| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| All right, Angela in Chicago with her opinion on the 20th day of the government shutdown. | ||
| Coming up here on the C-SPAN networks right here on C-SPAN at 3 p.m. Eastern Time, we're going to hear from the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Danine Pirow. | ||
| She's going to be holding a news conference at 3 p.m. and you can watch it live here on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our free video mobile app or online at c-span.org. | ||
| Also, today we will be covering the president with Speaker Mike Johnson at the White House when they both welcome the Louisiana State University basketball team to mark their 2025 national championship. | ||
| And that will have, we will have live coverage of that at on C-SPAN 3, C-SPANNOW and c-span.org. | ||
| And then at 4.30 p.m. Eastern Time, we're going to hear live from the Democratic leader in the House, Hakeem Jeffries of New York. | ||
| He'll talk about the shutdown on the 20th day here. | ||
| And you can watch it right here on C-SPAN, C-SPANNOW or C-SPAN.org. | ||
| Follow along on the government shutdown story on all of our networks. | ||
| And of course, online at c-span.org and that free video mobile app, C-SPANNow. | ||
| We're going to bring you to earlier this morning a conversation from the Washington Journal. | ||
| Joining us now to discuss Trump administration foreign and economic policies is Batia Angar Sargon. | ||
| She is an author and journalist. | ||
| Batia, thank you so much for being back on the program with us. | ||
| Thank you so much for having me. | ||
| It's such an honor to be here with you and your viewers. | ||
| We'll start with an op-ed, an opinion piece you had in the New York Post recently, the headline, How Trump Worked a Middle East Miracle with His Two-Sided American First Doctrine. | ||
| Explain what you mean. | ||
| You talk about President Trump's recent actions in brokering this peace deal between Hamas and Israel, and you say it's thanks to his tariff policy that he put in place. | ||
| Explain what you mean. | ||
| So prior to President Trump, our foreign policy, honestly, both from Republicans and from Democrats, had this view that we should be sort of exporting our democracy to countries that didn't have it on the view that we had shared values with them. | ||
| Trump really does not believe in that. | ||
| He doesn't believe in shared values. | ||
| He believes in sharing value. | ||
| He doesn't believe in exporting democracy. | ||
| He believes in exporting exports. | ||
| And he doesn't believe in this sort of mass fleecing of the American working class that was represented by this foreign policy that involved sending trillions of dollars and the lives of our soldiers in order to build up these fictional democracies in other countries. | ||
| What Trump wants is shared interests. | ||
| So there's three steps to the president's dealmaking, as far as I can tell. | ||
| The first is you ignore the experts. | ||
| And the second is you align the interests of the competing sides. | ||
| And the third step is you play the long game, you take the win when you can, and don't be afraid to pivot. | ||
| And where the tariffs and the economic policy come into that is in step two. | ||
| So let's take this Middle East deal, this ceasefire that he pulled off. | ||
| Truly miraculous. | ||
| He stopped the bombing campaign in Gaza and got those 20 live hostages home. | ||
| First, he ignored the experts who said the only thing the Arabs will be satisfied with is the destruction of Israel. | ||
| Nonsense, the president said. | ||
| Everybody wants things. | ||
| He went on this big Middle East tour in the beginning of the administration to Qatar and Saudi Arabia and the UAE. | ||
| And what he did when he was there was he attracted trillions of dollars in investment from those moderate Muslim countries back into the United States, intertwining our economy with theirs. | ||
| And he was then able to say to them, look, our interests are aligned. | ||
| So despite the fact that I, President Trump, am very pro-Israel and proud of that, I am not going to betray you because I'm on your side as well. | ||
| Look, our economies are intertwined. | ||
| And that was how he got both sides to align their interests, to see their interests as one with the United States. | ||
| And the tariffs were crucial because that investment from these Muslim countries came in the form of investment in our industrial base in AI, in the aerospace. | ||
| And that investment in American manufacturing is 100% the result of the tariff regime to where the president is saying, I'm going to make it costly to offshore manufacturing and I'm going to make it beneficial to reshore manufacturing. | ||
| So you see how the economic policy and the foreign policy are two sides of the same coin. | ||
| I want to read a quote from that opinion piece. | ||
