- [Announcer] Support for "Overheard with Evan Smith" comes from Hillco Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy, Claire and Carl Stuart, Christine and Philip Dial, and the Eller Group, specializing in crisis management, litigation, and public affairs communication, ellergroup.com.

- I'm Evan Smith.

She's the host of "News Night with Abby Phillip", airing weeknights on CNN.

She's Abby Phillip.

This is "Overheard".

(soft music) A platform and a voice is a powerful thing.

(audience claps) You really turn the conversation around about what leadership should be about.

Are we blowing this?

Are we doing the thing we shouldn't be doing by giving into the attention junkie?

As an industry, we have an obligation to hold ourselves to the same standards that we hold everybody else.

This is "Overheard".

(audience claps) Abby Phillip, welcome.

- Thank you for having me.

- Thank you so much for being here.

How do you wrap your head around the moment we're in, in this country, in journalism?

It just seems like something we have not seen before.

- It really isn't, but it's been 10 years in the making, so it's amazing how much time has passed since Donald Trump came into the political sphere, and in that time it has never been normal, so to speak, so I think this is a continuation of that, and I do think though, that every single thing that happens, which sometimes is like five times a day, we have to take them thing by thing and weigh them in the scheme of things.

Is this just something that offends us, or is it truly something that matters, and I think there's been a difficulty in distinguishing between those two things.

There are a lot of things that happen when it comes to Trump, and some of them are designed to provoke, right, to get a reaction out of people, but then there's a whole other category of things, I believe that really touch on some fundamental things about the country, about law, about what kind of society we live in, about the precedents that are being set that might be used by subsequent presidents and subsequent administrations, and I think those are the kinds of things that we have to take really seriously.

But this is a moment, in my view, of incredible significance for this country.

There are real things happening now that will have implications for many, many decades, and that's by intent.

I think Trump wants, in particular, to be an incredibly consequential president.

You know, the whole Mount Rushmore thing, it seems like a joke, but it's not a joke.

- He's not kidding.

- He's not kidding.

He's really not kidding.

He really thinks of himself in that pantheon of American presidents, and he's gonna do things that he thinks will get him up there.

- Right, and in fairness to him, not that he needs any of us to be fair to him in this way, he's not wrong that he's a consequential president.

What he's accomplished, winning the first time, but then especially winning the second time, like this is not nothing.

He will go down in American history as a major figure in American politics.

- 100%.

He is, has been, I think, perhaps one of the most consequential American presidents in at least 50 years, if not longer, and that's consequential.

You don't have to like it.

You know, maybe you dislike it, maybe you like it.

- People will hear us talking about him as consequential, - But he will be- - and they'll be like, "Gag".

But the reality is- - We will be talking about, it'll be in your kids' history books, your grandkid's history books.

It'll be there, because Trump has, at every turn, tried to push up against what is typical, push up against what is expected of a president, and because of that, it's gonna prompt, there's history already being made, just in the last couple of (indistinct).

- Well blowing through norms as he has, obliterating norms.

You know, the total disregard for institutions, and for what was, you know, the way we did things back in the day, like all of that stuff, and by the way, that stuff is also hard to rebuild.

Like people think, "Well, he'll just be President for four years, and then somebody else will come in, and everything will reset."

What he's done has fundamentally changed the way we think about the office, right?

- Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, Trump is putting in place right now a theory of the executive office that is unlike anything that we've ever seen before.

Every single day they are asserting that the courts can't have oversight ability, that they can simply ignore what Congress does, that they have the ability to ignore Due Process, you know, things like that when it comes to certain categories of things, specifically immigration.

That is a view of the Executive that has never been carried out quite like this, so that's gonna be, not just something that Trump does, every subsequent president is then going to have something to say, "Well, at least we can try."

- " He did it."

- "He did it."

- "Why why can't I do it?"

- Exactly.

- And by the way, we were told that he was gonna do this in some fashion, right?

This theory of executive power was a feature and not a bug - Absolutely.

- Of his campaign.

