| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
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| Friday, on C-SPAN's Ceasefire, at a time when finding common ground matters most in Washington, former House Speaker, Republican California Congressman Kevin McCarthy and former independent West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin come together to preview the year ahead in politics, including the upcoming midterm elections and the political and legislative battles ahead in Washington. | ||
| They join host Dasha Burns. | ||
| Bridging the Divide in American Politics. | ||
| Watch C-SPIN, Friday at 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPIN. | ||
| I saw you interviewed the other night. | ||
| I watched it about 2 o'clock in the morning. | ||
|
unidentified
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There was a little thing called C-SPAN, which I don't know how many people were watching. | |
| Don't worry, you were in primetime too, but they happened to have a little rerun. | ||
| Do you really think that we don't remember what just happened last week? | ||
| Thank goodness for C-SPAN, and we all should review the tape. | ||
|
unidentified
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Everyone wonders when they're watching C-SPAN what the conversations are on the floor. | |
| I'm about to read to you something that was published by C-SPAN. | ||
| There's a lot of things that Congress fights about, that they disagree on. | ||
|
unidentified
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We can all watch that on C-SPAN. | |
| Millions of people across the country tuned into C-SPAN. | ||
| Speaking! | ||
| Jesus! | ||
| That was a major C-SPAN moment. | ||
| If you watch on C-SPAN, you're going to see me physically across the aisle every day, just trying to build relationships and try to understand their perspective and find common ground. | ||
| And welcome forward to everybody watching at home. | ||
| We know C-SPAN covers this live as well. | ||
| We appreciate that. | ||
| And one can only hope that he's able to watch C-SPAN on a black and white television set in his prison cell. | ||
| This is being carried live by C-SPAN. | ||
| It's being watched not only in this country, it's being watched around the world right now. | ||
| Mike said before, I happened to listen to him, he was on C-SPAN 1. | ||
| That's a big upgrade, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Welcome to today's Washington Journal. | |
| Happy New Year, everybody. | ||
| We'll start with January. | ||
| The big news then was the second inauguration of President Trump. | ||
| So here is a portion of his speech. | ||
| The open age of America begins right now. | ||
| From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world. | ||
| We will be the envy of every nation, and we will not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any longer. | ||
| During every single day of the Trump administration, I will very simply put America first. | ||
|
unidentified
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Our sovereignty will be reclaimed. | |
| Our safety will be restored. | ||
| The scales of justice will be rebalanced. | ||
| The vicious, violent, and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our government will end. | ||
|
unidentified
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That was January 20th of this year. | |
| Then in February, the Doge cut started happening, and Doge was the Department of Government Efficiency, although it wasn't a department. | ||
| Here is Senator Corey Booker, a Democrat of New Jersey, talking about that at a rally. | ||
| First of all, in the United States Senate, we will not cooperate. | ||
| We are joining the leadership. | ||
| We are joining the leadership already stated by Brian Schatz of Hawaii that we will cooperate with no appointments when it comes to the State Department. | ||
| No appointments when it becomes of foreign policy. | ||
| The first thing we're going to do in the Senate is not cooperate with the illegal and unconstitutional acts that they are trying to do. | ||
| The second thing we are going to do, and we met this morning, it is in the legal perspective. | ||
| The second thing we are going to do is we are going to fight this legally in every way we can. | ||
| We will fight their violation of civil service laws. | ||
| We will fight their violation of civil rights laws. | ||
| We will fight their violations of separation of powers. | ||
| We will fight their violations of our Constitution of the United States of America. | ||
| We will not shut up. | ||
| We will stand up. | ||
| We will speak up. | ||
| We will rise up. | ||
| It is time, as the African spiritual says, for us to lift every voice in condemnation of what's going on. | ||
| And that was in February of this year. | ||
| We're asking for your top news story. | ||
| Bayhan in Silver Spring, Maryland. | ||
|
unidentified
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Democrat, you're up first. | |
| Yeah, I think that that's exactly what I was going to say, that there's a crime syndicate operating out of the White House. | ||
| It's all criminal, led by a criminal. | ||
| And what's amazing is that the American people are so good that they are standing up. | ||
| Millions and millions of people have been out on the streets this year demonstrating against this assault on the Constitution and on the United States of America. | ||
| And I'm so proud of Americans. | ||
| And this is just the beginning. | ||
| And Mike in Ohio, line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Mike. | ||
| Yes, I think that Article 2, Section 4, is being overlooked when it comes to the bribery issue and also the pardoning of that cocaine leader there in Central America. | ||
| And then on the other hand, bombing these little boats. | ||
| It's kind of like a Disney production wrapped around the Twilight Zone. | ||
| There's no logic, there's no reason, and there's a poor explanation. | ||
| So Article 2, Section 4, is probably the most important thing that should be questioned at this point in time. | ||
| So I appreciate it. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And Aaron in South Hill, Virginia, line for Democrats. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning, Aaron. | |
| Yes, I'm concerned about the bombing in Nigeria and Venezuela. | ||
| Our president is doing things that's not sanctioned by Congress. | ||
| He has no right to be bombing his people. | ||
| He said they're killing Christians. | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| They're killing people of all religions, whether you're Muslim, Christian, whatever your faith is. | ||
| He said these terrorists are killing Christians. | ||
| That is not true. | ||
| Our president is overstepping his hand. | ||
| He's out of control. | ||
| He needs to be impeached and he needs to be stopped. | ||
| Congress needs to speak up. | ||
| All the Republicans that are supporting Trump need to be held accountable also along with this president because this regime that we have in America now is dragging us into wars that we should not be involved in. | ||
| And there's no explanation for it. | ||
| He's not seeking any support from Congress or any of his administration on this. | ||
| And this is a shame what's happening to America. | ||
| And Aaron mentioned strikes on Venezuela. | ||
| So the latest news on that from CNN, CIA carried out drone strike on port facility on Venezuelan coast. | ||
| It says that it marks the first known U.S. attack on a target inside that country. | ||
| And that was Aaron, who was calling about that. | ||
| And there's also this that happened in February. | ||
| So if you recall, the president of Ukraine, Zelenskyy, was in the Oval Office and there was that meeting. | ||
| And here's what happened. | ||
| I signed with him, me, like a new president in 2019, I signed with him the deal. | ||
| I signed with him, Macron and Merkel, we signed a ceasefire, a ceasefire. | ||
|
unidentified
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All of them told me that he will never go. | |
| We signed him with gas contract. | ||
| Gas contract. | ||
| Yes, but after that, he broke the ceasefire. | ||
| He killed our people and he didn't exchange prisoners. | ||
| We signed the exchange of prisoners, but he didn't do it. | ||
| What kind of diplomacy, GD, you are speaking about? | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| I'm talking about the kind of diplomacy that's going to end the destruction of your country. | ||
| Mr. President, with respect, I think it's disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media. | ||
| Right now, you guys are going around and forcing conscripts to the front lines because you have manpower problems. | ||
| You should be thanking the president for trying to bring an end to this conflict. | ||
| I have been to what happens is you bring people, you bring them on a propaganda tour, Mr. President. | ||
| Do you disagree that you've had problems bringing people into your military? | ||
| I have problems. | ||
| And do you think that it's respectful to come to the Oval Office of the United States of America and attack the administration that is trying to prevent the destruction of your country? | ||
| A lot of questions. | ||
| Let's start from the beginning. | ||
| Sure. | ||
|
unidentified
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First of all, during the war, everybody has problems. | |
| Even you, but you have a nice ocean and don't feel now. | ||
| But you will feel it in the future. | ||
|
unidentified
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God bless you. | |
| You don't know that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
God bless you. | |
| God bless. | ||
| Don't tell us what we're going to feel. | ||
| We're trying to solve a problem. | ||
| Don't tell us what we're going to feel. | ||
| I'm not telling you. | ||
| Because you're in no position to dictate that. | ||
| Remember this. | ||
| You're in no position to dictate what we're going to feel. | ||
|
unidentified
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We're going to feel very good. | |
| We're going to feel very good and very strong. | ||
| We'll feel influence. | ||
| You're right now not in a very good position. | ||
| You've allowed yourself to be in a very bad position. | ||
| And this happens to be right about you. | ||
| From the very beginning of the war. | ||
|
unidentified
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You're not in a good position. | |
| You don't have the cards right now. | ||
| With us, you start having playing cards. | ||
| Right now, you don't have to play cards. | ||
| You're playing cards. | ||
| You're gambling with the lives of millions of people. | ||
| You're gambling with World War III. | ||
| You're gambling with World War III. | ||
| And what you're doing is very disrespectful to the country, this country. | ||
| It's back to you far more than a lot of people said they should have. | ||
| Have you said thank you once this entire meeting? | ||
| No, in this entire meeting, have you said thank you? | ||
| If you went to Pennsylvania and campaigned for the opposition in October, offer some words of appreciation for the United States of America and the president who's trying to save your country. | ||
| Please, you think that if you will speak very loudly about the war you've been. | ||
| He's not speaking loudly. | ||
| He's not speaking loudly. | ||
| Your country is in big trouble. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wait a minute. | |
| No, no. | ||
| You've done a lot of talking. | ||
| Your country is in big trouble. | ||
| I know. | ||
| You're not winning. | ||
| No, you're not winning this. | ||
| You have a damn good chance of coming out. | ||
| Okay, because of us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. President, we are staying in our country, staying strong from the very beginning of the war. | |
| We've been alone, and we are thankful. | ||
| I said thank you. | ||
| You haven't been in this cabinet. | ||
| You haven't been in this cabinet. | ||
| We gave you, through this stupid president, $350 billion. | ||
|
unidentified
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You won't. | |
| We gave you military equipment. | ||
| You won't have to do it. | ||
| And your men are brave, but they had to use our military equipment. | ||
| If you didn't have our military equipment, if you didn't have our military equipment, this war would have been over in two weeks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that was in February of this year in the Oval Office. | |
| There was another recent meeting between President Trump and President Zelensky, and we will show you a clip of that. | ||
| That happened in Marlogo just this past week. | ||
| Lester, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Democrat, you're on the air, Lester. | ||
| Good morning, Mamie. | ||
| How are you? | ||
| Good. | ||
| Happy New Year. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| Same to you. | ||
| Mamie, as I'm looking at TV, I see Trump and Goglinsky here having this conversation. | ||
| Mamie, since Trump came into office, the only thing he ever done is create chaos in America. | ||
| As we speak today, America is on the down climb under Trump. | ||
| Trump has done anything to help this country. | ||
| It's all about his dictatorship, buddy friends. | ||
| He brings into the White House Ela Malago as the president of the United States. | ||
| He needs to go and find him some class because the man don't have any class whatsoever. | ||
| And for anyone to support Trump right now, I hope when you pay your taxes that you find out he didn't give you one dime. | ||
| And he does not have anything to do with gas prices. | ||
| That's all the Republican talk about. | ||
| But go and trying to buy you a can of coffee and find out how much you pay for that. | ||
| Maybe have a happy new year. | ||
| You too, Lester. | ||
| And on the Republican line in La Murada, California. | ||
| Patrick, you're on the air. | ||
| Hello, happy new year. | ||
| Happy New Year to you. | ||
| I think the best one was when they stopped the conflict over in Israel. | ||
| You're talking about the peace deal between Israel and Hamas? | ||
| Yes, I am. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| Yeah, the peace deal. | ||
| I think that was in and right now he's trying to stop the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think he's going to go down as one of the greatest presidences we've ever had. | ||
| All right, Patrick. | ||
| And here is Russell in San Jose, California, line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Russell. | ||
| Good morning, America. | ||
| Happy New Year. | ||
| So very quickly, I wanted to talk about the fraud in Minnesota. | ||
| You know, that's not on the news enough. | ||
| And I believe that if you're stealing money from taxpayers like myself, then you should be kicked out of the country. | ||
| I see it here in San Jose, California, in the Vietnamese community. | ||
| I see it in the Hispanic community. | ||
| They're sending all their money back to their other country. | ||
| And our veterans are being treated like dirt. | ||
| And it's just not fair. | ||
| So, you know, I think the law is the law, is the law. | ||
| So if you can't, if you come here and you don't want to assimilate to our laws and you want to get caught stealing from our country, taking money out of my pocket, I'm a black man, so I don't want to hear the race car thing. | ||
| I worked hard all my life to pay for my house. | ||
| I paid, it's fully paid for. | ||
| I live in the most expensive place in the United States, San Jose, California. | ||
| So I just want people to wake up, stop saying I'm Democrat, I'm Republican, I'm independent. | ||
| How about us taking care of our people here in this country instead of everybody else that comes from different countries that don't even want to speak our language? | ||
| Come on, America. | ||
| And that's all I got to say. | ||
| So here is the latest on that story of the Minnesota fraud case. | ||
| Actually, let me get that for you after I take this call from Brian in Midland, Michigan, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Hey, back when they were talking about the SNAP benefits, that affects me immediately because I received SNAP. | ||
| And, you know, that also affected millions of Americans. | ||
| We almost didn't, one month, we didn't get our benefits for one month entirely. | ||
| And that affected a lot of people and their immediate ability to get food because a lot of us are very low income. | ||
| And it was a hard time. | ||
| And how are you doing now, Brian? | ||
| Is that. | ||
| Are you? | ||
| Yeah, I'm receiving my benefits. | ||
| I got December's benefits. | ||
| The only month I missed was November. | ||
| And then how did you manage during November? | ||
| What did you do? | ||
| Well, I had extra, thankfully, I had extra built-up on my card that I get from the state. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And the previous caller mentioned the fraud case in Minnesota. | ||
| This is foxnews.com with the headline, HHS, that's the Department of Housing and Human Services, freezes Minnesota child care payments over alleged daycare fraud scheme. | ||
| It says that the agencies said yesterday that they would be freezing all child care payments, federal child care payments to Minnesota. | ||
| And here is a quote from the Deputy Secretary. | ||
| He says this on X, you have probably read the serious allegations that the state of Minnesota has funneled millions of taxpayer dollars to fraudulent daycares across Minnesota over the past decade. | ||
| And he wrote said that in a video message. | ||
| So that's at Fox News. | ||
| If you'd like to read more. | ||
| Well, a caller also mentioned the peace deal between Israel and Hamas. | ||
| Here is the president in September announcing that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The 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. | ||
| They haven't maybe mentioned that, but I would imagine they do. | ||
| Otherwise, they wouldn't have gone as far as they've gone. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That was in September. | |
| And this also was in September. | ||
| Susan says on Facebook was her biggest news story of the year was the assassination of Charlie Kirk. | ||
| That is on Facebook. | ||
| Also here on Facebook is Jim who says, Nick Shirley doing the job the media once did. | ||
| The true story is not the fraud in Minnesota, it's the media failing to report or investigate the Somalian corruption and the incompetence of government to monitor how the people's money is spent. | ||
| And just so you know who Nick Shirley is, this is The Hill with this article. | ||
| Who is Nick Shirley? | ||
| It's a YouTuber who made viral Minnesota fraud video. | ||
| He became a viral sensation overnight after posting a 42-minute video documenting his hunt for fraudulent child care programs in Minnesota. | ||
| Video has been viewed more than 100 million times on X. | ||
| It shows him visiting daycare centers receiving public funds. | ||
| He's 23 years old. | ||
| He alleged that multiple local centers were not providing services to any children and bombarded employees with questions about children's whereabouts on camera outside of each location. | ||
| And here is Fernando in Galveston, Texas, Republican Line. | ||
| Morning. | ||
| Good morning, Minnie. | ||
| Go ahead, Fernando. | ||
| Yes, you are? | ||
| Go right ahead. | ||
| Anyway, yeah, first of all, Happy New Year. | ||
| Happy New Year to you. | ||
| As far as the fraud stuff, it's not going to be the last one for sure. | ||
| I'm pretty sure Don Arilla is going to be more. | ||
| I'd sure like to see what happens to the people who do get, I say, prosecuted for what they've done. | ||
| This is going to be something different because I don't think anybody's been prosecuted yet lately or anything. | ||
| So actually, actually, there has already been a lot of people charged with fraud, and that happened during the last administration. | ||
| Yeah, but what authority to tell me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, I wish you a happy new year, and I hope everything turns out better for us this coming year. | ||
| All right, Fernando, here's Ed in New Jersey, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Yeah, good morning. | ||
| To me, the biggest news story of this 25 is the war in Ukraine and also the war in Gaza. | ||
| I think for a lot of people in the world, that's also the biggest story. | ||
| I think for a lot of people in Europe, that's the biggest story. | ||
| I think that Europe is gearing up to become more involved in this war. | ||
