| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
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 Bishop William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign and founder of the grassroots group Repairers of the Breach, discusses the role of the faith community in opposing elements of the Trump agenda that they say hurt poor Americans. | ||
| And Manhattan Institute senior fellow and constitutional studies director Ilya Shapiro on the administration's scrutiny of federally funded colleges and universities, museums, and public media. | ||
| Washington Journal starts now. | ||
| Join the conversation. | ||
| Good morning, everyone. | ||
| On this Friday, April 11th, yesterday, on a 2616 to 214 vote, House Republicans stopped a revolt within their own ranks to approve a budget blueprint that now paves the way for President Trump's plan to extend his 2017 tax cuts while increasing spending on his immigration policies. | ||
| But first, Republicans need to agree on how much they need to cut from the federal government's spending to pay for it all. | ||
| This morning, here on the Washington Journal, our first hour conversation with all of you about President Trump and Republicans' economic policies. | ||
| Here's how you can join the conversation. | ||
| Republicans dial in at 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| You can also join us in a text at 202-748-8003 or post on facebook.com/slash C-SPAN and on X with the handle at C-SPANWJ. | ||
| We'll talk about the President's plan for the budget, including those 2017 tax cuts, increasing spending on his deportation and immigration policies while also trying to find spending cuts, as well as the president's tariffs policies. | ||
| Take a look at news out of China this morning. | ||
| Here's the New York Times. | ||
| China now raising their tariffs on U.S. imports to 125%. | ||
| That's up from 84%. | ||
| Beijing's retaliation today came after the White House had raised its tariff on Chinese goods to 125% on top of an existing 20% tax. | ||
| So the tip for tax with China continues this morning, and we can get your thoughts on that as well. | ||
| Take a look at a recent poll done by Quinnett Piak on whether or not people approve of the president's trade policies. | ||
| 55% said they disapprove, while 39% said they approve. | ||
| On the overall economy from the Quinnet PIAC poll, this is what they found. | ||
| 55% of those surveyed disapprove of the president's handling of the economy, while 40% approve. | ||
| The president held a cabinet meeting yesterday and he talked to reporters about the transition problems. | ||
| That's a quote from him when it comes to his tariff actions. | ||
| Here's what he had to say. | ||
| We had a very good meeting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're talking about a lot of different things. | |
| Consumer prices have actually dropped. | ||
| There's very little inflation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Everybody predicted a lot of inflation, very little inflation. | |
| Energy costs are down. | ||
| Interest rates are probably down. | ||
| They scatter, but they're probably down. | ||
| Prescription drug prices are even to down. | ||
| We're doing very well. | ||
| It's been amazing. | ||
| We had a big day yesterday. | ||
| There'll always be transition difficulty, but we had a, in history, it was the biggest day in history, the markets. | ||
| So we're very, very happy with the way the country is running. | ||
| We're trying to get the world to treat us fairly. | ||
| This is something that should have been done 25 years ago and it wasn't. | ||
| Should have been done 40 years ago and it wasn't. | ||
| But no president was willing to take it on, but you had to. | ||
| It's not sustainable. | ||
| It wasn't sustainable. | ||
| And as you know, without a lot of money being added, this is a lot of money that we could add. | ||
| The country is making approximately $2 billion a day. | ||
| And when you think of it, we've never done that before, never come close to it. | ||
| And the number is probably $3.5 billion a day. | ||
| And that makes us a very strong country. | ||
| But we have Scott here and Howard and some of the people that are working on deals. | ||
| And the biggest problem they have is they don't have enough time in the day. | ||
| Everybody wants to come and make a deal. | ||
| And we're working with a lot of different countries. | ||
| And it's all going to work out very well. | ||
| I think it's going to work out really, very well. | ||
| But we're in good shape. | ||
| There's no inflation. | ||
| There's very little inflation. | ||
| And I went four years without inflation. | ||
| And I tariffed. | ||
| I took in hundreds of billions of dollars from China and others, taxes in China. | ||
| But we took in hundreds of billions of dollars a year from China. | ||
| And we had no inflation, essentially. | ||
| So we think we're in very good shape. | ||
| We think we're doing very well. | ||
| Again, there'll be a transition cost and transition problems. | ||
| But in the end, it's going to be a beautiful thing. | ||
| President Trump in the cabinet room on Thursday talking about the economy. | ||
| Do you support or oppose the President and Republicans' economic policies? | ||
| As he said, inflation did cool. | ||
| This is Axios' headline. | ||
| Consumer prices fall in March with much cooler inflation. | ||
| Axios says, why does it matter? | ||
| Inflation moved down as President Trump began ratcheting up the global trade war last month, a relief after warnings that inflation progress had stalled out. | ||
| But concerns about inflation remain. | ||
| Trump 10% across-the-board tariff that took effect this month could hit consumer prices as well as the higher levy of 125% on imports from China. | ||
| Related to that, from the Wall Street Journal this morning, Trump inherited a solid economy and labor market. | ||
| But recent data and corporate announcements have presented a gloomy picture going forward. | ||
| Walmart on Wednesday cited tariff risks as a reason for backing away from its previous target, according to the Wall Street Journal report, for first quarter profit growth. | ||
| Delta Airlines pulled its earnings forecast for the year because of broad economic uncertainty around global trade. | ||
| Let's get to calls. | ||
| Tom in Frederick, Maryland, Republican. | ||
| Tom, support or oppose the Republicans, including President Trump's economic policies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, thank you for taking my call. | |
| I just want to say I absolutely approve. | ||
| I think everything he's doing is great. | ||
| I just wish some of these, you know, the left, if we could just sit back, let him do his thing. | ||
| He's a businessman. | ||
| He's going to help this country out tremendously. | ||
| Just give him a little bit more time. | ||
| Some of the things I've proved with, some of the things, eh. | ||
| But thank you. | ||
| Hey, Tom. | ||
| Tom, what do you approve of specifically and what are you eh on? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, you know, like his trade policies, the tariffs, I mean, we've been losing for years, and it's ridiculous. | |
| You know, it's like, look at the immigration stuff. | ||
| I mean, Everything, everything he's done. | ||
| I mean, he's been doing a total of 180 and is bringing this country back up to speed. | ||
| And that's where we need to be. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And what are you not so crazy about? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, he's really tough with negotiating stuff like that. | |
| A little scared about China, but hey, you know what? | ||
| In the end, they're all going to come to a deal and it's going to be fair. | ||
| You know, China just up their thing to what? | ||
| What was it, like 148 or something like that? | ||
| Yeah, what 125. | ||
| And the president. | ||
|
unidentified
|
125. | |
| No, I think they just went up again at midnight. | ||
| I heard one up to 148. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And retaliation of that. | ||
| So. | ||
| So, so, Tom, and they're also, China's also saying today, we have other tools in the toolbox. | ||
| We're not going to go any higher than what they just did today, they said, because that would be silly, I think, paraphrasing here. | ||
| But they did say we have other tools in the toolbox. | ||
| We could, for example, some folks are saying, prohibit the sale of any soybeans from U.S. farmers into China. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, yeah, we need to bring back our U.S. farms. | |
| I mean, you know, look at the solar panels. | ||
| I can't eat a solar panel. | ||
| You know, and it's like we import and export. | ||
| You know, it's just, you know, America needs to be America first, and that's what he's doing. | ||
| So what everybody just needs to let him do his thing. | ||
| Oh, sorry, cut you off. | ||
| No, it's all right. | ||
| I was just curious, what specifically about China concerns you? | ||
| Because of what? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, I don't know. | |
| That's a pretty good question. | ||
| Now I'm looking dumb here. | ||
| That's all right. | ||
| Not at all. | ||
| Not at all. | ||
| I mean, I'm asking because of the headlines in the papers this morning just talking about how much we import from China versus how much we export to China. | ||
| And the difference is, as you know, pretty startling. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, well, I mean, why can't we just bring back manufacturing here to America and just have America-based things again? | |
| You know? | ||
| All right. | ||
| So take a look at these numbers from the U.S. Census. | ||
| Nearly $582 billion worth of goods are traded between the United States and China. | ||
| These are 2024 numbers. | ||
| U.S. imported around $438 billion worth of goods and services from China. | ||
| China imported $143 billion from the United States. | ||
| So $438 billion versus $143 billion. | ||
| Let's go to Dave in Wilmington, Delaware, Independent. | ||
| Dave, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| A couple of points. | ||
| On China, it was Besson or Ludnick was talking about how America holds all the cards in this. | ||
| China has way more to lose. | ||
| And I think there are a couple of problems with that. | ||
| One, yes, there's a huge deficit, but China also holds 9% of America's debt in Treasury securities. | ||
| That's something that they can retaliate with. | ||
| If they decide to dump that debt, it's going to lose value just like stocks lose value when people start to sell them. | ||
| And that is going to cost the United States a lot more if those notes depreciate and we can't sell them anymore. | ||
| The Republicans are still talking about a budget that is going to have a huge deficit, and we're going to have to sell more debt to fund it. | ||
| And rates are going to go up. | ||
| So just servicing the debt is going to become even more than it is now. | ||
| Second, on China, Americans rely on all of our consumer goods, which contribute to the nice lifestyle that we have for all of our TVs and clothing and all of that. | ||
| Now, yes, that's discretionary spending, but it's still something that Americans want. | ||
| It's part of our lifestyle. | ||
| So if we cut all of that off, are we going to be happy about that? | ||
| No. | ||
| I don't approve of the way that Trump is doing this because it is rash. | ||
| It is unsophisticated. | ||
| We need to take a more reasonable approach, look at specific industries and go from there. | ||
| And even Democrats who are generally favorable to the idea of protecting our businesses and manufacturing more here because of abuses in the international trade system and what it does to people who are actually producing those goods overseas will say, | ||
| you can't just bring it back and overnight and... | ||
| start producing those goods here. | ||
| If they do, if, yeah, go ahead. | ||
| Well, Dave, I just want to share this headline with you because you said the United States is not in a good position when it comes to China. | ||
| However, there is this story in the international section of the New York Times of China not being in a great place either. | ||
| There is some leverage here. | ||
| Here's a headline. | ||
| China expects to shop itself out of a bind. | ||
| It'll be tough. | ||
| Consumers were skittish even before this tariff war. | ||
| That's Chinese consumers. | ||
| So if the United States is not going to purchase, import all these goods from China, this is the strategy, according to the New York Times, from the Chinese government, is that they'll encourage their own citizens to start buying up these goods and services. | ||
| Can they shop their way out of this, Dave? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I agree. | |
| I mean, China also has a lot to lose. | ||
| If we were to stop buying their products, yeah, it's going to kill their economy. | ||
| Now, as a state-controlled economy, you know, that doesn't really entirely follow free trade policies. | ||
| Maybe they're going to make a way around that. | ||
| But my point is that we're not holding all the cards in this. | ||
| Yeah, Dave, I'm going to pick up on that point, that we don't hold all the cards. | ||
| This is the Wall Street Journal this morning. | ||
| After tariff climb down, world asks, is it a method or madness? | ||
| And not just with the negotiations with China, because from the Wall Street Journal reporting this morning, some economists said the swift climb down after the market convulsions of the past few days provided world leaders with valuable information about Trump's pain threshold, which could lead them to take a tougher stance when negotiations start in earnest. | ||
| And you've heard it from the Trump administration officials, the Treasury Secretary Steve Besant from Howard Luttnick, the Commerce Secretary saying countries are lining up now to talk and negotiate. | ||
| Ronald, in Kaplan, Louisiana, Republican Ronald, let's hear from you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I like what they're doing. | |
| I want to make a couple of comments. | ||
| First of all, everybody keep saying that we're in a recession. | ||
| False, false, false. | ||
| Maybe we'll win a recession in 2024 because it takes three things to make a recession. | ||
| Economy, we went 19% higher than we are right now. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| The next thing, unemployment. | ||
| Unemployment stayed the same throughout 24. | ||
| And then the amount of people that work come to find out was 850,000 people that were falsely working. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So you went in a recession in 24. | ||
| Right after the election, things started to pick up. | ||
| Everything's starting to fall. | ||
| All right, Ronald. | ||
| It's a little difficult to understand you. | ||
| I think we got the gist of it. | ||
| Mark, Clayton, Illinois, Democratic caller. | ||
| Mark? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I got one comment, and that is they did all this at one time with no strategy, it looks like to me, except for to tear down our economy, period. | |
| It's the way it looks with the tariffs you have. | ||
| And then they sacked a lot of different parts of the government. | ||
| These are the people they're going to need to find the waste and abuse. | ||
| And after all that, then they're going to add another $7, $8 trillion to the national debt. | ||
| He already put $8 trillion last time he was here. | ||
| When are they going to start worrying about the national debt? | ||
| And Mark, you're talking about this plan to increase or extend, make permanent some of those 2017 tax cuts. | ||
| Are you talking about that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Yes. | ||
| They've been trying that. | ||
| They did it back in Reagan all the way up. | ||
| Give a whole bunch of money to the rich. | ||
| They pay, buy off their stock or whatever. | ||
| It doesn't help the economy. | ||
| It helps the rich. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Mark, we'll leave it there. | ||
| Yesterday, the Speaker and his counterpart in the Senate, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, they had a news conference in the morning saying that the Senate would agree to $1.5 trillion in tax cuts that they think they were confident they could find that and that the two sides should move forward with a budget blueprint for the president. | ||
| That was just before a vote on the floor. | ||
| And as we said at the top, 216 to 214, this budget blueprint was approved. | ||
| Two Republicans joined with all the Democrats to oppose it. | ||
| There were 20 holdouts the day before on voting for this budget blueprint. | ||
| Listen to Speaker Mike Johnson after it was approved. | ||
| In November, the American people delivered unified government to the Republican Party. | ||
| They returned President Donald J. Trump to the White House. | ||
| They gave us control of the House and the Senate, and we are going to make good by that. | ||
| We have a big responsibility. | ||
| In the budget reconciliation bill, the reason we call it the One Big Beautiful Bill, everybody in this crowd of journalists knows that all the components that will be in that, we're talking about ensuring that the border is secure, having the resources that are necessary to do that. | ||
| We're talking about getting the American economy going again by reducing regulations. | ||
| We're talking about restoring peace through strength and making sure we have the measures in place to properly fund those priorities. | ||
| We have a lot of things, American energy dominance, all the components that will make things better for Americans, drive down the cost of living, and get our economy really going again. | ||
| And of course, not the least of which, the big components of the One Big Beautiful Bill is to ensure that we don't have the largest tax increase in U.S. history all at once, which is what would happen at the end of this year if we didn't accomplish this mission because the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the tax cuts from the first Trump administration, as we know, would expire. | ||
| So a big day for us. | ||
| We will now get the committees operating on all cylinders. | ||
| They'll be working over the two-week district work period that encompasses Passover and Easter. | ||
| They'll take a couple days off for those holy celebrations and then keep their sleeves rolled up and get right back to work. | ||
| The committees in the Senate and the House will be working in a collaborative fashion. | ||
| We've explained this, that this really is a one-team approach by Republicans in both chambers. | ||
| I'm so grateful to Leader Thune and his steady hand of leadership. | ||
| We had a joint press conference this morning making our commitments known of what we're going to try to do, and that is ensure real savings for the American people because we have to do that. | ||
| We have a responsibility to get our country back on a sound fiscal trajectory and also make sure that we ensure and protect those essential programs. | ||
| The Democrats, as I noted this morning, have said that we are going to gut Medicaid. | ||
| It is not true. | ||
| We're going to protect the benefits that everyone is legally entitled to. | ||
| The beneficiaries who have a legal right to that, it will be preserved. | ||
| Those are essential safety net programs that Republicans support. | ||
| The President has made clear, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid will not take a hit. | ||
| So you can count on that and you can watch it develop as we go. | ||
| Speaker Mike Johnson, after House Republicans approved the budget blueprint to move forward on President Trump's tax and spending proposal, from the Washington Post, their headline, Congress approves agreement to implement Trump's legislative agenda. | ||
| And from their reporting about that joint news conference with the Speaker and the majority leader, it was seen as an effort of good faith by roughly 20 holdouts, budget hawks, and members of the House Freedom Caucus who delayed a planned vote Wednesday until they received a firm commitment from the Senate on spending cuts. | ||
| But the chambers remain sharply divided over how to find the savings and whether it will truly reduce the federal deficit as House hardliners have demanded. | ||
| So more to come in inter-party squabbles for the Republicans and whether or not they can move forward with President Trump's quote, big beautiful bill. | ||
| The Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries in the House also talked to reporters yesterday after that vote and reacting to the budget framework by Republicans. | ||
| Here's what he had to say. | ||
