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Beyond. | |
| Midco supports C-SPAN as a public service, along with these other television providers, giving you a front-row seat to democracy. | ||
| Coming up on Washington Journal this morning, we'll take your calls and comments live. | ||
| And then author Cheryl Atkisson, host of Full Measure with Cheryl Atkisson, talks about media coverage of the Trump presidency and White House policies towards news media organizations. | ||
| Also, David Weigel, politics reporter for Semaphore on the future of the Democratic Party and political news of the day. | ||
| Washington Journal starts now. | ||
| Join the conversation. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| It's Sunday, March 23rd, 2025. | ||
| Just over two months into his second term, President Trump is already deep in legal battles over the powers of the presidency, the role of the Doge team, and the rights of immigrants. | ||
| There's been little opposition from the Republican-controlled Congress to the president's agenda, despite protests from the Democrat minority. | ||
| This morning, we want to hear your thoughts. | ||
| Is the U.S. system of checks and balances working? | ||
| Our phone lines for Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| For Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| For Independents, that number is 202-748-8002. | ||
| If you'd like to text us, that number is 202-748-8003. | ||
| Please be sure to include your name and where you're writing in from. | ||
| On social media, you can reach us at facebook.com slash C-SPAN and on X at C-SPANWJ. | ||
| Now then, there's been some recent polling on how Americans in general think the U.S. system of checks and balances is doing. | ||
| Here's a story from NBC News with the headline, as Trump and courts clash, voters weigh whether each branch of government has too much power. | ||
| As a federal judge presses President Donald Trump's administration over whether it violated an order halting deportations in a growing clash between the presidency and the judicial branch, more American voters are saying they think the executive branch and the courts have too much power, according to a new NBC News poll. | ||
| What's notable, though, is that the change over the last six years has been driven by Democratic-leaning voters who have been frustrated at different times by both Trump's expansive policy agenda this year and the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe versus Wade in 2022. | ||
| A bit more detail on the numbers from that poll. | ||
| 43% of Americans polled say that they think the executive branch is too powerful, 28% say the judicial branch, and 18% say the legislative branch. | ||
| Breaking that down by parties, particularly when it comes to the executive branch, 75% of Democrats say that the executive branch is too powerful. | ||
| 45% of independents, just 15% of Republicans, think the executive branch is too powerful. | ||
| Now, President Trump was on Fox News this week speaking about his call for a federal judge who ruled against him to be impeached and Chief Justice John Roberts' rebuke of that call. | ||
| What's your reaction to the courts stepping in to make a statement here? | ||
| They didn't make a statement when Joe Biden decided to forgive all those student loans to say that. | ||
| Well, he didn't mention my name in the statement. | ||
| I just saw it quickly. | ||
| He didn't mention my name, but many people have called for his impeachment, the impeachment of this judge. | ||
| I don't know who the judge is, but he's radical left. | ||
| He was Obama appointed. | ||
| And he actually said we shouldn't be able to take criminals, killers, murderers, horrible, the worst people, gang members, gang leaders, that we shouldn't be allowed to take them out of our country. | ||
| Well, that's a presidential job. | ||
| That's not for a local judge to be making that determination. | ||
| And I thought it was terrible. | ||
| In fact, he said when they were well on their way, there was an order issued, as I understand it, to bring them back or to not let him go or something. | ||
| And this is not something that the country would stand for. | ||
| These people, they were led in here by an incompetent president who had open borders and anybody throughout the world could come in. | ||
| And we were given murderers. | ||
| We were given people from mental institutions and prisons. | ||
| The judge is essentially saying, excuse me, Mr. President, that there still is a process in place. | ||
| You can read between the lines. | ||
| There hasn't been a full ruling yet. | ||
| I know your Justice Department is appealing this on a couple of different grounds. | ||
| But this is leading people to wonder whether there are court orders that you will defy because you believe that the judge has no jurisdiction or they're political questions and not justiciable at all. | ||
| And what would you say to that? | ||
| Are there circumstances where you would defy a court order? | ||
| Well, I think that, number one, nobody's been through more courts than I have. | ||
| I think nobody knows the courts any better than I have. | ||
| I would say the chief judge does. | ||
| But nobody knows them better than I have. | ||
| And what they've done to me, I've had the worst judges. | ||
| I've had crooked judges. | ||
| I have judges that valued Mar-a-Lago at $18 million because that benefited his case, because he wanted to see me convicted of something. | ||
| I have judges that had relatives making millions and millions of dollars on the election, ruling on the election. | ||
| But going forward, I had judges. | ||
| Would you defy a court order? | ||
| We all know that. | ||
| I never did defy a court order. | ||
| And you wouldn't in the future? | ||
| No, you can't do that. | ||
| However, we have bad judges. | ||
| We have very bad judges. | ||
| And these are judges that shouldn't be allowed. | ||
| I think at a certain point, you have to start looking at what do you do when you have a rogue judge. | ||
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Now, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer in an upcoming interview on Meet the Press that's going to air today spoke about President Trump and Republicans' call for some federal judges to be impeached. | |
| Here's that exchange. | ||
| This week, the president called to impeach a judge who ruled against him on deportations of alleged Venezuelan gang members, as you know. | ||
| Supreme Court Justice John Roberts released a rare statement rebuking the idea of using impeachment to settle judicial disagreements. | ||
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Some constitutional scholars and fellow Democrats, Leader Schumer, say this is a constitutional crisis. | |
| Do you agree, is the United States in a constitutional crisis? | ||
| Yes, I do, Kristen, and democracy is at risk. | ||
| Look, Donald Trump is a lawless, angry man. | ||
| He thinks he should be king. | ||
| He thinks he should do whatever he wants, regardless of the law. | ||
| And he thinks judges should just listen to him. | ||
| Now, we have to fight that back in every single way. | ||
| And we actually have had over 100 cases in the courts where we've had a very good record of success. | ||
| So Donald Trump, infuriated by that success, said judges should be impeached. | ||
| Let me tell Donald Trump and the American people, Democrats in the Senate will not impeach judges full stop. | ||
| President Trump said he would not defy a court order. | ||
| Do you agree? | ||
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Do you believe him? | |
| I don't trust him. | ||
| We have to watch him like a hawk. | ||
| Defying court orders is why our democracy is at risk, and we'll have to do everything to fight back in that regard. | ||
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Again, our question this morning, is checks and balances working? | |
| Some additional polling on that from back in February. | ||
| This from thehill.com. | ||
| Most in new polls say a system of checks and balances is not working well. | ||
| And when asked about the functioning of the system of checks and balances between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the federal government, 54% of registered voters in a Quinnipiac University poll described it as doing not so well or and not well at all. | ||
| 38% of those surveyed described the system of checks and balances as functioning very well and somewhat well. | ||
| Let's get to your thoughts now, starting with Cindy in Norwalk, Connecticut on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Cindy. | ||
| Hi, good morning. | ||
| Look at the only court that's in our Constitution is the Supreme Court, not federal district judges. | ||
| The Democrats want to scream and yell how Elon Musk wasn't elected. | ||
| Well, neither was a district judge from some state in the country should not get to say what the American people voted for. | ||
| There was an election. | ||
| We won to deal with it. | ||
| These are criminal aliens. | ||
| The president has a right. | ||
| Now, with powers, really the judicial, they co-equal branches, but really the judicial is the least powerful branch of the government. | ||
| There's no military. | ||
| It's the president has executive authority to get rid of enemy combatants, which is what they are. | ||
| And if Democrats want to side with criminals, go ahead. | ||
| You're going to lose bigger in the midterms. | ||
| And we need that. | ||
| And Republicans, you need to focus on winning the midterms. | ||
| We need a bigger majority here because this is tyranny. | ||
| That one district court can dictate what goes on with the rest of the country. | ||
| Now, Joe Biden defied federal orders by letting them all in here. | ||
| And Chuck Schumer has some heck of a nerve. | ||
| President Trump never threatened the Supreme Court, but Chuck Schumer sure did. | ||
| And Joe Biden had no problem dressing them down at a State of the Union address, which was totally inappropriate. | ||
| So, Sandy, in general, do you think that the system of checks and balances is working well? | ||
| Do you think that overall the system is working? | ||
| No, it's not working. | ||
| The judicial branch has too much power. | ||
| And Congress needs to do their darn job and pass some legislation. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Flute is in Washington, D.C. on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Flute. | ||
| Hey, hey, hey, son, good morning. | ||
| Thanks for being a beautiful day today. | ||
| Hey, listen here. | ||
| I think with the checks and balances, it determines what part of the government level where the checks and balances are most effective because there's no way that it's going to get checked and balanced at the Supreme Court level because you already know what decide is going to vote, | ||
| you know, prior to who appointed that person to the Supreme Court, pretty much. | ||
| And then it trickles on down to the appointees or the people that run. | ||
| You have a Democratic Senate or you don't have a Democratic Senate though that are not every vote is right down the middle. | ||
| One vote here, one vote there. | ||
| That kind of checks down. | ||
| It's like, yeah, just one side of that. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Philippe is in Reading, Pennsylvania, on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Philippe. | ||
| Well, to correct you, my name is Felipe, and it's not reading. | ||
| It's not reading. | ||
| It's Reading. | ||
| Thank you for the correction, Felipe. | ||
| No problem. | ||
| And unfortunately, it's going to be a bunch of corrections going on. | ||
| I'm not trying to belittle people on their ignorance, but we are facing not only illiteracy, but ignorance. | ||
| And to say that the checks and balances are working, ask those people that face no indictment, face no trial, face no criminal accusation, and simply based upon the color of skin and association, they were shipped off to a foreign land. | ||
| And who knows what circumstances people are facing at the hands of a tyrant? | ||
| And the correcting young lady who called in earlier, it's Marbury versus Madison. | ||
| You may want to educate yourself about the authority of the courts of this nation. | ||
| Without our courts, we have no checks and balances, and we just answer to a tyrant. | ||
| And that's what we have right now, unfortunately. | ||
| But I do believe that when it comes down to the brass tax, the courts will rule, and the courts are doing their job and will do their job. | ||
| But we live in a fear that people are scared to stand up against this man and his party because they've suffered the consequences. | ||
| They don't want to be facing trumped-up fake charges against a U.S. Attorney's Office that has a 98% conviction rate, no matter what the evidence is presented. | ||
| It's a bad spot. | ||
| But what's going to happen is they're going to cause people that were not activated before to become activated, to become more educated. | ||
| And I have faith in my fellow countrymen. | ||
| Well, thank you, Felipe. | ||
| And Felipe referenced the case Marbury versus Madison. | ||
| That was an 1803 Supreme Court decision that established the rights of the courts to determine the constitutionality of the actions of the other two branches of government. | ||
| This is from the National Archives. | ||
| In 1801, outgoing President John Adams had issued William Marbury a commission as Justice of the Peace, but the new Secretary of State, James Madison, refused to deliver it. | ||
| Marbury then sued to obtain it. | ||
| With his decision in Marbury versus Madison, Chief Justice John Marshall established the principle of judicial review, an important addition to the system of checks and balances created to prevent any one branch of the federal government from becoming too powerful. | ||
| Deke is in Kansas City, Missouri on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Deke. | ||
| Yes, good morning. | ||
| You know, I don't believe that the system of checks and balances is working, but I do believe that it will. | ||
| I just believe that an educated populace is necessary for a democracy. | ||
| And the Congress seems to be weighing the fact that the threats of being primaried, so maybe not willing to act. | ||
| But I do believe that the citizens of this country have to believe in the fact of that there are three equal, co-equal branches of government, and that the courts cannot be determined, cannot wait to hear whether how they should rule by the executive. | ||
| The courts make that determination as far as looking at laws and interpreting the law. | ||
| So that's their job. | ||
| And I agree with Chief Justice Roberts that you can't just impeach a judge because you don't like the judge's decision. | ||
| That's what the pellet process is there for. | ||
| And if taken to that logical, you took that process to its logical conclusion that if the president or the executive branch doesn't like a judge, they can just vilify that judge and then impeach the judge or have the Congress impeach the judge. | ||
| Then taken to its logical extent, if the Supreme Court decided against the executive branch, then would you impeach the Supreme Court? | ||
| And if that's the case, then don't you have that point? | ||
| And you don't have co-equal branches of government. | ||
| You would have just the executive. | ||
| And so that's just, those are just my thoughts. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Deke mentioned the concern of some members of Congress about being primaried. | ||
| This is something that has come up quite a bit. | ||
| The advocacy group issue one recently, earlier this month, announced a new effort to defend America's checks and balances as former members of Congress call on lawmakers to exercise their constitutional authority. | ||
| This was an open letter signed by more than 60 bipartisan members of Congress calling on the legislative branch to exercise their constitutional authority amid growing concerns that the Trump administration is threatening the system of checks and balances enshrined by our founders in the U.S. Constitution. | ||
| Scrolling down, the letter from members of Issue One's Reformers Caucus goes on to urge members to launch comprehensive oversight hearings into what the group calls the unprecedented access granted to Doge operatives, subpoena key officials and documents related to Doge's hiring practices, financial access, and decision-making authority, publicly reaffirm Congress's constitutional authority under Article 1, | ||
| and reject any attempt to shift power permanently into unaccountable private hands. | ||
| Last week on Washington Journal, former Pennsylvania GOP Representative James Greenwood of the Reformers Caucus talked about congressional limits on the power of the executive branch. | ||
| Here he explains why members of Congress today are not taking more action. | ||
| And I think there are many, many members of Congress who understand that what's happening now, the failure to utilize the checks and the balances that the founders intended is not happening. | ||
| But they're scared to death. | ||
| And they're scared to death of being primaried. | ||
| And they're scared to death of the President of the United States choosing their primary opponent, supporting their primary opponent, and then to have Elon Musk fund that primary opponent. | ||
| And we are in a dangerous place in our history when that's how Congress must, Congress functions, primarily out of fear rather than doing the honorable and correct thing. | ||
| Back to your calls on how you think the U.S. system of checks and balances is working. | ||
| Mike is in Montgomery, Alabama, on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Mike. | ||
| Once again, the Democrats are making a significant political blunder backing this district judge on his ruling on blocking deportation of criminals. | ||
| Just a quote, if you want to ride with the cops, you can't root for the robbers. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Mike, before I let you go, do you think the system of checks and balances is working well? | ||
| I do not. | ||
| I think that the executive branch and the judicial branch most of the time are the key factors of two out of the three branches of government. | ||
| And I think they need to be reformed to a certain degree. | ||
| And I think President Trump is leaning toward that way, where our legislation right now is certainly tilted towards the Republicans. | ||
| However, the people voted for Mr. Trump, and basically it's being blocked with this district judge, judge's ruling once again. | ||
| So, yes, to answer your question, it's in need of reform. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, thank you for your call. | ||
| Looking at that NBC poll that I referenced earlier, breaking it down by party again, Republicans and their view of the relative power of the branches of government, 27% of Republicans say the legislative branch is too powerful. | ||
| 25% say the judicial branch. | ||
| Just 15% say the executive branch is too powerful. | ||
| Doug is in Ohio on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Doug. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| I got a few things to say. | ||
| I hope you don't think I'm hostile. | ||
| First of all, the Republican Party has no right to say they're a party of law and order anymore. | ||
| Number two, the Republican Party has shown me their congressional people are a bunch of jellyfish. | ||
| They won't stand up to the man because they're scared. | ||
| And they have no right to go after the judicial department just because a criminal runs our country right now, you know, a convicted criminal. | ||
| I didn't need to say, so don't him talk about law and order and taking care of the people. | ||
| He ain't doing it. | ||
| All he's doing is trying to take care of his rich friends. | ||
| And we've got to have these judges to put him in his place. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| There's a New York Times analysis how Trump is trying to consolidate power over courts, Congress, and more. | ||
| President Trump's expansive interpretation of presidential power has become the defining characteristic of his second term, going on to say that President Trump called for one federal judge seeking basic information about his deportation efforts to be impeached amid mounting concern about a constitutional showdown. | ||
| Another judge found that Mr. Trump's effort to shut down a federal agency probably violated the Constitution and stripped Congress of its authority. | ||
| The president was accused of overstepping his executive authority yet again in firing two Democratic commissioners from an independent trade commission. | ||
| And that was just Tuesday. | ||
| Nearly two months into his second term, Mr. Trump is trying to consolidate control over the courts, Congress, and even in some ways, American society and culture. | ||
| Harvey is in Columbus, Ohio on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Harvey. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| How are you? | ||
| I'm good, thank you. | ||
| Yes, ma'am. | ||
| Well, for one, I have a few things. | ||
| How are the Democrats going to be able to compete with the funding and stuff that the commercials that are Republicans are already putting out? | ||
| Because there's nobody really fighting in Ohio. | ||
| We have one governor, one Democrat running for office, and it's Amy Thatcher, the former doctor. | ||
| And Harvey, how do you think the system of checks and balances is working? | ||
| It's not working very well at all. | ||
| I'm not understanding how you can just go around and deport people without even just cause, no warrants, just kick the doors in and just accuse people of having a tattoo, and all of a sudden they're guilty of being affiliated with the gang. | ||
| That doesn't make you affiliated just because you have a tattoo. | ||
| And then there's some family members that have never been convicted of a crime in the United States, and they're being deported off into this awful prison where their families can't even get in touch with them. | ||
| And so I have another thing I'd like to know: if the economy is supposed to be supposed to be working for the people, how come you're canceling jobs like the CHIP Act for Ohio is holding the funds up now. | ||
| So who knows when the place is going to get done? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Brian is in Salt Lake City, Utah, on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Brian. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Hey, guys, you haven't even mentioned the fourth branch of government, the bureaucrats that Trump's trying to get rid of. | ||
| They are the ones that I almost lost. | ||
| Okay, the fourth branch of government, they're the ones running around. | ||
| You she doesn't matter. | ||
| Brian, your phone line is cutting in and out. | ||
| I just want to make sure that you're holding your phone nice and close to your ear. | ||
| Is this better? | ||
| It sounds a little bit better. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| Okay, the fourth branch of government. | ||
| They say it doesn't matter who we sheeple vote for, they still sit back and control our country. | ||
| Chief Justice Roberts should be impeached. | ||
