that he knows everything. | ||
| And I try to read four chapters a day in the Bible and pray. | ||
| But when it comes to General Milley, I've got to just point out Gerald Trump, or President Trump, didn't fire Gerald Mille. | ||
| He was already out. | ||
| So we're talking about seven generals and admirals. | ||
| And people, I mean, I know I've heard this said about General C.Q. Brown. | ||
| He's the poster boy for DEI. | ||
| People say that, but back it up. | ||
| Why do you say that? | ||
| Right? | ||
| Now, he was doing some programs that President Biden wanted, and that's because President Biden was the president, and he had asked the military to do these things. | ||
| President Trump comes in, and he gets the chance to tell the military, okay, I want to do it differently. | ||
| Let's do a 30-degree change, whatever it may be. | ||
| The military will respond. | ||
| So, to fire General Brown for doing what President Biden asked him to do, I don't think that's right, unless it was an unlawful order. | ||
| Here's Ken, a Republican in Louisa, Virginia. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I have a question about the original help that we gave Ukraine. | ||
| Now, was this agreed to as a loan before, prior to this? | ||
| Or was it determined later after Trump got into office here and he made up his own mind? | ||
| And also, as a sidebar to that, all the help that we've been giving Israel, has that been considered a loan or has it been ironed out yet? | ||
| The answer to both those questions is no. | ||
| They weren't loans. | ||
| It was aid, one to Ukraine, and also aid to Israel. | ||
| And they were not premised initially as loans. | ||
| And again, I'll just come back to it. | ||
| It's in our national security interest for Ukraine to win this war. | ||
| If Russia prevails, we're going to be spending a lot more money, whether it be NATO or in other ways. | ||
| And so you stand up to a bully. | ||
| If you do not stand up to a bully, they act out even more. | ||
| And I'm reminded of what happened in 1938 when Novell Chamberlain met with Hitler privately and they carved up Czechoslovakia without Czechoslovakian leaders even there. | ||
| And then a year later, Hitler took the rest of Czechoslovakia and invaded Poland. | ||
| And we call that appeasement. | ||
| Appeasement does not work with these dictators, and I believe in being firm with them. | ||
| And so I have a different view about how to go about this than our president. | ||
| I want to point out, I don't think President Biden did a great job here either. |