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WY National Guard Member Sarah Beckstrom Dies From Shooting; Speaker Johnson: "I'm Really Like A Mental Health Counselor"; Congress Members Lament Stalls In Progress And Action; Walter Isaacson One-On- One About Declaration Of Independence. Aired 12:30-1p ET

Aired November 28, 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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[12:30:38]

MANU RAJU, CNN ANCHOR: Sarah Beckstrom was only 20 years old when she was assigned to D.C. as a member of the West Virginia National Guard. On Thanksgiving Eve, she was gunned down near the White House and later died from her injuries.

CNN's Gabe Cohen is in West Virginia. Gabe, you were able to speak with some of her loved ones. What did they tell you?

GABE COHEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Manu, I did. And first, I want to paint a picture of where we are. This is Webster Springs. This is the small town where Sarah grew up. This is where she spent so many formative years.

In fact, I want to show you here, we're looking around this corner at, one of the few businesses here on the main street, this custard stand. This is where she worked in high school. I was just in there talking to folks who said they have nothing but warm, positive memories about Sarah.

And as you mentioned, I spoke with her longtime boyfriend of six years. They had just split about a month ago. But he, along with so many in this community, experiencing immense grief today and over the past couple of days. Here's a little bit of what he told me.

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ADAM CARR, SARAH BECKSTROM'S FORMER BOYFRIEND: She is super kind hearted, super sweet.

COHEN: So what have you been feeling the last two days?

CARR: A lot of just kind of hard to believe, more type. I don't know if it's really hit me the hardest yet. Kind of in shock. It's a little hard to grasp the whole concept that there ain't no more of her around.

Of course, she'll always be around, as you know, but hard to grasp she won't be back in town, won't see her around anymore. Can't just get a hold of her. It's really hard to grasp that. COHEN: I can hear the emotion in your voice just talking about that. What is that?

CARR: I mean, I still loved her. It was six years of our life together and some, and she was a huge role in my life and hers and we both grew up together.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COHEN: And Manu, I think that shock and disbelief is the overall sentiment here. I can't tell you the number of people who have come up to me, who I've talked to, who have said, yes, they babysat Sarah or vice versa, that she grew up with their kids. People who had such fond memories of her just experiencing that shock and grief today.

RAJU: Yes. Just so, so gutting. So tragic.

Gabe Cohen, thank you so much for bringing us that report and speaking to her loved ones. Really appreciate it.

RAJU: Come -- stay with us for more news after a quick break.

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[12:37:54]

RAJU: Congress returns Monday together for the first time since Republican Congressman Marjorie Taylor Greene announced her resignation. So what will the House actually do? That's a question that many frustrated Republicans have had after Speaker Mike Johnson kept this chamber out of session for nearly two months during the government shutdown fight.

Will Johnson have to fill his calendar with so-called therapy sessions with lawmakers? Well, he has suggested that. This is the Speaker himself speaking with Katie Miller, wife of one of President Trump's closest advisers, just earlier this week.

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REP. MIKE JOHNSON (D), HOUSE SPEAKER: And we have this joke that I'm not really a Speaker of the House, I'm really like a mental health counselor. And so, when the pressure gets turned up really high and the stakes are so high and the votes are so tight, I just try to sit down and listen to everybody and figure out what their primary need is and how we can meet that.

The greatest challenge of my day is trying to keep up because I miss -- I mean, literally hundreds of calls and text messages in a day. And I don't really -- the peril is, I don't know how important that was, what I missed.

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RAJU: The Speaker's strategy has been for so long, survive in advance.

TIA MITCHELL, WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF, ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION: Yes.

RAJU: Right? Like he's been trying to just get through the day, get through the day, but he's facing so much anger right now at this point in his tenure.

MITCHELL: Well, I think it's -- some of it is just the constraints of the job, the stresses of the job, the calls, the texts, wrangling, you know, 218 members and all their competing priorities, which makes me wonder, why is somebody not helping him screen his calls and texts? I mean, I feel like there should be some assistance there.

But also some of this is self-created. The fact that he's decided to kind of cede a lot of authority and focus and motivation in prioritizing to Donald Trump, which has frustrated a lot of his members. The decision he made to keep the House out of session, the entire government shutdown, again, that frustrated a lot of members. Most of them didn't go public, not like Marjorie Taylor Greene, but a lot of them privately have been just as frustrated with some of his decisions.

RAJU: Yes, to that point, this is the calendar, the Congress -- the House calendar. As you can see on your screen there, the days in white are -- they don't have a red box around them, are the days they were not in session. They were -- September 19th was the last time they voted in the House.

[12:40:13]

They didn't return until November 13th. That's when the government was reopened. Johnson said he was doing that to pressure Democrats in the Senate to vote for their bill to reopen the government. And then they were out during -- they were out -- they were back last week. They were out this week. They returned next week.

But the concern that I hear from Republicans and -- is that they have to drive to an agenda. What is the agenda right now that they are trying to pass to campaign on next year? When you're not in session, you're not passing an agenda. You're not passing on bills. You're not doing things that you can campaign on.

