SAM BUGLER: My name is Sam Bugler (ph), and I’m with a group from Drake University in Washington, D.C. And we are currently standing outside of the Supreme Court, waiting to hopefully hear the oral arguments against the TikTok ban. It is 9:11, and we have been waiting here for an hour and a half, but this podcast was recorded at…
ASMA KHALID, HOST:
12:38 p.m. on Friday, January 10 of 2025.
BUGLER: Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Now enjoy the show.
(SOUNDBITE OF BIG TOP ORCHESTRA’S “TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)”)
CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: That poor, cold soul had to stand outside for a long time.
KHALID: Hopefully they got in.
JOHNSON: Yeah.
DOMENICO MONTANARO, BYLINE: And it’s going to be really interesting oral arguments. I mean, there’s been a real decline in the number of people who are saying that they think that TikTok should be banned. And more young people actually getting their news from TikTok. So it’s going to be a big change.
KHALID: All right, well, hey there. It is the NPR POLITICS PODCAST. I’m Asma Khalid. I cover the White House.
JOHNSON: I’m Carrie Johnson. I cover the Justice Department.
MONTANARO: And I’m Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.
KHALID: And today on our weekly roundup, we are going to start the show with news that this morning President-elect Donald Trump was sentenced in that New York hush money case.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DONALD TRUMP: Yes. Thank you, your honor. This has been a very terrible experience. I think it’s been a tremendous setback for New York and the New York court system.
KHALID: Trump did not receive any punishment, and he will not spend any time in jail, but the sentencing itself is symbolic. We are just 10 days away from seeing Trump take the oath of office to reenter the White House. And this marks the first time that any former, current or future president has been tried on criminal charges. Carrie, what did the judge exactly rule this morning?
JOHNSON: Judge Juan Merchan in New York basically sentenced Trump to nothing – no requirement to report to the probation office, no incarceration, no financial fines. But Trump walks away a convicted felon. And he also, you know, has faced justice at the hands of a jury of New Yorkers, as he once was, people who convicted him last year of 34 criminal charges as part of this hush money scheme to cover up his alleged affair with Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election rolled around. And so that is a verdict for history, although Trump will be appealing, he said today. And he will be appealing, I guess, from his perch in the White House.
KHALID: And he can legally do that.
JOHNSON: Absolutely. It’s his right to appeal. And some people think he may actually have a good chance. Trump is arguing a couple of things. One is that it was undue burden for him to have to deal with this while he was preparing to reenter the White House in his transition. And the second was that the New York jury who convicted him last year – those jurors heard evidence that should have been out of bounds because presidents have some immunity, the Supreme Court told us. They have some immunity for their official acts. And even though the heart of this scheme, in which Trump was convicted for these hush money payments, happened before Trump took office in 2016, the jury heard some evidence from people like Hope Hicks and Madeleine Westerhout, who were aides to Trump in the White House. And Trump is saying the jurors never should have heard that information, and the whole case should be thrown out on that basis.
KHALID: Carrie, I want to also ask you about this request that Trump had. He asked the Supreme Court to essentially squash this ruling. Obviously, they didn’t decide to ultimately do that. But what was he asking them to do, and how do you interpret the Supreme Court’s decision?
JOHNSON: Yeah. This was a last ditch bid that Trump and his lawyer John Sauer and his lawyer Todd Blanche put into the Supreme Court to try to delay the sentencing that occurred today. And late yesterday, we heard the Supreme Court come out with just a couple of paragraphs denying the idea that they would intervene and make this sentencing go away for Trump. Interestingly enough, this was a 5-4 decision by the court, and the court majority basically said, you know, any issues with the evidence the jury heard about Hope Hicks and Madeleine Westerhout – that can be heard on appeal. We can deal with that later.
And then secondly, the court majority said this really is not going to be a major burden for Trump to appear virtually – he didn’t even have to go to the courthouse in New York – and also, because the judge had already signaled the week before, that Trump wasn’t really going to face any consequences – no prison time, no jail time, no fines, no requirement to do drug tests in the White House, none of that.
The kind of wild thing for legal scholars was that four justices appear to have sided with Trump and would have intervened in an extraordinary way in this case. Those were Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Justice Neil Gorsuch and Justice Brett Kavanagh. And the thinking there is, you know, usually, at this kind of stage, the Supreme Court would only really weigh in if there were, like, some kind of seriously irreparable harm coming down the pike.
MONTANARO: There were four criminal cases that Trump was facing. This was seen as the least consequential, potentially, of them all and is really the only one that came to full fruition. You know, and you have a Supreme Court that now leans heavily toward unfettered, essentially, presidential power. People used to say no one is above the law, not even the president. Well, I think the past year has shown that the president is, indeed – if not above the law completely, has massive protections that regular people certainly don’t have.
