C-SPAN’s Washington Journal (12/24/2025) dissects Trump’s foreign policy claims—rebuilding the military, ending wars in Gaza and Iran (strikes on Ford, Natans, Esfahan), and seizing 1.9M Venezuelan oil barrels—against callers’ skepticism: Democrats cite ongoing Palestinian deaths (300 post-ceasefire) and unproven drug cartel strikes, while Republicans defend "peace through strength" but clash over Ukraine’s alleged bullying by Zelenskyy. Greg Lukianoff counters leftist free speech critiques, warning that selective censorship—like demonizing Israel criticism as anti-Semitic—undermines democracy’s core protections, even as Trump’s policies spark global backlash and constitutional debates. [Automatically generated summary]
In honor of our nation's founding in 1776, we are sending every soldier $1,776.
unidentified
Next on Washington Journal, we'll continue our holiday Authors Week series featuring live conversations with a new author each day.
Coming up, after your calls and comments, we'll talk with author and free speech advocate Greg Lukianoff, President and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, discussing his book, The War on Words, 10 Arguments Against Free Speech and Why They Fail.
On this Wednesday, December 24th, Christians around the world marking Christmas Eve today.
Merry Christmas and happy holidays.
We'll begin this morning with the year-in review on foreign policy.
Looking back at President Trump's first year of his second term, do you oppose or support his handling of foreign policy?
Republicans, dial in at 202-748-8001.
Democrats, 202-748-8000.
Independents, 202-748-8002.
You can text if you don't want to call at 202-748-8003.
Include your first name, city, and state.
And we'll also take your comments on facebook.com/slash C-SPAN or on X with the handle at C-SPANWJ.
Let's begin with the President's address to the nation last week, where he talked about and outlined what he believes are his achievements on foreign policy.
After rebuilding the United States military in my first term, and with the addition we are adding right now, we have the most powerful military anywhere in the world, and it's not even close.
I've restored American strength, settled eight wars in 10 months, destroyed the Iran nuclear threat, and ended the war in Gaza, bringing for the first time in 3,000 years peace to the Middle East and secured the release of the hostages, both living and dead.
President Trump last week, excuse me, addressing the nation.
And this morning, we turned to all of you in our first hour.
Do you oppose or support President Trump's handling of foreign policy?
Start dialing in.
We'll begin that conversation with all of you in just a minute.
Let's begin with, let's also show a recent poll that was conducted on the president's job approval ratings.
Take a look at foreign policy right there at the top.
This is a real clear politics average of polls taken when asked about the president's job approval.
When it comes to foreign policy, 54% right now, this is snapshot in time, disapprove, while 43% approve.
Where are you if you were asked this question this morning in a poll, where are you on the President Trump's handling of foreign policy?
There are the lines on your screen, and we'll get to your comments here in just a minute.
Let's also hear from Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, last week spoke to reporters about diplomatic priorities in the second year of the Trump administration, and here's what he had to say about asked when he was asked about negative European reaction to the latest national security strategy from the United States.
unidentified
Going back to the previous question about Europe, and I believe the Sky News reporter referenced civilizational erasure, which is a term that has been used by both the White House and the State Department.
Both the West and the State Department have made kind of recurring overtures to Europe as a civilization that is in some sort of danger and that should join with the United States as a sort of Western civilizational bloc.
That seems to be a recurring priority.
However, with the release of the National Security Strategy, many European leaders, leader of Germany, members of the EU, of the European Parliament, have found it totally unacceptable or offensive or question the allyship of the United States with the rhetoric that was used.
So I just wonder if the United States is correct in that these policies like mass migration will lead to civilizational erasure.
Is it possible to save European civilization if the governments simply don't want to be saved?
What is it that, and it's not just me saying, you go to these NATO meetings, you meet with people, what they will tell you is our shared history, our shared legacy, our shared values, our shared priorities.
That's what they talk about as the reason for this alliance.
Well, if you erase your shared history, your shared culture, your shared ideology, your shared priorities, your shared principles, then you just have a straight-up defense agreement.
That's all you have.
So what I'm trying to point to, and what we've tried to point to, is very simple.
That is at the bedrock and at the cornerstone of our relationship, for example, with Europe, is the fact that we do have a shared culture, a shared civilization, a shared experience, and shared values and principles on things like human rights, on freedom, on liberty, on democracy, on all sorts of rights of the individual.
All these sorts of things that we in this nation are the inheritors of in many cases because many of these ideas that led to the founding of our country found their genesis in some of these places in the Western Alliance.
If you take that away, if that's wiped out because for whatever reason it's no longer a priority, I do think it puts a strain and threatens the alliance in the long term and in the big picture.
Now, whatever internal politics causes people to dispute this, I'm not going to comment on other than to tell you that I do think, I do think that at the core of these special relationships we have is the fact that we have shared history, shared values, shared civilizational principles that we should be unapologetic about.
This is a nation that was founded on Western principles, founded on Western principles like liberty, the value and the right of the individual, the right of self-governance.
These are all Western values.
Now, others may have adopted in different parts of the world, but they emanate from Western history.
And it's something that we should be unapologetic about.
Why would we be apologetic about it?
Anyone who doesn't recognize, for example, that many of the features of our system of government find their root in Roman and Greek history is a fool.
Is a fool.
It's just not true.
And so I think that we need to understand and embrace that, not negate it.
And I think that's what we're pointing to here, is that we are concerned that particularly in parts of Western Europe, those things that underpin our alliance and our tie to them could be under threat in the long term.
And by the way, there are leaders in those countries that recognize that as well.
Some say it openly, some say it privately.
In the eastern and southern part of Europe, they're much more open about it.
Nonetheless, it is a factor that needs to be addressed.
President Trump's Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, outlining the year ahead for the Trump administration on foreign policy.
And this morning, we're asking all of you: do you oppose or support the president's handling of the issue?
John is in Tampa, Florida, a Republican.
We'll hear from you first, John.
Good morning.
unidentified
Hello.
And a summary: the Trump agenda Republicans that tyrants hate are basically the most well-informed and patriotic voters.
As a result, people that have been brainwashed by plutocrats and bad actors and America's enemies hate President Trump.
This is a sad truth.
Those billionaire and multi-millionaire bad actors have been owning the news media, the TV news media, for decades.
And as a result, look at the surveys.
90% of Washington journalists consider themselves, plus or minus 90%, self-identify with being Democrats or liberal, while only 10% continuously identify with being Republicans or conservative.
I just wanted to call in and just add a caveat to that claim that the war, Israel and Gaza's war has come to an end because since the supposed ceasefire, there have been many attacks and 300 Palestinians have been killed.
So I don't think it's accurate to say that this war is over.
All right, Jerry, with his thoughts there, a Democratic caller on Israel and Gaza from the Council on Foreign Relations website.
This is their update on the conflict there.
Israel and Hamas have begun to implement the first phase of the president's 20-point peace deal.
Under the agreement's terms, Hamas has released all living hostages and promised to release the remains of others it holds.
While Israel has freed about 2,000 Palestinian prisoners held in Israel and withdrawn its forces to a predetermined line, leaving it in control of 53% of the Gaza Strip.
And we just showed you the headline from its defense minister saying they won't leave.
The United Nations has also drastically scaled up aid to the territory.
The status of other challenging issues, however, including the disarmament of Hamas and Gaza's future governance structure, remain unclear.
There is also from the UN agency overseeing the Gaza aid issue.
This is from Thompson Reuters reporting, the conflict in Gaza in numbers.
This is what they report: that after two years of conflict in Gaza, tens of thousands of Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed.
1.9 million people are displaced, and hundreds of thousands face starvation as famine spreads.
It also goes on to report about the children in Gaza.
At least one Palestinian child has been killed every hour on average during the war, according to Save the Children.
It says more than 20,000 children have been killed, nearly a third of the overall death toll, and 42,000 have been injured.
We're asking you this morning your thoughts on President Trump's handling of foreign policy.
To add to those Gaza numbers, this is from the UN Relief Aid Workers Association.
70,369 Palestinians reportedly killed.
170,999 have been injured.
Patrick in California, Republican, good morning to you, Patrick.
Support or oppose President Trump's handling of foreign policy.
unidentified
I support him 100%.
He's a great patriot.
He got the border closed.
He got peace on the Israel-Hamas war.
He's continually working to make America first.
He's the best president since Ronald Reagan.
He's done a wonderful job as far as I'm concerned.
Here's what he had to say: I'm going to play for you, just because this is all coming out this morning, one other piece of this new interview with Trump.
Kate, tragically, that's in keeping with the recently released national security strategy of this administration, which fails to identify Russia as an aggressor, Ukraine as a democracy that deserves our defense, and NATO as strong, trusted, and valued allies.
This latest statement from President Trump dishonors the decades-long bipartisan commitment in the United States and here in Congress to stand up for democracy and human rights and to stand shoulder to shoulder with our NATO allies.
As the President just referenced, they've stepped forward.
They've made significant investments in Ukraine security, in European security.
They're showing strength, not weakness.
And a decision just made by President Trump to allow the export of cutting-edge AI chips to China further alarms me that he doesn't understand the moment we're in and is making national security decisions with regards to Europe and Asia that are weakening the United States, not strengthening us.
Look, most world leaders are increasingly just ignoring what President Trump says or tweets one day to the next, and they try to look at the actions and decisions of the American government, the American Congress, and President Trump.
Unfortunately, as they look at his tariff policies, they've seen over months that it's unpredictable, chaotic, and destabilizing.
So a statement like this concerns our European partners because they think there may be actions that will follow, actions that would cave to Russian aggression and weaken the North Atlantic alliance between the United States and our trusted European allies.
Democratic Senator Chris Coons on CNN recently criticizing the president's approach to NATO.
We're talking about foreign policy and how has the president handled it so far in the first year of his second term.
There are the lines on your screen and we're also taking your text messages, posts on Facebook as well as on X. Here is Mike in Santa Fe texting us to say, for all the faults of this country, we were the best because we tried to follow the rule of law.
We have lost that and are nothing but a third world banana republic.
And then you also have Guy in Oklahoma saying, A plus, President Trump has secured our border, took out Iran's nuclear threat, stopping the flow of drugs, taking out the cartels as next, settled many wars, implementing free and fair trade deals, getting other countries to pay their fair share into NATO.
You also have Jeff in Dearborn, Michigan.
Wars in Gaza and Ukraine ended on day one?
No.
In fact, he's starting another with Venezuela and is back to talking about taking over Greenland.
Trump is a laughingstock amongst world leaders and has diminished America's standing.
I do not approve at all, says Don Floyd in Virginia.
I think we'll have us, he'll have us on World War III before long.
It is the 22nd bipartisan briefing we've had on a highly successful mission to counter designated terrorist organizations, cartels, bringing weapons, weapons, meaning drugs, to the American people and poisoning the American people for far too long.
So we're proud of what we're doing, able to lay it out very directly to these senators and soon to the House.
It's all classified.
We can't talk about it now.
We're also going to tomorrow allow the Hask and SASC to see the unedited video of the September 2nd alongside with Admiral Bradley, who has done a fantastic job, has made all the right calls, and we're glad he'll be there to do it.
But in keeping with long-standing Department of War policy, Department of Defense policy, of course, we're not going to release a top-secret, full, unedited video of that to the general public.
Hask and SASC and appropriate committees will see it, but not the general public.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth up on Capitol Hill briefing members of Congress about these boat strikes from Britannica website.
There have been 27, 26 boat strikes so far is what they calculate from recent weeks.
And the number of people killed, they say, is 95.
Others, other outlets are reporting that number at 105.
This is from Britannica.com on these boat strikes in the Caribbean and Latin America.
