C-SPAN’s Washington Journal (12/20/2025) dissects Trump’s Schedule III marijuana reclassification amid callers’ skepticism, from PR stunts to economic fallout—tariffs on beef and coffee worsen shortages while wage stagnation persists despite 64K November jobs. Epstein files spark bipartisan outrage over redactions, with Khanna threatening contempt charges, while Trump’s approval plummets to 36% as tariffs backfire. Mid-decade redistricting battles—Texas gains five GOP seats, California delays Democratic maps—expose gerrymandering’s undemocratic core, fueling voter distrust ahead of 2026 midterms. [Automatically generated summary]
Then Fox News and Concord Monitor national political reporter Paul Steinhauser discusses congressional redistricting battles and the potential impact on the 2026 midterm elections.
And Vox host and editorial director Estead Herndon on the release of the Epstein files, President Trump's grip on the Republican Party, his standing on the issue of affordability, and other political news of the day.
This is Washington Journal for today, Saturday, December 20th.
It's been a busy week in Washington, with Congress leaving town for the holidays without extending the Expiring Affordable Care Act tax credits.
Separately, the U.S. conducted airstrikes against ISIS targets in Syria in retaliation for an attack that killed two American soldiers.
And just yesterday, the Justice Department released thousands of documents related to the late sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein.
This morning, we want to hear from you.
What's your top news story of the week?
Here's how you can join the conversation.
Republicans, your line is 202-748-8001.
Democrats, your line is 202-748-8000.
Independents, your line is 202-748-8002.
You can also text us at 202-748-8003.
Include your first name, city, and state.
You can also post on facebook.com forward slash C-SPAN or on X with the handle at C-SPANWJ.
Our top story this morning includes the trove of documents released by the Justice Department yesterday on Jeffrey Epstein.
Frushing to comply with federal law before that 30-day deadline, the bill passed last month, the Justice Department released thousands of documents from their investigation on Jeffrey Epstein, and that includes a lot of heavily redacted material.
The Justice Department says that more will come in the future.
Included in those documents, according to an article from NBC headlines, Trove of Epstein files contains redacted investigative documents and new photos with powerful men.
Approximately 3,500 files released, more than 1,000 mentions of President Bill Clinton, as well as numerous photos of him with Epstein.
A search tool on the DOJ's website surfaces President Trump's name hundreds of times.
Files include apparently new photo of Epstein holding a novelty check made out to him for $2,200,000 that bears what appears to be Trump's signature.
Other photos show Epstein and his convicted co-conspirator Ghelain Maxwell, the late singer Michael Jackson, and actor Kevin Spacey.
Large sections of investigative documents are redacted.
Congressman Roe Cona, one of the legislators to lead the initial discharge petition, which led to that federal law, slammed the Justice Department yesterday for saying that they did not comply with the law by releasing all of the files by that 30-day deadline.
I'm saddened today because I was talking to the survivors.
There was so much anticipation for today.
They thought finally they are being seen, they're being heard.
We're going to have a release.
This morning, when the Deputy Attorney General went on television and said he's going to release hundreds of thousands of documents, not the whole thing, Thomas Massey and I texted each other and we said, we'll give him the benefit of the doubt.
We're not as concerned about having the full release.
As long as they're complying with the spirit of the law, at least they're going to release something.
But then we saw the documents filled with blanket redactions.
Documents that judges had ordered to be released, they had blanked out.
There's no draft indictment there that actually has the names of other men who may be implicated in the abuse.
There's not the prosecution's original memo that we wanted to see released.
There are none of the files on Epstein's computer.
And we do not know then who these other rich and powerful men were who abused these survivors.
And we know from the survivors and the survivors' lawyers that that information is in the files.
So this is deeply disappointing.
They have not complied with the law, and we're going to continue to fight to make sure they do.
Look, they have underestimated this issue for six months.
I don't get it.
Just release the files, get it over with.
President get talking about affordability and the economy.
They're the ones who continue to play these games that make this a bigger and bigger issue.
And Congress is talking about possible impeachment.
They're talking about inherent contempt for the Attorney General or Deputy Attorney General.
Any Justice Department official who has obstructed justice could face prosecution in this administration or a future administration.
And the last word, like I said, is going to be the survivors.
Americans don't trust politicians that much.
They trust those women.
And they are going to be back on the Hill, and the country will hear from them.
We're talking about the top news story of the week.
What's on your mind?
unidentified
Well, okay, my thing would be the totally phony, totally fake press conference from the Oval Office announcing that marijuana would now be, I think they're allowing research and FDA research and studies into marijuana.
And there were like 30 people assembled in the White House or in the Oval Office for this press conference.
And what was so cool was the four people, there were four people right behind Trump in white, pristine white lab coats.
Now, I don't know if these were doctors, supposed to be doctors, or are they supposed to be lab scientists?
Either way, if they were lab scientists or if they were doctors, it was a complete waste of time for them to be in that photo op.
And my suspicion is that they were neither doctors behind Trump nor lab technicians behind Trump.
It was all a kind of just a big PR stunt.
But I think the upshot was that they're going to legalize research for marijuana, I believe.
Now, what he was talking about was an action that President Trump took this week in the Oval Office, which basically is going to allow or ease restrictions on researching marijuana, but it stops short of legalizing marijuana.
I want to turn to this Axios piece saying Trump will sign order to ease marijuana restrictions.
The president said on Thursday he'll sign an executive order to relax federal restrictions on cannabis, instructing agencies to reclassify it as a less dangerous drug.
The Biden administration kicked off a review in 2022, but the effort stalled this January when an administrative judge postponed a hearing, leaving the rule in limbo.
The president's order would direct federal agencies to pursue reclassifying marijuana as a Schedule III substance, grouping it with drugs considered to have less abuse potential, like Tylenol with codeine and anabolic steroids.
Paul from Texas, a Democrat, you're next.
unidentified
Yes, my topic is the president.
Our government is a circus, and Donald Trump is the clown.
And the American people is so stupid that they buy anything that man says.
And everything comes out of his mouth is a lie, unless he's praising himself and degrading, trying to degrade Joe Biden, put everything off on Joe Biden, and everything good he tried to accept the credits for.
I mean, how stupid can the American people be to buy all this foolishness?
Yes, be like, they legalized heroin, but they won't legalize weed.
The news stations will sit there and be like, fentanyl, fentanyl, fentanyl.
That fentanyl was made by China.
They begged China to bring that fentanyl over here because it replaced the heroin that they brought over in this country, legalized and everything like that.
Be like, marijuana should be legal, and that's how I feel about it.
I have two stories, although there are many more with this guy.
But the ones that have upset me the most this week is, or today anyway, is the way he wrote all those things and put them on plaques under each of the president's pictures for the White House, like as if he's some kind of scholar.
As I said, it was so disrespectful.
But even worse was the way he put his name on the Kennedy Center.
And he's so egotistical.
He put his name first.
The least he could have done, and even this would have been bad, but the least he could have done was to put his name after John F. Kennedy.
But no, he had to put his on the top.
And then Kennedys had to be underneath it, making it look like, you know, he's the one that's the big deal for the Kennedy Center.
So to Roseanne's first point, I point you to this New York Times article titled Presidential History According to the President.
The White House unveiled plaques near the Oval Office that describe U.S. presidents with varying levels of accuracy depending on Trump's opinion of them.
And in this article, they say the plaques portray an often inaccurate version of history that aligns with Mr. Trump's worldview.
There are two plaques for Mr. Trump, one on each of his terms, which effusively praise him, while those other for former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and former President Barack Obama mock them and their achievements.
The plaque for Mr. Obama falsely describes him as one of the most divisive political figures in American history.
And here is an up-close shot right there you can see of President Biden's plaque that some of these Trump wrote himself, the White House said.
And then it says, Sleepy Joe Biden was by far the worst president in American history.
Now, I want to turn to Donald from Michigan, a Democrat.
Your light is open?
unidentified
Good morning.
Good morning.
I had a couple things.
I know I only got a few seconds to talk, but with these ICE raids and this mentality of ICE, you know, I was in law enforcement and we was taught that you treat people with respect.
You know, you, you know, you know, this is just like a running KKK situation because, you know, they are just attacking black and brown people, and they're doing it without regard to, you know, like they have no rights.
So I just, you know, as law enforcement, you know, we taught people to respect people, you know, and treat people right, help people, but that's a whole different ballgame.
And one more thing about the Republicans, you know, I just want them to tell me one thing that Trump is doing for you.
I mean, he's doing a lot for the rich and famous, the rich and powerful people.
But for the regular people, what is he doing for us?
You know, it's nothing he's doing for the Republicans that I see.
You know, even, you know, they think they're hurting the black and brown people, but they're hurting their own people.
So that's what I was, you know, Of course, it's a lot with Trump every day.
It's something new, it's some new issue.
They kill him, they turned into a murderer, killing those, you know, bombing them both.
So, to Donald's point about ICE, I turned to an Al Jazeera article that the headline is: How ICE Deports Refugees and Migrants Despite Years of Good Conduct.
The U.S. administration says it's deporting the worst of the worst, but 73% of detainees have never been convicted of a crime.
Now, I want to turn to a top news story of the day here.
We're talking about the strikes that the U.S. conducted last night in Syria in a retaliation of those two American military members being killed.
Here's President Trump in North Carolina talking about those strikes.
And I'm also pleased to announce that just two hours ago, we hit the ISIS thugs in Syria who were trying to regroup after their decimation by the Trump administration five years ago.
We hit them hard.
I ordered a massive strike on the terrorists that killed our three great patriots last week.
There was President Trump in North Carolina talking about the strikes that the U.S. conducted last night in Syria in retaliation of those American service members who were killed.
Alexander from Missouri and Independent, your line is open.
unidentified
Yes, I would like to understand why this President Trump has a blockade on Venezuela, and he claims that Venezuela stole something from the United States.
So he said that they're taking back what belongs to the USA.
That's an independent country.
What could they have stolen from?
What kind of all and minimums could they have stolen from the USA?
Well, I point you to a political article citing an NBC News exclusive interview with the president and them.
The headline here is Trump won't rule out war with Venezuela.
It says, President Trump remains open to war with Venezuela, he told NBC News in a phone interview Thursday, even as a majority of Americans oppose military action against the South American country led by longtime strongman Nicholas Maduro.
The president has applied more pressure on Venezuela in recent days, on Tuesday announcing a blockade against the country on TrueSocial and also describing plans to classify Maduro's government as a foreign terrorist organization.
In early December, U.S. officials seized a Venezuelan oil tanker, quote, the largest ever seized, actually, Trump said at the time, over its illicit transport of oil.
Michael from Connecticut and Independent.
You're next.
unidentified
Hey, good morning.
Wow, yesterday when I saw on the news that he was putting his name above on the Kennedy Center, I'm like, how much more despicable can you possibly get?
Then he had this speech last night, and I started counting, and I got at least 14 times he mentioned Biden.
If you were on a job for nine or ten months already, and we're still blaming the last guy, there's something wrong with you.
You don't know what you're doing.
Now he's making those plaques up and he's making a ballroom and he's firing the architect.
When does he have time to do anything that's being a president?
He doesn't know what he's doing.
He has no clue.
All these people around him are just saying yes, yes, yes.
But putting his name on a Kennedy Center is just despicable.
And you people who back him, he's the best president ever, what is the matter with you?
That was President Trump in the Oval Office this week.
He was asked whether or not he would go to Congress for authorization to basically start doing land strikes as he's promised for a couple months in Venezuela.
He said he didn't mind, but he says that he doesn't have to.
I want to go to Patrick from Hamilton, Ohio, a Democrat.
So going back to the Trump administration's strikes on those alleged drug votes off the coast of Venezuela, we heard just a few minutes ago President Trump saying he doesn't believe it's necessary to go to Congress for authorization on land strikes.
Well, in a bombshell Vanity Fair article from this week, Susie Wiles, his chief of staff, was quoted by journalist Chris Whipple basically disagreeing with the president.
Of course, this was done previously, but she said in this quote, obviously, it's a war declared only by the president and without any congressional approval, I said, according to Chris Whipple.
Don't need it yet, Wiles replied.
We're very sure we know who we're blowing up, she told me during lunch in November.
One of the great untold stories of the U.S. government is the talents of the CIA, and there may be an interest in going inside territorial waters, which we have permission to do, but because they're skirting the coastline to avoid getting caught.
But Wiles conceded that attacking targets on Venezuela's mainland would force Trump to get congressional approval.
If he were to authorize some activity on land, then it's war, then we'd need Congress.
Susie Walls was quoted in this Vanity Fair piece that came out just this week.
