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On Saturday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: Canada’s prime minister visited Mar-a-Lago Friday evening. USA TODAY Senior National News Reporter Rebecca Morin discusses President-elect Donald Trump’s election success in the Rio Grande Valley, a Latino-majority area along the border in south Texas. USA TODAY National Correspondent Trevor Hughes talks through President Joe Biden’s legacy on trains. French President Emmanuel Macron lauds artisans for restoring the Notre-Dame Cathedral ahead of its reopening next week.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Taylor Wilson:
Good morning. I’m Taylor Wilson and today is Saturday, November 30th, 2024. This is The Excerpt. Today a look at Canada’s Prime Minister’s trip to Mar-a-Lago, plus how Trump won a Latino majority area along the border this election. And we talk about Biden’s legacy with trains.
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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau landed in West Palm Beach, Florida yesterday evening for a dinner meeting with President-elect Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate, just days after Trump vowed to enact a 25% tariff on all products coming into the US from Canada and Mexico. Trudeau is the first of the leaders from the G7 group of industrial democracies to visit the president-elect. Others joining the meeting included several proposed members of the next administration, including North Dakota governor, Doug Burgum, the nominee for interior secretary, Cantor Fitzgerald CEO, Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary nominee, and Congressman Mike Waltz, who’s been named the next national security adviser.
The meeting was prompted by Trump’s thread, aired in a Monday post on his social media platform, Truth Social, to sign an executive order on his first day in office to hit the top US trade partners with steep tariffs. Because tariffs are paid by importers, not by the originating countries, the additional costs typically are passed along to consumers. That’s prompted anxiety, not just among American consumers, but also officials in Mexico and Canada. Canada is the top US trading partner.
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President-Elect Donald Trump won the Rio Grande Valley, a Latino majority area along the border in South Texas. What’s that tell us more broadly about Latino voters and the parties pitching to them? I spoke with USA Today senior national news reporter, Rebecca Morin, for more. Hello Rebecca.
Rebecca Morin:
Hey, how’s it going?
Taylor Wilson:
Good, good. Thanks for being the show today. So would you just start by telling us about Rufino Herrera, you spoke with him in this part of Texas. What’s his story and his background?
Rebecca Morin:
So Rufino lives in this small town called West Loco, Texas. It’s in this area called the Rio Grande Valley in the southernmost tip of Texas. And Rio Grande Valley is a predominantly Hispanic area, many Latino voters. He’s someone who is very outspoken. He invited me into his home to talk a little bit more about politics after the 2024 election and what we saw happen in the Rio Grande Valley, which was this shift red in an area that used to be a very big democratic stronghold.
And Rufino told me he remembers voting for Democratic presidents. The last Democratic president he voted for was Barack Obama. And he has felt in recent years though, that his values don’t align with the party anymore, and he thinks it’s not because he feels like he’s Republican. He just feels like the party has shifted away from the core of what they were. Democrats used to be the party for workers and that’s what he felt like. He grew up very working class. He talked about that and how he’s transitioned from thinking that he was a Democrat to really feeling like the Republican Party is who’s working for him now.
Taylor Wilson:
Yeah, so he’s not alone. As you outline in this piece, and we’ll get to this shift, what has this valley really been politically traditionally? You touched on… Has it just been a complete democratic stronghold really historically?
Rebecca Morin:
Yeah. So for a long time a lot of the people who live in this region have just been Democrats because that’s what their family has been. That’s what their friends have been. One county in the region. They have been voting for the Democratic presidential candidate since 1896 in Star County. And this election cycle, Donald Trump flipped that. This is a place though that, for decades, for a century almost, has been a democratic stronghold, but we’re definitely seeing the shift, even if it’s just at the presidential level that’s happening.
Taylor Wilson:
All right, so how did things shake out this election? We know this was a conversation really nationwide, trying to figure out how Trump pulled this off for a second time. What happened in this part of Texas?
Rebecca Morin:
Republicans have been really heavily investing in this area, in Latino voters. They opened up community centers to help residents learn English, to help them with citizenship papers. We hadn’t seen Republicans do this type of outreach previously. So, that’s why we saw, in the ’22 midterms, we saw a house seat flip in that region from Democrat to Republican-
Taylor Wilson:
Rebecca, you’ve touched on this, but in terms of the issues, we talked about Rufino at the top, some of the things that he cares about really. What are some of the major issues folks in these communities care about? Why do they feel Republicans are better suited for their needs?
Rebecca Morin:
I think what it comes down to, and I think everyone’s maybe getting tired of hearing this, it’s about money. It’s about, “How far does my paycheck stretch?” This area is a very poor region of Texas and of the country. A lot of people live paycheck to paycheck. When things are getting more expensive, your wages aren’t going up… I spoke to several people who were… Even just things that you don’t think about, like car insurance, for example. And people feel like a big shift that happened under the Biden administration, the pandemic caused inflation. Inflation has been coming down, but it’s not reaching people’s pockets as quickly as they would like, and they’re feeling the brunt of it, especially in this region where there aren’t a lot of high-level paying jobs that are always available. The good jobs are being teachers, working for border patrol. Those are very limited. And so, that was one of the top concerns.
