Donald J. Trump is headed back to the White House for a second term, Republicans will control the Senate, and if they win a majority in the House of Representatives, they will control all three branches of government: the Executive, the Legislature, and the Judiciary. In the 2024 presidential race, the support holding up Democrats’ “blue wall” in 2020 crumbled, and a MAGA-led “red wave” swept large portions of the electoral map. What the hell happened? And what happens now? How did Democrats lose so soundly, how did Republicans pull off such sizable wins? In this urgent episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with Congressman Jamie Raskin, a Democrat representing Maryland’s 8th District, about how Kamala Harris and the Democrats lost to MAGA, how to address the dangerous political divides in the US today, and what we need to be prepared for with a second Trump administration. Studio / Post-Production: David Hebden Transcript The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible. Marc Steiner: Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s wonderful to have you all with us. My guest this hour is Congressman Jamie Raskin, who represents Maryland’s eighth District. He’s been in Congress for four terms now. He was chosen by the Democratic caucus to be the ranking member of the House Committee on oversight and accountability, and has been a fighter for justice his whole life. And before he was a congressman, he was a three term state senator, and I won’t tell you how old he was when I first met him. Jamie, good to see you. Rep. Jamie Raskin: It’s great to be with you, mark. It really is, Marc Steiner: And I wish this was a way we were talking about something more upbeat, but given the election that we’ve just gone through, just on a personal note, I mean, how shocked and taken aback for you that Trump won and it was such a loss? Rep. Jamie Raskin: Well, I’d been to 27 states in the campaign, and I suppose it gives you a little bit of a distorted view because I was appearing at Democratic Party County dinners and state dinners and canvas kickoffs, rallies and so on. And I saw such exuberance and such energy and such determination and fight that I was taken aback by what happened. And it’s obviously going to take us a while to sort through everything to figure out exactly why it happened, but obviously the country is deeply divided and we beat them by, I guess 7 million votes in 2020. And here it looks like we’ll lose by a few million votes and in the electoral college, but we have to figure out a way to get through all of the bad vibes in the deadlock in the country, and I’m committed to do that. I was thinking about a letter, a favorite letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend of his named John Taylor during the time of the Alien Sedition Acts. And he said, A little patience in the reign of witches will pass over their spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight recover, restore the government to its true principles. And we must have patience because when the game runs against us sometimes, because this is a game where principles are at stake, and that’s kind of the way I feel the human inclination is to feel intense frustration and anguish about a loss like this. And we got to analyze it. But in the sweep of history, this too shall pass and we just got to keep moving forward. Marc Steiner: Before I come back to the questions about the deadlock and what the future might bring, immediately we are faced with an incoming government that will have JD Vance, RFK Jr, Vivek Swami in critical leadership roles, people who are on the edge, people who have an extremely conservative and right wing kind of bent because for all my time covering Donald Trump and the right in this country, which I’ve done for years, Donald Trump is like the madman figurehead, but it’s these people around him that are actually the ones who are going to begin to create the policies to change the nature of the country. Rep. Jamie Raskin: Yeah, it’s like a bunch of Batman villains. It’s like the Joker and the Riddler and the Penguin, and they all have their particular specialties they work on. Steven Miller is all about immigrant bashing and doing a roundup of undocumented people and deporting them from the country. JD Vance, I dunno, he’s a chameleon figure, but it’s some kind of culture war. I think he’s fighting. Others are in it for the plunder and the grift of the whole thing, but there’s not much of a program for the common good, and that’s what we’re all about. We’ve got to continue to uphold the public interest and try to defend everything that our grandparents and our parents have built in America like Social security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. We are going to be the real conservatives here trying to conserve the legacy of more than a half century of social struggle in the country. Marc Steiner: The election itself. I’m really curious, you’ve been through this a long time. You been in politics a long time, you’ve been state senator, US congressman. Why do you think the Democrats fell apart? Rep. Jamie Raskin: Well, I don’t know that the Democrats fell apart. I mean, that’s not quite the way I see it. Marc Steiner: How do you see it? Rep. Jamie Raskin: I feel like it was not enough to be defending freedom like women’s freedom, and it was not enough to be defending democracy. The constitutional system, the showdown struggle is going to be between progressive economic populism and right-wing authoritarian populism. And on that front, we obviously didn’t show up with a program that could appeal to a lot of working class guys who didn’t quite see what was in it for them. And I’ve seen some stuff that Bernie Sanders has been saying, and Bernie, to his credit, was really out there in the campaign and campaigning. But he has since the campaign been saying that there was not a strong progressive working class program, and we did not campaign on increasing the minimum wage and the right to organize and the right to strike and so on. I don’t think that’s any kind of magical cure to what ails us, but I do think that that is the entree into lots of young men who may have become the pivot, the lever in the end of the campaign for the Republicans. And they were running a very macho oriented campaign to turn out the young male vote, Marc Steiner: Which they did, Rep. Jamie