CSPAN - Washington Journal 02/22/2026
Aired: 2026-02-22
Duration: 03:00:47


=== Join The Conversation (01:46) ===

[00:00:03]  Coming up on Washington Journal, along with your calls and comments live, author and Wellesley College professor Dan Chasen will talk about his new book, Bernie for Burlington, The Rise of the People's Politician.
[00:00:16]  C-SPAN's Washington Journal is next.
[00:00:18]  Join the conversation.
[00:00:30]  And we're glad you joined us on The Washington Journal.
[00:00:33]  As regular viewers know, we go through the news, talk to interesting, relevant guests, and most importantly, we hear your voices.
[00:00:42]  And on this Sunday, February 22nd, two days before the State of the Union, we want to know what's that public policy issue on your mind?
[00:00:51]  What's driving you, keeping you awake, making you happy, angry, sad, etc.
[00:00:57]  I look forward to our conversation this morning.
[00:01:00]  Here's how you can participate.
[00:01:02]  202 is the area code for all of our numbers.
[00:01:04]  748-8001 for Republicans.
[00:01:07]  748-8,000 for Democrats.
[00:01:10]  748-8002 for independents.
[00:01:15]  And you can send a text message if you can't get through on the telephones.
[00:01:18]  202-748-8003.
[00:01:21]  Please include your first name and your city if you would on that.
[00:01:24]  And you can see our social media sites where you can participate in the conversation.
[00:01:30]  We'll begin taking those calls in just a few minutes.
[00:01:33]  Remember, what's on your mind this morning, especially when it comes to a public policy issue.
[00:01:38]  Well, about 3 million Americans fly every day in and out of our airports, about 44,000 flights.
[00:01:46]  If you haven't heard this news, this just happened yesterday.

=== Suspension Of Travel Programs (04:12) ===

[00:01:49]  The Department of Homeland Security is suspending two travel programs amid the shutdown.
[00:01:56]  The Washington Post reported that the TSA precheck and global entry programs would temporarily cease starting at 6 a.m. this Sunday morning as the agency moves to redirect staffing amid the funding stalemate.
[00:02:11]  Homeland Security Secretary Christy Noam said in a statement that DHS was making tough but necessary workforce and resource decisions and placing priority on the general traveling population at our airports and ports of entry.
[00:02:25]  Quote, this is the third time that Democrat politicians have shut down this department during the 119th Congress, she said.
[00:02:32]  Shutdowns have real serious world consequences, not just for the men and women of DHS and their families who go without a paycheck, but it endangers our national security.
[00:02:44]  And this note at the bottom of this article, DHS is also suspending courtesy and special privilege escorts, and FEMA will halt non-disaster-related responses, according to Secretary Noam.
[00:02:59]  That's in the Hill newspaper this morning.
[00:03:02]  This is from Politico.
[00:03:03]  As we mentioned, it's two days before the State of the Union address.
[00:03:07]  President Trump's first of his second term last year was an address to a joint session of Congress.
[00:03:16]  And last year we were talking about the Department of Government efficiency doge.
[00:03:22]  We were talking about potential immigration crackdowns.
[00:03:26]  That was a year ago.
[00:03:27]  Here's where we stand this year.
[00:03:29]  Again, this is in Politico, a high-stakes State of the Union just got harder for Trump.
[00:03:34]  President Donald Trump didn't hide it.
[00:03:36]  It's a disgrace, he said during a breakfast with governors, looking at a note that told him his administration had just suffered a humiliating rebuke at the hands of a conservative Supreme Court, according to a governor who was in the room, granted anonymity to share details of the meeting.
[00:03:54]  Trump cut his remarks short and walked out of the room.
[00:03:57]  The president's primetime address to Congress on Tuesday was supposed to set the stage for a tough but disciplined midterm campaign focused on the administration's efforts to lower costs for everyday Americans and tout his first-year accomplishments.
[00:04:12]  Instead, he heads to the Hill amid a torrent of negative news.
[00:04:16]  Economic growth is flagging.
[00:04:17]  U.S. military assets are massing in the waters around Iran in anticipation of a potential strike that many in the president's base find odious.
[00:04:27]  A major government agency is shut down over an immigration standoff with Democrats.
[00:04:33]  Make America Healthy Again activists are furious over Trump's order boosting domestic production of the herbicide glyphosate.
[00:04:42]  The scandal around Jeffrey Epstein, the late convicted sex offender, continues to swirl.
[00:04:48]  And now the nation's highest court has dealt the president what some allies see as the most humiliating and devastating blow of his second term.
[00:04:56]  Six justices, including two Trump appointees, said Friday that the president does not have the ability to unilaterally impose tariffs.
[00:05:04]  Quote, this is the signature economic policy.
[00:05:07]  We're four days away from the state of the union, and he has just been rejected by the court in a pretty serious public way.
[00:05:15]  That's according to Allison Smith, who's a lobbyist and a former trade official in the Biden administration.
[00:05:22]  So those are some of the issues that are being faced as the president goes in front of the Congress on Tuesday night.
[00:05:29]  A reminder that many of the Supreme Court justices sit right up front during that address.
[00:05:38]  And of course, on C-SPAN and C-SPAN 2, you will get full and unfiltered coverage of the state of the Union.
[00:05:46]  On C-SPAN 1, we're going to be doing conversation and commentary.
[00:05:51]  On C-SPAN 2, just the sights and sounds without the commentary.
[00:05:56]  Well, let's get to your calls and let's hear from John calling in from across the river in Arlington, Virginia, Independent.

=== Soy Boy Politics (02:39) ===

[00:06:02]  John, what's that public policy issue that's on your mind these days?
[00:06:06]  Well, I've observed both the body politic, domestic, and foreign affairs.
[00:06:13]  And at this point, I think I speak to the American public.
[00:06:17]  And I say that we see through the government's act.
[00:06:25]  But yet, up to this point, we have enjoyed the show.
[00:06:30]  But I think this goes to the fourth to say, too, that you're pretty much on thin ice.
[00:06:36]  And one point that I'd like to make is just that Mike Johnson denied a request to have Jesse Jackson lie in state.
[00:06:45]  So is he the quintessential face of soy boy politics in the American government?
[00:06:52]  What does that mean, soy boy politics?
[00:06:56]  Well, you all, you know what a soy boy is.
[00:06:59]  I don't.
[00:06:59]  I'm sorry.
[00:07:00]  What is that?
[00:07:02]  Look, I want you to look it up.
[00:07:04]  Okay, all right.
[00:07:05]  I will do that, John.
[00:07:07]  Thanks for that.
[00:07:08]  This is from Breitbart this morning.
[00:07:10]  And Speaker Johnson denies requests for late Reverend Jesse Jackson to lie in honor at U.S. Capitol Rotunda.
[00:07:17]  The family of Jackson, who died this week at age 84, initially made the request, according to the Hill publication.
[00:07:24]  Quote, the speaker considered past president of mostly reserving the practice for former presidents and select former government officials and military honorees, the outlet said.
[00:07:35]  However, Jackson is expected to be memorialized in Chicago in the coming weeks, according to his family.
[00:07:42]  The last individual to lie in state at the Capitol was former President Jimmy Carter.
[00:07:47]  According to Newsmax, requests were made and denied to have prominent figures such as Turning Point USA founder and conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated in September, and former Vice President Dick Cheney, Lion State, in the Rotunda.
[00:08:04]  There is no specific rule about who qualifies for the honor, a decision that is controlled by concurrence from both the House and the Senate, according to the Hill publication.
[00:08:14]  That was in Breitbart this morning.
[00:08:16]  Well, President Trump, the other day, after Jesse Jackson's death, at a Black History Month event for Black History Month, at the White House, paid tribute to Jesse Jackson.
[00:08:31]  Here is what President Trump had to say.
[00:08:35]  I want to begin by expressing our sadness at the passing of a person who I knew very well.

=== Lions and Lambs Lie Down (02:24) ===

[00:08:41]  Jesse was a piece of work, I want to tell you.
[00:08:44]  He was a piece of work.
[00:08:46]  But he was a good man.
[00:08:49]  He was a real hero.
[00:08:52]  I just want to pay my highest respects to Reverend Jesse Jackson.
[00:08:56]  He's a good man.
[00:08:58]  He's actually, as you got to know him, he got better and better all the time.
[00:09:02]  A lot of people, you get to know him, they get worse and worse.
[00:09:05]  Jesse got better and better.
[00:09:08]  But I knew him well long before becoming president, and he really was special with lots of personality, grit, and street smarts.
[00:09:15]  You would say Jesse had serious street smarts, right?
[00:09:19]  A very important ingredient to life, I will tell you.
[00:09:22]  He was gregarious and someone who truly loved people and a force of nature.
[00:09:27]  He was somebody that we're going to greatly miss.
[00:09:30]  And on behalf of everyone here today, I know you join me in sending our condolences to the entire family and a great family.
[00:09:39]  And of course, Jesse Jackson ran for president in 1988.
[00:09:42]  Here's a portion of one of his campaign speeches: The Bible teaches that when lions and lambs lie down together, none will be afraid, and there will be peace in the valley.
[00:09:58]  It sounds impossible.
[00:10:01]  Lions eat lambs.
[00:10:04]  Lambs sensibly flee from lions.
[00:10:07]  Yet even lions and lambs find common ground.
[00:10:10]  Why?
[00:10:11]  Because neither lions nor lambs want the forest to catch on fire.
[00:10:17]  Neither lions nor lambs want acid rain to fall.
[00:10:21]  Neither lions nor lambs can survive nuclear war.
[00:10:25]  If lions and lambs can find common ground, surely we can as well as civilized people.
[00:10:48]  The only time that we win is when we come together.
[00:10:55]  In 1960, John Kennedy, the late John Kennedy, beat Richard Nixon by only 112,000 votes.

=== The Margin of Hope (08:10) ===

[00:11:06]  Less than one vote per precinct.
[00:11:09]  We won by the margin of our hope.
[00:11:13]  He brought us together.
[00:11:14]  He reached out.
[00:11:16]  He had the courage to defy his advisors and inquire about Dr. King's jailing in Auburn, Georgia.
[00:11:24]  We won by the margin of our hope, inspired by courageous leadership.
[00:11:30]  In 1964, Lyndon Johnson brought both wings together, the thesis, the antithesis, and the creative synthesis, and together we won.
[00:11:41]  In 1976, Jimmy Carter unified us again and we won.
[00:11:46]  When we do not come together, we never win.
[00:11:51]  In 1968, division and despair in July led to our defeat in November.
[00:11:58]  In 1980, record in the spring and the summer led to Reagan in the fall.
[00:12:05]  When we divide, we cannot win.
[00:12:09]  We must find common ground as a basis for survival and development and change and growth.
[00:12:18]  And back to your calls.
[00:12:20]  What's on your mind, Benny?
[00:12:21]  Stockton, California, Democrat.
[00:12:25]  Yes, good morning.
[00:12:27]  My name is Benny Martin.
[00:12:29]  I just want to piggyback on the last caller.
[00:12:32]  It's a shame that the speaker would not allow Jesse to die in state so people could pay their last respect.
[00:12:44]  They flew the flags at half style for Charlie Kurt when we know he was a racist.
[00:12:52]  I just don't understand where this country is going.
[00:12:55]  Thank you very much.
[00:12:57]  That was Benny in Stockton.
[00:12:58]  Up next is Alicia.
[00:13:00]  Alicia is calling in from Highland Park, Michigan on our independent line.
[00:13:05]  Alicia, you're on C-SPAN.
[00:13:08]  Yes, first I want to say it's good to see you on anchoring again because I really think C-SPAN needs to get back to the folks who've been there a long time and stop with the guest host.
[00:13:20]  You guys really know what you're doing.
[00:13:22]  My public policy comment is the two-party system.
[00:13:27]  I just don't think this country is in a position where it's going to be able to recover from what we've been through for, let's say, the last 10 years since Trump came on the scene.
[00:13:39]  I just think people like myself, formerly used to call myself a liberal, always voted Democrat, but always was a registered independent.
[00:13:50]  I can't find a political home anymore.
[00:13:53]  I can't stand most of the Democrats.
[00:13:55]  I cannot really stand most of the Republicans.
[00:13:59]  I really straddle both parties.
[00:14:01]  And I think the only solution is going to be when somebody, maybe in the millennial generation, which is a generation before me, maybe even Gen Z, comes along and merges my main issues, which are immigration and economic progressivism.
[00:14:22]  I think that's where we're going to have a winning solution because I think the anger that is heard on C-SPAN calls every morning comes out of a frustration of feeling boxed in.
[00:14:34]  I know I feel boxed in.
[00:14:35]  So, Alicia, you say your issues are economic populism and immigration.
[00:14:41]  Would you agree that those are two of President Trump's issues?
[00:14:46]  No.
[00:14:47]  No, I would not agree with that because Trump, I mean, I mean, I don't disdain the man like so many liberals do.
[00:14:55]  I think tariffs are a good idea.
[00:14:57]  I'm from Michigan.
[00:14:59]  I grew up in an autoworker's family, and I saw it collapse in the 1980s when Reagan came in and allowed all the foreign Japanese import cars to come in.
[00:15:10]  They used to have it.
[00:15:11]  My father used to have a t-shirt that said, how do you spell unemployment?
[00:15:15]  Mazda, Mitsubishi, and Hyundai or Honda.
[00:15:19]  So, no, I absolutely agree with Trump on a lot of issues.
[00:15:22]  I just can't stand the person himself and would never vote for him for who he is.
[00:15:27]  Did you vote for Kamala Harris in 24?
[00:15:30]  Yes, I did.
[00:15:31]  Yes, I did.
[00:15:32]  Thank you, Alicia, and thanks for sharing what's on your mind this morning.
[00:15:36]  We appreciate that.
[00:15:38]  Christopher, Frederick, Maryland, Republican.
[00:15:42]  Yes, I just had a few comments on your opening Politico article, which Politico is, in my view, is just a left-wing rag.
[00:15:52]  All the points in the article are painting a picture, some of which has nothing to do with Trump.
[00:15:59]  The Epstein files, they're just the liberal talking points that, you know, it's all dire.
[00:16:07]  Trump had a setback on Friday, and he should have known that the tariffs were suspect.
[00:16:16]  But I give him points for trying on the tariffs.
[00:16:20]  Hopefully, there's another way to get there or that the trade deals he's negotiated remain in force.
[00:16:27]  Christopher, can you give us your reasoning for why you support tariffs?
[00:16:35]  Because I think where we are is a dangerous point in the country's history.
[00:16:43]  We don't make things like we used to.
[00:16:46]  And to say, well, we can get around that by just making these items from different countries, sort of diversifying the supply lines, is not enough.
[00:17:01]  We need to make things in this country.
[00:17:04]  That's an issue.
[00:17:06]  And he's dealing with it.
[00:17:07]  And it's not something, this is part of the problem in the politics and the media today.
[00:17:12]  These problems were not created overnight.
[00:17:15]  They cannot be solved overnight.
[00:17:19]  It's going to take time to rebuild manufacturing.
[00:17:22]  Can't be done in 90 days or a year.
[00:17:25]  It's going to take several years.
[00:17:26]  So just like the debt crisis we have in this country, it's going to take years to solve the problem.
[00:17:32]  We have to start confronting these issues.
[00:17:35]  But while the media talks about these nonsense issues, and some of your callers, like two callers ago, talk about Charlie Kirk being a racist, absolutely no evidence of that.
[00:17:46]  We're dealing with an uneducated citizenry in the country, and people have got to be educated on the issues before they speak.
[00:17:56]  Hey, Christopher, what do you think about your sheriff in Frederick County agreeing to work with ICE on immigration matters when Westmore, the governor, said that there will be no cooperation?
[00:18:09]  I think he's absolutely right, the sheriff, and I think the governor's wrong.
[00:18:13]  For 20 years, Sheriff Jenkins has been working with, and I've only lived here for a year.
[00:18:19]  Sheriff Jenkins has been working with ICE for 20 years.
[00:18:24]  It's the safest way to transfer people from the jail models, the 287G agreements, not letting them out in the public and having ICE agents chase them around the streets, as has happened in Minneapolis.
[00:18:41]  But our state is dominated by Democrats.
[00:18:45]  It makes no sense what they're doing.
[00:18:48]  Every bill dealing with public safety in the legislature this term is anti-ICE.
[00:18:55]  And they better hope in Maryland that they do not have somebody killed by an illegal alien in the next six months because the citizens of Maryland are going to hold the Democrats accountable.
[00:19:08]  That's Christopher in Frederick, Maryland, which is about 30 miles north of Washington, D.C. Bob is in Logan, Utah, Democrat.

=== Attacking Iran: Half a Loaf? (02:30) ===

[00:19:17]  Good morning, Bob.
[00:19:18]  Good morning.
[00:19:20]  I'd like to the person before me said, you know, he likes tariffs, but tariffs are nothing more than a consumption tax.
[00:19:30]  The Republicans have wanted that forever.
[00:19:33]  But what I want to talk about was a survey that C-SPAN put on the ratings of the presidents.
[00:19:44]  And in my lifetime, I was out of the top 10 presidents from the beginning.
[00:19:52]  We've had six.
[00:19:54]  So that tells you about how old I am.
[00:19:57]  And I'm so tired of listening to these people say President is the best president we had when he's rated 41 out of 45 when he's in.
[00:20:09]  And anyway, I'm losing my chain of thought.
[00:20:13]  No, that's okay.
[00:20:14]  Hey, Bob.
[00:20:16]  I take it you're retired.
[00:20:17]  May we ask how old you are?
[00:20:19]  Oh, I'm 88.
[00:20:21]  Okay, what kind of work did you do in the past?
[00:20:26]  Well, everything.
[00:20:28]  From logging to military, telephone work, engineering, contracting.
[00:20:36]  I've done it all.
[00:20:37]  I've had a good life.
[00:20:38]  All right.
[00:20:38]  And I've just feel lucky that six out of ten presidents.
[00:20:45]  That's pretty good.
[00:20:47]  So, all right.
[00:20:48]  So you were born, what, 1939, 38?
[00:20:52]  37.
[00:20:53]  37.
[00:20:54]  There we go.
[00:20:54]  So beginning with FDR.
[00:20:58]  Oh, right.
[00:20:59]  All right.
[00:21:00]  I've got an uncle still alive who was born during Calvin Coolidge, which I just think is just an interesting little fun fact.
[00:21:08]  So, Carl, Chicago, Independent.
[00:21:11]  Go ahead.
[00:21:13]  Yes.
[00:21:15]  Hello, this is Carl.
[00:21:18]  What's on my mind is Trump's buildup of armament overwhelmingly to attack Iran and apparently initial agreements from Iran of many concessions, not all of what Trump wanted, but a much better path because I think that when you're dealing with an enemy, half a loaf is a lot better than nothing.

=== Trump's Buildup to Attack Iran (02:05) ===

[00:21:47]  And I think attacking Iran would do nothing, meaning militarily attacking Iran would do nothing but cause a lot of more Iranians to die.
[00:21:59]  Carl, did you think that, were you, have you been consistent in that thought?
[00:22:02]  What did you think when the U.S. bombed some of the nuclear sites in Iran six, eight months ago?
[00:22:10]  Well, I don't think it achieved the intended purpose.
[00:22:14]  I don't think it stopped their nuclear enrichment.
[00:22:17]  I sent them back, and of course they are in a declined period.
[00:22:23]  However, the people are not more likely when they're in trouble to agree to major change typically than they are when they're in a better place.
[00:22:38]  That's Carl in Chicago.
[00:22:39]  Thank you for calling in.
[00:22:41]  This is an odd little article this morning in the Wall Street Journal.
[00:22:45]  It just happened last night.
[00:22:46]  Trump says he is sending hospital ships to Greenland.
[00:22:50]  President Trump said he plans to send a hospital ship to Greenland as part of his continuing effort to exercise control of the island in the Arctic.
[00:23:00]  Late Saturday night, Trump posted on social media that he is sending the ship to take care of the many people who are sick and not being taken care of there.
[00:23:09]  It's on the way, exclamation marks.
[00:23:13]  Trump posted the missive after a meeting with Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry, whom he named as envoy to Greenland last year.
[00:23:20]  The White House didn't respond to questions about what specifically prompted the ship's deployment.
[00:23:25]  Greenland's government provides free health care to the population.
[00:23:31]  Goes on to say that the Navy has two hospital ships, the East Coast-based Comfort and the West Coast-based Mercy.
[00:23:38]  It couldn't be determined which ship Trump would send or when it would arrive.
[00:23:43]  Both vessels are in a shipyard in Mobile, Alabama, and not at their home ports, according to the ship tracking website, Marine Traffic.

