Trump gets Stunned as GOP Revolts on Senate Floor

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1:34Ben Meiselas:The yeas are 52, the nays are 47. The motion is agreed to. The joint resolution will be placed on the calendar. But the end of last week, Donald Trump was repeatedly rebuked in the Senate and the House by also many members of his own party. You know, Donald Trump trying to project strength and unlawfully invading Venezuela without authorization. And then Donald Trump, again, continuing to kind of beat his chest about being a predator in the Western hemisphere. But what ultimately I saw was weakness and cracks developing within the Republican Party and his MAGA base. There was also that weird story about Donald Trump calling like the Secret Service on Marjorie Taylor Greene.

2:23Ben Meiselas:I'll do a whole other video on that. But that vote right there was a war powers resolution where the Senate voted basically to restrict Donald Trump's power to further invade Venezuela without the authority of Congress. Separately in the House of Representatives, the Affordable Care Act resolution was also passed to extend the subsidies. There are 17 Republicans joining with the Democrats there. That still has to go back to the Senate. We also saw the Senate in a unanimous consent vote agree to put the January 6th plaque up, which Trump and MAGA Mike and Trump's DOJ has been resisting. So you see those cracks developing.

3:06Ben Meiselas:I want to bring in Democratic Senator Andy Kim from the great state of New Jersey. Senator Kim, it's so great to see you. What are you seeing develop? Because, I mean, I think that those two votes, also the January 6th plaque vote, which is as Donald Trump was putting the disinformation on the White House website about J6, among a number of things, seems to show actual weakness at the end of this week. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Donald Trump wanted to enter 2026 with a lot of strength. I mean, this is the midterm election year. This is the year that's going to shape the rest of his presidency. And with the start with the Venezuela strikes, I think he thought, you know, he is on top.

3:49But in fact, this week, what I saw here at the Capitol was a lot of cracks in his support, a lot of signs of the weakness. And for instance, you know, we had the briefing with Secretary Rubio and Secretary Hegseth. You know, that was something that I actually think created greater concern amongst senators i think that briefing was a reason why a number of republicans voted against the trump administration with the war powers because nobody wants to have this go on for years of america running venezuela and that's literally what rubio told us in the briefing he said it publicly since that this is going to be years rubio said that this will be the remainder of the Trump administration will be, you know, be running Venezuela.

4:34And nobody wants that. And I think we're starting to see those cracks. And I think that this is going to be the effort that hopefully will snowball as we get towards the midterm elections. Right.

4:44Ben Meiselas:You look at Venezuela and it's like, well, what is the what's the plan? And, you know, there seems based on what was said publicly, I know some of the briefing was classified, of course, but there doesn't really seem to be a plan. And then it's like, OK, so you're going to have basically Maduro's team, Delcy Rodriguez, Diestato, Cabello, the enforcer, they're going to run things. And then what about Machado? And now she's going to Mar-a-Lago to give Donald Trump her Nobel Peace Prize. And maybe there's a trade for that this weekend. And people are like, what are we even doing? We're going to war over Nobel Peace Prizes or because of Maduro's dancing.

5:22Ben Meiselas:And by the way, it doesn't seem like China and Russia got the message that they're banned from Venezuela, because if you look at what Lavrov's saying and Demetri, they seem to be still pretty chummy with Delcy. And she seems to be doing things, which is good, releasing some political prison. But there seems to be this same entrenchment of the regime that was there before. Yeah, look, I worked in both Afghanistan and Iraq before. I know that there are limitations to what America can control, but that is not a lesson that Donald Trump learned. He is entering this with so much hubris and arrogance.

6:00And honestly, what I've seen in the past is the people that suffer from that type of hubris of an American leader, it's often the service members. It's often the military families. It's often the regular American people who want a president and a government that's focused on them. Nobody wants a president that's running Venezuela. We want a government that's running America. I want to be a Congress that's focused on America, not on Venezuela. And I think that's exactly the kind of message that people are getting loud and clear right now. They want us to have less foreign entanglements and things that are tying us down, and instead be able to focus on the affordability, the challenges that we play.

6:46And then they're seeing us spending billions of dollars of military equipment and personnel in Venezuela and outside of Venezuela. 20 % of the naval fleet of America right now is right outside of Venezuela. And like I said, potentially there for years to come. Right.

7:05Ben Meiselas:So that brings us to the affordability issue, because then in the House of Representatives, they took a vote to extend the Affordable Care Act subsidies by three years. You know, you had Donald Trump talking about subsidies, but subsidies for oil companies in Venezuela, while the American people are saying, hello, we've lost our health care right now because the premiums have skyrocketed without the subsidy. So it was about 17 House members. It's not a small number. And it would probably be more if they put income, if they did a few things. But 17 is still is still a lot. I support the bill in its kind of current form, whatever.

