CSPAN - Washington Journal 07/20/2025

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July 20, 2025 07:00-10:03 - CSPAN

03:02:49

Washington Journal 07/20/2025

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jamelle bouie

07:09

kimberly adams

cspan 41:21

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brian lamb

cspan 00:35

mike johnson

rep/r 00:48

tommy tuberville

sen/r 00:33

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henry olsen

00:29

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Speaker	Time	Text
unidentified		Poll's podcast host Henry Olson of the Ethics and Public Policy Center will talk about the week's top political news, including President Trump's agenda and political standing.
		And New York Times columnist Jamal Bowie also talks about the week's top political news, including New York City mayoral candidate Zorhan Mamdani's meeting with Democratic lawmakers in Washington and the future of the party.
		C-SPAN's Washington Journal is next.
		Join the conversation.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
		It's Sunday, July 20th, 2025.
		Today marks six months since President Donald Trump's return to office.
		He's notched several major political victories in that time, including just last week when the Supreme Court cleared the way for the White House to continue its plan to dismantle the Department of Education.
		That's the topic of our question this morning.
		Do you think the Department of Education should be dismantled?
		Our phone line for Democrats is 202-748-8000.
		For Republicans, 202-748-8001.
		And for Independents, 202-748-8002.
		We have a special phone line for parents and educators this morning.
		That's 202-748-8003.
		That's also the number where you can text us if you'd like to, but please be sure to include your name and where you're writing in from.
		We're also on social media at facebook.com/slash C-SPAN and on X at C-SPANWJ.
		Now, for a bit more information about that Supreme Court decision and the fallout, here's a story from the Associated Press reporting how Trump plans to dismantle the Department of Education after the Supreme Court ruling, saying Education Secretary Linda McMahon is expected to move quickly now that the Supreme Court has cleared the way for the Trump administration to continue unwinding her department.
		The justices on Monday paused a lower court order that had halted nearly 1,400 layoffs and had called into question the legality of President Donald Trump's plan to outsource the department's operations to other agencies.
		Now, Trump and McMahon are free to execute the layoffs and break up the department's work among other federal agencies.
		Trump had campaigned on closing the department, and McMahon has said the department has one final mission, to turn over its power to the states.
		Education Secretary Linda McMahon spoke about the Supreme Court's decision in an interview on Newsmax.
		She made Newsmax, excuse me, she made these comments last week.
unidentified		I was very pleased with the ruling from the Supreme Court because what we did when we first came in was to take a look at the department, to take a look at what could have been, you know, just too heavy in personnel.
		We weren't just trying to make radical cuts just to shrink the size of the department.
		We viewed it with exactly the right eye as I think an executive coming into a company to see what functions are needed, how many people we needed to do that, etc.
		So we're very careful in planning how those cuts were made.
		And I was very pleased that the Supreme Court did give us the ability to continue to do that and to operate the agency efficiently and to get all the work done that we needed to get done to meet all of our statutory requirements.
		And that's exactly what we're doing.
		And we were proving that we could do it at the time when we got the order that we couldn't proceed.
		So we're very happy to now be able to do that work and to do it well.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		That decision at the Supreme Court was a split decision, which, as included, as reported here in Newsweek, Sonia Sotomayor accused the Supreme Court of rewarding Trump's clear defiance, as she described it.
		This is the ruling from Monday, which was the latest in a series of Supreme Court emergency rulings that have gone in the Trump administration's favor.
		The High Court issued a ruling last week saying the administration can move forward with plans to implement massive layoffs across the federal bureaucracy, though it specified it wasn't commenting on the legality of Trump's plan, but merely allowing it to be launched while the case makes its way through the lower courts.
		And then if you go down here, Soda Mayor issued a blistering dissent saying that she could not condone such abuse of our equitable authority.
		More on that dissent, she said the decision is indefensible.
		It hands the executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out.
		The majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive.
		But either way, the threat to our Constitution's separation of powers is grave.
		Unable to join this misuse of our emergency docket, I respectfully dissent.
		And that came from Justice Sonia Sota Mayor.
		Once again, our question this morning is: do you support the Department of Education being dismantled?
		And there was some polling back in May on exactly this question from Morning Consults as well as Ed Choice, and they found that 36 percent of Americans, American adults, support closing the Department of Education compared to 49 percent who oppose closing the Department of Education.
		If you break that down by political party, however, you have 58 percent of Republicans supporting closing the Department of Education compared to just 23 percent of Democrats who support shutting down that department.
		Now, let's hear from you.
		We'll start with Elaine in St. Louis, Missouri on our line for Democrats.
		Good morning, Elaine.
unidentified		Thank you, Kimberly.
unidentified		Good morning.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Would you have turned down the volume on your TV, Elaine?
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		But please go ahead.
unidentified		Okay.
		Yes, I most definitely think we should continue to have the structure of the Department of Education as a retired educator myself.
		Having a consensus over what skills and topics children should understand is essential if we are truly the united state.
		Rather than having a hodgepodge of this state learns this and that state learns that, there's no continuity.
		When a child moves from one state to another, they are usually given usually their records.
		If they say they were in the third grade in Alabama, well, when they moved to Connecticut, you would think that they would still be in the third grade.
		But if there is no consensus on what goals and objectives and what things that they have studied, well, they can test that child and move them to the first grade because they have not met a certain body of skill work.
		So, yes, we need uniformity.
		It is so distressing the way that the administration has been able to just make a mockery.
		The bottom line is, I do believe that Trump might not value the education of minority children.
		I think he might be a racist.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		The largest teachers union in the country also slammed the, as it called, unlawful cuts to the Department of Education after the Supreme Court ruling, as reported here in the New York Post, that the president of the nation's largest teachers union, the National Education Association, slammed the Supreme Court's ruling on Monday for siding with the Trump administration on dismantling the Department of Education.
		And here's a bit of that statement from the head of the National Education Association president, Becky Pringle, who says, Nothing is more important than the success of students.
		America's educators and parents won't be silent as Donald Trump, with the support of the MAGA Supreme Court, strips our students, families, and our communities of protections and funding that Congress has mandated.
		Gutting the Department of Education has already harmed students and communities.
		Today's ruling, withholding relief that the lower courts ordered, will only compound the harm.
unidentified		Ed is in Lawrenceville, Georgia, on our line for Republicans.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Ed.
unidentified		Good morning.
		Your first caller claimed to be an educator herself, yet she talks with obsession.
		Obsession is when you think you know what you're talking about.
		Diligent is where you know what you're talking about because you know everything about it.
		Diligent is better than obsession.
		The test scores alone for children are so bad, the only thing you could possibly do is get rid of the Department of Education and give it back to the states, and then we'll see what happens because some states are going to do better than others, and then we'll correct that.
		But the Department of Education is like a car with two flat tires.
		It just doesn't work and it's very expensive, and it just is just crazy.
		You look at the test scores and you see why.
		Democrats just have to realize the Department of Education has to go.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		All right.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Let's hear a little bit more from Education Secretary Linda McMahon about what a reorganization of the Department of Education might look like.
unidentified		You know, the federal government provides about 10% of the budget for education in the states.
		The states provide about 90%.
		But the federal government does distribute grant money that Congress has appropriated, you know, to the states.
		Our Title IA funding, our IDA funding all went out as planned.
		We're very happy that that money does get to the states for them to use.
		And so the states really decide the curriculum.
		They hire the teachers.
		They provide the textbooks and all of that.
		But what the federal government needs to do is to provide the grant money that does come to them in a way that's formulaic and not so much with the competitive grants where states have to hire grant writers and they have to monitor them and all of that.
		But the states would get the money and they would distribute it on a formula basis and take the regulation out of it.
		You know, teachers for about every dollar that comes into the classroom spend about 47 cents of that dollar replying for regulation and compliance with regulatory environments.
		So we don't need to have that.
		Let's let teachers teach.
		Let's let the money go into the states and educate kids.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Now, for some differing opinions on how that could actually play out, there's some reporting in ABC News about what these potential changes could mean for American students.
		And here it says: former Department of Education employees and education advocates told ABC News they worry this ruling could harm the most vulnerable children in the country.
		This isn't just about jobs.
		Former teacher and Department of Education liaison Danny Pierce told ABC News in a statement, adding, It's about abandoning the people and programs that protect students' rights, support educators, and ensure equity in schools across the country.
		The Education Department, the smallest cabinet-level agency, was put in place to safeguard disadvantaged students, aiding them with financial support and civil protections, advocates say, by reducing the size and scope of the agency, now leaving it with about half of its staff.
		Experts and advocates tell ABC News that disadvantaged students are at risk.
		Scrolling down a little bit, the department's main responsibilities of administering the $1.6 trillion federal student loan portfolio and assisting low-income and disabled youth will likely be impacted the most.
		Education Department sources tell ABC News.
		Back to your calls on whether you think the Department of Education should be dismantled.
		Dan is in Rapid City, South Dakota on our line for independence.
		Good morning, Dan.
unidentified		Hello.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Hello.
unidentified		What do you think?
		I live in Rapid City, South Dakota, and we used to enjoy the highest test scores in the state and some of the highest test scores in the nation.
		When you look at the product that the Department of Education has produced, I think it's exceedingly clear that they need to go.
		Just on pure metrics, they have failed our students and they failed the ones that they speak of as being most vulnerable in the worst of ways.
		And I fully support getting rid of a department that has performed that badly.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Next up is Tyrone in New York on our line for Democrats.
		Good morning, Tyrone.
		Tyrone, are you there?
unidentified		Yes, I'm here.
unidentified		Can you hear me?
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		I can.
brian lamb ▲ ● ▼		Hello.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Do you think the Department of Education should be dismantled?
unidentified		No, not at all.
		I think one of your callers said if you got two flat ties, you throw your car away.
		I'm like, that makes no sense.
		And they say if the scores are low, throw away the Department of Education.
		That makes no sense.
		You fix things that are broken sometimes.
		Sometimes you don't just throw it away.
		And that's part of the pervasive hatred and disrespect that people have for the educators and education in this country because they don't want it to work.
		They don't want, just like they don't want our legal system to work properly.
		They don't want our government to work properly because it's not working for specific people the way they want it to.
		This is why we're having this problem.
		And I hope that this administration continues to step on the necks and choke and life, continue to choke the life out of the American people until we stand up against this tyranny.
		That's what it is.
		It's tyrannies of the fascist dictator.
		Until we stand up for the rights that we deserve in this country.
		Not that they're giving us.
		This is the stuff that we work for.
		And education is definitely something that is a necessity in this country.
		People don't realize without education, we don't know where we would be.
		And these people have helped us, these teachers, these educators have helped us to move forward in a tremendous way.
		We think that if it's not perfect, it shouldn't work.
		We should get rid of it.
		Something's wrong with people in this country because they figure if it don't work specifically for me and they single-issue voters, they believe that what they do should only matter for them.
		And we live in a country, I'm glad that I recognize that I'm not the only person I live in this country that deserves something that should be provided for me and everybody else in this country.
		And until we wake up, we're going to continue to suffer under this regime.
		We're going to continue because we've got to stand up for ourselves.
		We have to stand up against this tyranny.
		And I hope we do because this is out of control.
		The man doesn't respect anything.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Virginia is in Waldorf, Maryland, on our line for Republicans.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Virginia.
unidentified		Yes, good morning.
		I'm definitely for saving, and I will use that word, the Department of Education.
		You know, everyone's blaming them for low scores.
		They're not the flow of that.
		They do give some direction as to what should be taught, but they don't tell them how to teach.
		Most of it, I believe, is the result of working strictly on laptops, no interaction between students.
		You can't necessarily learn that way because you learn a lot from other people.
		So I just find it very interesting that they're blaming an entire department for something that's a simple solution, like let the students learn at their pace with interactions of other students and let the teachers teach, which is something we don't do anymore, but it has nothing to do with the Department of Education.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		So what do you think of the administration's plans to dismantle it or at least drastically reduce its size and distribute its operations to other agencies?
unidentified		I think that's a mistake.
		I think that in the long run, eventually they will see that.
		I mean, it's going to come to light.
		And the Supreme Court making that decision, as far as I'm concerned, in my opinion, is illegal.
		Trump doesn't have that authority.
		So I find it very interesting.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		All right, next up is Joseph in Worcester, Massachusetts, on our line for independence.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Joseph.
unidentified		Morning, C-SPAN.
		I never really gave a serious thought about dismantling the Department of Education, but I voted for President Trump twice.
		And I put my will on him because he has an insight that a lot of people don't have.
		He's gifted for certain things.
		And I always say what made America the greatest country in the world is they had a chance to expand themselves, secondary education, going to college, moving up from junior college.
		But what happened is America has become too much bureaucracy.
		It's too much red tape.
		You need a heavy-handed president.
		That's what Donald Trump did, the executive order.
		And real quick, Texas, for instance, they want to talk about slavery as a indigenous worker.
		Now, a lot of other Department of Education around the world get their textbook under Texas because Texas is the largest school district.
		But when you look at Texas, it's not a bad idea to dismantle the Department of Education because I was in secondary education.
		I'm talking about college.
		A lot of these colleges in Texas, I went to college in West Texas, Church of Christ University.
		They have their own way of teaching.
		Baylor is a Christian school.
		Southern Methodist, Christian, PCU, Southern Western.
		I went to Ibn Christie University, and I learned so much that wasn't taught in going to high school in Louisiana.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		So, I think you've got your idea.
		I want to go back to that morning consult Ed Choice poll and talk about some of the areas that, according to the polling, people do think or don't think the U.S. government should be involved in our education system.
		And so, the question was: What role do you think the federal government should play in education?
		This was a question asked only of parents in this poll, and they found that the federal government should play a major role in.
		63% said providing funding for schools serving low-income students.
		62% said the federal government should be providing funding for schools serving students with special needs.
		61% ensuring equal opportunities in K-12 education.
		56% said that the federal government should be involved in protecting students' civil rights.
		And 56% said that they believed, and these are parents again, that the federal government should play a role in administering financial aid for college.
		Let's now hear from AJ in Georgia on our line for Democrats.
		Good morning, AJ.
unidentified		Sure, I don't agree with dismantling the Department of Education.
		You got Resident Rump who won't even release his grades.
		And if you look at the MAGA, their base is southern states.
		But what's the education look like?
		So, my question: I'm going to get off the phone: is what's the alternative?
		What's their alternative?
		Where's the research to back it up?
		The gambling with children.
		Have a blessed day.
		Thank you.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Don is in Glen Burning, Maryland, on our line for independence.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Don.
unidentified		Yeah, good morning.
		Yeah, I don't believe they should dismantle it, but they definitely should reform it because the way I see it, the educational system is not adequately educating our kids for being able to go out in the workforce.
		It needs to be more vocational trade, learning trades.
		I mean, a lot of the kids can't even write a sentence.
		You know, they can't tell time by looking at a clock.
		So, you know, it definitely needs to be reformed.
		Definitely needs to be reformed.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		The day after the Supreme Court decision that allowed the Trump administration to move forward with those changes to the Department of Education, Georgia Democrat Lucy McBath called on the Education Department to release $7 billion that they say are being withheld from states and locality.
		Here's a portion from last Wednesday.
unidentified		These dollars appropriated by Congress are meant to improve student learning and empowerment as well as their achievement.
