--:-- Michael Barbaro: From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Over the past few days, President Trump has endured major setbacks at the ballot box, where Republicans lost races across the country. At the Supreme Court, which appears poised to strike down his tariffs. And in Congress, whose refusal to end the government shutdown will result in thousands of canceled airline flights beginning on Friday.
--:-- [Discussion continues with Michael Barbaro introducing the guests]
--:-- Michael Barbaro: Today, I try to make sense of all of that with three of my colleagues, National Political Correspondent Lisa Lair, White House Correspondent Tyler Pager, and Congressional Editor Julie Davis. It's Friday, November 6th. So shall we get started?
--:-- Michael Barbaro: Okay. Lisa Lair. Hi. Welcome back to the Roundtable. Julie Davis, good to see you. Great to be here. Tyler Pager, always a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
--:-- Lisa Lair: I want to start this conversation with you all with a very simple question for the three of you. Now, has this been the worst week for President Trump in the second term?
--:-- Tyler Pager: I think there's a good case to make yes, because voters actually weighed in on how he was doing. And I think we've seen a lot of polling, but it's different when people actually go to the ballot box and register their feelings. And their feelings were overwhelmingly opposed to the broader Republican Party at this point.
--:-- Lisa Lair: And up until this week, President Trump has had remarkable success in pushing forward on a number of fronts, just politically, as Tyler was saying. He hasn't had much in the way of obstacles in front of him. And we really saw that pivot a lot this week on a lot of different fronts. So I think it was a bit of a wake-up call.
--:-- Julie Davis: You've been nodding, Lisa. Yeah, I think the president learned, and perhaps the country learned, that Democrats can, in fact, still win elections. This was a party that was pretty demoralized, and they got a huge boost of momentum and energy this past week and showed, I think, the White House that there is still an opposition party.
--:-- Lisa Lair: So it feels like the three tentpoles of this not great week for the president is obviously, number one, Tuesday's election. Perhaps number two, the Supreme Court's profound skepticism of the president's tariff regime. And third, what I would describe as the metastasizing impacts of the government shutdown, now officially the longest in American history.
--:-- Tyler Pager: Let's dive deeper into the first one, which is Tuesday night's election. We've now had several days, Lisa, to sift through the data in the aftermath of this election. And what we've discovered is just how meaningfully the victorious Democratic winners, especially the governors, won over Trump voters.
--:-- Lisa Lair: Voters who voted for Trump just a year ago and made him president. Yeah. And so one statistic that really stood out to me in this whole thing is that Mikey Sherrill, the Democratic nominee who now is Democratic governor-elect of New Jersey, got more than 300,000 more votes than the Democratic nominee did in the last off-year election like this, which was 2021.
--:-- Tyler Pager: So not only did she mobilize Democrats, she also got voters who were not previously voting for Democrats, people who voted for President Trump. And in particular, there were looking at black and Latino voters. Trump made some real inroads in those communities in 2024. And what we saw in these elections is some of those voters came back to Democrats, that Trump was, in fact, like renting. He didn't own those voters.
--:-- Lisa Lair: It's not a permanent coalition. And for the White House, that's a big blow. Because that means that people are changing their minds about Trump in a negative way, that they were excited about the president, they voted for him, and now they're coming to the polls and saying, well, this isn't really working for us. I'm voting Democrat.
--:-- Tyler Pager: Right. And just to be very specific, and here I'm going to crib from our colleague Nate Cohn, he found that Hispanic voters in New Jersey, where Mikey Sherrill is now governor-elect, that group of voters really swung from Trump to Sherrill.
--:-- Lisa Lair: And let me give you the number. Exit polls found that Cheryl won 18% of Trump's Hispanic support in New Jersey. That's a pretty big number, wouldn't you say, Tyler?
--:-- Tyler Pager: Yeah. I mean, I think one of the things that Democrats are excited about is that they were able to win over these voters that were a long part of their base and had been slipping away. These coalitions that parties have relied on for decades are just way more movable than I think they had been.
