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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 14 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 4.
Appearances
I'm Susan Davis. I also cover politics. And I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent.
Well, Sue, explain the role that he played in the Senate and why he was so consequential and also the role he played in Trump's return after 2020.
And of course, it's beware of what you wish for. You just might get it. He got Donald Trump elected. And then there was January 6th. And very famously, Mitch McConnell decided not to vote to convict Trump after he was impeached by the House. for fomenting the January 6th insurrection. And he said at the time, famously, the criminal justice system can take care of Donald Trump.
And I wonder if Mitch McConnell is both responsible for helping Trump get elected so he could reshape the judiciary, but also helping him come back when McConnell clearly did not think he was fit to be president.
Well, it certainly fits into his larger governing strategy, which, as expressed by people like Russ Vogt, believes in an all-powerful executive with no checks and balances. They believe in something called the unitary executive. If an agency is in the executive branch, that means it, in effect, belongs to the president and he's in control of it.
What the implications are of this, it offers tremendous opportunities for corruption and self-dealing. Because the president has business interests. Elon Musk has tremendous business interests and a lot of government contracts. And this means that they can decide if an investigation is moving forward into Tesla or crypto, they can squash it.
So this executive order on independent agencies is part and parcel with almost every other thing that Trump is doing. And eventually, it's going to go to the Supreme Court because some of these agencies were set up by Congress. And the Supreme Court will decide.
And we know that several members of the conservative majority of the court that Donald Trump built are very receptive to this idea of an all-powerful executive.
And don't forget, there's a third branch of government here, Congress. Congress created these independent agencies. And so far, what we've seen is that especially the Republican Congress under a Republican president, this president, has pretty much abdicated its role as a co-equal branch of government.
So you've got left, the only check left is the courts, and we're going to see how willing they are to let Trump's new, very expansive view of the executive prevail. Right. Right.
And I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent.
Before Republicans finally came up with a bill that could pass, 34 Republicans helped defeat the bill Trump wanted, a bill that would have, among other things, raised the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling is the amount of money Congress allows the government to borrow to pay for spending Congress has already approved.
Trump's plans, including tariffs, tax cuts, and deportations, are estimated to add as much as $7 trillion to the national debt, and Trump didn't want the debt ceiling in his way.
But even if Trump doesn't care about deficits, there are still about three dozen Republicans in the House that do, and that means Trump may have difficulty convincing Congress to approve all the expensive things he wants to do next year. Mara Liason, NPR News.
Some of this is the normal anticipation and enthusiasm that the business community has billionaires, Wall Street would have to any new Republican president who's going to cut their taxes and limit regulation. Some of it's because Trump's takeover of the Republican Party is now complete. There are no more Romneys and Flakes and Cheneys around.
And some of it is that he's seen as a more legitimate president this time because he won the popular vote. But a lot of it is just a change in the approach of foreign leaders and business leaders and Democrats to they are using a different way to resist Trump compared to his first term. They're choosing their battles instead of across-the-board resistance.
They believe his mind can be changed on things like TikTok, which now he sees as useful to him, or cryptocurrency because his family is now in the crypto business. So I think it's a different kind of resistance.
Well, you know, he described the dinner he had with two big pharma CEOs and that industry's lobbying group. They're concerned about his pick for Health and Human Services Department, Robert F. Kennedy, who is an anti-vaccine activist. Here's how Trump described RFK Jr.
So he was asked about his own views on vaccines, and he gave full support to the polio vaccine. He said it's not going anywhere. But Trump did leave the door open to those who believe that vaccines are linked to autism, something that has been widely debunked. He said, quote, we're going to find out. He also wasn't clear about his position on vaccine mandates.
He was asked if schools should mandate vaccines, and he said, I'm not a big mandate person. But he also gave the pharma executives something they wanted. He was very hard on pharmacy benefit managers who pharmaceutical companies blame for price hikes. He scornfully referred to them as middlemen.
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