Greta Van Susteren and Alexander Hefner dissect tensions between President Trump and Pope Leo regarding the Iran war, where conflicting claims about nuclear support sparked public outrage. They analyze Marco Rubio's Vatican meeting, the rejection of Trump's global tariffs, and David Malpass's warnings on the $31 trillion national debt. The episode concludes with Hefner's "Mayors of the World" series, contrasting local governance successes in Lisbon and Santiago against U.S. urban decay, ultimately arguing that municipal leadership offers a vital alternative to partisan gridlock. [Automatically generated summary]
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Pope and President Tensions00:15:18
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Coming up on Washington Journal this morning, along with your calls and comments live, former Treasury Under Secretary David Melpass on the U.S. economy and the impact of the Trump administration's economic policies.
And then television host and author Alexander Hefner will talk about his new series, Mayors of the World, which highlights civic leaders from cities around the globe.
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Good morning, everyone.
Welcome to the Washington Journal on this Friday, May 8th.
We'll begin the conversation this morning with tensions between President Trump and Pope Leo over the Iran war.
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Morning, everyone.
Start dialing in.
We want to get your thoughts on the back and forth between Pope Leo and President Trump.
Before we get to that, the latest on the Iran conflict, front page of the New York Times this morning, U.S. and Iran exchange fire yesterday amid a declared truce.
Speaking to reporters last night, President Trump said the ceasefire with Iran is still on, despite the fire exchange yesterday between the two countries.
After these strikes, is the ceasefire with Iran still on?
Yeah, it is.
They trifled with us today.
We blew them away.
They trifled.
I call that a trifle.
I'll let you know when there's no ceasefire.
You won't have to know.
If there's no ceasefire, you're not going to have to know.
You're just going to have to look at one big glow coming out of Iran.
And they better sign their agreement fast.
Could you give us an update on what is the latest in those policies?
No, the talks are going very well, but they have to understand if it doesn't get signed, they're going to have a lot of pain.
They're going to have a lot of pain.
They want to sign it.
I will tell you.
They want to sign it a lot more than I do.
I think that's what you want to hear, fellas, eh?
But you want to hear a different tone.
That's the only thing they understand.
They don't understand it.
We had three world-class destroyers go through the strait today.
Any other country under the circumstances wouldn't have done, shot missiles at it and drones at it and these stupid boats that came at it.
They got blown away in about two minutes.
Their tanker got blown.
You know what we did with the tanker?
We didn't want to create an environment, so we shot out the rudder and a tanker's going around spinning around in circles.
They should not have done that today.
We thought they might.
We didn't know, but we were prepared.
They shot missiles.
Every missile was knocked down.
Every drone was knocked down.
And the people that shot it are no longer with us.
Has Ren officially responded to the one-page offer?
Well, it's more than a one-page offer.
It's an offer that basically said they will not have nuclear weapons.
They're going to hand us the nuclear dust and many other things that we want.
Yeah, they've agreed, but when they agree, it doesn't mean much because the next day they forget they forgot they agreed.
And, you know, we're dealing with different sets of leaders.
When you talk about regime change, you know, they keep talking about regime change.
Well, we got rid of the first regime.
We got rid of the second regime, we got rid of most of the third regime, and then they say, oh, is that regime change?
I think it's the ultimate regime change.
How close can you say that you are to a deal right now with Iran?
It could happen any day, and it might not happen, but it could happen any day.
I believe they want the deal more than I do.
President Trump last night on the latest with Iran, the president said, noting that the U.S. is waiting on Iran to respond to the latest peace deal.
The president sent Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, to the Vatican to meet with Pope as the two exchange barbs again this week, Pope Leo and President Trump.
The headline in the Washington Post is Rubio in Rome seeks to mend fences with Pope Leo and aides cite friendly meeting as Rubio aims to mend the U.S. ties with the Pope.
The president last night had this to say on the message he asked the Secretary of State to deliver to Pope Leo in their meeting this week.
I just said, tell the Pope very nicely, very respectfully, that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.
So when he comes to their defense, also tell the Pope that Iran killed 42,000 innocent protesters who didn't have guns, who didn't have weapons.
Tell that to the Pope.
The president on the message he wanted delivered by the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, to the Pope yesterday.
The Vatican put out a statement about the meeting saying, describing the talks as cordial and insisted the shared commitment to fostering good bilateral relations between the Holy See and the United States of America was reaffirmed.
But the niceties stopped, according to the Daily Beast, there.
There followed an exchange of views regarding the regional and international situation, with particular attention to countries marked by war, political tensions, and difficult humanitarian situations, as well as the need to work tirelessly in support of peace, the Vatican added.
This morning, your thoughts on the tensions between Pope Leo, President Trump, and his administration over Iran.
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On the exchange of the meeting between Pope Leo and the Secretary of State, the two exchanged gifts when they met yesterday.
The Independent out of the UK says the Pope gave Marco Rubio an olive branch as a gift, but could only say, wow, okay, when he saw what the U.S. brought him.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave the Pope a crystal football, given that he is from Chicago.
And there was a pen made out of olive that was given to the Secretary of State.
The Independent newspaper notes that it was a not so subtle gift by the Pope, given the exchange between the two sides over Iran.
A recent poll conducted by the Washington Post ABC News Ipsos found that Americans' reaction to statements by the president and the Pope when polled, 57% reacted negatively to President Trump's past false claims that the Pope said Iran should be able to have a nuclear weapon.
66% react positively to Pope Leo asking Americans to contact Congress to work for peace and reject war.
That's from the Washington Post ABC News poll.
Again, this morning, we want to get your thoughts on this back and forth between the Vatican and the Trump administration.
Democrats, 202-748-8000.
Republicans, 202-748-8001.
Independents, 202-748-8002.
And Catholics, our line for you this morning is 202-748-8003.
Pope Leo's response to President Trump, you'll remember he was quoted as saying, should anyone want to criticize me for proclaiming the gospel, they should do so with the truth.
For years, the church has spoken out against all nuclear weapons.
So there's no doubt about it there.
So I simply hope to be listened to for the value of God's word.
That is what Pope Leo had to say earlier this week after the president criticized him again.
Here's more of Pope Leo's comments to reporters on Tuesday about the church's stance on war and nuclear weapons.
Self-defense has traditionally always been involved by the church.
So to talk about just war today, it's a very complex problem.
You have to analyze it and kind of mess it up.
But ever since the entrance into the nuclear age, the whole concept of war has to be re-evaluated in terms today.
And I always believe that it's much better to enter into dialogue than to look for arms and to support the Armed Industry, which gains billions and billions of dollars each year, instead of sitting down at the table solving our problems and using Pope Leo on Tuesday reacting to President Trump earlier in the week criticizing him.
We are getting your thoughts on the tensions between the Pope and the President.
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And Independents, 202-748-8002.
You can text as well at 202-748-8003.
We'll get this conversation started here in just a minute.
Listen to the president unleashing new criticism against Pope Leo in an interview on Monday with conservative radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt.
It came up during an exchange about President Trump upcoming trip to China.
You know, you're going to China.
Let's talk about that, Mr. President.
You've had this back and forth with Pope Leo.
I wish Pope Leo would talk about Jimmy Lai.
You talk about Jimmy Lai with the chairman.
Will you be bringing him up again?
I will.
I brought him up.
And there's a lot of bitterness, I would say, with him and Jimmy Lai.
You know, he was, Hong Kong was not as easy, but I will be bringing him up.
I wish the Pope would.
I want the Pope to talk about Jimmy Lai, and I want you to bring him home.
That would be a good deal.
Well, the Pope would rather talk about the fact that it's okay for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, and I don't think that's very good.
I think he's endangering a lot of Catholics and a lot of people.
But I guess if it's up to the Pope, he thinks it's just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.
He's from Chicago.
President Trump phoning in to conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt's program on Monday.
Following that, the president sent Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, to the Vatican to smooth over tensions between the two.
So we're getting your reaction to that this morning.
Let's get the conversation going.
Kathy, in Texas, a Republican.
What do you say?
Well, I was noticing that some of the things we don't talk about is what the Pope actually said.
He is referencing scripture in Isaiah 59, where he talks about God not hearing the prayers of certain people with blood on their hands.
President Trump is really, I'm very sad about the lies that he is saying to all of us Americans and to the world about what the Pope said when the Pope didn't say that he is for nuclear weapons.
I wish our country would see the number of lies that come from our president.
It makes me sad.
Okay.
Kathy, and you voted for him as a Republican?
No, no, I did not vote for him as a Republican.
No.
Who did you vote for in 2016?
I Harris.
In 2024?
I'm sorry.
In 2016, Biden.
I would not, I could not vote for a liar.
I just couldn't.
Okay.
I think you meant Hillary Clinton in 2016.
2020 sounds like you voted for Biden in the last time around for Kamala Harris.
Lawrence in Louisiana, an independent.
Hi, Lawrence.
Good morning.
Morning.
What do you make of this back and forth between the Pope and the President?
Well, it is sad.
He is our president, and the actions that he takes and does just makes it look bad.
I think other countries look at us in a poor way.
And, you know, the Pope is a person that, of course, and I am Catholic, by the way, but that always is professing love, hope, peace.
And you can understand the two different viewpoints here.
But as the leader of this country, it is sad that he says and does some of the things he does.
It just is in his DNA, his human nature, I guess.
Okay.
Lawrence, did you ever vote for President Trump?
I did not.
I did not vote because I didn't like either candidate.
Okay.
Lawrence, an independent in Louisiana, we have a couple of text messages and social media posts as well here.
Michael in Plant City, Florida says Pope Leo should exercise his power of prayer and step back from political advice, or he can run for president in two years.
And you also have Gary Goshman on Facebook.
Who are you going to trust?
Someone who sells the Bible with his autograph, Trump, or the person who follows the Bible's teachings, the Pope.
I like the Pope's idea of peace.
And you also have Dan Short on Facebook.
Each of them have a job to do and should concentrate on doing it better.
Brenda in Pennsylvania, Democratic caller.
Brenda, what do you say?
Hey, good morning, Greta.
Good morning.
This rift between Donald Trump and the Pope, I just want to tell everybody I'm a Catholic, too.
Trusting the Pope for Peace00:04:10
And we're supposed to, we claim that we are a Christian nation.
And we claim that we believe that God has a plan for everybody and that God's will be done.
Yet somehow we don't have enough faith and trust in God that he will protect us from a nuclear Iran.
You know, and then we have a $1 trillion defense budget.
We have the greatest military the world has ever seen.
And we have thousands of nuclear missiles ourselves.
Those three things should protect us from a nuclear Iran.
All right, well, Brenda, what do you make of the back and forth between the two?
Is it do you think that the Pope is in his right to talk about the conflict with Iran?
Oh, I absolutely do.
I absolutely do.
He's supposed to be spreading the word of God.
And God promoted peace.
And God promoted, you know, having faith and trust in him, in God.
Okay.
And we're supposed to have that as a Christian nation.
We're supposed to have faith and trust in God that God will protect us.
Brenda, what do you make of the Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth invoking God when he talks about the war with Iran at these weekly Pentagon briefings that he and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Dan Kaine have given the public?
I think that's a disgrace.
Why?
Why do I do?
I think that's because, like I said, the Bible, you know, Jesus promoted peace.
Let's take, for example, Jesus was sent to earth to save us from our sins.
Jesus was crucified and he died on a cross.
When Jesus was hanging on the cross, he didn't ask his father to, you know, destroy the people that crucified him.
When Jesus rose from the dead, he didn't gather his apostles and disciples and set out on a revenge tour and a retribution tour.
Jesus promoted peace and forgiveness.
Okay, Brenda's thoughts there.
In Pennsylvania, Democratic caller.
The Washington Post's ABC poll that we shared with you earlier also found that 69% of Americans disliked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth prayer at the Pentagon for overwhelming violence of actions against those who deserve no mercy.
Here are those remarks in late March.
Please encourage your families, your kids, your schools, your churches, your communities, your circle of friends to openly pray for our troops to give them the skill, the courage, and the wisdom they need where they are.
And last month, I meant to read a prayer, which I'm going to read today, which I think is fitting given what's going on right now.
But it was just as fitting in January as it is today.
And it was sent to me by the chaplain who oversaw the Maduro raid.
So this was the prayer that he prayed before that mission with those great Americans who conducted that mission.
And he wanted to share it with me.
And I'd like to share it with the group today.
Almighty God, who trains our hands for war and our fingers for battle, you who stirred the nations from the north against Babylon of old, making her land a desolation where none dwell, behold now the wicked who rise against your justice and the peace of the righteous.
Snap the rod of the oppressor, frustrate the wicked plans, and break the teeth of the ungodly.
By the blast of your anger, let the evil perish.
Let their bulls go down to slaughter.
For their day has come, the time of their punishment.
Pour out your wrath upon those who plot vain things and blow them away like chaff before the wind.
Grant this task force clear and righteous targets for violence.
Religious Hypocrisy in Politics00:15:28
Surround them as a shield.
Protect the innocent and blameless in their midst.
Make their arrows like those of a skilled warrior who returns not empty-handed.
Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation.
Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.
Preserve their lives, sharpen their resolve, and let justice be executed swiftly and without remorse, that evil may be driven back and wicked souls delivered to the eternal damnation prepared for them.
The Defense Secretary, back in March, and a national poll found, 69% of Americans disliked when the Defense Secretary prayed at the Pentagon during that moment.
This morning, we're asking you about the tensions between President Trump and Pope Leo.
Following the president's criticism of him earlier this week, the Pope responded and Secretary of State traveled, Marco Rubio traveled to the Vatican.
There he is on your screen meeting with the Pope earlier this week.
The two of them exchanged gifts and behind closed doors discussed the Iran conflict.
The Wall Street Journal this morning says the Rubio visit aimed to ease tensions.
The Hill newspaper notes this: Rubio was an interesting pick for this meeting.
Rubio is a devout Catholic.
He is also seen as one of the top contenders to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2028 to succeed President Trump.
But so is Vice President Vance, they note, who converted to Catholicism a few years ago.
Jeff, North Carolina Republican, share your thoughts with us on the tensions between the Pope and the President.
Good morning.
Morning.
Yes, I think Trump ought to take care of Iran, and the Pope ought to take care of the pedophiles, make sure they don't get overlooked.
I think the Pope is a liberal Democrat.
I think he's from Chicago, if I ain't mistaken.
Ain't that right?
Yeah, that's right.
Correct.
I would bet $100 again, 20 he's a Democrat.
I bet he's never voted a Republican ticket.
What do you think?
And why does that matter to you, Jeff, if he's the Pope?
Does that matter if he's liberal or conservative?
He needs to mind the church.
If he can catch a lot of them pedophiles, make sure they ain't took care of like all the last ones got done and let Trump run the presidency.
Okay, Jeff, a Republican there from North Carolina with his thoughts.
I'll just share with you again what Pope Leo said in response to President Trump from earlier this week.
Should anyone want to criticize me for proclaiming the gospel, they should do so with the truth.
For years, the church has spoken out against all nuclear weapons, so there's no doubt about it there.
So I simply hope to be listened to for the value of God's word.
Mike and Alaska, an independent.
Mike, it's your turn.
