| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Well, coming up this morning on Washington Journal, along with your calls and comments live, we'll talk about the Trump administration, the future of the Republican Party, and political news of the day with Rich Lowry of the National Review and progressive talk show host Tom Hartman discusses Trump administration policies, the Democrats' agenda, and the progressive movement. | |
| Washington Journal is next. | ||
| Join the conversation. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| It's Sunday, November 23rd, 2025. | ||
| When President Trump and New York City Mayor-elect Zorhan Mamdani met in the White House last week, the two leaders were divided on politics but seemed united in their focus on affordability, what's shaping up to be the key issue in the upcoming election cycle, and what's on the minds of many Americans this Thanksgiving week. | ||
| Our question to start this morning, what's your message to Washington on rising costs? | ||
| Our phone line for Democrats is 202-748-8000. | ||
| For Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| And for Independents, that number is 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. | ||
| And you can also reach us on social media at facebook.com/slash C-SPAN and on X at C-SPANWJ. | ||
| Now, to layer out how important this issue is to Americans, there's been some recent polling from the Marist poll finding that lowering prices is the top issue for Americans when it comes to what they think should be the Trump administration's top priority. | ||
| 57% say that lowering prices should be the administration's top priority, above controlling immigration at 16%, reducing crime at 9%, ending the war in Ukraine and Russia at 7%, maintaining peace between Israel and Gaza at 6%, and eliminating drug traffic from Latin America at just 4%. | ||
| Now, there is some recent also polling in terms of just how Americans are feeling about rising costs. | ||
| CBS has some reporting on this, finding that although inflation across the U.S. is far cooler than in the post-pandemic years, millions of Americans say they still feel the pinch of rising prices, struggle to pay the bills, and express concern about their financial prospects. | ||
| Price increases are nowhere near the level reached in June of 2022 when the Consumer Price Index hit a 40-year high of 9.1%. | ||
| Yet many people feel squeezed by the cost of simple daily necessities, including the ability to afford healthy food and by long-term increases in the cost of essentials such as housing and health care. | ||
| Now let's scroll down a bit for more on just how food prices are changing over time. | ||
| Almost half of Americans say that it's harder to afford groceries today than it was a year ago, according to a September survey by Axios and the Harris Poll. | ||
| Only 19% said food prices are cheaper than a year earlier, with roughly a third seeing no change. | ||
| That's how people feel about food prices. | ||
| When it comes to what has actually happened to food prices, it matches up with what people are feeling. | ||
| All food cost about 18.2% more than they did in January of 2022. | ||
| That means a grocery bill that cost $100 back then would cost around $118.16 in September of 2025. | ||
| Now, as I mentioned earlier about that meeting in the Oval Office this week, on Friday, President Trump and New York City Mayor Alexor Ammam Dhani held a meeting there in the White House, and here they are speaking to reporters afterward. | ||
| Well, thank you very much. | ||
| We've just had a great meeting, a really good, very productive meeting. | ||
| We have one thing in common. | ||
| We want this city of ours that we love to do very well. | ||
| And I wanted to congratulate the mayor. | ||
| He really ran an incredible race against a lot of smart people, starting with the early primaries against some very tough people, very smart people. | ||
| And he beat them, and he beat them easily. | ||
| And I congratulated him. | ||
| And we talked about some things in very strong common, like housing and getting housing built and food and prices. | ||
| And the price of oil is coming way down. | ||
| Anything I do is going to be good for New York. | ||
| If I can get prices down, it's good for New York. | ||
| And we've got them down way down from last year. | ||
| We have, as you know, I've been saying to a lot of people, Walmart said that Thanksgiving this year is exactly 25% less than last year. | ||
| So that's good for New York, good for everybody. | ||
| But I just want to congratulate, I think you're going to have hopefully a really great mayor. | ||
| The better he does, the happier I am, I will say. | ||
| There's no difference in party. | ||
| There's no difference in anything. | ||
| And we're going to be helping him to make everybody's dream come true, having a strong and very safe New York. | ||
| And congratulations, Mr. Mayor. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. President. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| I appreciate it. | ||
| Please. | ||
| I appreciated the meeting with the President. | ||
| And as he said, it was a productive meeting focused on a place of shared admiration and love, which is New York City, and the need to deliver affordability to New Yorkers, the eight and a half million people who call our city their home, who are struggling to afford life in the most expensive city in the United States of America. | ||
| We spoke about rent, we spoke about groceries, we spoke about utilities, we spoke about the different ways in which people are being pushed out. | ||
| And I appreciated the time with the president. | ||
| I appreciated the conversation. | ||
| I look forward to working together to deliver that affordability for New Yorkers. | ||
| Affordability has certainly been on the minds of many of our leaders, including President Trump, who also spoke last week about this issue, touting the administration's record on cost of living issues. | ||
| We're also making incredible strides to make America affordable again. | ||
| That's a new word that they're using. | ||
| Affordability, they talk. | ||
| They had the worst inflation in history. | ||
| They had the highest prices in history. | ||
| The country was going to hell. | ||
| The only thing that we're going up in is our stock market, okay? | ||
| The only price that we really have, I mean, we're bringing prices down. | ||
| But they came up with the new word, affordability. | ||
| And they look at the, we are all about affordability. | ||
| And everyone assumes that that meant that, no, their prices were high. | ||
| If you look at the numbers, since I took office, core inflation is now below 2.7%. | ||
| It was at numbers that nobody had ever seen before with them. | ||
| Walmart just announced that the cost of their standard Thanksgiving meal is reduced by 25% this year from last year. | ||
| Once again, our topic this morning, what's your message to Washington on rising costs? | ||
| We'll start with Jeffrey in Greensboro, North Carolina on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Jeffrey. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you, and happy Thanksgiving to everyone. | ||
| It is just astonishing to listen to that, to what you just played. | ||
| This individual that want to recognize him as the leader of the free world, explaining everything is down. | ||
| It is just illusional. | ||
| Not in Greensboro, North Carolina. | ||
| Absolutely, it is not. | ||
| And just to know how he is back and forth and up and down with what he decisively say he's going to do, he has not produced that. | ||
| And a lot of your audience today that will enjoy this program knows that's factual. | ||
| But to stand by and address things, because he doesn't have to worry ever in his lifetime to know that people are really in that dire situation, desperately, and it's overpriced on every possibility of everything. | ||
| And my question is, why is it acceptable? | ||
| Why is it? | ||
| Because everyone is just not expressing this. | ||
| They are definitely in dire situations. | ||
| So I hope that if Mr. President is watching today and listens to this program, he recognizes people have serious needs and concerns. | ||
| And it is not the previous administration because the previous administration going to Thanksgiving was absolutely nowhere near financially costing what it just cost me now. | ||
| And you can't blame that. | ||
| How much did it cost you differently? | ||
| Like, how would you say the cost compared to what you paid last year for preparing for Thanksgiving this year, Jeffrey? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Realistically, in Greensboro, almost $50 more, $40, $43 more. | |
| I mean, it's really that expensive. | ||
| The turkeys and all this other stuff you're talking about, corn and just your basic stuff. | ||
| And eggs are not down. | ||
| Come to Greensboro, North Carolina, in Walmarts. | ||
| They are not down. | ||
| Bacon is like $12. | ||
| Cheap bacon, the cheap bacon, seven or eight dollars. | ||
| It is extremely high. | ||
| This is not no exaggeration. | ||
| It is not to make it sound like I'm really, really criticizing the president. | ||
| It is facts. | ||
| This is everyday living situations. | ||
| You got to do it. | ||
| So, Jeffrey, I want to pause you for a moment because I just want to read you something and then get your response because I understand you're saying what the costs are where you are. | ||
| But nationally, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation, cooking a Thanksgiving for friends and family will cost less than last year, marking the third straight year of price declines. | ||
| The American Farm Bureau Federation's 40th annual Thanksgiving dinner survey provides a snapshot of the average cost of Thanksgiving staples that make up a classic holiday feast for 10, which is $55.18 or about $5.52 per person. | ||
| This is a 5% decrease from 2024. | ||
| Three years of declines don't fully erase the dramatic increases that led to a record high cost of $64.05 in 2022. | ||
| The centerpiece on most Thanksgiving tables, the turkey, dramatically decreased in price, which helped bring down the overall cost of dinner. | ||
| While the wholesale price for fresh turkey is up from 2024, grocery stores are featuring Thanksgiving deals and attempting to draw consumer demand back to Turkey, leading to lower retail prices for a holiday bird. | ||
| Now, Jeffrey, when you hear about these national averages going down for the cost of Thanksgiving, what do you think when you're seeing such higher prices yourself? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would absolutely would love to know where is that. | |
| If I can travel, I'll travel to all of that. | ||
| Absolutely, it is not happening, at least in Greensboro. | ||
| So to know it may be in some locations, that's the key. | ||
| What locations? | ||
| Where really? | ||
| That people who are really depending, say, struggling on the every two weeks pay period basis, where are these financially experts evaluating that for people? | ||
| Because it really is in a situation where the shutdown for a while and people who was dependent on that, no exaggeration. | ||
| It was lines everywhere for people who put pride aside, had to go take care of their family and provide for their children. | ||
| They were really out their lines like that. | ||
| So it's not what it is. | ||
| Let's hear from Robert in Grass Valley, California on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Robert. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, America, and to yourself. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| What's your message to Washington on rising costs? | ||
| The root of the problem has been since the first year of the Biden administration when the oil companies and the producers of gasoline started raising prices in April of his first year. | ||
| And every month since then, we've had exorbitant prices that all the companies have had to pay and pass along to everyone in America. | ||
| So the price of a barrel of oil in 2008 was at its height, was $147 a barrel, and gas prices were $4.11 a gallon, and a little bit higher here in California. | ||
| So it's $65 a barrel right now, and we're paying $4.35 a gallon locally, $0.40, and higher in many other places. | ||
| I'm in rural, I'm out in the foothills, Sierra Mountains. | ||
| And that's the root of the problem. | ||
| So, Robert, what would you like to see lawmakers do about that to help address some of those costs, particularly the cost of gas? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, we live in an economy that's based on a free economy. | |
| So the oil companies are being subsidized. | ||
| So how about a reduction in the subsidies according to their profit margins that are exorbitant? | ||
| All right. | ||
| We have another Robert, this time in Indiana on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Robert. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Morning. | |
| How are you? | ||
| Happy Thanksgiving. | ||
| Well, what I would like to say is I think we had four years that everything went out of sight, and our gas prices were way up. | ||
| And when you travel delivering all these groceries and whatever, it costs more money. | ||
| Trump is trying, and I think he said, give him time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's worse than he thought. | |
| And he's working on it. | ||
| If the Democrats would work with Mr. Trump, I think things would level out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They need to get along. | |
| That's what our government's about. | ||
| It says the House divided will not work. | ||
| And that's exactly what we've got. | ||
| We've got so much hatred. | ||
| Look at the people that are getting killed just out of hatred. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just out of hatred. | |
| What do you think it would be if we declared a war here in America? | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| Give Trump a chance. | ||
| He does. | ||
| I exaggerate a lot, but a lot of times when he says it, later on, it comes true. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So give him a chance. | |
| Vice President. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Democrats out there, please. | |
| Vice President JD Vance made that call as well for patience. | ||
| This was at an event hosted by Breitbart News on Thursday with the Vice President issuing a plea for Americans to be patient as they work to improve the high cost of living. | ||
| People who are still feeling like things are unaffordable, who are still feeling like things are rough out there, is, look, we get it, and we hear you, and we know that there's a lot of work to do. | ||
| There's a lot of wood to chop because the Biden administration put us in such a very, very tough spot. | ||
| And the way that I think about this is it's always helpful to take this from the abstractions to the actual real things that people are worried about. | ||
| So, take, for example, a dozen eggs. | ||
| I'll never forget this. | ||
| It was one of the very first, maybe the single first press conference that the president had done since he had been the, since he had started his second term. | ||
| And some reporter, probably from ABC, yells at him and says, What have you done about the price of eggs? | ||
| The price of eggs are up 300% over the past three years. | ||
| And it's like it was January the 23rd. | ||
| Like, what do you mean, what have we done in two days? | ||
| It's going to take a little bit of time to fix that problem. | ||
| And so, if you're an American who's just struggling to get by, you work hard, you pay your taxes, you want your kids to have good opportunities, and the price of eggs goes from $2 a dozen to $8 a dozen under the Biden administration, and then under the Trump administration, it goes from $8 a dozen to maybe $6.50 a dozen. | ||
| Well, to you, that is still a major problem. | ||
| And even though we've made incredible progress, we understand that there's a lot more work to do. | ||
| And the thing that I'd ask for the American people is a little bit of patience. | ||
| This economy was not harmed in 10 months. | ||
| It took a deliberate four-year administration that was making life harder for everyday Americans, that was importing foreign workers instead of giving jobs to American workers, that was over-regulating, over-taxing, overspending. | ||
| They were doing everything wrong. | ||
| And as much progress as we've made, it's going to take a little bit of time for every American to feel that economic boom, which we really do believe is coming. | ||
| We believe that we're on the front end of it, but we also recognize that we've got a lot of work to do to undo the damage that Joe Biden did to the American economy. | ||
| And the last one I'll say, Matt, is it's, let's be honest, it's not just Joe Biden. | ||
| As much as I think Joe Biden was one of the most disastrous presidents of American history, we had a policy in this country for 40 years of shipping American jobs overseas and hiring foreign workers instead of American workers. | ||
| That has caused the economic stagnation of the American middle class. | ||
| Once again, our question this morning: what's your message to Washington on rising costs? | ||
| We received a text message from Don in Floyd, Virginia, an independent, who says, tariffs won't lower prices or bring back the many jobs that got shipped overseas for more profits. | ||
| Now, tariffs have driven some prices higher in recent months, but as reported here in the BBC, Trump has rolled back tariffs on dozens of food products. | ||
| This is a story from November the 14th: that U.S. President Donald Trump has signed an executive order allowing a range of food products, including coffee, bananas, and beef, to escape his sweeping tariffs. | ||
| The move comes as his administration faces mounting pressure over rising prices. | ||
| While Trump previously downplayed concerns about the cost of living, he has focused on the issue since his Republican Party's poor performance in last week's elections. | ||
| The dozens of products included on the White House list of exemptions range from avocados and tomatoes to coconuts and mangoes. | ||
| These goods, the Trump administration said on Friday, cannot be produced in sufficient quantities domestically. | ||
| Back to your calls with your message to Washington on rising costs. | ||
| Roderick is in Canada on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Roderick. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning from Vancouver, Canada. | |
| Happy Thanksgiving, American Thanksgiving to you all. | ||
| We had ours here several weeks ago. | ||
| My message is pass a bill that would enable and require a nationwide plebiscite system to be established, a nationwide voting system, | ||
| and use this nationwide plebiscite voting system to ask your voters, are they in favor or are they against abolishing private insurance and establishing a Medicare for all system, a system in which there would be a single payer for your health care industry as opposed to the current system. | ||
| Why am I making this urging your Congress to do this and to do this? | ||
| Because your health care costs per person are twice as much, two times as much per patient as they are in Canada, where we have a single-payer system. | ||
| Despite that, your outcomes are worse. | ||
| And these are not my manufactured facts. | ||
| They're empirical facts that every single reputable medical and medical care assessment industry, or pardon, industry organization worldwide find. | ||
| So if you were to establish a, at the very least, a nationwide plebiscite voting system, which would be allowed by your Constitution, your Constitution would not allow a nationwide referendum, but a nationwide plebiscite, which would not be binding legally. | ||
| However, it would hope put some steel into the backbones of your congresspersons and president so that for once they would push back against the health care industry lobby. | ||
| If the vote came back from a nationwide plebiscite regarding health care, that your country was in favor of having a one single payer system, one would hope that would be enough ammunition for your elected citizens and your Congress and your president. | ||
| While we've been talking, Roger, I was trying to find some data on the support for a Medicare for all system here in the United States. | ||
| And the most recent polling I could find on this was a Gallup polling. | ||
| This article is from 2020. | ||
| It looks like it was from 2023, but it has the most recent that I could find. | ||
| Majority in the United States seem to prefer private health care over a government-run system. | ||
| The question was, which of the following approaches for providing health care in the United States would you prefer? | ||
| And only 43% at the time wanted a government-run system, as opposed to 53% wanting private-based insurance. | ||
| This may have changed since then. | ||
| Obviously, there's been a lot of health care changes in the United States since then. | ||
| Let's hear from Melvin in Richmond, Virginia on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Melvin. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Kimberly. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Kimberly, may you live long and prosper. | ||
