Hey y'all, I'm John. Since I am a furloughed government employee, I'm using this time to take a tour of the MPR headquarters in Washington DC.

I just ran into Sue Davis and Ron, hard at work at their desk. This episode was recorded at...

Wait, did he like stand over our desks and record this when we were looking?

It's 10-25 Eastern on Tuesday, January 8th.

Things may have changed by the time you hear this. I hope I'm back at work.

Okay, here's the show.

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics podcast. In the midst of one of the longest ever federal government shutdowns, President Trump addressed the nation from the Oval Office.

I'm Scott Tattro, I cover Congress. I'm Scott Horsley, that's over the White House.

I'm Aisha Roscoe, I also cover the White House.

And I'm Domenico Montanero political editor.

Starting off, I'm curious what everybody made of these speeches and if you think anything in this protracted shutdown is going to change

because of them.

I think this is the NPR podcast that things are not going to change by the time you hear this.

I don't think we heard something that's going to buy and large.

This was a sort of abbreviated encapsulated cliff notes version of the two sides messages.

Yeah, Oval Office addresses are supposed to be the kind of thing where news is made, right?

Where there's something that moves the ball forward in a time of great tragedy.

Think about a war or an announcement of some major thing that had happened.

A lot of people, a lot of Republicans who I talked to before coming into the speech today noted back to Ronald Reagan's response to the Challenger explosion.

This was not that.

And really, the big takeaway for me is that we're no closer to a shutdown being over.

The thing that stood out to me the most was that a lot of this, almost all of this was stuff that he has tweeted, that he's talked about in campaign rallies.

...