Good morning, Greta.
Thank you, and good morning to what's left of America.
As a lifelong Catholic, Greta, and an ex-altar boy, I wouldn't give this Pope a grain of salt.
He's ingenuine to America.
He's pro-illegal abortion.
He needs to stick to the Ten Commandments and excommunicate some of these high-powered politicians in Washington that are pro-abortion.
But you know, in Catholic school, the Catholics have been corrupted since they declared papal infallibility, which means whatever the Pope says, it comes directly from God.
That is a joke.
Our popes are a joke, and I'm embarrassed about this guy.
He never talks about the Syrian slaughter of Christians.
I just, I can't believe he's pro-illegal.
And, you know, the Catholic Church, they don't teach the Bible or Constitution.
In eight years of Catholic school, I never saw the Bible.
I never heard about the Constitution.
And my neighbors, the kids I grew up with, they went to public school in Lawndale.
I went to St. Catharines in Torrance, California, down there by South Bay by the beaches.
They couldn't believe that I graduated without passing the constitutional test.
And that is the Catholics.
They're liberal.
They're pro-abortion.
They're pro-Word, woke, they're LGBTQ, and then now whatever else they've added on to steal our taxpayer dollars for their stupid agencies that promote this sodomy, basically what it is.
But the Pope is illegitimate.
He was hand-selected by the world government.
And anybody that follows this guy, to me, doesn't read.
They don't go to AlexJonesLive.com and study.
Like Alex is the greatest historian on the planet.
He's exposed this Pope many times and passed popes for their crimes.
Okay.
Mike in Alaska.
I will leave it there.
Travis Joel on Facebook.
The liberal pope from Chicago should worry about genocide against Christians around the globe.
He doesn't seem to care about that.
Jim in Englewood, Ohio, Republican.
We'll turn to you, Jim.
Good morning, Greta.
Good morning.
Thank you for taking my call.
I'm just sitting here as I do a lot of the mornings listening to all of your callers, and the perspectives are tremendous.
If the Pope was sent to talk to Khomeini, where would he be today?
And I thank God for President Trump.
The spine that that man has is tremendous, and it takes this kind of behavior to address these folks.
They're willing to give up their lives to Allah to kill as many Christians, Americans, and those that don't believe like them.
Jim, you believe that about every single Muslim?
No, no.
That's why President Trump hasn't destroyed Iran any further than what he has.
He wants to leave them a footprint to build in a free world.
And I don't understand how people can't see that personally.
But when you have so many politicians beating the drum to actually support the visceral hatred of the Iranians and they see things in an entire different light.
And for 47 years, they've been taught to hate Americans and Jews and others.
All right, Jim there in Ohio on our line for Republicans.
I'll share with you from the front page of the Washington Post.
U.S. intelligence says Iran can outlast Trump's hormoose blockade for months.
A confidential intelligence community assessment delivered to the White House also finds that Iran retains a substantial missile and drone arsenal.
So that is from the Washington Post this morning inside the jump page of this article.
They said that Trump painted a rosier picture in the Oval Office remarks on Wednesday saying of Iran, their missiles are mostly decimated.
They have probably 18 to 19 percent, but only a lot, only but not a lot by comparison to what they had.
That is what the president said on Wednesday.
It notes in the newspaper that the CIA estimates that Iran can survive the U.S. blockade for 90 to 100 days and maybe longer before facing more severe economic hardship, according to four people familiar with this assessment.
So you can read more in the Washington Post front page this morning.
We'll go to John in Princeton, New Jersey on our line for independence.
John, good morning.
Are you a Catholic?
Morning, yes.
I was raised Catholic.
And what do you think about this back and forth between the Pope and the President?
It's been going on for centuries.
My understanding of my Catholic faith is that Jesus was a pacifist and preached that we should love our enemies even.
However, for 2,000 years, for more, 3,000 years, politicians have invoked religion to justify war, invasions, slaughter, even the Catholic faith.
I think it was Pope Urban II that pronounced that people that went on the crusades would get an indulgence and would go straight to heaven.
But the desire to go on crusade or to initiate a jihad comes from politicians.
And politicians manipulate teachings of their faith to justify war.
You got to keep that separate.
Everybody's got to keep that separate in their minds.
That's about all I got to say.
All right, John there in Princeton, New Jersey, Independent.
Carl Turley on Facebook has one sentence for us.
The Pope needs to stay in his lane.
Candle in Chicago, Democratic caller.
Candle, the Pope is from your city.
What do you think?
Yes, good morning.
Thanks for taking my call.
And I like to say that I want to say something to the call of the last three calls talking about the Pope need to worry about the pedophile.
And y'all keep forgetting that our president is going to F-Sting file more than a thousand times.
Not only that, he's a pedophile himself.
So I don't understand why everybody talks about that.
Candle, what evidence do you have of that?
What evidence do I have of what?
The President Trump is a pedophile.
It's all over.
I'm saying he was liable for SA.
I'm saying it's all over the news.
Every for the last decade, we've been hearing stuff about him doing all type of stuff.
It's out there.
All right.
Rocky in Clearwater, Florida, on our line for Republicans.
Rocky, what do you think about the Pope v. the president?
I think the Pope should say Catholic.
I mean, I was a Catholic, but one guy is right.
They don't teach the Bible in there.
You see David and Goliath.
David was blessed to take over Goliath and Maryland.
Now, this war with Iraq, the guy's a lunate, he would definitely use a nuclear bomb against us.
They got to stop it now because they're not going to negotiate with the United States.
And anybody who thinks they will is a fool.
That's my opinion.
Okay.
Thank you for taking my call.
Rocky in Clearwater, Florida, on our line for Republicans.
Sue B in New Jersey says, well, this is why there is a separation of church and state.
Of course, the church is going to plead the humanity cause, but they shouldn't condemn the United States while not also speaking out against terrorism in the Middle East.
More of your phone calls coming up, your text messages, and your posts on our social media sites here as we continue in our first hour, the conversation on the tensions between the Pope and President Trump over the Iran war.
There are the lines on your screen.
Keep dialing in.
I want to share with you C-SPAN's coverage today.
It includes New York Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sitting down with political strategist David Axelrod to discuss the challenges and opportunities facing the United States, local communities, and younger generations.
You can watch that conversation live at 6 p.m. Eastern from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics on C-SPAN 2, C-SPAN Now, our free video mobile app, and online at c-span.org.
Tonight, 7 p.m. Eastern, C-SPAN's ceasefire includes former Senate Democratic Majority Leader Tom Dashel and former Vice Chair of the Senate Republican Conference Roy Blunt.
The two sit down for a conversation about whether bipartisanship is still possible in Washington amid the various challenges facing the country, including the Iran war and concerns about the economy.
This evening at 7 and 10 Eastern in Pacific, only on C-SPAN.
President Trump last night spoke to reporters and he was asked about the message he sent with Secretary of State Marco Rubio to the Pope when Rubio met with him yesterday.
And this is what the president had to say.
I just said, tell the Pope very nicely, very respectfully, that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.
So when he comes to their defense, also tell the Pope that Iran killed 42,000 innocent protesters who didn't have guns, who didn't have weapons.
Tell that to the Pope.
President Trump, last night, the latest between the Pope and the President.
We're getting your thoughts on that this morning.
Sid in Ardmore, Pennsylvania and Independent.
What do you think?
I think the president is wrong here to get involved in a political match with the Pope.
The Pope is going to say whatever he needs to say based on he's a man of God.
He represents the Catholic Church.
And I don't think the president should go back and forth with the Pope on this matter.
Let him be.
He needs to just focus on the political aspect of it, not get involved, not get the Pope involved in this political thing.
Political Match with the Pope00:14:54
It's absolutely wrong.
Okay.
Anderson in New York, Democratic caller.
Anderson, what do you say?
Yes, good morning, Greta.
Good morning in America.
The hypocrisy of the religious people in this country is very startling and is noticeable this morning where you have people coming on here and speaking about the Pope, and the Pope should focus on this and that and the edge.
And the president spoke, listen, we're all in this ship together.
And I don't think that the Democrats are for the Pope and the Republicans is for the president.
I think this is just nonsense.
I don't need to hear Pete Hexett coming on television and telling me about religion and the Pope and so forth.
This guy is not qualified to be what he's doing.
Okay, so let's get that out of the way.
And now I just don't understand what's the hypocrisy in this country.
You see the religious right coming up here and this morning on the television and talking all this nonsense.
And people are just believing these people.
It's just startling, Greta.
I'm just not believing what I'm hearing this morning.
And Anderson, let me get your reaction to this statement by Andy on Facebook.
He says, Trump and everyone that supports him are the opposite of what the Pope stands for.
Do you agree with Andy?
In that case, I do.
Why?
Because I don't think that the Secretary of Defense is doing what they are doing.
They are fighting a whole sector of the population with this nonsense.
I don't understand it.
What is this guy doing?
You're dividing the country dividing the world to?
Come on, enough is enough.
Okay.
Stephanie in Tampa, Florida, independent.
We'll turn to you.
I would have to, excuse me, agree with the gentleman from New York.
However, I just want to say and make the comment that Donald Trump is a master of chaos.
And he has this ability to have us all pick these topics that have us all fighting each other and saying such inflammatory stuff, even on this program today for the people calling in.
And I would just like everybody to focus on making Congress, making the Senate, making the executive office do their job.
Okay?
If they're supposed to make America great again, then make America great again.
Okay?
Let us all have our own opinions and don't let this tyrant create all of this chaos and distract us.
It was ingenious of him to go after, of all people on the religious side, the Pope.
It's created such an inflammatory subject for everybody and distracting us from the fact that we're pulled into another possible unending conflict.
Stephanie, do you think that the Pope should directly respond to the president?
Is he also continuing the back and forth by engaging?
Thank you for saying that because that was one of the things that I did want to mention and I got distracted.
And I wish the Pope would just like just set an example for all of us and ignore this chaos agent and focus on his message.
Okay.
Stephanie there in Tampa, Florida.
Let's listen to the Pope speaking to reporters in April, responding to President Trump's criticism then over his statements on the Iran war.
This is when it all began.
Message of the gospel is very clear.
Blessed are the peacemakers.
I will not shy away from announcing the message of the gospel, of inviting all people to look for ways of building bridges for peace and reconciliation, of ways to enjoy any time that's possible.
To put my message on the same plane as what the president has attempted to do here, I think not understanding what the message of the gospel is.
And we started here then, but I will continue about what I call as an official church in the world.
I do not look at my role as being political politician.
I don't want to get into a debate with him.
I don't think the message of the gospel is meant to be abused in the way that some people are doing.
And I will continue to speak out loud against war, looking to promote peace, promoting dialogue and multilateral relationships among the states to look for just solutions and problems.
Too many people are suffering in the world today.
The Pope, back in April, when this back and forth began between President Trump and the Pope, and this morning, our first hour here of the Washington Journal, we're asking your response, your reaction to the two men.
We'll go to David, who's in Maryland.
Good morning to you, David.
Go ahead and share your thoughts.
Okay, good morning.
I wish the president was less bombastic, but unfortunately, the mullahs in Iran don't understand any kind of weakness or soft speak.
They understand strength.
They only respect strength.
These are people that have been hanging, not even hanging, they're strangling people by hanging them from the ground up for not covering their hair or for being gay.
And what about the president's remarks towards the Pope?
The back and forth between the Pope is embarrassing as a Catholic, as an American.
I think Trump is very, very angry.
I have a theory on a lot of how he acts.
And I think a lot of it is, you know, you drag him through court for felonies that are the same thing Clinton did, but 10 times worse.
And then you call him a pedophile a thousand times.
The man's not a pedophile.
It's absurd.
And he's so angry that this is how he's reacting.
And it's just a peeing contest.
It doesn't need to occur.
I don't know why the Pope has gotten to be so political, but I also don't know why the president feels he has the gumption to speak to the Pope in this way.
It's embarrassing at some level.
All right, David, in Maryland, with his thoughts, as we shared with you earlier, the Washington Post, ABC News conducted a poll with Ipsos, and they found that 57% reacted negatively to President Trump's past false claim that the Pope said Iran should be able to have nuclear weapons.
66 reacted positively to the Pope asking Americans to contact Congress to work for peace and reject war.
Josephine in New Jersey, an independent.
Hi, Josephine.
Morning.
The first thing I am a practice Catholic.
Some people call themselves Catholic, but that's a name only.
Let me just say, at 82, I've been doing it a long time.
I had 14 years of Catholic education.
I heard someone say, oh, the Pope is infallible.
It's only in doctrine.
It's not in any other issues.
At least know your religion before you talk about it.
I saw the Pope travel through Africa, the four nations he went there, and every single time, all he talked about was peace.
That's all he said.
That's why over a million people showed up.
As far as the president espousing his views, let's get one thing straight.
This Pope has a degree in philosophy.
He's an Augustinian priest.
What does that mean?
He's taught to teach peace.
For those so-called Catholics who practice their religion, I respect.
For those who call themselves Catholic and never saw a church, please give me a break.
You're going to believe a president right now, Eric Lipton, just won a poster prize in the New York Times on this president and his family on the fraud and corruption.
So you're going to believe a man who they've totally documented is committing fraud against a man of peace.
Give me a break.
Josephine's thoughts there.
In New Jersey, let's listen to President Trump last night.
He spoke to reporters about the conflict with Iran after the two sides exchanged fire and insisted that the ceasefire is still on.
Here's what he had to say.
After these strikes, is the ceasefire with Iran still on?
Yeah, it is.
They trifled with us today.
We blew them away.
They trifled.
I call that a trifle.
I'll let you know when there's no ceasefire.
You won't have to know.
If there's no ceasefire, you're not going to have to know.
You're just going to have to look at one big glow coming out of Iran.
And they better sign their agreement fast.
Could you give us an update on what is the latest in those policies?
No, it's going.
The talks are going very well, but they have to understand if it doesn't get signed, they're going to have a lot of pain.
They're going to have a lot of pain.
They want to sign it.
I will tell you.
They want to sign it a lot more than I do.
I think that's what you want to hear, fellas.
But you want to hear a different tone.
That's the only thing they understand.
They don't understand it.
We had three world-class destroyers go through the strait today.
Any other country under the circumstances wouldn't have done, shot missiles at it and drones at it and these stupid boats that came at it.
They got blown away in about two minutes.
Their tanker got blown.
You know what we did with the tanker?
We didn't want to create an environment, so we shot out the rudder and a tanker's going around spinning around in circles.
They should not have done that today.
We thought they might.
We didn't know, but we were prepared.
They shot missiles.
Every missile was knocked down.
Every drone was knocked down.
And the people that shot it are no longer with us.
Is the President Dennis has one-page offer?
Well, it's more than a one-page offer.
It's an offer that basically said they will not have nuclear weapons.
They're going to hand us the nuclear dust and many other things that we want.
Have they remembered that so far before?
Yeah, they've agreed.
When they agree, it doesn't mean much because the next day they forget they forgot they agreed.
And, you know, we're dealing with different sets of leaders.
When you talk about regime change, you know, they keep talking about regime change.
Well, we got rid of the first regime.
We got rid of the second regime.
We got rid of votes of the third regime.
And then they say, oh, is that regime change?
