Sweeping Pardons
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Hey there, Ryan Reynolds here. It's a new year, and you know what that means. No, not the diet. Resolutions.

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These people have been destroyed. What they've done to these people is outrageous. Sweeping pardons, Donald Trump delivering on his promise to pardon nearly every single person charged in the January 6th riots. Plus: The golden age of America begins right now. Power moves, President Trump signs a bundle of orders to immediately reshape American policy. And: People are going to come pouring through the wall like nobody's ever seen before. I made it my number one issue.

Border emergency: The new commander-in-chief immediately closes a key pathway for asylum seekers at the southern border. And then: It will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female. Two genders: Trump takes immediate action on a big issue at the center of America's culture wars. 6 a.m. here on the East Coast, a live look at the United States Capitol. Welcome to the Trump era.

Trump era too. Good morning, everyone. I'm Casey Hunt. It's wonderful to have you with us. Promises made, promises kept. President Donald Trump, just hours into his second term, making good on this signature campaign pledge. So this is January 6th. These are the hostages. Approximately 1,500 for a pardon. Yes. Full pardon. Full pardon or commutations? Full pardon. We have about six commutations in there.

where we're doing further research. Maybe it'll stay that way or it'll go to, you know, full pardon. -That the president of the United States signing an executive order granting clemency to almost 1500 people convicted or charged in connection with the deadly assault on the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. -Come this way! -The clemency includes more than 600 people who were found guilty of assaulting or impeding police officers.

The president also commuting the sentences of 14 far-right extremists who were convicted or charged with seditious conspiracy. Among them, members of the Oath Keepers, including their leader, Stuart Rhodes. Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Terrio, sentenced to 22 years in prison, received a full pardon. The executive order also expected to end more than 300 ongoing prosecutions. President Trump's so eager to see the pardons enacted that he insisted the order be delivered

before he would continue signing others. Sir, this is an executive... Why don't we get that down so they can get him going right now? Yes, sir. Is that okay? Yep, absolutely. As news of Trump's action broke, family members and supporters of those imprisoned for charges related to January 6th, they gathered outside the jail here in D.C. Just three hours after Trump put pen to paper, the first people convicted of violent crimes during the assault on the Capitol walked free.

This is after President Trump signed his pardon today. It's official, they are released.

That's Paul Ingrassia, the new Trump White House's liaison to the Justice Department, announcing the freedom of Matthew and Andrew Valentin. Just last week, those brothers were sentenced to two and a half years each after pleading guilty to assaulting police officers. The allegations? They rushed the police line. They pushed a metal barricade into a line of Capitol Police officers. One of them grabbed a police baton and tried to wrest it away and also sprayed a chemical irritant at the cops.

The other brother, he threw a chair at the police. CNN has reached out to their attorneys. We've not yet received a response. Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone, among those injured by the rioters on January 6th. Last year, Daniel Rodriguez pleaded guilty to assaulting Fanone with a stun gun, tasing him in the neck. And he was sentenced to 12 and a half years in prison. Last night, Rodriguez received an unconditional pardon from Donald Trump.

Here's how Officer Fanone reacted after learning about the pardon last night on CNN. I have been betrayed by my country and I've been betrayed by those that supported Donald Trump. Whether you voted for him because he promised these pardons or for some other reason, you knew that this was coming and here we are. Here we are indeed.

My panel's here. Jonah Goldberg, CNN political commentator, co-founder of The Dispatch. Tara Palmieri, senior political correspondent for Puck. Kate Bedingfield, CNN political commentator, former communications director for the Biden White House. And Brad Todd, CNN political commentator and a Republican strategist. Welcome to all of you. Thanks very much for being here. Jonah Goldberg, I'd actually like to start with you because, you know, if you had told me on January 6th

2021 or really any day before that day unfolded that Republicans were going to be pardoning people who violently assaulted police officers, I would have told you that you were living on a different planet than the one that I was living on. What did we just see happen here? Yeah, so I'll just be clear. I think yesterday is the first in American history where two presidents have so abused their pardon power as to make me want to amend the Constitution to get rid of the pardon power.

