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Who's in Charge Here?

2025/2/26
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The chapter explores Elon Musk's involvement in President Trump's cabinet, his influence on government reorganization, and the potential repercussions of his role.
  • Elon Musk attends Trump's first cabinet meeting as a special government employee.
  • Musk's role in government reorganization leads to mixed reactions among officials.
  • A significant number of U.S. Digital Service staffers resigned in protest.
  • Polling indicates Musk's controversial influence is unpopular among Americans.

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It's Wednesday, February 26th, right now on CNN This Morning. The president and Elon and his entire cabinet are working as one unified team.

Who's in charge here today? Elon Musk. Unelected and not confirmed will be in attendance for President Trump's first cabinet meeting. Plus this: "We have a lot of hard work ahead of us, but we are going to deliver the America First agenda." After hours of back and forth, House Speaker Mike Johnson flips multiple Republican holdouts to pass his budget blueprint. But what comes next might be even more difficult. Then later: "It's a very big deal. It could be a trillion dollar deal."

Is Ukraine's president caving to Trump? The deal he's ready to sign in exchange for his country's rare earth minerals. And later... How did that happen? Another close call on the runway as Southwest Airlines pilot aborts landing to avoid a runway collision.

6 a.m. here on the East Coast. You are looking at video from that aborted landing that we were just talking about. It is 6 a.m. here, 3 a.m. on the West Coast. Good morning, everyone. I'm Kayla Tausche in for Casey Hunt. It's wonderful to have you with us.

In just a few hours, President Trump will host the first cabinet meeting of his second term. 18 of his 22 cabinet-level nominees have so far been confirmed, but no Senate confirmation is needed for Elon Musk, the world's richest man turned special government employee who will also have a seat in the room where it happens. The president and Elon and his entire cabinet are working as one unified team and they are implementing these very common sense solutions.

Potentially on the agenda at this meeting, large-scale firings. A source tells CNN the Office of Management and Budget is issuing a memo to agencies to submit what they're calling reorganization plans by March 13th. Elon Musk seems to have already gotten the memo, threatening federal employees with their jobs if they fail to respond

to his email asking them what they did last week. The White House says one million employees responded to the Doge demand, but it may not be going over well with some cabinet meeting attendees. Quote, "A Trump administration official tells CNN the move led to some annoyance among not only top officials, but even some cabinet secretaries.

adding that the secretaries are in charge of their own agencies and need to conduct their own reviews for where cuts may be needed. Doge now also facing blowback from team members within the government. Twenty-one staffers from the U.S. Digital Service, which is the precursor to Doge, resigned in protest Tuesday. The team members said in part, "We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems.

Despite the controversy, Musk still seems to have the confidence of the only person he needs. I think it's a very smart thing. And it says if you don't answer, essentially, you know, there's a penalty to pay. Like, that's the end of the job. Musk has said that. The order itself doesn't say that. I think that's part of the confusion. Is he speaking for you when he says you'll be terminated? Yeah, yeah. Everybody speaks for me. I'm the one. I'll take responsibility. You know the old statement, the buck stops here, right?

Joining me now to discuss Lulu Garcia Navarro, CNN contributor and journalist for The New York Times, Megan Hayes, former Biden White House Director of Message Planning, and Matt Gorman, former senior advisor to Tim Scott's presidential campaign. Good morning. Welcome to all of you. Thank you for being here. Megan, I want to start with you because we've been talking a lot about the fact that Elon Musk will be in this cabinet meeting. But when you think about the cabinet room,

There is the group of attendees at the table, which are the secretaries, but then there are also chiefs of staff and senior White House officials. It's not necessarily uncommon for some of these senior most officials to be on the outer loop of that room in seats.

Tell me about the dynamics here. Right, and so I think that will be part of the dynamic of where Elon Musk is sitting. Is he sitting at the table? Is he going to backbench with the staff and the other special government employees that normally sit back behind these cabinet secretaries?

It's all very well laid out and choreographed. They each have a chair with their name on the back of it. The president's chief of staff also sits at the table. So I do think that where Elon Musk sits will send a sign today. How close is he to the president? How close is he at the table? I think that will send a sign of where Donald Trump views Elon in his cabinet.

Lulu, we now have learned about this executive order that's going to give some of these cabinet secretaries essentially a directive to reorganize their own departments, giving them the keys to have some input on what these cuts look like after there had been some pushback about exactly how Elon Musk was going about this. What do you make of that?