I think it's the ultimate regime change.
How old would you say that you are to a deal right now with Iran?
It could happen any day.
And it might not happen, but it could happen any day.
I believe they want the deal more than I do.
President Trump on the latest with Iran talking about fire exchange between the two sides insists that the ceasefire is still on.
The Washington Post this morning, U.S. stocks down amid seesawing oil prices.
U.S. Ducks fell from their records Thursday after oil prices yo-yoed as Wall Street waits to see whether its hopes for a deal to end the Iran war are warranted or just wishful.
Take a look at CNBC from this morning.
Stock futures are higher this morning as traders monitor U.S.-Iran developments.
And we're waiting for the April jobs report.
They say that looms this morning, and we'll know more around 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time.
Patrick in Pittsburgh, Republican.
Patrick, we are talking about the President and Pope Leo exchanging barbs over the Iran war.
I'm a 20-year veteran of the Catholic Church as being a church councilman, and I'm also an intellectual property spectralist.
So there are two realities of what is taking place within the framework of these two realities.
The Vatican has massively abrogated its responsibility to exercise its responsibility, not just in the issue of expounding on the aspects of our spiritual structure,
but if you look at the damage that has been taking that has taken place with mass migration, which was underwritten totally within the framework of the Catholic faith, you see a complete collapse of reality.
The damage to Europe is beyond comprehension.
You have France, you have England.
London is now completely occupied by Muslims from a nation that is hostile to everything that the English people stand for.
Now, let's jump over into a reality of this war.
I'm a gay man.
I voted for this president to see this president being assaulted by the Vatican when the damage to the entire structure of our country is becoming so complicit.
And I was completely against this war in the first place.
But I'm an intellectual property specialist, so I step back and I look at this from a reality of what would have taken place within a timeframe of three to five years.
Just imagine with robotics and artificial intelligence.
You've seen what the Iranians have been able to do.
Just imagine, just factor that out in a timeframe of two to three years.
Worrying About Wrong Things00:04:53
Okay.
Five years.
Patrick, I'm going to jump in, and we've got other folks waiting.
Jay in Virginia, Democratic caller.
Hey, good morning, guys.
How's it going?
I called in because I normally listen in the mornings.
And I'm just absolutely disgusted by some of the comments that I'm hearing this morning.
As an American population, I grew up just in awe of the previous generations.
We're talking about the Vietnam veterans, talking about the World War II veterans, and all the things that they did that showed, you know, pretty much his courage and bravery and standing up for what's wrong and what's right in this country.
And today, all I see is a bunch of hateful rhetoric coming from that same generation.
The same generation that would sit up and talk to us.
They were so happy about when the Pope was the first American Pope to ever happen.
They were happy about that.
And now, because the Pope is going against, you know, the president, all of a sudden, the Pope is just throwing the Pope aside.
And it's frustrating because in the same Bible that you guys, you know, claim to be, you know, reading every day, and you claim to embody all of these values of being a Christian.
The same Bible says not to worship false idols, right?
And you guys are worshiping false idols.
You guys are cheering on for like legitimately mass murder and a bunch of despicable things on in different countries.
You're talking about mass migration when the Europeans from Europe literally went to another continent to enslave people, right?
And you're worried about mass incarceration.
We got people in this country that don't know when they're going to have the next food.
We have kids at school, and the schools are refusing to feed the kids because you have to pay for food for your kid when if you don't send your kid to school, you get in trouble because it's mandatory for your child to go to school.
We are worried about the wrong things.
All right, Jay, Jay there in Virginia.
In other news, this morning, front page of the Wall Street Journal, court rejects Trump's new global tariffs.
A federal trade court ruled President Trump didn't have the authority to impose new global tariffs after a previous set of levies was struck down by the Supreme Court earlier this year.
Front page of the Wall Street Journal this morning with that story.
There's also this in the Washington Post this morning about Senator Susan Collins, Republican in Maine.
She's up for reelection and always faces a tough fight.
She says she's had essential tumor for entire Senate career.
Maine Senator Susan Collins said Wednesday that she has had a benign essential tremor telling a local news outlet that she has had it for the length of her nearly 30-year Senate career.
The revelation comes amid broader scrutiny of older candidates' age and health after President Joe Biden ended his 2024 campaign amid questions about his health.
Collins 73 is running for a sixth term in the Senate.
So that is the Washington Post this morning with their headline and story.
There's also this in the opinion section of the post this morning.
Become a Republican, I'd be terrible.
Senator John Fetterman, penning this opinion piece this morning for the Washington Post, he says, I haven't changed, and here's what has.
Working across the aisle is the only way forward.
And he says in his piece, my values have not changed.
And I have always turned to those kinds of ideals that define being a Democrat.
I remain strongly pro-choice, pro-weed, pro-LGBT, pro-SNAP, the food benefits, pro-labor, and even pro-ribe over bio-slop.
You can read more from the Pennsylvania Democrat if you go to the Washington Post this morning.
And then there's also a story out of Tennessee.
Here's the Tennessee lookout.
Tennessee Republicans passed a U.S. House map carving up Memphis days after the Supreme Court guts the Voting Rights Act.
Under pressure from the president's White House, state GLP lawmakers rushed to create a more favorable U.S. House map ahead of the 2026 midterm.
And it means the sole Democrat, Steve Cohen, who represents that Memphis area drawn out of his seat.
Alan in Connecticut, a Republican.
Presidential Foreign Policy Decisions00:06:43
Alan, good morning.
Go ahead.
Good day to you, and thank you for as much time as you are.
Wow.
I'm a Pentecostal Christian, Messianic Jew, and there's a larger body of Christ.
So I'm going to First Amendment read something from the apostle or sent one to the nations.
Romans 13, verses 3 and 4, for rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil.
Do you want to be unafraid of the authority?
Do what is good, and you will have praise from the same last first, for he is God's minister to you for good.
But if you do evil, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain, for he is God's minister to an avenger to execute wrath on him who practices evil.
Now, I'm going to mention the word intractability.
I've read the Quran from cover to cover and part of the heath, hadith, and the sayings of Mr. Muhammad.
I'm just talking about Islamic jihadists, fundamentalist jihadists.
And they're intractable.
And as a Messianic Jew and a Pentecostal Christians, the blood of Nigerians and Syrians who are Christians cries out to God and me.
Alan, I have to jump in.
My apologies.
I want to go to Italy.
Secretary of State Rubio is talking to reporters.
Let's listen in.
Ultimately, it's important.
First of all, there's a lot that we work together with, with the church, and we talked about those areas that we're working together on, different parts of the world.
I know everyone's interested in the other aspects of it, but I expressed, you know, updated them on the situation with Iran, expressed our point of view about why this was important and the danger that Iran poses to the world, which is largely recognized.
So obviously, the Holy Father is a spiritual leader.
He's first and foremost.
I mean, that's his role to play.
And obviously, the church has always interacted on behalf of a mission for peace and a respect for all of humanity.
But at the end, it was a very cordial and important meeting.
And it's important to share our points of view and an explanation and an understanding of where we're coming from.
And I thought it was very positive.
Secretary Rubio, you also mentioned talking about the Western Hemisphere with the Pope.
And of course, the Catholic Church is instrumental in delivering humanitarian aid to Cuba.
I wondered if you discussed that and whether there was any disagreements on U.S. policy towards Cuba.
Oh, we discussed, I mean, we've provided $6 million of humanitarian aid, U.S. humanitarian aid that was distributed by Caritas, the Catholic Church agency.
We're prepared to do more.
In fact, we've offered the regime their $100 million of humanitarian aid that unfortunately so far they have not agreed to distribute to help the people of Cuba.
So we did the hurricane relief, but we're offering more.
And it's the regime that's not accepting it.
It's the regime that's standing in the way of it.
So we discussed that, and we hope we can do it because we do want to help the people of Cuba who are being hurt by this incompetent regime that's destroyed the country and the economy.
Secretary, can I ask about the meeting with the Pope?
I mean, after this meeting with the Pope, which you described as cordial and productive, are you going to recommend to the President that he stops criticizing the Pope and social media?
Why would I tell you what I'm going to recommend to the President?
But beyond that, the President will always speak clearly about how he feels about the U.S. and U.S. policy.
The President of the United States is always going to act in what's in the best interest of the United States.
I think we can do that and continue to also have a very productive and fruitful and important relationship with the church because it plays an important role in the world as well.
No, no, no, I apologize.
Secretary Rubio, were there any themes from your conversation yesterday with Pope Leo that resonated with you personally?
Well, if it was personal, why would I tell you?
No.
Here's the bottom line on that, is that the church is an important global institution.
It has a presence all over the world.
I know you guys are fixated on who said what about who at what time.
I understand all that, okay?
Because media, you guys have headlines, you have editors, you have people that want you to post, and these are interesting stories.
But at the end of the day, the Pope just returned from Africa, in a very important continent with growing Christian populations, many of whom are threatened or feel threatened by the spread of radical Islamic terrorism.
So we care about that.
The Pope and the Church has an interest in Christian communities in Lebanon, a place that we're very involved in trying to establish a peace between Israel and Lebanon.
The church obviously has a very important presence in Latin America.
The bishops from Venezuela had just been here a few days earlier.
So we shared thoughts about those sorts of things.
I think it's an opportunity to personally express our point of view from the standpoint of foreign policy and the areas we're involved in and share insights, but also to gain insights because the church has a unique role in many of these countries in terms of the insights and information that they're receiving.
In some cases, in the past, the church has been an important interlocutor, not just with governments, but with societies.
And then, of course, on the practical level, the church plays an important role in humanitarian efforts in different parts of the world, and in many places, has served as a facilitator of U.S. humanitarian assistance, such as I highlighted a moment ago when it comes to Cuba.
Yes, go ahead.
I'll get to the problem.
Mr. Secretary, can you say in your meeting with Prime Minister Maloney whether you talked about the possibility of withdrawing U.S. troops from Italy as well as the possibility of the United States withdrawing from NATO altogether?
Well, we didn't discuss any specifics like that, and that's a decision for the President to make.
It's a decision every president makes.
The fact of the matter, though, is, and I said publicly, and I've said repeatedly, I've been a strong supporter of NATO throughout my career in the Senate and even now.
And one of the advantages of being in NATO is that it allows us to have forces deployed in Europe and bases that allow us a logistical ability to project power in case of contingencies.
Well, we had a contingency.
And some countries in Europe, some countries in Europe, like Spain as an example, denied us the use of those bases for a very important contingency that in some ways the denial of those bases actually impeded the mission, not severely, but had a cost and in fact even created some unnecessary dangers.
So if one of the main reasons why the U.S. is in NATO is the ability to have forces deployed in Europe that we could project to other contingencies, and now that's no longer the case, at least when it comes to some NATO members, that's a problem and it has to be examined.
But ultimately, that's a decision for the President to make.
His team and people like myself and others will provide him what those potential options are.
But ultimately, he'll have to make that decision.
He hasn't made those decisions yet.
As far as recent news of deployments, like for example, those were all already ongoing.
For example, in Germany, the troops that were withdrawn, which represent less than 14% of our total troop presence there, that's already pre-programmed.
And in fact, all it did is take us back to where we were in 2022.
And so there was always a plan to do some shifting within NATO.
Christian Nationalism Concerns00:04:55
As far as broader changes, I don't have an announcement for you on that today, but that's a decision for the President to make.
Certainly, you know, we'll present both options and perspectives, but I don't have anything new to announce on that today.
Live from Rome, Secretary of State Marco Rubio talking to reporters this morning about his visit with Pope Leo yesterday at the Vatican.
You heard him call it cordial and that the U.S. and the Pope share the same values.
He talked about Africa and Lebanon and other areas around the globe.
The Secretary of State live from Rome this morning.
We are asking this morning in our first hour here about the tensions between President Trump and Pope Leo.
Now you get to react to what you heard from the Secretary of State, Ron in New Hampshire.
Democratic caller.
Hey, good morning.
Morning.
Go ahead.
Oh, hi.
Yeah, you have two completely different personalities between the two.
You've got a guy in our president, Donald Trump, who cannot open his mouth without disparaging somebody, a certain type of person, news people, Democrats, you name it, poophole countries.
And then you've got another guy on the other hand, the Pope, who can't open his mouth without saying something nice about people and decent and sweet.
And I've long since been calling up here and talking about the hypocrisy of the religious right, the religious conservatives.
And it was almost funny that three calls prior, you had a lady come on and talk about people who are just Catholic by name only and don't really practice the religion.
And that's exactly, she hit it straight head-on.
And then your very next caller absolutely proved her point about these hypocrites that say they're religious, yet elect a man that is just so outrageous and so against religion.
Everything he does is against people, against decency, against kindness.
Okay.
John, I have to leave it there.
The New Hampshire Democrat.
Donnie is a Republican.
Hi, Donnie.
Hi, good morning, Greta.
Morning.
I was actually in Rome at the night of the White House correspondence dinner, and it was probably 3 a.m. in the morning or 3.30 Rome time.
And it was happening, and I was listening to C-SPAN, and I thought that you were outside of the block somewhere, and you couldn't have got in.
So that was a personal share of me being listening to C-SPAN.
But I have to also say about the recent Secretary of State's visit to Rome and if he had any message to the Pope from the President, because the President has already said it.
The President said that I want the Pope to respectfully know that this is not his word, this is mine from here on, but probably it would translate to this, that the political affairs of the United States is not something that the Vatican has to have any commentary on because of the separation of church and state, yet along Vatican.
But on the other hand, when Secretary of State was asked, well, probably I would put it on the report, I assume that the news conference of him was after the Vatican visit, not after today's visit with the foreign minister of Italy, Mr. Tajani or Tajani.
So I assume that when he was talking about the NATO dealings or whatever is happening under NATO, I don't think it's anything because I don't assume, maybe you could factor me on that, but Vatican is a part of NATO.
But as far as the rift between an American Pope or not America, I mean, in terms of nationality, with the President of the United States, I assume that it should be known as that there shouldn't be any rift or any sort of daylight because it's not the business of the Vatican.
I mean, they could say, obviously, with the things that are humanitarian and Cuba, which probably would relate more, or South America or Latin America in a way that it would return.
Okay, Donnie, I've got to get in one more call here.
We're going to go to Aaron in Michigan, Independent.
Staying Informed on Democracy00:03:44
Hi, how are you doing this morning, Greta?
Morning.
I'm just calling in because I want to say I highly agree with two callers ago when he was saying that, you know, this Christianal nationalism with Donald Trump.
If we remember three months ago when this war with Iran started, him and Pete Hegseff had bombed a school children, a school building with 200 children in that building.
And I want to know kind of how that's Christian.
I mean, it's kind of disgusting for an outviel to think that we have a president who demands that the Pope bows down to him.
People, we've got to wake up.
Project 2025 has completely destroyed this country and this white power Christian nationalism has getting out of control.
And yes, our president is a proven pedophile if you look at the stories of Sasha Riley and Miss Katie Porter and also E. Jean Carroll.
Okay.
It's getting right to the point where it's quite clear to see that we have not only a problem with religion in this country, but it stems quite clearly from this White House.
Aaron, with his thoughts in Michigan, independent caller, we will leave it there for now.
