| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
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Security at mass gathering events. | |
| You can also watch live coverage on the C-SPAN Now app or online at c-SPAN.org. | ||
| C-SPAN, Democracy Unfiltered. | ||
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| Buckeye Broadband supports C-SPAN as a public service, along with these other television providers, giving you a front row seat to democracy. | ||
| Coming up on C-SPAN's Washington Journal, we'll take your calls and comments live. | ||
| Then a look at congressional reaction to the Epstein files controversy and potential impact on the legislative agenda with the Hills congressional reporter Michael Schnell. | ||
| And Illinois Democratic Congressman Sean Caston discusses Democrats' strategy on the upcoming government funding deadline and their push for the release of the Epstein files. | ||
| Also, journalist Selena Zito talks about her new book, detailing her experience covering the near assassination of President Donald Trump. | ||
| Washington Journal starts now. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| It's Tuesday, July 22nd, 2025. | ||
| The House and Senate both return at 10 a.m. Eastern, and we're with you for the next three hours on the Washington Journal. | ||
| We begin with a question for Democrats only on where the party stands one year since Joe Biden's exit from the 2024 presidential race and six months since Donald Trump was sworn in for a second term. | ||
| We want to know if you think the Democratic Party's on the right track or headed off in the wrong direction. | ||
| So Democrats only for this opening question, here's how you can call in if you're a Democrat in the Eastern or Central time zones. | ||
| It's 202-748-8000. | ||
| If you're a Democrat in the Mountain or Pacific time zones, 202-748-8001. | ||
| You can also send us a text, that number, 202-748-8003. | ||
| If you do, please include your name and where you're from. | ||
| Otherwise, catch up with us on social media on X, it's at C-SPANWJ on Facebook. | ||
| It's facebook.com/slash C-SPAN. | ||
| And a very good Tuesday morning to you. | ||
| You can go ahead and start calling in now. | ||
| Democrats only for this first question will have a question for Republicans only in about 40 minutes. | ||
| But for Democrats only, we're asking simply, are you satisfied with the direction of the Democratic Party to start the conversation? | ||
| Two stories from Sunday, the first from the Hill newspaper on polling, where the Democratic Party stands six months into Donald Trump's second term. | ||
| The story notes that views of the Democratic Party have been at historic lows for months. | ||
| The percentage of registered voters who view the party favorably reached some of its lowest levels, they write, since at least the start of Trump's first term in office, according to a YouGov polling average. | ||
| A CNN poll released on Thursday found only 28% of surveyed Americans view the Democratic Party favorably, a record low in the history of the outlets polling dating back to 1992. | ||
| An AP poll found just more than a third of surveyed Democrats are optimistic about the party's future. | ||
| That's compared with 57% last July. | ||
| Those numbers that wrap up of polls from The Hill newspaper. | ||
| Also on Sunday, a story in the New York Times on Democrats' new candidate when it comes to the city of New York City. | ||
| Mamdani won over New York City Democratic voters the question the New York Times asked, can he charm Washington? | ||
| National Democrats are grappling with how to embrace Assemblyman Zorhan Mamdani, a leftist who has become the party's standard-bearer in America's largest city. | ||
| Mr. Mamdani was on MSNBC last month, and he was asked about his brand of Democratic politics and whether it could translate nationally. | ||
| This is what he had to say. | ||
| I mean, you're running on issues that are very relevant to people in New York City, the cost of housing, free busing. | ||
| Some have projected that this is the type of platform that would work in other parts of the country. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, you're a proud Democratic socialist. | |
| Do you think that is a platform that would work for other candidates running in other parts of the country? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| I think ultimately, this is a campaign about inequality. | ||
| And you don't have to live in the most expensive city in the country to have experienced that inequality because it's a national issue. | ||
| And what Americans coast to coast are looking for are people who will fight for them, not just believe in the things that resonate with their lives, but actually fight and deliver on those very things. | ||
| And part of how we got to this point was through the endorsements of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders, who've been leading this fight against oligarchy across the country. | ||
| And I think that in focusing on working people and their struggles, we also return back to what makes so many of us proud to be Democrats in the first place. | ||
| Zorhan Mamdani was on MSNBC late last month for that conversation. | ||
| We're asking you this morning on the Washington Journal: Democrats are only, are you satisfied with the direction of the party? | ||
| In today's Washington Post, there is an editorial cartoon focused on Democrats. | ||
| It is a picture of a donkey embracing Karl Marx caught on camera. | ||
| Karl Marx and socialism is the word underneath him. | ||
| A moment there, a cultural moment reference to that TikTok moment at the concert and two people being caught on camera. | ||
| It is the Democrat in that picture, the donkey with his eyes wide open, seemingly scared of being caught holding Karl Marx. | ||
| That's the editorial cartoon from Michael Ramirez. | ||
| We're asking Democrats only, are you satisfied with the direction of your party? | ||
| 202-748-8000 for Democrats in the Eastern or Central time zones to call in. | ||
| If you're a Democrat in the Mountain or Pacific time zones, 202-748-8001. | ||
| And again, we're going to take this conversation for about 40 minutes and then a question for Republicans only. | ||
| We'll switch to that. | ||
| Linda in Mississippi, though, up first, a Democrat. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I'm satisfied in directions they're trying to go. | |
| And how could you not be? | ||
| Republicans are spying this. | ||
| They're leading us down to a dictatorial regime. | ||
| You don't have to ask Republicans what they're going to do for America. | ||
| You have to ask Trump because Trump, whatever he says, they agree with. | ||
| And Democrats are trying their best. | ||
| They are in the minority. | ||
| But you got to make some noise. | ||
| You got to make good trouble in order to be heard. | ||
| And Linda, are Democrats making enough good trouble right now in your mind? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, they're trying to. | |
| You know, I mean, what can you do? | ||
| You get out there. | ||
| You get out there. | ||
| We're in a society where we got a dictatorial president that just taking away your Medicaid, your insurance, your food for the poor. | ||
| They give it, he's more of an elitist. | ||
| His rich folks get all the money, all the credit, and black folks. | ||
| And poor people are losing their insurance. | ||
| They're losing their food security. | ||
| They're losing their rights, civil rights, women's rights, and just every day. | ||
| This is not the America that my brother and father fought for. | ||
| This is not it. | ||
| Those that voted for him, this is not what they were looking for. | ||
| How in the work can you round up people, children, women and children that have been here 30, 40 years? | ||
| He said he was looking for worst of the worst. | ||
| And he had the worst of the worst sitting in the White House. | ||
| That's Linda in Mississippi. | ||
| Vicki is in Nebraska, Democrat. | ||
| Are you satisfied with the direction of the Democratic Party right now, Vicki? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| I am. | ||
| I definitely am. | ||
| If they were in power, I wouldn't be worried about everything. | ||
| I think they're sometimes too nice, and they don't want to play the game, so they get criticized. | ||
| But yes, I am very happy. | ||
| And sadly, I don't know about the future of all of this. | ||
| Vicki, how are Democrats too nice right now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I just think they don't come out and talk like all the liars and make up things. | |
| And they try to be honest, and they try to do it the godly way. | ||
| And they don't use God for the way the Republicans do. | ||
| Like they're so into the Bible and into helping people when it's the complete opposite. | ||
| And I feel comfortable with the Democrats. | ||
| I don't worry about the future. | ||
| Where with this guy, I worry about, you know, and I feel sorry for the minorities because there's so many good ones. | ||
| And I've worked with them. | ||
| And they're some of my very favorite people. | ||
| They work hard. | ||
| And when they have to take their citizenship, they know the test better than most of the other white people that I've worked with. | ||
| Because I really feel bad. | ||
| As a Democrat in Nebraska, what are your views on Zorhan Mamdani and his brand of Democratic politics and being the standard bearer of Democrats in New York City and what that could mean nationwide? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I have to be totally honest with you. | ||
| I haven't listened to him enough to give an honest opinion. | ||
| I, you know, I have to be honest, but I know I would be willing to investigate him more to see if it made a difference all over. | ||
| But yes, otherwise, I don't know enough to give you a correct answer to that question. | ||
| That's Vicki in Nebraska. | ||
| It was former Democrat turned independent Senator Joe Manchin. | ||
| He represented West Virginia, you'll recall, in the United States Senate. | ||
| He was on Fox News, and he was asked on Sunday about the future of the Democratic Party. | ||
| He was asked about Zorhan Mamdani. | ||
| This is part of that interview. | ||
| But what are your thoughts about the party as you see these big crowds with Bernie Sanders AOC and the socialists winning in New York City for the Democratic primary? | ||
| Well, Brian, it's not the Democratic Party that I knew or that I was a part of for many, many years. | ||
| The Democratic Party I grew up in was responsible. | ||
| They were compassionate. | ||
| They were fiscally responsible. | ||
| They understood that they had to do their part, but help those who needed help. | ||
| But get up and do something for yourself. | ||
| There's none of that right now that we can see of. | ||
| And this socialist trend that's going on is something that I couldn't stomach anymore. | ||
| And it's why I left. | ||
| And if the National Democratic Party doesn't get back to more of a center or center left, there won't be a party that they're going to recognize at all. | ||
| So the far left, if that's where it's going, then let them have their own party. | ||
| Former Democrat Joe Manchin, his views on the Democratic Party. | ||
| We're asking you your views. | ||
| Democrats only are you satisfied with the direction of the party. | ||
| 202-748-8000 if you're a Democrat in the Eastern or Central time zones. | ||
| 202-748-8001 if you're a Democrat in the Mountain or Pacific time zones. | ||
| Gwen is out of Motor City in Detroit. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, John. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| You know what, John? | ||
| It's so funny how, you know, everything, just like Joe Manchin, everything that he said about the Democratic Party is what the Republican Party is doing. | ||
| Every time Trump criticizes the Democratic Party, it's what he's doing. | ||
| You know, and the same thing, all of them. | ||
| You know, they talk about corruption and all this. | ||
| Trump is doing it right in front of their face. | ||
| You know, and yeah, I do think that the Democrats are doing a whole lot. | ||
| They're standing out. | ||
| They're going here. | ||
| They're going there. | ||
| They're speaking out. | ||
| You know, they walked out on the Senate floor, you know, for this nomination and they're doing everything they can. | ||
| But it's not just the Democrats. | ||
| You know, we keep saying, what are the Democrats going to do? | ||
| It's the people. | ||
| The people have to make the right choices. | ||
| You know, they have to vote for who's going to do for them. | ||
| And John, I don't see the Republicans have not done anything to lower prices. | ||
| You know, they're firing people left and right. | ||
| And the people that they hire are not qualified, but they're hiring the qualified people. | ||
| So, John, and these polls, am I still here, John? | ||
| Yes, ma'am. | ||
| Go ahead and finish your thought. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, these polls, I think they are just when they ask, when they ask the Democrat, you know, how do you think the Democratic, you know, what do you don't like about it or whatever, people, they just want to see the Democrats or fight harder and harder and harder. | |
| They're just, you know, because of all the things that's going on, they didn't even say Democrats are not fighting hard enough, you know, but they are. | ||
| And then those polls are used, they're used to come up with scenarios to say, well, according to the poll, the Democrats is in the gutter and the people are not, they don't want the Democrats. | ||
| Gwen, we'll take your point. | ||
| This is Henry in San Diego out on the West Coast. | ||
| Henry, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| I'm a monk. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| What are your thoughts about the direction of the Democratic Party right now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm pretty much sad. | |
| I think it went too far left for me. | ||
| It's going so far left that it's not having common sense. | ||
| And I just saw when Corey Booker on the Senate, and one of the things I have a problem, Republicans can do whatever they want. | ||
| And then when the Democrats, they try to be fair, knowing that the Republicans are going to do whatever they want, even Trump. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| Henry, you say Democrats have gone too far left. | ||
| What do you think of that editorial cartoon, the Cold Play concert-inspired editorial cartoon of the Democratic donkey embracing socialism and Karl Marx? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think the Democrats allowed the Republicans to, especially politicians, to describe who they are. | |
| And they're not, when I was, I'm a Democrat, But I like more of the middle, like when Joe Biden first came, but then when he took president, to me, I think sometimes he went, he didn't go, he went so in the progressive that it wasn't Democratic. | ||
| I don't know if that makes sense. | ||
| Do you think Joe Biden should have stayed in the race a year ago? | ||
| Dropped out a year ago, yesterday. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think Joe Biden, when he was president, he said, stay more in the middle, like he always been. | |
| But I think he went more progressive than Democratic. | ||
| That's Henry in San Diego. | ||
| Ranny is in Wadesboro, North Carolina. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| You're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, John. | |
| How are you doing, guys? | ||
| I agree with the California caller and the Michigan caller. | ||
| Three points. | ||
| I'm going to see gives you some real facts. | ||
| First of all, with the Democrat Party, Joe Biden, in his first term, when Joe Biden, his first two years, he knew the situation. | ||
| So he should have made a statement not running for another term in the Democrat Party. | ||
| And Cameron Harris not running. | ||
| So now we got time to put in somebody that could beat Trump. | ||
| Because there's one thing about this country. | ||
| A woman will not be president of the United States of America. | ||
| And people know that. | ||
| You know that too, John. | ||
| Why do you think that, Ranny? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because this country's not, it's not, it's not, it wasn't built for a woman to be president. | |
| It's not going to happen. | ||
| I don't care if it was Republican or Democrat or Independent. | ||
| So, all right, number two. | ||
| Now, if he would have stepped down his first two years, we wouldn't have Trump today. | ||
| So think about it. | ||
| Trump beat two women in the lost to Joe Biden. | ||
| So what did that tell you? | ||
| It tells you the system is screwed. | ||
| And another thing, too, one thing more, John, I'm going to get off the phone now. | ||
| We got to change the Republican to a mega. | ||
| You got to take the Republican sign down and put up MEGA because there are no more Republican Party. | ||
| The Republican Party is gone. | ||
| We're focusing on the Democratic Party in this first 40 minutes of the Washington Journal this morning asking Democrats only: are you satisfied with the direction of the party phone lines? | ||
| If you're a Democrat in the Eastern or Central or Mountain or Pacific regions, they're on your screen. | ||
| We'll stay in the Tarheel State in Raleigh. | ||
| It's James. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, John. | |
| Can you hear me okay? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I'm intentionally trying not to be Dr. Bruffle, but I am going to try to speak some things I think people think about, they're just too afraid to say. | |
| The Democratic Party has gone too far to the left, if you want to call it that. | ||
| I really think the Democratic Party lost its way when it took up the banner of LGBTQ rights, as opposed to, you know, worrying about the rights of black and brown people who were the largest proportion of their voters. | ||
| They are, you know, their LGBTQ rights should be protected, but they're not the vast majority of voters. | ||
| I can tell you also that black voters are largely conservative. | ||
| And as African Americans, we support their rights, but we really don't, we don't really, we don't really rock with them like that. | ||
| It's also a bit of a fact that you've had Kamala Harris, you've got the gentleman in New York now, you've got AOC. | ||
| All these people had created, have Democratic Party created dossiers. | ||
| None of those folks are who they say they are. | ||
| They're not socialists. | ||
| If you look behind the rhetoric and you look behind the resumes, you'll see that the gentleman from New York was raised in South Africa. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| AOC used to work, was an intern for Chad Kennedy. | ||
| You know, she went to Boston College. | ||
| She, I mean, there's a whole, you know, she had her own business at the back by two. | ||
| So, James, are you saying you don't believe today's Democratic politicians are authentic? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely, they're not authentic. | |
| Absolutely not. | ||
| What would make them more authentic, James, in your mind? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, as far as an African-American, I encourage black people to become single-issue voters, which my issue is cash reparations. | |
| Any Democrat that's not talking about cash reparations will not get my vote. | ||
| And that's why they're going to continue to lose because that movement is getting bigger. | ||
| You have a new black media out here, and that is the single talking point. | ||
| It's cash reparations for the descendants of slaves in this country. | ||
| And as long as they're talking about everything else other than that, John, they're going to continue to lose. | ||
| So black folks don't continue to stay home. | ||
| That's James in North Carolina. | ||
| Also from Sunday on this program, it was New York Times opinion columnist Jamal Bowie. | ||
| He was talking about Democrats' authenticity problem in his discussion on Sunday. | ||
| This is what he had to say. | ||
| I think Democrats have an authenticity problem, and I think that this development is actually evidence of the party's authenticity problem. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I want to turn people's attention again to the Momdani 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. | ||
| It was kind of outtakes from a previous campaign video. | ||
| And in these outtakes, Mamdani is trying to record, and regular people keep walking by and wanting to say hi to him. | ||