		Operate before and after school programs, train teachers, and help adult learners go back and finish high school.
		Just a few weeks ago, on the evening of June 30th, the Department of Education sent out the following message to states, and I quote: Given the change in administrations, the Department is reviewing the funding for these programs, and decisions have not yet been made concerning submissions and awards for this upcoming academic year.
		Accordingly, the Department will be issuing grant award notifications obligating funds for these programs on July 1st, unquote.
		In their own words, they knew this deadline was coming and they missed it anyway.
		They chose to wait until the last second to notify states and schools that the funding your family relies on to educate your child for the school year that is starting in just a few short weeks is not where it's supposed to be.
		Instead of being in your child's classroom, your money is sitting in Washington here because the Secretary of Education could not be bothered to meet a deadline that is the difference between a school having an after-school program or not.
		Funding that is the difference between a child having a safe place to go while they wait for mom or dad to get off work and come get them or not.
		The Trump administration's failure to release this funding on time is disrupting school and district planning, jeopardizing the education of millions of students, and is forcing layoffs, program delays, and cancellations for students and their families.
		It is wrong and is completely unnecessary.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Now that was Representative McBath speaking on Tuesday.
		Now on the 18th, later on in the week, the Education Department announced that it would release some of those frozen grants supporting after-school and summer programs.
		Reading here from the Associated Press, the Education Department will release $1.3 billion in previously withheld grant money for after-school programs days after 10 Republican senators sent a letter imploring the Trump administration to allow frozen education money to be sent to the states.
		President Donald Trump's administration on July 1st withheld more than $6 billion in federal grants for after-school and summer programs, adult literacy, and English language instruction, part of a review to ensure spending aligned with the White House's priorities.
		In a letter sent Wednesday, Republican senators said the withheld money supported programs that had long-standing bipartisan support and were critical to local communities.
		The money had been appropriated by Congress in a bill that was signed by Trump.
		Back to your calls on whether you think the Department of Education should be dismantled.
		Bob is in Cleveland, Ohio, on our line for Democrats.
		Good morning, Bob.
unidentified		Good morning, C-SPAN.
		I have some issues with the people that claim that the Department of Education is responsible for the test scores.
		They're not.
		What they are responsible for, well, they do not set curriculum or tests, but they do establish accountability frameworks.
		They require states to participate in the standardized testing as a condition for receiving federal funds, but the selection, content, and scoring of those tests are determined by each state.
		So trying to blame the Department of Education for poor test scores is misplaced.
		They do collect and report data.
		People don't like the data, so they blame the Department of Education for the results.
		It enforces federal election laws, civil rights protections, accountability requirements, manages funding for programs targeting special educational populations such as low-income students and English learners.
		Let me go on.
		It does set a national conversation.
		The Department of Education, when they publish information, people analyze the information, they read it, they don't like it or they do like it.
		It depends on which state you're in.
		But taking away the Department of Education or the responsibilities of the department will end up with a patchwork of student learning capabilities that just will embarrass the United States.
		Some states will have much better test results depending on a long list of factors that do affect test scores.
		The economic condition of the family, the economic condition of the school department.
		There's so many factors that affect test scores, and blaming the Department of Education for them, and then saying, Well, because we have test score, bad test scores, the Department of Ed should be dismantled.
		That's wrong.
		It's the wrong conclusion.
		It's the wrong reason.
		If you want to reform the Department of Education, figure out what else it should be doing or what it should not be doing.
		But right now, they have no influence on the content of the tests, the content of the education, the course content, anything other than Bob.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Isn't this what the Trump administration is doing, analyzing what the Department of Education should be doing versus other agencies?
unidentified		I haven't seen that.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		So the Trump administration is saying that they want to shift some of the responsibilities of the Department of Education to, say, the Department of Health and Human Services or even Treasury for student loans and other responsibilities to the states.
unidentified		That may be a solution, but now we've got depending on which department gets which responsibilities, I don't know that we're going to have a consistent look depending on education only.
		In one case, it'll be the Department of Health.
		In another department, the Treasury will be in charge of student loans.
		You're right.
		The student loans situation is really pretty bad.
		All right.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Let's hear from Howard in New London, Ohio, on our line for Republicans.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Howard.
unidentified		Yeah, good morning.
		Yeah, I think it should be abolished.
		I graduated in 78, but the last two years of school, I didn't go to school.
		I went to what they called night school from that school, two hours a night, twice a week.
		And all they did was teach about how to get a job and how to pay your bills.
		I was in special ed from the sixth grade on, is what they called it.
		They thought that I couldn't see.
		Then they finally figured out that I couldn't read in the seventh grade.
		Now, it took them seven years of me going to school before they figured out that I could not read.
		To this day, I cannot read.
		I have a sixth-grade grandson, great-grandson, that can read anything you throw down in front of him.
		And he ain't even went to school yet.
		Now, when I was in the seventh grade, the government had come out and said, Hey, we need to take these teachers back to school and reteach them how to teach our children how to read.
		Because way back then, we knew that there were too many students that could not read.
		Now, I graduated, I got a diploma in a whole nine yards, but I got like a third or fourth grade reading level.
		They knew that it was broke way back then.
		They know that it's broke now because it was probably six, seven years ago I heard the same story.
		We need to teach our teachers how to teach our kids how to read.
		Well, they never did it.
		All it is is a bunch of bureaucrats.
		And when my grandkids were in school, a lot of their classes told them for their homework to watch CNN to do the reports.
		No, why is it CNN?
		Why wasn't it Fox or any of the other stations?
		Why do they want to be such Democrats and woke crap?
		They don't teach kids anything to do with history.
		They don't tell the kids how we killed the Indians and stole their land and all that.
		You ask the kid, what happened when we come over here?
		They say, Oh, the Indians took care of us, or we would have starved.
		Yeah, we were great friends with the Indians.
		They don't tell them the history.
		All the Democrats want us to do is bury the history and not tell nobody nothing.
		Well, if you don't know your history, you're going to repeat the history.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		So, Howard, you're saying that this is something that Democrats want to do in terms of burying the history, but this is a criticism that Democrats often level against Republicans, especially in regards to DEI rollbacks in terms of elementary school instruction and changing the way that history is taught.
unidentified		No, no.
		They want to remove history.
		You can't remove history.
		You need to teach them all the history.
		Well, I don't know what y'all are thinking, but you need to teach the kids everything, and you surely should know how to teach them how to read.
		If they can't read, they should not go to the next grade.
		All right.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		I'm going to go on to Talib in Laurel, Maryland, on our line for independence.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Tlaib.
unidentified		Hey, my sister, thank you for being so beautiful.
		I'm going to take a totally different viewpoint on this.
		I'm 80 years old.
		When I was nine years old, my grandmother, my maternal grandmother, told me, remember this, the white man stole this land from the Indian and massacred them.
		Brought us over, raped our women.
		I was in a state of like really shock.
		But my family has been here since 1695, 1695 in Virginia.
		I grew up in Philadelphia.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Just to leave, though, to bring it a little bit more closely to the modern times, do you think the Department of Education should be dismantled?
unidentified		I think that 98% of white Americans know nothing about the history of this country because what is lacking in America is critical thinking skills.
		That's the problem with America.
		My daughter and I were talking about this yesterday.
		She's a psychologist.
		Before I went to graduate school or college, I knew the history of America by the time I was 14 years old because my parents told me this.
		You have to be two or three times better than the white man to succeed in this culture.
		All of my friends in the 70s and 80s that came up in our era, we all were taught this.
		We talk about this all the time, how great our parents were.
		My mother graduated from high school in Philly, but my dad only went to the sixth grade.
		He was walking encyclopedia.
		My grandmother, they knew everything.
		So the problem with America, and I discussed this with James Lowen.
		He was one of the few.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		I'm going to keep it to the topic about the Department of Education.
		A previous caller mentioned the way that students have been taught to read historically and that teachers were sent back to change that policy.
		This came up in a series of stories in a podcast called Sold a Story, which resulted in several new reading laws sweeping the nation following Sold a Story.
		At least 25 states passed laws about how schools teach reading after that podcast airs, but proponents of disproven ideas about reading have not given up.
		And so for decades, schools all over the country taught reading based on a theory cognitive scientists debunked by the 1990s.
		Despite research showing it made it harder for some kids to learn, the concept was widely accepted by most educating educators until recent reporting by APM Reports.
		Now state legislators and other policymakers are trying to change reading instruction, requiring it to align with cognitive science research about how children learn to read.
		Several of them say they were motivated by the Sold a Story podcast.
		Half of the states have now passed laws to change the way reading is taught since Sold a Story was released in 2022.
		At least four other states considered similar effort.
		Mike is in Georgia on our line for Democrats.
		Good morning, Mike.
unidentified		Yes, sir.
unidentified		Thanks to having me on CNN.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		It's C-SPAN.
unidentified		My problem.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		But we're happy to have you.
unidentified		Yes.
unidentified		Can you hear me?
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Yes, go ahead, Mike.
unidentified		Yes, I was just saying that I don't think the Department of Education should be shut down at all.
		And the problem is that they got this new AI coming in.
		And with that coming in, they feel like they don't need Department of Education no more.
		And shutting it down, they can really get their AI stuff going because they want folks.
		No, they don't want kids to know anything.
		That's what I really believe.
		You know, they feel like if kids don't know anything, then they can really put the AI really in effect for the whole country.
		And, you know, all of a sudden, they want to shut it down after they got the AI going.
		But before then, they were involved in the Education Department.
		That's what these people don't understand is that they really want to get rid of because they bring AI here.
		And they feel like they don't need the students no more.
		Just like when they bought the Mexicans in here, they brought them in here to work.
		They felt like they was going to let them work.
		But once the Mexicans got in here and started making money and want to own their own business and stuff, then now they want to run them all out of the country.
		So people need to wake up and realize that it ain't got nothing to do with the Department of Education.
		They want to shut down because they feel like they got their new program coming in here, and that's AI.
		They're not going to need no Department of Education no more.
		So all these black folks that voted for Trump, they need to wake up and realize that they feel like they don't need them no more because they feel like the AI is going to be even better than a human doing the work now.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		After the Supreme Court decision that allowed the Trump administration to move forward with its plans for the Department of Education, Speaker Mike Johnson, House Speaker Mike Johnson, brushed off suggestions from reporters that the administration's actions to dismantle the department infringes on Congress's authority.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Here's that exchange.
unidentified		You've previously been asked whether Congress will assert its constitutional authority and pass legislation closing the department, which, of course, was created by an act of Congress.
		When exactly does that moment arrive?
		Does the president, having, quote, ultimate authority over the education department, as was Secretary McMahon's interpretation of the order, not conflict with Congress's legal and constitutional power?
		At what point does this become a separation of powers, Congress?
		It may not surprise you.
		I haven't had a chance to digest the Supreme Court opinion from yesterday, whenever it was.
		Been a little busy, but we'll look into that.
		I'm a constitutional law attorney.
		I'm a jealous guardian of Article I authority, but I also know that for decades, the Department of Education, since its creation, the Department of Education wielded by the executive branch.
		I think that was the intent of Congress, as I understood it back then.
		We have a large say in that, but we're going to coordinate that with the White House where I'm not going to get an extraordinary job thus far, and we're going to follow their cues on how to do that.
		If we see that the separation of powers is being breached in some way, we'll act.
		But I haven't seen that yet.
		So, yes.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Some Democratic response from Congress on social media includes from Representative Emmanuel Cleaver, who says, the far-right Supreme Court continues to allow the Trump administration to dismantle congressionally mandated agencies.
		Make no mistake, gutting the Department of Education will hurt students, families, and public schools in every community nationwide.
		A shameful decision.
		Also, from Representative Tony Weed, this decision is a huge win for students across our country.
		This is a Republican response.
		Since its inception, the Department of Education has consistently failed American students by every metric.
		I trust Wisconsin educators over federal bureaucrats any day.
		And then Coach Tommy Tubberville, who's also a Republican, says, Good, Democrats turn the Department of Education into the Department of Indoctrination.
		President Trump and Education Secretary McMahon are cleaning house and getting our education system back on track.
		Now then, back to your calls on whether you think the Department of Education should be dismantled.
		We'll hear from Don in Norwalk, Ohio on our line for Republicans.
		Good morning, Don.
		Go ahead, Don.
unidentified		Hello.
		I am an 82-year-old retired educator, teacher guidance counselor.
		I don't think that they should tamper with the Department of Education at all.
		When I was in the profession, it was like a guiding light for the teachers in the system.
		It was a foundation that we worked in collaboration with.
		I think they should leave it alone.
		It helped and aided and assisted educators within our just freaking school system.
		All right.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Janet is in York, Maine, on our line for independence.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Janet.
unidentified		Hello, can you hear me?
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Yes, I can.
unidentified		First of all, I'd like to mention thank you to Bob from Ohio, who alluded to the fact that it isn't the Department of Education.
		We can blame outcomes on one agency, but we have problems across the country.
		We have drug addiction created by big pharma.
		We have a carceral system that's focused on punishment instead of rehabilitation.
		And we do have the Supreme Court allowing usurpation of separation of powers.
		We have an appropriations committee in Congress.
		Congress is the purse strings.
		This is not happening.
		Everybody needs to wake up.
		It's not about right or left.
		It's about right or wrong.
		Thank you.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Todd is in Jupiter, Florida, on our line for Democrats.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Todd.
unidentified		Yes, hi.
		Good morning.
		Thank you.
		As far as Donald Trump's mission, his mission is to abolish public education and privatize education.
		He wants to make everything for profit so that only rich people get education.
		And what kind of education does he want for you?
		A Christian Catholic education.
		He wants to funnel public taxpayer dollars to put children in Jesus schools.
		He wants to make everyone a Christian, everyone a Catholic, and he is a pedophile, and we all know it.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Angel is in California on our line for Republicans.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Angel.
unidentified		Good morning, beautiful.
		Hi, sorry.
		I just wanted to say that I think the gentleman who called in and said that they're going to use AI, they're building these huge data centers and things like that.
		And, you know, I think he's correct, perhaps.
		And I'm sorry, I get nervous talking on the TV, but I like it.
		But anyway, I'm sorry I said that to you about, hey, beautiful.
		I apologize.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		It's okay.
unidentified		But you are.
		But anyway, I'm bothering.
		But I feel like Bill Gates tried to also do things for the Education Department.
		And maybe they want to teach the kids about Jesus, which I don't think is the worst thing.
		I'm a registered Republican in this, but I actually am doing that just because, or I did that because George Bush was, I feel, when we had 9-11, I felt like they were doing that to kind of get control, too.
		So I don't know who these people are.
		One of my friends calls them blood-sucking ghouls.
		And I have not heard that about Mr. Trump or the Donald, as I call him lately, that he's a pedophile.
		I don't think that's probably accurate.
		But anyway, those are my thoughts.
		I just applaud the, I really care about Indigenous peoples' rights, reparations for the black people, for your people.
		I care about the Japanese people who are interred and the Chinese people who have their fishing villages, like the little China camp we have out here, so-called.
		They took and passed laws so that the Chinese couldn't fish.
		I mean, this is just, I don't know where, I hate to malign my own race, but I was asking myself earlier today, where do these people come from?
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		So we're going to keep it on the Department of Education, but thank you for calling in.
		Let's hear from Robert in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, who called in our line for parents and educators.
		Good morning, Robert.
