WASHINGTON—United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN), a member of the Senate Appropriations, Banking, and Foreign Relations Committees and former U.S. Ambassador to Japan, yesterday joined Newsmax to discuss President Donald Trump’s first actions in office via executive orders and confirmation of his cabinet nominees.

Partial Transcript
Hagerty on the atmosphere in Washington: “It’s been absolutely uplifting. If you think about the collective sigh of relief that we’re feeling all over the nation, this four-year experiment in Marxism is over, and President Trump came in and basically laid out the facts that it’s time to get back to the exceptionalism that this nation is and can become again. He’s going to do everything in his power to make that happen as quickly as he possibly can. I’ll tell you this later this afternoon—I’m on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—we’re going to meet as a group, and we’re going to vote [Senator] Marco Rubio out of that committee to be our next Secretary of State. We’re going to put it to the Democrats to join us, to accelerate Marco’s process here, and make certain that we confirm him, I hope tonight, to be our next Secretary of State, same for John Ratcliffe to be our CIA Director. We have national security concerns that are enormous thanks to the failures of the previous Administration. We need to be ready to hit the ground running. We need to deliver the team that President Trump needs to win, and so we’re going to have the first real test of the Democrats. I hope they saw what happened in the November 5th election because seventy-five percent of Americans said that we were on the wrong track. President Trump won every single battleground state. He won the popular vote. He had a landslide in the electoral college. I hope that message has been carried loud and clear to my Democrat colleagues because we need to get moving as a nation again. And President Trump laid out the steps to do that today. I’m very excited about it.”
Hagerty on the Trump Effect: “Look, I was here at his first inaugural address in January of 2017. I think the mainstream media had already written the critique before he even gave the speech. He actually called out what had happened in America during the Obama Administration. Today, he let America know, again, the wrath that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris brought on America. But he’s going to bring us back. It’s already started even before he’s taken office. You’ve seen peace breaking out in the Middle East. You see the ceasefire that’s taking place in Gaza, thanks to Steve Witkoff being sent over there, on behalf of President Trump, to deliver the message that this needs to get fixed. You see that [the European Union is] now saying that they’re going to start buying U.S. LNG and displace Russian LNG, this all happened before President Trump has taken office. And you’ve also seen the projections for the 2025 GDP in America significantly revised upward last week because American CEOs, even foreign companies, are investing here in America making those commitments. And it’s easy and obvious to see that our economy is going to take off under President Trump.”
Hagerty on the difference between Trump’s first and second terms: “The environment is different…He’s the same Donald Trump that I’ve known for years, but he’s had the benefit of four years in office. He’s had the benefit, and so has the American public of seeing the failure of the Marxist policies of Joe Biden and the far-left Democrats. And he’s coming back strong because he knows he’s got four years to get this done. The damage that has been done these past four years under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris has been enormous. He’s got to fix it. He’s focused on fixing it, so he’s moving at a rapid pace. The other thing I’ll say is this: the opposition on the Democrats side has totally collapsed. If I think about what we faced—I was a finance chair for President Trump in 2016—I moved into Trump Tower the day after the election. They were so organized, they were there blockading us. They were shouting and spitting at us. [They said] not my president, very well organized. I think they were probably paid, but that resistance movement is broken. The Democrat Party is in shambles, and they should be. Three quarters of America has said that the policies that they advocated are all wrong. And so, we’re moving in now without that level of resistance. As I said, tonight, we have a chance to see what my Democrat colleagues in the Senate will do. And if they’ll allow us to seat Marco Rubio and Ratcliffe as our CIA director and our Secretary of State, we’re going to have a great start.”
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