| And so he stops and he talks to them and they give their greetings and they smile and they take pictures together and people move on. | ||
| It's just this again and again and again. | ||
| And one message of the video is clearly that, hey, this is a popular guy. | ||
| 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 Ocasio-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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Jamal Bowie, having that discussion on this program just this past Sunday. | ||
| If you want to watch it in its entirety, you can do so on our website at cspan.org. | ||
| We're asking Democrats only, are you satisfied with the direction of your party looking for your phone calls? | ||
| Also for your texts and social media posts on this topic. | ||
| This is Steve writing that I am hopeful. | ||
| That's why I'm a Democrat in the first place. | ||
| The problem is the boomer Democrats fell in love with Wall Street. | ||
| They didn't abandon the working class, but when Democrats spend more time defending transgenders than the working class, it feels like it, Steve writes. | ||
| This is Jeff in Dearborn, Michigan. | ||
| The problem is a DNC Democrat National Committee trying to sell the third way centrist policy that never delivered. | ||
| Why would anyone vote Republican light is what Jeff asks? | ||
| And this from David in Minnesota, trust and support for the Democratic Party will continue to decline as long as they continue to tack to the right. | ||
| The nation needs a progressive party, not a Republican-light. | ||
| Couple of your comments looking for your phone calls. | ||
| Democrats only, again, for about another 20 minutes here. | ||
| This is Kelly in Plainwell, Michigan. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, John. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| My first thought when you asked the question was that I'm not really sure what direction the Democrats are taking. | ||
| I do appreciate the champions like Hakeem Jeffries, Corey Booker, AOC, Bernie Sanders, Salisbury. | ||
| But that's just a handful of our senators and House Republicans who are speaking out. | ||
| I don't know where the rest of everyone else is. | ||
| The thing that concerns me is that I have a nephew who's black, who just turned eight that he feels like Charlie Kirk should be the next president. | ||
| Some Republicans. | ||
| And Kelly, you're going in and out. | ||
| You were talking about your nephew who's African-American, and you said he feels like Charlie Kirk should be president. | ||
| You still with us, Kelly? | ||
| We'll try to get Kelly back in the meantime. | ||
| Go to Mark in the U.S. Virgin Islands. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, guess what? | |
| Good morning to you as a listening audience. | ||
| And most of it is there. | ||
| The reason the Democrats are so weak is because they rigged their own elections. | ||
| Remember, it was Joe Baden voices, Bonnie Sanders. | ||
| Bonnie Sanders was beating him, and all of a sudden, they started putting all the funding to Joe Baden. | ||
| Joe Baden with the Crane Bill. | ||
| Him and Trump Thomas. | ||
| I mean, like, they try to find the best racists that could attract Republicans. | ||
| When Republicans had the best racists they could find. | ||
| And Donald Trump, right now, when I look at it, right, Bonnie Sanders would have been, I've already sexed America. | ||
| There would be less homeless people. | ||
| There wouldn't be no bombs going to Israel and all of this money that's going to Israel. | ||
| But Israel has insurance for everybody and the homeless people in the streets in the nation. | ||
| What do you say to some of those folks who say that the Democratic Party is drifting too far left towards socialism, to the idea of embracing socialism as that editorial cartoon implied today? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, it's just a cartoon. | |
| I was going to say to you, Cuba has an embargo by the United States, and yet there are less homeless people in Cuba. | ||
| So we need to stop using slogans like socialist, democratic, and all of these wars and get people, especially the veterans who fought American wives off the streets. | ||
| So we could use all this. | ||
| Socialism is actually doing better than democracy right now. | ||
| Before we're less homeless people in Cuba and these socialist places, even in Russia, there are too many homeless people. | ||
| So right now, democracy is in last place. | ||
| Look at our map, our science all around the world. | ||
| We got strained up. | ||
| So we need to stop using slogans like Lake Lake Lake Socialism and all of these different things when we basically are in last place. | ||
| Why are we complaining about all this socialism? | ||
| It's a slogan. | ||
| Got your point. | ||
| That's Mark. | ||
| This is Eddie out of Los Angeles. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| My problem with the Democratic Party is they don't apologize for their past speeds. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm Cork Generation, not a slavery. | |
| I said it didn't blow in with we ask. | ||
| You don't apologize. | ||
| You couldn't even get an apology from Obama. | ||
| That's what's wrong with the party. | ||
| And then they're going to run 10 million in here, 10 million illegals? | ||
| No, given them medical, man, we've been asking for medical and education for 400 years. | ||
| They got big, big, no. | ||
| So, Eddie, do you want the black? | ||
| Do you still consider yourself a do you still consider yourself a Democrat, Eddie? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I'm a Democrat. | |
| No, I want to say, I believe in the Democratic Party. | ||
| I just don't believe in Democrats. | ||
| And this is what you're dealing with. | ||
| You're still dealing with the 1800s. | ||
| They need to apologize to the people that they harm. | ||
| Citizens. | ||
| Citizens. | ||
| You understand that? | ||
| We got people sleeping on the street, black folks. | ||
| You know why? | ||
| Because they turned Los Angeles into a half-Hispanic city. | ||
| They've taken over the black community. | ||
| All right. | ||
| That's Eddie. | ||
| This is Alan in Minnesota. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Hi, John. | ||
| I ain't talked to you a couple months. | ||
| Can you hear me okay? | ||
| I can, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But I got to just call, you know, that's the problem. | ||
| That's part of the problem. | ||
| We don't need to apologize for anything. | ||
| The Democrats need to come right back to the center. | ||
| Stop the crap with all this identity politics. | ||
| You know, whether you're. | ||
| Democrats embrace all groups of people. | ||
| We don't need to have people always identify, I'm gay, I'm black, I'm brown, I'm white, I'm a veteran, I'm pregnant, got two kids, all that stuff. | ||
| They've got to stop all that stuff and the populism and come right back to the center and just take on this bipolar president and just go from there. | ||
| So Alan, you think the one uniting thing of Democrats is to be in opposition to Donald Trump? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| All the way. | ||
| What does the Democratic Party do? | ||
| What is the identity of the Democratic Party when Donald Trump is no longer in office? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The identity is the middle class, hardworking Americans, the seniors, the whole spectrum from, you know, just a whole spectrum of the middle class. | |
| The middle class has been taken away every year by year since the 1970s and 80s. | ||
| So we got to get back to that. | ||
| We got to fight back and draw back all this money that's being transferred from the middle class to the upper class. | ||
| That's Alan out of the land of 10,000 lakes. | ||
| About 10 more minutes in this segment, asking Democrats only to call in and to write in as well. | ||
| Give us your thoughts about the direction of the Democratic Party. | ||
| Several of those on social media who've written in talk about the leadership of the party, especially in Congress on the national level. | ||
| Todd on Facebook saying, I feel like we need changes at the Senate level. | ||
| Someone like Chris Murphy and Tammy Duckworth should be at the helm of leadership. | ||
| I'm comfortable with Hakeem Jeffries and his leadership team. | ||
| Both chambers need to be more combative, though, against Donald Trump. | ||
| Additionally, we need a true young leader like Josh Shapiro and Wes Moore and Gretchen Whitmer. | ||
| I feel like we have a true solid leadership team. | ||
| We just need to use it, is what Todd writes. | ||
| Eva saying, Democrats need a better voice like Pete Buttigig, whose sole job it is to counteract all the nonsense and lies Republicans spew about what Democrats believe. | ||
| And this is Jack saying, I'm extremely worried that we don't have the candidates in place to attract the mainstream of both parties. | ||
| To the Garden State, Burlington, New Jersey, this is Catherine. | ||
| Good morning to you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, John. | |
| This is Catherine again, and I'm using my call this morning to talk about how the Democrats are allowing the Republicans to label them. | ||
| The Democratic Party is fine. | ||
| We just need to buckle up, get some good candidates, and fight what's going on here in this country. | ||
| We're just fine. | ||
| Don't allow the Republicans to continue to label us. | ||
| Thank you, John. | ||
| Catherine, before you go, let me ask you about your idea that Democrats are fine. | ||
| Pulling up an Associated Press poll as you were talking. | ||
| It is a poll that shows 65% of Democrats are either neutral or pessimistic about the future of the party. | ||
| Just 35% of Democrats saying that they're optimistic about the future of the party. | ||
| Is that okay? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Number one, John, I don't believe in polls. | |
| Polls are, you know, your sample of where you do the poll and all of that. | ||
| I believe that the party will be just fine. | ||
| Just don't let people label us and tell us we're too far this or too far that. | ||
| And just keep on keeping on because what's going on right now, John, is totally unacceptable. | ||
| Catherine, who's thank you for the question. | ||
| Who's the leader of the Democratic Party right now? | ||
| Who do you look to for leadership in the party? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know what? | |
| I don't look for leadership, John. | ||
| I'm sorry, I don't. | ||
| We have good people. | ||
| Hakeem Jeffries look good. | ||
| There's a lot of them. | ||
| But right now, what? | ||
| They'll be three and a half years out, and we have plenty of time. | ||
| I think we're going to take back Congress in the midterms, and we're just going to be fine. | ||
| But don't let people label us and tell us what we are and what we are not. | ||
| I'm a true Democrat. | ||
| That's Catherine in New Jersey. | ||
| This is Lisa out of the Peach State. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| You're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Amen to Catherine in New Jersey. | ||
| I want Democrats to be very, very careful. | ||
| Do not let the Republicans define who Democrats are. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Because they are very crafty and they know what to do when it comes to messaging. | ||
| And that is what is happening now. | ||
| Democrats wake up. | ||
| Democrats are not trying to cut your Social Security. | ||
| Democrats are not trying to take away Medicare, Medicaid. | ||
| Democrats are not rounding up immigrants that are here legally. | ||
| Democrats are not doing those things. | ||
| Democrats are out there fighting against the big, ugly bill that will hurt not only Democrats, but MAGA. | ||
| And I will say MAGA because we have no more Republican Party. | ||
| Lisa. | ||
| You said Republicans know what they're doing when it comes to messaging. | ||
| Do Democrats know what they're doing when it comes to messaging? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, Republicans know how to message. | |
| So why don't Democrats know how to message, Lisa? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, that is my problem with Democrats. | |
| Their messaging is very bad. | ||
| But you have to see beyond. | ||
| We can talk about that, but we're not going to allow. | ||
| How do you fix that, Lisa? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, what Democrats need to do, they need to come out and they need to be forceful. | |
| They need to be aggressive. | ||
| They need to continue to repeat the issues, what's going on, and what Donald Trump is doing. | ||
| But Democrats, in their messaging, they need to get more aggressive. | ||
| And not more, I'm talking about they need to go to 100, okay? | ||
| Democrats, they have to get aggressive when it comes to messages. | ||
| They need to be in people's face. | ||
| They need to be telling people what Republicans are doing in this country and cutting Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, cutting agencies, and MAGA. | ||
| Democrats, we need to put Democrats in the office when it comes to midterm to hold the guardrails around Donald Trump. | ||
| That is what they're deflecting on, and that is what we need to be focusing on. | ||
| Lisa, on that point of Democrats getting more aggressive, Beto O'Rourke, former Texas congressman, has run several times in the state of Texas. | ||
| He was on CNN on Sunday talking about potential gerrymandering efforts in the state of Texas by Republicans. | ||
| He was talking about getting more aggressive, Democrats getting more aggressive and fighting fire with fire in his comments about how to respond to that. | ||
| This is Beto O'Rourke, about 45 seconds from Sunday. | ||
| Governor Gavin Newsome in California has talked about a redistricting in his state. | ||
| I think it's time that we match fire with fire. | ||
| I think Democrats in the past too often have been more concerned with being right than being in power. | ||
| And we've seen only care about being in power regardless of what is right. | ||
| So you support the new Senator because California right now has an independent commission that does districts in as fair a way as possible and nonpartisan way as possible. | ||
| You're saying Democrats should, even though you don't approve of it, Democrats should do it too. | ||
| We have to get serious. | ||
| We have to be absolutely ruthless about getting back in power. | ||
| So yes, in California, in Illinois, in New York, wherever we have the trifecta of power, we have to use that to its absolute extent. | ||
| I was Beto O'Rourke on Sunday. | ||
| A few minutes left here. | ||
| Democrats only asking simply, are you satisfied with the direction of your party? | ||
| This is Craig in Virginia. | ||
| Craig, what do you think? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, well, good morning. | |
| How you doing this morning? | ||
| I think that the Democrats are, right now, we're running from all the different accusations and all the name calling, trying to defend everything and put all these fires out. | ||
| I think what we need to do is step back, take a good look at who's the source of where it's coming from. | ||
| I mean, Donald Trump is what we're fighting, who we're fighting. | ||
| We're fighting all his little henchmen. | ||
| The deal is, they know what they have, but what we don't, we don't act like we know what we have. | ||
| I mean, Biden did more in two and a half years, his last two years of his administration. | ||
| He got the CHIPS bill passed. | ||
| He got the infrastructure bill passed. | ||
| And he did it with split Senate and Congress. | ||
| He did that because he was a moderate and a knowledgeable politician. | ||
| Okay, he was old. | ||
| I grant you that. | ||
| I'm not buying that Alzheimer's and all that. | ||
| That's a lie. | ||
| Is moderate the driving idea here is the only way to get things done is being a moderate? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What you do, sir, you play with what you got. | |
| Okay, right now, we're on defense and defense only. | ||
| Because every time they throw a lie out, we're trying to put the fire out. | ||
| We don't have to respond to that ignorant lie. | ||
| Donald Trump is a corrupt, and everybody knows it. | ||
| As far as this stuff about going to arrest Obama for something that was obvious at the time. | ||
| He let the ambassador to Russia in the White House in the bosom of our country and wouldn't let any third party to verify what he was talking about. | ||
| Now, that's obvious. | ||
| The man, he shouldn't be let a dog catcher. | ||
| He is not presidential. | ||
| He is not a statesman. | ||
| What we need to do is regroup. | ||
| Once you regroup, then you can have a plan. | ||
| You can't react to all these fires that they're throwing at you. | ||
| Every time something happens, we are not socialists. | ||
| Our problem is we did not address the poor in this country. | ||
| That's Craig in Virginia. | ||
| One more call here for Democrats only, then we'll switch to a Republicans-only question. | ||
| Carol, though, St. Louis, Missouri, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I have a little bit of a problem with what you're doing, John, about throwing that cartoon up all the time. | |
| I hope you got a cartoon of Trump. | ||
| The thing is... | ||
| Carol, I'm simply showing what's on the opinion page of today's Washington Post. | ||
| So readers of the Washington Post and D.C. are seeing that today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But you keep saying, what do you think of this cartoon? | |
| Well, we know showing it one time is fine, but drumming it down, you know, pushing it down people's throats is a different thing. | ||
| So, Carol, are you satisfied with the direction of the Democratic Party? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I am satisfied with them. | |
| I think they try to be fair. | ||
| Right now, Trump is trying to change Texas's voting places. | ||
| It's just the Republicans lately have just turned into MAGA. | ||
| And I'm not, and I never will be. | ||
| And I have two sisters that are, and I don't understand. | ||
| So there you go. | ||
| That's Carol in St. Louis, Missouri, our last Democrat in this Democrats-only segment of our first hour and a half today. | ||
| But we'll switch to Republicans only now. | ||
| The question for Republicans amid the continued stories over the Epstein files and the Epstein case, we're asking you simply, does the Epstein file story matter to you? | ||
| Republicans only for this question. | ||
| If you're a Republican in the Eastern or Central time zones, 202-748-8000 is the number to call. | ||
| If you're a Republican in the Mountain or Pacific time zones, 202-748-8001. | ||
| As you're calling in Republicans only, we want to turn to the Hill newspaper now. | ||
| Michael Schnell joins us via Zoom this morning. | ||
| Once again, Michael Schnell, the headline of your story from yesterday in The Hill, the Epstein saga hangs over Congress's sprint to the summer recess. | ||
| Explain. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Hey, John. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| This is essentially the second time in two weeks, in as many weeks, that the House floor has been brought to a standstill because of the Epstein saga. | ||
| So what happened this week, really yesterday, was that Democrats on the House Rules Committee planned to bring up another amendment vote on this mass economy that would force the release of the Epstein files. | ||
| Now, Republicans on the Rules Committee said they didn't want to vote for that amendment. | ||
| They didn't want you, they know that as being on the rules committee, the speakers committee, they would have to vote down that amendment because they prefer to have a vote on a different legislation. | ||
| But the problem is, and they saw this play out in real time last week, was that when they vote down these Democratic-led amendments on Epstein, they're getting a lot of heat and an earful from constituents back home who are accusing them of trying to conceal the files or protecting the convicted sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein. | ||
| So, Republicans on the Rules Committee said they wouldn't advance that amendment, but they wouldn't vote against that amendment, but they also wouldn't advance it, essentially bringing the House Rules Committee to a standstill. | ||
| The group met yesterday, left without voting out a rule, which is, of course, the mechanism that sets debate for legislation. | ||
