The NPR Politics Podcast - President Trump, One Year In

Episode Date: January 19, 2018

It's been almost exactly a year since President Trump was sworn in. In front of a live audience at the Warner Theatre in Washington, D.C., the NPR Politics team reflects on how Trump has changed Washington, whether Washington has changed Trump, and what the president has accomplished in his first year. This episode, host/congressional correspondent Scott Detrow, host/White House correspondent Tamara Keith, congressional correspondent Susan Davis, White House correspondent Scott Horsley, justice correspondent Carrie Johnson, political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben, national political correspondent Mara Liasson, political editor Domenico Montanaro and editor correspondent Ron Elving. 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

Hey everybody, it's the NPR Politics Podcast live from the Warner Theatre in Washington, D.C. We are doing the show in partnership with our local D.C. member station, WAMU, and here's the way this is going to work. So you are getting two shows for the price of one tonight. Half of us are on a panel right now. We're going to take a pause, take a break, and come back with a totally different group of people. And we're all going to be talking big picture about what has changed over the past year. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress for NPR. I'm Susan Davis. I also cover Congress. I'm Ron Elving, editor-correspondent.

And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. All right. All right, so for the record, since we did not have a time stamp tonight, it is 7.25 p.m. on Thursday, January 18th. And given the House schedule, I know for a fact that things will have changed by the end of this taping,

let alone by the time you hear this podcast. So let's start with that, because we're all going to talk big picture about how Trump has changed Washington and how Washington has or hasn't changed Trump, but obviously there's some breaking news to start with. I'm going to start with this question, which has signed a federal employee, and the question is, do I have to go to work on Monday? So Sue I'll start with you. Where do things stand in Congress right now? This is definitely one of those questions where the time stamp does come in handy. I would say what they're voting on in Congress right now is the fourth short-term extension of the federal government since Donald Trump has become president and at this moment this is the closest they've come to a shutdown since Donald Trump has

been president. We don't really know how this one's going to end, but we do know that Senate Democrats at this point say that they have the votes to block Republicans from passing a stopgap funding bill with the 60 votes they need. So yes, we could be looking at a government shutdown at midnight on Friday unless they reach a deal or come up with what Democrats are counter-offering, which is an even shorter short-term CR that would carry them just through the weekend to try and get these deals on immigration and spending bills. Which even in our world of short-term CRs, that's a very short-term CR. So Mara, one of the dynamics at play today, and I'm sure we're going to talk about this when we

talk more big picture, is that Republicans just don't know what their ally, President Trump, wants out of this. How do they work with a president who undercuts them on Twitter before key votes? It's really difficult. And Mitch McConnell said today, we're just waiting to hear what the president will sign. And when McConnell said today, we're just waiting to hear what the president will sign. And when we know that, we'll put it on the floor too sweet. But they don't know. Although generally what happens in the morning, he tweets something that seems to be at odds with the White House position on a certain piece of legislation. And within a couple of hours, it's been cleared up. He's back on the the program and he tweeted late today that yes he'll

he thinks the house should pass this as soon as possible this morning he tweeted that the children's health insurance program shouldn't be part of this short-term bill why we don't know that was one of the sweeteners they put in there to get democratic votes but so that is difficult but the president does not want a government shutdown, even though he has said in the past that maybe we need a good shutdown. But the politics of this are so perilous because even though today you saw Republicans spending a tremendous amount of effort, the president's been doing this over the last week, to lay the groundwork, to blame the Democrats if the government does shut down,

neither party can be sure that the other guy is going to be blamed if there's a shutdown. Although this will be, if we get one, the first shutdown with a party having complete control of the government. And you would think that the party that has complete control of the government would be responsible for keeping it open. So Ron, question to you is about the other party, because Democrats, while they are in the minority, do have the votes to block this in the Senate. And over the course of the day, more and more Democrats came out saying, I'm going to oppose this. And they at the moment do seem to have those votes. A lot of Democrats seem very eager to force this fight over DACA, particularly saying we don't want to vote anymore for any government funding until there's resolution for DACA because President Trump, you've said publicly you want to fix that. Do you think this is a smart move for Democrats? Do you think this is an argument they can win if in fact we're

talking about a shutdown that lasts for a while? Whether it's really smart, we'll have to see. It will take a little bit of time for that to sort out. Plus, I think we have to ask the question of what do we mean by smart? Do we mean will it help them win in 2018? Do we mean will it help them win in 2020? Or do we mean that they might actually have some reason to vote for something other than it being politically good for them? They made the pledge many times all through last fall that they would not vote for any more stopgap measures. They would not let anything go forward until there had been a solution for DACA, for the Dreamers, because the president has pulled the plug on that program as of March 5th. So something has to be done before March 5th. This is the ideal opportunity to do it. Six senators, eight senators, a large group of

senators have gotten together and tried to work something out that's bipartisan. And a lot of Senate Democrats are saying, finally, let's force the issue. And while the leverage of shutting down the federal government or beginning a process that leads to that is very drastic, it's one of the few pieces of leverage Democrats actually have. This is something they feel deeply about. So they seem to be going for it. And they have said repeatedly, this is what they're going to do, and the time is now. Okay, so let's shift to the big picture conversation, because this has been a year with a lot of news days,

like this one, where we don't even know what the news is going to look like when we're done taping the podcast, as listeners regularly realize once they listen to it. So we don't have a time machine yet. We're working on it. Almost exactly a year, I believe it's Saturday, right? A year Saturday. President Trump took the oath of office. I want to talk about what has changed and what hasn't. So what are the biggest moral, what are the

biggest specific changes Trump has made to the presidency and to governing? You know, I've thought about this a lot and I've done some reporting about this. How has the presidency and to governing? You know, I've thought about this a lot, and I've done some reporting about this. How has the presidency changed Trump? How has Trump changed the presidency? The answer to the first question is pretty easy. It hasn't changed him at all. He's the same guy who campaigned. That's how he is as president.

