- Jan Crawford, Robert Costa, Scott MacFarlane, Ed O’Keefe and Caitlin Huey-Burns
- Dr. Leana Wen, former Baltimore health commissioner.
- Aditya Bhave, senior ecomonist at Bank of America
- David Rubenstein, philanthropist and author
Click here to browse full transcripts of “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.”
MAJOR GARRETT: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Face the Nation.
I’m Major Garrett, in for Margaret Brennan.
As we close out 2024, we, of course, want to look ahead to the economy, health care, immigration, so much more, as Washington ushers in a new Congress and, importantly, a new administration.
We begin with a Face the Nation tradition, our year-end correspondents roundtable.
Joining us, chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford, congressional correspondent Scott MacFarlane, chief election and campaign correspondent Robert Costa, political correspondent Caitlin Huey-Burns, and senior White House and political correspondent Ed O’Keefe.
It is great to have you all with us.
Scott MacFarlane, I want to start with you.
The new Congress will be sworn in this week. What position does Mike Johnson, the current speaker of the House, find himself in seeking reelection to that position?
SCOTT MACFARLANE: It’s a tenuous position. It has the prospect and promise of having high drama Friday, when they begin the new Congress January 3 by choosing the new speaker.
One of the most underappreciated and underreported issues of the 2024 election was this incredibly narrow margin Republicans preserved in the U.S. House, even more narrow than the one that gridlocked them over the past two years.
And, of course, the first order of business is choosing a speaker. Republicans have just one or two votes to spare on anything. That has the possibility of paralyzing things. And we saw two years ago the speaker vote was like a – it’s like Gilligan’s Island. It was supposed to be a three- hour vote and ended up being a multi-arc drama with many divergent characters, not including Thurston Howell.
(LAUGHTER)
SCOTT MACFARLANE: But here’s the thing. It’s just the top layer of this very treacherous cake for them is picking a speaker, because, what does this next speaker have to concede to win that post?
We saw over the last two years the prior speaker had to concede positions on the pivotal Rules Committee to some contrarian voices in the Rules Committees, where bills went to die, instead of to get set up for a vote. And that’s why so many Democratic votes were needed for so many pivotal things, because the Rules Committee was jammed up by contrarians.
That could happen again.
MAJOR GARRETT: Robert Costa, I want to turn to you, because, if he were so inclined, president-elect Trump could clarify his preference here. And that would send an important signal to those Republicans in the House majority to be still on the fence about this, yet he remains conspicuously silent.
ROBERT COSTA: That decision is reflective of the dynamic right now down at Mar-a-Lago, the president’s retreat in Florida.
There is high drama, as Scott reports, on Capitol Hill. But, in Trump’s inner circle, it’s almost like the low-key second season of a TV show. That’s how it’s been described to me by allies of president-elect Trump. He’s being guided by Susie Wiles, his incoming chief of staff.
And she’s created, I’m told, this atmosphere of calm when it comes to some of the nominees, the process, laying out the agenda for next year, top of the agenda, tax cuts, trying to expand those Trump tax cuts from 2017, of course, mass deportations also part of Trump’s plan, a border bill as well.
And you do have controversial nominees in Kash Patel for the FBI, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services, among others. But, at its core, you have a president-elect who’s now comfortable with power, comfortable with the people around him.
This is so different, Major, than what we saw in 2016, when we were covering that transition period. It had this theatrical element, Trump welcoming people to Bedminster for these showy appearances and interviews.
Now we rarely see the president-elect. He’s firing off missives at times on TRUTH Social, his platform, but he’s often behind the scenes getting ready for 2025, because he’s been here before. He knows what he wants to do.
MAJOR GARRETT: Ed O’Keefe, President Biden remains president of the United States, though some Americans might have to be reminded of that fact.
ED O’KEEFE: Yes.
MAJOR GARRETT: What is ahead for the president in the waning days of his presidency in terms of travel and possible pardons?
ED O’KEEFE: Well, he is taking one final foreign trip, and it was one that we – those of us who followed him a long time anticipated might happen. And that is a trip to the Vatican to see the pope and then to see the Italian leadership as well.
They have been in far closer contact than I think many people appreciate, because the pope, like the president, shares a lot of the concerns about the state of the world, about what’s going on in Ukraine and Gaza.
MAJOR GARRETT: Conflict, climate change.
(CROSSTALK)
ED O’KEEFE: Absolutely, yes, and state of democracy and just general concern for social justice, which is…
MAJOR GARRETT: Refugee flows, exactly.
ED O’KEEFE: Yes, exactly.
And so that will be a critical political meeting, but also a real personal capstone for the second Catholic president.
And it speaks as well to one of the things he’s been focused on over the last several weeks and will continue to be. We’re still waiting to hear more about, for example, pardons and clemency. Will there be more of those? And will they be for the everyman? Or will they be for notable political figures like, for example, Jesse Jackson Jr., the former congressman from Illinois, or others who’ve ended up in the legal system and maybe are well- known and are now appealing for some kind of leniency or forgiveness?
And so those 37 death row clemencies that we saw before Christmas, a good example of what’s to come and what he’s eager to do, and also a good example of what little he can do, because, of course, Congress has no interest in working with him. They can’t even really sort out what to do with themselves, but – so he’s using the executive privileges that he has in these waning weeks.
MAJOR GARRETT: Jan, as you know better than anyone at this table, this last year was a clash of law and politics, unlike anything we have seen in our modern American history.
