| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
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As well. | |
| And I don't mean to minimize them at all. | ||
| We need you to shine your light brightly to help us address them. | ||
| Believe in yourself. | ||
| Be willing to adapt and learn. | ||
| And make a personal commitment to do something special. | ||
| Create something special that will outlast you. | ||
| As you leave here today, know this. | ||
| You are not finished. | ||
| In fact, you are just getting started. | ||
| The world is waiting for your ideas, your voices, your courage. | ||
| Alexander Hamilton sings in the opening number of Hamilton, there's one million things I haven't done just yet, but just you wait. | ||
| Just you wait. | ||
| I know I speak for everybody here when I say I can't wait to see what's next for you. | ||
| We believe in you. | ||
| Go forward with purpose, with passion, and the belief that your best work and your greatest impact is still to come. | ||
| Congratulations, class of 2025, and thank you so much for giving me a chance to share this day with you. | ||
| Today, White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt will speak to reporters. | ||
| She's likely to face questions on a federal court's recent decision to block President Trump from imposing tariffs on foreign imports. | ||
| A three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of International Trade said the president exceeded his authority under an emergency powers law, which was used to first announce the tariffs back in April. | ||
| We'll have live coverage of today's White House briefing on C-SPAN. | ||
| You can also watch on the free C-SPAN Now video app or online at c-SPAN.org. | ||
| Welcome to today's Washington Journal. | ||
| We'll start with a headline from the front page of the Wall Street Journal, and it says this, court strikes down Trump tariffs. | ||
| A federal trade court ruled President Trump didn't have the authority to impose sweeping tariffs on virtually every nation, voiding the levies that have sparked a global trade war and threatened to upend the world economy. | ||
| Decision on Wednesday from the Court of International Trade blocked one of the Trump administration's most audacious assertions of executive power under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977. | ||
| Shortly after the decision was handed down, lawyers for the Trump administration notified the court they will appeal. | ||
| Also, here's the AP. | ||
| Elon Musk is leaving the Trump administration after leading effort to slash federal government. | ||
| It says his departure announced Wednesday evening marks the end of a turbulent chapter that included thousands of layoffs, the evisceration of government agencies, and reams of litigation. | ||
| Despite the upheaval, the billionaire entrepreneur struggled in the unfamiliar environment of Washington, and he accomplished far less than he hoped. | ||
| It says that he dramatically reduced his target for cutting spending from $2 trillion to $1 trillion to $150 billion and increasingly expressed frustration about resistance to his goals. | ||
| Sometimes he clashed with other top members of Trump's administration who chafed at the newcomers' efforts to reshape their departments and he faced fierce political blowback for his efforts. | ||
| Well, this is what he posted on his social media platform X. | ||
| He said this, as my scheduled time as a special government employee comes to an end, I would like to thank President Donald Trump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending. | ||
| The Doge mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout government. | ||
| Also on Elon Musk, he was interviewed by CBS News. | ||
| As he's disappointed by Trump's Big Beautiful bill and what it means for Doge. | ||
| Here is a portion of what he said. | ||
| The full interview will air this coming Sunday on CBS. | ||
|
unidentified
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So, you know, I was like disappointed to see the massive spending bowl, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it. | |
| And that reminds the work that the Doge team is doing. | ||
| I actually thought that when this Big Beautiful bill came along, I mean, like, everything he's done on Doge gets wiped out in the first year. | ||
| I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful. | ||
| I don't know if it could be both. | ||
| My personal opinion. | ||
| Again, that's going to air on CBS this coming Sunday if you want to watch the whole thing. | ||
| Here's the AP with this headline. | ||
| Trump says he warned Netanyahu to hold off on an Iran strike to give U.S. more time for nuclear talks. | ||
| And we will have a segment later on in this program about those Iran nuclear talks. | ||
| So if you're interested, please stay with us for that. | ||
| We'll go to your calls now. | ||
| Here's Bronson in Las Vegas, Republican line. | ||
| Good morning, Bronson. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| How are you? | ||
| Good. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| What's your top news story? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, my top news story. | |
| Uh-oh. | ||
| We lost him. | ||
| Bronson, try to call us back. | ||
| Here is President Trump with reporters in the Oval Office yesterday. | ||
