CSPAN - Washington Journal Chris Stirewalt
Aired: 2026-03-10
Duration: 49:50


=== Unstable Leadership, Unstable Policies (15:12) ===

[00:00:03]  Especially when I look around the world by me traveling so many places, I can see that living in America has been a blessing to me.
[00:00:11]  People living in poverty, people are poor, people don't have water, they don't have clothes, they don't have food and shelter.
[00:00:18]  I'm free, so it means a lot to me.
[00:00:21]  Whatever your dream is, go get it.
[00:00:24]  Nobody can stop you but you.
[00:00:26]  Believe in yourself, apply yourself, and be the best you can be.
[00:00:30]  This is Sugar Bear.
[00:00:32]  This is our American story.
[00:00:51]  Welcome back.
[00:00:51]  Joining us this morning to talk about Iran and all things politics is Chris Steyerwalt, News Nation the Hills Sunday host and senior fellow at American Enterprise Institute.
[00:01:02]  Chris, thanks so much for being with us this morning.
[00:01:04]  My friend, it is a treat to be here.
[00:01:06]  I'm excited to be asking you questions.
[00:01:08]  Yeah, I know.
[00:01:08]  This is a nice change in dynamic.
[00:01:11]  Okay, let's start with Iran.
[00:01:12]  Messaging by the administration on the justification and goals of the ongoing military campaign in Iran.
[00:01:19]  Are they effective?
[00:01:20]  Well, it depends on how long they need to be effective, right?
[00:01:25]  How effective was the messaging on Venezuela?
[00:01:28]  Not super effective, but it didn't need to be effective for a very long time because it was a quick in and out.
[00:01:34]  The president said last week that he, I think he was talking to CNN, but said that basically he wanted to do a Venezuela in Iran.
[00:01:44]  Take out this leader from, which is taking out this leader of this regime and choose or designate the successor from within the same regime and then do a new negotiation and get down to business.
[00:01:58]  That doesn't need a lot of, that's not like building support for putting ground troops in Iran.
[00:02:04]  So they have a communication strategy that worked for a week.
[00:02:08]  Does it, he initially talked about four or five weeks now, says we don't know.
[00:02:12]  We're not going to give estimates.
[00:02:14]  How long is it an effective communication strategy?
[00:02:17]  I do not know.
[00:02:18]  Is it a cohesive?
[00:02:19]  I mean, the president is saying one thing.
[00:02:21]  Pete Hugsath is seemingly saying another thing.
[00:02:23]  Caroline Levitt at the press briefing last week said that we're just picking and we as in the press are just picking and choosing the thoughts and trying to see that they're in conflict.
[00:02:32]  But I wonder, as somebody looking in, is it cohesive?
[00:02:35]  Well, there's a difference between management and leadership.
[00:02:39]  I think the president's supporters would say that he is a good leader, but he is not a manager.
[00:02:47]  And this is not a managed administration.
[00:02:50]  As the whole spectacle, the debacle around Christy Noam and DHS illustrates, There is not command and control.
[00:03:00]  You are young.
[00:03:01]  I am old.
[00:03:01]  I remember when previous administrations, messaging was controlled down to the head of a pin, right?
[00:03:11]  And it was frustrating because you would talk to different agencies.
[00:03:15]  You would talk to different, this senator or that senator, this member of Congress or that member of Congress, and they'd all just say the same thing.
[00:03:22]  And it was infuriating because they were on message.
[00:03:25]  These people are not on message.
[00:03:28]  And in a way, they're pushing their own different agendas.
[00:03:32]  This is something that we saw in the first Trump administration.
[00:03:34]  Push your own agenda in the public space and see if you can win, right?
[00:03:39]  So Marco Rubio won Venezuela.
[00:03:42]  What's Venezuela?
[00:03:43]  Some people said it was for the oil.
[00:03:46]  Some people said it was for this.
[00:03:48]  Some people said it was about drugs.
[00:03:49]  Marco Rubio said, no, this is a law enforcement action.
[00:03:52]  This is what we're doing.
[00:03:54]  He stayed with that messaging.
[00:03:55]  And ultimately, that became the official line of the administration.
[00:04:00]  This time, were we doing it because Israel was going to make us do it?
[00:04:05]  Were we doing it because we were cooperating with Israel?
[00:04:09]  What was the cause of Spell Eye?
[00:04:11]  Why are we there?
[00:04:12]  What are our ambitions?
[00:04:14]  What's going to happen?
[00:04:15]  It actually reminds me of the tariffs, which is, if you ask Peter Navarro what the point of the tariffs was.
[00:04:24]  The point of the tariffs was that we were going to creative destruction.
[00:04:30]  We were going to tear down the existing bad economic model for the United States and build in its place a shining city on a hill based on high-wage manufacturing jobs.
[00:04:44]  You remember when, I think it was Howard Luttnick, but somebody talked about we're going to make iPhones in the United States?
[00:04:49]  That was Howard Lutnick.
[00:04:50]  We're going to have all these people screwing little screws.
[00:04:52]  Former secretary.
[00:04:53]  And then the Treasury Secretary and others are like, no, We're not talking about building iPhones.
[00:04:59]  We're not talking about building $5,000 iPhones in the United States.
[00:05:02]  We're actually talking about getting to frictionless global trade, and we're going to use these tariffs to break down barriers in other countries.
[00:05:10]  They never, part of the reason the tariffs are so unpopular, they never got to a point of clarity on this.
[00:05:17]  And in Iran, why we are doing this, why the price of gasoline is up, why American service members are dying, why, why, why, we don't quite, the nuclear program is a sufficient explanation, and public opinion research shows Americans overwhelmingly were concerned about the Iranian nuclear program.
[00:05:40]  That is a political winner to talk about that.
[00:05:43]  But again, three weeks from now, four weeks from now, if the conflict is still going on, the rationalization still needs filled in.
[00:05:53]  Before we continue with more questions, I want to invite our callers to join in on the conversation.
