Rep. Greg Casar

It's just remarkable how much a culture of corruption has completely infected and taken over the entire Republican Party. Look, this is all part of the same story. They crash the marketplace.

and then open it up to insider trading so that, I don't know, members of Congress, K Street lobbyists, the billionaire donor buddies of Donald Trump can cash in after everybody's retirement accounts got screwed over.

They put out these sorts of crazy blanket tariff proposals, and then you've got the president's son out there basically saying, I'm here ready to accept bribes or a deal from foreign leaders and foreign oligarchs. They are same thing with the whole Doge scam. They are threatening your social security and your health care all in order to pay for billionaire tax cuts.

So at the end of the day, this is all about basically taking your hard earned money and giving it to themselves or funneling it to their buddies. That's all this is about.

What they have spent the last couple of days fighting about on the Republican side is how much to destroy your health care to pay for billionaire tax cuts, how much to destroy Social Security and the Veterans Administration in order to pay for billionaire tax cuts. Their one area of agreement, like you mentioned, is to give billionaires and the biggest corporations a tax cut.

So the summary of the Trump administration so far is that they are jacking up your prices at the grocery store. They're jacking up the prices of cars, jacking up prices across the board in order to pay for billionaire tax cuts. They are stripping your services in order to pay for billionaire tax cuts. And they want as many of your taxpayer dollars to go to billionaire tax cuts.

And then they throw in a little bit of variety with things like the bill they packaged in with the budget yesterday to say, oh, and we want your overdraft fees to go up. If you just happen to go pay a few dollars too much for something at the bank, we want the banks to take more of your money. So they they throw in a few other ways to make things cost more.

But at the end of the day, they believe that you pay taxes in order to make them and their friends rich. And they believe you need to work longer hours for less pay to make them and their friends rich. And maybe they could do a little bit of insider stock trading on the side.

Look, at the end of the day, I think this is an opening and an opportunity in the darkest hour for Democrats to again become the party of the everyday working person.

to put at the top of our agenda, getting big money out of politics, getting billionaires out of running our government, banning congressional stock trading and say, look, we've got to get rid of this unholy alliance between corrupt government and corporate greed. Break that tie for good.

And I think that is what can rebuild the Democratic Party at this moment and sweep us into office in the upcoming elections.

The biggest news that people at home need to know that maybe they haven't heard is that under the law, Donald Trump must fire Elon Musk within the next 50 days. There is this part of the law called special government employee status.

And Musk has been exploiting that loophole in the law in order to continue to funnel $8 million a day in federal government contracts to himself and to his companies while screwing everybody over. Well, the clock is ticking. And I just wrote a letter alongside over 75 other Democrats making it clear to Donald Trump. His days are just running out as a federal government employee.

The gravy train is coming to a stop. And over the next 50 days, we need the entire country to make some noise and say that in 50 days, Donald Trump has to fire Elon Musk. Otherwise, he's breaking another anti-corruption law and we just can't stand for it.

The pushback against what the Trump-Musk administration is doing, it's here. There was a little while right after Trump's election where he said, we didn't know if that movement would come. Well, that movement is here. And it wants a Democratic Party that is going to stand for working people no matter what. Period. Stop.

End of the day, we've got to take this moment to be the pro-working people, anti-billionaire party. And that is what I'm hearing all across the country. This message that I'm having here on Midas Touch is the exact same message I used on Fox News Live the other weekend. The exact same message I used on Univision in Spanish the next day.

The exact same message that I bring into Democratic districts, Republican districts, and purple districts. It's the kind of message that makes sense to the vast majority of the American people, which is you should work hard to be able to...

pay for the everyday things in your life, save a little bit of money and make sure that your kids can have a better life than you've got and be able to have a comfortable retirement. You shouldn't have to work and pay taxes in order to have a billionaire buy puppet politicians and make himself rich. That's wrong.

And that core democratic message, I think that brings so many of us together and brings back those voters that we lost to Donald Trump.

I have told them I'm open and ready to come on any given day. So I'm waiting for the invitation back. But in the meantime, I'm actually going to a Republican district that we just lost in Colorado. We had a great Democrat in that seat and we lost it here when Donald Trump won the presidency. I'm headed to that Republican area outside of Texas. I've been doing this in Texas.

I'm headed across the country to go speak to those independent and Republican and disaffected voters and let them know that we can be the kind of party that includes them. Because I believe that we may disagree on this social issue or that one, but at the end of the day, we should all be able to agree that the richest man on earth

should not be coming after veterans, should not be coming after social security, should not be coming after your healthcare just to make himself more rich. So I appreciate you having me on and we're going to keep up the message.

