PBS NewsHour full episode, April 15, 2024

taxes they believe are available. What is the status of the agency at the moment? RICHARD RUBIN: I think the agency, like the tax rates, really depends on what happens in this election. They got that $80 billion in the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. Now Congress has recovered about $21 billion of that amount. So the IRS is moving forward with its plans. It is an expanded customer service. Law enforcement is being beefed up, but hiring, training and auditing takes a while. And then it really comes down to whether we're going to run out of that money for expansion sooner than they had planned.

So this next Congress, this next president is going to have to make some decisions about how much further to take that expansion in the IRS, whether to keep putting more money there or whether to start cutting back on some of the expansion that President Biden and the Democratic Congress set up. . LISA DESJARDINS: All right, Richard Rubin of The Wall Street Journal and friend to anyone who wants to understand taxes, thank you for joining us. RICHARD RUBÍN: Thank you. GEOFF BENNETT:   From the conflict in the Middle East to Donald Trump's first day in court as a criminal defendant, let's explore the political implications with   The Cook Political Report's Amy Walter  With NPR's Amy Walter and Tamara Keith.

It's good to see you both. So there has been some news while we were on the air about US foreign aid. House Speaker Mike Johnson shared with his House Republican colleagues in a private meeting his plan to introduce this foreign aid package after months of delay. Tam, he's calling for separate votes on aid to Ukraine, aid to Israel, aid to Taiwan and then a fourth vote on this forced sale of TikTok. Is this something the White House can get behind? TAMARA KEITH, National Public Radio: What the White House said today, even before Johnson presented this plan to its members, was that this is not the quickest way to get something to the president's desk that would help Israel and Ukraine, because the Senate has already approved a bill.

It is a bill that includes all of these things together. And the way this works is that, if the House can, and that's still a big if, if the House can pass these bills separately, then it would go to the Senate, where they would have to pass those bills separately. . . And it's not clear that the Senate can pass those bills separately. So the argument from the White House, as it has been for months, is: yeah, okay, whatever, but please, let's get this package done that we've been asking for, I think, since August. It has been a long time.

GEOFF BENNETT: That's right, at least since the fall. AMY WALTER, The Cook Political Report: Yes. GEOFF BENNETT: Donald Trump today became the first former president to be tried for alleged criminal offenses. Amy, we have seen how he has used these court appearances to really improve his political standing. AMY WALTER: Right. GEOFF BENNETT: He has used them as campaign appearances. Does this change now? I mean, will persuadable independent voters see it differently now that this trial is actually underway? AMY WALTER: Well, this is the billion dollar question. I don't even know what number to put on it.

It is this idea; The idea, of course, of a former president being tried, who is now the presumptive nominee, would seem to be a problem for that candidate in a general election, when voters start paying attention. The question for the Biden campaign is also: to what extent are we leaning toward this? And right now, it seems to me that the answer is: we really won't. We're going to let these photos and sketches of Trump sitting on the court speak for themselves and we'll also take the opportunity with Trump on the court to press our advantage as a sitting president.

The president will travel to Pennsylvania in the coming days. We are going to hear a lot not about the Trump trials, but about the economy. And it seems to me that the challenge for the Biden campaign right now is not so much to highlight what they already know are Trump's weaknesses, but to really try to reduce Trump's lead on this issue of inflation and the economy. And whether that works or not is a big question. I've talked to at least one Democrat who thinks, yeah, it's fine to have this split screen, but at some point, the Democrats, the Biden campaign, need to tell voters why they matter.

Simply allowing the images to come out and the way the media describes them is not enough. Democrats need to control some part of this narrative. GEOFF BENNETT: Tam, to Amy's point about this split-screen perception, President Biden was in Scranton today talking about Trump's tax plan and how he would benefit the wealthiest Americans. Do the campaign and the White House feel like they need to lean in a little more? TAMARA KEITH: When you try to ask them about the Trump trials, they go the other direction. They don't want to depend on this at all, because they have some challenges going on.

One is that Trump calls them Biden trials, this is the Biden trial. President Biden has absolutely nothing to do with this. This is a state case. This is not a federal case. And President Biden has made it clear that he does not want to interfere in any type of prosecution or judicial decision. However, because that's there, because Trump is making these accusations, the Biden campaign and the Biden White House don't want to do anything that looks like they're interfering in any way. So that's a challenge. But the other thing to think about is, yes, there is this split screen, but is it really a split screen or are all the screens focused on the Trump trial?