| He gave us a bomb. | ||
| He's the one that says, oh, well, you can make it a tax. | ||
| And that's not for him to say. | ||
| The chief justices should just sit back and shut up. | ||
| And then you got I'm hearing feedback. | ||
| Yeah, I think we're having some trouble with your line, Brian. | ||
| But since you mentioned Chief Justice John Roberts, he did issue a statement, as we heard President Trump referencing it earlier, in response to the multiple calls to impeach the judge that had ruled against President Trump. | ||
| Chief Justice John Roberts said on March 18th, for more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. | ||
| The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose. | ||
| On X, MLB wrote, We cannot have an executive branch that is too strong without a Congress that is willing to be weak. | ||
| If the House and the Senate were doing their job and controlling the power of the purse, the occupant of the Oval Office couldn't do what he's doing now. | ||
| Again, our question is: Is the system of checks and balances working? | ||
| And you can reach us on social media at facebook.com/slash C-SPAN and on X at C-SPANWJ. | ||
| Let's hear now from Jeffrey in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Jeffrey. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| You know, you got to go back and almost just thank the founding fathers of this country for the checks and balances. | ||
| You know, we broke away from King George for exactly this reason, somebody that got into power and is overreaching. | ||
| And they were smart enough to put this checks and balance in place. | ||
| And we've got to trust that it works. | ||
| If not, then we're going to exercise our second constitutional right to bear arms, which was put in place not to protect you at home, but to protect us from an overzealous government. | ||
| The one thing that no one's mentioned is finance reform. | ||
| You know, right now we have a system where if you're not a millionaire, you can't run for Congress. | ||
| And right now, we have billionaires that he's put in place that are so out of touch with the average person that has to get up and go to work or works on an hourly wage. | ||
| And if you want to make extra money, you have to work time and a half. | ||
| And they're so out of reach. | ||
| You know, someone saying the Commerce Secretary saying, well, if you don't get your check, you know, and the ones that call are fraudsters. | ||
| That's how you find them. | ||
| I've never heard anything so idiotic in my entire life. | ||
| But the other mention that I want to put just to say really quick is the Chief Justice, when the Supreme Court ruled that the president could not be charged for official business, did not say that the president could not be charged for illegal activity. | ||
| And that's the thing that we've got to count on the judicial system to back up, that at some point, the things he's doing are illegal. | ||
| To strip everyone from their due process and illegally deport people, even though these are not good people in a lot of cases, we still have a due process in this country. | ||
| And if we give that up, it's going to be a scary, scary time in this country. | ||
| So I do believe the checks and balances were put in place. | ||
| At some point, the GOP is going to have to get some backbone. | ||
| At some point, we're going to have to talk about term limits. | ||
| So if these guys can't do their job, let's get new people in there. | ||
| You know, the only one I hear right now really speaking out on the Democrats is Chris Vane Holland in Maryland. | ||
| And, you know, AOC up in New York is the other one that's speaking up in Bernie Sanders. | ||
| But there's like three people. | ||
| So right now we need some new leadership to step up and get the average person in mind. | ||
| Not the billionaires, but the person that has to get up every day and go to work and has to balance their budget at home. | ||
| So thank you for taking my call and appreciate it. | ||
| A couple of op-eds related to some of those points that Jeffrey was making about the role of the courts. | ||
| Here's a guest essay in the New York Times, an op-ed from law professor Stephen Vladek, who said in the headline, the courts alone can't save us. | ||
| An excerpt from that, for all the judicial interventions we've seen in the first eight weeks of the new Trump administration, alarmingly little has changed on the ground. | ||
| Much of the unlawfully frozen federal money is still frozen. | ||
| Many of the unlawfully fired federal workers are still out of work. | ||
| Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia graduate and green card holder arrested March 8th in New York on exceptionally tenuous legal grounds, remains in an immigration detention facility in Louisiana. | ||
| The central problem isn't that the courts have upheld legally dubious actions or even that the White House is openly defying adverse rulings. | ||
| Rather, it seems that chaos and disruption are themselves central to President Trump's objective. | ||
| To be fully effective, many of our legal rights depend upon not just judicial remedies, but also political ones. | ||
| That entails both new legislation and far more aggressive oversight from members of Congress. | ||
| Welcome to changing the partisan political environment and reasserting checks and balances against the other branches of government, all of which will make it a lot harder for presidents to break things in the future. | ||
| Now, a different perspective in the Washington Times with a call from Bossi David N. Bossey to, as the headline says, impeach out of control federal judges. | ||
| He says a constitutional crisis is upon us and action must be taken. | ||
| An excerpt from that op-ed, from the outset of Mr. Trump's second term, various federal judges at the district court level have politicized the judiciary and abused power to obstruct Mr. Trump's agenda, which is dramatically reforming the failed status quo in Washington. | ||
| Activist judges are ignoring the Constitution and Article II powers vested in the executive branch and are usurping presidential power and the solemn duties of the Commander-in-Chief to keep Americans safe. | ||
| House Republicans should use the rapid impeachment precedent against federal judges who desperately need constitutional checks and balances. | ||
| A constitutional crisis is upon us and action must be taken. | ||
| And noting here that Bossi served as the deputy campaign manager for Trump in 2024. | ||
| Back to your calls on whether you think the U.S. system of checks and balances is working. | ||
| Linda is in Mississippi on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Linda. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| The checks and balances for the judiciary is barely holding. | ||
| But the first caller you had, I mean, our Republicans that call in, evidently, they didn't take civics or they flunked it. | ||
| We have three equal, co-equal branches of government. | ||
| And if it wasn't for the judicial government, Trump would be absolutely a dictator because the legislation part, the Republicans, is spineless. | ||
| They're letting him do whatever he wants to do. | ||
| That is not their responsibility. | ||
| They're supposed to push back on his illegal activities. | ||
| And Trump only comes into office to write those executive orders. | ||
| He wrote so many that he'll even know what he's doing. | ||
| He's old, he's sea-down, and he got a whole cabinet full of DI hires. | ||
| They unqualified. | ||
| They cannot stop him because he's like a three-year-old with a pen, with a pencil. | ||
| And so far, they're holding. | ||
| But we have the executive, judiciary, and the legislature with equal authority. | ||
| Those judges that's ruling, they are ruling against an illegal act. | ||
| The president is trying to tear down everything. | ||
| And by the way, you cannot get rid of the Department of Education with a shopping. | ||
| It has to be done by Congress. | ||
| And no one tells the third or fourth count bellum that he cannot do that. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Earl is in Indiana on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Earl. | ||
| Well, I'm a Republican. | ||
| I don't know how long you let me be on there being you got the independents and Democrats talking forward. | ||
| You read all these magazines, it's all lies. | ||
| Look, Trump has went through 10 years of hell. | ||
| We put him back in there to get this country straightened down. | ||
| And these people that they don't want to find out where all this corruption, all this money's going to, that's why the country's in the shape it's in. | ||
| And look at the laws they put in. | ||
| Same-sex marriage. | ||
| You can get married. | ||
| That is against God's law. | ||
| And God is going to take care of this. | ||
| You look at the thing in Israel right now. | ||
| They're surrounded by seven or eight countries, and it says the last days. | ||
| Israel will be surrounded by all nations, be at war with all nations. | ||
| We're heading for the battle of Barbagin. | ||
| If you idiots can't figure that out. | ||
| Now, Earl, how do you think the system of checks and balances is working? | ||
| Oh, lost Earl there. | ||
| All right, well, let's hear from Mike in Sydney, Montana on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Mike. | ||
| Good morning, Kimberly. | ||
| There are no checks and balances, really. | ||
| We're trying to restore them. | ||
| But we have to face this, the Communists have tried to eliminate our constitutional checks and balances for the last over 100 years since Woodrow Wilson. | ||
| Our country has been infested by socialist judges paid off by the highly corrupted George Soros, who brags about his penetration into the governments around the world. | ||
| And to get into the back pocket of to stuff some pockets of these little peon district judges that are appointed, not even elected, that's a piece of cake from him. | ||
| And according to the best and most reliable news source on the planet, InfoWars, there are hundreds of corrupted judges in America paid off by George Soros. | ||
| And this Judge Bozberg, his blind arrogance, I'd like him to stand in front of Lake and Riley and the families of the slaughtered children and tell them why he sent back these murderous scum, scumbags from third world paperback countries. | ||
| They live out of paper bags. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Trump's borders are Tom Homan was on Fox News last week, and he issued, spoke on the legal pushback that the administration is getting to its deportation agenda. | ||
| Let's hear a portion of that. | ||
| Every day, the men and women of ICE are going to be in the neighborhoods of this nation arresting criminal, illegal, alien, public safety threats, and national security threats. | ||
| Lawrence, you're not going to stop us. | ||
| We made a promise to the American people. | ||
| The President Trump has made a promise to the American people. | ||
| We're going to make this country safe again. | ||
| I wake up every morning loving my job because I work for the greatest president in the history of my life, and we're going to make this country safe again. | ||
| I'm proud to be a part of this administration. | ||
| We're not stopping. | ||
| I don't care what the judges think. | ||
| I don't care what the left thinks. | ||
| We're coming. | ||
|
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|
Let's hear from Charles in California on our line for Democrats. | |
| Good morning, Charles. | ||
| Charles, can you hear us? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Charles, what do you think of how the U.S. system of checks and balances is doing? | ||
| Well, he's supposed to come in and make America great again, but it looks like it's not getting great again because he's changing everything in California. | ||
| And that's not good for us, our country, to get better again. | ||
| He posted the Bob Jobs Act, and it looks like lies had been made. | ||
| So it's not good. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Ed is in Pleasant Valley, New York, on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Ed. | ||
| Checks and balances? | ||
| I'm from New York. | ||
| We have 250,000 illegals in our state. | ||
| And our governor calls them migrant citizens. | ||
| Who's going to pay for them? | ||
| Us, the people? | ||
| Who are these judges offhand just decide that the people have to take care of these criminals? | ||
| I mean, where was everybody when Obama was shipping them out? | ||
| He's the highest deporter going when he was the president. | ||
| Not one word from any of the Democrats. | ||
| And I hate to say Democrats. | ||
| I hate to say Republicans. | ||
| But the bottom line is when it's a Democrat thing, it's okay. | ||
| But when it's an Independent or a Republican, nothing's okay. | ||
| Every judge crawls out of some hole in some state and makes a decision for the whole country. | ||
| Something's wrong. | ||
| Our country, and thank God for the Second Amendment, because I am an avid gun owner, and God help anybody that comes in my house with a tattoo or do harm to my family. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Some comments from social media. | ||
| This one from the handle A. Down Ingser saying, even though they are co-equal branches of government, it requires that each branch stay in their lane. | ||
| Activist district federal appellate judges don't have the constitutional authority to interfere with the executive branch, nullify elections, and write new laws. | ||
| And then Steve said to the question of: is the system of checks and balances working well? | ||
| No. | ||
| Court orders are being ignored. | ||
| Congress has the power of the purse. | ||
| Unfortunately, the speaker is a spineless, closeted Christofascist who would be happy to give Trump dictatorial powers. | ||
| Lawrence is in New York on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Lawrence. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| I'm going to offer a solution rather than what I keep hearing is the left complaining about the right and the right complaining about the left. | ||
| No, I think the system of checks and balances is drowning, quite honestly. | ||
| But I think that's the effect, not the cause. | ||
| The cause really is Congress. | ||
| Congress has fully surrendered the power of the purse. | ||
| They've done so. | ||
| Correct me if I'm wrong. | ||
| I think the last time they passed the budget was Newt Ginrich and Bill Clinton. | ||
| Since they've abdicated their responsibilities, someone needs to fill the void. | ||
| And the void is being filled right now by Donald Trump, rightfully or wrongfully, but they've completely ignored their responsibilities. | ||
| The second part of the solution is to get rid of gerrymandering. | ||
| Gerrymandering allows Republicans, hard-right-leaning Republicans in Republican states to keep getting elected and hard-left Democrats in blue states to keep getting elected. | ||
| There's no room for moderates. | ||
| And when there's no room for moderates, you're going to have this polarization. | ||
| And quite frankly, the media feeds on the polarization. | ||
| The media picks their targeted audience and they fuel further polarization. | ||
| To get rid of gerrymandering is so simple. | ||
| You just make a rule that says each congressional district needs to be comprised of the least fewest school districts in that state. | ||
| So you don't have congressional districts that stretch into seven different counties, like what they tried to do to me in New York. | ||
| And you just make it as few school districts as possible. | ||
| This way, the person, the congressman I'm voting for is the same person than the person that lives across the street from me, but for whatever reason is in the same school district as me, but is voting for a different congressman. | ||
| Anyway, I'll leave it with that. | ||
| And thank you, C-SPAN. | ||
| I really enjoy the show. | ||
| Lawrence was talking about what Congress has done in terms of turning over some of its powers to the executive branch. | ||
| A New York Times story on a similar topic saying, under the GOP, Congress cedes power to Trump, eroding its influence on spending, oversight, and other issues. | ||
| Republican lawmakers have willingly ceded power traditionally reserved for Congress to the Trump White House. | ||
| The Republican-led Congress isn't just watching the Trump administration gobble up its constitutional powers. | ||
| It is enthusiastically turning them over to the White House. | ||
| GOP lawmakers are doing so this week. | ||
| This is a story from March 14th, by embracing a stopgap spending bill that gives the administration wide discretion over how federal dollars are distributed, in effect, handing off the legislative branch's spending authority to President Trump. | ||
| But that is just one example of how Congress, under unified Republican control, is proactively relinquishing some of its fundamental and critical authority on oversight, economic issues, and more. | ||
| Daniel is in North Adams, Massachusetts, on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Daniel. | ||
| Hi, how are you doing? | ||
| Good, thank you. | ||
| I just want to tell you, I don't know how you do it. | ||
| You're incredible. | ||
| But I just got to ask a quick question. | ||
| It's like you talk about checks and balances, where, I mean, part of the checks and balances is like dissolved into the inspector generals, which Trump fired them all. | ||
| So, how is it you could actually have checks and balances when there's nobody kind of watching it or regulated or whatever? | ||
| And, you know, just like keeping an eye on stuff. | ||
| I mean, what Trump did, he like fired, what they're doing is like they fire all the police, you know, before they go in to rob the bay. | ||
| I mean, I heard a politician say that. | ||
| That made a lot of sense. | ||
| So pretty much, I was just wondering, you know, why? | ||
| And the other thing is, how come they say there's all this fraud? | ||
| If there is, where's the fraudsters? | ||
| I mean, why isn't there anybody like they're saying, well, this one here, who received the money? | ||
| And another thing, who voted it in? | ||
| I mean, what politicians? | ||
| Somebody had to vote it. | ||
| Who voted it in? | ||
| So pretty much that's all I got to say. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Margaret is in Ohio on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Margaret. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Listen, I have, I'm 94 years old, and the way these Democrats keep talking, I don't want to live under socialism. | ||
| And that's exactly what the Democrats are trying to do. | ||
| They don't even mention our deficit. | ||
| We've got to get rid of this deficit. | ||
| What is wrong with you people? | ||
| Wake up. | ||
| And, Margaret, what do you think about how the system of checks and balances is okay, Margaret? | ||
| Hung up on us. | ||
| Robert is in Chesterfield, Virginia, on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Robert. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| How do you think the system of checks and balances is working, Robert? | ||
| I don't think it's working at all, to be honest with you. | ||
| The Supreme Court Justice Roberts swore in Donald Trump as president. | ||
| Donald Trump is not a legal president. | ||
| He's a convicted felon. | ||
| He participated in the insurrection. | ||
| And the cabinet that he's appointed, they're not legal because he's not legal. | ||
| The only one out there that was voted correctly was the vice president. | ||
| And how bad he might be, he should be the one running the country. | ||
| Donald Trump is not all right in head. | ||
| I tell you, people are going to be sorry with the things he's doing. | ||
| And I hope for this country's sake that it don't end up in a civil war. | ||
| But that's probably where it's headed to. | ||
| And so I hope everybody out there has a safe weekend and thanks for C-SPAN. | ||
| Robert called in on our independent line. | ||
| And when we look at that, back at that NBC poll that we referenced at the top of the show, independents, in terms of how they view the various power of branches of government, 45% of independents in that poll said the executive branch was too powerful. | ||
| 27% said the judicial branch was too powerful. | ||
| And 19% said the legislative branch is too powerful. | ||
| A comment we received on X from Michael Thornton to the question of is the system of checks and balances working? | ||
| No, and it hasn't been working for a long time, largely because Congress has abdicated its responsibilities to POTUS and SCOTUS. | ||
| Gina is in Alexandria, Virginia on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Gina. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Kimberly, you do a fine job of keeping everyone keeping the heat down because this is a heated conversation, but it doesn't feel like it because people are being very intelligent. | ||
| My problem is I go to a neighborhood clinic where a lot of the recipients are Medicaid. | ||
| I have Medicare because I'm older and I have more extreme issues. | ||
| And when I filled out all the paperwork, the intake work completely. | ||
| So Gina, Gina, what do you think, though, of the system of checks and balances in the U.S. and how well it's working? | ||
| I'm getting to that. | ||
| I'm getting to that. | ||
| The checks and balance seem to be in place as long as I turn in the paperwork to the many Hispanics, because it's run by Hispanics, and I think I completed it, and they go, oh, and hand it back to me and say, you didn't fill out this part. | ||
| That's the part that says Puerto Ricans, and if you live on one of the islands. | ||
| And I looked at the girl and I said, So, Gina, I'm going to go move on. | ||
| Peaceful Warrior Independent on X, referring to the system of checks and balances, says, they don't seem to be working. | ||
| The President issued orders. | ||
| Lawsuits are filed. | ||
| Courts rule on the suit. | ||
| They are rebuffed or ignored. | ||
| Congress seems to be standing idly by as a disinterested party or a beguiled observer. | ||
| The Brennan Center for Justice has a piece on what the courts can do if the Trump administration does indeed decide to defy court orders, listing several actions that federal courts can take. | ||
| Judges have a range of tools for enforcing their orders in the face of non-compliance. | ||
| And this is an article from February 14th. | ||
| And at that point, more than 10 federal courts had temporarily halted or rejected actions by the new administration on issues ranging from spending to birthright citizenships. | ||
| Dozens more lawsuits against the administration's early actions were pending. | ||
| Now then, scrolling down, how can the courts enforce their orders? | ||
| Courts have several important tools available to enforce their orders, including contempt proceedings and attorney sanctions. | ||
| Judges regularly use at least some of these enforcement tools against the private parties and government officials who appear before them, holding parties in contempt. | ||
| In the face of noncompliance, a federal court can use the contempt power to either compel the party to take action or punish them for failing to follow an order. | ||