| It says, while American foreign policy throughout the post-war era has relied on endless extensions of our military might and our national wealth, Trump's stems from a relationship he built to profit the American people, specifically our working class. | ||
| The working class is a subject that you have written about. | ||
| We can see the book there behind you. | ||
| It's titled The Second Class, How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women. | ||
| Remind us what it means to be working class. | ||
| So in the book, the way I define working class is a person whose job does not rely on skills that they would have acquired through a college education, but who's been locked out of the top 20%. | ||
| So people who work full-time with their hands or in any job where you're not required to have that college degree, and yet you're still sort of cut out of having that middle-class standard of living, that stability that we all look for when we're pursuing the American dream. | ||
| And continue to explain how President Trump's foreign policies impact those working class Americans you just described. | ||
| So first of all, one of the key promises he made during both campaigns, but was extremely important in the second campaign, was no more foreign wars, no more foreign entanglements. | ||
| We're not going to be sending American troops to fight other people's wars. | ||
| And he's really kept to that, even in places where we did get involved in something like Iran's nuclear capabilities, very important to President Trump to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon. | ||
| He did it in a way that ensured that our soldiers were protected. | ||
| We're not sending billions and trillions of dollars to build up nations across the globe. | ||
| We're going to put American interests first and foremost. | ||
| So that was the first thing, and that is extremely important to working class Americans and to young Americans who are really sick of foreign aid. | ||
| They feel, I can't afford to buy a home. | ||
| Why are we sending billions of dollars across the globe? | ||
| It's a very interesting argument, a very important one for anybody who wants to be competitive politically to pay attention to. | ||
| So that's on the foreign policy front. | ||
| It's more about what we're not doing than what we are doing. | ||
| Although, of course, when it comes to terrorist threats to the United States, the president is very hawkish. | ||
| On the economic front, there are two main things that he's done. | ||
| The first is controlling the border and the mass deportations, controlling the supply of labor, the amount of people who are competing for jobs in working class industries. | ||
| If you get that number down by taking illegal workers out of the workforce, American workers, American citizens can then ask for more money because, of course, it's supply and demand. | ||
| The fewer workers there are, the more money they can ask for. | ||
| So this is already starting to impact the wages of working class Americans, which have started to go up. | ||
| But the tariff regime is equally important. | ||
| Before we had this tariff regime, you know, it was really unfair. | ||
| Foreign countries had tariffs on us, but we had no tariffs on them. | ||
| And so what happened was you saw this mass offshoring of manufacturing into other countries to build up their middle class because manufacturing jobs are really good jobs. | ||
| And these corporations would just say, well, if we have to pay an American, you know, $100,000 a year and benefits, why don't we just go to China where we can employ, you know, at best Chinese workers for $3 an hour, but at worst, you know, Uyghur slaves for $0 an hour. | ||
| We had this mass offshoring of these great jobs, 5 million good manufacturing jobs, which historically had given American workers a middle-class standard of living. | ||
| And what the president did with the tariffs was he said, okay, you want to manufacture elsewhere? | ||
| That's your right. | ||
| You know, this is capitalism, but it's going to cost you. | ||
| He put a tariff on those companies. | ||
| It's a tax on corporations, not on consumers, because it's corporations who've been paying it. | ||
| If they want to manufacture elsewhere, so we're seeing a lot of manufacturing coming back. | ||
| We've brought in $150 billion into this country in tariff revenue, and the vast majority of that has been paid by corporations and by foreign governments like China, because of course there's no free market in China. | ||
| Batia Angar Sargon is our guest for our discussion on the Trump administration's foreign and economic policies. | ||
| If you have a question or comment for her, you can start calling in now the lines, Republicans 202-748-8001, Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| Bhatia, I want to go back to what you were saying about tariffs. | ||
| You were saying that it's corporations who have been the ones taking a hit. | ||
| Economists will argue that tariffs tend to hit low-income families the hardest. | ||