| Look at the increased defendant expenditure of a lot of countries in Europe that are now spending more money and getting ready for war in bigger Europe, and this could really blow up. | ||
| I would just also like to thank you for letting us hear that exchange in the White House between Trump, Zelensky, and Vance because it shows the lack of civility that exists in the White House. | ||
| I don't like Zelensky, but I was kind of sympathetic towards the guy because he was trying to make his point and he kept being, because he was interrupting also. | ||
| But here is the guy, Zelensky, who really doesn't speak very good English, was combating those two politicians. | ||
| So I would like to just shout out to people that we better spend a little more time looking at Ukraine because this thing could get a whole lot worse. | ||
| And thank you. | ||
| And what do you think is going to happen in Ukraine in 2026, Ed, looking ahead? | ||
| Well, I don't really see. | ||
| I think the negotiations going on could drag on forever because Zelensky doesn't want to give up any territory. | ||
| And Trump says he wants Don Baz, Lugan, Zaparis. | ||
| He wants that land. | ||
| So it's kind of a stalemate. | ||
| In the meantime, you have Europe, they're increasing their defense expenditure to 5% of GDP. | ||
| They're getting ready for more war. | ||
| They're in for a penny, in for a pen, and they just come forth with this loan to Ukraine for, I don't know, anywhere from $100 to $180 billion. | ||
| So they want to continue the war because they want to get their money, their investment back. | ||
| And the Soviet, Russia, rather, has tremendous resources. | ||
| And Europe, I think, is going after those resources. | ||
| That's the reason for the war. | ||
| The expansion of NATO is the reason for this war. | ||
| And the United States is behind, is one of the prime movers for this war. | ||
| And the same thing in Gaza. | ||
| All right, Ed. | ||
| Let's hear for the sake of completion. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is the part of the news conference that was held on Sunday at Mar-a-Logo after Ukraine's President Zelensky and President Trump met there. | |
| With Ukraine's security guarantees, what number are we at right now? | ||
| Well, I think we're, look, you know, you can say 95%, but I don't like to say percentages. | ||
| I just think we're doing very well. | ||
| We're very, we could be very close. | ||
| There are one or two very thorny issues, very tough issues, but I think we're doing very well. | ||
| Well, we made a lot of progress today, but really we've made it over the last month. | ||
| This is not a one-day process deal. | ||
| This very complicated stuff. | ||
| But I think when the president says 95, I think it could be close to 95%. | ||
| Yeah, please, behind you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. President, have you agreed on the so-called three-trade zone on Donbass? | |
| How to separate, how to separate the sites, how to make the separation line, who will be responsible. | ||
| The word agreed is too strong. | ||
| I would say not agreed, but we're getting closer to an agreement on that. | ||
| And that's a big issue, certainly. | ||
| That's one of the big issues. | ||
| And I think we're closer than we were. | ||
| Probably one. | ||
| It's unresolved, but it's getting a lot closer. | ||
| That's a very tough issue, but one that I think will get resolved. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, please. | |
| We are seeing some mixed signals coming from Moscow, even after you spoke with President Putin. | ||
| Can you assure us that you have received written or any formal response from them? | ||
| Well, what was the issue you have to tell me? | ||
| What did they say? | ||
|
unidentified
|
They are telling that Ukraine has to give up Donbass. | |
| Just a very recent statement coming out. | ||
| Well, that's what they've been asking for. | ||
| And, you know, there's a dispute about that. | ||
| So they're going to have to iron that out. | ||
| That's an issue they have to iron out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But I think it's moving in the right direction. | |
| Here's Larry in Georgia, Democrat. | ||
| Larry, what is your top news story of 2025? | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| I was speaking about the Affordable Care Act. | ||
| I think the $40 billion that President Trump sent to Argentine. | ||
| I mean, he could have took that to try to work some out, you know, with the people here that really need their health care. | ||
| I mean, I mean, why do you send 40 billion dollars to another country when your country needs help? | ||
| All right, and here is Juan in Massachusetts, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning, Juan. | ||
| Good morning, happy new year. | ||
| I just want to speak to the people who surlined it. | ||
| What happened is they go against what this administration is doing in South America. | ||
| But I'm an immigrant from Colombia. | ||
| I've been in the army in the country. | ||
| And I see in the frost line what they do to the kids, the little girls, 9, 10, 11-year-old, and they take them with them. | ||
| They give it an air 15 and put it in the jungle. | ||
| They start killing soldiers, police, families, everything. | ||
| Those cartels, they have no mercy. | ||
| And they believe me, and they want to put that in America. | ||
| They want to bring drugs everywhere. | ||
| And now the Democrats are defending Venezuela. | ||
| And they say, oh, no, because federal is an abuse. | ||
| Now, when you come to the country, to America, I'm from Colombia. | ||
| I'm an immigrant. | ||
| And when you come to America, you got to follow the rules. | ||
| You got to go by the law. | ||
| If you come to America, you cannot go against America. | ||
| That's what happened with the immigrants now. | ||
| They come from different countries and they come against America. | ||
| You don't like it, please. | ||
| So, because they run away from those countries to come here, and now they want to leave, or they want the people to live according to for the things they run away. | ||
| And now they complain because they're taking the money and supporting all terrorist groups all over the world, taking the American money, the taxpayers. | ||
| And it's not right. | ||
| I think there is no right. | ||
| And some people who defend that, they are in the wrong line. | ||
| To me, that's not right. | ||
| So, Juan, do you support President Trump's actions in Venezuela? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And would you support American military action in Colombia as well? | ||
| Yes, let me explain you why. | ||
| Because why? | ||
| Because we have nobody else who can defend these countries. | ||
| This is what's going on. | ||
| This is what's going on. | ||
| This is what's going on because these people, it's not only the drugs. | ||
| These people are spreading the economies. | ||
| The Trendi Aragua. | ||
| And Colombia is full of Venezuelan people. | ||
| And they come and play Innocent or the same thing, Cuba. | ||
| So what would you think that the American military could accomplish in Colombia? | ||
| Yes, they need to get in because let me tell you. | ||
| But get in and do what one? | ||
| Just explain what you would want them to do. | ||
| Okay, we want to be in Colombia. | ||
| It's many terrorist groups. | ||
| It's ELN, FARC, URABA, all kinds of in the territories I know because I walk by myself up there. | ||
| And this is what it is. | ||
| It's a lot of laboratories in the jungle. | ||
| A lot. | ||
| I'm talking about tons of tons of cocaine produced every day. | ||
| And they cross the line to Venezuela and Venezuela spread all over the world. | ||
| They bring it to Morrecos. | ||
| The Morrecos, they cross the ocean, go in Spain, and then from Spain, go all over Europe. | ||
| And then they send the boats they have, supposed to be with oil, they have cocaine everywhere, and they bring it all over the world. | ||
| Venezuela is the one who supports the cartels in Mexico. | ||
| Mexico is only the delivery people. | ||
| They produce Colombia produce, they go to Venezuela, Venezuela spread all over the world. | ||
| And that is what happened. | ||
| And the people say, oh, please, Venezuela. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Tron is doing a nice job because they don't want to blow these people up. | ||
| They want to put pressure on pressure into their release because it's the army. | ||
| Venezuelan army is the one, is the cartel of the soul. | ||
| I just have to move on. | ||
| So here's Kyle in Buffalo, New York, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Well, good morning. | ||
| I was going to talk about Ukraine and Russia. | ||
| Just confused why it's been going on this long. | ||
| Remember, Russia invaded Ukraine like, what, five years ago? | ||
| So I can't believe we're still even having this situation. | ||
| But to my brother, almost four years ago. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, yeah. | ||
| But to my brother from Colombia, they've been shipping in drugs from that region since the early 80s. | ||
| They used to do it by planes, ships. | ||
| I mean, so I don't know what we can do. | ||
| We should have done some, I guess, 45 years ago because in the 80s, we had the biggest drug problem in American history. | ||
| So, and we're still obviously importing cocaine. | ||
| So, I don't know. | ||
| Military governments, I don't know what the answer is, but apparently Colombia is still, and the region is still producing drugs. | ||
| But yeah, I just feel bad for the poor president of Ukraine. | ||
| A gentleman said that earlier about how he was treating the White House, you know. | ||
| Poor guy, he didn't even speak. | ||
| I mean, when he said playing cards, you know, he didn't understand that terminology and other things, you know. | ||
| So, we got to just pray for that region because obviously there's no incentive for the president to deal with Russia, fairly. | ||
| He's been doing what he's been doing. | ||
| So, well, that's about it. | ||
| C-SPAN, thank you. | ||
| Happy New Year. | ||
| Happy New Year to you. | ||
| Carolyn in Georgia, Independent Line. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
| Yes, I'm calling in. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| I'm calling in because too often we have people, and especially people of color, they're calling in to do their put-down talk and being very negative because the show host will not do the talk that they, but they bring people in to do their negative talk and influences them to come in on the shows. | ||
| And especially the PM shows on these different networks like CNN, they bring those people in to do their talking. | ||
| It's just that it's a divider. | ||
| We, the people, divide the people in this country, not the president. | ||
| And I did hear about one caller that called in and said that President Trump hadn't done a thing, and all they need to do is just look at the border. | ||
| The border is a lot better. | ||
| That's one thing. | ||
| And taxes is another thing. | ||
| So if they will look and dig and see what the president has done, they would not be talking so negative about him. | ||
| And a lot of my people are talking about that they agree with a lot of things that President Trump has done. | ||
| So we need to take a look and write down what he's done so we'll know how to speak on it. | ||
| But all this negative talk that these host show hosts allow people to do, they need to stop it because we see that they bring them in to influence the division in this country. | ||
| Well, Carolyn mentioned the border, and this is Mike on Facebook who says: I'd say the enforcement of the southern border and mass deportation of illegal immigrants is the biggest story of 2025. | ||
| And here is actually, the Department of Homeland Security put this out. | ||
| If you go to DHS.gov, you will see this, Historic Year of Accomplishments, where they talk about secured the southern border to historic levels, citing these statistics. | ||
| Border crossings year over year have plunged 93%. | ||
| There have been 53% less than the monthly average of apprehensions along the southwest border. | ||
| They talk about $37 billion from the Big Beautiful Bill Act will be used to finish the border wall. | ||
| It says zero is the parole releases by CBP for seven consecutive months. | ||
| But you can take a look at those statistics. | ||
| That's DHS.gov. | ||
| Kenny Kirkpatrick also says this on Facebook. | ||
| Finally, a closed border. | ||
| That's his biggest news story. | ||
| And Sarah says that the Epstein files are the biggest news story of 2025. | ||
| Kevin, Washington, D.C., Line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Kevin. | ||
| Morning, Mimi. | ||
| You had Dr. Redfield on Washington Journal, and he said that gain of function is the biggest threat to humanity. | ||
| Wait, the what was biggest? | ||
| Say again, Kevin? | ||
| Gain of function research. | ||
| Please don't cut me off. | ||
| Ask me a question like you did the guy talking about Columbia. | ||
| Dr. Redfield said if they did gain of function on bird flu like they did on SARS that created COVID, it could be a bigger disaster, like 100 times or 1,000 times worse than COVID. | ||
| And he's given another talk at Brookings January 20th, along with the scientist Alina Chun, who people tried to get fired from her job at the Harvard and Columbia Broad Institute because they wanted to censor her. | ||
| So Dr. Redfield said that the bird flu Gain of function would be a man-made possessor worse than any war or climate change or COVID. | ||
| So I appreciate your interview with him, but you cut him off when he mentioned COVID at the beginning of the Washington Journal talk. | ||
| And you gave a good interview, but then he kind of smiled at the end. | ||
| It was like he didn't really get a chance to talk about COVID. | ||
| Okay, and appreciate that, Kevin. | ||
| That is on our website, c-span.org, if you'd like to go back and watch any of our Washington Journal segments that we have had. | ||
| But speaking of public health, this is on the front page of the Washington Post today. | ||
| Kennedy, in one year, has upended U.S. public health. | ||
| It's a speed and scope alarm medical industry. | ||
| Insider interviews shed light on his vision for change. | ||
| That is at the Washington Post this morning. | ||
| If you'd like to read that, their year in review from the Health Department and the impact on health. | ||
| Here's Larry, Chicago, Illinois, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| I haven't called since the National Day of Prayer back in May, so we're still a house divided. | ||
| So here's my prayer: With a humble heart, we beseech thee, O Lord, restore unto us the joy of thy salvation that we may walk in your paths and keep your adjustments. | ||
| And God bless C-SPAN. | ||
| Bye. | ||
| And Ray in Ithaca, New York, Republican line. | ||
| Ray, what is your top news story of 2025? | ||
| Yes, I think it's the just absolutely great job that President Trump has done. | ||
| You will try to get illegal immigration from the southern border to the 2 million people self-deporting to the ICE raids for sanctuary cities. | ||
| We're finally getting this done. | ||
| President Biden kept saying nothing can be done unless Congress does something. | ||
| Well, we know that that wasn't true. | ||
| This is just what President Trump has been able to do on this, I never would have thought was possible. | ||
| And I give him just every kudo in the world. | ||
| All right, Ray. | ||
| This is Jim in Grayson, Kentucky. | ||
| Democrat. | ||
| Good morning, Jim. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| You got to lower your TV, Jim. | ||
| Lower the volume because we can hear it. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| I just wanted to say that the way the president's done this first year, I think it's an excellent job. | ||
| And I think the top story is the way he did the border and getting these illegals out of the country. | ||
| And I think we should all make a New Year's resolution that we're one nation under God and let China and Russia and these other countries know that we're united and we're fully behind our president. | ||
| Can I say one more thing? | ||
| Yes, you can. | ||
| Go ahead, Jim. | ||
| Hey, would you put that lady on there, that black lady that does a job up against these other ladies? | ||
| But I'll tell you, that's one pretty lady. | ||
| Going back to March now, if you'll recall, that was SignalGate. | ||
| So that was there was a journalist accidentally put on a signal chat that is not encrypted, and they were talking about, they were discussing the plans on the attack on Yemen, the American attack on Yemen at that time. | ||
| Here is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth addressing that he was in Hawaii. | ||
| Can you share how your information about war plans against the Houthis in Yemen was shared with a journalist in the Atlantic? | ||
| And were those details classified? | ||
| So you're talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who's made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again to include the, I don't know, the hoaxes of Russia, Russia, Russia, or the fine people on both sides hoax, or suckers and losers hoax. | ||
| So this is the guy that peddles in garbage. | ||
| This is what he does. | ||
| I would love to comment on the Houthi campaign because of the skill and courage of our troops. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've monitored it very closely from the beginning. | |
| And you see, we've been managing four years of deferred maintenance under the Trump administration. | ||
| Our troops, our sailors, were getting shot at as targets. | ||
| Our ships couldn't sail through. | ||
| And when they did shoot back, it was purely defensively or at shacks in Yemen. | ||
| President Trump said, no more. | ||
| We will reestablish deterrence. | ||
| We will open freedom of navigation. | ||
| And we will ultimately decimate the Houthis, which is exactly what we're doing as we speak from the beginning, overwhelmingly. | ||
| Why were those details shared on Signal? | ||
| And how did you learn that a journalist was privy to the targets, the types of weapons used? | ||
| I've heard I was characterized. | ||
| Nobody was texting war plans, and that's all I have to say about that. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And this is the journalist that he was referring to was Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic. | ||
| Here is the headline of that article. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The Trump administration accidentally texted me its war plans. | |
| U.S. national security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. | ||
| I didn't think it could be real. | ||
| Then the bomb started falling. | ||
| You can read that at The Atlantic if you're interested. | ||
| Let's talk to Katrina in Georgia, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Hi, Katrina. | ||
| Hi, good morning, and thanks for taking my call. | ||
| I guess my biggest story is the failure of this government, the failure of our government, the failure of putting adequate and intelligent individuals in positions that has those individuals having the qualifications to run those divisions. | ||
| This president looks at our government as a joke, and he can tell by the people he appoints to different parts of the government to oversee different departments, and they have no clue. | ||
| They have no background in the departments that they oversee. | ||
| So that just tells you how serious he take our security and the security of the people. | ||
| And are there certain individuals that you are concerned about? | ||
| Yes, JFK. | ||
| RFK. | ||
| Yeah, RFK. | ||
| And the one over education, I can go on and on. | ||
| The one over housing, they do not have any qualifications to run those departments. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It's just a disgrace, and it's actually a slap in the face of the people. | ||
| And on top of that, these people that are calling in about the Minnesota fraud, we have a fraudster in office. | ||
| He is frauding the people every day. | ||
| He's laundering money for his family. | ||
| They have been doing it. | ||
| Each administration, when he came into office the first time, I thought we would learn not to put this fraudster, this con man, back into office. | ||
| And it's ridiculous. | ||
| He cares nothing about the people. | ||
| Please understand that. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| He would rather let us starve, let people starve, let kids go without, elderly go without, veterans go without. | ||
| There's nothing he has done. | ||
