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| Coming up on Washington Journal this morning, we'll take your calls and comments live. | ||
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| Join the conversation. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| It's Monday, July 28th, 2025. | ||
| A three-hour Washington Journal is ahead. | ||
| We'll talk about President Trump's overseas visit to Scotland and Joe Biden's post-presidential legacy. | ||
| But we begin with Washington Times columnist Don Fedder, who proposes in his column today to create a Billionaires Appreciation Day. | ||
| We'll take you through Mr. Fedder's arguments for why. | ||
| And as we do, we're asking for your view on today's billionaires. | ||
| Do you think being a billionaire is a bad thing? | ||
| Phone lines open for you to call, split as usual by political party. | ||
| Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| 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 Monday morning to you. | ||
| Here's where we are in Washington today at 3 p.m. Eastern. | ||
| The Senate is expected to come in overseas. | ||
| President Trump is expected to hold a press conference with UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer in about a half an hour. | ||
| We'll show you some of that when that does get underway. | ||
| But until then, we're asking this question this morning. | ||
| Is being a billionaire a bad thing? | ||
| Again, this question stemming from a column by Don Federer in today's Washington Times. | ||
| And this is what he writes in that column. | ||
| Billionaires don't hoard wealth. | ||
| They invest it. | ||
| They create business, shareholder profits, and jobs. | ||
| He goes on to say, today, America's most famous billionaires, household names like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, made their fortunes meeting consumer demand through companies such as Tesla and Meta and Microsoft and Amazon. | ||
| He says there are no billionaires in North Korea or Venezuela or Cuba. | ||
| There was none in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, China before the economic reform, East Germany or communist Poland. | ||
| Everything was owned by the state and all economic activity was directed by bureaucrats. | ||
| These societies were distinguished by misery, he says. | ||
| People looked drab. | ||
| They spent hours in breadlines. | ||
| They had gray little jobs. | ||
| Russian workers used to say, we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. | ||
| Don Federer, the headline of his column today in the Washington Times, We Need a Billionaires Appreciation Day. | ||
| Asking you your thoughts on today's billionaires, go ahead and to start calling in this conversation about American billionaires was back in the news at the end of last month. | ||
| It was then that Zorhan Mamdami, the presumptive Democratic nominee to be the next mayor of New York, was on Meet the Press and he was asked about whether we should even have billionaires today. | ||
|
unidentified
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This was his response: You are a self-described Democratic socialist. | |
| Do you think that billionaires have a right to exist? | ||
| I don't think that we should have billionaires because, frankly, it is so much money in a moment of such inequality. | ||
| And ultimately, what we need more of is equality across our city and across our state and across our country. | ||
| And I look forward to work with everyone, including billionaires, to make a city that is fairer for all of them. | ||
| That launched a conversation about billionaires in America. | ||
| It was a conversation that continued two days later on Fox business. | ||
| It was Christidi's CEO, John Castamatidis, who was on Fox Business, and he was asked to respond to those comments by Zorhan Mamdami. | ||
|
unidentified
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This is what he had to say: You're a billionaire. | |
| My response is that it takes people that are wealthy in New York to maintain the museums, maintain the hospitals. | ||
| And you know how much money these people we put up to contribute towards museums and hospitals and everything? | ||
| And we create the jobs. | ||
| We have the vision to create the jobs for everybody else. | ||
| John Castamatidis, a billionaire himself, on Fox Business back at the beginning of this month. | ||
| And it was Zorhan Mamdami's comments on Meet the Press that Don Federer mentions at the start of his column today: We need a billionaire's appreciation day. | ||
| This is how Don Federer ends his column saying, I'll never be rich. | ||
| I'm not a risk taker. | ||
| I don't have the vision, the drive, or the organizational skills needed to run a successful business. | ||
| But I live a hell of a lot better because there are people who can do what I can't. | ||
| If someone wants to start a billionaire's appreciation day, I'm in. | ||
| That's Don Federer in today's Washington Times. | ||
| That's the basis of our question this morning. | ||
| Phone line split as usual. | ||
| Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| We'll take you through more of Don Federer's column, but we want to hear from you. | ||
| And Jason's up first in Alabama. | ||
| Independent line, Jason. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Is being a billionaire a bad thing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| In the abstract, being a billionaire is not a bad thing, but when you look around, the way billionaires are kind of in America are conducting themselves, they're not using that wealth to advance society in any beneficial way. | ||
| I mean, Elon Musk would probably be the best example in the most recent months. | ||
| He's using it to undermine our political apparatus and to undermine Congress. | ||
| They're using it to go on vanity trips to space. | ||
| They're not using it for the betterment of people, and they're stepping on so many people to get it that it's not a net good for people to be a billionaire. | ||
| Plus, I mean, Elon, they say he's worth $300 to $400 billion. | ||
| So what's like at a point, like it doesn't, like, that money doesn't even exist. | ||
| Like, it doesn't even, it doesn't matter, especially if he's not using it for the benefit of all of us. | ||
| It's just a number somewhere. | ||
| Jason, Forbes has his net worth at, if it makes a difference to you, $244 billion, number one on the list of the wealthiest people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, but then here's the other part of it, too, right? | |
| He has all that money. | ||
| He has all those children spread out. | ||
| Like, it doesn't, that money doesn't inherently make him better. | ||
| It doesn't mean like he should have an appreciation. | ||
| Appreciation for what? | ||
| Like, it's not because he's a good dad or like a good person. | ||
| I mean, he's an addict that needs help, that is running around like with uncontrolled impulses. | ||
| And so it's not, and maybe he's the worst example, but it's not, he's not worth like looking up to in any great way, at least in my opinion. | ||
| That's Jason in Alabama. | ||
| This is Marco on Facebook writing into this question. | ||
| Being a billionaire is a bad thing. | ||
| Is being a billionaire a bad thing is the incorrect question, but rather do they conspire or use their resources incorrectly for the greater good of mankind. | ||
| Speaking of Elon Musk, back in January when Elon Musk was still with the Doge Commission and advising Donald Trump, the Associated Press asked the question about people asking whether Americans, | ||
| whether an American president should rely on billionaires for advice in government policy among all U.S. adults, some 60% said relying on billionaires for advice about government policy is bad, very or somewhat bad. | ||
| Just 12% saying it's very or somewhat good for a president to be relying on billionaires for advice about government policy. | ||
| Peter's next out of Lakeland, Florida, Independent. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| Great topic. | ||
| No, billionaires shouldn't exist. | ||
| What they are is pharaohs and gods. | ||
| They control our governments. | ||
| They control our regulatory institutions. | ||
| Look at Bill Ackerman. | ||
| He can single-handedly go out and destroy universities because they do something one billionaire doesn't like. | ||
| Take a look at Bill Gates. | ||
| All these vaccines and stuff. | ||
| He's making money on the back end, selling policy on the front end. | ||
| And nobody ever investigates him because they're billionaires. | ||
| They could buy the New York Times in a blink of an eye. | ||
| They could buy CNN if they wanted to. | ||
| All these news outlets know it, too. | ||
| So, Peter, being a billionaire is inherently a bad thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, hell yes. | |
| Because look at this. | ||
| Kill him a guy who became a billionaire without a crime. | ||
| Look at Bill Ackerman. | ||
| He shorted the stock market during COVID. | ||
| That's how he made his bank. | ||
| And now he's going to run his policy. | ||
| And he's going to control the United States. | ||
| A billionaire has got more power than 100 million people. | ||
| Politicians don't listen to the people. | ||
| They listen to the billionaires. | ||
| That's Peter in Florida. | ||
| This is Alexandria, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Republican. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, my name is Alexandria. | |
| I am thinking that billionaires are helpful. | ||
| If I was a billionaire, I would pay off China's debt. | ||
| I would make health care free and college free, and I would keep a strict COVID-19 order forever simply because during COVID-19, I understand metaphysics a little bit. | ||
| I'm in Atrium Health with Flores Baptist Hospital as we speak because I have schizophrenia. | ||
| And what it is is that the metaphysical room is messing with me and touching me. | ||
| But if I follow COVID-19. | ||
| That's Alexandria in North Carolina. | ||
| Mark in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Independent. | ||
| Your thoughts? | ||
| Is being a billionaire a bad thing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, John. | |
| Good to speak with you again. | ||
| Yeah, this is the way I see it. | ||
| We live in the United States of mafia. | ||
| And simply put, a billionaire is the head of the mafia. | ||
| We live in a pyramid scheme. | ||
| And yeah, I do think it's not effective. | ||
| I mean, there's something cool about a drive from a sector or something to change things. | ||
| And when you just have so few rays of light coming off the sun instead of the whole sun shining, it doesn't do much. | ||
| It doesn't encapsulate our potential. | ||
| Mark, this is Don Fedder's. | ||
| This is Don Fedder's argument today in the Washington Times. | ||
| Billionaires didn't hoard money. | ||
| They invested money to create things like Tesla and Meta and Microsoft and Amazon. | ||
| They innovated and they answered consumer demand. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, that seems like an oxymoron. | |
| I mean, if they're a billionaire, they're hoarding money in their own bank account, right? | ||
| So like, it's like they want to be the one ray of light, the one thinker. | ||
| They want to encapsulate the intellectual property of others to steal intellectual property from other wisdoms in society. | ||
| And it's just like, it's like Elon Musk. | ||
| Okay, he calls his car Tesla, you know, like, and Tesla created the electrical car and he stole from it. | ||
| And now everybody thinks he's innovative. | ||
| Well, he's part of the elite. | ||
| I mean, if you look at Elon Musk's family history, he comes from wealth. | ||
| And it's not that he's this grandioso guy. | ||
| He's stealing other people's innovation. | ||
| I mean, like, if you look at the SpaceX, he's still blowing a hard dick off the earth. | ||
| All right, that's Mark. | ||
| This is Dason in Baltimore, Maryland, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| I just want to say that, you know, I don't like the time, is billionaire bad thing. | ||
| I like to see it. | ||
| If you really, you know, really compassionate, you really care about your fellow human beings, you should never think that it's good enough for one man to have more than a small country. | ||
| It's starving people in this world. | ||
| I mean, it's people that don't have enough to even live, clean water, just the basics. | ||
| So, I mean, you got more money than you're going to ever be able to, you know, spend in your lifetime. | ||
| And it's people in need. | ||
| Now, listen, if you got billionaires out here, then you got people and everybody else good. | ||
| And that's one thing. | ||
| But if everybody else is doing bad and you got people that got more than enough, that's never good. | ||
| And that's never good in my eyes. | ||
| That's Dason in Baltimore, Maryland. | ||
| This is more from Don Fedder and his column today in the Washington Times. | ||
| If we don't need billionaires, then why do we need millionaires in a moment of such inequality? | ||
| Why should anyone earn more than, say, two or three times the average national income? | ||
| He goes back to the 19th century. | ||
| American industry was built in the 19th century by men who came from humble beginnings. | ||
| Andrew Carnegie came here, a penniless immigrant from Scotland. | ||
| He created the modern American steel industry. | ||
| He became one of the wealthiest men in the country and spent the last 18 years of his life giving away almost 90% of his fortune building libraries and endowing cultural, scientific, and educational institutions. | ||
| John D. Rockefeller started as a bookkeeper. | ||
| At one time, he controlled 90% of the nation's oil production. | ||
| He spent his retirement years pioneering targeted philanthropy through the Rockefeller Foundation. | ||
| Don Fedder writing that we need a billionaire's appreciation day. | ||
| Don Fedder, a columnist in the Washington Times, if you want to check out his work, graduate of Boston University, Liberal Arts and BU Law School. | ||
| He was admitted as a lawyer in Massachusetts for 19 years. | ||
| He was an editorialist and staff columnist at the Boston Herald. | ||
| There's a picture of Don Fedder in the Washington Times website. | ||
| If you want to check out his work, it's his column today. | ||
| That's the basis for our question. | ||
| It's coming up on 7.15 on the East Coast, getting word that that press conference with Kier Starmer in Scotland that we're expecting this morning. | ||
| It's running 20, 30 minutes late or so. | ||
| So if and when that does happen, we'll dip into it a little bit and show you that as the president continues his travels overseas. | ||
| He's been in Scotland since Friday. | ||
| And we will check in on that press conference a little bit later. | ||
| This question, though, in this first hour today, simply asking, is being a billionaire a bad thing? | ||
| Plenty of comments from social media as we've been going through your calls. | ||
| Jeremy's in New Jersey saying, I wouldn't mind becoming a billionaire myself, but it's a fantasy. | ||
| Only so much room for them. | ||
| I remain dubious of people who are too powerful. | ||
| This is Lucy saying, if one gives back to the community more than one takes, it doesn't matter one's socioeconomic status. | ||
| They are simply a decent human being. | ||
| Enriching oneself via exploitation of laborers and the natural environment is inhumane. | ||
| Cheryl saying, if all you care about is making money, then yes, billionaires need the workers to become billionaires. | ||
| Dwight, Fairfield, California Independent, is being a billionaire a bad thing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning, John. | |
| Good morning, Washington Journal. | ||
| John, being a billionaire, in my opinion, is absolutely not a bad thing. | ||
| This is the United States of America. | ||
| Our economic system is capitalism with entrepreneurial ship. | ||
| I'm a 72-year-old American of African descent, came from hardly anything. | ||
| And I learned from billionaires how to invest my money and the companies I invested my money into. | ||
| So as billionaires created jobs, opened up the market, stocks, that's how I, along with my job, made my money. | ||
| And we demonize people that are capitalists, that are billionaires. | ||
| But like one of the callers said earlier, John, everybody can grab hold to some of the things that billionaires are making and creating. | ||
| And no, I'm not a billionaire, but I've done very, very well in my life. | ||
| And I've also done very well for my children and grandchildren. | ||
| Just grab and hold to what billionaires are doing in the market with Bezos and Amazon, with Walmart, with Nvidia. | ||
| People have to take care of themselves. | ||
| And like I said before, our system of economic development, it allows us that. | ||
| And so at 72-year-old, this guy's doing pretty good because of billionaires. | ||
| That's Dwight in California. | ||
| Bradley's in the Peach State Democrat. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| Is being a billionaire a bad thing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, inherently no, but the question really should be, do we need trillionaires? | |
| Because trillionaires, that's what's coming down the road. | ||
| If you look at it before COVID, you know, Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, they were all like 20, 30 billion or whatever. | ||
| Now I think they're like 200 plus billion. | ||
| So it's not going to be too long until there's a trillionaire. | ||
| I've got Elon Musk at 244 billion, Jeff Bezos at 197 billion, Mark Zuckerberg at 181 billion, Warren Buffett in fifth place at $150 billion, and so on down the line. | ||
| That's the Forbes 400 list of richest people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I came like Walmart, see, like the people like these billionaires, they're making their money by really not paying a living wage. | |
| And like Walmart's the largest employer in the country. | ||
| Their employees are the largest recipients of like food stamps and stuff because these companies do not pay living wages. | ||
| And also, they don't pay anything taxes either. | ||
| And they take advantage of our stability of our country, our roads, or our research and development, all this stuff that they take advantage of and allow them to make money, which is great, but they're not contributing back to our society. | ||
| Well, you don't have like accountability. | ||
| I don't mean to bring up the FC and stuff, but you just have these billionaire people just able to get away with anything. | ||
| There's no repercussions for actions. | ||
| And I just, I feel like the country is like, eventually, man, there's only so much people will put up with at some point. | ||
| I mean, because the wealth of equality is just out of control. | ||
| I'll be living under a bridge in a couple of years. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It's Bradley in Georgia. | ||
| You bring up billionaires and paying taxes. | ||
| The Wall Street Journal today takes a look at the winners and losers in Donald Trump's tax and spending law and specifically what it means for billionaires. | ||
| Basically, they write the overall tax pie is getting smaller. | ||
| High-income people who receive tax cuts will pay a bigger piece of the smaller pie and still come out ahead. | ||
| Democrats will often describe a tax cut as a distribution program and judge its effects by looking at how much of the overall money goes to each income group. | ||
| Because rich people pay the most taxes, their tax cuts are also in dollars, typically the largest from an across-the-board tax cut. | ||
| This math drives Democrats' tax cuts for billionaires' arguments, they write. | ||
| Republicans choose to keep all, chose to keep all of the 2017 tax cuts because they viewed the 2017 law as an economic success and also wanted to keep lower rates for businesses that pay taxes through the individual tax returns. | ||
| A look at how Trump's tax and spending law is impacting different economic groups in America. | ||
| This is Neil in Columbus, Ohio, Republican. | ||
| Neil, questions about billionaires. | ||
| Is being a billionaire a bad thing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, being a billionaire is not a bad thing. | |
| When did it become a bad thing? | ||
| And why do we always have to exploit people to become a billionaire? | ||
| What happened to hard work in this country, living the American dream, and being successful? | ||
| Does it make sense to me? | ||
| And do people really think that Walmart does not pay taxes in this country? | ||
| It's ludicrous to me to think that people, the only way you can get rich in this country is to exploit other people. | ||
| I've never understood that. | ||
| And why is all of a sudden now being a billionaire a bad thing? | ||
| That Trump is in office. | ||
| Bezos and whoever else back to Democrats, it was fine to be a billionaire then, and now it's not fine to be in there to be a billionaire. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| That's my question. | ||
| Matt is in Germantown, Maryland. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, thank you for taking my call this morning. | |
| Being a billionaire, it's not so much of being the billionaire, it's how you get your money. | ||
| A lot of it is, you know, the people at the bottom are being robbed, literally. | ||
| And I like to use Uber as an example. | ||
| I mean, look at these guys that signed at Uber. | ||
| They're all probably hundreds of millions. | ||
| They bought millionaires. | ||
| Probably supposed to billionaire, maybe. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But Uber is one of the companies that grew so fast, you know, turned into a multi-billion dollar company. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because they recruited the, they exploited the drivers. | ||