The judicial system in our country, according to Gallup, 35 percent confidence, 20 percent below our peer countries, other free market democracies. How much of that is a reflection of this clash, the Supreme Court, or just a sense that our judicial system has become, in the words of someone we have all come to know, two-tiered?
JAN CRAWFORD: You know, that’s a hard question to answer, because I think you have got a…
MAJOR GARRETT: We always give you the easiest ones, Jan.
(LAUGHTER)
JAN CRAWFORD: But I’m going to try, Major, because I think it goes – you have got to look past just this past year and go further back.
I think it really started and took off in the wake of the Dobbs decision, the court’s ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade. The outrage over that decision was so extreme that you saw, I think, a quite calculated effort to undermine legitimacy of the Supreme Court by Democrats, Senate Democrats, for example, hearings, stories about scandals, some of which were pretty overblown, to say the least.
So, that has an impact on public opinion. The public starts to believe that this court is corrupt, that this is – it’s on the take, none of which is true. I mean, this is still a court. You may disagree with their decisions. It’s a very conservative court. It is not a corrupt court.
These are nine justices who have very different views on how to interpret the Constitution who are kind of in this Titanic struggle over law, not politics.
Even the immunity decision, I mean, that decision was so misreported to say that the court was going to save Trump from a criminal trial. No, it wasn’t. That was never the decision. In fact, that decision is going to help protect Joe Biden from any future prosecution by Donald Trump if he wanted to do that.
So, when we look at public opinion polls, sure, the court’s taken a hit, but that’s true over the years. The court often takes a hit. So do other institutions. And the court’s opinion – court’s public opinion remains much higher than our other institutions, including the White House, Congress, and by far the news media.
MAJOR GARRETT: Congress at 17 percent, according to Gallup.
Caitlin, Jan mentioned the Dobbs decision. One of the things that roiled through the political calendar year of 2024 was how important, how impactful would that decision be on turnout and the ultimate outcome of the election?
But, as you traveled the country, you kept telling us, yes, it’s an important issue, but there are other things on the minds of women voters in this country.
CAITLIN HUEY-BURNS: Yes, we always say that voters have the capacity to think about a lot of different things at once.
And we saw, in the wake of that decision in the midterms, that was top of mind for people. It was the first way to kind of exercise their views across the country on this issue. But, this time around, voters had different ways to express their feelings about the Dobbs decision.
Many of them had ballot measures in their states, a couple of those states being battleground states, that they could vote for codifying abortion rights into their state law and also vote for Donald Trump, because they believed in his views on the economy, on immigration, or at least that he could solve some of their concerns about them.
And as I spoke to women across the country, as we all spent the whole year talking to voters and really listening to voters, a lot of women talked to me about how concerned they were about safety, about the economy, a lot of them responsible for their family’s budgets, paying the bills, going to the grocery store, these kinds of fundamental things.
And, also, it was kind of a reminder that we have been treating women as kind of a monolithic group in the wake of Dobbs. And this election showed that it’s not as such, that they do care a lot about safety, the economy. Those were overarching issues, but they also do care about women’s rights, abortion rights, but they just had other avenues to express that.
And that’s really what helped. And Donald Trump also modified his positions, at least to satisfy some of those voters, at least that I spoke to.
MAJOR GARRETT: Robert, Caitlin brought up women’s concerns about security. That flows through immigration.
I wonder what your perspective is on this online feud that’s gone on, on for the last three or four days between parts of the MAGA universe over H- 1B visas, which are essentially visas set aside for high-skilled laborers, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and nominally president-elect Trump on the side of that, hard right nativist parts of the MAGA movement using expletives on social media typically reserved for their political foes, not for those in the MAGA tent, assailing one another.
What do you make of all of that?
ROBERT COSTA: The coalition that lifted Donald Trump back to power included Silicon Valley executives. Elon Musk, Trump inner circle members say, deserves a lot of credit for pouring a lot of money in the final months into the campaign.
But at the end of the day, this was a campaign where so many voters at rally after rally we covered were holding up signs that said “Mass Deportations Now.” The message was obvious, it was in your face.
And for – the idea that president-elect Trump is going to back away from his immigration position because of some whisper in his ear from a Silicon Valley billionaire, it’s just not happening, based on my reporting.
MAJOR GARRETT: And, Scott, very quickly, do you think that – we have got about 30 seconds before we need to go to break. How much do you think that will be a part of the early congressional conversation?
SCOTT MACFARLANE: I think this battle over the debt limit which Elon Musk weighed in on is going to be the first throw-down of 2025 and impact the first year of Trump’s term, because they’re going to need Democratic votes to raise the debt ceiling.
That won’t satisfy the Elon Musks of the world. I’m not sure how Trump circumvents Democratic concessions for the debt ceiling.
MAJOR GARRETT: When we come back, you know it, you love it, predictions, biggest story, things that were undercovered with our outstanding correspondents panel.
We will be back in just one moment.
(ANNOUNCEMENTS)
MAJOR GARRETT: Welcome back to Face the Nation and our correspondents roundtable.
Predictions.
Caitlin Huey-Burns.
CAITLIN HUEY-BURNS: I think the biggest story to watch this coming year is how the president-elect when he becomes president handles immigration.
We talked a lot about how the economy was the overarching theme of this election. Immigration is what Trump made his not only closing – closing argument on, but his entire campaign was really rooted in immigration.
So what this looks like, we saw in our polling majority support for mass deportations. What does that actually look like? And how do they handle that once we see what that looks like on television, how they have people explaining their policy, and what those stories look like because of that, and whether the base is satisfied and whether the general public gets what they voted for on that.
