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Today: CDC Advisers May Vote To Push Back Hepatitis B Shots; Trump To Host Peace Agreement Signing With African Leaders; Trump Adds His Name To U.S. Institute Of Peace; Trump To End Biden-Era Fuel Economy Standards For Cars. Aired 12:30-1p ET
Aired December 04, 2025 - 12:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[12:30:00]
PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN ANCHOR & CHIEF DOMESTIC CORRESPONDENT: -- to do their own things and just be scientists with no political influence and ensuring that they could control them in any way they wanted to. The wild card has been RFK Jr.
DANA BASH, CNN ANCHOR: Right.
MATTINGLY: And the people who were chuckled when Trump said, I'm just going to basically let him run wild over health. It's like, yes, well --
BASH: Well, the only --
MATTINGLY: -- it turns out he was serious.
BASH: He was. And the only reason RFK Jr. is HHS Secretary is because of Senator/Doctor -- Medical Doctor, Bill Cassidy. Here's what Bill Cassidy said on social media. "Aaron Siri is a trial attorney who makes his living suing vaccine manufacturers. He is presenting as if an expert on childhood vaccines. The ACIP is totally discredited. They are not protecting children."
Now, just by way of background, Aaron Siri served as Kennedy's personal lawyer during the presidential campaign. And he's handled several vaccine related cases, especially challenging vaccine requirements. And he is involved in what we're going to see today.
JAMIE GANGEL, CNN SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT: I would assume that Senator Dr. Cassidy may have some regrets about, you know, his position and his vote on RFK Jr. I still don't understand it because this was not a secret. RFK Jr.'s positions were knowable.
His cousin, Caroline Kennedy, came out and made this impassioned video pleading with senators, laying it out, asking them not not to testify. So, you know, better late than never, maybe. But here we are.
BASH: Well, the answer to why was the pressure he was getting from his constituents and from MAHA, the movement, Make America Healthy Again, that was pushing for RFK Jr.'s nomination and, of course, confirmation.
Axios has a story about the MAHA world thrilled with RFK Jr.'s latest vaccine changes. They're leaning strongly into the argument that success in next year's midterms is dependent on pleasing its constituents, but polling suggests that they're going too far.
TYLER PAGER, WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT, THE NEW YORK TIMES: Well, and I think one of the things to flash back to is when the President announced his Cabinet selection. He was at a different place politically than he is at now. And so the unrelenting --
BASH: Juncture (ph).
PAGER: He will -- he was stronger then than he is now, for sure. And so the unrelenting political pressure that some of these senators were under made it so that they felt it was an untenable situation but to go forward with these nominees.
I think now they are seeing, as you just, you know, flash that -- the graphic there, the polling is suggesting a different point for Republicans. And there's deep fears within the entire party about the midterm elections. And the President's oftentimes midterm elections are referendums on the President's approval rating. And if the President's approval rating continues to slip, that portends danger for Republicans across the country.
MATTINGLY: Just really quickly connecting all these things, and I say this is somebody and, Dana, I think, you know, Stuart (ph), having covered Bill Cassidy for many, many years and finding him to be a substantive, legitimate, good lawmaker who understand and work hard to play a role in --
BASH: Definitely.
MATTINGLY: -- legislation, he's up in '26. And that's not an insignificant factor. I don't think it was a driving force. I think he believed the commitments or at least believed he had security in the commitments that he got from Kennedy. He's broken every single one of them since.
But, like, that's always been the balancing act that made this extraordinarily complicated for Bill Cassidy.
BASH: Right.
PAGER: And for many Republicans in --
MATTINGLY: Yes.
PAGER: -- across the country.
BASH: Everybody stand by. We'll be right back. Don't go anywhere.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[12:38:18] BASH: President Trump may not have the Nobel Peace Prize he wants so badly, but today in Washington he will visit a building with the words "peace" and "Donald J. Trump" written on the outside. It is the United States Institute of Peace, which the administration now calls the Donald J. Trump United States Institute of Peace. That's where he will host the leaders of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to formally sign a peace deal he says he helped broker.
Now, this is not a conflict many Americans are familiar with, so I want to bring in CNN's Larry Madowo, who is in neighboring Zambia, to break down what is actually going on here. Larry, thank you so much for being here. Tell us about this war and whether a deal, or the deal that he's talking about, is actually working.
LARRY MADOWO, CNN CORRESPONDENT: This deal alone will not end the war in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, because the fighting is still going on, Dana. Even two days ago, these two sides accused each other of sabotaging this deal.
The M23 rebels are allegedly backed by Rwanda, even though President Paul Kagame and his government deny that. They have been fighting against the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo for years, going back decades even. Thousands of people have been killed and hundreds of thousands of people displaced.
President Trump claims to have ended this war, and today he's formalizing that by inviting the leaders of Rwanda and the DRC to sign this deal. It goes back to the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Some of the people accused of having formed, behind that genocide, crossed over into the DRC and formed an organization that has morphed into what some say is the M23.
Now, these people claim to want to overthrow the government of President Kagame. But the conflict in the Eastern DRC also has to do with minerals.