[00:05:58]  Democrats, your line is 202-748-8000.
[00:06:03]  Republicans, your line, 202-748-8001.
[00:06:07]  Independents, your line is 202-748-8002.
[00:06:12]  I know Chris is really looking forward to your questions.
[00:06:15]  Just a few more from me here, though.
[00:06:18]  Obviously, you're very good with the numbers.
[00:06:19]  You talked a little bit about the support that people have for, or concern at least, that people have for the Iranian nuclear program in general.
[00:06:28]  The president has said in a series of interviews that he is confident that Americans are behind him with this specific conflict.
[00:06:35]  Polls so far seem to dispute that.
[00:06:37]  I wonder how you see it.
[00:06:38]  So we don't have a ton of good data.
[00:06:41]  We have basically two operant polls.
[00:06:45]  We've got Reuters and Ipsos do their surveys pretty frequently.
[00:06:50]  It's not my favorite methodology, but they are able to find a golden mean between frequency and methodology that lets it be useful.
[00:07:00]  And then there's the Fox News poll, which quite by accident happened to be in the field.
[00:07:07]  They were in the field for three days with the poll, and the first day of the poll was the day that the strikes began.
[00:07:13]  And the Fox News has great pollsters because they use a Republican and a Democrat.
[00:07:17]  It's the same.
[00:07:18]  It was the model they used when I was there.
[00:07:20]  It's a great team, and it's a useful poll.
[00:07:22]  So they just got very lucky.
[00:07:24]  And do you know what the polling said as the bombing began?
[00:07:27]  50-50 split.
[00:07:29]  And a 50-50 split on partisan lines, basically.
[00:07:34]  So then if you peel back the top, and this is not a coalition of voters that stands up to almost any scrutiny or pressure, because what you got was a snap reaction.
[00:07:47]  Do you like what the president did?
[00:07:49]  And you know the survey research, the research about research that says if you say to Republicans, what do you think about the plan to privatize Medicare?
[00:08:00]  Sponsored by President Donald Trump.
[00:08:03]  He makes some good points.
[00:08:04]  So that's a sort of, and it's logical in its own way because people trust the members of their own coalition.
[00:08:10]  So when you look at independents, when you look at women, when you look at the suburbs, when you look at Hispanic voters, when you look at who are the swing voters for this midterm election, they are substantially less favorable than the nation as a whole.
[00:08:26]  And again, how long is the question?
[00:08:29]  How long and how much is the question?
[00:08:32]  Now, I want to ask you one more question before we turn to rising.
[00:08:34]  That's obviously going to be a part of the political calculus for how long Americans are willing to trust President Trump in this.
[00:08:41]  Democrats continue to hammer home the issue of affordability.
[00:08:44]  The president told Reuters late last week he's not concerned about it.
[00:08:47]  Let me read you his quote.
[00:08:48]  He said, I don't have any concern about it when it comes to gas prices.
[00:08:53]  They'll drop very rapidly when this is over.
[00:08:55]  And if they rise, they rise.
[00:08:57]  But this is a far more important, but this is far more important than having gasoline prices go up a little bit.
[00:09:04]  What are you watching here?
[00:09:05]  And what is the exposure to larger Republicans that are obviously going to face some votes in the midterms?
[00:09:14]  The petroleum industry does not like low prices, right?
[00:09:19]  And one of the complaints that the petroleum industry has had in recent years has been that as American energy production has gone up and OPEC has become less restrictive, they're like, where's the money, right?
[00:09:32]  There's a lot of stuff that's feasible when oil is $75 a barrel that is not feasible at $55 a barrel in terms of profits you're making and all the stuff that you're doing.
[00:09:42]  Is the juice worth the squeeze?
[00:09:44]  I think it's reasonable to say that the first run-up in costs, the initial spike here, yes, it's speculation.
[00:09:52]  Yes, it's people who are like, oh, this could, sincere people who say this could go badly and I'm going to hedge against future and long-term disruptions.
[00:10:03]  There's also people who are just trying to ride a predictable price.
[00:10:08]  It's like when the Federal Reserve cuts or raises rates, right?
[00:10:11]  There are people who are not making a long-term bet, but they're betting on the current reaction.
[00:10:16]  So this could be ephemeral, right?
[00:10:18]  This could pass through in a fairly, if the Strait of Hormuz reopened and everything got back to, how long would it take for energy prices to drop substantially?
[00:10:28]  I don't imagine it would be very long.
[00:10:31]  On the other hand, and I'm sorry that my answer to everything about Iran is tell me how long.
[00:10:39]  On the other hand, if people in the suburbs of these United States, and by the way, rural people, working class rural people, so use this as a metaphor or not as a case study.
[00:10:54]  Let's say you're a Trump coalition voter.
[00:10:58]  You voted for Donald Trump in 2024.
[00:11:02]  You are middle of the middle class and you live in a small town or rural America.
[00:11:08]  You drive a lot.
[00:11:09]  Gasoline prices are very material For you.
[00:11:13]  So let's say that you lived in rural Maine, for example, and gas is going at $3.50.
[00:11:20]  It's looking at $4.
[00:11:21]  Gas prices are high.
[00:11:23]  The party that asks you to fill up your truck to drive into wherever you need to go to vote for Susan Collins in November has a difficult argument to make to you about why, if it costs you $60 to fill up your truck, you should spend $30 to drive to the polls and vote for Susan Collins for a conflict that was, whatever else Iran is, it is a war of choice, right?
[00:11:51]  You can say it's a good choice, you can say it's a bad choice, but it didn't have to happen exactly in the way that it did.
[00:11:59]  It could have been a week later or three weeks later, whatever.
[00:12:02]  This wasn't a act now because there's a bomb under the Super Bowl or something.
[00:12:08]  And the Republicans will be either credited with or freighted with the choice aspect of this.
[00:12:17]  And that will have serious ramifications when they ask their low-propensity voters.
