JASON: Hello. This is Jason (ph) in Seattle, Washington. I’m currently prepping for a goodbye party as my spouse and I also pack up our entire lives as we prepare a move to Lisbon, Portugal. This podcast was recorded at…
DEEPA SHIVARAM, HOST:
12:35 p.m. on Thursday, January 30, 2025.
JASON: Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but, hopefully, we will have arrived safely in our new apartment with our senior Chihuahua Peanut and enjoying a glass of port wine.
SHIVARAM: Oh…
JASON: Vamos la.
SHIVARAM: …Lovely.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE GREAT AMERICAN MAIN STREET BAND SONG, “TEETER BOARD FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)”)
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Oh, my gosh.
SHIVARAM: Absolutely lovely.
KEITH: I want to go to Portugal. It is on my list.
DOMENICO MONTANARO, BYLINE: I have friends who live in Portugal, actually, who used to live in the U.S. It’s really interesting how they were able to do that. So I hope you enjoy it.
SHIVARAM: Oh, yeah.
MONTANARO: That’d be great. I don’t think I would go with the port wine personally, I don’t like it that sweet, but there’s other good dry wines there.
SHIVARAM: And a pastel de nata, too. Hey, there, it’s the NPR POLITICS PODCAST. I’m Deepa Shivaram, I cover the White House.
KEITH: I’m Tamara Keith, I also cover the White House.
MONTANARO: And I’m Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.
SHIVARAM: OK. So earlier today, President Trump briefed the nation on the plane crash that happened last night in D.C. Just before 9 p.m., an American Airlines flight carrying about 60 people from Wichita, Kansas, crashed into a military helicopter. There are no survivors. It was the first airline crash like this to take place since 2009, and there are investigations ongoing on how this happened, and the cause is not known. But this afternoon, President Trump weighed in, and he seemed to blame the crash on diversity, equity and inclusion hiring efforts at the FAA. We’ll have more information when we do actually know what is going on, but this is all worth mentioning, Domenico, because DEI efforts are a pretty big throughline for a lot of President Trump’s agenda on how he’s trying to restructure the government.
MONTANARO: It’s probably the most bizarre briefing I’ve ever heard after a disaster. Usually, presidents and officials have the information that they have, that they can present, that they’ve confirmed, because they want it to be responsible. But instead, Trump used it as a political cudgel to back up the things that he believes to be problems within the government, while also saying that he doesn’t actually know if that’s what caused any of this, but he’s throwing it out there because he has, quote, “common sense.”
SHIVARAM: And we talk about what the president’s agenda has been just in the last, like, week and some change. The idea has been, you know, making the government, quote-unquote, “more efficient.” There was a big memo that came out on Monday that caused a lot of confusion, it came from the Office of Management and Budget. Walk us through what happened there, because in the last, like, 72-ish hours, there’s been a lot of up-and-down.
MONTANARO: Yeah. So there was this memo from the Office of Management and Budget. It was just two pages, and it said that there would be a spending freeze for the entirety of the government, that there would be a review, and then those things had to align with the president’s priorities, the executive orders that he’d already put out. It was unclear what exactly would be cut or would not be cut, but it exempted direct payments to people, like for Medicare and Social Security. But that raised a whole lot of questions on programs that are funded that people indirectly benefit from – things like Title I funding for schools for free lunches for kids, you know, low-income heating programs, Meals on Wheels. There were a lot of questions. It wasn’t just the media. It was all of those organizations that were very confused.
The White House doubled down. They said that it was clear. They then tried to put out more guidance for Congress to say the kinds of programs that would not be affected, but it certainly did not spell out all of the programs that would not be affected, so people were very confused. You know, the memo was supposed to go into effect at 5 o’clock Tuesday, but a federal judge stepped in and blocked that. So the rescission that happened the next day really seemed to be trying to get the Trump administration out of court, because then you heard from the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, who then said that the freeze is still in effect. It’s just the memo that had been rescinded.
SHIVARAM: Yeah. And, Tam, I mean, you covered the first iteration of the Trump administration. There’s so many parallels that I feel like we could draw just in the first, like, six, seven days of, like, how much chaos there was. And, you know, talk to me about that era, too, because, you know, when the travel ban – I’m thinking – came out there was a lot of this similar sentiment of, like, you know, the White House thinks they’re giving a clear directive, and everyone else is just like, we actually have no idea what you’re talking about.
KEITH: Yes. There are echoes of the first term where the Trump administration put in place, through executive order, a ban on travel from people coming from Muslim-majority countries, several Muslim-majority countries. There was immediately chaos at the airports. They hadn’t actually explained the policy and how it would work to the people who would be implementing it before it went into effect. And that was something very similar with this, where there was a very immediate deadline that everything was going to have to pause. So all of a sudden, people didn’t know what to do – how it would affect them.
Eventually, the White House came down and said really the only thing affected are programs that are implicated by the executive orders that President Trump has hired in the first week. And this gets back to where we were before, because that includes executive orders banning diversity, equity and inclusion. It includes going after transgender care. It includes environmental and climate programs trying to reverse those. Then they said, no, it’s just those things. And, at least according to Karoline Leavitt’s tweet, the pause is still on for those things.
SHIVARAM: Getting into the politics of this a little bit, Domenico, I mean, how is this being framed? I mean, is this considered, like, you know, a backtrack, a failure on Trump’s agenda, for the most part? And I’m curious how Democrats are kind of framing this as well.
MONTANARO: Well, this was clearly the first major misstep that the Trump administration created trying to do something fast and bold, but that’s not always the best way to run the government. Being able to do this, though, obviously, part of the Trump playbook to flood the zone, to try to create confusion, to try to make people off-balance – it actually wound up unifying Democrats because they hadn’t figured out, before that, really what to focus in on. And they seem to be able to focus in on a message of, here’s what government actually does do for you, and here’s what the Trump administration doesn’t seem to know the government does. And they started to kind of find some of their own unity when they didn’t have it previously.
