First Look with the Post's Jonathan Capehart, Leigh Ann Caldwell, Ramesh Ponnuru and Jennifer Rubin
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You're listening to a podcast from Washington Post Live, bringing the newsroom to you live. Welcome to First Look, Washington Post Live's one-stop shop for news and analysis. I'm Jonathan Capehart, associate editor at The Washington Post. President-elect Donald Trump's picks for his cabinet continue to meet with senators as one key resignation glides the path for one of his more controversial choices—the

Joining me now, co-author of the early brief newsletter and Washington Post Live anchor, Leanne Caldwell, who's coming to us from West Palm Beach, where she is covering the Trump transition. Leanne, welcome back to First Look. Thanks for having me from West Palm Beach, where the weather is not good. I mean, OK, it's like 20 something degrees here, Leanne. You're not going to get any single tears here. What's the temperature?

I mean, okay, it is 70, but it is windy. I can't sit by the pool, it's too cold. 70, oh Leigh-Anne, okay. Okay, let's talk. Yes, yes, let's get serious here for a minute. FBI Director Christopher Wray announced this week that he'll resign at the end of the Biden administration, January 20th at noon. He was likely gonna be fired by Donald Trump anyway. So was this resignation inevitable?

Yeah, I mean, it wasn't necessarily inevitable. He could have stayed on and he could have put up a fight with Donald Trump and made this a very public firing. But all indications, my sources I was talking to ahead of his resignation assumed that that's what he was going to do. He was going to resign. He did not want a public fight. He got almost eight years in the job. And remember, he was a Donald Trump appointee.

And so he decided what people say, just to go out gracefully, let Donald Trump do his thing, put in his own person and go back to his private life. - The term of an FBI director is supposed to be 10 years. You just mentioned he's been in it almost eight. And this is by design. It's meant to span different administrations to shield the director, but also the agency from politics.

So what does Ray's resignation mean for that custom? Are there people out there who kind of hoped he would stay in the job, if anything, to preserve, it's not a law, but preserve the custom of the independence of the FBI director from being knocked around by politics?

Yeah, absolutely. There's a lot of people who do that. And there's a lot of presidents who don't necessarily want that person, that FBI director in the job, but do it because it is customary to do so. But Donald Trump is also doing the same thing with the head of the IRS, that he's essentially pushing out the head of the IRS, which is another similar position that is supposed to span administrations by he's going to appoint his his the person that he wants. But

But we also have to remember and re-get used to the fact that Donald Trump doesn't operate by traditional Washington norms. He has said over and over again, he just said again in his Time interview,

Time magazine interview when he was named person of the year that he's going to push the laws to as far as they will go. He said that when it comes to immigration and border security. His people, members of Congress, are also saying that about

government spending and their new DOGE, Government Accountability Organization. And so while this was not a law, this was tradition. So this is one of many traditions that we can expect to go by the wayside under a Donald Trump administration.

I think you've coined a new phrase, re-get used to. You've been doing a lot of reporting about Trump's cabinet picks, and this week you put their chances of not being confirmed into several tiers with defense nominee Pete Hegseth and Trump's choice for director of national intelligence

Chelsea Gabbard in the top tier of vulnerability. Has Hegseth improved his chances though with his series of meetings with senators this week? He has, and that's actually why I put Gabbard and Hegseth in the same tier and I didn't rank them. Because if this was last week, Hegseth would have absolutely been on his own. He was really struggling.

senators were skeptical. They didn't think they had a lot of questions. But this week, his chances have absolutely improved. And a lot of that has to do with a second meeting he had with Republican Iowa Senator Joni Ernst. Last week, she was very

very, very critical of Hegseth, said she could not get to yes at this point. Now, this week, she says she is willing to support him through the confirmation process. That isn't a yes, but it is not closing the door on him. And that is what is absolutely critical. Another thing is that the Trump ecosystem has gotten behind Hegseth.

A week and a half ago, they weren't there. They were letting him sink or swim and all nominees sink or swim on their own. But several people in the Trump administration or around Trump talked to Trump and said, you can't have another nominee go down. That means the Senate will take advantage of you and not listen to the mandate you have.

And so my sources told me that is when Trump decided to switch and to go in all in for Hegseth and allow his people to go all in for Hegseth. But it's still, you know, not a done deal. More things can come out. There's still these very critical confirmation hearings that'll come in January. So it's still a tough road ahead for Pete Hegseth.

