| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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This is outrageous. | |
| This is a kangaroo quarrel. | ||
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| 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, 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 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 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, 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 are willing to eat 10 to 15 percent of those tariffs. | ||
| When it gets above 20 percent, that's when they will start putting it onto 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'd 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 build 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. | ||
| They say they're going to do that. | ||
| And I really hope that they do because it's just so important. | ||
| And it's not just important economically, which it is, it's important spiritually and socially. | ||
| And in terms of, you know, there's a marriage crisis where young people aren't getting married and children are being born out of wedlock, which is a huge predictor for downward mobility for children. | ||
| Giving young men that feeling that they can be a provider, that's really, really important for our nation as a whole. | ||
| Bhatia, I want to share this headline. | ||
| I know you can't see my screen, but it says, it's too late to extend ACA subsidies without major disruptions. | ||
| Some state and lawmakers, some states and lawmakers say we are now 20 days into a government shutdown. | ||
| At the heart of the matter are those ACA subsidies that help low and middle income Americans afford health care. | ||
| If they aren't available, how is that going to affect working Americans? | ||
| It's going to be terrible if they're not available. | ||
| I do think the shutdown is going to end soon, and I do think they will extend those subsidies. | ||
| But there's a much bigger problem looming, which is that, you know, millions of Americans have terrible health care. | ||
| And I'm not even talking about the ones who have, you know, who don't, the health care that a lot of Americans have through their work is just terrible health care. | ||
| And that's just unacceptable. | ||
| And if the GOP really wants to be the party of the working class, they got the majority of working class voters in 2024. | ||
| If they want to keep them, they have to have a plan for that. | ||
| And right now they really don't. | ||
| If they don't like Obamacare, they need something better. | ||
| Because you can't just say to millions of Americans, like, oh, we're just going to get rid of the access you have, whether it's good or not. | ||
| And by the way, I'm not talking about poor people because the poorest Americans have access to Medicaid, which is the Cadillac of health insurances. | ||
| It's the working class and the middle class who get squeezed with, you know, $5,000 deductibles. | ||
| Do you know what that is to a person who makes $6,000 a year? | ||
| It's disgusting. | ||
| I mean, I don't know why a company that has a billion dollars in profit and revenue should be allowed to offer its workers health care that has a $5,000 deductible. | ||
| It's just so wrong. | ||
| It's godless. | ||
| It's bad politics. | ||
| So I really think that if the Republicans want to remain competitive, there's only one issue that the Democrats still have on them, and it's health care. | ||
| Chris is calling from Manhattan, Kansas, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Chris. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| So my question was, how much does you make as far as like salary or whatever? | ||
| And what's your health insurance? | ||
| What do you have right now? | ||
| Me personally? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, you personally. | |
| I just got a new job, and so I'm still working it out. | ||
| Is the honest truth? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What was that? | |
| What is that salary? | ||
| What do you make on average? | ||
| I don't know that I'm comfortable sharing that, but I appreciate the question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You are. | |
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| What about where did you grow up? | ||
| Where did you grow up? | ||
| Are you more comfortable with sharing that as well? | ||
| Chris, what are you trying to get Badia to answer? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What I'm trying to say is, I grew up in the Midwest. | |
| I've been with working class Americans my entire life. | ||
| I've held wrenches. | ||
| I've been in dirt. | ||
| I've been in mud. | ||
| Everything that you could imagine what a working class America would be. | ||
| Now, you say that, you know, as far as trade schools go and stuff like that, they cut that out. | ||
| Well, guess what? | ||
| They cut that out because they are now certifying it in different community colleges and different programs within the college community. | ||
