Senator Schatz Exposes Trump’s Complete Failure to Lead

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2:37Ben Meiselas:Visit growtherapy.com slash booknow today to get started. That's growtherapy.com slash booknow. growtherapy.com slash booknow. Availability and coverage vary by state in insurance plan. The Speaker's Rooms, Washington, D.C., October 10, 2025. I hereby designate the period from Tuesday, October 14th, 2025 through Sunday, October 19th, 2025 as a district work period under clause 13 of rule one. Signed sincerely, Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House of Representatives. Pursuant to clause 13 of rule one, the House stands adjourned until 2 p.m. Tuesday, October 14th, 2025. Tough day of work there for the MAGA Republican Congress members going on a paid vacation.

3:23Ben Meiselas:You know that they got to they got to take that gavel up and then they got to knock the gavel down. They gavel out. They send their members on vacation. Pretty much the whole summer, MAGA Republicans were on vacation because they wanted to leave to avoid talking about the release of the Epstein files. And now they're not working during a government shutdown while American people are suffering. And Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz outlined the absurdity and the offensiveness of what MAGA Republicans have been doing with all of their vacations and just not working while they're destroying American lives.

3:59Ben Meiselas:He did it on the Senate floor. Let's watch it. So here's what happened. They left early on the 25th specifically to avoid a vote on the Epstein files. Then they add this week off, this week off, this week off, this week off, this week off, this day off, come back. One, two, three. Long weekend. One, two, three, four. Long weekend. One, two, three, four. Long weekend. Another break. Another break. Another break. And now they're saying, another break! Get back to work!

4:35Get back to work!

4:37Ben Meiselas:But let me fact check it a little bit while they're on vacation. They are working. Be clear for Argentina. You see, Argentina just got 20 billion dollars so that their MAGA puppet Javier Malay can throw these concerts for himself with pyrotechnics while they literally burn away the money that America is giving them. And Senator Schatz was on the Senate floor and he outlined this perfectly. Watch. So just to recap, Trump is at the exact same time incinerating$70 billion of taxpayer money, but what's the one thing that there's not enough money for? You. There's not enough money for you. There's enough money for a$50 billion tariff bailout.

5:29There's enough money for Argentina, but there's not enough money for you. money to help a family of four that's going to have to pay$300 more per month to keep their health care plan. They have the money to cover for Trump's economic incompetence, but apparently they don't have the money to prevent a small business owner or a taxi driver or an early retiree from losing their health care. This is not complicated at all. Donald Trump's economy is already hard as it is because of his choices to create shortages of electricity, of lumber, of food, of health care. Electricity prices are going up at twice the rate of inflation.

6:16Vegetables are up nearly 40 percent. Grocery prices are at their highest in three years. And now people are supposed to find hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to spare every single month or give up their health care coverage and hope they don't get sick.

6:31Ben Meiselas:Let's bring in Senator Schatz of Hawaii. Senator, great to see you when you outline there on that calendar, just how many days MAGA Republicans have not been working. And you showed July when they fled with the Epstein files. Offensive is not even the word. I search for it, but let me toss it over to you. How do you even make sense of this moment? Yeah, I think Mike Johnson is a little bit in a bubble, an information bubble, and he's getting praised by the people that he's seeking praise from. But I think the thing about this shutdown is people know exactly what it's about. They know that we're fighting to prevent 114 % increase in healthcare premiums for about 22 million Americans.

7:15And that's just the people who are on the ACA marketplace. There are basically the rest of us who are not on the ACA exchange who are going to pay the increased costs as a result of healthcare everywhere becoming more expensive. And so we're just saying, like, can we help to avert this catastrophe? And in any functioning government, if you had a catastrophe where tens of millions of Americans were facing these precipitous price increases, both parties would just get together and cut a deal. Mike Johnson has no idea how to cut a deal. John Thune, I think, is still working on that skill. And I think different than in Trump 1.0, Trump really views himself as an elected monarch and he finds the legislature to be annoying and to be a nuisance and to be people who should just shut up and get in line.

8:05And I think so part of this is about the health care piece. It's definitely the driving issue for all of us that unites people across the country and unites Democrats. But it's also a broader issue, which is, you know, we represent, let's say, at least in the last election, half the country, slightly less than half the country. Obviously, we've lost the presidential and all the rest of it. But even if you suppose that we represent 48 % of Americans, we are out of power, but we should not be considered powerless. And to the extent that the Senate is supposed to work a certain way, we're not without leverage here.