--:-- Julie Davis: Which gives both parties opportunities, but also has warning signs for both parties who were relying on voters to turn out and support them and are not reliably doing so in the same ways.
--:-- Lisa Lair: And I think what they want on the Democrats is really important, perhaps the most important thing. Say more about that.
--:-- Tyler Pager: Well, all three of the candidates in really the major races here, so governor of New Jersey, governor of Virginia, and mayor of New York City, which captured outside attention as it want to do, ran on really these messages that were so focused on cost of living and affordability.
--:-- Lisa Lair: Like this was the my rent, housing, electricity, grocery, health care costs are all too damn high election. And they did that successfully.
--:-- Julie Davis: The reason why that is so unnerving for Republicans is traditionally economics have been a very strong point for the president. People have thought that he would do a better job handling the economy than the Democrats.
--:-- Lisa Lair: And we've really seen that edge a row to the point where Democrats were able to run a very successful campaign, almost exclusively focused on those issues, along with a heavy dose of, you know, opposition to the president, who's long been probably the best motivator for Democrats in the country.
--:-- Tyler Pager: And to your point, I had a conversation just before the election with Steve Bannon, one of President Trump's longtime advisors, who was very concerned about the president's hyper focus on foreign policy.
--:-- Lisa Lair: He's meeting with foreign leaders multiple times a week. He's done a lot of global travel. He has not been traveling at all really domestically outside his homes in Florida and New Jersey.
--:-- Tyler Pager: And some of the president's longtime advisors are saying you need to get back to focusing on the American people.
--:-- Lisa Lair: Well, why did the president take, and this is for all of you, why did the president take his eye off of the economy? It's not exactly news to him, based on his presidential election victory a year ago, that he won because of Americans' economic insecurities and their belief that he was going to make life more affordable.
--:-- Tyler Pager: Well, but I think that he has focused on the economy in a lot of ways, right? We've talked about how he really leaned into tariffs and imposing tariffs on various countries, but he kept on making the case that that was going to help Americans and help consumers and help manufacturing in this country.
--:-- Lisa Lair: You look at the big tax cut bill that he spent a lot of political capital and a lot of time pushing through Congress earlier this year. That was supposedly all about the economy.
--:-- Tyler Pager: I think the problem has been that in doing all of those things, he has really seen a blowback. Some of the tariffs have had negative effects on people in the United States. Same thing on the tax bill. In order to pay for that bill, they imposed massive Medicaid cuts.
--:-- Lisa Lair: They cut nutritional benefits for Americans. And that was a calculated gamble that a tax cut was going to be politically positive for them. But in the end, that did not help a big portion of his coalition.
--:-- Tyler Pager: So I don't think it's that he hasn't been focused at all on the economy. It's just some of the impacts of what he has chosen to do are now just starting to be felt.
--:-- Julie Davis: And Michael, just to add on to that, it's very reminiscent in some ways of Joe Biden's presidency, because Joe Biden passed all this legislation and promised that the economy was going to get better, but said that it would take time.
--:-- Lisa Lair: A lot of what Trump has done, he said, is in service of the economy. The tariffs as Julie said, the tax cut trying to take stake of companies saying he bringing in all this business and investment into the United States.
--:-- Tyler Pager: But that is something that happens over a many period. And I think that is a challenge for presidents who are stewarding an economy is Americans want relief right now, and it's often hard to deliver that.
--:-- Lisa Lair: It's one thing, of course, for Democrats to have won races in blue places, right? New York City, blue. New Jersey, pretty blue. Virginia, pretty blue, although a little bit less than perhaps in Jersey and New York.
--:-- Tyler Pager: But Lisa Lair, I noticed these two races that nobody thought all that much about in Georgia, statewide commission races, where Democrats ousted Republicans by like the largest margins in decades.
--:-- Lisa Lair: And if I'm the president, that would really worry me.
--:-- Tyler Pager: Yeah, I think the scale of the Democratic wins here is really important, as you're pointing out. We sort of was widely expected in the newsroom. We anticipated that Democrats would win those three major races that we've talked about.