| And I spoke to Speaker Mike Johnson late last night. | ||
| He said that essentially there's no time-sensitive legislation on the schedule right now that needs to move through a rule this week, and that the House has other business it could deal with: suspension votes, committee work, committee markups, hearings, things like that. | ||
| So, they are not going to report out a rule this week, which is pretty stunning and notable that it's again the second week in a row that the House Rules Committee has been brought to a standstill because of Epstein. | ||
| And not to mention, that means that a rule will not be reported out of the House until September because the House is scheduled to leave for August recess on Thursday. | ||
| So, a real mess right now in the House GOP conference, still over this Epstein conference. | ||
| So, President Trump has encouraged his Attorney General Pam Bondi to release the Epstein files. | ||
| Why has that not satisfied some members of Congress on this issue? | ||
| Because that's only some of the files. | ||
| So, those are the grand jury testimony, the grand jury transcripts of testimony. | ||
| And so, what some folks have said, particularly Democrats, have been the loudest about this, is that those documents will only scratch the surface. | ||
| Those will only involve testimony from Gillian Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein and specifics about them, but not about other people who were involved. | ||
| So, there are a number of Democrats and Republicans who don't want to cherry-pick the information. | ||
| They want the full breadth of the documents, which is why that move is not enough. | ||
| But I will note for a number of Republicans who have been drumming the beat, beating the drum about wanting to see the Epstein files, they're saying that the grand jury testimony, transcripts rather, would be a large step in the right direction. | ||
| And they're using that as a way to argue that Republicans and President Trump were on the same page. | ||
| It's something that Speaker Johnson's been saying, that there's no daylight between House Republicans and President Trump, although we know that President Trump has urged Republicans to drop this matter while other congressional Republicans are still arguing and calling for complete publication of the files. | ||
| So, speaking of calling, we've asked Republicans only to call in, asking, does the Epstein file story matter to you? | ||
| And we'll hear from them in just a couple minutes here. | ||
| But you talk to these members of Congress, these Republican members of Congress. | ||
| What are they saying about this particular issue as they head towards the congressional recess, towards weeks in which they'll be back home hearing from constituents? | ||
| Are they expecting this to be the focus of town hall events? | ||
| What are they telling you? | ||
| I mean, look, constituents are definitely talking about this. | ||
| That's what I'm hearing from members. | ||
| We know from the rules committee, after Republicans on the rules committee voted down that Democrat-led amendment last week, they got an earfull back at home. | ||
| And I spoke to Congressman Tim Burchett. | ||
| He's the Republican from Tennessee. | ||
| Of course, he told me that his cones are running off the hook with constituents calling, upset about the administration's handling of the matter, arguing that they want to see the full documentation. | ||
| He's even heard from some personal friends, which he said is not something that typically happens as a congressman himself, personally, for him. | ||
| So, certainly, there are constituents calling. | ||
| And as you mentioned, this could be a real issue for recess. | ||
| Republicans are heading home on Thursday in the House with a big task on their hands. | ||
| They need to sell the big beautiful bill to their constituents. | ||
| Look, it was really hard to get that piece of legislation over the finish line. | ||
| It may be even harder to sell it to their constituents and try to make it a winning message come next November when they're running to expand the majority in the midterms. | ||
| So, focusing any time on the Epstein files and not the big, beautiful bill is certainly not the situation Republicans want to be in, especially when they head home for this five-week August recess. | ||
| And then, Michael Schnell, just finally, remind us of the timeline here. | ||
| You talk about the floor, Not much is going to happen on the floor of the House this week in the wake of what happened yesterday. | ||
| So, when did they get out of town? | ||
| And what does that timing mean for September? | ||
| We know there's a big September 30th government funding matter to deal with. | ||
| There always is at the end of September. | ||
| So, how does this all impact that? | ||
| Yeah, so currently, right now, the House is supposed to break for recess Thursday morning. | ||
| Now, I spoke to Speaker Johnson last night. | ||
| I asked him that, in light of what's happening on the Rules Committee, do you expect to send folks home early? | ||
| He said no, arguing that there's a lot to focus on with suspension votes, committee markups, and committee hearings. | ||
| But we'll see if he gives back a few days because, again, there's no big ticket legislation to vote on. | ||
| Members are eager to get back home to their districts, and it's been a very long six-month stretch here in Washington. | ||
| But again, as you mentioned, that September 30th deadline for government funding is going to creep up very quickly. | ||
| The House has only passed two out of those 12 appropriations bills. | ||
| The Senate is going forward with just its first this week. | ||
| Lawmakers are very much so behind the eight ball when it comes to government funding. | ||
| Likely, more chatter about a continuing resolution is going to begin as Congress returns in September because they are just so behind on their work. | ||
| And so, it's going to be a fierce government funding fight come September because of all these differences between Republicans and Democrats on levels that they want the spending bills to be at, you know, locking in more of those dose cuts. | ||
| And then, of course, the different paces that the Senate and the House are on. | ||
| Michael Schnell, one of the best congressional reporters in the business, you can read all of her coverage of all of these issues and her colleagues as well at thehill.com. | ||
| And we always appreciate your time on the Washington Journal. | ||
| Thanks, John. | ||
| About 45 minutes here, and the question this morning for Republicans only: in that 45 minutes, does the Epstein file story matter to you? | ||
| 202-748-8000 if you're Republican in the Eastern or Central time zones, 202-748-8001 if you are a Republican in the Mountain or Pacific time zone. | ||
| This story continues to be all over the national papers today. | ||
| It is the lead story in today's New York Times from their front page. | ||
| The headline, Trump's deflections ease the base's fury over Epstein, but other grievances are reunifying allies for now. | ||
| We'll take you into that story over the course of this 45 minutes, but we'll hear first from Kat out of Culpeper, Virginia. | ||
| Republican, does the Epstein file story matter to you, Kat? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, sir, it does not. | |
| What really matters to me are the lies that the Democrats are putting out. | ||
| And I honestly believe if anybody's on the Epstein list, it's probably a lot of them and Republicans because, you know, it's human nature. | ||
| Even when children are used, I was abused when I was three years old the first time. | ||
| So I know what it is to, you know, have to deal with that all your life. | ||
| I'm 74 now, but what I really hate are the lies of the getting rid of Medicaid, getting rid of Social Security, or whatever they say. | ||
| The Democrats keep putting that out, but it's not. | ||
| It's getting rid of the cheaters. | ||
| And then when you're that mans of undocumented people who we don't even know who is living next to us and what they're capable of, and I'm sorry, you have to admit, people from the lower countries, uneducated, aren't trying to assimilate. | ||
| I have about seven neighbors in a one-block neighborhood that are here illegally. | ||
| I love them. | ||
| The ones that are in my neighborhood are great, but I just don't feel like the, you know, they're getting taken everything. | ||
| And we'll take your point. | ||
| We're focusing on the Epstein files and simply asking Republicans only: does it matter to you? | ||
| Is this a story that matters to you? | ||
| Is it something that you would bring up if you attended a town hall with your member of Congress this congressional recess? | ||
| Luis is in Hamilton, Ohio. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would like to know why everybody wants to know about the Epstein files. | |
| Are there people that are obsessed with trash, with gossip? | ||
| And why not put the girls' names out there, too? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That's Luis. | ||
| This is Melinda in Vermont. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| All the women, the children who were abused on Epstein Island are adults now. | ||
| There is no real statute of limitation on child rape. | ||
| Let them go to court and let their abusers, whoever they may be, face their accusers. | ||
| That's how it works in the United States. | ||
| That's Melinda in Vermont, and this is Phil in Clayton, North Carolina. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Yeah, I just wanted to say when Elon Musk gets this America's party going, then we can do away with the Republican Democrats and all this fussing and arguing all the time. | ||
| Y'all have a good day. | ||
| It's Phil in North Carolina asking Republicans only in this segment, does the Epstein files story matter to you? | ||
| Coming back to that front page story in the New York Times, here's what they write in the week after the Justice Department walked back its promise to release the full collection of files about the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. | ||
| It seems there was nothing President Trump could do to quell the fury of some of his own supporters. | ||
| But when the Wall Street Journal published a story detailing a decades-old letter with a lewd drawing that Mr. Trump allegedly sent Mr. Epstein for his birthday, Mr. Trump got a respite from the revolt as some of his core supporters rushed to his defense. | ||
| Mr. Trump turned one of the most fractious moments for his base into one of the most unifying by tapping into other MAGA grievances, the deep mistrust of mainstream media, the disdain of Rupert Murdoch, and the belief that the president had been unfairly persecuted by his political foes. | ||
| Mr. Trump's allies on the hard right, the Make America Great movement, said that the discontent that had divided the base had dissipated, but had not been eliminated, at least for now. | ||
| That's how the New York Times frames it this morning. | ||
| This is Tim in Rochester, New York. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| Tim, you're with us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I am. | |
| Does the Epstein files story matter to you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Why? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because Epstein is dead. | |
| And what's this news going to reveal? | ||
| Who are we going to prosecute as a result of it? | ||
| What we should be focusing on is the news story that's capturing not really the nation, but maybe some of the media publications about all of the Obama administration's nefarious activities during Trump's run for president. | ||
| That is the big news story of the day. | ||
| And that's what we should be talking about. | ||
| That's Tim in Rochester, New York. | ||
| It was yesterday at the White House that White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt was talking about Epstein once again after questions from reporters. | ||
| This is yesterday. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So, at six months, the president is also experiencing some pushback from members of his own mega base, especially on the matter of the referee Epstein file. | |
| Is the president satisfied that his own supporters are not heeding his call to let him go and to move on? | ||
| I know the president would reject that, Kelly. | ||
| In fact, he cited over the weekend some polls showing that his approval rating with the Republican Party is actually at an all-time high. | ||
| He's polling 90 to 95 percent amongst Republicans right now. | ||
| That's higher than any Republican president or any leader of this party ever. | ||
| The president is the creator and the leader of the Make America Great Again movement. | ||
| It's his baby that he made, and he knows what his supporters want. | ||
| It's transparency. | ||
| And he has given them that on all accounts when it comes to everything this administration has done, especially when it just comes to the president himself, taking questions from all of you and the press corps on a near-daily basis, multiple times a week. | ||
| No question is off limits here at this White House, not just for the president, but myself as well. | ||
| Kelly, again, as I just answered, the president has told the Attorney General and the FBI director to release any credible evidence that they find. | ||
| And he also signaled to them over the weekend to move forward with unsealing the grand jury documents that were underseal by various judges across the country. | ||
| And I believe the Attorney General has taken the proper legal action to do that. | ||
| That was Caroline Levitt yesterday from the White House taking your calls this morning, Republicans only. | ||
| Simply asking, Does the Epstein files story matter to you? | ||
| This is Susie in East Flat Rock, New York, North Carolina. | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I don't know why they want to keep dragging this up other than they don't think they're going to get Trump in on this deal, too. | |
| He probably was. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Who really cares at this point in time? | ||
| The thing of it is, is why we keep bringing up Trump, Trump, Trump every day when Hunter Biden just made that big spill over the Windows podcast. | ||
| He just dished the Democrats all up one side and down the other. | ||
| I mean, I don't understand what's going on here. | ||
| Why we keep on with trying to hang Trump when the Democrat Party is so nasty? | ||
| That's all I got to say. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That's Susie. | ||
| This is Susan in Seattle. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| You're asking about Epstein. | ||
| Please let him rest in peace. | ||
| He already faced the music. | ||
| Why are this? | ||
| You know, the Democrats are all sizzing about it. | ||
| You might know about Penton, what happened. | ||
| Imagine Obama was in there, and Bill Gates must be in there. | ||
| Remember one time they showed like Penton was dressed up in the dress or something? | ||
| So, man, it peace. | ||
| And you know, there's so many more ideal things in the world we have to solve, okay? | ||
| So it doesn't matter to me. | ||
| I think President Trump has been very transparent. | ||
| He even tells what's wrong with him, his body, okay? | ||
| So come on, people. | ||
| Go Galil. | ||
| Go live it. | ||
| Let Epstein rest in peace. | ||
| That's Susan. | ||
| This is Chris, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| I think all of these things should matter, quite frankly. | ||
| And, you know, we were told that this would be released. | ||
| There was the big release party a few months back when we found out that really nothing was released. | ||
| And there are just more promises broken by the president. | ||
| The Ukraine war was supposed to end on day one of his presidency. | ||
| Obviously, that didn't happen. | ||
| You know, the Middle East is a mess. | ||
| And, you know, I think this is white noise compared to the big problems of the world. | ||
| But, you know, it's par for the course, I think, with what we're dealing with. | ||
| And as a Republican, I think it's a shame that we just can't move forward on so many issues that are big problems with this country. | ||
| Release the files, whoever's names in there. | ||
| I think you've got Democrats and Republicans alike and a whole bunch of other super wealthy people in there. | ||
| But we were told they were going to be released, and they still haven't been released. | ||
| So I think it's just a bunch of white noise. | ||
| That's Chris in Pennsylvania on releasing the files, how to go about doing that, and promises made to that effect. | ||
| Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton was on this program last week talking about those subjects. | ||
| This is some of what he had to say. | ||
| So a couple of things here. | ||
| The client list. | ||
| The Attorney General put it in air quotes. | ||
| Is there a client list? | ||
| I think there is. | ||
| I mean, they talk about there's no... | ||
| Then why do you think they're not releasing it if it actually exists? | ||
| What they say in the memo is there's no incriminating client list. | ||
| I want the non-incriminating client list. | ||
| And client list is obviously a term of art. | ||
| That's why, you know, when people put air quotes around it, they're using something specific or something in a way that you might call a client list, but isn't labeled as such. | ||
| So folks want to know who he was in contact with, who potentially was involved in the sort of conduct that was at issue. | ||
| In the memo, this Justice Department FBI memo, they talked about a thousand victims. | ||
| Well, you know, that's a lot of victims for one man to have been involved with. | ||
| Were there others? | ||
| I think that's a fair question. | ||
| Now, is there other? | ||
| They said there's no evidence suggesting others should be prosecuted. | ||
| But is there any evidence at all? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| So my advice is, because we've got the FOIA lawsuit, is just release the records under FOIA in the lease. | ||
| And that way there's a process in place where records are released. | ||
| If there are exemptions or redactions where things are blacked out, they typically have to explain why and what the basis is for it. | ||
| And at least in the court process, we can appeal it if there's an issue. | ||
| But it's a way to kind of regularize this as opposed to the irregular way through which these disclosures and conclusions have been made. | ||
| I was Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch on this program. | ||
| If you want to watch that interview in its entirety, it's c-span.org, easy enough to find. | ||
| This is George out of Fremont, Ohio, Republican. | ||
| How do you feel about the Epstein story? | ||
| Does it matter to you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning, C-SPAN. | |
| Yes, it absolutely matters. | ||
| The Epstein issue is the keystone of what is at the heart of the problem in America. | ||
| The overarching issue is the capture of American politicians by, frankly, the state of Israel. | ||
| We know that Epstein had intelligence ties. | ||
| We know that Ghislaine Maxwell had intelligence ties. | ||
| This needs to be exposed. | ||
| There are politicians who are being told how to vote. | ||
| Thomas Massey had said in an interview that most congressmen have APAC handlers. | ||
| Most congressmen are taking APAC money. | ||
| And, you know, Epstein had homes, mansions across America with these girls going in and out, with politicians visiting in and out. | ||
| It has to be exposed. | ||
| That's George. | ||
| This is Bill out of Brunswick, Ohio. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, hi, John. | |
| Yeah, I believe the files have probably been corrupted, just like with Crossfire Hurricane, what did Carter Page, and they kind of changed that. | ||
| And one more thing. | ||
| A lot of Democrats were complaining about the cartoon, because I don't think they really know who Karl Marx is and what socialism is. | ||
| Thank you, and have a good day. | ||
| Kathy in Michigan, does the Epstein story matter to you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not really. | |
| I think there's more important matters. | ||
| Like, why don't you discuss what President Trump's accomplishments have been, like the peace through India and Pakistan, the big beautiful bill, the tax cuts. | ||
| Everybody was going to get a tax increase. | ||
| Getting rid of U.S. aid, only 12% of money went to aid on U.S. aid. | ||
| Only 12%. | ||
| That was never brought up. | ||
