Chuck Schumer

News of the Qatari government gifting Donald Trump a $400 million private jet to use as Air Force One is so corrupt that even Putin would give a double take. This is not just naked corruption. It is also a grave national security threat.

The White House doesn't claim he did anything criminal. He's in jail because of his political speech. And here's why everybody should care. In America, your political speech is protected. Whether or not the president likes what you say,

Before our very eyes, an unelected shadow government is conducting a hostile takeover of the federal government.

The immense danger is that we have no clarity, no explanation, no details for what Doge is truly after. The potential for corruption is too great.

Some of his comments sounded straight from a Russian propaganda playbook.

In an instant, Donald Trump has shut off billions, perhaps trillions of dollars that directly support states, cities, towns, schools, hospitals, small businesses, and most of all, American families. This is a dagger at the heart of the average American family in red states, in blue states, in cities, in suburbs, in rural areas. It is just outrageous.

Das ist eine Regierung durch Chaos. Er ändert sich von Tag zu Tag. Seine Vorsitzenden kämpfen unter sich selbst, nennen sich einander. Und man kann ein Land nicht mit so einem Chaos, mit so einer Unvergesslichkeit, mit so einer Unvergesslichkeit, mit so einer Unvergesslichkeit, mit so einer Unvergesslichkeit,

There will be no government shutdown right before Christmas. This is a good bill. It'll keep the government open and funds and helps Americans affected by hurricanes and natural disasters, helps our farmers and avoid harmful cuts.

It's shameful to hear the president repeat Putin's propaganda while laying the groundwork for negotiations that favor Russia at Ukraine's expense.

You know, the last four years seem to be consumed with theology regarding the environment. We're more interested in helping other countries than we were our own.

So we're here today with the Energy Secretary, with my good friend, Congressman Chuck Fleischman, to see what we can do to make certain that America remains at the cutting edge and that we're doing everything we can here in Tennessee to make that so.

A shutdown will allow Doge to shift into overdrive. It would give Donald Trump and Doge the keys to the city, state, and country.

We've had Democrats speak out about this in the past and Republicans speak out about it. So I would hope we would get a bipartisan agreement to a piece of legislation. And then I think the professor you had on previous to me said how even Justice Kagan said that this is abuse. So I don't know how much better you can get from both sides of the aisle that we got a problem we have to deal with.

And it's really exploded since Trump's become president of the United States.

I knew I'd get criticized, but I felt obligated for the country, for my Democratic caucus, to the people to explain how bad a shutdown would be. And if we had if we went into a shutdown and everything bad happened, I had to give people this warning.

Our caucus is unified on a clean April 11th CR that will keep the government open and give Congress time to negotiate bipartisan legislation that can pass. We should vote on that.

Either proceed with the bill before us or risk Donald Trump throwing America into the chaos of a shutdown. This, in my view, is no choice at all. While the CR bill is very bad, the potential for a shutdown has consequences for America that are much, much worse.

If the government shuts down, it will be average Americans who suffer most.

Funding the government should be a bipartisan effort. But Republicans chose a partisan path, drafting their continuing resolution without any input, any input, from congressional Democrats.

The CR bill is a bad bill. But as bad as the CR is, I believe that allowing Donald Trump to take even more power via a government shutdown is a far worse option.

Schimel's opponent, Circuit Court Judge Susan Crawford, has backing from some prominent Democrats. She's promising to fight to the finish.

Crawford says she's not made any promises on House redistricting. For NPR News, I'm Chuck Quirmbach in Milwaukee.

Circuit Court Judge Brad Schimel has been endorsed by President Trump and groups backed by business executive Elon Musk have poured in $20 million of support. The Republicans say the state Supreme Court contest could affect House redistricting in Wisconsin for 2026 and the Trump agenda. Schimel says he and his supporters are energized.

I'm demanding the FAA increase what are called ramp inspections at other helicopter tour companies. A ramp inspection is a surprise inspection. They show up unannounced.

But in this case... Everybody's got a fire, so it kind of limits our resources because I can't send nobody to another county, but yet they can't send them to me for help either.

I'm sort of, you know, I'm sort of the orchestra leader and I have a lot of talent in that orchestra. So what I do is I show them off. We have some great spokespeople, people like Chris Murphy and Brian Sharks. We have, you know, Democrats are learning to do the digital social media much better than we did before. I put Cory Booker and Tina Smith in charge.

and then we have bernie going out to republican areas and doing rallies and dwelling so we have a load of talent in our caucus and i'll tell you one thing we are totally united already pause it already because and then just go back a little bit because i want to get that next uh statement in there but

So we have a load of talent in our caucus, and I'll tell you one thing. We are totally united in one thing. Many things, but one thing above all, we are united in going after Trump and showing the American people that he is making the middle class pay for the tax cuts on the rich. Today, we're doing it on Medicaid. You know, we're good. Yeah, let's pause it.

going to do it very soon on the tariffs. He wants to put these tariffs in. It's going to raise you folks, the average family, $2,000 a year for these tariffs. Why is he doing that? Something so stupid. Why? He wants to use that money for tax cuts for the billionaires. The Republican Party is a different kettle of fish than it used to be. And that's why we're fighting them so hard.

They are controlled by a small group of wealthy, greedy people. And you know what their attitude is? I made my money all by myself. How dare your government take my money from me? I don't wanna pay taxes. Or I built my company with my bare hands. How dare your government tell me how I should treat my customers, the land and water that I own, or my employees? They hate government.

Government's a barrier to people, a barrier to stop them from doing things. They want to destroy it. We are not letting them do it. And we're united.

I don't think we have an authenticity problem. We have a real direction now. I feel good about it. And when he went below 40% in the polls, the Republican legislators started working with us. We're going to keep at it, keep at it, keep at it. until he goes below 40. When it happens, I am hopeful that our Republican colleagues will resume working with us, and I talk to them.

No. I think we're fighting very hard on every front. And initially we've had some successes, but we got to keep at it and we got to be open to new suggestions and ways to do it. But I think what we're doing is working.

So I mean, when you when I press people, you know, friends who have worked on campaigns or people at the DNC, on this issue. They're like, we know, we know these messages suck. They're annoying. But one of the only advantages we have as Democrats is a better grassroots fundraising program and base. And if the money from these text based messages went away, we would have less resources.

We'd lose campaigns, you know, so like they feel like they're kind of stuck. Is that is that bullshit?

I want to read you the opening lines of a couple of fundraising texts I got. These are mostly real, but some may be made up, and I want to see if you can spot the fake one. Sure. Family, it's Cory Booker. It's one. Two, we're about to shock Susan Collins. Three, Tommy, I'm gay and I need your help.

A lot full of garbage after a carnival is an excellent one for a losing campaign. People listening are probably like, OK, I'm angry. Who should I be mad at? Who are these consultants? Is it a bunch of them? Is it a few bad actors? Like, how how do we think about that?

That is a really good idea. And I think you speak to the need for someone who really knows what they're doing to kind of vet these things, because you get all these requests and you can you try to like sometimes I'll like get a forward from my father in law, who's like a great human being, a great Democrat. He'll be like, should I donate to this thing? And I'll try to like run it down for him.

