Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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deborah arnie arnesen
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kimberly adams
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peter laffin
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alexandria ocasio-cortez
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brian lamb
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eric schmitt
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hakeem jeffries
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kevin hassett
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maggie hassan
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mike johnson
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tom bevan
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david rubenstein
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john mcardle
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marc lotter
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walter isaacson
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Heading Into 202600:08:17
unidentified
Midco supports C-SPAN as a public service, along with these other television providers, giving you a front-row seat to democracy.
Coming up this morning on Washington Journal, along with your calls and comments live, we'll talk about the government shutdown, campaign 2026, political extremism, the Epstein files, and news of the day.
First with syndicated talk show host Arnie Arneson, and then we'll talk to The Washington Examiner's Peter Laffin.
With the shutdown over, both parties are trying to leverage the longest ever lapse in appropriations into a political win heading into the 2026 midterm elections.
But will this moment matter to voters a little under a year from now?
That's our topic this morning.
Will the recent government shutdown impact your 2026 vote for Congress?
Our phone lines for Democrats, 202-748-8000.
For Republicans, 202-748-8001.
And for Independents, 202-748-8002.
If you'd like to text us, that number is 202-748-8003.
Please be sure to include your name and where you're writing in from.
We're also on social media at facebook.com/slash C-SPAN and on X at C-SPANWJ.
Now, for a quick look back at the overall impact of the shutdown on politics, people, and the economy, ABC News has a rundown from a variety of sources, pointing out that 43 days was a total number of days the shutdown lasted, the longest in U.S. history.
0.8% the annualized inflation-adjusTedros domestic product that was lost due to the shutdown.
That equates to about $11 billion of inflation-adjusted GDP that will be permanently lost, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
About 670,000, approximate number of the federal workers furloughed during the shutdown.
In terms of the federal employees who worked without pay, that's 730,000.
Workers outside the federal government who lost their jobs due to the economic effects of the shutdown, according to National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, that's about 60,000 people.
And about 42 million people were SNAP recipients who lost their benefits at some point during the shutdown.
Now, in terms of who's to blame for the shutdown, there's a mixed bag.
It seems the American people blamed many folks.
But according to the Cook Political Report, the bottom line is that the Democrats, in particular, intra-party fight over who's to blame for losing the shutdown is missing the bigger picture.
While Democrats may, excuse me, while Democrats may have lost the battle of the shutdown, the 2026 election is going to be fought over which party voters believe will help make their lives more affordable.
And as we saw last week, Democrats are currently winning that war.
Now, much of this affordability fight has to do with health care.
And as reported here in CNN, Republicans are scrambling for a health care plan as Democrats eye the midterm battle.
That story going on to say that while Republicans in Washington successfully defused a 43-day government shutdown without surrendering to Democrats' demands to spend billions more to offset spiking health insurance costs, now the GOP is under mounting pressure to figure out its own plan.
Enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies are set to expire in just weeks, which would more than double the cost of premiums nationally for tens of millions of Americans.
And it's causing deep anxiety among some in the party, particularly in battleground seats, who worry Republicans will end up doing nothing to prevent those price hikes and enter a critical midterm year with the issue of health care haunting them once again.
But will voters keep that in mind that far into the future?
Last week on the Washington Journal, we asked Tom Bevin of Real Clear Politics whether or not the longest shutdown in U.S. history would matter to Americans during next year's midterm.
I think what voters are going to care about heading in.
And look, this is what it was in 2024.
And unless events intervene, and by that I mean, you know, a terrorist attack or a virus like COVID, which went from literally non-existent to the number one issue in 2020, unless something like that happens, it's very clear that voters are concerned about the economy, inflation, by an order of magnitude.
It's two or three times.
When you combine those two issues together, it's way more than the next most important concern.
It's the entire ballgame right now.
And as I said, Donald Trump came into office.
He had an advantage over Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on those issues.
He ran on those issues.
We're 10 months into his presidency now, and he's underwater by 11 points on the issue of his handling of the economy.
And by that, I mean his disapproval is 11 points higher than his approval rating.
And when you dig down and look specifically at inflation, he's at negative 25.5.
His approval rating on inflation is about 35% and his disapproval rating is over 60%.
It's 61.2%.
So clearly, voters, and not just Democrats, Independents and Republicans, have looked at Donald Trump's stewardship of the economy thus far and said, look, he promised he was going to get inflation under control.
We're still feeling it.
And that's something that he and Republicans have to grapple with between now and next November.
And looking ahead to next November, Real Clear Politics polling with a generic congressional vote has Democrats at 45.8% of support in terms of the general population, compared to just 41.4% for Republicans.
Pretty close, but Democrats slightly in the lead there.
Now then, in an interview on Newsmax, Republican National Committee Chair Joe Grutters gave this assessment of the Democratic Party after the end of the shutdown.
And right now, I think the socialists are winning.
Listen, I think the President Trump leads their party because the only thing that the Democrats like to say is they're against the president.
And that's what the shutdown was all about.
It's their effort to stop the president and all the good things that he's doing.
And that's why we have to win the midterms.
That's why it's all hands on deck.
We have to do everything we can to make sure we maintain the majorities in the House and the Senate.
Because if we don't, what's going to happen is exactly what you saw all these 43 days in the shutdown.
The Democrats are going to obstruct, they're going to impeach, they're going to investigate, they're going to do everything they can to stop the momentum and stop the president from delivering real results to Americans out there.
Next up is Bruce in Edinburgh, Texas on our line for Democrats.
Good morning, Bruce.
unidentified
Good morning, ma'am.
I haven't called in for a while, but I do appreciate all you do out there and all the people that you serve.
The one thing that everybody forgets about, and this is the one thing, okay, when it comes to health care, when they start sending out letters to family members to come pick up your loved ones at the nursing homes because the monies ran out and the only reason why your loved one being taken care of at the nursing home is because they got supplemental care.
They're going to get a letter and say, hey, you better come pick them up.
All right, you're turning to the Medicaid cuts that may be coming.
unidentified
Yes.
I mean, when they start cutting the federal subsidies, that a lot of the nursing homes are subsidized by federal government because they're elder, they're old.
The younger folks don't want to have to take care of the elder folks because they got jobs to do.
They got taxes to pay.
They got their lives to live.
When they start getting these letters, they say, hey, you need to come get your grandfather, your loved one, your mother, your whatever.
Well, ahead of Wednesday's debate and vote to reopen the government, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries announced that House Democrats would introduce legislation to extend those Affordable Care Act tax credits for three years.
Today, House Democrats will introduce legislation to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits for three years to make sure that tens of millions of Americans don't experience dramatically increased premiums, co-pays, and deductibles.
We believe that working class Americans, middle-class Americans, and everyday Americans deserve the same level of certainty that Republicans always provide to the wealthy, the well-off, and the well-connected.
The same level of certainty.
And so we're calling upon our Republican colleagues to join us and extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits.
And we will be working hard today, tomorrow, and throughout the balance of this year to make sure that those Affordable Care Act tax credits are extended.
Now, Republicans control the House, the Senate, and the Presidency.
They own the mess that has been created in the United States of America.
They own it.
In a few hours, we will convene on the House floor.
And our message to the American people is no matter what happens on the floor later on today, our promise to you remains the same.
House Democrats will continue to fight to make your life more affordable.
House Democrats will continue the fight to address the Republican health care crisis.
And House Democrats will fight to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits.
Dave is in Tamaqua, Pennsylvania on our line for Democrats.
Good morning, Dave.
unidentified
Yeah, good morning.
I just want to say the government is open, which is great, but the Democrats, which I am, is not talking about what we need, about the health insurance and everything else, and about the taxes, the food, the gas prices.
They're not bringing this all up when they go on TV.
They go on TV.
All they want to know is start another thing with the Epstein files.
I mean, who cares?
Trump is probably just friends with that guy who got killed himself.
We need to talk about what they get on TV, tell they want to meet with the Republicans and get things done for us, us Democrats, us unite to reunite the country with the Republicans, the Democrats.
Dave, do you think the shutdown is going to impact how you vote in 2026?
unidentified
Yes, if they don't change their thing and stop talking about the Epstein things and say they want to meet with the Republicans to work and work us out.
Enough is enough.
About the health care, about the food prices, all that stuff.
Get on TV and talk about that.
You want to meet with the Republicans and then talk about if they don't want to meet with us.
We meet with you, I mean, you know, meet with the Democrats.
Robert is in Clearwater, Florida on our line for Republicans.
Good morning, Robert.
unidentified
Yeah, the Republicans and Democrats got to get together.
That one guy with the cane that was next to the guy that was talking, I think they just like to talk to hear themselves talk.
I mean, what they got to do is they got to get things together.
They got to raise Social Security so senior citizens can live a little better.
Maybe give us a couple thousand.
You know, if they can give to the ward millions of dollars to award and stuff, I'm sure they can give to American people that have been living here and working all their life.
So, Robert, I hear you talking about President Trump and what he's doing, but I wonder, since the midterm elections will be for Congress, if you think the shutdown will shape your vote in that way.
unidentified
I don't think they're going to shut down anymore, if that's the UB.
But anyway, thanks.
I think I said enough.
And one more thing.
I think Epstein didn't kill himself.
I think somebody killed him.
They have nothing on camera to prove that nobody killed him.
Homer is in Kansas City, Missouri on our line for Democrats.
Good morning, Homer.
unidentified
Kimberly heard in the cats today.
Thank you, C-SPAN.
And, you know, it's going to affect, it should affect everybody's votes, especially as soon as however many millions of people get these increases on their insurance premiums.
However, when it comes to the shutdown, Mike Johnson, I mean, my God, Speaker, no, he is Trump's sock puppet and soon to be saying as head elf and Rudolph the resident owners of reindeer.
But if we do not tackle this health, why is it that we're the only free country, the only developed country that doesn't give its citizens health care?
You see, and this is the crux.
The whole crux of the thing lies in our health care.
And I'm going to tell you why, because you got your neighbors that are selling health insurance policies and driving BMWs, and this whole thing's going to come apart.
And the pharmaceutical industry that's pumping these ads every time, I mean, you cannot watch a football game without seeing at least 20 pharmaceutical ads.
And therein lies the problem, Kimberly.
And like I've told you before, it's the Federalist Society and their war on education that started with the busing debacle.
Well, I was just going to say, since you mentioned House Speaker Mike Johnson and his stance on potentially the health care subsidies, Speaker Johnson was speaking to reporters after the vote to reopen the government on Wednesday night, and he was asked if he would commit to a vote on an extension of those ACA subsidies now that the government was open.
