On C-SPAN’s Washington Journal (02/16/2026), callers debated U.S. presidents’ legacies, with Trump (19 mentions) praised for tax cuts and economic claims but criticized for alleged authoritarianism, while Obama (15) dominated for healthcare and moral leadership. The episode also examined Venezuela’s 2024 election fallout—Maduro’s disputed defeat, opposition transparency via Resultados Venezuela, and the Trump administration’s cautious engagement with Del C. Rodriguez amid corruption allegations. Ultimately, partisan divides persist, but Venezuela’s crisis underscores how U.S. foreign policy still grapples with regime change and stability over hasty transitions. [Automatically generated summary]
Washington Journal: President's Day Conversations00:02:51
unidentified
All of this on C-SPAN and part of our coverage of America's 250th birthday.
Democracy.
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Coming up on Washington Journal this morning, along with your calls and comments live, author and presidential historian Lindsay Cherbinski on the role of the presidency and President Trump's use of executive power.
And then Matt Briney, Chief Communications and Marketing Officer for the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, will talk about the building of the new presidential library and plans for a July 4th opening.
And later, PBS Frontlines Juan Ravel will talk about his new documentary on the aftermath in Venezuela after the U.S. capture of Nicolas Maduro.
This is Washington Journal for President's Day, Monday, February 16th.
Originally created to celebrate George Washington's birthday, the federal holiday is now celebrated as a day to honor every person who has held the United States' highest office, the presidency.
So this morning, we want to hear from you.
Who is your favorite president and why?
Here's how you can join in on the conversation.
Republicans, your line is 202-748-8001.
Democrats, your line is 202-748-8000.
Independents, your line is 202-748-8002.
You can also send us a text message at 202-748-8003.
Include your first name, city, and state.
And you can also reach us on social media.
Our Facebook is facebook.com forward slash C-SPAN or on X at C-SPANWJ.
So we start this morning with President's Day.
I turn to a Times article on the day.
The headline is 10 Surprising Facts About President's Day.
If you scroll a little bit over, it says, on the earliest federal day enacted, one of the earliest federal holidays enacted by Congress, President's Day honors a legacy of the first U.S. President, George Washington.
It's observed on the third Monday of February each year.
The special day is celebrated through patriotic parades, historical reenactments, and readings of major presidential speeches.
If you go down just a little bit further, it notes that despite its popular name, the federal holiday known as President's Day is officially called, quote, Washington's Birthday under Section 6103A in the Title V of the U.S. Code.
Now, since 1896, the Senate has observed Washington's birthday by reading his 7,000-word farewell address every year in the legislative session.
Last year, it was read by Mississippi Republican Senator Roger Wicker.
With me, a predominant motive has been to endeavor to gain time to our country to settle and mature its yet recent institutions and to progress without interruption to that degree of strength and consistency, which is necessary to give it, humanly speaking, the command of its own fortunes.
Though in reviewing the incidents of my administration, I am unconscious of intentional effort.
I'm nevertheless too sensible of my defects not to think it probable that I may have committed many errors.
Whatever they may be, I fervently beseech the Almighty to avert or mitigate the evils to which they may end.
I shall also carry with me the hope that my country will never cease to view them with indulgence and that after 45 years of my life dedicated to its service with an upright zeal, the faults of incompetent abilities will be consigned to oblivion, as myself must soon be to the mansions of rest.
Relying on its kindness in this as in other things, and actuated by that fervent love towards it, which is so natural to a man who views it in the native soil of himself and his progenitors for several generations,
I anticipate with pleasing expectation that retreat in which I promise myself to realize without alloy the sweet enjoyment of partaking in the midst of my fellow citizens,
the benign influence of good laws under a free government, the ever-favorite object of my heart, and the happy reward, as I trust, of our mutual cares, labors, and dangers.
Now that was Senator Roger Wicker last year reading his farewell address of George Washington.
The reading rotates every year between parties.
The Senate reconvenes on Monday, February 23rd at 3 p.m., in which that at that time, Senator Kaine will be recognized to read Washington's farewell address.
Now this morning is President's Day, so we are asking you guys to call in and tell us who your favorite president is.
Before we turn to some calls, another article for us this morning from history.com, and the headline is, Why some states don't observe President's Day in February.
It says, Among the states that honors President's Day on an alternate day, Indiana has long celebrated George Washington and Abraham Lincoln at the end of the year.
If you scroll down just a little bit, it says that when did Indiana start celebrating Washington and Lincoln separately?
Rather than celebrating a combined Federals Day in February, as many states do, Indiana honors the first and 16th president on different days.
Indiana marks the birth of Lincoln, who lived in the estate for 14 years and officially proclaimed Thanksgiving a holiday on Friday after Thanksgiving.
The state's observation of Washington's birthday is a day before Christmas.
The separate birthday celebrations have recognized, have been recognized by state employees since 1947 and have been observed on their current dates since 1979.
And so it goes on to answer more about why there are two separate days for President's Day, two different versions, and the like.
Because he, first of all, he established the Affordable Care Act, and that expanded health care to millions of people, and it made health care more affordable.
He saved the country after the housing and economic crisis of 2008.
He got Osama bin Laden.
He restored relations and made friendly relations with Cuba.
So he was definitely a promoter of peace and relations with other countries.
So that's why President Obama is my favorite president.
And let's go now to Facebook and Text and X, where we got some answers.
We're looking for more from you guys, so continue to call in.
First, Rob Ryber.
He says Donald Trump is the best because he's trying to expose and end the law affair of the lawfare Obama and Biden created.
Ronald Reagan, who turned the page from indulgent liberalism to responsibility and freedom, says Chris Medford from Massachusetts.
My favorite president is George Washington.
There's no one close.
Like me, a military man.
Our nation called, we served.
He was a professional land surveyor.
I'm a registered engineer.
He freed all of his slaves upon the death of his wife, Martha.
A slave was his aide in the war, and they were fast friends.
Henry Lee was right, quote, he was first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.
From Harry, from Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania.
And we'll turn now to Eddie from Atlanta, a Republican.
Good morning, Eddie.
Who's your favorite president and why?
unidentified
Well, my favorite president, you know, Biden was my president because, you know, when he came in, you know, my, my, you know, my, see, I'm, I'm confused now.
Okay, you said your favorite president was Biden because when he came in, he what?
unidentified
He, you know, he helped everybody.
He was, he was a humble president, you know, even though people didn't like him because, you know, he gave so much money to the war, to the war, you know.
But my bank account got fat.
You know, he's the only president I've seen where my bank account grows, my finance grow, my insurance was very reasonable, reasonable under Biden.
You know, I wish he could have got another term still that stupid Trump got in office to just default everybody.
You know, Trump, the worst president, I think, in the world.
Eddie, let me call, let me ask you, because you called it on the Republican line.
Are you a Republican or?
unidentified
I vote for Poe.
I vote for the party that can come and make America great.
I seen Reagan.
You know, Reagan did a pretty decent job, but I kind of more lean to the Democrats because they seem like they help more everybody still sticking like, see, Trump, maybe Trump make everybody make the Republicans sick, you know.
So that's why I couldn't stand Trump because he seemed like they wishy-washy.
You know, they want to take from American people instead of, on my point, then Gil.
The Democrats give, do more for everybody instead of just seem like, just seem like for the only parties, you know, they wishy-washy.
I think Obama was the best president out of every president we've had in 400 years.
I wish he could have stayed in there forever.
He made the Affordable Care help thing, and that helped so many working class people.
And just to have his intellect, his calmness, I'm turning 73 this year, and I've just been upset at the president we have now because I say I'm a senior citizen.
I wanted a good, nice, common sense president.
I didn't want a radical or maybe an authoritarian.
You know, when you get my age, you want to relax and be able to enjoy life.
But Obama would have been perfect for now.
And my second one would be President, I'll say Johnson, because although Johnson was from a southern state, he still believed in equality for all races.
And he did a lot for the black Americans.
And he was from the South.
You know, they usually don't care for blacks down there, but he was equal for everybody.
So that's my two presidents, Obama and President Johnson.
Can anybody realistically think of America without Medicaid and Medicare?
Can anybody think of America without the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Public Accommodations Act?
All these things were enacted because of his leadership and his just ability to get things done.
The second person I would name with President would be Ronald Reagan.
I didn't vote for him back when he was running for president, but he won 49 states, including states like New York and California.
He really brought the Soviet Union to its knees.
Can you imagine if the Cold War were still going on?
Obama's Moral Leadership00:15:11
unidentified
And he also revived America's spirit in terms of embracing capitalism, which is taking billions of people out of poverty around the world, according to the World Bank.
President Obama, because he was a good family man.
He had morals.
He had principles.
And he got us through a financial crisis.
He dealt with the Ebola virus.
A lot of people forget about that Ebola virus.
