C-SPAN’s Public Affairs Events episode highlights the Supreme Court’s 9-0 rejection of forced MS-13 returns to El Salvador, Trump’s Oval Office meeting with Bukele—where he touted a 99.1% border crossing drop—and vowed to deport violent criminals, including naturalized citizens. He slammed CNN for ignoring "success metrics," blamed past administrations for open borders, and boasted $7T in investments under tariffs on cars, steel, and drugs. Iran’s nuclear threats prompted strike warnings, while China/Vietnam trade talks clashed with NATO criticism over funding. The show wraps with bipartisan moments and a 2025 Windsor Castle state dinner, underscoring Trump’s aggressive immigration and foreign policy stances amid legal and diplomatic pushback. [Automatically generated summary]
Request to send National Guard troops into Illinois.
The administration argued that the Guard was needed to help protect immigration agents in the Chicago area, something that local leaders strongly objected to.
TNBC article goes on to say the decision marks a rare defeat for the president at the Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority.
By rejecting the president's premise, the court at least provisionally rejected the Trump administration's view that the situation on the ground is so chaotic that it justifies invoking a federal law that allows the president to deploy National Guard troops into federal service in extreme situations.
All 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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America 250 highlights the events, conversations, and reflections marking our nation's semi-quincentennial in Memorial.
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Coming up, an Oval Office meeting with President Trump and Salvadoran President Naebukeley.
The April meeting came as the Trump administration was working on expanding a deal between the U.S. and El Salvador for the Central American nation to accept deportees from the U.S.
Yeah, we even have this gang member from Venezuela, one of the ones you sent, and we interviewed him just to get some information, et cetera, from them.
And he said, oh, well, you know, I got arrested six times, but they released me that six times, so I should be released again.
And then we said, well, but what's the last thing you do?
And he said, well, I shot a cop in the leg, but I didn't kill him.
I just shot him in the leg.
And we're like, this guy was arrested six times here in the United States, six times.
He was released six times.
And he was released five times.
And the last time he was sent to El Saba, right?
So he's not getting released.
But the last thing he shot a cop, actually, and he shot him in the leg.
But we have people that fight to the death because they think men should be able to play in women's sports.
And some of those sports, it wouldn't matter much, but it still matters.
But some of them are very dangerous for women.
unidentified
Some years ago, like we said, a decade ago or so, women's rights movements were pressuring so that we enacted specific laws to avoid men abusing women.
And I think those laws were great because there were a lot of men abusing women.
But now some of the same people are trying to backtrack and actually trying to make new laws allowing men to abuse women in sports.
First and foremost, he was illegally in our country.
He had been illegally in our country.
And in 2019, two courts, an immigration court and an appellate immigration court, ruled that he was a member of MS-13 and he was illegally in our country.
Right now, it was a paperwork.
It was additional paperwork had needed to be done.
That's up to El Salvador if they want to return him.
That's not up to us.
The Supreme Court ruled, President, that if, as El Salvador wants to return him, this is international matters, foreign affairs, if they wanted to return him, we would facilitate it, meaning provide a plane.
So, as Pam mentioned, there's an illegal alien from El Salvador.
So, with respect to you, he's a citizen of El Salvador.
So, it's very arrogant even for American media to suggest that we would even tell El Salvador how to handle their own citizens as a starting point.
As two immigration courts found that he was a member of MS-13, when President Trump declared MS-13 to be a foreign terrorist organization, that meant that he was no longer eligible under federal law, which I'm sure you know, you're very familiar with the INA, that he was no longer eligible for any form of immigration relief in the United States.
So, he had a deportation order that was valid, which meant that under our law, he's not even allowed to be present in the United States and had to be returned because of the foreign terrorist designation.
This issue was then, by a district court judge, completely inverted, and a district court judge tried to tell the administration that they had to kidnap a citizen of El Salvador and fly him back here.
That issue was raised to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court said the district court order was unlawful, and its main components were reversed 9-0 unanimously, stating clearly that neither Secretary of State nor the President could be compelled by anybody to forcibly retrieve a citizen of El Salvador from El Salvador,
who again is a member of MS-13, which, as I'm sure you understand, rapes little girls, murders women, murders children, is engaged in the most barbaric activities in the world.