Later on in the program, we'll talk with television host Alexander Hefner about his latest series of interviewing with mayors across the globe about how they approach solutions to benefit their constituents.
But first, we'll talk about the U.S. economy with former Trump Treasury official and the former head of the World Bank David Malpaz.
We'll have that conversation when the Washington Journal continues.
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Washington Journal continues.
David Malpass is at our table this morning, former Treasury Undersecretary for International Affairs with the Trump administration and served as Undersecretary from 2017 to 2019.
Medicare Deficit and Debt00:15:19
He's also the former president of the World Bank Group.
I want to begin, sir.
This morning, front page of the Wall Street Journal, court rejects Trump's new global tariffs.
A federal court ruled President Trump didn't have the authority to impose new global tariffs after a previous set of levies was struck down by the Supreme Court earlier this year.
So did the President, in reaction to what the Supreme Court ruled, try to set a new round of tariffs and this court rejected them.
Yes, and I think he did two things when IPA, I'm sorry to use these terms, but trade terms are really important.
So IEPA was what was used in 2025 and into 2026.
And then he did two things, started several rounds of Section 301 investigations of countries that are unfairly trading with the U.S., and then imposed the Section 122 tariffs, which were rejected by the court yesterday, as I understand it.
I don't know whether there'll be an appeals process and so on, but they were temporary tariffs anyway.
So what I think will happen is countries around the world will want to keep moving forward with the deals that they've worked out with the U.S. Remember the Foundation, that the U.S. is running a very large trade deficit.
And in many cases, countries have been taking advantage of U.S. markets.
So the question is how to adjust within that world.
How does this relate the trade deficit to the nation's debt?
The trade deficit and the current account deficit, in my mind, are separate from the national debt.
So you have two somewhat separate things going on.
Businesses trade with each other.
Some of them import goods, and then they owe money for that, say to Japan or to others around the world.
And then separately, the U.S. government borrows huge amounts of money.
That's what we think of, that's what the national debt is.
And economists go back and forth about how they're connected and whether they're connected.
In my mind, they're separable concepts.
But the tariff revenue doesn't help us with our debt?
There is some crossover, and tariffs operate by bringing in revenues to the U.S. government.
And so there is a fiscal crossover.
But the current account deficit, the trade deficit, is much bigger than the tariffs themselves.
The U.S. is the world's biggest economy, the biggest import market.
And so that causes there to be a lot of financial interflows around the world.
So from a policy standpoint, there are two separate things going on.
One is the U.S. government has grown massively over this hundred years and year by year accelerating its growth.
That causes the national debt.
And then separately, businesses in the U.S. have been investing abroad and foreign businesses investing in the U.S.
And that gives rise to this current account deficit that the U.S. supports every year.
New York Times this morning with the headline, as U.S. debt hits worrying milestone, let's talk about the milestone, Washington shrugs.
Yeah, so I first came to Washington in 1984 and worked for the staff of the Senate Budget Committee, and President Reagan was very worried about $1 trillion of national debt.
Now we're looking at $39 trillion of total debt.
And if you count out the trust funds, it's the $31 trillion that's in that story.
These are massive amounts of debt that the U.S. government owes to the world.
So everyone who buys U.S. Treasuries in their money market funds is owed money by the U.S. government.
And that's not even the full story because the government also makes commitments out into the future for people's retirement, for example.
So if you think about the $31 trillion that was in the news this week, you have to add to that all of the military pensions, all of the Social Security and Medicare expectations of people, and the expectations that people have that the U.S. government will spend money next year in the following year.
That's not counted in the $31 trillion.
And the milestone that was reached, what was it?
It was $31 trillion is about the same size as the U.S. economy in nominal GDP terms.
So our economy is $31 trillion per year.
Our debt is $31 trillion.
So it's a crossover point.
I worked in the 80s and into the 90s on the idea that 50% was too big.
That meant the government was so big that it was 50% of GDP.
Now we're at 100% with the likelihood that it goes even higher.
So it's incumbent, I think, on people around Washington to think how can we stop the government from growing as fast as it does.
And in fact, it keeps accelerating its rate of growth and the expectations that people have on what it's going to give people in terms of benefits over their life.
All right, we want our viewers to join us in this conversation.
You heard Mr. Paul Pas Malpa say this.
How do you stop the government from growing?
We want to get your thoughts on that this morning.
So join us here.
If you're a Democrat, 202-748-8000.
Republicans, 202-748-8001.
And Independents, 202-748-8002.
We'll take your text if you don't want to call at 202-748-8003.
Just include your first name, city, and state.
We're about 15 minutes away from the April jobs report.
When we get that, we'll get real-time reaction from Mr. Malpa and all of you as well to the latest job numbers.
I want to stick, though, with the U.S. debt here and explain to folks what happens if investors who buy treasuries, as you were saying, start to think this is more than a shrug.
They don't like this milestone that we've reached this week.
And they start pulling back.
What happens to our economy?
What could happen?
Bond yields would go up, but fortunately, markets have been pretty tolerant of the borrowing of the U.S. government.
One reason for that is because the United States is the world's biggest economy, and the U.S. government has access to assets all around the country.
For example, it owns huge amounts of land.
And so if that were allowed to produce the minerals, the critical minerals that are needed now for the modern economy, that's worth much more than the national debt.
So bond buyers have been tolerant over the years, and people keep looking for a crisis, and it doesn't occur.
That doesn't mean it can't occur, but as long as the U.S., the United States, all the people in the United States have the confidence of the world, then they continue buying the debt of the U.S. government.
Are you one that's shrugging then?
It says Washington shrugs.
Are you shrugging?
For years, I've written over and over again, we ought to try to deal with it now in terms of checks and balances on the size of government.
My argument is that when the foundation of the country realized that you needed to restrain government in many areas, so the Bill of Rights is in many ways protection for individuals in the U.S. from overly large government.
It came from the King of England, which people didn't want to be controlled by the monarchy.
But there's a missing piece.
There's nothing in the Bill of Rights or in the Constitution that protects people from overly large government.
If you think of it, we're protected our rights to freedom of religion, of speech, of search and seizure.
All of these rights are so important to us.
There's nothing in the Constitution that says the government can't be 80% of the economy.
So right now, we see the government growing and growing.
And so I think we should use the concept of checks and balances to reestablish some constraint on the size of government.
Before we get to calls then, are you in agreement with President Trump when he says, I don't know how we can keep paying for Medicare and Medicaid?
Well, I think the U.S. government can and will and should, but there's so much fraud in those programs.
One of the issues is to have it operate properly.
Also, you want to make sure...
Is there enough fraud, though, to deal with the rising growth of those programs?
No, but medical costs are part of this public-private partnership that doesn't work very well.
People begin taking Medicare, and there's some.
I see Bernie Sanders saying everyone should just be on Medicare.
That means not a private sector market for health care.
We've benefited so much from having the private sector invent new medicines and operate new hospital inventions and innovations.
So I think we need to maintain that.
So I would like us to frame the idea that there should be some limits that protect people around the country from Washington.
This city is the richest in the world.
We're sitting right in the middle of it, and people are making huge amounts of money dictating to the public what they should do and who they should buy from.
What do you do about the other key driver of our government's growth, which is Social Security?
There's Social Security, which is a commitment out into the future, and I think that that's owed by the government to people as they retire.
So you can look for ways to stop increasing that amount.
You can hold down inflation, which does cause the cost of living not to keep up going up for the elderly.
I think it's an important program, and we should be preserving those parts of the government that are promises, but then stop making these massive new promises of commitments for government spending.
Specifically, I've argued that there's a debt limit that will be coming up in 2027 that really doesn't operate to protect the public.
It's called the debt limit, but every year, every two or three years, it's just massively increased.
So we could use that.
And Congress does that.
Congress does that, and the president has to sign it.
And so there's a deal between them, but it always ends up with spending more money.
And so I think we could use that moment in time in 2027 to say enough that there has to be a check and balance on size of government.
All right, let's turn to our viewers.
Ed is joining us for the conversation in Pennsylvania.
Republican caller.
Go ahead.
Thank you so much for taking my call this morning.
And I'm pleased to be on the phone today with Mr. Malpass because it's a unique opportunity.
Given everything that this man is saying, I think that when we're discussing something like the national debt and we're talking about the rest of the world purchasing American treasuries in good faith,
which is ironic given that we were discussing what was going on with the pontiff just in the prior segment, I'd just like to clarify that the government and the administration that Mr. Malpass served under and continues to serve in their interests have actually added significantly.
I could be incorrect, but more significantly than any in history.
We are currently up against the wall in terms of cost of living and particularly when it comes to Social Security ballooning and Medicare fraud.
There are many members of Congress currently who have been charged with significant amounts of defrauding Medicare.
All right, well, Ed, let's stick to the GOP adding to the nation's debt, because I want to add one sentence to that from the New York Times piece this morning about the U.S. debt hitting this worrying milestone.
President Trump's tax cuts could add over $3 trillion to the debt at a time when debt is already surpassing the total U.S. output.
Do you agree with that, caller, that Republicans are to blame for where we are at because of the first Trump administration?
So Washington, in a bipartisan way, keeps spending more money.
I didn't agree with the spot that you read there of the tax cut adding to the debt.
So one thing we agree.
I don't agree with that $3 trillion number that you cited there.
People keep wanting to say that when you give people in the country through a tax cut more of their money, that that's a loss to Washington.
That's the $3 trillion number.
And they're not recognizing that that allows the people to grow the economy.
And so we have this massive, unexpectedly robust economy in both 2025 and I think it will continue somewhat in 2026, in part because people were allowed to keep more of their money.
And not require as many government services?
Not require the services, but also reinvest the money.
So the question here is: if you tax people, the government is going to waste a lot of that money that it gets.
If you leave the money with people, they will invest in machines, their businesses.
We just see data even this morning of how large the number of new business formations are going on in the country.
That's a direct result of the expensing that was in the tax bill last year.
So as you reduce the regulations, the take by the federal government, what happened around the country?
People started new businesses at a record pace.
All right.
Duke in Pennsylvania, Independent.
Examining U.S. Creditor Status00:11:50
I'd like to explain to the American public that the Democrats and the Republicans are both in this together, and they've done this to us for many, many years, starting with big oil.
If you look at all the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, America, whatever you want to call it, that's our land.
That's our oil.
But we're not making any money off of it.
Big oil is making the money.
We have the best modular nuclear power plants in the world in our submarines.
Why aren't we building them and charging a fair price for electricity?
Because these politicians are getting rich off of all these companies making millions and millions of dollars off of the Americans.
All right, let's take that point.
Because you've heard debate in Washington during this Congress about banning stock trading by members of Congress.
It has not passed yet, both chambers, president signing it.
What do you make of this view from Americans outside of the Beltway who think that members of Congress are getting rich?
People should be incensed, and I think they should pass some limits on their own self-dealing and trading.
And that's been around.
That's a bipartisan problem.
And I agree also with the caller's point about nuclear power.
It's a huge resource that the U.S. could be doing.
I hope that they can clear some of the permitting problems and some of the invention and innovation problems.
He mentioned the skills of the U.S. Navy in nuclear power.
Why can't that be used?
One issue I'll take is the oil companies and the oil industry in the U.S. and the downstream industries and the natural gas industries are a huge profit center.
That's true.
They reinvest in exploration and development, but they also pay huge amounts of taxes.
So we should keep that in mind.
One of the things powering the U.S. economy is the private sector is allowed to keep some of their money.
The government takes a big cut, but people keep it and they reinvest it and they invent new things.
That's the magic of the United States, and it's a contrast with a lot of foreign countries.
What is the state of the U.S. economy right now?
It's okay.
You know, there is this oil price spike, which then penetrates into other parts of the economy.
There's also the weakness on supply chains.
We had allowed ourselves to become dependent on China for many things, for manufactured goods.
I come from a manufacturing background and family.
And we lost that over these 50 years of the machinists that are needed to make things.
And so I think we've got this two, two-track economy where there's huge innovation going on in technology.
And there's also innovation going on in the way government interacts.
President Trump is leading this huge change in the global, call it the global order.
I think it was really a global disorder.
The Pope this morning, you were playing those clips earlier, of him saying we care about people around the world.
And Secretary Rubio reinforced that.
He was talking about Cuba and the willingness of the U.S. to give money if Cuba would allow its people to be freer.
I saw that at the World Bank.
I could go to countries and say, we will lend you $5 billion if you will stop, if you, the government, will stop hurting people and taking all their money.
And the governments would say, no, we don't want to do that.
We're content taking money away from our people and impoverishing them.
The Pope was directly addressing that when he talked about compassion in Africa.
So I think we have to keep this in mind.
The U.S. is doing better than any country around the world, and it's facing immediate challenges.
David Malpass is our guest here this morning, former president of the World Bank Group, former Treasury Undersecretary for International Affairs.
You heard him just describe the economy as okay.
We're about 30 seconds or less away from hearing the April Jobs report, and that will give us a thumbnail sketch of where we are with the economy.
And we'll get Mr. Malpas' reaction to the numbers that the Bureau of Labor Statistics will share here with the American people in just a few seconds.
David Malpas, why do you think the president has these poll numbers then?
When asked about the cost of living, 23% approve, 76% disapprove.
On inflation, 72% disapprove of his handling of this, while only 27% approve.
He also has high disapprovals on the economy, 65% versus 34%.
And then on taxes, 61% disapprove of how he's handled taxes with 38% approving.
I think we're at really a dangerous point for the world.
And we can look at Iran and say they were almost having a nuclear bomb and think of what that would have done to the world.
So these are trying times.
They're challenging times.
You don't think those disapproval numbers are from before this conflict started?
Some were.
And so some was left over from previous administrations.
Some is going on right now with people's impatience.
They're saying we want to do better now.
And the president is saying, well, it's going to take time to, for example, on energy, to get enough electricity produced in the U.S. Contrast is China, which is going full speed ahead.
We have to compete with that.
So these are challenging, very real issues, and the people are saying they'd like more now.
Contrast those disapproval numbers with the stock market.
The stock market rallies and it hit a record just this past week.
It's down today on hopes that there is some sort of ceasefire deal that sticks.
But what are they trading on?
They're trading on earnings.
And so this is this issue of the amazing innovation.
I mentioned earlier the new business formation in the U.S.
No one in the world has anything like that.
The energy production and the increase in that production, think of the contrast with Europe or especially with Africa, where the U.S. has this amazing ability to produce new stuff.
I think we have to do a lot more on the supply chains.
The dependence on China was intense and it's going to take years to pull out of that.
That's some of what people are feeling.
Is Wall Street ignoring this Iran conflict?
No.
I think markets are able to look ahead and see that there is oil in the world and there will be flows coming.
They think it's not going to last for too much longer.
And in the meantime, the earnings coming out of that technology sector are just very large.
Pushed by AI, artificial intelligence?
By AI, but I think also the accumulated investment that was going on, the tax bill last year was really a commitment by the U.S. not to take the money away from those sectors, allow businesses to reinvest, which is what they're doing.
Amy in Georgia, Democratic caller.
We'll turn to you next.
Amy in Georgia.
One last time for Amy in Georgia, Democratic caller.
