(soft music) - [Pamela] Tonight, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.

- It sounds like you're saying Republicans are just better at politics and political messaging.

- They are.

(soft music) - [Michelle] Then, how nature transformed one Rhode Island artist.

- When I moved here, I realized I had no interest to begin in the studio.

It was like the studio was outdoors.

(soft music) - [Pamela] And the Rhode Island house says no to Governor McKee's proposed cabinet raises with Ted Nesi.

(playful music) (playful music continues) Good evening and welcome to "Rhode Island PBS Weekly."

I'm Pamela Watts.

- And I'm Michelle San Miguel.

We begin tonight with federal funding cuts and politics.

It seems every day there's a new headline about slashing support for medical research, climate change, and Medicaid among others.

- And as we've been reporting, many of the programs now struggling to survive are right here in Rhode Island.

President Trump says his administration's cuts to government spending are reducing waste and fraud.

But Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse told Ariandonis that what's happening is very different from Trump's stated goal of making America great again.

- Is President Trump gonna succeed in remaking America in his vision?

- He's doing damage that is gonna be very hard to repair.

So if that's remaking it in his vision, I guess, you know, it's easier to wreck a house than it is to build one.

But I do think he's gonna leave areas of lasting damage.

If you meet with the four star who leads AFRICOM, he'll say that USAID was pretty essential to the success of their military mission on the African continent.

And all that just got torn apart.

And when the people leave, when the contractors are gone, when the on ground people who had been working with USAID have had to go find other things to do, it's very hard to rebuild networks in those areas.

And the more dangerous the area, the greater the difficulty of rebuilding the network.

So that's a tough one.

- There's concern in Rhode Island about cuts to research funding.

What is the way back if the efforts of Elon Musk and DOGE have damaged the capacity of the government and research funded by the government?

- Why on earth would you want to interrupt the experts who tell us what weather is coming at us?

I mean, some of this stuff is really self-injurious, it's bizarre behavior.

- Do you and your democratic colleagues bear part of the responsibility for not acting sooner to address?

Certainly there is waste and fraud, but you know, this has been an issue that has been present for a long time.

How come Democrats haven't, didn't seize the initiative in going after this?

- Well, I think first of all, the waste, fraud and abuse logo that the Trump regime is imposing on its campaign of destruction is essentially a fraud.

Perfect example, social security.

They claim that there's all this fraud in social security, that there are people who are collecting social security at 130, 140 years old.

The president repeatedly went to it during his big speech to Congress as if it were real.

- According to the Social Security databases, are age over 160 years old.

(audience chattering) We have a healthier country than I thought, Bobby.

- None of it is real.

It's not a Ponzi scheme.

The whole thing is strategically designed, I believe, to cause people to have second thoughts about social security, to derogate Social Security as a program.

So that when they then put their, I call them the muskrats, the little muskrats that went into Social Security to screw things up, when they screw things up so much that then there's an interruption in benefits, now you've got an interruption in benefits, you've got a public, at least a large part of it thinks, you know, maybe there's something wrong with Social Security.

You've got the perfect moment to make your move to privatize Social Security to turn it over to the private equity guys and the tech bros. And so I think sometimes there's some real strategy at work behind the fakery of this being about fraud, waste, and abuse.

If they were serious about fraud, waste, and abuse, why are the first people they fired the inspector general who spent all day ferreting out fraud, waste, and abuse?

- Part of the wrap on the Democratic Party is that it's been overtaken by elites.

You're kind of an elite guy.

You come from old railroad money.

- Yeah.

- You went to Yale.

You belong to an exclusive beach club here in Newport.

How do you respond to the view that elites hold too much sway over the Democratic party?

- I think the issue with the Democratic Party, in my view, was very clearly a lack of fight and a failure to defend against Republican efforts to paint us as the party that only cared about trans kids and not about the economy, for instance.

- Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.

- We care a lot about the economy.

We want everybody treated fairly, absolutely, but we also care a lot about the economy.

But we got barrage with ads that made us look like we only cared about one or two or three things, and we let that happen.

Again, I think it's very hard to be in a political fight and be characterized by your adversaries as X and then spend your time saying, no, we're not X.

That still leaves X as the topic.

What you need to have is your own set of topics that you fight on.

- It sounds like you're saying Republicans are just better at politics and political messaging.

- They are.

- If that's the case, what do Democrats need to do differently?

- Well, part of it is institutional.

You know, the Republicans have had built for them by their billionaire funders a massive apparatus.

The apparatus that captured the court, the apparatus that has propped up climate denial, and misled the American public about what we're looking at.

