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Front Burner Transcript for January 21, 2025

Host: Jayme Poisson

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DONALD TRUMP: The golden age of America begins right now.

[crowd cheers]

DONALD TRUMP: Those who wish to stop our cause have tried to take my freedom and indeed to take my life. But I felt then and believe even more so now that I was saved by God to make America great again.

[applause, cheering]

JAYME POISSON: Hey, everybody, it's Jayme. So yesterday, Donald Trump was sworn in for the second time as president of the United States. And as promised, he wasted no time making his presence felt by signing a flurry of executive orders on his first day back in office.

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EVENT SPEAKER: And the next item, sir, is a letter that will be transmitted to the United Nations explaining that we are withdrawing from the Paris Climate Treaty.

[crowd cheers]

EVENT SPEAKER: Thank you, sir. This next item is a directive to the federal government ordering the restoration of freedom of speech and preventing government censorship of free speech going forward.

[crowd cheers]

JP: In his inaugural address, flanked by his family, tech billionaires and cabinet appointees, Trump laid out what his priorities will be during his initial days in office.

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DONALD TRUMP: All illegal entry will immediately be halted, and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.

DONALD TRUMP: Today, I will also declare a national energy emergency. We will drill, baby, drill.

[crowd cheers]

DONALD TRUMP: It will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female.

JP: In a second rambling speech to the overflow room, Trump repeated his lie that the 2020 election was rigged, criticized Joe Biden's pre-emptive pardons from earlier in the day, said that Hillary Clinton...

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DONALD TRUMP: Didn't look too happy today.

JP: And that Nancy Pelosi is responsible for what happened on January 6th.

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DONALD TRUMP: But she's guilty as hell.

JP: Speaking of January 6th...

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DONALD TRUMP: You know, tonight, I'm going to be signing on the J6 hostages. Pardons.

[crowd cheers]

JP: In one of his executive orders, he pardoned people convicted of nonviolent offences related to the January 6th U.S. Capitol attack, and commuted the sentences of others convicted of more serious offences. Among the things that he's promised that he did not act on yesterday was the 25% tariffs that he's been threatening against Canada and Mexico. For much of the day there was a sense of relief, but then around 8 p.m. Monday night, he said this from the Oval Office.

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DONALD TRUMP: We're thinking in terms of 25% on Mexico and Canada, because they're allowing vast numbers of people to come in and fentanyl to come in.

REPORTER 1: Are you planning on giving notice of that?

DONALD TRUMP: I think, I think we'll do it February 1st.

JP: Signing executive orders doesn't mean any of these things have actually been fixed, changed or dealt with, but they are things that Trump has promised or threatened to do on day one, many times over. Which is why on the eve of Inauguration Day, I spoke to Tolu Olorunnipa, the Washington bureau chief with The Washington Post and co-author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book, His name is George Floyd, about what to expect in the first days of the second Trump presidency.

[Music: Theme]

JP: Tolu, thank you so much for joining me.

TOLU OLORUNNIPA: It's great to be with you.

JP: These are, of course, not Trump's first 100 days as president. And I wonder if you could take me back to 2017. What characterized the early days of his first term?

TOLU OLORUNNIPA: Well, we have to go back to January 20th, 2017, where Trump gave his inaugural address that was different than anything that we had seen in this country. And so, it really set the stage for his early days in office. There was a lot of chaos. He tried to enact a ban on travel from several Muslim-majority countries, and it led to chaos at airports. There were big protests over his actions.

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[protesters chant: Refugees are welcome here!]

REPORTER 2: A weekend of protests over President Trump's immigration crackdown. That order signed Friday leading to instant chaos and confusion at airports at home and around the world. Travellers not allowed to board flights bound for the U.S. Some, including children, detained upon landing.

TOLU OLORUNNIPA: There was a lot of infighting in the White House. He didn't really know how to work the levers of government. He put a lot of people in office who were opposed to one another, and so there was a lot of fighting and leaks.

