| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
|
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| Joining us is Rich Lowry. | ||
| He's with National Review. | ||
| He serves as their editor-in-chief. | ||
| And joining us this morning, Mr. Lowry, thanks for your time, as always. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| I was struck by the last caller of this program, the previous segment, when he came to the Trump administration. | ||
| He said, and a lot of Republicans have repeated this over the last few weeks, is that we have to give the president a chance to put his policies in place before we criticize him. | ||
| What do you think of that sentiment? | ||
| I think it's basically correct. | ||
| Look, there's been a lot of good stuff. | ||
| The border has just been amazing. | ||
| It basically ended a massive historic border crisis instantly. | ||
| Now, the numbers will begin to tick up again if he doesn't have the resources and the policies in place to keep it under control for the long term. | ||
| But that's just been an amazing achievement. | ||
| I think the stuff ripping up DEI and the government and pushing against it in educational institutions is fantastic. | ||
| The deregulation, great. | ||
| Doge, I think directionally, absolutely what we need. | ||
| A little rocky rollout and there'll be legal issues there. | ||
| And then you get to the tariffs, which I think is what a lot of people are wondering about. | ||
| There's a good case. | ||
| China doesn't play fair, hostile to the United States. | ||
| They are an adversary. | ||
| Maybe tariff them. | ||
| But Canada, Mexico, and going back every 30 days, creating this sense of crisis, has created uncertainty in the economy. | ||
| And I think that's where even some Republicans are waiting to see where he settles out on that policy. | ||
| Even in a recent piece of yours, it just says the headline, Canada is not the enemy. | ||
| You can elaborate from there. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I mean, this is the Canadians are the closest we have as Americans to brothers or at least cousins, longest undefended border in the world. | ||
| This is not an adversary of the United States. | ||
| It's not even like Mexico. | ||
| There's not a border influx from Canada. | ||
| There's a trickle of fentanyl, but nothing like what you're seeing from Mexico. | ||
| And the rationales for threatening Mexico, for saying we're going to put on these sweeping 25% tariffs have been ever shifting. | ||
| Initially, it was fentanyl and border. | ||
| Then it was dairy, lumber, banking. | ||
| These are legitimate issues with Canada. | ||
| They've been discussed before. | ||
| They've been discussed for decades. | ||
| They were discussed prior to the USMCA that Trump himself negotiated, the free trade agreement between Canada, Mexico, and ourselves in his first term. | ||
| That's up for renewal next year. | ||
| You can just discuss them then. | ||
| And then finally, Trump has settled, at least at times, for the idea that our border with Canada is somehow artificial and should be changed, or Canada should be annexed, and that's never going to happen. | ||
| And that we're talking about threatening the sovereignty potentially of a fellow NATO country is insane. | ||
| So I think we just told the Canadians what we want. | ||
| There's a good chance we get it, but they have been confused as many other observers have. | ||
| When it comes to there's a new prime minister coming into Canada, long-term relations, is that a concern in your mind considering the erratic nature of how tariffs are being applied? | ||
| You know, I think the Canadians really want to get along with us, but we've kind of whipped them into an anti-U.S. fervor. | ||
| The biggest issue in that campaign they have coming up will be how to deal with the United States and Donald Trump and stand up for us. | ||
| But I think if we get to a better place, things would snap back. | ||
| But at the moment, we have deranged Canadian public opinion. | ||
| I mean, you have serious people in Canada saying Canada needs the benefit of a nuclear umbrella from Europe to protect itself from the United States. | ||
| And that's crazy, but when you're talking about potentially absorbing them as a 51st state, you're going to get a nationalist reaction. | ||
| So I think this is a problem with Trump. | ||
| He's a nationalist. | ||
| He understands national pride. | ||
| He understands prestige. | ||
| He understands being insulted easily. | ||
| But that's true of other people as well. | ||
| And a lot of them live in Canada. | ||
| I want to play you some of the defense that JD Vance had of president, or the vice president had of criticisms of the economic policy writ large of the Trump administration and get your reaction to it. | ||
| And you see so many people attacking the president's economic programs and attacking the progress that we've made over the past seven weeks. | ||
| You hear people saying, well, how dare Donald Trump impose tariffs on foreign countries that have been taking advantage of us for 40 years? | ||
| And the answer is that unless you're willing to use American power to fight back against what those countries have been doing for a generation, you are never going to rebuild American manufacturing and you're never going to support the American workers. | ||
| President Trump is done with leaders who talk, talk, talk. | ||
| We are an administration that is going to do things for the American people and for American workers generally. | ||
| So Mr. Lowry, that's the rhetoric. | ||
| What's the reality in your mind? | ||
| Well, first of all, that's classic JD Vance. | ||
| I mean, he always makes the best argument for whatever Trump or the administration is doing. | ||
| Now, I don't think Canada has been taking advantage of us. | ||
| Again, they signed on the dotted line in a free trade agreement negotiated by Donald Trump in his first term. | ||
| But this is the larger case for the tariffs, that the manufacturing sector in the United States has been devastated by free trade, and we need to protect it and rebuild it. | ||
