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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. It's happening. Trump supporters are finally realizing that he is a con man that doesn't care about affordability, that his sole purpose is to protect his fragile ego and to enrich himself and his cronies. The New York Times did a focus group on 2024 Trump voters pop this up. A New York Times focus group found that nine of 12 Trump voters regret supporting him, with many giving his second term failing grades. Asked how they're feeling about the country in one word, members of the focus group said the following. Let's go to the next slide. Worried, anxious, frustrated, annoyed, discouraged, surprised and discouraged. Concerned, apathetic and betrayed. And now we have gas prices that are hitting four year highs. Pop this up, New York Times. Gas prices in the US have hit their highest level in four years. Tuesday's jump was the biggest increase in more than a month as negotiators deadlocked over, over reopening the Strait of Hormuz. So here's the thing. Yes, Everybody's anti Trump. Nine out of 12 Trump voters are anti Trump. We have to be an opposition party that is more than anti Trump. We have to be a party that delivers for people, that can capture voters, that can capture back the working class. And here to join me today to discuss this is Congressman Greg Cassar, the representative from Texas's 35th congressional district and chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus with a major announcement. Congressman, how are you today?
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B
I'm doing well, Jennifer. Thanks for talking about this today.
- [01:52]
A
All right, so tell us about what your caucus is announcing today and how it will make a difference in the lives of American because Trump has only made Americans lives worse. Far worse.
- [02:04]
B
Yeah. We are launching our new affordability agenda today. Like you said earlier, we all know that Donald Trump lied to his own voters, lied to the country when he said he was going to bring prices down, when all he's done is jack prices up and enrich himself. Now he's calling making things more affordable a hoax. And so now as Democrats, we've got to say we are actually going to make things cheaper, make life more affordable for the everyday person. Because yes, we've got to be anti Trump, but we also have to be pro working person. So this agenda is what, what Democrats could actually stand for. A lot of people are, are saying, what are you for? And the agenda the Progressive Caucus is laying out today is we're anti Trump, but we're also anti corporations screwing you over, anti rich folks that have made more and more money by jacking up your prices. So it's the Kind of agenda that can lower utility bills, lower your housing costs, lower your grocery bills, and say, let's stop cozying up to these special interests as a party and instead start focusing on those voters that are disappointed in Donald Trump, whether they're Republican or Democratic.
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A
Let's talk about how the Republican Party, for years before Trump, since Ronald Reagan, has had this dismissive, demeaning attitude towards working class people. Colleagues in, in Congress have said, well, if you want, you know, better insurance, get a better job or get a second job or the, the person Agriculture Secretary is like, yeah, we know eggs are expensive, get you some chickens. Poor people. And it's really disgusting how for how many decades the Republican Party has treated workingclass people, yet they have captured them, they have captured their vote. Because in this exchange for, yeah, you get to be poor, they also say you get to be racist and they scapegoat people. How do we have a progressive party that comes back and recaptures the working class and delivers for working class Americans and we get a generational FDR style governance?
- [04:15]
B
Well, Donald Trump went out there and painted immigrants, painted high school coaches and LGBT people as the villains in the story. But Democrats didn't have a villain to our story. Right. If you think about it, even though he did good, some good stuff. Joe Biden famously told a group of wealthy donors, nothing will fundamentally change. And that's a problem. We've got to be out there and say, it's not an undocumented mom that is jacking up your housing bill. It is corporate Wall street landlords and we're going to go after them. It is not LGBT youth that are jacking up your utility bill. It is for profit monopolies that are doing that. And so with this new agenda of how we're going to lower the cost of living across 10 parts of your life, we are also saying to those corporate interests that Democrats have kind of played footsy with at the institutional level, you know what? I welcome your hatred because if you are jacking up on costs, we're going to go after you. And I think that is what's going to bring some of those voters back to us.
- [05:23]
A
Don't you think that the they scapegoat people and it's based on a lie? The Democrats, it's not necessarily scapegoating. It's pointing out that Elon Musk is just a total piece of shit. I mean, just a complete nut job. Tesla hasn't paid any taxes. So this, this idea that these working class people are moochers on food Stamp living off of this assistance. If you really look at at this billionaire class, we simply cannot afford them. Our country cannot afford these billionaires. They are too expensive for us.