It was killing people in Africa.
They thought it was going to come to America.
He took care of it.
As a matter of fact, he put stuff in place.
So when COVID came, it would have been a lot easier if the person who had been in the office at the time followed those principles that he had laid out for communal diseases like that with the NIH.
The other president I would say is other things about Obama.
He was cool.
He had a lot of swag.
And he was just like that.
The other president I would say would be Lyndon Johnson because he opened up things for a lot of people in America, especially with health, as the other gentleman has said as well.
And one other thing about Obama, he cared.
And America is always about opening up, not closing down.
The more you open up, the better.
Even individually, as we open, we better as human beings oppose the closing down.
Simple principles.
And he had principles.
We need somebody in office to have principles and morals.
My favorite president is going to be Andrew Jackson.
Something that we really need to focus on is, you know, they called him the common man of democracy.
The really thing that we need to focus on before Nation today that he did was pay off all of the national debt.
So that's something that we really need to focus on.
I think that Trump and just everybody in general need to focus on.
He did have some bad things that we kind of won't talk about, but he had some great terms trying to strengthen the presidential power, you know, and then just military leadership as well.
So I think you got to go with Andrew Jackson, you know, like he's just the calendar man for America.
Again, guys, we were asking about your favorite president.
Let me recite the lines for you.
Republicans, your line is 202-748-8001.
Democrats, your line is 202-748-8000.
Independents, your line is 202-748-8002.
And we've actually got quite a few responses on social and through text.
So I'll read a couple.
On X, we have from Elvin Brown.
None of the American presidents are my favorite, but with the exception of Calvin Coolidge.
Got to write him down, who gave us Indigenous people's rights to citizenship.
Oh, a second for Calvin Coolidge.
Calvin Coolidge was the only president to ever truly cut the federal budget, but my unitary executive article to POTUS, Donald J. Trump is undoubtedly the goat.
All right, I'll put one for Coolidge, one for Trump there.
Calvin Coolidge, okay.
We have got a bunch of Calvin Coolidge stands here.
Calvin Coolidge understood the least government is the best government.
Abraham Lincoln says Anthony P. Because of his leadership during our Civil War.
Let me mark Lincoln on my sheet.
Someone from Blue Sky says George Washington is the goat.
Ken Burns reinforced it with his recent American Revolution doc, though his compliments were mostly pre-presidency.
In that case, I'll say Lincoln, FDR, and Obama.
All right.
Just marking these on the list.
Another for Andrew Jackson.
Andrew Jackson says, Kevin, he wasn't perfect, but he had the courage to make America great again.
Oh, this is a new one.
Grover, Cleveland, says Ken Hamilton.
Grover, Cleveland, he advocated for the limited federal government set up by farmers of the U.S. Constitution.
And that's all we have for right now.
We're hoping you guys send us in some more on Twitter and Facebook and Blue Sky and wherever you can find us.
My favorite president in this past century and the favorite one in my lifetime has been Harry Truman.
And Harry Truman has had more impact on my life than any other particular president.
I served under him as a submarine officer.
He was my commander-in-chief.
And I inherited some of his beliefs, one particularly concerning civil rights.
Harry Truman was my preeminent hero on civil rights.
When I was still in the Navy in 1948, I was just a young officer.
Harry Truman ordained over tremendous condemnation that all racial discrimination would be ended in the military service.
In the submarine force, the Navy, the Army, the Air Force, Coast Guard, and so forth.
This was more than 10 years, 12 years, maybe, before Rosa Park sat down in the front of a bus in Montgomery and before anybody knew who Martin Luther King Jr. was.
And Harry Truman was one that did it.
And obviously later, President London Johnson was another hero of mine who signed into law prohibitions against racial discrimination in the schools and so forth.
But Harry Truman, to answer your question, was the one that had most influence on that.
Laurent from Beverly Hills, California, an independent.
You're next.
Who's your favorite president and why?
unidentified
Yeah, good morning, everybody.
Ronald Reagan, of course.
Okay.
Ronald Reagan was a good-looking guy.
He had a great relationship with his wife.
They both loved each other very much.
That was good for the time.
We needed that.
But his acting skills helped him to be extremely polished whenever he spoke, whenever he accomplished major things with racing against the Russians and the space program and so forth.
And he put the Russians in their place.
So he had what it took in terms of genetics and personality and strength.
And he got things done.
The wall came down in Berlin.
All of the nuclear treaties and mutually assured destruction deals went into place.
Well, I think you can actually just go on our website and search it, but I wonder if we can get, I wonder, Kathy, Kathy, I wonder if we can get back to the question.
Do you want to go on more about why you like the president?
unidentified
He's lowered our taxes.
He's given tax breaks to waiters and waitresses with no tax on tips.
He's what was the other one?
No tax on tips, no tax on Social Security for our elders, which I am.
And he, like I said, he's shut down eight wars.
He's trying to do that.
He took bullets for our country.
Now one man said, oh, the other guy, Washington fought in a war.
Well, President Trump took a bullet for our country and another assassination attempt.
What more do you want?
He doesn't need to be doing this, you know.
Let's see.
But you let you need to stop letting Democrats call in on the Republican line.
But President Trump is the best.
He's trying his hardest.
He may not have the best words, but, you know, if Democrats would quit fighting what he's doing and just let our economy, the stock market has been hitting 50,000.
It never ever hit 50,000 SP.
So the stocks are going great.
The economy is getting better.
Gas is low.
I really think that if the Democrats would quit picking on President Trump, that they would see how and talk about what he does, the good he does, because he's done a lot.
Jimmy Carter lived in a little house with his wife when He didn't, when he was defeated, he worked as hard as he could for Habitat for Humanity for many years until he died.
And what did Trump do?
He throws a TV fit and tries to overthrow the government.
Definitely George Washington, the father of our country, and Donald J. Trump.
Definitely the worst two were probably Obama and Lincoln and probably Biden because of stupidity, but the last two, the worst, they sure divided our country.
Donald J. Trump is also trying to save this country from racist.
He is the least racist president I've seen.
He hires all people in his staff, and he's trying to help the individual.
He's trying to help the people that work in this country, not the people that just get the free ride.
He's done a lot for young people my age as far as being inspirational.
You know, I'm not politically correct.
You know, I'm kind of learning, so I apologize.
And also, you know, he's helped, you know, young African Americans inspired to be better for where I come from.
So I'm totally Rhode Island.
And also, I just want to spread awareness on a side note of that there is someone in America that has a brain scan that is a human rights, you know, victim.
I just want to come on the news and spread that awareness.
His name is Marcus Ellis.
And I love your show.
I love what y'all are doing.
I hope he gets help that he's spread awareness that what's going on with him is not normal.
Well, today I'd like to give three incompletes, starting with Lincoln, Kennedy, and Trump.
And the reason why I'm giving incompletes, obviously, for what happened to Kennedy and Lincoln, he never got the job done.
But what Donald Trump is trying to do, the totality of what he is trying to achieve as king of the world, whether people want to agree with it or not, the president of the United States is the king of the world.
Any non-American will tell you that.
We are the greatest thing that has ever been put together on this planet.
And that's why Elon wants to go to another planet because this one could be the greatest planet, a great planet.
Elon wants to conquer his own.
He can't be the king of the world in the United States because he wasn't born here.
But my point is on Trump is that if he doesn't achieve what he's trying to do, he won't be great.
People called Lincoln white trash.
That's what he was called.
What he was trying to do, we cannot understand because what was so bad then, but yet they still called him white trash.
And then when he finished the job, he couldn't get it done.
You know, I'll tell you, Douglas may have been a great president, but he didn't get the opportunity.
Same thing with if RFK and MLK joined as a ticket and ran in 68, there would be no political parties.
The only heir apparent to MAGA, and this is to MAGA, the only heir apparent to what you're trying to do is General Flynn, because he is when Trump won in 16, he was the most dangerous man inside your Washington C-SPAN bubble.
This country, and if Trump doesn't do what he has to do, it's all going to fall back on all of us, Democrats, Republicans.
So watch out for the Prius in front of you because that's a mental disorder.
And this country better wake up or the white trash is going to be what New York City looks like today.
I want to turn before we get back to some callers to our online folks who have sent in a number of responses.
Barb from Long Grove, Illinois says, JFK was my favorite.
Let me just mark that before I continue.
JFK was my favorite.
I sent several letters to the White House when I was in high school and received answers to my questions.
He was more outspoken than other presidents and was a role model to young people at the time.
Luann Taylor on Facebook says George Washington because he was our only independent president and warned about those parties.
We should have listened.
Jim Leehart, he says toss up.
FDR, because he led the nation through the second and third toughest times in our history behind Lincoln in the Civil War.
FDR's persistence and stamina and dedication to the overall deserves the ultimate respect.
The other is FDR's successor, Harry Truman.
