Transcription
So, last night I wrote um a letter, my usual letter, and I was honestly surprised by how upset people got by it. I was angry about it because I felt like I pretty much killed myself last summer getting out the word about Project 2025 and with me and with other people and so on and was on the road talking about it and, you know, doing everything I could and and yet all Trump had to say was, "I don't know anything about it. I'm not involved with that." for the the mainstream media to say, "Oh, it's not true. If if if you say he's going to do it, he says he's not." And you know, you're lying because he says he's not. And it may be kind of bonkers at the time, but when I started to actually look at yesterday's news and how it just bang bang bang bang bang was Project 2025, it made me angry. I'm like, you know, we told you we we said this was going to happen, and all Trump had to say was, "No, it's not, and you fell for it."
So, what I was trying to do with that letter is important for what I'm talking about today. That is, what I laid out was, listen, Trump ran away from Project 2025 because Americans hated it. 4% of Americans wanted the the um imposition of Project 2025 on us. Even MAGA Republicans didn't make it to 10% of them. People hate it. They freaking hate it. And at the same time, some people, you know, I I kept saying before the election, he's promising everything to everyone. A lot of people voted for Trump in 2024 because he promised that the economy was being was going to be better. The economy under Joe Biden went gang busters. um you know he had to deal with the pandemic and so on and the inflation that was all around the world but the economic growth was extraordinary. Now that's fallen right off. I mean we don't know that as much anymore because the you know the economic numbers are not as as reliable as they used to be. But people are recognizing that the economy is not good. And as I said, Trump also got voters based on the idea that he was going to deport criminals, which by the way, um, both Biden and Obama did far more effectively than he did because they focused on criminals alone. So they could move them quite quickly through the process. These large sweeps that get in everybody are much harder to do because there isn't sort of a fast track to get rid of everybody the way there is a fast track to get rid of criminals.
In any case, um, so what my point was that if people hated Project 2025 by itself, but they were willing to say, okay, maybe the economy, maybe border security, and now they're turned against him on that, too. This is not an administration that is powerful. This is an administration that is hanging on by its fingernails. And the people who are enabling it are either all in for whatever reason they have or they are simply trying to play to see what will guarantee a future political career for them. My personal opinion is that virtually none of them have a future future political career because if the MAGA Republicans take over, they're going to toss all those people overboard and if they get rejected those of us who replace them are going to toss all those people overboard. But they're playing in an old-fashioned system in which keeping your head down and playing by the party rules used to mean that you had a long career. I could be wrong, by the way. I'm just suggesting that this is not what we have traditionally seen in terms of carryover in times like these. But what I was trying to point to in that letter last night was that this is an extraordinarily weak presidency. And the thing about about knowledge being power and about Trump trying to project that he's winning all these wars and getting all these deals and doing all these incredible things are he's trying to convince you of those things rather than having actually to do them because if you've actually looked at what this government is doing it's falling apart. It's not doing anything it's supposed to do.
So, what I was really trying to emphasize last night, and I'm going to continue to emphasize it, is we simply must push back and say this is not the government that we want. This is not the way things are supposed to work. So, in terms of the gerrymandering issue, they're having meetings in in Texas now about gerrymandering. So many people are turning out that they they have to have overflow rooms. Speak up if you're in Texas, but also in the other states where this is happening as well. Um, you know, in states like Ohio, where Bernie Marino, the senator who replaced um, Sherrod Brown in the last election, which was just a heartbreaking decision, has said that he's going to urge the federal government to withhold any funding to Cincinnati unless it does what Trump wants it to. Now, that's a senator from a state declaring war on one of the major cities in that state. Is that really what people in Ohio want? I mean, there are things all across this country like that that are falling into place. And there's going to be two things that we can do. We can take it and say, well, you know, it kind of sucks that we don't have health care. It kind of sucks that, you know, we don't have FEMA. Or we can or on the other hand we can say we were in the process of constructing a government after World War II that answered the needs of ordinary Americans and we really stopped doing that in 1980 1981 we really stopped trying to do that and the Biden and Harris administration tried to do that things along those lines and the more I see articles now saying oh my god we're losing that that rule they put in place for you know to go back to the 1920s I think, well, people didn't know that rule was in place because so few journalists wrote about it. But things like taking a medical debt off of your credit score, for example, or or saying that banks could only charge a certain amount of money for an overdraft fee, all the ways in which we've been gouged for so long that they tried to address, I would like to see back on the table.
So now is the time to think about what we want what we want the world to look like because the the Trump administration as it is is going to burn everything down. Um the the government itself and so on and I don't mean like there's going to be nothing left and it's going to be anarchy, but that right now everything is so unstable. This is the time to speak up and to protect the things you care about. And here's a news flash. It's working. When people show up and say that they are that they want funding for something, that something is important to them, the administration changes its mind and that funding gets restored. That's what that what you're seeing there is not Trump sort of saying, "Okay, I'm going to bestow my favor." What you're seeing there is politicians recognizing that the American people care deeply about something and if they want to get reelected, they better do it. So the more of that they see, the more likely it is that we're going to come out on the other side of this, not with what we had before, but with something better. really going to be important in this time to recognize that in moments like these when the cards are all up in the air, you get to catch them and put them into a new pattern. And just waiting for them all to fall into somebody else's hands is not the way to go. I promise.