| And there are two types of contempt proceedings, civil and criminal, both of which can result in sanctions, fines, and extreme cases, jail time. | ||
| And federal courts have broad discretion to determine whether a party is in contempt of court, as oftentimes the judge is a sole decision maker as to whether to bring and issue contempt citations. | ||
| Moving down to some other strategies that judges can use, they can issue stricter orders before starting contempt proceeding. | ||
| A judge who believes though the party is not adhering to a court order will often reiterate the order and identify specific benchmarks the party must meet to demonstrate compliance. | ||
| Another solution that judges have, sanctioning attorneys. | ||
| Courts have broad disciplinary authority over attorneys and can sanction them for helping their clients deliberately defy a court order. | ||
| And who do courts rely on to enforce these orders? | ||
| They ultimately rely on law enforcement and federal prosecutors to enforce penalties in the face of continued non-compliance. | ||
| The U.S. Marshals Service, which is part of the Justice Department, is the primary enforcement arm of the federal courts. | ||
| Courts often rely on marshals to serve summonses, subpoenas, and warrants, as well as make arrests. | ||
| And by law, it is the primary role and mission of the United States Marshals Service to obey, execute, and enforce all orders of the federal courts. | ||
| And have elected officials generally followed court orders? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Since the Civil War, presidents and other elected officials of both parties have respected their obligation to follow court decisions, even those with which they disagree. | ||
| And the last time the United States saw widespread open defiance of court orders by elected officials was when governors in southern states refused to integrate their schools after the Supreme Court ruled against segregation in public education in Brown versus Board of Education. | ||
| President Dwight Eisenhower, though he was no fan of the court's decision, ultimately dispatched troops to the South to help enforce the ruling, saying, The Supreme Court has spoken and I am sworn to uphold the constitutional process in this country, and I will obey. | ||
| Back to your calls on how you think the system of checks and balances is working in the United States today. | ||
| Estella is in Veneta, Oregon on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Estella. | ||
| Hello, it's Benita. | ||
| Benita, sorry about that. | ||
| No, it's not working at all. | ||
| If the president can't do anything, then why do we elect one? | ||
| I know people just absolutely hate him or like him. | ||
| That's just the way it is. | ||
| But it's ridiculous, all of this. | ||
| They're burning everything up like Mississippi burning because they hate this person, don't like that one. | ||
| They need to wake up, everybody, Democrats and Republicans and everyone else. | ||
| If there's a world war, we can't even make bullets. | ||
| Do the Democrats help? | ||
| No, they're not helping us at all get stuff back in the United States. | ||
| People better wake up because if it happens, and I'm not talking about civil war, if that was going to happen, it already would have because it's being pushed to the limit. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| I'm 60, almost 66. | ||
| I'm disabled. | ||
| I'm afraid to go outside most of the time because I'm old. | ||
| I'm in a wheelchair. | ||
| An electric one. | ||
| These kids are getting so out of line and everyone else. | ||
| You have senators and the other people coming out and calling our president a mother effer on national TV like he's nothing. | ||
| There's no respect anymore. | ||
| And I know you guys say the Republicans are bad, but no, they're not. | ||
| The Democrats are coming out and calling for people to burn stuff down, get rid of stuff because they don't like it. | ||
| And then Nancy Pelosi comes out and says, well, I get what I want. | ||
| And it makes you think of these smoke-filled dark rooms in the movies where I'll give you this if you give me that. | ||
| And it should be, they should be out in the open doing all this in front of us. | ||
| We should see every process, every bit of it of what they're doing because they work for us. | ||
| I don't claim to be any attorney or know any laws, but I know what's going on right now is not working. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| James is in Buffalo, New York on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, James. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| I guess the checks and balances, and I'm kind of think of it as a logical progression, like using math. | ||
| So if we say, like, you know, is the constitutional right, we'll say the Second Amendment, is that being followed by all the states because it's a federal, you know, it's a right. | ||
| No. | ||
| But the judge in charge, the head judge, Billy Roberts, he believes that he should come up and speak about, hey, you can deny your rights or you could do whatever, but that's just the system. | ||
| So no, our checks and balances aren't working. | ||
| We got federal rights that are being violated by every state, no matter how they feel like they can or cannot. | ||
| And then the court system, which seems to be the kings and queens now, will tell you, yeah, we understand this a different way now. | ||
| Or these words that everyone's supposed to understand mean something completely different. | ||
| So, you know, it's not working. | ||
| It hasn't worked for a long time. | ||
| The reason why the president's capable of drawing back this money is because he's in charge of making sure there's no fraud. | ||
| And if Congress just writes laws and pass these omnibuses, it's not broken down to say this money goes to here, this money goes to here. | ||
| They don't know where the money's going. | ||
| That's why everyone's surprised about, like, where is all the money going for USA and D? | ||
| Why did $2 billion go to a bank so that it can be given to green, you know, green projects? | ||
| So it hasn't worked in a long time, and I'm hoping that they're just trying to make it work now. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Carolyn is in Charlotte, North Carolina on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Carolyn. | ||
| Oh, yes, good morning. | ||
| I don't, I think the checks and balances are being pushed to the limit. | ||
| One thing, we have, people need to go back to school and learn physics and understand that we have three co-equal parts of government. | ||
| Not one should be stronger than the other. | ||
| The executive branch, the judicial branch, and the Congress. | ||
| So there is no, people don't understand that. | ||
| We have no king in the exception of the United States. | ||
| We have no king. | ||
| Those branches are there to check the president. | ||
| Congress is there to check the wallet of the president. | ||
| But since the Congress is mostly Republican, they just conceded they should be impeached for dereliction of duty because they made an oath to the Constitution. | ||
| The president made an oath to the Constitution. | ||
| The judges make an oath to the Constitution, not to one person, Donald Trump. | ||
| He is not going to do what he wants to do. | ||
| There is a process when putting immigrants or aliens or whatever you want to call them out of this country. | ||
| The reason why Obama was not checked on it is because he followed the law. | ||
| President Trump has to follow the law. | ||
| If you don't want a president to follow the laws, then move to a country that has a king. | ||
| We don't have a king. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Let's get a couple of responses that we received via text. | ||
| Rob is in Huntington, West Virginia. | ||
| The system of checks and balances set up by the Constitution relies too much on government officials being honorable. | ||
| Trump's presidency has demonstrated that the Constitution needs to be changed to strengthen checks and balances. | ||
| Sue in Whiting, New Jersey says President Trump may have been given a mandate to get the country back towards being more centered, but not to take an axe to everything. | ||
| Some bold measures have been already taken, others hinted to, but everything must go through proper channels. | ||
| The Republicans will look weak, and it may come back to bite them if they don't push back. | ||
| And David in Cleveland says, while we need to address many issues concerning the powers of branches of government, political action needs to be taken by the Democrats on all platforms to pressure the House and Senate to compel the GOP to use their powers instead of what's happening now, where the GOP is held in check by moneyed interests. | ||
| Mike is in Hannah City, Illinois on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Mike. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| I don't believe that checks and balances are working, and I find it very interesting that all of the Democrats are screaming from the rooftops about how Donald Trump hasn't been checked and balanced, and yet all of the things that the Democrats did with all the money being sent out and local court does not have the authority to take the powers of the presidency. | ||
| If it's something in their district, sure, they can put a halt, pause, or hold on it. | ||
| They do not have the authority to tell the President of the United States, the executive branch, what they cannot, can, and cannot do that's part of his powers granted by the Constitution. | ||
| And if you look at all the money and all of the things that the Democrats pulled under Biden, I just asked Democrats, what kind of hypocrites are you that you can't apply the same rules and logic and all of these things that you're trying to hold Trump to? | ||
| Why didn't you hold Biden and the rest of them to? | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, thank you for everyone who called in this hour. | ||
| Coming up next, we're going to hear from investigative journalist Cheryl Atkinson, who will join us to talk about her interview with President Trump and how traditional and not so traditional media is covering this White House. | ||
| And later, David Weigel, politics reporter for Semaphore, is going to join us to discuss the growing generational divide within the Republican Party. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| This week on the C-SPAN Networks, the House and Senate are in session. | ||
| The House will consider legislation to tighten foreign gift reporting requirements for colleges and universities. | ||
| The Senate will continue voting on President Trump's nominations, including Dr. Jay Batticheria to be director of the NIH and Dr. Martin McCary to head the FDA. | ||
| On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court hears consolidated oral argument in the case of Louisiana versus Calais and Robinson versus Calais on whether Louisiana's congressional maps are an illegal racial gerrymander. | ||
| The directors of five intelligence agencies will also appear before two committee hearings for the annual worldwide threat assessment. | ||
| First, on Tuesday before the Senate Intelligence Committee and then on Wednesday before the House Intelligence Committee. | ||
| Also Wednesday, Catherine Marr, CEO and president of National Public Radio, and Paula Kerger, CEO and President of the Public Broadcasting Service, testify before the Doge Subcommittee on concerns about alleged bias in news coverage by their federally funded organizations. | ||
| And on Thursday, a Senate Aviation Subcommittee will go over the National Transportation Safety Board's preliminary report on the mid-air collision between an American Airlines jet and an Army Black Hawk helicopter near Reagan National Airport in late January. | ||
| Live this week on the C-SPAN networks and on C-SPAN Now, our free mobile video app. | ||
| Also, head over to c-span.org for scheduling information or to watch live or on demand anytime. | ||
| c-span democracy unfiltered stephen m gillen was scholar in residence at the history channel for more than 20 years He has written 12 books on subjects including a history of the United States, the Kerner Commission, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the life of John F. Kennedy, Jr. | ||
| His latest book is titled Presidents at War, How World War II Shaped a Generation of Presidents from Eisenhower and JFK through Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush. | ||
| Steve Gillen closes his book saying, Ironically, the threats facing America in the third decade of the 21st century are very real and in many ways similar to the challenges the nation confronted in the 1930s. | ||
|
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Author Stephen Gillen with his book Presidents at War, How World War II Shaped a Generation of Presidents, from Eisenhower and JFK through Reagan and Bush on this episode of Book Notes Plus with our host Brian Lamb. | |
| BookNotes Plus is available on the C-SPAN Now free mobile app or wherever you get your podcasts. | ||
| C-SPANshop.org is C-SPAN's online store. | ||
| Browse through our latest collection of C-SPAN products, apparel, books, home decor, and accessories. | ||
| There's something for every C-SPAN fan, and every purchase helps support our nonprofit operations. | ||
| Shop now or anytime at c-spanshop.org. | ||
| Tonight, on C-SPAN's Q&A, Loretta Ross, author of Calling In, critiques cancel culture's excesses and advocates for a more inclusive way to hold others accountable. | ||
| Drawing on her past experiences working with rapists and white supremacists and her own history as a survivor of sexual abuse, she supports a more nuanced approach to addressing harm in the social media age. | ||
| Whenever we think we are irritated or have a beef with somebody, we want to publicly shame and humiliate them. | ||
| And the reason we do it that way so publicly is that we want others to see us holding somebody else accountable. | ||
| We call that virtue signaling. | ||
| Let me show you how woke I am, and I'm going to put this other person down for not being as woke. | ||
| Loretta Ross with her book, Calling In. | ||
| Tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN's QA. | ||
| You can listen to Q&A and all of our podcasts on our free C-SPAN Now app. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
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We are still at our core a democracy. | |
| This is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom. | ||
|
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Weekends bring you Book TV, featuring leading authors discussing their latest nonfiction books. | |
| Here's a look at what's coming up this weekend. | ||
| Pakistani British author and activist Tariq Ali discusses his memoirs, You Can't Please All, which covers the years 1980 to 2024. | ||
| He also talks about the war in Gaza and student protests in the United States. | ||
| Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Hiltzig, with his book Golden State, The Making of California, looks at the history of California from the 1840s gold rush era to the current tech boom. | ||
| Grove City College political science professor Paul Kengore, author of The Devil and Karl Marx, talks about the role of communists in the creation of International Women's Day and other progressive celebrations. | ||
| Then on Afterwards, best-selling author Michael Lewis poses the question: who works for the government and why does their work matter? | ||
| He's interviewed by Harvard Kennedy School of Government Public Policy and Management professor Elizabeth Lenos. | ||
| Watch Book TV every weekend on C-SPAN II and find a full schedule in your program guide or watch online anytime at booktv.org. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| We're joined now by Cheryl Atkinson, who is an investigative journalist, author of the book Follow the Science, and host and managing editor of Sinclair's Full Measure with Cheryl Atkinson. | ||
| Welcome to Washington Journal. | ||
| Great to be here. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
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Can you tell us a bit about your background in journalism as well as your program, Full Measure, with Cheryl Atkinson? | |
| I started out of college in about 1982, worked in local news, then at CNN back when it was a news organization, about 1990 to 93. | ||
| And then I went to CBS News, where I was working for over 20 years, including as an investigative correspondent. | ||
| I left ahead of my contract when I thought the news business, and particularly CBS but others too, were changing to shape the news in a way that wasn't always honest. | ||
| And now I've been hosting, going into my 11th year next fall, of Full Measure with Cheryl Atkinson, an independent show. | ||
|
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And on that independent show last week, you interviewed President Trump. | |
| And in that interview, you asked him about his relationship with the press and some of the actions he has taken against them. | ||
| Let's listen to an excerpt. | ||
| As a supporter of a robust free press, do you worry sometimes that the settlements you're getting against the press organizations and so on might have a reverse effect and chill the press and make people think that you're doing something to crack down on a free press? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, they really lied about me. | |
| I mean, in so many ways, you know that, and you understand that, and you've had it yourself to a large extent. | ||
| I mean, you know, larger than most. | ||
| But they were very dishonest. | ||
| That's why I came up with the name Fake News, Fake News. | ||
| And you're right, I've had some good luck suing these people, and I have some others in there that are. | ||
| And I'm doing that. | ||
| I'm doing that for the people of this country. | ||
| We need a free press, a fair press. | ||
| I said we need borders, we need a fair press, we need to stop crime. | ||
| And elections have to be perfect. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And they're not perfect. | |
| They're a disaster. | ||
| I tracked media mistakes when you first came into office the first time, and there were too many really to count, but I tracked them as best as I could. | ||
| I'm looking at them this time, and I'm not seeing as many when we're talking about false reporting and fake information. | ||
| Not that some of that isn't out there, but I don't see it to the same extent I did in the 2016 time period. | ||
| Do you think the media is treating you better now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I think that I've become more experienced in handling the media. | |
| I think the media respects me more. | ||
| You know, I've done this twice. | ||
| You know, when it first came in, don't forget I had never done it. | ||
| I won this incredible election, and I relied on people for recommendations. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And now I know everybody in Washington that you'd want to know. | |
| And we have a great staff, and I had a great staff before, too. | ||
|
unidentified
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Look, I rebuilt the military and all of the things we did, the great things that we did, the taxes were the biggest tax cut in history. | |
| All the things we did, and I had a lot of great people, but I had some that I wouldn't have put in in retrospect. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think now we have unbelievable people. | |
| But no, the media has, I find it to be that it hasn't changed. | ||
| What has changed is, I think, Facebook and Google and a lot of them have become, I think a guy like Bezos has gotten to know him. | ||
| I think he's trying to do a real job. | ||
| Jeff Bezos is trying to do a real job with the Washington Post. | ||
| And that wasn't happening before. | ||
| My first time, I had Google against me. | ||
| I had Facebook against me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I had Instagram. | |
| I had everybody against me. | ||
| The whole world was against me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
97% of it was just like horrible. | |
| And it was really crooked. | ||
| It was really dishonest. | ||
|
unidentified
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And I think I fought them well. | |
| And now I'm actually winning awards for the fact that, you know, a lot of that stuff is coming due now. | ||
| It takes a long time through the court system. | ||
| Now, Cheryl, we heard the president's assessment of why he's getting different coverage this time around compared to his first term. | ||
| What's your assessment of changes in the media landscape and how the president's being covered this term compared to his last term? | ||
| I think some of his analysis is spot on. | ||
| You know, being elected for a second time, but winning the popular vote this time, as well as, you know, the rest of the vote in the swing states and so on. | ||
| It does show those who are covering him that there was more of a mandate they may have felt the first time around. | ||
| And that means that some of their viewers and listeners and the people that they're targeting, they have to find ways to appeal to them as well. | ||
| And I happen to know that top news organizations, we all know about familiar names, many of them are making a concerted effort at the corporate level to figure out how to, what they say, move back to the center, at least what they consider the center. | ||
| So there is a big transformation going on largely as a result of President Trump being elected to a second term. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Other opinions on this come from news outlets like The Guardian, where they call this a true free speech emergency alarm over Trump's chilling attacks on the media. | |
| In this Guardian piece, the Trump administration is waging a disturbing attack on the freedom of the press that amounts to a true free speech emergency, media experts have warned, as the Federal Communications Commission recently launched an investigation into a series of media organizations, including the owner of NBC News. | ||
| The Guardian points out that Trump appointee in Project 2025 author Brendan Carr has also ordered investigations into NPR and PBS since Trump took office, in addition to that $20 billion lawsuit against CBS over its editing of the 2024 Kamala Harris 60 Minutes interview. | ||
| What is your take on some of these actions that the president is taking against the media and whether or not that actually is causing a chilling effect on the free press? | ||
| Well, that's why I asked him. | ||
| That's exactly the question I asked him, in fact. | ||
| So you heard his answer. | ||
| I really, you know, it's not up to me to say whether he's right or wrong, but as a journalist, I would rather us hold ourselves accountable. | ||
| I mean, my preference would be that we do a good job when we make mistakes, that we do something about them so that we can assure the public we're not going to make the same mistake again. | ||
| We haven't done a good job at that. | ||
