00:01Senator, when you heard that Josh Hawley introduced a bill to reverse some of the cuts to Medicaid that he himself voted for just two weeks ago, mostly focused on rural hospitals, what did you think?
00:13Well, I think I live in a very crazy environment.
00:17That so-called big, beautiful bill, the reconciliation bill, is, in my view, Anderson, the most disastrous piece of legislation in the modern history of our country.
00:28And I'm not exaggerating.
00:30What it does, as I'm sure Senator Hawley knows, is it throws 17 million people off the health care they have, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.
00:41It makes massive cuts to nutrition and education.
00:46And what studies have shown is that when you throw 17 million working class and low-income people off the health care they have,
00:55up to 50,000 Americans will die every single year.
01:02And on top of that, it's a disaster for rural hospitals, for nursing homes, and for community health centers.
01:08So bottom line for me, Anderson, and I suspect Senator Hawley knows this, our health care system today is broken.
01:15It's dysfunctional.
01:16This bill makes it a lot worse.
01:18It's interesting because a number of the Republicans who voted for this, essentially when asked about what the Congressional Budget Office said on this,
01:27or any number of other groups on different sides of the political aisle in some cases, some libertarian groups as well,
01:35in terms of the cost of this to the deficit, which Republicans used to care about, they say, well, look, the CBO is compromised,
01:45and that all of these things, everything's compromised.
01:48And so there is now apparently no authoritative source for anything, so anything goes.
01:56No, no, there is an authoritative source.
02:00Its name is Donald Trump.
02:03And one of the things that should worry people, and I don't care what your politics are,
02:10is that right now within the Republican Party, you have what I might almost call a Stalinist-type party,
02:18a cult of the individual, where people there feel no matter what their heart tells them.
02:23Do you think that every Republican thinks that this is a great bill, that they don't know the harm it's going to do?
02:29They do, but they are afraid to stand up to Donald Trump.
02:35And by the way, if occasionally somebody does, like a Tom Tillis, Senator Tillis from North Carolina,
02:41Trump will go after them, the billionaires will threaten to primary them,
02:46and in Tillis' case, he decided not to run for re-election.
02:49How concerned are you about these continuing ICE efforts that we are seeing, you know, videos of?
02:59A number of Republicans continue to say, Republican governors I've spoken to continue to say,
03:04well, look, they are going after the baddest of the bad people.
03:07You know, we have wiretaps on people and investigations.
03:10I read a piece in The Atlantic that says they're actually pulling people in FBI or elsewhere in law enforcement
03:17who are actually doing investigations on really bad, you know, people who are here illegally
03:23in order just to get body counts, in order to get the 3,000 people a day that Stephen Miller, you know,
03:29has told multiple people in the administration that he wants.
03:32Look, this is where I think the American people are at.
03:37If you are a drug dealer, if you are somebody in this country undocumented or has committed a crime,
03:44I think most people think, hey, have a nice day, you're out of here.
03:49And I support that.
03:50But the truth is that the vast majority of the people who are being picked up, put on, put in vans,
03:58sent to detention centers, and God knows what else.
04:01These are people who do not have criminal records in the United States of America.
04:05And I should tell you that many of them, many of them, the majority of them,
04:10are hard-working people doing some of the most difficult, dirty, underpaid work in this country.
04:17They are the people who are harvesting our crops.
04:20They're working in meatpacking plants.
04:22They are working in nursing homes for starvation wages.
04:26They're working in child care centers for inadequate wages.
04:29During COVID, in many respects, this is a group of people who are the essential workers.
04:37They kept our economy going, and some of them died in the process.
04:41They're raising their kids here.
04:43So I think the American people feel, yeah, we need a strong border.
04:46Yeah, we need to get criminal elements who are undocumented out of this country.
04:49But I think the American people are sick and tired of seeing hard-working people being treated the way they are treated.
04:57And in some cases, Anderson, if you can believe it, picked up and sent to Sudan.
05:03Now, what is that about?
05:05I mean, how cruel is that to send people to a country they don't know the language?
05:09They know it's a country falling apart.
05:12So I have a lot of concerns about what Trump is doing in terms of mass deportation.
05:19Finally, Senator Sanders, I wouldn't normally ask you about this, but Jeffrey Epstein's case is now front and center for this administration.
05:27It is tying up the FBI, it seems, in knots with Pam Bondi, the Justice Department, the top two leaders of the FBI who have been on podcasts spreading, you know, conspiracy theories about this for years.
05:40Now in a position of authority, people are turning on the president.
05:45Where should this go?
05:47To be very honest, you know, I don't know a whole lot about this.
05:52But all that I do know is that you're right, Trump and his friends campaigned and said, when we are elected, we're going to open up all of the files and you're going to see all these terrible things, presumably Democrats and so forth and so on.
06:08That's what he said to his people.
06:10And they say, OK, you're the president, open up the files.
06:13And now they're saying, oh, we can't open up the files.
06:15We choose not to open up the files.
06:16So I think above and beyond what may or may not be in the files, whether there are any files, who knows?
06:22I don't know.
06:24But I think people perceive that Trump has lied to them.
06:27He said one thing during the campaign, and now he is saying something very different.
06:32Senator Bernie Sanders, thank you for your time.