| Okay, he has not fixed any wars. | ||
| He so-called had these so-called plans to stop the war over there in Gaza and over there in, and that didn't hold up. | ||
| And is he saying anything? | ||
| Israel is still bombing those people. | ||
| And this is ridiculous. | ||
| And he has the nerve to bring that man back to the White House again so people understand this man cares nothing about the American people. | ||
| All he cares about the money he can make for his family. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| All right, Katrina. | ||
| And she did mention RFK Jr. | ||
| This is from May, and it's Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, a Democrat, questioning HHS Secretary RFK Jr. about his views on vaccines and the one, the measles vaccine. | ||
| Just this morning in front of the House of Representatives, you also said that you, in fact, would not recommend that kids get vaccinated for measles. | ||
| You said you would just lay out the pros and cons. | ||
| Okay, so this is the summation of everything that you have said to compromise people's faith in the measles vaccine in particular is contrary to what you said before this committee. | ||
| You said you support the measles vaccine, but then you have laid out a set of facts that are contested. | ||
| And I will submit information for the record from experts who can test what you've said about the vaccine. | ||
| And the result is to undermine faith in the vaccines. | ||
| Kind of like saying, listen, I think you should swim in that lake, but, you know, the lake is probably toxic, and there's probably a ton of snakes and alligators in that lake, but I think you should swim in it. | ||
| Nobody's going to swim in that lake if that's what you say. | ||
| And so I want you to acknowledge that when you say you support the measles vaccine and then go out and repeatedly undermine the vaccine with information that is contested by public health experts, that is not supporting the vaccine. | ||
| And so I guess I have two simple questions for you. | ||
| One is, can you clarify what you said in the House this morning? | ||
| Are you or are you not recommending that families get their children vaccinated or are you just giving people the pros and cons? | ||
| And do you understand that when you say these things about the measles vaccine, what ends up happening is less people get the vaccine? | ||
| That may be what you want, but do you understand that the result of constantly questioning the efficacy or safety of the vaccine results in less people getting the vaccine? | ||
| So I don't necessarily want to spend the remaining 20 seconds in an argument over the science, but do you at least understand that that's the consequence of what you're saying? | ||
| And are you actually still recommending people get the vaccine or are you not? | ||
| Senator, if I advise you to swim in a lake, I knew there to be alligators and wouldn't you want me to tell you there were alligators in it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So are you recommending the measles vaccine or not? | |
| What I've said and what I said and doesn't sound like you are if that's are you gonna let me answer are you gonna keep it are you are you not are you gonna let me answer what I pledged before this committee when I during my confirmation is that I would tell the truth that I would have radical transparency I'm gonna tell the truth about everything we know and we don't know about I am not going to just tell people everything is safe and effective. | ||
| If I know that there's issues, I need to respect people's intelligence. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're answering the question I think you're answering really dangerous for the American public and for families. | |
| The reason people have lost faith in this program is because they've been lied to by public officials. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No longer recommending the measles senator Marshall all right, by the way. | |
| I said at the hearing this morning that I was recommending the measles vaccine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go look at the transcript And we are taking your top news story of 2025. | |
| The lines are on your screen. | ||
| Republicans are on 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| Bob Kingwood, Texas Republican line. | ||
| Good morning, Bob. | ||
| Good morning, Mimi. | ||
| I think the stories that haven't been discussed were pretty important for this year. | ||
| The first one is the bombing of Iran, that Trump was bold enough to take out the Iran nuclear problem that had been plaguing us well since Obama when we gave cash and that it perpetuated on through Trump's first administration and then on through Biden. | ||
| You haven't heard much from Iran, and they were the ones funding Hamas and funding all the wars. | ||
| So we've made them quiet. | ||
| And in fact, their regime is in a lot of trouble now. | ||
| And I think President Trump did a really good job to do that, and the media and the Democrats really opposed him on that. | ||
| The other thing was the shutdown of Congress. | ||
| Nobody's talked about that. | ||
| Again, the Democrats shut our government down. | ||
| They claim the Republicans did it, but they were the ones that refused to vote to open our government. | ||
| And, Bob, when you said the shutdown of Congress, so what did you think of the House not being in session as long as the federal government was shut down? | ||
| Did you agree with Speaker Johnson's decision to keep all the Republicans at home and not in session? | ||
| They could have come to work, obviously, but what would they do? | ||
| They would sit there and argue and do their things, whatever they were going to do, but the official shutdown was the responsibility of the Democrats to vote to allow the government to open up, and they refused to do it until finally, eight Democrats, most of them retiring or getting out because they would have had trouble with their party, allowed it to open up. | ||
| And now look at the mess we're in. | ||
| We had little time to try to reconcile the health care situation that they wanted to have their shutdown over. | ||
| And where are we? | ||
| The health care is not going to happen. | ||
| The health care administration repair isn't going to happen. | ||
| And this is Deb on Facebook. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And she says this. | |
| There's no denying that this year has had its highs and lows. | ||
| After slashing SNAP and Medicaid, Donald Trump is sending millions of Americans into the new year without health care, a home they can afford, or food on the table. | ||
| He's wrecked havoc on our institutions, our democracy, and fundamental rights in unprecedented ways. | ||
| But we also saw exactly what happens when folks fight back. | ||
| This past November, Trump was dealt major losses in critical races across Virginia, New York, and New Jersey. | ||
| Bob also mentioned Iran. | ||
| So I wanted to show you this. | ||
| This is from yesterday's CBS news. | ||
| Iran vows harsh response to any attack, as Trump says he'd, quote, knock the hell out of them if nuclear work resumes. | ||
| It says that the Iranian president promised on Tuesday yesterday a harsh response to any attack, appearing to respond to a warning the previous day by President Trump over Iran's purported attempts to rebuild its nuclear program. | ||
| On a social media post, he says, answer of Islamic Republic of Iran to any cruel aggression will be harsh and discouraging. | ||
| The president did not elaborate, but his statement came a day after Mr. Trump suggested the U.S. could carry out new military strikes if Iran attempts to reconstitute its nuclear program. | ||
| He made those comments during wide-ranging talks with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago in Florida. | ||
| Rush, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Independent Line, what is your top news story of 2025? | ||
| Good morning, Mimi. | ||
| I got you again, huh? | ||
| But my big story, I just always say that to you. | ||
| I only call once a month, by the way. | ||
| But all the last callers are the Irans, everything is big. | ||
| To me, the Epstein stuff is the biggest because when it first started, this and that, Trump says, well, you mean we're still talking about Epstein? | ||
| And then he said it's a Democrat hoax. | ||
| Then he's lied. | ||
| I voted for him three times, but then he said he might have been on that plane once or twice. | ||
| He's on there eight times. | ||
| At any rate, he's pretty corrupt. | ||
| Now, you can get into a thing they call the tail wagon the dog. | ||
| So when you're caught up in that kind of stuff, and it's not only him, trust me, it's a bunch of them, and that's why they're probably not doing anything about it. | ||
| But, you know, you can start all kinds of crap like wars, and he's supposed to be the peaceful president, and he says he stopped all these wars. | ||
| Heck, he bombed Somalia and Nigeria Christmas Day. | ||
| You know, even in World War I, World War II, Vietnam, I think even with Putin and him, they didn't do anything. | ||
| They shut it down for Christmas Day. | ||
| So, Rush, when you say that you voted for President Trump three times, what was it that made you disillusioned with him? | ||
| Was it the Epstein files? | ||
| Was that the thing that? | ||
| Yeah, go ahead. | ||
| No, no, that just became, you know, recent. | ||
| You know, the Epstein thing just, I didn't realize that in 2024 here. | ||
| 2016, I fell for, I bet that I thought that he was going to do something. | ||
| I think he did do a few things there from 16 to 20. | ||
| Then from 20 to 24, he lost that election. | ||
| But from here on out, and I agree with the young lady on the cabinet, I loved all of these cabinet pics. | ||
| I'm done. | ||
| The only one I might hold any love for anymore is Tulsi Gabbard, because here's another problem. | ||
| Marco Rubio, senator, experienced, he has something to do with this Venezuela thing because he wants Cuba, too. | ||
| They're going to move from this Venezuelan thing. | ||
| And the drug thing, I'm 74 years old. | ||
| We never got drugs from Venezuela. | ||
| We smoked a lot of pot back in the day. | ||
| It was Mexican, and it moved up to Colombian, then Jamaican, then Hawaiian. | ||
| Those were all the best. | ||
| I never heard of Venezuelan pot. | ||
| I guess maybe there might be some cocaine or whatever. | ||
| That comes out from everywhere down there. | ||
| But I don't like war. | ||
| And he was supposed to be a peaceful president. | ||
| And I tell you what, he goes into Iran another time. | ||
| That's Persia. | ||
| We're dealing with Persia here. | ||
| We're going to be 250 years old next July 4th. | ||
| I mean, Iran's been around a long time. | ||
| China's been around a long time. | ||
| Russia's been around a long time. | ||
| So, Rush, since you mentioned the Epstein files, let's go ahead and take a look at Representative Thomas Massey speaking in September about that issue. | ||
| I hope my colleagues are watching this press conference. | ||
| I want them to think: what if this was your sister? | ||
| What if this was your daughter? | ||
| When these survivors speak, the Washington establishment is asking the American public to believe something that is not believable. | ||
| They're asking you to believe that two individuals created hundreds of victims and they acted alone, and that the DOJ has no idea of who else might have been involved, that nobody else did anything that rose to a criminal enterprise. | ||
| The American people know that's not true. | ||
| Now, the Speaker of the House just offered a fig leaf to my colleagues. | ||
| They're going to vote on a non-binding resolution today that does absolutely nothing. | ||
| I appreciate the efforts of my colleague James Comer, who's leading the Oversight Committee. | ||
| They may find some information, but they're allowing the DOJ to curate all of the information that the DOJ is giving them. | ||
| If you've looked at the pages they've released so far, they're heavily redacted. | ||
| Some pages are entirely redacted. | ||
| And 97% of this is already in the public domain. | ||
| So I'm calling on my colleagues. | ||
| Be one of the next two who sponsors this discharge petition. | ||
| I think it's shameful that this has been called a hoax. | ||
| Hopefully, today we can clear that up. | ||
| This is not a hoax. | ||
| This is real. | ||
| There are real survivors. | ||
| There are real victims to this criminal enterprise. | ||
| And the perpetrators are being protected because they're rich and powerful and political donors to the establishment here in Washington, D.C. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that was in September of this year. | |
| Here's Alan, Brooklyn, New York. | ||
| Democrat. | ||
| Hi, Alan. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Thank you, and happy new year. | ||
| This answer sort of encompasses a whole range of things that have not been done by the Supreme Court, which is controlled by Republicans, and by the Congress, controlled by Republicans, to honor the intent of our Constitution to have checks and balances among competing branches to ensure that no one branch brings tyranny to America. | ||
| Without that competition, we are a tyrannical monarchy, and that's what they're creating by letting Trump run rampant in so many areas and not checking his power. | ||
| And it seems to be that this is a deliberate attempt to raise a single party to the role of a monarchical force in the country. | ||
| And in the onset of the administration this year, when they first named their cabinet nominees, we recall the RTV program on December 4th of last year praising those choices as being capable, if they were all confirmed, Of dismantling America from within, brick by brick. | ||
| That is something that pleased Trump's media, and apparently that is something that Trump agreed to. | ||
| For all we know, Trump agreed to the cabinet nominees recommended by Putin for that reason, just the way he agreed to a peace plan for Ukraine, virtually verbatim. | ||
| And this combination of loyalty to a foreign force and disloyalty of the courts and the Congress to the principles of checks and balances is a prescription for tyranny if the people don't continue to push back and demand that all the branches of government act first on behalf of their branch and then, if ever, last for their party. | ||
| Because we cannot have a one-party dictatorship in this country. | ||
| Okay, and Alan is in New York, and I wanted to make sure you saw that Zorhan Mamdani will be sworn in tonight just after midnight. | ||
| So here is NBC News. | ||
| Mamdani to be sworn in as New York City mayor by Senator Bernie Sanders and A.G. Letitia James. | ||
| James will formally swear in Mamdani at midnight when his term officially begins, and Sanders will oversee the mayor-elect ceremonial swearing in later that day. | ||
| Here is Rick, Columbus, Ohio, Republican line. | ||
| Go ahead, Rick. | ||
| Yes, I'm talking about the fraud in the Somalian community. | ||
| What is his name? | ||
| Shirley, please have him come to Columbus, Ohio, because right down the street from me is one of the biggest churches that we've had. | ||
| It's on Cleveland Avenue and Huey Road. | ||
| The Somalians has taken it over and bought it. | ||
| Now, how can you come from a third world country where you don't even have a tool of paper, and then you come to our country and you buy a church that is one of the biggest churches in our community? | ||
| I want to know how that works and tell me they ain't no fraud. | ||
| And I know that they're selling their food stamps because I see it every day with my own eyes. | ||
| So you can't tell me I ain't seeing it. | ||
| And I know people that's doing it that are Americans to try to survive. | ||
| Now, what is the solution to this problem? | ||
| I was sitting in a bar in the 80s, and the bartender came up and told me I wasn't allowed to smoke a cigarette no more. | ||
| Well, the Democrats were in power, and that's when they started. | ||
| All this crap that they've got going on because they want to control us, and they say Donald Trump wants to be a dictator. | ||
| They better look at Obama. | ||
| That was the wordless president we ever had. | ||
| I used to have a sign in my yard that said, Obama. | ||
| Mike in Illinois, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning, Mike. | ||
| Top of the morning. | ||
| Happy New Year Eve. | ||
| Two C-SPAN top stories and two top stories under this dark cloud with the leaded vest that feels like the x-ray at your dentist's office. | ||
| The first C-SPAN top stories were a two-time winner in the student cam, incredible. | ||
| I'm definitely pulling for the third. | ||
| I'm wondering if Ken Burns heard the noise yet. | ||
| Another one is Tammy's incredible interviews in front of the Supreme Court and the National Mall. | ||
| How did she not get the ceasefire role? | ||
| Incredible interviews. | ||
| Every time she's out in her coat in that bad weather, she should have got that spot. | ||
| My two top stories under the black cloud: Trump's tariffs. | ||
| Number one, we planted crops. | ||
| The Parmesan crops were China. | ||
| Trump's put tariffs on the farmers on China. | ||
| China won't buy the crops. | ||
| Now they can come behind and buy the farm. | ||
| Now, FDA passes new laws saying for new farmers, they get low-interest tax breaks. | ||
| Talk about replacement. | ||
| And the other part of the tariff problem is he's asking corporations to eat his tariffs and not pass them on. | ||
| He's stabilizing them like the farms. | ||
| At the same time, he's saying, hey, I got Saudi money here to buy you out. | ||
| So when you get destabilized, we got trillions of dollars to buy you out. | ||
| You know, that's kind of weird. | ||
| And then the Senate passes a law for the CHIPS Act, which is unconstitutional, starting the House. | ||
| But anyways, the Senate passed the CHIPS Act. | ||
| He used that money to buy into corporations. | ||
| And we don't know exactly what's going on with that. | ||
| And then the military is doing the same. | ||
| They're investing into rare earth minerals in other countries. | ||
| Where are these rare earth minerals and what countries are they in that we have to protect now? | ||
| There's a lot of great areas under this dark cloud, and there's a way to let it vest that we're wearing. | ||
| Okay, Mike. | ||
| And Mike did mention tariffs. | ||
| So let's go back to April. | ||
| This is April 2nd, where President Trump announced Liberation Day, where he's announcing his reciprocal tariffs. | ||
| Take a look. | ||
| My fellow Americans, this is Liberation Day, waiting for a long time. | ||
| April 2nd, 2025 will forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn, the day America's destiny was reclaimed, and the day that we began to make America wealthy again. | ||
| Gonna make it wealthy, good and wealthy. | ||
| For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, raped, and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike. | ||
| American steel workers, auto workers, farmers, and skilled craftsmen, we have a lot of them here with us today. | ||
| They really suffered gravely. | ||
| They watched in anguish as foreign leaders have stolen our jobs, foreign cheaters have ransacked our factories, and foreign scavengers have torn apart our once beautiful American dream. | ||
| We had an American dream that you don't hear so much about. | ||
| You did four years ago, and you are now, but you don't too often, and for many years and decades even, you didn't hear too much about. | ||
| Our country and its taxpayers have been ripped off for more than 50 years, but it is not going to happen anymore. | ||
| It's not going to happen. | ||
| In a few moments, I will sign a historic executive order instituting reciprocal tariffs on countries throughout the world. | ||
| Reciprocal. | ||
|
unidentified
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That means they do it to us and we do it to them. | |
| Very simple. | ||
| Can't get any simpler than that. | ||
| This is one of the most important days, in my opinion, in American history. | ||
| It's our declaration of economic independence. | ||
| For years, hardworking American citizens were forced to sit on the sidelines as other nations got rich and powerful, much of it at our expense. | ||
| But now it's our turn to prosper and in so doing use trillions and trillions of dollars to reduce our taxes and pay down our national debt and it'll all happen very quickly. | ||
| With today's action, we are finally going to be able to make America great again, greater than ever before. | ||
| Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country, and you see it happening already. | ||