DAVID WEIGEL, POLITICS REPORTER, SEMAFOR: Oh, it is outsourced, as you were saying, to Donald Trump. You were talking about Tennessee. The way that Republicans campaign is just -- is not to say, I'm going to go to Washington to work with Republicans or work with Mike Johnson, it's I'm going there to help Donald Trump.

So the agenda will be what the White House says it was. They had a lot of running room this year because Democrats did not have a good response. And they still don't have what they often put together in an election year, which is here's a 6-point plan of 80 percent issues that we're going to pass when we get there.

They have gotten -- we saw in the polling, we saw in some of these election results, they did get weaker over the shutdown period. They still have not recovered the ground they had before that. And Democrats did find this affordability message. So I'm struck looking at all the members of Congress running for governor. On the agenda that they passed last year, they've not really been mentioning what they did in Congress over the last year. They're certainly not mentioning what they'd like to do for you, the voter in the next. It is down to what Trump says.

And they have to -- you saw this with Elise Stefanik and --

RAJU: Yes.

WEIGEL: -- Mamdani. You have to react to what he does in real time. What Mike Johnson says is almost immaterial.

RAJU: Johnson will say, look, they had a historic run in the first six, seven months. They passed the Big Beautiful Bill, is a massive bill that deals with, you know, a lot of different issues. But they have not really spent a lot of time trying to sell it.

WEIGEL: No.

RAJU: I mean, Trump -- where's Trump trying to sell this bill that they've now rebranded in the House Republican Conference, not calling it the Big Beautiful Bill, calling it working families tax cut bill. But Trump is not doing -- not going on the campaign selling this huge achievement.

TAMARA KEITH, WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT, NPR: You know, it is a remarkable thing about Trump's second first term is that he simply is not selling his policies in the way he did the first time around. He hasn't had a domestic travel agenda. He's not doing rallies.

I mean, a defining characteristic of his first time in office is that he was always doing rallies. He was always outselling. And he simply hasn't been doing that. He's been focused on foreign policy. He's been going to summits and trying to get a Nobel Peace Prize, and he hasn't been selling his agenda.

Now, a White House official I spoke to said that will change. I said when? Soon, in the New Year? I guess maybe that's what we're getting to at this point because it's already basically December.

So I think that they're aware at the White House that they need to do more selling, but it's just not clear when and how that's going to happen. And as you say, the President one day, he's like, it's the One Big Beautiful Bill. Then he's like, it's the Great Big Beautiful Bill. Oh, that name didn't really tell people what it is.

RAJU: Yes.

KEITH: We need a different name. I mean, I'm having flashbacks to the Biden year.

RAJU: Yes. I was about to say this was like Biden in reverse because --

KEITH: Yes. RAJU: -- the Democrats are complaining that Biden was not selling the agenda. This is what Marjorie Taylor Greene just posted today on X. She said, "One of the worst mistakes you can ever make is over promise and under deliver. It will leave people furious to the point that they won't even appreciate the good things they received. Big promises have and still are being made."

MITCHELL: Sounds like she's talking to President Trump. And quite frankly, this is what she has been saying for months, that there are Republican voters who are disappointed with Trump's return to the White House because he's not making good on the things he campaigned on.

And again, we've seen the White House blame Biden. They still blame Biden. We've seen them blame immigrants. They're still blaming immigrants. But at what point does the buck have to stop President Trump? You talk about the Big Beautiful Bill. One of the reasons I think he's not talking about it as much is because it's not very popular --

RAJU: Yes.

MITCHELL: -- among voters because it didn't do a lot in the short term. It didn't really do much in the short term. And some of the things that they say are coming, you know, remain to be seen whether it's going to pay off or not.

RAJU: And whether people actually feel it, which actually is the big question as we head into the midterms.

All right. Next, what is the greatest sentence ever written? Well, our next guest wrote a whole book that says the sentence, he says, change the world.

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[12:49:02]

RAJU: Fame biographer Walter Isaacson has written an entire book on one sentence from the Declaration of Independence that he says changed the world. Dana Bash sat down with Isaacson to talk about his book, "The Greatest Sentence Ever Written."

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DANA BASH, CNN ANCHOR: "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Those thirty five words from the Declaration of Independence are the subject of my guest's newest book, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written."

Biographer extraordinaire, former editor of Time magazine, and of course, our former boss here at CNN, Walter Isaacson is with me. Thank you so much for being here.

WALTER ISAACSON, AUTHOR, "THE GREATEST SENTENCE EVER WRITTEN": And Dana, glad to be with you.

BASH: I mean, I have to say it's nice to pick up one -- or it's interesting, not nice. It's interesting to pick up one of your books and not have it be a workout. We'll just --

[12:50:01]

ISAACSON: Well, this one is supposed to be like Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" (INAUDIBLE).

BASH: That's what I was thinking.

