Pramila Jayapal (3:52)

Absolutely right. And here's the thing. This guy, Donald Trump, has gotten rid of all the inspector generals. He's gotten rid of any entity that could actually crack down on the ethics violations, the corruption. And so you have so many things that are happening, from the trading that you talked about to the outright use of the office of the President to make money, whether that's his luxury hotels that he promises to some foreign government, you know, in return for something, or whether it is even I noticed that he is selling his own brand of perfumes now. It is, it's really, at the end of the day, this whole concept of, oh, he's going to drain the swamp. He is the swamp. And he is doing everything he can to enrich himself. And you can see it in whatever financial returns we have access to. Obviously, he's not. He's not releasing everything, but the corruption is now throughout the government. It's Donald Trump. It's also members of Congress who are trading. And you know that I've got a bill that I'm working on, a bipartisan bill that we hope to introduce soon on banning members of Congress from trading stocks. I mean, the American people should just know that we are working for them, not for our pocketbooks. And so I'm hopeful that we will get this to the floor. And once it gets to the floor, I believe it'll pass.

Ben (5:21)

Let's talk about how Donald Trump's trade war against the world, though. And, you know, even the threats against Canada 51st state, we're going to take you over. We have a huge Canadian following the maple Midas here on the Midas touch. Now, the totality, though, but it's everything too. How he attacks Japan, how he attacks South Korea. How is that impacting the state of Washington? How is it affecting your district and perhaps even more broadly?

Pramila Jayapal (5:48)

I mean, the tariffs are crazy. They have no logic to them. In the letter that he sent to Bolsonaro, you probably saw he quoted incorrect information. He said that we have a trade deficit with Brazil. That's not accurate. Lula responded and said, no, that's not true. If you want to do 50% tariffs on Brazil, we'll do 50% tariffs back. And guess what? American manufacturers who export into Brazil are going to be hurt by this. In my district, we have a lot of manufacturing, we have a lot of trade with all over Asia, actually. And so these tariffs are having a massive effect. I mean, you can see it in small ways with the price of apparel or foodstuffs, but also in big ways with Boeing. Manufacturing is here, obviously, we have a lot of tech here. And so all of the chips and all of the uncertainty is really affecting the district. It's affecting small businesses in particular. And consumers are seeing their prices go up every day. And some of it is being absorbed by the manufacturers who are hoping that this is another taco situation where Trump is going to chicken out and these tariffs aren't going to go into effect. But his MO Is always create a problem where there isn't one. Act like you're solving it, but have no solution at the end to whatever the problem you said was there in the beginning. So this is not a good way to do tariffs at all. And there's no investment in domestic manufacturing. That's what we did as Democrats with the Inflation Reduction Act. You don't see him, Ben, trying to do anything to actually incentivize copper manufacturing here in the United States or anything else.

Ben (7:38)

I want to talk about immigration. Large immigrant population in your district. I live in Los Angeles, where there are, you know, you see the ICE raids that are here. Vendors, Home Depots, parking lots, they put the ICE agents through MacArthur Park. It looked like an army was invading. So they did that Hollywood stunt. But it has real world implications. I mean, a lot of the immigrant community here, I wasn't going to church. They're not working out, they're hiding. They're very afraid here. Meanwhile, ICE posts things like this. Their social media is just trying to troll and terrorize migrants. My body is a machine that turns ICE funding into mass deportations. Fire up the deportation planes, exclamation point. They also post these videos of looks like an army going into the swap meet and they put on their equipment, they got their huge assault weapons heading into, heading into the family swap meet. It's like, all right, tough guys, what's going on in your district? What are you doing about it?

Pramila Jayapal (8:43)

That's exactly what's happening in our district. Do not like L. A, but we are seeing ICE agents, you know, try to come to courts that stopped for a while because we had a lot of protections here in Washington state, But certainly farm workers all of eastern Washington, Central Washington. I was just out in Spokane and I met with the Growers League. And, you know, farmers are terrified, workers are terrified. People aren't showing up to work. Yesterday I was at a food bank in my district talking about the snap cuts, the horrible snap cuts and Medicaid cuts. And they told me that people are not even showing up to Head Start where they get their food. They're not showing up to the food banks because they're afraid. And it's not just undocumented immigrants. It is people of all legal statuses. It's undocumented immigrants who have been here for 20 years, no crimes committed. And all of the research and the data shows that ICE is not picking up the so called worst of the worst, which is what Trump promised. He's going after immigrants of all legal statuses, including US Citizens, legal permanent residents. It's a complete terrorizing of the immigrant.

