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Inside Politics

A Look At Trump's First Year In Office; House And Senate Majorities Up For Grabs In 2026 Midterms; Governors Shapiro & Cox On Keeping The Faith. Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired December 25, 2025 - 12:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[12:00:00]

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DANA BASH, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome to a Special Christmas Edition of Inside Politics. I'm Dana Bash in Washington. Merry Christmas to everybody. This holiday season, we are wrapping up a roller coaster year in politics. Since January 20th, President Trump has moved at a frenetic pace to transform the United States of America. He took a sledgehammer to the federal government, targeting political opponents, launching a global trade war. I mean that's just one tip of the iceberg on using the word unprecedented an unprecedented amount of times in 2025.

The New Year is really on track to be maybe even busier if you can believe it. I'm joined by a terrific group of reporters here. Merry Christmas one and all. What's your hot take as we have a minute to digest? I mean that literally and figuratively.

PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN ANCHOR AND CHIEF DOMESTIC CORRESPONDENT: This seems to break from one another. Hot take while also having a minute to digest. It tracks directly with kind of how you laid out the year that was, which is the velocity and scale of the executive power agenda that was put into place and has evolved throughout the course of the first 12 months of the administration is extraordinary without precedent, and we keep saying unprecedented.

It's not being hyperbolic for the first time in cable news history, but it also sets up the most critical pillars of the year ahead, and the reason I say that is because the kind of underpinning of this executive authority push that they've been able to carry out with this administration has been really seizing and exploiting ambiguities, loopholes, weak spots in the norms and kind of structural, particularly post-Watergate structural, kind of infrastructure that we've all come to know.

And they've been able to maintain it, or having to be somewhat durable in the first year, because they've been able to get emergency stays or emergency pauses from the Supreme Court to lower court cases that they've lost.

All of those cases for the most part, on all the critical issues, on tariffs, on immigration, on the federal government, on ability to fire people are going to be coming up for the Supreme Court in the year ahead, and those are going to be huge and really determinative of whether or not his first year will be considered a success in his eyes over time.

BASH: Yeah. I mean, obviously he came in at an 11. Just want to show some examples, because it's easy to forget some of the things that we saw at the beginning of the year, the administration's second term. Law firms pledge almost a billion dollars in free work for Donald Trump because he wanted them to. The Trump administration was poised to accept a palette -- a palace in the sky, a gift of a plane from the country of Qatar.

Columbia University agreed to pay more than $220 million in a deal to restore federal funding, which he said that he was taking away. Tim Cook, the head of Apple appealed to Donald Trump and his love of gold by bringing a 24-carat base for Apple, an Apple plaque.

SEUNG MIN KIM, WHITE HOUSE REPORTER, AP: I look back on this year and I think of it, in general -- well, there are many themes that you could pull out from the first year of Donald Trump's second term in office, but a one to me is that President Trump bends fill in the blank here to his own will, whether that is the law firms and the universities that you just discussed, I'm also thinking foreign policy earlier this year at NATO.

It was such a marked difference from when he dealt with European leaders during his first term. Now, these European leaders recognize his power, you know, both domestically, here and globally, and is really kind of, you know, cozying up to in a way that wasn't there during his first term, and certainly bending the will of Republicans on Capitol Hill.

There aren't those dissenting voices that we saw in the first term. Now, certainly that has been breaking a little later in the year, once we saw the President's political power diminish, but that's certainly been kind of the overriding theme to me of his second term.

ZOLAN KANNO-YOUNGS, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: The first thing that comes to mind for me when I think of this year is, in many ways, I don't think you can be surprised what -- about what he's done. He told you that he would seek retribution in the campaign, he said he would pursue mass deportations, that tariffs would be at the centerpiece of his trade policy, his foreign policy, his foreign policy as well. And he's pursued a lot of that.

I mean the difference here is that during this campaign, they really did forecast what they intended to do. I do think there's something to the scale and the speed of which they pursued these things.

