'This Week' Transcript 12-7-25: Rep. Adam Smith and Sen. Eric Schmitt
This is a rush transcript of "This Week" airing Sunday, December 7.
A rush transcript of "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" airing on Sunday, December 7, 2025 on ABC News is below. This copy may not be in its final form, may be updated and may contain minor transcription errors. For previous show transcripts, visit the "This Week" transcript archive.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, ABC ANCHOR OF "THIS WEEK" (voice-over): Growing backlash.
REP. ADAM SMITH, (D-WA): Based on what I've seen, I am deeply concerned about the legality of the strike.
STEPHANOPOULOS (voice-over): Top lawmakers on Capitol Hill divided over the video of the Caribbean boat strike that killed two survivors.
REP. JIM HIMES, (D-CT) INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE RANKING MEMBER: What I saw in that room was one of the most troubling things I've seen in my time in public service.
SEN. TOM COTTON (R-AR): No, I didn't see anything disturbing about it.
STEPHANOPOULOS (voice-over): The tape's still not public days after President Trump pledged to release them.
DONALD TRUMP, (R) PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: Whatever they have, we'd certainly release, no problem.
STEPHANOPOULOS (voice-over): But are any of the airstrikes legal? Is war with Venezuela next? This morning, Democratic Congressman Adam Smith who saw the tapes and Republican Senator Eric Schmidt join us live. Plus --
TRUMP: They used the word affordability, it's a Democrat hoax.
STEPHANOPOULOS (voice-over): With his poll numbers dropping, President Trump's economic message creating anxiety for his Republican allies ahead of the midterms. Our Roundtable weighs in, and existential threat.
NATE SOARES, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, MACHINE INTELLIGENCE RESEARCH INSTITUTE: If you have an utterly indifferent super intelligence that is repurposing the world for its own strange ends, humanity dies as a side effect.
STEPHANOPOULOS (voice-over): A.I. models developing at a breakneck pace. New warnings about what it means for the future of humanity. We'll speak with the co-author of the book, "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" on the dangers of artificial intelligence. And --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Those stories need to be told because they really do echo in eternity.
STEPHANOPOULOS (voice-over): 84 years since Pearl Harbor, Martha Raddatz visits a retired combat pilot, bringing the day that lives in infamy to a new generation.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ANNOUNCER: From ABC News, it's "This Week" here now, George Stephanopoulos.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Good morning and welcome to "This Week." Is drug trafficking an act of war? That question lies at the heart of President Trump's campaign to kill suspected drug smugglers on small boats in the Caribbean. To justify the killings, the president has declared that the U.S. is in an armed conflict with drug cartels and that the boat crews are combatants.
A wide array of legal experts from both parties question that claim, including former Obama White House lawyer Tess Bridgeman, who told the New Yorker that the Trump administration is knowingly justifying murder. And that debate was brought into stark relief this week by two revelations.
The fact that a secondary strike in September killed two survivors of a first strike and President Trump's decision to pardon the former president of Honduras, who is serving a 45-year prison sentence for conspiring to smuggle 400 tons of cocaine into the United States. That drew a blunt response from Republican Senator Thom Tillis, who said simply, I hate it.
Senior White House Correspondent Selina Wang starts us off.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
TRUMP: -- pinpoint attacks.
SELINA WANG, ABC NEWS SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): This week, stunning revelations and a stark divide on Capitol Hill. For the first time, senior lawmakers were shown video of multiple U.S. strikes against one suspected drug boat on September 2nd, the second strike, killing two survivors.
The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee describing that second strike as an attack on defenseless survivors, an act that if true would violate international law.
HIMES: You have two individuals in clear distress, without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel, who were killed by the United States.
WANG (voice-over): A source who has seen the video telling ABC News, the survivors were clinging to the overturned boat and appeared incapacitated, defenseless, and waving at something overhead. But some Republicans emerged with starkly different conclusions. Sen. Tom Cotton asserted each of the four strikes were entirely lawful and necessary.
COTTON: I saw two survivors trying to flip a boat, loaded with drugs, bound for the United States, back over, so they could stay in the fight.
WANG (voice-over): Democrats urging the administration to publicly release the video. Trump telling me this week, he would have no issue doing so.
WANG: Will you release video of that strike, so that the American people can see for themselves what happened?
TRUMP: I don't know what they have, but whatever they have, we'd certainly release, no problem.
WANG (voice-over): But Secretary Hegseth saying on Saturday, it's under review.
PETE HEGSETH, (R) SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: Whatever we were to decide to release, we'd have to be very responsible about. So we're reviewing that right now.
WANG (voice-over): Earlier this week, Hegseth said the decision to strike again was made by Admiral Mitch Bradley, who was leading Joint Special Operations Command at the time of the strike.
HEGSETH: He sunk the boat -- he sunk the boat and eliminated the threat. And it was the right call. We have his back.
WANG (voice-over): Lawmakers from both parties say Admiral Bradley told them Hegseth did not give an order at the mission's outset to kill everyone aboard the boat. I pressed the president on accountability.
WANG: Mr. President, in the boat strikes, if it is found that survivors were actually killed while clinging on to that boat, should Secretary Hegseth, Admiral Bradley or others be punished?
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I think you're going to find that this is war, that these people were killing our people by the millions, actually.
