“I will never forgive him for the damage he has done, and for the damage he continues to do, to the very idea of America, for how the rest of the world now views this country, and more critically, more catastrophically, how we have come to view ourselves.”
Washington, D.C. — U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) spoke on the Senate Floor to recount President Donald Trump’s most unlawful, unconstitutional, and disastrous actions since taking office, emphasizing the deliberate chaos and complete disregard of the rule of law.
In his speech, Schiff laid out the top 10 ways that President Trump has hurt Americans’ lives and livelihoods: Trump’s inhumane immigration policy and indiscriminate ICE raids across the country, undermining the rule of law, cuts to health care, impact of tariff policy on American people and businesses, sweeping and indiscriminate DOGE cuts, ending our advances in health and science, destroying renewable energy, weakening our alliances around the world, cuts to food assistance, and attacking research and science.
Watch his full remarks HERE. Download remarks HERE.
Read the transcript of his remarks as delivered below:
Over the last 250 years, this country has grown from a handful of rebellious colonies, to an economic, scientific, military, cultural, technological, and agricultural behemoth. And, crucially, through it all, we have remained a democracy, devoted to the hard work our Founders envisioned of making our nation a more perfect union. Progress has not always been straightforward, but it has been consistent over time, and nothing short of extraordinary.
Which is why it is all the more heartbreaking to see so much damage, so much self-inflicted harm, imposed on our country by this administration over the last 170 days. Indeed, if you were to design a presidency and policies to diminish our scientific and technological prowess from within, it would look a lot like this administration. If you were determined to kill our clean energy future, and retreat from any hope of addressing climate change, it would look a lot like this. If you wanted to undermine our standing around the world, befriend dictatorships and betray our fellow democracies, it would look a lot like this. If you wanted to deliberately tear at the social fabric and cohesion of our country, set state against state, and people against people, to the point of conflict in the streets, it would look a lot like this administration.
The president and his Cabinet have been tearing down so much of what makes this country special, and so quickly, that it has been hard to see the big picture, hard to separate the biggest harms from merely the most sensational, or the most proximate. One hundred days was not enough time to evaluate the harms this administration had already inflicted on our country and its people, but 170 days just might be sufficient.
So today, I want to go through the top ten ways this administration has been wrecking the country. From the thoughtless and the irresponsible, to the illegal and the unconstitutional, to the deliberately cruel and malicious, I want to tell you what the actions of this presidency have really meant for the country, and for our future.
So here they are. The top 10 ways the administration is wrecking the country. Number 10:
Donald Trump is waging an all-out war on America’s research universities.
America’s universities have been the envy of the world for much of the last century, powering scientific achievement and economic growth. Dramatic breakthroughs in medicine, significant achievement in the arts, technological innovation, and all of the attendant economic benefits have been driven by a decades’ old partnership between universities and the federal government.
As part of this grand bargain, the federal government invests in research conducted at top universities and the country enjoys the benefits. From brilliant scientists in academia the military gets new technologies and capabilities, including innovations in fusion energy, laser technology, electronic jamming capabilities and so much more. Our health care is improved, and our life spans are increased by university-led research into new medicines, medical implants and devices. Food science helps us grow healthier crops and produce more food with less water and less pesticides. You would be hard-pressed to find a field of scientific endeavor in which university research has failed to deliver.
Now, that is all on the chopping block. The administration has cancelled tens of billions of dollars in university research funding. It is stopping some of the best and brightest from coming to the U.S. to study, by banning international students from attending. Already, some of the world’s most promising students are choosing to go elsewhere, to China, or the UK, or Sweden, or Canada. The reason we want the very best students is so we can remain the global leader in every field of endeavor. That is what makes us great. But this? This is a one-way brain drain in the wrong direction.
The administration is also raising taxes on research universities and threatening the removal of accreditation from universities which fail to bow to the president’s ideological and political whims.
And it is using real concerns about antisemitism on campus as a pretext, or the policies of athletic departments that it disfavors, to justify attacks on universities that will do nothing but set the country and our economy back. Their real agenda is to change the agenda at schools, to eliminate academic independence, and to indoctrinate students in an ideology that is more to their liking, turning administration bureaucrats into a kind of thought police.
Coming in at number nine of the top 10 ways the administration is wrecking the country: taking away food from hungry kids in America.