Carolyn from Ohio, a Democrat, you're next.
unidentified
Hi, this is the first time I've ever talked to you.
I think the story of the day came out, I guess it was a day or two ago.
But I was so happy I had seen a report about, I think it was Marie Farmer even talking on some show.
I can't even remember, maybe yours, C-SPAN.
But anyway, all she wanted was a particular, it's not little, it's a report she had made in 1996 involving her experience with Epstein and how all she wanted was these pictures that she had done of her two sisters that are also survivors of Zepstein.
And it was such great news.
I know they didn't get a whole lot, like that one caller said, and they needed to have it all at once, but at least out of everything, Maria Farmer got what she had wanted.
And she's been through a lot of cancer and a lot of problems and who knows what else.
And it was just great that she found in all that paperwork her report that she did from 1996.
And I guess that just was so wonderful for her because that's what she had been looking to get for so long.
I don't think she actually got the pictures, but at least she got the report from 1996 that she had turned into the police or something.
And her sister, Ann Farmer, was on some show yesterday and was just saying how it had made her sister so happy because I haven't seen her sister.
This was like, it seems like years ago that I saw her sister on the TV, but she's been going through a lot of cancer and so forth.
So I just want to focus on at least one positive out of the poor survivors.
And I think that's wonderful that at least one of the victims got what they had been looking for.
What she's referencing is a file included in the latest trove of documents the Department of Justice released, which included the complaint filed by Maria Farber in the 90s.
I'll turn to this New York Times article, headline, Epstein files include 1996 child porn complaint that FBI, that FBI ignored.
The woman, Maria Farmer, has for years said that she had called federal investigators in the summer of 1996, but the FBI had never publicly acknowledged her original report, even to Ms. Farmer.
Some people following the Epstein case had accused her of inventing the story.
After the release of thousands of Epstein files on Friday, the New York Times contacted Mrs. Farmer about a report stamped with the date September 3rd, 1996.
She broke down in tears.
I've waited 30 years, she said.
I can't believe it.
They can't call me a liar anymore.
So that was a document released yesterday in the trove of Epstein file documents that basically showed this FBI complaint among the thousands of documents that were in that release.
Ivan from Texas, an independent.
Your line is open.
unidentified
Yes, I love a BM American.
Y'all, y'all, y'all are Americans.
All stick together.
This is a great country.
ever get out of the country and see what the other countries has got, America's got it all.
And America is so great.
I love it so much.
And Trump is trying to dig us out of that hole that Joe Biden, Joe Biden's putting us in a bad situation.
It's a disgrace to us, you know, jacking everything upside up.
That was Ivan from Texas talking about the Trump administration's efforts this week to move marijuana from a Schedule I drug to a less serious Schedule III drug, easing the restrictions of research, but not legalizing.
I want to take a listen to Hakeem Jeffries, House Minority Leader, talking about whether or not he supports the president's efforts, something that Democrats had talked about a lot in the past, undoing themselves.
unidentified
What is your reaction to Trump's executive order rescheduling marijuana?
And sort of purtue to that, is do you anticipate that bumping into some of the regulations that came in the continuing resolution about hemp-related products?
We'll have to see how the language in the continuing resolution that was inserted, as I understand it, by Senator Mitch McConnell is reconciled with this particular executive order.
More broadly, and I haven't had the opportunity to review the executive order, but I've supported marijuana reform throughout my entirety in public service, both in the New York State Legislature and as a member of Congress, and have worked with the administration in the past to get criminal justice reform over the finish line, connected to the First Step Act.
And we welcome any opportunity moving forward to continue that work, to right-size our criminal justice system, to move away from the failed war on drugs, which includes a failed war on marijuana, and to deal with the mass incarceration epidemic that this country has suffered from that is both unfair and undermines our economic productivity.
James, I wonder if you have a top news story that stuck out to you this week on this issue.
unidentified
You had a news flash up there earlier that was talking about bombing Venezuela and all that and some of the oil capture and everything, which is legal because the United States did put that into fruition years ago.
But I noticed in the corner, the source you had was Al Jazeera.
So I'm like, where are you going to get any positive feedback from that?
The Muslim world doesn't really care for Trump at all, no matter what he does.
So that's what I was just saying.
I seen the Al Jazeera thing.
I was like, maybe you ought to find a better news source than that.
The headline is Schumer blasts, Rubio, Hegseth over transparency on Venezuela strikes.
Cabinet Secretaries Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth, the article goes on to say, faced lawmakers in two separate briefings on Tuesday about deadly U.S. strikes off the coast of Venezuela.
Both top Trump advisors remained tight-lipped about Tuesday's Senate briefing as they headed toward the House and said praising the Trump administration's operation on Southern Spear campaign to reporters, quote, this has been a highly successful mission that's ongoing and continued, and we're pleased to be here today to update Congress on how that's developing and how that's moving forward, Rubio said.
My top news story, and it seems like it's not really, it kind of flew under the radar, and it's like the re-release and more attention being paid to this phone call that Trump made to the Georgia Adjutant General,
whoever he was, and all that, which basically proves that this whole thing about January 6th and Trump trying to take over the election and all that proves it.
If people would listen to that phone call, Tim, may I ask, which phone call are you discussing?
The headline is, Jack Smith didn't invoke the Fifth Amendment during eight hours of testimony, GOP committee chairman says.
It says Smith defended both of his investigations into the former president and to into then former President Donald Trump, telling members that he charged Trump regardless of his political affiliation.
Smith and his attorneys have previously said that he wanted the opportunity to correct mischaracterizations about his investigations.
Former previous interviewees have invoked the Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.
Jordan said on Fox, this, of course, is talking about a closed-door testimony to the House Judiciary Committee over his investigations into Trump over the 2020 election.
Jason from St. Cloud, Minnesota, an independent, you're next.
What's your top news story of the day?
unidentified
Hey, good morning, America.
Good to see a new face on the line.
It's always great to see the C-SPAN still going and moving great.
Thank you.
I guess a couple comments.
You know, I mean, let's all get along.
That only works when your side's in power.
You know, Democrats said that before, Republicans said that before.
It's just lame.
United States is divided and looks like we're going to be for a little while.
The Venezuela oil, it's us to ours to take because we helped find it.
We helped find all the oil in the world, didn't we?
I mean, that's what I heard growing up.
We helped discover all the Saudi oil and everything else, so that doesn't make sense.
But my big story of the week is: I just cannot believe the little rant that he went on the other night, interrupting prime time for 20 minutes.
In the past, those were always for, hey, we're going to war, we found Osama bin Laden.
He went on a 20-minute lie-filled tirade where it seemed like he was yelling at America.
He wasn't proud of his accomplishments.
He's screaming at America, trying to tell us that he's right and he's wrong.
You know, again, this guy wants to have his hands in everything.
Like that guy said to you at the Kennedy Honors or the Kennedy Center, that's a memorial.
Trump ain't dead.
He can't be in a memorial.
And the other big thing of the week was that disgusting walk of fame, the presidential walk of fame, where he wrote those.
Again, this guy wants to be involved in everything else except trying to really solve the problems of America.
I want to be involved in the Lincoln Center.
I want to design this ballroom that was $150 billion, $200 billion, $400 billion, $500 billion.
It's just going to keep on going up.
This man, somebody just needs to check on grandpa.
If he didn't, if he had the handlers that he had last time, we would not be in this trouble.
But everybody signed their little loyalty pledge.
Nobody can go against the king.
This is getting scary, folks.
Talk to your family over Christmas.
Just, you know, have him read a transcript of what Trump talked about.
He referenced in his comments the primetime address that President Trump gave on Wednesday night.
And an article from the AP shows a headline: Trump gives a partisan primetime address, insisting the economy is stronger than many voters feel.
It says the remarks came as the nation is preparing to settle down to celebrate the holidays, yet Trump was more focused on divisions within the country than a sense of unity.
His speech was a rehash of his recent message that so far has been unable to calm public anxiety about the cost of groceries, housing, utility, and other basic goods.
Trump has promised an economic boom, yet inflation has stayed elevated and the job market has weakened sharply in the wake of his import taxes.
Trump suggested that his tariffs, which are partly responsible for boosting consumer prices, would fund a new, quote, warrior dividend for 1.45 million military members, a payment that would ease some of the financial strains for many households.
And the presidential address to the nation carried on network televisions are traditionally less partisan in rival speeches, but Trump gave a condensed version of his usual political remarks.
Paul from Indiana, I believe, or Idaho, excuse me, a Republican.
What's your top news story of the week?
unidentified
I would have to go with the changing of the scheduling of marijuana for research and development.
There was a caller that called in on this topic already, but I don't like correcting people, but he said I've never heard of anybody dying from smoke of marijuana.
And I disagree with that.
There was an Amtrak train approximately 30 years ago.
I can't be that accurate, but there was an Amtrak train, and the engineer on the train missed a signal to stop or slow down or what have you.
And he ended up smashing into another train.
And it killed at least three people, is the way I recall it.
And he was found when they did a toxicology report on him that he had marijuana in his system.
Now, you can't say you have marijuana in your system when it was smoked last or chewed last or whatever.
There's really no way of knowing how, unless you did, because it hides in your fat in your body, and it can keep coming out for about 30 days, is my understanding.
So I know that other people have passed away from it as well, and there's a lot of psychosis that's coming out about marijuana because of the strength of it.
I wonder if you support the president's move this week to de-schedule or move to a lower schedule marijuana, which he says is not legalization, which it's not, but allows for more research into marijuana.
And also included in that is the CBD-derived hemp products.
unidentified
I think that there's possibilities for it to be good, but what I don't want to see, this is a marijuana-free state, basically.
If you want to buy marijuana, you can go across the border to Ontario, Oregon, which is 60 miles away from where I live.
You can buy it and you can try to get it back across the border and not get caught.
But if you get caught with marijuana in this state, it's a very harsh penalty still.
And there's a lot of support for it.
And they don't want to see the state go to pot, as it were.
And, you know, I've had my own trials and tribulations with substance abuse.
And I can tell you, it's been a long time since I've ingested anything other than an aspirin.
My top story was also the story on the marijuana and the war on drugs.
I agree with the gentleman that just spoke.
And I'm really not for a ton of research on marijuana.
Honestly, I grew up in the 80s, and we had a very rigorous educational program on TV and in the news and everywhere to teach us how bad drugs were and everything.
And now, as an adult looking back, I mean, and a senior looking back, it is so clear how much damage marijuana did to young people.
I mean, we all know that people who smoke marijuana really aren't as successful as people who don't.
I mean, they're not going to have jobs where they have drug testing.
They're not going to have jobs where they have any kind of responsibility when it comes to safety.
I work at aviation, and you cannot smoke marijuana or take any drugs.
And everybody, I mean, a lot of people that I know that have smoked and still smoke, I mean, the way they think, their thought processes, their behavior, and the kind of trouble they get into, it's, I mean, they're just not, I mean, it's a problem.
It's a real problem.
And we knew back then that smoking in general caused all the damage to your lungs, all kinds of damage, and to your brain, and in addition, caused cancer.
But they have suppressed this kind of education over the last two decades, and kids don't really know about it.
And now we're seeing all the danger coming out about vaping.
And so turning to a CNN article about the marijuana action since we've had the last couple calls on it, the headline is Trump Signs Executive Order Expediting Marijuana Reclassification After Lobbying from Cannabis Industry.
It says, cannabis is currently considered a Schedule I drug along with heroin, LSD, and ecstasy, which are not considered to have any acceptable medical use, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.
It will eventually be reclassified as a Schedule III drug, which, according to the DA, have, quote, a moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence.
That, of course, is talking about cannabis.
It says, a quote from the president said, the facts compel the federal government to recognize that marijuana can be legitimate in terms of medical applications when carefully administered.
In some cases, this may include the use of a substance for addictive and potentially lethal opioid painkillers, Trump said, calling the move, quote, common sense.
Trump's action does not federally legalize marijuana, though the drug is already legal in several states.
The order does not affect recreational marijuana and does not include any criminal justice changes.
Debbie from Pennsylvania and Independent, what's your top news story of the week?
unidentified
Merry Christmas, everyone.
My top story is from this morning on 6 o'clock news.
I want to make young girls and women aware of what they're trying to do throughout the United States, starting with the state of Illinois, and I think it's already happening in Massachusetts.
The state of Illinois is being sued for trying to force a law to have all women and young girls have abortions.
And so now the citizens are suing the state of Illinois and mostly attacking the Christians and Catholics and anybody that's pro-life.
They also showed Planned Parenthood.
So these people that may also be going to Planned Parenthood for maternal care is their state of Illinois is threatening to shut down Planned Parenthood if they don't force abortions on young girls and women.