| And I wish your channel would play the NPR hearing more. | ||
| When that went on, you never played it during prime time. | ||
| I watched every channel, and so I wish you would play. | ||
| So, Kathy, we certainly have played the NPR hearing, and you can actually find it and watch it in its entirety yourself at cspan.org. | ||
| But you mentioned talking about Donald Trump's victories. | ||
| That's the focus, his wins, as she describes it, of Ingrid Jacques' story in today's USA Today. | ||
| Her column, Trump is racking up big Republican victories. | ||
| She cites taxpayers now free from funding liberal NPR. | ||
| Hallelujah. | ||
| She writes, Trump is dismantling the Education Department. | ||
| Don't forget about Roe v. Wade. | ||
| Those are just a few of the things she cites. | ||
| But just below that column in today's USA Today, it's Sarah Pekino's column, and it comes back to Jeffrey Epstein. | ||
| The Epstein files are a mess that's engulfing the Trump administration, she writes. | ||
| Again, this is just below that other column. | ||
| Trump really, really doesn't want you to focus on the fact that he said he wanted to declassify the Epstein files in the campaign. | ||
| She writes, it's best just to focus on immigrants who are now being treated no better than livestock. | ||
| Trump says that they're the root of the problem, and we should believe that, right? | ||
| Allegator Alcatraz, she writes, is a cruel reminder that Trump will do whatever he wants to vulnerable populations in the United States, and only a few Democrats seem willing to call him out. | ||
| It's also cruel for a reason to appease the MAGA base and keep them from realizing that Trump isn't making good on any of his other promises. | ||
| Those two columns, one on top of the other today in today's USA Today. | ||
| This is Marshall in Nashville. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Do the Epstein files matter to you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, they do matter. | |
| You know, I want to chide anyone. | ||
| I don't care Republican, Democrat. | ||
| I want to chide you because there are victims here. | ||
| These are little children, boys and girls, who have been, their whole life has been traumatized. | ||
| And to minimize what happened to them and to say, let's look the other way, you are no different than a Democrat who looks at the 2024 election process and they saw what the DNC did and they saw what Democrat leaders and Democrat politicians did in this country and they say nothing about it and they turn a blind eye. | ||
| You're no better than them. | ||
| Marshall, where did you expect we would be six months into a second Trump administration on this particular issue? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, to me, it doesn't. | |
| The reason I say it doesn't matter on this act is because nothing will ever come of it. | ||
| This is a waste of taxpayer dollars in many ways. | ||
| And I'll tell you why. | ||
| Lois Smooter was never held accountable for weaponizing the IRS against Republicans. | ||
| Reagan was never held responsible for Contra. | ||
| Eric Holder never held responsible for his selling of arms to the cartels in Mexico. | ||
| What do you it has taken us 50 years to release documents from RFK, and we have evidence that our intelligence agencies were involved with it. | ||
| So when you look at it, we're like a squirrel on one of those little squirrel cages running around in circles. | ||
| Nothing's going to happen from it. | ||
| But is it important? | ||
| You're right. | ||
| Because people have committed crimes and they ought to be held responsible for it. | ||
| The reason it probably won't come out is because you have politicians, lawyers, business owners, wealthy people, men and women, who have used the services of Jeffrey Epstein to abuse children. | ||
| And they will never let that come out. | ||
| They will never let those people held responsible. | ||
| That's Marshall in Nashville. | ||
| About 20 minutes left here, Republicans only, simply asking you, does the Epstein story matter to you? | ||
| 202748 for Republicans in the Eastern or Central time zones. | ||
| 202748 for Republicans in the Mountain or Pacific time zones. | ||
| President Trump, of course, being asked about this several times in recent weeks. | ||
| Here's President Trump on Wednesday from the White House answering one of those questions. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Will you ask Attorney General Pam Bonnie to release more documents to finally put this controversy to bed? | |
| Yeah, whatever's credible, she can release. | ||
| If a document is credible, if a document's there that is credible, she can release. | ||
| I think it's good. | ||
| But it's just really, it's just a subject. | ||
| He's dead. | ||
| He's gone. | ||
| And all it is is the Republicans. | ||
| Certain Republicans got duped by the Democrats, and they're following a Democrat playbook. | ||
| And no different than Russia, Russia, Russia, and all the other hoaxes. | ||
| They're started by the Democrats. | ||
| And some Republicans, in this case, I was surprised, but they got duped. | ||
| President Trump, that was last week. | ||
| This is today on the pages of the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| Joseph Epstein writes about the Epstein files, noting that I, Joseph Epstein, have grown very weary of hearing my surname mentioned in connection with the odious activities of the late pedophile and pimp Jeffrey Epstein. | ||
| But Joseph Epstein goes on to say this about the Trump administration's handling of the files. | ||
| Fair to say that the Trump administration has thus far bungled its handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, allowing anyone to imagine who might be on the list. | ||
| As National Review notes, everyone has built vast castles of fantasy atop the Epstein case. | ||
| That includes many members of his administration, Attorney General Pam Bondi, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Director Kash Patel among them. | ||
| Now, he writes, President Trump is on the back foot with demands in Congress that he release any files related to Epstein at the Justice Department. | ||
| On social media, he says that he has asked Ms. Bondi to produce any and all pertinent grand jury testimony subject to court approval. | ||
| I hope that happens soon, he writes, if only so that I and the roughly 12,000 American Epsteins can once again live in peace. | ||
| That is Joseph F. Stein writing in the pages of today's Wall Street Journal. | ||
| This is Francis out of New Jersey. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, John. | |
| How you doing? | ||
| Doing well, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I really don't care about the Epstein thing, but to me, if you really want to know the truth, all the Democrats, Republicans should ask Trump to pardon Delaney Maxwell and have her testify live on TV and throw everybody's dirty laundry out in the street. | |
| Unless the Democrats and Republicans do that, they're all hiding this bull crap. | ||
| So my thing is, pardon her, and let's get it on with the show. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Mike out of the bluegrass state. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| You are next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, thank you for accepting the call. | |
| I'm a lifelong Republican. | ||
| The Epstein files do matter. | ||
| The information that seems to be used by the current Republican leaders as what they would use for getting themselves elected, trying to show light on what they believe to be some sense of truth, there's a lot of dirt here. | ||
| And if there's nothing to see, release everything, except for the victims' names, right? | ||
| Redact that. | ||
| But if there's nothing to see, everything else should be released. | ||
| Do you think we're going to see everything at some point down the road, Mike? | ||
|
unidentified
|
As far as being able to see everything, I don't think you'll ever see everything with Trump and the Trumplicans that are in charge. | |
| Unfortunately, that is just not something that's going to be in the cards. | ||
| It's smoke and mirrors to cover, well, it's just CYA. | ||
| I think we all have seen that plenty enough now. | ||
| What's a Trumplican, Mike? | ||
|
unidentified
|
A person who claims to be conservative, who claims to be Republican, but is simply beholden to any and everything that Trump says. | |
| Classical Republicanism should be finding everything that we see in Washington right now as repugnant. | ||
| Does that include the one big, beautiful bill? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The big, bad, ugly bill? | |
| Yes. | ||
| Gutting education, gutting aid to foreign aid that makes a difference in soft political power around the world. | ||
| It is very unfortunate to see everything, including farm aid and everything else that we have sought to do to make our presence a positive presence around the world strategically. | ||
| It is unfortunate to see that instead of a scalpel, there's a shotgun approach to change. | ||
| Mike, what's the future of the Republican Party? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think it will certainly seek to circle its wagons from what's left of it. | |
| There is this personality cult that seems to be very much in charge. | ||
| And at present, like you're seeing the maneuvers that might take place in Texas with redistricting, they will try to circle and hold on to power as long as they can. | ||
| But the American people, in the long run, will end up doing the right thing. | ||
| And I think it's more than time to say your time is up, Trump. | ||
| What's the right thing, Mike? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The right thing would be to be fully disclosing of what is happening and seek to do what is right for all Americans, not just some. | |
| That's Mike out of the Bluegrass State to the Mountaineer State. | ||
| This is Carol in West Virginia. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Epstein files matter to you, Carol? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| I mean, if we're going to worry about the Epstein files, I'd like the full disclosure on the Weinstein files, the Crossfire hurricane files. | ||
| I'd like to know what happened to the congressional hush-slush fund. | ||
| That went silent real quick. | ||
| I'd like to know who was running the country for four years. | ||
| But we're never going to find out this information. | ||
| And if we find out anything, there's always going to be, no, we want more, more, more, more, more. | ||
| It's a waste of taxpayers' money. | ||
| We've got other things to worry about besides who's on a file and who's not. | ||
| That's Carol out of West Virginia. | ||
| Back to social media on this topic. | ||
| We showed you some of the responses to that question for Democrats. | ||
| Here's the responses to this question. | ||
| Jack Elaine says, I care about the Epstein files about as much as the Democrats did when Biden was president and they didn't care at all. | ||
| If there was anything damaging against Trump, you can better believe that the Democrats would have released it. | ||
| This is Dan saying, yes, it matters, but the rich and powerful of all stripes who might be connected will never let it come out. | ||
| So there's little point in continuing to waste time obsessing over it. | ||
| Rich saying, yes, it matters, but the victims should be the first consideration. | ||
| It's important also to define the list. | ||
| A client list could be just that. | ||
| The rape and pedo list is the one that counts, and the criminals there should not be protected. | ||
| And one more, Gary saying it matters because, as in any crime, justice must be done for the victims. | ||
| But quite frankly, I'm more concerned about President Trump and the Republican Congress doing what we voted for them to do. | ||
| I really think if there was any real evidence that Donald Trump went to Epstein Island and engaged in illegal activity, the previous Biden administration would have made that public in a New York minute. | ||
| Taking your phone calls here, another few minutes asking Republicans only this question. | ||
| Does the Epstein file story matter to you? | ||
| This is Kim out of the Buckeye State. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thanks for having me on. | ||
| The Epstein files, they matter to me. | ||
| But right now, I believe there's some more important things to worry about. | ||
| Like the illegal immigrants getting them deported. | ||
| Why not find out whose Coke was at the White House? | ||
| Why not find out who planned the pipe bomb before January 6th? | ||
| There's just other things to worry about for them. | ||
| Trump was on that list. | ||
| It definitely would have been known by now. | ||
| And I was reading last night that they have about a thousand FBI agents scrolling through the files and teaching them how to pinpoint where Trump's name is involved in there. | ||
| I think our tax dollars have stopped and stumped plenty enough trying to get Trump on other crimes. | ||
| And we don't need to spend more tax dollars on that. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Have a good day. | ||
| That's Kim. | ||
| Back to the opinion pages. | ||
| This is Frank Bruni in the pages of today's New York Times. | ||
| Frank Bruni writes, of course, the conspiracy theorists who reveled in Donald Trump's encouragement of their wildest fantasies feel jilted by his sudden command that they erase Jeffrey Epstein from their cognitive hard drives. | ||
| As the tawdry twists in the Epstein tale keep coming, Trump's most obliged defenders are being driven to exhaustion, he writes. | ||
| Vice President JD Vance responded to the Wall Street Journal's report that Trump had once written and doodled a special smutty Predators in Arms birthday greeting to Epstein with a social media post that asked, does anyone honestly believe that this sounds like Donald Trump? | ||
| Frank Bruni says, does anyone honestly believe that it doesn't? | ||
| We're talking about Mr. Grab Them by the You Know What's here, Frank Bruni, writing in the pages of today's New York Times. | ||
| This is Thomas Chesterfield, Missouri. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Donald Trump needs a haircut and a seat adjustment. | |
| Are you not a supporter of the president? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Poison Kool-Aid. | |
| All right, we will go to Richard in Anderson, South Carolina. | ||
| Apologize for that. | ||
| Richard, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Important issue, but it's a very complex issue because releasing files, you're releasing a lot of names possibly that had no connection to that stand. | |
| It's a social connection. | ||
| What's your name's out there? | ||
| It's out there. | ||
| You have a woman sitting in prison right now who's been convicted. | ||
| If you really want the truth, then give her a pardon and let her talk about the situation. | ||
| She has all the information, obviously. | ||
| Richard, I think we got your point. | ||
| You're going a little in and out there. | ||
| One more from social media on X. None writing in simply just rip the bandaid off here. | ||
| Either it's baloney or there are folks paying to get their names redacted as we speak about this. | ||
| One more post on that topic. | ||
| We're going to end our open forum there and plenty more, though, to talk about on the Washington Journal this morning. | ||
| Coming up in about 40 minutes here, we're going to be joined by Illinois Democratic Congressman Sean Kasten. | ||
| A discussion on the latest when it comes to fiscal deadlines and what Congress is doing headed into the summer break. | ||
| But first, it's journalist Selena Zito. | ||
| She joins us to talk about her new book, Butler, her first-hand account of covering the near assassination of President Donald Trump last summer. | ||
| Stick around. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Journalist and author Selena Zeno joins us now via Zoom. | ||
| She's the author of the book Butler, The Untold Story of the Near Assassination of Donald Trump and the Fight for America's Heartland. | ||
| Selena Zito, why did Donald Trump pick Butler, Pennsylvania as the site of that rally back on July the 13th of 2024? | ||
| So the book delves into the importance of place. | ||
| So it's really important that you ask that question because places like Butler, you know, there's only ever been two presidents that have ever campaigned for president in Butler, and the other one was JFK. | ||
| These are the places that often decide election cycles, but they're very far off from the sort of main places like DC or New York. | ||
| But they offer a different venue for the president to be able to make his case or whoever is running to make their case, Josh Shapiro, John Fetterman, Dave McCormick. | ||
| They're also elected officials that understand the importance of place. | ||
| It's situated right along the Ohio border. | ||
| Erie's to the north. | ||
| Pittsburgh is to the south. | ||
| So all of that makes sense in terms of if you're trying to appeal to the middle of the state or the middle of the country, it gives something for voters to have an association with because they see their place through the eyes of the people of Butler. | ||
| Why were you in Butler that day? | ||
| And how did you end up right there by the platform when the attempted assassination of Donald Trump happened? | ||
| So I'm a reporter. | ||
| I cover national politics and I live in Western Pennsylvania. | ||
| So, you know, anything that was happening in Pennsylvania, I was pretty much there. | ||
| I think I put, I don't know, 30,000, 40,000 miles in my car last year. | ||
| So I try to make every event that all the candidates were doing. | ||
| Butler is also home to me. | ||
| My family, not the Italian side, the Scottish side, were one of the first founding families of Butler County in the 1750s. | ||
| So it's also near and dear to my heart. | ||
| The morning started out. | ||
| If people look at the cover of the book, my daughter is a photojournalist. | ||
| She took that cover photo. | ||
| We started out that we were going to interview President Trump for five minutes before the event. | ||
| Chris Lasavita, who was his co-campaign chair, had called and said, hey, you know, you have an interview. | ||
| I requested one. | ||
| You have an interview five minutes right before. | ||
| I have interviewed President Trump several times. | ||
| I knew it was going to be a little longer than five minutes, just because he loves to talk about Pennsylvania. | ||
| That quickly changed, which, by the way, is not all that unusual. | ||
| And as a reporter, things change all the time. | ||
| You never really set out that morning and have accomplished what was on your list by the end of the day. | ||
| That changed about midday, and they said, we're running late. | ||
| Can we please do the interview after the rally? | ||
| That call came from Susie Wiles, who was the other co-campaign chair and who's today's chief of staff at the White House. | ||
| I said, sure. | ||
| And about an hour before the president came on, I get a phone call from Susie Wiles, and she says, so how would you feel about flying to Bedminster and doing the interview on his plane? | ||
| And I thought, well, I'll have a lot more time. | ||
| And they said they would get me back, my daughter and I back. | ||
| So that's the decision we all came to. | ||
| About six minutes before the president was set to go out, he had already landed. | ||
| He was in Butler. | ||
| Was in behind the stage in an area that's called the Click area. | ||
| It's called that because this is where the president meets with local first responders, law enforcement, community leaders, grabs some people out of the rally and just talk to them about their lives, thanks them for their service. | ||
| In fact, Mark Vogel's mom was there. | ||
| He was the Western Pennsylvania teacher who was held in Russia for several years. | ||
| And she was asking him to please do whatever he could, if he won, to get her son released. | ||
| So they rushed myself and my daughter back. | ||
| And I didn't know where I was going to do the interview. | ||
| And so I said to the press aide, his name was Michelle Picard III, what am I doing? | ||
| Where am I doing this interview? | ||
| And he had no idea. | ||
| So he went around the curtain where the president was and then came back very sheepishly and said, he just wanted to say hi. | ||
| You're still going to Bedminster. | ||
| So I went around, said hi. | ||
| We basically talked about our grandchildren. | ||