| They literally built their companies on the backs of the driver. | ||
| Hey, bring your car, sign up, skip the taxi. | ||
| Don't become a taxi driver. | ||
| Come and sign up. | ||
| You go out there and I'll send you trips. | ||
| Well, you go ahead and you do the trip and they pay you pennies on a dollar. | ||
| Matt, have you ever been an Uber driver? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I have been. | |
| You know, and that's stealing. | ||
| And our politicians who have the power of licensing to control these companies so that the drivers get their fair share of the wealth do nothing about it. | ||
| Nothing at all. | ||
| So literally, drivers are being robbed, and the government could use the power of licensing, safety on the road, and to control these companies, but they don't do it. | ||
| Instead, the companies write their own rules as they see fit and they exploit people. | ||
| And this stuff is happening in so many different industries. | ||
| You know, why do I have to punch my phone number in to get my discount when I go to the store? | ||
| That's Matt in Germantown, Maryland. | ||
| A few more of your comments via social media. | ||
| This is Sarah saying that this question we're asking is too reductive. | ||
| It's not inherently bad, but it is unethical. | ||
| Sarah writes. | ||
| The wealth obtained to reach billionaire status depends on an imbalance of power and inequality. | ||
| The system that allows billionaires to exist is bad, is what Sarah writes. | ||
| And this is Dorothy saying, absolutely not. | ||
| What on earth is wrong with people? | ||
| We should applaud accomplishments. | ||
| This is Robert, Staten Island, New York, Independent. | ||
| Is being a billionaire a bad thing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a way that billionaires pick people, like Bezos. | |
| If I was a billionaire and I own a company. | ||
| And you owned a company, Robert. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead with your point. | |
| If I'm making $10 billion a year, right, and pay my employee peanuts, instead of making that, I would try to tell you to make $6 billion a year and pay my employees a fair share, pay my fair share of taxes. | ||
| This way, everybody lives. | ||
| They can have 10 lifetimes of money. | ||
| And by just being greedy, to me, that's a bad billionaire. | ||
| Because it wasn't for the workers, you wouldn't have nothing. | ||
| So, Robert. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're the one that takes care of the company. | |
| So, Robert, you say being a billionaire is not a bad thing, but there are good billionaires and bad billionaires, or at least you can be a good billionaire or a bad billionaire. | ||
| And that's what you're saying? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, because look at Europe. | |
| Look at Europe. | ||
| They have free health care. | ||
| Look at Canada. | ||
| Free health care, because they billionaires pay their pay taxes. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| This country is a billionaire. | ||
| All they do is they want to just not pay no tax at all. | ||
| So why do we have more bad billionaires then, Robert, if that's your argument? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because of the Senate. | |
| Because the way our senators are set up. | ||
| The lobbyist goes in there and they buy up all the senators, give them money. | ||
| And then this way they don't vote for certain things to help us. | ||
| That's Robert in New York. | ||
| Speaking of the Senate, the Senate's back today. | ||
| The House already on its August recess. | ||
| The Senate still has one more week of work or maybe more if President Trump has something to say about it. | ||
| The Senate expected to be in at 3 p.m. Eastern today. | ||
| You can watch gavel-to-gabble coverage on C-SPAN 2. | ||
| This is Blake in Leland, Mississippi, Independent. | ||
| Blake, is being a billionaire a bad thing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course it's a bad thing because we aren't, and this is not Marvel Comics and everything where you got Bruce Wayne being Batman, using his money for good in charity and fighting crime. | |
| No, it's the total opposite. | ||
| You got billionaires just trying to be Lex Luga. | ||
| And that's the result. | ||
| And to make it worse, you need to pay the people that built that capital behind you. | ||
| You need to pay the people that built the White House. | ||
| You need to make it possible for them to have a world where anybody could create their own ability, their own life. | ||
| The African Americans, you know what I'm saying? | ||
| Sell all federal lands. | ||
| Sell all federal lands because you gave two billion acres to Europeans and you haven't given African Americans an itch. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| You're making us pay for our own education. | ||
| You denied us education for 400 years. | ||
| We've only been free for less than for maybe 100 years since, what, 65 when we got the civil rights bill? | ||
| And so you've got this debt that when I went to the military in 1998, you bring up a different topic. | ||
| We're going to stay on this one for now, but we can come back to that topic as well at some point down the road. | ||
| But a lot of callers on this topic on billionaires in America. | ||
| Is being a billionaire a bad thing? | ||
| Pamela in the Bronx, line for Democrats. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| I don't believe the question should be a good or a bad thing. | ||
| I don't see a problem with someone being a billionaire. | ||
| Is what you do when you are a billionaire, especially in the last 20 years or so. | ||
| So billionaires are not, many of them are not socially responsible. | ||
| Someone came on early and says, oh, they donate to the libraries and these kinds of things. | ||
| That's for tax deduction, not because they're altruistic in thinking about in the best interest of the majority of the people. | ||
| And the exploitation of our system. | ||
| I mean, billionaires are now pretty much running the government. | ||
| If we believe in a democratic system, then one or two people or 10 people who have a billion dollars should not have the say that they do in our system. | ||
| In some sense, I blame the court for Citizen United because if they were not able to flood the money into our system, then I would say be your billionaire, but have one vote. | ||
| Don't have the say that you are, that you're able, like Elon Musk, to destroy. | ||
| So, Pamela, you're saying we've created a system in which being a billionaire is corruptive. | ||
| The system corrupts billionaires, that they could be altruistic, but they're not because of the system we created. | ||
| Is that what you're saying? | ||
|
unidentified
|
To some extent, yes, because pre-Citizen United, I believe that's the name of the case, right? | |
| You didn't have corporations or individuals that can flood our democratic processes. | ||
| So, therefore, my one vote really doesn't count, right? | ||
| If I have a billion dollars, and like the person was saying, you can influence, you know, even our Democratic or a Republican. | ||
| Look at our systems now. | ||
| You know, it's not party. | ||
| It shouldn't be party. | ||
| It should be what's in the best interest of the country. | ||
| That trumps Democrats, independents, or Republican. | ||
| When an issue comes up, yes, you can help everybody, but the job of the people in the Congress, the job of the courts, the job of the president, is to say what is in the best interest of moving this republic forward. | ||
| And what is happening? | ||
| The system, the three branches of government, the checks and balances that are supposed to be there, are not there because the billionaires are using their wealth and their power and destroying the system. | ||
| And eventually, you will have the very, very super rich, the 1%, and everybody's on the bottom is suffering in some ways, middle-class, poor. | ||
| So, that's the corruption of the billionaires, not that it's bad or good, it's how it's being used. | ||
| That's Pamela in the Bronx. | ||
| This is a recent Rolling Stone piece from last month, looking at billionaires, looking at the kind of person who can become a billionaire. | ||
| And this is the commentary piece. | ||
| What you suspected is true. | ||
| Billionaires are not like us. | ||
| They have fantasies of going to Mars, transhumanism, and superhuman AI. | ||
| How the heck does somebody get this way? | ||
| And what does it mean for the rest of us? | ||
| Alex Morris and Melinda Black, Melinda Beck, explore those questions in their Rolling Stone piece last month. | ||
| We're exploring this question of being a billionaire. | ||
| Is it inherently a bad thing? | ||
| Edwin in New Bern, North Carolina, independent, what do you think? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think that being a billionaire isn't the problem, but if the marginal tax rate was 36 to 39.6% when Bill Clinton was president and he had the Deficit Reduction Act, we wouldn't have to worry about taking $861 billion from Medicare to cover a tax cut. | |
| Secondly, if you make $250,000 or less, you need to pay into the Social Security Trust Fund so it could be solvent for 75 years. | ||
| And finally, every Walmart in America that has people are getting public assistance, there needs to be a tally of all those employees and let that money be paid back to the USDA. | ||
| Because you got people right now working at Walmart that are getting public assistance, food stamps. | ||
| They need to have that tally and give that back to the USDA because they're a billion-dollar company, the biggest retailer in North America. | ||
| This is what I hate. | ||
| People that are super rich don't want to pay their fair shares. | ||
| And others, like that are entertainers, they say, don't, I can pay my fair share. | ||
| It's not all or none. | ||
| That's Edwin in New Bern, North Carolina. | ||
| It's just after 7:30 on the East Coast. | ||
| We are waiting to see when this press conference will happen between President Trump and Kier Starmer. | ||
| President Trump on the back end of this trip to Scotland that began on Friday. | ||
| News from that trip coming yesterday on the trade front. | ||
| The United States and the European Union have narrowly avoided a trade war, agreeing to a framework of a deal that will open European markets to the United States and place a 15% tariff on EU products entering the U.S. President Trump and the European Commission, President Ursula von der Leyen, announced the accord on Sunday in Turnbury, Scotland. | ||
| It followed intense negotiations. | ||
| The Washington Times sought to avert Mr. Trump's threat on Friday to slap a 30% tariff on EU goods. | ||
| More on that and likely questions on that at a press conference, the UK and President Trump earlier announcing their own trade deal and then this EU deal coming yesterday. | ||
| So plenty happening on this trip to Scotland. | ||
| We'll talk about that in the week ahead in the president's schedule coming up in our 9 a.m. hour, The Washington Journal. | ||
| This hour, we're asking simply, is being a billionaire a bad thing? | ||
| And the question stems from a Washington Times column by Don Federer, who calls for a billionaire's appreciation day, saying they created jobs and prosperity. | ||
| They need a billionaire's appreciation day. | ||
| This is David in Englewood, New Jersey, Republican. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I just want to make three quick points. | |
| First of all, the mere fact that this is being asked shows you the complete failure of the public school system, which most students in the United States go to in terms of educating kids about basic economics and some sense of financial literacy. | ||
| Second, to become a billionaire, you have to have done something extraordinary, super extraordinary. | ||
| You have to have created a product or either a service or something that didn't exist or that was better than what was out there. | ||
| Very few people are willing to go the entrepreneurial route and start a company. | ||
| I'll give you one of the greatest examples. | ||
| The guy that started Jersey Mike's submarine sandwich place, he started as a teenager at 17 with one shop, one shop. | ||
| So you think that it was unfair for him to work over 30 years, and then a year and a half ago, he sells most of the business for $8 billion. | ||
| A submarine shop, not something super technical. | ||
| So you have to reward people. | ||
| These countries that have punished wealth creation and being a billionaire like the UK have suffered a great outflow of talent and brains. | ||
| The United States is one of the places where you can become a billionaire as long as it's done legally. | ||
| Lastly, my point is this. | ||
| Bill Gates, for example, I was born on the same day, the same year as Gates. | ||
| If I had gotten into Harvard and talked about quitting Harvard to start, quote, a software company, my parents would have killed me. | ||
| There's, oh, no way. | ||
| But he took that risk and he changed the world. | ||
| He deserves every legal penny that he's earned. | ||
| And we have to keep that kind of system in the United States because it benefits everybody. | ||
| David Jobs. | ||
| David, let me bounce with what you just said. | ||
| Let me bounce this quote off you. | ||
| And Don Feder brings it up in his column today on A Billionaire's Appreciation Day. | ||
| It comes from Humphrey Bogart's speech in the 1954 movie Sabrina, when his brother asked him, what's the point of starting a business? | ||
| Is it money? | ||
| Is it power? | ||
| This is what Humphrey Bogart replies in Sabrina, quote, a new product has been found, something of use to the world. | ||
| A new industry moves into an undeveloped area. | ||
| Factories go up, machines go in, and you're in business. | ||
| It's coincidental that people who've never seen a dime now have a dollar, and barefooted kids wear shoes and have their faces washed. | ||
| What's wrong with an urge that gives people libraries and hospitals and baseball diamonds and movies on a Saturday night? | ||
| What do you think about that quote? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think it's a great quote. | |
| And to buttress that, what people don't realize is all these great universities in the United States, we would not have them at the level they are were it not for billionaire or multi-millionaire capitalists. | ||
| They have plowed that money back into schools and the hospitals. | ||
| You can't take any of this money with you. | ||
| And 50% of Americans, adult Americans, pay zero federal income tax. | ||
| You can look this up. | ||
| So all these people that are complaining about somebody else's money need to look in the mirror, get off their butt, and go out here and make it happen. | ||
| That's David in New Jersey. | ||
| George is in St. Louis, Missouri. | ||
| Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, morning. | |
| Thanks for taking the call. | ||
| I believe, in my opinion anyway, that being wealthy, a billionaire, having money doesn't make you a good or a bad person. | ||
| It's how you've been brought up. | ||
| It's your integrity, et cetera, all those characteristics. | ||
| However, with that being said, there was a gentleman that called up and specifically mentioned Mr. Ackman. | ||
| Mr. Ackman is a graduate of Harvard and has donated millions, if not billions, of dollars back to his alma mater. | ||
| He saw a wrong that he wanted to try to right. | ||
| And he stood up for his heritage, his Jewish heritage. | ||
| And I find it offensive for somebody to call in and attack that man. | ||
| All right. | ||
| He's one of the few Jewish people that have stood up and wanted to be counted. | ||
| And he put his money where his mouth is. | ||
| And he doesn't feel that the Jewish students and the rise in anti-Semitism is something that should be rewarded. | ||
| As far as other billionaires, there's so many billionaires that do so many great things that are not even known. | ||
| But just to name a few, you can go to Paul Langone, Bernie Marcus, Ted Turner, the great Ted Turner. | ||
| and then he mentions elon musk well didn't elon musk come to the aid of the uh floods that were george george let me pause there President Trump out in Scotland speaking to reporters live. | ||
| Let me take viewers to that. | ||
| President Trump there with Keir Starmer. | ||
| The greeting there. | ||
| And we're expecting a press conference in the not-too-distant future. | ||
| He's in Turnbury, Scotland, and meeting with the U.K. Prime Minister this morning. | ||
| We'll bring you more of that when they sit down and they take questions. | ||
| But the arrival ceremony happening, you can hear the bagpipes in the background. | ||
| That happening right now across the pond in Turnbury, back here in Washington, D.C., and around the country with you, our viewers, we're asking this question this morning. | ||
| Is being a billionaire a bad thing? | ||
| Taking your phone calls on phone lines for Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. | ||
| Aaron's been waiting in Alexandria, Virginia. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| I mean, nice to hear from you, John, and that's how I like to start my Mondays off with bagpipes and Trump, who doesn't pay taxes, by the way. | ||
| Your question is being a millionaire, a billionaire being a bad thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not saying millionaires and billionaires are bad people or billionaires are bad people. | |
| But if we think about how many millionaires can be made from a billion, which is a thousand, we don't see this sort of equity and wealth distribution that we see or that would be needed to make this a more fair and equal place. | ||
| There are plenty of billionaires who have exploited people in order to get their billions, whether it's overseas or what have you. | ||
| So I personally think that having billions while other people struggle in this country is not necessarily a good thing. | ||
| If we had more of a system where that wealth could be distributed, and of course, when you're thinking of, hey, someone made a product and they started from the ground up, there were people that paid for your product. | ||
| So how does that come back into our economy? | ||
| And if we really want to make our economy a better place, we would do that. | ||
| As someone who does look in the mirror and gets off their butt and goes to work, I've been working many years, and I see that there's a roof or a ceiling that some people cannot get past when it comes to money. | ||
| So I think. | ||
| Where is that ceiling, Aaron? | ||
| What is that ceiling? | ||
| Is there a number you can put on it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, yeah, I believe there are people that are in this country that make less than $30,000 a year. | |
| And how do they get to be into the six-figure salaries? | ||
| Looking at the tax codes, looking at how the government distributes money across different states, right? | ||
| I mean, there's part of, I live in Northern Virginia. | ||
| We pay the majority of the taxes for the rest of the state, which is unfair. | ||
| So if we're talking about equality, equity, and we're talking about wealth, how do we get there? | ||
| How do we make people pay their fair share? | ||
| Not paying your taxes is illegal. | ||
| Having loopholes or being able to afford fancy lawyers who can find every single loophole so you can pay your taxes is not fair to everyone else. | ||
| Also, the distribution of wealth between rich families. | ||
| We know they're not paying the same taxes like us. | ||
| So I am glad personally I do not know any billionaires because they know me. | ||
| If I knew they were a billionaire, I'm throwing on Biggie Small, and I'm rolling up there looking for my cut of what I put into the economy. | ||
| So it's always great talking to you, Sean, and I'll speak to you guys in my next 30 days. | ||
| That's Aaron in Virginia. | ||
| We'll head to Monks Corner, South Carolina. | ||
| David, Republican, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| The last caller, interesting points. | ||
| I'd like to make a few points, if I could. | ||
| He talked about wealth distribution, which is really redistribution from people that have attained it. | ||
| It's kind of dangerous when you say that Washington, D.C.'s job is to take people's wealth and spread it around. | ||
| That's not in the Constitution. | ||
| Is that what we do with David? | ||
| Is that what we do with taxes, David? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, yeah, that's what the basic role of the IRS is to redistribute wealth. | |
| And the gentleman from David in New Jersey, you should do a whole show with him. | ||
| He was fantastic. | ||
| I think he mentioned that half of taxpaying eligible Americans don't actually pay any net taxes. | ||
| And most of them get money through the IRS. | ||
| So that's the role of IRS, to redistribute wealth. | ||
| So I make a couple of points. | ||
| There's no bank account in the country that will yield you a billion dollars. | ||
| So people don't get to be that way by hoarding your money. | ||
| They have to invest. | ||
| In order to make a billion dollars or even a few million, you really have to invest. | ||
| And that means jobs for other people. | ||
| That's one point. | ||
| Another one, people here, they're not opposed to wealth because they seem to be upset only when other people have wealth. | ||
| So they're not opposed to having a lot of money, but they don't want other people to have it. | ||
| They say, you should give us your money. | ||
| And that's kind of the opposite of altruism. | ||