The apparatus that runs the dark money.

They are rich with apparatus.

- [News Anchor] White House says Democrats should have brought the fight on climate change, anonymous corporate campaign contributions, ethics questions involving the Supreme Court and what he calls a corrupted tax code.

- Our tax code is corrupted and rotten, turned upside down for special interests.

People would've thought differently of us if we'd been hammering those forward instead of, you know, like trying to take credit for the CHIPS bill or the IRA or whatever.

I mean, that's all nice.

It was good legislation, but that's not what people are looking for, particularly when they haven't landed in people's lives in a big way yet.

- For now, president Trump remains the center of attention.

The Trump administration has a new trade agreement with China.

Does this show that things are moving in the right direction for Trump and his approach to trade?

- Just the confusion is a problem.

All the chaos.

It puts a pause on economic activity while people try to figure out what's going on.

At the moment, turning back to a more sensible and thoughtful policy is a move in the right direction.

But we're a long way from being on safe economic ground with tariffs.

- The nays 49, the joint resolution fails passage.

- Some of your fellow Democrats were troubled last month when you missed a Senate vote, you were coming back from South Korea on a conference on oceans.

Was it a mistake for you to miss that vote?

- I'd been cleared to go.

So it might've been a blunder to call it up at that point, or it might've been a clever move while we had a tie situation to make sure that the Vice President, JD Vance, had to come in and break the tie and tie himself to these disastrous tariffs with an added, you know, thread of having come in and voted for it to break the tie.

He now owns the tariffs.

Was it a blunder?

Was it a genius move?

I don't know.

- Do you expect courts to be an effective backstop against President Trump?

- It's been a pretty robust response by those district court judges around the country.

And they run from, you know, Biden and Obama appointees to Trump appointees with Reagan and Bush and all sorts of other appointees in the middle.

The dangerous spot is obviously the Supreme Court.

- Right now, Republicans hold the House, the Senate, and the White House.

If Democrats regain the house in midterm elections in 2026, what difference will that make?

- There's gonna be, I think a probably a year or so before that, during which our Republican friends are gonna be thinking a lot about what that election looks like.

At the moment, it looks pretty bad and the worst it gets for the President, the worst it gets for them.

- You won your fourth term in the Senate last year.

How would you define what would make this term a success for you?

- Get rid of the damn dark money.

Get that court under a proper ethics code where there's actual independent fact finding, which is the basis of rule of law.

Clean up a very rotten and corrupted tax code and get carbon pricing in place so that we can promise our children and grandchildren there is a pathway to climate safety.

We're not gonna leave you ruined natural systems on this planet earth.

- That sounds like a wishlist.

How practical do you think it is to get any of those things done?

(Senator chuckling) - You know, if it's the right thing, you just fight like hell and do your best and every once in a while you get lucky.

Every once in a while it pays off.

- For more on Ian's reporting, please go to thepublicsradio.org.

Our next story takes us into the woods of Southern Rhode Island where we meet an artist who was once uprooted from her homeland.

She has since spent decades transforming works of nature into works of art.

- [Ana] This is where the glaciers ended 10,000 years ago and dropped a lot of stone and rubble and boulders.

So of course you'll see a lot of stone walls.

Some of these lots around here were used for wood by the colonials, so it's kind of a scrubby forest landscape, but it holds all kinds of histories here.

- [Michelle] Artist Ana Flores is fascinated by the stories the land holds.

It's one of the reasons she likes to start her days by going for a walk in the forest next to her home in Charlestown.

This stretch of southern Rhode Island has a complicated history.

- It's the land of the Narragansetts and they're still very present.

It's also a place, it's had a history that is very connected to the Caribbean because Rhode Island was part of the slave trade, the New England slave trade in this area.

Charlestown had one of the slave plantations in the area.

- [Michelle] For Flores, the land isn't simply a muse, it's also an extension of her studio.

(branches rustling) She's searching for materials she can incorporate into her artwork.

- I do a lot of branches.

(Ana chuckling) A lot of wood comes in because all kinds of forms of wood, stones and manmade objects that get left behind and rusted.

- How would you describe the type of artist that you are?

- I call myself an ecological artist 'cause I very much work with a relationship with the natural world.

And I also call myself an interdisciplinary artist 'cause I use numerous medias.

I'm a sculptor, painter, writer.

(machine whirring) - [Michelle] Flores's work has been featured in exhibits around the world.

Her pieces, she says, are rooted in identity, place, and discovery of place.

Her work's been described as evocative and at times provocative.

