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WASHINGTON — This morning, Speaker Johnson joined Meet the Press on NBC to preview President Trump’s inaugural address, discuss TikTok failing to divest in advance of the deadline Congress set, President Trump’s plans to begin deporting illegal aliens on day one, and California wildfire aid.

Watch the full interview here

On President Trump’s inaugural address:

We're going to usher in a new golden age for America. He's excited. We're all excited everyone [is excited]. Walk around the city, there's this sense of anticipation because we know that something big is happening here. The comparison to Reagan this morning on moving in inside, I think is apt because it was morning in America under Reagan. Now we're going have a new golden age. You're going hear that hopeful tone in President Trump's speech and a unifying speech. And I think that's really important for the country.

On TikTok failing to divest from ByteDance:

When President Trump issued the Truth post and said, “save TikTok,” the way we read that is that he's going to try to force along a true divestiture changing of his hands, the ownership. It's not the platform that members of Congress are concerned about, it's the Chinese Communist Party and their manipulation of the algorithms. They have been flooding the minds of American children with terrible messages, glorifying violence and antisemitism and even suicide and eating disorders.

And they're mining the data of American citizens. It's a very dangerous thing. The Chinese Communist Party is not our friend, and we have to make sure this changes hands. I'm really heartened to see that Google and Apple and Microsoft have taken the steps to comply with the law. There needs to be a sale of full divestiture from the Chinese Communist Party. And I think President Trump is the one that can make that deal happen.

We don't have any confidence in ByteDance. They had 270 days to be exact. The law's very precise, and the only way to extend that is if there is an actual deal in the works. Now, Kevin O'Leary and others have talked about buying it. I think President Trump is probably intrigued by all this, and he likes to make deals, as you know. So we're very hopeful that that can happen.

On President Trump’s deportation plans:

Kristen, I cannot think of a better dollar for dollar investment than to restore the security and the safety of the country. We've had a wide-open border for four years and millions upon millions of illegal persons. We have dangerous illegals in the country, criminals who have already committed crimes here, violent crimes against American citizens. The best thing we can do is return those people from where they came. And I think the, the American people understand that. I saw a New York Times poll, I think it was just two days ago: 87% of the American people agree that we should deport dangerous, illegal criminal aliens. And that's what we're going to do.

The number one job of the federal government is protecting the citizenry. And when you have a wide-open border, you don't have safety, security, or even sovereignty for that matter. President Trump is going to follow through on his campaign promises and the promises that we all made on the campaign trail. It costs money to do that. But that is a small investment in terms of what it costs us […] The untold humanitarian cost in terms of trafficking and fentanyl deaths, the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18 to 49 for the last few years, we have to get on top of this. And so, getting rid of that criminal element, that dangerous element, is something the American people want us to do.

On California wildfire aid:

We have a serious problem in California. Listen, there are natural disasters. I'm from Louisiana. We're prone to that, we understand how these things work. But then there's also human error. And when the state and local officials make foolish policy decisions that make the disaster exponentially worse, we need to factor that in. And I think that's a commonsense notion. 

Listen, in California over the last couple years, they cut a hundred million dollars from forestry management. They cut, I think almost $18 million from LA's Fire Department, putting them into their other crazy priorities. And you had a 117-million-gallon reservoir that was left empty for a year outside Pacific Palisades. Those were decisions they made based on whatever, whatever their ideas were, but it made it worse, and everyone knew it would. The risk was there.

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