James Madison during the debates over the ratification of the Constitution said that a president who used the pardon power to advance essentially criminal or selfish schemes for his own benefit should be subject to impeachment. And I think both of them did an impeachable offense yesterday. This is grotesque. I fully expected a thousand people to get impeached

pardons or clemency of some kind or another, the nonviolent ones, the ones where it was a gray area and stuff like that. But the blanket pardons for all of them is, I think, just flatly indefensible. And it's going to have just both of the pardons, both Bidens and Trumps are going to have

unbelievable moral hazard knock-on effects and set terrible precedents going forward. Let's look at what a couple of Republicans had to say about the distinction you're making there between those who were not violent on that day or at least not violent towards police officers and others. Let's start with Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House. This was a little bit just over this weekend.

Mr. Speaker, do you believe that someone who assaulted a law enforcement officer on January 6th deserves a pardon? No, I think what the president said and vice president-elect J.D. Vance has said is that peaceful protesters should be pardoned, but violent criminals should not. That's a simple determination. A simple determination, he says. Let's then look at what he was referencing, which was J.D. Vance talking about this same issue. Watch.

I think it's very simple. Look, if you protested peacefully on January the 6th and you've had Merrick Garland's Department of Justice treat you like a gang member, you should be pardoned. If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn't be pardoned. And there's a little bit of a gray area there, but we're very much committed to seeing the equal administration of law. And there are a lot of people we think in the wake of January the 6th who were prosecuted unfairly. We need to rectify that.

Tara Palmieri, that interview was nine days ago. That man's now vice president of the United States. It seems to suggest he had no idea what was going on inside the Trump team at the time because they've clearly been working on these pardons for a while. What does it say here that, you know, Republicans and what's Mike Johnson going to have to say today? Well, this is going to be the issue for the next four years. How are Republicans going to react to everything that Donald Trump does? I do think, though, you know, Biden's pardon 15 minutes before Trump

The inauguration gave Trump a little bit more of a leeway when it comes to the ability to pardon, you know, violent offenders in the sense that like a lot of people are going to say, well, look at what we just saw from Biden. Now, maybe perhaps Trump. But a lot of these Republicans cannot keep up with Trump. And we saw that in the first term.

You know, he says one thing, he does another. He changed his mind at the last minute. They perhaps were doing this all along but didn't keep their team in, you know, in communication. Or maybe it was a last-minute decision. But I think Trump wanted to absolve all

of these January 6th partners of their sins because he's attached to that. Everything that they did, he was the leader of that. So he needs to move that aside so that he can be cleared himself. Well, to the point that he talked about, well, if they have weapons in that crowd, he said, take down the mags, right, at the Ellipse because he knew, he was like, these people are not here to hurt, these people are here for me, they're not here to hurt me. Brad Todd, I'm going to put Kate Bedingfield on the spot on Biden in a second. So I just would like to kind of,

I understand that there's some ties to these, that these things are going to end up being tied together. But I really am interested in your assessment. I mean, you work with candidates across the ballot, right? Up and down, Republicans. Is there going to be a price, a political price to pay for the sweeping nature of what Trump did, pardoning violent offenders as well as the leaders of some of these groups that were convicted of seditious conspiracy? I think the 14 commutations and maybe a couple dozen others,

are going to be controversial and I think that you may see Republican elected officials, you will see a lot of Republican officials come out against those. CNN's own reporting says that the majority of these people were peaceful. They were just wandering around the Capitol sucked up in the mob. Most of them have already served their jail time and this is really a formality for those people. But I do think there will be about three dozen or four dozen of these that are going to be politically sticky and you'll see Republicans oppose them. But the real

for a lot of Republicans, what I'm hearing is that this drowned out a lot of good that happened yesterday. Donald Trump stepped on his own good news. You know, most of his executive orders yesterday also made a huge impact and kept his promises on the border. He undid a lot of Joe Biden's bad executive orders. Uh,

We would be talking about those without the January 6th pardons being done today. They did promise it on day one, of course. So I do, again, as Jonah noted, we saw two sets of pardons yesterday, President Biden preemptively pardoning January 6th select committee members as well as members of his own family. Donald Trump was asked about that by a reporter as the pool was watching him last night in the Oval Office signing more of these executive orders. Let's watch what he said. I was surprised that President Biden

would go and pardon his whole family, 'cause that makes him look very guilty. You know, I could have pardoned my family. I could have pardoned myself, my family. I said, "If I do that, it's gonna make me look very guilty." I don't think I'd be sitting here, frankly.

