Louisiana Senator John Kennedy speaks at the 2026 New Orleans Book Festival, contrasting President Trump's reported bombing of Iran's Karg Island with his own legislative critiques. Kennedy attacks DHS Secretary Kristi Noem for undisclosed political ad spending and defends due process against mass immigration enforcement, citing Terry v. Ohio. While acknowledging a tragic missile strike on an Iranian school, he warns that U.S. air power alone cannot stop China, Russia, and Iran from dominating global regions. The discussion concludes with urgent calls for New Orleans flood control, safe water, and restoring civility amidst social media toxicity. [Automatically generated summary]
President Trump announced last night that the U.S. had struck Iran's Karg Island in a Truth Social, which I'll read some of you, some of it for you now.
He said moments ago at my direction, the United States Central Command executed one of the most powerful bombing raids in history of the Middle East and totally obliterated every military target in Iran's crown jewel, Karg Island.
Our weapons are the most powerful and sophisticated that the world has ever known.
But for reasons of decency, I have chosen not to wipe out the oil infrastructure.
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We'll leave this here to take you to the New Orleans Book Festival, where Louisiana Senator John Kennedy is speaking about his book, How to Test Negative for Stupid.
Live coverage on the New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University.
I should not have to tell any of these wonderful people in this audience this behave.
You understand what I'm saying?
If you don't behave, Cheryl is going to kill me.
So I just want to make sure everybody, this is a book fest.
All ideas are welcome.
We are thrilled to have a senator with us.
John Kennedy is a friend of mine.
I've been knowing him for 30 years, and I want you to welcome him and some other folks out here.
We're going to formally introduce him and get on with one of the best conversations we can have in Book Fest.
God bless you.
All right, you guys, come on out.
Welcome.
I've been on the board at Tulane for 35 years.
I've never, ever seen such a great thing happen on this campus as the Book Festival.
I've known John Kennedy for at least 35 years, and in the last hundred years, Louisiana has never had anyone in Congress from Huey Long up until today better than John Kennedy.
He is somewhere in between Huey Long and Mark Twain.
He is the best of the best.
And having Walter Isaac here with John Kennedy is a real treat.
Well, speaking of everything from Vanderbilt to University of Virginia to Oxford, those are the three most polished places on earth where you really learn to have a veneer of polish.
And you went the other way, this whole sort of corn pone thing.
Is that in, did you think about that?
Was it an intention?
Were you going to say, all right, I ain't going to be polished.
Well, in politics today, in government, to some extent today, is about communication.
It's all about communication.
And we have so many different ways to communicate between and among ourselves.
Social media has changed everything.
And so when I, for example, do a television interview, I did one last week with Casey Hunt on CNN.
Casey told me ahead of time the topic she wanted to cover, Iran, no mystery there.
But you've got maybe four or five minutes.
And my staff knows me.
This is how I prepare.
About five minutes before I go on, my staff knows to leave me alone.
And I try to organize my thoughts.
And I try to communicate them in an honest way, but a memorable way.
And some people like it, and some people don't.
And when I'm asked by my friends, you know, how do you sleep at night, knowing that there are people that hate you, I tell them the truth with the fan on.
It has to do with using community development block grant money as both a carrot and a stick to encourage our local governments to increase housing starts.
Well, look, I'm very fond of the former secretary.
I thanked her in committee for executing the president's policies to secure the southern border.
But we were having a lot of management problems at her department.
And She took a quarter of a billion, not million, a quarter of a billion dollars, more money than most presidents spend on presidential campaigns, and ran television ads all across America of her on a horse in front of Mount Rushmore that were clearly political ads.
She told us in committee that she had bid it out.
bid out the service contract.
She did not.
And the contract, maybe it was just happenstance, went to some of her friends.
And I don't believe she got the name of the names of those people who got the contracts off Zipper Kruger, okay?
And I'm going to call out spending porn every single time, but I had a whole list of, and then she basically blamed it on the White House and the President.
And I didn't know how it would be received.
That night, about 9.30, I got a call from the President.
He was mad as a mama wasp.
He was pissed.
And that's when I was pretty sure that the Secretary's time was going to be limited.
But was there something larger about the enforcement, the ICE enforcement, DHS, that just seemed to be whatever you may think about immigration, just not American?
Well, everyone has to be, every human being has the right to dignity.
Everybody, and I don't care what your color is or your social class or your economic class or what country you're from, to a bear, we all taste like chicken, okay?
And I'm not, we were having problems with that.
I mean, just speaking politically, one of President Trump's platforms and one of his major successes was securing the southern border.
Most Americans look at the southern border like they look at their front door at night.
Most Americans lock their front door at night.
They don't do that because they hate everybody on the outside.
They do that because they love the people on the inside.
And they want to know who's coming in and out of their house.