And if a president holds three rallies in Pennsylvania and no one puts it on TV or on the front page of the newspaper, is that really happening? And this is a challenge that President Biden has had for a long time, which is that he was sort of meant to be boring. And he has achieved it. The challenge, however, is that it doesn't really get much attention. People don't see it. And when his biggest... the biggest question voters have about him is whether he's vital, whether he has what it takes to run a campaign and run to be president again, he needs people to actually see him doing that?

GEOFF BENNETT: Meanwhile, President Biden and his top advisers are deeply concerned that an Israeli response to Iran's attack on Israel over the weekend could lead to a regional war with catastrophic consequences. If we look at this from a purely political perspective, Amy, does this take some pressure off President Biden, at least as it relates to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, now that the focus is, at least for now, on Iran? ? AMY WALTER: It sure doesn't seem that way. I mean, the frustration that many within Biden's party, those on the left, have has to do with Gaza.

And the situation there is not improving, no matter what happens with Iran and the retaliation for that or the support that some may feel towards Israel now that it is being attacked by Iran is not going to make up for what is happening in Gaza. So I don't think that will help you there. The other question is, if this leads to a broader conflict in the Middle East, will this have implications not only for the geopolitics and danger there, but also for what it means for Americans at home, higher gas prices in the face of to an election year, something that is not particularly relevant. a sitting president wants to try.

And even these votes on the House bill, if they pass, we will once again see that division within the Democratic Party between those who think that Israel doesn't need much more, that they've already gotten enough from us. and we need to send more humanitarian aid to Gaza, which will also send a message. Do we need to send a message (as many Democrats say) to Netanyahu that what he is doing is wrong? And one way to send that message is to not give them any more help. GEOFF BENNETT: Amy Walter and Tamara Keith, thank you both, as always.

TAMARA KEITH: You're welcome. AMY WALTER: You're welcome. GEOFF BENNETT:   Yuval Noah Harari as a history professor recognized for his broad and thought-provoking perspectives on human history. Harari, author of the best-selling "Sapiens," recently published a new volume of this work called "Unstoppable Us" for younger readers. Tonight, he shares his brief but spectacular insight into what it means to be human. YUVAL NOAH HARARI, author of "Unstoppable Us":  I think it's harder to write for kids than it is for adults. When you're writing about complicated things and you're not really sure what you want to say, then with adults you can cover yourself by talking in these very long, complicated sentences.

With children, it doesn't work. You need to speak very clearly. And, for that, you really need to think deeply, to know, what do you really want to say? When I was a kid, I asked these big questions about life, like, what are we doing here? What is this all about? And I think what struck me most is not that adults often didn't have answers, but that they weren't concerned with the fact that they don't really understand the world. In a way, I wrote "Unstoppable Us" to answer at least some of the questions that really bothered me when I was 10 or 12 years old.

How do we get here? If you look at any major human achievement, it is always based on large-scale cooperation. You want to build pyramids, you want to fly to the moon, you want to create an atomic bomb, you want to build a healthcare system, you always need thousands of people to cooperate together. And we are the only mammals that can do that. How do we do that? Inventing and believing fictional stories. You can't do that with chimpanzees. Unfortunately, humans are very intelligent, but despite our wisdom, we still do very stupid things. We know that nuclear weapons could destroy all human civilization.

We know that artificial intelligence can now escape our control, and yet we continue to produce it. I believe the three biggest challenges facing humanity today in the 21st century are ecological collapse, disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence, and the threat of nuclear war. The one thing everyone needs to know about A.I. is that it is the first technology in history that can make decisions on its own and can create new ideas on its own. It is often compared to earlier technological advances, such as the printing press or the atomic bomb. It's completely different. Printers couldn't decide which book to print.

Atomic bombs could not alone decide which cities to destroy. But the A.I. I can do that. The book's dedication says that our ancestors made the world what it is and now we can decide what it will become. The main message of the book and also of the title, "Unstoppable Us", is that humans, all humans, are the most powerful entity on the planet, and we must take ownership of it. We should recognize our immense power, because only then we can also take responsibility for what we are doing with this power. My name is Yuval Noah Harari and this is my brief but spectacular vision of what it means to be human.

GEOFF BENNETT: And you can find additional short but spectacular

episode

s online at PBS.org/NewsHour/Brief. And there's much more online, including a look at the progress made in voter registration and strengthening election safeguards in the swing state of Michigan. That's on our website, PBS.org/NewsHour. AMNA NAWAZ: And join us tomorrow night for our next report from Ukraine, where we'll take a closer look at Russia's escalating attacks on Ukraine's energy systems and the impact that's having on the Ukrainian people and on war. And that's tonight's "NewsHour." From Kyiv, I am Amna Nawaz. GEOFF BENNETT: And I'm Geoff Bennett.

To all of us here at "PBS NewsHour," thank you for joining us and have a good night.