| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
Trump's Qatar Controversy
00:15:05
|
||
|
unidentified
|
And her investigation into the use of force by immigration officials. | |
| And reporter Brendan Peterson of Punch Bowl News talks about President Trump's call for a 10% cap on credit card interest and other measures to address affordability. | ||
| And then Southern Methodist University's Jeffrey Engel discusses the 35th anniversary of Operation Desert Storm. | ||
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal is next. | ||
| Join the conversation. | ||
| It's Saturday, January 17th, 2026. | ||
| A bipartisan group of lawmakers is in Denmark today attempting to calm rising tensions between the U.S. and its ally over President Trump's interest in American control of Greenland. | ||
| Here in the U.S., multiple sources are reporting the Department of Justice is investigating the governor of Minnesota as well as the mayor of Minneapolis as the ongoing ICE enforcement action in the state continues to spawn backlash from some residents. | ||
| Those are just two of the stories we're following this morning, but we want to start our show today with your top news story of the week. | ||
| Our phone line for Democrats is 202-748-8000. | ||
| For Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| And for Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| If you'd like to text us, that number is 202-748-8003. | ||
| On Wednesday, Minnesota Democratic Governor Tim Walz was actually condemning ICE actions in his state and encouraged residents to protest peacefully. | ||
| The CBS News reported that the DOJ is investigating Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Fry over those alleged conspiracy, an alleged conspiracy to impede immigration agents. | ||
| Here it is, the Justice Department is investigating Minnesota officials, including Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Fry, over an alleged conspiracy to impede federal immigration agents, an extraordinary escalation in the Trump administration's clash with Democratic leaders there. | ||
| Multiple sources familiar with the matter told CBS News. | ||
| One of the sources, a U.S. official, said the investigation stems from statements that Walls and Fry have made about the thousands of immigration and customs enforcement officers and border patrol agents deployed to the Minneapolis region in recent weeks. | ||
| Subpoenas are likely to be issued in the probe, sources familiar with the matter told CBS News. | ||
| A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment. | ||
| And then the response from the Minnesota Minneapolis mayor, this is an obvious attempt to intimidate me for standing up for Minneapolis, our local law enforcement, and our residents against the chaos and danger this administration has brought to our streets, Fry said in a statement to CBS News. | ||
| I will not be intimidated. | ||
| My focus will remain where it's always been, keeping our city safe. | ||
| Wallsted said in a statement, two days ago it was Elisa Slotkin. | ||
| Last week it was Jerome Powell. | ||
| Before that, Mark Kelly. | ||
| Weaponizing the justice system and threatening political opponents is dangerous, is a dangerous authoritarian tactic. | ||
| The only person not being investigated for the shooting of Renee Goode is the federal agent who shot her. | ||
| On Wednesday, Democratic Governor Tim Walz spoke to the public and condemned those ICE actions in his state, and again, urged residents to protest peacefully. | ||
| I know it's scary, and I know it's absurd that we all have to be defending law and order, justice, and humanity while also caring for our families and trying to do our jobs. | ||
| So tonight, let me say once again to Donald Trump and Christine Ohm, end this occupation. | ||
| You've done enough. | ||
| Let me say four critical things to the people of Minnesota. | ||
| Four things I want you to hear as you watch the news and look out for your neighbors. | ||
| First, Donald Trump wants this chaos. | ||
| He wants confusion. | ||
| And yes, he wants more violence on our streets. | ||
| We cannot give him what he wants. | ||
| We can. | ||
| We must protest loudly, urgently, but also peacefully. | ||
| Indeed, as hard as we will fight in the courts and at the ballot box, we cannot and will not let violence prevail. | ||
| You're angry? | ||
| I'm angry. | ||
| Anger is not a strong enough word, but we must remain peaceful. | ||
| Second, you are not powerless. | ||
| You are not helpless, and you are certainly not alone. | ||
| All across Minnesota, people are learning about opportunities, not just to resist, but to help people who are in danger. | ||
| Thousands upon thousands of our fellow Minnesotans are going to be relying on mutual aid in the days and weeks to come, and they need our support. | ||
| Tonight, I want to share another way you can help. | ||
| Witness. | ||
| Help us establish a record of exactly what's happening in our communities. | ||
| You have an absolute right to peacefully film ICE agents as they conduct these activities. | ||
| So carry your phone with you at all times. | ||
| And if you see these ICE agents in your neighborhood, take out that phone and hit record. | ||
| Help us create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans, not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution. | ||
| The third thing I want to say to you tonight is we will not have to live like this forever. | ||
| Accountability is coming at the voting booth and in court. | ||
| We will reclaim our communities from Donald Trump. | ||
| We will reestablish a sense of safety for our neighbors. | ||
| And we will bring an end to this moment of chaos, confusion, and trauma. | ||
| We will find a way to move forward, and we'll do it together. | ||
| Earlier, the Trump administration had floated the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act in response to the ongoing response to the ICE parades in Minnesota. | ||
| But here is reporting in Fox News that Trump has said there is no need to invoke the Insurrection Act right now amid that anti-ICE unrest in Minnesota. | ||
| With the story saying President Donald Trump on Friday said there wasn't a reason in the present to invoke the Insurrection Act as agitators continue to clash with federal immigration authorities carrying out enforcement operations in Minneapolis. | ||
| Trump was departing the White House when he was asked about the 1807 law, which he threatened to invoke earlier this week. | ||
| I believe it was Bush, the elder Bush. | ||
| He used it, I think, 28 times, Trump told reporters. | ||
| It's been used a lot, and if I needed it, I'd use it. | ||
| I don't think there's any reason right now to use it, but if I needed it, I'd use it. | ||
| It's very powerful. | ||
| The law allows the president to deploy the military to suppress rebellions and enforce federal laws. | ||
| It would grant Trump the authority to federalize the National Guard and deploy active duty forces to restore order. | ||
| It would temporarily override the Pase Comitatus Act, which normally restricts the use of military for domestic law enforcement. | ||
| On Thursday, Homeland Security Secretary Christy Noam was responding to reporter questions about the ICE operations in Minnesota and her conversations with President Trump about potentially invoking the Insurrection Act there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And how would you describe what you were seeing on the ground there? | |
| Would you describe it as an insurrection and do you believe the President should invoke the Insurrection Act? | ||
| I describe it as violent and a violation of the law in many places. | ||
| I discussed with the President this morning several things that we are dealing with under the Department and different operations. | ||
| We did discuss the Insurrection Act. | ||
| He certainly has the constitutional authority to utilize that. | ||
| My hope is that this leadership team in Minnesota will start to work with us to get criminals off the streets. | ||
| Remember, we are there in surged operations because of the largest fraud scheme in American history. | ||
| We had people stealing from taxpayers, stealing funds away from the most vulnerable individuals in this country, people who needed mental health services, developmental services, autism, daycare. | ||
| Instead, individuals came in, much from the Somalian community, and stole dollars from those people who needed it and put it in their own pockets and enriched themselves. | ||
| Did it right under Governor Walls' nose? | ||
| And we believe that he didn't just know about it, that he may be complicit in it as well. | ||
| Again, we're looking for your top news story of the week. | ||
| We'll start with Ted in Buenavista, Colorado, on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Ted. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, good morning. | |
| Thank you very much for taking my call. | ||
| It is no doubt that the ICE is out of control in Minneapolis and other states in the nation. | ||
| And also, we have to switch gears to it's been announced on the internet right now that Donald Trump has been served with Article 25 of impeachment of Article 4 of the Amendment 25. | ||
| And it's being reported right now that Donald Trump is locked up in his residence. | ||
| So, where are you seeing that, Ted? | ||
| I haven't seen anything about the president being served with any articles of impeachment in this administration. | ||
| Okay, let's go with Joy in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Joy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Good morning, Joy. | ||
| What's your top news story of the week? | ||
|
unidentified
|
My top news story is the fact that Donald Trump claims that he's concerned about the fraud in Minneapolis, but I'm concerned about him taking all the oil tankers and having a secret bank account in Qatar. | |
| And if you remember, Qatar is the one that gave him the airplane. | ||
| My top news story is that he's robbing the citizens here blind. | ||
| And I would like you to look that up to see if that's a true story. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, one story that I do have on hand is that the United States has officially started selling Venezuelan oil. | ||
| Here's reporting about that in CNN, showing that the United States has completed its first sale of Venezuelan oil, valued at about $500 million, according to an administration official. | ||
| Additional sales of oil are expected in the coming days and weeks. | ||
| The official added: In the days since the United States attacked Venezuela and captured its president, Nicholas Maduro, earlier this month, President Donald Trump has made it clear that he plans to tap into the country's oil reserves. | ||
| Let's now go to Paul in Nampa, Idaho, on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Paul. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Morning. | ||
| We're getting so close to Martin Luther King's birthday that I'm currently getting excited about that. | ||
| He was such a prolific spiritual being as far as his writing is concerned. | ||
| And he was articulate, and he just, you know, I learned a lot from him, even though I was eight years old when he was assassinated. | ||
| It still means a lot to me. | ||
| But yeah, I think we'll see what happens today up in Minneapolis. | ||
| I heard a little news conference that they had on PBS about the five different law enforcement people that were going to get together and, I guess, back up the ice if it was necessary. | ||
| And I'd like to see that if that were to happen. | ||
| That way, maybe something would not be done, and they would indeed have a peaceful protest. | ||
| I'm really pretty skeptical. | ||
| I feel as though these people have been bought off to be able to do whatever they want running around town. | ||
| And it's cost two people to get gunshots. | ||
| One person is deceased and the other person got shot in the leg. | ||
| But, you know, I don't see it having to get to that point. | ||
| But I really hope it doesn't. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Our previous caller, Joy, was referencing some of the oil sales money from the oil in Venezuela being held in accounts in Qatar. | ||
| Here's some reporting about that from Semaphore showing in their reporting, revenue from the oil sales is currently being held in bank accounts controlled by the U.S. government, as indicated in Friday's order. | ||
| According to an administration official, the main account, according to a second senior administration official, is located in Qatar. | ||
| The second official described Qatar as a neutral location where money can flow freely with U.S. approval and without risk of seizure. | ||
| Trump's order noted that at least some of the revenue would be held in U.S. Treasury accounts. | ||
| President Trump brokered a historic energy deal with Venezuela immediately following the arrest of narco-terrorist Nicholas Maduro that will benefit the American and the Venezuelan people, White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers told Semaphore in a statement. | ||
| Back to your calls with your top news story of the week. | ||
| Mark is in Tulsa, Oklahoma on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Mark. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, Kimberly Adams, how you doing? | |
| It's good to be back on the air again with the American people. | ||
| I want to tell a real news story. | ||
| This is new. | ||
| That's why they call it news because it's new. | ||
| It's not the same old game. | ||
| It's not the same old drama. | ||
| This is theatrics that we're watching right here. | ||
| The power and the purse control everything in our government. | ||
| The money controls everything. | ||
| These politicians in Washington, D.C. are bought off. | ||
| They are playing theatrics. | ||
| Mr. Walls is playing theatrics. | ||
| Trump's playing theatrics. | ||
| This is like WWE. | ||
| I feel like I'm watching Hulk Holgen and Macho Man right now. | ||
| It is so fake. | ||
| But the problem is we buy into this theatrics. | ||
| And the people of Minnesota, to me, have expressed themselves. | ||
| I don't see people of Minnesota on the doorsteps of the mayor. | ||
| I forget his name. | ||
| He's theatrical as well, but they're not on his doorsteps knocking down his door saying, hey, just be quiet and let the ICE agents go. | ||
| It seems to me that the majority of the Minnesotans are like, get out of our city. | ||
| And I'll tell you, it would be a more theatrical game for the rich people that control this game like Squid Game. | ||
| You guys need to go to a Republican city, and I'm an independent. | ||
|
Wrestling Match Controlled By Others
00:15:40
|
||
|
unidentified
|
But go to a Republican city. | |
| You guys, you act like these Republican people hate immigrants. | ||
| I don't think Republicans hate immigrants. | ||
| I don't think they do. | ||
| But you guys try to persuade them to. | ||
| So go to someplace like in Texas and go to like a city like Dallas and start doing your shenanigans there and see how it works out for you. | ||
| Because at the end of the day, Kimberly and American people, this is a game. | ||
| We are watching a wrestling match right now controlled by the others. | ||
| It's prescribed. | ||
| It's pre-done. | ||
| Let's get over it. | ||
| Leave the Minnesotans alone. | ||
| They clearly don't want ICE in there. | ||
| If the federal, we have sovereignty in this country, do we not? | ||
| Sovereignty. | ||
| You know, like we talk about states, state sovereignty. | ||
| You know, like they get to make their own decisions on abortion. | ||
| You know, like half of Americans think abortion is murder, half think it should be the right of the mom. | ||
| Well, you know, let the states decide. | ||
| If they want ICE in their community, then the leadership of the de-elected leadership's the same, bring it on. | ||
| And then we'll start seeing the leaders, we'll start seeing these local leaders adhering to the people. | ||
| So, Mark, the administration has pushed back against what have been called sanctuary cities. | ||
| And some of these cities have actually made particular policies that were protective of immigrants. | ||
| But the Trump administration and many others have said that's actually problematic. | ||
| And I know you're talking about state-level control and decisions on this, but what do you think of the concept of these sanctuary cities? | ||
|
unidentified
|
My concept is they're Dallas, Texas. | |
| That's where my mom was born. | ||
| She was born in Dallas, Texas. | ||
| Believe me, there are tens of thousands of so-called illegal immigrants in Dallas, Texas. | ||
| Now, to me, people are power. | ||
| I love people. | ||
| I don't have a problem with any of it. | ||
| You know, like if they're doing like hard crime and stuff, yeah, get them off the streets if they're like killing people and raping young people or whatever the case may be. | ||
| I don't think people have an issue with that, but they're doing more than that. | ||
| This is overflowing into a game of theatrics. | ||
| And so go to Dallas, Texas, or go to a Republican, a big city with a Republican head and start doing your ICE agents there. | ||
| And we'll see if the people just sit back and watch it happen and just extradite all the illegals from that big city. | ||
| Okay, I think we've got your idea, Mark. | ||
| Let's go to Stan in Scottsboro, Alabama on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Stan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'm my name as a week. | ||
| I'm a member of the gun culture here in Alabama. | ||
| And I grew up hunting in vision. | ||
| At eight years old, I thought how to kill people. | ||
| Not shooting up the Minnesota where they shot that woman in the head. | ||
| That wasn't nothing but a killing. | ||
| I said going around this country killing people. | ||
| Got a bunch of masked people look like Long Rangers or something running around here in this country. | ||
| Vincent is in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Vincent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, in 12th grade at Edison High School, I took a history class. | |
| Absolute power corrupts absolutely. | ||
| Trump is corrupt. | ||
| It's going to his head. | ||
| And something else, why are there so many games on Martin Luther King Day like professional football? | ||
| All right. | ||
| Creation is in Pennsylvania on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Creation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, good morning. | |
| What's your top news story of the week? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, good morning, y'all. | |
| I would like to say this. | ||
| Now, I'm asking a question. | ||
| Okay, why aren't immigrants tight over here in the United States of America? | ||
| Because when they are legally, believe it or not, are over here. | ||
| When you have someone, every race, every culture, everything in one, why are they going back overseas? | ||
| Or if they're born on either way of gone, they should be tried over here. | ||
| They are illegal. | ||
| Why are they sending them overseas? | ||
| And I always say that. | ||
| I listened to your story about the oil. | ||
| That they have started selling the oil for USA in Venezuela. | ||
| But if you have heard the news yesterday, they are no longer allowed to have government over there. | ||
| Did they make this decision before or after the decision? | ||
| Because they're going to make government over in Venezuela. | ||
| And not over there, and maybe the entire overseas. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Harold is in East Alton, Illinois on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Harold. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'd like to try something different. | ||
| Instead of complaining, I'd like to give simple solutions to some complex problems we're having. | ||
| I think with ICE, instead of deploying them on all these different immigrants, why don't we deploy them on the people that hire them so if they don't have jobs, they won't stay here. | ||
| Deploy them on people that rent them a home for they have no place to live. | ||
| If they don't have no place to live and they don't have no place to work, they will not stay here. | ||
| They will deport on their own. | ||
| And as far as our government is concerned, we need to get all of the money out of the government. | ||
| We need to have the elections funded by the government. | ||
| And I'm not talking about two three-year-long elections. | ||
| I'm talking about maybe six months at the most. | ||
| Each candidate gets so much airtime. | ||
| Each candidate gets so much money for however they want to use it. | ||
| And it's all a level playing field. | ||
| And maybe instead of getting all these millionaires to go and work for $175,000, maybe we could get a guy that only makes about $80,000, offer him a job for $175,000, and he will show up every day and do his job to the best of his ability. | ||
| And as far as any of the Trump minions out there that are listening, or if Trump is listening himself, because he does have C-SPAN 1, he's got the upgrade, I think that he ought to invite Putin and Noton Yahoo down to Mar-a-Largo, put out the red carpet, and as soon as they get there, abduct them and send them over to The Hague for their war crimes, and he could get the Nobel Peace Prize by solving two wars in one time. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Shirley is in Missouri City, Texas, on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Shirley. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| How are you? | ||
| I'm fine, thank you. | ||
| What's your top news story? | ||
|
unidentified
|
My top news story is that, first of all, I think that Walt and his corrupt mayor, and he's just as corrupt also, but I think that they're trying to push up all this business on ICE and try and keep it in the news so that it keeps the monkey off his back as far as the corruption goes. | |
| Because now the corruption has moved all the way, they say, to Ohio, and it's already up to over $16 million, or is it $16 million or $16 billion? | ||
| For which case in particular are you talking about, Shirley? | ||