And, you know, I mean, if you go even bigger than that, I mean, the founders in this country wanted to break away from a monarchy. Instead, we wind up with sort of a pseudo king. You know, two systems of justice, a lot of people talk about – one for the rich and poor, one for the privileged and unprivileged. We really have three, it seems, because if you get to the point where your power is so great that you’re above even the rich and powerful in this country, where you’re the president, you have your own judicial system that’s now been carved out, something that we hadn’t seen really post-Richard Nixon ’cause he resigned.
And it’s really now sort of the coda on the end of what happened to start with the Nixon Watergate crisis. And not having that settled then, it certainly seems to have been settled now, where you have a Supreme Court that’s more conservative and leaning toward unilateral power for a president.
KHALID: Domenico, do you see any political repercussions to this sentencing?
MONTANARO: Well, I mean, Trump won the election, so the political consequences have already happened. I think that Trump doesn’t want to have on his record that he’s a convicted felon. And that’s part of why he is continuing to fight this. He doesn’t like that asterisk being next to his name.
KHALID: Didn’t he campaign heavily off of it as well?
MONTANARO: He did. So that’s the irony – is that he campaigned with this as a badge of honor, but in reality, he doesn’t want this to be something that sticks. He’s tried everything he possibly can. And frankly, he should be thanking his legal team because they were able to get about as good an outcome as could possibly be gotten for an individual.
JOHNSON: His legal team and the Supreme Court, which helped him along the way, most notably in that immunity decision last year. And in fact, Asma, this week we had another data point about Donald Trump and the Supreme Court. That’s that Trump actually had a phone call this week with Justice Samuel Alito. We have not heard about this before. It was reported within 24 hours the phone call. ABC News reported it.
And then the Supreme Court confirmed in a statement from Justice Alito that he and Trump talked because, Alito says, Trump is thinking about hiring one of his former clerks, a guy named William Levi. Levi was a top aide to Bill Barr in the Trump Justice Department, and we know Donald Trump really leery of Bill Barr. They really went crosswise toward the end of the administration. And apparently, Trump wanted to make sure that Levi was both qualified and loyal.
So he had to talk to Justice Alito. Justice Alito seemed to have thought this was a perfectly fine interaction. He said he didn’t know at the time Trump was going to go to the Supreme Court in this last-ditch bid to delay sentencing in New York. But certainly, there’s been a lot of criticism of the justice for taking that phone call and then deciding to vote on the Trump bid to delay sentencing.
KHALID: In a way that’s favorable for Trump. Yeah. Carrie, I want to shift gears ever so slightly and ask you about a somewhat related issue, and that is that many members of Trump’s personal legal team are now expected to take jobs in the incoming administration, and there seems to be a lot of blurring of lines between Trump’s personal legal world and his political orbit. How do you make sense of that?
JOHNSON: Yeah, it’s remarkable how many lawyers who work for Donald Trump in their private capacity, as a client, are going to have major-league jobs in the Justice Department and elsewhere in the government. Starting with Pam Bondi, the former Florida attorney general, who was defending Trump and even advancing some of his baseless election fraud claims several years back – she’s in line to be the attorney general. Her confirmation hearing is in the Senate next week.
And next up is Todd Blanche, who actually stood next to Donald Trump today on that Zoom for the sentencing and who told Judge Merchan that they would be appealing. Todd Blanche is in line to be the deputy attorney general – that’s the second-in-command at the Justice Department. That’s a major responsibility. He’s in charge of the criminal function. People who are in charge of the FBI and the DEA and the ATF would report to Todd Blanche if he’s confirmed as the deputy. And Blanche’s right-hand man is Emil Bove, who’s another of Trump’s lawyers.
And then finally, we have a guy named John Sauer. John Sauer is the nominee – the prospective nominee for Trump to be the solicitor general of the United States. And in the meantime, he’s been filing petitions with the Supreme Court and briefs with the Supreme Court advancing Trump’s personal interest in the New York case and in other matters as well.
So all those fellas – and then separately, it just came out in the last several days that a gentleman named Stanley Woodward, a lawyer here in Washington who represented a number of January 6 Capitol riot defendants, including one accused of seditious conspiracy – Stanley Woodward also has defended Walt Nauta, Trump’s right-hand man and valet at Mar-a-Lago – Stanley Woodward is going to be a lawyer and adviser to Donald Trump in the White House. And here we have lawyers not only being nominated from Trump’s legal team, but people who have continued to stand beside him and represent him at the Supreme Court level, even after they’ve been announced as his nominees.