WANG (voice-over): But Congress has not given any more authorization and some legal experts say going after drug smugglers is not the same as being at war. Previously it's been a mission the U.S. Coast Guard has handled by intercepting boats and making arrests.
The September 2nd strikes are just one piece of a far larger and increasingly controversial campaign. Since September, the U.S. has hit at least 22 suspected drug boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific killing at least 87 people, including a strike on Thursday that killed four. Some lawmakers and legal experts question whether the entire operation is even legal.
SEN. CHRIS COONS (D-DE): This campaign has been going on for months. I think it deserved a fuller and more clear briefing and legal justification.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
WANG (on-camera): And, George, the president keeps on saying this is all about cracking down on drug trafficking, but that pardon of the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, tells a different story. This freed someone the Justice Department says spent nearly two decades helping cartels move mountains of cocaine into the United States, a man convicted of being involved in one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world. George?
STEPHANOPOULOS: Selina Wang, thank you.
We're joined now by Congressman Adam Smith, the top Democrat on House Armed Services Committee.
Congressman, thank you for joining us this morning. You've seen these videos. You were briefed by Admiral Bradley and others. Can you just describe what you saw and what you heard?
REP. ADAM SMITH (D-WA): I think Jim Himes described it really well. There were two -- survivors on an overturned boat, and Senator Cotton's description of it is simply not accurate. When they were finally taken out, they weren't trying to flip the boat over. The boat was clearly incapacitated. A tiny portion of it remained capsized, the bow of the boat. They had no communications device. Certainly they were unarmed.
Any claim that the drugs had somehow survived that attack is hard to really square with what we saw. So it was deeply disturbing. It did not appear that these two survivors were in any position to continue the fight. And then you get into the larger issue, which you previewed of what is the fight exactly? They were trying to bring drugs, and not even to the United States, by the way. There's no evidence, I mean, the drugs were going to some other point.
Where they were going to be transshipped from there and, again, no congressional authorization for this. If it is a war, then there should be either congressional authorization or compliance with the war powers resolution. So this seems to go directly against Donald Trump's pledge to keep us out of wars. He seems to be dragging us into one without legal authorization.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me just pin you down on one point because Secretary Hegseth also said yesterday that the survivors could have still been in the fight and have access to radio, link up with another boat carrying the drugs.
SMITH: Yes, that's ridiculous. There are no radios. They ought to release the video. If they release the video, then everything that the Republicans are saying will clearly be portrayed to be completely false and people will get a look at it and they will see.
The boat was adrift. It was going where the current was going to take it, and these two were trying to figure out how to survive. And the interpretation of this, that if maybe there were still drugs somewhere on that boat, that justifies the use of deadly force is an incredible expansion of presidential power.
If you say anyone who has drugs that they're intending to illegally transit to the U.S. is a legitimate target for deadly force, the amount of power that gives the president and the U.S. military is unprecedented and something that ought to be concerning to all of the American people.
STEPHANOPOULOS: On the release of the video, President Trump has said he's fine with having it released but Secretary Hegseth also said yesterday that's still being reviewed and he raised the possibility that they can't release it because they don't want to compromise sources and methods.
SMITH: Yes, that's ridiculous. I mean, how many videos have they released to date? I'm not sure. It's like 15 or 20. They've showed the strike. It's not very hard to make sure that nothing in that video, you know, shows anything. If they showed us just the portion that we saw, those two on the boat, it's no different than any of the dozen plus videos they've already released.
I mean, it seems pretty clear they don't want to release this video because they don't want people to see it because it's very, very difficult to justify. And, again, the big issue here is President Trump is dragging us into a foreign conflict when we have domestic issues that we're supposed to be paying attention to, that we need to be paying attention to. It's
directly contrary to the campaign that President Trump ran.
And is this really about drugs, or is it about regime change in Venezuela? Are we about to go to war with Venezuela? The president has alluded to that repeatedly over the course of the last several weeks, couple months now. And that, too, I think, would be very, very bad for the national security interests of our country.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Have you or any of your colleagues in Congress been given any briefings on the possibility of land strikes in Venezuela and taking out President Maduro?
SMITH: We have not. And that's the other aspect of this Department of Defense and the president. They don't really think that Congress should be allowed to exercise their oversight. They have not kept us informed on this. They did not inform us of these strikes.
The decision to go forward with this was made in late July. The execute order that the White House gave the Department of Defense was issued on August 5th. By law, they are supposed to transmit that execute order to Congress within 30 days. They haven't. They have no intention of doing so.
Look, I mean, that's the biggest problem with this Department of Defense. They don't seem to think the law applies to them.
I mean, let's start with the fact, it's the Department of Defense. I'm out at the Reagan Defense Forum, and they're all running around calling him the secretary of war, the Department of War. The law states clearly, it's Department of Defense. They don't care what the law is. They do and say what they want.
And look, we're going to have arguments between the executive branch and the legislative branch. Every president that I've worked with as a member of Congress has that, but all prior presidents at least gave some effort to follow the law. This one doesn't seem to want to, and the secretary of defense doesn't either. That undermines our representative democracy and our Constitution.
STEPHANOPOULOS: You say the secretary of defense doesn't want to follow the law. We also saw this inspector general's report on the release of sensitive information but -- on the Signal messaging app before the strikes in Yemen. Secretary Hegseth has called that a complete exoneration. Your response?