Donald Trump promised to “Make America Healthy Again,” but he is not. Instead, he has settled for making America hungry again. The budget, just realized through their Big Ugly Bill, makes a multi-hundred-billion dollar cut to the SNAP program. That’s supplemental nutrition and food assistance. Basically, food for hungry kids and families.
This isn’t a cut that can be explained away with a vague, multipurpose phrase or platitude like “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Or by engaging in funny math. Feeding hungry families is not wasteful, providing fresh food at schools for kids that can’t otherwise afford to eat is not a fraud, and helping seniors living on the edge of poverty afford a meal is not an abuse. But taking this food away to fund tax cuts for wealthy people and corporations — that is a fraud, that is a waste, and that is an abuse.
These cuts will mean more kids who are unable to get a school lunch. More seniors literally sitting and starving in their homes. An America that is more hungry than before. An America, that though it is the richest nation on earth, and the most productive agricultural nation on earth — has chosen to adopt more hunger as its policy. Moving on to number eight.
Coming in at number eight of the top 10 ways the administration is wrecking the country: Donald Trump is destroying our alliances with democratic nations around the world and aligning our country with dictators.
Across administrations and decades, America has been a symbol of stability for the globe. A trusted partner. A champion of freedom and democracy. We have stood up to evil empires and championed the cause of liberty. And though we have made more than our share of mistakes in trying to rebuild other nations in our image, we have strived to achieve a foreign policy consistent with our values.
Now, in just the first few months, so much of that legacy has been betrayed, so many of our alliances have been degraded, so much of our standing in the world has been made small, so many of our friends have become estranged, our treaty partners unsure of whether they can count on us in a pinch.
Donald Trump likes to talk about “peace through strength.” He likes to think that bullying our friends, or extorting a price for our security guarantees, is what makes us strong. But he is wrong. He trashes our relationships with our friends. He belittles the Canadians and the British, who fought and died alongside American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. He denigrates Ukrainians, and their brave president, who fight nobly in defense of their democracy and sovereignty, and he insists on Ukraine paying tribute — in the form of mineral rights — to secure his support. He flatters and fawns over the Kremlin dictator, at least he did, until even Trump could see that he was being made to play the fool by a mass murderer who did not want peace, only further mayhem. And who can say how long Trump’s new resolve against Putin will last before it is overtaken by caprice or self-interest.
The only true constant of Trump’s foreign policy has been that the United States will be there for you if and only if it is pleasing to the president. If you flatter him, if you bow and scrape before him, or if there is something in it for him. Personally. Like a $400 million aircraft, or a multi-billion-dollar crypto deal for his family. He has made it plain that American foreign policy is part protection racket, and part just racket.
All of this means that America is less safe and secure, with fewer friends we can rely upon, out of any sense of shared sacrifice or values. The mutual defense clause of Article 5 of NATO has only been invoked only once, and that was on our behalf after we were viciously attacked by terrorists on September 11th. Our friends and allies rushed to our defense, and not just out of a sense of treaty obligation, but because of a shared sense of purpose and our common humanity. The problem with turning every relationship into a transitional or transactional one— is that everyone will want something in return — and no one will be there when you really need them. Moving on.
Number seven of the top 10 ways the administration is wrecking what is best about this country — is their pointless, economically suicidal and self-destructive attack on the development of renewable energy.
Renewable energy can lead the world away from a climate catastrophe. It can be an economic slingshot, catapulting us into an abundant energy future that is American made. It can truly make us energy independent, instead of simply more dependent on the fossil fuel industry.
But Trump has attacked clean energy with a vengeance, repealing incentives passed during the Biden administration. And why? Because they were passed during the Biden administration, and because Donald Trump made a promise to oil companies in exchange for campaign cash — lots of it. More than a billion of it. The Big Ugly Bill phases out tax credits meant to spur development of solar and wind power and replaces them with tax credits for coal. If you are wondering whether you heard that right – you did.
Tax credits for coal mining. In the year 2025. At a time when we’ve harnessed the capacity of the sun and the wind to power entire communities, we are disinvesting in a renewable energy future in order to fund an industry from the 1800s.
It’s the policy equivalent of investing in Black Lung. And it will choke our energy supply over time and kneecap our economic potential. China knows this. In May, China installed 93 gigawatts of solar capacity. That’s enough to power almost 70 million homes. And they did it in a single month.