It took a whole lot of courage for a working, stiff, turned politician to take on such a load and work through it successfully.
Yes, he made a controversial decision to nuke Japan.
He was screwed either way, so he did the math.
That takes real leadership.
Okay, I'm just going to mark Truman on mine.
Ronald Reagan, he made us all proud to be Americans again after the Carter slump, says Don Simmons.
So I'm going to mark Reagan here on my list.
And Kareem says, it's easily Obama because I only look at my lifetime when asking the question.
I did not agree with a lot of the policies nor the continued war in the Middle East, in the Mideast, but he brought respect and normalcy to the office like none other.
He tried to explain things with a level of decorum and honesty that I've never seen in office today.
I locked George WT, but that's because he was unintentionally funny.
Now, I assume that's George W. Bush, so I'm just going to mark that.
If it's Washington, Kareem, I apologize, but you let me know.
Greg from Texas, a Republican, you're next.
Who's your favorite president?
unidentified
Why?
Yeah, my favorite presidents are John F. Kennedy and Donald J. Trump.
Mainly because of the overwhelming accomplishments that John F. Kennedy managed to effect, and that would be the same for Mr. Trump.
And I don't want to attack any other presidents or make any comments contrary about anybody.
I wasn't alive when George Washington was president.
So it just seems ludicrous to me to, I don't, yeah, a favorite based on what?
Something you read, history.
But I was a child when JFK was assassinated.
And, you know, I'm still alive now.
So I've seen presidents throughout my lifetime.
And I think both of them are standing firm to try to accomplish amazing things.
JFK with the space program and backing off Everyone in the Bay of Pigs and Donald J. Trump for the numerous accomplishments that he procured, you know, in the face of diversity and everything else that's going.
Donald Trump, for all the obvious reasons and everything he's accomplished and all the crap that the socialists have put him through since he's hit both of his terms so far.
The social said to try to sabotage him every step of the way.
They hated the man when he came down the staircase and said he was going to run for president.
Later on, the Washington Journal, PBS Frontline Director Juan Ravel discusses his new documentary about the future of Venezuela after the U.S.'s capture of Nicolas Maduro.
But first, on this President's Day morning, a conversation with author and presidential historian Lindsay Schervinsky on the changing role of the presidency and President Trump's use of executive power.
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Why are you doing this?
This is outrageous.
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Fridays, C-SPAN presents a rare moment of unity.
Ceasefire, where the shouting stops and the conversation begins.
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Joining us now to talk more about President's Day and the current president's use of executive power is Lindsay Chervinsky, who is a presidential historian, currently at George Washington, an author, discussing, obviously.
the news of the day here.
Lindsay, thanks so much for joining us this morning.
Well, the observation of President's Day was created as a national holiday in 1885, and that's really when it became a federal holiday for all employees.
But the concept of celebrating George Washington actually goes back much farther.
And that is important because the official name for this holiday is actually George Washington's birthday.
We have lumped in President's Day as sort of an advertising mechanism, but it still remains George Washington's birthday.
And that started during the Revolutionary War in 1778 when Colonial Williamsburg held the first celebration in honor of the then Commander-in-Chief's birthday.
And that really continued throughout all of American history.
At times, we've added presidents like Abraham Lincoln.
Alabama includes Thomas Jefferson in their celebrations, but really the heart of it is all about George Washington, which I have to admit, being here at the George Washington Presidential Library, we don't mind very much.
I was going to say, you're executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library, but tell me, why is it important to reflect on the past of all of the president's legacies?
I mean, so I think we have to be really honest that, you know, Millard Fillmore and John Tyler and James Buchanan are not in the same realm as the George Washingtons and the Abraham Lincolns.
So I don't think that people should feel like they have to celebrate all of them equally.
But it is an opportunity to reflect on the power of the office and how important it is to our daily life.
It is the only office that represents all Americans, and it has a tremendous ability to shape foreign policy, economic policy, and things that affect how we live.
So it's a good day to step back and think about where has the office come from, where is it today, and where do we want it to go?
Well, I think in Washington's case, it's slightly unusual because so little of the presidency was actually written down.
The Constitution is, as it is currently written today with all of our amendments, is the second shortest written Constitution in the world.
When we just had passed it in 1788, when it was ratified, it was just over 4,000 words.
And very few were on the presidency, which meant that Washington had to create all of these precedents and fill out what I call kind of the fuzzy bits of the presidency.
How does a president dress?
How does a president interact with other branches of government?
How does a president interact with citizens on a daily basis?
Those are the things that made Washington extraordinary, in addition to, of course, establishing two key precedents, the civilian control of the military and the peaceful transfer of power.
Now, other presidents that we remember as great tend to lead in moments of national crisis, presidents like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, or represented key turning points in American history, like Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower.
And their leadership in those big moments is what we tend to remember.
So sometimes the change comes because we are taking into account factors that we didn't before.
Andrew Jackson is a great example of this.
He was really celebrated as sort of the working man's president.
But as we've come to include things like what was their position on slavery, did they actually own enslaved individuals and bring them to the White House?
How do they treat Native Americans?
His position in sort of the American esteem has declined pretty precipitously.
Others, like Dwight D. Eisenhower, his position has risen because as more information came out and was declassified, people realized just how incredibly important he was to almost every governing decision.
He had sort of put forward an image of being kind of this old daughtery, you know, caretaker, not really on top of what was happening.
But in practice, he was actually a very active president.
And so the full complete record, once it was declassified, really changed our perspective.
And the last way that I think a presidential legacy can change is depending on what happens afterwards.
George W. Bush is a great example of this.
He left office with incredibly low approval ratings.
But as different administrations came in, we changed how we thought about him because we started to appreciate qualities that maybe weren't as important to us while he was actually in office.
Well, I think a bunch of the early presidents, there is always the question about how do we think about both their presidential leadership in combination with whether or not they held people in bondage.
And those are two really complicated thoughts to hold in our head at the same time, but I believe that we are capable of doing it as humans and that we can assess both their contributions and maybe their own personal moral failings.
And we don't have to balance them like we would a checkbook.
I think for more recent presidents, we also struggle to objectively view their legacy because maybe we don't have all the information yet.
Maybe it's not fully declassified.
Maybe we still have memories of what their administration was and they're tinted by our partisan perspective.
So it definitely takes, I think, at least 30 years for a presidential legacy to start to calcify because we have all the information, some of the passions have started to subside, and we can see how their policies evolved, survived, or what impact they had after they left office.
You know, I mean, the presidency was always supposed to be important.
The framers were very concerned with having what they called an energetic executive, meaning one that could make decisions quickly in moments of crisis, could implement the laws and enforce them, or if there was a war, could be a decisive commander-in-chief.
But the framers also really anticipated that Congress would play a central role, and they believed that Congress would be the main body representing the American people, putting forth legislation, establishing financial policy.
And Washington and the early presidents really lived by those expectations.
Even Washington, who carved out really major spheres of influence for himself over foreign policy and domestic crisis policy, still was incredibly respectful of Congress and was willing to subject himself to congressional scrutiny as part of their constitutional oversight.
It's interesting that you say that because this president, President Trump obviously is somebody who doesn't always seem as willing to subject himself to congressional oversight and scrutiny.
A lot has been said this term about his use of executive power and his efforts to expand that executive power.
I wonder how does the way that the president and the White House now use executive power compare to other presidents in the past?
Well, I think we're seeing a couple of key shifts that have occurred over time, especially over the last several administrations, but maybe have accelerated in the current administration.
So the first is the rise of executive orders.
And this is actually largely because Congress has become quite absent from its governing responsibilities.
If you don't have a congressional body who's willing to pass legislation, to make compromises, to work across the aisle, then you're not going to get anything done.
And presidents get frustrated and they start to pass executive orders.
And we've seen this over the last several decades.
Now, in terms of sheer numbers, that has increased in the last year, but this was a process that I think began several decades ago.
And I largely attributed it actually to really weak parties.
If you have weak parties, then you can't have a party that is protecting moderates, that is encouraging that kind of cooperation and bipartisanship, protecting against intense primary challenges or weeding out some of the crazy voices.
And so you see a breakdown in Congress actually working as a governing body.
And I think that's really one of the reasons we're seeing a rise in executive action and executive orders in particular.
Well, they had kind of a complex relationship with executive power because obviously when Washington first came into office in 1789, that was only six years after the end of the Revolutionary War.
And so when you have just won a war to depose a king, you are going to be very wary about recreating one.
And yet they had also gone through a period under the Articles of Confederation where they didn't have an executive really at all.
They had Congress that didn't have enough authority to raise money, to create one foreign policy on behalf of the nation, or to settle disputes between the states.
And so they kind of had this love-hate relationship where they knew that they needed it, but they wanted it to be sort of restrained.
And they did try and put checks and balances in to ensure that the worst sort of excesses of a monarchical system would not be repeated.