| And there's another point. | ||
| David, can I just give you some numbers from the Tax Policy Center? | ||
| It's run with the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute. | ||
| A report from June of this year on who doesn't pay taxes, the numbers you were saying. | ||
| In 2025, according to the latest Tax Policy Center estimates, 40% of households or about 76 million tax units, as they are called, will pay no federal individual income tax. | ||
| That number a little bit lower than a couple years ago. | ||
| And the report goes into some of the findings of those numbers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, 40-50. | |
| I didn't look it up. | ||
| I just know there's a huge proportion, huge portion of people that file taxes that end up with no net income tax. | ||
| And I was going to make another point. | ||
| Whenever you use anecdotes, and Congress is famous for this, for tugging on heartstrings when a federal fund is cut, they'll show some kid who federal government came and snatched his plate in front of him in the schoolroom or in the lunchroom. | ||
| But the same thing with billionaires. | ||
| There's so many of them. | ||
| We don't know who they are. | ||
| But you can always make examples or anecdotes out of individuals, good or bad. | ||
| And it doesn't really matter what wealth bracket you're talking about. | ||
| So you have to be careful with the individuals and then generalizing from that. | ||
| And I heard a Democrat representative years ago on a radio on NPR, she was being interviewed. | ||
| She said, anybody that can drive a long time ago now when $70,000 meant a lot. | ||
| She said, anybody can drive a $65,000 SUV is not paying enough taxes. | ||
| Now, you think about that. | ||
| That means if you had a really good year with all your real estate, and if you're allowed to have it in this country, you're allowed to be a landlord, and you made $2 million and you had a dream car, you wanted to spend $65,000, this representative is saying, no, no, you're not allowed to have all that money you made. | ||
| You're only allowed to keep maybe $100,000. | ||
| David, let me stop you there. | ||
| Let me go back to Turnbury because President Trump decided to chat with members of the press. | ||
| Here's the president with Kier Starmer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, we've done a lot of work stopping them coming. | |
| We just signed an agreement to return them, and we've returned 35,000. | ||
|
unidentified
|
In fact, I'm the first year of this labor government of people who shouldn't be in this country. | |
| So we're very pleased that we're getting on with returning people who've got no right to be here. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| As somebody that loves this, I love this country. | ||
| My mother was born in, as you know, my mother was born in Scotland, and it's an incredible place, a beautiful place. | ||
| And if that be the case, I congratulate you. | ||
| That's exactly because, you know, Europe is a much different place than it was just five years ago, ten years ago. | ||
| And they've got to get their act together. | ||
| If they don't, you're not going to have Europe anymore as you know it. | ||
| And you can't do that. | ||
| This is a magnificent part of the world, and you cannot ruin it. | ||
| You cannot let people come in here illegally. | ||
| And what happens is there'll be murderers, there'll be drug dealers, there'll be all sorts of things that other countries don't want. | ||
| And they send them to you and they send them to us, and you've got to stop them. | ||
| And I hear that you've taken a very strong stand on immigration, and taking a strong stand on immigration is imperative. | ||
| That's President Trump in Turnbury. | ||
| We're expecting more from the President and Kier Starmer. | ||
| Expected, as they're called, by Latz, a press conference with the two of them. | ||
| Although it looks like it's sort of begun already on arrival there in Scotland. | ||
| We'll show more for you and we'll take you through the news of the day. | ||
| A few minutes left in this first segment of the Washington Journal, as we've been asking you this morning about billionaires stemming from a column in the Washington Times calling for a billionaire appreciation day. | ||
| Do you think being a billionaire is a bad thing? | ||
| Just about 10 minutes left in this segment. | ||
| This is Jim in Tennessee. | ||
| Independent, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, I'm a first-time caller. | |
| Being a billionaire is a bad thing because what they've done is they have robbed the working people in this country. | ||
| When I was a kid back in the 60s growing up, a man could work and he could provide for his family and his wife could stay at home. | ||
| My best friend's dad was a shoe salesman and had four kids, and he provided well for his family back in the day because back then people made a good wage, and the money wasn't all siphoned off by the billionaires. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He was a shoe salesman. | |
| Imagine someone being a shoe salesman today and providing for six people, him and his wife and four kids. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And she, like I say, she stayed at home. | |
| And in those days, an executive would make maybe 10 times what the working man was making. | ||
| But now today, these CEOs are making like hundreds and hundreds of times what a worker is paid. | ||
| And so they're taking the money from the poor. | ||
| They're taking the money from the working people. | ||
| And then the money goes all into the billionaires. | ||
| And so that's what's happening in our country today. | ||
| That's why there's so much income inequality because the billionaires are just sucking all the money out from the working people. | ||
| And so. | ||
| Jim, got your point. | ||
| This is Steve in New York who writes in this via text message. | ||
| It's like asking, should human nature exist? | ||
| By nature, some will succeed mightily and others will not. | ||
| The troubling question is why most of the callers today now frame it as, why can't someone else do more for me, me, me, rather than how can I do it too? | ||
| This is a few of your comments via social media, via our text messaging service, and of course, your phone calls. | ||
| By the way, if you want to continue to watch President Trump live in Turnberry, Scotland, as he continues to chat with the press outside ahead of that expected bilateral meeting, we're airing that on C-SPAN 2 Live. | ||
| You can pop over there for that and then hope you come back to the Washington Journal and continue to listen and call in as Aaron did in the Yellowhammer State out of Scottsboro. | ||
| Republican, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, hi. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| I'm finally on. | ||
| I think my answer is going to be short and simple. | ||
| It's just, to me, it's a human being thing. | ||
| Just like with the issue of the police, I think it's a more nuanced issue than most people want to make it out to be. | ||
| You might have some billionaires who are very philanthropic and have good intentions in their heart and they want to help, really truly want to help people with their wealth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And you'll have some people who are more corrupt and abusive and they might have less than savory intentions. | |
| But I think that's a human issue. | ||
| And it's just like whenever I talk to people who are outright capitalists or even Marxists, I never just have a nuanced answer. | ||
| It's always like a blunt-ended one way or the other sort of deal. | ||
| I never have like, you know, it's never, they never make it out like a human issue. | ||
| It's always like, oh, they're absolutely evil. | ||
| Or, oh, no, they're, they're superheroes. | ||
| It's never like an in-between sort of answer I get out of people. | ||
| Aaron, how many, um, how many Marxists do you run into in Scottsboro, Alabama? | ||
|
unidentified
|
To be honest with you, this is funny. | |
| I am personally not one. | ||
| I'm actually more independent. | ||
| I know it says Republican, but I try to call through the independent line. | ||
| I have friends who are very right-wing and very capitalist. | ||
| And I have friends who are, when I say Marxist, they're not like Stalinists or anything. | ||
| They're just on the lighter end of like socialists or something. | ||
| And they identify with Marxism. | ||
| But like, I don't know. | ||
| Like, I've encountered quite a wide variety of people. | ||
| And I used to live in New York as well. | ||
| Aaron, thanks for the call. | ||
| From Alabama, we'll head to the old line state. | ||
| This is Reva, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| How are you? | ||
| Doing well. | ||
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| Are you still there? | ||
| Yes, ma'am. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| So as far as billionaires and are they a good or bad thing, I've heard different takes on it. | ||
| My big problem with billionaires is they're having an undue influence on our politics because some guardwell guardrails were removed. | ||
| And of course, they naturally represent themselves more than they represent me, but they can donate to our politicians in a huge amount. | ||
| So I don't like that. | ||
| I would like to talk about how policy affects people, and specifically today's news about tariffs. | ||
| The news is that it's going to settle at 15% for EU goods, and EU provides a huge number of goods and a huge dollar amount. | ||
| So this is going to impact the American consumer because the American consumer basically ends up funding tariffs. | ||
| It won't happen immediately, but it's gradually kicking in, and people need to be aware. | ||
| In 2024, that was at like 1.2% tariff rate. | ||
| And during this pause, it's been at 10%. | ||
| So not quite a pause. | ||
| So, Reva, I could actually get you some more exact numbers there. | ||
| This is the New York Times wrap-up to try to put this number in perspective. | ||
| The 15% tariff rate given to Europe mirrors the main tariff rate of the U.S.-Japanese trade agreement that was announced last week. | ||
| It's lower than the 19 and 20 percent rates imposed on several Southeast Asian countries. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's higher. | ||
| Give me one second, Reva. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's consumer. | |
| It's higher. | ||
| It's higher than the 10% tax that Europeans had been angling for and that Mr. Trump applied to British goods. | ||
| It's also higher than the tariffs that have been historically applied here. | ||
| According to the World Trade Organization, before Mr. Trump came into the office, the trade-weighted tariff the United States charged for foreign goods was 2.2 percent, while the European Union's was 2.7 percent. | ||
| So those are some of the numbers there, Reva. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And that means that for consumers, they will have been paying less a year ago. | ||
| I call this the tariff show game, because by moving it around a lot, everybody loses sight that for the final end of it, consumers are going to pay more. | ||
| Now, this is my question. | ||
| This is what I'm going to be waiting to see: is what is Congress going to use the tariffs for? | ||
| What is the executive branch, I'm not quite sure who decides, going to use the tariff monies that ultimately come down to the consumers paying an extra tax. | ||
| What are they going to use it for? | ||
| That's Reva in Maryland. | ||
| Time for just a couple more calls here. | ||
| This is Francis out of Oakland, California Independent. | ||
| Francis, the question we've been asking, is being a billionaire inherently a bad thing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for the wonderful discussion on this issue. | ||
| I don't think being a billionaire in and of itself is bad. | ||
| Just like I don't think being a poor person in and of itself is bad. | ||
| What is bad is the policies that the U.S. Congress and the presidents have followed for the last 25 years. | ||
| Over $20 trillion has been lost in revenue to the U.S. government because of tax cuts and wars of choice, not necessity. | ||
| We've been in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. | ||
| These were wars more of choice rather than necessity. | ||
| And particularly the war in Iraq was a bogus reason why we went in there for weapons of mass destruction. | ||
| That was exposed, and it was a big lie. | ||
| So over $20 trillion, and now we have a $36 trillion deficit that threatens every man, woman, and child in the United States of America. | ||
| It's not a deficit, it's a debt. | ||
| And the deficit continues to add to the debt. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a time bomb. | |
| It's a debt time bomb in America that could blow up at any time if we go into a recession here and slide into a depression. | ||
| A $36 trillion plus every day growing like crazy. | ||
| We're living with a financial time bomb. | ||
| And Francis, if you want to see how it grows, you can go to usdebtclock.org, a running total of the U.S. national debt, $37,159,805,000,000 and counting. | ||
| And they break that up as debt per U.S. citizen, debt per taxpayer. | ||
| Lots of numbers there for you to look through. | ||
| This is Rick with just a couple minutes left here in New York Independent. | ||
| Rick, this question about billionaires and whether they're a bad thing. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, hi, John. | |
| This is a fun topic. | ||
| What I would say is this: there's two parts to this. | ||
| The first thing is not only do we have more billionaires than ever before, we're going to continue to have more. | ||
| And it's a mathematical thing, and nobody's talked about just the mathematics of it. | ||
| It is true. | ||
| Most of these folks make these billions through investing. | ||
| And what happens is when you and I get an extra $10, we might save one of those dollars. | ||
| But when Elon Musk gets an extra $10, he's going ahead, he's investing all $10 of those dollars. | ||
| And this thing continues to compound. | ||
| So what you have is a system that is going to, you're going to see the wealthy get wealthier and wealthier. | ||
| So somebody way at the beginning of the program said, what's coming next are trillionaires. | ||
| And that's exactly what we will face. | ||
| And it's just pure straight mathematics. | ||
| Second thing is, somebody made a comment about how they use their money. | ||
| And, you know, people talk about Andrew Carnegie and the library system. | ||
| Wonderful thing. | ||
| And plenty of billionaires today do good things. | ||
| A billionaire who buys a mega yacht, he's doing a good thing. | ||
| He's creating a lot of jobs, no question. | ||
| But billionaires who use their money to unduly influence politics, that's probably not a good thing. | ||
| So what I'd like to see is if someone who is a billionaire chooses to invest $300 or $400 million in a political campaign, he should perhaps be taxed at two or three or four times the amount he invests in politics. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So if we can keep the wealth out of influencing, that might be a better thing. | |
| So a special extra tax on political donations. | ||
| Is that what you're saying, Rick? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Something like that. | |
| I'd be lying to tell you I thought it through completely. | ||
| But on the surface, it feels to me that there's no problem with being a billionaire. | ||
| It's the use of the money. | ||
| And I believe at this particular point in our American history, money is playing an out-of-proportion role in national politics. | ||
| It just doesn't feel right. | ||
| If somebody has that level of money, though, Rick, can you disincentivize them from political donations by simply taxing it? | ||
| Isn't that just the cost of doing business then? | ||
| Well, I'd like to think, I'd like to agree with you on that, but I agree with the earlier caller who said about Citizen V United. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Spending money is political free speech. | |
| I don't agree with it at the level it's occurring in the United States now. | ||
| I mean, it's absurd to think that. | ||
| But nonetheless, you got Citizen V United. | ||
| That basically says money is free speech. | ||
| Rick, thanks for the call from New York, our last caller in this first segment of the Washington Journal. | ||
| If you want to continue this conversation and you didn't get in, as I know several folks were unable to, you can do so. | ||
| We're going to have our open forum segment a little later today. | ||
| Happy to continue the conversation there. | ||
| Coming up a little later on in the Washington Journal, author and presidential historian Talmadge Boston joins us to talk about former President Joe Biden's post-presidency and his legacy. | ||
| But first, Ankush Kadori, a senior writer at Political Magazine, joins us to discuss his recent piece on President Trump's lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| Stick around for that discussion. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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
|
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
|
I saw on television a little while ago in between my watching my great friends on C-SPAN. | |
| C-SPAN is televising this right now live. | ||
| So we are not just speaking to Los Angeles. | ||
| We are speaking to the country. | ||
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| Shop now or anytime at c-spanshop.org. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Ankush Khadori joins us now, a former federal prosecutor, current politico magazine senior writer. | ||
| His recent story on the Epstein files bears this headline: Trump's Wall Street Journal lawsuit raises new constitutional questions. | ||
| And one of those questions you explore is why we now have a dynamic where the president can sue you, but you can't sue the president. | ||
| Explain how we got here in our legal system. | ||
| So Trump has managed to push this to an entirely different sort of set of dynamics. | ||
| But originally, you know, under American law, constitutional law, the president is entitled to immunity from civil lawsuits under law developed by the Supreme Court, not based in a statute, not based in the Constitution. | ||
| So to the extent that the president is engaged in conduct that falls within what the court describes as the outer perimeter of his official duties, Trump is immune from civil lawsuits for damages. | ||
| However, Trump is free to go around and sue people himself. | ||
| Now, this is not something we have seen from prior presidents, but Trump is sort of unique in his litigiousness. | ||
| So we have this sort of asymmetric dynamic where if somebody now reports on a story that concerns him and he does not like it, which is what happened with the Wall Street Journal's story on the alleged letter that he sent to Jeffrey Epstein in this book, then he is free to go out and sue them as he has done for defamation. | ||
| But at the same time, if you or I wanted to sue him for similar sort of under concerning the same facts for whatever reason, we'd probably be precluded from doing so. | ||
| Even the Wall Street Journal, if it wanted to bring a counterclaim against Trump in this lawsuit for defamation, because of the way in which he's denied it, maybe alleging that it's fake and that may have concocted it, it's not clear that they would be able to assert a defamation claim against him because of his immunity. | ||
| And his claim, his argument would be, which he's asserted before, that he's sort of free to respond to critics on matters of public concern, and that falls within his presidential zone of duty. | ||
| So this is how he approached the E.G. and Carroll case. | ||
| It's how he's approached the January 6th civil lawsuits against him. | ||
| Those lawsuits have moved forward despite this defense, but they went through years of litigation on just this issue. | ||
| On the Wall Street Journal lawsuit specifically, what does he have to prove for a defamation lawsuit against a media company? | ||
| And what is the process he will have to go through here if he moves forward with this lawsuit? | ||
| And as you point out in the article, that's not necessarily a sure thing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So the standard is he has to prove that the Wall Street Journal defamed him with actual malice. | ||
| And for a public official, that means either they knew that it was, the reporting was false or they acted recklessly with regard to their reporting, meaning they had some reason, substantial reason to believe it was false, but they proceeded nonetheless. | ||
| So that's just sort of the broad contours of what he needs to establish. | ||
| That, I think, is going to be very difficult in this case because I think the, I would assume that the journal spent a lot of time and careful thought that went into its reporting and that they involved lawyers as well because of Trump's litigiousness. | ||
| The prospect that he faces if this case actually proceeds, the journal could get it dismissed. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| I'm sure they'll move to dismiss the case. | ||
| But if it proceeds to discovery, Trump will then be exposed to civil discovery like any other plaintiff. | ||
| That would include requests for, I would think, extensive documents from the Wall Street Journal, both from his private and public archives, so to speak. | ||
| And they will want to depose him under oath, not just about the letter at issue and whether or not he wrote it, but about his broader relationship with Epstein going back decades, because that relationship is probative of his credibility on the denial, right? | ||
