--:-- [Up First theme music fades out]
--:-- Leila Fadel: On day 100 of his second term, President Trump celebrated changes to America in his second term. Those changes include a trade war, punishing perceived political enemies and invoking wartime authorities.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: I'm Steve Inskeep with Leila Fadel, and this is Up First from NPR News. Steve Bannon, a sometime advisor to the president, talks of a busy summer.
--:-- Leila Fadel: I think the convergence, particularly of spending cuts, and the simultaneously constitutional crisis that we're hurtling to is going to make this summer a summer like no other.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: How is a populist podcaster defending the president's first hundred days, and what does he see in the next hundred?
--:-- Leila Fadel: And congressional Republicans return from recess with a goal of passing the president's so-called Big Beautiful Bill in a month. Stay with us, we'll give you the news you need to start your day.
--:-- [Up First theme music continues]
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--:-- Leila Fadel: President Trump took a victory lap in Michigan last night. In 100 days, we have delivered the most profound change in Washington in nearly 100 years. I read a editorial today that this is the most consequential presidency in history. How about that? It's a little early for that superlative, but Trump's critics and fans alike agree that these 100 days were consequential.
--:-- Tamara Keith: Trump has pushed the limits of presidential power. He invoked wartime authorities to crack down on immigration. He punished his political enemies and launched a trade war that shook consumer confidence and also shook U.S. relationships with the world.
--:-- Leila Fadel: Joining me now to talk about this milestone is NPR senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith. Hi, Tam. Good morning.
--:-- Tamara Keith: Good morning. So that was a long but incomplete list of what President Trump has done since January. So suffice to say, a lot has happened.
--:-- Leila Fadel: How did the president take stock of things at his rally last night?
--:-- Tamara Keith: Well, he covered all of that and more in a 90-minute speech that was actually rather joyful by Trump's standards. You know, at times during the campaign, his speeches got pretty grim. But this was his first rally since Inauguration Day, his first time fully feeling the embrace of the MAGA faithful. And he comes alive with a crowd, especially when he can boast about owning the libs and taking back the country from a, quote, sick political class.
--:-- Leila Fadel: We are stopping their gravy train ending their power trip and telling thousands of corrupt incompetent and unnecessary deep state bureaucrats you fired Get the hell out of here You fired Get out of here
--:-- Tamara Keith: He also talked about paper straws and low flow shower heads along with border security working to bring down prices. And there were also, as always, plenty of exaggerations and outright falsehoods throughout.
--:-- Leila Fadel: I want to ask you about the difference and the similarities with Trump's first term, which you also covered. What are you seeing as the key differences so far?
--:-- Tamara Keith: He has a lot more experience. As a longtime Trump ally told me, he has been through the knife fights and knows how to use the levers of power. And he's having an easier time of it so far as well. During Trump 1.0, he faced pushback from within his own administration. The second Trump administration is all loyalists. Gone are the establishment Republicans who saw themselves as guardrails working behind the scenes to temper his plans. And Congress is more compliant as well. Most of the Republicans who criticized him last time are no longer in office.
--:-- Leila Fadel: A big test of that is coming soon, though. And Trump last night seemed to be transitioning to a campaign-style push for what he calls his one big, beautiful bill, a massive tax and spending cut measure that Trump is urging Republicans to pass quickly. He has done a lot through executive action in these first 100 days, but he's going to need Congress for this.
--:-- Tamara Keith: And what about the similarities? Well, last night, Trump complained repeatedly about polls he said couldn't possibly be valid. That's the raft of public polls out in recent days indicating Trump has the lowest approval rating at the 100 days mark of any president in 80 years. A lot of Americans told pollsters they think Trump is going too far. And like in his first term, significant parts of Trump's agenda are being held up in the courts, which he made clear he isn't happy about.
--:-- Leila Fadel: The courts and the polls are the two biggest hints of gravity that Trump is experiencing right now.
--:-- Tamara Keith: NPR's Tam Marquis, thanks for joining us, Tam.
--:-- Tamara Keith: You're welcome.
--:-- Leila Fadel: The president's sometime advisor, Steve Bannon, expects a busy summer. Bannon has a front row seat for whatever happens. He broadcasts a daily webcast from a Washington, D.C. townhouse that we visited this week.
--:-- Steve Bannon: There's going to be a confrontation. I think the convergence, particularly of spending cuts, and the simultaneously constitutional crisis that we're hurtling to is going to make this summer a summer like no other.
