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Inside Politics

Trump to Focus on Mass Deportations, Tax Cuts, New Tariffs; Trump Eyes Mass Deportations, Tax Cuts as Top Priorities; Trump's Agenda will have to Make it Through Historically Narrow House Majority; Undocumented Immigrant Charged with Murder for Allegedly Setting Woman on Fire in NYC Subway Car; How Republicans Used "Migrant Crime" to Drive 2024 Message. Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired December 24, 2024 - 12:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN HOST, INSIDE POLITICS: Today, on "Inside Politics", the first 100 days, President-Elect Trump has an audacious agenda and a plan to carry it out, but did the divide we saw last week inside the GOP signal big problems ahead? Plus, Trump's pick for FCC Chair writes a, we'll call it, vaguely threatening letter to Disney boss Bob Iger.

He's promising a major crackdown on broadcast networks and tech companies he accuses of anti-conservative bias. And mighty Musk, he's worth nearly $500 billion and seems to be attached to the president elect at the hip. We'll look at the enormous power Elon Musk will wield over American business, politics and culture once Trump moves back into the White House. I'm Phil Mattingly in for Dana Bash. Let's go behind the headlines and "Inside Politics".

We are just 27 days away from the dawn of the second Trump Administration. Once Donald Trump takes the Oath of Office, his party will control the White House, the Senate and the House. Trump's policy ambitions are equal parts aggressive and transformative, an agenda that should theoretically be attainable with unified control of the executive and legislative branches.

But as we saw during last week's spending fight thread, bear majorities divergent inter party goals, well, they could serve as a reality check of sorts for a president-elect at the height of his political power, raising a major question here in Washington. Can Trump and his party overcome those hurdles in the months ahead? We start things off as CNN's Steve Contorno, who joins me now. Steve, President-Elect Trump's inauguration I think it's just a couple of weeks away at this point. How are those first 100-day plans taking shape?

STEVE CONTORNO, CNN SENIOR REPORTER: Phil, we still have a lot to learn about how Trump intends to execute his policies that he wants to implement early in his administration? But he has certainly offered some broad parameters of where his targets will be early on, and certainly immigration is at the top of that list, and his plans for mass deportations soon after taking office.

Restarting the border wall and closing, to some extent, the border between U.S. and Mexico. He has also proposed extending the Trump era tax cuts that are set to expire at the end of next year. Implementing new tariffs on foreign goods. We've already seen him tease a 25 percent tariff on goods coming from Mexico and Canada.

And he's also said he will review the cases of the January 6th offenders and potentially pardon at least those who committed non- violent crimes that day. He has also made more vague promises that he will end the war between Russia and Ukraine, that he will get back the hostages from Hamas, and that he will open the U.S. to oil and drilling.

We are still waiting to see how exactly he intends to achieve those goals? But one thing we are looking for is on that first day, is a series of executive orders that he intends to sign right out of the gates, indicating where he will go and how he will tackle these policies, Phil?

MATTINGLY: Steve, it's front of mind right now. You wrote a great piece on this last night for cnn.com. How did the comments on Panama, the Panama Canal and Greenland fit into kind of the plans going ahead?

CONTORNO: Well, it's certainly in line with this sort of quote, America First nationalist policy that Donald Trump has been promising. And he is also someone who is very focused on trade, and so that is one of the areas where the Panama Canal would come in, is the ships that are going through trying to get from the Atlantic or to the Pacific or vice versa, making a little bit easier for them, or less costly for them to do that.

And that's where that pressure campaign is coming from. Greenland has sort of just been something that has preoccupied him, going back to his first term, believing it is a national security interest. And so even as he continues to push this idea that in some ways, America should be retreating from the foreign affairs.

At the same time where it serves American interest. His allies are saying this is where he might use that sort of saber rattling or that big stick to get what he wants, Phil.

MATTINGLY: Yeah, we'll definitely have to wait and see. Steve Contorno for us live. Thanks so much. I'm joined now by some fantastic reporters on this Christmas Eve, Semafor Burgess Everett, CNN's Kayla Tausche and CNN's Steven Collinson. I think the availability of great reporters might underscore the fact that at least three of us have young children and maybe just want some time out of the house. I'm kidding OK.

KAYLA TAUSCHE, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: To my family watching. I love all of you.

MATTINGLY: Thank you all very much. Merry Christmas. Burgess, I want to start with you, because the dynamics of the first 100 days. Steve did a great job laying out particularly on the executive order and executive action piece. The Trump White House can handle that. The Trump White House needs the Republican Senate and the Republican House to handle a huge chunk of the agenda going forward.

