| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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Baldwin's Unread Speech
00:03:04
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unidentified
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John Washington. | |
| Baldwin had in fact written a speech to be read there and he had written it in France. | ||
| He'd gone over to France for a march over there. | ||
| These were black Americans in France who were doing a march along the Sen in support of the March on Washington and then Baldwin brought this speech with him. | ||
| And the exact reasons and specifics of how this happened, we don't know, but somehow or other he didn't end up reading it. | ||
| But a very famous person, actor at the time, without saying that it was James Baldwin's words, read these words about black global liberation coming out of the mouth of, you guessed it or not, Burt Lancaster. | ||
| Nicholas Box with his book, Baldwin, a love story, tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN's Q ⁇ A. You can listen to QA and all of our podcasts on our free C-SPAN Now app or wherever you get your podcasts. | ||
| The Senate has completed work on the 12 government spending bills to reopen the government. | ||
| Officially, funds ran out Friday at midnight Eastern Time. | ||
| Senate Democrats and the White House eventually agreed to a deal to pass five of the six remaining appropriations bills funding parts of the government through September. | ||
| The Homeland Security Department, which covers ICE and other immigration agencies, was provided two weeks of temporary funding while negotiations continue regarding enforcement actions across the country. | ||
| The changes made by the Senate require House approval. | ||
| Speaker Johnson has indicated that those votes will take place Monday when members return from their week-long recess. | ||
| Also next week, the House will vote on whether Bill and Hillary Clinton are in contempt of Congress after their refusal to work with the Judiciary Committee on the Epstein files investigation. | ||
| As always, watch the House on C-SPAN, the Senate on C-SPAN 2, and both on the C-SPAN Now app or online at c-SPAN.org. | ||
| C-SPAN, Democracy Unfiltered. | ||
| We're funded by these television companies and more, including Comcast. | ||
| The flag replacement program got started by a good friend of mine, a Navy vet, who saw the flag at the office that needed to be replaced. | ||
| He said, wouldn't this be great if this can be something that we did for anyone? | ||
| Comcast has always been a community-driven company. | ||
| This is one of those great examples of the way we're getting out there. | ||
| Comcast supports C-SPAN as a public service, along with these other television providers, giving you a front-row seat to democracy. | ||
| Welcome back for a discussion on the week in Washington politics. | ||
| I'm joined now by Jim Antel, who's the executive editor of Washington Examiner magazine. | ||
| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
|
Midterms And Shutdown Politics
00:15:38
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|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| So somehow we are in the midst of yet another partial government shutdown as a result of Democrats really digging in on DHS funding. | ||
| What do you think of the fact that the White House and Republicans seem to go along with this? | ||
| Well, obviously, I think Republicans would like to avoid a lengthy shutdown. | ||
| We had the longest government shutdown on record, and that was a full government shutdown late last year. | ||
| So in an election year, there would be some desire, I think, to avoid the optics of a shutdown. | ||
| This will be a little bit less disruptive than a full shutdown, but it still would be a political problem and a practical problem. | ||
| I also think there is some desire for an off-ramp from the contentiousness of Minneapolis. | ||
| I think we've seen the Trump administration has tried to shift gears a little bit in Minnesota, but also that creates some level of openness to some kind of reforms about the way ICE does business, but it still would need to be reforms that are compatible with fulfilling President Trump's campaign promise to remove large numbers of illegal immigrants from the country. | ||
| Let's talk about some of the demands that Democrats are laying out in order to advance funding for ICE. | ||
| For example, ending roving patrols, tightening the rules on warrants and requiring ICE to coordinate with local authorities, enforcing accountability and a uniform code of conduct, also requiring agents to take their masks off, wear body cameras, and carry an ID. | ||
| What do you think about some of those democratic demands? | ||
| Well, I think the two big things are one, sort of local law enforcement cooperation with immigration authorities is one of the points of contention. | ||
| You know, these sanctuary jurisdictions don't really allow local law enforcement to cooperate with immigration authorities. | ||
| And so that's something that I think a lot of Republicans would like to see come to an end. | ||
| So if some kind of compromise on that front delivers that goal, they'd certainly be open to it. | ||
| think the other question would be would the changes to the warrants, a shift from administrative warrants to judicial warrants, would that make deportations functionally impossible? | ||
| And I think just to pause to explain to folk what you're talking about Right now, ICE is using administrative warrants for their detentions and to ask people for access to different places. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| But many people are pushing back against that by demanding judicial warrants for entry into homes and businesses, which are signed by a judge. | ||
| So there are still some rights in terms of access to private property, you know, getting on private property where you do need warrants, but in terms of being able to go out and arrest and set up for deportation, it would be very difficult to deport large numbers of people if they embraced the Democrats' current language on how the judicial warrants would proceed. | ||
| So it would functionally make it very difficult to pursue the administration's goals on removing a significant number of illegal immigrants for the rest of their term. | ||
| So I think that there would have to be significant give on that for there to be some kind of compromise. | ||
| You had a piece last week about the role of ICE in Minneapolis headline, Trump Shifts Tactics and Optics to Calm the Immigration Firestorm. | ||
| A lot has happened in the last week. | ||
| Can you lay out sort of what you were arguing here and maybe if your perspective has just shifted at all? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So I think after the second shooting of an American during the sort of conflagration that's going on in Minneapolis over the ICE presence there, there was a desire on the part of the White House to kind of lower the temperature a little bit. | ||
| And after initially using very strong language to describe the person who was shot as a domestic terrorist and somebody who is seeking to kill large numbers of law enforcement, they backed off of that rhetoric. | ||
| They sidelined some of the people who were key to that messaging, particularly Homeland Security Secretary Christy Noam, and they dispatched Orders Rom Holman, Tom Homan, to Minneapolis. | ||
| And Homan has really tried to take a different tack. | ||
| And the president has also had a lot of phone conversations with Minnesota Governor Tim Waz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frye, both people with whom the president has had a pretty contentious relationship on this issue in particular, but also just more broadly, Waz was the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2024. | ||
| So he was on the ticket with former Vice President Kamala Harris, which Trump and Vance ran against. | ||
| So I think there's been an attempt to see if there is some kind of way in which they can cut a deal that will lower the temperature. | ||
| And maybe some of the federal immigration personnel, Border Patrol, and ICE, the numbers of people who are there will start to get lower. | ||
| So I think by and large that what they've sought to do is what they're still doing. | ||
| You know, there does come a point, though, where they're pretty far apart. | ||
| The Minnesota elected officials and the Trump administration are pretty far apart in what they would like to see happen in the state. | ||
| So I think there is some room for negotiation on that. | ||
| But there's also, you know, there are matters of principle for both sides that I don't think are quite so easily resolved. | ||
| Last week, Attorney General Pam Bondi asked for access to Minnesota's voter rolls as a condition for ICE being withdrawn from Minneapolis. | ||
| Do you think that's an appropriate strategy? | ||
| I mean, there are a whole lot of other controversies involving Minnesota that are separate from the immigration issue. | ||
| And I think that to have a successful resolution of the immigration standoff specifically, there's probably going to have to be some backing off of demands that are not really directly related to that. | ||
| Otherwise, it seems pretty unlikely to me that there's going to be a resolution that the Minnesota elected officials are going to go along with. | ||
| I want to move to a different topic altogether, which is different state as well in Georgia, because last week the FBI searched the Fulton County, Georgia's election office seeking records related to the 2020 election, which the president still says he won, even though that has been disproven on multiple occasions. | ||
| Now, they asked for ballots, tabulator tapes from the scanners, voter rolls. | ||
| This was overseen by the DNI director Tulsi Gabbard. | ||
| What's going on here? | ||
| Well, obviously the president still would like to see the 2020 election results contested. | ||
| I'm not sure what he thinks or what people around him think they're going to find that will change anybody's mind about what happened in 2020. | ||
| It seems to me that having won the 2024 election and nobody really contests that he won that election. | ||
| You've made a pretty significant political comeback, not really comparable to anything maybe Richard Nixon. | ||
| I mean, but greatest political comeback in history. | ||
| I'm not sure why being so backward-looking would be to your benefit politically, particularly given that we're now in another election year, and I think most voters have moved on from this. | ||
| But it's clearly something that's very important to the president. | ||