I think a big, important piece of the confusion here was also, though, about presidential power and about how far Trump wants to test the limits of the presidency, considering that the country was founded on having three separate but equal branches of government to be able to be a check and a balance on the other two branches. And what raised questions about what Trump was doing here is whether or not his administration would continue to fund or dole out the funds that had already been specifically approved by Congress. If he doesn’t do that, that’s something that would certainly be challenged, brought to court, and he’d be testing the limits of just how far the Supreme Court would go in his favor.
KEITH: Well, and, Domenico, let’s just be clear – there is no mystery here. They are trying to test the limits of presidential power. This White House, White House Counsel’s Office, everyone around President Trump believes in a very expansive view of presidential power. They believe that the president has the legal authority to stop spending money that Congress told him he had to spend. And they want to test it. They want to get it to the Supreme Court. They want to defend it because they believe that they will win, especially with this court.
SHIVARAM: All right. We’re going to take a quick break and we’ll be back in a moment.
And we’re back. Yesterday, in a different White House memo, President Trump instructed his administration to house 30,000 migrants deported from the country at Guantanamo Bay.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people. Some of them are so bad, we don’t even trust the countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back, so we’re going to send them out to Guantanamo.
SHIVARAM: Domenico, walk us through the history of Guantanamo Bay. I mean, there’s a lot going on this week, but why was this announcement significant?
MONTANARO: Well, I think what’s important here, number one – this is not where enemy combatants who the Bush administration had brought over during the global war on terror – they would not be in that same facility or in that area. It’s a different area, run by the Navy. And it’s not clear, though, that there are actually that many beds.
It has been used to detain migrants who tried to go to the United States who are dissidents from places like Cuba, for example. What’s important here legally is that when the Bush administration started doing this, it was intended because they didn’t want to have people step foot in the United States because the fear was, for them, that if they had people step foot in the United States, then they would be subject to due process in the U.S. judicial system. This is going to create all kinds of legal issues because the migrants that they want to put in this facility are not people who are on boats who are coming here who had never stepped foot in the United States. These are folks who are already in the United States and now they want to put there.
SHIVARAM: And, Tam, would this be the first time that migrants are held at Guantanamo the way that Domenico is talking about? I mean, this is, I assume, not, you know, standard procedure.
KEITH: Yeah. So as Domenico said, there is a facility to sort of process people who are apprehended at sea – or, in many cases rescued at sea – and then get them back to their home countries. What President Trump and his Republican allies in Congress are talking about is on a different scale and a different type of thing. They are saying there are people that are so bad that we can’t just deport them back to their home countries. We have to house them on an island. That is a pretty big shift. This is going to require congressional action, congressional funding. And this is something that Trump had talked about wanting to do before, but it didn’t work out. We will see if, in Trump 2.0, he is better able and more effective at getting these sorts of things, where there are, as Domenico says, legal questions.
SHIVARAM: Well, yeah. I mean, legally speaking, like, if he doesn’t have congressional approval – question mark – to get this done, is this something that he can try to do through an executive order?
MONTANARO: He can try to do whatever he wants through an executive order and, like we said in the earlier segment, try to push the limits of the presidency to see what he’s allowed to actually be able to do. And then there would have to be lawsuits that are taken into the courts, and then see if those courts uphold his executive order or if they deem it to be unconstitutional.
KEITH: And he did sign an executive order, but it’s essentially calling on Homeland Security and the Department of Defense to do stuff. It isn’t like, and I bequeath that this happens. He would need money and authority. But as we know, Congress – Republicans in Congress are very eager to pass a big spending bill related to immigration enforcement. This could, in theory, be wrapped into that. And their desire is to do that without any Democratic votes, using a procedural maneuver.
MONTANARO: I will say, though, it does lend itself to the broader problem of what to do with migrants who the U.S. wants to send back to countries that won’t take them. Venezuela is a perfect example of this, because temporary protected status would be stripped from Venezuelans who have come to the United States as political dissidents seeking asylum from the government there. If that were to be the case, where do you put them? This issue with Guantanamo is going to be potentially held up in courts, so they’re going to run into some issues on what to do with folks whose countries don’t want to take them back.
SHIVARAM: Yeah. I’m curious if this unfolds into, like, another one of – you know, almost on the same vein of the OMB memo of, like, they throw out the biggest picture possible, right? And then it kind of gets scaled down, scaled down, scaled down, depending on what is realistically, you know, feasible.
MONTANARO: Sure. And we saw that in the first, you know, Trump round, with him scaling back the travel ban, for example. I mean, initially, on the campaign, it had been all Muslims coming to the United States. Then it wound up being much more tailored to specific countries, and they had to lay out national security reasons for why.
KEITH: And then, because this is the Trump administration, they will say that they got the maximalist thing. They will say that they did it, they solved it, even if what they ultimately got was sort of scaled back – as we saw with that Office of Management and Budget memo, which was rescinded, but then they said, we’re not actually changing our policy.
MONTANARO: And I’m going to be really curious to see if there’s any kind of push for a comprehensive immigration overhaul, because there are so many problems that are going to be exposed and have been exposed by this, including how many judges are in the court. There’s too few of them. Some of them have backlogs of years because they’re not able to adjudicate cases of the millions of people who are here without legal status.
SHIVARAM: OK. I think we’re going to leave it there for today. I’m Deepa Shivaram. I cover the White House.
KEITH: I’m Tamara Keith. I also cover the White House.
MONTANARO: And I’m Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.
SHIVARAM: And thank you 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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