SMITH: Yeah, it's ridiculous. And in addition to not following law, he doesn't want any accountability. He was asked yesterday at the Defense Forum here, you know, do you have any regrets about the way you handled that? At which point, he gave a philosophical answer about how life's too short for regrets.
I disagree with the secretary in that point. It's perfectly okay to look back at past actions and say, yeah, I didn't do that right.
Look, he released sensitive information on an unsecured public app (ph) that went to a journalist. How anybody anywhere in the national security sphere, much less the secretary of defense, can look at that and say, "Oh, good. No worries. I'd do it again"?
I mean, okay, you make a mistake, whatever. But admit it, you are not supposed to share that type of information.
And the report says clearly the secretary placed our troops at unnecessary risk. So, for the secretary of defense to look at that poor report and say, “I placed troops at unnecessary risk, and I'm okay with that. I did nothing wrong” -- that's really disturb -- really disturbing.
We need them to follow the law, and we need some measure of accountability. We can disagree on policy a bunch of different areas, but we can't have a completely unaccountable secretary of defense who repeatedly ignores the law. And that's what we're -- we're battling with in Congress right now to hold them accountable.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally, I want to ask you about the president's pardon of the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez. Of course, the pre -- the pardon power is absolute. Congress has no recourse to stop it.
But is there anything more the public needs to know about this? Can you think of any justification for the pardon?
SMITH: No, I mean, I think what the public needs to know about this and I also like to point out the pardon of Ross Ulbricht, the Silk Road crypto guy who was setting up a secret way of using crypto to basically launder billions of dollars in drug money. He was convicted of laundering drug money and Trump pardoned him.
Look, it seems like this isn't that much about drugs coming into the U.S. It's more about what Trump released with their national security strategy a couple days ago, three days ago now, where he wants to assert dominance over the Western hemisphere. He wants to go back to the 19th century where the U.S. does what it wants in the Western hemisphere, the Monroe Doctrine.
And look, that's disturbing. You know, for 80 years, we have tried to develop a international system that is based on law, a rules-based system. And Trump seems to want to smash that. And if he can go after Venezuela and go after Maduro, that's one way of doing it.
The Honduras thing seems to have to do with the presidential election that's going on down there and the party that supports Trump or the party that doesn't support Trump. So, it seems to be much more about that than any legitimate desire to stop what, by the way, is a huge problem. Drugs in the U.S. are a huge problem.
But they keep -- you know, just one more example. And this fentanyl is killing a lot of people. There's no fentanyl involved in what we're blowing up down in the Caribbean, even though the White House and others keep saying that. This is cocaine, which is a problem.
But if you really wanted to get after this, you'd be putting pressure on China to stop the precursors, and you'd be putting pressure on Mexico where the fentanyl comes.
There seems to be much more about President Trump’s world vision of the U.S. needing to
dominate the hemisphere than it does about protecting Americans from the incredible problem that we have with drug overdoses and death.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Congressman, thanks for your time this morning.
I want to bring in now Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri, a member of the Armed Services Committee in the Senate. And Senator, let me just begin where we left off with Congressman Smith. Do you support this pardon of the former Honduran president?
SCHMITT: I'm not familiar with the facts or circumstances, but I think what's telling here is to try to imply that somehow President Trump is soft on drug smuggling is just ridiculous. It's totally ridiculous. He's the -- he has provided border security like we've never seen before. And the fact is, these cartels now, because the southern border is closed, they've gone to the high seas.
So, President Trump is acting with his core Article II powers. No serious legal expert would doubt that the president has authority to blow narco terrorists out of the water, who are poisoning a hundred thousand Americans every year. If you watched the SEC Championship Game yesterday, the Big 10 Championship Game, combine those two stadiums with the number of people there, that's how many people are dying each every year from the poison that's coming from these narco terrorists.
So the fact is, George, President Trump has been delegated the authority by Congress to designate terrorist organizations. He has done that. He sent a letter to Congress saying he was going to initiate these strikes. We've had regular briefings about it, including from Secretary of State Rubio, including from other high-ranking officials in the Department of Defense. He's executing those.
And so now, what we have now are Democrats who have such X-ray vision in clairvoyance that they know the intentions of narco terrorists on boats, yet were so blind to see that they had a president for four years that was operating as a vegetable in Joe Biden. So, forgive me if I'm a little skeptical that this isn't all about politics and trying to take out Secretary Hegseth. That's what this whole thing's been about, George.
They didn't want him confirmed. They didn't want a realist in place. They didn't want to shift from their pet projects around the world and trying to build democracies in the sand of the Middle East by the barrel of a gun. We have core national interests at stake, the homeland and the Western Hemisphere, and the rise of China. That's what this administration is focused on.
The Democrats are just upset about that, and they try to create some controversy each and every week, and it goes nowhere.
STEPHANOPOULOS: What do you mean you're not familiar with the facts and circumstances of the pardon? It's been well reported all across the country. He is the former president of Honduras. He was convicted of conspiring to bring in 400 tons of cocaine into the United States, also guns and other materials. It's been front page news across the country. Aren't you curious about that?
SCHMITT: Well, I'm curious about your pushback on that particular point. With your previous guest, you had zero pushback because he is, giving the Democrat talking points like you spew every single week, which is probably why your ratings are so bad. But to make the point, what I'm saying is that you're trying to divert here the attention from what the American people actually support.
