This coming Monday, January 6th to be exact, Kamala Harris will preside over Congress as it ratifies the election of Donald Trump.

Two weeks later, Trump takes the oath of office and immediately plans to implement his agenda, but he'll also confront a long list of preexisting challenges, including, as we saw this week in New Orleans, the continued salience of the Islamic State terror group.

Joining me tonight to discuss these issues and more, Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, Leigh Ann Caldwell is an anchor for Washington Post Live and a co-author of The Early Brief, Francesca Chambers is a White House correspondent for USA Today and David Ignatius is a columnist for The Washington Post.

Thank you very much, all of you.

Happy New Year to all of you.

Thank you for being here.

Very serious opening days of this year, I have to say.

I want to turn -- before we get to New Orleans and the attack, I want to talk about the action on the Hill today.

Leigh Ann, why don't you give us a little understanding about how Mike Johnson managed to become speaker again despite a lot of tempestuous emotions in the Republican Caucus?

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL, Anchor, Washington Post Live: Yes, so ultimately it was not necessarily a repeat of two years ago, the four days and 15 rounds of Kevin McCarthy trying to win the speaker's gavel, but it was still dramatic.

He did it on the first round, but, ultimately, it came down to Donald Trump.

There were some holdouts, people who didn't want to vote for Mike Johnson, voted for someone else.

And those people got on the -- Donald Trump got on the phone with those people and ultimately negotiated and worked out a path forward.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: What did they want?

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: So, it was -- generally speaking, what they wanted and what they got is a commitment from Mike Johnson, which he says there was no deal, but in a reaffirmation, Johnson says, to reduce spending, and also to give more power to committees and the rank and file members rather than leadership negotiating all sorts of big bills instead of spending bills.

And even Mike Johnson says that that a large factor had to do with Donald Trump.

I asked him that tonight.

I said, what role did Trump play?

And he said, Donald Trump has been -- is perhaps the most powerful president in the country's history, he says, or most influential, and that he absolutely played a major factor in Mike Johnson winning the speaker's battle tonight.

So, there was a lot of cajoling.

There's still a divided Republican conference, but, ultimately, Trump was able to, before the vote, turn a lot of members in favor of Johnson.

And then in the most ultimately dire times of today where Johnson didn't have the votes, Donald Trump was able to get them there.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: FDR might want to have a word with Mike Johnson on the question of who's the most powerful, but we'll put that aside.

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: I guess influential is what he said.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: We can have that argument another time.

David, I'm curious, this is interesting because Trump chose stability over chaos in this case.

DAVID IGNATIUS, Columnist, The Washington Post: Momentarily.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, no.

But, I mean, what do you take from Johnson's success?

DAVID IGNATIUS: I thought that today's events were a piece of political theater.

The right got to flex its muscles.

Trump got to show everybody I'm in charge.

I can make it happen.

I think the interesting question, Jeff, is whether Trump really wants to set about being the leader of a governing party.

He's shown ways that he's trying to be pragmatic, push the extreme right in his party down on the question of the H-1B visas, on questions of an abortion mandate, on some other cultural issues.

He's been pushing the right away and saying I'm going to govern myself, and I think he has the ambition to govern the whole country.

He keeps saying that, you know, this is a movement, there's never been a president who can solve problems the way I can.

I keep coming back to the question with Trump, whether he is about trying to build the country or seek revenge for the things that he feels were done to him.

You see both of them -- saw both of them today actually in a strange tweet in the very early morning hours as a kind of American carnage, and then this effort to rally the Congress around his chosen candidate as speaker.

Which Trump is going to prevail after inauguration day?

I couldn't say.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Peter, do you know which Trump is going to prevail after inauguration day?

Let us know.

PETER BAKER, Chief White House Correspondent, The New York Times: Yes, no, but if past is prologue, I think we should not expect the unifying leader that he sometimes pretends he wants to be.

It's just not his metier, to use a word I heard recently around this table, that's not the way he rolls.

He does have moments where he wants a little stability over chaos, where he feels it will benefit him.

But let's face it, he's working with one party, not two, right?

He's not trying to work across the aisle.

He's not having any conversations that we know of with Democrats to talk about their priorities or how to have joint priorities.

They actually could come to deals on some really important things.

There are immigration deals, for instance, to be had.

If he wanted to have them on DACA, you know, with some border stuff, that kind of thing, he has indicated no interest in that.

And his appointments of, or his choice of people like Kash Patel for the FBI and Pete Hegseth for the defense indicates to me that retribution is high on the list, whether it also comes along with building some policies or not.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But on the other hand, I mean, to go back to David's point, just to follow this, is this an indication that there's a learning curve here, that he's learned some lessons from the first term and is trying to apply the normal rules of politics and, you know, trying to marginalized to some degree the extreme right?