=== Tools Made Overseas (03:04) ===

[00:23:52]  That's in the Wall Street Journal this morning.
[00:23:55]  Richard's calling in from Hacienda Heights, California, Republican line.
[00:24:00]  Richard, what's on your mind this morning?
[00:24:03]  All right.
[00:24:03]  Good morning.
[00:24:05]  Talking about tariffs, I got a degree in economics in the 80s, and I've followed the economic picture pretty closely.
[00:24:16]  And I just, I don't think the country realizes what the tariffs are all about.
[00:24:20]  Everybody calls them a tax.
[00:24:22]  What we are trying to do here is get some manufacturing back into this nation.
[00:24:27]  We can't all be a service economy.
[00:24:29]  It just doesn't work that way.
[00:24:31]  So here comes a president who rubs everybody the wrong way.
[00:24:34]  I swear now I think he's even rubbing the Supreme Court the wrong way with his antics.
[00:24:41]  And they're going to wipe out these tariffs, which I swear, if we could just keep it up for a few years, these tariffs, we could get some manufacturing back into this country.
[00:24:51]  And if we just grin and bear it, pay the price, we could be, you know, the economy will just improve and improve the more manufacturing it gets here.
[00:25:02]  It's not great for the environment, I give you that.
[00:25:04]  But boy, if we don't get some manufacturing in this country, I don't know how else to do it except with tariffs because we can't compete against the labor market overseas.
[00:25:13]  We can't do it.
[00:25:15]  So we bring in tariffs.
[00:25:16]  That's the only way we can try to do it.
[00:25:18]  And here they are.
[00:25:18]  They're cutting them.
[00:25:19]  They're going to go bye-bye.
[00:25:20]  And I'm like, oh, that's not a good plan.
[00:25:23]  Hey, Richard.
[00:25:24]  Richard, what kind of work do you do or did you do in Hacienda Heights?
[00:25:28]  That's in the L.A. area, right?
[00:25:30]  Purchasing.
[00:25:31]  I'm a buyer, you know, for tool companies, things like that.
[00:25:37]  And those tools are mostly made overseas, is that correct?
[00:25:41]  Well, definitely.
[00:25:42]  They didn't used to be.
[00:25:43]  When I first started, you know, my family owned the business back way long time ago, and that's how I got into it.
[00:25:49]  You know, basically tools and fasteners for construction.
[00:25:52]  And, you know, when I got into it, most of the expendable products like nuts and bolts and screws were made in Japan and then Taiwan and now China, who you can't compete with that.
[00:26:05]  But as far as the tools go, now they're all made overseas.
[00:26:08]  Even Milwaukee Tool and things like that, they say you'd think they make them here.
[00:26:12]  They don't.
[00:26:14]  It's tough.
[00:26:15]  And I just, I've watched it go away every year.
[00:26:19]  Bye-bye.
[00:26:20]  Another manufacturing plant's gone.
[00:26:23]  About all we do over here in Los Angeles now, of course, is we do the aerospace still, which is huge.
[00:26:28]  But everything you look around where you're at right now, everything you touch, everything you look at is made in China.
[00:26:35]  And it's just, it's amazing.
[00:26:37]  Sometimes I wonder how they do it.
[00:26:39]  But, you know, if we don't have these tariffs, I don't see it improving at all.
[00:26:47]  I think it's going to get worse.
[00:26:49]  And we won't be much of a country if we can't make anything over here.
[00:26:53]  Thank you, sir, for calling in this morning and sharing what's on your mind.

=== Tariffs and Racism (15:39) ===

[00:26:56]  Well, this is what was on President Trump's mind on Friday in the White House pressroom.
[00:27:04]  The Supreme Court's ruling on tariffs is deeply disappointing.
[00:27:11]  And I'm ashamed of certain members of the court, absolutely ashamed, for not having the courage to do what's right for our country.
[00:27:21]  I'd like to thank and congratulate Justices Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh for their strength and wisdom and love of our country, which is right now very proud of those justices.
[00:27:36]  When you read the dissenting opinions, there's no way that anyone can argue against them.
[00:27:43]  There's no way.
[00:27:45]  Foreign countries that have been ripping us off for years are ecstatic.
[00:27:50]  They're so happy.
[00:27:53]  And they're dancing in the streets, but they won't be dancing for long, that I can assure you.
[00:27:58]  The Democrats on the court are thrilled, but they will automatically vote no.
[00:28:05]  They're an automatic no, just like in Congress.
[00:28:07]  They're an automatic no.
[00:28:10]  They're against anything that makes America strong, healthy, and great again.
[00:28:16]  They also are a frankly disgrace to our nation, those justices.
[00:28:22]  They're an automatic no, no matter how good a case you have.
[00:28:24]  It's a no.
[00:28:28]  But you can't knock their loyalty.
[00:28:31]  It's one thing you can do with some of our people.
[00:28:37]  Others think they're being politically correct, which has happened before far too often with certain members of this court.
[00:28:45]  And it's happened so often with this court.
[00:28:48]  What a shame.
[00:28:49]  Having to do with voting in particular.
[00:28:53]  When in fact they're just being fools and lapdogs for the rhinos and the radical left Democrats and not that this should have anything at all to do with it.
[00:29:03]  They're very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution.
[00:29:07]  It's my opinion that the court has been swayed by foreign interests and a political movement that is far smaller than people would ever think.
[00:29:16]  It's a small movement.
[00:29:20]  I won by millions of votes.
[00:29:21]  We won in a landslide.
[00:29:24]  With all the cheating that went on, there was a lot of it, but we still won in a landslide, too big to rig.
[00:29:30]  But these people are obnoxious, ignorant, and loud.
[00:29:33]  They're very loud.
[00:29:34]  And I think certain justices are afraid of that.
[00:29:39]  And just a reminder that the State of the Union is on Tuesday night, February 24th.
[00:29:44]  The President will be in the House chamber.
[00:29:46]  And as regular viewers know, the Supreme Court, many members of it, come and they sit right down front.
[00:29:53]  So that may or may not be interesting to watch that dynamic.
[00:29:58]  Lonnie, Salisbury, North Carolina, Democrats line.
[00:30:01]  Lonnie, good morning to you.
[00:30:02]  What's on your mind this morning?
[00:30:05]  Yeah, what's on my mind?
[00:30:06]  I'd like to go back to Jesse Jackson.
[00:30:09]  I can understand that there Johnson is not letting, didn't let Kurt lie in state at the rotunda because all he spread it seriously was hate at his little rallies.
[00:30:25]  Now, Jesse Jackson changed the way black people in America politics was ran for minorities.
[00:30:35]  Another thing I'd like to say is that I live in the state of North Carolina.
[00:30:39]  I live in Salisbury.
[00:30:40]  Governor Stein signed an executive order for flags to be lowered to half staff.
[00:30:48]  Here in Salisbury, about 30 miles outside of Charlotte, they're not flying the flags at half staff.
[00:30:57]  I was downtown in our governmental section of the city.
[00:31:01]  None of the flags were at half staff.
[00:31:04]  But for Kurt, there were flags that have staff.
[00:31:08]  I mean, the blatant racism here in Salisbury, North Carolina, is very evident.
[00:31:15]  Hey, Lonnie, just to go back to the lying in state in the rotunda, Dick Cheney was denied being able to lie in state in the rotunda.
[00:31:25]  What do you think about that?
[00:31:27]  Do you think that's correct as well?
[00:31:31]  No, I don't think that's correct.
[00:31:34]  But Jesse Jackson changed it for a whole race of people.
[00:31:40]  You know, white people have been doing what they want to do for years.
[00:31:47]  They think that they are so privileged throughout the United States.
[00:31:52]  But when a person of color has done wonderful things for this nation, you have the used to be majority of Americans, which are white people.
[00:32:03]  They downplayed it.
[00:32:04]  They stole a lot of things, a lot of inventions from us, you know, and claimed it for themselves.
[00:32:12]  Just like I just attributed it to what they're doing to Jesse Jackson here in a racist city.
[00:32:20]  You can see the blatant racism here.
[00:32:23]  It's ridiculous.
[00:32:24]  It's Lonnie in Salisbury, North Carolina.
[00:32:26]  Deborah's in Beaford, Georgia, and she is an independent.
[00:32:31]  Hi, Deborah.
[00:32:32]  Hello.
[00:32:33]  What's on your mind?
[00:32:36]  My question is about the tariffs.
[00:32:38]  I understand that some companies are suing to get back their reimbursement for the tariffs they pay.
[00:32:44]  What about the consumers in the country that paid tariffs?
[00:32:48]  What do you think?
[00:32:49]  Because prices were higher because of the tariffs.
[00:32:51]  What do you think?
[00:32:52]  What's your view?
[00:32:54]  I think they should come up with a way of reimbursing people because we couldn't afford to pay those higher prices.
[00:33:01]  Did you think tariffs were a bad idea to begin with?
[00:33:05]  Well, I think he knew they were illegal.
[00:33:08]  He thinks he can just claim emergency for everything and get his way.
[00:33:12]  We had a caller earlier who said tariffs were important because they would help bring back manufacturing here to the United States.
[00:33:19]  Do you think that's an important goal or do you agree with his analysis?
[00:33:24]  Manufacturing left because they could get cheap labor overseas.
[00:33:28]  I worked in manufacturing where they laid off 400 people at a time because they moved overseas.
[00:33:34]  And it was because labor was cheap.
[00:33:37]  So if they would pay more, I mean, they're not going to get people to work for that here.
[00:33:43]  All right, Deborah in Beaford, Georgia.
[00:33:45]  We appreciate your time.
[00:33:47]  Carl's calling in from New Mexico on the Republican line.
[00:33:50]  Good morning, Carl.
[00:33:53]  Just a couple of things real quick.
[00:33:56]  There was a gentleman yesterday who was saying that they were talking about the voting age.
[00:34:02]  And he was saying, oh, no, these kids have to be 21.
[00:34:07]  But yet he was willing to keep the draft at 18.
[00:34:11]  I guess he hadn't never had any children that went to war or anything.
[00:34:15]  And that was the biggest decision of their life.
[00:34:18]  Another thing is, is when you see who caused the problem of migrants is Democrat Party, Mr. Biden.
[00:34:29]  Now, they're against Trump trying to fix the idea.
[00:34:35]  They're against people being questioned whether they're a citizen or not.
[00:34:39]  That's because Biden let everybody in, and they don't know, had records of who's who.
[00:34:45]  So the only way you're going to find out who they are is to ask them.
[00:34:49]  And the other thing is when you see the Democrats raising heck about the people, the different secretaries not answering their questions, right?
[00:35:00]  They forgot about just when Biden was in there.
[00:35:04]  It was reversed.
[00:35:05]  And the Republicans were raising heck about the Democrats not answering their questions.
[00:35:11]  And thanks for listening.
[00:35:13]  All right.
[00:35:14]  Carl, thanks for participating in our conversation this morning.
[00:35:17]  Here's the front page of the Washington Post.
[00:35:19]  They lead with the tariff article.
[00:35:22]  They have this terrific picture of the biathlon, the women in the biathlon, yesterday all prone and shooting at their targets.
[00:35:32]  It's really a terrific picture if you get the chance to look at it.
[00:35:35]  But right below the tariff article is this article.
[00:35:38]  Extra $500 billion for military trips, Pentagon planners.
[00:35:43]  Trump administration officials have struggled to figure out how to increase U.S. military spending by a whopping $500 billion in their forthcoming budget, slowing the overall White House spending plan, for people familiar with the matter said.
[00:35:57]  President Trump last month agreed to a roughly 50% funding boost sought by Pete Eggseth.
[00:36:04]  The idea ran into internal criticism from several other officials, including White House budget chief Russell Vogt, who warned about its potential impact on the widening federal deficit.
[00:36:16]  Since Trump agreed to the higher number, White House aides and defense officials have run into logistical challenges surrounding where to put the money because the amount is so large.
[00:36:28]  That's in the Washington Post this morning.
[00:36:30]  Virginia in Dayton, Ohio on our Democrats line.
[00:36:33]  Virginia, thanks for calling in.
[00:36:35]  What's on your mind?
[00:36:36]  Well, I wanted to say that Donald Trump has done nothing for the United States except for bring us down.
[00:36:44]  His whole thing since he's been president is to make his family richer, fill their pockets with as much money as he can.
[00:36:52]  The tariffs, I agree that we do need tariffs.
[00:36:55]  It is a tax, you know, for trade, and I agree that we do need it.
[00:36:59]  But it's not something that he should use like a pawn.
[00:37:03]  You know, Donald Trump acts like a little child that if he doesn't get his way, he wants to take his toys and go home and whine.
[00:37:10]  He needs to get some balls about him and act like a president instead of some whining ass.
[00:37:16]  And I think that we need to know Donald Trump's health records because I think that Donald Trump has syphilis brain and that he's got dementia.
[00:37:26]  And that's Virginia in Dayton, Ohio.
[00:37:28]  Robert is next, calling in from Chesterfield, Virginia, Independent Line, just down by Richmond.
[00:37:34]  Go ahead, Robert.
[00:37:36]  Well, good morning.
[00:37:38]  Yeah, I've listened to a lot of people this morning, been on hold a long time, and a lot of them finally are realizing what Donald Trump is, and a lot of them voted for him and wouldn't do it again.
[00:37:48]  But you know, what he done to Obama was just wrong.
[00:37:53]  Look, he done it.
[00:37:54]  Nobody else in the White House was stupid enough to do that.
[00:37:58]  But he thinks he's above the law and can get away with anything.
[00:38:02]  And for saying that, I say this.
[00:38:04]  All the people that's working for him, like Pam Bundy, if there had been anybody else, she'd have charged him with a hate crime.
[00:38:10]  But she's just a motor piece for him.
[00:38:11]  That's all she is.
[00:38:13]  And the rest of them that he's hired are pretty much the same.
[00:38:17]  And I can tell people something.
[00:38:18]  They're all telling you the billionaires, buy gold, buy gold.
[00:38:23]  They want you to buy gold.
[00:38:25]  So when they close the stores down, they'll take an ounce of gold from you to get a loaf of bread.
[00:38:30]  That's where your money's going to go.
[00:38:33]  My suggestion is this.
[00:38:35]  Don't buy gold.
[00:38:36]  Buy ammunition and matches, because that's what it's going to take to get Donald Trump out the White House.
[00:38:41]  Hey, Robert, this is...
[00:38:42]  Y'all have a good day.
[00:38:43]  Hey, can I ask you a question?
[00:38:48]  How much of your 24 hours in a day is spent talking about or thinking about Donald Trump?
[00:38:56]  I'm 77 years old, just to be going from this world, got health issues.
[00:39:02]  I think about him a lot because I know he said that he will never let people vote again if they got him back in office.
[00:39:11]  And that's what his intentions are right now.
[00:39:14]  He was destroying the democracy we have in this country.
[00:39:17]  And it stays on my mind a lot.
[00:39:18]  I wish I was a much younger man so I could go up there with the rest of the people when they get their guns out to closes and take the country back from him and make America great again.
[00:39:28]  So, Robert, have you had friends who were Trump supporters?
[00:39:32]  And are they still friends?
[00:39:35]  Oh, yeah.
[00:39:36]  And a lot of them ain't Trump supporters no more because they found out that this man is nothing but he's filled with hate because he never had a place in time where he couldn't do what he wanted to do.
[00:39:49]  But now everybody's on him to do what other people, he don't negotiate with nobody.
[00:39:54]  And he's never made an honest dollar in his life.
[00:39:56]  He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.
[00:39:59]  I tell you what, the country would be better off if he was underground instead of on top of it.
[00:40:03]  All right, Robert.
[00:40:05]  Eddie, Cannapolis, North Carolina.
[00:40:08]  I'd like to be here.
[00:40:09]  What's on my mind?
[00:40:10]  It's about the terrorists.
[00:40:11]  I like Donald Trump number one.
[00:40:14]  I am a Republican.
[00:40:15]  I don't know nothing about law.
[00:40:17]  I don't know nothing about that.
[00:40:19]  Thing is, tariffs are good, I think, because when the tariffs went up, stuff got higher in Walmarts, shell stations, Macy's.
[00:40:31]  So those people raised their prices.
[00:40:33]  Which one of those are the Democrats?
[00:40:35]  Because one of those were Democrats, then they would have made their prices where the poor people could afford to buy.
[00:40:41]  Those Democrats that own these corporations ain't making their prices to help us where we can afford to buy them.
[00:40:48]  I'm one of the poor ones.
[00:40:50]  That's all I got to say.
[00:40:53]  Here's a tweet that came in regarding our conversation this morning.
[00:40:58]  What is on my mind is a hatred that people seem to have for the opposite political party.
[00:41:03]  What is happening to this country?
[00:41:06]  Next call is Will in Decatur, Georgia, Independent Line.
[00:41:10]  Hi, Will.
[00:41:12]  How are you doing?
[00:41:13]  Thank you for taking my call.
[00:41:16]  What I have on my mind is the United States.
[00:41:20]  What is the president doing to help the United States of America?
[00:41:25]  We have gone downhill.
[00:41:29]  And I think that the caller's name is Carl.
[00:41:32]  He got it right.
[00:41:34]  We're in bad shape.
[00:41:36]  America is just in bad shape.
[00:41:38]  Just look around.
[00:41:40]  Our president is doing everything on foreign soil.
[00:41:43]  He has did nothing to help America.
[00:41:48]  And as far as taxes and tariffs, it's all BS.
[00:41:55]  Simply put.
[00:41:56]  And thank you for taking my call.
[00:41:58]  That's Will and Decatur.
[00:41:59]  What's the top of mind for me?
[00:42:02]  Ask Jim in Forsyth, Illinois.
[00:42:04]  The terribly scary trajectory of U.S. national debt.
[00:42:08]  Fixing our debt fiasco starts with a balanced budget, and I do not think our political leaders have what it takes to address it.
[00:42:15]  We are headed for a crisis.
[00:42:17]  Again, that's Jim in Forsyth, Illinois, texting in.
[00:42:21]  Now, if you want to text in, there's the number.
[00:42:24]  If you can't get through on the phone lines, 202-748-8003.
[00:42:29]  Please include your first name and your city if you would.
[00:42:33]  On our Democrats line is Mark in Philadelphia.

=== In-Depth Conversations (02:28) ===

[00:42:36]  Hi, Mark.
[00:42:37]  Hey, Peter.
[00:42:38]  Good to see you.
[00:42:39]  You're as diaper as ever.
[00:42:41]  Let me say this, Peter.
[00:42:43]  I'm a little off topic here.
[00:42:44]  I'd like to see in-depth return to book TV.
[00:42:48]  I don't know why it was taken off, but it powers it be at C-SPAN.
[00:42:53]  But I have some writers lined up for you.
[00:42:55]  Michael Conley of the Lincoln Warrior.
[00:42:58]  I have Lee Child of the Reacher series.
[00:43:01]  And please bring in-depth back.
[00:43:04]  Hey, Mark, do you watch QA on Sunday nights?
[00:43:09]  Often 95% of the time, it's an author that I have on.
[00:43:14]  Yes, I do, but I don't know.
[00:43:17]  I just liked in-depth better because you had the call-ins, and I called in in-depth.
[00:43:24]  And I always seem to have gotten through to in-depth for some odd reason.
[00:43:29]  But, and I have a hard time getting through the Washington Journal, but in-depth, I always got through to you.
[00:43:34]  And, you know, I don't know.
[00:43:36]  I guess I just like in-depth better, and you were great on it.
[00:43:40]  I love to see you come back.
[00:43:42]  Bless your heart.
[00:43:42]  Well, tonight, tonight on QA is a book called A War Within a War.
[00:43:50]  It's by Will Haygood.
[00:43:52]  Will Haygood, by the way, is the man who wrote The Butler.
[00:43:56]  Probably know about that.
[00:43:57]  But this is his new book, and it's about black soldiers in Vietnam and what they faced in Vietnam and what they faced when they came back during the civil rights movement.
[00:44:11]  So that's tonight, 8 p.m. on Sunday.
[00:44:15]  David, Royal Arkansas Independent Line.
[00:44:17]  David, you're on.
[00:44:19]  Hey, man.
[00:44:22]  David.
[00:44:22]  There's just so much that I need to say, but I just can't say it in this time.
[00:44:25]  But I don't understand why people have just joined this cult of a man that's been bankrupt four times.
[00:44:37]  He lies every day.
[00:44:39]  And I was born, my mother raised me, single mother, and she whipped my ass every day if I lied.
[00:44:48]  But Donald Trump does it every damn day, and people just eat it up.
[00:44:51]  I don't understand.
[00:44:54]  That's David in Royal, Arkansas.
[00:44:56]  And this is Walter in Walter in Jamaica, New York.
[00:45:01]  And Walter is asking, What's on your mind?

