On this week’s edition of “The Signal Sitdown,” Bradley Devlin speaks with Max Primorac, former acting chief operating officer at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), under the first Trump administration. As chief operating officer, Primorac saw firsthand how U.S. taxpayers unwittingly fund a litany of leftwing causes at home and abroad.

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Recovery and rebuilding efforts continue across the southeastern United States in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene’s devastation last September. In the break-neck pace of the newscycle since the general election campaigns, one of the most under-covered stories from 2024 is how the Biden administration withheld desperately needed hurricane aid from conservative citizens impacted by the hurricane. Freshman Rep. Mark Harris, R-N.C., has been deeply involved in recovery efforts and recently visited impacted North Carolina communities with President Donald Trump. Harris joined The Signal Sitdown this week to provide an update on how Trump and Republicans are trying to rectify the wrongs done to hurricane victims by the Biden administration.

As for, “where do things stand now, they've got a long ways to go,” Harris told me. But “?the American people have been doing a great job, I feel like, of stepping up and helping. People literally came in from all over the country, offering aid, offering help.”

Without the generous aid and hard work from private citizens, Harris suggested things in western North Carolina would be much worse because of the “nightmare” response from FEMA and the Biden administration.

“[?The] corruption that was uncovered and was exposed really began to bring things to light,” Harris said. “For the federal government, through FEMA in this particular case, to have been so corrupted to avoid helping those who were perceived to have conservative values or even to support President Trump in the upcoming election—that's almost criminal.”

Other reports have uncovered that FEMA, under the Biden administration, had spent millions on housing migrants in hotels throughout the country, rather than having that money ready for natural disaster aid.

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The full account of events that culminated in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy has been kept hidden from the American public for over 60 years. Now, however, President Donald Trump is on the verge of declassifying what other administrations—even his own previous administration—refused or declined to make public. Not only has Trump promised to declassify documents pertaining to the JFK assassination, but also the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. 

Craig Iffland is an independent researcher with a Ph.D. in Moral Theology from Notre Dame. He is more knowledgeable about the JFK assassination, what we know and what we don’t yet know, than anyone I’ve ever met. Daily Signal readers may have become acquainted with Iffland by reading a recently-published Daily Signal article titled, “Here’s How We Find Out Who Killed JFK.” This week, he joins me on The Signal Sitdown to not only discuss Trump’s effort to bring transparency to the assassination attempts but also revisit what happened on Nov. 22, 1963 and the years leading up to that fateful day.

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The budget reconciliation process stands as President Donald Trump's and congressional Republicans’ best—and likely only—hope to pass their agenda through Congress.

While this policymaking mechanism has become more well-known in recent years because recent presidents have used it to get their policies through Congress, the budget reconciliation process is difficult to untangle—even for the seasoned Washington insider.

Budget reconciliation, however, does not evade the understanding of Richard Stern, the director of the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget at The Heritage Foundation. Stern joined me this week on “The Signal Sitdown” to discuss the players, procedures, and policy options on the table as Republicans consider their legislative path forward.

Reconciliation, “is the one shot we have to really get all these things done,” Stern told me. “Really, almost all of the agenda can and should be in this bill.”

“That's both border security, its interior immigration enforcement, deportations, but it's also permitting reform, regulatory reform, deregulation, unleashing our energy resources. We could go after the deep state. We could dismantle the deep state if we really wanted to,” Stern said of what could be accomplished in budget reconciliation.

Though there are limitations imposed on what can be done through budget reconciliation, Stern suggested Republicans can go big on it because the Senate can make changes to the rules that govern the reconciliation process—and some of those rules are in dire need of reform.

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“Energy security is national security.”

If you spend enough time with Rep. August Pfluger, you might get tired of hearing him repeat those words.

The Texas congressman and new Republican Study Committee chairman would be the first to say that if you aren’t tired of hearing it, Republicans haven’t been saying it enough. 

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Rep. Ralph Norman was on the House floor Jan. 3 when Rep. Nancy Mace, a fellow South Carolina Republican, phone in hand, told him that President-elect Donald Trump wanted to speak with him. Norman had just voted for Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, to become speaker of the House, rather than Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La.

For this week’s episode of “The Signal Sitdown,” Norman joins Daily Signal Politics Editor Bradley Devlin to explain why he initially voted against giving Johnson a second term as speaker, to share the inside story on how he went from a “no” to a “yes” on Johnson, and to pull back the curtain on an exclusive meeting Trump held with House conservatives at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, on Jan. 11.

“I had one chance when we voted for the speaker to use my one vote out of 435 the way I thought it should be used, and I voted against [Johnson]. I voted for Jim Jordan,” Norman said.

“Nancy Mace handed me the phone,” Norman recalled. “She said, ‘the president wants to talk to you.’”

The first thing Trump told Norman? “‘You're interrupting my golf game,’” the South Carolina lawmaker said with a smile. “I said, ‘Well, Mr. President, I hate to be doing that.'”

“‘Mike's the only one that can win it. Jordan can't win it,’” Trump said in Norman’s retelling, “‘I love Jim Jordan more than you do.’”