| It's very important to some of the president's strongest supporters. | ||
| I'm not sure that there's anything anybody could find that's going to really change anybody's minds about any of this stuff at this point, but clearly they're going to try. | ||
| Do you think there's harm in doing this? | ||
| Well, I think that I don't see a very good reason for looking backwards in this way. | ||
| Even if you were to accept some of the things that the president thinks about that election, and I don't, you know, I don't see what, you know, you're the president now. | ||
| So there's, you know, but obviously one of the things that kept him politically viable during his four-year hiatus from the White House was contesting these election results. | ||
| So, you know, it's part of what maintained his strong bond with the Republican base. | ||
| So, you know, to some extent, I can understand on a certain guttural level why this is important to him, but I think that the real election Republicans need to be focused on is the one that's happening this November. | ||
| With that in mind, some of the pushback to this raid, Rob Pitts, who's the chairman of the Fulton County, Georgia Board of Commissioners, says every audit, every recount, every court ruling on the 2020 Georgia election results has confirmed what the people of Fulton County already knew. | ||
| Our elections were fair and accurate, and every legal vote was counted. | ||
| These ongoing efforts are about intimidation and distraction, not facts. | ||
| Several folks on the Democratic side have said that moves like this, as well as sort of the demand for voter rolls in Minnesota, are more about almost an intimidation tactic ahead of the midterms. | ||
| Do you think that's a fair concern? | ||
| I mean, I don't know that anybody's behavior in the midterms is going to be significantly influenced by any of this. | ||
| But I do think that, you know, number one, Trump won Georgia in 2024. | ||
| And number two, there's a pretty important Senate race that's happening in Georgia this year. | ||
| It's one of the Republicans' handful of actual pickup opportunities. | ||
| You know, there's because Georgia is such a closely contested state, there's going to be a lot of emphasis on things that can happen at the margins. | ||
| You know, should the voter rolls be purged? | ||
| Are there people on the voter rolls who shouldn't be voting? | ||
| So there's going to be some focus on that. | ||
| But I really think that what mainly needs to happen for the Republicans is they need to be focused on the election that's about to happen and not the one that was concluded six years ago. | ||
| Looking at that election that is about to happen, I mean, the generic congressional vote polling, according to Emerson College polling, says about 48% of likely voters would support a Democratic candidate. | ||
| 42% would support a Republican candidate. | ||
| 10% undecided. | ||
| You have another piece in the Washington Examiner. | ||
| Is Trump's 2024 coalition coming apart ahead of the midterm elections? | ||
| With the numbers that we have and everything else you're seeing, why do you think that might be a risk? | ||
| Well, I mean, there's certainly been some erosion of President Trump's support among some of the people who were key swing voters in the 2024 election. | ||
| So he's not doing as well with younger voters as he was at that time. | ||
| He's not doing as well with Hispanic voters as he was at that time. | ||
| You know, a pretty important part of how he was able to not only win the Electoral College, but win the popular vote, was that there was a large shift of conservative-leaning non-white voters to support his ticket. | ||
| And that is less evident in the polling that's going on right now. | ||
| There are a number of voters who don't feel that the administration has yet delivered on some of the promises about the economy and affordability. | ||
| And that really seems to be hurting the president and his party right now. | ||
| Now, the reality of modern American politics is that generally speaking, the party that holds the White House does not do well in the midterm elections. | ||
| The midterm elections are an opportunity for a course correction or a rebuke that voters who are unhappy with the incumbent administration can hand down. | ||
| And that's generally happened to every president, regardless of political party, really since 1938. | ||
| And the couple of exceptions that there have been kind of prove the rule. | ||
| I mean, Republicans did well in the 2002 midterm elections, but that was in the aftermath of the 9-11 terrorist attack. | ||
| So there was still a sort of rally around the flag, a sort of national unity moment behind President George W. Bush that was in effect at that time that made the midterms different than they normally would be. | ||
| But we have seen most recent presidents have encountered serious political setbacks during the midterm elections. | ||
| And we've also seen more recently an evolution in the two parties' coalitions where Democrats, having previously been more reliant on low-propensity voters, now have the higher propensity voting coalition. | ||
| So their voters are people who are going to turn out in a race for dog catcher, right? | ||
| They're going to vote no matter what's happening on the ballot. | ||
| And they'll show up to protest President Trump regardless of whether he is personally on the ballot or not. | ||
| Whereas Republicans have moved to a much lower propensity voting coalition. | ||
| These are people who will show up to vote in presidential elections perhaps, but they're less reliable in terms of turning out for things like the midterms. | ||
| And then some of these voters have been pretty reliable in showing up and voting when President Trump is on the ballot. | ||
| But in elections where he's not on the ballot, they stay home or how they're going to vote is a little bit less reliable. | ||
| And so Republicans are facing a challenge. | ||
| Downballot Republicans, who are going to be the people who are running in this election, are facing the challenge of what do you do about that? | ||
| How do you turn these people out? | ||
| All right, let's get to your questions for Jim Antel, who's the executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine. | ||
| We'll first take one via text from Steve in Tampa, Florida. | ||
| Does Mr. Antel believe that examining previous voting records to identify deceased individuals, people who live in different states, and illegal aliens who have voted in the elections? | ||
| I mean, I think, you know, there are some people on voter rolls who shouldn't be there. | ||
|
Voter Roll Controversies
00:12:30
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||
| And I think that the laws in that regard should be followed. | ||
| And I think there are some areas where they have, you know, people who are still on the rolls who shouldn't be there. | ||
| And some states have better systems for purging those roles than others. | ||
| And I don't have any issue with that. | ||
| I think that I do, however, think that the focus should be on the law and on the elections that are going on right now. | ||
| I mean, there are still people who contest the 1960 presidential election between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. | ||
| And that's interesting. | ||
| And I certainly would be interested in reading more books about that or something. | ||
| But it's not something that the modern Republican Party should be particularly focused on. | ||
| And it kind of ruined when Richard Nixon did get into the White House. | ||
| That focus kind of ruined his presidency. | ||
| And I think we wouldn't want to see the same thing happen with Donald Trump. | ||
| Scott is in Ithaca, New York, on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Scott. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Jim. | |
| I just wanted to make a couple of statements to set the record straight other than the kind of news feeds that everybody looks at, which is kind of stupid. | ||
| But so local law enforcement is supposed to be in charge of the crowd control for protests, not ICE. | ||
| And as far as ICE goes, there's illegal and there's psychological things going on. | ||
| The legal things have been going on for decades, and that is all law enforcement are held to things like administrative warrants for public property, but for private domain, it's always been judicial that was required. | ||
| There's two exceptions that people need to know: there's consent. | ||
| So if somebody consents to the warrant or to search their property, there's also this exigent circumstances, and that's what's possibly being abused by ICE in some circumstances, and all law enforcement sometimes in some circumstances. | ||
| But there is a place for exigent circumstances for those individuals that have created heinous crimes or whatever that are illegal aliens to go after those people. | ||
| I think the psychological component, though, is that the American public was not ready for the way that they were doing it now. | ||
| They should have just gone after the hardest criminals that were illegal aliens and gone with the judicial warrants when necessary, but exigent circumstances when necessary. | ||
| But as far as rounding up people just that are irrelegally to start with, I think the American public was not ready for that. | ||
| I think they should have done it in phases. | ||
| And I want your comments. | ||
| I'll go up here. | ||
| Well, I definitely think that the public is more ambivalent about interior enforcement of immigration laws than they are about border security. | ||
| And I think that's shown up in the polling regularly. | ||
| There's a Fox News poll that found that 59% of voters say that ICE is too aggressive, which is up 10 points from July. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I think that when you're looking at getting people who are illegal immigrants who have already made it into the interior of the country, maybe they've been here for some time. | ||
| The optics of some of the tactics that will be involved are not something that a lot of voters are ready to stomach, even though they say that they would like a lot of these people removed from the country. | ||
| So, you know, it's some of that is the administration's administration not having really prepared people for what they're going to see, maybe assuming that people will share their zeal for these things in a way that I don't think is really supported by the public opinion polling. | ||
| You know, and there's also, you know, voters, voters want, you know, a balanced budget, but they don't want tax increases or spending cuts. | ||