And also to make everybody aware, Debbie, what's your source on that?
It was on Fox News this morning, the 6 o'clock news.
They showed it on TV.
And also, UC SPAN also during the last four years, well, not the last four years, but I saw after President Trump was inaugurated, there was a Medicaid meeting, and you guys filmed it.
And I watched the whole thing.
It was a Medicaid meeting, some small space.
I don't know where it was at, but it was only a small group of people that went, and it was women and only a couple of men.
And Hakeem Jeffries, a minority leader, was there, and he's in the last row next to the girl that was an employee of Medicaid.
And this has been happening during the last four years: that all the Medicaid employers had a meeting with all the Medicaid employees, and they told them and taught them to force abortions on all young girls and women, but they were not allowed to tell them it was abortions.
They said that they had to tell them that it was inverted births because it was a lot cheaper to have abortions than it was to have birth.
So I will ask my producers to look back for some of those articles.
I think that what she might be talking about is represented in this article saying Illinois Catholic bishops back pregnancy center suit over law requiring abortion referrals.
Catholic bishops in Illinois offered their support to a lawsuit from pro-life pregnancy centers that say a prairie state law requiring those centers to refer women for abortions violates their First Amendment rights.
Beckett, a Washington-based religious liberty law firm, filed an amicus brief, sometimes called a front of the court brief, on December 16th on behalf of the Catholic Bishops of Illinois, the Illinois Catholic Health Association, and some others in support of a lawsuit from a group of pro-life pregnancy centers and doctors challenging the state's Health Care Right of Conscience Act.
And so I think that is what the last caller was talking about, although that would be a bit different than how she described it as forcing people to have abortions.
Bob from Illinois, a Republican?
Once I find your name, you're next.
Okay.
What's your top news story of the week?
unidentified
Yeah, good morning.
I heard on Scott Adams' podcast.
I listen to coffee with Scott Adams every day.
He had a story about the vote count in Georgia and saying that Trump ended up being right.
I don't know if you can find that or not.
I haven't looked yet.
I'm on my way home, but I just heard the podcast, and I heard him mention that.
And something about the votes in Georgia.
And one other thing I got.
The votes in Georgia for which election?
Oh, yeah, way back when 2020.
And then I got one other, if you can find that, I appreciate it.
Now, I got one piece of advice for Brown University.
They should give homeless John a full-time job and a residency anywhere he wants to stay for the rest of his life.
I'll point to this USA Today article that said the Kennedy Center's Board of Trustees voted unanimously on December 18th to rename the National Music, Arts, and Cultural Institution after President Trump, White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt said in the statement, the board, which Trump chairs is made up of mostly hand-picked, mostly members hand-picked by the president.
The full name, the Donald J. Trump and the John F.K. Memorial Center for Performing Arts, Roma Davari, the center's presidential relations, the center vice president of public relations, told USA today.
Linda from Indiana, or excuse me, Linda from Michigan, an independent.
You're next.
What is your top news story of the week?
unidentified
My top news story of the week is the marijuana story and using it for medicinal purposes.
I think it's a great idea.
Contrary to what the earlier caller said, it is not something you have to smoke.
It is better than opioids and what's happened with opioid addiction.
I think people need to understand there's a medicinal purpose for this, and I think that we're headed in the right direction with being able to do the research on it.
And our next guest will talk a lot about inflation and health care and all of the economic news coming out of the White House and across the nation.
Recently, John from Wisconsin, an Independent.
You're next.
What is your top news story of the week?
unidentified
Good morning.
As a right-leaning independent, Donald Trump is trolling America like a professional by putting his name on the Kennedy Center and a lot of the things he does.
He does these things to agitate the left, and it works brilliantly.
The person that called earlier from Minnesota was concerned about the same thing, and I think they should be more concerned about the $9 billion at least that have been stolen from us American taxpayers by the Somalis.
I'll get to my top news story of the week now: Judge Hannah Dugan was found guilty of concealing or hiding an illegal immigrant from being legally and justly arrested inside a public space in this Milwaukee County federal courthouse building.
And I haven't heard anything about that on C-SPAN.
That's going to set a precedent, hopefully, to other judges around our entire country that, you know, I mean, if you're here illegally and you've committed crimes, the federal government has the opportunity to arrest you wherever they see fit in a public place.
unidentified
They did not enter her courtroom, which would have been illegal, but she illegally let him out a side door in an event to try and evade capture, which failed miserably.
And I am extremely ecstatic that she was found guilty.
Unfortunately, now we have to go through the entire process of the appeals and how her attorneys want to overturn a jury of her peers guilty verdict.
He's saying, well, how come she was found guilty of the felony and not the misdemeanor?
They used the same facts for both cases.
If she was guilty for one, I mean, the jury, they asked a couple of questions of the judge, and the judge answered their questions, and they came back with their verdict, and that should be the end of it in this country, in my mind.
He was referencing a story that we'll now read from Fox News saying Milwaukee County judge found guilty of obstructing federal immigration agents in courthouse incident.
And it says Duggan, the Dugan, the judge, was arrested in April after helping Eduardo Flores-Ruiz avoid plainclothes immigration and customs enforcement agents who were trying to serve him a warrant.
Prosecutors said Dugan helped Flores-Ruiz and his attorney exit her courtroom through a back door on April 18th after learning that ICE agents were in the building to arrest him.
And here's a quote from her representative saying, While we're disappointed in today's outcomes, the failure of the prosecution to secure convictions on both counts demonstrates the opportunity we have to clear Judge Duggan's name and show she did nothing wrong in this matter, her defense team said in a statement.
We have planned for this potential outcome, and our defense of the judge is just beginning.
The trial required considerable resources to prepare for, and public support for Judge Dugan's defense fund is critical as we prepare for this next phase in the defense.
Jurors reached the guilty verdict after six hours of deliberations, though Dugan was acquitted on a misdemeanor count of concealing an individual to prevent arrest.
Duke from West Virginia, a Republican, you're next.
What's your top news story of the week?
unidentified
My top news story is this it's not a UFO.
They say it's a comet, but it comes down and it goes in circles and stuff.
And, you know, it's big enough if it hits us, it's going to be the end of everything.
I think I found the comment you're talking about, Duke, from CNN.
It says, Interstellar Comet, 3i slash Atlas will fly by the Earth Friday.
Here are the latest images.
You can see on the screen they have an image.
You see the sun.
I guess that is the comment.
And it says, interstellar comet first spotted passing through our solar system in July is beginning its departure from our quarter of the universe.
But first, it will fly by Earth, and scientists are capturing stunning new images during its approach.
It says it would make its closest pass by us on Friday, so yesterday, coming within about 167 million miles of our planet, but on the other side of the sun.
For reference, the sun's distance from Earth is about 93 million miles.
So I will point to a notice article from Torrance Banks.
The headline is, Artists are threatening to cancel over Trump's Kennedy Center renaming an exclusive.
I mean, the paragraph goes, at least one musician is planning to cancel their upcoming performance at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Performing Arts after the Center's board added President Donald Trump's name to its own.
A spokesperson for musician Christy Lee, who is scheduled to perform on January 14th on the Kennedy Center Millennium stage, told notice that, quote, we are in the process of canceling her scheduled performance.
Other performers also expressed disdain and frustration about the name change.
The Kennedys website now refers to the facility as the Trump Kennedy Center.
And on Friday, they affixed the words the Donald J. Trump and above the existing the Kennedy F. Center Memorial, the Kennedy F. Memorial Center for Performing Arts on the center's exteriors.
Quote, I feel really bad for performers, not just for performers, but for the people who work there, said one person scheduled to perform at the center who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
Kennedy Center is supposed to be a memorial focusing on being a non-partisan, a non-partisan, a place where people, it doesn't matter what party they believe in, should be performing and experiencing the arts together, regardless of what their party is.
And it has not become that.
Ed from Milwaukee, a Democrat.
You're next.
What's your top news story of the week?
unidentified
Yes, I'd like to just touch on these.
What this man has done with these portraits and the portraits or the plaques at the White House?
I'm sorry, the plaques, just him.
Excuse me.
And what he's doing with the ballroom and what he's doing with the Kennedy Center.
This is pure narcissism on steroids.
This man right here does nothing unless he is going to benefit from it.
And the idea that he has the gall to do this, it just, again, shows how much of a narcissist he is.
He is no different than Jim Jones or Bernie Madoff.
He over his deplorable eyes, and they're following him right into that Trump hole.
Talking about the rescheduling of the marijuana slash cannabis.
And, you know, I think people are realizing there's two elements to the cannabis issue: it's the medicinal and it's the social.
And if you look at the medicinal, I think Trump actually is trying to save a little bit of the Republican vote here because obviously the Senate did nothing to help that.
They gave the people a dirty continuing resolution where they gave the Democrats a clean resolution.
If you look at what McConnell had gotten slipped in there against the hemp industry and basically virtually has attempted to kill that because the night before that vote went down, they also got a bunch of letters from the lobbyists of the liquor industry.
And the liquor and the restaurant industries are very, very nervous because cannabis is taking over where their people used to drink more.
The younger generations are not drinking near as much.
They're not consuming alcohol because it is a known poison.
And if you look at the social elements as well, you look at that, look at the behavioral medications that are even available in the context of what's available medicinally.
And maybe marijuana has a plan to help some of the people with their social anxieties that we haven't been able to research.
Later on, Fox News and the Concord's monitors Paul Steisenhauser discusses the congressional reditioning battle taking place across the country.
But first, the president is addressing affordability issues.
We'll talk about that and the Trump administration's economic policies with economists and colonists, Peter Marishi.
unidentified
Sunday.
On C-SPAN's Q ⁇ A, in his book, Taking Religion Seriously, political scientist Charles Murray discusses his decades-long evolution from happy agnostic to Christian.
He also talks about the foundations of human morality, the Big Bang, and the authorship of the Gospels.
Some of us have access to spiritual acquisition of knowledge that others of us do not.
In the case of spirituality, I don't have an ordinary level of spiritual perceptiveness.
If you put it in IQ terms, I have a spirituality score of about 70, which is way low.
unidentified
Charles Murray, with his book, Taking Religion Seriously, Sunday night at 8 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN's Q ⁇ A. You can listen to Q&A and all of our podcasts on our free C-SPAN Now app.
Starting next week through the new year, the C-SPAN Networks will present a series of marathons highlighting the most consequential moments, conversations, and coverage of 2025 across C-SPAN, C-SPAN 2, and C-SPAN 3.
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Our highlights include key speeches with this year's most impactful speeches from elected leaders and influential voices.
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For our complete marathon schedule, head over to our website, c-span.org.
Back at our table this morning is Peter Morisi, columnist and economics professor at the University of Maryland, here to talk about the debate over affordability.
In your latest column, you write that Republicans may be getting a bum rap on affordability.
Can you explain that?
unidentified
Well, inflation is certainly here, and for the president to claim that it's not as silly.
But there's a lot of pressure in the system that, frankly, no politician can control.
Let's look at the price of beef.
I mean, people are very conscious of that.
We've had a Western drought, and that has required cattlemen to basically thin their herds.
We have no more steers today in the herd than we did in 1950.
But the population is more than double.
We continue to eat about 44 pounds of beef a year, each of us.
And so, you know, there's not much the president can do to increase the supply of beef unless we go back to grain-fed beef, which gives us marbled meat, which is very not good for our health and so forth.
Now, some places you could go to import it would be Argentina, but on their planes, they've had flooding.
And I mean, the President, to your point, has reduced some of the tariffs on things like coffee, bananas.
He's also launched an investigation over beef and whether or not there's some price gouging amongst the individual sellers.
unidentified
You know, I don't know why AOC and Donald Trump don't like each other better.
Because if you're talking about the extreme of the Republican Party, which he is, or the extreme of the Democratic Party, whenever the price of something goes up at the grocery store, they say there's a monopoly out there that's conspiring.
I don't see it.
And I'm in the business of finding things like that to write about.
For example, one of the things they keep talking about is the monopoly grocers.
Consider how many grocery stores you can go to.
My wife does the food shopping.
And she named Harris Titus, Safeway, Giant, Whole Foods.
She went down this whole list of places she goes.
There's a lot of competition there.
And the margins in the grocery business are fairly thin.
Now, the president has talked a lot about affordability in the coming days.
Obviously, he gave a primetime address on Wednesday where he defended his administration, basically saying that they're digging themselves out of a hole left by the former administration.
But he's also called affordability or the discussion around affordability a hoax.
I wonder to what degree do you believe that the president's assessment of the current conversation is accurate?
unidentified
He's wrong.