unidentified		Good morning.
		I surely am.
		I'm a retired teacher, and I have children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren.
		And the Department of Education should be strengthened.
		Now, most of those people who are calling dismount in education, what they want to do is strengthen the army force, our armed forces.
		And if you look at the people who are at the head of the armed force, all of them are Caucasian or white people.
		None up there who are African Americans.
		But education, if the education system was strengthened, we would have less problems in this country.
		And again, I'd be willing to bet you 99% of the people who are calling are Europeans, so-called white people.
		Not all white people are that way.
		I'm not saying that.
		But they want to strengthen the army, but not the education.
		In other words, because too many African Americans are getting educated today.
		And I think that a lot of Europeans are so-called white people.
		There are no white people.
		There are some black people in color, but there are no white people.
		And they want fewer African Americans to have an education.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		We have the idea.
		Let's hear from Mary in Alpena, Michigan on our line for independence.
		Good morning, Mary.
unidentified		Good morning, Kimberly.
		I'm definitely for maybe reducing a little bit.
		All government, maybe 10, 20% could be reduced and everything.
		I'll tell you my story.
		Four years ago, I had retired early.
		I'm a retired nurse.
		Because of the pandemic, I retired earlier than I expected.
		And I answered an ad in our local paper.
		And I started tutoring at the library.
		I thought, well, I love the library.
		I love kids.
		I worked at a pediatric office, and I did home care for special needs kids.
		And I started tutoring at the library.
		Well, that rolled into a job where I hate to say it, but a lot of it really bothers me a lot when people call on C-SPAN that have not been in an elementary or high school, or they haven't been in a school in 50, 60 years.
		They have no clue what's going on in the public or even parochial schools, as you can tell by their calls.
		I volunteer at a program.
		It's a foster grandparent program.
		I volunteered for three years in a row.
		I'm there five days a week.
		It's extra help.
		Definitely, one of the biggest problems in this country is low pay for teachers and class size.
		And I see every day how hard the parents are working, the teachers are working.
		People that call that haven't been in a school in 50, 60, sometimes 70 years have no idea.
		The school that I have been assigned to.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Mary, I'm wondering, though, do you think, you know, you raised these issues that are happening in schools right now, but what do you think of the plan by the administration to kind of unwind the Department of Education, distribute its responsibilities elsewhere in response to some of the complaints people have had about the department?
unidentified		It's a terrible idea, tell you the truth.
		The school that I'm at right now, 90% of the kids qualify for free lunches.
		So you can imagine.
		But when you dive down into why a lot of this is going on, I believe it's because they want to privatize schools, school vouchers and that.
		Now, that doesn't work when you're in a kind of a rural area.
		If you don't go to the public school, there is the only alternative is the Catholic school, parochial school.
		There is no other type of school.
		And one of the worst things that I ever, that they talk about, and I think it's been proven, I've read all kinds of whatever, is they want to get rid of Head Start.
		Now that's one of our, for low-income children, that's the only way to get education, you know what I mean, is Head Start.
		And it's been proven by study after study that children that go to Head Start, how well they do.
		I've got a niece, my sister, and a couple aunts that all teach or whatever, and they have gone to graduations from students, former students of theirs, and inevitably the ones that do well, that are in these low-income or whatever, they were Head Start.
		They had Head Start.
		There's not, there's such a patchwork of preschool for our kids, and they need it so badly.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		All right, I want to.
unidentified		That's all I wanted to say.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		A couple of other folks up here from Steve and Virginia on our line for Democrats.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Steve.
unidentified		Good morning.
		Well, I don't think they ought to abolish the Department of Education.
		The privileged are always going to have the best access to the best education and the best opportunity.
		The Department of Education tries to level the playing field for the underprivileged.
		The privileged don't like to pay taxes to help the underprivileged.
		If you leave it to the states, you won't have these programs for special needs, transportation for special needs kids.
		And the state of Florida does not recognize dyslexia as a disability because they don't want to spend the money that it's going to take to have special teachers to teach kids how to read that have a dyslexic problem.
		So the Department of Education tries to level the playing field and put a standard across the nation.
		And that's my thoughts.
		Thank you.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Jan is in Birmingham, Alabama, and is calling in on our line for parents and educators.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		And Jan, I believe you're a parent.
unidentified		I'm a parent, yeah.
		I have three grown sons who are products of public school.
		Two of them are attorneys, and one's a CPA.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		And so do you think the Department of Education should be dismantled?
unidentified		No, I do not.
unidentified		I think that there are clearly some, I'm sure, some improvements that should be made, but I don't trust Trump's gang to figure it out.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Let's go to some responses to our question from social media on Facebook.
		James Hopkins says, of course not.
		If one looks at the history of authoritarian movements through the ages, with no exceptions, the intellectuals, poets, artists, and most literate and the institution that created them, education, are the first to be targeted.
		It's no coincidence that they are going after the Harvards and Columbias and are redacting history textbooks and are scrutinizing which books are on library shelves.
		Should we be surprised that environmental protection and education are their enemies?
		Charlotte says on Facebook also, no, it should not be dismantled.
		Trump is attempting to end the Department of Education.
		Trump's attempt to end the Department of Education as illegal and unconstitutional.
		President Trump is now on the warpath against working families of our country.
		So the billionaires class can receive huge tax breaks is terrible public policy and morally and reprehensible.
		And then more responses from members of Congress to that Supreme Court ruling earlier this week.
		This was from Senator Mike Lee.
		The Department of Education's final mission is to champion parental rights, school choice, and academic rigor.
		SCOTUS reaffirms the right of the president to downsize the department to achieve these goals.
		Back to your calls.
		Suzanne is in Kittery, Maine on our line for Republicans.
		Good morning, Suzanne.
unidentified		Hi, good morning.
		Stop ignoring the horrible treatment Department of Education does to poor college students who fall on hard times and can't pay their university federal student loan debts.
		Department of Education punishes students who are poor and ruin their credit reports and ruin their future and declare that only death will release them from the loan.
		Even suicide.
		Dismiss all federal student loan debts.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		So Suzanne, the Trump administration has actually been pretty adamant about not forgiving student loan debt and has recently reactivated interest payments on some of the student loan payment programs that have been on hold during the pandemic.
		What do you think of the idea of the Department of Education being dismantled and what the Trump administration is doing related to student loans?
		Suzanne?
unidentified		Trump Administration has actually been pretty good.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Okay, we're going to move on then.
		Let's hear from Michael in Brooklyn, New York on our line for independence.
		Good morning, Michael.
unidentified		Good morning.
		How are you doing today?
		I'm calling because really, I want people to look at what Trump is doing.
		He is actually dismantling every department.
		So the object is to keep people less educated.
		I think we need to take a look at everything he's doing.
		Congress is giving up their power of Article 1.
		And if you look at the Supreme Court, they have now elected to give this man the power to destroy and sort of ruin what poor people of the middle class have used to actually get a foot up in America.
		I think people in red states need to really take a look at this.
		He's doing this to almost go back to the pre-civil rights movement.
		It's not the United States anymore.
		It's the divided states.
		If you give all of this power back to red states, they've proven over time that their education and what they're doing there has only gotten worse.
		I think people made good points when it came to the AI discussions, when they said a lot of the callers before.
		Really, AI is here to really kind of take over what we have going on in the future.
		And they want you to be less educated because you won't be able to use AI.
		Then poor and the middle class are forced into factory jobs.
		They're forced into working low-educated jobs.
		And the rich stay at the top while the middle class and the poor stay at the bottom.
		So I think what Trump is doing is totally wrong.
		And people mentioned voucher programs earlier.
		That is totally true.
		They want to privatize education where rich kids will be able to have the opportunities and poor kids won't.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Diane is in St. Paul, Minnesota, on our line for Democrats.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Diane.
unidentified		Good morning, America.
		I think that's the apartment of education needs to be, it can be downside, but not dismantling like Trump is talking about doing, because I agree with the people who came on this morning and talked about the fact that we're trying to go back pre-civil rights time.
		That's where Trump wants to take us back to.
		That's what he calls making America great again.
		That wasn't great, not for me, because I'm an African-American.
		I'm 76 years old.
		I lived in a segregated society, and I went to a one-room schoolhouse that my grandfather in Arkansas built for us, for the kids in my community, because the state didn't give us any money.
		The state gave us second-hand books.
		All black kids in the other schools, except the white ones, the white kids got the good books.
		We got the secondhand books.
		But then what happened was in the 50s and 60s, the laws changed, but you couldn't do that no more.
		But what Trump is trying to take us back to, that same thing, that's why we have a Department of Education at the federal level to make sure that there is equity for all children in states.
		And that's especially the red states, because that's who was doing that.
		And you look at their education skills, they're less than anybody else.
		And now, since we got, we had the Department of Education, do you know we got African-American teachers in school now because they were given grants to help them get through college?
		My son is a teacher.
		He's been a teacher for 30 years and he won't quit because there know there's not a whole lot of African American men teaching our children in our neighborhood.
		He ain't going nowhere else.
		He's in my neighborhood, teacher, and he has a master's degree in education.
		Had it not been for the education that was provided after the civil rights bill was passed, my whole family would be very poor.
		Now they are middle-class people reaching for higher gains, and they're helping their communities, and they should leave that alone.
		Why don't people look at why the department was created in the first time?
		Nobody talked about it.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		We're winding down.
		I want to get to a few more comments that we received on Facebook.
		Larry says, absolutely, let each, to the question of should the Department of Education be dismantled, absolutely, let each state handle its education system given grants by the government.
		It's been a huge failure the last couple decades.
		They need to go back to the basics, reading, writing, and arithmetic.
		Victoria says, no, the Department of Education has done absolutely nothing to harm people.
		If anything, we need to strengthen it.
		We are falling behind the rest of the world, and if we continue to cut education, we will no longer be able to compete in the global economy.
		Andrew says, of course, education is better managed at the state and local level.
		By the way, we need school choice.
		The national bureaucracy hurts our kids.
		They need real education, not indoctrinization.
		Let's quickly get to one more call.
		Valerie in Lisbon Falls, Maine on our line for Democrats.
		Good morning, Valerie.
unidentified		Good morning.
		You have a lot of callers that I agree with.
		The gentleman from, I think he was from Brooklyn, yes.
		But as far as dismantling the Department of Education, no, I don't think we should be doing that.
		I think what we need to be doing is improving it.
		There's always room for improvement.
		I'm going to be 64 in about nine days, and my kids are all grown up, and I can't imagine having to worry about this.
		And I do have teachers in the family that do, you know, schools do rely on the Department of Education.
		But that's basically all I have to say.
		I don't want to go off on a tangent about other things.
		But yeah, we need to keep these programs.
		And I was one of the first, I guess, during 1965, Head Start.
		I was one of the first Head Start kids.
		And I remember that, you know, to this day.
		And I think that's so important.
		But that's it.
		Thank you so much.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Well, thank you.
		And thank you to everyone who called in this hour.
		I really appreciate it.
		Coming up on Washington Journal, we're going to have some conversations with two top writers about the week in politics.
		In about 45 minutes, we'll be joined by New York Times columnist Jamel Bowie.
		But first, after the break, Henry Olson of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, as well as host of the podcast, Beyond the Polls.
		We'll be right back.
unidentified		Tonight on C-SPAN's Q&A, a discussion on preserving the legacies of U.S. presidents and the work their privately funded organizations do to achieve this, including through the Presidential Leadership Scholars Program, which launched in 2015.
		The participants talk about the relationship between their foundations and the government-funded presidential library system, which is overseen by the National Archives.
		The idea of opening the George W. Bush Center on SMU campus was first broached.
		There was some resistance among faculty and students.
		That has totally changed.
		And these days now, President Bush on occasion may make surprise appearances in classrooms.
		And I think that's a huge hit for a lot of the students, some of whom weren't born when he was first elected president.
		The partnership is really what's important at all of our institutions.
		And we all have a little bit of a different model.
		At the Clinton Presidential Center, the foundation and the library, we work very closely together on our programs, but the library staff really, a lot of them focus on the core mission, which is to preserve and open the records of those eight years.
		We do try to bring programming to either the Texas A ⁇ M campus utilizing our network so that students have the opportunity to be exposed to those that embody the principles, the values of the 41st president, so that the legacy is living on in that way.
		The foundations put additional money into these institutions.
		Actually, they build the libraries, they build the edifices, and turn them over to the American people through the National Archives, which maintain these institutions.
		But we continue to be involved and put money into them to make them what they are.
		Preserving the legacies of U.S. presidents tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN's Q ⁇ A. You can listen to Q ⁇ A and all our podcasts wherever you get your podcasts or on our free C-SPAN Now app.
		Washington Journal continues.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Welcome back.
		We're joined now by Henry Olson, who's a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and also the host of the Beyond the Polls podcast.
		Welcome back to Washington Journal.
unidentified		Well, thank you for having me back, Kimberly.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Well, I want to start off with, since we're about six months in, exactly six months into President Trump's second term, he's had quite a few political wins to notch that we can list through.
		The passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, it's now law, a successful NATO summit in the Netherlands, getting allies to spend 5% of their GDP on defense, the major strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, which the administration is celebrating as a big win, inflation, 2.7%, tariff policies moving forward.
		What's your take on how the first six months have gone?
unidentified		Yeah, I think the six months have been tumultuous.
		You're drinking through a fire hose if you're trying to follow the news on a daily basis.
		But the president's agenda is largely moving forward very rapidly in foreign policy and social policy and economic policy.
		So it's hard to imagine how much better it could be for Trump trying to implement his ideas into law.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		You've written a piece in the American Mind recently titled, Trumpism is Here to Stay.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		What do you mean by that?
unidentified		Well, what I mean is that Trump-ism is the idea that every person deserves a spot in the American dream.
		And many people voted for Donald Trump because they believed that the people who run the country had decided that they don't count.
		That if you have a manufacturing job in the Midwest, you don't count.
		If you're somebody who doesn't want to have untrammeled immigration, you don't count.
		And those attitudes are not transient.
		They're going to outlive Donald Trump.
		They predated him, that Trump won because he responded to ideas rather than creating them.
		And we see this worldwide, that people who have similar arguments are reaching similar types of people in virtually every country in the world.
		This is a social movement on the scale that we have not seen in decades.
		It's just on the right rather than on the left where we're used to seeing those things.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Now, despite all of those things that the administration would qualify as wins that I just went through, Trump's approval rating is not doing well.
		And here's a New York Times.
		This is just sort of a gathering of the latest polls.
		But it's showing that a recent compilation of polls has his approval rating at 52%, up from 43% in late January.
		This is the disapproval rate of the president.
		It's going up.
		What is the disconnect there, do you think?
unidentified		I think the disconnect is, first of all, having policy wins doesn't necessarily translate into having popular wins.
		And the other thing is that the very scope of change is unsettling people.
		That people like to see a clear narrative, a clear trajectory, and President Trump is not providing that.
		You're providing a lot of discrete wins, but every day is up and down and back and forth.
		And I think the sheer unsettledness of it is disturbing some people.
		He would do better if he could, in the polls at least, if he could slow down the rate of change a little bit, focus on a few things and make things seem and be calmer for the average everyday person as opposed to a continuation or an exacerbation of the chaos that they kind of wanted to replace with Trump.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		What do you think this sort of low approval rating for the president, as well as what you just described, this kind of sense of too much change happening too fast, and also some of the messaging, particularly around the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		What does this mean for Republicans in the midterm?