And that's why most Americans support properly vetting people at the border.
Now, it's a compliment, I suppose, in a way that everybody across the world wants to come to America.
They do.
And we admit a million people in our country to our country every year, of our world's neighbors, to join us.
But everybody wants to come to America.
I mean, when is, think about this, when is the last time you heard of somebody trying to sneak into China?
No, it doesn't happen.
But it has to be controlled.
And the president did that.
But the way the immigration laws have been administered, frankly, turned under the authority of the Secretary, it turned one of the strongest issues politically for my party into one of the weakest issues.
Our immigration statutes are not some second-tier laws that you can break without consequence.
And President Obama enforced our immigration laws.
President Clinton enforced our immigration laws.
We should enforce our immigration laws.
Now, how you do that matters.
You have to do it in accordance with due process, with equal protection, with there's a very clear precedent called Tierry v. Ohio, Supreme Court precedent, I think it was in the late 60s, which says that under, in America, you have to have reasonable suspicion and objective standard to stop someone.
A cop can't just see somebody driving down the road and say, huh, I think I'm going to pull them over.
You've got to have reasonable suspicion to believe that someone has committed or is about to commit a crime.
How come, I mean, speaking of people, TSA, you never quite know at Armstrong, whether it's 15 minutes or three hours.
You got the body cams and everything else.
Couldn't you and 10 Democrats and 10 Republicans or whatever and maybe get Steve Scales and Troy Carter together, Louisiana people, and say, we can solve this whole DHS TSA funding bill with these compromises?
Senator Thune's position is we have passed a budget for DHS, which would open TSA, it would fund the Coast Guard, it would fund the Secret Service, it would fund, it would finish funding DHS.
His position is the Senate has passed that once, and we did.
Most Democrats and Republicans voted for it.
Now, then we had the problems in Minnesota, and Senator Schumer, who's a minority leader, instructed his members, not all of them followed, but most of them did, to basically change their position.
And their position now seems to be they want body cameras for ICE agents, which we're all for, I'm all for.
They want to require a judicial warrant for virtually any interaction between an ICE officer between an ICE officer and someone in our country allegedly illegally.
Now, there is Supreme Court precedent going way back forever saying that you do not have to have a judicial warrant.
You can use an administrative warrant if someone has already been through the court process.
Well, the Senate only works when everybody's not crazy at the same time.
And right now, there are other issues that people are pretty worked up on on Iran.
But the point I'm trying to make is if you require a judicial warrant for every interaction between an ICE agent and a private citizen, you can't get 10 Democrats to vote.
No, I wouldn't vote for it because you will shut down immigration.
Let me ask you: when George W. Bush once came to Tulane, one of the things he said on stage was his biggest regret was that he didn't do comprehensive immigration for me.
Almost got it to the lot.
First of all, would we be in such a politically mess of a country if there had been a comprehensive immigration reform compromise?
On Iran, let's put aside, you have the classified intelligence, we don't.
Let's put aside, it maybe made sense that they were having too many ballistic missiles being built too quickly and whatever, and we had to at least slow down that.
Do you think, though, it's possible to achieve regime change by an air war?
And if you saw the classified information, and unclassified information that I have, I think you might agree with me.
35,000-foot view.
President Xi in China is working with President Putin in Russia, who's working with the Ayatoma, the Supreme Leader, in Iran.
President Xi is the quarterback.
He's much more involved in all of this than it might appear.
Their goal is to have Russia dominate Central and Eastern Europe, to have Iran dominate the Middle East, to have China dominate the Indo-Pacific with freedom to roam in sub-Saharan Africa, South America, and both Russia and China want to dominate the Arctic and space.
Now, that's not a world that's safe for America.
Let me speak about Iran in particular.
Here's what our intelligence showed: Iran had restarted its effort to develop a nuclear warhead.
We know they have uranium, most of it's buried, but they have uranium for 10 bombs.
But they had restarted their effort.
But more to the point, they had ramped up their missile and drone production.
Iran was developed, they're very smart, Iranians are very smart people.
They had revved up missile production, for example, to between 200 and 600 missiles a month.
And they were improving their technology so that their missiles could not only destroy the Middle East, but they could reach Berlin.
They could reach London.
And what our intelligence showed was that the Supreme Leader's game plan was to develop this stockpile of missiles, huge, and then turn to the United States and Israel and the world and say, I'm restarting my nuclear program.
You can come in and bomb me again, but I'm going to destroy the entire Middle East, and I'm going to attack Turkey, and I'm going to mob missiles at Berlin.
And I mean, our intelligence guys don't get it wrong very often.
And President Trump had to make a decision.
Do you do it now or you just wait until it becomes more expensive?
And he decided to move in.
Right now, we are really, we have destroyed their Navy, destroyed their Air Force.