Yesterday at the United Nations, the Venezuelan ambassador took aim at U.S. policy towards his country, Venezuela calling for the U.N. Security Council to meet about the aggression against its country.
The U.S. government is threatening an armed attack against Venezuela to satisfy the big oil corporations, particularly Canoco Phillips and ExxonMobil Mogul, which are pioneers in the theft of Venezuelan oil.
The children of American families will be ordered to risk their lives to line the pockets of oil company shareholders with billions of dollars while thousands of Venezuelan and American families are destroyed.
It is blood for oil.
Blood for oil is not a noble proposition.
It is unworthy and unacceptable.
War for oil is a death sentence.
The same one offered to Iraq, Syria, Libya, and so many others.
The behavior of the U.S. government confirms the cynical phrase of the propaganda of wars for oil, which states that, and I quote, it is unfortunate that God has placed the oil of the United States in the territory of other nations.
End of quote.
It's a war of plunder and pillage with a flag taken from the pit of human values.
The Venezuelan ambassador to the United Nations at a UN Security Council meeting yesterday, they called for the meeting because of the military actions against Venezuela.
CNN reporting this morning, two oil tankers have been seized by the United States and they're pursuing a third.
We're asking all of you this morning, do you support or oppose President Trump handling of foreign policy?
You can talk about the situation in Venezuela, the president's threats against the country, the boat strikes, as well as his efforts to secure peace between Ukraine and Russia, Israel and Gaza, his strikes against Iran, all of that on the table this morning.
Sticking with Venezuela, last week on the Washington Journal, we had the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, Adam Smith, on the Washington Journal talking to our viewers.
And here's what he had to say about these military actions against Venezuela.
And look, there's been a long history in this country of presidents using their authority as commander-in-chief combined with their inherent right of self-defense, which has been interpreted from the sec, sorry, Article 2 of the Constitution for the president.
And we've done a lot of things over, gosh, centuries.
But what's different about this is normally those conflicts, many cases, they have had some kind of congressional authority.
You had the Gulf of Tunkin resolution for Vietnam.
You had the UA, sorry, the AUMF after 9-11.
This time, there is no congressional authorization whatsoever.
And second, conflicts that have been done without congressional authorization, Panama, Grenada, Libya, have always been very confined in their goals and short in duration, usually less than a month, two months at the most.
President Trump has taken us into an endless conflict with drug narratives, as he calls them, in Venezuela without any congressional approval, and frankly, also without an adequate explanation.
We've had some classified briefs.
They waited a couple of months before they actually even started briefing Congress in a classified setting.
We have not had the Secretary of Defense or the Secretary of State come before the appropriate Congressional Committee, Armed Services or Foreign Affairs, and said, this is what we're doing.
This is why we're doing it.
This is where it's going.
And then to be questioned by the people's representatives.
Okay, where is it really going?
There's been no effort to do that.
So I think this significantly undermines our Constitution is a massive expansion of presidential power.
Basically, what the president has decided is that we are now going to have the death penalty for drug traffickers.
But further, not only are we going to have the death penalty, but Trump is going to be judge, jury, and executioner.
He's not going to have to show any evidence or probable cause.
He's going to make the decision and he's going to start killing people.
That, again, is a massive expansion of presidential power.
Congressman Adam Smith on our network here on the Washington Journal talking about the president's strikes against Venezuela, the boats coming from Venezuela and his threat to the country.
We're asking all of you, do you oppose or support President Trump's handling of foreign policy?
The Britannica.com website says that the strikes form a part of a broader U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean, where roughly 10,000 troops, at least eight naval warships, two B-52 aircraft, and MQ-9 Reaper drones have been deployed in recent months.
Sterling in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, a Democratic caller, good morning to you.
Sterling's thoughts there in Alabama Democratic Caller.
Let's go to that moment the caller was talking about, and that is from February of 2025, President Trump confronting the Ukrainian President Zelensky during a visit in the Oval Office.
President Trump and the Ukrainian President Zelensky in the Oval Office back in February, about a month into the president's first year of his second term.
From the Council on Foreign Relations, the war in Ukraine, nearly four years since Russia's February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia still occupies roughly 20% of the country after gaining over 4,000 square kilometers of territory in 2024.
Russia continues to bombard Ukrainian cities while Ukraine maintains drone attacks on Russian oil infrastructure and military sites.
Since January 2022, Ukraine has received about $175 billion in aid from the United States and $197 billion in aid from the European Union.
Fighting and airstrikes have inflicted over 53,000 civilian casualties, while 3.7 million people are internally displaced and 6.9 million have fled Ukraine.
12.7 million people need humanitarian assistance.
Robert in Indiana, a Republican.
Let's get your take on the president's foreign policy.
Okay, Robert's thoughts are Republican in Indiana.
Larnell, Maryland, Democratic caller.
What do you say?
unidentified
Hey, thanks for taking my call.
I am a combat veteran.
I am the father of a young man that's serving in the military.
I'm an uncle of two young men that are serving in the military.
First and foremost, this operation that's going on off Venezuela's coast, the Coast Guard and the Navy have snipers that are trained to shoot out the engines of those boats.
Those individuals are then left afloat, and once they're too hungry and too hot, they surrender.
You then get the drugs.
You then sit down, talk to those people, and find out where the drugs are coming from if you're serious about stopping this and not killing people.
So we know they're not serious about stopping this.
That's the first thing.
This foreign policy that folks want to believe this man is pursuing, it is not.
It is absolutely a distraction.
You can look at the fact that in Afghanistan right now, we don't have things as calm as folks want us to believe.
It is incredibly insulting to tell Canada they need to be our 51st state.
And meanwhile, folks in Kentucky are now finding out that they're going to pause the production of whiskey.
That is hurting the economy.
This foreign policy is a farce, and everything, and I'll be out of your way, everything leads back to the Epstein files.
You heard from a Republican and a Democrat back to back there, one in support and one opposed.
That's what we're asking all of you this morning on the president's handling of foreign policy.
Take a look at the average of polls from Real Clear Politics.
When they looked at polls asking the president's job approval in certain areas, on foreign policy, the average polls show a disapproval rate of 54% and an approval rate of 43% when it comes to foreign policy.
Sal in New Jersey, a Republican, we'll turn to you.
unidentified
Hey, Dylan, good morning.
I just wanted to say a few things.
President Trump's doing the best job he can do with the cards he's dealt.
And he's got a lot of troubles after four years of Biden, so he's doing the best he can.
And I don't understand.
I watched the Remercan Revolution, George Washington.
If you don't show strength like we did against England, this country would have been toast.
He's doing the same thing with his policies, showing strength.
These other countries will walk all over us.
We have to show we're strong, and that's what I see.
These people bringing drugs into the country, you see these boats with four motors on the back of them.
I mean, nobody's talking about the kids they killed, the teenagers, the middle-aged people taking the fentanyl that killed them.
How come nobody's saying anything about that?
They're worried about these people getting blown up on these boats.
He's the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, urging members of both parties to demand the president come to Congress before deploying the U.S. military.
Here's what he had to say last week.
unidentified
So if this is about regime change, it seems to me that the administration should say that's what it is and should come to Congress to ask for that authorization, which has not taken place.
So where I was hoping that we would have a serious discussion, you know, as I open the meeting, I basically said that this is about Congress and our authority to be a separate but equal branch of government and to make determinations, not the OLC,
not just the president by himself, because he's not the only one.
He's designed by our country, these oversights and separate legislative, the legislative, the executive, and the judiciary parts of government.
And it seems as though they're trying to eliminate who we are.
This is not Russia.
We're not Dumas, the Duma.
You cannot just do what you want to do as Vladimir Putin does.
This is the United States of America.
We have rules, we have regulations that must be followed.
And it's my job and our job, Democrat and Republicans, to hold the executive to that.
You know, I'm just shocked.
And, you know, when we saw some illegal acts done in the past by Richard Nixon, for example, it was Democrats and Republicans, or Republicans and Democrats that stood up.
And in this situation, it should be both of us standing up and saying that this president needs to come before this Congress in order to utilize military force.
Gregory Meeks, Democratic Congressman, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee there, talking about the president's handling of the military.
We're asking all of you this morning, do you support or oppose President Trump's handling of foreign policy?
Samkafa in Marietta, Georgia, Independent.
Good morning to you.
unidentified
Good morning, Greta.
And first of all, I want to say as a descendant of the enslaved, we are not immigrants because I get tired of people saying we all hear it.
No, we were captive.
That's not what an immigrant does.
Now, to get on with your question, really it is for me, it's mixed because there's certain things I like and certain things I disagree with.
What I disagree with is with what I disagree with, first of all, is what he's doing in Venezuela, which I disagree with.
And then what I do agree with is with him making NATO pay their fair share.
And I think the European Union should, the European Union should be taking care of what happens in Europe, not us.
And as far as what's going on with Gaza and the Israeli, I think he's mishandling that.
He's not being very just in the way that he is doing it because he's still allowing Israel to actually direct things.
So what else?
There's one thing I would like to say is that there's a saying, if you are America's enemy, it's bad.
But if you are America's friend, then it's illegal.
And the way that we act as a country is like a heavyweight prize fighter fighting lightweight.
We always want to get our, we want to pop our collars on weaker countries that we can overpower, but never those that are equal to us in power.
Her thoughts on opposing or supporting the president handling of foreign policy.
On X, one of our viewers notes, the world knows that President Trump is doing a great job on foreign policy matters.
You can propagandize with all of the manipulated poll numbers you can find.
But we can see the respect he gets from world leaders.
Totally support the president's work.
And then you have Sue in New Jersey.
Well, I understand it's good PR for President Trump to claim he's ended the war in Gaza.
There are so many unresolved issues in the Middle East.
Only step one of a 20-point plan has been implemented thus far.
It's too soon to tell if lasting peace will prevail.
The Prime Minister of Israel has come to Washington several times during the first year of President Trump's second term.
This from September at a joint White House press conference with the Israeli PM, President Trump outlining the plan to end the conflict in Gaza, which called for the immediate release of all hostages held by Hamas, ending of hostilities, and Israeli withdrawal over time.
But if accepted by Hamas, this proposal calls for the release of all remaining hostages immediately, but in no case more than 72 hours.
So the hostages are coming back.
And I hate even saying this from the standpoint doesn't sound right, but it is so important to the parents.
The bodies of the young men, I believe in almost all cases, the young men are coming back immediately.
I met with parents.
Their parents felt as strongly about getting the body of their dead boy back as they did as though the boy were alive and well.
It's so important to them.
And it means the immediate end to the war itself, not just Gaza.
It's the war itself.
Under the plan, Arab and Muslim countries have committed, and in writing in many cases, but I actually would take their word for it, the people I mentioned, I take their word for it, to demilitarize Gaza, and that's quickly.
Decommission the military capabilities of Hamas and all other terror organizations.
Do that immediately.
And we're relying on the countries that I named and others to deal with Hamas.
And I'm hearing that Hamas wants to get this done too.
And that's a good thing.
And destroy all terror infrastructure, including the tunnels, weapons of production facilities.
They have a lot of production facilities that we're destroying.
They'll also help train local police forces in the areas that we're discussing right now, in particular in and around Gaza.
Working with the new transitional authority in Gaza, all parties will agree on a timeline for Israeli forces to withdraw in phases.
They'll be withdrawing in phases.
No more shooting, hopefully, as progress is made toward achieving these goals.
Arab and Muslim nations need to be allowed the chance to fulfill these commitments of dealing with Hamas.
They have to deal with them because they were the one group that we have not dealt with.
I haven't dealt with them.
But the Arab countries are going to, and Muslim countries are going to be dealing with Hamas.
And I believe they've already been there.
I think they probably have an understanding.
And they haven't maybe mentioned that, but I would imagine they do.