Ben (9:55)

Community, you know, but there's a lot of serious things going on right now. But it just feels like we're living in a Ponzi scheme. It feels like he goes out there, he makes up numbers. I mean, he literally, he posted something that says 100% of all new jobs created come from Americans. And look what we've done. 100%. I'm like, where are you even getting these numbers from? You've got Howard Lutnick and you've got Brooke Rollins, the Secretary of Agriculture, and you've got the Secretary of Labor out there just saying a whole bunch of things that you look at. You're like, those aren't the facts, but, like, there seems to be this. I don't know if it's just that at the, at the cable news level or whatever that is, it's all right, but, like, it's not all right. And the question is, is like, when's it all? In any Ponzi scheme, it has an end. And that's what I'm kind of worried about, because you see the ports, the ships aren't coming in the same way they used to be coming in. You see the factories are not filled with the people we see here in California. The farms aren't filled with the same. So when is it all gonna catch up? And then does Donald Trump just try to find his fall guy the way he did with the Faucians? They did it. They did it. Blame the deep state.

Pramila Jayapal (11:16)

Americans have to feel the effects. They have to feel the way that they're losing health care, the way that their prices on groceries keep going up, the way that we end up in more wars and isolate America from the rest of the world. They've gotta feel that there's no jobs. That in fact, instead of job creat, the big bad betrayal bill is going to lose us at least a million jobs in the United States. And I think that you're seeing this now starting to come through with the tariffs, with immigration, actually, which is one of our tougher issues. You're seeing people starting to say one in ten Americans now knows of somebody who's been picked up that they personally know that should not have been picked up. And so I think it's got to trickle down. We've got to do a really strong job of messaging not only what we're against, but also what we're for. And affordability is a big part of this. Right. The tariffs are driving up prices. Corruption is stripping people of things that they legitimately deserve to pad the pockets of the millionaires and the billionaires and Donald Trump and his family. And so we've got to continually make our case not only for what's wrong, but how we're going to fix it. And I think that's. That's going to be the job between now and the next election. We can still roll some of this back, Ben, but I don't want to sugarcoat it. It's going to be very difficult to rebuild a lot of the destruction that's been done to the agencies, whether it's FEMA and NOAA or, you know, any, literally any agency from education to Health and Human Services.

Ben (12:55)

Finally, Congresswoman, I always like to ask this question when I have people like you on here, because oftentimes, you know, the news host has their series of questions. But there may be an issue that's always on your mind that I'm not thinking of, that you're closer to. We have a huge platform here, almost 6 million subscribers. Is there anything that you think isn't getting enough attention that you want to bring people's attention to.

Pramila Jayapal (13:17)

Yeah, I just wrote a. You know, there's so many things in the big bad betrayal bill. I just wrote an op ed about this scam. Talk about a Ponzi scheme. The scam on no tax on tips. Supposedly Donald Trump's no tax on tips policy. And how what is in the big bad betrayal bill is really a scam because first of all, you gotta file taxes to get any benefit. And most tipped workers are not filing taxes. About a third are not filing taxes. And then on top of that, it's a $25,000 cap. So the way it's done and finally, I mean, there are lots of things wrong with it, but it expires in two years. So all of the things that are supposed to be for working people expire in two or three years. And everything that is for the millionaires and the billionaires are permanent. And I think we have to keep pointing out to people that they're lying about what you're going to get. And I think that's true in so many ways. But the no tax on tips policy is one I think that has not gotten a lot of attention. And, and it's going to be used to try and sell the big bad betrayal bill. But it's a scam.

Ben (14:24)

Sounds like Donald Trump's past with scams. They're. The no tax on tips is a scam. The no tax on Social Security just doesn't even exist. They just made, they just made that up.

Pramila Jayapal (14:34)

And they keep sent a letter out to all of us. I mean, I got one, you know, saying that there's going to be this massive boon and they use Social Security to send a letter out with lies. You're absolutely right.

Ben (14:46)

Congresswoman J. Paul, please come back. Thanks for being on.

Pramila Jayapal (14:49)

Thanks, Ben.

Ben (14:50)

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