[12:40:05]
The DRC is very rich in many minerals that are very critical in the current industrial revolution, including cobalt and others that are useful in the manufacture of everything from electric vehicles to mobile phones. And the DRC accuses Rwanda of exploiting those minerals and exporting them as Rwandese minerals.
So that is why some of this is happening. And there have been many attempts to make a deal. There's a separate agreement happening in Doha, mediated by Qatar. And at the center of this is the M23 rebel group, which is not a party to this deal being signed in Washington.
And when I spoke to them in September, they said, we wish President Trump all the best, but we don't trust President Tshisekedi of Congo, and we intend to overthrow him. So just the signing alone will not bring peace to the Eastern DRC.
BASH: All right, Larry, thank you so much. Really, really important to have you. Be well. Now, my reporter -- smart reporters are still back here at the table. Tyler, I just want to reiterate what he just said. They're signing a peace deal for a war that is still going on.
PAGER: Yes, it's striking, obviously. And I think it is part of a pattern we've seen with the President across many of these conflicts, in which he has taken credit for resolving years-long conflicts when some of the parties say he played no role or the conflict is still going on.
And this is, as you said at the top, part of a clear public campaign for the President to win a Nobel Peace Prize. And this event today at the newly renamed Donald J. Trump U.S. Institute for Peace is part of a branding and messaging effort by the President and his aides and allies to portray this sense of Donald Trump, the peacemaker.
BASH: Yes.
PAGER: He said it in his inaugural address, and he's made it a focus of his second term. But I think one of the challenges for his Nobel Peace Prize campaign is what Larry just laid out, is that the facts on the ground may not always match the rhetoric from the President or this White House.
BASH: And then there's this actual building that they're going to and the institution, the actual U.S. Institute of Peace --
MATTINGLY: Beautiful building, by the way.
BASH: It's a gorgeous building. It's across the street from the State Department. The administration, the Trump administration, has this and actually had been pretty successful. Let's just give you a little bit of a timeline here.
In February, Trump signed an executive order with the intent to dismantle the U.S. Institute of Peace. In March, DOGE officials, law enforcement forcibly gained access to the institute. Trump terminated most of the institute's governing board.
And then in May, a judge ruled that Trump's takeover was illegal. A D.C. appeals court lifted the judge's order, sides with the Trump administration. But in July, employees at the U.S. Institute of Peace were laid off.
So this is the entity that he has his name on the building for. I mean, is it empty?
GANGEL: I really don't know how much work. I was just trying to see what's going on there. It is not clear. I think the impression is not a lot of work is going on there. I will say that I called a friend of mine who was involved in the building of the back one.
And when I told her that it had been renamed, she didn't believe me. I mean, she started laughing. And she said, does he think this is going to help him get the Nobel Peace Prize if his name is next to the word peace? ASMA KHALID, CO-HOST, THE GLOBAL STORY PODCAST, BBC: I think what's so interesting about Trump's second term, as you mentioned, Tyler, is how much he's been fixated on the world outside America's shores. You know, he claims that he has solved on a given day, say, seven wars. Some days it's eight wars. It's not just today where he's meeting.
I mean, we've got an episode actually on our podcast, The Global Story, tomorrow looking at FIFA, the World Cup drawing is happening here.
BASH: Yes.
KHALID: And the president of FIFA has announced this inaugural FIFA Peace Prize that was announced when Donald Trump didn't get the Nobel Peace Prize. And by all accounts, it is expected to go to his buddy, Donald Trump, their close friends.
PAGER: I mean, the other remarkable split screen in Washington today is what we started the show off with, lawmakers on Capitol Hill asking questions about whether or not the Trump administration committed war crimes in the Caribbean off the coast of Venezuela, where the President has been amassing a military force for potential -- an increase in military action there.
And across Pennsylvania Avenue, he's at the United Institute of Peace trying to broker peace deals. So just the split screen there is also just another remarkable phenomenon (ph).
MATTINGLY: And a couple of days after he pardoned somebody in the Justice Department --
KHALID: Former president --
MATTINGLY: -- charged as being a major narco leader --
KHALID: Yes.
MATTINGLY: -- helping to ship tons of cocaine into the United States. It is a wonderful confluence of contradictions on a day-to-day basis here. I will say, and it's funny, to Jamie's point, I texted somebody who recently worked at the U.S. Institute of Peace, or the artist formerly known as, this morning.
[12:45:08]
And I was like, honestly, the most interesting part of seeing those headlines yesterday was, what the hell is happening there right now?
KHALID: Yes, yes.
MATTINGLY: And the answer was nothing, which is perilously close to being an anecdote in Tyler Pager's analysis of foreign policy two or three years from now, if these peace deals don't come to fruition.
BASH: I mean, just the idea of his name on Institute of Peace that is empty inside, because he fired everybody, I just -- I can't. We have to take a quick break, but I just quickly want to say, we just learned that the President is going to Pennsylvania next week. The politics of that, very interesting, as there's a lot of criticism from within his own party about so much focus --
KHALID: And not paying enough on what's going on.
