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Trump's Tariff Controversy
00:15:15
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unidentified
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On Wednesday, President Trump speaks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. | |
| Watch live coverage starting at 8.30 a.m. Eastern on C-SPAN. | ||
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| Welcome back. | ||
| Joining us this morning is Bob Cusack, Washington Examiner Executive Editor. | ||
| Bob, thank you so much for being with us this morning. | ||
| Jasmine, thanks for having me. | ||
| All right, let's talk about the president's first year in office of his second term. | ||
| He was inaugurated just a year ago today, the only president since Grover Cleveland to leave the White House and return for a second term four years later. | ||
| Talk to us about what the president's most notable successes and achievements have been. | ||
|
unidentified
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Just one year. | |
| I think you've got to start with the border. | ||
| That has been a big success. | ||
| He promised to close down the border. | ||
| It was a big issue in the 2024 election, and he has largely done that. | ||
| He's been very aggressive on that. | ||
| It's been obviously controversial. | ||
| President Trump is a very controversial president. | ||
| Though on the economy, it's been more mixed results where inflation has been stubborn. | ||
| The administration is saying, we're going to fix this. | ||
| But it's going to take a little time. | ||
|
unidentified
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So wait. | |
| Now, Republicans on Capitol Hill, at least some of them, want to do another reconciliation bill to address the economy. | ||
| So there's a bit of a split there. | ||
| But I would say one of his biggest achievements, and he's done a lot, he's a very active president, has been the border. | ||
| Now, one thing that he was able to pass was that first reconciliation bill. | ||
| I know you said Republicans wanted to do another one, but the first one passed last summer, the One Big Beautiful Act law, now they call it, which expanded those 2017 tax cuts. | ||
| Do voters perceive that bill as beneficial to them? | ||
| I know that the White House has said that they're going to see really a lot of the benefits this year in 2026, but what about in the last 12 months or since it's been passed? | ||
| Yeah, first of all, it was a monumental achievement to get it passed, especially with their narrow majorities in the House and Senate. | ||
| And I didn't, President Trump kept saying, let's get it done by July 4th. | ||
| I didn't think he was actually going to get it done by then. | ||
| I thought he would get it done, but it would take a little more time maybe before the August recess. | ||
| He really leaned on members to pass it. | ||
| It's a big bill. | ||
| It has a lot of provisions on. | ||
| Obviously, tax cuts is at the heart of it and extending them. | ||
| However, the problem for the administration is that the now law isn't popular. | ||
| So a big part of the midterm strategy is to make it more popular. | ||
| And we've seen this with big sweeping bills where President Obama passed Obamacare and it wasn't easy. | ||
| It was very tight. | ||
| I was on Capitol Hill covering that and it got done. | ||
| That said, at least initially, it wasn't popular. | ||
| So Trump has a similar type of problem. | ||
| They've got to sell it. | ||
| The Treasury Secretary Scott Besson says it's going to be popular, especially when people feel the effects of 2026. | ||
| But remember, there are also Medicaid cuts. | ||
| They don't go into effect in that now law until 2027. | ||
| Those are not popular, but Democrats are going to be targeting them throughout this election year. | ||
| Yeah, Democrats will be messaging that, messaging more on health care, particularly if those ACA subsidies don't get expanded or something doesn't happen on health care. | ||
| I want to turn to this poll that we talked about at the beginning of the show from CNN that was released a week ago, where it showed that 58% of those surveyed believe that the president's first year in his second term is a failure. | ||
| Just 42% say that is a success. | ||
| What do you think of when you see numbers like that that are pretty large? | ||
|
unidentified
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They are. | |
| They are. | ||
| And it's troubling for the White House. | ||
| When you think about a year ago, President Trump came in maybe as the most powerful president since Obama. | ||
| Obama came in with 67, maybe 70% approval rating. | ||
| President Trump won all the battleground states. | ||
| He won the popular vote. | ||
| He not only won, but he exceeded expectations. | ||
| He had this enormous power. | ||
| He went after the media. | ||
| Corporate media was scared of him, and they were cowering, as well as foreign countries. | ||
| He used a lot of political capital to do a lot of stuff, including the Big Beautiful Bill. | ||
| But a year later, his numbers are not good. | ||
| They are in the low 40s. | ||
| Some, depending on the poll, would be high 30s. | ||
| That poll is not good. | ||
| Now, President Trump would tell you he would give himself an A ⁇ . | ||
| But that's kind of what he always says. | ||
| So overall, President Trump and Republicans have some serious issues going into 2026 and the midterms, especially with the House really being up for grabs. | ||
| The Senate, I think, is safer for Republicans because of the map, but you never know what's going to happen in elections, and conventional wisdom is often wrong. | ||
| Now, before we continue this conversation, Bob, I want to invite more of our viewers who join in on the conversation. | ||