- And, you know, for all of the denials of Project 2025, they are going according to that playbook almost word for word in some cases in how they're operating in virtually every branch of government.

It was written out there, and the reason it was written out there is because Project 2025 was a project of conservative activists who wanted to set forth a new theory for what the Executive Branch could be if, particularly conservatives, were empowered again.

So it's not just about how they're gonna tinker with the federal government, it's also about executive power.

That's what that document is about, and it's about reshaping what that looks like.

It's about challenging the courts in certain ways.

It's about challenging the legislature in certain ways, and that's why what Trump is doing isn't just DOGE.

It isn't just the things that he says.

It's the whole view of the Executive Branch as, because the Executive is elected by the people, largely unchecked by other branches of government.

- Right, and there might have been guardrails in the past, but those guardrails are also basically non-existent.

- Yeah, and I think there's a process.

I think one of the things that's frustrating to people is that this process can seem, it can seem almost random, and also very slow, and it's both of those things (laughs) at the same time.

The process by which you say, "Okay, what you're doing is illegal.

Let's go to the courts", that process means that whatever random cases are filed get assigned to different parts of the country, and then it's up to, sometimes, a lottery for judges, whether or not your case is going to, you are gonna be victorious in a particular case.

So yes, it is designed that way, and that's why the idea that, "Can he just do that?

", and then the answer is, "We don't really know yet" can be extremely frustrating, because it's going to take a while for a lot of this stuff to work through the court system.

- How does what you just described, I think very well, change your thinking of your job as a journalist?

In this moment, how do you do your job in response to solve for what you just described?

- You know, I think that we encounter this almost every day in our coverage.

I think that there are some truly unknown legal questions about how the court is gonna interpret certain things that Trump is doing, but I also genuinely think that there are some real common sense things that are being put on the table here that we can say, "This is not how it works", right?

So like, just one example is, are the courts allowed to decide what the law is?

The answer is yes.

That is just a fact, and it's just, it's- - As strange as it is to be saying, it's a very common sense.

(audience laughs) Like, "Duh, it's the courts."

Right?

- It sounds maybe, I mean, I don't know, maybe it sounds crazy.

It doesn't matter whether Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, says, "They can't do this."

"A judge doesn't get to decide what the law is."

It doesn't matter that she says that.

(audience mutters) That's actually not how our legal system works.

Judges do get to decide what the law is, how it's supposed to be interpreted, how it should be applied under certain circumstances, and that's true not just because Donald Trump is President, but to protect every single person in this country.

So there are some things that are being said from people who are political appointees that are not consistent with 10th grade social studies (audience laughs) and common sense, and I think those things, we should just say, "This is not how our system works."

- As opposed to reporting - "This is."

- what they say, report it and say, "This is not how our system works."

- Exactly.

- I love that.

- We can report what she says, but also say, "This is not how our system works."

It would be a disservice to people to say, if a politician says, "The courts don't have a role in deciding what the law is", and then say, "I don't know".

Actually we do know.

- No, we do.

- We do know.

- I mean, I'll give you an example of a headline, unrelated to what you just talked about, where I remember thinking, "Oh, finally, journalism," my career and your career, "got it right."

President Trump says crash in Washington, plane crash, is because of DEI.

Period.

And then the headline said, "There is no evidence that that is true."

Right, like, where the headline actually just said, "No, we're not gonna just accept the fact that he said it, and report it, and repeat it, and legitimize it.

We're gonna call BS on it."

- It's extremely important to do that when it is possible.

Now, I wanna leave room here for the things that we simply don't know, right?

There are some things that, as journalists, we are not ever seeing.

We don't know all the things, but there are some things that are pretty clear are political tactics that have no basis in fact, that are contradictory to every other known thing, and we should just say it when we encounter it.

And so when a politician's, five seconds after a plane crash, start blaming it on DEI, I think it's pretty clear that, at that point, there is no evidence.

There's no evidence that it is, and there's no evidence that it isn't, and we should say that upfront rather than simply regurgitating the misleading comments that, once they are out there, can seep into the psyche.