| Now, it is true manufacturing employment has declined, but it's been a secular decline for a very long time. | ||
| At the same time, we continue to make a lot of stuff. | ||
| And I think that the problem is the tariffs are another problem with tariffs that's kind of contradictory. | ||
| If you want to build up manufacturing in the United States, the last thing you do is put tariffs on steel and aluminum, which are inputs for manufacturing. | ||
| Now, those tariffs will help at the margins, the steel industry and the aluminum industry in the United States, but they'll hurt everyone else. | ||
| So I think it's appropriate to have a focus on building things, but the best approach is to make our domestic environment here in the United States as competitive as possible. | ||
| Good tax policy, rolling back regulations. | ||
| And I think we will see an EO soon that I'll really welcome from Donald Trump about shipbuilding. | ||
| The commercial shipbuilding industry in the United States has been reduced to basically nothing. | ||
| At the same time, China has taken over about 50% of that market worldwide. | ||
| And that's so important because if we get in a shooting war, God forbid, with China and the Indo-Pacific, ships are going to go down. | ||
| They're going to need to be rebuilt. | ||
| They're going to need to be repaired. | ||
| And China has much bigger ability to do that than we do. | ||
| So there are a number of sectors like this that it's appropriate to focus on. | ||
| Think about do we need an element of government support for them? | ||
| But I think the willy-nilly tariffs are a mistake. | ||
| This is the topic of your piece this morning. | ||
| We're showing the folks the headline. | ||
| Trump is right to emphasize shipbuilding. | ||
| If you want to ask questions of our guests, here's how you can do so. | ||
| 202-748-8000 for Democrats, 202-748-8001 for Republicans, and 202-748-8002 for independents. | ||
| You can text us your questions or comments at 202-748-8003. | ||
| Mr. Lowry, you see the president's current effort in his second term. | ||
| You viewed him during his first term. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What's changed, do you think? | |
| Well, it's just more Trumpy than ever. | ||
| So first time around, he did push NATO. | ||
| He did push some terrorists, but there were more traditional Republicans there saying, yes, sir, maybe that's not such a good idea, and convincing him and conjoling him behind the scenes. | ||
| Partly because of that experience, the Trump team prepared the second term to just have people who really on board this agenda and who weren't going to obstruct it, but who are going to accelerate it. | ||
| So I think that in some ways has been very good. | ||
| Again, DEI, they considered a big rollback of this LBJ executive order that got the ball rolling there. | ||
| First term, but like, no, that's too politically radioactive. | ||
| We can't touch it. | ||
| And this time around, they're like, no, we're going to do it in the first couple days, which I think is a very good thing. | ||
| And there's also the flood the zone approach, again, not to be obsessed with DEI. | ||
| But that would be our main, if that was like one of the just two or three things he'd done, that'd be the main, we'd be talking about it top of mind this morning, still, like a month and a half later. | ||
| But because so much is happening on so many fronts, a lot of things that would be otherwise controversial or all-consuming aren't. | ||
| So the bad side of the rush is you can make mistakes. | ||
| The good side of the rush, it does keep your domestic opponents on their back feet. | ||
| And some international news. | ||
| We heard from our reporter earlier this morning that later on this week, the president is expecting to talk with Vladimir Putin over issues of Ukraine. | ||
| What are concerns as far as the White House approach at this stage? | ||
| Well, I think he's right to want a deal. | ||
| I think we've established the last three years that Russia isn't going to win the war in the sense of sweeping the Kyiv and toppling the government and establishing a puppet government of its own. | ||
| That's a very good thing. | ||
| But we've also established, unfortunately, that Ukraine is not going to push the Russians all the way back to its sovereign borders and retake its territory. | ||
| So it's time for this thing to end. | ||
| I've been concerned, as many Ukraine hawks like myself have been, that all the public pressure has been on the Ukrainians. | ||
| I think Zelensky mishandled that Oval Office meeting. | ||
| It was really idiotic of him to think he can go in there and win a public argument over this stuff. | ||
| And it's kind of inevitable that he got slapped down. | ||
| But I didn't like seeing Trump and Vance berate him in public. | ||
| I think they should have gone in private if they wanted to berate him and do it there, but not do it publicly. | ||
| And then they cut off aid and cut off the intelligence sharing. | ||
| Now that's being restored. | ||
| And the Ukrainians have signed up to this ceasefire proposal. | ||
| So I think the Ukrainians now are in a better place or the one that I would have thought would have been the place for them to go. | ||
| Initially, stay on Trump's good side, establish that you're the one who wants peace and put the ball in Vladimir Putin's court. | ||
| Now, the ball is in Putin's court. | ||
| And since he's gaining, he may want to keep gaining, but he's got to be careful of pushing it too far against President Trump's wishes, because then he could engender a reaction that would be very unwelcome for him. | ||
| This is Rich Lowry of National Review joining us. | ||
| He serves as the editor-in-chief. | ||
| Our first call for you comes from Kentucky. | ||
| This is Tim. | ||
| He joins us on our line for Democrats. | ||
| You're on with our guests. | ||
| Go ahead with your question or comment, please. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, sir. | |