| And it goes to his motive to potentially falsely deny that he wrote the note. | ||
| So you would expect a very aggressive deposition from them. | ||
| And those depositions have typically not gone well for Trump in the past. | ||
| You may remember he was deposed by E.G. and Carroll's lawyers in that civil lawsuit, and a lot of very unpleasant clips emerged from that, some of which were used against him. | ||
| So he faces a real risk of a messy discovery process, assuming the case goes forward. | ||
| Do you think it will go forward? | ||
| You know, I think the Wall Street Journal has a pretty good shot at getting it dismissed because I think it's not a very strong case on its face. | ||
| If it does not get dismissed, it's possible the journal will settle the case with him, as we've seen other media companies settle cases. | ||
| I doubt that they are prepared to settle this. | ||
| I would assume that when they published this story, they were prepared for a lawsuit, prepared to proceed without settling the case. | ||
| It is also possible that Trump at some point could voluntarily dismiss the case. | ||
| And he has done that before, for instance, in a case of a lawsuit he filed against Michael Cohen when that case was approaching discovery and when he was on deck for a deposition. | ||
| He voluntarily dismissed the case. | ||
| So we have seen in the past when he's exposed to discovery that may be unflattering or unpleasant for him personally, he just sort of quietly dismisses the case. | ||
| I would not be surprised if we saw that here, but it's among the options. | ||
| What is President Trump's record when it comes to suing media companies? | ||
| It is quite poor. | ||
| He generally loses these cases when they actually proceed to a judicial resolution. | ||
| The exceptions, which have gotten a lot of attention, understandably in recent months, are the settlements that he's gotten. | ||
| One with ABC News and the other with Paramount Global, which is the parent company of CBS. | ||
| And those are the exceptions rather than the rule. | ||
| They've attracted a lot of attention, understandably, but they are outliers. | ||
| When he sues a media company based on its reporting, sort of rigorous reporting, and that is a credible media company, as of course, the Wall Street Journal is, he tends to lose. | ||
| Ankush Khadori is our guest. | ||
| His piece in Politico magazine, Trump's Wall Street Journal lawsuit, raises new constitutional questions. | ||
| The president is wielding lawsuits as both a sword and a shield. | ||
| He is taking your phone calls and with us until about 8.45 Eastern, so another 35 minutes or so. | ||
| Get your phone calls in. | ||
| Time to do that on phone line split as usual by political party. | ||
| Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| And as folks are calling in, we mentioned at the top your background as a federal prosecutor. | ||
| Can you talk through that and how long, when you moved to journalism and how long you've been writing for Politico? | ||
| Oh, so I was a federal prosecutor for about three and a half years. | ||
| From summer of 2016 to early 2020, I was based here in Washington, D.C., and I was specialized in white-collar crime and financial fraud, cases that concerned people throughout the country and potentially international cases. | ||
| I was not in the U.S. Attorney's Office in D.C. | ||
| I was in a specialized unit within Maine Justices that focuses just on large, complex financial fraud cases. | ||
| How I came to journalism is sort of an interesting little story. | ||
| I mean, I left the Trump administration in January 2020. | ||
| I left the Justice Department, I should say, under the first Trump administration in January 2020. | ||
| Long story short, I was not pleased with how the Justice Department was being run within my office under the management that had emerged under the Trump administration. | ||
| And then in January 2020, we're close to the pandemic. | ||
| So at that time, I was sort of taking a break. | ||
| And then the pandemic came along. | ||
| And so like many other people is like, well, what's the point of looking for a job at this point? | ||
| We may not need any money. | ||
| We may be bartering for goods and services. | ||
| It could be like a walking dead type situation. | ||
| So I didn't know what was going to happen. | ||
| So I wasn't looking for work, but I was writing to sort of pass the time. | ||
| And I got very lucky. | ||
| People were supportive and picking things up that I was writing. | ||
| So I was a contributor at Politico doing kind of freelance alongside a columnized writing for New York Magazine for a couple of years. | ||
| I came on full-time last March, so a little over a year. | ||
| And what is your beat now that you're on full-time at Politico? | ||
| Do you have a specialized beat? | ||
| Yeah, so I'm a columnist for the magazine. | ||
| I'm not on the news side. | ||
| We have excellent news reporters, including legal news reporters. | ||
| I write a column about national legal affairs and the intersection between national legal affairs and legal issues. | ||
| So I kind of have a wide remit and I have the luxury of being able to sort of pick and choose the things I focus on. | ||
| And a lot of your focus in recent weeks has been on the Epstein files and the Epstein cases. | ||
| Your most recent piece, the Epstein Files Timeline, raises real questions for Donald Trump. | ||
| We can go through that, but let me get a few phone calls in. | ||
| There are several waiting for you already. | ||
| This is Patrick out of Fairfax, Virginia, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Patrick, you're on with Ankush Khadori. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, thanks for taking my call. | |
| Question is, does the Supreme Court ruling about not being able to sue a president, does that apply to former presidents like President Obama? | ||
| So yes, if the conduct concerns his official duties or the conduct that falls within the outside of perimeter of his official duties, it would apply to conduct that occurred while he was in office, both on the civil side and the criminal side of liability. | ||
| You make the case in your piece, though, that Donald Trump has blurred those lines between official and unofficial. | ||
| How do we find the difference between the two? | ||
| This is the tricky part of this, right? | ||
| Because you take a look at this particular story, right? | ||
| The Wall Street Journal story. | ||
| It is, of course, a personal matter to him because he knew Jeffrey Epstein personally, and Trump is very concerned, I would say, about the extent of his personal relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. | ||
| But that personal relationship now has political implications, right? | ||
| Because the Trump administration, not just Trump himself, but the vice president, the Attorney General, the FBI director, and the FBI deputy director all spent years cultivating these Epstein conspiracy theories as part of a political process that is now playing out in the current administration. | ||
| So we've seen the public and the private, the political and the private, sort of merge under Trump. | ||
| So now for him, he views this as a personal matter that he can sue about, but it's also a very political hot topic, one that's very, very important to many Americans. | ||
| So effectively, he's in a position where he can file a lawsuit that is looking to essentially squelch reporting on a matter of public concern. | ||
| Joseph, New Jersey, Republican, good morning. | ||
| You're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| How are you? | ||
| Just listen to somebody from the media that's telling me that President Trump is sue happy or whatever the word he used. | ||
| This man, president I voted for, has been destroyed by the media and my own government with fake stories like Russia collusion. | ||
| That was all made up. | ||
| I don't know if Political ever apologized for that. | ||
| The man for three years, he was undermined. | ||
| The guy I wanted to be in the White House was undermined, couldn't get things done because of phony and fake stories. | ||
| Now, here's another one, Epstein. | ||
| Is Politico, are they investigating President Clinton and how many times he's been over there? | ||
| President Trump has every right to defend himself because we know the last 10 years of his life has been destroyed by people like him for Politico. | ||
| Did you guys ever apologize with the Russian collusion? | ||
| It was all made up. | ||
| It was a soft coup. | ||
| Joseph, got your points to a couple different topics he touches on. | ||
| So Politico does not apologize for reporting true facts. | ||
| I'm not going to do it here either. | ||
| The Mueller investigation was not based on a hoax. | ||
| The hoax is the claim that it was based on a hoax. | ||
| The Mueller investigation was predicated on intelligence that the government obtained in 2016 from an Australian diplomat who suggested there may have been untoward relationship between the Russian government, Russian intelligence, and the Trump administration. | ||
| That kicked things off. | ||
| Now, there are undoubtedly, like the still dossier in hindsight, clearly a mess. | ||
| But it was not a hoax. | ||
| Several people pled guilty, were charged. | ||
| Things did not move in the way that many people anticipated, but that often happens in large and complex criminal investigations. | ||
| That doesn't mean it was a hoax. | ||
| With respect to, you know, why isn't Politico looking at Clinton? | ||
| Look, Clinton is not the sitting president. | ||
| This is a very, very simple answer to this question. | ||
| Clinton is not the sitting president, nor did Clinton, or in the top levels of his law enforcement, spend years cultivating conspiracy theories about Epstein. | ||
| Nor is Clinton now in office, evidently sitting on information from the quote-unquote Epstein files that references him, despite all of the promises that Trump and his vice president, Attorney General, FBI Director Anod, made to the public for years. | ||
| And you're talking about the other Wall Street Journal story last week saying that Pam Bondi let the president know that his name was in the Epstein files, whatever the Epstein files officially are. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, exactly. | ||
| So, look, I respect everybody's opinion, but like the notion that why isn't political focused on Clinton? | ||
| I mean, it's an absurd question. | ||
| To Janet in Florida, Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, thanks for taking my phone call. | |
| Yeah, I am around 60 years old, and I actually grew up in Queens, New York. | ||
| So I was very aware of Donald Trump when I was growing up and the fact that he was very litigious in terms of how he conducted his business. | ||
| And last 20 years, I've actually lived in Florida where I've seen how the, especially in the last two terms of the DeSantis administration, and there's now this supermajority in our state legislature. | ||
| They seem to be conducting a very Trump-like strategy of enacting unconstitutional legislature and then just leaving it to the courts if someone can come in and fight these unconstitutional decisions. | ||
| But they pass them nonetheless, and a lot of damage is done in the meantime while we hopefully can fight some of these unconstitutional decisions. | ||
| So I guess I'm realizing now that this does seem like a very Trump-like strategy. | ||
| And I don't know that I, you know, I thought I followed politics all my life, but it really seems to me like this is this, it is strategic, and they can market their, you know, their messaging bills while unfortunately, you know, the common, the average American who may not be paying too much attention, you know, suffers from the consequences of some of this, a lot of this legislation. | ||
| But it does seem to me like it's strategic and it's very Trump-like. | ||
| Got your point. | ||
| Ankush Kadori, give you a chance to respond. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, look, the Trump administration has taken a particular strategy upon entering office, which is to move very quickly and very expansively and aggressively on a host of fronts, violating quite a few laws that are on the books that were written by Congress. | ||
| I'll give you just very one example, which is he was supposed to provide notice to Congress before he dismissed any of the inspectors general. | ||
| They deliberately did not do that. | ||
| That's a very low-hanging example of violating statutory law. | ||
| And yes, it does appear to be the case that they then draw the lawsuit and then kind of see how it plays out, and some of it gets upheld, some of it doesn't. | ||
| It is a very, very unusual strategy coming from the executive branch. | ||
| It's unlike anything I've seen, at least during my lifetime. | ||
| Usually, when you have an administration pushing all of these things so aggressively, we would regard that as sort of politically unpalatable. | ||
| A question from Kristen in Maine via text message. | ||
| Do you think that Donald Trump will try to sue South Park over that last episode, Kristen saying, watch or beware? | ||
| They literally and figuratively exposed him for ridiculousness. | ||
| I do not know if Trump will sue them. | ||
| I highly doubt it. | ||
| If he tried, that would almost be a certain loser because it's satire and parody. | ||
| And there's not an assertion of fact that he would be able to challenge. | ||
| You need an assertion of fact to be able to mount a defamation suit. | ||
| And this is, to me, just seems very classic political satire. | ||
| It falls within the heartland of the First Amendment. | ||
| When we come back to your most recent story for Politico magazine, the Epstein Files timeline raises real questions for Donald Trump. | ||
| What are some of those questions? | ||
| Look, I mean, I think the questions that have emerged concern the shifting rhetoric over time and the ways in which I think they've tried to deflect attention from the material in their possession that their supporters have been wanting to release. | ||
| Now, the Wall Street Journal reported in May, as you noted, that there was a briefing in which the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General told Trump that he was actually referenced in the so-called Epstein files, which is, I think, just the investigative file. | ||
| After May, I think we have seen sort of a conspicuous shift in their rhetoric. | ||
| This was an inflection point, you're right. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So it seems to have been a bit of an inflection point. | ||
| So after that, we've seen sort of a series of evasions and non-sequiturs. | ||
| For instance, Pam Bondi saying that there are, I think she said, tens of thousands of videos of child pornography for your assault. | ||
| Of course, no credible outlet, media figure, political figure, public figure has ever suggested that any of that material should be released. | ||
| Never. | ||
| There's also been Trump saying, oh, we only want to produce or release credible information. | ||
| We only want to release grand jury testimony, but it should also be pertinent grand jury testimony. | ||
| He has begun blaming Democrats for ginning all of this up and the media for jilling all this up, which is false. | ||
| I mean, he and his allies did more in the political and media spaces to amplify this than anyone else. | ||
| And so I look at that as a former prosecutor, and you just invariably have to ask, and we do this in criminal investigations. | ||
| Now, Trump has not been implicated in any criminal wrongdoing. | ||
| I'm just trying to explain how I think about these things. | ||
| You sort of look at these evasions and you wonder whether the people doing the deflecting are trying to suppress information that is unhelpful to them. | ||
| This is Rush in Pennsylvania, not Rhode Island, independent. | ||
| Rush, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, hi, John. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| Hey, I'm 73 years old. | ||
| Retired mill worker. | ||
| Worked numerous jobs. | ||
| I don't know if it's hoaxes or not, but I tell you what, I haven't watched the mainstream media since I followed Tucker Carlson for about the last 26 years. | ||
| And when he got fired off of Fox, I was done. | ||
| I tried watching, I used to watch Meet the Press Fascination, and this week with George Stephanopoulos, I used to tape two of them and watch all three of them. | ||
| So, Rush, bring me to your question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, my question is: okay, on the Epstein thing, I've seen numerous, forget about this Ghislaine Maxwell. | |
| Her dad's the one that, you know, got things running going there. | ||
| I think Epstein was an agent. | ||
| Bill Barr's dad, Don Barr is the one that got him started in that college and this and that and the other. | ||
| Here's the thing: forget about her. | ||
| I have seen two, I would say, very reputable, you know, girls that were molested by him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not him, maybe per se, but whatever. | |
| The whole nine yards. | ||
| One's his niche. | ||
| So, Rush, bring me to your question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, my question is: you're never going to get the truth from Ghislaine Maxwell. | |
| You got to get to there's a lot of these girls that are older now, and they'll come out and talk. | ||
| That's where you're going to get the truth. | ||
| There is no list. | ||
| There is no this list they're talking about. | ||
| Now, got your point, Rush. | ||
| Agush Kadori. | ||
| Yeah, you know, I actually think the key points he made at the end are correct. | ||
| I think it is appalling that the Justice Department is spending time with Elaine Maxwell, the Deputy Attorney General, spending days with her. | ||
| This is somebody who's in prison on heinous charges. | ||
| 20 years, child sex trafficking. | ||
| Government's already charged her with perjury twice. | ||
| They fully discredited her. | ||
| She has plenty of reason to curry favor with the administration to shave the truth or to lie about it in order to try to get a commutation or a pardon. | ||
| I would not touch this person with a 10-foot pole if I were in government right now. | ||
| I think it's terrible. | ||
| I wish they would stop engaging with her. | ||
| And I think it is a bad idea on many levels, both legally and politically. | ||
| Now, with respect to who might have information about the extent of the criminal misconduct here, again, I think your caller is correct. | ||
| You actually would want to speak extensively to victims about this. | ||
| Now, the problem is this happened already, right? | ||
| The government conducted this criminal investigation. | ||
| They charge Epstein and Maxwell. | ||
| This process occurred. | ||
| And instead of now us being in a situation, oh, we should go now talk to the victims, gather this information, I think actually what we're doing is kind of re-traumatizing the victims by extending this saga past the point at which they thought it was closed, at least publicly. | ||
| And these are terrible things that happen to these people, unspeakable things that happen to some of these people. | ||
| And I'm so, I feel so terrible for them to have to be now confronting this on a daily basis in the media and from the president and the White House and the top levels of the Justice Department. | ||
| And it's a lot of flailing, and I think it's very counterproductive. | ||
| You know, it's a situation that the administration created for itself, but that does not obviate the harm and the trauma that I think that we're putting these victims. | ||
| So is that an argument to not release the Epstein files, whatever that phrase refers to? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Yes. | ||
| It is the best argument, in fact, for not releasing the Epstein files, not just the extent to which there are references to them. | ||
| I think anyone would redact them if there were some sort of release, but also because it will prolong this issue potentially for years and years to come. | ||
| And I have to say, you know, Thomas Massey and Roe Khanna have gotten a lot of attention for the discharge petition that would force the release of all of the Epstein files with redactions for the victim. | ||
| That is a terrible idea. | ||
| That is an absolutely terrible idea. | ||
| All it is going to do is give the public and conspiracy theorists years and years and years to rummage through Lord knows how many documents and spin up Lord knows how many other conspiracy theories. | ||
| I cannot think of a worse idea than dumping this on the public. | ||
| If they're not released, the counter argument would be that it's years and years and years of being able to guess or say there's something in there with no information, no ability to refute it. | ||
| And so the conspiracy continues. | ||
| Yes, but what should happen, and I don't know if this administration is capable of it, is that the president and or the attorney general and or the FBI director should get in front of a microphone and explain what is actually going on, explain that they had this wrong for years, explain why they had it wrong, whether it was deliberate or whether it was a mistake on their part, and level with the American public in a way that is credible and that gives us some assurance and to try to put this to the bed. | ||
| Now, I think they've created such a mess that I think you're right. | ||
| I don't think there is a way for them to put this to bed, possibly ever now. | ||
| But that is what I would like to see. | ||
| I would like to see a highly credible effort to explain what's going on to the public and to try to put a stop to this. | ||
