'America's decline is over.' Trump returns to the White House | The Excerpt
On Tuesday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: Paste BN Chief Political Correspondent Phillip M. Bailey gives some of the biggest takeaways from President Donald Trump's Inauguration Day. Trump's new meme coin soars. Paste BN Justice Department Correspondent Bart Jansen breaks down Trump's executive orders surrounding January 6 pardons, and the southern border. Trump Monday also signed an order on TikTok and removed the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement, among other moves.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
Podcasts: True crime, in-depth interviews and more Paste BN podcasts right here
Taylor Wilson:
Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson, and today is Tuesday, January 21st, 2025. This is The Excerpt. Today, a look at some of President Donald Trump's first actions, plus a Trump meme coin soars in value, and a college football champion has been crowned.
♦
Donald Trump was sworn in yesterday as the 47th President of the United States.
Donald Trump:
From this moment on, America's decline is over.
Taylor Wilson:
For more from Inauguration Day, I caught up with Paste BN chief political correspondent Phillip M. Bailey. Phillip, thank you so much for hopping on during this big, big week in Washington.
Phillip M. Bailey:
Hey, Taylor. How are you?
Taylor Wilson:
Good. I just want to start with the general mood on the day, Phillip. I mean, was there a sense of optimism, I guess, from the day?
Phillip M. Bailey:
Well, look, I think as much as critics of President Trump and his MAGA-aligned movement may not want to admit it this was a much cheerier speech from the Trump MAGA perspective than it was in 2017, which Trump was talking all about American carnage and how screwed up the country was. He really leaned into the fact that he is more popular and his win was more decisive than in 2016. You could just tell that this is a president who has the wind at his back. He has a more consolidated Republican Party. He has a Democratic Party that is completely out of power. Former critics or people who were at least very arm's length with him showed up to kiss the ring. You saw the tech bros like Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos there.
Look, the vibe and the feeling of this is much different for me than it was in 2017 where there was this deep skepticism and resistance movement to Donald Trump. You see now, and I've written about this a little bit, Democrats, but also left-leaning groups, saying, "Hey, there might be some areas of cooperation with Trump given his more deal-making sometimes attitude towards politics, his more transactional attitude, honestly, towards politics." Certainly, people on the left... They're hearing the same thing they heard eight years ago.
Taylor Wilson:
Well, Phillip, you mentioned mass deportations. We know now President Donald Trump talked a lot about immigration and deportations in the buildup to this day. How did that factor into his speech, and what were some of the general nationalist tones?
Phillip M. Bailey:
It was very prominent as you would think it should be, given the fact that immigration was what launched Donald Trump's political career on that escalator back in June of 2015. He has certainly leaned into the promise to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. In this speech, he really leaned on gangs and violent offenders as the face of that deportation process. There is some deep, deep concern about how this process is going to work. How are these folks going to be apprehended? How are they going to be detained and sent back? We're all waiting to see this here, but that was certainly Donald Trump's chief issue in the campaign. I was on the campaign show with him a lot in states like North Carolina. He talked vehemently about migrant crime and this infection of immigrants into the country. It was no surprise for folks that he leaned heavily into that in his inauguration speech.
Taylor Wilson:
Phillip this inauguration fell on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I'm curious. Was that a part of anything we saw from Trump or the day itself?
Phillip M. Bailey:
It didn't surprise me that Trump shouted out Dr. King saying, "We're going to make his dream come true." Politicians, Republicans and Democrats, who don't really know a whole hell of a lot about Dr. King's actual radical beliefs and his thought process and certainly how he ended his life talking about redistribution of wealth and declaring his position against war and racism, et cetera... It doesn't surprise me that his name is evoked on his holiday as an easy pass-through. But it was interesting, Taylor, was because Trump mentioned MLK's Day in the context of his more diverse coalition.
Look, in this impressive win by Donald Trump in 2024, he won all the swing states. He won the popular vote, albeit by 1.5%. But one of the things he did was he really encroached upon Democrats' strongholds. He got, I think, a higher percentage of the vote even in the Bronx, and he did better with voters of color, particularly with men, Black men, Hispanic men. His coalition was far more diverse than it was in 2016. I think that that takes Democrats aback, especially because Democrats, Taylor, for decades now almost, have assumed that the more diverse the country becomes, all the more liberal it will become. I think Donald Trump completely turned that on its ear. Democrats are going to have to do a lot of work, particularly with some of their core constituencies.
Taylor Wilson:
Phillip, in terms of who was in attendance, you mentioned some of these high-profile tech bros, the Elon Musks of the world. How do you see their influence in this next administration, especially in comparison to some of those more traditional MAGA bros?
Phillip M. Bailey:
What's very interesting about Trump 2.0 is this emerging alliance. Perhaps it will be turned into a beef between the OG MAGA, like Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer and others, who were with the president in the early years when no one took him seriously, to now a lot of these so-called tech bros, part of the broligarchy, who jumped on perhaps a bit late to the party here. That's Elon Musk and others. But at the same time, look, in the tech industry, they are very reliant on visas and people from foreign countries coming over here and doing all that work. That will be, I think, a source of tension.
This is President Trump's last term. He essentially is a lame-duck president already. He's coming in with a razor-thin, razor-thin, majority in the house. He's coming in with swing-state Republicans and swing-state Democrats who certainly want to make some deals but maybe not others, a Supreme Court that isn't always compliant with his bidding on how he wants to do things. What has Donald Trump learned from that first term to now? Where is he going to make deals? Will he shed more of the MAGA movement to be remembered as a great president? He likes to cut deals with folks. He likes to make compromises behind the scenes as he looks good. That may be bad for, I think, Bannon and some of the OG MAGA folks.