Otherwise, they wouldn't have gone as far as they've gone.
You've got to mute your TV so that you know it's time to go.
All right, I'm going to go on to Bob in Wheeling, West Virginia, Republican.
Morning, Bob.
unidentified
Yes, ma'am.
Love your show.
I just want to say that I think Trump is doing great.
He's taking the war of drugs to them.
He's seizing that oil that is meant to go to places that fund terrorism.
And people on the Democratic side say, oh, and when they blow up these boats that are bringing drugs to our country, killing hundreds of thousands of us, and they go, those two went over the side.
And maybe they, oh, I just, I cannot accept it.
I think that it's time for, I don't want to sound harsh, I swear, but it is time to take the war to them and to stop that.
And as far as his other handling of other policies in Gaza and stuff, it's incredible what the left hates Benjamin Netanyahu.
You've got to admit it.
They hate Jews.
They hate Christians.
And I'm sorry to put it out there like that, but look at how many Democrats will not side with the slaughter of the Jewish people.
Now, maybe you'd clarify for me.
Is that Somalia or where's that slaughter going on right now of the Christians?
Today we're talking about foreign policy and the president's handling of it here this morning on the Washington Journal.
We showed you an average of real clear politics on foreign policy, and 54% disapprove, 43% approve.
When you look at his immigration numbers, that caller was just talking about immigration.
That, of course, related to foreign policy as well.
50% disapprove, while 47% approve when you look at the average of poll numbers.
On the economy, also tied to foreign policy, 55% disapprove, 41% approve.
And on inflation subset there of the economy, you can see the president's job approval disapproval rating going up to 63%, while 36% approve on his efforts of inflation.
This morning, we're talking about foreign policy and the president's handling of it.
Tony in Buffalo, New York.
Democratic caller.
Hi, Tony.
unidentified
Good morning, brother.
Morning.
First of all, this is no longer the Biden administration.
This is the Trump administration.
Do you realize that when Biden was the president, he went by Shrine to visit Witzelinsky in Ukraine?
All right, Tony, I'm going to jump in at that point because let's listen to Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina, last Sunday on Meet the Press, warned about Russian intentions in Ukraine.
Let me ask you about the other major conflict you're focused on, Ukraine.
I want to read some comments Secretary of State Marco Rubio made to Vanity Fair about President Putin.
He said, quote, there are offers on the table right now to basically stop this war at its current lines of contact, which includes substantial parts of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, which they controlled since 2014.
And the Russians continue to turn it down.
And so you start to wonder: well, maybe what this guy wants is the entire country.
Do you think President Trump is underestimating President Putin's willingness to stay in this war?
I'm not so sure he's underestimating his willingness.
I think we're overestimating the people negotiating who are good friends Putin's willingness to end the war.
Listen, we've made great progress between Ukraine, Europe, and the United States to come up with a proposal that would end the war.
We're not going to evict every Russian out of Ukraine.
I understand that.
But I want a deal that would prevent a third invasion.
I want European troops on the ground to make sure there's no third invasion.
I want us to give security guarantees to Ukraine to make sure there's no third invasion.
I think Putin's going to continue to take the Donbass by force until we increase pressure.
So here's what I think.
We're going to be loosey with the football if we don't watch it.
We keep engaging Russia.
We keep engaging trying to lure Putin to the peace table, and he rebuffs all of our efforts.
If he says no this time, here's what I hope President Trump will do.
Signed my bill that has 85 co-sponsors and put tariffs on countries like China who buy cheap Russian oil.
Make Russia a state sponsor of terrorism for kidnapping 20,000 Ukrainian kids.
And most importantly, seize ships that are carrying sanctioned Russian oil like you're doing in Venezuela.
If Putin says no, we need to dramatically change the game, including giving tomahawk missiles to Ukraine to hit the drone and missile factories that exist in Russia.
Senator Lindsey Graham from last Sunday's Meet the Press on NBC with his take on the Russia-Ukraine war and where the negotiations stand and what he would like to see the Trump administration do next when it comes to the conflict there.
We're asking you this morning, do you oppose or support President Trump's handling of foreign policy?
Part of that is his trade policy with other countries.
Earlier this month on the Washington Journal, Republican Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, member of the Agriculture Committee, criticized President Trump's trade and tariff policy, specifically noted China and soybeans.
From the Washington Journal, our conversation earlier this month with Congressman Don Bacon, a Republican of Nebraska, we're asking this morning if you support or oppose President Trump's handling of foreign policy.
Peter is next in New Mexico, independent.
unidentified
Oh, okay.
Thank you.
Morning.
Good morning.
First thing I would like to say is: Senator Graham is a warmerer.
He supported every war, including the Iraq war, the Afghanistan war.
He's never not supported a war.
So his thoughts are just all about war.
When you bring up Kuhn, Senator Kuhn, that guy supported Biden.
He was actually part of his election campaign.
That dude lied to us about Biden's capacity.
And so why people even listen to him?
That guy lies all the time.
All the time.
Senator Kuhn.
And then the other thing I wanted to mention was I lost my chance.
All right, I'll go on to Tom, who's in Hyde Park, New York, Republican.
Tom.
unidentified
Hi, good morning.
I'd give President Trump an overall good rating for his conduct of foreign policy on the plus side.
He's encouraged the Europeans to spend more on their own defense, which has been a position that both Democratic and Republican administrations have held for a long time.
In the Pacific, I read recently that the U.S. government will be supplying Taiwan with around $11 billion of weaponry to help them deter China.
And he's also strengthened our alliances with Japan and Australia in the region.
Also, the bombing of the nuclear facility in Iran, that should have been bombed years ago, and it took President Trump the time, the opportunity to do it.
He supported Israel throughout the war in Gaza, whereas the Biden administration was constantly hamstringing Israel from conducting the war.
On the negative side, I tend to disagree with where he's going with the tariffs.
I think I'm pretty much a free trade advocate.
But tariffs don't need to be applied to every country.
They can certainly be used selectively against our enemies.
And finally, in Venezuela, I think he needs to go to Congress and ask for permission to engage militarily, if needed, the Venezuelans.
But I think he needs to frame the argument not related to drugs, but more related to the fact that the Maduro regime is illegitimate.
It's stolen two elections.
It's allied with our enemies, Russia, Iran, and China, and he needs to establish American primacy in the hemisphere.
A short time ago, the U.S. military carried out massive precision strikes on the three key nuclear facilities in the Iranian regime, Ford, Natans, and Esfahan.
Everybody heard those names for years as they built this horribly destructive enterprise.
Our objective was the destruction of Iran's nuclear enrichment capacity and a stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world's number one state sponsor of terror.
Tonight I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success.
Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.
Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace.
If they do not, future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier.
For 40 years, Iran has been saying death to America, death to Israel.
They have been killing our people, blowing off their arms, blowing off their legs with roadside bombs.
That was their specialty.
We lost over a thousand people, and hundreds of thousands throughout the Middle East and around the world have died as a direct result of their hate.
In particular, so many were killed by their general, Qasem Soleimani.
I decided a long time ago that I would not let this happen.
It will not continue.
I want to thank and congratulate Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.
We worked as a team like perhaps no team has ever worked before.
And we've gone a long way to erasing this horrible threat to Israel.
I want to thank the Israeli military for the wonderful job they've done.
And most importantly, I want to congratulate the great American patriots who flew those magnificent machines tonight and all of the United States military on an operation the likes of which the world has not seen in many, many decades.
Hopefully, we will no longer need their services in this capacity.
President Trump in June announcing those strikes on Iran's nuclear sites flanked there by his Vice President, Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Oppose or support President Trump's handling of foreign policy.
Duane's been waiting in Michigan.
A Democratic caller, your turn.
unidentified
Yes, I'm looking at the picture of Trump and the three stooges.
1982, the executive director of the United Nations Environmental Program predicted that by the year 2000, climate change would cause a global catastrophe.
He said that it will be irreversible as any nuclear holocaust would be.
This is what they said at the United Nations.
What happened?
Here we are.
Another UN official stated in 1989 that within a decade, entire nations could be wiped off the map by global warming.
Not happening.
You know, it used to be global cooling.
If you look back years ago in the 1920s and the 1930s, they said global cooling will kill the world.
We have to do something.
Then they said global warming will kill the world.
But then it started getting cooler.
So now they could just call it climate change because that way they can't miss.
It's climate change.
Because if it goes higher or lower, whatever the hell happens, there's climate change.
It's the greatest conjob ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion.
Climate change, no matter what happens, you're involved in that.
No more global warming, no more global cooling.
All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong.
They were made by stupid people that have cost their countries fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success.
If you don't get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.
And I'm really good at predicting things, you know.
They actually said during the campaign they had a hat, the best-selling hat.
Trump was right about everything.
And I don't say that in a braggadocious way, but it's true.
I've been right about everything.
And I'm telling you that if you don't get away from the green energy scam, your country is going to fail.
And if you don't stop people that you've never seen before, that you have nothing in common with, your country is going to fail.
President Trump, at the United Nations General Assembly, before other world leaders on global climate change, we're asking you if you support or oppose President Trump's handling of foreign policy.
We're going to return to this conversation in our last hour of today's Washington Journal.
So if you missed it, you can call in at that point.
Joe is our last here right now in Iowa Democratic Caller.
Joe, go ahead.
unidentified
Yeah, good morning, Greta.
Great subject.
Very much in my ballpark.
I'm a farmer that farms about 600 acres.
There is climate change.
I have seen things happen.
I'm absolutely against the way Trump is handling subjects on foreign policy.
I'm also a flight attendant who travels the world.
The world is irritated at us.
They're tired of having us be this authoritarian.
And I am getting so tired of Donald Trump and his administration not going with facts.
I don't think they have facts.
Greta, I wish you a happy holiday.
I think you're the best, and I'm looking forward to the next segment that you guys got coming up about speech.
Okay, Joe and Iowa, Democratic caller, thank you for that segue.
Up next, Washington Journal's annual Holiday Authors Week series continues this morning.
Nine days of authors from across the political spectrum whose books shine the spotlight on important aspects of American life.
This morning's featured author is Greg Lukianoff, President and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, discussing his book, The War on Words: 10 Arguments Against Free Speech and Why They Fail.
unidentified
we'll be right back 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.
Revisit speeches that moved a nation, hearings that shape debates, and the authors, leaders, and thinkers that define the year.
Our highlights include key speeches with this year's most impactful speeches from elected leaders and influential voices.
Book TV book fairs featuring author conversations and interviews from our book fairs across the country.
Memorable moments with some of this year's most watched and talked about C-SPAN programming.
President Trump and foreign leaders with key coverage of events both at home and overseas.
America's Book Club, featuring a special lineup from our new weekly series of thought-provoking conversations with host David Rubinstein and leading authors.
America 250 highlights the events, conversations, and reflections marking our nation's semi-quincentennial in Memorial.
Remembering the political figures, public servants, and other influential people who've passed away in 2025.
Key congressional hearings that sparked debate and captured public attention.
Voices of 2025 with book TV and American History TV's compelling interviews and discussions with historians, scholars, and authors who shaped the national conversation.
Watch our in-depth look at the people and events that defined 2025, C-SPAN's year-end marathon.
All week through the new year on the C-SPAN Networks.
For our complete marathon schedule, head over to our website, c-span.org.
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.
The thing that I appreciate about Rom is while we differed, particularly after he led the charge for the Democrats to defeat the Republican majority in 2006, I always felt still too soon.
This morning we continue with our annual Holiday Authors Week and nine days of conversations with America's top writers from across the political spectrum on a variety of public policy and political topics.
This morning's featured author is Greg Lukianov, president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
He's discussing his new book, The War on Words, 10 Arguments Against Free Speech and Why They Fail.