- I worry and I wonder if you worry that in this environment there are some journalists who are holding back a little bit, worried, watching what happened to the AP, right, watching the ways in which this Administration has said gleefully, "We are going to retaliate against people who we don't like, who we disagree with," and therefore some in our business are holding back, or are pulling their punches, and not doing the work that they do for fear that they'll be the next ones in the sites of this Administration.

- I think that that is always a risk, and I'm sure that this is happening across the country, 'cause we're a pretty big country, but I will say, Evan, I do think, actually I've been incredibly impressed by the boldness of the media in asking the right questions, and doing the deep digging and the reporting.

I honestly think that, to the extent that we can, news organizations across the spectrum are trying to meet this moment.

Now I say trying because it's an incredible challenge.

I mean, right now we have stories that are unfolding by the second across a massive expansive federal government and federal bureaucracy.

It is almost impossible for that to be fully covered, but you have places like "The Wall Street Journal".

You have places like "The Washington Post" where they are now owned by a person who has made it pretty clear that they're trying to appeal to the Trump administration for- - Right, an out of the closet supporter of Donald Trump's, right?

- Yes, so "The Washington Post" is in that kind of situation from its ownership perspective, and yet The Post continues to do the work.

"The Wall Street Journal", which is owned by the same parent company as Fox News - And "The New York Post".

- And "The New York Post" is doing some of the most aggressive investigative journalism out there on the Administration, on foreign policy, on the economy, on the federal government.

What I see out there is journalists continuing to do their jobs.

- Let me ask you about the relationship between this Administration and the press in broad terms before we get to CNN specifically.

What have we seen over the last couple months?

Lawsuits against news organizations, the weaponization of the FCC against some networks.

We've seen the attempt or the plan announced to defund PBS and NPR.

I mentioned the AP being kept out of the White House Press Room, banned effectively from covering the Administration in the ways that it had.

But as an extension of that, the wholesale takeover of the press pool by the White House, saying it's no longer gonna be the Correspondent's Association.

We're gonna decide who gets to cover the President and who doesn't.

This is really an order of magnitude different than anything we have seen before.

You can understand why some are concerned about whether free speech and freedom of the press can survive this, right?

- Absolutely, and there's reason to be concerned, right?

All of the other rights that we have in this country are downstream of our ability to freely speak.

They really are, and that's whether the President is Barack Obama, or Joe Biden, or Donald Trump, or George W. Bush, and it really doesn't matter, so until we are really truly committed to that, we're always gonna have a problem, and I think right now that is under threat.

This White House has made it clear that they do want to stack The White House press corps with people who are friendly to them.

Fine.

Lots of White Houses want to do that, but there are a lot of reasons why that's not how it's been set up, that the press gets to police itself in one important area, in the fact that they're creating a press corps that is designed to adequately cover the President, 24 hour coverage essentially, of this President, and the organizations that are in that press corps are not in that press corps because of what they cover, or because of how they cover it.

It's because they've made commitments to be there no matter what, and we've created a press corps that does that to provide this service on behalf of the American people that you know that, at any given time, if the President is going somewhere, if they're talking, if they're walking, someone is there to tell you what the President said.

And the White House is starting to tinker with that, and they're claiming that it's because they want to open the doors to more news organizations, but that's not really what it is, because if those news organizations wanted to be a part of the press corps, they could make those commitments, and be a part of the press corps, and no one is gonna have an ideological litmus test for them, so this is about how they wanna be covered, and I think that there's an important need for the press to say, not only is this about speech, but this is also about serving the American public actually.

- We have to remind people of the value proposition of the press.

- Yeah, it's about people at home who take for granted that there is someone always there.

The reason there is someone always there is because the press has created an institution to provide, at an incredibly high level, full service coverage of the President.

That is extremely costly.

It costs a lot of money for news organizations to do that, and that commitment is made for the benefit of the American people.

- Of the American people.

So in this moment that you've just very artfully described, what is the role and responsibility of CNN specifically as you see it, your employer for the last eight years?