--:-- Lisa Lair: But it was these lower races. They made huge gains in the Virginia Statehouse. They won these two Georgia Utility Board races, which, you know, I talked to Republicans there and they said, well, we weren't paying attention to this. We weren't invested in it.
--:-- Tyler Pager: But, you know, Democrats still flipped those seats and the margins were really high. It shows that the energy is still there and it shows that Republicans haven't solved one of their most sort of pernicious problems, which is their inability to get their voters to turn out when Donald Trump's name is not on the ballot.
--:-- Julie Davis: Right. That has been a problem for them since 2017 and they still haven't solved it.
--:-- Lisa Lair: Julie, I want to ask this to you because you wrote a whole book about immigration. Lisa's suggesting that this election may serve as a rebuke broadly of Trump, perhaps not just his economic agenda, the whole package.
--:-- Julie Davis: I'm thinking back to the turnout of Hispanic voters in New Jersey, the number of Hispanic voters who went for Trump just a year or so ago and went for Mikey Sherrill there.
--:-- Tyler Pager: Yeah. I mean, listen, it's always very possible to overread the results of these elections in off years. Off-year elections. And lots of issues at play, all of which we've been talking about.
--:-- Julie Davis: But yeah, I think in general, there is a pretty good possibility that all of the chaos and disruption that those raids have had, the fear that's been sown in some of these communities is showing up in some of these results, not least because the overarching goal of why President Trump said he wanted to do this, lowering crime and getting people out of this country who shouldn't be here, people are not feeling the positive impact that he may have promised.
--:-- Lisa Lair: Okay, so that is Tuesday's election. The next blow to Trump in this pretty bad week for him came from what we mostly think of as a very reliable source of strength for the president, his conservative majority in the Supreme Court, which started to express these huge misgivings about the president's legal rationale for his tariffs.
--:-- Julie Davis: Julie, to me, what was so interesting about how the conservative justices spoke about these tariffs was that they were so overtly offended, it felt, by the way Trump is taking power from Congress.
--:-- Tyler Pager: We heard Neil Gorsuch, who, by the way, is a Trump appointee, not to mention one of the most conservative justices on the court. And we played this clip on yesterday's Daily. But he basically said, if I sign off on this, it's a path toward congressional irrelevance.
--:-- Lisa Lair: And no one's really said that to the president before. Right. The only people who have been saying that to the president much this year have been Democrats in Congress who have been watching with increasing alarm as he imposes tariffs, tries to make unilateral moves on spending.
--:-- Julie Davis: But it was really striking to hear the justices themselves voice those concerns.
--:-- Tyler Pager: Incidentally, this has been a concern rising on the Republican side as well. We've seen just in the last week, the Senate's taken three different votes on ending various tariffs that President Trump has imposed.
--:-- Lisa Lair: All of them passed, but none of them have a chance of being enacted, of course, because the House is not going to take them up. And President Trump certainly won't sign them.
--:-- Tyler Pager: But what they are is a very clear sign that there is rising unease, even on the Republican side, with the president taking this power away from Congress and using it himself in ways that many of them are concerned are really going to hurt their constituents.
--:-- Lisa Lair: And you know who else doesn't like tariffs? Voters. The voters. It's really interesting because I was in this conversation reminding me I was in North Carolina in February and the tariffs were just starting. They were talking about them.
--:-- Tyler Pager: And I was asking people, you know, what do you think about this? And even some moderate Democrats said, well, we got to give the president more time. This is what he promised to do. Let's see how it works out.
--:-- Lisa Lair: Fast forward nine months and these women running for governor in Virginia and New Jersey are running, assailing the tariffs, just laying into them. They're really unpopular.
--:-- Tyler Pager: And I think not only do people believe that they have hurt the economy and maybe contribute to these affordability concerns, they also, because of the back and forth and the headlines and the next headline, the next one, they also add to this sense of chaos coming out of Washington that people also, I think, were reacting to in some of these results.
--:-- Lisa Lair: Tyler, the president, I have to imagine, is preparing for the very real possibility that the Supreme Court, his Supreme Court in a lot of ways, is about to strike down this centerpiece of his agenda, these tariffs.