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You write the Senate Budget Committee may move a budget resolution in early to mid-January that would keep Congress on trap -- track for a Trump signature on border funding by sometime in February, pending the inevitable drama with such narrow margins in Congress. How is this all going to work mechanically?

BURGESS EVERETT, CONGRESSIONAL BUREAU CHIEF, SEMAFOR: Yeah. I mean, the first thing that you have to do to evade a filibuster, which is what Republicans will need to do to pass their agenda without Democratic votes. Nobody expects Democratic votes for these things.

And so right now, the leading plan, they don't have total buy in yet, either from Trump or the House of Representatives, but the leading plan in the Senate is to pass a border funding bill funded with new energy leases and perhaps with the national security component, to kind of twin with those executive actions that you just talked about Trump signing on day one, on January 20th.

So, to do that, you got to move a budget through both chambers of Congress, and then you got to pass these bills. You got to do the vote-a-ramas, which is these unlimited vote-a-ramas. So, it's going to be pretty painful, and as we saw Trump can kind of derail things, if he wants to, with a simple tweet or a Truth Social or even maybe something from Elon Musk now.

So, in theory, you could get these things done pretty quickly if you get that unity. I'll be looking across the Capitol at the House of Representatives with those really small margins to see exactly how that goes. Because if the speaker's race, Mike Johnson, speaker's race turns into a big problem, it's going to have a domino effect on the whole agenda.

MATTINGLY: And I think that's my big question coming out of last week. We run the risk of reading too much into anything at this point in time as you try and figure out what's next. But the reality to Burgess's point is they're going to need pretty much every Republican vote in the Senate and House to start moving down this path if they're going to do two reconciliation bills, which is extraordinarily hard just to do one, let alone two. And after last week, you could hear Republicans kind of push back a little bit. Take a listen.

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REP. TIM BURCHETT (R-TN): We didn't do what he wanted to in the third bill. We didn't raise the debt limit.

REP. CHIP ROY (R-TX): The president's right to want to get rid of the debt ceiling issue, but we're right to say not without spending cuts.

MANU RAJU, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: He tried to bully members of Congress, and it seemed to not work. REP. THOMAS MASSIE (R-KY): It didn't work for 38 or 39 people last

night.

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MATTINGLY: Are we reading too much into it to say, hey, Republicans, they were willing to push back here. They're not going to do whatever he says.

TAUSCHE: Well, I think that they are able to read the room and figure out where the votes are. But I also think that it underlies Trump's ultimate strategy, which is try to extract a better deal. But these terms are not necessarily ultimatums. In the end, he didn't get the debt ceiling, but he forced them to do essentially a deal that was reshaped around the priorities that he had laid out.

Similarly, in 2018 he shut down the government because he wanted to try to get $6 billion in funding to build the border wall. Ultimately, 35 days later, the government reopened without that money because it became too financially painful. This is what he does. He's needling them to try to get something better. But ultimately, it's not -- it's not an ultimatum.

But I do think that it underscores a couple issues. One, as Burgess was just saying they're going to try to do as much of this on a party line vote as possible, through the reconciliation process, possibly twice this year for both border funding and energy, and then tax reform later in the year, when those Trump tax cuts are set to expire.

But then I'm hearing them talk about the fact that if they get a budget for a third time, they could have a third reconciliation bill to essentially reserve some of those other priorities that they're not able to get done and have another bite at the apple. It's difficult to do one, nearly impossible to do two, but the fact that they're even talking about doing three shows you that they don't believe that doing things on a bipartisan basis is necessarily possible.

MATTINGLY: To that point, Stephen, I've tried to figure this out kind of coming out of the election, looking at the team that's being put into place as well. We have a pension based on years of experience. Not Kayla. She's much younger than the rest of us, but that this is at some point Washington is going to win, right?

There's a way this is always done. There's a way a CR gets done. There's a way a reconciliation bill gets done. At some point we are going to revert to the norm. Is that a mistake, given Trump's team, Trump's perceived mandate, Trump's goals heading into this administration?

STEPHEN COLLINSON, CNN SENIOR REPORTER: Well, the team he's chosen tells us the presidency he wants. The question is, will he be able to get that presidency? To your point on the Capitol Hill right now, there is a visceral understanding that they have to get a quick start among the Republicans.