| I'm Kush Kadori, a senior writer with Politico magazine. | ||
| His columns in Politico magazine. | ||
| You can find that at politico.com. | ||
| He's with us for about another 15 minutes taking your phone calls. | ||
| And this is Remy out of Brooklyn Park, Maryland, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Remy, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning, gentlemen. | |
| I appreciate your taking the time to speak with me. | ||
| But I just have some quick questions to run by the gentleman. | ||
| And basically, a little background. | ||
| I'm a retired trade forwarder, 79 years old, pushing 80. | ||
| Well, one of the things I'm seeing here that I think politico needs to really start to focus on besides what's happening here with the Epstein files, which is really, to me, I'm seeing nothing more than, well, let's put it, diversionary action. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a diversionary action to take away from what's actually happening in Gaza. | |
| When I see a country like the United States of America that is complicit for supplying the weapons of mass destruction that are being used to decimate these starving people, and why is it? | ||
| We can't just stand up and say, hey, look, we're going to talk about the Epstein files. | ||
| But the fact of the matter is we've got some bigger things going on and where we're trying to come to conclusion as to how did we end up in Gaza? | ||
|
unidentified
|
How did Israel have the right to go into Gaza? | |
| Because we haven't answered all the questions. | ||
| And when talking with people from Syria and Israel and also Jordan, with the perimeters that we have around Israel, the Hamas took a year and a half to put something together. | ||
| And with the border security that they have in Israel, how did it get through that border without the Massad and the IDF already there and awaiting for Hamas? | ||
| There's something. | ||
| Got your points on Kush Kadori on the idea that this is a distraction. | ||
| Well, I think there's no question that there are many, many more important, substantive, and consequential things that we could all be paying attention to. | ||
| I totally agree with your caller, including the issue that he described, which raises a host of legal issues that are entirely different from why we're here today, but agreed. | ||
| I will just say, though, that the reason we're in this position is because of the Trump administration. | ||
| So I don't, it is now maybe serving as a de facto distraction from those other things, but this is unlike the other situations. | ||
| I don't think the Trump administration wants this to be in the news, right? | ||
| It may be sort of boxing out some of those other things. | ||
| This isn't a strategic distraction. | ||
| No, I don't think this is a strategic distraction. | ||
| In fact, I think they wanted to move very quickly beyond this after they put out this very terse joint DOJ FBI memo. | ||
| I believe it was back in June. | ||
| Now they find themselves here because they sort of created these expectations among their supporters and the folks interested in this. | ||
| And they've been fumbling around, quite honestly, for the last couple of weeks with public remarks and comments that have just not come close to putting this fire out. | ||
| And now we have front page headlines like this from the Washington Post today. | ||
| Trump fumes as the Epstein files overshadow his agenda. | ||
| The administration's plan to quell the crisis is dependent on the public forgetting about it. | ||
| Do you think the public will forget about this? | ||
| I think it's hard to see them forgetting about it anytime soon for several different reasons. | ||
| One is there are now several different sort of markers in the future for things that we now are looking to see how they unfold, right? | ||
| One is if the House comes back, is there going to be a vote on a discharge position or similar thing? | ||
| So that's going to be a news thing until that gets resolved. | ||
| The Trump administration has also moved to unseal grand jury testimony in the Epstein case. | ||
| There's going to be a story until at least that's resolved. | ||
| They're also doing this whole thing with Delane Maxwell, which is a terrible idea, but they're doing it nonetheless. | ||
| And it's unclear how long that process will extend. | ||
| So they've actually created a situation where there are multiple sort of reasons why this will not exit the news anytime soon. | ||
| This is Dorothy out of Baltimore. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
| You're on with Ankush Kadori. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I think he said he was a lawyer. | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| But I thought he said he was. | ||
| Yes, ma'am. | ||
| Former federal prosecutor, legal background. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, that's good. | |
| What I want to ask you is about these two things we're speaking about. | ||
| Epstein and I'm going to say the Obama situation that they brought up. | ||
| Now, I would say, okay, let's use this for example. | ||
| And you're a lawyer. | ||
| Tell me, if I incited a riot, though, I didn't do it. | ||
| I just told people to go up and tear up the Capitol or whatever. | ||
| And you heard me do that. | ||
| And that's not the only question. | ||
| So please don't hang up. | ||
| There's something to follow up to this. | ||
| Would I be responsible for any of that? | ||
| Got you, Dorothy. | ||
| And give me your second question just so we can get it on the table. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, my second question is this. | |
| We heard Trump say for Russia to hack Hillary Clinton's email. | ||
| They did it. | ||
| They did do that. | ||
| And today, you all cannot tell us, well, they're journalists, cannot tell us anything Trump ever said behind closed doors with the two Russian, what was his name, Sergio Lavro when he first got in. | ||
| Also, Helsinki, y'all can't even tell us what they said behind closed doors. | ||
| So I think y'all are not doing justice to that. | ||
| And you all know that the Russia thing, the government, our government always check out Russian agents who come to America. | ||
| We do. | ||
| And we found a lot of them was going into Trump's campaign. | ||
| And we may say colluded, but they were communicating. | ||
| Dorothy, got your points. | ||
| January 6th, Russia, Hillary's emails. | ||
| Yeah, you know, I got to say the fact pattern that your caller outlined sounds suspiciously like Trump's speech on January 6th, which resulted in a siege of the U.S. Capitol. | ||
| Would you be liable for inciting the insurrection? | ||
| Look, there is a statute that holds people liable for inciting insurrection. | ||
| There were multiple reasons why that was not a good fit for the facts on the ground. | ||
| I say that as someone who wrote for years, actually, including on January 6th itself, about how Trump's conduct, including around the call he made to Brad Raffensberger, deserved immediate and aggressive attention from criminal investigators after the Biden administration took over. | ||
| So that's how I guess I'll address that. | ||
| With respect to the questions about Trump's connections to Russia, I mean, look, I think the media did quite a good job, a pretty good job during the first Trump administration. | ||
| There were definitely missteps, including around the coverage of the Mueller investigation, which I think was over-torqued. | ||
| However, I'll just say, you know, it is not for lack of trying that the media is not able to get the sort of details that your caller wants. | ||
| The reason that the caller and other people know that we're missing that information, for instance, is precisely because the media told us that, that they haven't gotten all of the ins and outs. | ||
| Now, so I think that's what I have to say about that. | ||
| Not for lack of trying. | ||
| This comes up from the several books that have come out on the 2024 election. | ||
| I'm thinking the Jake Tapper book in particular on the media lack of trying to get the story about Joe Biden's cognitive capacity and ability to run another campaign. | ||
| Do you fault the media for lack of trying on that story? | ||
| Yeah, I do, actually. | ||
| I do. | ||
| I think that was a combination. | ||
| Obviously, I've not read Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's book, but I think we're all familiar with the thrust of it. | ||
| But yeah, I do think on the whole, the media did not perform well on that subject. | ||
| I mean, there were months of time beginning in 2023, maybe even 2022, where you could see visible deterioration. | ||
| And what you had was Democrats going out into the media calling it cheap fakes, and you had members of the Democratic Party saying he's great, and like we don't see any sort of missteps cognitively. | ||
| And this was opposed to what Americans thought and saw for themselves, which is why the polling did so poorly. | ||
| It's one last thing, which I think really aggravates me to this day, quite honestly, in terms of the media's coverage. | ||
| You may recall vaguely when Rob Herr, special counsel, issued a report on Biden's handling of classified documents, right? | ||
| There was a special counsel investigation released the report, and it contains some derogatory, or some references to Biden being elderly, well-meaning, not speaking well. | ||
| That report comes out the same day Biden goes and convenes his own impromptu press conference, at which I think he effectively confirmed Hearst's conclusion by stumbling and misspeaking and being kind of lashing out at MJ Lee, a CNN reporter at the time. | ||
| I was very struck by the lack of aggressive coverage of that event because I thought it was, again, staring us in the face. | ||
| But then you had a whole bunch of Democrats and too many figures in the media saying, well, let's just move on and move past this. | ||
| And it's just Republicans spinning this up. | ||
| And then it was months between that event and the June debate, in which this became impossible for anyone to deny. | ||
| So a caller may then call in and ask, why is there no lack of trying of coverage on a potential scandal surrounding Donald Trump? | ||
| And why was there a lack of trying during a potential scandal with Joe Biden? | ||
| Sorry, can you reconstruct that for me? | ||
| There's a lot to do. | ||
| Why does the media try when it comes to Trump and they didn't try when it came to Biden? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It's a good question. | ||
| You know, I wasn't covering, I'm not a White House reporter. | ||
| A columnist. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| With respect to Trump, I will just say on this issue, it is one that he and his administration created the expectations around, right? | ||
| So I don't think there's a situation where the media can be faulted for attending to this. | ||
| They created with their own public comments. | ||
| I mean, to this, I mean, I just say, like, you look at Vice President JD Vance on the campaign trail. | ||
| You've probably seen the clip many times now. | ||
| He's on a podcast with this guy, Theo Vaughan, and he said, let's release the Epstein list. | ||
| And he sort of chuckles about it. | ||
| I think it's a really appalling display on the part of a public official and wannabe public official to be chuckling about anything like this in public or privately. | ||
| That is just to say, though, that they created this mess for themselves. | ||
| To Sharpsburg, Georgia, Dick's Waiting Independent, just a few minutes here with Ankush Kudori. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I feel that the Epstein files is a smokescreen also. | |
| I wish they would release everything unredacted, and I would fire anybody that does any redaction. | ||
| But as far as a smokescreen, I think it's a smokescreen because of the insider trading that's going on amongst our elected officials in the amounts of money they're making and the Palestinian thing. | ||
| I believe it is a smokescreen, and the news media is falling for it, bookline, and sinker. | ||
| But I wish they would release all the files unredacted. | ||
| It is so foolish to redact 10-year-old files. | ||
| And what was it, 30 years ago, Trump was running with Epstein? | ||
| Who cares about that? | ||
| Ankush Kudori. | ||
| So look, I respect the notion that we want to put this to bed quickly, but again, I have to underscore this is a really bad idea, releasing all the files. | ||
| It's an extraordinary volume of information. | ||
| And just dumping this into the public domain, I think, is not a good idea. | ||
| It may be that they need to release something now in some fashion, or they may be forced to because of the political firestorm. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But under ordinary circumstances, the government would never do this. | ||
| And I just have to say, with respect to your color, the idea of producing them, releasing them without redactions is a terrible, terrible idea. | ||
| Terrible. | ||
| There are going to be references to victims. | ||
| There's going to be sensitive financial information. | ||
| There's going to be derogatory information that was never corroborated about people. | ||
| It's a terrible idea. | ||
| Just a few minutes left. | ||
| I did want to ask you about one of your other stories. | ||
| And again, you can find all of Ankush Kodori's columns for Politico Magazine, Politico.com. | ||
| This one is about Donald Trump's deals with law firms. | ||
| The fallout is growing on Trump's deals with law firms. | ||
| The deals are looking worse and worse for both Trump and the law firms. | ||
| Can you just explain why? | ||
| Well, you know, after Trump undertook this effort to sort of issue these series of executive orders punishing these law firms, there was a split. | ||
| There were firms that immediately settled, offered now close to a billion dollars in free pro bono services for the White House and the Trump administration. | ||
| And then there were firms that put up a fight, went to court. | ||
| All of those firms have prevailed so far. | ||
| The Trump administration lost quite quickly in all of those cases. | ||
| They're now appealing this, but the firms that stood up are looking pretty good at this point. | ||
| On the sort of other side of the ledger, the firms that entered into these settlements, they had a lot of overheated claims about what would happen if they didn't enter into those deals. | ||
| Brad Carp from Paul Weiss, which is a firm I used to work at, but Brad Karp is not a reputable person. | ||
| I'll just leave it at that. | ||
| He claimed that the firm was at existential risk and would go out of business if they did not give Trump what he wanted, which was $40 million. | ||
| Paul Weiss was the first firm to settle they never should have done it, has raised a host of legal issues, including whether or not the firm violated a variety of federal and state criminal laws. | ||
| So these deals look worse and worse and worse for the people that entered into them. | ||
| And I think particularly the legal profession and I guess I would say the political class or people who follow politics closely have tended to rally around the firms that fought back. | ||
| And I think they're feeling pretty good about where they've landed. | ||
| Time for just one or two more calls. | ||
| Kathleen's waiting in Williamsburg, Virginia line for Democrats. | ||
| You're on with Ankush Kadori. | ||
|
unidentified
|
As a matter of fact, Mr. Kedori has just hit upon it that the minute that's missing with Epstein hanging from the cell. | |
| And Trump and them, they can cover everything up. | ||
| And the young girls, the girls are now women, and they would be the only key to it. | ||
| But as he said, why traumatize them? | ||
| That's Kathleen in Virginia. | ||
| Are you inclined to believe that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered or that he committed suicide? | ||
| That he committed suicide. | ||
| I mean, I understand that there are questions. | ||
| Many people have questions about them, about it, but I think the notion of there having been like a murder of him in this context, it's very hard for me to take seriously, that it would somehow be covered up in this fashion so successfully. | ||
| When you talk about your concerns about releasing the Epstein files, and again, whatever they may be, the full files, is there a way to release certain information to answer questions like what the caller has? | ||
| And to can you release this kind of thing in parts without doing the damage that you're concerned about? | ||
| Yeah, so the answer is, in theory, yes, depending on the nature of the release. | ||
| I think the problem that the administration has now created for itself is I think they've burned all of their public credibility on this front, right? | ||
| So even if they're saying, okay, we're going to release this, that, or the other, even if they attempt to do what I told you I would like them to see, try to put this to bed publicly, there is going to be a group of people among the public who just don't darse them anymore or will figure, okay, well, we didn't get the whole thing because they didn't give us the whole thing. | ||
| Maybe they're covering up, so on and so forth. | ||
| So, yeah, again, this is a situation of their own making, and I think there's no really good way to get out of it at this point. | ||
| Last call, Doug, Falls Church, Virginia, Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| Hey there, thanks for taking my call. | ||
| I love C-SPAN. | ||
| I thought the host asked the guest a great question a few minutes ago about the difference in coverage that Biden got when it was starting to become clear that he's incapacitated versus Trump generally. | ||
| And I think Trump definitely warrants being pushed on, but I think the guests really sidestepped the question. | ||
| And to me, it's very clear that this is revealing the bias of the media generally. | ||
| And it's hard to refute it, doesn't it? | ||
| And I would like to hear your guests' thoughts on that. | ||
| Give you a final minute or so here, Ankush Kadori. | ||
| On Epstein, I mean, I just, Trump and his administration created this situation. | ||
| They spent years fostering and cultivating these conspiracy theories. | ||
| Not just Trump himself, and we've all seen by now the Fox News clip from last year, but again, the vice president, the FBI director, the FBI deputy director, and the attorney general. | ||
| I don't know what to tell folks who think that we shouldn't be covering this. | ||
| These are the most senior law enforcement officials in the country, and the president, and the vice president. | ||
| I'm very sorry it's inconvenient for folks that these are the people who did this to themselves, but these are the people who did this to themselves. | ||
| Politico.com is where you can go to see all of Ankush Kedori's columns. | ||
| He is a senior writer with Politico magazine. | ||
| Appreciate your time this morning. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| A little later on our program, its author and presidential historian Talmadge Boston will discuss President Biden's post-presidency and his legacy. | ||
| But first, some time for our open forum. | ||
| Any public policy issue, any political issue that you want to talk about, phone lines are yours to do so. | ||
| The numbers are on your screen. | ||
| Go ahead and start calling in now, and we will get to your calls right after the break. | ||
| In a word, Evan Osnos' latest book focuses on the subject of money. | ||
| His book is titled The Haves and the Have Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultra-Rich. | ||
| There are 10 essays which originally appeared in his home publication, The New Yorker. | ||
| The oldest one, Survival of the Richest, ran in 2017. | ||
| The newest, titled Land of Make-Believe, was published in 2024. | ||
| In his introduction, Evan Osnos writes that, quote, reporting in the enclaves of the very rich, Monte Carlo, Palm Beach, Palo Alto, and Hollywood is complicated. | ||
| It's not a world that relishes scrutiny. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Author Evan Osnos, with his book, The Haves and the Have Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultra-Rich. | |
| On this episode of Book Notes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb. | ||
| Book Notes Plus is available wherever you get your podcasts and on the C-SPAN Now app. | ||
| In a nation divided, a rare moment of unity. | ||
| 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. | ||
| This fall, Ceasefire, on the network that doesn't take sides, only on C-SPAN. | ||
| Nonfiction book lovers, C-SPAN has a number of podcasts for you. | ||
| Listen to best-selling nonfiction authors and influential interviewers on the Afterwords podcast and on QA. | ||
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| And BookNotes Plus episodes are weekly hour-long conversations that regularly feature fascinating authors of nonfiction books on a wide variety of topics. | ||
| Find all of our podcasts by downloading the free C-SPAN Now app or wherever you get your podcasts and on our website, c-span.org/slash podcasts. | ||
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| Thank you. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Here's where we are today on Capitol Hill. | ||
| The Senate is in at 3 p.m. Eastern. | ||
| You can watch live gavel to gavel coverage when they do come in on C-SPAN too. | ||
| The House, of course, is already on its August recess, but there is still plenty going on in Washington today. | ||
| This morning at 11 a.m. Eastern, the America 250 Commissioner, the Chair Rosie Rios and DC Mayor Muriel Bowser will discuss the launch of a new national project ahead of America's 250th birthday celebration. | ||
