Charlie Dent
speaker
80 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Charlie Dent’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
to you but can't bring themselves to tick the box for a democrat well what i tell them you know you vote vote your values and i said here you know here's my values as a republican i do think we should be about a strong national defense or peace through strength and that means you embrace your allies you don't embrace autocrats like vladimir putin and kim jong-un Why would we do this?
And so that's one issue. We should embrace economic freedom as a party. We should be vigorously opposed to these types of indiscriminate across-the-board tariffs. We should be for certain things and against certain things. So we need to articulate this. We should be for the Constitution. that we believe in the rule of law. These are fundamentally Republican and conservative principles.
We should be about the union, trying to keep it together. Our founder was Abraham Lincoln. That's what he was about and why our party was born, to maintain this union as big and diverse as it is and as challenging as it can be. So these are just a few core principles that I think we need to
continue to beat on and in fact i'm i'm part of an organization called our our republican legacy where we have articulated many of these principles where we are trying to talk to republicans about you know embracing real principles not about simply adopting whatever it is that the president wants is
Yeah, I don't think... with the party, I don't believe the party goes back to where it was. But at the same time, some of those principles I just laid out are enduring principles. They're the ones that have sustained the party since Abraham Lincoln. And so I think that we should focus on those core principles once again. Like I said, we should be talking about peace through strength.
We should be talking about embracing allies. We should be talking about the constitution, the union. You know, economic freedom. We should be talking about those things that I think most Republicans still embrace, even those who support Trump. There are a lot of people who are Trump voters. who aren't real happy with everything he says and does and may disagree with him.
They're voting for Trump because they so much dislike where the Democrats are on many policy issues. So I think that's really where we need leadership in the party to present a counter-narrative quite often. You hear the MAGA narrative, and where I've been critical of some of my former congressional Republican colleagues is they've been too quiet.
You cannot counter that MAGA narrative with silence. Silence is silence. If there's nothing narrative to counter MAGA's argument, well, then MAGA's going to win every single time. But I think because of this trade war, there's a tremendous opening for a lot of Republicans to counter.
And remember, too, Donald Trump's not ever going to be on the ballot again, at least not legally or constitutionally. He's not going to be on the ballot again. And so he's a lame duck president. And Republicans will be up in 2026. And many of them are going to need separation from Donald Trump. And now is the time to start making arguments.
about how they are different than the president, particularly those who are in those marginal and swing districts who hope to survive. They're not going to be able to run simply embracing Donald Trump, whose approval rating is what, around 40 now, low 40s? That's not a way you're going to win an election. So I think there's an opportunity now for Republicans to start speaking up.
Well, remember what happened during Trump won on, let's take the Medicaid issue. And at that point, reconciliation was being used to repeal and replace Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act. And I was one of the folks who rang the bell on the Medicaid issue at the time because you remember what the debate was then.
Many states like mine had expanded Medicaid and that it was basically we would have ended up dumping all sorts of millions of people back onto the market with an insufficient tax credit. They would have lost coverage. And I just said, this is not acceptable. And I was making arguments on behalf of various Republican governors.
four of whom asked me to present Donald Trump with a letter about this issue, which I did directly. And what was that like? Well, I had two meetings with him, actually, one in the Oval Office where I gave him the letter. He was respectful. He listened. And I told him my concerns with the bill. And that meeting ended fine. That was on Tuesday.
Thursday, I got invited back and it was a smackdown meeting. You know why? You know, basically in front of a whole bunch of people. I told him I wouldn't vote for the bill and I was against it. And he was, you know, he took it well the first time. It was the second and third time he went crazy and told me I was going to destroy the Republican Party.
As he's berating me, you know, I'm not voting for the bill. And I told him why, because he basically had me back in on a Thursday and I, there were 17 members of Congress around the table in the cabinet room. And he said to me, I was the second one he called on. That's how I was voting. And I said, I'm against the bill. I'm going to vote yes. And then, you know, then he said, well, why?
And I said, well, For the same reasons I told you on Tuesday, you know, it's Thursday and nothing's really changed. And so, but bottom line is after he got done, you know, trying to berate me or trying to bully me, I said, Mr. President, can I ask you a question? He said, yeah. And I said, are you telling me, because he kept saying taxes are done, taxes are done.
You remember at that time they were trying to do tax reform. And I said, are you telling me, Mr. President, that if we don't pass this, this healthcare bill in this particular form, we won't be able to do tax reform because the tax baseline is not going to be low enough. That's exactly right. And when you lose, you lose.
He goes off again, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, same stuff, repeating himself. And it kind of got nasty. And then after about a long time of this, you know, we're going back and forth a little bit and finally it ends. And it was, this is all picked up in one of the tell-all books, a team of vipers for about three pages. I didn't know that until the book was written.
Didn't even know anybody was taking notes or recording it.
Someone is there. Cliff Sims, who worked for me, wrote the book. He did it. So basically, it all breaks. So he gets done with his tirade. I had asked him my questions. And then we just sat there staring at each other. A real awkward silence that I forgot about, but they recounted in the book. And then he said, yeah, well, Trump realized at that moment that wasn't budging.
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