75 percent of Americans support us blowing narco terrorists out of the water in the Caribbean who are trying to poison Americans. There's no real legal debate about the ability to do that. Now, you could have a policy discussion about it, which now you see the Democrats pivoting from the second strike and the war crimes allegation to really what this whole thing is about. Should we do it -- be doing it in the first place?
I have way more sympathy for my friends, my cousins, my neighbors, those people who've been poisoned by these narco terrorists, people who've been skinned alive by these cartels that they bring people to the United States than I do for these narco terrorists. I mean, that's just the reality of the situation. So, there's legal justification for it. He's doing it. We do have more of a focus on our interest now in the Western Hemisphere, and I'm thankful for that.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you support the pardon of the convicted drug smuggler or not?
SCHMITT: George, like I said, what we're talking about here are the narco terrorist poisoning Americans. This attempt to try to focus on a pardon is classic because you've lost the debate now on the narco terrorist question. Because at the beginning of the week, you had Democrats actually on camera saying you should disobey orders. That's what Senator Kelly and Slotkin were saying, you should disobey orders. And then they went so far as to say that if you do -- if you don't do that, you might get prosecuted down the road.
It's hard to sort of overstate how problematic that is for the chain of command and what it is for a military. The Democrats had their shot at all this and it was rejected. They wanted to have DEI struggle sessions in our military, transgender surgeries, recruitment was way down. The fact is under President Trump and now Secretary Hegseth, recruitment is sky high. Morale is sky high. They're upset about that, because they had an agenda that said that America could be everywhere all at once all the time.
Now, we have a president that's a realist, focusing on core national interest, including protecting Americans from being poisoned by the narco terrorists.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Just to clarify, the Democrats you talked about were talking about illegal orders, they were specific about saying it was illegal orders --
SCHMITT: Yeah.
STEPHANOPOULOS: -- that they were talking about. Sure.
SCHMITT: Sure. But when you press them on -- but when you press them on what orders are they talking about, they had no answer except to say that, somehow they should be guessing along the way. I mean, it's ridiculous. It's really ridiculous. And this is kind of the rabbit hole of Trump derangement syndrome, is that they can't let this thing go. They can't
believe that he won.
They didn't want Hegseth to be the secretary of War. They fought it. He was their number one target. They failed at that. And so now you just have a series and series of issues that come up every week to try to undermine the president and the secretary of war. And it's not working. They're going to carry out their mission. They executed another strike of a narco-terrorist just this past week.
Those will continue and they're completely authorized. I reviewed the 40-plus page memo by the Office of Legal Counsel. There's JAG officers in these room, George, every time there's a strike. So, again, the narrative at the beginning of the week that these are war crimes, that's clearly fallen away and now the Democrats are peddling another lie.
STEPHANOPOULOS: You mentioned Secretary Hegseth. Here's a quote from the Department of Defense inspector general report on that release of sensitive information over the Signal app. According to the inspector general, "The secretary sent information identifying the quantity and strike times of manned U.S. aircraft over hostile territory over an unapproved, unsecure network approximately two to four hours before the execution of those strikes. The secretary's actions created a risk to operational security that could have resulted in failed U.S. mission objectives and potential harm to U.S. pilots."
Isn't that a concern?
SCHMITT: I reviewed the I.G. report and it's a nothingburger. The fact is there were allegations this was confidential or classified information, I should say. It wasn't. There was no operational integrity problems that that Operation Roughrider was executed flawlessly. So was by the way Midnight Hammer. So you can't really call that into question. There's no confidential or classified information that was disclosed.
And, again, I think the bigger concern that you didn't have a hue and cry about from the Democrats was when Secretary Lloyd Austin went in for a medical procedure, was incapacitated and didn't tell the president. Literally, we had a secretary of defense that wasn't on duty and nobody knew about it. Like that's a real problem.
This was a nothingburger and that's what the I.G. report that I read last week in the SCIF indicated.
STEPHANOPOULOS: It said it was a risk to operational security.
SCHMITT: But it wasn't. It wasn't. There was no -- listen, remember, when the scandal -- so-called scandal started, it was about classified information being disclosed. It wasn't classified information. So, again, you pivot to this sort of sensitive information, but there was no risk. There was no risk. And by the way, I'll point out, Signal is approved by the U.S. government for communications. And so if you want to have a broader discussion about that, we probably can. But I think the bigger issue was, you know, in the previous administration you had real operational risk. You had a department, you had a secretary of defense that was incapacitated in a surgery and nobody knew about it for days. That's a problem.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator, thanks for your time this morning.
SCHMITT: Thanks, George.
STEPHANOPOULOS: The "Roundtable" is up next. We're back in two minutes.
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(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: This is fake narrative that the Democrats talk about. Affordability. They just say the word. It doesn't mean anything to anybody. The word affordability is a con job by the Democrats.
SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER (D-NY): Donald Trump says there's no affordability crisis. What kind of world is he living in? He's a billionaire. He doesn't have to worry about paying his medical bills, his heating bills, his food bills.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
STEPHANOPOULOS: Cost of living debate this week.
Let's talk about it on our roundtable with former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, former DNC chair Donna Brazile, and former Trump White House chief of staff Reince Priebus.
And Chris, let me begin with you. We just saw the president right there calling this a hoax, dismissing the concerns about affordability that has caused some concern even inside the White House and among Republican ranks. They think that the president may be repeating former President Biden's mistakes.