KHALID: All right. Thanks, Carrie. We’re going to let you go.
JOHNSON: Thank you.
KHALID: And let’s take a quick break, and we’ll be back in a moment.
And we’re back. And we’re joined now by Miles Parks, who covers voting for us here at NPR. Hey there, Miles.
MILES PARKS, BYLINE: Hi, Asma.
KHALID: So you have been reporting on the so-called election integrity movement. I know you’ve been doing a lot of stories around this. I just want you to explain, though, what this term means. Who makes up this movement?
PARKS: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, for decades there’s been kind of partisan differences in elections generally. On the right, you know, you have – Republicans have been more in favor of restrictive voting policies. You know, things like photo ID, things like that. Democrats – the left has prioritized things that make, generally, voting easier.
Now, since 2020, I would say there’s kind of a third column, this election integrity movement, which is really motivated – still kind of on the right, but really motivated by this idea that elections are not just things you should be skeptical of, but that you are certain they are stolen, and that policies need to be based around this idea that elections are being stolen and things need to kind of be wholesale changed as opposed to tweaked. And I think one of the leaders of the movement, who I’ve done a lot of reporting and this piece looks at, is somebody named Cleta Mitchell, who listeners might remember was on that famous phone call after 2020…
KHALID: Yes.
PARKS: …When Donald Trump asked Brad Raffensperger, the Secretary of State of Georgia, to try to find votes. She has become very influential in crafting this election integrity movement since 2020.
KHALID: So these are folks on the right, but they are further to the right than where Republicans are around voting issues.
PARKS: Exactly. I would say that, for a long time, Republicans have been more skeptical of the elections process, but these are people who have really – a lot of them only got interested in elections after 2020. And therefore, their worldview around voting is really driven by Donald Trump’s lies about the election system.
MONTANARO: Now, I find it interesting that the election integrity folks, which is really just a euphemism, really – it’s amazing to me that they think that – I assume – that this election was perfectly clean and went well, but that 2020 wasn’t.
KHALID: I mean, is that true? They do think this past…
PARKS: That is…
KHALID: …Election was fair?
PARKS: …One of the most interesting aspects of this to me – is that, yes, I would say that is true, which some people would say that’s outcome dependent – right? – that Donald Trump did very well.
MONTANARO: (Laughter).
PARKS: But what – I was emailing with Cleta Mitchell, and their argument is actually that they became more involved after 2020, and that is why the 2024 election was secure – it’s because there were all these people who got interested in elections and interested in election oversight.
MONTANARO: So this is a big country. We have a decentralized election system. How true is what she’s saying? ‘Cause it strikes me that it’s not very true.
PARKS: Well, you’re right. When you talk to experts, it’s not true – that the administration of this election actually – it’s true that there were more people and there was more oversight, probably. There were more people interested in elections in 2024 maybe than ever before, but the actual – there were – there’s oversight of every election. In 2020, there were numerous – how many audits did we report on? How many reports led by Republicans? I always go back to this idea that there was – in every single swing state, there were investigations led by Republicans that found the elections to be accurate. So no, this idea that 2020 is stolen and 2024 was fair because of – isn’t true, but it is true that there was probably more citizens involved.
KHALID: Miles, if their assessment is that 2024 was fair and that the elections were run fairly smoothly, then what’s next on the group’s agenda?
PARKS: It does not seem like they are slowing down. I think that is another interesting aspect to me. We acquired this audio. So it’s of a panel at a meeting of ALEC, which is this conservative group that helps draft state-level legislation. And we got the audio from the watchdog group Documented, which passed it along. And to be clear, it was secretly recorded. And so we’re able to get this insight into what people in this election integrity movement are telling conservative state lawmakers, and one of the big things is that noncitizen voting, which we heard a lot from Trump, from Elon Musk – this was a huge issue leading up to 2024. That’s not going away in 2025 – that the election integrity movement still wants proof of citizenship, which is a very controversial idea in the voting community, basically requiring people to either show a birth certificate, a passport – documentary proof of citizenship to be able to register to vote.
Currently, to register to vote in this country, most people use a driver’s license, so most people do have their citizenship verified in some way. But if there’s no official requirement that you need to show documentary proof of citizenship, you have to check a box that says you could be arrested, you could be deported if you lie about this, and there’s never been evidence that noncitizens are voting in anything but very miniscule numbers in the U.S. But the election integrity community is really pushing for these sorts of more stringent requirements, which many experts – voting experts – say would have a huge impact on communities of color, older voters, people who generally have less access – surveys have shown people who have less access to these sorts of documents.