[00:12:22]  Remember the key to the Republican coalition, they stole the Democrats' voters.
[00:12:27]  The people who had been the backbone of the Democratic coalition for generations, going back to the New Deal.
[00:12:33]  For the 2024 election.
[00:12:34]  The white working class, starting in 2016, said, you know what?
[00:12:39]  This guy, he's hilarious.
[00:12:41]  I'm sick of these people.
[00:12:42]  I'm sick of Hillary Clinton.
[00:12:44]  I'm sick of it all.
[00:12:45]  I'm ready for something else.
[00:12:47]  And these voters moved over.
[00:12:48]  They trusted Trump on the economy.
[00:12:50]  They liked him on immigration.
[00:12:51]  They moved over.
[00:12:53]  Those voters are great to have in a quadrennial election.
[00:12:57]  But in midterm elections, they don't show up.
[00:13:00]  That was a problem Barack Obama experienced when Democrats were in the last phase of their supremacy with that group of voters.
[00:13:08]  Getting those people to go to the polls is hard under any circumstances.
[00:13:13]  If they're frustrated with you about the economy, if they're frustrated with you about gas prices, they're not going out for you.
[00:13:20]  All right, Philip from South Carolina on Independent, our first call.
[00:13:24]  Good morning, Philip.
[00:13:26]  Hey, how are you doing?
[00:13:27]  Good, how are you?
[00:13:28]  I'm doing good.
[00:13:30]  What I want to say is this: when you have, when the head of a country is unstable, you're going to have policies that are unstable.
[00:13:41]  And we all know that the president of the United States is unstable.
[00:13:45]  Look at the situation in America and around the world.
[00:13:48]  He caused all of that.
[00:13:50]  So that's all I have to say.
[00:13:52]  Do you have a question for Chris here?
[00:13:55]  Chris, did you tell the people that the president is messed up?
[00:14:01]  I, if, Philip, let me tell you something.
[00:14:03]  If I went around Washington telling everybody who I thought was unstable and messed up, was messed up, I would never do anything else.
[00:14:13]  I would never get anything done other than going out and saying that about people in Washington.
[00:14:20]  Look, I think your point, though, is there are good things about chaos, right?
[00:14:30]  Chaos can be creative, right?
[00:14:32]  We're talking about creative destruction, the idea that churn can lead to good things.
[00:14:40]  And that's true.
[00:14:42]  And I think the best argument that the Trump people, that MAGA has made consistently is, oh, you don't want to tear down these institutions.
[00:14:53]  You don't want to blow this stuff up.
[00:14:54]  How's it working out for you?
[00:14:55]  And people say, I don't like it.
[00:14:58]  I call this the Arby's phenomenon.
[00:15:01]  The Arby's phenomenon is if Jasmine says, we're all going to Applebee's for dinner, I can turn to the audience and I can say, hey, I think Jasmine's like, why are we going to Applebee's?

=== The Arby's Phenomenon Explained (02:04) ===

[00:15:15]  We don't really want Applebee's.
[00:15:17]  And people are like, yeah, I'm sick of going to Applebee's.
[00:15:19]  I'm sick of Jasmine telling us we have to go to Applebee's.
[00:15:22]  And I'm like, yeah, so we all deserve what?
[00:15:25]  Something else.
[00:15:26]  We need something else.
[00:15:28]  And they're like, yeah, enough of Jasmine and Applebee's.
[00:15:31]  And then I say, okay, good.
[00:15:32]  Now get in the van because we're going to Arby's.
[00:15:35]  And they're going to say, we didn't want Arby's, Chris.
[00:15:37]  That's not what we were talking about.
[00:15:39]  Chaos and disruption is very appealing, especially in a wealthy, stable nation like the United States, where we take a lot of stuff for granted.
[00:15:49]  And we get sick of how it is.
[00:15:50]  We get sick and tired of being sick and tired.
[00:15:53]  You could watch Barack Obama's 2008 primary campaign.
[00:15:58]  You go back and look at how he ran and what he did.
[00:16:00]  Look at James Tallarico running down in Texas for the Democrats.
[00:16:04]  What is the message?
[00:16:05]  No more Applebee's.
[00:16:07]  We're not going to Applebee's anymore.
[00:16:08]  We're going someplace else.
[00:16:10]  Getting people attracted, this is why third parties, people always say, third, I wish there was a third party.
[00:16:17]  And then there is one and people go, not that one.
[00:16:20]  I didn't mean that third party.
[00:16:21]  I meant a different third party.
[00:16:24]  And I think the challenge of MAGA is good, stable, boring governance is not sexy or popular.
[00:16:35]  It does not get attention, right?
[00:16:37]  If you had a Republican Party that was full of Mitch Daniels's and Ben Sass's and these people who were really excited about soybean yields and wait times at the DMV, you could ask the outgoing governor of Ohio, right?
[00:16:53]  You can ask all of these Republicans who are boring and people like how they do.
[00:16:58]  You can't get in the news cycle and you can't get exciting, you can't create excitement among your core voters if you're just good at your job.
[00:17:07]  For the record, I'm more of a red lobster TGI Fridays.
[00:17:11]  I need a little bit of a Olive Garden type of girl.
[00:17:13]  There you go.
[00:17:14]  That's right.
[00:17:14]  Mike from Florida and Independent.
[00:17:17]  You're next.
[00:17:17]  Good morning, Mike.
[00:17:19]  Yeah, hi.

=== Foreign Policy vs. Ideological Betting (12:12) ===

[00:17:20]  Hey, look, this thing with Iran, this problem we have.
[00:17:23]  Now, I wonder why we never hear how we overthrew their government back in 1953 and installed a tyrant, and people got tired of it after 25 years and overthrew him.
[00:17:37]  So here we are today.
[00:17:38]  So let's get real on what's really going on in Iran.
[00:17:42]  I can remember that Netanyahu came before Congress in the 90s and tried to get us to invade Iran.