| Kimberly, it was, you guys mentioned, you mentioned a few minutes ago about the tariffs. | ||
| And that was going to be my main point, that I don't believe that the tariffs were needed. | ||
| They were not even necessary. | ||
| We all knew back when he started putting them on that it was going to affect the consumer, you know. | ||
| And now, of course, what he does, this guy Trump, is he causes a problem, and then he comes in, you know, like he starts, he puts the house on fire, and then he comes in and says, oh, let me put it out, you know, and pretends to be the hero. | ||
| But if he hadn't put tariffs on all these products originally trying to raise some money that he could end up sticking in his pocket, we wouldn't have the prices of everything going up. | ||
| And we wouldn't have the situation where Republicans got trounced in the previous election. | ||
| And of course, it's going to happen again next year unless he can get this thing going with rigging the elections as he's trying to do by doing a mid every five years reorganization of the votes in each state, then the Republicans are going to get trounced in November, which I hope happens, you know. | ||
| But the problem is that he put the tariffs on in the first place and it's caused everything to go up. | ||
| Now he's claiming that, oh, he's going to solve the affordability by going in and reducing some of the tariffs when they should have been put on in the first place. | ||
| Thank you, dear. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Next up is Margie in Meadville, Pennsylvania on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Margie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| About the prices, we see people announced going in and out of the White House. | ||
| I would imagine if a group of brilliant minds in the insurance field had been invited, we would have known about it. | ||
| So my advice to the president is to get all the fabulous insurance brains into a room and say, let's come up with something. | ||
| ACA isn't working. | ||
| It never did work. | ||
| But I've never heard anybody say, he keeps saying we have a plan, but it's just, if it's just the president talking to people that are already there, obviously the plan hasn't been formed. | ||
| So get all the insurance. | ||
| And I think it was on the 12th of November, you had a guest on that was talking about insurance. | ||
| And he was so intelligent. | ||
| I thought, why don't a bunch of them get together and do it? | ||
| And along about the president, who I admire greatly, let's just take a minute to it's just amazing the way he don't want to say worked, but I guess it is Mr. Bandami. | ||
| It showed that political enemies sitting down, acknowledging they have problems, and working together is just the best way to do it. | ||
| Instead of like the Democrats not even trying to sit down, he just played that Mr. Mandami perfectly, almost like fatherly. | ||
| And I was so impressed. | ||
| So that's all for today. | ||
| Happy Thanksgiving to all. | ||
| Bye-bye. | ||
| Next is Tim in Cobleskill, New York, on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Tim. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| It seems like a lot of your guests that are calling in don't understand that we live in a capitalist society. | ||
| And that's why we have some of the problems we have. | ||
| These companies are in business to make money. | ||
| Another problem which I blame completely on Washington Journal is that you need some people on that are psychiatrists or psychologists because Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist and he doesn't care if you drop dead in the streets because he was willing to take food away from children and mothers. | ||
| And meanwhile, he's going to give $4 trillion to some of his billionaire buddies that were all standing behind him. | ||
| him when he was inaugurated. | ||
| And you know, this is where he's coming from and you got to let the people know that's where he's coming from. | ||
| So have some psychiatrists or psychologists on to talk about his problem. | ||
| So Tim, what would be your message to Washington on rising costs? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, it's obvious that there are rising costs. | |
| I mean, I have Thanksgiving with my brother. | ||
| We're both in our 70s, so, you know, it's not a big strain on us. | ||
| But, you know, I really feel for the people that have not been working, you know, because they were, you know, giving up their jobs. | ||
| They had to leave their jobs. | ||
| And people that have on SNAP, and all these people that have children, and my heart really goes out to them. | ||
| So these things would be dealt with if we had a president and a Congress who didn't answer to the lobbies and instead tried to take care of the people instead of the answering to the lobbies. | ||
| But get somebody in there that can tell you what Trump's all about because you got these people calling up and you know they've been listening to Fox News or OAN or you know because they got their you know head in the sand. | ||
| They have no idea what they're talking about and they think that you just got to give them more time. | ||
| So all right. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I guess that's about it. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| Now then House Democrat, House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries also made a similar argument, arguing that congressional Republicans and the president are not doing enough to lower prices. | ||
| Let's listen next week throughout America. | ||
| Families will be gathered together at the dining room table and millions of Americans are going to experience sticker shock as they prepare for Thanksgiving. | ||
| The Trump administration itself acknowledges that the cost of turkeys has gone up 40% since last November. | ||
| Grocery costs are through the roof, housing costs out of control, electricity bills through the roof. | ||
| And the Trump administration and Republicans here in Congress continue to refuse to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits. | ||
| That means that tens of millions of Americans are about to experience dramatically increased premiums, co-pays, and deductibles. | ||
| In some cases, health insurance costs are going to go up $1,000 or $2,000 per month. | ||
| We have a cost of living crisis in the United States of America, and Donald Trump and Republicans haven't done a damn thing about it. | ||
| In fact, costs aren't going down. | ||
| Costs are going up all throughout America. | ||
| And the Trump tariffs are costing everyday Americans thousands of dollars in additional expense per year. | ||
| Now, one of the solutions that President Trump has suggested to dealing with the cost of living issues has been dividends to offset the cost of tariffs that Americans are paying. | ||
| Here's a statement about that, a text message we received from Alan in Hobart, Indiana, who says, my message to Washington, where's that $2,000 we keep being promised? | ||
| And Fox Business has an article about that proposal saying Trump's $2,000 tariff dividends would carry a hefty, could carry a hefty price tag. | ||
| A nonpartisan analysis finds that annual payments would cost twice what the administration's tariffs raise. | ||
| Going on on that article, it says, President Donald Trump's proposal to give Americans $2,000 tariff dividends could carry a hefty price tag, according to a new analysis by a budget watchdog. | ||
| Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, this was obviously a few weeks ago, that the federal government is looking to pay out the dividends by mid-2026, which would fall ahead of the midterm elections. | ||
| The timing could depend on Congress, as Treasury Secretary Scott Besson recently said legislation would be needed to authorize the dividends. | ||
| We're going to be issuing dividends later on or somewhere prior to, probably the middle of next year, a little bit later than that, Trump said. | ||
| Thousands of dollars for individuals of moderate income, middle income. | ||
| Then the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated that if Trump's tariff dividends are structured like the COVID-19 era stimulus payments that went to adults and children after accounting for income level, each round of tariff payments would cost about $600 billion on an annual basis. | ||
| The CRFB noted that the tariffs the Trump administration has put in place have raised about $100 billion so far this year, including tariffs that were ruled illegal by federal courts and are pending an appeal before the Supreme Court. | ||
| On an annual basis, the Trump administration's tariffs, including those that may be struck down by the Supreme Court, are projected to raise about $300 billion. | ||
| By contrast, the net new tariff revenue that isn't subject to the Supreme Court ruling raises a little less than $100 billion per year. | ||
| And again, that's compared to the CRFB's analysis that it would cost about $600 billion a year to give people those $2,000 tariff dividends, as the president proposes. | ||
| Gary is in Dayton, Ohio, on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Gary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, good morning. | |
| Yeah, I was just wondering if any if he wished to make a like a new law or something to where we could figure out like a two-part law where we can make the president divulge how much money he has in his pocket right now, like walking around money. | ||
| Because if he's like anybody else, you have money walking around money to where you go to the store, you buy certain things, or you want to have cash money. | ||
| Now, obviously, people like himself would have a credit card, but some people like to have cash. | ||
| Well, let's find out how much cash he has on his body right now. | ||
| And then, two, let's force the president once a month to go out and buy groceries for the White House and force him to see how much things cost to buy. | ||
| He goes with the chef for the commissary for the White House and goes to the grocery and buy things for the White House and see how much things cost for the White House. | ||
| Because obviously, he doesn't know how much things cost for the White House. | ||
| Because that way he knows, that way he can find out how much things cost for the White House. | ||
| Because he doesn't know. | ||
| You know, he has to find out these things. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That's my thing. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And happy holiday. | ||
| Frank is in New London, Ohio, on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Frank. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Yeah, two things. | ||
| One, I'm tired about the gasoline going up, down, up, down. | ||
| Everybody blames everybody. | ||
| It's real easy. | ||
| It's our oil. | ||
| We're Americans. | ||
| This is our land. | ||
| It's our oil. | ||
| It's not the governments. | ||
| It's not the oil companies. | ||
| It's our oil. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So oil prices for United States stay one price, period, right? | ||
| Low price, right? | ||
| Now, as far as oil companies making money, well, the world market runs that part of it. | ||
| Oil goes up and down on the world's market. | ||
| They can sell it on the world market for any price they want. | ||
| But when it comes to our oil, selling it to Americans, it's our price. | ||
| Two, healthcare. | ||
| Healthcare, your government, both sides, all they want to do is keep throwing money at problems. | ||
| You have to learn to fix the problems. | ||
| It's real easy. | ||
| I kind of like Canada's right system, but I'm a Republican, and I don't like socialism. | ||
| And I don't want the government telling me if I need surgery or not. | ||
| I want my doctor to tell me that. | ||
| So here's how you fix that problem. | ||
| Anybody that wants to go to college for medical, period, medical or anything, the United States pays for it. | ||
| We spend money all around the world to all these other countries. | ||
| You need a healthy country. | ||
| Healthy people work. | ||
| Sick people cost you money. | ||
| So let's make everybody healthy in America, get the best health care you can get as cheap as we can get, and we'll have a great country. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Have a great holiday. | ||
| Frank, do you mind staying with me for a moment? | ||
| Because you mentioned the idea of allowing an education for health care professionals to be free, but there's something that just happened this past week from the Trump administration. | ||
| I want to read you a bit of the story and then get your response given this idea you just laid out. | ||
| So the headline is, this is in USA Today, but it's been covered elsewhere. | ||
| Are nurses, professionals, the government's answer impacts students. | ||
| The controversy involves a list of graduate-level career paths considered professional degrees that could qualify for bigger federal student loans. | ||
| Backlash and confusion have swirled after the Department of Education under President Donald Trump left nursing and other professions off a list of professional degrees in a proposed rule over loans, which could impact how students finance their education in the future. | ||
| The news involves a loose list of graduate level career paths that could qualify for bigger federal student loans. | ||
| This list of professional programs has a newfound importance as the administration winds down a program that allowed careers off the list to qualify for larger loans. | ||
| Leaving nursing off the list has been perceived by some as a slight against the vital field. | ||
| Besides nurses, other degree programs not explicitly included on the select list of professional degrees could see lower loan caps than before. | ||
| Just about 20% of the nation's workforce, nursing workforce has a master's or doctorate level degree, according to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing. | ||
| So basically this proposal would make it a bit more challenging for nurses to get federal loans to cover their education. | ||
| What do you think of that proposal, Frank? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I'm all for anything that you, like I said, healthy people work. | |
| Sick people cost, right? | ||
| So I don't care what kind of where you're at. | ||
| I don't care if it's a nurse's aide or a doctor or any of that. | ||
| It all needs to be paid for by the American people. | ||
| Now, these doctors that owe two, $300,000 in school, you know, colleges to get their degrees and stuff, they have the right to say, oh, well, this is why I make $250 an hour. | ||
| And no, well, you take that right away from them because a doctor won't have that excuse anymore. | ||
| You need a healthy country. | ||
| And the only way you're going to get it is let anybody that want, and if you don't, and here, to keep out the bad eggs, if we pay for your college to go to anything you want to have to do with health care, right? | ||
| Then if you don't do that, you know, if you don't do that as your part of your living, then you're going to have to pay that back because you wasted the taxpayers' money. | ||
| You got to hold people responsible at the same time. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Lupe is in Canoga Park, California on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Lupe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning, Kelly. | ||
| I was falling asleep, but you know, these things really don't let me sleep. | ||
| I keep listening to it so much. | ||
| But anyway, my Thanksgiving won't be happening this year because the place I normally go to, Monty's, they're either serving prime rib or turkey, and their turkey is 95 for the one serving, and the prime rib is 85. | ||
| You see anything low in that? | ||
| And that's in that's in Woodland Hills, Monte's. | ||
| They're going up, up, up because they can't seem to get enough people to get in the restaurants. | ||
| So that's why the prices were going up there. | ||
| But anyway, with what the gentleman was saying a little while ago, I remember growing up, and they were at programs on TV, and you would see, I'll be 80 and mate. | ||
| And they would have doctors, schools, and what have you, and they all raise their right hand to serve the people, anyone, any color, short, tall, or whatever, because they were there to perform what they studied, to help the health of this person. | ||
| I haven't seen that at all. | ||
| And as far as our president goes right now, he's supposed to be for everybody. | ||
| But when he starts everything with a lie, deny, and then attack, and I agree with the gentleman that called from Virginia that he just makes the fire and then tries to put it out. | ||
| Okay, thank you for this date. | ||
| Lisa is in Waverly Hall, Georgia, on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Lisa. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| How are you? | ||
| Good, thank you. | ||
| What's your message to Washington on rising costs? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Rising cost is horrible, and I speak to this as facts because I go through the store weekly. | |
| And for the administration to be boasting as if they're bringing costs down is also horrible because of the fact that to be helpful, the stores I've noticed have bundled deals at a lower cost for the Thanksgiving dinners. | ||
| However, if you were to buy these items outright, they are still very expensive and continuously going up. | ||
| And those bundles go quickly, of course, because people are blessed to be able to have that opportunity. | ||
| So therefore, it's not helpful and cost is not down. | ||
| I went into another store and I showed they had pre-made items at a lower cost. | ||
| And that's just to help during this Thanksgiving season and the holiday seasons. | ||
| But once the holidays are over, those opportunities will not be there and cost is still continuously rising. | ||
| It's just completely horrible at the things that this administration is doing and is destroying in this country within. | ||
| The claim from President Trump, or the statement from President Trump, that Thanksgiving dinner will cost 25% less this year came from a Walmart assessment. | ||
| But as the AP reports in what they call a fact focus, his numbers are a bit misleading. | ||
| So with Thanksgiving, this was a story from November the 7th, with Thanksgiving less than three weeks away, the question of how much this year's turkey and trimmings will cost looms large, especially with grocery prices 2.7% higher than they were in 2024. | ||
| President Donald Trump has claimed over the past two days that the costs for the Thanksgiving meal are down 25% this year, citing, as our last caller mentioned, a pre-packaged Thanksgiving meal basket from Walmart. | ||
| But, and this was his statement, I just saw that Walmart came out with a statement last night. | ||
| They've done it for many years, that Thanksgiving this year will cost 25% less than Thanksgiving last year, he said during a news conference on Friday with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. | ||
| But Trump's numbers are off. | ||
| Here's a closer look at the facts. | ||
| Walmart prices show that the cost of Thanksgiving dinner is 25% lower in 2025 than 2024. | ||
| This is misleading. | ||
| While Walmart's 2025 meal basket costs about 25% less than the one from 2024, that's because it offers fewer items and different products that make it more affordable. | ||
| It's not apples to apples, right? said David Anderson, who is a livestock economist at Texas AM University. | ||
| What this does highlight is individual retailer strategies for getting customers in the door. | ||
| The 2025 basket costs less than $40 and feeds about 10 people for about $4 a head, according to Walmart. | ||
| In 2024, a basket for eight cost approximately $56, less than $7 a person. | ||
| But the baskets differ significantly. | ||
| For example, this year's includes just 15 items compared to last year's 29. | ||
| It's missing many dessert items, including a pecan pie, mini marshmallows, and muffin mix, as well as savory items such as sweet potatoes, yellow onions, and celery stalks. | ||
| Back to your calls with your message to Washington on rising costs. | ||
| Colin is in Sissiwate, Massachusetts on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Colin. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I was focused on health care. | ||
| And the biggest problem is not the cost of health care, it's the cost of insurance. | ||
| All of the health care money comes through insurance companies. | ||
| I get advertisements from every insurance company around every year. | ||
| I never get anything from any hospitals or doctors because all the money is absorbed through the insurance companies. | ||
| We've got to get our health care money to go to health care instead of through insurance. | ||
| It's the insurance that's killing the money. | ||
| I'm retired and I've had many health problems. | ||
| And in the time that I've been retired, my health care costs have more than paid for my health care problems. | ||
| And I'm an extreme case of cost, but my payments to insurance companies has way eclipsed my actual health care costs. | ||
| There's a difference between health care and insurance, and the people just don't understand that. | ||