KHALID: Miles, have you seen any efforts to try to rewrite the events of the 2020 election?
PARKS: One of the other topics that came up in this meeting that I wanted to touch on is all the panelists talked about pushing the lawmakers not to pass legislation that protects election workers. And so if you think about that, there have been – post 2020, there’s been a wide documentation of this sort of, like, increased harassment and threat landscape for local voting officials. On this panel, all of the panelists talked about this threat environment for voting officials as being a narrative, as being made up. And so you can hear Sharon Bemis, who works on Cleta Mitchell’s organization, talk about this here.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SHARON BEMIS: So many of us are familiar with the threat narrative that has been very prominent. I think you’ll find in your states that it’s unfounded. If you ask for police reports relayed and threats against your election administrators, I think you’ll find that it is very rare.
PARKS: And so she talked about explicitly telling the conservative lawmakers in this room, do not pass any legislation that adds new protections to voting officials because it keeps this idea that voting officials are under attack kind of in the mainstream.
MONTANARO: So do they want to make it easier to threaten election workers?
PARKS: They would say no.
MONTANARO: Ah.
PARKS: I mean, they would say that these people already have enough protections, that they’re regular citizens, that it’s already illegal to assault a person. Like, if I just punch you in the face, it’s illegal for me to do that. So you being a voting official doesn’t change that. But I do think it’s – the opposite point – right? – is, like, then what’s the harm in passing new protections for these people, considering more than 20 people have been arrested for threatening violence against voting officials since 2020? You know, we’ve heard countless Republicans, Democrats, voting officials, talk about the fact that this environment has changed. So that is not a debatable fact, but we are seeing a preview – going to your point, Asma – of what’s coming in 2025, I think, in terms of the rewrite of what happened in 2020 and post – and following that one.
KHALID: And it falls into this larger just reimagining of base facts and…
PARKS: Yes.
KHALID: …Information and evidence that we’ve seen so routinely in the last several years. Miles, do you have any final takeaways from the 2024 election?
PARKS: I think the biggest takeaway for me – all that matters at this point is how the candidates who ran in that race talk about it. And we saw Kamala Harris accept defeat, quickly concede in that election. We saw Donald Trump stop spreading lies after it became clear he was going to win, and we see now that wide majorities of Democrats and Republicans trust the process.
MONTANARO: Leadership matters.
KHALID: All right, one more quick break, but Miles, stick with us because when we get back, we’ll have Can’t Let It Go.
We’re back. And it’s now time for the part of the show that I know you all love called Can’t Let It Go. That is the part of the show where we talk about the things from the week that we just cannot stop talking about, politics or otherwise. And Domenico, why don’t you kick it off?
MONTANARO: I’m staying politics because, you know, we all watched, here, the Carter funeral. I thought it was really heartfelt. But what I can’t let go of is the seating arrangements and how you had these presidents, ex-presidents and their families all sitting together and the kind of weird you know, cartoonish (laughter) interactions that you saw between presidents and their families – everything from, you know, when Donald Trump and Melania Trump came in, had this really awkward handshake with Mike Pence, you know? And Karen Pence, who…
KHALID: Karen Pence, yeah, former second lady.
MONTANARO: …Refused to stand up, continued to look at her program, didn’t shake hands, didn’t make eye contact. Then Barack Obama is there. And Barack Obama – it seems like everyone got together and said, he’s it. He’s the guy who is going to be the buffer between all of us…
(LAUGHTER)
MONTANARO: …And Trump. He’s going to have to talk to Trump. They seemed to be yukking it up. There are all kinds of memes going around about what it was they were talking about.
KHALID: Like, yukking it up, Domenico – I mean, at some point – you know, you’ve been in those awkward assigned-seating situations. Say you’re, like, at a wedding, and you’re seated next to somebody. You can’t be rude.
MONTANARO: I am terrible at small talk. But just watching Barack Obama and Donald Trump talk – I was just like, what are they talking about?
PARKS: I do…
MONTANARO: ‘Cause there’s just so much stuff.
PARKS: I did wish – I – and I didn’t monitor the memes super closely, but I did – there’s a podcaster, John Boy.
MONTANARO: Oh, I love John Boy. He’s a…
PARKS: He’s a podcaster who reads…
MONTANARO: He does all the lip reading. Yeah, he’s great.
PARKS: …Does the lip readings, right? I was like – I was thinking – I was, like, this would make a great…
KHALID: Oh.
MONTANARO: I want a John Boy…
PARKS: …John Boy…
MONTANARO: Yes.
PARKS: …Clip of – so that would be awesome.
