The NPR Politics Podcast - How Trump Is Governing In His Second Term

Episode Date: January 27, 2025

This past weekend, President Trump showed the country how he plans to govern in his second term. On Friday, he fired independent inspectors general and on Sunday, he threatened Colombia with a trade war. This episode: White House correspondents Deepa Shivaram and Tamara Keith and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.The podcast is produced by Bria Suggs & Kelli Wessinger, and edited by Casey Morell. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Tanya Mosley, co-host of Fresh Air, and I just talked to Pamela Anderson about her big career comeback after years in the tabloids and not being taken seriously. She's entered a new era on stage and screen. Suzanne Somers had a great line. She said, you can't play a dumb blonde and be a dumb blonde. Find this interview with Pamela Anderson wherever you listen to Fresh Air. Hi, this is Virag in Washington, D.C. It's my first day in town after moving across the Atlantic. This show was recorded at 1 0 6 p.m. on Monday, January 27th, 2025.

Things may have changed by the time you hear this. All right, here's the show. hear this. All right, here's the show. Welcome. Wait, what? That just feels like a teaser. What is she doing here? Is this is this part of the Trump administration is just totally unrelated. I mean, moving across the Atlantic, but like from where? That's a big large swath of options. And why is she so calm about moving to DC? Yeah, of all things. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Deepa Sivaram. I cover the White House. I'm Tamara Keith. I also cover the White House. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And today we're talking about how President Trump made a show of how he plans to govern in his second term. On Friday night, the White House fired about 17 independent inspectors general that was first reported by the Washington

Post. Tam, a lot to get into. So I'm going to start with you. There are a lot of questions I have, but I just kind of want to start at the beginning here. What do we know about what happened? Right. So what we know is that these inspectors general got an email from the White House saying, today's your last day, you're done. One of the inspectors general was interviewed on MSNBC and said he was out to dinner with friends, started getting calls from other inspectors general and was like, oh, I'm so sorry that happened to you, opens his email and learns, oh, I too was fired.

The group chat was popping. The group chat was in fact popping. These are people who investigate the government essentially. They are looking for waste, fraud, and abuse. They are the ones that investigate the agencies and find out if the agencies are doing what the agencies should be doing. Right. And to your point, these are jobs that are not political in nature. That's right.

These are supposed to be apolitical. They serve long terms, but their terms do not coincide with a president's term. There are inspectors general who have served for literally decades. You know, and some of these people were appointed by President Trump himself the first time, but I guess their sin is that they served the following four years, which they're, like you said, supposed to be nonpartisan, but Trump wants a clean slate. And this shows that they're really going to go deep on who they think is with them or not.

Right. And so what has the president said? Have we heard from him? Yes, we have. He came back to the press cabin on Air Force One and talked to reporters at length. And he said, oh, this is just a very common thing to do. It's like replacing the US attorneys. That's not actually true.

Replacing the US attorneys is a very common thing to do. Replacing the inspector's general is not. When Ronald Reagan did it back in 1981, when he came into office, people were scandalized. Members of Congress were scandalized. And ultimately, many of them were hired back. But what Trump said is that some people thought that some of them were unfair or were not doing the job. And so he said, let's get rid of them. As for who he would put in their place, he was asked, oh, are you going to put your people

in there? And Trump said, they're not my people, but we'll put people in there that will be very good. So he was very casual about it. But certainly this is a stress test. To be clear, this is not something that every president kind of comes in and is just like, okay, clean house, we're going to start from scratch. No, right. They usually don't do that.

I mean, Tam noted that Ronald Reagan did this in the early 1980s when he first came in. But this does appear to violate a 2022 law that Congress passed that said that the president has to give 30 days notice to Congress to say what his reasons are and who the inspector's general would be that would be fired rather than just being able to do it overnight. But that hasn't appeared to matter to Trump here, obviously, because he feels he has the authority to do it. And on Meet the Press, Lindsey Graham, the senator from South Carolina, was asked about

whether or not Trump violated the law. I'm not overly worried about that. It's not the first time people have come in and put their team in place. When you win an election, you need people in your administration that reflect your views. So I'm not really worried about that. But very quickly, the law says he's supposed to do 30 days notice. He didn't do that. Do you think he violated the law? Well, technically, yeah, but he has the authority to do it. So I'm not losing a whole lot of sleep that he wants to change the personnel out. Yeah. So technically, yeah, violated the law, but I guess the law in this case,

Lindsey Graham feels is just a technicality. And you know, the fact is the Supreme court has pretty much allowed presidents now going forward to do what they want, as long as they're, uh, it, there are official acts that they are doing, and this certainly is an official act. So a president has presumed immunity. So nothing in particular of consequence would happen to President Trump anyway. We don't know how this is going to shake out as far as what the inspectors general who were fired are going to do. But even so, it would just be a 30 day difference. So I think a lot of Republicans

are saying, look, he's getting the people he wants. The whole idea of inspectors general to look into agencies came about after the Nixon administration during this period of government reform in the late 1970s. And they're kind of a quirky thing, right? They're supposed to be independent, but they are technically part of the executive branch. And the president is the head of the executive branch.

