SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
There has been a major escalation in President Trump's military actions in Latin America. Yesterday, the Pentagon announced the deployment of the USS Gerald Ford, the world's largest aircraft carrier, just hours after the tenth U.S. strike on alleged drug vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific. NPR senior political contributor Ron Elving joins us. Ron, thanks for being with us.
RON ELVING, BYLINE: Good to be with you, Scott.
SIMON: The president said there could also be U.S. land strikes. How serious is the situation now?
ELVING: It's as serious as it looks and was meant to look. The world's largest aircraft carrier, with 5,000 sailors, scores of aircraft, eight additional warships. You know, some of these small boat operators may begin to feel a bit outgunned. But you have to wonder if it's really all about the drug runners. Let's accept that the 10 blasted on the high seas so far were carrying drugs and were heading this way, although there have been reports raising questions on both counts. Setting those doubts aside, the sheer size of this naval force suggests something else, something like the, quote, "gunboat diplomacy," unquote, the U.S. has practiced as far back as the early 1900s, pressuring regimes in Central America and the Caribbean.
SIMON: President Trump said he's halting trade talks with Canada over an ad in Ontario featuring Ronald Reagan, which, by the way, has subsequently been withdrawn. The president called the ad fake. Was it?
ELVING: The voice in the ad is Ronald Reagan's, and the words are from a radio address he gave in April 1987. But the ad is guilty of changing the order of sentences, and that is wrong. The ad also ought to have made clear that Reagan was about to impose a tariff on Japanese semiconductors at the time, despite his own dislike of tariffs and his strong preference for free trade. Now, the Reagan Foundation called this out, published a link to the audio and transcript. And to their credit, the provincial officials in Ontario who paid for this ad in the first place have also published that same link. And everyone who cares ought to check it out. They will find Reagan condemning tariffs in no uncertain terms as a prelude to trade wars and deep economic harm.
SIMON: The U.S. government is in its fourth week of a shutdown. More than a million federal workers missed a paycheck yesterday. What could end this - air traffic controllers, Obamacare premiums going up?
ELVING: And maybe both. It was the absentee problem among air traffic controllers that ended the last shutdown of the record five-week-long freeze-up in 2019. This time, the Democrats say it's all about health care - premium subsidies for people on Obamacare. Much higher bills are about to hit home for millions of Americans, and they live disproportionately in states that voted for Trump, so there could be some rising tension there. The Republicans in Congress say the Democrats just want to fight. And they say, for their part, there's nothing to negotiate. My guess is that they would be back at the negotiating table on Monday if summoned by the president, but he does not seem to be so inclined.
SIMON: Ron, the east wing of the White House was demolished this week to make way for a new ballroom President Trump wants built. Why did the demolition of the east wing seem to strike a chord with so many?
ELVING: It's the permanence of the look of it. You know, they knocked down the whole east wing of the White House, carried it off in trucks, with some of it going to a golf course. It's not coming back. And for many people, that is a metaphor for all that's happening in Trump's second term. I have to confess, this is a hard one for people who care about the White House - the tradition, the symbolic value. Just a few days ago, Trump said he was only making some adjustments and modifications to the east wing. Then this week, after demolition had begun, he said architects and engineers needed to take the whole thing down in order to build the ballroom Trump wanted - a ballroom financed not by the people but by Amazon and Apple and Google and Meta, some major government contractors and Wall Street billionaires. The ballroom they build may well be impressive, but what has been lost in this process will not easily be replaced.
SIMON: NPR's Ron Elving, thanks so much.
ELVING: Thank you, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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