Mr. Lukianov, let's just begin with the state of free speech in America today.
Well, you know, fire's been around for 26 years, my organization.
We mostly focus on campus at first, but then we expanded what we do to beyond campus.
So we have tons of data to look at the situation.
And a lot of the threats, for example, on campus, you know, used to come from the left, the, you know, what might be called wokeness or political correctness.
This year, the majority of the threats have actually come from the right.
They've come from the off-campus.
They've come from the Trump administration.
They've come from individual politicians.
So right now on campus, it's the worst of both worlds.
But also off campus, I have seen cases.
We are currently, we just filed a lawsuit this past week in defense of an ex-cop named Larry Bushart.
He was arrested and held for 37 days for a mean, basically making fun of Trump while also being somewhat dismissive about a vigil being held for Charlie Kirk after he died.
Now, you can dislike him for that.
You can think that was inappropriate or whatever, but it's unquestionably protected.
And if you're looking at 37 days in jail for clearly protected speech, you have to go back to the 1920s to see something like that.
You know, he came in with very big promises of freedom of speech.
JD Vance, you know, he took a lot of criticism for when he went to Europe and pointed out how bad the situation is in Europe.
And by the way, JD Vance is entirely right.
It's been a disastrous scenario, both in the EU and in the UK.
And they made big promises of protecting freedom of speech.
But since being in office, they have targeted law firms, they have targeted media, they have targeted higher education in blatantly unconstitutional ways over and over again, including actually picking up some of the weapons that they used to decry on the left, like the use of hate speech, in order to punish speech that the current president hates.
Well, the most important thing about the book is this was my opportunity to write with one of my heroes, the former president of the ACLU, who I met as a fanboy back when I was in law school, the great Nadine Strawson.
And we have spent our careers, hers much longer than mine, answering specific questions about freedom of speech so many times that we figured, okay, we're just going to write these down and put them in a book.
And by the way, relating to your previous question, one of the questions we answer is what we hear a lot of times is people on the left claiming that free speech is a right-wing value.
And of course, that's all flipping over right now.
And basically, it's because there's so much misinformation about freedom of speech.
Nadine and I thought just putting it in a simple collection of responses to the most common arguments against free speech and pointing out why they're not as strong as you might think they are was a really good use of our time.
Words are violence was something that I saw early in my career, starting back in 2001, as kind of a rhetorical escalation, a way of basically saying, I want to censor you, but that sounds bad.
So I'm going to recast your harsh words or allegedly harsh words as violence.
But I think as the years went on, younger people consistently began to sort of believe this, that there's no real distinction between speech and action.
And we'll point out that it's a societal decision, for example, that we draw a bright line distinction, thanks to the First Amendment in the United States, but traditions of free speech everywhere else, between speech and action.
And I say, yeah, I mean, to a degree, everything's in your subjective reality.
But at the same time, that distinction is one of the best technologies, really, that we've ever developed for peace, for prosperity, for innovation, and for authenticity.
The First Amendment was passed and it's respected under the misunderstanding that words can't be dangerous.
And our answer to that is nonsense.
Words are protected precisely because they're powerful, because they can change minds, because they can move democracies, because they can change hearts.
If words weren't powerful, there'd be no reason to protect them.
But solving things through speech and argumentation and persuasion is infinitely better than the way societies have done this traditionally, which is violence or the threat of violence.
The greatest marketing success of the censorship movement of the last 50 years has been trying to recast mean-spirited, sometimes bigoted, sometimes sexist speech as hate speech.
And if you're wondering why in the UK, they are arresting something like 12,000 people a year is one of the estimates for speech, for online speech, it's because of the success of hate speech theory.
That's what happens when essentially you say, well, you know, if we're offended, if we think what you're saying is highly offensive, you end up with selective prosecution of opinions that the people in power are uncomfortable with.
So hate speech isn't an exception to free speech in the United States, to be very clear.
And there are tens of millions of young people who think it is.
And we have to debunk this argument all the time.
We have something very clever in First Amendment law called the bedrock principle that came out of the famous Texas v. Johnson flag burning case, that in the U.S., you cannot ban speech simply because it's offensive.
And with that bedrock principle, there's no such thing as a hate speech exception in the United States.
Well, it started on campus back in the 1970s and 80s.
And I think that in the K-through PhD educational system, this is reinforced over and over again.
I don't think students are taught good lessons about freedom of speech.
In fact, my first book was called Unlearning Liberty, because I actually thought that we were teaching students to think like censors, not like equal citizens in a free society.
So I think that the misinformation on hate speech goes deep.
I do think it ultimately started on campus.
But the K-PhD system has not been doing a good job or really much of an effort at all to correct this misapprehension.
The way we're able to have a democracy is that we can speak with candor and honesty.
And what people really tend to forget is that laws are enforced by people.
There's this idea, the very, to be honest, naive idea, no offense, Timbo, but that essentially all you have to do is pass a law, and of course it's going to be enforced in the way intended.
That's nonsense.
That's never the way it works.
If you give power a special exception to free speech and you just call it something really nice and they're going to call it something nice because they need to have a PR victory on that, you end up having a situation where the government then gets to pick and choose who to punish and when and why.
So for example, right now, one of the things that's going on in the UK is people who are getting arrested oftentimes are people who are complaining, sometimes nastily, sometimes not, about problems created by mass immigration.
About radioactive topic, sure.
And make people uncomfortable?
Sure.
Important to be able to discuss honestly and fairly in a democracy?
You bet it is.
So do not give power more power in hopes that that will work out to your or anyone else's benefit.
This is also something that a lot of students don't seem to understand.
Some do and don't care.
But 2023 and 2024 were the two worst years for shoutdowns, as best we can tell in American campus history.
And we don't mean like heckling or just someone saying, boo, and someone takes the stage.
We're talking about when students show up and they make sure that no one else can hear the speaker because they don't want that speaker to be heard.
And that is the most primitive, most basic form of censorship in probably in human history.
A crowd of angry people deciding you cannot hear this speaker because I don't approve of them.
It is, you know, it's mob authoritarianism.
It is the kind of mob censorship that the First Amendment was inspired to protect, was inspired to not protect, to avoid these kind of conclusions.
So I do think that the problem of shoutdowns, when people try to claim, oh, it's just us exercising our free speech to make sure no one else hears the speaker, it's nonsense.
Mark, our first caller here on our line for Democrats.
unidentified
Mark, what do you say about free speech?
Well, the first thing is I think free speech is under the worst attack that I've seen in my lifetime.
And I think that we definitely need fire involved now.
Mom Dami got elected in New York City despite the fact that all these Jewish groups and all these Israel lobby groups came out against him.
In New York State, you have mob rule when you go against certain groups and we were sending $30 billion to Israel, but we're cutting the VA and people aren't getting their Medicaid and Medicare.
You cannot criticize certain people like Jews in Israel lobby and criticism of what's going on in the Middle East without being called an anti-Semite.
That is the one thing that they did to Jesus 2,000 years ago and now they're doing to Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk who was assassinated because his free speech was offending people.
I do think the Trump administration has relied on using the argument that essentially they're cracking down on anti-Semitism on campus to expand its power and to use that argument against higher ed.
However, I want to be really clear here.
I've been doing this for 25 years almost.
There is a real anti-Semitism problem on college campuses, but it's not defined as mere criticism of Israel.
It's defined as anti-Semitic harassment, which means a pattern of discriminatory behavior directed at individuals because of a protected characteristic that is severe, persistent, and pervasive.
And that's not protected.
And that was happening, by the way, in 2023 and 2024.
The shoutdowns that I mentioned, by the way, were overwhelmingly, I think all but about three of those examples were pro-Palestinian students.
So I, and the argument that you can't criticize Israel, I see an awful lot of criticism of Israel at the moment.
I've seen among certain cohorts of students more discomfort in criticizing Hamas.
We'll go to Julius next, Philadelphia, Independent.
unidentified
Yeah, great, great conversation today.
I really like how this author has talked about the sort of fiction or this exception for hate speech.
You know, the speech that needs to be protected is always disliked.
Speech that's pretty, that everyone likes needs no protection.
So by definition, if we're going to have freedom of speech, it's always going to be hated speech.
And then I would like to dig in a little bit more to just some of the issues, I think, with free speech in the country.
One is just the concentration of media.
You know, it's like five companies that own it.
And so I think that is creating a situation where there's so many false narratives, right?
So you can almost harm free speech by just putting out so much filth and garbage so that people are arguing and bickering about stuff that's nonsense anyway.
It's really interesting.
The previous caller had talked about Israel.
And there's no doubt in my mind that there is hatred toward different groups, Asians, African Americans, and even Jews.
But what I see happening on college campuses is not a hatred toward Jews.
In fact, I see many of the students that are protesting, they are Jewish students, and what they're protesting is something very specific.
And I think the news gets this wrong a lot.
They're protesting Zionism, which is a form of nationalism.
It's very dangerous.
And what Israel has been doing is not a war.
It's a genocide.
The rest of the world pretty much agrees.
It wasn't ever a war.
It was a genocide.
We don't have a current ceasefire.
Israel is violating that daily.
And so I do agree with that previous caller that there is a way in which we're not allowed to criticize Israel.
And then Israel's lobby is really strong here.
It's something called AIPAC.
Everyone's afraid of them if you're a politician.
That's changing now.
I think the recent, he talked about the recent election in New York where Mamdani won.
That was with, and the previous caller had said that there was a lot of Jewish people acting against that.
Actually, Mamdani won a majority of the Jewish vote.
And so again, this conflating Zionism and Jewish is a very, very violent thing.
So I'm not Jewish, but I do see a lot of people saying it's not anti-Semitic, it's anti-Zionist.
And then the next thing is a series of anti-Semitic sort of stereotypes, you know, about them controlling everything and them being super powerful and even like even cruder stereotypes.
So I'm a little less sympathetic to just the all-purpose, oh, this isn't anti-Semitic, this is anti-Zionist.
But that's a personal opinion.
I do think that when we talk about powerful lobbies, one of the more powerful lobbies that's underappreciated is Qatari, for example, is some of the Middle Eastern money that's coming in.
China's power influence on campuses is huge.
My colleague Sarah McLaughlin wrote a great book called Authoritarians in the Academy, specifically about how much Chinese policy harms free speech on American campuses.
But also, the next runner-up there is Qatar.
So I do think the, but when he opened up by talking about media consolidation, I'm a civil libertarian.
So I want to make sure that the number one opponent of human freedom historically doesn't get too much power.
So yes, corporations can abuse their powers and all that kind of stuff.
What I'm the most worried about, though, is governmental control over those institutions, governmental abuse of those institutions, governmental takeovers of those institutions.
So what Trump has been doing, for example, with the mergers and holding that very explicitly over the groups, over Paramount, CBS, and all these other groups' heads to try to get them to change their coverage, that's unlike anything I've seen in American history.
And if you're worried about corporations, you should be much more worried about state-controlled corporations.
Yeah, that's an argument that we get that essentially free speech, free speech might have all been well and good in 1792, but we're facing a different time now.
We're facing different circumstances.
And I get that this argument sounds maybe initially persuasive, but people, if you study human history, this argument gets made for every new innovation, whether it's radio, television, internet, certainly social media, that free speech time has essentially passed.
But people then very quickly jump and the government needs to do something about it.
That essentially the government needs to have greater power over social media companies, like as they're doing in the EU to a ridiculous extent.
That essentially the solution is going to be new laws and new powers over speech.
And again, that is going to accrue to the benefit of power.
That's going to accrue to the policy preferences of the Trump administration or the bureaucrats in Brussels or whatever's going on in the UK.
We'll go to Greg, who's in Glen Allen, Virginia, Independent.
Greg, you're next.
unidentified
Yeah, good morning.
