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Inside Politics
Trump Expected To Sign Order Banning Transgender Service Members; Powerful New Chinese AI Technology Shocks Experts, Disrupts Markets; Today: World Marks 80 Years Since Auschwitz Liberation; Elon Musk To Germany's Far-Right Party: Move Beyond "Past Guilt". Aired 12:30-1p ET
Aired January 27, 2025 - 12:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
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[12:32:23]
DANA BASH, CNN ANCHOR: Newly sworn in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reported for duty at the Pentagon this morning.
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PETE HEGSETH, DEFENSE SECRETARY: The lawful orders of the President of the United States will be executed inside this Defense Department swiftly and without excuse.
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BASH: The lawful orders he mentioned include a number of executive orders President Trump is set to sign today that could reshape the American military. CNN's Natasha Bertrand is here with the details. Natasha?
NATASHA BERTRAND, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY REPORTER: Dana, Secretary Hegseth, he did seem to confirm earlier today when he arrived at the Pentagon that Trump would be signing these executive orders that could really dramatically reshape the military. Of course, it remains to be seen how exactly the Defense Department is going to actually implement them.
But these orders include, we are told, a new ban on transgender service members, a complete gutting of DEI programs across the military, as well as the reinstatement of service members with back pay who were discharged for refusing to get the COVID vaccines back in 2021.
Now, we should note that for that COVID vaccine mandate, that was actually repealed back in 2023, and service members could rejoin the military who did not have the COVID vaccine, and very few actually chose to rejoin after that. It was a couple dozen, less than 100, that chose to rejoin.
Now it seems as though the change here is going to be that they will get back pay, and they will also be reverted back to their full rank that they had when they were first ejected from the military. So that is a significant development here, depending, of course, on how the U.S. military carries out this executive order.
But then there is also, of course, the ban on transgender service members. And that could be really significant because there are currently over 14,000 transgender service members in the U.S. military. And it's unclear whether or not it is going to involve actually discharging currently serving transgender service members, or whether there will be an exception of sorts carved out for them.
But again, all of this is really up to DOD now and Secretary Hegseth to figure out how to implement based on the president's executive orders.
BASH: 14,000, that is a big number. Thank you so much, Natasha. I appreciate that reporting.
Up next, the Nasdaq is in free fall today after a Chinese company unveiled a powerful new A.I. chatbot. It is spooking Wall Street and it's spooking Washington, too. Stay with us.
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[12:39:22]
BASH: A powerful new Chinese AI tool is sending shockwaves from Silicon Valley to Wall Street to here in Washington, especially on Capitol Hill. The Chinese startup is called DeepSeek, and it says it spent less than $6 million to create its new AI model, challenging the notion that it takes hundreds of millions of dollars and sophisticated chips to develop AI products.
Now, the Nasdaq sees this and is clearly not happy. It's down more than 3 percent today. And Nvidia, which makes the chips that power AI, is down more than 15 percent.
[12:40:00]
My smart panel is back here. And, you know, this is happening with the backdrop of Donald Trump, a, inviting all of these tech leaders to not only to his inauguration and all the events around it, but prime seer seating on display with all of these -- there you see it -- all of these tech CEOs not pictured here, but in attendance.
Sam Altman with OpenAI and also the CEO of Nvidia, which I just talked about. And it also comes on the backdrop of among the first things that Trump did was $500 billion for AI infrastructure. And so, here you have this clear commitment when he's talking about the golden age of America, he's focused a lot on tech, on innovation, on AI.
And then it's clearly not an accident that China not only put out there that they have this product put out there, how little it costs relatively to make and put out all of the intricate details of how they did it.
JEFF ZELENY, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: Without question. And this is the second week of the Trump presidency. So I think we'll see many reality checks from the world sort of responding. And I think you're right, on the first full day on Tuesday afternoon, I was at the White House, President Trump standing in the Roosevelt Room with these three leaders and the stock prices of Oracle and SoftBank also plummeting today because of this.
