Bulwark Takes - Jason Crow: Voters Want Normal Government, Not Trump’s Circus

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

Sam Stein and Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO-06) take on the growing backlash to Trump’s chaos politics—and why voters are sending a clear message that they’ve had enough. Go to https://Zocdoc.com/BULWARKTAKES to find and instantly book a doctor today.

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and may uncover early signs of conditions like heart disease and cancer. A healthier you means more moments to cherish. Take control of your well-being and book an assessment today. Medcan, live well for life. Visit medcan.com slash moments to get started. Hey, everybody. It's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the Bullwark, and I'm pleased

to be joined by Congressman Jason Crowe again. We're going to be talking about government shutdown, candid recruitment for Democrats, bombings of ships in Venezuela, and so much more. Congressman, thanks so much for doing this. Really appreciate it. Sam, is this good to be back with you? Yes, we've got to make it a routine. Let's start with a shutdown. Look, I don't really know. I'm kind of curious, I suppose, how Tuesday night's victories for Democrats affect the party psyche here. There's a lot of chatter about deals potentially in the Senate, but less so in the House. What's your like 30,000 foot takeaway on how the victories on Tuesday impact the way the Democrats approach to shut down? I actually, I'm going to not view

from my personal perspective. I'm not going to view the victories to a political lens. I just firmly believe that we are holding firm because the guardrails of our democracy, constitutional, and rule of law require us to make sure that we're not being abused by this president. It's about health care. It's about hungry kids. And it's about rule of law and making sure this president doesn't run rough shot over the Constitution. Right. And then separate from that, on Tuesday, America was very clear.

They don't like what Trump is doing. They don't like the politics of chaos and dysfunction that Donald Trump has brought to the United States government. they actually want a reasonable approach to good government in the tariffs, the military adventurism, and all the other things that Donald Trump is offering to the American people is not what they want, clearly. You know, it's interesting that you phrased it that way because, you know, obviously we had the bulwark believe in all that, right, the Constitution is being trampled. Do you have to have checks and balances?

The garters are falling. The prism through which the shutdown is being waged is on affordability and health care, though. And I'm not saying you're not stressing that, but it is interesting that you've leaned in on the guardrails issue because, frankly, that doesn't always come up when you talk to Democrats. It's not like, oh, rescissions and unilaterally canceling programs and, you know, just disregarding the legislative body. That's not always the foot forward for Democrats when we talk to them. Yeah, because there are two things that play here. There's policy, right? And by definition, to pass an appropriations bill that has a policy that both sides. will support, there was going to have to be some compromise. Like, we have to figure out a way to save the ACA subsidies in lower health care and provide SNAP benefits to folks that the Republicans snatched away, by the way. We're in this position because of Trump's Megabill in July, where they took away

nutritional programs, SNAP, they took away massive amounts of health care subsidies for regular working class Americans to deliver tax breaks. for the wealthiest Americans. We know that. And Republicans and Democrats will need to come together and figure out a way to do it. Actually, in Democrats, I have been willing all along to do that, right? It's Republicans that shut down the House. It's Donald Trump that said don't deal with the Democrats.

It's Donald Trump that says shut out the Democrats and blow up the filibuster. They have brought us to this crisis. But also, in addition to that, I am not willing to vote on a bill unless I know there are guardrails in place that will prevent Donald Trump from violating the Constitution in law and the ways that he has very clearly. So what are those guardrails, though? It's like, is it, because what can you trust, right? I guess is the question. Like, so you could say to, you know, you could say to Speaker Johnson, I will not vote for a bill unless you rule out, you know, passing recisions package in the future. And what do you have to go on other than his trust? Well, what I want to

see is protections around the movement of funds, right, that they can't reprogram funds. And just move it around without congressional authority like they've been doing. I want to see protections around domestic deployment of military in the United States. And I want to see a real teeth behind congressional oversight. I want commitment that they're going to come to Congress, that they're going to seek our authority on tariffs and the other things that they have vastly exceeded their authority on. Because listen, people are like, well, we need to just get the rails back on, train back on the rails, right? I hear that. lot. Like just, just do a clean CR. Let's just get it open and operating in the train back on the