|
unidentified
|
For all of the daycares and all of the transportation companies that they were supposedly picking these kids up at, and all of that's tied into everything. | |
| And they probably got 12 bullshit, oops, sorry, I'm sorry, 12 companies that aren't really set up. | ||
| They're set up, but they really don't use them. | ||
| And they bill each company for a service that really wasn't provided. | ||
| And then they've also found out that over $12 million has been sent back over to Somalia somewhere. | ||
| There's definitely an ongoing investigation into fraud in Minnesota over the daycare centers, also some food assistance programs. | ||
| I'm not finding the exact numbers that you were using, Shirley, but this investigation is ongoing. | ||
| Next up, let's hear from Anthony in South River, New Jersey on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Anthony. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Kimberly, top of the morning. | |
| Thanks for coming in. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I'm with Shirley, and I know you can't find the numbers, and the reason is because the legacy media is very biased, and they won't give you the numbers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is my suggestion to everybody. | |
| I want you to go on YouTube, Google, or you put in YouTube in a search for Nick Shirley. | ||
| Actually, Anthony, it just took me a little minute. | ||
| I'm looking at a story here in CBS News. | ||
| As national attention focuses on the growing fraud scandal in Minnesota, which federal prosecutors estimate could top $9 billion, this was around when the state's Democratic governor, Tim Walz, announced he was dropping his reelection campaign. | ||
| And so, again, the investigation is ongoing, but that's where some of these numbers are coming from, an estimate of over $9 billion in fraud, which obviously Minnesota's government has been disputing those tallies, but this is being reported in the mainstream media. | ||
| But go ahead, Anthony. | ||
| Okay, so Kimberly, I love you, and I appreciate you, and I appreciate what you just did because, you know, C-SPAN, Washington Journal is one of the few things out there that we still have left, even though there is some bias there. | ||
| But I like when you go and you get the information. | ||
| I'm going to tell the audience to do this because CBS and all the legacy, they're still biased. | ||
| Okay, so they're looking for information and they won't say anything. | ||
| When Governor Waltz says that Nick Shirley is the guy who's exposed to all this stuff, and he basically took a GoPro camera and he went to all these places and he found out they're not daycare centers, they're bodegas and they're just addresses. | ||
| There's nothing going on there. | ||
| So what I suggest to the audience, just like you did right now, and I appreciate that, but you have to empower yourself as Americans and get the facts. | ||
| So if you go to YouTube and you search for Nick Shirley, you're going to get two videos. | ||
| Yes, they're about 40 minutes and 50 minutes each. | ||
| And you're going to see that he goes to all of these places and you're going to see how corrupt and how there is no oversight on these programs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And there's five different programs. | |
| There's daycares, there are adult daycares, and then there's transportation. | ||
| As an example, he'll point you to the transportation places. | ||
| So he'll go to all these places. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They won't have any vehicles. | |
| They won't have any parking. | ||
| They won't even have a sign saying that they have a business. | ||
| They're wire transfer places in a couple of them. | ||
| So they get all this money. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's no oversight. | |
| And they'll point out per the Minnesota government website. | ||
| There's this guy, Dave, who got all of this stuff that gave it to Nick Shirley. | ||
| That there's no, that they give you, they're saying that they're giving out millions of dollars. | ||
| But if you just want to go down and say, I have a transportation company because I want to transportate elderly people to the grocery store or something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, that's a beautiful thing. | |
| We should have that because that's what our country needs. | ||
| But there's no oversight. | ||
| So if I, Anthony from South River, want to go and say, okay, I have a transportation company. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have six vehicles. | |
| Okay. | ||
| And the company, and the website will ask you how many trips you made. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, well, I made 10 trips yesterday. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, Anthony, I think we have your idea. | ||
| In response to some components of the Nick Shirley video that Anthony was talking about, investigators, and I'm reading here from reporting in CNN, investigators with the Minnesota Department of Children, Youth, and Families conducted on-site compliance checks at all the centers shown in the video, according to a department news release. | ||
| Children were present at all the sites except for one. | ||
| That site was not yet open for families the day the inspectors arrived. | ||
| The release stated, investigators gathered evidence and initiated further review according to the release. | ||
| The department has ongoing investigations into four of the centers mentioned in the video. | ||
| In total, across the state, the department has 55 open investigations involving providers receiving CCAP funding, according to that release. | ||
| So, as Anthony was pointing out, that investigation is ongoing. | ||
| Let's now go to Larry in Normal, Illinois, on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Larry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, it appears Canada, the Prime Minister of Canada, has called Donald Trump's bluff on his tariffs, and now he's dealing directly with China on items that America needs, such as aluminum and fertilizer for our farmers and stuff like that we need instead of China. | |
| Larry, can I pause you for just a moment to make sure that folks are familiar with the story that you're talking about? | ||
| I just want to give a little recap and then I'll let you finish your point. | ||
| This is reporting in Politico that Kearney has opened Canada to Chinese EVs. | ||
| China has cut canola tariffs. | ||
| Xi Jinping and Mark Carney mark a new strategic partnership. | ||
| This is a story from yesterday. | ||
| Prime Minister Mark Carney is opening the door to more imports of electric vehicles from China with expectations the olive branch will lead to considerable Chinese investment in Canada's auto sector within three years, risking potential blowback from Washington. | ||
| The move comes as Kearney and Chinese President Xi Jinping chart a new era in Canada-China relations and diversify trade ties in response to U.S. President Donald Trump. | ||
| That's the overview, but go ahead, Larry, with your point. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, this is not just going to happen with like China. | |
| It's going to bring European nations starting to counteract his tariffs also. | ||
| And I don't believe this, you know, the art of the deal, I don't believe this is a good, good art of the deal. | ||
| And that's all I have to say. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Next up is Richard in Hacienda Heights, California on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Richard. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| Very early here. | ||
|
Americans View ICE Unfavorably
00:07:37
|
||
|
unidentified
|
Obviously, the topic of the week is still the immigration enforcement. | |
| ICE, Christian Noam, and Jonathan Ross should both be dealt with. | ||
| And I just want to say that I think the President is so stubborn that he doesn't get it. | ||
| They were making so much progress with the immigration issue in this country, and now they bring these masked guys out to agitate people. | ||
| The whole country's up in arms over it. | ||
| It just really surprises me that Trump can be so stubborn as to not realize that all the progress he's made with the immigration is being thrown out the you know thrown right out the door. | ||
| I see it out here in LA, and people are getting really upset about it. | ||
| So it just surprises me that the president would be so foolish as to bring masked armies onto the streets where they're not wanted just to agitate, it looks like to me. | ||
| Richard, can I read you some polling about this exact topic and then get your response? | ||
| This is some polling from YouGov that after the shooting in Minneapolis, majority of Americans view ICE unfavorably and support major changes to the agency. | ||
| YouGov polling in October of 2025 found that majorities of Americans disapproved of ICE and had concerns about the agency's treatment of both citizens and immigrants. | ||
| New UGOV polling shows that majorities of Americans say that Ross's shooting of good was not justified and that it should lead to criminal charges. | ||
| More broadly, Americans view ICE less favorably than several other federal agencies. | ||
| Nearly half of Americans now say that ICE should be eliminated as a federal agency entirely, a significant increase from past polling. | ||
| Majorities of Americans support major changes that would place new restrictions on ICE. | ||
| And if you break that down by parties in terms of whether or not ICE sometimes uses unnecessary force and things like that, it breaks down by party. | ||
| Democrats are obviously way more likely to say that ICE is using too much force in general. | ||
| And in terms of viewing ICE unfavorably, most let's see, 40% of Americans view ICE somewhat or very favorably. | ||
| 52% view ICE somewhat or very unfavorably. | ||
| But it's highly polarized by party, with obviously more Democrats viewing it unfavorably compared to Republicans. | ||
| What are your thoughts on that data, Richard? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know anybody, regardless of party affiliation, that could have seen that video of that woman being shot in the face and think that's a good thing. | |
| I mean, this guy should be in jail, or at least charges should be put on him. | ||
| And Christy Noam lies like crazy right after it, you know, an hour or two later, and everybody's just sitting there stunned by it. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| I don't know any Republicans like me that could possibly see that. | ||
| Which is interesting because according to this polling, 63% of Republicans say that the ICE agent should not face criminal charges for shooting the woman in Minneapolis. | ||
| Overall, just 53% of overall Americans say that he should, but only 14% of Republicans, according to this poll, say that he should face criminal charges. | ||
| What do you think is going on there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think that's just people have had so much problems with illegal immigration that they're going to do anything they can possibly do to change it and get the people deported or self-deported, probably. | |
| So they'll say anything because I don't know anybody who saw that video. | ||
| And I've talked to a lot of people of all color. | ||
| And I have not met one person that didn't think that was unjustified completely. | ||
| I mean, three rounds is quick succession like that. | ||
| That was just an assassination of that lady. | ||
| It was really bad. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, some more of that YouGov polling about whether or not the force used by the ICE agent in Minneapolis was justified or unjustified. | ||
| According to the U.S. polling, just 28% of Americans in general say that that use of force was justified in that shooting. | ||
| 53% say it was not justified. | ||
| Again, big disparities by party. | ||
| 88% of Democrats say that that was not justified. | ||
| Just 15% of Republicans say that it wasn't justified compared to 61% of Republicans saying that the shooting was justified. | ||
| Moving on to Greg in Texas on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Greg. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, Kimberly, good morning. | |
| Hey, Kimley, I have my comments. | ||
| If you please give me some time. | ||
| Thank you, Ms. Jasmine Crockett. | ||
| Made me come back and want to vote again because they done tuck over the voting thing and all this stuff. | ||
| Ms. Jasmine Crockett, everything you say come out your mouth because it's true. | ||
| So I'm going to vote for you as an independent. | ||
| Y'all only one vote. | ||
| I'm casting a vote for you. | ||
| I'm not voting for nobody else because the rest of these people, I just follow along. | ||
| Okay, to my point, when it comes down to all this with the ISIS doing, this ain't nothing new because we went through this all our life. | ||
| Black folk been complaining and complaining about how we've been treated by the police force, checking us, stopping us, thinking we don't work, we steal, we do this, there. | ||
| We can be on our lunch break. | ||
| They need to get a job. | ||
| They need to get this. | ||
| So this is nothing new. | ||
| Now it's turning the cheeks. | ||
| But then again, I want to say, Kimberly, these people call in on these shows and they want to suggest the opposite, like Jenning on CNN all night with Abby Phillips, all the Republicans sit up. | ||
| They're making the shows a boring. | ||
| So can't? | ||
| Nobody will get tired of hearing the same old lies that had come out their mouth. | ||
| They're not going to admit whatever going wrong in this country and whatever said was white is right. | ||
| So it don't matter if we we know what we see. | ||
| We were raised the way to believe in the American way and the way they raise us to do it the right way. | ||
| These people ain't gonna never admit that what's going on in this country is wrong. | ||
| Kimberly and Kimberly, let me let me let you know, let me tell you something. | ||
| The way, the way that this country is being ran right now, this is what black folks been dealing with for years. | ||
| With the with the checking your ID, we get stopped every day, checking your ID, want to do inventory on us. | ||
| So now they're not messing with us, but they. | ||
| Let me tell you about this job situation. | ||
| Bear with me Kimberly, the job situation in America that I have experienced coming up as a kid. | ||
| First thing they did, they hired, they had, they had the white guys controlling the companies, construction companies and all that. | ||
| They were happy. | ||
| They ruined the company. | ||
| We are focusing on your top news story of the week. | ||
| If it's okay, I want to follow up with something you started with about that Texas Senate race, and here's some reporting in Politico about that. | ||
| Tallrico Tallerico leads Crockett in the Texas Senate primary, according to a new poll. | ||
| An Emerson College poll finds that Representative James Tallarico, with a nine-point lead in the Democratic primary, and Senator John Cornwren, neck and neck with Attorney General Ken Paxton on the GOP side, James Tallarico has leapt ahead in the Texas Senate Democratic primary with a nine-point lead over Representative Jasmine Crockett. | ||
|
Esther Salas And Pizza Judges
00:06:38
|
||
| According to new polling from Emerson College released Thursday. | ||
| The data shows Tallarico, a state representative from Austin, leading the Dallas congressmember by 47 percent to 38 percent ahead of their March 3rd primary. | ||
| When Crockett jumped into the race in December, her national prominence and fundraising strength had some expecting her to take the lead in the primary, but Tallarico has poured money into his campaign and built a large online following. | ||
| Let's go now to Kathy in Hanover Massachusetts, on our line for Democrats for your top news story of the week. | ||
| Good morning Kathy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, happy Saturday. | |
| I'd like to talk about the support of ICE, individuals wearing masks and and the justification of it, and I would like to bring awareness To Judge Esther Salas, who has had her son killed when someone delivered pizza intentionally to her house. | ||
| They don't go to people's work, places of work. | ||
| This is the other justification: they need to wear it at work because people will come to them at work. | ||
| No, the people who are going after people they don't like are going to their homes. | ||
| You have now pizza being delivered to other judges' houses and their families in the name of Esther Salis' son. | ||
| In addition to that, you had Brad Raffensberger, whose family, not only Brad Raffensberger, but and that's the Attorney General of Georgia during the 2020 election, whose daughter-in-law was met on their property with someone who was intending to just intimidate her. | ||
| Not only that, you have the politicians this week as a result of the recording they made, the six of them, about Kathy. | ||
| Are you still there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Okay, you were talking about the recording, I'm guessing, the advertisement where they were telling members of the military and National Guard to ignore illegal orders, that video? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, You missed my whole thing. | |
| Go ahead. | ||
| Which video are you talking about? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The ICE agents, people who support ICE agents wearing masks because they're in the office or at their job and they fear being doxxed and so on and so forth. | |
| My point is the opposing people who do not wear masks, Judge Esther Salas, all the judges who get pizza sent to their home in the name of Esther Salas' son, who was killed in their home by a pizza delivery. | ||
| But which video were you referencing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I really wasn't, I don't think I was really referencing a video per se. | |
| I'm more about the masks. | ||
| Apologies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And people, yep, yeah. | |
| So you can't justify the masks by because they get doxed because there are too many other people in this world. | ||
| Oh, the video, yeah. | ||
| No, I mean, the video was the six people. | ||
| That was the end of my little story, bringing it back to current day. | ||
| But you can't justify the masks. | ||
| You really can't. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Gloria is in Kansas on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Gloria. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I just wanted to make a comment about the ICE people in Minnesota. | ||
| If the people would stay home and mind their own business and live their lives and let ICE do their job, there wouldn't be any problems at all. | ||
| ICE has been around forever and ever, and they have always gone to all communities and got criminals, and there's been no uproar over it. | ||
| And I think the Democrats, the governors and the mayors are using this to try to do a Russia collusion thing because they are instigating all of this stuff in Minnesota. | ||
| And another thing, that that poor good girl that got shot, she did hit the officer, the ICE agent, and he has internal injuries. | ||
| And when the Democrats don't have any common sense, they listen to CNN and they don't tell the truth. | ||
| And they don't tell the truth of the whole story. | ||
| And I think people should respect our law enforcement people and leave them alone and let them do their job. | ||
| There have been no citizens arrested unless they were attacking ICE officers, which is a crime. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Next up is Lewis in Pensakin, New Jersey on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Lewis. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I want to make one comment about the gentleman who called about the illegals getting jobs. | ||
| Well, they tried to pass a law that everybody had to e-verify before they got hired, and the Democrats wouldn't pass that, okay? | ||
| Now, another thing is, you know, when Obama deported 3 million illegals when he was president, ICE was everywhere, but nobody was attacking them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, it was just quiet. | |
| They went in and out, in and out, taking people out, which ICE was doing until they pulled, you know, they made a big deal about it. | ||
| My top story is that guy Waltz is an idiot. | ||
| You know, I mean, that known lady was in Minnesota that one day, and they had two people in the back of a car, and people are screaming at her, why are you taking them? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why are you taking them? | |
| And she said, well, that guy over there molested children, and that guy over there molested children. | ||
|
PJM's Concerns About AI Data Centers
00:05:49
|
||
| This is the kind of people that these Democrats are protecting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're criminals. | |
| And that's that. | ||
| That's all they're getting. | ||
| And I don't want peep when Obama deported 3 million of them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| All right. | ||
| Next up is Angela in Conawingo, Maryland on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Angela. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll give you the exact top news story of the week. | |
| It's in The Hill today. | ||
| It says, biggest U.S. grid operator appears to stop short of reforms pushed by Trump and bipartisan governors. | ||
| This was actually a topic I called about 60 days ago on a CNBC article similar to this topic. | ||
| The PJM grid is the largest grid, and AI data centers are increasing the cost for all the households. | ||
| In 2024 to 2025 to buy the electricity, it was $2.2 billion. | ||
| In 2025 to 2026, it went to $14.7 billion. | ||
| And PJM just put a memo out this month that now the 2026 to 2027 to buy that electricity is now it's going over $16 billion. | ||
| And not only see the problem is when that it raises the price. | ||