China is installing almost 100 solar panels every second. And that’s not because the Chinese Communist Party is populated by a bunch of crazy environmentalists. It’s because they know this is the industry of future. They want to dominate the global market in clean energy, and thanks to Donald Trump, they will.
So how will Trump’s energy policies impact you at home? It means your energy bills are going to go up – way up. By hundreds of dollars a month. Renewable sources of energy are the vast majority of the new energy coming online in America. Take that away, and we are reliant on the same old capacity, your same old utility, less competition, and higher prices. Costing you more to heat your home in the winter, or cool it down during the hot, hot summer. It means more families will make the impossible choice between paying their utility bills and putting food on the table.
Now earlier, I talked about this administration’s cuts to our research universities. Which brings me to number six, the broader attack on health and science. The administration is slashing the National Institutes of Health – the nation’s premier medical research agency.
They have cut NIH by almost half. Almost half. Now, I’m no scientist. But I took enough science classes in college to know my way around a lab. And I’m certainly no economist. But I can do basic math. And I can tell you with certainty – as anyone can who looks at this — that cutting NIH in half, massively gutting research grants and positions, will lead to the cancellation of clinical trials and new treatments, and to Americans needlessly suffering from any number of illnesses.
It will mean scaling back research efforts on everything from cancer, to Alzheimer’s, to HIV/AIDS. Destroying years or decades of research in any number of fields, that might have been weeks or months from a breakthrough.
That hurts everyone. There isn’t a Senator in this body who hasn’t been visited by families with sick children, or sick parents, or constituents who are ill themselves, constituents who have pleaded that we increase funding for NIH, who have put a human face on the hope that they or their loved ones might be saved, saved if only we invest in NIH.
And now, we turn our back on them. And for what? For what?
At number five, of the top 10 ways the administration is wrecking the country, we have the massive DOGE cuts to the federal workforce and federal agencies everywhere.
Elon Musk and his lot of unqualified, unvetted, unrestrained tech bros have taken a chainsaw to any number of federal grants, federal contracts, federal departments, and federal jobs without the slightest understanding of the human consequences. Musk may have held himself harmless during these massive cuts — he managed to use his position of influence to expand his billions in government contracts at Starlink — but everyone else was made to suffer. Now he is gone, but the wrecking crew continues its work.
DOGE accidentally cut our nuclear safety staff, then had to rush to rehire them. They cut specialists in bird flu and then had to rush and rehire them. Remember those coal tax credits I mentioned earlier? Well, they’re cutting mine safety efforts – making dangerous work, even more so.
They DOGE-d USAID and diminished our soft power around the world. They are dismantling the Department of Education, and selling off our children’s education, piece by piece.
And they would cut NASA in half. There is no more high-profile example of America’s scientific and technological prowess than our space program. And sadly, there is no better example of its deliberate forfeiture.
In my lifetime alone, our space program was the first to plant a flag on the moon. We launched the first solar probe. We took the first photos and landed the first rover on Mars. We are sending more humans into orbit than ever, and on track to land the first human on Mars. We did those things not because they were easy.
No, we did those things, as President Kennedy said – because they were hard.
Because space exploration can teach us things about our life on earth that propel innovation here at home, innovation that allows us to travel faster, live longer, and live better. And because exploring space can provide the most profound thoughts of our place in the universe, and whether amidst all of that we are alone.
This agency that has brought us such hope and excitement – and pride – will be brought low. It may be one small step for DOGE, but it represents one giant leap backward for mankind.
The Trump administration has also paused the hiring of critical seasonal firefighting staff, and laid off probationary employees, just as we begin another devastating fire season. They cut staff and programs at NOAA and the National Weather Service – hurting early earthquake warning, early warning of all disasters, warning that is pivotal when disasters strike, like it did in Texas this week, in North Carolina months ago, or in Los Angeles in January.
They cut staff who run the phones at Social Security while closing regional offices, making it harder for seniors to get the benefits they paid into their entire life. Because that was the goal. That was the goal.
And for all the pain that DOGE has inflicted and continues to inflict, the only thing that bastard agency has really served to accomplish is making government less effective, less efficient, and less trustworthy. Because more than anything else, the DOGE bloodletting has killed the trust of countless Americans.
