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| Democracy. | ||
| It isn't just an idea. | ||
| It's a process. | ||
| A process shaped by leaders elected to the highest offices and entrusted to a select few with guarding its basic principles. | ||
| It's where debates unfold, decisions are made, and the nation's course is charted. | ||
| Democracy in real time. | ||
| This is your government at work. | ||
| This is C-SPAN, giving you your democracy unfiltered. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He 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'd 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's 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. | ||
| 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 are 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
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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, they're like, no, that's too politically radioactive. | ||
| We can't touch it. | ||
| And this time around, 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 that he 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
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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 them 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 their reaction. | ||
| 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 in those 30 days? | ||
| If you don't, it's going to slap another 30 days on them. | ||
| That's the aluminum and steel, the whole nine yards, it duces the American economy to give it a chance. | ||
| Because in the past four years, we have suffered horribly under the Biden administration. | ||
| Okay, James in Virginia. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Slowery, 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 answer. | ||
| 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 as 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 prices are higher. | ||
| So this is 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 relatively healthy. | ||
| Oil prices were on the lowest 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
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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. |