rails. But if I am looking down the rail line, I see that the bridge is out, right? Am I going to put the train back on the rails? So if it just goes down the line, not unless you're a masochist, yeah. Right? Yeah. That is not my responsibility to like do something that I know was going to end in chaos. My responsibility is actually the opposite, is to read all the signs and signals and obvious things that have been sent to us the last 10 months, know that this is going to end very, very badly for America and make sure that I'm taking steps to correct it. On the last one on the shutdown, because, you know, I think the conventional wisdom heading into it was, well, be a couple weeks at most, and ultimately Democrats want to make a stand, but

they probably will at some point cut a deal. And I think that's been turned on its head. Is the party's posture even stronger now than when you started? How would you describe how the mindset has changed over the course of the 35, 36, whatever days it's been? Well, very clearly, what people have wanted is the Democratic Party to be stronger, more confident, and more vigorous, and show some fight. Right. That is clear. You know, the reason why Democratic Party's approval rating was 23% is not because people disagree with our policies. They don't actually. If you ask America, without attribution to the partisanship or political party, you know, how they line up behind policies, like our policies generally are very popular with folks. You know, there are some that even I don't agree with. There need to be changed and reform. There's, there are things that we need to fix and do better. No doubt about it. But this, but this is not solely a policy decision. So our policy to pay. What they want is they want people who are going to fight for them, truth and nail, who will stand up for.

the democracy. And that is what we are showing. That's what I've been showing the last 10 months. You know, the Senate has started to get more of a clue since they passed their bill in April, which I'm glad about. And we're here to fight for our country. But again, do you think that the party, you think more of your colleagues are sort of that mindset that really what it comes down to is not necessarily finding the right policy prescription that's going to win over voters, it's showing a pulse. Well, so showing a pulse is the lowest possible bar. Showing a bit of an aggressive, more aggressive pulse.

It's not about just showing a pulse. You need to show up and be really damn good at what you do, smart, know your stuff, and fight with vigor and boldness, right? That is the standard, right? Gotcha. And stop this crisis of confidence, this hand-wringing and, like, being afraid of our own shadow, like, hell with that. Right. Like we have the country on our side. Americans want a champion and defenders. And we're the ones who can do it. Right. So we're the ones that have the obligation to do it, the duty to do it. That is what my oath requires me to do. Right. From the very first time I took the oath in service to this country and put the uniform on, that was a lifetime oath. It's still good until the day that I die. And I'm willing to fight and give everything for it.

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That's Z-O-C-D-O-C dot com slash bulwark takes. Zocdoc.com slash bulwark takes. You've been focusing a lot on these attacks on alleged, I want to say alleged drugboats in the Caribbean and now, I guess, in the East Pacific. And, you know, there's not really any legal rationale that the administration has put forward to defend it. They've just said these are drugs being smuggled into our country and it's a national security imperative that we blow up these boats. explain to people who might not understand because I think sort of, you know, the average American might say, great, you know, we don't want drugs coming into our country. Thank you for taking this proactive action. Explain to them why that's troubling to you. Well, number one, do Americans really

want a president who has the authority to bomb whoever he wants, whenever he wants, without congressional oversight, without people asking questions? Because that's what's going on right now. Right. And it's, you know, the Caribbean one moment, then it's been a bit of, Venezuela the next, then it's Iran, then it's God knows where else. And we just spent the last 25 years in almost endless conflict. We spent $3 trillion, 7,000 American lives, decades of lost opportunity and credibility. Largely that burden was born by working class kids like me around the country in rural areas and working class towns, right? Not the elites in Washington. They're not bearing the burden of this. It's working class folks that are doing it. We've just

been 25 years doing this without the accountability and oversight that's necessary to ask the tough questions and to make sure we're doing things the right way. And because of the lack of accountability, they ended poorly. So this administration and Donald Trump have learned nothing in the last 25 years because they're literally just doing the same thing. There is not a problem that Donald Trump encounters that he doesn't think he can bomb his way out of. And that is very disturbing because this is a man who campaigned like an isolationist, but is acting like an imperialist and an interventionist. And America's fed up with it.

So that's number one. Number two is America actually does need an answer to fentanyl on our streets. Right. And it's overwhelmingly fentanyl that's killing our kids and our young folks, right? Fentanyl is the prime problem. And that's not Venezuela. The issue here is that this administration is not going after fentanyl trafficking. Right.