Kate Bedingfield, a pretty frank political assessment from President Trump there. What has I mean, how do you feel about Biden pardoning his family members, especially on the way out in a preemptive way? And, you know, how much damage do you think he did? How much damage do you think Democrats think he did? It was a disappointing move. I was disappointed in it. I think he has

spoken so eloquently about the need to preserve the rule of law. As he was coming into office in 2020, he talked about the idea of Trump pardoning his family and said that it would send a bad message. And I think it's hard to argue that it didn't yesterday. I will be totally candid. I think it was disappointing. I also think you have to recognize that we are now in a Trump 2.0 era where Trump has been very clear that he intends to use

the long arm of the government to go after his political enemies. And I can understand why Joe Biden might look at his family and say, I'm going to do everything in my power to protect them on the way out the door. I think as a human matter, I can understand that argument. I think politically, I don't buy the argument that

somehow what Biden did yesterday gives more leeway to Donald Trump. Donald Trump was going to come in and issue a blanket pardon for people who assaulted police officers in the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. It did not matter what Joe Biden did or did not do. That was going to happen. And that's something that Donald Trump's going to own. And I think it, first of all, it clearly puts a lot of Republicans who have said that you should not, uh,

give a pardon to somebody who assaulted a police officer. Yeah, police officers that, by the way, were protecting people with mic jumps. Yeah, exactly, exactly. But I also, I actually, I think Trump is misreading what swept him into office here and the fact that he's not spending, he didn't spend his first day talking about what he's going to do to lower prices or, you know, highlighting the executive orders that he signed that he claims are going to lower prices. Uh,

I think his base wanted to see what he did yesterday. I think actually the vast majority of people who voted for him were uncomfortable with January 6th, but said, I think the different direction he's gonna take the country and the economy is what matters. And I think he's misreading. And I actually think that's gonna be a political vulnerability for him moving forward. - January 2020, 2021 has always been an Achilles for Donald Trump. And it's always held him back from his better days, talking about what he wanted to do for the American people.

I think a lot of Republicans are hoping that now this is out of his system, right? That now he can turn the page from the 2020 election. He can move forward. This is his, he's used all his power to put it into the book. And so now let's see if he can move on to other things. I'll believe it when I see it.

Yeah, I think it's interesting, too, what you brought up about the fact that he could have pardoned himself in advance. He talked about it. He thought about it back in 2020. But I think he didn't have that political power. He left on such a low note. But he has such a strong mandate right now. I think he feels like he's invincible. And that's why he took that step. But I think Donald Trump, even he understands that he won't have that power in a few months. Joan, I want to give you the last word. Yeah, look, Brad, I...

You know, I love you, man. This eternal dream, this Lucy in the football eternal dream, this waiting for Godot-like desire to see Trump pivot to be a responsible, you know, today he's now president of everybody moment. It hasn't happened. I don't think it's going to happen. This is an Asapian thing. His nature is his nature. And he will...

He craves, he would much rather positive attention than negative attention, but he'll take negative attention over no attention any day. So he will create many, many, many more moments that create bow-stewing panic for Republican candidates trying to figure out what to say.

I'm an American optimist. Bless your heart. All right. This is the first full day of the Trump administration, and here we are. All right, coming up on CNN this morning, from gender to censorship and even electric vehicles, President Trump wasting no time on some of the cultural issues that galvanized his base during the campaign, plus the president trying to end birthright citizenship. So what about the 14th Amendment, protecting it, and the big rollback of President Biden's four years of policy?

I'll revoke nearly 80 destructive and radical executive actions of the previous administration, one of the worst administrations in history. Maybe not the one of them, the worst. This podcast is supported by Sleep Number.

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Protecting women from radical gender ideologies. Ooh. They'll have 100% tariff if they so much as even think about doing what they thought. This next order relates to the definition of birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment of the United States. That's a good one. It's ridiculous. We're the only country in the world that does this with birthright.