| We're paying for two industries and not getting the benefit of either of them because it's all divided up between the two industries. | ||
| The actual health care costs are really affordable for the medium people, median-income people. | ||
| It's the lower people, lower-income people that can't afford it, which they're never going to. | ||
| They need to be subsidized. | ||
| And the high-income people that have got more than enough money are not paying more than their fair share towards it. | ||
| Colin, do you get your insurance through a private company or Medicare or the ACA? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Medicare, and I have a supplemental. | |
| Okay. | ||
| And you've still seen your costs going up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course, every year. | |
| But it's, you know, Medicare is going up, and, you know, as we get our Social Security increase, our Medicare goes up as well. | ||
| So half of our cost of living increase is going towards Medicare. | ||
| So it's really not giving seniors any benefit. | ||
| So health care is a major issue for many people as well as a topic that is certainly getting the attention of lawmakers. | ||
| Here's a story about this in Politico. | ||
| Rising Obamacare premiums are a political problem for Republicans. | ||
| Rising premiums for workers who get health insurance from their employers could be an even bigger one. | ||
| Republicans in Congress are focused on finding a way to counteract an expected 26% rise in premiums for people who buy insurance through the Affordable Care Act without extending government subsidies that make insurance more affordable. | ||
| But what the GOP isn't talking about, nearly seven times as many Americans get health insurance through an employer as those who buy it individually. | ||
| Those 165 million people are expected to see their premiums spike by up to 7%. | ||
| Now then, back to your calls with your message to Washington on rising costs. | ||
| Garr is in Decatur, Georgia, on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Garr. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| You know that old saying, honesty is the best policy. | ||
| Okay, when I started driving a car, gas was 19.9 cents a gallon to 23.9 cents a gallon. | ||
| Gas bill was about $4. | ||
| Your natural gas bill in Northeast Ohio was about $4. | ||
| And capitalism price always go up. | ||
| And another thing, too, Joe Biden tried to forgive student loan debt, but Republicans turned it down. | ||
| And my question to Congress is, why did they forgive Nazi Germany and Hitler their debt, but refuse to student loan debt? | ||
| How come they didn't allow that to happen? | ||
| I mean, students didn't kill six million Jews, but they treat them like they did. | ||
| So I don't understand why Congress won't forgive student loan debt. | ||
| They forgive Hitler's debt. | ||
| I don't get it. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Joseph is in Kalamazoo, Michigan on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Joseph. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I'm on Kelly. | |
| I just got to figure out the American people don't see what's going on around us. | ||
| All this hatred and animosity stuff toward each other when it comes to politics mainly is because of Trump. | ||
| I mean, this president came straight in, went straight at the tariffs. | ||
| I mean, he ain't just going to stop there. | ||
| He went at our friends, our fools. | ||
| I mean, he went for everybody. | ||
| Then you expect the prices will go up this high and they turn around and say, it was Biden's fault. | ||
| I don't see how you get it. | ||
| And then every lie he comes out of his mouth, Republicans start to believe this mess, just like the sixth, on January 6th, when that came down like we did. | ||
| I mean, come on. | ||
| I know it was this man's fault. | ||
| He was the instigator of this. | ||
| If this happened somewhere else, the president. | ||
| What's your message to Washington on rising costs? | ||
|
unidentified
|
My message to rising calls, they're going to continue to rise until you get these tariffs straightened out. | |
| If you don't get them straightened out, but he went at them so fast, I don't think he was prepared. | ||
| But he figured he's going to come in and let everybody in other countries know, but he's rough. | ||
| But the only thing he's rough on is those small little countries. | ||
| Like, what is the one? | ||
| He's blowing the boats out of the waters on the country of the country. | ||
| He won't help with it. | ||
| We were helping. | ||
| One thing I can tell you about this man here, he is scared of the big country. | ||
| I bet he won't mess with Russia. | ||
| I bet he won't mess with China. | ||
| I bet he won't mess with North Korea because I guarantee he threatened Russia. | ||
| Russia went straight and all up together. | ||
| Russia, China, North Korea, Japan. | ||
| This man is out here stirring up mess. | ||
| And where he goes, but he's missed all the little countries. | ||
| And he's missing. | ||
| When's this when you start taking money from your own states? | ||
| I mean, he's supposed to be making America great. | ||
| Show me what he has done to make America great inside the United States of America. | ||
| Has he gave the people almost, I'm telling you, majority of black folks to vote for him. | ||
| So on the topic of rising prices, last week, Washington Democratic Representative Adam Smith posted this on Facebook, criticizing Trump's tariff policies and arguing that the president is failing to address the cost of living. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We'll put tariffs on over 100 different countries and about a dozen different items. | |
| This has driven up the costs for people in a wide variety of different areas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There is a case before the Supreme Court, which should be ruled on shortly, to decide whether or not those tariffs are illegal. | |
| Now, tariffs are part of policy, but the way President Trump has done it has been very extreme. | ||
| He put a 50% tariff on Brazil because he didn't like how they were treating Bolsonaro. | ||
| He put a 50% tariff on India because he didn't like that Modi, the Prime Minister of India, wasn't giving Trump credit, which he didn't really deserve, for stopping the conflict between India and Pakistan. | ||
| These wild tariffs that are on and off, delayed, then turned back on, is really creating major problems for businesses in our country and driving up the cost of a wide range of items. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Even Trump sort of acknowledged this recently, and I think it was yesterday, two days ago now. | |
| He said he was going to reduce some of the tariffs that he had put on certain key food items, coffee, bananas, and beef, I think, were the top items there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So he's even recognizing that the tariffs he's done are undermining the ability to get after the inflation problem. | |
| Back to your calls on your message to Washington on rising costs. | ||
| Gina is in Pique, Mississippi on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Gina. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Gee, there's so much to say in this conversation. | ||
| There has been some good points made this morning. | ||
| But I would also like to point out that there is a class of people that exist, millions of people that make too much money to get on Medicaid, which most of the poor are on, and they don't make enough money to buy insurance. | ||
| So I think that needs to be paid more attention to. | ||
| Also, I would like to point out the decline in the medical system in the United States. | ||
| And I worked in it for 33 years, so I know how it used to be compared to how it is now. | ||
| It is all about the money now. | ||
| The big corporations have come in and they bought out all of the doctors of the hospitals and they tell them what to do. | ||
| And it's all about how much money they can milk out of the insurance companies who are also, you know, their lobbyists live in Washington, D.C. | ||
| And another comment I'd like to make, if you don't mind, is that I have been an avid watcher of this show for 20 years, up until the last four years. | ||
| I watched it every morning. | ||
| As of now, I only watch it occasionally because I am so sick of the hate that is spewed from the host, Washington Journal, and the Democrats every day. | ||
| You people act like that man has not done one good thing for this country. | ||
| And the only reason that is, is because most of you are so uneducated. | ||
| You don't even really know the facts. | ||
| You don't understand the facts. | ||
| You don't even understand how tariffs or the government even really works. | ||
| So, Washington Journal, you are doing a disservice to this country by propagating false information and the people are getting more and more ignorant. | ||
| So I will follow up on Gina's point about health care. | ||
| This is something that several folks have raised today. | ||
| And there was some polling. | ||
| It's a West Health Gallup survey that was reported in USA today, finding that nearly half of U.S. adults are worried they won't be able to pay for needed health care in 2026. | ||
| This is the highest level of concern recorded since West Health and Gallup began taking this measure, tracking this measure in 2021. | ||
| One in 10 adults planned a cutback on utilities, skipped a meal, or drove less so they could pay for health care or medicine. | ||
| 15% of adults borrowed money and rationed medicine due to health care affordability struggles. | ||
| Three in 10 adults said they skipped medical care in the past year because they could not afford it. | ||
| Homer is in Florence, Massachusetts on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Homer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wondering if you can tell me exactly the numbers because you told before when Biden was in, you guys gave the numbers without including food, energy, and housing. | |
| You said that they were too volatile. | ||
| All the media did. | ||
| And now that's all you include is food, energy, and housing. | ||
| I called before a few years ago. | ||
| The prices went up 24% in four years, and you guys told me it wasn't happening. | ||
| Then you said it was transitory. | ||
| Then you said we were doing better than the rest of the world. | ||
| So the narrative has surely changed. | ||
| And as for these polls that you guys want to keep citing and saying them like they're the final line of everything, with a thousand people in a poll of a country with over 345 million people in the country, it's kind of funny to use a poll of a thousand people and say, well, that's what people feel like because it'll be different every time you do it and every time you ask the question a different way. | ||
| So it's pretty hilarious that you give one side of a story when one person's in office and give another side of the story when the other one's in office. | ||
| Are we doing better than the rest of the world? | ||
| What would be in this world doing for inflation? | ||
| On rising costs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
On rising costs, costs are rising a heck of a lot less than they did when they were 9% a year under Joe Biden and you guys told me that they weren't happening. | |
| They were already high. | ||
| And from Joe Biden for four years, and you guys said nothing. | ||
| You guys covered for him and read from the Washington Post and every other liberal newspaper or media outlet that you could to say that it wasn't happening. | ||
| You included, you said you weren't gonna include prices that included food, housing, and energy. | ||
| And now that's what you're talking about, is energy. | ||
| You told me they were too volatile and that the president didn't have anything to do with those things. | ||
| That's what you told me four years ago when I called before, every time I called. | ||
| Thank God. | ||
| I mean, half a story. | ||
| You don't look up those things on the computer or in any of your newspapers because they don't talk about them. | ||
| They talk about it. | ||
| They said inflation wasn't happening. | ||
| And then they said it was only happening transitorily. | ||
| And then they said, okay, it's happening, but we're better than the rest of the world. | ||
| I mean, come on. | ||
| So there's a story that's actually echoing a similar theme in Reuters: that Trump faces the same reality as Biden. | ||
| Americans despise higher prices, saying that President Donald Trump campaigned on a pledge to lower consumer prices that skyrocketed during Joe Biden's term, but he is now facing the same hard reality that dogged his predecessor. | ||
| Once prices rise, they seldom fall, and Americans hate higher prices. | ||
| Trump may now be making some of the same mistakes as Biden, including downplaying the impact of higher prices on households and looking to corporate investments to boost jobs and wages, a strategy that takes years to pan out. | ||
| That is all of our time for this segment today. | ||
| But later on, Washington Journal, we're going to hear from Progressive Talk Show host Tom Hartman to discuss the Trump administration policies, the Epstein files, Democrats' agenda, and the progressive movement. | ||
| But up next, we're going to be joined by Rich Lowry, editor-in-chief of the National Review, who will join us to discuss the Trump administration, the future of the Republican Party, and divisions among conservatives, as well as the political news of the day. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Past precedent, why are you doing this? | |
| This is outrageous. | ||
| This is a candle root quarrel. | ||
| Fridays, C-SPAN presents a rare moment of unity: Ceasefire, where the shouting stops and the conversation begins. | ||
| Politico Playbook chief correspondent and White House Bureau Chief Dasha Burns is host of Ceasefire, bringing two leaders from opposite sides of the aisle into a dialogue. | ||
| Ceasefire on the network that doesn't take sides. | ||
| Fridays at 7 and 10 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPAN. | ||
| We bring you into the chamber, onto the Senate floor, inside the hearing room, up to the mic, and to the desk in the Oval Office. | ||
| C-SPAN takes you where decisions are made. | ||
| No spin, no commentary, no agenda. | ||
| C-SPAN is your unfiltered connection to American democracy. | ||
| Advance the mission. | ||
| Donate today at C-SPAN.org forward slash donate. | ||
| Together, we keep democracy in view. | ||
| Watch America's Book Club, C-SPAN's bold original series today with our guest-famed chef and global relief entrepreneur, Jose Andres. | ||
| His books on reimagining food include Feeding Dangerously, Change the Recipe, and We Fed an Island. | ||
| He joins our host, renowned author and civic leader David Rubinstein. | ||
| Are people afraid of inviting you over to their house for dinner because they'd be afraid that the food wouldn't be good enough for you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
When people cook with love for you, it is great, but you know, you know, the dry turkey in Thanksgiving is unnegotiable. | |
| It's always dry. | ||
| But yeah, turkeys are so dry. | ||
| That's why gravy exists. | ||
| Watch America's Book Club with Jose Andres today at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPAN. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| Joining us to talk about the Trump administration and the future of the Republican Party, as well as other political news of the day, is Rich Lowry. | ||
| He's the editor-in-chief of the National Review. | ||
| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Last week, President Trump signed legislation to compel the release of the Epstein files. | ||
| It was legislation to compel the Justice Department to release any records related to that convicted sex offender. | ||
| And you just penned a recent piece for the National Review titled The Epstein Conspiracy in Plain Sight. | ||
| This was a unanimous, almost a unanimous vote from Congress to release these files. | ||
| And I wanted to hear from you about what you say the Epstein conspiracy is and where the responsibility lies. | ||
| Yeah, so first of all, Trump just got completely rolled on this. | ||
| Great act of gumption encouraged by those three or four Republicans who are willing to sign on to that discharge petition, get slammed by Trump every day, and turn the entirety of Washington around to their review. | ||
| Passes the House with one dissenting vote, unanimous consent in the Senate, and then Trump has to sign it after inviging against it for months. | ||
| I don't think it's a good idea. | ||
| I don't think it's a great idea to make public sensitive investigative materials like this. | ||
| This is not our usual practice because you might reveal victims, you might reveal people who are innocent that people are going to assume are guilty. | ||
| You might, at the margins, make it less likely in the future that witnesses will talk to grand juries if they think their testimony will be exposed. | ||
| So I don't think it's a great deal, and I don't think the upside here is worth it, but we'll see. | ||
| You know, I'm willing to change my mind depending on what the facts are. | ||
| But it seems very unlikely to me that there's some thermonuclear Trump scandal hiding in there. | ||
| People forget, in Trump's first term, his Justice Department, SDNY, very aggressive office up here in New York City, prosecutes Epstein, despite there being a non-prosecution agreement that had been forged in his first scrape with the law, which was outrageous and never should have happened. | ||
| But they could have just let that stand. | ||
| They said, no, we're going to move our way around it, prosecute him. | ||
| He kills himself in jail. | ||
| Then they could have just said, well, the matter's going to rest there. | ||
| Then they go out of their way and they prosecute Glain Maxwell, which they didn't have to do. | ||
| This is not a Justice Department that's acting as though it has a guilty conscience or it has to cover for the president. | ||
| And these people, they hate sex offenders. | ||
| That's one of the reasons they're in their line of work. | ||
| Very unlikely that they were giving some prominent sex offender a pass if there was a prosecutable offense there. | ||
| And also, they don't like Trump in that office. | ||
| Maureen Comey, James Comey's daughter, huge presence in that office. | ||
| Very unlikely if they had damaging material on Trump that it wouldn't have leaked in my view. | ||
| Now, Trump's very defensive about this because he was friends with Epstein. | ||
| We don't know when he cut off the relationship, but he did cut it off 15, 20 years ago. | ||
| We don't know quite why he cut it off with Epstein, but he did. | ||
| And one of the ironies of these emails that were released from the estate is that Trump is all over the emails, but he's not in the emails himself. | ||
| He's not emailing with Epstein because he'd cut him off. | ||
| At the same time, all these very prominent people, members of our social, political, economic, academic elite, are chums with Epstein. | ||
| They like Epstein. | ||
| They're socializing with Epstein. | ||
| An element of the American elite embraced Epstein as one of its own even after his guilty plea thanks to his wealth and connections. | ||
| Yeah, they figured other wealthy, connected people know Epstein, are friends with him, so I should be friends with them. | ||
| Maybe I can get something for him. | ||
| If not, he has lots of information. | ||
| He's influential. | ||
| He's entertaining. | ||
| He must have been fun to be around on a certain level, or Larry Summers wouldn't have been friends with him. | ||
| And a lot of these people are conspiring with him. | ||
| That might be a strong word, but are discussing with him. | ||
| Maybe Michael Wolfe is actually conspiring how to bring down Trump. | ||
| So a lot of the headlines were Trump's in the Epstein emails. | ||
| Yeah, because Epstein was talking a lot about him in 2015, 16, 17, when all of us were obsessed with Trump. | ||
| And he was discussing with people how to bring Trump down. | ||
| This on, you know, something is going to be released, although the New York Times reports that the bill contains some significant exceptions, including that provision you mentioned about protecting continuing investigations. | ||
| But what do you think the eventual release of whatever these records are and the emails we've seen so far are going to do to the Republican Party and the MAGA movement in particular? | ||
| Well, it depends on what they say about Trump. | ||
| And what I would expect about Trump is more embarrassing releases, but not anything that's a huge scandal. | ||
| That's what I expect. | ||
| I might be wrong. | ||
| I think we'll see some more Larry Summers, people who are associated with Epstein, but highly embarrassed and might damage their careers or reputations. | ||
| I think we might see some more Alan Dershowitz's, people who are caught up in it and people assume they're guilty and then have to spend years clearing their names. | ||
| And then we might see a couple of Prince Andrews, you know, people who everyone believes for good reason are guilty. | ||