And it takes me forever. You go to a website, I go to the FEC page, I try to Google the people associated with it. It's almost impossible to actually vet a lot of these PACs and organizations that are just bombarding people.

Four, and this one I believe is supposed to be sung, lately I've been losing sleep, losing sleep about the future of our country, Tommy. Number five, friend, I don't mean to sound dramatic, but our democracy is about to burn to the fucking ground. My ass is literally on fire, RN. This is Chuck Schumer, by the way. Which of those do you think is real? Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Tommy Vitor.

What's sort of the gist of a better way to run a railroad that raises money and like resources candidates appropriately, but doesn't feel annoying or at worst predatory?

Yeah. Trump has directed the Department of Justice to investigate ActBlue, which is, you know, the biggest fundraising platform for Democrats. How important do you think ActBlue is for the Democratic Party? And what do you think it would mean if, you know, the DOJ made it go away somehow?

After the 2024 election, a bunch of Democratic operatives and fundraisers sent a letter to the leader of ActBlue demanding that they make some changes to the way their service worked. Like the biggest asks were getting rid of messages that trick donors into believing they were giving to an official party entity when they were not, or that their donation would be matched somehow by someone.

Do you think that letter went far enough? And what responsibility do you think ActBlue has in this kind of conversation we're having about fundraising sucking for the end user?

This might be a dumb question, but do you think it's possible for a campaign to raise too much money?

: That's a really good point. I bet a lot of people don't realize how much money gets spent in pursuit of fundraising. I guess a lot of listeners to this show, I bet like 90% of listeners to Pod Save America, have given to a candidate at some point. And they just want to feel like that money is going to a good cause or being well spent or just like not getting abused in some way.

And this episode is about something everyone hates, fundraising emails and fundraising texts. Even if you've made only one political donation in your life, your contact information can get thrown into some database that leads to endless streams of unhinged fundraising solicitations. But this problem is bigger than it just being kind of weird when Hakeem Jeffries won't stop sending you selfies.

Do you have advice for people about kind of like a couple best practices around donations to politics generally?

Yeah, that's a really good point. I mean, and that's a reason to donate early, right? Because that money could be invested in hiring a field staff and not dumping money on TV ads that may or may not work.

It could actually undermine one of the few advantages that Democrats have over Republicans, which is grassroots fundraising success. In 2024, Kamala Harris raised about 40% of her money from small-dollar donors, while Trump raised less than 29% of his.

Yeah, agreed. And it does feel fixable. And just to just to nail a point you were making about the grift on the Republican side, like, I have this kind of faint memory of, I think, Donald Trump sending out an email ostensibly for like Herschel Walker, but 90% of the funds actually went to his pack. And then sometimes you're automatically opted in for a recurring donation.

And sometimes those recurring donations continue after election day. So it is just a shocking extraction of money, usually from... their most elderly voters and supporters. So it is really as gross as it is, you can feel on our side, it is worse over there.

Yeah, I don't want them to be more effective at raising money. But I also like I don't want broad swaths of the most committed political activists on both sides to feel like the entire system is a grift that is rigged against them and is like designed to harm them. I feel like that's just bad for our body politic and helps enable people like Donald Trump. Joe, thank you so much for doing this.

This is fascinating. I'm really grateful. Yeah, thanks. Great to be here. We'll be right back with my conversation with Dan. But as you guys know, we are trying to build an independent, progressive media company. And the best way you can support our work is by subscribing to the Friends of the Pod. Subscribers get tons of great perks.

Just this month, they heard Dan Pfeiffer on Polar Coaster break down Trump's attempts to blame the economy on Joe Biden. On Inside 2024, Alyssa and Dan answered subscriber questions about Trump's first 100 days. And every Friday, subscribers get a much-needed break with Terminally Online,

where Crooked hosts and staff unpack the weirder shit on the internet in very unhinged, usually very funny ways. Plus, friends of the pod get access to exclusive AMAs with hosts like me, John Lovett, Aaron Ryan, Leah Lippman. So go over to crooked.com slash friends to learn more and subscribe today.

And according to an analysis by the Center for Campaign Innovation, in the first three months of 2025, House Democrats have raised about twice as much on average from donors giving under $200. And the Democratic Party's advantage with small-dollar donors is even bigger over in the Senate.

Here's my conversation with Dan about his concern that these fundraising tactics are worse than just annoying, that they could actually hurt the Democratic Party. All right, Dan. So everybody hates fundraising emails. We hate fundraising texts.

But you have said before that you think this is a bigger issue than it just being annoying and that the fundraising tactics could actually hurt our candidates or the party itself. Why is that?

But if we drive those donors away by annoying them, or worse, by exploiting them, that fundraising advantage will evaporate. So in today's episode, I'm going to explore the world of online fundraising.

Yeah. And another piece of this is that, you know, text-based communications is a great way to communicate with people because people actually open their texts and they read their texts. But we're only doing it with fundraising now. Like what's a better way for campaigns to leverage that high open rate for a political advantage, do you think?

how it got so bad, why texting stop never seems to make the messages stop, the political risks for the Democratic Party, and the critical role that ActBlue plays in our fundraising success and how Republicans are trying to destroy it. You're going to hear from three experts in this digital media world.

Yeah, it makes you just assume that everything is just a solicitation. Last question for you. So I was talking to Joe Raspars earlier about whether he thought it was possible for a campaign to raise too much money. And he said, yes, especially if you're a campaign that is spending a lot of money to bring in money. It can become like a self-licking ice cream cone.

And it got me thinking about the Harris campaign and how they spent their roughly $1.5 billion they raised in 2024. The New York Times reported that Harris spent about $600 million producing and airing TV ads. There was the $900,000 they spent on the exterior of the sphere in Las Vegas as sort of marketing effort at the end of the campaign.

And, you know, a lot of these things were perceived as being pretty ineffective, especially given the price tag. Do you think campaigns are putting too much time, money and effort into fundraising at this point with diminishing returns for even the spend on those dollars?

Crooked Media's own Dan Pfeiffer, Regina Wallace-Jones, the CEO of ActBlue, and Joe Rosbars, the CEO of Blue State Digital and a longtime digital strategist. We're going to start with my conversation with Joe about how online fundraising has evolved, the explosion of awful fundraising texts, and what a better approach to small dollar fundraising could look like.

That's a really good idea. I mean, there's a couple of kind of actionable suggestions that have come out of this episode. One, I think you're right.

The party leaders should come together and try to lay out some some standards that everyone should be asked to follow to some sort of charity navigator like platform will be really helpful because it's incredibly difficult to run down like the providence of these packs and see what's legit and what's not.

And then three, Joe recommended that we keep a list and just name and shame all the worst actors. The campaigns or PACs or party entities that harass people the most. Yeah.

I think that's a great idea. Great idea. Dan, thank you so much. Thank you, Tommy. After the break, you'll hear my conversation with Regina. But our friends over at Vote Save America would kill me if I didn't make clear that Vote Save America does not sell donor contact information ever.