- Yeah, I mean, that's the way it's always worked, right? I mean, you have a system in place where the president actually puts cabinet secretaries and then they oversee their own departments and then they decide what is gonna happen there. What has been so unusual, why there has been so much outrage is that Elon Musk is the person that's sort of been going in willy nilly and making these cuts.

I think looking at this, it was kind of amazing to see Donald Trump say the buck stops here. You're going to see, I can promise you, that juxtaposed with Elon Musk and his

what was it that he's holding? His chainsaw. Thank you. His chainsaw coming up for Democrats. There it is. Yeah, there we are. I mean, you're going to see those two things juxtaposed, I think, for Democrats coming forward. You know, this is increasingly unpopular. Polling is showing it. It's starting to hit people in their communities and many people don't like it. How

There has been a lot of public praise by the president for Elon Musk and what he was doing as recently as yesterday. But Matt, we know that the president likes to be the lead character in his productions. We remember the cabinet meetings from the first term where all the secretaries went around and said,

how wonderful he was. What are you watching for today in that meeting for how the two of them interact and what it says about their real relationship behind the scenes? I guess I kind of, taking a step back, disabuse myself of the sanctity of the cabinet meeting. Look, these are obviously, no matter what administration, mostly performative exercises. And so I

I tend not to put a lot of stock into this whole thing. Again, where he sits, fine, interesting. I think two things. I think, A, Elon relishes being the quote-unquote bad cop in this, right? And I think Trump likes being the good cop. They like that sort of dynamic on this. And it seems to be working, at least right now,

I think what we saw a little bit earlier in the year, even during the transition where they tried to kind of place a wedge, Democrats meet some of the media between Elon and Trump, doesn't seem to have worked. I think more than anything else, that likely, as long as that stays stable, I think this relationship could go a little while.

One thing that's interesting to me, though, is when these cabinet secretaries are pushing back on these emails, who is Donald Trump going to be loyal to? Is it going to be Elon Musk or is it going to be the cabinet secretaries? Because there might not be a wedge right now between the president and Elon, but there could be coming up a wedge between some of these cabinet secretaries. It'll be interesting to see where Donald Trump falls in that. Can I just also say that it's not the media, quote unquote, that's doing this. What you're seeing is polling showing that everyday Americans, something that Republicans are loving to invoke these days,

are actually increasingly unhappy with this. Elon Musk is unpopular, he's underwater. And the question for Donald Trump is going to be how much political capital is he willing to invest in someone who is very unpopular? And if he is willing to invest that capital,

Why? What is the relationship really between these two people? Let's not forget how much money Elon Musk put into Donald Trump's campaign. - I think that's the point though, right? Like as long as, if Elon's numbers can do whatever they want, he's never gonna, his name will never be in the ballot as long as Trump's stays high. And that's the key here. And look at, you know, you got a Harvard Harris poll

out today that said 60% of people believe in kind of the idea of Doge and what they're doing. So look, we can kind of play this all day, but I think the good cop, bad cop routine, as long as the good cop's numbers stay high, that's where this will be. - Well, I think Congress is also concerned about this. And we're gonna talk about the town hall specifically a little bit later on in the show, but John Thune, who's the Senate majority leader, also weighed in on this. And the Senate's gonna have to be, and the House are going to have to be actually executing on what the agenda

of the entirety of the federal government looks like. Here's what John Thune said. If that involves some reductions in force, it needs to be done in a respectful way. Obviously, that's respectful of people involved. But I do think as they go through this process, the objective of DOGE is to try and figure out ways to make government run more efficiently, more effectively, and reduce its cost.

needs to be done in a respectful way. Matt, is that what's happening right now? Well, look, all of this stuff will be done during the reconciliation process. And look, all the talk about Doge right now, I understand it. It's a big thing.

Trump's second term will be succeed or fail based on what the reconciliation package goes through. Like that was, we'll define his term. It's what by and large defined the first term with healthcare and with the tax bill. So really that is what I'm watching for. This is, it's an appetizer, so to speak, but what comes through and obviously Mike Johnson last night will be telling the tale. Uh,

Yeah, I mean, I agree. And I actually think what you saw was very impressive. I mean, you saw Trump really actually being incredibly engaged, calling up lawmakers, getting them to the table. This is actually where a president matters. This is

actually something that was a big question whether Trump was going to engage in in this granular level and we've seen him do it. Congressman Tim Burchett detailed for reporters a little bit of that conversation. I believe we have the congressman if we can play that right now. We're going to get it in just a minute but essentially he was talking about the call that he received from the president and some of the assurances he received. I believe we do have it now. Let's take a listen. So tell us why you changed your vote, Congressman.