| We will supercharge our domestic industrial base. | ||
| We will pry open foreign markets and break down foreign trade barriers. | ||
| And ultimately, more production at home will mean stronger competition and lower prices for consumers. | ||
| This will be indeed the golden age of America. | ||
| It's coming back. | ||
| We're going to come back very strongly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that was in April. | |
| And here's what Judy sent us from Waynesburg, Pennsylvania on text. | ||
| Trump's war on drugs has included bombing Venezuela and pardoning a major drug dealer, but not asking the people of this country to not buy illegal drugs. | ||
| Back to the calls now. | ||
| Dan in Tennessee, Line for Democrats. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| I have you again. | ||
| You're just lucky, Dan. | ||
| I love my fellow callers, even when I don't agree with them. | ||
| Maybe one of the top news stories would be when you have the Billionaire Boys Club, the Lutnick Boys, the Witcoff Boys, the Trump Boys, the Ellison boy, and they don't have enough money, so they get about $24 billion of Saudi money, and they want to take over the American media with a Skydance Paramount Warner Brothers deal. | ||
| Now, pretty soon, Mimi, we're going to all be wishing that Mimi was back because they're going to yank PBS, C-SPAN off the air, because you deliver bad news. | ||
| See, there's a shiny object there. | ||
| We don't want you to see the bad news. | ||
| We'll do away with the Bureau of Labor Statistics. | ||
| We'll do away with the Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Protection Boards. | ||
| We'll do away with regulations, rules, policies. | ||
| We don't need any of that. | ||
| And Dan. | ||
| And when you showed the clip of, it made my skin crawl when you showed the clip again of Trump and Vance bushwhacking Zelensky in that meeting. | ||
| It just makes my skin crawl. | ||
| And Dan, I just want to clarify something you said about lumping us with PBS. | ||
| PBS does take government funding. | ||
| C-SPAN does not. | ||
| You know that, right? | ||
| You know what? | ||
| Yeah, I know that, dear, but it's just that they are trying to take over the media, and we will not have any bad news, will we? | ||
| Everything will be rosy. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Here's Gary in Texas on the line for independence. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Gary. | |
| Well, hey, you're such a growth. | ||
| I hope they keep you on. | ||
| And thank you, I want to say you're such an asset to the American people. | ||
| And I just want to say a couple words. | ||
| Well, one name in the word. | ||
| Gustavo Petro, the Colombian president, if you're listening to C-SPAN, stop sending your citizens over here to commit marriage fraud. | ||
| You know how I know it? | ||
| Because I've been married for 23 years to a Colombian, Maria Francisco Leyba. | ||
| And she married me for green cards. | ||
| You know how I found out? | ||
| My nine-year-old son. | ||
| He checked her WhatsApp messages. | ||
| They were planning green cards in visa fraudulent applications for 23 years. | ||
| I didn't know. | ||
| He found out. | ||
| This hurt my son. | ||
| This hurt our marriage. | ||
| Thank God for President Trump. | ||
| I'm a black American. | ||
| I married a Colombian. | ||
| She came over illegally. | ||
| She overstayed her visa. | ||
| And she somehow got awarded a green card. | ||
| Because she married you. | ||
| And she married me. | ||
| Oh, correct. | ||
| Donald Trump is an asset to the American people and the American family. | ||
| Now, I don't agree with everything he does, trust me. | ||
| But he's a good president. | ||
| Holman, Secretary Noam, ICE, they're doing us a great service. | ||
| They're bringing jobs and cleaning up our marriage situation. | ||
| To me, marriage, fraud, 350,000. | ||
| Look it up on AI. | ||
| Americans are affected every year by illegal marriages. | ||
| I was telling your phone lady, 90-day fiancée, whoever hasn't watched that, if you're married to one of these people, they will do you in. | ||
| Their families will never be dedicated to you as an American. | ||
| So, Gary, do you mind if I ask you, I mean, what happened when you confronted your wife about those messages? | ||
| Well, so ICE, it's being invested. | ||
| There's a big investigation going on right now. | ||
| So what happened was initially, about 12 years into our marriage, my wife, my son came to me and told me that my wife threatened to slap him in a WhatsApp message. | ||
| So I said, well, I asked my wife, can I see your text messages? | ||
| She said, yeah, go right ahead. | ||
| As I started looking at him, she asked me, well, what are you looking for? | ||
| I said, well, our son said that you threatened to slap him. | ||
| He's nine years old. | ||
| I want to know why you did that. | ||
| And then she wanted to take the phone. | ||
| When she tried to take the phone. | ||
| Wait, wait, wait. | ||
| Gary, she threatened to do what to your nine-year-old son? | ||
| To do what? | ||
| She threatened to slap him. | ||
| Slap him. | ||
| So when I tried to read the messages, she tried to take the phone and then she pulled a butcher knife out and threatened to, I don't know if she was going to stab me or not, but this is what happened. | ||
| So we went, got tested. | ||
| You know, 13 years later, we got over it, moved on. | ||
| And then my son found messages in WhatsApp where she was planning to get visas with her brother, Alfonso Leyva, in Colombia, who's still there, his sister, Lena Maria. | ||
| And they planned on getting all these visas for the rest of her family. | ||
| Yeah, for the rest of her family. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It was in Colombia. | ||
| So I could not translate it. | ||
| So as it was presented to me, I was just like, okay, well, I'll just, I'll figure it out later on. | ||
| I don't have time to deal with it. | ||
| But now we know after we broke it down, our attorney, that she was planning, they had planned this very sophisticated. | ||
| So Gary, you're going through a divorce right now? | ||
| Yeah, we're going through a divorce. | ||
| But now my son doesn't know whether he actually, you know, she actually wanted to have him or not. | ||
| Obviously, I think not. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, we got your point, Gary. | ||
| Raymond in New York, Republican. | ||
| Go ahead, Raymond. | ||
| Hi, good morning. | ||
| Thanks for having me in and have a happy new year. | ||
| Happy New Year. | ||
| Can you hear me? | ||
| I brought up this topic many times of term limits. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| People being in office for decades and decades, year after year, are the same people in office. | ||
| I'm always wondering how come they can't, like, sign into legislation term limits for Supreme Court justices, Congress, and Senate. | ||
| You can't have these same people in office year after year, decades after year, going at each other. | ||
| And this is just a power struggle. | ||
| We know that. | ||
| And if we know, I'm a Republican, and I know if Republicans lose to Congress, the Democrats are going to go after Trump. | ||
| We know that. | ||
| Okay, I voted for Trump because I saw the United States under Joe Biden going to shambles. | ||
| And for four years, Trump inherited a disaster of policies, money, all kinds of things. | ||
| So my thing is, I'm just hoping that one day they can get term limits in place. | ||
| Can't have these same people in office year after year, decades after year. | ||
| I'm not going to keep repeating it, but that's my philosophy. | ||
| How could it get signed into legislation? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right, Raymond. | ||
| And C-SPAN put together a video to honor the people that were lost during the year 2025, some of the notable people. | ||
| Take a look, and then when we come back, we will go back to your calls. | ||
|
unidentified
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For the first time, we said as moral citizens, we have to do what is right for our country. | |
| Our country is not always right. | ||
| Nobody wants to be a failure, but I had failed in trying to protect the president. | ||
| And I knew that humor is the universal solvent against the abrasive elements of life. | ||
| The America I know is grounded in the determination found in patriots and pioneers, in small businesses with big ideas. | ||
| Let us treat others with the same passion and compassion with which we want to be. | ||
| The judiciary is an institution which is not a political institution. | ||
|
unidentified
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The whole point of it is not to be one. | |
| What can we in the older generation do to make a better world for this country? | ||
| Before we leave the stage, what can we accomplish? | ||
|
unidentified
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We do have a problem in baseball, and using steroids is not respecting the game. | |
| We were so curious, so excited about being at the moon that we are like three school kids looking into a candy store window, watching those ancient old craters go by. | ||
| Our current state of slow motion national decline is a choice. | ||
| I see the community that we can be and the strength that we do have. | ||
| It makes me all the more passionate about joining that community and raising whatever I can do to help raise the voice to represent the people. | ||
| Every one of us, not just the young people, but all of us have to remember that each day we actually do make a difference. | ||
| It's time for America's leaders to stop pointing the finger of blame and to begin sharing the credit for success. | ||
|
unidentified
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I have discovered is that from activism and having a position on something to trying to | |
| get something done on an area. | ||
| You cannot hold on to strict positions because you find that the perfect is enemy of the good. | ||
| Post encouraged me to be better, to do more, to find out things I hadn't known. | ||
| It was and is my home. | ||
| Those are some of the notable people that were lost in 2025. | ||
| But we are taking your calls throughout this program up until the end of the program at 10 a.m. Eastern on your top new story of 2025. | ||
| As you look back on the year, what really stood out for you? | ||
| What do you think was the most impactful? | ||
| Let's hear from Lester in Washington, D.C. Democrat. | ||
| Good morning, Lester. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Okay, good morning. | ||
| What I want to say is that a couple things. | ||
| Number one, I think the top story today is the ACA and the Affordable Care Act. | ||
| And most people out there, you know, most people don't understand that the Affordable Care Act was never the solution to the health care crisis in America. | ||
| It was only an opportunity to resolve and to make people eligible for health care. | ||
| 24 million American students. | ||
| It was never a solution. | ||
| The solution to the health care crisis in America is universal health care. | ||
| But that sounds too much like socialism. | ||
| Second, a lot of people call in from different places talking about how great the economy is. | ||
| How great the economy can be when you let off thousands of Americans, okay? | ||
| Thousands of Americans. | ||
| You know, Biden left the economy with 3% inflation. | ||
| Trump is hovering between three, I think a little over 3% now, as well as the fact that you have thousands of people seeking employment right now. | ||
| So how great is the economy? | ||
| Also, too, you know, how serious is the Trump administration when it comes to the war against drugs? | ||
| When the Trump administration pardoned the Honduran president or Honduran president who made it very clear that he was, you know, that he was floating cocaine here in the United States. | ||
| So how serious can Mr. Trump be talking about stopping the drugs? | ||
| You know, I mean, people call in and they, you know, they make it, they seem to lack, I don't know, maybe intelligence or maybe an understanding of the drug war. | ||
| You know, and last but not least, you know, we haven't heard the last from Iran. | ||
| The United States is a young country. | ||
| Iran has been around thousands of years. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And Lester, just to clarify, you mentioned the inflation rate. | ||
| That is at 2.7%. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's the latest number from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. | |
| Here's Lisa Wake Forest, North Carolina, Independent Line. | ||
| You're on the air, Lisa. | ||
| Hi. | ||
| Yeah, hi, Mimi. | ||
| Great topic to end the year off. | ||
| The most important news stories for me this year are the attacks on Americans, the attacks on our own people in the country. | ||
| Of course, the deportation of tens of thousands of immigrants, some of them not even immigrants. | ||
| Some of them are actually holding, they're here legally. | ||
| And I also have a personal attack on myself. | ||
| About 30 years ago, I had a fixed change operation, and the attacks on the trans people are bothering me. | ||
| Personally, I don't care about the transgender athletes and all that kind of thing. | ||
| But what I do care about is I don't feel safe going out in public. | ||
| If I do go out in public, I don't want to have it be for more than half an hour. | ||
| I need to use a bathroom. | ||
| We had a lieutenant general here in North Carolina who said, let him go out and use the bushes. | ||
| That's terrible, okay? | ||
| But we're attacking good people. | ||
| I'm a veteran. | ||
| I'm a really great citizen. | ||
| I've done a lot for this country. | ||
| I was here, well, my family was here in America 200 years before the Trump family. | ||
| So. | ||
| All right, Lisa. | ||
| Here's Rory in California, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Okay, my name is Rory. | ||
| And I think that Ukraine is probably the silent big story these days. | ||
| When they dropped their atomic bombs, not literally, but when they gave them up, they were doomed to be invaded by Russia. | ||
| And I heard they don't want them to go to NATO. | ||
| However, Finland went to NATO. | ||
| And from what I'm hearing, they're trying to get tactical nuclear weapons so the Russians don't go after them. | ||
| So the point is, it's not disarmament so much. | ||
| What kept us out of nuclear war for 50 years was each side had a bomb and scared the other side into not using it. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| All right, Rory. | ||
| Let's talk to Caroline next in Ohio, line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Good morning, Mimi. | ||
| I just want to say I'm the, I just want to horseback off of one of the callers that called in on the South and Central American women, you know, wanting to marry him only for the green card. | ||
| Well, that was just a reminder that in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, when the slew of African men had come to this country to marry the black American women, only to get green cards, have kids, and just create havoc in their lives. | ||
| And I just want to implore to President Trump to please not build anything over in Gaza, because if you read in Jeremiah in the King James Version Bible, that that land is cursed. | ||
| Do not build anything over there or bad things will happen. | ||
| In Gaza, that's the modern day Jericho. | ||
| And please don't put a brick or any mortar in that country. | ||
| Leave it alone. | ||
| These people know that that land is cursed, but they're skinning and grinning in President Trump's face, and they know that, you know, it's a cursed piece of land. | ||
| So leave it alone. | ||
| So happy New Year's to everyone. | ||
| Dee in Tennessee, line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Yes, good morning. | ||
| Morning. | ||
| My feeling is Donald Trump as president is playing from Putin playbook. | ||
| He's doing everything he can to separate Americans. | ||
| Donald Trump, a president, downgrade another president to foreign nationals. | ||
| He talked bad about playing from Joe Biden. | ||
| Joe Biden is American. | ||
| And he downgraded another president to other ones. | ||
| And not only that, Putin is his main goal. | ||
| He is a dictator, and he's trying to turn America. | ||
| He got our soldiers, our children, out there fighting us, not in war, but here in America. | ||
| It's his main government. | ||
| Here's Roberto in Houston, Texas, Independent. | ||
| Good morning, Roberto. | ||
| Good morning, Mimi. | ||
| I'm so glad you're on. | ||
| I want to give you an update. | ||
| You know, when you had Adam on concerning the independent movement, and I called in, and I tried to call him, he didn't return my call. | ||
| I am running as independent here for my district in Houston, and it's very hard to do. | ||
| It's really stacked against independence. | ||
| It's really for Democrats and Republicans. | ||
| I have registered as an independent with the state, and they have all kinds of complications for independence. | ||
| So I want to follow up with you and perhaps have him back and do a follow-up, especially next year. | ||
| It's November, next November is so important. | ||
| But I want to give you an update on that. | ||
| And also, I have to say this, to me, the most important thing, because it showed our moral failure as a country, was Gaza genocide. | ||
| There's no other way to put it. | ||
| And these Christians, conservative Christians, Americans who think it's in the Bible, no, no, no, no. | ||
| The UN created Israel, not God. | ||
| The UN created Israel. | ||
| And Israel has to be responsible by paying reparations to the UN to take care of Gaza because it is over 70,000 human beings, people. | ||
| 70,000. | ||
| And we are mourning the Australian Jewish attack for 15 died. | ||
| That's horrible, of course. | ||
| Paul Reiner died. | ||
| One Jewish man. | ||
| That's horrible. | ||
| 70,000? | ||
| 70,000, over 7,000. | ||
| And children and women. | ||
| So I'm getting very involved. | ||
| And I'm so glad you did the segment on the people who died this year because the Pope died in April. | ||
| I didn't know what day. | ||
| I'm trying to get with the Catholic Church starting here in Houston to have a Saint Francis, Pope Francis, he probably will be declared a saint. | ||
| Anyway, Pope Francis Relief Fund for Palestinian Children. | ||
| I'm trying to start that. | ||
| And thanks for your input on our programming. | ||
| And in New York, Line for Democrats, you're on the air. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Thank you for C-SPAN. | ||
| And I just have to say, the young woman who took my call as a screener, she did a fabulous job, as do you and all of the hosts on C-SPAN. | ||
| I really loved your retrospective of who we lost this year. | ||
| I would have liked to have seen Diane Keaton included. | ||
| So if you do any updates, that would have been great if you could include her. | ||
| And also, I think the main story is the Epstein finals cover-up by Trump and his powerful cronies known as the Epstein class, and specifically how Ghelane Maxwell was moved to a low-security prison. | ||
| If that's not a quid pro quo, I don't know what is. | ||
| All right, Anne. | ||
| And Anne was in New York. | ||
| A couple of programming notes for you. | ||
| We are going to be covering the New York New Year's Eve celebration tonight happening in Times Square in New York City. | ||
| There will also be videos celebrating the 250th anniversary of the United States. | ||
| That celebration kicks off at midnight. | ||
| The ball drop at midnight will include a patriotic salute to America's birthday. | ||
|
unidentified
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Our coverage starts at 6 p.m. Eastern Time. | |
| You can watch that live here on C-SPAN. | ||
| Also, tonight, you can ring in the new year with a fireworks show in Washington, D.C. on the National Mall. | ||
| A candle is going to be projected onto the Washington Monument in honor of America's 250th birthday. | ||
| Live coverage starting just before midnight on C-SPAN 2. | ||
| Both of those you can also watch online at c-span.org and our free mobile video app, C-SPAN now. | ||
| Here is Jeff in Ohio, Republican line. | ||
| Good morning, Jeff. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| The top story for me and realization this year was how right and correct Elon Musk was about the fraud, waste, and abuse in our country. | ||
