SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
It has now been one month since President Trump was sworn in for a second term and the pace has been unrelenting. Mass firings in the federal government, resignations and protest, and controversial foreign policy moves - and that's all just this week. Here to talk about what exactly happened and what it all means is NPR senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro. Hi, Domenico.
DOMENICO MONTANARO, BYLINE: Hey. Great to be with you, Scott.
DETROW: Let's start with the comments about Ukraine. This is a country that just marked the start of the third year of Russia invading it. Now Trump is criticizing Ukraine's president. What is going on?
MONTANARO: I mean, it was quite the back and forth. It got pretty personal. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was pretty upset that his country was left off of initial talks between the U.S. delegation and their Russian counterparts in Saudi Arabia. That led to Trump responding actually to a question that was about whether the U.S. would support the idea of elections in Ukraine, which has been a talking point that Russia has pushed.
He said he did want to see that, but elections, of course, during wartime are incredibly logistically problematic, especially when it was Russia itself that invaded and has been bombing Ukrainian towns and infrastructure. Never mind that Putin has largely kept himself in power for the last 20 of 25 years in Russia. Trump, though, then went on to blame Ukraine for, quote, "starting it" and that they should have ended it and gotten a deal in these past three years.
DETROW: Fair to say, this did not go over well with Zelenskyy?
MONTANARO: No. It did not. I mean, Zelenskyy said that he needs to hear more, quote, "truth from the Trump team," and Trump didn't appreciate that, as you can imagine. He wound up calling Zelenskyy a dictator. A lot of Republican elected leaders, even those who've sparred with Trump in the past and have been on Ukraine's side, have said that it's a bad idea for Zelenskyy to publicly criticize Trump.
DETROW: Meanwhile, the biggest by far domestic story line of the Trump administration is this DOGE nitiative led by billionaire CEO Elon Musk. The two of them had that big impromptu press conference in the Oval Office last week. At this point, do we have a better sense of what they're trying to do?
MONTANARO: Yeah, and, I mean, that meeting was really quite striking. I mean, the scene with Musk in the Oval office, you know, wearing a black Make America Great Again hat, standing next to the president seated behind the resolute desk.
DETROW: Like, looming over him.
MONTANARO: Yeah, I mean, just standing there with his son with him there - you know, he was explaining that DOGE, the informal Department of Government Efficiency that he leads, is making an effort to tackle bureaucracy and to decrease the national deficit and debt. Well, I mean, this week, he even took to the CPAC stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference just outside Washington D.C., proudly wielding a chainsaw.
He was eally leaning into this image of him slashing the federal government and federal workforce. But those cuts that his group is making to the federal bureaucracy are miniscule in relation to the overall federal budget. On top of that, Musk even floated this week the idea of a $5,000 DOGE dividend check based on the cuts that his team makes, but we know that the cuts that DOGE is touting don't quite add up to as much as they're saying. Plus Trump is pushing for tax cuts, and those are expected to cost some $5 trillion. All of that's only going to add to the federal debt.
DETROW: Another storyline last week - several federal prosecutors in New York stepped down over the decision to suspend charges against New York's Mayor Eric Adams. Did that continue to play into politics this week?
MONTANARO: It did. We saw four deputy mayors in New York resign because of what a lot of people see as a quid pro quo for the Democratic mayor helping the Trump team with immigration in the city. We saw that the Deputy Acting Attorney General Emil Bove go to court asking a judge to suspend the corruption charges against Adams for national security purpose so he could get, quote, "get back to work unburdened and unhindered." It led to New York's governor pushing for more guardrails on the independence of a New York mayor. So New York is really trying to push back against the Trump administration. It's another indicator of Trump's, you know, you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours approach.
DETROW: A month in, any sense how this is playing with the public?
MONTANARO: Yeah, we're starting to have a better idea of that with a couple new polls that are out this week. The bottom line is that it looks like that the honeymoon for Trump appears to be over. The country has largely always been split on Trump, slight majority disapproving. And that's what we saw in back-to-back polls with CNN and Washington Post-Ipsos.
People were split on Trump's approach to the presidency - approach to immigration, rather, but both polls found a majority think that he's exceeding his power as president. CNN's Poll also found that 62% think that he hasn't done enough to reduce the price of goods. Of course, tariffs have been a big part of the conversation. We saw that - some volatility in the stock market over a lot of this, something people are paying attention to.
You know, so we'll see what Trump continues to pursue here, but this flood-the-zone strategy can really have two sides. You can confuse opponents, but it also makes you seem less focused on the issues that matter to people, and we know that the economy is what helped him over the finish line in the presidential election in the first place.
DETROW: Right. That is NPR senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro. Thanks a lot.
MONTANARO: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