Because there are legitimate cuts and it's the right direction to go. It's not everything I wanted, but in this game, you're either at the table or on the menu and it's time to get at the table. Did they promise you anything? There's no quid pro quo, but the president assured me that he would work towards cuts and he's never lied to me. He's always been honest about it and the speaker backed him up.

So they got there. They got across the finish line for this first hurdle. But there's clearly a lot of work yet to come, Megan. Yeah, absolutely. And that to me, when there's no quid pro quo means I am not going to fund a challenger against you moving forward. So I think that that's a little bit, you know, they're getting to the table for different reasons. And it will be interesting to see how this all plays out. But back to your question about is this being done respectfully and firing? It is not being done respectfully. But I do agree with you that Donald Trump's term is going to be defined in what happens in this

And to that end, I mean, the reconciliation bill and many of those policies will last four years, if not decades beyond this term. Lulu, we tend to focus, history tends to focus on a president's first 100 days. But I'm wondering if this term we're going to focus on the first 130 days, because that's the length that Elon Musk will be serving as a special government employee. Well, we don't know how long he's going to be serving as a special government employee.

let's be clear, but yes. Elon Musk has become a focus, and this is where I'd push back a little, because this is so unusual. When have we ever seen someone like this, the richest man in the world, coming in and having such sway over the government, over the president, and over the first term of a new administration? We've never seen it before, and so therefore, it is legitimately fascinating, important, and worthy of scrutiny.

There is more to come from our panel and on this show ahead on CNN This Morning. A peaceful night for the Pope, the Vatican releasing a new update on Pope Francis as the 88-year-old spends another day in the hospital. Plus, a massive sinkhole in the middle of a Philadelphia neighborhood. It's one of the five things you have to see this morning. And a pilot avoids a runway collision in Chicago with just seconds to spare.

I just feel very thankful for who we had flying our plane. I was already anxious, and then when that happened, I was extra thankful. Very thankful for the pilot and everyone who was involved. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop. With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments, but that's weird. Okay, one judgment.

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This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Upgrade your business with Shopify, home of the number one checkout on the planet. ShopPay boosts conversions up to 50%, meaning fewer carts going abandoned and more sales going cha-ching. So if you're into growing your business, get a commerce platform that's ready to sell wherever your customers are. Visit Shopify.com to upgrade your selling today. A dictator without elections. Zelensky better move fast or he's not going to have a country left. Gotta move.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is making that move. He could be visiting the White House by the end of the week after Ukraine and the U.S. reached a deal. A source telling CNN there's a framework agreement in place on revenue from Ukraine's mineral resources and reconstruction.

I hear that he's coming on Friday. Certainly it's okay with me if he'd like to. And he would like to sign it together with me. And I understand that's a big deal, very big deal. It's a very big deal. It could be a trillion dollar deal. It could be whatever. But it's rare earths and other things. CNN's Nick Payton Walsh is in Kyiv with more.

Kayla, once again Ukraine's fate is going to rest on a meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and President Donald Trump, really about how well these two men get along. The rare earth minerals deal seems to be in a very final stage with Ukrainian officials suggesting that both sides have indeed agreed

to final terms that are acceptable to both of them. That's not something we've had openly confirmed by the White House. But when asked about this, President Trump said that he was willing to meet Zelensky as he suggested he would

matter of days earlier and that Zelensky wanted to sign that particular deal and he called it a big deal, a very big deal. So positive indications too but frankly the volatile nature of all of this means that until those names are written on a piece of paper it's going to be hard to know exactly what the final outcome is. The deal as we understand it does not contain security guarantees.

for Ukraine. Some of the language Ukrainian officials said was more in favour of Ukraine's security, but at the same time too in Ukraine's favour it doesn't contain some of the more onerous things the Trump administration wanted to see written down in paper. Some of those harder discussions about Ukraine's natural resources will likely be left to later deals, later uglier, harder talks.

But really, it is still down to whether these two men are able to get along after an exceptionally acrimonious week that they went through. Remarkable that French President Emmanuel Macron was able to get this meeting through and bring Trump back more towards the European viewpoint as to Ukraine's defense.

but a very vital meeting on Friday in the White House. Not 1,000% guaranteed that it indeed will all happen as planned. So much has changed, but certainly a more positive slant for Ukraine in the last 24 hours, Kayla.