| If everyone remembers going back nine, ten months ago, he was vilified by members of the House of Representatives and senators from the Democratic Party and got people to torture his dealerships, destroy his Teslas all over the country. | ||
| And look how right he was about the fraud with recent discovery in Minnesota now coming up here in Columbus, Ohio, and New York, and then the fraud in the state of California. | ||
| It turns out he was right, and the Democrats should listen to him, and they should apologize. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Here's Jim and Cairo, Missouri, Democrat. | ||
| Hi, Jim. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Mamie, some numbers you quoted earlier about inflation and unemployment, they were produced by a Trump appointee. | ||
| Trump has demonstrated that if his appointees do not give him good news, they're out of a job. | ||
| I do not trust numbers out of this administration. | ||
| To change the subject, Gaza, the ceasefire is not holding. | ||
| He wants to move on to phase two of his 20-part plan. | ||
| Phase one never worked. | ||
| I don't know what the man's talking about. | ||
| Would you say that was your biggest news story of the year was the war in Gaza? | ||
| That's the biggest embarrassment. | ||
| Well, that and blowing up boats that were not coming to America full of drugs. | ||
| May I point out that Venezuela does not have a Pacific coast? | ||
| I don't, if he's bombing boats in the Pacific, they are not from Venezuela. | ||
| All right, Jim. | ||
| Let's talk to John in Louisiana, Independent Line. | ||
| Hi, John. | ||
| Hey, good morning, ma'am. | ||
| How are you doing? | ||
| Good. | ||
| Yes, I served for 30 years in the military. | ||
| And what I've seen for this year is just the dismal performance of the Secretary of Defense, you know, who's supposed to be running our military. | ||
| This guy is definitely not qualified to be in charge of anything. | ||
| I fought in wars. | ||
| I've seen how he was disrespectful to generals, and you see admirals and everybody just retiring because of the incompetence of this guy. | ||
| We have lost our credibility on the world stage. | ||
| I have participated when I was stationed overseas with many of our foreign allies and different type scenarios. | ||
| We have lost that respect. | ||
| And what I see is it's going to take decades for us to get that back. | ||
| So is there something specifically, John, that you've seen Secretary Hagseth do that makes you believe that he is not qualified for the job? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| The bombing of the boats coming out of supposedly coming out of Venezuela when they don't even have the capacity to reach our shores and the fact that he passes over classified information. | ||
| On the signal chat? | ||
| Is that yes, ma'am? | ||
| I've served so many years in the military and had top secret security clearances, and they made it very clear about your responsibilities to secure top secret information and also with the law of armed conflict from the time I joined the military when I was 17 years old. | ||
| And they taught us about our responsibilities that we are in war. | ||
| And if our soldiers are in that position, then that allows our enemies to go out and do the same thing to us. | ||
| And we can't say anything because we'd have lost the moral high ground. | ||
| All right, John. | ||
| Let's talk to Hillgrove in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| I hear people calling up to talk and talking about how bad the economy was under Joe Biden. | ||
| By the way, Mark Zandy was on C-SPAN this year, and he said that the economy under Joe Biden was the best in 35 years. | ||
| So, I mean, you can check that on your programs. | ||
| But the other thing is Trump inherited a good economy both times when he was his first time from Obama, and then he screwed that up. | ||
| And then, of course, Biden inherited his ridiculous economy and had to do it. | ||
| And then also with all the programs that Biden promoted in four years, certainly was a tribute to him. | ||
| I think he'll get down as one of the best presidents we ever had for a four-year president. | ||
| And I think the Democrats were rude today that they didn't let him run. | ||
| I think I would have voted for him if he came out in a wheelchair before I would ever voted for Trump. | ||
| That's my comment for today. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And speaking of the economy, this is from earlier this month. | ||
| House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat of New York, criticizing President Trump and congressional Republicans for their handling of the economy. | ||
| Yeah, House Republicans have no issue as it relates to affordability. | ||
| They believe that the affordability crisis in the country is a hoax and a scam. | ||
| That's what their leader has said, Donald Trump, who says he's both the president and the speaker at the same time, Donald Trump's words, not mine. | ||
| They don't plan to address the high cost of living in this country because they don't even believe that it exists. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Now, the interesting thing is that I agree that the American people will continue to feel the impact of the one big ugly bill that Republicans jammed down their throats. | |
| But it's going to be an adverse impact because hospitals and nursing homes and community-based health centers are going to continue to close as a result of Republicans enacting the largest cut to Medicaid in American history. | ||
|
unidentified
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Electricity bills are skyrocketing because of the Republican attack on the clean energy economy. | |
| Clean energy is cheaper energy, but they gutted those provisions of the tax code. | ||
| Republicans did so they could reward big oil and their donors. | ||
|
unidentified
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But as a result, the American people are seeing their electricity bills skyrocket. | |
| And then, of course, if you rip $186 billion from SNAP, which Republicans did in their one big, ugly bill, they're going to cause everyday Americans to go hungry. | ||
|
unidentified
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We're talking about 42 million people, 16 million children who are going to be hurt by what Republicans did in their one big, ugly bill, 8 million older Americans, and over a million veterans who rely on SNAP. | |
| And so the adverse impact, the harm that Republicans have done to the American people, actually, we're just scratching the surface. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries from earlier this month. | |
| And here is Ron in California, aligned for Republicans. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| How are you? | ||
| Good. | ||
| Yeah, all right. | ||
| The reason I called, I wanted to mention the three big broadcasters, CBS, Embassy, and ABC. | ||
| And I just wanted to equate them to the three monkeys when they regard the Democratic Party, see no evil, speak no evil, and hear no evil. | ||
| And that's pretty much what it looks like. | ||
| And thank you for taking my call. | ||
| All right, Ron. | ||
| And this is Kay in Arnold, Missouri, Independent Line. | ||
| Hi, Kay. | ||
| Happy New Year. | ||
| Happy New Year to you. | ||
| There are so many news stories from this year. | ||
| It's hard to pick just one. | ||
| But something that hasn't been brought up this morning is the insurrection, the pardoning of all the insurrectionists from January 6, 2021. | ||
| And I think that is noteworthy. | ||
| First of all, it's a bit offensive for anybody who's ever had any dealings with the courts and has suffered the consequences and no one pardoned them. | ||
| And not that I'm a retired educator, but I do know people that have had dealings with the court system. | ||
| And the other thing is that it just sort of started off the tone for the year that we have a lawless administration in the White House. | ||
| Anyway, Happy New Year and Washington C-SPAN. | ||
| Bye-bye. | ||
| Gwen in Detroit, Michigan, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning, Gwen. | ||
| Hi, good morning. | ||
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| My biggest story of 2025 is the Supreme Court, the GOP Supreme Court, and the coward, powerly Republicans in Congress by not presenting a tyrantical presidential takeover, including Trump's MAGA followers. | ||
| They act just like the Supreme Court, refusing to acknowledge his destruction of America's values and our historical achievements. | ||
| These people who voted for Trump have actually betrayed America, betrayed immigrants, Ukraine, and Gaza by not condemning Trump. | ||
| So that's my biggest story, that Trump has actually taken office, that he was allowed to take office and allowed to continue his destruction. | ||
| Thank you, Mimi, and Happy New Year to everyone. | ||
| I hope 2026 will be a turnaround from this. | ||
| The Democrats will win. | ||
| And Jose in Texas, Independent Line, what's your top news story of 2025? | ||
| Putting Donald Trump in office. | ||
| He's a con man, and the whole America is being scammed by him. | ||
| He's making money with all his sales as he's using to set. | ||
| He's using his office to sell everything he can to make his profit from it. | ||
| He's a con man, and we made a big mistake on putting him in office. | ||
| That's the number one topic of the year. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Bye. | ||
| Let's talk to Kathy in Grand Terrace, California, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning, Kathy. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| The ability for him to be elected was a sham and should never have happened. | ||
| But that, you know, we are where we are. | ||
| The bottom line is this. | ||
| America needs to understand that this man should never have been elected. | ||
| And all the things he's doing to seniors, all the things he's doing to people who came here trying to make a better life of themselves, the horrific things that he's doing to everyone in America. | ||
| I could go on and on, but I don't have a lot of time. | ||
| But thank you so much for listening and hope everyone has a happy new year. | ||
| Let's go to Jay in Raleigh, North Carolina, Republican. | ||
| Good morning, Jay. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| I'd just like to make a comment about the affordability narrative. | ||
| I bought gas at Myrtle Beach this past weekend for $2.16 here in Raleigh, North Carolina yesterday for $2.40. | ||
| That's $20 less a gas tank. | ||
| I call that affordability. | ||
| That money's going right back into our pocket. | ||
| But also, I want to hear Americans speak up sometime and say that times are tough. | ||
| Maybe we need to work a little more. | ||
| Maybe we need to pick up a second part-time job instead of depending on someone else to make the ends meet for us. | ||
| Come on, America. | ||
| We're better than this. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| All right, Jay, and let's hear from Vice President JD Vance. | ||
| This is from November, and he's asking Americans to be patient about the high cost of living. | ||
| And I guess my message to the American people who are still feeling like things are unaffordable, who are still feeling like things are rough out there, is: look, we get it, and we hear you, and we know that there's a lot of work to do. | ||
| There's a lot of wood to chop because the Biden administration put us in such a very, very tough spot. | ||
| The way that I think about this is it's always helpful to take this from the abstractions to the actual real things that people are worried about. | ||
| So, take, for example, a dozen eggs. | ||
| I'll never forget this. | ||
| It was one of the very first, maybe the single first press conference that the president had done since he had been the since he had started his second term. | ||
| And some reporter, probably from ABC, yells at him and says, What have you done about the price of eggs? | ||
| The price of eggs are up 300% over the past three years. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And it's like it was January the 23rd. | |
| It's like, what do you mean, what have we done in two days? | ||
| It's going to take a little bit of time to fix that problem. | ||
| And so, if you're an American who's just struggling to get by, you work hard, you pay your taxes, you want your kids to have good opportunities, and the price of eggs goes from $2 a dozen to $8 a dozen under the Biden administration, and then under the Trump administration, it goes from $8 a dozen to maybe $6.50 a dozen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, to you, that is still a major problem. | |
| And even though we've made incredible progress, we understand that there's a lot more work to do. | ||
| And the thing that I'd ask for the American people is a little bit of patience. | ||
| This economy was not harmed in 10 months. | ||
| It took a deliberate four-year administration that was making life harder for everyday Americans, that was importing foreign workers instead of giving jobs to American workers, that was over-regulating, over-taxing, overspending. | ||
| They were doing everything wrong. | ||
| And as much progress as we've made, it's going to take a little bit of time for every American to feel that economic boom, which we really do believe is coming. | ||
| We believe that we're on the front end of it, but we also recognize that we've got a lot of work to do to undo the damage that Joe Biden did to the American economy. | ||
| And the last one I'll say, Matt, is it's let's be honest, it's not just Joe Biden. | ||
| As much as I think Joe Biden was one of the most disastrous presidents of American history, we had a policy in this country for 40 years of shipping American jobs overseas and hiring foreign workers instead of American workers. | ||
| That has caused the economic stagnation of the American middle class. | ||
| There was one bright spot in 40 years, and that was the first Trump administration. | ||
| And there is going to be a massive exception to that 40-year trajectory of American decline, and that's the second Trump administration. | ||
| We just got to keep it going. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That was the vice president speaking in November of this year about the economy. | |
| And Pat in New Jersey sent us a text and said, The biggest story this year is the massive fraud in Minnesota. | ||
| This is a story that will continue to be revealed and will also be the biggest story in 2026. | ||
| Just the tip of the iceberg. | ||
| Go to Claude in Oklahoma. | ||
| Democrat, good morning, Claude. | ||
| Clyde, sorry. | ||
| Yeah, we said, Stop shooting at the boats and let they got proof they got drugs on them. | ||
| That's a different story. | ||
| Just shooting somebody and knowing, you know, not knowing that there's drugs on ridiculous, man. | ||
| I mean, he's already ruined this friggin economy, and he's going to make it even worse if he keeps on. | ||
| God bless America and God bless y'all. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Ron, Independent in Glendale, Arizona, you're on the air. | ||
| Hi, Happy New Year. | ||
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| Hey, listen, what top story? | ||
| Well, you know, whatever it is, whether it's Gaza or the war in Ukraine, it all boils down to the media and how they react to all these news stories. | ||
| And the one thing, the number one topic, is hatred of Trump. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| I'm sick of hearing it. | ||
| Everybody's bellyaching about Trump. | ||
| And it's amazing that you just had that little segment with the vice president talking about egg prices. | ||
| Well, all these problems with the high cost of living has come from the Biden administration ever since COVID, in fact. | ||
| And it's going to take time to clean it up. | ||
| And less than the cost, gas is already down $2 a gallon for crying out loud. | ||
| And, you know, again, it's going to take time. | ||
| And Trump's got a mess to clean up from the Democrats. | ||
| And, you know, Epstein's one of them. | ||
| And the Democrats want to bellyache about Epstein. | ||
| Well, they had a lot of time since the Obama administration and their long-term in office with Biden. | ||
| They should have attacked Trump instead of all these bad bogus court cases against Trump. | ||
| I mean, that would have been much easier if there had been one iota of evidence against Trump, where there is not. | ||
| So that's my point. | ||
| All right, Ron. | ||
| Let's talk to Sherry, Mississippi Republican. | ||
| Good morning, Sherry. | ||
| Good morning, and happy new year. | ||
| You too. | ||
| The first 70 years of my life, I was a born and raised Minnesotan. | ||
| My husband and I moved to Mississippi because we could not take all the socialism up there anymore, and we knew the graph was going on. | ||
| But for one thing, you'd have to go back to when Illian Olmar got reelected to Congress. | ||
| It took over 100% of the registered voters to vote for her. | ||
| And when it was raised as a question, Tim Waltz just, I saw nothing wrong with it. | ||
| And he signed right off and hippity skipped it. | ||
| She's off to Washington again. | ||
| You said more than 100% voted for her? | ||
| Is that what you said? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| More than 100% of registered voters voted in that election for her. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I believe it was 117% of the registered voters had to vote in the election. | ||
| And where did you get that information? | ||
| That was in the newspapers in Minnesota. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Bill in New York, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Good morning, Mimi, and wishing you and the Washington Journal a happy new year. | ||
| It's always wonderful to watch the program. | ||
| Just wanted to say, everybody's really going in with a lot of good stories, and they kind of took mine, which was one of the fraud being exposed in Minnesota. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| And I can't imagine what's going on across our nation. | ||
| This American delineation for all of the rest of the people is something that we have needed to be doing from a very long time ago. | ||
| The foundational black Americans who are also delineating from those people who are acting like them and coming into this country and really taking advantage of all the things that should be given to them. | ||
| Much respect to you all and no disrespect to anyone. | ||
| Have a wonderful new year. | ||
| And yes, I can't wait to see what's going to happen in the future with all of this fraud being exposed. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Stephanie in New Jersey, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Stephanie. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| My biggest story is the economy. | ||
| Going back to COVID, does everybody remember COVID? | ||
| And business wasn't businesses were closing down and whatnot. | ||
| Nobody was doing business. | ||
| And inflation was global. | ||
| Why is everybody, why do people buy before inflation? | ||
| It was global, okay? | ||
| The other thing, did I just hear the segment, the clip that you played for Vance? | ||
| Did he say that during Biden's administration that jobs were being shipped overseas? | ||
| He said that Biden was importing foreign workers instead of giving the jobs to Americans. | ||
| I think referring to the people that came across the border. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wasn't the board being closed down? | |
| President Biden is not letting increase in during COVID during COVID because of the public health shutdown. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But then that got lifted. | |
| I'm sorry. | ||
| That was lifted, Stephanie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Vince in Florida, Republican Line. | ||
| Good morning, Vince. | ||
| Good morning, Mimi, and happy new year to you and everybody out there. | ||
| The biggest story, I think, is going to be the fraud that's going on across the nation, not only in Minnesota, but it's happening everywhere. | ||
| And that's the tip of the iceberg. | ||
| They finally cracked it. | ||
| Over $9 billion, they're saying. | ||
| And these people that are trying to say it's all about race, hating the Somalian people, no, no, it's not. | ||
| But if you look at the facts, of the 90-plus people that were arrested, 85 of them were Somalians. | ||
| So there is an illicit group of people, not only in Minnesota, but it's happening on the East Coast and the West Coast. | ||
| People need to just wake up, look around, and do some research. | ||
| And that's all I have to say. | ||
