The NPR Politics Podcast - Latest News + Listener Mail

Episode Date: February 21, 2017

This episode: host/White House correspondent Tamara Keith, political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben, and political editor Domenico Montanaro, with a special appearance by Cory Turner of the NPR Ed team. More coverage at nprpolitics.org. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Tim from Boston. This podcast was recorded at 333 and 35 seconds. Things may change by the time you hear it. Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage at npr.org, on the NPR One app, and on your local public radio station. Okay, here's the show. It's the NPR Politics Podcast, here to answer some of your questions about politics and to talk a bit about the day's news. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. Hello, guys.

Hey, Sam. So you guys are at HQ. I'm here at the White House in our tiny little booth in the basement. All right. Yeah. I'm going to stretch my arms out. How tiny exactly? I've never been. You know, it is not actually that tiny. It's technically a double wide. So we answer listener mail whenever we can find time and the news cycle is not too crazy. So a reminder, you can write us with your questions and comments at nprpolitics at npr.org. That's our email. And you can also record a voice memo and send your question to us that way also via

the email. But before we get to the mail, let's say a quick word about the news over the weekend that President Trump has chosen Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster to be his new national security advisor. And this is a pick that's being endorsed by Democrats and Republicans, including many people who've been critical of the president, right? Right. Yeah. I mean, Senator John McCain, for example, gave him a pretty ringing endorsement. This guy is an academic. He wrote a book called Dereliction of Duty. It was about the Vietnam War. It really challenged the general thinking on the Vietnam War, for example, that it was politics and politicians, the presidents in particular, that got us into the war. Whereas he said, you know, the Joint Chiefs of Staff really

had a role to play in this as well. So he is very well studied. One comparison that I saw made today was that bringing him in, it's kind of like bringing in Ben Bernanke, a famous student of the Great Depression, right before the Great Recession. And, you know, it's kind of like bringing in Ben Bernanke, a famous student of the Great Depression, right before the Great Recession. And, you know, he's supposed to be somebody who's been a great strategist within the military. And he is somebody who, as we all know, Donald Trump values greatly presence. You have to have presence in the room so that you can stand out. And apparently General McMaster is like that. He can walk into a room, command a room, and is bold, understands all of the different sides of the coin, and can make an

argument with President Trump or anybody else in the room. And we all know that there are lots of competing factions for the president's attention, and that is an important quality. One other thing that we learned today is that the White House is saying, insisting that Lieutenant General McMaster will be able to pick his own team, bring in his own staff. They say he's happy with the people that are there, but it's possible that he could shake things up in the National Security Council. And one other interesting small thing, he will remain on active duty. Which means when you see the president's national security advisor, he will be in military uniform. And another piece of news from today, the Department of Homeland Security issued new policies aimed at detaining and deporting more immigrants from the country who are here illegally. The Department of Homeland Security put out two memos.

They lay out a series of steps the agency plans to take to implement Trump's executive orders from January. Those orders called for increased border security and tougher enforcement of the nation's immigration laws. So how is this different? Well, one thing that makes this different from President Obama's immigration enforcement is that under President Obama, they enforce this by giving special priority to immigrants who are in the country illegally and who had committed serious crimes. Now they're expanding that out to people who have committed, you know, maybe non-serious crimes. Like driving without a driver's license kind of crimes? Yeah. I mean, compare felonies versus misdemeanors, for example. You know,

the Obama administration had focused primarily on those who had committed felonies as opposed to going after anybody who had a criminal record to give enforcement agents a reason to kick people out. A couple other things I found kind of interesting in this. One, they want to increase the number of immigration judges and expand the pool of immigrants prioritized for removal. And the big change here is from two weeks to two years. So right now, currently, the courts prioritize those who've been in the country illegally under two weeks. Now, the reason for that is because there just aren't enough immigration judges to process all of those folks. There's already a backlog. And I don't understand, honestly,

they haven't talked much about the funding for any of this. Where does the money come from to put the number of judges necessary or needed on the courts to get this done? The 2013 Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill would have put 40 new judges on there and the judges union was saying that wasn't enough. So how this gets accomplished is completely unclear at this point. Well, and not only that, you talk about expanding it from two weeks to two years. One thing that I was reading about this is that it also expands out geographically. The priority used to be to people who were within X miles of the border. Now it is nationwide, which means not

