00:00Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to vitiate the quorum call.
00:04Without objection.
00:06Mr. President, people voted for Donald Trump for all kinds of reasons,
00:11but the main reason was that they thought he would bring down the price of goods,
00:18groceries, food, housing, gas, whatever his other faults.
00:25He was good for your money, people thought.
00:28But it has been almost eight months now,
00:32and the persistent economic uncertainty and pessimism are no longer a temporary blip.
00:40It is now abundantly clear.
00:43Trump is not making anything cheaper.
00:46In fact, he's purposefully making everything more expensive.
00:51Health care, groceries, toys, cars, housing, electricity, computers, clothes, booze, video games.
01:02Whether you're shopping at your local grocery store or Walmart, prices are continuing to go up.
01:08And that reality is catching up with the president.
01:12He's underwater with the public on his handling of the economy with a 57% disapproval rating, according to the latest polling.
01:21Now, Democrats learned this lesson over the last few years.
01:29Saying the economy is great or not as bad as it could have been,
01:34while people struggle to afford basic necessities, is not a winning strategy.
01:39So Trump is ruining the economy on purpose.
01:42But are people better off in other ways?
01:45Is the country better off in other ways?
01:48The answer is no.
01:51A month ago, Trump federalized the local police department in Washington, D.C.
01:55and deployed thousands of National Guardsmen and federal agents because of a so-called, quote, crime emergency.
02:03What does that look like?
02:04It looks like masked men with no identification, walking up to people on the street, arresting them, and disappearing them into unmarked vehicles.
02:15Up until a few months ago, that would have sounded like a chilling scene possible only in a third-world country.
02:23But now it's happening here in our cities and our communities.
02:27Now, whether you supported or hated the previous administration's immigration policies is not the point anymore.
02:36What possible justification is there for masked men showing up and abducting people without a trace?
02:44Anyone who has encountered law enforcement in D.C. or Arkansas or Honolulu knows that officers are typically trained
02:52to identify themselves by face and badge as a standard practice.
03:00So why should federal agents be any different?
03:03Worse, the fact that you now only need a black T-shirt and a face mask to look like an ICE agent
03:09means that there are a bunch of vigilantes running around impersonating law enforcement and terrorizing communities.
03:15This is exactly the kind of tyranny and government overreach that the people on the right worried about for many, many years.
03:26Except they thought it would happen under a democratic administration.
03:30They worried about socialism.
03:32They worried about the government impeding free markets.
03:36They worried about power concentrating in the executive branch.
03:40All of that is happening now under Donald Trump.
03:46We have the United States government taking a 10% stake in a private company,
03:54picking winners and losers in one of the most important industries for America's future.
04:00We have the leader of the free world forming a secret police of sorts to kidnap people and send them to foreign gulags.
04:07We have the president of the United States making $5 billion in one day by launching a new crypto product on the side.
04:18We have an entire administration more focused on tormenting private institutions into submission.
04:25Universities, law firms, media companies, then delivering public services and making people's lives better.
04:32And here's the thing.
04:35All of this is part of the same project.
04:38There is this tendency, particularly among liberal pundits, to wave off parts of Trump's agenda as distractions.
04:48He may be decimating American foreign assistance and starving kids around the world, but that's a distraction.
04:53He may be sending armed troops and masked men into American cities without justification, but we're supposed to treat that as another distraction.
05:03But we don't need to outsmart ourselves here.
05:05We can acknowledge that two things are true at once.
05:10Donald Trump is trashing the economy and creating shortages of everything.
05:15Shortages of everything.
05:17Electricity, food, workers, healthcare.
05:21He is single-handedly ruining people's personal finances and the American economy on purpose because he believes in shortages.
05:30He wants there to be not enough workers, not enough healthcare, not enough electrons, not enough food.
05:36He believes in shortages.
05:38This is his economic philosophy.
05:40And his illegal actions and brazen takeovers of the media and the private sector institutions and American cities are the stuff of authoritarians throughout history and across the planet.
05:53These things are not intention.
05:56They work together.
05:58They are the same thing.
06:00They are the same project.
06:02And so the question for us, and especially my Republican colleagues, is,
06:08when is it going to be too much?
06:12We've blown past red line after red line these past eight months.
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