Raskin: And they succeeded in doing that. Marc Steiner: Yeah. So I am curious, you’ve been at this a while and on the progressive end of the spectrum inside the Democratic Party, and what is it going to take to bring that party around? As I was watching all the ads and listening to the radio ads around the country and watching and how was all presented, A, it didn’t feel like there was a lot of fight inside those ads, and B, they didn’t at all begin to describe what you’re talking about this moment, which is appealing to the working class of America, appealing for kind of racial unity to really being out there as the fighters for a more just economic world in our country. I didn’t see, I mean that in some ways was flagrantly missing. Rep. Jamie Raskin: Well, I mean, here’s the big problem, and there’s nothing more tempting after an election than to criticize what other people did. And these are my people. I wasn’t running the campaign. I was a foot soldier out there. But if I could go back and change one thing, it would be this. I mean, we as the Economist magazine put it, our economy right now is the envy of the world. I mean the lowest inflation rate of the western industrialized countries. We’ve had 50 straight months of under 4% unemployment. Biden was handed a debacle by Donald Trump when he came in, and the Biden Harris administration did a great job. Now here’s the problem. The inflation that we had coming out of Covid with supply chain breakdowns and also with the multi-trillion dollar aid packages that both Democrats and Republicans voted for, there was an inflation. And I think that Biden did a good job, and the Fed did a good job of managing the inflation, but people still in an existential way felt the inflation. And that was an important part of what was going on out there. Here’s the way I see what the response was by our forces and what it should have been. The response was, well, we can’t tell people how great the economy is because they don’t feel it. And so it looks like we’re out of touch if we do that, and therefore we just have to say yes, we have to continue to wrestle inflation to the ground and so on. That’s not what the Republicans would’ve done an exact situation. What they would’ve done is partly what we should have done. We should have taken credit for the fact that the economy is roaring and that we have a great economy. But then we should have gone to the point you and I were just discussing a moment ago to say, but there’s way too much inequality in the society and the benefits and the gains of this roaring economy are overwhelmingly going to the billionaires, and that’s not right. And so we need to increase the minimum wage. We need to make sure that unions can collectively bargain. We’ve got to strengthen labor laws. We need to make an investment, as Kamala was saying in young people and their ability to purchase a house the first time and so on, but in other words, don’t run away from our success. And that was the part that was bumming me out about that people were saying, well, we don’t want to be celebrating or gloating about an economy that hasn’t filtered through to so many people. And I think the answer to that is we’ve done a great job on macro economics, but the Republicans have been fighting us every step along the way in terms of making sure that we’ve got greater economic equality in the country. So instead, we get the Republicans blaming us for the failures of their own policies and for all the inequality that they insist upon, and us not being able to take credit for the huge economic achievements that were actually made. Marc Steiner: And that’s what I was talking about earlier. That’s what I meant. I mean, for a moment, just speaking about that strategically, I kept looking at these commercials going, looking at the literature coming out, where’s the fight? Why aren’t you saying the things you just said? Rep. Jamie Raskin: Yeah, Marc Steiner: Right. And organizing on the ground, I mean, yeah. Rep. Jamie Raskin: And look, I’ll tell you what my rhetoric was out there about democracy, because that was obviously a critical component of the campaign. And in fact, it was the lead issue invoked by voters at the polls when they asked, what is your number one issue? Democracy was the lead issue. And it was invoked by huge numbers of Democrats, but even some people on the Trump side because Trump and his inimitable way just mimicked us to try to hold the rug out from under what we were saying. But here’s the thing about democracy, okay? Democracy is not just a static collection of institutions and practices. It’s partly that it is the right to vote, and it is representative institutions and so on. But democracy is always an unfinished project. It’s something that’s in motion. And Tocqueville understood this in democracy in America. He said that democracy is either growing and expanding or it’s contracting and subsiding, and we’ve been in this terrible contractionary mode with all the voter suppression tactics and the gerrymandering of our congressional districts and right-wing judicial activism. So on the democracy point, I think we needed to say, we are going to defend everybody’s right to vote. We are going to defend our political institutions, but we are also going to keep the project of democracy moving forward. The whole thing about the anti Puerto Rican racist joke, that would’ve been the perfect moment to say, now is the time to admit Puerto Rico is a state into the union. We got three and a half million disenfranchised Americans. We got 713,000 tax paying draftable Americans in Washington dc, the only residents of a national capital on earth who are not representing their own legislature. It’s time for DC statehood. That’s a genuine, bonafide political grievance. And they didn’t come down in the capitol and beat the hell out of our police officers and put people in the hospital and drive the members of the house and send it out of their chambers. They petitioned for statehood, and we should admit them. So the pro democracy message has got to be forward looking as well as defensive in Marc Steiner: Nature. So the little time we have left here, talk about your thoughts and analysis about what do you think is going to happen in this moment? You have JD Vance and Elon Musk, RFK Jr, all of them bright men, but really right wing rams. So what do you think is going to happen in the