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So much to happen here, to get through Monday and into a new Trump administration. She has provided leadership at CBS in driving forward conversation. Margaret Brennan joins us now, of course with Face the Nation seat on the CBS television network Sunday morning and of course on Bloomberg Radio Sunday afternoon. Margaret, I'm going to cut to the chase Republicans and Democrats thunderstruck by the caliber of the talent, and then you know, with Secretary Treasury, I guess doing
a good job yesterday. Enter stage right, Michael Waltz of the Virginia Military Institute. Who is Michael Waltz and why are you going to speak to him? Sunday?
The Republican congressman from Florida, former Green Beret, is the incoming National security advisor to Donald Trump. We want to talk to him about the job he is about to take on, because he will be the man in the Oval Office providing that advice and really in many ways curating what gets to his desk from the cabinet cabinet officials. We want to talk to Walls about this really complex environment.
Most immediately you have the question of who's going to implement and oversee this incredibly complex ceasefire and hostage deal that could see some hostages coming out as soon as Sunday into Monday, Which official diplomats with deep regional knowledge will take over from Bradan Burk and the CIA director.
We want to talk to him about China. Why did President Trump invite Shijinping, who just is now sending his vice president to the inauguration, an inauguration at which the CEO of TikTok will be an honored guest, at the same time that TikTok is deemed a national security threat and the Supreme Court's trying to decide whether or not it goes dark. And immediately, I mean, there's just such a list of things. It is such an important moment.
Margaret within the CBS reporting, how will the first weeks forget about the one hundred day shtick? How will the first four weeks of Trump to differ from Mattis, Kelly McMaster and others in the first term. To me, there's a radical set of different people, with Mike Waltz being one of the few common features of what we saw eight years ago.
It will be different, and we are already getting a sense of that, in part because we don't have people who are completely without clue as to how government works. Right, Donald Trump is bringing with him stack Ye wait wait.
Margaret, stop, Damien, do you see how diplomatic Miss Brennan is compared to Margaret? Please continue.
No, But so that's where the sort of learning the process. Some of his advisors who don't require Senate information may be able to offset some of those who do. We know Mattis had such experience both on the battlefield in terms of dust on his boots. Pete Hegseith, I think tried to get people to forget that that Maddis was actually a general and the first Secretary of Defense in the in the Trump administration, when he claimed he'd be a new set of set of blood with you know,
a completely different perspective. We will see a bunch of cabinet officials who might not have ever been up for a job like this had Donald Trump not president of the United States.
Damiens jump in here and say.
Yeah, Margaret, you mentioned Mike Waltz, and I remember Mike Waltz because he boycotted the twenty two Beijing Olympics, the Winter Olympics. Right, So another notorious China hawk, and there's so many of them in this administration. And you know now we're hearing all this news about ten cents been added to the list of China military firms expert controls on rarers. China's preventing Applin and BYD from shipping production
across Asia this morning. So talk to us about this cold war that's sort of lingering in the background here in the minds of America and China. I mean, how do we get through this? What comes next?
It's the big question. I mean, you have Marco Rubio, who could be the next Secretary of State, who's actually like sanctioned in China. Does that mean he could ever trouble there? You have, yes, China hawks, But this is not a very hawkish first approach on day one to be asking Shijin paying to send his best representative to Washington and to be embracing TikTok the way Donald Trump
now is and reversing his past position. Perhaps that has to do with the one hundred and seventy million users who want to stream the Trump inauguration on social media. But we will see how this actually translates into policy. Is this the charm offensive by Beijing to try to convince Trump not to go ahead with the tariffs that he promised on the campaign trail? What is does this actually mean? That's one of the things we want to ask Mike Waltz, is makes sense of all these discordant
things for us? What's the strategy? What's the approach?
It's gonna be fascinating in your line up here. You've got somebody stuck in the middle, which is a Senator from Carolinas, Lindsey Graham. I'm fascinated, Margaret, how you initiate a conversation with a gentleman torn between a Trump GOP and a mainstream GOP. How are you going to do that?
And Lindsay Graham has gone between them time and time again. I don't know, you know, at this moment in time where he is in relation to the Trump orbit, We'll ask him that we'll talk to him because he is, for example, a staunch supporter of Ukraine, something that Donald Trump is not, and we want to talk to him about. Okay, by the way, what do we actually learn from that hearing with Pete Heike Sith We didn't actually get a lot on policy or vision for the Pentagon, or innovation
or changes. There was more about who he is as a person. Yeah, and character is important, no doubt. Tim Kine, one of my other guests, will be on with us, and he was a Democrat with some of the sharpest questions on that front of you know, why wouldn't oath to the Constitution be different than breaking an oath to your first and second wives. That was pretty sharp. We'll talk to him about that.
Extraordinary, an amazing four or five days for Facination, Chris Margaret Brennan, host of CBS Facination. Hear it on the CBS Television network Sunday morning, and you can hear it again Bloomberg Radio on Facination Sunday two PM in New York, Washington, DC, in Bloomberg ninety two nine FM across all of New England and Boston. We thank Margaret Brennan for that time here on a Friday morning