Tuesday on the RealClearPolitics podcast, Carl Cannon, Andrew Walworth, and White House reporter Phil Wegmann discuss the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, and the 2026 midterm plan President Trump outlined to House Republicans this morning. After that, the group welcomes Alexander Gray, CEO of American Global Strategies and former deputy assistant to the National Security Council in the first Trump administration, to discuss the political future of Venezuela and Greenland. Plus, the group reacts to the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) voting to formally disband the organization after Congress cut their funding. What does the future of public broadcasting without federal support look like? You can listen to the show live each day at 11:00 a.m. on SiriusXM’s Megyn Kelly Channel 111 and then on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and here on our website. *** The program opens with the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. The panel asks whether the country is any closer to a shared understanding of what happened and the place that day will hold in American history. Carl Cannon argued that the passage of time has done little to resolve the disagreement. It is still not clear what happened that day and what the ramifications are, he said. We have pretty much the same set of facts and very different perspectives as to what it meant. “How could people who went to Tea Party rallies and picked up their own trash suddenly get into shoving matches with Capitol Hill police?” Wegmann asked. “In their mind, they had seen the media downplay the riots in the summer of ‘mostly peaceful demonstrations’ and thought, Why would I face consequences for paralyzing the federal government for an afternoon? “Half the country believes a demonstration got overexuberant and the reaction was the real scandal-charging thousands of people with crimes, felonies, putting people in prison, impeaching Trump, having this show trial on Capitol Hill,” Cannon said. “The other half of the country thinks this was an attempted coup, and Trump got away with it, and it led to him coming back as an authoritarian!” *** After that, at minute 19, the group welcomes Alexander Gray, the CEO of American Global Strategies, who served as a deputy assistant in the National Security Council for the first Trump administration, to unpack the president’s plans in Venezuela and Greenland. “The Venezuelan people 100% want democracy. They’ve shown that when they voted for Juan Guaido and Maria Corina Machado,” Gray said. “But historically, these transitions from entrenched authoritarian regimes to elected liberal democracies are not straight lines. You can’t do it overnight.” “If you use the National Security Strategy, Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, as the template, success in Venezuela starts with no Chinese, no Russian, no Cuban, and no Iranian influence in the political, economic, military, and security apparatus of Venezuela,” he explained. “Longer term, success is whether Venezuela is reintegrated into the hemisphere and the community of nations, and whether it becomes a functioning democracy. That’s something we’ll find out over five or ten years.” The U.S. taking over Greenland is not a “Donald Trump flight of fancy,” Gray also said. “Presidents going back to Andrew Johnson have believed there is a national security imperative to have Greenland closer to, or part of, the United States.” “Our Canadian friends, who are supposed to be the front line in the Arctic, have basically allowed their defenses to go down to almost nothing-less than 1 percent of GDP,” he explained. “Greenland, as an integrated part of the United States defense apparatus, would help NATO rather than hurt it.” *** About 41 minutes into the program, the group discusses the Corporation for Public Broadcasting voting to shut down in response to Congress cutting $ 1.1 billion in annual funding. Would the world really be better off without public broadcasting? “There was always a question about whether the government should really pay for any of this,” Cannon said. “Especially now, when anybody with a microphone can broadcast the news. A 23-year-old guy without journalistic experience just humiliated the entire Minnesota press corps. So maybe the idea was one whose time had come and gone.” “The media environment is completely fragmented. If you’re conservative, you watch Fox. If you’re liberal, you watch MSNBC. The same goes for newspapers,” Wegmann added. “What PBS and NPR once provided-serving news deserts and underserved markets-may no longer be unique. The question is what distinct value they now offer.” *** Don’t miss a single episode of the RealClearPolitics weeknight radio show – subscribe at Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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