BHS - 7A – The Trump Transition | History: First 100 Days in Oval Office

What can Trump do in one day? The history of ‘day one’ and the ‘first hundred days’ in the oval office. Inside the plan to reopen Three Mile Island’s nuclear plant.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM
six forty KAM six forty handle here on a Tuesday morning,
November the twelfth, and the Democrats are still reeling in
trying to figure out what the hell happened because it
wasn't a close win. Joe Biden won by a hair

(00:21):
in twenty twenty, Donald Trump won by a full head
of hair. Certainly not his head of hair, but a
full head of hair. There is no issue of the
Trump win. It was substantial. Was it a landslide it
was not. Was it a squeaker it was not. I
think the word substantial works here now. He has promised

(00:45):
to do a lot of things day one. A matter
of fact, a lot of presidents do. He hundreds of
promises during the campaign, including dozens of Day one a
lot of Day one stuff. At the top of the list,
closing the US border with Mexico, so mass deportations, increased
oil and gas production, retribution against political opponents. Those three

(01:09):
are the ones that are most likely to happen on
Day one. Certainly the border, I mean, there is no
issue about the border. And that's probably the I think
the most important thing to him as a matter of fact,
it was. And there were interviews where he said the
border is the most important part of his philosophy, dealing

(01:33):
with the border. And that's interesting because his advisor said, no, no, no,
the economy, and he said to his advisors, let me
tell you, I won on the border, and the border
is as important as the economy. Well, you know, the
guy succeeds, and his advisors telling him what to do

(01:53):
didn't work. So that is what he has promised. Now.
A lot of his proposals are going to hit California
you very hard. Why Well, because Trump hates California. And
if you're on the wrong end of Donald Trump and
he has any kind of power, he's going to hit
and hit hard. He tells you that you hit me,

(02:13):
I hit you back twice as hard. You don't vote
for me, I'm going to go right back at you.
You don't support me, I'm going back at you. You
go against me, I'm going back at you hard. And
that is what's happening to California. Matter of fact, salt
in which during Trump's first administration he pulled back the

(02:35):
he pulled back the amount of money we could deduct
for our property taxes, which used to be one hundred
percent down to ten percent. And that's because California has
a lot of wealthy people, and because our pricing of
our housing is so expensive. And the other thing is
because California is wealthy people, far more than Arkansas or Alabama.

(02:56):
Deducting state income tax used to be one hundred percent
off your Feds and the federal income tax, and he
changed that, where again it's only ten percent. It's over
ten thousand dollars. Oh it is Sorry, it was ten
thousand dollars each one, not ten percent. So Donald Trump,

(03:17):
President elect Trump has repeatedly promised to launch the biggest
deportation campaign in American history. Is that going to happen? Well,
let's start talking some practicality. I'm sure he's going to
make a move to do that. And here again, California
is going to be hit the hardest if in fact,
that happens. Why is that? And this comes from the

(03:38):
La Times. These figures. To expel every undocumented immigrant, every
illegal immigrant, would deprive California more than seven percent of
the workforce, potentially cripple agriculture and construction, divide families, disrupt communities,
According to the La Times, Now I'm going to bring
something here. You know, everybody he had harangues Donald Trump

(04:02):
for this or a lot of people in California. Look,
it's going to destroy our economy. Look it is going
to cripple agriculture. Look at our workforce, look at construction. Hey,
what are we doing advocating violating the law in the
first place? Is California's position is that we want illegal aliens,

(04:25):
we want a violation of the law, because we do
well with a violation of the law. And there's some
realities here. How many people who are here legally are
okay with picking strawberries? Not many. So there are two
points here. Number one, Yes, it would cripple our economy.

(04:46):
And two, what are we doing advocating the immigration of
illegal migrants? So that was sort of up in the air,
and I think both sides have a problem here or
looking at obstacles. Also, there is a practical problem. Eleven
million people. I'm going to start mass deportations the same day. Yeah,

(05:10):
we know they're going to be deportations. He has promised
the most sweeping deportations in the history of the United States,
some of the big ones during Reagan, with some big ones,
Obama were when numbers were very high deportations. But we're
talking about mass deportations programs. We go back to the
fifties with Dwight Eisenhower and that was a big one.

(05:33):
I think it was over two million deportations. Two million
people were deported who were here illegally. And just to
give you a quick lesson in political correctness, the official
government name of that program like app Operation Desert Storm,
Operation Desert Shield, you know those where we have these

(05:54):
names that the government comes up with the official name
of that deportation programs, Operation wetback. It's a different time,
It's a different place, isn't it. What's going to happen
day one? A lot of promises are being made by
President to be President elect Donald Trump. One of them

(06:16):
being probably the most important one in terms for him
is immigration boom, going to shut down the borders and
we're going to deport eleven million people day one. Well,
you know, obviously that's impractical, but he intends to do
as much as he can. And there may be a
debate in the new administration over how fast how sweeping.