| I just was wondering what your opinion is of Trump's attacks on the First Amendment and the judiciary. | ||
| All this threatening and talk of impeachment and denying constitutional orders. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, so Trump will say things. | ||
| You know, he has launched a suit against 60 minutes for how they edited a Kamal Harris interview that cut against the First Amendment and a wrong. | ||
| They're not strict violations of it, but against the spirit of it. | ||
| But at the same time, the people who work for him and support him are very strongly in favor of the First Amendment. | ||
| So you've seen this loosening up in our culture. | ||
| I would say Meta is the most prominent example of this, where they had a moderation policy that was, in some respects, coerced from the government. | ||
| And after Trump's election, they said, basically, we're not going to do this anymore. | ||
| We're going to adopt more of the Elon Musk-Musk X model, where you have a more robust free speech template, which I think is the correct one. | ||
| So that story is a little bit muddled, but I think in general, the Republican Party is more pro-free speech than the Democrats are now. | ||
| And they've lawfully abided. | ||
| There's a dispute over this latest order having to do with the deportation of these Venezuelan criminals. | ||
| But the Trump administration has abided with these rulings, even if they hate them and has taken the tack appropriately that they're just going to fight him out in the court with appeals. | ||
| You have seen talk of impeaching from Elon Musk and others. | ||
| John Roberts hates that. | ||
| He says that's an anti-judiciary move. | ||
| As far as I'm concerned, Elon Musk can say whatever he wants. | ||
| It's not a violation of our constitutional system, and no judges are actually going to get impeached. | ||
| Mr. Lowry, there's a viewer from texting us this morning following up on something you said, asking you to explain why you think DEI is bad for the country. | ||
| I think it's a poisonous and race-obsessed ideology that puts people's race and sex above their status as individuals. | ||
| And the fundamental American idea is that we should judge everyone on their merits and as individual people. | ||
| So we've seen this in quotas, in college admissions. | ||
| We've seen it in all these hideous dumb trainings that have taken over corporate America. | ||
| So I think all that should be ripped up. | ||
| It's wrong. | ||
| I think a lot of it is illegal and violates our civil rights laws. | ||
| And we should just treat people as they come as individuals. | ||
| That's a fundamentally American idea. | ||
| James from Virginia, Republican line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I think this tariff is just a genius ideal of Trump because the first thing the politicians do is they say we don't want the product. | ||
| And in order to reduce inflation, these are shelf-like products that's got to be moved. | ||
| So in turn, it goes back to the American people, which reduces the prices. | ||
| It's not price control, but at the end of the day, it accomplishes the same thing as price control without the legislation, without the red tape. | ||
| Because the grain that China says we don't want, it's got to go back. | ||
| The pork that Canada says we don't want, it has to go back. | ||
| I mean, this is just ingenious of how Trump has played these politicians because he knows what they're going to anybody knew what Canada's reaction was going to be. | ||
| And a 30-day tariff, I think it's a good idea because at the end of the day, you can see, are you getting results for those 30 days? | ||
| If you don't, slap another 30 days on them. | ||
| That's the aluminum and steel, the whole nine yards, that it uses the American economy to give it a chance. | ||
| Because in the past four years, we have suffered horribly under the Biden administration. | ||
| Okay, James of Virginia. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| Mr. Slowry, go ahead. | ||
| Yeah, so again, steel and aluminum are inputs, they're making it more expensive at the margins for people to make things, and I think that's a bad idea. | ||
| The audio is a little muddy in my end, so I didn't quite follow the argument on inflation, but this is a political risk to the president. | ||
| One of the main issues, if not the main issue he got elected on, was prices. | ||
| So if you, one, seems as though he doesn't care very much about it, that's bad. | ||
| Two, if he's doing things to increase prices, even if it isn't strictly inflationary, the supporters of the tariffs will point out this doesn't, you know, it doesn't increase the monetary supply and create this inflation that builds on itself. | ||
| It's just a one-time price increase. | ||
| But for the consumer, it doesn't really matter that much whether it's a one-time price increase or not. | ||
| It's just that the prices are higher. | ||
| So this is an Achilles heel potentially for the president, and you see it showing up as a vulnerability in the polls. | ||
| And you've mentioned the polls, but is the vulnerability just on the tariff front economically, or are there other economic concerns as far as policy that the Trump administration is going to make? | ||
| Ultimately, the peril is prices. | ||
| People, they seem pretty divided on tariffs. | ||
| But the key metric from Trump's first term economically was that real wages increased. | ||
| Wages went up. | ||
| Inflation was low. | ||
| So people had more money in their pocket books and they could buy more. | ||
| And the key metric in the Biden administration is that real wages were stagnant. | ||
| So it's crucial for Trump to get that number back up. | ||
| It's good for everyone in the country, so we should hope he's successful on that front. | ||
| Writing about economic issues, it's the New York Times Thomas Friedman recently writing this, saying Joe Biden got a lot of things wrong, but by the end of his term, with the help of a wise Federal Reserve, the Biden economy was actually in pretty good shape and trending in the right direction. | ||