Congress, with this 2022 law, was saying, yeah, but we want you to give us notice because we actually really care about the independence of inspectors general. We want to know if they're being fired and why. But if Congress, and particularly Republicans in Congress, are not going to push back hard on this, then there really isn't much of an enforcement mechanism. Yeah. Big question on the checks and balances of all of this. Someone like Lindsey Graham saying like, technically, yeah, not making a big deal out of it. He is, you know, someone

who was an ally of President Trump. Are there other members of Congress that are speaking out and maybe taking this in a different way? Chuck Grassley, he's a Republican from Iowa, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee. He loves Inspectors General, feels that their role is really important. He said in a statement that was obtained by CNN, there may be good reason the IGs were fired. We need to know that if so, I'd like further explanation from President Trump. Regardless, the 30-day detailed notice of removal that the law demands was not provided to Congress. His hair was not on fire about this. Democrats, on the other hand, their hair is on fire, but there isn't much that they can do, given that

Republicans control the House and the Senate and the White House. I think that the bigger issue then becomes who replaces these inspectors general. Yeah. And I think that it goes to the bigger picture of the fact that we are supposed to have three independent branches of the government that are supposed to be checks and balances on each other when it comes to the executive branch, which the president runs Congress, which Lindsey Graham is a part of and the judiciary, which, you know, of course, President Trump appointed three of the Supreme Court justices who are on the court now. And there's a much more of a symbiosis between those three branches than there has been many

times in the past. And it even goes to things that are as small as who the chairman on committees are going to be. Usually that kind of thing is reserved for seniority, people who are playing the inside game pretty well. And the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, demoted Mike Turner, who was the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, but because President Trump said he didn't want him to be there because he doesn't feel he's Trumpy enough.

Yeah, it really leaves a lot of question about what oversight looks like, what checks and balances even turn into in this era that we're living in. I think it really signals though, that there won't be a lot of checks and balances, that what we're looking at is Trump funneling power and wanting to have more power than maybe we've seen a president have previously. Yeah. All right, we're gonna take a quick break and we'll be back in a moment.

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called Here and Now, Anytime. And we're back. And another piece of news from the weekend, President Trump threatened to start a trade war over deportation flights to Colombia. Once again, Tam, a lot to get into, but I want to start at the beginning. Talk to me about what these flights were. I mean, who were on these flights? Where were they supposed to be going? And then we can get into like why it got complicated. There were two military transport planes with Colombian citizens being deported from the U.S. and basically the president of Colombia said,

no, you can't land here. And so then Trump went on truth social and was like said that there would be tariffs, there would be other sanctions, that this is a national security issue and how dare you. And then there were like 12 hours of back and forth of escalating threats and then it was resolved. And Columbia is going to resume accepting flights and the White House says that President Trump got everything he wants and he won't sign those tariffs as long as Colombia complies. Okay. So like a lot of maybe back-channeling diplomacy that happened like out loud. Yeah. Let's just say that in a typical administration, arranging for flights, US military flights to enter the airspace of another country is the kind of thing that would be handled through

diplomatic channels. We would never have known that it was happening and it certainly would not have been an escalating war of words on social media. But this is the Trump administration and Trump wants to send a message and other countries are trying to just figure out how to exist in Trump's world. And Domenico, I mean, put this in context for us. I mean, like, how does this really contradict what a quote unquote typical president would do when it comes to foreign policy? Definitely. And I think that it's not unexpected because Trump had promised that he was going to use tariffs to leverage allies, right?

I mean, he'd been talking about imports and wanting to rebalance trade deficits with other countries with US allies, as opposed to really how he treats a lot of adversaries of the United States, strongmen in other countries, people like MBS, Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, who he feels the US needs to be able to win over a little bit to be able to, you know, what he feels is key to the Middle East in bringing peace there, but with a country like Columbia Which is a non NATO ally the US usually doesn't take this kind of hardball tech I will say though that it is a win for Trump because these were Colombians who are being sent back to Colombia they were in the United States without permanent legal status. It'd be different. I am going to be very curious to see

what happens if, let's say, there are Venezuelans in the United States, which we know there are many who are in the country without permanent legal status, who are then sent to Colombia because the United States doesn't have relations in the same way with a country like Venezuela and they're not going to accept planes of Venezuelans back. How Trump is going to deal with that as opposed to dealing with ostensibly what is really an ally. Well, and Colombia had accepted flights of Colombians before. It's not like this is the first time a flight of

Colombians were deported back to Colombia and the plane was accepted. This is just a new administration and it turned into a fight. But the fact is Trump asserted dominance. And I think that was the point. Yeah. And one more thing I wanted to get to, there are more hearings this week for Trump's pick for his cabinet, including some pretty controversial ones, RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Cash Patel. What can we expect? What are you guys watching for this week? Yeah, I mean, RFK Jr. is going to be testifying, you know, in his hearing to be HHS Secretary

of Health and Human Services, Secretary Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence, Cash Patel for FBI Director. And I thought it was really notable that Republicans, John Thune, the majority leader, decided to put these all on one day together. That's the worst. Yeah. Because that is flooding the zone, right? It is. And it's going to make it really difficult for any news from those to break through for

what senators should focus on who might be opposed to them. And then I'm really going to be curious to see how specifically Tulsi Gabbard does, because I think that she might be the most vulnerable of these three as controversial and as conspiratorial as all three have been in the past. I do think Gabbard with her background as remember she was a Democratic member of Congress, but she has some real issues when it comes to her travels to Syria during the Obama administration echoing some of the talking points of Russia and Vladimir Putin. I think that there are going to be a lot of Republicans who have questions for her on those things.

And I think, substantively, we're going to learn a lot too from these three because, you know, the likelihood is that RFK Jr. and Kash Patel are both going to be confirmed for very important positions in the U.S. government. We know how RFK Jr. has felt about things like vaccines, but we also know that there's a lot of Republicans opposed to him because of his pro-abortion rights positions. And Cash Patel, who has talked of this enemies list and who he winds up going after, if he does that at the FBI, really some very consequential things that both men could do.

All right, we're going to leave it there for today. I'm Deepa Sivaram. I cover the White House. I'm Tamara Keith. I also cover the White House. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. Listen to this podcast sponsor free on Amazon Music with a Prime membership or any podcast app by subscribing to NPR Politics Plus at plus.npr.org. That's plus.npr.org.