Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is one of just 13 Democrats to represent a district that Donald Trump won. Her distinctive economic message, and a willingness to buck her own party, helped her win re-election. But now the reality of the Trump era is coming home.Gluesenkamp Perez faced raucous crowds at town halls in Washington State recently, with some of her more liberal constituents furious that she isn’t opposing the administration more forcefully. At the same time, the White House has started making economic arguments that sound very similar to ones that she’s made – that we should consume less, produce more and import less stuff from abroad.So I wanted to talk to her about how she’s navigating this moment. What does she think of Trump’s economic agenda? What reactions is she seeing across her district? How does a Democrat now represent both terrified liberals and loyal Trump voters?This episode contains strong language.Book Recommendations:The Wheelwright’s Shop by George SturtExperiences in Visual Thinking by Robert H. McKimChildren’s poetry anthologies from Jack PrelutskyThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.htmlThis episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal and Kristin Lin. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Switch and Board Podcast Studio. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What challenges does Marie Gluesenkamp Perez face as a Democrat in a Trump district?
You go back a couple of decades in American politics, and it is extremely common to have members of the House who represent a district that was won at the presidential level by the other party. But year by year, election by election, it's becoming a lot less common. At this point, only a handful of Democrats represent districts that Donald Trump won.
But one of them is Marie Glusenkamp-Perez from Washington's 3rd District. And Glusenkamp-Perez doesn't sound like other Democrats. She's a pretty different economic philosophy they do, one built around the right to repair, built around, I would say, a moral critique.
of what our economics has come to look like, who we value, what we value, the way we have lost respect for those who work with our hands, and the economy has become profoundly imbalanced towards a consumerism away from a producerism, which makes it particularly interesting in this moment. Because all of a sudden,
People in the Trump administration began saying kind of similar things, that we should be making so much more at home, that we're addicted to cheap stuff from abroad, that we're on a sugar-high economy, that we need to detox.
So let's talk a little bit about what we believe in the Republican Party. We believe that a million cheap knockoff toasters aren't worth the price of a single American manufacturing job.
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Chapter 2: How does the economic philosophy of Marie Gluesenkamp Perez differ from mainstream Democrats?
If they had a choice between a doll from China that is not as well constructed as a doll made in America, and those two products are both on Amazon, that yes, you probably would be willing to pay more for a better made American product.
The market and the economy have just become hooked. We've become addicted to this government spending, and there's going to be a detox period.
Tariffs are about making America rich again and making America great again, and it's happening, and it will happen rather quickly. There'll be a little disturbance. But we're okay with that?
For a lot of Democrats, this is a pretty easy moment in economic policy for them. The tariffs are causing all this upheaval. Donald Trump is less popular than he was when he was elected by a lot. Simply opposing him is enough. But if you're someone like Lucincap Perez and your marginal voter is a Trump voter... Well, how does this look to you? How has it changed your politics?
I was curious to see how she was absorbing it. Things have gone a little bit weirder in her district. There have been some very raucous town halls. So how is she thinking about what Donald Trump represents and the broader economic arguments she's been making as the politics of this begin to come into direct conflict with reality? As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of Trump's tariffs on local communities?
Congresswoman Marie Glusenkamp-Perez, welcome to the show.
Thank you. Glad to be here.
So I wanted to start with a clip of President Donald Trump from Wednesday talking about China and his tariffs.
When will you speak to President Xi of China? That'll happen. Look, right now, and I told you before, they're having tremendous difficulty because their factories are not doing business. They made a trillion dollars with Biden, a trillion dollars, even a trillion won with Biden selling us stuff. Much of it we don't need. Somebody said, oh, the shelves are going to be open.
Well, maybe the children will have $2 instead of $30. And maybe the $2 will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally. What did you think of that?
Well, you're talking to a lady that doesn't give my child toys. I'm a big believer in dirt and string and sticks. But at a broader level, tariffs are a tool. A tool can be used destructively or it can be used productively. And it depends on how it's wielded.
You know, talking to folks back home who really don't care at all about most politics, you know, they have very sophisticated views on Canadian lumber dumping practice. We've lost seven mills in my area. Last year, I think it's about seven. We want domestic manufacturing. We want self-sufficiency. We want the ability to make things ourselves.
I think it's a mistake to sort of defend our identity around being just consumers and not producers as well. But these reciprocal trade deals, it's a backroom deal for multinationals. How it's used is what matters.
It's one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you about the tariffs, because in a way, members of the Trump administration have moved to making a critique that I think of as something that you've argued at times and that many people argue, which is that over decades, we became somewhat addicted to cheap stuff from China, that we lost values that we should have had in terms of what we want in the economy.
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Chapter 4: How do constituents perceive the balance between cheap goods and local production?
Do they feel like people who are like hijacked arguments you make for something completely different? Like when you think about that economic philosophy that you've been trying to push in Washington, how have you processed both the sort of overlaps and the contradictions?
Well, I'm pretty focused on my community and what we want and what we believe. And yeah, I think people have pretty nuanced views. I mean, the specifics really matter. One thing that's weird is like watching the Democratic Party suddenly become the defenders of the stock market and like NASDAQ. That's a weird thing to me.