only do you need more people, you need more people in more places, as I understand it. And the White House press secretary today said that the Department of Homeland Security is working through trying to figure out where the money would come from, whether they could change internal priorities or whether they're going to have to ask Congress for more money. It seems highly likely that at some point they're going to have to ask Congress for more money. But this is clearly a priority for the Trump administration and for many Republicans in Congress, and they control Congress. So, Tam, we have this new framework for enforcement right now. So is this meant to send a particular message, you know, maybe be more afraid to immigrant communities in the U.S.? Sean Spicer was asked that particular question more or less today in the White House

press briefing. One thing he said is that the program known as DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which was the Obama administration policy that sought to give some sense of security to so-called dreamers, the young people brought into the country when they were even younger, that is not affected by this order. But he said that people are in this country illegally. It is the law of the United States that they shouldn't be here illegally and that it is the right of this administration to do that. This is consistent with everything the president has talked about, which is prioritizing the people who are here who represent a threat to public safety or have a criminal record. And all this does is lay out the exact procedures to make sure that that subgroup of people who pose a threat to our nation because of a conviction or a violation of public safety or have a criminal record are

adjudicated first and foremost. That's it, plain and simple. I mean, this is at its core prosecutorial discretion. What President Obama did during his administration was prosecutorial discretion. They had different priorities. This administration is coming in and they're saying we are going to use this same thing, this idea of prosecutorial discretion, and have the White House saying that they don't expect mass deportation when they were asked specifically about that, but they didn't exactly define what mass deportation means, right? more people than any president previously. If this expands, how many people could be deported? Was that mass deportation? Was it not? Well, and what Spicer said is that the universe of people that they are specifically going for is a million people, which is a lot. A lot. But President Obama deported almost three times that. And we should add sort of taking that in terms of the context of what there are estimated to be around 11 million people in the country illegally. So that's sort of the universe we're talking about here. Right. And one final piece of news, the fact that it was news today when the president at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture

finally spoke out against recent waves of threats against Jewish community centers across the country. The anti-Semitic threats targeting our Jewish community and community centers are horrible and are painful and a very sad reminder of the work that still must be done to root out hate and prejudice and evil. Domenico, the president has been asked to weigh in on this several times recently, and he's been criticized for not saying something like this earlier. So this president is always defensive when it comes to this subject, and it's in part because he is so sensitive to the subtext in every kind of question, right?

You saw him avoid the question at the press conference the other day where he essentially told a reporter to sit down and be quiet. I'm not sure he fully heard the question. who are associated with the alt-right or white nationalism, who, you know, maybe tweeted at Donald Trump things that were anti-Semitic, that were retweeted by his campaign, either on purpose or unwittingly. So there's been this kind of flirtation that people have noticed and picked up on during the campaign. But now Donald Trump is president of the United States, and the president sets the moral tone. Well, we should add here that, you know, this wasn't a one-time thing. Part of the reason that people keep asking is that there seems to be a bit of a narrative building here. And I'm not saying intentionally on Donald Trump's part here, but for example, there was that Holocaust Remembrance

Day statement that did not mention the Jewish people. And that press conference that Domenico was talking about the day before at President Trump's press availability with Benjamin Netanyahu, another reporter asked him a question about xenophobia and racism. And Donald Trump responded with a major part of his answer being about his electoral college victory as opposed to being more about xenophobia and racism. So this has been a few times that this has come up and the people have been wondering about this. Yeah, and the president's daughter is Jewish. His son-in-law is Jewish. His grandchildren are Jewish, something that he mentions frequently. But there's just something where he has taken it as a personal affront, like people are accusing him of being anti-Semitic

rather than taking it as an opportunity to simply say, hey, these threats against Jewish community centers that have been on the rise, that's terrible. That white nationalist who was arrested for planning an attack on a synagogue, that's not good. Instead, he has sort of made it about himself in a weird way. But this statement today was an attempt to get that right. So, Tam, I mean, the point here is that the president of the United States is now the president of the United States. President Trump is no longer campaigning and he has to think more big picture, more about how he's trying to bring the country together and that it's not necessarily everything is about him personally, but is about what kind of message he wants to set forth, not only for himself, his campaign, whether or not he can win, but what America represents. OK, so we will have more on the news of the week this Thursday in our roundup. But now