- Yeah, I mean, look, I think that we cannot be all things to all people, right, but I just want to just, I'll talk about what I do, right?

So on my show, on "News Night", what we are trying to do is have a forum for the conversation that is happening and playing out across the country.

That is a conversation that is sometimes messy.

It's sometimes loud, it's sometimes honestly chaotic, but it's real- - And it's reflective of the diversity of voices.

- It is reflective of the diversity of voices, so we try our darnedest, and we're not always successful, right, because schedules and whatnot, but we try our hardest to find people who reflect a wide spectrum of views, conservatives, liberals, libertarians, people who are somewhere in between, people who are hard to figure out, and we bring them to the table, and we facilitate that conversation, and I do think that there is a need for more of that in cable television in particular, which is a specific kind of medium that, you know, we're not necessarily "The Washington Post", or "The New York Times", but we are the place where people gather every day and in the evening, and they sit sometimes with their families, and they watch to both find out what is happening, but to understand it, to digest it, to contextualize it, and I think that more and more there is a need for the sides to meet somewhere.

They don't have to meet in the middle, but they have to meet somewhere, and have a conversation, and actually engage with each other, because what I often see, and I think what happened for a while, I think even on our air, is that the sides might be on the same program, but they don't even talk to each other.

They're responding to questions as if they're in their own world, and what we want them to do on my show is talk to each other, challenge each other, say, "Hey, hold on a second, that's not true.

Hey, hold on a second, but what about this?"

And that actual tension is where we really get to the heart of what our disagreements are as a country.

- Is this the show that you wanted to do?

Did you go and say, "I want to do that kind of show.

", or did it emerge that way organically?

- No, it is not the show I wanted to do (laughs).

(audience laughs) I mean, it's really not.

I mean, just being honest.

Like, let me just tell you, I mean, I did not, first of all, I didn't come to CNN to necessarily do a show like this, and when we launched "News Night", it wasn't this show.

It was a much more traditional news broadcast, and one of the reasons that I was kind of resistant initially to this idea is because I don't want people yelling at each other all the time.

I don't like that.

I don't think it's constructive, and so what I, said as we decided to kind of reframe this show was, "Okay, let's take it from the premise of, how can we create a real conversation?"

And it has to be moderated.

It has to be pretty aggressively guard railed, so that we are at least operating on the same plane of some kind of mutual understanding of the facts, right?

And I also really wanted to make sure that it wasn't just like liberals and former Republicans, because that can also happen.

- The definition of Republican these days has changed.

- Right.

It needed to be that we could find enough people that truly represented the other point of view in this country, which is almost half of the country, people who are actual Trump Republicans, who believe what he says, who like him, who support him, and to really have those people at the table is the only way that this can be an authentic conversation that reflects this country, so we try really hard to do that, and it's hard.

It's not easy.

- And you're recognizing something that is gone largely from all of our communities, and that is people who don't agree spending time with one another, talking to one another, listening to one another.

That has largely stopped.

- Absolutely.

- In places all over the country.

- And there are, actively I think, many people right now who are advocating to just cut 'em off.

Don't even talk to them.

- I know a few people who would like to see you shoot Scott Jennings out of a rocket for instance.

(audience laughs) - A lot, I mean, I hear about it every single- - I'm sure you do.

- I hear about it every day.

- And there are people on the other side probably who would like you to shoot, you know, fill in the blank out of a rocket.

- Yes, people don't wanna talk to each other and they don't, and I often have to, whenever I speak in public as I'm doing now, the thing that I talk about the most is why do we need to talk to each other?

Because we live here (laughs).

We all live in this country.

- We're not going anywhere.

- We are not going anywhere.

And I think that there was a time when I think a lot, especially on the left, a lot of people on the left were sort of like, "Oh, well this is gonna peter out.

It's really not that many people."

It's half the country, okay?

- I mean, we now know.

- We know that it's half the country.

- He won the popular vote.

- And I think that what I really wanna emphasize is that people who voted for Trump are people that you know.

People who voted for Joe Biden are people that you know, and the fact that you may not have known that about them is not good (laughs).