=== Republicans On Tariffs Discretion (10:37) ===

[00:45:04]  Republicans should accept the changes of DHS that the Democrats are requiring to end this shutdown.
[00:45:11]  We don't need tariffs.
[00:45:13]  Up next is Larry calling in from Texas, Democrats line.
[00:45:17]  Larry, where in Texas are you?
[00:45:19]  I'm in Houston.
[00:45:20]  Thank you, sir.
[00:45:22]  What's on your mind?
[00:45:23]  Thanks for taking my call.
[00:45:25]  First of all, I remember when Clinton signed the NAFTA agreement.
[00:45:31]  I just got the military.
[00:45:33]  There's a stone wall.
[00:45:35]  The economy was thriving.
[00:45:38]  Starving.
[00:45:39]  I think he was the only president that ended with a surplus, if I'm not mistaken.
[00:45:44]  Now, we're hearing about the tariffs.
[00:45:46]  First of all, people, tariffs is a tax.
[00:45:48]  I never heard Republicans.
[00:45:49]  Republicans used to always be against Texas.
[00:45:52]  But here's the tax against what, 90% of the people that paid on the tariffs.
[00:45:58]  You know, if the tariffs are so good, Republican, please answer me this for you.
[00:46:04]  If it's so good, y'all controlled the White House, Congress, and the Senate.
[00:46:14]  Why have they not passed giving him control for tariffs?
[00:46:19]  And one guy had it right.
[00:46:20]  This other guy said something about uneducated sir.
[00:46:24]  Republican Party has the most uneducated.
[00:46:27]  That's who Trumps get.
[00:46:28]  If you have been watching the elections, but we need to stop all this fighting.
[00:46:34]  We need to really go ahead and we really got to do something about the welter oligarchs in this country because they just had them to call me paying $10.99 for beef over here, $4.99 for not even a pound of flour.
[00:46:48]  You know, and these people talking about the prices ain't nothing.
[00:46:51]  People, y'all, what is wrong?
[00:46:54]  That's Larry in Houston, Texas.
[00:46:56]  Larry, thanks for adding your voice to the conversation this morning.
[00:47:00]  The New York Times also leads with the tariff story.
[00:47:04]  Trump defiance on tariffs poses headache for GOP.
[00:47:09]  The painful political reality for Republicans, even those allied with the president, is that his tariff regime has proved deeply unpopular.
[00:47:18]  Some privately lamented that Mr. Trump had missed a chance to walk them back ahead of a midterm election expected to turn heavily on the economy, instead recommitting to a policy that divides his party.
[00:47:30]  Quote, it was bad policy, said Congressman Don Bacon, who's retiring from Nebraska.
[00:47:37]  He's clashed with Mr. Trump on the issue of tariffs and other matters.
[00:47:41]  A majority of Americans and 58% of independent voters opposed Mr. Trump's tariffs, according to a New York Times Siena University poll released last month.
[00:47:52]  Next call is Kelly calling in from Clemens, North Carolina.
[00:47:57]  Kelly, on the Republican line.
[00:48:00]  Kelly, I'm glad to hear you from you.
[00:48:01]  Please go ahead.
[00:48:02]  Oh, I'm glad to talk to you.
[00:48:04]  Thank you for having me on.
[00:48:06]  I have a couple of things, a couple of comments.
[00:48:10]  And the first one is about tariffs, and the second one is about Trump's bankruptcies.
[00:48:19]  Oh, and first off, the last caller that you had that was talking about Republicans are quite uneducated.
[00:48:30]  Well, I have an IQ of 140, and that was at 11 years old.
[00:48:36]  And I was also engifted.
[00:48:39]  So there we go, okay?
[00:48:41]  I'm not dumb.
[00:48:43]  Okay, the tariffs.
[00:48:46]  The tariffs are not gone.
[00:48:48]  I don't know where everybody is getting that from.
[00:48:51]  Now, he is taking the information that came from the three that voted for it.
[00:49:03]  And there is information that Kavanaugh put in there of other laws he can use to do the tariffs.
[00:49:11]  And he did them that afternoon.
[00:49:14]  The tariffs have not stopped.
[00:49:17]  As a matter of fact, that put 15% on the entire world.
[00:49:23]  So, Kelly, are you supportive of the idea of tariffs?
[00:49:27]  Absolutely.
[00:49:29]  Because it brought $18 trillion of companies that are coming in here to build because of the tariffs, because they didn't want tariffs on their products.
[00:49:43]  So they're coming here and bringing us jobs and all kinds of wonderful things.
[00:49:47]  And that will be money for the city that they move to and all of that.
[00:49:54]  All right.
[00:49:55]  Then we get to the issue of whether or not that is at the president's discretion.
[00:50:01]  You know, when it comes to economic matters, spending matters, often the Congress needs to have a voice in that.
[00:50:08]  Do you agree with that, or do you think the president should be allowed to unilaterally do that?
[00:50:14]  I think he should unilaterally be able to do that because look at our Congress we have now.
[00:50:20]  It's so close.
[00:50:22]  You can't get hardly anything through there without a big fight, like is going to happen here shortly with the talking filibuster on the voter ID issue?
[00:50:35]  Yes, on the Save America Act.
[00:50:39]  And the other comment I wanted to, oh, and the law he's using now for the tariffs that he did that same afternoon so they didn't stop.
[00:50:50]  It goes for five months, and at the end of five months, he just redoes it again, and it keeps going and keeps going, and he just keeps redoing it.
[00:50:59]  That's the way the law states.
[00:51:01]  All right.
[00:51:01]  That's Kelly and Clemens.
[00:51:03]  We're going to leave.
[00:51:04]  Kelly, we're going to leave it there.
[00:51:05]  We've got a lot of callers on the line.
[00:51:07]  I want to share this article with you.
[00:51:09]  This is from the Washington Times.
[00:51:10]  Ghillaine Maxwell fights release of more Epstein documents calling disclosure law unconstitutional.
[00:51:18]  Lawyers for imprisoned British socialite Ghelane Maxwell are fighting the requested release of 90,000 pages related to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:51:28]  And Maxwell saying a law used to force the public release of millions of documents is unconstitutional.
[00:51:36]  The lawyers filed papers late Friday in Manhattan federal court to try to block the release of documents from a since-settled civil defamation lawsuit brought a decade ago by Virginia Guefery against Maxwell.
[00:51:52]  That goes on.
[00:51:53]  This is in the Washington Times, in case you're interested in reading the whole thing.
[00:51:58]  In the New York Times is this long full, you know, three-quarters of a page article, tracking recent fallout from the Epstein files, is what this is.
[00:52:10]  And some of the people who have been impacted by this include George Mitchell, who was the Senate Majority Leader for a long time, Democrat from Maine, and they are removing his name from some monuments, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:52:28]  But if you're interested in seeing some of the people who have been impacted by Jeffrey Epstein, it's right there in the New York Times.
[00:52:36]  Well, as you may know, President and Mrs. Clinton are due to be deposed by the Government Oversight Committee on the Epstein matter this week in Congress.
[00:52:49]  It is not right now scheduled for a public hearing, but a behind-the-closed doors hearing.
[00:52:57]  Here's what Hillary Clinton had to say about it earlier this week to the BBC.
[00:53:02]  You say you never met Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:53:04]  Clearly your husband did know him.
[00:53:07]  The former president says he knew him before his crimes came to light.
[00:53:12]  But there are also associations with Ghelane Maxwell, including in 2013 when she was a guest at a Clinton Global Initiative event, years after allegations had emerged against her.
[00:53:26]  What I want to know is, do you regret the links that there have been between Epstein Maxwell and the Clinton family?
[00:53:34]  Well, let me start by saying that a law was passed in Congress to require that all the files that have anything to do with them be released.
[00:53:47]  And what we're seeing, I think it's fair to say, is a continuing cover-up by the Trump administration.
[00:53:54]  In fact, when the Attorney General testified last week, it was quite a scene because she refused to answer questions.
[00:54:03]  She diverted attention away from the matters at hand.
[00:54:08]  She refused to look at the survivors.
[00:54:11]  So there's something about this administration's attitude toward this, which I think really leads us to conclude they have something to hide.
[00:54:21]  We don't.
[00:54:22]  We have been willing to say whatever we know.
[00:54:27]  We've even done it under oaths.
[00:54:30]  But they want us to testify, not everyone else who's mentioned many, many times, hundreds of thousands of times in these files.
[00:54:40]  So we've said, fine, let us do it in public.
[00:54:43]  And we will appear in public and we'll answer all your questions.
[00:54:45]  We'll get to that in just a moment.
[00:54:47]  But just to be clear, do you regret the links that there have been?
[00:54:50]  You know, we have no links.
[00:54:54]  Have a very clear record that we've been willing to talk about, which my husband has said he took some rides on the airplane for his charitable work.
[00:55:05]  I don't recall ever meeting him.
[00:55:08]  Did you have to meet Delay Maxwell?
[00:55:10]  I did on a few occasions, and thousands of people go to the Clinton Global Initiative.
[00:55:15]  So it to me is not something that is really at the heart of what this matter is about.
[00:55:26]  So next week is a very busy week in Washington.
[00:55:29]  Tuesday, February 24th is the State of the Union by the President that evening.
[00:55:35]  Live coverage before, after, during here on C-SPAN and on C-SPAN 2.

=== Anti-Republican Bias Discussion (09:22) ===

[00:55:41]  We'll also be covering the Democratic response, of course, and some alternative State of the Union gatherings.
[00:55:48]  We'll talk about those a little bit later this morning.
[00:55:50]  And then the Clintons will be in town being deposed by the Government Oversight Committee about the Jeffrey Epstein matter.
[00:55:58]  Steve, Martin, Texas, Independent Line.
[00:56:01]  Steve, you're on C-SPAN.
[00:56:02]  What's on your mind this morning?
[00:56:06]  Yeah, you know, for the last several weeks, and it happened again a while ago, some of these racist people calling in.
[00:56:18]  You know, they say that Republicans are in a cult and we're just so terrible.
[00:56:28]  Well, there's 79 million people that voted for Donald Trump.
[00:56:34]  And that includes the entire military: United States Navy, United States Marine Corps, United States, the Christian Coalition, the firefighters unions, the police unions, the United States Republicans.
[00:56:53]  Right, we got it.
[00:56:54]  We got it.
[00:56:55]  We got it.
[00:56:56]  All the military.
[00:56:57]  So that means they're saying all the military and the firefighters were all racist or something.
[00:57:08]  And just like that wonderful black lady the other day, Alice Marie Johnson and that other lady, too, that scolded the African Americans.
[00:57:21]  You know, we have wonderful Christian African Americans down here in my area of Texas.
[00:57:27]  We do.
[00:57:28]  I mean, some of these people are calling in, and white and black, are just got the TDS so bad.
[00:57:35]  It's, you know, it's horrible.
[00:57:37]  And another thing I would just like to bring up: would y'all mind start reading off some conservative newspapers like the New York Post or the Federalist or some, y'all constantly read off the Atlantic, the Washington Post, the New York, all of them are liberal.
[00:58:01]  Every page of the world.
[00:58:03]  Now you're getting the hackles up here.
[00:58:05]  I've already read from Breitbart, The Washington Times this morning.
[00:58:10]  We've got some National Review articles coming up.
[00:58:13]  So, Steve, you make sure you know what you're talking about before you call in and start accusing us of something.
[00:58:18]  But I hear you, and I understand you, and I appreciate it.
[00:58:22]  Thank you, Steve.
[00:58:24]  Here's another Steve, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, Republican line.
[00:58:27]  Steve, good morning.
[00:58:29]  Yes, good morning, sir.
[00:58:31]  Yeah, I just, there's a lot of vitriol, you know, a lot of stuff going back and forth.
[00:58:36]  I'm not one of those guys.
[00:58:37]  I just like being cheaper on the gas.
[00:58:40]  I like seeing the borders close.
[00:58:42]  I like seeing prices going down a little bit and hopefully more.
[00:58:47]  And, you know, strong military force, man.
[00:58:50]  I mean, guess what?
[00:58:53]  These countries are aware of what we can do, and we don't flaunt it, but if we have to use it, we will.
[00:59:02]  But those are all things that I'm pretty going forward.
[00:59:09]  Thank you, Steve, in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
[00:59:12]  Here's another South Carolina caller, Bob on the Democrats line.
[00:59:16]  Bob, where in South Carolina are you?
[00:59:18]  Rock Hill.
[00:59:19]  Rock Hill.
[00:59:21]  That's over in the East.
[00:59:22]  It's about 10 miles from Charlotte, Carolina, or whatever like that.
[00:59:26]  Right.
[00:59:27]  Okay.
[00:59:27]  What's on your mind this morning?
[00:59:29]  Well, I believe since there's freedom of speech, free speech that the other couple days ago in the White House or whatever, they have Jim Jordan there and they had 12 or 15 people from the Epstein files.
[00:59:45]  I believe somebody should put together, since all the names are named on the people, but nobody was there, everybody else was redacted, they should have their own show and speak out to the public who actually were the people that molested them, that took them to the island.
[01:00:05]  The men and women that stood up in that room to say we were used and abused, but their names were the ones shown.
[01:00:13]  Let's just make a people court and get some people there and get the people that were abused there and put it on national TV and hell, everybody else.
[01:00:26]  They're not going nowhere.
[01:00:28]  They're just going to keep, you know, getting rid of it.
[01:00:30]  That's part of it.
[01:00:31]  That's what I think people should do is they should get together and make a show over it and let the names come out on TV.
[01:00:40]  Also, they talked about gas and oil.
[01:00:43]  Well, when gas was $5 a gallon of gas and then oil was $7, gas went down, but the price of oil is $80 for just get your oil change now because that price never went down.
[01:00:57]  And tariffs, once the tariffs go up, they're never going to come down.
[01:01:02]  Now, I used to go to, I love Harris Teeter, okay?
[01:01:05]  I go in there for $20, $23, get a couple of nice steaks.
[01:01:09]  Now you walk in there, it's $38,000 to $42.
[01:01:12]  They're not going to go down.
[01:01:14]  Donald Trump has ruined everything.
[01:01:16]  Everything is so high with tariffs that people making $30,000, $40,000 a year.
[01:01:22]  I don't see how they can pay their rent, eat the food.
[01:01:24]  No, it's crazy.
[01:01:25]  All right.
[01:01:26]  That's Bob in South Carolina.
[01:01:27]  We appreciate the call.
[01:01:29]  This is Edward in Pennsylvania, Independent line.
[01:01:33]  Edward, where in Pennsylvania?
[01:01:36]  Lebanon.
[01:01:36]  Lebanon, Pennsylvania.
[01:01:38]  Great.
[01:01:38]  Go ahead.
[01:01:40]  What's on my what's on my mind is we become a nation of politicians by politicians for politicians.
[01:01:50]  What does that mean?
[01:01:52]  Well, they're all there for themselves.
[01:01:57]  All right.
[01:01:58]  Thank you, sir, for calling in.
[01:01:59]  We appreciate it.
[01:02:00]  Bruce in Chicago, Republican line.
[01:02:02]  Good morning to you, Bruce.
[01:02:04]  What's on your mind?
[01:02:05]  Well, you know, I listened to all this talk about how you're independent and people call in on the supposedly neutral line.
[01:02:14]  I think in order to be fair to everybody, it would be nice if you would publish whenever anybody calls in on your independent line, that you publish how the remarks are coming in.
[01:02:24]  Are they anti-Democrat or are they anti-Republican?
[01:02:27]  Because I find most of them to be anti-Republican, and it seems like people might be telling a fib when they think you call in and say they're independent.
[01:02:36]  That's just an FYI.
[01:02:38]  As I sit here and listen, I said most of the people on the independent line come in anti-Republican.
[01:02:45]  I hear you.
[01:02:46]  I actually hear both voices on the independent line.
[01:02:50]  And you can kind of figure out if people have tried to subvert the system, whatever the system is, you know, our little system here of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents.
[01:03:00]  We don't try to keep it too scientific.
[01:03:03]  And unless it's really egregious, I don't think it's necessary, Bruce, to call it out, especially because you notice it.
[01:03:12]  And the other callers and the other viewers notice it as well.
[01:03:15]  So I don't think it's something that we necessarily need to call out.
[01:03:19]  But yes, agree with you.
[01:03:21]  It's the honor system.
[01:03:22]  That's how we operate here at C-SPAN.
[01:03:25]  So, Bruce, thank you for watching.
[01:03:28]  I hope you continue to watch and don't let your blood pressure get up too high if somebody calls on the Independent line and doesn't seem quite independent.
[01:03:39]  But we appreciate your time.
[01:03:42]  This is in Trending Politics News.
[01:03:45]  J.P. Morgan admits to shutting down Trump's accounts after January 6th protests.
[01:03:51]  J.P. Morgan Chase confirmed in a recent legal filing that it did indeed shut down President Donald Trump's bank accounts following the January 6th capital protests.
[01:04:02]  The president has long accused the financial institution of doing so and has taken legal action, which led to the admission.
[01:04:09]  Recent filings confirmed that the institution closed more than 50 bank accounts linked to President Donald Trump, members of his family, and multiple Trump organization entities in February 2021.
[01:04:23]  The disclosure occurred as part of the bank's response to a lawsuit filed against it and CEO Jamie Diamond.
[01:04:32]  So if you want to see this article, the website is Trending News Politics.
[01:04:40]  Let me, you know, now that I'm handing out a website, Trending Politics News.
[01:04:48]  Trending Politics News is the website.
[01:04:51]  Sorry about that.
[01:04:52]  And if you want to see the whole article, you can go there and read it for yourself.
[01:04:56]  It's a website that's been around for a little while and it has quite a good variety of articles.

=== 10 Years of Research (03:08) ===

[01:05:03]  I think you might find it interesting.
[01:05:05]  We're going to return to this question in about an hour or so, but coming up next is Dan Chason.
[01:05:12]  He's the author of this book, Bernie for Burlington.
[01:05:15]  It's about Bernie Sanders and how he got to Burlington, Vermont.
[01:05:20]  We'll be right back.
[01:05:30]  Tonight on C-SPAN's Q&A, former Washington Post correspondent Will Haygood, author of The War Within a War, talks about the experience of black American soldiers in Vietnam and the struggle for racial equality, both in the war zone and back home in the United States.
[01:05:46]  He also reflects on growing up in Columbus, Ohio during that time, where he experienced this stark divide firsthand as a child.
[01:05:53]  And I found myself as a 14-year-old kid running from National Guard tanks during the riots.
[01:06:02]  I don't think it was until I really got deep into the research of this book that I realized that these two epical moments in American history, Vietnam and the draft, and then riots, that I saw elements of both through my own eyes.
[01:06:25]  Author Will Haygood with his book, The War Within a War, tonight at 8 Eastern on C-SPAN's Q ⁇ A. You can listen to Q&A and all of our podcasts on our free C-SPAN Now app or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:06:46]  Watch America's Book Club, C-SPAN's bold, original series.
[01:06:50]  Today, with our guest author, former Reagan administration official, and a Library of Congress living legend, Linda Chavez.
[01:06:57]  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.
[01:07:06]  She joins our host, renowned author and civic leader David Rubinstein.
[01:07:11]  How long did it take you to write the novel?
[01:07:13]  It took me almost 10 years.
[01:07:15]  10 years.
[01:07:15]  10 years, yes, to write the book.
[01:07:18]  Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace in seven years.
[01:07:22]  So.
[01:07:22]  I know.
[01:07:23]  Well, what can I do?
[01:07:24]  It's 400 pages, David.
[01:07:26]  It's not a short book.
[01:07:27]  All right, well, man.
[01:07:28]  And actually, it was longer.
[01:07:29]  It was longer.
[01:07:30]  I had to cut myself, yes.
[01:07:32]  Watch America's Book Club with Linda Chavez today at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPAN.
[01:07:48]  Washington Journal continues.
[01:07:50]  And now in the Washington Journal, we want to introduce you to author Dan Chasen.
[01:07:56]  Dan is also the chair of the English Department at Wellesley College, and he has written this book, Bernie for Burlington, The Rise of the People's Politician.
[01:08:07]  Dan Chasin, what sparked the concept of this book?