| Angela, if I can pause you for a moment just so other folks can be aware of the article that you're referencing. | ||
| As you said, it's in the Hill. | ||
| And you were right about the headline. | ||
| The biggest U.S. grid operator appears to stop short of reforms pushed by Trump and bipartisan governors. | ||
| After the Trump administration and a coalition of bipartisan governors called on the biggest U.S. electric grid operator to enact reforms to cut electricity prices, the operator announced its own plan that does not include any key details of the bipartisan proposal. | ||
| The grid operator, PJM, which serves states on the East Coast and in the Midwest, said Friday that it would seek to incentivize data centers to bring their own power sources to the table, including by offering expedited connections to the grid. | ||
| Power-hungry data centers are expected to be a major source of electricity demand in the year ahead, years ahead. | ||
| And if they don't bring their own power sources along, they could add to rising prices and reliability concerns for ordinary people. | ||
| Go ahead, Angela. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So now, let me follow up with that. | |
| So again, because it's really in two years, it's quadrupled to buy this electricity. | ||
| And so it prices the kilowatt, it pushes up the price of a kilowatt hour. | ||
| So I'm going to pay the same for a kilowatt hour at my house as an AI data center is. | ||
| And not only that, PJM also goes in that article and in their memo from their last press release, they're worrying about blackouts, blackouts in America because of AI data centers. | ||
| Now, it could be a really big win for Trump if he has the Republican Congress draw up some sort of a bill, which I know the Democrats will support because, like the article says, this is bipartisan. | ||
| And I give credit Trump. | ||
| I give Trump credit that he is pushing this, but it's going to need federal legislation because the states aren't going to be able to do it because the grid is connected to like 14 different states. | ||
| That's 14, 15 different governors. | ||
| It's going to have to be federal law. | ||
| Angela, if I can, I want to read you one more thing and then get your response to it because you were talking about what the grid operator is doing. | ||
| And one of the things that that bipartisan group as well as Trump was calling for was for tech companies and data center operators to bring their own power. | ||
| There's a story about this in Marketplace. | ||
| Microsoft promises to fully pay for electricity, replenish water that data centers use. | ||
| The tech giant laid out a five-point plan to address backlash in communities around the country over AI infrastructure buildouts. | ||
| Microsoft is pledging to pay for the full costs borne by communities where AI data centers are being built. | ||
| The tech giant says it will work to keep electric bills from rising and water resources from being drained by the giant server farms. | ||
| Microsoft's announcement comes amid growing public backlash against data center. | ||
| That backlash has led to tens of billions of dollars in projects being delayed or canceled in recent months. | ||
| Angela, you were saying this needs a federal solution. | ||
| What do you think of this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because if you believe you're going to take the good word of the billionaire companies, well, if you believe their good word, I got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. | |
| There has got to be a federal law on this. | ||
| And I think that could be a big win for Trump and Republicans in the midterms if they could get a federal law to stop this. | ||
| I mean, there is no way that our electricity bills should double. | ||
| And there's no way that even PJM says they're worried about blackouts. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| And the only thing that's going to stop these billionaires is an actual law. | ||
| Their good word means nothing to me. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Regina is in Ravenel, South Carolina on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Regina. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, hi there. | |
| I just want to say I love your voice and your approach with people. | ||
| It's just perfect. | ||
| And we love to talk. | ||
| And I don't watch the news because I don't believe half of it. | ||
| I don't even believe 9-11. | ||
| That's how bad I hate AI. | ||
| And I believe that the fall in Genesis had something to do with us being, we were all dead. | ||
|
Iron Dome Diplomacy
00:05:03
|
||
|
unidentified
|
Now we all have to do that. | |
| So Regina, I know you said you don't really pay attention to the news, but our segment is for the top news story of the week. | ||
| Was there something in particular that you were following this week? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Turn to me, Kimberly. | |
| What I'm saying is all these people complaining, I love that they have the chance to speak, but we don't complain in the world we live in now. | ||
| We write down to God in petition what in the hell we want to happen. | ||
| We don't sit there and complain about this and that. | ||
| We have people in charge now that know the rules that we are under one God and by the authority in me, as we all have God in us as our soul, we each have equal authority as God is no respecter of persons. | ||
| Okay, I think we have the idea. | ||
| Let's go to John in Windsor, Connecticut on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Yeah, my top news story is Greenland. | ||
| I don't know how Trump and Republican Party could dismiss our relationship with NATO since World War II. | ||
| You know, they, I mean, America has a false security about these two oceans protecting us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We had Germany land on our shores. | |
| We had Japan land on our shores. | ||
| We had 9-11 that came over to our shores. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, the Iron Dome over Israel. | |
| That Iron Dome fell miserably on the day when Israel was attacked. | ||
| And thank God, Israel had the United States as the ally to help them. | ||
| You know, like most Republicans didn't go to Greenland because of their schedule. | ||
| What's more important, a NASA security or a birthday party? | ||
| You know, it's just, you know, Trump's using terrorism to strong-arm our NATO allies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is in America, I remember. | |
| You know, we helped each other, you know, and, you know, and now the world is looking at America fighting with each other in America here. | ||
| We've got a war going on in America. | ||
| You know, this is unbelievable what this country came to now. | ||
| You know, and, you know, like those masks, federal agents in Minnesota, they're masks because of the, you know, if they didn't have masks on, you find out there's generally six riders behind those masks. | ||
| You know, you know, facial recognition, that's why they wear those masks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But that's all I have to say. | |
| So John was mentioning that bipartisan delegation that went to Denmark to discuss the ongoing tensions around Greenland. | ||
| But this past week, U.S., there were meetings here in Washington about this as well. | ||
| Here's a story about that in Politico. | ||
| Denmark-Greenland failed to win the Trump team over. | ||
| U.S. allies hoped meeting senior Trump officials would diffuse tensions and tough talk on Greenland. | ||
| It didn't. | ||
| Denmark and Greenland still have a fundamental disagreement with the U.S. over President Donald Trump's desire to control the Arctic territory, Denmark's foreign minister said on Wednesday. | ||
| Lars Lockhey Rasmussen and his Greenland counterpart, Vivian Motzfeld, finally had their chance to turn down the temperature at the White House after more than a year of aggressive internet trolling statements and demands from the U.S. Their conversation did little to dissuade Trump and his team from their hold on Greenland. | ||
| Quote, we didn't manage to change the American position, Rasmussen told reporters after the meeting. | ||
| It's clear the president has this wish of conquering over Greenland. | ||
| We made it very, very clear that this is not in the interest of the kingdom. | ||
| Rasmussen and Motzfeld took pains to describe the session as respectful, frank, and constructive, but their frustration that their longtime ally would not cooperate was clear. | ||
| Yesterday, President Trump responded to a question about the future of NATO if they don't help the U.S. acquire Greenland. | ||
| Here's his response. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You have to pull out of NATO if it doesn't help you acquire Greenland. | |
| Well, we're going to see. | ||
| NATO has been dealing with us on Greenland. | ||
| We need Greenland for national security very badly. | ||
| If we don't have it, we have a big hole in national security, especially when it comes to what we're doing in terms of the Golden Dome and all of the other things. | ||
| We have a lot of investments in military. | ||
| We have got the strongest military in the world that is only getting stronger. | ||
| And you saw that with Venezuela. | ||
| You saw that with the attack on Iran, with the knocking out their nuclear capability, potentially. | ||
| So, yeah, we're talking today, though. | ||
| Mr. President, I don't talk about the Top News Story of the Week. | ||
|
Creatures of a Decrepit Past
00:05:37
|
||
| Dave is in Baltimore, Maryland, on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Dave. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right, yeah, good morning. | |
| I first want to start off by saying that a lot of your callers are creatures of some decrepit past where protesters were allowed to be shot, such as at Kent State. | ||
| However, the Constitution gives us the First Amendment right to protest peacefully. | ||
| And clearly, you can see on videos where people were across the street, 100 feet away from them, and getting hit by grenades, blast grenades, whatever they call them, bang grenade grenades and pepper balls and all kinds of other ballistic things shot at them. | ||
| So clearly, they're hiding their faces so that they can't be held accountable once we take over this country, get this country back, because somebody has to pay for the damages that they have created. | ||
| And furthermore, these creatures that's calling in on the other side are saying that everything that they're doing is right. | ||
| People need to stay home. | ||
| Some people, Obama did this and nobody attacked ICE. | ||
| What these people are actually saying in our regards and our reality is that this is white privilege. | ||
| So everything boils down to white privilege because they wouldn't let Obama do half the things that these, that this guy in the office White House is doing. | ||
| So society was based on, the fabric of society is based on assimilation. | ||
| And we can't assimilate with creatures. | ||
| We just have to. | ||
| All right, I think we got the idea. | ||
| Let's go to Christina in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and online for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Christina. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Okay, so first of all, give me just a minute here, okay? | ||
| You guys have got so many different subjects going on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're hard to address. | |
| But I would like to just say this to the American people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We need to look at this in the big picture of everything, right? | |
| Now, they have divided us from left to right. | ||
| And then on both sides, they divided, you know, different areas in there, okay? | ||
| And somebody had said something about the Declaration of Independence. | ||
| I would like just to take a moment, please do not cut me off, to read this to the people, okay? | ||
| This is the Declaration of Independence, and it's out of the law book, okay? | ||
| When in course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands that have connected them with one another, to assume among the pirates of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitled them. | ||
| Decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impelled them to separation. | ||
| We've heard these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're endowed by their creator with unilateral rights. | |
| And those are your first one through 10 amendments, okay? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Unalienable means unviolatable. | |
| And among these is life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. | ||
| To secure these rights, we have instituted the government, okay? | ||
| And it said governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the government, meaning the people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And it gives you a very, and that's just the beginning. | |
| And I really highly suggest that all this misinformation, we need, we have all these national months. | ||
| Why don't we have a national information, factual information month, to where we can have all the representatives up there, and I'm sure that they can do something where it comes over all the channels, and we can get down to the bottom of everything because individual accountability has to happen. | ||
| Women have distracted us so much and they're getting away with so much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Every time one side does something, the other side's yelling in the election time. | |
| Well, we're going to get them back in elections. | ||
| But nobody ever is held accountable. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then they just keep moving on to something else. | |
| We have packed on so many problems. | ||
| Listen to these people. | ||
| They're divided. | ||
| The government is there for the people, not to line their pockets. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're not there to start wars. | |
| They're there for the people. | ||
| They need to start concentrating on us. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Christina, before you go, who... | ||
| Oh, never mind. | ||
| We lost you there. | ||
| Well, that's let's hear now from Jimmy in Santa Ana, California on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Jimmy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The lady was right on, Kimberly. | |
| I've given up watching. | ||
| I used to watch MSNBC on a regular basis. | ||
| And I just, all I do is watch you guys now for about a year or so. | ||
| The reason I turned off the MSNBC, they said that Trump was going to lose Iowa by, you know, and he won by 20 points. | ||
| And I thought, you know what? | ||
| I'm getting a lot of misinformation. | ||
| The propaganda in this country is beyond pale. | ||
| They have, we have, I watch that stuff, but my biggest thing is Minnesota. | ||
| So the people in Minnesota, the governor and the mayor came out within minutes, if not hours, and said he's a murderer. | ||
|
Pivotal Events of 1963
00:04:28
|
||
|
unidentified
|
Christian Nolan came out and said he's a terrorist. | |
| The deal that I don't understand is when the mayor and the governor stand up and say something like that, take questions from the media, for the people. | ||
| My party, the Democratic Party, is afraid of real questions because they're getting everybody else to fight their fight for that. | ||
| Jimmy, you said you're a member of the Democratic Party, but you called in on the independent line. | ||
| We're going to wrap it up there for the hour. | ||
| Really appreciate everybody who called in. | ||
| Later this morning on Washington Journal, Punch Bowl News financial services reporter Brendan Peterson is going to join us to discuss President Trump's call for a 10% cap on credit card interest and other measures to address affordability. | ||
| But next, after the break, we'll talk with ProPublica journalist Nicole Foy about ICE enforcement under Trump and her investigation into the use of force by immigration officials. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Monday, watch C-SPAN 2 as we present all-day programming commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. Day. | |
| Beginning at 8 a.m. Eastern, journalist Jonathan Icke, author of the biography King, Alive, discusses the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr. | ||
| It's the first comprehensive biography of the civil rights leader in more than 30 years. | ||
| Then, at 10.25 a.m. Eastern, the July 1963 interview of Martin Luther King Jr. by four international and domestic journalists for Press Conference USA, a U.S. information agency series that was distributed internationally. | ||
| At 5.10 p.m., Boise State History Professor Jill Gill on Martin Luther King Jr.'s political strategies in the civil rights movement up to his assassination in 1968. | ||
| And later, at 8 p.m. Eastern, Reginald Dwayne Betts talks about reading Dr. King's letter from Birmingham Jail while he was in jail and the impact it had on his life since his release, including his founding of the organization Freedom Reads that builds libraries in prisons. | ||
| And at 9 p.m. Eastern, CNN anchor Abby Phillips and her book, A Dream Deferred, Jesse Jackson and the Fight for Black Political Power. | ||
| Watch our special all-day coverage of Martin Luther King Jr. | ||
| Monday, beginning at 8 a.m. Eastern on C-SPAN 2. | ||
| Sunday on C-SPAN's Q&A, University of Texas at Austin history professor Peniel Joseph shares his book Freedom Season, talking about the pivotal events of 1963 that impacted the civil rights movement in America. | ||
| That year marked the centenary of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, the assassinations of President Kennedy and Mississippi civil rights activist Medgar Evers, and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four young girls. | ||
| 1963, I think, is the most pivotal year of the 1960s. | ||
| It's the year that gives us both triumphs and tragedies. | ||
| And it's really the year that makes the 1960s the 60s. | ||
| So it's civil rights insurgency. | ||
| It's the Kennedy administration going back and forth with activists like Martin Luther King Jr. and others about what to do next. | ||
| We see a right-wing insurgency. | ||
| George Wallace becomes one of the pivotal figures of the year. | ||
| And people like William F. Buckley in the National Review are engaged in a war of ideas with people like James Baldwin, who becomes the best-selling author and really perhaps the most pivotal figure in the entire year. | ||
| So it's really an extraordinary year. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Peneil Joseph with his book, Freedom Season, Sunday 9th at 8 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN's QA. | |
| You can listen to QA and all of our podcasts on our free C-SPAN Now app. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| We are now joined by Nicole Foy, who is an immigration and labor reporter at ProPublica to keep going with the conversation about ICE enforcement under the Trump administration. | ||
|
Deadly Tactics Questioned
00:15:33
|
||
| Nicole, welcome to Washington Journal. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| You and your colleagues at ProPublica did an investigation and found more than 40 cases over the past year of immigration agents using life-threatening tactics. | ||
| Can you describe what those tactics are, what you found in your investigation? | ||
| Yeah, my coworker Mackenzie Funk and I were specifically looking at how often immigration agents over the course of the past year across the country were using these tactics that, in addition to being banned or highly discouraged by their own policies, are also things that many police departments across the country have banned since 2020 and the murder of George Floyd. | ||
| These are chokeholds and carotid restraints, which are specifically banned by the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice's use of force policy, unless there is a call for using deadly force. | ||
| And then we also found a number of cases where people were, where immigration agents were leaning on kneeling on people's necks, kneeling on their backs in ways that can seriously restrict blood flow or airflow in ways that have proven to be very dangerous for people. | ||
| And again, it's something that police departments in particular across the country have also taken out of their training and something that they're allowed to do ever since 2020 and some before that. | ||
| And there was a particular example that you found in Massachusetts. | ||
| What happened there? | ||
| I think the case in Massachusetts is very useful to kind of analyze from this point of whether, you know, this was a time when our experts who we showed all these videos to would consider that this type of deadly force was required. | ||
| It involved immigration agents who had stopped a car that contained a man and a woman and their one-year-old daughter. | ||
| They had come for the woman. | ||
| She had some pending assault charges, but the man Carlos, he didn't have any charges. | ||
| He had a pending asylum case. | ||
| But the problem was the mother did not want to leave without her one-year-old child and be detained. | ||
| And Carlos didn't want to let go of either of them. | ||
| And so immigration officers repeatedly, as we saw on police body cam from the police that responded to the scene because there were so many protesters and bystanders, they, you know, you could hear them talking with immigration agents and the immigration agents explaining that, you know, they really don't want to do something to very forcefully separate this family. | ||
| However, then you can see in the videos that something changes. | ||
| And an immigration officer can be seen on bystander footage reaching into the car and putting his thumb and his finger, his fingers onto the neck of Carlos, who appears on camera to violently seize. | ||
| He appears to be having convulsions so hard that his one-year-old daughter is shaking with him. | ||
