Interview Highlights: ICE Shift, Elections, and Fed Pressure (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Welcome back. President Trump has given a wide-ranging interview to NBC, which will air this weekend during the Super Bowl coverage. And in it, he concedes there needs to be a softer touch on immigration after the deaths in Minnesota. The man newly in charge of ICE deployments in the city, Tom Homan, says he is drawing down a number of agents roaming the streets to focus instead on the processing of illegal migrants they've already arrested. Here's the president when questioned on the deaths of Rene Good and Alex Pretty and the way in which the administration had responded to them.

[00:00:33] Speaker 2: 700 officers leaving Minneapolis. Did that come from you?

[00:00:37] Speaker 3: Yes, it did. I learned that maybe we can use a little bit of a softer touch, but you still have to be tough. These are criminals. We're dealing with really hard criminals. But look, I've called the people. I've called the governor. I've called the mayor. Spoke to them, had great conversations with them, and then I see them ranting and raving out there, literally as though a call wasn't made.

[00:01:01] Speaker 1: Still 2,000 agents in Minneapolis. Let's go live to Boston, speak to Shannon Felton-Spence. She's a politics and communications strategist at the Harvard think tank, the Belfer Center. Welcome to the program. Further into that interview, he says he would like similar operations in five other cities, which will be ringing alarm bells, no doubt, among Democratic governors. Did he give any clues as to where he's looking and how that would unfold?

[00:01:26] Speaker 4: He didn't in that interview with NBC. He said that he was looking at particularly five cities, but a lot of places. But what he did say was that he wants to be invited in. He wants a call from the governor or the mayor saying that we need your help. I think that's going to be hard to find in these major cities where most of them are run by, you know, Democratic mayors, certainly, and many of them Democratic governors as well. So we'll have to see if that remains true. But that was sort of his concession of what went wrong in Minneapolis, was that he hadn't been invited in and he didn't have a good working relationship with the mayor or the governor. And then he pointed to Louisiana, where he says the governor has given him a call. Now, of course, Louisiana is a deep red Republican state. So that's not maybe the best example.

[00:02:10] Speaker 1: Right. But there did seem to be a sort of mellowing of his attitude towards these deployments. He talks about a softer touch. So there is a recognition, at least on the part of the president, that things didn't go as they should have.

[00:02:23] Speaker 4: Certainly, Christian, I believe that Minnesota was a turning point in this presidency and this administration. The images were absolutely appalling and shocking. And just imagine the sheer numbers of 700 ICE officers now leaving the city and the state, like 700 people in a major American city, you know, federal law enforcement. And he's talking about hardened criminals are going after really tough, hard criminals, violent criminals. But yet we saw two American citizens get killed on the streets of Minneapolis. And we saw a four year old little boy in a Pikachu winter hat and backpack getting put into a car. So to the American people, the images just are not adding up with what the president is saying.

[00:03:04] Speaker 1: He's been returning in the last few weeks to 2020 and the stolen election in the absence of any facts that it was actually stolen. But he's sent in investigators to Fulton County in Georgia. And then he talked about nationalizing the vote. He appears to be walking that back. Have a listen.

[00:03:22] Speaker 2: You've recently suggested nationalizing elections. What do you mean by that?

[00:03:27] Speaker 3: When and I didn't say national. I said there are some areas in our country that are extremely corrupt. They have very corrupt elections. Take a look at Detroit. Take a look at Philadelphia. Take a look at Atlanta. There are some areas that are unbelievably corrupt. I could give you plenty more to. I say that we cannot have corrupt elections.

[00:03:48] Speaker 1: And then he goes on to talk about his role in 2028 and whether he would run again. What does he say about that?

[00:03:57] Speaker 4: Listen, this is all part of the plan to make the American people doubt whatever result is going to come out in the midterm elections in November, which is only a few short months away. And we are about to get into the height of midterm campaign season. The reason he is doing that is because he is in trouble. Every indication in a special election, including one state Senate seat in Texas this week, which should have gone to a Republican, went to a Democrat. All indications are this is going to be a very, very tough midterm for the Republicans and for the president, which means the back end of this administration is going to be very, very tough for him. And he is not going to be able to legislate or act the way that he has been acting. So all of this is pretense so that when we come to the second week of November, he can challenge these election results in the same way that he did with 2020. So he's talking about voter fraud in all of these cities where he lost by a very thin margin in 2020. And it has been proven time and time and time again that voter fraud in this country is very, very, very low. And it does not amount to anything meaningful to be able to sway an election in any locality. He talks about illegal aliens voting in these elections. What incentive would they have to vote in in one of our elections? It just doesn't it doesn't add up. It doesn't make sense. And you can tell that he's in trouble because he is getting more erratic in his in his rhetoric. And he is gearing up for a big fight through the midterm season.

[00:05:17] Speaker 1: And of course, one of the big issues in that midseason midterm season will be affordability, the cost of living. He has recently appointed the next chair of the Fed, Kevin Walsh. Here's what he said about him.

[00:05:29] Speaker 2: Is there any doubt in your mind that interest rates are going to be lowered? Not much. Why? How can you say that?

[00:05:36] Speaker 3: I just think they're going to be lower. They should. Is your new Fed pick on board with that? We're way high. OK, we're way high on interest. We have now with me and with all the money I've always been good at money. And with all the money coming into our country, we're a rich country again. We have debt, but we also have growth and the growth will soon make the debt look very small.

[00:05:57] Speaker 2: Does your new Fed pick understand that you want him to lower interest rates?

[00:06:00] Speaker 3: I think he does. But I think he wants to anyway. I mean, if he came in and said, I want to raise it, we said that he wouldn't have gotten a job. He would not have gotten a job. No.

[00:06:08] Speaker 1: But there is a question about the independence of the Fed. And that's the bit that alarms Wall Street in the city.

[00:06:16] Speaker 4: First of all, he's not good with money. Watch like an E. News True Hollywood story from like 1993. Donald Trump is not good with money. Second of all, Jerome Paul's term is coming up on May 15th. He has two more chair meetings. He may lower interest rates in one of those meetings. We do not know. But no person interviewing for the next chair job is going to say, oh, yeah, I want to keep interest rates high. I want to you know, I want to even make that increase them. They're, of course, going to tell the president that they want to decrease them. So what I will say to this is that Jerome Powell is in place until May 15th and then we will get a new Fed chair. The chair does not make the decision alone. He has a whole board of governors. And this chair has to be confirmed by the Senate, which I don't think will be a problem. But, yes, you know, this is Donald Trump making overarching sort of threats and statements about his influence on the economy through the Fed, which is not how this is supposed to work. It is important that America has an independent Federal Reserve because it gives us long term monetary policy that is not influenced by the whims of a president or by a Congress, which, you know, many of our other things like foreign policy and other things are. So this is a really important issue that we will be watching for the next five months.

[00:07:28] Speaker 1: And when you talk about his whims on foreign policy, we're slightly taking a breath after Davos. But we're heading into another big week with the Munich Security Conference.

[00:07:36] Speaker 4: The Munich Security Conference, where all of the European leaders and many leaders from around the world will be kicking off in the middle of next week and go through the weekend. And I think we're in for a rocky conference. The president and the vice president have made it quite clear how they feel about Europe and NATO and Ukraine. And all of those issues will be the headlines coming out of Friday and Saturday next week.

[00:07:57] Speaker 1: Shannon, good to talk to you as ever. Thanks for coming on the program.