So, Joe, you've worked for a bunch of different candidates, Howard Dean, Barack Obama, Elizabeth Warren. How has your job evolved over time, the job of a digital strategist?

Throughout this episode, we've been talking about ActBlue. So we wanted to end it by talking with Regina Wallace-Jones, the CEO of ActBlue, about what they do and why Trump's attempts to destroy ActBlue could be so devastating for the Democratic Party.

And what is ActBlue?

What was the fundraising landscape or process like for Democrats before ActBlue came along?

Yeah. I worked for John Edwards for president in 2004. And when you would walk around the fundraising department, there would be giant books filled with contact information for trial lawyers. So I remember the kind of OG fundraising and the types of people that it involved in the political process. And you're right.

I mean, Howard Dean comes along and he starts this revolution in online fundraising. But at some point along the way, ActBlue just exploded in popularity and kind of became the only game in town. I'm just wondering, why do you think that was?

So As you said, I mean, you're not a political party. You're not a political entity. You're not fundraising. You're a technology platform and conduit through which funds are raised and then distributed out. Is there a version of ActBlue on the Republican side that just happens to be used by Republicans? And how does it differ?

So let me get at some of these annoyances because a big part of why I'm doing this episode is because democratic fundraising efforts can be really annoying. I think it goes just beyond the inconvenience. I think sometimes the volume of requests, the feeling that you can't get them to stop, the tone, the tenor. It can feel like almost disrespectful or worse.

You know, there are these scam packs that raise money. And that money then primarily gets funneled to the people working for these scam packs and not for good campaigns or good causes. What role can ActBlue play in reforming the process or weeding out bad actors?

So what you're saying is for people who get a million texts and they feel like they have texted back stop to every campaign or PAC in the history of campaign impacts, and they want to blame ActBlue because sometimes embedded in those texts is an ActBlue link. You're saying you guys have nothing to do with that. You're not sending those messages.

Right now, it's just media. That's the whole ballgame. Do you have a sense, generally, of how much money Democratic campaigns are raising from big donors versus grassroots online fundraising these days?

I don't think so. I don't think there's any donors that are saying bring that on.

Listen, you're being, I'm just, as a friend, you're being excessively generous to these campaigns, okay? We get the concept, but no one is like, sell my data ad infinitum. That is a nightmare for everybody.

I think most people don't know what's happening. I think people are going to donate to a list that we're...

Yeah, they're not opening their phone to a giant picture of Nancy Pelosi being like, Tommy, we're all going to die if you don't give me five bucks right now.

She is absolutely lovely, but the texts are awful. So in December of last year, a group of fundraising practitioners and consultants in academics, they wrote this letter to ActBlue with some recommendations about protecting donors from the kind of scam packs, the unscrupulous actors that we were talking about earlier. How can you do that? How can you guys help protect against scam packs?

Did you guys find the recommendations in that letter helpful or were they targeted the wrong people? How do you think about it?

Yeah, that's a really important point, right? You can have a sort of annoying, scammy, obnoxious tone, but that doesn't mean the money is going to a bad place. And look, I have empathy for how challenging the task is of identifying or defining a scam pack, because let's say we're talking about a charity.

If there was a charity that said they were buying malaria nets for kids, but you look at their expenditures and 85% of it is going to a marketing firm or legal services or overhead, and 15% is going to malaria nets, you're like, aha, nope, bad actors, right? But we're talking about political entities seeking political outcomes. And the expenditures...

could be on marketing or ads or whatever and look up on the up and up, but they could be routed through an entity that's affiliated with the person that launched the PAC that's doing the fundraising. So they're getting paid that way.

And I guess the challenge is like, how do you guys root out situations like that where you have someone who starts a PAC and then pays their own firm a bunch of money and profits on the backend, but it seems like that would be tough for you to know.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, that's true for Obama in 2008, we didn't take any PAC money, any lobbyist money, People thought that might be stupid or risky, but I think the messaging that comes with that kind of, let's be honest, like bare minimum campaign finance step you can take personally is pretty important.

No mathematicians here.

Philosophy major. Marinate on that. Imagine that was your life. That's the one for you. Imagine.

I just want to switch gears a little bit, which is President Trump has ordered his attorney general, Pam Bondi, to go after ActBlue. Republicans in Congress have been going after ActBlue or investigating ActBlue since 2023.

It's clear their concern is what we've been talking about, which is that ActBlue has become a great way for Democrats to raise a lot of small dollar money and has been very beneficial to the Democratic Party. But what do you think they're looking for? And what has the impact been on you guys from these investigations or these threats?

Let's say Donald Trump snapped his fingers and made ActBlue go away tomorrow. What would the impact be on the Democratic Party?

So the big question behind this episode is why the hell am I getting so many text messages from candidates and why can't I get them to stop? So I was hoping to start with some basics. So when I donate to a candidate, what happens with my data?

Why is it impossible? If this is a man who can direct his attorney general to tell the world that him accepting a $400 million plane from Qatar is okay, why couldn't he tell her to take you guys out?

Well, listen, Regina, thank you so much for doing the show. I appreciate this. I know you guys are dealing with a lot of stuff in D.C., so thank you for making the time.

So basically, the campaigns can log your data, put it into a file, and then sell that to other political candidates or, I guess, PACs or organizations? Yep. So I think that's the part that frustrates people because you end up getting these fundraising texts from candidates you've never heard of, from PACs you've never heard of or never given to.

Is it also getting scraped from FEC data or information that we sort of put into the system writ large when we just vote or register to vote?

And I guess that's probably why it feels like to a lot of people, you can reply stop every day for the rest of your life, and you're still going to remain on some list, probably because your data is just getting sold over and over and over again.

There have been instances, I believe, of candidates who basically seemed like their entire campaign was predicated on running against Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, or some Republican in like an R plus 30 district. And then this person runs and they raise a ton of money online.

You come to realize that, oh, actually, that money is going into, let's say, a marketing firm that they actually own and operate.

Can you explain what peer-to-peer texting is and whether you think that has contributed to this increase in text message fundraising requests?

And I think that's what's so frustrating about this, right, is because I think peer to peer texting or text based communications started as a really great way to remind people to vote or to get registered to vote. And now it's being taken over by these this fundraising piece of the political pie. And it feels like it's ruining it.

I want to read you the opening lines of a couple of fundraising texts I got. These are mostly real, but some may be made up. And I want to see if you can spot the fake one. Sure. Family. It's Cory Booker. One, two, we're about to shock Susan Collins. Three, Tommy, I'm gay and I need your help. Four, and this one I believe is supposed to be sung.

Lately, I've been losing sleep, losing sleep about the future of our country, Tommy. Number five, friend, I don't mean to sound dramatic, but our democracy is about to burn to the fucking ground. My ass is literally on fire, RN. This is Chuck Schumer, by the way.

Yeah, you nailed it. Why do they include these creepy photos? Why is the tone so completely unhinged? Like, is that effective?

Right, right. What's a little bit more effective? Do you think the candidates themselves have become aware of how much people hate these messages and how much they annoy them?