(06:39):
Tom Homan, who is the forming former acting director of
ICE under Trump and now the new Czar of the
Border said in a sixty minute interview last week, it's
not going to be a mass sweep of neighborhoods. It's
not going to be building concentration camps. And I think
he'd have a hard time doing anything like that because

(07:01):
polls show most of us want tougher enforcement of immigration.
We're okay with that. I'm okay with that, but not
indiscriminate deportation, especially if they divide families, which happened the
first time around and was a political disaster for the
Trump administration. On the environmental side, he has plans and

(07:22):
he has said this. He has said at many rallies
Drill Baby, Drill, doesn't believe in climate change. He has
called it a hoax. Has never walked back from that.
He has plans, and he has the power to roll
back a lot of the environmental gains if you look
at them as gains. Day one, he's expected to open
more federal lands and offshore waters to oil and gas drilling.

(07:44):
Oil companies are thrilled with that one. He's also probably
going to ease restriction on the oil industries emissions of methane.
That's a big plus for them, and Joe Biden had
a pause on increasing with petroleum gas exports. He basically
put a moratorium on increasing the liquid petroleum gas exports,

(08:08):
and Trump's going to reverse that probably day one. Also,
looking at EV's, a lot of it has to do
with the fact that evs are promoted by Democrats. And
I don't know if Trump really believes evs are terrible.
I don't know, But there's no issues going to roll

(08:30):
back Biden's efforts to encourage the adoption of electric vehicles,
repeal federal subsidies for solar, wind, renewable energy park programs.
He just doesn't like them. He's an oil and gas guy. Also,
when you talk about alternative energy, guess where the heart
of alternative energy is. Why it's California. And so he's

(08:54):
not particularly happy with California, right, And there is no
way that to California is going to be fossil fuel
neutral by twenty thirty five, as Gavin Newsom has indicated,
there's no chance without federal money. Just can't happen. Later on,

(09:14):
I'm going to do a story about how we can't
do this without nukes, and I'll explain why. So you're
going to see permits slowing down for new offshore wind
energy project. Now this is I don't know if this
is a fact other than maybe it's a coincidental time wise.

(09:38):
But Trump really became a strong opponent of wind energy
ever since Scotland built a wind farm that spoiled the
view from one of his golf courses. And now does
that change anything? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, is
that just an attack on Trump? I don't know, But

(09:58):
he looks at his property and this again according to
interviews done by the La Times. Take that with whatever
you want. Also, he talked about tariffs, and this is
where a president can act almost immediately and has full
power to do so. He said last month, to me,
the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariffs. He

(10:19):
has proposed tariffs on at least ten percent of the
goods from every country, at least sixty percent, tariffs of
at least sixty percent on China, and as high as
two hundred percent on Mexico. Now there's a discussion about
that because here's what happens. Tariffs are basically taxes on imports,

(10:42):
and two things happen. They raise the prices because goods
become more expensive they raise the prices on what we buy,
and that pushes inflation. They also almost always prompt other
countries to retaliate by imposing their tariffs on our goods.
But China is already doing that. And this is where

(11:04):
President elect Trump is dead right. If we don't do that,
China is cleaning our clock on this stuff. And he's
the one that had the balls to say that's enough.
Other presidents didn't want to rattle that saper, and he says,
we're not going to have this anymore. And so is

(11:25):
there going to be a tariff war? Well, the reality
is is how do you undo a tariff war? Reciprocal?
That's it. You charge ten percent tariffs on our goods
going into your country and allow us to do it
freely and import or export our goods into your country,
and we will charge exactly the same the other way around.

(11:46):
China has been abusing that, even though it signed treaties
abusing that from day one. And then the retribution part.
Man he's threatened to prosecute Vice President Harris Adam Schiff
former US Representative Live Cheney. Here's one man that is

(12:07):
just woe. During his first term, he publicly demanded that
Attorney General William Barr arrest Biden, arrest former President Obama
and Hillary Clinton, who was Secretary of State at that time,
for what he claimed was a treasonous plot to spy
on his twenty sixteen campaign. That was treason and they

(12:30):
should be arrested. Barr just ignored it, didn't even discuss it,
just didn't pay attention. Now, he does have the power
to order the Justice Department to investigate. He absolutely does.
Even though there is a longstanding norm right where the

(12:51):
Justice Department is held at Bay there's a firewall between
the Justice Department and the White House. That's been the tradition.
You don't meddle. Well, he is going to meddle, and
he can meddle because that firewall is not protected by law.