Am I going to guarantee a vote on ACA unreformed COVID era subsidies that is just a boondoggle to insurance companies and robs the taxpayer?
We got a lot of work to do on that.
The Republicans would demand a lot of reforms before anything like that was ever possible.
And we have to go through that deliberative process.
We have 430, well, currently 433 members of the House of Representatives.
There's a lot of opinions in this building and on our side, certainly a lot of opinions on how to fix health care and make it more affordable.
I have to allow that process to play out.
I'll leave you with this.
The biggest objection that I had to Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, who are playing political games with people's lives when they shut the government down, was Chuck Schumer came out and said the quiet part out loud.
I don't even think you realize he has no self-awareness.
But he came and cried to all of you that I would not agree to go into a back room and make a four corners agreement on these issues.
That just he and I and Hakeem Jeffries and Leader Thun would go in a room and make this decision for the entire population of America and block out all of our colleagues as if they had no voice in it.
That is why Washington is broken.
That's why Congress hasn't worked well for people.
That's why they don't have a lot of faith in what goes on here.
And I'm committed to trying to restore that faith.
And one way we do that is we get back to regular order.
We allow all the duly elected members of this body to have their voices heard.
I'm not playing games and Chuck Schumer, I'm not going in a back room with you and making a four corners deal on anything.
Do you think that the recent government shutdown is going to affect your vote for Congress in 2026?
unidentified
No, ma'am, not at all.
I've voted different ways different times since I've been a voter.
I didn't like the way that people had to wait for their food stamp cards.
There was a lot of young girls, young people, families that are working.
Food Stamps Shutdown Impact00:15:28
unidentified
And I'm on Social Security now, and I'm blessed because I've got blah blah blah my life.
But now I'm retired and I have a lot of testimonies about my retirement, my music, and whatever.
I've got a lot of friends that are, some of them are still working, some of them are not.
My family, my brothers are still working.
My sister, she's retired.
But I think it really hurt a lot of Americans for us to lose this food stamps for just a little bit of time, and I hope they can get that straightened out by next time.
But no, I don't think it'll cause me to vote different.
I think President Trump's doing a pretty darn good job.
We need to support Israel because that is God's chosen.
Excuse me.
I mean, he started this whole thing 6,000 years ago at Creation of the World, and he came and died on the cross for our sins in Israel.
Gary, just because you mentioned President Trump and your support for him.
Oh, it looks like we lost Gary there.
But I wanted to bring up some recent polling on President Trump's overall approval, which actually shows that more Americans are unhappy with the way that Trump is managing the government.
This is according to an AP NORC poll saying that approval of the way that President Trump, Donald Trump, is managing the government has dropped sharply since early in his second term, according to that new AP NORC poll, with much of the rising discontent coming from fellow Republicans.
The survey from the Associated Press NORC Center for Public Affairs Research was conducted after Democrats' recent victories in off-year elections, but before Congress took major steps to try to end the longest shutdown in U.S. history.
It shows that only 33% of U.S. adults approve of the way the Republican president is managing the government, down from 43% in an AP NORC poll from March.
And that was driven in large part by the decline in approval among Republicans and independents.
According to the survey, only about two-thirds of Republicans, 68%, said they approve of Trump's government management, down from 81% in March.
Independence approval ratings dropped from 38% to 25%.
And so you can have a look here at a chart representing that decline, these orange bars being March and the green bars being in November and showing declines across the board in Trump's approval rating.
Back to your calls on whether you think this recent government shutdown will impact your midterm vote for Congress.
Helene is in Mala, New Jersey on our line for independence.
Good morning, Helene.
unidentified
Good morning, my friends.
I love your show.
I want to tell everybody that we're to blame, not the Democrats or Republicans.
Do you remember a couple of years ago to tell me to breathe that Obama's 1,000-page bill got passed without one single vote from either Democrats or Republicans?
I'm so upset with us fighting with Egypt when we're all to blame for not voting those people out.
Jay is in Anniston, Alabama on our line for Democrats.
Good morning, Jay.
unidentified
Good morning.
Yeah, I guess, you know, I look at health care going up in the 60s and 70s and researching how health care used to operate in this country in the 40s and 50s, and they didn't have all these middlemen and insurance companies involved.
You had the doctor come into the house, which was very common, and it was cheap.
He had access to every medicine in the world.
There were less regulations.
There was basically any way for a doctor to treat the patient, you know, with informed consent, which is still the law between doctor and patient.
So there wasn't these middlemen involved.
And you didn't have the government telling you it was good and bad for you.
There was freedom in this country, freedom of choice.
We need to go back to that because this country's a mess.
You know, my 18-year-old daughter, when she gets out of high school, can go work for OnlyFans right now.
Do you know that?
So she can go work for OnlyFans and make money online.
Well, that's okay, because our question is about whether or not the recent shutdown would impact your vote in the midterm elections.
unidentified
I'm a Democrat.
I'm going to vote Democrat.
So, no, it won't change the way I'm going to handle things.
But what I called in to say is that Trump brought Elon Musk in there with that chainsaw, and they cut all them jobs.
How do you think them people are going to vote?
They messed around with the air traffic controllers.
I heard that people wouldn't call enough.
And Trump just took it up on his own to lay people off, furlough people, risk people, fire people.
How do you think these people are going to vote?
And then you got the 42 million people who get napped.
How do you think they're going to vote?
The people ain't going to forget about this.
And then last week, the senators, the Republican senators, went in the back room and cooked up a deal for themselves where they can get $500,000 each in our tax dollars.
And here we are calling in, calling people names, the Democrats do this and they bet.
And the Republicans then loaded a $4 trillion tax cut.
So, Loretta, I want to go over some of these issues that you raised related to the actual deal that was negotiated between Republicans and a few Democrats in the Senate to reopen the government.
That deal funded the government until January 30th of 2026.
It also funded military construction, Veterans Affairs, the Department of Agriculture, which SNAP lives under the Department of Agriculture, and the legislative branch through September 30th of 2026.
Loretta mentioned the people who were fired during the shutdown.
It reinstates over 4,000 federal workers who were laid off during the shutdown.
It also prevents the Trump administration from firing additional federal workers through reductions in force until January 30th and includes a promise of a December vote, at least in the Senate, on extending the ACA-enhanced subsidies.
Let's see a few comments that we've received via text and social media.
Timbo in Mountain Home, Arkansas says, Will the shutdown affect my vote in the 2026 midterm?
Absolutely not.
Full steam ahead, Democrats impeachment ahead.
Next, we hear from Cindy Hahn on Facebook.
We know now that everything the Democrats told us about the ACA was a lie.
Why would anyone in their right mind vote for a party that blatantly lied to Americans about their health care program?
Craig Michael, also on Facebook, said in terms of whether the shutdown would impact his midterm vote, absolutely.
We need to eliminate more waste.
Voting conservative across the board is the only way.
And Joe says, I will still vote Republican, but I will be voting against any APAC-funded candidates.
Back to your calls now.
Violet is in Bronx, New York on our line for independence.
Good morning, Violet.
unidentified
Good morning.
I'm here.
I really wanted to add on to what the lady said before from Louisiana.
I believe that 11.2% of our population right now is on SNAP.
So I definitely do agree to what the last person said: that we are like our vote doesn't even matter at this point.
We've been through so much in this country to where we are tired.
Both sides, Democratic and Republic, are not doing what they're supposed to do for our country.
So why would we sit here in the 2026 and sit here and vote when it wouldn't even matter?
How many people went out their way thinking Kamala was going to win this year?
And she did not.
The only thing that it leads for me to think is that what we're voting for isn't even worth the vote.
Next up is Yaya in Chicago, Illinois, on our line for Democrats.
Good morning, Yaya.
unidentified
Hey, good morning.
The recent shutdown will not affect voting.
I will still continue to support Democratic candidates.
And I just want to, you know, I want to mention that I'm an RN, and I just want to mention that people are in for a rude awakening coming in 2026 if they do not have their coverage to the ACA, if they continue to limit Medicaid expansion in about 10 continuing states.
Voting Against Self-Interest00:15:20
unidentified
Medicaid cuts, you know what funds, you know, nursing homes are funded by a lot of Medicaid money.
The Republicans have had 15 years to come up with an alternative for the ACA, also known as Obamacare.
They have yet, yet to introduce any piece of legislation that could remotely replace all the benefits and all the provisions that the ACA affords.
So people need to really stop and think about what is happening.
I think the shutdown, I didn't support the shutdown, but yes, I agree that he did bring attention to the impending health care insurance collapse that we're about to see.
And when it comes to fruition at the beginning of 2026, it is going to hurt a lot of people.
Let's hear from Roy in California on our line for Republicans.
Good morning, Rory.
unidentified
Good morning.
I'd like to bring something else different to this whole thing.
I'm not a federal employee, but I have a relative who is.
Had to continue work and has still needed money.
And he's middle-aged, and he needs actually not to do so much work.
How about unemployment for people who have to go to work but will not be paid?
And then later on, if they're paid, because he wasn't sure about that, if he was going to be paid or not after everybody went to work, let him get unemployment.
And then the government can take it back.
But something needs to be done.
You're going to kill middle-aged people under these conditions where they work and not get paid.
They need money.
And this way, the government can talk to the state and get its money back.
But in terms of this recent shutdown, do you think it's going to shape the way that you plan on voting in the upcoming midterm elections?
unidentified
Mate, I'll tell you how I'll vote.
I'll probably vote Republican, but anybody and everybody, if they're fighting for something, don't make everybody else starve or get dead because they didn't get medical attention.
Keep that going.
Keep things going where they can still fight, but don't shut everything down.
One side trying to force the other side into that by having the people suffer, even die.
So really, President Trump won't be on the ballot in the midterm elections, but do you think the shutdown is going to affect how you choose to vote in the midterms?
Bingman, when it comes to the upcoming midterm elections in 2026, do you think the recent shutdown is going to affect how you decide to vote?
unidentified
I am going to vote for common sense like I've been voting.
The problem is, is that we're going to have people, we got people right now voting against their own self-interest because they're voting for party lines and they're voting because they're uninformed on what's going on.
Since I've been sitting here listening to you, I've been hearing people, oh, this person is heaven sent.
Oh, I'm still voting because I believe this person was sent by God.
I haven't heard one person say anything about this vote being common sense.
Number one, the government has a job to govern and to deal with facts.