| The project is known as Our American Story to share personal stories from across the country. | ||
| Our coverage of that event, 11 a.m. on C-SPAN and c-span.org, and of course the free C-SPAN Now app. | ||
| 4.30 p.m. Eastern Time, Virginia Governor Glenn Young joins former Donald Trump Economic Advisor, several different economic advisors, but Stephen Moore, one of them, to discuss economic policy and a new report that maps out the movement of American wealth nationwide. | ||
| Again, 4.30 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN, C-SPAN.org, and the free C-SPANNOW app. | ||
| And one more for you, 6 p.m. Eastern, the Texas legislature currently considering a plan to redraw the state's congressional map. | ||
| Today, a Texas House committee holds a public hearing to discuss that project. | ||
| That's going to be here on C-SPAN, C-SPAN.org and the free C-SPANNOW app. | ||
| We are also waiting for President Trump to speak with reporters alongside UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer. | ||
| A joint press event is expected to happen today. | ||
| It was originally scheduled much earlier this morning. | ||
| The president was able to speak with reporters when he was joined by Kier Starmer in Scotland at Turnberry, but a formal press conference also expected. | ||
| And we can dip into that if it happens here in our open forum. | ||
| But in this half hour, we turn the phones over to you. | ||
| Any public policy issue, any political issue that you want to talk about, now is your time to do that. | ||
| This is Giovanni in Missouri, St. Louis, a Republican. | ||
| You're up first in open forum. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, how are you doing this morning? | |
| Doing well. | ||
| I am calling. | ||
| I wanted to talk to the other guy and ask him a question. | ||
| And since you have your computer right in front of you, in 2005 and 2007, the S Epstein files were sealed by an appointed Democrat judge. | ||
| Again, Rosenberg, an appointed by Obama, has also sealed the files to the indictments for the indictments. | ||
| So my question is this, and this is what I wanted to ask that guy. | ||
| You say about Trump wants to hide everything, but these are two Democrat judges that were put in a position by presidents, two Democrat presidents. | ||
| Why? | ||
| I don't understand why nobody's talking about this. | ||
| Why isn't this being written that these two Democrat judges will not release the indictments? | ||
| And so my question is to all of America. | ||
| You want to say Trump is trying to hide something, but if Rosenberg, the judge, had just sealed the Epstein files, if he was to release the indictments, we would know who's in the files. | ||
| That's Giovanni in Missouri. | ||
| This is Sarah in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Independent. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, thanks for taking my call. | |
| First time caller here. | ||
| Love C-STAN. | ||
| Thank you, John. | ||
| Thanks for everybody. | ||
| But I just want to follow up on the question that opened up about whether billionaires are a good thing. | ||
| I think it's kind of absurd. | ||
| Billionaires obviously have an outsized power on politics. | ||
| They manipulate society. | ||
| They are not the only individuals or the elite group that can organize, that can pool resources, that can invent, that can invest, that can create essential services. | ||
| People, individuals, communities, collectively, they deserve wealth. | ||
| Deserve to have a share in the power so that they can collectively pool their resources and do the labor that they find meaningful and create products and services and goods that the public actually wants and actually needs instead of us having to be constantly beholden to people like Elon Musk, who wants to push on us products and things like that we don't actually need tons of electric vehicles. | ||
| His vision is not the only important vision. | ||
| Same with Meta, any kind of Jeff Bezos. | ||
| They make their money off the back of these workers, and it's time that we need to distribute that wealth to the workers who are actually making that wealth happen in the first place so that they can have a say democratically in how to structure society and what kind of working conditions and living conditions they get. | ||
| So that's my comment. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| That's Sarah in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. | ||
| Let me head to Turnberry in Scotland. | ||
| President Trump Starmer just started their news conference. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Including images of starvation. | |
| And I think both of us know that we have to get to that ceasefire and we have to increase humanitarian aid in. | ||
| And thank you for what you've already been doing, are doing and are committed to because without you this would not be capable of resolution. | ||
| And I think that if we can work not just on the pressing issues of the ceasefire, but also on this issue of getting humanitarian aid in at volume, at speed, and then we've discussed a plan for what then happens afterwards, I think we can do our very best to alleviate what is an awful situation at the moment. | ||
| So thank you very much for the discussion we've had so far and the discussion we're about to continue on that really important issue. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But it's fantastic to be here. | |
| Thank you for your hospitality and to see this amazing golf course. | ||
| I'll invite you to a football ground at some stage. | ||
| We can exchange sports. | ||
| It's been great being with you and thank you very much, Mr. Prime Minister. | ||
| And you've done a fantastic job with regard to the trade deal. | ||
| You know, they wanted a trade deal here for years, many years, through many different terms of different people. | ||
| And you got it done. | ||
| So I want to congratulate you on that. | ||
| And it's a great deal for both. | ||
| It brings unity. | ||
| We didn't need unity, but it brings us even closer together, I think. | ||
| It's good for both parties. | ||
| We also discussed, obviously, Gaza. | ||
| And I think before we get to phase two, which is, you know, what's going to happen afterwards, we want to get the children fed. | ||
| We made a contribution a week ago of $60 million all going into food. | ||
| We only hope the food goes to the people that need it because so much, as you know, when you do something there, it gets taken by Hamas or somebody, but it gets taken. | ||
| And we're prepared to help. | ||
| We want to help. | ||
| It's a terrible situation. | ||
| The whole thing is terrible. | ||
| It's been bad for many years. | ||
| But it's great to hear you feel the same way that I do. | ||
| We have to help on a humanitarian basis before we do anything. | ||
| We have to get the kids fed. | ||
| So we've been sending in a lot of food. | ||
| A lot of the food that's been going there has been sent by the United States. | ||
| I spoke yesterday with the President of the European Union, Ursula, who was terrific also on the subject, and she's going to play a big role also in helping us. | ||
| So we have a good group of countries who are going to help with the humanitarian needs, which is food, sanitation, and some other things. | ||
| It's very difficult to deal with Hamas. | ||
| I said, you know, we got a tremendous amount of hostages out, but it would take place in drips and drabs. | ||
| You'd get 10, you'd get five, you get two, you'd get ten, twelve, we get twelve one time. | ||
| Many of them would come to the White House, and they were so thankful. | ||
| But I always said when you get down to the final 10 or 20, you're not going to be able to make a deal with these people because they use them as a shield. | ||
| And when they give them up, they no longer have a shield. | ||
| And the people of Israel feel so strongly about the hostages. | ||
| Some people would take a different view, but they feel so strongly about the hostages. | ||
| So that's an ongoing process. | ||
| Hamas has become very difficult to deal with in the last couple of days because they don't want to give up these last 20 because they think as long as we have them, they have them, they have protection. | ||
| But I don't think it can work that way. | ||
| So I'm speaking to PBNet and Yahoo, and we are coming up with various plans. | ||
| We're going to say it's a very difficult situation. | ||
| If they didn't have President Trump speaking at Turnbury in Scotland, if you want to continue to watch that live, you can see it over on C-SPAN too. | ||
| We're going to continue our discussion here in open forum as we hear from you and let you lead the discussion on the public policy and political issues that you want to talk about. | ||
| Again, phone lines for Democrats, Republicans, and Independents in open forum. | ||
| And again, you can watch President Trump live over on C-SPAN too. | ||
| Hope you come back here after he's finished if you do do that. | ||
| This is Kelly in Denison, Ohio, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, John. | |
| Hey, are you still there? | ||
| I'm here, Kelly. | ||
| What's on your mind? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, hey, I too remember October 7th is when I started calling back into you because I knew Trump was going to win the election. | |
| I've called several times and I've been right every time. | ||
| And I want to tell you, John, there's a big story going on between Obama and Biden that's not being covered. | ||
| I watch the NBC News at night. | ||
| And for the last two nights on ABC and NBC both, there's not been one mention of Obama and what the President of the United States and the Director of National Intelligence has charged him with. | ||
| They're not even covering it, John. | ||
| That makes them compliant to the story. | ||
| And I'm afraid you're kind of getting in on that situation too. | ||
| We should be talking about these things. | ||
| So, Kelly, when you say they've charged him with, you're not talking formal charges. | ||
| You're talking about the report that Tulsi Gabbard released and President Trump pointing to this report. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| That's big news, John. | ||
| And how can somebody like the President of the United States and the Director of National Intelligence accuse without evidence, John? | ||
| Answer me that. | ||
| That's Kelly in Ohio. | ||
| This is Tony in North Carolina, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| Thank you very much for having me on C-SPAN, which I really enjoyed the show. | ||
| I'd just like to say, you know, this thing trial and everything that went over like six years ago. | ||
| Six years, nobody asked any questions. | ||
| Nobody wanted to drop all the cases and the videos and whatever, the files and everything. | ||
| It seems like the only thing I've seen is it was on FaceTime. | ||
| It was on State of the Union. | ||
| It was on all the networks or things talking about this because there's nothing else that the Democrat side can talk about. | ||
| They have fell drastically on every platform. | ||
| And the only thing they're wanting is hopefully that there's something that ties Trump to some of this scandalous actions. | ||
| Nobody's asking for the Bill Cosby files to be released or anything. | ||
| Nobody's asking for the PD files to be released. | ||
| No, this is the only one everybody's asking about. | ||
| And there's a whole lot more going on in the United States than functional something like this. | ||
| Thank you very much for your time. | ||
| That's Tony in North Carolina. | ||
| More of your phone calls in just a few minutes. | ||
| But we want to spend some time now looking at President Trump's trip to Scotland and the week ahead at the White House. | ||
| To do that, we're joined on a hot morning here in Washington, D.C. from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue by Alex Gangetano of the Hill newspaper. | ||
| Ms. Gangetano, on President Trump's visit to Scotland, obviously that bilateral discussion going on now, what are you watching for as the president wraps up this five-day visit overseas? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so we know yesterday he was able to strike that trade deal with the European Union. | |
| That was a success that we know this White House will be touting a lot over the next week ahead of the August 1st deadline on Friday. | ||
| That sets 15% tariffs on the EU. | ||
| It also brought in $750 billion in investments for the U.S., something that the president said was the biggest trade deal he thinks he's ever seen. | ||
| So that was yesterday. | ||
| Now today with UK Prime Minister Starmer, a lot of the conversation is geared away from trade. | ||
| I think the White House wishes they were talking a little bit more about the economy and the president's tariff plan and not as much about this humanitarian crisis going on in Gaza. | ||
| That's a lot of the questions that we're seeing reporters have for the president is how are you responding to the images of children starving in Gaza and is there any daylight? | ||
| I think that's a lot of what we're looking for between the president and Israeli Prime Minister Nanyahu, between the president and Starmer or French President Macron, some of the European leaders over his handling of the situation in Gaza. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So it's been interesting to watch. | |
| It seems like the president just moments ago was saying food needs to get in. | ||
| What we're seeing there is terrible. | ||
| But you know, everyone's hanging on every word of how he will maybe put some pressure on Nanyahu. | ||
| A press conference in real time taking place on C-SPAN 2 for viewers. | ||
| Alex Gonjitano, you mentioned the trade deadline on Friday. | ||
| Should we expect more trade deals this week? | ||
| Are there other countries trying to rush to make a deal to beat that deadline? | ||
| Yeah, we know the major ones was Japan that the president was getting pretty impatient with and saying, I don't think we're going to be able to strike a deal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That came out late last week, setting 15% there. | |
| EU was another one that we were really watching at. | ||
| I mean, the fact that they were able to strike that deal really stops a trade war from happening with us and our European friends. | ||
| So that was a huge one. | ||
| Otherwise, a lot of the other Asian nations, some of the smaller ones, the president has been able to strike deals with the likes of Cambodia, Indonesia. | ||
| I think we're still watching to see what else he could do with some of the Asian countries. | ||
| Otherwise, they're in fairly good shape ahead of this deadline. | ||
| I mean, it was weeks, months in the making since April that a lot of people were pretty concerned if any trade deals would be struck. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And it seems like over the last 10 days or so, they really moved into pretty quick gear to get them done. | |
| Of course, the big question is: will they stick to that August 1st deadline? | ||
| The administration has moved that deadline many times. | ||
| I mentioned that the first one was in April. | ||
| So we'll see. | ||
| But it seems like so far, and we heard from the president yesterday saying August 1st is set. | ||
| You mentioned that the White House would likely rather be talking about trade deals in this press conference that's happening. | ||
| One topic that the president has been less interested in talking about, the Epstein files. | ||
| What are you hearing from the White House this week on what the White House is doing, what the President will do to keep this story from dominating the headlines for yet another week? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, just yesterday, the president was actually asked about Epstein again, right when he was announcing the EU trade deal. | |
| And he said, expressed his frustration that that's what people were asking about. | ||
| But people are still asking about it. | ||
| Of course, your callers are bringing it up. | ||
| I think the White House, of course, is in kind of distraction mode. | ||
| They tried, you know, with the files related to the 2016 election that DNI Director Tulsi Gabbard put out to see if people would focus on that instead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course, these trade deals, they want people to focus on, see them as a success for this administration ahead of the Friday deadline. | |
| And we'll see what else they put out to try to, you know, get the news cycle to move past Epstein, move past Maxwell. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know on Friday there was another meeting with top DOJ official Todd Blanche and Maxwell to talk about what she knows. | |
| We'll see if the White House wants to reveal anything from that meeting or if they're hoping that just the fact that there was a meeting will appease people and hopefully we all can move on from this narrative. | ||
| But so far, and I'm sure you're seeing it from your viewers, that people are not ready to move on from this and still have a lot of questions. | ||
| Well, what else are you watching for this week ahead at the White House? | ||
| What else is on the president's schedule once he gets back from Scotland? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so we know, you know, these are some big international focused meetings. | |
| So the president will have to turn back to the domestic agenda here when he gets back. | ||
| We're going to have a meeting. | ||
| Powell will be speaking on Wednesday, I think, so we can see if how maybe some of the pressure that he put on him from last week when he toured that Fed renovation, how that could impact what we're seeing over in the Fed, if interest rates would move at all, but also if he seems open to moving it earlier than the end of the year or so. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think it's a pretty big economic week here at the White House. | |
| And so they want to, you know, stay focused on news like that and see how positive they can move ahead ahead of these tariff deadlines with markets shaky after all of this and what they can do to stabilize that. | ||
| Alex Gangitano and her colleagues at The Hill cover it all at thehill.com. | ||
| I'll let you get back to that press conference. | ||
| They just started questions from reporters. | ||
| Viewers can watch that over on C-SPAN too. | ||
| And we thank you for joining us on Hot Morning from the White House. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Back to your phone calls. | ||
| This is Candace in Maine. | ||
| It's Auburn, Maine, Republican. | ||
| Candace, thanks for waiting. | ||
| Open forum. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, John. | |
| My husband and I always love when you host. | ||
| I haven't called in over a year. | ||
| I've just been in listening mode, I guess. | ||
| But the guest this morning really just kind of made me want to chime in when he swerved to the last question and wouldn't respond about media bias. | ||
| And he made it about Epstein again. | ||
| And I think we're seeing a lot of that. | ||
| It's always going back to Epstein. | ||
| And Epstein is a big story. | ||
| We need to get to the bottom of it, but I don't think it's what's impacting most of America. | ||
| I think media bias actually is a bigger story because it diminishes trust in the American people. | ||
| And it's, you know, it increases cynicism, apathy, and it's just really eroding away. | ||
| And it's hurting the Democrat Party, which we've seen with what, 33%, the Wall Street Journal says support the Democrat Party now. | ||
| And talking about the poll that came out this weekend. | ||
| Candace, do you think that the books that have focused on campaign 2024, the Jake Tapper book, put a focus on that, saying that the media missed the story about Joe Biden's cognitive abilities? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think it did. | |
| It certainly put a spotlight and it forced the media to confront it. | ||
| I also think because it was so little, so late, or at least so late, that it just fed into this cynicism of, okay, now they're going to get, you know, now they talk about it after Biden's out and make money. | ||
| So, you know, so the American electorate becomes more and more cynical and just fractured. | ||
| And I just think that's our biggest problem is how fractured we are. | ||
| And the media bias is just feeding into that. | ||
| And now this Epstein, Epstein, Epstein, all the time is kind of the new Russia, Russia, Russia. | ||
| I think we're seeing that. | ||
| And especially with your last guest, you know, he couldn't confront, he didn't know how to confront the media bias. | ||
| What do you say when you say, yeah, you know, the media didn't say anything about Biden for four years? | ||
| And what we need to confront these hard truths and then maybe heal. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know if we can heal. | ||
| Candace, we can. | ||
| Do you think that's a fair statement that the media didn't say anything about Biden for four years? | ||
| Because I imagine if I had a national political reporter, they would very much disagree with that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I hear what you're saying. | |
| I think some reporters did, like Alex Thompson, right? | ||
| He did, and he took a lot of heat because he did. | ||
| He actually said when he won his award at the White House correspondents dinner, and he was getting the award for his coverage of the White House, he said we missed this story, that we as a media missed that story. | ||
| He put himself among the group that missed the story. | ||
| Again, he was talking about Joe Biden's cognitive abilities at the end of his presidency. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I saw that. | |