for some questions. Let's start with one from Lindsay here in the D.C. area. She writes, Hi, hoping you can help me understand if this is something normal. I saw this survey from the Trump team was sent to Trump's fan base. And she links to what was called the mainstream media accountability survey. She asks, is it kosher to send out questionnaires like this? Is this something we should expect to see Trump citing in the next few weeks? Keep up the great work. Saw you guys live last week. Take care, Lindsay. Danielle, you've been writing about this. Yeah, thanks, Lindsay, for coming to our show. I mean, look, part of the problem with this, which Lindsay seems to be getting at, is that the questions in this are phenomenally biased, you know, bordering on silly.

Like, here are a couple. Do you believe the mainstream media has reported unfairly on our movement? Or on which issues does the mainstream media do the worst job of representing the GOP? It's like if NPR put out a survey that said, in which areas is NPR the absolute greatest? All areas, some areas, or every single possible area. Are we great, excellent, or awesome? You know, that sort of thing. I mean, the point of this is not to get a scientifically representative sample because, you know, this only went out to a self-selecting group of people, a bunch of people on their email list, which kind of gets at the point here. You have a few points.

One is to get people thinking even more about how biased they think the mainstream media is. And another thing, you know, maybe these people pass it on to their friends. Maybe they put it on Facebook. And, you know, then your friend fills out the survey, gives the Trump team their email address. Suddenly the Trump team has another person to fundraise with. So this is list building. Yeah. And it sort of reminds me of those free credit score things you see on TV. Like, yeah, they're free, except they come with a cost in the sense that they sell your data and then try to send you follow up emails. Well, that's what happens with these kinds of political things. They're really share worthy. People like to share and like lists and quizzes. But, you know, it's going to come with a data trail. You know, in this case, in your recent podcast discussing the resignation of General Flynn, you all asked questions about contact and collusion.

But I am genuinely interested in consequences. I have recently heard many GOP officials, as well as the Department of Justice, are reluctant to probe what contacts might have occurred during the election. My question is, if the legislative branch and the president's own appointee to be attorney general decide they don't want to investigate, will all this simply go away? Basically, it would. Now, there will be some investigations. The Senate Intelligence Committee is looking into Mike Flynn's contacts with Russian officials, looking into the Trump campaign's contacts with Russia. And the FBI also said that it had talked to Mike Flynn. And there was one report that said that they didn't think that Flynn was necessarily as forthcoming as he should have been. And those things can be the tip of an investigative iceberg that leads to something later on. But this is what happens when you have

one party in power. Bill Clinton would have never been impeached if Democrats ran the House and Senate, most likely, because it would have been much more unlikely for them to have launched a kind of impeachment investigation. OK, one more question before the break. Matt emailed to ask about Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump's resort in Florida that Trump has visited three weekends in a row. Matt wrote, is it normal for a president to work from a location other than the White House so much? I understand that the president needs to be mobile and works from everywhere he stays, but it seems wasteful and like a conflict of interest to have all the required resources shacked up at his resort. Thanks a lot, Matt. And also a shout out to Julie in North Carolina,

who had a similar question this week and sent us a great video of her son talking about Star Wars. Hey, Julie. OK, what do we know about this? Well, I emailed a guy, Mark Knoller, who is a correspondent for CBS News and is also the resident White House reporter correspondent who keeps track of all of the president's travels and past president's travels. He says that George W. Bush visited his ranch in Crawford, Texas, 77 times over all or part of 490 days. They like to call it the Western White House. Of course, President George W. Bush took a lot of heat for all the time he spent in Crawford, but there is certainly a precedent there.

There's precedent not just for George W. Bush going to Crawford, but President Obama went to Hawaii often on his, what was known as his winter White House going to... He was just on vacation in Hawaii. Taking those trips home. And, you know, depending on which party is in power, the activists on the other side get annoyed by it. You know, you had George W. Bush's trips cost something like two hundred and twenty six thousand dollars apiece. So seventy seven trips there would be something like seventeen point four million dollars. Oh, my goodness. Right. Look at that. Conservatives had headlines about President Obama going to Hawaii once a year that it cost $35 million over eight years. So again, depending on which side is in power, they're going to get upset by this. And the fact is that presidents are always trying to figure out a way out of the bubble, how to get outside the White House, whether it was Obama, Bush, whether it was Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan going out to California to his ranch.