| And I think that's left this sort of vacuum whereby the president is taking actions on his own because he sees, you know, some cases are debatable, some cases I don't think are debatable of mistakes or problems that happen involving him. | ||
| And so he's taking unilateral action. | ||
| I would much prefer, as I said, that the press do a better job of policing ourselves. | ||
| And maybe that's coming. | ||
| And maybe that's one answer to sort of dialing back on letting the government. | ||
| I'm always uncomfortable when the government weighs in too much on things because very little good happens in my view when the government steps in with a heavy hammer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What do you consider it to be a heavy hammer, this move by the Trump administration to control press access to the White House? | |
| There had been a 111-year practice of the White House Correspondents Association determining who would be able to cover the president. | ||
| And Press Secretary Carolyn Levitt announced last month that the White House press team would be making that decision. | ||
| Well, if you know anything about me, it's sort of, I like being standing up sort of for regular people, being an outsider. | ||
| Yes, I worked at CBS and CNN, but I will tell you, when I would go into that White House press room working for CBS as filling in occasionally, covering the president, and I had a seat in the front row. | ||
| And, you know, it's hard not to feel like a little superior to the guys around you, but it's nothing you did that deserved that front row prime seat. | ||
| It's just something that was bequeathed to you, in essence. | ||
| And of course, it can be argued that many liberal-leaning organizations were having places of prominence or organizations that tended to then go further and further left as time went on without a fair and balanced access for some of the other organizations. | ||
| So I think it's good that it's shaken up or shook up. | ||
| How that should be done, I really can't say. | ||
| And then there is the question of does it go too far depending on what kind of news organizations or what kind of organizations that aren't maybe even news organizations who are given equal access. | ||
| Again, I feel like that's a little beyond my pay grade because I've been working for traditional news organizations my whole career, but we all have to acknowledge that the media landscape is entirely different now with many people, if not most young people, for example, getting their news from places that are not news outlets in the traditional sense. | ||
| So I think it's not bad to shake things up as for how the architecture of that should shake down and what that should look like. | ||
| I really don't know. | ||
| I think this is all sort of a new experiment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Switching gears a little bit, tell us about your book out last year, Follow the Science, How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails. | |
| This is an idea that HarperCollins had, which is my publisher of my other books. | ||
| They wanted to look at, they started out with some of the COVID era mistakes and errors and problems that we had with media coverage and beyond, you know, looking at our health. | ||
| But we decided together that by the time the book came out, a lot of people were covering the COVID situation well. | ||
| We do touch upon that in the book, but it's a bigger look at the entire health landscape, whereby I like to say we have seen as just health consumers for decades that we have grown sicker and sicker with chronic health disorders. | ||
| As oddly enough, our doctors and public health establishment either haven't noticed, which would be a problem, or pretending not to notice, only except to the extent that they refer us to expensive treatments and so on. | ||
| We've never spent more money on health care and insurance and doctors and hospitals, and we've never been sicker from chronic diseases. | ||
| So this digs into follow the science, digs into a lot of the reasons why, with some anecdotes and a lot of documentation that people probably have no idea how the medical journals are conflicted, how medical school and continuing medical education classes that our doctors rely on, how those are conflicted, and also, of course, how the media has become very conflicted when it comes to covering health matters. | ||
|
unidentified
|
When it comes to health, your book examines the relationship, as you just kind of laid out, between the vaccine industry, big pharma, and as you just mentioned, the media. | |
| What do you think is the quality of information that Americans are getting about their health and medicines, and are they being misled? | ||
| It's very mixed. | ||
| I think there are a lot of good alternative sources that have cropped up, particularly as people grew to mistrust what they were hearing from a lot of mainstream or traditional sources on COVID. | ||
| So they're still getting a lot of bad information, even from official government sources and from traditional media. | ||
| There is some good information from alternative media, but there is also, of course, a mix of bad and weird information in the media too. | ||
| And I think it's hard for regular people to sort through when they're trying to find answers about their health, and they've come to distrust the official narrative with good reason. | ||
| The official narrative may sometimes be true now, but the government has spoiled the public into thinking maybe nothing's true because the public has caught them in things that aren't true. | ||
| So that's like the public is, the government has created this distrust in my view. | ||
| And then people end up hunting around and looking for better options. | ||
| And it's hard to kind of distill the good from the bad. | ||
| And follow the science, I try to put out some sources that have proven accurate in the past on matters of medical controversies. | ||
| As a journalist, that's sometimes just a basic sourcing thing that we learn. | ||
| You go back to people with the benefit of hindsight who may have proven accurate on something. | ||
| You may go back to them on future things. | ||
| It doesn't make sense to keep going back to the same people who are authorities and sources and then proven wrong about something. | ||
| So there are some ways that people can go through this media landscape that seems so confusing and try to divine a bit of truth out of it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
When it comes to health, we are getting quite a bit of conflicting information from the medical and science community and official government sources right now. | |
| In particular, we have RFK Jr., the Health and Human Services Secretary, claiming that measles can be treated with vitamin A, that it's blamed on a poor diet. | ||
| He's been encouraging people to take alternative treatments, but at the same time, measles cases are on the rise in Texas and New Mexico have topped more than 300 cases, and medical officials say that these treatments are not effective. | ||
| Based on your knowledge of the nation's health industry, vaccine policies, and just the research that you've done for your book, do you think that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is qualified to be Health and Human Services Secretary? | ||
| He seems to be. | ||
| I mean, that's more of a also management question because that position is beyond just knowledge. | ||
| It's a very important management position. | ||
| To the extent of his health knowledge, yes, he is probably, in my view, after 20 years of looking at him and other medical and health matters, one of the most well-informed, maybe the most well-informed top official on these health controversies that I've ever interviewed or spoken with, and I've talked to quite a few. | ||
| So I think that's definitely going to shake up the environment, but in a way many people expect to happen, and in a way that could lurch us, hopefully, in a good way, past a lot of problems that we've had, keeping us mired in, for example, again, chronic disease disorders without looking at the root causes and solutions. | ||
| He's more of, just like a lot of people have become, more oriented toward what's causing this rather than simply treating it and almost turning a blind eye as to the epidemics that are occurring under our noses. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, with the measles epidemic occurring under our noses at the moment, what do you think people should do with the fact that we're hearing one narrative about what to do about this disease from our government officials and another one from the science community? | |
| Well, when you say the science community, there are a lot of scientists who agree with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. | ||
| They're not often quoted in the media. | ||
| And his breadth and depth of scientific knowledge is probably broader than most people in the media because he doesn't just hear the official narrative. | ||
| He's familiar with very credible scientists who are published and peer-reviewed who have different viewpoints that typically aren't well read about and well represented in the media. | ||
| It's interesting when I do hear this stuff debated. | ||
| You know, it's not like I don't know as much as him about some of these issues, but I know quite a bit, probably on some cases and some specific instances that I've investigated. | ||
| And I hear some journalists debate him, and they're so uninformed, it's, you know, it's a little embarrassing to hear them speak with authority as if they know something that's false. | ||
| And he pretty much very politely tries to explain his viewpoints or the scientific basis behind it. | ||
| But I would just urge people, you can read up for yourself on these things and make up your own mind because the information is more accessible. | ||
| You just have to hunt a little harder for the other side, I would call it. | ||
| You're going to get one narrative from the media. | ||
| It's going to say the same thing over and over again about these positions that I think a lot of Americans hold, that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is in line with. | ||
| You're not going to hear as much about those. | ||
| You're going to hear those dispelled and treated the same way in a lot of the mainstream media. | ||
| But in my experience, the people writing those stories are either not as well informed many times on these issues and or are conflicted by special interests. | ||
| And that's why they're pushing out the narrative that they are. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's get to your questions for Cheryl Atkinson, investigative journalist and author of Follow the Science. | |
| We'll start with Martin in Louisville, Kentucky on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Martin. | ||
| Yes, good morning. | ||
| Yes, I lived in Tampa, Florida from 1987 to 1996. | ||
| I remember Cheryl from way back when she was on TV down there. | ||
| I'm just wondering if she has anything to say about what cable television news has evolved into at this point. | ||
| I mean, when we were growing up in the 70s, the two most popular things in America was Johnny Carson's monologue and those gossip papers you see at the grocery checkout counter. | ||
| And cable TV news has become a combination of those two things. | ||
| It's just gossip and rumors and jokes about people who are famous and news stories everybody's heard about. | ||
| And to me, it's almost an insult to journalism. | ||
| In fact, CNN has a comedy show on at 9 o'clock on Saturday night now. | ||
| Oh, and by the way, my fifth grade school teacher was Diane Sawyer's mother. | ||
| But I'm just wondering why if you watch a CBS evening newscast, I feel like I'm being informed by journalists, and you seem to think that they're dishonest. | ||
| But if you turn on Fox TV after 8 o'clock at night, all you're listening to is a bunch of accusations and insults and like Archie Bunker would say, suppository remarks. | ||
| And I'm just wondering what you have to say about that. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Well, I think your observations about cable news are, you know, much like many people's. | ||
| And I wrote about this in my last book. | ||
| I interviewed a lot of people for my last book. | ||
| We all had worked at CNN about the same time, including managers and other on-air people. | ||
| 100% of them, most of whom describe themselves as progressive, were just appalled at what CNN has become today. | ||
| And they spoke of this, and I wrote about it. | ||
| This is not what we did back in 1990 to 93, not what Ted Turner expected from us when he ran that organization. | ||
| So why it's devolved into what it has today, I guess it has to do with viewership preferences, what they see, spikes, you know, Ratings, although it's not like the ratings are that huge on cable news. | ||
| If you look at the raw numbers, they're not out of this world. | ||
| But I can tell you that they are trying to put an emphasis, some of these organizations you're referring to, on moving, as I said a minute ago to Kimberly, back to the center, whatever that means to them, because they understand something's happened and something's happening. | ||
| I argue, so a lot of people think people want to watch their stovepipe news. | ||
| You know, the conservatives want to watch conservative news and liberals want to watch liberal news. | ||
| And I think there's some truth to that, but I have long argued, could be wrong, but I've long argued there's still a place, even for people who like to watch that kind of news, they would still like to go to a place where they can sort of get a reality check that they don't feel there's bias in either direction because they understand what they're getting when they're watching MSNBC or Fox News. | ||
| And I still think those viewers at times would like to just sit down and sometimes watch a place where they feel as though they're getting a straight story without so much opinion and sort of narrative building. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's hear from Richard in Savannah, Georgia, on our line for Republicans. | |
| Good morning, Richard. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| And it's such an honor to speak to you, Cheryl. | ||
| I followed you for a long time. | ||
| I remember the days of Walter Conkite, so that should aged me a little bit. | ||
| But I think with the 24-hour news cycle that I lived in Atlanta at the time Ted Turner created it, it's caused a lot of dissension. | ||
| You got your left, you got your right. | ||
| But the most important thing I think that was lost was the fairness doctrine being dissolved in 2012 when Obama signed the Smith-Munt Act. | ||
| It created a lot of division and money causes division with ABC owning zoned by Disney. | ||
| They have their way and Comcast has their way. | ||
| And I hate to see the division. | ||
| And the main thing is that if we could all just see what's going on, like Trump, since he came on the stage, it seems like it's this constant Trump derangement syndrome. | ||
| And we have DAs and judges like New York City, Atlanta, with Fannie Willis and Letitia James up there, Albert Bragg, constantly campaigning on get Trump, get Trump. | ||
| And yet we got judges, families making millions of dollars on judge rulings. | ||
| So how can we get back to the Walker Cronkite days? | ||
| That's really my question. | ||
| And you are one beautiful woman. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Oh, my goodness. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| You obviously have good taste. | ||
| I'm not sure we're ever going to go back. | ||
| I mean, I've thought a lot about it. | ||
| Well, let me say that people point out, like Frank Cessna, who's a great media analyst at the George Washington University, who I worked with, by the way, at CNN back in 1990. | ||
| I'm going to have on an upcoming program of Full Measure, my TV show, to talk about this very thing. | ||
| He points out, as do other analysts, the news has always had problems. | ||
| I mean, there was a partisan press 150 years ago that was more powerful than the nonpartisan press when we were looking at political events and so on. | ||
| And he thinks maybe we're headed back to something like that with the partisan press holding more sway and just getting more public attention than what we would call the nonpartisan press, if there is such a thing. | ||
| But I don't think there's a way to dial and go back to exactly like we had it because part of how it was during Walter Cronkite's time, there were three, really, it's sometimes two places to watch TV. | ||
| ABC, if I remember correctly where I lived, ABC was new. | ||
| We used to only have NBC and CBS, and then finally we got ABC. | ||
| So, of course, the eyeballs were only divided by people wanting to watch news. | ||
| Three times, one time in the evening, everybody got their news that way. | ||
| And I don't think we're ever going to go back to anything close to that. | ||
| And I think that's part of why you just have so many alternatives and opinions and different views and different kinds of media out there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
John is in New York on our line for independence. | |
| Good morning, John. | ||
| Thanks for taking my call, Kim. | ||
| And Cheryl, thank you for sharing your thoughts. | ||
| Very informative. | ||
| I'm in my late 70s, and I grew up getting my news from the TV. | ||
| And it's just, it's really unbelievable to see how the legacy media and now cable news has devolved. | ||
| I mean, they play to everybody's emotions. | ||
| And it's very hard. | ||
| You know, if you're talking to somebody, you're getting into the debate with them and you're citing facts and statistics. | ||
| A lot of these people, what they'll do is they'll revert to their, whether it's Fox News or whether it's CNN or MSNBC or, you know, anything like that. | ||
| And they'll just, you know, regurgitate talking points. | ||
| But I've, you know, with respect to Trump, like him or love him, I've never seen one individual so demonized and totally misrepresented in my life. | ||
| I mean, he's a terrible communicator, but he does get things done. | ||
| And whether you're talking about academia, whether you're talking about cable news, you're talking about the digital world, social media, you're talking about any of these things. | ||
| You'll see that this is a fanaticism that, you know, it brainwashes people. | ||
| And people, you know, the psyche of people, they're so easily manipulated. | ||
| They respond in knee-jerk emotional reactions. | ||
| And it's kind of hard to reason. | ||
| And the second thing that I'd like to comment on, you mentioned about big pharma. | ||
| I've never seen anything like it in my life. | ||
| How these pharmaceutical companies can charge tens of thousands of dollars and totally bankrupt people. | ||
| Our hospital system can bankrupt people just for getting sick. | ||
| There needs to be some drastic change in healthcare, whether you're Republican or Democrat. | ||
| It's something that we should all really consider. | ||
| And we've got to get rid of this opportunistic pharmacy benefit managers and things like that. | ||
| Again, where big pharma can charge thousands of dollars for certain medications and yet go to Europe and get them for a fraction of the cost. | ||
| So you're providing a great service. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| And I'd like to listen to your response offline. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Well, one thing I talk about in Follow the Science is I think we in the media have dropped the ball. | ||
| We're a very important part of the equation in reporting on the things that you talk about, such as the rising costs, the unaffordable costs to the country and to the individual of our health care and that type of thing. | ||
| People understand, I think, already that the pharmaceutical industry, which understandably is profit-driven, I expect them to be, but that they have in essence bought off the agenda on Capitol Hill by donating to members of both political parties in such a way that the parties no longer, | ||
| as of around the 2005 time period, in my view, they no longer conduct proper oversight hearings on some of these big issues that they used to conduct because the pharmaceutical industry and its lobbyists pull strings as to what types of hearings can and cannot be held on these issues, what witnesses could and couldn't appear, and so on. | ||
| But we in the media were supposed to be sort of the great equalizer. | ||
| If our political figures maybe weren't being honest, and if the pharmaceutical industry was profit-driven, perhaps sometimes to the exclusion of our health, it was kind of up to us to step in and do the good work. | ||
| Unfortunately, when the pharmaceutical industry developed an advertising and business partnership that's so strong and worth so much with media companies as it has, particularly starting around that time period in the early 2000s, we stopped doing the oversight. | ||
| And then in that absence, it was a vacuum that's been left, I think, whereby you're getting an almost singular narrative on important topics from the pharmaceutical industry, the government, and the media, the folks that I'm talking about. | ||
| And you're not getting that balance that we used to have, all of us in the early 2000s, meaning me at CBS, my colleagues at the LA Times, the Washington Post, NBC, and so on. | ||
| We were all covering these controversies in the early 2000s, and nobody was stopping us or calling us anti-vaccine when we were reporting on vaccine controversies. | ||
| That was all invented and created in a big propaganda movement in the early 2000s quite successfully. | ||
| And I think the result has been awful news for our health. | ||
| Hopefully, again, this confusing landscape we talk about that is difficult to navigate. | ||
| Hopefully, that still somehow gives birth to, though, to more of the truth or more fair coverage or opposing opinions. | ||
| So people aren't just hearing one thing all the time that may not be the whole truth about something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Lance is in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on our line for Democrats. | |
| Good morning, Lance. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Hi, Cheryl. | ||
| Hi, Kimberly. | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
| And I'm an older guy myself. | ||
| I'm 71. | ||
| And I can remember in sixth grade, we were told to read the New York Times talk about in class. | ||
| And I used to love to look at the editorial page. | ||
| There was one editorial and then another that was totally different. | ||
| There was a real difference between what people were saying and it was well written. | ||
| You could read them and try to make some sense of it. | ||
| Now I don't see that at all. | ||
| I mean, to me, though, the worst part of it, I remember during Watergate when Bernstein and Woodward, they went up to Ben Bradley and said, We found this guy deep throat. | ||
| Let's print. | ||
| And Bradley said, no, we can't go with one anonymous source. | ||
| You need to have two more corroborating sources. | ||
| I can't just go with some guy in the dark. | ||
| And now, whenever I look at news, whether it's Fox or CBS, although the legacy media is far worse, it's always an anonymous source said. | ||