| They want no illegal immigration, but they don't want to deport anybody. | ||
| There is an element, except for criminals, beyond immigration violations. | ||
| So there is sometimes the voters themselves have certain contradictions in what they'd like. | ||
| But I think that, number one, there is a little bit of public ambivalence on that front that the administration, I think, is going to have to address. | ||
| The other thing is, I think that maybe they ought to look more seriously at things like a more employer-centric approach to reducing illegal immigration. | ||
| So, you know, obviously the jobs are the big magnet for illegal immigration. | ||
| Do a little bit more work site enforcement, enforce the employer sanctions that are in the law, and also maybe tax and go after some of the remittances that are being paid back to the home country. | ||
| And that would remove some of the economic incentive. | ||
| But the Republican Party, even under President Trump, is still the party of business. | ||
| And so there are a lot of donor relationships and political relationships there. | ||
| And even the president has been sensitive to the labor needs of certain industries, which have become pretty dependent on illegal immigrant labor. | ||
| Paul is in Schenectady, New York, on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Paul. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Morning, how are you? | |
| Good, good, good morning. | ||
| I just want to say. | ||
| Good. | ||
| I support ICE 100%. | ||
| And if you're an American citizen, you have nothing to fear. | ||
| Simple as that. | ||
| And it seems that the news media and politicians forgot that this whole thing started with the Biden administration open border policy, letting murderers in, child molesters, killers, everything. | ||
| So now you got Donald Trump, our president, has to clean house. | ||
| And he's doing it the right way. | ||
| These people that came into our country are all illegal. | ||
| And it's millions of them. | ||
| So I think it's time to clean house. | ||
| And I support Donald Trump. | ||
| And that's all I could say. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And when Sonny Bono, the singer, first started running for elected office, he was asked in a debate what his opinion was of illegal immigration. | ||
| And he said, well, it's illegal. | ||
| And then he sat down. | ||
| And I think that's how a lot of voters feel about it. | ||
| I think a big thing, and I take the caller's point on this, is that you do have to remember a bit how we got here. | ||
| And the Biden administration tolerated a situation at the border that, one, at least during the election, made voters willing to accept or at least contemplate measures that they'd previously been unwilling to really entertain. | ||
| So the support in polls for mass deportations grew past the point where we'd ever really previously seen it. | ||
| There was also a lot of polling. | ||
| There was the Gallup poll that showed more support for a reduction in immigration in general than we'd seen since 2001. | ||
| That's cooled off substantially since we've seen the Trump administration get back control of the border. | ||
| But there does come a point where just the sheer volume of illegal immigration becomes a problem, even if many of the illegal immigrants themselves on an individual basis are sympathetic people. | ||
| So you can't have, I think the most accepted estimate is that about 9 million people came in illegally during the Biden administration. | ||
| That's a lot of people to have coming in who are totally unvetted and you don't really know who they are and what their intentions are. | ||
| And so that is sort of the climate in which that, one, Trump was elected again, and two, that he has been charged with dealing with this problem. | ||
| And so, you know, the administration is certainly not blameless in terms of why they're encountering the political backlash that they are at this moment. | ||
| But they're also in a situation there are reasons why they find themselves in the situation that they do now that aren't really entirely their fault. | ||
| Sylvia is in Pennsylvania on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Sylvia. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| You can hear me? | ||
| Yes, we can hear you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| You already touched on this. | ||
| Why does it make a law that for the companies hire any illegal people? | ||
| Find them $1,000 for each one of them. | ||
| You're saying companies should be fined $1,000 per each violation of hiring folks who are not legally authorized to work here, Sylvia? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And what's a legal thing that take children out of schools? | ||
| I want to hear about that, too. | ||
| That has been incredibly controversial, the sort of immigration enforcement in Minneapolis near or around schools. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So on the employer front, there are employer sanctions for hiring illegal immigrants. | ||
| And I think that is an area where the administration should do more. | ||
| I mean, and it isn't just the Trump administration. | ||
| Part of the immigration law that amnestied a large number of illegal immigrants in 1986 was to try to crack down on employers who hire illegal labor. | ||
| And that has never really been enforced to the satisfaction of, I think, most people who follow the issue closely and would like to see more enforcement. | ||
| And I think that going after the businesses, even though here there's also some risks of backlash, you know, if you hurt the business community, but I think that these are generally less sympathetic people. | ||
| These are people who don't want to pay fair wages to Americans and to legal immigrants. | ||
| And I think that's a good way to position yourself on the issue. | ||
| But there's been hesitance to do that out of a certain amount of solicitude toward the business community. | ||
| JD is in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, JD. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I was just wondering if we were going to see 3,000 agents, ICE agents, arrive in like Miami or like San Antonio to do the same thing they're doing in Minneapolis, where mostly the population is illegal. | |
| Are you saying that in Miami and in San Antonio, most of the population is illegal, JD? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, there seems to be more of a Spanish-speaking populations in those areas. | |
| Like in Oklahoma, like we're in, there's a lot of Spanish-speaking people. | ||
| So your question is about sort of how ICE is choosing the areas to surge its enforcement, yes? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think. | |
| Yeah, I mean, so part of it is that Texas and Florida are not sanctuary jurisdictions. | ||
| And so even if in some cases, maybe the people leading the cities are not super enthusiastic about federal immigration authorities coming into their hometowns. | ||
| The state leaders are generally supportive of it. | ||
| There are a lot more people being deported from Texas than are being deported from Minnesota. | ||
| So that is a factor in why you're not seeing these ICE surges in those types of cities. | ||
|
Minnesota vs. Elsewhere
00:02:09
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| Now, there is a reasonable question to be asked. | ||
| You know, are the administration's priorities in this area inflaming things without really achieving the most practical effects for what they're setting out to do in terms of removing illegal immigrants? | ||
| I think that is an open question, but there are Minnesota-centric reasons as well for why this is happening in Minnesota and it's not happening elsewhere. | ||
| Alan is in Palantine, Illinois on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Alan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I'm calling. | ||
| I wanted to know what you thought about the president suing the IRS. | ||
| You know, personally, as a taxpayer, I'm offended by the notion. | ||
| And it just really seems like a deeply corrupt act. | ||
| And I'll just give some context for folks who maybe aren't following this story that, and here's just reporting from CNBC, although this was widely reported, that Trump, his two sons, the Trump organization, sues the IRS and Treasury for $10 billion over the tax records leak. | ||
| This is over alleged leaks of their confidential tax information. | ||
| They seek at least $10 billion in damages. | ||
| Quote, the IRS wrongly allowed a rogue, politically motivated employee to leak private and consular information about President Trump, his family, and the Trump organization to the New York Times, ProPublica, and other left-wing news outlets, a spokesman for Trump's legal team said. | ||
| What do you think of the caller's concern that this is not a good use of taxpayer money? | ||
| Well, his tax records shouldn't have been leaked, I would say, number one. | ||
| But yes, it does raise issues in terms of now he's running the executive branch, and the IRS is part of that. | ||
| And now he is suing to potentially get $10 billion out of the IRS. | ||
|
Joe Trump's Frequent Lawsuits
00:06:01
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| And conceivably, there'd be some kind of settlement talks. | ||
| And it does raise some conflicts given that he is the chief executive, and his attorneys, his agents would presumably be parties to those talks. | ||
| Having said that, I mean, President Trump sues a lot of people, sues a lot of entities, and there's quite a variety in terms of outcomes as to how far any of these lawsuits actually go. | ||
| There have been some cases, particularly lawsuits against media companies where Trump has begun to have some success, but there also are a fairly long list of lawsuits that the president has filed that have really not resulted in much of anything. | ||
| Siobhan is in Melbourne, Florida on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Siobhan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for C-SPAN. | ||
| The country used to try to cultivate a community trust between the local and state law enforcement. | ||
| Many migrants would not come forward as witnesses to crimes, or if a victim of a crime, they would not report it. | ||
| The federal and local law enforcement working together has set back the security, the safety of our communities. | ||
| I would like to state that I think federal and law enforcement should be separate and uh, the courts should not be used as a hunting ground for migrants. | ||
| Um, that's about all I have to say. | ||