And you know, when I was a single person, my girlfriends would always say, when you go out with somebody that you eventually marry, everything you need to know about that marriage, you can find out if you think really hard about the first date. So everything we know about Donald Trump, we could have known by him in the campaign. So I don't think he's changed at all. I think he has changed the presidency. My question is, has he changed it permanently or not? He has a different concept of the presidency than any other chief executive before him. He doesn't see it as a kind of moral leadership role.

He doesn't see it as his responsibility to unify the nation. And that could have profound effects, or it could be temporary. Another way that he's changed the concept of the American presidency is that he doesn't see himself as the leader of the free world, as the leader of some kind of global order, the leader of alliances. As a matter of fact, he sees a lot of alliances, especially multilateral ones, with suspicion. But I think that so much about Trump is unique that I don't think that we're going to have a whole spate of Trumpian presidents following him. And as a matter of fact, all the norms that he's broken, and this is the first time in my life I've ever talked so much about norms. It's like there's some guy named norm somewhere that but he has broken so many norms he hasn't released his tax returns he has disparaged other democratic institutions other branches of government he has belittled and humiliated publicly his own cabinet

members all of those things and and many. I can imagine if he leaves office and there's a reaction against him, that people will pass laws to make sure those norms are legislated. Like you can't have conflicts of interest, you have to divest yourself of your businesses, you have to release your tax returns, et cetera, et cetera. So Ron, let me follow up on that with you

because you can take the, I guess I was going to say not consequential, but this was the directly attacking your cabinet member, your attorney general, for example. You can take something like that. You can take little things like just the way he uses Twitter instead of sending out press releases. What of the things that Trump has done to change things

do you think are most likely to just be picked up by the next president, Democrat or Republican? The big change has not been structural. It has not been a political science change. It's not been the sort of thing that everyone would necessarily have to follow or live with. They could very well pick up a model either from the Obama presidency, the presidency of one of the Bushes, even in some respects back to Bill Clinton or some more distant model in history. I think what has changed, and that's going to be a problem going forward, is that people's expectation of the president in terms of behavior and in terms of what you can look to the president

for as a national model, in terms of behavior, yes, but also in terms of just a moral leadership and a dignity and things of that nature. That has been an automatic that attached to the presidency. People grew into the role. We used to talk about how people were totally transformed by this experience that think of Harry Truman going from a very minor figure to being a kind of iconic, historical, important figure. That, I think, is going to be much more difficult to assume going forward. Sue, you were in Congress all of 2016 listening to the regular Paul Ryan press conferences,

especially where he distanced himself from Donald Trump. He denounced Donald Trump in a way, and there was not much love between the Trump campaign and Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, and a big chunk of the Republican members of Congress. Obviously, that has changed. What has been the most surprising thing of 2017 to you when it comes to the relationship between the White House and Congress? You know, I always think it's important to remember that Washington really wasn't prepared for Donald Trump. You know, on the eve of the election, Republicans in Congress were preparing

for Democrats to take the Senate and for Hillary Clinton to be president. That was what their strategy plans were. That's what their action plans were. So the transition period leading up to the inauguration of Donald Trump, everybody was kind of scrambling. They didn't know who this guy was going to be. And that includes people like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. And I think that there was, at the beginning, a lot of cautious optimism. Because if you remember, you know, Trump campaigned outside of the traditional political sphere, right? He was going to be a dealmaker. He was going to shake up Washington. And there was a sense that maybe he could be a president who could broker the partisan warfare that we had seen in Washington in the last six years of the Obama administration. One year into that administration,

I'm not sure we have seen him really be the dealmaker that he promised to be. They haven't had a ton of legislative accomplishments. And Madoka back and forth is an example of the opposite. It's the opposite of that. And I do think their greatest legislative achievement so far, the tax bill that they passed at the end of 2017, was really more a product of congressional Republicans and unification on that end. The president really didn't need to clinch that deal. They just wanted to vote for that. So at this stage, though, even though, again, as we've seen in the immigration fights, the president is unpredictable. They don't know where he is. They're still always on his side.

If anything that's really shifted is that I think that the Republican Party, at least as I see it in Congress, has almost uniformly lined up, excuse me, lined up behind President Trump because we are very familiar with the Republicans who haven't. People like Jeff Flake of Arizona, Bob Corker of Tennessee. The critics in his party are way outnumbered by the people that stand behind the president. And many of those critics have decided it's not even worth trying to run for re-election.

Exactly, because I think they recognize that the base of the party, the Republican primary voter, believes that Donald Trump is the head of their party and they like him a whole lot more than they like a lot of the establishment. So Mara, you've made it clear you like talking about norms.

Do you like norms more than memes? I like norms more than memes. I'm not a meme person. Norm, yeah. Did you see the picture someone made a meme of you after you said that? I thought that was pretty funny. If you didn't see this on Twitter, Mara said the other week that she hates memes.

I don't like the word meme. Well, it seems like you don't like memes either. I mean, it's okay. Okay, I don't like the word memes either. So a listener helpfully emailed us a Mara meme. It's a picture of Mara and it just says hates memes, got her own meme. So It's a picture of Mara, and it just says, hates memes, got her own meme. So what is the norm that the Trump White House and President Trump have tacked to the most? Is there anything out there that you've been surprised to see, oh, the White House is actually incredibly conventional on this particular front?