So I think that the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court has to go down as one of the worst Supreme Court decisions because it made this weak or unnatural connection between free speech and political donations.
And that has led now to all this political corruption in Washington, D.C. and the amount of money that it takes to run for office.
It's just created a huge, I think it's been damaging to our country in a big way because of the amount of money now that's involved in politics.
So I wonder if you could comment.
You probably disagree.
I wonder if you could comment on this unnatural and weak connection between freedom of speech and campaign finance.
Well, first of all, fire largely stays out of campaign finance.
Like we're pretty, we have a pretty broad ambit, but there are other organizations that entirely specialize in that.
So that's not our area of specialization.
However, I do think Citizens United is consistently a misrepresented and misunderstood case.
The law that was challenged under Citizens United for McCain Feingold required lawyers to go into the Supreme Court and argue, and this was a real question.
They were asked a question by one of the justices.
Would this law require you to ban, say, an unflattering book about Hillary Clinton that was released during the election season?
And the answer was yes.
That is unquestionably a violation of the First Amendment.
So people need to remember that the law at issue in Citizens United, and it had everything from like whether or not you could put up like campaign posters and nonsense like that, it was laughably unconstitutional.
Am I sympathetic to the argument that Citizens United went far further than it needed to?
I get that.
I do get that.
But I do think like the problem of money in politics has to meet the problem of what if government has the power to control how much money you spend?
Because you can destroy entire causes if you want to, if suddenly the government can decide how much money goes to that cause or to that person or to that, well, actually to that cause or organization.
As far as the law is concerned, they don't really draw a perfect distinction between those two things.
Because the truth is, lies are protected speech in the United States.
Not in all circumstances, to be very, very clear.
So for example, if I were to say that I know for a fact that you engaged in the, that you've sexually abused a child, you know, that could easily be defamation, depending on the way I put it.
So that's a case where a lie is not protected.
But we have seen cases where people say, oh, you know, I won the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Well, in the U.S., you don't go to jail for that.
You're a jerk.
But at the same time, it's not a crime to claim that.
So lying can be fraud in some cases, but lying can be protected in other cases as well.
Now, what's the difference between that and exaggeration?
Exaggeration is usually understood, like the word that we use a lot in law is hyperbole.
And if it's really clear that you're saying, you know, that, you know, President Lyndon Johnson was the worst president of the last, you know, 60 billion years, obviously you're kidding.
Also, it's expression of opinions.
There's lots of reasons why that's protected as well.
But that essentially it's a way of signaling that you're not to be taken seriously.
So if someone said the same thing that I opened up with that I call defamation, but in a way to make it really clear that you're exaggerating to a degree that signals people, I'm not making an actual factual statement.
I'm just expressing that I'm really mad about something.
That is also makes our jobs easier because if it's hyperbolic, it's clearly protected.
Nobody can be meant to be defrauded by something saying that these diet pills will help you lose 120 pounds a day.
Greg Lukianov is part of our series, Author's Series Week here on C-SPAN's Washington Journal, Nine Days of Conversations with America's Top Writers from Across Political Spectrums.
Greg Lukianov is the CEO and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and the author of the book, The War on Words, 10 Arguments Against Free Speech and Why They Fail.
We want to get your thoughts on free speech this morning.
Republicans dial in at 202-748-8001.
Democrats, 202-748-8000.
And Independents, 202-748-8002.
You can text if you don't want to call at 202-748-8003.
Here's a text from Ann in Pittsburgh.
Your speaker says shutdowns are censorship.
What does he say about Mr. Trump's tactic of speaking over people until they shut up, like he did with Zelensky and so many women journalists?
Of speaking over people, like in a conversation, it's rude.
It's certainly protected.
When the idea of how a shoutdown is censorship is essentially saying that, like, I'm shutting down this talk, this play you came to see, I'm not going to let you see.
Someone having a heated argument where they're speaking over each other, that's, you know, that's considered rude.
That's considered inappropriate in some cases.
But particularly in a press conference, it's also not unheard of, to say the least.
But I think a lot of times people want things that are merely showing bad manners to be somehow punishable.
And I think they'd want that until they realized that a standard that vague could get them or people they love or people they support punished quite often.
This is an argument that I've gotten my whole career, even though some of my most famous first cases went way back after, right after 9-11, were defending left-wing people's free speech for saying sometimes pretty insensitive things about the attacks, for example.
But nonetheless, partially because we were focused on campus initially, and a lot of the threats we were seeing were from the left, even though they weren't all, and we were always there for every case of someone getting in trouble from threats from the right.
It was very convenient to just say, well, these free speech absolutists, which by the way, there is no such thing as a free speech absolutist, are just right-wing ideologues who just want to shut down higher education and all this kind of stuff.
And the term for it is a thought-terminating cliché that essentially, that if I just label you right-wing, I don't have to listen to you anymore.
It's a childish way of arguing that the right does it too by calling someone woke or lived hard or like whatever.
Just some way of saying like, I'm going to label you and now I don't have to listen to you anymore.
But it was a very common argument that essentially, and we still run into it to this day, particularly by people who don't bother to do their homework, that if we take a case that they don't like, we're immediately considered right-wing.
That's just them not understanding free speech is supposed to be for everybody or it's for nobody.
Greg, could you speak a little bit about the history of free speech?
I believe it originated in this country because of the Enlightenment and their experience dealing with monarchs and people who have power.
And what free speech really does is it gives you a tool to deal with authoritarians.
And for example, I think that there was certainly no free speech in Russia among the Bolsheviks.
There was certainly no free speech in Nazi Germany.
And if you do away with free speech, what you're doing is you're giving power to the authoritarians, whether it's our government or the next authoritarian that may appear.
And certainly, no, there was no disagreeing with Lenin.
There was no disagreeing with Hitler under those regimes.
And certainly, you know, the great bulwark of our liberty is freedom of speech.
And it's the thing that makes us, defines us, frankly, as a free people in an authoritarian society, in our anarchical society, and certainly in a totalitarian society.
You're not permitted your own opinions as a way to sort of protest the government or counterbalance it.
But I do think that the history of free speech goes well beyond that.
And this is something that I do think that a lot of young people don't understand, is that we really tried to have a blanket protection against encroachments on freedom of speech, partially because it was seen as a natural, also known as a human right, that essentially adheres to individuals and it's something that is sacred to them and is simply a part of actually being a human.
But interestingly, it is also a way to protect minority points of view.
That essentially, I joke a lot of times that people make the argument that free speech, that young people seem to come in to college thinking that free speech is just the argument of the bully, the bigot, and the robber baron.
And I always argue, listen, that's just bad history.
The robber baron, the rich and powerful are protected by being rich and powerful.
They don't need a special protection for free speech like the First Amendment.
And if the bully and the bigot have enough votes, they still get to call the shots.
You only need a special protection for freedom of speech to protect minority points of view.
So basically people who are unpopular with two different kinds of groups.
One, the powerful, the elites, ruling class, whatever you want to call them, and the majority.
So I think free speech does protect us from authoritarianism, but I think it goes even deeper than that.
Oh, man, I'm laughing because Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in an opinion back when Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Supreme Court justice around the time of World War I and into the 1920s, very famous.
He argued before he became, shall we say, good on free speech, that an anarchist group or a communist group organizing to say that people should resist the draft, that was like shouting fire in a crowded theater.
Sorry, falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater such that it creates a panic.
And what's interesting about this is that quote was from an opinion that came before the change, that also Oliver Wendell Holmes experienced going from being really bad on free speech to being one of its first real champions, along with the great Louis Brandeis.
So they're referencing an opinion that was basically used to justify punishing people for merely having politically non-conforming points of view.
But one of the reasons why that term frustrates First Amendment people as well is that it gets trotted out with all of the falsely such that it creates a panic removed being like, well, that's like shouting fire in a crowded theater.
Obviously, that's not protected.
And it's like, well, one, there is no case that says that you can't shout fire in a crowded theater.
The play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern shouted fire at a crowded theater every single night of its production to make the point that it's like, well, it's actually not really that simple, but it's also trotted out for the most ridiculous of things.
I feel like I wouldn't be surprised by a senator saying, it's like, we just passed this new law saying you can't insult me because surely you don't want to be able to shout fire in a crowded theater.
It gets pulled out for the most trivial of reasons, even though it is a piece of dicta, a piece of just language and law that has no real legal force from an opinion back when people thought you should be able to go to jail if you oppose the war.
Yeah, and to be clear, Sue, you absolutely can wear shirts with what you want on them.
And that is protected by the First Amendment.
You absolutely have a right to wear that shirt.
It gets a little more complicated because it's at a workplace scenario where your employer can decide to fire you for good or bad reasons.
Depending on what the confrontation was like, that the private company would be also in its right to kick that customer out if she's flipping out at an employee.
That's something that would have been within their power to do as a private employer.
They also have the power to decide rightly or wrongly to punish the employee for wearing it.
But what you're describing isn't so much a free speech in the First Amendment sense.
It's free speech in the free speech culture sense.
And my previous book, The Canceling of the American Mind, is about ideas about free speech culture and against cancel culture.
So if you're saying, I am going to get you fired, I'm going to get you punished because I don't like that you were wearing a MAGA hat or a Charlie Kirk shirt or a Bernie Sanders t-shirt.
That's something that you do have the right to demand that this person never work again.
But we make an argument, me and my co-author Ricky Schlott, make the argument that we should really be careful about when we do those kind of things in a free society.
Because essentially what you're saying is like, I have zero political tolerance for anyone who even makes me vaguely uncomfortable.
And that's ultimately bad for democracy if every employer believes that and every individual citizen believes that you have a right to an opinion, but not really a job.
I addressed it in my TED Talk from this past April.
It is one of the most common arguments that we hear is that the First Amendment freedom of speech only protects power.
And I say, listen, if power is not unpopular with the ruling class, if that institution of power is not unpopular with the ruling class or it's not unpopular with the majority, power is going to do just fine.
It's only in situations in which people are going after corporations because there's enough of majority vote or the powerful in government want to go after that particular speech that you start having issues.
But historically, what young people need to understand is, particularly if they're on the left, that free speech was the argument of John Lewis in the civil rights movement, of all of the civil rights leaders, of the leaders of the gay rights movement, of the leaders of the women's rights movement, understood that as, except for women, of course, as numerical minorities, they needed a special protection from the will of the majority and the will of the powerful.
So it has been one of the best protectors of the rights of minorities ever invented and very much intended to be that protector of numerical minority rights.
So I get the argument that sometimes when you see a corporation benefiting from protections of freedom of speech, there can be a sense of getting cynical about it.
But what doesn't get as much coverage is how many times regular citizens, and oftentimes it's fire defending them, are speaking truth to power and they would not stand a chance in a million years without the wonderful protections of free speech in the First Amendment.
This was a favorite argument of the Biden administration and one that made us all very nervous.
And this is more of a deep philosophical explanation, but people need to understand that one of the great revelations in human history is that truth is hard to know.
Our brains are designed to lie to us about permanence and certainty and all of these things in the name of survival and reproduction.
So we have this like unwarranted certainty kind of all the time.
So, but that means that when the scientific revolution began, when the Enlightenment began, and we started testing a lot of these folk wisdom ideas about like what, you know, like whether the sun goes around the earth or the other way around, for example, or heavy objects falling faster than lighter ones.
We started realizing, oh my God, we were wrong about everything.
And it turns out that when you apply structured friction, when you apply skepticism to the world around you, you start realizing that you've gotten a lot wrong.
So really, in a very real sense, the battle over what is true and what is real is the whole ballgame.
And the scariest scenario would be is if you gave government the power to decide what is misinformation or disinformation, that's giving them the power to decide what reality itself looks like.