It's that simple.
When he took over, inflation was about 3%.
And probably when we get some better numbers collected for the month of December and January, it's going to be about the same.
So there's been no progress on inflation during his administration.
Now, he's done a number of things which contribute to inflation.
One of them is create shortages of lower skilled workers by deporting people who didn't do anything wrong to anybody.
You might not be aware of this, but the economy grew over the Trump-won Biden years 2.5% a year, which is really, really quite impressive.
And we were adding about 175,000 jobs a month.
Indigenous population growth and the legal immigration regime we had in place during the Biden years can only give us 90,000 workers a month, additional.
The rest were basically illegal aliens or undocumented workers.
Use which language you want.
But the economy needs more immigrants to function and his extreme policies.
I certainly deport people who have committed crimes and seal the border and then let's have measured immigration where we let people come here who fill needs and we can do quite well.
But these extreme policies make it very difficult to run businesses, to build homes and so forth and push up prices.
Now I want to invite our viewers who join in on the conversation.
We're talking about the economy and affordability.
Republicans, your line is 202-748-8001.
Democrats, your line is 202-748-8000.
Independents, your line is 202-748-8002.
Now, I want to ask you, because the president has been talking a lot about affordability in a speech, he talked about it on Wednesday, and then we heard from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer responding to that.
Our country is in a lot of trouble right now, but instead of giving Americans a plan on how we'll lower their costs, Donald Trump played the blame game.
That's so typical of him.
Instead of solving a problem, which is what a good president is supposed to do, he just points the fingers at other people.
And that doesn't do a bit of good to remove to get the American people back on the right track.
It's never a good sign when the president begins a speech by saying, I inherited a mess.
Because that's just another way of telling people, I don't want to be responsible for any of this.
Again, President Trump's speech showed he lives in a bubble, a billionaire bubble, completely disconnected from reality that everyday Americans are seeing and feeling.
I can remember the Obama people, the Obama-Biden people.
For two years, they were blaming George W. Bush for their economic troubles and their problems in getting their program going.
It seems to be one of the stock things that new presidents do, and I guess Donald Trump is again a new president, is to blame the previous administration when they can't solve the problem.
The reality is the inflation that we have today was a joint product of Trump-Biden years.
They ran up the deficit, each for different reasons and different purposes, from 3% of GDP to 6% of GDP.
Those are approximate numbers.
To do that, the Fed printed a great deal of money, expanded its balance sheet.
That got inflation going.
Once COVID came, Joe Biden didn't admit that it was a problem.
Neither did Jerome Powell.
So they let it fester and get worse.
Now we've had four or five years of heavy inflation.
Expectations by businesses and consumers that we're going to continue to have inflation is quite high.
It is very hard to crack the back of that.
But for Chuck Schumer to complain about Donald Trump blaming his predecessor, he was mighty silent when Barack Obama was doing that.
Okay, my last question to you before we turn to some callers is that you spoke a bit about the jobs numbers over the last four to eight years, basically saying they added hundreds of jobs when the economy was growing.
I wonder if we can take a look at the latest job support where we saw just 64,000 jobs added in November and the employment rate ticked up to 4.6 percent.
I wonder how concerning are these figures to you and talk about where wages are, particularly compared to last year.
unidentified
All that in three minutes.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, first of all, Donald Trump has not only tightened down on illegal immigrants, he's tightened legal immigration.
If you look at probably what we're going to inhale in terms of folks from abroad and what the Indigenous population can generate through normal population increase, we can only maybe add 50 to 60,000 jobs a month.
So in reality, the last two quarters, the second and third quarter, we're expecting third quarter growth to look like second quarter growth.
The economy has grown a great deal, but it has only added as many jobs as there really are there people to add.
One of the reasons the unemployment rate jumped, remember, is we just had this big federal layoff.
They came into the statistics in October because they were getting paid until October and until they are no longer paid, they count as employed.
Now, that's a judgment BLS makes, but that's the rule they apply.
So that didn't alarm me very much.
I don't think the Fed needed to lower interest rates any further because I think that inflation continues to be a problem and that so far this year We've added jobs at about the pace that the economy is capable of given the constraints that Donald Trump has imposed on it.
Now how are we managing this?
Think about it.
You know it grew at 2.5% a year for eight years and we're adding 175,000 employees a month to do it.
Well one of the things is that businesses have really been screwing down on employment by applying artificial intelligence.
I mean as a young person or as a younger person than me, you probably have lots of intelligence.
I couldn't agree with you more on the fact that both presidents, Biden and Trump, wasted cahooties of money unnecessarily during COVID.
But the thing I really want to bring up is I do all grocery shopping here at the House and have for the last seven, eight years.
The prices in the grocery stores just, I mean, I know they got to make money all through the, you know, the line of getting everything processed and in the grocery stores.
But when you take an item just say, for instance, mayonnaise, a quarter mayonnaise is $6.
At a gallon, that would be $30.
And a gallon of gas is $2.50.
Now, how much goes in to making mayonnaise compared to getting oil on the market?
Well, actually, quite a bit.
Mayonnaise is made of eggs mostly.
And eggs were very expensive last year.
And that pushed up the price of mayonnaise.
And you have to remember, the grocery can't buy mayonnaise for $5 a jar and sell it for four and stay in business.
If we look at the margins in the grocery business, they're not way out of line.
They're kind of thin because it's a very competitive business.
The other one is the meat processes.
It just seems, you know, I'd hate to be Frank Perdue's son.
I don't know his name offhand because it seems as though whenever there's trouble in the grocery store, they want to go after the meatpackers, as if they're conspiring.
Unfortunately, we've gotten used to having conspiracy theories for things that have sensible explanations.
You can't change the fact that there is only as many cattle today on the range, so to speak, as there were in 1950.
And back in 1950, the population of the United States was maybe 120 million or something.
And today it's 300 and what, 50, 60 million?
And people still like to eat beef.
Now, we eat less beef than we used to.
We eat a lot more chicken, and chicken is grain-fed.
So the good thing about chicken is the abundance of grain in America permits us to have chicken at a moderate price.
The price of turkey has gone down, by the way.
That is true.
Trump pointed that out, and it has, simply because Americans are eating less of the big bird these days, and they're eating more chicken.
I wanted to know, given the push for unleashing AI and developing the data centers, and the limitations on student loan backing from the federal government and the policies regarding health care, where do you see the American dream for the youth in the middle class?
Like, what fields should they be looking to go into?
Is this, you know, is the American dream now an illusion?
Or how do you see this panning out in the future?
Well, I think that I wrote a column about this one.
Americans are going to be working with their hands again more.
Throughout our history, the notion of technological progress has been to have fewer and fewer people with their hands on things and more and more people first going to high school in the 20th century, first half of the 20th century, and the second half, then going to college.
High school only became the norm for a worker around 1960.
And that has to change.
Not everybody can go to college anymore.
But the reality is that you can get into an apprenticeship program out of high school where you get paid $15 an hour.
I know that's not much, but you're being paid to go to school and within a few years get a job that pays you $80,000 or $90,000 a year.
And they're in all kinds of trades, and they're in all kinds of work.
Some of it is white-collar, some of it is blue-collar.
And I think we're going to have more people doing that sort of thing.
Now, if we had a reasonable immigration policy, something that neither AOC nor Donald Trump want to talk about, and that is we permitted people to come here where we have need.
We need people to pick lettuce.
We need unskilled workers.
But 20% of the engineering roles in the United States are, or you know, STEM roles are filled by immigrants.
40% of the people at the doctoral level are immigrants.
If we permit ourselves to welcome people in those skill areas, the economy itself would grow faster.
And then there would be more need for these displaced white-collar workers.
Because after all, if the economy is bigger, they may be running hotel chains with fewer bookkeepers than they were before.
But still, if you double the size of the hotel chains, then you're going to double the size of the bookkeepers that you need now.
And so there is a potential to do this, but it isn't like we're pursuing pro-growth policies in this country.
An open border, like Joe Biden had, created a lot of chaos and homelessness in New York and places like that.
And this business of throwing everybody out is just silly.
Andrew from New Jersey, an independent, you're next.
unidentified
Yes, thank you for taking my call, Cease Man.
I watch you all the time.
Thank you.
Now, as far as the jobs numbers created, is it not true that the Trump administration fired the woman from the agency that looks at the jobs numbers?
And as far as stability, here in New Jersey, they're building townhomes that are going for half a million to two million dollars a year.
The price of utilities are going up.
And I don't think Trump has a grasp on reality.
But as far as economics go, the prices in food stores are going up.
They're not coming down.
Well, they are going up, but they're not going up as rapidly as people seem to behave.
The average rate of inflation for groceries through September, because we know the September data was good, indicates it's about 2.7% a year.
Certainly, that's not as nice as zero.
But you've got to remember, in order to get to 2.7, there had to be a lot of stuff that was going up slowly if the price of beef was going up so rapidly.
So my feeling is that the grocery, these are a lot of different issues here.
Housing, we make it very difficult to build where the jobs are in and around big cities.
I mean, New York has got height restrictions.
It probably has fewer people living in Manhattan now than it did in 1900.
They make it impossible to get anything done.
And builders face these difficulties and it gets rolled into your costs.
It just does.
You know, I did an addition to my home about 40 years ago.
And then I had some work done subsequently to that addition, you know, about 25 years later.
I couldn't believe how many people were running through the place with clipboards this time, the second time.
And, you know, they seem to be retired firemen.
It seems to be the gig over in Alexandria.
You retire from the fire department after 25 years, then they make you an insulation inspection.
We had an insulation inspection.
I looked at my, I had the same contractor both times.
Charles Hall, bless his soul, has passed away.
And he said, Peter, I've never had a project fail an insulation inspection.
It's impossible to do that.
But we had one.
And that's the way our cities operate.
And it's really kind of sad.
And if you talk to people on the left about cleaning up all this nonsense, they behave as if you want to go back to the Stone Age.
There's such a thing as over-regulating something too much, and housing is a classic example.
And that's why we can't build houses.
Now, I don't hear Donald Trump talking much about that.
And he should.
It should be possible to start to form a national consensus by bringing together the governors to look at this problem.
The governor of New York tried very hard to initiate a program to build housing along the places where there are train stations on Long Island, because there's a lot of commercial land in those places.
And the villagers all went crazy.
They wanted to even know about it.
They didn't want to be able to see it if they had to drive through it to get the train.
That's the problem there.
Donald Trump denying all this stuff exists or that there's a problem.
And the president has said that he is going to look at doing some reforms on housing for next year, but that was basically as much detail as we got there.
unidentified
Well, we got a flip off-the-cuff answer, which seems to be his approach to making economic policy.
That and listening to Peter Navarro and Stephen Marin.
And I mean, they're the guys who told you that tariffs wouldn't make prices go up.
I mean, since I was a small boy, my father was a staunch Republican, because his father was a staunch Democrat.
That's how that used to work.
You did the opposite your father did.
But since I was knee-high, you know, 75 years ago, my father was telling me taxes always raise prices.
Tariffs are taxes.
That's been the Republican line for at least four generations.
All of a sudden, you impose taxes.
Anyway, he's getting his economic advice from places like that.
I was wondering, you mentioned about Trump kicking out unskilled labor, even illegal people that didn't do anything.
But isn't it true that they're going to be obsolete?
It's a waste of dragging them into this country, either legal or illegal, because AI, if they're unskilled labor, AI machines are going to take their place.
Already have AI machines working on farms.
You've got AI machines making buildings.
I mean, I've seen one robot making a wall within an hour.
X amount of bricks, they can make a wall.
Isn't it ridiculous to expect that these people are going to be able to contribute to society if they're unskilled?
More focus should be on skilled laborers, American citizens, with plumbing, electricity, welding, and especially AI programming.
That's going to be the future.
Not dragging illegals in to replace unskilled labor.
That's ridiculous.
I'm glad to know, but I'm more on.
The reality is we need all different kinds of workers in this economy.
There's many things that AI cannot yet do and is not likely to do anytime soon.
The cost of having robots make sandwiches at sandwich shops in New York City is prohibitive.
That's where you find immigrants.
You find them cleaning our homes.
Half of the workers on a construction site are immigrants.
And I don't think that's going to need for labor in those areas is going to change.
What I'm advocating is that we look at the areas where we need people.
We need agricultural workers.
So a certain amount of unskilled workers we should permit to enter to meet the need that we have.
We need scientists and engineers.
We need software designers and things like this.
So fine, that's where we should be adding them.
We probably don't need any more economists, so I wouldn't necessarily say we would have a quota for them.
Taylor from Dover, Delaware, a Democrat?