- [06:01]
B
You're right. We can't just be the anti Trump party. We've got to also be the anti billionaire party. You know we, when Repub. We've let since the Reagan era, the Republicans say that we're all about just spending money. But the fact is it's folks like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos who are taking your money. And so we don't have to tax a working class mom to drive down the cost of child care. We just have to be willing to tax the wealth of the Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk's and we could have $10 a day childcare for virtually every family in this country. We could do that if we're willing to pick out and point out the villains in the story. Like you said, we don't have to scapegoat. We just have to be willing to tell the truth. And what I've been worried about is Democrats just go out there and say affordability, affordability, affordability, like a magic word. We actually have to fill that in with the policy that we would change. So on gas prices, these corporations are making out like bandits right now in this war. The gas prices have shot up. They're selling gas at over $4 a gallon all across the country. They're making hundreds of billions of dollars in profit. We should take most of that, tax most of that back and send it back to the American people in the form of a rebate check. And I know that Republicans in Texas, when I tell them that, they might say, look Greg, obviously you're more liberal than me on this or that, but I can agree with you on that. And we have to be ready to go and talk about that all the way through November and then actually do it if we're elected into the majority.
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A
And I think we have to say we don't think it's that liberal. We don't think it's that radical to take tell a billionaire to stop bedwetting and threatening to pack their toys up and leave if this state is going to tax you this much. Like there was this video that Zoran Mamdani did where he called out a guy named Ken Griffin because he owns like some ridiculous $270 million penthouse. The best thing that Ken Griffin could do would have been, you know what, I'm going to go sit down with the mayor. I want all the cameras There and I'm going to write the check for my taxes to show that I have appreciation for this government, I have appreciation for this country that provided a system where I'm so r have a bank account account that could choke a bull. But instead there's this bedwetting enabled by workingclass people like, oh my God, the billionaires are going to move. Why do you give a if the billionaires move? Like we have to capture the the true narrative and stop letting this propaganda that the Republican Party that oh my God, these poor rich people, where, where are they going to go? They create, create all these jobs which is total. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Apple all these people are firing people. It was never the immigrants that were going to take your job. It was always the billionaires and the robots. I just think we need to go full tilt against these people because we absolutely cannot afford these people to live in this country.
- [08:58]
B
We've been told that we can't have these bold ideas, but some of them, like you said, aren't even that bold once you expose the truth. Let me rant about utility bills for a second. Because people all across the country have seen insane increases in their utility bills in the last few years. Some people have 50% increase just over the last few years. When you go look at what these for profit utilities do is they charge their private jets to you on your utility bill. When they show up and say we've got to raise utility prices and get approval for that. Sometimes they are charging their political donations to you. And so we've got to say screw that. We've got to just cap the insane profit margins and that saves the average American family 500 bucks off the bat. And we now have members of Congress from way more conservative districts like Josh Riley leading the charge on stuff like that to say, look, this isn't radical stuff. It is the basic everyday things that some political parties should do. And I think it's the Democrats that should step up and do it right now.
- [10:10]
A
So I think that the Democrats have to walk and chew gum as we head to the midterms and head to 2028. I think we have to have affordability. We need to properly bully the billionaire bedwetters for what babies they act like what victims they act like online how pathetic it is how they suck off working class Americans and avoid paying taxes and just how disgusting that is. And to quote JD Vance, have they ever thought about saying thank you, thank you to the country, thank you to the American taxpayers. But I also think we have to have a component of our response to this fascist takeover. That is accountability. That is, yeah, when we get back in power, it is full tilt. Every investigation you can imagine, it's hauling every mfer in front of here for every lie, every dollar. Because basically Donald Trump is a dirty cop in the White House running a crime syndicate. You can, you can buy a pardon. They completely diminished all white collar crime. They're not even investigating that stuff anymore. And then we have ICE and pop up the screen gab Kylie, about this ICE agent. The ICE agent who fatally shot unarmed mother Renee Good in Minneapolis has been quietly relocated and allowed to resume working in another state. Punch up has learned. Senior Department of Homeland Security officials have also told Punch up that agents Jonathan Ross has effectively been shielded from ICE's own accountability process because an FBI investigation has stalled. This is outrageous. And so I think another thing that we have to point out, other than the billionaires or titty babies that bedwet all the time, is the Republican Party is the crime party. This is a crime syndicate. They are not the party of law and order.