All right. With just a stroke of his Sharpie, President Donald Trump looking to dramatically reshape American policy on his first day in office, signing dozens of orders from delaying the TikTok ban to withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization. His actions delivering on campaign promises and then some the vast scope, all part of what Trump declared as the beginning of a golden age of America. My recent election is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible pandemic.

betrayal. Today I will sign a series of historic executive orders. With these actions we will begin the complete restoration of America and the revolution of common sense. It's all about common sense.

So, Jonah, obviously the details here are what will ultimately end up being important. But the way of governing that has emerged here where, you know, you just on day one, you walk in, you undo everything the guy before you did with the pen and the phone because Congress, I mean, they've got their own, they've relinquished a lot of their own responsibility. We can blame them for that. But

Trump is going to have taken some significant actions here. What of this should we be paying attention to here? And what is your sort of big picture sense of what it all means? Yeah, so I've been complaining about this tendency. I started writing columns about this about 15 years ago of people, candidates in primaries, pledging all these things they're going to do on day one, as if we live in a plebiscitory parliamentary system where you vote for this person. It's the first time that word has been used on this set, for the record. And they're all going to just be like...

I'll use it again. And like, this idea that like somehow, you know, like Kamala Harris said on day one, we're going to take all the guns or whatever. No, you're not because that's not how our system works, right? And similarly, a lot of these things just don't work, right? I mean, like the birthright citizenship thing, there are going to be

More lawsuits, the Supreme Court's not going to get his back on that. So a lot of these things are essentially press releases that kick the can to the courts or to Congress to clean up the mess, but he gets the credit on day one, sets this expectation that he's done some of these things. And then there are other things that are real that he's actually done or can do. And I think this is one of the distinctions that the press really needs to keep in mind is that there are things the president has the authority to do

but maybe not the ability to do, and there are things that he has both. He can issue an executive order about the gender stuff throughout the bureaucracy, I think, pretty easily. I mean, some lawyers may correct me on that. Deporting 10 million, 12 million people, regardless if he has the authority, and I think he has some authority,

That is a massive coordination political challenge where you have to get law enforcement at every level of government to work together. You need funding from Congress to provide all sorts of things they don't have. They're already saying they can't even implement the latest Riley Act. A stroke of a pen doesn't do any of that.

But a lot of things he did yesterday on the regulatory front, that is the way you do it. It has to be done with the pen and the phone. There are things on the asylum program that Joe Biden screwed up in his first couple of months in office that Donald Trump will now undo, and that will have a meaningful effect if you care about the border. There are a lot of things on energy that Biden did in his first couple of months that Trump undid yesterday or proactively went further. That'll have a big signaling effect on people investing in American energy projects.

Some of it is hooey, right? But the birthright citizenship's not going to be ended. I'm a strict constructionist and strictly reading the Constitution, it's pretty clear what it says. And it's also pretty clear from the debate in 1868 when they passed the 14th Amendment that they considered this and they decided to do it anyway. So the Supreme Court will strike that one down and it'll be there as fast as it can get there.

So some of this was signaling, much like Joe Biden trying to say the ERA is added to the Constitution by executive order on his last day. A lot of that's just showmanship. And the archives had to say, well, actually, no, it's not been ratified. Executive orders have become showmanship in addition to actually running the government. Yeah, their message, I mean, Jonah's point is right. They're largely messaging vehicles. I shouldn't say largely. Many of them are messaging vehicles that are going to run into reality in the courts. This issue of the president doesn't have appropriation authority, so it's...

You can sign a piece of paper saying we're gonna deport every person who wasn't born in the United States, but he doesn't have, or create Doge, but he doesn't have the money to fund it until the Congress moves. So it's messaging vehicle. Every president, I mean, look, when we came in in the Biden administration, we spent the first week laying out executive orders because you have this moment where you command the stage and you wanna communicate to people, here's what we're gonna focus on. And he's doing that. But a lot of it will be, a lot of it will meet reality very quickly.