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NEWS PRESENTER 1: President Trump's enemies within the administration continue an unprecedented level of leaking for a presidency that is not yet two weeks old. There are new leaks tonight about the president's role in launching a mission in Yemen in which U.S. Navy Seal William Owens became the first American killed in Yemen.

NEWS PRESENTER 2: Talking about it all morning, President Trump facing questions now about his son-in-law amid reports that Jared Kushner tried to set up a backchannel with Russia amid the barrage of Russia revelations. There could be a White House shakeup, something we have heard before.

TOLU OLORUNNIPA: And that was a very turbulent period. Now he's going to be coming in with a lot more loyalty among his ranks and a lot more experience. And so we'll have to wait and see how much he shakes things up. But I do remember those early days where he started off talking about American carnage, and there was a lot of carnage within his administration because they couldn't figure out how to work their levers of power and get things done.

JP: Okay. Let's talk about some of the things that Trump says that he plans to do. On the campaign trail, he vowed to seal the border on his first day in office and start deporting undocumented migrants. What are people anticipating could happen here? What could it look like?

TOLU OLORUNNIPA: Yeah, immigration is one of the big issues that people expect Trump to act very quickly on and very aggressively on. He does have a lot of leeway as a president to use his executive power to try to move things on the immigration front. He has already said that he's going to try to target people who are in the country illegally, and specifically people who have come recently under the Biden administration, as well as people who have a history of violence or crimes and criminality in their background.

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DONALD TRUMP: We will reinstate my Remain in Mexico policy.

[applause]

DONALD TRUMP: And I will send troops to the southern border to repel the disastrous invasion of our country.

TOLU OLORUNNIPA: I expect him to try to show a force in terms of using the various agencies and the law enforcement powers that are under the federal government's command, to show themselves being, you know, going into neighbourhoods, going into big urban cities, and at least for the spectacle, pulling people out and saying that you're going to be going out of this country. I expect him to try to do a lot of that. And then on the policy front, he has a number of policies that he put into place during his first term. Things like the, quote unquote, Remain in Mexico policy, different kinds of policies where they used the pandemic to really restrict the ability of people to come into the country and claim asylum. I've heard and read that they are looking for new diseases or new public health threats that they can use to justify that same kind of policy, even though we're not in the middle of a pandemic. But there are wide ranging powers that go to a president when you are in a health crisis. And so I have heard that they're going to try to use that to restrict access to anyone trying to come across the border and claim asylum, saying that we have a public health crisis and we can't allow any more people to come through.

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DONALD TRUMP: We will not be deterred. Together we will end the chronic disease epidemic and keep our children safe, healthy and disease free.

TOLU OLORUNNIPA: And so I think between trying to close down the border and keep it from having more people cross and trying to deport large numbers of people who are already here, I think we are going to see a lot of action from this president, especially early in his administration.

[music]

JP: Here's one that's been getting a lot of play here. In Canada, Trump has been threatening Canada and Mexico with a 25% levy or tax on all exports to the U.S., and also a 10% increase on tariffs already in place from China. Three-quarters of everything that we sell internationally is sold to the U.S. This is, this is a real problem for us, as you can imagine. I am curious to hear what you are hearing about how serious this is, how it could play out, what they're preparing.

TOLU OLORUNNIPA: Yeah, there are two camps on this. There is the camp that says that Trump uses these tariff threats largely as a negotiating ploy. He wants to be able to say that I extracted things from allies or adversaries by threatening and making a hard bargain. And eventually he comes to the table and says, oh, we're not going to have these tariffs, we're not going to raise the prices of goods for the American taxpayer. We're just going to say that we won and claim the win and back down. And he did a lot of that during his first term. [JP: Mm-hmm.] He had a lot of people in his, in his administration who weren't a big fan of tariffs, who were nonetheless part of his administration. This time around, he is now surrounding himself with people that will support what he wants to do. And so I do expect there to be a push towards making these tariffs actually a reality.

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DONALD TRUMP: I will immediately begin the overhaul of our trade system to protect American workers and families. Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.

TOLU OLORUNNIPA: Now, he could always back down, and he could always get, you know, a pretty good bargain from these other countries, including Canada, saying that we're going to enforce stricter border measures, we're going to offer different economic incentives to not put these tariffs in place.