| Have a happy new year. | ||
| Happy New Year to you, Vince. | ||
| And regarding research, here is the National Desk has some fact-check information for you on that the fraud cases in Minnesota. | ||
| It says, so some of the things it says is federal prosecutors have already secured convictions tied to hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud involving Minnesota-administered programs. | ||
| Most prominent case centers on the Feeding Our Future nonprofit operated under a federal pandemic meal program meant to provide food to children. | ||
| According to the DOJ, defendants in that case alone fraudulently siphoned approximately $250 million, making it the largest pandemic relief fraud scheme charged in U.S. history. | ||
| More than 90 individuals have been charged. | ||
| At least 60 have been convicted. | ||
| You can read that at the nationaldesk.com if you'd like more information. | ||
| Cindy, Hampton, New Hampshire, Independent Line, good morning. | ||
| Oh, good morning. | ||
| Hi, Mimi. | ||
| Hi. | ||
| I just wanted to give a little levity for everybody because it's not the top news story of the year because we could just go on and on about all of the things. | ||
| But my favorite story of the year is the raccoon that broke into the liquor store and was found out passed out in the bathroom. | ||
| And just for everybody to get a little chuckle. | ||
| And, you know, the bears that are breaking into the stores in Japan. | ||
| I mean, is it animals gone wild this year of 2023? | ||
| So, Cindy, it's in the Washington Post, actually. | ||
| It says five of the best good news stories from 2025. | ||
| And what you mentioned did make that. | ||
| It says here, a nurse saved a drunk raccoon from a dumpster using CPR. | ||
| I don't know if that's the right one that you're talking about, but definitely. | ||
| They showed the picture of him and he was sprawled out right before the porcelain pot. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It says drunk raccoons are having a moment. | ||
| Recently, a raccoon ransacked a Virginia liquor store, passing out in the bathroom after making some poor life choices, according to authority. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, thank you for that. | ||
| Happy New Year. | ||
| Happy New Year. | ||
| Darrell, Columbus, Georgia, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Hey, Mimi, how are you doing? | ||
| Good. | ||
| Good. | ||
| Yeah, my top story for the year is, of course, the F-City files. | ||
| We all know that we got a pedophile in the White House right now. | ||
| And I would advise Ivanka Trump, which is his daughter, and Laura Trump, his daughter-in-law, to please hide the grandbabies. | ||
| Do not let these grandbabies go around Papa, Papa Trump, because we all know he's a pedophile. | ||
| And my last thing I want to tell you guys is: Mr. Feist, Mr. Sam Feiss, you guys' boss, tell him, please do not cave in to these clowns because these clowns are going to, we know you guys are independent, but these guys are going to try to set us all down. | ||
| They hate us calling in, saying things about Trump. | ||
| So they're going to try to do what they, that guy with an FCC car and Trump and the rest of them clowns over there. | ||
| They're going to do everything they can to try to set Cease Man down. | ||
| But I know you guys are going to stand strong and let us keep on calling in. | ||
| But we got a lot to say about this clown. | ||
| And thank you, Mimi, and have a great, happy new year. | ||
| Happy New Year, Daryl. | ||
| Doug in Las Vegas, Republican. | ||
| Good morning, Doug. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
| Hi. | ||
| I would just like to explain how I think about the economy. | ||
| So I'd like to give thanks to the Democrats in the last couple times they've ran the government, especially Biden. | ||
| If you don't know about how oil works, oil is in every product you buy. | ||
| Every single product you buy has got oil in it. | ||
| When you get inflation, it's mostly when oil goes up, just like in the 70s when I lived through that silliness through Carter and he jumped the thing way up. | ||
| And now I'm, or did I get cut off? | ||
| Nope, you're still on, Doug. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| Okay, okay. | ||
| But when they went for the $8 price of oil during the last election, when Biden got elected, he told everybody what he was going to do. | ||
| We're going to raise the gas to $8. | ||
| By God's, I love the guy for it because I got rich from it. | ||
| I don't have to work anymore. | ||
| I'd also like to thank the Obama administration for the ACA. | ||
| I retired because of the ACA because y'all paid $14,000 a year to me that I was going to have to pay for my insurance. | ||
| So I lived on that fruit of that last five years before I retired five years ago. | ||
| I love what the Democrats have been doing with the economy. | ||
| They've been screwing up for everybody who people who pay attention. | ||
| It's worked out really good for us because it's so easy to make money on people that are that dumb. | ||
| Justin in Ohio, Republican line. | ||
| Good morning, Justin. | ||
| Hey, good morning, Mimi. | ||
| Yeah, I just wanted to call in because I think, yeah, one of my biggest things I've noticed this year that I've personally enjoyed is America seems to be getting a little bit of its sense of humor back, at least to me. | ||
| You know, people seem to be a little bit less hung up on when someone says a certain word or a certain phrase. | ||
| You know, it gets less traction. | ||
| It seems that, you know, there's a little bit more let the water roll off your back than there has been in a few, you know, the past few years. | ||
| And that's probably the biggest positive I can pick up from this year. | ||
| All right, Tom. | ||
| I mean, Justin, Tom is now on the air, Rock Island, Illinois, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning, Tom. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| I'm calling in as basically about what really isn't the story that's going on. | ||
| We aren't hearing facts. | ||
| Even you guys have turned into repeating statistics that really aren't proven. | ||
| They're reported by the Trump administration. | ||
| We all know Trump has 30,000-plus lies proven, checked. | ||
| Now, that's long ago. | ||
| Now, this man is a dictator, whether we want to admit it or not. | ||
| The man has sickle pets that do what he wants. | ||
| He fires people that don't put out statistics you want. | ||
| Why aren't we being a lot more skeptical of what's going on? | ||
| Let's not look back. | ||
| Let's not look at the future. | ||
| Let's look that we are under a dictatorship and start doubting the facts that they tell. | ||
| That's my comment. | ||
| I wish we would start looking at your other stations as well. | ||
| All you see is Obama or not Obama, but Trump. | ||
| Promotional films on it. | ||
| Clips, clips, clips, clips of Trump and even religious stuff on it. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Let's get this political. | ||
| Let's stay to the topic. | ||
| Let's doubt our politicians. | ||
| We all do it. | ||
| Thank you for it. | ||
| All right, Tom. | ||
| And it was in June that President Trump announced that he'd be deploying the National Guard to Los Angeles. | ||
| Here is a portion of that announcement. | ||
| Called him up to tell him, got to do a better job. | ||
| He's done a bad job causing a lot of death and a lot of potential death. | ||
| If we didn't send the National Guard, and last night we gave a little additional help, you would have Los Angeles would be burning right now. | ||
| Los Angeles would be not a lot different than what you saw take place in California and Los Angeles just a little while ago. | ||
| And, you know, you've got to remember we have the Olympics coming, and we don't want people looking at Los Angeles like it was, like it would have been. | ||
| It would have been bad. | ||
| Last night they had total control. | ||
| We didn't have the military in there, the National Guard. | ||
| And then we also sent in some Marines. | ||
| We had some bad people. | ||
| We have people they look in your face and they spit right in your face. | ||
| They're animals. | ||
| And these are paid insurrectionists. | ||
| These are paid troublemakers. | ||
| They're agitators. | ||
| They're paid. | ||
| Do you think somebody walks up to a curb and starts hammering pieces out, has all the equipment necessary, and starts handing it out to people to use as a weapon? | ||
| These are paid insurrectionists or agitators or troublemakers. | ||
| You can call it whatever you want. | ||
| And we ended it, and we have in custody some very bad people. | ||
| Some very bad people. | ||
| Mr. President, did you see the guy throwing the rocks at the police cars as they went by and crushing their windows and endangering our police? | ||
| We're not going to let that happen, you know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And also from June, this is California Governor Gavin Newsom's response to the president sending the National Guard to Los Angeles. | |
| He chose theatrics over public safety. | ||
| He federalized another 2,000 Guard members. | ||
| He deployed more than 700 active U.S. Marines. | ||
| These are the men and women trained for foreign combat, not domestic law enforcement. | ||
| We honor their service. | ||
| We honor their bravery. | ||
| But we do not want our streets militarized by our own armed forces. | ||
| Not in LA, not in California, not anywhere. | ||
| We're seeing unmarked cars, unmarked cars in school parking lots, kids afraid of attending their own graduation. | ||
| Trump is pulling a military dragnet all across Los Angeles, well beyond his stated intent to just go after violent and serious criminals. | ||
| His agents are arresting dishwashers, gardeners, day laborers, and seamstresses. | ||
| That's just weakness, weakness masquerading as strength. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Donald Trump's government isn't protecting our communities. | |
| They're traumatizing our communities. | ||
| And that seems to be the entire point. | ||
| California will keep fighting. | ||
| It will keep fighting on behalf of our people, all of our people, including in the courts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That was in June, and we're asking for your top news story of the year. | |
| Here's Jennifer Democrat in Missouri. | ||
| Good morning, Jennifer. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call and happy new year. | ||
| I just wanted to mention quickly a few things, starting with the clip you showed of JD Vance talking about affordability and the price of eggs and all that. | ||
| In case anyone forgot the price of eggs went up due to the bird flu, it wasn't regulations or any of Biden's policy that really had anything to do with that. | ||
| And also, he's talking about immigrants coming into the country, and he's trying to push this lately, how the immigrants are causing the housing affordability crisis and other affordability crisis due to immigrants. | ||
| And that's so not true. | ||
| And this country, again, was built on immigrants. | ||
| During the gold rush, we brought in a bunch of foreigners to help with that. | ||
| When we built the railroads, we brought in foreigners to help build the railroads. | ||
| So this little country was literally built with the help of foreigners that we brought in. | ||
| And now we're kicking out all these immigrants who do a lot of work that the Americans won't do, picking in the farms and all that. | ||
| So I just don't believe half of what the Trump administration has to say. | ||
| Trump's been a proven liar over and over again. | ||
| And another comment for the guy who said that he saved $20 on a tank of gas, well, oil's pretty volatile. | ||
| Mark my words. | ||
| By the end of the Trump administration, gas will go up again because it goes up and it goes down. | ||
| So maybe you save $20 on a tank of gas, but when you look at your electric bill and your grocery bill, you know, you just lost that $20 that you saved. | ||
| But in any case, not happy with this administration, his dehumanization of people, talking about different foreigners doing this and that. | ||
| And then he generalizes the whole country or the whole culture and makes everybody seem bad. | ||
| So I just, I think he's a bad president for this country. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Timothy Mansfield, Ohio, Independent Line. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
| Hi there. | ||
| First of all, I just want to say I'm a kind of laid-bad guy, independent. | ||
| I vote for either side. | ||
| It's just that it's been very hard lately. | ||
| I'm a former soldier, and the whole idea of a person that was afraid to be a soldier wants to command soldiers. | ||
| A person that has no respect for military wants to command the military and have them do all kinds of stuff that he himself was too afraid to do. | ||
| And one more thing. | ||
| Presidents and pedophilia and administrations and pedophilia, all of that stuff is not right. | ||
| Just in the beginning. | ||
| If a person cannot just stop, I mean, the president or his administration or anybody and say, hey, we need to investigate what happened to these young girls, these women. | ||
| Let's expose this. | ||
| What is this thing that America is doing right now where we're not looking at the real? | ||
| We're talking about children. | ||
| They're women now, but who are we protecting? | ||
| If I was in that scenario, anything like that, I'd be in prison, maybe dead by now. | ||
| I just want fairness. | ||
| We need to know about the Epstein files. | ||
| The man needs to tell us his involvement or their involvement. | ||
| And that's all I have to say. | ||
| Happy New Year to you guys. | ||
| And a couple of programming notes for you for your New Year's celebrations. | ||
| And that is, first, we'll have live coverage from Times Square. | ||
| You can watch the scenes from New York City and the videos celebrating the 250th anniversary of the United States, the ball drop at midnight. | ||
| We'll include a patriotic salute to America's birthday. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That starts at 6 p.m. Eastern here on C-SPAN. | |
| And also, you can ring in the new year with Fireworks Show in Washington, D.C. on the National Mall. | ||
| That's starting just before midnight. | ||
| You'll see a candle projected on the Washington Monument in honor of America's 250th birthday. | ||
| That's on C-SPAN too. | ||
| Both those programs are going to be on our website, c-span.org, and on our app, C-SPAN Now. | ||
| On the line for Democrats in Brooklyn, New York, Alexander, good morning to you. | ||
| Good morning, Mimi, and happy new year to you, the rest of the C-SPAN team, and the rest of the listeners. | ||
| Really, really insightful show this morning, just showing the range of topics that everybody has picked. | ||
| You know, I'm thinking of everything that everybody said, I think the biggest story of this year, for me at least, is the failure of the American people. | ||
| I am extremely disappointed that coming into 2015, 2016, knowing from the first tapes that came out about Trump and the way that he treated women, | ||
| the way that he treated his opponents in the primary, insulting everybody, saying that even the first primary run was rigged against him, knowing full well all the evidence of the thousands of cases that have been brought against him, the corruption, everything else, the bankruptcies. | ||
| And here we are. | ||
| The American people picked this person again. | ||
| And he has been destroying the government, lying that he knew anything about the 2025 project and picking the most, you know, destructive administration and embarrassing administration that has destroyed this country. | ||
| But so for me, the misinformation, disinformation, and the corruption of the mind of the people of this country, I don't see hope because I don't think people with C-SPAN, the tool that can give them the resources to see the facts for what they are, they still fall for the lies. | ||
| And one last thing, Mimi, just so that we can, you know, I can get off. | ||
| Put to the American people what the projection of the temperature of this world will be now that we have gone beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius and we are jumping to 2.6. | ||
| The misinformation and disinformation about the real disasters that are happening in this world are just being ignored completely. | ||
| So if you can just do me that favor, I would really appreciate it, Mimi. | ||
| All right, Alexander, let's talk to Andrew next. | ||
| Detroit, Michigan, Independent Line. | ||
| Hi, Andrew. | ||
| Hello. | ||
| I am an ex-Trump supporter. | ||
| I voted for Trump in 2020 and 2024, but I now consider myself anti-Trump. | ||
| Trump takes orders from BBNet and Yahoo, not from the MAGA voters who served the historic mandate in 2024. | ||
| The top news story of 2025 is Trump's betrayal of his supporters in the MAGA base, which is illustrated by one, total capitulation to Israel, and two, the Epstein cover-up perpetrated by Trump's Department of Justice. | ||
| That's all I have to say. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call and have a happy new year. | ||
| Lynn in Oregon, Republican. | ||
| Good morning, Lynn. | ||
| Hi, I think the top story just is Donald Trump. | ||
| Whether you like him or don't like him, he is on every channel that you would listen to, whether it's conservative-based or liberal-based. | ||
| He's still a topic. | ||
| Now, I voted for him each time that he was the Republican nominee. | ||
| I didn't vote for him in primaries because he does bring a certain amount of chaos, could be too strong a word, but it's the one I'm coming up with. | ||
| But his policies are basically good. | ||
| And while he speaks with a lot of hyperbole and he does tend to focus much conversation on himself, I don't believe he actually lies. | ||
| He does speak globally, and he speaks in the manner of what he intends to do, whether that is what actually happens or not. | ||
| So while he's an outside-the-box thinker, he does accomplish things, which is better than doing absolutely nothing. | ||
| So I still support him. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And this is Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green. | ||
| She was on CNN in November, vowing to end her use of toxic rhetoric and her rift with President Trump. | ||
| Here's a portion of that. | ||
| Congresswoman, you posted on X that President Trump is, with his comments, fueling a, quote, hotbed of threats against you. | ||
| Obviously, any threats to your safety are completely unacceptable. | ||
| But we have seen these kinds of attacks or criticism from the president at other people. | ||
| It's not new. | ||
| And with respect, I haven't heard you speak out about it until it was directed at you. | ||
| Dana, I think that's fair criticism. | ||
| And I would like to say humbly, I'm sorry for taking part in the toxic politics. | ||
| It's very bad for our country. | ||
| And it's been something I've thought about a lot, especially since Charlie Kirk was assassinated, is that I'm only responsible for myself and my own words and actions. | ||
| And I am committed, and I've been working on this a lot lately, to put down the knives in politics. | ||
| I really just want to see people be kind to one another. | ||
| And we need to figure out a new path forward that is focused on the American people because as Americans, no matter what side of the aisle we're on, we have far more in common than we have differences. | ||
| And we need to be able to respect each other with our disagreements. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So just to put a button on this, you regret the things that you have said and posted in the past. | |
| Facebook post that was taken down of you in 2020 holding a gun alongside the squad, encouraging people to go on the offense against the socialists, liking a tweet of somebody calling for the execution of Nancy Pelosi and former President Obama. | ||
| Just examples. | ||
| Well, Dana, as you know, and many people know, I addressed that back in 2021. | ||
| And of course, I never want to cause any harm or anything bad for anyone. | ||
| So that was addressed back then, and I very much stand by my word. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And back to your calls on your top news story of 2025. | |
| Here is Michael Lancaster, California Democrat. | ||
| Hi, Mimi. | ||
| Happy New Year. | ||
| I don't have really a top story right now, but what I want to say is I've been blind. | ||
| I lost my eyesight about five years ago. | ||