Right. And speaking of cost, those numbers have already started coming up for Donald Trump. These numbers also, I got these from CBS News, showed that thus far during Donald Trump's presidency, it has cost $10 million to send him down to Florida and back all of those times. A big part of that, for example, is Air Force One, which costs $180,000 to operate for one hour, which means for every round trip down to Florida, it is $700,000. So do that enough, do it every weekend or every other weekend, and that could really start adding up. And if he's going to talk about conflict of interest, remember Donald Trump has actually doubled the cost of membership at Mar-a-Lago from $100,000 to $200,000 for the initiation fee. So in some ways, he is benefiting off of having Mar-a-Lago there and paying all this attention to it.

Okay. We have to squeeze in a quick break here, but we'll be right back with some more questions. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Rocket Mortgage by Quicken Loans. Lift the burden of getting a home loan with Rocket Mortgage and get a secure, transparent home loan approval in minutes. Skip the bank, skip the waiting, and go completely online at quickenloans.com slash NPR politics. Before we get back to the show, don't forget to use NPR One for all your podcast and public radio listening. And one show we recommend if you're looking for something new is NPR's All Songs Considered. In any given year, there are more than 100,000 albums released.

And All Songs Considered with hosts Bob Boylan and Robin Hilton are there to help. Each week, they find the best of the best songs for you to fall in love with. Subscribe to All Songs Considered now at npr.org slash podcasts. Okay, back to the show. We're back. But before we go on, there's one question we get asked all the time, which is, is this news article I read true? People send us these emails all the time with links to stuff that they find online, wondering what to believe. And because we don't have time to answer every note like that, we thought we would bring in NPR reporter and editor Corey Turner, who works on NPR's education team and is here with us now.

Hello, Corey. Hello, Tim. So you have done some reporting on this, on how best to tell real news from fake news. And we do not mean fake in the sense that the president seems to think, which is news he doesn't like. But we're talking about actual untrue news. Yeah. I mean, we were thinking about it at the education team trying to figure out what is our take on fake news. And the fact is, we kept coming back to or hearing from teachers time and time again, how do we handle this in the classroom? How do we talk to our students about this, considering they're spending so much time on social media, on Facebook, on Twitter?

So did you come up with a handy dandy guide? Well, I actually did. Oh, perfect. No, I stumbled across one organization that's doing really interesting work on the fake news front. They're called the News Literacy Project. And I went to a Virginia classroom where a civics government teacher is basically teaching a curriculum the News Literacy Project put together. You know, look for, are there primary sources in a story? Is there a byline to the story? You know, did someone actually take enough pride in the story to put their name on it? And then also, you know, the good old-fashioned Google test.

You take a tidbit from the story that seems like the heart of the thing and Google it and see is any other reputable news source reporting something similar? So just a few guidelines. You know, one question I have actually is, you know, I've seen some of these, some of those same tips out there, you know, look at, you know, do the Google test and everything. How are they teaching kids about bias though? I mean, how do you teach someone, you know, how to tell if a story is biased, you know, to the right or to the left or in any particular way? Yeah, it's interesting. I think part of the curriculum tackles bias and tries to help students spot it by looking for, do they even bother to present

the other side, since we all know that lots of stories have an other side, whether or not you're sympathetic to that side, does the story bother to even mention the other side? Is there any context, if there are quotations, especially from, say, a government official, President Obama, President Trump, is there any context before or after those quotes that suggests bias? Short answer. I have to say, you know, as a former high school English teacher myself, my biggest problem was trying to teach internet literacy at sort of, I'll date myself here, at the sort of dawn of when widespread internet use went into effect. To let it go. Kids were, you know, my biggest problem was having to keep them off of Wikipedia, you know, because to let them know that not all of this stuff is real on Wikipedia, check the sourcing for it.