I mean, is there -- DAVID IGNATIUS: Remember just a couple weeks ago, and we uncovered this, you know, he tried to blow up a spending deal that had just been sealed off by Mike Johnson, and it was 40 Republicans who said, no, we're not going along with you on your decision to try to punt the debt ceiling off until later in the presidency.

So, they rebelled against him and maybe he's learned from that a little bit.

But I would be cautious about overstating how far he's changed.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Francesca, let's talk about this House Republicans, 218 to 215, it's about as close as you can get.

You know, and this is what Thomas Massie, who I think Johnson's, at least at the moment, most ferocious opponent, had to say before the vote on the Matt Gaetz show on the One America Network, yes, that Matt Gaetz now has a television show.

Things move really quickly these days, don't they?

Anyway, this is what Massie said.

He said you could pull all my fingernails out.

You can shove bamboo up in them.

You can start cutting off my fingers.

I am not voting for Mike Johnson tomorrow.

And you could take that to the bank.

That's -- if Mike Johnson had a comfortable buffer, that's one thing, but he has no buffer, whatsoever.

So, how stable is this group of Republicans who are now for the moment backing Mike Johnson?

Is he going to be speaker, in other words, at the end of the year?

FRANCESCA CHAMBERS, White House Correspondent, USA Today: Well, it partly comes down to what is the other option, and that's what they ran into this week.

If you don't want Mike Johnson, then who else do you want?

And how do you get a majority of Republicans behind that person?

We saw Donald Trump come in and help to save him.

You mentioned his own self-interest.

I mean, he wants to come in.

He wants to be able to get his agenda done.

He has four years to do so.

He doesn't have an eight-year term that he can look forward to here.

He has the four years to get things done.

And we've already seen him start to make aggressive moves in that direction.

But as you pointed out with Massie, Trump's influences, even within this new Republican Party, is sometimes limited.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

Peter, I'm not asking for predictions, but how stable is this majority?

PETER BAKER: Well, it's not stable at all, obviously.

I mean, to your point, the second they come back to this economic question in March, the financial stuff they're going to have to do in March, you're going to see the same nine people.

There were nine people who tried to flex their muscle today, you know, trying to enforce on Johnson commitments they believe he's made about spending.

That would probably be impractical.

And Johnson's going to have to talk with the Democrats probably if he wants to pass some.

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: And that number nine that were held out today is important, because that number is very important.

Because number nine is now the number of Republicans it takes to vacate the chair for speakership.

During Kevin McCarthy last Congress, he got in trouble because it just took one Republican.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

He agreed to like his own poison pill.

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: Yes, exactly, but now that number has been lifted to nine.

And so that was a very purposeful symbolic moment on the House floor today from these critics of Mike Johnson to tell Johnson, we are watching you and we have the numbers if you do not get spending under control, if you negotiate with Democrats, if you don't enact our agenda.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Are there more than nine?

In other words, is there some zone of comfort for those punitive rebels?

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: It depends on how bad it gets.

But, yes, there's three dozen members in the far right Freedom Caucus, and so there could potentially be a lot more than nine.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Peter, let me change the subject to something historic.

January 6th is coming.

It's exactly four years since the insurrection, the violent insurrection of January 6th.

We're about to witness Kamala Harris, Democratic vice president, presidential candidate, losing presidential candidate, oversee the ratification of Donald Trump's election.

Going back four years, we all covered this, some of us, very up close.

It's hard to imagine that we're here.

Given the way much of the country felt about Donald Trump in the immediate aftermath of the insurrection, the idea that Donald Trump is about to be peacefully ratified as the next president is striking.

I just love to hear your analysis of how we got here.

PETER BAKER: If you woke up on January 7th of 2021 with the glass still shattered on the floor of the Capitol and the smoke rising and the troops are surrounding the building and you had said that Donald Trump will be president in four years, nobody would have believed that.

Anybody who says that today is not telling you the truth.

We weren't a hundred percent sure he was going to make it out two more weeks, right?

There was talk that day about whether he might be impeached immediately, whether he would be forced out by Mike Pence in the cabinet in some sort of 25th Amendment thing, whether something would happen that we couldn't trust him for two more weeks with power.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: The Senate was infuriated.

PETER BAKER: Senate was infuriated.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: House was infuriated.

PETER BAKER: Of course they were.

Lindsey Graham said he was done with him, right?

Well, it turns out he wasn't.

And the Republican caucus wasn't done with him either.

And the Republican electorate wasn't done with him.

That's the most important thing, right?

How did he come back?

Well, Kevin McCarthy, of course, gave him a new lease on life by going down to Mar-a-Lago and essentially exonerating him almost.

Mitch McConnell decided not to try to force conviction in the trial that followed the impeachment that happened in the House.

But broadly speaking, it turned out that his electorate still wanted him, and that held power over the elected officials who didn't.

And that's the real story here, is that they were not -- they did not find what he did on January 6th to be disqualifying.

And therefore, the Congress and the elected officials went along with it.