| Well, you know, in that kind of turn right there, you have the ability for those people to not only learn in general, but also get those trade skills as well. | ||
| And listen, all right. | ||
| Some health, yeah, our health care system's terrible. | ||
| At least having some health care right now is better than no health care at all. | ||
| And don't even get me started on tariffs because our soybean, our soybean farmers are doing pretty bad right now. | ||
| And all Trump is right now is just talking about bailing them out. | ||
| And don't even get me started on whether he's. | ||
| Chris, we're going to give Batia a chance to respond to your comments. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| Oh, I totally agree about the health care, as I just said. | ||
| Some is better than none for sure, but we should have much better health care for all Americans. | ||
| Honestly, I think that the Republicans should embrace a Medicare for all platform. | ||
| I think that will be great. | ||
| And on the soybeans, again, I agree. | ||
| I think that the farmer should be getting subsidies until this all works out. | ||
| But the situation that we had before in which we were reliant on China for things like the very ships we would need if we were going to have to fight them in a war and the very pharmaceuticals we would need to fight a pandemic that came from them, like that was unsustainable. | ||
| Something had to change. | ||
| So if you thought that the situation we were in prior to Trump was good, you're going to be very upset that he's fixing it. | ||
| I think it was very damaged. | ||
| And so I'm very happy that he's fixing it. | ||
| Let's hear from Susan, who's calling from North Carolina on the line for independence. | ||
| Hi, Susan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning to both of you. | |
| And thank you for the information that you've been given. | ||
| It's been an interesting morning to listen to this. | ||
| I just wanted to share something from Grassroots America. | ||
| After the tariffs were released, I got a letter from a company that we buy stuff for our church from saying that there would be a 12% increase across the board on the products we buy because of the tariffs. | ||
| And also, I went to get candles. | ||
| I had priced them for our Christmas program. | ||
| At our church, it would be $26 for a box of 24. | ||
| When I went to order them, they had gone up to $52. | ||
| So I don't know here who is experiencing this in Upper America, but in Grassroots America, we're really seeing a taking a hit. | ||
| And that's all I have to say. | ||
| But thank you so much. | ||
| Thank you for the call. | ||
| I know that small businesses have been hit by the tariffs, and some of them have not been able to absorb the costs as much as sort of bigger corporations. | ||
| I feel sorry for them, and I feel sorry for the consumers who rely on those small businesses. | ||
| Unfortunately, a small business that built its business model on importing all of the components of its product from China, that business model is not sustainable in my view and came at the expense of their working class neighbors. | ||
| And now we're trying something else. | ||
| So every model is going to have sacrifices. | ||
| When we offshored manufacturing to China and Mexico, we destroyed working class communities, but we made it much easier to start a small business because you could get access to these cheap materials. | ||
| So there are winners and losers in every situation. | ||
| And it's my view that right now it is the turn of the American working class to be the winner here. | ||
| And in general, we have seen, by and large, the vast majority of the tariffs have been eaten by American corporations and then by China as well. | ||
| Bhatia, I want to go back to something you mentioned a few minutes ago, and that was pharmaceuticals. | ||
| It was earlier this month that President Trump announced a deal with Pfizer. | ||
| It's also something that you wrote an opinion piece about in Fox, how Trump uses same strategy to curb big pharma, secure Middle East peace. | ||
| What do we know about this deal and how is it going to benefit working Americans? | ||
| Yeah, this is again one of those issues that Democrats talked about for so long, bringing down the cost of pharmaceuticals. | ||
| We had this ridiculous situation where Americans were paying four times as much for the same pharmaceuticals that we produced as favored nations, as European, rich European countries. | ||
| It was so, so unfair and unjust. | ||
| And basically, the president again did the three-step dealmaking. | ||
| He started with number one, ignore the experts who all told him, look, healthcare, that's the Democrats' bag. | ||
| That's not our thing. | ||
| He was like, no, this is my thing. | ||
| Why shouldn't this be my thing? | ||
| This matters to working class people. | ||
| It matters to my voters. | ||
| I'm going to bring down the cost of drugs. | ||
| Step two, align the interests. | ||
| So generally, when you have, you know, a company that's selling something and a consumer that's buying it, their interests are at odds. | ||
| What he did with the tariffs was he said, okay, Pfizer, you can keep doing this. | ||