ISAACSON: We're going to rally around our birthday, the 250th. And so this is like a 50 or 60-page book that just looks at our shared values.

BASH: OK, so Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, just to name a few, what is it about this sentence? I mean, you wrote extraordinary biographies of all those people. This is a sentence that you are writing about and exploring. We know how important the sentences, but what made you say, oh, I'm going to dig in on this?

ISAACSON: Well, first of all, I wanted to make sure that in this time of turmoil and divisiveness, we remember we do have a common mission statement that we all pretty much agree to. And maybe we could have a good 250th birthday if we'd all go back to appreciating that sentence.

But to put it into the context of the people you mentioned, I've always been interested in innovation. And you want to say what's the most important innovation maybe in the past half millennium? It's a notion of a nation where rights come from the consent of the governed rather than the divine right of kings.

And individual rights are respected. But we also come together to have a common ground. That was a new type of nation, a democracy based on individual rights. And, boy, that's probably the most important political innovation you can think of.

BASH: It really is something that we take for granted now. And it's something that is so basic, but it didn't exist in the way -- anywhere near the way that it does in this country or other countries until that sentence was written and the war came after that.

I do want to ask about the word men and the fact that it's men. And this sentence deliberately excludes women, slaves, indigenous people. How do you reconcile this greatest sentence with the fact that it just said men?

ISAACSON: Well, it's an aspirational sentence that was definitely not true about the time they wrote it. And sometimes you may think, well, man -- all men, that just means all humankind or whatever. No, they pretty specifically when Abigail Adams wrote her husband John and said, remember, the ladies don't deprive of us, of our rights. He said, no, no, we're not going to give up our masculine powers. And so they did not include slaves, indigenous people and women. But if you read Jefferson's original draft, which is in my book, even though he owned slaves, even though he enslaved 400 people, including somebody who was in that room, Robert Hemmings, his young valet, his younger sister would become Jefferson's mistress in this most complicated of things.

And Jefferson knew that slavery was abhorrent, but we create a country in which it's up to the rest of us for 250 years to try to live up to that mission statement, not say we've achieved it. And fourscore and seven years after they wrote that sentence is when Lincoln stands at the Gettysburg Cemetery and invokes a sentence saying a new type of nation conceived in liberty, dedicated to the proposition of all men are created equal.

And he's burying more than a thousand people who fought to make that sentence expand. And that's what we've had to try to do in fits and starts as a country.

BASH: Yes. Took about 50 more years, give or take --

ISAACSON: For women.

BASH: For women.

ISAACSON: Yes.

BASH: But Benjamin Franklin, again, as I mentioned, he's another one of -- or he is one of the people who you've written a spectacular biography about. You note in your book that he said, quote, "Compromisers may not make great heroes, but they do make great democracies." What a great sentence.

ISAACSON: You know, we've lost the art of the compromise. Franklin was a scientist. Jefferson was a scientist. We could actually -- unfortunately, I think, we have approximately zero scientists if you don't count medical doctors in governance today. But what you know when you study Newton like they did is how you have contending forces, but you can bring them into equilibrium.

You can figure out the balance. So, as Franklin said, when we were trying to make a joint of wood and it didn't quite hold together, you'd take from one side and take from the other. And you could have, in this case, a constitution that would hold together.

I think there are many things we've lost that the founders understood. But the most important is that it's not all or nothing. It's not some algorithm that sends you one way or the other down a rabbit hole. It's how do you balance different values.

BASH: I mean, I'm just as -- I'm listening to you talk about them as all -- or many of them as scientists and innovators. I was thinking exactly about the algorithm and wondering how they would use their expertise to try to get rid of that or at least change it so that --

[12:55:07] ISAACSON: You know, I think Benjamin Franklin would be able to create an algorithm for social media that didn't immediately say, oh, this person like something. Tucker Carlson said, I'll send them down this rabbit hole --

BASH: Yes.

ISAACSON: -- and this one down that rabbit hole. He would have said, hey, we can invent some form of social media that tries to figure out the consensus based on all of our values.

BASH: Yes.

ISAACSON: Because, as he said, when they signed that declaration, John Hancock wrote, you know, his big handwriting and said, with the forces seeking to divide us, we must hang together. And Franklin said, yes, assuredly, we must hang together. Otherwise, we're going to all hang separately.

BASH: Yes, I think that the innovators right now know how to do it. They just don't want to. But that's a whole other -- go ahead.

ISAACSON: Yes --

BASH: Real quick.

ISAACSON: -- I guess the business model is not --

BASH: Exactly.

ISAACSON: -- exactly geared to it, but we should be geared to it.

BASH: Amen to that.

Walter, it is always good to see you. Congratulations on this book, "The Greatest Sentence Ever Written." Thanks, Walter.

ISAACSON: Thank you, Dana.

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RAJU: All right, thanks for joining Inside Politics. And if you want more Inside Politics, join me Sunday at 8:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. Eastern. Aftyn Behn, the Democrat running in the Tennessee special election will join me live.

More CNN after this short break.

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