unidentified		Well, you know, Republicans in the midterms, there's the House and the Senate.
		The Senate is on good turf for Republicans, meaning that there are Democratic seats that are up in places that Trump carried, and Republican seats are only one of them up in places that Harris carried.
		So the Senate should be good for the Republicans regardless, unless Trump really tanks in the approval rating.
henry olsen ▲ ● ▼		The House is a toss-up.
unidentified		And if Trump is much below a 47% job approval rating, you should expect that the Republicans will narrowly lose the House.
		So right now, where, depending on the aggregation you look at, he's at 45 or 46 percent.
		If this were the case in a year and a half, I would expect the next speaker would be Hakeem Jeffries, but with a very narrow majority.
		If it gets lower, then I'd expect Jeffries to have a larger majority.
		If Trump gets up to 48 percent, I think Mike Johnson would come back, again, with a very narrow majority.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Your EPP's EPPC bio states that your work focuses on how America's political order is being upended by populist challenges from the left and the right.
		You also study populism's impact, as you mentioned earlier, on other democracies in the developed world.
		Can you sort of step back and put the Trump presidency thus far into that populist context and what it tells us?
unidentified		Yeah, like I mentioned in response to your earlier question, this is happening everywhere.
unidentified		As you and I are speaking, there's an election in Japan, and the exit polls in Japan show that the populist right-wing party has made record gains.
henry olsen ▲ ● ▼		It's called San Saito, or do-it-yourself.
unidentified		And this is showing up everywhere: people are frustrated with what the elites are doing, and they're turning to a nationalist, communal, but also respectful of individual rights alternative.
		Trump was the first one to break through.
		Brexit won at the same time in Britain with the same sort of message, same sort of coalition.
		But Trump was the first one to really achieve power.
		And so as a result, what he's doing is leading and interpreting a movement that is happening worldwide and will continue to happen.
		If Donald Trump left the scene tomorrow, this would still be here.
		Somebody else would inherit it.
		It would be interpreted in a different way.
		But this is coming bottom up, ground up, not top-down.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Speaking of sort of bottom-up angst, it would be hard to talk about the policy ones that the Trump administration has had without talking about the controversy that he's dealing with right now over the Epstein case.
		And here's his latest post on Truth Social, where Donald Trump says, I have asked the Justice Department to release all grand jury testimony with respect to Jeffrey Epstein is subject only to court approval.
		With that being said, even if the court gave its full and unwavering approval, nothing will be good enough for the troublemakers and radical left lunatics making the request it will always be more, more, more, make America great again.
		Now, some of these troublemakers that he describes are very loud voices within the MAGA movement.
		What do you think of this whole controversy and why it has the base so riled up?
unidentified		Well, I think what we've got is the base influencers riled up.
		What the polls are showing is that his approval rating among Republicans is actually up a little bit.
		Harry Anton of CNN, their data analyst, did a little clip on that a couple of days ago.
henry olsen ▲ ● ▼		So this is a lot of grass tops, but not very much on the grassroots.
henry olsen ▲ ● ▼		But why?
unidentified		Epstein is a controversial figure for good reason.
henry olsen ▲ ● ▼		He did disgusting things in his life.
unidentified		Donald Trump was a friend of his, and of course, people are going to try and make hay of that.
		And you can see why he would be angry, because by association, people are implying certain things about him.
		Well, there's never been any fact that Donald, any proof that Donald Trump did any of the things that Epstein arranged for other people, much as there's no proof that Bill Clinton engaged in it or Bill Gates, who also were friends with Epstein at a particular time.
		But yeah, it's a slow news period.
		Is it?
		Well, late compared to the Big Beautiful Bill Act and the attacks on Iran and everything.
		Late July and August tend to be a period.
		This is when the Swift Vote controversy popped up in 2004.
		And Epstein is just, he's a national news item, has been for years.
		And that you have the possibility of tying the controversial president of the United States to the disreputable and controversial deceased child trafficker.
		I think that's a story that's just too rich to pass up either as an influencer who wants to attract attention to your site or for the media who are trying to get to the bottom of the story.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		It's also pulled in many members of Congress who have started speaking up about this.
		Last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson called for the Department of Justice to release the information on Jeffrey Epstein.
		Let's listen to some comments that he made on Benny Johnson's show.
mike johnson ▲ ● ▼		It's a very delicate subject, but we should put everything out there and let the people decide it.
		I mean, the White House and the White House team are privy to facts that I don't know.
		I mean, this isn't my lane.
		I haven't been involved in that.
		But I agree with the sentiment that we need to put it out there.
		And, you know, Pam Bondi, I don't know when she originally made the statement.
		I think she was talking about documents, as I understood it.
		They were on her desk.
		I don't know that she was specific about a list or whatever, but she needs to come forward and explain that to everybody.
		I like Pam.
		I mean, I think she's done a good job.
		We need the DOJ focusing on the major priorities.
		So let's get this thing resolved so that they can deal with violent crime and public safety and election integrity and going after Act Blue and the things that the president is most concerned about as we are.
		So I'm anxious to get this behind us.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		And so that was the House Speaker basically saying that this issue, because it's so controversial, has become a distraction for the party and they need to address it and have Pam Bondi clear up her statements so that they can move on to other things.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		How big of an issue is this for the GOP broadly?
unidentified		Right now, I would say it's not a big issue because it's not showing up in polls.
		You know, there are polls that say that, yes, people are following Epstein and maybe they think that Trump is involved, but it's of extremely low priority for people.
		Obviously, if there were something that would be more damaging that would tie Trump not just to being a friend of Epstein 20 years ago, but to being closer to the awful things that Epstein did, then it could blow up on them.
		But right now, distraction is the right word, and I think it's the sort of thing that will eventually die out, absent something new and more troubling coming to light.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		And the Wall Street Journal article saying that Trump sent an image, let's see, a card with an image of a naked woman to Epstein does not qualify as that, in your opinion.
unidentified		No, I don't think so.
		I think, again, it's the sort of thing that's, as they said, bawdy.
		Probably not the best idea, but apparently that's what Epstein's friends were doing with one another, making crude jokes and images with one another.
		And again, I think it's the sort of thing that absents something that ties Donald Trump in some way to the actual awful acts that were happening on that island.
		This is the sort of thing that will be superseded by events in the next few weeks.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		We're going to be taking your calls with questions for our guest.
		Democrats can call in at 202-748-8000.
		Republicans at 202-748-8001.
		And Independents at 202-748-8002.
		I want to turn to immigration quickly before we get to the calls.
		There have been quite a few very public immigration crackdowns and raids and issues around that.
		What do you think of the Trump administration's tactics in terms of doing what he promised on the campaign trail of trying to get to the goal of mass deportations?
unidentified		Yeah, I think this is the sort of thing that's being applauded by Trump voters by and large.
		It might find certainly it's being vehemently attacked by Trump opponents.
		You know, I think people in the middle are a little disturbed by it.
		They like the goal of deportation, but they may be a little troubled by the means.
		And that might be one reason, in addition to the chaos, why Trump is a little bit below where you might expect given the number of wins that he's got.
		But it's difficult to see how you can avoid that.
		If you want to be serious about enforcing the immigration laws, you can't simply stop people from coming in.
		You have to make sure that the people who are here are identified and pushed out.
		And that means workplace raids.
		That means raids in other locations when you have the identity of somebody who you have extremely good reason to believe is here illegally.
		And there's really no way around that.
		And Trump would be much better suited if he would go out and sell the idea behind it rather than simply asserting that this is correct.
		One of Trump's issues is he tends to rely on direction and order rather than argument.
		And sometimes in politics, providing an argument, a narrative, speaking more than doing is important for public relations.
		And that means more than truth social post.
		It means making an argument in a speech.
		It means making an extended argument in interviews.
		And it may be if he doesn't particularly want to do it, he needs to be having Tom Homan and JD Vance doing it for him.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Speaking of narrative, though, there have been quite a few stories about people who are not here illegally, whether they be U.S. citizens or whether they be immigrants here lawfully, who are being arrested and deported.
		And last week, Pablo Menriquez, who's a reporter with the news outlet MigrantInsider, asked Alabama GOP Senator Tommy Tubberville if he was concerned about U.S. citizens being detained in ICE raids.
		And here's his response.
unidentified		So Senator, do you care if U.S. citizens accidentally get detained in ICE raids?
tommy tuberville ▲ ● ▼		If U.S. citizens detained.
unidentified		Yeah, it's been happening a lot.
		It's been happening a lot with veterans in particular.
		Yeah.
		Well, first of all, don't put yourself in a situation where that happens.
tommy tuberville ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		And I'm sure with all the illegals we have in this country, you're going to probably have some mistakes happen.
		That always, that's going to happen.
		But again, as long as we take care of it the right way, understand they are assistant, let them go.
		But again, if you're going to be hanging around people that are not citizens of this country, some things like that are going to probably happen.
unidentified		Is there anything people can do to take care of themselves?
unidentified		Like, you know, how can they do to prevent it?
tommy tuberville ▲ ● ▼		Don't hang around illegals.
unidentified		Okay.
tommy tuberville ▲ ● ▼		Bottom line, because President Trump has said, we're going to go after you.
tommy tuberville ▲ ● ▼		And at the end of the day, if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time, something bad could happen.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		So there he is saying that even if U.S. citizens are caught up in this, it's a result of people hanging out with folks who are undocumented or in the country illegally.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		What do you think of this idea, this narrative about undocumented people with no criminal records being detained and deported, as well as U.S. citizens sometimes being detained in deported?
unidentified		Of course, that's why it's important to have due process, you know, is that people deserve a hearing.
		They need to be dealt with legally.
		I have no problem with people here who are being illegally being deported regardless of the lack of a criminal record.
		Simply being here illegally means that you are in violation of the law.
		U.S. citizens should never, ever be deported because they are here legally.
		And that's why it's very important that everyone have a day in court so that the government proves a case as opposed to making an assertion.
		And inevitably, mistakes will be made when you're talking about a mass movement like trying to identify millions of people.
		And that's why having court hearings is so important is so that the one or two cases in a thousand that are mistakes get caught before people get sent overseas.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		All right, let's get to your calls for our guest.
		We're here with Henry Olson.
		Jerry is in, I believe it's Gary, but in Sewell, New Jersey on our line for Democrats.
		Good morning.
		Jerry, thank you.
unidentified		Thank you.
		My name is Jerry.
		Yeah, thank you.
		I am a call.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Jerry, your line is breaking up quite a bit.
		So I'm going to go to a different caller while we try to sort that out.
		Let's hear from Gabriel now in Telford, Tennessee on our line for Republicans.
		Go ahead, Gabriel.
unidentified		Oh, yes.
		My question is for Henry Olson.
		Of course, my question was when he was discussing the radical, fast-paced movements of our president, Donald Trump, which I'm sure he's having to do a lot on his own right now and figure things out.
		What advice could you give for like how he could efficiently some word I can't think of right now, but like who would be the inheritance of that if who would be Donald Trump's so you're saying that if I understand your question correctly, Gabriel, you're saying if Trump was the first to break through in sort of the populist movement in the United States, who would come after him?
		Is that what you're asking?
		Yeah, Mr. Henry Olson made a comment, something about someone inheriting if he failed or something.
		I can't even remember what he said about that, but I wanted to elaborate mainly, I guess, on who would like be the inheritance of it.
		Would it be the Republican or a different type of character?
		Okay.
		Yeah, I think right now Vice President Vance would be the obvious inheritor.
		He's somebody who shares all of those beliefs, the principles that animate populist movements and populist voters.
		He's the vice president, so he has the Trump imprimatur.
		You know, Trump thinks he's acceptable because he's the person who's one heartbeat away from the Oval Office.
		And so far, Vance is doing quite well for himself in terms of projecting a serious image, of being able to make argument, of being a loyal foot soldier, but also somebody who can think on his feet.
		So right now, I think it's pretty clear that Vance would be the next nominee, and he would be the person to inherit the mantle.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Dan is in Woodbridge, Virginia on our line for Democrats.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Dan.
unidentified		Yes, good morning.
		My question and opinion would be as far as as we can see that our government is totally sold out.
		I mean, our Supreme Court, it's a sham now.
		I mean, the Republicans have absolutely no heart, guts, anything to stand up to the wrong that's going on in our justice system to the American people.
		So my question and opinion is, what can actually the American people do to stop all this illegal stuff that's going on with the Congress?
		Republicans not doing anything, no bipartisan, to try to work with the Democrats at all or anything.
		What is your opinion and question?
		What can we do, the American people do about this?
		And that voting stuff, that's not it.
		There needs to be something else to stop this.
		Well, you know, ultimately, the only solution is to elect different people, you know, is that we're not going to have any sort of change in government, and we shouldn't have any change in government accomplished by popular force as opposed to popular votes.
		And that takes time.
		You know, if the polls are accurate, Democrats will do well.
		You know, not a landslide, but will do well.
		That means they'll take more governorships, more state legislatures, probably win the House if the polls stick where they are right now.
		I think that that's the only Democratic solution is to win the argument.
		The fact is that for all of the vitriol that's been unleashed at Trump and at Republicans for the last decade, the polls are quite clear.
		Fewer people today say they are Democrats than at any time in the last century.
henry olsen ▲ ● ▼		More people say they are Republicans.
unidentified		Republicans continually win free and fair elections.
unidentified		And that's a very difficult fact to process if you believe so strongly that Donald Trump and Republicans are wrong.
henry olsen ▲ ● ▼		But those are the facts.
unidentified		And what you have to do is go out and rewin people's hearts and minds who are willing to vote for you just a few years ago.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Jim is in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on our line for Republicans.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Jim.
unidentified		Hey, good morning.
		Thank you for taking my call.
		There's so much I want to talk about.
		I just want to backtrack just a little bit.
		Earlier in this conversation, this gentleman said that this month is like a slow news month, and that's why this Epstein story seems to have some legs.
		But I would actually offer quite to the contrary that, you know, the administration itself handed off those binders on February 27th, and they were actually manufacturing Manufacturing news this entire time and have continually run on the conspiracy theories that they have manufactured for their base what they would call red meat for the Republican Party, which I'm a member of, about Epstein and have very much played cute with a lot of these QAnon aspects of things.
		And I would really disagree generally.
		I heard the term discreet wins used earlier.
		And we're talking about when it comes to immigration, my memory is long enough for me to recall that the president himself killed an immigration bill that would have allowed a bipartisan effort in Congress to try to avoid things like the optics of having masked men confronting and imprisoning people who are showing up to their scheduled immigration hearings in federal courthouses across the country.
		Now, what I'd like to say is that I think that, you know, generally when it comes to the right wing and the administration as a whole, this time around, their message disappointment is extremely good.
		They had plenty of time to get this together.
		But I would disagree with the guests about the president being ahead in polls or Democrats losing elections or whatever.
		The reality is that the deck has been quite stacked.
		Now, when it comes in terms of who the inheritor or who the heir apparent is to what the president has done, if JD Vance is that person, we are in trouble as a country because that man is embarrassing.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		So, Jim, you're raising a lot of points.
		I want to let Mr. Olson respond to several of them.
		But first, the binders that you were referencing, for folks who are unfamiliar, here's a story from CBS News from back in February, as you mentioned, that right-wing influencers get binders labeled the Epstein files, but downplay the revelations.
		A group of 15 right-wing influencers visited the White House and emerged with binders labeled the Epstein files phase one that they obtained from Attorney General Pam Bondi, who has vowed to release information held by the Justice Department about the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, but then goes on to say that there was little new information in the files.
		But Jim raised quite a few points there.
unidentified		Yeah, he did, but they tend to go around the idea that he doesn't think that what the Trump administration is doing is necessarily good.
		And he doesn't think the vice president is a very strong character.
		He said it was an embarrassment.
		And he said that the deck was stacked against Democrats.
		I would politely disagree that certainly for Trump supporters, what Trump is doing is not an embarrassment.
		It is a vindication.
		Among conservative sites, they look and they say, finally, we're getting our way.