All right. So coming up here on CNN this morning, a southern snowstorm, some 40 million people dealing with winter weather like this today. Plus, Donald Trump's new action on the border. The former acting director of U.S. Customs and Immigration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is going to join us live.

Welcome back. As promised, President Trump kicking off his second term with a dizzying number of executive actions on immigration, already declaring a national emergency at the southern border, immediately terminating the use of an app that's called CBP One. It allows migrants to enter the U.S. legally and attempting to end birthright citizenship, which is, of course, a right guaranteed by the Constitution. I made it my number one issue. They all said inflation was the number one issue. I said, I disagree. I think people disagree.

coming into our country from prisons and from mental institutions is a bigger issue for the people that I know. These executive orders had an immediate impact on people's lives. Thousands of migrants making the trek to the southern border were stopped in their tracks. Their hopes of seeking asylum legally and their previously set immigration appointments were dashed with the stroke of the president's sharpie.

It was a very hard announcement because it means that our hopes to be able to achieve our dreams right now are over. In other words, with this closure, it was the only way we had a way to legally reach the United States and now the sacrifice we made to leave our countries has been completely in vain. We had to go through many countries to get there. This has been a very, very, very hard blow.

President Trump also shutting down a Biden-appointed task force that was working to reunite families separated at the border by Trump in his first term. Let's bring in John Sandwick. He's the former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. John, good morning to you. This, of course, is what President Trump campaigned on, what the American people seem to have said that they wanted here.

What impact are these initial actions going to have on the number of people who are able to come into the country?

Okay, so at the border itself, I think what we saw here was nothing too surprising, but everything was taken to an extreme level. So repudiation of the Biden-era policies, including what you just highlighted, the CBP One app, where the Biden administration had tried to provide alternative pathways for people who would have otherwise crossed the border illegally to make their asylum claim. But again, everything seemed to have been taken a little step further. So we saw the deployment of the military assets to the border. I think that was to be expected.

But rather than just declare them to go to the border and provide a supportive role, which traditionally they've done in multiple administrations, Trump also calls for a NORTHCOM to come up with an operational plan to seal the border.

So it's going to be in terms of the and then just not just the return to Mexico policy, which is the remain in Mexico policy, which he had touted he was going to reinstate, you know, where migrants who are seeking asylum can make their claims. But wait in Mexico. He also makes a return to his previous efforts to seal the border entirely, declare that you are not eligible to make an asylum claim at all with multiple and overlapping justifications for it.

So in terms of the actual impact, look, I think that we've already seen with the Biden administration changes in June of this year to the asylum system, a massive drop at the border. Look, these in the short term, these are certainly likely to reduce dramatically asylum claims. The question, Casey, will be, does this start pushing people to start illegally entering the United States and rather than declaring themselves to a Border Patrol agent to make asylum, try to sneak their way into the United States and just kind of blend into our cities throughout the country?

John, one of the big looming questions, of course, we have these things that the president can do with his pen. Actually removing immigrants from the country, migrants from the country, is something the president has also promised. To do that is much harder than just signing a piece of paper. His incoming immigration czar, Tom Homan, was on Fox News late last night. From one of the inaugural balls, it's a bit of a jarring clip, but the content is what I want to focus on here. Let's watch what he said.

So the interior enforcement operation starts tomorrow. ICE agents, they're gonna lose the handcuffs they've had to put on them by the Biden administration. People will find out real soon what we're gonna do. He says the interior enforcement operation starts tomorrow. What are you expecting? What can they do that the Biden administration hasn't been doing right out of the gate here without any additional money from Congress, etc.?

Casey, I don't expect what they're going to do tomorrow operationally is that different from what the Biden administration has been doing. I think what's going to change here is the public emphasis and the attention they draw to their operations. So what I'm anticipating today is a type of Operation ISIS historically done,

which is individuals that go through the criminal justice system. Typically, what ICE likes to do is take custody of those individuals in prisons and jails. It's a more secure environment. They're easier to obtain. And the local police officials in jail will hold those individuals for ICE. But a certain percentage of people slip through the cracks. You know, typically, often they get sentenced, convicted of an offense, but not sentenced to any prison time. As a result, more often than not, these are people who are less likely to pose a threat to

public safety. But what ICE will do is they'll go through and look at probation records and then target those individuals and go out into the cities and make apprehensions of them when they're at large.