We're not doing that.
A lot of people are going to vote based on party lines.
They're going to vote against their own self-interest because they're not truly informed in what's going on.
Philip mentioned multiple issues around affordability and what plans Republicans might have to control prices.
On Thursday outside the White House, White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett spoke about President Trump's focus on affordability as well as slowing inflation.
The first thing that we've done is we've stopped the runaway inflation.
And the second thing we've done is we pushed policies that have caused incomes to grow a lot.
But we understand that people understand as they look at their pocketbooks that go to the grocery store that there's still work to do.
The way I summarize all the stats we look at is that real purchasing power for a typical worker dropped $3,400 under President Biden and has gone up $1,200 so far today.
But Americans rightly are frustrated that they're still $2,000 short.
And that's something that we're going to fix, and we're going to fix it right away.
Bob is in Sacco, Maine on our line for independence.
Good morning, Bob.
unidentified
Good morning.
Yes.
This shutdown for me drew a couple of different lines in the sand.
One thing that it showed me was when the Republicans go to the Supreme Court to keep people from getting food assistance, I mean, I think that's extreme.
I mean, we took $8.5 billion out of the American economy for that month of October November by not putting SNAP benefits out there, which is real important.
And the other thing it showed me was on these subsidies, there's a book out there called Finding Our Compass, Setting a Course for Democracy to Succeed.
And in that book, it talks about lowering the cost of what is a living wage.
And these Obamacare subsidies lower the cost of a living wage for millions of Americans.
And it's so important that we keep the cost of a living wage down so that people can participate in the economy at the highest level they can for their level of income.
And that keeps America strong and America's economy growing.
Mary is in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on our line for Democrats.
Good morning, Mary.
unidentified
Yes, good morning, C-SPAN.
Anytime that we have a shutdown in this country on a federal or a state level, that increases your interest rate because we have to borrow money.
We're $38 trillion in debt on a federal level.
And in Pennsylvania, we had to borrow $1.7 billion just for our school system alone because we had a shutdown in Pennsylvania.
This is ridiculous.
People need to realize when you have to borrow money for any programs that we have on board, I don't care if it's SNAP benefits, health care, your taxes will go up.
We were providing zero payments for businesses and corporations who had 10 employees on board.
And this was before the Affordable Care Act.
We cannot afford that now because we have to pay trillions of dollars for people going into the emergency room under the Emergency Medical Treatment Act under Medicaid.
I don't care that we have citizens, we have legal during the debate over the shutdown.
So do you think the shutdown itself and how it was resolved is going to shape how you vote, especially given your concerns about how much shutdowns can cost taxpayers?
unidentified
Everybody needs to look at that.
I can hear the people that are paying taxes, just the ones that are calling up.
Nothing is free, and when we pass our programs to nonprofits, because they're basically running our system, they're like the arm of the government, state and federal government.
What are you planning to do then in the upcoming midterm elections?
unidentified
To be honest with you, I'm at the point I'm so disappointed in both parties that I'm praying that there will be somebody that comes out that actually talks to the people, that really talks about their needs and not about party.
Because these parties are both working for the same donors.
I'm a 55-year-old black man, served two tours in the army in that bar.
This country is gone.
It ain't going to change my mind.
But what these people, these Republican callers, what y'all saying, people, we paying $8 for a pound of beef here in Texas.
And y'all going to sit right there and talk about he's doing a very good job.
I remember when they used to call Obama the SNAP president.
Snap, keep money rolling in the economy, people.
That's what helped the farmers also the poor people.
And I'm driving disappointed up in the Democrats.
How would you sign a bill to reopen the government when Trump gonna sue the government for $225 million for the trial that he would have been found guilty in?
Bridging America's Divide00:03:37
unidentified
And you got eight senators that the least they can sue the government for is $50,000.
Lindsey Grant came in there and said he's not taking less than a million.
All the time that we have for this segment for today, but coming up later on Washington Journal, the Washington Examiners Peter Loffin will be joining us to discuss the government shutdown, the upcoming vote on the Epstein files, as well as news of the day.
But first, we're going to be joined by syndicated talk show host Arnie Arneson to discuss, again, the government shutdown, progressive politics, and campaign 2026.
We'll be right back.
unidentified
Friday on C-SPAN's Ceasefire.
At a time when finding common ground matters most in Washington, Pennsylvania Democratic Senator John Fetterman and Alabama Republican Senator Katie Britt come together for a bipartisan dialogue on the top issues facing the country.
They join host Dasha Burns.
Bridging the Divide in American Politics.
Watch C-SPIRE Friday at 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPIRE.
Weekends bring you Book TV featuring leading authors discussing their latest nonfiction books.
Here's a look at what's coming up this weekend.
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We're joined now by Arnie Arneson, who is the host of the Attitude with Arnie Arneson, which is a syndicated talk show with Pacifica Network and WNHN Radio in Concord, New Hampshire.
So I've been doing talk radio on and off since 1988.
That'll tell you how old I am, all right?
And in between that time, I actually was the Democratic nominee for governor and the Democratic nominee for Congress in the state of New Hampshire.
And I describe myself as a politician in recovery.
But I've always loved talk radio.
And for years and years, I did talk radio on a commercial station.
But then what happened was commercial radio basically became the province of conservative talk.
And so if you were more liberal, which is what I am, there was no place for me to land.
And now I'm on the Pacifica Network, and I'm across the country.
My two biggest stations are WBAI in New York City and KPFT in Houston, Texas, so which really gives me the sort of the extremes of the spectrum of politics in America.
And we look at politics through the eyes of sustainability, facts, justice, and we want people to have information from both sides.
But right now, one of the sides doesn't provide information.
It basically is averse to facts.
And that, of course, is the MAGA GOP.
And that's something that shocks me because what you need to know is that who actually asked me to run for the legislature in 1984 was the Republican majority leader.
Can you imagine that today?
The Republican majority leader watched me in the Constitutional Convention and said, what are you doing in the fall, Arnie?
Ever thought about running for the legislature?
And I remember looking at him, Kimberly, and saying, but I think I'm a Democrat.
And he said, we could tell that, Arnie.
No, no, no, I think I'm a liberal Democrat.
Then we could tell that too, Arnie.
And then I said, why are you asking?
And listen to his answer.
This is 1984, not true today.
He said, 75% of what we do in the New Hampshire legislature is about what's good for New Hampshire.
And 25% of it is partisan.
I think you need to be there for the 75%.
I'm not a partisan.
I'm a policy person.
And yet today, I'm forced to actually make decisions.
And when I look at the Republican Party, they're not offering me a choice.
Well, it's going to matter because we're probably not going to get anything in the way of the ACA credits.
So what we know is that when you look at the Tuesday election, it was really, it seemed like a romp for Democrats.
You look around the country from Georgia to Texas to New York to New Jersey, and you saw Democrats win.
So can I first take that back?
Democrats didn't win.
You know who won?
No Kings won.
People weren't embracing a party.
They were screaming for change.
They were looking for someone who would offer them policy prescriptions that really addressed affordability, didn't just use the word, but actually spoke to it.
You saw in New Jersey, they talked about electric rates.
You saw with Sauran, what did he talk about?
He talked about transportation.
He talked about housing.
He talked about childcare.
He gave you specifics.
People are realizing that you can't use the word because Trump used the word affordability.
And now he's made it so unaffordable for us, and the struggle has only increased.
So that's what I see.
And then after this Tuesday election, which clearly showed that people were looking for a fight, what we see is that eight Democrats caved.
And the reason is they finally actually had some leverage.
And they didn't make a deal.
Donald Trump never showed up.
He didn't care.
He was having parties.
He was traveling around the world.
He doesn't care about government.
He doesn't care about policy.
And then they claimed that they made a deal, that they would be able to write the ACA bill and return the credits in the Senate.
We already know Speaker Johnson has basically said, eh, I'm not sure I'm going to bring it up.
And of course, just because you write a bill doesn't mean that bill passes the Senate.
And of course, then again, Donald Trump would have to sign it, and you know he won't.
So you didn't get anything.
And then when you look into the deal, it wasn't a clean reopen.
What did they do?
They banned hemp products.
What did they do?
They gave these eight Republican senators $500,000 a shot to sue the government for the government doing something that was absolutely legal and it only applied to the Senate and it was backdated to 2022.
You begin to look at all these things and then you even look at SNAP.
So one of the claims to fame is that right now the bill that they passed or the deal that they passed said that there could still be another shutdown at the end of January, right?
Well, except for SNAP and the Department of Agriculture.
That goes to the end of the fiscal year.
And then you look in the bill and you see all this money for SNAP.
Here's the problem.
Right after the deal passed, guess what came out of the Department of Agriculture?
All of a sudden there was an announcement that everyone needs to reapply for SNAP.
What the H is that about?
That's about making it more difficult for people to access the benefits they deserve.
And let me remind everyone, just because you give Donald Trump and his administration money doesn't mean that they actually send the money to the people that need it.
And the people that wrote that deal, and I'm going to put it in quotes, they understood that.
So if you look through the language, there is no demand that this money must be delivered.
There's no requirement that the old rules of SNAP still apply because within literally a day or two, they suddenly tell everyone, you have to reapply for SNAP because of the claim of what?
So both of your states in New Hampshire, both of your states' Democratic U.S. Senators, Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hawson, broke with the party's leadership and voted in favor of this deal that ended the government shutdown.
In fact, all the people that voted for this, you know, that came up with the deal, none of them are going to be returning.
So in a lot of ways, they had that mode of cover.
They didn't have to worry about it, except for Maggie Hashman.
I mean, she, again, she's not running in 2026.
But let me explain, Maggie.
So Jeannie is not running.
Jean Shaheen is not running.
Although her daughter, by the way, is running for Congress.
And this really put her daughter in a real pickle.
Does she side with her mother or does she side with the base of the Democratic Party?
My understanding is that she's not siding with her mother.
So that should tell you something, all right?
Maggie Hassen, the other senator who voted for it, Maggie Hassen has an interesting history.
She has voted more with MAGA Republicans than any sitting member of Congress.
So when you think of Democrats voting with MAGA, you usually think of Fetterman, all right?
It's not Fetterman.
It's my sitting senator.
So she was already predisposed to do this.
And let me also remind everyone that they were already negotiating a deal before the Tuesday election.
And then when the Tuesday election shocked everyone, because the numbers were huge, because there was double digits, it showed a passion and commitment to fight, not only from the Democratic Party, but frankly from the American people.