All right, I'm going to go to John, Dallas, Texas, Republican.
Hi, John.
Hi.
I was wondering, what do you see as the future of the World Bank and similarly other global institutions such as the World Trade Organization or NATO or the UN?
It seems like you hear talk that we're in the midst of sort of a nationalist sort of uprising, populism, as populist movements are on the rise.
All right, John, we'll take that.
Go ahead.
Great question.
Thank you.
I think we had gone too far into globalism.
So as you think of an international organization, they're like government but really big government.
They're called sometimes supranationals.
So that's the World Bank and the IMF and the United Nations.
And in many ways, they're not very effective.
At the World Bank, what I tried to do was, and what I did, we had a mission which was to have our programs in some way improve the lives of people in some countries.
And so that means in Kenya, in Ethiopia, in Ghana, and so on around the world.
And the challenge is you're up against a system that is not very responsive to what a supranational, this big institution, can actually do.
And so I think we need to have much smaller engagement in these international organizations, and they need to look inside and rethink their size.
In the case of the IMF and the World Bank, these were created in 1944 during World War II to respond to World War II.
That's so many decades ago.
I think they could be much smaller now.
But one other issue, and this is important, China has found ways to use these international organizations and even create their own.
There's a big one in Beijing called the AIIB, a big one in Shanghai called the New Development Bank or the BRICS Bank.
And these stand beside the World Bank and the IMF, but they're China organized and China controlled.
So that's a source of conflict.
I think their creditor status should be re-examined as the world re-examines all of this.
The United Nations has been unable to create peace or to in Lebanon, in Haiti, and in parts around the world, the refugees are still in camps from wars that occurred decades ago.
And so this is not the world that the Pope is describing, a caring world.
So I think there needs to be full re-examination.
The caller mentioned WTO, the World Trade Organization, which has been really unsuccessful and even its mission, I think, was overstated.
And the WHO, I'll mention, and on down, we could do 100 international organizations that are overfunded, underfocused in terms of their mission.
Re-examining Global Trade Systems00:10:13
Let's get to the job reports.
This is from CNBC.
U.S. payrolls increased $115,000 in April, more than expected.
Unemployment at 4.3%.
And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Household Survey data, the unemployment rate was unchanged at 4.3% in April, and the number of unemployed people changed little at 7.4 million.
Both measures changed little over the past year, they note.
And then for the established survey data, total non-farm payroll employment edged up by 115,000 April after showing little net change over the prior 12 months.
In April, job gains occurred in health care, transportation, and warehousing and retail trade.
Federal government employment continued to decline.
What do you make of those details?
The market will say an economy that's okay or that's stable, which is interesting given the oil price shock.
But it shows you resilience.
That's what I get out of those numbers.
And why is that important?
That's important because it shows in a world where we all feel that there's this turmoil, constant change going on, that companies are doing what they're supposed to do.
They're hiring workers.
They're finding new workers.
I'd like to see a lot more jobs for young workers.
And that means this skills issue is so important.
You mentioned the sectors that saw some growth, healthcare and transportation, that's good.
But what we need is electricians.
We need people that can work on HVAC systems to make air conditioning operate across the country.
We need people that are machinists, that can operate machine tools.
And that's so important.
And we've lost some of those skills.
So important to recreate.
I think we have to look all the way back in our education system.
In grade school, in junior high, I took long ago shop, remember?
And girls can take shop.
And they learn to draw graphs or draw diagrams and then operate the machines that make those diagrams.
We have junior colleges, a robust system in the U.S. that I think could be used much more to help people learn the skills that are really employable.
People coming out of those programs can be making $200,000 a year.
It sounds like an incredible amount, but that's because there's such a hunger in the business community for skills.
I'd like to see that from this number.
Not only shop back in the day, but we also took home economics.
And I'm for that.
And why?
Because I cook and I need to know how to do it.
It was more than that, though.
It was more than that.
It was more than that.
It was part of families.
And, you know, we do, we haven't talked about the demographic challenge around the world, the U.S. less negatively affected than in Asia, where women are just not feeling part of the society to the point of wanting to have children.
And so we need lots more people that are happy in the U.S. and that want to start a family and have children.
And that can come out of good broad education.
And I think confidence that they can make money, which is so important.
We're losing a little of that.
We focus on the stock market going way up.
And we have to think about what I want to go up is people's wages.
The president is addressing that with no tax on tips, with recognizing that people need a break from some of their taxes.
We need to do a lot more in that area, I think, to incentivize people to jobs.
I remember how to learning how to balance a checkbook.
Yeah, we don't do that.
People don't write my children don't write checks.
They send the money electronically.
That's actually, I mean, let's talk about that.
Around the world, and in Africa, one of the things I worked on from the World Bank was how to enable digital payments.
It turns out that if farmers have the ability in an inexpensive way to trade goods and services with people, buying fertilizer, selling their produce, without having the bank charge them, that's hugely enabling.
So we can hope for that future for the world.
Let's go to Jimbo, who's in Bakersfield, California, Independent.
Welcome to the conversation.
Go ahead.
Thank you.
You made me think of my boy's chef class back at Potola Junior High School in Orange, California, where I learned how to make a German chocolate cake there.
That was very, all those skills were really useful.
Hey, I wanted to go in the Peabody Sherman Wayback Machine and look at the 2001 and 2003 George W. Bush, I guess they were called the Economic and Tax Relief Reconciliation Acts.
And that's when Dick Cheney, our vice president, was telling us that deficits didn't matter.
We went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq without selling more bonds like we did in World War II.
We just put all of this on the credit card.
And I was just wondering if that kind of set the tone for everything.
And then the other thing I wanted to talk about was the complete disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street and how the gains on Wall Street are completely irrelevant to my life.
It's a non-sequitur.
All right, let's talk about those two things.
Thank you, Jimbo.
Appreciate that.
Both real challenges.
So in 01 to 03, you know, the U.S. embarked on nation building.
We were trying to have Iraq be a democracy, remember that.
And it was very expensive and it failed.
And so we should be candid about that.
And it was added to the national debt, as the caller said.
There was one technical thing that I should point out.
George W. Bush, I think, made a big mistake in 01 and 02 by delaying the full impact of the tax changes that were going on that the caller mentioned.
So there were more things that could have been done with the economy.
I've been a critic of what the Federal Reserve was doing in those years.
They had the rates set too low, and so we ended up in the great financial crisis in 08.
They were looking backward at the inflation rate in 03, 04, 05, and it wasn't showing up in the data, so the Fed was complacent.
And so that was a big mistake, and the Fed's made quite a few mistakes going forward.
Do you agree with Federal Reserve Chair, former Jerome Powell?
Not on his activities on inflation.
The Biden inflation was in part related to the Fed.
It was partly government spending.
A lot of it was government regulation.
And so we ended up with that very punishing high inflation rate.
But the caller's right then to raise this issue of affordability.
Wall Street is doing well, but Main Street not as well.
This is a giant challenge for government policy.
I think it in part reflects the government is just too darn big.
And so as we look at it, they're reallocating so much resources.
And Washington, D.C., where we're sitting, takes its cut.
It takes a giant cut from what's left for the rest of the country.
Wall Street gets its cut, and there's not enough left over for people.
That can change, and I think some of the current policies will improve that.
The CNBC with the Dow futures, as we get the April Jobs report, 200 points gained as jobs report is strong.
Traders see potential for Iran deal.
What do you expect the markets to do when they open up at 9.30 a.m. Eastern?
They'll open up on the upside.
The futures are a pretty good indicator of what the market's going to do.
And then during the day, people will watch Iran.
And The market would be very happy if there could be a resolution of the Straits of Hormuz.
Yeah, and listen to this.
This is from the Associated Press reporter Rubio, speaking to reporters in Italy, says the U.S. is expecting a response from Iran sometime today.
I hope it's a serious offer, he said.
I really do.
So the markets are going to be watching that as well.
That's right.
And I did see your clip of President Trump saying something similar and that Iran would, that he was focused on how do we get the nuclear material, the bomb-making material out of Iran as part of the deal, along with the Strait of Hormuz.
Think how absurd this is.
This is an open international waterway.
And Iran, a country that is just one of 200 countries in the world, is saying you can't come through.
So that's the core of the problem that's harmful to the whole world.
So if that can be resolved, Wall Street says great.
I'd like to also see, I think we should, I don't want to lose track of the supply chains around the U.S. that creates jobs for people all across the country.
That's through the connection of energy production with innovation, with manufacturing.
The U.S. has the capability to make stuff for itself and for the rest of the world.
And we need to recapture that.
And sometimes it gets submerged in the stock market hitting a record.
Connecting Energy to Innovation00:02:38
But underneath the surface, there are these millions of companies around the country that are trying to figure out what people want and how to make it at a price that's fair.
And that's the dynamism of the country.
David Malpas, thank you so much for sharing your insight and your thoughts with us this morning.
We appreciate it.
Thanks, Greta.
We're going to take a break.
Coming up later on the Washington Journal, PBS host Alexander Hefner joins us later to discuss what he's learning from mayors as he travels across the globe talking to them about creative ways to benefit their constituents.
But first, after the break, we will be in open forum.
Your reaction to news of the day.
Well, take your phone calls and your texts.
There are the lines on your screen.
Start dialing in.
We'll be right back.
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Seeking Facts Straight from Source00:03:57
Washington Journal continues.
Welcome back to the Washington Journal.
We are in Open Forum.
Your reaction to the latest in the news.
We'll take your text messages, your posts, and your phone calls.
Let's begin with Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State.
He was in Rome, Italy, earlier this morning speaking to reporters, and here's what he had to say about a possible ceasefire deal with Iran.
We should know something today.
I mean, we're expecting a response from them.
We'll see what the response entails.
The hope is it's something that it can put us into a serious process of negotiation.
Obviously, we've seen the reporting overnight that Iran is established or trying to establish some agency that's going to control traffic in the straits.
That would be very problematic.
That would actually be unacceptable.
I mean, the normalizing of their controlling of international waterway is both illegal and it's just something that's unacceptable.
And the world has to start asking itself, what is it willing to do if Iran tries to normalize a control of an international waterway?
I think that's unacceptable.
But we're expecting a response from them today at some point.
We have not received that yet as in the last hour, but perhaps that will come.
Their system is still highly fractured and a bit dysfunctional as well.
So that may be serving as an impediment.
I hope it's a serious offer.
I really do.
The Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, he was live here on the C-SPAN network earlier this morning from Rome, Italy, gaggling with reporters.
They are taking questions about the Iran conflict, as well as his meeting at the Vatican yesterday with Pope Leo.
You can talk about the headlines on Iran as well as that visit with the Pope and any other public policy or political issue.
We'll go to Amanda and Hurt Virginia Democratic Caller.
You're up first.
Good morning.
Good morning.
I would like to wish you had called your guest out when he claimed that the debt was caused by both parties in Congress voting on these bills.
I wish you would have reminded him that it's the Republicans that are passing reconciliation bills that are causing our debt to go up, and that's without the Democrat support.
Amanda, that is the beauty of the program is that you get to call in and share those exact thoughts.
Do you have anything else to add?
Yes, two more items.
He also claimed that, oh, oh, poor Iran, oh, poor us.
Iran closed the Strait of Hermuse and is affecting other countries and blah, blah, blah.
What did he think Iran's defense was going to be?
I mean, get real.
Everybody knew what was going to happen, but Trump is an idiot.
The third thing is that Alito used false, fake numbers to justify changing the Voters' Rights Act.
He falsified numbers based on a friend of the court that was given by the Department of Justice, and they faked the numbers that said that African Americans are voting in higher percentages than white people.
Fake numbers.
Trump is cruel.
Trump is self-serving.
Down with Trump.
8643.
Okay, that was Amanda there in Virginia.
There is the latest on the redistricting wars taking place in Tennessee, the Tennessee lookout, with the headline from yesterday's action by the state legislature.
Tennessee Republicans pass U.S. House map, carving up Memphis days after the Supreme Court guts the Voting Rights Act.
Under pressure from President Trump's White House, state GOP lawmakers rushed to create a more favorable U.S. House map ahead of the 2026 midterms.
There were protests that took place in Nashville, Tennessee, outside of the state capitol there, as they approved this new map for Tennessee House districts ahead of the midterm elections, which means Steve Cohen, the lone Democrat, will likely lose his seat.
Federal Reserve Interest Rates00:16:08
They're going to carve that up.
And so it is likely Republicans who pick that up.
You can see the protest there from yesterday in Tennessee.
Frank in Pennsylvania, an independent.
Frank, what's on your mind?
Good morning, Greta.
I was on hold earlier for your earlier topic.
And as a very outspoken atheist, this is a topic that intrigues me.
And this is why religion and the governed state should never be combined.
And the whole topic is crazy to me.
So the way I'm going to break it down is, let me get this straight.
We have this orange clown, right?
And his best friend was the world's most notorious pedophile.
This orange clown is listed in the files of this pedophile.
Now we have this pedophile, and now he wants to argue with another man who runs the world's largest organization and cult that is famous for protecting and harboring pedophiles.
So you have these two pedophiles arguing, and this is all, they're all arguing over about protecting a Jewish state that was illegally settled in the Middle East, causing genocide because their imaginary God promised them that that lump of sand is in a book of ridiculous myths from 4,000 years ago, and that lump of sand is their fake God's favorite place on earth.
So he promised it to them.
All right.
Frank in Pennsylvania, with his thoughts and his beliefs this morning.
We are getting your response to the headlines in the papers this morning in the news as well in any other political or public policy issue.
There are the lines on your screen.
I do want to show you what President Trump had to say earlier this week when he called into conservative radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt's program.
He talked about the Pope once again.
It came up during an exchange with the president ahead of his upcoming trip to China.
You're going to China.
Let's talk about that, Mr. President.
You've had this back and forth with Pope Leo.
I wish Pope Leo would talk about Jimmy Lai.
You talk about Jimmy Lai with the chairman.
Will you be bringing him up again?
I will.
I brought him up.
And there's a lot of bitterness, I would say, with him and Jimmy Lai.
You know, he was, Hong Kong was not as easy, but I will be bringing him up.
I wish the Pope would.
I want the Pope to talk about Jimmy Lai, and I want you to bring him home.
That would be a good deal.
Well, the Pope would rather talk about the fact that it's okay for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.
And I don't think that's very good.
I think he's endangering a lot of Catholics and a lot of people.
But I guess if it's up to the Pope, he thinks it's just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.
He's from Chicago.
President Trump, on calling into Hugh Hewitt's radio program earlier this week, want to share with you, the president talked about the Pope being okay with Iran having a nuclear weapon.
The Washington Post, ABC News did a poll with Ipsos, and they found that 57% reacted negatively to President Trump's past false claim that the Pope said Iran should be able to have a nuclear weapon, while 66% react positively to Pope Leo asking Americans to contact Congress to work for peace and reject war.
Now, the Pope responded to the president, and he said, Should anyone want to criticize me for proclaiming the gospel, they should do so with the truth.
For years, the church has spoken out against all nuclear weapons, so there's no doubt about it there.
So, I simply hope to be listened to for the value of God's word.
Here's more from Pope Leo speaking to commenting to reporters on Tuesday about the church's stance on war and nuclear weapons.