| Democrats, your line is 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans, your line is 202-748-8001. | ||
| Independents, your line is 202-748-8002. | ||
| Now, I want to take a look at this headline from the Wall Street Journal talking about inflation. | ||
| It says, the pace of inflation held steady in December, consumer prices up 2.7 percent on the year. | ||
| In a speech last week, the president said inflation is defeated. | ||
| You said that inflation has stayed pretty stubborn. | ||
| We see that number up there. | ||
| Is the president off base with his estimation, or is it just kind of a wait-and-see type of thing? | ||
| Well, we do have to think of when did inflation really start to increase, and that was during the Biden administration. | ||
| And that's why President Biden, well, there were a lot of reasons why President Biden didn't get a second term, and obviously he was shelved by the Democratic Party, and Harris was the one who lost to Trump. | ||
| So it really did start in the Biden administration. | ||
| However, promises are promises, and Trump said he was going to eradicate it. | ||
| At times, he has said issues like affordability are a hoax, and then sometimes he backs off on that. | ||
| Lisa Murkowski, a Republican but very independent-minded Republican, has said it's not a hoax because members are hearing this back home, that too much is unaffordable, whether it's groceries or housing or anything else, or buying a car. | ||
| So now, gas prices are down. | ||
| So it's a mixed view, but if Republicans are going to have a good election, there's going to have to be, those type of polls are going to have to change. | ||
| Otherwise, Democrats are going to do quite well. | ||
| Is there something that the president has enacted within the last 12 months or what you think that the White House could try to enact to try to bring down some of these prices that we know that folks are reacting really negatively to? | ||
| It's very difficult. | ||
| There's no magic wand. | ||
| If you're the president, it's kind of like a football coach. | ||
| You're going to be judged on wins and losses, and inflation is still there. | ||
| But there's no easy way. | ||
| You can lower taxes. | ||
| You can do a number of things. | ||
| Democrats would do different things, but it's stubborn and sometimes it's cyclical. | ||
| But Republicans want to be more, some on the Hill, they want to be more active. | ||
| They just don't want to say, well, it's an election year, we're not going to get anything done. | ||
| Let's do things that will help the economy. | ||
| Obviously, Democrats mostly don't agree with those, so don't expect a lot of bipartisanship. | ||
| Trump has leaned on health care executives to get the price of health care down. | ||
| That said, you mentioned the Obamacare subsidies. | ||
| That's where health care is going up. | ||
| A lot of Republicans have been trying to eradicate Obamacare. | ||
| They've not been successful in that, and they want these subsidies to end. | ||
| But that has and is having an effect on what consumers are paying for health care. | ||
| And those voters, they're likely to show up at the polls. | ||
| One thing that the president in the White House has been focused on is this idea of executive power, expanding the power of the presidency from a number of executive orders that they've done, from a number of court cases that they've defended in his executive orders. | ||
| I wonder how do you see the president coalescing power within the executive in a way that has been different than presidents before him? | ||
| It is different, but in some ways the same. | ||
| I've covered Congress since 1995, and the executive branch has taken so much power from Congress in those three decades. | ||
| And it certainly has, the pace has increased with President Trump. | ||
| Sometimes I think he thinks Congress is a nuisance and a big obstacle of what he wants to get done. | ||
| So he's, like President Obama and President Biden and all the predecessors, have done a number of executive actions. | ||
| Trump's executive actions have been more encompassing. | ||
| And there are Republicans on Capitol Hill who don't like that. | ||
| They don't like when the power is being taken away from them. | ||
| Washington is a city of power, and theirs is less now because President Trump has usurped a lot of authority from Congress. | ||
| I mean, just to go over just a list of some of the executive orders within the last 12 months, securing our borders and a national emergency declaration, of course, talking about immigration, establishing the Doge Department, Department of Government Efficiency, unleashing American energy, which encourages energy exploration of production on federal lands and waters, pardoning the January 6th rioters, ending federal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. | ||
| That's just one half of my long list that my producers put together. | ||
| I mean, the president has been extremely active these last 12 months. | ||
| And a lot of these things, like you said, he doesn't go to Congress on. | ||
| No, he doesn't. | ||
| And the Doge was not successful. | ||
| It was really a missed opportunity because Democrats agreed government's gotten too big. | ||
| We need to streamline it. | ||
| And Elon Musk came in, and he's a very smart guy, the wealthiest man in the world, but he really didn't understand government. | ||
| And he came in and was not really assessing and then acting. | ||
| He was acting before assessing. | ||
| And then they fired a number of workers who they had to rehire. | ||
| So some of these initiatives have been successful, but certainly not all. | ||
| And Doge has really faded from the headlines. | ||
| But overall, initially, remember, Jasmine, it was said, I think it was Musk who said, we're going to save $2 trillion. | ||