Yeah. So the annoyance we all feel with fundraising texts used to be the annoyance we all felt with fundraising emails. Is that the email issue abated because of spam filters becoming so effective? I just feel like people don't. It's like I don't even notice them anymore.

Yeah, bro. Let's throw that in.

And you know what their attitude is? I made my money all by myself. How dare your government take my money from me? I don't want to pay taxes. Or I built my company with my bare hands. How dare your government tell me how I should treat my customers, the land and water that I own, or my employees. They hate government. Government's a barrier to people, a barrier to stop them from doing things.

They want to destroy it. We are not letting them do it, and we're united. This clip.

The Trump administration is robbing Peter to pay the billionaires. American families make no mistake about it. The money being taken from them will be spent, but not on them. Instead, of going to support for your community, it's going to the ultra wealthy and the mega corporations. This is cruelty, this is lawlessness, this is a heist done on a national scale.

No matter how much he may believe he does, the President does not have the authority to ignore the law and we're going to fight this in every way that we can.

There's no exit strategy. How do you get out of a shutdown? Guess who determines it? Trump, Musk, Trump. They're the only ones. And one of the Republican senators told one of the Democratic senators, you get us, you get in this. We're staying in for six months, nine months, a year till we decimate the entire federal government.

And you know what their attitude is? I made my money all by myself. How dare your government take my money from me? I don't want to pay taxes. Or I built my company with my bare hands. How dare your government tell me how I should treat my customers, the land and water that I own, or my employees? They hate government. Government's a barrier to people, a barrier to stop them from doing things.

They want to destroy it. We are not letting them do it, and we're united.

A $400 million flying palace is an unconstitutional gift to this president or any president if it is not explicitly approved by the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate.

Make no mistake about it. Donald Trump is teeing up a nationwide recession. Less than a week after Donald Trump started the largest, dumbest trade war in American history, all the signs say America is heading towards calamity.

The president owes the American people some answers. What is he going to do about the price of eggs that's been exacerbated by bird flu? When hundreds of thousands and even millions of chickens die, they lay fewer eggs. And when there are fewer eggs, the price goes up. The problem is reaching crisis levels.

In November, a dozen eggs cost approximately $4 at a grocery store in New York, already too high. It used to be $2 a year earlier. Now, that same dozen eggs cost $6. And experts believe that the price of eggs could increase as much as 20% more this year if outbreaks continue, meaning that the same dozen eggs would be $8. Hilarious.

I am going to stand with you in this fight, and we will win.

We will win. We will win. We will win. We will win. We will win. We won't rest. We won't rest. We won't rest. We won't rest. Thank you, everybody.

In a Fox interview released last night, President Trump spoke about the war in Ukraine. And some of his comments sounded straight from a Russian propaganda playbook. Rather than speak the truth, rather than acknowledge Vladimir Putin's role in starting this war, President Trump amazingly blamed Ukraine for Putin's invasion. To quote the president, you should never have started it, he said.

He was saying that to President Zelensky. This is disgusting, disgusting, after how this man has fought so hard and so valiantly.

Of course, there's some wasteful spending, but you don't use a meat axe and cut everything. We need to look at each program. We need to go through Congress and see what's wasteful and move to eliminate it. And what's very not wasteful, but very much needed. I'll give you one example. They went after community health centers in Medicaid. They're among the most deficient.

producers of health care we have, yet they tried to eliminate them. Makes no sense. They're just using a meat ax and cutting everything, including many things that American families need, want, and approve of.

The more Donald Trump and Doge indiscriminately hack away at public agencies, the greater harm to Americans' well-being and even their safety. The FAA is a good example. just weeks after the deadliest plane crash in a long time. And just as we see more incidents around the country, President Trump has fired hundreds of FAA workers, including air safety personnel.

Firing people whose very job it is to keep air travel safe is nothing short of reckless.

And our caucus is united in fighting Donald Trump every step of the way. Our goal, our plan, which we're united on, is to make Donald Trump the quickest lame duck in modern history by showing how bad his policies are. He represents the oligarchs, as I said. He's hurting average people in every way. And we are, through oversight hearings, we're exposing what he's doing.

Through the courts, which I mentioned, we've had some real success in. Through legislation and through organizing in all the districts throughout the country.

Will you find out who was involved in this policy within the FBI, who agreed with it, who implemented it, who encouraged it? Will you find out that, Mr. Patel? Will you do an internal investigation? And will you make clear that those who supported this policy are appropriately disciplined? And will you make clear that the FBI will never do something like this again?

Thank you.

Democracy is at risk. Look, Donald Trump is a lawless, angry man. He thinks he should be king. He thinks he should do whatever he wants, regardless of the law. And he thinks judges should just listen to him.

We are mobilizing in New York. We have people going to the Republican districts and going after these Republicans who are voting for this and forcing them to either change their vote or face the consequences.

Either proceed with the bill before us or risk Donald Trump throwing America into the chaos of a shutdown. This, in my view, is no choice at all. I believe it is my job to make the best choice for the country to minimize the harms to the American people. Therefore, I will vote to keep the government open and not shut it down.

to have the conflict on the best ground we have, summed up in a sentence, that they're making the middle class pay for tax cuts for billionaires? It's much, much better not to be in the middle of a shutdown, which to divert people from the number one issue we have against these bastards, sorry, these people, which is not only all these cuts, but they're ruining democracy.

And one other thing on a shutdown. On a shutdown, the courts could close. or at least be totally, totally disabled. And the courts are one of the best ways we've had to go after these guys.

Let me put it this way. First, I don't think there's anybody – well, I think I know how to win seats back in the Senate, which I've proven. Okay, I proved it in 2005 when we gained, I proved it in two, three, four years ago, they said, you'll never get back the Senate. I said, we're gonna. We won the two seats in Georgia, everybody's surprised.

So my, you know, one of the talents that I have, and I miss some and have some, is how to get the right candidates, get the right campaigns, and win back. And even this year, winning four out of those five seats against big headwinds was trouble. But basically, I'm not the only person, nor should I be. This idea we need one person, that's a residue when you have a president. We don't.

I'm sort of like an orchestra leader. And there's a great deal of talent in the orchestra. And my job is to highlight all those talents and emphasize those talents and get Chris Murphy out on television and get Bernie out doing the rallies and get everyone to talk to their constituencies. So that's my job.

Yes. He can't help himself.

So I was born in 1950. And for the first 50 years, it was sort of what you might call the golden Medina, the golden age for Jewish people, not only in America, but forever. Because we had never seen... Such acceptance. We were accepted in ways we never thought.

There's no final straw. It's all the things he is doing. But let me say this. Last time he was president, which is the closest experience we have with him. Admittedly, the world has changed some, particularly on the media side, how it works. We kept pushing and pushing and pushing and chipping away. And when he went below 40% in the polls, the Republican legislators started working with us.

He was at 51. He's now at 48. We're going to keep at it, keep at it, keep at it. until he goes below 40. Look, I talk to a lot of these Republican legislators. I've worked with them. Some of them are Trump devotees and advocates and all that. But many of them don't like him, don't respect him, and worry about what he's doing to our country.