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B
It is accountability and affordability. And we can do them both. And they support each other. We've got to be able to say, Donald Trump goes out and sells pardon pardons to rich folks that got convicted of screwing over their workers. He sold off part. He pardoned the drug trafficking convicted president of Honduras. We should be able to hit him for that. I mean, come on. And then we should also be able to pull forward, you said these corporate CEOs and billionaires who bent the knee and thought they could make a profit by doing crime with Trump and say, hey, did you come forward now if we're in charge as Democrats, how did you get your merger? Who did you pay off? Where? What meetings did you have? And make sure that those folks who think that they can participate in the corruption in dc, that it's going to work out for the bottom line there, if they get caught doing that, there has to be a consequence, just like there has to be a consequence for ICE agents that killed an unarmed, innocent American woman. And so it is both accountability and affordability, because we need the American people to know we're going after both. And they're all tied up in corruption because this is the last part of this affordability agenda that isn't being talked about enough. We've got how to reduce your prescription drug costs. We've got how to increase your wages. But also critical on the new ideas is a bill to end Super PACs. Because at the end of the Day things are more and more expensive in this country because corporations can go buy elections on the cheap, go buy regulations on the cheap for them. And then it costs you when you go to the grocery store, it costs you at the end of the month. And so part of our affordability agenda is to root out corruption and hold these guys accountable who are making money off of you.
- [14:08]
A
All right, let's address, because I think there's a, there's a through line here on the bedwetting. The billionaires are bedwetters. Donald Trump, look at his true social bedwetting all the time. He's a victim. James Comey hurt his feelings. Letitia James hurt his feelings. Jimmy Kimmel hurt his feelings. Just bedwetting all over the place with these quote, unquote, Alpha mega men. And so now they are blaming Democratic rhetoric for the incident, the shooting incident at the White House correspondence dinner. And I just think this is incredibly rich when you have a president has that has called for Liz Cheney to be shot, he's called for Mark Milley to be executed. I mean, he had that video of Joe Biden that was like, bound and gagged. It was some AI thing. He has videos of him in a, in a AI videos of him in a jet dropping feces on Americans. And so it's just incredibly rich to hear these MAGA people talk about rhetoric coming from Democrats. What's your take on all of that?
- [15:10]
B
I mean, Trump is the ultimate gaslighter. Of course we condemn political violence of all kinds against any person of any party, period, including against the president. But he's such a gaslighter because he's the one that gave out the pardon to January 6th on his very first day in office, who literally tried to kill people here in this building, in this Capitol. It is such gaslighting. And to me, look, when you talk about what real standing up for people really being tough looks like and gaslighting against them, look at Alex Peretti, who was trying to defend a protester who was being beaten down in the street. That is real courage, standing up. And then he was killed in plain sight, unarmed, on video for it. And they're trying to somehow blame him for that. And so I called him a terrorist. Yeah. And they called him a terrorist. So I think that we all should not take the gaslighting, continue to stand up for our neighbors, continue to stand up against violence of all forms from any direction, and not let Donald Trump have us forget that he has been the person that has stoked more political violence in this country than any leader that I can think of in my lifetime here in America.
- [16:33]
A
I agree with that. So you're the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. How are you dealing with members in your caucus who still support military aid to Israel? And I think we need to diffuse this whole myth that there is a difference between offensive aid and defensive aid. I think that's. There's no differentiation between a missile that is defensive and like we can trust Benjamin Netanyahu. He claims everything he's ever done has been defensive. So how are you dealing with this as the chair?