| And that's one thing both parties are not dealing with. | ||
| The debt is a serious problem. | ||
| President Trump added. | ||
| $38 trillion. | ||
| He's approaching $40 if it's not there. | ||
| And obviously, COVID added to it. | ||
| But the debt is a problem that Congress is going to have to deal with. | ||
| Because if you look at Medicare and Social Security, they're headed for bankruptcy. | ||
| And neither party has done much about that. | ||
| And it's interesting, Trump and Nancy Pelosi don't believe a lot of things, but they have both said we can grow out of the debt. | ||
| That's not the case. | ||
| There's going to have to be some major structural reforms to entitlement spending. | ||
| Democrats want some tax cuts, tax increases as well. | ||
| So there's going to have to be a big deal, but it's not going to happen this year. | ||
| One more question for you before we turn to some calls. | ||
| I want to talk about tariffs, something that the president has done when we're talking about expansion of power, something that he has done unilaterally, I think sometimes to the annoyance of some members in Congress on both sides. | ||
| Your company this morning has a piece out. | ||
| Trump's tariffs aren't raising prices, but they are shrinking Americans' manufacturing workforce. | ||
| That's from January 15th, excuse me. | ||
| And Christian writes, President Trump's tariff agenda hasn't increased inflation as many as predicted by many economists, but it does appear to be having one intended consequences, shrinking America's manufacturing workforce. | ||
| There's also been a recent article, I think it was in the Wall Street Journal, about how Americans are taking more of the burden of those tariff costs. | ||
| I wonder tariff costs versus companies. | ||
| I wonder what you make of the president's tariff agenda and how that has impacted the view of his first year in office. | ||
| Well, as Christian wrote, it hasn't been, the sky hasn't fallen. | ||
| A lot of people did predict that. | ||
| However, if you look, talk to some economists, there have been some negative consequences. | ||
| But it's certainly gotten the attention of a lot of countries. | ||
| And I think it's a fair point that the president raises is that a lot of trade policies were not fair to the United States. | ||
| And President Trump, I first interviewed him in 2015, he's been talking about this well before then, about how the U.S. was, in his words, getting screwed. | ||
| And so we need to fix that. | ||
| So he's applying the power of the United States and all the consumers of the United States to get deals. | ||
| Has he gotten some deals? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Republicans on Capitol Hill, they're not. | ||
| Trump has changed the Republican Party because tariffs used to be just the worst thing to the GOP. | ||
| And now the leader of the GOP is leading the charge. | ||
| And leaders like Senate Majority Leader John Thune wanted these tariffs to be short. | ||
| We're still talking about them. | ||
| That was last year, the beginning of last year. | ||
| He wants them to be short-lived. | ||
| We're still talking about it. | ||
| He is not abandoning it. | ||
| We're waiting for the Supreme Court to issue a huge ruling on tariffs. | ||
| The betting is, you never know, but the betting is, is that the court is going to reject his authority on tariffs. | ||
| Now, what will Trump do then? | ||
| It depends on the ruling exactly, but then he can rely on another law and still go forward. | ||
| But he doesn't want to lose this case. | ||
| And he's won a lot of cases with the conservative-leaning Supreme Court. | ||
| He might lose this one. | ||
| Yeah, he's true socialed a lot in the last few days about how those tariffs are necessary and bringing great, tremendous change, he says, to the American economy. | ||
| One place that he's also used tariffs, though, is to bend nations to his will. | ||
| I want to take a listen to the soundbite from yesterday night on the tarmac when the president was asked about Greenland before he heads to Davos. | ||
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unidentified
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What do you plan to say to European leaders in Davos when they push back on your Greenland plan? | |
| Well, I don't think they're going to push back too much. | ||
| Look, we have to have it. | ||
| They have to have this done. | ||
| They can't protect it. | ||
| Denmark, they're wonderful people. | ||
| And I know the leaders are very good people, but they don't even go there. | ||
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Done More for NATO
00:00:43
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| And, you know, because a boat went there 500 years ago and then left, that doesn't give you title to property. | ||
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unidentified
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So we'll be talking about it with the various people. | |
| We've had tremendous success. | ||
| And we've, you know, I've done more for NATO than anybody else. | ||
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unidentified
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I don't think you'd have NATO right now. | |
| I got him to go 5% and pay as opposed to 2% and not pay. | ||
| I've done more than any other American president for NATO by far. | ||
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unidentified
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And we'll see how that goes. | |
| Greenland is very important now the president there says he's done more than any other president for NATO but now he's also you can continue watching this event if you you go to our website c-span.org. | ||