You know, right now he's so popular they can't resist him. I mean, so many of them came to me and said, I don't think Hegseth should be defense secretary or RFK should be HHS. But Trump wants him. He won. Let's give him. That's not going to be the same. The Republicans would like to have some freedom from Trump, but they won't until we win. bring him down in popularity.

That happened with Bush in 2005. It happened with Trump in 2017. When it happens, I am hopeful that our Republican colleagues will resume working with us. And I talk to them. One of the places I told them to go in the gym, you know, when you're on that bike in your shorts panting away next to a Republican, a lot of the inhibitions come off.

No. Let me tell you the little... I dealt with Biden and his staff often. And whenever I dealt with him, you know, the right wing was saying, oh, he's mentally declined. He wasn't. He had rational, good, strong conversations. Did he ramble from time to time? He's done that when I knew him when he was 45 years old. Did he sometimes forget a name? Who doesn't? But he was fine.

I didn't realize, I didn't, because of my dealings with him, we're just fine. And we worked on many things and had a lot of success. 2022 was regarded as one of the greatest legislative sessions we had. And we did it together, Senate and him, until the debate. And then I realized he couldn't win. Now, I did think the fact that he spoke lower a little bit and he walked slower,

allowed the right wing to portray him incorrectly as, you know, not competent. But I didn't find that.

I can't give you the answer to that. When I dealt with him, he was fine.

They're just BS. Just BS. There was no cover-up.

I was so proud when I was, I guess, about 12 years old that Sandy Koufax, a Jewish pitcher, not a scientist or a teacher, didn't play ball on Yom Kippur. And that made us so proud. I experienced a little anti-Semitism. There was a moment, for instance, when I was eight years old and we were driving home from my grandma's house.

There are different polling numbers, you know, the exit polls. But most of them show, the ones that are most reliable show that still like, you know, a very high percentage, 70, something like that, of the Jews voted Democratic this year.

Some of the more vocal people are on the right, and the Republican Party has made an attempt to make Israel and even anti-Semitism a political issue, which is horrible for Israel. I told that to Netanyahu actually years ago, not to make it a political issue, but he did. He embraced Trump and did it.

But I do think the progressive values of the Jewish people, the fact that we've been oppressed for so long, we've always had a sympathy for the underdog, that doesn't go away. Obviously, with the situation in Israel, there are some people who felt the Democrats weren't strong enough, but Biden was. He stuck by Israel very strongly, and most everyone recognizes that.

It cost him a little. I'm not sure how much, but okay. I think that basically the rank-and-file Jewish person, who is not that political, you know, no more than anybody else, is fundamentally a Democrat and will stay that way.

First, I've criticized the Israeli government.

And I've criticized Netanyahu, as you know. So criticism of Israel and how it conducted the war is not anti-Semitic. But it begins to shade over, and it shades over in a bunch of different ways. When you use the word Zionist for Jew, you Zionist pig, you mean you Jewish pig.

There's an incident on the New York subway and a bunch of people got on, you know, protesters or whatever, and said, all the Zionists get off the, who's a Zionist? Raise your hand. Get out of the subway car.

When the head of the Brooklyn Museum, who was Jewish, or the chairman of the board she was, but the Brooklyn Museum had nothing to do with Israel or taking positions on Israel, her house is smeared in red paint, that's antisemitism. And a lot of the slogans that people use either are or slide into antisemitism, okay? So, from the river to the sea, which is a Hamas expression.

Well, what does Hamas believe? People don't pay enough attention to the evilness of Hamas in this whole discussion. What does Hamas believe? That there should be no Jews living from the Jordan River to the ocean. And their view, in their charter, they cite an old Arab proverb. Is that a Jew behind the tree? Chop him down and shoot him.

So when people say from the river to the sea, it edges on anti-Semitism, even though some of them may not know it. How about by any means necessary? Does that mean kill any Jew by any means necessary? Okay? And the one that bothers me the most, which I want to take a minute on, is genocide. Okay? Genocide is described as... This is the definition.

And someone rolled down the window and said to my nice, decent father, you fucking Jew. I think of that almost every week, but it didn't happen very much. And the Jewish people, all the kinds of discrimination that we had seen, Jews couldn't work here, Jews couldn't do that, even the sort of innuendos went away.

A country or some group tries to wipe out a whole race of people, a whole nationality of people. So if Israel was not provoked... and just invaded Gaza and shot at random Palestinians, Gazans, that would be genocide. That's not what happened. In fact, the opposite happened. And Hamas is much closer to genocidal than Israel, even when you have disagreements.

And again, I told Netanyahu, I told, I said to him what I thought, you got to reduce the number of casualties and make sure aid gets in and stuff like that. Here is the difficulty. Hamas has a different way of waging warfare. of using innocent Gazans as human shields. And they do. They put rockets in hospitals. They put their military supplies in schools.

What is a country just supposed to do when rockets are being fired from a school? Sinwar, the head of Hamas, who was killed, you know what he said? Dead Palestinians and maimed Palestinians are a necessary sacrifice. His words, according to the Wall Street Journal, which got his documents. So Israel's been in a much more difficult position because of what Hamas did.

And it's not that Israel is above criticism. Of course it is not above criticism. But Hamas, well, I just, Hamas is never, wait, can I just finish? I'm sorry, it matters so much to me. I feel so deeply about it. Sorry.

And Hamas made it much, and no one blames Hamas. I mean, the news reports every day for a while showed Palestinians being hurt and killed. And, you know, I see the pictures of a little Palestinian boy without a leg, or I saw on sticks in my head there was a little girl, like 11, 12, crying because her parents were both killed. I ache for that.

But on the news reports, they never mention that so much of the time Hamas used the Palestinian people as human shields. And so when these protesters come and accuse Israel of genocide, I say, what about Hamas? They don't even want to talk about Hamas. Wait, one final thing.

This is very important. Jewish people were subject, at least in my judgment, to the worst genocide ever. I put in the book, on the day they got Kiev, the Nazis asked 33,000 Jews to line up by a trench, strip naked, and they shot them all dead. Every day Auschwitz killed 20,000 people. My family was killed from a place called Chortkiv in western Ukraine. And this was vicious and horrible.

And it is vicious of the opponents to call it genocide. Criticize it? For sure. Say Israel went too far? For sure. And you know what it does? It increases anti-Semitism because they're making Israel and the Jewish people look like monsters, which they are not.

And there was one reason above all, the Holocaust hung over a curtain, not only for Jewish people, but of course us, we always thought about it. I get a little emotional. People on my block, older ladies would come and roll up their sleeves. and show us the numbers on their arms that the concentration camp made them do because they were just a number, you know, probably scheduled to die. Okay.

You know, my great-grandmother was the wife of a well-known scholar in Chortkiv. The Nazis rolled in in 1941 and said to the Jewish people of Chortkiv, gather in the town square. And then my great-grandmother, who had a house on the town square, they said your greater family should come to the porch. About 35 people from age 85 to three months came to the porch.