| The states and the local law enforcement should not be working in concert with the federal officials over an immigrant law. | ||
| Thank you well, that is. | ||
| The big argument that people make in favor of becoming sanctuary jurisdictions is that there's concern that that people will be afraid to come forward in terms of reporting crimes, in terms of cooperating with the state and local government, really on any issue, if they feel that they're at some risk of deportation. | ||
| I and and I don't think very many people are actually calling on state and local authorities to be particularly involved in immigration enforcement itself, which is a federal issue. | ||
| Um, but we are talking about, in some cases of people who are already incarcerated, and these are the people who I think the general public has supports most removing from the country, and so if you can't really get a certain level of cooperation on that status, you know, in that particular situation, I think that's unacceptable to a lot of people. | ||
| Joe is in Naples Florida, on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Joe morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A couple of questions and then a comment, um. | |
| Number one, is there interface between county clerks and the voter rolls, that when a county clerk records a death certificate, that it goes back to the voter rolls for removal? | ||
| Uh, second thing, I used to farm 1200 acres of vegetables and I had about 212 migrant workers working for me. | ||
| Under the law, any employer who hires someone has to fill out an I-9 form. | ||
| When mr Andle and you got hired at CNN and uh the examiner respectively, you had to fill out an I-9 form, which you had to present your proof that you are not an illegal alien. | ||
| If you did not, then your employers are in violation of the law. | ||
| We fill those out on everybody that walked in the door. | ||
| I don't care if it's my next door neighbor's kid, and I remember when you were. | ||
| So Joe, just because we're short on time, I think we understand about your, your statement about the I-9, but what was your specific question for mr Antel? | ||
|
unidentified
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Um, is there correlation between county clerks and the voter rolls so that when someone dies they're automatically removed? | |
| Thank you, I mean different states and different local jurisdictions have different procedures on that. | ||
| It it is true that people in practice Practice. | ||
| People have often lingered on voter rolls past their expiration date on this planet. | ||
| That doesn't necessarily mean that somebody's voting on their behalf. | ||
| I certainly can, you know, when I moved to D.C., was on the voter rolls where I grew up after I was no longer living in D.C. | ||
| I don't think anything bad voting-wise happened as a result of that, but it is certainly something that happens. | ||
| And states do need to exercise a certain amount of due diligence on that front. | ||
| Yeah, in terms of the I-9, I mean, that's absolutely true. | ||
| I mean, there are processes and procedures every business with every hire has to follow. | ||
| Yet at the same time, clearly there are ways around that that people, both employers and employees, have found. | ||
| Otherwise, we wouldn't have, you know, in excess of, you know, 10 million illegal immigrants in the country. | ||
| Most of them are working. | ||
| Well, that is all the time that we have. | ||
| Thank you so much once again. | ||
|
Authoritarian Watch Project
00:11:28
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| Jim Antle, the executive editor of Washington Examiner Magazine. | ||
| Thanks for coming by again. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| All right, coming up next, the Nation Magazine's columnist, Sasha Abromsky, is going to join us to talk about his new book, American Carnage, how Trump, Musk, and Doge butchered the U.S. government. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
On this episode of Book Notes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb. | |
| Jonathan Horn's latest book is titled The Fate of the Generals, MacArthur, Wainwright, and the Epic Battle for the Philippines. | ||
| The publisher, Scribner, explains the premise of Horne's book. | ||
| For the doomed stand American forces made in the Philippines at the start of World War II, two generals received the country's highest military award, the Medal of Honor. | ||
| One was the charismatic Douglas MacArthur, whose orders forced him to leave his troops and go to Australia. | ||
| The other was the gritty Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright, who became a hero to the troops, whose fate he insisted on sharing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A new interview with author Jonathan Horne about his book, The Fate of the Generals: MacArthur, Wainwright, and the Epic Battle for the Philippines. | |
| BookNotes Plus, with our host Brian Lamb, is available wherever you get your podcasts and on the C-SPAN Now app. | ||
| Best ideas and best practices can be found anywhere. | ||
| But we have to listen so we can govern better. | ||
| Democracy depends on heavy doses of civility. | ||
|
unidentified
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You can fight and still be friendly. | |
| Bridging the divide in American politics. | ||
| You know, you may not agree with the document on everything, but you can find areas where you do agree. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's a pretty likable guy as well. | |
| Chris Coons and I are actually friends. | ||
| He votes wrong all the time, but we're actually friends. | ||
| A horrible secret that Scott and I have is that we actually respect each other. | ||
| We all don't hate each other. | ||
|
unidentified
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You two actually kind of like each other. | |
| These are the kinds of secrets we'd like to expose. | ||
| It's nice to be with a member who knows what they're talking about. | ||
|
unidentified
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You guys did agree to the civility, all right? | |
| He owes my son $10 from a bed for a while. | ||
|
unidentified
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Fork it over. | |
| That's fighting words right now. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm glad I'm not in charge of it. | |
| I'm thrilled to be on the show with him. | ||
| There are not shows like this, right? | ||
| Incentivizing that relationship. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ceasefire Friday nights on C-SPAN. | |
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| We're joined now by Sasha Abromsky, who's the author of the book American Carnage: How Trump, Musk, and Doge butchered the U.S. government. | ||
| Mr. Abromsky is also a columnist for the nation and does a segment called Authoritarian Watch. | ||
| Welcome to Washington Journal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thanks for having me on. | ||
| I want to talk first about your column for the nation authoritarian watch. | ||
| What is it exactly? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So it's based on the premise that something unique is happening in American politics under Trump that hasn't happened in the past and that carries some really, really profound consequences for how our democracy functions. | |
| And it's based on the idea that you can sort of almost measure on a week-by-week basis democratic norms being placed under attack, whether it's universities or journalists coming into the sort of crosshairs, or whether it's the actions of ICE or whether it's a foreign policy that's explicitly based on a mighty-right philosophy of the world. | ||
| So a couple of months ago, my editors and I started talking, and I've been writing weekly columns for more than a decade now, but we started talking about how to quantify the democratic backsliding in a way that would be understandable and compelling to readers. | ||
| And out of that came this idea that on a weekly basis, I would be looking for new ways in which the Trump administration was pushing back against democratic norms, or new ways in which Congress was failing to do its congressional duty according to the traditional divisions of power, or ways in which just on the ground, laws were being ignored or court orders were being undermined by an administration that seems more intent on results than on using constitutional means to get those results. | ||
| And so that's the basis of the column Authoritarian Watch. | ||
| In one of your recent columns for Authoritarian Watch, you have a piece, an open letter to Congressional Republicans of conscience. | ||
| Conscience, for the good of the country, it's time to cross the aisle. | ||
| What's your argument there? | ||
|
unidentified
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So the argument is that the Republicans in Congress have basically rubber stamped an authoritarian agenda and that actually it wouldn't take that much pushback from Congress to rein in large parts of the agenda. | |
| So my argument is that if four Republican senators, and I name them, and three Republican congressmen were to cross the aisle, because the majorities are so narrow in the Senate and in the Congress, that would be enough to flip Congress to Democratic control. | ||
| Now, what I've said in the letter is, look, if you're Lisa Makowski, for example, you do not have to agree with everything or even most things that your Democratic colleagues are saying, but you do have to agree that the future of the democracy is at risk under Trump and there needs to be a congressional pushback. | ||
| And the way you get congressional pushback is you control the purse again, because traditionally Congress controls spending, and you control the investigative leaguers of power. | ||
| And the reason that's important is Trump's administration is committing manifestly illegal and impeachable offenses almost on a daily basis. | ||
| Christy Noam is, Pete Hegseth is, Donald Trump of course is. | ||
| We're seeing this explosion of cronyism, of nepotism, of corruption that is going to have profound consequences for how this country's political system functions, not just for a few months, but for many, many, many decades. | ||
| If enough Republicans said, you know what, we can't stomach this anymore. | ||
| We didn't enter politics for this vision to be imposed on the country. | ||
| If enough Republicans of conscience said, we're going to cross the aisle temporarily to ensure that this out-of-control administration is held accountable, that would be a profoundly important historical gesture. | ||
| And so I wrote it as an open letter. | ||