Self-defense has traditionally always been involved by the church.
So, to talk about just war today, it's a very complex problem.
You have to analyze it kind of stuff.
But ever since the entrance into the nuclear age, the whole concept of war has to be re-evaluated in terms today.
And I always believe that it's much better to enter into dialogue than to look for arms and to support the arms industry, which gains billions and billions of dollars this year, instead of sitting down at the table solving our problems and using money.
Pope Leo from Tuesday, reacting to President Trump on what he had to say earlier in the week on Iran and nuclear weapons.
Bob in Illinois, Republican caller.
Bob, what's on your mind?
Good morning, Greta.
I love C-SPAN.
I'd like to praise our president.
This guy's so courageous, what he's doing in Iran, taking that nuclear thing off the table.
I got 10 grandkids.
I worry about their future.
I'm so happy he's doing what he's doing.
Finally, a president that can do it, has the courage to do it.
And Pete Hagg says his whole cabinet is so much more serious than President Biden's cabinet.
I don't know how independents don't see that and realize what a great thing he's doing.
The FBI director, man, they've been doing stuff every day.
They're getting drugs off the street, home and getting some of the undocumented criminals off the street.
I'm here in Illinois where our governor and the mayor of Chicago allow these criminals to stay in Sanctuary City, Sanctuary City.
We got to hang in there.
We got to make sure that Republicans retain all the seats in the fall.
And God bless President Trump and his cabinet.
Thank you.
Okay.
All right.
Well, Bob, are you still there?
Yeah, I want to bounce this off of you because it's a headline in the Washington Post this morning about the midterm elections.
Democrats are becoming more bullish on a Senate flip.
Big hurdles remain, but Trump's unpopularity in Iran war provide an opening.
And they are taking that from the Democratic leader in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, who in an interview said that he is confident that Democrats can pull it off, citing the president's weakness in polls and the strength of the candidates Schumer has recruited to run in red-leaning states.
Bob, your reaction.
Well, that's a pipe dream coming from Senator Schuber.
He's been in Peckwest for the last 20 years.
They're dreaming if they think they can even get the House.
I think the House is going to stay Republican and Senate's also going to remain.
The polls don't matter.
Everybody's going to underestimate Republican.
The independents, very important.
The independents come out and the Republicans stick with Trump.
And Democrats are crazy, man.
I was a Democrat.
Bob, I'm going to leave it there because Ned is an independent in Florida.
Let's hear from you, Ned.
Oh, yeah.
Hi.
I just want to talk both about your previous caller and some of his comments regarding Main Street versus Wall Street.
And there's too much government.
That's been the same chant coming from Republicans since Reagan now.
And as all we're getting is these for-profit corporations that are running things like health care, insurance, et cetera.
And it's just, you know, they're going to squeeze every dime out of every possible way to help their shareholders and not worry about the people, the patients, the homeowners with homeowners' insurance, car insurance, et cetera.
Also, I just want to make one comment on his talking about Cuba.
And it's always this quid pro quo.
Oh, Cuba, if you become more democratic, we'll give you money.
Well, why don't you just give them money?
Why does it have to be this quid pro quo?
They're not doing these people are poor.
They're starving.
I was in Cuba a few years ago, and it's a beautiful country.
And the people just give them the money and start doing business with them.
What's this democracy?
Actually, it's probably more democratic than the United States is these days.
Okay, Ned's thoughts there in Florida.
More of your calls coming up here for your reaction to news of the day.
But first, joining us this morning is Nick Timarose, who is the chief economics correspondent with the Wall Street Journal, here to talk about the latest with the economy.
We saw the jobs report come out, Nick, and the headline in the Wall Street Journal this morning by you, April hiring keeps Fed on hold, shifts focus to inflation.
What do you mean by that?
Well, the big question for really the last six months has been, would the economy slow down so much that the Fed would need to cut interest rates?
And remember, the Fed did cut interest rates three times at the end of last year because they were worried that maybe the labor market was softer than it appeared on the surface.
If we now go back to the beginning of this year, what has happened since then?
Well, the labor market looks like it steadied itself.
We had 115,000 jobs added in April.
The unemployment rate at 4.3% is stable.
And wage growth was pretty solid last month.
Average hours worked went up.
So, you know, consumers, the workers doing okay.
It's not going gangbusters, but we're not getting worse.
And that's what you would need to see for the Fed to come in and cut interest rates.
The other big thing, of course, that's changed over the last several months is the inflation outlook has gotten worse.
And the Fed cares about both the job market and inflation.
And so when you have inflation now going in the wrong direction and the labor market looking okay, that's telling the Fed you do not need to focus on cutting interest rates anymore.
And I expect as we get into the summer here, we're going to hear from more Fed policymakers about, well, gee, are interest rates actually at the right level?
Should we be higher?
Well, I thought the president has a new Fed chair who the president believes will cut rates.
So how does it work at the Fed?
Well, it is going to be very interesting because you're right.
There is going to be a new Fed chair in about a week.
The Senate is poised to confirm Kevin Worsh this next week as the 17th chair of the Fed.
And Kevin Worsch last fall when the Fed was cutting interest rates had said, yeah, there's room to cut interest rates.
And that was, of course, what the president wanted to hear from whoever was going to be picked to lead the Fed.
But the inflation situation is nothing like it was back then, both because of tariffs, we see goods prices going up still, but then you layer on top of that the shock from the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz being closed, fuels, petrochemicals not being able to move.
And so that's beginning to have serious effects on commodity and energy prices.
And normally the Fed would look past that.
If there's something that's happening that you think it's going to be resolved in short order, you're not going to react to it because by the time interest rates change and affect the economy, the shock will have come and gone.
But the strait is not open.
We don't really have visibility yet on what's going to happen there.
And you are layering this shock on top of earlier shocks from the pandemic, from the high inflation that we had after the fiscal stimulus in 2021.
And as I said before, tariffs have been sending up goods prices over the past eight or nine months.
How much sway does Kevin Warsh have?
Should the Senate looks like you said they're on track to approve his nomination.
How much sway does he have on the Federal Reserve Board?
Well, the sway that Kevin Worsch has is going to come from his power of persuasion.
You know, the Fed doesn't just do something because the Fed chair or the president says, do this.
These are 12 people who meet every eight weeks in Washington, D.C. to set interest rates.
And you could think of it a little bit like a debating society.
You have to persuade.
You have to bring the best arguments and the best ideas to the table and say, here's what we're missing if we don't do X, Y, or Z, right?
And so that's what Kevin Worsh is going to have to do: he's going to have to build a case for whatever he thinks is the right policy here.
But right now, he's going to encounter a room full of people who are in no mood to cut interest rates.
And we really don't know what Kevin Worsh's own views are on the current situation.
He was asked a little bit at his confirmation hearing last month, but he didn't have to reveal a whole lot, and he didn't.
Will he face Jerome Powell at the table?
Well, so Jay Powell has said he is going to stay as a Fed governor.
It's very unusual, but the law allows Powell to remain as a Fed governor until early 2028 because he is confirmed to a separate 14-year term as a governor that extends beyond the end of his four-year term this coming week.
As Fed chair, you know, Powell at the press conference that he had last week said that he did not want to be a high-profile dissident.
He's not staying on the board to try to challenge a different sort of monetary policy.
He's staying because of these legal fights that the Fed has had to have with the Department of Justice over the building renovations and some other issues.
And so, you know, I don't really see Powell as being an issue in terms of how the Fed is going to respond to the economic situation right now.
As Fed Chair Jerome Powell held a news conference following the Federal Reserve Board's meeting, do you expect that should he be confirmed, Kevin Worsh will do the same thing?
And when would that be?
Well, the Fed's next meeting is in the middle of June.
That press conference would be on June 17th.
If, you know, Kevin Worsch indicated at his confirmation hearing that he's not such a big fan of several of the communications innovations that the Fed has devised since he left the Fed in 2011.
The Fed did not have press conferences when Kevin Worsh was a Fed governor.
But this is actually a tool of the job now.
And it's something that could give the Fed chair a little bit more power because you get to come out of that meeting and tell people, well, here's how we're thinking about it.
You can kind of put your spin, if you will, on what's happening.
So it's possible that the Fed will do things differently on communications.
It would be surprising if they do it, if they make big changes right away.
Just to give you an example, when Jay Powell became the Fed chair in 2018, the Fed had been doing press conferences after every other meeting.
And there had been some concerns that, gee, the market only thinks we're going to do something when there's a press conference.
So after a couple of press conferences, Powell announced that he would be doing it after every single meeting.
And that's what they've been doing since.
Nick Timros, before we let you go, what do you think the market does today?
What are you watching for?
Well, I think the market's much more interested in what's happening with the peace talks or the ceasefire with Iran.
Fed Chair Press Conference Changes00:03:49
And really, when do those ships begin to move?
The market has been dominated by both that and sort of the AI mania and what's happening in the U.S. economy.
The month-to-month, you know, wibbles and waggles and the jobs report really has not been that big of a story.
And this number this morning is telling you you just don't have to worry.
So if people want to party and load up on risk, they don't have any reason not to do that when you see a number like this.
All right, Nick Timuros, who is the chief economics correspondent with the Wall Street Journal, thank you for your time.
Thanks for having me.
Back to your calls.
Jerry in Pittsburgh, Texas, a Republican.
Jerry, good morning.
What's your reaction to today's news?
Well, I called in on the open line and it changed a lot.
But yeah, this 4.3% actually is considered full employment between 4 and 5% due to the population change jobs at much of the population changing jobs at one time.
But what I called in about was, oh me, there are communist callers that are on first-name basis every 30 days kind of get me.
But they go back to Karl Marx, not believing in God and wanting to be the left-handed Lucifer.
And Saulinsky, who was an American communist, wanted to be, he thought, Saulinsky thought that Lucifer was first rebel communist.
So when you refer to a person as the leftist, you're referring to a left-handed Lucifer.
Okay.
Jerry, I'll leave it there.
Richard in Richmond, Virginia, Democratic caller.
Good morning to you.
Happy Friday to you too, Goretta.
I mean, I don't know where to start.
So much stuff being flung everywhere.
But to begin it all, I don't believe these unemployment numbers.
I think it's going to be revised.
You see every day all these white-collar jobs people getting laid off, you know, tech companies.
You see California is going to pay to destroy 420,000 peach trees that could be going towards, you know, we've got starving people here and around the world, but they're going to pay that because Del Monte went bankrupt.
And I guess it's more profitable to destroy 420,000 peach trees than to take the food and give it to people.
But, you know, it's very frustrating because you have so much, you've got like an overload.
You've got the Howard Luttnick thing.
Nobody's really talking about it because you've got the Iran war.
And this guy refused to go under oath and video where the Clintons told Comer that they would go under oath, but they wanted the same transcribed thing because they didn't want to be embarrassed, basically, with the video.
But he didn't see it was fit for them.
He's going to hold them in contempt.
But he let this dude, Lutnick, not testify under oath at all.
It's like, what's the point of even being there?
And on top of that, he didn't have to do a video.
And they're going to do the same thing with Bondi and hit them up.
Richard's talking about the testimony earlier this week by Howard Luttnick behind closed doors before the House Oversight Committee.
They're conducting an investigation into the handling of the Epstein records.
So, Howard Luttnick, up on Capitol Hill this week, we covered a news conference that the chair of the Oversight Committee gave, James Comer, Republican, and Democrats also spoke at the microphones to reporters.
Sea Ice and Climate Change00:02:28
You can go to our website, cspan.org or c-span now, to hear the latest from both sides on that investigation.
Also, I want to share with you this morning an opinion piece written in the Washington Post by Senator John Fetterman.
I haven't changed.
Here's what has.
And he writes: Become a Republican?
I'd be terrible.
In his piece, the Pennsylvania Democrat says that my values have not changed, and I have always turned to those kinds of ideals that define being a Democrat.
I remain strongly pro-choice, pro-weed, pro-LGBT, pro-SNAP, pro-labor, and even pro-ribe over bio-slop.
You can read more from the senator if you go to the Washington Post.
Douglas, Laramie, Wyoming, Independent.
Hi, Douglas.
What's on your mind?
Good morning.
Morning.
In July of 2024, the Environmental Protection Agency released the fifth edition of climate change indicators in the United States since 1880 when thermometer-based observations began.
2014 to 2023 was the warmest decade.
September 2012 had the lowest recorded extent of Arctic sea ice, 44% below the September average for the period 1981 to 2010.
The extent of Arctic sea ice in September 2024 was the sixth smallest on record.
The frequency of heat waves increased from an average of two heat waves per year during the 1960s to six per year since 2010.
Since 1992, Greenland and Antarctica both lost above 90 billion metric tons of ice per year.
From 1960 to 2023, sea levels rose along much of the U.S. coastline, where some stations registered increases of more than eight inches.
Could these have been consequences of our dependence on fossil fuels?
All right, Douglas, climate change on his mind this morning.
Steve, California, Republican.
Morning, Greta.
Morning.
Alabama Redistricting Battles00:05:57
Well, it's open forum, so I can't mess up your program here.
Okay, my main story, oh, God, don't let me screw this up.
Okay, is in France.
They're building a fusion reactor, and they use about, I think it is, four ounces or four grams of nuclear material.
And it's basically a sun on the planet Earth.
They already put a couple billion in it.
I hope it works because it'd be free energy.
I mean, it was on the financial channel is basically where it came on.
I think it was the Edge on CNBC.
And speaking of that, they had other couple stories on there that I thought I thought were very interesting.
The one that I would like to report on is that the last oil tanker from Saudi Arabia has reached California.
So, the Western states, the gas prices will go up because of the war that's going on.
On a side note.
All right, Steve, I'm going to jump in.
I want to share some other news with folks as well.
We're an open forum, and we have not talked about the Hantavirus.
The World Health Organization yesterday held a news conference, and the director general of the World Health Organization made remarks about this outbreak on a cruise ship and why there was no concern at this time of a larger outbreak to occur.
Take a listen.
Given the incubation period of the Andes virus, which can be up to six weeks, it's possible that more cases may be reported.
While this is a serious incident, WHO assesses the public health risk as low.
It also shows why the international health regulations exist and how they work.
WHO is working with multiple governments and partners on the response under those regulations.
Our priorities are to ensure the affected patients receive care, that the remaining passengers on the ship are kept safe and treated with dignity, and to prevent any further spread of the virus.
From the World Health Organization, yesterday a briefing on this virus break out on a cruise ship.
We are in open forum.
We'll hear from Gilbert next in Birmingham, Alabama, Independent.
What's on your mind?
Yes, good morning to C-SPAN, and Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers, grandmothers, and aunts.
But what's on my mind is the disgusting finding that's coming from the Supreme Court's gutting out Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
As a man of 76 years old, I feel that this is just a throwback to the 1860s when they took the federal troops from out of the South.
And I find it quite alarming that everybody don't want to accept the fact that this country is going back to the throwbacks of George Wallace, Left America, Strong Thurman, and the likes of those people.
And it's not good for the country.
And everybody knows that everybody should have the right to vote for people who are going to represent their interests.
But here in Alabama, they don't want any black representation in this state, and they don't want any in Mississippi, South Carolina, and so on and so forth, and Tennessee either.