Oh, there's a lot of ways the White House is incredibly conventional. First of all, Donald Trump might be unconventional in his behavior and his divisiveness, but what surprised me is how conventional a Republican his policies have actually been. You know, he ran on this almost post-partisan idea that he would make deals with both sides. He ran on this kind of nationalist, populist platform. And it turns out that while Donald Trump was recreating the image of the Republican Party, or at least on paper in his speeches, the Republican Party in Congress was going way far to the right, much more supply-side libertarian. And that's the policies, because Donald Trump didn't come into office with a whole fully thought out set of policies or even instincts

on them or interest in them. You got the tax bill. You got something that I think that a lot of Republicans were surprised it went as far as it did to the side. Now, one of the reasons it did that is because they gave up on getting any Democratic votes. That's a norm that I think has been really chipped away at during the Trump presidency. The way that our system is set up is supposed to force compromise. That's why there are all these norms protecting minority rights in Congress, because you're supposed to have a certain amount of bipartisanship because our founding fathers thought that would be good and it would make for more stability and social cohesion. And if you're going to pass a policy, it's better to have buy-in from both sides.

But that has been totally thrown overboard. But he has ended up being much more conventional than what he ran on. And as a matter of fact, especially now that Steve Bannon has been banished, he is pretty much in the arms of Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan. As much as he infuriates them and frustrates them with all of his back and forth about policy, he said famously the other day, I am going to protect incumbents. And I think the regulations of the White House systematically go back to this great example.

Any conservative Republican president would have nominated Neil Gorsuch, tried to do deregulation, and passed a tax cut more or less like that one. So, Ron, following up on that, we use the word unprecedented a lot, and rightly so, but everything has some sort of precedent or another. What can you think of as a good comparison to a president coming in, nobody thinking they're going to win, and just dropping a bomb on Washington and day in, day out having the reporters who cover and the lawmakers have to work with, just kind of staring at what just happened? Are there any

good comparisons? At the risk of being thought to have covered this personally... The Civil War! Ron was just an intern then, really. A drummer boy. That turtleneck was very fashionable then as well. It's remarkable how everything old is new again.

But actually I do appreciate the kindness of the Civil War comparison because I was planning to go back to Andrew Jackson. And you know, if Andrew Jackson had been around, he would have taken care of that whole Civil War thing. But Andrew Jackson did blow things up and did decide that an awful lot of the things that had been done by, say, Alexander Hamilton and some other famous folks really didn't need to stick and really didn't need to keep being the federal policy or the national policy. And he was known as a populist

hero. And of course, as we know, the president famously has taken a representation of Andrew Jackson into the Oval Office. And I don't know how much of a fan he really is and how much he's really made a study of that history but he knows that Andrew Jackson was a populist who came to town brought a lot of new folks to town angered everybody who had gotten established here and changed the direction of the country now I'm not necessarily saying that everything Andrew Jackson did wore well it did not and I'm certainly not advocating any particular set of policies either pre or post Andrew Jackson, but he shook the town up in a way that very few have.

So Sue, sticking to this big picture idea of change and what has changed and what hasn't, you've covered three presidencies now from the Hill? What is the biggest difference whether it's just kind of a specific scene in the hallway that you get or just the way things work of of covering congress during a trump presidency that's different from obama or bush i think the difference because under both bush and obama if i'm doing it my mind's doing it correctly they both had to they both had the pleasure of having unified government and then having to deal with split government under both and trump right now has unified government and then having to deal with split government under both.

And Trump right now has unified government. And the thing that is fascinating but can also be infuriating as you're covering things is it's just crazy to have one party just be so not on the same page all the time. And I think this week's a great example of that. Normally, the speaker and the majority leader and the president in one party would be on the same page. They would be on the same message. And the president would be leading the kind of negotiations we're seeing right now. And the president just throws such an unpredictable element into everything that I just think it shows you how much lawmakers are just scrambling every day. The strategy, the plan shifts sometimes hour to hour, day to day. And I think what we're dealing with right now, the immigration and spending bill talks, I think how these conclude

will set the tone for 2018 going into the midterms. If they are able to get a bipartisan immigration deal and a bipartisan spending deal, then I think 2018 might have the ability to be a pretty productive year. People don't always believe this, but historically, election years are more productive than non-election years legislatively. They tend to pass more laws. If it doesn't happen, if immigration falls apart, if we're operating on these stopgaps week after week, I think 2018 could just be open political season, and it's going to be just an absolute brawl up until the midterms. And I think part of the reason why we're seeing Democrats

feel really emboldened in the shutdown fight is they feel pretty good about their chances about winning back a House majority and maybe putting the Senate in play. All right, well, we have been talking for 19 minutes, and things have changed since we started talking. The House passed a bill funding the government through mid-February, of course. As we've been talking about, the big question comes with the Senate because Democrats seem to

have the votes right now to block it if they want to. We'll pick that up in our next podcast or who knows, maybe the next panel. But right now, we are going to take a quick break and we are all going to leave the stage and Tamara Keith is going to take a quick break, and we are all going to leave the stage, and Tamara Keith is going to come back with a whole different set of people to talk about more stuff. So hang around, and thanks for being here. We'll be right back. Thanks. Thank you. details and be confident you're getting the right mortgage. To get started, go to rocketmortgage.com slash NPR politics. Equal housing lender licensed in all 50 states. NMLS consumeraccess.org number 3030. Up first, it may be just the podcast you didn't know you were looking for. It's the morning news podcast from NPR. You can put it on during breakfast or

while you're commuting, and you'll be caught up for the day in just about 10 minutes. That's it. Find up first on the NPR One app or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so we are back here with a tremendous live audience at the Warner Theater here in Washington, D.C. Arguably the greatest live audience in the history of live audiences. Certainly the largest. So we've got a whole new crew. Period. Period. Period.