| He's filed a lawsuit in Massachusetts alleging excessive force out of this encounter. | ||
| And he's also alleged that immigration officers after he was eventually allowed to leave with his daughter, he alleged that he still had some serious medical, he needed some medical attention and that it was not provided to him. | ||
| We were able to back this up in body cam footage that we watched as well that there's, you can hear on screen when an immigration officer says he's fine to paramedics. | ||
| And he alleges that he was not able to get the medical attention that he needed even after experiencing this really deadly restraint. | ||
| Now, what does DHS policy specifically say about tactics like these? | ||
| DHS policy says that these are forms of deadly force, using a carotid restraint, using a chokehold around someone's neck. | ||
| It's a form of deadly force. | ||
| So it's the kind of thing that you're not supposed to just use when a subject is not complying, when a subject is fleeing, when a subject is maybe not resisting. | ||
| It's supposed to be something that you use only if there's a serious threat to the officer, a serious dangerous life-threatening threat, and not and only if there is no other option. | ||
| And so that's why we showed so many of these videos to former law enforcement professionals, but also former officials in the Department of Homeland Security and asked them, you know, is this a situation in which you would believe that you have no other option but to use this type of restraint? | ||
| By and large, they did not believe that that was a, you know, that these deadly restraints were called for in many of these situations. | ||
| You reached out to DHS. | ||
| Did they ever cite a real physical threat to agents in their response to these incidents? | ||
| No, they didn't. | ||
| We sent them all of the videos that we used in our story and asked them, you know, can you please share anything that we should know, anything extra context? | ||
| Let's get on the phone. | ||
| Like, please walk us through why officers made the decision to use these things that are banned in your policy unless there's a deadly threat. | ||
| We can't see necessarily. | ||
| And from what we know from our other reporting, we can't see a deadly threat. | ||
| Walk us through this. | ||
| And while they did respond and give, you know, some answers, usually allegations that many of the people involved had assaulted officers, They roundly stood behind these immigration agents and said that they acted with the utmost professionalism and that they used a reasonable amount of force. | ||
| However, each time we asked, and I asked a couple follow-up times, you know, can you point to us? | ||
| Why was it necessary to use a very dangerous carotid restraint on a young father who was physically holding his child in a car simply because he appears to not be complying? | ||
| Was there something we're missing? | ||
| Why did you use a chokehold on a 16-year-old U.S. citizen being detained with his father in Houston? | ||
| Walk us through what was so dangerous about this situation. | ||
| Really, the only answers they had were that this is, they believe that their officers used reasonable force. | ||
| And in many cases, they alleged that off-screen before camera, before the camera started rolling, that these different subjects that they were pursuing had assaulted officers. | ||
| You mentioned a U.S. citizen in that example. | ||
| You and others at ProPublica have also been tracking ICE arrests of U.S. citizens in the past year, finding that more than 170 U.S. citizens have been held by immigration agents. | ||
| Your reporting found that they've been kicked, dragged, and detained for days. | ||
| Homeland Security Secretary Christy Noam was outside the White House on Thursday, asked by reporters about the rise in ICE arrests of U.S. citizens over the past year. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Here's what she had to say: Secretary Noam, are you okay with federal agents and officers violating people's Fourth Amendment rights by asking for papers with our reasonable suspicion? | |
| Every single action that our ICE officers take is according to the law and following protocols that we have used for years, that this administration has used, that the previous administration used. | ||
| They are doing everything correctly. | ||
| And over and over again, in litigation in the courts, we've proven that they've done the right thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why are we seeing Americans being asked on the street to provide proof of citizenship in Minnesota? | |
| Is that targeted enforcement? | ||
| And are you advising Americans to carry proof of citizenship? | ||
| In every situation, we're doing targeted enforcement. | ||
| If we are on a target and doing an operation, there may be individuals surrounding that criminal that we may be asking who they are and why they're there and having them validate their identity. | ||
| That's what we've always done in asking people who they are so that we know who's in those surroundings. | ||
| And if they are breaking our federal laws, we will detain them as well until we run that process. | ||
| Nicole, based on your reporting, what's your reaction to the Secretary's statements there? | ||
| I think my immediate reaction is that that is largely in line with what the Department of Homeland Security has told me the entire year when I've sent them numerous cases of immigration agents detaining U.S. citizens and asked them, you know, can you explain this? | ||
| And that they've said that in response to almost every case. | ||
| Sometimes they have said, well, this person was detained for, not to question their citizenship, but in order to, but in order to detain them because they, you know, they committed a crime, they assaulted an officer. | ||
| But I have to say that while certainly that may be the case for some of the people who were detained by immigration agents, there are some people who have cases pending still, charges pending. | ||
| So many people we found who had been arrested either they had been arrested and asked questions about their citizenship. | ||
| And we have full video footage of the encounter and we can personally see no assault, but also that they were released on the spot. | ||
| I think of the case of a young man in Alabama who has since now been detained twice on his construction site. | ||
| And the first time as he was taken to the ground, he was, you know, he was yelling that he was a U.S. citizen, even as officers didn't listen and he wanted to show that his ID. | ||
| And later, even though he filmed the entire encounter, the response of Department of Homeland Security was to say, well, he assaulted officers, but he was never charged with that. | ||
| And many of the people who have been accused of assaulting officers after they were detained, whether because often because of questioning their citizenship, they were released without charges. | ||
| Their cases have been dropped, or they were never even charged with that at all. | ||
| All right, we're going to be taking calls for ProPublica's Nicole Foy. | ||
| If you are a Democrat, you can call in at 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans at 202-748-8001. | ||
| Independents at 202-748-8002. | ||
| If you have had experience with ICE that you would like to share, you can call us at 202-748-8003. | ||
| Let's hear now from Hank in South Carolina on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Hank. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Did you actually see all these atrocities going on? | ||
| Yes, so I don't know which exactly you're referring to, but when it comes to our footage and our investigation into chokeholds, yes, we found in the in the case of these more than 40 incidents, the vast majority of them are caught on camera in footage, and we then showed that footage to police officers and to law enforcement, to former law enforcement officials. | ||
| Some of these incidents were filmed from multiple angles. | ||
| Some of them, I'm thinking of one particular case in Minneapolis that I added to the list right before we published, I kind of watched play out on a live stream. | ||
| So we, yes, we were physically able to see many of these on footage. | ||
| But yeah, I hope that answers your question. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Any of this stuff going on when Obama was removing people? | |
| That's a great question. | ||
| We asked many of the, especially the former Department of Homeland Security officials. | ||
| These are people who, in one case, one man had spent 20 years in both Border Patrol, HSI, working for both the Obama administration and for the first Trump administration in various high-level roles. | ||
| They said that, especially the use of chokeholds, this was something that was really like, it was not even controversial when it was formally banned in 2023 in this updated use of force because it was understood that you weren't supposed to use these type of tactics anymore, that they were dangerous. | ||
| They were even dangerous for officers sometimes. | ||
| So we did try to look and find previous cases like pre-2025 and found very little. | ||
| Now, of course, there's a lot of attention on immigration enforcement right now, and everybody is filming everything. | ||
| So we're never going to know exactly the exact numbers, especially if the government is not going to track this. | ||
| But as far as U.S. citizens being detained, one of the things that I wrote about in my story is that this is actually like something that we have a very long history of in this country, especially in the past few administrations. | ||
| There has been a long history of U.S. citizens being improperly identified, often because of, you know, they have the similar name as someone. | ||
| They have on their record that they've had an encounter with an ICE official, but the database that whichever official is referring to doesn't update that this encounter proved that they were a U.S. citizen. | ||
| This is something that DHS ICE in particular was found by a government watchdog report has a serious issue with this. | ||
| They mostly use data from the last year of the Obama administration and the first four years of the Trump administration, the first Trump administration as an example, but it's been a long history. | ||
| However, all of our experts that we spoke to and certainly in past coverage of this issue says that what we're seeing right now with the detention of U.S. citizens, both because of, you know, during these protests and also because of assumptions about their U.S. citizenship, they have yet to see this level. | ||
| We would like to know more about the exact numbers, but the government is not tracking this or at least has not provided that information when we've asked for it. | ||
| Celeste is in Pennsylvania on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Celeste. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, thank you. | |
| I just want to say the way they're doing this with all this force and everything, it just shows you that Trump told us what he was going to do. | ||
| The only thing he did wrong on January 6th was not have an army to back him up. | ||
| So now he learned through the hiring the worst of the worst, but they're very smart, that you can't have a coup if you don't, you know, have an army behind you. | ||
| Now, $55,000 sign-on bonus, cutting the time in half that they get training, six and seven men on one person. | ||
|
ICE's Roving Patrols
00:09:44
|
||
|
unidentified
|
Well, when Trump says that, you know, he's going to become an autocrat, he needs an army. | |
| And I think this is what ICE is. | ||
| It's just crazy to me. | ||
| And people, I mean, they're talking about it on every station, every channel. | ||
| They're just not saying it out loud that he is preparing his army to take over. | ||
| And like he said, there'll be no votes. | ||
| He's in, he's in, until he dies, and then his kids will take over. | ||
| And that's all I have to say. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Nicole, before you follow up, I want to share some polling about how Americans view the effect of ICE enforcement actions in cities. | ||
| 51% say that these enforcement actions make cities less safe. | ||
| 31% say they make the cities safer. | ||
| And 18% say that they're not having much effect. | ||
| Obviously, our previous caller was in that 51%. | ||
| But what's some of the other reaction you've seen? | ||
| I think I've been really struck by the responses when we showed, like particularly like our chokehold videos that we had collected to these law enforcement professionals. | ||
| And they've pointed out many times in many cases that not only is this something that, you know, in one case, a trainer of federal officials, including ICE officials, said that, you know, this is something that they're trained not to do. | ||
| And especially DHS asked that they're not supposed to be trained to do this. | ||
| But also that this is, you know, one of the things they said that this is bad policing. | ||
| These are examples of situations that have quickly spiraled out of control. | ||
| Many of our experts said that this appears to be because of the fact that immigration officials are more and more relying on these kind of roving patrols and kind of unplanned immigration enforcement activity. | ||
| One photographer that we interviewed kind of described it as like they would draw as he was following them around the Charlotte area and taking photos of the immigration operations that it really seemed like they were just stopping in random neighborhoods and going and stopping and going to pursue someone if they thought they might be undocumented. | ||
| And our experts said that that particular operation, in contrast to what previously immigration officials mostly used, which was much more targeted operations, knowing exactly who they're going after, that they believe that these lack of this lack of targeting and more spontaneous pursuits is really what kind of sets up these situations to spiral out of control. | ||
| You don't know necessarily much about the person that you're pursuing. | ||
| You don't know who's around them, what type of bystanders may show up. | ||
| And that's one of the things that they've pointed out is that many of these officers are acting in ways, at least according to the footage that we asked them to review, that would get many police officers disciplined in some way. | ||
| Billy is in Claremont, California on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Billy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning, America. | |
| This is Billy live from Claremont, California. | ||
| Yes, everybody's, excuse me, everybody is bashing ICE. | ||
| I'm in favor of ICE, ma'am, and I give them credit because that's the federal government. | ||
| Listen, when this whole campaign first started, nobody gives ICE credit for being polite and for being professional in the way that they went about doing their job. | ||
| We had all of these illegal immigrants spitting on them, beating them up, cursing at them, throwing things at their cars, and just slashing their tires and everything that they're doing now. | ||
| Nobody pointed their finger at those bad people. | ||
| But ICE, they're only trying to protect themselves. | ||
| They're only trying to protect the United States from being invaded by illegal aliens. | ||
| You know, and you know what? | ||
| ICE is not violent. | ||
| They're just out there, you know, protecting the nation, trying to protect themselves. | ||
| Remember this, America. | ||
| ICE members have families too. | ||
| So all of this bad press coming from the liberal media, this is why I'm an independent, okay? | ||
| Look, maybe I should be your next president in 2028 if I threw my hat in the ring. | ||
| But other than that, I support ICE. | ||
| You know, Trump, he's only out of line when it comes to tariffs and the way that he's running the rest of the country. | ||
| But immigration, he's spot on. | ||
| If we don't have ICE, who do we have? | ||
| And look, Billy, we're just about out of time, and I want to give Nicole a chance to respond to your point. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know if you have a specific question, Billy, if I can answer for you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Please. | |
| Yes, why don't you answer this question for me, Nicole? | ||
| Why don't you give ICE some credit? | ||
| Well, you know, why don't you criticize the thugs and the illegals out there that are cursing them out, throwing rocks at them? | ||
| Okay, I think we've got the sense of your question. | ||
| Yeah, no, I understand. | ||
| So I would say, first of all, you're talking about, I think, about a lot of protest footage coverage that we've seen around the country. | ||
| And I want to tell you that, you know, certainly based on the number of, you know, a number of people have been arrested out of incidents that you've described. | ||
| The vast majority, certainly not everyone, have been U.S. citizens or legal residents. | ||
| So I don't know what you're seeing in particular that would make you think that those folks are not here legally. | ||
| But many of the protesters who have been arrested, and that's honestly how we've seen so many U.S. citizens get arrested, is in these protests or kind of, you know, they've been accused of obstructing or assaulting ICE officers. | ||
| And I would just say that all year I've been asking for immigration officials, particularly top officials, to make available anyone in ICE or Border Patrol or DHS. | ||
| I've reached out individually to many leaders, asking them, like, we want to understand the context. | ||
| Understand that you have a job to do, and we want to know more about the way you've done it. | ||
| We at ProPublica have yet to get an interview in response to these questions, but we are certainly eager to understand and include the perspective of the administration because that is our job is to pursue the truth and give everyone a chance to respond. | ||
| But it's also our job at ProPublica, we believe, to pursue the truth, even if it involves holding the government accountable. | ||
| That's kind of how we view our role. | ||
| Marvin is in Iowa on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Marvin. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, Nicole, I was kind of in agreement with the gentleman from California. | |
| And I wish that people would just look at what where the money goes. | ||
| Who's supporting these people that are out of work protesting and doing what? | ||
| What are these people? | ||
| Are they educated? | ||
| What are they laid off? | ||
| Are they just have nothing better to do? | ||
| Who's paying these people? | ||
| And I always hear about the in the past tense, follow the money, follow the money. | ||
| They really need to report on following the money in all cases, not just this, but elections and/or discriminations. | ||
| Because it seems to me you have nobody that wants to work, number one, in this country. | ||
| And number two, those that do work just want to keep their jobs. | ||
| So I don't understand who's the one that's feeding these people like Ad Tifa. | ||
| Could you comment on that? | ||
| And I really think that people put the cart before the horse. | ||
| Are the laws the laws? | ||
| Okay, Marvin, I'm going to let Nicole respond. | ||
| Yeah, I have not, I'll tell you the truth. | ||
| I have not personally done an investigation into, I guess, the funding for what you're referring to, some of these protests. | ||
| I do know that there has been coverage on that. | ||
| And, you know, I've been mostly focused on looking at how immigration enforcement has played out around the country this year. | ||
| But I will tell you that when it comes to the number of U.S. citizens that I've interviewed who have been caught either, you know, many of them were not even protesting. | ||
| There are so many people who were detained by immigration officials while they were on their way to work or when they were stepping out in their neighborhood or when they saw something happening to a loved one or a friend or a stranger in front of them on the street and stepped in to, you know, in this case, immigration officials allege they interfered with the operation. | ||
| Certainly many people who have showed up to protest, there are many protests across this country every day for any variety of reason, but not everybody who has been detained or that you see on TV, you know, getting involved or and sometimes experiencing extreme force were even really intending to be at a protest at all. | ||
| So many of them, they have one woman in LA who had just gotten dropped off at work when suddenly there was, you know, a pursuit of different street vendors in LA, and she ended up getting detained even though she was a U.S. citizen. | ||
|
David Rubenstein's Baseball Tour
00:03:23
|
||
| That is the hard truth, as many of these people weren't there to protest. | ||
| Well, Nicole, thank you so much. | ||
| Nicole Foy is an immigration and labor reporter at ProPublica. | ||
| Really appreciate your time this morning. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| Later this morning on Washington Journal, we're going to be joined by Southern Methodist University Center for Presidential History Director Jeffrey Engel to talk about the 35th anniversary of Operation Desert Storm. | ||
| But next, after the break, we'll talk with Punch Bowl News financial services reporter Brendan Peterson about President Trump's call for a 10% cap on credit card interest and other measures to address affordability. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Book TV, every Sunday on C-SPAN 2, features leading authors discussing their latest nonfiction books. | |
| Here's a look at what's coming up this weekend. | ||
| At noon Eastern, Mary Roach, author of Replaceable You, looks at advancements in repairing and replacing parts of our bodies. | ||
| Then at 7 p.m. Eastern on America's Book Club, Baseball Hall of Famer Cal Ripken Jr. joins David Rubenstein to discuss his legendary career, his work as a best-selling author, and gives viewers a tour of memorabilia from his decades in baseball. | ||