[00:17:48]  He said they were going to get a nuclear bomb in two weeks.
[00:17:51]  Here we are, 30 years later, no nuclear bomb, but for some odd reason, Israel is pulling the strings in this country.
[00:17:59]  Let's get really real here.
[00:18:03]  I mean, the Panama Canal, right, exists in a country that we substantially invented.
[00:18:14]  We can go around the world, and I'm not evading, like, the relationship between Iran, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the West, because Iran is in a very important strategic location and has got lots of oil.
[00:18:35]  You don't have to go back to 1954.
[00:18:37]  You can go back to Lord Balfour, and you can go back to the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War.
[00:18:44]  We, if by we, I mean the West, Britain and the United States principally, but the West generally, has been meddling in Iran for longer than anybody alive on this earth has been alive, right?
[00:19:01]  This is a thing.
[00:19:02]  Since the internal combustion engine arrived, the West has been meddling in the Middle East.
[00:19:09]  Now, we could pick points along the continuum to say this was virtuous meddling and this was not virtuous meddling.
[00:19:17]  Kermit Roosevelt, the son, the presidential son, long ago took credit and claimed that the CIA had installed the government of Iran.
[00:19:28]  He was exaggerating.
[00:19:30]  There was truth in it, right?
[00:19:32]  But he was puffing up his own role in these things.
[00:19:37]  But of course, for conspiracy theorists, not that you are, but for others, it was like, yeah, see, we knew it.
[00:19:44]  The power of the CIA to manipulate and do these things.
[00:19:47]  Iran is a big, big, complicated, ancient culture.
[00:19:53]  And unlike Iraq, which has ancient roots but does not have the Saddam Hussein's government was the Western intervention in Iraq had created Iraq out of basically nothing.
[00:20:09]  And as we saw with after we took Saddam Hussein out, there was not a lot of strong national unity around the concept of Iraq.
[00:20:19]  Iran is different than that.
[00:20:23]  And there are more ancient, the Persian people, there are people, and you know people in the United States, who if you say you're Iranian, what do they tell you?
[00:20:32]  No.
[00:20:32]  I'm Persian.
[00:20:33]  I'm Persian.
[00:20:34]  And that's, we can go all the way, we can go back to the hanging gardens.
[00:20:39]  We can go to when there were Persian people sacking the hanging gardens.
[00:20:45]  We can go all the way back through 10,000 years of human history, and we can find this is a complicated, difficult, and rich and important place.
[00:20:54]  The United States, I'm sure, has screwed up a lot in Iran in the 50s, in the 70s.
[00:21:01]  I'm sure we've gotten it wrong multiple times.
[00:21:03]  But you can't just pick one moment in history and say it was good and then it was bad or it was bad and then it was good.
[00:21:11]  Lewis from Colorado, a Republican?
[00:21:14]  Go ahead.
[00:21:15]  Thank you.
[00:21:16]  Hi, Chris.
[00:21:17]  Hi.
[00:21:18]  Two quick points, two quick questions.
[00:21:20]  Point number one, it's easy to criticize when you don't have any solutions.
[00:21:24]  Point number two, Jasmine Crockett called Donald Trump an orangutan.
[00:21:29]  Question number one, what is Chris Steirwalt's solution to Israel, Iran, China, Cuba, Haiti?
[00:21:42]  Question number two, can you, Chris Steyrwalt, explain the symbiotic relationship between C-SPAN hosts and CNN?
[00:21:52]  Thank you and have a great day.
[00:21:56]  I don't think he thinks that's a good relation.
[00:21:58]  Is there a symbiotic relationship that you'd like to discuss?
[00:22:02]  Not that I can think of, although I go on CNN and I used to work there.
[00:22:06]  But you also come on News Nation.
[00:22:08]  I go on News Nation.
[00:22:10]  I will fundamentally go on any network basically that'll have me, but that's basically where that is.
[00:22:15]  I express symbiotic affinity with Jasmine's television products.
[00:22:21]  What is my solution?
[00:22:24]  The best thing about being a journalist, no, there are many great things about being a journalist, but the best thing about being a journalist is I'm not telling you that I know the answer.
[00:22:34]  I don't know what the answer is, and very often there isn't an answer.
[00:22:37]  The thing about foreign policy that people forget, and I think the caller alludes to this, there is not usually, almost never, is there a choice between two good, a good thing and a bad thing.
[00:22:52]  It's not, do we want Arby's or Applebees when you're talking about foreign policy?
[00:22:58]  You're talking about, do we want punched in the face or do we want kicked in the shins?
[00:23:04]  Which bad thing do we want?
[00:23:06]  Which outcome is the least odious to us?
[00:23:11]  There isn't a solution.
[00:23:13]  The countries the caller listed were Haiti, China, Iran, Israel.
[00:23:19]  Did I miss any of them?
[00:23:20]  Cuba.
[00:23:20]  Cuba.
[00:23:22]  I don't know a thousand years of history more.
[00:23:25]  And we'll like, these are long, big, complicated, multi-generational.
[00:23:35]  I don't know what's going to happen in Cuba.
[00:23:36]  I don't know what's going to happen anywhere.
[00:23:38]  And I don't know what the correct doctrine is.
[00:23:40]  Every administration that takes power comes in and their plans, it may have been Philip Sheridan.
[00:23:48]  And if it wasn't Philip Sheridan, I'm very sorry.
[00:23:50]  It may have been Stonewall Jackson, but some general once said that no battle plan ever survives first contact with the enemy.
[00:24:00]  And when you are in power, when you have the presidency, you could have a plan.
[00:24:06]  You can have think tanks.
[00:24:07]  Shout out to my colleagues at AEI.
[00:24:10]  You can have plans for domestic policy.
[00:24:13]  You can have plans for all of this stuff.
[00:24:15]  And then you get to the dance and they're not playing the tune that you wanted them to play.
[00:24:20]  So if we think about what makes great leaders, it is a combination of being right, right, having the correct policies.