And that's what totalitarians, that's the power they always wanted.
That's what the Bolsheviks wanted.
That's what the Nazis wanted and had.
I think that if you want A department of a ministry of truth in government, you should understand that what you're asking is to give power to the government, not just over, you know, the exclusive use of legitimate use of force, but also over telling you what reality looks like, no matter what your eyes claim it does.
Of course, Orwell's 1984 is all about the power to use the control of misinformation, disinformation to create tyranny.
Well, you are part of the reason that, so I love the word radical because I call my substack the eternally radical idea, because I make the point that free speech is not a conservative idea.
It's not a progressive idea.
It's a radical idea in every generation.
And how do you know this?
Because in every generation, people stand up to oppose freedom of speech, and they are usually on the winning side.
We should count ourselves as very lucky, you know, people my age and older, to have grown up at a time that free speech protections were increasing and they were increasing globally.
You know, I've spent a lot of my early years in the 1990s when it all seemed like small L liberalism, including free speech, had won the globe, had won the argument kind of forever.
And those are radical ideas.
Now, when it comes to who gets labeled radical and who, you know, and who cares about who gets labeled radical, one thing that I just love about fire is how we will fight for your right to support AOC or Bernie or to hate them, how we will fight for your right to support Trump and MAGA or oppose them as well, because that's what freedom is.
It's the ability to make up your own mind and speak accordingly.
The ability to think as you will and say what you think is the heart of a free people.
And there is a piece of misinformation propagated by particularly people like Richard Delgado, for example, one of the early proponents of hate speech codes on campus, one of the fathers of the theory of hate speech, essentially, which I say has been such a disaster for free speech globally.
He really and his wife, Jean Stefanik, really liked to rest their argument on the idea that, well, speech codes could have stopped the Holocaust or speech codes could have stopped Rwanda.
And this argument doesn't make any sense.
First of all, when you look at Nazi Germany, one thing that people don't understand is that people believe that Weimar Germany's sin was that it was too protective of freedom of speech.
Now, this is wrong for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that how would that have stopped people from wanting to elect Nazis?
That was a big part of the problem come the early 1930s.
But more importantly and more obviously, Weimar Germany was not protective of freedom of speech.
Nazis went to jail for saying anti-Semitic things, and they turned it into massive PR victories.
Hitler had speech restrictions placed on him after his arrest.
He couldn't speak on campuses.
And guess what?
He turned it into a PR coup.
So like the idea that it was too much free speech that created the Nazis doesn't make sense on every possible level, including just being historically wrong.
They tried to shut down the Nazis and they turned it into an advantage.
And when it comes to Rwanda, the idea that sort of speech codes could have prevented that shows a kind of shallow understanding of how thorough the control of the government was and how complicit it was, along with the radio stations, in the specific murder of actual individuals in the Rwandan genocide.
So even when you look at America with its very strong free speech protections, the kind of behavior that the radio networks and the government facilitated in order to carry out a genocide is not protected under American law.
If you get on the radio and tell, hunt these people down.
We know that they're at this building right there.
Go get them.
And knowing that they're going to kill them, that is not protected under American law.
So like the idea that kind of they needed, that Rwanda needed some kind of speech code and it would have fixed it is also politically naive because it doesn't actually understand the situation politically on the ground in Rwanda.
But it's also just foolish because even in our comparatively libertarian system, the behavior that they engage in wouldn't be protected.
But here's the question.
Who would have enforced that, those laws against Rwanda?
Because the government was very much at that point in favor of the genocide.
I really appreciate all the work you do for free speech.
I guess one thing I like to say is whenever somebody tells me that war is bad and war never accomplishes anything, I like to respond with, wherever there is free speech on this planet, somebody had to win a war to get it.
So there are good wars to fight.
In a specific case, I'd like to say the one time where I tried to use what I thought was free speech and wound up going to jail for it.
It's sort of embarrassing.
It happened long ago, but I said to a person, I'll give you lots of money to spend the night with me.
That's basically where speech is considered to be an incidental part of the commission of the crime.
In this case, it's, you know, I don't know if you were talking, I probably weren't talking to a prostitute, but if you were, either way, it would be considered soliciting prostitution.
So it's no more protected than the fact you use words to say your money or your life.
Like these are, these are kind of where speech is an incidental part of a commission of a crime.
The fact that you actually committed that crime using words isn't considered relevant.
To put it very simply, the purest understanding of freedom of speech is the mere expression, is the expression of opinion, not asking someone to sleep with you for money.
I mean, I get asked this a lot that essentially, and there was one person who I disagree with on practically everything, but who was really shocked that I didn't want there to be laws saying that private employers have to, they can't fire people on the basis of political expression.
It's like, oh, my God, you believe in freedom of speech?
I'm like, yes, and I believe in limitations on the power of government, because if you were to pass that law saying that employers can't fire their employees based on political expression, I am an employer.
Fire is about 135 people at this point.
What you would be opening the door to is a situation in which you could kind of get rid of nobody because everybody would then claim, I know I may have been asleep at work, but really you're going after me because of my McCain Palin pin, ironic pin.
So I very much oppose laws that require that.
I think that I also run a cause-based organization.
And if someone raised their hand one day and say, you know what, I actually think these books should be banned.
I really hate this book and this is a hill I will die on to get rid of this particular book.
I'd be like, hi, we're going to have a talk about why you shouldn't work at fire anymore because we defend freedom of speech.
So I know it sounds initially kind of persuasive that this should be the law of the land too.
But I think the way it would work out would be accruing way more power to the government and actually harming free speech in the rest of the world.
I remember Jerry Carter refusing to communicate anything of any significance or electronically.
He would write a letter.
Yeah, I'm wondering how we can pretend to have any kind of a free speech or even a real democracy when every word that we communicate electronically is recorded by the NSA and intelligence agencies.
I think that essentially, if you know that everything you're saying is being looked at by a third party, you are certainly not going to say what you really mean.
It's one of the reasons why I'm proud that Signal, at least to my knowledge, has stood up.
Two attempts by the UK and the EU to provide backdoor access.
I hope that's still true.
I'd be really disappointed if it wasn't.
I do think we need more private ways of communicating with each other because a truly surveilled society is one where people aren't going to be authentic.
They're not going to actually engage in candor.
They're going to really watch what they say.
So I do see the threat.
Fire doesn't do privacy directly, but we do talk a lot about how creating a situation in which people know that every word they say is being watched is disastrous for free society.
Greg Lukianov, the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, part of our author series here in the Washington Journal during this holiday season.
The book is The War on Words, 10 Arguments Against Free Speech and Why They Fail.
Thank you for the conversation this morning and happy holidays to you.
The thing that I appreciate about Rahm is while we differed, particularly after he led the charge for the Democrats to defeat the Republican majority in 2006, I always felt like...
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.
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After rebuilding the United States military in my first term, and with the addition we are adding right now, we have the most powerful military anywhere in the world, and it's not even close.
I've restored American strength, settled eight wars in 10 months, destroyed the Iran nuclear threat, and ended the war in Gaza, bringing for the first time in 3,000 years peace to the Middle East and secured the release of the hostages, both living and dead.
President Trump from last week on foreign policy, when you take a look at the average polls put together by RealClear Politics, they found that 54% of those polled in these surveys disapprove of the president's handling of foreign policy, while 43% approve.
You can take a look then below that on immigration and the economy, also tied to foreign policy, and you see the average disapproval rate at 50% for immigration.
47% approve of how he's handling immigration.
55% disapprove of the economy.
And 41% approve of the economy.
And of course, economy related to foreign policy on tariffs and trade.
We'll get to your calls here in just a minute on whether or not you support or oppose President Trump's handling of foreign policy.
But take a listen to the Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who held a news conference recently.
And this is what he had to say about the year President Trump had in 2025 on foreign policy.
At its core, the core principle of the national interest, the core principle behind our foreign policy needs to be our national interests.
So you have to, first of all, define what is the national interest and then you have to apply it.
We defined it as we are in favor of foreign policies that make America safer or stronger or more prosperous.
Hopefully all three, but at least one of those three.
And then it requires you to prioritize.
Even the richest, most powerful and influential country on earth has limited resources, has limited time.
And it has to be able to dedicate those resources and time through a process of prioritization.
That includes geographic prioritization.
It also includes issue prioritization.
And that's what we intend to do here.
Then you have to have the mechanisms of foreign policy to deliver on it.
In essence, you have to have a Department of State and a National Security Council and all the elements of U.S. foreign policy influence and power to deliver, to identify, and then deliver on those priorities.
And that's what we've attempted to do here, and I think we're well on our way to doing it.
There's more work to be done.
There's things we will improve upon.
But generally speaking, it was the genesis behind the reorganization of the department, oftentimes applying reforms that secretaries of states of both parties, appointed by presidents of both parties, have long sought to do.
And we're very proud of that going into effect and continuing to work forward.
I think we generally avoided massive disruptions to our operation, although any transition involves some disruption.
But we're very happy with the way we empowered our regional bureaus, meaning our embassies and the folks at the desks here behind the regions have become more empowered and having influence over every element of our foreign policy, particularly how it's applied tactically.
At the same time, one of the things we looked at is foreign aid.
Foreign aid is not a separate activity of the United States government.
It is an element and a tool of our foreign policy, and it should be used for the purpose of furthering the national interest.
That doesn't mean we don't care about human rights.
That doesn't mean we don't care about starvation.
That doesn't mean we don't care about hunger.
That doesn't mean we don't care about humanitarian need.
What it does mean, however, is that even foreign aid, which is not charity, it is an act of the U.S. taxpayer.
Now, American charities are free to give their money to whoever they want, as long as it's not a sanctioned entity.
But the United States and the taxpayer money should be spent in furtherance of our foreign policy, should be spent in places and on things that further our foreign policy.
And even that is not unlimited.
We have a limited amount of money that we can dedicate to foreign aid and humanitarian assistance.
And that has to be applied in a way that furthers our national interests.
And that's what we have sought to do as well.
And in that endeavor as well, we have empowered the regional bureaus and our embassies to play a dramatic role.
In fact, they are not just the implementers of this.
They, in many cases, are the ones that are suggesting and are leading the response.
And so bringing the tools of foreign aid underneath the umbrella of our broader foreign policy has been an important and dramatic reform.
Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, recently outlining the President Trump's approach to foreign policy.
You hear him talking about diplomats.
Front page of the New York Times this morning, nearly 30 envoys were called to the United States by the White House with no explanation given.
Many of the ambassadors were told in recent days to leave their posts by mid-January.
They are all Foreign Service officers who were appointed to their positions by the Biden administration and confirmed by the Senate.
A standard tour is three to four years.
The union representing career diplomats said this was the first time that such a mass recall had taken place of career diplomats serving as ambassadors or chiefs of mission.
You can read the front page of the New York Times this morning more on that story there.
David in Indiana, Republican.
David, good morning to you.
We're talking about President Trump handling foreign policy.
What do you say?
unidentified
Oh, yes.
Good morning.
Well, it's very difficult to follow such an eloquent speech by our Secretary of State.
I have a mixed bag with Trump's foreign policy.
I think we do not want to get bogged down in another conflict such as Afghanistan.
I want to drill down on Ukraine.
I want to go back in history just a little bit to put a perspective on where Trump is now and in the beginning of his term.
In 2014, he was taken over by Russia.
Obama didn't lift a finger.
He gave him blankets.
Here comes 2022.
Joe Biden is in office.
The president says, don't, a small skirmish across the border probably wouldn't hurt anything.
And his foreign policy was don't, don't, don't.
So he lost the election.
Now Trump's president.
Trump is trying to do something in any war.
Victor goes to spoils.
There's going to have to be a land compromise in Ukraine.