=== Burlington's Political Transformation (15:19) ===

[01:08:12]  Yeah, thanks so much for having me on.
[01:08:14]  I grew up in the city of Burlington during the eight years of Bernie's time in City Hall, and I was aware at the time, and as it's grown my sense, that I was part of some kind of kind of wacky American experiment in Burlington, Vermont.
[01:08:30]  We called it the People's Republic of Burlington.
[01:08:33]  And, you know, as a low-income kid living right in the city, I was kind of a witness to this experiment, but also a bit of a, you know, beneficiary of it.
[01:08:43]  Sanders and his team in City Hall had a lot of outreach to people in the city, particularly teenagers, actually.
[01:08:50]  So it was a transformative time in my life.
[01:08:53]  And, you know, I went on to be a writer and realized that I was sitting on a pretty good story, having been a witness to this early days of Bernie's career.
[01:09:04]  Did Bernie Sanders, Mayor Bernie Sanders, transform Burlington, Vermont, or was it transformed already and just waiting for him?
[01:09:13]  Well, I really feel that he transformed the city.
[01:09:16]  You know, it was small measures, you know, bringing in artists and writers and starting a youth office and giving kids something to do, training teenagers to do carpentry and remodeling of properties.
[01:09:35]  He started a community land trust for low-cost home ownership.
[01:09:40]  There's a long laundry list of things that he did.
[01:09:43]  Some of these measures were inexpensive or free.
[01:09:47]  You know, we're staring down another big blizzard here in Boston as the whole East Coast is.
[01:09:53]  And I see that Mayor Momdani in New York City just called on his residents and citizens of New York to get out their snow shovels and pitch in.
[01:10:03]  And that reminded me of something that Sanders did in Burlington, which was called Operation Snow Shovel, which we were all given shovels and told to go shovel out the old ladies in their homes.
[01:10:15]  So that was a non-political measure that Sanders designed, and it just built a lot of community richness and trust, I think.
[01:10:25]  Bernie Sanders was mayor of Burlington 1980s?
[01:10:29]  That's right.
[01:10:29]  He was elected in 81 by a margin of initially 22 votes, narrowed to 10 on recount.
[01:10:37]  And he was elected to four terms as mayor.
[01:10:40]  He left City Hall in 1989, took a year in the wilderness, and came back to successfully contest the incumbent Republican and go off to Washington as our only U.S. Congressperson.
[01:10:55]  Vermont has only one seat.
[01:10:58]  And we'll get to that in just a minute, but tell us a little bit about Burlington.
[01:11:02]  Sure.
[01:11:03]  Well, Burlington was an immigrant community.
[01:11:09]  I'm from a French-Canadian and Irish background, and those were the two main immigrant groups.
[01:11:14]  There had been manufacturing in the city in the 20th century.
[01:11:19]  Those mills closed in the 50s, and large groups of former mill workers and their families fell into discouragement in the city.
[01:11:30]  So there was a very large underclass, including members of my own family, on the one hand.
[01:11:36]  On the other hand, you had the University of Vermont, which was kind of a separate, almost principality up on the hill.
[01:11:46]  We all benefited from things that the university brought in, great hockey and great art museum, concerts and so on.
[01:11:55]  But it was a little bit removed from the daily life of ordinary Burlington.
[01:12:00]  The city had been transformed very negatively by urban renewal in the 50s and 60s.
[01:12:06]  So when Sanders got to Burlington to live there full-time in 71, there were still open construction sites and just empty lots where an old neighborhood had been and had been taken down.
[01:12:21]  So it was a place that was really, you know, Bernie says at one point in my book that it wasn't a place that was optimal for a leftist politician.
[01:12:32]  It wasn't like Berkeley, California or Ann Arbor, Michigan.
[01:12:35]  It was really a much more mixed population, I think.
[01:12:40]  And we're going to put the numbers up on the screen.
[01:12:42]  We're talking with author Dan Chasin about his new book, Bernie for Burlington, The Rise of the People's Politician.
[01:12:49]  Of course, it's Senator Bernie Sanders that he's talking about.
[01:12:52]  You'll see the numbers up there on the screen.
[01:12:54]  There's a fourth line set aside for Vermont residents.
[01:12:58]  Mr. Chasin, what is the population of Burlington, about 40,000?
[01:13:03]  Yeah, it's been around 40,000 for just about ever.
[01:13:07]  And it's the largest city in Vermont, isn't it?
[01:13:10]  It is by some measure, yeah.
[01:13:12]  How did Brooklyn Bernie Sanders get to Burlington, Vermont?
[01:13:18]  Well, we have to back the story up a little bit.
[01:13:21]  In the 50s, I was told by Bernie's older brother, Larry Sanders, who was a great source for me, that he and his little brother took the subway into New York City and went to a little shop in Midtown Manhattan called Vermont.
[01:13:36]  It was a simulated cottage right in the middle of, right next to the Radio City Music Hall.
[01:13:43]  And it was put there by the Tourist Bureau of the state of Vermont.
[01:13:47]  Larry and Bernie went into this little shop and picked up brochures full of farms for sale, Vermont farms for sale.
[01:13:56]  So Bernie and Larry went back to their little apartment, a very tiny apartment in Midwood, Brooklyn, and poured over these catalogs.
[01:14:04]  Finally, when Bernie got to Vermont at first in 1964, you know, he was dreaming, as many were at the time, of a kind of back-to-the-land existence, a simpler life.
[01:14:15]  He'd graduated from college and kind of wanted to start over in a new place without any rules or restrictions.
[01:14:23]  But when he got to Vermont, he found really grinding, almost Appalachian poverty.
[01:14:29]  So I think of Sanders as having a kind of utopian dimension to his politics, but also a brutally real dimension.
[01:14:38]  And they were both in play in the 60s.
[01:14:42]  He eventually began to run as the kind of superstar of a third party called Liberty Union.
[01:14:49]  They were an anti-Vietnam party that ran some somewhat successful races in the 70s.
[01:14:54]  And Bernie ran for various offices, governor, senator, and so on.
[01:14:59]  But he never got above, say, five or six percent statewide.
[01:15:03]  There seemed to be some kind of a cap for him.
[01:15:06]  So eventually when he moved to Burlington, a friend of his named Richard Sugarman, a guy who considered himself to be a hobby political strategist, went down to City Hall and saw that Sanders had outperformed his statewide totals in the city of Burlington by quite a bit.
[01:15:25]  He'd gotten 20, 30% in Burlington, when statewide in those races, he'd gotten only 2% or 3%.
[01:15:31]  So the idea occurred to Sugarman, well, I'm going to ask, see if my friend, who at that point had retired from politics, he said, see if my friend will stage a campaign for mayor of Burlington.
[01:15:44]  Was he working, was Bernie Sanders working in Burlington?
[01:15:47]  Now, did he move up there without a job?
[01:15:50]  Did he move for a job?
[01:15:52]  So all through the 60s, he was a freelance writer and he kind of had pickup carpentry jobs and kind of improvised life.
[01:16:01]  But by the late 70s, he'd actually started a pretty successful small business.
[01:16:06]  He was producing historical film strips for schools.
[01:16:10]  He noticed that his son Levy would come home with his worksheets from his school day, and the worksheets that corresponded to his history classes had nothing about labor history, nothing about leftist history, nothing about kind of the people's history.
[01:16:26]  So Sanders and some friends put together this little film strip business in his little apartment.
[01:16:33]  They scripted them, they recorded them, they produced them, and then they drove them all around New England.
[01:16:41]  And they apparently did pretty well with these film strips.
[01:16:44]  Maybe some of them are still in some supply closets somewhere in little libraries or schools across New England.
[01:16:52]  Now, Dan Chase, Bernie Sanders has a pretty noticeable Brooklyn accent.
[01:16:59]  Yes, he does.
[01:17:00]  Did that play well in Burlington?
[01:17:03]  And wasn't there a pretty strong GOP establishment in Burlington at the time?
[01:17:08]  Yes.
[01:17:08]  Well, so statewide, Vermont was considered the only one-party Republican state into the 70s.
[01:17:16]  Political scientists and sociologists actually studied Vermont's political culture.
[01:17:21]  It was a really established Republican political culture.
[01:17:25]  And the only Democrats in Vermont really were in cities.
[01:17:30]  So the city of Burlington was a Democratic stronghold.
[01:17:33]  There was a Democratic machine in place there.
[01:17:37]  And the mayor of the city, Gordon Paquette, had been in for five terms.
[01:17:42]  He controlled the entire board of aldermen and web of city commissions.
[01:17:48]  So it was a kind of a daunting prospect to break into that machine for Bernie.
[01:17:53]  And of course, he was the consummate outsider.
[01:17:56]  You know, he had the real urban guy, the thick Brooklyn accent that has not diminished over the years at all.
[01:18:04]  There was a lot of anti-Semitism in the city at the time.
[01:18:08]  It was a very interesting moment in the city because, you know, we were just becoming aware of outsiders, quote-unquote, flatlanders, starting to really come in and transform the culture of the city.
[01:18:20]  Ben and Jerry's played a role in that moment as well.
[01:18:24]  But these were all people who were, you know, sort of on the margins.
[01:18:27]  It was very shocking for Sanders to kind of break in to such an existing political hierarchy.
[01:18:36]  When did he start using the label socialist?
[01:18:40]  That's a really good question.
[01:18:41]  He discovered socialism in his one year at Brooklyn College.
[01:18:46]  There was a table set up in the sort of auditorium or gymnasium with all the various student groups, and he met some, he said, real live socialists.
[01:18:56]  Around that time, he was also introduced to a pamphlet that was published by Albert Einstein called Why Socialism?
[01:19:04]  It had a really big influence among college kids in particular.
[01:19:08]  Einstein was probably the most respected person in the world, and he put out his own political broadsheet calling for socialism.
[01:19:18]  So that was a really impactful experience for Sanders to discover that literature.
[01:19:24]  And then at the University of Chicago, where he transferred, he read a lot of Marx and he developed really his idea of himself as a socialist, I think, there in the early 60s.
[01:19:38]  So Dan Chase, and Bernie Sanders is probably well known as well for having a flinty, sometimes aggressive personal style.
[01:19:50]  How did that play in Burlington, Vermont?
[01:19:54]  That's a great question.
[01:19:55]  You know, the classic Yankee Republican of the type that you would find in the state's hill regions and countrysides was a very flinty, stubborn, you know, tenacious character.
[01:20:12]  And the politics of that individual were nominally Republican, but we would recognize a lot of progressive strains in that form of Republican thought.
[01:20:24]  And Sanders made a really very effective and persuasive appeal to those voters when he started to run statewide for office.
[01:20:34]  So, you know, he talked to them about economic insecurity.
[01:20:38]  He talked to them about the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
[01:20:42]  A lot of those folks were watching their farmland, neighboring farmland get bought up by wealthy out-of-staters.
[01:20:52]  And there was a fear of development.
[01:20:55]  There was the fear that Vermont was going to somehow lose what made it special.
[01:20:59]  And I think Bernie and others in his generation who moved to Vermont really only wanted to preserve it as they found it.
[01:21:07]  So he had a really surprising appeal, actually, to those kinds of folks.
[01:21:12]  He also had a strong, I think to this day still libertarian strain to his thought.
[01:21:19]  He would tell folks in Franklin County in Vermont that he was against gun control period in the 70s.
[01:21:26]  He wanted there to be absolutely no laws banning drugs, for example.
[01:21:35]  So he had a strong libertarian strain underneath his socialism that appealed, I think.
[01:21:41]  Has that been consistent throughout his congressional career, first in the House of Representatives and then, of course, as senator?
[01:21:48]  I think so.
[01:21:49]  I think primarily just in his insistent independence throughout his career.
[01:21:55]  You know, after he left Liberty Union, this sort of fringe anti-Vietnam party in the 70s, he never once again joined a political party.
[01:22:04]  He ran as an independent in Burlington and he ran as an independent, you know, statewide and was elected to the House as an independent and remains an independent.
[01:22:16]  So I think that strain of, you know, strong Yankee independence just goes into sort of the basics of his career.
[01:22:24]  Yeah.
[01:22:25]  Dan Chase, and this goes a little bit beyond your book, but Vermont has had a Republican governor for years and years, and he gets reelected all the time.
[01:22:33]  Jim Scott, I believe is his name.
[01:22:35]  Yeah, Phil Scott, yeah.
[01:22:36]  Yeah, Phil Scott.
[01:22:37]  And but Vermont, 65% votes for the Democratic nominee for president, entire congressional delegation, Democratic.
[01:22:49]  Where's the dichotomy there?
[01:22:51]  How does that happen?
[01:22:52]  Well, it's one of the great paradoxes, and it's true across New England, that some of the most progressive states tend to hold the governor's chair for a Republican, as though almost maybe to balance out the politics of the state at large.
[01:23:10]  You know, what I would say is that the Republican Party as a whole in Vermont has collapsed.
[01:23:16]  It collapsed in the 80s and really has never gotten back on its feet.
[01:23:20]  So when we see these Republican governors like Phil Scott, we're watching real political independence and talent play out.
[01:23:29]  He's a widely loved guy.