It was like Tuesday never existed because then they went to the deal.
And of course, what's the deal when the MAGA not only gets everything they want, but then you have to ask, and what did you get?
You reopened a government that is so crippled already because of Doge, that is already making an assault on everything we value.
And what we know is not only has affordability not been addressed by this Congress, which never shows up, but now people have to make Sophie's choice.
Will I be able to keep my health care or pay my rent?
Will I be able to keep my health care or pay for the car payment?
I was going to actually play Senator Hawson's comments last Sunday after voting for the measure to proceed with the bill to reopen the government amid the Democratic criticism.
The real question is why would a President of the United States pit hungry children against sick children?
And that is what President Trump has done.
I mean, this is outrageous.
We can't reach agreement on government funding, so the government shuts down.
And even though the law is clear that he could fund SNAP benefits during a shutdown, he did not.
And then he also said, and by the way, I don't really care if people's health insurance premiums get so high they can't afford their care.
That's on Donald Trump.
My vote today was to do two things, both equally morally important and imperative.
One is to make sure that the government is functioning so that our kids eat, so that our elderly citizens eat, so that our air traffic controllers can get some sleep and earn money, get paid while they are working, so that our veterans are protected, and continue the fight to a realistic platform to get the premium tax cuts done.
And if that is not successful, then shame on the Republican Party and shame on Donald Trump.
But the American people will see who stands with them on health care and who does not.
The Democrats who supported this deal have caused a lot of controversy, and this has led some to even call for Senator Schumer, who did not support the deal, to step down over what many are saying is a lack of leadership in the party.
What do you think of those calls for Senator Schumer to step down as leader of the Democrats in the Senate as well as the divisions that this vote is soaking within the party?
So look what the Democrats refer to as an example of leadership in the Democratic Party, and they refer to Nancy Pelosi.
And when Nancy Pelosi was the head of the Democrats in Congress and basically the Speaker of the House, she would never bring a bill to the floor unless she knew she had all her ducks in line.
She had all her Democrats with her.
She knew what leadership looked like and that you needed to round up the troops.
What you have here in the Senate was eight Democrats that split from the Democratic Party and Schumer basically saying, oh, I disagree with them.
Well, if you disagree with them, where was your leadership?
And one of the things you have to start asking was, did he really disagree with them or were they his cover?
Because we know that there's a pounding of a drum in New York for AOC to run against Chuck Schumer.
So Chuck Schumer is not just looking at whether he'll be the head of the Democrats in the Senate.
Because I want to actually play a clip of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was on Capitol Hill on Wednesday and asked about this, the future of the Democratic Party and support for Senator Schumer during the shutdown.
Here's what she had to say.
unidentified
Congressman.
Will Senator Schumer stay as the minority leader?
I think what is so important for folks to understand is that this problem is bigger than one person.
And it actually is bigger than the minority leader in the Senate.
You had eight Senate Democrats who coordinated their own votes on this.
As well as you have two retiring members, many of them are also up in several cycles from now with the hope that people are going to forget this moment.
And I think what's important is that we understand that this is actually, this is not just, a leader is reflected, is a reflection of the party.
And Senate Democrats have selected their leadership to represent them.
And so the question needs to be bigger than just one person.
We have several Senate primaries this cycle.
I know I'm being asked about New York.
That is years from now.
unidentified
After my own constituents, because they think that this election is this year, we actually do have Senate elections this year.
The question then becomes, will the Democrats fight?
And you had a caller that called in in the earlier hour.
And both parties have been bought.
Let's be honest with you.
Citizens United did not do us a favor.
Citizens United just continued to open the floodgates.
And what you see is you have one party that's completely bought, okay?
Sold completely.
And then the Democrats, what this does is what they buy is everything gets slowed down.
Nothing really happens.
Everything becomes a distraction.
So instead of responding to the immediacy of the moment, instead of raising the minimum wage, instead of giving us a public option, instead of addressing things to invest in infrastructure in a timely fashion, what money does to both is it corrodes democracy.
And then not only does it corrode democracy, but then you throw in gerrymandering, and what you get is this kind of partisan gerrymandering.
So basically, you don't get representation of the people.
You get politics that ultimately lets politicians pick their voters.
So the system has rotted.
The system has rotted.
I don't want to go back.
I want to go forward.
I want to improve.
I want to fix what's wrong with it.
AOC is absolutely right.
It's not one man.
We have now created a system where they're too old, they're too rich, they've been around too long, and they've forgotten what it's like to ultimately not be able to afford to go to the doctor when they're sick.
You know, one of the reasons why Tuesday was so important and they should not have made the deal is that for the first time we had leverage.
And we had proof of the leverage because the public spoke and they spoke resoundingly.
They wanted people to fight.
And just when you want people to fight, what do you do?
Because I woke up at 4:30 this morning on my Facebook page, and I went immediately to Facebook.
And I went, Trump and Epstein are different sides of the same coin.
All right?
They are the same.
They are the same.
Of course, Trump is trying to hide something, but that's been his whole life.
His whole life is about distraction and hiding.
His whole life is about corruption and blaming someone else.
Well, you know that they just had that dump from the Epstein estate.
And what is it?
They found his name referenced 1,600 and some odd times.
Now, you don't reference a name unless you have a relationship.
You don't reference a name unless you know something.
And let me just say something.
So even if Trump did not sleep with a 15-year-old, which over a thousand young girls basically were raped, and this was a kind of sex trafficking at a level we can't even imagine.
But let me remind you, I'm going to take you back to something else.
Remember when the pedophile scandal happened in the Catholic Church?
What we know is who did we blame?
Did we blame the priests that were accused of pedophilia?
Absolutely.
But who else did we blame?
We blamed the cardinals and the bishops who knew.
Who knew?
And did nothing about it.
And instead of removing these pedophile priests, they put them in another congregation.
They sent them away, but they didn't shelve them and stop them.
There were so many people that knew, and absolutely there is no way Trump did not know.
He knew that Epstein liked younger women.
All right?
He knew that.
What did that mean?
Trust me, they were bonded at the hip for years.
There is so much in the little black books that they find about their connection.
This is affinity that Trump has with Epstein.
He may not have gone as far as Epstein went, but you know what?
The fact that he had knowledge and did nothing about it, epox on him, and all those women were sacrificed because too many people knew and nobody did anything about it.
And to some extent, I wonder if Trump aided and abetted this.
Well, I think you're going to see a lot more Republican votes for this than we've ever seen before.
This is one situation that is actually bipartisan.
And maybe part of the reason it's bipartisan is not only because the whole Epstein saga was really pushed by the MAGA base.
Let's remember, Democrats kind of rolled their eyes.
They really weren't as attached to this issue until ultimately we began to learn more and more about it.
And then we found out more and more about the former prime ministers and the princes and the oligarchs and the billionaires and the politicians and the heads of universities that were connected to these poor, poor women that were raped and abused.
And all of a sudden we wanted to weigh in.
No sooner did we want to weigh in than all of a sudden Donald Trump disavowed any knowledge.
All of a sudden there wasn't a file.
So I think for the first time now you have such a huge public reaction to this that Republicans have cover to basically vote against their president because their president isn't asking them to vote about policy.
He's asking them to deny reality and protect him for what?
For something about a pedophile and a sex trafficker.
All right, let's hear from Richard in Savannah, Georgia on our line for Republicans.
Good morning, Richard.
unidentified
Good morning.
My question is: for someone who cares about the women and the children, for over four years, we watched around 10 million to 20 million people come in from the border.
I live in Georgia.
They had a bill passed called the Lincoln Riley Bill.
We had Lincoln Riley get raped and murdered.
We had Rachel Moran.
We had a beautiful 12-year-old girl in Houston, Jocelyn Nungry, get raped and murdered by illegals coming across the border.
Why do we want to watch another episode of people come across the border under Democrat-run policies, et cetera, sanctuary cities where that beautiful lady from Ukraine was murdered by sanctuary city policy?
Why do we want to vote for Democrats and have more of that year after year after year for people who care about children and women, which I do, and I'm an American, okay?
I do not want more policies for Democrats that hurt women and children.
I ran for governor on an income tax on a state that has neither an income tax or a sales tax for exactly what you just said.
Because I wanted everyone to pay their fair share.
If they had the ability to pay, they should be paying.
And what we know is I lost.
And you want to hear the irony of this?
I didn't lose because Republicans were working against me.
I lost because Democrats were.
You see, it's ironic.
We think that Republicans are anti-tax.
Well, Democrats are afraid to talk about it.
And if you're afraid to talk about it, how do you pass it?
How do you pass it?
And now look what's happening.
The only program that the MAGA Republicans like that turns out to be a government program is a program that aids and abets the rich and hurts the rest of us.
That is the reality that we are living right now.
And it is pathetic.
We have the richest economy in the world.
But if it's only serving the top 5%, then you have to ask yourself the question: what is an economy for?
If it's not for us, then it's not an economy that's valued.
Joe is in Milford, Massachusetts, on our line for independence.
Good morning, Joe.
unidentified
Hi, good morning.
One of the things that's really, really bothering me is it seems to be the total absence of the public's concern regarding our Republican Congress.
The Constitution is very explicit on their duties and responsibilities, and I don't believe that we're seeing this whatsoever.
Their total lack of oversight on the president and his powers and the oversight of what's happening with him in the Department of Justice is just an absolute horror.
It's totally just try to imagine this whole situation with the Democratic president with the House and Senate under Republican control.
They would have impeached him no less than six months ago for sure.
So what we have is this dereliction of duty capitulation of their responsibilities to President Trump.
It's scandalous and it shouldn't be allowed.
Where is Jordan?
Where is Mr. Colmer?
They're nowhere to be found.
Same as the whole Republican Party.
So they've certainly lost any consideration of my vote.
If I could just pause you for a moment, could I get you to turn down the volume on your TV and then please go ahead.
You can go ahead, Skip.
unidentified
Okay, but I was asking you about looking ahead.
You were talking about the seven or eight Democrats that voted to open the government after Schumer and the Democrats shut it down.
My question for you, when you talk about all the things you want, you want more of this, more of that, and blame Trump, blame Mike Johnson, blame them all, those darn Republicans.
You know what?
That's why I'm not a Democrat anymore, and I was for 30 years.
Because somewhere along the line, ma'am, somewhere, somebody's got to pay for all this free stuff and your $15, $20 an hour raise for the minimum workers.
Busting Unions and Revenue Loss00:06:32
unidentified
Where do you think that money is going to come from?