You brought up Senator Joni Ernst, so I don't have to ask my initial question. So I'll ask my follow-up. Can Hegseth get confirmed without Senator Ernst's vote? And it's critical because she is not only a combat veteran, but she's also a survivor of sexual assault.

Yeah, that's right. And it's interesting. One of the things that really concern Joni Ernst is not just the sexual assault allegations against Hegseth, but also that Hegseth has said that he doesn't support women in combat positions in the military. She was one of those women. And so, yes, he can get confirmed without the support of Joni Ernst. There are 53 Republicans. He can lose three.

But he can't lose more than three. There's one other interesting component about Senator Ernst is she's a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. And Pete Hegg says confirmation has to first pass out of committee before it can be voted on before the whole floor or before the whole Senate.

We don't yet know the breakdown of Republicans versus Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee. So that is going to matter if one, depending on the ratio,

If one Republican defects, that could sink him. Or the breakdown might be as much that two Republicans, it'll take two Republicans to vote against him in order to sink his nomination. So we're also, that's just a little kind of insider thing that we're also watching because that committee vote is also very important. Yeah, here's my prediction, Leanne. He might survive the armed services vote.

for the purpose of Republicans saying, well, he should have his, let's go through the process and let's take it to the full Senate and let them deal with it. Let's talk about your second tier, where you have Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is Trump's pick for HHS secretary, and Kash Patel, who is Trump's pick for FBI director. What are the biggest challenges to those confirmations?

Yeah, so I think that RFK Jr. actually has a little bit harder of a chance getting confirmed. And it isn't necessarily because of his beliefs in the health system and vaccines. One of the things that might be very difficult for RFK Jr. is his pro-choice.

position and history. That is making a lot of Republican senators very uncomfortable. A person close to RFK Jr. said that he is absolutely prepared to commit to senators that he will, quote, protect life, is what I was told by this advisor, which means that he will not try to water down any sort of anti-abortion policy

federal provisions that are that are in law. And so and and so that is something that we should watch out for as reporters, as viewers of what is happening in Washington. He will be on Capitol Hill this week meeting with senators. So it will be this next week. So it will be a critical week for him now with Kash Patel. He's actually looking pretty good now.

He has very uncontrolled or controversial opinions about the FBI, including wanting to close the FBI. He has an enemies list of people he wants to prosecute. And so those are things that should be troubling, but it seems like most Republican senators are getting on board, especially since there's these other more controversial picks. I will say that I wrote in my newsletter this week that one Republican aide said,

Kash Patel is insane, but with Trump, you have to pick your battles, and there's other battles to pick right now. Wow. Okay. Leanne Caldwell, co-author of the early brief newsletter and Washington Post live anchor. Thank you very much for coming from frigid West Palm Beach. Have a good weekend. Thanks. You too, Jonathan.

Time for the Opinions Roundtable. So let's go to the opinion side of The Washington Post, where we will find Washington Post contributing columnist Ramesh Ponnuru in the top box and Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin in the lower box. Thank you both very much, Jennifer, Ramesh, for coming back to First Look. Nice to be here.

Okay, can I just, before we get into what we were going to get into, Leigh-Anne just said, in talking about Kash Patel and his selection for FBI director, she said that folks are picking and choosing their battles, and they'd rather go after Donald Trump's more controversial picks than spend time sort of...

opposing Kash Patel. Jennifer, I mean, there are a lot of problematic nominees for Trump 2.0, but it would seem to me Kash Patel should be within the top two or three of hair on fire, we've got to come up with a way to get another pick.

Or do I have my left of center blinders on here? No, I think you're right. And it's not, I hate to say this, it's not merely because he has a hit list and wants to go after political enemies. Republicans probably won't get hot and bothered by that. It's that he is completely incapable of carrying out the very serious duties of the FBI and

And one of the serious duties of the FBI is counterterrorism. And do Republicans really want to put in someone who is a nut and patently incompetent, patently unsuited to the job, risking that there could be an event of some type which he and then they would be blamed for?

So I think, frankly, the Senate's attention has been on Pete Hegseth. That's where the media's attention has been. And when they begin to set their sights on Kash Patel, just as like they're beginning to set their sights on Tulsi Gabbard, I think it's going to become much more problematic. I have a piece on Sunday, a shameless plug, um,

that Mitch McConnell is putting himself out there as a defender of America first and the serious grown-up in the room on foreign policy. Well, we'll see how serious he is because Kash Patel would fall into, frankly, the same category as

Tulsi Gabbard, worse, I think, than Pete Hegseth when it comes to putting America's national security at risk. So we'll see what happens. I think it's a little early in the game to write a free pass for Kash Patel.

