WATCH: FOX 8 one-on-one with GOP gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy
*For our full, unedited interview, watch above.
CLEVELAND (WJW) — GOP gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has already secured an endorsement from President Donald Trump and Ohio's Republican Party.
More coverage from Your Local Election Headquarters
The 39-year-old biotech entrepreneur sat down with Fox 8's Joe Toohey this week to discuss why he's running, what he'd like to do and whether he'd run for president again in 2028.
Ramaswamy sought the GOP nomination for president in 2024 before dropping out to back Trump, who later tapped him to co-chair the efficiency initiative with billionaire Elon Musk.
Ramaswamy and Attorney General Dave Yost are running as Republicans to replace the term-limited Gov. Mike DeWine. Dr. Amy Acton is running as a Democrat. Lt. Gov. Jim Tressel, a Republican, has said he is considering a run.
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Los Angeles Times
26 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
Can Trump fix the national debt? GOP senators, many investors and even Elon Musk have doubts
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White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt opened her briefing Thursday by saying she wanted 'to debunk some false claims' about his tax cuts. Leavitt said the 'blatantly wrong claim that the 'One, Big, Beautiful Bill' increases the deficit is based on the Congressional Budget Office and other scorekeepers who use shoddy assumptions and have historically been terrible at forecasting across Democrat and Republican administrations alike.' House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) piled onto Congress' number crunchers on Sunday, telling NBC's 'Meet the Press,' 'The CBO sometimes gets projections correct, but they're always off, every single time, when they project economic growth. They always underestimate the growth that will be brought about by tax cuts and reduction in regulations.' But Trump himself has suggested that the lack of sufficient spending cuts to offset his tax reductions came out of the need to hold the Republican congressional coalition together. 'We have to get a lot of votes,' Trump said last week. 'We can't be cutting.' That has left the administration betting on the hope that economic growth can do the trick, a belief that few outside of Trump's orbit think is viable. Most economists consider the non-partisan CBO to be the foundational standard for assessing policies, though it does not produce cost estimates for actions taken by the executive branch such as Trump's unilateral tariffs. Tech billionaire Musk, who was until recently part of Trump's inner sanctum as the leader of the Department of Government Efficiency, told CBS News: 'I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing.' The tax and spending cuts that passed the House last month would add more than $5 trillion to the national debt in the coming decade if all of them are allowed to continue, according to the Committee for a Responsible Financial Budget, a fiscal watchdog group. To make the bill's price tag appear lower, various parts of the legislation are set to expire. This same tactic was used with Trump's 2017 tax cuts and it set up this year's dilemma, in which many of the tax cuts in that earlier package will sunset next year unless Congress renews them. But the debt is a much bigger problem now than it was eight years ago. Investors are demanding the government pay a higher premium to keep borrowing as the total debt has crossed $36.1 trillion. The interest rate on a 10-year Treasury note is around 4.5%, up dramatically from the roughly 2.5% rate being charged when the 2017 tax cuts became law. The White House Council of Economic Advisers argues that its policies will unleash so much rapid growth that the annual budget deficits will shrink in size relative to the overall economy, putting the U.S. government on a fiscally sustainable path. The council argues the economy would expand over the next four years at an annual average of about 3.2%, instead of the Congressional Budget Office's expected 1.9%, and as many as 7.4 million jobs would be created or saved. Council chair Stephen Miran told reporters that when the growth being forecast by the White House is coupled with expected revenues from tariffs, the expected budget deficits will fall. The tax cuts will increase the supply of money for investment, the supply of workers and the supply of domestically produced goods — all of which, by Miran's logic, would cause faster growth without creating new inflationary pressures. 'I do want to assure everyone that the deficit is a very significant concern for this administration,' Miran said. White House budget director Russell Vought told reporters the idea that the bill is 'in any way harmful to debt and deficits is fundamentally untrue.' Most outside economists expect additional debt would keep interest rates higher and slow overall economic growth as the cost of borrowing for homes, cars, businesses and even college educations would increase. 'This just adds to the problem future policymakers are going to face,' said Brendan Duke, a former Biden administration aide now at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank. Duke said that with the tax cuts in the bill set to expire in 2028, lawmakers would be 'dealing with Social Security, Medicare and expiring tax cuts at the same time.' Kent Smetters, faculty director of the Penn Wharton Budget Model, said the growth projections from Trump's economic team are 'a work of fiction.' 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Yahoo
30 minutes ago
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Andrea Mitchell on Rebuilding Faith in the News Media: ‘Trust Is the Coin of the Realm, and We Have to Be the Gold Standard'