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The other theme of this -- of this time, this past year is we have seen what happens when you have an administration that forced out some of the bureaucrats that might have resisted some of the President's impulses, things that he mused about, and replaced them with loyalists that where their main measure of success is how can you implement this President's agenda? BASH: One of the things that you -- many things that you've been

covering in a very detailed way this year, Zolan is what's going on with immigration. And our producer, Tes (ph), put together a fantastic illustration of the difference in what's happening in the border now versus what happened just in the year beforehand, which was Joe Biden's presidency.

Joe Biden's presidency is green and Donald Trump's is the yellow. I mean, that tells a story of an accomplishment for the President, one that he definitely ran on. He definitely made a promise there, and yet there hasn't been a lot of focus on that because of what he has been doing in the interior of the country, which he also promised to do, which is apprehend people who are in the United States illegally and deport them.

KANNO-YOUNGS: He definitely said that he would crack down on illegal border crossings, that he would curtail asylum at the border. You're right. He's done that. The image, though, that's going to be remembered from this first year, is likely what he's done in the interior. Masked agents going and picking up people off the street, a -- often, at times, a disregard for due process of migrants as well and those that are in the country illegally.

Remember, I mean, a signature moment of this past year is when they used an arcane (ph) (inaudible) Alien Enemies Act to basically round up migrants and those who had been in the country for -- who had not just arrived and send them to a mega prison in El Salvador as well. That's not something that he talked about often during the campaign.

BASH: That's right.

KANNO-YOUNGS: He's gone above and beyond, and I think of also what he's done, not just on illegal immigration, but also legal immigration. He has suspended refugee admissions to this country for everyone, with the exception of white South Africans, right. Mostly Afrikaners now coming into the country. He's gutted admissions to a record low level, while reserving those limited slots meant for people fleeing war and persecution from South Africa. That's also something that's going above and beyond what he promised.

BASH: His signature economic policy is, of course, something that he's wanted to do his entire adult life, tariffs. Let's watch some of the evolution of his tariff policy over the year.

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DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: In a few moments, I will sign a historic Executive Order instituting reciprocal tariffs on countries throughout the world.

I did a 90-day pause for the people that didn't retaliate.

REPORTER: Is the August One deadline firm now? Is that it?

TRUMP: I would say firm. No, I would say firm. But not 100 percent firm. It's always been August 1st. Every time we put out a statement, they

say he made a change. I didn't make a change. Clarification, maybe. No, August 1st, they pay.

So in other words, we'll be putting a tariff on of approximately 100 percent on chips and semiconductors.

They might be paying something, but when you take the overall impact, the Americans are gaining tremendously. They're gaining through national security. Look, I'm ending war because of these tariffs.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BASH: And look at the Google searches, the top Google searches of 2025. I mean they're all interesting starting with Charlie Kirk as number one. But the fact that tariffs is number 10 tells you how much people care, because it affects their lives and their businesses.

MATTINGLY: Yeah, I feel like I'm finally not in the minority on random economic policy. Thank you. This is really (inaudible) a big year for me, and that's -- you know what's -- what's really great about the clip you just showed, kind of spanning the entire year, is how essential watching that over time is to understanding the actual strategy that he takes with tariffs.

To Zolan's point and to connect it back to a lot of the things he's done, he told you he was going to do this. And so Liberation Day, as shocking as it was to the markets and as incomprehensible as the formula they utilized to identify the reciprocal tariffs, including that one place that just has penguins on it, he said he was going to do it, but he's also been very clear that he uses tariffs as a central linchpin to his negotiating strategy.

And the inability to see these as connected elements of the same strategy has, I think, plagued Wall Street individuals or market participants for the better part of this year, not seeing that there are tariffs that are national security related. There are tariffs that are purely to negotiate with Xi Jinping or with other Asian leaders, and then there are tariffs that are critical to his economic proposals and that kind of trio is really important.

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BASH: And we're going to see in the coming year what the Supreme Court thinks of these tariffs, which is going to be a huge decision. Up next, big stakes; little, small margins. We're going to break down the midterm matchups you're going to hear about non-stop in 2026.

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BASH: Welcome back to this Special Christmas Edition of Inside Politics. Cue the campaign ads, text messages, political calendar. It's about to flip and we're going to be in midterm mode, officially. It usually means bad news for the president's party, as we learned in 2022 though, anything can happen. My panel is back now.