| At 8.15 p.m. Eastern, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Rick Atkinson, author of trilogies on the American Revolution and World War II, gives a tour of his home office and talks about his research process. | ||
| And at 10.15 p.m. Eastern, Reginald Duane Betts talks about the impact that Dr. King's letter from Birmingham Jail had on him when he read it in prison and the life he's led since getting out, including founding Freedom Reads, an organization that builds libraries and prisons. | ||
| Watch Book TV every Sunday on C-SPAN 2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at booktv.org. | ||
| Watch America's Book Club, C-SPAN's bold original series. | ||
| Sunday with our guest Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove, who has authored several collections of poetry. | ||
| Don't think you can forget her. | ||
| Don't even try. | ||
| She's not going to budge. | ||
| No choice but to grant her space, crown her with sky, for she is one of the many, and she is each of us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
She joins our host, renowned author and civic leader David Rubenstein. | |
| Did your teachers say, well, look, poetry's not a big career future. | ||
| You should write prose. | ||
| People tell you that or not. | ||
| You see, I didn't even know that it was something that you could do and live with your life. | ||
| I thought that, and I was writing poetry from the age of 10, I guess, but it was always a secret thing. | ||
| It was a thing that I wrote and thought, okay, this is my secret. | ||
| It was my thing that I enjoyed. | ||
|
10% Cap on Credit Card Rates
00:12:26
|
||
| I didn't realize that a little black girl could become a poet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Watch America's Book Club with Rita Dove. | |
| Sunday at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPAN. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| We're ready for a discussion on some of the proposals that President Trump has had to address affordability, including a potential 10% cap on credit card interest rates. | ||
| And for this conversation, we're joined by Brendan Peterson, who's a financial services reporter for Punch Bowl News. | ||
| Welcome to Washington Journal. | ||
| Thank you for having me, Kim. | ||
| And so, you know, the president did say that, you know, he wanted to address credit card debt. | ||
| I want to give you some numbers on that, which you're probably familiar with. | ||
| Credit card debt in the United States exceeds $1.21 trillion. | ||
| Average interest rate is at 22%. | ||
| The average credit card debt per American was over $6,000, $6,523 per American in 2025. | ||
| 37% of adults carry a balance on their credit cards. | ||
| So, talk about this proposal from the president, what we know about it, and how it might affect those numbers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, the proposal, what you see is what you get. | |
| The president came out and announced, I want to say last Friday, that he wants to see credit card interest rates capped at 10%. | ||
| The White House has gotten a lot of follow-up questions about this proposal. | ||
| For example, like, do you need legislation? | ||
| The answer is almost certainly yes. | ||
| When I've heard Caroline Levitt talk about this proposal, I've heard her say, like, well, we're expecting the credit card companies to come out with products like this. | ||
| And we've seen some like marketing pushes along these lines. | ||
| There has been, I think the company built, was like, oh, yeah, 10% credit card, no problem. | ||
| That is an introductory rate, and it will eventually go up to something closer to 30% APR. | ||
| So you're hearing noise about the president's proposal, but very little action happening so far. | ||
| What would it actually take, though, to implement something like this in terms of what goes into credit card rates and what it would take to lower them? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, again, it would certainly take an act of Congress at this point to institute some kind of larger cap. | ||
| And right now, leaders on the Hill, mostly Republicans, are saying maybe not, right? | ||
| There is some interest on Capitol Hill in changing some things about credit cards, but when you're thinking about a 10% cap when the rates are, like you said, closer to 22%, that is a pretty big intervention in credit card markets. | ||
| Now, I would not tell you that it's impossible to economically pull that off. | ||
| There's data out of Vanderbilt's, their policy accelerator, that has found that maybe a 15% credit card rate would be more, or cap, I should say, would be manageable without the kinds of like hair on fire risks that bankers will tell you there are as soon as you start talking about any kind of government price cap, price controls, right? | ||
| In theory, the bankers will tell you, once we start talking about credit card interest caps, the availability of credit goes down, which means that fewer people with worse credit scores are not going to be able to use that credit card. | ||
| And having a credit card is like a nice financial tool to have in your toolbag. | ||
| Like no one would dispute that. | ||
| But it's definitely on the margins that you can make changes. | ||
| I think talking about a 10% cap, that's a pretty serious intervention. | ||
| But above it, you can look on the margins and say, yeah, this is probably doable if there's political will for it, which based on my conversations with lawmakers right now, isn't exactly there yet. | ||
| And there have been a couple of ideas floated in Congress to address credit card swipe fees, to address interest rates. | ||
| You had a post on X just about that that President Donald Trump appears to endorse the Credit Card Competition Act and gives an ada boy to Senator Roger Marshall. | ||
| The banks will not like this one bit. | ||
| President Trump said on True Social, everyone should support great Republican Senator Roger Marshall's Credit Card Competition Act in order to stop the out-of-control swipe fee rip-off. | ||
| Roger is a fantastic senator. | ||
| What would this legislation do and what other legislation may be in the works that might address credit cards in particular? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The Credit Card Competition Act is a bill that is led by Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois and Roger Marshall of Kansas. | ||
| It is probably the single most lobbied about bill as far as the banking sector is concerned over the last several years. | ||
| It's a swipe fee reform bill. | ||
| In the United States, swipe fees are pretty high, especially relative to our friends in Europe. | ||
| The average swipe fee, which I should explain, when you swipe your card or use a credit card in a transaction at a retailer, the retailer is paying a certain percentage fee to process that transaction with the credit card company with that bank. | ||
| In this case, in this country, it is about 2%, a little up, a little down, depending on the merchant. | ||
| In Europe, it's capped at 0.2%. | ||
| So a lot of retailers for a lot of years have been complaining about just how much they are spending in swipe fees. | ||
| Those prices, in theory, are passed along to customers, right? | ||
| If you've been to like a mom-and-pop store in the last several years, you've probably seen like taped up front on the register saying credit card expenses, 4% charge, right? | ||
| They are trying to cover that margin. | ||
| That is a case where consumers are directly paying for that swipe fee. | ||
| What Roger Marshall and Dick Durbin have been trying to do for the last couple of years now is say, okay, we're not doing price caps. | ||
| This is not a like we're bringing a ceiling into swipe fees. | ||
| They want to introduce a requirement that credit card companies actually offer a cheaper payment processor in the matter of actually payment transactions. | ||
| Because right now, the credit card market is largely dominated by two big companies, Visa and MasterCard. | ||
| They move their prices in tandem. | ||
| You can dispute whether it is a duopoly, but it certainly has the qualities of like kind of a cartel. | ||
| And what they are arguing, Marshall and Durbin, is that if you just make the companies offer a cheaper company, prices could go down on swipe bees. | ||
| Let's get some actual economic competition in there. | ||
| Banks hate this for a lot of reasons. | ||
| And they'll say, look, Visa and MasterCard, we make a lot of money off this, but we also make our payment rails more secure. | ||
| And we offer these great credit card rewards. | ||
| Don't you like your credit card rewards? | ||
| It'd be a shame if something happened to your credit card rewards. | ||
| They love to say that. | ||
| At the end of the day, this is an economic intervention. | ||
| Credit card rewards, which we should say, are paid for by those swipe fees, by the interest paid by folks who don't pay off their cards every month, et cetera. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Like that, that is the transaction, the exchange that people get. | ||
| And I think some people like they look at credit card rewards, some of which can be very lucrative, sometimes it's more marginal. | ||
| And people wonder, like, where's this money actually coming from? | ||
| You're exactly right. | ||
| Is swipe fees and is interest paid by the people who are not paying that maximum balance every single month, right? | ||
| That's the exchange. | ||
| That is the deal that we have made between banks, consumers, credit cards, and retailers. | ||
| It can change. | ||
| I want to talk about some of the president's other measures to address affordability, including, so we talked about that cap on credit card interest rates at 10%. | ||
| He's also suggesting a ban on institutional investors in the single-family home market. | ||
| He has suggested buying $200 billion in mortgage bonds to bring down housing costs, allowing 401k funds to be used for home down payments, which some people can already do in certain cases. | ||
| And Trump is expected to unveil a broader proposal on that at Davos next week. | ||
| How much impact do you think some of these measures would actually have on what people are calling this affordability crisis? | ||
| It's a really good question. | ||
| And the answer is like, I'm not totally sure. | ||
| I would say most experts aren't totally sure. | ||
| A lot of the devil is in the details on these proposals. | ||
| I'll just talk about the institutional investors proposal to ban them from buying single-family homes. | ||
| Nationally, if you zoom out, like a company like Blackstone has something like 1% of single-family homes nationwide, right? | ||
| That's not a huge supply, but it's also not nothing. | ||
| Where it gets interesting is when you look at more regional problems. | ||
| They own more housing stock in certain places. | ||
| And I remember this being a bigger problem in Ohio, for instance, when Senate Banking Chairman Sherrod Brown was still in office, the senator, Democratic senator from Ohio, he introduced a bill that he said was targeted at predatory institutional investors buying homes in Ohio. | ||
| He gets knocked out of office by Bernie Moreno. | ||
| Bernie Moreno is now a senator on the Senate Banking Committee, Republican. | ||
| And as soon as Trump makes this announcement saying, hey, we want to ban institutional investors from buying single-family homes, Bernie Moreno shows up, I have a bill for this, right? | ||
| So there is a bipartisan appetite. | ||
| You can see how Trump entering the space sort of opens the aperture, the Overton window, if you will, for doing this kind of analysis. | ||
| The Overton window being the sort of realm of acceptable ideas and policies that shifts over time. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| There is interest here. | ||
| And like a lot of things in housing policy specific, it's very local. | ||
| It's very regional, right? | ||
| The dynamics of like who the construction builders are, what your zoning regulations are, all of that is incredibly close in proximity, local politics. | ||
| So to some extent, it's less less things that Congress can do in a lot of ways, but that's not something folks from trying. | ||
| There's another bill in the Senate right now called the Road to Housing Act, which is led by Elizabeth Warren, one of the top progressives, and Tim Scott, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. | ||
| Those two do not agree on law, but they do have the Road to Housing Act, which would generally try to make it easier for developers to build, reducing some key regulations about manufactured housing policy and getting rid of the steel chassis, for instance, which is something that was kind of a holdover for when homes had to be driven from manufacturer to home. | ||
| Now a lot of homes can be built on site. | ||
| That's something that could save thousands of dollars per home. | ||
| It's a lot of small interventions like that. | ||
| That's a big one that's coming down the pipe. | ||
| I'm going to follow up on your point about Elizabeth Warren and the president kind of lining up with someone who's been a very traditional opponent. | ||
| The story about this in NBC News, Trump turns to progressives for ideas on affordability. | ||
| The president called Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, on Monday, and she said they discussed legislation to cap credit card interest rate. | ||
| It feels almost unreal in the environment that we're in to hear about this kind of communication on an issue. | ||
| What's unique about this? | ||
| There's a lot of things unique about this. | ||
| For one, the day that Warren gets this call from Trump, and I should say it was an unscheduled call, she told reporters that it just came from a 202 number in the Washington area. | ||
| She almost didn't pick up because she had no reason to believe that it was the President of the United States who was calling her. | ||
| But earlier that day, she had given a speech about basically economic populism and calling on her fellow Democrats to embrace this economic populist wind that has sort of gotten picked up by the Trump administration. | ||
| She's telling Democrats, hey, let's not worry so much about our corporate donors anymore. | ||
| Let's dig in on populism. | ||
| She gives that speech, and then an hour or two later, she gets a call from the President of the United States. | ||
| She says she talked to him both about the Road to Housing Act, which almost got included in the annual defense policy package last December, and it was eventually stripped out. | ||
| And she also talked to him about credit cards and credit card rates, saying that we could reduce those rates if the president, Trump, delivered and actually put his political will behind it. | ||
| So on the one hand, it is a remarkable story because the two of them do not agree a lot. | ||
| Every now and again, Trump will say something supportive and then he'll come back and say something like sort of racially charged about her. | ||
| Like it's a little bit of a mess, but it will show you that Trump will cut a deal with anybody. | ||
| Like Trump is politically, ideologically agnostic in a way that I think we lose track of in the day-to-day like churn of DC politics. | ||
|
CFPB And Credit Card Rates
00:15:19
|
||
| All right. | ||
| Well, we're going to be taking questions for Brendan Peterson of Punch Bowl News. | ||
| Our phone lines are going to be regional for this segment. | ||
| If you're in the Eastern or Central time zone, call 202-748-8000 in the Mountain or Pacific time zone, 202-748-8001. | ||
| Again, you can text us at 202-748-8003. | ||
| Just let us know your name and where you're from. | ||
| Let's start with Thomas in Smithfield, North Carolina. | ||
| Good morning, Thomas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Good morning, everybody. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Yeah, I think the 10% rate is a fair rate considering that a lot of people use credit. | ||
| And for banks to have an extortion or a loan shark rate of 15, 20, 25% is rather excessive. | ||
| And you touched on the transaction fees on top of that that the retailer absorbs. | ||
| But what we have to remember is the economy is based on consumption. | ||
| And I think there's a level of responsibility to the credit card companies offering easy credit for qualified people. | ||
| And it's like selling candy on the corner there. | ||
| People are going to take that, you know, and it's a false sense of entrapment. | ||
| And so my question to Brandon is, do you think the banks should lower their rates, which I believe they do, and the marketing that they do is kind of an entrapment, but then people fall for that trap. | ||
| And the other thing, you touched on mortgages there. | ||
| I really think the whole financial industry should look at mortgages and look at the amortization tables and see how they're weigh leveraged towards the banks where your principal payment and your interest payment, your interest is a fraction of what your principal payment is up front. | ||
| And that's why you have to have a 50-year mortgage, what they're entertaining. | ||
| So I think the industry, we need to look at the industry as the overall general functioning of the economy. | ||
| Credit is easy. | ||
| So Thomas, I just want to make sure that we're getting the questions that you want Brendan to address. | ||
| It's about the banks and the rates that they set more broadly, and then about housing affordability and sort of how mortgage rates are amortized over time, correct? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Correct. | |
| Okay, go ahead, Brendan. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| So on the credit card piece, let me just say this. | ||
| Credit cards have never been more profitable for the banking industry. | ||
| Like in the last 10 years, we have seen a pretty significant uptilt in exactly how much profit that banks get. | ||
| They call it the APR margin. | ||
| It's like 14.3% today, according to the latest data from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has a lot of credit card data, if you're interested in looking at it yourself. | ||
| That's up from about like 8% 10 years ago. | ||
| And so like when you think about who is making money off of credit cards, and I should also say like part of the reason that APRs and other things in the credit card market have become more expensive is because federal interest rates have gone up. | ||
| The prime rate has gone up because of higher inflation in the economy. | ||
| This is just part of the pandemic era economy that is still working its way through. | ||
| But at the same time, banks have created an engine with credit cards that are still very, very profitable despite those higher costs. | ||
| On mortgages, yes, you mentioned the 50-year mortgage, and we haven't heard about it as much recently since the president first sort of tweeted an image of him and FDR on a piece of poster board with FDR 30-year mortgage, Trump 50-year mortgage. | ||
| You're exactly right that like a 50-year mortgage is really, really difficult to pay off in the long term. | ||
| I have had many an expert refer to it as debt slavery to me as I've been talking to them about this. | ||
| 30-year mortgage is kind of a sweet spot. | ||
| And if you can get a 20-year mortgage, if you have that kind of capital, it's even a little bit easier to pay it off as long as you can pay that rate. | ||
| There's not a lot of serious interest in a 50-year mortgage, I think, because the politics of it are pretty dicey. | ||
| You mentioned the CFPB, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which had all that credit card data that you were referencing. | ||
| But in response to some of Trump's affordability proposals, including that cap on credit card interest rates, there's been a lot of pushback from Democrats that the CFPB was literally working to improve affordability to rein in credit card companies. | ||
| And the Trump administration, as part of its Doge cuts, has made significant cuts to that agency. | ||
| How do you think that this plays into sort of the overall affordability narrative that the administration is trying to prose? | ||
| That's a great question, especially on the narrative itself. | ||
| I think it has definitely hurt the Trump administration's case. | ||
| And when you talk to progressives on the Hill, like Senator Bernie Sanders, for instance, who has his own 10% interest rate cap bill for credit cards, they just don't believe that the president is serious about this. | ||
| And a lot of that has to do with the ways in which they have gutted the CFPB. | ||
| The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in its history before being mostly largely shut down in the early months of the Trump administration, they saved consumers $20 billion. | ||
| That is a huge sum of money. | ||
| A lot of that in like going after predatory lenders, people who are doing unfair debt collection practices. | ||
| There's a lot of good things the CFPB did. | ||
| And they were summarily shut down by Russ Vogt, who is technically the acting director of the CFPB, as well as the director of the Office of Management and Budget. | ||
| It's bad politics for them. | ||
| The CFPB was maybe the most popular federal agency if people knew what it was. | ||
| I would say that it doesn't have the best PR in the world, in part because the banking industry despised the CFPB. | ||
| They really didn't like how it worked, especially under the Biden administration when it was led by Rohit Chopra, who had a very muscular understanding of what the CFPB could do. | ||
| He pushed very hard within the regulatory framework to make credit more accessible, but also cracking down on bank practices and the practices of other non-bank lenders. | ||
| So it doesn't help. | ||
| The CFPB is still cooking. | ||
| I will also say that we saw a pretty significant change in the CFPB's budget during Republican reconciliation. | ||
| The one big beautiful bill that came through not too long ago, Senate banking Republicans and Republicans in the House Financial Services Committee successfully cut the CFPB's long-term budget in half by going into their statute and saying, okay, the CFPB is allowed to get 12% of the Fed's budget every year. | ||