| I watched that. | ||
| I watched the whole thing. | ||
| And I think I'm glad you brought that up because the correspondence dinner is a great indication of how, I mean, it was a shell of its former self. | ||
| They didn't have the comedian. | ||
| The president wasn't there. | ||
| You know, it's just, it was just like the media is not what it used to be. | ||
| And did they, and I know Alex Thompson says they missed it. | ||
| They didn't miss it. | ||
| They intentionally didn't cover what we all saw, including them. | ||
| We all saw what was going on. | ||
| And I probably overstated, maybe used a little hyperbole saying nobody covered it for four years. | ||
| Yeah, that's an overstatement. | ||
| However, the general beating drum of the media was not on it. | ||
| Candace, I got your point. | ||
| And I've got other folks waiting. | ||
| Candace, you can call once a month, not once a year, if you want to call once a month. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I'm back on it. | |
| Thanks. | ||
| Good to talk to you. | ||
| Karen in the Badger State in Franklin, Independence, you are next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, thank you for taking my call. | |
| I just want to mention a song, The Immigrant, by Neil Sadaka. | ||
| Art imitating life. | ||
| If people could just listen to that simple song, it didn't get much airplay in the 70s, The Immigrant. | ||
| And the second thing I would like to bring up is I think that people want the Epstein files, the names of the adult men and women who may be on adjudicated pedophiles, because society in America wants pedophiles to be on registries. | ||
| They want them to not live within a certain foot distance from elementary schools or schools. | ||
| They don't want them participating in Halloween. | ||
| Society, American society has, I think, generally agreed extra restrictions need to be placed on people who are known pedophiles. | ||
| I think people want the list just to maybe know who is not known at this point who may still be a risk to American society. | ||
| Vice Wonder, I think that's why people want the information. | ||
| I hope it's not just for salicious reasons or just out of curiosity, just for the sake of curiosity. | ||
| I would submit that Americans want information for other reasons. | ||
| Got your point. | ||
| That's Karen in Wisconsin. | ||
| Jess in Arkansas. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I have one question to ask. | ||
| How can our governor, Huckabee, and Trump act like they got so concerned about kids and stuff in other countries when in our own country, they're trying to starve our kids, cutting out snap and everything. | ||
| They're the devil. | ||
| That's Jess in Arkansas. | ||
| Time for one or two more phone calls here in Open Forum. | ||
| 202748-8000 for Democrats, 202748-8001 for Republicans. | ||
| Independents, it's 202-748-8002. | ||
| By the way, a story, we've mentioned a couple books about the 2024 election, and certainly we do plenty of nonfiction book coverage here on C-SPAN via book TV. | ||
| Here's a story about books on the front page of today's New York Times. | ||
| One man's reading list of 3,599 books can now be seen by all. | ||
| Once Dan Pelzer set his mind to reading something, he didn't put it down until he was finished the story's notes. | ||
| That's how Mr. Pelzer's children said he was able to read 3,599 books from 1962 when he first began jotting his reads down in his language class worksheets while stationed in Nepal with the Peace Corps to 2023 when his eyesight failed him and he could no longer read. | ||
| Mr. Pelzer died at 92 on July 1st in Columbus, Ohio. | ||
| The story says he had lived there for five decades. | ||
| At his funeral, his daughter, Marcy Pelzer, wanted to hand out his reading list to family and friends, but at more than 100 pages, it wasn't practical to print physical copies. | ||
| So Ms. Pelzer and her godson created what DanRead.com, which guests could access through a QR code. | ||
| And if you go to what-dan-red.com, you can check out Mr. Dan Pelzer's reading list. | ||
| It's handwritten, all 3,599 different books as listed by Mr. Pelzer over the course of decades. | ||
| You can flip through that list, see what he read, compare what you've read to it. | ||
| It's an interesting story in today's New York Times. | ||
| Back to your phone calls. | ||
| This is Bruce, Indiana Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| On the Hamas and Israel war, I never see any interviews by the news of Hamas officials and why they are doing what they're doing with the food, why they aren't trying to help get that done. | ||
| And also all I've heard from is that they say that they want to kill all the Jewish people. | ||
| So I'm wondering why the news doesn't interview them more and put out Why is there being helping not helping with this food distribution? | ||
| That's Bruce in Indiana, our last caller in open forum. | ||
| Stick around. | ||
| We've got about 40 minutes left this morning, and in that time, we'll be joined by author and presidential historian Talmadge Boston. | ||
| We'll discuss former President Joe Biden's post-presidency and his legacy. | ||
| Stick around for that discussion. | ||
| We will be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Honor the person who first showed you democracy in action and ignite America 250, C-SPAN's 18-month ad-free celebration of our nation's story. | |
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| In a word, Evan Osnos' latest book focuses on the subject of money. | ||
| His book is titled The Haves and the Have Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultra-Rich. | ||
| There are 10 essays which originally appeared in his home publication, The New Yorker. | ||
| The oldest one, Survival of the Richest, ran in 2017. | ||
| The newest, titled Land of Make-Believe, was published in 2024. | ||
| In his introduction, Evan Osnos writes that, quote, reporting in the enclaves of the very rich, Monte Carlo, Palm Beach, Palo Alto, and Hollywood is complicated. | ||
| It's not a world that relishes scrutiny. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Author Evan Osnos, with his book, The Haves and the Have Yachts, Dispatches on the Ultra-Rich. | |
| On this episode of BookNotes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb. | ||
| Book Notes Plus is available wherever you get your podcasts and on the C-SPAN Now app. | ||
| America marks 250 years, and C-SPAN is there to commemorate every moment, from the signing of the Declaration of Independence to the voices shaping our nation's future. | ||
| We bring you unprecedented all-platform coverage, exploring the stories, sights, and spirit that make up America. | ||
| Join us for remarkable coast-to-coast coverage, celebrating our nation's journey like no other network can. | ||
| America 250. | ||
| Over a year of historic moments, only on the C-SPAN networks. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Author, lawyer, and presidential historian Talmadge Boston joins us now via Zoom from Dallas. | ||
| This weekend, the Dallas Morning News ran his column focusing on the post-presidential legacy of Joe Biden. | ||
| Mr. Talmadge Boston, you write in that piece that in just the last few months, Joe Biden's legacy has moved from downward spiral to full-blown free fall. | ||
| Explain why. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, downward spiral had to do with 2024 and his decision in the first place to run for a second term when obviously he was not up to being able to run through an election, never mind, four more years. | |
| And then the delay in his withdrawal from the race meant there was no Democratic primary season. | ||
| And so there was no vetting of the candidates like you typically have in a primary season, which resulted in, of course, his vice president Kamala Harris, who turned out to be a weak candidate, lost every single swing state and thereby delivered the White House back to Donald Trump, which for Democrats anyway, was the worst possible news. | ||
| For years, they had sung Biden's praises as the man who defeated Donald Trump and got him out of the White House. | ||
| And now he was essentially singularly responsible for bringing him back. | ||
| So all that was bad. | ||
| But then in 2025, what's caused the freefall is now all the information coming up about the cover-up of his cognitive decline. | ||
| Most famously, Jake Tapper's in Alex Thompson's book, Original Sin, that goes into great detail about all that was known for quite some time, and that the White House was actually run by a Politburo, not the president. | ||
| None of these people had been elected. | ||
| None of these people had been confirmed. | ||
| Of course, run by a Politburo as well as Joe Biden and possibly even Hunter Biden, who obviously stayed very close to his father. | ||
| And now we have this situation with what's coming out about the granting of pardons that were all signed by Autopen, and people were pardoned whose names Biden didn't even know. | ||
| They were screened under some criteria. | ||
| And so it's reminiscent with all this that's coming out. | ||
| And now the House Oversight Committee is investigating the cover-up and the Autopen and some of Biden's key people, his Joe Biden's chief of staff and Joe Biden's doctor, have taken the Fifth Amendment rather than answer questions, which obviously they have a constitutional right to take the Fifth Amendment. | ||
| But it doesn't bode well for the American public's reaction to whether there really is something to this cover-up or not. | ||
| And so you put all these facts together. | ||
| And of course, the House Oversight Committee is continuing with its investigation. | ||
| It's going to call more witnesses. | ||
| very likely may call Jill Biden. | ||
| We'll see if Jill takes the Fifth Amendment in answering questions about her husband's presidency, which should be a first in American history. | ||
| So you put all these things together and it's made Joe Biden a pariah to the Democratic Party. | ||
| And he was never thought highly of by Republicans. | ||
| So he is now at this stage in his life, a man with essentially no supporters on either side of the aisle. | ||
| Don't we need more time before we can be talking about the legacy of a president that left office six months ago? | ||
| Is it too early to say that this is the direction that his legacy is headed? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, Harry Truman famously said that it takes 50 years for the dust to settle. | |
| And certainly Harry Truman was a beneficiary that over he left the White House with very low approval ratings and over time has his stature has risen and he's now considered a top 10 president. | ||
| And so yes, you need time to let the dust settle, see how these decisions that have been made by Biden during his presidency play out over the long term. | ||
| But I don't think you're going to get past this cognitive decline. | ||
| The most enduring image of Biden's presidency is going to be that June 27, 2024 debate with Trump and the follow-up interviews where he couldn't complete his sentences. | ||
| And so those facts are not going to change. | ||
| And it's like Woodrow Wilson having a stroke and his wife took over as president and she and his doctor tried to keep everybody out of the loop. | ||
| And so we basically had 15 months with a totally physically and mentally dysfunctional president. | ||
| This cover-up associated of the decline, which is detailed in the Tapper book, is reminiscent of Nixon's cover-up of the Watergate burglary. | ||
| So the facts of the cover-up are not going to go away. | ||
| The facts that we had a president who was not able to function well with more and more evidence coming out about that and exactly who was running the country in Biden's final year and with people taking the Fifth Amendment. | ||
| So these facts are not going to go away. | ||
| So in answer to your question, yes, over time, people will change their perceptions regarding certain things that Biden did. | ||
| But what I just covered, these facts are not going to go away. | ||
| When you say Biden is a president without a base of support right now, talking about Democrats blaming him and obviously Republicans who never had a great opinion of him if they were Donald Trump supporters. | ||
| The historical perspective here, is it unusual for a president who loses re-election to be sort of in this position? | ||
| Their own party is looking for somebody to blame for the loss, and they're going to get no help from the party that takes over from them. | ||
| Certainly that party would say all the problems are because of what happened over the past four years. | ||
| It's a person you can blame, at least for some amount of time, in a new presidency. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think the key to this is what his own party thinks. | |
| And I think most Democrats today are in a very negative, have a very negative attitude toward Biden's presidency and the results of it and what is being learned about his essentially turning over the reins of decision-making to the Politburo and his family. | ||
| And of course, they're blaming him for the 2024 election loss. | ||
| And so these are beyond atypical. | ||
| These are unique situations. | ||
| This is a unique situation. | ||
| I mean, yes, Jimmy Carter, one-term president, he loses in his bid for a second term, but people knew he was honest and always honest. | ||
| He was a man of great character. | ||
| He was a man who truly tried to do his best for the American people, was always honest, never ducked press conferences or interviews, which, of course, is part of the saga of the Biden cognitive decline, his unwillingness to do press conferences or interviews, particularly that last year. | ||
| So I do think this is a uniquely bad situation for a former president to be viewed as negatively by his own party supporters as Joe Biden is. | ||
| I mean, I made the point in the Dallas Morning News op-ed piece that they're not rallying around him to write seven-figure checks to support the Joe Biden presidential library. | ||
| I wonder whether they will ever be able to raise money. | ||
| A presidential library these days costs upwards of $300 million, $400 million. | ||
| You have to have lots of people willing to write seven-figure checks. | ||
| The burden is really on the president to call on his old supporters to write the big checks, and that isn't happening. | ||
| And the two people who have been charged with the responsibility for fundraising for the Biden library are two people who've already taken the Fifth Amendment in response to what was going on, Annie Tomasini and Mr. Bernal. | ||
| So we can't just pass over all of these things that we know and act like, oh, well, over time, it will all go away and people rethink it and they'll want to show their support for good old Joe. | ||
| I do not think that's going to happen. | ||
| Phone lines are open for viewers to get your thoughts on this topic. | ||
| We're talking about Joe Biden's presidential legacy. | ||
| Talmadge Boston, presidential historian, author, lawyer. | ||
| His column ran this weekend in the Dallas Morning News on this topic. | ||
| He's our guest. | ||
| You can chat with him on phone lines for Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans, 2027-8001. | ||
| Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| One more fact point here, Talmadge Boston, that you raise in your piece. | ||
| What do you read into Joe Biden's book deal as compared to other presidents? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, it looks to me like Hatchett, who's the publisher who signed into the contract, paying him one-sixth of what the Obamas got, but nonetheless, paying him $10 million. | |
| I can't imagine them making any money on that book. | ||
| I think they're going to lose most of it. | ||
| I mean, everybody knows Joe Biden, who couldn't complete his sentences in interviews, is now, quote, writing a book. | ||
| And so who's writing the book? | ||
| I mean, yes, presidents normally have collaborators who help them write it, but the president definitely is in charge and has a measure of control and so forth. | ||
| So there's the question of who's writing this book. | ||
| And then back to who's going to buy this book? | ||
| Are Democrats going to be standing in line to read some historical collaborator spin on the Joe Biden presidency? | ||
| Because they know Joe couldn't possibly write this book given his mental condition. | ||
| So I think this is going to be a huge loss for the publisher who signed the contract, even though it is substantially below what his predecessors have gotten. | ||
| I mean, Bill Clinton in 2004, more than 20 years ago, got $15 million. | ||
| So here we are 21 years later and stakes and cost of living and everything's going up in terms of book contract advances and so forth. | ||
| And Joe finally found a publisher. | ||
| But let's see when it comes out. | ||
| Let's see what the reception is. | ||
| Normally, when you sign a book contract, they're going to pay you more money in advance if you're willing to say certain controversial things. | ||
| So exactly what is Joe Biden going to say about his son Hunter, about the debate with Trump, about the interview with Stephanopoulos, about his going 12 months without holding cabinet meetings between June 23 and June 24, about the George Clooney reception where Clooney said he didn't even, Biden didn't even recognize him. | ||
| I mean, all these things that, of course, the media has been covering well. | ||
| And now here's CNN, which historically is not exactly a conservative station, is front and center on the story of the cognitive decline and the Pulit Bureau running the presidency. | ||
| And so I think the book is going to be a huge financial loss for the publisher. | ||
| You bring up Hunter Biden. | ||
| What do you make of his recent media tour, his criticism of the party not rallying around his father? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, Hunter Biden, I think, is a person who has zero credibility with every American person who has any sense at all. | |
| Everything he's done has been a total disaster for his father. | ||
| And so anybody who would be paying attention to what Hunter Biden has to say, you have to wonder what kind of Kool-Aid have they been drinking. | ||
| He's obviously angry. | ||
| I mean, as long as his father was president, as long as his father was in good standing with at least a lot of folks, he found ways to make money, whether it was off of his paintings, whether it was off of the business deals he did with people from China and other places around the world. | ||
| So he's obviously at a huge financial loss by reason of his father's free fall and popularity and loss of power. | ||
| So he's doing what you would expect, although to get on the air on a podcast and start blasting expletives right and left just confirms that this is a guy who's out of control, been out of control, should not be respected. | ||
| And hopefully he will leave the scene soon so we don't have to hear from him anymore. | ||
| How long does it usually take historically for a former president to take on the elder statesman role in a party? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, normally they go right into it. | |
| I mean, you know, or they certainly try to go back into it. | ||
| But I mean, you notice, I mean, here was President Joe Biden who, you know, during the last year and a half, two years, whatever, all he could do was read a teleprompter. | ||
| And that was the words that somebody else wrote. | ||
| And so for him now to open himself up to interviews and speaking without some canned teleprompter, that's not going to happen. | ||
| You don't lead a party or a country or anybody else by reading from a teleprompter. | ||
| And his predecessors have all had the horsepower to be able, until, for example, President Reagan, until, of course, he got Alzheimer's disease. | ||
| He lost his power to lead his party then. | ||
| But up until then, he was definitely a party leader. | ||
| George H.W. Bush played that role for a while. | ||
| Bill Clinton has played that role. | ||
| Barack Obama is playing that role. | ||
| So this is in the normal course of things. | ||
| And of course, Jimmy Carter, who had such an unsuccessful presidency, and yet over the time, he wrote all these best-selling books. | ||
| And by the time his funeral rolls around, everybody's singing his praises, regardless of what happened during his presidency. | ||
| But that was tied to Carter's integrity. | ||
| That was tied to Carter's good works and habitat for humanity and all these things. | ||
| Well, Joe Biden's not going to be able to do that. | ||
| I mean, he's not able to do much at all. | ||
| We saw that in the last part of his presidency and ever since his presidency. | ||
| Nobody's hiring him to give canned speeches. | ||
| And so he just, you know, he's 82 years old. | ||
| And the idea of being in his condition at that age, his capacity to lead anybody to do anything, I think is beyond doubtful. | ||
| Tommy Boston, our guest, presidential historian, author, including last year's How the Best Did It: Leadership Lessons from Our Top Presidents back in 2016. | ||
| It was cross-examining history. | ||
| A lawyer gets answers from the experts about our president's. | ||
| His column on Joe Biden's legacy ran this weekend in the Dallas Morning News. | ||
| And he is here to take your phone calls, including from Ted out of Las Vegas Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I was referring back to all these. | |
| I've got a question for all these prosperity book writers about Biden's cognitives. | ||
| How was he able to commit all these crimes, including stealing the election and all these other conspiracies about barisma and all these other GOP, you know, all these other crimes that he was able to commit in his bunker if he was so cognitive? | ||
