The Campaign Moment: Trump, the unpunished felon
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 10 January 2025
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Senior political reporter Aaron Blake talks with The Post’s White House editor, Naftali Bendavid, and national political reporter Maeve Reston about the politics of Trump’s sentencing in the New York hush money case. They also dig into how Trump is trying to pin the Los Angeles wildfires on Democrats and look ahead to next week’s Senate confirmation hearing for Trump’s pick for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth.
Today’s show was produced by Sabby Robinson. It was edited by Lucy Perkins and Rachel Van Dongen and mixed by Rennie Svirnovskiy.
Subscribe to Aaron’s newsletter, The Campaign Moment, here.
Subscribe to The Washington Post here.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | On Thursday, former president Jimmy Carter's state funeral was held at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. |
| 0:09.3 | This is an unusual opportunity where we see lots of former presidents and vice presidents all gathered together and actually sitting within a few feet of one another. |
| 0:18.8 | And so there were a lot of memes you know, memes floating around yesterday, |
| 0:22.8 | lots of video of the presidents and vice presidents interacting. |
| 0:26.8 | Anything strike you guys from the scenes that we saw Thursday at the funeral? |
| 0:31.6 | I mean, I think the most interesting thing in that regard was just the back and forth seemingly joking relationship between Obama and Trump. |
| 0:39.5 | These are two people who have said the most devastating things about each other and represent |
| 0:43.5 | in some ways opposite polls of the American political spectrum. But they seem to be having a very |
| 0:48.8 | casual and almost friendly relationship. They made each other laugh. And I think that was an image |
| 0:53.0 | that really struck a lot of people. Some of those interactions among the former presidents were so fascinating. And, you know, |
| 1:01.0 | the very idea that former vice president, Mike Pence, was sitting behind President-elect Trump |
| 1:08.8 | after President-elect Trump endangered his life on January 6th. |
| 1:13.6 | Yeah, and Vice President Pence did shake Trump's hand, but his wife, Karen Pence, did not stand up and did not shake Trump's hand, which I think was a pretty poignant moment. |
| 1:26.6 | Welcome to the campaign moment for this Friday, January 10th. I'm Aaron Blake, senior political reporter and author of the campaign moment newsletter. |
| 1:37.1 | Today I'm joined by Naftali Ben David, a White House editor at the Post who is soon taking on a new role as our senior national political correspondent. |
| 1:45.6 | Hey, Neftali. |
| 1:46.4 | Hey, thanks for having me. |
| 1:47.9 | We're also joined today by national political reporter, Maeve Reston. |
| 1:51.6 | Hey, Maeve. |
| 1:52.3 | Hey, how's it going? |
| 1:57.2 | So we've got a lot to dig into today, including, as mentioned, former president Jimmy Carter being honored at a state funeral on Thursday. He's also being laid to rest on Friday in Plains, Georgia. And this morning, President-elect Donald Trump was formally sentenced in New York. The case was, of course, about hush money payments that Trump made to an adult film actress who accused him of |
| 2:18.3 | an affair during the 2016 election. We just heard that Trump will be sentenced to something known |
... |
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