JP: You know, he makes some concessions on dairy or whatever. Yeah.

TOLU OLORUNNIPA: For sure. And we've already seen this with, you know, things like TikTok, where Trump has, in the past, driven a hard bargain and then, you know, when presented with new information or presented with, you know, the political outfall of some of these things, he decides that, you know, maybe it's not such a good idea to move forward with the most extreme version of a set of events. And so I wouldn't be surprised if he does eventually strike a bargain. But it seems like in the initial running, he wants to be seen as serious when it comes to tariffs. He wants to be seen as making an example of different countries. And even if this is, you know, what he does to try to strike a hard bargain with other countries, I think there will be at least one scapegoat, one country, that gets these tariffs and has to deal with the consequences, and to put all the other countries on notice that this is how he's going to operate in his second term.

JP: Let me tell you, Tolu, we're pretty worried it's going to be us. You mentioned the TikTok ban. Late Saturday evening, the long-threatened TikTok ban went into effect in your country. It's still working here, though. And it looks like TikTok initially accepted the ban and shut down. But that didn't last too long. Trump has, as you mentioned, has previously been a supporter of the ban.

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NEWS PRESENTER 3: TikTok has 100 million users in the United States, but President Trump is not one of them. The president told reporters Friday night that he wants to ban TikTok using an executive order as early as today. Now in a statement, TikTok...

JP: But then said this past weekend that he plans to issue an executive order giving the company more time, most likely 90 days, to find an American buyer. He now suddenly is a real advocate of TikTok. He says the platform needs to be open for people to watch his inauguration. Why the reversal on TikTok for Trump? Just tell me more about it.

TOLU OLORUNNIPA: Yeah. Donald Trump, if anything else, he is a populist. In the sense of the word that he understands the things that are popular, and he knows that, you know, going against something that has broad popularity in the country, especially among a key constituency like young voters, is not something that he wants to do. He's actually... you know, he tries to drive a hard bargain, but he actually does not like to be seen as someone who is taking a broadly unpopular point of view and pushing forward something that's going to make people feel like he's taking something away from them. And so he started to get feedback from, you know, the young people that supported him. He realized that this is a, you know, pretty popular platform and it's a platform where he is actually relatively popular and where he has been able to trend and get a large number of followers.

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DONALD TRUMP: You know, I have a warm spot in my heart for TikTok, because I won youth by 34 points. And there are those that say that TikTok has something to do with that.

TOLU OLORUNNIPA: And so a lot of this is sort of ego driven and driven by sort of these actions of a president who sees himself as trying to represent the viewpoint of the people who put him into office. Trying to represent this new crop of young voters who are Trump curious or who are willing to vote for Trump or are willing to see Trump as part of the counterculture.

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DONALD TRUMP: And as of today, TikTok is back.

[crowd cheers]

TOLU OLORUNNIPA: Despite all the national security implications, despite the fact that he had a previous position saying that China was potentially going to use TikTok to spy on Americans, now it's all about the popular nature of this app. [JP: Right.] This is really Trump trying to find what's popular and trying to figure out how to align that with his own policy.

JP: He also spent quite a bit of time during his campaign talking about the problems he sees with Wokeness.

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DONALD TRUMP: And Woke has to stop. Because along with everything else, it's destroying our country. We're going to stop Woke. Woke... Woke is bullshit.

[crowd cheers]

JP: He said he would end woke-ism in schools on day one. And what does he mean by that? Like, what could that look like?

TOLU OLORUNNIPA: It's hard to tell because if you ever ask someone who likes to traffic in the word wokeness what it means, you'll get [JP: Yes.] a thousand different definitions. Sometimes [inaudible] no definition. But I do expect, you know, Trump to take a lot of symbolic action, at least, on issues of diversity, equity and inclusion, on trans issues. He really wants to be seen as, quote unquote, "bringing America back to," quote, "common sense." For Republicans and conservatives, that means pushing back against the idea of diversity, equity and inclusion, and being a part of the government ethos that we've seen over the past four years under Joe Biden. You know, the idea of, quote unquote, "boys playing in girls' sports."