We've got a whole new crew. Period. Period. Period. We've got a whole new crew here up on stage for you. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Scott Horsley. I also cover the White House. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter. Carrie Johnson, justice correspondent.

I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And while our fellow compatriots were discussing this chaotic first year, we would be remiss if we didn't also discuss the Russia thing. It's, you know, the Russia investigation, investigations are something that have been in the background all year. And sometimes it's been very much in the foreground. And Carrie, you are our resident expert here. And this week, all eyes have been on former White House strategist Steve Bannon. He testified behind closed doors before the House Intelligence Committee. And by basically every account was not particularly forthcoming. We've also learned that he's gotten a subpoena from special counsel Robert Mueller's team.

So, Carrie, is he cooperating? Well, it depends on who you ask. Bannon spent almost 11 hours before the House Intelligence Committee this week, but that tenure was most remarkable for the questions he didn't answer. He didn't want to talk about anything that happened in the transition. He didn't want to talk about anything that happened in the White House. And then he didn't want to talk about things that happened after he left the White House. Now, Bannon had some legal grounding for refusing to answer questions about his time in the White House because the White House has signaled it might want to assert executive privilege. But the time during the transition,

lawyers tell me makes no sense because there's only one president at a time. And during that time, Barack Obama was the president of the United States, not Donald Trump. And he's not asserting privilege right now on that. Not so much. Bannon will not be able to get away with staying silent when he talks to investigators for the special counsel, Robert Mueller.

We're told that his lawyer has worked out a voluntary interview as opposed to a grand jury appearance by Bannon, but it doesn't really matter. He's still got to tell the truth and he's still got to answer questions. You and I occupy different policy universes. Just a little bit. Just a little, yeah. So like, I feel like I'm the best person to ask you, just fill us in, what exactly is being investigated? Because I keep hearing the word collusion, and as I understand it, collusion isn't even a legal thing, right? Collusion is not the word we want to use. Don't use that word again. The President Trump used it 16 times in a single half-hour interview with the New York Times. Yeah, but we're not going to do that. There's another C word we want to use, and that word is conspiracy, because there are laws against conspiracy. And there are

laws about conspiring to take things of value from foreign powers to influence an American election. There are laws about conspiracy to hack into somebody's computer accounts or email accounts. There are also laws about conspiring to launder money or evade the Bank Secrecy Act. And then, of course, there's also obstruction of justice. And while the special counsel isn't giving me a blueprint about what he's looking at, we can tell from some of the questions we're hearing that the witnesses have been asked and some of the document requests he's put out that those are all things that appear to be under his purview right now. Yeah, this feels like this big investigation where we talk about it a lot, but we were just talking about these very narrow, these little glimpses that we're getting.

Little glimpses and sometimes big surprises on one day. Remember the same day that Paul Manafort and his business partner, Rick Gates, were indicted about an hour later, somebody we didn't even know, George Papadopoulos. We barely knew he existed. Yeah, it became clear that he had agreed to plead guilty and cooperate with Mueller. I was yelling at the top of my lungs in the newsroom, who is this guy, what's going on, you know? And then minding my own business, cleaning my floor,

and we can email Mike Flynn has decided to plead guilty. You know, something might happen tomorrow, something might happen next week. We'll just see. By the way, if there is a shutdown, Robert Mueller and his team are considered essential personnel, and they're going to keep on working. I'm just reminding you, when we were here a year ago, the news had just broken that Mike Flynn had mischaracterized his conversations with the Russian ambassador and had miscommunicated what they'd talked about to, among others, the vice president,

who then went on television and parroted what Flynn had told him, which turned out not to be true, so it put the vice president in a very difficult spot. It was a couple weeks after that that Mike Flynn left the White House. Just 24 days. So where do things stand right now with Donald Trump potentially being interviewed?

Interesting question. So Ty Cobb, the lawyer that's been brought in by the White House to handle some of these investigations, says that Donald Trump is very, very eager to sit down with Special Counsel Robert Mueller and that he wants that to happen. Ty Cobb also told CBS that he expects this investigation to last four or six more weeks. I don't know about that. Around Thanksgiving, he was telling me

he thought it would be wrapped up by the end of the year. Sort of hopeful thinking. I mean, you know, and the thing is about this, you know, we talk about Mueller being essential personnel, and it's fascinating to think about the last time we were here and that we didn't even have James Comey fired at that point. And it only happened after Flynn had wound up leaving. And then when you think about what the push against Robert Mueller has been in conservative media, and we had a poll out just yesterday that affirms that that seems to be working because Robert Mueller is seen through a very partisan lens.

Some 42 percent of the country doesn't even know who he is. And you have to think about that for a second. This is the guy who was the longest-serving FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover. And most Americans – or not most Americans, but a significant chunk of Americans don't know who he was or is. 29% of Americans have a favorable opinion of him. Another 29% have an unfavorable opinion of him. And it's sharply divided by party. When you look at Republicans, a majority of Republicans don't have a favorable opinion of him, or 40% don't. And only 15% have a favorable opinion of him.

And a strong majority of Democrats have a favorable opinion of him. And a strong majority of Democrats have a favorable opinion of him. And when it comes to the fairness of the investigation, overwhelmingly Democrats think it's fair and Republicans don't. And what our pollsters said on our poll call when we were talking about this is he said, if this was a political campaign, now is the time to start putting up those ads to define yourself because right now Robert Mueller is only being defined by his opponents. And the problem is Kerry knows Robert Mueller is not somebody who's going to go campaign for himself. He's the opposite of that. He's a very private individual.