MAJOR GARRETT: Jan, 2025 prediction.
JAN CRAWFORD: I will go back to the court.
I think that Donald Trump will probably get his fourth nomination to the Supreme Court either this year or maybe next year, when…
MAJOR GARRETT: Because someone retires.
Who?
JAN CRAWFORD: Justice Sam Alito.
MAJOR GARRETT: Justice Sam Alito.
JAN CRAWFORD: He was nominated, took the bench in 2006, after nearly two decades on the court.
MAJOR GARRETT: Robert Costa.
ROBERT COSTA: Most importantly, Marcus Freeman and the Fighting Irish will win the Sugar Bowl on January 1.
(LAUGHTER)
JAN CRAWFORD: Now, this is normally my prediction with Alabama.
ROBERT COSTA: I’m stepping into your territory. But…
JAN CRAWFORD: I’m happy to give it to you.
ROBERT COSTA: Governing by crisis in 2025.
Ed, when we first met over a decade ago, we were covering crisis on Capitol Hill. Crisis persists. Such a handful – and Caitlin Huey-Burns as well. And Scott was there as well.
Look, they only have a handful of seats in the House for the Republican majority. They can only do so much, as Scott said, debt limit battle on the horizon, spending fights. Deja vu. That culture of crisis, governing to the brink of discussions is here again.
MAJOR GARRETT: Ed O’Keefe.
ED O’KEEFE: I will make the firmer prediction that, based on all that chaos, Speaker Johnson won’t be speaker by the end of 2025.
Did that a few years ago on Paul Ryan, and it worked. So, watch out, Speaker Johnson. Nothing personal.
MAJOR GARRETT: Be careful, Speaker Johnson. Be advised.
ED O’KEEFE: But just look at – look at what faces him.
(CROSSTALK)
ROBERT COSTA: … real soon.
(LAUGHTER)
ED O’KEEFE: The other one real quick, Washington Commanders will get a stadium here in the District of Columbia, because that congressional vote that authorized land…
(CROSSTALK)
MAJOR GARRETT: Happened right before Congress adjourned.
ED O’KEEFE: It sure did. And it was a great surprise at D.C. It’ll happen this year.
MAJOR GARRETT: Scott MacFarlane.
SCOTT MACFARLANE: Long before the next election, there will be some people departing Washington voluntarily. This is a challenging environment to be an elected official.
They’re getting thousands of threats a year on their lives, on their families. The travel is exhausting. And we’re coming into a relatively polarizing moment with Trump coming back into office. You’re going to see a lot of retirements in odd-numbered years, including 2025.
JAN CRAWFORD: I think that’s one reason why you’re going to see Justice Alito step down.
(CROSSTALK)
MAJOR GARRETT: One of the things we also do in the year-end correspondents roundtable is dig into what was undercovered or underreported.
Jan?
JAN CRAWFORD: Undercovered and underreported, that would be, to me, Joe Biden’s obvious cognitive decline that became undeniable in the televised debate.
MAJOR GARRETT: At the presidential debate with Donald Trump.
JAN CRAWFORD: Unquestioned.
And it’s starting to emerge now that his advisers kind of managed his limitations, which has been reported in “The Wall Street Journal,” for four years. And yet he insisted that he could still run for president. We should have much more forcefully questioned whether he was fit for office for another four years, which could have led to a primary for the Democrats.
It could have changed the scope of the entire election. Yet still, incredibly, we read in “The Washington Post” that his advisers are saying that he regrets that he dropped out of the race, that he thinks he could have beaten Trump. And I think that is either delusional or they’re gaslighting the American people.
ROBERT COSTA: President Biden has said repeatedly he was sick during the debate June 27 in Atlanta and he’s always been fine and he leaves fine.
That is his position, the position of many of his top aides as well, even though there is that reporting.
(CROSSTALK)
MAJOR GARRETT: Robert Costa.
ROBERT COSTA: The biggest story that’s underreported, the battle for working voters across the country.
I spent a lot of time this year with Shawn Fain, the head of the UAW. That’s the battle of the future. Who’s going to win over that person who’s aligned with labor? Are the – the industrial worker in this country. Is it going to be the Democratic Party or the Republican Party? It remains a key story, deserves more attention.
MAJOR GARRETT: Caitlin Huey-Burns.
CAITLIN HUEY-BURNS: I mentioned how we covered women voters, but also I think there is an aspect to which we underestimated or perhaps the public underestimated how Trump’s personality wasn’t as much of a burden to him.
And, in some ways, it turned out to be a benefit with low-propensity voters. And talking to the Trump campaign throughout the cycle and reporting on it, they were making this bet that, if he leaned into his personality and made no qualms about it, made no apologies about it, that would kind of speak to this authenticity factor, this premium that low- propensity voters, those not inclined to participate in elections, might be inclined towards.
It was a big bet. It paid off. And it will remain – the biggest question I have is whether Republicans can replicate any of that, because so much of their political wins this year are unique to Donald Trump himself.
MAJOR GARRETT: Scott MacFarlane, underreported.
SCOTT MACFARLANE: The scope and size and political impact of these forthcoming January 6 pardons.
Trump has never specified if it’s everybody or just some people. Will it include people who gassed and beat police officers with baseball bats, or will it just be those who pleaded guilty to misdemeanors? He’s never been pressed to specify if it’s all or some. And what’s the political impact?