And it's amazing that we don't have more output erection in this country.
It's a sad day for America.
We're going back to the past.
Have a good day.
All right.
That was Gilbert in Birmingham, Alabama, talking about the Supreme Court's decision in that voting rights case that focused on districts in Louisiana.
They ruled against those districts.
And now, as he said, southern states are scrambling to redraw their maps ahead of the midterm elections.
Alabama's House approved a last-minute congressional gerrymander in that state, the Senate as well.
And we've been covering those debates across the country.
You can go to c-span.org to learn more of C-SPAN now.
Perry in Alabama, Democratic caller.
Perry.
Good morning, Greta.
Good morning.
I want to look at Iran.
We went to war with Iran, and everybody kept talking about these nuclear weapons.
And did Iran test that nuclear weapon to see how reliable it was, the existence of that weapon?
Or did we just go to war because we thought they might get a weapon?
And then plus, we're not out of this war because we're still paying the sailors and Marines over there in that Gulf War combat pay or what we call hazard pay or hostility pay.
We're not out of this war, but we let the president get away by not coming to Congress to get approval.
So something is not squaring here with the weapon that we say that they have, they thought they may have, and then we turn around and we're still paying for this war without having the president to tell the Congress about why we went to this place.
All right.
Perry's thoughts there.
In Alabama, we'll leave it there for now.
How are mayors meeting the needs of their constituents and what can Washington learn from that?
PBS host Alexander Hefner discusses what he has learned from mayors across the globe.
He joins us next and he'll want to hear from all of you about the job your mayor is doing.
Join us for that conversation next.
Bipartisanship in Washington00:03:38
In a divided media world, one place brings Americans together.
According to a new MAGIN research report, nearly 90 million Americans turn to C-SPAN, and they're almost perfectly balanced.
28% conservative, 27% liberal or progressive, 41% moderate.
Republicans watching Democrats, Democrats watching Republicans, moderates watching all sides.
Because C-SPAN viewers want the facts straight from the source.
No commentary, no agenda, just democracy.
Unfiltered every day on the C-SPAN networks.
Today, on C-SPAN Ceasefire, former Senate Democratic Majority Leader Tom Dashell and former Vice Chair of the Senate Republican Conference Roy Blunt join our host Dasha Burns for a conversation about whether bipartisanship is still possible in Washington amid the various challenges facing the country, such as the ongoing Iran war and concerns about the economy.
Watch Ceasefire today at 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPAN.
American History TV, Saturdays on C-SPAN 2, exploring the people and events that tell the American story.
As the nation celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding, join American History TV for our series, America 250, and discover the ideas and defining moments of the American story.
This weekend at 11 p.m. Eastern, we explore the role of the Cherokees in the American Revolution and talk about how combatants in conflict viewed the issue of slavery.
And at 8 p.m. Eastern, we'll share you a college lecture on the portrayal of immigrants in the video game Grand Theft Auto.
And then at 9.30 p.m. Eastern, the grandson of Bess Truman discusses the legacy of America's 33rd First Lady, exploring the American story.
Watch American History TV.
Saturdays on C-SPAN 2 and find a full schedule in your program guide or watch online anytime at c-span.org slash history.
Watch America's Book Club, C-SPAN's bold original series, Sunday, with our guest, best-selling author Heather Cox Richardson.
She's a professor of history at Boston College and whose books span subjects from the Civil War and Reconstruction to the Gilded Age, the American West, and the history of the Republican Party.
Her most recent book is the best-selling Democracy Awakening.
Her newsletter, Letters from an American, reaches over 6 million readers.
She joins our host, renowned author and civic leader David Rubinstein.
Some people who have written about the Revolutionary War say the indispensable person was George Washington.
Had he not been the general, we probably would have lost the war and so forth.
Do you agree with that?
In terms of the ideology, the person he was, and his willingness to walk away from power, that was extraordinary.
I always tell my students America has lucked out a number of times.
And the first time it lucked out was with George Washington in that position of extraordinary power.
Walking away from the Army first, and that's just why that's in the rotunda of the Capitol, but then walking away from the presidency is an extraordinary thing.
Watch America's Book Club with Heather Cox Richardson Sunday at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPAN.
Washington Journal continues.
Housing as Civil Foundation00:14:46
We want to welcome to our table this morning Alexander Hefner.
He's the host of The Open Mind, here to talk about a new series he is doing, Mayor of the World.
Where did you go for this series?
Mayors of the World.
So here in America, Detroit, Miami, Atlanta, and then abroad, our northern neighbor, Toronto, Canada, Europe, Lisbon, and Athens, and two cities, twin cities as they're known in Germany, Dusseldorf and Cologne, they call it Cologne, and Santiago, Chile.
And I hope we can expand beyond that.
I know it's a limited sample.
There are mayors in Asia, Australia, and Africa, but we wanted to start there.
And why?
Why the mayor?
So as you know, because we've been talking about this for the last few years, I went around the country having meals with governors and senators, and then I kind of got exhausted of that, but I got exhausted of a particular thing, which is this bridge-building rhetoric to where.
And the spiritual side of things was impressive in terms of, I think, people like Lisa Murkowski and Westmore and others who want to generate positive political capital and morale.
But actually facilitating that is a challenge.
And so they can talk in the abstract about bipartisan commitment and promises.
There are all different kinds of triangulation and moderation in American politics.
Some is about ego, some is about reputation, and some is about actually doing the work.
Mayors have to fill the potholes.
And they're also responsible for the health and well-being.
You mentioned just a few minutes ago hantavirus and memories of COVID.
Who was on the front lines?
Mayors dealing with overrun hospitals.
So there's something undeniable about the necessity of local government representation.
And the promise of that accountability is not abstract.
It's very concrete.
Do mayors work the same all over the world as they do in the United States?
I think they get up very early and they work really hard and they listen to constituents.
And I think most of them who are not shielded from the paparazzi, if you will, we the people, yeah, I mean, when I was walking with the mayor of Atlanta, he took me to during COVID, we got these huge container shipments all over the country, and some of them after the emergency phase of COVID were vacant.
So he took these vats, these containers, and turned them into housing.
Not temporary housing, permanent housing for people in Atlanta.
So when I was walking with him in downtown Atlanta, where he also opened the first ever grocery store, one of the problems in American cities has been food deserts, nutrition deserts.
And if you can believe it or not, in Atlanta, there was not a real supermarket for the downtown population, which includes a lot of students, Georgia State, it includes community members, a lot of businesses.
So basically, when you see these mayors, they're interacting with real people all the time.
I mean, people came up to Mayor Dickens.
They came up to Mayor Modas in Lisbon.
In the process of spending a day with the mayor, I had more interaction with constituents, their constituents, than I did with governors and senators.
That was more specific to where we were doing the interview.
Here, we were all around town, and people came up to them and told them how they were doing.
That was the old expression for Mayor Koch in New York City.
How am I doing?
He used to say to people, and they had that interaction.
I want to encourage our viewers to call in this morning.
Join us for this conversation.
Let us know how your mayor is doing.
What sort of policy issues are they taking on in your communities?
We want to hear from you.
Democrats, 202-748-8000.
Republicans, 202-748-8001.
Independents, 202-748-8002.
You can text if you don't want to call at 202-748-8003.
Alexander Hefner is our guest, and I want to show our viewers the conversation, part of it, that you had with the Atlanta mayor as part of this Mayors of the World series.
Here it is.
Our next and final stop is a grocery store.
Tell us about it.
Where are we going?
We are about to go to something that I really wanted to see happen.
And I'm very proud that we made a promise and we kept that promise.
Downtown Atlanta was a food desert.
No grocery stores downtown.
If you live downtown or work downtown or a Georgia State student that's downtown, you didn't have a grocery store that you could go to.
You had to catch a couple of buses or a train or an Uber lift to go to a grocery store.
Downtown Atlanta, unfortunately, like many downtowns, aren't as thriving 24 hours a day.
People come in from all over from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. to work and then they leave.
So it's like a ghost town in the evening unless you have a major event.
We want to change that.
I want our downtown Atlanta to be thriving with residents that live down there, businesses small and large, and people just fill with life.
So we're brightening it up.
We're adding street lights, we're paving roads, fixing sidewalks, and making sure that small businesses thrive.
One of those things was to also make sure that people could eat healthy and affordable food downtown.
We just opened a new supermarket in downtown Atlanta called Azalea Fresh Market.
This is like Maine and Maine for Atlanta.
This is Peach Street Street right here and Marietta Street.
These are, you know, this doesn't get much Atlanta downtown and right here.
And we opened a grocery store and this is backed by the city government.
This is an idea I had that says, hey, if they don't want to build a grocery store downtown, I'll build one with the help of some good folks that know how to do things in the grocery space.
This is our opportunity to say, hey, you can live, work, and play downtown.
You can go to a great park and get a bite to eat.
You can get some cooked food that's in here.
We got some pre-prepared stuff, as well as some regular groceries that you can go home and cook yourself.
So a cafe is going to be upstairs and a lot more is coming.
Alexander Hefner, is it working?
We'll have to catch up with the mayor and see.
I was there the first week and it was populated.
So the concern when you have a partnership of this nature is that it's not going to be an economic success.
So this business model is not state-owned, but state partnered, in this case, city-partnered.
It was working when I was there.
I'd like to catch up with the mayor and ask him how it's working now.
But based on how many people the streets were bustling, I think that it would work.
It makes sense.
And, you know, in each of the episodes, there is an inventive policy prescription that a mayor is proposing.
One that is particularly relevant to the climate with Mayor Mamdani in New York City proposing this Pieda Terre tax is in Toronto.
Mayor Chow proposed and successfully passed something called the vacancy tax.
So for vacant apartments that are not being used by their landlords, they're not there.
They're not renting them out.
They're just sitting there.
She said that's not acceptable in the long term with the housing crisis.
So the state has picked up some revenue to build more housing as a result of that vacancy tax.
And that's a kind of getting at a systemic issue.
I think that a grocery store in downtown Atlanta is important when you look at the largest forms of revenue that are possible in a city.
Real estate is right up there.
So that's a structural issue.
Zoning is important, but also whether or not people are living there.
I mean, I'm originally from New York, and growing up, you would see in townhouses just ghost-like character.
I mean, every day you would feel like, where is everybody?
I mean, and that's not downtown Atlanta.
That's midtown, uptown, New York City.
So to me, that was problematic and something that I was interested in exploring.
In Lisbon, Mayor Modas has made a point to ensure that first-time renters are not priced out of what has become a more expensive housing environment.
So the state will offer grants matching funds based on what you need to afford the rent in Lisbon.
Lisbon, where?
Lisbon in Portugal.
And it's a city that a lot of Europeans and Americans have flocked to for a variety of reasons.
Business, a political escape from what concerns them in the United States about being under attack from their democracy, not being as resilient.
And Lisbon, because it's a big attraction for people, has seen an influx of new ownership and renters.
And the mayor said, we're not going to price out our own residents, natives of Portugal and Lisbon.
So it was important to him.
And my understanding from talking to a New York Times real estate reporter just the other day is that this is an experiment that's going on in other cities too.
She mentioned Cleveland, Ohio, as an example of one where the city will match funds if you are priced out of the housing market so that you can rent.
Will you talk to or did you talk to Mayor Mamdani of New York?
I have not yet.
I wanted to demonstrate to him that we have these global perspectives and that we're interested in the ideas.
The mayor is a celebrity, a bona fide celebrity now.
He is considered a major figure in the Democratic Party's future.
I think we wanted to establish our credibility by visiting these places and seeing mayors in office already and what they've done.
But I'm eager to, if we keep this up and talk to more mayors, I'd like to talk to Mayor Mamdani, and I hope we can also talk to mayors in other parts of the world continents that we didn't visit yet.
Let's turn to our viewers.
Elaine in Savannah, Georgia, Democratic Cola.
Elaine, how do you like your mayor?
What kind of job are they doing?
My mayor, first of all, thank you for taking my call.
And I wanted to just give a shout out to my mayor in Savannah, Georgia.
His name is Van Johnson.
And he does an awesome job being especially a black mayor and was elected twice for his office.
Too bad he can't run three times, four times, you know, but I just wanted to say come and visit him and see our beautiful city of Savannah.
And Elaine, if Alexander Hefner visited there and sat down with your mayor, what should he focus on?
What is the mayor doing that you like?
Well, I personally don't have a complaint because I believe in letting leadership lead.
And he does take, you know, counsel, you know, from other constituents, you know, besides the, you know, the boards of, you know, elected Congress or Republic representative.
But I personally think he's doing a fantastic job.
All right.
Thank you for the call.
Did you talk to mayors about popularity and how they retain positive approval ratings like that caller on the Savannah mayor?
So first of all, the caller is emblematic of a lot of people.
You know, we see this kind of harangue of stimuli around us on social media.
That's not representative of the majority of the American people.
That caller is representative of the majority of the American people who understand the importance, especially if you have a family and children, of local municipal issues and services.
And most people, if they don't like their mayor, they see an avenue to engage with them in the democratic process.
And I did visit Savannah not to meet with the mayor, but in an earlier season of The Open Mind, sat down in Savannah with Senator Warnock.
And Savannah was a lively, vibrant place with all the trappings of what you would hope for in a city, to have access to nature, a waterfront, employment, a tourism sector.
So all those things are fashioned into the heartbeat of a city.
In terms of your question about popularity, I think that the mayor of Athens was thinking about the Mamdani effect in TikTok and how that can be deployed.
And I asked him that question about how much do you want to engage your own constituents in solving a problem?
In the case of Athens, there have been some major fires surrounding Greece and multiple islands over the last few years, which has historically happened, but he's concerned that climate change is making that problem more extreme.
And also he's been concerned with the kind of deforestation of the islands, specifically in Athens, that it's so densely populated, there's more smog and people than ever before and fewer birds and trees.
So he's made an effort to greenify the entirety around the Acropolis where he jogs not every morning, but the mornings he can.
But the one thing that most of these mayors say is their sanitation chief is the one that they're on the phone with first thing in the morning.
And again, that's because they're responsible for the people, the smells of the city, the tastes of the city, making sure that we're feeling like it's civil society.
And that's why these issues are just unmistakable in the way that governors and senators can skirt around them.
Mayors cannot.
We'll go to New York.
Chuck is there on our line for Republicans.
So our mayor, I would encourage your guests to come up and speak to our mayor, Sharon Owens.
She's the first black woman to be elected president, and I think she'll do a decent job.
The problem is the city is too far gone.
We're number one in the city.
What city are you calling from, Chuck?
Syracuse, New York.
Okay.
And we're number one in child poverty.
We have no grocery stores.
And the only thing we have going for us is Syracuse University, which is our only saving grace.
But if you go to the north side or you go to the west side, this is as close to the third world in America as you're going to get.
City Poverty and Corruption00:16:00
And it's completely run by Democrats.
So although she's probably the most qualified candidate or the most qualified mayor we've had in maybe 50 years, and she's a Syracuse graduate, there are so many problems here in the city, it's too far gone.
Okay, well, let's take that.
We'll take that.
Well, yeah, this is a really important issue.
I mean, thanks to the caller for making that observation.
