Washington Wednesday: Softer tone, sharper stakes

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s Wednesday, the 26th of November. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Time now for Washington Wednesday!

Washington is still dissecting the surprising Trump-Mamdani meeting at the White House last week.

President Trump hosted New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani in the Oval Office, but today we will rewind the tapes and show why this moment was such a surprise.

MAST: President Trump got behind former Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo in his race for mayor against Mamdani. On 60 Minutes, the president said: “I’m not a fan of Cuomo... but if it’s going to be between a bad Democrat and a communist, I’m going to pick the bad Democrat all the time.” Very, very blunt.

For his part, Mamdani, the face of the future of the Democratic Party, was equally blunt about Trump: very open in his disdain. Here he is on election night talking about immigration.

MAMDANI: So hear me, President Trump, when I say this. To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.

EICHER: All right. And so based on that, it might have seemed inevitable that a meeting between the two would get heated, even in the press briefing the day before press secretary Caroline Leavitt, dropped this little bomb.

LEAVITT: We have a communist coming to the White House because that’s who the Democrat Party elected as the mayor of the largest city in the country. I think it’s very telling but I also think it speaks to the fact that President Trump is willing to meet with anyone and talk to anyone.

And so I wonder what she knew and when she knew it. Because instead of name-calling, we got this.

TRUMP: We're going to be helping him to make everybody's dream come true. Having a strong and very safe New York, and congratulations, Mr. Mayor.

MAST: Joining us now to talk about it is Hunter Baker, he is a political scientist, WORLD Opinions contributor and provost at North Greenville University. Hunter, good morning!

HUNTER BAKER: Good morning.

MAST: This was a chummy change of pace for these two. Trump did not give Mamdani the fight he may have wanted and has since taken some criticism for just how friendly he seemed to Mamdani…The mayor-elect certainly can’t claim he was the victim of any sort of attack here. How calculated do you think that was?

BAKER: In my mind, I cannot put together somebody like Mamdani and Ronald Reagan. I can't imagine Ronald Reagan greeting a newly elected socialist mayor of New York, and so you see this kind of friendly exchange. And I just think that it shows Trump's instincts as a politician. He is much less ideological and much more instinctive and and I think that it also affects things that Trump is so closely related to New York, he has a very New York oriented identity, and he also is somebody who respects winning. So while Trump may not like the idea of a socialist mayor of New York City, Trump does respect somebody who has what it takes to win the fight. And that's what Mamdani did. And so you see Trump's pragmatism very much at work here. He's not going to kind of stand back and say, oh gosh, I wish this hadn't happened. Instead, he's going to figure out how to work with it. And I think that's what we saw.

MAST: I do want to talk about the substance of what was said, particularly in terms of affordability. That’s likely to be the defining political issue going into the midterms.

Trump expressed some amount of confidence, or perhaps desire, that Mamdani might change his views.

TRUMP: I mean, he's got views and a little out there, but who knows? I mean, we're going to see what works, or he's going to change. Also, we all change. I change a lot. Change a lot from when I first came to office. It's now quite a while ago. It's quite a while. My first term was great. We had a greatest economy in the history of our country. We're doing even better now. We're doing much better now than we did even the first term. I feel very confident that he can do a very good job. I think, I think he's going to be, I think he is going to surprise some conservative people, actually, and some very liberal people. He won't surprise him because they already like him.

Hunter, what do you think of this: was Trump working to set out the terms of the debate over affordability? That working with Trump is what will lead to success on that front? How do you take those comments?

BAKER: Well, I go back to what I was saying about New York. I think that Trump is somewhat oriented in what he's going to say, because he's talking about the person who's supposed to lead New York City. I just can't emphasize enough the degree to which New York. And Donald Trump are inseparable. Some of you may remember Home Alone two lost in New York.

KEVIN: Excuse me, where’s the lobby?

TRUMP: Down the hall and to the left.

KEVIN: Thanks.

Or the many documentaries that you might see at places like CNBC talking about Trump's rise in New York City, or the famous story of how Donald Trump was able to get the ice skating rink up and running in New York City when nobody else could. He's deeply invested in that place, and so he wants to keep Mamdani close. Trump even said, I think, in that meeting, that he would have liked to have been the mayor of New York City at some point. And so yes, New York is where you're going to have serious problems with affordability. Those of us from sort of the the middle of the country, when we think about places that are really unaffordable, we think about New York City. We think about Los Angeles. Those are the people who are kind of on the front lines of that battle for affordability. So the real question is, do either of these figures actually have any way to unlock affordability? That's something that we don't know. I'm not sure that Mamdani actually has a practical program to do it. Sometimes I talk about wishing makes it so public policy. I think that he's currently in the wishing makes it so stage. he must not give in to the temptation to kind of gaslight people on things like fuel prices and thanksgiving.

EICHER: Well, speaking of that, and let's move out of New York City proper and stay on the affordability question, it did come up on Meet the Press over the weekend. The host of the show played a clip of the Vice President asking Americans for a little bit of patience, and then she pressed the point exactly how much patience does the administration expect now?

Her guest was the Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent. He insisted that affordability is getting better. He pointed to cheaper gas, better home sales, and what he says will be the lowest cost Thanksgiving dinner in four years. But when the host pushed back, she mentioned coffee and bananas and bacon, the prices of those commodities going up. Here's how Besant responded. It's kind of funny.