| America certainly did not need a global tariff shock therapy. | ||
| Corporate and household balance sheets were relatively healthy. | ||
| Oil prices were on the low side. | ||
| Unemployment was around 4%. | ||
| Consumer spending was rising. | ||
| And GDP growth was around 2%. | ||
| That's his assessment. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it was okay. | ||
| It wasn't great. | ||
| People didn't feel it again because of the real wages issue. | ||
| But if we have a downturn, you know, the income president is always going to be blamed. | ||
| But if you had a downturn early in the Trump administration, usually he could say, well, you know, I just got here. | ||
| I haven't done anything yet. | ||
| You know, my tax bill is still being considered by Congress. | ||
| But here, he took ownership of the economy almost immediately with the tariffs. | ||
| And they will be blamed if there's a downturn. | ||
| I'm not saying there's a downturn. | ||
| I'm not an economist. | ||
| My economic forecasting is even worse than my political forecasting. | ||
| But it is a huge risk for the president, no doubt. | ||
| Rich Lowry joining us for this conversation. | ||
| Let's hear from Michael in Florida, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I am hoping you'll join with Mrs. McMahon in explaining to the populace that anti-DEI, when it's applied to schools, is actually a good thing, because in schools, there should be equality between students. | |
| And what I mean by that is that if a student is physically able to accomplish an A in the work, how dare we not give that student and take it upon ourselves the responsibility to teach that child so that he earns an A, okay, deserves the A. Every child should get an A in a classroom if they're able to. | ||
| And to not do that is to categorize them and put them into categories for the specific purpose. | ||
| And this is where I think there can be a joining of the right and the left. | ||
| It's decolonizing, decolonizing our schools where we're not separating and compartmentalizing kids into black, white, disadvantaged, poor, so that we can categorize them as to high value and low value. | ||
| There is no low value student. | ||
| No child is chaff. | ||
| No separating of wheat from chaff. | ||
| No child is chaff. | ||
| I mean, that's what our schools are doing now. | ||
| So what Mrs. McMahon is proposing to do, by the way, is constitutional. | ||
| No child is happy getting an S, a D, or a C. None. | ||
| And in three of our states, it's in the state constitution. | ||
| I think it's Wisconsin, Virginia, and Massachusetts. | ||
| And in those states, any child, I mean, you're doing the child a disservice. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| We got your point. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Lowry. | ||
| Totally endorse that sentiment. | ||
| We should have high expectations for every single child and teach them, right? | ||
| And a lot of schools are just failing on this basic measure of success. | ||
| At the same time, they're obsessed with all this nonsense and wasting their time with all this nonsense. | ||
| So I think every state in the union would be well served to adopt Florida's education policy, which has created the best education system in the country. | ||
| And it begins with having high expectations for every child and focusing on the basics. | ||
| When it comes to education, overall, your thoughts on the thinning of the Education Department and the possible dismantling of it? | ||
| Well, I think it'd be great if it went away. | ||
| I think if it went away, it might be a little less consequential than people think because the Education Department administers these enormous student loan programs and other funding programs that aren't going to vaporize if the Education Department goes away. | ||
| But this goes to one of the key. | ||
| This isn't necessarily a Doge initiative per se, but goes to the legal problem with Doge. | ||
| You can cut people. | ||
| You can maybe say we can achieve this goal that Congress has set out without spending quite so much money doing it, but you can't vaporize entire agencies and departments without Congress voting to do so. | ||
| So if you really wanted to get rid of the Education Department, you need Congress to vote to do it. | ||
| You'd need 60 votes in the Senate. | ||
| That's not going to happen. | ||
| So I think they may, it's going to be a smaller education department in terms of the workforce. | ||
| Maybe some functions are transferred over to other departments, but it's not going to go away, unfortunately. | ||
| To what degree do you think Congress is going to go along with Mr. Musk's suggestions for cuts? | ||
| Well, I think this would be, again, a really good idea. | ||
| To the extent that there's any legal question, Congress should adopt the Doge policies and pass them. | ||
| And under the Impoundment Act, that was passed in the 1970s. | ||
| I believe this was a reaction to Richard Nixon's impoundment, which is a fancy word for just not spending money Congress had appropriated. | ||
| Congress said, no, you can't do that anymore. | ||
| But by the way, we can do rescissions. | ||
| Come to us, and we'll cut these things. | ||
| And the filibuster isn't involved, so you don't need 60 votes. | ||
| So I think everything the Doge wants to do, basically, should, at least when it comes to cutting things, should go to Congress and should be duly passed. | ||
| And that eliminates all legal question. | ||
| Now, the big question, though, is whether you actually have the votes to do this in Congress, and particularly in a House where we all know now you have about a two-vote margin for Speaker Mike Johnson. | ||
| From Alabama, Democrats line, we'll hear from Perry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning, C. San Audience. | ||
| I have a question about these tasks. | ||
| You know, for the last 40 years or so, the American government kind of encouraged our industries to move overseas. | ||