[00:24:29]  The reason Abraham Lincoln stands above all of the other presidents except for George Washington, who invented the presidency, so he's sort of DQ'd.
[00:24:37]  The reason Abraham Lincoln stands above is that he had the right idea, but he had this astonishing gift of leadership and an amazing character.
[00:24:47]  So that he didn't know, right, when Abraham Lincoln was debating Stephen Douglas, he didn't say, here's my easy five-point plan for how we're going to eradicate the evil of slavery in America.
[00:25:01]  Here is how we're going to fix all of this and do all of this.
[00:25:04]  He said, this is who I am.
[00:25:05]  These are my principles.
[00:25:07]  And if you trust me, I will go forward.
[00:25:10]  As president, Abraham Lincoln faced a predictable disaster, but not a predictable disaster that would turn out exactly in the way.
[00:25:20]  So if he would have had a plan that he had carried forward, it wouldn't have worked.
[00:25:23]  So you have to choose as you go.
[00:25:25]  So I don't think it's about having a plan.
[00:25:27]  I think it's about having principles.
[00:25:28]  It's about having precepts.
[00:25:29]  And it's about being a good leader.
[00:25:31]  Talking about principles, I want to ask you one more question about Iran, and then I want to turn to DHS.
[00:25:35]  But on Iran, MAGA reaction, the president says that he is MAGA, MAGA is him.
[00:25:41]  He started it, that they have no problems with what he's doing.
[00:25:45]  But then we see some louder voices like Tucker Carlson, like Megan Kelly, Voicing very loud opposition against these strikes.
[00:25:54]  Is there a rift right now?
[00:25:56]  I think if you think about political media as a sort of a calci bet, those are a lot of 2026 words.
[00:26:07]  Go ahead.
[00:26:08]  Which is, what is the position that I can take that will be early but not wrong and not too early?
[00:26:20]  Where can I put myself so that, and I have no idea what anybody believes about anything and don't care.
[00:26:28]  Everybody ought to think exactly what they want to think and live their lives.
[00:26:32]  It's fantastic.
[00:26:33]  I highly recommend it.
[00:26:35]  But I think, so that, going back to that Fox News survey, 16% of Republicans in that survey were not supportive broadly of the initial strikes.
[00:26:51]  That's not a very big number, but it is a significant number.
[00:26:56]  I don't think it's, I don't think, I think the people who are being very critical of this are ideologically, yes, that's their belief, but also they're betting on the come because they figure if this goes badly, as they believe that it will, because that sticks with their priors.
[00:27:15]  That's where they are.
[00:27:17]  If you believe that it's going to go badly, being clear in your opposition early on sets you up later to say, and I told you so, and that's why you should buy the beet powder that I'm selling, or that's why you should, whatever, right?
[00:27:32]  Like that's being right early, but not too early is very good for people who want to be successful, rich, and famous.
[00:27:41]  This is a good place to be.
[00:27:43]  The more significant part of the 16% is that the Republican Party is going through a reinvention of itself on foreign policy.
[00:27:58]  They had a foreign policy that had become an absolute boat anchor, right?
[00:28:04]  Donald Trump's success in 2016.
[00:28:08]  He looked at Jeb Bush and he said, hey, tell your brother thanks for the Iraq invasion.
[00:28:14]  And Republican voters for the first time felt when in New Hampshire, Donald Trump talked about how George W. Bush should have been impeached for not taking Iraq's oil.
[00:28:25]  The crowd loved it.
[00:28:26]  And I was like, oh, they've been waiting to have their revenge, right?
[00:28:32]  Just as Democrats did with Lyndon Johnson about the Vietnam War.
[00:28:36]  Like, oh, now we can finally say what we wanted to say is that we hate this.
[00:28:40]  But opposition to a foreign policy is not in itself a foreign policy.
[00:28:46]  So no new wars.
[00:28:47]  JD Vance wrote his Wall Street Journal endorsement back in 2023 of Trump for reelection, and it's because he never got us into a dumb war, and all these other people are dumb, and he is smart, and he will not get us into any wars, is not a foreign policy.
[00:29:01]  And now the Republican Party is trying, so it's like a post-neoconservatism.
[00:29:05]  It's a post-interventionism in which they say Colin Powell was wrong.
[00:29:11]  If you break it, you do not have to buy it.
[00:29:14]  It's sort of like the debate between Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld about the Iraq invasion is happening again, but this time Team Rumsfeld is winning.
[00:29:24]  And the answer is, it's not a forward strategy of freedom.
[00:29:27]  We're not going to have a birth of Madisonian democracy break out across the Middle East.

=== Post-Interventionism and Passive Clients (15:27) ===

[00:29:33]  What we're going to do is put passive clients.
[00:29:37]  We're going to put people in power around the world.
[00:29:39]  It's going all the way back to Ferdinand Marcos, what was his name in Panama?
[00:29:46]  You know the guy, Manuel Noriega.
[00:29:48]  Yes.
[00:29:49]  Apologies to the Noriega fans.
[00:29:52]  To put Saddam Hussein himself, to choose bad people in a Kissingerian realpolitik kind of way to say, like, we don't care.
[00:30:00]  This is not about something else.
[00:30:02]  This is about American interest very narrowly.
[00:30:04]  So they're trying that one out.
[00:30:06]  All right, Michelle from Los Angeles, a Democrat.
[00:30:09]  Hi, thank you for taking my call.
[00:30:11]  Hi, thank you for taking my call.
[00:30:13]  This is a little bit off topic, but I was wondering what you thought about the fact that Pamela Bondi is proposing a rule to limit or suspend state bar ethics investigations of DOJ lawyers.
[00:30:29]  When she first came into office, she dismantled the Office of Professional Management, which also investigates attorneys general's misconduct.
[00:30:40]  So should we be alarmed?
[00:30:43]  No, the struggle of life in 21st century America is am I too alarmed or not alarmed enough?
[00:30:51]  But it feels like we never have the right amount of alarm.