They don't know how long this coalition is going to hold together. There's a tiny majority, much smaller than the one that Trump had the first time he came around. If you want to do the mass deportations, you have to get that funded. You have to get a budget through. Last time around, it was Christmas before they manage to pass the tax deal.

Trump really wants that a lot quicker, because they know they go into a mid-term election. They need to goose the economy, if you like. So, there is a limited amount of time. The normal dynamic is you have 100 days a year. There are some Republicans who think that they may not have that much time, not least because you have a president who is more able to blow up a coalition than he needs to construct one.

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MATTINGLY: And isn't always laser focused on whatever the issue is of the day. And we've seen that last 48 hours, and all of a sudden, the Panama Canal. Greenland is back in the news, announcing his Ambassador to Denmark, and then just kind of tacking in at the very end there.

Remember that thing I was talking about in the first term? Still in -- still into it still very into it. Some of the headlines we've got Trump is teasing U.S. expansion into Panama, Greenland and Canada. Trump's wish to control Greenland and Panama Canal not a joke this time.

Trump dreams of empire expansion. You make a great point that people perceive what he's saying, what he's doing, is actually trying to lay the groundwork for other things he may be working on here. Does that a lot with tariffs, is that we do -- what he's doing here?

TAUSCHE: A little bit. I mean, I think this is his way of finding new and creative approaches to go after familiar foes. In the Panama Canal, lawmakers have raised concerns about the outside influence that Beijing is playing there. That House Select Committee on China heard evidence that it poses a national security risk.

And if Trump is trying to say the United States should seize the Panama Canal, essentially, that's his way to say, like, I want to kick China out of the canal. It's his way to go after Beijing, sort of using the Panama Canal as a conduit, because they do so much of the business and control so much of the traffic within the canal.

When it comes to Greenland, I think it's less about necessarily wanting to buy Greenland, although it's a funny thing to say, and more as an indirect way to go after Denmark, which is one of the very few NATO allies that is still not meeting that 2 percent defense spending target, that has been one of the most familiar scratching posts for Donald Trump, going after allies who are not meeting that share of defense spending.

And President Biden and the alliance for the last four years, went to great lengths to get as many of those countries as possible to either meet that target or lay out a road map for a time frame in which they could meet that target. Denmark is still about five years away from that, and this is Trump, I think saying, Denmark, you need to step up to the table here. MATTINGLY: It's a fascinating point, particularly because particularly because there's -- there's an underpinning here of strategic interest in Greenland that I think you know. And I want to ask you about this, because you're one of the few people I think Tom Cotton talks to every-once-in-a-while on Capitol Hill of our --

EVERETT: -- says no comment.

MATTINGLY: He says no comment to you, but it's on the record. So, I appreciate that. The strategic interest of which Tom cotton in the first term was somebody who would detail when this first came out is from a foreign policy piece on Greenland. The three main reasons for the interest the melting ice will create a new commercially valuable sailing routes from the east Greenland maintains security importance to the United States as the site of its northern most military base.

And finally, Greenland could become a crucial rare earth mineral source. When you talk to folks on Capitol Hill, are they trying to think through how to make this possible? Are they just kind of batting around a little bit?

EVERETT: I mean, to me, it plays off as a totally political issue, and it's part of a throwback. Trump likes to talk about presidents that expanded the United States's map and made it a bigger country. It's all about American exceptional, exceptionalism, right? And what could be better than adding more land to the United States?

We haven't done that for a really long time. I don't hear people on Capitol Hill talking about this because they're worried about not tripping over their shoe laces in January. I mean, they're just going to be so much to take care of with those small majorities.

We haven't even gotten into what it's going to take to get his cabinet confirmed to enact the agenda that he's talking about, it's going to take a ton of coordination and synchronization. And so, if there's time for them to get to Greenland in the Senate and House, it may be waiting until 2026 because I think 2025 is pretty booked up at this point.

MATTINGLY: Is it trolling?

COLLINGSON: I don't think so. Sometimes Trump makes very important points in the most unorthodox ways. There is a big debate about China's influence in Latin America. Greenland is a hugely important strategic issue, especially as the ice melts, and the thought that Russia or China could get a foothold there is strategically very dangerous to the United States and Europe.

Why shouldn't Europe spend more money on its defense you know, 80 years after the cold at the end of the Second World War? These are important questions. The problem is, does Trump make it worse? Does his -- does his style backfire? Because in Panama, you have a president quite sympathetic towards the United States.