--:-- Tyler Pager: And so I wonder what his plan is and also if he's upset by it. I mean, look, Michael, President Trump loves tariffs. He has loved the tool for decades, and he tried to do a more aggressive tariff regime in the first term, but was held back by some advisors.
--:-- Lisa Lair: And so he is going to be very, very disappointed, to put it mildly, if the Supreme Court overrules his ability to do this.
--:-- Tyler Pager: He likes the unilateral aspect of it. We've seen throughout his presidency. He likes to sign executive orders. He doesn't like to defer to other agencies or to Congress.
--:-- Lisa Lair: And he is very focused, as we talked about earlier, on foreign policy. And so if his ability to institute tariffs is rolled back by the Supreme Court, he's going to be extremely angry.
--:-- Tyler Pager: And it's unclear what his strategy is going to be. Maybe he'll try to go through the process of getting approval from Congress. But as Julie said, they're not all so interested in his current posture.
--:-- Lisa Lair: Okay, so we're going to take a break. When we come back, we're going to talk through the final element of the president's rough week, which very much does involve Congress, and that is the increasingly dire dynamics surrounding the government shutdown and the possibility of airline Armageddon.
--:-- [Break music plays]
--:-- Michael Barbaro: Okay, we're back. Lisa, Julie, Tyler, welcome back. It hasn't been that long, but so good to see you still here.
--:-- Lisa Lair: The final way in which this week has proven so taxing for President Trump is that the shutdown moved into even darker territory because after hurting hundreds of thousands of government workers who aren't getting paid, and millions of Americans who rely on food stamps, the shutdown is now about to hit millions of people who don't have that close a relationship to the government who just want to get on a plane and fly.
--:-- Tyler Pager: We just got a list of 40 airports that the administration says have to cut flights by 10 each.
--:-- Lisa Lair: Tyler first to you, what is that really about? Is it about safety or is it about the president and those around him deliberately trying to deepen the crisis of the shutdown to try to end it?
--:-- Tyler Pager: Look, Michael, what we can point to is what the Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, said, which was that the reductions were an attempt to, quote, alleviate the pressure on air traffic controllers.
--:-- Lisa Lair: Prior to these cuts, we've seen flight delays, flight cancellations, because air traffic controllers are working without pay.
--:-- Tyler Pager: And in previous shutdowns, we've seen that they just start calling in sick and don't show up to work because they don't want to work without getting paid.
--:-- Lisa Lair: But also, Michael, to your point, the way that shutdowns often end is through political pain points. One of the biggest ones is the troops not getting paid. The president has sort of taken that off the table.
--:-- Tyler Pager: Right. You explained that in our last roundtable, how he worked around that.
--:-- Lisa Lair: Exactly. So I think there are many people that see this as the administration trying to ratchet up the pressure, particularly on Democrats, who they've been saying need to reopen the government.
--:-- Tyler Pager: But, Michael, what's really interesting is that President Trump seems to really only be focused on negotiating with Republicans, not with Democrats.
--:-- Julie Davis: Jeffries and Schumer, the two Democratic leaders in the House and Senate, requested a meeting with President Trump. But the president is really just calling on Republicans to abolish the filibuster as a path forward.
--:-- Lisa Lair: Julie, is this the 20th time we ask you to explain the filibuster?
--:-- Julie Davis: The filibuster is relevant here because the Democrats are blocking passage of a bill that would reopen the government, which needs 60 votes because the filibuster allows any senator to block action on any bill unless the proponents can get 60 votes to let it move forward.
--:-- Lisa Lair: Right now, the Republicans don't have those votes. They only control 53 votes in the Senate. There are only three members of the Democratic caucus who have been voting for a spending bill. So they're stuck.
--:-- Julie Davis: And rather than try to engage in any real negotiation with the Democrats, as Tyler said, President Trump's position has been wait him out, try to get him to cave and in the meantime, put pressure on Republicans on his own party to blow up the filibuster rule so that they can just ram through a spending bill and not worry at all about what the Democrats want.