=== Vermont's Political Independence (15:10) ===

[01:23:31]  He was a stock car racer.
[01:23:33]  He speaks with a thick Vermont accent.
[01:23:37]  The other thing is that Vermont Republicans are able, as Phil Scott has shown often, to break from the National Party and show themselves to be real independents.
[01:23:47]  Whereas if you're running as a Democrat in Vermont, you know, you're basically in line with the Democratic Party in Washington.
[01:23:55]  So those Republicans are able to be kind of maverick.
[01:23:58]  And I think that they do appeal to the average Vermont voter.
[01:24:02]  Where I think what Bernie and somebody like Phil Scott have in common is that they're viewed as very independent politicians, not beholden to any kind of a party structure.
[01:24:13]  Well, let's work some calls in.
[01:24:15]  Dan Chason is our guest.
[01:24:16]  He is chair of the English Department at Wellesley College outside of Boston.
[01:24:20]  And he is the author of this new book, Bernie for Burlington, The Rise of the People's Politician.
[01:24:26]  Our first call is coming in from Alaska, Bettlesfield, Alaska, independent line.
[01:24:32]  Mike, an early good morning to you.
[01:24:35]  Oh, yes.
[01:24:36]  Good morning to you, Peter and Dan.
[01:24:38]  Thank you for taking a call.
[01:24:40]  Sure.
[01:24:40]  Yeah.
[01:24:42]  You guys, you know, I grew up in down in Southern California during the late 50s and early 60s.
[01:24:47]  It was glorious.
[01:24:49]  I was 12 years old.
[01:24:51]  Yeah, I was 12 years old.
[01:24:53]  I mean, Mattel Toys was a mile away.
[01:24:55]  We used to sneak in and jump into the trash cans and get our Hot Wheels back in 1968 when it first came out.
[01:25:01]  I had a thousand Hot Wheels at least.
[01:25:05]  But anyway, I would hitchhike to the beach when I was 12 or 14 with my small surfboard.
[01:25:10]  I'd surf all day.
[01:25:11]  My dad would get home from his construction company on Olympic Boulevard in LA, and he'd pick me up after fishing at McDonald's Beach on the rocks and take me home.
[01:25:20]  Every day like that, nobody at the beach.
[01:25:22]  Just fantastic.
[01:25:24]  Ideal.
[01:25:25]  So, Mike, Mike, tie it into our conversation about Bernie Sanders.
[01:25:29]  I'm trying to tie this in real quick.
[01:25:32]  Okay, gone.
[01:25:34]  John Kennedy, gone.
[01:25:35]  The assassination era, gone.
[01:25:38]  Yeah.
[01:25:39]  There goes my happiness.
[01:25:41]  The Democrats get in and take over.
[01:25:44]  Communism takes over.
[01:25:46]  The civil rights movement takes over, which was bogus.
[01:25:50]  My dad had a 15-man black concrete crew, the best concrete finishers you ever saw.
[01:25:55]  There was no racism, in my opinion, back then.
[01:25:59]  It was manufactured by the CIA, like all the assassinations from Joseph McCarthy on.
[01:26:04]  I think the Democrats have destroyed America and the Republicans, too.
[01:26:09]  Thank you, Mike in Alaska, calling in with that comment.
[01:26:13]  Dan Chason, has Bernie Sanders been a consistent politician in both his policies and his actions?
[01:26:24]  To a fault, perhaps.
[01:26:26]  It was amazing in the 70s, even before There was a lot of broadcast attention on Sanders that it would be reported from village to village as he would campaign across Vermont.
[01:26:38]  People would compare notes.
[01:26:39]  You know, they would say, Did you see this guy, Bernie?
[01:26:41]  Can you believe his, you know, his appearance, his outfits, his voice, and his politics?
[01:26:48]  You know, there were the same phrases and fixations repeated over and over.
[01:26:53]  It was millionaires at the time, but now it's become billionaires, and it's the same critique.
[01:26:59]  In 1974, when Nelson Rockefeller was confirmed to be the vice president under Gerald Ford, he had to have these Senate hearings.
[01:27:09]  And Bernie went around saying, We can't have a billionaire in the White House, you know.
[01:27:16]  And people thought, well, that's paranoid, and he's being alarmist.
[01:27:20]  And who is this crazy Marxist?
[01:27:22]  But in fact, it was very prescient that we have now a guy who's enriching himself daily from the public coffers.
[01:27:30]  So he has been consistent throughout.
[01:27:34]  And there is an element almost of prophecy in some of the things that he's been saying since the early days because we've seen them very depressingly come to fruition.
[01:27:44]  Dan Chase and you have written a vignette in your book about Bernie Sanders purchasing a home from a Republican.
[01:27:53]  What is that story?
[01:27:57]  Yes, well, he bought a house in Stanard, Vermont in 1968, the first home, the first year-round property he owned there.
[01:28:08]  And he moved there full-time.
[01:28:10]  And that was a completely Republican state village, only about 200 people.
[01:28:17]  A few of the hippies were starting to move in.
[01:28:20]  But the key takeaway from that time is that, you know, Sanders was traveling around to the communes as a freelance writer.
[01:28:27]  He was doing some reporting on all these communes that were springing up and countercultural young people were coming to the state of Vermont to kind of start over and make a new civilization.
[01:28:38]  Sanders was very impatient with their scene.
[01:28:41]  He would go and visit them and take some interviews and talk to the folks, but he would quickly get out of there and go back to Stannard, where he was much more impressed by the kind of overall weave of a Yankee Vermont village, which was very tolerant, actually, of these few outsiders who were starting to show up.
[01:29:02]  As long as they could, you know, help plow the driveway and, you know, show up for the 4th of July picnic and all the things that you do in those little communities, they were accepted.
[01:29:14]  And so there was wonderful reciprocity in rural Vermont, still is.
[01:29:19]  You can't have a political beef with the guy who has the snowplow in town.
[01:29:24]  You can't have a beef with the guy who's the, you know, the obstetrician in town.
[01:29:30]  If you want your baby born or your driveway plowed, you got to work with people.
[01:29:35]  So I think he was very impressed by that.
[01:29:37]  Is it really a case in Vermont in many areas that everybody knows everybody?
[01:29:43]  Well, I'm finding that.
[01:29:45]  Setting out to write this book, I was no more than one degree apart from really anybody I needed to interview.
[01:29:53]  And so that was a great convenience and benefit to me.
[01:29:58]  And then as I've been traveling around Vermont, reading from the book and discussing it, if you're not in the book, your cousin's in the book.
[01:30:08]  And it is quite amazing.
[01:30:10]  You know, it's a state of only about 600,000 people.
[01:30:13]  It's one of the least populated states in the country.
[01:30:16]  I tell the story in my book how that is really by design.
[01:30:20]  The state has taken great pains to remain rural, which is very surprising since it sits so close to some of the big population areas in our country.
[01:30:30]  Richard is calling in from Augusta, Georgia, Democrat.
[01:30:33]  Richard, you're on with all Dan Chason.
[01:30:36]  Please go ahead.
[01:30:38]  Good morning, Dan.
[01:30:41]  I'm an Army veteran.
[01:30:42]  I'm 70 years old, and I enjoy listening to Bernie Sanders, and I support Bernie Sanders 100%.
[01:30:49]  Because one thing Bernie Sanders has done in recent times is he has addressed my issue that I brought on C-SPAN in April of 2024 that we were going to have a dictator in the White House.
[01:31:04]  Jim, you hosted the show that day with Mr. Cohen.
[01:31:07]  And I tell you, here we are with premonition, if you're going to call it that.
[01:31:12]  Yep.
[01:31:12]  That's what we had.
[01:31:14]  And I love Bernie Sanders' politics because he was for people of all nationalities, genders, race, whatever.
[01:31:22]  And that European surveys have shown that they are the most happiest people in the world compared.
[01:31:31]  The United States was down like 17th or 19th.
[01:31:36]  Bernie Sanders speaks the truth.
[01:31:38]  All right.
[01:31:38]  Thank you, Richard and Augusta, Georgia.
[01:31:40]  Dan Chasin, any comment for that caller?
[01:31:44]  Well, I agree.
[01:31:46]  And it's just, you know, it's good to hear people calling in from all over the country, you know, kind of testifying to that, you know, to that position.
[01:31:55]  Yeah, it's great.
[01:31:56]  Well, C-SPAN has literally hundreds, if not thousands, of Bernie Sanders' videos in our archive.
[01:32:05]  C-SPAN.org.
[01:32:06]  Type in Bernie Sanders, not only the Senate, but also all his campaign stops that we've covered.
[01:32:13]  You can just go to C-SPAN.org if you have any desire to watch a Bernie Sanders speech.
[01:32:18]  You can compare for yourself whether or not you think it's consistent and whether or not you think it's effective.
[01:32:25]  But it was in 1988 that C-SPAN first interviewed him.
[01:32:30]  Here it is.
[01:32:33]  To recognize that in our nation today, we have an extreme disparity between the rich and the poor.
[01:32:39]  That elections are bought and sold and controlled by people who have huge sums of money.
[01:32:44]  So my first concern is to have a president who has the courage to look reality in the face and say that we need some radical changes in this country so that every American can have the opportunity to have a decent standard of living and live a decent life.
[01:32:58]  I also, when we talk about presidential politics, I always have a little bit of a problem because I'm not a Democrat and I'm not a Republican.
[01:33:06]  In Burlington, Vermont, we have, I think, the only three-party system in the United States of America.
[01:33:11]  My dream would be that we would have a strong third-party movement in the United States composed of working people and minorities and women groups and all of the people who are presently disenfranchised.
[01:33:21]  Well, that doesn't exist right now.
[01:33:22]  So my options are somewhat limited.
[01:33:25]  But essentially, I would like to see somebody who speaks for the underdog, for the people who don't have decent health care benefits, somebody who understands that in America today, 50% of the people don't even vote anymore.
[01:33:40]  And the vast majority of that 50% are poor people and working people who have given up on the system.
[01:33:45]  So essentially, I would like to see a candidate who has the guts to have a vision that America could be a land for all people, not just the land controlled by the super rich.
[01:33:54]  And that was Bernie Sanders in 1988 when he was the socialist mayor of Burlington, Vermont.
[01:34:00]  By the way, Dan Chason, who is the mayor of Burlington today?
[01:34:05]  Her name is Emma Mulvaney-Static, and she is a progressive.
[01:34:08]  So the progressives who got their start under Bernie, he never joined them, interestingly.
[01:34:13]  He always was an independent.
[01:34:15]  But the Progressive Coalition formed during his mayorality, and they still hold City Hall today.
[01:34:23]  I did want to mention that I believe the clip you just played, it was during that broadcast on C-SPAN that Sanders announced that he would be a candidate for U.S. House in 1988.
[01:34:35]  There's a chapter in my book that discusses that, in part, that broadcast that you just played.
[01:34:41]  So that was really cool.
[01:34:42]  And did he won in 1988, correct?
[01:34:45]  Or he lost that one?
[01:34:46]  No, so it's fascinating.
[01:34:48]  He decided, just to back it up for a moment, he decided to try his hand.
[01:34:53]  He was very popular in Burlington, almost non-political by the mid-80s.
[01:34:58]  He had a 65, 70% approval rating across a lot of different groups in the city of Burlington.
[01:35:05]  And he thought, okay, well, let's try to scale this up.
[01:35:07]  And in 86, he tried unsuccessfully to run for, he ran for governor, and it was a very unsuccessful campaign.
[01:35:14]  He got about 15%, total disappointment.
[01:35:18]  And in the interim, he worked on his statewide organization.
[01:35:23]  In part, he used Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition as his organizing framework.
[01:35:29]  And in 1988, he announced he would run for U.S. House, and it was a three-way race, and he came within just a few percentage points of winning.
[01:35:40]  Peter Smith, sort of the last liberal Vermont liberal Republican, was sent to Washington.
[01:35:48]  And Sanders licked his wounds and kind of went into the wilderness a little bit and staged a rematch in 1990.
[01:35:59]  And that's when he won by a pretty significant margin.
[01:36:03]  And the rest is history.
[01:36:05]  And you tell the story in the book of Peter Smith campaigning to get reelected with George H.W. Bush coming up on Air Force One.
[01:36:14]  That's right.
[01:36:15]  Peter Smith and I spoke a number of times.
[01:36:18]  He's a wonderful person and a dignified man and a person I respect very much.
[01:36:25]  But when he went to Washington in 1988, he had pledged to the NRA that he would support no legislation putting any kinds of controls on any kind of weapon.
[01:36:36]  He got to Washington and almost immediately there was a horrific mass shooting in Stockton, California.
[01:36:43]  And Smith told me he looked at himself in the mirror when he was shaving one morning and said, you know, if I'm going to like this guy the rest of my life, I want to do something about this.
[01:36:52]  So he signed a bill with a bipartisan bill with a Democrat to ban certain types of assault weapons.
[01:37:01]  This enraged the Vermont NRA and they pledged to defeat Peter Smith.
[01:37:07]  They didn't like Sanders much better, but they hated Smith.
[01:37:11]  And in fact, that might have been the difference between the 1988 and the 1990 campaign.
[01:37:17]  It's a great irony, of course, because this, you know, kind of prince of progressivism, Bernie Sanders, you know, one of the factors that sent him to Washington was that he was seen as better by the NRA than the Republican that we had.
[01:37:31]  Diane in Port Charlotte, Florida sends in this text.
[01:37:35]  It was hysterical watching him fly around with AOC in a private jet, complaining about oligarchs, complained about millionaires until he became one.
[01:37:46]  Is that a fair criticism in your view, Dan Chasem?
[01:37:49]  It's completely unfair, but such things have been said, of course, from the very beginning.
[01:37:55]  You know, his house was, that he had a house was, you know, some kind of hypocrisy.
[01:38:04]  when he wrote a book that made a little bit of money.
[01:38:08]  He bought a very modest camp up on the lake in the islands of Lake Champlain, and people decided, oh, he's got a vacation home.
[01:38:16]  So the idea that he's a total hypocrite, because how could you be a socialist and own a car or, you know, a home?
[01:38:27]  It's absurd, really.
[01:38:29]  We're not put on this earth to be completely consistent in our beliefs at every moment.
[01:38:33]  And we live within a capitalist society.
[01:38:36]  I think Sanders just simply feels that socialism should have a seat at the table.

=== Burlington's Socialist Experiment (15:20) ===

[01:38:41]  And I will say that when it did have a seat at the table in Burlington, it turned out to be a very effective negotiating position.
[01:38:48]  So it's possible to be a socialist and own a home.
[01:38:52]  What's your critique of Bernie Sanders?
[01:38:55]  Of Bernie?
[01:38:57]  Well, in the book, there are decisions he made in the city of Burlington that I think were potentially not great.
[01:39:09]  He was very involved with developing the waterfront.
[01:39:11]  People don't know that.
[01:39:13]  In the end, we got a lovely public park, but he had backed something that was much more extensive and would have put much more of the waterfront in the hands of private homeowners.
[01:39:25]  As a national politician, just in terms of his stylistic moves as a politician, I've always felt, and it's one of the reasons I wrote the book, that he should speak more biographically about his own background and family and past.
[01:39:43]  He comes by his, for example, his positions on socialized health care, because his own parents suffered so terribly because they were not able to access medical care.
[01:39:54]  So some of my critiques would be stylistic.
[01:40:00]  I thought he was a little late coming around to name the Gaza genocide.
[01:40:05]  I think many people on the left felt that about him.
[01:40:09]  So things come and go.
[01:40:10]  But in the main, I find Sanders to be a really admirable politician.
[01:40:16]  In a sense, is he the godfather of the congressional squad, including AOC and Mayor Mamdani of New York?
[01:40:26]  I think so.
[01:40:27]  I think they would say so.
[01:40:28]  It's particularly striking with Mamdani.
[01:40:31]  When Zoran won the primary last June, Sanders and his people began to mentor him pretty carefully and pretty effectively.
[01:40:41]  He was in New York a lot.
[01:40:44]  Sanders would convene sort of conclaves back in Burlington.
[01:40:48]  All of his old aides would get together, brainstorm about how they could advise the candidate at the time, now the mayor, Mamdani.
[01:40:58]  And Bernie would deliver these lessons down to the candidate.
[01:41:02]  And Mamdani himself has said that, you know, Sanders' 2020 campaign was the beginning of his political life.
[01:41:11]  He declared his candidacy for the state assembly at Bernie's rally in Queensbridge.
[01:41:17]  That was the first rally that Sanders did after his heart attack.
[01:41:22]  So their fates are very much aligned in a way.
[01:41:25]  And I think a lot of the DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America, who really sort of have coached and fundraised and mentored and managed Mamdani's rise, a lot of them would say that it's the disappointments of Bernie's 2016 and 2020 campaigns that really re-energized that movement.
[01:41:47]  And, you know, we're seeing them finding, scouting, recruiting candidates all over the country now.
[01:41:54]  So it's an exciting moment if you share these politics.
[01:41:57]  Jackie's calling in from Oklahoma City on the Republican line.
[01:42:01]  Good morning, Jackie.
[01:42:03]  Hi, how you doing?
[01:42:04]  Please go ahead.
[01:42:06]  Yeah, I'd like to ask him a question.
[01:42:07]  What was up with that essay you wrote for the Vermont Freeman in 72?
[01:42:15]  That's great.
[01:42:17]  What was he thinking about?
[01:42:19]  All right, walk us through that, Dan Chason.
[01:42:21]  I love the question.
[01:42:22]  Okay, so this was a little grassroots paper called The Vermont Freeman, and Bernie did freelance writing for them.
[01:42:29]  And this was a notorious piece that he published called Man and Woman.
[01:42:35]  And it came to light during the 2016 campaign.
[01:42:38]  Hillary Clinton's people found it.
[01:42:41]  Her OPO researchers found it in the archives up in the state of Vermont.
[01:42:47]  And they tried to portray this as the kind of root of the phenomenon known as the Bernie bro.
[01:42:52]  The idea that there was some kind of deep sexism that was sort of at the root of Bernie's sort of sensibility and politics and following.
[01:43:02]  So this little essay that the caller mentions, it tries to illustrate, it's a quite blunt piece, I would say.
[01:43:09]  It's not a successful piece.
[01:43:11]  I don't think a lot of Bernie's writing is actually very good.
[01:43:14]  So there's a criticism that I can make of him.
[01:43:19]  But the underlying point it's trying to make is that we live in a society that in a way kind of influences us to imagine doing terrible things to one another.
[01:43:33]  We're brought up to want to go to war.
[01:43:35]  You know, there's all this bloodthirst that comes out of our childhoods.
[01:43:38]  We're brought up to see the opposite sex as predators or prey.
[01:43:43]  So this was a kind of sort of a satirical piece that, you know, I don't think it's probably Bernie's proudest moment, but it was very much of the era as well.
[01:43:55]  Sanders was very influenced.
[01:43:57]  This gets us in the weeds a little bit, but I'll just advertise it.
[01:44:01]  He was very influenced by a psychoanalytic thinker named Wilhelm Reich, who was very controversial.
[01:44:08]  But what Reich taught was that, you know, some of the sexual repressions and restrictions that capitalist Americans and others feel under capitalism, you know, really created a kind of violent underbelly of the society.
[01:44:24]  Of course, this was during the Vietnam War, and it was very troubling to many how much bloodthirst there was in the country.
[01:44:35]  Dan Chasin, you don't often write big books like this one, do you?
[01:44:39]  What do you write nicely?
[01:44:41]  Well, I'm a poet, if you can believe that.
[01:44:43]  I've published five books of poetry, and I decided to turn to this big nonfiction project, partly because, you know, my origin story as a writer is very tied up with Bernie's Burlington.
[01:44:58]  When I was growing up and discovering the art of poetry, Sanders had started what was called the Mayor's Council on the Arts, and there was always a kind of steady supply of really interesting, free programming that we could take advantage of.
[01:45:14]  My family didn't have a lot of money.
[01:45:16]  A lot of us in Burlington didn't have a lot of money.
[01:45:19]  And suddenly we were seeing, for example, the poet Alan Ginsburg came to Burlington and dedicated a poem to our city called Burlington Snow.
[01:45:30]  It ended up becoming, this poem, almost a kind of founding document, like a constitution of the People's Republic of Burlington.
[01:45:39]  And, you know, it just kind of sparked my interest as a working class kid in trying to pursue a career in, let's face it, not a very lucrative or remunerative art.
[01:45:54]  I think that one benefit of growing up in Bernie's Burlington is that kids felt they had a wider variety of choices that they could make about their own lives and futures.
[01:46:04]  And that was very stimulating.
[01:46:07]  So, yeah, but it's the first, you know, this is a rather large book.
[01:46:12]  And I think all of my other books piled up would be about the same size.
[01:46:18]  Next call for Dan Jason is John in Wisconsin Independent Line.
[01:46:22]  John, good morning.
[01:46:22]  You're on C-SPAN.
[01:46:24]  Good morning.
[01:46:25]  Thanks for taking my call.
[01:46:26]  I didn't know if I'd make it in with all the filibustering between the two of you.
[01:46:33]  I consider myself kind of a libertarian and independent, kind of right-leaning a little bit.
[01:46:39]  But my question to your guests would be: when it comes down to the single-payer health care plan and an issue that Bernie and progressives or Marxists, whatever we want to call them, label people as.
[01:46:53]  It didn't work out too well in Vermont when they had it instituted in Vermont back in 2011.
[01:46:58]  After three years, there were not enough funds to even continue to cover the people of the state of Vermont.
[01:47:04]  So how in the world do you expect that same type of policy to work for 350 million people without bankrupting the country, which is basically already bankrupt in its entirety?
[01:47:17]  All right.
[01:47:17]  Thank you, John, for that question.
[01:47:19]  Dan Jason.
[01:47:20]  Yeah, it's a great question.
[01:47:22]  It's not really within the remit of my book, but I'll tell you what I know about it, which is that it's very hard for a state to break away from the overall economy of the country.
[01:47:33]  So I think respectfully, I would just disagree with the caller.
[01:47:37]  I think the only way to do it would be nationally, because it's way too much of a burden on individual states to get that right.
[01:47:45]  I will say that Burlington, Vermont does not have a large financial elite or a kind of aristocracy.
[01:47:56]  If you were wealthy in Burlington in the 80s, it was likely that you were a doctor.
[01:48:02]  What we do have is a very big hospital, thriving regional hospital, probably the best hospital outside of Boston in New England.
[01:48:11]  And the doctors were getting, you know, very rich actually in Burlington.
[01:48:17]  So some of the sort of sense, you know, the sense that the medical system is rigged against ordinary people who can't afford procedures, you know, that was very glaring right on the streets of Burlington, where the doctors all drove BMWs and you had to take a loan to get your hip surgery.
[01:48:37]  I think some of those tensions and ironies played out in a way that just strengthened Bernie's sense that we've got to get health care right if we're going to have a moral society.
[01:48:49]  Is Ben and Jerry still heavily connected to Burlington?
[01:48:54]  Yes.
[01:48:55]  You know, their flagship store is right there on Church Street.
[01:49:00]  Of course, they've had their own adventure being bought up by, I don't know, Unilever eventually and so on.
[01:49:08]  So, and I believe that Ben Cohen is trying to, and they're trying to, you know, separate out from that larger conglomerate.
[01:49:15]  But yeah, it's still very much a big part of life there.
[01:49:19]  It was an important element of Bernie's rise.
[01:49:22]  I think the fact that, you know, it started to chip away a little bit at the fear of outsiders, which was manifested by anti-Semitism in those days.
[01:49:34]  They started their gas station operation.
[01:49:37]  I remember waiting in line.
[01:49:38]  They would have two flavors at any given time.
[01:49:42]  And, you know, the community started to see one another.
[01:49:44]  It was really fun to, you know, they threw concerts and they had free movies.
[01:49:49]  And so it was more than just ice cream.
[01:49:51]  It was a kind of little cultural hub.
[01:49:54]  And forgive my use of wording, but does Vermont still have a hippie vibe to it?
[01:50:04]  Yeah, a lot of the true blue hippies are now in their 80s or so.
[01:50:10]  But sure.
[01:50:11]  I mean, I would say so.
[01:50:14]  And of course, we have a steady influx of students coming in through UVM and Middlebury and other colleges, and they tend to keep things a little crunchy, I think.
[01:50:24]  You know, it's part of it is just practicality.
[01:50:27]  You don't, you should wear certain kinds of clothes in Vermont because of the cold and because of the mess and the mud and everything else.
[01:50:37]  But no, I would say so.
[01:50:38]  It's a, you know, it's a mellow state.
[01:50:41]  We have a lot of festivals during the summer.
[01:50:43]  Used to be a great reggae festival.
[01:50:45]  The band Fish, of course, is from Burlington.
[01:50:48]  I'm particularly involved with and fascinated by a theater company called Bread and Puppet that does these kind of anti-capitalist productions all over the state.
[01:51:01]  So yeah, it's still a crunchy place.
[01:51:04]  But in my book, I tried to make sure that I highlighted, you know, not really that Vermont so much as the Vermont of the working class.
[01:51:13]  And I think that those two groups have sometimes been in some kind of tense relationship.
[01:51:19]  It takes a little bit of money to be a hippie, you know.
[01:51:23]  And some of the folks who are, you know, fueling up their snowmobiles, you know, don't take too kindly to hippies.
[01:51:30]  And I wanted to make sure that that Vermont was represented.
[01:51:33]  I mean, that's truly my background and my own Vermont.
[01:51:36]  Yeah.
[01:51:37]  Ann is calling in from Ohio, Republican line.
[01:51:40]  Please go ahead, Anne.
[01:51:41]  Hello.
[01:51:42]  Thank you.
[01:51:44]  I'm an outsider.
[01:51:45]  I've been to Vermont a few times, but I see Bernie as a clanking symbol.
[01:51:50]  He's a good person, well-intended, but I just don't see where he accomplished a lot of his goals as far as income inequality and all of that.
[01:52:02]  And I see your state, Vermont, as more and more being taken over, if you will, by progressives from New York City, carpet beggars who basically retire out there.
[01:52:14]  I think the farmers and the laborers that you wax poetic about are dying off.
[01:52:20]  And one last thing.
[01:52:23]  Bernie just said, according to that video, you show the 1988 speech when he was mayor.
[01:52:28]  Elections are bought and sold.
[01:52:30]  But yet, if President Trump says that, he gets knocked about by everybody.
[01:52:35]  So I find some discrepancies there.
[01:52:38]  And I think it's okay if my doctor drives the BMW after replacing my hips.
[01:52:43]  I have no problem with that.
[01:52:45]  All right, Ann in Ohio, thank you for your call.
[01:52:47]  Dan Chason, any comment for that caller?
[01:52:51]  Well, I appreciate the comment, actually.
[01:52:53]  I don't disagree with a lot of what she said.
[01:52:55]  One thing I would say, though, is that, you know, there are a lot of really thriving farm communities in Vermont now.
[01:53:05]  A lot of farms have been repurposed.
[01:53:08]  There's a thriving scene of, you know, breweries and cheesemakers and small farms.
[01:53:15]  They're all networked up together, delivering their, you know, food to the restaurants.
[01:53:20]  There's a service that actually brings food from Vermont, groceries from Vermont farms down to Boston.
[01:53:27]  So, you know, I sometimes go to a little town called Greensboro, Vermont.
[01:53:32]  I believe it had 80 farms at the turn of the 20th century, turn of the 19th into the 20th century.
[01:53:39]  And I believe it has like 90 farms now.
[01:53:41]  So there are farmscapes that are surviving.
[01:53:45]  But as a basic principle, I think the caller is right.
[01:53:50]  It's always a struggle to keep Vermont from becoming a kind of landlocked Martha's Vineyard, I think.
[01:53:57]  That's a real, real struggle.
[01:53:59]  And luckily, there are a lot of good people working on it, but it's tricky.

