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RocketMoney.com slash Wondery. What happens when the world's best journalists come together? Write a prescription for the healing of America.
We're retired and this is our paradise. Now it's going. You get the stories of America every night. You get the all-new CBS Evening News starting Monday. Good morning.
I'm Jane Pauley and this is Sunday Morning. President Trump's first week back in the White House was certainly an eventful one. More than a hundred executive orders, tariff proposals, presidential pardons, changes in civil service, and more. Plenty of activity. Plenty of controversy as well.
Our Robert Costa helps us keep track of it all. Okay, that's a big one. President Trump has wasted no time bending Washington to his will. As historians remind us, the presidency is always a showcase for power. To quote Faulkner, the past has never really passed in American politics.
Or as historians like to say, the past doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. We're going to win like never before. A turbulent week in Washington with echoes of history coming up on Sunday Morning. While Los Angeles grapples with the impact of those devastating wildfires, its most famous industry, the movie business, rolls on. And this week, as Lee Cowan will tell us, the entertainment world's attention is focused on a famous film festival some 700 miles away. Are we ready for some nominees?
The guessing game is officially underway now for who will take home an Oscar at this year's Academy Awards. One path has been through the Wasatch Mountains of Utah. Where for more than four decades, Robert Redford's Sundance Institute has been giving independent filmmakers a leg up.
My definition of an independent film is a movie that almost doesn't get made. The snow and stars at Sundance later on Sunday morning. When it comes to hurling insults at Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm, Suzy Essman is famously loud and proud. This morning, Essman's assignment finds her very much closer to home, back in the place where it all began. This is Arthur Avenue back here, which is right there. I was born a block down. If you ask me, and you should, there's no place like the Bronx. I honestly believe that you can make it here. You can make it anywhere.
I've heard that before. It's big, beautiful, complicated. So move over Manhattan. Let's show some love to my hometown. This is just amazing.
I mean, look at these homes. I'm Suzy Essman, and this is The Bronx, ahead on Sunday morning. With President Trump planning radical changes to the federal workforce, Mo Rocca goes back to the time of Mark Twain to explore the roots of civil service. Seth Doan visits with the renowned English fashion designer Paul Smith, truly a cut above. Tracy Smith talks with Tony-winning actress and singer Adina Menzel on her return to Broadway. Rita Braver catches up with Dave Pilkey, the author-illustrator behind the best-selling Dog Man series, now the subject of a movie starring Pete Davidson, plus Ben Tracy, finding signs of hope in paradise, the California town ravaged by wildfires some seven years ago, a story from Steve Hartman, and more, this Sunday morning for the 26th of January, 2025. We'll return in a minute. We begin this Sunday morning with the week that was in Washington, as President Trump began his second term with a flurry of activity.
Robert Costa gets us up to speed. Ladies and gentlemen, the President-elect of the United States of America, the President of the United States of America, and the President of the United States of America, President Donald Trump descended on Washington last week, weathering a cold front that pushed his inauguration indoors. I stand before you now as proof that you should never believe that something is impossible to do.
In America, the impossible is what we do best. But the winter winds were no match for the flurry of executive action. Pardons and pens he let fly. Trump swept away Biden administration policies with each jagged stroke. So many people in Washington this week, they say it seems like history is unfolding before us.
Absolutely. The thing that's really interesting about studying history is when people are living through historic moments, they know it. Lindsey Czerwinski is a presidential historian and executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library in Mount Vernon, Virginia. There's no doubt that seeing a president come back after being defeated in an election, that's only happened one other time, and came back after being indicted on dozens of felony charges and was involved in an insurrection to overthrow the previous election. These are just not things we've seen before.
And so there's no doubt that we are living in a historic moment. So this is January 6th. These are the hostages, approximately 1,500 for a pardon. On his first day, Trump pardoned some 1,500 January 6th defendants and broke the record for signing executive orders, issuing even more in the days that followed. They range from renaming the Gulf of Mexico, to ending diversity efforts in the federal workforce, to exiting the Paris Climate Accords and the World Health Organization, and reinstating anti-abortion policies from his first term.
He has also tried to upend the constitutional right to citizenship for all children born on American soil. But a federal judge already put that change on hold. We are in a system that has separation of powers. There are supposed to be checks and balances, and it is essential that both Congress and the court do their job to check the president.
As the president checks them, that is how the system was designed to work. And I think that should give Americans comfort that they occasionally still want to actually do that role. Executive orders have often been pivotal and controversial. Think of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, FDR's funding of the Manhattan Project, and his internment of Japanese Americans in 1942. Recall Eisenhower's deployment of troops to desegregate southern schools.
I have today signed an executive order providing for the establishment of a peace corps. And Kennedy's creation of the peace corps. In the past decade, there has been a back and forth with Obama, Trump and Biden reversing each other's policies. What does it say to you to see a president use executive orders instead of going to Capitol Hill and trying to get Congress to enact their agenda? Well, when a president needs to use executive orders to get most of their agenda done, it means either that the agenda is not particularly popular or it is a reflection of the ills in our current political system. Congress doesn't do much. They don't pass that much legislation. They're kind of a broken institution. So what we see is that a president is trying to go around that.
And until Congress tells them not to, they're going to continue doing it. There have always been periods of fighting, to be sure. And American politics is messy. American politics is messy.