We are doing enough damage, you know.
I mean.
Your line is open.
Yes, I'm just calling in reference to how they are going to be addressing everybody losing their affordable health care.
And in our state, so many houses now in the neighborhoods are being bought by equity guys, and they're using them as group homes and things like that.
And a lot of the new developments are just rentals, basically.
They're not for home ownership anymore.
And with AI replacing everybody, it's like they're trying to, you know, just replace life with artificial everything.
And it's just so depressing because everything just costs more and more, and we're getting less and less.
Well, this is why it's so silly for the president to be making speeches that we never knew how good we have it or whatever it is, that there's really not a problem out there.
There are a lot of problems out there, a lot of very unsettling things happening in the economy.
After all, we're growing at a pretty significant pace, but we're not adding a lot of jobs.
That means the labor force has to change.
But there's a whole host of problems that just aren't getting addressed because economic policy in this administration consists of the president getting up in the morning, making a flippant remark, and then the Treasury Secretary having finding some way to map out a justification and a program to fix it.
I mean, he gets up in the morning, he doesn't like what's going on in Brazil, so he puts on a 50% tariff.
I wonder how much discussion there was in the White House of the efficacy of that move.
Now, that's not to say that the Biden administration was that their policies were any more rational, but we are doing things right now from an economic policy perspective that make inflation worse and that don't address the real structural problems the labor force now faces because of the rapid advance of AI and white-collar work.
I want to talk about the gas prices that's going down under $3 in 20 some states and a couple states is under $2 a gallon.
And Trump's getting all these drug prices down and pharmaceutical prices are going down like crazy.
And the supermarkets other than Delaware, the shop right in Delaware has real cheap prices.
Other stores like Acme and all are way higher.
And it's not that big.
And I don't understand what's going on.
You're supposed to be fair.
And yet, you're a Trump hater.
I'm not a Trump hater.
Hold on a second.
I do not hate the man.
I have a lot of trouble hating people.
But I do see problems with the policies that are being pursued in terms of solving the inflation problem, in terms of solving our basic labor force problems.
As for the price of gasoline, that's one of the places where, frankly, the world is awash in oil.
Part of that is slow demand in China because the Chinese economy exports, but domestically it's a mess.
It's got long COVID.
My feeling is that the price of gasoline can't go down much further.
There was an interesting graphic in the Wall Street Journal yesterday or the day before showing exports.
And the major exporters, of which the United States is one, are all exporting more oil, except for the United States.
Now, why is that?
Well, the United States has an abundance of oil if the price of oil is above $60.
If the price of oil in the national market goes below $60, which is about where you get $3 a gallon gasoline, then a lot of these shale oils fields start to become uneconomic to pump.
And the life of a shale well is fairly short, four or five years.
So they start to fall off production and they don't get replaced.
So what's going to happen is that if the price of gasoline goes down much further, U.S. production is going to start to shrink.
But right now, the world is awash in oil.
And I like telling my MBA students: if something good is happening and they compliment you for it, say thank you, even if you had nothing to do with it, because you're going to get blamed for so many things that you really didn't have any responsibility for anyway.
So it evens out.
And Donald Trump would like to take credit for the oil boom.
And compared to the Biden administration, he is doing more to encourage domestic production.
On the other hand, the price of electricity is going up.
Why?
Because these data centers for AI consume so much of it.
Now, we need to have a full court press on all our energy sources.
That means certainly, you know, drill for oil, drill for gas.
But we should also be pursuing renewables.
The data center people, the people that build these things and the big hyperscalers like Microsoft, Meta, Google, and OpenAI that are basically buying all this stuff.
They prefer to have clean energy.
And discouraging clean energy is not a good policy.
So it is very hard to have low electricity prices in this country if you have one president who wants to shut down oil and gas production and then another president who wants to shut down green energy.
When the reality is, we need energy from all sources to deal with this huge demand for electricity.
And we're just not, we didn't get that from Biden, and we're not getting it from Trump.
David from Austin, Texas, a Democrat, you're next.
unidentified
Yes.
I want to ask you a question.
Donald Trump is saying this is the worst inflation ever in the United States.
Is that true?
No.
He wasn't?
No, and he's my age about.
He was a couple years older than me.
When I was a young economist, we were living through the late 1970s and early 80s.
Inflation is what made Jimmy Carter a one-term president.
Inflation got up into double-digit levels, and the Fed had to put the country through a grinding recession to bring it to an end.
The mistake here was during the Biden years, the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, tried to convince himself that he didn't have to do anything about it, that these price increases were temporary.
They were caused by a surge of demand coming out of the COVID shutdown.
In reality, in reality, they had printed a lot of money to finance that.
It was very easy how they financed COVID.
They gave everybody all these big relief checks.
The folks couldn't spend it, so they put it in the bank until the shutdowns ended.
But they did that basically by the Fed printing money.
The Fed was printing money and it was buying Treasury securities, which essentially was monetarizing the new debt.
Now, Joe Biden spent a lot of money.
Donald Trump cut a lot of taxes.
So we went from a deficit that's about 3% of GDP to one that this year is going to be close to 6%.
Last year it was 6.4%.
And next year, if the Supreme Court strikes down these tariffs, it's probably going to be near 7%.
Because one of the things that's happened is the Big Beautiful Bill increases the deficit by about $330 billion a year.
Near as I can calculate, by the way, I wrote my doctoral dissertation about tariffs.
If there's any aspect of economics that I understand, it's tariffs.
As best I can compute, these tariffs are going to generate about $300 billion a year in revenue if they stay as they are.
That's a big if because every time Donald gets out of bed, he seems to want to change the tariffs.
You know, that's another thing.
If you want to have more jobs, you have to have investment someplace other than an AI.
And the industries that he is favoring, like pharmaceuticals and automobiles, in reality, all the investment right now is in AI and AI data centers, all the growth in investment, I should say.
One of the reasons for that is the tariff situation is so unstable and is under a Supreme Court review and all that, but it's so unstable that businesses can't plan.
You can't have an erratic personality making economic policy and expect people to make investments that have to pay out over 10 or 20 years.
And later on, Vox hosts and editorial director Estead Herndon discusses the release of the Epstein files, President Trump's grip over the Republican Party, and other political news of the day.
But first, a look at congressional redistricting battles with Paul Steinhauser of Fox News and the Concord Monitor.
unidentified
Watch America's Book Club, C-SPAN's bold, original series.
Sunday with our guest Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. poet laureate Rita Dove, who has authored several collections of poetry.
Paul Steinhauser is a Fox News and Concord Monitor National Political Reporter here to talk about where the various congressional redistricting battles stand heading into next year's midterm elections.
I want you to remind our audience exactly where the status stands when it comes to who is in the lead in the House and who obviously is in the minority.
unidentified
All right, just I guess politics 101 is, as we all know, every two years, the full House of Representatives, all 435 seats up for graphs.
That's the way it works here in our country.
Right now, the Republicans hold a very narrow margin, narrow majority in the House.
They are up 220 to 213 with two seats vacant right now.
Those seats are Democratic-held and will likely, once they have special elections early next year, go back in Democrat hands.
And then, of course, there's one Republican who's about to step down, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.
So when she does that in January, it'll be back to 219 to 213.
Regardless, it's very close right now.
And if you look ahead to November, the Democrats basically need a three-seat pickup.
They need to flip three seats and that gain is three seats to retake the majority.
That's why this congressional mid-decade redistricting is such a very, very big deal.
Obviously, off-year redistricting kind of sounds what exactly it is.
Can you tell us about how unusual and how big of a deal it is this time around?
unidentified
A huge deal.
Is it rare?
Yeah, nowadays it's pretty rare.
It's not unheard of.
It has happened.
Back in the 19th century, it was actually more common.
But over the last 125 years, it has not been that common.
Traditionally, congressional redistricting is done after a census.
So every 10 years, right, we do that census.
And then there's congressional redistricting and also reappointments.
Some states gain seats if their population goes up.
Some states lose seats if their population goes down.
And then there's the redistricting, how those districts are shaped.
That traditionally happens every 10 years.
So there are times where it happens mid-decade.
Maybe there's a court order because a lot of these maps are often go through the legal process, obviously, and sometimes that takes years.
So you can see occasionally some mid-decade redistricting.
What's going on now?
A little unusual, not illegal, but definitely a little unusual.
Listen, President Donald Trump remembers what happened during his first term.
In the 2018 midterms, he lost control of the House of Representatives.
He does not want that to happen again in the 2026 midterms.
So there has been a very concerted push by Trump and his political team to head out to the Republican-controlled states to have them redistrict.
And that's what is going on.
The Democrats obviously are pushing back in many states as well.
So that's kind of the fight we're in right now.
And in December, we have two very, very big kind of cases.
One in the Supreme Court that upheld Texas, which drew new maps over the summer, and they were passed by the supermajority in Texas, signed into law by Governor Greg Abbott, the Republican down there.
That led to five more seats, Republican-leaning seats in Texas.
There was a legal challenge.
The Supreme Court greenlighted those maps.
So they continue on.
And in Indiana, a Republican push in a very red state actually went down.
It failed in the state Senate there.
So two more Republican leaning seats will not happen or take place in Indiana.
So that's kind of one of the big developments we've just had over the last few weeks.
Yeah, we spent a lot of time last week talking about Indiana.
I want to show this full screen that talks about the six states that have new congressional maps.
I wonder what seat gains and losses are expected to come from these maps.
I know you talked a little bit about Texas already, and what districts are in play and most likely to flip?
unidentified
Well, let's take a look at the map.
And first of all, Texas, they were the first to do it.
So it's a red state.
They redrew the maps, and it looks like you'll have five more Republican-leaning seats.
California, Governor Gavin Newsom of California, somebody we look at as a potential 2028 Democratic presidential contender, led the charge in California for them to redo their maps.
But that first had to be passed by voters because California has a nonpartisan commission.
A bunch of these states have that now, nonpartisan commission.
Instead of a state legislature, the nonpartisan commission would draw up the maps every 10 years.
What the Democrats in California had to do was get a referendum on the ballot, which they were successful in doing, that would temporarily delay or kind of push that to the side, giving the state legislature the power to redo the districts again, at least for the next four to six years.
And that was overwhelmingly passed by voters in the left-leaning state back in November.
So California kind of cancels out Texas, right?
Five seats in Texas going right, five seats in California going left, kind of balances it out.
A couple other states, as you mentioned, have already changed their maps as well.
Missouri, and that picks up an extra seat for Republicans, although there is a referendum on the ballot will likely be going on the ballot in Missouri.
So that may be up in the air.
Voters may get to weigh in on that.
We'll see where it stands.
North Carolina as well, redoing the maps, giving the Republicans another seat.
Ohio, giving the Republicans two more seats.
And Utah, a Republican-dominated state, but the judicial process there kind of forced a new map that gives the Democrats a chance to win back a seat.
So if you look at everything right now where it stands, it's probably about a three, maybe about a three seat net gain for Republicans in this process.
But we still have a long way to go.
And these numbers could definitely change between now and obviously Election Day next year, which is over 10 months away.
Yeah, so actually, you guys were just speaking about what I was curious to want to learn more about, which was gerrymandering.
Basically, if you could give me a sort of a quick succinct masterclass in a few minutes we have.
Basically, so what is the history of it?
Is there a way to combat it?
Do we combat it?
And yeah, if I could speak to Mr. Steinhausen directly.
Well, Dan, that's a great question.
Yes, it is legal.
A lot of people think it isn't, but actually it is legal nationally.
And there are a few states that actually ban it.
One of them, Florida.
And that's one of the states that's still a Republican-dominated state, obviously.
The governor down there, Ron DeSantis, and the supermajority in the legislature will likely take action early in the new year to try to change the maps and maybe create another one or two right-leaning seats to help Donald Trump and the Republicans in the midterms.
But the state constitution down there does not allow.
So there are a few states, Florida is one, that don't allow political gerrymandering.
So it'll be interesting to see if that goes forward, what kind of legal challenges occur.
And that could probably end up again in the Supreme Court, just like we saw the Texas case.
Now, there is a difference here between racial, between political and racial gerrymandering.
And racial gerrymandering is not legal in this country.
But what is happening right now is there is another case in front of the Supreme Court, Louisiana versus Cal A.
And it's a crucial case that may overturn a key provision in the Voting Rights Act, which prevents racial gerrymandering.
If that happens, that could lead to a lot more rewriting, remapping of some districts that could give the Republicans a much bigger advantage in next year's midterms.
But again, all eyes on the Supreme Court to see when that case is decided and how it's decided.