| And so if American companies overseas and ship those products back here, is that a deficit for us? | ||
| That does not count as far as when it comes to the GDP and all those things. | ||
| Mr. Lowry. | ||
| Yes, I didn't quite catch the last question. | ||
| Paula, can you repeat your last part of your question, please? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| We know we kind of encourage our businesses to go overseas for the last 40 years. | ||
| And so when American companies are incentivized to go overseas and make their products, when they ship them back to this country, is that a deficit against the United States or does it go against a foreign country as it's a foreign product being shipped back to America, even though it's an American company? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, so, right. | ||
| So if, you know, Apple's making a lot of phones in China, I think is what the caller's getting at is, is that good for China or is it good for Apple, which is an American company? | ||
| I think it depends. | ||
| And I think there are critical supply chains that you don't want dominated by China. | ||
| And we went way too far in that direction. | ||
| But a lot of this stuff is not coming back to the United States, kind of the low-end manufacturing. | ||
| So what you want is for it, and some of this has happened, to go to allied countries that don't hate us, you know, the Philippines, or come back to North America. | ||
| And again, I don't want to seem totally obsessed with Canadian tariffs, but some of this stuff has been reshored to North America and has come to Canada and Mexico, and that's not necessarily a problem. | ||
| So you're kind of punishing, you've encouraged these companies to come back to North America, and then you're turning around and saying, oh, it's terrible here in North America. | ||
| It's terrible you're in Canada. | ||
| You've got to come back to the United States. | ||
| And a lot of this stuff, for instance, with the automotive industry, you know, building a million square foot plant is not a quick project, right? | ||
| You don't plan it in six months and build it in six months. | ||
| It's like a 10-year project. | ||
| So what they need is certainty. | ||
| They need to know what the policy was. | ||
| And what they were relying on, because they thought it was the policy, because it was a signed agreement, was the USMCA. | ||
| So again, you got problems with Canada, you got problems with Mexico. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| Negotiate it in an orderly fashion next year when you're revising that free trade agreement. | ||
| But the back and forth is just a killer. | ||
| And it's a sign that it's a killer that even President Trump recognized as much when he was talking last time about imposing these tariffs because he exempted the auto industry. | ||
| Because a lot of the stuff you have coming across borders multiple times. | ||
| So you get these crazy numbers. | ||
| I don't know whether they're right or not, but price of certain kind of cars will go up $10,000. | ||
| And that obviously would be bad for our economy and bad for the consumer. | ||
| So I see the point the caller is making, and that's my take. | ||
| Richard is from California, Republican line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Sorry, didn't push the button. | ||
| Richard, I'm sorry I didn't push the button right away. | ||
| Go ahead with your question or comment, please. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Yeah, my question is, it's been 50-something days since the election. | ||
| The Democrats already want to get back into power again. | ||
| So if we let them get back into power, does Mr. Lowry think that the Democrats would go ahead and cut that $2 trillion deficit spending down? | ||
| Oh, of course not. | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| They are not interested in reducing the deficit. | ||
| Unfortunately, neither party's truly interested in reducing the deficit. | ||
| Republicans talk about it a lot more. | ||
| I think Elon Musk is quite sincere about it, but unfortunately, Doge won't be able to do it on its own. | ||
| And the Democrats are in a really terrible state. | ||
| I think it was the NBC poll yesterday what had the approval rating of the Democrats at 27%, the lowest ever in that polling series. | ||
| You have this contention over Chuck Schumer and talks of dumping Chuck Schumer because he didn't trigger a government shutdown last week. | ||
| I think Schumer is absolutely right in that call. | ||
| Party doesn't have any leadership. | ||
| The direction is unclear. | ||
| So they're in a terrible state, but usually what happens in American politics is you're out of power, you seem hopeless, you seem futile, and then things happen, and events save you, and presidencies get shaped by events and they're unforeseen crises. | ||
| So I'd be shocked if Democrats don't take back the House next year because they don't need, you know, they just need a handful of pickups to do it. | ||
| Not so sure about the Senate, but that would allow them at least to have something of a break on President Trump. | ||
| And then you see what you come up with in terms of a presidential nominee in 28. | ||
| I don't think there's anyone who's looking great on the Democratic side at the moment, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're not going to get a good and talented candidate. | ||
| So people who, people a little overenthusiastic on my side, who are ready to put the Democrats six feet under, but that's not the case. | ||
| That's not going to happen. | ||
| I was wondering where to say, the CR vote that took place last week, what it said about the strength of the House and Senate Republicans and the strength of the party in Congress. | ||
| I think Speaker Johnson, you just have to conclude, he's good at this. | ||
| You know, this is another high wire act, and he stayed on the wire, only loses Thomas Massey. | ||
| Now, it helps a lot to have President Trump backing him up because Trump's grip on the party is so strong. | ||