		Finally, our party, who's been telling us they agree with us for years, is doing it.
		Take the defunding of NPR and of PBS, something Republicans have talked about for decades.
		You go back to the Newt Gingrich Revolution in 1994, they were talking about doing, didn't happen.
		Now it's happened.
henry olsen ▲ ● ▼		For Republicans, this is a time for jubilation.
unidentified		With respect to the elections, I don't think anyone can reasonably look at what was going on in 2024 and say that the deck, media, forces, laws, and so forth were stacked against Democrats.
		They had as fair a hearing as everyone else.
		The fact is, people starting in 2021 looked at what the Biden-Harris administration was doing and disapproved of it.
		That was a constant disapproval in the polls.
		And the reason Donald Trump won is because the 8% of the people who didn't like either Trump or Harris, according to the exit poll, voted for Trump by almost 20 points.
		This is a free and fair election, even if you don't like the outcome.
		And the answer, if you don't like the outcome, is to fight back and persuade Americans to change their mind.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Bob is in Glenside, Pennsylvania, on our independent line.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Bob.
unidentified		Yes, good morning.
		I really appreciated the insights of the previous caller, this gentleman talking about a slow news cycle.
		It's crazy how exciting the news cycle has been around Iran, us illegally bombing them, just Israel, Ukraine.
		It's been anything but dull.
		And then I do recognize that Trump does have some popularity issues.
		The Democrats are even worse, which is interesting.
		They're less popular than Trump.
		And I think there's something wrong in our politics in general.
		I would say it's a system captured by billionaires to promote policies that help billionaires.
		And so Americans are always going to be dissatisfied with whichever party elects somebody.
		And then connecting this to immigration, it's just another example of really bad policy.
		There are policy solutions to immigration.
		And one thing if you wanted to actually have immigration solved, you could just hold employers accountable.
		So if you employ an illegal, we will come and seize your business and assets.
		It's illegal.
		Immigrants would self-deport.
		They're coming here for jobs.
		So if you're going after the people coming here for jobs, but not the employers, that's a silly policy, and everyone knows that.
		The other thing that was raised is Epstein.
		And I think that's another, I don't know, it's a weird thing.
		I'll connect it to some other things really quickly.
		The idea is that a math teacher, this guy, Epstein, was a math teacher in a parochial school, didn't have a college degree.
		How did this man get such access, wealth, and connection?
		And there's definitely a big story there.
		How did he own an island where he flew Bill Clinton?
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Bob, I do want to give Mr. Olson a chance to respond to your points.
unidentified		Yeah, no, I want to focus on the immigration point because I think the caller is both correct and has flagged something that's going to become an important issue over the next year, which is that if there are, as even migration advocates say, 11 million people here illegally, maybe it's a little bit higher, maybe it's a little bit lower, but there's a lot of people who are here who are not legally able to be here.
		You can increase detention centers, increase immigration judges, increase enforcement.
		It's going to be really hard to deal with 11 million people.
		When the reason they are here is to get jobs.
		And I think the conflict between the desire to deport people who are not here legally conflict with the realities of the measures needed to do so, which we talked about, and the lack of progress means that the employer sanctions is going to become an increasingly important question.
		Right now, all employers have to do is accept documents that appear to be giving people a legal right to work, but they don't need to check them, and they're not responsible for it.
		I think the pressure will grow from immigration restrictionists to make employers responsible for who they hire.
		And that will be a huge battle within the GOP because, of course, even though the Republican Party is no longer as tied to large business as it once was, it remains a friendly outpost.
		And large business and small business are not going to want to be responsible for verifying the legal status of their employees.
		I think that's going to be one of the big fights in the next couple of years.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Jerry is in Seoul, New Jersey on our line for Democrats.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Welcome back.
unidentified		Yeah, good morning.
		Mr. Olsen, I have a few questions for you.
		I understand that with Donald Trump and Epstein, there was a falling out because Epstein did something at Mar-Lago, something with a child of a friend of Trump's, and he kicked them out.
		And I understand that they have not talked to each other or been friends since then.
		Could you explain a little bit about that?
		Now, the other question I have for you is.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		First of all, Jerry, where are you getting that information?
unidentified		What about the Epstein?
		Well, he'll tell me.
		Also, no, because I've heard this before.
		He kicked Trump out.
		I mean, he kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago, and they have not been friends since, I think, 205 or so.
		Ultimately.
		The other question I have for you, please, is how did Obama, you know, there's a story came out about Obama and going after Trump with the Russia-Bush Luxes story.
		And you could see the coup going on at the time.
		Now, this is another thing.
		Trump is so successful at what he's doing.
		I see that the Democrats are doing it again.
		They're picking this story to try to tear at him.
		And people can see it.
		You know, the problem is, I'm a Democrat.
		And the one thing I see here is that the exposure of the Democrats, the news media, has been horrible.
		I mean, you could see them just targeting and not going, you know, giving Trump any credit for anything.
		And I need some explanation from you regarding that.
		So back to the question about what happened with Trump and Epstein, Obama's story with the coup, and where do you think that's going?
		I appreciate it.
		Thank you.
		Yeah, I mean, what I have read is that there was a falling out around 2004 and that they had not talked to one another since then before Epstein's death.
		So that much seems to be documented.
		The cause is not something I've read about.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		So I think that this was actually covered in the New York Times article that's actually out today.
		So I'll read just a little bit of this.
		Please.
		In 2004, Trump and Epstein have a falling out over a property fight.
		Two years after Mr. Trump called Epstein a terrific guy, the two men became rivals over an oceanfront Palm Beach mansion that had fallen into foreclosure in a power struggle detailed by the Washington Post.
		Mr. Trump ultimately outbid Mr. Epstein for the property.
		There's little public record of the two men interacting after that real estate battle.
		Trump would later say in 2019 that he and Mr. Epstein had a falling out and hadn't spoken in 15 years.
		The president declared himself not a fan of his former friend.
		Not long after the property auction, the police in Palm Beach fielded a tip that young women had been observed going in and out of Mr. Epstein's home.
		That's the best we've got.
unidentified		There we go.
		With respect to the Obama story, that's something that's getting a lot of play in conservative media for the obvious reason.
		It'll be very interesting to see what the Attorney General does with this, which is to say it's one thing to release information.
		It's another thing to see whether or not there are criminal charges that could be brought with respect to the involvement of the president, former president, and other members of his administration with respect to what's called the Russian collusion hoax by conservative media.
		There's been calls for people like Jim Comey and others to be criminally investigated.
		If the Attorney General does that and pursues that, she's going to have to think that she has evidence that a jury can find beyond a reasonable doubt.
		And if she can do that, that raises it to another level.
		If it's simply where it is right now, then information that'll be interpreted one by one sets of partisans, another way by another set of partisans, and we won't be talking about it in a month.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Yes, this is also covered in the New York Times that Gabbard claims, this is Tulsi Gabbard, claims the Obama administration tried to undermine Trump in 2016.
		Democrats denounced a report issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence as politically motivated and error-ridden, as you predicted.
		Let's hear from Joe in Bowling Green, Ohio, on our line for independence.
		Good morning, Joe.
unidentified		Hi there.
		I just want to point out that all these victories for Trump are actually defeats for people.
		Your guest mentioned Brexit over in England as a quote-unquote populist victory.
		Brexit was a disaster for England.
		It's ruined their economies.
		The plan, the big, beautiful bill, basically planned to bankrupt the federal government in order to give Trump himself a tax break.
		The EPA under Trump is increasing the levels of mercury-lead and asbestos that people are going to be exposed to.
		You've got people dying all over the world from aid cuts to USAID.
		And also, your guest, I happen to live in Ohio, which is the most gerrymandered state in the country.
		And our congressional representation in Congress does not at all reflect the populist people distribution of people in Ohio who actually are much less conservative than our congressional idiots would show.
		I just want your guest to talk about the fact the actual impact of these victories are actually harming people.
		Well, you know, that's something what an advocate of the president would say is, you know, first of all, there was no new tax cut that was given to wealthy people.
		It was the re-adoption of the 2017 tax cut that Trump put in place.
		Yeah, Trump's tax cut.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		The extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, individual side income tax cuts.
henry olsen ▲ ● ▼		Right.
unidentified		So I just wanted to say it's not like there's anything new.
henry olsen ▲ ● ▼		This is the extension for everybody of the tax cuts.
unidentified		So working people will continue to get the tax cuts that they got.
		I'm saying this is what the president's supporters would say.
		They did increase the, continue to increase the child tax credit, which is available to people with children under the age of 18.
		They put in the no tax on tips, which will primarily help people of working and middle class backgrounds who receive a significant amount of their income from tips.
		And so that I think there are people who would say, no, actually, this is a big win.
		And I think with respect to some of the aid cuts, there's a lot of dispute as to whether or not these cuts are actually going to lead to fatalities overseas or not.
		One of the things that you have to take into account when you're reading media accounts is that a lot of what you tend to hear is based on estimates produced by advocate groups.
		It may very well be that some of these cuts end up impacting people overseas poorly.
		But certainly the Senate tried to exempt PEPFAR cuts, which is the program that America funds to reduce AIDS transmission and has saved lives around the world.
		And presumably that will reduce or eliminate some of the potential negative impact.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		There have been multiple reports, though, that the cuts that have already been made to foreign aid have been directly tied to deaths overseas.
unidentified		Yeah, well, I find that a little bit difficult to, first of all, I have seen reports, but as far as the sorts of things where you can say, well, here's the cut that was happening.
		Here's the program that was cut back.
		This is what's happened on the ground.
		Again, when you look at advocate groups, whether it's on the left or the right, they will always, you know, you talk about during Obamacare, right-wing groups said that this was going to mean that tens of millions of people were going to lose their private sector health insurance.
		Employers are going to leave the field.
		Didn't happen.
henry olsen ▲ ● ▼		It didn't happen.
unidentified		It was an estimate.
		It was based, it was a political argument.
		And in the absence of somebody actually saying the sort of hard data that is not refutable, saying here's the uptick in death rates, here's the government statistics.
		I would tend to say that what you're seeing is advocate groups taking an anecdotal or a projected view as opposed to actual fact on the ground as far as the impact overseas.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Mike is in Peoria, Illinois, and our line for Republicans.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Mike.
unidentified		Hi.
		I love the responses that your guest has.
		They seem to be fairly well balanced and thought out.
		We keep talking about the Democrats with all the big beautiful bill and all the other things.
		They keep talking about how Democrats aren't getting their message out.
		But every time we hear a Democrat call in and talk about, oh, the Big Beautiful Bill is going to kill people.
		It's going to do this.
		It's going to do that.
		Obviously, their message is getting out.
		But as your guest just pointed out, that's not really based on reality.
		There's no hard evidence of that.
		And with the immigration issue, we've cut off the immigration at the border, and now we can handle what's already in the country.
		And we have so many criminals.
		And every time there's a criminal that's a proven criminal, the left, all they want to do is scream about how due process.
		Yet you've got a criminal who's cut a woman's head off and put her in a cooler in his yard or others.
		And all the Democrats want to do is complain and complain and complain.
		And that's all I've got.
		One of the things that polls is showing right now is that the one thing that comes through when Democrats are asked what should Democrats do in response to the Trump administration, what comes through is fight.
		And we can hear it on a number of the callers is the outrage at what the Trump administration is doing is so strong that what they're hearing from their base and from their donors is fight.
		Fight rhetorically.
		Fight on the, you know, oppose, oppose, oppose.
		And I can tell you, again, looking at registration data and polls, is that is not producing an uptick in Democratic support.
		It is still the case that more people register Republicans than Democrats, which didn't, as far as new registrations, that's been a trend that's been going on for about three and a half years, and it's not slowing down very much.
		So feeding the base during the Tea Party era was not very good for Republicans.
		Feeding the base during the Biden, now early Trump 2.0 era, is not a winning strategy for Democrats.
		It's preaching to the converted, and it's not going out and telling the people who eight years ago voted for Hillary Clinton, who four years ago voted for Joe Biden, who are now voting for Republicans why they should go back.
		When the Democrats figure that out, well, then beating Trump is going to be easy because they'll be winning elections and then they'll replace him with a Democrat in 2028.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Just to follow up on some of the points you raised, I'm looking at an article in The Hill pointing out that Democrats are underwater in a new poll that the Democratic Party's approval rating is underwater at 40% according to a new poll.
		This is a Harvard CAPS Harris poll released on Monday that found only four in 10 respondents approved of the job that the Democratic Party is doing.
		A slight drop from June when 42% of respondents answered similarly.
		All right.
		Well, that is all the time that we have with our guest, Henry Olson, who is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, also the host of the Beyond the Polls podcast.
		Thank you so much for joining us here again on Washington Journal.
unidentified		Thank you for having me back, Kimberly.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Wonderful.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		And so after the break, we're going to continue our conversation about the week in politics with New York Times columnist Jamel Bowie, and we will be right back.
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		Washington Journal continues.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Welcome back.
		We're joined now by Jamal Bowie, who is a New York Times opinion columnist here to discuss the week in political news.
		Thanks so much for joining Washington Journal.
unidentified		Thank you so much for having me.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		I want to start with a meeting that happened this week between a New York Democratic primary, New York City Democratic primary winner, Doran Mamdani, and Democrats in Washington.
		Here's a story about it in ABC News: that he met with congressional Democrats who praise his campaign.
		He met on Wednesday with those congressional Democrats as he continues his outreach to members of New York's congressional delegation, some of whom have still not said whether they'll endorse him, pointing to concerns over his progressive policy proposals or how he's declined to criticize some pro-Palestinian phrases.
		There has been so much talk about this race.
		Why is it so important to Democrats more broadly?
unidentified		I think that for Democrats more broadly, one reasons why this race is important is it's just a high profile.
		It's the mayor of New York, and although that hasn't recently been a stepping stone to higher office, it's still mayor of the largest city in the country, and arguably one of the most important cities in the country.
		So there's just a lot of attention being paid to this.
jamelle bouie ▲ ● ▼		It's also the case that Mamdani was able to prevent, at least at this stage, the former governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, from becoming the party's nominee.
		He kind of unseat is the wrong word, but he was able to block Cuomo from winning that and did so quite decisively.
		And so it's sort of a challenge to at least the New York Democratic Party establishment.
		So for those reasons, I think Democrats in a lot of places are paying attention to this.
		But I'll also say that one thing Mamdani did in winning his primary victory is he was able to peel back some of these voters in immigrant neighborhoods who backed Trump in the presidential election.
unidentified		And so if you are a Democratic strategist, there's also something to pay attention there to how exactly he did that.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		And what are some of the strategies that you think he can, that other Democrats might be able to take from it across the board, not just in New York, not just in New York, but in other communities as well, especially around social media, which played a big role in his race?
unidentified		Social media did play a big role in his race, but I would, one thing I would say is to not treat the social media aspect of it as sort of dispositive, you know, not treat it as it's the whole thing.
jamelle bouie ▲ ● ▼		I don't think you can replicate this just by like doing more TikTok videos.
		I think what Mamdani did was have a deliberate strategy of really meeting voters where they were, like going directly to voters, speaking directly to voters, trying to get their concerns first and foremost, and then articulating a message that actually responds to those concerns.
		And then once you've built a message, you're trying to reach them wherever you can, and that's where the social media comes into it.
unidentified		That's where the TikTok and what have you comes into it.
		And even in that, what Mamdani's social media presence does, how it's a little different, it's not so polished.
		It's attempting to be authentic, perform authenticity, show authenticity, and not so worried about being strictly on message in the most rigid way possible.
		There's a level of flexibility there that I do think Democrats nationwide could learn from.
		I think the approach of voters first been message, Democrats everywhere can learn from.