| And it's, you know, I mean, the way they handle COVID, it's amazing that anything, anybody believes anything the government says about it. | ||
| And you don't see the corrections that they used to print. | ||
| If the Times got something wrong, they would say the next day, we were wrong about this. | ||
| And it would be on page one or page three. | ||
| Now, if they ever do it, it's buried so far that you can't even find it. | ||
| I no longer read the New York Times. | ||
| I cannot watch CNN, whereas once CNN was the gold standard. | ||
| I couldn't even remember when Kennedy was shot, and I didn't believe it until I saw Walter Cronkite say it that night on the news. | ||
| And I miss that. | ||
| We need them. | ||
| They are the biggest bulwark we have against tyranny. | ||
| And now I look at the legacy media and they seem to be the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. | ||
| I can switch to channels and I'll watch all the news and I'll watch CNN and someone will say ABC and I'll switch to the next channel and they will say exactly the same thing. | ||
| And I'll switch to the next channel. | ||
| It'll be exactly the same thing. | ||
| And you just start to wonder, you know, who's giving them this news? | ||
| What happened to you? | ||
| You're bringing up a bunch of points. | ||
| I want to let Cheryl respond. | ||
| Well, I have argued that one way to become a better informed consumer of news is when you're hearing the same narrative like you just described from so many news organizations, and they're frequently using the same words and phrasing and interviewing the same experts. | ||
| That's not organic. | ||
| I can tell you from the inside of news organizations. | ||
| If we were doing organic news from the ground up, what we think is interesting for people to hear, we would be coming up with many different and diverse topics on a given day, and we'd be talking to a lot of different people and be using a lot of different phrases. | ||
| So, when you're hearing that signal that should look like a signal to you when everybody's trying to tell you the same thing, particularly to the exclusion of some other viewpoint or science or facts or theories, that should make you say, I need to find out what's on the other side. | ||
| I need to find out the opposite of what they think. | ||
| Not that that's necessarily true, but certainly it should tell you there's a powerful interest that's effectively somehow putting out a narrative across all the media organizations, and you need to find out why it's so important for them to not want you to hear, for example, an opposing view. | ||
| I think that's a great signal. | ||
| A quick thing, Kimberly, if we have time on anonymous sources, the media in the first Trump campaign, people may recall the New York Times led the way in announcing it was suspending its normal ethical standards and guidelines in order to cover a president that they considered uniquely dangerous. | ||
| And I was just horrified by that because, as someone who's advised at journalism schools and so on, the reason for your ethical standards is if you don't like someone you're covering or if you have an opinion about him, to keep you honest on that person and try to be as unbiased as possible. | ||
| Not to say, oh, we only use our ethical standards when it's an official that we like, and then we suspend them if it's somebody we don't like. | ||
| But it's that suspension of standards, which said everybody followed suit, that allows them to, I suppose, use anonymous sources, for example, under conditions that we were not permitted when I worked at CBS News. | ||
| We had guidelines. | ||
| You don't just quote anonymous sources. | ||
| There are reasons why you do that and how you must describe them if you end up doing that. | ||
| I don't see that followed at all by the organizations that are doing this. | ||
| And furthermore, some of those stories have been proven incorrect, actually wrong over the years, and yet you see the same reporters apparently going back again and again as if nothing happened and doing the same kinds of stories again, relying on anonymous sources. | ||
| So I think that's a problem as well that started to be really bad around the 2015 time period. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Guy is in St. Augustine, Florida, on our line for Republicans. | |
| Good morning, Guy. | ||
| Yes, I'm with you. | ||
| Yes, go ahead. | ||
| What's your question for Cheryl Atkinson? | ||
| Basically, I'm curious about to go in a little deeper with her discussion about Kennedy and his position on some of the cures that he recommends. | ||
| I'm over 80, and castor oil hasn't been used since I was a kid for curing anything, basically. | ||
| And his form against masking and different vaccines, my mother was a polio survivor. | ||
| And most of us were lucky that we did get polio shots as children. | ||
| And the same with measles and a lot of the other things that he's totally against. | ||
| I can't understand how Cheryl can be supportive of this gentleman. | ||
| I'll go ahead and listen off the air now. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Well, to the extent that I'm saying he, I hope, can shake up an establishment or disrupt what I think has been harmful to our health, which is almost a singular narrative on things, sometimes incorrect. | ||
| I have not investigated every position he's taken on every matter. | ||
| I can just tell you he's very well informed, very well educated on these things. | ||
| He's litigated successfully as a lawyer against pharmaceutical companies, vaccine makers, and had access to information most of us have never seen and probably will never see about some of these things. | ||
| But let me just tell you a story, quick story about polio. | ||
| My daughter had her polio vaccine, had all her vaccines, but some of the things I've learned in covering news over the years later are some of the things that have appalled me about the government and medical establishment's narrative. | ||
| The vaccine she was offered was oral polio vaccine or the shot. | ||
| And the doctor offered it this way, or the nurse said, would you like to have sugar water or an injection for your daughter for the polio vaccine? | ||
| And as a parent, you say, well, I'd rather have sugar water. | ||
| You know, why should I get my daughter stuck once again? | ||
| I only found out years later as a reporter that the oral polio vaccine carries a slight risk of giving your child polio, whereas the injectable vaccine has no such risk. | ||
| And in fact, all of the last cases of polio in this country were caused by the oral polio vaccine. | ||
| And I'm thinking, how were parents never told this? | ||
| And when I was offered the choice, I should have been told as a parent, would you like the sugar water, which could give your child a slight chance of getting polio, or would you like the injection, which gives your child no chance of getting polio? | ||
| And I would have chosen the injection. | ||
| Fortunately, she didn't get polio. | ||
| Most kids won't. | ||
| But the point is, I didn't have the opportunity to make an informed choice. | ||
| And that's just one sub story of some of the things I've learned that never made headlines when, you know, when I wasn't looking for them myself as a news reporter. | ||
| And there are many scandals and stories like that behind the scenes going on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Our caller had referenced Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s statements about castor oil and vitamin A. There's a story in ABC News looking to what scientists say about this. | |
| With the awareness, Cheryl, that you've pointed out, there are different narratives in different media outlets. | ||
| During an interview on Fox News with Sean Hannity, Kennedy said that HHS was currently providing vitamin A to measles patients for treatment. | ||
| He claimed vitamin A can dramatically reduce measles deaths. | ||
| The World Health Organization recommends two doses of vitamin A in children's and children and adults with measles to restore low vitamin A levels, which can help prevent eye damage and blindness. | ||
| However, experts who spoke with ABC News said it is not an anti-viral treatment against measles, meaning it does not prevent infections, nor is there one available. | ||
| Let's go to John in Warwick, Rhode Island on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, John. | ||
| Yes, good morning. | ||
| I listened to your show, and I'm definitely a fan. | ||
| Where, if any, I mean, the country is being torn apart by the news media outlets. | ||
| I always get a kick out of Russian interference or this interference. | ||
| I come from a large family. | ||
| No one's ever told me they read something on the internet from Russia negative about this person and that person. | ||
| But what's going on with the news outlets is just terrible. | ||
| It's like CNN is owned by the Democrats, and this is all related to money. | ||
| Can the government do anything about this? | ||
| Shouldn't someone like CNN be able to say that they have an agenda? | ||
| Meet the press has become nothing but a joke. | ||
| It's like calling a microphone, say something bad about Trump. | ||
| Say something bad about Trump. | ||
| Say something bad about Trump. | ||
| I'm amazed if they get everybody thinking he's going to go on that program, and no one even challenges them. | ||
| But can the government do, it's almost like it's done on purpose. | ||
| It's all money. | ||
| What, if anything, can the government do to stop this? | ||
| It's tearing the country apart. | ||
| Well, I think a lot of people have, and I certainly do as a journalist, I see some of the problems you see, but I have discomfort with the government being the answer because at its heart, I've learned there really is no, I have really found sort of like unbiased government. | ||
| Because even when you talk about the government, well, do you mean the FCC? | ||
| Well, those are political officials appointed by, you know, politically by political parties or at least leaders of the parties or the president or whoever. | ||
| It's hard to find what you would be looking for, what I would be looking for, which would be maybe government being able to step in and do something that's fair, that fixes things. | ||
| And I just don't see that kind of an answer on a horizon. | ||
| I wish I had a better answer. | ||
| And I just think the disruption of the traditional media, we're in sort of this upheaval or transition period. | ||
| We don't know exactly what's going to come of it or what will be the new sources everybody or many people eventually turn to. | ||
| Or is it going to be just people turn to one source on a particular topic where they find an expertise with a particular reporter and they look somewhere else? | ||
| It's more work than it used to be. | ||
| You can't just sit down and watch a half hour of news. | ||
| You can't just read a newspaper from cover to cover anymore. | ||
| And that's unfortunate, but I don't see the answer, unfortunately, like with some sort of government solution. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nancy is in Florida on our line for Republicans. | |
| Good morning, Nancy. | ||
| Oh, good morning. | ||
| Very interesting program this morning. | ||
| I have a question. | ||
| And it goes back all the way to when Joe Biden, former President Joe Biden, was campaigning and said about the both sides in Charlottesville. | ||
| And everybody knows, or they should know by now, that both sides have been debunked. | ||
| I watched it live on C-SPAN when he was talking about Nazis were very bad people. | ||
| And to this day, they keep saying the both sides. | ||
| Nobody corrects it. | ||
| I've called C-SPAN before. | ||
| I've seen it on there, and nobody ever corrects that. | ||
| Nancy, what do you mean by the both sides? | ||
| Nancy, what do you mean by that? | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| I know what she's talking about. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, go ahead. | |
| So she's talking about it was widely misreported that Donald Trump had called Nazis or white supremacists or extremists good people after the Charlottesville protests that happened during his first term. | ||
| And it was later clarified that his full comments in context, he had repeatedly and actually over the years condemned right-wing extremism and so on many, many times. | ||
| And he did so on the day two where he was misquoted out of context. | ||
| That has been widely corrected even by sort of mainstream and liberal news outlets, but she's right. | ||
| The narrative or the false information has persisted. | ||
| And even by political candidates, I think Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have repeated that in recent years. | ||
| And I thought the same thing. | ||
| They must know better. | ||
| On this one point, there is no longer any dispute because everybody has corrected and come to agreement on that. | ||
| I don't know what her question was, but I know what she's referring to about the both sides. | ||
| I think she's just pointing to how narratives can persist far beyond what the facts eventually may prove to be true or false about them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, that's all the time that we have for this segment today. | |
| Thank you to everyone who called in and thank you so much, Cheryl Atkinson, author of Follow the Science, investigative journalist and host and managing editor of Full Measure with Cheryl Atkinson. | ||
| We really appreciate your time this morning. | ||
| Thank you, Kimberly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Next up, we have Semaphore's political reporter David Weigel, who will join us to discuss the growing generational divide within the Democratic Party that's coming up. | |
| We'll be right back. | ||
| Tonight, on C-SPAN's Q&A, Loretta Ross, author of Calling In, critiques cancel culture's excesses and advocates for a more inclusive way to hold others accountable. | ||
| Drawing on her past experiences working with rapists and white supremacists and her own history as a survivor of sexual abuse, she supports a more nuanced approach to addressing harm in the social media age. | ||
| Whenever we think we are irritated or have a beef with somebody, we want to publicly shame and humiliate them. | ||
| And the reason we do it that way so publicly is that we want others to see us holding somebody else accountable. | ||
| We call that virtue signaling. | ||
| Let me show you how woke I am, and I'm going to put this other person down for not being as woke. | ||
| Loretta Ross, with her book, Calling In. | ||
| Tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN's QA. | ||
| You can listen to Q&A and all of our podcasts on our free C-SPAN Now app. | ||
| Weekends bring you Book TV featuring leading authors discussing their latest nonfiction books. | ||
| Here's a look at what's coming up this weekend: Pakistani British author and activist Tariq Ali discusses his memoirs, You Can't Please All, which covers the years 1980 to 2024. | ||
| He also talks about the war in Gaza and student protests in the United States. | ||
| Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Hiltzig, with his book Golden State: The Making of California, looks at the history of California from the 1840s gold rush era to the current tech boom. | ||
| Grove City College political science professor Paul Kengore, author of The Devil and Karl Marx, talks about the role of communists in the creation of International Women's Day and other progressive celebrations. | ||
| Then, on Afterwards, best-selling author Michael Lewis poses the question: who works for the government and why does their work matter? | ||
| He's interviewed by Harvard Kennedy School of Government Public Policy and Management professor Elizabeth Linos. | ||
| Watch Book TV every weekend on C-SPAN II and find a full schedule in your program guide or watch online anytime at booktv.org. | ||
| 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
|
We are still at our core, a democracy. | |
| This is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Washington Journal continues. | |
| Welcome back. | ||
| We're joined now by David Weigel, who's a politics reporter for Semaphore. | ||
| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
| Good to be back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| So you have a recent piece for Semaphore, In with the Old, the Anti-Trump Resistance Comes of Age. | ||
| And in it, you write, the Democratic Party's reckoning over age and gerontocracy appears to be on hold. | ||
| The key figures in the anti-Trump resistance right now were born in the 1940s. | ||
| Can you talk about the generational divide in the Democratic Party right now? | ||
| Yeah, so I wrote that piece right after Al Green, the congressman from Texas, protested was taken out of the State of the Union, and as Bernie Sanders was starting a campaign, which he continued, which I joined over this list last week, a campaign of rallies, not for any election, rallies to organize people. | ||
| And both of them generated a lot of organic excitement among people who voted for Democrats in 2024, people who were really disappointed with the direction the party's taken. | ||
| So there is and has been a discussion, really spurred by Joe Biden, about why the leaders of the party refuse to give up power. | ||
| Even Nancy Pelosi, whose left leadership is still leader, seek her emiritis, takes a lot of big role in the party in shaping their messaging. | ||
| And this frustration that the leadership of the party is too committed to norms, too committed to finding some way, some legal way that's going to win back power for them or stop Trump from acting instead of, and the base doesn't know what it wants here, instead of being more fiery and protesting and scaring them out even out of what they're doing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So Democrats are harking back to the civil rights movement. | |
| They're looking back to the Tea Party in the 2010s and the idea that that was good at opposing what Democrats wanted to get done. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The coherence here is that they're not looking at anything the party leadership is doing now and saying that's going well. | |
| Now then you just mentioned Bernie Sanders as sort of one of the members of the vanguard of what resistance there is within the Democratic Party. | ||
| You spent some time with Sanders as well as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over the weekend. | ||
| Can you talk about that? | ||
| Yes, so this is the third round of Sanders stops where he has organized a big rally either in a swing district held by Republican, like Western Wisconsin or in Omaha, or in a major city where they can get a big crowd. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And he did that in Denver on Friday, the day I spent and talked to Sanders. | |
| He was in Greeley, Colorado, which is part of a swing seat. | ||
| And he was in Denver for what was the biggest rally Sanders has ever managed to hold, period. | ||
| And he ran for president twice. | ||
| And the point, he said, was just generating a lot of organizing capacity and also finding people who can run for office, whether they run as Democrats or whether they run as independents. | ||
| And he clarified for me that's probably more in the mode of what he does, which is running as an independent without the Democratic Party's brand, but without a Democratic Party candidate splitting the vote when he runs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But some of the premise is that there needs to be a organization outside the Democratic Party, not one group, but full-time rallying organizing that is not part of the Democratic Party because the Democratic Party's brand in much of the country is terrible. | |
| And it has been going underwater since 22008, since Barack Obama was the last peak performer able to compete in very rural places. | ||
| Rather than saying, here's how we fix that party, Sanders, an independent who is at the end of his career, he's in his 80s and his final term, saying, what can we build that resists what he calls fascism and authoritarianism but isn't hidebound by the people's frustrations with one of the two parties? | ||
| You mentioned the decline in popularity of the Democratic Party, even within their own base. | ||
| CNN has a poll finding that among the American public overall, the Democratic Party's favorability rating stands at just 29%, a record low in CNN's polling dating back to 1992. | ||
| Just 63% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents report a favorable view of their own party, a dip from 72% in January and 81% at the start of President Joe Biden's administration. | ||
| What's behind that? | ||
| Well, you pointed to the right numbers, which is a lot of this is Democrats, people who will vote for Democrats in November next year. | ||
| They'll vote for Democrats in special elections where Democrats are doing pretty well, just saying that they don't think the party is doing the right thing at all. | ||
| The party has not been able to resist Donald Trump to the extent they wanted. | ||
| There is this paradox where lawyers, law firms, progressive groups have been suing and stopping or slowing some of what Trump is doing. | ||
| But politically, they're not seeing any effective counter-messaging from the party they all elected and the frustrations, and we'll get into them, but they build on each other. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're everything from Democrats who have kind of lame messaging on TikTok that's repetitive or jokey, but doesn't say anything, to Democrats saying we need to organize now and then win in the midterm with no particular plan to stop this or that Trump item agenda, or Democrats saying we need to continue funding the government because Trump can take advantage of a shutdown without fully explaining to the base, okay, what does that mean? | |
| What is the alternative? | ||
| So it's not that these voters have said, I don't like the Democratic Party and now I'm going to vote Republican. | ||
| It's that I don't like the party and I'm tuned out and I'll chump check back in November next year when I need an alternative. | ||
| You've seen this in voter registration too, which is a little bit harder to track because not every state has registration by party. | ||
| But where it does, even when Democrats have been doing pretty well, he gains House seats in California last year, for example, but the independent registration has been going up, Republican registration has been going up, and Democratic registration has been flat or down in much of the state, and that's across the country. | ||
|
unidentified
|
These are things that Democrats used to be good at. | |
| They had this normal amount of support, generational support. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They had some churns from people coming into the system. | |
| And they're finding younger people who might even be aligned with the party on nine to ten things don't look at them and say, yes, I want to join that. | ||
| I want to organize with that. | ||
| I want to register as a Democrat and support that party. | ||
