“I still believe that in my bones, [President Trump] is not who we are. And it’s up to us to remind ourselves of our better angels and to continue making the case about the damage he’s doing, the harm he’s doing to real people.”
Los Angeles, CA — U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) joined Crooked Media co-founder Jon Lovett on his podcast, Lovett or Leave It, to break down President Donald Trump’s abuse of presidential power, expose Trump’s blatant graft, and stand up against his threats to law firms, universities, businesses, and media.
Key Excerpts:
On Trump’s military birthday parade:
[…] We see really how much Trump 2.0 is so much worse than Trump 1.0. Trump wanted to do this in his first administration, and the mayor of D.C. at the time — because among other things, this would destroy the roads to have these tanks going down the streets in Washington D.C. — famously said or tweeted, “Tanks, but no tanks.” But now there’s no protest to it, because the District of Columbia has to worry about the President of the United States essentially trashing the district, withholding any kind of funding or using other federal means to disenfranchise further the people of the District of Columbia. And it just shows how much danger there is from this now unrestrained executive. But the idea that we’re going to have this vanity show, this military vanity show, like Kim Jong Un or Il, like Putin, like Khrushchev, like Andropov, like all these people. This is his way of showing the country, “I’m in charge of the military. I can call up the military for my birthday. I can call up the military for protests. I can call up the military to deport people.” So, this is my way of putting myself in the league with other despots around the world.
[…] What we’re seeing now, unlike other military parades like we have on the Fourth of July — which are largely a celebration of the country, or they’re a celebration of veterans who are serving the country — we’re very comfortable, we should be very comfortable with that. No, this is a celebration of the president and his power, and that makes it fundamentally different. And it’s why you’re right to have that reaction, that visceral distaste for it.
On not capitulating to Trump’s demands:
[…] I’ve been on the phone — I won’t name names — to universities I’ve attended, to law firms I’ve been with, to companies that I represent as now the Senator from the state to tell them, do not make a deal with this devil. He won’t honor it, and you won’t find any comfort in the dishonor of making the deal. Because you’re right. The law firms that cut a deal, who made the false claim, and maybe they believed it at the time that, “Oh no, we wouldn’t do any work we’re not already going to do,” are being asked to do things they would never do. And what’s more, no matter what they say, they’re also refusing to take cases that they would have taken. And for these media companies, yeah, the business decision, just as a pure business decision, is to try to settle and make the problem go away, but the problem is never going to go away.
On what gives him hope:
[…] It’s breathtaking to me how quickly and radically he has changed the country in 100 days. I thought the first administration would be bad. It was far worse than expected. I thought the second would be even worse, and it is well beyond any expectation. All of the walls that have come down have been terrifying. His attack on the universities, and on the lawyers, and the law firms, and on the press, and on any opposition.
But I’ll tell you what gives me hope, and I think there’s a lot of reason for hope about this is it took us a while, all of us collectively, to get back on our feet. It was hard the second time, because he won the popular vote, because we couldn’t say like we did the first time, people really didn’t know what he was, what he represented. We couldn’t say that the second time. So, it took us a while to get on our feet, but now you see Harvard standing up to this guy, and you see other universities start to follow their example. You see law firms start to fight and win against him, and others start to follow that example, instead of those that capitulated. You see demonstrations now growing in size. You see people willing to assert themselves again to reclaim the country, and it tells me we’re going to get through this. It’s going to be hard. We’re going to suffer damage along the way, but we’ve been through other hard times in our history. We’ll get through this.
[…] We’re fundamentally a good country and we’re a decent people, and he is not who we are. And I still believe that in my bones, he is not who we are. And it’s up to us to remind ourselves of our better angels and to continue making the case about the damage he’s doing, the harm he’s doing to real people. I don’t care what anybody says. They knew he was a crook, but they didn’t vote for the corruption, and that’s what they’re getting.
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