Nick Payton Walsh and Keith Nick, thank you. Coming up, a near disaster at a major American airport. A Southwest Airlines jet barely avoiding a runway collision with a private plane. Plus, if this isn't a tease, I don't know what is. It wasn't Rogaine that police found under this man's toupee.

24 minutes past the hour. Five things you have to see this morning. A dramatic water rescue. A police officer jumping into action to save a border collie that had fallen through the ice. According to News 12 New Jersey, the dog was chasing geese when the incident happened.

Take a look at this massive sinkhole opening up on a Philadelphia street, swallowing one car and nearly claiming another. Fortunately, no one was hurt, but it did knock out water to the neighborhood. I'm surprised it didn't knock out more than that. An avalanche caught on camera in southwest China. This footage shows tourists fleeing from the avalanche. They were able to find shelter in a shed before getting buried. There were no injuries.

Police in the UK releasing surveillance footage of the 2019 heist of a $6 million 18-carat gold toilet. The video shows cars arriving at a palace as men with tools run to the entrance. That is a heavy getaway car. They later appear with parts of the gold toilet before stashing objects in the trunk and driving off. Three men are on trial for what a prosecutor calls an "audacious raid."

And finally, a man's toupee in Colombia was covering up more than a bald spot. Police found cocaine under his hairpiece as he tried to board a flight to Amsterdam. The drugs are worth an estimated $10,000.

Wow, that's incredible footage. Coming up on CNN This Morning, President Trump's budget blueprint, surviving a narrow House vote, but major potential roadblocks are ahead. Plus, a quick-thinking pilot avoids a runway collision in Chicago with just seconds to spare. It was pretty amazingly calm on the flight. You know, no one just, everyone just kind of looked around and just, okay, this ain't normal. But nobody panicked. Nobody panicked at all.

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This week on The Assignment with me, Adi Cornish. The push to have bigger families and more babies is part of a movement called pro-natalism. They are freaking out about declining global fertility rates. And that is real. It's a phenomenon called birth dearth. What's behind this push to start a new baby boom? Who are the voices pushing for a more pro-family America? And what exactly does that mean?

Listen to The Assignment with me, Audie Cornish, streaming now on your favorite podcast app.

A Southwest Airlines flight nearly collided with another plane while landing in Chicago on Tuesday. The incident unfolding at Midway Airport, where video that you're looking at right now shows the Southwest flight coming in for a landing. But just before touching down, a jet appears on the runway just ahead. The Southwest pilot immediately pulls back up and then has some questions for air traffic controllers.

Southwest 2504 going around. 2504 roger that, climb maintain 3000. Tower, Southwest 2504, how'd that happen? You can hear the Southwest pilot asking, "How'd that happen?" The FAA and National Transportation Safety Board have that same question and have opened an investigation. Passengers on the flight say the close call reminded them of what has already happened so far this year.

I just feel very thankful for who we had flying our plane. Yes, and I was already kind of anxious going on the plane just because of what's been happening this year so far with all the flights crashing and things happening. So I was already anxious. And then when that happened, I was extra thankful, very thankful for the pilot and everyone who was involved.

Joining me now is Mary Schiavo, CNN transportation analyst and former inspector general at the Department of Transportation. Mary, there have been several incidents this year that have not been confidence-inducing for American flyers. The New York Times reporting that at Ronald Reagan National Airport, American Airlines flight 2246 arriving from Boston was making a final descent when it suddenly canceled its landing, climbed toward the skies, and it

and accelerated away from the airport. That was an aborted landing, and it was to avoid a plane getting ready for takeoff. Both of these incidents happened within 90 minutes of each other. And then there was also the same airport where the midair collision happened just last month. So what is going on here? Are we just becoming more aware of these incidents because we're on high alert?

Well, no, we are certainly more aware because we're on high alert. But these airport near collisions, we call them near misses, but obviously they're near collisions. They're called runway incursions. And every year we have, well, for example, in 2024, we had 1,758 of them.

So that's more than three a day. And this has been a fairly consistent number. We had a little drop in the numbers last year or the year before last. But when we have, you know, 1,500, 1,700 of these every year, it is very alarming. And that is the worst, one of the worst statistics in aviation safety. Everybody says it's safe to fly. Well, the problem is, is it safe to be at the airport?

because that's where the greatest hours of exposure come to people to this danger. And that is something that even when you have the equipment, for example, at Midway, they had the most current equipment to alert the tower, to alert pilots, to avoid collisions.