So this is just an example of the competition is at an entirely new level here. And it's not going to be enough for the President and the administration just to simply tout this here. This is, you know, might be a game changer.
So, a challenge for him that we've not heard the White House obviously say anything about this. I'm not sure it's something that he understands. But the question is, will there be people in the government? And he does have an envoy or a special adviser for this type of thing. But we will see sort of where it goes from here. But a huge shock for the market.
BASH: I just want to correct one thing I said. The Nvidia CEO was not at the inauguration.
ZELENY: Right.
BASH: But all the other men were there. What's your take on this? And, you know, obviously, we are not tech people, but we are people who are knee deep in covering the politics of this. And there's so many different layers that will have an impact.
One of which I mentioned before, which is sort of the competitive side of this. Then the other is the national security concerns, which we have seen play out, which are still playing out with TikTok, which became so popular in the U.S. despite having American made competitors.
But American consumers tend to prefer TikTok. And I'm sure there are a lot of people who are worried that this AI company, DeepSeek, will maybe follow TikTok.
Yes, there's a lot of layers here with, of course, our caveat that -- I'm not a technology expert, AI expert, but I will say from a policy perspective, Congress has been tinkering and talking about how to deal with AI for several years now. It really escalated in the last couple of years.
And there was this multi-pronged approach of not only funding artificial intelligence to ensure that the U.S. continues to be the leader in it, but also when Democrats controlled the Senate under Chuck Schumer, it was also to put guardrails and try to find out the right way to regulate AI as well.
We've seen a shift in the Trump administration where the guardrails, it seems as how they're talking, guardrails don't matter as much as long as they are industry leaders. This is going to be a huge job for Congress to figure out alongside the president and what they're able to do.
BASH: In 28 seconds. LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Can they even reach an agreement? No, I just thought it was interesting that Elon Musk came out and basically downplayed, cast doubt on what DeepSeek is saying about their capabilities. And, of course, he's going to be a factor in this as he's expected to have Donald Trump's right ear.
BASH: Yes. He has right, left, all ears.
Coming up, Never Again is now. We're going to recognize International Holocaust Remembrance Day after a break.
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JONA LAKS, HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR: What I felt when I came back, I came back, I just said to myself, I really need to tell people, need to know. They won't believe because I myself cannot believe that that happened. As time passes over, things are being forgotten. The world hasn't learned its lessons from what happened and what was done.
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BASH: That was 94-year-old Jona Laks, a Holocaust survivor who returned to Auschwitz today, 80 years after she was liberated from the horrors of that Nazi concentration camp. Between 1940 and 1945, approximately 1.1 million people were murdered there.
And on this International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I'm joined by Deborah Lipstadt, she is not only one of the world's foremost experts on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, until last week she was America's special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism.
Thank you so much for being here.
DEBORAH LIPSTADT, MODERN JEWISH HISTORY & HOLOCAUST STUDIES PROFESSOR, EMORY UNIVERSITY: Thank you.
BASH: It's an honor. You have worked your whole life tirelessly to combat hate against Jews. What did you make of what Jona said about the fact that she's worried the world hasn't learned?
[12:50:13]
LIPSTADT: I'm more worried now than if you had asked me this three, four years ago. What we've seen in the past couple of years, certainly since October 7th, but it was bad even before October 7th, is a tsunami of anti-Semitism. A tsunami of anti-Semitism.
And, in fact, I think over a year ago, you and I talked about this, I believe it was on air, about the normalization of anti-Semitism. How kids in middle school make anti-Semitic cracks. Where do they hear that? Where do they pick that up? It's sort of in the bloodstream that people are saying things that they never would have said before, and I'm quite concerned about that.
BASH: And you're very clear that this is not a far-political left issue, a far-political right issue. It's just an issue regardless of politics.
LIPSTADT: That's exactly right. I have friends on the left who see anti-Semitism on the right, and they're absolutely accurate with what they see. I have friends on the right who see it on the left, and they too are accurate. The problem is they don't often see it next to them.