Trust that the federal jobs and programs they relied upon would continue. Trust that they might be paid less than private sector workers to do the work they love, to unravel new mysteries in space, in the oceans, in our bodies and in ourselves, but that they could rely upon the government as an employer, that they would be insulated from political and partisan considerations, that they would not become some ideological arm of a president or his party, or its collateral damage. Now, that trust is now gone.
And the loss of that talent and that trust, just might be the most expensive loss of all.
At number four, of the top 10 ways in which the administration is wrecking our country and our economy: tariffs. The on-again, off-again, on-again, off-again, on-again, off-again, on-again tariffs. The ill-considered, ill-executed, unpredictable, unproductive, costly, indiscriminate and self-destructive, tariffs.
For a president who ran on lowering costs, his most significant economic action has been a colossal backfire. Prices for your 4th of July barbecue last week were the highest they’ve ever been. Like the costs of burgers or beer. Phones are now more expensive. Cars are more expensive. Prices at Walmart, Target, Costco, up, up, up. And on Amazon, they were going to add a specific line item for the cost of the Trump tariffs besides each affected product, until the Trump administration begged its owner, Jeff Bezos, not to be so transparent with their own customers because it made the president look bad. This didn’t stop Amazon from adding the Trump tax to the price of the goods you buy on Amazon— it just stopped them from showing you just how much more you were paying.
And while you get poorer because of these tariffs, America is not getting any stronger. While your pocketbook is getting hit, so too is our standing around the globe. After all, these chaotic tariffs give our trading partners the all too accurate impression that we are unpredictable. That we’re unstable. That America, with all its power, is unreliable. So those trading partners flock elsewhere. They go to China, or India, or elsewhere. The fact is we have so alienated even our closest friends and allies, that some, like Canada, have gone beyond reciprocal tariffs to a downright boycott of American goods. Devastating American farmers, small businesses, and consumers alike.
The Art of the Deal indeed.
Which takes us to number three, and this administration’s attack on our health care.
When the Senate passed Trump’s Big Ugly Bill last week, 50 of our colleagues put their stamp on a budget that will devastate Medicaid, that will mean hospitals and clinics close, and that millions of Americans will lose access to life saving care. That will mean people get their care denied. That will mean the long hard fight against opioids will be set back, by cuts to substance abuse treatment. After promising that Medicaid would not be touched, that our health care would not be harmed, they cut it by one trillion dollars, trillion with a T. To fund tax cuts for wealthy people, by the trillions.
And when your hospital closes because it loses millions of Medicaid dollars, it won’t matter whether you personally were on Medicaid — your hospital will be gone. You, and everyone else, will have to drive farther to find an emergency room, to have a baby, to get dialysis, or to be treated for a stroke. The quality of your care will decline. Your access to care will diminish. Especially reproductive care, but every kind of care. Most of us will pay more, a lot more, for the care we receive. But some will go without care altogether.
In the richest nation on earth, we will move farther away from universal quality care, to a period of even greater scarcity, even shorter life spans, even lesser quality of life. And again — for what? More tax cuts for wealthy people who don’t need them, and who already have all the care that they need.
Now we have reached number two, of the top 10 most destructive acts of the administration — Trump’s undermining of the rule of law.
The assault on the rule of law began almost immediately, with the pardon of 1,550 people who committed one of the most serious offenses in the nation’s history — attacking the U.S. Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power. In granting pardons to hundreds of offenders who used violence that day against police officers, Donald Trump sent a powerful message to his followers: that they may use violence on his behalf and he would have their back, that he would insulate them from the law and from accountability. And more than that, that he would promote them, advocate for them, appoint them to high positions in a new justice department, a department oriented not towards justice, not devoted to a rule of law, but devoted only to him.
In Trump’s justice department, we are no longer a nation of laws, but a nation of men, to be rewarded or punished according to the president’s whims. A mayor of New York charged with corruption has his case dismissed, not because of any prosecutorial misconduct or lack of evidence, but because he is useful to the president on an unrelated policy matter.
In Trump’s justice department, the absence of evidence or lawful predication is no bar to initiating a criminal investigation, when a political pretext will do. He is using the department as both sword and shield — a sword to pursue his enemies and a shield to protect his friends, and to protect no one more than himself.
A president given immunity by Supreme Court justices he appointed — acting like a convicted felon because he is a convicted felon — now engaging in the most blatant graft and corruption, accepting gifts and gratuities, airplanes and commissions, in the hundreds of millions, in the billions, and without any fear of investigation, let alone prosecution. The inspector generals are gone. The watchdogs are gone. Only the dogs are left, to feed on the carrion that was the rule of law.