Could you push him towards China? And to your point about Trump's expansionism, he has this almost Neo-Colonialist view of international relations, and I think that's going to be important when we come to the issue of Ukraine. He wants to end the war. The big question is, how much of the land does Putin get to keep if he's rewarded for the invasion?

MATTINGLY: Yeah.

COLLINSON: Trump doesn't necessarily see the seizure of land by a big country in the same way as many other Western leaders.

MATTINGLY: Also, something else he has to deal with in the first 100 days.

COLLINSON: Yeah.

MATTINGLY: -- or the first day, as he pledged during the campaign.

COLLINSON: Yeah.

MATTINGLY: All right, stay with me. Just in Bill Clinton has been discharged from the hospital after an overnight stay for the flu. The 78-year-old Former President was admitted yesterday after experiencing a high fever. A statement from his office, says, quote, he and his family are deeply grateful for the exceptional care provided by the team at Med Star Georgetown University Hospital, and are touched by the kind messages and well wishes he received.

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He sends his warmest wishes for a happy and healthy holiday season to all. Well up next, new details about the man suspected of burning a woman to death on the subway in New York after a brief manhunt, he's now charged with murder and could be arraigned today. Stay with us.

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MATTINGLY: We are awaiting the arraignment of the man accused of burning someone to death on the New York City subway. As soon as today, the suspect, seen here, could hear his charges of murder and arson. We're learning more about his history, including the fact he is in the U.S. illegally. CNN's Gloria Pazmino is looking into the background joins me now. Gloria, what more do we know here?

GLORIA PAZMINO, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Phil, the first thing is that in the last few hours, we've learned that the suspect was actually hospitalized overnight. We're waiting to learn more details about what led to that hospitalization.

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But that explains the reason why they have not yet arranged him. He hasn't appeared in court. You're seeing him there being walked out of the precinct yesterday after they finished processing him, but he has not appeared in front of a judge yet. Now he is facing murder in the first-degree charges as well as murder in the second-degree and arson charges in connection to that incident in the subway. It happened early on Sunday morning. Police say he walked over to a

woman who was sleeping on the train and set her on fire. She burned alive, and he watched from the platform. Now we've also learned a little bit more about his background. His name is Sebastian Zapata Khalil. He's 33-years-old, and he is believed to have entered the United States in 2018. He was quickly deported after that, according to Customs and Border Patrol Enforcement Officers.

But then he made his way back into the country and eventually up here to New York City, where in the last few months, he's been in and out of shelters, including the last one where he was staying, which was for men who were struggling with substance issues. That is about as much as we know right now.

We are still also waiting to learn more details about the victim, Phil. Law enforcement officials tell me they believe she, too, was a homeless person, so a really just horrific crime, really disturbing set of details, and for now, waiting to hear more details about when this suspect will be facing a judge, Phil.

MATTINGLY: Gloria Pazmino for us with the latest thanks so much. Now Trump's incoming Border Czar Tom Homan is using the latest attack by an undocumented immigrant to slam the Biden Administration and its immigration policies.

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TOM HOMAN, INCOMING BORDER CZAR: This is another example of an illegal alien killing American citizens almost a daily occurrence now. You know because historic number of criminal aliens walking the streets because this administration's policy and sanctuary jurisdictions and lacks immigration enforcement.

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MATTINGLY: My panel is back with me now. And Kayla, it wasn't just Tom Homan, Caroline Levitt, the incoming Press Secretary for the White House, tweeting out 28 days until mass deportations begin. Hallelujah. Homan, Stephen Miller, the Acting ICE Head, has also been named as well. What is this team planning right now? Do we have a sense of what it's actually going to look like?

TAUSCHE: Well, they've talked a lot about mass deportations, but it's unclear what the definition of mass will end up being, because to deport the volume of migrants that they're talking about deporting, I mean simply that enforcement regime does not exist, nor does the budget to fund it and many of the other resources associated with it.

And it will not only take time to get that passed through Congress, but also for that money to flow into the system those people to be hired, that's going to take quite a bit of time. So, what we've heard about, what they're planning is instead, to set an example early in the term, possibly even on the first day of deporting migrants who have committed crimes, either having been convicted of crimes or currently serving sentences in prison. It's unclear exactly who they're going to be targeting or what the

parameters for that will be. I mean, we've gotten a little taste of that with the way that Trump described the dozen Venezuelans in a gang in Aurora, Colorado, where he declared the town a war zone and has essentially isolated one group of people and held them up as an example of what's wrong with this system.