The Nazis in front of all the Jews in Chortkiv said, you're coming with us. She said, we're not moving. They machine gunned every one of them down. I was in China on the night of October 7th, and the Israeli ambassador came in and told me what happened in the kibbutz of Biari. And they took like a hundred from the elderly to the children on a stage and shot them all down.

So, yes, it's very emotional, and to almost all Jewish people, we all have relatives, and we know about this has happened. Again, genocide is a vicious, vicious word to use.

Please. The UN has been anti-Israel, anti-Semitically against Israel, double standard. Moynihan was my idol. He became famous when in 1976 they tried to pass a resolution, Zionism is racism. To say that the Jewish people should not have a state when every other people should have a state is anti-Semitism, the old double standard, ipso facto.

And the international organizations, I have no faith in them being fair. These same international organizations, when horrible things go in in Darfur or China or wherever, they look the other way.

Colombia did not do enough. I criticized them. And believe me, I believe in free speech. I believe in the right to protest. As you read in my book, I started my career protesting the Vietnam War. I say to some people, if I were your age, you know, the younger people protesting, I'd be protesting something or other. So I get that. And I love it. And it's about America. protest.

But when it shades over to violence and anti-Semitism, the colleges had to do something, and a lot of them didn't do enough. They shrugged their shoulders, looked the other way, et cetera, Columbia among them. Okay, so what did they do? They took away $400 million. I'm trying to find out where that $400 million, what they took away.

Are they taking away money from cancer research at Columbia, you know, at New York Presbyterian, which is part of Columbia, or Alzheimer's, which are doing good things? What is the $400 million? It could be hurting all students.

Students who go there who have nothing to do with the protests, students who might have protested peacefully or Jewish students who were victims of some of those protests. So I think we have to see. My worry is that this 400 million was just done in typical Trump fashion indiscriminately without looking at its effect.

Look, I don't know all the details yet. They're trying to come out, and there'll be a court case which will determine it. If he broke the law, he should be deported. If he didn't break the law and just peacefully protested, he should not be deported. It's plain and simple.

You know, it's a legal issue, and it's what are Columbia's rules, and what does it mean breaking them, and what are the legal rules about what did he do? I don't know what the charge against him is, so it's a little premature to make a decision, except if he didn't break the law, he should not be deported. If he broke the law, he should.

When did that change? It began changing in the beginning of the 21st century. And what I've written in the book is when things get bad or a little rough, that's when anti-Semitism sort of bubbles up and then can get worse. Conor Cruz O'Brien, the great Irish poet, said anti-Semitism is a light sleeper. So in 2001, for the first time after 9-11, we saw these conspiracy theories.

Well, if they're just protesting and they're arrested, they shouldn't be arrested for protesting as long as they go by the rules. Look, I get protests in front of my house all the time, but they have to have a permit and they have to obey certain rules. There are rules. But the bottom line is we have courts and Khalil will go to court.

And I have a lot of faith that the judge will give a fair ruling. It's not the Trump administration. It's an independent federal judge.

I think that there is a feeling in New York on certain issues that New York is not doing a good enough job. Crime. Now, crime is actually lower. But I talk to lots of people that go on the subway, and almost inevitably there's someone there who's not hurting people but disruptive and frightening them because they read in the paper that some people were hurt.

You know, the pushing of people onto the tracks. And so I think that, above all, I think that influenced New Yorkers. New Yorkers are willing to put up with a lot to live in New York, but they want to be safe. And I think that's the number one reason we lost the percentage vote.

Yes, the Bailey's.

Probably voted for Trump. Probably voted for Trump. But if you ask them why, I think they'd say above all crime, Long Island. You know, I think they'd say that.

Well, I think there are real efforts being made by the city and state to reduce the level of crime. It's got to be more.

I mean, there's also— There are some, but less so in New York. Less so in New York. When I used to advise candidates who were running for mayor, you know, Democratic candidate, I'd say, if you can assure New Yorkers they're going to be safe, it'll almost ensure your election, because on all the other issues, New Yorkers are Democrats.

I'm not getting into the mayoral race. I know you're going to ask questions about the characters in the mayoral race.

But I have had a tradition that has served me well. Don't mix in in primaries in New York. I haven't. And this will be interpreted as mixing in in the primaries. So I'm not going to answer questions about people running.

I get it.

But if we weren't close to a primary, I might give you another opinion, but I'm not going to give you an opinion on that.

You're not quitting.

Oh, the Jews did it. All the Jews evacuated the building, etc. But okay. It was not good, but it didn't lead to a huge spread of anti-Semitism. 2008 got a little worse because of the financial crisis and the international conspiracy. And there were all kinds of theories, George Soros,

Let's see what happens in the election. That's all I'm going to say in the primary.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

30 years earlier, they never would have dared use George Soros as the sort of way to talk about the international conspiracy, because he was Jewish and because of the Holocaust. But it was October 7th that changed it all. And all of a sudden, anti-Semitism explodes in ways we've never seen, and overt anti-Semitism.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Jewish bakeries being called Zionist bakeries and rocks thrown through their windows. People who wore yarmulkes or Jewish stars being screamed at, yelled at, vilified, even punched and cursed. All the kinds of things that we had not seen in America for a very long time. And it shocked us.

Thank you. ,,,, . . . . . ., the, P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P,實,實, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , a in a

For the first time, Jews I know, I'm part of this generation, started saying, oh God, maybe it could happen here. No one thought it would happen here, but for the first time, the thought, maybe it could happen here. And as the highest ranking Jewish elected official, not only now, but ever in America, I felt an obligation to do what I could to combat this rise in anti-Semitism.

So I felt I had to write the book. I had to write the book. And hopefully it'll do some good.

Yeah. Okay. Very good question. That's your job. I appreciate the endorsement. I think the American people think the Jews have had it very good. And we have. You know, I used to say when I was younger, oh, America's been so good to the Jews and the Jews have been so good to America.

The Jewish values and the American values are a very good mix and potent combination and have yielded a lot of success for the Jewish people. But I think people don't realize how fragile we think that success can be because of our history through the generations. You know, the Jewish holidays are all about escaping being killed. There's a joke.

How do you sum up the Jewish holidays in three sentences? They tried to kill us. We survived. Let's eat. I don't know if I wrote that in my book.

Jewishness was always part of me. People know I'm Jewish. You know, when a new candidate comes to me and says, what's your advice? I say, my best advice is be yourself. The public may not know the difference between your education platform and your opponents, but they can smell a phony a mile away. And then I say, I'm from Brooklyn. Sometimes it helps me. Sometimes it hurts me.

But I know one thing. If I tried not to be from Brooklyn, I'd be worse than whatever I am. Well, that's a synonym for Jewish. So I was always Jewish, and I enjoyed telling the stories of my family to my caucus and things like that. But it was never that vital to my career. And when I ran in 1998, I would go to upstate. You know, before that, I was from Brooklyn and Queens.

I was wondering, how would I be accepted as somebody who was obviously Jewish, although I didn't go talk about it a lot? I was Jewish. I was. It was very gratifying. You know, very little anti-Semitism. And when I got to Congress, the same. There was some anti-Semitism. One of the senior guys when I got on the Judiciary Committee said, Schumer, welcome to the Judiciary Committee.