| And the budget lab at Yale, analysis from them last month, found that President Trump's tariffs will likely increase the number of Americans living in poverty by 875,000 in 2026. | ||
| Your response to that. | ||
| It's funny how it's always in the future tense. | ||
| So on April 2nd, on Liberation Day, when he imposed the tariffs, all of the economists, all of them said, these are going to get paid by the American consumer $4,000 per family by the end of the year. | ||
| Okay, well, it's been eight months. | ||
| You know, that didn't happen. | ||
| And so they're always projecting the cost that's going to be paid by the American consumer. | ||
| They're pushing it down the line because they keep predicting it's going to happen and it keeps not happening. | ||
| There is no inflation from the tariffs. | ||
| None of that materialized. | ||
| We do know that most of it has been paid by corporations. | ||
| And every time Walmart threatens to raise prices, President Trump picks up the phone and they don't raise the prices. | ||
| So the predictions of economists, they keep getting things wrong. | ||
| And I know that it's very hard. | ||
| It sounds very arrogant of me. | ||
| I mean, I'm not an economist, right? | ||
| But I pay very close attention to what they say. | ||
| And you just keep looking at things and it doesn't show up. | ||
| It doesn't materialize. | ||
| Of course, it's possible I'm wrong. | ||
| And if next year there are 800,000 more families living in poverty, I will, of course, admit that I was wrong. | ||
| And I will turn on the tariff regime and I will say we made a mistake. | ||
| But for now, we're seeing huge benefits. | ||
| We're seeing working class wages rising, just as we're seeing that from meatpacking plants where there are raids and they deport illegal workers. | ||
| And the next day, that waiting room is full of Americans applying for those jobs. | ||
| I mean, this is a re-Americanization of the workforce in this country. | ||
| And that is something that everybody should applaud, whether you're a Democrat or a Republican. | ||
| I'm not sure if you would agree or not. | ||
| I know you spoke with a lot of people for your book, but when it comes to a group that may be considered working class, that's farmers. | ||
| And this is a headline from Politico: Trump promised farmers a bailout. | ||
| Time is running out. | ||
| It says that Trump, President Trump, promised a bailout for farmers reeling from the effects of his tariffs and the high cost for fertilizer and other equipment. | ||
| It looks like they could possibly use some of the tariff revenue to send funds to those farmers who are impacted by that. | ||
| Is that the right thing to do with those funds? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Yeah, I would totally support that. | ||
| Our farmers are extremely important. | ||
| And also, you know, what we're asking of farmers is a lot because we're, you know, some massive farms, not the family farms, which rely on citizen American labor, but some of the larger farms do rely on illegal labor. | ||
| And what we're saying to them is: look, you have to invest in the American workforce. | ||
| So I totally support that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We have callers waiting to talk with you. | ||
| We'll start with Catherine, who's calling from Rhode Island on the line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Catherine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, how are you? | |
| We're doing well, Catherine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I just want to want you to explain how your guests to explain how the tariffs are not going to affect the consumer. | |
| I'm in the manufacturing industry. | ||
| I already see prices from the corporations being put, like raising their prices to the retailers, which the retailers are going to raise their prices. | ||
| They already are raising their prices. | ||
| And as President Trump can pick up the phone and say, oh, no, no, don't do that, it will happen because they're not going to eat those costs for very long. | ||
| Thank you so much for the question, Catherine. | ||
| So people have been saying that from the beginning. | ||
| And obviously, one understands why somebody would say that. | ||
| Well, why would these corporations just eat it, right? | ||
| The thing to remember is that there was a phenomenon called greedflation during the pandemic, to where in the beginning of the pandemic, the supply chains broke down. | ||
| And corporations and companies couldn't get access to their goods. | ||
| So the cost of those goods went up by 10-15%. | ||
| And then the supply chains mended. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| A lot of those corporations did not bring the prices down. | ||
| They didn't then say, oh, this additional cost we had incurred due to a broken supply chain is now gone, therefore we'll bring prices back down. | ||
