Ruben Gallego
Appearances
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
Look, it's always a blessing, man. Like that. Yeah. You know, it's a hard situation, but I get to say that I'm a U.S. senator. And if you kind of look at where I started in life, all things aside, and I never even ended up, you know, being in Congress. And the fact I get to be the first Latino U.S. senator from Arizona is pretty cool. Yeah.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
I'm more alarmed. Look, I kind of saw some of the autocratic bullshit that he's doing ahead of time, but not at the level that he's doing it now. I... kind of foresaw some of this stuff when it comes to the government cuts, firing of these workers, but not the way they're doing it right now. And then some of the stuff, I'm just like, what the hell is going on here?
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
The cuts to the VA, cuts to firing all these veterans. This is the kind of stuff that makes no logical sense, makes no political sense, and just tells me he might be out to lunch when it comes to a lot of this stuff.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
Well, because most Americans actually agree with what the president's doing on immigration. And that's actually one area where he's still polling well. He's still at 54% to 55%. And one of the things that we have to focus on are, and I talk about this all the time, it's like, when we fight on the grounds of immigration, let's fight smartly, right?
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
So we should talk about the fact that we have, for example, a stylist who has no contact with criminal world that was deported without due process, right? That's a really good example. But to overall argue that we shouldn't be deporting criminals to El Salvador, I think it's a very dumb argument that will politically, it's not going to win.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
Because if you talk to a lot of people and you tell them like, hey, should we be deporting these hardcore criminals to another country since we can't hold them in jail here anymore? A lot of people are going to say, absolutely. Now, if you add, can we do that without due process? That's when people understand like, no, obviously we need to have due process.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
Due process is important, obviously, not just for the immigrants. It's also important for United States citizens because you will see, unfortunately, from my experience, you will see US citizens get wrapped up in this kind of stuff without due process. So we have to be very smart about how we fight when it comes to issues of immigration and border security. I think a lot of what we want to do
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
will sound very good on a little circle and bubble. But when you get out and talk to real America, including Latinos, they're going to agree a lot with what Donald Trump is doing. And we have to figure out a way to kind of get in there with a precision strike of a good argument that kind of keeps our morals together, but also allows us to have some type of ability to bring these voters back to us.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
It's designed to be different. It's designed for you to get into this fight with him Instead of focusing on the fact that he's deporting mothers and children, the fact that he is causing a lot of foreign students that usually are great contributors to our economy to be missing, he wants you to fight him on this. There's a reason why this is all happening right now.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
He wants us to be talking about these majority of them Venezuelan gang members that got sent over there. And he wants us to get into his nitty gritty. So we have to have arguments in public about due process, knowing that the American public understands almost zero of it, right? Don't get into the trap.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
This is like, if you see an ambush coming, you have no responsibility to actually walk into that ambush, right? And this is just my personal advice to Democrats. Fight your fight. Talk about dreamers. Talk about the fact that there's this Colombian couple that's been here for 30 years that was recently deported who had no criminal history whatsoever. Talk about green card holders.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
But don't jump into the fight where they want you to fight. They're doing this on purpose. They're doing this on purpose.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
Exactly. How do you know that it's citizens that aren't being rounded up and taken away without punishment? Well, they shouldn't be taken away because it needs to stay in the United States. You focus on the actual case. Don't get involved in this bigger fight that is very popular.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
I'm telling you right now, if you get into this fight over should we send people to the South or not, you're giving him the ground that he wants. Fight for the individual cases. Fight for the actual stylists that we're talking about. But if you try to get into this bigger argument, you're losing. And that's where they want you to be. They want you to be on that losing ground.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
Because then we have to explain due process. We have to explain why it's different for these gang members versus non-gang members. It's just not smart. We need to figure out how to fight so we can win, so we can stop this shit.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
I mean, they're more likely to cut Medicaid cuts. than they are to give up on tax cuts to the rich. I mean, that's their bread and butter. That's the whole reason of living for the Republican Party. But politically speaking, I mean, I was out in rural Arizona. I mean, this is the part of the state where you have to drive hours and hours in order to get to some cities, and they're not big cities.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
And in rural Arizona, people are worried because rural Arizona, 30% of rural Arizona is on Medicaid. So when you shut down or start throwing people off Medicaid, it's going to end up having huge impacts. Hospitals shut down, everything else like that. And... And people will know that the only reason they're doing this is to give tax cuts to the rich.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
So what I think they're going to try to do is they're going to end up doing a couple of things. Number one, they're going to try to shave Medicaid, see if they can politically get away with it by coming up with bullshit reasons why people should not be on Medicaid. Number two, they're going to try to change the law, the rule, as we call it here in the Senate,
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
and saying like, well, we don't actually have to justify these cuts. We actually don't have to find any further cuts. They're already existing in law. So who cares? Just keep expanding them, right? And that way they don't actually have to go and find somewhere else to cut. And And then the rich get their tax cuts.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
