How Trump Is Governing In His Second Term
The NPR Politics Podcast
NPR
4.4 • 25.7K Ratings
🗓️ 27 January 2025
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode: White House correspondents Deepa Shivaram and Tamara Keith and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.
The podcast is produced by Bria Suggs & Kelli Wessinger, and edited by Casey Morell. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Okay, so does this sound like you? You love NPR's podcasts. You wish you could get more of all your favorite shows and you want to support NPR's mission to create a more informed public. If all that sounds appealing, then it is time to sign up for the NPR Plus bundle. Learn more at plus.npr.org. |
| 0:23.4 | Hi, this is Weleg in Washington, D.C. It's my first day in town after moving across the Atlantic. |
| 0:32.3 | This show was recorded at 106 p.m. on Monday, January 27th, 2025. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. |
| 0:42.0 | All right. Here's the show. Welcome. Wait, what? That just feels like a teaser. What is she doing here? |
| 0:52.4 | Is this part of the Trump administration? Is this totally unrelated? I mean, moving across the Atlantic, but like, from where? That's a big, large swath of options. |
| 1:04.6 | And why is she so calm about moving to D.C.? Yeah, of all things. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Dupa Shiverum. I cover the White House. |
| 1:12.7 | I'm Tamara Keith. I also cover the White House. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and |
| 1:17.4 | correspondent. And today we're talking about how President Trump made a show of how he plans to |
| 1:22.6 | govern in his second term. On Friday night, the White House fired about 17 independent |
| 1:27.2 | inspectors general. |
| 1:28.6 | That was first reported by the Washington Post. Tam, a lot to get into. So I'm going to start |
| 1:33.4 | with you. There are a lot of questions I have, but I just kind of want to start at the beginning here. |
| 1:37.3 | What do we know about what happened? Right. So what we know is that these inspectors general got |
| 1:43.7 | an email from the White House saying, |
| 1:46.7 | today's your last day, you're done. One of the inspectors general was interviewed on MSNBC and said |
| 1:51.8 | he was out to dinner with friends, started getting calls from other inspectors general and was like, |
| 1:57.3 | oh, I'm so sorry that happened to you, opens his email and learns, oh, I too |
| 2:01.0 | was fired. The group chat was popping. The group chat was in fact popping. These are people who |
| 2:06.3 | investigate the government, essentially. They are looking for waste, fraud, and abuse. They are the ones |
| 2:11.9 | that investigate the agencies and find out if the agencies are doing what the agencies should be doing. |
| 2:18.3 | Right. And, you know, to your point, these are jobs that are not political in nature. |
| 2:23.0 | That's right. These are supposed to be apolitical. They serve long terms. But their terms do not |
... |
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