| Here in the Capitol, the battle lines with respect to Democratic values and Republican values have once again been clearly drawn. | ||
| House and Senate Democrats are standing on the side of the American people and we continue to be committed to building an economy that's affordable and that works for everyday Americans and drives down the high cost of living while protecting health care, nutritional assistance, and the social security of the American people. | ||
| Donald Trump and extreme MAGA Republicans are doing everything they can to tank our economy, drive us toward a recession, and gut the health care of the American people by visiting upon them the largest Medicaid cut in history, | ||
| along with the largest cut to nutritional assistance in American history, all in service of enacting massive tax breaks for their billionaire donors like Elon Musk. | ||
| It's a toxic scheme that they cannot hide from because it continues to be on full display on the House floor and on the Senate floor for the American people. | ||
| The budget resolution that passed the House today will set in motion some of the most extreme cuts To health care, nutritional assistance, and the things that matter to everyday Americans in our nation's nearly 250-year history. | ||
| It's a disgrace. | ||
| This is just the beginning. | ||
| The House Democrats are going to aggressively push back every day, every week, every month, until we bury this reckless Republican budget resolution in the ground. | ||
| Never to rise again. | ||
| Democrats plan to respond to Republicans' move on the president's tax cuts and spending proposal. | ||
| You heard it there. | ||
| They will try to bury it in the ground. | ||
| We're getting your thoughts on the President Republicans' economic policies in our first hour here of the Washington Journal. | ||
| Mark, let's hear from you in Clayton, Illinois, Democratic Caller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If you was born today, you would already owe $100,000 because of the national debt. | |
| And they tell you how they're getting rid of waste and abuse, but they can't name it. | ||
| They won't show it. | ||
| And they inherited the best economy in the world from Biden and turn around. | ||
| And I'm all for getting rid of waste. | ||
| If, you know, it's legitimate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just hacking and cutting is not the way to do it. | |
| And they need to focus on paying off this national debt. | ||
| If they're going to go put us through the pain of it, at least pay off the bill. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So, Mark, is the stock market the economy? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, it's not. | |
| But I'll tell you what, it's not the nation's economy, but it's our economy. | ||
| If you have a 401k and you've lost a large amount of it because the careless talk and the careless actions of the president, then yeah, it's your economy. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Mark's thoughts there in Clayton, Illinois. | ||
| Take a look at the headlines from yesterday. | ||
| Dow tumbled a thousand points, wiping out a chunk of Wednesday's historic rally. | ||
| And then here is that CNBC from the same outlet this morning. | ||
| Their headlines about futures, stock futures rise as traders assess latest tariff-related developments. | ||
| And as we told you at the top, China announcing today on this Friday that they had retaliated again against the United States, raising tariffs above that 84% to now over 100%. | ||
| We'll see what President Trump does today. | ||
| Steve, let's go to you in Tampa, Florida, Republican. | ||
| Hi, Steve. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
My feeling is that good leadership has to make tough decisions. | |
| If you look back, Nancy Pelosi, Schumer, Obama all suggested that we were being taken advantage of by China, that we were paying big tariffs and we needed to do something about it. | ||
| Trump is doing that. | ||
| Trump has spent the last four years trying to decide how he can help America. | ||
| I think one of the problems that the public has is there's a saying from the Amish proverb, when you're looking for something, you find what you want to see. | ||
| And I think that's true. | ||
| People on one side, on the Republican side, look at Fox and Newsmax. | ||
| People on the Democratic side look for CNN and MSNBC. | ||
| When they hear what they want to hear, they're happy. | ||
| Not enough people focus on the truth. | ||
| The other thing is earlier this week you had a show called About Financial Literacy. | ||
| Unfortunately, a lot of America is not financially literate, and they don't understand what's going on. | ||
| When they hear what they want to hear, they're happy. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Steve, let me ask you about polls then and how that your thought on polls that are taken. | ||
| Quinnipieck on tariffs asked people their views of the president's tariffs, and 72% said they'll hurt in the short term. | ||
| 22% said they'll help in the short term. | ||
| When it came to the long term, 53% said it'll hurt, and 41% said it will help. | ||
| What do you think of those numbers? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is that the truth? | |
| Well, I think polls tend to be biased depending upon who's taking the poll. | ||
| The Democratic polls tend to talk to mostly Democrats. | ||
| The Republican polls tend to talk to most Republicans. | ||
| Well, Quinnipieck would say they're neither. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, obviously, it's not necessarily the case because in the last polls, everything was wrong. | |
| In the last polls, Trump didn't have a chance of winning. | ||
| So I don't believe in the polls because they change from day to day, and it depends on the questions. | ||
| I haven't heard of the same poll being asked to two different populations, the exact same questions. | ||
| The polls are designed to elicit the responses that they want, that would like to hear. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And Steve, I mean, you know, this is not broken down by party. | ||
| These are overall numbers. | ||
| So if you go into Quinnipiek's polling, you'll see how this breaks down by Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. | ||
| They are putting those three together to come up with the numbers that you see there on your screen. | ||
| Let's go to Patrick in Ironton, Ohio, Independent. | ||
| Patrick, morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I just wanted to say thank you for the opportunity to speak. | ||
| The first presidential campaign I can remember was Mr. Eisenhower and coming up to Donald Trump. | ||
| And my thought is the legislative branch has totally negated its responsibilities. | ||
| And as far as Mr. Trump goes. | ||
| Negated its responsibilities on what issue? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Standing up for just the regular working fella. | |
| The man that has no voice. | ||
| The man that goes to work every day and hopes that he can put a roof over his family's head and pay his bills on time and have groceries on the table and maybe have a little bit to put in the bank. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, Patrick, there is an effort bipartisan in both the House and the Senate to take back the power over trade from the President of the United States. | ||
| And it is bipartisan in the House and the Senate. | ||
| We'll see as these negotiations with countries take place in the coming weeks whether or not Congress has momentum to take that power back from the president. | ||
| Related to that, front page of the Washington Post headline, a scramble to make progress in trade talks. | ||
| As negotiations begin, one Trump official vows results within weeks. | ||
| Let's listen to Kevin Hassett. | ||
| He's the director of the National Economic Council for the President, served in the first administration as well. | ||
| He was talking with reporters outside the White House in the driveway on Thursday, making the case that the president's tariff approach is already yielding results. | ||
| And USTR has informed us that there are maybe 15 countries now that have made explicit offers that we're studying and considering and deciding whether they're good enough to present to the president. | ||
| And we're setting up with the chief of staff's office a very orderly process to prioritize countries and to make sure that the countries that are most important for getting this in the finish line are the countries that we bring in first. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We could do negotiations a number of ways. | |
| We would expect that there'll be quite a bit of movement of world leaders into the White House in the next three to four weeks. | ||
| But yeah, this is a really, really fast process now that's not beginning today or yesterday. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It began long before. | |
| One of the options that the president was considering before he decided to go the way he did yesterday was to announce some deals that are already so far along that we could pretty much finish them up and make them public. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But in the end, he decided that a more general announcement, the one that he made yesterday, was the best way to let everybody understand that he's 100% serious about putting American workers first and making the trade deals happen as fast as possible. | |
| Kevin Hasa, economic advisor to the president, talking to reporters yesterday saying progress is being made already on the president's tariffs moves. | ||
| USA Today front page this morning, GOP fears a political payback from tariffs. | ||
| If the president's gamble fails, voters could sour in the midterm 2026 elections and hurt Republicans' majority in both chambers. | ||
| Let's go to Sue in Michigan and Independent. | ||
| Sue, good morning as an independent. | ||
| What are you thinking? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Well, I'm a retiree, and all I know is that since President Trump came into office, my quality of life has decreased. | ||
| Groceries have not gone down. | ||
| Gas has gone down a little bit, but my 401k has taken a beating. | ||
| And I think the other thing that worries me the most is that the lack of communication with his party. | ||
| Trump says one thing and his department heads, his administration says another. | ||
| So I am very concerned about that. | ||
| Sue, can you give me an example of that happening? | ||
| On which issue? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, you're talking about his department heads? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| They act like they don't know what's going on. | ||
| The way I heard it on the TV is that some says one thing and they don't have a clue about it. | ||
| You know, I do, I watch or I read the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| And, you know, he did shoot them down because of the bond market. | ||
| And he has to remember: retirees are the ones that vote, okay? | ||
| If our quality of life has decreased, I really think that Republicans are going to take a beating. | ||
| I like some of the stuff he does, but President Trump is not truthful about stuff. | ||
| He says groceries have gone down. | ||
| They haven't gone down. | ||
| Drugs have gone down. | ||
| I just paid, I'm on a new drug, and I paid $600 for a medication. | ||
| The only thing that's saving me is Biden put a cap on all medications, so they can't charge me more than $2,000 a year. | ||
| So he hasn't improved my quality of life. | ||
| He decreased it. | ||
| All right, so Sue, did you vote for him in the last election? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I did not. | |
| Have you ever? | ||
| I did not vote for either one of them. | ||
| I didn't like either one of them. | ||
| So I did not vote for them. | ||
| But I have one more thing to say. | ||
| Well, before you get to it, Sue, have you ever voted for President Trump? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, his first time. | |
| Okay, go ahead. | ||
| His first time. | ||
| Second time, I did not vote for him because I didn't think he knew what he was doing with the pandemic. | ||
| He acted like it was out of his league. | ||
| He didn't know what the heck he was doing. | ||
| The third time, you know, he promised us a bunch of stuff and he did not deliver at all, as far as I'm concerned. | ||
| Now, I wish you could have a call in for retirees like me who are at fixed incomes that, you know, what do you think about this? | ||
| Because, you know, we do have 401ks. | ||
| We do take a little bit of risk or we would not make any money. | ||
| You know, so you know, I wish you would have some kind of call in for retirees like me who would tell what they're going through. | ||
| Our groceries have not gone down. | ||
| Price of medication is still high. | ||
| And, you know, we're the ones that go to, and we vote. | ||
| They have to understand that. | ||
| And Sue heard those points, and I appreciate that suggestion of retirees only. | ||
| Maybe we'll try that in the coming days. | ||
| Samantha in Washington, D.C., Democratic caller. | ||
| Hi, Samantha. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| I have a comment that says basically one thing: this is a con game on the part of the president and all of his MAGA, whatever people they are. | ||
| The problem is everything that they have played this game on us with us, which is basically a bait and switch. | ||
| Tell the public one thing: get elected, and you come with a scaffold to destroy the fabric of this country. | ||
| Tariffs are going to tear up the supply chain. | ||
| The lie about eggs will be less costly. | ||
| Eggs were $2.99 for the small white eggs, and now they're up to $7.99. | ||
| He doesn't have a clue as to what the people that he's conned are going through. | ||
| He's probably never been in a supermarket. | ||
| He's probably never gone to a gas station. | ||
| He hasn't been anywhere that has cost him or his family and the clowns who are around him. | ||
| All right, Samantha, on grocery prices, this is from the end of March. | ||
| Inflation levels have leveled off for grocery prices, but the cost of these items continues to rise. | ||
| While the cost of eggs and some other items continue to rise, grocery price inflation overall seems to be leveling out. | ||
| We'll see what happens after the tariffs, though, that were put into place after this article was written. | ||
| For example, the price of eggs rose 10.4% and beef prices rose 2.4% from January to February. | ||
| And the average cost of cereals, bakery products, seafood, processed fruits, and vegetables also saw slight increases. | ||
| Samantha in D.C. here, Democratic caller. | ||
| Hi, Samantha. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Oh, sorry. | ||
| We just talked to you. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| Let's go to Justin, who's in North Carolina, Republican. | ||
| Hi, Justin. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I'm very concerned about the bear market wearin, including the cuts to Medicaid. | ||
| Representative Akeem Jeffries that C-Span showed 10 minutes ago, I couldn't agree with him more. | ||
| Donald Trump isn't cutting spending in the places that really matter. | ||
| And I recently experienced the Medicaid cuts. | ||
| Now I have to turn to X-ray sites to get Iraq. | ||
| Big black. | ||
| All right, we will go to Darrell in East Point, Michigan, Independent. | ||
| Daryl, your turn. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Greta, thank you very much for taking my call. | |
| First thing I want to say is what Trump is doing as far as a tariff goes is absolutely necessary. | ||
| I just wish it would have happened 50 years ago. | ||
| When that was when our government voted to put China in the World Trade Organization, a big mistake. | ||
| I wrote every Congressman Senator I could recommend that. | ||
| But in our naivety, we thought that if China came into the capital trading system, they would learn from us and they would smooth up their ways and be more tolerable of freedoms. | ||
| Not happen, did not happen, has not happened. | ||
| And this month, he just mentioned today that we have imported $500 billion worth of goods, while China has imported $100 billion worth of goods. | ||
| Don't tell me words. | ||
| I agree with them. | ||
| So what that means is, amazingly, in this madness that America is going through, we're spending $800 billion on our military, and we're financing and paying for $500 billion for China's military. | ||
| It's absolutely unconscionable and absurd, and it has to stop. | ||
| All right, Daryl, let me give those numbers again that you were referencing. | ||
| This is from the Census Bureau. | ||
| This is the numbers for U.S.-Trina-China trade in 2024. | ||
| Nearly $582 billion worth of goods traded. | ||
| The U.S. imported around $438 billion worth of goods and services from China, while China imported from us $143 billion. | ||
| So you can see there the trade deficit. | ||
| The trade deficit is what the president has pointed to for his rationale of moving forward with these tariffs, not just on China, but other countries as well. | ||
| This was tried by the administration, by President Trump in his first administration as well. | ||
| From the New York Times reporting this morning, the first trade war with China, which lasted from 2018 to 2019, resulted in billions of dollars of lost revenue for American farmers. | ||
| To help offset the losses, Mr. Trump handed out $23 billion in subsidies from a fund that the Department of Agriculture created to stabilize the farm sector. | ||
| Large farm operations and farmers in the South benefited the most, fueling concerns about fairness and leaving some farmers feeling cheated. | ||
| Now, the headline on the front page of the papers this morning, this is the New York Times. | ||
| American farmers are bracing for the loss of major market for crops, soybeans being the first and corn as well. | ||
| That's from the New York Times. | ||
| Let's go to Lou in Highland Park, Illinois, Democratic caller. | ||
| Hi, Lou. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| I think the president is moving away too fast. | ||
| If he wanted to settle our deficit, he could have done this in a much slower and moderate way. | ||
| For example, he could have asked each department of the government to reduce their expenditures by, let's say, one half percent every year for four years. | ||
| That would be a 2% reduction. | ||
| And he could ask for a much slower solution to what's happening. | ||
| And I think what's happening, America, Americans have become addicted to low prices. | ||
| If you go to Walmart and buy a screwdriver and it costs $4, we cannot tolerate going to Walmart and buying a screwdriver for triple or quadruple what the $4 would become. | ||
| We just can't afford it. | ||
| But if it moved slower, I think we could have. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So you don't disagree with the strategy, but how it was executed is where you have concerns. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Correct. | |
| I think reducing and trade deficit. | ||
| Lou, you cut off there. | ||
| Reducing trade deficits? | ||
| Pardon me? | ||
| You were cut off. | ||
| So reducing trade deficits, pick up there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a good idea. | |
| I mean, for example, if you have a speed ankle and you go to the emergency room and they cut off your leg, it's not a good solution. | ||
| They should take a slow approach and one that Americans can deal with. | ||
| We can't deal with triple, quadruple prices overnight. | ||
| All right. | ||
| All right, Lou. | ||
| Well, let's go to the Senate floor with the Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, who over his years in the Senate has talked extensively about U.S. competition with China. | ||
| And you can find it in our archives if you go to c-span.org, all the times that he has talked about his concerns with the Chinese. | ||
| But here he is on the Senate floor Thursday on the president's sudden pause on tariffs. | ||
| So as we look back on this week of self-made chaos and even destruction, we have to ask, what was the purpose of this exercise? | ||
| What was the purpose of this exercise? | ||
| Was it, as President Trump originally said, to force other countries to pay enough tariffs so the United States could eliminate the income tax? | ||
| No. | ||
| Trump backed off that. | ||
| Was it, as President Trump said later, to retaliate against countries that were unfair to us? | ||
| No. | ||
| That was never true. | ||
| But even if it was, Trump backed off that. | ||
| Was it, as some sycophants and cabinet secretaries have claimed, some 4D chess move to call China's bluff? | ||
| No. | ||