But in this case, the private jet pilot, at least in my opinion, seemed very confused just from leaving the apron area from the private pad. Had to get instructions twice, repeated the instructions back wrong, was told to hold short and not cross the runway.

And that's somewhat understandable because this particular airport, when you look at the airport map, it looks like a plaid kilt. I mean, there's just so many intersecting runways, taxiways, etc. So that one is explainable. But yes, we have a lot to worry about at our airports in near misses.

So roughly three per day, and I take your point that it's not more than normal, but there was also another close call over the weekend at an airport in San Francisco. It involved the same air carrier that came in too low and crashed back in 2013 and killed three people. Here's the air traffic controller telling that flight that they were coming in too low. Let's listen to it. -Agent, this is heavy, check your altitude immediately. Altitude 3026. Agent, this is heavy, are you correcting? -Agent, I thought you were going all out.

So do you think that that is something that could have been a more serious incident than it was? Yes, and I worked on the crash of Asiana Flight 214 back in 2013. And there, you know, very similar communications with the tower. In that case, they were not watching their airspeed, and then their altitude deteriorated. They literally had not...

engage the auto throttle on that plane. And to see this uncoordinated and not stabilized landing, you have to ask several questions. One, one of the things that came out of the Asiana 214 crash is a big criticism over what's called crew resource management. What's going on in the cockpit and are the pilots communicating with you?

with each other? Are they double checking their altitude, air speed, et cetera? And I think that is why that the NTSB might look at it. The FAA is certainly looking at it to see if that resource management hazard has not improved, especially in light of some accidents in Korea where the airline is from.

Of course, the context for these incidents happening at this moment right now is that the FAA and the NTSB are subject to the same personnel and technological overhauls as the rest of the federal government. And there are questions about the impact that those overhauls would have on operations. Just this week, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy was talking specifically about the needs of air traffic control. Here's what he said.

In a lot of these air traffic control centers, they're using floppy disks. A lot of your young viewers don't even know what that is, but this is really old technology. The communication system with the internet is not well served. So again, that doesn't go to air safety, but that does go to the technology that we use. Government takes 8, 10, 15 years to upgrade systems.

And that's the enemy of progress. So we're going to do this very quickly. We're going to look at a year, year and a half time frame and do massive upgrades, improve the systems, help air traffic controllers, keep our skies safer. And again, time is the enemy. So now we're learning about how outdated some of these systems might be, Mary. But we're also learning that Elon Musk's Starlink has a new contract to assist the FAA, raising some conflict of interest concerns. Do you think that

that technology is so outdated that someone like Musk can help it? What's your view here? Well, technology is outdated, but even when I was Inspector General, I had investigation after investigation of not only the outdated technology, but the fact that the FAA had great difficulty managing these contracts. We were scrapping billion-dollar air traffic control modernization contracts

because the FAA was simply not on top of the contractors. So yes, we need improvement. Yes, we need more equipment and we need better investment. But most of all, we need oversight over these contracts and contractors. So if we're going to bring in Starlink, somebody's got to be on top of this and somebody at the FAA has to be in charge and know what they're doing. And the problem is we found when I was inspector general, we just didn't have

the expertise within the department to run these contracts. And so contracts and contractors were running them up. Going to take some great oversight. And I hope Secretary Duffy's prepared for that. He's got to have top people on it. Hopefully officials will heed that warning from someone who has seen this firsthand. Mary Schiavo, our thanks to you this morning. Thank you.

Behind closed doors, several House Republicans pleaded with leadership yesterday, asking for guidance on how to respond to questions from their home districts on recent federal cuts and calls for more involvement in the Doge job cutting process. Voters have been turning out to town halls across the country, expressing frustration over how Doge is operating. CNN's Tom Foreman has more.

Are you okay with the chaos being ruined? Are you okay? Government employees are going to be let go, and that's just the reality of it. Shouted down at town halls. Let's restore some order. So yelling at me is not going to get any answer, okay? Protested on their way to work. We've lost 10% of our workforce. Shut up and let him talk. I will not, sir. Republican lawmakers are being hammered by voters, including their own.

Over the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which is chainsawing federal jobs in blue and red states alike. Right now, I think we should just be using a scalpel. And some elected leaders are now pushing back on DOGE's unelected Cutter-in-Chief.