8:41And we're not using our leverage for some sort of weird, you know, issue that we cooked up in a lab. We're not using our leverage to just make trouble. We're using our leverage to try to make sure that we prevent a real thing from happening to people. And I have to tell you, everywhere I go, you know, I've unfortunately been in Washington and not in Hawaii for now several weeks, but everywhere I go, people come up to me and say, hey, my sister wanted me to tell you, thank you. My cousin, they just got their letter and their rates are going up 112%. So keep fighting. And I think that's why we've got the moral clarity and the political unity that we need to win this fight.

9:23Ben Meiselas:You know, Donald Trump ran on affordability and he only got a plurality. I mean, there were, and also there were tens of millions of Americans who did not vote because for whatever reason, they thought, whatever, they don't like politics. They stay out of it. Why does it impact me? Well, they're seeing it does impact them. But what I want to talk to those, how do you deal? I mean, actually negotiate where Magamike and Thune are feckless because they'll just do what Trump says. And Trump is in this bizarro Trumpy world where he talks about reducing healthcare prices by 500 or 600%, which isn't a real thing, where he posts AI videos, which he purports to be his plan, which are alien spaceship technology called med beds that cure cancer when you go through MRI machines, which is like a fake QAnon conspiracy, like really deranged thing.

10:22Ben Meiselas:And then he goes, we're the party of healthcare. And he says, don't talk to Democrats. Like, I just don't even know how you even deal with someone like that. How do you communicate with somebody like that? I mean, they have to decide that the pressure is too much to bear. And I think that what they truly didn't understand was the extent of these rate increases. We were saying that rates were going to double or worse, but you know, you'll be forgiven if you kind of assume that something that comes from the opposing party is sort of, you know, designed to be persuasive and not entirely accurate.

11:04And I think what is, you know, the reason Marjorie Taylor Greene and a California congressman and a Long Island congressman are starting to say stuff and a A couple of my Republican Senate colleagues are starting to say stuff is like there's kind of no spinning the letter that you get from your provider saying, here's the new price. And as those prices come in, there's no poll. There's no talking point. There's no AI. There's no accusation. accusation. There's no invasion of an American city or a blowing up of a fishing vessel that can distract people from the fact that they made a deliberate policy choice and it's going to double the cost of health care for tens of millions of Americans.

11:46And so it's starting to sink in. I think the challenge for them now is how do they get out of this without looking like they caved, right? And, you know, that's the sort of art of legislative compromise is that in order to get something enacted, we're going to have to allow them to tell themselves a story about why they did this. And I think it probably starts with Donald Trump, who doesn't like to do deeply unpopular things to people in rural areas if he can avoid it. Obviously, the tariffs are a terrible counter example. So I, you know, I frankly don't exactly know how this ends, but I know how it starts.

12:31It starts with enough momentum and political support so that people, not just, you know, I love your podcast and I love the work you're doing and I watch it and listen to it, but it's got to be people across the political spectrum, people who even may have voted for Trump and now have mixed feelings or people who don't generally vote or people who who are, you know, sort of begrudgingly voted for Democrats or whatever. It's got to be everybody saying like, hey, idiots, you got to fix this thing.

13:01Ben Meiselas:I watched clips of you from 8, 12 years ago, and you were warning about the moment that we're in right now. And there were steps taken, you know, of how we deal with premiums. You know, do you go subsidies? How do you lower them? let's be productive at all times after the Affordable Care Act was passed. All Republicans tried to do it. Every step is destroy a challenge and go to the Supreme Court. There was a way, I think, to use that as an architectural framework and then and then help make it better. But it seemed the fight was always to make it worse, rip it away. Fortunately, with McCain doing the thumbs down, it was saved temporarily.

13:43Ben Meiselas:But but they've always wanted to rip it apart. You've warned about that. you're also warning though and you've also been warning when no one's really been talking about electrical prices and you but you've been telling me ben you don't get it like you like maybe i get it but you said generally people don't get it um you know what they're doing right we don't have enough energy to power what's happening with ai and with the crypto with you know these data centers are sucking up this is the time we need energy more than ever and this whole making a mockery of wind and solar is the stupidest thing you could be doing.

14:18Ben Meiselas:Like we're heading into catastrophe after talk to that. Cause when you and I spoke three months ago, two months ago, you were, you were warning and we see it getting worse. Now we see it impacting Americans. Yeah. Donald Trump likes shortages. Like that's his political philosophy. His economic philosophy, shortages of food and healthcare and labor and raw materials. And in this case, electrons. Um, I think, you know, I'm a climate guy. I'm motivated and animated by the planetary crisis. And for basically all my political career, which is now a little more than 25 years, I have been making an argument, which I believe, that, look, we've got to take action on the planetary crisis.