Okay. Ramesh, I want to bring something up that Leigh-Anne brought up during our conversation when we were talking about RFK Jr. And it relates to a column you wrote this week. In your column, you wrote, the anti-abortion movement has lost their confidence after two years of political setback. But you have some advice, and it's there on the screen. The pro-life movement needs to recover its fight and its self-respect.

The Kennedy nomination is the place to draw a line. Ramesh, why is Kennedy the place to draw a line?

Well, you know, there are, I think, a lot of reasons to have concerns about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s nomination to be secretary of HHS, and we can go into some of them. But here I was focusing specifically on the politics of the pro-life movement and the extent to which they've been sidelined in the Republican Party. And this, it seems to me, is an opportunity to reassert its place in the coalition. Kennedy's nomination ought

to be beatable. It only would take four Republican senators. And if pro-lifers decide to make this an issue, to say that a candidate who has been on the other side of this issue and sometimes diametrically on the other side of the issue is not acceptable and that they can defeat him, I think

They need a win. Now, what they're doing instead is seeking private commitments behind closed doors. But I think given the political context I'm talking about, where Trump has tried to sideline this movement, they need to have a public reassertion.

I am looking on my, because as you were talking, there was a story, and now I can't find it. It had something to do with RFK's lawyer and the lawyer from the, it was on the New York Times. I saw it on the Instagram. Maybe you know what I'm talking about. Wanting to revoke the approval of the polio vaccine. Right. Right. Yeah. Which is right. Which is nuts, right? Which is nuts and which is dangerous. I do think,

You know, as extreme and factually baseless as a lot of the Kennedy positions and record on these issues of vaccination is,

It has distracted from a question that we need to ask about all of these nominees, and Jennifer raised it about Kash Patel, which is that these are actual jobs. It's not just a question of are their opinions acceptable, but can they actually do the administrative job of running these sometimes gargantuan departments?

The Pentagon and HHS being, I think, the prime examples of this. But ODNI is a serious government agency as well. Ramesh and Jennifer, this is a question for both of you. But I'm going to start with you, Ramesh. Which of the Trump cabinet choices worries you the most? Just one. Just name one. If you have one.

I would say Kennedy. I think that spreading that kind of vaccine denialism is potentially quite dangerous because you only need to... I mean, I don't think that he can actually change government policy in a significant way. School districts' policies aren't going to change because of Kennedy, but he can help shape public opinion, I think, in a really destructive way. But let me also just say the picking and choosing your battles...

point that Leigh Ann was quoting a Senate aide saying, it sure looks as though right now they're choosing not to pick any battles. Agreed. Jennifer, which of the cabinet choices worries you the most, if you can narrow it down?

Well, as much as I loathe the idea of RFK Jr. becoming HHS, and frankly, Mitch McConnell, who is a polio survivor, might have something to say about that.

There are backstops for a really rotten, even a destructive HHS secretary. There is a bureaucracy there. There are state agencies, state figures. But there's no one to back us up if Kelsey Gabbard gives our secrets to the Russians. There's no one who's going to put the five eyes, that is the other intelligence agencies that share information with us, back

together because they won't share information. They don't trust her. She is a Putin stooge. She was an Assad stooge. She is, dare I say, disloyal to the United States. And putting her in a position like that is equivalent to putting Putin's man or woman in the inner ring of the White House. And it is madness for senators to capitulate on that. It's essentially for them to forfeit any serious role in the advice and consent process.

Jennifer, let me stick with you because Trump announced on Wednesday, when I saw this, my jaw hit the floor. Just stay there, given all these announcements. But he announced that he wants Carrie Lake, the failed Senate and gubernatorial candidate from Arizona, to be the next head of Voice of America.

Should she be the face of Voice of America, an organization committed to showing the world how our democracy works, but also clear objective reporting on events around the world?

Before we get to that, I think we risk falling into a Trump fallacy, which is just because he says something doesn't mean he can do it or it's real. He doesn't have the power to appoint the head of VOA. There's an independent board. It's a bipartisan commission. So I don't know how he's going to stick her in there. I suppose he can pull the unitary executive stick and get rid of all of them and say, this is my gal. Um,

But there's a really big question mark whether he can even do this. And as for being the voice of America, well, if I were in my sarcastic mode, I'd say, well, that's about it. Looking at the election results, she really is the voice of America, at least part of America.