“I said, ‘Mr. President, I get that, but you need to be calling Mike Johnson and going over where is he going to take a stand on [budget] offsets,” Norman claimed. “And that's why we've got the $38 trillion in debt.”

Trump agreed Johnson and his House objectors should meet. In a side room, Norman, Johnson, and others huddled around the phone with Trump on speaker.

“I said, ‘Mike, are you going to not put any more suspension votes up where more Democrats vote for it than Republicans?'” Norman recalled. “'Before you spend another dollar, are you going to have it offset with cuts?'”

“After we talked back and forth, he said, ‘Yes.’” Norman claimed. “He said, ‘I will do that, and if I don't, you can put me out,’” essentially promising to make good on his promises to conservatives or suffer going the way of his predecessor, former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif.

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The Republican-controlled Congress has a monumental task ahead of them: Passing the agenda that elected President-elect Donald Trump and gave Republicans control of both the House and Senate. It will be trial by fire for the newest members of the Republican House like Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas.

This week on The Signal Sitdown, politics editor Bradley Devlin interviews the newly-minted Congressman. Gill gives us an inside look into how new members of Congress go about setting up their office and getting up to speed on the legislature’s rules and procedures. All the while, these new members are posed to play important roles in the House Republican conference’s dynamics and passing the Trump agenda.

“Everybody recognizes President Trump's leadership, and he's got the ability to sort of bring people in line—to put it nicely—in a way that I don't think our party has had in decades, if ever,” Gill said of the Republican trifecta.

“I think we all recognize this is his mandate,” Gill continued. “We have a majority in the house because of President Trump, not because of anybody else. We have a majority in the Senate because of President Trump. So that is the vision that President Trump has cast for the party, which is an America first agenda. That’s what we're going to be focused on passing.”

With slim majorities, Republicans in Congress will have to pass large swaths of this agenda through a process called budget reconciliation. Reconciliation is exempt from the 60-vote cloture threshold in the Senate, but it also to a certain degree limits what can be included in the budget reconciliation legislation.

The razor-thin majority in the House makes the path to success even more narrow and marred with potential pitfalls. House Speaker Mike Johnson is meant to guide his energetic and rambunctious Republican conference down this path.

“There is no harder job in politics than being a Republican Speaker of the House,” Gill claimed.

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A sweeping election victory on Nov. 5 means Republicans will have control of the House, Senate, and the White House come January. Capturing this trifecta, however, was just the beginning of conservatives’ fight to save the country. 

Now comes the much harder task: conservatives actually have to govern. Republicans, animated by President-elect Donald Trump’s winning agenda, will have to work at record pace to get the changes the American people want through the slow-turning gears of Washington, D.C. 

To preview the incoming Congress, I spoke to Ryan Walker, executive vice president of Heritage Action for America, on this week’s episode of “The Signal Sitdown.” Walker has nearly a decade of experience working for the House of Representatives under his belt and is now tasked with ensuring conservative grassroots priorities are attended to on Capitol Hill.

While Republicans have a strong majority in the Senate, it is nowhere near the 60 votes needed to overcome the Senate filibuster. Nevertheless, there are some mechanisms that exist for the Senate to circumvent the filibuster and pass their agenda with a simple majority vote in the upper chamber. And Republicans are planning to put one of these mechanisms, budget reconciliation, to use to pass large portions of Trump’s agenda.

In this upcoming budget reconciliation process, Walker told me that “the American people have demanded that [Congress] go big.”

“[The American people] don't just want a bill dealing with tax reform,” Walker continued. “They want substantial change to the way the government functions. They want the border closed. They want inflation to come down. They want crime rates to drop. They want folks to start acting in a way that is not weaponizing government agencies against the people. They want spying on American citizens to stop. They want their votes to count and illegals to not be allowed to vote in federal elections or even state and local elections.”

To no surprise, the American people actually want the policies they voted for in November to be enacted, Walker suggested. “Regardless of which strategy,” Republicans in Congress go with, Walker said, “it needs to be a big and massive piece of policy change.”

#dailysignal #congress #democrats #Republicans #mikejohnson

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Shortly after President-elect Donald Trump announced his 2024 presidential bid, the former and now future president released some preliminary policy objectives. Among them, Trump promised that, if put back in office, his administration would undertake efforts to get rid of ugly public buildings and beautify American cities. This week on The Signal Sitdown, my guest was someone who can, and already has in the previous Trump administration, help the next president deliver on his promise to make America beautiful again.

Justin Shubow is the president of the National Civic Art Society, a nonprofit that promotes the revitalization of classical architecture and art in public works. Shubow previously served on Trump’s U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. In a recent op-ed for the Wall Street Journal by Intercollegiate Studies Institute President Johnny Burtka, Shubow was floated as someone who could play a big role in Trump’s beautification agenda.

While some conservatives wish the federal government would mostly get out of the architecture business, Shubow told me the construction of public buildings is not just inevitable but worthy of more conservative resources. “Great architecture can inspire people to be better people, to be patriots, to be better citizens,” Shubow said. When conservatives aren’t involved in this process, public architecture and art “can be subversive and be demoralizing.”

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This week on “The Signal Sitdown,” Bradley discusses the latest from Ukraine and Syria with Kelley Vlahos, editorial director at Responsible Statecraft.

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