| You can keep charging Americans more money and manufacturing your drugs in China, but it's going to cost you. | ||
| He changed the rules of the marketplace to where it aligned the interests of the consumer and the producer, to where now suddenly Pfizer had a financial interest to reshore that manufacturing to the United States. | ||
| And then also to get on the president's good side, they offered to give the United States consumer, our patients, the same price as those favored nations, as those rich European and Canadian nations that were paying so much less for the same goods. | ||
| Just completely, completely brilliant deal making there. | ||
| It's very hard to imagine somebody else being able to pull this off, like having the cojonists to do it. | ||
| And I think it's very similar how he handled Pfizer as how he handled the Middle East. | ||
| CT is calling from San Diego on the line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, CT. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| God bless you all. | ||
| CFN, it's fantastic. | ||
| If I could join or support you in membership drive, I would pay you before I buy food. | ||
| My question is, my statement is this, and I have a question. | ||
| Well, please, I have a difficulty pronouncing your name, I'm sorry, but please, I appreciate your honest, impartial statements that you're making at this time. | ||
| It is a breath of fresh air against all those who have persuasive abilities to deceive the people. | ||
| But please address the issue of the 20 million people that have come to America, illegal, undocumented, however you want to title them, and the burden that has been placed on our economic structure by having to be enforced by the Democrats to take care of these people on a medical basis. | ||
| Thank you all. | ||
| Thank you very much, and God bless you. | ||
| God bless you too. | ||
| Thank you so much for the question. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, every person who's here illegally is either working or not working. | ||
| If they're working, then they are working illegally in an industry that is because they are available to work for less than minimum wage and less than an American would be able to ask for, they're bringing down the wages in that industry. | ||
| And if they're not working, they're being subsidized by the American taxpayer. | ||
| Now, the Democrats will say it's illegal for an illegal migrant to have access to Medicaid, and that they say that this is a lie from the Republicans. | ||
| But that's not actually true. | ||
| There are states like California that do use federal funds in order to give access to illegal migrants health care in hospitals. | ||
| And it's not just your sort of basic, obviously, I think most of us wouldn't want a person to be turned away from a hospital, whether they're legal or illegal. | ||
| But in California, they really upped the ante and started giving them that sort of Cadillac Medicaid to where they get things that American citizens don't have access to, including dental care and vision. | ||
| And you can hear this straight from Dr. Oz, who's the head of Medicare and Medicaid. | ||
| The way that Democratic states that are sanctuary states have offered this taxpayer-subsidized health care, the best possible health care in America to people who are not citizens, while their own citizens can't get work and can't get that great health care. | ||
| And I find that to be outrageous. | ||
| I think a lot of people do. | ||
| A lot of Republicans, a lot of Independents. | ||
| And I do think that Democrats should find that outrageous as well. | ||
| Not the idea that illegals are getting health care, but the idea that people who are citizens are subsidizing a higher standard of health care for people who are not Americans while they themselves don't get dental and don't get vision and are paying these enormous, enormous premiums in order to get a lower standard of care. | ||
| There is something about that that is truly to me very, very unfair. | ||
| Josie is calling from New York on the line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Josie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning to you. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I'm calling because I disagree with what Batia, I think that's how you pronounce the name, said about Walmart prices. | ||
| They are insane. | ||
| Coffee has went up to $15 to $16 a can. | ||
| All the fruits and vegetables we are getting are rotted. | ||
| I'm a senior citizen, okay? | ||
| Everything has gone up from bread to shampoo. | ||
| Electricity has gone up. | ||
| Every single thing has gone up. | ||
| And I'm not talking by one or two dollars. | ||
| I'm talking by five, six, seven, eight, nine dollars. | ||
| So, how she says that these things that they're doing is not affecting the poor, it most certainly is. | ||
| It most certainly is. | ||
| And I've worked my whole life. | ||
| Middle class, there was no such thing as middle class no more. | ||
| A being a hamburger is like $22. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| So I disagree with her. | ||