| So it's going to be all that, I assume, but this is not a good practice. | ||
| It's not the way the system is supposed to work. | ||
| Switching topics, you also wrote a piece recently titled, The GOP Can't Punt on Healthcare. | ||
| And you wrote that failing to introduce and explain Obamacare alternatives represents a serious political risk. | ||
| There's polling to show that nearly half of U.S. adults are worried that they're not going to be able to pay for needed health care in 2026 as many people are facing rising premiums. | ||
| Why do you think the Republicans are having such a hard time coming up with an alternative for Obamacare? | ||
| I think it's not something that they're naturally in their wheelhouse. | ||
| It's not something they know a lot about necessarily and are comfortable with, although there are members of Congress that really know the health care issue. | ||
| And there's certainly a lot of experts on the outside on the right who know a lot about health care. | ||
| It's very complex and involves trade-offs. | ||
| So you're going to be upsetting people in the public. | ||
| You're going to be upsetting elements of your own party. | ||
| And Donald Trump hasn't had a huge amount of interest in it himself, except for at a very making statements at a very high level. | ||
| So he put all that together and you've gone more than 15 years without Republicans having an alternative. | ||
| All they say is Obamacare is bad, it has to go, but then they leave blank the question of what the alternative is. | ||
| So this isn't a great position to be in as a party. | ||
| I don't expect it to change. | ||
| The Democrats really latched on to the issue of health care and then that sort of broadened to issues of broader affordability as we were talking about in the last segment. | ||
| And it seemed to lead to a lot of success in these off-year elections recently. | ||
| I want to talk specifically about New York City mayor-elect Zorhan Mamdani and the idea of these candidates that latch on to this winning. | ||
| Do you think that this is going to shift the GOP strategy heading into 2026? | ||
| Well, on affordability, I think it is going to shift it. | ||
| And you never like to lose elections. | ||
| And Republicans got shellacked in the off-year elections, but it can oftentimes be useful because it sends you a message. | ||
| Bill Clinton never would have been re-elected president in 1996 if he hadn't suffered a disastrous midterm in 1994 and adjusted accordingly. | ||
| So we have the president talking more about affordability, which is good, but what is he going to do when the rubber meets the road and how much can he do? | ||
| I think what they did about a week or so ago, rolling back these tariffs on coffee, on beef, on other common food items was good, but it's an implicit acknowledgement that his real signature economic initiative this first year here has at the margins increased prices, and that's a very bad thing. | ||
| And I just think what matters most to people, or certainly is most prominent in their minds when they're thinking about the economy and their welfare is nominal prices, right? | ||
| It doesn't matter whether the inflation rate is two or five. | ||
| I mean, that matters because it will affect nominal prices, but that's not what they're focused on. | ||
| So the fact that the inflation rate has gone down from whatever it was, eight to three, is good, but that's not going to make them feel better as long as everything is more expensive. | ||
| And because when the inflation rate declines, it doesn't mean prices are actually going down. | ||
| That would be inflation, which would be deflation, which would be very bad in its own terms. | ||
| Everything just feels more expensive. | ||
| And I think that is a political risk to the president and obviously a powerful issue as Mamdani showed in New York City. | ||
| What did you make of that meeting between the president and the New York City mayor-elect? | ||
| Classic. | ||
| Just classic. | ||
| If you want to put a time capsule why President Trump got elected president twice and has dominated our era for the last 10 years, I think would be that clip where Mamdani is asked by someone, well, you think this guy you're standing right next to is a fascist, right? | ||
| You still think he's a fascist, right? | ||
| And Mamdani's about to issue forth with a very slick, long statement, and Trump pats him in the arm. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| You can just say I'm a fascist. | ||
| It's easier. | ||
| So when he's at his best and he wants to get along with people, he can be very charming. | ||
| People forget he's a host, right? | ||
| He's been a professional host. | ||
| That was part of his career prior to being president of the United States. | ||
| So this one surprised me not at all. | ||
| I haven't met Mamdani, but he's obviously charming. | ||
| He has an easy smile. | ||
| You see it in public. | ||
| People come away who are not inclined to his politics come away saying warm things about him after private meetings. | ||
| And Mamdani wanted a good meeting, right? | ||
| He doesn't want Trump to send the National Guard to New York City or to cut off the funding willy-nilly. | ||
| So Mamdani was incentivized to be charming, and Trump likes winners and he likes being charmed. | ||
| So it doesn't mean there are not going to be huge conflicts between the two down the road here, maybe sooner rather than later, but it didn't shock me that that was a good meeting. | ||
| We're going to be taking calls for Rich Lowery shortly. | ||
| Democrats can call in at 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans at 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents at 202-748-8002. | ||
| Before we get to calls, I want to ask you about some internal divisions within the GOP and the conservative movement, which has really been fighting internally over disputes related to white nationalism and anti-Semitism that was further ignited by Tucker Carlson's interview with the self-avowed racist Nick Fuentes. | ||
| Now, then Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, got blasted for initially defending this and then apologized. | ||
| There have been resignations. | ||
| What do you think the Republican Party needs to do overall to kind of address this issue? | ||
| And where should the sort of voices be speaking up? | ||
| Yeah, so obviously it should wholeheartedly reject white nationalism and anti-Semitism or even anything that's anti-Semitic adjacent. | ||
| And Nick Fuentes, I don't think whatever services are hosting his podcast or whatever should cancel him. | ||
| I just think respectable people shouldn't have anything to do with him and should denounce his vile views. | ||
| And Tucker had him on and Tucker knows how to interview someone and knows how to conduct a hostile interview as we saw with his interview with Ted Cruz prior to the strikes on the Iranian nuclear facility and basically gave Fuentes a tongue bath. | ||
| He pushed him a little bit on, look, we shouldn't blame all Jews, right? | ||
| Because that's bad, and we're Christians and we don't believe in collective punishment. | ||
| This would also be good for the neocons if we're seeing to blame all the Jews. | ||
| And Fuentes, yeah, yeah, I agree with you. | ||
| And then Fuentes, in the next breath, says, You know, I agree with you. | ||
| We need to be individualistic and universalistic. | ||
| Tucker, the future of the country depends on it. | ||
| You know who can't do that? | ||
| The Jews. | ||
| And Tucker kind of nods along and then changes the subject. | ||
| So it was a terrible interviewee and a terrible interview, a sign of Carlson's dissent on this stuff. | ||
| And Kevin Roberts is friends with Tucker. | ||
| I believe one of his missions at the Heritage Foundation obviously has been to cozy up to that element of the right, represented by Tucker Carlson. | ||
| And he gave a Tucker Carlsonite type statement initially out of the gate on this and was totally wrong-footed and read the room the wrong way. | ||
| And it wasn't just outsiders had the reaction. | ||
| This reaction, a lot of people in the Heritage Foundation, now Roberts is now tacked back. | ||
| But this will be an ongoing fault line within the right. | ||
| All right, let's get to your calls. | ||
| Paul is in New Fairfield, Connecticut, on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Paul. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I thank you, Kimberly, and I've enjoyed listening to Mr. Lowry. | |
| I want to bring up the last speech that George Washington made, where he admonished the country that parties were going to pull us apart. | ||
| That was in 1796. | ||
| We've seen that he was correct. | ||
| The party system, Republicans and Democrats, have pulled us apart. | ||
| That's why I'm an independent. | ||
| We have to, I believe, that we have to end the two-party system, not by adding more parties, but by more people joining the ranks of the independents. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| What do you think of Paul's thoughts there, Rich? | ||
| Yeah, so the founders were profoundly uncomfortable with the idea of a party system at the same time they were creating one. | ||
| The same time they were part of one. | ||
| Right at the beginning, they didn't have the names, but they were quickly going to separate into the Federalist and the Jeffersonian Democrats. | ||
| They hated one another. | ||
| They didn't trust one another. | ||
| They thought each other was a tool of a foreign power, whether it was the French or the British. | ||
| And the two-party system is just an ingrained part of the American project. | ||
| Doesn't mean you have to be a Republican or Democrat. | ||
| Obviously, you can be an independent and swing either way. | ||
| It's a free country, but just the gravitational pull of our system is towards two parties. | ||
| And I think there are downsides to it. | ||
| Their advantage is to it as well. | ||
| It provides more coherence to our political system than you see in countries with multiple parties. | ||
| But whether you like it or not, it's here to stay. | ||
| President Trump strongly criticized several Democrats this past week, condemning their video about the armed forces. | ||
| This is a story here from NPR that the White House condemns Democratic lawmakers' video but backs off President Trump's post. | ||
| This was the White House press secretary, Caroline Levitt, said Thursday that President Trump does not actually want to see members of Congress executed, despite his social media post earlier in the day, calling a video by some members seditious behavior punishable by death. | ||
| Trump made a pair of posts on his site, Truth Social, in response to a video posted by several representatives where the lawmakers address members of the military and intelligence communities and said, you can refuse illegal orders, repeating the phrase several times before saying you must refuse illegal orders. | ||
| President Trump wasn't asked to clarify what he meant in an interview on conservative Brian Kilmead's radio show, and here's what he said about this on Friday. | ||
| If you look at sedition, if you look at that type of, that's a form of, a very strong form of being a traitor, it's a terrible thing to say. | ||
| I must tell you, I heard it, and I thought it was some kind of a comedy situation. | ||
| I thought they were, you know, it was some kind of a skip, and because I couldn't believe that they'd say it. | ||
| And I watched Democrat congressmen and one Democrat senator yesterday on one of the shows didn't even want to discuss it. | ||
| They said, whoa, don't get me into that one. | ||
| They don't want to get into that. | ||
| That is a really serious charge. | ||
| I'll tell you what. | ||
| What they said is, and it was, I mean, I don't know about the modern day things because, you know, modern day is a lot softer. | ||
| But in the old days, if you said a thing like that, that was punishable by death. | ||
| Yeah, but you're not saying, you're not threatening them. | ||
| A lot of people are interpreting there's a threat in their security. | ||
| I'm not threatening them, but I think they're in serious trouble. | ||
| I would say they're in serious trouble. | ||
| I'm not threatening death, but I think they're in serious trouble. | ||
| In the old days, it was death. | ||
| Rich Lowry, what did you think of the president's posts and his clarification? | ||
| Well, I think this Democrat video was theatrical, not really applicable to anything that was going on. | ||
| But of course, it's a truism that members of the military should disobey unlawful orders. | ||
| Someone orders you to gun down civilians in my lie, you don't do it. | ||
| And that's the appropriate thing to do. | ||
| And if you disobey lawful orders, that's insubordination. | ||
| It's not treason. | ||
| And clearly, issuing a video that might suggest, if you read it a certain way, that members of the military should disobey lawful orders. | ||
| That's not what they're saying. | ||
| But even if you were saying that, that's not sedition either. | ||
| So classic Trump, you know, when people in the media say something he doesn't like, he comes up with the harshest thing he can say. | ||
| Their license should be pulled. | ||
| And when members of his own party, members of the other party say things he doesn't like, he calls them a traitor. | ||
| We've seen that with Marjorie Terrell Green, or in this case, says it's sedition. | ||
| No one's going to be tried for sedition. | ||
| No one's going to be executed. | ||
| So it's all, at the end of the day, a lot of noise signifying nothing, but obviously it's not something he should say as President of the United States. | ||
| Kathy is in Bloomington, Indiana on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Kathy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Yeah, I like to wonder how this Jeffrey Empstein files and list has anything to do with Trump because he calls Marjorie Taylor a traitor. | ||
| I mean, only thing Marjorie Taylor Green is protecting babies, kids. | ||
| Right now, kids are being raped, killed, thrown away like throwaway kids. | ||
| And she's protecting, trying to protect these people. | ||
| You really think these people stopped 40 years ago, raped little kids? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| And then plus, I just want to say, all these whiners and criers that are calling you up on the Democrat side saying, well, grocery prices up. | ||
| Kathy, you also called on the Democratic line. | ||
| Are you a Democrat? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Well, this is what I want to say. | ||
| It's their fault. | ||
| They didn't go out and vote. | ||
| They didn't vote. | ||
| They shot theirselves in the foot. | ||
| Wait until January 1st when everything's gone. | ||
| It's their fault. | ||
| It landed on these people that didn't want to vote. | ||
| Because everybody's a criminal. | ||
| I'm going to give Rich a chance to respond, but she raised the issue of Marjorie Taylor Greene and her efforts. | ||
| And obviously, she has announced her resignation, which was a shock to many people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So again, I think she's wrong on the merits on the Epstein files, but certainly took a courageous and principled stand and scored a big success in her terms. | ||
| But this just shows how there is some loose chatter after Trump got rolled on that vote that he was beginning to become a lame duck. | ||
| The real sign you're a lame duck is when your party no longer has to pay attention to you and no longer fears you. | ||
| This is just a sign that day is not going to come for a very, very long time because this is a congresswoman. | ||
| Pretty entrenched in her district with a distinct political identity, and he vaporized her in a matter of weeks. | ||
| Now, maybe she could have fought the primary, maybe she could have won, but clearly she was making the calculation she could fight it and go to all the trouble and quite probably lose. | ||
| So she quits within weeks instead. | ||
| So it's another sign of Trump's incredible grip on the Republican Party. | ||
| Greg is in Glen Allen, Virginia on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Greg. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, good morning. | |
| I just wanted to say something about inflation. | ||
| You know, we got here after decades of government spending 25 years. | ||
| And so now we're in a situation where it's going to take some time to get, you know, prices don't just come down automatically. | ||
| And if you go back to Economics 101, the thing that's going to bring it down, of course, is to cut government spending, stop printing money. | ||
| My question is, what do you think would happen if Trump came out and said prices are not going to come down during my presidency? | ||
| It's going to take time. | ||
| It might take another eight to 10 years to actually get prices to come down because we need to do something about the $37 trillion debt. | ||
| And that's going to take a long time. | ||
| What do you think would happen if Trump really told the American people prices are not coming down while I'm president? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| I don't think he's ever going to say it. | ||
| I think it'd be a big political risk. | ||
| Maybe people would appreciate the truth telling. | ||
| But prices could come down, at least inflation could come down. | ||
| Again, but your price of beef isn't going to go from, depending on how much you buy now, from $5 to $3 based on anything that Trump does. | ||
| So in that sense, prices aren't going to come down. | ||
| And the play for the Trump and Besson's talked about this is you get wages increasing at a nice clip for a sustained period of time. | ||
| And then so-called real wages have increased, right? | ||
| You have more purchasing power. | ||
| So the fact that prices are higher doesn't really take the big bite you'd expect out of your wallet because you're earning more. | ||
| So that is the optimal scenario. | ||
| We don't know when that's going to happen. | ||
| It might take a while to clip in, for people to feel that. | ||
| And this is a huge political risk to the president because the signature issue from the beginning, besides immigration, has been the economy. | ||
| And his numbers are the worst they've ever been on the economy. | ||
| And if that holds going into the midterms, Republicans are absolutely going to get shellacked. | ||
| John is in Massachusetts and online for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, thank you. | |
| Let me make this comment so you don't interrupt me, okay? | ||
| The reason why this is going on, it's because the race created racism, communism, Zionism, especially Rothschild, British Israeli Zionism that was created in the 1800s. | ||
| So it has nothing to do with the Jews of the Bible. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| So when your Rockefellers and your J.P. Morgans and your Rothschilds funded the Nazis to Wall Street. | ||
| John, it sounds like you have some strong opinions on this, but what's your question for Rich Lowry? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Let's hear from Ken in Carlsbad, New Mexico on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Ken. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, good morning. | |
| I'll have to go back to the whole Epstein saga. | ||
| We need to go back and look at the whole thing. | ||
| Here's a guy from Coney Island from an average family that shot to the top of New York City's elites and ended up with billions of dollars in the bank. | ||
| Very strange. | ||
| And our media doesn't seem too interested in that story. | ||
| And the more I read about it, I mean, it's very obvious. | ||
| I think he was an intelligence asset for the Israelis, maybe Russia, or both. | ||
| And our media doesn't seem to want to follow that line of thought. | ||
| And I like to hear Rich's comment. | ||
| What he thinks about this big peace proposal in Ukraine, which was pretty much just written by the Russians. | ||
| And Donald Trump has just endorsed it completely. | ||
| It seems like Vladimir Putin has some type of blackmail material over Donald Trump. | ||
| I mean, if anybody's got a brain in their head. | ||
| And tell us. | ||
| Those are two points I want to follow up on. | ||
| The first one related to the finances around Jeffrey Epstein, which is something I know Rich you've written about as well. | ||
| But there's a politico piece from November the 18th that the House has demanded Epstein financial records from J.P. Morgan, Trace, Deutsche Bank, and the U.S. Virgin Island, and that this was before the vote to release the records. | ||
| But the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform issued a series of subpoenas for some of Epstein's financial records. | ||
| And this is because, according to the subpoenas, J.P. Morgan Chase began an internal investigation into accounts previously held by Epstein, flagging some 4,700 transactions as suspicious in the process. | ||
| Epstein also held accounts at and banked with Deutsche Bank from 2013 until potentially late in 2018. | ||
| The subpoenas state. | ||
| I know that the other question our caller had was about the Ukraine peace proposal, and I'd like for you to address that as well. | ||
| But can you talk about some of these financial dealings? | ||