| They're becoming independents instead because they don't think the party is effective and stands for many things. | ||
| Whereas a younger conservative person looks at the GOP under Donald Trump and says, that party is very clear, it's direct, and it wins. | ||
| When Donald Trump says something, he's usually going to try to get it done. | ||
| I don't hear that from Democrats. | ||
| More on sort of where the Democrats sit. | ||
| Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, says, I think the Democrats' brand is really bad. | ||
| And I think this 2024 election was based on culture. | ||
| And the Democrats' failure to connect on a cultural basis with a wide swath of Americans is hugely problematic. | ||
| I think the majority of the party realizes that the ideological purity of some of the groups is a recipe for disaster. | ||
| That, candidly, the attack on over-the-top wokeism was a valid attack. | ||
| And that was in Politico. | ||
| You know, much of the discussion was on whether cultural issues have undermined the Democratic Party. | ||
| Do you think that that's really the case? | ||
| It has, but even look at what he said and how specific he was. | ||
| It wasn't very specific. | ||
| So when Democrats talk about problems they have with appearing too woke, what does that mean? | ||
| If I pay attention or you pay attention to conservative commentary, they'll explain. | ||
| It's everything from the party has signed on to this sort of 1990s gender theory redefinition of sex and gender, and it has. | ||
| The party legally and politically is committed to a different view of gender than the one that was in the code before BOPSTIC, the Supreme Court decision. | ||
| Does it mean the affirmative action, which the Supreme Court struck down a few years ago? | ||
| Does it mean just we would like it if the new Snow White Disney movie had a different actress the lead? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It runs through everything. | |
| And a goal of conservative activism for decades has been winning the culture because politics will run downstream from culture. | ||
| One crisis liberals are confronting, Democrats are confronting, is that they do. | ||
| Hollywood, a lot of pop culture is oriented towards Democrats. | ||
| It's a place where the Trump agenda, especially when it comes to immigration or women's rights, is seen as aberrant. | ||
| But people signing up and becoming growing up in this country, becoming new voters at age 18 or getting involved in politics after they graduate from high school are really unhappy with what the party stands for culturally. | ||
| How do they change that? | ||
| There's not much of a discussion yet. | ||
| To the extent there is one, it is we need an open tent and a bigger tent, I should say, and we need to be more tolerant of people who disagree with us, let's say, on gender and trans rights or disagree with us on immigration. | ||
| For example, you saw Democrats help pass the Lake and Riley Act before Trump took office and he signed it. | ||
| And there hasn't been an effort to say we're going to primary and get rid of everybody who voted against the Lake and Riley Act. | ||
| But there's not a Democratic meeting or press conference that says, new plan, we're not going to be as tight on enforcing discipline on some of these issues. | ||
| We're going to have a bigger tent. | ||
| The last time they had the ability to pass policies with the supermajority in D.C. was when they did, was when they had pro-life members, when they had more socially conservative members, even Joe Manchin, who only left at the beginning, at the end of last year, culturally was not aligned with the party on guns and a couple other things. | ||
| And that's the discussion they're having. | ||
| But again, it's not very specific. | ||
| There's not a Democrat running, going to a group of progressives on one issue or another issue and saying, you're all wrong, we need to break away from this. | ||
| They're just sort of hemming and hawing about how this constellation of groups that they represent might be hurting them with some voters, usually younger white male voters. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you're seeing, you mentioned gender issues, and the Senate Democrats blocked a GOP-led bill to ban transgender athletes from women's sports. | ||
| And then you also saw in Kentucky, I believe, that Andy Bashir, the Democratic governor there, vetoed HB4, which banned DEI initiatives at public universities. | ||
| So there are these issues where Democrats are still weighing in on these cultural moments. | ||
| Is that a risk to them kind of trying to redefine themselves here? | ||
| Well, yeah, but all of politics is a risk. | ||
| And this is another thing that Republicans have been willing to take risks to do fairly unpopular things. | ||
| Even if you look at polling on DEI, people's understanding of DEI, if it's just that corporations, the federal government, whoever, are going to take racial diversity into account when they're hiring or signing applications, depending on the poll, that's not terribly unpopular. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's unpopular to say we're getting rid of, for example, all these pages in the federal government websites that refer to Jackie Robinson or refer to civil rights heroes. | |
| That's terribly unpopular, but Republicans will take that risk. | ||
| With Democrats, yes, all of this poses a risk because let's say even 10 years ago, the theory of how Democrats would keep winning was that demographic change was happening in the country. | ||
| While white voters became a smaller proportion of the electorate and Hispanic voters, black voters, Asian voters became larger, that was naturally going to help the Democratic Party. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And not to say they were taking it for granted. | |
| They thought our policies of supporting more immigration, more legal immigration, our policies of racial diversity, affirmative action, they're going to benefit us as the country becomes more diverse. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And really, that's why 2024 was so traumatic to them, is because if the electorate had stayed in place from 2020, the racial preferences of the electorate, Harris would have won. | |
| She lost because non-white voters moved towards Donald Trump, despite everything, despite what he's doing right now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And they're not sure where the political backlash is going to come or even what their political response should be. | |
| For example, they are criticizing the government for taking down these pages about civil rights heroes from government websites. | ||
| They're not saying, if we get elected, we're going to restore affirmative action at colleges. | ||
| Their hopes are really on Republican overreach, which they've been getting. | ||
| They have been getting the administration going, let's say, going after college endowment, sorry, going after research funds for colleges, $400 million for Columbia, for example, demanding that they enforce new laws protecting Jewish students. | ||
| Successfully demanding. | ||
| Very successfully demanding that. | ||
| And Democrats are also divided on how to respond to that. | ||
| But their political hope is that the backlash is so overzealous that people get sick of it and say, well, I'm ready for the party that doesn't talk about these things, or it doesn't obsess about them the way that Republicans do. | ||
| But you can hear what I'm saying. | ||
| That's not a plan. | ||
| There is not a coherent, we have figured out how the country should, what direction the country should be going in, legally or culturally. | ||
| They felt like they were riding the wave that was going in one direction, and they don't feel that way anymore. | ||
| They really are at the fate of Republicans screwing up and causing a backlash. | ||
| Does that tie back to the gerontocracy issue that you mentioned earlier, because the leadership was sort of moving away from the average age of even Americans? | ||
| Well, a little bit, but they found some of the older leaders of the party, again, think of what the politics they got through. | ||
| Bernie Sanders was a civil rights protester, protested for housing access in Chicago in the 1960s. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And there are not young Democrats who have any personal memory of that. | |
| So one appeal of the older members of the party, one appeal of them, is that they live through civil rights struggles and they can say, yes, what we're going through right now is similar. | ||
| You're going to resist. | ||
| And Sanders closes his rallies with a version of this, that everybody said the labor movement was crazy. | ||
| Everyone said the women's rights movement was crazy. | ||
| The appeal to how other people have been in this position, been losing, and had to organize and win, is very strong. | ||
| That part of it appeals. | ||
| That the party is too old and doesn't get it, that's the flip side of this. | ||
| They're using tactics that worked for a different country, a different conservative party that was not trying to undermine this, a different legal regime. | ||
| All the kind of civil rights laws we're talking about are from the 19, are younger than Bernie Sanders. | ||
| And Republicans are very bold about wanting to dismantle some of them. | ||
| Trump's first day in office dismantling LBJ's affirmative action order, which no president had touched. | ||
| Ronald Reagan thought about it and pulled away from it. | ||
| And so that's part of the frustration is, hey, you have old leaders who have survived situations like this, but what do we do if Republicans take the tools that they won in those fights away, starting with the Dobbs decision in Rowe? | ||
| What if those victories are reversed? | ||
| What's their plan now? | ||
| That's where people start to run out of patience with this leadership and say, what do you have except for appeal to tradition and previous victories? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What's the new victory you're going to give us? | |
| Speaking of running out of patience with leadership, what are your thoughts on the anger that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has elicited for supporting the continuing resolution? | ||
| Well, everywhere, too. | ||
| Every branch of the party. | ||
| Schumer, had he had his way, was going to be on a book tour this week with public events, list of public events. | ||
| Here's the address. | ||
| Here are the tickets. | ||
| And they canceled those. | ||
| He kept an interview tour where he was in TV studios where people might not show up and protest and heckle him. | ||
| There was going to be protesting of what he did at the end of the CR process. | ||
| And he explained it. | ||
| If we had not funded as Democrats the continuing resolution, Republicans would have used the shutdown to focus on defunding things they don't want that we need to resist Donald Trump. | ||
| And he tried to make this point, which is accurate. | ||
| They could say that federal courts are shut down. | ||
| And that means that the only place Democrats are winning, the federal courts where they're filing restraining orders and getting injunctions on Trump policies, they wouldn't be working. | ||
| But the CBP would be deporting people. | ||
| The flights would keep going to El Salvador. | ||
| He explained that, and that's pretty true. | ||
| That's not very compelling to Democrats because they have a very recent memory of Republicans forcing a shutdown, everyone saying in the media, this is a disaster, polling saying it's a disaster, and Republicans winning. | ||
| Donald Trump presiding over shutdowns, Tea Party Republicans forcing shutdowns. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's a frustration in the base. | |
| Again, yes, you leaders have told us something has worked in the past or here's how the system works, but we want to try something new because we're living under Donald Trump getting his way every single day. | ||
| How come you can't stop that? | ||
| And that was the problem for Schumer. | ||
| What does he say to those voters? | ||
| Go through all his interviews. | ||
| He doesn't have a good answer. | ||
| The answer is wait for Republicans' polling to go down and then win the next election. | ||
| And you saw it at some of these town hall meetings from members of Congress. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If they said literally that, they were getting heckled by Democrats. | |
| We're going to be taking your calls with questions for David Weigel. | ||
| Our number for Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| For Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| And for Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| Before we get to the questions, earlier this month, Michigan Democratic Senator Alyssa Slotkin delivered the party's state response to President Trump's joint address to Congress. | ||
| And in it, she called on Americans to embrace civic engagement and demand principled leadership. | ||
| Let's listen to a bit of that. | ||
| So as much as we need to make our government more responsive to our lives today, don't for one moment fool yourself that democracy isn't precious and worth saving. | ||
| But how do we actually do that? | ||
| I know a lot of you have been asking that question. | ||
| First, don't tune out. | ||
| It's easy to be exhausted, but America needs you now more than ever. | ||
| If previous generations had not fought for this democracy, where would we be today? | ||
| Second, hold your elected officials, including me, accountable. | ||
| Watch how they're voting. | ||
| Go to town halls and demand they take action. | ||
| That's as American as apple pie. | ||
| Third, organize. | ||
| Pick just one issue you're passionate about and engage. | ||
| And doom scrolling doesn't count. | ||
| Join a group that cares about your issue and act. | ||
| And if you can't find one, start one. | ||
| Some of the most important movements in our history have come from the bottle up. | ||
| In closing, we all know that our country is going through something right now. | ||
| We're not sure what the next day is going to hold, let alone the next decade. | ||
| But this isn't the first time we've experienced significant and tumultuous change as a country. | ||
| I'm a student of history, and we've gone through periods of political instability before. | ||
| And ultimately, we've chosen to keep changing this country for the better. | ||
| But every single time, we've only gotten through those moments because of two things. | ||
| Engaged citizens and principled leaders. | ||
| Engaged citizens who do a little bit more than they're used to doing to fight for the things that they care about, and principled leaders who are ready to receive the ball and do something about it. | ||
| So thank you tonight for caring about your country just by watching you qualify as engaged citizens. | ||
| And I promise that I and my fellow Democrats will do everything in our power to be the principal leaders that you deserve. | ||
| What about that? | ||
| Is that enough of a message or a coherent strategy for Democrats? | ||
| Starting to get there, and again, the assumption is that it's going to take a while. | ||
| Democrats are going to not be very satisfied with what's happening until date TBD. | ||
| And so what Democrats are describing is something that has worked for them, but I would say in other media environments. | ||
| This is, not to get too meta about this conversation, but everything Democrats tried in the past was in a media environment that was much less fragmented, where they were taken more seriously, and traditional media was taken more seriously. | ||
| And they've been slow to adjust to the world we live in right now, and I'd bring up the Lake and Riley bill as an example again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That has from a combination of outside pressure and internal electoral pressure. | |
| Elected Republicans wanted to make it easier to deport migrants accused of a crime, not convicted yet, indicted. | ||
| And they had from the outside activists and this woman's family, et cetera, campaigning for this, holding their photos up, having rallies, talking to politicians, and they had in Donald Trump a president elevating that. | ||
| That's the sort of story, if you look at a story of blaming the immigration system for crime. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If a single crime is committed by illegal immigrants, they shouldn't have been here in the first place. | |
| The old media environment the Democrats liked and were used to saw some stories as that as a little bit too extreme, a little bit too emotionally fraught, a little bit too simplistic, and might not cover them the same way. | ||
| And that's the problem Democrats are having. | ||
| How do we elevate the stories we think that would change this conversation in this media environment? | ||
|
unidentified
|
How do we talk, for example, about fired federal workers and get them in front of people and make it sympathetic? | |
| And they have been struggling, even though those workers have been fired, have been laid off not for cause, but because Republicans wanted to get rid of their organizations. | ||
| And you've seen this, she sees slockings of a foreign policy Democrat. | ||
| You've seen people coming out of the civil service who worked in foreign aid for years have very sympathetic stories to Democrats. | ||
| But if you're a Republican getting your news from Fox or watching TikTok or what have you, you don't particularly care that somebody who lived in D.C. for 15 years and was giving aid to a foreign country was doing it. | ||
| You watch TV and they say, well, that aid was going to some crazy program that you don't need to care about. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You've seen Democrats focus more on veterans who work for the federal government. | |
| And this is, I think, part of their strategy. | ||
| There's a pipeline of people who are veterans and have access to federal jobs after they leave the service. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There are tens of thousands of veterans losing their jobs. | |
| They're veterans in the VA and that healthcare who are being downsized. | ||
| There's efforts to shrink that and do more automated help for people calling for safety services. | ||
| And talking to Sanders, but talking to every Democrat, they think that's where they can go is, look, Republicans are doing stuff that you might think is popular, but is it going to make the government work better for you? | ||
| And it's going to help or hurt people who just did nothing wrong but lived good American lives and wanted to help their fellow citizens. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's where they're getting. | |
| They're not here yet there. | ||
| And they are thinking maybe in a couple months when people see more of these effects and the government's working less efficiently, they can come back and say, here's the story of somebody who was trying to do that job and they were fired. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's get to your calls. | |
| Jeff is in Lexington, Kentucky on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Jeff. | ||
| Yes, thanks for taking my call. | ||
| The Democrats, one of the big problems I think they caused yourself was, I mean, really, they rigged their last three presidential primary elections. | ||
| And then with the hiding of Joe Biden, I think they lost a lot of trust. | ||
| I mean, how could you not? | ||
| And I'd like to say one other thing. | ||
| To get my news, I go to Greta Van Sustran and Harris Faulkner. | ||
| That's about it. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, the Biden part he mentioned is important. | ||
| And the good news you could say for Democrats is that they're not going to run Joe Biden again. | ||
| He's not going to be a major figure in the party. | ||
| I'd say even if he wants back in, there are some Democrats who will say they'll appear with him, but let's see if they actually do it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But the problem that the caller just discussed, where voters were told by the Democratic Party, their entire leadership, but Joe Biden is in position to run for president again. | |
| He can handle four more years. | ||
| And then backing down on that, that left a mark. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It made the party much less credible to people who might not even have an ideological dispute. | |
| They just look at the Democrats and say, you lied to us. | ||
| You said you could run Joe Biden again and you couldn't. | ||
| He couldn't handle this. | ||
| There will be more questions. | ||
| There are books coming out this summer. | ||
| Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper's book about this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're going back to Democrats and saying who is willing to talk about this now. | |
| I think that is a bigger problem for them in the medium term than the caller mentioned, the 2016 and 2020 primaries where Bernie Sanders got less votes, didn't win the nomination, but his supporters said, yes, it was stacked against us for various reasons. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But that leaved in 2024 when the Democrats effectively refused to have a primary primary. | |
| That's right. | ||
| Where they didn't have a primary in New Hampshire, where they pushed South Carolina top of the calendar. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's the problem that I think they have not figured out how to fix yet. | |
| The problem of does the party treat progressive candidates seriously? | ||
| Is it blocking them? | ||
| I think the damage has already been done from that. | ||
| And you've seen people who've left the Democratic infrastructure completely and become MAGA or become non-voters because of the 2016-2020. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's been some loss there that Democrats probably can't get back. | |
| The Biden question, they have not been very blunt or honest about what they did wrong. | ||
| And the bet here is that come 2028, who will still be voting on that question? | ||
| Probably not that many people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But in the short term, if you're looking at the two parties and saying, which one is more honest with me, Democrats can point out a lot of things that Donald Trump is doing that are unpopular, and Republicans can come back at them as this party was engaged in a conspiracy to cover up the president's health, and they couldn't carry out through the election. | |
| That is enough to kind of shut down a conversation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And what Democrats need right now is a lot of person-to-person conversations where people are taking politics seriously and convincing them to abandon Donald Trump. | |
| It definitely hurts the Biden situation in retrospect. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mark is in Hampstead, Maryland, on our line for Republicans. | |
| Good morning, Mark. | ||
| Hey, good morning. | ||
| So, you know, speaking of shutting down conversations, one of the things that really shuts down a conversation these days is this push of, like you were playing a clip of Senator Slotkin a few minutes ago, talking about how she was a student of history. | ||