Seung Min, the president, gave an interview towards the end of the year in December with the Wall Street Journal.

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Here's what he said about the midterms. We'll see what happens. We should win. But you know, statistically, it's very tough to win. Yeah, it doesn't make sense. All we're going to do is we're going to do our best to win.

MIN KIM: Pretty downbeat, I would say, from a president who clearly would want his party to do well in the midterms, not only for the success of the Republican Party, because there are significant implications for him if Democrats take at least the House. Obviously, if you're in the majority of the House, you have all the subpoena power, the control of the House, control of the agenda over there.

So how involved Trump gets next year, how much of his political capital he puts on the line will be something really critical and important. And I was really struck, and I still think about this interview that Susie Wiles did. Not like, the interviews that we've been talking about for the last week or so, but a separate interview where she talked about what the President would do in terms of campaigning.

And she said, I haven't broken it to him yet, but he is going to campaign like it's 2024 because a lot of these Republican voters will come out if he's on the ballot. Clearly he's not going to be literally on the ballot, but I think the Republican Party wants to try to make sure he's figuratively there.

BASH: Well, and the problem the White House is well aware, and people in Trump's political orbit is well aware, is that he is figuratively on the ballot, even more when he's not physically on the ballot. But Democrats use the Trump factor to their advantage in a pretty successful way, historically, in the last 10 years, since Trump has been a factor.

Quickly the balance of power, you already know, it's really, really narrow, just an example of what it's -- what it is. And then, as we go into this year, if the midterms were today, who would you vote for? This is known as the generic ballot, Democrats 55 percent, Republicans 41 percent, Phil.

MATTINGLY: Which is a significant shift from where had been for a large chunk of the year. And I think underscores how, at least in the top line political sense, the fortunes have shifted from the Democratic Party that everybody was pretty convinced was dead for eternity for the first six months of this year, that has found some issues, been able to exploit some of Trump's weaknesses, or Trump's inability to actually make good on some of his promises, and that puts them in a much better position in December than they had been even through probably most of the summer.

What does that mean going forward? I think the real question becomes, this is a small universe of races that will decide who is in the majority, both on the House side and on the Senate side. The trench warfare that plays out, the messages they lock into and to SMK's great point like Trump's ability to get out the people who he gets out in presidential years, even as Democrats are saying, yes, please get on the trail all the time.

That kind of Catch 22 they're trying to navigate right now. And if he's able to navigate, it is going to be the biggest story.

BASH: The narrow universe you talked about, let's just show what right now going into 2026 looks like a narrow universe. If -- if there's a wave, this is, you know, just part of -- part of the discussion.

We're talking about eight Republican seats, two Democrats that at the beginning people are focused on and on the Senate side of the Capitol, we have battlegrounds pretty much across from, you know, the middle of the country going East. Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Maine, Ohio, Iowa, Texas, Minnesota, Zolan.

KANNO-YOUNGS: And remember that comment from the President was interesting too, because this administration really has tried to get an edge, not just through talking about the issues and rallying voters, but through redrawing the maps, right.

BASH: That's right.

KANNO-YOUNGS: Through also pushing for redistricting to gain a partisan edge as well. I think that effort they put in, particularly in Texas, also speaks to the anxiety that comes with incumbency, right. Historically, the incumbent party suffers losses in the next midterms. And you know that some in the White House are aware of that and are anxious about that, not just that, but also this conversation around affordability and prices.

The President, as the leader of the party, ran on driving down prices and making the economy better for working class Americans, for all Americans, and you have real economic frustration right now in the country. People are really frustrated, and you have heard that at town halls as well in recent months, when members have decided to go out and do those town halls.

So see -- yes, I see how Republicans want the president to be on the ballot, you know, figuratively, but there's challenges to that too, when you look at the issues facing this administration.

BASH: Merry Christmas. Thank you all for being here today and throughout the year. Thank you for being very smart people and good people that I learn from and I get to, you know, hang out with and it's -- it's a pleasure. Thank you.

MATTINGLY: Appreciate that. Thank you.