The Peabody Awards will honor veteran NBC News' Chief Washington and Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell with the Career Achievement Award, and the landmark sketch comedy series 'Saturday Night Live' with the Institutional Award during a June 1 ceremony in Beverly Hills. Now in its 85th year, the Peabody Awards recognize the importance of storytelling and of narratives irrespective of genre or platform, whether the show be entertainment, news, a documentary, children's programing, radio, podcasting or a video game. More from Variety Kenan Thompson Suggests 'A Lot of Change' Is Coming For 'SNL' Season 51: 'You Want Everyone to Stay Forever' Michael Che Gives Humiliating Apology to Scarlett Johansson for Lewd 'SNL' Jokes: 'I Was Just Lashing Out Because I'm Jealous ... I've Never Seen a Human Vagina' 'SNL': Kanye West Parodied, Says 'I'm in the KKK Now' in Wild Sketch With Mike Myers Jeffrey P. Jones, executive director of the Peabody Awards, says that Mitchell's long, distinguished career as a journalist at various capacities covering the White House and international affairs — and the gravity of both of those positions — makes her an obvious choice for the award. 'It's someone like that who's had such a career in the public eye, we felt as if it was important to recognize not just that longevity, but the quality of her work and the importance of what quality journalism looks like in 2025. There's a lot of new and challenging understandings of what constitutes professional quality journalism. What better way than to demonstrate somebody who, for 30 years, has done it right?' Mitchell isn't just flattered by the acknowledgement, she says, 'I can't tell you how thrilled I am. This is the ultimate recognition in our profession, and it's not just personally from my career, but also just how far we've come in broadcast journalism and how much television has been transformed since I first started. It means a lot to be the first woman to receive [the Career Achievement Award for journalism]. It is such a signature achievement.' After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967, Mitchell was hired as a reporter for KYW radio in Philadelphia. When she first started as a journalist, she was told that women couldn't be in the newsroom. 'And now I look around and I have a woman bureau chief and a woman president of NBC News and women producers and colleagues and women at every level in our newsroom, throughout the company here in New York, around the world. So there is so much ratification,' she says. And Mitchell has been at the forefront of that progress for women journalists, beginning in 1972 when she covered both the Republican and Democratic presidential conventions. She also covered all the Gorbachev-Reagan summits and the end of the Cold War, and interviewed everyone from Margaret Thatcher to Fidel Castro. 'I mean, who gets to do that?' she asks with a laugh. 'When I think about having a front row in history, it's such a responsibility because it's through our reports — through my reports, as well as my colleagues — that the American people get to experience all of these historic events. So that raises the bar in terms of how important it is to get our facts right. And to always be accurate and to share so much about how we're communicating history to people.' The blurring of lines between 'news' and 'entertainment,' fueled by the spreading of fake news has snowballed into a major threat against the responsibility of the Fourth Estate, which has become more important than ever. Social media — and before that, talk radio and every other transformation of the way people consume news — has complicated what true journalists do. Their standards have to be in violet. 'They have to be accurate and fair and doing justice to the story, providing context analysis when it is appropriate, but not opinion,' Mitchell explains. 'You have to be true to your mission, and that is providing context and facts to your audiences, It doesn't matter what the platform is. We evolve with the technology, but the mission remains the same. … Trust is the coin of the realm, and we have to be the gold standard. We have to be absolutely right all the time. Getting something first is never as important as getting it right.' And that is the sage advice Mitchell offers young, aspiring journalists coming up in the ranks: Do your homework. 'The best political reporters are the people who like to talk to people. If you don't like people and you don't want to ask questions and ask people about themselves and their lives, then I don't think you're going to ever rise to the level of, certainly, broadcast journalism. I mean, maybe there are other formats where you can fake it, but it's too transparent. You're too visible. People get it when you're not authentic.' While Mitchell has covered the serious side of politics and history, 'SNL' has taken a tongue-in-cheek approach — but without pulling punches. 'Beyond being one of the longest programs on television, let's just count the ways in which 'Saturday Night Live' revolutionized so many facets of television itself,' says Jones. 'It helped define American television, for better or worse, what political humor and satire looks like. And one can't overstate the importance of Lorne Michaels as a creative and to having the vision for that 50 years ago, and then for making a show that people still tune into week after week. Given that 'SNL' is in its 50th year, we felt it was an appropriate time to tip our hat to them as a landmark television show that's 'an institution.'' Best of Variety What's Coming to Netflix in June 2025 New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week 'Harry Potter' TV Show Cast Guide: Who's Who in Hogwarts?