| We're going to make that 6%, 6.5%. | ||
| That's going to be a really significant cut, not now, because the CFPB is not taking in all that much money. | ||
| Russ Vogt has only asked for, I want to say, $145 million in budget this year. | ||
| Whereas under the Biden years, they were approaching $700,080, $900 million. | ||
| A future Democratic administration is going to have a CFPB budget that's basically cut in half. | ||
| And that will also have an impact on consumers. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Let's go to John in Chicago. | ||
| Good morning, John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Hey, really love the show. | ||
| You know, I'm sort of an old school capitalist guy, and you know, all the talk about forcing companies to do this and that. | ||
| I've always wondered why we just couldn't force good old old school capitalism into this mix. | ||
| And I think we'd have a lot of brilliant business people getting into the credit card business that would bring chaos to the market and change. | ||
| I think that's fair. | ||
| And I think when you have something like the Trump administration that's coming out and saying, like, lower this, cap this, like, you're going to have, even before the government takes any formal responses, private actors in that market are going to try to capitalize on that. | ||
| Like, I mentioned at the top of the hour that BILT, this credit card company, B-I-L-T, introduced a 10% card rate. | ||
| That will, it's an introductory rate. | ||
| It will get lower over time. | ||
| Get higher or lower? | ||
| Sorry, get higher over time. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That's just good old-fashioned marketing, right? | ||
| There are certainly opportunities. | ||
| And we could see credit card companies like make their whole thing like, hey, we have cheaper APR than those guys, right? | ||
| That's a possibility. | ||
| But again, you have to remember these are profit-seeking actors and they are going to try to maximize their profits. | ||
| I was saying to Kimberly before we started the show, I didn't realize that in the last couple of years, just between 2022 and 2024, the amount of just interest being paid by U.S. consumers on their credit card bills has gotten a lot higher. | ||
| In 2022, they were paying $105 billion as a collective in the United States. | ||
| In 2024, just two years later, that number had jumped to $160 billion, which is an increase of more than 52%, just in interest. | ||
| And so, like, I'm not someone who is religiously following what exactly his APR credit card is. | ||
| I think that's most people. | ||
| People are paying a lot of money on this that they might not be paying attention to. | ||
| And that's, I think, where like the kind of capitalism hits the rubber of the road. | ||
| When people don't realize how much they're spending, it's easier for a free market to take advantage of that. | ||
| Connie is in Ambler, Pennsylvania. | ||
| Good morning, Connie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I have a question. | ||
| Well, now, more of a statement. | ||
| It's interesting that you're saying that Trump went to Elizabeth Warren for these ideas. | ||
| Isn't it interesting that there are Democratic ideas that are really better covering what we need to do in this state than the Republican ideas because they have no ideas, no ideas on health care, no ideas on credit card. | ||
| So tell me, really, who is helping the American people? | ||
| Not the Republicans. | ||
| I think it's a very good point that the president is embracing these Democratic ideas. | ||
| I think the credit card interest rate is a good one. | ||
| I should also say there have been populists in the Republican Party who have been saying this kind of thing too. | ||
| Josh Hawley, senator from Missouri, has also thrown his support behind a 10% credit card interest rate cap. | ||
| He is also supportive of the Durban-Marshall, or has at least in the past, been supportive of the Durban-Marshall credit card swipe fee bill. | ||
| So it's not like Republicans don't have anybody in the mix who are doing this. | ||
| But Elizabeth Warren, to your point, is the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee. | ||
| She is easily the most influential Democrat in the Senate on economic policy, except for maybe Chuck Schumer, who is the leader of the Senate. | ||
| And she has a lot of sway with the Democratic Party establishment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So your point is well taken. | |
| Connie, excuse me, Connie also mentioned health care and that whether or not the Republicans have ideas on health care. | ||
| I should point out that Trump actually laid out a new framework this week to address health care costs. | ||
| This is a story in Axios. | ||
| Trump on Thursday called on Congress to pass a package of measures aimed at lowering drug prices, insurance premiums, and increasing health cost transparency. | ||
| The Great Health Care Plan is a response to Democrats' attacks around expired Affordable Care Act subsidies and an acknowledgement the GOP could get blamed for health care affordability heading into the midterm elections. | ||
| I mean, what should we take from the fact that this health care plan is coming out now, that these credit card ideas are coming out now, all of which probably need Congress to do something? | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| Affordability is a big deal. | ||
| You know, it is something that even as inflation, we haven't even talked about inflation numbers recently. | ||
| Like, inflation annually right now is like 2.7%, according to the Bureau of Labor statistics. | ||
| That's certainly not as high as it was during the Biden years coming out of the pandemic, but it is also much higher than inflation was in the years leading up to the pandemic. | ||
| Rates were near zero for a very long time, so much so that like people were literally writing think pieces about like what happens if inflation never comes back, right? | ||
| Like it was a funny, weird time. | ||
| So I was thinking about this on the way into C-SPAN today. | ||
| Like people are experiencing higher costs everywhere in their lives. | ||
| They are clocking it kind of everywhere they go. | ||
| For instance, I was at the grocery store yesterday and I saw a bag of Doritos going for like $8. | ||
| And I could remember when I first moved to DC, that was a $4 bag. | ||
| And that is just something that happens after several years of elevated inflation. | ||
| To your point about all the policies that are coming hurtling out of the Trump administration right now, yeah, it does look like this is an administration that is pretty worried about what the economy is doing to its base. | ||
| And you have to remember that Biden was arguably washed out of office, or I should say Harris lost after being associated with Biden because of inflation, because of high-cost politics. | ||
| We saw worldwide incumbents after the pandemic get washed out of office, and the consistent thread from all these voters and all these surveys and polls was inflation. | ||
| The Trump administration does not want a repeat of that, especially when the president himself has historically had very good branding and polling associated with his economic policy. | ||
| That has always been his strongest suit. | ||
| And he is now deeply underwater with voters on the economy. | ||
| Like, I think the lowest he was ever underwater with voters in the economy was like maybe 9% on net in his first administration. | ||
| He is easily in the double digits now. | ||
| I want to say it's closer to 20 or 30 points underwater, but I haven't seen the most recent polling. | ||
| Suffice to say, it is bad. | ||
| It is bad. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Let's hear from Evelyn in Ohio. | ||
| Good morning, Evelyn. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| I just want to make a quick statement and a question. | ||
| One thing that it seems hasn't been mentioned is that the United States Supreme Court successfully destroyed usury laws that the states had in place back in the 1978 in the Market Bank versus First Omaha decision. | ||
| Once that decision was issued by the United States Supreme Court, interest rates on credit cards skyrocketed. | ||
| They effectively destroyed the state's usury laws. | ||
| And Congress has been complacent. | ||
|
Long-Running Trend in Banking Regulation
00:01:43
|
||
|
unidentified
|
I almost feel as an American that they're on the take because this should have never happened. | |
| This ruling should have been overturned. | ||
| And I applaud President Trump for trying to do what he's doing. | ||
| And I'll listen to you on there. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's true that the national economy has really changed in the wake of that decision and others. | ||
| There's been a longer running trend. | ||
| We're getting into like my favorite like bank regulatory stuff. | ||
| So thank you. | ||
| There's been a lot of big changes in how like states and the federal government split their supervision of like federal law. | ||
| And you're right. | ||
| Like the pendulum has swung very far in the nature of the federal government. | ||
| There's a lot of preemption of state law. | ||
| And this is something that we're still fighting about. | ||
| There have been Supreme Court cases in the last couple of years that have looked at like the ability of states like California and Illinois to try to like reduce all kinds of like specific banking practices. | ||
| And the Supreme Court continues in general to side with the feds on this. | ||
| It is just a long-running trend of allowing Congress to regulate commerce. | ||
| And I don't see it changing anytime soon. | ||
| Absent, to your point, a major change in congressional law. | ||
| We're not there yet. | ||
| But listen, this is a pretty topsy-turvy time in American politics. | ||
| Like I can squint and I can see it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Well, we're going to end it there. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Brendan Peterson is the financial services reporter for Punch Bowl News. | ||
|
C-SPAN's Unbiased Voice
00:02:59
|
||
| Really appreciate your time and coming in this morning. | ||
| Thanks, Kimberly. | ||
| All right, coming up later this morning on Washington Journal, we're going to talk with Southern Methodist University Center for Presidential History Director Jeffrey Engel about the 35th anniversary of Operation Desert Storm. | ||
| But next, after the break, it's open forum. | ||
| You can start calling in now. | ||
| Here are the lines. | ||
| Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents at 202-748-8002. | ||
| We will be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Watch C-SPAN 2 as we present all-day programming commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. Day. | |
| Beginning at 8 a.m. Eastern, journalist Jonathan Icke, author of the biography King, Alif, discusses the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr. | ||
| It's the first comprehensive biography of the civil rights leader in more than 30 years. | ||
| Then, at 10.25 a.m. Eastern, the July 1963 interview of Martin Luther King Jr. by four international and domestic journalists for Press Conference USA, a U.S. information agency series that was distributed internationally. | ||
| At 5.10 p.m., Boise State History Professor Jill Gill on Martin Luther King Jr.'s political strategies in the civil rights movement up to his assassination in 1968. | ||
| And later, at 8 p.m. Eastern, Reginald Duane Betts talks about reading Dr. King's letter from Birmingham Jail while he was in jail and the impact it had on his life since his release, including his founding of the organization Freedom Reads that builds libraries in prisons. | ||
| And at 9 p.m. Eastern, CNN anchor Abby Phillips and her book, A Dream Deferred, Jesse Jackson and the Fight for Black Political Power. | ||
| Watch our special all-day coverage of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Monday, beginning at 8 a.m. Eastern on C-SPAN 2. | ||
| C-SPAN is as unbiased as you can get. | ||
| You are so fair. | ||
| I don't know how anybody can say otherwise. | ||
| You guys do the most important work for everyone in this country. | ||
| I love C-SPAN because I get to hear all the voices. | ||
| You bring these divergent viewpoints and you present both sides of an issue and you allow people to make up their own minds. | ||
| I absolutely love C-SPAN. | ||
| I love to hear both sides. | ||
| I've watch C-SPAN every morning and it is unbiased and you bring in factual information for the callers to understand where they are in their comments. | ||
|
Why Credit Cards Are Evil
00:03:24
|
||
|
unidentified
|
It's probably the only place that we can hear honest opinion of Americans across the country. | |
| You guys at C-SPAN are doing such a wonderful job of allowing free exchange of ideas without a lot of interruption. | ||
| Thank you, C-SPAN, for being a light in the dark. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| We are in open forum ready to take your calls. | ||
| Democrats at 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans at 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents at 202-748-8002. | ||
| Let's start with Bob in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Bob. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I think credit cards are evil for most people. | |
| The basic rule should be if you don't have the money, don't spend it. | ||
| I mean, you swipe that card, charge it, put it on credit. | ||
| I don't know, I guarantee you'll go into debt and it'll spiral out of control. | ||
| So why risk the trap? | ||
| Live within your means, use cash or debit, and avoid the headaches. | ||
| Bob, if you don't mind me asking, do you have any credit cards? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, but I pay, I have a USAA credit card and I pay it off every month. | |
| I just use it as basically a master card. | ||
| I mean, as a banking card. | ||
| I'm curious why you don't use cash yourself or just sort of, you know, use a debit card. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because I've had it for over 30 years and I get some rewards back, so they're actually losing money on me. | |
| I don't pay interest. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| How would you feel? | ||
| I mean, because as we were talking with our last guest, there have been some efforts to change the swipe fees and things like that, which the banking companies say would potentially risk people's rewards programs. | ||
| I understand that you don't like the idea of credit cards, but use this for the rewards. | ||
| What would you think of legislation that might reduce those swipe fees or put other limitations on interest rates for credit cards but might endanger those rewards that you get? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I would just stop using it then. | |
| I'm looking at it. | ||
| I'm not looking at it as an individual thing. | ||
| I'm looking at it as a whole. | ||
| I mean, millions of people are stuck carrying month after month debt. | ||
| I mean, they got, what, balances, $10,000, $12,000, and, you know, it's like endless interest payments, like you're just working just to pay the banks. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You don't have the money, don't spend it, I guess. | ||
| I think it's anti-capitalist, the whole credit card system, if you ask me. | ||
| Well, let's now go to Faye in Ithaca, New York, on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Faye. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I have a number of comments. | ||
| First of all, I want to say to the Jeffrey Epstein survivors that you're not forgotten, that there are people out there that want the Epstein files to come out entirely, and we're rooting for you and keep the faith. | ||
|
Why Trump Pardons the Guilty
00:07:54
|
||
|
unidentified
|
And the other thing is, Bob Reiner, when he passed away and Trump said that he was deranged, was unbelievably insensitive. | |
| I was horrified by that. | ||
| And also when Marjorie Taylor Greene said that Trump said that the Epstein survivors don't have the honor to meet with him. | ||
| I mean, what let's talk about who's deranged. | ||
| I mean, it's the woman that came to the White House from Venezuela who won the Nobel Peace Prize and gave him her award. | ||
| I mean, how deranged is that? | ||
| What more does this country need to see that there's a real problem mentally and spiritually with the leader of this country? | ||
| I mean, first of all, Mar-a-Lago is not the White House. | ||
| We choose a president so they are in the White House. | ||
| That's where the work gets done. | ||
| Taxpayers are paying for the airplane and the security to constantly be going to Mar-a-Lago, constantly going to golf clubs. | ||
| I mean, then there's all the money the Trump family is making. | ||
| I mean, it goes on and on and on. | ||
| And when you have callers saying, oh, you know, I'm tired of hearing people call in and bashing Trump. | ||
| I don't want to bash anybody. | ||
| I want the truth. | ||
| PBS News Hour Weekend is now off the air. | ||
| They don't have the funding. | ||
| This administration took that away. | ||
| The news media is exceptional, okay? | ||
| PBS, BBC, C-SPAN, and there's others, okay? | ||
| This administration wants to silence the truth, including the military. | ||
| I actually want to follow up on something that you mentioned early in your comment about the Venezuelan leader Machado, who, as reported here in ABC News, said that she was grateful to Trump after giving him her Nobel medal. | ||
| The Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Carina Machado said on Friday that she was absolutely grateful to President Donald Trump after meeting with him Thursday and presenting him with her Nobel Peace Prize medal. | ||
| The president called it a quote wonderful gesture of mutual respect. | ||
| And yesterday, during her first news conference, since fleeing her home country, the exile in Venezuelan opposition leader was asked about that meeting, and here's what she said: Did you urge him not, did you urge him to seek the arrest of Diosado Cabello? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did you urge him not to meet with Del Codriguez, as he's indicated he would? | |
| And did you urge him to not allow Del C. Rodriguez to reopen the Venezuelan embassy in Washington? | ||
| Those are three specifics. | ||
| Want to know what your position on those are. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Well, I think I don't need to urge the president of specific things. | ||
| I think it's very clear what has to be done right now. | ||
| We exchange views about the implications of several actions. | ||
| And I just want to tell you that I was very impressed with the degree of information he has, how closely he follows the situation in Venezuela, and how much he's concerned about the well-being of our people. | ||
| Certainly, we did talk about the political prisoners and their families, and the importance to stop repression from the root in Venezuela right now, because you cannot talk of a transition, even in its first steps, if there's still repression in our nation. | ||
| All right, back to your calls and open forum. | ||
| Mike is in Valley Center, California, on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Mike. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| Hey, I just wanted to mention that Trump is prosecuting the innocent and pardoning the guilty. | ||
| He's operating like a crime boss. | ||
| And another point is Trump wants to build battleships, and battleships are an outdated platform that's an easy target and would cost trillions of dollars. | ||
| Trump would be better off to build more cruisers and more destroyers if you want to build more ships, even though I think they would probably be better off to spend their money on new missiles and drone warfare. | ||
| I think Trump doesn't have any concept of naval warfare. | ||
| And also, he is prosecuting Mark Kelly for telling for reciting the military law. | ||
| And he has a real problem. | ||
| What they ought to do is compare service records between him and Hensf, who's a Fox News host, and Trump's a draft charger. | ||
| And the final point is: on January 6th, Trump ought to come forward, tell the truth on what's going on, and then to the American people. | ||
| He's trying to rewrite history, and then he ought to quit. | ||
| Anyway, those are my comments. | ||
| Next up is John in California on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, good morning. | |
| You know, I have a question. | ||
| Last Sunday, I was watching CNN with Flores Icario. | ||
| And, you know, my background, 20 years ago, I was teaching at a community college, American government. | ||
| So, you know, I have some background of this. | ||
| But at the beginning of that show, he was talking about Trump's representatives were meeting with the Vice President of Venezuela, who was married to the president of their assembly, and basically cut a deal to come in and take out the president. | ||
| And he did, and it seemed awfully slick. | ||
| Trump bragged about our military, but if it was an inside job, I guess the reason I'm calling is I have not heard that point of view on any other platform. | ||
| And I watch an awful lot of various types of news sources. | ||
| And I'm curious if you, because you do follow these things, has that story been verified in any way in some other media? | ||
| I have not seen that personally, but I also haven't individually looked into that in great detail. | ||
| I'll see what I can find while we hear from other callers. | ||
| And if I find something, I'll follow up, okay? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, that's fantastic. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Next up is Jack in Davenport, Iowa on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Jack. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I give C-SPAN a 96% rating on fairness and balance. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're pretty good. | |