| You can take a look at this about what I just mentioned about his conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. | ||
|
unidentified
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Becca Ron, did you warn Prime Minister Netanyahu against taking some sort of actions that could disrupt the talks there in a phone call last week? | |
| Well, I'd like to be honest. | ||
| Yes, I did. | ||
| Next question, please. | ||
|
unidentified
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Mr. President, doesn't that find sanctions? | |
| I did. | ||
|
unidentified
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The Senate Republicans want to push. | |
| It's not a warning. | ||
| I said, I don't think it's appropriate. | ||
|
unidentified
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What exactly did you tell him that did? | |
| She said, I don't think it's appropriate. | ||
| We're having very good discussions with him. | ||
| And I said, I don't think it's appropriate right now. | ||
| Because if we can settle it with a very strong document, very strong, with inspections and no trust. | ||
| I don't trust anybody. | ||
| I don't trust anybody. | ||
| So no trust. | ||
| I want it very strong where we can go in with inspectors. | ||
| We can take whatever we want. | ||
| We can blow up whatever we want, but nobody getting killed. | ||
| We can blow up a lab, but nobody's going to be in the lab as opposed to everybody being in the lab and blowing it up, right? | ||
| Two ways of doing it. | ||
| Yeah, I told him this would be inappropriate to do right now because we're very close to a solution. | ||
| Now, that could change at any moment. | ||
| Could change with a phone call. | ||
| But right now, I think they want to make a deal. | ||
| And if we can make a deal, save a lot of lives. | ||
| And let's go to your calls to John in Portland, Connecticut, Republican. | ||
| Good morning, John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Mimi. | |
| How are you? | ||
| Good. | ||
| Yes, well, I think Elon did the best he could. | ||
| I wish he had more support from the, I hate to use the word rhino Republicans in Congress, but I think he set a pattern for our country, and I hope we continue it. | ||
| It's just a lot of work. | ||
| There's a lot to uncover, and I just hope that things work out and we start saving money and get rid of this fraud and abuse that's been going on in our country for years. | ||
| But I do support him. | ||
| I do support the president, and I think we got a good chance of recovering a lot of money. | ||
| Thank you, Mimi. | ||
| And here is from Politico. | ||
| White House plans at last to send some Doge cuts to the Hill. | ||
| If you can see it, House Republicans are expecting a modest package next week amid an online pressure campaign. | ||
| It says this, that President Donald Trump plans to send a small package of spending cuts to Congress next week. | ||
| That's according to White House Budget Director Russ Vogt. | ||
| The planned transmission of the, quote, rescissions bill, previously relayed to Politico by two Republicans, granted anonymity to describe the plans, comes after a long internal battle over how to formalize the cuts that have been made by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency Initiative. | ||
| Top GOFE officials started informing some House Republicans of the plans early yesterday. | ||
| You can see that at Politico if you'd like to see the rest of that article. | ||
| Here's Rob in New York Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning, Rob. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| To show just how truly independent I am, I'm recommending that everyone watch the Scripps National Spelling Bee. | ||
| The semifinals are the semis were last night, and the finals are tonight. | ||
| It's live on television. | ||
| I wish you guys on C-SPAN would cover it. | ||
| And why is that your top news story? | ||
|
unidentified
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Because it makes far more sense than anything going on in Congress or in the administration or the courts. | |
| And Nicole is in Brandon, Florida. | ||
| Democrat, good morning, Nicole. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| So I got a few things to touch on. | ||
| The first thing I want to touch on is these tariffs. | ||
| So first of all, with the tariffs, they don't hurt the poor people or the rich people. | ||
| The middle-class people are the ones that's being hurt because we're not seeing no change. | ||
| The second thing that I want to touch on is an article or news I heard about Harvard and how 33% of the school population is from out of the country. | ||
| First of all, I think he's correct in that because my child with a 3.6 can't even get in there because it's overpacked. | ||
| That's my second thing. | ||
| The third thing is Elon Musk. | ||
| I don't really believe Elon Musk was in there to do anything positive. | ||
| I think he came in there with Trump to get what he was going to get. | ||
| And now all of a sudden, oh, he's going to step down. | ||
| I believe that that was the plan from the beginning. | ||
| The plan was for him to get his money back that he invested in Trump and keep it moving. | ||
| Now he done got all his money back. | ||
| He done got his satellites over here. | ||
| Canada done told him they don't want to deal with him no more. | ||