| I just wish things would get back to normal. | ||
| I don't know what that is at this point, but I'm worried because I don't know how I am so glad that my children are grown, but I don't know how people with children are surviving. | ||
| I can't even imagine to have to raise three children right now on these insanity prices. | ||
| And I want to say thank you. | ||
| I enjoy C-SPAN. | ||
| I'm not very political, but something's got to be done because I just think the rich are getting richer. | ||
| There is no middle class. | ||
| And the poor, I don't know what they're doing with the medical coverage and everything, but it's absolutely horrible. | ||
| Josie, we'll let Batia respond. | ||
| Thank you so much for the call, Josie. | ||
| That's terrible what you're saying about the situation with the fruits and vegetables being rotten and the prices being up. | ||
| Coffee, I do know, is up. | ||
| I think that that's been established because we don't grow much of it here. | ||
| We import most of it. | ||
| We do produce 75% of the food that we consume is made in the United States. | ||
| Walmart frequently talks about how much of their products are made in the USA, and so they really have no excuse to be raising prices due to tariffs in a big way across the board. | ||
| But I completely agree with you that the middle class has disappeared. | ||
| It's been squeezed completely. | ||
| We do know that across the board, the price of food is not significantly up by more than 1%. | ||
| So the inflation that started, you know, three years ago, four years ago, with a big influx of cash into the system is still there, and we should be doing much more to bring it down. | ||
| And I think that the administration is looking for ways to do that. | ||
| And I hope that they succeed soon. | ||
| But I totally agree with you. | ||
| Yeah, inflation has proven very sticky. | ||
| And I really hope those prices come down soon. | ||
| And Batia, and to our caller, this was a headline from earlier this month in the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| It says, hell hath no fury like a coffee drinker in 2025. | ||
| It says that roasted coffee prices at the grocery store are up 22% in the past year, more than any other item tracked by the government. | ||
| And it also notes that the price increases are due to bad weather in the world's coffee-growing regions and the Trump administration tariffs. | ||
| So it sounds like what you were saying is correct, Batia. | ||
| We don't grow a lot of it here, and it's bad weather partially to blame. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, as somebody who drinks four cups of coffee a day, I'm definitely feeling it. | ||
| Agreed. | ||
| Let's hear from Zachary. | ||
| He's calling from Tampa Line for Independence. | ||
| Good morning, Zachary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, everyone. | |
| Thank you, C-SPAN. | ||
| And Batia, thank you, too. | ||
| Although I don't agree with you, I certainly respect you. | ||
| So let me say this: I'm in the Marine, and the fact, one, that they have Marines on the street pointing guns at our citizens is disgusting me. | ||
| I have to be honest with you. | ||
| Also, I do agree with Charlie Kirk when he talks about his definition of DEI, when he said DEI didn't earn it. | ||
| I think the administration is full of that. | ||
| So I see that all the time. | ||
| Incompetency. | ||
| You talk about the budget. | ||
| Let's talk about the budget. | ||
| All these trade agreements that he's made, every one of them has something for the oil and gas companies. | ||
| Every one of them. | ||
| Every one of them has that you have to invest in this country. | ||
| Well, the investments go through Lutnick and his billionaire group. | ||
| All the agricultural products that they have to buy in these trade agreements go through Besson, his billionaire group. | ||
| The GDP growth, see, in the last 10 months, for the billionaire class of Donald Trump's friends and Donald Trump individually and his family has exceeded the country's GDP growth. | ||
| So look at it. | ||
| The prices. | ||
| You say the prices aren't high. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| I'm an IT director. | ||
| I buy equipment. | ||
| I buy food for my staff. | ||
| It's considerably more expensive now than ever in the last eight, 10 months. | ||
| And also, you mentioned about vocational schools because I train and I hire from vocational schools and vocational programs. | ||
| The vocational training trade changes were done under Ronald Reagan in 1980, 1981. | ||
| What Obama did is he just shifted those to junior and community colleges. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| But the vocational funds were pulled by Ronald Reagan. | ||
| Last thing, this whole dishonesty, the dissemination of systematic information, often biased, misleading, or emotional, to influence public opinion and further a specific political, commercial, or military agenda, which you're doing this morning, ma'am, is propaganda. | ||
| This is not disinformation or misinformation, I'm sorry, but it's propaganda. | ||