We're going to have to pay $10 for a burger.
I just wish some common sense would go back to the Democrats and stop blaming.
Blame the Republicans and blame Trump.
Why don't you come up with some solutions?
And in the solutions, ma'am, all I'm asking for is who's going to pay for it?
They lowered it to a level that was shocked even to the corporations.
Why are you lowering the taxes on billionaires and soon to be a trillionaire?
What about Republicans in Congress?
Republicans in Congress, they have chosen to do nothing.
They have chosen.
They will continue to erode the revenue stream going into this government.
And he was complaining about raising the minimum wage to $15.
Well, here's the problem with the minimum wage.
If you don't raise the minimum wage, then people need food stamps.
If you don't raise the minimum wage, then people need Medicaid.
If you don't raise the minimum wage, then people need Section 8 housing.
And that's what?
That's government programs.
That's our revenue dollars.
But if you raise the wage so people can pay for their own housing, pay for their own food, and pay for their own health care, then guess what?
We have saved money and you won't be taxed as much.
So in the end, you have to look at what's going in and what's going out.
And unfortunately, what we have done over and over again is cut revenue.
And that has been something that the Republicans have chosen to do.
And not only have they chosen to do that, they've cut revenue, but then they cut programs.
And when you cut programs on Medicaid or SNAP or whatever you do, you do a shift and shaft.
Because if the federal government using all the revenue of the 50 states doesn't contribute, and then you send the responsibility back to the states, then guess what happens?
Your local taxes go up, or people are in greater need in your state.
And that is going to hurt the red states more than the blue states because they depend more on federal dollars than the blue states.
So this isn't solved when government cuts programs.
This ultimately means a shift and shaft back onto governors.
Brian is in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and our line for independence.
Good morning, Brian.
unidentified
Hey, good morning.
Let's get back to affordability for average people in America and then how illegal immigration affects it.
You know, the Democrats need to get back to Econ 101 and think about supply and demand.
You know, when Bill Clinton, the man who sowed the seeds, but this best friend, started signing all the Republican legislation and went along with free trade and globalization, essentially he devalued the American worker.
Because in the world economy, an average American with an eighth-grade level of education isn't worth very much.
But he thought it was a good idea to open it all up.
And then on top of that, we let millions and millions and millions of people pour into the country, unregulated, basically.
And then, oh, just let them work.
Let them work.
They'll do jobs Americans won't do.
Well, that's a false.
That's not true.
You know, I remember, I'm an old guy back in the 70s, there was a meat packers union.
A lot of the meat packing plants were unionized.
There was everyday Americans working there.
So what happened?
The government let the unions get broken, the plants were closed down, then they were resold, magically reopened, and then millions of people flooded into the country.
So now all the meatpacking plants are basically the province of illegal immigrants.
And everybody's like, well, Americans don't want to do that job.
That's not true.
When I worked in the Chicagoland area as an electrician, I saw many, many, many, many businesses.
And I've come to the opinion that the last thing an American employer wants to do is hire an American citizen.
They want the illegal immigrant because they make more money off of them.
And when Democrats just Play along with it and ignore the problem of illegal immigration through making it worse for the average American worker.
No, there's a part of me that totally agrees with what you just said.
Okay, so let me just start with that.
The problem is that the reason why we have so many undocumented immigrants is that we don't even have a path to get here.
All right, so let's understand that we haven't addressed the immigration problem for how many decades?
So, part of the problem is if you don't have a rational system, then what you've done is you've opened the floodgates to the undocumented.
Number one.
Number two, we have an aging demographic.
I don't know about you, but I don't know a lot of young people or people in their 50s who want to go into a lettuce field and pick lettuce, or want to go on a roof and repair a roof, or want to work in a nursing home.
So, our demographics work against us.
The fact that we haven't actually addressed the immigration policy in this country addresses us, and also because we're busting unions.
And that's another problem.
And who's been busting the unions?
But it turns out that Republicans have been busting the unions.
So, if you want to protect workers, then you better protect unions because unions are the only ones that can come to the table with the boss and make sure things are on a level playing field.
Do a lot of people want to work in an agricultural community?
Probably not.
And it's not just because of the wages they get paid, it's because of the hours.
It's because of now with the climate crisis, oh my god, I don't know how any human being can actually work in agriculture, and it's only going to get worse.
Do we have to fix the system?
Absolutely.
But do we need the undocumented immigrants that are here right now?
Yes, we do.
Yes, we do.
Now, figure out how to make them legal, figure out how to protect them, raise the wages, and make them a contributing member of society, which they already are.
They contribute with no benefit.
No benefit.
They can't collect welfare.
They can't collect Section 8, but they send billions of dollars in money into the federal coffers, whether it's Social Security or taxes.
So, first of all, remember what I said about the election on Tuesday?
The election on last, what is it, a couple weeks ago now, was done in an election of Democrats.
It was an election of us.
It was a no-kings election.
We spoke, and we spoke in huge numbers, and we basically said, this is what we want.
We want someone who will lead.
You're asking me about who should run for president.
I have no clue.
I have no clue.
And remember, I'm from New Hampshire.
What have we been doing my entire political life?
We've been picking presidential candidates because we have the first in the nation presidential primary.
Well, I'll be honest with you, I don't know yet, but I may know as we begin to see the whole situation evolve and we speak.
As we speak, a leader will emerge.
I don't want someone from the top figuring out what to do because, so far, as far as I can tell, the top is pretty thin and doesn't have a spine.
What I'm hoping is we find our spine, we find our voice, and we start defining not only what we want out of government, but the policies we need to hear.
And more often than not, too many of my leaders use generic headlines: oh, I believe in affordability, I want you to have access to health care.
Really, show me the policy, honey.
I want to know what it actually looks like.
And that's one of the things that I have to actually compliment Zorin Mandani.
Zorin Mandani didn't just talk about affordability.
That's a very easy term to sue.
He then said, What are you hurting?
You're hurting because the cost of daycare in my state, if you are a family of four in the state of New Hampshire and you have to access daycare, do you know what daycare will cost you until your kids are outside the daycare frame?
It'll cost you $300,000.
Let me repeat that.
That's $300,000 that you have to spend to go to work.
To go to work.
That is unaffordable.
That is unconscionable.
So as we look for a candidate, what I need to hear are what are the policies?
One of the reasons I wanted to come on at 8 o'clock was that I knew I'd catch you before church.
All right?
No, I'm kind of serious about that.
And what you need to know, caller, is that my second husband was a Republican libertarian atheist who never voted for me.
I loved him.
I buried him.
He died of cancer.
He was the most important person in my life.
I don't look at party labels.
I look at actions.
And when I see the actions are so cruel, and when I see the actions choose not to address the needs of the hungry, of the sick, when I see people ignore the science, want to undermine public education, I'm not saying that I hate the person, but their actions are something I despise.
I remember saying to my dad, my dad was very conservative, Republican.
And at the end of his life, I looked at him and I said, there's something you need to know, Papa.
Later on our program, we're going to be taking more of your calls and comments in open forum.
But first, coming up next on Washington Journal, the Washington Examiners, Peter Laughan, will join us to discuss the government shutdown, campaign 2026, political extremism, the Epstein files, and other news of the day.
We'll be right back.
unidentified
This week on the C-SPAN Networks, after the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, the House and Senate are back in session.
The House will vote on legislation for the Justice Department to release all of the files in its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein.
The Senate will continue work on 2026 federal spending legislation, including a full year of funding for the defense and health and human services departments.
On Tuesday, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, Philip Swagel, will testify before the House Budget Committee, conducting oversight on his agency.
And on Wednesday, a Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Subcommittee hearing on the effects of the government shutdown on the aviation system.
Watch live this week on the C-SPAN networks or on C-SPAN Now, our free mobile video app.
Also, head over to C-SPAN.org for scheduling information or to watch live or on demand anytime.
c-span democracy unfiltered watch america's book club c-span's bold original series Today, best-selling biographer Walter Isaacson, who chronicles history's most remarkable lives.
His books include Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs, and Einstein.
He joins our host, renowned author and civic leader David Rubinstein.
So I actually don't think it's going to make much difference at all in the upcoming midterms.
And I don't think there were particularly any winners in the shutdown.
And I think that's something that may be different from shutdowns in the past.
This seems to have been truly a Seinfeld shutdown, just totally pointless.
There may have been a couple of losers, but it's hard to say that there was a winner.
I guess you could say Republicans essentially got what they wanted, but in the process, with the government shutdown and with them in charge, they gave the impression, or there was the impression that there was a great dysfunction in Washington, and that never helps the party in power.
And when it comes to the Democrats, well, the one big loser of this whole thing is almost certainly Chuck Schumer.
Chuck Schumer has been getting lambasted by his own party for failing to keep his caucus together, but it's hard to say exactly how this could have been resolved in any other way.
This seems to have been a sort of a preordained conclusion.
They were never going to get what they were after, which was an extension of the Affordable Care Act credits that were assigned during COVID and were set to expire at the end of this year.
And they never really had any leverage to get that done.
And so it seems the Democrats went into this because they wanted to give the impression that we're fighting Trump.
That's the impression they want to give their voters right now.
And it doesn't seem that they had a real strategy to come out on top of this.
And so you see, you know, Schumer getting trashed, but he may deserve it because he went along with this with his party's base the whole way.
And then he couldn't keep his caucus in line in the end.
And he seems to be the one who's going to take the fall.
But were there any winners?
No, I think we're going to forget about this one really quick.
I think this was a long shutdown.
There was real pain that was inflicted, particularly in Northern Virginia.
And so, you know, with all the federal workers who were laid off or not getting paid.
And I think that helped Abigail Spanberger win her Virginia race, her race for governor of Virginia.
But beyond that, I think we're going to forget about the story pretty quick.
You mentioned, you know, sort of the fight over health care that was central, or at least these ACA subsidies, that was pretty central to the shutdown debate.
And there is a KFF health tracking poll that public support remains quite high for extending those enhanced ACA credit.
What danger do you think, if any at all, this issue poses to Republicans moving forward?
Oh, well, it poses a danger in the sense that they need to come up with a real replacement for Obamacare.
Yeah, you're going to see things, you're going to see polls like KFF, you know, people, they want this tax credit extended.
But I think the reason that Democrats couldn't use that as leverage here in the shutdown is because there's behind it the tacit admission that Obamacare is failing, which in a way, the exact way Republicans always said that Obamacare would fail.