=== Timothy Calls In (08:25) ===

[01:54:02]  Really is.
[01:54:04]  Timothy is calling in from Burlington on the Democrats line.
[01:54:07]  Timothy, you're on the air with Dan Chasin, author of this book, Bernie for Burlington.
[01:54:14]  Hello, gentlemen.
[01:54:15]  Hi.
[01:54:16]  Where do I start?
[01:54:20]  Yeah, I know Bernie.
[01:54:21]  Yeah, he won by 10 votes.
[01:54:23]  Dan, or Timothy, how do you know Bernie?
[01:54:26]  Did you live in Burlington in the 80s?
[01:54:29]  I most certainly did.
[01:54:31]  Did you vote for Bernie Sanders when he ran for mayor?
[01:54:34]  Yes, I did.
[01:54:35]  It was the first election I voted in.
[01:54:38]  And actually, my grandfather was mayor of St. Albans.
[01:54:44]  Wow.
[01:54:46]  And you guys were talking about the Democratic machine, which was very powerful subsequent to the dams were big.
[01:54:55]  I can start with Phil Hoff, and I could go off.
[01:54:59]  So, Timothy, are you still a fan of Bernie Sanders today?
[01:55:03]  I am, yes.
[01:55:04]  But he's never, he's never wavered from his message.
[01:55:12]  Terrific.
[01:55:14]  Have you heard of Dan Chasin's book?
[01:55:17]  Timothy, have you heard of Dan Chasin's book?
[01:55:21]  No, ironically, and I'm going to buy it.
[01:55:25]  I mean, I knew, you know, subsequent to Bernie, I knew, I know, I know, I come from a pretty big political family.
[01:55:36]  And I don't want to digress into that.
[01:55:38]  The subject is Bernie.
[01:55:41]  All right, Timothy, we're going to leave it there.
[01:55:42]  We're going to get a comment from Dan Chasen.
[01:55:44]  What'd you have to say for him?
[01:55:46]  I'm sorry.
[01:55:46]  I just wanted to say that Timothy and I are probably related.
[01:55:49]  My whole family is in Franklin County and in St. Albans.
[01:55:53]  And it's just, it's nice to hear that accent coming in.
[01:55:57]  Wonderful.
[01:55:57]  I love it.
[01:55:58]  And it's true what Timothy says about, you know, Democrats in the cities in Vermont.
[01:56:07]  They were always, those were the strongholds.
[01:56:10]  The countryside was all Republican, and the state saw its political image in the Republican sort of hill farmer.
[01:56:18]  So it's a fascinating political weave.
[01:56:21]  And particularly St. Albans, which is very close to the Canadian border.
[01:56:26]  Yeah.
[01:56:28]  Melody, Pratt, Kansas, text message.
[01:56:32]  Does your book tell us much about Bernie's wife, Jane?
[01:56:37]  Well, only insofar as it's relevant politically.
[01:56:40]  Jane, before she was Bernie's wife, was the head of the mayor's youth office.
[01:56:46]  And so she had an enormous outreach to teenagers, including programs that I availed myself of personally.
[01:56:54]  So there's a lot about Jane Sanders as a really effective city employee, making very little money, actually, and working really, really hard.
[01:57:04]  And of course, they do get married.
[01:57:07]  I don't have a lot about their courtship or relationship.
[01:57:10]  I really am not that interested in Bernie's personal life.
[01:57:13]  We all have a personal life, and not all of us are transformative politicians.
[01:57:17]  So my focus was on the public life.
[01:57:19]  But of course, you know, we understood them to be our kind of, you know, our first family.
[01:57:24]  And they were married in a public park in Burlington.
[01:57:28]  So it was a kind of a public relationship in a way that was helpful and thoughtful, I think, for the rest of us.
[01:57:35]  John is calling in from Ave Maria, Florida, Independent line.
[01:57:40]  John, you're on with author Dan Chasen.
[01:57:43]  Hi, how are you?
[01:57:44]  Excellent show.
[01:57:47]  I've got a question for your left-leaning professor.
[01:57:52]  I wonder our kids are so indoctrinated today.
[01:57:54]  Absolutely.
[01:57:55]  I'm doing my best.
[01:57:56]  Yes, you do.
[01:57:57]  You certainly do.
[01:57:59]  Did you talk about his wife and the fact that she started a fake college and embezzled millions and millions of dollars of federal and state funds in your book?
[01:58:12]  John, is that information that is well known in your view?
[01:58:18]  Yes, it is.
[01:58:19]  And the funny thing is, like most left-leaning communists, let's call them what they are.
[01:58:25]  They're not socialists.
[01:58:26]  They're communists.
[01:58:27]  Okay?
[01:58:29]  They embezzled millions of dollars of state and federal funds because they did not write up the grants correctly.
[01:58:36]  They misled the government.
[01:58:38]  And then she ended up stealing most of it herself.
[01:58:41]  Is that in the book?
[01:58:42]  All right, John.
[01:58:43]  Thank you for that comment.
[01:58:45]  And do you have a problem with Dan Chason being, like you say, left-leaning?
[01:58:53]  He's, you know, he is who he is.
[01:58:56]  Is that a niche?
[01:58:57]  If you're a professor, when you get to the classroom, you have to be objective, not subjective.
[01:59:04]  You've got to give all the facts and let the kids learn and make their own decisions.
[01:59:09]  That's not what's going on in colleges at all.
[01:59:12]  You have all of these history professors that are indoctrinating students, and this has been going on for years.
[01:59:17]  It didn't just start.
[01:59:18]  All right, John, we're going to leave it there.
[01:59:20]  But thank you for participating this morning.
[01:59:23]  Mr. Chasin, any comments for that viewer?
[01:59:25]  Well, I wish I had the power to indoctrinate my students.
[01:59:28]  I think more of them should become leftists, but it seems not to be working, unfortunately.
[01:59:34]  I'll try harder for him now.
[01:59:36]  John, next call is Eddie in Millbury, Massachusetts, Republican line.
[01:59:41]  Eddie, good morning to you.
[01:59:43]  Good morning.
[01:59:45]  Yeah, my parents lost their farm in the mid-30s.
[01:59:48]  Small farms don't make it.
[01:59:50]  The Mississippi Valley and its tributaries, they can handle thousands of acres, thousands of milking cows.
[01:59:58]  Small farms are an ancient thing.
[02:00:01]  As far as Bernie Sanders, he went to Moscow on his honeymoon.
[02:00:07]  The man, you said that the small state can't handle it, finance medical systems.
[02:00:14]  Do you think the federal government can do it?
[02:00:16]  We have $2 trillion deficit a year.
[02:00:20]  It is unsustainable.
[02:00:24]  Calvin Koolid says the business of government is business.
[02:00:28]  Give them a job.
[02:00:31]  Socialists say, give us a data.
[02:00:33]  Give.
[02:00:34]  He would say, go out and earn it.
[02:00:37]  Get a job and buy your own bread.
[02:00:41]  That's Eddie in Millbury, Massachusetts.
[02:00:44]  Dan Chasin, Vermont, the home of Calvin Coolidge and Bernie Sanders.
[02:00:50]  I like that we heard from Silent Cowell there.
[02:00:52]  I just want to address one thing the caller mentioned: Sanders went to Moscow on his honeymoon.
[02:00:58]  Sanders and his administration went to Moscow and to Yaroslavl in coordination with the Reagan State Department, which was encouraging these kinds of programs at the time, sister city arrangements.
[02:01:13]  They were an expression of American soft power.
[02:01:16]  And in fact, they worked because the Iron Curtain fell soon after.
[02:01:20]  So I think that the idea, and by the way, the New York Times in 2020 reported that Bernie went to Moscow, but they didn't report the fact that this trip was coordinated with the Reagan State Department.
[02:01:32]  So that was a very shameful reporting.
[02:01:34]  Not surprising from them.
[02:01:36]  As Dan Chason writes in his book, Bernie for Burlington, as teenagers keeping an eye on Mayor Sanders as he bagged garbage outside of City Hall or flew to Nicaragua to meet the Sandinistas or traveled to Disney World to meet Mickey Mouse, we knew we were witnessing something unusual.
[02:01:56]  But the thought that Bernie would eventually break through as a national figure of historic impact would have never occurred to any Burlingtonian of the era, not even to Bernie himself.
[02:02:08]  Quote, people who hold our views, Sanders told his supporters at his mayoral farewell address, do not hold public office in this country.
[02:02:18]  Dan Chasen of Wellesley College and Burlington, Vermont, is the author of this book, Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People's Politician.

=== President Trump's State of the Union (03:02) ===

[02:02:28]  And we appreciate your spending an hour with us here on C-SPAN.
[02:02:31]  It was great fun.
[02:02:32]  Thanks so much.
[02:02:33]  Well, we've got one hour left in this morning's Washington Journal, and we're going to return where we started, which is going through the news and hearing from you, most importantly, about what's on your mind.
[02:02:45]  You can see the lines there divided between Republicans, Democrats, and Independents.
[02:02:50]  Obviously, we're talking about public policy issues.
[02:02:53]  When we ask that four-worded question, go ahead and start dialing in.
[02:02:59]  We'll be right back.
[02:03:09]  Members of the United States Congress, thank you very much.
[02:03:14]  And to my fellow citizens, America is back.
[02:03:21]  Watch C-SPAN live Tuesday as President Donald Trump delivers the annual State of the Union Address before a joint session of Congress.
[02:03:29]  Our coverage begins at 7 p.m. Eastern with a preview of the evening from political reporters.
[02:03:35]  Then, at 9, the president's address, followed by the Democratic response given by Virginia Governor Abigail Spanbergson, will also take your calls and bring you reaction from lawmakers.
[02:03:46]  Over on C-SPAN 2, experience the moments leading up to the speech and the address itself as if you're there, uninterrupted.
[02:03:53]  No commentary with unfiltered sights and sounds.
[02:03:57]  The State of the Union Address, live Tuesday, with coverage beginning at 7 p.m. Eastern on the C-SPAN Networks.
[02:04:05]  C-SPAN, bringing you democracy unfiltered.
[02:04:15]  Tonight on C-SPAN's Q&A, former Washington Post correspondent Will Haygood, author of The War Within a War, talks about the experience of black American soldiers in Vietnam and the struggle for racial equality both in the war zone and back home in the United States.
[02:04:30]  He also reflects on growing up in Columbus, Ohio during that time, where he experienced this stark divide firsthand as a child.
[02:04:37]  And I found myself as a 14-year-old kid running from National Guard tanks during the riots.
[02:04:46]  I don't think it was until I really got deep into the research of this book that I realized that these two epical moments in American history, Vietnam and the draft, and then riots, that I saw elements of both through my own eyes.
[02:05:09]  Author Will Haygood with his book, The War Within a War, tonight at 8 Eastern on C-SPAN's QA.
[02:05:16]  You can listen to Q&A and all of our podcasts on our free C-SPAN Now app or wherever you get your podcasts.
[02:05:27]  Washington Journal continues.

=== Hearing Your Voices (05:57) ===

[02:05:30]  Well, you know what?
[02:05:31]  I hope you're still with us.
[02:05:32]  We know the hockey match is happening right now between the U.S. and Canada, but you can record that.
[02:05:40]  Stick with us for a little longer.
[02:05:41]  Got one more hour left in the Washington Journal, and we want to hear what's on your mind.
[02:05:47]  And that's how we're going to conclude today's show.
[02:05:50]  Hearing your voices.
[02:05:51]  That's the most important part.
[02:05:53]  That's the most important part of what we do on the Washington Journal is listen to your voices.
[02:05:58]  I mean, yes, we talk to interesting and relevant guests and we go through the news, but mostly we want to hear from you and what you're thinking about, especially when it comes to public policy issues.
[02:06:10]  Here's a reminder.
[02:06:11]  Now, this morning already, we've gone through these news articles.
[02:06:15]  This is from The Hill.
[02:06:16]  DHS is suspending two travel programs that includes Global Entry and TSA PreCheck, which are two programs that many people use.
[02:06:27]  3 million people in the U.S. fly every single day, about 44,000 flights.
[02:06:34]  So this could have some impact.
[02:06:37]  We also talked about this article that was from Breitbart, that Speaker Johnson denies requests for late Reverend Jesse Jackson to Lyon State in the U.S. Capitol.
[02:06:47]  This article from the Wall Street Journal: Trump says he is sending a hospital ship to Greenland.
[02:06:52]  This happened late last night in a social media post.
[02:06:57]  So that's in the Wall Street Journal if you want to read that for yourself.
[02:07:01]  This was in Trending Politics News.
[02:07:05]  JP Morgan admits to shutting down Trump's accounts after January 6th protests.
[02:07:12]  Now this is a new article that we haven't shared with you yet.
[02:07:15]  And this is Senator Adam Schiff of California is going to boycott Trump's State of the Union speech, Speak at Alternative Event.
[02:07:26]  Senator Adam Schiff is joining a growing group of Democrats who plan to boycott President Trump's State of the Union address next Tuesday in favor of an alternative event.
[02:07:37]  That's according to the media outlet Midas Touch.
[02:07:40]  The outlet reported that Schiff is set to speak at a counter-rally on the National Mall dubbed the People's State of the Union that it is hosting alongside liberal advocacy group Move On Civic Action.
[02:07:55]  Now, Tuesday night is a State of the Union.
[02:07:59]  We'll be live on C-SPAN.
[02:08:00]  We'll be live on C-SPAN 2.
[02:08:02]  We may be live on C-SPAN 3 as well.
[02:08:05]  We will be covering the speech.
[02:08:07]  We will be doing commentary and conversation before the speech and after the speech and getting your viewpoint.
[02:08:14]  On C-SPAN 2, we will be doing the sights and sounds.
[02:08:17]  We will have no commentary, no conversation, but you will see a lot of sights and sounds that we, like we normally do here on C-SPAN, and of course the speech, the Democratic response.
[02:08:31]  Plus, on C-SPAN 2, we'll have reaction from members of Congress.
[02:08:36]  Then, there are some alternative events that are popping up, including this event that we just mentioned with Adam Schiff that we will also be covering.
[02:08:46]  So, Tuesday night, beginning at 7 p.m., tune in and join us here on C-SPAN for State of the Union coverage.
[02:08:54]  Now, sports broadcaster Stephen A. Smith said that Democrats should attend the State of the Union speech.
[02:09:05]  Here's a little bit of what he had to say this week.
[02:09:09]  You see, when you go to the American people and you ask the American people, yo, stand up, step up, and handle your business.
[02:09:15]  Stop bitching and screaming all the time.
[02:09:18]  When you got problems at the job, when you got bills to pay, when you got a family to take if, find a way to work around it and handle your business.
[02:09:26]  How come that can't apply to elected officials?
[02:09:30]  Why do they get to get away with that?
[02:09:32]  Why do they get to circumvent those rules and regulations?
[02:09:34]  Why do they get to circumvent the need and the insistence of mere decorum?
[02:09:45]  This is the kind of stuff that ticks me off.
[02:09:51]  And now back to hearing your views.
[02:09:53]  What's on your mind this morning?
[02:09:54]  What's that public policy issue that's keeping you awake, making you happy, angry, sad, etc.?
[02:10:01]  Denise in Goebbels, Michigan, Independent Line.
[02:10:04]  Hi, Denise.
[02:10:06]  Good morning.
[02:10:07]  I'm very nervous.
[02:10:08]  Been listening for ever since Bernie hit the campaign trail the first time around.
[02:10:14]  And I just got really lucky and caught his initial campaign rally speech and was so impressed, taped it, showed it to my family.
[02:10:22]  We were Bernie up all the way after that.
[02:10:25]  And I was hoping to get in with your previous author that did the book on the ground.
[02:10:30]  I'm sorry.
[02:10:31]  But that's okay, because I just was wondering if there's anybody out there that agrees with me that the Democratic Party, the leaders of the Democratic Party, I blame them for giving us Trump because in 2016, when Bernie was leading, they put their fingers on the scale because they thought their best luck was going to be with the first woman president.
[02:10:53]  And then he was in the lead again the next time around, 2020.
[02:10:57]  And Jim Claiborne put his finger on the scale to take out Bernie.
[02:11:01]  And this is why we have Donald Trump today.
[02:11:04]  It makes me really sad.
[02:11:05]  We'd be in such a better place if Bernie would have won the first time around.
[02:11:09]  That's all I have to say.
[02:11:10]  Thank you so much for taking it.
[02:11:12]  Denise, what is that one issue that attracts you to Bernie Sanders?
[02:11:17]  It was the health care for all and the big one, income inequality, because it's corporate greed that's, in my opinion, destroying all of us.
[02:11:27]  Thank you, ma'am.

=== Hope Toward One Another (02:57) ===

[02:11:28]  Thank you for calling in.
[02:11:29]  Next call is Julia calling in from North Carolina, Democrat.
[02:11:33]  Julia, good morning.
[02:11:35]  Good morning.
[02:11:37]  What's on your mind this morning, Julia?
[02:11:39]  Well, listen, we have begun our late celebration.
[02:11:46]  So I'm hoping that everybody will just consider, just consider this festival that we're about to celebrate and really think about our lives,
[02:12:03]  our aspirations, and the hope that we have and to have toward one another and toward the country that we have to live in.
[02:12:17]  I just hope that everybody will just think, meditate, and consider their lives, their hope, hope for one another,
[02:12:32]  pray one for the other, that we could be contented, that we could be just satisfied with our life and continue to live this life as it was planned by everybody.
[02:12:52]  God planned lives for everybody, that everybody could live a good life if we choose to.
[02:13:04]  We have to choose to.
[02:13:06]  And this is on my mind.
[02:13:09]  And I thank you for the time.
[02:13:12]  Julia, are you old enough to remember the bicentennial in 1976?
[02:13:18]  I surely do.
[02:13:20]  Are you looking forward now to the semi-quincentennial of 2026?
[02:13:25]  Yes, sir.
[02:13:29]  Hoping that I'm well and available to celebrate.
[02:13:34]  Yes, sir.
[02:13:36]  Well, thank you, Julia in North Carolina.
[02:13:39]  It's an honor to have you call in.
[02:13:41]  I just should note that the National Archives is doing something really kind of neat, and it's kicking off in March, and of course, we'll be covering it, et cetera, et cetera.
[02:13:51]  But what they're doing is they're calling it the Freedom Plane.
[02:13:55]  And they are taking historic documents from the National Archives, and they are flying them around the country and putting them on display.
[02:14:04]  And they're going to six, seven locations, beginning in Kansas City on March 2nd, is when the first flight is due to take off.
[02:14:14]  And so you'll be able to, they're bringing the National Archives to you.
[02:14:18]  That's just one thing that is happening in this 250th anniversary year.