--:-- Leila Fadel: Now, Steve Bannon promoted Trump's cause back in 2016 and worked in the White House for a time. Now he is pushing the administration to go even further. Political observers still follow Bannon as one of several indicators for where a part of Trump's coalition may be going, and that is one reason we've been over to see him.
--:-- Steve Bannon: Well, he says he represents the working class, the average person. We should be clear, Bannon is a Harvard MBA, made lots of money on Wall Street and Hollywood, and in the first Trump administration, he had the Elon Musk role, the upscale advisor.
--:-- Leila Fadel: This time around, he's had his differences with Musk. He talks about oligarchs. He attacks Wall Street and the economic system. And he spends a lot of time on his podcast and webcast insisting the working class is being screwed.
--:-- Steve Bannon: He talks about income inequality, which is a widely accepted idea. People on the left can nod their heads when he talks about that. The debate, of course, is about his solutions, which involve attacking the bureaucracy and expelling immigrants without legal status and even some people with legal status.
--:-- Leila Fadel: And what's he saying as Trump finishes 100 days? Tamara just said that polls indicate Americans think Trump has gone too far. Bannon wants more. More intense attacks on universities, for example.
--:-- Steve Bannon: He wants to go after public universities, not just the elite private ones. Trump has canceled some student visas. Bannon was on his program Monday talking about sending home hundreds of thousands of Chinese students, all of them immediately if it were up to him
--:-- Leila Fadel: If Bannon is conservative what he say about Trump treatment of the Constitution?
--:-- Steve Bannon: Oh we had a very long discussion about this The Supreme Court of course unanimously said that people who are being thrown out of the country deserve some kind of due process. This includes Trump appointees. A Trump-appointed judge said due process hadn't even been followed in one case for a two-year-old U.S. citizen recently.
--:-- Leila Fadel: But Bannon is using this phrase, it's very common on the right, judicial insurrection, saying judges are improperly standing in the way of the president.
--:-- Steve Bannon: We also, in this conversation, talked about the president's claim of sweeping powers to raise tariffs. And here's how some of that discussion went.
--:-- Leila Fadel: Does it concern you at all that a president could claim the power to completely transform the economy all by himself just on his say-so?
--:-- Steve Bannon: Well, it's not just on his say-so. He did execute emergency powers to do this, given the emergency that's there both on fentanyl and on the national security. But the emergency is he says there's an emergency. That's all there is. No, he gave back up document two on the fentanyl issue. In Canada? The deficits alone, the trade deficit's $25 trillion, brother. That's not an emergency?
--:-- Leila Fadel: The U.S. does have an annual trade deficit with other nations, which the White House estimates at $1.2 trillion last year.
--:-- Steve Bannon: Okay, so now Bannon has been provocative, controversial for years. He supported Trump's effort to overturn the election he lost in 2020. He's favored attacking the government bureaucracy, urged giving it, quote, blunt force trauma.
--:-- Leila Fadel: But here's a question. What is the future that he wants to see? We got a sense of that in this part of the interview.
--:-- Steve Bannon: We've got to start making things again. The high value added part of manufacturing has to come back. Something that a man or a woman can have a job and have a family and have their spouse stay home if they so want and raise their kids. Once we're back to that, the country is going to be vibrant and robust again.
--:-- Leila Fadel: He's looking at an older idea of the economy, which is connected to a more traditional idea of the family. Of course, we're far from that now.
--:-- Steve Bannon: And as we heard, Bannon is forecasting a summer of crisis.
--:-- Leila Fadel: Fascinating. So the full interview, video interview, is at the NPR app and elsewhere.
--:-- Elena Moore: Republicans in Congress returned to Washington this week after a two-week recess. Ready to make good on President Trump's promise to pass a big bill full of his top policy priorities.
--:-- Leila Fadel: In the House, they say the goal is to write these plans covering everything from taxes and immigration to spending cuts and pass it by Memorial Day, which is less than a month from now.
--:-- Elena Moore: NPR's Elena Moore is following this and she joins me now in studio. Hi, Elena. Good morning.
--:-- Elena Moore: Good morning. So Republicans have been talking about their plans to pass President Trump's agenda for some time now. Just remind us of where they are in this process.
--:-- Leila Fadel: Yeah, well, a few weeks ago, the House and the Senate approved a budget framework for this big spending bill. Now, House Republicans say their focus on drafting and agreeing to all the pieces of the legislation based on that framework.
--:-- Elena Moore: Here's how Republican Congressman and Majority Leader Steve Scalise put it to reporters on Tuesday. All of our committees have been meeting both individually. We've been meeting with the president for about a year to get to this moment and start delivering on those things that we all ran on.