(13:13):
It's simply been tradition, nothing more, nothing less. A lot
of presidents say, day one, what is going to happen? Well,
in reality, it's really not day one, because day one occasionally,
but it really is legitimately the first hundred days. That's
how presidencies are looked at, and the first one hundred

(13:37):
days has become an iconic time when a first term
president comes into office. By the way, just a little
bit of history where the one hundred day concept actually
came in. It refers to the period in eighteen fifteen
between Napoleon Bonapartes returned to Paris from his exile on

(14:00):
the island of Elba and his defeat at the Battle
of Waterloo, and that was one hundred days. So out
of that came sort of the concept of one hundred
days when you're dealing with a return. What happened King
Louis the eighteenth returns and anyway, so let me just

(14:20):
go on the first hundred days. In the US, it
really wasn't very important. No one paid attention until FDR
took office in nineteen thirty three, and he had a
day one. He shut down the banks for four days.
He had a banking holiday because people were making runs
on the bank and he says, we have to call
him down. And he's given the credit for stabilizing and

(14:44):
keeping the run on the banks from going crazy. Also,
he started his fireside chats, and boy, you talk about
a brilliant communicator on the radio. He would go, Hi,
this is Franklin Roosevelt, and I'm in front of the fireplace.
We're just talking. Of course, it was a room set
up and it was a full broadcast facility, but he

(15:06):
did it was a very friendly, almost family like ambience
to calm the country down. And he began rolling out
his programs. Fifteen major pieces of legislation in the first
one hundred days, and we're talking about the Civilian Conservation Corps,
the Work Progress Administration, all of the programs just keep

(15:30):
people working. Now, for those people that think FDR started
us on a road to socialism, he did. We turned
into a much more left wing government support government control
of our economy. But what you can't argue with is
he kept millions of people alive, putting them to work, producing,

(15:57):
not being paid very much, but enough to eat. Not
only was it construction, he had writers, he had filmmakers,
he had photographers, He had drama troops going around that
were paid for by the government. They were government employees.
So that first hundred days was absolutely extraordinary, and by

(16:18):
far most of the programs that have been created in
the first hundred days were FDR. But what he inherited
very few other presidents have. You can argue that Barack
Obama inherited something pretty crazy because we were going into
a free fall and you could also argue that Joe
Biden inherited craziness because COVID was going full blast and

(16:43):
he inherited that. So a little bit of history of
those first hundred days JFK eighty seven days into his presidency,
he ordered the Bay of Pigs invasion, which came very
close to destroying his presidency. The decision, the ordering of
the overthrow of the Castro government. The CIA set this

(17:04):
up really badly, I might add, and he was talked
into it by his Joint chiefs of staffs, the military guys,
and it was horrible and he came back and just
he admitted it. He just said, I blew it. That's
it goes. It was a horrible decision. Gerald Ford, within

(17:25):
the first one hundred days pardon Richard Nixon. And that
was the reason, by the way, I voted against Gerald Ford,
and I thought that cost him his presidency. And he
knew it that he was going to lose the next
election because of his pardoning of Richard Nixon. Today, it's
viewed as a very heroic act, saying, I know it's
going to cost me my election, but this is the

(17:47):
decision I'm going to make for the good of the country.
Liz Cheney feels the same way she got slaughtered in
her view that President Trump should not be president. The
biggest day ones Ronald Reagan. Boy, did he start off
with a bang. Remember the Iranian had the hostages. US
diplomats were being held hostage. And he made it really

(18:15):
clear to Ian. To Iran, Jimmy Carter was useless by
the way in terms of negotiating, And Jimmy Carter and
Ronald Reagan, prior to his being sworn in, made it
very clear to Iran, you do not want to screw
with me. You do not. The minute I become president
and those hostages are still there, you're in for a

(18:36):
world of hurt. And they understood that he was not
screwing around. So as he's being sworn in to the presidency,
the plane is taking off from the Iranian from Tehran
Airport with the hostages aboard. What were the most laws

(19:00):
passed during the first hundred days, Franklin Roosevelt. He was
able to pass. When I talk about the fifteen major programs,
he was able to pass seventy six programs. George Bush
the least, George W. Bush seven, Harry Truman fifty five.