| Everyone knows that isn't true. | ||
| This was not a week of 3D chess, 4D chess, nor even checkers. | ||
| Again, to paraphrase a former Trump official, people think Trump is playing 3D chess, but most of the time, the staff is just trying to keep him from eating the pieces. | ||
| Democratic leader in the Senate, Chuck Schumer on the floor. | ||
| Michael in Strongsville, Ohio, Republican. | ||
| Michael, what do you think about the Republicans' economic policies? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think that they're, for the most part, good. | |
| The reason why I say that is because Donald Trump always ends up being right at the end. | ||
| And what really amazes me is I don't know what world some of these people live in. | ||
| Eggs are cheaper than what they're saying, number one. | ||
| And number two, the guy's only been in office 90 days to 100 days. | ||
| You guys talk about how fast he's moving, but you never talk about how slow the other president was moving. | ||
| None of it makes any sense. | ||
| That's the reason why the Democrats lost because of the common sense thing. | ||
| You have to have common sense. | ||
| Everything he does, he's always right. | ||
| He's not going to be perfect, but his policies, you see it, you know that it's right. | ||
| You automatically know it. | ||
| All right, Michael. | ||
| So your message to Republicans in the House is go along with him. | ||
| That in the end, because they still have concerns about how they are going to pay for extending tax cuts and increasing spending for immigration. | ||
| There are budget hawks in the House that want to see $2 trillion in cuts. | ||
| And the Senate passed a bill, which the House approved yesterday, with a promise of $1.5 trillion. | ||
| But are you saying to these House Republicans who have concerns, trust the president, just go along with it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, so here's, let's keep it real. | |
| Nobody's always going to agree. | ||
| Everybody has different opinions. | ||
| And you know what they say about having the city. | ||
| Everybody has different opinions. | ||
| At the end of the day, Donald Trump's the boss. | ||
| He calls the shots. | ||
| If he makes a mistake, he'll have to own it. | ||
| So far, he hasn't made a mistake. | ||
| He's showing that everything he does is working out for everybody's best interests. | ||
| It's just that the Democrats, nobody hates him or anything, but why can't they just ever say that he does something right? | ||
| People are not stupid. | ||
| They see how they're acting right now. | ||
| All they got to do is give them credit once in a while. | ||
| Let the guy have time to do what he's doing. | ||
| He's the smart one. | ||
| Obviously, he's smart. | ||
| He won presidency. | ||
| Why is everybody else trying to play boss? | ||
| All right, Michael. | ||
| Terry in Atlanta, Democratic caller. | ||
| Your turn, Terry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, Greta. | |
| Morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's been a while. | |
| It's been a while. | ||
| I have a problem with the overall communication of the economic strategy. | ||
| Of course, everyone wants to cut taxes. | ||
| Of course, everyone wants lower food, gas, housing costs. | ||
| Of course, everyone wants to maintain and contain the number of people who legally come into our country. | ||
| But I don't think the communication of the strategy and the subsequent strategic plans have been communicated so that people understand them and can go along and accept them. | ||
| I also think that there is a real lack of just being in touch with the common people. | ||
| The lady that called in earlier, the retiree, I'm also a retiree. | ||
| I agree 100% with everything she said. | ||
| No, things are not costing less. | ||
| And we know it's going to take time. | ||
| Prices didn't rise overnight. | ||
| We know they're not going to drop overnight. | ||
| But don't try to okey-doke us and tell us, oh, yeah, the prices are good. | ||
| Everything's good. | ||
| It's going to be good. | ||
| Most people I know have 401ks. | ||
| They're retired. | ||
| And their 401ks have been decimated, just absolutely decimated. | ||
| They don't know what to do. | ||
| And the last thing I want to say is this whole thing with Elon Musk and the whole thing about cutting waste in the government, we definitely do need to do that. | ||
| I saw that video of the Social Security Administration's records down in this cave-like environment with the rows and rows and rows of files. | ||
| That's totally unacceptable in today's world of technology and how that all should have been digitized. | ||
| All right, Terry. | ||
| A couple headlines to share with folks, and you may find this first one interesting. | ||
| This is from the Washington Times reporting, Doge, President Biden took 6,300 migrants with criminal records, and many took taxpayer benefits too. | ||
| This is according to Stephen Dinan's reporting in the Washington Times this morning. | ||
| Another headline to share with you next to that from the Washington Times. | ||
| Trump takes 100 questions at meeting. | ||
| The president has answered nearly 100 questions from the press during his first three cabinet meetings this year, nearly 20 times the number answered by President Biden in the same setting during four years in office. | ||
| This data compiled by the Washington Times. | ||
| Gilbert in Toledo, Ohio, and Independent. | ||
| Gilbert, what do you think about the President Republicans' economic actions so far? | ||
| And as one caller noted, we are coming up on 100 days of this administration. | ||
| April 30th will mark 100 days for the president's second term. | ||
| Gilbert? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, I totally agree with the president. | |
| I'm willing to give him all the time that he has available to try to straighten out this country. | ||
| This is the first time I ever called, so excuse me, but I get a little nervous. | ||
| Oh, you're doing great. | ||
| November 5th is when the Americans decided to put him on the seat, and Democrats and Republicans, the Houses and Senate, they were all everybody, the Americans decided to put them in, and I give them the opportunity 100%. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just like the first man from Maryland called in and the guy from Florida. | |
| I've lived my life using common sense, and I've been laid off, and I've been fired all my life. | ||
| And I deal with every president that we have to deal with on a common sense basis. | ||
| All right, Gilbert, since it's your first time, I'll give you a pass, but you got to mute your television the next time you call in. | ||
| Ken in Hot Springs, Arkansas, Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| I have three comments or maybe a question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Number one, I'm a senior retired at 74. | |
| As far as food goes, I have opted for freezed diet vegetables because of my age. | ||
| It's easier to digest. | ||
| But it's a whole lot cheaper and it stays a lot longer. | ||
| And I've been buying boxed meat online. | ||
| So I'm basically bypassing a local grocery store in a major expenses. | ||
| That's number one comment. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That's to deal with the economy. | ||
| Step number two. | ||
| And I've reduced my grocery bill by $100 a month by doing that. | ||
| Secondly, I'm a little bit upset at the reaction that the Democrats have demonstrated in Congress, almost to the point of insurrection, which should really be something that should be aired because it's unfair to it's okay to express opinions, | ||
| but it's unfair to challenge by disruption the elected, duly elected president of the United States, the chief of the armed forces. | ||
| How are they disrupting that? | ||
| In what way? | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're challenging his integrity and his motives when the American people already voted him in based on those personality traits he has and the way he deals with business. | |
| We wanted a clean house in the government, and that's exactly why he was voted in. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Ken, there, a Republican in Arkansas with his thoughts. | ||
| We're asking this morning your thoughts on the President Republicans economic policies. | ||
| According to that Quinnipiak poll, some more numbers for you. | ||
| This is the top economic concern for voters that they surveyed. | ||
| 47% said it was the price of food and goods. | ||
| We'll see what happens with tariffs after this week. | ||
| 20% said it was the cost of housing and rent. | ||
| 17% cited the stock market, while 6% said job situation. | ||
| 10% said it was something else. | ||
| We'll go to Kurt, Orlando, Florida, an independent. | ||
| Kurt, your turn. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning, Greta. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| I just wanted to say for the tariffs that I don't think there would be any good time to start them. | ||
| So now that we're starting them, I think it's about time because we've been tariffed from other countries and we're just matching them. | ||
| So I believe what he is doing is correct, and I don't think any president that would start them would, it would ever be a good time to start them. | ||
| What about then reversing course? | ||
| I mean, he started them and then he did a 180 this week. | ||
| Was that the right decision or should he have held strong? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think he's a businessman at the end of the day, and I think he is giving them an opportunity to reflect on what we can do and for them to come to the table and negotiate trade deals. | |
| So he's giving them a period of time to reflect on what is to come. | ||
| Then they can come to the table and discuss that. | ||
| And I think he will, after the 90 days, press the tariffs. | ||
| I think it's a negotiation topic. | ||
| Kurt, one of the papers this morning says that he may have exposed, though, his pain threshold by reversing course this week. | ||
| And so that gives other countries who had already started calling to negotiate leverage because they can see where the president will, that he won't go, you know, past once the bond market starts reacting the way it did, stocks fall the way that they did. | ||
| That that's his threshold. | ||
| Now they know it. | ||
| He, you know, showed him his cards according to this piece. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's true, but at the end of the day, he is a businessman. | |
| And I think what we need right now is somebody that is a businessman to run the business aspects of America to get us back on track. | ||
| All right, Kurt. | ||
| Cynthia Youngston, Ohio, Democratic caller. | ||
| Cynthia, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| You know, is he a businessman or is he a con man? | ||
| And do you have to be a con man to be a businessman? | ||
| I feel that all of this economic stuff is Trump wanting to cause uncertainty. | ||
| I think he's using this to scare people. | ||
| He's causing distraction so that people aren't paying attention to how he's tearing down our legal system, our system of representation. | ||
| He's intimidating members of Congress. | ||
| He's intimidating the entire legal profession. | ||
| He's cutting off our borders, Canada, Mexico. | ||
| He's isolating us. | ||
| Divide and conquer to gain power. | ||
| Create fear to gain power. | ||
| Economic fear, fear of immigrants. | ||
| He's eliminating the guardrails that protect us as the voters. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Congress represents us. | |
| The regulations that he's taken off that Musk came in and cut and Musk was just his fall guy, those regulations were put in place by us. | ||
| We voted on those things. | ||
| We want clean air and water. | ||
| We voted on that. | ||
| He's removing our power. | ||
| He's going around Congress. | ||
| And he's doing that with these economic policies, too. | ||
| People should look at what Eric Holder, the former Attorney General of the United States, is saying to the legal profession about how they had better stand up and protect themselves and protect the legal profession and not cave in to Trump, who's using intimidation tactics. | ||
| He's shutting down this whole legal law firm. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Cynthia there in Ohio, Democratic caller. | ||
| Another headline to share with you from The Guardian out of London, Trump ignites insider trading accusations after global tariffs U-turn earlier this week. | ||
| The U.S. president posted on Wednesday morning it was a great time to buy on social media just hours before pausing tariff impositions and the stock market skyrocketing. | ||
| John in New Hampshire, Independent. | ||
| John, what do you think about the President Republicans' economic policies? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think he's doing what he told us he would do, and it feels good to finally have a president that's doing that. | |
| I also think the last president never told us what he was going to do. | ||
| He never told us he was going to open the borders wide open. | ||
| He never told us he was just going to let crime go crazy. | ||
| He never told us he was okay with letting inflation go up to what, 9%. | ||
| And right now, my groceries right now aren't going up. | ||
| I don't know what people are talking about. | ||
| I don't know where they're shopping. | ||
| My groceries are going down. | ||
| My gas is going down. | ||
| So I expect they will go down even more. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And in terms of layoffs, I have to say, every layoff that happens, those businesses hire some people back. | ||
| It's the nature of the work. | ||
| It's the way the legal system works. | ||
| You have to offer those people what you offer everybody. | ||
| So even if you want to keep people, you lay them off, you have a conversation with them, and then you bring them back if they want to come back. | ||
| All right, John. | ||
| We'll go to Ken, who's a Lancaster, South Carolina Republican. | ||
| Good morning to you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Greta. | |
| Well, it's been a while. | ||
| Can I give me a few minutes, please? | ||
| I used to be an independent, but I'm a Republican. | ||
| Yes, I'm going to talk about the tariffs in a minute. | ||
| But the article you read about 63 criminals, 6,300 criminals President Joe Biden led into this country, it's another thing, the Doge discovery, about nearly 6 million Social Security cards that were given to illegal immigrants to get jobs and get benefits from American citizens. | ||
| And Chuck Schumer reported years ago how it was important to put more tariffs on China because it was Robin Sublime. | ||
| And there's a book I got called Charles Mangles, China, the Gathering Threat, where they list the United States as they number one enemy and they want their economy to surpass ours within a couple of years. | ||
| All right, Ken, I'm going to just update folks who missed it. | ||
| This is the headline from the Washington Times. | ||
| Doge claims that President Biden took 6,300 migrants with criminal records. | ||
| From their reporting, they note that the Biden administration justified it as a way of taking pressure off the Border Patrol because the migrants were coming through border crossings or airports rather than trying to sneak in between crossings. | ||
| Critics said that that was, critics said that was a distortion of the law, which only allows parole in exceptional cases where there was an urgent humanitarian need or particular benefit to the U.S. Traditionally, that had meant things like medical emergencies or when the U.S. authorities wanted someone here to help with the criminal investigations. | ||
| So you can read more from the Washington Times reporting this morning in their paper. | ||
| David, Glendale, Maryland, Democratic caller. | ||
| David, we're talking about the economy. | ||
| Do you approve of what President Trump and the Republicans are doing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I don't approve of it. | |
| And I think what happens is that people don't really understand that we have the deficit because we went to these foreign countries to get products made so we could get them cheaper so that the companies could have greater profits in them. | ||
| We didn't, those countries didn't come to us and say we'll make them cheaper. | ||
| We went to them to make these products cheaper. | ||
| The reason the deficit is so high is because they sat up there and sent all their technology and their products to them to make. | ||
| So they didn't have to pay the American worker a decent wage to be able to buy the products they would have made in the United States. | ||
| If we remember that when they first started making cars, I think it was Ford that actually said we have to pay them a wage so they can buy the product that they're actually making. | ||
| So I don't think some of these people realize that, you know, these countries that we have a trade deficit with have actually, you know, those companies, our American companies went to them to get their products made. | ||
| All right, David, heard the point. | ||
| Ronald, St. Petersburg, Florida, Independent. | ||
| Let's go to you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I'm tired of these mega zombies with Trump being a businessman, and we're running America like a business. | |
| We're not a business. | ||
| A politician's job is to take care of the citizens of America. | ||
| And it's not happening right now. | ||
| With all these terrorists on, terrorists off, nobody knows what's going on. | ||
| And I'm just tired of it. | ||
| And that's all I got to say. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Christine in Michigan, Republican. | ||
| Your turn. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Greta. | |
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I just want to say that what hurts me most about our president is that he doesn't care about us. | |
| And the people that have been hurt by the 401ks, they're losing all their money. | ||
| And I already lost almost $1,000 from the IRS. | ||
| And this is the first time in 30 years. | ||
| And we don't know what's going on. | ||
| And it's just upset our whole country. | ||
| Christine, you're a Republican? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Did you vote for the president in the last election? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I didn't because I could see how things were going during the campaign, how he was not treating people good at all. | |
| Did you vote for him the first or second time that he ran? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I did the first time. | |
| Christine there in Michigan says a Republican. | ||
| We'll go to Stephanie in Lincoln, North Carolina, Democratic caller. | ||
| Hi, Stephanie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| I just feel like I'm living in a Marvel multiverse. | ||
| This whole thing with Trump running on economic, how he's going to fix everything. | ||
| He's going to lower prices on day one, and everything is like we owe $36 trillion and we need to make all these cuts. | ||
| And Doge is supposedly finding all this money. | ||
| And we haven't seen evidence of anything, actually, the not one penny that's accurate. | ||
| And Then they've got this new stuff they're trying to push through. | ||
| Well, they've already pushed through one where they needed more money for border control and defense. | ||
| Then they came out and said, Oh, we need this new fighter jet that's like this new stealth thing that's going to be bigger and better than everybody else. | ||
| So they've already spent money there and got more money for border. | ||
| Well, now they're saying they need this big, beautiful bill that's going to be even more money in the national debt, that they need more money for border control and all this stuff. | ||
| But then they're saying, okay, well, we have even the lowest number of people crossing the border ever. | ||
| So why did they need all this extra more money for border control? | ||
| Well, you heard the president talk about mass deportation during the campaign, that that's what he wants to do, and that would take money. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But they're mass deport. | ||
| Well, they're not even saying they're mass deporting people right now. | ||
| Because they're waiting for the money. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, we're not sure that that's where the money's going to go today. | |
| That's the problem because he can impinge on whatever he wants. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'm going to go to Kenneth. | ||
| He's in Barberton, Ohio. | ||