And I can promise you, if he was your neighbor, you would move right away.
In our favor, against the district court ruling, saying that no district court has the power to compel the foreign policy function of the United States.
As Pam said, the ruling solely stated that if this individual at El Salvador's sole discretion was sent back to our country, that we could deport him a second time.
No version of this legally ends up with him ever living here because he is a citizen of El Salvador.
That is the president of El Salvador.
Your questions about it per the court can only be directed to him.
unidentified
I asked him.
Can President Bukele weigh in on this?
Do you plan to return him?
Well, I'm supposed to have not suggested that I smuggle a terrorist into the United States, right?
How can I return him to the United States?
Like, could I smuggle him into the United States?
Or what do I do?
Of course, I'm not going to do it.
It's like, I mean, the question is preposterous.
How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?
I don't have the power to return him to the United States.
You can release him inside the world.
Yeah, but I'm not releasing, I mean, we're not very fond of releasing terrorists into our country.
I mean, we just turned the murder capital of the world into the safest country of the Western Hemisphere, and you want us to go back into the releasing criminals so we can go back to being the murder capital of the world.
unidentified
That's not going to happen.
Well, they'd love to have a criminal release into El Salvador.
And that's what the Supreme Court held, by the way.
The Supreme Court said exactly what Marco said: that no court has the authority to compel the foreign policy function of the United States.
We want a case 9-0, and people like CNN are portraying it as a loss, as usual, because they want foreign terrorists in the country who kidnap women and children.
But President Trump, his policy is foreign terrorists that are here illegally get expelled from the country, which, by the way, is a 90-10 issue.
And I just asked the President, you know, it's this massive complex that he built, jail complex.
I said, can you build some more of them, please?
As many as we can get out of our country that were allowed in here by incompetent Joe Biden through open borders.
Open borders.
You probably hear open borders and you can't even understand it because nobody can understand.
Nobody smart or with common sense can understand it.
So we have millions of people that should not be in this country that are dangerous.
Not just people, because we have people, but we have millions of people that are murderers, drug dealers.
They've been allowed to come into our country by other countries that were very smart.
When they heard that this very low IQ president, and by the way, I took my cognitive exam as part of my physical exam, and I got the highest mark, and one of the doctors said, sir, I've never seen anybody get that kind of.
That was the highest mark.
I hope you're happy with that.
Although they haven't been bugging me too much to take a cognitive.
But I did do my physical and it was released.
I hope you're all happy with it.
I notice there's no question, so probably you are.
But the cognitive, they said to me, sir, would you like to take a cognitive test?
I said, did Biden take one?
No.
Did anybody take one?
No, not too many people took them.
I said, what about Obama?
Did he take one?
No, he didn't take one either.
I said, let me be the only one to take one.
But I've actually taken them three times already.
I like taking them because they're sort of, they're not too tough for me to take.
But we had a great physical exam, so I knew you were going to ask that.
And the doctors, who are total professionals, Walter Reed Medical Center, they're great, great people.
And I visited a soldier that was badly wounded, incredible soldier, lost his leg, and spent a lot of time with him.
I mean, great, with his mother, and it was really a very great thing.
They do a phenomenal job.
I just want to say, Walter Reed, I was there for, what, five, six hours, you were there with me.
But I took a full physical, and it came out perfecto, so that's good.
That means you've got me for a little longer.
unidentified
Wouldn't you always be willing to give up pay for those facilities to be opened if new ones were going to be built?
They're great facilities, very strong facilities, and they don't play games.
I'd like to go a step further.
I mean, I said it to Pam.
I don't know what the laws are.
We always have to obey the laws.
But we also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways that hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they're not looking.
That are absolute monsters.
I'd like to include them in the group of people to get them out of the country, but you'll have to be looking at the laws on that staff, okay?
He said, you know, you have liberty and you have to have liberty, but to have liberty, not everybody is going to be good.
And, you know, some are bad because they're sick.
They're mentally deranged.
They're bad.
And you have to take them.
If you're going to have a country, you're going to have to take those people out.
And we've been doing that.
But this was like an unforced era, they would call it, where we had people that may hate our country, or maybe they're just stupid people.