=== America 250 Events Coverage (14:33) ===

[02:14:25]  I should also note that C-SPAN, as an official media partner of the A250 Commission, we have access to a lot of the things that they're doing.
[02:14:36]  We're covering a lot of their events.
[02:14:39]  And I would encourage you to go on our website and type in America 250 or semi-quincentennial.
[02:14:46]  You can see it right up there at the top of the page.
[02:14:49]  And there's a lot of things that are going on that you may not have heard about just yet, but we've been deep in America 250 now for quite a while and already have several reenactments and different things in our archive that we'll be airing, and it's just going to increase as the year goes on.
[02:15:11]  And Julia's call kind of sparked that thought bubble in my head.
[02:15:17]  This is from the New York Times.
[02:15:19]  This is the bestseller list on the nonfiction books.
[02:15:24]  The Invisible Coup is number one by Peter Schweitzer.
[02:15:28]  Peter Schweitzer was due to be on this program as we speak right now, but unfortunately, Mr. Schweitzer had to postpone his appearance, but he will be here at some point.
[02:15:40]  We will get him on.
[02:15:41]  We've covered him for his previous books.
[02:15:43]  This was an unforeseen postponement.
[02:15:46]  No other reason than that.
[02:15:48]  But he's got the number one book right now.
[02:15:52]  It's an argument that he puts forward that mass migration is a political weapon.
[02:15:57]  Rage in the Republic, this is by Jonathan Turley.
[02:16:00]  We just had him on.
[02:16:01]  It's number three.
[02:16:03]  And then I also want to point out that How to Test for Stupid by Senator John Kennedy is on the top 10 list.
[02:16:10]  1929 by Andrew Ross Sorkin.
[02:16:15]  And then Black AF History by Michael Harriot is another book that's number 10.
[02:16:21]  It's been on the list for quite a while, you can see there.
[02:16:25]  All of those books have been covered by our companion network, Book TV.
[02:16:31]  Go to C-SPAN.
[02:16:33]  You can click to Book TV, but if you type in booktv.org, you'll go straight to the Book TV website.
[02:16:40]  And that is an amazing archive of nonfiction authors and books, probably 25,000, 30,000 authors.
[02:16:50]  If there's been a nonfiction author who's written a book in the last 25, 30 years, we've covered it.
[02:16:58]  And we are on every weekend.
[02:17:00]  In fact, we're on right now.
[02:17:02]  Book TV is on right now on C-SPAN 2.
[02:17:04]  But stick with us through the end of the show.
[02:17:06]  Then you can flip over to C-SPAN 2 if you want.
[02:17:10]  Tom in Newark, Ohio, Republican line.
[02:17:13]  Thanks for holding.
[02:17:14]  What's on your mind this morning?
[02:17:16]  Thank you very much.
[02:17:17]  You know, Peter Schweiser is probably one of my favorite authors.
[02:17:21]  And of course, you know, he leans to the right.
[02:17:25]  But I have some comments.
[02:17:26]  I was a Democrat for 38 years, and in 2010, I became a born-again Republican.
[02:17:34]  Let me make these comments, please.
[02:17:37]  As always, the Democrats are on the wrong side of our constitutional laws when they declare sanctuary cities.
[02:17:46]  This is an act of treason.
[02:17:48]  It's against our federal laws as written.
[02:17:51]  When you alter or ignore federal laws for political power, you are committing a crime.
[02:17:59]  You are committing a crime of high treason.
[02:18:02]  These cities should not be allowed to participate in federal elections if they encourage non-citizens to vote.
[02:18:12]  The next step Democrats are going to get is going to be a civil war.
[02:18:18]  Goodbye, and thank you.
[02:18:21]  That's Tom in Ohio.
[02:18:23]  And he reminded me that I had this article in the stack to bring forward.
[02:18:28]  And this is from the Washington Examiner.
[02:18:30]  It's by Samuel Abrams, who teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
[02:18:35]  And the title of the article is Politics Without Restraint.
[02:18:40]  Again, this appeared recently in the Washington Examiner.
[02:18:44]  Let's pull out so we can see that title, if we could, please.
[02:18:48]  And we're just going to read one paragraph from this.
[02:18:51]  If you're interested, you can find it at the Washington Examiner.
[02:18:54]  We're going to start by showing you this chart.
[02:18:57]  And it's a percentage of students nationally who approve of three disruptive tactics in at least some cases that they've all increased.
[02:19:06]  The percentage of students approve of shouting down a speaker, 71% of the students, blocking other students from attending a campus speech, 54%, using violence to stop a campus speech.
[02:19:23]  That's up to one-third of students believe that that is an appropriate tactic to use if you do not agree with a speaker.
[02:19:32]  Now, Professor Abrams concludes his article this way.
[02:19:35]  American social movements have involved confrontation, but they succeeded when they preserved moral asymmetry, when they exposed injustice without abandoning restraint.
[02:19:47]  When movements surrender that restraint, they trade legitimacy for power and power for escalation.
[02:19:55]  Again, this is in the Washington Examiner.
[02:19:58]  There's the title, Politics Without Restraint.
[02:20:00]  Samuel J. Abrams is the writer.
[02:20:04]  Christina is in Illinois Independent Line.
[02:20:07]  Christina, good morning to you.
[02:20:09]  Yes, good morning.
[02:20:10]  Sorry about the throat allergies.
[02:20:14]  I really liked what you just read.
[02:20:17]  I mean, that is, you know, that's quite good stuff.
[02:20:24]  I tried to get on with the other writer, but I was, you know, kicked off, of course, after I was in the queue for that.
[02:20:34]  But I was wondering if for the American people, you might be allowed to define both communism and socialism.
[02:20:45]  So many people get them, you know, they put them together, and they are totally two different things.
[02:20:53]  And I was wondering if you might be allowed to do that.
[02:20:57]  Well, that's an excellent idea, Christina.
[02:21:01]  And I guarantee the producers of the Washington Journal will put that in the queue as well.
[02:21:06]  Robbie is from Bronson, Florida.
[02:21:09]  Democrat.
[02:21:10]  Robbie, you're on C-SPAN.
[02:21:11]  What's on your mind?
[02:21:12]  Yes, good morning.
[02:21:14]  Good morning.
[02:21:14]  Thank you for taking my call.
[02:21:16]  I wanted to talk about the issue of division, which has been brought up over and over again with both programs that I've been following.
[02:21:24]  You know, the last speaker talking about decorum, Stephen Smith, the sports writer, you know, and I want to go back to where some of this started, you know, with Trump's language about, oh, just beat him up and I'll pay your legal fees.
[02:21:38]  And so many of the, you know, people pick up on this, and then they come up with alternative facts.
[02:21:44]  In other words, they watch one particular TV station and they get a certain view or cherry pick facts, so-called.
[02:21:54]  And, you know, when you think about the sports issue, you know, many MAGA people or Republicans were told not to go to the Super Bowl, not to support it because of the halftime show.
[02:22:06]  And this creates more division.
[02:22:08]  The more hate, the more anger, the more you get violence.
[02:22:12]  I remember Marjorie Taylor Greene shouting down speakers in Congress while they were on the dais.
[02:22:20]  And going back to some of the things that were said even about Bernie in your previous segment, that he's a communist.
[02:22:27]  He is not a communist.
[02:22:29]  And anybody that looks him up can find out exactly what he is.
[02:22:33]  But then trying to drag his wife into it.
[02:22:35]  I mean, you know, if you look at Trump's wife and the sexual issues around the Epstein thing and how he met her through Epstein, you know, there's always sides to pick.
[02:22:47]  But so, Robbie, you talked about political divide early on in your comments.
[02:22:54]  Do you think you contribute to that or are you trying to ameliorate that?
[02:22:58]  I'm trying to ameliorate it because on your program, people are listening who are also Republicans or also independents who may not understand that this division has been getting worse and worse as we go along.
[02:23:15]  And we can see it, not just in Democrats, but also in the things that Republicans or independents are saying and doing.
[02:23:22]  For example, many of the people here in the Levy County area, where I live in Florida, believe that Joe Biden was terrible.
[02:23:30]  He didn't do anything for Levy County.
[02:23:33]  However, he actually got us the affordable high-speed internet, and he got a $500,000 improvement to our only airport, as well as some highway projects.
[02:23:45]  So if you only get certain facts, you know, and you leave out important things, then we don't see a full picture, and that leads to division.
[02:23:54]  Thank you, ma'am.
[02:23:54]  We're going to leave it there and talk to Donnie in the Netherlands, is what my screen says, Donnie.
[02:24:00]  Is that correct?
[02:24:02]  Well, that is correct.
[02:24:03]  I was going to say Amsterdam, but sometimes I didn't want to get mixed up in Amsterdam in New York.
[02:24:09]  Okay, well, no, that's fine.
[02:24:10]  You're following me in the Netherlands, which is 3:23 p.m. right now.
[02:24:13]  And how are you watching us?
[02:24:18]  I'm listening to your program.
[02:24:19]  I mean, I've been listening to your program since a long time ago.
[02:24:23]  I didn't say long time.
[02:24:24]  This is a first-time caller.
[02:24:25]  Well, welcome.
[02:24:26]  I was successful to call you months ago.
[02:24:29]  I was going to talk about, excuse me.
[02:24:32]  Please go ahead, Donnie.
[02:24:33]  We're listening.
[02:24:36]  I was going to talk about the state of the Union, but also the book that you were talking about, the name How to Test Negative for Stupid.
[02:24:48]  Or John Kennedy's book, right?
[02:24:50]  Yes.
[02:24:51]  Actually, I was taking a look at the bookstores, and this is not the kind of books that even go to any sort of bookstores.
[02:25:00]  Probably going to be in Amazon.
[02:25:02]  But sometimes, to the credit of the senator, I always travel to the Belgium, which is close by, and I always test negative for stupid.
[02:25:13]  But Washington obviously is a different place.
[02:25:17]  I was going to talk about the State of the Union address and what America has been going on, going on in America for you could hear it from the tariff decision that has came out from the division.
[02:25:33]  The State of the Union used to be, as I mean, I've watched it probably State of the Union when it was after 9-11 that President Bush had to bring a country together.
[02:25:46]  And then right now, we have a senator from California who wants to have another event parallel to the State of the Union address, which is not called the democratic response.
[02:25:58]  I don't want to make divisions higher in America.
[02:26:03]  This is not America 250 needs to be all about.
[02:26:07]  America 250, the America that everybody knows, the America that everybody sees as the hope of the world, is an America that is inclusive, as you just said brilliantly in your program.
[02:26:21]  And as just the professor who was on earlier, who someone just caught him up, maybe he had some disagreements ideologically with him.
[02:26:28]  I don't know.
[02:26:28]  I didn't watch him entirely.
[02:26:30]  But the way, and I'm a Republican, the way he talked to that professor was a disgrace.
[02:26:36]  The guy who talked to the professor, this is what American extremism, on both sides, on both sides of the political aisle.
[02:26:45]  But it's a good thing that there are systems of checks and balances.
[02:26:50]  Everybody knows that.
[02:26:52]  And the power, which obviously the way that the founding fathers created, and if someone believes in the idea of America, President Biden used to say America is an idea.
[02:27:04]  If everyone would believe in that, I think it's going to be a very beautiful State of the Union address by the State of the United States.
[02:27:14]  Thank you.
[02:27:15]  Right.
[02:27:15]  If you could hold on for a second, Donnie, we want to talk to you a little bit.
[02:27:18]  Since you're calling in from Amsterdam, have you followed American politics for a long time?
[02:27:27]  I wouldn't say necessarily long time, but I would say that it's been something that I would not call it sometimes politics, just like the J.P. Morgan story, just like the story about the debanking of the president.
[02:27:42]  I mean, there are regulatories here in Netherlands where if someone actually gets debanked in another country, for example, in Germany, they could go to and they could resolve it.
[02:27:52]  It could be political at points, but it's part of any equation of systems of financial institutions, for example.
[02:28:05]  How often in the Netherlands is Donald Trump featured in a news story?
[02:28:12]  TV or press?
[02:28:15]  I would say it's the prime story.
[02:28:17]  I would say it's a prime story because the morning news, obviously, and when it was going about Greenland, for example, and obviously the NATO chief who used to be the former prime minister of this country, it is always a priority, let's say.
[02:28:36]  But it's been perceived by some people who would say it's the golden age, but we're not talking about the American Golden Age.
[02:28:46]  They would use it as a political stunt for their right-wing activism, I would say, which has nothing to do with Republicanism, which has nothing to do with the American politics.

=== Visited But Not Welcomed (03:29) ===

[02:28:58]  Donnie, have you visited the United States, and what's your impression?
[02:29:04]  I have never been in the United States, but I have been in the United States Embassy, if that counts as the United States.
[02:29:12]  Yeah.
[02:29:13]  Why haven't you come over and visited?
[02:29:17]  Well, it's going to be a story of my life.
[02:29:19]  I hope that the president would have a very, very beautiful.
[02:29:24]  I pray for him.
[02:29:25]  It's a Sunday.
[02:29:26]  I pray for him that he has a very, very successful State of the Union address.
[02:29:30]  I'll be watching.
[02:29:32]  So, Donnie, why have you not visited the United States?
[02:29:38]  I don't like to answer that question.
[02:29:39]  Oh, okay.
[02:29:40]  Thank you very much.
[02:29:41]  I appreciate it.
[02:29:42]  Appreciate your time.
[02:29:43]  All right.
[02:29:44]  That was Donnie calling from the Netherlands.
[02:29:46]  Got to spend a half hour quizzing that poor man before I let him go.
[02:29:50]  Mike in Essex, Connecticut, Independent.
[02:29:53]  Go ahead, Mike.
[02:29:55]  That was excellent.
[02:29:56]  Let me say thank you for C-SPAN.
[02:29:58]  Just love your programming.
[02:29:59]  But you deserve a compliment.
[02:30:01]  Somebody has to compliment you because when your face is on the screen, I know I'm watching because you're so good with the audience, an exceptional interviewer with your guests.
[02:30:11]  I love an interviewer who can ask questions, get answers, and not steal the shine of the show, not become the star of the show.
[02:30:20]  You allow your guests to be the star.
[02:30:22]  A tough thing to do, and you do it so well.
[02:30:25]  In fact, I don't know anyone else who does it better.
[02:30:27]  I'll leave it at that in terms of the compliment.
[02:30:30]  You really are exceptional.
[02:30:31]  But I did want to say this.
[02:30:33]  My concern, what's on my mind, we've become so mean as a culture here in the United States of America.
[02:30:40]  And at the risk of sounding like I'm blaming, I'm not.
[02:30:43]  It really got worse with Donald Trump.
[02:30:46]  It really did.
[02:30:47]  And I think we all understand it.
[02:30:49]  He sort of emboldened meanness, you know, threats.
[02:30:55]  And to the point where I'm going to give you a personal example.
[02:30:58]  I used to work out in the gym where we could watch the news on television in the gym.
[02:31:04]  It got so ugly with people turning on one news channel over the other and raising the buck.
[02:31:10]  They had to take away the news at the gym I work with, that I work out at, because it was just instigating violence, people screaming at one another.
[02:31:22]  We've just become such an angry, mean place over the last decade, and I'm afraid it's going to get an awful lot worse.
[02:31:31]  And I think of it in these terms.
[02:31:33]  Imagine the 10-year-old at 2016 when Donald Trump was elected president.
[02:31:40]  Well, that 10-year-old is now 20 and voting.
[02:31:44]  And they're just filled with them thinking this is the political structure we're in.
[02:31:50]  This is the world we live in now.
[02:31:52]  It's who they are.
[02:31:54]  And I think it's going to get worse before it gets better.
[02:31:58]  But we do have people like you who could do a great interview.
[02:32:02]  Bless your heart.
[02:32:03]  Bless your heart.
[02:32:03]  That's Mike in Essex, Connecticut calling in.
[02:32:07]  From Politico this morning, U.S. Ambassador causes uproar by claiming Israel has a right to much of the Middle East, Arab and Muslim nations on Saturday, sharply condemned.
[02:32:17]  Comments by the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who said Israel has a right to much of the Middle East.
[02:32:23]  Huckabee made the comments in an interview with conservative commentator Tucker Carlson.

=== Huckabee On Middle East Land Rights (03:49) ===

[02:32:28]  It aired on Friday.
[02:32:30]  According to this article, Huckabee said that I should read Tucker's question first.
[02:32:37]  Carlson said that according to the Bible, the descendants of Abraham would receive land that today would include essentially the entire Middle East and asked Huckabee if Israel had a right to that land.
[02:32:49]  Huckabee responded, quote, it would be fine if they took it all.
[02:32:54]  Huckabee added, however, that Israel was not looking to expand its territory and has a right to security in the land it legitimately holds.
[02:33:04]  His comments sparked backlash from Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Obama, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and the League of Arab States.
[02:33:16]  If you want to see more, it's in Politico.
[02:33:19]  Next call is Rob in Phoenix, Democrats line.
[02:33:22]  Hi, Rob.
[02:33:23]  Good morning, Peters.
[02:33:24]  Good to hear your voice and see you on the C-SPAN this morning.
[02:33:27]  Thanks.
[02:33:28]  And I want to ditto everything and to use the phrase.
[02:33:33]  Everything that this last fellow said about you and also about the threat to our country from the volatility.
[02:33:43]  And I just want to mention that fellow Tom from Ohio calling and saber rattling, calling for threatening, in a way, a civil war for differences.
[02:33:56]  And we need to settle things democratically.
[02:33:58]  But what I really called about, Peter, is I want to say I bought tickets for the Bruce Springsteen concert in Phoenix on April 16th here.
[02:34:08]  He's going to tour 16 different cities starting in Minneapolis.
[02:34:13]  The tour called the Land of Hope and Dreams Tour.
[02:34:18]  And this is a chance for people to get together and hear a real State of the Union with the boss who I've been following since 1975.
[02:34:29]  I can still remember hearing Born to Run and the beach and listening to somebody's record and listen to him ever since.
[02:34:39]  And just real excited about Bruce Springsteen.
[02:34:44]  It'll be my second or third time seeing him.
[02:34:47]  I don't really remember the first time.
[02:34:49]  I know the second was about 10 years ago.
[02:34:55]  That said, Rob, are you going to watch the official State of the Union, the original State of the Union address on Tuesday night?
[02:35:02]  Well, I just can't take this guy's rambling.
[02:35:05]  I'll listen to the reviews and the segments, but it's just mumble-jumble.
[02:35:13]  How much?
[02:35:15]  All right, give us an insight.
[02:35:16]  How much were your tickets to Springsteen on April 16th in Phoenix?
[02:35:20]  Well, I bought behind-the-stage tickets $248 with all the taxes and services.
[02:35:28]  about as cheap as you can go but uh okay behind the stage you're not are you are you you're getting a view from literally behind the stage Yeah, they're behind the stage, but I figure all these things have jumbo screens.
[02:35:42]  I mean, I don't know what I'm going to see.
[02:35:44]  It's at the basketball arena.
[02:35:47]  You know, like I say, he's going to start in Minneapolis.
[02:35:49]  He's going to end in Washington, D.C., twice in Los Angeles, twice in New York, other cities in between.
[02:35:56]  Just excited to be there on April 16th in Phoenix, Arizona.
[02:36:00]  Why do you live in Phoenix, Rob?
[02:36:03]  Well, I moved here about 25 years ago from Los Angeles, and it's a great place to live.
[02:36:07]  I called you many times over the years about Joe Arpaio to inform the public about what's going on with the sheriff's problems.