| Both of us have a deep love for our grandchildren. | ||
| This is sort of this connection. | ||
| And then I go to go back to the riser with my daughter. | ||
| My son-in-law is there too. | ||
| He's carrying all of our lighting equipment. | ||
| And they couldn't get us back to the riser. | ||
| So Picard tells us, okay, you guys go in the buffer. | ||
| The buffer is the area between the stage that the president walks out on and the people that are attending the rally. | ||
| Mostly it's used for photojournalists and Secret Service. | ||
| So he comes out, we follow him out. | ||
| If you look at the cover of the book, my daughter took that as he's coming out. | ||
| And that cover has significance. | ||
| And I'll tell you about that in a minute. | ||
| But if you take a look at it, and you can see it's not picked, it's a photo of the back of him looking at the people attending the rally. | ||
| So we go out and Picard told us, make sure you end up over on the side so when the motorcade is ready to leave, we can just grab you. | ||
| So that's what I did. | ||
| The president comes out, he comes out to the song, and two things happen simultaneously, which rarely happen, if at all. | ||
| A chart comes out. | ||
| And I thought, what does he think? | ||
| He's Ross Perot. | ||
| Like, he never has a chart. | ||
| And if he does have the chart, it's at the end and it's on the other side of him. | ||
| I've covered enough Trump rallies to know that. | ||
| It's very rare. | ||
| If it does happen, it happens at the end. | ||
| And the other thing that happens, and this is the significance of the cover, President Trump never turns his head away from the people attending the rally. | ||
| It is a very transactional relationship. | ||
| He feeds off of them and they feed off of him. | ||
| This sort of connective tissue that happens. | ||
| And now he may turn his body to face different parts of a rally, but he never turns his neck away. | ||
| However, he did. | ||
| He turns his neck away when the chart comes down. | ||
| And that's when the four shots went overhead. | ||
| And let me show viewers that in real time. | ||
| I'm sure they've seen it before, but it was less than two minutes from when the shots ring out to when Donald Trump is taken off the stage. | ||
| Here's that two minutes. | ||
| want to really see something that said, take a look at what happened. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Shooters down. | |
| Shooters down. | ||
| Are we good to move? | ||
| Are we good to move? | ||
| We're clear! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's move! | |
| We're clear! | ||
| Let me get my shoes on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I got you, sir. | |
| I got you, sir. | ||
| Let me get my shoes on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hold up in your head. | |
| So we're going to move too fast. | ||
| Okay, watch out. | ||
| Watch out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Watch out. | |
| Wait, wait, wait. | ||
| Selena Zito, as you listen to those moments again, describe where you were and what you remember from those two minutes. | ||
| So this is very detailed in the book. | ||
| I have my recorder on, so I have all of that too. | ||
| I'm a few feet away, and I didn't see the video that you showed, but if it's the one I'm thinking of, you can see me, it would be off to your right. | ||
| And you can see the Secret Service guy in camo just point the gun straight at me. | ||
| Because at that point, they didn't know if there was someone else there. | ||
| So I see it in the gun. | ||
| I know, I'm a gun owner. | ||
| I knew exactly what it was immediately. | ||
| I see him grab his ear. | ||
| I see the blood go across his face. | ||
| I see the sea of blue. | ||
| It's the same time that the next rounds go off. | ||
| I'm still standing at this point. | ||
| It's at that moment that Picard takes me down. | ||
| And there's a really iconic photo of him hovering over top of me, protecting me. | ||
| And we have that photo that we can show as you talk through that moment. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know, I didn't know this young man. | ||
| He wasn't law enforcement. | ||
| He was a press guy. | ||
| But yet, you know, he just stayed there until we got the all-clear. | ||
| And I will forever be grateful for that moment from that young man. | ||
| I have my recorder on. | ||
| I always have my recorder on. | ||
| And people will say, well, why? | ||
| There's always a transcript. | ||
| Yes, there's a transcript, but transcripts are one-dimensional. | ||
| You don't always get the nuance of what someone's saying. | ||
| And writing it in a very flat, one-dimensional way often misses the point of an event. | ||
| So I have that all recording. | ||
| And so they leave. | ||
| We are taken. | ||
| All of the photo journalists and myself are taken in the back for about 47 minutes. | ||
| And then after that, we go to leave. | ||
| And it is so quiet when we get out of there. | ||
| Everything's gone. | ||
| Everyone is gone. | ||
| At least we thought they were. | ||
| Now, if you know anything about Pennsylvania, Western Pennsylvania, we have beautiful rolling hills, including our farmland. | ||
| And so on this, the Butler Farm Show complex is an old farm. | ||
| So there's a rolling hill, and that leads to where the parking lot is. | ||
| And I didn't realize, we didn't realize that everyone was still there. | ||
| They had not let anybody leave. | ||
| And they didn't let them leave for an additional hour. | ||
| And what could have been very chaotic and angry, like you could imagine all kinds of worst case scenarios in that situation. | ||
| People have all different kinds of reactions when they're scared, they're angry, they're, you know, they're destabilized, right? | ||
| You literally witnessed a president of the United States being shot. | ||
| But what we came upon was actually something aspirational, remarkable. | ||
| People were singing. | ||
| People were sharing that, you know, a lot of people had killers in the back of their cars or trucks. | ||
| And so they were sharing water and food and they were hugging and they were talking. | ||
| And so it was really in a moment that could have been gone very, very different way in the aftermath of an assassination was really quite remarkable on those farm fields. | ||
| And Butler, I believe that is because of the way the president comported himself when he said fight, fight, fight. | ||
| And we called me the next morning, called me bright and early the next morning. | ||
| We eventually get to why he did that. | ||
| And Selena Zito talks about this in her book, Butler, The Untold Story of the Near Assassination of Donald Trump and the Fight for America's Heartland. | ||
| You can join the conversation this morning by calling in. | ||
| Phone lines are open for you to do so. | ||
| Phone lines split as usual in this segment. | ||
| Democrats 202-748-8001. | ||
| Republicans, phone lines for you. | ||
| Independents as well. | ||
| Go ahead and start calling in with your questions for Selena Zito. | ||
| And as folks are calling in, you mentioned talking to the president. | ||
| You ended up talking to the president several times over the course of the next 24 hours. | ||
| How and how many times and why so many times? | ||
| It would end up being seven times. | ||
| And the first phone call was almost funny because he said, good morning, Selena Zito. | ||
| This is President Donald Trump. | ||
| And I'm thinking, well, I mean, nobody else has that voice, right? | ||
| I just wanted to make sure that you and your daughter and son-in-law are okay. | ||
| And he named them. | ||
| And then he said, I'm really sorry for not being able to do that interview. | ||
| And I swore like a truck driver and I won't hear. | ||
| And I said, are you bleeping kidding me, sir? | ||
| You have just been shot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I feel like I'm fine without the interview. | |
| Now, you ask why. | ||
| Before I tell you what those conversations are like, you asked why, and that's an important question. | ||
| If anyone out there that's listening or watching has ever been through a traumatic event and your family members or close friends or loved ones were not with you, and you try to explain it, they can nod their head and understand and have empathy or sympathy. | ||
| But if they weren't there, they don't know what that moment felt like. | ||
| And President Trump and I have always had mutual respect for each other over one very particular thing, and that's the people I cover and the people that he comes to see. | ||
| So he knew me really well, and he knew I was right there because he just saw me just a couple minutes before I went out. | ||
| He knew exactly where I was standing because we walked eyes. | ||
| And so I think the reason that he repeatedly called me is twofold. | ||
| First of all, just that respect for people that I cover and he sees, but also the fact that he knew someone that was right there. | ||
| And to talk about it and sort of figure out why he did the things that he did is sort of why we had those conversations, I believe. | ||
| And, you know, I suppose if I were any other journalist, I would have really pushed him, but I could tell he was going through something. | ||
| So I let him just talk. | ||
| And I was also going through something, right? | ||
| I wasn't quite sure what it was, but I knew that never happened in front of me before. | ||
| And so he began questioning, like, why did I turn my head? | ||
| I never turn my head. | ||
| And why did that chart go down? | ||
| I never do that. | ||
| And those questions and those conversations, repeated conversations, led to the hand of God and led to faith and purpose. | ||
| And he concluded that he was spared and that he had purpose and that if he won, that he would use that in the way that he believed was the best for the country. | ||
| You may disagree with him, but he came to that conclusion. | ||
| And so the last thing I asked him in our last conversation, I said, sir, well, why did you say fight, fight, fight? | ||
| And he said, oh, yeah, I wasn't Donald Trump in that moment, like not Donald Trump the man, right? | ||
| I was representing the presidency, the presidency of the United States, and representing the country. | ||
| In that moment, I understood that I needed to show that the country, not me, but the country was strong, that the country would endure and we had resolve. | ||
| And I needed to represent the grit and the exceptionalism that our country has always stood for. | ||
| So I didn't do that for me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I did it to show that we will be okay. | |
| But he was, and I also was very aware of the fact that there's 50,000 people there. | ||
| If I'm, my shoes aren't on, let alone his shoes. | ||
| I can still care, you know, he kept asking about his shoes. | ||
| Well, he didn't want to be, you know, walking down with stalking feet on gravel, right? | ||
| He wanted to project strength. | ||
| And he wanted to make sure, well, the people there didn't feel panicked. | ||
| And to his great credit, the temperature in that place went way down in that moment. | ||
| It was like a light switch. | ||
| And so that was a really smart decision on his part. | ||
| But also, he said, I wanted to project that to if there was anyone that was videotaping it or the cameras are rolling. | ||
| That there was no panic in the streets in other parts of the country. | ||
| Well, let me pause there and bring in some callers for you. | ||
| And we have several for you. | ||
| The book, again, you've probably heard about it. | ||
| It's been very much in the news since the anniversary of the shooting Butler, the untold story of the near assassination of Donald Trump and the fight for America's heartland. | ||
| This is Tom, Spring Hill, Florida, Republican up first with Selena Zito. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Appreciate it. | |
| Good morning, Miss. | ||
| I was wondering if there is any information, if they're investigating who is behind all this. | ||
| My first suspect, I would assume, would be Barack Hussain Obama. | ||
| And who's ever funding it would be, of course, George Surrows. | ||
| Well, Selena Zito, do you want to talk about the investigation since the shooting? | ||
| So it was slow-walked. | ||
| You know, there was a void in intellectual curiosity about Thomas Matthew Crookes. | ||
| And also, I did as best as I could, but this is a young man who seemingly had a, he was quiet, however, seemingly had a normal life leading up until November of 2023. | ||
| And that's when something changed, snapped, whatever way you want to reference it with this young man. | ||
| And you can find through public records that he went from, you know, public email through school to encrypted email. | ||
| He went from using Google to using encrypted dark websites. | ||
| His father, in the interviews, said something had changed, that he started dancing and talking when no one was there. | ||
| And it was a concern to him. | ||
| But, you know, in this country, we really don't treat mental illness with the proper scrutiny that I think we should. | ||
| There's still a stigma that goes around, that comes around in people's heads about mental illness. | ||
| And so for whatever reason, the family is not talking. | ||
| That was never, it appears that that was never explored. | ||
| Michael, Suffolk, Virginia, Line for Democrats. | ||
| You're on with Selena Zito. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| I was calling to congratulate you on the book. | ||
| And I did have a couple of questions. | ||
| I heard you mention earlier someone asked about why he would ask for his shoes. | ||
| And I would submit that if someone was shooting at me, I would run out of my shoes. | ||
| And I also would like to know why isn't his ear damaged now today? | ||
| And I believe that the whole thing was a fake. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Selena Zito, what do you say to people who say that a year later? | ||
| Someone died, okay? | ||
| Someone died. | ||
| Someone was shot there. | ||
| And that, to me, is a horrible question. | ||
| And I just interviewed the president a couple days ago. | ||
| There's a scar there. | ||
| Charlie. | ||
| I'm just going to leave it at that. | ||
| Upstate New York, this is Charlie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, thank you for taking my call. | |
| Love C-SPAN. | ||
| I was watching the event live on C-SPAN when it happened. | ||
| And I'm not a big conspiracy theory guy, but it did look kind of fakey to me. | ||
| And the last call, the referenced ear, so I'm glad your guest mentioned that she saw a scar on his ear. | ||
| Selena Zito, why do you think conspiracy theories continue on this a year later? | ||
| I don't know, because I don't like Trump. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| I don't understand it. | ||
| Someone died. | ||
| So I'm just not going to entertain that question. | ||
| In terms of understanding it, we started by talking about Butler and why President Trump went there that day. | ||
| You talk about understanding in the term of rootedness, of rootedness to an area. | ||
| This is a quote from your book. | ||
| Most reporters would better understand what and whom they cover in today's politics and more importantly, where to cover events if they understood the importance of place. | ||
| It's a big theme in your book. | ||
| Explain. | ||
| So the majority of Americans live less than 100 miles of where they grew up. | ||
| Most of them live within 25 miles of where they grew up. | ||
| People are very connected to place. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Well, priorities, your priority tends to be, and the thing that's valuable to you tends to be living down the street from your parents or your grandparents or the ability to see your grandchildren. | ||
| You're very rooted to community. | ||
| This crosses all races. | ||
| This is why you saw the coalition for the Republicans to grow among Blacks and Hispanics and Asians, because place begins to be more and more important to American people as the elites tend to make things more important or events more important than community. | ||
| And so that's why place matters to voters. | ||
| It's very difficult to get to that in a poll. | ||
| It's very difficult to get to that as a strategist. | ||
| I would suggest that likely our problem with not understanding that characteristic is out in places like Pennsylvania, there's a lot of news deserts. | ||
| What do I mean by that? | ||
| Lots of small newspapers have closed down. | ||
| Places where people used to get their news, local news, and even national news from a local perspective, have now closed, which has made people gravitate more towards national news. | ||
| Now, there's nothing wrong with national reporters. | ||
| However, they are a more placeless. | ||
| They're more transient. | ||
| I did an event the other day at Hudson, and I asked everyone to raise their hands if they were from DC. | ||
| Nobody was. | ||
| But I asked them to raise their hand if they lived in D.C. and everybody did. | ||
| And they all came from, there's 100 people there, and they all came from very different places. | ||
| The people that are in our legacy media are more transient. | ||
| They know less and less people that live in places like Butler or Erie, Pennsylvania. | ||
| So when they cover them, they don't understand what's more valuable to them. | ||
| So things like climate change isn't as valuable as are our roads going to get fixed. | ||
| And so when you cover them, you tend to cover them almost as like an anthropological study because you don't know them. | ||
| And that's where that distrust in media happens. | ||
| And that's our problem in covering American politics because not enough local reporters cover national issues. | ||
| This book. | ||
| That's a long answer. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| Your book, Butler, is, of course, the story of that day in July a year ago, but it's also this idea of place and what happened with the rest of the 2024 election. | ||
| There's been a lot of books about the 2024 election. | ||
| Jake Tapper had a book with Alex Thompson, the 2024 book that just came out with Josh Dawesy and Tyler Page and Isaac Ansdorf. | ||
| Chris Whipple had a book, Uncharted, about the 2424 election. | ||
| Do any of them get to this idea, this sense of place? | ||
| Have you read those books and what do you think of them? | ||
| So I love Jake Tapper's Nag Thompson book. | ||
| I thought it was great. | ||
| I'm only halfway through Josh's book. | ||
| These are very well-reported books, but they're also very inside books. | ||
| This book takes a look at the people who changed American elections. | ||
| This looks at the people who make the decision that decides who presidents are and what we can learn from them and what we've been ignoring about them. | ||
| What do you think was the turning point for Donald Trump when it came to his run in 2024? | ||
| East Palestine. | ||
| Not Butler. | ||
| I would say, so I would call showing up in East Palestine when nobody else did, in particular in the entire Biden administration until after he did. | ||
| I covered East Palestine intensely. | ||
| I was there many times. | ||
| My family is from East Palestine. | ||
| And my great-grandfather ran as a free silver Democrat for state rep in East Palestine. | ||
| But not showing up, the Biden administration not showing up there and Trump showing up there was really, really important. | ||
| That was February of 2023. | ||
| President Trump at that time was down in the polls, New Hampshire poll to Ron DeSantis. | ||
| It was probably his lowest point. | ||
| And I wrote that day: if everything changes, it's because he showed up and he told people that he saw them and he heard them. | ||
| And a week later, he was ahead in the primary polls. | ||
| But I also knew it had general election implications in a very significant way. | ||
| Butler, when the assassination happened, I believe that was the second moment where if you had any doubt that he was going to win, it should have been erased in that moment. | ||
| But I think two other moments are important. | ||
| One happened, it was a year ago yesterday when President Biden dropped out. | ||
| And seemingly, everyone in my profession just turned their gaze away from the fact that a president got shot and they focused on the shiny object. | ||
| And people saw that. | ||
| And people that wouldn't likely vote for Trump said, wait a minute, there's no balance here. | ||
| And why are we chasing this shiny object? | ||
| And this is a guy who you've been telling us is fine. | ||
| And now he's dropping out. | ||