--:-- Lisa Lair: That is clearly not going to happen. John Thune, the majority leader, has said many times he does not have the votes to do that. There are 15 or so Republicans who are dug in against doing so.
--:-- Julie Davis: And why are they dug in? Because that's another notable rebuke of Trump in this past week or so. Right. I mean, it's really because of the be careful what you wish for rule of the United States Senate, which is if they do this, then when and if the Democrats win the majority, they would be able to ram through whatever legislation they wanted to get through the Senate without any regard for what the Republicans wanted.
--:-- Lisa Lair: And to do it for a three or four or five week temporary government spending bill would be really quite remarkable because this is a Senate precedent that has been around for many, many decades.
--:-- Julie Davis: And the votes are just not there to do it. But it's interesting to hear Trump say that he thinks it's not necessarily Democrats. It's Republicans. It's his own party who have to get off the dime in order to end this thing.
--:-- Lisa Lair: But it's hard to believe that there isn't a parallel effort going on to get Democrats to do what Trump has believed from the very beginning that they would have done weeks ago, which is cave and just finally allow the government to reopen.
--:-- Tyler Pager: I'm just not sure how much the air travel will force Democrats to cave, right? If they didn't cave over SNAP benefits, you know, it's only 20 percent of people or so in the country that fly more than three times a year.
--:-- Lisa Lair: Like most people, a lot of people don't fly at all. That's a great stat. Where did you find that?
--:-- Tyler Pager: I looked that up when this happened because I was curious, like, how many people does this actually impact?
--:-- Lisa Lair: Now, granted, I looked it up. It was like 44 percent or something fly once a year. And if you fly once a year, there's a chance you're flying over Thanksgiving, right? It's a major holiday, American holiday.
--:-- Tyler Pager: I mean, it impacts a lot of people. The footage that will be running on all the news of these lines and chaos at airports is certainly bad.
--:-- Lisa Lair: But I do wonder if this is the thing that causes Democrats who are coming off this very big suite of wins who feel like they have the wind at their back to come to the table with concessions.
--:-- Tyler Pager: You're saying you don't think it will be the thing? No, I'm not sure it will be.
--:-- Lisa Lair: I mean, we can't know. And, you know, the holidays will be approaching and that obviously people travel. It's a heavy travel season.
--:-- Tyler Pager: But I do think there are divides in the Democratic Party. And some of that has to do with how they are interpreting the results. Right. There's certainly a group of people in the party who say these results show that voters want Democrats to fight.
--:-- Lisa Lair: You know, they like to say resist Trump and they absolutely should not give in on the shutdown, that they're being rewarded for refusing to give in to Trump to keep the government open.
--:-- Tyler Pager: But I do think there's another group of Democrats who look at these results and say this was not about the shutdown. This was about cost of living. And the risk with this is that if the shutdown doesn't end, all those cost of living pressures get worse and worse for people.
--:-- Lisa Lair: And in fact they really want the shutdown to end and then move to this issue that they see as more politically salient and positive for them which is talking about cost of living and affordability.
--:-- Tyler Pager: Well but here's the riddle right the last batch of polling that I looked at correct me if you've seen more recent polling is that most Americans are still blaming the shutdown on Republicans and on Trump.
--:-- Lisa Lair: So if you combine that with the election results on Tuesday and like you said this view that Democratic resistance is good for the party, if you put all those things together and layer in one more thing. President Trump himself said on election night that the shutdown is why Democrats did well.
--:-- Tyler Pager: If those things were all in the air, what incentive do the Democrats have to end the shutdown? The shutdown's been working.
--:-- Lisa Lair: And the shutdown's about affordability on some level, which is health care. I mean, I think one incentive is it's quite bad for people, Right. Like the SNAP benefits are going to be a big problem.
--:-- Tyler Pager: They may be delayed. The airline travel is going to get messier and messier. You know, at some point that could reverberate against Democrats.
--:-- Lisa Lair: But there are real consequences. Right. So certainly one would hope that for people in elected office, that would be some kind of an incentive.