Paul, that case would be huge if the Supreme Court did what I think some folks are expecting them to do, which is really gut the Voting Rights Act.
Some reports have said that by gutting the Voting Rights Act, that could lead to states redrawing, giving Republicans up to 25 seats.
Some other reports said up to 40 seats.
I wonder if you can kind of break it down.
Let's say that this happens.
I mean, obviously, we don't know when the Supreme Court is going to rule, but let's say that they have that, let's say that they rule in the beginning of next year.
Would there still be enough time for districts across the country who this would apply to or who would allow them to draw new maps?
Would there still be enough time for them to do that before the midterm election?
unidentified
Goes state by state, right?
It depends on the states because the states are in control of their calendars when it comes to elections.
In Texas, like it wouldn't because Texas, but they've already made their moves.
But Texas has a very early primary, March 2nd or March 3rd, I believe, coming up in the new year.
So their process is already underway.
But in states where the voting takes to the primary elections take place much later, then yes, depending on when this case is settled, depending on what the opinion is by the Supreme Court, yes, some of these maps could take effect in November of next year.
And of course, if that was the case, give the Republicans a much bigger advantage going into the midterms.
Anthony from Detroit, Michigan, an independent, you're next.
unidentified
Good morning.
Merry Christmas.
I am pretty disgusted by the partisan gerrymandering that's happening.
And I think the best thing Americans could do if you want to push back against this elitism and political choosing their own seats is you could vote for a third party or independent.
If all Americans did that, it would throw your equations out the window and we'd have a lot more than 30 competitive seats.
Paul?
No, that's an argument we've heard a lot of over the years: that the two-party system does not work well for this country, that it is way too partisan, that the major political parties are looking after themselves and not after the American people.
And we have seen in the past some success for third-party candidates, no doubt about that, especially not at the national level so much, but more at the state and local level.
But let's be honest, this country remains to a great degree a two-party system, the Democrats and Republicans.
And it is hard for third-party candidates to crack that system.
Mary from Columbus, Ohio, a Democrat, your line is open.
unidentified
Hi.
I heard another gentleman from Ohio, so I'm on the other side of this issue.
As an Ohioan, we voted on fair districts more than once.
And there was a court case that went to the Ohio Supreme Court, and our maps were found unconstitutional to the Ohio due to the voters.
Our voting board here in Ohio basically raised their middle finger to our voters and said, not going to do it.
And we still are voting on unconstitutional maps in Ohio.
And I'd like to know if you have really any advice for people like me who are just so disgusted.
So I will just take your comments offline.
Thank you.
Paul?
The caller there makes a good point.
Ohio was already underway.
Redistricting was already mandated by the judicial system in Ohio even before the Republicans, before Donald President Trump decided to kind of make this concerted push, which really started late last spring and early into the summer.
So Ohio is already underway because the judges in Ohio had already deemed the previous maps unconstitutional.
But there is a lot of disappointment, I think, by those in Ohio who are hoping to see a different set of maps than what they got because, again, it is a Republican-dominated state.
They control the legislature and they have the governor's office as well.
It is frustrating for a lot of people.
You know, the best avenue, of course, is your vote, which they'll get again next November.
I'd like to ask the gentleman about the redistricting going on in Texas.
Are there any black or Hispanic districts left in Texas?
And if so, which, excuse my voice.
Yes, there are.
There are.
I don't have the specifics.
They're obviously in some of the urban areas, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, and so on.
What the remapping in Texas does is take a state that already had a lot more Republican than Democratic-leaning congressional districts and give about five more right-leaning districts.
This was the first target for the Republicans.
Remember, the president asked about this back in, I believe, early July, said Texas would be first, and we hope to get five seats there.
I'm paraphrasing here, but Texas was the first big target for Republicans.
And after Texas made its move, that's where you saw California Governor Newsom and Democrats in the left-leaning state kind of counterattack.
And it was a tough push for them as well because they had to go through the referendum process.
But California basically canceling out Texas.
But overall, again, when you look at where things stand right now, and again, this is a very fluid situation.
But right now, the Republicans maybe have gained about two to three more seats due to redistricting.
I just want to know why the Democrats have done this for years.
And all of a sudden, when the Republicans try to even things out, then the Democrats absolutely go crazy.
And it's all over the news.
The Democrats are doing the same thing with Trump.
Everything he does, they've already done.
And I don't understand why everyone is so upset about the Republicans doing this when the Democrats have done it for years.
Paul?
Your caller makes a good point.
Both parties have been doing this for years.
And we were talking about that, about how a blue-dominated or blue-leading states, you've seen the maps change, think Illinois, I go on, but also red states as well.
Texas did this in the past as well, back earlier this century, back, I think, 2004 or three or four.
So there has been, you know, partisan redistricting, gerrymandering by both sides for a long time.
It's quite a sport here in our country.
What makes this a little different, again, is it's mid-decade.
Most of the time, we have this crazy partisan redistricting right after the census.
So it's the timing and I would say the large scale of all this because it's not happening in just one or two states.
This is happening from coast to coast.
And it's just the size of this, the scale of it, is a little unprecedented.
That's why it's grabbing so much national attention.
You know, I believe the Constitution begins with the words, we the people of the United States, not we, the corporations, not we, super PACs, not we, gerrymandering.
It says we the people, and that's been taken away from the people as a democracy.
We now live in what I call a corporitocracy where corporations actually control everything.
And people have no longer have a say or a word.
And it's only through referendums like they are doing in the state of Missouri, where they collected 300,000 signatures to do away with gerrymandering in this state and also the right for a woman to have whatever care she needs for us when she's pregnant.
So we're going all the way back to 1787 in that constitutional convention back in Philadelphia that there would be congressional redistricting and reappointment of the states every 10 years after a census.
So that was laid out in the Constitution.
Remember, at the time the founding fathers put that together, we had parties, but it was nothing like what it evolved into, right?
So the political party process really gained a lot of strength after all, after our Constitution was created.
And the parties have controlled this process.
And it is legal.
Again, we've talked about this before.
It is legal.
What can voters do?
Again, certain states prevent bam gerrymandering, political gerrymandering.
And maybe someday down the road, that could happen at the national level.
But right now, these are the rules that we have when it comes to redistricting.
Gerrymandering by political gerrymandering is legal, and the political parties obviously take advantage of that.
It's like having a football team agree to the rules together that we're going to play 11 each side and the footballs.
And it's at halftime, one team says, well, actually, we're going to take two of your players, despite all of the agreements ahead of time and tradition, and we're going to put them on our team.
Hey, can you kind of tell us what the percentage of voters are in the state of California versus how many representatives they're going to have for each party?
My understanding is it's been done for so many years and so much that it's completely out of balance in a lot of states as far as representing the actual voters and how they vote.
And Texas may have done it some, but not nearly as much as like California and a lot of these other states that have done it for years.
Well, California is a great example, right?
California, a state where Democrats have dominated for sure.
It's a left-leaning state.
So, gosh, I got to go back about what, 17, 18 years ago when we had Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, one of his signature moves as governor, and it was passed by the legislature, was to create a nonpartisan redistricting commission.
They would do redistricting not only for Congress, but also for their state legislative maps.
And that was one of his crowning achievements.
And that's why we saw Schwarzenegger as one of the opponents of Newsom when this process began just a few months ago in California.
And what the voters did there was they're not scrapping the redistricting, the nonpartisan commission altogether in California.
It's just being put on hiatus for the next, what, four cycles, I believe, or next or three election cycles, at least through 2032, I believe.
And then it comes back.
Yeah, so California, by doing this, is by with their new maps, they're adding five more left-leaning congressional seats.
Is that a little out of whack with the, I guess, the overall percentage breakdown between Republicans and Democrats in the state?
Of course.
But that's also on the flip side.
That's the case in Texas as well and in some of these other states.
Another one of the arguments against redistricting, and we saw this in playout in Indiana, the opposition to the maps in Indiana were saying, well, wait a minute, you're redrawing the maps.
My district now is going to extend from one part of the state to the other.
And it just, you know, it doesn't seem right.
It doesn't seem like my interests in my area will be kind of a centerpiece for my representative in Congress that these maps kind of take away local power.
And that has been another argument against them.
Indiana was a fascinating case.
It was also one of the few times where we've seen President Trump's clout with Republicans tested and actually go down to defeat because the president, of course, has a very strong sway over his party.
But Republicans in Indiana, at least enough of them in the state Senate, were opposed to this map.
My question is: why can't we do representation by percentage in all states?
Let me give you an example.
State of North Carolina is pretty much a 50-50 state.
Right now, the state of North Carolina, I'm not sure on the exact number, but three-fourths of the representatives of that state are Republican, and a quarter of it is Democrats.
But yet, you have a 50-50 voting block.
So, how is that fair?
How is that fair at all to the Democrat voter when they're going out to the poll and 50% of them are voting Democrat, but yet their representation is 25%?
I'd like to hear what you got to say about it.
It's a great question.
And you hear that in a lot of states, right?
Think Illinois.
Republicans would say the same thing in Illinois that it's not fair to them.
Or in California, Democrats would say the same thing in Texas.
North Carolina, as you just mentioned, they redid the maps.
And it looks like you'll have another, probably one more right-leaning seat in the midterms next year due to the redistricting in North Carolina.
So, yeah, this is you're hearing this from a lot of voters in a lot of states that it just doesn't make sense.
And unfortunately, I keep coming back to the same thing, the same answer.
And it's not one I think your listeners and your viewers are going to like, but it's the law right now.
It is legal.
Political gerrymandering is legal.
And that's why we have this situation that we are in right now.
Yes, I wanted to ask you again, like, who's going to be representing the black minorities in Texas?
And also, does Bobby Pulido have a chance in the southern region of Texas?
I live in far Texas, and I know that Monica de la Cruz is running, but a lot of people don't like her.
So what are the chances for Bobby Pulido to gain contraction?
I wish I could be more helpful.
I'm not that familiar with that race.
I cover a lot of races across the country.
That one I'm not familiar with, so I don't want to speak out where I'm not up to date.
But yeah, there is a concern by a lot of people in Texas that their representation is disappearing.
There are some, there still will be, you know, Democrat districts, especially in the more urban and inner suburban areas of Texas.
But these maps, again, basically lead to five more Republican-leaning seats across the state.
And as we talked about, Texas was the first state to take this action.
Others obviously have followed.
And this is a moving process here.
So these maps could change in other states going forward.
We talked right now where things stand.
It looks overall, if you look at all the changes, the six states that have already changed their maps.
Right now, it's about a three-seat pickup for Republicans.
And why does this matter?
Because every seat is so important with not that many in play, with the Democrats only needing three to flip to retake the majority in 2026 in the midterms.
In my lifetime, there's always been a process to nullify the black vote.
And this is a smokescreen in terms of redistricting because we've always had to redistrict in order to even get black people to be able to vote or have their own representation.
So they're calling me one thing, but primarily it's to nullify the black vote because we are making an impact on the electorate process.
Paul?
I'm so glad you spoke up and 90 years young.
Happy holidays, my friend.
That's God bless.
But I'm glad you spoke up because let's put the spotlight back again on the huge wildcard that we've briefly talked about earlier.
And that's the Supreme Court case, Louisiana versus Calais, which could lead to that key provision in the Voting Rights Act being overturned, which would then allow for remapping in a number of states, which could dramatically change the situation.
So that again, sometime in the new year, we don't know when the Supreme Court is going to rule.
We don't know which way their opinion is going to go, whether it upholds the Voting Rights Act or not.
But that is going to be a huge blockbuster ruling when it occurs.
Paul, I just want to ask you to, you know, the previous guest used the word moron, and I feel like I'm kind of a moron right now as I listen to you because I think a lot of Americans don't really understand the political process.
unidentified
We have, we're supposed to be a democracy, but there's this battle between being a democracy and a republic.
And I'm not sure we really understand what the difference is because a democracy is supposed to stand for we the people.
But a republic, to my understanding, is where we allow elected officials to stand for us.
And I'm really not sure if we are changing from a democracy to a republic or what the difference is.
So I'll just stop there and I'll just ask you to just give us some political one-on-one so we can have a more effective conversation because this whole thing about gerrymandering really makes me feel like this something.
It's a great question, and he is expressing the frustrations of a lot of Americans because it just, to them, this doesn't seem right to a degree, right?
But this is the process.
We elect our officials, and that is part of the Republican process of a republic.
But redistricting is laid out in the Constitution, and it does not prevent mid-decade redistricting.
And that's kind of the situation we're in right now.
And next up, we have Vox host and editorial director Estet Herndon discussing the release of the Epstein files and other political news of the day.
unidentified
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I want to talk about the Epstein files release last night from the Justice Department.