At the end of the day, we still end up getting screwed if you're working class because they're going to end up borrowing a ton of money. It's going to keep inflation higher. It's going to keep interest rates higher. And I think it's probably going to slow down the economy even more. So working class America is going to end up paying one way or the other for the tax cuts for the rich.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
Well, I mean, the strategy on the fight is we have to show why they're doing this. You talked about this. The only reason they want to do this is because they want to give their rich buddies, Elon Musk, more money. And the only way they're going to do that is they're going to gut the working class at some point.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
We need to try to give an oppositional view, a contradiction to that, something that actually people can talk about. I think the Democrats should be talking about you know, trying to bring a child tax credit instead of giving tax cuts to the rich. I think Democrats should be talking about a minimum wage that actually people can live on instead of giving tax cuts to the rich.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
This is the thing that we need to kind of be giving a viewpoint of what you can get is an alternative. So just being a party of no is not going to work. And just saying, hey, we're the party that's going to stand up for working class people. We don't actually introduce any real legislation to actually make people feel that that's the case is not going to be a winning message.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
And I think my lesson from the CR shutdown was a lot of lessons. But a lot of my colleagues felt uncomfortable because they felt that there was no messaging that could give them higher ground against the bully pulpit of Donald Trump.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
My argument to them was like, well, yeah, we got ourselves in this situation because we never actually had an affirmative oppositional view that people could actually jump on it and grab a hold. And I think that's what we need to really do when we get into reconciliation coming up.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
I think... A lot of us showed our frustration and were very clear what direction the party was heading unless we were listened to. And I think they're listening now.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
I'm going to sound like I'm just going to be repeating their shit again. I haven't read the book yet, so I can't plagiarize. I think it's very simple. Number one, the problem that we have is we have a lack of energy, right? And we need to make sure that when we take power, we use power. What does that look like? A, actually fundamentally changing people's lives for the better.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
And right away, I would do a good minimum wage increase, $15, $17, whatever it is. Peg it to inflation automatically so it keeps growing every year. Child tax credit, as I said, $200, $300 per family. Everyone that's making less than, I'd say, $100,000, $120,000 a year. for childcare.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
I mean, right now, it's more expensive for you to send your kid to childcare than it is to pay for tuition, in-state tuition for most universities. Let's just give direct childcare subsidies to families to take care of that, to take care of their kids. These are the kind of impactful things we should be doing right away. I think we should help do a credit buster.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
There's so many people right now that are paying off credit card debt that they were living off of inflation. During inflation, they basically survived by putting on credit card debt. Now they're carrying the highest amount of credit card debt in the history of this country. We should help these families at least pay off a good chunk of their credit card debt.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
Now, that could just be a direct subsidy to them, but that would be a huge relief. We need to get... Americans to understand when you elect Democrats, good shit happens and I feel better, right? It's that simple. And a lot of times we get into these very kind of like wonky bureaucratic process that we think we'll end up getting credit for and we never, ever, ever do.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
And that's the one time I can tell you like my family, working class family remembers, especially not my direct family, but my sisters and my cousins, they finally remember when they were all getting the child tax credit. And that's what they remember at Democrats as being good, right? So having a real focus on an energetic response really to the needs of working class America would be huge.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
Something that every time there's an election, like Democrats got me this, right? That's it.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
I hate to be the Cassandra here, but I was telling this to people in the administration from day one that they were too focused on, first of all, infrastructure. Every president runs on infrastructure. Do they pass it? Do they not? But no one ever gets credit for it.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
If you look at even the unions that benefited from infrastructure ended up voting for Trump, I think we have to understand that unless people feel it, then it's not real, right? You can talk all you want about the quick chargers for electric vehicles that run across the whole country, but unless somehow someone sees it and how it affects them, they're not going to fit.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
You could talk about the IRA and all this kind of stuff, but until you actually see the results, it's not going to impact you. One of the things that was really messed up by the IRA, people forget, is that a lot of the stuff that really, really, really had impact For example, the negotiations for Medicare prescriptions, drugs.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
The other one is, for example, bringing down the overall costs of what people have to pay if you're a senior on Medicare to $2,000 a year capped. None of that started until 2026. It was whenever they were negotiating the stuff that would be actually impactful to people, I think purposely it was put off so it would actually not have any real impact on people's life until after the election.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
And when Biden and his administration were negotiating this, I think they were just happy to take the victory and walk away. And they should have realized that it was a whole thing, was one big setup because we ended up creating a trillion dollar bill that no one really felt the effects of right away. And I think that probably cost us a lot of the election right there.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
I don't want to get involved in this little California civil war. Most people don't really care about parties. This whole it's toxic versus not toxic, that's like a bunch of political scientists, pundits, and they're all talking... If you want to change the opinion that people have for the Democratic Party, we need to start winning. That's it, right?