When courts try to restrain the Trump administration’s illegality, his departments ignore their orders. We saw it with the Alien Enemies Act. We see it with the unlawful impoundment of FEMA funds. With the lawless withholding of state funding. With attacks on foreign assistance appropriated by Congress. With racial profiling, and illegal renditions to foreign prisons without due process, or frankly any kind of process.
Which takes me to the number one way in which Donald Trump and this administration are wrecking this country, and that is, by destroying the very idea of America.
Our nation was formed as an improbable experiment, an experiment based on the unproven idea that people possessed sufficient virtue to be self-governing, that we did not need to be ruled by a tyrant. From that humble and daring beginning, the idea grew, that a country so constituted, so organized, could not only rule itself, but could attract the best and brightest, the most industrious of souls from all over the earth and make them Americans. That there would be no caste system in America, that here, anyone with the drive, the talent and the intellect could prosper. That there were no limits to what we could achieve. That idea — that became America — was our most powerful appeal, our calling card, at home and around the world.
It has driven people to our shores. It has inspired people in dark prison cells in Iran, in labor camps in China, in gulags in Russia, and in impoverished places everywhere to dream of America, what it stands for, and what it might mean to them, if only they were so lucky, so very lucky, to one day move to this great place called America.
And Donald Trump’s destruction of that idea, the idea of America, as the last best hope of mankind, is the worst offense of this administration.
During Ronald Reagan’s final speech as president, he spoke of a man who wrote to him of the uniqueness of America: ‘You can go to live in France,’ the man wrote, ‘but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.’”
“Other countries,” Reagan said, “may seek to compete with us; but in one vital area, as a beacon of freedom and opportunity that draws the people of the world, no country on Earth comes close.
“This,” he said, “is one of the most important sources of America’s greatness. We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people — our strength — from every country and every corner in the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation. While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”
That was Ronald Reagan. But now we have Donald Trump, a president who, more than any other in our history, “clings to a stale past.”
I can forgive the president for his reckless tariff policies, for his sycophantic hires, or his foolish tax giveaways to the rich. But I will never forgive him for the damage he has done, and for the damage he continues to do, to the very idea of America, for how the rest of the world now views this country, and more critically, more catastrophically, how we have come to view ourselves.
Tackling immigrants to the ground, people who are landscapers, or farm workers, or restaurant workers or garment workers, let alone beating them while they lay there, as agents did the father of three U.S. Marines, is not how Americans treat the hardworking people who come here in search of a better life. Using the military against our own citizens, sowing chaos and division in our cities, is not consistent with the idea of America. That is not an America confident of its future and of its place in the world, able to inspire people around the world, able to see the best in ourselves.
On a day that Benjamin Franklin watched our nation being formed, on a day he witnessed George Washington preside over the constitutional convention, seated in a chair with an image of the sun embossed on the top, Franklin pulled some colleagues aside, and remarked about how artists often have a difficult time distinguishing between a rising and a setting sun in their art.
“I have often,” Franklin said, “and often, in the course of the session… looked at that [emblem] behind the President, without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting. But now at length, I have the happiness to know, that it is a rising and not a setting sun.”
Today, I know, a great many Americans fear that our sun is setting, but I do not believe that. I have more faith in America than that. We have overcome far greater challenges in our history than our present difficulties. And those who would bet against this country would be wise not to, those who have, are far more likely to be proven the losers than the winners of that bet.
The sun is not setting on our republic, but eclipse-like, it is obscured, and the actions of this administration have cast a kind of shadowy darkness over the land.
Though our sun is not setting, neither is it rising, nor will it rise of its own accord. In this respect, Franklin’s celestial metaphor falls short. We have no control over the sun. Our orbit has been predetermined by forces well beyond our time and understanding. We are powerless to change its trajectory. But we are not powerless to change our own. We are not powerless to save our country, to remember who we are, to once again capture the imagination, the hopes, and aspirations of a weary mankind.
Our sun, America’s sun, will rise again and shine brightly unto ourselves and to all nations. But it will take all of us, working together and well into the future, to make it so. Until then, we must press on, doing all we can to mitigate the harms of the current administration until we can end them, until we can bind up our nation’s wounds as Lincoln said, and begin again the sacred work of restoring the very best of America.
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