And largely that was because they trusted Washington.
They trusted Washington to use this power safely and to put in place norms and customs that would hopefully curb the impulses of his successors.
And it doesn't mean that there weren't questions about his use of power.
You know, for example, Washington was the first president to, of course, issue a presidential pardon.
And he issued a number during the Whiskey Rebellion, but we actually have one that he issued earlier that is for a rum smuggler who had brought in too much rum.
There was sort of limits on what you could do.
And Washington offered that person mercy because he recognized that they had largely lived a quality and upstanding life and had just made this one mistake.
But there were questions about what is the appropriate use of a presidential pardon.
And in a lot of ways, those are things that we, of course, are still discussing today.
The number of pardons has increased pretty dramatically, and that was certainly not the expectation or intent of the framers who expected that that should be used sparingly.
In terms of parties, this process, what's really interesting about today is it actually is quite similar to the 1790s in that you did have these weak parties.
And because there are weak parties, you have a huge rise of partisanship.
And as a result, people view everything, whether it's health care, response to pandemics, foreign interference in elections, citizenship, immigration, freedom of speech, all through the lens of partisanship.
The 1824 election was thrown to the House because no one candidate won enough votes.
And it came down to John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson.
John Quincy Adams ended up winning, and Andrew Jackson's supporters called it a corrupt bargain.
And they argued that John Quincy Adams was willing to make a deal with Henry Clay, and Henry Clay would become the Secretary of State in return for swinging his votes.
So there was that argument.
And then in 1876, again, there was a contested election, and there was a committee that determined the outcome and put Rutherford B. Hayes into the White House.
So I think the idea that maybe people are disgruntled about the outcome of an election is a very American experience.
That's okay.
It's okay to feel passionately about the outcome and maybe to feel really disappointed.
Where I think it's really important is that none of those defeated presidents resorted to violence to try and change the outcome.
Because in the American system, we accept the determination of the voters and we accept the determination of Congress if they are the ultimate arbiter.
And that's what it means to live in a republic: you settle your disputes in the ballot box.
I like, you know, I want to know about when they talk about George Washington, why do they go on and praise him so much when he owns slaves and he was treated people inhumane?
How can somebody be that great with what he did to slaves and own slaves?
This is a good question, and it's one that we grapple with here at Mount Vernon: how do you both appreciate the contributions someone made to a nation while also acknowledging their real failings?
And that is a story that we are committed to telling.
We just opened a new exhibit on Juneteenth that is a permanent exhibit exploring the life of the enslaved people here at Mount Vernon.
I think there are a couple answers to that question.
So the first is that we have to tell the whole story.
We have to tell, of course, the people that lived here that made his life possible and his contributions because both shaped the outcome of the nation and shaped the world that we are living in today.
The second is we have to tell a story of change over time because that's, of course, what we want all people to be able to do.
And Washington did change his behavior and he changed his perspective on slavery over the course of his lifetime.
Earlier as a young man, when he inherited enslaved people from his father, he could be quite callous and sell people and split up families.
And by the end of his life, after seeing black soldiers fight with incredible valor in the Continental Army, he emancipated the people that he legally controlled in his will, which was a very public statement and not something that everyone did.
And while, of course, we wish that he had done more and it's easy for us to say, you know, I wish he had said something while he was alive or president, that change is really, really important and is something that we should always, of course, tell as part of the revolutionary story, but that we should ask of all people.
The right to life of the three mentioned in the opening to the Declaration of Independence is the most foundational.
When President Trump nominated three conservative justices who correctly said there is no right to an abortion guarantee in the Constitution, would you agree that that and other actions he has taken make him the most pro-life president in history?
Well, I think whether or not he's the most pro-life president in history is probably a matter of opinion, so I'll leave it for each voter to decide.
But I just want to make one quick distinction, which is that the Declaration of Independence is a wonderful document, and it is our aspirational touchstone.
The life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness is essentially what it means to try and be an American.
But it is not a legal document.
It does not form a government.
It is not a body of laws, unlike the Constitution, which of course says we the people in order to form a more perfect union.
So I like to think of those two things as connected.
The Declaration is what we aspire to be, and the Constitution is how we try and get just one step closer to being a little bit more perfect on a daily basis.
And you can join on our conversation talking more about presidential history and President Trump's use of executive power.
Republicans, your line is 202-748-8001.
Democrats, your line is 202-748-8000.
Independents, your line is 202-748-8002.
Now, Lindsay, I want to ask you about an interview that the president gave to New York Times a month ago in which he said that his own morality is the only thing that can stop him.
I want to go down a little bit.
It says here, when asked if there were any limits to his global powers, Trump said, Yeah, there is one thing, my own morality, my own mind.
It's the only one thing that can stop me.
I wonder, just as a presidential historian, Lindsay, how do you believe the president sees his role as president and of course his limitations?
Well, I think that, you know, I don't want to put myself in the mind of the president because that, I can't do that for anyone, but I do think that that statement reflects a certain commitment to using authority in a way that no president has been able to do so before.
And certainly, some presidents would like to, or would have liked to, have their own interests or their own morality be their only check.
But of course, the Constitution specifies that there are several other checks.
There's Congress, which is responsible for creating the laws and providing oversight of the executive, including things like pulling back funding if they don't like what the executive is doing.
There is the judicial system, and of course, ultimately ending up with the Supreme Court, which can overrule a presidential action.
But most importantly, there are the American people, and that is both through elections but also through making their opinions known and what they want to have happen.
Now, what I think is the interesting part of President Trump's argument in that case is that so many of those different elements of checks depend on people being willing to use them.
So, whether or not Congress is willing to or the Supreme Court is willing to is, I think, a question that we're exploring right now as a nation.
But people's role, citizens' role in checking all officials that represent us is an essential part of what it means to be an American.
I think one interesting thing about that quote as well, Lindsay, is that he's being asked about his own foreign policy.
And I think that we're seeing him in a lot of ways reshape foreign policy and kind of the world order.
I wonder if he has or if you've seen other presidents do that, or is that an unprecedented way that he's utilizing his power on the foreign stage, on the world stage, really?
Well, I think, you know, since I would say World War I, we could maybe even go back a little bit farther and say Theodore Roosevelt, the United States has played a very large role on the world stage.
Before then, we certainly aspired to.
You know, the Monroe Doctrine has been in the news lately, and that was President Monroe's statement written by John Quincy Adams that said that the Western hemisphere was closed to further European colonization.
That was really an aspirational statement as opposed to one that actually reflected American power.
But since, let's say, the start of the 1900s, the United States has been a position of power, and there have been moments, including Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and I would include Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, where presidents have shifted what the international world order looks like.
They have shifted what our priorities are, how we think about our allies, and how we approach the American role in the world.
What is notable about this moment is that it is certainly one of those turning points, but it seems to be a rejection of sort of the consensus that we had seen from FDR all the way up to President Biden that this world order and our allies are useful to the United States and beneficial for us to be in that leadership position.
So I wanted to make a comment because I hear this stuff every time I hear slavery brought up.
That timeframe that y'all are discussing, you're missing major pieces of it.
All right.
Number one, you're missing the fact that Native Americans uprose with Abraham Lincoln to end that ideology.
Second of all, you are missing the portion where most of those individuals were used to having somebody taking care of them.
And a lot of them decided to stay with the individuals.
When they came over here, it was an ideology that was attacking our country.
Same goes for every bit of history that you're talking about right now, from Teddy Roosevelt all the way up to current times.
What we face is a poisonous ideology.
And the history that you're seeing is how we counteracted those poisonous ideologies.
Yes, our government is made up of rules and regulations and laws.
But what you're not understanding, because you think all of your history comes from the British, is that the laws that are laid down for our government are the actual laws of this land passed down from the Native American tribes that originally belong here, a group called the Children of the Moon.
So when you're looking through our history, remember, most of the stories that you hear only represent 1% of the population during that timeframe.
The only way you can find the true history of what happened during those timeframes is to go to each one of those cities that are in the United States, go in their eye cart, their eye, you know, go into the library, into the ICAT.
I can't say it properly.
Go into the library and look at the Pacific times that you're looking at and look how the rest of the nation did it.
Because most of the time when you're discussing these issues and these atrocities that have happened, you are missing the mass population's view on these subjects.
And when you're talking about slavery and the Civil War, you're only comparing two sides.
One who wanted slavery and one who did not.
But that one was actually four different wars.
That boiled down to the right to own somebody or the right not to to either federalize the government or leave the power in the states.
So stop trying to hinder everything.
Look at the true ideology of that time frame before you throw insults at people.
Yeah, well, I always encourage people to go into archives.
I think that's a great thing to do and to look at the primary sources.
The primary sources are such a valuable source.
And so, for example, the primary sources tell us that most of our laws, including the Constitution, are borrowed from common law, which is the British system.