| Everybody was focused on Tesla. | ||
| But what you didn't focus on is how many pots Elon Musk had his hand in as far as telecommunication with T-Mobile, Mint Mobile, Consumer Seller, Frontier, AT ⁇ T. | ||
| So this man been making money off of us. | ||
| It's just the fact that until he got into the Trump administration, nobody knew. | ||
| And everybody was concentrating on Tesla. | ||
| But this man has been making money off of us. | ||
| And what's so sad about it is us as Americans have not had knowledge. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Like, you're not putting on the news that this man is continuously making money off of us. | ||
| Like I said, he came to get what he got. | ||
| He came to get his money back after all the money he invested in Trump, and now he's gone. | ||
| The DOG or whatever all that stuff was really didn't exist. | ||
| It was a plot for Elon Musk to get his money back from Trump. | ||
| And, Nicole, on one of your points about Harvard and international students, The Hill reports this. | ||
| Trump suggests a 15% cap on foreign students at Harvard and other universities. | ||
| He proposed that yesterday on Wednesday, and it says that he said that he suggested that foreign students take up too much of the student body and raised issues over some of the foreign students he called troublemakers. | ||
| And regarding tariffs, take a look at, this is the president in the Oval Office yesterday. | ||
| Now, this is before that announcement from the judge halting most of his tariffs, talking about his on-again, off-again policy. | ||
| Yeah, please. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. President, Wall Street analysts have coined a new term called the taco trade. | |
| They're saying Trump always chickens out under tariff threats, and that's why markets are higher this week. | ||
| What's your response to that? | ||
| I kick out. | ||
| Chicken out. | ||
| Oh, and then I chicken out. | ||
| I've never heard that. | ||
| You mean because I reduced China from 145% that I set down to 100% and then down to another number? | ||
| And I said you have to open up your whole country. | ||
| And because I gave the European Union a 50% tax tariff, and they called up and they said, please let's meet right now. | ||
| Please, let's meet right now. | ||
| And I said, okay, I'll give you till June. | ||
| I actually asked them, I said, what's the date? | ||
| Because they weren't willing to meet. | ||
| And after I did what I did, they said, we'll meet anytime you want. | ||
| And we have an end date of July 9th. | ||
| You call that chickening out? | ||
| Because we have $14 trillion now invested, committed to investing when Biden didn't have practically anything. | ||
| Biden, this country was dying. | ||
| You know, we have the hottest country anywhere in the world. | ||
| I went to Saudi Arabia. | ||
| The king told me, he said, you got the hottest comp, we have the hottest country in the world right now. | ||
| Six months ago, this country was stone cold dead. | ||
| We had a dead country. | ||
| We had a country people didn't think it was going to survive. | ||
| And you ask a nasty question like that. | ||
| It's called negotiation. | ||
| You set a number. | ||
| And if you go down, you know, if I set a number at a ridiculous high number, and I go down a little bit, you know, a little bit, they want me to hold that number, 145% tariff. | ||
| Even I said, man, that really got up. | ||
| You know how it got? | ||
| Because of fentanyl and many other things. | ||
| And you added it up. | ||
| I said, where are we now? | ||
| We're at 145%. | ||
| I said, whoa, that's high. | ||
| That's high. | ||
| They were doing no business whatsoever. | ||
| And they were having a lot of problems. | ||
| We were very nice to China. | ||
| I don't know if they're going to be nice to us, but we were very nice to China. | ||
| And in many ways, I think we really helped China tremendously because you know they were having great difficulty because we were basically going cold turkey with China. | ||
| We were doing no business because of the tariff because it was so high. | ||
| But I knew that. | ||
| But don't ever say what you said. | ||
| That's a nasty question. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| To me, that's the nastiest question. | ||
| And this is the New York Times reporting this, why Vietnam ignored its own laws to fast-track a Trump family golf complex. | ||
| It says as President Trump blurs the lines between politics and business and threatens steep tariffs on trade partners, governments feel compelled to favor Trump-related projects. | ||
| And here is Kevin in Independent in Windsor, Connecticut. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| All these two stars did their work. | ||
| They didn't show no proof of any fraud or anything. | ||
| Just say the American people are ripping out the government. | ||
| You know, the able-bodied people should get off Medicaid and all that. | ||
| I think it's about time able-bodied billionaires should start paying their fair share of taxes instead of having all the pain on the American people. | ||
| You know, and I see Trump is laying Lucky out the prisons now. | ||
| You know, he's just partying the ex-governor of Connecticut, Republican, naturally. | ||