--:-- Tyler Pager: But you're right. I think there is a sense in the Democratic Party that they see the same numbers you do. And I've been told in their internal numbers that they're doing in battleground states that they do see that President Trump is so far carrying the blame for this.
--:-- Lisa Lair: But that could, of course, change.
--:-- Tyler Pager: I will say that after the results on Tuesday, there was a real notable shift in the sort of body language coming from Democrats. Before the elections, I think there was a real sense of they felt that they had won the messaging fight here.
--:-- Lisa Lair: Their message about extending the expiring Obamacare subsidies had resonated. People agreed with them. That was showing in the polls.
--:-- Tyler Pager: But also that this was starting to be very painful and they needed to find an off-ramp here that would get some sort of concession that they've been asking for but also allow the government to reopen pretty quickly.
--:-- Lisa Lair: I think there was a little bit of a pivot, frankly, after the results came in and particularly after Trump, like you said, Michael, said the next morning that the elections were lost in part because of the shutdown.
--:-- Tyler Pager: The shutdown was bad for Republicans. I think that did give Democrats at least a few more days here of feeling like they really needed to put up a fight and try to get the best possible deal they could get in exchange for reopening the government.
--:-- Lisa Lair: And some of this, of course, also in terms of Democrats depends on where they sit. So if you were a Democrat that's looking at a tough midterm reelection race in a purple state, you may be slightly more inclined towards getting a deal.
--:-- Tyler Pager: If you're a Democrat who is wistfully looking at 2028 as a presidential run in what we all sort of expect is going to be a very crowded and chaotic field, you may be looking at resistance and showing that you're a fighter against the administration as a better political play.
--:-- Lisa Lair: So just to wrap this all up, friends, everything we talking about here points to the success of an anti-message in this moment.
--:-- Tyler Pager: And the question, of course, is, is Trump going to really change in response to that? Is he going to be more focused on the economy? Is he going to be talking about affordability? Is he going to be ratcheting back some of the more divisive elements of his agenda?
--:-- Lisa Lair: Or is he going to remain exactly as he has and stay focused on international diplomacy, mass deportations, White House renovations from the East Wing to a bathroom off the Lincoln bedroom, now clad in statuary marble?
--:-- Tyler Pager: Is this, Tyler, Julie, I'm curious what you're thinking, Lisa, too, going to potentially, if it really is the worst week of the second term, maybe going to make the president rethink some of this stuff and change?
--:-- Lisa Lair: Michael, it's really interesting. I think back to this moment on the campaign where Trump had a campaign event in New Jersey where his advisors wanted him to focus on inflation.
--:-- Tyler Pager: And what they did was they set up this table of all these different grocery items for him to highlight how prices had rose under the Biden administration.
--:-- Lisa Lair: But privately, Trump didn't want to talk about that. He thought it was boring. His aides were like, please just talk about the economy briefly and then you can go talk about whatever you want.
--:-- Tyler Pager: So he goes out to this table with all these groceries and says, you know, my advisors want me to talk about this, but I'm not all that interested in this. But they say I need to do it. So here's the speech and basically says it's boring and then moves on.
--:-- Lisa Lair: And I think about that because I think it's going to be really hard for the president to fully pivot and just focus on the economy. He's really interested in renovating the White House, as you said, and he really wants to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
--:-- Tyler Pager: And he didn't win it this year and there's more foreign conflicts that he thinks he can solve to bolster his case.
--:-- Lisa Lair: And look, I think there may be moments where his advisors are successful in convincing him to stay focused on the economy. I know he is deeply concerned about losing the midterms and Democrats taking control of the House and investigating him.
--:-- Tyler Pager: And so his aides are trying to redistrict and do other things to try to make it possible for the Republicans to hold the House.
--:-- Lisa Lair: But I don't imagine a full pivot from Trump on messaging. I think he feels vindicated by his win and focused on what he wants to do.
--:-- Tyler Pager: And there's only so much his advisors are able to convince him to focus on, as evidenced by that scene during the campaign.