| So that lost people's trust in my profession. | ||
| And I would say the final moment, if you had any doubt at all, happened when the massive floods hit Western North Carolina. | ||
| And once again, it's just sort of a bookend East Palestine. | ||
| The Biden administration, Harris, were very slow to show up. | ||
| Trump and Vance were both there immediately. | ||
| And that showing up and getting stuff done, it's a quality that Trump has, but also shared by Governor Josh Shapiro, U.S. Senators John Fetterman and Dave McCormick. | ||
| They all get that. | ||
| They all have that quality. | ||
| And the Biden and Harris administration were very lacking in that. | ||
| Less than 10 minutes with Selena Zito, the book is Butler, and we're taking your phone calls. | ||
| This is Velma in Ashland, Kentucky, Republican line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| I was going to say something. | ||
| A couple of callers said that they thought that the assassination of Jim was phony on page. | ||
| And that really is a sense of any sensitive. | ||
| You've got a family there that lost their husband and father. | ||
| And someone else was wounded. | ||
| And then the president was nearly, could have been assassinated. | ||
| And for people to say things like that is just so what they want to see. | ||
| What would satisfy them that it was real? | ||
| That's the family that lost their loved one. | ||
| I believe it was a fireman. | ||
| And Corey, is that right? | ||
| Yes, Corey Compatore. | ||
| He was the fire chief in his hometown of Sarber. | ||
| He served in the Army Reserves. | ||
| He was the husband of Helen. | ||
| They met in kindergarten and were boyfriend and girlfriend since middle school. | ||
| He has two beautiful daughters. | ||
| You wrote a recent story about the family. | ||
| You write that Corey, this is quoting Helen, looking back a year later. | ||
| Corey should be here, Helen told the Washington Examiner through tears while sitting at a picnic bench not far from her home of crooks, of the shooter that day and the failings of the Secret Service. | ||
| They haunt her. | ||
| They failed my husband miserably, she said, and I want answers from this, she said. | ||
| What sort of answers is she still seeking? | ||
| I think she's really concerned about the way that this was conducted by the Secret Service from the top decision makers. | ||
| There is an archaic role in the Secret Service where former presidents are not covered with the same robustness that current presidents are. | ||
| I remember covering this with Barack Obama before he was the nominee. | ||
| And President Trump was like almost a week away from being the Republican nominee. | ||
| And I don't think that at that moment you put the same footprint for, you know, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, and Donald Trump. | ||
| This is a man who was a former president. | ||
| He's a polarizing figure, but he is also, you know, days away from being the Republican nominee. | ||
| I think that was, there are rules to be broken. | ||
| That would probably be one of them. | ||
| I would think the other problem is the lack of shared resources between local law enforcement, who know where every nook and cranny is in those farm fields, because most of them grew up there. | ||
| And not sharing communication with Secret Service who have spent a couple days there, but not the lifetime there, was also something that needs to be explored. | ||
| Michelle is waiting in Maryland line for independence. | ||
| Michelle, you're on with Selena Zito. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning, John. | ||
| The guest is clearly enamored of Trump. | ||
| You can hear it. | ||
| He has won her over with his charm. | ||
| But there are four reasons why someone, including myself, believe that Butler was a setup. | ||
| And it's very interesting that Zito says that she doesn't want to entertain those questions when we had Trump for years. | ||
| And he continues to say that the 2020 election was a setup, that it was fake. | ||
| And so that's why people do not believe Butler. | ||
| Secondly. | ||
| Well, Selena Zito, let you respond to that. | ||
| I have no response to that. | ||
| When it comes to responding to Donald Trump, one thing you have talked about is a theory on who takes Donald Trump seriously and who takes Donald Trump literally. | ||
| Just less than four minutes left here. | ||
| Wanted to give you a chance to talk through that theory, especially as it applies today. | ||
| So Donald Trump has been in the American psyche for decades, right? | ||
| He didn't just show up in 2015 and decide to run. | ||
| People knew who he was. | ||
| He was always in the New York tabloids. | ||
| He had a television show. | ||
| He had two television shows, I think, right? | ||
| And so people knew who he was. | ||
| They also knew how he comported himself. | ||
| So he didn't take everything that he said literally, but they took his candidacy seriously. | ||
| Whereas my profession takes everything that he says literally and doesn't particularly take him very seriously. | ||
| It was the two worlds that I straddle. | ||
| If I go on X, whether it's the far right or far left, it's a very different world than when I experience when I'm out interviewing people. | ||
| I don't fly. | ||
| I don't take highways or turnpikes. | ||
| I only take back roads and listen to people in their barbershops and their homes and in their businesses. | ||
| To make the number one best-selling on the New York Times, this book is really a testament to the people who opened their doors and to the people who bought the book and that live in the middle of the country. | ||
| I guess the final question would be after going through this experience with Donald Trump, talking through his thoughts and his feelings afterwards over the course of seven phone calls afterward, continuing to cover him on the campaign trail. | ||
| It was just last week where he mentioned you were in the building at an event that he was doing in Pennsylvania. | ||
| How has this impacted how you cover Donald Trump? | ||
| Does it change at all how you cover him as a president? | ||
| How do you deal with this as a journalist after living through it as a person? | ||
| So he's also been mad at me too. | ||
| He's also called me a fake news reporter. | ||
| So it doesn't change it. | ||
| I've gotten the same kind of greetings from Governor Josh Shapiro and Senator John Fetterman. | ||
| When I interview people, I tend to not ask the questions that is more important to someone that's like covering him from a policy perspective, from D.C. or from New York. | ||
| I tend to cover them through the people that I interview, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, people that don't even vote. | ||
| And I do the same thing with Governor Shapiro, Senators Fetterman, and McCormick. | ||
| And I also did this with then-Secretary Hillary Clinton. | ||
| And I covered Joe Biden for 30 years. | ||
| So it's just the way I am. | ||
| The book is Butler, the untold story of the near assassination of Donald Trump and the fight for America's heartland. | ||
| The author is Selena Zito, and we, of course, appreciate your time. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Coming up in just a few minutes here, we will be joined by Illinois Democrat Sean Kasten will get his take on the administration's handling of financial issues, the Epstein files, and all of Congressionals, the congressional agenda headed into the August recess. | ||
| Stick around for that conversation. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
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| This fall, C-SPAN presents Ceasefire, where the shouting stops and the conversation begins in a town where partisan fighting prevails. | ||
| One table, two leaders, one goal, to find common ground. | ||
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| Democracy. | ||
| It isn't just an idea. | ||
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| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Back with us in the Washington Journal, it is Illinois Democrat Sean Kasten. | ||
| He serves on the Financial Services Committee. | ||
| And Congressman, before we get to some of the looming fiscal deadlines and the congressional agenda, I just want to start with the question that we posed to Democratic viewers at the very beginning of today's program. | ||
| We asked the question to Democrats, are you satisfied with the direction of your party right now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
How would you answer that question? | |
| It frankly feels very lonely right now to feel like so many things that we take for granted as Americans are being defended solely by the Democratic Party. | ||
| And I think it's hard for a lot of us to process that. | ||
| I mean, do you have a Fifth Amendment right to due process? | ||
| Do you have a 14th Amendment right to equal protection under the law? | ||
| Do you have an 8th Amendment right to not be subject to cruel and unusual punishment? | ||
| All of these things matter to the American people, and they are defended on a purely partisan basis right now. | ||
| And I love my Democratic colleagues. | ||
| Some of them are better at articulating that issue than others, and that's fine. | ||
| We've got a fair amount of diversity. | ||
| But like I said, it's just lonely to feel like we have to defend those things on a partisan basis that used to be. | ||
| We used to think were universal. | ||
| Who are the Democratic Party's national leaders right now? | ||
| Who would you say is the leader of the party? | ||
| I think we're going to find out. | ||
| I think leaders are made in times like this. | ||
| They are not assigned. | ||
| You know, I'd remind you that back in 20, I came into Congress in 2018. | ||
| And at the time, Donald Trump was in the White House. | ||
| The House was controlled by Republicans. | ||
| The Senate was controlled by Republicans. | ||
| And I don't know how you would have answered the question at that time. | ||
| Would you have said it was Chuck Schumer? | ||
| Would you have said it was Nancy Pelosi? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| And, you know, obviously, you know, we had a lot of success in 2018. | ||
| But when you don't control the executive branch, when you're not the leader of one of the two houses, it's difficult to get the national spotlight. | ||
| I think Hakeem has done an excellent job of running the House, but that's a different job than being a national leader. | ||
| I think that'll change a little bit in the next year, year and a half, as people start throwing their hats in the ring to run for president, and we'll start to see some people have some national messaging. | ||
| But I think that's okay. | ||
| We'll find out. | ||
| We'll find out who catches fire. | ||
| Since coming to Congress, you're known as somebody who is happy to talk to constituents and hold town halls. | ||
| Are you planning more town halls for the upcoming August recess? | ||
| And if so, what is the message you're going to be bringing to your constituents? | ||
| Yeah, so I've averaged a town hall a month since I've gotten in, and we do a mix between in-person and telephone. | ||
| I always joke that an in-person town hall is a conversation, and a telephone town hall is a lecture. | ||
| On the other hand, you get a lot more people in a telephone town hall. | ||
| What I've found in the last couple that I've done, and I don't expect this will be any difference, is the questions have become sort of existential. | ||
| You know, I'm used to doing town halls where you say, here's what Congress is working on, here's what I'm working on, here's some constituent services we can offer, and some people, of course, say, I like what you're working on, some people don't like it, why did you vote on this? | ||
| That's all pretty easy. | ||
| I mean, it's important, but it's pretty easy. | ||
| What's been really tough the last couple town halls is people are asking these questions like, you know, I'm fully documented. | ||
| I'm an American citizen, but I have brown skin. | ||
| What should I do if ICE arrests me? | ||
| That's a really hard question to answer. | ||
| You know, people saying, you know, will the courts protect us and what if they don't move quickly enough? | ||
| These are sort of deep fundamental questions about democracy. | ||
| And I've found that we need to be out there. | ||
| We need to be talking to people. | ||
| We need to be sharing what we know. | ||
| We need to provide hope where we can, but also be realistic. | ||
| You know, I increasingly feel like it's sort of like a Winston Churchill moment where the purpose of those town halls is to let people know that I have nothing to promise you but blood, sweat, and tears. | ||
| I know that if we don't fight, we will lose, and I can't guarantee that if we do fight, we'll win. | ||
| But it's pretty heavy. | ||
| Does the rise in political violence, and by that I mean violence specifically against politicians for simply being a politician and being in a position of power, does it give you pause as you are somebody who is, again, known for in-person town halls? | ||
| It is certainly a concern. | ||
| We have a much larger police, both uniformed and uniformed, presence in our town halls than we used to. | ||
| You know, I had someone get on the stage with me that we had to have forcibly removed from an event. | ||
| And that happens. | ||
| I've never personally felt physically threatened. | ||
| Candidly, I'm a straight white guy. | ||
| People don't come at me the way they come at other people. | ||
| But it's a concern. | ||
| I mean, certainly some of my colleagues, and out of respect, won't name them. | ||
| They've shared stories of people calling their office in the morning and reading to them their schedule for the day, sending pictures to them with pictures of their car with the license plates. | ||
| That's really heavy stuff. | ||
| And we shouldn't require as a condition to service that you may have to martyr yourself. | ||
| But it's a reality of the moment we're in right now, that that threat is out there. | ||
| Congressman Sean Casten is our guest Democrat from Illinois. | ||
| Familiar to C-SPAN viewers, phone lines are open for you to call. | ||
| Democrats, Republicans, and Independents will put the numbers on the screen as they're calling in Congressman. | ||
| Let me come to some of those looming fiscal deadlines that we mentioned off the top. | ||
| What's your expectation after the August recess for what happens as we come to September 30th, a funding deadline, potential government shutdown? | ||
| I mean, you should have Mike Johnson on to ask these questions. | ||
| We have only gotten one appropriations bill through the House on a purely partisan basis. | ||
| There's absolutely no way we're going to get the rest of those appropriations through. | ||
| The calendar has been hung up because the House and Senate Republican leadership decided to prioritize first Trump's tax cutting bill and then this rescission package, which essentially says that money that Congress has appropriated, the White House doesn't want to spend. | ||
| And Congress, on a straight party line basis, gave the White House approval to not spend that money. | ||
| So, you know, things you depend on, like PBS and NPR, they've just decided to cut. | ||
| The fact that they prioritized that shoot-up time on the calendar, but it also created a real crisis of trust because for those of us who's, you know, we have the power of the purse. | ||
| Our job is to set funding levels. | ||
| And to have that funding taken back raised real question amongst our appropriators of why should we trust you the next time. | ||
| And so the stakes are going to be pretty high. | ||
| I would like to tell you that we are working to push that forward this week. | ||
| As it turns out, last night Johnson decided not to bring any bills to the floor this week. | ||
| They shut down the rules committee because they didn't want to talk about Jeffrey Epstein. | ||
| So I'm not even sure if we're going to have a whole week. | ||
| It looks like our August recess might start early right now because they don't want to go after a pedophile. | ||
| I mean, this is really hard to look at what they're doing and saying you're justifying the right things, especially when we are running out of time to keep the government open. | ||
| The lead opinion column in today's New York Times is Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen, former chairs of the Federal Reserve, writing about the need for an independent federal reserve. | ||
| As a member of the Financial Services Committee, what do you think would happen if Donald Trump fired Jerome Powell? | ||
| Well, ironically, interest rates would go up because if the rest of the world doesn't trust that the United States has a non-political treasury, then the question is, why should we buy U.S. Treasury bonds? | ||
| And we've already seen one downgrade. | ||
| We never had that before. | ||
| The U.S. was always the AAA rating, and we saw a downgrade recently. | ||
| We've seen a dynamic over the last several months where you saw money moving out of U.S. equity markets at the same time it was moving out of treasuries. | ||
| That's not supposed to happen. | ||
| And it's because money was looking for another haven. | ||
| So there would be a bitter irony if Donald Trump in deciding that he wants, he doesn't like the fact that Jay Powell is not lowering rates, fires him and causes markets to raise rates. | ||
| But look, there's a really good reason for an independent Fed. | ||
| You want your monetary policy to be countercyclical. | ||
| When the economy is running really hot, you want to make money a little bit more expensive to cool it down so you don't blow up a bubble. | ||
| When the economy is in a bad way, you want to make it a little bit easier to get money. | ||
| That's counter to the politics, right? | ||
| If you're the president and you're running a booming economy and you're a year away from the election, politically, you wouldn't want to slow down the economy, even though that might be the right thing to do fiscally. | ||
| So it's really important that we have an independent Fed and a lot of the strength of our economy and the reason why the rest of the world wants to invest in the United States, wants to use the dollar as their reserve currency, is because they trust that our monetary policy is set by someone who is insulated from the political process. | ||
| And this isn't something that you just break and then you fix it. | ||
| If you break that, it will take a long, long time to repair that damage. | ||
| And on the back end of that, we may not be the world's reserve currency anymore. | ||
| So the president's playing with something very dangerous right now. | ||
| Plenty of callers for you, Congressman. | ||
| Let me start in Hudson, New Hampshire. | ||
| This is Jimmy Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Hi, Jimmy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Hi, Rep Kasten. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| First of all, quickly, thank you, Washington Journal. | ||
| You guys are a blessing. | ||
| And thanks, John. | ||
| Rep Caston, I have a first of all, keep the faith, sir. | ||
| We are here. | ||
| Second, I don't understand why, and this is not personal, but Taco Trump versus Wall Street. | ||
| When he went to the firing of Fed Chairman Jay Powell, Wall Street went down. | ||
| When he rescinded it, Wall Street went up. | ||
| When Trump said about the tariffs, Wall Street went down. | ||
| Then when he tacoed out, Wall Street went up. | ||
| Also, the lowering cost of living, he said, I'm going to lower it. | ||
| He did not. | ||
| Wall Street went up when he first said it. | ||
| Then when he did not, Wall Street went down. | ||
| Now, Jimmy, bring me to the question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, the question is, I'm sorry. | |
| The question is, sir, what would you do for the break that's happening here in the summer? | ||
| I think it's called the rescinding for the Epstein issue. | ||
| And I'm not an anti-Trumper per se, but I think Congress is feeling its responsibilities. | ||
| So thank you, and I'll take my answer off the air. | ||
| So I think it is safe to say that the Republican leadership does not want to talk about the Epstein issue, and that's why they're probably going to send us home early this week. | ||
| That's why they've not allowed the votes to come to the floor. | ||
| There are the votes on the floor to compel the release of the Epstein files. | ||
| Thomas Massey and Roe Khanna have this petition that's out there. | ||
| It's got enough signatures. | ||