He happens to be a Republican, by the way, but he's not someone who's going to go put up ads about it. And that does raise a question later on when his findings do come out and come to its conclusion, how that's received by the public. Well, Mueller isn't going to talk. He hasn't done any press conferences. In fact, the judge in the Manafort case has installed a gag order on the prosecutors and the defense. The defense has already gotten chastised a couple of times for yakking outside of court and holding fundraisers and stuff. Robert Mueller is not a political animal. He's a former Marine who is the most decorated law enforcement officer of his generation, and if he's susceptible to a discrediting campaign, that says something right now about where our politics are.

Right. He is very vulnerable right now. I mean, if you're a pollster... Luckily, he's not running for office. Soster... Luckily, he's not running for office. So the thing is, he's not running for office, but he is conducting an effort to investigate the president and his campaign with what's supposed to be a degree of objectivity. Remember, when he was appointed to this job, you couldn't find a Republican on Capitol Hill who would say a bad word about Robert Mueller. So the fact that this campaign against him has stuck is a major potential problem for the outcome of the investigation. We're operating in

a universe where people don't even trust the president's doctor about how much Donald Trump weighs. So it's true. But I mean, like, on top of all that, I mean, as you reported this week as well, Domenico, I mean, people have a remarkable lack of trust in government and in pretty much any formalized institution. So American political institutions right now, it's not surprising, perhaps, but the lack of confidence people have in American institutions, especially political institutions, is striking. I mean, when it comes to the media, including Congress, Republicans, then the media, and the Democratic Party, and the presidency, that's the rank order of things of just how little confidence people have and that says a lot about

where we are right now right exactly yeah and so when the results of this investigation come out I'm very interested in seeing how many Americans just might shrug and go on I don't know man like I don't I don't trust him I don't trust that they're convincible I mean I was struck by in this number that 50% of Republicans a majority% of Republicans, a majority of Republicans, more than a majority of Republicans, actually, I think it's 53%, said that they have no confidence at all in the media, none, which is a pretty shocking thing, considering that fairness and objectivity are the pillars and tenets of what we do. Domenico, the even more shocking number is that if you add little confidence

to no confidence, you get 90% of Republicans have little or no confidence in the media, according to our recent poll. All right, moving on. Let the navel-gazing end. I'm kind of bummed out right now. Okay, so Scott Horsley, I want to sort of ask you a big-picture question. Let's pull back from the Russia investigation. Let's pull back a year in review. What has President Trump accomplished?

Where does he stand? Yeah, I mean, amid all the distractions, real and imagined, work is being done by this government. And we went back and looked at some of the campaign promises that Donald Trump has made. And we sort of said, okay, here's some things he's actually done, what he said he was going to do. Here's some things where he maybe hasn't finished the task, but he is chipping away at things he said he was going to do. And here are some promises that are just sort of gone by the wayside. In the first category, in the first category, obviously the tax bill is his major legislative achievement. I think a lot of people were surprised that he actually got that done before Christmas, as he said he would.

That was a much faster process than previous tax overhauls like that have been. He kept his promise to appoint a conservative replacement for Justice Antonin Scalia, and not only on the Supreme Court, but he has been putting his stamp on the circuit and district courts of the federal bench as well. Just as Mitch McConnell managed to preserve that vacancy on the Supreme Court long enough for the Republican president to get to fill it, Mitch McConnell and his Senate colleagues, Republican Senate colleagues, preserved a lot of vacancies throughout the court. So Donald Trump came in with a huge number of vacancies on the federal bench, and he's been moving pretty aggressively to fill them with young conservative jurists who are going to be reshaping the federal jurisprudence for years or decades to come. Absolutely. Last year, a record, a record for the first year of a presidency, 12 appeals court nominees confirmed

lifetime appointments. And today, the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced 17 more judge nominees. They're going to the floor. And Chairman Grassley of the Senate Judiciary Committee is rocking and rolling on judges. On top of all of that, by the way, not only are they young conservative, they are much less diverse than Obama's nominees. I have a few numbers there from November, but still. You compare the Obama nominees that were still pending to an equal number of Trump's. You had 50% women of Obama's nominees, 19% women on Trump's nominees, 17% African Americans of Obama's nominees, 0.2% of Trump's nominees. So my point being that it's also just going to look very different, assuming these people are all confirmed.

Can we go back to the origin story of way back a couple of years ago as to why they are able to push these nominees through so easily and so quickly? When Barack Obama was president, the Senate was stonewalling a lot of his nominees, and so the Senate Democrats used the semi-nuclear option to say that we're gonna do away with the filibuster for everything right up to the Supreme Court. That allowed them during the Obama administration,

and now it's allowing Republicans to confirm district and circuit court judges with just a simple majority. And then Republicans, when it came their turn, went one step further, went the full nuclear and said, that goes for the Supreme Court too. And when you think about the corrosiveness of what that might mean for our politics, where it sort of came from was it was an affirmation of the Republican strategy of filibustering basically every nominee that could come forward or putting a hold on them. So basically gumming up the system, gumming up the wheels of government was affirmed as a good political strategy. There were no consequences for that.

In fact, they got a Republican president out of it in some ways. So, you know, what do Democrats take from it? When, when or if they're ever back in power? And then what do Republicans do? Because Republicans will blame Democrats and talk about the origin story for going to real creationism here was from back to Robert Bork, right? And the nominee who was, you know, put up for the Supreme Court and Democrats standing in the Middle East where, you know, your side started 100 years ago. No, your side started 1000 years ago, your side started 5000. Let me throw down a minute. When last year, when President Trump got his Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, it did not change the ideological balance of the Supreme Court. The next vacancy and the next nominee

have the possibility of doing that. In that case, Republicans and Democrats both tell me they are going nuclear war. And that means massive amounts of money, massive amounts of negative advertising on television. And I don't know what kind of mudslinging we're going to see. You may, you got to be careful with nuclear war. I think you just gave Tam a case of PTSD. We'll get to that later. There was one little genteel break left in the Senate for the