Taylor Wilson:
All right. Phillip M. Bailey is Paste BN's chief political correspondent, joining us on this historic week. I thank you as always, Phillip.
Phillip M. Bailey:
Taylor, thanks for having me.
♦
Taylor Wilson:
Donald Trump's new crypto token soared to more than 10 billion in market value yesterday. Launched Friday night, Trump's so-called meme coin went from less than 10 bucks on Saturday morning to as high as nearly $75 before coming back down slightly. Bitcoin was also briefly lifted to a new record. The expansion of Trump's crypto interest comes as his administration is widely expected to bring in a golden age for cryptocurrencies while the industry saw regulatory scrutiny under former President Joe Biden. Meanwhile, the Melania Trump meme coin, another type of crypto, hit the market Sunday night. You can read more with the link in today's show notes.
♦
On Trump's first day in office, he signed a number of executive orders. I caught up with Paste BN Justice Department correspondent Bart Jansen to discuss Trump's actions on January 6th pardons and the southern border. Bart, hello, sir.
Bart Jansen:
Hey, how are you?
Taylor Wilson:
Good, good. Thanks for hopping on on this busy day. We'd heard a lot about pardons for January 6th defendants, but what happened here? What exactly did President Trump announce?
Bart Jansen:
Well, he appears to have pardoned nearly everyone who has been charged with the January 6th, 2021, riot at the Capitol building. When he spoke in the Oval Office, signing the documents, he said that he was pardoning about 1500 people. But the documents themselves seem to say that they are pardoning virtually everyone associated with January 6th. There were nearly 1600 people charged so far. About 1,270 of those people have already been convicted. 1100 of them have already been fully sentenced. He appears to have given reprieves to virtually all of them. There are another 14 defendants who were given commutations, shortening the sentences who are still going to be released but fell short of full pardons. One of those is the Oath Keepers leader, Stewart Rhodes, and another was Dominic Pezzola, who was a proud boy who was credited as being the first person to break through a window on the Senate side of the Capitol, allowing the first people, other people, to breach the Capitol and get inside. Rhodes had gotten an 18-year sentence, and Pezzola had gotten a 10-year sentence. All of those folks are slated to be released under his order.
Taylor Wilson:
Wow. Bart, did anything surprise you about this move, or was this really on track for what we expected from this day?
Bart Jansen:
Well, his allies such as Pam Bondi, his nominee to become Attorney General... She's the former Florida Attorney General, and his vice president, JD Vance, former senator from Ohio, had each suggested in recent weeks that violent offenders from January 6th would not be pardoned and that people who had assaulted police would not be pardoned. Somewhere in the vicinity of 600 people were charged with either assaulting, or resisting, or obstructing police on January 6th. By pardoning nearly everyone, he appears to have gone a little bit farther than his allies were suggesting in recent weeks.
Taylor Wilson:
Bart, we also know immigration and the border have been major points for Trump going back to the campaign trail and then as president-elect. I mean, what can you tell us about this declaration of an emergency at the southern border?
Bart Jansen:
He is aiming to mobilize the military to better defend the southern border. He's asking for plans from the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security to better tighten the southern border. He's talking about steering more funds to the border for more construction of the border wall. He wants to end birthright citizenship, the policy since the 14th amendment to the Constitution, shortly after the Civil War, that if you are born in the United States, that you are a citizen. Well, his order would stop that policy for children born to foreign nationals.
He has asked the Defense Department to develop plans within the next 90 days with the Department of Homeland Security about whether to invoke the Insurrection Act. That would enable the military to help round up undocumented immigrants within the United States, which is highly unusual. The military is usually forbidden from helping detain or deport immigrants because of the Posse Comitatus Act, that duty is left to local law enforcement. By raising the specter of invoking the Insurrection Act, he's saying the military could perhaps start working in that area as well.
In the meantime, to very seriously strengthen the southern border, one of the first things that happened as his administration took office at noon on Monday was an end to Customs and Border Protection's online application for asylum. People had used a phone app to put in their request to stay in this country while they litigated their claim that they felt like they would be persecuted or harmed if they were returned to their home country. He's eliminated the app entirely, sending all those folks back to square one. Part of his executive orders contains a Remain in Mexico policy so that folks waiting along the border to enter the country to litigate their asylum claims, at this point, under Trump, would have to remain on the south side of the border, not get into this country as they had been during the Biden administration.
Taylor Wilson:
All right. Bart Jansen covers the Justice Department for Paste BN. Thanks for the insight here on a busy day, Bart. I appreciate you.
Bart Jansen:
Thanks for having me.
♦
Taylor Wilson:
Trump also signed an order aiming to halt enforcement of a ban on TikTok in the US for 75 days. In addition, he inked an order requiring federal employees to return to work in person, and he withdrew the US from the Paris Climate Agreement, which former president Joe Biden had rejoined after his election four years ago. For a complete roundup of President Trump's first moves in office head to usatoday.com.
The Ohio State Buckeyes are college football champions. They held off a nearly impressive comeback from Notre Dame to win the game 34 to 23. It's their first national title since 2014.
♦
Thanks for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your audio, and if you're on a smart speaker, just ask for The Excerpt. I'm Taylor Wilson, and I'll be back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from Paste BN.