But in all seriousness, this is another instance in which America is becoming a joke, in which institutions that were respected around the world, that dissidents in other countries, that democratic movements in other countries rely on, can point to and say, see, this is real news. The propaganda we're getting from our own government is false, is misleading, is an attempt to cow us.

This is another way in which we completely undermine our stature and we let down people around the world. So it is a horrible joke. One hopes that someone finally figures out that he really doesn't have the power to do so. Unfortunately, the alternative was to send her as ambassador to Mexico. And I really don't want to do that to my Mexican friends. That really would be a stick in the eye. But at least she's not going to Greece. That's so cold.

That is so cold. Romance, do you want to jump in or I can go to our next comment?

But I think that the accusation of disloyalty to the United States really needs to grapple with that point and acknowledge her service. Okay. Yesterday, Time Magazine announced Donald Trump as their person of the year. Here he is basking in all his glory yesterday at the New York Stock Exchange. Watch this.

I do want to thank Time magazine. I've been on the cover many times. I don't know who has the record, but I can only probably talk well about 25% of the covers. 25% are great. The others I just sort of hide. But it's been an honor. And every time it's an honor, I will tell you. And thank you very much for doing it. Okay. So, Jennifer, good choice.

Man of the Year has also featured Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin. It is not supposed to be a confirmation of goodness, of decency, of greatness, of making the world a better place to live. It is simply meant to be the person who is sort of the most important in the year, who has made the most impact. And I suppose it's hard to

justify anyone else other than him. Perhaps you could give it to the Syrian rebels who have brought down Assad. Perhaps you could give it to the Ukrainian military. But he has certainly made an impact. He has done what many of us thought was impossible. And

And like Stalin, like Hitler, I'm not calling him Hitler, I'm not calling him Stalin, I'm simply using them as reference for those who are going to get all upset. He may very well be a force for bad things, for authoritarianism, for discrimination, for economic disaster, frankly, if he gets his way. But simply as a marker of someone who is the most important person

I suppose he is. It does not mean he's the best of us. It does not mean he's a admirable figure or he is a hero in any sense of the word.

Ramesh, in the interview he gave to Time Magazine as part of this, he walked back his vow to lower grocery prices, to do something about it. He said it's going to be hard to bring those prices down because, well, once the prices are up, they're up. They're kind of hard to come down. Is he going to be held accountable for that? Because God forbid Joe Biden say something like that.

Well, I think he will be held accountable if there's a resurgence of inflation and prices go up. I mean, I think reality gets a vote here. But I don't think that merely, you know, bobbing and weaving and changing his positions, he has a real remarkable facility for that. And nobody's really found a way to really hold him to account for that, for the kind of normal sort of

political flip-flopping that harms other politicians. I do think that it was a defensible, in some ways the natural choice for Time to Make a Man of the Year. I think the only other two people, as our colleague Jim Garrity, my double colleague Jim Garrity at National Review and The Washington Post said, the only two real alternatives you could have put up there are Elon Musk and Bibi Netanyahu.

Jennifer, also in that Time interview, Trump said he would pardon some of the people currently in jail for their role in the January 6th insurrection within minutes of being sworn in. Is that a smart way to try to start healing the nation?

Well, Trump doesn't want to start healing the nation. He's never about healing the nation. He's about defying the establishment. He's about throwing red meat to his base. It's about keeping the country in a constant state of turmoil. It would be horrific.

Remember, a good number of these people are in jail because they physically assaulted police officers. So spare me the hypocrisy of the Republican Party, which insists that it's the party of law and order, it's the party of decency. It would be horrific. And of course, what he is doing is putting his stamp of approval on insurrection, on an anti-American attempted coup. But that's what happens.

What happens when the American people reward him with the presidency? What did we think was going to happen? So of course it's horrific. Of course it is inappropriate. Of course we should not be rewarding people who attacked the Capitol trying to transfer the power in a peaceful manner. But after all, the voters did it themselves by putting Trump back in.

I'm not surprised. I'm not even shocked, frankly. I am once again chagrined that none of this made a difference to the voters, the American people who thought it was appropriate to put Donald Trump back in power.

