Trump 2.0: The Art of the Deal
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What deals did President Trump propose this week?
From New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. This week, the president proposed two deals, one at home, the other abroad, that would require allies to put his needs ahead of theirs. And in both cases, Trump got exactly what he wanted. To understand why, I spoke with three of my colleagues, White House correspondents Maggie Haberman and Zolan Kano-Youngs, and congressional correspondent Katie Edmondson. It's Friday, February 28th. So friends... Welcome back, all three of you, to The Roundtable. Zolan and Katie, thank you for being in our Washington studio. Good to have you.
Thanks for having us.
Thanks for having us, Michael.
Thank you, Michael.
Oh.
How presumptuous of me. There's an order to this all. The host says hello, and the guest, you can't just get ahead of it. You can't just circumvent it.
I hope you all keep this in.
That's the plan. You ready? Maggie, thank you very much for being here.
Michael, thank you for having me.
What is the controversy surrounding the congressional budget deal?
So this was a week, I would argue, of deal-making by President Trump. And we are going to spend time on two of those deals. And you've all been carefully selected because of your relationship to these deals. The first deal was with Congress, and there was a lot of drama surrounding this one, as there often is with Congress. Maggie, just to start, what was this?
Trump has been very focused and his aides have been very focused in the White House on trying to get through some kind of a bill through Congress that reflected what he campaigned on.
Not an executive action, which is pretty much to fine this president.
Correct. Trump has taken a number of executive actions. He's very proud of it. But you can't do everything that way. Spending has to get passed through Congress, at least in this form. So this House bill was sort of a half man, half horse of Trump's campaign promises.
That's a very intriguing metaphor. Katie, can you explain what this half-man, half-horse thing was that ends up before Congress?
Yeah, I mean, the campaign promises that Maggie highlighted are really tax cuts. It is extending the 2017 tax cuts that his administration passed the first time around. And there are a number of other taxes that on the campaign trail he said he wanted to eliminate. But for a lot of House Republicans, they don't want to just... cut taxes. They also want to cut spending, federal spending.
Right. That's a huge part of their message. It's a huge part of their brand. It's a huge part of the Republican Party identity for the last decade.
Absolutely. And so a number of these Republicans have said President Trump, we're very happy to extend your tax cuts to cut taxes more, but we also need to be able to cut federal spending. And that is what this budget resolution that they put to a vote on the House floor on Tuesday night laid out the parameters for. Okay.
And so what happens once this half-man, half-horse, I'm just going to keep saying that as many times as I can, reaches the House floor?
Well, this is the balancing act that Speaker Johnson has really had to deal with his entire time as Speaker, which is placating basically both the ultra-conservatives in his conference and the more moderate Republicans, many of whom represent sort of swing districts.
How did the congressional budget deal pass in the House?
And so you heard some concerns from those more centrist Republicans who are saying, look, I know this resolution we're about to vote on doesn't say that we're going to cut programs like Medicaid or Medicare. But we're looking at the way this bill has been written. And it seems that almost certainly in order to get to the levels of spending cuts we're talking about, we're going to have to cut programs like Medicaid. And so you had some deep concerns from lawmakers who represent districts where a lot of their constituents rely on Medicaid. At the same time, you had these ultra conservatives say, actually, I think this bill doesn't cut spending enough. And I'm not sure if I can bring myself to vote for this resolution if it, in fact, is going to increase the deficit.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What deals did President Trump propose this week?
0:02–1:33
2
What is the controversy surrounding the congressional budget deal?
1:33–3:45
3
How did the congressional budget deal pass in the House?
3:45–11:38
4
How does Trump's budget impact U.S. debt and spending?
11:38–14:51
5
What are the implications of potential Medicaid cuts?
14:51–25:20
6
How did Trump's approach shape the U.S.-Ukraine minerals deal?
25:20–29:15