=== Eric's Comments on Politics (15:09) ===

[02:36:18]  But we've become like a whole nation of Joe Arpaios.
[02:36:22]  So that's been my main subject with Washington Journal several years ago.
[02:36:28]  And when I saw you, I thought, well, I can call and talk to Peter and just tell him about Bruce Springsteen.
[02:36:36]  Excellent.
[02:36:37]  Thank you, Rob, for calling in.
[02:36:38]  Good to hear your voice.
[02:36:40]  Lester, Louisiana, Independent.
[02:36:43]  Hi, Lester.
[02:36:45]  Hey, good morning.
[02:36:46]  Where in Louisiana?
[02:36:47]  Where in Louisiana are you?
[02:36:50]  In Baton Rouge.
[02:36:51]  Baton Rouge.
[02:36:52]  Thank you, sir.
[02:36:53]  Yeah, I want to agree with your previous call that told then about how the Democratic Party sabotage Bernie Sanders against Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.
[02:37:06]  The Democratic Party has gotten so weak.
[02:37:08]  They don't have any fight in them.
[02:37:11]  How are they sitting there and letting Trump destroy the White House and putting his name on the Kennedy Center?
[02:37:19]  That should be taken to the Supreme Court and stopped.
[02:37:24]  Why they haven't investigated Melania Trump immigration papers.
[02:37:29]  You know, I'm a Jasmine Crockett supporter, and they seem to be trying to sabotage her also.
[02:37:37]  Thank you.
[02:37:39]  Thank you for that, Lester.
[02:37:41]  The Tallarico-Crockett primary will be decided on Tuesday, March 5th, I believe it is.
[02:37:49]  And C-SPAN will have live primary coverage of all the primaries that night, specifically in Texas, with both the Republicans having a primary and the Democrats having primaries for that Senate seat.
[02:38:04]  Just coming out, an armed man shot and killed by law enforcement outside of Mar-a-Lago.
[02:38:10]  Axios reports that law enforcement shot and killed an armed man outside of President Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort on Sunday.
[02:38:20]  The president is in Washington today, though he often travels to Florida over the weekend.
[02:38:26]  The individual, a man in his 20s, who has not been named, was spotted by the north gate of the property carrying what the Secret Service said appeared to be a shotgun and a fuel can.
[02:38:38]  No Secret Service or Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office personnel were hurt, and there were no protectees present.
[02:38:46]  Again, this is just coming out in Axios.
[02:38:49]  You can probably find it on your favorite news site by now as well.
[02:38:55]  Eric is in Rockley, New Jersey, Republican line.
[02:38:59]  Eric, where is Rockley, New Jersey?
[02:39:01]  What's exit?
[02:39:02]  It's just over the New York border.
[02:39:06]  And Peter, thank you for taking my call.
[02:39:09]  I just want to give you a hug to the phone and say thanks.
[02:39:14]  I'm one of the people that was the architects with the Americans with disabilities under President Reagan.
[02:39:24]  And today's society makes me sad because if the president were alive today, he would be very sad that there's this unity among the nations.
[02:39:40]  We're all human beings.
[02:39:43]  We can help each other.
[02:39:44]  We're skin and bones.
[02:39:46]  So bigoting won't help the problems unity will.
[02:39:55]  Because we're skin and bones.
[02:39:56]  We're not supermen and women.
[02:39:59]  So how can you be the solution rather than the problem?
[02:40:05]  Eric, you said that you were one of the architects of the ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act.
[02:40:11]  Didn't that get signed into law in 1991 by H.W. Bush?
[02:40:17]  It did.
[02:40:18]  It did.
[02:40:19]  And what was your role?
[02:40:22]  I was, I just, I grew up on Long Island, and I was under the latest Henry McScotty, so he helped me.
[02:40:39]  Eric, it is good to hear from you.
[02:40:42]  I know y'all have some weather coming up there shortly up in through the northeast, so good luck.
[02:40:49]  But thank you for calling in.
[02:40:50]  It's nice to hear your voice.
[02:40:52]  Stephen, Gainesville, Florida, Democrats line.
[02:40:55]  Stephen, as you know, this morning we've been asking people what's on their mind when it comes to a public policy issue.
[02:41:02]  Well, the big thing that's on my mind is Jesse Jackson, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, lying in state in the Capitol.
[02:41:13]  I can't believe that we have this, maybe it's under the table, this racist kind of commentary coming out of the Republican Party from the Obama stuff out of the White House to the Speaker of the House.
[02:41:31]  Jesse Jackson is I met Jesse Jackson at Mount Carmel Church here in Gainesville, Florida.
[02:41:40]  It's predominantly a black church.
[02:41:42]  My wife and I were one of the few white people in that church.
[02:41:47]  And Jesse Jackson is, I got to shake his hand.
[02:41:52]  And my wife asked me why I have heroes.
[02:41:56]  And the reason I have heroes in my life is because I want to be like them.
[02:42:01]  I want to be led by them.
[02:42:02]  I want to do good, not harmful things.
[02:42:06]  And I might add, is the president's puffy hands while we're on the next subject.
[02:42:12]  He's getting infusions for Alzheimer's.
[02:42:16]  And, you know, we've got problems.
[02:42:19]  Where did you get that in that second piece of information, Stephen?
[02:42:22]  Where'd you get that information?
[02:42:24]  That came from a confidential resource out of Washington.
[02:42:28]  That's a confidential resource that the president's puffy hands are due to medication he's taking for Alzheimer's.
[02:42:34]  Yes, sir.
[02:42:35]  That's Stephen in Gainesville who's saying that, not C-SPAN.
[02:42:39]  And I would ask you about the Jesse Jackson lying in state.
[02:42:44]  I believe, and I know I'm going to be checked on this, but I believe Rosa Parks laid in state in the Capitol after she passed.
[02:42:55]  And golly, I wish I could remember that for sure.
[02:42:57]  But I know that the Republican Congress denied Dick Cheney, former Vice President of the United States, former member of Congress, a chance to lie in state.
[02:43:08]  Charlie Kirk did not lie in state in the Capitol as well.
[02:43:13]  So isn't there a consistency with Jackson, Cheney, and Kirk not being able to lie in state?
[02:43:21]  Well, we'll start from the last, Charlie Kirk.
[02:43:26]  You know, I have heard him debate other people, and what I call it is the talk over.
[02:43:32]  He doesn't debate.
[02:43:34]  And I never heard any, and I'm not a Christian, but I never heard any Christian views from this man other than hate and division.
[02:43:43]  And, you know, didn't Dick Cheney, isn't he the one that came out saying that you shouldn't elect Donald to the presidency?
[02:43:54]  So there's a, you know, it's a Republican thing, I believe.
[02:43:57]  If you'll look who was in power at the time, it was Republicans that refused these people.
[02:44:02]  But Jesse Jackson is America.
[02:44:05]  I'm white.
[02:44:06]  He's black.
[02:44:07]  He is my brother.
[02:44:09]  And it was a very proud moment to shake his hand.
[02:44:14]  And if the Speaker of the House thinks that the black people of his state are going to vote for him, he is mistaken.
[02:44:21]  And I'm just waiting for midterms.
[02:44:25]  I want the House turned over to people who are sane, not these crazy ring kissers.
[02:44:30]  But Stephen in Gainesville, Florida, and yes, it was, it was 2005, that Rosa Parks laid in state in the U.S. Capitol.
[02:44:41]  And I believe she was the last non-president.
[02:44:45]  Jimmy Carter was the last person to lie in state, but I believe Rosa Parks was the last person to lay in state before in 2005.
[02:44:56]  Okay, Gary is in Fletcher, North Carolina, independent line.
[02:45:03]  Gary, what's on your mind this morning?
[02:45:05]  Well, I just want to make a couple of comments.
[02:45:09]  Like you just announced that somebody had a gas can and a shotgun over at Mar-a-Lago.
[02:45:16]  And I like your show about books.
[02:45:20]  I bought several books, I think, because you brought out questions and made the book seem really interesting, like must-reads.
[02:45:27]  And you're really good in that department.
[02:45:30]  But you had a call around earlier that was talking about we have to settle this with matches and guns, and you didn't cut them off fast enough.
[02:45:41]  I agree with you.
[02:45:42]  I agree with you.
[02:45:43]  Yeah.
[02:45:44]  Okay.
[02:45:45]  So, you know, your willingness to be open is why I give you a pass on that, because you can't, you know, you're a man and you have to make split decisions.
[02:45:55]  And we all can't do that without some kind of flaw.
[02:46:00]  So, but I could hardly tell.
[02:46:05]  I call a good commentator, somebody you can't really tell what their political affiliations are and things, you know, by the way they ask questions or the way they personify themselves.
[02:46:17]  And that's why you're one of my favorites.
[02:46:21]  Anyway, point being made, all this division, people talking about like President Trump not controlling prices or how can you have so many failed bankruptcies?
[02:46:39]  There's two different ideologies in America.
[02:46:42]  Some people pick themselves up and move on.
[02:46:45]  Some people fail at things and they pick themselves up and they try again.
[02:46:49]  Whether they get bankrupt or they do, you know, if we didn't have Americans who picked themselves up, we'd all be complaining at the bottom.
[02:46:59]  So that bankruptcy thing or flaws in people's personalities shouldn't be the standard of how we gauge human beings.
[02:47:10]  Thank you, Sheriff, for calling in.
[02:47:12]  We're going to leave it there, and we're going to talk to Jack, who's a Democrat in Minneapolis.
[02:47:16]  Hi, Jack.
[02:47:18]  Hello.
[02:47:18]  Hi.
[02:47:19]  Thank you for taking my call.
[02:47:20]  I just want to get back to something that was touched earlier regarding the two separate state of the unions.
[02:47:28]  I think this is a symbolic action, but I hope one that isn't left at just that.
[02:47:33]  Too often, the Democrats have been just putting symbolic actions and have been very weak-willed against much of the Republican strong arming.
[02:47:43]  I think most vividly is the example of Corey Booker's filibuster.
[02:47:48]  It was a record-breaking filibuster, but it didn't really do anything in a policy sense, and it didn't really do anything to stop the tide that has been, I must say, rather personally assaulting my community.
[02:48:02]  What's your community, Jack?
[02:48:05]  I'm living here up in Minneapolis, so the recent events in Operation Metro Surge has, I mean, spiked anxiety.
[02:48:14]  I'm also an educator, so the children in front of me are visibly scared to come to school, and I've had attendance rates drop.
[02:48:22]  Are you participating?
[02:48:23]  Have you participated in some of the protests that we've seen coming out of Minneapolis?
[02:48:30]  I personally have not.
[02:48:32]  Many people I know have.
[02:48:34]  I just, based on my career and where I am in my career, it's in a very sensitive spot.
[02:48:39]  So I feel the best way for me to support my community is the work that I do for my job as an educator, as opposed to maybe being out, say, outside of the Whipple building or during those larger marches.
[02:48:53]  Jack, thanks for sharing what was on your mind this morning with us.
[02:48:56]  We appreciate it.
[02:48:57]  Betty is next.
[02:48:58]  And Betty is in Blacksburg, South Carolina.
[02:49:02]  Republican line.
[02:49:03]  Hi, Betty.
[02:49:05]  Yeah.
[02:49:06]  Trump is the best president we've ever had.
[02:49:09]  The Democrats has what the American people is going through is what the Democrats have done.
[02:49:18]  All y'all people have seen that.
[02:49:20]  You've seen everything that they've done.
[02:49:22]  They talk discrimination, discrimination, that Trump was, but he ain't.
[02:49:29]  But Biden said on TV, it was on TV to send them back to the jungle.
[02:49:37]  So he's wanting to take power so he can be like China, tell us what to do and all that.
[02:49:45]  That's not what they're after.
[02:49:47]  They want to do that.
[02:49:48]  So if a Republican gets back in there, you're going to get the same thing.
[02:49:55]  And the way y'all treated that man, the devil's gathering up his people.
[02:50:04]  I'll say that.
[02:50:06]  Say, Betty, Betty.
[02:50:08]  Miss Betty, why do you say that President Trump is the best president we've ever had?
[02:50:14]  Why do you say that?
[02:50:16]  Because he has tried to do everything for all people, not just, you know, he's tried everything and everything he does.
[02:50:29]  And y'all know that everything that man does, he gets put down.
[02:50:35]  Plus, he's accused of everything.
[02:50:38]  Accused of everything, even his family, which is wrong.
[02:50:43]  Just like that said about Charlie Kerr.
[02:50:48]  I guess his wife and his children, the man was doing something to help young people and all.
[02:50:58]  And Trump was trying to make this America great again.
[02:51:02]  That's what he said.
[02:51:03]  He's been doing it.
[02:51:05]  And it takes time to do what he come, what he, when he come in office, what Biden had done, all the stuff they've done to bring, and y'all know he brought all these illegals in.
[02:51:19]  They gave them money.
[02:51:22]  All right.
[02:51:22]  Hey, Betty, we're going to stop you there.
[02:51:25]  We're going to say thank you for watching.

=== Real Clear Politics Polls (07:02) ===

[02:51:27]  Thank you for sharing what's on your mind this morning.
[02:51:30]  I'm going to point out because of what you had to say a website that you might be interested in.
[02:51:36]  This is from Real Clear Politics.
[02:51:39]  And that's all one word, realclearpolitics.com.
[02:51:44]  So you go to Real Clear Politics, you get the latest polls.
[02:51:47]  This is where they put all the polls that are happening, you know, all the political polls, measuring support, et cetera.
[02:51:54]  They put them on every day from all sources.
[02:51:58]  So beginning, the last polls they had on there are Friday.
[02:52:02]  President Trump job approval by Ras Musin and RMG Research, 4751, 4752, disapprove more than approve.
[02:52:14]  They have the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary on here.
[02:52:18]  Budajudge, 20%.
[02:52:20]  Newsome, 15%.
[02:52:21]  Ocasio-Cortez, 15.
[02:52:23]  Harris, 10, et cetera.
[02:52:25]  And that's from the University of New Hampshire.
[02:52:27]  The Republican presidential primary has Vance at 53, Rubio, 7, Haley, 9, et cetera, et cetera.
[02:52:36]  But you get to go through here and you could look at general election polls.
[02:52:40]  You can look at Texas Senate polls.
[02:52:44]  Every day they aggregate all the polls that are taken.
[02:52:47]  And this is one of those websites that I basically keep open because it's something you just want to check every day.
[02:52:54]  If you're addicted to the news and addicted to information, then you check those types of websites.
[02:53:02]  So I recommend it, realclearpolitics.com.
[02:53:06]  They also have articles, but you can click on the polls and you can read all their polls.
[02:53:11]  All right.
[02:53:11]  End of that commercial.
[02:53:12]  No, I did not get paid for that commercial.
[02:53:15]  And let's talk to Mark in Albany, New York, Independent Line.
[02:53:19]  Hi, Mark.
[02:53:20]  Good morning.
[02:53:21]  Thanks for all you do at C-SPAN.
[02:53:24]  You know, I'm an independent.
[02:53:26]  I call them like I see them.
[02:53:27]  I've been watching everything for like 40 years.
[02:53:30]  And, you know, we, so 250th anniversary, we separated from the tyranny of Great Britain.
[02:53:39]  We came over here.
[02:53:40]  We adapted.
[02:53:41]  We created.
[02:53:42]  We innovated.
[02:53:44]  And we come a long ways in 250 years.
[02:53:47]  And it's a shame to let it all go now.
[02:53:51]  As far as President Trump goes, he gets up and he fights hard for us every single day.
[02:53:58]  And just think where we would be when he came down off the elevator.
[02:54:04]  He wanted to make America great.
[02:54:05]  I said, finally, a message.
[02:54:07]  Everyone could get around, rally around, support.
[02:54:11]  And what happened?
[02:54:14]  They fraud tooth and nail ever since.
[02:54:19]  You know, as far as immigration goes, they should streamline the legal progress so it's not so cumbersome.
[02:54:28]  And I think they could do that in like one day.
[02:54:30]  Chuck Schumer's been down there for 40 years and has not fixed anything.
[02:54:37]  I mean, they say they're hard workers.
[02:54:40]  Well, they can go back to their country, work real hard to make their country as great as ours.
[02:54:45]  That way they don't have to break into our country and mooch off the U.S. taxpayer for $250 billion a year or whatever it is.
[02:54:55]  These are just a few things I got on my mind there.
[02:54:57]  Thank you, sir, for sharing what's on your mind in Albany, New York.
[02:55:02]  This is from The Hill.
[02:55:03]  Truckers will have to take tests in English amid CDL crackdown.
[02:55:07]  The Trump administration is expanding an effort to ensure all truckers understand English well enough to read road signs and communicate with law enforcement.
[02:55:17]  Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced Friday that all truckers and past drivers will have to take their commercial driver's license tests in English.
[02:55:27]  The announcement comes on the heels of two fatal Indiana crashes, allegedly involving people in the country illegally.
[02:55:36]  That's in the Hill newspaper.
[02:55:38]  Sandy's in Jackson, New Jersey, and she's calling on the Democrats line.
[02:55:43]  And Sandy, what's on your mind this morning?
[02:55:46]  Hi.
[02:55:47]  Thank you for taking my call.
[02:55:50]  Talking about division in this country, I think there's division for a reason.
[02:55:55]  People, especially that do watch the news, the real news.
[02:55:59]  When I say real news, there's a lot of stations up there that are going towards what people want to believe and do believe.
[02:56:06]  And I think it's kind of sad because not everybody's getting the right information.
[02:56:10]  It's very frustrating when you're listening to news and you're saying, am I getting the facts or not?
[02:56:16]  I'm so tired of fact-checking everything that I hear because you can't believe it.
[02:56:22]  I don't go on Facebook.
[02:56:23]  I don't have any those type of counts because I want the truth.
[02:56:27]  I do watch C-SPAN a lot, and thank you for that because it is a very, you see it in action.
[02:56:32]  You see what's coming out of their mouths.
[02:56:34]  In fact, I watched Trump at the national prayer meeting, and I'm saying to myself, people want this as our president.
[02:56:41]  He rambled on for more than 77 minutes, starting almost every sentence with the word I.
[02:56:47]  He did not talk about this country once.
[02:56:49]  He didn't talk about religion once, at least the part I saw.
[02:56:52]  I did have to leave early.
[02:56:53]  But for 77 minutes at least, he rambled.
[02:56:58]  He talks about cats and dogs being eaten from people.
[02:57:03]  Let's say it about the Republican Party.
[02:57:05]  When I talk to people I know, they talk about loyalty.
[02:57:07]  They don't talk about truth.
[02:57:09]  Why is a president allowed to say that he won an election and nobody talks, nobody questions that?
[02:57:16]  I don't understand that.
[02:57:17]  He can say that on a world stage, that he won an election, and it's not true, and nobody cares.
[02:57:24]  That's what saying what this country has come to.
[02:57:27]  So, Sandy, early on in the program.
[02:57:29]  Early on in the program today, I asked a caller how much of his time he spent thinking about Donald Trump in his 24-hour day.
[02:57:42]  What about you?
[02:57:43]  Do you spend a lot of time worrying too much?
[02:57:46]  Too much.
[02:57:46]  Yes, and I want to say, I never, honestly, I'm 70, I'll be 70 years old, and I never really cared about politics, but I am from New Jersey.
[02:57:56]  I kind of do know the history of Donald Trump, like how he screwed people out of Trump University, how he had a foundation, him and his family had to get off the board.
[02:58:07]  And why doesn't that matter?
[02:58:08]  I had a Republican who's very close to me say, well, that has nothing to do with him being president.
[02:58:13]  Why doesn't it?
[02:58:16]  I'm wondering why with tariffs, they're saying, well, what should we do with the money?
[02:58:20]  Why should the court have to tell them what to do with the money?
[02:58:22]  When a kid goes into a store and sells a piece of candy, the parent makes them give it back.
[02:58:27]  Isn't that what you do?

=== Brian Armstrong's Call (02:18) ===

[02:58:29]  All right.
[02:58:30]  Sandy, we're going to have to leave it there, but we really appreciate your honesty and calling in and expressing your view today.
[02:58:38]  We really do, and thanks for watching.
[02:58:41]  Brian is in Sandusky, Michigan, Republican line.
[02:58:45]  Brian, what's on your mind?
[02:58:48]  Yeah, I have a question for you.
[02:58:49]  I would like one useful C-SPAN to go to Dearborn, Michigan, and report back to all of us and tell us what you see going on there.
[02:58:58]  I really would like to see that happen.
[02:59:00]  Why?
[02:59:02]  If you don't see what's going on there, you don't watch the news, you don't see him praying in the streets, can't walk your dog down the street, you're not even allowed to have picks up bacon in your hand.
[02:59:14]  That's Brian in Sandusky, Michigan.
[02:59:16]  We got time for one more call that we're going to fit in here.
[02:59:20]  And this is another Brian.
[02:59:23]  This is Brian in Cambridge, Ohio, Republican line.
[02:59:26]  Hi, Brian.
[02:59:31]  You know what?
[02:59:31]  I don't think Brian's with us, unfortunately.
[02:59:34]  So we're going to have to say goodbye at that point.
[02:59:37]  We really appreciate everybody calling in today and watching the program and participating because that's what really matters is when we hear your voices and hear your views on issues that we face.
[02:59:50]  So thank you everybody for participating and for watching.
[02:59:55]  And beginning now, it's Ceasefire.
[03:00:12]  Welcome to Ceasefire, where we look to bridge the divide in American politics.
[03:00:17]  I'm Greta Brauner in for Dasha Burns.
[03:00:20]  Joining me now on either side of the desk are two guests who have agreed to keep the conversation civil, even when they disagree.
[03:00:27]  North Dakota Republican Governor Kelly Armstrong and Delaware Democratic Governor Matt Meyer.
[03:00:33]  Gentlemen, thank you both for being here.
[03:00:35]  You're in town in Washington this week for the National Governors Association winter meeting.
[03:00:42]  How do both of you view the purpose of the National Governors Association?
[03:00:46]  Governor Armstrong?