Did his voters really want that? Does he gain political capital or lose it if he pardons everyone?
MAJOR GARRETT: Ed O’Keefe.
ED O’KEEFE: Once again, we don’t cover the Western Hemisphere enough and why it is that people come from the far reaches of South America.
MAJOR GARRETT: What is the gravitational pull of the United States in those particular countries?
ED O’KEEFE: Exactly.
And it’s going to be more critical than ever in the coming year that we continue to explore and explain why it is they continue to do so, despite the threats of being sent back.
And watch also the cooperation between a lot of those countries, especially in Central America, with the United States and the intrigue they have over the first Latino secretary of state, the most senior Latino ever to serve in an administration and in the presidential line of succession, Marco Rubio.
I heard within days of the election from Latin American governments quite eager to get on the good side of Marco Rubio because they are thrilled to know there will be more attention paid to the hemisphere, as there should be.
MAJOR GARRETT: And there will be attention paid in terms of accepting those this administration incoming intends to deport.
ED O’KEEFE: Sends them back.
Yes, that – because they understand that’s the gateway.
MAJOR GARRETT: To better relations with this administration.
ED O’KEEFE: Yes, that, if you start with that, and ensure that they’re being treated fairly on their way back, that they will probably end up taking them.
No formal agreements yet, but they’re willing to have the conversation.
MAJOR GARRETT: No better way to close out a calendar year than to have the correspondents roundtable here at Face the Nation. It’s been my honor and privilege to have you all here.
Ed O’Keefe, Caitlin Huey-Burns, Scott MacFarlane, Robert Costa, Jan Crawford, my thanks to all of you.
We will be right back with a lot more Face the Nation. Please stay with us.
(ANNOUNCEMENTS)
MAJOR GARRETT: Last week, the U.S. reported its first severe case of bird flu found in a patient in Louisiana.
For more, we’re joined by Dr. Leana Wen. She is the former Baltimore health commissioner.
Dr. Leana Wen, it’s great to have you with us.
So, bird flu, is this report out of Louisiana worrisome? And, if so, why?
DR. LEANA WEN (Former Baltimore Health Commissioner): Well, it’s one more sign that the drumbeat of bird flu coming closer to humans is becoming a major threat.
So, we’ve already seen this year that there have been a number of mammalian species close to humans that now have bird flu outbreaks. We have outbreaks in poultry in all 50 states. Sixteen states have outbreaks in cattle. In California, in the last 30 days, there have been more than 300 herds that tested positive.
And now we have 66 cases of bird flu in humans, and this is almost certainly a significant undercount, because we have not been doing nearly enough testing. So, we really don’t know the extent of bird flu that’s out there in humans.
But this particular case, it’s someone who is severely ill, but not only that. Researchers have isolated the virus in this individual who is sick in Louisiana, and they found that this particular strain of the virus appears to have acquired mutations that make it more likely to bind to airway receptors.
Bird flu has been around for a long time, but it hasn’t…
MAJOR GARRETT: About 30 years.
DR. LEANA WEN: Yes, exactly.
But it hasn’t been a major issue in humans, because while it spreads among birds, it hasn’t really spread among mammals. But now there is this mutation. And there’s another concern now, Major, too which is that we’re in flu season, and it’s possible that a single person could have bird flu and seasonal flu at the same time.
MAJOR GARRETT: Something called reassortment…
DR. LEANA WEN: That’s right. That’s right.
MAJOR GARRETT: … where things change because of one illness becoming another illness through reassortment of a mutated virus.
DR. LEANA WEN: That’s right.
And so the viruses could exchange genes. You could develop a new hybrid virus. And if you now have a virus that’s more contagious and causes more severe disease, that’s when it becomes a major threat to humankind.
MAJOR GARRETT: What should be happening in the Biden administration right now that isn’t going on?
DR. LEANA WEN: Yes, there are two main things that they should be doing in the days that they have left.
The first is to get testing out there. I feel like we should have learned our lesson from COVID that, just because we aren’t testing, it doesn’t mean that the virus isn’t there. It just means that we aren’t looking for it. We should be having rapid tests, home tests, available to all farmworkers, to their families, for the clinicians taking care of them, so that we aren’t waiting for public labs and CDC labs to tell us what’s bird flu or not.
And the second very important thing is, this is not like the beginning of COVID, where we were dealing with a new virus, we didn’t have a vaccine. There actually is a vaccine developed already against H5N1. The Biden administration has contracted with manufacturers to make almost five million doses of the vaccine.
However, they have not asked the FDA to authorize the vaccine. There’s research done on it. They could get this authorized now, and also get the vaccine out so – and to farmworkers and to vulnerable people.
I think that’s the right approach, because we don’t know what the Trump administration is going to be doing around bird flu. If they have people coming in with anti-vaccine stances, could they hold up vaccine authorization? If they don’t want to know how much bird flu is out there, could they withhold testing?
I mean, that’s a possibility, and I think the Biden administration in the remaining days should get testing and vaccines widely available, so that at least it empowers state and local health officials and clinicians to do the right thing for their patients.
MAJOR GARRETT: Dr. Wen, is bird flu in humans super dangerous?
DR. LEANA WEN: Well, the World Health Organization estimates that, in prior outbreaks of the bird flu, that the mortality rate is 52 percent, 52 percent.
However, in the – in this most recent outbreak, it seems that most cases have been mild, and maybe some people even have asymptomatic infection. But the question is, we don’t know what happens when bird flu affects more vulnerable individuals.