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
The reason we're right now clinical at stock is because we lost, right? And once we start having some wins, we start having some people actually, I think, showing what the Democratic Party is in a real personal way for people running for office, the presidential candidates are coming up, everything else like that, then I think we'll get our mojo back.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
But some of the stuff that we're doing right now is just kind of, you know, it's like public therapy, I guess, when we should really just be focusing. And I'm all for therapy, don't get me wrong. But I really think we should be focusing on just like trying to figure out how to like immediately bring wins, wins, wins. So just from my experience in Arizona, Arizona, it's always been a swing state.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
What happened in Arizona for many years when we started winning elections, Democrats, because we started in a momentum of just winning. And eventually the message in Arizona, especially among voters, was like, oh, damn, these Democrats, they know how to win in Arizona. So there was always this excitement. And, you know, right now we just don't have that. We need a couple of wins under our belts.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
We need to make sure that we're really showing who we're fighting for. And I think that's where we get our momentum back. But like these kind of like sniping that politicians do to each other, it's cute, but it doesn't really make a big difference, I think.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
Yeah, I was going to say, if it's not regulated, you should be skeptical of it. The fact is, crypto is here to stay no matter what, right? It's either going to be a US-based economy, or it's going to be overseas. If we could bring it here, base it here, and regulate it to American standards, it's going to be a fine asset, right? If we don't do that, it will be a bunch of rug pulls.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
It will be a bunch of pump and dump projects. whether it's stocks, meme coins, whatever it is, that's actually what's going to happen. I think if we could bring this here, have it regulated under our US systems where you could get prosecuted, you have to have transparency, you have to have consumer protection, I think that's the better way to go. Are we there yet? No.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
This is what Congress is really working on to make sure we get to that point. But it is better than what is going to exist right now. Because right now, it runs the gamut. It can be legitimate Bitcoins down to meme coins that are being hawked by anybody just to kind of do a quick sale and get out. So I would rather have it regulated under US systems than not. But right now, it's really not.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
And it's only going to get worse if we don't bring it into, I think, US compliance.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
My role right now is to kind of bring some hard truths to the party, right? And look, I won a very hard race. And Latinos started moving away from the party. Latino males started moving into the party. And what I saw in past campaigns is that a lot of times people just kind of want to whistle past the graveyard. And I want to make sure the Democrats have a fighting chance.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
Our only fighting chance is two. Number one, we need to bring Latinos back into our fold. And as the numbers we said before, and we have to have a fighting chance with men, right? Not that we're going to win it, but we have to do better and stop sliding away.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
I think my role right now is to be that person that is unafraid and willing to have conversations with fellow Democrats and be honest about, do we want to win or do we want to feel good? Because sometimes they don't align. And for me, I want to win to make sure that we can protect our families, our most vulnerable communities, our standing in the world.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
And sometimes that means we're going to have to piss off people within our tent, not on purpose, but in order for us to win. And I think we have to – my job right now is to kind of have those conversations. And if anybody that wants to run for president – wants to talk to me about that, I'm gladly sit down. I'll talk to you from my perspective. I'm here. I'm a good Democrat.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
I want to make sure Democrats win in four years. And that's going to be my focus.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
I mean, this is going to, it's kind of a loaded question. For those that want to see a path forward, they're keeping their minds open and coming and talk to me. I think, you know, I've, I have ruffled some feathers, to be honest. I know I did something wrong or right.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
I did something right because sometimes when I do something, I'll get it both from the left and the right on Twitter and social media. And I think there are some people from a more liberal bent that are mad at me And again, I do this all with love. I want us to win. I want Democrats to be competitive.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
And some of that, we have to have a very realistic view of what the world looks like and what these voters want. And sometimes it doesn't align. Our primary voter is very different from a general election voter. And it's very easy for us to make our primary voter happy and then lose the general election. I just don't want to see us doing that again. And this is why...
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
And because it has consequences. What happens when we lose? And I think it's not going to get any better. The next Republican that wins will do just exactly what Donald Trump is doing. And so we have to win elections from here on out. And that means that if I have to guide some of my friends in a way that makes sure we win general elections, I'm going to do it. And that may tick off some people.
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Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term
But we have to win. Not winning has really bad consequences on this country, as we can tell. Yeah.