SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Today at the White House, President Trump touted his recent efforts to remake the federal government, including calling on federal workers to return to the office. He also defended his administration's attempt to pause and review federal loans and grants.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We are merely looking at parts of the big bureaucracy where there has been tremendous waste and fraud and abuse.
DETROW: Mara Liasson joins us from the White House to parse through the administration's moves today. Hey, Mara.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Hi, Scott.
DETROW: All day, there was so much confusion about whether this freeze was unfrozen, about the state of scores of federally funded programs. There were conflicting messages from the administration, minute to minute. But what was the bigger political picture here?
LIASSON: The bigger political picture is that the White House had put a temporary but very broad freeze on federal spending, and they were challenged in court, and a judge put a pause on Donald Trump's spending pause, and it wasn't clear what exactly it was going to impact. But what the White House says now is, just because this broad freeze has been rescinded, it doesn't mean that the president isn't still going to try to cut federal spending.
The bigger debate is about Donald Trump's very expansive - some people would say authoritarian - view of presidential power. He doesn't believe the presidency should be constrained by constitutional checks and balances, including those in Article 1 that says Congress gets to decide how money should be raised and spent. And those clashes are going to continue because he believes that some of the checks and balances on presidential power, like the impoundment law that says presidents can't not spend money that Congress has voted to spend - he believes that's unconstitutional.
DETROW: And that, of course, would be a fundamentally different approach to federal governing than we've seen.
LIASSON: Fundamentally different, yeah.
DETROW: Like we mentioned, the president did address all of this today. He was speaking at the signing of immigration legislation at the White House. Tell us about that event.
LIASSON: Right. He signed a bill that fulfills his promise to prioritize cracking down on illegal immigration. It expands the scope of who can be arrested, detained and deported. It passed with bipartisan support. Democrats, including President Biden, came very late to understand how important border security was to voters. The law is named for Laken Riley, a young woman who was killed by an immigrant in the United States without legal status.
And this really is Trump's most original theme. Ever since he rode down the golden escalator in 2015, talking about Mexico sending rapists, he has surrounded himself with the families of people who've been harmed by immigrants without legal status. And this is an issue that he really won in the 2024 election. The majority of people agree with him that immigrants who commit crimes should be deported.
DETROW: Let's go back to this funding freeze. What comes next, the way that Trump is talking about that? We have all of that confusion. You have the halt put in place by the federal judge. The administration seems to walk it back - does walk it back today, for now at least. Still, though, would you call today a political success for Trump?
LIASSON: Absolutely. He also announced, by the way, he made some news. He says he's asking the military to prepare a 30,000-bed detention center at Guantanamo Bay to house migrants who are being deported. But this was a real Trump day, all the familiar themes. He's in perpetual campaign mode. He started out his remarks with a lot of false statements. He said that he won the election by millions and millions of votes. Actually, he won by 1.5 million.
He had many, many negative things to say about federal workers. He says, most of the time they're not working. He said most of them have other jobs. He says most of them haven't been in the office for years, they haven't worked. So these are - you know, faceless federal bureaucrats and people here without legal status are easy to demonize. And I think he would say, I was elected as a disruptor. I said I'd deport a lot of immigrants, and I am. I said I would cut the federal workforce, and I'm doing that, too. And I think he would consider this very, very successful.
DETROW: That's NPR's senior national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Mara, always good to talk to you.
LIASSON: Thanks. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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