| We could pass that on the floor. | ||
| Are you on that petition? | ||
| Yes, yeah. | ||
| And if there's nothing there, then nobody has anything to worry about. | ||
| The fact that they are working so hard to block its release suggests that they have some concerns. | ||
| And look, we all know the history. | ||
| We all know Donald Trump spent a lot of time with Jeffrey Epstein. | ||
| This is not about gotcha journalism, though. | ||
| This is about do you trust the President of the United States to give you their word? | ||
| And I think a lot of the concern that a lot of people have with Trump is, you know, as the caller said, when he says he's going to do something, he doesn't do it. | ||
| When he says, I didn't know that person, it turns out he knew that person. | ||
| When he says that woman is not my type, and then, you know, is shown a picture of her and identifies it as his former wife. | ||
| There's a question of honesty here. | ||
| And if you don't believe that the President of the United States is being honest to you most of the time, a whole bunch of other problems come up. | ||
| And so Congress, I believe, is a co-equal branch. | ||
| That's a partisan idea. | ||
| Congress, I believe, when the president is not following the laws of the United States, is not obeying the will of Congress, Congress has an affirmative obligation to do some oversight. | ||
| And in this case, that oversight is, let's release the files, let's see what's in there, and let the chips fall where they may. | ||
| But between Donald Trump and Pam Bondi, there seems to be a real resistance to letting sunlight be that disinfectant. | ||
| Let me head to the Palmetto State. | ||
| This is Elliot in St. Helena Island. | ||
| Republican, good morning. | ||
| Hello, Elliot. | ||
| How are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fine, fine. | |
| Rep, I have a question for you. | ||
| The Democrats have a violent militia that comes against anyone who goes against the Democratic Party. | ||
| Here are the names. | ||
| Antifa, Indivisible, and BLM. | ||
| When the radicals send their black shirts and brown shirts against Republicans, you don't say anything. | ||
| The Democrats don't say anything. | ||
| They sit down and they let their violent militia beat the crap out of the Republicans. | ||
| Huh? | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| Are you going to say, hey, I'm a white guy, I'm heterosexual, and I like the brown and black shirts? | ||
| Congressman Casten. | ||
| So look, number one, I don't think you'll, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find any Democrat who didn't condemn violence when it comes forward. | ||
| I think it's a little bit laughable to say that Indivisible is a violent group. | ||
| I just did a town hall with them last night. | ||
| They are awfully nice folks. | ||
| They go out and they hold signs at rallies. | ||
| To be opposed to fascism, anti-fascism, count myself among their numbers, right? | ||
| But it is the rare exception that's out there. | ||
| I think there is a larger, there's a larger issue here. | ||
| I mean, look, the folks who attacked the Capitol on January 6th were right-wing agitators. | ||
| That's pretty clear. | ||
| There has been no shortage of evidence from the FBI that the single largest terrorist threat in the United States is coming from right-wing groups. | ||
| The biggest terrorist group that's ever existed in the United States is the Ku Klux Klan. | ||
| The domestic terrorism is a much bigger threat to the United States than foreign-born terrorism. | ||
| And yet the FBI has been very reluctant. | ||
| They don't even really code domestic terrorism when it happens because that becomes political. | ||
| And yet, who are the groups who are saying we need to arm everybody? | ||
| Who are the groups out there saying that the violent will take it by force, quoting the Bible to justify acts of violence? | ||
| These are all coming from the right. | ||
| That's not to say that there aren't violent people on the left. | ||
| But if you look at the numbers, they are historically domestic violence in this country has come much more from folks who are seeking to protect and preserve the current status quo against people who are trying to expand democracy. | ||
| And that's as true today as it was during Reconstruction. | ||
| And if we're going to call it out whenever it happens, by definition, we're going to be calling it out more on the right. | ||
| Line for Democrats, this is John in Grand Rapids, Michigan. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Hey, John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I was curious, what would prevent people in the administration from destroying or disappearing different parts of the files on Epstein? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| So, you know, obviously I haven't seen the files, so I have to speculate here a little bit. | ||
| There have been, remember, there's been a lot of cases. | ||
| Jeffrey Epstein was actually convicted in Florida. | ||
| There was testimony in that case. | ||
| You remember there was a separate case that at the time Secretary Acosta kind of made go away, but there was a case in New York. | ||
| Gilsain Maxwell has testified. | ||
| There are a whole lot of witnesses who've testified, some of whom anonymously, some of them under oath. | ||
| And so I think while in theory you could imagine a world where the evidence was destroyed, you've also got the reality that a lot of people have seen the evidence, and so it would be hard to destroy it without raising flags of people saying, no, no, I actually saw those files and there was another picture in there that you didn't release. | ||
| So yes, they could. | ||
| It would be illegal and they could be prosecuted under the law if they destroyed it. | ||
| But my guess is that it would be hard for them to destroy that without somebody knowing that it was destroyed. | ||
| Thanks for the question. | ||
| Is trust in government irrevocably broken? | ||
| I sure hope not. | ||
| But I do think it's going to take a long time to repair. | ||
| I mean, you think about, you know, think about issues like U.S.AID. | ||
| U.S.AID has saved over 90 million lives. | ||
| People who have gone to work for government, public servants who've gone to work in some pretty remote and difficult places because they believed in the idea of America and that America should be the leading moral agent in the world. | ||
| With that agency now shut down, the rest of the world might reasonably wonder, wait, I thought the United States was the country that gave me food, that gave me medicine, that helped build schools. | ||
| I guess they don't do that anymore. | ||
| Who's going to come in to fill that void? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Maybe China. | ||
| But if we were to try to recreate that at this point, why would those people come back to work for us? | ||
| Why would they trust that something they gave years of their life to and always understood that whether a Republican president was in power or a Democratic president, there was a commitment to that idea of the United States being the moral agent in the world? | ||
| And if that's not there, why should those people trust the government to come back? | ||
| And I'm not saying we can't rebuild that. | ||
| I'm just saying it takes, I mean, I remember my dad telling me when I was a little kid, you only have to tell a lie once for someone not to trust you anymore. | ||
| So if you don't tell the truth all the time, it's going to set you back a long time. | ||
| And I hope it's not gone forever, but it's definitely bruised up a bit. | ||
| You've proposed some structural changes to how we run this government of ours. | ||
| What are they, and do they fix that trust issue? | ||
| Yeah, so a lot of it is, you know, we I sort of got to thinking a couple years ago, you know, and I was in my second term, of how many times I go back into a town hall and someone would say, why isn't Congress doing something that is really popular? | ||
| You know, women's rights are extremely popular. | ||
| Campaign finance reform, getting rid of gerrymandering is extremely popular. | ||
| Sensible gun control is extremely popular. | ||
| Why isn't Congress doing that? | ||
| And as you start working through it, you realize it's because our founders designed a government where the House of Representatives is representative, and the House of Representatives has actually passed bills to do everything I just described. | ||
| But our founders didn't really trust democracy, right? | ||
| Because our founders said, number one, we don't want the majority of the people to vote. | ||
| If you're female, if you're an African American, we don't want you to vote. | ||
| That's not trusting democracy. | ||
| They said that even among the people who they did allow to vote, we don't trust you to vote for senators. | ||
| We'll have those appointed by the states. | ||
| We don't trust you to vote for president. | ||
| We'll have those appointed by the Electoral College. | ||
| We don't trust you to fill the judicial branch. | ||
| We'll have that filled by the Senate who is not elected by the people. | ||
| Now, over time, we've, you know, women can now vote, African Americans can vote. | ||
| We do now directly elect senators. | ||
| We still don't directly elect presidents. | ||
| We still have the majority of the justices on the Supreme Court appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote. | ||
| And so we have this situation where because of the government our founders designed, there's two ways to come into power in the United States. | ||
| You can either win the support of the majority of the people or you can win control of the minoritarian institutions. | ||
| And I think our democracy works better if we expand democracy. | ||
| And so we've proposed things like expanding the House, which would have the practical effect of largely eliminating the gap between the popular vote and the Electoral College. | ||
| We've proposed expanding the Senate by adding 12 new senators who would be nationally elected so that in every Senate vote, 10% of the Senate would be responsive to public will, not just the power of small states. | ||
| And we've proposed using the language of Article III of the Constitution that says that the Supreme Court's jurisdiction is limited to admiralty law, maritime law, disputes between the states, and appellate jurisdiction that Congress provides. | ||
| And since the Supreme Court is consistently frustrating the will of Congress, we've said, well, let's create a separate senior appellate court staffed with randomly selected judges for every case so you can't pack the courts. | ||
| Because I've always been really impressed with Justice Scalia's expertise in maritime law and admiralty law, and I'd be happy if he spent the rest of his life doing that. | ||
| But he seems to have a hard time doing things that are supported by the majority of the American people or consistent with the Constitution. | ||
| We can do that in Congress, and I think we should. | ||
| Do you think on the idea of expanding the House and Senate that it's a popular idea among Americans to create more professional politicians? | ||
| Well, I'd put it a different way. | ||
| The House used to expand fairly consistently with population. | ||
| Little fun fact, the original Bill of Rights had 12 amendments, not 10, and the original First Amendment said that under no circumstances will a member of the House of Representatives represent more than 50,000 people. | ||
| If that was the case, do the math, I think we'd have like 6,000 members of the House right now. | ||
| But the flip side of that is that over the course of our history, members of the House of Representatives, you know, if you represent 30, 40, 50,000 people, you can have a pretty good intimate relationship with most of the people you represent, certainly most people who vote. | ||
| At 750, you get bigger. | ||
| There's only two countries in the world where parliaments represent more people than we do, India, and I believe the other one is Afghanistan, if I'm not mistaken. | ||
| And so what we've done is really say, let's go back to what we did until 1920 and said, as the population grows, let's grow the representation consistent with the population so that we can continue to be representative rather than growing the number of people we represent. | ||
| So it's not making government proportionately bigger. | ||
| It's just saying let's keep up with a growing population. | ||
| Time for just a couple more calls with Congressman John Casten. | ||
| This is Joyce Stockbridge, Georgia, Republican. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| Hey, Joyce. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| First of all, it's President Trump, not Donald Trump. | ||
| You show no respect. | ||
| None of the Democrats show respect. | ||
| You've talked about going out and being violent against the ICE agents. | ||
| You want them unmasked, which is ridiculous. | ||
| Crime against them are up 800%. | ||
| You talk about Trump breaking, President Trump breaking the laws. | ||
| What law has he broken? | ||
| So number one, I have deep respect for the office of the presidency, and I don't think that should ever be confused with respect for the person who's in it. | ||
| And vice versa. | ||
| The office is important. | ||
| And my disrespect, such as I have for Donald Trump, is that he doesn't respect the office of the presidency. | ||
| With respect to ICE, let's just talk about immigration here for a second. | ||
| The lowest propensity group to commit crimes in the United States are immigrants. | ||
| Undocumented immigrants are even less likely to commit crimes than people who come here through legal channels. | ||
| And that's really not that surprising, right? | ||
| If you think about what would happen if you've lost your home in a hurricane, you're a victim of gang crime in El Salvador. | ||
| You're looking for a better place to come for your family, even if you can't get here legally. | ||
| The last thing you want to do is get kicked out. | ||
| And so when we are prioritizing law enforcement going after groups with the lowest propensity to commit crime, we're intentionally not going after people with higher propensities to commit crime. | ||
| And one of the most consistent sets of crimes that I think you can clearly say Donald Trump has committed is white-collar crime. | ||
| He was convicted 34 times of falsifying financial records to hide white-collar crime. | ||
| The Constitution very clearly says that you cannot use presidential office to secure payments from foreign entities or from domestic people, what are called emoluments. | ||
| And yet the president has made over $600 million creating crypto platforms where he can buy and sell. | ||
| Crypto can be the broker, can run the exchange in these vehicles that appear to be more or less designed to launder money because in fact he's gotten payments from people who are now, you know, Chinese nationals who are now asking for pardons from him. | ||
| So the crimes are out there. | ||
| My bigger issue, because he's not the first president to commit crimes, why isn't the Congress doing oversight? | ||
| Because if we allow that to continue, then we're complicit in allowing the crime to take place. | ||
| And I love this country too much to allow that to continue. | ||
| But this is not about the individual. | ||
| This is about the office. | ||
| And if we respect the office being clear-eyed, that we have to hold it to a higher standard than the people who are in it. | ||
| Congressman, I know you have work to do today. | ||
| Let me get one more call in. | ||
| Henry Butler, Georgia Line for Democrats has been waiting. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| Hello, Henry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| It's very interesting. | ||
| I appreciate that you would come on public television and let us hear your thoughts. | ||
| I don't think that any president is a panacea for the ills that we have with our democracy. | ||
| And democracy has always been a fight. | ||
| It is the foundation of our democracy. | ||
| Then we disagree, then we hammer it out, and sometimes no one's pleas is seen, and nobody gets everything they want. | ||
| This president has come in at a very difficult time. | ||
| I do agree with getting the illegals that are in our country out. | ||
| They've overstayed visas. | ||
| I don't think we needed the influx. | ||
| I think that the former president failed, particularly in that respect. | ||
| And I think everybody is out to get what power they can. | ||
| We get caught up in such a fight that we get nothing done, and that's everybody draws a line. | ||
| And I think as government moves too slow, but that seems to be the way it's going to be for some time. | ||
| I don't think we'll ever have a clear direction. | ||
| We'll choose a direction. | ||
| If it doesn't work out, we try by the panaceas to vote somebody else in. | ||
| I think we're going to have to come to terms with each side making sacrifices. | ||
| But currently, I think that we are on the right track. | ||
| It's a different track. | ||
| It's going to be costly in some respects. | ||
| And Medicare and some of these things, they need to be cut back because they haven't been properly supervised. | ||
| Henry, let me take your points and Sean Cassie and give you the final two minutes here. | ||
| Yeah, so I appreciate the way you framed that, Henry, because you're right that no president is going to fix everything. | ||
| And I think a lot of times we overstate the importance of a president and understate the importance of the organization that that president runs. | ||
| I spent 20 years in the private sector, 16 as a CEO before I came here. | ||
| And I don't think I ever had a board member or an employee who thought that the whole company succeeded based on what I did. | ||
| They understood it was, did I attract and retain good people, right? | ||
| And I think you look at presidents, look at do they attract and retain good people? | ||
| Do they do, you know, Abraham Lincoln famously brought in a team of rivals to challenge his viewpoints and to push him to think different ways. | ||
| Whether you agreed with Abraham Lincoln or not, he had people around him who challenged him. | ||
| I don't think that's true of this president. | ||
| Winston Churchill famously said that democracy is a lousy form of government, but for all the others that have been tried from time to time. | ||
| And it's lousy for all the reasons that you described, Henry. | ||
| It's slow, it's cumbersome, it bounces back and forth a little bit. | ||
| But I think what we have to do, not just as members of Congress, we as all Americans, is do we have a red line that as long as you're not tampering with democracy, you are no more entitled to your opinion than I am to mine. | ||
| But once you're tampering with democracy, you're allowing the creation of a system that would elevate your opinion over mine. | ||
| And that's where the danger comes in. | ||
| And I guess I'd just leave you, you know, with respect to immigration. | ||
| Well, number one, with respect to Medicare and Medicaid, Abraham Lincoln, Republican, famously said that the purpose of government is to do things that the people in civil society can't rightfully do for themselves. | ||
| What are we going to do to make sure that, you know, disabled kids have productive lives, if not for Medicaid? | ||
| What are we going to do to make sure that somebody who had a sudden medical emergency gets food if not for SNAP? | ||
| That's the federal government's role. | ||
| And I guess I'd just leave you with one of my favorite political philosophers who famously said that the day America stops welcoming immigrants to our shore is the day America cedes its position of leadership in the world. | ||
| I have always viewed America as a great shining city on the hill. | ||
| And if that city must have walls, make sure it has doors and windows so that all with the passion and the desire can come inside. | ||
| Both of those quotes are from Ronald Reagan. | ||
| Once upon a time, those were very bipartisan ideas. | ||
| And I think it behooves us all to get back to that time. | ||
| Thanks for having me on. | ||
| Congressman Sean Casson, Democrat from Illinois. | ||
| We'll let you get to the day and we'll see you down the road. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Coming up and for our last 25 minutes here before the House comes in, it is open forum. | ||
| Any public policy issue, any political issue that you want to talk about, phone lines are yours. | ||
| Numbers are on your screen. | ||
| Go ahead and start calling in and we will get to your calls right after the break. | ||
