Ryan Knutson and Molly Ball round up the week’s news including nomination hearings, inspectors general firings and the airplane crash in D.C. Plus, they speak to WSJ’s Washington coverage chief Damian Paletta about the administration's freeze on potentially trillions of dollars in government financial assistance. Further Listening: - Trump 2.0: A Fast Start to a Second Term - Trump’s Immigration Overhaul Further Reading: - White House Budget Freeze Tried to Flip Script on Busted Budget Process - Trump Blames DEI, Democrats for Deadly Plane Crash Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are Ryan Knutson and Molly Ball's insights on Trump's early days?
Molly Ball, senior political correspondent. How are you?
Pretty good, Ryan. How are you doing?
Great. So Donald Trump has been president for 11 days. Is it just me or does it feel like he's trying to do everything everywhere all at once?
Just like the movie, which means we're also going to get a proliferation of like clones with weird appendages. Is that how this is going to go?
Yeah, with hot dog fingers. Is that coming soon?
That's right. The hot dogs. Uh-huh. That must be the next executive order we should all look out for.
How would you say overall that things are going for him so far with the strategy?
I would say mixed. I mean, Republicans and people in the administration are pretty thrilled with how it's going. They feel like he's racking up wins. Democrats are also sort of getting their moxie back because they see him as doing too much too fast. And they feel like this is going to cause a backlash that's going to bring them back to relevance.
All right. Well, there's a lot to cover here on the show today. So let's get right to it.
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Chapter 2: Who are the controversial nominees in Trump's cabinet?
That's why the world works with ServiceNow. More at servicenow.de slash AI for people.
All right, so before we get into this temporary freeze in federal spending, there are a few other things I want to talk about. First, Trump is putting his cabinet together. And this week, a few of his more controversial nominees had their Senate confirmation hearings. There's Keshe Patel for FBI director, Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
for health secretary. How big of a battle do you think lies ahead for the administration and these nominees?
Well, it's been a bit of a battle on Capitol Hill this week. These nomination hearings were pretty rocky. These nominees got grilled pretty hard, particularly by Democrats, of course. But there was some skepticism from Republicans as well. And you can tell that while these Republicans want to be loyal and give the president his team, some of them have misgivings.
And you heard them pressing, you know, RFK, for example. not just for his views on issues important to them, like abortion, like agriculture, but also just his basic knowledge of the way the department works that he's going to be tasked to run. And he stumbled over things like understanding what Medicaid does and how it relates to Medicare.
And that, of course, is something he would be tasked with overseeing. So I think there's a real sense on Capitol Hill that these are sort of going down to the wire and could really go either way.
It seems like from the hearing so far that most Democrats are most likely to oppose these nominees. But what Republicans do you think might present the biggest hurdles? We saw a few of them flip on Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, who barely cleared his nomination, needing a tie-breaking vote from Vice President J.D. Vance.
So I think what we saw with Hegseth is there are Republican senators who feel relatively impervious to Trump's threats. There are at least three, Lisa Murkowski, who has survived a primary challenge before, Susan Collins, who represents a very blue state, and Mitch McConnell, who's not running for reelection again and has strong views, particularly on national defense. Mm-hmm. So that's three.
And if there is one more senator who feels that one of these nominees is a bridge too far, that's it. They're not going to get through.
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Chapter 3: Why did Trump fire 17 inspectors general?
I don't think we know yet. They haven't appointed new people to these positions yet. And as we said at the beginning, they're doing a lot very fast. They're still trying to confirm the cabinet. So this doesn't seem like necessarily the highest priority.
All right. So I also want to talk to you about this deadly plane crash that happened late Wednesday night in D.C. More than 60 people are presumed dead. This is the first tragedy in Trump's second term. And it's actually not something that I would expect that we would be talking about on this podcast.
But President Trump weighed in on it in a press conference on Thursday morning in a way that has drawn a lot of attention. Fake news.
— It's all under investigation. — I understand that. That's why I'm trying to figure out how you can come to the conclusion right now that diversity had something to do with this crash.
— Because I have common sense, OK? And unfortunately, a lot of people don't. We want brilliant people doing this.
— What did you make of what the president had to say about this?
Well, it was certainly striking how political the president immediately chose to make this. I think the normal thing to do in these situations is to refrain from seeming to politicize a tragedy and to focus on the people dealing with the loss of their loved ones. just a horrible tragedy that does raise a lot of potential policy questions.
It raises questions about the crowding of the DC airspace, about the staffing levels and the funding and the personnel in the Federal Aviation Administration. And then there also have been questions for years about the diversity initiatives undertaken by the FAA. Trump wasn't making that up. But, you know, he is not waiting for an investigation to say whose fault this actually is, right?