So there was some of that.

Can't say. He's dead. He's from Texas. That's all I'll say. You can figure it out. But it was not the thing that I was most known for in any way at all.

I don't think we have an authenticity problem. We have a real direction now. I feel good about it. It's this. First, you got to look at who the Democratic Party is and who the Republican Party is, who they really are. We are the party of working people. We feel that very, very strongly. That's who we have always been. The Republican Party is a dramatic contrast to that.

In the last 20 or 30 years, in my judgment, they have been taken over by a cabal of greedy, very wealthy people. And their whole goal is to reduce taxes, cut their own taxes, even though they're extremely rich, and get rid of any government regulation.

That's where we're moving. That's where we have to move. So the contrast is real. What are we saying? And this is not just Chuck Schumer. I've talked to my whole caucus. I've talked to Hakeem and his caucus. I've talked to Martin, the new head of the DNC. I've talked to some of the others. It's a sort of a simple, it's a simple little phrase.

Donald Trump is making the middle class pay for tax cuts for billionaires. And then you can add things to it, is making the middle class pay for tax cuts for billionaires by cutting your health care, your Medicaid, by adding in tariffs and raising your prices, by cutting education so your kids don't get an education. That has a number of, I think, virtues.

Correct. But it unifies us. In my caucus, from Bernie to Fetterman, everyone believes in this. Second, the public understands it. 80% of the public doesn't like tax cuts for billionaires to hurt the middle class. 60% of Republicans. It's true. So what happened? Because you asked, that's your question. We think we always cared. I'm sorry. We always cared about the working people.

But in the last few years, while we did a lot for working people, here's what we didn't do. We didn't tell people about it. We thought just by legislating, people would know about it. They don't.

Yes.

No, we feel it, but we never, we talked about legislation and passing legislation. Now, one of the liabilities we have is a lot of the good things that'll come out of this legislation, take a few years to happen, you know, to build the road, to build the bridge, et cetera. But frankly, when we did talk about it, it worked. We had five battleground states that we had to win in the Senate, okay?

And every week I met with each of the senators about implementing legislation. We called it implementation. If we said that to the public, that would be a bad idea, but it was a concept. And they did. So Jackie Rosen was in Las Vegas saying, that infrastructure bill, I am now getting you the thing we've dreamed of in Nevada for a long time. Las Vegas has about three quarters of their population.

a high-speed rail from Los Angeles to Las Vegas so people could get on the train, spend their money in Las Vegas, and go home. Tammy Baldwin delivered this bridge that northern Wisconsin had been dying for for 30 or 40 years.

We won. We won in four of those five. I don't think the presidential campaign did enough of it. And I don't think Democratic Party as a whole did enough of it. We just assumed we were on the side of working people so they would just naturally assume it. And it didn't happen. We lost them because they didn't think we cared about them enough. We always did care about them, but we didn't convey it.

So now, as you said, we're learning to convey in different ways. I put Cory Booker. and Tina Smith in charge of the social media. We had like 60 influencers at the State of the Union, and again, learning how to communicate, not just Chuck Schumer talking about the legislation we passed, but I brought people there who were affected by what's happening.

I brought a veteran, and they went on all the social media, and according to the people tell me, because I get all these reports, it had millions and millions of views. And the bottom line is, I think the party as a whole neglected how the social media has become so much more important, but we're learning it quickly and we're doing it much better and we're going to do it better still.

That's in the past.

It just happened. I got excited. I wanted to tell people I didn't do it right. But it's one day, you know, you can't get because a bunch of people on, you know, in the social media attack you. And most of the attacks on me, even on that, were from the right wing.

There's always going to be people who take a shot at you. That's how it is. You just got to move forward.

I don't think it is. I think, first of all, talking about the difference between the two parties is what we're supposed to do. We're supposed to give the contrast. And we have a unique opportunity now. When Trump ran... He could say anything. He said, I'll lower your costs on day one.

And once he's not running and he has to govern and he is so enthralled by tax cuts for the billionaires, it gives us an opening to talk to the people who were listening more to Trump before because we didn't talk to them. The negative that Trump is doing is spreading, but gives us an opportunity to regain the ear

of the working people and middle-class people so that we can connect with them the way we always used to. And it did succeed in the past. It even succeeded even a long time ago, different media world, of course. But 2005, Nancy and Harry, I was at Harry's side. I was his little lieutenant in those days.

We said, we're going to wait for the issue to pounce on, and then we're going to do it every day. George W. said, we're cutting Social Security. They don't change, the Republicans. And we pounced, and we had huge success.

Especially with the Trump people, absolutely.

I called your office and I was told I could have the mic to speak. And then I was lied to.

Funding the government should be a bipartisan effort. In fact, Senator Schumer early in the week comes out and says... Republicans chose a partisan path, drafting their continuing resolution without any input, any input from congressional Democrats.

Our caucus is unified on a clean CR that will keep the government open... and give Congress time to negotiate bipartisan legislation that can pass.

I am a no.

The Republican bill is a terrible option. It is deeply partisan. It doesn't address far too many of this country's needs. But I believe allowing Donald Trump to take even much more power via a government shutdown is a far worse option.

Republicans do not have the votes in the Senate.

I will vote to keep the government open. I believe it is my job to make the best choice for the country to minimize the harms to the American people.

When he went below 40% in the polls, the Republican legislators started working with us. He was at 51. He's now at 48. We're going to keep at it, keep at it, keep at it until he goes below 40. When it happens, I am hopeful that our Republican colleagues will resume working with us.

I talked to them. One of the places I told them to go in the gym, you know, when you're on that bike in your shorts, panting away next to a Republican. A lot of the inhibitions come off.

We talk to our Republican colleagues all the time. I talk to them all in the gym. When you're a 60-year-old on a bike panting in your shorts, the inhibitions sort of fall away.

Republicans need Democratic votes. It's going to be clear they can't pass anything without Democratic help.

Also know this is just the beginning. If Doge attacks USAID today, then you can be sure they'll move on to another target tomorrow. Who knows? Maybe it'll be the Postal Service, or the IRS, or even the Social Security Administration. They could be next. Or maybe our national security agencies.

The bill is a very definition of pernicious. It attacks women's health care using false narratives and outright fear mongering. And it adds more legal risks for doctors on something that's already illegal. So much of the hard rights anti-choice agenda is pushed, frankly, by people who have little to no understanding of what women go through when they're pregnant.

The scenario targeted by this bill is one of the most heartbreaking moments that a woman could ever encounter. The agonizing choice of having to end care when serious and rare complications arise in pregnancy. And at that moment of agony, this bill cruelly substitutes the judgment

of qualified medical professionals and the wishes of millions of families and allows the ultra-right ideology to dictate what they do.

So today, I'm demanding a full inspector general investigation as to what went on. The chaos at Newark could very well be a harbinger if issues like these aren't fixed. How much has the recent loss of several thousand experienced safety and support personnel due to Doge firings and resignations, forced and voluntary, contribute to the current chaos?