The primary sources also tell us that George Washington was grappling with his ideas on slavery because he was interacting with noted abolitionists like the Marquis de Lafayette during the course of the revolution, and that these ideas about whether or not slavery should exist or there was another form of labor that would be more efficient and the rights of people that were actually enslaved, those were ideas that were circulating in communities at that time.
So I agree, we should absolutely look at the ideas that were present and the conversations that were taking place.
I think the challenge is that if we do that and we only look at, let's say, the white enslaved owners, we are ignoring the ideas and the perspectives of the enslaved people who did not need a change in law or did not need an abolitionist campaign to know that the system that they were being held in was one of degradation and forced labor.
So there were a lot of people at the time who felt that the institution was cruel and unjust.
And some people like Washington did something about it and others did not.
Yes, well, the United States declared independence in 1776, and Britain officially recognized that independence with the Treaty of Paris in 1783.
And our current Constitution was ratified in 1788.
So if you're looking for sort of the start of our current government, 1788 is really the start.
But I would say the nation really begins in 1776, and we are celebrating its 250th birthday this year.
I think you're right that the first law didn't go into effect all that long afterwards.
It was the abolition of the international slave trade into the United States.
But that was actually done for economic reasons because it made people's existing property, property, more valuable.
And that was something that a lot of actually people who owned plantations were pushing for because it would increase the value of the people they already held.
What I think is notable about, as we're talking about the global history of slavery, is that Great Britain, who of course, yes, introduced slavery to the North American colonies, abolished slavery first.
They abolished slavery before we did.
And they had, not only did they have as much to lose, but they also compensated the people who were plantation owners to avoid the Civil War.
I'm 87 years old, and that's the point that I want to make, because my question is, why do the American people, or why doesn't the American people,
vote in some younger blood that knows what is going on in the world today instead of what took place back 60, 70, 80 years ago?
Let's get into now and get in today's world, not one that was 80 years ago.
Those old people that you've got in Senate and you got in Congress, you got in the presidency, you need to get them in younger minds in there to control our country.
Number one.
Number two, our country is headed for a Trump family dictatorship if it continues the way it's going.
I think some younger politicians, some younger officials would be fantastic.
And actually, if we look at the course of history, we're at a particularly odd moment where there is a concentration of older representatives, older senators, older people on the Supreme Court, older presidents in a way that we haven't really seen over the course of American history.
And that's partly because people are living longer and, in case of positions like the Supreme Court, don't want to go off of the court.
When the country first started, there used to be a lot more turnover, and people wouldn't be on the bench nearly as long as we're seeing today.
I think the reason we're not seeing that as much yet, although I do think that that's coming, because I think there's a groundswell for some new ideas and new perspectives, is because the party structure and the campaign structure and the financial structure that helps people run for office and get elected to office is controlled by the people in office.
And so they are often reluctant to replace themselves or replace their friends and allies with younger people and have the control of the systems and the finances that make that possible.
So, you know, Johnson is such an interesting case because Johnson's earlier career as a teacher in a very poor district in Texas really forced him to think about what economic opportunity meant for education.
And he was in a primarily Latino district where there was, I believe, there was no running water, there was no electricity in the schoolhouse, and the children came from families that were really hard off, if I'm remembering the story correctly.
And that really caused him to think about what we actually need to have a fair shot at proving ourselves based on merit.
It's, you know, one thing to say that we're a merit-based system, but if you're hungry and you can't see at night because you don't have electricity, so you can't do your homework or you don't have running water, that is starting you at a position so far behind other people that it's really hard to catch up.
So I think he already had that mindset in place.
But when he was in Congress, he was representing a district and then a state that was deeply segregationist, that was deeply opposed to civil rights, and to rise in power for the Democratic Party.
He kind of towed that line.
Now, once he got into the office, I do believe he felt a little bit freed to pursue some of those objectives, but he had also seen the really incredible civil rights movement that had taken place at the beginning of JFK's presidency.
He had seen the impact of JFK's words to try and move civil rights along.
And Johnson was a brilliant, brilliant politician.
And he understood the opportunity, and I know this sounds crass, the opportunity provided by JFK's assassination to put forward civil rights legislation in Kennedy's honor, and that that type of opportunity would not come around very often.
Lincoln did not start off his presidency seeking to emancipate all enslaved people.
He certainly had been anti-slavery himself in his own personal life and in many of his speeches and writings prior to the presidency.
But he took a very pragmatic approach in that he was trying to avoid civil war and so was willing to make compromises up until the point that compromise was no longer possible.
Initially, his goal was really trying to keep the union together and he didn't want to alienate states like, for example, Maryland and Missouri that were both remained within the Union but had enslaved populations.
And so he was really trying to keep them on side.
As he moved into his presidency, he realized that enslaved labor was being used as a major source for the Confederacy and particularly for the Confederate Army.
And so the best way to cripple the Confederacy and to end the conflict once and for all was to take decisive action.
But even then, the Emancipation Proclamation only applied to states in the Confederacy.
It did not apply to all states in the Union.
And it actually took a series of amendments to make sure that slavery was abolished completely.
You guys do the most important work for everyone in this country.
I love C-SPAN because I get to hear all the voices.
You bring these divergent viewpoints and you present both sides of an issue and you allow people to make up their own minds.
I absolutely love C-SPAN.
I love to hear both sides.
I've watched C-SPAN every morning and it is unbiased.
And you bring in factual information for the callers to understand where they are in their comments.
It's probably the only place that we can hear honest opinion of Americans across the country.
You guys at C-SPAN are doing such a wonderful job of allowing free exchange of ideas without a lot of interruptions.
Thank you, C-SPAN, for being a light in the dark.
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Well, my favorite president would be Joe Biden, and I have some reservations, some issues with his presidency, even.
Okay.
I think he was one of the greatest legislative presidents in the history of the United States.
Two things I don't like about what happened during his administration was he had Mariorkas as the Homeland Security, and he allowed people to pour over the border like it was a waterfall.
And the other was he hired Merit Garland as the attorney general who just moved too slow on the January 6ers.
And I have, so I have that.
Those are my reservations about Joe Biden.
I do want to make one comment about the lady that called in and said that there were two sides to slavery.
Maybe being a foundational black American, she said there were those who wanted slavery and those who did not want slavery.
I suggest there's a third side to slavery, that is those who were slaves, those who suffered physical and bodily violation by the slave masters, those who were forced into labor and living in crowded cold conditions and windowless houses, dehumanization and family separation.
Asked her how would she like it if somebody went and plucked up her child from her arms and said, you will never see this child again as long as you live or as long as he live.
And so those are the things that, you know, that, you know, there are some people who don't want to see.
And one final point about the woman who said, who said that, asked the lady just a while ago, did she think Donald Trump was the most pro-life president ever?
Let me say this about the Epstein file.
Do you think there weren't babies born?
Do you think pregnancies didn't occur with as much illicit sex that went on?
I'd like to concur with the gentleman from North Carolina.
He said his best about heard it.
But my favorite president was Jimmy Carter, hands down.
And the reason America didn't want Jimmy Carter a second time is because they didn't want to be independent of all these wars around the world.
And during the Jimmy Carter administration, with the civil rights for African American and black people in America, he had the best civil rights division that ever been in this country.
And that's one reason why they didn't vote for him, because they didn't want to see America get civil rights for black folk in America.
Jim McCarter, that go for, now I'm calling that as a black man from Birmingham, Alabama.
People Come Killing, Raping, Enslaving00:03:21
unidentified
That goes for Obama, Clinton, and all the rest of them, and Biden and all of them.
And just a programming note for folks watching, this morning to mark President's Day, we will be at Mount Vernon for a wreath-laying ceremony at Washington's tomb.
That will happen at 10 a.m. after this program.
And then at 6:30 p.m., New York Historical hosts a discussion on American democracy and key lessons in U.S. history.
All of this will be on C-SPAN as a part of our American 250 coverage.
All right, Loretta from Cleveland, Ohio, a Democrat.
And that's because it was the first time that America had to accept the results of the election.
But I got a few other questions to ask America.
I have a cold, so please excuse me.
We had a real bad storm like a week or so ago in Cleveland.
But, You know, all of this deportation going on, it really, really, really kind of upset me because I started thinking about it.
There is no pathway to citizenship.
So Trump is importing white people from South Africa.
And he's sending people back to Africa and all over the world.
But if we want to look at deportation, I'm asking myself, who invited white people here?
White people did not come here in peace.
They came here killing, raping, and enslaving.
So they worse than the people they deported.
If you look at things on the face of it, and I know a lot of people are a little upset with what I'm saying, but what I am saying is based on the facts.
And the point of it is, if we are going by facts, they're talking about getting rid of the worst of the worst.