| Republican. | ||
| Kenneth, good morning to you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And good morning to you. | |
| Thanks for the call. | ||
| All I want to say is some of the people that I've listened to, I've been watching this for about a good 45 minutes. | ||
| Anyway, what he's trying to do is it's going to hurt a little bit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I'm going to say it. | |
| And people, I'm 82 years old, worked through the pandemic, so on and so forth, part-time to make an extra buck. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And it was hard times. | |
| Listen, we've just got it, we've got to know how to take it. | ||
| And let's see what we can do. | ||
| When people got paid more money, $20 an hour, for example, I started at a little part-time job. | ||
| I know I'm with Trump. | ||
| Now, don't get me wrong. | ||
| I just got to tell you this real quick, and I'll let you go because I know there's other calls. | ||
| All right, Kenneth, we're listening. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I wanted to now, the same job that I had part-time working for a local Ohio company, the fellow that owns it, has 100 stores in Ohio. | |
| No names, please. | ||
| But what I'm saying is now that people are getting paid close to $11 an hour. | ||
| Now, that's two bucks only, more an hour. | ||
| But I started at $9, and I left a job when I retired at $12 an hour, which was no big money for a guy. | ||
| Worked two jobs all my life, the last 50. | ||
| Wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, but my boss said one thing to me. | ||
| He said, Kenny, you're still a knife in the drawer. | ||
| And that means if you worked hard, worked together, God bless us. | ||
| I wouldn't want to be in any other country than the United States of America. | ||
| And I used to be a Democrat, and I voted for President Obama. | ||
| Now, you notice I use the word with respect, President Obama, but not the second time. | ||
| And then I did not vote for President Biden because of what the Democrats were doing when a woman tears up a state of a union speech. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The only one that ever did it to my president, President Trump, in his first turn. | |
| Shame on you, Nancy Pelosi. | ||
| All right, Kenneth, I have to leave it there. | ||
| CNN reporting breaking news that the dollar, the U.S. dollar, has fallen to its weakest level against the Euro in three years. | ||
| We're talking about the economy and President Trump and Republicans' control of it, their policies. | ||
| Kevin in Beiton, Texas, Democratic caller. | ||
| Kevin, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| For listening. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep, go ahead. | |
| What I got to say, I got three key points. | ||
| One, why would you go and put a 90-day hold on the tariffs? | ||
| I mean, on the tariffs, and then all of a sudden you blocked it. | ||
| Now that all your rich buddies done got richer, less than a couple of hours. | ||
| It just, everything just don't add up. | ||
| And then, two, I think his agenda is where he's still soaring over from Obama when he was president. | ||
| And I think that's the reason why everybody voted for Trump this time go round because they couldn't accept the fact that an educated woman that was more educated than what we have now. | ||
| And so they said, well, okay, we had Obama for eight years. | ||
| So no, we're not going to do this or go another four years with the same thing. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Kevin's thoughts there. | ||
| Bonnie in Florida, an independent. | ||
| Bonnie, we are talking about the economy, President Trump and Republicans' actions, their agenda for the economy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you support or oppose? | |
| I actually do not support. | ||
| And I do want to say thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I really enjoy C-SPAN, and I wish all Americans would educate themselves by listening to your program. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| But my issue with so many of the callers that call in is I can understand one side or the other. | ||
| I happen to be an independent and I vote on who I believe has the best policy and will represent our country fairly. | ||
| And I did not obviously vote for President Trump. | ||
| I will give him credit for being a master marketeer, but I will not say he is an excellent businessman. | ||
| As far as the tariffs are concerned, I can't believe that there is a CEO in this country that would work the way Donald Trump does with our country. | ||
| He's like a bull in a China shop. | ||
| And it's not his policies I'm adverse to. | ||
| As you mentioned earlier with another caller, it's the way in which he's implementing them. | ||
| It's just insane. | ||
| The uncertainty. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not only the uncertainty, it's the methodology he appears to be using. | |
| For example, if you look at Madagascar, who we import a ton of olive oil and vanilla, excuse me, vanilla. | ||
| We don't make that in our country. | ||
| So you need to negotiate country by country based on product and product and what makes the most sense, not a global tariff across the board that drops our economy and our stock market and our bond market into insanity. | ||
| All right, Bonnie, I have to leave it at that point. | ||
| I just want to share again with our viewers this morning news coming out of China that in retaliation to the president responding to China earlier in the week, they have now raised their tariffs on U.S. imports to 125%. | ||
| That followed the White House yesterday raising its tariff on Chinese goods to 125%, which actually on top of existing 20%, so it went up to 145. | ||
| And we'll see what the president says, if at all, today from the White House on this tit for tat with China. | ||
| We're going to take a break. | ||
| We come back with conversation with Reverend Dr. William Barber of the grassroots group Repairs of the Breach. | ||
| We'll talk about the role of the faith community and how it's taking a role in standing up for the economically disadvantaged in this country. | ||
| And then later, Ilya Shapiro from the Manhattan Institute joins us on why he supports the Trump administration's anti-DEI crackdown at several American colleges and universities. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
American History TV, Saturdays on C-SPAN 2, exploring the people and events that tell the American story. | |
| This weekend, beginning at 9:30 a.m. Eastern, all-day coverage of the 2024 Lincoln Forum held in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, authors and historians discuss Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War with presentations on Canada's role in the war, African-American reactions to Lincoln's death, and soldiers' motivations to fight. | ||
| At 7 p.m. Eastern, watch our American History TV series First 100 Days as we look at the start of presidential terms. | ||
| This week, we focus on the early months of President Donald Trump's first term in 2017, including the withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement and construction of a border wall between the United States and Mexico. | ||
| And at 8 p.m. Eastern on Lectures in History, Santa Clara University history professor Sonia Gomez on the intimate relationships between people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds that occurred in Hawaii and Japan during and immediately after World War II. | ||
| Exploring the American story, watch American History TV Saturdays on C-SPAN 2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at c-span.org/slash history. | ||
| Book TV, every Sunday on C-SPAN 2, features leading authors discussing their latest nonfiction books. | ||
| Here's a look at what's coming up this weekend. | ||
| At 7 p.m. Eastern, journalist Michael Wolf provides his behind-the-scenes look at President Trump's 2024 re-election with his book, All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America. | ||
| And then at 8 p.m. Eastern, Bard College history professor Sean McMeekin talks about his book, To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism, which was selected as the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's 2025 Conservative Book of the Year. | ||
| And at 9 p.m. Eastern, the New York Times's Annie Carney and Luke Broadwater, authors of Madhouse, chronicle the key events of the 118th Congress and the 2024 presidential election. | ||
| Then at 10 p.m. Eastern on Afterwards, Oklahoma Republican Senator James Langford speaks about his faith, the challenges the country faces, and what he believes needs to happen to improve the country in his book, Turnaround: America's Revival. | ||
| He's interviewed by Wall Street Journal congressional reporter Siobhan Hughes. | ||
| Watch Book TV every Sunday on C-SPAN 2 and find a full schedule in your program guide or watch online anytime at booktv.org. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| We want to welcome back to the program Reverend William Barber. | ||
| He's the founder and president of the Repairs of the Breach. | ||
| He's also a professor in the practice of public theology and public policy at Yale Divinity School. | ||
| Reverend Barber, appreciate the conversation with you this morning. | ||
| I want to start with the action in the House yesterday along party line vote 216 to 2014. | ||
| House Republicans, with no help from Democrats and opposition from two of their own, were able to pass a budget blueprint. | ||
| Do you have concerns about this blueprint and what it means for safety net programs? | ||
| Well, thank you so much for having me on the Washington Journal. | ||
| And indeed, we do have great problems with this budget blueprint and what is being proposed here. | ||
| A couple of weeks ago, I think last week, Senator Corey Booker picked up a line that our movement has used since 2018. | ||
| He said some issues are not about Democrat versus Republican, left versus right, but right versus wrong. | ||
| And we've been saying that since 2018 and then 2020. | ||
| This budget is not about that. | ||
| It's a moral issue. | ||
| It's an immoral, destructive budget. | ||
| Inside of this budget proposal, there are serious cuts to Medicaid, for instance, over a 10-year period. | ||
| One proposal is as high as $800 billion. | ||
| Now, what that translates into is 36 million people potentially removed from Medicaid. | ||
| And we know Medicaid serves the vulnerable, the disabled, and the hurting and the broken and people in nursing homes and so forth and so on. | ||
| When you think about that, in a country where we already have 80 plus million people who are either uninsured or underinsured, where we have a country where we do not guarantee health care based on your humanity, but it's determined by your job mostly. | ||
| Think about what that would do to the poor and the low-wage people of this country. | ||
| And that's one of the problems with the whole conversation right now. | ||
| People are talking about Wall Street, they're talking about the middle class, they're talking about the wealthy. | ||
| But what does this budget proposal do more? | ||
| In addition, how does it hurt the 140 million people in this country who are poor and or low wage? | ||
| The 80 plus million people who are uninsured or underinsured, the 14 million people who make less than $15 an hour because we've not raised the minimum wage since 2009. | ||
| And the current administration's financial people are saying they don't believe in raising it, even for waiters that make $2.13 an hour. | ||
| And 800 people are dying a day from poverty right now. | ||
| This budget proposal is deadly. | ||
| It's destructive. | ||
| And while clergy in this country, pastors, rabbis, we've decided to bring more Monday to the U.S. Capitol every month to in our full vestments to say this is immoral. | ||
| This is wrong. | ||
| It does not establish justice. | ||
| It establishes injustice. | ||
| It does not provide for the common defense. | ||
| It provides for the defense of a few. | ||
| And we must challenge it now. | ||
| It will devastate the people who are actually the backbone of this country, which are poor and low-wage working people. | ||
| Reverend Barbara, listen to the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, talking about how the Republicans are pledging to preserve what he called essential programs. | ||
| Our first big, beautiful reconciliation package here involves a number of commitments. | ||
| And one of those is that we are committed to finding at least $1.5 trillion in savings for the American people, while also preserving our essential programs. | ||
| The Democrats are out right now trying to make hay out of the fact that we're going to gut Medicaid and all these other things. | ||
| It's simply not true. | ||
| We're going to protect the essential programs for everybody who's eligible to receive those. | ||
| And you'll see that reflected in the final bill. | ||
| But I think it's very important for us to note that we'll be looking for $1.5 trillion in savings. | ||
| And I can tell you that many of us are going to aim much higher and find those savings because we believe they are there. | ||
| We want to make government more efficient, effective, and leaner for the American people. | ||
| And I think that will serve every American of every party. | ||
| Reverend William Barber, your response. | ||
| Well, you know, Mike Johnson and others in the MAGA group are very good at distorting the words. | ||
| He said preserve. | ||
| That means you can preserve a program, but the program is not strong enough or big enough to meet the need of the American people, particularly poor and low-wage working people, whether they're work poor and low-wage people in East Kentucky or in the Delta of Alabama or in San Francisco or in New York or in North Carolina. | ||
| Secondly, he said there is no way mathematically to cut 1.5, and he says even more, maybe $2 trillion from the budget and not uproot Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid in a major way. | ||
| Inside of their budget, they talk about even cutting free lunch programs, which if they use the formula that's in the budget, it would actually affect 24 million children. | ||
| Now, these are black, white, brown. | ||
| You know, when we talk about poor and low-wage people, the majority of them are white in raw numbers. | ||
| The majority and percentage are black. | ||
| And we've got to have a real conversation, even with the media. | ||
| I'm glad you all are doing this, because all of what he just said is distorted. | ||
| Preserve and actually make the program what it ought to be. | ||
| We are in crisis now. | ||
| So you're going to cut the budget at the very time that you have 80-some million people who don't even have health insurance or are uninsured. | ||
| You're going to defund programs that are already underfunded. | ||
| But what you're going to do with that is you're going to take a $1.5 trillion and give it to the wealthy and the greedy who don't need it. | ||
| That is fundamentally immoral. | ||
| And for Mike Johnson to be doing that, and at the other side, claim to be a Christian, which means he has a mouthful of scripture in his mouth, but a whole lot of harm and injustice in his heart, which is reflected in his policy. | ||
| This budget proposal shows the scripture says where your treasury is where your heart is, where your heart is with where your treasury is, that their heart is with cutting the $5 trillion budget by $2 trillion and giving it to the wealthy and those that don't need it as another form of failed trickle-down economics. | ||
| And this is a 10-year budget that they're trying to pass, and it will devastate the programs. | ||
| Every economist that is truthful and real that looks at this will tell you there's no way to cut $1.5 or $2 trillion out of a $5 trillion budget and maintain and expand those programs at the level that they need to be to serve the American people now, let alone address the existing issues of poverty and low wealth, even before this budget is passed. | ||
| All right, we're talking with Reverend Barber about the Republicans' budget blueprint. | ||
| Then you can join the conversation. | ||
| Republicans dial in at 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| Independents will take your calls at 202-748-8002. | ||
| And remember, you can text if you don't want to call at 202-748-8003. | ||
| Just include your first name, city, and state. | ||
| Reverend Barbara, I want to show an ex post from you last week. | ||
| As you mentioned, you and other faith leaders were on Capitol Hill to protest various budget cuts. | ||
| And you wrote this in your post. | ||
| We were told that we could not pray or it would be seen as an act of protest. | ||
| In fact, we could not even get in the position of prayer and lower our heads or we would be arrested. | ||
| Explain what happened. | ||
| We have started on Ash Wednesday. | ||
| We started Witness Wednesday, and some 400 clergy from around the country came in full vestments to say, we're very serious. | ||
| This is not political for us in terms of party. | ||
| This is about the morality of this moment, the immorality of what we see going on and how it is going to hurt the very people that our Bible, our scriptures call us to be concerned about first when you do public policy, which is poor and low-wage folk. | ||
| That's biblical any way you look at it. | ||
| And the clergy came and what we also have been working with is the Institute for Policy Studies and a number of other think tanks to actually examine this budget. | ||
| We didn't just, we're not just saying this. | ||
| We produced a brand new report, Repairs of the Breach and IPS Institute for Policy Studies, that talked about the high moral price of this budget. | ||
| And we went down each line of it and examined how deadly, dangerous, and destructive it is. | ||
| And we decided as clergy, we would go in in full vestment. | ||
| We would deliver it to every member of the Congress and to the leadership, the speaker and the opposition leader from the other party, and say to them, this is what you're doing. | ||
| This is not hyperbole. | ||
| We also said that while we were in there, we would simply pray in the retunda. | ||
| I sent the first group in and they called me to tell me that they were being told by the Capitol Police that if in fact they bowed their head in a posture of prayer, it would be considered a violation of form of protest. | ||
| Just bowing their heads, let alone saying a prayer. | ||
| And that if they were to pray out loud and they would not get a warning, they would be arrested. | ||
| Now, to think about that, because there used to be a time when extremists or conservatives would encourage people to come and pray in the retunda. | ||
| We're not finished with that issue yet. | ||
| We're going to be coming back on the 28th of this month of April. | ||
| We are reaching out and training. | ||
| We have more than 9,000 clergy connected to our prophetic council with repairs of the breach. | ||
| And we're training clergy. | ||
| We are taking them through this budget and the budget proposals to how bad it is. | ||
| Because one of the things we're saying to people in all of the movement that's going on, all of the executive orders, all of the things that are happening, that we as American people need to focus like a laser on this budget because the budget connects us all. | ||
| Because what's going to happen is going to hurt white and black and brown and Asian and Indigenous and everybody in this country. | ||
| It's going to hurt North and South, East and West. | ||
| It's going to hurt gay folk and trans folk. | ||
| It's going to hurt everybody. | ||
| Anybody who is poor and low wage. | ||
| And if you hurt poor and low wage folk, it's going to have an impact on the rest of the country. | ||
| And when you add that to all of the tariff battles and the prices going up, you add that to the attack on voting rights. | ||
| You add that to what's going on in the Justice Department and this attempt to falsely. | ||
| Yesterday, I think the president signed something to tell the Justice Department to go after people, which is a fundamental violation. | ||
| We are not just in a crisis of party politics. | ||
| We are in a crisis of democracy and a crisis of civilization in a time when immorality is trying to rule over morality. | ||
| And so we have to pray. | ||
| We have to stand. | ||
| We have to protest. | ||
| We have to speak out. | ||
| Whether they change or not, we have to have a prophetic witness in this moment, and we will. | ||
| The one thing you cannot do when people, any country, decide they Want to be kings, want to be lords, want to be dictators, is bow down and accept what is being said. | ||
| Because bowing down is not an option. | ||