What I think ICE has planned for this week is going to be a massive, what we used to call a cross-check operation, where they go out there and hit the streets looking for these individuals on probation or parole. So in that sense, it's not going to be different than what we've seen historically under Biden, under President Obama, under the first Trump administration. But Casey, really quickly, I do think what you also saw in those executive orders yesterday

is they're laying the groundwork for this mass deportation in a way that we haven't seen before, including on an explicit directive for the military to start creating detention camps, which addresses one of the real resource issues that they would face if they ever carried out this mass deportation effort.

Can you talk a little bit more about that, creating these mass deportation camps? Has anything like that ever happened before? I mean, obviously, we know President Obama, who you worked under, I believe, came in for criticism from immigration activists for the number of people that he deported. But have we ever seen what what has been outlined in this order about creating these detention centers?

I can't remember us ever seeing this in modern immigration enforcement history, certainly not since the creation of DHS. So in one of these executive orders, the president, first of all, he calls repeatedly for DHS to end what's called catch and release. And catch and release is a real misnomer, right?

Idea that for policy reasons, the Biden administration or the Obama administration before it chose to apprehend a migrant maybe with, you know, at the border and then release them just for policy reasons. The real reason that happens is resource constraints.

ISIS has given about a budget of $40,000 for 40,000 detention beds annually. But when you have the numbers you were seeing at the border of 250,000 people being apprehended a month, there's just no way to detain all 250,000. So Trump has repeatedly said we're going to end catch and release, so to speak. So how is he going to do it? Well, in the executive orders,

is this, it tells us how. He's gonna direct the military to provide operational support to DHS, including explicitly detention camps and transportation services. But the detention camps that really caught my eye because we've never seen detention camps in military bases. And what I think they're envisioning is a low cost, you know, quickly resourced using Department of Defense resources, kind of building of, you know,

know, just like this, you know, camps basically inside military bases where when they start making larger numbers of arrests in the interior, they can detain all those individuals and then use military transport planes to fly those individuals back to their home country. I think, you know, despite the fact that a lot of these executive orders yesterday were not terribly surprising, especially as it relates to the border, you can see that groundwork being laid in these executive orders for the mass deportation effort.

Really fascinating. John Sandweg, thanks very much for your expertise, sir. Hope you'll come back. I'm sure we're going to have a lot of occasions to be talking about this topic. Thank you. Thanks, Casey. All right, still ahead here on CNN this morning, Trump's tariff talk back in play. The cost hikes on Mexican and Canadian goods he's considering that were not imposed on day one, as he had previously threatened. Plus, leaning into the culture wars, President Trump making good on promises to his base of supporters.

There's a longing for competence in this country. There's a longing for common sense. We don't want to have men playing in women's sports. I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, host of the Chasing Life podcast. Pain is there as a signal to sort of galvanize you into action. Dr. James Dankert, co-author of the book Out of My Skull, The Psychology of Boredom.

Dankert is saying that boredom is essentially a motivational state. It's not an emotion. We're going to embrace boredom and we're going to learn how we can benefit from it. Listen to Chasing Life, streaming now, wherever you get your podcasts. I didn't know exactly what the president would put in that speech. And I hope to myself that he wasn't going to hold back. And sir, you didn't hold back. That was a hell of a way to start the next four years.

President Donald Trump getting rave reviews from his base and his allies as he officially returns to the White House after taking the oath of office and sounding, let's say, a note of unity. He quickly turned to a laundry list of culture war issues that characterized many of his campaign speeches, and he outlined his plans to try to address them quickly.

There are only two genders, male and female. We will revoke the electric vehicle mandate. I will also sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America. We are going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of

of America, William McKinley to Mount McKinley, where it should be and where it belongs. Our panel is back.

Jonah Goldberg, there are a lot of buzzwords when people talk about this, you know, government censorship. They have this phrase, government operations, that really means a lot of other things. On these culture war issues, I mean, one thing that did stand out to me when he had that line about two genders, it was played over the jumbotron at the Capital One Arena when I was watching it. It got probably the loudest of cheers from that crowd. That's part of all of this. How big of a part?