Folks want to talk a lot today about the impact of AI, the displacement of jobs, the disappearance of economic vitality that's going to result from this revolution that's already happening.
But it's worthwhile and really important to note that that kind of deterioration of the social fabric, antiquated infrastructure, poverty, crime, that that does pervade places, especially places that are not the talk of the town, that are not the major cities.
I think we have to accept that and accept that the challenge presented by further technological upheaval is made even harder because of the intransigence of local leadership in some municipalities that see things as, well, this is acceptable.
This is the way it's always been.
And that's a destructive mindset.
If we do more of these interviews with mayors, I think going to a place like that where there is a feeling that things have gone wrong would be important.
I mean, there are always going to be neighborhoods that are vulnerable to that kind of disempowerment, disenfranchisement, poverty, et cetera.
The thing to do is to understand why.
I mean, and I don't know if mayors are capable of addressing it at that level.
Yes, they're responsible for democratic governance and are more accountable than senators and governors, but they, in many cases, in the case of Athens, the mayor is restricted by federal authorities from some of the more ambitious projects that he wants to undertake.
I mean, he was very proud of new lights that he put up around the Acropolis and the ancient theaters there.
But he's hamstrung in some respects to do that.
He was able to establish some health clinics for residents of Athens.
So I think it's worth acknowledging that we feel in America that despite all these promises of populist economic agendas, namely President Trump for three campaigns, but also Senator Sanders, that, well, where's the beef?
Like, where's the beef of the conditions that feel like they've improved?
And I think that's important to talk about, the systemic underlying challenge of an economy that, you know, in the case of the caller's comment, the economic rights of people are not expressed and they may not have the housing or employment or opportunities to express them.
Alexander Hefner is our guest here this morning.
He's the PBS host of The Open Mind here to talk about his new series, Mayors of the World.
He's traveled around the United States.
He's gone overseas.
The series continues.
And we want to hear from all of you about the job your mayor is doing.
Bruce in Lexington, Kentucky, Republican.
My mayor's middle of the road.
Not very, you know, nothing super special, but I think she does a good job.
Much better than Madame or the Karen Bass or the racist Chicago mayor who admits discriminating against white people.
And Mayor Madame blaming Jews for getting attacked.
And then you've got Karen Bass out there with one big party all the way down the sidewalk, smoking crack, shooting drugs.
Yeah.
I think our mayor is doing a lot pretty damn.
Is your mayor Bruce?
Is your mayor a conservative?
No.
I mean, she's not a total left-wing Democrat or nothing, but she's not a conservative.
She's not a Republican or anything like that.
All right, Bruce, they're in Lexington, Kentucky.
How difficult is it for mayors to toe the party line when they are much closer to their constituents physically?
They go to the same grocery stores and schools and churches than maybe members of Congress who spend a good portion of their time out here in Washington, D.C.
So most mayors have councils, and many mayors are still on the party or partisan system, if you will.
But Greta, that's the point.
They don't really toe the line because they don't have to.
They are concerned about the well-being of their people.
And the greatest example of this, I think, was the mayor and is the mayor of Santiago, Chile.
So here's a person who came of age as the coup was happening there.
And he tells a story in the episode about how his dad was on the left and his mom was on the right.
And even as the coup was unfolding, there were portraits in the house of Allende, who had been deposed and killed, and his successor, the military junta, Pinochet.
And he lived in this house and grew up to be a cop, a police officer, but it was not a politicized role.
And he describes how he came to see that even amidst that transition of government, which was a violent one, he saw that he didn't view people on the left as criminals.
He didn't view them as agitators.
They thought differently than his mom, who was for Pinochet.
And maybe they thought differently than him.
I mean, he considers himself center-right in his role as mayor.
But it's interesting, he does not want to stigmatize and he does not attack people on the basis of their partisan or political affiliations.
And we did the interview, at least part of it, at what is the equivalent of, from my native New York, One Police Plaza, right?
We did it at the security center, and you can see inside the officers monitoring and surveilling various densely populated pockets of the city to protect railways and subways and streets.
And so here's someone who he's not castigating anyone, a cop who's concerned about the security of people, but he's not maligning the left, you know, or the right.
And that's the way most mayors are.
They're not interested in the partisan theatrics.
They might like their celebrity status to be on the rise, but they care about people.
All right.
We'll go to Christopher in Tamar, Florida, Independent.
Did I pronounce the name of your city correctly?
Yes, Tamarak of Florida.
Okay.
Hi.
Good morning.
Good morning.
And I would like to say good morning to all these pen.
My mayor is Michelle J. Gomez.
She is Hispanic.
She is nonpartisan.
And I would like to say that she has done a pretty good job.
She is really nonpartisan, so she likes to work with the community.
And I think, yeah, that's how politics should be, right?
I feel like we live in a very polarized society today, left versus right, with all of these populist movements.
And, you know, I am 20 years old, and my parents are Cuban, so they've escaped communism.
They are part of the Cuban exile community here in Miami.
And I can tell you one thing.
I understand this left versus right, but I mean, if you go to Cuba and you see the disaster there has been with that government, you will understand why Cubans really hate these leftist policies.
It's not because they necessarily want to hate them.
It's that if you've seen around the world, what communism has bring is misery.
If you see in the Soviet, in the Soviet Union, with Stalin and Mao with China, millions died of hunger.
So I obviously do not hate leftists, but do I hate necessarily the policy, right?
I feel like we as a society need to respect private property and respect ownership of businesses so that a society can prosper.
The government should not intervene on those stuff.
All right, Christopher, thank you for the phone call.
Your reaction.
Well, I think that there's been misery in the places that the caller described.
So Cuba, which has been lacking power a lot in the last few months.
And I'm sure people are not able to feel the prosperity there.
And Russia has been a case of that.
But it's not just about socialism.
I think it's about corruption.
And it's interesting.
I have a piece coming out next week on this subject.
You know, the richest man in the world recently said on his social media platform, of course, we're talking about Elon Musk on X, that the machines are coming.
They're going to take over everything.
And Americans, and I think he means really not just Americans, all citizens deserve not universal basic income.
He said high income.
I don't think he's deleted this post, by the way.
It's so interesting to me because Musk, like the caller, is concerned about socialism.
He's concerned about the idea of government assistance.
And yet he's observing that technology that he is partially creating in some of his platforms is going to create this culture where people are not going to have jobs in the traditional format.
So while I think the caller and Musk are correct that there are countries that have fallen to that kind of scandalous, corrupt, ineffective socialistic policy, at the same time, there's going to be a new paradigm.
And I wouldn't call it socialism.
And I don't think most people would.
Republicans aren't on the record against universal basic income in the way they were on the record against the Green New Deal.
Most people haven't taken a position yet on this idea.
You know, Republicans were very proud of President Trump during his first administration with those stimulus checks for people to get a source of funding during that crisis period.
And a lot of people thought of the Great Recession and the idea that President Obama failed in not bailing out real people who were being foreclosed on.
I remember talking with your colleague Pedro about this in 2009 on this same show.
So I think I would ask the caller to think about what is the political system.
We can call it capitalism plus.
We could call it something else.
But the system that's going to recognize that people aren't guaranteed now and maybe even less guaranteed in the future a livable wage, what do you do about it?
And again, it's interesting that Musk has invested all of his political capital in an oligarchic serving presidency, President Trump, that talks a really great game on we the people.
But then when it comes to policy, he's not invested in a political system that's going to give universal high income to people.
They haven't even envisioned what that would look like.
So let's start envisioning what that would look like.
Not handouts, but a system that works for people.
I mean, personally, I would rather people be employed than machines be employed, but that's the conundrum of this moment.
We'll go to Minneapolis.
Richard is there on our line for Republicans.
Richard, what do you make of Mayor Fry in Minneapolis?
Well, yes.
Yeah, this is Richard.
Good morning.
Mayor Fry, I have about three things about Mayor Fry.
He's a liberal.
He's very liberal, but compared to our city council, he's moderate because they have a far left city council.
About half of them on there are Democratic socialists of America.
And beware of the Democratic Socialists of America.
They're way, way left.
And what happened at Minneapolis is, like some other cities, our downtown buildings are about two-thirds full and they're devalued.
So that means the property tax on our houses went way up about 20% every year for three years.
And we don't have enough money left over to repair our houses and pay our property tax.
And so, yeah, we went to a strong mayor system, and that made the city council very, very mad.
And they're fuming about it now, and the city council is fighting amongst each other.
And it's very, very liberal here, and it's going to be hard to live here, I guess, because the property tax just keeps going.
Okay, Richard, we'll take that.
We'll take those points.
Yeah, I think probably property taxes next to health insurance companies are the least favorable institutions or mechanisms of government in America.
So I would challenge Richard, who I think is spot on, and most homeowners would agree with the nuisance and imposition of property taxes, to encourage Mayor Fry there in Minneapolis or the governor, who I think may Governor Klobuchar, succeeding Governor Walls, come next year, to call for citizen assemblies.
So we in America know about the constitutional conventions.
Most of your callers probably do.
And many of them probably have, at one point or another, online with you advocated for a constitutional convention to fix things.
But there's a starting point on the local level, and it could be at the city level or the gubernatorial level, the state level, which is a citizen assembly.
A lot of people don't know what citizen assemblies are, but the idea is you take the jury system.
We're familiar with jury duty.
And instead of sending random applications for that to citizens, you invite your citizens to an assembly to address an issue.
In fact, a Yale University political scientist is working on this with the Connecticut government to do a citizen assembly on property taxes.
And the idea is that the first hundred people or thousand people that respond to the invitation by a city or a state to participate in a city assembly, a citizen assembly, that they become members of this assembly and get to vote on what to do about a problem.
Participatory Governing Models00:07:17
Now, in the case of the Connecticut experiment, my understanding is that the project is endorsed by the state's treasurer or comptroller, but it doesn't have any power beyond that.
So you would have to try to insist at the local level that the mayor enlist people to have a function, meaning what they decide in the citizen assembly actually has weight and can have the same power as legislation in effect.
But a lot of people feel powerless in our democracy now.
And if they don't want to feel powerless, I think they need to engage in these types of institutions.
Participatory governing is one of them.
It's like a town hall meeting, but you decide where the budget goes for your county, city, state.
And I don't see the urgency from citizens to actually do these types of experiments.
But I would encourage anybody who ever has called into C-SPAN who cares about their country so deeply to try to perform that civic duty on the phone, but then create a mechanism for real life change in their community.
Citizen assemblies is the way to do that.
It's basically kind of the cousin of the Constitutional Convention.
Together, if you have citizen assemblies in 50 states, you can make a lot of difference.
And since this program is an assembly, right, we're hearing from the American people, and we know from surveys the C-SPAN viewers are also voters.
We have a very high rate of viewers that vote.
And so they are engaged in our civics.
Absolutely.
Did you talk with mayors from other countries who hold these types of assemblies?
In Lisbon, they do.
And they hold them at a beautiful city hall in Lisbon.
The mayor was showing me the room where they do the citizen assembly.
And it inspires a real sense of duty and patriotism.
And he really, like the mayor of Athens too, wants to engage the populace in these types of mechanisms for reform.
So, yeah, and I mean, it's always interesting to me to observe that more people pay their taxes in America.
I've said this on your air, than vote.
And I mean, where have we come as a society?
I mean, we were furious about not being represented and threw the tea into the harbor.
And now we kind of hold our nose, pay our taxes, and not expect to be represented.
Institutions like participatory governing and citizen assemblies and constitutional conventions are the way to do it.
There are ways to do it.
We can observe the problem, but also practice the solution.
Where can people find this series?
So they can go to theopenmind.com.
They can go to 13.org slash openmind.
The first episode will be broadcast and streaming this coming weekend, and that's with Mayor Modes in Lisbon.
And then you can see the plethora of other mayors over the next 10 or so weeks that I've mentioned, Mayor Des Bordes in Santiago.
One of the other, this is a harrowing story, but also gets at the emotional plug and pull of civic life.
The mayor of what they say in Germany, Köln, we call Cologne, Germany, nearly died in an assassination attempt on her life and was the victim of an extremist who didn't like her pro-immigration stance.
So, I mean, there's some really important stories about innovation and policymaking, but also, like Mayor Des Boris and Mayor Ricker of Cohn, there's some personal stories that are very profound.
Where will you go next and why?
How are you picking these cities?
You know, some of it is happenstance.
Some of it is just the alignment of the stars in the constellation makes sense.
In a given season, you don't really approach it and say, I'm going to go to Santiago and I'm going to go to Germany.
I often find, as you do here, when people accept your invitation to join you, they believe in the principle of your journalism, of the idea of having these types of dialogue.
So if Mayor Mamdani answers the call, I'll go to my native New York and speak with him.
Like I said, I'd really like to get to a few other continents to experience the mayoralty there.
The unifying fabric has been democracies in the work that I do.
So it would be mayors who were legitimately elected in democratic systems.
There are some mayors that are appointed places in the world that would probably not interest me as much.
And I hope that these mayors together can kind of resolve the pressing issue of housing because it seems to me that the most unifying view, perspective across all these mayors, Toronto, Santiago, Athens, here, Detroit, Miami, Atlanta, is housing is foundational and essential to civil society.
Whether you view housing as a human right, that's kind of a separate question, but I think all the mayors agree if you don't have accessible, affordable, safe, clean housing, you've got many problems.
And what are some of the mayors doing about housing?
So in that episode that you showed with Mayor Dickens, the first half of it is at the melody.
So again, taking these shipment containers and making it into permanent, sustainable housing in the city.
The vacancy tax, the renters' assistance were the big examples.
One thing that we didn't get into in depth, but I know mayors have problems with the zoning laws.
And when some of your callers refer to council members who are intransigent or accepting the status quo, I think the zoning has prevented a lot of growth and building that's necessary.
One thing to just point out, because this has been a prevalent theme in discussions about housing, I don't think it's entirely about construction.
There is always construction somewhere.
I think it's also about the systemic problems and the incentives of whether people can live and have livable wages, basically happy lives in these places.
And if you have housing, that doesn't guarantee that you're going to be able to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.
I think it's the starting point, but it's not the end point.
So there are interesting prescriptions across the mayors in terms of growth.
The ones that I would point to in particular were Atlanta, Georgia, Lisbon, Portugal, and Toronto, Canada.
Toronto, Canada, I think, deals with the most intrinsic problem.
If you have an economy driven by land ownership and that person is not using the land for the benefit of people and the economic benefit, I mean, when you rent to someone, you're benefiting too.
It's not like you're only benefiting the person who you're renting to.
So those were the three cities where I thought that the ideas of prescriptions to the housing crisis were most apparent.
Global Mayors Solve Housing00:00:45
The new series is called Mayors of the World, Alexander Hefner, the host of The Open Mind, embarking on this new series and sharing with us this morning.
We thank you.
Thanks, Greta.
And that does it for today's Washington Journal happening now in Washington.
Experts holding a discussion on Russia, Ukraine, and the resulting economic and military domestic impacts of that conflict on both countries, hosted by the Atlantic Council.
Live coverage here on C-SPAN.
At the Atlantic Council, we have a wonderful event for you today.
We're going to talk about the fissures, F-I-S-S-U-R-E-S, that have been appearing.