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.