| Now, I'm under no illusions that Susan Collins or Lisa McKowski or Rand Paul are reading the Nation magazine, but I do think that if my readers start calling and writing to these senators and congressmen, there is momentum here that could be built. | ||
| Along with authoritarianism, which you're highlighting there, another term that a lot of folks on the left have been using to describe this administration has been fascism, which has pulled a lot of negative responses on the right, including in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, America Doesn't Do Fascism. | ||
| Trump is far more interesting than the dictator living in the liberal imagination. | ||
| I want to read a bit of this op-ed and get your response, in which Barton Swain writes for the Wall Street Journal, in fairness to liberals who have mistaken Mr. Trump for a fascist over the past decade, that the president sometimes acts and sounds like a strongman. | ||
| He understands constitutional limits when he wants to and doesn't when he doesn't. | ||
| In his second term, he has used the Justice Department to target his foes, though in comically inept ways that diminish his polling numbers and turn those foes into heroes. | ||
| He has chafed at constitutional limits, but hasn't declared himself exempt from them except in goading asides. | ||
| He promised not to be a dictator except for a day. | ||
| After that, I'm not a dictator. | ||
| He likes to name buildings after himself, which is weird but doesn't hurt anything but sensibilities. | ||
| He has complied with court orders, even if the administration's attorneys have required cajoling by district judges on matters of immigration. | ||
| This is what makes Mr. Trump more interesting and more puzzling and exasperating than the latter-day fascist of liberal imagination. | ||
| He has far more in common with Andrew Jackson than with Buzz Windrup, the fascist American dictator and anti-hero of Sinclair Lewis's novel, It Can't Happen Here. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, it's interesting. | |
| I've been speaking as part of my authoritarian watch project. | ||
| I've been interviewing academics and historians of fascism and advocates and legal scholars all over the country for the last many, many months. | ||
| And some of them agree with that op-ed and some of them don't. | ||
| Where I tend to fall is I think that it is a kind of fascism, but it's not exactly the kind of fascism of mid-20th century Europe. | ||
| It isn't an exact mirroring of Hitler or of Mussolini, though Trump does use their language and he borrows phrasing. | ||
| And ICE in its recruitment strategy is very explicitly borrowing neo-Nazi phrasing in how it's recruiting young men to become ICE agents. | ||
| There is a breakdown of law and order on the streets in places like Minneapolis when you have federal agents doing the breaking of the law. | ||
| And that is where it gets really, really dangerous. | ||
| The way ICE has been funded, the way it's been empowered, the way it's been essentially told both by Vance and by Trump that anything they do results in absolute immunity. | ||
| That's a recipe for domestic bloodshed. | ||
| When Trump pardoned 1,500 insurrectionists from the January 6th insurrection, that was a signal that justice would be partial, that if you were on Trump's enemies list, the full might of the state would be thrown against you. | ||
| But if you were seen to be on Trump's side, you got a free pass. | ||
| Now, that is extraordinarily dangerous because it begins the empowerment of street fighters and of paramilitaries. | ||
| So yes, I mean, there are differences between ICE and the Gestapo, but there are also shocking similarities. | ||
| And there are differences between Trump and Mussolini or Hitler, but again, at least rhetorically, there are extraordinary similarities. | ||
| So I don't agree with the editorial in the Washington, in the Wall Street Journal, but I do think that history never quite repeats itself exactly. | ||
| There's always a melodic variation. | ||
| And we're seeing in 21st century Trump's America that melodic variation. | ||
| It's a sort of fascism light. | ||
| It uses propaganda tools that earlier fascists didn't have access to, especially around social media. | ||
| But the idea that you can use the big lie, the idea that if you say something loudly enough and if the state propaganda machine amplifies it enough, it becomes a reality. | ||
| That's a common thread that runs through all strongman government. | ||
| And that goes from Hitler to Mussolini. | ||
| It goes from Perron in Argentina in the 50s to Pinochet in the 70s and 80s, through to people like Donald Trump or Victor Orban or Modi in India today. | ||
| So, you know, I think we can pass whether or not it's exactly fascism. | ||
| But I think what almost every commentator at this point would agree with is it's a shocking departure from traditional American democratic norms. | ||
| All right, let's get back to the topic of your book, American Carnage. | ||
| Why did you choose that title? | ||
|
unidentified
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The title is based on a speech that Donald Trump made in 2017 in his first inauguration address. | |
| And he made this extraordinarily dark speech about how there was American carnage playing out on the streets of America. | ||
| And the thing about Trump's presidency, both in Trump 1.0, but more especially this current incarnation, is Trump's people and Trump's rhetoric and Trump's inflammation and polarization of the political process, that is creating the American carnage. | ||
|
Financial Carnage 2025
00:15:19
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unidentified
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And so when I started researching the Doge purges, which basically defined the first several months of the Trump presidency, it struck me that that was an extraordinarily apt title for the book. | |
| Because what Trump was doing and what Elon Musk were doing, they were essentially shredding, not the entire federal government, but key parts, the parts that had to do with the environment, the parts that had to do with education, with public health, with overseas aid, with workplace protection. | ||
| And they were doing it in a way that harmed hundreds and hundreds of thousands of federal employees, public civil servants, and their families and the broader communities that they were part of. | ||
| And they were leaving a catastrophic legacy in the wake of these purges. | ||
| And I started interviewing people. | ||
| I ended up finding 11 federal workers from eight different agencies who were willing to talk to me over the first several months of 2025 as all of their life certainties were upended and as they found themselves being described by Russell Vogt and by Donald Trump and by Vance and by Elon Musk as the enemy within. | ||
| And it was creating an absolutely extraordinary stress on the functioning of the U.S. federal system and the federal government. | ||
| And so again, it seemed to me that if I was going to be writing about and describing the Doge purges with Elon Musk and his chainsaw and everything else that went with those purges, there was no title more apropos than Trump's own words, American Carnage. | ||
| Now then, how did the employees you profiled find out their jobs were in jeopardy and later on that their jobs were going to be terminated? | ||
|
unidentified
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I mean, oftentimes it happened on the same day. | |
| So for example, one of the women that I focus on was an NOAA scientist, a National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration climate researcher called Natasha Miles. | ||
| And she had just gotten this job. | ||
| She'd been in academia for 20 years. | ||
| She'd just gotten this job. | ||
| And it was in Boulder, Colorado. | ||
| So she sets off from the East Coast. | ||
| She drives west. | ||
| It's a 2,000-mile drive, and it takes her five days. | ||
| And she gets to Boulder, and literally an hour outside town, she gets a phone call from her boss saying, you've got to check your email. | ||
| And when she checks her email, there's a message there saying as of five o'clock that day, Natasha Miles was no longer a federal employee. | ||
| I mean, that's an extraordinary way to treat a worker. | ||
| It's an extraordinary way to treat a fellow human being. | ||
| There was another woman also at NOAA I interviewed called Kelsey Hendrix and she was blind. | ||
| She wasn't a scientist. | ||
| She worked in the sort of clerical area of NOAA. | ||
| And she had the same thing happen. | ||
| She's in work one day in Washington, D.C., and she gets an email saying, later this afternoon, you're being terminated, your work email's being cancelled, you're being, I mean, she was essentially frog marched out of the building. | ||
| I interviewed people at the CDC working on vital public health programs. | ||
| And same thing happened. | ||
| They just get these emails saying you're being fired. | ||
| And some of them got emails saying you're being fired for poor performance. | ||
| And this was something Doge basically made up out of thin air. | ||
| If you're fired for poor performance in the federal government, you can't get rehired by the federal government. | ||
| It's almost impossible. | ||
| You've gotten a scarlet letter against your name. | ||
| So people were getting these fallacious emails from Elon Musk and his henchmen saying you're being fired for poor performance. | ||
| And then they had to go through all this legal rigmarole to try and get that reversed. | ||
| And some succeeded, some didn't. | ||
| But this is what I found again and again and again. | ||
| Russell Vogt, who was one of the architects of Project 2025, he's sort of the thinking man's MAGA person. | ||
| He's the ideologue behind a lot of what Trump 2.0 is doing. | ||
| Russell Vogt was caught on camera in October 2024 saying that their ambition as they got into power was to quote unquote put the federal workforce into trauma. | ||
| And they succeeded. | ||
| On a daily basis, people were absolutely traumatized in the federal government. | ||
| I spoke to one person after another who said, yeah, I had to go on antidepressants. | ||
| I spoke to several people who had been prescribed drugs that are normally reserved for veterans suffering from PTSD. | ||
| But their daily work experience became so traumatic under Elon Musk and under Russell Vogt and under Donald Trump that they were having to go onto these powerful drugs simply to maintain their equilibrium and be able to do work. | ||
| That's something no employer should be imposing on their workforce and certainly not the federal government, which employs 2 million or did employ before the purges, 2 million civilian employees. | ||
