Joining us now, New York Times chief White House correspondent
Peter Baker and NPR national political correspondent Mara Leah Liasson.
All right, good to see you,
Peter. Good to be here.
Let's talk about all of this.
Donald Trump says that he's going to have a comprehensive
policy within a week or so.
He's been all over the lot on abortion and now
on contraception.
Are Donald Trump in the Republican Party more broadly,
just struggling to come up with a cohesive stance that's
going to satisfy all of their,
you know,
there are different constituencies in the party?
Yeah. It's rather remarkable that here we are in
2024 and we're having an argument about contraceptions that did
not seem to be a debate that was going to
be reopened
more than 60 years after the Supreme Court said there's
a constitutional right
to to contraception. But here we are.
It's possible that he misunderstood the question in that interview
and he thought that they were talking about,
you know, abortion drugs or drugs that are,
that that are known to cause abortion and that not
not talking about standard contraception.
But in any case, certainly it raises the question of
what he's talking about and why he would have a
policy on contraception to begin with and what what that
policy could be. So I think that,
you know, it keeps the Republicans on the defensive on
a subject
in which they have already seeing,
you know, political, political trouble as a result.
And this is, of course,
after the IBF controversies in Alabama.
Mara, I also want to ask you about the White
House.
Around
the White House position on all of this and the
campaign position,
because they're seizing on this.
This is one of the best issues for Democrats.
Republicans are like the dog that caught the car for
years and years.
All they had to say was,
I'm pro-life. They didn't have to answer the question,
when does life begin? Does it begin at conception?
Therefore destroying an embryo is murder.
I mean, they have been able to avoid all this.
And every single time abortion rights have been on the
ballot since Roe was overturned,
the abortion rights side has won.
That doesn't mean it's going to turn red states blue,
but it does mean that it's going to help Democrats.
The Biden campaign thinks it'll help them turn out suburban
women and also flip some suburban women.
This issue is going to be good for them.
And Peter, let's talk about the Student Loans,
because the president today is trying to announce,
or he's going to announce,
a new round of federal student
debt forgiveness totaling some $7.7 billion.
Now, this obviously is a really important initiative given what's
happening with young people who are angry with him on
other issues,
but they've also stumbled. The rollout
of this whole program has been
unnecessarily complex. I mean, there's a lot of criticism on
the Hill and elsewhere
and among recipients about the way this is working,
right? Yeah, this is obviously an important issue.
As you rightly point out,
Gaza and the protests on college campuses have gotten the
most attention.
They're obviously dramatic pictures. But if you look at polls,
Gaza is actually relatively low on the list of main
concerns for younger generation.
They are concerned about economics.
They're concerned about their ability to get a job,
to find housing and to be able to pay off
loans when they get out of school.
Those are big, big issues for many young people.
And there's a disappointment on the part of some of
them.
According to polls, the president hasn't delivered as much as
they thought he he was going to remember.
He had planned to have a much larger more comprehensive
student loan forgiveness program that was struck down by the
Supreme Court.
So he's been trying to do it in this piece
meal way to try to get around the legal issues.
That's obviously caused some hassles and and and uncertainty on
the part of young people.
But what he's trying to do with this announcement is
say,
look, I'm on your side.
I'm the guy who's trying to to
take care of these issues that we know are important
to you and and give me time and give us
the ability to keep doing it.
And Mara, this is important for him today to try
to get this message out because the frankly,
the Trump trial has been dominating the news and
Joe Biden has been doing things campaigning and making announcements
and cutting ribbons and pointing things out.
He has not. They've been frustrated.
They've been frustrated. 10s of millions of dollars have been
spent.
Many events have been held.
Don. You know President Biden has been trying,
but the public polls are not budging.
Donald Trump still has a lead in the battleground states.
They're very frustrated, but they can do is use the
power of the presidency.
They can use executive orders like this one,
They can reclassify marijuana. They can do everything they can
to appeal,
especially to young people and hope that it changes the
dynamic
and of course the sort of high risk,
high reward debate initiative. Peter,
before I let you go,
Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister,
has called a snap election
to, frankly, a lot of surprise.
You and I both follow this,
but he's right now speaking outside Downing St.
and it's for July 4th.
So it was it's, you know,
thinking that he has an advantage.
Now. We've all thought frankly that the Tories were on
their back feet and that
this might be a time for Labor to come back.
Yeah, I think we had
thought, I think we had thought there would be an
election later in the year.
This is obviously trying to move it up in.
In a way, he's kind of taking a page from
Biden's book in in calling for that early debate.
Right. Let's go ahead and get going.
Is in in effect is his is his thinking here,
obviously. But it has a huge
risk reward capacity here because in fact,
you're right, the the Tories have not been doing well
politically.
They have been, you know,
they have been in power now for quite a while.
They're defending a lot of seats that don't seem like
they're going to be able to hold on to.
And I think that that's a big risk that he's
taking here.
But it's coming right at a time,
by the way, in which they're going to be a
lot of international meetings.
The president is going over to Europe in just a
few weeks to celebrate the Normandy anniversary.
He's going to be back there a few days after
that in Italy for the G7 meeting in which the
Prime Minister will presumably be there.
And then they have the NATO summit.
So this is actually coming at a very
important time in terms of European solidarity and alliances
and at a time of confusion and dismay of over
Palestinian state over
you know Gaza. Tehran is obviously a
a big unknown And so this gives Sunak a time
where he can,
during the election of their very brief election campaigns,
a couple of weeks he can be the world leader
on the stage with the G7 and others.
And it's kind of a the the best scenario most
likely for him to
look like a player and be a player.
Key ally Peter. Lots lots of travel.
Lots of ceremonies and now a British election in the
mix of the whole thing.
Thank you so much, Mara Liasson.
Great to see you.