I wonder what your reaction was and what to what was and what wasn't released.
unidentified
Yeah, I think that, you know, we were looking to see the scope of information that would be released.
And I had a lot of skepticism going in simply because of how the White House has chosen to handle this.
And I think from what we saw, people are still going to be looking for more information.
I mean, I understand the kind of process of privacy and redacting.
I think a lot of Americans do, but the reaction is overwhelming.
I mean, think about this, Jasmine.
There are very few issues that actually cut across DR and independent like this.
Polling would tell us that upwards of 70% of Americans want to see the Epstein files released.
And, you know, I don't think that last night's dump is going to get, is going to change that much, simply because we know that there is much more information, particularly a focus from the estate, focused on Donald Trump's involvement, that I think that Donald Trump's possible, I should say, overlap should is where I think a lot of people are really focused on.
And, you know, there's been some good journalism.
There were some stories this week by the New York Times about how Epstein got rich.
I think answers some of the questions that some people have.
But really, there's a need for firsthand documentation.
And that's really right now.
But I think people are still looking for the White House to follow through on.
Yes, and our early reaction that we heard from the administration was basically saying that this is the most transparent administration of all time because they moved to release these files, despite the fact that they were basically compelled to buy that federal law passed by Congress 30 days ago.
I wonder, though, just looking at the shifting arguments from the White House and from President Trump himself, do you think that he could still sustain damage from this, not just because of the release wasn't as fulsome as people thought it would be, but just on the issue itself?
unidentified
I think the issue has already been quite politically damaging for Donald Trump.
When we think about this year, there's a couple of things that have really broken through the noise.
You know, tariffs being one, and I think his kind of inability to focus on prices, what most people brought him to the White House for, is a big reason that we have seen things like approval rating and others fall.
But when we think about Epstein, I mean, Lord knows that when we talk to voters, including voters who brought him, who voted for him, kind of the undecided group who chose him over Democrats last cycle, Epstein comes up all the time.
You know, I tell people that there are very few issues that cause Donald Trump to feel inauthentic, that kind of place Donald Trump in the club of wealthy insiders rather than kind of fight for every man.
I remember being with Trump supporters, you know, years ago who kind of saw him as their champion for things against kind of an insider cabal.
There was a kind of QAnani crowd really thought that Donald Trump was going to be their hero in terms of transparency, in terms of openness, in terms of fighting back against what they felt was a group of elites who were kind of conspiring amongst themselves.
As we've seen this morph, it turns out Donald Trump is not on the side that a lot of folks expect.
And I think that's really caused some political damage already.
You know, it is, you know, it's clear that whether it's Attorney General Pambondi or whether it's Trump himself, there has been a trained eye from MAGA back to them saying, hey, on this issue, we're expecting more.
And so there's been very few things that actually cause a rift between Donald Trump and his base.
But that's why I go back to that kind of overwhelming upwards of 70% number, because you only get to that if that means it's genuinely bipartisan.
If it was just Democrats or just Trump haters who wanted these files released, we wouldn't have seen this level of pressure.
You know, we did an episode at Vox and today explained about the Epstein files and the pressure Congress was under to even lead to this law.
And the reporting was that members of Congress were receiving upwards of 100 phone calls a day.
These are Republican members about releasing the Epstein files.
In a gerrymandered era, in a moment in Congress with very few things cut across aisles, this issue itself has forced the White House's hand simply because it's unique.
So not only do I think it threatens to have a longer kind of political tale because we haven't seen the fullness of those documents, I think it's already had an effect and really, I think, impacted perceptions of this White House.
You mentioned your Vox Today explained podcast where you dived into this.
Obviously, there have been some problems with the base on this and some problems in Congress.
I wonder if that leads you to a different consensus of how the president is able to maintain a grip on his party, particularly lawmakers, as you head into the midterm season.
unidentified
Yeah, it's really interesting because one of the things we explored is the distance between the way that Donald Trump has had a kind of total grip on Congress versus some of the cracks that we've seen emerging on the local and state level.
Like think about the ways that he has kind of molded Mike Johnson and his image.
Mike Johnson's taken heat from his own members simply because of his willingness to stand so close to Donald Trump.
And I think even more than that, Trump has really convinced Congress to abdicate their own power.
I mean, when we think about what the real goals of this administration has been, it's been a drumbeat of expansion of executive authority and really the bulking up of the role of presidency at the expense of Congress.
And a lot of Republicans in Congress have gone along with that.
But we continue to see some inability for the White House to get that level of buy-in from the state level.
I'm thinking about some redistricting efforts.
I know your last guest talked about that, but think about places like Indiana where there was real pushback against the White House and their attempts to redistrict.
And you're seeing that grow more and more from some lawmakers who think that Donald Trump is going to be a net negative for the midterms.
One of the things that happened in those elections that we saw last month is it really changed the focus from being, and I think amongst both parties.
You know, there was such focus about the Democratic failures after the presidential election.
And Lord knows Democrats still have some problems when we think about the national electorate at large.
But when we think about midterms, about these off-year races, Democrats have been performing well.
And it's Donald Trump and the Republican coalition that has been fractured.
And so I think that that has really emboldened people, particularly on the state and local level, to see him as a lame duck that they don't necessarily have to fall in line with directly.
That's not necessarily true when it comes to Congress.
And we've basically seen Congress members have two choices, fall in line or resign.
And so we've seen some of those Republican members increasingly make noise about leaving Congress, about not enjoying their role, things like that.
But the vast majority have simply signed up for their own, I call it abdication of their own power and expansion of executive authority that's been driven by this White House.
Before we continue our conversation, instead, I want to invite our viewers to join in on this conversation.
Republicans, your line is 202-748-8001.
Democrats, your line is 202-748-8000.
Independents, your line is 202-748-8002.
Estead, another place that we've seen Republican lawmakers really try to distance himself from the White House and from President Trump itself is on health care.
I want to take a listen to Brian Fitzpatrick, a Republican from Pennsylvania, in kind of a vulnerable seat this week, talking about how he signed onto the Democrats' discharge petition to force a vote on extending those Affordable Care Act subsidies.
unidentified
Take a listen.
Only thing worse than clean extension with no anti-fraud, no income caps is the cliff.
So I was left with a Hobson stress.
We all.
But we report to people, we report to our constituents.
We do not answer any person or problem.
And we'll continue our conversation with the speaker.
He means exactly where we stood the whole time.
We heard him out on his concerns.
And we did not have a meeting online.
So it's something that for us is very, very time sensitive and very existential for people that we care about, people that need help badly on a very important issue like healthcare.
This is a very personal, very sensitive issue to a lot of people.
So there was Brian Fitzpatrick talking about signing on to that discharge petition.
We also have a notice article with the headline: These House Republicans won't commit to running in 2026.
As retirement rumors swirl, notice asked dozens of House Republicans whether they plan to run again by my colleagues, and they list about over 120 members who some of them weren't exactly gung-ho about saying whether or not they were going to run for reelection.
I wonder if you put Brian Fitzpatrick and these Republicans who are talking about retiring, as you said, together.
What does that tell you about the concerns heading into November from the Republican caucus?
unidentified
Yeah, it tells us a lot.
I mean, Republicans aren't having a good time in Congress.
I mean, in all honesty, Congress itself, DNR, have really been struggling with where their role is.
I mean, we've seen, I mean, Donald Trump has deeply expanded this, so I don't exactly want to say it's one-to-one, but we've seen president after president kind of methodically minimize Congress.
And I think as kind of gerrymandering has broken that institution, there is an increasing kind of question about whether that's the best place for legislating to happen.
And for a lot of these people, somewhat feel like there's more money to be made or more power to be had outside of that institution rather than in it.
But specifically to your question, I think we should see this as signs that Republicans are somewhat thinking that next year might not be a great year for them.
And that's on a couple fronts.
Not a great year at the ballot box, but also not a great year kind of taking on the White House's mess.
And I think that we have seen that really drive the rumors of Republican resignations.
Of course, we've had high-profile ones, thinking about Marjorie Taylor Greene, some of the kind of other folks who have made their brand kind of Stefanik last night announcing she wouldn't run for re-election dropping out of the gubernatorial race.
And I think that speaks to a kind of structural break from Congress.
It used to be the place where you would make your own name, that you would grow your own reputation.
But now I think there's an ability to raise small dollars elsewhere.
There's an ability to grow your voice elsewhere.
And there might be even a freedom of voice that exists further outside of the institution rather than in it.
But to the kind of first point that you were mentioning about health care subsidies, I think it's a really important issue.
Democrats have succeeded in elevating the rising health care premiums and the expiration, those Obamacare subsidies during this shutdown fight.
That was successful in terms of bringing that into the public consciousness.
And it's really put pressure on Republicans on what they're going to do on that front.
Now, I think that kind of both sides of the party have an open health care question when it comes to the next presidential race.
Where will Democrats fall on issues like Medicare for all?
Where will Republicans fall on not just repealing Obamacare, but actually coming up with a vision?
There's a kind of universal recognition that our health care system could and should be improved, but we haven't really seen an outlying vision about how to do that.
I think that comes in the next couple of years.
But in the short term, Democrats have succeeded and we're boxing Republicans in on the question of cost.
Well, the truth is that, you know, it really hasn't been Democrats or Republicans, I think, to push it.
Has been a bottom-up kind of grassrootsy effort.
I think there's a lot of interest, whether it be among individual people on social media, that feels as if this is emblematic of the type of small group of people who have had outsized power and have used it kind of badly.
I don't think this is coming from pure ideological lines.
Of course, this is something that is already roped in Democrats, Republicans, kind of cultural figures, intellectuals, academics.
And so it's not necessarily, I think, a partisan-driven thing, more so than an anti-elite thing.
And so I can totally see someone making the argument that maybe this doesn't have material effects for people, or maybe this isn't the most important issue in the world.
And I'm actually sympathetic to the argument that Democrats have been searching for a way, in my opinion, to kind of one easy trick to get rid of Donald Trump.
I can think you can certainly stake that case for some of the things he's faced previously.
I don't think that's what's happening here.
I really think this is a more grassroots, people-driven effort against what they view as a cabal of elites.
Now, you can disagree with that, but I don't think that's driven by the Democratic Party more so than I think the Democratic Party has been swept up into trying to reflect it.
But it hasn't been necessarily been something that has started as a Democrat play to oust Donald Trump, partially because it's going to wrap up some folks that they know and love.
Like Bill Clinton, who was featured a lot in those Epstein photos that were released last night.
Roger from Carbondale, Illinois, a Republican.
You're next.
unidentified
Yeah, I've heard all this morning from this gentleman, Mr. Herden, how he thinks that the Republican Party is a mess and that they need to change this and change that.
There's not a thing they need to change, buddy.
I mean, when we talk about the change that took place since the mess that he inherited from Biden, you know, look at the border.
Look at the guy, I was in Missouri yesterday.
The price of gas was $2.31.
It was $510 in 2020.
I remember that.
So that's a big thing.
You got to give it time.
10 months is not a lot of time to change everything.
But I think when it comes to what Trump is doing, he's on course to make changes like I've never seen.
And we just need to hold on.
The Democrats right now, they don't have a plan at all.
All you do is rip Trump all day long on all the Hulk stations, CNN and MSNBC and all that.
You know, let's get together and work together and go across party lines and help this country grow instead of just saying that the Republicans are not going to ever, ever have anything done right.
Yeah, I don't think that's really my argument.
I don't think the Republicans are never doing anything right or anything that I'm saying.
I'm saying that there is a legitimate break with how Donald Trump has conducted his second term and some of his own supporters.
Now, clearly, that doesn't include this gentleman who seems fairly happy with Donald Trump's focus and his agenda.
I guess what I'm saying is when saying that it's just been 10 months is the argument that the White House makes.
But for a lot of people, they feel like this is no longer Joe Biden's economy.
This is the Donald Trump economy that he has imposed chaos on through his own actions, specifically tariffs.
And that is the number one reason we have seen Donald Trump's approval rating go down is because people have flipped on his handling of the economy.
And that is not just Democrats who didn't really like him in the first place.
That is mostly Republicans and independents.
Some Republicans and mostly independents.
That is just the fact.
The fact is also that the things like handling of Epstein have really driven.
The fact is also that people think the focus on things like ballrooms and unexplained strikes in Venezuela are not as important as some of the agenda items that he laid out and has not followed through on.
And so there has been an air of incompetency that has infected Trump's second term.
And you see that reflected in the kind of voter reaction to him.
Now, does that mean that Democrats get to win because of that?
Absolutely not.
We still have another year before the midterm elections.