minority party to exercise some control. And that the that's ok a blue slip tradition where uh... if you were nominating a federal judge in a state the senators from that state were expected to to sign off on and if it was a senator from the opposing party that gave that senator some say and who got to be the federal judge in his or her state uh... that was one of the tools republicans used to preserve all those vacancies that you had you had uh... republican senators who just refused to return a blue slip for some of Obama's nominees,

even after the Democrats pulled the semi-nuclear option. That genteel tradition has now been thrown overboard. And so even if a Democrat from a state objects, the Republicans will just go ahead and confirm that. One little complicating factor. This week brought the arrival of two new Democrats under the Senate Judiciary Committee, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris. They've already made their presence known. They are cross-examining a lot of these nominees and sometimes their colleagues

about these judges, potential judges' records on a whole bunch of things. Can we go back to the economy and the tax bill just a little bit? Because that is the other area where President Trump has, on a nearly daily basis, tweeted about how well the Dow is doing. Now, the Dow is not the economy, we know. But the president has been touting the success of the economy for the past year. And the economy has done well for the past year. Totally has. Yeah, I had to double check this number backstage, but the S&P 500 has gone up 23% during Trump's first year in office, which is, you know, pretty good. I mean, it's very good,

you know, and so he has reason to tout that. And, you know, there's also good reason to think that he has something to do with that deregulation, you know, signing that tax bill that businesses, business people are very happy about that. That said, he also likes to tout the unemployment rate, which has fallen from 4.8 to 4.1 percent. We're probably near full employment right now. But the president does not have a lever, not anything close to it that changes the unemployment rate. Like if a president could do that, we would always be at full employment. And we're not. And job creation during Donald Trump's term has been a little bit below what it was during the last year of the Obama administration. Correct.

Now, that's not really a knock on Donald Trump. Not at all. You would expect job growth to slow a little bit when you get that close to full employment. And we're at the stage we are in the economic cycle. But when you hear the president talk about some sort of turnaround in the job market, that just hasn't happened. Likewise, wage growth has pretty much been exactly where it was during the later years. It's weirdly low. It should be picking up but it hasn't.

And the other thing that the president talks about is boosting GDP numbers and we have seen two good quarters of economic growth, GDP growth north of 3%. That's certainly encouraging. We had a couple of quarters north of 4% growth during 2014 under former President Obama, and then it dropped down again. So there's no guarantee that that trend will continue. We're going to be watching in just over a week for the fourth quarter of 2017 GDP number, and it's going to be very interesting.

It's probably going to be somewhere around... All of us will be watching at like 8.30 in the morning when it comes out. I'll be setting my alarm for 8.30 that Friday morning, but it's going to be maybe a little above 3% or maybe a little below 3%. To you and me, it doesn't really matter, but politically, it makes a big difference whether it's above 3% or below 3%. Right. And on top of all of this, what's important and what I will be watching long-term, and I'm sure Scott will too, is that there is a certain amount of time that we tend to go between recessions. And at some point, there could very well be

some sort of an economic downturn during Donald Trump's presidency, one that he won't have caused. And so the question is, how does he react to that if that happens? I genuinely do not know, but I am genuinely curious. The thing is, when you step back from this, we are in an election year. It's 2018. It's the midterms. It's the first midterm of a president. Historically, midterms are really bad to presidents. And there are two major factors

that always point to when you think about off-year elections and most elections. There are two big things that a lot of people care about. The economy. How is it doing? How are we doing? A lot of people are going to get a raise in the next couple of weeks or so, perhaps, from the tax bill. Well, okay. This is going to be a longer conversation.

It'll feel like one, though. You'll see more money in your paychecks right that's a very good question whether it's going to feel like one all right i think that's an open question and we brought up the other one is foreign policy okay and we're not while we do have troops in places where they're in danger it's not 2006 when the iraqi civil war was in a downturn and spiraling out of control. And, you know, it was clear which direction the country was moving. The fundamentals right now are kind of split when it comes to who can, you know, win back or take control of the House and Senate. And we can't overlook the fact that the economy doing as well as it is, even though we can't really give a lot of credit to any president for how an economy does. Most people, when things are going well, will say, OK, things are not that bad.

And when there isn't a hot war that's spiraling out of control, then people don't feel like there's something that they're going to be outraged over. And they will give the president some credit for that. I think the nerds over here would like to get a word in edgewise. Yes. No. On that economy thing for 2018, though, if you look at this tax bill, if you look at what it will do to growth, it front loads growth in a huge way. It is projected to really bump up economic growth this year and in the next few years. And that very nicely happens to happen in years when, you know, there are elections. And then in the long, medium to long term, say 10 years out, growth is projected to not really be much bigger than it would have been otherwise.

Someone I know wrote a great article about this and you should read it. On NPR.org. On NPR.org. Maybe by someone possibly named Daniel Kurt kurtzleben right yeah but the yeah no you get it all right so but anyway but no but really the tax bill really could benefit republicans in a you know moderately big way on that count okay one more indicator presidential approval i mean like that's a factor too, no? Yes. So that's the other complicating factor here, because the president is historically low when it comes to approval ratings, except we haven't seen it really change all that much. And he was historically low when it was during the presidential election. So he was in the mid 30s to high 30s. He's still in the mid 30s to high 30s for favorability as well as approval rating,

and he still won. But when it is that low, and you've seen Democratic enthusiasm tick up, and you've seen Democrats win in places like Virginia, where they felt like, okay, they've got a chance here, and then they win and pull off a huge upset in a place like Alabama. When you see those things, then you see Democratic enthusiasm rise. And what that means, any midterm election, when you have the side with the enthusiasm is usually the side that wins. There are, like I said, though, these split fundamentals. And most people right now, our poll also found that they think that first year for President Trump was a failure. Again, though, if you go inside the numbers, his base, 91% of them still with him. So that has not eroded.