That we can't simply continue to spend this much money propping up a system that doesn't work in the long run.
Right now, we're $38 trillion in debt.
And that's real money.
That's not pretend money.
$38 trillion.
I know when we get to numbers like that, it's hard to even conceptualize just how deeply indebted we are.
And most of that debt, if not, you know, the large, large majority, 90% plus, comes from these social spending programs.
And so we're going to hit a real wall here at some time.
And it comes to the point where are we going to learn the lesson of how terrible it is what we're doing to our future after it happens or before it happens?
And so there was never it's hard to say that just because people wanted this particular tax credit extended, that that created real political leverage.
Because, yeah, it sort of admits that the policy itself just isn't working.
Certainly we're seeing now a rise of extremism on both sides that's very concerning.
It's been going on a bit longer on the left, and it seems as though the more extreme elements of the left have effectively become the mainstream of their party.
And I think we saw that with Zorhan Mamdani's victory in New York City.
On the right, for me, it's particularly concerning as a conservative to see some of the attitudes and behaviors and thoughts that have been percolating up into what we call the new right mainstream.
So one of the problems with calling people Nazis for the past decade, which is what we've been doing, we've just been, every time somebody does something we don't like, we say you're a Nazi, is that we have this sort of linguistic inflation and we lose our ability to communicate when real danger is coming.
And there are real Nazis, people who, you know, if they're not wearing Nazi uniforms, they sure do share Nazi ideas and have their ambition to take over the conservative movement and the country.
There was an incident a couple weeks ago that got this whole firestorm started.
There's this young man named Nick Fuentes on the far right.
I'm not sure how many in your audience would be familiar with him.
I hope they're not, frankly.
He is a truly despicable person who has said, you know, and believes, stands by some of the worst ideas imaginable.
A true racist and a proud one.
A true anti-Semite and a proud one.
And he has legions of followers online.
I think I saw the other day he may have the top podcast on Spotify.
And so normally, in normal times, the Republican Party would keep people like that away.
No, you can't come into our center circle here.
You're not on our team.
Even though we're principally, we're fighting against the left.
You extremist people, you're not with us.
But then, a couple weeks ago, Tucker Carlson, who is probably the most influential and powerful media figure on the right, invited this Fuentes character onto his show and had a two-hour interview with him that was downright friendly, where none of his ideas were challenged.
At times, he used phrases like, yes, we have to defeat organized Jewry.
And Tucker Carlson sat there with a straight face and didn't say anything or nodded along.
And so for a figure like that to be brought into the mainstream, it was very disconcerting.
And there was a blowback to that.
But then again, then two days later, the Heritage Foundation, the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, came out and made this video defending Tucker Carlson's decision to have this young man on his show and accused anybody who is against platforming this young man as being part of a venomous coalition.
Now, the Heritage Foundation is an enormously influential organization within the conservative movement, enormously.
In fact, it's been, I'd say, the power center of conservative thought for the past decade, really since Trump came on the scene, and has a long, you know, storied history.
And so to see the president of that organization come on and say that was incredibly troubling.
Now, he has walked that back in the last couple of weeks.
Roberts has, and has reaffirmed his commitment to anti-Semitism.
But the whole episode left conservatives, and I'll say me too, pretty shaken.
And then, you know, another element of this, an elephant in the room that needs to be discussed, JD Vance's reactions to this whole spat over the past few weeks is also something that many in the more traditional right, and I consider myself in that camp, found very troubling.
Senator Ruth Cruz, if you'll allow me a moment, was one of the people who gave a statement like that saying a comment, if you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very, very cool and that their mission is to combat and defeat global jewelry, and you say nothing, then you are a coward and you are complicit in that evil.
Yeah, and that seemed to be a direct shot at the vice president.
And we're seeing on the right, and Cruz would also be included in this more traditionalist camp, that the old guard, they're referred to sometimes, their spines are stiffened by this whole thing.
All of a sudden, there's a real concerted effort to keep the Vance wing of the party from ascending.
Now, that's interesting in terms of 2028 because JD Vance, obviously, is a runaway favorite to become the next party's nominee.
He's up 30, 40 points in most polls that come out.
Early polling, who knows?
But it's a very strong position.
Trump's magic in the Republican Party for the past decade is that he's been able to hold these two factions together.
This sort of new right, populist, protectionist, isolationist wing that Vance is probably a bit more comfortable in.
And people like Tucker Carlson and Kevin Roberts kind of hail from.
But also the more traditional conservatives, the Cruises, the people who are maybe a bit more eager to use military intervention to solve problems around the world.
Trump ended up commanding loyalty and respect from both sides, which is an incredible achievement.
And it's why he's had such incredible power and such a hold on the Republican Party over the past decade.
This whole episode shows that it's pretty clear Vance doesn't have both camps here.
He's not going to be able to hold them as automatically as Trump did.
And so that does open the door to a challenge.
Now, the other day, I was at a Buckley Institute conference.
The Buckley Institute, William F. Buckley founded the National Review.
And I have to tell you, from that crowd, which is comprised of mainly the old guard, there was a lot of talk of, hey, we need to put up a challenger to this.
And so it's interesting.
It looked like the nomination fight in 2028 for Vance was going to be a cakewalk, but he's still very clearly the favorite.
You mentioned that there does seem to be this division within the Republican Party over issues similar to this.
Back in September, Missouri GOP Senator Eric Schmidt spoke at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington and delivered a speech titled, What is an American?
And he was critical of multiculturalism and immigration.
For decades, the mainstream consensus on the left and the right alike seemed to be that America itself was just an idea, a vehicle for global liberalism.
We were told that the entire meaning of America boiled down to a few lines in a poem on the Statue of Liberty and five words about equality in the Declaration of Independence.
Any other aspect of American identity was deemed to be illegitimate and immoral, poisoned by the evils of our ancestors.
The true meaning of America, they said, was liberalism, multiculturalism, endless immigration.
In a speech in 1998, Bill Clinton said that the continuous influx of immigrants was, and I quote, a reminder that our America is not so much a place but a promise.
Let me just say, I believe our founding fathers were the most brilliant group of men ever assembled in any one place at any one time, in any room.
Their ideas are central to who we are.
You can't understand America without understanding things like freedom of speech, the right to self-defense, the ideals of independence, self-government, and political liberty.
But these principles aren't merely abstractions.
They're living, breathing things rooted in a people and embodied in a way of life.
So I think that he makes a lot of important points.
I don't dislike that comment necessarily, those comments necessarily.
America is an idea and it is also a particular place made up of a particular people.
And that's just the truth.
We have a history and we have a culture.
And on the left, for the past decade or more, there has been great effort to make it seem as though America is nothing but an idea, a purely propositional nation.
And that's not quite right either, because obviously we do at this point, 250 years into our existence, have a lineage.
We are a people.
We are also a people who pride ourselves on taking in people who need to come here because of our vast wealth and power.
So there is tension here.
I fear that this particular point, this particular point of the debate is very polarized.
And so you have people on the right, and I think Eric Schmidt, you could say he's among them, who want America to only be a people and a particular place at a particular time and not its propositional nature, not a creedal nation built on creeds.
And if that's your position, you're coming into close proximity with some forces, some ideas that are not only politically toxic, but very morally problematic.
And I think we've seen that on the right in the past few weeks, that when you move in that direction, it can empower some people who really want to hear that message and use it for bad reasons.
Fuentes, chief among them.
Now, the problem on the left is similar.
They want America to only be an ideal and to completely ignore the culture that is here, the culture that it was built on, the values that America has been built on, the Judeo-Christian values America has most definitely been built on, and replace it with whatever comes next.
And That's also very troubling, and that's an idea that I've been fighting against for a long time now.
So, there's great tension in this particular argument, and I think we're going to see it play out over the next few years.
What is an American?
We've seen a lot of right-wing influencers pose that question online, seemingly as if they just want to get us thinking.
Now, I think an American is somebody who is a citizen of America.
We're not going to, there is some energy on the right to do things like deport leftists.
You know, this is in the far right, deport, you know, anybody who calls themselves a Muslim.
You know, and that is obviously a terrible idea that I would never go along with.
There's problems on both sides of this issue, and I think we're going to see it play out over the next few years.
All right, we're taking calls for Peter Laffin, and let's start with Thomas in Derwood, Maryland, on our line for Democrats.
Good morning, Thomas.
unidentified
Good morning.
I have a question for the guy for the examiner.
We know that the examiner is definitely a right-wing newspaper or company.
Let me ask you this: when you say the founding fathers, I mean, they massacred the Indians, forced them to live their land.
Okay, that's one of their, I guess, legacies.
They kept black people in slavery.
They didn't want women to vote.
Then they said some men were three-fifths of a man.
So, I like to know when you speak about the right wing and William F. Buckley and people like that, and they believed in having the Nazis here because if you remember, after the war, they let the Nazis come into this country.
Full-fledged, car-turned Nazis.
So, why should we be surprised that the Republicans have a nationalist movement, Christian nationalists, they call it?
But how can they be called a Christian nationalist when they let Nazis in the country that merge Jewish people and came here with the same beliefs and thoughts and spread it out amongst the lands?
Even if you go back to Charlottesville, what did they say?
One general response I'd give to this caller is there's a lot of speaking about an enormously varied and large group of people using the word they.
And that's a terrible habit that we get in our politics on the other side.
They're just the big they.
He started talking about the founders and that they, you know, all did terrible things.
And there was a great amount of diversity of thought in the founders about things like slavery, about things like expanding westward.
And if we get up to the time of, you know, is Lincoln a they?
I don't know.
If he is a they, he was a bad they because he freed the slaves, the Emancipation Proclamation, and fought the Civil War for it.
Was Grant a they, one of the bad guys?
You know, he fought against members of his own family in the Civil War to make sure that black people could be free eventually.
So It seems that in this caller's mind, and I think in the mind of a lot of Americans, there is this larger enemy on the other side who's this spooky, terrible force, and it's all the people who aren't like me, and they are evil.
So it would be hard to answer all of the callers' comments, all of his questions in this moment because he raised a lot of things.
But I would say that's the thing we need to avoid right now if we want to get to a better place.
There are people on the right and on the left who are good, decent people who are attempting to find a way to live together in this country.
I'm about to go to church and sit next to a bunch of them on both sides.
Many people are going to the grocery store today, and I promise they are going to be all around you.
And so to try to avoid these huge generalizations, I think, is a way toward a better politics that won't end in a disaster.
Martin is in Smithtown, New York, on our line for Republicans.