But so much of this starts in the home. I mean, with everything else, you know, whether or not you grow up watching news with your parents or talking about the news or engaging, what was some of the parental input that you guys heard about while you're reporting the story? Well, you know, the interesting thing about this, though, is that I was just reading a story written by a reporter I know and admire over at Education Week. And he was reporting on news literacy and a different program that a school, I believe it was in West Virginia, was using. And he spoke with teachers there. And one thing he heard was, you know, this often puts teachers in a really difficult position because as they start unpacking sources of news, you know, differentiating between the Washington Post, NPR, Fox News, the whole spectrum of organizations, occasionally a teacher

may have an awkward moment where they have to tell a student, you know, not necessarily everything you get here is going to be reliable. And then that piece of information goes home to a household where that news source might be the primary news source. And suddenly the teacher is hearing about it from her principal or the school board. You know, it puts teachers specifically in a really difficult position. Yeah, I think that's definitely true because anytime you introduce politics generally into the classroom, it's become a real problem for a lot of teachers. I mean, I remember teaching books

that kids would come to me about their parents and say, you know, don't talk to my dad about that book we're reading because, you know, he'll be pretty upset about it. And it had to do with interracial dating. Like this is like just anything with politics can be a tinderbox in the classroom. And we know that news sources of information have become political in the way that they're viewed anyway. I mean, I have to say I'm sympathetic to the teacher's point of view here because, you know, in the very specific story that I told that was only about four

minutes, you know, I'm not a teacher and these students' fates are not in my hands, but I had one brief reference to the Pizzagate story. And I got so many emails from people trying to convince me that Pizzagate was itself not fake news and should be taken seriously and should be taught in class as a legitimate news story. And I can only imagine what teachers who really try to, you know, take on news literacy head on, I can only imagine, you know, what sort of diplomacy is required of them working with parents of every student. Totally. Corey, while you're here, I'm hoping you have time for another question, this one about education policy. You bet. Okay, so we got this question from Erica in Chicago about Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. She wrote,

I understand that as head of the Department of Education, she is perhaps not the role model some want. But honestly, what is the most impact she could have on everyday Americans? As I remember, No Child Left Behind under George W. Bush was about as far reaching as the education department tried to get, and it was backpedaled pretty hard under Obama. For the most part, don't states control their education systems? There's a lot in there, Corey. I have to say, though, Erica, I love this question. This is such a wonderful, nerdy question and super important question. And it has a couple different answers.

I'll try to go quickly through them. First, you are right. The big federal education law that Congress passed a little more than a year ago, it's called the Every Student Succeeds Act. We call it ESSA. It was a direct response to No Child Left Behind. And it really did get the Federal Department of Education and the Education Secretary specifically out of the classroom. There are a lot of very specific prohibitions in that law that say the Education Secretary cannot dictate terms on, say, academic standards or how to turn around a failing school. That said, one of the things we've already seen Congress begin to from state to state and district to district in how they respond to

really tough challenges in their schools. You know, whether or not certain groups of kids are struggling, we may see very different responses, you know, depending on where we're looking, whether it's California or Alabama or New York or Texas. It just depends. So enforcement is still a huge responsibility for the secretary. But you're right, Erica, there are lots of things that she cannot do. So you're saying there are some things that the education secretary can certainly do to enforce what's on the books already. But there are a lot of things that are potentially big deals that Congress has to deal with, right? Yeah. And I think this is a really big and important point. Not all education policy has to necessarily go through the education secretary. There was a report, I believe it was today, in Politico talking about a new idea for a national or at least multi-state voucher program

that would use the federal tax code to create a tax credit for individuals or corporations that then give money to a sort of third-party non-profit that can then take that money and give it to students who want to attend a private school. So ed reporters like myself, we've been scratching our heads trying to figure out, could Betsy DeVos and Donald Trump create any sort of multi-state voucher program? Well, here's one way Congress could do it, and DeVos wouldn't have much to do with it. Okay. And that's a wrap for today. Thanks for all of your questions. We would love to answer every single one of them, but we cannot. Still, it is really helpful to hear what you're curious

about. So thank you so much for writing. We will be back with our regular weekly roundup on Thursday. And if you want an easy way to be back with our regular weekly roundup on Thursday. And if you want an easy way to keep up with our coverage in the meantime, sign up for our newsletter. Go to npr.org slash politics newsletter to subscribe. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And Corey Turner with the NPR Ed team. Thanks for hanging out with us. Thank you.

And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.