And I understand why the Ukrainian president does not want to do that.
I get it.
But if they're going to want to stop the killing, they've got to come to some kind of agreement to do the land borders.
And Trump, I think, has really pretty much wiped his hands from it.
He doesn't have the influence on Putin that he, I think, thought he did.
Everybody says in Putin's pocket.
Well, if that was the case, you know, they would come to some agreement and the war would be over.
So that's a fallacy, among others.
But anyway, that's my feeling on the foreign policy.
Hearing what Zelensky is saying, so far we're not seeing the willingness.
But let's remember what all of this started from.
It was back with the coup d'état in Ukraine back in 2014, as well as the deception about there being a possibility to address all of the issues via Minsky P. Minister.
Afterwards, in 2022, when everything was on the verge, when the Kyiv regime, the Ukrainian regime, basically unleashed a war in the southeast part of Ukraine, we said that we would have to recognize the unrecognized republics.
It would be better if you leave these people in peace and let them leave without russophobia, without coup d'etat, and just withdraw your troops from there.
And after Istanbul, at first, they basically initialed those drafts and then they basically threw them in the bin.
And this is what we're seeing right now.
They're basically refusing to finish this conflict via peaceful means.
That said, we are seeing things and we know there are signals, including from the Kyiv regime, indicating that they are willing to engage in some type of dialogue.
The only thing, and I would like to say something that we've been saying for quite some time, we are willing to put an end to this conflict by peaceful means based on the principles that I outlined in July last year when I spoke at the Foreign Ministry of Russia.
The root causes that brought about this conflict have to be addressed.
Let me ask you about the other major conflict you're focused on, Ukraine.
I want to read some comments Secretary of State Marco Rubio made to Vanity Fair about President Putin.
He said, quote, there are offers on the table right now to basically stop this war at its current lines of contact, which includes substantial parts of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, which they controlled since 2014.
And the Russians continue to turn it down.
And so you start to wonder: well, maybe what this guy wants is the entire country.
Do you think President Trump is underestimating President Putin's willingness to stay in this war?
I'm not so sure he's underestimating his willingness.
I think we're overestimating the people negotiating who are good friends Putin's willingness to end the war.
Listen, we've made great progress between Ukraine, Europe, and the United States to come up with a proposal that would end the war.
We're not going to evict every Russian out of Ukraine.
I understand that.
But I want a deal that would prevent a third invasion.
I want European troops on the ground to make sure there's no third invasion.
I want us to give security guarantees to Ukraine to make sure there's no third invasion.
I think Putin's going to continue to take the Donbass by force until we increase pressure.
So here's what I think.
We're going to be loosey with the football if we don't watch it.
We keep engaging Russia.
We keep engaging trying to lure Putin to the peace table, and he rebuffs all of our efforts.
If he says no this time, here's what I hope President Trump will do.
Signed my bill that has 85 co-sponsors and put tariffs on countries like China who buy cheap Russian oil.
Make Russia a state sponsor of terrorism for kidnapping 20,000 Ukrainian kids.
And most importantly, seize ships that are carrying sanctioned Russian oil like you're doing in Venezuela.
If Putin says no, we need to dramatically change the game, including giving tomahawk missiles to Ukraine to hit the drone and missile factories that exist in Russia.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham on NBC's Meet the Press with his take on the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
From the Council on Foreign Relations, they say Russia still occupies roughly 20% of the country after gaining over 4,000 square kilometers of the territory in 2024.
They also note that since January 2022, Ukraine has received $175 billion in aid from the U.S. and $197 billion in aid from the European Union.
Fighting and airstrikes have inflicted over 53,000 civilian casualties, while 3.7 million people are internally displaced and 6.9 million people have fled Ukraine.
12.7 million people need humanitarian assistance.
Jeffrey and Kansas City, Missouri, Democratic caller, we're talking about support or opposition for President Trump's handling of foreign policy.
What do you say?
unidentified
I obviously disapprove when you look at the whole things that Trump has been doing.
I mean, so I disapprove.
This conversation goes along with the free speech and the misinformation conversation because Trump has lied and lied and lied.
And his 43% either believes him or they just still, you know, they think they're getting something out of it.
But Trump is being played.
I mean, you know, if Ukraine falls, I mean, Russia is at our doorstep.
It's plain and simple.
And you see what he does when he's, you know, on the border of, you know, people he don't like.
He will be at our doorstep.
And the guy that said that it was Biden and Obama that didn't do anything, all that, you know, I believe in Ukraine, but Ukraine was warned.
They were warned.
They were warned.
And they could have been better prepared from the start of this.
So you got to look back at the history and the conversations, but they were warned.
Craig, do you think he needs congressional approval for these strikes and possibly strikes within Venezuela?
Does he need congressional approval?
unidentified
First of all, I'm going to say no, and then I'm going to say yes.
Okay.
Trump's going to do what he wants to do with executive orders.
He's already proven that.
He'll do it and shoot first and then ask questions later.
That's my take on congressional approval.
As far as Ukraine, he needs to get bold.
He needs to pull our friends together.
He needs to allow Ukraine into NATO.
He needs to provide them with the weaponry, just like the Biden administration did, and provide them with the weaponry where they can really put a hurt on Russia and change their minds at the negotiating table.
It's the 22nd bipartisan briefing we've had on a highly successful mission to counter designated terrorist organizations, cartels, bringing weapons, weapons, meaning drugs, to the American people and poisoning the American people for far too long.
So we're proud of what we're doing, able to lay it out very directly to these senators and soon to the House.
It's all classified.
We can't talk about it now.
We're also going to tomorrow allow the Hask and SASC to see the unedited video of the September 2nd alongside with Admiral Bradley, who has done a fantastic job, has made all the right calls, and we're glad he'll be there to do it.
But in keeping with long-standing Department of War policy, Department of Defense policy, of course, we're not going to release a top-secret, full, unedited video of that to the general public.
Hask and SASC and appropriate committees will see it, but not the general public.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth from last Tuesday, when he briefed lawmakers on those boat strikes against alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean, yesterday the UN Security Council came together after Venezuela called for a meeting about the U.S. military action against them.
Here's the Venezuelan ambassador to the United Nations.
The U.S. government is threatening an armed attack against Venezuela to satisfy the big oil corporations, particularly Canoco Phillips and ExxonMobil Mobile, which are pioneers in the theft of Venezuelan oil.
The children of American families will be ordered to risk their lives to line the pockets of oil company shareholders with billions of dollars while thousands of Venezuelan and American families are destroyed.
It is blood for oil.
Blood for oil is not a noble proposition.
It is unworthy and unacceptable.
War for oil is a death sentence.
The same one offered to Iraq, Syria, Libya, and so many others.
The behavior of the U.S. government confirms the cynical phrase of the propaganda of wars for oil, which states that, and I quote, it is unfortunate that God has placed the oil of the United States in the territory of other nations.
End of quote.
It's a war of plunder and pillage with a flag taken from the pit of human values.
The Venezuelan ambassador to the United Nations at yesterday's United Nations Security Council meeting.
We covered it here on C-SPAN, and you can find it online at c-span.org.
Part of our conversation this morning about whether or not you support or oppose President Trump's handling of foreign policy.
Here's a text message from Curran in Pittsburgh: Stop Putin, stop war.
That's simple.
Russia is the aggressor.
Ukraine is the victim.
It's clear who is a stumbling block.
Some news here this morning.
Zelensky says on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Zelensky says he's open to a free economic zone in Ukraine's east, but it must be put to a vote.
The Ukrainian president told reporters that he would be willing to withdraw troops from the country's eastern industrial heartland if Russia also pulls back and the area becomes demilitarized, free economic zone, monitored by international forces.
He said it also must be put to a vote, though, in his country.
Mark in Connecticut, a Republican, we're talking about foreign policy and how the president has handled it in his first year of his second term.
What do you say?
unidentified
I say he's done a good job, and I think it's a refreshing contrast to the prior administration, which really was kind of like a deer in the headlights and didn't have effective responses.
And that's not meant to be as critical as it may sound.
It's that, you know, foreign policy is very complicated and there are many different attributes to be covered.
And I would like to just add this, that I do think that I do think that the mainstream media, I think C-SPAN does an outstanding job of putting everything out there for everybody to see.
But aside from C-SPAN, I think the mainstream media tends to bias their reporting against Trump, and therefore it's not surprising that the polls are not higher.
I think the polls are influenced more by the press than by what Trump has actually done.
I do think that, you know, Ukraine is not a pure society.
It's a society filled with corruption as well.
And Russia is certainly a society that has its share of corruption and is working against American interests.
So it's sort of a, it makes it a very sticky wicket.
And at least I give Trump credit for thinking strategically and taking actions.
And by the way, with regard to the caller from Oregon, I would just like to kind of point out that this is trying to take the drug traffickers down and shut down Venezuela is more about the Venezuelan government.
Certainly, America and the Trump administration continues to have a good relationship and a good belief in the brotherhood we have with the people of Latin America.
So what Trump is doing is not against the Latin American people.
In fact, I think his actions with Venezuela set the stage for potentially freeing those people up for the better life they had before they were subject to the current policies of the Venezuelan government and the drug lords who control governments in Latin America.
I think what has been forgotten a lot with the current dialogue is what happened back in 2016 when the five eyes countries, which is basically a collaboration of the crown, got together and tried to do an insurrection on our country.
unidentified
They basically used a foreign document that showed Russia, Russia, Russia.
And they were not going to do anything except hold on to that narrative.
We're talking about President Trump's handling of foreign policy, asking you this morning: do you support or oppose it?
In other news this morning from the Washington Post with the headline, Congress set records in 2025, some more dubious than others.
Paul Kaine, who's covered Capitol Hill for a long time, reporting this morning about some C-SPAN numbers.
This is what he writes: The Republican-led Congress managed to land quite a few achievements in 2025, but not necessarily the ones that lawmakers consider commendable.
With fewer than 40 bills signed into law as of Monday, the House and Senate set a modern record for the lowest legislative output in the first year of a new presidency.
This is according to data maintained by C-SPAN and Purdue University.
Despite that lack of productivity, the Senate held more roll call votes, 659, than any odd-numbered year of this century, with almost 60% of them focused on advancing President Donald Trump's nominations to the executive and judicial branches.
The House, meanwhile, set a 21st-century record for fewest votes cast, 362 in the first session of a two-year Congress.
It held barely half as many votes as in 2017, which was Trump's first year in office and when Republicans held the majority.
Perhaps, not surprisingly, an unusually large number of House members, 24 Republicans and 19 Democrats, have decided to leave the chamber either to retire or run for other office.
That places the chamber on pace to set a 21st-century record for retirements in one Congress.
Again, according to C-SPAN and Purdue.
You can read more from Paul Kaine's reporting in the Washington Post this morning.
Back to foreign policy and how the president is handling it.
We'll hear from Mickey in Los Angeles, Democratic Caller.
As far as Ukraine is concerned, it's been a complete failure.
He said he would resolve that on day one.
He hosted Putin in Alaska red carpet treatment.
It's gone nowhere.
The Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, I don't know what he's doing because it seems like de facto Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are the secretaries of state jointly.
Marco Rubio is nowhere to be seen.
He's a lot of times he's just echoing what the president is saying, but otherwise it's Steve Witkoff who's handling the foreign policy, especially when it's been regarding the Middle East.
As far as Venezuela, I think that this Maduro regime, in this aspect, I agree with Trump.
It's not only Venezuela trafficking drugs whether to the United States or to Western Europe, but also there's Iranian money being laundered through Venezuela, Iranian oil going back and forth with Russia, Venezuelan oil going to Cuba.
So in this respect, I agree with Trump.
