Lisa Desjardins:
It was fascinating, Geoff.
In that room, President Trump, president-elect Trump now, sat for two hours with Republican senators. They emerged that room really exuberant. You know, we know these moments. They’re excited. They don’t have to do the hard part yet. But they are convinced that they are going to change how things work in Washington and that they’re going to do it very quickly.
So I also very quickly am going over the many topics that they covered and that I received as part of my reporting about this meeting. Let me take you through some of these things, because they’re all important.
First of all, President — former president-elect Trump does want to do one big giant Trump agenda bill. We will be talking about that if it’s able to occur. It is a risk, because he would need virtually every Republican in the House and almost all of them in the Senate to do it.
Now, something that came up a lot that Senate sources told me about was Canada. We have been talking about other countries here, but the idea that president-elect Trump is serious about pressuring Canada with terrorists and other trade tactics. He’s really ramping up his talk about how he interacts with our neighbor to the north.
In addition, Panama Canal, that is something that has been talked about and it’s something that for many people has came out of the blue, but today we saw a House member introduce a bill that would give president-elect Trump the ability to actually negotiate or attempt to negotiate with Panama. They say they don’t want to sell the canal.
But as part of this, senators who I regard generally as serious brought that up, also brought up the idea of Greenland as part of the meeting yesterday. This is stuff we didn’t expect to talk about, but I’m raising it now because it was regarded seriously in the meeting by Senate Republicans yesterday with president-elect Trump.
Finally, day one, Senate Republicans left that meeting saying they expect not just some executive orders on day one, but more than they had expected, that president-elect Trump said he’s going to spend a lot of time on immigration on day one.