| Yeah, so this is a big mystery. | ||
| Why was he so rich or seemed so rich? | ||
| So I wholeheartedly endorse these kind of inquiries to try to unravel this mystery. | ||
| I don't think he was a massad agent. | ||
| That would be completely idiotic on the part of the Israelis, and they're not stupid people. | ||
| I think after the Jonathan Pollard mess, they determined we're never going to get ourselves in that situation in the United States ever again and risk a huge rupture in the relationship over what, right? | ||
| Blackmailing people through Epstein. | ||
| If they believe that people had vulnerabilities, they wouldn't have to rely on Epstein to find them out. | ||
| You send a girl to meet them at the bar or whatever. | ||
| This has been done for centuries by intelligence services, so you wouldn't have to rely on someone like Epstein. | ||
| I think the proposal is bad on its merits in the Ukraine war. | ||
| I think it does Tilt too far the Russians' way. | ||
| So there's the administration saying they're open to counters and negotiations around this. | ||
| Trump, of course, give the Ukrainians a deadline to accept it, but there's also said, well, if we're making progress, I'm not sure I'm going to stick by that deadline. | ||
| So the optimistic scenario is this is a starting point, but it'd be very bad if this is the end point and we're going to try to shove it down the Ukrainians' throats and cut them off if they don't accept it. | ||
| I think that would be a policy debacle. | ||
| And I don't see why it's not plausible just to draw the line at the current line of contact, give the Russians de facto control of what they've already taken, let the Ukrainians keep what they've kept, and then have some sort of European security presence going forward as a tripwire. | ||
| Of course, Russia doesn't like that. | ||
| They want its maximal territorial gains. | ||
| They want things even they haven't won on the battlefield yet, and they want the Ukrainian state neutered to the extent feasible. | ||
| And this current deal tilts too much in that direction for my taste. | ||
| Dale is in Hillsboro, Missouri on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Dale. | ||
| Dale, you can go ahead, just make sure the volume on your TV is turned down, and then you can ask your question of Rich Lowery from the National Review. | ||
| I'm guessing you can't hear me, so we'll go to James in Mobile, Alabama, on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, James. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And top of the morning to you. | |
| I'm just calling to make just one comment, if I may, please. | ||
| I'm a veteran, and the picture I saw of our president, supposedly in the Vietnam War, sitting there, people, he was a draft Dodger. | ||
| He ran to Canada when he ran out of his educational options. | ||
| Harvard would not accept his bottom line. | ||
| They would not accept his entrance exams. | ||
| He tried all the other universities. | ||
| The only thing he could get into was NYU. | ||
| And then there, I think the second semester or so, he went below 2.5, and that made him eligible for the draft again. | ||
| And that's when he took up to Canada. | ||
| So, James, did you have a question for Rich? | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Why are we allowing that man, a convicted felon, in the White House? | ||
| Why did we vote for him? | ||
| Why was he eligible to run for president as a convicted felon? | ||
| That's all I'm asking. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Because it's not a bar for running for president. | ||
| And people knew about that case. | ||
| It was a highly politicized case, extremely tenuous at best. | ||
| I think eventually he'll prevail on it. | ||
| It'll take a lot of time and appeals, but the people chose him because they thought he was much better than the senescent president who was the incumbent and had presided over a number of disasters. | ||
| So people were willing to swing with Trump again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Will is in Tampa, Florida on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Will. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| I'm just going to say thank you for hosting. | ||
| I really appreciate the dialogue and everything. | ||
| My question for, I guess my comment is: the comment about the Democrats making this video as a combat veteran from Iraq, I think it's important to state that that is what we are supposed to do. | ||
| If you think about the Geneva Convention, active service members are not allowed to commit war crimes, and we should not be committing crimes against Americans. | ||
| So that's the point of that video. | ||
| I think it's important not to try to politicize that and be mindful of where we're at because it should always be country over party. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I want to ask you about something else that the president said last week. | ||
| He was responding on Tuesday. | ||
| He was meeting with the Saudi Crown Prince in the Oval Office and responded to a question about the killing of an American journalist in Saudi Arabia. | ||
| And here's how that interaction went. | ||
| As far as this gentleman is concerned, he's done a phenomenal job. | ||
| You're mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial. | ||
| A lot of people didn't like that gentleman that you're talking about. | ||
| Whether you like him or didn't like him, things happened, but he knew nothing about it. | ||
| And we can leave it at that. | ||
| You don't have to embarrass our guests by asking a question like this. | ||
| Just yes, Mr. President, you allow me to answer. | ||
| You know, I feel painful about the families of 9-11 in America. | ||
| But we have to focus on reality. | ||
| Reality, based on CIA documents and based on a lot of documents, that Osama bin Laden used Saudi people in that event for one main purpose, is to destroy this relation, to destroy the American-Saudi relation. | ||
| That's the purpose of 9-11. | ||
| So whoever buying that, that means they are helping Osama bin Laden's purpose of destroying this relation. | ||
| He knows that strong relation between America and Saudi Arabia. | ||
| It's bad for extremism. | ||
| It's bad for terrorism. | ||
| And we have to approve him wrong and to build our relation and continue developing our relations. | ||
| It's critical in the safety of the world. | ||
| It's critical against extremism and terrorism. | ||
| About the journalists, it's really painful to hear anyone that's been losing his life for no real purpose or not in a legal way. | ||
| And it's been painful for us in Saudi Arabia. | ||
| We've did all the right steps of investigation, et cetera, in Saudi Arabia. | ||
| And we've improved our system to be sure that nothing happened like that. | ||
| And it's painful and it's a huge mistake. | ||
| And we are doing our best that this doesn't happen again. | ||
| Now, obviously, former documents from the United States government and research from the United States government found that the Saudi Crown Prince did have involvement in the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. | ||
| I wonder about your response to those comments in the White House. | ||
| Yeah, I love just how euphemistic the phrase is, we've improved our systems. | ||
| Like this was just a bureaucratic error that they butchered this guy. | ||
| So look, I think it was a mistake of the Biden administration to say the Saudis are pariahs now because of this and try to cut them off when they're just inherently very strategically important to us. | ||
| Biden quickly realized that the price of world oil wasn't congenial to him and he needed the Saudis to keep pumping or pump more. | ||
| And I think Trump's approach is better. | ||
| We should be close to the Saudis, but you don't need to provide that kind of cover for them. | ||
| Even if you're going to have MBS in the Oval Office like that, you're inevitably going to get that question. | ||
| Just say, well, that's the past. | ||
| We want to move on to the future. | ||
| Don't deceive people about what really happened to try to cozy up to MBS. | ||
| So I think the Saudi meeting went fine in general, but that was a really bad moment. | ||
| In that interaction as well, President Trump went out of his way to criticize the journalist who asked that question. | ||
| And also last week, he criticized a Bloomberg reporter saying quiet piggy to her on Air Force One. | ||
| What's your take on the way the president talks to journalists and particularly women journalists? | ||
| Shouldn't do it. | ||
| Shouldn't talk that way. | ||
| Should be respectful to everyone. | ||
| Unfortunately, it's not going to happen. | ||
| CJ is in Stoughton, Wisconsin, on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, CJ. | ||
|
unidentified
|
CJ, I truly enjoy your writings and readings. | |
| I've been so impressed with what you've done with the National Review. | ||
| William Buckley, miss him, and thank you for taking up the conservative battle. | ||
| It's not easy today. | ||
| When the Republicans get blamed for the unaffordability of the United States, how can the Republicans battle the leanings of the left in the national press? | ||
| And because certainly the Biden administration, 19.5% over four years inflation with now mortgage rates up above 7 or 8 percent. | ||
| How can the Republicans be blamed for that? | ||
| And how can they defend themselves better with the national press? | ||
| It's so frustrating to watch when you hear statistics and look at charts and see the reality of the damage caused. | ||
| Thank you so much for what you do, Mr. Lowry. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Your kind words about NR. | ||
| I would say the economist Steve Moore, I haven't kicked the tires in this number myself, but he says 87% of the price increases we've seen to this point were Biden's responsibility. | ||
| But Trump's in the chair now, and presidents just get blamed for economic conditions, no matter how responsible or not they are. | ||
| And I do think he bears some responsibility. | ||
| I think the tariffs at the margins put upward pressure on prices. | ||
| And so that's augmenting this problem. | ||
| Turns to the national press. | ||
| Republicans are never going to get a fair shake from the national press. | ||
| I have to say, it's encouraging, though, the national press just matters less than it ever has before, as we've seen a dispersal of sources of information, and we've seen the rise of a real conservative counter media ecosystem from podcasts to websites. | ||
| So it's never going to be, I think the culture of the mainstream media is fundamentally corrupt and is not going to change. | ||
| But fortunately, there are more alternatives now. | ||
| Do you consider the National Review part of the mainstream media? | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| Never have been. | ||
| Never will be. | ||
| Henry is in Fort Gratchett, excuse me, Mississippi on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Henry. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| That's Michigan. | ||
| You're in Michigan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I'd like to first of all try to interject some facts. | ||
| When Donald Trump entered office in January of 2025, the inflation rate was 3%, not 8%, as Rich tried to imply. | ||
| The Saudis, Rich, definitely sidesteps the fact that the Trumps, the Trump family is in business with this murdering Saudi prince. | ||
| And the Saudis had 15 of the 19, they actually financed 15 of the 199-11 hijackers and terrorists. | ||
| As far as the trader controversy, Levitt and Johnson both lied just flat out. | ||
| Levitt said that the congresspeople were telling troops to disobey lawful orders. | ||
| He said lawful. | ||
| Johnson said just orders. | ||
| They did this for a purpose. | ||
| They did this because Trump has placed troops on our city streets to terrorize citizens to get normalized troops on our streets. | ||
| Federal judges have ruled that Trump has committed unlawful, unconstitutional orders by ordering the National Guard onto our streets, fabricating an emergency. | ||
| Henry, we're just about out of time for this segment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I want to give Rich a chance to respond to some of these points you've raised. | |
| Can I ask one more question? | ||
| I just want to ask Mr. Lowry that if, Mr. Lowry, if you had children, would you want children to be to have Donald Trump as a role model for the presidency of the United States? | ||
| Yeah, I don't think you want your children treating people Donald Trump the way Donald Trump does very often, but there's a reason he's president of the United States. | ||
| He has a big persona. | ||
| He hit on some key issues, especially at the beginning, where the elites of both parties were out of touch with most people. | ||
| Immigration, trade, foremost on that list. | ||
| And he can be incredibly effective. | ||
| Now, he can also shoot himself in the foot at times, but he's gotten a lot done this first year. | ||
| I think it's going to be tough sledding next year in the midterms, and then we'll see where that goes. | ||
| But he is an extraordinary politician. | ||
| Doesn't mean you want your kids acting like him or taking cues from him on how to behave towards others. | ||
| But again, as I started saying at the top of this segment, he is the dominant figure of our era. | ||
| This will be remembered as the Trump era the same way the 1830s remembered as the era of Andrew Jackson. | ||
| Kurt is in Mount Union, Pennsylvania, on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Kurt. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| Good morning, Mr. Lowry. | ||
| Hi there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let me say that when Trump first come on the scene, I saw him as a breath of fresh air. | |
| And what I'm saying is because prior to that, Republicans had a regimented succession. | ||
| Okay, this one was president, so the next one we're going to put in line. | ||
| And he just blew that all to pieces. | ||
| And it's people like you that are archives of the Bush administration that keep pushing this idea that the people don't want. | ||
| The people are tired of elites controlling the way things are. | ||
| You're a voice, you're a blast from the past. | ||
| You're a voice of the elites that want the race. | ||
| Kurt, we're just about out of time. | ||
| What's your question for Rich? | ||
|
unidentified
|
My question is: why does he continue to be a rhino? | |
| Okay. | ||
| Well, I'm not a Republican in name only. | ||
| I've never voted for a Democrat. | ||
| I think actually maybe voted for one Democrat in an extremely local, insignificant race because my wife knew him and said he was a good guy. | ||
| Otherwise, I'm a Republican through and through. | ||
| I don't think the party is going back to the Bush era ever, but I don't think that that means necessarily that everything Trump has done is 100% correct or should represent the future of the party. | ||
| And National View exists to stand up for a set of principles and ideals. | ||
| Sometimes these principles and ideals are in fashion, sometimes they're not. | ||
| Oftentimes it's in between. | ||
| But it's our role to hold up the flag for these ideals we think are very important to the nature and the success of the United States of America. | ||
| So that's what we're going to stay here and do whether you like it or not. | ||
| Well, thank you so much. | ||
| Rich Lowry is the editor-in-chief of the National Review. | ||
| Really appreciate your time this morning. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| I've enjoyed it. | ||
| Coming up later on our program, we're going to be joined by progressive talk show host Tom Hartman, who's going to join us to discuss Trump administration policies, the Epstein files, Democrats' agenda, as well as the progressive movement more broadly. | ||
| But up next, we're going to take more of your calls and comments in our open forum. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Watch America's Book Club, C-SPAN's bold original series. | |
| Today, with our guest-famed chef and global relief entrepreneur, Jose Andres. | ||
| His books on reimagining food include Feeding Dangerously, Change the Recipe, and We Fed an Island. | ||
| He joins our host, renowned author and civic leader David Rubinstein. | ||
| Are people afraid of inviting you over to their house for dinner because they'd be afraid that the food wouldn't be good enough for you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
When people cook with love for you, it's great, but you know, you know, the dry turkey in Thanksgiving is unnegotiable. | |
| It's always dry. | ||
| But yeah, turkeys are so dry. | ||
| That's why gravy exists. | ||
| watch america's book club with jose andres today at 6 p.m and 9 p.m eastern and pacific only on c-span on thanksgiving day starting at 10 a.m eastern c-span presents a day-long america 250 marathon all part of our more than year-long coverage of historic moments that explore the american story | ||
| At 11 a.m., we'll feature Boston's Freedom Trail through a guided tour, featuring the site of the Boston Massacre, Old Statehouse, Faniel Hall, and Old North Church. | ||
| Give me liberty or give me death at 2:30 p.m. Eastern, Patrick Henry's Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death speech on the 250th anniversary and in its original location, St. John's Church in Richmond. | ||
| At 6:05 p.m., the U.S. Navy 250th anniversary Victory at Sea concert in Philadelphia with a musical performance by Patty LaBelle. | ||
| Also at 8 p.m., the 1775 Battle of Bunker Hill, where more than 1,000 reenactors commemorate one of the earliest and most consequential Revolutionary War battles. | ||
| And at 9:30 p.m., a celebration of the U.S. Army's 250th anniversary, featuring a parade through Washington, D.C., an enlistment ceremony, parachute demonstration, and fireworks. | ||
| Watch the America 250 Thanksgiving all-day marathon on Thursday on C-SPAN. | ||
| Also, head over to C-SPAN.org to get the full schedule. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| We're an open forum ready to take your calls and comments. | ||
| Our phone lines for Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| For Republicans, 202-748-8748-8001. | ||
| And for Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| We're going to start with Mariah in Houston, Texas, on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Mariah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, and I appreciate you taking my call. | |
| I just have two comments, and I would like for people to think about this. | ||
| The first one is about Jeffrey Epstein. | ||
| President Trump signed the bill, although I think it was reluctantly. | ||
| But I am just, I am, I don't understand why he signed the bill. | ||
| He did not invite any of the survivors, many of them that would certainly have appreciated at least him acknowledging them. | ||
| These women are survivors. | ||
| He has people in the Oval Office all the time when he's signing bills, but nothing with those women. | ||
| And I thought that was really below the title of being a president because people voted for the president. | ||
| But he is supposed to be the president for all the people, not just Republicans, not just Democrats, all of the citizens of the United States. | ||
| That's the first thing. | ||
| The second thing, and I'll be quick about this. | ||
| Marjorie Taylor Greene, I'm a Democrat. | ||
| I never agreed with anything that she said because I thought she was out of left field. | ||
| But with the survivors, she took a stand. | ||
| I believe we all have to look in the mirror and look within our own self. | ||
| I don't care what she says or had said in the past. | ||
| This was a bridge too far for even her. | ||
| She stated she has children, and you have to set an example for your children. | ||
| And I don't think she could, in good conscience, be with her family or around her family and not stand up. | ||
| So let's look into what's actually in that piece of legislation that the president signed, the Epstein Files Transparency Act. | ||
| It requires the Department of Justice to publicly release within 30 days all unclassified records related to the investigation and prosecution of Epstein. | ||
| Personal information of the alleged victims or info that could jeopardize active federal investigations would be withheld. | ||
| And the Department of Justice is required to justify to Congress any withheld information and redactions. | ||
| That's what's in that particular piece of legislation. | ||
| Let's hear from John in Braddon, Florida on our line for independence. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, John. | |
| Hey, thanks for taking my call. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| You're an open forum. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I recall when you had your guests on earlier because I've been in the printing. | |
| I'm listening to people ask questions. | ||
| And you really do cut the Republicans off. | ||
| And you say, what's your question? | ||
| But you let the Democrats go on and on about their insults and their complaining. | ||
| And another Republican calls, and you say, well, what's your question? | ||