| I want to give some numbers as to the scale of the cuts that you're talking about between the Doge cuts and people who took buyouts or early retirement and things like that. | ||
| More than 322,000 employees have left the federal workforce. | ||
| Every federal agency has been impacted. | ||
| Department of Education, HUD, and Treasury saw the most cuts in terms of the percentage of the workforce. | ||
| In raw numbers, though, the Department of Defense, Veterans Affairs, Treasury, and HHS were impacted the most. | ||
| Can you talk about sort of where all of these people went and how that rippled through the broader economy? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It had a massive impact. | |
| And when you say 300,000 workers, that's about one in seven, one in eight, one in seven federal workers who just disappeared off the payrolls. | ||
| So it had a profound impact on communities, especially in Washington, D.C., but also in places like Atlanta, Georgia, which is the headquarters of the CDC. | ||
| And you mentioned different agencies were impacted differently. | ||
| Look, if you're a taxpayer and you're trying to get answers about your tax return and you're phoning the IRS at this point, good luck, because so many IRS telephone workers, including one of the people in my book, were fired and told they were no longer necessary. | ||
| If you're an overseas person and you're looking to get vaccinations or medications that USAID provided, good luck because USAID was absolutely eviscerated. | ||
| It's gone. | ||
| But it's not all aspects of government that were shredded. | ||
| So, I mean, you know, Donald Trump and Musk portrayed this as a way of saving hundreds of billions of dollars for the American taxpayer. | ||
| Well, that never materialized because actually what happened was large parts of government simply became utterly inefficient and caught in red tape. | ||
| People who used to be able to do workplace inspections if they were workplace safety inspectors, now they have to jump through hoops to get that funded. | ||
| So things that used to run smoothly no longer run smoothly. | ||
| But there are parts of the government that have been turbocharged. | ||
| If you're working for ICE, you're in the golden age because tens of billions of dollars are flowing towards ICE and the CPP, the Border Patrol. | ||
| So it's not that it's a sort of equal opportunity shredder. | ||
| It's not that Elon Musk's chainsaw just worked equally across the government. | ||
| They picked and chose, and they chose parts of the government that didn't align with Trump's ideological vision. | ||
| So Trump doesn't want anything to do with the environment and government, so they shredded all of the agencies and all of the employment opportunities connected with environmental research. | ||
| Trump and Kennedy don't really like a sort of scientific vision of public health. | ||
| So the CDC has been relentlessly hammered. | ||
| None of them, none of the new oligarchs who are governing this country, like laws that protect ordinary Americans in the workplace or ordinary Americans against financial predators. | ||
| And so they went after NIOSH, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. | ||
| They went after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which helps prevent predatory lenders from exploiting ordinary Americans. | ||
| So this was a very, very programmatic effort, not to make government smaller, but to reduce the parts of government that stood in the way of this extremist political agenda. | ||
| We'll be taking calls with questions for Sasha Bromsky of the nation. | ||
| Our phone line for Republicans is 202-748-8001. | ||
| For Democrats, 202748-8000. | ||
| And for Independents, 202748-8002. | ||
| Quickly, before we get to our callers, Sasha, last November, the Department of Government Efficiency disbanded, still with eight months left in its mandate. | ||
| What is Doge up to now? | ||
| Are any of these employees still in government? | ||
| Where do things stand? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, here's the sort of horrifying thing about Doge. | |
| Doge became a political commissariat. | ||
| And basically, Doge embedded its commissars in key agencies, in key branches of government, and looked over the shoulders of the people who were normally running operations in those agencies. | ||
| And they became this sort of political and financial commissariat that made it impossible for agencies to make independent decisions. | ||
| And those embedded employees are still there. | ||
| They're speckled all around government. | ||
| But perhaps the biggest legacy of Doge, the most destructive long-term legacy, is they hacked the financial and the information pipelines of government. | ||
| And that should shock anybody, Democrat, Republican alike. | ||
| They went outside of Congress. | ||
| They didn't seek congressional authority for what they were doing. | ||
| And all of the information that's kept by the Treasury, kept by immigration authorities, kept by the Education Department, kept by the Department of Health and Human Services, kept by the Housing and Urban Development Department, all of this information, which for good reason has been compartmentalized, the barriers broke down. | ||
| And they used that information ruthlessly over the past year, especially in the anti-immigrant crackdowns that have gone on all over this country. | ||
| They used that information to work out where people were living, where people were working, what status they had, whether they could revoke that status. | ||
| All of that is the indirect legacy of Doge coming in and hacking the government's information pipelines. | ||
| Now, you know, I'm sure some of your callers are going to say, well, Abramski's just this left-wing person, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| Look, it doesn't matter whether you're left-wing, right-wing, or any other wing, you have a stake in protecting privacy. | ||
| You have a stake in having your information treated fairly and honestly by the United States government. | ||
| And when the United States government comes in and says, we don't care about congressional authority and we don't care about constitutional limits, but we're going to use an agency like Doge to bulldoze our way into all of those information databases, that's big government at its very, very worst and most terrifying. | ||
| And my audience, whether they're left-wing or right-wing, should be horrified at what Doge did with no congressional oversight. | ||
| All right, let's go to Rick in Homestead, Florida on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Rick. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning, my friends. | |
| Listen, I'm a moderate Republican, so by no way am I a MA fan and not happy with a lot of things they're doing. | ||
| But where you lose me in the Doge argument is when you have, you know, $22 billion with programs aiding illegal immigrants through resettlement. | ||
| You have $26 billion higher education in Egypt. | ||
| Have $11 million Middle Eastern version of Sesame Street in Iraq. | ||
| When you have those things, I'm off for a surgical approach, but come on, some of these things are just ridiculous. | ||
| We should have no business funding some of these things. | ||
| And that's where you lose me in this argument. | ||
| If you were to say, okay, let's do a surgical approach. | ||
| Let's get rid of some of these ridiculous programs that don't help America at all, then I'm on board. | ||
| But come on, don't say that all doge is terrible because that's just not what's needed in America today. | ||
| Yeah, Rick, I appreciate your comment. | ||
| And if you'll bear with me a minute, I'll answer it. | ||
| So, part of the problem around USAID was a matter of perception because for decades and decades, people like Rush Limbaugh and then later on Elon Musk and right-wing social influencers told the American public that up to 25% of the federal budget was going on US aid on foreign assistance. | ||
| Now, if that was the case, that should and would have raised alarm bells. | ||
| But it was never the case. | ||
| America never, ever spent more than 1%, and in most years, way less than 1% of its federal budget on overseas aid. | ||
| USAID was $40 billion a year. | ||
| And that $40 billion was one of the best investments that America has ever made on the global stage because it was a massive demonstration of soft power. | ||
| What it said to people all over the world was, we aren't all about military might. | ||
| That's a part of who America is, but a large part of who America is, is generosity. | ||
| We work out where there is need, and then we help fill that need because we have resources and we have expertise. | ||
| And what USAID did was they went around the world preventing starvation. | ||
| They injected vaccines to people who would otherwise get polio or die of other preventable diseases. | ||
| They distributed medications for things like tuberculosis and malaria. | ||
| And here's the other thing, which is a matter of self-interest. | ||
| They worked out where emerging pandemics were likely to be, and they worked out ways to get medical interventions in before those pandemics jumped the shock and became global. | ||
| It was a massively effective way of investing money. | ||
| But here's what I am going to do. | ||
| I did a few back-of-the-envelope calculations when Elon Musk was in the middle of his Doge purchase. | ||
| Now, you said you're a moderate Republican, and I believe you. | ||
| And I believe that you're also a very decent human being who cares about other people, especially children. | ||
| So I'm going to talk about a medication called Plumpy Nut. | ||
| It's got a bizarre-sounding name, but it's a really important medication. | ||
| It was developed by French scientists in the 1980s, and it's a very high-nutrient package that helps children on the brink of dying of starvation, and it brings them back to life. | ||
| And each packet costs about 35 cents. | ||
| A child, once the doctor puts them on it, needs to be on it four times a day for about eight weeks. | ||
| So it comes to ballpark about $50 to save that child's life. | ||
| Now, in January and February of 2025, when Elon Musk was at the height of his powers and was saying, we can't afford overseas aid, he kept saying this. | ||
| And he said, he quoted, he tweeted once that too much empathy results in civilizational death. | ||
| So I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation because in January and February, Elon Musk's personal wealth was going up not just by a few million dollars a day, but by several billion dollars every day. | ||