(19:22):
During his first hundred days. This is after he was
elected president, not from the time he assumed the presidency
after the death of FDR. The foreign countries visited just
a little aside the most Barack Obama, the fewest, Dwight
Eisenheighers Eisenhower, JFK Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Donald Trump. All

(19:43):
are tied at zero. So are you going to see
Donald Trump? Probably he's going to visit a foreign country.
And then approval ratings, that gets really interesting. The highest
approval rating the first hundred days John F. Kennedy with
AD three. The lowest approval rating of any president during

(20:05):
the first hundred days Donald Trump between forty and forty
five percent. So, and I don't know why you even
deal with approval ratings. You've got four years of a presidency.
This is not England. We do not have a parliamentary
government where the government can fall any minute and a
new government has to be instituted. We'll see. And the

(20:30):
big question is not only does it matter the first
hundred days, but what's going to happen the first day
day one? Does the president have a little table there
where he starts signing directives literally after his hand goes
on the Bible and goes up in the year. All right,

(20:53):
let me tell you, let's talk a little bit about nukes. Now.
I'm a big fan of nukes, not just nuclear weapons
that could blow at cities, but civilian nuclear power, power plants,
and it has there's been a history there for a
real long time. I mean literally ever since the atomic
bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. And that

(21:17):
was the peaceful use of atomic power. I mean it
started literally right there. This was the future. This was
the future. And so we started building an atomic willing
reactors to create power. They are not weapons grade. The
way it works is power grade uranium is much much
less powerful or developed, if you will. The purity is

(21:43):
far less than weapons grade. So it's very different. And
so nuclear power started to be used in power plants
and ships, et cetera. And so we now have a
history and around the world a history of nukes. Very
big on nukes. It was growing like crazy, and then
what ended up happening, Churno Will happened shut everything down.

(22:07):
And then and then three Mile Island it was moving.
I had Three Mile Island happened in one of the
units A three mile island had a partial meltdown, shut
down everything. Okay, then we start coming back and people
realize that nuke power is pretty important stuff. Fukushima happened,
shut down everything. Now it's coming back, and here's why

(22:29):
it's coming back. One, you can't be one hundred percent safe.
You can be ninety nine point nine nine nine percent safe.
The problem is when that point zero zero zero one happens,
all hell breaks loose and the fallout, if you will,
is pretty extraordinary, and we are not going to make

(22:51):
it in terms of the climate change issue, which I
already think we've hit critical mass and we're over the edge.
But in terms of making us not relying on fossil fuels,
which of course is all the damage out there, We're
not going to make it without nuclear power just isn't
going to happen, which is why environmental so actually spit

(23:12):
on a split on this. Used to be everybody was
against dukes and then realized, Okay, maybe that's the only
answer is using nuclear energy. So I have always been
a fan of nuclear energy, especially going to what is
it the Mount Diabolou plant down in San Clementy, because

(23:33):
it looks like two giant breasts, and I just I
go past, I go, that's my idea of nuclear energy.
By the way, I think that's already been shut down.
That's been decommissioned, if I'm not mistaken, And power plants
are being decommissioned one after another. So now here's what
happened last year. There are a bunch of CEOs meeting

(23:54):
and Open AI co founder Sam Altman says, you know what,
there is so much need for electrical power. AI needs
so much need that frankly, some models they're gonna need
as much power as a large city. Well, they head
of Constellation Energy was there, and this guy and Constellation

(24:17):
Energy produces about a fifth of US nuclear power, and
his name is Joe Domingaz, and he says, wow, boy,
are these guys going to be in for a root
of awakening about how much power is actually going to
be available. So he goes back to Baltimore and thinks,
what if his company restarted the undamaged reactor at three
Mile Island, which has been shut down. Let's restart, not build,

(24:42):
restart those that are being decommissioned. And that's exactly what
is going on now' This was in Pennsylvania. And it's
no small deal. I mean, they're gonna spend one point
six billion dollars in bringing it up to up to par,
up to up to its ability to actually produce power

(25:02):
according to regulations. So now are they going to put
it on the open market? Why would you spend one
point six billion dollars on the guess that the energy
is going to be sold at a profit, particularly since
energy is cheaper now outside of the nuclear industry, Alternative
energy is cheaper. Coal fired plants are cheaper than nuclear energy.

(25:27):
So you know what the deal was cut. It was
Microsoft cut a deal with Constellation to supply all of
its power for twenty years at a price more so
than electrical power or than a gas powered plant or

(25:48):
alternative energy. And by the way, price wasn't a big
deal here. Microsoft really didn't care about price. I mean
a little bit, but that wasn't the negotiating point. You
know what the negotiating factor was here getting the power.
Because it looks like there's no other way that that
much power. These AI facilities demand so much power that

(26:13):
it needs a city's worth of power, and there is
no way at this point to connect the grid and
make it all happen without nuclear power plants because there
it's already connected. So the bottom line for Microsoft is
we need this more than negotiating the price of power.

(26:34):
I mean, they're not gonna get raped. But it's interesting
that when you see something on a twenty year power
deal that prices number three or number four in importance,
pretty impressive. KFIAM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.
You've been listening to the Bill Handle Show. Catch My
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(26:57):
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