As far as attacking Iran, supporting Israel, the war that started on June 13th and lasted 12 days, and then destroying the Iranian nuclear site, in that respect, I 100% agree with him.
So it's a mixed bag.
But as far as Europe and NATO and Ukraine, I think the Trump presidency has been a failure.
A short time ago, the U.S. military carried out massive precision strikes on the three key nuclear facilities in the Iranian regime, Ford, Natans, and Isfahan.
Everybody heard those names for years as they built this horribly destructive enterprise.
Our objective was the destruction of Iran's nuclear enrichment capacity and a stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world's number one state sponsor of terror.
Tonight I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success.
Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.
Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace.
If they do not, future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier.
For 40 years, Iran has been saying death to America, death to Israel.
They have been killing our people, blowing off their arms, blowing off their legs with roadside bombs.
That was their specialty.
We lost over a thousand people, and hundreds of thousands throughout the Middle East and around the world have died as a direct result of their hate.
In particular, so many were killed by their general, Qasem Soleimani.
I decided a long time ago that I would not let this happen.
It will not continue.
I want to thank and congratulate Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.
We worked as a team like perhaps no team has ever worked before.
And we've gone a long way to erasing this horrible threat to Israel.
I want to thank the Israeli military for the wonderful job they've done.
And most importantly, I want to congratulate the great American patriots who flew those magnificent machines tonight and all of the United States military on an operation the likes of which the world has not seen in many, many decades.
Hopefully we will no longer need their services in this capacity.
President Trump back in June there with his Defense Secretary, his Secretary of State, and the Vice President surrounding him as he announced those strikes on Iran's nuclear sites.
Here is a CNN on the Venezuela military action against Venezuela.
This is a headline this morning.
U.S. strikes two more boats in the Pacific Ocean, killing five, a recent headline from CNN.
We're talking about Venezuela, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, Iran, as you just heard from the president, all of those areas across the world.
Part of the conversation this morning on whether or not you oppose support President Trump's handling of foreign policy.
And of course, it also can include the President's trade and tariff policies as well.
Kim in Sacramento, Independent.
What do you say, Kim?
unidentified
Oh, well, first I want to start off with saying that I hope this Christmas that all of us keep Palestine in our hearts and in our minds.
The genocide that is happening there has never stopped.
They're hungry, they're starving, they're wet, and we will go down in America on the wrong side of history.
As far as Ukraine, I don't really know what to say about it because, you know, you're talking about a dictator and, you know, and a country that is trying to survive.
I would like to see peace in it, but I don't know answer how to get there.
I don't think Trump has a policy either.
That's showing definitely.
He did say he would stop it day one, and that didn't happen.
And as far as Venezuela, it's ridiculous to call it to war.
It's actually murder happening, and it's happening on our side of America.
And I want Americans to understand that Latin America is never, ever going to stand with us against any of this.
We have no right for regime change.
I mean, we wouldn't want somebody to come and tell us right now, hey, help us.
I hate Donald Trump.
I do not like any of his policies anywhere.
But I wouldn't want no other country to say, let's help them overthrow their government.
I'm going to jump in with the headline, Kim, this morning from today's Wall Street Journal that you and others may be interested in.
Israel won't leave Gaza.
That from the defense minister there in the Wall Street Journal reporting the stance is at odds with Washington's multi-phase peace plan for the enclave.
Rudy in San Diego, Republican.
Rudy, good morning.
unidentified
Good morning.
Look, I'm really, really disappointed, very disappointed with the Trump administration.
It's an embarrassment to America.
He does what he wants to do, like Venezuela, those boats that he's attacking.
They haven't been any proof of drugs saying, you know, we pulled out so much packages of drugs from the ocean.
You know, here's the proof and stuff.
And, you know, the drug is coming from Mexico because China sends it to Mexico.
Mexico, they do it and they bring it back.
But to the bottom of this, if the American people wouldn't get involved in drugs, we wouldn't have this problem.
Because the generations look for drugs here in America.
And look, there's been a long history in this country of presidents using their authority as commander-in-chief combined with their inherent right of self-defense, which has been interpreted from the sec, sorry, Article 2 of the Constitution for the president.
And we've done a lot of things over, gosh, centuries.
But what's different about this is normally those conflicts, many cases, they have had some kind of congressional authority.
You had the Gulf of Tonkin resolution for Vietnam.
You had the UA, sorry, the AUMF after 9-11.
This time, there is no congressional authorization whatsoever.
And second, conflicts that have been done without congressional authorization, Panama, Grenada, Libya, have always been very confined in their goals and short in duration, usually less than a month, two months at the most.
President Trump has taken us into an endless conflict with drug narratives with the narco-terrorists, as he calls them, in Venezuela without any congressional approval, and frankly also without an adequate explanation.
We've had some classified briefs.
They waited a couple of months before they actually even started briefing Congress in a classified setting.
We have not had the Secretary of Defense or the Secretary of State come before the appropriate Congressional Committee, Armed Services or Foreign Affairs, and said, this is what we're doing.
This is why we're doing it.
This is where it's going.
And then to be questioned by the people's representatives.
Okay, where is it really going?
There's been no effort to do that.
So I think this significantly undermines our Constitution is a massive expansion of presidential power.
Basically, what the president has decided is that we are now going to have the death penalty for drug traffickers.
But further, not only are we going to have the death penalty, but Trump is going to be judge, jury, and executioner.
He's not going to have to show any evidence or probable cause.
He's going to make the decision and he's going to start killing people.
That, again, is a massive expansion of presidential power.
Adam Smith, the congressman there on the Washington Journal last week, he's the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, represents the Washington State District.
In our conversation with him, you heard him argue against what is happening, the military action against Venezuela.
The president earlier this week, when he was in Mar-a-Lago speaking with reporters about the new Trump-class battleships, had this to say about rising tensions with Venezuela.
You know, I thought about taking some that are in dry dock and changing them.
And then when I said that, you know, if we did, would be about we could increase, if we doubled them, they'd be at like just a tiny fraction of what one of these was.
Ms. President, Juliro Rosas with most peaceful.media.
You just referenced the lower amount of illegal drugs that are coming by sea, and you just said that you're going to start that same program on land soon.
Are you just referring to Venezuela or are you referring to other military?
President Trump on Monday on Tensions with Venezuela.
Part of our conversation here this morning on the Washington Journal on President Trump's handling of foreign policy.
Stephanie in Fresno, California, on our line for Democrats.
Morning.
unidentified
Morning.
And happy holidays to everyone.
I just wanted to say that I'm completely against Trump's foreign policy.
I'm embarrassed.
I'm embarrassed of his actions.
And the Venezuela attacking those boats, I mean, without congressional approval, is horrible.
And all for oil.
And he's trying to say that it's for drugs when he released one of the biggest drug dealers a couple weeks ago was all over the news.
I'm totally opposed to everything that he's doing.
And it's all, he's a grocer and he's just taking, you know, at the end of his presidency, they're going to come out and he's going to have taken all of his decisions based on how much money he can put in his own pocket.
He's going against the grain of all of our past failures because we can't keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different outcome.
His hemispheric defense is brilliant because Europe is trying to take away freedom of speech and they're letting the Muslims take over their identity.
They ain't even having the city of lights, didn't have Christmas lights to pander to the Muslims.
But Donald J. Trump is the greatest president we have ever had.
He has took over the trading routes.
He's intervened on China's dominance over the world.
And for all the useful or non-useful idiots that are Democrats that keep going against the 80-20 decisions of the people, Trump just puts them on the wrong side of things all the time.
Let's listen to the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, from that news conference he held in recent days.
Here he is looking forward to 2026 and the priorities for the Trump administration.
unidentified
Going back to the previous question about Europe, and I believe the Sky News reporter referenced civilizational erasure, which is a term that has been used by both the White House and the State Department.
Both the Russian State Department have made kind of recurring overtures to Europe as a civilization that is in some sort of danger and that should join with the United States as a sort of Western civilizational bloc.
That seems to be a recurring priority.
However, with the release of the National Security Strategy, many European leaders, leader of Germany, members of the European Parliament, have found it totally unacceptable or offensive or question the allyship of the United States with the rhetoric that was used.
So I just wonder if the United States is correct in that these policies like mass migration will lead to civilizational erasure.
Is it possible to save European civilization if the governments simply don't want to be saved?
And it's not just me saying, you go to these NATO meetings, you meet with people, what they will tell you is our shared history, our shared legacy, our shared values, our shared priorities.
That's what they talk about as the reason for this alliance.
Well, if you erase your shared history, your shared culture, your shared ideology, your shared priorities, your shared principles, then you just have a straight-up defense agreement.
That's all you have.
So what I'm trying to point to, and what we've tried to point to, is very simple.
That is at the bedrock and at the cornerstone of our relationship, for example, with Europe, is the fact that we do have a shared culture, a shared civilization, a shared experience, and shared values and principles on things like human rights, on freedom, on liberty, on democracy, on all sorts of, on the rights of the individual.
All these sorts of things that we in this nation are the inheritors of in many cases because many of these ideas that led to the founding of our country found their genesis in some of these places in the Western Alliance.
If you take that away, if that's wiped out because for whatever reason it's no longer a priority, I do think it puts a strain and threatens the alliance in the long term and in the big picture.
Now, whatever internal politics causes people to dispute this, I'm not going to comment on other than to tell you that I do think, I do think that at the core of these special relationships we have is the fact that we have shared history, shared values, shared civilizational principles that we should be unapologetic about.
This is a nation that was founded on Western principles, founded on Western principles like liberty, the value and the right of the individual, the right of self-governance.
These are all Western values.
Now, others may have adopted in different parts of the world, but they emanate from Western history.
And it's something that we should be unapologetic about.
Why would we be apologetic about it?
Anyone who doesn't recognize, for example, that many of the features of our system of government find their root in Roman and Greek history is a fool.
Is a fool.
It's just not true.
And so I think that we need to understand and embrace that, not negate it.
And I think that's what we're pointing to here, is that we are concerned that particularly in parts of Western Europe, those things that underpin our alliance and our tie to them could be under threat in the long term.
And by the way, there are leaders in those countries that recognize that as well.
Some say it openly, some say it privately.
In the eastern and southern part of Europe, they're much more open about it.
Nonetheless, it is a factor that needs to be addressed.
President Trump, Secretary of State, Marco Rubio at a news conference recently, we're asking all of you to let us know your support or opposition to how President Trump and his administration is handling foreign policy.
We'll hear from Joe, our final call this morning from Butner, North Carolina, Democratic caller, Joe.
unidentified
Yes, concerning Venezuela, three points.
We cannot use the sweet, heavy crude oil in Venezuela for our refineries.
Trump is after a earth mineral called coal tan that is used to charge cell phones and computers.
It's worth trillions of dollars.
Number two, the pictures of these boats are going east against the Atlantic current towards Africa with three gas-guzzling outboard Yamaha motors that are useless over the ocean, over the open ocean.
They are not bringing drugs to America.
We've got a con man, and we need to wise up and pick out and read what he's doing.
We'll be back tomorrow morning, 7 a.m. Eastern time for another conversation.
unidentified
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.
Book TV book fairs featuring author conversations and interviews from our book fairs across the country.
Memorable moments with some of this year's most watched and talked about C-SPAN programming.
President Trump and foreign leaders with key coverage of events both at home and overseas.
America's Book Club, featuring a special lineup from our new weekly series of thought-provoking conversations with host David Rubinstein and leading authors.
America 250 highlights the events, conversations, and reflections marking our nation's semi-quincentennial in Memorial.
Remembering the political figures, public servants, and other influential people who've passed away in 2025.
Key congressional hearings that sparked debate and captured public attention.
Voices of 2025 with book TV and American History TV's compelling interviews and discussions with historians, scholars, and authors who shaped the national conversation.