| It is not an option. | ||
| When you know that the most vulnerable of the country, people who get up and work every day of their lives for low wages, sometimes sleep in their cars, that's who we're talking about, regardless of what their color is. | ||
| They are going to be hurt the most. | ||
| And more people will die because of this budget. | ||
| Because as things already are, 800 people die a day from poverty and low wages and the impact and the neglect. | ||
| This will only increase the deadliness, the destructiveness of those realities in this country. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| We're talking with Reverend William Barber. | ||
| He's the founder and professor of the practice of public theology and public policy at Yale Divinity School and founder and president of the Repairs of the Breach. | ||
| John in Hallsville, Texas, Republican. | ||
| John, let's hear from you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
When you mention about Medicaid, I've got two points because Medicaid's the first one. | |
| 40%, almost 40% work. | ||
| They pay federal income tax to the treasury. | ||
| But this is tax season. | ||
| And when they file their taxes, they get all, not some, all of their federal withholding back, so they haven't paid nothing to this country. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Then they get the child tax credit, which is free cash. | |
| Then they get Medicaid, which is free health care. | ||
| They didn't pay for it. | ||
| And they get food stamps that they didn't pay for. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So they're in the red. | |
| And we can't. | ||
| And Mr. Barber, I'm going to tell you: Jesus Christ fed 4,000 and he fed 5,000, but he did not go home with them and keep feeding them. | ||
| That is a fact. | ||
| That's called enabling. | ||
| And if we would go down that road, we would be robots. | ||
| All right, let's get it. | ||
| All right, John, let's get a response. | ||
| First of all, John's facts are off. | ||
| Most of the people on Medicaid, many of them work, many of them are disabled. | ||
| The majority of them in a state like Texas are white people who actually, Republican and Democrat, they don't have any party. | ||
| This country decided that it had an obligation to give people a safety net and not just leave people languishing in poverty. | ||
| Remember, the same people that want to cut Medicaid don't want to raise the minimum wage to a living wage, John. | ||
| And I'm sure that you agree that a person should get a living wage of a fair wage for a fair day's work. | ||
| That's not happening in this country. | ||
| But we are giving welfare to corporations. | ||
| We want to talk about giveaway. | ||
| We are giving welfare to corporations. | ||
| You are giving tax cuts to the wealthy who don't pay taxes, many of them, or pay less than their secretaries. | ||
| We are doing that. | ||
| We are saying that companies and corporations are too big to fail, but we're saying people are not too human to be left out. | ||
| You really need to look at, for instance, in Texas, who's very hurt. | ||
| And since you want to talk theology, Isaiah chapter 10 says, woe unto those who legislate evil and rob the poor of their rights and make the women and children their prey. | ||
| The Bible says in Deuteronomy 14 that we are supposed to lift the poor. | ||
| We are not supposed to take everything away from the poor. | ||
| Well, we know that poverty is not caused by laziness. | ||
| It's caused by policy. | ||
| Jesus said in his first sermon that you preach good news to the poor. | ||
| Poor, there's a word in Greek that means the potokos, those who've been made poor by extreme policies. | ||
| Jesus said that nations would be judged by how the nations would be judged by how you treat the least of these, the hungry, the poor, the lame, the sick, the imprisoned, and interestingly enough, the immigrant, that that's how nations would in fact be judged. | ||
| And so your exegesis is wrong about Jesus. | ||
| When Jesus did those things, he was challenging the politics of Rome and the politics of Caesar that would see people hurting, see people broken, and just leave them there. | ||
| The fact that you have a group of folk in Congress that would rather take a trillion and a half dollars and give it to people who don't need it, $98 billion they want to add to the Pentagon budget that the Pentagon doesn't even want, when in fact that same money could be used to undergird. | ||
| And part of, I hear in John's analysis, you think that most of the people that are getting food stamps are black people and brown people. | ||
| That's in there somewhere. | ||
| The reality is, John, it's your neighbors, it's people that go to your church, is people that are around you, it's people that look like you, probably, it's people that are hurting. | ||
| And this is a failure of public policy to know that America is the only one of the 25 wealthiest countries in the world that doesn't offer some form of universal health care for all people. | ||
| And yet we spend more on health care than any other nation in the world. | ||
| We have not raised this minimum wage from $7.25. | ||
| There are people in Capitol Hill who say that if a man or a woman works a job and makes $7.25 an hour, and therefore they make about $15,000 a year before their taxes, that they in fact are in the lower, lower middle class. | ||
| They are not poor. | ||
| Think about that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right, let's go to Catherine, Burlington, New Jersey, Democratic caller. | ||
| Hi, Catherine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Greta. | |
| This is Catherine again from Burlington. | ||
| Good to talk to you, Bishop Barber. | ||
| My question is: if we continue the tax cuts for the rich and they're going to cut $1.5 trillion in savings, where are the cuts coming from? | ||
| Is my problem? | ||
| And I'm afraid it's going to come from poor people of all colors, Reverend. | ||
| And I'd like to know what you said about that. | ||
| And we, and another thing, Greta, I would like to say, we don't need a businessman. | ||
| Everybody out there who's saying we need a businessman, we need a president for all of the people, Greta. | ||
| All right, Catherine, let's get a response. | ||
| Well, let me just say something. | ||
| Remember that it was Teddy Roosevelt, who actually was a Republican, who back in the early 1900s said that there were moral issues that this country needed to face. | ||
| One of them would be health care for all. | ||
| The other was taking care of the environment. | ||
| The other was making sure people were paid a decent wage. | ||
| And this was in the 1900s with Teddy Roosevelt, even before the Great Depression. | ||
| So when people think this is just Democrat and Republican, they miss it. | ||
| Secondly, as the caller said, who will they hurt? | ||
| Poor and low-wage people. | ||
| And I want to keep saying that because too often people think the 140 million poor people, 66 million, by the way, which are white, 30 million, which are black, and 68% of Latinos and so forth and so on, are lazy folks somewhere not. | ||
| The majority are working folk. | ||
| The majority are white women who are single and working. | ||
| We really need to get our numbers right. | ||
| And part of the challenge is you can't cut $1.5 or $2 trillion from the budget and call it savings when you're in fact giving it away in tax cuts. | ||
| And in fact, you have to cut. | ||
| There's no mathematical formula that will allow you to have the programs like Medicaid and Social Security and lunch for poor and low-wage children in rural communities and in urban communities. | ||
| You just can't do it and you don't need to do it. | ||
| But you know, lastly, Megha has said, and Bannon has a video where he says, he says they want to control the $5 trillion budget so that they can control the $76 trillion of assets. | ||
| They want this to be a 10-year budget, which will last to 2035. | ||
| And by the time we get to 2035, they will have busted and broken the government in such a way that the government will, us, we are the government, will not be able to care for those among us. | ||
| It's amazing to me, lastly, how many people say that they are persons of faith. | ||
| But you don't want to see disabled people have Medicaid. | ||
| You don't want to see elderly people have Medicare. | ||
| You don't want to see people who work every day have a living wage and have universal health care and have paid family leave. | ||
| Well, guess what? | ||
| 60 and 70% of the American people actually want those things. | ||
| So they are out of step, even with the American people, and they're out of step with the deep moral callings of consciousness and our faith. | ||
| Chad, Augusta, Georgia Independent, it's your turn with Reverend Barber. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| A couple of things. | ||
| First of all, if I recall right, in the last administration, inflation went so up so bad that all the poor people that I know were, I mean, they got desperate. | ||
| They got totally desperate. | ||
| You know, that to me was as immoral as anything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Plus, we're $36 or $38 trillion in debt, and you know we're finding waste everywhere, everywhere. | |
| So I think a trillion dollars cut is not going to hurt anybody because most of it's going to be waste. | ||
| And third thing, you talk about morality. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What about all these whites, blacks, and all of that are leaving kids? | |
| You know, the marriage rate in the United States has plummeted since government got involved with the family. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If they would get the government out of a family, well, maybe dads would want to raise their kids. | |
| I'll take your points, Chad. | ||
| First of all, what you're saying is a lot of unfactual generalities. | ||
| If you want to get government out of your life, you got to remove police people, environment. | ||
| Government is everywhere. | ||
| And that's not the cause of why families are unable to survive. | ||
| You just heard me say that we have refused to even raise a living wage. | ||
| I've not heard one of you who complain about what's being done, saying that you would want to see people make a living wage that work every day. | ||
| And until you can even say that, you really undermine your own moral stance in this discussion. | ||
| Furthermore, during the Biden administration, Biden handed the Trump administration an envious economy because in this around the envy of the world to cook us out of COVID. | ||
| COVID, you can't dismiss COVID and what it caused, but you also recognize that during COVID, we did child income tax credit and dropped poverty among children by almost 50% in some ways. | ||
| But yet during COVID, with over a million people dying, the people who went to work during COVID, who saved our lives, who cut our meat, who served us at restaurants, they were not even provided a living wage. | ||
| They were not provided paid family leave. | ||
| They were not ensured health care. | ||
| And yet we call them essential workers. | ||
| We're talking about now, though, the Trump administration. | ||
| We're talking about trickle-down economics in any form is a form of evil economics. | ||
| It fails. | ||
| It has failed again and again. | ||
| It only benefits the greedy and the wealthy. | ||
| It does not help poor and low-wage people. | ||
| You said many of your friends, my friend. | ||
| You talk to people and find out what's going to happen in this is that people are going to think that this is going to hurt everybody else. | ||
| And then when the policies are implemented, it's going to come straight down your alley because the majority of the people who benefit from these programs are people who actually are hardworking, low-wage people or people who have faced extreme different kinds of disabilities. | ||
| And lastly, lastly, let's not generalize. | ||
| Let's not lump all people in. | ||
| Poor and low-wage people are some of the most moral people in this country. | ||
| They work hard every day. | ||
| They work to raise their families. | ||
| I met women in West Virginia, white women who were poor and low-wage women making less than a living wage, who are so committed to one another that they sell tacos on the side of the street every Tuesday and keep that money so that they can help other poor women during their monthly cycles and doing times of distress. | ||
| Poor and low-wage people are the backbone of this country. | ||
| And we should stop dismissing. | ||
| You're talking about 140 million people. | ||
| And to suggest that 140 million people are just lazy and stealing and whatnot. | ||
| No, the real theft comes from the greedy. | ||
| And we are not in debt because of the programs that help poor and low-wage people, Social Security, Medicaid, free luck. | ||
| That's not where the debt comes from. | ||
| The debt comes from the unnecessary tax cuts to the wealthy and the wars that we have fought that we're still paying for and many times the unnecessary wars that we were led into by previous administration. | ||
| So let's make sure we get our facts right. | ||
| Do not blame poor and low-wage people for the deficit in this country while you're giving unnecessary trillion dollar, $2 trillion cuts to the wealthy. | ||
| And it has not yet been proven that Doge is finding waste. | ||
| Just because they say it doesn't make it true. | ||
| They are saying some things they are claiming waste means they just don't like it. | ||
| So they cut it. | ||
| We know that there's waste in everything. | ||
| There's certainly waste in corporate America. | ||
| But it's interesting. | ||
| We never complain about waste when we give corporate America a tax cut. | ||
| Somehow we believe if somebody is a wealthy technocrat, if they have money, they don't waste. | ||
| They are just and we just need to give them more and more and more. | ||
| That is not in keeping with our founding documents that say what we're really supposed to be about is life and liberty and justice for all people and that we're supposed to establish justice and watch this. | ||
| Promote the general welfare, my brother. | ||
| Promote the general welfare of all people, not the specific welfare of the wealthy and the greedy, but the general welfare of all people. | ||
| That is what is supposed to be at the fundamental basis of every policy that we pass on this country. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Let's go to Shirley, Stratford, Connecticut, Democratic Color. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you so much for taking my call. | |
| And thank you, Reverend Barbara, for being here. | ||
| I do appreciate all that you have done for the American people because they think patriotism is being greedy, but it's not. | ||
| Patriotism is being what the Bible says in Matthew 25, 31 to 46, when you, when you've done it to the least of these, you've done it unto me. | ||
| And they seem to forget their scripture, the Republicans who are trying to say that they are religious believers when they have allowed this president to demonize, affect the people who've done nothing wrong but run for their lives and seek a better life here in America. | ||
| America is supposed to be the melting pot of the world. | ||
| And it seems like they've forgotten our beginnings. | ||
| But what I want to ask you is that I need to know why they feel that they can usurp the law in America being in the White House. | ||
| And the thing is, is that when Martha Stewart had did some insider trading, they locked her up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But what happened with this president before he decided to stop the tariffs, he went on national TV and said, this is a good time to buy. | |
| And I think that's what insider trading is. | ||
| All right, Shirley, we'll go to Reverend Barbara. | ||
| Well, Shirley, you know, it's amazing how people remember what they want to remember. | ||
| People will say they stand on the Bible and they say they're against a woman's right to choose, but they refuse to stand on the 2,000 scriptures in the Bible that tell us how we're supposed to treat the least of these in public policy, not just in quote unquote a church, but in a nation. | ||
| It's amazing that the scripture you quoted says the nations will be judged by how you treat the least of these. | ||
| We also, you're right, a country of immigrants. | ||
| Everybody criticizing our immigration immigrants are immigrants themselves. | ||
| And notice that the immigrants they most talk about are black and brown because they know that this country is in the midst of shifting demographics. | ||
| And by 2035 or 40, the country will be for the most time in the Western Hemisphere, predominantly black and brown. | ||
| And you get black and brown and progressive white people to join together, they'll be able to shape public policy and shape elections. | ||
| And there's a great fear of that. | ||
| It shouldn't be, but there is. | ||
| And then lastly, you're right. | ||
| When the president engages in something as reckless as he's doing with these tariffs and then announces publicly is a great time to get rich. | ||
| That's almost like saying what he said when he did the first trillion dollar tax cut with the Congress several years ago. | ||
| And then at Mar-a-Lago, he said, basically told his friends, I just made you rich. | ||
| You know, you're signaling, go purchase the stocks now while they're low and buy low and sell highs, how you do it at Wall Street. | ||
| But again, what I want to focus on mostly is that in all of this conversation, and this is why clergy are now mobilizing. | ||
| We really, we criticize Democrats and Republicans that both have places to claim. | ||
| I'm not here as a Democrat Republic, as an independent, and as a moral agent with other moral agents. | ||
| What is missing in the midst of this is this talking about how all of this is going to affect poor working people in this country and poor people in this country. | ||
| And to me, that is a great failure. | ||
| To us, that is a great failure. | ||
| Because if we were having that conversation, if we were showing the nation that if you cut 500,000 people, say from healthcare, 2,500 people or so die. | ||
| There's a death element. | ||
| That blocking living wages has a death element. | ||
| That messing with Social Security and Medicaid actually have death realities. | ||
| That 800 people are dying a day from poverty and low wages in this country. | ||
| If we were showing that, because when we were able, when we were forced to see that 500 people are dying a day from COVID, we call it an epidemic. | ||
| And the nation's consciousness was aroused. | ||
| 800 people dying a day from poverty, and we're not hearing it. | ||
| We're not seeing it. | ||
| And I think that undermines the conscious expansion that's necessary in this country. | ||
| And it allows us to just kind of go down the same route and have the same debates that we have had. | ||
| What we are demanding and saying, until this nation begins with the question, how will this policy impact the poor and low-wage people, first and foremost, the most vulnerable and the hurting in society, then that policy is flawed. | ||
| The budget is flawed. | ||
| It's beneath the call of our Constitution's morality, which is to establish justice. | ||
| It is beneath the call of our deepest religious values, which say that a nation is judged not by how she treats the greatest among us and the wealthiest among us, but how we treat the least of these. | ||
| Remember that scripture says the love of money is the root of all evil. | ||
| And when all that matters is money and how much money can be given to a few, that that produces what I call evil public policy, evil in the sense that it hurts those who need it, lifting up the most, those who are working hard every day, but just can't make it is a violation of their life, their liberty, and their pursuit of happiness. | ||
| And we should be alarmed and morally stirred as a nation that we're having all these conversations about Wall Street and budgets. | ||
| And hardly ever do we hear the critique raised, how will this impact the poor and low-wage people of this country? | ||
| To our audience, if you want to follow Reverend Barber's work, go to breachreprayers.org. | ||
| He is the founder and president. | ||
| He's also the founder and a professor in the practice of public theology and public policy at Yale Divinity School. | ||
| Reverend Barber, thank you for the conversation this morning. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| And thank you to your audience, both sides and all sides. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| We'll take a break. | ||