| Actually, that's quite good. | ||
| Your 10% credit card limit program was excellent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have a question, though. | |
| Has C-SPAN ever covered Article 4, Section 3 of the Constitution, which uses the term invasion? | ||
|
Andy And The Police
00:05:48
|
||
| Whose responsibility is it to work against invasion? | ||
| It seems to me that either it's a state responsibility or a federal responsibility, or maybe both. | ||
| Have you ever had an expert that talked about the term invasion as used in the Constitution? | ||
| I'm not sure, but you're welcome to go to C-SPAN.org and check our archives. | ||
| We have detailed transcripts of many of our programs, and you can search for that and see if you can find something. | ||
| Next up is Andy in Lewiston, California on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Andy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| I just have a little train of thought here. | ||
| I'm really glad that the Capitol Police didn't have the same training as the ICE agents. | ||
| Can you imagine the massacre that we could have had that day? | ||
| It's just beyond my comprehension. | ||
| I'm for taking directions from the police. | ||
| That young woman, Babbitt, she should have taken some directions from the Capitol Police. | ||
| She wouldn't have been shot. | ||
| And that gal that got shot the other day was clearly trying to drive away from the situation. | ||
| It's just, I mean, if we had ICE agents protecting the Capitol on January the 6th, it could have gone in any direction. | ||
| Who knows what side they would have taken? | ||
| Trump side and would have killed all the politicians, or there would have just been a massacre out on the steps of the Capitol. | ||
| It's just unbelievable how people see things the way they see it. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Mary is in Spokane, Washington on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Mary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, hi there. | |
| I'm not in Supocan, but anyway, I'm in California. | ||
| Apologies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's okay. | |
| Kimberly, I have two. | ||
| I was born and raised in Minnesota. | ||
| I haven't lived there since I got out of college there. | ||
| But I have lots of family there. | ||
| Anyway, there are two other instances of police shootings that I think your listeners should look up. | ||
| One is a young woman named Justine Damon, J-U-S-T-I-N-E Damon, D-A-M-O-N-D. | ||
| She called police in Minneapolis. | ||
| There was something going on in her alley. | ||
| She went out to meet the police. | ||
| This was in 2019, correct? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Shot or dead. | |
| Guy was a Somalian officer. | ||
| It was an accident, apparently. | ||
| He did not go to jail. | ||
| No riots for that woman. | ||
| Okay, so the next one I'm going to talk about is. | ||
| So just to give other folks the information that you're working from, I'm going to read a little bit from CBS News about the specific case that you're talking about, which was from 2017. | ||
| And this is a 2019 article from when the cop, the headline is cop shot woman who called 911 without saying a word. | ||
| The prosecutor says a Minneapolis police officer acted recklessly when he fatally shot a woman who had caught 911 to report a possible rape near her home, near her home. | ||
| Prosecutors told jurors in the former officer's trial. | ||
| This is when opening statements began in the trial of the ex-officer, Mohamed Noor, who fatally shot Justine Damon in July 2017 as she approached his SUV. | ||
| So that's the case that you're referencing there. | ||
| What was the other case that you were talking about? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Officer Potts, her first name escapes me right now. | |
| She went to jail for shooting someone, Potts, a woman, 25-year police officer, exemplary record, pulled out her gun instead of a taser because the guy had a warrant out. | ||
| She stopped him for traffic violation and he drove away. | ||
| Of course, he's black and he's 20 and he's dead. | ||
| But she went to jail. | ||
| Her whole family went dragged through a trial and everything for two years. | ||
| Name was Potts, Officer Potts. | ||
| Anyway, I just want the viewers to think about these officers, what they're going through, and including the ICE officer. | ||
| Now, in case of the woman, Justine, she was unarmed. | ||
| She called the police. | ||
| She went out to meet them in the alley. | ||
| Now, this woman who was shot by ICE, she had a car. | ||
| She drove into him, and she had lots of time to think about it. | ||
| Now, if there was a woman with a baby stroller in front of her car or an old lady crossing over in front of her car, do you think she would have driven into them? | ||
| I don't. | ||
| So I really feel like people should take a step back, let this play out. | ||
| Let's find out what exactly happened that day. | ||
| And let people who are in the position of responsibility to make the decision make them as far as what should happen to this ICE officer. | ||
|
Bernice's Video Analysis
00:06:07
|
||
| All right. | ||
| Next up is Barbara in Branford, Connecticut on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Barbara. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Kimberly, you do a good job. | ||
| You're a beautiful looking woman. | ||
| And hats off to Elizabeth Warren, who like our Democrats, my party, is in it for the little guy. | ||
| They certainly helped me when the bank mixed up an account, a CD that belonged to me. | ||
| And they were contacted the Consumer Protection Bureau, which is Elizabeth Warren Savey, which Elon Musk consumpted last funding for. | ||
| And everything was straightened out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The bank made a big mistake. | |
| So I just wanted to give that account. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Robert is in Columbus, Ohio on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Robert. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| We're an open forum. | ||
| What's your comment? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| Yes, I was wanting to talk about the issue in Minnesota, and I just believe the governor and the mayors, St. Paul and Minneapolis, should take leadership role and convince the protesters this hasn't really solved anything. | ||
| So let's just go home, be with your families, and let this investigation play out and see if they calm down. | ||
| All right. | ||
| James is in Englewood, Ohio, on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, James. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I have called on several occasions, and I follow you guys all the time. | ||
| I find it interesting, the perspectives of so many different people, and I try to keep an open mind on many things. | ||
| But there are multiple factors here that I don't think has soaked into most people's mindset. | ||
| The reason that ICE is as busy as they are and they're following the orders of the law of the land has to do with an invasion and an open border. | ||
| The situation that occurred recently in Minnesota with the death of the woman is directly related to drums being beat on that tell people to go out there and resist. | ||
| I truly believe that the governor of Minnesota and the mayor of Minneapolis should be forced to read the criminals that have been taken off the street and the legalities for which makes them criminals. | ||
| We have to reach a point where we make sense and it's no different than a lot of different issues. | ||
| If you complicate it, it becomes complicated. | ||
| There's no need for it. | ||
| I thank you for your time. | ||
| I pray for this nation, and I support Donald Trump a thousand percent. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Bernice is in Guthrie Center, Iowa on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Bernice. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Can you hear me well? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| I want to note, I saw one slice of videotape on television. | ||
| I never saw it again, and it has to do with the shooting of that beautiful young mother that was shot in Minneapolis. | ||
| Renee Good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Ms. Good was shot at an angle from the front of her windshield. | ||
| If that officer had been in front of her car at the end of the front of her car, it would have shot straight in to her on the right side of the windshield. | ||
| And not only that, but the tape that I saw, the officer was something like five foot away from her car, shooting at an angle. | ||
| And I only saw it once on television. | ||
| I saw all the other tapes that they showed, and it's just a joke that the government is saying that that woman did something wrong. | ||
| Furthermore, in one of the tapes, it shows her swinging her steering wheel very far to the right to avoid that officer. | ||
| And then the other tape that I saw where he was standing about five feet from the actual car matched that. | ||
| So, Bernice, as you've pointed out, there are quite a few videos of that incident and varying analyses of them. | ||
| I want to read a bit from one of the New York Times analyses of the videos of that incident. | ||
| It says, in a video analysis, the Times focuses on some of the key contested moments of the agent's cell phone video alongside other footage. | ||
|
David Rubinstein's Guest
00:03:02
|
||
| More videos are likely to emerge, but the visual evidence shows no indication that the agent who fired the shots, Jonathan Ross, had been run over. | ||
| The footage provides visibility into the positioning between the agent and Ms. Good's SUV and the key moments of escalation. | ||
| It also establishes how Mr. Ross put himself in a dangerous position near her vehicle in the first place. | ||
| Obviously, there's a lot more to this article and many more different analyses of the videos there. | ||
| But that is all the time that we have for Open Forum. | ||
| Next up, after the break, we're going to be joined by Southern Methodist University Center for Presidential History Director Jeffrey Engel. | ||
| And we're going to discuss the 35th anniversary of Operation Desert Storm. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Watch America's Book Club, C-SPAN's bold original series. | |
| Sunday with our guest Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. poet laureate Rita Dove, who has authored several collections of poetry. | ||
| Don't think you can forget her. | ||
| Don't even try. | ||
| She's not going to budge. | ||
| No choice but to grant her space, crown her with sky, for she is one of the many, and she is each of us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
She joins our host, renowned author and civic leader David Rubinstein. | |
| Did your teachers say, well, look, poetry is not a big career future. | ||
| You should write prose. | ||
| Did they people tell you that or not? | ||
| You see, I didn't even know that it was something that you could do and live with your life. | ||
| I thought that, and I was writing poetry from the age of 10, I guess, but it was always a secret thing. | ||
| It was a thing that I wrote and thought, okay, this is my secret. | ||
| It was my thing that I enjoyed. | ||
| I didn't realize that a little black girl could become a poet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Watch America's Book Club with Rita Dove, Sunday at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPAN. | |
| On this episode of Book Notes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb. | ||
| The Trillion Dollar War Machine is the name of the book. | ||
| The co-authors are William Hartung and Ben Freeman. | ||
| They both do work for the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a think tank in Washington, D.C. | ||
| It's a nonprofit research organization whose stated purpose is to oppose the military-industrial complex described by President Eisenhower in his farewell address. | ||
| We will talk with co-author Ben Freeman, the Quincy Institute Director of Democratizing Foreign Policy. | ||
|
Congressional Authorization for War
00:15:28
|
||
|
unidentified
|
A new interview with co-author Ben Freeman about his book, The Trillion Dollar War Machine, How Runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign Wars and Bank Robs Us at Home. | |
| BookNotes Plus, with our host Brian Lamb, is available wherever you get your podcasts and on the C-SPAN Now app. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| Now we're joined by Jeffrey Engel, who is the director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. | ||
| He's joining us to discuss the 35th anniversary of Operation Desert Storm. | ||
| Welcome to Washington Journal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, it's a pleasure to talk to you. | |
| I want to promote our phone lines now because we are going to have a special phone line for Gulf War veterans in addition to our normal numbers. | ||
| So Democrats can call in at 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans at 202-748-8001. | ||
| Independents at 202-748-8002. | ||
| And if you are a Gulf War veteran and you'd like to share your experiences, 202-748-8003. | ||
| And Jeffrey, I wonder if you can sort of set the stage for the environment of what the global politics were like when this Gulf War started in, you know, 35 years ago. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, yeah, I think the global politics are actually key to understanding the entire thing. | |
| This is the end of the Cold War. | ||
| This is 1989, 1990. | ||
| The Soviet Union obviously is transforming under Mikhail Gorbachev. | ||
| It's losing its grip over its own empire and as a consequence, losing its ability to help its own allies. | ||
| And this is really key because Saddam Hussein in 1990 decided that he wanted Kuwait's oil. | ||
| And I'm sure we'll get into great detail about that specific question. | ||
| But he wanted Kuwait's oil and saw that, or presumed, that the rest of the world was, frankly, a little bit occupied with other issues, occupied with the reunification of Germany, occupied with figuring out what to do with the collapsing Soviet Union. | ||
| Occupied, by the way, we're still only a little bit out, that's a year out from Tiananmen Square, a little bit more than a year, actually, from Tiananmen Square in China. | ||
| So the world's really in flux. | ||
| And Saddam Hussein saw that as an opportunistic moment to jump in and get the oil from Kuwait that he wanted, which is why I argue that the United States and George H.W. Bush in particular responded exactly the way that they did. | ||
| Their first reaction to hearing the news that Saddam Hussein was going to take this oil, was interested in this oil, was to really say, well, do we really care? | ||
| You know, what we care about from the Middle East is getting oil out. | ||
| Saddam Hussein wants to sell the oil that he would take from Kuwait. | ||
| Why does this matter to us? | ||
| Dick Cheney, actually, by the way, was the one as the Secretary of Defense who made that argument most explicitly in the National Security Council. | ||
| And George Bush and others, after thinking about it for a few days, came to the conclusion that this was really the first test of what the post-Cold War system was going to be like. | ||
| And if they allowed an aggressive rampage through another country as the first moment at the end of the Cold War, that would tell people that the post-Cold War system would be chaotic. | ||
| That would tell them that the United Nations regulations wouldn't matter. | ||
| That would tell them that sovereignty didn't matter. | ||
| So really, the United States decides to step up and lead a massive coalition to eject Saddam from Kuwait, not necessarily for the sake of the Kuwaitis, but rather for the sake of the new international system that they were hoping would develop at the end of the Cold War. | ||
| Operation Desert Storm, which was the second phase of the Gulf War, and Operation Desert Storm is what began 35 years ago today. | ||
| It was a pretty short operation, just about five weeks. | ||
| Why did it play out so quickly? | ||
| And how is it sort of viewed historically as an overall operation? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, it's viewed in many ways as a textbook operation in how to accomplish your strategic goals, with one important exception I'll get to at the end. | |
| It was essentially a large, massive air campaign for about the first month or so of the war. | ||
| And to be honest, you know, it was an incredible display of American technological advantage on the military sphere. | ||
| And there really was no one in the world who could keep up with us technologically, especially someone like Saddam Hussein, whose most of his equipment had been sort of older Soviet equipment and really just was not up to the same generation, if you will, as American technology. | ||
| So the United States conducted a month-long bombardment to essentially soften up and weaken the Iraqi regime. | ||
| And then a ground invasion that only lasted by the end of it 100 hours before Kuwait was liberated. | ||
| Now, I have to stress that point because obviously the United States goes into Iraq again a little bit more than a decade later and occupies Iraq. | ||
| That was the decision that George H.W. Bush did not want to make in 1991, not to occupy Iraq. | ||
| No one in his administration wanted to occupy Iraq because, as they put it at the time, if you occupy it, then you have to run it. | ||
| And we saw how difficult that can be. | ||
| So the United Nations mandate for George Bush and the others was to liberate Kuwait. | ||
| That took about 100 hours. | ||
| And the United States and its allies decided at that point to stop the war, even though they could have gone further, could have taken Baghdad, could have done whatever they wanted, really. | ||
| But they knew that the consequences of doing so the next day, if you will, was going to be hardly worth the effort. | ||
| Talk a bit more about that coalition. | ||
| Who else was part of this effort? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, this is perhaps the most impressive coalition, I think, since World War II. | |
| It has all the players, all the allies, if you will. | ||
| The British are there. | ||
| The French are there. | ||
| The Italians are there. | ||
| The Japanese, who, of course, at this time have constitutional restrictions on what they can do militarily, they send hospital vessels. | ||
| The Germans send a lot of financial support. | ||
| Basically, this is the NATO alliance plus our key Pacific allies, the Australians, coming together under American leadership. | ||
| Turns out that's actually the largest deployment of American forces since Vietnam. | ||
| Over half a million troops were moved into the area by the end of it. | ||
| So the really key point also is that the Soviets, who remember, had been a real advocate for Saddam Hussein. | ||
| He essentially was a Soviet client state for many years. | ||
| The Soviets decided not to do anything, not to intervene, because they too wanted to be on the right side, if you will, the democratic side, at the end of the Cold War. | ||
| So the coalition essentially is everyone who you can imagine as an American ally, plus other countries, Russia, China, deciding not to oppose. | ||
| And that was really key to making the whole thing work diplomatically. | ||
| And then what was sort of the outcome and lasting impact in terms of U.S. casualties and sort of the longer tail of political consequences? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, we have a long conversation about political consequences because there's a whole bunch of counterfactuals and what-ifs that are built into what happens next. | |
| But essentially, it's a remarkably efficient war, if you will, from the United States' perspective. | ||
| I mean, every casualty is a tragedy, of course, but the United States loses only about 100 people at the end of the day, and the Iraqi army is completely routed. | ||
| And the real question then becomes, a historians still debate to this day, whether or not Bush made the correct decision not to take Saddam Hussein out, not to take Bad Dad, not to remove him. | ||
| Now, I have to stress that the logic here was really quite clear, and everyone within the administration was on the same page with this, that the chances they calculated for Saddam Hussein to survive were infinitesimally small. | ||
| I mean, let's face it, you just got routed in a war. | ||
| Dictatorships that get routed in a war do not usually end well for the leader immediately after. | ||
| So if we had to put a number on it, we would say he has less than a 1% chance of surviving. | ||
| Obviously, he survived. | ||
| Sometimes the 1% works. | ||
| And Saddam Hussein then becomes a thorn in the American side for the next decade plus, until obviously the subsequent President Bush decided to take more definitive action against him. | ||
| So there is a whole lot of historical speculation you can get into about whether or not Bush Sr. was right not to take Saddam out, whether or not he was right not to take Baghdad. | ||
| Everyone within the administration believed to the end that this was the right choice to have been made. | ||
| Even Dick Cheney, who of course was a vigorous advocate of the Iraqi war in 2003 and removing Saddam Hussein in 1991, he was clearly in favor of not going in and he didn't want the job of occupying Iraq. | ||
| So when we ask about the long-term consequences, I'm afraid it's hard to talk about this war without also talking about the next war. | ||
| I want to talk, we've talked a lot about what the administration was doing in this moment, but not so much about Congress. | ||
| What did congressional action look like around this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's really a funny, I shouldn't say funny, significant tale, especially in our own age today when we're having questions over congressional versus executive authority when it comes to warmaking. | |