| He can basically convince, I think, any Republican to jump off any ledge, with the exception of a Massey and maybe a Collins or Murkowski-McConnell in the Senate. | ||
| But the key predicate of this victory, tactical victory for Republicans, was Johnson holding his caucus together. | ||
| And if that doesn't happen, then he has to look for Democrats, then it gets really messy, then these votes are probably failing in the House, and Schumer's in the catbird seat. | ||
| And Schumer was not in the catbird seat, thanks to the excellent work of Speaker Johnson. | ||
| This is Rich Lowry joining us for this conversation. | ||
| This is James joining us from Louisiana Independent Line. | ||
| You're on with our guests. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, sir. | |
| I hope this doesn't take as long as I think it's going to take. | ||
| But I don't understand your answer about why DEI is bad for the country when people like me that see in the Constitution. | ||
| I'm going to see if I get it real quick. | ||
| In the Constitution, there was a three-fifths compromise. | ||
| I don't call it a compromise. | ||
| I call it an affirmation that they affirmed that a certain group of people were less than human. | ||
| And then for hundreds of years, we had laws that said they were less than human. | ||
| Then when we sent those same people to defend this country, when they came back, they said, okay, you certain people, you go right, those other white people go left. | ||
| We still treated them differently. | ||
| Now, with all of that type of history, where only certain people were lynched in public with law enforcement watching, how do we correct that? | ||
| Why would Republicans want to make policies and laws to do something that the people might want to do to ameliorate that type of situation? | ||
| Well, I think that's very well said, and I appreciate the sentiment and emotion behind it. | ||
| I think the key thing is what would we do to rectify it? | ||
| We'd treat everyone equal, right? | ||
| Why do we want to turn around and say, because of that terrible history, that we want to disadvantage an immigrant child from Cambodia who's come here in terrible circumstances, talented, has worked hard, and deserves to get into, say, Harvard, but isn't because they're Asian in our ridiculously overly broad and simplistic census categories. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Does that undo any wrongs that were done over 150 years in terms of African Americans? | ||
| No, it's just another wrong. | ||
| So equality of opportunity, treating people as individuals, that's where we want to get as America. | ||
| So, it would be perverse in my mind to look at all that history and say, we're not going to repeat it in the gruesome and hideous form that it took those 150 years, but we want to do at least a lower valiance, milder form of discrimination against certain classes of people. | ||
| That's wrong. | ||
| And again, even if you don't think it's wrong, it is definitely against the civil rights laws of the United States. | ||
| So, you'd have to go and change all these historic laws that we hold up as great exemplars of the American idea and say, no, actually, it's okay to discriminate against certain people based on their race. | ||
| And that would be wrong, and it's not going to happen. | ||
| Because of guidance from the Trump administration at colleges and universities, in some cases, money not being sent to colleges and universities, how do you think that changes what happens on the college campuses when it comes to DEI policy? | ||
| Well, I think every university in America, with a few exceptions, is dependent on federal funding. | ||
| So, they're going to take this very seriously. | ||
| I think the effort on the part of a lot of them, and we saw this with the Supreme Court's affirmative action jurisprudence as well, is they'll change what they're doing in public or come up with new names of what the old practices are and hope they can kind of duck and cover and continue to get away with it. | ||
| So, I think that that's going to be a focus of the Trump administration, seeing that they get compliance. | ||
| But it'd just be a very good thing if everyone in America just took it as gospel that we should treat people equally, regardless of race or other inherent characteristics. | ||
| We'll hear next from Joe, Joe in Florida, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| How are you doing? | ||
| You're on with our guest. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good. | |
| Okay, great to see Mr. Laurie on. | ||
| I do have a couple of questions for him. | ||
| One is: he made a comment earlier about Zelensky should try to stay on Trump's good side. | ||
| I'm not really sure what that means. | ||
| Being on a president's good side for the good of his own country, is that carry over to Americans too? | ||
| Now we need to stay on Trump's good side so he doesn't come after us like he has suggested with a lot of his comments at the DOJ the other day. | ||
| If you're not on his good side, then you're not someplace in the gray area. | ||
| You're on his bad side. | ||
| So, and he's demonstrated that kind of stuff before with now he wants to silence people from being able to go and talk about things and maybe protest things that he doesn't agree with. | ||
| So, you know, is that both international and national that we all need to stay on Trump's good side in order to ingratiate him and make him feel good about himself so he doesn't come after us or do what he did to Zelensky? | ||
| Zelensky didn't stay on his good side, so he withdrew things for a couple weeks. | ||
| Hey, I'm going to withdraw U.S. help. | ||
| We're a country. | ||
| We're not Trumpland. | ||
| We're the United States. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Joe in Florida. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| Yeah, so look, President Trump overly personalized things. | ||
| There's no doubt about it. | ||
| And that's not a good quality, but it's just there. | ||