Yahoo
40 minutes ago
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After Trump administration axes $500 million from Washington dam project, Patty Murray says she won't let it happen again
May 31—WASHINGTON — The most fundamental job of Congress is to fund the government each year, typically through a bipartisan process that distributes dollars more or less evenly between red states and blue states. But a dustup over a dam construction project in Washington state has thrown a wrench into that process and raised the stakes of a government funding showdown in September. Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, has accused President Donald Trump's administration of pulling $500 million that Congress allocated last year to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for a fish passage project on the Green River, east of Tacoma. In a news conference at the Capitol alongside her fellow Democratic senators from Washington and California, Murray said that move undermines the trust lawmakers rely on to negotiate spending bills. "Trump is robbing our states in broad daylight, and we are not going to be quiet about this," Murray said. "President Trump is ripping up the road map that we all agreed on, even the House Republicans, and turning the Army Corps construction funds into his personal political slush fund." After Republicans and Democrats in Congress agreed last year to appropriate the money for construction at Howard Hanson Dam, Trump shot down the bipartisan funding bill they had negotiated and Congress eventually passed a short-term funding bill, with the help of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and a handful of other Democrats. Murray staunchly opposed that legislation, warning that its wording would give extraordinary leeway to the White House. Her fears came to pass when Trump's Office of Management and Budget — helmed by Russell Vought, a lead architect of the policy initiative known as Project 2025 — intervened to redirect Army Corps funding from states represented in the Senate by Democrats to those represented by Republicans. As the Columbian of Vancouver, Washington, reported, an analysis by Murray's office found that the Trump administration reallocated funds that were split roughly 50-50 between red and blue states so that only 33% of the money goes to states with two Democratic senators, while 64% goes to states with only GOP senators and 4% to "purple" states with one senator from each party. In addition to zeroing out the funding for Howard Hanson Dam, the Trump administration cut overall funding for the Army Corps' civil works projects by about $1.5 billion and slashed the Columbia River Fish Mitigation program — intended to reduce the impact of dams on salmon and steelhead runs — by nearly half. In response to questions from The Spokesman-Review, the Office of Management and Budget didn't directly say what role it had played in redirecting Army Corps' resources or why it had defunded the Howard Hanson Dam project. But the office said the new Army Corps work plan "will generate billions of dollars in economic activity by building American energy dominance and shipping capacity while investing in important conservation projects." "The available funds were allocated by the administration based on need and urgency, in accordance with the guidelines set by Congress," the office said in a statement. In a House subcommittee hearing on May 21, Army Corps official Robyn Colosimo confirmed that it was the Office of Management and Budget, and likely Vought , that made the decision to shift the money to red states. The Army Corps didn't respond to a request for comment from The Spokesman-Review, but a spokesman for the agency previously told the Columbian that the Columbia River Fish Mitigation funding is "an important source for many projects in the basin" and the Army Corps would "work with our partners in the region to prioritize projects depending on how much funding we actually receive from Congress." That proposition gets more complicated if the Trump administration, which has taken a maximalist view of executive power, can change how much money agencies receive from Congress. At the news conference, Murray said she intends to "explore every opportunity and every wording" as she crafts the language of the next funding bill "to make sure that we have funds protected." Congress has been historically unproductive this year, and the annual appropriations process is so far behind schedule that another short-term spending bill is the most realistic option to avert a government shutdown when the current stopgap bill expires at the end of September. Even with Republicans in control of both the House and Senate, they need Democratic senators to help pass a spending bill. That gives Democrats some leverage to include language in the legislation to require that funds be spent as Congress directs, but it would require the party to be willing to let the government shut down. By choosing to help Republicans pass the partisan spending bill in March, Schumer may have squandered that leverage and encouraged the GOP to try the same move again. If Murray can help it, she said, the government won't operate under such an open-ended funding bill when the next fiscal year begins in October. Orion Donovan Smith's work is funded in part by members of the Spokane community via the Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper's managing editor.