We don't know if it was the air traffic controller's fault at all. We don't know if it was, as Trump also said on social media, if it was the helicopter pilot's fault. We don't know if those diversity initiatives, while real, had anything to do with any of the staff who were involved in this.
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Chapter 4: How did Trump respond to the D.C. plane crash?
So can you walk us through what happened here? What is the Trump administration trying to do and why?
Sure. So when it's numbers, it's easy to unpack it a little bit if we just talk. We start with the numbers. So the federal budget's about $7 trillion. We know that the Trump administration wants to cut the budget dramatically from $7 trillion down to who knows what. You know, Elon Musk said he wants to lop $2 trillion off the budget so that we could get it down maybe to $5 trillion.
So we know they want to do this, but obviously spending stuff all runs through Congress. But what happened here is one week, exactly one week after Trump was sworn in, they put out this memo, this two-page memo, and it says... First of all, it says there's a $10 trillion budget, which is not true. There's a $7 trillion budget, which is still a lot of money, but, like, every trillion counts.
There's a $10 trillion budget. $3 trillion of the 10 is used on woke stuff and this and that, financial assistance. And so we're going to freeze it, and it's going to be frozen effective tomorrow at 5 o'clock. The only thing they really said, the only exemptions that they offered in this memo, deep in the footnotes, were Social Security and Medicare.
And so for a lot of us who follow the budget closely, that said everything else was fair game. And so what happens after this memo goes out? Well, I mean, Head Start programs that get money for, you know, the children, community centers, states felt like their money was going to get frozen. And then so the memo went out on Monday.
By Tuesday, it appeared that the Medicaid system in this country had completely frozen up and seized up. And so the system that paying the hospitals, paying the health care providers for all those people completely seized. I've never seen anything like that before. That happened less than 24 hours after this memo went out. There was a ton of questions.
The White House couldn't answer the questions. And so they had to put out another memo on Tuesday, essentially blaming the media for the confusion and offering a few clarifications, essentially saying this would not apply to Medicaid and it would not apply to food stamps or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs.
So then a federal judge put a pause on this order. And then the Trump administration came out and said they were rescinding the memo.
Yeah, this is kind of a tale of three memos. The Monday memo that didn't make a ton of sense. The Tuesday memo, which tried to walk a little bit back. And then there's the Wednesday memo that said, we rescind the Monday memo. Let's just pretend this never happened. And then Caroline Leavitt tweets out, well, we're not actually rescinding it. We're just doing something else.
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Chapter 5: What is the impact of Trump's federal spending freeze?
I mean, Damian, I wonder what you think about the potential for a constitutional crisis here, right? If the courts are telling the administration they can't do something, you know, the Constitution says it's up to Congress, there's a law in the books that says presidents can't just do this, but what if the administration just goes ahead and does it anyway when the courts have said that they can't?
I mean, there's a clear strategy by the Trump administration to take some of these things, birthright citizenship is one, and this Impoundment Act of 1974 is another, and get them out into the courts as quickly as possible.
And the Impoundment Act, just to say, is this idea that Congress controls the purse strings. They decide how much money should be spent. But there's a view that the executive branch should say, OK, that's a ceiling, but we'll set the floor. We're going to not spend money that you've allocated.
Exactly. The Empowerment Act of the 1970s essentially puts restrictions around what the White House can do once the money has already been authorized by Congress and put into law. And Russ Vogt, who's Trump's nominee to be the budget director, and President Trump himself both believe that that law is unconstitutional and that the commander-in-chief should have the power to do that.
So what they want is... is to get this into the courts. They wanted a lawsuit about this, just like they wanted a lawsuit about the birthright citizenship executive order, which the Constitution appears to say, you know, should not go into effect.
But if there's a lawsuit and it gets in the courts and they get in front of a friendly Supreme Court, and actually Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy wrote an op-ed in the journal saying exactly this, that they want this into the courts. So that if a friendly Supreme Court rules on it, then they get everything they want.
They actually can't do these things without the court kind of ruling in their favor. So the sooner they can do it, even if it's in kind of a messy memo, although that might not help them in the courts if they have a messy memo, but the sooner they can get the courts involved, the sooner they can kind of get down to business.
But what I'm saying is you say they can't do it unless the court rules in their favor. But why not? Why don't they just I mean, look at what they're doing with TikTok. The Supreme Court already unanimously said that the law of the land is that TikTok cannot operate. But it still is because the administration is just ignoring that. Right. I mean, the inspectors general, same thing. Right.
Lindsey Graham was on television and was asked, wasn't this illegal? Because in the law, it says they have to give 30 days notice before they fire these people. And he said, well, yeah, technically, technically. Very quickly, the law says he's supposed to do a 30 days notice. He didn't do that. Do you think he violated the law?
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