People infected so far in the U.S. have been mainly farmworkers, who are working, presumably generally healthy, as opposed to what happens when you get to children, to pregnant women, to older individuals with chronic illnesses.
We don’t know how deadly, how dangerous bird flu is going to be for those individuals. And, again, that’s one more reason why we don’t want it to spread and acquire more mutations.
MAJOR GARRETT: Thirty seconds.
Norovirus is what you call it. Stomach bug is what I would call it. Numbers are surging. It’s the holidays. What should people do to protect themselves?
DR. LEANA WEN: Wash your hands really well, especially if you’re going to buffets. Wash your hands if you’re touching commonly touched surfaces before you touch your mouth, before you touch your nose.
Norovirus is the most common foodborne illness here in the U.S. It’s very hard to avoid once it’s in your family. And, also, don’t prepare food if you’re having vomiting and diarrhea stomach cramps, because you don’t want to spread it to other people.
MAJOR GARRETT: Dr. Leana Wen, thank you so much for your expertise. We really appreciate it.
We will have more questions for Dr. Wen when we come back, but, first, we’re going to take a quick break.
(ANNOUNCEMENTS)
MAJOR GARRETT: We will be right back with Dr. Leana Wen and a lot more Face the Nation.
Please stay with us.
(ANNOUNCEMENTS)
MAJOR GARRETT: Welcome back to FACE THE NATION. We return to our conversation with Dr. Leana Wen.
Doctor, you talked about vaccines and testing in the context of bird flu and preparations therefore. Vaccines and testings were part of the Covid conversation and the Trump administration, when it was in charge.
What level of concern do you have about some of the people appointed by President-elect Trump to incoming public health positions regarding issues of vaccine, testing, public health, efficacy?
DR. LEANA WEN, (Former Baltimore Health Commissioner): I think that there are some people coming into this administration who are very competent. For example, Dr. Marty Markary, a Johns Hopkins surgeon, we have worked together for the last ten-plus years on issues like hospital medical error (ph). He’s an independent thinker who really listens to science and is willing to change his mind when there is new evidence that emerges.
But I have a lot of concern, and I’ve spoken to my colleagues in medicine and public health, and I think all of us share this concern in particular about Robert F. Kennedy, the nominee to be the head of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has espoused many views in the past that are anti- vaccine. In fact, he’s been one of the leading anti-vaxing advocates in the country, if not in the world over the last couple of decades.
He’s also someone who has made his career from being an activist and not a scientist. And what I mean is that, if you’re a scientist, even if you have deeply held convictions, you should be willing to change your mind if there are new facts that are presented.
It’s a fact that childhood vaccines are safe and they are lifesaving. A CDC analysis just now found that the childhood vaccination have saved over 1.1 million children’s lives over the last 20 years. According to a Lancet (ph) study, childhood vaccines saved 154 million lives globally over the last 50 years. I mean these are facts. And it’s very concerning to have someone who doesn’t believe in the – in how science works and basic scientific principles to be in charge of our nation’s preeminent scientific and medical agencies.
MAJOR GARRETT: With that perspective, do you believe it’s more imperative than you described earlier for the Biden administration to move forward on bird flu vaccinations and testing?
DR. LEANA WEN: Well, that’s exactly it, I don’t want to wait for the Trump administration to potentially hold up the vaccines saying that they want more evidence. Look, evidence is always good and facts are always good. New research is always good. But you also have to weigh that against a potential catastrophe as we could be having for bird flu the way that we had for Covid.
There’s no reason why we should hold off on getting more testing. We need to know how much bird flu there is out there. We need to know if there are new mutations that are being developed. Other countries also need to know so that they can prepare as well.
And I think it’s a major problem that in the U.S. we have been holding back on testing and also holding back on getting the vaccines deployed that are already developed.
MAJOR GARRETT: Dr. Leana Wen, thank you so much for your expertise. Thanking you twice. And a Happy New Year to you.
DR. LEANA WEN: Thank you. To you, too, Major.
MAJOR GARRETT: We’ll be right back.
(ANNOUNCEMENTS)
MAJOR GARRETT: We turn now to the economy and what to expect in year 2025. We do so with Bank of America senior economist Aditya Bhave.
Aditya, good morning. It’s great to see you.
I’ve covered a lot of presidential transitions. There’s always an assessment by the outgoing president about what kind of economy he’s giving to his successor. That’s a political conversation. Objectively, what is the economy the incoming Trump administration inheriting?
ADITYA BHAVE (Senior U.S. Economist, Bank of America): Good morning. Thank you for having me.
So, we think the economy has really solid momentum going into next year. You can look at our internal card data, for example, that shows a nice acceleration in spending going into the holidays. You can also look at the TSA on airport traffic, and that looks really strong around the holiday period as well.
You can also think about things via a wider lens. Start in 2022. That was a year in which GDP grew by only 1 percent. CPI inflation peaked at 9 percent. And all of the talk back then was stagflation, when, not if, is a recession going to arrive. Why are workers quiet quitting. And then you look at what happened over the following two years, right. This was quite unexpected and in a very pleasant way. Three percent GDP growth. Inflation coming down. Labor productivity moving up. So, all positives that leave us optimistic going into next year that we can continue to grow above 2 percent, albeit with somewhat sticky inflation.
MAJOR GARRETT: Is there any larger x factor in 2025 than the scale and scope of promised mass deportations of the Trump administration?