- One of the first larger pieces that I made was a piece called "Gaia," and it was made out of a root system that kind of became almost like an earth womb.

You know, it was like the earth giving birth.

- [Michelle] Flores recalls the piece being censored in the late nineties at a university library.

It was moved to a less visible gallery.

- I had a discussion eventually with the dean of the library and it was quite clear it was censorship.

I mean, he just didn't want it in there.

He said, "Too many people are stopping and talking."

(machine screeching) - [Michelle] She ended up removing the sculpture.

It went on to be displayed at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC.

(soft music) For Flores, "Gaia" represented how humans have abused the environment.

She's not afraid to make a statement through her work.

It's a privilege she does not take for granted.

She was six when she left Cuba with her family in the early 1960s as a political refugee.

Fidel Castro's promise of a free Cuba vanished.

- [Reporter] Castro gloated over his victory and told the world that Cuba was now a socialist nation.

- What memories did you have of Cuba as a little girl?

- Going to the shore with my nanny and fishing and swimming, it was like paradise.

And then we left that because of the revolution, my parents didn't wanna live under communist rule.

- [Reporter] Where Castro has admitted his communist sympathies and where communist propaganda is being manufactured.

- [Michelle] Flores seen here as a baby in Havana, ended up moving to Connecticut with her family.

She later graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design where she met her husband.

(upbeat music) She returned to Cuba in 2002, her first time back, since leaving the island 40 years earlier.

She found a British bicycling group that was doing tours there and spent three weeks taking in the sites.

- It was a wonderful way to be in the landscape and really meeting Cubans, you know, because you were coming in on bicycles.

You weren't just these fancy tourists.

And I just, I felt so Cuban.

(Ana laughing) It's a funny thing to say.

It was like this whole suitcase of my life and my memories had been put away for a long time.

And that trip brought it out.

(upbeat music) - [Michelle] And it inspired Flores to create the "Cuba Journal," a multimedia installation featuring her homeland.

It was displayed throughout the United States for several years.

It included these toy sized sculptures made from driftwood and recycled materials showing Cubans dancing, recalling the joy she witnessed while visiting her uncle and cousin, Rosita, on the island.

- She put on this Cuban music and they began to twirl around this small apartment.

Rosita looked at me and said, "Castro can't take this from us."

And I thought, that captures it all.

That's that Cuban resilience.

(car vrooming) - [Michelle] Resilience in the midst of suffering.

Flores also designed a larger than life puppet of Castro made from paper mache and mosquito netting.

Its presence threatening the small wooden figurines of locals below it.

Flores used theatrical lights to create shadows.

- Cuba is a small island, but it's had such a large political history in the story of, you know, the western world in the last, you know, a hundred plus years.

And so in many ways it was, you know, the shadow of something can be much larger than the thing itself.

(leaves rustling) - [Michelle] Flores says, traveling to Cuba made her feel more rooted in Rhode Island.

She spent much of the last two decades devoted to creating work that helps communities connect with their landscapes.

(water rushing) - We do have an environmental problem.

We're not taking care of the planet and of the places we live in, partly because of ignorance.

We don't understand how our behavior can affect it.

You can't just give people data about that.

They have to live and care in a kind of tactile, immersive way to understand how what they do matters.

- [Michelle] When Flores became the first artist in residence at the Wood-Pawcatuck Watershed Association, she was tasked with teaching people about watersheds.

She soon found herself carrying around garbage bags and cleaning up the trails.

- As I did that, I would keep saying, "God, how do you make people out here thoughtful and you know, how do you turn slobs into poets?"

- [Michelle] She went on to create her poetry of the Wild Project.

She designs boxes that look like bird houses.

Each one contains a poem and a journal where visitors can jot down their thoughts.

- Every time I go and do a workshop to make these boxes, I tell them what a watershed is.

I bring in an an example of this 3D topo watershed where they can sprinkle water and see that the water falls into certain gullies and it flows down in that direction.

So it became a tactile way to explore what a watershed was.

(camera shutter clicking) - [Michelle] It's a project she's launched across the country.

She hopes it motivates people to slow down and appreciate their environment.

- You can tell people there's gonna be bird watch walks or this or that, and a lot of people won't go hiking, but if you tell them there's a poetry box, a writer they might know wrote something for the box, their children might have been involved in making some of the boxes.

All of a sudden you get this new audience going out walking.

(water rushing) - [Michelle] On this day, she took a stroll through the Canonchet Brook Preserve in Hopkinton with Sarah Windsor, Chair of the Hopkinton Land Trust.

(leaves rustling) Together they searched for a spot to place a poetry box.