Large numbers of people were fired and others quit because they saw what mismanagement was coming from Doge. How has that affected things?

We have the Schumer. Here it is.

I just want to tell you a question. Do you know you have just broken the record? Do you know how proud this caucus is of you? Do you know how proud America is of you?

I'm interested to know whether the man that you saw sitting there on that couch on that day, you were in there, you saw him up close and personal. Did you really not have any idea that he was not fit to serve a second term?

You're facing all of this because you lost a presidential election. And is that not Joe Biden's responsibility for deciding to run again?

Forward. That's it?

Oh, all right. Senator Chuck Schumer, I know you got to go. I appreciate your time today. I'll see you soon, I hope. Thank you. Take care.

He is among the people that are responsible for this. The leaders of the Democratic Party, the staff of the White House. And I have to say, I find everybody now talking to these authors. Get out of here. Go home. You're part of the problem. Now you tell us. So I just and I find the reason why the Democratic Party has less credibility today. Here's an unpopular president.

The Democratic Party has a worse rating than the Republican Party with this catastrophic governance that we've seen over the last 120 days. And yet, why is the Democratic Party in worse shape? Because of this distrust, because of this. Frankly, what the public feels as if the party leadership let them down and let this happen. He's as responsible as anybody else. He was a leader in the party.

He could have said something sooner. What is Jonathan?

I believe so strongly I did the right thing. When I was majority leader and under Biden's presidency, we passed more legislation in 2022 than before. When you're a leader, sometimes you have to do things that you know are right, despite the consequences. I've always said to people in politics, the higher up you climb, the more fierce the winds blow.

One of the things I am known to be very good at is how to win Senate seats. Look, winning in 2026 in the House and Senate, which could stop Trump once and for all, is vitally important.

President Trump amazingly blamed Ukraine for Putin's invasion. It's disgusting to see an American president turn against one of our friends and openly side with a thug like Vladimir Putin. The people of Ukraine did not start this war. Vladimir Putin did.

I talk to President Biden regularly, or sometimes several times in a week, or usually several times in a week. His mental acuity is great, it's fine, it's as good as it's been over the years. All this right wing propaganda that his mental acuity has declined is wrong.

Look, we didn't. And let's look at President Biden. He's had an amazing record. He's a patriot. He's a great guy. And when he stepped down, he did it on his own because he thought it was better not only for the Democratic Party, for America. We should all salute him. We should all salute him.

Well, I'm not going to speculate. As I said, I think his record is a stellar one and he'll go down in history as a really outstanding president.

Let me put it this way. First, I don't think there's anybody. Well, I think I know how to win seats back in the Senate.

Let me put it this way. First, I don't think there's anybody... Well, I think I know how to win seats back in the Senate, which I've proven. I'm not the only person, nor should I be. I'm sort of like an orchestra leader. And there's a great deal of talent in the orchestra. And my job is to highlight all those talents and emphasize those talents.

While the CR bill is very bad, the potential for a shutdown has consequences for America that are much, much worse. For sure, the Republican bill is a terrible option. But I believe allowing Donald Trump to take even much more power via a government shutdown is a far worse option.

Allowing Donald Trump to take even much more power via a government shutdown is a far worse option.

Donald Trump's visit to the Middle East, my view is the overall narrative here was selling out US national interests for the private gain of his family. He essentially gave away the crown jewels of American AI and semiconductor technology to the Gulf in exchange. In exchange, it looks like, for a $2 billion investment in the Trump family stablecoin venture.

Would the senator yield for a question?

I just want to tell you a question. Do you know you have just broken the record? Do you know how proud this caucus is of you? Do you know how proud America is of you?

Would the senator yield for a question?

I just want to tell you a question. Do you know you have just broken the record? Do you know how proud this caucus is of you? Do you know how proud America is of you?

A shutdown would give Donald Trump and Elon Musk carte blanche to destroy vital government services at a significantly faster rate than they can right now.

The Senate Democratic leader now backs a Republican bill to fund the government. A shutdown would give Donald Trump and Elon Musk carte blanche to destroy vital government services.

Wherever you put your eye to the horizon, it's the same. Destruction everywhere.

Would the senator yield for a question?

I just want to tell you a question. Do you know you have just broken the record? Do you know how proud this caucus is of you? Do you know how proud America is of you? You have broken the record. America is so proud of you.

If we're going to eliminate the waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicare, it does mean we're going to cut some of that out. And when I hear my friend Dave Camp say, you cannot cut money out of Medicare, you can't just get up there and say, we don't want to cut anything out of Medicare. We want to cut the bad stuff and keep the good stuff.

Funding the government should be a bipartisan effort. But Republicans chose a partisan path, drafting their continuing resolution without any input, any input, from congressional Democrats. Because of that, Republicans do not have the votes in the Senate to invoke cloture on the House CR.

Americans certainly support eliminating waste, but they don't want to see their Social Security benefits taken away over a lie perpetuated in hopes of just slashing them to give tax breaks for billionaires paid for by the middle class. As Musk lies shamelessly about Social Security, he conveniently ignores the federal government already conducts an audit of Social Security every single year.

He cherry picks data to suggest that tens of millions of dead people are getting checks. This is a lie, like so many of his other lies.

Yes, I do. Kristen and democracy is at risk. Donald Trump is a lawless, angry man. He thinks he should be king. He thinks he should do whatever he wants, regardless of the law. And he thinks judges should just listen to him. Now, we have to fight that back in every single way.

Look, I think the president's doing the right thing. China has been taking advantage of us for two decades. They're stealing our intellectual property, which means stealing our good-paying jobs. And I, frankly, am closer on this issue, not on many, but on this issue with President Trump than I was with Presidents Bush or Obama because they did nothing to tell China off.

Now, China, of course, will respond. But if they know we're strong and we're not going to back off, they will back off. They have far more to lose than we do. They have a $300 billion trade surplus with us. I'm looking out, number one, for jobs. You know, if General Electric moves jobs to China, they're not unhappy. But my New York workers in Schenectady are unhappy.

And so you can't let the international business companies who don't give a hoot about where their factories are govern this. You have to do what's good for the American worker.

You know what their attitude is? I made my money all by myself. How dare your government take my money from me? I don't want to pay taxes. Or I built my company with my bare hands. How dare your government tell me how I should treat my customers, the land and water that I own, or my employees? They hate government. Government's a barrier to people, a barrier to stop them from doing things.

They want to destroy it. We are not letting them do it, and we're united.

Funding the government should be a bipartisan effort, but Republicans chose a partisan path, drafting their continuing resolution without any input, any input from congressional Democrats. Because of that, Republicans do not have the votes in the Senate to invoke cloture on the House CR.

Our caucus is unified on a clean April 11th CR that will keep the government open and give Congress time to negotiate bipartisan legislation that can pass. We should vote on that. I hope, I hope our Republican colleagues will join us to avoid a shutdown on Friday.

Funding the government should be a bipartisan effort, but Republicans chose a partisan path, drafting their continuing resolution without any input, any input from congressional Democrats.