ADITYA BHAVE: From a market perspective, I think the two biggest issues will actually be fiscal policy and trade policy. And there’s a lot of uncertainty around those as well, just as there is around immigration policy. So, with fiscal policy, you had this conversation in your last segment, right, the majority for Republicans in the House is very, very narrow. So, if they want to extend the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, they want to do more fiscal stimulus, which we think will probably eventually get done, they have a very slim margin to work with.
And then with trade policy, we really need to understand, you know, how much of the tariffs that President-elect Trump has threatened are actually going to be implemented versus how much is a negotiating tool, right, so how much is transactional.
MAJOR GARRETT: And for mass deportations, how much do you fear that could affect the labor market and our country, that is to say put upward pressure on prices because if there is mass deportations and workplace inspections, lots of workers in agriculture, construction, meat processing and other vital industries could be pulled out of those sectors.
ADITYA BHAVE: So, I think it’s – our base (ph) case is that there will be a slowdown in the flow of immigrants, right? It’s harder to know what will actually happen around deportations.
From an economic perspective, a worker is also a consumer, so there are some down risks to economic activity if there’s a large change in the population, right? That’s just math.
In terms of pressures in specific sectors, it’s really going to depend on how things play out. Yes, there could be labor shortages in certain sectors, but it’s very hard to know at this stage.
MAJOR GARRETT: Many CEOs I listen to say that they expect the tariffs and regulatory relief to kind of wash themselves out, meaning essentially, you put them together, it’s benign on the U.S. economy. Is that your perspective?
ADITYA BHAVE: I think that’s about right. If you look at the four key policy issues that we’ve been focused on, as I said earlier, trade, fiscal policy, immigration policy and deregulation, we think they’ll roughly wash out. But again, the starting point is pretty helpful, right? So, we think that we can continue to grow at around 2 to 2.5 percent this – the coming year, as well as in 2026.
MAJOR GARRETT: So, in reading year-end summaries, “The Economist,” “The Wall Street Journal” and “The Washington Post,” all in their own way, warned that the stock market may be overvalued, may be to exuberant. Do you share any of those concerns?
ADITYA BHAVE: I’m not an equity analyst, so it’s hard for me to day, to give a specific number. Our equity strategists do think that stocks can continue to run up to around 6,600, 6,700 by the end of the year.
What you can say is that, obviously, there’s been a pretty aggressive run- up in tech stocks, but it is not of the same scale that we saw in the late ’90s if we’re really worried about a similar bubble.
MAJOR GARRETT: What effect do you believe cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence will play in the global economy in 2025?
ADITYA BHAVE: So, when it comes to A.I., I think there’s two things to be said. The actual impact of A.I. adoption is probably going to show up pretty slowly in the data. So, I don’t know that we’ll necessarily see that in 2025 or 2026. It might be a story for a few years down the line.
But what has been really impactful already, and probably will be much more impactful in the coming years, is just laying the groundwork for A.I., right? So, if you see the increases in investment in data centers, and you think about what all that requires, right?
MAJOR GARRETT: Yes. We need to –
ADITYA BHAVE: It requires materials. It requires energy supply.
MAJOR GARRETT: Aditya, we need to go. Pardon – pardon me.
ADITYA BHAVE: It requires labor, you – you put – sure. Sure.
MAJOR GARRETT: Yes, I’m sorry to cut you off. We have a hard break we need to get to.
Aditya Bhave from Bank of America, Happy New Year and thank you so much for being with us.
We’ll be right back in just a moment.
(ANNOUNCEMENTS)
MAJOR GARRETT: In 22 days Donald Trump will be sworn in as the nation’s 47th president, only the second to serve two nonconsecutive terms.
For more perspective on the most powerful position in the world, we spoke with David Rubenstein, the co-founder and co-chairman of the Carlyle Group. His new book, “The Highest Calling,” studies the highs and lows of some of this country’s most consequential presidents.
(BEGIN VT)
MAJOR GARRETT: How would you compare, based on your study of the presidency, our unsettled times now to unsettled times past?
DAVID RUBENSTEIN (Co-Founder and Co-Chairman, The Carlyle Group): Well, nothing is as bad as the Civil War, when we had 3 percent of our population killed and the fighting in Washington was so bad that about 60 different times members of Congress hit other members of Congress on the floor of the Congress. So, we’re not quite there yet.
Clearly, though, we’re going into some uncharted waters because we have a president coming back who had been president before. That hadn’t happened since Grover Cleveland was re-elected in 1892. And Trump has got more power than I think many people would have thought by the virtue of his victory size. And I do think he’s going to act like he’s got a mandate and Washington is bracing for what’s going to happen.
MAJOR GARRETT: Related to that, before the election results were known, polls indicated pretty consistently that Trump supporters were afraid if Harris would win, Harris supporters were afraid if Trump would win.
Based on your study of this institution, the presidency, can you recall a time where that fear of an outcome was as prevalent as it was leading into this election?
DAVID RUBENSTEIN: Well, there have been a couple times when people really were afraid that the next person coming in that was the opposite party would really hurt the country in many ways. Clearly, my former boss, Jimmy Carter, really feared Ronald Reagan. He thought that Ronald Reagan was going to do – undo many of the things that Carter had done. Obviously, Reagan won by a landslide.
And you’ve seen other times when this has happened as well. So, for example, when FDR won the first time, Herbert Hoover could not believe that this man, Herbert Hoover, had been such a distinguished American before he was president, and while he was president he had problems, but he was a very distinguished person. He never took FDR seriously. And FDR didn’t really take Hoover that seriously. He refused to really meet with him, essentially, or met with him briefly and they just didn’t want anything to do with him – each other.