And I think to the caller's point, Donald Trump wants to shift the focus of that before we get to next November.
He very well might.
The other question is when we get to things like a presidential race, it becomes vision versus vision.
And I think that's a big difference.
When we go back to voters, even some of whom are disappointed with Donald Trump's actions right now, they don't necessarily say that that means that they wish they voted for a Democrat.
That just meant they were disappointed with what he was doing.
And so I think Democrats still have an onus on them to come up with a competing vision on a lot of issues that can speak to what Donald Trump has spoken to.
And so that's still a challenge for Democrats, even as Donald Trump has created a governing problem of his own.
Now, I want to put the president's most recent approval ratings on the economy on the screen here from PBS Mara's poll taken December 8th through 11th of this year.
36 approve of the job the president is doing on the economy.
57 disapprove and 8% are unsure.
I want to take a listen to the president who this week gave a primetime address basically defending his economy and saying that it is that he's basically digging himself out of a hole left to him by former President Joe Biden.
After years of record-setting falling incomes, our policies are boosting take-home pay at a historic pace.
Under Biden, real wages plummeted by $3,000.
Under Trump, the typical factory worker is seeing a wage increase of $1,300.
For construction workers, it's $1,800.
For miners, we're bringing back clean, beautiful coal.
It's $3,300.
And for the first time in years, wages are rising much faster than inflation.
Remember that wages, just look at it.
Wages are going up much faster than inflation.
How big is that?
Very importantly, there are more people working today than at any time in American history.
And 100% of all jobs created since I took office have been in the private sector.
Think of that.
100% of all jobs have been in the private sector rather than government, which is the only way to make a country powerful and great.
This historic trend will continue.
Already, I've secured a record-breaking $18 trillion of investment into the United States, which means jobs, wage increases, growth, factory openings, and far greater national security.
Much of this success has been accomplished by tariffs.
My favorite word, tariffs, which for many decades have been used successfully by other countries against us, but not anymore.
Companies know that if they build in America, there are no tariffs.
And that's why they're coming home to the USA in record numbers.
They're building factories and plants at levels we haven't seen, AI, automobiles.
We're doing what nobody thought was even possible.
That was President Trump in his primetime address on Wednesday.
But it said, I wonder if you couple the president's rather rosy message on the economy, coupled with those approval numbers, 36% approve of the job he's doing on the economy.
I wonder if you feel that there needs to be some sort of message shift there from the president to his own base.
unidentified
I mean, listen, it reminds me of what Joe Biden was trying to do in 2021 when there was rising inflation, but he kind of insisted amongst Americans' concerns that things were going well.
It's not exactly the same because we have seen some inflation slow, particularly in recent job numbers through government shutdown.
But the key word and what I heard from that sentence is Donald Trump reinforcing his favorite word of tariffs.
That puts him at odds with most Americans who correctly understand that tariffs has not driven up jobs and has driven, and in the short term, has been a cause of price increases.
And the biggest thing is their private companies are busy telling them that, you know, this is due to concerns about tariffs.
This is, you know, and so I think the legal chaos that was imposed this summer that was imposed even by Donald Trump's own actions, let's remember it caught, you know, some of the freak out around tariffs caused him to pull back from his initial kind of set of numbers.
I mean, that itself, I think, is a concession from the White House.
We should not just ignore this.
This policy focus has not succeeded.
However, this is his obsession.
And so he is trying to make it succeed over the concerns of Americans.
And so that's why I make it the comparison back to Biden is because it reminds me of the dangers of when you do not reflect people's concerns and respond to them, but simply try to re-impose your own view to that.
I haven't really ever seen that work.
And so like, I guess that to me is the hard hill the White House is trying to climb.
I guess I would suggest the messaging shift simply because I would say that your best road always is to be where the people are.
And on tariffs and on the economy, he is not.
And so that's been true for his life.
But in the first term, he did not go down this road.
And to be honest, a lot of the closest people around him really regretted that over the last four years.
And so that's why I think it's a very interesting tension about the remaining years of this White House.
Do they care about public reaction?
Do they calibrate themselves to blowback in sentiment?
Or do they feel like, hey, the plan is not to run again?
Donald, you know, whatever, whoever comes next in Republicans has to make their own way.
Trump is going to do what he wants.
And so that can be true no matter what happens in the midterms.
And I think that's really the question in front of us.
Yeah, why do all the people that say trillionaires in these big corporations should pay their fair share?
And then when they have to pay for tariffs, because they're getting all their stuff made by horrible labor conditions in China, you know, and other places where they have nets on the sides of the building so that people don't kill themselves.
Okay, these are big corporations paying these tariffs.
And guess what?
Those are trillionaires and they should pay their fair share.
I think if Donald Trump was raising taxes on wealthy individuals or on corporations, that would be the argument.
That's not what he's doing.
These companies are passing those on to Americans.
And he's also creating carve-outs for companies to individually bypass some tariffs if they give the government money.
And so the combo of tariffs plus, I think, cronyism is partially to this response.
And to the point about polling, I do think that there is problems with electoral polling when it comes to Trump space.
But you really can't say that in terms of last year, where Donald Trump's ability to win was pretty seen in polling.
But also, I would say when we talk about issue polling, which is what we're talking about here, you're right that they did say that Donald Trump was the best, his best issue on issue polling has been the economy over the last several years.
And so, even if you have some skepticism of said polling, the fact that that has gone belly under in the last six months should give fans of Donald Trump some concerns, fans of the Republican Party some concerns.
And so, I guess I'm not like here to tell you what you need to believe or not.
I'm telling you for a fact that some of Donald Trump's own supporters, many of them, do not like what he's doing on the economy.
I've talked to them.
And so, whether you, what you want to do with that information, what the White House wants to do with that information is simply up to them.
But the polling reflects a shift in sentiment that is true among the American people.
I do think that speech was a recognition of a White House that needs to recontrol a narrative.
I think that Donald Trump has often been used to dictating kind of where, you know, kind of discussion starts and ends.
And on a couple of issues, I would say the economy currently, but also Epstein, as we've talked about, and a couple other things, they have not been able to do that.
And so, again, like, you know, I really see this as a White House that has that has made a priority of power and has basically backfilled explanations to the American people as convenient.
How many different things did they tell us for the reasons why we have an escalating conflict with Venezuela?
You know, it wasn't about Fentanov first.
It's also been, it's been about 10 other things.
Before it's actually been an admission to Donald Trump about like the extraction of oil and having a government in there that would allow American companies and businesses to grow.
That's something they had denied for weeks until we kind of said so this week.
And so I'm saying on the Epstein files, how many excuses have we have from this White House on tariffs?
How many explanations have we have from this White House?
There is not a consistency in terms of giving the American people a why behind their actions.
But I would say that falls into line with a group of people whose goal has been the explicit expansion of executive authority.
When we think about the most important people in this White House and around Donald Trump, I think about Stephen Miller, I think about Russ Vogue, I think about the people who saw this as a project about power.
And so even things about, even things like Doge were oftentimes seen as individual pet projects for Elon Musk or such.
Those were intentionally created organizations that targeted the exact orgs that Project 2025 was laying out for the purposes of creating a legal framework that could expand executive power.
These are intentional decisions.
And so, one of the things I think is important to understand about this White House is that there is a legal and political framework that is working at the same time as the policy one.
And so, yes, that can be confusing.
Yes, that means there's a waterfall of things happening.
And yes, that somewhat means that from a public perspective, I think the options of pushback are fairly limited.
Because even if they were to say lose X amount of seats in Congress or Democrats would gain control of the House, I do not think that stops the Donald Trump and Stephen Miller agenda overnight.
I think that that is the reason why the executive authority has been such a goal: someone to insulate the White House from those concerns.
And so that has been what they've wanted to do, and they've said that publicly.
And so I don't think we should try to overinterpret their desires.
And to put a point on your point, Estead, you tweeted this week: the Stephen militarization of the White House is a big reason it's been a political flop so far.
Maybe he and Russ Vogt, who is the OMB director, view everything through the lens of their ideological project or the goal of expanding presidential authority, but that's not even true of the MAGA voter.
Jay from Loveland, Colorado, an independent, you're next.
unidentified
Hey there.
I have more of a comment than a question.
Isn't the release of the Epstein files more about morality and what's right and wrong?
We don't want to see these girls being exploited and raped by anyone.
I mean, that's why I say it's a bottom-up grassroots public thing.
What happened to those girls is horrible.
What happened, what Epstein has been accused of and proved to have kind of coordinated for years is horrible.
The people who have hung out with him after those accusations were public and litigated in court, horrible.
And so I think that's what the interest is: because there is legitimate questions for both the people who ingratiated themselves to him and were relying on him, the financial institutions who supported him, the, you know, so I'm saying, like, I totally agree with that caller because I think it is a, I think it is really, I think it's insulting to the American people to act like this is only seen through the lens of partisan politics or by Donald Trump.
I think the facts of this case are horrible.
And I think that's what's motivating people to want transparency.
Turning the conversation, Estead, you're in New York City and you've done a lot of work profiling Mayor-elect Zorhan Mamdani.
You had a piece in the New York Times before the election.
That headline is inside the improbable and audacious and so far unstoppable rise of Zorar Mamdani.
I wonder if you believe that he is setting new expectations for what Democrats should expect from their leaders.
And also, what do you make of his relationship with President Donald Trump?
Obviously, he was here in the Oval Office in Washington, D.C. last month.
unidentified
Yeah, I'll take your first question first.
I do think that Mamdani has tried to model something different in terms of campaigning for Democrats.
I think it works on two fronts: there's a kind of process and how he campaigned, and there's the kind of policy front.
On the why and how, I think it kind of speaks to something I was talking about earlier.
That is a campaign that has really been molded in response to people's concerns.
So things like affordability became a focus because they have been doing such door-to-door housing or door-to-door door knocking and canvassing that they recognized that housing was central to people's concerns, even though some polling said that things like public safety and other things were more important.
I remember Mamdani telling me that he understood that people had just lost faith that government would do anything about affordability.
And so that's why he wanted to focus his campaign on that.
I think that is also in the kind of social media aspects, the way he reached voters where they are.
Those are certainly things you're going to see Democrats and Republicans on the like start to model.
We've even seen that in terms of like the places they're willing to go on podcasts, even some of the YouTube videos they've been putting out.
A lot of that is very Mamdani-coded.
But, you know, they would say that you can't separate that kind of performance of politics from the substance itself.
And even when I was out on the trail with him, it's not like he would mention of, you know, Israel Gazo or things kind of outside of affordability concerns consistently on the trail, but it was in the air and it kind of was a reason why a lot of the people trusted him.
He was seen as someone who has consistently fought for his values, no matter kind of who was on the other side.
And I think that's really served him.
And so I think it's going to be an open question for Democrats about whether they can get the glitz of Mandani without the substance that was bringing particularly progressives and young people to him.
That's going to be an interesting thing.
To your point about Donald Trump, you know, it was interesting because I think when he came to the White House, I expected them to get along.
You know, Momdani has been doing this charm offensive across New York City.
He's willing to meet with anybody, friend, foe, everyone in between.
And his goal is simply to find one place of shared common ground and to focus on it.
And he's been doing that across a lot of different sectors of New York in the last several months.
And so when I heard that he was going to the White House, I imagine he was going to try to execute the same thing, you know, focus on the commonality rather than the differences and let his kind of charm do the work.
Now, I didn't necessarily expect Donald Trump to be like looking at him like favorite son, but I do think it reflects someone who, you know, Donald Trump is a New Yorker who has a respect for someone who climbs that ladder.
But I think there is a willingness to make your politics work with anybody.
And for so many Democrats over the last several years, there was a little bit, I would say, of a snobbery about who they were willing to be in coalition with.
I think that was including some snobby Republicans or people who may have previously voted for Trump, but even their kind of base poor Democrats who were who maybe didn't love the party's nominees or people who were upset about the actions that the party was seen to be supporting in Gaza.
I think one of the things that Mamdani did is open up his campaign to all.
He would say it stops.
We are not going to say Republicans can't be here.
We're not going to say Trump supporters can't be here.
There's places of overlap for all.
I think that's a lesson that served him well in the Trump meeting.
Estead, you joined Vox in October after covering politics and elections at the New York Times and hosting the podcast, The Run Up.
I wonder if you can describe to our viewers how will your reporting be different across all of the platforms at VoxNow?
unidentified
Yeah, I appreciate you asking.
You know, one of the things that has really motivated me not only to join Vox, but it was to really evolve my journalism.
You know, I was really excited at the times to be able to do magazine stories, to be able to do the run-up podcast, to also be able to report in text and on audio with the daily.