Can we have this kind of quickly before we move on to a quick interview after this?
unidentified
I'm a city school teacher.
I will just tell you that I don't know if this is my favorite, but George Washington, everybody thought he would become a king.
He, after eight years, left and went back to his farm.
That's a huge precedent.
Can you imagine?
Some people would just want to have that power forever.
Lincoln also dealt with immense tragedy and rift in our country, so he's got to be put right up there.
FDR was outflanked on the left by Huey Long and on the right by Father Coglin.
And so he was amazing, too.
I think the president we have now is going to be the worst just by the way he acts, but the Biden administration put him there because they just epically failed on immigration.
So we have the Biden administration to blame for what we have now.
I'm going to have to turn now because we have Matt Bryney, who is the Chief Communications and Marketing Officer for the new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library.
Explain why the Presidential Library is in North Dakota and in connection to it.
unidentified
Yeah, so after the death of his mother and his wife on the same day, Valentine's Day that we just celebrated the anniversary on, Theodore Roosevelt retreats to Medora, North Dakota, where he had a cabin, the Maltese Cross Ranch, and then eventually the Elkhorn Ranch.
And he lived a strenuous life.
This is the area of the Badlands in North Dakota, very beautiful area of the country that helped to heal him, helped to connect him with nature, and allow him to return back into service.
What will be the key features of that library, Matt?
And what can visitors expect when they go there?
unidentified
Yeah, it's unlike a lot of presidential libraries, which are located in big cities or on college campuses.
This is right adjacent to Theodore Roosevelt National Park, the only national park named after an individual.
Very fitting for the conservation president that's preserved over 230 million acres of public lands for us.
And it's a place where you can come.
You will be able to go through our exhibits and learn about his life, but learn from Theodore Roosevelt and not just about him.
And it's equally important for us that you're also able to get into the Badlands, get into nature, go on a hike.
So there's going to be a lot of activities.
We have a one-mile walking trail around the facility that is all ADA compliant and allows you to be able to immerse yourselves, dangle over the Badlands and take it all in.
And a roof, a green roof that's walkable.
The building is actually meeting one of the largest sustainability challenges, the living building challenge.
So it'll produce 105% of its own energy, zero waste, zero water.
And so it's really a testament to Theodore Roosevelt's conservation legacy.
Now, I know you said President Roosevelt faced some struggles making a life there in Medora, but are you guys, you know, in the building process?
Had there been any complications?
Obviously, it is a remote area, but a very specific area as well.
unidentified
You know, there's always challenges with being out of a major city, but we've got a wonderful construction team that's been able to manage all the logistics around this.
We've been working with very closely with the town and the county and the state.
And, you know, we're just all very excited to be able to welcome everybody to Medora, show part of the Badlands, part of the country that I think a lot of people haven't visited.
And we're just excited to open our doors this July.
And just a programming note: C-SPAN will be covering the opening of the new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library opening on July 4th as part of our America 250 programming.
Check out our website, c-span.org, for updates.
I want to get back to the question of the morning, which is who is your favorite president and why?
Bill from Maryland, a Democrat.
unidentified
I would say my favorite presidents are Joe Biden and Bill Clinton.
Well, my favorite president is going to be Donald Trump.
And I'm sorry for the people that say he was guilty of 44 felonies because when you can set somebody up any way you want to, like they did to him, you can get them for 34 felonies.
Just like that rape.
He didn't or rape or molestation.
He didn't molest that girl.
How can you come out of nowhere and say something happened 20 years ago with absolutely no evidence and get a guy convicted on that?
So the New York justice system is a big joke.
And give me a break.
He won in 2020 because they're proving it right now with hundreds of thousands of votes that were like unbent and they were supposed to be mail-in ballots.
So I don't understand how anybody can say that the presidential election wasn't stolen.
That would have to be Thomas Jefferson because he was an architect, a lawyer.
He helped write the Constitution, and he wrote Negroes in as three-fifths of a man.
And yet, still, he owned slaves.
And not only did he own slaves, he impregnated them.
And so I think he showed the true nature of his kind and his people.
My second favorite president would be John F. Kennedy, because he told George Wallace, if you don't get your ass off those school steps and let those two black children into there, I'll lock you up and your entire police force.
And a programming note for you: podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen interviewed President Obama for President's Day, and we'll air that entire interview today at 3:30 p.m. ET and again at 8 p.m. ET.
Donald Trump came second with one point behind Obama, Washington next.
Those tallies were 15, 19, 18, and 10.
Up next, PBS Frontline Director Juan Ravel discusses his new documentary on the future of Venezuela after the U.S. capture of Nicolas Maduro.
Stay with us.
unidentified
Watch America's Book Club, C-SPAN's bold original series, Sunday, with our guest author, former Reagan administration official, and a Library of Congress living legend, Linda Chavez.
She has written a number of books, including Out of the Barrio, An Unlikely Conservative, and The Silver Candlesticks, a novel of the Spanish Inquisition.
She joins our host, renowned author and civic leader David Rubinstein.
And we are going to renew unlimited promise of the American dream.
Every single day, we will stand up and we will fight, fight, fight for the country our citizens believe in.
unidentified
Watch the C-SPAN Networks live Tuesday, February 24th, as President Donald Trump delivers the annual State of the Union Address before a joint session of Congress.
The speech will mark President Trump's first State of the Union of his second term.
The State of the Union Address.
Live Tuesday, February 24th.
Our coverage starts at 7 p.m. Eastern on the C-SPAN networks.
Fighter jets and bombers took out Venezuelan air defenses, paving the way for Delta force commandos to close in on the compound.
It involved months of planning, special forces, a sort of operation you would expect in a Hollywood movie, but not something that I expected the U.S. government to attempt.
President Trump says Nicolos Maduro and his wife, Celia Flores, have been captured and flown out of the country.
Maduro faced charges of drug trafficking, narco-terrorism, and conspiracy to import cocaine.
So many things have happened, but I think that the buildup in the Caribbean by the U.S. Armed Forces was clearly an indication that the Trump administration has had his eyesight on Maduro.
As reporter Joshua Goodman says in the film, he believes that this is a fake leaf, that the drug boats that were being targeted, while the government is saying that they're part of a campaign against narco-terrorism, it's clearly also about regime change in Venezuela.
And the question that we ask right now is, has the regime changed?
Yeah, well, in the film we interviewed Sandy Gonzalez.
He's a former DEA agent who was stationed in Venezuela until the DEA was booted out of Venezuela.
So according to him, it's hard to explain what exactly the Cartel de Sols is because it's not your typical cartel like Cartel de Sinaloa, Cartel de Nuva General.
It's more like a criminal structure mafia mindset where people, according to Sandy Gonzalez, who are in government are involved in or benefit from the drug trade.
And Venezuela is not a large producer of drugs.
It's a port of transport.
Venezuela is where many planes fly to Central America and to other places.
Also, boats go out of Venezuela with drugs.
So in general, the Cartel de Rosales is a name given, I understand, by the press.
It's not how they recognize themselves to be.
It's more of a mafia of sorts of people in government who benefit from the drug trade and allow it to prosper.
Yes, we could say that after the 2018 elections that Maduro rigged to allow himself to win, so in the case of the 2018 elections, you have to understand that there was scheduled presidential election in Venezuela, but Maduro didn't allow the main opposition candidates to run.
So basically, he just run by himself almost, and he won the election.
That was one of the main triggers for the Trump administration, the first Trump administration, to try to oust Maduro and also impose very harsh sanctions on oil and another participating in the general international markets.
So their strategy at the time called maximum pressure was pressuring Maduro out of office with sanctions and trying to remove him and lobby diplomatically so no country or no major country recognized him.
The Trump administration recognized Juan Guedo as the interim legitimate government in Venezuela.
And as we discussed in the film, that didn't work.
And one of the main reasons why it didn't work, according to our investigation, is that Maduro found a way to survive, to use a shadow fleet of oil tankers, of partners like Russia, Iran, Turkey, to move money around and keep his government afloat.
One of the main people who was very important in that was Del C. Rodriguez, the vice president of Venezuela, now acting president, and a person called Alex Saab, who is a Colombian man who was close to Maduro, and he helped him also avoid U.S. sanctions and move oil around.
One of the pernicious effects of this maximum pressure campaign we see in the film is that it also fuels more corruption because by using this shadow fleet of oil tankers, it's very hard to account for where the Venezuelan money is or where the money for oil is.
So corruption existed before this and corruption existed after the maximum pressure campaign, but we could say it was even larger.
One of the things that I found really interesting in the film is that you had a former Trump official who, in describing kind of this maximum pressure campaign, acknowledged that there was no real military plan to take out President Maduro.
Obviously that has changed.
I wonder how you account or the best way to understand the change of approach towards Venezuela from Trump term one to Trump term two.