[00:30:56]  There was a fictive independence of the Justice Department that was created after Watergate, after the horrors of the Nixon firing everybody at the Justice Department, all of that, all of that stuff, the abuses of power under the Nixon administration.
[00:31:16]  And they put in guardrails and they said, we're going to be independent.
[00:31:20]  But we all know that attorneys general, federal attorneys general, are political kind of people and they're interested in this.
[00:31:30]  And so the wall was there.
[00:31:31]  The independence was there.
[00:31:33]  But it was sort of a winked at independence.
[00:31:37]  The Trump administration has, just as we were talking about before, about chaos versus construction, the Trump administration correctly, truly said, this is false.
[00:31:48]  This is a false independence.
[00:31:49]  This is just part of the administration.
[00:31:51]  And it was true when Eric Holder was the attorney general.
[00:31:55]  And it's true now.
[00:31:58]  And we're calling it a lie.
[00:32:01]  And it felt really good.
[00:32:03]  But the fictive independence turns out to be politically useful.
[00:32:09]  And the political utility of the fictive independence is it wasn't me.
[00:32:14]  I did not do that.
[00:32:16]  I did not do that.
[00:32:18]  That was the independent Justice Department doing that, and I had nothing to do with it.
[00:32:24]  This administration, this president, cannot do it.
[00:32:27]  The Epstein files is a great example.
[00:32:29]  And he tries.
[00:32:29]  Exactly.
[00:32:30]  Epstein Files is a great example.
[00:32:31]  Like, I don't have anything to do with the Epstein files, but I do get to have a prosecutor detailed to the White House to investigate people for fraud when I want to investigate them for fraud.
[00:32:44]  They have torn down and eliminated the often fictive independence of the Justice Department.
[00:32:51]  And now everything is in his lap and everything is in the administration's lap.
[00:32:56]  If you saw the thing, I don't know anything about bar investigations.
[00:32:59]  No one would ever make me a lawyer.
[00:33:01]  But if you saw the thing about punishing these law firms, where the Justice Department said, we're going to crush you.
[00:33:11]  And then they lost and lost and lost.
[00:33:12]  And they said, this is a waste of time and too expensive.
[00:33:15]  And we're not doing it anymore.
[00:33:16]  And then 20 hours later, it was like, oh, no, We're withdrawing the withdrawal and we are angrier than ever.
[00:33:23]  And you will do what we want to do.
[00:33:26]  It's a lot of plates to keep spinning in the air.
[00:33:28]  And one underrated part of all this, and this goes to the Department of Homeland Security, it goes to the Justice Department.
[00:33:35]  If the risk of terror attacks are high, if the risks of bad things happening are high, you don't want to have a public narrative that says we're doing 80 bajillion things.
[00:33:46]  The government's always doing 80 bajillion things, but you don't want to have a narrative that says we took our eye off the ball.
[00:33:52]  Yeah.
[00:33:52]  On DHS, obviously we know we're in a partial shutdown.
[00:33:55]  We read a story earlier in the show about long lines over the weekend at TSA as they're set to miss their first full paycheck.
[00:34:05]  And we know that over the weekend or on Friday, the president effectively fired and then moved her to a different role, Christy Noam, DHS Secretary.
[00:34:15]  Shield of the Americas.
[00:34:16]  Shield of the Americas and is putting in place Republican Oklahoma Senator Mark Wayne Mullen.
[00:34:23]  Do you think that this shift of moving Christy Noam out of this space is a signal that policy for DHS is shifting?
[00:34:32]  Yeah.
[00:34:33]  This is Tom Homan, the Borders Are, started a process.
[00:34:39]  We talked before about the struggle for message control being litigated in public.
[00:34:45]  Tom Homan, during the debacle in Minnesota, started saying publicly, this is not how you do this.
[00:34:54]  You are undercutting the message.
[00:34:56]  And he said it publicly.
[00:34:58]  And it was like, oh.
[00:35:01]  And then he won, right?
[00:35:04]  Noam was forced to withdraw her forces.
[00:35:07]  Greg Bovino was out and they did, they went to old school Tom Homan, you know, a cop from a law and order episode kind of like, you know, we're being serious, we're being grown up, we're not the army, we're police.
[00:35:26]  And that was the beginning of the end for Noam because she had lost her credibility and it was a political loser.
[00:35:35]  The idea that the American public opinion is absolutely crystalline.
[00:35:43]  It is perfectly clear on the question about immigration.
[00:35:46]  It is not a mystery what the American people want, nor is it a mystery what they have wanted for, no joke, 25 or 30 years.
[00:35:53]  They want strict enforcement of the law and they want a pathway to citizenship for people who are in the country illegally.
[00:36:00]  They want those two things, which are intention, but they want it resolved in that way where both of those considerations are carried forward.
[00:36:07]  And the idea that Stephen Miller and Christy Noam were putting forward, which was that we're doing it.
[00:36:16]  The worse, the better.
[00:36:17]  The uglier, the better.
[00:36:19]  The harder, the better.
[00:36:20]  It's good because Noam's argument was they will self-deport.
[00:36:23]  And she really tried, and that's how she sold her ad campaign.
[00:36:28]  Which kind of spelled her doom.
[00:36:29]  Which kind of spelled her doom.
[00:36:32]  That's how they sold these military-style, large-scale raids and all of this stuff, was we're going to save money and make it better because illegal immigrants, migrants will not try to come to the United States, and the people who are here now will self-deport.
[00:36:51]  I'm sure that is true in a large degree.
[00:36:54]  We've seen the numbers that show what's happening with the United States population.
[00:37:00]  Some of that is going on for sure.
[00:37:02]  But for the voters who are living in that point of tension between I want the laws to be enforced, but I want us to be humane.
[00:37:11]  And I want the people who are here illegally and haven't committed other crimes to be treated mercifully and decently and be given a path to citizenship.
[00:37:21]  The GNOME approach blew past that and became this massive political liability for the administration.