| Later on the Washington Journal in 30 minutes or so, we'll talk to Ilya Shapiro from the Manhattan Institute. | ||
| He'll join us to talk about why he supports the Trump administration's anti-DEI efforts at several American colleges and universities. | ||
| But first, when we come back from this break, we're going to return to your thoughts on President Trump and Republicans' economic policies. | ||
| There are the lines on your screen. | ||
| Start dialing in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This Saturday, watch the final segment in our 10-part American History TV series, First 100 Days. | |
| We've been exploring the early months of presidential administrations with historians and authors and through the C-SPAN archives. | ||
| And we've learned about accomplishments and setbacks and how events impacted presidential terms and the nation up to present day. | ||
| This Saturday, the first 100 days of Donald Trump's first term. | ||
| As a businessman, he won elective office for the first time in 2016 by defeating Democrat Hillary Clinton. | ||
| President Trump pushed for construction of a wall at the southern border, a travel ban against people from certain countries, repeal of the Affordable Care Act, and a tax cut plan. | ||
| He also nominated Neil Gorsuch for Supreme Court, the first of three justices confirmed to the high court during his presidency. | ||
| Watch the final program in our American History TV series, First 100 Days, Saturday at 7 p.m. Eastern on American History TV on C-SPAN 2. | ||
| Book TV. | ||
| Every Sunday on C-SPAN 2 features leading authors discussing their latest nonfiction books. | ||
| Here's a look at what's coming up this weekend. | ||
| At 7 p.m. Eastern, journalist Michael Wolf provides his behind-the-scenes look at President Trump's 2024 re-election with his book, All or Nothing, How Trump Recaptured America. | ||
| And then at 8 p.m. Eastern, Bard College History professor Sean McMeekin talks about his book, To Overthrow the World, The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism, which was selected as the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's 2025 Conservative Book of the Year. | ||
| And at 9 p.m. Eastern, the New York Times's Annie Carney and Luke Broadwater, authors of Madhouse, chronicle the key events of the 118th Congress and the 2024 presidential election. | ||
| Then at 10 p.m. Eastern on Afterwards, Oklahoma Republican Senator James Langford speaks about his faith, the challenges the country faces, and what he believes needs to happen to improve the country in his book, Turnaround: America's Revival. | ||
| He's interviewed by Wall Street Journal congressional reporter Siobhan Hughes. | ||
| Watch Book TV every Sunday on C-SPAN 2 and find a full schedule in your program guide or watch online anytime at booktv.org. | ||
| Richard Overy is a British historian who has spent most of his professional life writing books about war, primarily World War II. | ||
| Professor Overy's current work is called Reign of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and the Surrender of Japan. | ||
| Liner notes on the cover of the book say, quote, with the development of the B-29 Superfortress in the summer of 1944, strategic bombing, a central component of the Allied war effort against Germany, arrived in the Pacific theater. | ||
| 1945, Japan experienced the three most deadly bombing attacks of the war. | ||
| Professor Richard Overy is 77 and lives in Great Britain and Italy. | ||
| He has written close to 30 books. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Author Richard Overy, with his book, Reign of Ruin, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and the Surrender of Japan on this episode of Book Notes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb. | |
| BookNotes Plus is available wherever you get your podcasts and on the C-SPAN Now app. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| We'll turn to our question that we asked all of you this morning: if you support or oppose President Trump and Republicans' economic policies, there's some latest numbers to share with you from the U.S. Inflation Report. | ||
| It says that inflation cooled to a six-month low in March, but tariff pressures are quickly mounting. | ||
| This is from CNN This Morning, and they note that annual inflation cooled sharply to 2.4% in March, marking a six-month low in consumer prices. | ||
| However, President Trump's sweeping tariffs could potentially speed price increases up. | ||
| Core inflation, excluding food and energy, fell to its lowest rate in nearly four years. | ||
| Economists warned this could be a low point for inflation as tariffs may drive prices significantly higher. | ||
| And we shared with you earlier from the New York Times reporting China's reaction to the president's decision to retaliate against China, raising tariffs to 145% on Wednesday. | ||
| Yes, the Friday morning, this is the news out of China. | ||
| They're raising tariffs on U.S. imports to 125%, and also saying that they have more tools in their toolbox beyond raising tariffs that they could impose on American producers. | ||
| We'll go to Oliver in California, Democratic caller. | ||
| Oliver, support or oppose President Trump and Republicans' economic policies? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I oppose it mostly just because how can anybody trust a guy with this moral compass, the lack of a moral compass? | |
| I mean, he has just proved himself to be a criminal and a thug. | ||
| And I can't believe he just marches the billionaires into the Oval Office and brags about this guy made $2.5 billion and this guy made $900 million. | ||
| Ha ha ha ha. | ||
| They all have a big laugh. | ||
| There's no talk about housing. | ||
| There's no talk about education. | ||
| There's no talk about health care and the things that ordinary middle-class and struggling people need in this country. | ||
| So thank you, Brian Lamb. | ||
| Thank you, C-SPAN, and Go Bernie. | ||
| Thanks so much. | ||
| All right, Oliver there in California, citing some economic concerns there of Americans. | ||
| This is what Quinnipiak found when they did a poll about the top economic concerns. | ||
| 47% said it was the price of food and goods. | ||
| 20% said the cost of housing and rent. | ||
| 17% cited the stock market. | ||
| 6% said it was their job. | ||
| Celine in California, Republican, will turn to you next. | ||
| What do you think about the President and Republicans' economic agenda? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I called to speak to the bishop before, so I just wanted to follow up on something there. | |
| I had done some research on the countries where folks lived the longest and are the healthiest, and they do have government-sponsored health care, which is great, but they also have very strict immigration laws. | ||
| And the European countries that have the highest live the longest and have the best health care aren't in the EU because I think the EU does require some more lenient immigration. | ||
| But anyway, I agree. | ||
| So, Celine, let me ask you then: do you agree with Republicans on immigration, but with Democrats on the economy? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think that you can't have both. | |
| And it seems like Democrats want both. | ||
| They want unfettered immigration and government-sponsored health care. | ||
| I don't think you can. | ||
| You don't think you can have both? | ||
| Celine's thoughts there in California. | ||
| By the way, the House of Republicans yesterday on a vote of 216 to 214 approved the Republican budget blueprint. | ||
| This now allows committees to get to work on the president's plan to extend his 2017 tax cuts, increase spending for his immigration agenda, while also finding trillions in spending cuts to pay for those tax cuts and increased spending on immigration and in other areas. | ||
| Problem is that Republicans in the House and Republicans in the Senate don't agree on how much they need to cut to pay for the president's economic agenda. | ||
| We're asking you this morning if you support or oppose it. | ||
| And this includes the actions that he's taken on tariffs and trade. | ||
| Donald in Florida, Independent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning there. | |
| Yes, I'm 91 years old. | ||
| I was listening to C-SPAN for a long time and really appreciated it. | ||
| But I vehemently oppose this budget because it's really not a budget. | ||
| It's really just a giveaway to the wealthy again. | ||
| And it's going to increase the deficit tremendously. | ||
| So there's no saving. | ||
| If you increase the deficit by taking some money from the impoverished people, you're not saving anything. | ||
| You're increasing the debt limit. | ||
| And so it's really not a budget at all. | ||
| It's a giveaway. | ||
| But in keeping with Reverend Barber and how impactful it is, I suggest for all the people that believe that the low-income people don't deserve help. | ||
| I would suggest to Reverend Barber that he initiates a general strike for everybody under $20,000 a year. | ||
| And when the shelves are empty in the stores, the garbage not picked up, when these hotels are shut down, restaurants are shut down within two weeks. | ||
| I suggest that the people that don't believe these people are impactful in your society will quickly realize they are the most important people that keep this country functioning. | ||
| And the wealthy people would not know where to go. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Bill. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Bill, in Portage, Indiana, Republican. | ||
| Bill, it's your turn. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't see why people don't want to give him a chance. | |
| My God, he's only been in there a few months. | ||
| You know, and as for your other, your guest you just had on there, your big reverend sitting here with his bling on, where do you find these guests? | ||
| And he sits there and he says, it's not true just because you say so. | ||
| Well, he sits there and says so. | ||
| What makes you think he's telling the truth? | ||
| All right, Bill. | ||
| All right, finish your thought? | ||
| What makes what? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What makes him think he's telling the truth? | |
| What makes you think he's telling the truth? | ||
| He's just echoing the left. | ||
| All right, got it. | ||
| Van in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Democratic caller. | ||
| Van? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, good morning. | |
| I'm sitting here thinking about everybody talking about giving money to whoever. | ||
| They're dozing people and stuff like that, but nobody is dozing, what's his name? | ||
| The doge guy. | ||
| What's his name? | ||
| Elon. | ||
| They're not looking at the $8 million a day that he is receiving from this government. | ||
| That is corporate welfare. | ||
| You mean in contracts? | ||
| You're talking about contracts? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whatever. | |
| The money is coming from the government and going to him, whatever the money, whatever it is. | ||
| He's eating off the government. | ||
| All right. | ||
| That's Van's thoughts there in North Carolina. | ||
| Yesterday, Congressional Progressives held a news conference to talk about Elon Musk and in their words, firing him when his special employee, government employee status ends. | ||
| Here is the chair of the Progressive Caucus, Greg Cesar of Texas. | ||
| We would be here for hours if I tried to recount every single one of Musk's illegal actions or abuses or attacks on working Americans, but let me give you just a few. | ||
| In his 80 days in power, Elon Musk has fired more veterans from the federal government than anyone else in history. | ||
| Elon Musk has fired independent watchdogs that were investigating his own companies for corruption and for breaking the law. | ||
| Elon Musk called Social Security a Ponzi scheme, tried to shut down the phone lines that seniors used to get their checks. | ||
| They degraded the system so much that we were being warned that it was on the verge of crashing and collapse. | ||
| Elon Musk demanded access to Americans' most sensitive and private medical records and tax information. | ||
| Elon Musk tried to steer billions of dollars of government contracts towards his own companies while already collecting $8 million a day from the federal government. | ||
| Elon Musk fired nuclear safety workers, air traffic controllers, and people trying to combat ongoing disease outbreaks. | ||
| This must end. | ||
| If we're up to the American people, I think Elon Musk will be fired tomorrow. | ||
| But a typical government employee would have been gone weeks and weeks ago. | ||
| A typical government employee would have been held accountable for these crimes and for this corruption. | ||
| But Musk relies on his so-called special government employee status. | ||
| That gravy train runs out in 50 days. | ||
| Congressman Greg Cesar, Democrat of Texas there. | ||
| Now, Elon Musk was at yesterday's cabinet meeting with the president, and he spoke about the efforts of Doge. | ||
| Here's what he had to say. | ||
| Thanks to your fantastic leadership, this amazing cabinet, and the very talented Doge team, I'm excited to announce that we anticipate savings in FY26 from reduction of waste and fraud by $150 billion. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And some of it is just absurd, like people getting unemployment insurance who haven't been born yet. | |
| I mean, I think anyone can appreciate whether it's, I mean, come on. | ||
| That's just crazy. | ||
| So, you know, some of these things, people ask me, like, well, how are you going to find waste from Ford in the government? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm like, well, actually, just go in any direction. | |
| That's how you find it. | ||
| It's very common. | ||
| It's, as the military would say, target-rich environment. | ||
| So I think we're doing a lot of good in excellent collaboration with the cabinet to achieve these savings. | ||
| And it will actually result in better services for the American people. | ||
| And we're going to be spending their tax dollars in a way that is sensible and fair and good. | ||
| And your people are fantastic. | ||
| In fact, hopefully they'll stay around for the long haul. | ||
| We'd like to keep as many as we can. | ||
| They're great. | ||
| Smart, sharp, right? | ||
| Finding things that nobody would have thought of. | ||
| Very computer savvy. | ||
| We're working with Hard to get the Trump gold card operational, hopefully in the next week or so. | ||
| That'll be very exciting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really exciting. | |
| It's a pathway to citizenship into the United States. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a big deal. | |
| Yep, it's a big deal. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Great job you're doing. | ||
| Elon Musk on the Doge team efforts to cut spending in the federal government. | ||
| We're asking about the President and Republicans' economic agenda. | ||
| Do you support or oppose it? | ||
| Sophia in Raleigh, North Carolina, Independent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Greta. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| Good morning, and thank you so much. | ||
| Please give me a little bit of time. | ||
| I missed my March call. | ||
| I'm calling about the money that is being sent to El Salvador to house the prisoners in the Sikot, which is a horrible place. | ||
| It violates human rights. | ||
| It's a torturous place, and I'm sick about it. | ||
| I would like to remind people that it was Trump who started the first STEP act in his first administration, and that was to help prisoners. | ||
| All right, Sophia, now you've got to come back around to the economy because that's our conversation this morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I did ask if it was okay when I called. | |
| Well, I'm just saying to me, the money that's being spent to house prisoners in El Salvador and other people who had no notice and no due process that it shouldn't be spent for that because it's a horrible place. | ||
| Understood. | ||
| Sophia's thoughts there in Raleigh, North Carolina. | ||
| We'll go to John, Cleveland, Tennessee. | ||
| Hi, John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. | |
| I'm poor Trump. | ||
| What the administration's doing, but you allowed that last guest to lie. | ||
| You played Speaker Johnson. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| You played Speaker Johnson. | ||
| And I said that he said they want cutting none. | ||
| And then you allowed that so-called preacher Proverbs 310. | ||
| All right, Ken, McDonald, Pennsylvania, Democratic caller. | ||
| Hi, Ken. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Morning. | ||
| I agree 100% with what President Trump's doing. | ||
| As far as the tariffs that are going on, we've been getting taken advantage of for many, many years. | ||
| And now we've got somebody in there who is standing up to that. | ||
| All right, Ken, you may be interested in this report from the budget lab at Yale, the fiscal and economic effects of the revised April 9th tariffs. | ||
| This was updated yesterday, so it doesn't include retaliation by China today. | ||
| But the budget lab estimated that the effects of all U.S. tariffs and foreign retaliation implemented in 2025 through April 9th, including the revised April 9th pause. | ||
| Current tariff rate, consumers face an overall average effective tariff rate of 27%, the highest since 1903. | ||
| This is only slightly different from where the effective rate was before the late April 9th announcement. | ||
| Even after consumption shifts, the average tariff rate will be 18.5%, the highest since 1933. | ||
| Overall price level and distributional effects. | ||
| The price level from all 2025 tariffs rises by 2.9% in the short run, the equivalent of an average per household consumer loss of $4,700 in $2024. | ||
| Annual pre-substitution losses for households at the bottom of the income distribution are $2,100. | ||
| The post-substitution price increases settles at 1.7%, a $2,700 loss per household. | ||
| We'll go to Michael in Massachusetts, Independent. | ||
| Michael, your turn. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| Thank you very much. | ||
| I just want to remind most of you callers, the United States is a capitalist republic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's not a democracy. | |
| If people want to live under Western European rules, then move out of the country. | ||
| It's the unions who are fighting for power and the government unions. | ||
| Shouldn't have been allowed. | ||
| You've got a capitalist society. | ||
| It's a democratic republic. | ||
| And people who whine, Republicans or Democrats, are just politics. | ||
| It's not the Constitution. | ||
| So the economic policies that we're trying to return to for the benefit of jobs and people's lives is what I would say that people should think about. | ||
| All right, Michael. | ||
| An update for all of you on our programming here on C-SPAN today. | ||
| We're covering at 10.30 a.m. Eastern Time, the Afghanistan War Commission. | ||
| They're going to be looking at the early U.S. decisions in the Afghanistan war. | ||
| And we'll have live coverage of that at 10.30 a.m. Eastern Time right here on C-SPAN on C-SPAN Now, our free video mobile app, and online on demand at c-span.org. | ||
| At 1 p.m. Eastern Time, a little after 1, the former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff speaks ahead of a discussion on U.S. tech priorities and competition with China. | ||
| The event will focus on a range of topics, including AI, cryptocurrency, and critical mineral supply chains. | ||
| That's live from the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy, starting just after 1 p.m. Eastern Time on C-SPAN 2, C-SPANNOW or C-SPAN.org. | ||
| And then also watch today, the White House will hold a press briefing with the press secretary Caroline Levitt, and that will be live on C-SPAN. | ||
| You can also watch on the free C-SPAN Now video app or online at c-SPAN.org. | ||
| Arnold in Ravenswood, West Virginia, Republican Arnold. | ||
| What do you think about the president's economic moves? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Am I on? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Hey, I got two things I'd like, and I'd like for you not to hang up on me if you can. | ||
| Number one is Elon Musk is going to make a lot of money for what he's doing because I believe there's a law that states if you find any fraud or abuse, you get a percentage of what you find. | ||
| And he could collect a percentage of all the fraud and abuse they found. | ||
| That's number one. | ||