So, we do know that they're going to start relatively small. It's going to be, you know, focused on those who have committed crimes, but then how that ramps up from there ultimately will depend on what Congress can do.

MATTINGLY: Stephen, what's been interesting? The message from the president-elect throughout the course of the campaign was consistent. It was aggressive. Probably 5, 6, 7, 8, years ago, people would have blanched at the idea of it. And then we see things like what we just saw in New York. We've seen stories like this repeatedly, particularly on Fox News, over the course of the last year or so, and they've had a tangible effect. This was some of what we heard on the trail.

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DONALD TRUMP (R), FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT AND CURRENT PRESIDENTIAL- ELECT: On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history to get the criminals out. As soon as I take office, we will immediately surge federal law enforcement to every city that is failing, and I'm hereby calling for the death penalty for any migrant that kills an American citizen or a law enforcement officer.

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MATTINGLY: What's the pressure on the Trump Administration to deliver, even though, to Kayla's point, it's a little bit amorphous at this point in terms of what they actually will be doing in those first 100 days in particular, but to actually deliver, to show that they're doing this since they pledged to?

COLLINSON: I think they have pressure from the president's base, but the politics over the last four years has shifted on this. The public has gone somewhat to the right on immigration, partly due to the policies of the Biden Administration and the fact that some of these Republican Governors like Abbott in Texas started sending undocumented migrants into liberal cities, that has brought the issue home a lot more politically to a lot of people.

And we saw that on the campaign trail. So, I think there maybe is a little bit more running room and less shock value that we'll see from the Trump Administration early on.

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But they do understand as well that this can be unpopular. If we get lots of images of families being separated, of border agents trying to arrest people and things going wrong and violence erupting, that can be politically challenging. So, when they talk about this migrant crime, not only do they believe it, but they know it's also a useful political advice.

MATTINGLY: To Stephen's great point, the Overton Window shift on this issue. I've talked to Democratic Senators in the last year who will acknowledge to Steven's point. You know, particularly Texas Governor Greg Abbott, bussing over 105,000 migrants to sanctuary cities. This is as of March 2024, more than 12,000 Washington, D.C. 39,000 to New York City. 32,000 to Chicago. 16,900 migrants to Denver. This has had a dramatic effect on lawmakers, on their constituents and how people perceive this issue.

EVERETT: Yeah, and I'm going to date myself here, but one of the first big bills I covered in Congress was the Gang of Eight immigration bill. We are so far from something like that being on the table because of these factors that you just mentioned. When you go to cities where this has happened, you see people begging for money on the street, and you can tell that they have been bused there from places like Texas.

I do think that there is going to be a lot of pressure to move quickly, to do things like get more detention beds, get more man power, to enact the things that they talking about doing now, because there's only a few weeks now until this is Trump's problem. It can't be blamed on the Biden Administration as much as soon as they take office, I'm sure there will be a few months of that.

But at some point, he will take ownership of that, and it was the primary issue of his campaign. It's been probably the primary issue of his political career, and he's going to face a lot of pressure to act on it, and he's going to put that pressure on his allies in Congress, and maybe people that don't necessarily agree with him in the Republican Party.

MATTINGLY: Yeah, I think this important point, because it connects to what we're talking about in the first segment about the reconciliation bills, which, like all of us, are happy to go down that rabbit hole. I don't think you; the viewer would like that at this point in time --

EVERETT: No.

MATTINGLY: -- but doing immigration, first, splitting them up, immigration, then tax, moving immigration as quickly as possible. You listen to Tom Homan interviews, of which he's done, very many he talks about, I'll tell you how many people we can deport when you tell me how many beds I have.

EVERETT: Yes.

MATTINGLY: And -- financing for air transport, for busses, all that. That's, that's the focus of that first bill, if that's how they do it, right?

EVERETT: You could get in a situation if they were unable to do that and move it quickly, where the administration is beating up on Congress and a Republican controlled Congress. So, you could see why they face a challenge in keeping things small and finite. Because some people are going to want to -- there's going to be a little bit of a Pandora's Box aspect to this, because once you start negotiating and broadening it out, it'll get more and more and more complicated. And so, it's going to be a lot of pressure on Mike Johnson, John Thune, the incoming Senate Majority Leader, to make sure that doesn't happen. Keep it small and doable so they can actually send this to the Trump Administration.

MATTINGLY: Yeah, it's a critical point. All right, guys thanks so much. Coming up, immediate powerhouse under the microscope, the incoming FCC Chairman just put Disney CEO Bob Iger on notice. We'll bring you the details next.

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