SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Senior political contributor Ron Elving joins us. Ron, thanks so much for being with us.
RON ELVING, BYLINE: Good to be with you, Scott.
SIMON: Of course, there were big protests during the first Trump administration, women's marches among them, many demonstrations against his immigration policies. How do these No Kings protests compare?
ELVING: The day after Trump's first inauguration in 2017, close to half a million people - most of them women - marched on the mall in Washington. There was an estimated 400,000 in New York City, 250,000 in Chicago, and so on. But as we just heard, organizers this year expect crowds in more than 2,000 locations, and attendance, they hope, will be in the millions. Those earlier protests were largely driven by advocates for abortion rights and women's rights. The current protests cover a wider range of issues - the rule of law, individual rights under the Constitution, and the cutbacks in funding for health and education. But at the same time, the overarching issue today is rejection of autocracy, rejection of rule by one person.
SIMON: We're now on the 18th day of a government shutdown. Is this becoming showdown - a shutdown, unlike any other?
ELVING: In past shutdowns, there have been serious ongoing efforts to resolve the underlying issues, to negotiate between the parties, to reach some kind of agreement. That's the difference. In the past, there has been general agreement that the damage from the shutdown, the harm to everyday Americans was more important than having one side or the other prevail. There was a sense of there being an us - not just an us against them. And we are not seeing that now. Whatever responsibility Democrats have for this shutdown, they are at least here in town, in D.C., ready to talk. The president and his party have refused, saying there is nothing to negotiate. The House has not had a voting session since the summer.
SIMON: Speaker Mike Johnson is also refusing to swear in Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva. She won her special election in Arizona more than three weeks ago. Arizona's attorney general is threatening legal action if she's not sworn in. What reasons has the speaker offered for the delay?
ELVING: Johnson has said he does not want to swear in Ms. Grijalva until the House is back in session so she can have all the usual ceremony. Except that earlier this year, he swore in two Republicans elected in special elections when the House was not in session - ceremony or no ceremony. We cannot know the mind of Mike Johnson or overhear his conversations with the president, but people wonder whether the real difference here is that swearing in Grijalva could cost Mike Johnson control on the issue of the Epstein files. Once she's a member, there will be a bipartisan majority on the petition to force a vote releasing those files, something Mike Johnson has fought hard to block.
SIMON: And former Trump national security adviser John Bolton pleaded not guilty yesterday to charges that he mishandled classified materials. What are your thoughts, Ron?
ELVING: We hope now to have a trial to test whether Bolton shared classified information in messages he sent to family members and kept copies of those messages at home. Another thought, of course, is back to the stacks and stacks of documents - many of them classified - found at Mar-a-Lago in 2017, all of them subject to a subpoena that Trump was ignoring after leaving office.
SIMON: And, of course, Ron, last week, we talked about President Trump's success with the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas. Yesterday, the president said he thought the deal provided momentum for Russia-Ukraine talks. Does that seem to be the case?
ELVING: That has been a fond hope for all who want these wars to end. But Trump has not yet been able to transfer his Middle East momentum to Ukraine. He has been pressuring Russia to come to the table. But this week, he had a phone call with Vladimir Putin, and after that, he said he thought Putin wanted a deal, and then Trump sat down with Ukraine's President Zelenskyy in the Oval Office and poured cold water on the long-range missiles he had talked about sharing with Ukraine. Obviously, a big letdown for Zelenskyy.
SIMON: NPR's Ron Elving. Thanks so much for being with us. Talk to you later.
ELVING: Thank you, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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