| And also his next-to-last speech, it seemed like he had a very robust speech when he addressed the nation and Congress. | ||
| And nobody's talking about that positive speech. | ||
| How was he able to do that one? | ||
| And it seemed like the next-to-last speech is the one people are focusing on. | ||
| It seems like it was all rigged to me. | ||
| Well, in terms of you make mention of his crimes during his presidency, I have not made any assertion that he committed crimes during his presidency. | ||
| I know that there are some people who think that some of the things he did were criminal, and I'll leave that for others to draw conclusions on. | ||
| I think what he was saying is that the people who accuse him of masterminding crimes or conspiracies, if he was so cognitively declined as they say, how could he have masterminded those things? | ||
| I think that was the caller's point. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, okay. | |
| The bottom line answer to that is he didn't mastermind anything. | ||
| His wife and his son were there telling him what to do. | ||
| The Politburo, his Ron Clain and the others were telling him what to do and were doing. | ||
| And so he didn't mastermind anything. | ||
| That was why they were able to have such total control of him, as Jake Topper at Tapper and Alex Thompson point out in their book. | ||
| And the whole question, who was running the country, is something we still don't know the answer to. | ||
| And that's what the House Oversight Committee is investigating to figure out how these decisions were made. | ||
| What was the second question that Ted asked? | ||
| I'm not quite sure, but Ken is in Manassas, Virginia. | ||
| So let's go to Ken on the Republican line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Morning. | |
| Thank you very much, Sir. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Thank you very much, C-SPAN, for having me. | ||
| My question for you today is I wonder if you will put in your book about how the political party, the newspapers and such covered up Joe Biden's decline. | ||
| And if we look back years into his presidency, it was early on. | ||
| You could even accuse the bike ride as a prime example. | ||
| And I want to know if you will write that in your book. | ||
| Well, thank you for the question. | ||
| About a month ago, I wrote a column for the Dallas Morning News where my subject matter was the Jake Tapper-Alex Thompson book, which on the one hand, is a good read, an easy read, a fact-filled read. | ||
| But what they left out was their own complicity in the cover-up and the media cover-up. | ||
| And here was Jake Tapper, who was in 2020, blasting Laura Trump in an interview because she had the courage to say, hey, I think this guy's in cognitive decline. | ||
| And Jake Tapper accused her of simply making fun of his stutter and was very harsh and rude to her. | ||
| Then a couple years later, Biden, after a prominent Congress woman had died and he had put the flag at half mast at the White House and given this public tribute to her. | ||
| And then a couple of months later, here he's at a public function with Congressman and he says, where is she? | ||
| And then Tapper interviews him a week or two later and doesn't grill him on what were you thinking when you were asking where is the dead woman? | ||
| And then when the Wall Street Journal did its major investigation that led to its report that came out in early June 2024 about the bona fide cognitive decline and all the insiders who preferred to remain nameless, giving the details of it and Tapper criticized it. | ||
| And of course, then, you know, two or three weeks later, there was the debate. | ||
| So the CNN and Tapper certainly have a lot of complicity in the cover-up from a media standpoint. | ||
| I also did a column last November, Bob Woodward's book, which came out on the Biden presidency in October. | ||
| Of course, it came out after Biden had withdrawn and the debate meltdown. | ||
| But here's Bob Woodward saying that Joe Biden had a steady and purposeful presidency and sang the praises of his foreign policy. | ||
| Even in the book, he acknowledged that all of Woodward's sources from Russia said the only reason that they felt confident about invading Ukraine was because they knew that Biden was such a weak president as evidenced by the Afghanistan withdrawal. | ||
| And so here's Woodward acting like Biden was a good president when, and then, of course, after the debate meltdown, of course, his book's Going to print and ready to come out. | ||
| He acknowledges what everybody had to acknowledge, and that was it was a nuclear bomb meltdown, were his words, something to that effect. | ||
| So there is a story here, and that's presumably part of what the House Oversight Committee is going to be investigating. | ||
| Not only what were the people in the White House doing to cover it up, but why was there so much attention or so much ignored by so much of the media about what was obvious to the American people? | ||
| I mean, I wrote a column for the morning news in 2020 saying that if somebody who's over 75 years old says, I want to be president, they need a complete fiscal exam and the results made public to the public so that we can evaluate whether this person has the cognitive capacity to serve for four years. | ||
| Then in January 2024, I wrote a column for the morning news saying with each passing day, he's becoming more cognitively dysfunctional. | ||
| And so what I was seeing was what everybody was seeing, and yet so much of the media was pretending like it wasn't there. | ||
| So there's a real story there. | ||
| I think one of the most fascinating and fun incidents in the Tapper Thompson book is on the night of the June 27, 2024 debate, Rob Reiner, the television star and director, producer, all the, anyway, had a big party at his house in California for all kinds of Hollywood celebrities. | ||
| And one of the people who he invited to come to the party was Kamala Harris's husband, Doug Imhoff. | ||
| And so they're all eating and drinking and having a big time and thinking this debate's going to go great and old Joe's going to do great. | ||
| And then he collapses. | ||
| And all of a sudden, Rob Reiner just loses his temper and aims it at Doug Imhoff, who surely has been around Biden. | ||
| His wife's been around Biden. | ||
| Let's not pretend like this guy's in good shape. | ||
| And yet here we are and we're stuck with him as our presumptive nominee at that point. | ||
| And so there really is a big story here of the media cover-up as well as the White House insider cover-up. | ||
| And that's not going to go away. | ||
| Just like Watergate doesn't go away for Nixon and Monica Lewinsky doesn't go away for Bill Clinton. | ||
| These things don't go away. | ||
| To California, this is Barbara waiting on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Barbara, you're on with Talmudge Boston. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, it's what I wanted to say. | |
| You're right. | ||
| You guys have used Mr. Biden as a mirror for yourselves. | ||
| You guys have told so many lies. | ||
| You guys are going to get thrown down Satan's throat. | ||
| And Satan's probably a choke on you. | ||
| You know, you guys know, Donald Trump. | ||
| I don't know what you're talking about. | ||
| I'm a historian. | ||
| I write history books. | ||
| I don't cover the White House. | ||
| If you've read my book and you find one lie in it, I'd like for you to bring it to my attention. | ||
| I'm telling the truth about what I see and what I analyze from the facts that are really not in dispute. | ||
| And so I don't know what you're talking about, but I think you need to aim your comments at somebody else. | ||
| On your book from last year, How the Best Did It Leadership Lessons from Our Top Presidents? | ||
| Who are our top presidents? | ||
| What are the lessons? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, our eight greatest presidents, and this comes largely from the C-SPAN presidential ranking poll: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan. | |
| The only adjustment that I made to the C-SPAN presidential ranking poll, I think Harry Truman is overrated. | ||
| I pulled him out of the top eight. | ||
| I moved Jefferson and Kennedy and Reagan up a notch. | ||
| I think Truman is overrated. | ||
| He got us into Korea, had no idea how to get us out. | ||
| He had no idea how to deal with McCarthyism. | ||
| He gets lots of credit for bringing a prompt into World War II, which obviously we're glad he did. | ||
| But on the other hand, there was no Plan B. | ||
| It was a no-brainer decision. | ||
| Plan B was to invade Japan, which would have cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives. | ||
| So, anyway, those are my top eight presidents in my book. | ||
| Per president, I have a chapter on each president, an average of three leadership traits per president for a total of 24 leadership traits. | ||
| But they cover integrity. | ||
| They cover how to go across the aisle and work with people who you have issues with to build consensus. | ||
| They go to best practices in communication. | ||
| They go to magnanimity. | ||
| They go to promise keeping. | ||
| They go to addressing your public remarks to the better angels of our nature, the way John F. Kennedy did, using those magic words from Lincoln's first inaugural. | ||
| They go to not only the capacity to be optimistic, but to inspire optimism, the way Ronald Reagan did in bringing the country back after the Jimmy Carter presidency. | ||
| So those are just a sampling of the 24 leadership traits that are covered in the book. | ||
| What president do you think had the most integrity, and what president do you think was the best able to work with the other side of the aisle? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, the best integrity, I think there's a tie for first between George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. | |
| Washington, of course, famously could not tell a lie, and nobody ever accused Washington of dishonesty. | ||
| And Lincoln, of course, was honest, Abe, and the same with him. | ||
| So in terms of integrity, you're not going to beat Washington and Lincoln. | ||
| The second question was who best worked across the aisle, could get things done? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Across the aisle, I think the award goes to Thomas Jefferson. | |
| Jefferson obviously succeeded John Adams. | ||
| The country had been badly divided during Adams' presidency. | ||
| Adams was a Federalist. | ||
| Congress was controlled by the Federalist Party during his presidency. | ||
| Adams was notoriously thin-skinned, hated criticism. | ||
| And so Adams and the president and the Congress during his presidency passed what was called the Sedition Act that made it a crime punishable by incarceration for anyone to criticize Adams or any Federalist policy. | ||
| And so people were being thrown in jail for exercising their freedom of speech and freedom of the press rights. | ||
| Fortunately, the Sedition Act expired by its own terms at the end of Adams' presidency. | ||
| But that was the country that Jefferson was taking over, a country so at war with itself that people were throwing each other in jail just because of expressing their constitutional rights. | ||
| So Jefferson had this grand strategy, and it started with his first inaugural address, which is regarded as one of the great inaugural addresses. | ||
| He said, my fellow Americans, we are all federalists. | ||
| We are all Republicans, i.e., we are all Americans. | ||
| And we better start acting that way or this country is not going to make it. | ||
| And then over the course of his two terms, eight years, two to three times every week during the eight years, he would host dinners with people from 10 to 15 people, people from all beliefs and disagreements on political issues. | ||
| And he served them great wine and great food. | ||
| And he had one rule. | ||
| We're not going to talk about political hide-button issues. | ||
| We're going to talk about our families. | ||
| We're going to talk about what we do for a living. | ||
| We're going to talk about history, literature, music. | ||
| And we're going to have a good time. | ||
| And we're going to decide, even if we have political disagreements by day, we can be friends at night. | ||
| And the old adage: if somebody likes you, they're going to give you the benefit of the doubt. | ||
| And if they don't, they won't. | ||
| And that politics is all about relationships. | ||
| Well, no, he didn't break down all the walls of polarization in the first dinner, the third dinner, or the fifth dinner. | ||
| But if you keep a steady pace of working, working, working to bring those walls down and get people to realize we can have civil discourse. | ||
| We can have mutual respect. | ||
| And of course, Jefferson had a successful presidency. | ||
| In particular, obviously, the Louisiana Purchase was huge. | ||
| He's regarded as one of our eight great presidents. | ||
| And he was taking over a country that was totally at war with itself politically. | ||
| So he gets my award for being the best at being able to start building consensus, getting people on the same page, and moving America forward. | ||
| Lessons you can learn in how the best did it. | ||
| Leadership lessons from our top presidents, Talmudge Boston's book. | ||
| It's over his right shoulder there, and there it is on your screen. | ||
| It came out in 2024. | ||
| He's with us for less than 10 minutes. | ||
| This is Gene waiting in South Carolina, Republican. | ||
| Gene, thanks for waiting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
In particular, I. Gene, you're with us. | |
| Got to stick by your phone, Gene. | ||
| So we go to Otis in South Carolina as well. | ||
| It's Prosperity South Carolina, Independent. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I just wanted to know, does he think that Biden's cognitive abilities were caused from him contracting COVID? | |
| And because I remember when the 2020 debates between him and Trump, there's no way Trump beat him in any of the debates. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So he was on top of his game then. | |
| And I just believe that maybe the COVID was what helped him have a cognitive problem. | ||
| I don't pretend to be a doctor, and I'm not going to, therefore, weigh in and opine on whether Biden having contracted COVID was related to his cognitive decline. | ||
| I agree with you that in the 2020 presidential debates, Biden was better than Trump in the debates. | ||
| Trump was constantly interrupting, and it all was to his disadvantage. | ||
| But I haven't heard any doctor say that the reason Biden lost his cognitive capability was because he contracted COVID because we've got a whole country full of people who contracted COVID. | ||
| And hopefully most of us are not suffering cognitive decline. | ||
| Some what-if history here on legacies. | ||
| What if Joe Biden had said, I'm going to be a one-term president, stuck with that promise, stepped aside, and a primary happens. | ||
| What would you be saying about his legacy in place in the party today if that had happened, regardless of whether whatever Democrat emerged, be it Kamala Harris or somebody else, had won or lost? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You mentioned the column I wrote that was in yesterday's Johns Morning News. | |
| I said his decline and his legacy is self-inflicted. | ||
| He's done it to himself. | ||
| If he had, toward the end of his one and only term, said, you know what, I was elected as a transition president for one term. | ||
| I've done the best I could. | ||
| We've done some good things. | ||
| We've restored some improved relations with our international allies. | ||
| We've gotten some legislation passed helping the infrastructure. | ||
| I did the best I could. | ||
| He'd be in the Jimmy Carter to maybe better than Jimmy Carter class. | ||
| But of course, at the same time, when we're talking about improving our relationship with our allies, he also, because of his Afghanistan withdrawal, inspired Putin to invade Ukraine. | ||
| He also has a mixed record on Israel. | ||
| So his foreign policy is up in the air. | ||
| On his economic policy, obviously we had the highest inflation that we'd had in over 30 years. | ||
| We had a substantial increase in the federal deficit. | ||
| So his economic policies are not exactly A-plus by any means. | ||
| They're, you know, just a mixed bag. | ||
| And then, of course, we have the extended period during which we had an open border and all that came with that. | ||
| And then states like Texas, where I live, and others, saying, we don't know what to do with these people. | ||
| And if they're cities that call themselves sanctuary cities, we're going to let you have it. | ||
| You want to be a sanctuary here? | ||
| Have all these illegal immigrants who are just running across the border under President Biden's watch. | ||
| So I think he has a mixed record, but I do think that people would say that he gave it his best shot. | ||
| He wasn't wildly successful, but he had some successes. | ||
| And he saved the Democratic Party from in 1920 from Bernie Sanders and presented a moderate candidate who could be elected and defeated from the Democratic standpoint, Donald Trump, who they didn't like at all. | ||
| But now, because of what's happened in his going for a second term, he's brought Trump back. | ||
| And then we have everything we've been talking about on the cover-up and who was making the decisions and so forth. | ||
| And so that's the point of my column. | ||
| That's the point of what I'm saying this morning: the free fall damage to his legacy is self-inflicted by him, his family, and his insiders who did not have any. | ||
| And people like Maureen Dowd a year ago were saying he's running for a second term because he's power crazy, not because he cares about what's in the best interest for America. | ||
| He knows he can't finish a sentence. | ||
| He knows he can't speak without a teleprompter. | ||
| And yet here he claims, and his wife's claiming, and his insiders are claiming he's going to be good for another four years. | ||
| He failed to put the country first. | ||
| And that's something that, whether we're talking about now or 50 years from now, is an inescapable fact. | ||
| Time for one more call. | ||
| Van has been waiting in the volunteer state. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't believe he failed. | |
| He asked every question in the debate. | ||
| Trump didn't ask about one single question, yet they questioned his Senate. | ||
| So, Van, you're saying that you think Joe Biden did better in the debate than he's given credit for. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Well, Van, with all due respect, you are in a substantial minority. | ||
| All the Democratic leaders thought he was a colossal failure, train wreck in the debate. | ||
| Thomas Friedman, Bob Woodward, George Clooney, all the powerhouse media and big money donors insisted that he drop out because he was such a horrible failure in the debate. | ||
| So you are certainly entitled to your opinion on what you remember about that debate, but that's not the way the Democrats remember it. | ||
| That's why they forced him out. | ||
| And that's certainly not the way that the rest of the country remembers it, but you're entitled to your opinion. | ||
| If you want to read Talmadge Boston's opinions in the Dallas Morning News and this column in particular, the headline, Biden's Legacy is All But Ruined. | ||
| It's available at the website for the Dallas Morning News. | ||
| Talmadge Boston is the author of the book, How the Best Did It: Leadership Lessons from Our Top Presidents. | ||
| And we appreciate your time this morning on the Washington Journal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
John, it's great to be on your show. | |
| And that's going to do it for us this morning. | ||
| A reminder that the Senate is in at 3 p.m. Eastern. | ||
| You can watch live on C-SPAN 2. | ||
| We'll, of course, be back here on the Washington Journal tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. Eastern, 4 a.m. Pacific. | ||
| In the meantime, have a great Monday. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This morning, America 250 Commission Chair Rosie Rios and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser discussed the launch of a new national project in advance of America's 250th birthday celebration known as Our American Story. | |
| to share personal stories from across the country. | ||
| Watch our coverage of the America 250 event live at 11 a.m. Eastern on C-SPAN. | ||
| C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app or online at c-SPAN.org. | ||
| The U.S. Senate returns later today at 3 p.m. Eastern. | ||
| Senators are expected to vote tonight at 8 Eastern to confirm David Wright to a new five-year term on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. | ||
| President Trump plans to appoint him as chair of the NRC if he's confirmed. | ||
| Lawmakers will also vote to advance Earl Matthews' nomination to be general counsel for the Defense Department. | ||
| Later in the week, more Senate votes on nominations, including Susan Menares to serve as CDC Director, and work is expected to continue on the first 2026 federal spending bill, funding for military construction projects, and the Veterans Department. | ||
| Watch live coverage of the House on C-SPAN, see the Senate on C-SPAN 2, and all of our congressional coverage is available on our free video app, C-SPANNOW, and online at c-span.org. | ||
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| Agriculture is the main life in Sussex County, and I'm very proud of that. | ||
| I felt like we were being left behind. |