We will ultimately destroy all of their launchers, missile launchers, all of their missile production plants, all of their drone production plants.
We're bombing all of the infrastructure for the Revolutionary Guard.
And then I hope the plan, I think the plan is to get out.
In fact, I said the other day that if, I mean, I can't guarantee things, but if he puts boots on the ground, the thud you hear will be me face planning because I fainted.
I just, I think he understands that regime change, it's easy to talk about.
The only way to stop Putin and get him to the bargaining table is to cut off his cash flow.
And the only way to cut off his cash flow is to stop him from selling his oil.
Now, there's another way that will help.
I asked the president to support this.
He chose not to.
But the EU is borrowing about $105 billion against seized Russian assets in Europe, and they're giving that money to Ukraine and telling Ukraine, look, however many Tomahawk missiles you want.
Now, Victor Orban, who runs Hungary, he's got an election in a few months, he's holding up the deal.
And I'm hoping they're going to get that worked out.
That's the other thing that Putin understands.
Russia has changed dramatically.
You wouldn't recognize it.
There's no freedom.
They're spying on people.
They use their social media now in a way the Chinese do.
It's a totally different country.
They've lost a lot of their smart people.
Their economy is in shambles.
Putin's fighting for his life.
But this guy is, I wouldn't turn my back on him if he were three days dead.
He's just an evil.
And to get him to the table, you've got to make the cost greater than the benefits.
And I hope we all finger point back and say, well, it started with, I don't know, who was the guy who was nominated to the Supreme Court 20 years ago.
And it gets ratcheted up with lawfare, people prosecuting it.
It seemed to me that you were trying to get Kash Patel, you know, and was it Pam Bondi, to say, to promise to stop this cycle of retribution, stop prosecuting your predecessors, et cetera.
Is that what you were trying to do, and how can we do that, if so?
I have a theory about Louisiana in this city, is that we could lead our way out.
We could be the ones to lead the way out, which is strong disagreements from you and Mitch Landrew, for example, you and Mary Landrew, Helena Marino, who just spoke on the stage an hour or two ago.
And yet we do it in a, we all go to the neutral ground, catch the same beads, and worry that we don't have a quarterback or something.
We do it with more civility and we don't let the cycle of poison keep turning.
Is there a way that that can happen in America?
Do you think in Louisiana and New Orleans, where Wilson?
Books from the authors you hear today and throughout the New Orleans Book Festival are available for purchase in the Festival Tent presented by the Hyatt Regency New Orleans.
This weekend on C-SPAN 2's Book TV, watch our live coverage of book festivals all weekend long.
On Sunday, Book TV heads to the University of Arizona for the Tucson Festival of Books.
At 1 p.m. Eastern, Julia Ioff, former U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul, and Candace Rondeau discuss Russian history, national security, and life under President Vladimir Putin.
At 2.30 p.m. Eastern, Edward Larson, Jacob Silverman, and Reality Winner examine the past, present, and future of the American Experiment.
And at 4 p.m. Eastern, Kenneth Rosen, Anthony Vincy, and Tim Weiner discuss the history of the Central Intelligence Agency and how climate change and technology are shaping national security and espionage.
Watch Book TV live in the Tucson Festival of Books on Sunday on C-SPAN 2.
For the full weekend festival schedule, visit booktv.org.
C-SPAN's Washington Journal, a live forum involving you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy.
From Washington, D.C. to across the country, coming up Sunday morning, Democratic strategist Joe Cayazzo and Republican strategist John Feary cover Campaign 2026 and political news of the week.
And retired Brigadier General Leslie A. Beavers, former Pentagon Acting Chief Information Officer, discusses how the United States is using technology in the Iran conflict.
C-SPAN's Washington Journal.
Join the conversation live at 7 Eastern Sunday morning on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our Free Mobile app, or online at c-SPAN.org.
We've got more Campaign 2026 coverage on Sunday when U.S. Representative Robin Kelly speaks to voters in Chicago ahead of Tuesday's Democratic primary election to succeed Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, who's retiring.
Illinois Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton and fellow U.S. Representative Rajah Krishnamurthy are also seeking the Democratic nomination.
Watch Representative Kelly's remarks live starting at 2 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our Free Mobile app, and online at c-SPAN.org.
President Trump this week traveled to the district of one of his fiercest Republican critics, Kentucky Representative Thomas Massey.
As noted by the state's Daily Independent newspaper, he took aim at Representative Massey for his opposition to the president's agenda, calling him, quote, a disaster of a congressman and human being, while endorsing his primary challenger, Ed Gowrine.
Finishing the Iran Job00:00:41
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The president also remarked that the U.S. had already won the war with Iran, but that the job still needed to be finished.
From Hebron, Kentucky, this is just over 90 minutes.
From the lakes of Minnesota to the hills of Texas.