Yeah, well, one thing that opposition people in Venezuela have said that in order to get Maduro out, they argued there needed to be a credible threat.
And the threat from 2819 and onward, as President Trump and Secretary Tillerson and Bolton, everybody said many times that all options are on the table, hinting that a military option was available and possible for Venezuela.
But as Eliot Aaron, special envoy to Venezuela at the time, said to us, there wasn't really a specific military option planned.
So it seems like the Venezuelan government and Maduro knew this.
So they survived this.
In this time around, the buildup in the Caribbean and the operation to remove Maduro clearly showed that the options that were on the table had a clear plan and a tactic that was done on January 3rd.
The documentary also looks briefly at what the Biden administration tried to do, obviously the administration prior to this term for Trump, and their efforts towards free and fair elections.
So I think the Biden strategy was very different from Trump 1 and Trump 2.
Clearly, they wanted to engage with Maduro, try to persuade him into going into free and fair elections.
And for a brief period of time, they achieved some of this.
In 2023, there were opposition primaries in Venezuela, and the government allowed the opposition to run their own primaries without cracking down on them heavily.
So, yeah, some people were arrested.
There was a lot of intimidation, but they did allow for the primaries to happen.
And for Maria Corina Machao, the opposition candidate, to win that primary with around 92% of the vote.
So that was in the context of negotiations with the Biden administration.
And what the Venezuelan government wanted is to have the sanctions leaved and just try to get less sanctions.
And the Biden administration also wanted some prisoners back because Venezuela had been for a time jailing U.S. citizens in Venezuela.
Some wrongfully detained.
So that was the mission of the Biden administration.
So after the primaries, Biden, the Biden administration, released Alex Saab, this money man for Maduro, who was in jail facing money laundering charges.
And Maduro had made a promise to hold free and fair elections.
Then, Maduro didn't allow the frontrunner of the opposition to run in the actual elections, but he did allow Edmundo Gonzalez Uruteto to run, and Maria Corina Gonzalez supported his candidacy.
So, again, it's not a full, open, free, fair election, but it's enough for the opposition to feel like they can participate.
Then, in 2024, the election happened, and according to opposition tallies that they gathered during the voting, the opposition candidate backed by Maria Corina Machalo won by around 60 to 30 percent.
It was sort of a landslide according to opposition tallies that were verified by the Carter Center and others and other independents.
So, Maduro didn't believe this was truth.
He said the Electoral Council of Venezuela said that Maduro won.
They didn't accept the actual results, so they just took over the election.
So, in the end, the Biden administration for free and fair elections, they didn't happen, but at least the Venezuelans got some sort of test to try and reveal what the Maduro government was about.
Regina from Louisiana and Independent, your line is open.
unidentified
Harry?
Good morning.
How are you guys doing?
I wanted to ask you, I know that to Maduro, Venezuela's people, not everyone liked him, but there were some individuals that did care for his leadership and how he governed the country.
But when you say that he stole the election, and I hear that you said the Carter Center and other agencies verified that, but I do want to ask you, when the Supreme Court equivalent, you know, to make the final decision requested that the opposition leadership provide all of their documentation to verify that the elections were stolen, and they refused to give the information.
Can you explain that?
Because if you're not giving your information to validate your point that the election is stolen and that you won, and you dismiss what the court is asking you, why wouldn't you do that?
And I know a lot of people like to say, well, he runs the court.
Still, I would say, produce your documentation to the world so the world can see that Maduro stole the election.
I mean, I haven't seen the whole documentary, but it looks like it's a really phenomenal job.
I have questions.
One question is, what is your opinion of the real reason that the administration took Maduro to the United States based on the fact that the entire Maduro regime is still in power and there's no consideration given to the fact that someone else won the election?
Yeah, we explore that in the film, the fact that Del C. Rodriguez worked for Maduro and is now still in government in Venezuela.
What the administration has argued is that they don't want to impose in a short term a new president or a new election before some of the institutions in the government are dismantled.
What they argue, what President Trump argues, that you don't want to have a second Iraq where they impose a government and then it created some chaos.
The situation in Venezuela is a little different.
I think there's a long democratic vein to Venezuelans.
I think Venezuelans are not divided in tribes and factions like some other countries, but there is the possibility that some interactors within Chavismo could spoil a smooth transition.
I'm talking, for example, about Diostado Cabello, Interior Minister.
He's a very powerful man who controls the secret police and some of the prisons in Venezuela.
So that's someone you want to, if you're planning to do a transition, according to the experts we interviewed, you have to have that person in line.
So I don't think the plan for the Trump administration is to do something really fast.
I think how Secretary Rubio addressed in Senate, he said they needed more time.
On the other hand, there's worry from Venezuelans and there's worry from many people, even within the opposition, that the Rodriguez brothers, Del Ci Rodriguez and her brother Jorge, are going to say yes to everything that the Trump administration asked about oil, about doing any economic deal.
They're open for that.
They were before this happened and they're now open for it.
So that's not something that is hard for them to do deals on oil.
What is hard for Delsi Rodriguez and her government is to say yes to free and fair elections, is to say yes to free all political prisoners, is to say yes to allow every Venezuelan, no matter what the political stance, to participate in politics in Venezuela.
That's something that is not happening today.
So that's the fear right now from Venezuelans, and that's exactly the moment that we're living.
Are we living a transition into a democracy or are we living a transition into another type of autocracy?
What I want to ask you, because in the documentary there is a portion that says that in the first days of the country being without Maduro after his capture, the president was more focused on oil than, say, free and fair elections.
Well, you know, Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world, one of the largest.
And I think that's an interest.
We're very close to the U.S. U.S. can manage Venezuelan type, the oil that Venezuela produces.
And we have had a long-standing relationship with the U.S. on that.
When Chavez came to power, that deal was restructured and the U.S. oil companies weren't happy with that.
And they sued.
And so they are owed a lot of money.
So the way that the Trump administration framed this from the beginning was interesting to us as journalists and filmmakers because we wanted to understand more about this.
And five or four days after the attack, Trump invited some big oil companies to the White House and pitched Venezuela to them.
And what was interesting, and this is an analysis that Francisco Monalde from Rice University gives us in the film, is that these oil companies weren't that eager to go back into Venezuela because they have had their assets stolen twice there in the case of Exxon, as he stated.
And to make the type of investments that the Venezuelan oil industry needs to be back where it was before Chavez or when Chavez came to power, remember we had three and a half daily, 3.3, 3.5 daily million barrels of oil production.
Now we're under a million.
That's the number right now.
So the oil company, oil production in Venezuela has been decimated.
To go back to those numbers, you need over 10 years of investments, hundreds of billions of dollars.
So it's a lot of stake for oil companies to do.
And they, for now, I understand that they don't feel it's really the right moment.
They want to see more stability.
And what Monaldi says to us that I think is really interesting is that usually oil companies, they don't care if there's a democracy or not, a democracy in a country.
They just want respect for their contracts and stability.
And according to Monaldi, you won't have that in Venezuela unless you have a democratic election and newly appointed leaders.
Well, you have to understand also there are different types of companies in that meeting.
So there's smaller players who can go in and move tankers of oil that they would do that tomorrow if they have just the permissions, you know.
And you could also extract oil with current oilfields and just do some investment to make those oil fields better and just revive some of the existing infrastructure.
But in order to do new infrastructure, in order to do large oil extraction in Venezuela, as I said, you would need a larger player.
So the larger players, they need stability.
They need to know that their contracts will be respected.
They need to know that international arbitration is the place where their contracts will be discussed, not in local Venezuelan courts.
That's a major point for them.
And after that meeting, with some pressure from the US, Del C. Rodriguez, and the Venezuelan government have started to promise that, that yes, they will respect the contracts, that yes, they will do international arbitration in the case of a feud of disagreement.
So that's where things are right now.
According to Secretary Rubio, that's not enough.
They would want more from the Venezuelan government, but is, according to the Trump administration, a first good step.
I mean, it's interesting because just over the last week, we saw Energy Secretary Chris Wright go to Venezuela, making him the highest-level Trump administration official to go.
The president said on Friday that he might be going, but he didn't stipulate a time.
I point now to this Wall Street Journal article.
The headline is: U.S. Secretary talks oil revival and democracy in Venezuela visit.
And if you look at the photo, it's Chris Wright and Del Codriguez handshaking something that I think folks would never have assumed could happen, even just a year ago.
So you said that Del Codriguez has already kind of basically suggested that their contracts would be respected.
What other things has she done to alleviate potentially some of the oil companies' concerns about investing in the country?
Well, the main other thing that the government is proposing in a new bill, the Venezuelan government, is that foreign oil companies and U.S. oil companies could have a majority stake in the investments that they participate in.
So if you remember, that was the main point of Chavez's restructuring of the oil deals with the U.S. Chavez wanted Pedevesa, the state oil company, to have a majority partnership in any investment.