They have not shown me evidence of a single thing. single pill of fentanyl that's been bombed and disrupted. It's other drugs, right? But do we really want an aircraft carrier battle group, nuclear submarines, you know, squadrons of F-35 fighters, hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer dollars spent to blow up a couple of speedboats every day in the Caribbean? There's obviously a better way of doing this, right? That would be compliant with the constitutional authority that Congress needs to grant to the president and actually has an endgame in the strategy. America deserves a drug strategy. That's going to deal with demand, going to deal with supply, and this is not that. What do you think it is? There's definitely

been theories floating around. We've talked to people on the show about their own theories, but what do you make of the decision to focus so aggressively on Maduro and Venezuela? Well, I know what it is. What this is is the theatrics of Donald Trump and Pete Heggseth. What they want is they want videos of U.S. fighter jets blowing up speedboats and wooden rafts and saying that they're serious about the drug war. That's what they want. They want the video clip. They want to be able to say they're doing it when in reality they're not actually

interdicting fentanyl, right? And they have no strategy to actually stop. The 70-year flow of drugs in the United States, right? We've been doing this for 70 years. they're not doing anything different that we haven't tried to some degree in the past, interdiction, but they don't want a long-term fix. They want a short-term theatrical video that they can keep on posting on social media, and they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars to get that.

Do we even know what they're spending? I'm assuming they've not provided any cost analysis to you, right? Yeah, we're working to get a firm cost analysis, but I can tell you this is a huge number, right? We have an aircraft carrier battle group moving into the area. We have about a tenth of the United States naval assets, now reorienting to the Caribbean. Massive armadas of ships and aircraft and other assets that are exorbitantly expensive.

You know, this kind of raises an interesting question. I guess we're allowed to do this now that we're past the off-year election and now we're on to the midterm election cycle. But let's say in theory you guys win back the house, which is the goal here, and you do get oversight investigative authorities, the power subpoenas. Let's say you had your druthers and you could pick one or two or even three items that you are most intent on trying to get answers to. Is this one of them? And what are the other two? Yeah, this is one of them. I mean, I'm a national security Democrat. I've served overseas.

You know, I talked earlier about the trillions of dollars in the decades that we spent at war. I think this is so essential, both for taxpayers and the amount of money that we spend on this for our national security to do right by our troops and our veterans, it is just madness what we have allowed to happen over the last 20 years, right? And Democrat and Republican Congresses have allowed to happen. Democrat and Republican presidents have a lot of to happen. It is madness and it has to stop. So I want real answers about what this administration is doing because I'm sure there are plenty of things that are doing that are vastly outside of their legal authority that are not in the best interest of the American public.

There's plenty of things that I know about that we can't talk about in this open line that I'm deeply concerned about. You could talk about them. You might get in trouble, but I could, but I'm not. It's safe to say I'm pretty worried and don't get a lot of sleep these days because of the pretty dangerous behavior of this administration and how cavalier they are with a very sensitive and very powerful national security apparatus. Yeah, well, when you start talking about it within the couple weeks on Signal, it gives away a bit of the game. I want to switch a little bit of

accountability. I mean, nothing ever happened. I know. Nothing did ever. That's crazy, right? I mean, that just happened and we're like, oh, okay, moving on. Well, you know, Mike Walts got promoted to UN ambassadors. I know. I don't know if that was a promotion. But, putting that aside. All right. Your co-chair of candidate recruitment for the D-Trip, I don't have to tell you, we're in this middle of the middle. It's like a decades-long, ongoing debate among Democrats over what is the right candidate for this moment and should they emphasize this or that and yada, yada, yada. And, you know, Tuesday night kind of showed that you can run different candidates in different locations, have different messages and

different vibes. But I am wondering if there is sort of going to be a unified type of three of the case for the candidate heading into 2026 on the Democratic side. Yeah, people are always like, what's the model, what's going to work? You know, the sky is falling, and we have to completely revamp our models. Like, no, like what Tuesday showed is that when you put smart servant leaders, people with service backgrounds with proven track records in their community that run very local races that are pragmatic and reasonable and sensible,

and run good campaigns, they went, right? Like, it happens all the time, right? Like, this is not rocket science, right? What we need is great people with backgrounds largely outside of politics, not in every instance, but, you know, America is thirsty for new leadership. I mean, the people who won were politicians, right? I know that they had backgrounds in the CIA and Navy fighters and all that stuff, but, like, they've been in the house for multiple terms.