I think it's a big part. And I think it's one of the things that I think a lot of folks in sort of new, I usually very rarely talk about the New York, D.C. Acela Corridor kind of stuff. But like the gender stuff is,

is basically a 70/30 issue for Republicans. And it's a 90/10 anti-issue among a certain set of sort of media elites and stuff. But if you look at that recent New York Times poll, this plays very well for Trump. Trump is on the majority side of the issue for the most part.

Now you can take it to a point where it starts as blowback for him, but I don't think he's there yet. He gets half of Democrats. That New York Times poll you referenced showed that 55% of Democrats are with Republicans on the issues that are in play now. Certainly other issues might change that. In sports and that kind of thing.

But we do underplay exactly how big a winner this is. And it's a natural backlash to the Biden administration going way too far. And by all note, it was one of Joe Biden's first executive orders was on transgender issues. He said he set his demise up early. I do think, though, that there is and Jonah kind of just alluded to this. But if he is seen as using the government to persecute a minority, minority, minority in this country, people do start to say, look,

Look, it's not even that I care so much. It's just like, why are you focused on this? You should be focused on things that matter to me. So I don't dispute that it is a political winner for Trump in this moment. I do think that people across this country still don't believe that the government should be used to persecute people. And I think he runs the risk of

of looking like a bully and looking like he's spending his time on something that doesn't touch the lives of most people in this country. And I think he, so I think he runs the risk of focusing too much on it. Although Tara, I mean, part of what worked for them

the messaging that worked for them in the campaign, was taking essentially what you're saying and instead of criticizing transgender people, the message was, Kamala's for they/them, Donald Trump is for you, right? Essentially saying, I'm gonna focus on you. They're too focused on things that you don't care about. - Right, exactly. And I also think this is just Trump saying, I won the culture war, I set the culture. And he's basically saying, the Americans voted for me,

and this was what they wanted. And this is just another, as you said, messaging vehicle. Doesn't really mean that much, but he's leaning into the culture that he created, the culture that was supported by podcast bros, by his voters, and by a number of Americans. And so

It's an easy thing to do on day one, and I think it's just a blip that will be remembered by some people, but not by others. But I think for the most part, they'll be thinking about immigration and pardons. Go ahead. It's ironic. There was a big kerfuffle back in the day where Trump took a pretty pro-transgender position, got support from Caitlyn Jenner and all that kind of stuff. So this is in one of... I think Tara's right. This is one of these areas where in some ways...

he's following his base rather than leading his base. - Trump is not a native of the conservative side of the culture wars, but he is very adept at navigating it. But this is a backlash. It's a backlash to what's happened in the Biden administration. And by the way, he also did executive orders yesterday to guarantee that you can get the dishwasher you want and the water heater you want and the light bulb that you want. - Shower head. - And the shower head that you want. - They're back, they're back. So are tankless water heaters. - They were never gone.

- They were never gone. - But there's been a push. - But they were absolutely gone. - They were absolutely gone. - I rated the shelves, I will say, I will admit to this, of Target when those in Kansas, and now you can't find one. I went looking the other day, they're not there. - Well, if you try to permit a new business, they're gonna make you use LED lights now because of the environmental left. This is a little natural pushback.

I mean, the environmental left or, you know, not wanting the planet to burn before our grandchildren are even able to, you know, to live. But sure, there is that. Absolutely. Okay. It is 54 minutes past the hour. Here's your morning roundup. A live look at the Riverview fire. This is burning and spreading right now in San Diego. Speaking of climate change and its impacts. This is the third fire that is raging right now in that county. All of the fires are currently 0% contained. They are

threatening structures. This is of course the last thing people in Southern California need right now, so we've been monitoring this throughout the day. And then there's this, not quite a day one initiative as previously promised, but President Trump is considering 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico on February 1st. During an Oval Office signing yesterday, Trump said that's because the two countries are letting drugs and migrants into the U.S. The move could end up raising prices for Americans.