MAJOR GARRETT: You mentioned Grover Cleveland. There’s not a chapter in the book about Grover Cleveland. Is there anything that retroactively fascinates you about the Cleveland presidency now that Trump has returned to office, or are you similarly fascinated by the time in which he was president, the Gilded Age?
DAVID RUBENSTEIN: Grover Cleveland was a Democrat, a former governor of New York, very well respected, but he lost the election in 1888, and he came back in 1892. Now, one of the things we don’t really know is whether a president, when he has a second term after he’s been out of office, whether he’ll be fresher, whether he’ll bring better people in, whether he’ll be more experienced.
For example, Grover Cleveland’s second term was reasonably successful. And, you know, maybe Trump’s will be as well.
MAJOR GARRETT: One of the things the nation struggled with this last 18 months or so was the collision of politics and the law. Do you think there are any lessons to be learned from this clash and the politics that came from the clash of trying to indict and try someone who had been president of the United States and was aspiring to that office again?
DAVID RUBENSTEIN: I think there is a feeling among many people that it wasn’t a good idea to indict the president of the United States. I think the trial in New York, where Trump was convicted, I think really helped him in his election effort. And I think there are many people who are – who are Trump supporters who believe that the indictments that came out of the special prosecutor, Jack Smith, were really political as well.
And so I think there’s – both sides feel that the other side is really talking past each other. The people who are in the Justice Department now feel that these indictments were fair and correct and had a special prosecutor and so forth. The Trump people believe they were completely political. I hope going forward that the Justice Department is not seen as political because one of the strengths of this country has been the rule of law, and I hope that the Justice Department that’s coming in now will continue that tradition.
MAJOR GARRETT: Do you have a president in mind who, based on your study, grew in your regard and a president in your mind who, based on your study, got more diminished?
DAVID RUBENSTEIN: Harry Truman left office extremely unpopular, very unpopular, and he was thought to be an inappropriate (ph) successor to the great FDR. Now, because of books by David McCollough and other people who have written great books about Truman, people see him as one of our great presidents because post-World War II he helped end the war because he dropped the atomic bomb, which many people say was a mistake, but ki would say many historians think it was necessary to avoid –
MAJOR GARRETT: And he never doubted?
DAVID RUBENSTEIN: He never doubted. He never had self-doubt. Self-doubt was one of – was not one of his thing. He always believed it was the right decision. But he also was responsible for NATO, the U.N., the World Bank, the IMF, and the CIA, which he created as well. All these things he created
MAJOR GARRETT: And the recognition of Israel.
DAVID RUBENSTEIN: Yes, he recognized Israel, even though his secretary of state threatened to resign over it. So, he was a person who has really risen up.
A person who’s gone down, I would say, or two that have gone down a lot. One is Andrew Jackson. Remember, Democrats used to say, we’re going to have a Jefferson-Jackson day dinner. You don’t have that anymore because Jackson is now widely seen as being racist and very anti-Native American, and he really did many things that I think killed a lot of people, particularly in the Native American community. So, he’s not really well respected today by scholars.
Another person I would say is – is that – whose reputation has gone down is Woodrow Wilson. Woodrow Wilson was the great reformer after being president at Princeton, two years later he’s – he’s governor of New Jersey, then president of the United States.
However, he now is widely seen as having done two things that were really big mistakes. One, he resegregated the federal workforce and had been integrated. Two, and this is very damaging I think as well, he – he had a stroke and with about 18 months to go, he couldn’t really do what he had done before. He hid that from the public, and his wife essentially became a shadow president. She was really making decisions and deciding things that maybe he should have decided, and the public didn’t know this. And that was a big problem.
MAJOR GARRETT: You often ask biographers what question they would most want to pose to the subject of their presidential biography. Let me expand on that. If you could go to dinner with any president, who would it be, and what question would you want to make sure you got answered?
DAVID RUBENSTEIN: Without doubt, the greatest president and the greatest American ever is Abraham Lincoln. He was a person who – was not an abolitionist but ultimately came to free the slaves through the Emancipation Proclamation. And he also won the Civil War despite the fact that many people in the north didn’t really want to fight the Civil War. They’d say, let the south go, we’ll have our own country. Lincoln said, no, we’re going to hold the union together. And he did that. We lost 3 percent of our population in the war, but he kept the union together and I think made the United States a stronger country as a result.
We ended slavery eventually because of the 13th amendment. But, most importantly, he did it with humility. He didn’t run around saying, look, I just won the Civil War. I just did the Gettysburg Address. Isn’t that a great speech? He didn’t do that. He didn’t brag about it. He was very humble. And I think he had a sense of humor and a sense of perspective that is a really good thing for presidents.
And I would like to ask him, do you have any regrets about not having freed the slaves earlier? Do you have any regrets about not getting rid of some of your generals earlier who were not very good? And he waited a couple years before he got Ulysses S. Grant in.
Grant is also a person I should mention. He had the most amazing meteoric rise of almost anybody who’s become president. He was selling firewood on the streets of St. Louis in 1860. The war breaks out in 1861, more or less, and eight years later he’s president of the United States. I mean it’s just amazing.
MAJOR GARRETT: You mentioned humility. George W. Bush told you in your interview with him that that was the most important characteristic a president can possession. I’ve read other words that are important for presidents – courage, compassion, curiosity, decisiveness. Based on your study, what would you say is the most important?
