hello, everybody. welcome to inside politics. i m john king in washington. thank you for sharing a very, very busy news day with us. 6,000 plus dead. 6,000 plus. grief running over turkey and syria. hope, too, running out as rescue crews continue to look for thousands still lost in the rubble of a monster earthquake. plus, tonight, the president tells the country what he s done and where he wants to go advisers promise a classic joe biden speech. out but his state of the union collides with challenges and implications of a newly divided washington. plus, briefing, congress getting a briefing on the chinese balloon. and raises questions why the pentagon was so slow to shoot down that suspected spy in the sky. up first, a dramatic harrowing race to find survivors it s barely 24 hours after a massive earthquake hit turkey and syria. already again, more than 6,000 are dead. and the aftershocks still creating treacherous conditions for rescuers trying to reach those tr
going to look like. the biden theme, the way they are playing the economy and despite how grim americans view things, they say the trend is their friend. they are looking at the steady jobs improvement, the improvement on inflation numbers, still up. and they are clinging to that and say time is on their sides to resonate. what do you think of that? we saw that happen in the last cycle. we are talking about unemployment. with inflation, they will say, it is better than it was last year.
so, there are fires going on always around me, behind me, and, you know, it is an awful heartbreaking situation. there are, understandable asking us to move away at this stage. john. becky anderson, live on the ground for us. remarkable reporting. appreciate you showing respect there, walking away. great to have someone with your experience on the scene. we ll stay in touch, becky and your crew, thank you so much. we ll obviously track that dramatic story. the tragedy in turkey and syria. back to washington, president biden congress serves as the bullet for the plan and the setting is the same but it will be very different tonight. the biggest right would be right on the third of your screen, the house speak now kevin mccarthy. his ascendence under lies washington. the familiar biden theme,
freedom versus tyranny as democracy versus autocracy, which is something president zelenskyy had spoken about as well. that s right. that has been a familiar biden theme even before this invasion. he does believe that american democracy is being tested. he believes that vladimir putin is testing it. that xi jinping in china is testing and, let s face it, we have some tests internally as well. so it is an apt way to describe it but you re right, anderson. there was no new policy really toward russia. the ban on russian aircraft is a very small incremental adjustment. i wish there had been a little bit more on how there are probably going to need to be daily incremental adjustments by which i mean the costs have to keep ratcheting up for vladimir putin. biden framed the whole issue very powerfully.