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DONALD TRUMP: With the stroke of my pen, on day one we're going to stop the transgender lunacy.

[crowd cheers]

DONALD TRUMP: And I will sign executive orders to end child sexual mutilation, get transgender out of the military and out of our elementary schools and middle schools and high schools. And we will keep men out of women's sports.

[crowd cheers]

TOLU OLORUNNIPA: Those are the things that Trump has branded as woke and that he plans to reverse either in policy or in symbol. Sometimes, you know, the federal government does not have the power to actually move on some of these things. Some of them are handled by states and local governments, or even at the local level at the school level. But he can issue an executive order saying, you know, the federal government recognizes two genders, or the federal government believes that only girls should play in girls’ sports and things like that. And I would expect there to be a lot of symbolic executive actions. You know, studies being put together or commissions being put together or, you know, statements of principle from the federal government. Those will largely be what leads the way. But there will also be some policy changes in areas where he has the power to change policy on, quote unquote, "woke ideology" and things like diversity in the government. I would expect that to be one area where his government tries to roll back some of the things that Joe Biden has done. Especially all the things that have been done since 2020 when George Floyd was killed, and it led to this outpouring of support for diversity and equity type policies. Now we're seeing a big rollback, and Trump wants to be the leader of the movement to roll back that progress.

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DONALD TRUMP: This week, I will also end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.

[applause, cheering]

DONALD TRUMP: We will forge a society that is colourblind and merit-based.

[applause]

[music]

JP: I also wanted to ask you about his team, right. His appointments and confirmations have really run the gamut. From Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the Department of Health and Human Services. And just can you walk me through where we are on some of the biggest appointments right now and which ones are proving to be the most controversial?

TOLU OLORUNNIPA: Yeah, I'd say the most controversial ones are the defense secretary choice, Pete Hegseth, a Fox News personality who has not a lot of experience in the kinds of background that you would expect of a defense secretary. This is someone who's going to be leading a department with an $800-billion budget and more than 3 million members.

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REPORTER 3: Heralded by some as a much-needed Washington outsider, his many critics label Hegseth supremely unqualified with his suggestion women are unfit for combat roles and a past allegation of sexual assault.

PETE HEGSETH: I'm not a perfect person, as has been acknowledged. Saved by the grace of God.

REPORTER 3: Hegseth dismissed most of the criticism against him as a media smear campaign.

TOLU OLORUNNIPA: He hasn't had a lot of managerial experience, but he does seem like he is on a glide path to being confirmed because Trump has the rock-solid support of the Republican majority in the Senate. Other people who are relatively controversial, R.F.K. Jr. for Health and Human Services. He's someone who has expressed anti-vaccine ideology in the past and really had some extreme views on a number of things concerning health.

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NEWS PRESENTER 4: Now, one of his main false claims was that autism comes from vaccines. During the pandemic, R.F.K. Jr. was also a critic of restrictions to limit the spread of COVID-19. He also spread misinformation by telling media that COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. R.F.K. Jr. has also long campaigned against fluoridated water.

TOLU OLORUNNIPA: Trump has said he wants R.F.K. Jr. to go wild on health, and so that has led a lot of people to question whether or not he should be the leader of America's health-care system. But he could get the votes as well because Trump has Republican votes behind them. The third person that is somewhat controversial is Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democrat who Trump has chosen to lead the intelligence community in America. She has, you know, some controversial ties to Russia and Syria that has caused people to wonder whether or not she should be the keeper of America's secrets. But again, because Trump has that 53-seat majority in the 100-member Senate, he can lose a number of votes and still get through his cabinet choices. And so, writ large, he has a pretty unconventional cabinet. It's made up of some people who are conventional, like Marco Rubio for senate secretary of state, but other people who are very unconventional and people who are, most importantly to Trump, loyal to him and willing to do his bidding. And so, you know, it's not the kind of cabinet that you would ever see in the past in American history, but Trump is coming in and wanting to do his own thing, wanting to have loyalists around him. And because he's remade the party so much in his image, the kinds of senators that would stand up to him and say, no, this is too far, are largely out of the party. People like Mitt Romney, they are no longer in government. And so, he has pretty much a rubber stamp to get his nominees through and to support his agenda going forward.