| I say, so this is you're very biased in what you're doing. | ||
| Let's talk about the Epstein children. | ||
| Are there children on it? | ||
| I mean, 14-year-old girls, their children. | ||
| They weren't kidnapped. | ||
| They're walking the streets, and she scooped them up. | ||
| That's how it happened. | ||
| That's all he got. | ||
| Samuel is in South Pasadena, California, on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Samuel. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I'm very happy with President Trump. | ||
| He's a great president. | ||
| I'm telling you, what I'm trying to say is that everything he campaigned on, he did great. | ||
| I mean, God, I mean, look at all the money he's bringing in this country. | ||
| And look at all the things he's doing for this country and the people. | ||
| And he's making this country great. | ||
| There's plenty of money in this country now. | ||
| And when the new year hits around April, May or June of 2026, this country is going to be booming. | ||
| Let me tell you, he's going to be doing a lot for the people of the United States. | ||
| And Mandami knows that too, the mayor of New York, because Mayor-elect of New York, because I'm telling you right now, he is, they got along great with their meeting and everything. | ||
| And there's going to be money flowing. | ||
| And I think it's going to be a great success. | ||
| And I don't know what's wrong with the Democrats in this country. | ||
| They don't have no leader. | ||
| They've screwed up everything. | ||
| And I'm going to tell you now, Trump is going to be the greatest president we've ever had. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Oh, one other thing. | ||
| The host of the show now, I'm looking at her hairdo. | ||
| Whoever gave her that hairdo had a wonderful sense of humor. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I gave that hairdo to myself. | ||
| Roger is from Kansas on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Roger. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I'm calling. | |
| I'm just really calling about the economy and what we feel it is. | ||
| I'm in farming, so I know the prices of what's being paid for things. | ||
| I also, my wife calls me on the way home and says, go to the grocery store and get this and this. | ||
| I've been the last four years, I've been making a very conscious view of what prices are. | ||
| And right now, eggs are $2.99 a dozen. | ||
| I can tell you that. | ||
| And that's the cheapest form of protein a body can buy, you know, to give yourself that kind of a boost from the protein. | ||
| It's cheap protein. | ||
| Beef, beef has gone sky high, but it has gone, it's at record levels on the farm. | ||
| So that has to happen. | ||
| But the Packer is making quite a bit of money now. | ||
| If you can't afford beef, you can buy pork. | ||
| Pork is as cheap as it's ever been. | ||
| You can buy a pig for 88 cents a pound. | ||
| So whatever. | ||
| What kind of farming do you do, Roger? | ||
| Oh, I have cattle and I have wheat and I raise soybeans. | ||
| Four years ago, our grains were, grain prices the farmer was receiving was as good as as good as we've had it. | ||
| In the middle of Biden, it went worse and worse, and our input costs, that's what killed us, was the input cost. | ||
| Everything we had to spray on it, our fertilizers, fuel. | ||
| Fuel when Biden took over, you probably don't know this, but fuel was at, I think it was right around $58 a barrel. | ||
| And where then steel went way up, and fuel got so high that we could not afford it hardly. | ||
| And fertilizer is also attached to fuel, to oil. | ||
| So those prices went way up, which everything we pay goes up. | ||
| The other thing I was going to bring up real quick was the tariffs. | ||
| I feel the tariffs are a great situation for the farmer. | ||
| They said, you know, Argentina, we're getting their beefs now from Argentina. | ||
| They're going to put 100% tariff on the Argentinian beef before it gets here. | ||
| That's money that comes to us. | ||
| Now, they say China, the tariffs have made China go up on their prices. | ||
| Donald Trump's going to be able to work that down, I think, because Roger, if I can just jump in here. | ||
| So about just two days ago, President Trump signed an order to remove the tariffs from Brazilian beef. | ||
| How do you think that's going to affect you, to have those tariffs? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Argentina beef, Argentina beef. | |
| Brazilian beef specifically in this case. | ||
| But you were talking about Argentinian beef, excuse me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, Argentinian beef is still on, and that's where we're going to get the large amount of beef. | |
| Brazil does not, we don't get a lot of beef from Brazil. | ||
| I think our Secretary of Agriculture said we get enough beef from them to last us less than two days a year. | ||
| So okay. | ||
| Well, thank you for that information, Roger. | ||
| Let's go to Dan in Cherry Hill, New Jersey on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Dan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, good morning. | |
| I'd like to say that of all the issues, the most important is the defense of our country. | ||
| And I think the current administration has ran on that issue. | ||
| But there's something very odd that has happened ever since President Trump came into office the first time. | ||
| He's been putting down NATO. | ||
| He's pulled us from absolute support of Ukraine, whittling down, giving every reason why. | ||
| And finally, he's given a reason that he just wants to stop the killing and that he's some kind of pacifist in that sense, which is contrary to his entire personality. | ||
| And he taught us that it's because it involves Putin out everything that Putin wants. | ||
| He's been doing so ever since. | ||
| He's pretended to support Ukraine for whenever he had to, and now it's come out that he's giving Ukraine an ultimatum. | ||
| In my opinion, Trump, if you look at what he's done, is the greatest traitor ever to our national defense and to our country. | ||
| We are witnessing this damage to our national defense and the 80-year architecture that has kept Russia, the Soviet Union, and now resurgent Russia. | ||
| And he is giving that up and giving Putin what he wants. | ||
| We're witnessing the greatest treason in the history of our country. | ||
| Nothing like it. | ||
| Perhaps the greatest treason in the modern Western world. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Carol is in Bayonne, New Jersey on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Carol. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Hi. | ||
| Yeah, I was just calling regarding, we just received some checks from the government to help us out with whatever. | ||
| And, you know, it was so helpful to have that coming in. | ||
| But then a week later, I got a letter in the mail that the value of my home went up $65,000, the value. | ||
| Now, what does that say? | ||
| That tells me the check we just got is going to be going towards new higher taxes. | ||
| Carol, do you know which government agency sent you that check? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know, but I know there's checks coming out and there's different checks that he wants to put out. | |
| But it just seems no matter what we do, the taxes and insurances and I mean, it's crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, they say people can't afford houses. | |
| Why can't they? | ||
| When you get a mortgage, they'll tell you, okay, with your house, it's going to be $2,500 is going to be a mortgage. | ||
| But they're not telling you about the taxes, the insurance that are included. | ||
| Carol, if I can pause you for one moment, I want to read a story from Fox News that talks about exactly what you're mentioning: that the hidden home cost of home ownership jumped, tightening the squeeze on buyers. | ||
| Insurance premiums surged 48% since 2020, while maintenance and property taxes add to the financial burden. | ||
| And it says the hidden costs of home ownership are reaching nearly $16,000 per year nationwide, underscoring the ongoing affordability crisis, crippling potential buyers. | ||
| A new analysis from Real Estate Marketplace, Zillow, and Thumbtack, an online marketplace for local services, found that insurance, maintenance, and property tax can cost the average homeowner $15,979 per year. | ||
| Maintenance costs account for $10,946 of that, while about $2,000, excuse me, while about $2,003 goes towards homeowners insurance and about $3,000 towards property taxes, according to the November analysis. | ||
| Collectively, those housing costs jumped 4.7% in the last year, outpacing household incomes, which rose just 3.8%. | ||
| So Carol, there's data backing up exactly what you're seeing in your own life. | ||
|
unidentified
|
People don't see it. | |
| They keep blaming landlords for these greedy landlords. | ||
| And not for nothing, but I own, I have a rental, and my rental house is because I got a good people there. | ||
| The rents are going for like $3,000. | ||
| She is paying $2,300 because she's good, but I'm struggling. | ||
| I'm not making nothing for repairs. | ||
| I mean, the house insurance now is going to go up because the taxes are going up constantly. | ||
| And my sister just called me and she said, too, her house went up property value $65,000. | ||
| And she said, last year it went up $35,000. | ||
| And tenants don't have this. | ||
| I'm serious. | ||
| People are saying that I don't know what's going on, but they want your homes. | ||
| They want your properties that you work so hard for. | ||
| And people are hurting. | ||
| And it's not because of the greedy landlords. | ||
| It's because repairs are so costly. | ||
| Every year your taxes go up. | ||
| Your insurance went up sky high for everything. | ||
| Your parts went up. | ||
| You're not making it. | ||
| And they keep doing more and more to you. | ||
| Why? | ||
| They know people can't make it. | ||
| There's something going on. | ||
| Carol. | ||
| The issue of affordability has become such a political talking point. | ||
| What would you like to see lawmakers do about the issues that you're facing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
First of all, just to lower the taxes. | |
| And another thing, big thing in my opinion, your corporations, like they're taking over your health care. | ||
| They're telling you what you can get, what you can't get. | ||
| You're talking about human lives. | ||
| And you're playing with people's humans' lives. | ||
| Is that greed? | ||
| Look at your politicians. | ||
| How many mansions do they have? | ||
| Look at your foreigners coming in. | ||
| Nothing against foreigners. | ||
| You've got mostly good people, but we can't support them all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They've got to come in the way they used to come in. | |
| Years ago, your companies, when you worked, your companies used to pay for your health insurance, decent. | ||
| And if you didn't like it, you could move on to another company the better. | ||
| And you also had a decent working salary that you can survive. | ||
| So it worked its way in years ago. | ||
| Now all you see is power and greed. | ||
| They don't care. | ||
| They got mansions, these people. | ||
| They got mansions. | ||
| And they want more and they want power. | ||
| I mean, taxes every year, water, insurance, repairs. | ||
| And like I say, I got a beautiful tenant. | ||
| I got her rent so low because she's good. | ||
| She takes care of the things, but she's struggling. | ||
| And I don't want to raise her, but I can't do it no more. | ||
| I'm going to lose my home because the rents are going for $2,800. | ||
| I'm trying to do the best I can for her. | ||
| So Carol, these issues around affordability are certainly big talking points as well as things that affect regular Americans. | ||
| It did come up in our program Ceasefire. | ||
| And if you want to tune in right after this program, we are going to be replaying our latest episode of Ceasefire, featuring Florida Democratic Congressman Jared Moskowis and Tennessee Republican Congressman Tim Burchett. | ||
| And they sit down for a bipartisan dialogue on the Epstein files, health care, which Carol just mentioned, as well as some other top issues facing the country. | ||
| That's going to be at 10 a.m. Eastern here on C-SPAN. | ||
| Let's get back to your calls in open forum. | ||
| Eve is in Royal Oak, Michigan on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Eve. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| So, just listening to this most recent phone call from the woman talking about affordability, I think she speaks for so many Americans. | ||
| And I think one of the problems is we're not paying attention to what our politicians do, how they vote, but we do listen to the rhetoric, what they promise to do, what they say they'll do. | ||
| And these things often do not agree with each other. | ||
| And if she's wondering, one of the reasons things are not affordable right now is we need to look at policies under the Trump administration and what is happening with Project 2025. | ||
| It is terrifying. | ||
| And it sounds crazy, but it is absolutely terrifying what they want to see happen with Project 2025. | ||
| It is a complete destruction of what we understand to be democracy to be. | ||
| It is a takeover of tech oligarchs. | ||
| And I know that sounds crazy, but it's absolutely real. | ||
| And if you look to see what policies are passing right now, what's going on with the Trump administration is making things better for people who already have money, donors. | ||
| Our president sells crypto from the White House, as does the First Lady. | ||
| We have grifting going on that I can't even wrap my brain around. | ||
| If there's one thing I would like people to do is to really look into what they're doing with Project 2025, this new initiative right now, they've recategorized certain jobs, which ones are eligible for student loans. | ||
| They've gotten rid of things like teaching, nursing, occupational therapy, jobs that are, I'm sorry to say, mostly female-oriented, but they've added theology and chiropractic. | ||
| There is a scary thing happening in this country right now that is reimagining what democracy should look like. | ||
| And people like Peter Keele, please look him up, terrifying. | ||
| And quite frankly, JD Vance, who's part of these think tanks, who think that democracy is old-fashioned and slow. | ||
| And we really, really need to concentrate on what they're doing. | ||
| And incidentally, I just want to say that we really need to be careful what kind of news we ingest because it is making us hateful. | ||
| I heard two men before me, one insult the journalist here's her beautiful hair, and another one say that 14-year-old girls were out, you know, getting themselves in trouble with Epstein and somehow deserved what they got. | ||
| That is brainwashing. | ||
| That is not a normal way of thinking. | ||
| It's cruel, and we need to stop getting used to this. | ||
| Anyway, I just think also we all need to look at each other and see how much we are alike. | ||
| The woman, there's these Republicans talking struggling with his farming. | ||
| I know nothing about that. | ||
| But I identify that his problems are caused by the same thing my problems are. | ||
| I believe he actually called in on our line for Democrats, but I understand your view. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Even some of the Republicans, I agree with them. | |
| It's hard for all of us, and we are letting strange cultural things make us hate each other. | ||
| All right, let's hear from Christina in DeCoin, Illinois on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Christina. | ||
| Good morning, Christina. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Apologies. | |
| I missed the beginning of what I was saying. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, that's okay. | |
| You didn't bing me and I was waiting for that bing. | ||
| So what I would like to speak on today is the changing of our government. | ||
| When I was in 1970, when I was nine years old, we got World Book Encyclopedias, and I've always been a reader well above my grade level. | ||
| And when I got, after a year, reading it out loud to my younger sister, got to the youth, you know, the United States and the three branches of government and the direct declaration and the Constitution. | ||
| I was so proud. | ||
| We sat and cried with the pride of where we were. | ||
| And now, let's just take us up to 1980 and the inaugural speeches and the swearing-ins. | ||
| The people behind Ronald Reagan were Billy Graham, Al Sharpton, and then I can't, I mean, I'm blind now, so I couldn't look at their pictures and know who they were. | ||
| But they were, you know, civic leaders of civil rights leaders and come up to this past year, and they were nothing but a pack of oligarchs, of billionaires. | ||
| And so I have kind of rewritten the preamble to the Constitution, and I can say it very quickly. | ||
| It is called, We the Privileged, a Plutocratic Manifesto. | ||
| We the Privileged Refuse to Upold the Constitution, abandon justice, destroy domestic tranquility, provide for our private expense, promoting corporate welfare, secure financial liberty to ourselves and our posterity, to ordain and establish a plutocracy for these divided states of America. | ||
| And I think that is, I wrote it back in 19, and I think it is more poignant today than it was then. | ||
| And I thank you so much for your talk, you know, for you listening to me. | ||
| And I'll hear from you in another 30, 35 days. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| And I love your program. | ||
| And you are such a lady when people, you know, talk bad about you and, you know, call you, you know, one side or the other. | ||
| And I mean, I think your show is fabulous. | ||
| I've watched for years. | ||
| So thank you very much, and have a wonderful holiday. | ||
| Happy holiday, America. | ||
| Next up is Danny in Jamestown, South Carolina on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Danny. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| Happy Thanksgiving to America. | ||
| I hear a bunch of Democrats calling in about Trump's economy. | ||
| Trump inherited this economy from Joe Biden. | ||
| I wish C-SPAN would show a graph of Trump's first presidency and the economy and what he did with it, and then show Joe Biden's economy and what he did with it. | ||
| And I think a lot of these callers would call in with a different mindset. | ||
| And instead of just hating Mr. Trump, maybe they realize their vote is why the economy is in as bad a shape as it's in. | ||
| And C-SPAM, when y'all take calls, seems like y'all got this operator system set up where you could, you wouldn't have to put someone on hold for 30 minutes. | ||
| I was on hold this morning and then got cut off at the end of the segment. | ||
| Y'all can just take callers as they call. | ||
| You get that many calls coming in, I promise you. | ||
| I've called about a hundred times this morning to get back on. | ||
| Thank you for cutting me off. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Isaiah is in Midlothian, Virginia, on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Isaiah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| My comment is about C-SPAN itself. | ||
| I would like for you and other moderators to randomly ask some of the callers why or where they get their information from. | ||
| And the reason I say that is it appears some people call in and they offer these talking points that they get from some of these so-called news outlets, which is fine. | ||
| But I think the rest of us out here in the country need to know where they get these talking points from so the rest of us don't go to those sources to get that information because some of the stuff they're talking about just makes no sense. | ||
| It's as if people are blind to common sense and they'd much rather say what other people present to them as facts, even though proof is seldom offered under that disguise. | ||
| So I would like for C-SPAN moderators to randomly ask the callers where or what is their primary source of the information they call in to comment on. | ||
| And by the way, I heard some person called in earlier today, demeaning you about your hair and whatnot. | ||
| That person, that's one of the people I'm talking about. | ||
| You should have asked him where does this attitude come from? | ||
| For me, I think all of you are beautiful. | ||
| I think you do a great job. | ||
| I've been watching C-SPAN ever since Brian Lamb. | ||
| You probably don't even know him. | ||
| That was so long ago because you look so young. | ||
| But I've been watching C-SPAN because I like to get the information from the sources rather than have it filtered through the corporate media. | ||
| But ma'am, you're doing a great job and you're beautiful, so ignore the ignorance and just keep doing what you're doing. | ||
| And please, for me and the rest of the audience, please randomly ask these callers what is their primary source of the information they put out here in the public for other people to consume. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Barbara is in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Barbara. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm just begging C-SPAN. | |