| So I thought, all right, we can't afford to give plumpy nuts to kids anymore. | ||
| How much would it take to be able to afford it? | ||
| Let's say we say to Elon Musk, why don't you give up one day of your wealth? | ||
| Not one month, not one year. | ||
| Why don't you give up one day of your wealth, Elon Musk? | ||
| What could we do with that? | ||
| And it turns out that in January and February of 2025, if Elon Musk had been willing to give up one day of his wealth, we could have distributed Plumpy Nut via USAID to 12 million children at risk of starvation. | ||
| So when you say that you're not a MAGA Republican and that you don't like some of this stuff, I'd ask you to think very, very hard. | ||
| Because when Musk was telling you we couldn't afford all this stuff, he was feeding you a propaganda line. | ||
|
Breaking Point Moments
00:09:09
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| We have a lot of other callers I want to get to before. | ||
|
unidentified
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That wasn't what was happening. | |
| We were saving children's lives. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
|
unidentified
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And now we're not saving children's lives. | |
| And that is a horrific message on our line for Democrats. | ||
| We're going to go to Rick next. | ||
| Go ahead, Rick in Codkill, New York, on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hi. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| Love Z-SPAN. | ||
| This is a little out of my general crane of mind, but I have a question, a serious question. | ||
| Is it possible for the governors of our country to call out the National Guard to protect the U.S. citizens against ICE? | ||
| You know, Rick, that's a great question. | ||
| And I've been thinking a lot and talking to a lot of people about this. | ||
| Look, when Waltz in Minnesota last week put the National Guard on alert, he very carefully didn't say why he was putting the National Guard on alert. | ||
| But there was an underlying implication that at least in part, it might be necessary to protect Minnesotans from a rampaging ICE that was clearly out of control and was being told by the federal government that they had absolute immunity to inflict harm, even up to death, on people protesting their actions. | ||
| So we're seeing stresses developing, especially in Minneapolis, but not just in Minneapolis. | ||
| We're seeing in cities all around the country, as ICE goes in, and as people like Gregory Bovino go in with this sort of flamethrowers mentality, that governors are trying to work out ways to protect their populations, and mayors are trying to work out ways to protect their populations, and local police forces who hate this stuff because it totally messes up their relationship with ordinary residents in their neighborhoods. | ||
| All of these organizations and political leadership structures are trying to work out what can be done within the constitutional system to rein in an out-of-control ICE backed up by a federal government that clearly does not care if bloodshed if blood is shed. | ||
| So your question is a great one. | ||
| I'm not a legal scholar. | ||
| My colleague Ellie Mastahl at the Nation would probably have a far better and more in-depth answer than I do. | ||
| But it's certainly something that seems to be increasingly on the books. | ||
| And that in and of itself is extraordinary. | ||
| Because what that means is Trump is pushing the federal system, the constitutional system, to the absolute breaking point by unleashing these armed groups onto civilian populations in major urban areas. | ||
| Ahmed is in Morgantown, West Virginia on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Ahmed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I wanted to go back to your open letter and ask you, are there things that you're seeing in the Republican ranks in Congress that triggered you to write this open letter? | ||
| And as an independent who tries to influence my local or my state officials, I was curious, what are signs to look for to see if a particular lawmaker would be willing to go against the party line? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| You know, Ahmed, again, that's a really, really good question because it's asking a lot of lawmakers. | ||
| Lawmakers get elected on a party platform and they're generally extraordinarily reluctant to cross the aisle. | ||
| It has happened before. | ||
| Senator Jim Jeffords in the early George Bush years, he switched parties and in doing so handed over control of the Senate. | ||
| It has been done a few times in American history, but only when those senators think my party is so far out of whack with my core beliefs, I can no longer stomach it. | ||
| The reason that I wrote this letter is it seems to me there are some senators and a few Congress members who are reaching that breaking point. | ||
| There are people who've been willing increasingly in recent months to very profoundly critique the rationale for what happened in Venezuela, for what's happened in the Eastern Pacific and the Caribbean around the bombing of boats that may or may not contain drug smugglers. | ||
| It's happened with the behavior of ICE. | ||
| It's happened with Trump going after Jerome Powell and threatening to prosecute Powell, who's the chairman of the Federal Reserve. | ||
| There are these sort of breaking point moments where people like Senator Rand Paul or Representative Tom Massey or Representative Bacon, there are these breaking moments where those senators look increasingly not just uncomfortable with individual policies, but increasingly uncomfortable with the concept of what MAGA stands for as a whole and what it's doing to the country's democratic structure. | ||
| So my appeal to them was a very simple one. | ||
| It was that in a moment of national crisis, when the very pillars of the democracy are under threat, follow your conscience because your conscience always ought to transcend your obligation to party. | ||
| Follow your conscience and do what you know is morally right. | ||
| Now, I don't know if my open letter will have any impact at all, but I do know that if millions of Americans from moderate brands of the Republican Party, from independents, from Democrats, if millions of Americans contact those representatives and senators and say, look, we are at that breaking point. | ||
| We are seeing the United States government do things in our name we never thought we would see the United States government do. | ||
| That if enough people contact those politicians, there is at least a chance that some of them will follow their conscience. | ||
| I want to read a few messages that we've received via text. | ||
| One is more of a comment and that you can elaborate on, but then two questions that relate to each other. | ||
| So first from Renee and Marietta, Georgia. | ||
| Mr. Abramski, please explain that Musk got rid of programs he personally hated, like USAID, who he blamed for ending apartheid, Department of Education, who he blames for his trans child, etc., etc. | ||
| And then the next two are related to each other. | ||
| David in Baltimore says, can the guest please clarify the catastrophic results of these cuts to the federal workforce? | ||
| I've noticed no difference whatsoever, and I'm convinced that every agency, including the Pentagon, could easily cut 10% and do the same mission. | ||
| Along the same lines, Chris in Durgia, Pennsylvania says, it's funny, Doge got rid of all these government workers and the government is still running. | ||
| Perception works on both sides, sir. | ||
| How many days of wealth have you given up? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, so there are a few points there. | |
| Let me answer Kristen and Davids first. | ||
| Look, oftentimes what government does is behind the scenes. | ||
| We don't see it. | ||
| If the weather forecasters aren't working as effectively as they were, if the environmental modelers aren't there to do their job, we may not see it on a daily basis. | ||
| But if there's a major hurricane or a major outbreak of wildfires in the American West or a major drought and farmers don't have access to all of that information, they can't plan their crops accordingly. | ||
| Emergency responders can't get on the scene effectively to prepare for an outbreak of extreme weather or to prepare for the cleanup after that outbreak of extreme weather. | ||
| A lot of this stuff on a daily basis, we don't notice. | ||
| If government is running smoothly, we don't give it credit. | ||
| When government suddenly stops running so smoothly, then we get very, very angry. | ||
| When the IRS fires a whole bunch of telephone operators or Social Security fires a whole bunch of telephone operators, we don't end up in a situation afterwards where government is working as well. | ||
| We wait hours and hours to get an answer on a tax question. | ||
| An old-aged person waits days to try and enroll in Social Security because they can no longer get the services effectively that they used to get. | ||
| So you can talk to people all over the country and you're hearing that government services are more creaky and more unreliable than they used to be. | ||
| Now, that's not saying they were ever particularly brilliant to begin with. | ||
| And you're absolutely right. | ||
| There was bloat in the system. | ||
| And you're absolutely right. | ||
| There could have been some surgical trimming of parts of the government. | ||
| That wasn't what happened with Doge. | ||
| What happened with Doge was these young guys came in, they hacked the systems and they fired people by and large indiscriminately, including tens of thousands of veterans. | ||
| Now here's the thing. | ||
| The easiest people to fire are what are called probationary employees, people who've been on the job for less than two years. | ||
| A huge number of veterans, when they transfer out of the military, go into the civilian federal workforce. | ||
| And many of those veterans in middle age found themselves on the wrong end of Doge because they come in, they're new hires in the civilian workforce, and they're easier to fire. | ||
| So they were fired indiscriminately, not because they weren't needed, not because their job was a part of bloat, but they were fired simply because they had less workplace protections. | ||
| And that's just wrong. | ||
| That's not the way for good government to function. | ||
| Now, coming to Renee's question about Elon Musk getting rid of programs he didn't personally like. | ||
|
Veterans Fired Indiscriminately
00:04:36
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unidentified