JP: I know this isn't a cabinet appointment, but Elon Musk is set to lead DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency. And what are people anticipating here in terms of him taking an axe, I guess, to government departments? What are people in Washington, where you are, thinking is going to happen here?

TOLU OLORUNNIPA: Yeah, this is a new wrinkle in Trumpism. The first time around when he was in office, he wasn't really that focused on cutting spending. He gave a good talk about it, but he didn't really seem to care much about it. He just wanted to cut taxes. This time around he seems to be very serious about cutting spending. And, you know, it's an age-old thing in Washington. People say they want to cut the size of government. But he has put behind this effort, you know, not only the richest person in the world, but they're putting together a huge team outside of government -- tech billionaires, tech executives -- who are looking to try to make the government more efficient, in their words, but they're also looking to cut, you know, trillions of dollars in spending from the government.

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REPORTER 4: Sources say Musk and fellow entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, chosen by president-elect Trump to form a Department of Government efficiency, told the mostly Republican lawmakers yesterday that they would be keeping a 'naughty and nice' list of those who join in the budget-slashing proposals and those who don't. Lawmakers reportedly discussing a variety of cuts targeting the education department, redundancy in the government workforce, and government employees working from home.

TOLU OLORUNNIPA: And so this could be something that could really change the way government works, and you could see a real impact on programs that people have gotten used to that, you know, in Trump's mind and the mind of his acolytes, are not worth the dollars that we spend on them. Those programs could be cut short. Trump could try to use the power of the presidency to X out some of the spending that has been approved by Congress that has never been tested in the courts. Whether or not a president can say, 'Congress has passed this funding, but I don't want to spend the money so we're not going to do it.' It's called impoundment. Whether or not he can do that, the courts will potentially ultimately decide. But if this DOGE effort goes forward, we could see the government of the United States really reformed in a way that could reshape how people interact with the government. The kinds of programs and support that people have gotten used to and that have helped some people could be cut down, cut short, eliminated. And I don't think people are quite ready for that. It could be a major shift in the way the government works.

[music]

JP: Is there anything that we haven't talked about today that you are really watching for when we're discussing, you know, what to expect in the first hundred days?

TOLU OLORUNNIPA: I do think there's this really interesting alignment between Trump and the world of technology, technology executives, and what that means beyond just, you know, cutting government and cutting taxes. What it means for regulations, what it means for things like crypto and AI, and whether or not Trump has the opportunity to sort of lead the country in a forward-looking approach to the 21st century technology that's emerging, or whether or not, you know, in the words of Joe Biden, we are leading ourselves into an oligarchy where these tech billionaires are going to sort of feast on the carcass of a declining nation and just sort of pick off wins for themselves and not for the country. And so I do think this alignment between Trump, not only Musk, but people like Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, people that are going to be advising Trump that emanate from Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley has normally been a pretty blue liberal area, and I think this new alignment between Trump and the Silicon Valley executives could have a lot of potential, but it could also lead to some unintended consequences and some really controversial things. And so I'll be watching that very closely to see how Trump acts when it comes to, you know, the big issues of technology -- whether or not he acts in the best interest of the country or just in the best interests of this billionaire class of executives that seems to be cozying up to him as he gets ready to take office.

JP: Tolu, this was great. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

TOLU OLORUNNIPA: You got it. Thank you.

[Music: Theme]

JP: All right, so before we go today, former president Joe Biden's final moves in office were also made public yesterday, including commuting the sentence of Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier, and as I mentioned in the intro, pre-emptive pardons for potential targets of the Trump White House, like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Liz Cheney. And pre-emptive blanket pardons for his family, who he said were "subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me -- the worst kind of partisan politics," he went on. "Unfortunately, I have no reason to believe these attacks will end." All right, that is all for today. I'm Jayme Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.

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What will Trump's first 100 days bring? - Transcript

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