--:-- Lisa Lair: I think that the overarching thing that we can take from what Trump said after Tuesday is not that he's changing so much as that he's doubling down. I mean, the fact that he went directly to, we now have to change the rules to ram through as many things as we can, Before the Democrats can get control and ram through as many things as they want to do.
--:-- Tyler Pager: I think tells you what you need to know about whether his message or his pitch has changed at all.
--:-- Lisa Lair: And while I think it's certainly the case that his advisors at the White House and probably he on some level recognized that there was a reckoning in these election results, a lot of these things are already in train.
--:-- Tyler Pager: The tariffs are already in place. The tax cut and all these Medicaid cuts are already there.
--:-- Lisa Lair: And I think this is going to become a messaging battle in the run-up to the midterms. And the message seems to be, we did all the right things. We just need to talk about them better.
--:-- Tyler Pager: That's what Speaker Johnson said this week after the election results. Not that there was any real lesson for the party, but just that they needed to sell President Trump's policies more effectively than they have in the past.
--:-- Lisa Lair: Just like Democrats during Joe Biden's entire presidency. It sounded very familiar to what Democrats said the entire time, which is that nothing wrong has been done. No policy change is needed. It's just a messaging change.
--:-- Tyler Pager: And I think we know from history that Trump is not a person who really changes his approach very much.
--:-- Lisa Lair: So I think despite all of the rebukes that he received this week, he is in a posture of doubling down.
--:-- Tyler Pager: And we've seen the Republican Congress generally follow in his footsteps at those kinds of moments.
--:-- Lisa Lair: So that's where we are now.
--:-- Tyler Pager: Well, Julie, Tyler, Lisa, thank you all very much.
--:-- Lisa Lair: Thanks so much, Michael.
--:-- Tyler Pager: Thanks for having us.
--:-- Lisa Lair: Thanks for having us.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: On Thursday night, Trump faced a new setback. A federal judge ordered the administration to fund food stamps in full for about 42 million low-income Americans during the shutdown, something the president has repeatedly resisted.
--:-- [Break music plays]
--:-- Michael Barbaro: In his ruling, the judge criticized the White House for attempting to delay such payments, writing, quote, This should never happen in America.
--:-- Tyler Pager: The Justice Department almost immediately told the court that it planned to appeal the ruling.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: We'll be right back.
--:-- [Break music plays]
--:-- Michael Barbaro: Here's what else you need to know another day.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: Tesla shareholders have approved a compensation package for their founder, Elon Musk, that could be worth as much as $1 trillion.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: The pay plan is the largest in corporate history for a CEO.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: The arrangement, which requires Tesla to hit ambitious financial milestones under Musk, aroused skepticism from some shareholders.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: But Musk had threatened to leave Tesla if the plan had been rejected.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: And on Thursday, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said that she will retire from Congress when her term expires in 2027.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: Ending a path-breaking career in which she rose to become the most powerful woman in American government.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: In a video, Pelosi said that after nearly 40 years in the House of Representatives, the time had finally come to leave it.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: I say to my colleagues in the House all the time, no matter what title they have bestowed upon me, speaker, leader, whip, there has been no greater honor for me than to stand on the House floor and say, I speak for the people of San Francisco.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: I have true love serving as your voice in Congress, and I've always honored the song of St. Francis.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: Today's episode was produced by Mary Wilson and Stella Tan.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: It was edited by Chris Haxel and Paige Cowan, with help from Rachel Quester.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: Contains music by Rony Misto and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: The Daily's engineers are Chris Wood and Alyssa Moxley, with engineering support from Brad Fisher, Maddy Maciello, Nick Pittman, and Kyle Grandillo.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: Our theme song is by Ben Lansford and Jim Brunberg of Wonderly.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: Our radio team is Jody Becker, Rue Niemisto, Diane Wong, and Katherine Anderson.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: Alexandra Lee Young is our deputy executive producer.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: Michael Benoit is our deputy editor.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: Paige Cowett is the editor of The Daily.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: Ben Calhoun is our executive producer.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Larissa Anderson, Sam Dolnik, and to the founding editor of the show, Lisa Tobin.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.