		And I think a focused message on material concerns, which is what the Mamdani campaign was and is, is something Democrats around the country can learn from.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		In addition to meeting with the New York delegation while he was in Washington, Mamdani also met with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
		And there's a story here in Politico saying Mamdani finally meets Jeffries and comes up short.
		What's your reaction to some of the hesitation we're seeing from Democratic leadership, both Chuck Schumer over in the Senate as well as Hakeem Jeffries in the House to Mamdani?
unidentified		I'm of sort of two minds of it.
unidentified		The first mind is that if you look back to the previous New York mayoral election, it did take some time between top Democrats who aren't directly in New York local politics, but obviously in New York City politics, got around to endorsing Eric Adams.
jamelle bouie ▲ ● ▼		So part of me is like, well, you know, maybe they're just, maybe they'll do it eventually, right?
		But the other part of me is a little baffled by this because here you have two Democratic leaders who themselves have spoken about the difficulties Democrats have had reaching these immigrant communities, reaching young people.
		Here you have a Democrat in Mamdani, and to be clear, Mamdani is a member of the Democratic Party.
unidentified		He ran in the Democratic primary.
		He is a Democrat.
		Here you have a Democrat who has at least given some kind of proof of concept for how you can reach those voters again, who's exciting people in a way that a Democratic politician hasn't done in some time, who's clearly very skilled and talented, and clearly open to listening and working with others.
jamelle bouie ▲ ● ▼		And they're keeping him at arm's length.
unidentified		And it feels on their part like a certain amount of just undue political hesitancy.
		That's a nice way of putting it.
		You could say a little bit of political cowardice.
		They don't want to be on the wrong side of something.
		And so they're keeping their distance.
		But from my perspective, it seems like in keeping their distance, they're going to end up on the wrong side of things.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Some of the narratives that it seems like the Democrats are trying to avoid are the topics being pushed by Republicans.
		You have Caroline Levitt, the White House press secretary, asking about, who was asked at a recent press conference about President Trump's view of Mandani, and we heard a lot of those talking points.
		Let's listen.
unidentified		He absolutely does not want to see Zemdami elected, who is a known communist who supports the abolishment of private property, the defunding of police.
		He has made very well-known anti-Semitic statements.
		It would be a disaster for New York and for this country.
		And I think it's quite telling that this individual, a known communist, has been spending time in Washington this week meeting with leaders on Capitol Hill.
		This is truly where the Democrat Party is headed.
		Clearly, they learned nothing from November 5th and the president's overwhelming victory.
		Your response to that framing and how this narrative is playing out.
		I mean, my response, my response to the journalist of that framing, is that Levitt is just telling blatant falsehoods to her audience, that Momdani isn't a communist.
		He's never expressed, we have no record of him expressing communist beliefs or allegiance to the Communist Party.
		We have no record of him saying anything anti-Semitic.
		The controversy over the language that you referenced earlier is about whether or not he would condemn other people saying it, but we have no record of him using anything anyone could describe as anti-Semitic language.
		We have no record of him calling for the abolition of private property.
		My response to the White House is that it seems to be scrambling to say something negative and has to make up things to come up with its message.
jamelle bouie ▲ ● ▼		And I think Democrats who, if Democrats are watching this and are sitting worried about what the White House will say, this to me is evidence that they have really nothing to worry about.
unidentified		If this is the level of invective the White House has, then they don't really have much of anything.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Going back out to sort of the broader Democratic Party, there's a story here in the Washington Post that Democrats are trying a new tone, less scripted, more cursing, trumpier insults.
		In a Washington Post analysis, since 2024 and the 2024 election, Democratic politicians have really been trying to change it up.
		They're cursing more online than Republicans, trying to come off as less scripted.
		Do you think this is helping with the party's overall outreach, or do you think that they have an authenticity problem?
jamelle bouie ▲ ● ▼		I think Democrats have an authenticity problem, and I think that this development is actually evidence of the party's authenticity problem.
unidentified		That listening to consultants or whomever tell you that you have to curse more and that's going to read as authentic seems to me, to my ears, actually quite inauthentic.
jamelle bouie ▲ ● ▼		I want to turn people's attention again to the Mamdani campaign and also to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, because they both do this, and that is the Mamdani campaign put out a campaign video that was very interesting.
unidentified		It was kind of outtakes from a previous campaign video.
unidentified		And in these outtakes, Mamdani is trying to record, and regular people keep walking by and wanting to say hi to him.
jamelle bouie ▲ ● ▼		And so he stops and he talks to them and they give their greetings and they smile and take pictures together and people move on.
unidentified		It's just this again and again and again.
jamelle bouie ▲ ● ▼		And one message of the video is clearly that, hey, this is a popular guy.
unidentified		But the other message of the video is that he's a comfortable person.
		He likes being around you.
		He wants to talk to you.
		He's authentic in this very real way.
		And Representative Okasi-Cortez has been known since he's been in Congress for doing these Instagram lives, these TikTok videos, whatnot, where she's just explaining how Congress works to viewers in a way that feels very real and authentic.
jamelle bouie ▲ ● ▼		And it's treating the viewer as an adult who can understand.
		And I think that it's not that you have to copy these things, but that you have to find some way as a lawmaker, as a politician, to embody your actual self and perform it for viewers and for voters.
		Now, if your authentic self is someone who likes to curse, then by all means, go for it.
		But if that's not your authentic self, it's going to be very immediately obvious that it isn't.
unidentified		And so the conclusion here is just to solve the authenticity problem, you actually have to work at being authentic, which means it does mean being unscripted, but not unscripted in this kind of, what reads to me kind of consultant-driven way that's trying to mimic or copy something that Trump is doing, but authentic in a way that feels quite, that feels real to people.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		We're going to be taking your calls soon, Democrats at 202-748-8000, Republicans at 202-748-8001, and Independents at 202-748-8002.
		But before we go to calls, I want to go to one of your recent pieces, Jamal.
		Face it, Trump is a normie Republican.
		You're arguing in this piece that Trump has actually governed thus far as a mostly Orthodox Republican, not kind of this change agent or chaos agent that other people describe him as.
		Can you expand on this idea?
unidentified		Absolutely.
		So the administration's signature piece of legislation is this reconciliation bill, they call the Big Beautiful Bill, that is at its heart a large upper income tax cut and a massive cut to existing social insurance programs.
		The previous Republican administration, the first Trump administration, also passed a large upper income tax cut and attempted to slash the existing social insurance programs.
		The previous Republican administration, the Bush administration, passed two large upper income tax cuts and attempted to slash existing social insurance programs.
		Like, you can kind of just keep doing this.
		These represent long-standing Republican priorities.
		Slashing taxes on the very wealthy, slashing the safety net for middle class and working families, reducing regulations on industry, giving, in fact, industry a seat at the table when it comes to the making of regulations, vastly reducing the existing federal administrative state.
		Like all these things are just part of the Republican agenda.
		And so perhaps the way in which Trump is doing them is radical.
		One might say lawless in many respects, given the number of lawsuits that have been filed against the administration's actions.
		But the actual substantive agenda is just standard issue conservative Republicanism, going back to at least Reagan and representing the aspirations of conservatives in this country since at least the New Deal.
		And I think it's important to emphasize that what we're seeing is not some kind of new populism, but really just the collected interest of ideological conservatives and their allies in industry and business in the courts.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		All right, we're going to your calls with questions for New York Times opinion columnist Jamel Bowie.
		We'll start with Ron in Laporte, Indiana on our line for Democrats.
		Good morning, Ron.
		And can you please turn down the volume on your TV before you ask your question?
unidentified		Hello.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Yes, go ahead, Ron.
unidentified		Yeah, I was talking about the previous interview you had a little while ago.
		You were talking about the Democrats.
		Yeah.
		The theory is fear and hate equal.
		This is the formula, equal power.
		Yeah.
		Jesus said, you shall know me by my good works.
		And that was, but those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart and they defile the man.
		Confucius, he said.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Do you have a question for Mr. Bowie?
unidentified		Correction in society begins when things are not called by the right names.
unidentified		And war called by in.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Did you have a question for Mr. Bowie?
unidentified		Like police action.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		All right, we're going to go to Peter in Sauk Rapids, Minnesota on our line for Republicans.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Peter.
unidentified		I wanted to point out that I think Jeffrey Epstein is too smart to be captured like he was.
		I think he's still alive.
		And I'm surprised more people aren't talking about that.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		So all the reports we have is that he is dead.
		And according to those reports, he died by suicide while in prison.
		But since we're on the topic, Jamel, I was wondering if you could talk about this in the context of the way that the Democrats are responding to this ongoing scandal story here in Politico.
		The powerful protecting the powerful.
		Democrats see an opening on Epstein that internal polling suggests there's a window for Democrats to use the controversy over the so-called Epstein list.
		And more than a dozen strategists, elected officials, and aides are urging them to take it.
		What do you think of this as an opening for Democrats as it's described here?
unidentified		I think that's right.
		You have here a public controversy that's really, I think, captured the imaginations of many Americans.
		It directly implicates the president's own message about his intention, what he hopes to do with his presidency, stand for the little guide, stick it to the deep state, go after perfidious elites.
		And here we have evidence that he is completely unwilling to do this in the case of this very one prominent individual.
jamelle bouie ▲ ● ▼		And then if you step back just a little bit and you look at the president's kind of approval across issues, he is well below negative on basically every issue of importance, including his signature one, immigration, and on his handling of the Epstein controversy.
unidentified		The vast majority of the public is unhappy with him.
		And I think there is an opportunity to link that with his unpopularity across other areas and to essentially make the case that the same kind of avoidance of responsibility and accountability, the same kind of elite protection racket that Trump seems to be trying to orchestrate on this applies to these other issues as well.
		It helps explain his massive upper income tax cuts.
		It helps explain his assault on the social safety net.
		Helps explain all these things as well.
jamelle bouie ▲ ● ▼		So I think Democrats do have this opportunity to just kind of create an ER narrative using the Epstein controversy.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		You mentioned polling around this issue.
		There was a Quinnipiac poll that was run from July 10th to the 14th on the disapproval of Trump's administration's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
		63% of all voters disapprove of how the Trump administration is handling this, including 36% of Republicans, 71% of Independents, and 83% of Democrats.
		Let's get back to your calls for New York Times opinion columnist Jamal Bowie.
		Paul is in New York on our line for independence.
		Good morning, Paul.
unidentified		Hey, good morning.
		So this is my take on it, and you can respond, okay?
		So I'm not allowed to vote in the primary because I'm an independent, but the way I looked at it was this.
		First of all, people want change.
		Okay?
		And as much as politicians like to talk about change, they don't actually, particularly if they're establishment politicians, want to make change in any big, big way.
		And what Zoron was, was new.
		Cuomo is not new, okay?
		Nor is Brad Landers, nor is Scott Stringer.
		These are other candidates in the Democratic thing.
		These guys have been around a long time.
		So this guy's young, he's new, and he's talking about change.
		And there's a big affordability problem, not just in New York City, but around the country, in my opinion.
		And people want change, and it's very difficult for somebody like Cuomo to say, hey, yeah, I hear you.
		I want to make things more affordable when he's been in power for a tremendously long time.
		There are other issues like Cuomo wasn't liked by city workers, which are big players in the Democratic primary in New York City.
		But I won't go into all of that.
		But the real issue, though, I think, that people are missing is that people want change.
		There's an affordability issue.
		And Democrats, for the most part, have programs that are very narrowly focused, sort of like poverty programs, kind of like, oh, we'll create a program for people who have trouble housing and what have you, as opposed to just getting more housing, just making things cheaper.
		They want to make it some special thing that you can apply for and what have you to accommodate it.
		And I don't know if Zoron's going to be any different, but he is new.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		So, Paul, I think we have your idea.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		I want to let Jamal respond.
unidentified		No, Paul, I think that's an excellent point.
		And the point about his policy program, which was not so much narrowly tailored programs, a grant if you make under $40,000 or somewhat or some such thing, but rather we're going to make buses free.
		We're going to freeze rent in the units so we can freeze rent.
		We're going to try to build more housing to reduce housing costs.
		We are going to pilot maybe city-owned grocery to see if we can't reduce the cost of groceries.
jamelle bouie ▲ ● ▼		Now, are all of these things, programs, things that are going to work?
unidentified		There's obviously a lot of, I think, good faith debate over the wisdom of some of these plans.
		But politically speaking, they are simple to understand.
		You don't need to know much to understand these programs.
jamelle bouie ▲ ● ▼		They lend themselves well to like a quick 30-second, 45-second ad.
unidentified		You can just kind of rattle them off.
		Not unlike, and this is not to draw a comparison to the figure, but to the messaging, not unlike Build the Wall in the 2016 election.
		These are very easy, very simple things you can say, and people immediately understand them.
		And they represent, you know, they represent, I think, to voters someone who really is taking their concerns seriously.
		And the fact that he's young and new certainly helps that as well.
		But there's this connection between the broadness of the policy proposals and in his newness and his novelty that I think is important in understanding why so many voters in the city were attracted to him and his campaign.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Ed is in Toms River, New Jersey on our line for Democrats.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Ed.
unidentified		Hello.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Hello, we can hear you.
unidentified		Oh, okay.
		I'm sorry.
		The whole thing that I'm seeing is that we Democrats are just as guilty as the Republicans because the billionaires are on both sides, and they were the ones that were tuning our children through Epstein to rape and do whatever they want with.
		If we can't stop that sort of thing, if we don't talk up against that, then what are we doing?
		We should, this revealing of information on Epstein and who these billionaires were, whether they included Donald or not, they were doing things that were incredibly wrong.
		How we could let that go.
		We're all guilty if we don't do anything about it.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Jamel, any thoughts on Ed's comments there?
unidentified		I think one thing I hear in Ed's comments is just a frustration with the lack of accountability for wrongdoing among powerful people and elites.
		And I do think that one of the things that is drawing public attention to the Epstein files beyond the salaciousness of it all is I think there's a real sense that this is a country that just does not hold its political elites accountable for when they break the law, for when they engage in wrongdoing, for when they just mess up in a major way.
		And there is, I think, space in our politics for someone to capture that discontent with the absence of elite accountability.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		This came up as well in a text message comment that we received from Dana in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, who says, why didn't the Democrats release any salacious info about Trump, especially during election time?
unidentified		It doesn't make any sense.
		I mean, I mean, Trump was, he was convicted in a court of law of multiple felonies.
		He was found civilly liable for sexual assault.
		Much of his most salacious stuff is kind of in wide public display.
		I'm not sure that there's all that much to release into the public air that wasn't already there.
jamelle bouie ▲ ● ▼		That's honestly part of the political advantage superpower Trump has is that people do associate him with a kind of libertine milieu and don't necessarily hold this stuff against him.
unidentified		I think what makes the Epstein files different is that part of the popular grassroots energy around Trump is this idea that he's going to take revenge and retribution against a diabolical cabal of elites.
		And here you have something that seems like would be right up that alley and he's not doing it.
		And so there's a contradiction there and that's what's fueling, I think, some of the discontent.
		But if this were not about Jeffrey Epstein, if this were just another case of Trump being accused of sexual misconduct, I don't think there'd be any of this fervor or furor around him.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Mark is in Newport, Kentucky on our line for Republicans.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Mark.
unidentified		Yes, I was just going to comment on the Epstein.
		I said the same thing.
		I just wonder why the Democrats was in charge for four years, and they never brung him up at all.
		And everything else they put Trump through, if there was anything there, you'd think they would have been riding their coattails on that for years.
		And that's all I got.
		Thank you.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Mark, I believe that Jeffrey Epstein was arrested during a Democratic administration.
		Oh, we've lost him.
		But Jamal, did you want to go ahead and comment on that?
unidentified		I was just going to say what you were about to say.
		I believe that he was arrested during a Democratic administration.
		It should be said that it's not appropriate for federal law enforcement officials to release damaging information about the political enemies of the incumbent administration, right?