15:03but sometimes that might be slightly more expensive in the short run because it's worth it in the long run. Now, I made that argument with all of my sincerity. Here's what's changed. We don't have to make that argument anymore. Even if you don't care about the climate crisis, even if all you want is cheap electricity on the grid, even if all you want is relief on your electricity bill, solar and wind and geothermal and nuclear power are the way to go. Coal and burning low sulfur fuel oil for electrons and gas, it's all more expensive than solar. And right now we're, and you just pointed this out, we are facing a big shortage of electrons on the grid.

15:47And that's kind of at the beginning of the data center boom. So it's true that the data centers are going to create this huge crunch. It's also true that we're actually already seeing a doubling of electricity prices as against inflation. So it's rising twice the rate of inflation. And that's basically before most of these data centers come online. So one of the things that I want people on the left to talk about in the energy context is, look, like I said, my main thing is climate action, but we don't have to talk about climate action. We can simply say wind is cheap, solar is cheap. They're stopping wind and solar because this guy has very strange ideas about the energy mix.

16:26And it is consistent with the rest of his political and economic philosophy, which is if there's less of everything, then it gives him more authority to kind of dole out favors and have people ask for sort of indulgences from the king.

16:41Ben Meiselas:That's why ultimately scarcity and shortages are his currency because he's the one who hoards it in that weird golden bordello thing he's turned into the White House. And he sits there and divvies up the favors, loves when the foreign leaders show up with the press and the sports teams, but won't ever go in front of the cameras to talk about health care or the shutdown or have that discussion with Democratic. That had to be private. For that one, Senator, he said theatrics. I don't. Why would I want the theatrics? Before we go, though, I want to hit upon another floor speech that you gave where you talked about, look, yes, Donald Trump does lots of distractions, but we also have to recognize that when he's making these posts now on social media, as deranged and unhinged as they look, he's actually giving orders.

17:36Ben Meiselas:As we saw, he's giving the order to Pam Bondi, go after my opponent, which I guess he thought was a direct message, according to Wall Street Journal, because he has no clue what's going on. But what he's doing has reached, I think, a new level where everybody's saying this is authoritarian. There's no other way. We're not in constitutional crisis. I think we're in like a dictator. He's ruling like a dictator. That's where we are. What's the opposition going to do? Am I being hyperbolic or is that where we're at right now? Look, I think that there's two ways to look at this. The first is we should have total clarity about where he wants to go.

18:17And there's plenty of evidence that he is walking down that path with the mobilization of the Guard into Portland and Chicago over the objections of the governors and the mayors. most recently with the threat to jail, J.B. Pritzker and the mayor of Chicago, obviously with the indictment of James Comey. All of that indicates that he's not actually kidding about where he wants all of this to end. That is a different thing. And I want to be really clear. That is a different thing from declaring that we are no longer a democracy, because that question is still up to us, right? And so when Gavin Newsom steps up, when the governor of Oregon steps up, when the governor of Illinois steps up, when litigation succeeds, when people are out there very peacefully and smartly and in a disciplined way on the streets, that matters.

19:21When people get involved in the electoral process, that matters. When we do whatever we can in the legislative context federally, all of that matters. So it's a fine line between being appropriately alarmed as to what they are trying to do, but not catastrophizing to the point where we act like we are already powerless and we have already lost. We have not already lost. And so the tendency for people who are worried and are worried that others aren't sufficiently worried is to talk like we are already Belarus. We are not already Belarus. We are a functioning democracy. And Donald Trump wants to take that away from us.

20:02And our job is to stop him from doing that. But that is a different frame of mind than we're all cooked. We are not all cooked. I think the rally on October 18th is going to be very important for the country to see peaceful, mainstream folks across the country to say, we're not a monarchy. We're still in charge of our own government.

20:27Ben Meiselas:Peaceful protests, October 18th, the No Kings protests across the country. I'll be at one. Hopefully everybody else is watching. We'll be at one. Peaceful protests, the bedrock of our democracy. Senator Schatz, thanks for joining us. Thank you. Everybody hit subscribe. Let's get to 6 million subscribers. Want to stay plugged in? Become a subscriber to our sub stack at MidasPlus.com. You'll get daily recaps from Ron Filipkowski, ad-free episodes of our podcast, and more exclusive content only available at MidasPlus.com.

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