If I could say one thing to Elon Musk, it's like, please put a dose of compassion in this. These are real people. When you have a president who can affect somebody's business or somebody's livelihood, it just needs to be done with deliberation.

For weeks, the parade of departing workers has been growing from the FAA to the IRS, from health agencies to the Small Business Administration, from Veterans Affairs to the national parks and more. And when Elon Musk demanded this past weekend that all remaining workers justify their employment in an email or be fired, President Trump initially was all for it. I thought it was great because

because we have people that don't show up to work and nobody even knows if they work for the government. But around a dozen departments in Trump's own administration effectively told their workers to ignore Musk. Trump appeared to back down, leaving party bosses to put the best face on a bad situation. I think the vast majority of the American people understand and applaud and appreciate the Doge effort.

Polls indeed show voters want less government waste, but a slim majority now think Doge has gone too far. And by the hour, it seems more GOP Congress members are subtly backing the resistance. If I were a Senate confirmed head of a department and I had somebody from the outside undermining my ability to manage and demonstrate there's one leader in every department, I'd have a problem with it.

Let's bring in the panel to discuss this. Lulu, your reaction to what we just saw from voters? Yeah. Americans don't, everyone's invoking the American people. Let me invoke the American people. Americans don't like to have things taken away from them. That is a true thing, I think, that you can all embrace. And when they see government not working for them, they want cuts, they want to take away fraud, but at the same time, they don't want

the fear that planes are going to be falling out of the sky. They don't want their taxes not to be processed on time. They don't want to have their national parks shut down. And so I think what you're going to be seeing is everything that goes wrong in America at the moment is going to be pointed at

Elon Musk and that picture of him with that chainsaw, and they're going to say he's to blame for that. So this is a high risk strategy, I think, for the administration. Not anecdotes or not data, but we're starting to get some data that puts numbers behind this with 51 percent of respondents in a recent CNN poll saying that President Trump's efforts to cut federal programs have gone too far. Fifty four percent say they do not

support him giving Elon Musk this prominent role. And a full 53% are afraid or pessimistic about the rest of his term. How do you digest those numbers? A couple things. I mean, I think you're right. We talked about this the other day as well. I was there doing House Republican work in 2018 when you had the health care town halls. And they were a lot more intense, a lot more well-populated than this.

And I think that was far more of the median voter. You didn't see the jail my president, which is not indicative of the swing voters. But what I will say is this. What did ring true for me is I remember coming in and a lot of members of Congress get very spooked very, very quickly based off this. They come in with reports rushing in and it really kind of overtakes them. So what I would be very, very careful and what I would counsel folks to do if you're on my side is you've got to have a strategy to kind of counter this and call

these members down because they're going to go home and feel this exact same pressure. And again, I think they need to make sure that they're selling whether it comes to the reconciliation bill and all those things are going through Congress in a really effective way. That's going to be key. And as for Democrats strategy to combat this, James Carville, who's an elder statesman in the party, has called for what he is describing as a strategic political retreat. He writes in The New York Times, allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight and make the American people miss us.

Is that the right strategy? I mean, I don't think Democrats have a lot that they can do right now, but watch all of this happen. There's not much that they can do to stop does right. The president is in charge of that, so I think that he's not wrong and letting this sort of happen. But this is why elections have consequences, and that's why the midterms will be so crucially important for Democrats going into 2028, especially if they want to get any power back.

to have any power in the government again. So I do understand what he is saying there. I don't think Democrats have another strategy but to watch things sort of crumble. Carville suggests that you need to let Trump's approval rating fall by about 10 points and then, in his words, make like a pack of hyenas and go for the jugular. Never one to mince words, Vince Carville. Ahead on CNN this morning, House Speaker Mike Johnson exhaling a little bit this morning. His effort to jumpstart President Trump's agenda off to a pretty good start.

but major hurdles for the GOP budget still remain. Plus, from green cards to gold cards, the new plan from President Trump to boost a different kind of immigration. - Hi, I'm Donald Trump to talk to you about the remarkable convenience of the Visa check card.

What was supposed to be a 15-minute House vote last night on Capitol Hill turned into an hours-long saga for President Trump's agenda. At first, it appeared House Speaker Mike Johnson did not have the votes from Republican members of his caucus to pass that budget blueprint. But after calls directly from President Trump to a handful of Republican holdouts, the votes flipped in Speaker Johnson's favor.