And I think the question is not like what the nominal picture of wealth in these terms are, but how much economic agency and self-determination we have. Do you have the power to stay home and spend time with your family? Or are you working three jobs? Are you able to own a home, to own land, own farmland? Or are you stuck in a cycle of perpetual running that you don't want to be in?
Do you have the right to make your own stuff? Do you have a level playing field to start your own business? Those are the questions. And so that's kind of the lens that I think about these bigger international arguments on trade through. It's like, what is worth having at the end of the day? What do people really want?
Well, maybe we want contradictory things. I think on the economy specifically, I think we want plentiful cheap goods and And I think we want the self-determination, the resilience, an economy that values and rewards production in exactly the way you say. And I always think of one of the real problems for politics as being the collision of those two things.
People want policies that will get us to that self-determination and sovereignty. But then, I mean, we saw this a bit during the Biden administration. If you begin to see the price of things at the grocery store go up, people get pissed real quick.
Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, under NAFTA, there's this argument presented to the American public of like, well, you're not going to have jobs anymore, but you have a bunch of cheap crap. And then when people don't have the cheap stuff and they don't have the jobs, it accelerates into a really profound anger. And I think kind of a righteous anger.
And so, you know, one point is like, we don't just want cheap stuff. We want stuff that will last, right? I mean, I think that was one of the issues with the CHIPS Act is it's like, well, what's driving the chip shortage? Like, do I want a washing machine that can play Tchaikovsky or do I want a washing machine that will last more than three years? My washing machine is from 1997.
My stove is from 1954. And I think about how many times that has been bought and sold on Craigslist, like how much durable wealth that's created in the middle class. Not just because people were paid a living wage in America to make those things, but because then they held value and created value for the household who owned them. And then they were sold and bought and sold and bought and sold.
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of localism in modern politics?
And when you think of the cities and you represent partially a city, like they're not going to work without trash pickup. You know, I'm not necessarily here to defend single cup yogurt servings.
But some of this is a kind of marvel of modernity that does have remarkable benefits and has allowed us to live in different ways and ways that are look like I have this sort of distinction to sometimes make between green and gray environmentalism. And there's ways of living deeply in harmony with the world around you.
And then there's ways of living that are very unharmonious with the world around you aesthetically, but they're actually quite light footprint. Living in a pretty tall high rise is in many ways quite good for the environment because you just have a lot more economies of scale in the heating and a bunch of other things.
Yes, there are economies of scale, but often they can exclude the fuller reality. Like, yes, there is a modern convenience, but is the climate better? Are we happier? Are we healthier? Do we have what we actually want? Or has it been supplanted? And yes, I would like to have trash service, but would I like to have trash service enough to move to a city? No.
I very much take the point that you don't want trash service to move to a city. And I think that that's totally fair. But what do you think and how do you talk to your constituents who do?
Oh, that's great. Like if you want to live in a city like you should live. Yeah. It's also true. Like you could put an apartment building in a rural town and a lot of people would get a lot of utility out of that. But I think one of the things that is missed frequently in this discussion is that like the shift to.
service economy or a knowledge economy means that now your barber has to move to a city where they're not able to afford housing. When you have domestic manufacturing, if you're a mill in a rural community, you're able to own land. You're able to spend time with your family. I'm not trying to like slight the urban issue, but I think it's that divorce from
the farms you rely on, from the water that you drink, from being able to ship your garbage somewhere else and not have to smell it yourself. It changes your relationship to the natural world around you. And if you're not clear about that and those relationships, you're losing something necessary.
I think you're losing something profound. Something that you've been involved in recently is the revival of the Blue Dog Democrats. And I think for my younger audience who sort of doesn't remember the Blue Dogs of the 90s, that was sort of traditionally the more moderate Democratic coalition. And it may still be that now.
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Chapter 6: How does Marie Gluesenkamp Perez address the disconnect between urban and rural needs?
We're going to stop harvesting timber. But hey, here's a grant that you could apply for if you're nice to me. Maybe I'll give you money. That's not what people want. People want self-determination agency. And I think it presupposes a hierarchy that's pretty offensive to a lot of people I know that you're going to tell me I have a problem and that you're the one that knows how to fix it.
It's this masturbatory interest in policy without a reality of implementation or local localism. You can't be all brain and no muscle. They're equally necessary to have a healthy body. And there is also a false dichotomy, like, you know, not everything worth knowing you can learn in a book. Like, we don't all want to go to college.
Like, don't tell me we need to go to college to be useful and to be self-realized, self-actualization or whatever. Like, we can know things and be in the world in a way that is not strictly capturable by a—or capturable at all by, like, a spreadsheet, right? Yeah.
So this is why I started in this Trump quote, because something to me really interesting and strange is happening in politics and economic politics right now. Look, Donald Trump has been for decades the living, breathing embodiment of materialist excess. And Republicans probably have been quite free trade and very excited about cheap stuff from all over the world.
