SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
It's been a week since the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was toppled by a coalition of rebels that includes some with ties to groups like al-Qaida and ISIS. Ron Elving joins us. Ron, thanks for being with us.
RON ELVING, BYLINE: Good to be with you, Scott.
SIMON: The U.S. carried out some strikes in Syria after the fall of the regime, hitting what were described as ISIS targets. Any indication of how the Trump administration will respond to events there?
ELVING: I think we have to know more about who will be the incoming Trump administration. Will it be Marco Rubio at state, Pete Hegseth at defense, Mike Waltz as national security adviser? As the saying goes, personnel is policy. We do know, of course, that ultimately, the Trump administration and its policy will be Trump. And last week, he was on Truth Social saying Syria was, quote, "a mess," wasn't our fight, and we should stay out. Let it play out.
He said some similar things in his first term, but his secretary of state then and national security adviser then turned him around a bit. He did do some airstrikes then. And now with Assad gone, the situation is far more volatile. And the new boss in Damascus is a group the U.S. has long considered to be terrorist. So if Syria becomes the new base of jihad on the doorstep of Israel, can the U.S. just let it play out?
SIMON: New York Times put out an analysis this week showing the immigration surge at the beginning of the Biden administration was the largest in U.S. history. Now, that surge has been dramatically lower in 2024 as President Biden tightened the rules, but can we now see some of the possible political effects of that surge?
ELVING: Oh, yes, the government numbers themselves are not really the news here. They are released on a monthly basis, but this new analysis by The Times says the cumulative total during the first phases was that much greater in absolute numbers, not necessarily relative to the entire United States population, say in the 1850s or the early 1900s. But then, in a sense, these numbers just confirm what a lot of voters have been telling us in interviews for years now and with their votes last month.
They see immigration as out of control. They believe it's affecting their wages and making them feel less safe in their neighborhoods. And while there is some nativism in all of that, there's also rational self-interest. We see the pushback even among Hispanic voters in South Texas and elsewhere. We see it in working-class voters with various backgrounds. So yeah, inflation was the Trump campaign's best ally this fall, but immigration was not far behind.
SIMON: If mass deportations come about, will there be reactions in Congress, or what will those reactions be?
ELVING: In the first term, Trump tried various ways to stop immigration at the southern border. These came to include family separation, the incarceration of children. Those were not popular, and the wall that Trump wanted did not get the funding it needed in Congress. Now, some of the same people responsible for those policies in the first term seem to be back in the picture for the second. So it's possible we would see a turnaround in the politics of this issue once again down the road. It's surely easier to say mass deportation as a campaign applause line than to bring it off and make it a popular policy.
SIMON: Ron, the White House, on Thursday, announced President Biden's commuting the prison sentences for nearly 1,500 people, pardoning 39 others - the largest act of clemency in a single day in modern presidential history. Some of those pardons are quite controversial - a judge in Pennsylvania who was convicted of taking kickbacks for sending children to detention centers and a former Dixon, Illinois, official convicted of stealing $54 million from her city, the largest municipal fraud in U.S. history. What are the political repercussions of all these pardons?
ELVING: The surge in pardons and commutations is a curious coda to the Biden term, Scott. The average American might feel some sympathy for many of these cases - maybe the vast majority of the minor offenses, well in the past. But, you know, the attention is going to go to the egregious cases, such as the ones you just mentioned. Sure, they might have been a long time ago, and the guilty have done much penance since. But one wonders whether Biden and his team are trying to create some new context around the whole idea of pardon, generosity in government, perhaps in the aftermath of Biden's pardoning his son, Hunter.
The absolute power to pardon harks back to medieval times, and Alexander Hamilton fought to have it in the Constitution. He saw it as a benign tool in the hands of a benevolent chief executive such as George Washington. But over the generations since then, it's been tainted with clemency for family members and political donors and cronies. Does it still make sense in our time, or are we now finally seeing the case made for reform?
SIMON: NPR's Ron Elving, thanks so much.
ELVING: Thank you, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