| Obviously, she wasn't a very good student because she kept carrying on about democracy, which we are not. | ||
| That's something that's been pushed in academia. | ||
| It's been pushed in Hollywood. | ||
| It's been pushed in the media for about 80 years. | ||
| You will not find the word democracy anywhere in any of our founding documents. | ||
| It's kind of a talking point that was invented by Woodrow Wilson. | ||
| I was not a Democrat, but I was a very, I was sort of a right-leaning centrist for most of my life. | ||
| And it wasn't until Donald Trump ran in 2016, and we kept hearing the Hitler comparison, he's a Nazi. | ||
| And it made me start to wonder, what is it about the right wing that leans towards Nazism? | ||
| So it made me kind of a student of history. | ||
| I started going back and actually reading some history books and come to find out that my generation, which is Generation X, had been lied to, as had the baby boomers, about Hitler, for instance. | ||
| They've pushed him into the right-wing column when the man was clearly a socialist. | ||
| He was a national socialist, as was Mussolini. | ||
| These were not right-leaning men. | ||
| We were also lied to about the history of the Democratic Party claiming to be the party of civil rights. | ||
| We had a civil rights movement in the 1960s, which wouldn't have had to have happened had it not been for the Democrat Party blatantly ignoring the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, which were passed exclusively by Republicans right after the Civil War. | ||
| For 100 years, they were the party of white supremacy. | ||
| You know, it was actually Republicans that got the 19th Amendment passed. | ||
| And even though LBJ put the civil rights bill out in 1964, proportionally, more Republicans supported those. | ||
| The Voting Rights Act of 65 and the Fair Housing Act of 68. | ||
| So through the internet, we think a lot of people are coming to realize that the Democrats are a party of liars. | ||
| Well, that phrasing, I hear that a lot, that we relied to, and I actually agree with the caller, that you always could look up alternate information and verify it for yourself. | ||
| For example, the idea the Democratic Party wasn't the party of civil rights. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, no historian disputes that. | |
| Eric Foner won't dispute that. | ||
| You can go back and read the history of the party's transformation. | ||
| It was a coalition of segregationists and urban liberals. | ||
| And then after the 1960s, there was a very slower coherence. | ||
| But the Party of Slavery did not nominate Barack Obama. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll say that the party's transformed quite a lot. | |
| The Liberal Republican Party that he's talking about from the 1960s, a lot of those members have been replaced by different Republicans. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So it is important to go back to history. | |
| On the democracy point, that's a talking point that I've seen used by everybody. | ||
| Elon Musk will say, for example, if we're not allowed, if Donald Trump's not allowed to fire government employees, we're not a democracy, we're a bureaucracy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That phrasing, often the people who want to win the political argument in America will talk about democracy, even though you could quill about the definitions. | |
| You can go back and tell Alexis de Tocqueville, hey, change the title of your book. | ||
| You should say Republic. | ||
| No, democracy, the idea that the citizenry gets to rise up and change the government, that the government's responsible to the people that you elected representatives, but you can get rid of them if they're not doing what the majority constituents think. | ||
| Rhetorically, every politician in America does that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You start to hear them say, well, no, it's a republic if they're losing, basically. | |
| But the appeal to majoritarianism, every party does that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The bigger problem, I think, for Democrats short term has been when they appeal to majoritarianism for ideas that don't have majority support. | |
| And that's a couple that we were talking earlier in the segment. | ||
| They might not get into the details of them, but if they're forced to discuss, for example, affirmative action policies, they've not been popular. | ||
| They don't have majority buy-in, put them on the ballot, they lose. | ||
| So what's their true democratic position? | ||
| Their problems are not, I'd say, about the rhetoric. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Their problems have been more recently Donald Trump changing the political coalition again. | |
| For example, as you said, which is the anti-war party, which is the party that's against foreign interventions, that had a very clear answer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think in 2003, when George W. Bush was leading the Republican Party, he has a different answer with Donald Trump now in 2025. | |
| And when you see Democrats say, this is not the part of Ronald Reagan, which Alyssa Lotkin said in a different part of that speech, yeah, it's not. | ||
| It's not the party of Ronald Reagan. | ||
| There is transformation inside these parties. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So it's bad to get too hung up, I think, on the definitions because the devil can quote scripture for his purpose. | |
| Any party can take rhetoric and say, we own this rhetoric now. | ||
| And final point about the fascists of the 20th century with the real politics. | ||
| You could ask the German communists or the Italian communists what they thought about Mussolini and Hitler. | ||
| They would take the definitions, political definitions that they thought were most sellable and use them for their own purposes. | ||
| Any party can do that, usually with different implications. | ||
| Joe is in Ohio on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Joe. | ||
| Hi. | ||
| Yeah, I'm actually a Green Party person. | ||
| I have been since the 80s. | ||
| And I just want to point out that the fundamental difference between being an independent and belonging to a third party like the Greens is that we base our party on principles. | ||
| We have four key principles. | ||
| Ecological wisdom, grassroots democracy, social justice, and nonviolence. | ||
| And so we have over 100 Greens in office throughout the country, local offices. | ||
| But if any of them violate those principles, then the party can turn its back on them and say, you're not acting as a Green. | ||
| Like, if they support nuclear power, we could say you're violating the principle of ecological wisdom. | ||
| And I don't see either the Republicans or the Democrats having that. | ||
| And unfortunately, Bernie Sanders, when you say just run as an independent, independents are completely undefined. | ||
| They don't have any principles that hold them together the way the Greens do. | ||
| So, you know, as a third party person, I just also wanted to point out that if you add the third party votes to the Harris votes, it turns out that more people voted against Trump than voted for him. | ||
| So that kind of jabs about this whole band-aid idea. | ||
| Yes, the point you make about Sanders, I talked to him two days ago about what this all meant, what his campaigning meant and what the recruiting of independents meant. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And it is being figured out because the point you make about independence is true. | |
| At the end of the last Congress, Kirsten Cinema was independent and Bernie Sanders is an independent, and cinema was the senator who undermined his biggest goals in the last four years. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And so what he's talking about is more in places where Democrats are just so unpopular that no one listens to them, this the Democratic brand is so bad, it would make sense to run as an independent and that people should be organizing political power with or without the Democratic Party. | |
| But you're right. | ||
| What are the challenges if there's not a set of principles that voters know this brand represents and that brand doesn't? | ||
| Republicans have largely fixed this by allying around Donald Trump. | ||
| There are a handful of Republicans right now in a couple of swing seats who don't vote with Donald Trump on everything or don't agree with him on everything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And what we were talking about in the last segment, these Democrats appealing to the old Republican Party, Republicans are very coherent now. | |
| If Donald Trump says that we're going to change our position on Ukraine, we're going to talk to the Russians and even agree with them on some of their territorial demands, a Lindsey Graham, who has politics oriented around the exact opposite, will move towards Donald Trump on that. | ||
| Democrats don't have a leader who can do that. | ||
| And so they're in the position that Republicans were a few years ago, but parties often are in America, where they're, because of our voting system, because of first past the post, you don't need 51% to win. | ||
| You need to get more votes than the other person, and a third-party candidate can lower that threshold, as happened in 2024, or before that, 2016. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, you end up getting people who agree with a party on 80% of something, vote for a party they agree with 100%, and they get the party they agree 0% of the time on. | |
| That is a, I think we'll figure that out this morning. | ||
| That is a trick of the American voting system. | ||
| In some countries, there are just so many parties that they hold the elections, and then the coalitions form after the election is over when they're choosing a prime minister. | ||
| And in this country, basically, all the coalition working happens inside the parties. | ||
| Again, the Republican advantage right now is that their coalition building is managed by Donald Trump. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Democratic Party coalition building managed by absolutely nobody. | |
| Molly is in Compton, California on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Molly. | ||
| God bless morning to everyone listening. | ||
| Yes, I am a registered Democrat, and I'm what they call a baby boomer, just turned 78 this year. | ||
| And I support the Democrats. | ||
| And I'm so disappointed in Trump. | ||
| Trump should have gone to jail. | ||
| He was found guilty of so many things. | ||
| The party, and we know that he was guilty of it. | ||
| But I didn't want him to go to jail. | ||
| I didn't want us to put a president in jail. | ||
| That's the moral in me. | ||
| I thought he would gracefully, you know, just pull out himself and go ahead and open up another apprentice show or something. | ||
| I also think that the judges in the Supreme Court, when they start being out of order, and you know they were out of order. | ||
| They did things that they should not have done. | ||
| I think that Trump, the judges, the Supreme Court, and he had them, I wish that he had done that. | ||
| He was morally wrong. | ||
| He said he was going to build a wall. | ||
| And he didn't build a wall while he was in office. | ||
| That's what he said he was going to do. | ||
| So some of the things that we thought he was going to do. | ||
| And then finally, even France thought that we were a country that we could bring all the huddled masses, the poor people, the hungry people, those who are hurt, should have been able to do it. | ||
| Maybe they're going to take that Statue of Liberty back. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But I'm saying that Trump is out of order. | ||
| And we as Democrats recognize that, but we just don't do that to our presidents. | ||
| Thank you for letting me call them today. | ||
| Well, you're talking about, we're hearing about norms and about how, well, the country doesn't done this before. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Therefore, what he's doing can't happen. | |
| there must be some way to stop it and that's just not been a very helpful rhetorical or strategic place for Democrats to live in because the Trump approach to politics is to take things take take risks and take things that were part of let's say the consensus maybe the liberal consensus and say we're going to blow that up you saw this we haven't talked a lot about colleges today but you've seen this in the way that the Republicans talked about foreign students for example There have been for years foreign students who come to elite universities or not even that elite universities pay full tuition. | ||
| The colleges court them because they like that tuition. | ||
| And the position administration through Vice President Vance is that every foreign student taking a position in college is taking a position away from an American. | ||
| And so, yeah, the Emma Lazarus poem does not really comport with that. | ||
| But Republicans are saying we're running a different type of more nationalist politics, and we don't care if you're appealing to tradition. | ||
| Our tradition is older, and we believe in it, and we were going to remake the country. | ||
| So that is a thing that Democrats are confronting right now. | ||
| What are these ideas that Americans are pluralist ideas, whether liberal or not, that Americans actually do support and don't like to see undermined? | ||
| They have not found one yet, but the administration is attacking on so many fronts, saying, for example, there are people who have been living in the country legally for years and never committed a crime, but we're going to deport them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're very comfortable with that. | |
| They're very comfortable defending that. | ||
| Stephen Miller is very comfortable defending that. | ||
| You're seeing that in the communities that people are being taken from, some outrage. | ||
| You're seeing from people who might even support, let's say, deporting everyone in the country who's illegally and got here illegally, saying they don't feel that way about somebody who got a visa or a green card and is being taken out of the country for their political beliefs. | ||
| So there is not, the appeal to tradition is not that powerful to Democrats. | ||
| The individual appeal to, well, we have, as Americans, some sense of fairness and some idea of who should be allowed in this country because we're not France. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're not one of these countries that was founded by a group of people 1,000 years ago. | |
| We're a conglomeration of immigrants and descendants of slaves, et cetera. | ||
| We're different than those other people. | ||
| They didn't win the 2024 election, but that's the place the Democrats are coming to. | ||
| We're ready to defend pluralism against some of these Trump attacks on it that are kicking people out of the country who might have earned the right to be here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Janet is in Aurora, Illinois on our line for independence. | |
| Good morning, Janet. | ||
| Yes, I believe the 2024 election was a racist election. | ||
| The white men in this country decided that the blacks and the Democratic Party had gained too much control. | ||
| And the whole election was based on making sure blacks got no farther. | ||
| Because white men are scared that the day will come when the blacks outnumber the whites in this country. | ||
| And I really believe that... | ||
| Janet, what do you make of the fact that white women also voted for Trump in the majority? | ||
| White women are racist, too. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| Well, I was just, you specified white men, so I was just asking. | ||
| Well, mainly the majority of those that voted in the 2024 election were white men and they went to the Republican Party. | ||
| And, well, that's all I have to say. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Well, the point she was making is one that I don't hear Democrats make because they do think we were talking about how could Democrats win in the past. | ||
| Democrats in the past got a lot of voters who did not have progressive racial views to vote for them. | ||
| Barack Obama had this. | ||
| Anyone who covered that campaign and won't talk to canvassers would find voters who had what we would call racist views even about all sorts of things. | ||
| They're probably not worth getting into in this conversation, but they're willing to vote for Barack Obama because they could overlook that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And they didn't think he was too focused on dividing up people by race. | |
| So what the caller is talking about, that's part of the change I'm discussing. | ||
| There is a confidence on the right, not necessarily every part of the Republican Party, but on the intellectual right, that Americans were told for decades that diversity was good, and that meant that white Americans had to take a back seat who starred in movies, who got into colleges, who got jobs. | ||
| They would have to take a back seat for a while in the interest of diversity. | ||
| That is simplistic history of the last 30-some years. | ||
| But there are people in the Trump administration or in the orbit of the Trump administration who made this argument that the country has not become diverse. | ||
| It's become anti-white. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that does, if you read Elon Musk's Twitter feed, it'll take you a while because there's a lot of it, he'll often be responding to somebody who has an opinion like that. | |
| I saw one earlier where somebody was talking about the shrinking white population of the world and Elon had a comment on it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There are people who have views of how we should align our politics in order to fight back against the diversification of the country. | |
| And they have roles in the administration right now. | ||
| And Democrats are pretty comfortable in saying, we disagree with that. | ||
| We're a diverse country. | ||
| We're pluralistic. | ||
| Multiculturalism is good for America. | ||
| But they're having some fights that are reminiscent of fights we had in the 1990s. | ||
| The same discussion was having in the 1990s. | ||
| The difference was a media environment that could say there are some opinions out there that are so anti-black, anti-Hispanic that we're just not going to put them on the air. | ||
| They're too racist. | ||
| Or if we put them on the air, it's going to be a TV show where there's a fistfight between this guest and that guest. | ||
| We're not going to take it very seriously. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And the discourse is very different because of how atomized the entire media is, how people can turn off the rest of the press and look at different voices online with different theories. | |
| Again, this is a very big topic that the caller is talking about, but just the horizons of what people are allowed to say about race and say about diversity are much bigger than Democrats are used to. | ||
| They were winning elections in a climate where people had a little bit more self-censorship about what they would say. | ||
| And in that self-censorship, they might say, well, maybe I'm wrong. | ||
| Maybe I'm wrong about diversity. | ||
| Maybe I'm wrong about who deserves these roles and who doesn't. | ||
| Very different climate now. | ||
| And I think Democrats have had to get used to people saying things that even 10 years ago would make the room drop silent and end the conversation because people consider it too offensive. | ||
| There's not really a bar in Republican politics right now that says that's too offensive. | ||
| Stop saying it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Charles is in Virginia on our line for Republicans. | |
| Good morning, Charles. | ||
| Yes, you just made the point I'm calling about. | ||
| I grew up in the segregated South. | ||
| I spent a good part of my youth fighting against the Democratic Party. | ||
| At one point, the Democratic Party became turned, as he said, and became an equal rights party. | ||
| But now it reversed itself. | ||
| It is now what it was before, a racist party. | ||
| But now it wants to give preference to a different race. | ||
| The Supreme Court decisions were not about a recent one about discriminating against white people. | ||
| It was discriminating against Asians. | ||
| So what's happened to the Democratic Party is that it is reverted to form. | ||
| And the idea that you can't say, I want everybody treated equal. | ||
| Nobody gets a preference. | ||
| They get it on merit. | ||
| That's what the Democratic Party changed to. | ||
| Hubert Humphrey said about the Civil Rights Bill. | ||
| If this has got a quota in it, I'll eat the paper. | ||
| That changed. | ||
| They became preference of certain groups, and that has changed back because even the supposed preferred groups don't think that's right. | ||
| Yes, the Hubert Humphrey quote you're talking about, I would almost combine that with the debates that happened around the 1965 Immigration Act. | ||
| You can go back and find Democrats voting for that bill saying this is not going to substantially change the makeup of the country or who's coming in. | ||
| And it did. | ||
| It did change. | ||
| The ways that especially kind of chain migration, family members coming into the country after other family members had settled in America, there were massive changes. | ||
| So the Republicans, the Republican politics the last decade or so under Trump have been oriented against that, saying their liberals went too far, they changed the country, and we're going to change it back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And the point you make about Asians, yes, the Students for Fair Admissions versus Harvard, the affirmative action case, that was about Asians being discriminated against. | |
| Again, a very old topic in the politics we're talking about. | ||
| This was happening in the 1990s. | ||
| This is a reason California voters banned affirmative action because the California university system was seeing high-testing Asian, sorry, Asian students with high scores losing spots in colleges. | ||
| That's the crisis of the Democratic Party is their coalition was, after the Civil Rights Act, their coalition was very racially diverse, and they have lost a lot of ground with Asian voters, not just on that issue, but for example, in the aftermath of the pandemic, rising crime, Democratic politics in New York were saying, well, you were seeing attacks on Asians in New York. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Democrats were saying this is because of Republican rhetoric. | |
| A lot of Asian voters who moved to the right said, no, the party is not taking seriously the complaints we have about crime. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're fixable. | |
| We had safe subways not that long ago. | ||
| We need to enforce the laws on our subways. | ||
| Democrats have actually moved back in that direction. | ||