BESSENT: Kristin, how much does your arm weigh?

HOST: That I do not know.

BESSENT: But you know how much you weigh — you get on the scale every morning. Inflation is a composite number. We look at everything. So we try to push down the things we can control.

So in other words, don’t focus on any single item going up — focus on the whole cost-of-living picture.

Hunter, is that going to fly politically?

BAKER: I don't, and the reason is, it's really part of just simple economics. I can remember a friend of mine wanted me to buy a hat that he had because he didn't want to bother to take it back to the store. And when he gave me the number, I knew I was not going to pay that price for the hat. But then he gave me another number, and I instantly knew I would pay that price for the hat. There's something that is very instinctive about the way that we react to prices, and I think that a lot of Americans have been in this situation of just kind of having sticker shock at things that they see ever since covid, ever since that post covid period, and they desperately want for the prices to slow down and to even drop back some. And so as long as we're in that phase where the prices just don't seem right relative to what we're used to, politicians are going to struggle with that many politicians have lost in the past and recently for that reason, and Donald Trump is going to have to face that same sort of challenge.

EICHER: Well, switching gears. Hunter The Pentagon has opened up a formal inquiry into Senator Mark Kelly. He is the former Navy captain and astronaut who is now a Democrat senator from Arizona. This is over a video that he recorded with several other Democrats, total of six members of Congress, all of them veterans or former intelligence officials. The video aimed at military members saying that they can refuse illegal orders, even that they must do so, and we'll hear some of that in just a moment, but the message of that video prompted a sharp response. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called the video “despicable” and “reckless.” President Trump went further than that. He described it as seditious, and then pointed to the penalty for sedition, namely the death penalty. Here's a portion of the video that started the whole thing.

VIDEO: The threats to our Constitution are not just coming from abroad, but from right here at home. Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders — you can refuse illegal orders — you must refuse illegal orders. No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.

We know this is hard and that it’s a difficult time to be a public servant. But whether you’re serving in the CIA, the Army or Navy, the Air Force, your vigilance is critical. And know that we have your back, because now more than ever, the American people need you.

We need you to stand up for our laws, our Constitution, and who we are as Americans. Don’t give up. Don’t give up. Don’t give up. Don’t give up the ship.

All right. Well, this is an interesting dance, Hunter. I wonder whether both sides aren't playing with fire here. And I'll note that no one in the video has pointed to any specific illegal order that must be refused or should have been refused, but they sure imply and imply very strongly that illegal orders are, in fact, being issued, and the administration here is invoking capital punishment. So let's slow this whole thing down a bit and take it at face value. How do we understand the actual legal standard here? What is an illegal order and who decides?

BAKER: Well, so members of our military do not take an oath to a person. They take an oath to the Constitution. And so we definitely don't want to get in a situation where we're seen as kind of having allegiance to the United States based on a particular figure. I'm a little bit worried that what we have coming from these Democrat politicians is a desire to set up resistance to Donald Trump. So then the question is, well, is he making illegal orders? So what illegal orders are we talking about attacking these Venezuelan sort of gunboats out in the Caribbean? Are we talking about ICE in the cities? Are we talking about the National Guard helping with crime? Everything that I have seen is that the politicians who are sort of challenged on this point don't really want to say, which tells me that it's more like they're playing into a narrative instead of trying to accomplish some sort of real objective. Maybe we could think about this as a very serious and dangerous form of virtue signaling now that, having been said, I do want to say that. I don't want to, I don't want to set up this idea that we don't have to worry about what the law is, that we just put our head down and do whatever a president says. The movie Nuremberg is in theaters right now, which kind of underlines how you don't ever want to just have blind obedience. But I don't think that we're in that territory here. I think that the reason that they are not specifically saying what these illegal orders are is because they are not ready to have that debate.

EICHER: Very quickly, The New York Times quotes military experts saying there is no precedent for recalling a retired officer over political speech. Is that correct? In your understanding?

BAKER: I certainly cannot think of any similar example.

MAST: Hunter, finally, earlier this week, a federal judge threw out the indictments of the former head of the FBI James Comey and Letitia James the attorney general of New York. Trump had demanded they be prosecuted in September, and within weeks, interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan had delivered.

But the judge found that Halligan wasn’t legally appointed, so those indictments now get tossed. Hunter what do you make of the judge’s assessment, and where does that leave the cases against Comey and James?

BAKER: Well, it's important to remember that Halligan replaced Eric Siebert, and that is because Eric Siebert said there's not a good reason to issue these indictments, so I'm not surprised that, you know, they kind of run into some stormy weather on these now that, having been said, it's important to note that the dismissal of these cases was “without prejudice.” Now what that means is they've not been dispositively dealt with. They've been kind of dealt with on the technical question, but the substantive question is still there. So these actions could come back. Now I'm less sure with Comey, because of the timing and sort of the statute of limitations, but still, otherwise, these actions could come back.

EICHER: Well, Washington Wednesday gives way to Thanksgiving Thursday. So as we say, goodbye Hunter for this week, just say happy Thanksgiving.

BAKER: Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.