Good morning, Martin.
unidentified
Good morning, Peter.
I'd like to ask three questions, but please answer them after I answer them.
The first thing is with the Epstein and Trump, my President Trump.
The first thing that Trump is not gullible, and he's pretty smart, I think he took a staff and said, AI, I want you to go through the 23,000 papers and come up with a conclusion.
And for sure, Trump has the answer.
I don't think he wants to disgrace our nation or disgrace our country internationally.
My question to you is: when Biden ran this country for four years, when he had control of both houses, why didn't he do something about it?
Why are they dumping now on Trump?
My second point is stopping the nation for 40 days.
What did the Democrats actually accomplish?
And the answer is absolutely nothing.
What they did do, they did screw the people that have food stamps.
They screw the people that had a fly, the federal government workers who got terminated.
My question to you, and also from day one, the Republicans and Democrats could find a solution for Obamacare.
And my question to you again, what for the four years that Biden do, why didn't he do anything?
And why did he dump on Trump?
Now, the most important third thing that I have to say is this country votes for a president.
80 million people voted for Trump.
Why do we have federal judges who are not even elected, appointed, running our country?
They don't know the first thing about tariffs.
If they do to banks, their own bank accounts, it would be great.
Why are they getting involved with states such as California?
If you want to be cynical about American politics, pay close attention to the Epstein story.
Both sides on this issue have been so awful and cynical and opportunist over the 15 or 20 years this has been going on that I almost don't feel bad for anybody really caught in the crossfire of this.
If you remember going back, you know, for the first 10 years of this scandal, it was all about Bill Clinton's connection.
It appears, you know, rightfully so, that there are a lot.
Bill Clinton spent a lot of time with this guy that we can verify.
And a number of other prominent Democrats, liberal people, I won't name them.
You probably know who they are.
And during that time of the story, Democrats and the legacy media willfully ignored it, did everything they could to make anybody who was concerned about the Epstein issue seem like they were a crazy kook, a conspiracy theorist, tinfoil hatter.
Those are the people who think the Epstein scandal will produce some list of powerful people.
And now that there's some information that Donald Trump's relationship with him, you know, is was somewhat extensive.
I'm not sure exactly what it amounted to.
But now that that's the case, suddenly the left and Democrats are the ones who are so concerned with the victims of the Epstein story.
And that is just so it's grotesque, you know, to emotionally manipulate people like that through the media for so long that they suddenly care about the Epstein saga.
It's gagworthy.
Now, on the other side of that, the Republican Party, particularly President Donald Trump and Vice President Vance and their most famous supporters, they did everything they could in the past five years, really, and particularly during the 2024 presidential campaign, to raise this issue.
They wanted the Epstein files to come out.
And the reason is, is that Republicans online, particularly the far right, are obsessed with Jeffrey Epstein.
And so they gave them constant lip service that we're going to get to the bottom of this when we get in there.
Even after they were elected, this was going on.
JD Vance was on the Theo Vaughan podcast.
I think this was in the spring.
And he said, yeah, we really got to release that client list, you know, as if there is one.
And so both sides have used this story as a political football to try and hurt the other.
And there are real, again, real people at the center of this.
People who appear to have been really hurt.
But for both major parties, it's just a political football.
Oh, you know, as I said earlier, it doesn't seem anything was accomplished by the shutdown except Chuck Schumer probably losing his leadership in the Senate sooner than later.
Besides that, it's hard to see.
You know, Democrats didn't really have a plan.
They just wanted to give the perception that they were fighting Trump.
I think that getting away from euphemisms in politics and speaking bolder and clearer truths, particularly about our economic situation, particularly about our debt, would be fantastic, if that's what I'm understanding you're saying.
And so I would, I think you said you were in Maryland.
Okay, so Mary, I would say, you know, you may have said a couple of things that I agree with, but you lost me in the first sentence when you said that the problem and that they're all the same and that they're all bad.
I think you said evangelicals plus Nazis plus white supremacists.
Again, that's a very large group of people.
Evangelical Christians are a very large block of this country.
And if you think they're all white supremacists or Nazis, you're part of the problem with the polarization and really the lack of respect and thinking in this country, the lack of thoughtfulness.
My father is an evangelical.
So when you lump that word next to Nazi and say those are all the bad people, that's a pretty big they.
And it's not only inaccurate, I'd say that's really immoral.
And so you may want to rethink that categorization block that you just put together.
The rest of it, some other things, I think you said that Donald Trump did something in Russia.
You know, maybe, I don't know, but certainly not what the Democrats would have had you believe in the past decade.
The Russia Gate conspiracy theories have been almost universally debunked.
And many of the mainstream news outlets you probably get your news from have walked back their earlier stances on that considerably.
That includes the New York Times and the Washington Post, by the way.
And so I'd go and I'd take a look at that, see if your ideas about Trump and Russia still hold up.
And as for the rest of it, is he a pedophile?
You know, you seem to have all of the proof in the world.
So, you know, I'd say you should go out there and write an article, put it out and convince us all.
And we'll believe you if you really have the proof.
So, Tom, they're raising his opinion that the Obamacare is a universal failure, that people should be in support of President Trump's tariffs, the need for smaller government, as well as the opposition that the president is facing from Democrats.
So, to respond to your first point, yeah, I think clearly, as I said earlier, Obamacare has been a failure and a bad one.
And that's the reason we're seeing our health care premiums skyrocket.
And the fact that Democrats were holding on to this extension of tax credits for Obamacare for an extension that was made during the COVID emergency is proof that that program just doesn't work and needs to be replaced with something better.
So, I'd agree with you there completely.
On the second point about the tariffs, I'm going to disagree with you here.
And that's because our consumer products, the prices of food, the prices of almost everything, with a few exceptions, are still too high.
Donald Trump was elected in 2024 primarily, and this is according to polls, primarily by voters who wanted him and trusted him to bring down the cost of living.
And he's been focused on a lot of other things in his first year.
I know some people have said, well, he's had a very foreign policy-focused term here.
He's remaking the White House, which I don't really have a problem with.
But I think there is a perception problem with what are you doing to lower the cost of the stuff I buy?
And here you are obsessed with making a ballroom.
I think that's a political problem.
And so, and I don't believe that the tariff policy, while it's been maybe an interesting negotiating policy in terms of foreign policy, other things like that, it has not delivered on reducing the cost of living.
And that's a real problem for the president.
It's going to be a real problem in the midterms.
I think I saw Vice President Vance on one of the Sunday morning shows last week, you know, saying, well, it's going to take a long time for all of everything that Biden messed up to be done away with.
It takes a lot of time for the tariff policy to be enacted and for us to see the fruits of it.
And I thought to myself, man, that sounds a lot like the Biden people saying that inflation was transitory.
And we're a year into this and we're not seeing any results.
And, you know, so I think that's going to be a major problem.
And as I said earlier, I think the Supreme Court shutting down the tariffs would be a real favor to the president.
Alexander is in Brooklyn, New York, on our line for Democrats.
Good morning, Alexander.
unidentified
Yes, hello.
Good morning.
And thank you for taking my call.
You know, I'm hearing you as a conservative, and I saw you almost bent backwards in trying to explain the difference between what is, I would say, the spirit of this country and the people that live in this country.
It just makes it seem as if you want to say that we have a history here, but you want to deny what that history is.
And you say that we have a culture and that we have a people.
And somewhere along the history of this country, you close that door and you just say, this is what we are.
This is who we are.
And you say that you are a person of faith.
And yet, what you are just explaining is a president that has taken conservative values, conservative philosophy, and we are watching it in display.
There is nothing normal about a president unilaterally putting tariffs out there, putting people's lives and businesses at risk, destroying economies.
There is nothing normal about a person saying that the vermin and the blood of the vermin coming to this country eating animals and making people feel as if they are less than human.
Why are you surprised that Nick Fuentes on a interview with Tucker Carlson, who was from Fox News, that feeds this hatred is the result that you get from what we have of the conservative movement and the conservatives part of the political spectrum.
Do you see how you conflate and the way that you distort the reality?
All I can tell you is this, and please let me just make this point.
You conservatives have now been able to get the Federalist Society and your vision of America to be on full display.
How do you think history is going to look at the conservative movement and you and what you consider to be an evangelical I think we have the idea, Alexander?
How do I think that history will judge, I guess me, I guess that's what he's implying as a Christian person, as a person who calls himself conservative?
You know, I think in the past 45 minutes on the show, I've showed you where I agree and where I don't disagree with the people who are in charge of the conservative movement and the country.
I don't know you, so I can't label you as part of a movement and paint you with a broad brush and say you're the bad guy.
And nor would I, though, trust me, if you're on the left, there are a lot of people who are very bad guys.
I mean, we think about the past year alone, we've had a political assassination spree coming almost exclusively from the left.
Is history going to judge you poorly for being part of that?
The second that the left could no longer win elections, they started torching Teslas.
They started shooting at the most prominent President Trump has survived two assassination attempts.
Charlie Kirk, probably the most prominent conservative movement leader, literally got assassinated last month.
Now, does that speak highly of you and the movement you're in?
I don't think so, but I wouldn't say that because you're somebody who's on the left, that you are morally equivalent to the person who pulled the trigger.
That's just childish.
And it's a childish thing we have in our politics right now, that if you have certain ideas or you have a certain identity, then I'm going to lump you in with all of the worst people in history.
That's why we have a hard time identifying actual Nazis and bad people when they're in our midst.
Because you say ridiculous things like that.
And so I would say for you as a piece of advice, don't paint with such a ridiculously and childishly broad brush.
I think we'll be in a better place if you do that.
William Arthur Galston has been a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution since 2006 and a columnist for the Wall Street Journal for the past 12 years.
In the first paragraph of his latest 161-page book, he tells us what the book is about.
Quote, this book advances this proposition that what I call the dark passions, anger, hatred, humiliation, resentment, fear, and the drive for domination, fuels today's attacks on liberal democracy.
Galston also says, persuasive public speech is the main way demagogues mobilize these passions to pursue power.
The actual name of the book is Anger, Fear, Domination.
unidentified
Author William Galston with his book, Anger, Fear, Domination, Dark Passions and the Power of Political Speech.
On this episode of Book Notes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb, BookNotes Plus is available wherever you get your podcasts and on the C-SPAN Now app.
And past president dominance.
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One story that we've been watching this morning here reported in the AP, immigration enforcement surge begins in Charlotte, North Carolina, officials confirm.