The Department of Government Efficiency now going to exist within the federal government. Initially, the Elon Musk-led task force was going to be an outside advisory board, but a new Trump order changes those plans. Doge co-chair Vivek Ramaswamy, he will not be joining the team he plans to run for governor of Ohio.

Tara Palmieri, Vivek Ramaswamy really misplayed his cards it seems. He got tossed out of this. Yeah, and it really started with the H-1B visa fight. I don't know if you remember this, but he was like comparing it to, like saying that American culture favors Zach from Saved by the Bell and the jock and charisma over Screech the nerd. And it's like, it turns out the guy that you want to work for, Donald Trump, is the jock.

who married the cheerleader model. He just didn't go over well. You're also not the world's richest man. You can't pick a fight with Trump's base right now. And since then, he'd been pretty quiet on Twitter. Not to mention the fact that he didn't donate to Trump's campaign the way that Elon Musk did. People were getting tired of him. His personality can wear on someone. And so I was told that he had been iced out a while ago. And Doge, which if it was really about efficiency, shouldn't have had two heads on.

at it anyway. Now has won. Now people say, oh, Vivek's been doged himself. Because that's how people are talking about their programs right now. They're like, is it going to get doged? That's how they talk on the Hill. Am I going to lose what I want? It's become a verb. It is. It's a verb, doged. So he's been doged. And now we'll see if Ohio will take him. You want to get the heck out of doge. Exactly. Exactly. All right. Let's talk.

Let's turn out of this. President Donald Trump has been taking a victory lap as he returns to the Oval Office yesterday. Many people thought it was impossible for me to stage such a historic political comeback. But as you see today, here I am. The American people have spoken. He laid out his vision for the next four years and he took more than a few political jabs at his predecessor.

The golden age of America begins right now. From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world. A tide of change is sweeping the country. Sunlight is pouring over the entire world. And America has the chance to seize this opportunity like never before. My recent election is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal.

Worth noting, President Biden was sitting right behind him there. You couldn't see his face in that particular shot, but it was worth watching. The Wall Street Journal editorial board points out this. It's a stark contrast from his speech four years ago. They write, quote, that speech responded to the Democratic and media resistance to his election with the same dark tone that set the stage for four years of rancor and division. The tone and message of his inaugural was that America has always been great and will be greater as it meets new challenges. This speech was more Elon Musk and much less Steve Bannon

and all for the better. Is that what it was, Jonah Goldberg? More Elon Musk, less Steve Bannon? I mean, it was, it had a few moments of notes of unity, but it was mostly a

In many ways, it was a State of the Union. Yeah, it was very State of the Union-y. My colleague Sarah Isger makes the point that in the era of short viral bites that you push out to all these different things, basically that's the way to look at it, is it contained little sound bites that covered the waterfront of Trump's coalition. And I don't think it was this, there was no central unifying coherent theme to it. It was a bunch of different

shoutouts to different constituencies that are gonna be used chopped up. If you watch the whole thing straight through, I don't think it was very coherent. It also probably matters less than any inaugural address ever delivered by any president because Donald Trump doesn't deliver scripted remarks. I mean, he delivered the address and then he went and spoke and we heard the real Donald Trump and that's the fundamental tension and we're gonna keep seeing the real Donald Trump for the next four years. So analyzing how, you know, who got their paragraph into the speech,

probably not actually all that impactful in telling us where Donald Trump is going to go. It's just like incredible to see him like not riff for once, but it was just his greatest hits, except he read them, you know, and I still think it was dark. I still think it was American carnage. He's like, America is a wasteland right now and I'm going to save it and dip it in gold. But like, it was not, I,

I don't necessarily agree with the Wall Street Journal, that this was like some hope in unity speech. Few people in American politics get to start over, and this is not a fresh start for Donald Trump, but he is in the best position he's ever been in his political life. More people view him favorably than unfavorably. I think yesterday, maybe there's a window that he's going to take advantage of that. Maybe, although then he went to the Oval Office after that speech and pardoned all of the people who assaulted police officers on January 6th.

among other things. All right, first full day of the Trump era about to unfold. Thanks to our panel. Thanks to all of you for being here. I'm Casey Hunt. Don't go anywhere. CNN News Central starts right now.

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