I think they're probably stupid people more so.
A lot of people said they did it for the vote.
But I did better with Hispanic people than they did, because they always used Hispanic.
I did better.
You people love me.
I saw my poll numbers in your country up through the roof, right?
91%.
No, no, some people think they do it for the vote.
But they don't have to do it for the vote.
They're cheap.
They're professional cheaters.
That's about the only thing they do well.
So we just have had a great relationship, and it's become bigger because of a strange thing that happened.
You know, I came back.
We had no war in Ukraine.
We had no war with, we had no October 7th Middle East problem.
We had nothing.
We had no inflation.
We didn't have the Afghanistan.
Most embarrassing moment in the history of our country, the Afghanistan, not withdrawing because I would have been out.
I had it all set to bring people out with dignity and pride.
That was the worst, most embarrassing moment in the history of our country, Afghanistan.
We didn't have any of that.
You wouldn't have had the war with Russia-Ukraine.
You wouldn't have had the Middle East problem because Iran was broke.
They had no money because we had secondary sanctions on and lots of other sanctions.
And now every single thing, got a problem with Iran, but I'll solve that problem.
That's almost an easy one.
We've got to solve a war that should have never started, Ukraine and Russia, and we'll get that solved.
And we have to solve problems, and we already solved inflation.
If you look at the numbers, the numbers are incredible, actually.
Stock market's up, and we're not letting other countries take advantage of this country like they have for the last 40 years.
So thank you very much.
You have a question, please, sir.
unidentified
Thank you, Mr. President.
Thank you so much.
You scored another major investment win this morning when India pledged to build its AI supercomputer, the first time ever right here in the United States.
Well, it's one of the biggest announcements you'll ever hear, because NVIDIA, as you know, controls that almost the entire sector, which is one of the most important sectors in the world, between chips and semiconductors and everything else.
And they're the biggest.
And the other biggest we already have coming in and spending $300 billion, as you know, they announced two weeks ago.
But NVIDIA is so highly respected.
And this was an announcement that a lot of people, I knew it was going to happen, but not to the extent that it happened.
It's big.
And the reason they did it is because of the election on November 5th and because of a thing called tariffs, as I said, the most beautiful word in the dictionary.
After love, God, relationship.
The press actually hit me.
I said, tariff is the most beautiful word in the dictionary.
We're doing it because we want to make our own drugs.
We're doing it because we want to make our own steel and aluminum, lumber, other things.
And they're all coming in.
We have record numbers, $7 trillion.
Since I announced like a month and a half ago, since I came, basically, since I came in, we have over $7 trillion being invested in the country.
We didn't have $1 trillion.
We didn't have half a trillion dollars with some of these guys.
They didn't know what the hell they were doing.
So we have the largest investment that we've ever heard of, and we're only two months in.
And that'll continue at levels that you've never seen before.
That's what's going to happen.
And even the stock market's up today.
We also had, you know, a lot of people didn't say it the way it was.
We had the largest gain in the stock market in history on every single category last week.
That was a nice game because we get a little hit because people didn't understand the power of our economic, our country economically, if you use it right.
Do you have something to say on that, JD?
unidentified
Yes, sir.
I mean, look, for 40 years, we have lost manufacturing capacity.
And some of the most critical things that we need from the pharmaceuticals, the drugs that we give to our children, the antibiotics that we give to our kids, to the weapons that we actually need to fight a war, if, God forbid, we had to fight a war, we don't make enough of that stuff.
And so President Trump ran explicitly on changing that.
Yes, as the President mentioned, it caused a little bit of disruption in the market, but I actually think over the long term, workers are going to benefit, stocks are going to go up, American businesses are going to benefit as we reinvest and reindustrialize our country.
And the auto workers and the Teamsters and all of the unions, you know, not traditionally Republican, but I'm winning those unions by 40, 50 points on the Democrats.
They're losing everything.
They're losing everything because they just have policies that are not believable.
They fight for policies that are 5% popular, and nobody knows who the 5% are.
I mean, nobody can find the 5%.
But if you go back to Ohio, and by the way, we have the great championship team from Ohio coming in today, right?