| And the memorial that you did today, it seemed like it was pretty nice. | ||
| But next time, could you guys, you know, name the participants, the people that were in there? | ||
| Because there's a lot of blind people like myself, and we just hear the voices and we don't know who they are that you were talking about. | ||
| Understood, Michael. | ||
| It's good feedback. | ||
| If I had to pick a story, it would probably be Donald Trump sending troops into our cities and stuff. | ||
| I spent 10 years in the military, and one thing that I always would have hated is to have to be called against my own people. | ||
| So that would be my top story. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Happy New Year. | ||
| Happy New Year to you, Michael. | ||
| Joyce in Georgia, a Republican. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
| Hi. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I called about four years ago and said the hate has got to stop. | ||
| And yet, every time I turn on C-SPAN, it's hate Trump. | ||
| And he is trying to save America. | ||
| People do not realize because the media does not tell, just like Mandani just won New York City. | ||
| Do people not realize what is happening to America? | ||
| Socialism and communism is taking over, and President Trump is trying to keep us back on the path of America. | ||
| And everyone calls and says, oh, he's destroying democracy and he's a dictator. | ||
| They never give an example of how he's not following the law, how he's being a dictator. | ||
| They just are saying things they hear on the other stations. | ||
| And you can tell the people who sit all day and listen to CNN and MSNBC, and they are just brainwashed. | ||
| Open your eyes. | ||
| You forget about Bidenomics, and it's transitory. | ||
| All the inflation. | ||
| And Biden used up our strategic oil so he could get gas prices down because they were going too high and they realized they were going to lose. | ||
| So President Trump's out there fighting for America. | ||
| He loves America. | ||
| He's a multi-billionaire. | ||
| He does not have to be president. | ||
| Am I still on? | ||
| Yes, you are. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| John Joyce. | ||
| I just looked at my TV and I see President Trump talking, so I was afraid you'd hung up on me. | ||
| No, I did not hang up. | ||
| You often get cut off. | ||
| All right. | ||
| But President Trump is the main story is he is turning America back to America. | ||
| And these people calling the illegals immigrants, they're brainwashed, calling them immigrants. | ||
| Yes, America was built on immigrants who came through and went through processes. | ||
| And the Biden administration allowed 21 million young people who were never vetted. | ||
| All right, Joyce, Happy New Year. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Annette, also in Georgia, Democrat, good morning, Annette. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| Go ahead, Annette. | ||
| We're listening. | ||
| Okay, my story of the year, and it's many, but I would say what really sent chills up my spine was the Doge coming into the government and slicing jobs and going into our Social Security information. | ||
| That right there to the American people should be very, very scary. | ||
| And even though there's a lot to talk about, that particular Doge is what really sent chills up my spine. | ||
| Listen to this, America people. | ||
| Doge went into our personal information. | ||
| The government is supposed to protect us. | ||
| People from off the street had no business into our files. | ||
| And another thing I want to mention is that people are saying, calling in on the Republican line, talking about y'all always are talking about Trump. | ||
| Y'all hate Trump and all of this mess. | ||
| Let me take you back. | ||
| Trump came into office with baggage. | ||
| This is not the American people talking about Trump and talking about bad things about Trump. | ||
| This is Trump being Trump. | ||
| He came into the government. | ||
| When he came into the White House, he had baggage of scamming people. | ||
| He had cases that was pending where he had scammed people out of their money. | ||
| He had so much going on, not paying his taxes. | ||
| This is what Trump brought to the American government. | ||
| And I want to say one more thing about biomics, okay? | ||
| We are talking about handing Trump a bad economy. | ||
| Do y'all remember COVID? | ||
| Do y'all remember COVID, what Biden had to come into, where everything was out of order and Biden had to stabilize the country? | ||
| Do y'all remember that? | ||
| Okay, you're talking about Trump inheriting a bad economy. | ||
| All right, Annette. | ||
| And speaking of Doge, take a look at this. | ||
| This is from February, where President Trump responds to a question about Elon Musk and his team getting access to the Treasury Department's payment system. | ||
| Well, he's got access only to letting people go that he thinks are no good if we agree with him. | ||
| And it's only if we agree with him. | ||
| He's a very talented guy from the standpoint of management and costs. | ||
| And we put him in charge of seeing what he can do with certain groups and certain numbers. | ||
| The numbers, some of the numbers are horrible of what he's found. | ||
| 100, think of it, $100 million on condoms to Hamas. | ||
| Condoms to Hamas and many other things that are frankly even more ridiculous. | ||
| And they're finding tremendous waste, really waste more than anything else, I think you could say. | ||
| Probably fraud and abuse can be added to it. | ||
| The Bohr standard waste, fraud, and abuse. | ||
| But they're finding tremendous amounts of really bad things, bad spending. | ||
| You've been reading about, you've been writing about some of it, frankly, and some of the things that they've been doing is just terrible. | ||
| Leah, Elon can't do and won't do anything without our approval. | ||
| And we'll give him the approval where appropriate. | ||
| Where not appropriate, we won't. | ||
| But he reports in, and he it's something that he feels very strongly about. | ||
| And I'm impressed because he's running, obviously, a big company. | ||
| He has nothing to do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If there's a conflict, that we won't let him get near it. | |
| But he does have a good natural instinct. | ||
| He's got a team of very talented people. | ||
| We're trying to shrink government, and he can probably shrink it as well as anybody else if not better. | ||
| Where we think there's a conflict or there's a problem, we won't let him go near it. | ||
| But he has some very good ideas, and we have a lot of other talented people also. | ||
| We're bringing in the most talented people in the world. | ||
| And this is on the front page of the New York Times today: a government upended by a decimation of jobs. | ||
| Under Trump, a lean federal workforce results in less efficient services. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It says the extent of the effect on the public so far is unclear. | |
| Some of the White House's moves are stalled by a mountain of litigation. | ||
| More than 200 lawsuits have been filed challenging the firings of federal workers and the freezing of grants and elimination of programs, vast majority of which are still pending. | ||
| Agencies have not fully detailed the number of staff members and services that have been cut, making it difficult to discern the full scope of the difference between today's federal government and the one from a year ago. | ||
| That's at the New York Times this morning. | ||
| And this is Linda in New York. | ||
| Democrat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Linda. | |
| Hi. | ||
| Hi. | ||
| I don't really know what the top story would be. | ||
| I just don't understand the American people have voted in a man like Trump. | ||
| I know the one lady says, oh, everybody hates Trump, but to make it normal that this man is doing normal things to me is just beyond. | ||
| I just don't understand it. | ||
| I'm 75 years old, and I know that a lot of the classmates that I've graduated are feeling the same way. | ||
| What has happened to the people in this country to vote in a man like this who just is, I mean, you know, when you say, why don't you like him? | ||
| I mean, every day he shows us why not to like him or understand. | ||
| You know, I just, this just, to me, I just don't understand it. | ||
| I will leave this earth never understanding it. | ||
| I look back, and I think at the end of the Biden administration, they said the inflation was 2.9%. | ||
| It's gone up since Trump is here. | ||
| And I do understand, like the woman said, Biden had to deal with the shutdown of the world, with COVID. | ||
| You may not have agreed with some of the things that he did, but in general, in general, he was a decent man, empathetic, compassionate. | ||
| And I look back at the years of eight years of President Obama. | ||
| There might have been things you disagreed with, but the man was a decent, compassionate, empathetic man and intelligent. | ||
| And now all we have is you've got Vance standing up, giving speeches, say, well, you don't have to be apologizing for being white now. | ||
| And the caliber of people that are there in that administration is pathetic. | ||
| All right, Linda. | ||
| And we are going to pause our calls. | ||
| We will get back to your calls. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of America in 1776 on July 4th. | |
| So we're going to talk to Rosie Rios. | ||
| She is the America 250 Commission Chair. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Rosie, welcome to the program. | |
| Hi, thank you for having me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, so the America 250 Commission has a partnership with the One Times Square and the Times Square Alliance. | |
| Can you explain what that partnership is about? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So the One Times Square Alliance, which is the owner of the One Times Square building and the Times Square Alliance, are partners in kind of having three bites of the New York apple this year. | ||
| So first of all, I am here in Times Square today. | ||
| This is the moment that's going to really spark the movement moving forward. | ||
| And we are here to do a second celebration at 1204, where we are going to mark the semi-quincentennial, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence with several tons of confetti, a great way to, again, kind of bring the patriotism to life in a way that Times Square has never seen before. | ||
| In addition to that, we are coming back on July 3rd. | ||
| And out of the almost 120-year history of the Times Square ball drop, this is going to be the first one ever outside of New Year's Eve. | ||
| We're doing that to bring in July 4th. | ||
| And then we are coming back again on December 31st of next year because we have a number of exciting initiatives that will conclude at that time, but also just a great way to hopefully keep the momentum going even long after 2026. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So there'll be another ball drop on July 3rd on midnight? | |
| That's right. | ||
| The first time ever outside of New Year's Eve. | ||
| And it's going to be everything that you can imagine and much, much more. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, we are going to be covering all of that on C-SPAN. | |
| We'll be covering tonight the ball drop. | ||
| You mentioned 1204, but you got to see a preview of the 2026 numerals being installed. | ||
| What was that about? | ||
| You know, it was pretty incredible. | ||
| It's the numerals. | ||
| It's the crystals on the new ball, the Waterford crystals. | ||
| It's the technology that's being deployed in a way that's never happened before. | ||
| But just to even just take a step back from that, yes, to see the numerals being lit up with 2026. | ||
| Look, I mean, next month's going to be eight years that I've been on this commission. | ||
| So to see it all come to fruition in a way that this commission has envisioned is really, really special. | ||
| But just the excitement of seeing, you know, there's over 5,000 crystals that are being used as part of this ball. | ||
| It's over 12 feet in diameter. | ||
| It's pretty incredible to see and be part of kind of the testing, seeing our logo on the ball, seeing the red, white, and blue twinkling of the stars. | ||
| It's just really, really magical. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So there is also the official launch of America Gives at midnight. | |
| Can you tell us about that? | ||
| You know, I would say of all of our movement activities, you know, we have the moment, of course, tonight, and then the movement, which is going to be sparked by America Gives. | ||
| This is my favorite. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| America Gives, our national service initiative, that makes giving back a full, a year-round effort. | ||
| We are making 2026 the largest year of volunteer hours ever recorded by our country. | ||
| And it starts literally at the stroke of midnight, and we're taking it all the way through calendar year 2026. | ||
| And as I mentioned, we're going to make that grand announcement next December 31st of what that volunteer record number is going to look like. | ||
| And I can only predict, I'm just, I'm curious how it's going to all work out, but it's going to be incredible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think this is not just what our country wants. | |
| I think this is what our country needs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And can you tell us about some of the other activities that America 250 has in store for us this year? | |
| This is a great question. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So if you go to our website at America250.org, you could already get involved in so many ways. | ||
| So one, you could go on and learn more about what America gives, as we mentioned. | ||
| Two, we already have America's Field Trip already underway. | ||
| This is our third round. | ||
| It's a national student competition for grades three through 12. | ||
| We get to answer the question, what does America mean to me? | ||
| Through an essay, through a poem, through artwork. | ||
| And in exchange, they get to choose from a series of backstage experiences, most of which have never been offered to the public before. | ||
| So that is live now. | ||
| It's a great holiday activity for kids who are on their breaks. | ||
| And the deadline is the end of March. | ||
| And then we also have Our American Story. | ||
| You can go online and see and nominate whose story you think should be preserved in perpetuity at the Library of Congress. | ||
| Again, all of this is on our website at America250.org. | ||
| That's the movement. | ||
| But again, as I mentioned, we will have so many more moments beyond what anyone can even dream about. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And C-SPAN is the official media partner, so we will be with you along the way and we'll be showing that to our audience, all those great activities that you've got planned. | |
| Rosie Rios, America 250 Commission Chair, and as mentioned, the website is america250.org. | ||
| Thanks so much for joining us. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And back to your calls. | |
| We're asking you about your top news story of 2025. | ||
| We will do, we'll take your calls until the end of the program at 10 o'clock. | ||
| This is Kristen in Indiana Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Hey, good morning, Mimi. | ||
| Happy New Year. | ||
| Happy New Year to you. | ||
| I found this show in 2025, so that was a big highlight. | ||
| But my top news story of 2025 was the first American Pope in history. | ||
| So it gives me some hope that America can still produce good world leaders. | ||
| I knew that before the Pope, but I wanted to call in and say that. | ||
| So thank you very much. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And we did cover the funeral of Pope Francis here on C-SPAN in its entirety. | ||
| So you can go ahead and take a look at that at c-span.org. | ||
| On the line for Republicans, North Carolina, Mike, you're on the air. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| And the first thing I want to say is we're seeing the greatest generation of war soldiers and the greatest generation of America soldiers from World War II and the Korean War dying off at Michael's numbers. | ||
| And we're probably going to be alive to see the last one. | ||
| But I just, my dad fought in World War II, and that's the greatest generation from, in my opinion, not from them, from Vietnam now, but the greatest generation of World War II. | ||
| But my top story is Trump. | ||
| And I voted for him all three times. | ||
| And, you know, it's just like this border thing. | ||
| I know when Biden come in, he said, just give me some legislation to shut the border. | ||
| Just look, if Kamala would have got elected, I mean, we would have had 100 million refugees and immigrants in this country. | ||
| Democrats don't understand illegal immigration. | ||
| If you come into this country illegally, you're illegal. | ||
| And Trump is doing his best. | ||
| Like you say, you know, how many years did Obama blame Bush for the economy? | ||
| How many years? | ||
| All eight years of his administration. | ||
| But Trump is doing what he can to help this country, and it don't flip overnight. | ||
| It don't change overnight. | ||
| It's got to go in gradually. | ||
| And as far as Marjorie Kaler Green, she's, you know, she wanted to run for Senate in Georgia. | ||
| And all the polling numbers said she would come in below any of the Democrats. | ||
| And that's the main reason why she turned on Trump. | ||
| But this Epstein files, all you hear, you got a couple Democrats talking, or a couple Republicans and the Democrats talking about it. | ||
| What Pam Bondi ought to do is release everything and everything, unredacted and everything. | ||
| Then all these, quote, survivors that got paid from the Epstein state, let them sue the Democrats and a couple of Republicans, but put everything out there, every single thing out there and let it be out. | ||
| Because that's all they trying to say they want to protect the survivors and all this stuff. | ||
| Okay, you got to take time to redact stuff. | ||
| And there's a lot of rich politicians and rich lawyers and from Larry Summers and all them. | ||
| Their names are exposed, but all the main, the main thing is like a bunch of rabbit dogs. | ||
| They're all wanting to find something on Trump, find something on Trump. | ||
| And you can read that report from the Wall Street Journal, I think, yesterday, that why Trump kicked severed ties with Epstein. | ||
| And I wish you'd read that. | ||
| All right, clowns. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| Donald in Honolulu, Hawaii, Independent Line. | ||
| Go ahead, Donald. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bernie. | |
| Hello. | ||
| Hey, I just want to say my top story is just Trump being president. | ||
| And you know this Epstein thing that's flying around. | ||
| If they, all these people in Washington are lawyers, they did the Me Too movement with all these victims from the Epstein case, went to New York, opened a case, and they would blow it wide open. | ||
| Everybody, Me Too, Eugene Carroll convicted Trump on only her words. | ||
| They made Stormy Daniel come to court and testify when NBA signed legal document. | ||
| If they did all that on the Epstein case, it would blow it wide open. | ||
| But nobody in Washington wants to do it. | ||
| That's all I have for the year. | ||
| All right, Donald. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Happy New Year to you. | |
| And this is Ellen, Coco, Florida, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Hi, good morning. | ||
| Happy New Year. | ||
| I'd say the top story is Trump and everything his administration has done. | ||
| And also one of the big things to me is how C-SPAN this year, I believe, is when you stop doing any fact-checking. | ||
| And one of the reasons that came to my mind this morning when I heard the clip where Trump was talking about the millions of dollars spent on condoms to Hamas, I believe, Mimi, that that was never, there were never any facts to prove that. | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
| No, that is absolutely true. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That was an exaggeration. | |
| But when that first came out, Ellen, we did fact-check that on the air. | ||
| I remember doing that myself. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, because I wasn't even sure if condoms had been sent at all to Hamas. | |