|
Look, this is overwhelmingly the case. | |
| If Musk didn't like a program or if Trump didn't like a program, if social media influencers on the right had targeted those programs, especially around the education system or public health or overseas aid, those programs met the Elon Musk chainsaw, or they were fed into what Musk called the wood chipper. | ||
| There's no doubt about that. | ||
| You can look at which programs survived Doge and which programs didn't survive Doge. | ||
| And at least in part, this was a personal vendetta campaign by the world's wealthiest man against ordinary public civil servants and their agencies. | ||
| It wasn't about saving money. | ||
| It didn't save money. | ||
| There's a whole bunch of reporting now saying the Doge idea that it would save hundreds of billions of dollars was always a pipe dream. | ||
| It didn't save money, but it did restructure and remodel government in a way that was favorable to Elon Musk and the oligarchs who surround him. | ||
| Mark is in Kingsland, Texas on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Mark. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, first-time caller. | |
| I'd just like to say this. | ||
| The TDS is rampant. | ||
| It all started with the fake news, the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, and it's continuing on. | ||
| The ICE issue right now that's going on is because of the 12 million unvetted, unverified, uneducated, and undocumented illegals that were allowed into our borders. | ||
| I think this is just a reason for all this turmoil is for them to continue their power struggle within themselves and here in America and abroad. | ||
| This is a globalist situation here that this man is talking with. | ||
| And I agree with everything Donald Trump has done. | ||
| And I say God bless America. | ||
| And did you have a question for Mr. Bramsky, Mark? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not really. | |
| I just believe this is all hoax. | ||
| This ICE issue is working to the Democrats' welfare, chaos, chaos, chaos, and they love it. | ||
| And otherwise... | ||
| All right, then let's hear from Tony in Salisbury, North Carolina, on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Tony. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, good morning. | |
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| I really don't have too many comments. | ||
| I just have some questions for you, if you could answer them for me. | ||
| What's happening in Georgia? | ||
| Could you tell me what the Trump, you think the Trump administration is doing and what they're trying to do throughout the nation? | ||
| And could you tell me if anybody in the Trump administration can be held accountable for what they're doing after Trump leaves office, even Trump, because then they get immunity, but not total immunity, because most of what he's doing. | ||
| Tony, your line is breaking up. | ||
| So hopefully Mr. Branskin can respond to just those first points that you raised. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| Tony, it's a great question. | ||
| There are two major things I'd like to talk about in Georgia. | ||
| First of them is what happened when Doge went in and started decimating the CDC. | ||
| Look, Georgia hires, has thousands upon thousands of public health workers attached to the CDC. | ||
| Those workers were receiving income from the federal government. | ||
| That income was then spent in local communities, at cafes, at restaurants, at bookshops, whatever it might be. | ||
| Now that income has disappeared because nearly one in four, I believe, I may have the numbers slightly off, but a huge percentage of the CDC staff have been fired or placed on administrative leave because of the Doge purchase. | ||
| Well, that's shocking. | ||
| And, you know, again, it doesn't matter if you're a Republican or Democrat. | ||
| There were entire communities that were based around the CDC and people took pride, again, Republican, Democrat, independent alike. | ||
| They took pride in having the CDC and the CDC staff as part of the community. | ||
| And that's been gone. | ||
| And there are reports that it's cost Georgia hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars of lost income. | ||
| That's an incredibly tangible outcome of the Doge cuts. | ||
| Now, the second thing that's going on in Georgia that isn't Doge related is the recent FBI raid of the Fulton County elections offices. | ||
| Now, again, you can be Democrat, Republican, Independent. | ||
| That should send chills down your spine. | ||
| Because what that means is an election six years ago nearly that was investigated time and time again and there was found to be no credible fraud. | ||
|
Society's Fleeing Response
00:04:59
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unidentified
|
You don't have to take my word for it. | |
| You can take Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger's word for it. | ||
| He's a Republican. | ||
| There was no credible evidence of fraud. | ||
| But the FBI went in looking for nebulous evidence of fraud and looking to seize ballots. | ||
| Well, if they can do it about an election years in the past, you can bet your bottom dollar that someone in the FBI is thinking about how to do the same thing in 2026 in the midterm elections. | ||
| So what happened in Georgia last week ought to send chills down the spine of anybody who believes in the integrity of the election process and the Democratic process. | ||
| Now, your bigger question, who can be held accountable? | ||
| Look, the Supreme Court came up with that inane ruling last year that a president can do almost anything they want. | ||
| And as long as they tagline it in the line of official duty, it's almost impossible to hold them legally accountable. | ||
| I disagree with that ruling. | ||
| I think it came out of thin air. | ||
| There's no legal precedent to back it up. | ||
| But that's the ruling at the moment. | ||
| But that doesn't mean that other people in the Trump administration can't be held accountable. | ||
| It doesn't mean that Christy Noam can't be held accountable for clearly illegal orders given to ICE. | ||
| It doesn't mean that the people who've ordered the destruction of these boats in the Pacific and the Caribbean with no legal justification whatsoever. | ||
| Again, you don't have to take my word for it. | ||
| You can take Senator Rand Paul's word for it. | ||
| Those people are ordering their service members to commit illegal acts. | ||
| Let's hear from you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I profoundly hope that when this nightmare is over, when we resume a more normal, more democratic, more accountable form of politics, I profoundly hope that people who have issued orders that have resulted in this sort of bloodshed, that they are held to account and they are brought before courts to have to justify their actions. | |
| I do want to pause you because I do want to get you one more call. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, that doesn't make sense. | |
| There are millions and millions of undocumented people in this country. | ||
| People don't come to this country without documentation on a lark and a whim. | ||
| They come out of desperation. | ||
| They come fleeing economies that have crumbled. | ||
| They flee wars. | ||
| They flee. | ||
| We understand your point. | ||
| Let's hear from Paul in New York City on our line for the Statue of Liberty says. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I bring you poor, the tired, the hungry masses yearning to be free. | |
| That is a better thing. | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| Let's let our caller get our question in really quickly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sasha, terrorizing community. | |
| Do you mind? | ||
| We want to get in at least one more caller, please. | ||
| Go ahead, Paul, in New York City. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks so much. | |
| Yeah, a couple things, Sasha. | ||
| First of all, you know, you talk about the disruption to the federal workforce, et cetera, from these layoffs. | ||
| And I agree that they seem somewhat haphazard and not particularly well executed. | ||
| But being laid off and having your life disrupted is an extremely common experience for the vast majority of Americans. | ||
| You mentioned that, oh, these guys were, they laid off the people who were probationary employees. | ||
| Guess what? | ||
| Most Americans don't even have that classification because they don't get protections after two years. | ||
| That's a very common experience. | ||
| And it's very problematic when you have a portion of society that's protected in that way, where the rest of society isn't. | ||
| Likewise, with immunity and ICE, most police have immunity, whether it's by law, which is in many cases like New York City here, or just de facto. | ||
| They don't get punished when they beat people up. | ||
| I've seen it in just regular policing, not necessarily demonstrations. | ||
| But again, when we see it done with ICE and people who are demonstrating and they're upset about this because they're just so rough on them and they pull them out of cars, obviously killing is outrageous, but whatever. | ||
| These things happen around America all the time. | ||
| And somehow, you, Sasha, feel that if it's special people, like people in the government, or heaven forbid, academia experience this, it's outrageous. | ||
| But when average people experience it, Sasha, I don't hear you guys crying about it because it happens all the time. | ||
| All right, Paul, we're going to let Sasha respond because we're about out of time for this segment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Paul, it's a great question. | |
| And two things. | ||
| You're right about police officers having some immunity, but it's not absolute immunity, it's qualified immunity. | ||
| We'll leave this recorded program here. | ||
| You can finish watching it, though, if you go to our website, cspam.org. | ||
| Live now to remarks from President Trump. | ||
| And we'll find out whether or not he was right. | ||
| Mr. President, Texas, a Democrat won a special election in an area that you had won by 17 points. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What is your reaction to that? | |
| I don't know. | ||
| I didn't hear about it. | ||
| Somebody ran where? | ||
| In Texas. | ||
| A special election for legislators. | ||
| The ninth state senate seat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm not involved in that. | |
| That's a local Texas race. | ||
| You mean I won by 17? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And this person lost. | ||