CHRIS CHRISTIE, ABC NEWS CONTRIBUTOR: Well, I don't think it's that bad yet, George. But what I'd say is that, you know, he's cranky right now. I mean, that's the -- for those of us who have known Donald Trump for a long time, he gets into these modes at times where things aren't going the way he wants, right?
So, this is a guy who has spent most of his presidency this second time around on the correct side of 80-20 issues. And that's been part of his strength and his power politically.
He's on the wrong side pretty consistently in the last few months of 80-20 issues. You know, the Epstein files was an 80-20 issue against him. Now, affordability is an 80-20 issue against him. And he doesn't like it because that goes to the core of who he believes himself to be, which is the economy president.
And when it's not being perceived that way by the public, he's seeing the poll numbers change. He gets cranky.
So instead of trying to change it that way, he tries to convince people what you're seeing doesn't exist.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Can the White House turn this around?
REINCE PRIEBUS, ABC NEWS POLITICAL ANALYST: Yeah, they can even turn it around. I think what he -- what he's cranky about is the fact that some of the messaging, I think, on the Republican side isn't where it needs to be. I mean, he had the huge tax bill. Gas prices are down. Inflation from where it was a year ago is in a much better place, and I think it's going to take some time for it to come around.
And I think that impatience of that time of this issue coming around them getting hammered on affordability is making him cranky. That's true. But I think all in all, he's got a lot to be proud of.
(CROSSTALK)
STEPHANOPOULOS: What does he need to do, though?
PRIEBUS: Well, I think -- I think what you're seeing is that I think getting these trade deals done by the end of the year is very important. May not happen with Canada and China, but it's important. And you're also seeing him and the administration target some exceptions to these trade deals, whether it be coffee, whether it be bananas, whether it be -- and I think that is going to spill into exceptions in the world of manufacturing, on component parts, on autos, and you're seeing the administration do it.
I think the president is going to have a strong economy, but the question is, is this economy going to start kicking in with enough time before the midterms? And I think that's what the Trump administration is hoping. I think they're going to do it.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Question for the Democrats, can they make this cost-of-living message stick?
DONNA BRAZILE, ABC NEWS CONTRIBUTOR: Absolutely, George. Because every time you go to the grocery store, when you want to buy new furniture, new appliances, when you're trying to pay your utility bills, the American people are getting sick and tired of the lies. They're worried that Donald Trump is not looking at the problems that they're facing in their everyday lives. Too many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.
I think the president is not just cranky. I think he is really upset that his policies are not working. His tariff policies not -- are not working, and he knows that. He knows that the American people are waiting to exhale, and he's promising $2,000 that will probably not materialize.
But for now, Democrats are going to seize this moment not just on the affordability crisis, but they're going to make sure that the Republicans own this healthcare crisis, which is about to hit everybody.
PRIEBUS: I forgot where we were a year ago, in the Biden economy.
BRAZILE: Oh, we have an --
(CROSSTALK)
PRIEBUS: What was the inflation rate? How much were eggs? You were talking about making gumbo and egg omelets that you can make --
BRAZILE: And avian flu. And avian flu. And avian flu. Yes. Of course, the egg prices have gone down a little bit. Gas prices have gone down.
PRIEBUS: A little bit?
BRAZILE: But you know what? You can drive your car to the nearest grocery store, and you still find that the price of chicken, coffee, and the rest of those goods are going way up.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Chris, let's pick up on the healthcare debate. This could be a freight train coming for everybody in Washington right now.
CHRISTIE: Yeah.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Next year, 22 million Americans are going to face a huge increase in their health care premiums. It doesn't appear that the Republican Party is any closer to a response on this. The president said he might be for extending the subsidies, then appeared to take it back.
CHRISTIE: Yeah. Look, I think it's hard because I don't know that he has the votes for extending the subsidies. And this is part of the problem of being on the wrong side of 20-80 stuff, right? Because he's starting to lose a bit of that completely reflexive support that he's had from his majority party in Congress.
And this issue is going to really be difficult for both parties because in the end, people are not going to care who's making those premiums go up. They're going to blame everybody.
And because the Republicans are in charge of both houses of Congress and the presidency, it’s going to hit them more or have ramifications to them more.
And one thing I would say about what Reince mentioned about the tariffs and the changes on some of the individual items, part of the problem is that his people have been out there saying all along that tariffs don't affect the consumer. That no, no, no, the governments are paying this and other companies are paying it.
But if you're going to exempt certain things to try to bring the prices down, a coffee or whatever, you're admitting that the tariffs are affecting consumers. And this undercuts the president's entire theory about tariff being the most beautiful word.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Yeah. Then also, we don't get the revenue if you have all these exceptions.
CHRISTIE: Well, that's right. So he's caught in between. So all these things go back to why is he cranky? Why is he saying the things that he's saying, not just on this, but on other topics. And it's because, right now, he's really stuck and his majority is thin in the House. And you want to talk about cranky, look at those people.
PRIEBUS: Well, they're moving through it. I mean, obviously you -- they're making adjustments and I think they're smart adjustments. And I think as the tax --
(CROSSTALK)
STEPHANOPOULOS: You're talking about the tariffs?