And that's very different than 2006, when Democrats took back the House, because then you saw a lot of erosion with the Republican base and George W. Bush. I was looking at some social media from politicians in Wisconsin, because there was this Wisconsin state Senate seat that for the first time in something like 17 years went to a Democrat this week. And the governor and lieutenant governor were both like, OK, guys, this is a warning. We need to take this seriously. The Republican governor and lieutenant governor both said, wow, OK, Wisconsin is not a red state and Democrats are more motivated than we are. We need to change this.

But the thing is, these state legislative seats are actually very important. I mean, for the past decade or for about a decade, you said Democrats essentially ignore those races and ignore governor's races. And then what happened in 2010? They got crushed when it came to redistricting. And because of that, you have a playing field that's much more imbalanced and in Republicans' favor. All right. I think that we have mostly tackled policy. We solved everything. We have solved all of the problems

of the world. We're going to take a quick break. And when come back can't let it go support for this npr podcast and the following message come from the stars original series counterpart starring academy award winner jk simmons upon discovering a secret parallel dimension howard is thrust into a shadow world of intrigue danger and double cross where the only man he can trust is his counterpart from this other world. Counterpart premieres Sunday, January 21st at 8 p.m. on Starz. Download the Starz app to start your free trial.

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Listen to Here and Now on NPR One or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, we're going to shift gears here and end the show like we do every week when we talk about one thing we just can't stop thinking about politics or otherwise. Obviously, there are many people on the stage. We are not all going to go. Feel free to applaud or not applaud to that fact.

But we're going to start with 10. This may have come up in your last panel, but I really wanted to hear about your really relaxing vacation last week. It was great. Got some fruity beverages. Saw some whales and turtles and then one morning I was sitting in bed and this came in on my phone ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii seek immediate shelter

and then the best part this is not a drill which that was scary. Well, isn't a nice part of vacation living in the moment and bracing the moment and when you're not dead in a nuclear blast

moment. Yeah. There were a lot of really weird thoughts that went through my head like should I change out of the synthetic clothing I'm wearing and put on cotton in case, like, it melts in the nuclear attack? That's true. That's pretty smart. So practical.

And then I thought, oh, whatever. But I will change into clean underwear just in case I'm out of my room for a long time. And I had my five-year-old son with me when, and I was trying to like, I started to explain what an intercontinental ballistic missile was. And then I thought, no, let's just get on the elevator, which maybe wasn't the best idea. I did pack his iPad just in case we were bored.

The preschool teachers don't come to the bomb shelter of the hotel. Well, there is no bomb shelter when you're on the beach. Like, there's, like, there's, I don't think they can have a basement. Where's the water table? I don't know. There was no plan. And so after, like, five minutes of no plan, a certain peace came over me. Like, there's literally nothing we can do about this.

So then I called the office, and I was like, hey, guys, I'm ready to report. And our producer, Miles, answered the phone and said, actually, some members of Congress have been tweeting, and it was human error. This is not, there is no missile coming. I was like, great, I'm going to go interview people. Because, like, focusing on doing your job is much easier than focusing on dying. I like to think that if I were in my last moments, I would, you know, be so good as to call the office.

I didn't call my parents. I love a PR, but I don't know if I would. In all seriousness, though, what's kind of amazing in looking at the poll that we conducted this week, we asked a bunch of questions about North Korea. And one of them was that people are very concerned, seven in 10, more than seven in 10 are concerned about possible war breaking out with North Korea, which laid the foundation, frankly, for why people would freak out so much about this, because they think it could be, could actually happen. Well, and as much as I was freaking out, actual real Hawaiians were truly freaking out. And I talked to a number of people who they've been doing drills. They've been told from the time you get that message, you have 15 minutes to get to safety. And the people

I talked to were in the tourism industry. They were at work. They couldn't reach, some of them couldn't reach their families. They clearly weren't going to get to the other side of the island to get home. And they were genuinely completely upset and people were crying and it was terrible um but on a positive note that night I went to a luau and um although it might not seem like I am afraid of getting on stages and performing. I am, especially when it comes to dancing. And I was like, you know what? I am volunteering for the embarrass the moms on stage dance thing at the Luau. So you only live once.

Dance like you've just survived a nuclear attack. So you're here. We're not living in the road post-apocalyptic world. Everything's great. And that brings us to what Sue can't let go. So we talked a lot tonight about the degrading of norms, so Mara, I think I'm going to contribute to that a little bit. My can't let it go is that apparently Nancy Pelosi is going to appear this year

as a judge on RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars. What are her qualifications? Which, well, she is actually well qualified for this because she is the longtime representative of San Francisco and said that she did it in part to show support for the LGBTQ community. But part of why I think it's so interesting about it is if there is one show that I think I would be super nervous to go on, it would be that show. Because if you can't, like the witty banter you

need to keep up with judgy drag queens, I don't even, I don't even know what that takes. And I think it's, I'm curious to see Nancy Pelosi be on the show because if you've watched her or covered her, she's so polite. She's so proper. She was the daughter of a politician. She writes thank you notes. She always sits up straight, does everything proper. So I want to see her be catty with drag queens. Her office confirmed she's going to be on. They've already

filmed it, so it's definitely happening. The new season starts at the end of January and her spokesman confirmed that she was on it and the only thing he would say is, she had a fabulous time. Mara, what about you? My can't let it go this week is that yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the Drudge Report.

First headline about Monica Lewinsky and three days after that, the Washington Post broke the story about the President of the United States having an affair with an intern. And on that day, 20 years ago, when the Post broke the story, Robert Siegel, someone else I can't let go of, Boo Hoo. He retired recently. We love him. He was a giant. He is a giant. He and I had a previously scheduled interview with Bill Clinton.