[00:37:29]  Mark Wayne Mullen is a Worschock test for whatever you want to see in Mark Wayne Mullen right now.
[00:37:38]  He's whatever you want to be.
[00:37:39]  If you're a progressive, if you're a Democrat, you've got this guy who is like, you know, an MMA brawler and what does he know?
[00:37:49]  But if you talk to Republicans in the Senate, and by the way, some Democrats, and I know you do, they like him, right?
[00:37:55]  They find him honest.
[00:37:57]  They find him good to deal with.
[00:37:59]  He ran a successful plumbing company.
[00:38:01]  He's only been in the Senate.
[00:38:03]  Time goes so fast now.
[00:38:05]  I had to be reminded he's only serving out the unexpired term of Jim Inhoff, right?
[00:38:11]  He has not been in the Senate for a full term.
[00:38:14]  He was in the House for quite a while, but he is well liked and well thought of, certainly in the Republican conference.
[00:38:20]  But plenty of Democrats will tell you, like, he's okay to deal with.
[00:38:24]  I think this is a pragmatic choice for the president and for this administration.
[00:38:31]  He'll get confirmed, lickety split.
[00:38:33]  There'll be no confirmation battle at all, number one.
[00:38:37]  And number two, Mark Wayne Mullen is a good politician.
[00:38:41]  And it's bad politics to turn what had been your party's chief political asset into its chief political liability.
[00:38:50]  So I don't think he'll do that.
[00:38:52]  All right, Sonny from New City, New York, an independent.
[00:38:56]  You're next.
[00:38:57]  Good morning, Sonny.
[00:38:59]  Hey, I really enjoy your commentary, and you have really good chemistry together.
[00:39:03]  You should have a podcast.
[00:39:06]  Noted.
[00:39:07]  Do you have enough on your schedule, Jasmine?
[00:39:09]  I've got a little podcast.
[00:39:11]  Go ahead, Sonny.
[00:39:12]  What's your question?
[00:39:13]  Well, the question is about the restaurant analogy.
[00:39:17]  I think you were painting with broad strokes, but I think there is some truth to it in that all these candidates run as an anti-John McCain type figure, but then once attaining the office, they become almost a John McCain on steroids.
[00:39:34]  And that is something that I think should be addressed.
[00:39:41]  And I don't know how to address it, but that would be my only comment on.
[00:39:47]  But otherwise, you're spot on with everything you're doing today.
[00:39:52]  And keep on doing it.
[00:39:54]  Right now.
[00:39:54]  Thank you.
[00:39:55]  Hey, this is the best caller of the day.
[00:39:58]  Why were you holding him back?
[00:40:02]  On this one, I do have a solution.
[00:40:03]  On most things, I don't offer my own opinion because I don't know anything.
[00:40:06]  I'm a person who started writing in a newspaper when I was 17 years old.
[00:40:10]  I do not pretend that this has gifted me with Solomonic wisdom to solve all the problems of the world.
[00:40:16]  But I have spent a lot of time thinking about politics.
[00:40:19]  And our primary system is trash.
[00:40:23]  We have a hot garbage system of these parties.
[00:40:27]  The way that these parties choose their candidates has all the wrong incentives.
[00:40:31]  It's new.
[00:40:32]  It's a new way, historically speaking.
[00:40:34]  It's a new way of doing this.
[00:40:37]  We did not really have these kinds of binding primaries until the 70s in large number, and the 80s is when the regime that we now have came into effect.
[00:40:47]  And it's an impossibly stupid way to choose the people who will run for office.
[00:40:53]  Because in order, if only 11% or so of the electorate votes in primaries, who's in the 11%?
[00:41:02]  The most radical people, right?
[00:41:04]  The most extreme people are in the 11%.
[00:41:07]  And then those people go vote.
[00:41:09]  Do you know that there's about the same number of primary voters in a midterm year as there are in a presidential year?
[00:41:17]  The overall turnout goes up by 40 or 50 million people.
[00:41:21]  Primary electorate is about the same.
[00:41:23]  And I say this with love because you strike me as a voter.
[00:41:26]  I don't.
[00:41:27]  I'm not doing that.
[00:41:28]  But oh, I had to vote this last time.
[00:41:30]  I'm sorry.
[00:41:30]  That's a lot.
[00:41:31]  But you're probably an active voter.
[00:41:35]  You're weird among weirdos because most of the people who are devoted primary voters are politically obsessed.
[00:41:42]  They're unusual or they have a policy obsession that they're really into.
[00:41:47]  And so they're going into this space and then they're choosing candidates who then go into a general election and say, now I want you to forget, so like, what will James Tallarico have to spend a lot of time doing in Texas for the next several months?
[00:42:04]  Now, when I said that about a non-binary God, what I meant to say was, da-da-da-da-da, about cleaning up and refocusing your messaging.
[00:42:15]  The solution here is we need to get rid of closed partisan primaries that have low participation and produce crummy candidates.
[00:42:27]  We are making it too hard for sensible, normal people to go through the political process.
[00:42:34]  Ranked choice in primaries is a great idea for some states.
[00:42:37]  California's system of a nonpartisan, watching Democrats in California freak out because they've got too many people running in California and they've got to get out for governor.
[00:42:47]  There's going to be like 20,000 of them.
[00:42:48]  So my answer is reform the primary election system in your state.
[00:42:54]  I think the caller was from California.
[00:42:56]  You already did it, so you can rest easy and enjoy the sunshine.
[00:42:59]  But everybody else, fix the primary system in your state because it's garbage.
[00:43:04]  All right, we've got about one more minute left here, Chris.
[00:43:07]  Lightning round.
[00:43:08]  You had a great book, Broken News.
[00:43:10]  I did.
[00:43:11]  Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back in 30 Seconds?
[00:43:15]  How has the media landscape changed since you wrote that book in 2022?
[00:43:19]  Consolidation continues and winners and losers are being sorted out and the universe is filtering down to we went from this to that and now we're going to go back to this.
