Latest / KMUD News / Congressman Huffman on Trump’s First 100 Days, Rising Authoritarianism, and the Fight for Democracy
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker A: In national news, KMUD got an opportunity to speak with our representative for the North Coast, Congressman Jared Huffman in this interview. Congressman Huffman, to begin, how would you summarize Donald Trump's first hundred days in office from your perspective in Congress?
- 0:21Speaker B: Longest hundred years of my life. Yeah, it's a wrecking ball. It is far more extreme, destructive and reckless than even I would have imagined. And I was out there warning the country and lighting my hair on fire about Project 2025 all summer and fall last year. And it's as if Donald Trump took Project 2025 and just said, hold my beer. I'm going to go way beyond all of this. And that's sort of where we are. Whether it is just the day to day chaos, what it's doing to our economy, to the global economy, to our trade and foreign policy relationships and alliances, what it is doing throughout the federal government with everybody on edge, if they're not already laid off, worried about a firing that's about to happen. Just the misery of being in the federal workforce, the endless litigation, the 130/plus lawsuits and the court orders. This is everything I worried about and worse.
- 1:30Speaker A: Top Democrats estimate that over $430 billion in federal funds have been disrupted, 60,000 federal jobs have been cut and 150,000 more are at risk, all within the first hundred days of the Trump administration. With added instability from a trade war and a weakened federal infrastructure. What kind of political fallout should we expect in the next hundred days?
- 2:01Speaker B: Yeah, it won't get better. That's what you can expect. I mean, you know how recessions work, right? It's consecutive periods of zero or negative growth and you don't know you're in one until you get the backward looking data that shows it. Right? I'm no economist, Lauren, but I'm pretty sure we're in a recession right now. And that will be validated in the next month or two as we get the rest of the data. But the fact that the Q1 data showed a contracting economy tells you that the recession probably began in April. That's my best sense. And all of the analysis I've seen is that it just cannot and will not snap back into an economic recovery. The things he's doing in many cases are pretty structural. The folks that are making investment decisions to leave the US to go somewhere else, the scientists and other people that are fleeing our country, this is going to take a long time to repair the damage. So it's unlike anything I've ever seen. This is going to be a recession. That is totally self inflicted. And I've never seen that. I've seen recessions caused by, you know, other factors, you know, bank collapses and tech busts and things like that, but never something that a President of the United States just came in and started doing wildly dumb things and crashed the economy.
- 3:31Speaker A: Recent headlines suggest a diverging of loyalty between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, two of the world's wealthiest individuals. Do you think this power dynamic has any implications for public policy?
- 3:47Speaker B: Oh, I don't know about the intrigue of that clash between those two, but I do know that we have too many mega billionaires that are way too cozy with the President of the United States. It's really unlike anything I've seen. I was at this, I may have told you, I was at the luncheon right after the inauguration, which is kind of an intimate affair, you know, maybe a couple hundred people at the most, and in Statuary hall for a lunch, and everywhere I looked was a billionaire. I mean, it was like Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Zuckerberg, Elon. I mean, they were all there. The guy from Google. That's crazy to me. And just right in that room, a huge percentage of the entire national wealth of our country was concentrated. There's something wrong with that.
- 4:42Speaker A: Now that Congress has returned from recess, Republicans are moving quickly to advance legislation aligned with Trump's agenda. Minority Leader Schumer has described it as tax cuts for the billionaires paired with the dismantling of Medicaid. How are Democrats planning to respond to this push?
- 5:04Speaker B: Or we're calling it out on them? We have been working hard the first three months of the year to explain to people why cuts to programs like Medicaid would be so devastating. To help people understand that, you know, even if they don't use Medicaid for their health insurance, I mean, one in three Americans do use Medicaid as their health insurance. But even if you don't, it's going to affect your health clinic's ability to stay open. It's going to affect your health care, because emergency first responders and your ER and everything else is going to be strained and it could cause, like, a broader collapse, not just for folks who directly depend on Medicaid. I mean, the nursing home system in the US is almost entirely dependent on Medicaid. 100% of the people with disabilities in the US dependent on Medicaid. And so you start pulling major amounts of funding out of that program and things unravel very quickly. So that's our message. We are taking it to them in every way we can in our hearings and our public messaging. And I think you're beginning to see that they're feeling some of that pressure. Some of my Republican colleagues are expressing doubt about whether they should vote to cut Medicaid.
- 6:24Speaker A: One of the foundational principles of American democracy is that the Bill of Rights protects all people, not just citizens. Yet we've seen thousands detained without due process, including some US Citizens like a child receiving cancer treatment. How do you respond to these humanitarian concerns? Are lawsuits enough? And what role does Congress need to play in defending civil liberties?
- 6:57Speaker B: Yes, and, well, lawsuits. No to the pot. Are lawsuits enough? Lawsuits are super important because it's a way to quickly get a court order that can hold an abusive policy and a cruel policy in check. And we've been able to support lawsuits that are doing that right now. But no, Congress can't. Do know, we're just not bystanders here. Congress is where the legislative power resides. So we are certainly pushing bills. We are using the bully pulpit to the extent we can. And I'm on all kinds of resolutions and letters on this subject. It is deeply dystopic when habeas corpus, you know, one of these fundamental civil liberties seems to, seems to just not be respected anymore by an administration that's rounding up people and disappearing them. And you, you pointed it out. I mean, it's not just non citizens. Some US citizens have been caught up in this. And so this is dark and dystopic and un American and unthinkable. And it's one of the biggest fights that we have right now with this administration.
- 8:06Speaker A: My final question, is the United States still a democracy? A recent NPR report cited more than 500 political scientists who concluded that the US has shifted from a full democracy to what's described as a competitive authoritarian system. Do you agree with this assessment? And if so, what must elected officials and citizens do to reverse that trajectory?
- 8:35Speaker B: We're democracy in name. But it is hard to argue with that analysis that in practice we've sort of been bought off by all of these oligarchs and we have allowed this totalitarian leader to assume all of these anti democratic powers. So I take the point. And you know, I guess the only way to answer that question is to say that the voters now have to decide. You know, one of the things that Donald Trump says to defend all of these outrageous things, all of these ways in which he's flouting the law, flouting the Constitution, flouting Congress, is to say, well, you know what I told people I was going to do this and they voted me in. So I don't think that's what Americans voted for. I think they voted for Trump for a variety of reasons but not to shred the rule of law and upend democracy and replace it with a dictatorship. But now that the lines have been drawn so clearly that's going to be what that's going to be a big part of what the 26 midterm election is all about.
- 9:39Speaker A: Is there anything else you would like to leave us with today, Congressman Huffman?
- 9:44Speaker B: That's about it. First hundred days, you know, really a terrible moment I think in the history of this country and hopefully a call to action for everyone who wants to continue to have a democracy.
- 10:00Speaker A: Again. That was our representative for the North Coast Congressman Jared Huffman. If you have a question you would like asked you can email them to news at cayman. Org. We will return with Congressman Huffman at the beginning of June.