A lot of hard work ahead of us, but we are going to deliver the America First agenda. We're going to deliver all of it, not just parts of it. And this was the first step in that process. Now Republican leaders in the House and Senate have to get on the same page. Both chambers have passed their own budget plans and have disagreed on the best way to advance the president's agenda. So the House has a bill and the Senate has a bill and I'm looking at them both. Each one of them has things that I like. So we'll see if we can come together.

We'll see if we can come together. It's going to be a weeks-long process, Matt. And yesterday, Senate Majority Leader John Thune was chuckling a little bit when he said, yeah, the Senate's going to be making some changes to this. So how does this process play out? I mean, in the end, I think that

I expect them to say something along those lines, but in the end, whatever Johnson can do to land the plane in the House is what the Senate will likely eat with minimal revisions, right? The numbers are too thin there. It did take two lessons broadly from last night. A, it was a big win for Johnson. I think he's been consistently underrated, facing a lot of these challenges from an accidental speaker to skillfully navigating a lot of these challenges. That's number one. And number two, I think to Lulu's point earlier in the show,

I've said this consistently too, if Trump wants to get his agenda passed, no matter what it is, he has to get in the details, whether it's a speaker's vote, this, he has to get in there and lobby those people and work the phones because that's how he's gonna get it done.

Lulu, the devil will be in the details, as it always is. This is a blueprint. But even if and when the Senate and the House get on the same page, they still have to figure out exactly what their new tax reform bill will look like, exactly

where those $2 trillion in cost savings will come from, and then to win over some holdouts who don't necessarily support a $4 trillion hike to the debt ceiling. So how are they going to get there? I mean, I think that's going to be the real difficulty here, but I do think they're going to get there. I just see this as it's, you see this typically in any new administration, the wind is at Donald Trump's back. You know, they have

the Senate, they have the House, and they want to show that they know how to govern. But the devil's in the details in this. You're already seeing Democrats pushing back on what is actually in this, about cuts to Medicaid, about cuts to other entitlements. This is something that is very worrying to a lot of people, and it fits this wider narrative that Democrats are trying to push, which is to say, yes, they can do this, they can govern, but what is that going to mean to your bottom line individual voters? And that is also going to be the legacy of

To that point, I believe we do have some sound that we've heard from Democratic lawmakers exactly on that. Let's listen to it.

Hundreds of thousands of people in Ohio, tens of thousands in my district are going to lose their health care if this budget passes, all so they can pay for these ridiculous wasteful tax giveaways to billionaires and big corporations. It is a very unpopular budget and I'm not sure they will ultimately have the votes to pass it once people realize, and they realize, that it's a trillion dollars out of health care.

trillions more in deficit spending, all for what? To give Elon Musk and a bunch of billionaires and big corporations more tax giveaways? Democrats, Meghan, are generally aligned on that, but do you think that that message is enough to give many Republicans or independent voters buyer's remorse?

I don't know if they'll have buyer's remorse, but I do think this is where the Democrats have their bargaining power here. And also it goes to show that what is Doge actually cutting if they're still going to add $4 trillion to the deficit? It doesn't make any sense what they're doing here. So I think the Democrats really need to work on their messaging and really focus on getting that out there to the American people. Because I do think, to your point earlier, when people start calling into their members' offices, that makes a difference. When they start showing up at town halls, members get spooked very easily. Yeah, and we will see how it plays out in the coming.

months and then of course the midterms will be here before we know it. I know we don't want to think about our election already, but that's how it is. The panel will stay. You guys will be right back. It is 53 minutes past the hour. Here's your morning roundup. The Vatican says Pope Francis spent another peaceful night in the hospital. He is sitting in an armchair today and continuing with his treatment for double pneumonia. Despite showing slight improvement on Tuesday, the Pope remains in critical condition.

A somber day in Israel as the country lines up for the funeral procession of the Bibas family. Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, Kfir and Ariel, were abducted during the October 7 terror attacks and were killed while in Hamas captivity. They are being laid to rest today after their bodies were returned as part of the ceasefire agreement.

They were brazen in using an NSA platform intended for professional use to conduct this kind of really, really horrific behavior.

A senior Trump administration official telling CNN that rank-and-file members of the intelligence community brought the issue to Gabbard's attention. Plus this:

President Trump announcing plans to sell $5 million gold cards to wealthy foreigners, giving them the right to live and work in the United States and offering a path to citizenship. Trump says gold card sales will start in about two weeks and suggests millions of them could be sold.

Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary, says that these individuals will have to go through vetting to make sure they are wonderful, world-class, global citizens.

I will say they have had a version of this before. It was rife with fraud. There was not a lot of oversight. It is hard to have oversight over a program like this. You had people coming into this country who had criminal backgrounds, who were laundering money, all sorts of things. I'll also just say one other thing, because immigration is a specialty of mine.

A lot of people who have a lot of money don't want to become American citizens because America is the one, one of the few countries in the world that taxes you on your global income. So if you come here and your money is in Belarus, you're going to get taxed on your money in Belarus, even if you are making money here. Although Trump has tried to change that. He has, but he hasn't yet. And so what I'm saying is it's...

It's not the big fancy thing that's going to bring in, I think, a lot of people in the way that he envisions. Yeah, and if individuals thought that real estate prices in big cities were high now, that would surely make it worse.

I remember the Visa check card commercials we saw before the break from before. I mean, it was a Derek Jeter, George Steinberg. Those things were great, actually. Take me back to that more than anything else were those old commercials. Moving on, Monica Lewinsky is reflecting on the events that made her a household name more than two decades ago, sitting down with Call Her Daddy podcast host Alex Cooper. Lewinsky sharing how she thinks the situation involving former President Bill Clinton should have been handled. I think that

The right way to handle a situation like that would have been to probably say it was, you know, nobody's business and to resign, you know, or to find a way to find a way of staying in office that was not lying and not throwing a young person who was just starting out in the world under the bus.

Clinton has defended his handling of the scandal. This is what he told NBC News in 2018. I think I did the right thing. I defended the Constitution. Let's bring the panel back in. Megan, obviously, you know, those moments were in the fog of war, right in the middle of a scandal. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, do you think Lewinsky is right? I also think we view things differently now with the Me Too movement. There's a lot of different things that we've evolved over.

I think the way we view some of these issues culturally, I don't think that how we villainized her, I was very young when that happened, but I don't think how we villainized Monica Lewinsky was appropriate by any stretch. I don't think we would have done that now. I'm not sure that he needed to resign. I don't know. I was very young, so I'm not sure about all the like constitutional issues and exactly. But I do think we villainized her in a way we would not do today. And I do think that we should take a look at how we did that. She's also stepped into the limelight.

defending herself, trying to reclaim her own reputation. I'll never forget Adam Grant, a psychologist and professor who's now a thought leader, tweeting, "What's the worst advice you've ever received?" And she responded, "A White House internship will look great on your resume." - Yes. - And at the same time, Bill Clinton has retreated. Really, it wasn't until this campaign that he came back, 'cause after that really disastrous interview with Craig Melvin, where Melvin asked him very point blank, like, "Would you apologize to her?" And he really was very defensive about it.

- And you see his body language there. - Exactly. So he went into hiding for, you know, relative hiding for about six years until really this campaign with Biden. He didn't really emerge in the same way. - I think it's hurt him in the party. I think it's hurt the Clinton brand. You know, there was a lot of nostalgia in the Democratic Party.

about the 90s, about balanced budgets, et cetera, et cetera. And I think the benefit of hindsight is that actually it was sorted. He did not behave honorably. And whether or not he should have resigned or not, I will leave that to others to decide. But certainly no one views Bill Clinton in the same way now. But there's still no real standardized playbook for dealing with some of these situations, Megan. I mean, I remember when Al Franken stepped down from the Senate because of allegations against him. And some of those were founded allegations. And

I think some Democrats would say that was probably the wrong move. Yeah, I think that it just is sort of in a moment of time, right? Like that wouldn't have happened. It probably, you know, Cuomo had to step down too. And then they did investigations and now he's going to run for mayor. So I just president who has been credibly accused of sexual assault and found liable in a in a civilian court. I mean, you know, on the other side of this,

there's been a lot of things that have changed too, where there's more permissiveness about what people do in public office. And so, I mean, we have Elon Musk, who is the father of 13 children and has his ex-partner pleading for him to be a good father on social media. So, you know, I think...

A lot to discuss about this. Well, one thing that Lewinsky interview will do is spur a conversation, as it has for sure. One quick programming note. If you're missing Casey Hunt in your day, as we all are, be sure to tune into her new show. It is The Arena with Casey Hunt at 4 p.m. weekdays here on CNN. Her unique perspective, her reporting to the day's most important stories will all be there. That premieres Monday. Thanks to everyone. CNN News Central is right now.

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