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
So then Trump goes around the whole room, asks everybody how they're voting. Yes, lean yes. That took a while. And then one of the guys, And now a couple of them lied to him, but that's to be expected. And so after it's all over, after 45 minutes of all this going around the room and chit-chatting about other things, he turns back at me and he says, you still a hard no?
I said, yeah, I'm still a no, Mr. President. With that, he goes off again. Now, I was really getting annoyed at this point. I finally, I waited like five or 10 seconds. I said, oh, come on, Mr. President. He said, oh, I'm done talking to you. I don't want to hear it. Tell them anything. turns away like that and looks in the other direction. The meeting breaks up.
I just look at Mike Pence and say, Mike, you know, this isn't helping anything. And then one of the young aides came up to me and I know he'd worked in the House and he said, hey, Mr. Dent, Mr. Dent, why don't you go up to the president privately now as the meeting's breaking up? Just tell him you'll vote for the bill. And I know what his motivation was.
Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan at that particular moment weren't for the bill either. I think he wanted Trump to blame Meadows and Jordan. But I said, hey, I said to this young guy, hey, you know what? I came here and now I'm an F no now. OK, so I'm going to spend the next 24 hours, find another four or five Republicans to vote against this piece of crap of a bill.
And so the next day they had to pull the bill off the floor. We got a couple of guys to vote against it. And so that was in March of 2017. So the point I'm making is Medicaid was a tough issue then. It's a tougher issue now. Because so many more Republicans now recognize that much of their base is on Medicaid.
And so I think if we couldn't reform Medicaid the way they wanted to then, why do we think we'll be able to do it now? I mean, they might try to stick a work requirement in there. Beyond that, I'm not saying –
how they're going to do too many significant changes particularly in the u.s senate the house might pass something but the senate i think is going to be a bit more squeamish they have a lower threshold for pain they feel that you know the house has a higher threshold they'll pass bills that are going to go nowhere uh even though they're very politically damaging which was the case back in 2017 on the repeal replace the bill that the house passed i warned colleagues policy's bad the politics are worse the bill would never be adopted by the senate never in a million years
And, of course, nothing close to the House bill was even considered in the Senate.
Yeah. And Rand Paul, I think, has said he's against it.
He's absolutely right on tariffs. You know, he's going to be against reconciliation, not because of the Medicaid changes, because he's got other reasons, but he's certainly right about the tariffs.
Well, I think this is where I kind of maybe differ. I mean, if we want to change the party, we have to we have to still kind of stay within it. I do feel strongly about that. And frankly, you know, the Democrats have tremendous opportunities, but they're very much tied to their organized labor base.
And on an issue like tariffs, they just can't make the argument because many of them agree with the policy, the basic policy. They don't like the way Trump's doing it. And I think the Democrats have that challenge. And also, you know, I think we've also seen, too, where the Democrats have struggled. you know, particularly on the border.
It was clear that the American people, you know, were appalled by, you know, the mayhem at the border during the Biden administration. And they were just too lackadaisical about it for at least the first three years of their administration. It didn't get serious. And it was a very important issue.
People do believe in the nation's sovereignty and that there should be an orderly system of entrance and exit. And the Democrats just weren't able to speak to it. And I think also, too,
You know, and I think where the Democrats also get into trouble, and which I think keeping a lot of Republicans away, is on some of these issues where, you know, they feel like, a lot of Republicans feel like the Democrats might be a little too condescending for them. They speak down to them. Like, for example, you know, and I'm for transgender rights.
I think, you know, a person should be able to transition and we should, you know, respect that. But, you know, when that situation happened at the University of Pennsylvania where the swimmer transitioned from, you know, male to female, And, you know, broke all the records, you know, blew away everybody at the NCAAs. A lot of people said, you know, that's unfair.
And then they were called transphobic. And they said, well, no, I'm not transphobic. I just have a pair of eyes and ears. And, you know, I think that's unfair. And then I think there are just too many on the left who, you know, just didn't know how to respond appropriately to people who saw things that they questioned and without being ridiculed or told that they're
you know, they're a hateful person. And I think this is where the Democrats have to kind of stop listening to this, this fringe base of theirs and start talking like normal people to folks. And I think that's keeping a lot of Republicans away. Cause I think Democrats have some opportunities like Republicans for years.
And I was one of the, I was one of the, I was, well, the last pro-choice Republican in the house when I left, there might be a couple now since Dobbs, but but who actually voted against the 20-week abortion ban. And I voted to fund Planned Parenthood. I was the only one there for a while. And I found that Republicans were not on the right side of issues like that.
That came into stark relief during their post-Obs. When Roe was overturned, then boy, oh boy, then all of a sudden the politics of that issue changed and Republicans realized that they were on the wrong side of that issue. So Democrats had an opportunity to But that was not the only issue they had.
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