Mara Liasson

speaker

943 appearances 21 recordings 3 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 3 Sep

Mara Liasson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 14 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 4.

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The NPR Politics Podcast · Poll: Majority Thinks Trump Is Making Changes Too Quickly · 3 Mar 2025 podcast

That's right. But he's still underwater. He's never had a net positive approval rating as president. And he is trying to do things that are very dramatic, big changes. Now, Donald Trump ran as the change candidate. He was elected because people wanted to make big changes. But we don't know if they wanted to make the changes that he's making now. like completely upend U.S.

foreign policy so that the U.S. is now aligned, at least in the last United Nations vote, with Russia and North Korea and against the Western democracies of Europe. We don't know if they wanted him to radically downsize the federal government. We just don't know the answer to that. We know that they wanted him to bring down the price of eggs.

And that's it. And when you have 57 percent of Americans saying they think the price of groceries will increase in the next six months, that affects inflation. Inflation is made up a lot of things. It's made up of supply chain problems. It's also made up of expectations. There's a psychology to this.

If a majority of people think that groceries are going to get more expensive, they're going to change their behavior.

See, that's the big question. Trump is such a different president in so many ways. And one of the most the biggest is that he's an automatic lame duck. He's barred by the Constitution from running again. So public opinion is not as much of a guardrail for him. As it would be for other presidents. The markets still are. He seems to react to them.

If they freak out about tariffs, he pulls back, at least temporarily. And that's why this whole presidency might be completely different in terms of public opinion. I don't think he's thinking about how can I – Be as popular as possible so J.D. Vance becomes the next president. That's not an issue for him.

But he wants to prove a couple things, things that he really believes in like tariffs are the answer to all economic problems or dismantling the federal government will make America better.

And, you know, we're going to have a real controlled experiment about the political impact of Elon Musk. Like Trump, he is very polarizing. And he may turn out voters for Republicans and against them, just like Trump did. We have an election coming up on April 1st. It's in Wisconsin. It's for a seat on the state Supreme Court.

And it's the first election of the cycle with national implications because the Wisconsin state Supreme Court will probably draw congressional district maps. And Elon Musk is pouring money into that race. And Democrats are going to make him an issue. And it'll be really interesting to see if his money is a net positive for Republicans or does he become a lightning rod?

OK, it's time for a quick break.

Well, what's interesting to me is that to what extent is the debate about Ukraine becoming a debate about Vladimir Putin and how close Trump is to him, how much he identifies with him? He talked about the two of them going through this horrible experience together of the investigation that led to Trump's impeachment of how much Russia supported him in the 2016 election.

So I think if this question gets drawn as kind of pro-Putin, anti-Putin, you'll see those numbers be even stronger for Ukraine because the American people don't like Vladimir Putin. There is a big chunk of the MAGA right that likes him because he's a kind of conservative culture warrior, anti-LBGTQ rights, etc.,

But this is one place where Trump is at very much at odds with American public opinion, even though foreign policy is not something that usually is a top priority for voters.

Doesn't look like it is so far. That's for sure.

Right. But he's not reshaping the U.S. into being a kind of neutral bystander or someone who – or just an isolationist country. He actively – he parrots Kremlin talking points. He calls the president of Ukraine a dictator but he won't call Putin a dictator. He won't say that Russia invaded Ukraine. He says Ukraine started the war. So this has gone farther than just he kind of likes strongmen.

He's actively siding with Russia. And that vote in the United Nations, which was on the third anniversary of the invasion, and it was a motion – to condemn Russia. You know, there the United States was refusing to sign on and siding with North Korea, Belarus and Russia.

You know, Donald Trump has a very radically different view of how the government should work. The founders set up a system of broadly distributed power, three co-equal branches of government, so that if someone was elected with what they would have called monarchical tendencies or authoritarian tendencies, the system would prevent that person from doing too much damage.

Well, Trump and the people around him believe in something called a unitary executive. They want a vastly empowered president. Congress... right now has pretty much abdicated its role as a check on the executive branch. And Trump and his supporters are talking about impeaching judges. So he's going after the judicial branch, which is supposed to be the ultimate check on

on the executive, the branch that decides whether what the executive is doing is constitutional or not. And this hasn't come to a head, but it will, because a lot of the things that Trump is doing are headed for the Supreme Court.

I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent.

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