And we have to be bipartisan or multi-partisan because it comes not just from the right and left, it comes from other areas as well. We've seen it from Islamists, extremists, et cetera. You've got to be willing to call it out irrespective of where it comes from.
BASH: And let's talk about what the -- it is. We've talked about this before, but it's important, particularly on this day, to reiterate that everybody knows now about conspiracies and how it can erode societies. Hate against Jews is, as you say, the original conspiracy --
LIPSTADT: Right.
BASH: -- in global culture. And you wrote a piece in The New York Times, and in part you say, "Those who adhere to this conspiracy -- who see power ceded, not to a legitimate government, but to a Jewish cabal -- have lost faith in the rule of law and are looking for someone or some group of people to blame.
They're willing to believe that their votes do not help them, their leaders do not represent them, and their institutions do not protect them. Their distorted worldview renders accountable, rules-based government an illusion."
LIPSTADT: That's right. If you believe -- see, anti-Semitism is -- acts like a prejudice, operates like a prejudice, like racism, homophobia, et cetera, et cetera. You know, a Jew does something right, oh, that's one of the good ones. A Jew does something wrong, oh, that's how Jews are.
But it has something unique. And one of the unique elements is this conspiracy-based notion that the Jews, small in number, are working to manipulate the world for their own benefit. And this has been a conspiracy that has existed over centuries.
And even though it can be shown to be absolutely absurd, I mean, it existed after World War II when Jews were -- as we saw now with Jona Laks, coming out of death camps with nothing. And you have this -- if you're adhered to this conspiracy theory, you feel, not only do I hate Jews, but I've got to stop them by any means necessary. And that's when it becomes really dangerous.
BASH: Let's go back to Germany for a second and talk about what happened and what has been happening with Elon Musk, arguably -- certainly the most -- the richest man in the world and now clearly one of the most powerful in a lot of ways. A lot of people made a lot out of the move that he made.
LIPSTADT: The hand motion.
BASH: The hand motion at a Trump event on Inauguration Day. What I want to focus on is what he said during a virtual appearance at a campaign event for Germany's far-right AFD party on Saturday. Listen to part of his message.
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ELON MUSK, CEO, TESLA MOTORS: And I think there's like, frankly, too much of a focus on past guilt and we need to move beyond that. People -- you know, children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents or even let alone their parents, their great-grandparents.
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LIPSTADT: You know, I don't -- his hand motion, I don't know what he meant. I know how it was interpreted by far-right neo-Nazi groups. But it's not a matter of guilt that a child born today in Germany -- a child born today in Germany is no more guilty than a Jewish child born today in the United States or anyplace else, but responsibility.
And what he is saying can easily be interpreted as forgive, forget, forget. We don't have to worry about it. The first sin is forgetting. When you forget what you've done wrong, then you're -- it's possible to slip into it again.
BASH: And you know more than anybody about the way that people talk and about the sort of politics in Europe, especially Germany. The fact that he gave this message to the far-right party, which, you know, there are various -- there's a spectrum inside that party, as with a lot of parties, but there are people who have --
LIPSTADT: Neo-Nazi --
BASH: -- Neo-Nazi tendencies who are --
LIPSTADT: And putting the neo is sort of kind.
[12:55:10]
You know, there are many people in that party with far-right, anti- Semitic, and by the way, also anti-Islam, anti-people of color, but certainly anti-Semitic views. And to give them an out, again, it's not guilt, it's responsibility --
BASH: It's not just out, it's support.
LIPSTADT: It's support. It's responsibility. You've got to take responsibility for what's happened in the past. My family wasn't here during the 19th century when there was slavery, but they came to this country quite a few years ago, but still we've benefited.
I bear responsibility for the wrongs of this country. The Holocaust, which was the decimation out of one of every three Jews in the world, is not something that should be diminished, forgotten, or set aside. Certainly not in Germany.
BASH: Ambassador Lipstadt, Professor Lipstadt, you have lots of titles. Thank you so much for being here.
LIPSTADT: Thank you very much.
BASH: Appreciate it.
Thank you for joining Inside Politics today. CNN News Central will start after a break.
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