[00:43:29]  And C-SPAN is an important part of it and getting C-SPAN paid for by streamers is important and C-SPAN is essential.
[00:43:36]  And I'm here today because I'm stealing this coffee mug.
[00:43:39]  I'm here today because I'd like to hang out with you and I'm here today because C-SPAN is important.
[00:43:43]  All right, Chris, that's all we have for today.
[00:43:46]  Thank you so much for coming on the show.
[00:43:48]  Heck yeah.
[00:43:49]  We appreciate you, host of News Nation the Hill and senior fellow at AEI.
[00:43:53]  Love to be here.
[00:43:53]  Love to be with you.
[00:43:55]  All right, that's all we have today for Washington Journal.
[00:43:58]  Another edition comes at you tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. Eastern here on C-SPAN.
[00:44:06]  C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum inviting you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy from Washington, D.C. to across the country.
[00:44:16]  Coming up Tuesday morning, Vote Vet Senior Advisor and former Representative Max Rose will talk about Congress's role in military operations and the need for a war powers resolution.
[00:44:26]  And then Washington Post reporter Olivia George on the long-delayed installation over the weekend of a plaque honoring law enforcement's response to the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
[00:44:35]  Also, author Peter Schweitzer will talk about his book, The Invisible Coup.
[00:44:39]  C-SPAN's Washington Journal.
[00:44:41]  Join the conversation live at 7 Eastern Tuesday morning on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, or online at c-SPAN.org.
[00:44:53]  C-SPAN, official media partner of America 250, commemorating 250 years of American democracy.

=== Fresh Lobster from Maine (03:42) ===

[00:45:00]  America 250 is traveling the country to honor the voices that define our nation.
[00:45:05]  Stories of identity, service, and community.
[00:45:07]  Here's one of them.
[00:45:15]  My name's James Sherland.
[00:45:17]  I'm the captain of the fishing vessel Julialis.
[00:45:20]  Been lobstering about three years now to catch the delicious meal everybody wants on their dinner plate.
[00:45:26]  I grew up in Antucket fishing with my father since I was eight.
[00:45:30]  He wasn't a month old and we went and we put him in the boat and we said we're going to break him in right.
[00:45:39]  My father came from Norway.
[00:45:41]  He fished all his life.
[00:45:43]  I've fished out in Antucket many, many years.
[00:45:49]  The first time he took me, I was too short to stand normally, so I had to stand out like a milk crane.
[00:45:58]  A few day trips, usually about 12 hours.
[00:46:01]  I pretty much always get up about 3:30 in a boat by about 4:30.
[00:46:06]  About a two-hour ride out from where we fish.
[00:46:09]  So the whole way out, the stern man and I are cutting up bait and bagging it for the day to put in lobster traps.
[00:46:19]  They try to haul 300 traps a day.
[00:46:21]  you know we're driving to the fish market to deliver them my name is brendan alterio This is the Hair Segut Luncheon Lobster.
[00:46:40]  It's a lobster company working waterfront in a restaurant.
[00:46:45]  This is our 56th season.
[00:46:49]  Our boats land down there in a lobster car, we call it.
[00:46:53]  You weigh them up.
[00:46:56]  They're in wet storage overnight.
[00:46:59]  It is the freshest of the fresh.
[00:47:02]  I get going around 6 a.m.
[00:47:04]  We work till all our work's done, usually around 5 o'clock or so.
[00:47:09]  Right here in our lobster pound, we normally go through about 5,000, 6,000 pounds a week.
[00:47:14]  Who doesn't want lobster, right?
[00:47:25]  The Lobster Shack at Two Lights, which has been a seafood restaurant in Cape Elizabeth since 1969.
[00:47:35]  136 please.
[00:47:37]  I started working here as 136.
[00:47:40]  There you are.
[00:47:41]  Oh, 131.
[00:47:43]  Last job.
[00:47:45]  I'm third generation, and Hannah is one of my kids.
[00:47:49]  I have five brothers and one sister.
[00:47:52]  Two of the youngest are not old enough, but so far everyone else works either at the restaurant or at the gift shop next door.
[00:47:58]  I kind of take the ocean for granted, but I think when I'm in other places or more inland, I miss the calm and the peace.
[00:48:06]  And just like the people, like the friendliness and all that, I think that's also a major part that like makes Maine Maine.
[00:48:16]  All of the world's famous lobster rolls are made right here.
[00:48:20]  Someone orders lobster, just scoop one up and put it in the boiling tank.
[00:48:27]  One at a time, made to order.
[00:48:29]  We toast it, put a little bit of lettuce, fresh lobster meat, and then a dollop of mayonnaise on top.
[00:48:37]  Fresh days catching it, somebody bringing it to you.
[00:48:41]  You could go to a restaurant to get it.

=== Maine's Incredible Work Ethic (01:07) ===

[00:48:43]  It's just the American way.
[00:48:46]  The lobster industry is the number one driver for tourism.
[00:48:49]  It's a big thing.
[00:48:51]  We see a lot of people all summer long.
[00:48:54]  It is just part of the economy, but on top of that, it's just part of our personality.
[00:48:59]  If you're honest and work hard and show up, you can get ahead no matter what.
[00:49:06]  There's an incredible work ethic in Maine.
[00:49:08]  Hot chowder.
[00:49:10]  So all of that hard work goes into tourism and inviting people to come see what we all live here for.
[00:49:19]  My name is James Charland.
[00:49:21]  My name is Brennan Alturio.
[00:49:22]  I'm Kyle Sherland.
[00:49:24]  I'm Katie Porch.
[00:49:25]  And I'm Hannah Porch.
[00:49:26]  And this is our American story.
[00:49:33]  C-SPAN, official media partner of America 250, commemorating 250 years of American democracy.
[00:49:43]  Get C-SPAN wherever you are with C-SPAN Now, our free mobile video app that puts you at the center of democracy.