Democrats have been a little bit more, generally speaking, pro-tariff and a little bit more skeptical. And even during the campaign, Trump is running aggressively on the cost of living, how much everything costs, how much things would be at the Walmart.
And as he's sort of layered on these tariffs, you've begun seeing this other argument that was sort of burbling around the edges of, I would call it the new right for a while, get more central.
And all of a sudden, Donald Trump is talking about how we have too much cheap stuff in this country and kids shouldn't have all these dolls and we're too materialistic and we're not valuing the right things. And the Democratic Party and liberals in the Democratic Party become very pro-free trade, which is not their traditional stance. And you're watching this thing reorient really fast.
And I mean, Trump is good at that. He sort of reorients politics around him. But when you watch this and you talk about the Democratic Party becoming the party that is defensive of the line on the stock market, how have you just experienced this? Do you feel like your allies are changing?
Do you feel – I guess I asked this in a way before, but do you feel like your critique is being hijacked for something that doesn't really serve it? There's something changing around you. I don't think you're changing that much, but something is changing around you. Yeah. And people are talking in a way they didn't speak before. How do you take it?
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Chapter 7: What does Marie Gluesenkamp Perez think of the current Democratic Party's direction?
So we wean ourselves off a lot of cheap crap and we make it here. And if that means things cost more, And if that means you can't have things, good. Like it's time for you to like pick up, start making things here again, and like get over this neoliberal delusion that we can have, you know, everything shipped in from another continent at half price.
I mean, the tariffs will go up and they'll go down, but like, is that right? Is he right about, is he going about it wrong? Is he right on half of it? I mean, this is a big policy, right? This is not weirdo Washington stuff. Like we're all going to feel this. Like it's going to affect every store in the country.
I think most of us in my community share a lot of those sentiments. When they shut down the paper mills, congratulations, now we're packaging everything in plastic, disposable plastic from Saudi Arabia. And we got wildfires at home because there's no value in the residual, in the slash piles.
So I would say the policy position can't just be anti, anti, anti, anti, but saying, all right, what is it going to take to build manufacturing? It's going to take permitting reform. It's going to take some antitrust work. It's going to take shop class and junior high. It's going to take the elite reevaluating and acknowledging the nobility of manufacturing
People in the trades and the reality of like dirty hands, clean money. So I think it would be a mistake to just be like anti, anti, anti. But instead saying, all right, like if this is the thing they're going to do, like how do we harness it in a way that is productive in the long term for having the things that we actually want?
Tell me a bit more about what that looks like. I hear you on permitting reform. I mean, the argument the Biden administration used to make was we are trying to compete with China by building our capacity here. We'll put tariffs on a limited number of things from China, electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels, things like that.
And we will invest a bunch in domestic manufacturing capacity and infrastructure. And that's going to get us where we need to go. Then you have Trump who says, no, what we need to do is actually just make the things unaffordable. And that's what's going to get us where we need to go. What would you keep from the two approaches or would you keep nothing from them?
When you say it should be a positive agenda, what should that agenda look like?
Well, I mean, a reevaluation that like there's been this like obsession with technology and the next like whatever lobbyist is in your office, like shilling, you know, triple glazed, argon filled windows and a blindness to the actual skilled trades of like, yeah, you know what? You get a shit ton of you put the long side of your house facing south. You put an eve on it.
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Chapter 8: How can Democrats create a positive policy agenda that resonates with voters?
That is where things should look first if you're trying to decrease the carbon footprint of the American basket of goods. It's not just like what feels good or what's like a virtue signaling, but like what is the actual absolute value you can get.
Tell me about some of the divisions over sort of these ideas or Trump in your district right now. You've had some very raucous town halls recently, and you've got these voters who are both the voters that Democrats win reliably and the voters that Republicans win reliably. Like you have a like a very you have a bigger coalition and a more complicated coalition behind you than most Democrats have.
And you have urban and rural voters in your district. So how are the different constituents you come into contact with experiencing this moment differently?
Yeah. So six out of seven counties are highly rural. You have Vancouver is kind of the big city. Vancouver, Washington is the big city in my district. And it's voted for Trump three times in a row. I outperformed Trump and Harris in the last election. And so, yeah, I have a unique coalition. I have a very independent community.
So I think, like I was saying before, where it's like 8% here and 8% on the other side, but like most of us feel like It's all sound and fury and nobody actually gives a shit about our lives. The kind of unglamorous, deep, bitter erosion of fentanyl addiction and farm consolidation and job loss. I really believe in showing up. I do town halls in all my counties. I've done 15 now.
And I think it's really important that people know that you're available and accountable and present and meeting them where they are. And when I'm talking to people, I kind of in my head, I have these two buckets of like, was this person paid to talk to me or do they have to get a babysitter to come here?
And I weight the input proportional to reflect like how many people in my community are paid to engage in politics.
What do you mean by paid to engage in politics?
like a lobbyist or somebody that's a director, you know, they're paid to be in government relations. They're paid, they're on the clock when they show up in my office. And if somebody had to like take time off work to come talk to me, I take that really seriously. And I try to spend my time going out and talking to them, like going to where they're at to be available.
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