jamelle bouie ▲ ● ▼		Like, if Democrats had something on Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, it wouldn't have been appropriate to release it.
unidentified		And the fact that we've, I think so many people have already gotten acculturated to the idea that it's the place of federal law enforcement officials to advance the political interests of the president is a sign of just how much this president has degraded long-standing norms and operations about how our government ought to work.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Bruce is in Kingston, New York on our line for Democrats.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Bruce.
unidentified		Yeah, good morning.
		I want to just cut my sounds off here.
		Jamel, I want to just compliment you.
		I've followed you on many different occasions on your reports, and I find you a very excellent journalist and a very intelligent man.
		I wanted to start that out in contrast to what was just on the last show with Henry Olson, which is really a false representation of ethics.
		This guy is from the think tanks, Manhattan Institute, and it's very much a conservative thing.
		I don't think he talked anything about ethics whatsoever.
		It seems to rise to the divide between the blue and the red Confederacy of this country.
		I would like to say, though, that I wanted to point out that and ask your opinion on how the media handles Democrats compared to Republicans, where rhetoric like communist accusations, things that really go back to the old days of demonizing people become the standard.
		And that, I guess, doesn't sell on the media.
		Whereas the Democrats, having so many variable people representing so many different people, are easy to find a mark to label.
		They'll take a particular person and generalize the entire Democratic Party for being that way.
		And a good example of that is what we were bringing up before concerning how the Democrats are somehow playing the Republican game of taking advantage of a very factual situation going on.
		And apparently, they're not allowed.
		They're politicizing things the Republicans never do.
		And the factual events about Epstein and Trump being connected is somehow a play, a political theater game by Democrats.
		Again, the media seems to run with that stuff.
		And finally, just I want to ask your opinion.
		We've forgotten about what think tanks have done to us.
		I'm talking about the Manhattan Institute from the beginning and various things with 2025 going on.
		We seem to have forgotten that that's behind the scenes of a lot of things we're suffering right now.
		So I'm wondering how this impacts on first media coverage, the division of the country into red and blue, which is so routine, and also the failure to really analyze Republican rhetoric when it becomes so easy to divide the Democrats.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		So, Bruce, I just want to make sure that we understand your two questions that I'm hearing clearly.
		The first being how the media treats Democrats and Republicans differently.
		And I believe your second question is on the role of think tanks in influencing Republican policies.
		Is that accurate?
unidentified		Yeah, let me concisely put it.
		I find that there are institutional organizations in the country that are kind of running a game, and the media has failed in its job to dissect that and deliver it to the public the correct way.
		Let's let Jamil respond.
jamelle bouie ▲ ● ▼		I think it's worth disaggregating the media a bit.
unidentified		There was last year, for example, plenty of coverage of Project 2025 of Republican plans, of Democratic plans, sort of fair-minded, factual coverage of the respective parties and what they intended to do with power.
		But that isn't often the stuff that is in front view, right?
		When you turn on a cable news network channel to watch the news, that's not necessarily what you're getting.
		There, you are getting more of this horse race, who's ahead, who's behind kind of coverage.
		And I think that implicit in some of that coverage is a set of storylines about the respective parties.
jamelle bouie ▲ ● ▼		The Democratic Party in this is kind of the responsible governing party.
		And so it's judged according to a different set of standards in the Republican Party, which is in the storyline.
		This party of insurgent anger, 10 years ago was the Tea Party, or 15 years ago was the Tea Party.
		Now it's MAGA.
		But this insurgent anger and even extremism, and those things are kind of baked into the narrative about the Republican Party.
unidentified		So in this sort of horse race coverage, there isn't as much attention to the stakes of an election, of the practical things that may happen, as it is these two respective storylines.
		And the great disadvantage of this is it really does obscure what is what A could happen, but B, it obscures the extent to which I think Republicans do have a serious and coherent governing plan that deserves as much scrutiny, they deserve as much scrutiny as a potential governing party as the Democrats do.
		But I think the extent to which in the kinds of you know in the kinds of much more visible political media, the extent to which it's less a story of stakes and more a story of who's ahead, contributes to an atmosphere where the parties are just like, seem to be judged on a different set of criteria reflecting the kind of different roles they play in the story.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Sophia is in New York, New York, on our line for independence.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Sophia.
unidentified		Good morning, Kimberly.
		When you are on on Sunday and John, I watch you on the television.
		I had my cell phone doing my show.
		I just invited Alex on my birthday.
		I'm going to be 75.
		By the way, Jamal, you have been wonderful.
		You do remember Steve Scali.
		I wish he could write a book.
		You know, how do we remember this?
		And by the way.
		And did you have a question for Jamal?
		No, no question.
		I'm happy with everything.
		I'm lighting a candle.
		The day, Mr. Trump, go away.
		That is the day I'm going to celebrate.
		Hey, hey, have a good day.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Miriam is in Grovetown, Georgia on our line for Democrats.
		Good morning, Miriam.
unidentified		Hi, thanks for taking my call.
		Before I get to my question, since 30 days, so much stuff happens in 30 days, I did want to talk about, you know, how Trump keeps saying that it was God that protected him from his assassination when it hit his ear?
		Well, and it was God that wanted him here to, you know, keep doing the good things that he's doing.
		Well, Adolf Hitler had 42 assassination attempts on his life.
		So God must have really loved Hitler and wanted him to do what he's doing.
		But okay, I just had to say that.
		All right, to my question, I'm a progressive, and I'm disappointed with the Democrats.
		And I'm disappointed mainly because I think they are beholden to the same rich donors that the Republicans are.
		They're really friends at the top.
		And even though they say, oh, we're for this, you can tell they're not authentic because they kind of say, oh, yeah, we're against this.
		We're against this.
		But it's so weak, almost as if they don't really mind if a bill passes because they're rich and they're going to get something for it.
		And I think that's the kind of feeling a lot of us have, is that they're not fighting because they really don't really want to fight that hard for us because they're getting enriched, they're doing stock trades and having insider trading.
		They have all the perks, and they don't really mind hurting us in a way so long as they're protecting themselves and their rich donors.
		And that's all I have to say.
		Thank you.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Janelle, your thoughts?
jamelle bouie ▲ ● ▼		I thought that was a very interesting comment because it gets to it confirms, I think, one of my views of the recent polling of the Democratic Party, which is, you know, everyone's seen these polls showing Democrats very unpopular with the public.
		But the thing about a poll like this is you're asking what you're feeling about the Democratic Party and why you feel that way could be very different.
		You could feel that way because you disagree with the party's program.
unidentified		You could feel that way because you are generally against the political parties.
jamelle bouie ▲ ● ▼		Or you could feel that way, not because you necessarily disagree with the program, but because you disagree with sort of the attitude.
unidentified		You view Democrats as being weak, as being unwilling to fight.
jamelle bouie ▲ ● ▼		And I think that among Democratic voters, there is a lot of frustration, a lot of frustration with what is perceived to be an unwillingness to fight and stand up for the values that these Democrats say that they have.
		I think part of the enthusiasm, just to bring things back to an early conversation, part of the enthusiasm for someone like Mamdani is that he appears to want to fight, to want to stand up for people.
		And I think that there is space within the Democratic Party now for a kind of anti-establishment positioning that, again, isn't so much about policy, but is about like affect and attitude.
unidentified		Do you want to stand up and fight for these values?
jamelle bouie ▲ ● ▼		Do you want to fight Republicans?
unidentified		Do you want to challenge corruption within the party?
unidentified		Do you want to ban stock trading?
jamelle bouie ▲ ● ▼		Like all these things, I think, would be quite responsive to Democratic voters and would likely wear very well with Democratic voters and perhaps with voters outside the party.
jamelle bouie ▲ ● ▼		But I do think that there is just this deep frustration among Democratic voters with the Democratic Party about its sort of lack of urgency about the situation.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Frank is in New York on our line for independence.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Frank.
unidentified		I think that everybody should really stop fighting and arguing about their usual craziness.
		I think Mamdani, the young guy, he's great.
		I think Trump's great.
		Everybody's getting a chance to say something, which should be that way.
		On the money thing with the stock trading, honestly, they should share the wealth, not hide it, make us rich, and we probably won't be fighting about anything.
		It's all about money.
		I make money every day.
		I'm a contractor.
		I'm bidding on jobs every day.
		I work off the economy.
		Honestly, the economy was really good when Trump was in.
		When Biden was in, it was right in the toilet.
		Nothing I could do about it.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Frank, do you think that's a result of who was president or because of the COVID-19 pandemic?
unidentified		COVID-19 was a part of about a 14-year program between Obama, Bush, and Biden, and Trump probably knew a little bit of it.
		They kept moving that around the United States.
		Then they sent it over to a third world country so they can practice on splitting genes.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so let's bring it back to some of the points that you were making about the New York City race and also Trump.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Jamel, if you had any comments to what Frank was saying.
jamelle bouie ▲ ● ▼		I think I would just say that as much as I maybe can understand the desire to stop see people not fight, that politics is about fundamental questions of how we organize our society, and people are going to fight over that.
jamelle bouie ▲ ● ▼		I mean, people are going to fight very hard and vociferously about it.
unidentified		And that's just the way things are in any kind of democratically organized society.
jamelle bouie ▲ ● ▼		And that's certainly the way things are in the United States.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Lewis is in Salisbury, North Carolina on our line for Democrats.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Lewis.
unidentified		Yeah, top of the morning, Taylor.
		Good topic.
		Look, I just want to answer a few of these people who called.
		Now, I'm not the one that's calling you stupid.
		Trump call you stupid.
		Now they're trying to change the narrative, saying the Democrats is not fighting, and the Democrats, why they didn't send it out, why?
		Look, Trump was already going through RICO law in Georgia.
		He was going through 34 counts of felonies.
		Don't you know if the Democrats would have released all this information, plus Trump is reaped with it, they would have said this is a weapon that they're using to try to stop Trump.
		Now, remember, Trump went on and put his head in the ring real early.
		So if anything that we had, we couldn't present it no way for him.
		But since he ran on, he's going to open up the Epstein House.
		He saw his name all in it, like, you know, with the little kids, he couldn't do it.
		I got a question here.
		Isn't it so that the Democrats gave America everything that they have right now that the Republicans, Trump administration is trying to take away voting rights, Medicaid, Medicaid, USAID, FEMA, all those things that Obamacare, PAC Act, everything that they are taking away, the Democrats gave.
		Could you tell us what the Republicans ever did for the people?
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Mr. Bowie?
unidentified		So some of those programs, for example, Medicare and Medicaid, they are definitely projects of the Democratic Party, Medicare, and Medicaid coming out of the Johnson administration, for example.
jamelle bouie ▲ ● ▼		But you got to remember that the way American political parties are isn't the way they've always been.
unidentified		And in an earlier era, there's plenty of Republican support for these programs because there were liberal and moderate Republicans.
jamelle bouie ▲ ● ▼		I think that in the present, it's certainly the case that when it comes to who wants to expand the social insurance state, that's going to be Democrats.
jamelle bouie ▲ ● ▼		Who wants to slash it?
unidentified		It's going to be Republicans.
jamelle bouie ▲ ● ▼		But even still, there has been support for these programs from some Republicans.
		And I think one of the distinctive things now is that that support, those Republicans rather, are long gone, and that the party is uniformly very, very conservative in a way that it wasn't even 20 years ago.
		And so with that uniform, staunch conservatism means kind of a straightforward opposition to all of these programs, even ones that maybe a previous generation of some Republicans might have been in favor of.
unidentified		Martin is in Long Island in New York on our line for Republicans.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Martin.
unidentified		Yes, good morning.
		I would like your opinion on one of the hottest stories going now, how the Obama administration fabricated, I'll use the word again, fabricated and lied about how Russia interfered with the voting when President Trump ran for the first.
		And I'd like to know what your opinion is on it after his administration lied to Congress.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		So this is a story that was in the New York Times as well about Tulsi Gabbard claiming that the Obama administration tried to undermine Trump in 2016.
		This is that report we referenced earlier in the show that was issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which the Democrats have obviously opposed.
		Your thoughts, Jamal.
unidentified		So when it comes to the allegations of Russian interference on behalf of Trump in the 2016 election, we have multiple sources, allied intelligence agencies, our own intelligence agencies,
		independent examinations that kind of all conclude the same thing, that there was Russian interference in the 2016 election, and there's a good deal of evidence, direct connections between members of the Trump campaign and members of the Russian government, that this was done on behalf of Trump and that there was some kind of connection between that campaign and some of these figures in the Russian government.
		I understand that Tulsi Gabbard is making this accusation that this was all fabricated, but that accusation just doesn't stand to what has been established over years of investigation and report.
		What it does fit with is the president claim during this entire time that it's all a hoax.
		And to my mind, this seems much more like Tulsi Gabbard trying to bolster the views of her boss than it does have anything to do with an honest assessment of American intelligence.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Well, that is all the time that we have for this segment.
		I do want to follow up.
		Earlier, it came up what date and what year Jeffrey Epstein was actually arrested and charged, and that was actually in 2019.
		He was arrested in July of 2019, and this is the Department of Justice announcement at the time.
		So, that was actually during Trump's last term.
		So, thank you so much, Jamal Bowie, who is a New York Times opinion columnist.
		Thank you for joining us this segment.
		I really appreciate your time today.
unidentified		Thank you for having me.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Now, we are going to have more of your phone calls coming up after the break in open form.
		You can start calling in now.
		Our line for Democrats is 202-748-8000.
		For Republicans, 202-748-8001.
		And for Independents, 202-748-8002.
		We'll be right back.
brian lamb ▲ ● ▼		Dave Barry's memoir is called Class Clown.
		It is at least his 46th book.
		On the front of his book, he makes an important declaration: quote, How I went 77 years without growing up, unquote.
		For 30 years, Dave Berry wrote a weekly humor column published in newspapers, mostly on the weekends.
		He retired that column in 2005, but has kept writing.
		On the back flap of his memoir, the bio says he has more bestsellers than you can count on two hands.
		Barry won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.
		He lives in Miami.
unidentified		Author Dave Barry with his book, Class Clown: How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up, on this episode of BookNotes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb.
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kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Welcome back.
		We're an open forum, ready to hear your comments about public affairs issues of the day.
		Our phone lines again for Democrats, 202-748-8000.
		For Republicans, 202-748-8001.
		And for Independents, 202-748-8002.
		Let's start with Kevin in Illinois on our line for independence.
		Good morning, Kevin.
unidentified		Good morning.
		Thank you.
		Thank you so much for having me and thank C-SPAN for all it does.
		It gets the real word out to the people.
		These days, that's hard to do.
		Like the Washington journalist guy there, he's like CNN.
		He's a Trump hater, but that's another story.
		But I called to see if I could pray for our country real quick if I could, please.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Very quickly, please, Kevin.
unidentified		Okay.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Oh.
		And it looks like we've lost your line.
		All right.
		Well, let's hear from Rudy in Sun City, California on our line for Democrats.
		Good morning, Rudy.
unidentified		Good morning, Kimberly.
		My comment today is about Donald's one big ugly bill may have had a positive effect and have gotten rid of a 45-year-old trope about the welfare queen.
		And people will now see that it's not all minorities that are on Medicaid or any type of food assistance, that type of stuff.
		So hopefully, people open up their eyes and realize that Donald and his group have thrown you under the bus.
		Okay, thank you very much, Kimberly.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Robert is in Folsom, California on our line for Republicans.
		Good morning, Robert.
		Robert, are you there?
unidentified		Yeah.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		We're in open forum.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Please go ahead.
unidentified		Oh, no, thanks.
unidentified		Not one that's recall.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Well, then let's hear from Judith in Missouri on our line for independence.
		Good morning, Judith.
unidentified		Good morning.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		You can go ahead, Judith.
unidentified		Well, I have a question.
		I received a letter that looked like it was going to be a big birthday card or something, quite an envelope, and it came from the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.
		And what it is, it's something besides AARP that he is now pushing for people to sign up.
		I lost my piece of paper where I had it all written down, but I just wondered: anybody else that calls if they have gotten this letter, this thing to join his so-called AARP.
		Thank you very much.