They're saying that federal officials confirmed on Saturday that a surge of immigration enforcement in North Carolina's largest city has begun as agents were seen making arrests in multiple locations.
Quote, Americans should be able to live without fear of violent criminal illegal aliens hurting them, their families, or their neighbors, end quote.
Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement, we are surging DHS law enforcement to Charlotte to ensure Americans are safe and public safety threats are removed.
Local officials, including Mayor V. Lyles, criticized such actions, saying in a statement that they are, quote, causing unnecessary fear and uncertainty.
We want people in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County to know we stand with all residents who simply want to go about their lives, the statement said.
It was also signed by Mecklenburg County Commissioner Mark Jarrell and Charlotte Mecklenburg School Board member Stephanie Sneed.
Crime is down in the city this year through August compared with the same months in 2024.
Homicides, rapes, robberies, and motor vehicle thefts fell by more than 20 percent, according to AH Datalytics.
But President Donald Trump's administration has seized upon the fatal stabbing of Ukrainian refugee Irna Zarutska on a Charlotte light rail train to argue that Democratic-led cities fail to protect residents.
A man with a lengthy criminal record has been charged with the woman's murder.
There is some video there of that crackdown that's beginning in Charlotte.
But let's go to open form with the stories that you're following.
Dave is in Las Vegas, Nevada, on our line for independence.
Good morning, Dave.
unidentified
Good morning.
I'd just like to say, first of all, Trump is abusing power.
He's getting rid of everything that's good in this country: jobs, laws, everything.
Tells people to do violence.
He's just a terrible person.
And in 1994, Katie Johnson paid off.
What he did was it's documented.
He took a 13-year-old girl, tied her up for the Epstein files, tied her up beats.
I do want to follow up on those accusations that you mentioned about the 13-year-old girl who that was reported in various cases.
This is a story from back in 2016, referencing that story.
That the woman who did accuse Donald Trump of raping her at 13 dropped the lawsuit at the time.
She alleged that Trump and billionaire Jeffrey Epstein raped her in 1994, but the accuser's attorney filed a voluntary dismissal, and President Trump had denied those accusations.
But that was a story that the caller was referencing.
Jim is in Asheville, North Carolina, on our line for Republicans.
Good morning, Jim.
And Jim, can you please turn down the volume on your television and then you can go ahead with your point?
unidentified
Okay, what I would like to speak about is with the thing with this Obama thing with the things that Democrats have code saying.
If we really use the situation with that, where we need to know who's getting the benefits, how many people benefit from the things of this file, and how many people are American people with so forth, and how many foreigners or so forth are receiving the goods of this.
Jim, we're still getting pretty bad feedback on your call, but I think I understand your point about wanting to have more details about who's receiving the health care benefits in the country.
Sal is in Ridge, New York on our line for Democrats.
Good morning, Sal.
unidentified
Hi, good morning.
It's my opinion that what's going on with the food stamps and immigration is just the tip of the iceberg.
The money that gets funneled away from the poor and into the hands of the wealthy and the connected.
It's not by mistake.
It's my opinion that the unseen arm of the Catholic Church, the CIA, and the media are using artificial intelligence to break people from their political views, their religious views.
And a lot of what's going on in Ukraine, in my opinion, is just a holy war between, you know, the Orthodox Christians and the Catholic Christians.
It's the same thing that was going on in Ireland with the Catholics and the Protestants.
It's just moved to another area of the world.
That's my opinion.
That's what I think is going on, and that's where the problem is.
I think a lot of the immigration is probably immigration, but they're also targeting people, like I just said, you know, for political views and their religious views.
And they're using weapons of war that we don't know about, but it's happening.
They have artificial intelligence, and it's being used as a weapon of war.
You don't see it, but it's happening.
You know, people could be enslaved.
There's a new slavery.
It's not, you know, out in the open where people are owned by somebody.
You're owned by somebody by these means of these weapons.
All right, then let's go to AJ in Kennesaw, Georgia, on our line for Democrats.
Good morning, AJ.
unidentified
Good morning.
How are you?
Hope everyone has a blessed day.
Yes, it's been a very interesting.
C-SPAN is the number one show on TV in America.
So, real quick, today is Sunday, and we're talking about Christians.
Psalms 1017 says, No one who practices deceit will dwell in my house.
No one who speaks falsely will stand in my presence.
So God rejects deceitful people from his fellowship.
And so the Washington Post fact-checker counted 30,573 false or misleading claims by Donald Trump during his first term.
That's over just 31,000 lies, basically.
And so here's the last thing I want to say: 91 criminal charges, six bankruptcies, four indictments, two impeachments, one convicted company, one fake charity shutdown, one fake university shutdown, 26 sexual assault allegations,
$25 million fraud settlement, $5 million sexual abuse verdict, $2 million charity abuse judgment, and 34 convicted felonies.
Oh, I don't know, you know, because you cut them off.
And if you say the wrong thing, a cuss word or anything, Donald Trump uses cuss words.
He's a racist, bigot.
He's everything you want to think of.
If you listen to some of his comments that he made, how he was abusing women, The sexual comments he made on an interview, he said, I touch him here, I touch him there, and he gets the benefit of the doubt.
I'm sorry, Gregory, we can't hear you well anymore.
Let's go to Love in Atlanta, Georgia on our line for Republicans.
Good morning, love.
unidentified
Hi, I would just like to say, in reference to that last guest, I have been watching C-STAN Washington Journal for years because, like another caller said, I love to listen to what the country is thinking, the people, not the politicians, because we know what they think.
And you guys, since this administration started, you constantly have conservative guests that just deflect.
They're condescending.
And the guest you just had, Larry, was very rude and condescending to specific guests.
I would like to.
Yes, yes, that guy.
Very condescending, very rude, very biased.
When people talk about Christians, I just like to say, I wish I had met Jesus before I met a Christian.
Because we use that term so loosely.
And these Christian evangelicals, the ones who are also Nazis and white supremacists and white nationalists, he said they're not all bad people.
I would love to know what makes them good because how do you not love your neighbor and you call yourself Christian?
And the last thing I would like to say is to all the black men that I've met who have said to me they did not vote for Kamala because she was married to a white man.
Imagine voting for a white man whose evil racism pedophiling has told you many times what he thought about you.
Robert is in Moreno Valley, California on our line for Democrats.
Good morning, Robert.
unidentified
Hi, thank you for taking my call.
I was going to piggyback on what two of the people said just about Waffen, your previous guest that he was bending over backwards about certain things about conservatism that was masked as racism and how he said about fundamentalist Christians.
Republicans Untrusted00:01:26
unidentified
There's a difference between them and Christians because the most fundamentalist Christians right now are acting as if they believe in like 200 years ago and how they feel about people of color and things like that.
And as the last caller did say, he was condescending and rude.
And when people make these things, these statements saying that, oh, to lump everyone else out like that and whatnot, or you're being rude, you're being childish and stuff like that.
He knows what he's doing and what he's saying by that.
So he can't be trusted.
Another thing, if they're really upset about the Obamacare, they've had 15 to 20 years to come up with something else and they haven't done it, the Republicans or anything like that.
So whenever anyone says that about the price of Obamacare and premiums and everything, they haven't had anything but, quote, a concept of a plan that Trump said in his in part of his speech when he was debating Kamala Harris and nothing has ever been done.
And everyone just goes by the wayside and doesn't say anything about this and doesn't put people, their feet to the fire about these issues or about the Epstein issues, how Blossom, the guest you just had, he didn't say anything about that that much and how, you know, that's a pressing issue, especially as a so-called Christian man.
Well, the Obama phones must have got preloaded today.
I just want to make a general comment regarding immigration and the benefits or no benefits.
Let's say that just for speaking terms, 5 million were allowed in illegally.
And we know it's more than that.
Okay.
I hear the Democrats, oh, they don't get any benefits.
They don't get anything.
All right.
So they get sick.
Where do they go?
They go to the emergency room.
Oh, but that's all taken care of because anyone to be able to be treated in the emergency room, that's a law.
Okay.
Well, who reimburses it?
The federal government.
So where are these immigrants receiving their health care?
Where?
Are they just incredibly healthy and they don't go to doctors?
I mean, it's ridiculous.
And as far as food stamps and benefits in that category, 30 states, most of them blue states, expanded Medicaid to provide benefits to the illegal aliens, and they've set up all forms of fake...
I just want to remind him about the 34 felonies in New York City.
If you look at the ingredients that went into that case, we had Michael Cohen, a liar, and we had, well, we had a Hooker porn star with their star witnesses.
So let's call them what they were.
There were 34 fake felonies, just like the fake Mueller report, just like the fake two impeachments, just like the fake election, and just like the fake insurrection investigation.
Unreal.
But I want to mention Epstein real quick.
There's only a certain number of people that were there.
They know what happened.
The rest of us, 7 billion of us, weren't there.
We don't know what happened.
So the only thing I can say about Epstein thing is forget about it.
Just forget about it.
We got better things to work on.
All right.
And can I mention one more thing about the shameful Schumer shutdown?
We wasted 40 days.
We wasted.
Schumer's been down there for 40 years.
He could have fixed this.
But no, he's been causing gridlock.
This is why we needed Donald Trump in the first time, first place.
It really displays a vast amount of new information out there.
Real quick, just these are all facts.
These are verifiable.
Look them up yourself.
Why?
Trump never said the races and everything were good.
He was talking about the people that wanted to keep some statues for history purposes.
Number two, this 13-year-old, thank you for pointing that out.
That's just an allegation that was out there forever.
Three, they talk about the Democrats standing up for Obamacare and health care and everything.
That was their program.
Obamacare is their program.
These extensions that have expired, the Democrats put that expiration date in.
If people are complaining about the expiration, blame the Democrats and Biden because when that expiration date was put in, Biden was the president.
The Democrats controlled the House.
The Democrats controlled the Senate.
And now they're winding that the extensions are terminated.
Well, why didn't they just go ahead and make it longer?
The final thing, and the most important thing, is there's a lot of talk about Christianity here, and all the people that are yelling for government action based upon Christianity are heretical.
I think we lost your call and your connection there.
But that is actually all the time that we have for the show today.
But coming up next, we're going to have another edition of Ceasefire.
Former Alabama Democratic Senator Doug Jones and former Ohio Republican Congressman Steve Stivers will come together for a bipartisan dialogue on the shutdown and the top issues facing the country.
That's coming up next.
But tomorrow, we'll be back with another edition of Washington Journal starting at 7 a.m. Eastern.