Ramesh, also in that Time Magazine interview, he said that he viewed illegal immigration as an invasion of the United States, something he said many times on the campaign trail. But he also said he plans to use the military to help with deportations, something else he said many times on the campaign trail. And I'm quoting here, he wants to use the military to help with deportations, quote, to the maximum level of

of what the law allows. Last I checked, the law doesn't allow for the US military to be used on American soil. So would this be an abuse of presidential power? And let me add to that, if he invokes the Insurrection Act or something to allow him to use the military in that way, would that throw us into a constitutional crisis?

Well, I think that there are some ifs in there in that I do think we are getting mixed signals from...

from the incoming administration about what exactly the immigration policy is going to look like. Sometimes you hear, uh, from people like Tom Homan, the immigration czar to be that, uh, that this is an effort that is going to focus on violent criminals who are here illegally, something where I think there'd be actually quite a lot of bipartisan support, um, to, uh, uh, to, to do that kind of more focused intervention. Um,

But then you also hear this kind of thing, this kind of crazily ambitious, not particularly thought through policy where we're just going to like see what we can do. You know, the maximum legal allowable question is,

That's going to be disputed. I think that talking about illegal immigration as an invasion is a kind of way to lay a legal predicate for doing that, but I don't think it's one that's really going to stand up because what we're talking about really is a loose analogy, not an actual invasion.

And yes, I do think that you could get a kind of constitutional crisis, but it would depend on the political reaction on whether people are willing to say, yes, you've got a mandate to do something about illegal immigration. This isn't it. Jennifer,

This is just coming over the Twitters or the X in Washington Post has confirmed this, NBC. Vice President-elect J.D. Vance has invited Daniel Penny to be his personal guest at the Army-Navy game this weekend. They will be joining President Trump in his suite at the game for the uninitiated Daniel Penny,

is the man in New York City who was just acquitted by a jury in the chokehold death of a young black man who was going through a mental health crisis on a subway a couple of years ago. Jennifer, your reaction to that and the optics of that?

This is the deification once more of the Kyle Rittenhouses, of the vigilante males, of the white males who take matters into their own hands, who act with violence and frankly with rotten judgment.

But this is par for the course for Donald Trump. These are the heroes he lifts up. This is the kind of message that he put out there trying to lure particularly young males, particularly white young males to support him. So it's very symbolic of who they are and who they support.

And I have to say the verdict in New York and the reaction in New York was really fairly fascinating. New York is the quintessential liberal city, and yet there was tremendous support for Penny. And this is this issue of personal safety, that people felt a certain amount of empathy for not only him, but for the other people on that train. And many of these people had the reaction, damn right now.

The circumstances were horrific. He held this person in a chokehold long beyond the time was necessary to subdue him and eventually wound up killing him. So there are many reasons to...

frankly, not support this. But the reaction in New York, the reaction of people, I think, goes to a fundamental understanding and misunderstanding that many Democrats have, that the issue of personal safety, the issue of crime is very emotional, it's very fundamental to Americans. And unless you take that seriously, unless you empathize and address it in a

proper way, in a legal way, you're going to have these vigilante heroes that pop up. So let me just say very briefly on the use of the military. The military can be used to build facilities, and maybe that's the retreat position for Trump. In the past, they were used, for example, to help build the border wall.

They can lend intelligence assistance. They can lend other sorts of assistance. So it's not as if the military can't do anything. What they can't do is start arresting people within the United States and calling it invasion or instituting the Insurrection Act, frankly, is legally absurd. And I think even the courts, even Trump courts would balk at that.

And just to be clear, the name of the person Daniel Penny killed is Jordan Neely. And to amplify your point, Jennifer, as a person who lived in New York for 16 years and during the high crime days and lived through the time when crime came down, you are absolutely right. Crime in heavily Democratic New York City

plays differently. It is definitely an emotional issue in that borough. And so I am not surprised by the reactions coming out of New York City as a result of Daniel Penny's acquittal. Yeah, Ramesh? I just want to say public authorities failed

In this case, and they didn't they failed in letting people feel this kind of endangerment that Penny responded to. But also they feel Jordan Neely. Right. I mean, the he should have had some kind of mental health treatment that was more forceful than what he received, because what he ended up having was not real freedom.

Yeah, New York Governor Kathy Hochul made that very point yesterday on MSNBC. We are out of time. We'll have to save the Middle East for next time because it'll still be a topic. Ramesh Poonuru, Jennifer Rubin, thank you both very much for coming back to First Look. Have a good weekend. You too. Thank you. You too. Thanks for listening. For more information on our upcoming programs, go to WashingtonPostLive.com.