If they're criminals, and if they hit people with baseball bats over their head that happen to be 90 years old, and if they rape 87-year-old women in Coney Island, Brooklyn, yeah, yeah, that includes them.
Why do you think there's a special category of person?
They're as bad as anybody that comes in.
We have bad ones, too.
And I'm all for it.
Because we can do things with the president for less money and have great security.
And we have a huge prison population.
We have a huge number of prisons.
And then we have the private prisons, and some are operated well, I guess, and some aren't.
But he does a great job with that.
We have others that we're negotiating with, too.
But no, if it's a homegrown criminal, I have no problem.
Now, we're studying the laws right now.
Pam is studying.
If we can do that, that's good.
And I'm talking about violent people.
I'm talking about really bad people.
Really bad people.
Every bit as bad as the ones coming in.
And I made the statement when I heard about this a long time ago now, four years ago.
When I heard that this guy was having open borders, I said, every single criminal from all over the world is going to be dumped into our country.
The meeting, like trying to figure out how do we screw the United States of America.
Don't forget, the European Union was formed to do just that.
The European Union was formed to hurt the United States on trade.
And they get us on NATO because they don't pay their bills.
But now, since I got involved, they have been paying their bills.
I took in over $600 billion for NATO.
Nobody took in anything.
I mean, they were all delinquent.
They had eight nations out of 28 paid their bills.
The rest of them were way delinquent.
And I said, if you don't pay your bills, we're not going to protect you anymore.
And the money poured in over 600.
The Secretary General last week made that statement.
He said, I've never seen anything like it.
We couldn't get anybody to pay because the United States was putting the bill for NATO.
Well, we got hurt there, and we got hurt on trade, likewise, European Union.
And they've got to come to the table.
And they're trying to.
They're trying to.
But the European Union has taken terrible advantage.
They don't take our food products.
They don't take our cars.
We have millions of their cars, BMW, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, many others.
They come in by the millions, they don't take...
There are no Chevrolets in Munich, I can tell you that.
I said to Angela Merkel when she was there, and she was letting millions of people infiltrate Germany, which was not so good from, we would call them illegal immigrants, but she made them legal.
But I said to her, and I get along with her very well, I said, how many Chevrolets do we have in Munich or Frankfurt?
Why, none, Donald.
None.
I said, you're right.
And yet we take in millions and millions of cars.
No, those days are over.
Okay.
Thank you very much, everybody.
unidentified
Thank you, Peters.
Thank you, Rez.
Mr. Brother, did you comment on the FPC's case against March 7th?
This Friday on a special edition of Ceasefire, host Dasha Burns features key moments from Ceasefire's inaugural season, highlighting moments of friendship and humor, respectful disagreement, Tim's someone who, even when he disagrees, vehemently disagrees, Tim makes friends across the aisle with everyone.
The thing that I appreciated about Ron is while we differed, particularly after he led the charge for the Democrats to defeat the Republican majority in 2006, I always felt like still too soon.
We ought to just commit ourselves to love and justice, not hatred and revenge.
unidentified
One of the wonderful things that I've been able to experience with my very dear brother, Robert George, is that I love the brother when he's right.
I love him when he's wrong.
I love him when he's wrestling in his quest for truth.
Watch our special bipartisan moments from the season of Ceasefire this Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, only on C-SPAN.
C-SPAN is as unbiased as you can get.
You are so fair.
I don't know how anybody can say otherwise.
You guys do the most important work for everyone in this country.
I love C-SPAN because I get to hear all the voices.
You bring these divergent viewpoints and you present both sides of an issue and you allow people to make up their own minds.
I absolutely love C-SPAN.
I love to hear both sides.
I've watched C-SPAN every morning and it is unbiased.
And you bring in factual information for the callers to understand where they are in their comments.
This is probably the only place that we can hear honest opinion of Americans across the country.
You guys at C-SPAN are doing such a wonderful job of allowing free exchange of ideas without a lot of interruptions.
Thank you, C-SPAN, for being a light in the dark.
Next, a look at the second of two state dinners held in President Trump's honor this year as we look back at the president's most notable meetings with foreign leaders in 2025.
In September, President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump attended an official state dinner in their honor at Windsor Castle, hosted by King Charles and Queen Camilla, following days of visits with leaders on estates throughout England.