You should know your neighbor, your family member, and it shouldn't be a secret, and you should understand how they got there, and if you are not willing to go a little bit under the surface, you're gonna continue to be surprised by the results of elections in this country, because we are not talking to each other.

We don't even know what's happening in this country anymore, because people are so in their silos in media, in social media, in their communities, in their families that they don't know even what somebody that you think, maybe you thought you've known this person forever, and you could never imagine them voting this way.

You don't know what got them there, and I think we should start to understand each other a little bit more.

- Yeah, I love that, and I couldn't agree more.

We have a couple minutes.

I want to talk about you.

So you were born in Virginia, moved outta the country with your family at some point in your childhood to Trinidad.

- Trinidad and Tobago.

- Trinidad and Tobago, yes.

- Came back and grew up the remainder of your childhood and adolescence in Bowie, Maryland, and then went to Harvard University, thinking you wanted to be a doctor, thinking you wanted to go to medical school, but you wrote for "The Harvard Crimson".

It's those pesky student newspapers - I know (laughs).

- that derail your plans.

Was that it?

Did you start writing for the paper and think, "Oh, I wanna do this instead"?

- Yeah, I mean, that's basically what happened.

I mean, first of all, I couldn't cut it as a doctor (laughs) is really what happened.

- You know you were not obligated to acknowledge that, so good for you.

That's all right.

- Listen, we all have to learn our gifts, and I realized very early on, being in a lab and looking at, you know, cells and all this, I'm fascinated by science.

I still am, but it just wasn't for me, and what I did find out was the thing that really woke me up and brought me to life was learning and talking to people.

And the first story that I did when I worked for "The Harvard Crimson" was that I interviewed David Gergen, and he is, was, I think he's now retired, but at the Harvard Kennedy School at the time.

- Right, worked for a whole bunch of presidents.

- Worked for a whole bunch of presidents.

I mean, honestly a salt of the earth guy, and just a great example of a public servant who could work across ideological lines, right, and I interviewed him for this story and I was like, "Oh my God, this is so interesting."

And he was so gracious and I learned so much, and I was just in awe that I could learn from somebody who worked in the White House, and that was the beginning for me.

- That did it for you?

Does Gergen know that, because of him, there's an Abby Phillip on TV?

- He does, I mean, I've told him.

I mean, I don't whether he remembers anymore because- - But it's a great story.

- This was like 15 or 20 years ago, but.

- Oh my God, you're a kid.

- I mean, I know.

(audience laughs) But he is, I mean, he really was the very first person I interviewed, the reason that I decided that there's something there for me, and also, to me, I think the importance of, I've always been a political junkie, the importance of politics and of a politics that allows for people with different points of view to express themselves in this system, and sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, and at the end of the day, we still have a country.

That is the system that I really believe in, and I think that journalism is in service of facilitating that, and the continuation of a true democracy where, even when you lose, you don't just take your ball and go home, or you know, riot or whatever.

We believe in the system more than we believe in any particular person, or even any particular ideology, and that's what I kind of bought into when I decided I wanted to be a journalist.

I wanted to be a political journalist in particular.

- Right, I love that.

That's a great, I'm so glad I asked.

It's a great story.

(Abby laughs) You don't know what you're gonna get.

We're out of time.

Abby Philip, thank you so much.

- Thank you so much.

- Good to see you, appreciate it (indistinct).

(audience claps) (soft music) We'd love to have you join us in the studio.

Visit our website at austinpbs.org/overheard to find invitations to interviews, Q&As with our audience and guests, and an archive of past episodes.

- Voters are the deciding factor in politics.

They are the ones who can exert pressure upward on their representatives who then exert pressure upward on the President of the United States, so I think that's the only way that certain things might become out of bounds for this President.

- [Announcer] Support for "Overheard with Evan Smith" comes from Hillco Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy, Claire and Carl Stuart, Christine and Philip Dial, and the Eller Group, specializing in crisis management, litigation, and public affairs communication, ellergroup.com.

(whistling tune)