7:44Ben Meiselas:But you have 17 supporting it. But that was another rebuke. So what happens next there? Because it seems that Thune's going to try to block that. And it seems that Trump wants the Senate to squash it. But when there's that type of support in the House, is this kind of like what we saw with the Epstein discharge petition, where there's so much much momentum that it just starts to build. What happens in the Senate? Yeah, what you're seeing is in real time, Speaker Johnson's power collapsing, you know, his ability to control is falling apart. And that's because people are just tired of that, frankly, on both sides of the aisle.

8:17You know, just the other day, I slipped and I called him Secretary Johnson because I was saying that he is acting more like a cabinet official in the Trump administration rather than a leader of a separate and equal branch of government and that's true and and people are sick and tired of that including on the republican side you should hear the things that they tell me behind the scenes so i think these are manifestations of that you're seeing that with the epstein files you're seeing it now with health care you're going to see it continue to grow and that just chips away at it but what i will say is like look at what trump's response was when it came to, for instance, the War Powers Resolution, you know, five Republicans voted alongside the Democrats.

8:58And then Trump immediately said they should not be reelected. You know, he was immediately attacking them by name. And look, it included in Susan Collins, who is critically important for the Republicans if they want to try to maintain a majority in the Senate. So look, if Trump doesn't want Susan Collins to go back to the Senate after this term, I think a lot of Democrats in Maine are happy to try to work in that direction. But it just shows you how Trump wants not just loyalty anymore, he wants fealty. He wants complete control. And that's where things are really coming apart. But look, in terms of what comes next, we had this vote in the Senate already.

9:40We saw the Republicans vote against an effort to extend these subsidies. We will continue to push because, look, people are really struggling. The calls we're getting from people who are talking about the increases that they're going to be experiencing now, this is not theoretical anymore. This is real. So we'll keep pushing. But if the Republicans continue to block it, this has to be at the top of the list of what we're pressing and hammering when it comes to the midterm elections, especially since the majority of people who benefit from the ACA subsidies live in states that Trump won before.

10:17So, you know, these are people that may have very well supported Trump, or at least at the state level, their governments did. This is a perfect example to show why Trumpism and Trump's policies are failing America.

10:32Ben Meiselas:You refer to Maga Mike Johnson as being like a secretary because he's functioning as a cabinet member for Donald Trump. In that New York Times article that came out, They observed that Donald Trump would refer to his cabinet members as his children, and he would call Rubio his kid and Vance's kid, and he would buy them shoes. And he would say to the reporter, hey, can you show them the shoes that I bought you? And Rubio and Vance would show the shoes to them. and in that same interview the New York Times asked well so I guess my point is maybe Maggie Mike Johnson is viewed as one of Donald Trump's children based on that bizarre cult over there.

11:18Yeah I mean it's crazy to think about I mean like just he's literally humiliating them in public to force them to show just how much control he has over them. One thing I've been saying on this is I've been calling it, you know, mob boss tactics. You know, I've seen this. I'm from Jersey, unfortunately. You know, we're called the Soprano State for a reason. But we're familiar with these types of tactics, you know, that are about just, you know, total domination, utilizing, you know, every and all tool to just pressure and coerce. I mean, essentially what you saw in Venezuela is now this moving to the foreign policy level of what I call an extortion foreign policy.

12:01and this is all happening again because Trump is just subjugating his own leadership. This is all just coming down to him and that's where the breakdown of the government is. I hate to say this, but we do not have three functioning branches of government anymore. We have one branch of government that is literally trying to dominate the other two and that's part of these mob boss tactics that you were just showcasing in terms of how he's handling his own administration.

12:31Ben Meiselas:But here's what I don't get, like about your Republican colleagues who share this stuff with you privately, but don't have the courage to publicly resist or stand up. Like being a senator, think about the jobs out there. Like, you know, it's a pretty good one. Like in terms of like, there's two in a state, it should be a powerful gig. Like it's hard to become one. You have to go through a lot of process. So you become a United States senator. And these are smart people. Why would you want to do that and then have this guy treat like it just doesn't make sense? How do you describe the dynamic? Because you know these senators on the Republican side.

13:18Ben Meiselas:These are smart, tough people in private, but they give up all of their agency to this mania. Help me make some sense. I don't get it. Yeah, you know, I say like, look, like it's a good job, but it's not that good. You know, it's not that good of a job that I'm going to betray my own morals and values that I'm going to, you know, humiliate myself publicly by basically subjugating myself to another person. And I mean, he is a bully and you're allowing a bully to just dominate you. Like, why would you go through this? You know, so I just find it to be. Do you guys like make fun of him? But like, like behind the scenes when you're there with the Republicans, like when you're talking to them, you don't have to give me the exact dialogue, but do you look at them and are you like, really?