| I'm begging you. | ||
| Just one time. | ||
| Get the facts about this inflation. | ||
| Get the facts about Biden when they call him names. | ||
| He had no inflation. | ||
| He's the one that brought it down to 2% from 9.8 that I think that it was 9-something, 9-point-something. | ||
| Well, Barbara, there was inflation during Biden's term. | ||
| What do you mean that there was no inflation under Biden? | ||
|
unidentified
|
To him. | |
| He got it from Trump. | ||
| Trump handed him 9-point-something inflation. | ||
| Yeah, he had to get it down. | ||
| But he got it down to two, and Trump's already starting it back up. | ||
| And every single Republican, you can check this too, I wish you would. | ||
| Every single Republican since Dwight Eisenhower has busted our economy, has handed us a busted economy. | ||
| Reagan did. | ||
| The Bushes, both of them did. | ||
| Trump did, and Trump's going to do it again. | ||
| And this has been going on how many years? | ||
| And why do you let this lie be told? | ||
| Three hours a day they call here. | ||
| Oh, Biden had inflation. | ||
| Well, he didn't have it, but he got it from Trump and he brought it down. | ||
| Trump got two point, and that still was high to Biden. | ||
| Biden was headed. | ||
| He wanted it down to one something, but he did hand him 2% instead of one, but he did bring it down the whole time he was in there. | ||
| Barbara Gallin actually did some polling on this back in May, and I want to just read sort of the assessment of their polling, or at least what their survey said in terms of how Americans place responsibility for the economy. | ||
| And again, this was from back in May. | ||
| More in the U.S. say it's Trump rather than Biden's economy. | ||
| 46% of Americans say Trump is mostly responsible for today's economy. | ||
| 27% see Biden as mainly responsible. | ||
| And about one in five think that responsibility is shared. | ||
| And this differs based on people's partisan leanings. | ||
| Republicans, only 21% think that Trump is responsible for the economy, compared to 55% say that Biden is responsible for the state of the economy. | ||
| Democrats, on the other hand, 75% say that Donald Trump is responsible for the economy versus just 4% blaming it on Joe Biden. | ||
| And then for independents, it's much more down the middle, with 43%, well, not down the middle, 43% still blame Donald Trump compared to 24% blaming Joe Biden. | ||
| All right, that's all the time that we have for open forum. | ||
| But up next on Washington Journal, we're going to have Progressive Talk Show host Tom Hartman joining us to discuss Trump administration policies, the Epstein files, and Democrats' agenda along with the progressive movement. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| Kenneth Feinberg is a Washington-based attorney who served as a special master of the U.S. government's September 11, 2001 Victims Compensation Fund. | ||
| Mr. Feinberg worked for 33 months, pro bono, deciding who should be compensated as a result of the deaths and injuries from 9-11. | ||
| Kenneth Feinberg, who today is 79, was interviewed on C-SPAN's Q ⁇ A about his book, What is Life Worth? | ||
| The unprecedented effort to compensate the victims of 9-11. | ||
| Here is an encore presentation of that July 1st, 2005 interview 20 years ago. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Author Kenneth Feinberg with his book, What is Life Worth? The unprecedented effort to compensate the victims of 9-11 on this episode of Book Notes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb. | |
| Book Notes Plus is available wherever you get your podcasts and on the C-SPAN Now app. | ||
| On Thanksgiving Day, starting at 10 a.m. Eastern, C-SPAN presents a day-long America 250 Marathon, all part of our more than year-long coverage of historic moments that explore the American story. | ||
| At 11 a.m., we'll feature Boston's Freedom Trail through a guided tour featuring the site of the Boston Massacre, Old Statehouse, Faniel Hall, and Old North Church. | ||
| Give me liberty or give me death. | ||
| At 2.30 p.m. Eastern, Patrick Henry's Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death speech on the 250th anniversary and in its original location, St. John's Church in Richmond. | ||
| At 6.05 p.m., the U.S. Navy 250th anniversary Victory at Sea concert in Philadelphia with a musical performance by Patty LaBelle. | ||
| Also at 8 p.m., the 1775 Battle of Bunker Hill, where more than 1,000 reenactors commemorate one of the earliest and most consequential Revolutionary War battles. | ||
| And at 9.30 p.m., a celebration of the U.S. Army's 250th anniversary, featuring a parade through Washington, D.C., an enlistment ceremony, parachute demonstration, and fireworks. | ||
| Watch the America 250 Thanksgiving all-day marathon on Thursday on C-SPAN. | ||
| Also, head over to C-SPAN.org to get the full schedule. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| Joining us now to talk about the Trump administration as well as the progressive movement. | ||
| We're joined by Tom Hartman, who's the host of SiriusXM's Tom Hartman program and author of the book, The Last American President. | ||
| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
| Hey, Kimberly, thank you for inviting me back. | ||
| It's great to see you again. | ||
| Last week, President Trump signed legislation that would compel the Justice Department to release records related to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein after Congress approved doing so by a nearly unanimous vote. | ||
| You have a piece sort of about this whole saga saying, is the Epstein scandal an outlier or America's oldest crusade laid bare? | ||
| What do you mean by that? | ||
| That the country was founded on the idea of white male supremacy. | ||
| That, you know, I mean, there were extraordinary ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and by many of the founders. | ||
| You know, the idea of people being able to govern themselves. | ||
| This was radical stuff in the 1770s. | ||
| It was an experiment that hadn't been tried in 3,000 years. | ||
| It was a noble experiment. | ||
| And yet, embedded within it at that time was this idea that basically only men should rule and only white men should rule. | ||
| And in fact, there was even an argument at the Constitutional Convention about whether only wealthy white men should rule. | ||
| Ultimately, they decided every man should be able to vote, not just men who were landholders. | ||
| But it was a serious debate. | ||
| And that notion that only white men, and now, you know, with this Christian nationalist movement, we've added the idea of only Christian white men, which was also something, I mean, you know, you had Patrick Henry, who was the, you know, give me liberty or give me death guy. | ||
| You know, he was the largest slaveholder in the state of Virginia. | ||
| And he argued very strongly that only Christians should be allowed to participate. | ||
| He was a super evangelical. | ||
| But he was kind of the outlier. | ||
| Most of the founders were fine separating religion from government. | ||
| And in fact, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in particular spoke out about it very loudly because just 100 years earlier, they had seen the Salem Witch Trials and they'd seen the consequences of religion and government. | ||
| But basically this idea that only white men should run the country was at our founding. | ||
| It animated the Confederacy. | ||
| It led to the Civil War. | ||
| It crushed Reconstruction in the election of 1876 when Tilden was, you know, the Tilden Hayes election when Tilden actually won both the electoral count and the majority vote. | ||
| He had Hayes became president as part of a deal to destroy Reconstruction and basically, you know, take away the franchise from black men. | ||
| And, you know, we saw women getting the vote in 1920, but that never went away, that idea that only white men should rule and increasingly that only powerful white men should rule. | ||
| And I see the whole Epstein thing, the fact that he operated with such impunity for so many years that his actions were covered up over and over and over again, that Pam Bondi was the Attorney General of Florida for eight years while Epstein was doing this right under her nose after he had been exposed and was continuing to do this and never bothered to investigate it after Donald Trump gave her a major campaign contribution. | ||
| You know, it just seems like it's all one thing, that the Confederacy never went away. | ||
| This idea of white male supremacy never went away. | ||
| And they're still doing this dance. | ||
| So it's not just Republicans who are being involved in this scandal, especially with the recent release of some of the emails that we've seen. | ||
| President Trump has already instructed the Justice Department to investigate links between Epstein and notable Democrats, including former President Clinton, former Harvard President Larry Summers, and Democratic mega donor Reid Hoffman. | ||
| What do you think of those developments, as well as the president's sort of about face on releasing these files at all? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A couple of thoughts. | ||
| Number one, if any Democrats were involved, they should be treated just like any Republicans who were involved. | ||
| I mean, you know, these are heinous crimes and, you know, extraordinary abuse of wealth and power. | ||
| And I don't think that the letter after somebody's name, the party affiliation or non-affiliation, should have anything more, you know, should have anything to do with whether they're prosecuted or not. | ||
| And by the way, that's the official position of all of the Democrats that I know of. | ||
| I mean, that's Chuck Schumer's position. | ||
| That's Hakeem Jeffries' position. | ||
| That's the DNC's position. | ||
| I don't know of any Democrats who are out there saying, oh, yeah, let's just look at the Republicans. | ||
| On the other hand, Trump is explicitly saying, let's just look at the Democrats, which is just weird. | ||
| The other thing that I think is really important that doesn't get mentioned very often in the news reports, and I don't know why, is the House Oversight Committee, James Comer, who is a very dear ally of Donald Trump's, a vigorous defender of Donald Trump's, is the chairman of that committee. | ||
| He's a Republican. | ||
| And I believe Jamie Raskin is the ranking member. | ||
| I could be wrong. | ||
| But both the ranking member, which would be the top Democrat on the committee, and the chairman of the committee signed off on a subpoena to the Justice Department, to Pam Bondi and Kash Patel, to the DOJ and to the FBI, and by extension to the administration, to Donald Trump, to turn over all of the Epstein materials to the committee so that in private, respecting people's privacy and secrecy and everything else, | ||
| the committee members could go through these materials and determine what might need to be made public and what might not and what the next steps are, which is essentially what this legislation that was just passed calls for. | ||
| And the administration has been defying that subpoena for months now, I believe for about at least four or five months. | ||
| And so there was no need for the discharge petition. | ||
| There was no need for Congress to vote on this, to force the release, because there's already a law. | ||
| I mean, right now, Pam Bondi is in defiance of the law. | ||
| She's breaking the law by not turning this material over to the House Oversight Committee. | ||
| So it's just, it's weird. | ||
| And that's one of the things that causes me to be skeptical that we're actually going to see these materials. | ||
| Obviously, there's a massive cover-up going on within the administration. | ||
| I want to switch topics a bit because just after the government shutdown ended, you wrote, and standing at the center of this disgrace is Chuck Schumer, the so-called leader of the Senate Democrats, who orchestrated or at least approved or failed to stop the entire debacle from behind the curtain when he then had the gall to vote no at the last minute and wash his hands of it. | ||
| You argue in this piece that the government shutdown was something of a wasted opportunity for progressives because they walked away with effectively, in your argument, nothing. | ||
| How do you think a progressives should move forward, particularly as it relates to Leader Schumer? | ||
| I think it's important to understand when we talk about progressives and the Democratic Party, what and who we're talking about. | ||
| When President Hoover crashed the economy in 1929 and provoked what was for several, for at least a generation, referred to as the Republican Great Depression in the 1930s. | ||
| FDR came into office with this radical new idea. | ||
| At that time, in the census of 1900, about 10% of Americans were in the middle class. | ||
| By the end of the roaring 20s, it was up to around 15%. | ||
| But we had never seen, the world had never seen, a nation where half of the citizens or more were in the middle class. | ||
| And FDR said, I'm going to do that. | ||
| That was the first major progressive era. | ||
| You can argue there was a progressive era in the 1890s, which went after the big trusts. | ||
| But just setting that argument aside for a moment, FDR was a progressive. | ||
| He gave us the right to unionize. | ||
| He gave us the minimum wage. | ||
| He raised the top income tax rate up to 91% in order to get the oligarchs under control. | ||
| He continued the trust-busting that Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft had done back two decades earlier, three decades earlier, and basically created the modern American middle class. | ||
| We went from 15% of us being in the middle class to 65%, roughly, two-thirds of us being in the middle class in 1981 when Ronald Reagan came into office. | ||
| Then you had LBJ, Lyndon Johnson, President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. | ||
| And the middle class at that point was still only crossing that 50% threshold when LBJ came into office. | ||
| And LBJ said, we're going to expand the middle class beyond just half of America. | ||
| And so, you know, he created Medicare and he created Medicaid and he expanded. | ||
| Just because I want to get to a few more topics, I'm wondering if you can fast forward. | ||
| Sorry for the history. | ||
| I've heard my point is that all of this, or much of this, got abandoned in 1992 with the election of Bill Clinton, who defined this kind of centrist thing, the new Democrats, that we could be friendly with corporations. | ||
| We didn't have to do all this stuff because Reagan had been so successful in trying to destroy the middle class, going after unions, cutting taxes on rich people, raising taxes on average people, raising the retirement age for Social Security. | ||
| And so the progressive movement kind of went away in the Democratic Party for a long time. | ||
| And Joe Biden was the first president since that era, since Reagan, to come along and say, we're going to go back to FDR, we're going to go back to LBJ, we're going to go back to having a middle class. | ||
| I mean, only 47 percent of Americans today are in the middle class as a result of that. | ||
| What do you think that means for Leader Schumer? | ||
| Well, Chuck Schumer has been kind of following the old Clinton line of, you know, well, yeah, we can get along with these corporate. | ||
| And I get it. | ||
| You know, his main job is to raise money for the Democrats. | ||
| And he's a brilliant, you know, legislator. | ||
| But what we need right now is a leader, and we need a leader who I think most Democrats, and I think frankly, the American people, are saying we would like to go back to building the middle class that FDR and LBJ were doing, the progressive vision of America. | ||
| And Chuck Schumer has never really explicitly articulated that, and that's my concern. | ||
| We're going to be taking your calls shortly for Tom Hartman. | ||
| Democrats can call in at 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans at 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents at 202-748-8002. | ||
| But first, I want to get your take on the meeting last week between President Trump and New York City Mayor-elect Zoram Mamdani and the seemingly collegial interaction that that looked like, at least on camera. | ||
| I thought it was fascinating. | ||
| I would love to have been a fly on the wall in their conversation. | ||
| My guest when he came in and said words to the effect of, you've won this election basically. | ||
| You have always been an advocate for the little guy. | ||
| This has always been the position that Donald Trump has taken. | ||
| He hasn't run the government that way, but this is how he has always talked. | ||
| And said, that's what I'm trying to do, and that's what you're trying to do, and why don't we work together on this? | ||
| And clearly, from the meeting, it appears that that was at least in some way the nature of the conversation. | ||
| So I think, you know, and Trump also, you know, his polling numbers are worse than they've ever been, and probably worse than any president in a long, long time. | ||
| And, you know, I think he kind of wanted the glow from Mom Dami as well. | ||
| But Mohamdami is a very reasonable guy. | ||
| He calls himself a Democratic socialist, which makes people crazy. | ||
| But he's really just, you know, to reference my earlier history lesson, he's really just calling for the same kind of stuff that LBJ and FDR were doing, which is, you know, let's take care of the middle class in New York City. | ||
| And I think Trump is okay with that. | ||
| And in fact, likes it because it's so popular, which is probably a good thing for the country. | ||
| All right, let's get to your calls for Tom Hartman of the Tom Hartman Show. | ||
| Jeff is in Indianapolis on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Jeff. | ||
| Good morning, Jeff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Hartman, I listen to your show on CSXM Radio a lot, and you are a very, smart and good person. | |
| And I have three statements that I would like to say. | ||
| The first statement I would like to say is the reason why we have such a high debt in this country in deficit is because Republicans keep believing that the supply-side economic scam ushered in by Ronald Reagan is going to work. | ||
| And we've had it three times now, and it doesn't work. | ||
| It doesn't work. | ||
| That's the reason why we have such high debt and deficit in this country. | ||
| The second thing is, the second thing is people don't even understand what the word communism means. | ||
| They throw it around and try to label people as being communists. | ||
| Well, they don't even know what that word means. | ||
| Congress means an entire state takeover of all means of production, distribution, and sales. | ||
| And no one is advocating that. | ||
| Mohamdami in New York is not advocating it. | ||
| But people want to call him a communist because they don't even understand what the word communism means. | ||
| And the third one, and my last one, is we have a serious problem in this country with the rise of Christian nationalism. | ||
| They want to throw everybody out who doesn't, who's not white or who is not a Christian. | ||
| Muslims in this country have a right to pre-practice their religion. | ||
| What is going on in Texas and some of these other states is totally wrong. | ||
| People have a right to practice their religion and not be called extremists. | ||
| Most Muslims in this country are not extremists. | ||
| They don't advocate Sharia law, none of that. | ||
| They just want to be able to practice their religion in peace. | ||
| But we have all this distortion and misinformation out here, and that's bad. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So Jeff raised three points there about our debt being caused by sort of the legacy of supply-side economics, about people's misuse of the term communism, and about his concerns over the rise of Christian nationalism. | ||
| Your thoughts, Tom? | ||
| Well, he's so right. | ||
| I think most people don't realize that when we ended World War II, our debt was at 134% of GDP, which is roughly where it is now. | ||
| By the time Reagan came into office, we had gotten it down to the point where the debt was only $800 billion, eight-tenths of $1 trillion. | ||
| It's not even $1 trillion. | ||
| And then Reagan started supply-side economics. | ||
| And by the time he left office, it was back up to $2.4 trillion. | ||
| And every Republican since then has massively increased our debt. | ||
| And a few Democrats have too, in large part, just because they haven't been able to raise taxes, frankly. | ||
| But yeah, he's absolutely right on the debt. | ||
| On communism, he's right on that, too. | ||
| Momdani is not suggesting that the government should take over anything. | ||
| He's saying, let's start some stores. | ||
| There are several cities in America that have already done that. | ||
| That experiment has been tried. | ||
| And in areas where companies and entrepreneurs don't want to start stores or can't start stores, it works. | ||
| And I think it's a great idea. | ||
| It's not communism. | ||