		I love C-SPAN.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		I'm not seeing anything quickly on that mailing, but it could have been potentially a fundraising mailer or something like that.
		But happy birthday.
		Carol from Kingston, Georgia, on our line for Democrats.
		Good morning, Carol.
unidentified		Hi, good morning.
		I just never see any coverage on fear.
		And I live in the South.
		I was from the North.
		And I can tell you after attending many party events that the fear is great when you're the minority in this community.
		So, and I never see anything addressed in the media about that type of situation.
		So I just thought I would bring it to your attention.
		Thank you.
		I love C-SPAN.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Nick is in Florison, Colorado on our line for independence.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Nick.
unidentified		Hello, and thank you for letting me talk.
		I appreciate C-SPAN.
		What I have a question about is I have a question about this crypto investment that the president is involved in and his family.
		And how does this conflict with the oath of office that he took and the separation that was supposed to happen between him and his businesses?
		That's my question.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Well, what do you think about it, Nick?
unidentified		Well, I don't think that it should be allowed.
		I've listened to both sides extensively on this.
		And I believe it was Raskin who said that they are looting the Treasury in the sense that this is acting like a criminal enterprise.
		And after looking at the history of the United States and the things that spawned the criminal enterprises, such as prohibition and things of this back in the 20s and whatnot, and the evil that it has spawned and permitted to exist, I do believe that we need to take a very close look at this.
		Back in the 80s, I was trading stocks just as a personal little thing, and I discovered that congresspeople are privy to insider information.
		That we, as citizens who pay their salaries, are not privileged to this.
		It's against the law.
		Okay?
		People have been sent to jail over this.
		One very prominent person who all she did was have a cooking show.
		And I just don't understand how we can tolerate this type of out-and-out corruption of our system.
		I'm not concerned about everything else that he's doing because I do believe that a lot that he's doing, he is stretching the limits of what a president should be allowed to do.
		And in a healthy society, we allow people to do this so we can see who's going to stand up to them and see if what we have as a country in our Constitution and our Bill of Rights actually means something.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Robert is in Atlantic City, New Jersey on our line for Democrats.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Robert.
unidentified		Hello.
		I'd like to encourage my fellow Democrats to audit the Pentagon.
		It's failed eight straight audits.
		Rumsfeld had a press conference September 10th, 2001, and said $2.3 trillion were missing.
		Widely viewed press conference on every network in the previous 10 years.
		And since weapons of mass destruction hoax, we've spent $15 trillion on Middle East wars that could easily finance our Social Security, which Elon Musk correctly called a Ponzi scheme.
		We have to audit the Federal Reserve.
		We have to audit the Pentagon.
		And Democrats need to hold these rich people accountable that are stealing money from infrastructure, education, and health care.
		The $10,000 toilet seat is still alive and well.
		That was discovered in 1980s, and it never went away.
		They're overpaying for everything, and it's graft.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		So, Robert, you mentioned that the Pentagon audits have been failed, so the Pentagon is already being audited.
unidentified		What are you suggesting beyond that?
		That where there's waste, fraud, and abuse, people need to be indicted or held accountable.
		No one loses their jobs.
		They fail every time.
		Let's cut the Pentagon budget 5% every time they fail until the Pentagon budget is more than the next 10 nations combined.
		So they're looting it, both parties, I guess.
		And it's offensive, and we have no Social Security money in the Treasury.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		James is in Washington, West Virginia, on our line for Republicans.
		Good morning, James.
unidentified		Good morning.
		I'd like to get some facts.
		We spent $38 million on the Mueller report.
		And what did Mueller find?
		That no one in the United States colluded with Russia during the 2016 campaign.
		And he even went even farther.
		He said that no Trump administration employees colluded with Russia during the 2016 campaign.
		Why don't you check that?
		All you guys are becoming is an arm of the Democratic Party.
		Not Bowie, he was really terrible.
		Thank you.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Garr is in Dictator, Georgia, on our line for independence.
		Good morning, Garr.
unidentified		Thank you for taking my call, Kimberly.
		I want to talk about what your earlier program was about: education.
		Education comes from Latin, means to bring forth or to bring out ignorance.
		And the reason why they want to get rid of education as we know it is because they don't want competition.
		And that's one thing, if you know about America, sports, knock out the competition.
		You know, that's what it's about, knocking out the competition.
		And China then competed with us, and we're trying to knock China.
		And we don't want to do what China has done, bring its people out of poverty.
		I mean, here in Atlanta, we supposed to have the World Cup next year, 2026, and they're trying to figure out what they want to do with the homeless.
		The most wealthiest country in the world trying to figure out what to do with the homeless.
		Thank you.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Avery is up next in Atlanta, Georgia, on our line for independence.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Avery.
unidentified		I'd like to talk about the work requirements for people with disabilities.
		I have three points.
		Number one, people do not appreciate how corrupt the disability benefit system is.
		The true definition of disability is an inability to earn the average wage for your age.
		Number two, people do not appreciate what is required to judge people's abilities.
		To judge people's abilities, you need standardized work requirements consistency measures.
		Number three, I have been disappointed in C-SPAN's interviews about Medicaid because he did not corner the guests over their use of definitions.
		You should have someone on from the medical regulatory bodies so you can hammer them over the inaccurate way we define disability and judge disability because someone really needs to expose these rugged individuals who believe in survival of the fittest as people who are trying to kill off people with disabilities by labeling them as able-bodied and kicking them off their head.
		Okay, because if doctors are not willing to use an accurate definition and test for disability, you can be sure politicians and the public will not be willing to recognize who is disabled.
		That's it.
		All right.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Next up is Kathleen in Dayton, Ohio on our line for Democrats.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Kathleen.
unidentified		Yeah, thanks for C-SPAN or Washington Journal as well.
		Is that I'm a right, left, and center media reader watcher.
		And I've been just looking through your archives again, and I watch you guys two or three days a week.
		I used to watch guys all the time.
		But I don't anymore because, like you guys, MSNBC has become the worst.
		They took this Rebecca Cutler, the new CEO there at MSNBC.
		You know, they let go of Joy Reed, who was just starting to touch on the Israeli-Palestinian issues.
		But Ayman Moy Hadin also got switched, and he was covered all the time.
		So MSNBC has indeed just kind of wiped out any reporting about the genocide and the slaughter going on in Gaza.
		But you guys also, you're not even covering.
		I never see Diana Buto or Mustafa Barghuti Or any Palestinians on your program as guests.
		So I encourage your public to watch PBS, BBC, Amanpur and Company, Democracy Now.
		Go read Mondo Weiss because you're not going to get any information off a Washington Journal about the slaughter that's taking place and that what U.S. tax dollars are paying for in Gaza, as well as the support we've, unbridled support we've given Israel for decades, allowing them to just expand continuously with illegal, I don't like to call, I call it illegal land theft, not settlements sound so nice.
		So I wish you guys would actually cover that issue more.
		Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski, all those guys are just basically silent on the issue.
		And Washington Journal has become silent as well.
		So I actually hope you guys have some Palestinian guests and people who can talk honestly about the issue.
		But again, I encourage people to go to the PBS TV shows, news shows, BBC, Amanpur Company, Democracy Now, and Mondo Weiss to get accurate information about the slaughter taking place over there and the extreme violence taking place in the West Bank.
		Thanks.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		So Kathleen, among the sources that she suggested was the BBC.
		The BBC has the latest in the ongoing conflict in Gaza with the headline that Israel has issued a new evacuation order in the crowded central Gazan city.
		This was about an hour ago that the Israeli military issued evacuation orders for a crowded part of central Gaza where it has not launched a ground offensive during its 21 months of war against Hamas.
		The Israel Defense Forces said on Sunday that residents and displaced Palestinians sheltering in the city of Deir al-Bala should evacuate immediately and move towards Al-Mawasi on the Mediterranean coast.
		The evacuation demand, which could signal an imminent attack, has caused widespread panic among tens of thousands of Palestinians, as well as the families of Israeli hostages who fear their relatives are being held in the city.
		Next up is Alan in Waynesboro, Tennessee, on our line for Republicans.
		Good morning, Alan.
unidentified		Yes, ma'am.
		I'm 81.
		I could talk all day and trash the unproductive government agencies, both Democrat and Republican, also Congress, all with proof, also doctors and hospitals.
		But I just want to give this advice since it came up this week.
		About four years ago, I had trouble with my ankles swelling.
		And the doctors prescribed one thing and another thing, didn't work.
		And I tried some stuff, didn't work.
		But I want to tell everybody this: it worked for me.
		My ankles are now flat.
		I take one tablet of Hydra Columbia.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		So I don't want to give your private medical information out, Alan.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Is there other public policy topics you wanted to discuss?
unidentified		I've seen all kind of ankle swelling with people walking around.
unidentified		And I don't walk around now with my ankle swell.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Thank you.
		Let's go to Scott in Los Angeles, California on our line for independence.
		Good morning, Scott.
unidentified		You know, when Bob Marmley would give a concert, he would say, it is so good and pleasant for us to be here together in one entity, which is unity.
		And that's how I feel when I call the show.
		Kimberly, you are doing a phenomenal job.
		It's a big thank you to C-SPAM.
		I guess it must have been on your bookstation.
		I caught Egene Carroll.
		And I just thought it was pretty delightful, actually.
		Exactly my type.
		I just had to roar about that.
		And for those who don't know, Donald Trump was thrown a picture of Egene Carroll and asked who it was.
		And he said it was his first wife.
		Now, the reason I'm calling, Kim, is I called you about six weeks ago, and I brought up something absolutely nobody was talking about, and that was this Epstein thing.
		And I was imploring reporters to please get involved and do a little work on this.
		Now, you have Acosta who gives this unbelievable sentence of mainly home detention, I believe 18 months.
		He's not even in there half the time.
		And anyway, if you just follow the whole thing out, it'd be great if you guys would do a show on it.
		You see Trump making these comments lately now.
		When it was brought up, I don't know, for the first time a week ago, he got so puffy and mean to the reporter.
		I thought that was quite a tell on his part.
		What he has done subsequently with these long rants that he's posting that are difficult to get through and his commentary, just I wish you guys had a laugh track, Kim, when he came with this is a Democratic hoax.
		Now, I just can't help but think, just like in the Eugene Carroll situation, where she was not his type, she would be the last one he would go for.
		He also said he was not a fan of Jeffrey Epstein.
		And I'm sorry, but when I hear that coming from him, and I think the facts have established, he actually was quite a fan of Epstein for quite a long time.
		God bless every last one of you at C-SPAN, and thank you very much.
		Earl is in St. Clairsville, Ohio, on our line for Republicans.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Earl.
unidentified		I'm calling about the flooding they've had in West Virginia.
		Wheeling, West Virginia, Tridelphia, Elm Grove, that whole area has been pretty well devastated.
		If you looked on YouTube and you looked underwater, you got a better view of that.
		The devastation that they've had.
		And I know that people have been complaining.
		They haven't heard from it.
		It seems like they're like in the backwater, you know, just pushed aside.
		And I think FEMA should be more active in that area because I know we've had it all over the country, but it just seems like they've been left out.
		And I think the government should look in on it a lot more closely and take care of those people in that area.
		It's devastating over there.
		That's all I had to say.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		So, Earl, I'm looking at some local coverage of this story from WTRF in West Virginia, and their headline from just a couple days ago is that a West Virginia senator says a FEMA disaster declaration for the floods is expected next week.
		Senator Shelley Moore Capito tells Seven News that the White House is set to approve the West Virginia Flood Disaster Declaration to unlock FEMA early next week.
		This involves last month's fatal and disastrous flash flooding that left nine people dead and multiple homes and businesses destroyed.
		West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrissey formally requested a major disaster declaration and an emergency declaration for Ohio and Marion counties back in June.
		Weeks later, impacted community members are still waiting for federal aid, but they might not have to wait much longer.
		Roscoe is in Los Angeles, California on our line for independence.
		Good morning, Roscoe.
unidentified		Hey, how are you doing?
		How are you doing?
		So it's crazy.
		You know, you hear all the news, and the fellow was just talking before about that Trump rant and talks about all these things, and people don't get around to listening to them.
		But it seems like all the stuff that comes out, he ends up being right.
		You know, for a long time, what is your opinion on that?
		I mean, in the Russia thing, like everybody thought that Russia was colluding with Russia.
		Now we find out he's not.
		It's like it seems that every time that we think he did something, it ends up being fake news.
		Have you noticed that?
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Well, this show's about your opinions, not mine.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		What do you think?
unidentified		I'm just surprised because, you know, you follow the news.
		And, you know, I grew up watching CNN, and, you know, you thought it was always facts.
		Now you realize that they're not even bent facts.
		They're actually being fabricated.
		And the previous administration fabricated?
		Could this be real?
		I mean, isn't that a serious offense to fabricate an entire assumption that he all right?
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Sounds like your line's dropping out, Roscoe.
		So let's go to Steve in Tampa, Florida, on our line for Republicans.
		Good morning, Steve.
unidentified		Good morning, Kimberly.
		With the incredible rise of anti-Semitism in the United States, as demonstrated by Governor Josh Shapiro's home being burned, the murder of the two Israeli diplomats, including one who was actually a practicing Catholic, the anti-Semitism on campus, and the terrible thing that happened in Boulder, Colorado, I think it's time for all the media to show the videos of what actually happened on October 7th in Israel.
		I've seen it.
		I've seen excerpts on JBS channel.
		I've seen it on I-24, but none of the media are willing to show that.
		I think it can be done in a respectful way and let the public understand what is really happening to Israel.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		Next up is Kay in Louisville, Kentucky on our line for independence.
		Good morning, Kay.
unidentified		Good morning.
		I called because I have a great concern for the rural hospitals that are slated to be closed as a result of the health care cuts that are in the recent budget reconciliation bill.
		And there is a solution.
		If we would pass a national single-payer bill, a not-for-profit, improved Medicare for all, that would facilitate a functioning infrastructure funding so that all of our rural hospitals could be saved and that everyone in the country would have available health care and everyone would be covered.
		So I'm encouraging support for an improved Medicare for all.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Darren is in Hutto, Texas on our line for Democrats.
		Good morning, Darren.
unidentified		Yes, thank you for taking my call.
		It kind of bothers me.
		It kind of bothers me how nobody's talking about, especially the mainstream media, is talking about what Trump is actually doing to the country.
		I mean, by devastating all the government agencies and just, I mean, it's just terrible, and nobody's talking about it enough.
		Now about this ask about this guy dead guy here.
		Here's the deal.
		It's not too far fetched to say that Trump doesn't have anything to do with it.
		Do y'all remember what Trump said that got caught walking through the locker room of 18-year-old girls in a beauty pantry?
		That was a small thing.
		Nobody talks about.
		And last but not least, what is he going to pay DJ Carroll for $83 million?
		And what is he going to throw to pay out that half a billion dollar fraud case in New York?
		Nobody's talking about this stuff.
		And Trump needs to be held accountable.
		Thank you.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Well, thank you for your call.
		And thank you to everybody who called in for Open Forum and the whole show.
		That's it for us today, but we are going to be back with another edition of Washington Journal tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. Eastern.
		We hope you'll join us and have a great day.
unidentified		Coming up Monday morning.
		Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Marty McCary on the actions the agency has taken during his first 100 days in office and his goals during his tenure.
		And then Politico White House reporter Iri Sentner previews the week ahead at the White House and News of the Day.
		Also, Forward Party CEO Lindsey Draft discusses efforts to expand the U.S.'s two-party political system.
		C-SPAN's Washington Journal.
		Join the conversation live at 7 Eastern Monday morning on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, or online at c-span.org.
		Tonight on C-SPAN's Q&A, a discussion on preserving the legacies of U.S. presidents and the work their privately funded organizations do to achieve this, including through the Presidential Leadership Scholars Program, which launched in 2015.
		The participants talk about the relationship between their foundations and the government-funded presidential library system, which is overseen by the National Archives.
		The idea of opening the George W. Bush Center on SMU campus was first broached.
		There was some resistance among faculty and students.
		That has totally changed.
		And these days now, President Bush on occasion may make surprise appearances in classrooms.
		And I think that's a huge hit for a lot of the students, some of whom weren't born when he was first elected president.
		The partnership is really what's important at all of our institutions.
		And we all have a little bit of a different model at the Clinton Presidential Center.

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