MONTANARO: Oh, you need to pitch – I hope he listens.
PARKS: Yeah, exactly. Someone show this to him – request.
MONTANARO: (Laughter).
KHALID: Well, Miles, what about you? What can you not let go of?
PARKS: I cannot let go of is not related to politics at all, but I have a new favorite rapper. And…
MONTANARO: Oh, I can’t wait to hear it.
PARKS: I know, exactly. That’s kind of – I was like, sometimes I’m like, public service.
MONTANARO: I have an idea who it might be. It’s in my head. I want to see if it’s the same.
PARKS: So Doechii…
MONTANARO: That’s it.
(CROSSTALK)
KHALID: ‘Cause of the Tiny Desk?
PARKS: Yes, the Tiny Desk – I mean, like, a month and a half ago, they – full disclosure, they do record these Tiny Desks a few weeks, sometimes, in advance of when they actually publish.
KHALID: No. We’re telling you how it happens.
PARKS: Exactly. But they are recorded on our floor, where we work. And so occasionally, this will happen where you’ll kind of be walking. And from across the floor, you’ll see…
KHALID: I know.
PARKS: …A group of people, and you can kind of hear – this happened to me when the Doechii Tiny Desk was happening – is I was on the other side of the floor, and I just kind of, like, heard the beginning of it and could see the energy of the way people were responding to it, and I walked over. And I think – I mean, I’ve now been at NPR 10 years. I think it was the best Tiny Desk I’ve ever seen…
KHALID: Whoa.
MONTANARO: Wow.
PARKS: …In person in terms of…
KHALID: That’s high praise.
PARKS: Especially, I had not listened to her before. And I’m embarrassed to say that ’cause I try to be up – I had a baby this year, so I’m a little behind on my music. But it was truly a breathtaking performance. And then, for me, selfishly, I, like, obviously go down the rabbit hole. I’m, like, grinding her mixtapes. I’m like, into it, and I read the Wikipedia, and she’s from my hometown.
MONTANARO: Whoa, cool.
PARKS: So she’s from Tampa, Florida. And just to find that – I don’t know. It was just a very special day for me to be like, I have a new favorite rapper, and she’s from Tampa. So listeners, go check out the Tiny Desk.
MONTANARO: Well, we’ll have to see what she thinks about election integrity.
PARKS: Yeah, I have no – she didn’t rap about it. I’ll say that much.
MONTANARO: Yeah, wow. We got to wait for a verse and see if…
PARKS: Yeah, exactly. Post-2026 mixterm (ph)…
KHALID: Maybe she’s listening to this podcast. Maybe she’s…
PARKS: …Mixtape, I think…
MONTANARO: Mixterm – I like that.
(LAUGHTER)
PARKS: Asma, what can’t you let go of?
KHALID: All right. So I don’t want to bring the mood way, way down. But, you know, I can be a cerebral person, as you all know, sometimes. And I think what has been genuinely hard for me to let go of this week have been the apocalyptic pictures out of the West Coast, of southern California. I have been not able to, like, look away from the photos on Instagram because they are so horrific. You see these images of people who have just abandoned their cars, their whole homes gone.
And I just want to give a shout-out to, I’m sure, the many listeners we have in southern California because I cannot imagine being in that situation. It is horror upon horror watching those pictures and videos. And so they have been in my minds a lot this week. And I’m sorry that I’m leaving you all on such a down note, but it’s just been something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.
MONTANARO: Well, we have a huge listener base in California, and we all have friends who…
PARKS: Yeah.
MONTANARO: …Live out there and – you know, just checking in with a lot of them to see where they are, if they’re safe, if their homes are OK, and if they’re OK.
KHALID: Sure.
MONTANARO: And so we’re certainly – are, you know, thinking of everybody there.
PARKS: Well, I do think also, like, to your point, Asma, of, like, literally not being able to let this go, I – you know, I come from a land of hurricanes. That’s Florida’s natural disaster of choice or whatever you want to call it. Wildfires, to me, are, in my opinion, the most visceral of – I don’t know. I’ve had the same response as you. There’s something…
KHALID: Yeah.
PARKS: …Very viscerally unsettling. And so, yeah, I don’t know exactly what that is, but I’m with you.
KHALID: All right, well, that is a wrap for today’s show. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Our editor is Casey Morell. Our producers are Bria Suggs and Kelli Wessinger. Special thanks to Anna Yukhananov. I’m Asma Khalid. I cover the White House.
PARKS: I’m Miles Parks. I cover voting.
MONTANARO: And I’m Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.
KHALID: And thank you all, as always, for listening to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIGTOP ORCHESTRA’S “TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)”)
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