And now, with this new law, companies can have a majority stake.
So that is the main people thing.
And one of the things that we show in the film, which is quite interesting, is that Del Codriguez celebrates this new deal while using a very, in terms of marketing, very Chavista, very like, yeah, classic Venezuelan Chavista attire.
And they're celebrating something that is actually the reversal of all of Chavez's policies.
I have two more questions for you, Juan, before we head to take some more calls.
But speaking of Del Codriguez, can you kind of lay out for people how involved she is in day-to-day, how much control she has over the actual affairs of the country?
Some experts suggest that she is sort of like a junta.
That's something that Elon Abrams, especially with Venezuela, said to us, because it's Delsi Rodriguez.
She's running the executive.
Her brother, Jorge Rodriguez, is running Congress or the Assemblia Nacional.
And Diosdado Cabello is running the intelligence apparatus.
So in a way, those three people are running the country.
Delsi Rodriguez is known to be a person who is very agile in having good international relationships and good international relationship with oil people from the U.S. and elsewhere.
So she's seen as a sort of a person who gets things done and she's getting things done in terms of oil for the U.S. right now.
There's a story in AP that, for example, she's through the Venezuelan oil company SIDCO, she donated money for Trump's inauguration in 2016, although that didn't have particular positive effects because then the maximum pressure campaigns happened.
But you see that she knows how to lobby Washington and she's trying to do that now.
And then one moment in the film that I found spectacular is when one of the reporters that you're following finds that Delsi Rodriguez has a number assigned to her that revolves around the drug trafficking infrastructure in the country.
Can you explain to us what happened there and what Del Codriguez's relationship with the drug trafficking infrastructure is?
And the thing is that one thing is to be a target of an investigation, and one thing is to be accused in an investigation.
So she's connected with people who are involved in this.
What we haven't seen absolute proof that she's part of this in a specific personal way or hard proof of this.
So yes, Delsi Rodriguez, according to the AP and the investigation that we show on the film, has been part of an investigation related to these things.
And as we point out, she hasn't yet been indicted.
Can you go into telling us about the machines that were brought in or originated from down there in Venezuela?
I believe Dominion, maybe SmartMatic 2.
And the communists use those machines, and we've known this for years, to manipulate and steal elections.
And then they've been brought up to America, where they have also been used to manipulate and steal elections, such as the 2020 election that Joe Biden, quote unquote, won.
And I believe that that is one of the main reasons why we have so much military down there and what we did as far as getting that bad guy out of there that had a price on his head anyway.
Can you go into those machines and how they've been brought up here?
So that's not an area that we investigated in this film.
Being Venezuelan and held even in Venezuela, I know what a regular Venezuelan knows about this.
So I haven't investigated thoroughly on this.
What I can say is that, yes, there have been some allegations about some machines in Venezuela, some voting machines that are, I don't know, not up to international standards.
What I should say is that these machines that were used in the 2024 election printed tallies that the Venezuelan opposition gathered, and they showed that Edmundo Gonzalez-Rude won the election.
So these same machines that we're talking about have, at least the ones used in the 2024 elections, I'm not sure if it's the same that the question was referring to, but this machine did say that the result was the Edmundo Gonzalez-Rude had won the elections.
That's not the result that the Venezuelan government announced in the end.
First off, I just so happened to catch the documentary, I think on YouTube, over the weekend.
And I want to say it does a great job of explaining everything that's been going on in Venezuela since Maduro was taken out by our military.
And I just want to say it's a brilliant job.
I think those who have not had an opportunity to watch this documentary, it's eye-opening, it's educational, and it really helps explain what's been going on in Venezuela since then.
One of the illuminating things that I was wanting to hear more about was the connection between the cartel in Venezuela and the presidency there in the connection back to Maduro.
Because when we see the boats that's being shot by our military with very little explanation on the boat's, you know, the connection with the boat and cartels itself.
But it was illuminating to see in the documentary to hear a little bit of how that works.
Yes, thank you for the question and thanks for the kind words for the film.
So as Sandy Gonzalez, the DA agent that's in the film stated, the Cartel de los Soles is not a classic cartel structure.
And also we have to point out that after Maduro was arrested, a new indictment was revealed and the language about Cartel de los Soles was downplayed and now Maduro's been accused of being part of a criminal structure that facilitated drug trade.
So again, I think that Maduro's involvement or according to the accusation, Maduro's involvement in the drug trade is one of allowing it to prosper, knowing that some generals, some people in the military are benefiting from this and doing nothing about it.
And we will see in court if they can prove that Maduro benefited from this, either politically or with money, or money ended up in his pocket.
So that's something that we're looking forward to also following the next months is the trial on Nicolas Maduro.
Let me point to a message that we received online from Jim Bo from Bakersfield, California, independent voter.
He asked, can Ravel explain why the Trump administration has no problem working with Delsi Rodriguez when she was up to her eyeballs in corruption and criminal behavior as a member of the Maduro administration?
And I would add to that question there, Juan, is what you believe the administration's perception of Maria Cornelia Machado as a leader in Venezuela.
unidentified
Obviously, you focus on a little bit of that in your documentary.
Yeah, so what the officials from the Trump administration and Trump himself have said about working with Del Codriguez is that she's the one who controls power in Venezuela, and we have to deal with the person who controls the levies of power in Venezuela.
What they hope to do, and we will see in the next few months and years, if they're capable of doing, is using Del Codriguez as a person to dismantle their own regime.
So it's not an abrupt change, but a slow change into a possible transition.
Again, what many Venezuelans fear is that Del C. Rodriguez will do what many others in Chavismo have done in the past, which is gain some time, stretch this, and see if they can survive this administration and hold on to power.
It depends, according to Ehler Avrons, on how much the U.S. pushes for democracy and transition.
So if the U.S. pushes harder, the probabilities of that happening raise.
It's up in the air right now.
We don't know exactly if that will happen, but that's the moment we're living.
And the Mariana Corina Machado story is also in the film.
This is the Nobel Prize opposition leader in Venezuela who is now living in exile.
And in the first remarks from Donald Trump, he said that Maria Corina Machado was not ready to lead Venezuela because she didn't have the respect of the people.
We're not sure if she means the respect of the armed forces, the respect of the security service, or the respect of the population.
If he was referring to the respect of the population, I just shared what happened in the elections that showed that she has great support.
In terms of the respect of the armed forces, it's something that is very hard to know right now because it's very hard to report on how much the armed forces or security apparatus would support Maria Cornina Machado being government.
So for now, the Trump administration has now met with Maria Corina Machado.
She gave, Donald Trump offered him his Nobel Prize, her Nobel Prize.
He accepted it.
And his view on Maria Corina Machado, you could say, has shifted in terms of discourse, but she's not yet part of the transition in a specific way.
So Trump has said many more positive things about Maria Corina Machallo after they had their meeting in the White House, but there doesn't seem to be a firm public plan to involve her in a transition.
Also, Secretary Rubio met with Machalo and said kind words about her.
And I understand that Rubio hopes that Maria Corina can be part of that.
But the Venezuelan government has clearly said in the last few days, Del Codriguez in an interview to NBC said that Maria Corina Machado is not going to be covered by a new amnesty law that would let opposition exiles return.
She said that because she supported this military action from the U.S., she cannot participate in Venezuelan government activities for now.
Chris in Birmingham, Alabama, he writes, in the documentary, many Venezuelan citizens appeared happy about Maduro being ousted.
What is the current sentiment among Venezuelans, both within Venezuela and those living in the United States, regarding the country's political situation?
Well, one of the main differences is that the ones in the United States can celebrate freely because they fear no repercussions.
When Maduro was captured, I jumped, I took my camera and I went to Doral to this Venezuelan restaurant and arepera where people gather when major things happen and they watch the news and they were very happy.
I would say they were very happy.
Their concerns about TPS, about temporary status, about their own precarious immigration situation was paused for a day to celebrate this that they have yearned for.
So they were really happy.
People in Venezuela can't celebrate publicly.
It's hard to say how many people were celebrating privately or not, but what I think people, what they celebrating or not, here is not the important thing.
I think people are very hopeful in Venezuela that this could lead to a democratic transition and to a better economical outcome because the economy was not good.
And they hope that a better economy and a possible transition to democracy is now more possible than before.
Marking President's Day, we'll be at Mount Vernon for a wreath-laying ceremony at Washington's tomb that starts momentarily.
So we start this morning with President's Day.
I turn to a Times article on the day.
The headline is 10 Surprising Facts About President's Day.
If you scroll a little bit over, it says, on the earliest federal day enacted, one of the earliest federal holidays enacted by Congress, President's Day honors a legacy of the first U.S. President, George Washington.
It's observed on the third Monday of February each year.
The special day is celebrated through patriotic parades, historical reenactments, and readings of major presidential speeches.