Look, on a roll, what I know is that when the ultra rich and special interests were on a roll in the 1920s and they started controlling the government, they crashed the economy and caused the Great Depression. When the ultra rich and the big banks were controlling the government, they were, quote unquote, on a roll and caused the Great Recession in 2008. And we've got to stop that role.

We can't let them do something like that again. And the only cure, the only solution to oligarchy is the actual power of working people. The only solution to want to be autocrats is more democracy. So we need more and more people to show up and speak out against Trump and Musk's abuses.

And when people speak out, we start to recognize we actually still do live in a democracy where we can have a real check and balance. on these billionaires, but it takes people being willing to organize and it takes elected officials of conscience being willing to stand up and fight.

That's actually what I've always found. I don't think that as progressives or as Democrats that we have to throw any vulnerable people under the bus or have to give up our ideas of equality. We can actually say, look, we may disagree on some social issues here or there, but on the core economic issues, think about who you would rather have on your side.

a person that cares about raising your wages, cutting your taxes, lowering costs, and taking on these big corporate oligarchs? Or do you want the Elon Musks of the world on your side? And so I'm going on this fight oligarchy tour with Senator Sanders and with Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez because we can expose what Elon Musk is doing to the everyday person. Look, here's how I put it to people.

Elon Musk and Trump want to share all these lies about Doge. but you can quickly explain Doge with just two numbers. First, $8 million a day. $8 million a day is how much Elon Musk collects in federal government contracts. And the second number you need to know is $65 a day. That's how much money your average senior that's worked their entire life gets from Social Security.

Elon Musk isn't looking to cut actual waste, fraud, and abuse from big pharma or from big tech or from his own $8 million a day, he's looking to cut your parents $65 a day they get in social security. Elon Musk has called social security a Ponzi scheme and billions of dollars that he wants to quote unquote eliminate. If you take that message out to working people,

Folks seem less like they're on the left or on the right and more that it's people that believe that we should be protecting Social Security. We shouldn't be protecting Elon Musk's eight million dollars a day. You know, folks have been working their entire life. They're not the parasites and the moochers. Elon Musk is the moochers.

That's the guy that's collecting eight million dollars a day and is in a corrupt way trying to gather even more money from the government for himself.

I think, you know, you can, another key two numbers. are that over 80% of Republican voters oppose these enormous cuts to Medicaid, but over 100%, not over 100%, but I'll say that again, over 80% of Republican voters oppose these massive cuts to Medicaid, but 100% of Republican members of Congress are trying to cut Medicaid right now. That's the enormous disconnect.

The enormous disconnect is that Republican officials aren't acting as Congress people representing their constituents. They're acting like Trump-Musk employees.

And that's the space that Democrats and activists really need to step into and go and tell folks that voted for Donald Trump that they were sold a lie and that they need to hear the real truth and be a part of a big tent that includes all different sorts of people.

And when you ask the question of why aren't people getting the message, why aren't they hearing the message, is that, sure, Democrats, I think, do need to improve our policies and improve our messaging.

But there's another big question that Democrats need to grapple with, which is, what if people aren't even hearing the words coming out of our mouths because we aren't being willing to pick a fight? What if we're not making politics interesting enough for people? We have to actually show people that we're willing to stand up and fight for them. We should be willing...

to name a villain, to say that Musk is corrupt, to say that Trump is breaking the law, to not just act as business as usual, because then are people even going to notice what we have to say? So I think Democrats have to recognize that we need to be willing to be confrontational and not do things business as usual. Otherwise, is anybody going to hear us?

So I want to talk some about being part of the stand and fight wing of the Democratic Party, not the play dead part of the Democratic Party, because a corpse is not very inspirational and many folks don't hear its message.

Yeah, what I want people at home to know is that Donald Trump and Elon Musk want you to feel powerless in this moment. Because if you decide there's just nothing we can do, this is just too much of a lost cause, then they win and they get to control everything.

And so it was people like you that after the ultra rich took over the economy in the 1920s, people like just like you watching at home, organized, elected FDR, the president, created Social Security and built the New Deal. It was people just like you.

that wouldn't give up when segregationists had a stranglehold on the Congress and fought back, won the Voting Rights Act, won the Civil Rights Act, but actually at the same time, that same term under a Texas president, we won the creation of Medicare and Medicaid and Head Start. So many of these things we're trying to create. So right now in this moment of real despair, we cannot just give up.

And I think it's an actual moment for us to say, look, this fight against oligarchy, which we've been fighting as a country since the inception of the country. This is an exceptional moment because the billionaires aren't trying to run the government behind a curtain hiding anymore. They're bragging about it in public. They're playing golf at Mar-a-Lago.

They are doing the corruption when the lights and cameras are on and when they're off. So this is a real time to expose that corruption and build the kind of movement, not just to stop Trump and Musk's abuses, but to win a big enough majority to make things really better in the country and start turning things around.