| So prices were already artificially high and they knew that. | ||
| And what is so funny to me is that the Democrats used to be the ones railing against greedflation and saying, this is terrible. | ||
| We should put a tax on corporations and companies to bring down the price because it is so unfair what they're doing to the American consumer. | ||
| And that's exactly what Donald Trump did. | ||
| And I think that's why they're willing to eat 10 to 15 percent of those tariffs. | ||
| When it gets above 20 percent, that's when they will start putting it on to consumers, I believe. | ||
| But for now, the vast majority of the tariffs are under 20 percent, and they are still being eaten by those corporations. | ||
| Inflation is, I think, below 1% from where it was last year. | ||
| The price of food has fluctuated, but the general trend is downwards. | ||
| The price of energy is down. | ||
| Gas and electricity and all of the things that make other products expensive is down by about 11% year over year. | ||
| And I think that is where these corporations have a little wiggle room to eat these tariffs. | ||
| So that's what we're seeing. | ||
| Now, again, Catherine, you could be right. | ||
| It could be that in six months, I will be proven totally wrong. | ||
| The cost of everything will be up by 20%. | ||
| The corporations will give up on paying the tariffs. | ||
| But I think for now, they're playing ball because we all understand that the situation we had in which we were reliant on China for everything, including things that have deep, deep national security interests at stake, was totally unsustainable. | ||
| I do think we're seeing a new noblesse oblige, if you will, coming out of the elites around what they owe their working class neighbors. | ||
| But again, I could be wrong, and I promise you I will admit it if I was. | ||
| Let's hear from Ray, who's calling from New Hampshire on the line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Ray. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| I really like to say I really enjoyed your book, Second Class. | ||
| One of the things you mentioned in there, and I've heard you talk about this before, was how President Obama cut back on trade schools. | ||
| I just like to say I know this young man who just graduated high school and he's going to school to become a welder. | ||
| And I was telling him just the other day, I saw a report where the U.S. Navy is desperate to find enough welders because of the big shipbuilding boom that's going on for subs and service ships and things like that. | ||
| And they were saying, I think it was around 100,000 plus welders that just the Navy is going to need for the shipyards, repair facilities, things like that. | ||
| And here in New England, we have Electric Boat down in Grant, Connecticut. | ||
| We have Baft Ironworks up in Maine. | ||
| They built destroyers. | ||
| And then Portsmouth, New Hampshire is the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, which repairs subs. | ||
| So if you could, you know, again, how Gen Z is looking at more trade school than college, and how, what exactly did President Obama do to cut back on the trade schools? | ||
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| Thank you so much for that. | ||
| Yeah, he defunded vocational training in high school. | ||
| And the idea was: well, everyone will just go to college. | ||
| And what that ended up doing is sending the message to a generation of young men that if you are not built to sit for long periods of time quietly taking notes and listening to authority, which many young men are not, then you're nothing. | ||
| Because when we had vocational training in high schools, it signaled to them: look, everybody has their role to play and their God-given talents. | ||
| And you can make it into the American dream based on what makes you unique. | ||
| And that was defunded, and that avenue was taken away. | ||
| And instead, we had this view that if you don't, if you're not academic in nature and you're not good at algebra and Shakespeare, then you're nothing. | ||
| And you don't deserve the American dream. | ||
| It was a horrible, horrible thing to do. | ||
| I personally believe a lot of the deaths of despair, drug epidemic, and overdoses, a lot of that is tied to this crisis in self-esteem around working class people, working class life, just the absolute, you know, murdering the romance of working class life and the dignity that young men in particular get from being providers and working with their hands for a living. | ||
| And you're so right. | ||
| We are so back on that front. | ||
| That is something that Trump telegraphs a lot in the way that he talks about work. | ||
| And it's so significant to young men to where they do feel, I think, that there is that dignity coming back to that working-class life. | ||
| And I would love to see the administration invest in vocational training in high schools and vocational training secondary school. |