| Number two question is, that preacher, I think he's wrong on what he said because this law that they're wanting to vote on is a law that's already passed. | ||
| And what the law is, is to keep it going. | ||
| If you vote to keep it going or to eliminate it so that it's going and the law, the taxes come back. | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| All right, Arnold there. | ||
| And in West Virginia, we're going to take a short break when we come back. | ||
| A conversation with Elia Shapiro of the Manhattan Institute. | ||
| We're going to talk about his support for the Trump administration's anti-DEI crackdown at several American colleges and universities. | ||
| Stay with us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
American History TV, Saturdays on C-SPAN 2, exploring the people and events that tell the American story. | |
| This weekend, beginning at 9:30 a.m. Eastern, all-day coverage of the 2024 Lincoln Forum held in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. | ||
| Authors and historians discuss Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War with presentations on Canada's role in the war, African-American reactions to Lincoln's death, and soldiers' motivations to fight. | ||
| At 7 p.m. Eastern, watch our American history TV series First 100 Days as we look at the start of presidential terms. | ||
| This week, we focus on the early months of President Donald Trump's first term in 2017, including the withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement and construction of a border wall between the United States and Mexico. | ||
| And at 8 p.m. Eastern on Lectures in History, Santa Clara University history professor Sonia Gomez on the intimate relationships between people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds that occurred in Hawaii and Japan during and immediately after World War II. | ||
| Exploring the American story, watch American History TV Saturdays on C-SPAN 2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at c-span.org/slash history. | ||
| Sunday, on C-SPAN's Q&A, travel writer Rick Steves talks about his 1978 journey along the Hippie Trail and the 60,000-word journal he kept of the trip, which he recently published as a book. | ||
| During the 3,000-mile trek, the then 23-year-old Steves and a friend visited Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal. | ||
| He recalls the people he met along the way, the challenges of traveling in foreign countries in the 1970s, and the lifelong impact the trip had on him. | ||
| It's fun to look back on it with the help of the journal and see how naïve and green and uneducated I was. | ||
| But it's the growing pains of a global perspective, of gaining a global perspective. | ||
| And I've got this notion that culture shock is a good thing. | ||
| A lot of people try to avoid culture shock. | ||
| To me, culture shock is constructive. | ||
| It's the growing pains of a broadening perspective. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Rick Steves, with his book On the Hippie Trail, Sunday night at 8 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN's QA. | |
| You can listen to Q&A wherever you get your podcasts and on the C-SPAN Now app. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Joining us this morning is Ilya Shapiro, Senior Fellow and Constitutional Studies Director at the Manhattan Institute and also author of this book, Lawless: The Miseducation of America's Elites. | ||
| Let's start with your book, Mr. Shapiro. | ||
| What do you write about here? | ||
| I talk about the illiberal takeover of higher education and especially legal education. | ||
| And I focus on law schools not just because I'm a lawyer, but because whatever craziness is going on in English or sociology departments, law schools graduate the gatekeepers of our legal and political institutions. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And the problem is you have these illiberal mobs, again, people that don't agree with the basic academic missions or the core classical liberal values of any educational institution like free speech, due process, equality under the law. | |
| They want to burn it all down and remake it according to a different kind of privilege hierarchy, viewing all issues through lenses of race, class, sex, and other identity categories. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's not good. | |
| And I talk about the failures of ideology, bureaucracy, leadership, and what we can do about it. | ||
| So what's at the root of this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, a number of things. | |
| First of all, is the return of critical theory, or in the legal context, critical legal studies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
These are kind of postmodern theories that when I was in law school 20 years ago, we had heard about it. | |
| It was something from the 80s and early 90s. | ||
| We thought it had been put back in kind of a niche corner of the sociology department, but now the crits are back. | ||
| And as I was saying, the idea is our institutions, our law is illegitimate because it has imbalances of power structures built in, needs to be torn down, rebuilt in a host of different ways. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And there's sub-areas there: critical legal, critical race theory, queer theory, all these other things. | |
| But the problem isn't just the ideology or the faculty bias towards activism rather than education. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's the bureaucratic explosion. | |
| And especially in the last decade, non-teaching staff has ballooned, and most of that growth has been in the DEI space. | ||
| And the problem there isn't with those words. | ||
| Diversity is a good thing. | ||
| You can have people from different perspectives bringing a richer conversation, preventing groupthink. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Equity means treating people fairly. | |
| Inclusion, people feel welcome where they're working or they're studying. | ||
| But the problem is how this has been implemented here with a focus on higher education is in an Orwellian way the opposite of those things to prevent intellectual diversity, to go for equal outcomes rather than opportunity, and to exclude those who dissent from the prevailing progressive orthodoxy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's been a negative trend on campus culture where people are afraid to speak in class. | |
| They want to just keep their head down lest they be canceled. | ||
| Programs that indoctrinate rather than educate. | ||
| And I think people recognize that there's a crisis in higher education and there's these different facets that have driven us there. | ||
| Well, what's the methodology that colleges and universities are using and what evidence do you have to back up your arguments that you just made about the impact of them? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The methodology, I mean, in terms of teaching, there are classes across the board that skew away from traditional disciplines, history, political science, economics, what have you, and more have an activist bent. | |
| In terms of faculty hiring, there's discrimination by viewpoint or ideology as well as by race, which is illegal, the Supreme Court has held. | ||
| And these bureaucratic growth of non-teaching staff, where especially in the so-called elite places, Yale, Stanford, there are many multiples of non-teaching bureaucrats and often diversity officers rather than faculty themselves. | ||
| And what are the numbers? | ||
| Have you seen the numbers? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| I mean, it's all in my book. | ||
| I've written it up in many, many op-eds over the months at a place like Stanford. | ||
| The number of non-teaching staff have grown 30% from 2017 to 22 alone. | ||
| There are now six times the number of administrators than undergrads, about triple the number of faculty. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that's replicated across the board. | |
| We're seeing, you know, this is part of what's driving tuition increases, the student loan crisis, all of these other things that we talk about. | ||
| But it's not so much the finances that are, that's the problem, but the reorientation of the mission of universities. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And for example, the average university of the old Power Five football conferences. | |
| Now it's kind of a little bit different, but 65 large universities, according to a study in 2022, have an average of 45 DEI officers, which is more than the number of history professors, more than the number of people providing legally required accommodations for students with disabilities. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And there are more statistics if you really want to drill down. | |
| We're talking with Ilya Shapiro this morning of the Manhattan Institute about the Trump administration's policies towards colleges and universities. | ||
| Mr. Shapiro, the president signed an executive order to withhold federal funding for colleges and universities that allow illegal protests. | ||
| Define an illegal protest. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| I mean, all schools have policies that protect free speech but draw a clear line between speech and expression and things that disrupt classes or student programs or block access for students to go to the library, go to their academic buildings, go to their dorms. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We've seen lots of protests and encampments that harass and intimidate students, that vandalize takeovers of academic buildings, most notably at Columbia. | |
| And the universities have largely been absent, have not been enforcing their own rules. | ||
| They've allowed this stuff to fester, and I think that is what the administration is targeting, as well as general campus climate going on longer than just the last year, year and a half, where they're not protecting student and faculty civil rights and free speech rights. | ||
| And the president has said that he has the power to act when it comes to campus free speech. | ||
| What federal laws exist that give the president that power? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, it's not just the president. | |
| I mean, he signs executive orders to direct the various executive branch agencies and officials to enforce laws in certain ways, to prioritize certain kinds of investigations. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And so most of the action hasn't been from the president. | |
| It's been from the Department of Education, investigating, blocking funds going to universities. | ||
| Most of it is centered in Title VI, which provides that universities that get federal funding have to abide by certain civil rights regulations. | ||
| There are other federal strings attached to funding. | ||
| This is nothing new. | ||
| We don't need a new law to do this. | ||
| When you accept federal funds, whether you're at Harvard or whether you're a school that less people know about, and you take those funds, you have to abide by everything from accounting standards to anti-discrimination law to a whole host of other things. | ||
| And so the Education Department and its Office of Civil Rights is focused on looking at anti-Semitism, looking at free speech, and those schools that for too long have allowed a toxic environment to fester where students are sometimes afraid to go to class, can't speak up, are being have complaints filed against them for various reasons. | ||
| That's what the administration is targeting. | ||
| And we've seen the settlement, for example, from Columbia that is looking to reform its ways. | ||
| It's interesting how this is playing out as a campus-by-campus negotiation rather than lawsuits. | ||
| We'll go to calls. | ||
| Terry, Bellwood, Illinois, Democratic Caller. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| Can you hear me? | ||
| Yes, we can. | ||
| Questionnaire comment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, I was asking, Mr. Shapiro, why does me as a black person feel like when I hear DEI, it's just like a slash at my door towards the black society? | |
| And I don't think that's scared from my point of view. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Mr. Shapiro? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, if I can understand that, I mean, DEI, you have to understand, has nothing to do with federal and state civil rights laws. | |
| So that count I gave of the average number of DEI officers, for example, I think the biggest school is Michigan, which had a full-time 261 people, double that if you count part-time, $30 million a year. | ||
|
unidentified
|
None of that has to do with legal requirements, either federal or state. | |
| Title IX with respect to gender equality, equal employment opportunity, anti-discrimination laws under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. | ||
|
unidentified
|
None of that is DEI. | |
| So those things, the compliance officers, the lawyers, and their staffs, they were there when I was in college and law school 20, 25 years ago. | ||
| They're still there. | ||
| DEI is an overlay that claims to be part of that tradition, but really it's this noxious postmodern ideology that forces people to view issues or tells people to view issues through these narrow identity categories. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It balkanizes campuses. | |
| And, Greta, here is the bitter irony of all of this. | ||
| They fail on their own terms. | ||
| That is, campus climate surveys show that student feelings of belonging on campus generally, comfort with racial diversity specifically, is inversely correlated to the size and budgets of these DEI offices. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So, this has nothing to do with civil rights and everything to do with propagating postmodern racialist theories. | |
| Renee, Pikesville, Maryland, Democratic caller, you're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| So, to your person, because I've been taking notes, and so like there's so many things over the map. | ||
| But you talk about the president and you're trying to give him a pass. | ||
| What is the president, if he's so busy, why should he be concerned about Columbia University or Harvard or anything like that, and to threaten to take their funds? | ||
| The whole point of a university is diversity, equity, inclusion, having folks. | ||
| And just like the other caller just said, we know when you say DEI, you're talking about black people. | ||
| Who has benefited from affirmative action the most? | ||
| Who has benefited from diversity and inclusion? | ||
| It's not black folks. | ||
| So, the one thing I wanted to know from you, because there's a couple of things, you were talking about with the Supreme Court. | ||
| Isn't that activism? | ||
| They didn't have to come back with Roe v. Wade. | ||
| It has been decided. | ||
| Isn't the five on there? | ||
| That's activism. | ||
| And one of the things that I'm really upset when we talk about this as far as funding with and the president, DEI, is with the Naval Academy in terms of what is your feel of banning of books, the Naval Academy having to throw out these things. | ||
| We know what's going on when folks say DEI. | ||
| All right, Renee, a lot there. | ||
| Ela Shapiro. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I mean, I think racial discrimination is wrong. | |
| And so giving preferences to people who are less qualified based on the color of their skin is wrong no matter who benefits, whether it's Asian, white, black, Hispanic, mix of, you know, it's a nefarious game, classification game that we've been involved with. | ||
| But the DEI, the anti-DEI effort, is broader than simply affirmative action or racial preferences or what have you. | ||
| And DEI is more than about race, by the way. | ||
| It's also gender, sexual orientation, ethnic background, all of these different things that form part of the intersectional matrix if you go all highfalute and academic and philosophical and whatnot. | ||
| And I don't think it's President Trump who is focused on Columbia. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's not drilling down in their policies and practices and statistics. | |
| He's issued some executive orders directing, first of all, the entire federal government to get rid of the DEI commissars that President Biden put in, some of the programs that President Obama put in, the race balancing that dates back to Lyndon Johnson. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, I talk to law students and college students sometimes about this stuff. | |
| LBJ might as well be Andrew Johnson, ancient history. | ||
| But some of the seeds of the racial balkanization that we're seeing now that's blossomed under these DEI programs dates all the way to back then. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And again, this is not about anti-discrimination laws. | |
| The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a good thing. | ||
| People shouldn't discriminate based on race or these other immutable characteristics. | ||
| What we're talking about now is indoctrination. | ||
| And the purpose of universities, with due respect to this last caller, is not diversity, equity, inclusion. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's truth-seeking, it's knowledge creation, it's education. | |
| Jeff in Spring Hill, Florida, Democratic caller, let's hear from you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| First, I'd just like to make a quick comment to the world and apologize for America's actions of treating our NATO allies, our allies from the North and South, for basically treating them like hostile countries. | ||
| The other part I'd like to make is I find Mr. Shapiro to be a person who's representing something that no longer exists. | ||
| He says it's constitutional studies, but America is no longer a republic as he represents it. | ||
| It is a democracy because the Constitution is dead. | ||
| The Republican Terrorist Party killed it when they refused to prosecute a proven traitor to our country. | ||
| And Jeff, who are you talking about? | ||
| Prosecution of what? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Who? | |
| When the Republican terrorist parties in the Senate refused to listen to any information regarding the insurrection of January 6th, and they refused to prosecute a president who proved himself to be a traitor and set up a rally. | ||
| The theme of the rally was for understood the argument. | ||
| Mr. Shapiro, your response. | ||
| I think that self-rebuts. | ||
| I don't really need to say anything. | ||
| Dan, Palm Bay, Florida, Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I had a question. | |
| I was watching the other day on my phone, James O'Keefe, where he was doing an investigation into a college here in Melbourne, Florida, called Florida Institute of Technology, where basically, you know how the president basically is saying we're going to cut funding for colleges that have DEI courses, things like that. | ||
| Well, these people, the president was having a meeting with staff, and I guess basically they are just talking about just changing the wording. | ||
| That way they still get the funding. | ||
| So I do want to make people aware of that. | ||
| And also, had a question. | ||
| Every time you guys have a guest on that is funded by George Soros, you guys don't ask how they are funded. | ||
| Like your last guest there, the past year, funded by George Soros, but you guys didn't ask how they were funded. | ||
| And I find that curious. | ||
| All right. | ||
| All right, Dan. | ||
| Mr. Shapiro. | ||
| Change in wording. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So just changing titles of people or taking down websites without changing programs or orientations or trainings, moving people around without getting at the underlying substance, that's a violation of federal law. | ||
| And so, I mean, it's going to take a lot of resources for the Department of Education or the Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division to look into what different schools are doing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I imagine the focus is probably more on the larger schools, your Columbias, your UCLAs, your large state schools, Michigan, what have you, than on FIT, Florida Institute of Technology. | |
| But there are whistleblower hotlines. | ||
| So if you know that some local school is not abiding by federal law, you can call in and maybe they'll investigate. | ||
| But absolutely, this is not just kind of a semantic game where as long as you get rid of the magic words DEI, you're okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, it's more about getting rid of these noxious systems and structures. | |
| All right, Kevin's in Suitland, Maryland. | ||