DAVID RUBENSTEIN: I think the most important thing is having a perspective that you really want to do what’s right for the American people. You’re not trying to make money. You’re not trying to feather your own nest. You’re not trying to worry about history. You’re just trying to do what’s best for the American people.
The qualities that I admire in leaders are people who are reasonably intelligent but not geniuses. You don’t have to be a genius to be a great president. People who are willing to listen to other people. People that have some humility. People that are highly ethical. Those are the qualities that I think great leaders have in any area.
Overall, we’ve gotten some pretty talented people who have served as president of the United States. And we’ve been fortunate. Lincoln, Washington, FDR, Teddy Roosevelt, Jefferson, and modern day presidents, Eisenhower, among others, have had some really great attributes and the country is good and I think better off for having had good people serve.
One of my concerns in the future is that because it’s become so political in Washington sometimes and the fight – infighting has been so intense that I’m not sure that – as many good people want to rise up and run for president in the future as we’ve seen in the past.
MAJOR GARRETT: You mentioned in your very first answer the Civil War, the greatest time of testing in our country’s history. You don’t have to be very aggressive online to find casual talk among Americans about another civil war. They banty it about with some frequency.
How worried are you about that, and do you think the mere discussion of it creates the potential of an inevitability?
DAVID RUBENSTEIN: Well, I think there has been discussions. Some people say the red states and the blue states should separate, but I don’t think that’s realistic or really going to happen. I think the country realizes that we are the strongest power in the world economically, militarily, politically, culturally and, in part, because the country’s got a big enough population, and in part because we have a lot of attributes in red and blue states. I don’t think it’s realistic. People talk about that, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. The country is not going to be split up the way it was in the Civil War. I just don’t see that as being realistic or desirable.
MAJOR GARRETT: Is there any doubt in your mind that presidents, all presidents, must guard against bitterness, anger, resentment, some of the things that fueled their pursuit of the office in the first place? Meaning, once they got there they need to set those things aside, even though they were part of the engine?
DAVID RUBENSTEIN: Everybody goes through life and has ups and downs. And you get a lot of bitterness and you get resentment of people. People that are good presidents ultimately rise up above that. A lot of people criticized Abraham Lincoln for many, many things. They called him all kinds of terrible names and they did say he was barely human.
MAJOR GARRETT: They called him a gorilla.
DAVID RUBENSTEIN: Yes. And he rose above that. And I think you have to rise above it. And, hopefully, when you don’t have to worry about politics anymore in a second term, for example, you can rise above all the concerns you’ve had. When you’re president of the United States, if you carry your resentments too long, it can affect others people adversely. So, I think in the case of President Trump, for example, clearly he has some resentments, but I think overall I believe he’s going to rise above that in his second term.
MAJOR GARRETT: Is Richard Nixon, which you, in your book, describe as a tragic figure, almost a Shakespearean-like tragic figure, the most available cautionary tale about resentments in the presidency?
DAVID RUBENSTEIN: If only Shakespeare had been alive to write about Richard Nixon, it would have been a wonderful tragedy. He’s a man who’s really talented, very smart. He stumbles from running for president in 1960, barely loses. Loses for 1962 in the governorship of California and comes back and is elected in 1968 against all the odds.
But he resented the people that looked down on him. He resented the liberals. He resented the ivy leaguers, as he would call them. And he really, I think, took those resentments and he perpetuated them through his chief of staff, Rob Haldeman and other people. And the result was a terrible thing called Watergate.
I think Richard Nixon, had he not had Watergate, I think he would have gone down as a really impressive president because they opened to China, things he did on the environment. But Watergate will be what he’s remembered for.
MAJOR GARRETT: Was he the least ethical president in our history?
DAVID RUBENSTEIN: I don’t think there’s – that’s easy to say because some presidents had issues that we don’t know about as much. Richard Nixon wasn’t a person who was trying to make money for himself necessarily. He wasn’t grafting himself into – into business deals and so forth. But I think he had some ethical failings.
MAJOR GARRETT: The book is called “The Highest Calling.” Is the presidency the highest calling? Some might argue that an age defining innovation is a higher calling or being a captain of industry is a higher calling, or just being a simple CEO employing tens of thousands of people is a higher calling. Why is it the highest calling?
DAVID RUBENSTEIN: The reason I called it “The Highest Calling,” and I had historically said that private equity, my profession, was the highest calling, but that was more tongue-in-cheek, is this. When Woodrow Wilson went to Paris to help end World War I, he was cheered by hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Parisians. And people, for the first time, realized the most important person in the United States, in the world, really, is the president of the United States. And that’s been true almost since Wilson came back from Paris.
When FDR was running, the world really effectively, because he was president of the United States during World War II, he was the most important person in the world for sure. And I think ever since then, because of the economic, military, political power of the United States, whoever is the leader of the United States is almost certainly the most powerful person in the world, and pursuing what I would call the highest calling because you can affect the lives of people so much more significantly as president of the United States than any other job in the world.
MAJOR GARRETT: Thank you very much.
DAVID RUBENSTEIN: My pleasure. Thank you.
(END VT)
MAJOR GARRETT: You can watch the extended interview on our YouTube page or on our website, facethenation.com.
We’ll be right back.
(ANNOUNCEMENTS)
MAJOR GARRETT: That’s it for us today. Thank you very much for watching. And let me be among the first to wish you a Happy New Year. For FACE THE NATION, I’m Major Garrett.
(ANNOUNCEMENTS)
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