| And another thing. | ||
| There might have been to Gaza as part of some public health initiatives that certainly not that number. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And there's so many other things that even exceed the scope of that. | ||
| I mean, have you even looked at how much Doge actually saved us? | ||
| Or did they end up costing us money? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You know, and how much of our, you know, data did they take? | ||
| I don't think we really know about that yet. | ||
| And Trump and crypto and how his family is getting wealthy on that and how they control the regulations. | ||
| I mean, there's just so much. | ||
| You know, the pardons of the January 6th people who were went to court and were convicted by juries of their peers. | ||
| You know, him releasing, pardoning the president of Honduras that we know what's trafficking in drugs, and he expects us to believe he's hard on crime. | ||
| It's just too much. | ||
| All right, let's go to the Republican line next, Virginia Beach, Virginia. | ||
| Mike, you're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| My story, I think, of 2025 just recently happened here in Minnesota. | ||
| And here you have Elon Omar that's a representative of that state, as well as Tim Waltz. | ||
| And the fact that they're blaming this fraud, this massive amounts of fraud that's going on here on Donald Trump is basically par for the course for liberals to spin any kind of narrative that they can to blame Trump for anything. | ||
| But, you know, I thought of all that. | ||
| You know, the real reason why I think Obama was a terrible president because of his mandates alone. | ||
| You know, first thing he did in office was basically took abortion and put it in the taxpayers' hands to try to do that, which was unconstitutional. | ||
| He mandated COVID vaccinations, you know, for every business that had a certain amount of employees and federal legislation. | ||
| You're talking about Biden. | ||
| Biden, yes. | ||
| Not Obama. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right, Biden. | ||
| My bad. | ||
| He's done this while letting in undocumented, unvaccinated, and unvended illegal immigrants in this country, at the same time, putting COVID shots in people's faces and firing them. | ||
| And of course, Trump's given a lot of money back to those people because that in itself was also constitutional, what he did with that. | ||
| But then, you know, the student loan forgiveness. | ||
| There's another example of something that's illegal that the Supreme Court knocked down as well. | ||
| So due to Biden's mandates alone was the biggest reason that I thought, you know, the man is absolutely untethered to the Constitution. | ||
| So bringing us to 2025, you would say your biggest news story of the year was what, Mike? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would say my biggest news story of the year by far is the largest scandal fraud scam going on in Minnesota underneath Tim Waltz's watch. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Without a doubt. | ||
| And a couple of callers mentioned the Epstein files. | ||
| Here is what President Trump said about it in September. | ||
| Right now, there have been survivors of Jeffrey Epstein speaking at a press conference on Capitol Hill. | ||
| They're calling for these case files, these documents to be released. | ||
| And Thomas Massey, who is some sort of discharge position to get the House to vote on Louise Those documents, says he hasn't been here implicated in these files, but many of your friends and donors may be. | ||
| And he says that's why the Justice Department is redacting them and slow walking the release. | ||
| Is the Justice Department protecting any friends or donors? | ||
| Sir? | ||
| So this is a Democrat hoax that never ends. | ||
| You know, it reminds me a little of the Kennedy situation. | ||
| We gave him everything over and over again, more and more and more, and nobody's ever satisfied. | ||
| From what I understand, I could check, but from what I understand, thousands of pages of documents have been given. | ||
| But it's really a Democrat hoax because they're trying to get people to talk about something that's totally irrelevant to the success that we've had as a nation since I've been president. | ||
| Even if you look at D.C. right now, D.C., it's a totally safe zone. | ||
| It's called a safe zone. | ||
| That's a term. | ||
| It's a term of art. | ||
| It's a safe zone because it's very safe. | ||
| You could walk down the street now and nothing's going to happen. | ||
| No crime, no murders, no nothing. | ||
| Because we had a lot of problems with certain places, and we still do. | ||
| All run by Democrats, or for the most part, run by Democrats. | ||
| So what they're trying to do with the Epstein hoax is get people to talk about that instead of speaking about the tremendous success like ending seven wars. | ||
| I ended seven wars. | ||
| Nobody's going to talk about because they're going to talk about the Epstein, whatever. | ||
| I understand that we were subpoenaed to give files, and I understand we've given thousands of pages of files. | ||
| And I know that no matter what you do, it's going to keep going. | ||
| And I think it's, I think, really, I think it's enough because I think we should talk about the greatness of our country and the success that we're having. | ||
| I think we're probably having, according to what I read, even from two people in this room, we're having the most successful eight months of any president ever. | ||
| And that's what I want to talk about. | ||
| That's what we should be talking about, not the Epstein hoax. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And this is William, a North Carolina Independent Line. | |
| Hi, William. | ||
| Good morning, and happy new year to you, Mimi. | ||
| First thing I'd like to do is that lady who said that people call up and talk about Trump and never mention any of the things he does that are illegal. | ||
| Well, you can talk about how he constantly is usurping the Constitution, ignoring court orders, the emolument clause, taking a plane as a gift, using his office to make him and his family wealthy or wealthier, just so many different things, ignoring even the Epstein file thing, if that's being brought up so much. | ||
| Still haven't released all the files, and now they're talking about, oh, they just happened to find a million more and it's going to take a few more weeks. | ||
| But my top story is basically the seven wars thing. | ||
| There's no proof that he's ended any wars, really. | ||
| And some of them are still ongoing conflicts. | ||
| And he keeps bragging about this stuff. | ||
| And yet he has no real proof of it. | ||
| This trillions of dollars that are coming into our country. | ||
| Where's this $18 trillion? | ||
| Most estimates say that's about $8 million as opposed to $18 million. | ||
| So just the fact that he also makes comments like the next inauguration is going to be in the new ballroom. | ||
| How would he determine the next inauguration? | ||
| That the hepatitis vaccine should be given to children when they're sexually active, like when they're 12. | ||
| He made that comment. | ||
| So there's a lot of things about Trump that unfortunately these Fox News narrators could come on sometimes and talk about him on this line particularly are talking about how everyone is brainwashed. | ||
| That's the biggest thing that's going on right now. | ||
| No matter what Trump does, everybody finds a reason. | ||
| And they keep going back to Obama, what's that, 16 years ago? | ||
| And Biden, Biden's not in office anymore. | ||
| And the economy, still not better. | ||
| I mean, same inflation. | ||
| Now unemployment's ticked up. | ||
| So I think the people that want to boast about Trump being the greatest president of all time might want to actually do some fact-checking and stop letting AI tell them everything. | ||
| But Mimi, I hope you have a happy new year. | ||
| Happy New Year to you, William. | ||
| And speaking of fact-checking, a previous caller asked about the condoms to Gaza. | ||
| Guardian has this. | ||
| Trump repeats false claim that U.S. sends condoms to Gaza. | ||
| The claim was first made in a press conference prompting Fox hosts to say condoms were also being used to bomb Israel. | ||
| And this is Richard, Democrat in Missouri. | ||
| Good morning, Richard. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| I think their best news story is happening right now. | ||
| We got this president and this ghoul we got for war chief about bombing little wooden boats with the greatest military in the world. | ||
| Now, if we're going to invade Venezuela, see, we invaded Vietnam. | ||
| Them little guys, those little black pajamas, they didn't do much. | ||
| They didn't have no aircraft carriers or anything, but they killed 55,000 of us. | ||
| So think about a landlord in Venezuela. | ||
| Your sons and daughters and people over there dying just for some damn nonsense trying to prove how brave they are. | ||
| I'd say their war crimes is being committed by the President of the United States. | ||
| And I'll let you go at that. | ||
| And we got a text from Anna in California. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It says, Mimi, you are awesome. | |
| The news this year that I never imagined I would see here was a socialist winning an election. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is just the beginning of socialism taking over. | |
| Sad that we can't learn from other countries that have tried socialist concepts and have failed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Speaking of Mayor-elect Zahron Mamdani, his inauguration ceremony will be taking place at 1 p.m. Eastern Time tomorrow. | |
| We will have live coverage of that here on C-SPAN. | ||
| Among the speakers, there will be Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. | ||
| Cindy in Williamsburg, Kansas, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning, Cindy. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Happy New Year. | ||
| Happy New Year to you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| The greatest story of 2025 was how all these patriots have stood up against the biggest fascist regime in our history. | ||
| I'm talking about the No Kings events where thousands and thousands of people have marched the streets and come out for America. | ||
| The reason why the United States was even founded was for people protesting against a king. | ||
| And we have been doing that every week in lots of red states and blue states. | ||
| And it just gets so little press from, well, we're fighting for the freedom of press. | ||
| And now that it's been taken over, CBS News has been taken over by the Trump regime. | ||
| And I mean, you have to go to independent places to find the real news, the true news. | ||
| But I'm so proud of my patriots that have been out protesting against this awful, awful destruction of our republic, of our democracy. | ||
| It's just happening every week, and nobody is paying attention to it except for on the biggest days when people can't get through Washington, D.C. or New York City because everybody's protesting for our wonderful country to keep it alive. | ||
| And we will be in 2026, we will have Congress back. | ||
| Congress has been under the thumb of the Trump regime, and it will come back to us in 2026. | ||
| All right, Cindy, let's talk to John in Conover, North Carolina, Republican. | ||
| Go ahead, John. | ||
| Hey, how you doing? | ||
| Biggest story of 2025 for me is going to be January 20th. | ||
| Donald J. Trump was elected, and it was wonderful. | ||
| The other big thing about that is we have three more years of not listening about race, gender, climate change, which is weather, by the way, people. | ||
| I do believe in climate change. | ||
| Climate changes. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| But that's it for me. | ||
| All right, John. | ||
| Happy New Year. | ||
| And another big story of the year was the government shutdown. | ||
| It was the longest in history at 43 days. | ||
| Here is from November. | ||
|
unidentified
|
House Speaker Mike Johnson speaking to reporters after the vote to reopen the federal government. | |
| Well, good evening, everybody. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We feel very relieved tonight. | |
| The Democrat shutdown is finally over, thanks to House and Senate Republicans who stood together to get the job done. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely no question in anybody's mind now that the Democrats were responsible for this. | |
| What happened? | ||
| Millions of American families went without food on their table. | ||
| You had millions of Americans stranded in airports, their flights canceled and delayed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You had troops and federal employees wondering where their next paycheck would come from. | |
| The Democrats openly admitted, they openly admitted, many of them said it in their own words, that they used the American people as leverage in this political game. | ||
| They knew that it would cause that pain to the people, and they did it anyway. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They did it for their own selfish purposes, their political purposes, and it was a game they played with real people's lives. | |
| It's something that is very difficult to forgive. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I want to say that all this was utterly pointless and foolish. | |
| This outcome was totally foreseeable. | ||
| I said that this would be the outcome when all this began back in mid-September. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They did it anyway. | |
| Democrats admitted that they used the people as leverage, and they got nothing for their selfish political stunt here. | ||
| They didn't achieve anything with this at all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And anyone who studied history would know that shutdowns never yield any positive result. | |
| It just hurts people. | ||
| I said on the House floor a little while ago that we did all this in good faith. | ||
| From the very beginning, I was insistent about this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Our leadership team was. | |
| The Republicans did the right thing. | ||
| We had a nonpartisan continuing resolution. | ||
| We didn't have any Republican priorities on it at all. | ||
| We just said, in good faith, let's keep the lights on. | ||
| Let's keep this going for another seven weeks so that the Congress can do its work, so they can get back to the regular appropriations process the way that it is supposed to be done for the people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So that we're good stewards with their money. | |
| That hasn't been done here in a long time. | ||
| Another few minutes of your calls. | ||
| Let's talk to Daryl in Ohio Democrat. | ||
| Go ahead, Daryl. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| As I want to mention, what you live, you learn. | ||
| What you learn, you become. | ||
| The reason I say that is because we have so much division going on in the world. | ||
| And the division we are passing on to our children, we are passing on to everyone. | ||
| And this has to stop because it is not doing anything but stunting our growth with all this division. | ||
| One other thing I would like to add is that I really think the next president of the United States elects should be a generational X. Why do I say that? | ||
| Because a generational X can understand and understand the certain views that's going on now, whether that generational X is a Republican, a Democratic, or Independent. | ||
| If you can, can you do any research for me to see if we ever had a president in office that was a generational X? | ||
| I would definitely appreciate that if you can do that for me. | ||
| All right, Daryl, here's Frankie in Pennsylvania, Independent Line. | ||
| Go ahead, Frankie. | ||
| Good morning, Nimi. | ||
| And I have to start off. | ||
| The only nice thing I'm going to say this morning is your nails look beautiful as they always do. | ||
| But my top story is not just of the year, but it's of our lifetime. | ||
| It just happened to happen this year. | ||
| We are on the second crusades of humanity. | ||
| We are about to go into scientific darkness again. | ||
| And what happened the first time, 500 years of scientific darkness had set our species back incredibly. | ||
| And thanks to two men who wear way too much orange makeup, what they're doing to the scientific community and the scientific doubt from medicine to human-caused climate change, they are about to, we are watching the beginning of the destroying of humanity as we know it. | ||
| And this is going to go down in history for thousands of years. | ||
| If our species survives, they are going to look back. | ||
| And the way we look back at what the Crusades did to our species, how it just changed the world and not in a good way. | ||
| This is what we're observing during our lifetime. | ||
| So I wish everybody luck. | ||
| And the next generation, what we're doing to them is what true men with orange makeup is astounding to me. | ||
| I'm lost of words of what's happening. | ||
| And science is the only thing that's going to save us, not imaginary gods. | ||
| And I would just like to end it with a recommendation. | ||
| Carl Sagan, nobody listened on YouTube. | ||
| He called it in 1995. | ||
| And it's all happening now. | ||
| I recognize that. | ||
| It's time for one more call. | ||
| Patrick and Alabama Republican. | ||
| Go ahead, Patrick. | ||
| Good morning, ma'am. | ||
| Happy New Year to you, hon. You too. | ||
| I just want to, it's clear that C-SPAN hired that guy from CNN last year that y'all inherited CNN-based cheerleaders, too. | ||
| So, Patrick, here's your top news story of 2025. | ||
| Quickly, please. | ||
| All righty. | ||
| My top news story is: I used to joke with my boss about how they hunted something wrong with Trump. | ||
| And if he did something out in public, get mailing for it. | ||
| New York's Time posted it. | ||
| Trump farted in the courtroom. | ||
| That's how bad. | ||
| We have to end it there. | ||
| We will be back with you tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. Eastern Time. | ||
| This was the last show, Washington Journal of 2025. | ||
| Happy New Year, everybody. | ||
| Have a great year in 2026. | ||
| On this New Year's Eve, C-SPAN will have live coverage throughout the day and evening of events to ring in the new year. | ||
| Starting at 6 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN, we'll take you to Times Square in New York City as the crowd starts to gather for pre-celebratory festivities ahead of tonight's ball drop. | ||
| Then at 7 p.m., we'll head over to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. for a light and projection show on the Washington Monument as part of our America 250 coverage. | ||
| Then at 11 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN, we're back at Times Square for the final countdown and ball drop. | ||
| And just before midnight on C-SPAN 2, there's more America 250 coverage with a fireworks show on the National Mall. | ||
| Our New Year's Eve coverage is also available to watch on the free C-SPAN Now video app and online at C-SPAN.org. | ||
| C-SPAN, Democracy Unfiltered. | ||
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| Cox supports C-SBAM as a public service, along with these other television providers, giving you a front-row seat to democracy. | ||
| Well, up next, we'll take you back to January of 2025, where a joint session of Congress was held to count the Electoral College votes for the 2024 presidential election. | ||
| Vice President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Mike Johnson presided over the session. | ||
| Mr. Speaker and members of Congress, pursuant to the Constitution and laws of the United States, the Senate and House of Representatives are meeting in joint session to verify the certificates and count the votes of the electors of the several states for President and Vice President of the United States. | ||
| After ascertainment has been had that the certificates are authentic and correct in form, the tellers will count and make a list of the votes cast by the electors of the several states. | ||
| The tellers on the part of the two houses will take their places at the clerk's desk. | ||
| Without objection, the tellers will dispense with reading formal portions of the certificates. | ||
| After ascertaining that the certificates are regular, in form, and authentic, the tellers will announce the votes cast by the electors for each state, beginning with Alabama. |