BASH: Coming up two governors, very different parties, different religions. They share how their faith guides them. Stay with us.

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(COMMERCIAL BREAK) BASH: Two politicians from different parties and religions share the

same guiding principle, Faith shapes their leadership. Here's part of my conversation with Democratic governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Republican Governor Spencer Cox of Utah.

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BASH: We're at the National Cathedral, and you have very different backgrounds, LDS, you're Jewish, but each of you has a very strong sense of faith and belief in God, and I want you to talk about how that drives you as a public person and as a public servant.

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GOV. SPENCER COX (R-UT): So I've said from the very beginning, when I ran for office, that the very first time, that I can't separate my faith from who I am. It's part of me, and I'm going to be very transparent about that, so that if you don't like that, then don't -- don't vote for me. But I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that I can check that at the door.

And so my faith informs me. I believe that there is a higher power. I believe that he cares about us. I believe that we're his children. I believe that we're all brothers and sisters and -- and that means that I treat you differently. I don't care what color of your skin is, I don't care where you're from, you're -- you're my brother and you're -- you're my sister.

And -- and I also believe that, because of my faith, that I'm supposed to love my enemies and I'm supposed to forgive and I'm supposed to do good to those that hate me and despitefully use me, and that's so hard. And I keep, you know, I keep -- I keep looking for somewhere in the Scriptures where it tells me that that's true, everywhere except politics, and I can't find it.

And so -- so I have to -- I have to bring that with me. Doesn't mean I'm not going to -- I'm not going to fight for what I believe in, but it does mean when we do have that battle, I'm going to treat you with dignity and respect, that -- that I feel that you deserve as my -- as my sibling.

GOV. JOSH SHAPIRO (D-PA): I really admire the way Spencer and Abby lead their -- live their lives openly and are honestly about -- honest about their faith with the public. And I can tell you from my experience, from Lori's experience, the more open we are about our faith, in our state, the more folks are drawn to having conversations with us about their faith, about their practices, about the way they live their lives, even if the way they live their lives and pray isn't in a temple or a church or a mosque or a place of worship.

I think by putting yourself out there and being open about who you are, you're able to have a deeper, more personal relationship with the people that you're sworn to serve and protect. We are from obviously different faiths, but there are some common bonds, some similarities, some universality in our faith. We're both from faiths where our ancestors were displaced and were

moved. We're both from faiths where we can draw from different parts of our respective scriptures, but they teach us a similar lesson, that we have to go serve others and do good for others. And I think as you understand that more, you realize that there is a universality throughout all faiths.

That if you really believe in your faith, if you believe in something that may not be tied to a particular book or scripture, but just a goodness that exists in this country, you believe in -- in treating your neighbor respectfully. You believe in serving others. You believe in, you know, clothing the naked and feeding the hungry and housing the homeless.

These are universal messages. And so I think whether you come at it through your faith, as we do, or you come at it just by being blessed to live in this wonderful nation that we are in, most people come to those conclusions in ways that they're really genuine and uplifting and offer me a whole lot of hope.

BASH: And just quickly bring it back to where we started, this connectivity, I know you both believe will help with the epidemic of loneliness and political division.

COX: Yeah, look, it's we -- as some other very smart people, wise people have said, we all have a God shaped hole in our heart. And whatever that looks like, it has to be filled with something and filled with connection. And if you're not finding that in a place of worship, that's OK, there are other places to find that, but you need to find that thing and -- and we are wired for that -- that connection and -- and so it gives us an opportunity to be with people, not the fake connections, the digital connections on our phone that that, again, aren't -- aren't real, but -- but in ways that that make us whole.

I think we make a mistake when we tell our kids they need to go out and change the world. I've given those commencement speeches. I think we need to start telling them to go out and change their neighborhood. It -- we are going to fix what's wrong in our country, not by, again, changing the world, but one community at a time. It is about serving your neighbor.

You can't serve your neighbor if you don't know who they are, and so whatever that looks like, if it's in a congregation getting to know people who are different than you, if it's in a service organization in your neighborhood, figuring out a way to give back and strengthen your community will solve all that's broken. It will fix the political violence, the dangerous rhetoric.

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