next six months to a year? You have Donald Trump and these really far right people managing the government taking over, and I’m just curious how you see the fight going on against that, and B, what do you think is going to happen? Rep. Jamie Raskin: Well, project 2025 lays out, I think, their big wish program, even though Trump repeatedly tried to disavow it and distance themselves from it, if they could do everything, they would do all of that. I mean, I’m concerned about the proposal of sacking 50,000 federal workers and replacing them with Trump sick events. A lot of those people live in Maryland and work for the Department of Energy and NASA and NOAA and NIH, and they want to gut the government functions they don’t agree with. They want to abolish the Department of Education and Head Start. So that’s going to be one front in their war. I think if Steven Miller has his way, they’ll start the way they did last time, which is with a war on immigrants because they think that scapegoat politics is the most successful form of right-wing authoritarian politics. So they will try their roundups and their deportations to create a climate of fear and intimidation in the society. And if RF Kennedy Jr goes in there and Trump said he would let him run wild when it comes to health and food, Marc Steiner: Right? Rep. Jamie Raskin: Drugs could be a war on fluoride in the water. And I mean, who knows where he takes it? So we’re going to have to defend science and reason along with democracy and the rule of law. Marc Steiner: So I’m curious how you think we fight that and how that is fought. I mean, the roots of the part of the Democratic Party, part of the roots of the party is unions and union organizing is the civil rights movement, is people fighting for civil liberties. There’s people trying to debunk the 1950s myth about fluoride in the water. So how do you organize the battle to save the country? Rep. Jamie Raskin: Well, look, we’ve been through this before. We are veterans in the battle, hardened champions of the Constitution and enlightenment and the democracy. And I think our main job is we’re going to have to be recruiting whole new generations of young people to get in the fight and to be ready to participate in it. Obviously, this is going to be a long-term struggle against these people. The good news is that if you look at the unfolding of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, you look at the unfolding of social legislation like Medicare and Medicaid and Social security, the National Labor Relations Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act. There’s a logic to all of it. There’s a reason to it. They’re coming in with a program which is a collection of conspiracy theory driven ideological at pet agendas like the Bobby can, like the anti-vaccine thing or deporting immigrants or build the wall. It’s a chaotic agenda. There’s no real reason to it. And each one of those things is so extreme and so outlandish. It could take all of the energy of their forces to try to get behind to do it, but they’re going to be trying to do all of them, and there’s going to be a succession struggle taking place. All of these people want to be the next whatever, GOP nominee running mate, they’re already talking about Donald Trump, like he’s yesterday’s news and they’re all rivals to take over the mega movement. And one thing that we’ve seen in the information we’ve gotten about how it operated before was that it was totally divisive and internet and warfare kind of stuff, because they’re not unified around a program for the common good. It’s all just a collection of people who have their own ambitions and agendas, whether it’s to make money off of the government, to plunder the government, to change the system of politics in America, to move away from democracy. I mean, there’s a lot of different forces contending over there. And we’re able to stand strong for the American Democratic experiment and for American freedom, which a lot of them have abandoned. So we, we’ve been through it and we are ready to organize to stop them. My campaign program, mark, as you know, is the Democracy Summer project. I spend no money on holsters polling tv, radio, direct mail, any of that stuff. It all goes into a school for young people. And the Democracy Summer Project, which started here in Maryland, is now nationwide. We were in 46 states in the 2020 election. We had more than 1500 young people spend the summer with us organizing, studying on the history of social movements and change in America, and then working on today’s problems like gerrymandering, like voter suppression, and then being involved in getting out the vote, canvassing, digital organizing, and so on. And I think that’s where the action is politically. Marc Steiner: So in the midst of what we face at the moment, you seem to come out a very positive note, but it seems to me what it takes is, is what I said a moment ago, organizing people, going out and building some kind of force to say, we are here and not going to let this happen. Rep. Jamie Raskin: And we are not without resources. We have tremendous resources to politically, socially, organizationally across the country. We have tens of millions of people, nearly half the people in the country voted with us, and we’ve just got to expand that coalition. But we really have to invest in new generations of organizers and leaders. Marc Steiner: Jamie, I know you have to run, and I appreciate this conversation and in a couple of weeks, we rejoin Councilman Jamie, were asking thanks for your work. Thanks for being here today, and good luck to us all. Rep. Jamie Raskin: Thank you so much, mark. Thank you. And I appreciate so much everything you do hang tough. Marc Steiner: You too. Once again, I want to thank Congressman Jamie Raskin for taking time out of his day to join us here at The Real News. And thanks to David Hebden for running the program today. Audio editor, Alina Nehlich for all of her Magic in audio producing was that Ali for producing the Marc Steiner Show and the tireless Kayla Rivara for making it all work behind the scenes. And everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at [email protected] and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you to Congressman Jamie Raskin for being our guest today. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved. Keep listening, and take care.