Another, living on the border, it’s always going to be immigration, and that is a complicated issue. Border communities for a really long time have always held the brunt of helping migrants who are coming to the United States to seek asylum. And for a long time, communities could handle that. But I think the sentiments are changing. The Rio Grande Valley, a lot of people are generations removed from the immigration process. Some who know people who are recent immigrants or maybe even know people who are undocumented, don’t believe that the people that they love or care about fall under the umbrella of who Donald Trump has been talking about when he talks about recent immigrants coming to the country. There’s also concerns with the amount of people coming. They said that there’s an increase of violence, of cartels trying to come and people are concerned about human trafficking. And so, that’s another issue that Donald Trump really was able to hone in on during his candidacy and his campaign that really resonated with some of the residents down there.
Taylor Wilson:
All right. It’s an eye-opening piece. I implore the listeners to go check out the full version with the link in today’s show notes. Rebecca Morin is a senior national news reporter with USA today. Thanks, Rebecca.
Rebecca Morin:
Thank you.
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Taylor Wilson:
As Amtrak Joe leaves the White House, a huge part of President Biden’s legacy runs on America’s train tracks. I spoke with USA today national correspondent, Trevor Hughes, for more. Hi there, Trevor.
Trevor Hughes:
Hey, good to be here.
Taylor Wilson:
Good to have you, as always. So interesting legacy here when it comes to rail. What is President Joe Biden’s background really with trains and what did he do while in office? What are some of the train projects underway, in part, thanks to him?
Trevor Hughes:
It’s easy to forget when we look at the president today that he was a young vigorous man quite a long time ago and rode Amtrak back and forth from his home in Delaware to his seat in Congress, in the Senate, back and forth every day to spend time with his family. In fact, his nickname was Amtrak Joe. And so the president has pushed for rail all of his career, and now that he was in the White House, he got Congress to pass a ton of funding for rail expansion of passenger rail improvements to bridges and to tracks and to underpasses and overpasses and tunnels, really trying to transform, in part, how Americans travel around this country.
Taylor Wilson:
You do write that Biden’s legacy on freight trains is more complicated, Trevor. How so?
Trevor Hughes:
Rail workers are subject to sort of a policy that the president and Congress can actually ban them from striking because they’re considered so valuable to the American economy. And so that’s actually happened a couple of years ago, and rail workers really never forgot that. They were very frustrated. They felt that the freight companies, who were making quite a bit of money, were not treating the workers well, were being unsafe, were extracting huge profits at the cost of safety from those workers. And so a lot of these workers wanted to strike, and the president intervened and told them that they were not allowed to strike. They ultimately got a contract with these rail workers that provided things like paid sick time and more consistent schedules. But a lot of rail workers never forgot that he intervened in that case.
Taylor Wilson:
All right. So as for the incoming president, Trevor, where does Trump stand on rail? Have we heard from him a lot on this issue?
Trevor Hughes:
We have not heard a lot. Now, of course, this is a guy who flies in private jets, flies in helicopters, loves his limousines. So he is not Amtrak Joe, as it were. But at the same time, during his first administration, President Trump often talked about our railroads and our airports when he says he travels internationally to see what other countries have done. And he felt, in some ways, ashamed that we had not kept up. And so I think this is going to be a interesting time because a lot of the funding that came out from the Biden administration could be canceled by Trump potentially. A lot of Republicans are pretty hostile to passenger rail. And again, freight companies have spent billions of dollars of their own money on improvement. So there’s this conversation about who should be spending money on rail travel in America.
Taylor Wilson:
Well, you mentioned other Republicans, Trump obviously not just the only player here. We know Republicans will have full control in Congress. What’s the expectation there? Do we have any sense on where Republicans stand writ large on Capitol Hill?
Trevor Hughes:
No. Many of the people who were in office when Congress passed the initial rail funding during the Biden administration, many of those folks are still in office and they voted for this. You also have to bear in mind that this is billions and billions of dollars being spent at American factories, at American Steel Mills, building locomotives, making tracks, construction companies. This is a lot of money being spent in basically every state, many of them Republican states. So, the train folks I talk to are optimistic that this infrastructure spending will really remain. But that being said, one of the first things during the Trump administration that they did was cancel funding for a high-speed rail network in California. Biden then immediately put it back when he came into office. So there’s a question as to whether or not President Trump, when he takes office, would again try to remove that federal funding.
Taylor Wilson:
All right. Interesting stuff. Trevor Hughes is a national correspondent with USA today. Thanks as always, Trevor.
Trevor Hughes:
You bet.
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Taylor Wilson:
French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday praised the more than 1000 craftspeople who helped rebuild Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral. He called the work, “The project of the century.” The 12th century Cathedral will reopen its doors next week to tourists and Catholic visitors. The reconstruction work restored the cathedral spire, stained-glass windows and carved stone gargoyles. The work came after a massive fire at the cathedral in 2019.
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The hormonal and physical changes that come with menopause are rarely discussed openly. The question is, why not? Dr. Judith Joseph, a psychiatrist and chair of the Women in Medicine Initiative for Columbia University, joins my colleague Dana Taylor to talk us through what’s euphemistically known as The Change. You can find that episode right here beginning at 5:00 AM eastern Time tomorrow morning.
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Thanks for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your pods. And if you’re on a smart speaker, just ask for The Excerpt. Dana Taylor will be in for the Sunday edition tomorrow, and I’ll be back Monday with more of The Excerpt from USA Today.