|
unidentified
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Only on the C-SPAN networks. | |
| Mike said before, I happened to listen to him. | ||
| He was on C-SPAN 1. | ||
| That's a big upgrade, right? | ||
| But I've read about it in the history books. | ||
| I've seen the C-SPAN footage. | ||
| If it's a really good idea, present it in public view on C-SPAN. | ||
| Every single time I tuned in on TikTok or C-SPAN or YouTube or anything, there were tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people watching. | ||
|
unidentified
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I went home after the speech and I turned on C-SPAN. | |
| I was on C-SPAN just this week. | ||
| To the American people, now is the time to tune in to C-SPAN. | ||
| They had something $2.50 a gallon. | ||
|
unidentified
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I saw television a little while ago in between my watching my great friends on C-SPAN. | |
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| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Here's where we are today on Capitol Hill. | ||
| Both the House and Senate will be in today in about 24 minutes. | ||
| The House, of course, you can watch here on C-SPAN, the Senate on C-SPAN too. | ||
| Over at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue at the White House, President Trump is set to greet the President of the Republic of the Philippines. | ||
| That's happening today. | ||
| A bilateral meeting with the President of the Philippines is expected to take place at 11:15 a.m. Eastern Time. | ||
| We're expecting to cover that here on C-SPAN as well. | ||
| The morning hour of the House should be done by then, so you'll likely be able to watch that here on C-SPAN. | ||
| You can also watch on the web, of course, at c-span.org. | ||
| But a busy morning here in Washington, and it is your time to lead this program in open form. | ||
| Any public policy, any political issue that you want to talk about, now's your time to call in. | ||
| And Nancy is up first out of Connecticut in Milford. | ||
| Line for Democrats. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| This is to the lady from Georgia who called in. | ||
| With all due respect, you obviously don't respect the office of the presidency because you voted in a convicted felon and a sexual assaulter. | ||
| Sophie is in Brooklyn, Independent. | ||
| I'm sorry, Republican. | ||
| Sophie, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I am calling because I am an immigrant myself, but I came to this country for the freedom. | |
| A lot of Americans and a lot of representing our what we want in the House and Senate, they say in democracy. | ||
| What do you mean democracy? | ||
| Democracy, it's not burning American flag, it's not going, killing people. | ||
| If you are immigrant, you should come and work because you have all the rights to that. | ||
| And you should come to the right channels. | ||
| Sophie, when did you come to this country? | ||
| Where did you come from? | ||
| And how did you come in? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I came legally in 78, 1978, with two small children. | |
| I never depended on the, I only depended on my hands. | ||
| We went to work right away. | ||
| My husband went to work. | ||
| We went to school to take English. | ||
| And what country did you come from? | ||
|
unidentified
|
From Ukraine. | |
| That's Sophie in New York. | ||
| This is Alejandro in North Carolina, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| I'm just calling today to bring about this serious issue of how, under this current administration, small farmers, particularly those from minorities, have been underrepresented. | ||
| Funding has been cut. | ||
| Programs have been taken. | ||
| They recently covered the term socially disadvantaged farmers from the USDA. | ||
| And I just want to state that this is wrong. | ||
| This is appalling. | ||
| African Americans have some of the highest food insecurity rates in America, in my state of North Carolina. | ||
| And we have to do something to fix this fractured food system because we want to cut things like Medicaid, SNAP, and food stamps. | ||
| But we have nothing in place to help people who cannot have healthy access to food, even though that is a livelihood that has just been cut by this current administration. | ||
| Alejandro. | ||
| Are you a farmer? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I come from a small family. | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
| What is your family farm? | ||
| How long has your family been farming? | ||
|
unidentified
|
My family's been farming for about 10 years. | |
| We've been farming North Carolina region specifically, Jim Fina Farms. | ||
| And just seeing that, you know, access to fresh food is hard. | ||
| And we typically, what we grow is for the immigrant community. | ||
| So we really want to help because I'm a farmer immigrant. | ||
| We're Nigerian and Panamanians. | ||
| We really want to help those of our people here. | ||
| But we're constantly seeing how minorities, people in general, are not having access to fresh health food. | ||
| And the young people are suffering the most. | ||
| Childhood obesity is through the roof. | ||
| So we need better policies. | ||
| We need more funding. | ||
| But most importantly, this is a human right that needs to be addressed. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That's Alejandro. | ||
| This is Cecilia Birmingham, Alabama. | ||
| Good morning, Line for Democrats. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Yes. | ||
| I want to remind people about what happened before Obama got in office. | ||
| You know, everyone wants to blame the Democrats and Biden for immigration policy. | ||
| Before Obama got in office, it was the Republican Congress that allowed Mexican immigrants to come in, to come in and pick the field because actually the farmers had lobbied Congress at that time. | ||
| It didn't have anyone to pick the crops. | ||
| So it was before Obama got in office, under the George, George Bush Jr., yeah, they allowed 12 million immigrants to come into this country. | ||
| Now, you know, yes, there's been some since then, there needs to be, you know, different laws to control immigrant population or whatever in a fair by due process, of course. | ||
| But everyone now, now this president now wants to stick his chest out. | ||
| Oh, I'm doing the work. | ||
| No, actually, you're cleaning up the mess that your party created a long time ago. | ||
| And you can't, it's going to take a collective effort between Congress, the Democrats, and the Republicans to fix the immigration crisis. | ||
| That's what I want to say. | ||
| That's Cecilia in Alabama to the Cornhusker State. | ||
| This is Larry in Fort Calhoun, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I can't remember your name, but you've been there at C-SPAN Washington Journal from the very beginning, right? | ||
| Not the very beginning, Larry. | ||
| That'd be a long time. | ||
| But it's been a minute. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And Brian Lamb is still in charge. | |
| Brian Lamb actually retired, and he still does his podcast that you can listen to on the C-SPAN Podcast Network, so you can still hear his voice. | ||
| But what's your question or comment, Larry? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, it's more of a comment than anything. | |
| I've been listening to it from its beginning, and I've been really kind of disappointed in it in the last few years. | ||
| I think the Washington Journal should make a little bit more standards. | ||
| Should have a meeting saying people, when they come in there and they have such vowel and hate for our president, that we got to tone it down. | ||
| Otherwise, this hate is going to get somebody killed. | ||
| And I think we need to tone the hate down. | ||
| And when your Democrat callers come in to talk about hate and misinformation about the president, you got to put a stop to it. | ||
| Otherwise, somebody is going to get hurt or even get killed. | ||
| You know, we got enough hate on CNN and MSNBC and the mainstream media and from the Democrats. | ||
| We don't need it on the Washington Journal. | ||
| It should have a little higher standards. | ||
| And that's my only criticism about you guys. | ||
| But that's what I wanted to ask you: as you just have a meeting and maybe talk about how to solve this problem because I'm at the point where I don't know if I really want to get up in the morning and turn you guys on. | ||
| It's just hate, hate, hate. | ||
| Larry, how long have you been watching the Washington Journal? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ah, thank you. | |
| 1981. | ||
| And this is the most you've ever been concerned about callers in that time? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, it's been over time. | |
| It's not just the Washington Journal, it's the media. | ||
| And, you know, this is not, I understand, I lived in Water Concrete, Huntley Brinkley, and Howard K. Smith, and all them. | ||
| Those days are gone. | ||
| I understand that. | ||
| And news, when you turn on the news now, it's propaganda. | ||
| But I would love to, I'm just, it's just so vowel and so hateful. | ||
| And nothing good happens with hate. | ||
| And maybe you might have a show asking the Democratic voters, what good is hate? | ||
| And see if they can defend it. | ||
| So that's really what I came to call about was let's try to tone it down a little bit. | ||
| It's okay to disagree with the president, but you know, have a little common decency when you criticize. | ||
| Larry, if I get a call from a caller in the next 15 minutes or so who say all the same things you're saying, but about Republicans, that they're concerned about the same thing on the Republican side, what would your response be to that person who calls in? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, easily. | |
| For every 20 Democrat, for every one Republican caller that may have something nasty to say, there's 20 Democrats in line. | ||
| Hey, look who calls the violence. | ||
| It's the Democrats. | ||
| Look at in LA with the ICE agents. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look at Palestine. | |
| They are protesting for the fact that a terrorist organization like Palestine, now 20, 30 years ago, you never would try to defend a terrorist organization or even defend MSM 13 and criminals. | ||
| You never would have seen anybody in the media trying to defend criminals and stuff like that. | ||
| So, yeah, for every 20 Democrats, there's one Republican. | ||
| And I do know, and it's for the fact that we try to keep our head clear, but every once in a while, man, after a while, you just want to let loose. | ||
| That's Larry in Nebraska this morning. | ||
| About 10 minutes before the House comes in for the day. | ||
| We'll, of course, be taking you there live for gabble-gabble coverage. | ||
| Already mentioned the meeting with the President of the Philippines that's happening at the White House today. | ||
| A few other events on the C-SPAN networks today. | ||
| The House Administration Committee is holding a hearing to review standards and practices used to maintain voter roles and voter lists. | ||
| That's happening live 10:30 a.m. Eastern. | ||
| We're going to show that on C-SPAN3, C-SPAN.org, and the free C-SPAN Now video app. | ||
| 2 p.m. this afternoon. | ||
| The state and local law enforcement officials that are coming to Capitol Hill today will testify on past security failures and successes at large-scale public events. | ||
| It's the first hearing held by the bipartisan House Task Force on enhancing security for special events in the United States. | ||
| Again, 2 p.m. Eastern is when you can watch it, where you can watch C-SPAN3, C-SPAN.org, and the free C-SPAN Now video app. | ||
| Back to your calls. | ||
| It is Open Forum, Gloversville, New York. | ||
| This is John, Democrat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Hello? | ||
| Go ahead, John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, my whole family seems to be Democrat, but I don't understand why people don't want the independents. | |
| I think the Independents should come in. | ||
| Hello? | ||
| So, John, are you saying you're an independent? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I think there should be a third party that separates in the Senate and in the Congress that would make their votes indeterminate. | |
| So they just didn't have one party fighting against the other. | ||
| It seems like they're all Democrat or they're all Republican. | ||
| I just don't understand why we don't have a third party that would make up the third party to vote, and then it wouldn't be just one side or the other fighting with each other. | ||
| John, if Elon Musk started a third party, is that something you think you could get behind? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah, definitely. | |
| It wouldn't have to be Musk. | ||
| I don't think he's that great, but the third party would be something that we need as far as I'm concerned because that's where we're at. | ||
| Like, all the Republicans want to fight with one if he don't want to be the one to be against them, or the Democrats the same. | ||
| Got your point. | ||
| That's New York. | ||
| This is Wisconsin, Corine, New Munster, Wisconsin, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I am first-generation American. | ||
| My mother was a legal immigrant. | ||
| And I believe in bringing immigrants into this country, but they need to work. | ||
| They need to learn to speak English. | ||
| My mother had to do all that. | ||
| And they need to get their citizenship. | ||
| They need a pathway to citizenship when they come here if that's what their goal is. | ||
| If they come here on a working visa, then they should regard what the visa has legally allowed them to be here. | ||
| And they should abide by that. | ||
| So I do believe in legal immigration. | ||
| The Democrat you had from Illinois at the end before he left implied that he believed in all these things, but he didn't imply that they would be legal. | ||
| And of course, everybody wants to come to this country. | ||
| It's a great country. | ||
| And I agree that he was a little disrespectful. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And this is a problem that we have right now in this country: Both sides, Republicans and Democrat, no longer work together. | |
| They no longer see what the good is in what is presented by each party. | ||
| They are just so negative against whatever the other party wants. | ||
| This is not good for America. | ||
| And we are a republic. | ||
| And we need to consider a lot of things. | ||
| I am an independent because I don't agree with Republicans. | ||
| And sometimes I don't agree with Democrats. | ||
| I agree with some things Republicans have and some things the Democrat brings forward. | ||
| And we do need to take care of poor people. | ||
| But Medicaid has gotten out of hand. | ||
| And a lot of illegal immigrants are here, and they're taking advantage of Medicaid. | ||
| And we do have people that need Medicaid. | ||
| It's just not being watched over well. | ||
| That's Corrine in the Badger States in the Buckeye State. | ||
| This is Robert, Cincinnati, Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| What's going on? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Now I wanted to say something. | ||
| You know, I heard y'all say about this third party thing. | ||
| We already got a third party. | ||
| It's called the Independent Party. | ||
| And they always go for the Democrats, every one of them. | ||
| They don't go into a different party because of policies or blah, blah, blah. | ||
| They go to the different party because the Democrats won't elect them dominantly, predominantly. | ||
| So they have to go to independent so that they can try to squeeze some of them Republican votes into there. | ||
| Take Bernie Sanders for effect. | ||
| He's been an independent, but he's been a Democrat for 30 years. | ||
| And I wanted to say, yeah. | ||
| Do you think there is room right now in our political system for a third party? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| It won't never. | ||
| It's the same thing. | ||
| It won't never go nowhere. | ||
| Like Elon is mad over his little EV mandate thing, which I understand. | ||
| It kind of messes his business up because he was thinking that everybody was going to have to buy an EV car, an electric car. | ||
| That's all that's about. | ||
| This third party thing, it'll never work. | ||
| The only way you could even attempt to try to get a third party into there is it would just be too monotonous. | ||
| It would just be the same thing over and over again. | ||
| An independent or however you, if you want to call them American free rally, however you want to call that political party, whatever name you want to use, it'll always just be the same. | ||
| That's Robert in Ohio. | ||
| Just a minute or two before the House is set to come in, we'll go to the Pine Tree State. | ||
| Jane, Democrat, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, I have three comments. | |
| One is about NPR and PBS, which is tearing my heart out because I've been watching it since I was a little girl and I'm 78. | ||
| And that it's just so sad that they're getting rid of it. | ||
| And one of the main reasons why I watch those, why I watch PBS today is because they condense the commercials in between the entire show. | ||
| The networks, the commercials are killing. | ||
| Nobody likes them. | ||
| Nobody, I mean, they're just terrible and they're so frequent that I don't know how anybody can stand it. | ||
| I always mute them if I happen to be on one of those networks. | ||
| The other thing is, people criticize Trump with good reason. | ||
| Good reason. | ||
| 34 felony counts and him cutting agencies for the people is just outrageous. | ||
| And so I forgot the third thing. | ||
| So bye-bye. | ||
| That's Jane in Maine. | ||
| This is Bonnie in Florida. | ||
| Republican, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Are you there? | ||
| Yes, ma'am. | ||
| I called because I'm an old C-SBAN watcher, too. | ||
| When the lady called, I think, from Nebraska, yes, say hi to Brian Lamb. | ||
| I didn't know he was on a podcast. | ||
| So it's exciting. | ||
| But I just wanted to say, most people don't know that we as Americans allow a million people a year legally. | ||
| Listen, listen, we're a gracious country. | ||
| We allow people to come in here legally. | ||
| Like two women called today from different parts of the country who came here who came here legally. | ||
| That's what we're about. | ||
| Now my kids are out working to pay for these illegals. | ||
| Bonnie, do you think health care? | ||
| Do you think we need less legal immigration? | ||
| Is a million a year too much? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know what the number is. | |
| I do know that people keep talking about changing these laws so it would make it easier for people to come, but that's Congress never takes it up. | ||
| But people don't realize that we are a gracious country and we do allow a million people a year. | ||
| It's Bonnie in Florida to Tim in Haverhill, Massachusetts. | ||
| Independent, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, John. | |
| Thank you for getting me on here in the last minute. | ||
| I want to say that I am an independent. | ||
| I do believe some of the things that President Trump has originally wanted to do were good. | ||
| Not everything is good. | ||
| One of the problems that we cannot have a third party in this country is because the Constitution has not been enacted correctly as it was initially proposed. | ||
| Initially, it was proposed that the House of Representatives would increase proportionately with the people in the United States, and that is not going to happen. | ||
| Tim, did you watch that Sean Casten interview that we just had? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I did, and I wasn't able to call in at the time. | |
| What do you think of his plan? | ||
| He would add 230 more members to the House, another 12 members to the Senate, and for the House to decrease the amount of people each member represents. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, it would need to be a gradual increase to the proportion that it should be. | |
| Should it be the proportion that James Madison wanted, it would now consist of over 3,000 members. | ||
| And my belief is that at such a rate, we would enable third parties because there would be so many representatives that would be overwhelming with how many parties you could have. |