It was right around State of the Union time, and he'd scheduled three interviews on a day. So we woke up, and we'd prepared our questions. We were ready to go. We woke up in the morning. We opened the Washington Post. We did not read it online. We looked at each other and we said, uh, I guess we have to ask him about this. We didn't know anything more than that one story in the Post. And of course, back then there was no way for Drudge to go viral. No memes back then. We live without memes. We chopped our own wood and we didn't need memes. And we used razor blades to cut our audio tape. Anyway, so Robert Siegel and I went in and of course the interview was scheduled for 11 and they moved it to two.

They were obviously scrambling what they should do. Finally, we went in there very late in the day, and it was so late and so close to airtime, and you could not broadcast live from the Oval Office back then. So they railroaded the tape. We would talk to him for 10 minutes. They'd grab that 10 minutes of tape, rush it outside, and upload it. And it was literal tape. Literal tape. So I said to him, gee, Mr. President, was there some kind of relationship with Ms. Lewinsky that might have been misconstrued? Oh, goodness. And he said, well, I don't know any more about this than you do, Maura. Oh, that was a lie.

He lied to my face. Fact check, untrue. And the interesting thing about that interview, and I've talked to Bill Clinton many, many times. He's always interesting, super smart, really thoughtful. He lost his train of thought, clearly distracted. And if you remember, he has a very big jaw, and his jaw muscle was pulsing, ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum, like from stress, I guess.

I'd never seen him like that before or since. And, of course, fast forward, Bill Clinton was impeached for lying. How quaint. But had the internet all points in between, but just how much it shifted the fact that it breaks on drudge, and then like two to three days go by before it ends up anywhere else. There wasn't social media.

Right. There wasn't. Yeah, but still, it's just how much the news cycle has changed. Proof that the 90s will never go away. I'm fine with that. No kidding. And also 2016 will never go away. I'm fine with that. No kidding. And also 2016

will never go away. I'm more fine with the 90s not going away than 2016. We will keep Nirvana forever. Danielle, what about you? What can you not let go? Alright, so this is about UK government. Okay. Yeah, so this week I read this story

about how the UK government has a new position called the Minister of Loneliness, which I genuinely can't let it go. Yeah, it's totally real. This is not a Monty Python thing. Theresa May appointed a Minister of Loneliness. First of all, I just love the idea of there being a Department of Loneliness. But aside from that. Very small.

Right. Just one person. So the reason I can't let this go, aside from the fact that it's very kind of soft and fuzzy because the idea is to save people from loneliness because there has been a sort of wave of scientific research

showing that especially in the elderly, loneliness is associated with all sorts of diseases. Arthritis, depression, diabetes, you know, all sorts of those sorts of things. So you know, loneliness kills. But aside from that, like, there are two things that I love about this. One, it's kind of efficient. If it's associated with so many bad things and you can at least try to fix it, you know, great.

You're trying to fix a whole bunch of diseases at once. Aside from that, this feels very low-hanging fruit, policy-wise. Like, you're not telling people to jump rope or eat celery or do things that are a drag like that. You're telling them to go hang out with nice people. Let me inject a note of misanthropy here. Oh, no. Like, what are they going to do to cheer people up

that's not going to be more irritating than being lonely in the first place? Other than dogs. Dogs are often a solution. Everything else is irritating. Staffed by dogs. You bummed me out again. Well, my can't let it go will cheer you up,

especially you, Danielle, an Iowa native, because lots of things are happening. We are celebrating the one-year mark of the Trump administration. We're celebrating many other occasions. We are also celebrating the caucus equinox. And I will explain what I mean, as in caucus, as in caucus, because the 2016... Thanks for clarifying. Diction, Scott, diction.

It was more like... I'll explain. Okay. Well, the 2016 Iowa caucuses were February 1st. They have not set the date for the 2020 Iowa caucuses yet,

but it's going to be sometime around late January. So we are at this moment halfway between the last Iowa caucuses and the next Iowa caucuses, which to me is really exciting. If you're experiencing campaign withdrawal, please contact the Ministry of Loneliness. Okay, that is the show for tonight. Thank you all. We love coming to the Warner Theater.

Everyone here at the theater makes it so easy and so much fun. Thanks to Sarah Sample, Bud Budinsky, and everyone at Live Nation and the Warner Theater for making this come together so smoothly. Thank you also to Joshua Johnson and our partners at WAMU. You can support our work by supporting them, your local public radio station. Thank you also to Allie Prescott, Jessica Goldstein, and the whole events team at NPR, and to Neil Carruth, our general manager for podcasts. If you're interested in more events like this one, check out nprpresents.org.

Andy Heuther and James Willett engineered the show tonight. Rene Klar designed the visuals you see in the audience behind us. Our podcast is produced by Samantha Fields with much help from Barbara Sprunt, who did a ton of work on this live show in particular. Our editors are Shirley Henry, Beth Donovan and Mathoni Maturi. We had additional help tonight from Miles Parks. And most of all, thank you to everyone in the audience and to everybody listening. Thank you for listening to the podcast.

We'll be in the lobby after the show if you want to say hi and stick around. Obviously, that does not apply if you're listening to the podcast at home. I'm Tamara Keith.

I cover the White House for NPR. I'm Scott Horsley. I also cover the White House. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter. I'm Karen Johnson, NPR. I'm Scott Horsley. I also cover the White House. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter. I'm Karen Johnson, justice correspondent. I'm Ron Elving, editor correspondent.

I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress for NPR. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And I'm Scott Detrow. Thank you for coming, and thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. © transcript Emily Beynon