PRIEBUS: -- and the tariffs. I mean, on the ACA, I don't really disagree with what Chris said. I think, the reality is most of us, people like me, can't stand Obamacare, thinks it rewards too many people for inaction that could be working more, but some of them are not. I actually don't think out of the 20-some million on Obamacare, there's maybe five or six million that might be voters that the president would want to make sure they stay on our side of the aisle.
But the fact of the matter is, without an alternative, as Chris said, it's a big problem. And what -- you need to have an alternative, you need consensus. And I think consensus is more elusive --
(CROSSTALK)
STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you see one developing out there?
PRIEBUS: -- than even an alternative?
BRAZILE: No, George, there's no consensus because look, Senator Cassidy of Louisiana is going to put forward some alternative. We don't know if that's going to pass. Then you have Senator Scott from Florida because Florida is going to be hit hard. There's a lot of Floridians who are on Obamacare in their marketplace. And Senator Hawley is trying to put something forward.
The Democrats are going to stay united on extending the subsidies for maybe three years while the Republicans try to get their act together on healthcare. The Republicans don't have an alternative to Obamacare or the Affordable Care Act.
(CROSSTALK)
PRIEBUS: It won't affect -- it will not -- the issue, what I was trying to say before, the issue of the ACA subsidy, the extenders, the issue of us shutting that down, that issue alone, I don't think is going to affect our ability to win an election.
STEPHANOPOULOS: It's 22 million people.
PRIEBUS: I understand that. But of that amount, I really don't think a lot of those people are on our side. But secondly, the bigger issue is that we have to have an alternative and the media is going to go bananas with this issue. And it's going to create a scenario that over excites the country on something, I don't think --
(CROSSTALK)
BRAZILE: It's a problem.
(CROSSTALK)
CHRISTIE: Here is a concern.
PRIEBUS: I said it (ph) was a problem.
CHRISTIE: Look at the concern politically, and you saw it play out in New Jersey and Virginia. The people who are going to vote in these non-presidential years are folks who are motivated most of the time by anger right now.
BRAZILE: Yeah.
CHRISTIE: And the people who are angry right now and are motivated are the Democratic voters and the left-leaning independents, who are saying the president's not delivering. And a lot of those left or leaning independents voted for Donald Trump because they rejected Kamala Harris for a whole bunch of reasons.
And so what we saw in New Jersey was Mikie Sherrill, the Governor-elect, win by 470,000 votes in New Jersey. Even for a blue state like ours, that was incredible because Trump voters stayed on the sidelines.
STEPHANOPOULOS: That debate is coming. We're out of time right now.
Up next, is artificial intelligence a mortal threat to human civilization? I'll speak with an expert raising the alarm when we come back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOE ROGAN, THE JOE ROGAN EXPERIENCE HOST: The fear would be that we would no longer have control and that we would no longer be apex species on the planet. This thing that we created would now be. Is that funny?
JENSEN HUANG, NVIDIA PRESIDENT AND CEO: No.
ROGAN: It's scary.
HUANG: I just think it's not going to happen.
ROGAN: I know you think it's not going to happen.
HUANG: Yes.
ROGAN: But it could, right?
HUANG: It could. I just think it's extremely unlikely.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
STEPHANOPOULOS: That was Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang brushing off concerns about the dangers of A.I. with podcaster Joe Rogan.
As artificial intelligence races ahead, we're taking a closer look in both the promise and the peril of the technology. I'll speak with the co-author of a new book warning about the
dangers of superhuman artificial intelligence after this report from Jay O'Brien on how Washington is addressing the A.I. challenge.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JAY O’BRIEN, ABC NEWS CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Just over three years since the launch of ChatGPT stunned the world and catapulted artificial intelligence into the mainstream --
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: A.I. revolution.
BRET BAIER, FOX NEWS HOST: Artificial intelligence.
JOHN OLIVER, COMEDIAN: Artificial intelligence or A.I.
O’BRIEN (voice-over): -- that technological revolution now sparking a growing divide between those sounding the alarm --
GEOFFREY HINTON, FORMER GOOGLE EXECUTIVE: Sometime in the next 20 years, these things will get smarter than us and we really need to worry about what happens then.
O’BRIEN (voice-over): -- and others touting A.I.'s potential.
JENSEN HUANG, NVIDIA PRESIDENT & CEO: The best-case scenario is that A.I. diffuses into everything that we do. Everything's more efficient.
O’BRIEN (voice-over): But as artificial intelligence gets smarter by the day, the federal government has struggled to keep up.
In the last few months, President Donald Trump welcoming tech luminaries to the White House and set an ambitious A.I. goals.
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: America is the country that started the A.I. race. America is going to win it.
O’BRIEN (voice-over): Trump rolling back Biden era A.I. regulations and installing entrepreneur and tech investor David Sacks as his A.I. and cryptocurrency czar.
DAVID SACKS, WHITE HOUSE A.I. & CRYPTO CZAR: It's really the job of government to enable the private sector and get the red tape out of the way.
O’BRIEN (voice-over): And the president pressuring Republicans in Congress to pass legislation prohibiting states and local governments from regulating artificial intelligence in any way, warning overregulation is threatening to undermine this growth engine.
Some in the president's party pushing back.
REP. THOMAS MASSIE (R-KY): I think this is a state and local issue.
O’BRIEN: Why do you think the president adopted that position?
MASSIE: Probably donors. Maybe he just thinks it's the best way to get A.I. going in this country.