| And Zelensky is in a different position than anyone else in the United States. | ||
| He's a leader of a foreign country that desperately needs United States support. | ||
| So it's not unusual for foreign leaders to read other foreign leaders and do things to ingratiate themselves. | ||
| Totally different example, but I'll just throw it out there. | ||
| You know, Churchill knew he needed FDR support. | ||
| He needed FDR's material support before the United States was in the war, and then he wanted to get the United States in the war eventually. | ||
| So sharing, you know, FDR was a navalist, right? | ||
| So sharing all the naval information that the British had early on, bringing nice champagne, you know, and cigars when he visited the United States. | ||
| These are kind of typical things. | ||
| With Trump, as with a lot of things with Trump, it's exaggerated. | ||
| And I wish he didn't take things so personally. | ||
| But if you're Zielinski and other leaders have figured this out, well, you wear a suit to the Oval Office. | ||
| Should that matter? | ||
| Maybe not, but it does. | ||
| Don't argue in public. | ||
| Should that matter? | ||
| Maybe it shouldn't, but it does. | ||
| So that was just a failure of diplomacy on his part. | ||
| Again, I don't like the way he was treated by Trump in Vance. | ||
| But if you're the supplicant, if you need U.S. aid, perhaps for your national existence, just do these things to stay on the good side of the leader of the country that's so important to you. | ||
| That's my only point. | ||
| To your point of taking things personally, we have a viewer off of X asking the question, what's your opinion of different press outlets being banned from the White House press room? | ||
| Yeah, I think it's good to let in new kind of outlets. | ||
| A lot of people snarked to come back to the Zelensky Oval Office meeting that a reporter, I forget from what outlet he was with, but asked Zelensky, why aren't you wearing a suit, right? | ||
| Now, that's a question that would never have been asked before unless you had alternate media sources there. | ||
| But it's a question that 30%, 40%, 50% of the country might be wondering. | ||
| So it's good that that question actually gets asked. | ||
| But when it comes to excluding people or determining yourself what the pool is going to be, I think that goes a little too far. | ||
| So I like openness. | ||
| I like diversity, but you don't want to seem punitive. | ||
| Do you think the rhetoric or vitriol against the media is the same this time around than we saw in the previous term? | ||
| It's probably about the same, maybe a notch or two more intense, more actionable than it was first time around. | ||
| Because again, like excluding the AP because they don't call the Gulf of America Gulf of Mexico, that's kind of thing you might have had brooded about the first term, but someone would have said, nah, let's not act on that. | ||
| But now that they actually did. | ||
| So it goes back to the theme we were discussing earlier: that this is more unrestrained, full maximal Trump than we saw the first time around. | ||
| Rich Lower, you recently wrote something for National Review. | ||
| I just want to read you the headline. | ||
| You can fill in the blanks, but the headline is, Does anyone know what a Nazi is? | ||
| Yeah, I just think it's so tiresome, these charges of fascism and Nazism. | ||
| The occasion for that piece was lodged against Elon Musk. | ||
| Elon Musk is a techno-libertarian. | ||
| Elon Musk is trying to reduce the power and the scope and the size of the federal government. | ||
| This is not a Nazi agenda item, right? | ||
| He's into freedom. | ||
| So just because people don't like him, though, they turn around and say, oh, you're a Nazi. | ||
| They spray paint swastikas on his cars and all the rest of it. | ||
| And it's just so childish. | ||
| It's not remotely true. | ||
| It's the opposite of the truth. | ||
| But some people, they think Nazi is a synonym for bad. | ||
| So if you want to say you disagree with someone a lot on the right, you don't just explain how you disagree with them, why you disagree with them. | ||
| You call them a Nazi or a fascist. | ||
| So I wish it would stop, but this has been going on for decades and it probably won't. | ||
| A few more minutes with our guests. | ||
| This is Butch and Merrill and Democrats lying. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| You're next up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| I want to piggyback on a call of two callers ago about DEI and WOAL. | ||
| And I feel that they are discriminating because not all black people are from Africa. | ||
| And there were Indians here, and there were a lot of black people here way before 1700. | ||
| And now it seems like they're trying to erase the history of Americans, black Americans, and some black Americans. | ||
| How can he distinguish the two between immigrants and black Americans? | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Okay, but you're Maryland. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| So I think what the caller is getting at is just the long lineage of a lot of African American families in this country here on average longer than Caucasian Americans. | ||
| And that's something to be aware of and to honor. | ||
| You know, Nicole Hannah Jones, who wrote the 1619 essay in that New York Times magazine project that became such a big deal and kicked off a lot of this debate. | ||
| I thought one thing that was very moving in that essay, she described being in school, I think it was elementary school. | ||
| I'm fuzzy on the details. | ||
| Forgive me if I get some of them wrong, but I'll get the broad point correct. | ||
| And the teacher said to the class, well, why don't you come up and point to the country where your family was from? | ||
| And some kids would go up and point to Italy, some would point to Britain, some would point to Poland. | ||
| And she and her fellow African-American classmate or classmates, they didn't know where to point because they're from America. | ||