| You know, he gets a free ticket out, you know, with everybody else, murderers, everybody else. | ||
| You know, this ain't the country I remember. | ||
| That's all I have to say. | ||
| And here is Betty in Blacksburg, South Carolina, Republican. | ||
| Good morning, Betty. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I think Trump's doing a good, good job. | |
| He did a good job before, and he's still doing a good job. | ||
| And one thing I don't know why people keep saying, talk about Trump all the time. | ||
| I mean, this is our time. | ||
| And to me, I'm 80 years low. | ||
| And I know lies when I hear him because the fact that I've seen everything that he's done, and I've watched TV, and I've heard him. | ||
| And why in the world would a man do what he's trying to do? | ||
| And people keep putting this man down. | ||
| If you had four more years of Democrats, this wouldn't be American no more. | ||
| They just want what they want, which is power and money. | ||
| All right, buddy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| And previous caller talked about pardons from President Trump. | ||
| Here's NBC News. | ||
| Todd and Julie Chris Lee released from prison after pardons from Trump. | ||
| It says Attorney Alex Little said he supplied President Donald Trump with a binder filled with court documents and testimonials to convince him to release the couple. | ||
| So here is, it says, disgraced reality TV stars convicted in a scheme to swindle banks out of tens of millions of dollars walked free from prison Wednesday after they were pardoned by President Trump. | ||
| The pair known for the show Chris Lee Knows Best were headed from home to Nashville following their release. | ||
| It says they're called the Trumps of the South who are unanimously convicted by a jury in 2022 of fraud, tax evasion, and conspiracy to defraud the United States. | ||
| Received the pardons after intervention by one of their daughters. | ||
| It said, well, you can read more about that at NBC News. | ||
| And here is Kathleen, Chicago, Illinois, Democrat. | ||
| Kathleen, what's your top news story? | ||
| I'm doing good. | ||
| Go right ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I was under the impression that this president was a law and order president. | |
| First of all, he campaigned of relieving America of immigrants. | ||
| I don't call anybody illegal because we're all God's kids. | ||
| Okay, he did that. | ||
| But then, too, he brought thousands of white, you know, South African immigrants here on a lie that they are being misused. | ||
| Then this man gets in here. | ||
| He's supposed to be so with law and order. | ||
| Why are he releasing all of these criminals? | ||
| I know why, because they're giving him money. | ||
| But everybody was up in arms about Joe Biden pardoning his son. | ||
| In 100 days, or however many days this man been in office, look how many people he have pardoned. | ||
| And then he's talking about people here in America is scamming the economy. | ||
| And you got Fosters here. | ||
| You know, Elon Musk used to be the richest man in the world. | ||
| But guess who's the richest man in the world now? | ||
| That's that Donald Trump. | ||
| He's doing all this crypto. | ||
| He's not a part-time president. | ||
| He's a full-time president. | ||
| I was under the impression he wasn't supposed to be making money while he's president. | ||
| But every time you turn around, this man is making billions. | ||
| And then you got people like this lady from South Carolina, North, talking about he's doing a good job. | ||
| Yeah, he's doing a good job of scanning America. | ||
| People, we need to wake up. | ||
| Donald Trump was only in this for himself. | ||
| And he's showing you every day. | ||
| Where is the lower end of the eggs? | ||
| He doesn't even talk about eggs and rent anymore. | ||
| His thing was to get in there, to keep him going to jail and to make himself rich. | ||
| And he's around here. | ||
| He's a dictator, like he said. | ||
| People believe the lies, but they don't believe the truth. | ||
| He said he wanted to be a dictator for one day. | ||
| But guess what? | ||
| The news outlets and whoever, the judges, the lawyers, whoever don't agree with him, he finds reason to prosecute him. | ||
| What kind of law and order is that? | ||
| All right, Kathleen. | ||
| Let's go to the Republican line now to Mountain Home, Arkansas. | ||
| Timbo, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, America. | |
| Our major crime boss is well on his way of achieving his goal of pardoning all the MAGA criminals in America. | ||
| I guess he wants to shore up his voter base. | ||
| Six months ago, I predicted that either way, we were going to find out how many criminals we got in this country. | ||
| If Trump got elected, I guess we got more criminals than we got law-abiding citizens. | ||
| That's all I got to say. | ||
| God bless America. | ||
| Let's get this idiot out of office. | ||
| Here's Tony in Waterbury, Connecticut, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning, Tony. | ||
| What's your top news story? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning, Mimi. | |
| Yeah, I'm an independent. | ||
| I live in a blue state, and I'm going over all these different items, these news stories over the last few weeks you guys do it, and the different topics. | ||
| And I said, I got a call. |