| Hi, Kevin. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, how are you doing? | |
| I just had a quick question. | ||
| DEIA came about because Caucasian businessmen would not let black businessmen get contracts. | ||
| So white people actually came up with DEIA to counterbalance that. | ||
| And most people that benefit from that is white women. | ||
| That's all my question is. | ||
| All right, Mr. Shapiro, you looked at the data. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What did you find? | |
| Well, again, this conflates DEI with affirmative action somewhat. | ||
| There's an overlap, of course, but DEI as such didn't exist until about 15, 20 years ago. | ||
| When you're talking about anti-discrimination law and it's morphing into racial or gender balancing or what have you, the caller does have a point that especially at university admissions, women benefited a lot, | ||
|
unidentified
|
White women included, and that's partly why things have developed such that now some people who believe in affirmative action or believe in balancing these sorts of things want to apply it to men, because for a while now we've had on, whether at the undergraduate level or graduate school, there are more women than men in most departments, and so you know I'd I'd rather not get into that one way or another, | |
| but I'm I'm happy to keep the civil rights laws that stop white businessmen from edging out black businessmen improperly. | ||
| We'll go to Wilsonville, Oregon. | ||
| Kurt is a Democrat watching there. | ||
| Good morning to you, Kurt. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes ma'am, my question is because I kind of have an idea, but we really need to keep the ADA American Disabilities Act an idea Individuals With Disability Act because you know, Mr. Trump and Elon, they're like, well, we're gonna give it over to the states. | |
| I don't think that would work. | ||
| And also DEI, as part of this whole conversation, I was wondering if what the current speaker thinks. | ||
| Mr. Shapiro, I haven't seen executive actions relating to the ADA, the Americans With Disabilities Act. | ||
| There are some abuses with respect to websites, for example, and how that accessibility works. | ||
| There are people that make a living going around looking at companies' websites, seeing if they're accessible to people that have various disabilities that make it harder to use the the internet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So there may be some adjustments needed there. | |
| I don't know what the caller means about sending it back to the states. | ||
| It is a federal law and so unless that's repealed or changed legislatively in some way, I don't think states really play. | ||
| I mean they have their own disabilities laws. | ||
| But as far as the ADA or the IDEA, which is relates more to K-12 education and individual assessments and education plans, I don't think that's changing anytime soon. | ||
| Our guest this morning is Ela Shapiro, with the Manhattan Institute senior fellow and constitutional studies director. | ||
| He's also the author of this book Lawless, The Miseducation of America's Elites. | ||
| We'll go to Charles in Buffalo, New York Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi Charles, Hi, good morning. | |
| I'm concerned that I want to ask Mr. Shapiro, his director of constitutional studies, I'm concerned about his legal basis for his policy decisions with regard to DEI and the issues associated with the current government and the abrogation of First Amendment rights. | ||
| Clearly, I want to know what his constitutional basis is. | ||
| Is there a basis in social construct? | ||
| What is his legal basis? | ||
| All right. | ||
| Mr. Shapiro. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Well, the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause says that people can't be treated differently by government on the basis of race and other categories. | ||
| Then the Civil Rights Act of 1964 built on that to apply anti-discrimination protections to a host of categories. | ||
| There have been amendments to the education part, Title VI, Title II of the Civil Rights Act, of the Education Acts. | ||
| And all of that overlay says that, for example, Title VI says that universities are responsible for ensuring that there is equal access to educational opportunity. | ||
| And if they're aware that on-campus organizations or individuals are preventing other students or in the faculty context, what have you, from accessing those equal educational opportunities. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And if the university does nothing about that, then it becomes liable under those federal laws. | |
| But at the end of the day, this is a battle of how we apply these things. | ||
| And President Trump rescinded a number of executive orders by President Biden, Obama, as I said, even going back to Lyndon Johnson, that we're applying these laws in different ways that he felt that this administration feels is illegal and that builds on Supreme Court precedent against, for example, using racial preferences in admissions. | ||
| Just broadly speaking, looking at the President's actions, you've said in a New York Times article that the Trump administration isn't exactly being legally precise in a lot of what it is done. | ||
| What did you mean? | ||
| And what approach? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, I was saying that the President himself, he's not a lawyer, so he's not the one who's delineating these regulations and looking at the sub-provisions and what have you. | |
| So when he issues a statement, when he talks to the media, he's not a lawyer. | ||
| He's not being legally precise. | ||
| But actually the lawyered up stuff, whether the executive orders, whether the investigations that have been launched, I mean, those legal teams have worked overtime both during the transition and since Trump became president. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think they're doing a good job of crossing their T's and dotting their I's in this area. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Jack, Holland, Ohio, Independent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, thank you. | |
| I'd like to guess what would be his definition or the difference between affirmative action and DEI. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What would be his difference, his understanding of it? | |
| All right, Jack. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Mr. Shapiro. | ||
| Yeah, well, affirmative action, as originally conceived, was about making sure that when you're recruiting workers, when you're recruiting students, you're not just going to the same networks that have prevailed over time, which acts to the detriment of various underprivileged people, whether racial minorities or otherwise. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So, Harvard, when it was recruiting students in the 50s and the 40s, would predominantly look at maybe a dozen prep schools in the Northeast. | |
| And the affirmative action says, you know, you take affirmative action to look at public schools in St. Louis, where I'm recording this, where I'm appearing from right now, and things like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Now, a part of that was morphed rather quickly into racial quotas, racial balancing. | |
| The original conception of affirmative action under the Kennedy administration was not that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was simply meaning don't discriminate based on these various categories and make sure that when you're recruiting, you draw your net widely and don't just go to your old boys' networks. | |
| So, you know, some people use affirmative action as shorthand for racial and gender and other kind of identity-based preferences. | ||
| And that's where it bleeds into the DEI stuff, which is this overlay, this structure of postmodern theory that trains people, trains entering freshmen in college or your HR offices in corporate America, trains people to look at what they call systemic structural racism that requires acting in race-conscious or gender-conscious ways to remedy. | ||
| We'll go to Lewis in Salisbury, North Carolina, Democratic caller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, top of the morning to you. | |
| We all know what DEI represents. | ||
| It was no problem with DEI until this president came in and just turned it into the N-word. | ||
| But I want to ask you, and I think you kind of like touched on it a little bit, but what I want to know is that I was reading on one of the charts for the labor, and they said that there were like seven categories of DEI recipients. | ||
| And the first one was white women. | ||
| The second one was CEO white men. | ||
| Then people with disabilities, Native American, Hispanics, gays, and you know who's the last one on the total poll for DEI? | ||
| You guessed it, African Americans. | ||
| But Donald Trump, if y'all don't mind me calling his name out, Donald Trump, he turned it into now a negative thing that Walmart is paying for it, Target is paying for it, and any other company who say they get rid of their DEI program is going to pay for it. | ||
| Because people are thinking, especially people on C-SPAN, they thinking that it's the majority of black people who really benefit from it. | ||
| Would you please tell the audience that black people are not really benefiting from DEI? | ||
| It's the white people. | ||
| All right, Louis. | ||
| Mr. Shapiro. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, my whole point is I don't think anybody benefits from DEI. | |
| It balkanizes society. | ||
| It worsens race relations. | ||
| It further polarizes an already polarized political discourse. | ||
| I think it should be gotten rid of altogether. | ||
| And we should treat people as individuals on their own merits without regard to these categories that have no bearing on educational potential or capability of doing a particular job. | ||
| Crystal River, Florida is where Israel is at. | ||
| A Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| Hi. | ||
| I'm calling because I'm hearing DEI and I'm hearing about race and I'm hearing about this and that. | ||
| But I wanted to know because we as a Republican believe that the godly principles that are not established in any function of government or anything in that regard discredits and it starts watering down the great principles of what this nation stands for. | ||
| So how can you respond to that? | ||
| Mr. Shapiro? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, if I'm understanding the caller correctly, I think I can say to that that one of the problems with DEI is that indeed it goes against America's founding principles in the sense of treating people as individuals, | |
| having equal protection of the laws, free speech in the higher ed context, academic freedom, due process, all of these things those who call themselves woke radicals or social justice warriors think are tropes of white supremacy. | ||
| Or you look at the slides that are training the diversity officers, the National Association of Higher Education Diversity Officers, and it talks about how things like intellectual rigor and academic excellence, that these are aspects of white supremacy. | ||
|
unidentified
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I mean, I think it's a very negative thing that goes against the founding ethos of America where, you know, we treat people fairly and equally and let them try to achieve their vision of the good life. | |
| Russell in Louisiana, Republican, welcome to the conversation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| I don't know exactly when things started going real sideways in our country the way it is today. | ||
| You know, we was raised and taught right from wrong, reading, writing, and arithmetic, and knowing sure what bathroom to go in. | ||
|
unidentified
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Things have become unbearable in a sense when you think about where our country started from and where we at today. | |
| I have a hard time understanding, but the main thing I wanted to say was I've just turned 59 years old. | ||
| And in my whole lifetime, the presidents that we've been through, and I'm a hardcore Republican, all the presidents that I've been through, Republican and Democrat, in my whole lifetime, we've had veterans living on the streets. | ||
| With the money this country generates with taxes and the economic growth over time, with that kind of money, especially what Elon is funding with all the waste and everything, and we still got veterans living on the streets. | ||
| And some of it is self-hurt. | ||
| They hurt themselves. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Russell heard your point. | ||
| The money should go to the veterans. | ||
| Let me go to Linda, who's in Southgate, Michigan, Democratic caller. | ||
| Linda, your question or comment here for Mr. Shapiro? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Well, he's sort of dancing around a bit because he talks about where there is systemic racism, definitely. | ||
| I mean, anyone intelligent realizes that. | ||
| Anyone that's worked in any kind of a corporate situation realizes that. | ||
| But what I'm calling about is then you say that it's about indoctrination, which I don't know what that has to do with DEI, indoctrination. | ||
| You said that that was the definition. | ||
| I want to know why that executive order was written to get rid of all DEI. | ||
| Why did that necessitate taking any pictures of black people out of any government books, such as taking Colin Powell out, black people and women? | ||
| And it even got to the point where there was a picture of Enola Gay, which I'm sure you know what that was famous for. | ||
| But the person who was doing this cleaning out of the DEI did not know and took it out because it had the word gay. | ||
| So please explain to me. | ||
| Also, let's get a response to what you just said. | ||
| Mr. Shapiro. | ||
|
unidentified
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I think there's been some what lawyers call malicious compliance, meaning that you interpret a directive in a way that makes the political officials who are putting it into place look bad. | |
| It's certainly not in compliance with, it's not a reasonable reading of the executive orders against DEI to eliminate Colin Powell or any other black historical figures or American officials, what have you, from our history books or from websites or anything like that. | ||
|
unidentified
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I think there was one instance where I heard about Jackie Robinson was taken out. | |
| I mean, that's ridiculous. | ||
| He's an anti-DEI person in the sense that he had to be better than everyone else to be able to play in the league, given the racism and the barriers in Major League Baseball at the time. | ||
| So that is, whether it's incompetence but more likely malicious compliance, as I said, that is not what fighting against DEI is about. | ||
| Roderick, Detroit, Michigan, Independent. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hey, how's everybody doing? | |
| Morning. | ||
|
unidentified
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First of all, this is a long line of Republican thinking that goes back to the Dixiecrats becoming part of the Republican Party. | |
| They have found ways to integrate their racist ideology into public policy, and they've dressed it up to look really nice. | ||
| But what they say they want and what they are willing to do are two very different things. | ||
| And they will go after anything that they think is against their ability, a particular group of people, to command control of the United States. | ||
| They do not believe in diversity. | ||
| They do not believe in equity. | ||
| They do not believe in inclusion. | ||
| They believe in power. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| All right, Mr. Shapiro, your response to that caller. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm not going to dignify that. | |
| Uria in Houston, Texas, is a Democratic caller, and you're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Hello. | ||
| I really appreciate this fellow being on because this discussion needs to be had. | ||
| My position or my question to him is all of the things that DEI and racism and all of that stuff is American history. | ||
| There's no reason why the victims of that type of prejudice should see DEI and reducing it or the affirmative action stuff being reduced. | ||
| They shouldn't see that as some good thing. | ||
| So I'd like to know why you feel the way you feel. | ||
| Mr. Shapiro? | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's, I mean, people should learn our history. | |
| Kids, students should learn all of American history. | ||
| You know, getting rid of DEI does not mean whitewashing our history. | ||
| It also doesn't mean that our history should be portrayed as America's a litany of bad things from the very beginning, that it's morally corrupt from beginning to end. | ||
| In fact, that's DEI's point and why it's had such a pernicious effect on the minds of our young people. | ||
| But absolutely, if there are places, obviously curricula for K-12 is controlled at the local level. | ||
| There's a little bit of involvement, obviously, by state boards of education and things like that. | ||
| But if there are school districts that don't teach, for example, in Oklahoma, the Tulsa massacre, we just celebrated marked a century, I think, last year or the year before that should be taught, or the Trail of Tears about the expulsion of Native Americans. | ||
|
unidentified
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There's nobody that goes through school without hearing about slavery or Jim Crow or what have you. | |
| But if there's other episodes that are whitewashed, they need to be, we need to learn our whole history, the good, the bad, the ugly, the interesting. | ||
| And getting rid of DEI has nothing to do with not teaching our history. | ||
| Steve in Texas, Republican. | ||
| Steve, question or comment? | ||
|
unidentified
|
A little bit of oath. | |
| I'd just like to say that a wonderful Christian African-American woman, Alice Marie Johnson, was hired by Donald Trump. | ||
| First of all, Donald Trump got her out of prison when Obama didn't even bother. | ||
| He got this wonderful Christian African-American woman out of prison back in 2018, and now he has put her over the parole, or she's the parole czar of getting people out of prison that are wrongfully jailed for way too long. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And Steve, your question for our guest? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello? | |
| Your question for our guest. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, yeah, yeah. | |
| Well, I'd just like to say that that counter thing is saying that Donald Trump is a racist and all that. | ||
| And Israel loves Donald Trump. | ||
| I mean, they named a city after him. | ||
| It's called Trump Heights, and it's in Goland Heights. | ||
| I'm going to leave it there, Steve, because we're running out of time. | ||
| Ilo Shapiro, your final thoughts on this topic this morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I mean, the last caller talked about the Trump administration's own hiring practices. | |
| And by some measures, the cabinet is one of the most diverse that we've ever seen. | ||
| And certainly I have personal friends who identify as all different kinds of identity categories that have gone into the administration. | ||
| So, you know, the head of civil rights at the Justice Department is Harmeet Dillon, who's of Indian heritage. | ||
| So look, there is a difference between fulfilling America's promise of treating everyone fairly, allowing everyone to have liberty and to be able to pursue their own version of happiness. | ||
|
unidentified
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There's a difference between that and under the guise of acting for civil rights or equality, putting in a noxious ideology that divides people, that denies the best of America. | |
| And so no human is perfect. | ||
| No administration is going to be perfect. | ||
| There could be things that could be better with how executive orders are done or how they're implemented. | ||
| That's for sure. | ||
| This is a human enterprise. | ||
| But the thrust of what the Trump administration is doing with respect to responding to the crisis in higher education at a time when these institutions enjoy the lowest level of public confidence in our history, I think at the end of the day, will be a positive force. | ||
| Ila Shapiro, Senior Fellow and Constitutional Studies Director at Manhattan Institute, we thank you for the conversation this morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. |