14:07Ben Meiselas:Like real? And they're like, I know. Yeah. That does happen. What I will often find is that, you know, like my Republican colleagues, they will, you know, they will note that like, look, like he Trump is clearly someone that's that's able to connect with a huge swath of the Republican base. And that gives him power. But in terms of just where his ideas are, the way that they talk about him, like I remember I was having a conversation with actually someone within his administration. and we were talking about something that we were disagreeing with the president on. And they were just like, let's just not talk about this and keep this quiet.

14:48And maybe he'll forget about it. Like, maybe we can just, literally someone in his own team is saying this. They're just treating him like, maybe we'll just forget about it. And we can actually go ahead and do this thing. And I just find that to be crazy. You know, that like everyone around him is just recognizing how how reckless things are, how chaotic things are. And they just think, well, this is just what they have to deal with. If they have to, if they want to continue to be centered, they just have to deal with this rather than thinking about maybe we should actually try to fix this and get something that resembles a government that is described in the Constitution back on the ground.

15:35Ben Meiselas:And they continue to cover up the Epstein files. I saw it was a Democratic senator who, in a previous unanimous consent where people agreed to tell the DOJ, don't delete the Epstein files. They wanted to put it in one of the upcoming appropriations bills. And that was voted down by some of the Republicans in the Senate. And it's just, it's a wild thing that here we are two weeks, three weeks after the Epstein Transparency Act was a law, maybe even more at this point. Maybe, yeah. And we haven't even heard, and they're just going dark. Like they're just going silent with it. They're not doing the redaction reports.

16:16Ben Meiselas:It's also a wild concept that they're covering that up in plain view. Yeah, you pointed out the January 6th plaque, right? I mean, and for those who might not have been following this story, we passed by law a requirement to showcase a plaque that's dedicated to those that saved our lives that day, the Capitol Police and other law enforcement. and Speaker Johnson is just like refusing to put this forward. And like, we don't even know where it is. I was like telling my colleagues, it's like probably like in that warehouse where from Raiders of the Lost Ark that they put things in that no one ever sees again.

16:57And like, I just find like just the fact that the Speaker of the House is so scared of Trump that he refuses to even put forward a plaque that is about like lifting up law enforcement and what they did for us is crazy and and like looks you know my colleagues in in the senate i thought were really admirable the other day when uh in a bipartisan way some of my colleagues went forward and and called for unanimous consent uh and which really just puts it the spot you know is any senator actually going to come to the floor and trying to stop the unanimous consent about supporting our law enforcement.

17:36And that's why it got passed. So we're trying to figure out where Speaker Johnson's hiding this plaque now, literally all day. We're trying to figure out where it is. And we're going to put it up in the Capitol finally to be able to honor our law enforcement that saved our lives, but also to mark the memory of January 6th, which was such a dark day for our Capitol and our democracy.

17:57Ben Meiselas:Before we go, anything you think that there's a blind spot on that as we head into this weekend, you want to address or just let the people know? You know, just it's been a weird it's been a weird start. It's been a bizarre start to 2026 and they've thrown a lot at us so far. Yeah, well, just two things I'll say. One is, you know, as we move forward on this War Powers Resolution, you know, that vote allows us to move towards the final. So we're actually going to have hours of public debate about Venezuela on the floor. This is exactly the kind of dialogue and debate that should have been happening.

18:32We have so far, since even the boat strike started, had zero public hearings about what's happening in Venezuela, zero in the Armed Services Committee, zero in the Foreign Relations, zero in the Intelligence Committee. And this is what the administration has been kind of hiding behind. Even when they do briefings, they refuse to do them unclassified because they want to hide behind the classification because they know that the American people disagree with what they're doing and they don't want us bogged down for years in Venezuela. So this is going to be the first week. Next week is going to be the first time where we can really have a substantive debate on the floor about Venezuela.

19:11We're going to be bringing forward ones about Greenland and others because it's important for the American people to see that Trump is now threatening a NATO ally of ours. And I worked in Afghanistan. I lived on a NATO military base that had soldiers from Denmark there working alongside ours to protect us. It's important to shine a light on that. The other thing I'll just say is it's so clearly in the election season. I can feel it with my colleagues here that are on the ballot. especially my Republican colleagues, they're terrified. They know the trajectory of where things are going. And, you know, that's something I think the people need to pay attention to is just how that's going to change the dynamic with legislation.

19:54But we have to keep the pressure on when it comes to the elections. That's ultimately how we're going to stop this.

20:00Ben Meiselas:Senator Andy Kim, we appreciate you. Thanks for joining us. Thanks so much. Everybody hit subscribe here. Let's get to six million. 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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