| They consider themselves fundamentally Americans. | ||
| So I think it's a great history. | ||
| We should be aware of it. | ||
| And I take the caller's point. | ||
| One more call, and this will be from Nixon in Florida, Republican line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Ms. Larry. | |
| I want to know: does our policy basically suit whoever the president is at times, or we just follow the Constitution? | ||
| And why was the, what was the guy's name? | ||
| I forgot his name. | ||
| Even he is on CNN with Jake Dave Trapper. | ||
| And once he spotted that we have an American policy and an Israeli policy, he was terminated. | ||
| That's my question. | ||
| Color, I think you're going to have to elaborate a little. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The guy that was on CNN, he basically stated, Hamas, those guys were good guys. | |
| They weren't bad guys. | ||
| And he was there to negotiate on behalf of America. | ||
| Oh, Adam Bowler. | ||
| Adam Bowler. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| Exactly. | ||
| The hostage envoy, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| After he made that statement, he was terminated. | ||
| If we have an America that has a constitution that we don't ban one way or the other for any other countries, why is everybody terminated or canceled or reprimand if they go strictly America first? | ||
| American policy. | ||
| Gotcha, Paul. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks. | |
| Okay, so obviously the Constitution is a fundamental law of the land. | ||
| No president is above it. | ||
| No one is above it. | ||
| All office holders pledge to uphold it and should take that oath seriously. | ||
| But what we're talking about with Adam Bowler, who is a very talented guy, is something different. | ||
| This isn't a free speech issue. | ||
| This isn't a random commentator on CNN. | ||
| I'm not sure whether it was CNN interview. | ||
| Maybe it was. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But some random commentator being punished by the government for what he said. | ||
| He was a member or was going to be a member of the Trump administration. | ||
| And when he said, I think it was, forgive me again if the details are fuzzy, that Hamas are nice guys. | ||
| That puts you in a real awkward position if you're an envoy supposed to be negotiating and dealing with in good faith, and that's a hateful thing to say for the Israelis for understandable reasons. | ||
| So you're just not going to get that job or not going to stay in that job. | ||
| That's not a First Amendment issue. | ||
| The president runs under the Constitution, the executive branch, and he has hiring and firing issues, certainly for these kind of positions. | ||
| The work of our guests and others can be found at nationalreview.com, Rich Lowry, who serves as editor-in-chief. | ||
| Mr. Lowry, thanks for your time. | ||
| Thanks so much for having me. | ||
| I enjoyed it. | ||
| Our first guest in the morning is near at hand, and she's the president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, also served in the Biden administration as the Domestic Policy Council Director. | ||
| She did that from 2023 to 2025. | ||
| Welcome back to the program. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| You're just back to the center. | ||
| I am. | ||
| What brought you back? | ||
| Well, I thought this was an incredibly important moment in history. | ||
| You know, obviously, I have deep concerns about the Trump administration, but I also think it's really important for the broad center left to develop its own agenda. | ||
| I think it's, I do think there's a competition of ideas between the parties. | ||
| And, you know, once you've been through an administration, I think it's important to have to develop a new agenda on the economy, education, crime, immigration, you know, just the problems that people are experiencing in their own lives. | ||
| And so I'm really excited for the work we'll be doing in the center at the center to address challenges people are facing. | ||
| When you work in an administration like you did in the Biden administration, now you come to this new job. | ||
| What do you bring with it? | ||
| How does it help inform what you do going forward? | ||
| Well, I loved my job as chair of the Domestic Policy Council. | ||
| And I really saw how government works in every creek and cranny. | ||
| And, you know, I think there are a lot of ideas that we had that some we didn't roll out, some we did. | ||
| And I think it was really a moment of deep reflection to see why some ideas, some strategies didn't resonate as much from the public. | ||
| You know, I think the president had an agenda, for example, to reach out to working class people. | ||
| You know, we had the Invest in America agenda, and most of those jobs created and through the Inflation Reduction Act, the Chips and Science Act, the Inflation, the Infrastructure Bill, those jobs, most of those jobs went to people without a college degree. | ||
| Yet, I think we didn't, those messages didn't really resonate. | ||
| And I think it's an important moment for all of us on the, again, on the broad center left to really understand what did and did not work. | ||
| And then also think through, you know, how we solve people's problems. | ||
| Education, I'll take the example of education. | ||
| Our public schools have not been improving. | ||
| Many have been declining. | ||
| And I think it's really incumbent upon us for those of us who believe in public schools and public education to have ideas about how we improve student performance, how our schools improve and compete in the 21st century, how we ensure that kids are reading on grade, how they learn math on grade. | ||
| And I think those are just ways in which we have to actually answer the mail. | ||
| Again, I think fundamentally we're at a very large level we can get right now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you remember Wednesday? | |
| I'm sure. | ||
| I've got one of the teams. | ||
| Mmm. |