--:-- Leila Fadel: Yeah, and House committees are planning to release and work through their proposals for the spending bill over the next few weeks. After that, the House Budget Committee will work to put it all together so the whole House can vote.
--:-- Elena Moore: And we should say, Layla, this is entirely a partisan process. And Democrats who don't have the power to stop this are unanimously opposed.
--:-- Leila Fadel: OK, Elena, Memorial Day is about a month away. Does it seem like they will actually be able to meet this goal?
--:-- Elena Moore: Well, Republicans want to pass a lot of policy, but some of it is divisive, even among Republicans. And that's just a difficult task given their razor thin majority. It means Republicans need virtually full party support to get this bill over the finish line.
--:-- Leila Fadel: So they need to keep different factions of their conference happy Plus there already one big problem House committees have been directed to propose at least trillion in cuts In the Senate they supposed to slash just billion in cuts but they promised to cut more
--:-- Elena Moore: Okay, so they're working with different numbers, but what about policy? What are the biggest divisions right now?
--:-- Leila Fadel: Well, one is over the future of Medicaid, the government insurance program available for low-income Americans and folks with disabilities. It falls under the House Energy and Commerce Committee's control, and the committee is looking to propose $880 billion in cuts.
--:-- Elena Moore: And Democrats point to a recent analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to conclude that cuts to Medicaid would have to happen in order to get to that number. Still, you know, some Republicans have come out strongly against this, both in the House and in the Senate.
--:-- Leila Fadel: You know, it's something Missouri Senator Josh Hawley told me he's not going to compromise on, given just how many people in his state rely on both Medicaid and the related children's health insurance program.
--:-- Elena Moore: Some people, I think, would like to cut Medicaid. That's a goal. They view that as a feature, not a bug. But I view it as a bug. I mean, I'm not going to vote for Medicaid cuts, not with 21 percent of my state, including a lot of kids who are getting Medicaid or CHIP.
--:-- Leila Fadel: What else are they considering?
--:-- Elena Moore: Some committees have started to spell out what they would already cut. Just this week, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce released their spending proposal, which includes scrapping some current student loan repayment plans and capping how much Americans can borrow from the government.
--:-- Leila Fadel: So we'll be watching how lawmakers negotiate these cuts over the next few weeks.
--:-- Elena Moore: That's NPR's Elena Moore. Thank you, Elena.
--:-- Leila Fadel: Thanks.
--:-- Leila Fadel: And that's Up First for Wednesday, April 30th. I'm Leila Fadel. And I'm Stephen Scape.
--:-- Stephen Scape: You can listen to this podcast sponsor-free while financially supporting public media with Up First Plus. Sponsor-free because you're sponsoring the programming, which means it's in your interest. Learn more at plus.npr.org.
--:-- Leila Fadel: That's P-L-U-S dot N-P-R dot org.
--:-- Stephen Scape: And today's episode of Up First was edited by Roberta Rampton, Reena Advani, Kelsey Snell, Vincent Nee, Jenea Williams, and Alice Wolfley.
--:-- Leila Fadel: It was produced by Ziad Butch, Nia Dumas, and Christopher Thomas.
--:-- Stephen Scape: We get engineering support from Damian Herring, and our technical director is Carly Strange.
--:-- Leila Fadel: Who is also supportive, wouldn't you agree?
--:-- Stephen Scape: I agree.
--:-- Leila Fadel: We can't do this without her.
--:-- Stephen Scape: Happy you join us. Happy you join us tomorrow.
--:-- Leila Fadel: I'm now my uncle. Is that how your uncle would say it?
--:-- Stephen Scape: I feel like the other day, somebody was like, are you going to Vermont for skiing? and I texted wrong and I said, I'm not going for a skiing. And she was like, who are you? Okay. Anyways, hope you, hope you join us again tomorrow.
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--:-- Leila Fadel: That's L-E-E-S-A dot com, promo code NPR.
--:-- Stephen Scape: This message comes from the Hartford. Every day, they create unique risk solutions for unique businesses. They understand the challenges businesses face today and are ready to anticipate the risks of tomorrow. Their teams know the ins and outs of specific industries. So the Hartford can help provide insurance solutions for midsize and large businesses. If a business needs it, chances are they've got it and get it. Connect with your underwriter at the Hartford or visit the Hartford.com.
--:-- Leila Fadel: This message comes from NPR sponsor Rosetta Stone, an expert in language learning for 30 years. Right now, NPR listeners can get Rosetta Stone's lifetime membership to 25 different languages for 50% off. Learn more at rosettastone.com slash NPR.