REP. JAY OBERNOLTE (R-CA): I know that no industry wants to be regulated, but also no one can deny that A.I. is such a powerful technology that the malicious use of it creates some really negative consequences.
O’BRIEN (voice-over): But on Capitol Hill, lawmakers largely on the sidelines when it comes to the A.I. revolution. A flurry of bills have been proposed, but not a single piece of notable A.I. regulation has ever cleared the House or Senate, despite some members expressing mounting concerns.
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (I-VT): A super intelligent A.I. could replace human beings in controlling the planet.
O’BRIEN: Do you think Congress is behind on this issue?
REP. JAKE AUCHINCLOSS (D-MA): Republicans in Congress are because what they're trying to do is at the federal level, nothing, and at the state level, prevent any state legislators from doing any regulation of A.I. bots whatsoever.
O’BRIEN (voice-over): A.I. companies stress while risks for the technology exist, they say the potential benefits are nearly limitless and that they're constantly improving their algorithms to improve interactions, all while some industry leaders have gone from publicly encouraging regulation --
SAM ALTMAN, OPENAI CEO: I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong. And we want to be vocal about that. We want to work with the government to prevent that from happening.
O’BRIEN (voice-over): -- to now warning about too much red tape.
ALTMAN: I am nervous about standards being set too early. We need the space to innovate and to move quickly.
O’BRIEN (voice-over): Meanwhile, Congress seems stymied.
SEN. MIKE ROUNDS (R-SD): The fear is, is if you regulate it, you slow it down. If you don't regulate it, you have people that could get hurt.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
STEPHANOPOULOS: Thanks to Jay for that.
We're joined now by Nate Soares, co-author of the new book, “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman A.I. Would Kill Us All”.
Mr. Soares, thank you for joining us this morning.
I want to start out with a summary of your thesis that you write in your book. I'm going to put up on the screen. “If any company or group anywhere on the planet builds an artificial super intelligence using anything remotely like current techniques based on anything remotely like the present understanding of A.I., then everyone, everywhere on Earth, will die.”
That is about as stark a warning as you can possibly get.
Can you spell it out for us and tell us why you believe that?
NATE SOARES, MACHINE INTELLIGENCE RESEARCH INSTITUTE PRESIDENT: You know, I wish it was fiction, but the way that we make A.I.s today is more like growing an organism than it is like carefully crafting a piece of traditional software. The A.I.s we make, they have the very beginnings now of goals or objectives, or so it seems. We don't really know what's going on inside them.
They have the very beginnings of goals and objectives that we didn't try to give them. They have emergent behavior that their operators never intended. In lab scenarios, we've already seen them sometimes try to escape the lab or blackmail the operators. They're too dumb right now for that to work. But if we keep rushing to make A.I.s that are smarter and smarter to the point where these sorts of things succeed, then the most likely outcome is they become much more powerful than us. They pursue goals nobody intended, nobody wanted.
And the most likely outcome of that is that we die, not because the A.I.s hate us, but because they are utterly indifferent. It would be sort of like ants under a skyscraper.
STEPHANOPOULOS: As you know, many of your critics have said that this is more like science fiction than science. One of the problems with Stephen Marche (ph), for example, “The New York Times”, pointed out is you haven’t fully defined your terms like intelligence or super intelligence. He says the book reads like a Scientology manual. So, why don't you start out by defining that artificial super intelligence that you're so worried about?
SOARES: Yeah, we do actually define the terms in the book, if he had read. I think it's in chapter one. We define artificial super intelligence as an A.I. that is better than the best humans at every mental task. This is not the sort of A.I. we have today, but the A.I.s of today, many people's only experience with A.I. is ChatGPT. The people who have been in the field of A.I. understand that the field of A.I. is a moving target, that sometimes people come up with insights, come up with new ways of doing A.I. that unlock whole new domains of A.I. like ChatGPT and the Large Language Models of today.
One of the big questions is what happens when there's new insights? What happens when there's new breakthroughs? These companies are rushing to make A.I.s that are smarter than every human. And once we get these super intelligent A.I.s, I think the most likely outcome is that they don't do exactly as the humans say.
STEPHANOPOULOS: And I know you say you're agnostic on exactly how the extinction would happen, but just lay out one possibility.
SOARES: The one easy way for an A.I. to take out humanity would be a virus. This, as you say, I'm not -- I'm not sure exactly how it would happen. It's a little bit like trying to predict a football game between an NFL team and a high school team. It's hard to predict the plays. It's easy to predict the winner. The sort of real question here is something like, what will the A.I.s be pursuing? Will they do exactly what the operators say? And we're already seeing the very beginnings of evidence that the answer is no, just like theory has predicted for years.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you see any evidence that anyone is doing anything to control this? A lot of the optimists about A.I. say that you can calibrate the systems internally.
SOARES: People are trying to control these A.I.s. The type of work that people tend to do tends to fall into evaluation metrics, trying to see how dangerous the A.I.s currently are, and interpretability research, which is trying to understand what is going on inside the A.I.s. With any other technology, like with a nuclear reactor, if you ask people, how do you know you're going to be able to make this not melt down? And they said, well, we have two teams, one who is trying to figure out what's going on inside there. And another saying we're measuring whether it's currently exploding. You might not be very confident that these people were on track to do the job properly.
STEPHANOPOULOS: How much time do we have?