| But this period I'm talking about where they became very progressive on a lot of these big issues we're talking about and on the theory that the country was going to move in their direction as it got more diverse. | ||
| When that didn't happen, that completely changed their idea of what was politically possible. | ||
| And that's what they're fighting about right now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Before I let you go, I want to ask you about another one of your pieces in semaphore about Republicans putting Trump's court fight on the ballot. | |
| This is about a court race in Wisconsin. | ||
| Can you tell us a bit about it and why this is so important? | ||
| Yeah, well, we probably be hearing a lot about this in the run to April 1st. | ||
| This is Wisconsin elects its state Supreme Court in a off-year, not off-year, but a non-November election when usually turnout is lower. | ||
| Historically had not been that politicized. | ||
| It has been for really since 2008. | ||
| These have been more normal elections where there's a candidate backed by Republicans who runs a more conservative campaign, a candidate backed by Democrats. | ||
| They're nonpartisan on the ballot, but everybody knows in the state who's going to be the liberal judge, who's going to be the conservative judge. | ||
| And Democrats recently, under Ben Wickler, the chairman who ran for DNC chair, have raised a ton of money and outspent Republicans and out-organized them and won these races to build a 4-3 majority for liberals, three conservatives that has ruled against, for example, Republican maps that helped gerrymander the legislature. | ||
| Republicans have fought back this election with the help of Elon Musk. | ||
| I think they might still be outspent by Democrats by little, but Musk has spent more than $10 million through his Building America's Future PAC on TV, his America PAC on mail and grassroots outreach. | ||
| And he's tried, Republicans have tried to say, hey, Republican voters, if you voted for Donald Trump in 2024, you might not vote in every election, but you need to vote in this one because this is an election for a judge. | ||
| And these judges you're seeing stopping Donald Trump from being able to deport people, that's just like the liberal judge who's running in this race. | ||
| And I was in Wisconsin. | ||
| Donald Trump Jr. was making that message pretty explicitly. | ||
| Donald Trump endorsed the Republican nominee Brad Schimmel, who's a former Republican Attorney General and a very not running as a non-party job, he's running it as a fair judge, but he's also running as a elected Republican who defended Trump on the ballot and has campaigned with Trump voters. | ||
| Democrats are running a slightly different campaign, but warning that Elon Musk's money is distorting the whole process. | ||
| If you vote for the wrong candidate, stay home in this race, you don't vote for our liberal candidate, you are saying Elon Musk and his money can buy our election. | ||
| So it has become a very polarized race. | ||
| The stakes being if conservatives win, get a 4-3 majority, they could revisit those maps. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They could, there's the abortion case that the state might be decided before all this, but they can have a conservative court there. | |
| And they're campaigning to vote saying, yes, you should want a conservative court. | ||
| You should not listen to whether the judicial system is fair or not. | ||
| You're seeing in these cases that are going against Donald Trump that there are too many, to use Stephen Miller's words, Marxist judges who you need to get out of office if you want conservatives and Donald Trump to win. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that's the test. | |
| Can they get, they think if 60% or so of people who voted for Donald Trump in November vote in this race, they can win. | ||
| Democrats say they're right, but we're going to get 62, 63% of Harris voters to win. | ||
| And that race will determine how much these messages that are about Donald Trump, but when he's not in the ballot, how much they can still shape an election. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, thank you so much, David Weigel, who's a politics reporter for Semaphore. | |
| Really appreciate your time this morning. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And for everyone else, we're going to be taking more of your phone calls coming up next in open form. | ||
| You can start calling in now. | ||
| Our line for Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| For Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| Marking the recent presidential election, C-SPAN's Student Cam video documentary competition challenged middle and high school students nationwide to create short videos with messages to the new president, exploring issues important to them or their communities. | ||
| Child protective services is important to protect kids from danger. | ||
| We are here to deliver a message to the president. | ||
| Homelessness needs to be prioritized now. | ||
| It is important for state and local governments to be given power and a voice to help support the communities they serve. | ||
| Nearly 3,500 students across 42 states and Washington, D.C. produced insightful and thought-provoking films. | ||
| Through in-depth research and interviews with experts, participants explored critical issues like the climate, education policies, health care, gun violence, and the economy. | ||
| Our panel of judges evaluated each entry on its inclusion of diverse perspectives and overall storytelling. | ||
| Now, we're thrilled to announce the top winners of Student Cam 2025. | ||
| In our middle school division, first prize goes to Eva Ingra, Sophia Oh, and Eliana Way of Eastern Middle School in Silver Spring, Maryland for one-party, two-party, Red Party, Blue Party. | ||
| But what about third parties? | ||
| For nearly two centuries in the USA, Democrats and Republicans have been the top dominating parties. | ||
| Our high school Eastern Division First Prize goes to Daniel Asa of Winslow Township High School in Atco, New Jersey for saving Sudan, U.S. aiding in a forgotten crisis. | ||
| Global solidarity is vital as Sudan's conflict is not isolated. | ||
| In the high school central division, Benjamin Currion of Olentangy Liberty High School in Powell, Ohio won first prize for the road to Vision Zero, which explores AI-driven road safety solutions. | ||
| Everyday eight teenagers never make it home because of a car crash. | ||
| The High School Western Division First Prize goes to three anonymous students from California for no sanctuary, addressing transnational repression in the next four years, which sheds light on global human rights threats. | ||
| Government needs to do better to make sure that the fundamental values of American democracy are not undermined. | ||
| And Dermot Foley, a 10th grader from Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, earns the grand prize of $5,000 for his documentary, Teens, Social Media, and the Fentanyl Overdose Crisis. | ||
| His compelling documentary, which features interviews with parents who've lost children to fentanyl, has earned him the top award for the second time. | ||
| A first in 21 years of the C-SPAN Student Cam competition. | ||
| Yo, this is C-SPAN Student Cam 2025 Grand Prize winner. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I just want to say also I'm really grateful to the families who shared their stories. | ||
| They were really brave to share their stories. | ||
| I learned so much from them and I hope other teens can learn from them as well. | ||
| C-SPAN would like to thank all of the educators, parents, and students who participated this year. | ||
| Congratulations to all our winners. | ||
| Watch each of the 150 award-winning Student Cam documentaries anytime at studentcam.org. | ||
| And don't miss the top 21 winning entries airing this April on C-SPAN. | ||
| C-SPAN, bringing you democracy unfiltered. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| We're in open forum, ready to take your calls. | ||
| Our lines again for Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| For Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| Before we get to your calls, a couple of events you can watch out for that we'll be covering on C-SPAN. | ||
| On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear consolidated oral arguments on whether Louisiana's redrawing of congressional maps amounted to racial gerrymandering and a violation of the Voting Rights Act. | ||
| That's going to be live at 10 a.m. Eastern on C-SPAN, also on C-SPAN Now, our free mobile video app, or online at c-SPAN.org. | ||
| Then on Tuesday, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, FBI Director Kash Patel, and other officials will offer an assessment of worldwide threats. | ||
| It will be hosted by the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, and you can watch that live at 10 a.m. Eastern on C-SPAN 3. | ||
| It will also, of course, be on our app, C-SPANNOW, and online at c-span.org. | ||
| Now to your calls in open form. | ||
| We'll start with Mike in Heartland, Wisconsin, on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Mike. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| You know, I was really hoping to speak to that David guy at the end because I was at that town hall that Donald Trump Jr. and Charlie Kirk put on. | ||
| And once again, you mislead the people. | ||
| First off, let's talk about the Democrat that's running in that race. | ||
| She's backed by J.V. Pritzker, George Soros. | ||
| That is dirty outside money. | ||
| But yet, you guys, the only reason why you brought it up is because Elon Musk's name is attached to the guy that's more conservative. | ||
| And, you know, to your last, to the guest, the female journalist, Neston Journalist, you guys could learn a lot from her because you guys spread a lot of fake news and you spread biased news constantly. | ||
| Rarely use conservative sources. | ||
| So I hope your producers have her and maybe give you guys a class on how to do your job. | ||
| Okay, next up is Skip in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, on our line for Independent. | ||
| Good morning, Skip. | ||
| Skip, go ahead. | ||
| Yes, good morning. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| How are you this morning? | ||
| Good, thank you. | ||
| Okay, now There are forehead and dynasties. | ||
| I don't know if any folks read the Bible, but the forehead and dynasties are financial, political, educational, and religion. | ||
| And they are all starting to come through. | ||
| And God bless C-SPAN and God bless America. | ||
| Love you guys. | ||
| Bye-bye. | ||
| David is in Florida on Our Line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, David. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| The guy who just called about the diocese, he definitely hit the nail right on the head. | ||
| I've been listening to this race stuff, and I think this country is tired of the race baiting and stuff like that. | ||
| We just need to get back to balancing the budget, get down to the fundamentals of who we are. | ||
| Back in the 70s and 80s when I grew up, you know, we all hung out together. | ||
| It didn't matter what race you were. | ||
| And, you know, it was always government who stoked them flames. | ||
| So I just feel like just like the thing with Elon Musk, you know, he was the next best thing since sliced bread to the Democrats. | ||
| And then as soon as he, you know, goes with the Republicans, they want to, you know, crucify this guy. | ||
| I just think this country, without politics, is doing great. | ||
| And the politicians need to just do their jobs and balance the budget. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Eugene is in Indianola, Pennsylvania on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Eugene. | ||
| Good morning, Mimi. | ||
| Thanks for C-SPAN. | ||
| The reason I'm calling is there's somebody keeping track of like, you know, the money they're supposedly, those you're supposedly saving in the Department of Education and Department of Defense. | ||
| Is there somebody keeping track of how much that the people are supposed to be saving? | ||
| And like, where is it going to go? | ||
| Is it going to go to the national debt? | ||
| Or where is it going? | ||
| That was my, I'm hoping somebody can find out. | ||
| And thank you for C-SPAN. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Next up is Anastasia in Ohio on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Anastasia. | ||
| Hello. | ||
| I just had a couple comments. | ||
| I just wanted to say that I've been a registered Republican and a Democrat in the last 10 years. | ||
| And I really lost my trust for the Democrats after the debate in the summer showed how incredibly dishonest the traditional media and the Democrats are. | ||
| And I just had a quote that I wanted to pass on from Frederick Bastiat. | ||
| And it goes, when plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in society, over the course of time, they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it. | ||
| And I do believe that's what we are seeing today. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Charlotte is in London, Kentucky on Our Line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Charlotte. | ||
| This is a very old question. | ||
| I'm old, so I'm afraid my memory isn't so good, but I'd like to know who set up the two-party system. | ||
| It seems our forefathers deliberately divided our country. | ||
| Can you tell me who set that up? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I don't think I have the answer to that one, but maybe somebody else does. | ||
| Let's hear from Danette in Portland, Oregon on Our Line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Danette. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| I really wanted to say that from the beginning, I really think Trump and Elon won all the money and all the power. | ||
| And I really think through Project 2025, which they worked on so hard, apparently, for over a year, They had all these plans in place to do this very quickly and almost to an obscene speed. | ||
| But do you think they would have done all of this? | ||
| Would Donald Trump have done all of this without making sure he won the election? | ||
| And I believe, with the help of Elon Musk and the Doze Boys, he won the election in the swing states. | ||
| Elon probably paid off poor election workers. | ||
| And when they did that, they gave that. | ||
| Where have you seen evidence that election workers were paid off by Elon Musk? | ||
| I don't think there is any evidence. | ||
| This is just my personal opinion. | ||
| Why else would Donald Trump sit there and let someone else take over the oval office? | ||
| Somebody who, you know, the man with the biggest ego in the world is going to let Musk and his Dozeboys do whatever they want, and he can't say a word because he knows what they did for him. | ||
| And they're going to try and do it again in the midterms. | ||
| And I'm telling you, I think somebody should be just looking out for it just in case because nothing else makes sense to me. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I really am a Democrat. | ||
| I love this country, but I'm scared for us because I think these people are doing things we can't even imagine. | ||
| And Donald Trump didn't say one word about, oh, the elections were rigged. | ||
| Oh, they're going to be rigged. | ||
| Like he always does. | ||
| The first election, he didn't even mention it. | ||
| Even when he won, he went on saying it was rigged. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's just too much for me. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Avery is in Shelby, North Carolina on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Avery. | ||
| Hey, good morning, young lady, and hello, Earth. | ||
| Anyhow, there are several comments, and please bear with me to choose and raise up good words, right words, just words, truthful words. | ||
| Anyhow, to the one lady, there is a king overall, and he is king over king and lord over lords. | ||
| And through his way, his will, before him dynasties, the man was correct, except for the finances, and it was the merchants, commerce, and trade. | ||
| Anyhow, there is a lack of understanding. | ||
| There is a lack of understanding going home. | ||
| The translation was spot on. | ||
| But that understanding knowledge isn't given to every religion, faith, denomination. | ||
| It isn't given in the Christendom. | ||
| There is not Republican or Democrat, white, black, red, brown, yellow. | ||
| There is only the Spirit and the Word and God's creation. | ||
| And there is a balance that must be maintained. | ||
| That's the reason the law was instituted that keeps the darkness and the light at bay and to know your place. | ||
| And there is going to be a great separation because we are all gathered here together, one place. | ||
| Yesterday was in. | ||
| So, Avery, your line is a little bit challenging to hear. | ||
| So let's go on to David in Indiana on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, David. | ||
| Yes, good morning. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Earlier on, we were talking about the controversy over the deportation of the Trinity Wataragua. | ||
| Members, fact when Obama was president for Eight years. | ||
| He deported 5.3 million people. | ||
| I took the numbers on that. | ||
| Removing Saturday and Sunday. | ||
| That would be about 2,500 people a day for eight years. | ||
| Now, do you think every one of them were given due process? | ||
| Take what it takes for one individual to go through a due process court case. | ||
| Give me a break. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Jan is in Michigan on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Jan. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| What's your comment? | ||
| My comment is that I heard a gentleman on there, or a person on there, state something about George Soros and how bad he is. | ||
| And do you know, you people know that he gave away three-quarters of his billions of dollars? | ||
| I think he had like $65 billion or maybe I'm not positive of that number to help people around the world. | ||
| So they would, like, women that were getting, he wanted to protect people from mosquitoes that gave malaria or whatever that disease was. | ||
| He helps everyone. | ||
| He even gave Trump money because Trump was, all his businesses were going down. | ||
| And he gave Trump money to save his businesses years ago. | ||
| If you look it up, the man is a wonderful man. | ||
| He actually helped his dad hide Jewish people so Hitler couldn't kill them. | ||
| So these people that are constantly talking about George Soros, they have no idea who this man is and what a great, kind man he is. | ||
| And I'm really getting sick of it. | ||
| And I'm hoping that the Democrats start talking about this too, because that person was very ignorant and he was just a hater that came on and talked about George Soros. | ||
| And anybody that George Soros is for, people should be for because he is a kind man. | ||
| What happened to kindness? | ||
| I mean, you're talking people like Trump, some of the biggest racists that ever lived. | ||
| And he doesn't care. | ||
| He'd watch a black person or a Latina person die and laugh at it. | ||
| He does not care. | ||
| If he gets money for it, he will be happy. | ||
| He is a disgusting person. | ||
| And that Doge guy with that horrible looking car of his, everybody's laughing at, he is out of control, crazy. | ||
| He's cut down that U.S. aid, and that USAID, that 10-year-old boy, just died, just died of AIDS because he couldn't get his medication that was out in a warehouse rotting away. | ||
| That little boy was skin and bones. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| People need to look these things up. | ||
| These are horrific things. | ||
| And as far as the Democrats go, the Democrats, it's hard for them to combat all Trump's lies. | ||
| He lied over 30,000 times when he was in office the first time. | ||
| And it's hard to combat those lies that are constantly, constantly being told by all of his party. | ||
| I mean, and he's not on the right. | ||
| I'm going to get to a couple more folks before we have to end the show. | ||
| Let's hear from Sean in Minnesota. | ||
| And can you turn down your TV? | ||
| Because we're getting some feedback. | ||
| Seani there. | ||
| Seanny there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Here. | ||
| Okay, if you turn down your TV, Sean is on our line for independence. | ||
| Yeah, I just wanted to say that hypocrisy that comes off of Trump, the things that he says, it's funny how the Republicans play by a set of rules and the standards that they don't hold themselves to. | ||
| Like they say that Biden's a flip-flopper because After certain years, he changes his mind on same-sex marriage, but Donald Trump is against electric cars. | ||
| But then all of a sudden, Elon gives him $240 million for his campaign. | ||
| And, oh, he's electric cars, you know, Elon Musk. | ||
| It's just ridiculous. | ||
| Donald Trump's a joke. | ||
| Barbara Beruie. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, that is all of the time that we have for Washington Journal today. | ||
| Thank you to everyone who called in with your thoughts and your questions. | ||
| We'll be back tomorrow with another edition of Washington Journal at 7 a.m. Eastern. | ||
| We hope you'll tune in and have a great day. | ||
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum inviting you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy. | ||
| From Washington and across the country. | ||
| Coming up Monday morning, Notice politics reporter Rhys Gorman previews the week ahead in Congress. | ||
| Then Shelby Talcott, semaphore White House correspondent, discusses White House news of the day. | ||
| And Nina Olson with the Center for Taxpayer Rights on the impact of Doge on the functions of the IRS and the privacy of taxpayer data. | ||
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal. | ||
| Join in the conversation live at 7 Eastern Monday morning on C-SPAN. | ||
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| Weekends bring you Book TV featuring leading authors discussing their latest nonfiction books. | ||
| Here's a look at what's coming up this weekend. | ||
| Pakistani British author and activist Tariq Ali discusses his memoirs, You Can't Please All, which covers the years 1980 to 2024. | ||
| He also talks about the war in Gaza and student protests in the United States. | ||
| Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Hiltzig, with his book Golden State, The Making of California, looks at the history of California from the 1840s gold rush era to the current tech boom. | ||
| Grove City College political science professor Paul Kengore, author of The Devil and Karl Marx, talks about the role of communists in the creation of International Women's Day and other progressive celebrations. | ||
| Then on afterwards, best-selling author Michael Lewis poses the question, who works for the government and why does their work matter? | ||
| He's interviewed by Harvard Kennedy School of Government Public Policy and Management professor Elizabeth Linos. | ||
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