| Essentially, George Bush, again, senior, was firmly of the belief, both legally and politically, that he had the constitutional authority to wage this war without congressional consent. | ||
| Now, just because he thought he had the authority didn't mean it was a really good idea. | ||
| So he was convinced by his aides to go to Congress to get a congressional resolution authorizing him to do this force. | ||
| By the way, this force is, this authorization is just before the desert storm period of the battle, which we're talking about today, the January 1991. | ||
| George Bush, of his own military authority as commander in chief, had already moved several hundred thousand troops into the desert to protect Saudi Arabia and prepare for this invasion months before. | ||
| So essentially, Congress, faced with the situation of a half million troops in the Persian Gulf, decided that yes, they were, in fact, going to support the president. | ||
| It actually was a relatively close vote in the Senate, largely, I think, because like so many other votes in Washington, once people realized what the answer was going to be, they were able to then line up their votes for whatever they thought was politically best. | ||
| The really, really interesting thing, and we now know this from George Bush's diary and from the records that have been pulled out of the Bush Library at the time, is that President Bush, though he was absolutely convinced it was the right thing to do to go to Congress to get congressional approval, he was convinced that he had the authority to go to war even if Congress said no. | ||
| And he was determined, in fact, that he was going to go to war, even if Congress said no. | ||
| And his logic is actually really quite interesting to us today. | ||
| He said, listen, I think we're going to win this war, and I think we're going to win this war very handily and very quickly. | ||
| And presidents who win wars are typically very, very popular. | ||
| Consequently, he said, you know, let them try to impeach me when I have an approval rating of 95%, of 90%. | ||
| You know, no one's going to want to say I did the wrong thing when we're standing victorious. | ||
| And it's one of the riskier moments, I think, of a president deciding ahead of time to defy constitutional and congressional authority, though he never had to do it because he won the vote. | ||
| He was prepared fully to go ahead without congressional authorization. | ||
| How has the authorization for Operation Desert? | ||
| I'm sorry, how did the authorization for Operation Desert Storm shape later congressional debates on military action, such as for Iraq later on and Afghanistan? | ||
| And even, I guess, to now, we just had a war powers vote this week. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, I think it's a really interesting question because as we have learned looking back now historically, the War Powers Act that comes at the end of the Vietnam War is not as effective as its original authors would have wanted. | |
| So we see in 1991 President Bush seeking congressional authority before launching actual military strikes. | ||
| Again, he's already moved almost half a million troops into the desert. | ||
| We are prepared to go to war. | ||
| But he seeks that congressional authority and thereby sets an unusual precedent, not law, but precedent, that future commanders in chief before going to that kind of military conflict, I don't want to say war because it's not a full technically legal war, before using military force would in fact seek congressional authority if they could see the conflict coming. | ||
| We're not talking about maybe trying to, in the war on terror, we're not talking about hitting a target that you identified half an hour ago. | ||
| We're talking about something that took months to build up and get ready, which is why we saw George W. Bush go to Congress to get authorization before he went to war in 2003. | ||
| It's when we saw Barack Obama, during his efforts to rein in the Syria conflict, go to Congress and essentially wink, wink, and nudge, nudge and say, I'm asking for congressional authority and I hope you don't give it to me because I don't think it's a good idea for us to go to war no matter what I said diplomatically. | ||
| So we see the precedent for Congress being called in essentially to give its approval to something the president has already decided to do. | ||
| And again, that's really one of the key issues that we're going to see, I think, potentially over the next few months and years as Congress and the executive still have this age-old battle over who, in fact, is in charge of the military. | ||
| We'll be taking questions for Jeffrey Engel, who's a director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University about the Gulf War. | ||
| Our phone lines again for Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| For Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| Independents at 202-748-8002. | ||
| And if you're a Gulf War veteran, 202-748-8003. | ||
| Let's start with Linda in Ottawa, Ohio on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Linda. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Yes, I find it that our presidents are very, are very, they can decide, okay, so we need to go here to this country. | ||
| We need to go here to this other country because what is a really good reason? | ||
| Like in Venezuela, I believe that it was just oil. | ||
| In Operation Desert Storm, I believe that it was just oil. | ||
| And they are so proud because they didn't have a lot of casualties. | ||
| But understand, the people that went to fight there, the veterans that came back, the soldiers like my son that came back physically and mentally affected. | ||
| It's not just about going to war, it's about thinking about how our soldiers are going to come back. | ||
| And then after all this happens and our soldiers come back from these countries, I don't know, I just don't understand. | ||
| I mean, we have to be more careful about these decisions that we're making about sending our soldiers to foreign countries that after we leave, after they leave, I mean, what happens? | ||
|
Why We Went to War
00:15:16
|
||
|
unidentified
|
Do they become better? | |
| Are there people off better for that? | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| So just our presidents realize what happens when you send our young men to war. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Well, and the questioner raises a really great point, which is that there were, in fact, a whole lot of medical, psychological issues that developed for Gulf War veterans after the fact, which became kind of a political football, if you will, during the 1990s, because veterans started reporting all kinds of terrible and bizarre illnesses, strange cancers, strange lung ailments, et cetera. | ||
| And it was essentially wrapped up in a title of Gulf War Syndrome, because doctors at the time really didn't know what was going on, except that they knew that there was a statistically significant chance that if you had been in the Gulf War, you were going to have health problems afterwards. | ||
| And it took throughout the 1990s before this really became something that the rest of Congress was willing to step up and provide additional support to those veterans and recognize that this was, in fact, a legitimate concern. | ||
| It's actually not that dissimilar in some ways. | ||
| And I want to get into a fight about this, but it's really not that dissimilar some ways politically in how people understood long COVID, which is when people started first reporting long COVID, just like they started first reporting the symptoms of Gulf War syndrome, the medical community's first response was to say, well, we don't know what that is, and that's not a thing. | ||
| After enough people finally recognized it, and after enough time had done for studies to be done, people recognized that this was in fact something that was detrimental to the soldiers. | ||
| And largely, I believe that the problem for Gulf War soldiers was exposure to burn pits and exposure to other chemicals that were used during the war for the expediency of the war that, of course, then had long-term health consequences. | ||
| We have a question that we received from Mike in Keyport, New Jersey via text, who says, can you discuss how desert storm spending, along with the following regional conflicts, added to the national debt we have today? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It added quite a lot, to be honest, less so the Gulf War. | |
| In fact, to be honest, the Gulf War, here I'm referring to the one that we're talking about, the 35th anniversary, 1991, 1990, 1991, believe it or not, that actually made the United States a small profit. | ||
| That was not the goal, but the amount of aid financially that our allies, the Germans and the Japanese in particular, paid to help support the mission wound up being more than the mission actually cost. | ||
| Now, there's a little bit of accounting that goes into there. | ||
| There's no suggestion whatsoever that the United States went to war to make money, but it shows how prestigious and how important the United States was in the international system that our key allies, especially those, again, who were not sending military force, were more than willing to open up their bank accounts in order to help the United States. | ||
| So we actually wind up not losing a lot of money, in fact, making a little bit of money on the Gulf War in the big scheme of things. | ||
| Obviously, that's not the case for the rest of the 1990s when the United States under first Bush and then Bill Clinton have to set up or decide to set up a no-fly zone over Iraq, which is a very expensive proposition to keep going for years upon years and certainly has nothing like the expense of both Afghanistan and then especially Iraq after 2003. | ||
| I don't know that we still know the full cost of the Iraq war and we won't, of course, for years as veterans costs rise and benefits rise as a consequence of the service in Iraq. | ||
| That's certainly in the multiple trillions of dollars at this point. | ||
| That was not the case for this particular conflict, for the 1990-91 Gulf War, the Persian Gulf War, as we refer to it, which, as I said, actually wound up not costing the United States technically much of anything. | ||
| William is in Englewood, New Jersey, on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, William. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| I'd like you to explain, and it seems to be with all Republicans who are connected with oil, what happens and why the oil is not more talked about. | ||
| The oil with the Bushes and up to today is disgraceful. | ||
| We go to war here even recently in the guise of drugs, and it really was about oil. | ||
| The Bushes were all in oil. | ||
| They were the oil family. | ||
| And let's talk about what they got out of this deal with the oil. | ||
| Why it was so much about oil and the price of oil? | ||
| I'd like to hear your answer. | ||
| You know, it's a great and important question. | ||
| And I'm going to, not just because I'm an annoying academic historian, I'm going to answer it in sort of two different ways, because there's two different levels I think that we need to think about this. | ||
| The first is, I would argue, that this conflict has nothing to do whatsoever with oil. | ||
| Ultimately, well, let me phrase that, the American response, which is to say, Saddam Hussein obviously wanted Kuwait's oil. | ||
| That's why the war begins. | ||
| He wanted to sell more oil. | ||
| He was in debt because of his long war with Iran. | ||
| He needed to essentially flood the market, which his OPEC allies did not want to do to drive the price down, but to sell more. | ||
| So the conflict at base is about oil. | ||
| But the American response, I would argue, is actually on the first level not about oil. | ||
| It's ultimately about what the post-Cold War system will look like. | ||
| And again, we have all the records from the Bush administration at this point. | ||
| I can't tell you what Barack Obama was thinking on a particular day. | ||
| I can't tell you what Joe Biden or Donald Trump were thinking. | ||
| I can tell you what George H.W. Bush and his advisors were thinking on a particular day as they go through this. | ||
| And they were very clear that if it was just about oil, then they weren't going to care too much because what they cared about was oil coming out of the Middle East. | ||
| And then as a consequence, Saddam Hussein was going to sell oil. | ||
| So what's the big deal? | ||
| Well, the big deal they realized was setting up the fact that the post-war system, post-Cold War system should not have this aggression as a precedent. | ||
| Now, on the second point, of course it's about oil. | ||
| It's about oil because it's very clear that if this had taken place in a non-mineral resource area, if this had taken place in the middle of Africa, if this had placed in place in the middle of South America, I doubt that the United States would have mustered the interest and the energy to send half a million troops to the Gulf. | ||
| So I want to be clear about this. | ||
| I don't believe that the Bush administration went to the Middle East to get oil, but they cared a lot about the Middle East because that's where the oil was. | ||
| And at this particular moment in history, we're actually not getting too much of our oil from the Gulf, but the Europeans, our European allies, and our Japanese allies are getting almost all of theirs from the Gulf. | ||
| So essentially, if this had been a place where oil was not involved, we would not have gone to war. | ||
| Having said that, I think we went to war not because of the oil, but because we cared about stability in this region, because I had oil, but really because we wanted to make sure that there was not an aggression. | ||
| And I realize those are two statements in tension, but I think they're both true. | ||
| Let's listen to the justification that the president gave at the time. | ||
| This is from January 16th, 1991, President George H.W. Bush announcing the start of Operation Desert Storm. | ||
| Just two hours ago, Allied Air Forces began an attack on military targets in Iraq and Kuwait. | ||
| These attacks continue as I speak. | ||
| Ground forces are not engaged. | ||
| This conflict started August 2nd when the dictator of Iraq invaded a small and helpless neighbor. | ||
| Kuwait, a member of the Arab League and a member of the United Nations, was crushed. | ||
| Its people brutalized. | ||
| Five months ago, Saddam Hussein started this cruel war against Kuwait. | ||
| Tonight, the battle has been joined. | ||
| This military action, taken in accord with United Nations resolutions and with the consent of the United States Congress, follows months of constant and virtually endless diplomatic activity on the part of the United Nations, the United States, and many, many other countries. | ||
| Arab leaders sought what became known as an Arab solution, only to conclude that Saddam Hussein was unwilling to leave Kuwait. | ||
| Others traveled to Baghdad in a variety of efforts to restore peace and justice. | ||
| Our Secretary of State, James Baker, held an historic meeting in Geneva, only to be totally rebuffed. | ||
| This past weekend, in a last-ditch effort, the Secretary General of the United Nations went to the Middle East with peace in his heart, his second such mission. | ||
| And he came back from Baghdad with no progress at all in getting Saddam Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait. | ||
| Now, the 28 countries with forces in the Gulf area have exhausted all reasonable efforts to reach a peaceful resolution. | ||
| Have no choice but to drive Saddam from Kuwait by force. | ||
| We will not fail. | ||
| All right, back to your questions for Jeffrey Engel, the director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University about the Gulf War. | ||
| Let's talk to Rob in Chicago, Illinois on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Rob. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Kimberly. | |
| I'm just calling because I believe there was no justification for Jesus Storm, or rather, the invasion of Iraq. | ||
| None at all. | ||
| And unfortunately, we can't talk to Colin Powell because he's gone. | ||
| Donald Rumsfeld is gone, Dick Cheney is gone. | ||
| But however, President George Bush is still here, and so is Condoleezza Rice. | ||
| I believe that they should be pursued and questioned about- So, Rob, if I can just pause you for a moment. | ||
| We're talking about two different conflicts here. | ||
| Jeffrey, do you want to sort of lay out the difference between those two? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, this is a common problem, but also it's an understandable problem because we're talking about the same people in many ways, the same enemies, the same area. | |
| In 1991, the war we're talking about this afternoon, this morning, excuse me, that was about Saddam Hussein having captured Kuwait. | ||
| It was about the United Nations-led mission to liberate Kuwait, but it was not about taking over Iraq, nor was it actually about taking Saddam Hussein out of power. | ||
| It wasn't about regime change. | ||
| It was just about Kuwait. | ||
| And we can critique President Bush if you wish. | ||
| I would not do so, but people can, for not going further, for not doing more, for not taking Iraq. | ||
| Yes, I believe what the caller is referring to is actually the second Iraq war, if you will, the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, which again was done by the second George Bush, George W. Bush, who was advised by Condoleezza Rice and who was advised by Donald Rumsfeld. | ||
| Neither of those players were particularly important in the conversation. | ||
| Rumsfeld wasn't in the government at all, but Condoleezza Rice was a Soviet expert in the first Bush administration. | ||
| So she really didn't have a lot of discussion to do with the decision to go into war in 1991. | ||
| So with that clarification, Rob, did you have a follow-up question? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, if he doesn't, I've just noticed Connolly Runsfeld on the Sunday morning talk shows talking about mushroom clouds about Iraq. | |
| If Bush goes into our, if we don't go into Iraq, talking about talking about, there will be a Muslim cloud. | ||
| So, so again, Rob, that's a different conflict, but I understand your point. | ||
| Let's hear from Greg in Wilmington, Connect in Willington, Connecticut, on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Greg. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Kim. | |
| Good morning, Jeff. | ||
| Jeff, you sound like you're on board with all of this insanity, to be honest. | ||
| It sounds like you. | ||
| No, seriously, seriously. | ||
| Who was there? | ||
| But just one quick question before I ask my general question. | ||
| Who was in Afghanistan in 1979? | ||
| Well, it's the Soviet Union. | ||
| Well, and the CIA. | ||
| So was Osama bin Laden. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And who gave Osama bin Laden his first rocket launcher? | ||
| The United States government did. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That's a little, that's a little, you're cutting out a few steps, but okay. | ||
| So, Greg, what's your question about the first Gulf War? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So getting to this specific situation here, George Bush could have told Hussein, no, don't go invade. | ||
| In fact, Hussein asked if he could invade Kuwait. | ||
| Now, that never gets covered. | ||
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So this is just incorrect, I'm afraid. | |
| This is one of the, and I appreciate the viewers' enthusiasm. | ||
| I love a good historical discussion in the morning. | ||
| This is one of the stories that comes out of the Gulf War that is misremembered and simply not the way things actually played out. | ||
| I believe what the viewer is referring to is in the days before Saddam Hussein invaded Iraq, excuse me, invaded Kuwait. | ||
| So this would have been the midsummer of 1990. | ||
| He had already been saying for several weeks, several months, that he really was interested in getting more oil and perhaps he would take it from Kuwait. | ||
| And he called the American ambassador in, a career diplomat named April Glaspie, called her into his office and said, what are we going to do about this Kuwait problem? | ||
| And April Glaspie said, and I want to be very clear about the language here, she said, the United States takes no position on border disputes. | ||
| We do not want any dispute, she said, to be resolved militarily, but we do not take a position formally on border disputes. | ||
| And why did she say that? | ||
| That's standard operating procedure for the State Department because the United States otherwise could be involved in adjudicating 8,000 different border disputes around the world. | ||
| What she said was, we do not want this done militarily. | ||
| She goes home for vacation. | ||
| The war begins. | ||
| She's stuck back in the United States. | ||
| And then Saddam Hussein releases a transcript, a somewhat edited transcript of their discussion after the war has begun, after Desert Shield has begun, after he has already taken Kuwait, in which he essentially makes it seem as though April Glaspie was given the choice and told that he was going to invade Iraq, excuse me, invade Kuwait. | ||
|
Preparatory Memorandum for Bush
00:00:53
|
||
|
unidentified
|
And did the United States want to do anything about it? | |
| And she said, we take no position on border disputes. | ||
| Essentially, everything that she said was technically textbook correct. | ||
| In fact, little known fact, George H.W. Bush was scheduled to have a telephone call with Saddam Hussein the evening after he invaded Kuwait. | ||
| That call never happens, obviously, because he invaded Kuwait. | ||
| But we have the notes and the preparatory memorandum from that telephone call for President Bush. | ||
| And President Bush's memorandum says, remind Saddam Hussein, we don't take any position on border disputes between two countries so long as they're resolved peacefully. | ||