SOARES: You know, the timing is very hard to call. It could be that next year the A.I.s will still be pretty dumb, but they'll be just barely smart enough to make smarter A.I.s that make smarter A.I.s, that make smarter A.I.s. And then things could go very quickly. It could be that it takes 10 years. It could be that the current A.I.s stay kind of dumb and it takes 10 years to have some new breakthrough that unlocks new A.I.s like last breakthroughs -- like previous breakthroughs unlocked ChatGPT.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Mr. Soares, thanks very much for your time this morning.
Up next, Martha Raddatz revisits Pearl Harbor and shares the effort to bring its history to a new generation.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT: December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy. The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
STEPHANOPOULOS: That day of infamy 84 years ago has passed from the memory of most Americans, but the lessons it teaches still on display at the Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum on Ford Island in Honolulu.
Martha Raddatz traveled there for a conversation with the museum's new leader, a former Navy Blue Angel who is bringing his passion for history to a new generation.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
RADDATZ (voice-over): It was just before 8:00 a.m. on December 7th, 1941.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The Japanese have attacked the Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, from the air.
RADDATZ (voice-over): Waves of attacks by Japanese bombers devastating the airfields and warships at the naval base leaving more than 2400 Americans dead, including 1177 on the USS Arizona. The site now a solemn memorial. The Ford Island operations building and control tower were witness to the attack, now part of the Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum.
Chairman of the Board of the museum, retired U.S. Air Force General Ray Johns, taking me up in a World War II T-6 built in 1944.
GEN. RAY JOHNS USAF (RET.), PEARL HARBOR AVIATION MUSEUM BOARD CHAIR: OK. Are you ready?
RADDATZ: Ready.
JOHNS: OK.
RADDATZ (voice-over): The general flying the same deadly route some 350 Japanese aircraft took including those that bombed the Arizona.
If you were looking up in the air that day, what would you see?
JOHNS: Chaos. You would see tornado bombers coming in, the cates. You would see dive-bombers coming in. You'd see fighter zeros doing strafing runs. You'd see all that ongoing, and you're in pure panic.
JOHN HILTZ, PEARL HARBOR AVIATION MUSEUM CEO: The Arizona is just over here.
RADDATZ (voice-over): For John Hiltz, the new CEO of the museum, it is that horror and that history he wants people to remember.
HILTZ: Nowhere else in America can you stand on an American battlefield that was in World War II. These are hallowed grounds in a similar fashion to Gettysburg, like Normandy. You know, what happened here created a new world order, and I think that's an incredibly powerful lesson to tell.
RADDATZ (voice-over): Hiltz is a decorated combat pilot himself and a former member of the Navy's famed Blue Angel Team. I first met Hiltz nearly a decade ago aboard the USS Truman in the Persian Gulf, leading a mission in the fight against ISIS in Syria.
HILTZ: We've got a 30-minute window to execute. And we'll make sure that we do so.
RADDATZ (voice-over): This video from the nighttime mission showing Hiltz refueling his jet midair with lightning and thunder surrounding him. But Hiltz and his wingman still managing to successfully take out ISIS targets. Hiltz says he was inspired as a child to
become a pilot by sitting in the cockpit of a fighter jet at an aviation museum. He's now bringing that inspiration to the next generation, including his own daughter, Soren.
RADDATZ: What do you see for this museum in the future? What is your dream for this museum?
HILTZ: The dream of anything like this is that it has to be constantly reinvented and retold in new ways to make sure that it is impacting new generations of visitors that can understand the cry behind, Remember Pearl Harbor. For somebody that had a similar attack perpetrated in Manhattan right before I entered the service, to think that, that could ever be forgotten or not remembered in the same way is heartbreaking in some ways and I think Pearl Harbor has to be in the same breath. The lessons that we learned here cannot be forgotten.
RADDATZ (voice-over): And those lessons come alive at this museum. Hangar 79 was struck that day. You can still see bullet holes from the attacks that shattered the windows.
HILTZ: It was a maintenance hangar and people were in here working that morning on Sunday, December 7th, and ran out to some trenches that were dug out on the flight line and took cover there.
RADDATZ: I think people, when they think of Pearl Harbor, they think of the Arizona --
HILTZ: Right.
RADDATZ: -- or the Utah. It -- this is different.
HILTZ: Those are really poignant reminders of the sacrifices that were made that day. But I think the other important neat concept is that Pearl Harbor, the attack on Pearl Harbor was an air raid and it was a novel air raid. It was logistically unprecedented in scope and scale. And to be able to tell that story about how that day transformed our nation, our world, but also how America responded to it. Those stories need to be told because they really do echo in eternity.
RADDATZ (voice-over): And Hiltz has a personal connection to the site. He flew over the Arizona during a Blue Angels air show in 2014, taking this remarkable photo. You can just make out the American flag patch on his uniform, reflecting on the cockpit window in the lower right corner.
HILTZ: And know that, at a place that I flew over with the Blue Angels in 2014, now I'm fortunate enough to steward into this next iteration is incredibly moving and it's the reason I'm here.
RADDATZ (voice-over): Finding his new purpose, honoring the past and inspiring the next generation.
For "This Week," Martha Raddatz, A BC News, Pearl Harbor.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
STEPHANOPOULOS: Thanks to Martha. We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
STEPHANOPOULOS: That is all for us today. Thanks for sharing part of your Sunday with us. Check out "World News Tonight" and I'll see you tomorrow on GMA.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
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