| And please, America, wake up. | ||
| Thank you guys. | ||
| Thank you, Zachary, for your service. | ||
| And thank you for calling in. | ||
| And I really appreciate hearing where you're coming from. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Kent is calling from Greenville, Ohio, on the line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Kent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Yeah, my perspective on the insurance is you've got a flood of illegal aliens coming into the country and they're overwhelming the system. | ||
| When they don't pay, your insurance goes up. | ||
| They're going to get the money. | ||
| Same thing goes with the looting and the rioting. | ||
| Every time a car is burned, an insurance company has to come in and pay these people back. | ||
| Illegal immigration is the biggest thing, and then education would be the second. | ||
| There's too much estrogen in the school systems. | ||
| We need male teachers like former drill sergeants, military people, and they need to put boxing rings in the gyms and let these kids fight. | ||
| I'm telling you, when I was a kid in the 80s, we always got in street fights and stuff like that. | ||
| The kids blew their steam off, and then they were friends again at the end of the day. | ||
| Now they're bringing guns into these schools. | ||
| And where are the high school counselors at with all these shootings? | ||
| Someone's got to hold them accountable. | ||
| What are they doing? | ||
| I think I spent 12 minutes with my high school counselor my junior year. | ||
| You know, the whole thing's messed up, and a lot of it hinges on illegal immigration and feminization. | ||
| I'm speechless. | ||
| What a great call. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| We'll go to Shirley, who's calling from Pasadena, Texas, Line for Republicans. | ||
| Hi, Shirley. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, how are you? | |
| Good morning. | ||
| I need to let your person know that you have on there right now that I agree with pretty much everything she's saying. | ||
| I think that as far as the government shutdown goes right now, I think that if the Democrats would have not shut down the government, that they would have hashed all this insurance business out, and we wouldn't be dealing with this right now. | ||
| I agree. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you so much for the call. | |
| Batia Ungar Sargon is host of Batia on NewsNation. | ||
| She is also author of Second Class, How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women. | ||
| Batia, thank you so much for your time this morning. | ||
| What an honor to be here with you and all of your callers. | ||
| Thank you so much for having me and God bless. | ||
|
unidentified
|
C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum inviting you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy from Washington and across the country. | |
| Coming up this morning, we'll talk about the government shutdown, President Trump's economic policies, and the upcoming November elections with the Club for Growth's David McIntosh and documentary writer and producer Michael Weiser discusses the recent PBS frontline film, The Rise of RFK Jr. | ||
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal. | ||
| Join in the conversation live at 7 Eastern this morning on C-SPAN. | ||
| C-SPAN Now, our free mobile video app, or online at c-span.org. | ||
| So you interviewed the other night. | ||
| I watched it about 2 o'clock in the morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There was a little thing called C-SPAN, which I don't know how many people were watching. | |
| Don't worry, you were in prime time too, but they happen to have a little rerun. | ||
| Do you really think that we don't remember what just happened last week? | ||
| Thank goodness for C-SPAN, and we all should review the tape. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Everyone wonders when they're watching C-SPAN what the conversations are on the floor. | |
| I'm about to read to you something that was published by C-SPAN. | ||
| There's a lot of things that Congress fights about that they disagree on. | ||
| We can all watch that on C-SPAN. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Millions of people across the country tuned into C-SPAN. | |
| That was a made-for-C-SPAN moment. | ||
| If you watch on C-SPAN, you're going to see me physically across the aisle every day, just trying to build relationships and try to understand their perspective and find common ground. | ||
| And welcome forward to everybody watching at home. | ||
| We know C-SPAN covers this live as well. | ||
| We appreciate that. | ||
| And one can only hope that he's able to watch C-SPAN on a black and white television set in his prison cell. | ||
| This is being carried live by C-SPAN. | ||
| It is being watched not only in this country, but it's being watched around the world right now. | ||
| Mike said before I happened to listen to him, he was on C-SPAN One. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's a big upgrade, right? | |
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