(water rushing) - Now what we should do is mark this.

- [Michelle] For Flores, there's nothing quite like seeing her work out in the world.

- You become more aware by doing more walking, more careful observation of what you're doing.

You begin to care more, and then maybe you act in a different way.

(leaves rustling) - [Michelle] An artist with a deep appreciation for the place she calls home after being uprooted from hers as a little girl, - I'm not just one type of artist, I'm only happy if I'm working in a sort of broad spectrum of medium.

I never planned to be this kind of artist.

It was really this place that made me this kind of artist.

- Finally, on tonight's episode of "Weekly Insight," Michelle and our contributor, WPRI 12's politics editor, Ted Nesi, explain why dozens of Rhode Island lawmakers disagree with Governor Dan McKee's proposed pay raises.

- Ted, welcome back.

Always good to see you.

It's hard to believe here we are.

It is the middle of May.

- [Ted] That's right.

- And lawmakers at the State House are winding down as they prepare to finish at the end of June for the General Assembly annual session.

They're looking to pass hundreds of bills and one of the ones that's received a lot of attention is a proposal by Governor Dan McKee, a resolution to offer pay raises to his cabinet members, which was unanimously rejected by members of the house.

What did you make of that?

- Well, I found the whole thing a bit of a surprise because firstly, people should understand the way it works is the governor proposes these raises and then the assembly has about a month to reject them or sort of passively allow them to go into effect.

We've seen Sabre rattling before Michelle, where you know, legislative leaders say, "Oh, we shouldn't be spending this extra money," but they don't actually do anything about it.

So for the house to actually take a vote to reject these and kick it over to the Senate and actually put that potentially alley in play, I thought that was very interesting.

Now we should say, as we're taping this, we're waiting, we're expecting, frankly within hours, the Senate leaders to decide are they gonna join in that and actually block the raises or are they gonna let them go through?

So by the time this airs, I think we'll know how that came out.

But it's very interesting - And the political context is important, which is that House Speaker Joseph Shekarchi, who of course presides over the house is widely being seen as someone who is considering a possible run for governor next year.

- Right.

And of course, Michelle, if Shekarchi was here, he'd say, "No, no, it's not about that.

It's about the budget deficit."

- [Michelle] Sure, yeah.

It's about, my members don't want this and I do think, of course there's some truth to that, but as you say, you can't get away from the context that Shekarchi is at least toying with a run for governor himself next year where he would need to either run against Dan McKee, though he says he wouldn't do that or put distance between himself and McKee if McKee is no longer running at that point.

So I think it's a way to put a little distance there.

I don't think Shekarchi minds that even if there are other motivations too.

- Yeah, another, you know, memorable moment over this past week were the hearings in the Senate over the proposed Assault Weapons Ban Act.

We have seen in recent years, those debates of course get heated, but you've been saying this year it looks different.

How so?

- Well, as we've talked about on this segment before, Michelle, this is the year advocates of the Assault Weapons Ban Act, it felt like they really could pass it before his death.

The late Senate President, Dominick J. Ruggerio, who'd been against it in the past, had signaled maybe he'd allow a vote on it.

The new Senate President Val Lawson is a supporter of the bill.

Now that doesn't mean it's definitely going through, but I think that's why it's seen as such a live issue because the Senate's positioning on this has changed a bit, but we really, again, still don't know where it's gonna land.

Will there be a compromise?

Will it not actually happen?

So I think that one's gonna get a lot of attention in these final weeks.

- And what other bills are you tracking, Ted?

- Well, the budget bill, obviously, first and foremost, Michelle, the revenue numbers came back a little better, but spending is also up and so unclear to me if that's gonna be a wash or not.

So how they put the spending bill together in the end.

And also healthcare.

We've talked a lot about the primary care crisis on here lately.

There is a big push going on for some serious investment in primary care, but there's also some pushback from those who say, this is not a time we can afford to do something big and we need more information.

So I think that's gonna be a hot topic through the end.

- Bottom line, it affects everybody, healthcare.

- Absolutely.

- Good to see you.

Thank you Ted.

- Good to be here.

- And that's our broadcast this evening.

Thank you for joining us.

I'm Pamela Watts.

- And I'm Michelle San Miguel.

We'll be back next week with another edition of "Rhode Island PBS Weekly," and you can now listen to our entire broadcast every Monday night at seven on The Public's Radio.

And don't forget to follow us on Facebook and YouTube.

You can also visit us online to see all of our stories and past episodes at ripbs.org/weekly, or listen to our podcast on your favorite streaming platform.

Goodnight.

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