| And then finally, with regard to religion, I think it's important to remember that it was George Washington who signed the Treaty of Tripoli that said, or wrote the Treaty of Tripoli. | ||
| Actually, it was signed by John Adams, the next president, which opens, the opening sentence is, as America is in no way based on the Christian religion, we have basically no fight with the Muslims. | ||
| They called them Muslim at that time. | ||
| So there's a long history in this country of religious tolerance. | ||
| Our country is founded on religious tolerance. | ||
| So yeah, his points were brilliant. | ||
| Scott is in Ithaca, New York on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Scott. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, Scott. | |
| I listened to you for years. | ||
| I don't know if you remember. | ||
| I used to call in a lot. | ||
| I know you started out as a capitalist, actually. | ||
| You started out with small businesses and had one business that generated like $250 million in revenue at one point. | ||
| So sometimes it's hard to hear you talking about progressive. | ||
| I was a progressive, too, a long time ago, and I'm still a registered Democrat. | ||
| But how do you reconcile capitalism and entrepreneurship with local governments trying to tax people out of their homes and like the one caller said and progressiveness, progressive politics, it's just not working. | ||
| We need to have more conservatives in local government to lower the taxes on people's homes so they can afford to stay in their homes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, first of all, I've never made a quarter billion dollars. | ||
| I'm not a rich guy. | ||
| I have started a number of businesses over the years and sold them. | ||
| The largest one was a $6 million business, and that was 30 years ago. | ||
| But in any case, yeah, I've done okay in my life. | ||
| I have no complaints. | ||
| With regard to taxes, I'm inclined to agree with you. | ||
| I'm most concerned about property taxes, frankly. | ||
| I think property taxes are in some ways destructive. | ||
| You can't own land in the United States because of property taxes. | ||
| We're basically renting it from the government. | ||
| And I would love to see this country experiment with suspending property taxes or reducing property taxes in some way. | ||
| I think it's one of the most regressive of the taxes. | ||
| I'd much rather see taxes, a tax on wealth rather than on land and house. | ||
| And if your land and house is part of your wealth, then maybe they could be rolled together. | ||
| But it's a conversation I think we need to have. | ||
| Next up is Randall in San Diego, California on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Randall. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| Morning, Randall. | ||
| Mr. Hartman. | ||
| I don't understand your logic. | ||
| You spoke about taxes and how you would wish the property taxes could be controlled. | ||
| But then you turn around and say that they can't be lowered, but it bothers my mind the way you people think. | ||
| Progressive thinking is not working. | ||
| Biden didn't do anything for the economy, for the little people, but the middle class, he took most of our stuff away from us and he gave it to the people under us and put the burden on our shoulders. | ||
| I don't understand how you can sit there and make the statements you're making because you're talking out of the side of your mouth. | ||
| You're no longer a politician. | ||
| You're a public citizen now. | ||
| It would be fresh to hear you guys talk honestly. | ||
| We're not stupid out here in America, but we're living our lives every day under these different policies that the people we elect and the government put on us. | ||
| All right, let's Tom respond to some of those points. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I'm a little astonished. | ||
| Joe Biden, first of all, put into place a 15% minimum attack on corporations, on big corporations, who have been evading taxes for years and years and years. | ||
| And Trump and the Republicans just stopped enforcing that, just did away with that. | ||
| They fought it vigorously. | ||
| Joe Biden fought for the average working person. | ||
| He was the first president in the history of this country to walk a picket line. | ||
| He supports unions and the average person. | ||
| The Republican Party hates unions. | ||
| Donald Trump put Anthony Scalia's son in as secretary, as his first Secretary of Labor, who is a union buster. | ||
| That's what he does for a living. | ||
| Republicans have been fighting against the average person basically since the end of the Eisenhower administration. | ||
| I think Dwight Eisenhower was the last Republican who actually was in favor of the little guy. | ||
| In 1956, he ran for election based on the fact that he had expanded unions in the United States. | ||
| So I just don't get it. | ||
| I'm in favor of taxing great wealth. | ||
| We now have a top income tax rate that I believe is around 34%, maybe a little higher, maybe 35 or 6%. | ||
| When the top tax rate was 74% when Ronald Reagan came into office, we didn't have this explosion of billionaires. | ||
| We had four or five billionaires in the United States at that time in today's dollars. | ||
| Now we've got, what, 900 of them, 1,000 of them? | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| It's just this, and they're richer than any king or pharaoh in the history of the world. | ||
| And they're paying nothing in taxes. | ||
| I mean, one, two, three percent at the most. | ||
| You know, they figured out how to, not, well, it isn't that they figured out how to game the system, it's that the Republicans have drilled a million holes in the tax code every time they get in power. | ||
| So, I just don't understand where the listener is coming from. | ||
| I suspect he's been living in a right-wing news bubble where the billionaire Murdoch family, through their Fox News instrument, tries to get the average person to think that the interests of the billionaires are their interests. | ||
| And then you get these multi-millionaire hosts on radio basically pitching the same thing. | ||
| It's really tragic. | ||
| We have a question we've received via text from Stephen in Savannah, who says, Ask Tom about the Greg Palast voter suppression investigation. | ||
| Yeah, this is fascinating. | ||
| Greg Palest is an interesting guy. | ||
| He has a graduate degree in economics. | ||
| He was a student of Milton Friedman, and he's a journalist, a degree in journalism. | ||
| And he wrote for the New York Times. | ||
| He was a television reporter for the BBC for years and years and years. | ||
| So after the 2024 election, he put on a statistician hat and took all of the official government statistics. | ||
| This is all based on state and federal government statistics about how many people were purged from the voting rolls who turned out to be actually still citizens and not having moved. | ||
| And he hired the company that Amazon hires to confirm postal addresses to find that they hadn't moved. | ||
| And people who tried to vote and then had their vote challenged. | ||
| This was a big campaign of the Republican Party in the 2024 election: having, they wanted to have 10,000 people in polling places looking at mail-in ballots and saying, I challenge it because I don't think that signature matches. | ||
| And what Greg Palace found was that in those states that swung and gave the election to Trump, roughly 4.2 million people who were legal citizen registered voters had their names removed from the voting rolls, so they were turned away at the polls. | ||
| That was a little over 3 million. | ||
| Or had their votes challenged, and thus when your vote is challenged, you have a couple of weeks to go to the Secretary of State's office and prove who you are. | ||
| But most people don't even know that. | ||
| And so when their votes are challenged, typically they're simply never counted. | ||
| So basically, 4.2 million people's votes were not counted who were citizens. | ||
| And we know also, and Greg, you know, looking at the statistics, and you also, the vast majority of those people were people of color, mostly black, but a lot of Hispanics as well. | ||
| And so it's a pretty safe guess that had those people been able to vote, that not only would Democrats right now control the House and Senate, but that Conal Harris would be president. | ||
| And his numbers are pretty solid. | ||
| You can Google it. | ||
| Tim is in Wetzby, Wisconsin, on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Tim. | ||
| Hey, Tim. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'd just like to ask your guests here: how come the progressives can't seem to get their message across to the Republicans who continually vote for their own worst interests? | ||
| I mean, you have to look no farther than across all the red states, which, and my best friend, is a Republican. | ||
| I'm not trying to dish the people, but the wages are by far lower than a lot of the other blue states in a lot of cases. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nine of the ten lowest-wage states are red states, which have been run by the Republicans for 40, 50 years. | |
| But yet they just, I'm a retired union man. | ||
| I believe that a rising tide rises all ships. | ||
| But they don't seem to, I mean, that's why all these corporations are moving south because they can pay their people 50% less than they do here in Wisconsin or Michigan. | ||
| And as far as the economy goes, I mean, look at what Biden took over. | ||
| The economy was in free fall. | ||
| The unemployment rate hit 14% in 20. | ||
| The shelves were empty. | ||
| Had to rebuild everything. | ||
| And then to top it off, let's have a rally and have an insurrection and smash the capital up. | ||
| So, I mean, Trump really didn't hand Biden a very good situation in 21 when he took over. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yeah, well said. | ||
| In this regard, I think you really have to hand it to the Republican Party and the billionaires behind them. | ||
| Back in 71, Lewis Powell said, hey, let's get politically active and let's take control of the media, the schools, the political system, basically. | ||
| And they did it. | ||
| They pulled it off. | ||
| We now have 1,500 right-wing radio stations. | ||
| We have four right-wing television stations. | ||
| One owns over 200 television stations around the country. | ||
| The other, Fox News, is the largest cable system in the country. | ||
| We have half of the local newspapers in the country have gone out of business. | ||
| And the other half, the remaining half, half of them are now owned by right-wing leaning hedge funds out of New York City. | ||
| So they're promoting right-wing ideology. | ||
| You have right-wing podcasters. | ||
| There was a big scandal a couple of years ago. | ||
| We found out that many of them were being funded to the tune of like a million dollars a year each from Russia. | ||
| But now they're being funded by right-wing billionaires associated with the Republicans. | ||
| The Democrats never had anything close to this. | ||
| The Democrats have not been thinking strategically about this for the last 40 years like the Republicans have. | ||
| And so so much of the media has now been captured by right-wing interests and billionaire interests. | ||
| And they're just singing the songs that billionaires want to hear. | ||
| Oh, yes, let's lower taxes. | ||
| Wages are too high. | ||
| Unions are terrible. | ||
| All this kind of stuff. | ||
| It's a real testimonial to the efforts that were put into place in the 70s that have borne fruit for the GOP. | ||
| And the Democrats blew it on this regard. | ||
| We had Air America Radio. | ||
| I helped start Air America Radio back in 2004. | ||
| And we didn't have enough money to buy stations. | ||
| So we rented 57 stations from Clear Channel. | ||
| So when Mitt Romney decided he was going to run for president against Barack Obama, what did he do? | ||
| He had his company buy Clear Channel and took us off all those stations. | ||
| And that was the end of the Democratic experiment. | ||
| And the Democratic Party never funded us. | ||
| But that was the end of progressive radio in America on a wide scale. | ||
| We had over 95% of Americans could hear our signals. | ||
| But now it's back to all right-wing. | ||
| Jonathan is in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Jonathan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| Great conversation. | ||
| I like most of what the guest is speaking to. | ||
| I think, you know, I don't have a preference Democrat or Republican. | ||
| I sort of despise both parties. | ||
| I think they're captured by billionaires. | ||
| If you're a billionaire and you have that much money, why not buy both? | ||
| You can't lose. | ||
| And so I think that's what's happening, and the American people are losing. | ||
| I also object a little bit to this, you know, certainly historically white supremacists, you know, white supremacists had a large outsized role. | ||
| I don't think that's mostly true now. | ||
| I think, again, our government has been captured not by white supremacists. | ||
| I lived in this country all my life and no one's invited me to a KKK rally. | ||
| But I do notice that the media, our courts, our government, our health care, our housing, our education system, everything is being bought up and sold to the billionaire class. | ||
| I think that's the issue. | ||
| I can also sort of dig in a little bit to the even the Obama election a little bit, because I think what the Democrats do a really good job of is demonizing rural white people, and they hate them. | ||
| And I think that it's similar to the way the Republicans demonize immigrants. | ||
| And it creates these sort of false narratives that aren't even true. | ||
| White rural America actually voted for Barack Obama. | ||
| I voted for him twice. | ||
| I was very much a fan when I did so, but not so much after the fact. | ||
| And one last point. | ||
| I know our host talked about Epstein. | ||
| I'll tell you why Epstein has been covered up by both parties for decades. | ||
| It's because it's an Israeli intelligence operation in conjunction with ours. | ||
| That's the story, and that's why it's going to, nothing will come out on that story. | ||
| One last point. | ||
| Jonathan, very quickly, just where are you getting that piece of information? | ||
| You're the second person today who's mentioned the idea of a conspiracy around the Epstein files with Israel. | ||
| Where are you hearing that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you for asking. | |
| And your hair is wonderful. | ||
| I don't care what the other guest or the other caller said. | ||
| So the reason I bring that up is, A, there's just a lot of data on him. | ||
| If you look at Epstein, you look at sort of the money, the financing, if you look at who his parents were, if you look at who visited Epstein Island, and then if you look at the level of cover-up at all levels of our government over decades, an administration, | ||
| Democrat and Republican, there's only one logical conclusion that you can draw about Jeffrey Epstein, and that is that it was an intelligence operation to control our politicians so that they will continue to give money to support Israel. | ||
| And currently, we have two Democrats and Republicans that are both funding and supporting genocide. | ||
| I'm very shamed to my country. | ||
| You've raised a bunch of points. | ||
| I'm going to let Tom respond to as many as he can. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| With regard to Epstein, Epstein was Jewish. | ||
| Ehud Barak, the former prime minister of Israel, was one of his buddies. | ||
| And those two facts have been exploited by anti-Semites to which is widespread across right-wing media, anti-Semitism, to promote this idea that it's all part of a Jewish conspiracy. | ||
| Maybe they even thought that Epstein ran the Jewish space lasers. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But I'm not buying it. | ||
| I think that's coincidental. | ||
| Although, I have seen the news stories arguing that Israeli intelligence was somehow associated with Epstein, but apparently so was American intelligence. | ||
| I mean, he just had a lot of people in high power. | ||
| With regard to white supremacy and not America not, I would just look at the Trump administration right now. | ||
| Trump just restored Albert Pike's statue. | ||
| Albert Pike was a major Klan leader. | ||
| He was a Confederate general. | ||
| He was a big supporter of slavery, but I think most importantly, he was an opponent of democracy. | ||
| The Confederacy was no longer a democracy in 1861 when they declared war on us. | ||
| They had become a complete oligarchy, a fascist state. | ||
| And so you've got Trump restoring the monuments. | ||
| You've got Hagseth purging the military of mostly black people, also women, but aggressively going after black leadership in the military. | ||
| I see white supremacy, if anything, rearing its ugly head all over again in a big way in today's GOP and particularly in the Trump administration. | ||
| Godwell is in Artesia, California on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Godwell. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you for taking my call. | |
| And I just want to draw attention to the misrepresentation of the facts, a revision of history that your guest seems to be doing in light of the fact that the KKK happened to be the paramilitary arm of the Democrat Party. | ||
| It was the Democrats that created the KKK for the suppression, killing, and hunting of African Americans in the South. | ||
| And it was the Democrats that went to war to hold on to slavery. | ||
| It took the first Republican president to go to war to stop slavery. | ||
| And yet the Democrats tell these lies that somehow the KKK is more attributable to the Republican Party. | ||
| They've never, I hope your guest, Mr. Hartman, would look America in the face and at least apologize for aligning himself or his party being responsible for slavery to start with. | ||
| And the election. | ||
| So just because we only have a couple minutes left, I want to make sure that Tom has a chance to respond to that point that you just raised. | ||
| Godwell, go ahead. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Godwell's history is right. | ||
| The Klan and the Democratic Party were closely aligned for many, many years. | ||
| The Democratic Party controlled the South at the time of the Civil War. | ||
| And for a long time, the Democrats were the apologists. | ||
| The Southern Democrats were the ones who fought LBJ's efforts to pass the Civil Rights Act. | ||
| All that changed in 1964 and 1965. | ||
| And that's why Richard Nixon came in in 69 and said, I'm going to do my Southern strategy. | ||
| We're going to have the Republican Party reach out to those racists who used to be Democrats, who had left the Democratic Party because of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act signed in 64 and 65. | ||
| We're going to reach out to those people and we're going to embrace them. | ||
| And that's why Ronald Reagan's first speech that he gave after he was officially nominated to be president in 1981 or in 1980 was at the county fair in Nebosha County, I think it's pronounced, which is where Schwermer, Cheney, and Goodman, the three civil rights workers, were murdered. | ||
| And it was a state's rights speech to an all-white audience. | ||
| So you're right that the Democratic Party and the Klan used to be aligned. | ||
| Today, I see the people who are wearing, and by the way, the Klan used to be regularly authorized as police. | ||
| They used to, in many parts, particularly across the South, they would wear badges, they would wear guns, and they would wear hoods. | ||
| And I mean, we're talking from 1876 right up until the 1930s and 40s. | ||
| And now we've got guys who have guns and they're masked and they're going after brown people. | ||
| And we call them ICE. | ||
| And they are not working for the Democratic Party. | ||
| They're aligned with the Republican Party. | ||
| So your history is right pre-1964. | ||
| But since the 1960s, the Democratic Party has been the party that has said we need raciality, plurality in the United States, and fairness. | ||
| And the Republicans have been supporting the racists. | ||
| Well, that is all the time that we have for today. | ||
| Thank you very much, Tom Hartman, host of SiriusXM's Tom Hartman program, also the author of the book, The Last American President. | ||
| Thanks very much, Tom. | ||
| Thank you, Kimberly. | ||
| It's always great seeing you. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, stay tuned after this edition of Washington Journal. | ||
| This is it for the program today. | ||
| But if you join us tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. Eastern, we are going to have another edition of Washington Journal. | ||
| But up next, we have Ceasefire. | ||
| Welcome to Ceasefire, where we seek to bridge the divide in American politics. | ||
| I'm Dasha Burns, Politico White House Bureau Chief. | ||
| And joining me now on either side of the desk, two guests who have agreed to keep the conversation civil, even when they disagree: Florida Democratic Congressman Jared Moskowitz and Tennessee Republican Congressman Tim Burchett. | ||
| Thank you both so much for joining me today. |