- [17:08]
B
Look, the tide has been changing here in Washington, D.C. increasingly publicly and then especially privately, more and more members of Congress are saying, I just cannot fund the Israeli military any longer. I haven't voted to send them funding of any kind. And right now, I mean, they are dragging us deeper and deeper into war. I mean, they've committed this genocide in Gaza. They're continuing to bomb and invade places like Lebanon, and they're putting now American service members at greater risk in Iran. And so I think that is shifting. We're seeing more and more members of all kinds sign on to the Block the bombs bill led by Congresswoman Delia Ramirez. The Progressive Caucus endorsed that bill. It's the first time a major caucus of members in Congress has endorsed anything like this. And that's really thanks to folks like the people that watch your show, people at home reaching out to their member of Congress. So as you keep on pushing folks to sign on to block the bombs, part of my job is just like anybody else at work to sit down with folks and say, look, even if you had a different position before, it isn't flip flopping. It is we got to give people the ability to say, you know what, I had one position before and now I've seen what has happened and I'm ready to get on Block the bombs. And I think we should welcome those folks into the movement. Because the Democratic Party cannot, in my view, continue to send money to Netanyahu's military that's done what they've done and they're trying to do what they're doing.
- [18:49]
A
I completely agree with you. I think that we have to allow people the time to clue in, because we were Americans and we're very ethnocentric in the way that we view our news and the way we think. And the fundamental problem here is that you have people that live in America, that taxes come out of their check, or on April 15th, they mail their check off to the IRS and that money is being spent to carpet Bomb and kill infrastructure, civilians, women, children, et cetera. And there has been a huge propaganda campaign surrounding all of this stuff for so long, and I fell prey to a lot of it. And I, over the last 18 months, have really opened my eyes up on the issue and evolved. And I think it's important as these wartime war crimes continue, that we have to applaud people who say, oh, my God, this is, these are war crimes. This is horrible. I don't want our money funding this. And we have to allow people the, the grace to jump on board and be anti genocide. And Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump are the number one killers of women and children right now in the world. And it is just horrific. When you think about, when I think about when I lived in Oklahoma City and I would drive my son, who was a basketball player, to these rural towns and there's Trump flags and all this everywhere. And these people were poor, no health care, no wages going up. And you think about those people that are told by this government, I'm sorry, you can't have a higher wage, quit being lazy. And you know the government's going to come after your guns and they rope them in, into all this. If you get cancer, tough titties, all those people are funding the killing of all of these people. It's so immoral. It just is such an awakening for our party, such an awakening for our country. And I'm just so grateful that, that we have a Progressive Caucus and a leader like you who has moral clarity and has had moral clarity when a lot of us didn't, myself included, on this issue. But I want to ask you in after the midterms, you know, progressive candidates are kind of winning all over the place. Do you anticipate a big growth in your Progressive Caucus?
- [21:11]
B
I think we're going to have a huge growth in the Progressive Caucus. But that's also based on folks voting in these upcoming primary elections in the summer. Almost everywhere, no matter, almost wherever you live, you probably have primaries coming up. And very few people vote in those primaries. Most people come out and vote in November, where you determine whether the Democrats or Republicans are in control. That's extremely important, obviously. But if the Democrats are in control, who the Democrats are gets determined by the primary. A much smaller election probably happening in your home city this summer. And so the Progressive Caucus endorses our progressive candidates in those. Go out and vote for whoever you want to. But please take a look at, at our slate, because what we're pushing for is to be, yes, an anti Trump party, but also an anti billionaire party and an anti war, anti genocide party. That way we can be pro democracy, pro worker, pro peace, pro human rights. Because those folks you talked about in Oklahoma, a lot of them got told by Donald Trump that he was going to pull us out of wars, and all he's done is start more of them. So we've got to be able to go talk to those folks and say we are actually building a party that's against war, which requires changing our own party. And so thank you so much, Jennifer, for speaking out on this, letting us. This is my first live interview here on this announcement today. And so you can check it out online. I'm Reg Casar on all the socials. And that's where we have the big list of bills on how we'll drive down prices and take on these billionaire, as you said, billionaire bedwetters.
- [22:48]
A
That's right. We need to get that to go viral. All right, Congressman, it's always a pleasure. Please send me your list of endorsed candidates so that I can pass it on to my listeners and come back anytime.