Yeah, most of them. their lives and careers have been in service, though, to the nature. Right, right. The idea is this isn't someone that, you know, started an internship on the hill when they were 18 and has never left policy. Not that there's always something wrong with that. I mean, nothing wrong with that. There are good people that do that too. But like, by and large, by and large, these are people who, you know, are raising families know how excruciatingly difficult it is to raise kids in modern America and all in all the pitfalls and traps. They are building businesses and how hard it is to make a payroll. They've served in uniform and how really, really tough and dangerous it was to serve

in our 20-year wars. And they run local campaigns, right? And when I'm out recruiting and talking to these candidates, I'm looking for a track record of service. I'm looking for people that can connect people with real lived experience and people that are going to run hyper-local campaigns, right? Because remember, we're trying to flip Trump districts. We are trying to flip flip districts where people voted for Donald Trump and voted for Republicans. So people in those communities are not going to be like, well, you know, for the last 20 years, I've been turned off on Democrats, but they really seem to be crushing it right now. So let's give this Democrat a chance.

That's not what's going to happen between now and next fall, largely. Right? Now, we have to rebuild and re-earned trust in World America and working class America, but it took us 20 years to get ourselves in a difficult position in those communities. It's going to take more than one year to get out of it. They're going to go to their ballot. They're going to go to the ballot and be like, you know, I don't like what Donald Trump is doing. He hasn't fulfilled his promises to me.

My life is largely worse off than it was before. The Democrats, I'm starting to warm up to them, but they're not quite there yet. But this woman, this man, they get it. This person gets it. and they've run a hyper-local campaign on the issues that are important to our community, and this is the person that I want to lead. I know your time is short, so let me end on this question, because one of the people who has run in those communities and done so successfully

is your colleague, Jared Golden, who, if people don't know, he's from Maine's 2nd District. It's a Trump District. Three times in a row, Trump's won the District, and he's won. He renounced he's retiring at the end of this year. his statement really was like it bother me not not because i you know don't agree with him it bothered me because of what it said about politics which is that he felt i guess in a way scared about the way that politics had come frightened for his own physical well-being and also convinced that there's just nothing productive really to do in washington dc i'm wondering if

you share his thoughts about the institution you're in and if so how you combat the mental fatigue that might come with feeling that way. Yeah, it's a really tough challenge, right? This comes up when I'm talking to candidates who have to make a very hard decision. Do they actually want to dump in to the current political environment, which is dangerous, which is vitriolic, which is really tough on families. It's a very, very hard environment for folks to step up and serve right now. Then you add a eye on top of that, disinformation, propaganda, you know, a president, that's weaponizing the DOJ against politicians and his political opponents. It's a tough environment.

And, you know, I know Jared. He's one of my closer friends. You know, he's one of those servant leaders that I talk about. And he's at the Marine Corps got one of the few combat veterans in the actual, you know, serious combat. And he's, he had to make a personal decision that was right for him and his family. But what do you tell the, what do you tell the candidates who you want to recruit who say, why would I want to be involved in this? Here's what I tell them.

None of us woke up this morning or last morning and said that, you know, I want to serve and I want to live in a time where democracy is under assault, where the bricks of our institutions are being disassembled brick by brick, where political extremism and political violence and assassinations are running rampant, where, you know, the Congress and other places are excruciatingly difficult to get. things done, where fundamental constitutional rights are being denied Americans. None of us that wanted this. But in those handful of times in America where we have faced challenges like this, the folks that stepped up and made great sacrifices to win the day to get us out

of it and to move us forward also didn't want it and didn't ask for it. You never get to choose your time. Your choice is only when that time is thrust upon us. And we're in one right now. We're in one of the handful of moments, and I can count them on this hand, where what happens in the next couple of years will determine the course of our democracy in our country. This is one of those moments. And I tell folks that you just happen to be in a place and in a time where you can make a huge difference for tens of millions of Americans.

And I know there are other things that you could be doing, but that's not your choice. The moment is thrust upon you and your only choice is whether or not you're going. going to answer the call. And I'm not asking you to storm the beaches of Normandy. I'm not asking you to walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. I'm asking you to take a couple of years of your life, run a really hard political campaign, win, and help us defend our democracy. Pretty good pitch. Not bad, man. Thank you so much for joining us, Congressman Jason Crow. Really appreciate it. For those who watch this, thank you for that as well. We appreciate your support. So do subscribe to our feed. We get great conversations like this. Jason, take care. Talk to later. Thanks, Sam.

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