BASH: -- on national security.
All right, everybody stand by. President Trump is slamming the brakes on Biden-era regulations on cars. He says it will save you money, but will it? We'll find out after the break.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[12:50:24]
BASH: Remember when President Trump showed off a bunch of Tesla's parked in the front of the White House? Well, now electric is out. Gas is back in.
At a Nobel office event flanked with automobile executives, the President announced the reversal of the increased Biden-era fuel efficiency standards for new vehicles.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: These policies forced automakers to build cars using expensive technologies that drove up costs, drove up prices, and made the car much worse. The action is expected to save the typical consumer at least $1,000 off the price of a new car. And we think substantially more than that.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BASH: Lucky for us, we have CNN's Chief Climate Correspondent, Bill Weir, to explain what is going on and really the importance of what the President did today.
BILL WEIR, CNN CHIEF CLIMATE CORRESPONDENT: Well, the best analogy, Dana, that I've heard is imagine if President Taft over 100 years ago, just as Ford Model Ts were cranking off the assembly line, had tried to shut that whole thing down so the country could double down on horses and saddles and manure shovels.
This is, of course, a tug-of-war between Democratic and Republican administrations over gas mileage. It started in the 70s when tailpipe emissions you couldn't ignore and OPEC embargoes were causing gas lines. Now, Obama tried to raise them. First, Trump tried to take them back.
Joe Biden wanted us to hit 50 miles a gallon by 2035. Trump now says they're going to keep it below 35 miles an hour. But so what's really striking is what's happening in the rest of the world, Dana, that the President seems to be trying to ignore. Jim Farley, CEO of Ford, was recently raving about this. This is a Xiaomi SU7. This is a car made by a Chinese phone company, not even an automobile company, that he says is one of the greatest things he's ever driven and presents sort of an existential threat to American automakers. That's a luxury brand. They go from $30,000 to $75,000.
Take a look at this one. This is called the BYD Dolphin. It sells for less than $15,000 in Asia, less than 20 grand in Europe, and is getting rave reviews everywhere. But you can't even test drive these cars in the United States because the fear is if these were allowed in, they would completely destroy the American automotive industry.
China is 20 years ahead of the U.S. when it comes to EVs on this. So Jim Farley and the rest of these CEOs trying to walk this line between a president who wants to keep the United States in the fuels of the 19th century and the rest of the world that is going this way, they've invested billions into assembly lines to build EVs. And they know maybe a future president is not going to stay with fossil fuels.
But here's Jim Farley this morning after the announcement.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JIM FARLEY, FORD CEO: We're converting our Louisville, Kentucky plant into an affordable EV plant, which we think will compete with the Chinese in terms of cost. So I think what you're seeing in our industry is more and more announcements of manufacturing coming back to the country.
What we think might make sense for Americans is to offer everyone a broad range. We're not going back to gas guzzlers. You know, we sell a lot of EVs, but we want people to have choice. And that's not what the regulations were about.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
WEIR: So on all of human history, Dana, people have moved towards the most efficient option when it comes to solving problems in machinery. And this is what the rest of the world is doing. This policy may hold things up for a while, but the future is here.
BASH: Bill, I saw a smile on the face of Ohio native Phil Mattingly when you mentioned President Taft. But I do want to ask you, most importantly, about the affordability argument that the President is making. It is just a couple days after he called that a con. But nevertheless, he says that this move is going to save $1,000 off the average cost of a new car. Is that true?
WEIR: No. I mean, not really. Let's just take the Chevy Equinox. It's a smaller SUV. It sells in an EV model. And then there's a gas model. Just do a side-by-side comparison.
In the first five years, the EV saves $750. By 10 years, you've saved $6,500 on fuel and maintenance. By 15 years, about $12,500. Because an electric motor is just way more efficient than an internal combustion one. And it takes a lot less maintenance. And the fuel cost. It's the same if you go up to the Ford F-150 electric versus the gas- powered ones. The savings over time are there. And so the affordability, he's trying to -- President Trump trying to enter the affordability debate right now. And the long-term, people who know better know which is more affordable.
[12:55:11]
BASH: Bill Weir, thank you so much. Always good to see you.
WEIR: Anytime.
BASH: Thank you.
BASH: And my panel is back. The aforementioned, Phil Mattingly, do you want to go back to horses and buggies?
MATTINGLY: I mean, I don't really know how to respond to that. I'm very impressed with the poll, though.
One, this was expected. Two, this is in line with how the President has operated in this space and on energy in general. It was always going to be a diametrically different policy agenda than we saw in the last administration, just as it was his first term from the Obama administration.
I think what's -- the connective tissue between this and everything else they've done in this space is really important getting at what Bill was talking about. Incentives from an industrial policy effort from the Biden administration that were critical downstream to the infrastructure and supply chains of these electric vehicles are -- have all been eliminated on top of all this, it's a big deal.
BASH: Right. We are out of time. Thank you so much. Great discussion. I learned a lot from all of you, as I always do.
Thank you for joining Inside Politics. CNN News Central starts after a quick break.
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